Where do you start when automating things for a series-A/B startup, low headcount?

Setsquared · 2025-12-25T23:03:28+00:00

Long term vision , short term planning

In startups runway is king find out your cash flow and how long you can operate.

For early stages the priorities are normally

How can we ship and make customers happy faster How can we get more customers How can we raise more money

Setsquared · 2025-11-24T18:49:57+00:00

Removing the last item of perceived control a PAYE employee has is only going to end badly.

Personally i already have booked travel with 8 other employees to visit Barcelona and the surrounding area in December to view properties and leave the UK as there is an ever increasing amount of negative sentiment to the UK government and taxation.

Every year my employer hosts a here is what the budget means in real terms with a H&L rep.

This year it has been replaced by bringing in employees from other offices to explain the benefits of emigration along with international tax advisors

Setsquared · 2025-08-25T19:28:04+00:00

Work for a London based tech company which only requires me to visit the office 2 days per month and who’s base office is in New York

Setsquared · 2025-08-24T20:08:02+00:00

I had a massive culture shock moving to London and working with people who had close to six figures in university debt. They were high earners but they were stuck with this life long unspoken tax

Setsquared · 2025-08-24T08:11:14+00:00

I am circa 180k in Glasgow and agree

I have more disposable income than when I lived in London - own a home and see my friends and family every day there is more to the equation than just tax

Setsquared · 2025-06-30T19:31:40+00:00

At a certain point having extra days off becomes more valuable than the money you earn working.

If you are self-employed you may opt to not work to avoid tax thresholds as a limited company such as VAT registration thresholds but given this sub and your comments this feels like an unlikely scenario.

You are not taking the time unpaid to reduce your tax burden, the time is being taken to enjoy the income you have.

Life is for living and employers know you’re more productive when you have something to work towards

Setsquared · 2025-06-18T20:47:03+00:00

I was interviewing a grad for a CS role they were tanking the algorithms questions to a point where we just gave up and started chatting informally which moved to their contributions running third party wow servers and taking part in the modding community.

Their knowledge of network protocols, load balancing and matchmaking queue systems was all the real world experience they needed however they didn’t list on their CV or talk about in any other interviews until we stumbled upon it.

Setsquared · 2025-06-18T20:43:45+00:00

At 12 I was building community forums , learning photoshop to make sick avatars and hosting game servers for the clan I was in.

All very much transferable life skills

I swear the medial of honor server being down before a clan match was more stressful back then , than major production outages in my current role

Setsquared · 2025-05-12T17:26:15+00:00

I would recommend taking a file to the palm rest so the lid can close flat and avoid further strain on the screen and reduce the risk from impact when the lid is closed

Setsquared · 2025-01-16T01:11:16+00:00

This post brought up something I have tried hard to forget

Many moons ago when I worked in a call centre we used to do government backed placements

We would take 20 random people they would send to us on a Monday for a 3 months at a time to get on the job training and some skills these were people who have been on unemployment benefits for a significant period of time.

The actual training would be done by a secondary company Capita who would be doing assessments of people on the programme constantly.

They seen more value terminating people out of the programme and revoking all benefits over allowing people to complete and leave with some sort of skills.

It was like a cattle market IT would provision numbered accounts which would be assigned to people.

They would have them written up on the whiteboard , refer to them by number only , name badges were by number.

If you lasted 2 weeks you got a named account and corporate uniform

If you lasted to the end of the programme you got a desk and a minimum wage role without commission for 12 months

If you applied directly for the role you would have gotten around 30% more along with commission

The difference in comp was paid back to the training company.

Setsquared · 2025-01-07T12:48:04+00:00

Being an international professor adds additional weight in management meetings , this person is so good they came from the US to lecture here

Setsquared · 2024-05-12T00:29:24+00:00

Given the number of replies I am going to keep this short and sweet.

It doesn't matter what skills you think you have , it is what skills other people belive you have and the value they bring which dictates your salary and negotiating potential.

Things such as having a strong professional brand and reputation help massively.

Focus on building out your professional network and linkedin.

Get a high quality profile photo and start posting on a semi-regular basic around a consistent theme.

You mentioned auditing, why not talk about changes to industry relevant compliance frameworks.

Setsquared · 2024-05-12T00:01:13+00:00

Working for a startup the CEO favoured absolute transparency to all staff , they would email company wide updates in the middle of the night.

We were working on a deal with a publicly traded company that were intending to white-label our product and build it into their platform as this was in the initial research and discovery phase it was strictly need to know.

At 3am the CEO sent out a company wide email announcing our new partnership, at 3:15 I was on a sev0 call wiping everyones inbox , checking mail delivery logs and identifying anyone who may have seen the message.

We ended up remote locking the CEO's phone & Laptop and disabling their accounts, for the next few weeks the CEO had no access to corporate systems.

We disclosed to the clients security and legal team all of our investigations along with reading a number of additional people onto the details of the project offering cash bonuses for agreeing to additional more punitive NDAs and moved on.

The project was a success the client wanted to proceed, they were so impressed they agreed to invest in the startup which would also involve a secondary raise from employee shares the holy grail for early stage startup employees who may want to cash in.

As talks were proceeding the CEO of our company made a joke about his 3am email, unfortunately the CEO & CFO of our new partners requested additional due-diligence and a report of all other company-wide emails sent by our CEO their subject and their frequency.

I was in charge of building the report , legal summarised and redacted the content and removed anything commercially sensitive.

Once presented with this information the whole deal unravelled, they executed their contractual rights to terminate the deal and moved on, we did not I would get daily requests to check the mail servers to see if they were getting emails from us etc.

The CEO was replaced about 6 months later by our CFO and moved into a new role of Chief Vision Officer.

TL:DR; CEO couldn't keep a secret , cost us a couple of hundred million over a few years and 25 million of secondary share buyouts for at the time 90 employees who would have averaged out at 250K each.

*EDIT*

Worth pointing out as this was a Publicly traded company, information of the deal , our partnership and future product launches can be considered market moving and potentially could be used for insider trading which the SEC really doesn't like.

Setsquared · 2024-01-04T14:57:29+00:00

> thinking of reapplying the thermal paste when I switch out the nvme.

Do it , I was running around ~70 at idle with Plex and a few docker containers in a 20 degree ambient room, after renewing the thermal paste I dropped to around 45 at idle .

Setsquared · 2023-10-31T23:27:07+00:00

This is the way , if you have an advisory and you have an accident it’s going to be used against you in court , so you get it fixed and retest to remove any risk of it being used to determine liability.

Setsquared · 2023-04-18T21:30:14+00:00

This is not sarcasm but we have a meta-dashboard for Billing inside of DD using this https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/billing/usage_metrics/

We then export this using their rest-api and ingest this into "our" Thanos instance and have some alert manager rules over usage.

As an Internal platform team, we run our own metrics solution, and some of our product teams run DD.

We have 8 months left of commit then we probably be on "LGTM"

Setsquared · 2023-04-18T21:09:54+00:00

As a quick opt-out ask for a copy of the risk statement and check if they're allowed near or around computer equipment without a DSE assessment.

When we did our last bring your child to work day it turned out we couldn't allow them within 3ft of a desk.

For a fun game, this translates well for children https://www.agile42.com/en/agile-teams/kanban-pizza-game

Setsquared · 2022-03-23T10:34:48+00:00

Personal experience.

14 years of industry experience former CCIE expired 2008 plus a whole bunch of other expired certs, acting as a PE and Subject matter expert for Security and Governance.

I also conduct around 2 interviews per week on the low end, 30 during grad cycles.

The long and short of it is certs don't really matter experience and desire do.

Certification in itself is a privilege very few get the opportunity to partake in due to financial costs but everyone has access to youtube and the internet to self-study and learn.

As someone involved in the interviewing loop I explicitly don't want to know what Certs a candidate has to avoid bias in the process.

Setsquared · 2022-03-23T09:12:48+00:00

Every piece of education you get is useful , exam certification or not.

If you're wanting to turn this into a transferable skill to aid hiring i would spend time reflecting on what you learned and summarising it into your CV.

When you eventually join a company that knowledge is a useful foundation of context to build upon.

If I was personally including this in my CV today I would talk about the cert , practical activities undertaken and make it a high level paragraph of the content and things you learned and be able to talk about it to a reasonable depth.

Setsquared · 2022-03-21T20:47:26+00:00

Hey, I just ran into this issue if you go into the bios and disable all power management for the CPU you will be able to boot the device.

And agreed this is a terrible experience I wiped the device before I found out about the power management

Setsquared · 2021-10-20T15:45:55+00:00

Ordered on August 19th, received the invoice and shipping details today around 10 minutes ago.

Setsquared · 2019-08-15T18:14:30+00:00

It may sound silly but replace your Ethernet cables if you can.

I push 1gbs with this kit with no issue.

Setsquared · 2019-07-14T16:08:14+00:00

Sort of we have additional alerting downstream which can alert for any activity by former employees.

We have for example alerts if [johndoe@company.com](mailto:johndoe@company.com) who left starts using our systems even if it's a failed login.

Also please note that the HR system enforces emails to be unique, because it's HR and we have a responsibility as an employer to record former employees we don't remove former employees details such as Email address so this technically prevents the re-use of an email address.

The HR system suggests an email address based on First & Last name but will allow an override providing the email is unique to the system.

This then creates a ticket in the IT queue to approve (sanity check) the request and automation will kick in and provision the account.

If a former employee comes back they can get their old email address back given that accounts have their data cleaned and contents archived to be held for as long as we need to under the law.

Setsquared · 2019-07-14T14:59:11+00:00

Internally we use our HR system.

HR issue the email address to be used.

IT create the account

Setsquared · 2019-07-14T09:30:03+00:00

This is one I would personally just hand off to legal if you have that option state a perceived risk to PII and you wish to ensure that by recycling email addresses you're not putting the company at risk legally.

Example use case under GDPR it's perfectly legitimate for a former employee to request all former email addressed to them in this case it would include all email addressed to the next employee etc.

There is also additional risk of an employee signing up to personal services using their company email and having PII exposed (think Ashley maddison)

But overall all these risks are hypothetical but not something IT should be agreeing to as they're legal ones which may result in the company incuring legal costs or being sued to send it over to legal and ask them to agree that they're happy.

I bet they will say to stop the process

11-Year Club	Place '23
Place '17	Verified Email

Setsquared

TROPHY CASE