What's interesting about your question is both the variety of answers, but equally how many of them are unimplementable.

Probably the easiest to grasp, and (in theory) the easiest yo do is "give it away". But even this is much harder to do, and more complicated than it seems.

For example injecting substantial cash into a local economy leads to inflated prices. For example revitalized neighborhoods (gentrification) leads to higher housing prices, driving out the local population.

Aid to Africa has shown that in many cases the aid was harmful - inhibiting the growth of local food production etc.

If you choose to make say a thousand billionaires, then expect a billion applications. Good luck deciding.

Even building infrastructure (like say solar farms or nuclear plants) would greatly impact other players in that space. And ending up with all that energy production in one set of hands would be dangerous.

Spending money well is really really hard. Much, much harder than we imagined. Expect every grifter, scammer, organised crime etc to gravitate to your orbit. Filtering value from scam becomes hard.

Bill Gates is working on eradicating some diseases via vaccines, which is both clearly achievable, and really difficult (because some areas are hard to work in.)

So, it's an interesting question. But equally interesting is that no simple answer is really useful.

I understand where you are coming from here, but I think it is helpful for people to overtly grasp that there are very different cancers, very different treatments, and indeed very different outcomes.

Without this understanding it becomes a quick jump from "we're spending all this money on cancer" to "we've made no progress"

An example of the nuance plays out in the common cancers (like breast and prostrate). These have between 90 and 100% 5 year survival rates. Others (like the one in this article, pancreatic) have very poor survivability.

As you note, it's very unlikely that we'll "cure cancer". But we already "cure" (for some definition of cure) some cancers. Progress is slow, methodical, and incremental. It can feel like a lost cause when viewed from afar, but up close very real progress is being made. And that's an important message to pass along.

The other part that is simply missing is that cancer, very unfortunately, evolves and mutates. That's how you go from a cancer that responds to treatment to one that is treatment resistant.

Like you said, for a lot of common cancers we have multiple treatments. It's usually not just one magic drug, but rather the doctors working with the most effective treatments down to the least effective treatments.

Depressing: evolution has discovered a universal cure for cancer, and it's reproduction. You make a whole new human without the bad bits. Other humans have to evaluate which bits are bad.

You define "productivity" as coding.

The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".

Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.

I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.

When did I say I code?

I have been on the industry for 35 years. I have seen my share of technology evolutions and o have seen the work from a dozen different dimensions. If after all that time, I find the process painful, just trust me -- they can't change me, and I can't change them. You take the warts with the wins and move on. 2-3 bad weeks, 10 good weeks. Life moves on to next quarter. Complete CEO mindset :)

You heavily implied presentation preparation implies zero productivity. He tried to say this prep is also productive even if you personally don't or can't appreciate it.

Last comment and I will see myself out.

I meant my other productivity drops because I am not a natural presenter so even though I am rehearsing / editing for 2 hours a day, the presentation consumes me / overwhelms me that I can't even focus for the remaining 4 hours or 2 hours. Just do the bare minimum email processing, just survive. Everyone knows it. But by being in that zone of paralysis, I can still deliver a presentation. Sometimes good sometimes ok.

I have this need for the presentation content to reside in my memory cache and other work disrupts the cache quite badly.

But that's not a way to live. The other work stalled for 3 weeks.

True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway. The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job hunting.

But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place. In that case the game is different.

In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important, it's necessary to promote the visibility of your (just working) team. If visibility is the game, then be visible.

You know how test-driven-dev was always "write the test first"? In that environment a test is always written before any code.

Well in the "ticket closing" scenario it's important to open a ticket, regardless of how trivial, for every code action taken. For every meeting attended. For every scenario dodged. If tickets are the way to score then write tickets.

If "being a hero" is the valuable thing, then be a hero. Be prepared to champion your team every chance you get. Every time you interact with management stress the emergency you just fixed (before it became an emergency.) Tomorrow do it again with the next thing.

Management needs visibility. Be visible. I know, this seems stupid and beneath you. But that's why they call it a job, not playtime.

> I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place

I worked at Amazon, previously.

> Management needs visibility.

I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing the state of things rather than waiting for people to deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility" in spades are often charlatans. People who deliver fixes, code, and improvements in spades usually do not have time to manage their own public relations for your visibility.

However, you have ALL the tools to proactively see what they've been upto. You can attend their standups and other regular meetings, you can set up an updates document, you can see what they've been posting in Slack, you can look at their PRs and commits, you can look at JIRA tickets, and in the age of AI you can have AI explain to you all of the parts of the above that you do not understand.

I don't disagree. However few managers are this proactive. If you have such a manager, then fantastic.

If not then making yourself more visible becomes necessary. Because you can be sure (at least some of) your co-workers are doing so.

Or, you know, stand on principle, then come here to complain about injustice as things work out badly. :)

>> But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings,

Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.

If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.

Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.

Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.

As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.

Yes, all good advice. In reality what I need is probably a cofounder.

If you plan to let someone else lead the marketing (ie a co-founder) then stop coding now and make that your only task.

Because your co-founder will almost certainly have input as to what you code. Indeed your current project may not be suitable at all.

Seriously, until you gave all this sorted out you are really just on holiday, and when your savings run out you'll be back looking for a job. And in this job market that may not be fun.

This is the hard part of starting a business. If you want a fun holiday then by all means continue coding. If you so much as open an IDE or run a compiler this week then at least admit to yourself that's what this is.

If you really want to start a business then do the hard part while you have time. Find a market. Or a person. Until the market is found don't bother writing code. You are wasting time (which is in limited supply.)

I know this sounds harsh, but I'm hoping you hear it. Perhaps you will. If not, you'll be following in the footsteps of the 95% who failed. Which doesn't make you a bad person.

I'll close by saying that maybe you've romanticized what a startup is. Hint- it's not coding. That's maybe 10% of it. And you code what the customer wants not what you want. If what you really want is to code your hearts desire, then get a day job to pay the bills and code for fun after hours.

Until you are ready to accept that the "code doesn't matter" then you have a hobby not a startup.

I genuinely wish you all the best. Sorry if my words seem harsh.

I'm not Eric, and I'm not an economist, but I'd suggest this quote is mostly used to drive up profits for shareholders, and not for the benefit of the other two constituencies.

For example, we bought a company, and over the next year or so doubled wages in that company. Our "social responsibility" in that case was to spend shareholder money so that workers had a living wage. That doesn't seem to be the story I hear about say Amazon.

Yes, we've also spent money outside of those 3 groups. We contribute to charity. We spend money encouraging staff (and customers) to get cancer screenings etc. We spend (I guess shareholder money) on lots of things that are adjacent to our actual business.

Frankly, in the long run, I think it ultimately helps the business. It makes us "human" and reminds us that we control money, the money does not control us. This permeates through employee relationships, it permeates customer relationships. Ultimately that makes for a stronger company, built to last.

We've had acquisition offers. The shareholders have resisted them so far (despite easy riches) because we've seen what happens to other companies our size when they get acquired. Shareholder interest flows up. Staff (and by extension society) interest goes down. Ultimately most everyone leaves.

> For example, we bought a company, and over the next year or so doubled wages in that company. Our "social responsibility" in that case was to spend shareholder money so that workers had a living wage. That doesn't seem to be the story I hear about say Amazon. Yes, we've also spent money outside of those 3 groups. We contribute to charity.

I would suggest that there is also some degree of (subconscious?) expectation of higher wages meaning: staff would be happier/performance would be higher/staff retention would be better/absence would be lower.

You weren't just giving (shareholder) money away. You were trying to optimise your team.

Yes, of course. We expect that creating a happier environment where people are well paid, will naturally lead to better productivity and happier customers. And yes, that will ultimately benefit shareholders.

Not that everyone stays forever. People come and go, just like in any business.

As an aside, I'd also say that the "happy bump" employees get from raises (even substantial raises) does not really last. It's not like it's all rainbows and unicorns just because you pay folk a decent wage. After a while there's pretty much the same level of complaints as before. You can't please everyone all the time.

FWIW, Friedman himself I think would be quite scandalized by what passes for normal business practice today.

>> The same general situation has happened to me twice now and I am wondering if it’s something I can break free from or if it’s just the nature of the Startup beast - or what

9 out of 10 statups will fail. So if you're joining startups uou can expect them to (mostly) follow this pattern.

If you don't like this pattern the perhaps look for jobs at more stable (ie non VC) companies. And consider companies not directly in tech.

As regards to today, yes the job market is swamped. Don't quit your current job unless you gave something else to go to. But perhaps start actively looking.

Given you're a generalist, it's likely you'd make a good fit in a company which has been around a while, and which has a reasonable "IT" department, as distinct from a pure IT company.

Polishing off the resume. Thanks for the advice

This exactly. Or put another way;

"Because you think the quality of the product matters."

If you want to get customers then the right focus is getting customers. Not making the product.

There are 2 of you. Your product is already better. Stop coding. Start marketing.

Like some others here, it's not something I would use, indeed I can't imagine using it, so I can't offer specific advice other than "find the market".

I'll also point out that you did the easy part first, which is your real mistake. Don't build a product then look for the market. Find the market first (that's the hard part) and build a product for them.

Nostalgia plays a part for sure.

For those born after an era it can be easy to romanticize an era. And for those who lived through it, it can be easy to remember the good, and forget the bad.

Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"

Ultimately each era is different. Some good, some bad. But in 20 years expect your kids to be idolizing the "20s". "Such a simpler time than now..."

"You got to stay home for a year? What fun...."

> Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"

I disagree with this, the lack of cellphones meant that once people agreed to a plan, they stuck to the plan. "Meet next Saturday at 17:00 at the main square", and everybody would be there.

Nowadays people keep arguing and changing plans until the very last minute, it's exhausting.

>> Jewish people lived in that region first.

I'm going to skip over the obvious assertion that they weren't- Cainanites were in the promised land when they arrived - but instead focus on the "here first" doctrine.

Because if "here first" is the primary source of political legitimacy then that argument extends to lots of places. It would require that Texas should be part of Mexico, that current govts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are illegitimate, that all whites in South Africa should be disenfranchised, that most of Europe needs to redraw borders.

In other words, appealing to the political boundaries of a period thousands of years ago is not quite the killer argument it might appear to be.

(It does however support Greenlanders in their fight against US rhetoric. )

It's also fun that the people who advocate the right for Jews to "return" to Palestine because they were there 2000 years ago, are the same that deny the right of return of Palestinians to the land because "dude you lost it 80 years ago, you need to accept and give up".