Red Canary just posted the latest Amazon Web Services article by Terry Goertz and myself. In Surviving the Storm we dive into some of the operational and architectural considerations associated with running your solution on AWS and EC2 in particular. This is a follow-up to our first article Scaling with Clouds where we introduced the major components of AWS.
If you have topics you’d like us to cover please leave us feedback here or at Red Canary.
Terry Goertz and I are writing a series of articles on designing, hosting and managing your application using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our first one, which provides a basic overview of AWS, is up on RedCanary.
We needed a portrait for RedCanary and not really being into the glamour shot scene, my son and daughter pulled together this drawing of the two of us. Yeah I’m convinced my kids have a pretty demented view of what we actually do. They know we do something with whiteboards. My daughter demanded help drawing UML actors and then my son proceeded to draw the hair and Terry’s beard. Finally it’s clear who the evil one is.
Alex Iskold asks Are YOU Replaceable? He says what I’ve been thinking for a couple of years now. The idea that everyone is replaceable just isn’t the case anymore. Sure some people are but for small growing companies, I’d argue the Top 15-25% simply aren’t replaceable without a serious hit to the organization.
Things get really scary when it comes to visionaries and leaders. Alex says it well:
Losing leaders and visionaries is very, very costly. The knowledge, the vision, and the game plan that was in his head is unique and can not be replicated.
What’s interesting is that few if any startups consider this during their hiring strategy. Sure everyone wants to recruit the best talent, usually you’re going to toss in some options to keep the person engaged but then what? Our industry is very cyclic. Right now we’re (ok I’m) seeing some interesting stratification of talent happening. The Top 10% (aka the freakishly good) are now able to command above market rates - significantly above market rates. As the market heats up people really do seem to be willing to cherry pick and to pay for that privilege.
Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities float by. In both cases the compensation for the year outstripped what I was currently making and the potential upside that I as a non-founder of a startup could expect over the life of a startup. Holy crap.
I can tell you that the super-sized packages make for interesting over coffee discussions but it makes trouble for the startups themselves. It also makes trouble for the person themselves because once $200k becomes the new $100k and then $250k, etc… it’s really hard to roll back to last year’s lifestyle.
I’m taking this as a wake-up call personally. Now more then ever companies really need to consider their retention policies. Clearly retention doesn’t just include raw compensation but the market does dictates rates. So take a look at your team, segment your talent and figure out a plan to keep your Top X% happy and engaged before it’s too late.
Yesterday or maybe a couple of days ago (I’m temporally challenged) Dave Winer tweeted:
programmers are supposed to be too virtuous to want to be paid. a bunch of hooey. i don’t think programmers started that rumor!
Amen brother! It was weird to read that from Dave, it was somewhat unrelated to the rest of his Twitter stream. Even weirder is that over the course of the days (hey I already said I was temporally challenged) several people brought up the issue of the virtuous startup. You know the old: do good things and the money will follow. Hmmn maybe Dave Winer has one those “world consciousness machines“; he does have an early iPhone.
Well I’m here to tell ya it ain’t the case. If you’re building a startup and you’re not sweating the revenue model and just “doing good stuff” you don’t have a business — you have a hobby and probably an expensive one at that. Trust me I’ve had a hobby.
Revenue isn’t the devil. Revenue lets you do good stuff. Revenue lets you hire “good” people, develop even more “good” products, hire more “good” people (if you need them) and most importantly continue to make your customers happy and the world a better place.
If someone tries to tell you something different, ask them why they hate you.
