"Divide their annual recurring revenue by the total headcount. If that number is below $150K, the company is either pre–product market fit or scaling too early."
Most of the time, if you are a technical person joining a company that already has revenue, you are probably already too late for a significant equity stake. And if a company already has $300k of revenue per employee, I'd have trouble calling it a "start-up". Just my experience - I am sure there are exceptions.
Some of the other advice is good - finding out how many shares are outstanding and the current valuation is the info you need to judge what the shares in your offer might be worth. I agree that if the company is evasive on this info, it is a red flag.
Start-ups are risky - but if it doesn't work out, move on. It isn't the end of your career.
"The H-1B program was started with the vision of finding von Brauns across other industries and bringing them into the US"
Is this true? I thought the the "O" visa accomplished this. H-1B is for specific worker shortages. Of course, a "shortage" from a company's perspective is "no Americans are applying for my position", which isn't necessarily because there are no qualified Americans to hire...
That isn't what it means to have a shortage. In many cases Americans are discouraged from applying for these jobs. They can overspecify the criteria or be overly skeptical about your resume, write the job listing poorly, or hide the job listing entirely. What a shortage really means from their perspective is that they can't find enough workers for the price they want to pay (as opposed to what they can afford). However, I don't find that satisfying. I might have a legitimate business idea that would work only if I could find 100 great engineers willing to work for far below average. That would be considered insane in isolation, but if several large companies get together and issue the same complaint like "We can't move ahead because there are not enough engineers in our price range" then they call it a shortage. But I don't think American workers should have to tolerate these people flooding the market just because they can make money by doing so lol...
We are mostly in agreement. I'm pretty sure we need to sympathize with employers in situations like this, at times, though. It doesn't help anyone to reduce every shortage to a supposed moral fault in the employers lol. At what point do we become sympathetic to them? When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price? Or is it when the market rate for a job is offensive to other kinds of workers at jobs of similar difficulty? I think the societal need is a plausible reason, but it leads to this slippery slope we started off complaining about. It boils down to: who's to say how expensive is too expensive, or that a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?
> we need to sympathize with employers in situations like this, at times
Of course, at times, yes. Not at this time in American history, clearly.
> When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price
Yes, absolutely, if by "given price" you mean "the price Americans should reasonably be paid". But this particular combination of two things is probably nonexistent.
> a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?
Again, probably not what would actually happen. If businesses are forced to hire Americans, they would not "fail". Rather, investors/leadership may choose to go do some other more-profitable business, but not because the business can't survive. We are talking about the lack of socially normal humans in US leadership, not economic constraints. I.e. the kind of person you have to compel to be a non-negative force in society via legislation. Not every country, now or in history, has to deal with this problem. It's definitely a weird one. But it's what we're dealing with right now. Yes, there have always been unscrupulous Scrooges among those running things, but often their goals happen to benefit society as a whole enough that we don't have to step in this dramatically.
Yes, it’s true. The H-1B program was redesigned that way in the Immigration Act of 1990 that introduced the O visa category; before that, the H-1B criteria formally required that recipients have “distinguished merit and ability” and perform services “of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability”.
The thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable.
100% agree. Only thing is, as the last few years have shown, if you don't jump into the cesspit but a majority of your fellow humans do, it affects you anyway.
we also need time, energy. and care to make and tend to our own gardens. I see more and more people even with jobs try to go into various hustles just to make ends meet. Let alone those who aren't in work and pushed into NEET-dom.
That's because the US national debt is indeed not like household debt. As a household, I can't choose to print more GlibMonkeyDeathBucks and hand them out to service my debts. I also don't have my own standing army to defend from creditors who might try to seize my hard assets.
This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
Kids can absolutely still excel. This just means their "excellence" isn't reduced to a 1-dimensional score. Excelling by writing a phenomenal essay that you still think about or creating a relationship with a professor that stays with you beyond the class is probably an even more meaningful way to excel than achieving some test score
> This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.
In my opinion you are under-appreciating the external validation. Removing grades disincentives excelling. Why work any harder than getting a "pass"?
At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
This is one semester, not all, and they still will be getting individual marks (necessary to determine final grade). They can excel if they want to, and they'll have external signals if that's what they need. It just won't be reflected in their GPA for that semester. Oh no, the horror.
Classes in college aren't everything, I found that extracurriculars in college were more important than straight A's.
I have only had one company ask for my transcripts and GPA. Ever! And guess what, they were the one company I never wanted to work for after the interviews.
You know what the best companies I ever worked for cared more about? That I got the degree, and a million questions about my skills and projects that I engaged in.
Some students have a personality quirk called "intellectual interest", and actually want to learn something about disciplines that lie far outside any likely future major of their own.
I struggled my freshman year. In high school, I never had to study or do much of anything outside of class. College was a huge adjustment. My high school also had an experimental math program that didn’t help anything. I’m a decent test taker, so I placed into classes my high school did not prepare me for.
My GPA being low, but not failing, gave me the wake up call I needed to make the needed adjustments. A “Pass” wouldn’t have given me that wake up call, and a “Fail” may have just bounced me out, not giving me the chance to right the ship.
>Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.
This is what I always thought was one of the major problems - unless an alien civilization is directly targeting Earth, we would never detect them. And our EM emissions are too weak to be detected by other aliens unless they stumble near us for some reason.
They found that airport radar systems, which sweep the skies for airplanes, send out a combined radio signal of 2×1015 watts. That’s enough for telescopes comparable to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to pick up as far as 200 light-years away. [0]
Huh - very interesting! Now I am going to have to calculate this for myself!
Seems that (r_d/(theta_e z))^2Pt_p ~ 100 hv (~100 photons at 3 GHz; a single 3GHz photon is about 2e-24 J) I'll drop this to 1 photon below.
Where
r_d = detector radius,
theta_e = diffraction angle of source,
z is detection distance,
P = 2e15 W (peak power of source, according to article) and t_p is pulse duration (say, ~5e-9 s).
Now theta_e ~ wavelength/(emitter radius), let's say the detector radius r_d ~ emitter radius = r ~ 3 meters for simplicity. Lambda = l = 3e8/3e9 m ~ 0.1 m) E_p = Pt_p ~ 2e155e-9 ~ 1e7 J (!)
(r^2/l)^2(1e7 J)/(1002e-24 J) = z^2, so z ~ \sqrt(100 m*(1e29)) ~ 3e15 m
But one light year is ~1e15 m. If I assume they have single-photon sensitivity in the microwave regime, then I can boost this result to ~30 ly. So about 1 order of magnitude less than their paper, but that is for a single photon of a single radar pulse. If you sum over many pulses from all the different radars that could be emitting over the integration time then, yeah, I guess 200 ly isn't ridiculous.
Curious what the cosmic microwave background is compared to this though...
2) The 2e15 W/10 MJ/pulse has to be all the radars summed together already, so that is all the power available.
Take these two points together, the single photon detection limit is indeed about 200 ly.
Third: if we assume a 1 Hz detection bandwidth, I get ~200 photons/s for the CMB @ 3 GHz. I can't find the original paper (just the abstract) so they must assume 100-200 s integration time or so to get to an SNR of 1. So 200 ly is on the very edge of possibility - the example curves were calculated for 10x closer (~30 ly), as I would expect. Still, a lot further than a fractional light year!
When Bell published his Theorem, work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics was pretty much universally discouraged, and certainly out of the main stream. But it turns out, Bell himself said (according to Whitaker's book) that the reason he published in this obscure journal was due to page charges - he was a visitor at Stanford and didn't want to ask the host institution to pay for it, since it was a side-quest for him. Surprised the linked article doesn't mention this.
I'd love to learn more about John Bell, being from Belfast and having sat through many lectures in the Bell Theatre. But not being from a mathematical background I've never found an approachable layman's description of what the theorem means.
Most of the time, if you are a technical person joining a company that already has revenue, you are probably already too late for a significant equity stake. And if a company already has $300k of revenue per employee, I'd have trouble calling it a "start-up". Just my experience - I am sure there are exceptions.
Some of the other advice is good - finding out how many shares are outstanding and the current valuation is the info you need to judge what the shares in your offer might be worth. I agree that if the company is evasive on this info, it is a red flag.
Start-ups are risky - but if it doesn't work out, move on. It isn't the end of your career.