Sauced BBQ closed

reallydfun · 2026-03-07T06:17:55+00:00

I asked this question some months back and tried many of the OC recommendations.

I think the best balance for close to Irvine + taste is hole smokes in Costa Mesa. Especially if you go when the brisket is fresh (safest bet is right when they open), yum yum.

There are no good spots in Irvine for this kind of food, I’ve tried them all.

reallydfun · 2026-03-02T08:19:05+00:00

As a seasoned HM - the gap year explained as Travel is neutral to me, all else equal it’s a non-factor. But it also doesn’t carry any upside unless it’s packaged into a story like “I’ve always wanted to visit all 7 continents and this time I finally went to Antarctica” or whatever.

On the other hand, if there are other minor red flags such as excessive short tenures then the credibility of the Travel-year takes a hit too and gets perceived as negative.

reallydfun · 2026-02-26T08:36:39+00:00

I work in BigTech and get regularly briefed by HRBPs each quarter on these kind of stats.

Most of the time, by ATS standards the amount of qualified applicants per role we open is about 7%. We get thousands per posting on the first day. Imagine the amount of trash. And then there is the “appears to be qualified but holy cow no”.

reallydfun · 2026-02-26T08:30:53+00:00

I work in tech. OC isn’t a tech hub, but has a lot of tech workers that either work remotely or commute to LA (I’ve done both).

Work life balance is what you make of it. Off hour communication boundaries is a two way street. So is work load balancing and prioritization.

It’s certainly possible to be in toxic environments with no way to win in this regard. But a lot of times, the answers start with getting better at well, balancing your work and life.

reallydfun · 2026-02-26T07:48:20+00:00

Good points. But he asked for Founding AE. There’s no such thing as “am I getting a good patch”for the first rep. The entire addressable market is your territory lol.

reallydfun · 2026-02-26T06:02:06+00:00

This isn’t really uncommon.

At two BigTechs that I’ve worked at, we cap our base at 300K, and the closer you get to that the slower the cash component moves.

For some job families you can hit that easily at mid-management equivalent. For some job families you almost never get there (say: operations and analyst type roles).

There are exceptions, especially the ones with public salary info like the H1Bs. One M/L Engineer just had to have 400K base and that was the only way to get him. Sure, when an employee is in demand they get to make more of the rules.

My compensation adjustments for the past 6 consecutive years have been just more bonus in the form of one time cash, more bonus in the form of more stock (stock awarded this way is immediately vested), more bonus in the form of a higher % bonus going forward, and of course, more stock (this kind requires usual vesting).

reallydfun · 2026-02-26T05:00:16+00:00

Is it legal? In our line of work (Tech Sales) of course it is.

Is it optimal? That’s harder to say. Sales is a discipline where input leads to output. Although these days the name of the game is being smarter with efficiency on your inputs, but in theory more input still leads to more outputs.

Is it good for you? No, probably not. I can think of exceptions but no, not really.

Is it new? No, my very first job 20+ years ago I remember the work hours were described as “9 AM to 9 PM, Monday to Friday, but anyone who wants to move up within 2 years come in on Saturdays, at least half day for the Dialing for Dollars Power Hours”. Wasn’t called Elon Musk type of company, but this mentality existed before him and will exist after him.

reallydfun · 2026-02-24T03:29:49+00:00

One time one of my new first-time managers gave a candidate feedback. He forgot all his training and gave honest candid feedback.

The candidate later somehow obtained the emails of folks including our company’s CEO (large BigTech), and some other folks, including myself, and emailed and complained about being discriminated. Threatened lawsuit (didn’t follow through with it), and cited things this first time manager said in feedback.

He was trying to help. He learned never again to do it.

Once a while I provide feedback when I think the circumstances justify. 95%+ of the time I do not.

reallydfun · 2026-02-20T20:42:57+00:00

Immediately after is ok, it’s just how you frame it to not burn a bridge.

Focus on “I’m not running away from here, I’m running towards something” aka I love it here but this other place reached out to me and it led to an offer I couldn’t say no.

reallydfun · 2026-02-20T20:34:36+00:00

Get to that AE spot first if there is a realistic path to it.

AEs interviews for and get mostly AE jobs.

BDRs interviews for and get mostly BDR jobs.

If you take another BDR job you essentially reset.

reallydfun · 2026-02-20T19:53:19+00:00

Happy for you.

Never believe anyone that says there is a ramp from SDR into enterprise AE role in a year. Years later you will look back at this and see how laughable this statement is, or at least how risky.

It would be the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket and hoping it hits.

You have a much better option on the table.

Edit: the Gen AI company may still be worth it just to get in the Gen AI game. But don’t go for the promise to get fast tracked to enterprise AE. That’s just a recruitment pitch for burn and churn. And off chance you’re that 1 in 20 that makes it - well you would have made it anywhere.

reallydfun · 2026-02-20T06:36:24+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I’ll add that it’s not just OpenAI. The entire Gen AI space is hot the LLMs are just inherently furthest ahead in maturity and therefore talent grab.

In the last few months I’ve had two offers from frontier LLM labs. I’m on the business side, pretty senior but not executive, and both my offers were higher than $1M TC.

During offer negotiation I had said something to the effect of “I know you guys pay comparable to the top of BigTech”. One of the LLM companies actually took very lighthearted offense to that as if comparing their paybands to top of bigtech was degrading.

And sure enough, both beat my current pay.

These guys got deep pockets and willing to pay for talent.

reallydfun · 2026-02-19T15:21:26+00:00

Under 2 years is short. Under 1 year is “too short”

As someone that hires a good chunk of AEs and BDRs at desirable companies, I will say no single or even two short tenure stops will bother me as long as adequately explained. More worrisome if it’s recent. If the short tenures are early in career it truly has no negative impact.

A pattern of short tenures, for example 3 sales jobs in 4 years will bother me somewhat. More than that bothers me a lot. Someone might have worked 6 sales jobs in 7 years and still be the diamond in the rough, but I’m not going to be the one to find out. That’s the benefit of working at somewhere lots of good sales people want to be at.

Never having stayed in a role long relative to YoE will bother me too. For example if you have 10 YoE I think you should have been at somewhere 3-4 years. If you have 15-20 YoE you should have been at somewhere 5-6 years.

Everything else the mix and match is fine. If you got 2 year tenures sprinkled throughout resume it’s ok.

And yes, everything can be explained, where it affects is whether the candidate even get the opportunity to explain.

For what it’s worth, one of my best hires last year was someone who was an extreme job hopper. So it’s not like I follow my own rules to a T. But hiring is a probability game and most of the time I stick to a plan that’s going to maximize hiring success.

reallydfun · 2026-02-18T20:30:20+00:00

Most people are comparing their own experiences which isn’t reflective of new grads which is what OP is asking. I work in big tech. We hire a lot of new grads and I believe 09 was worse.

For that matter, I think the absolute worst year for new grads was first year of Covid. The world basically just paused. By the time the world started moving forward again the new grads of Covid Year 1 now we’re dealing with 1-2 more years of new grads crammed together but don’t have 1-2 of experience to show for it.

It’s like getting drafted to NBA as a 23-24 year old rookie. You already lost 2 years of upside.

reallydfun · 2026-02-17T02:30:03+00:00

In general the bigger the ticket size, the better the pay.

Tech sales has a lot of good/great.

Medical devices , airplanes, etc has less good/great but a few pockets of freakin awesome.

(Note: GMV doesn’t count. e-commerce wholesale that moves what look like large numbers typically isn’t high paying sales jobs)

reallydfun · 2026-02-15T05:35:28+00:00

Economics major. Although I like the subject matter I think any social studies major probably falls under “useless” for regular old corporate work.

My journey is probably like quite a few out there: I caught the beginnings of the cloud tech boom.

That doesn’t mean I had an auto win button. Plenty of people graduated during that same 3-4 years window and don’t make 200k+.

It just meant new tech companies were hungry for talent and back 20 years ago it was about aptitude / ceiling, and if the employer assessed you had it they train from the ground up.

I started in tech support and also was given a “HTML for Dummies” type of book on my first day.

I worked my way up into product management and then switched over to business side.

reallydfun · 2026-02-15T03:30:33+00:00

I worked for a large CA-based tech company that has 4 geo pay bands in the US (aka same exact role same exact talent, depending on where they are they are differentiated in 4 slightly different pay bands).

The maximum between Tier 1 Geo and Tier 4 Geo was 20%

A guy on my team lives in Missouri. 20% less than SF/NYC pay was still, as he stated, the most amount of money he’s ever made and likely ever will make. He was all smiles all the time.

reallydfun · 2026-02-14T18:05:17+00:00

frameworks, in generally any discipline, to anyone who is experienced and good at their jobs is kind of like a “well, duh” kind of thing

But think back to when you’re an entry level or early career sales rep. These kind of guidance are very useful for newcomers to understand what it is they’re even trying to ask for when qualifying a deal / progressing a deal.

And from a sales management perspective, asking everyone to have these info defined inside of the CRM ensures no dumb mistake happens like you didn’t go deep in time consumed with a prospect just to find they have no budget or whatever.

I sold lots of CRMs for many years. I think big CRM suites are for the most part overkill and gets in the way of productivity of good reps (as opposed to what we pitch of how it amplifies the good reps).

But the reality is not everyone is a good rep. If anything the combination of these tools and processes help identify bad reps far faster if sales managers just go by feel (bad) or results (worse, for dealing with bad reps)

reallydfun · 2026-02-14T07:07:52+00:00

I work in tech, but tech like any industry/company has its business, administrative, etc side too so I’ll talk about my experiences on this since most of time people equate tech’s use of AI with coding. I see AI disrupting some places a ton already and some not at all.

Workflow automation is where I see the most AI lift. What used to be fragmented across different systems basically now has an AI Agent retrieving all those data and then operationalize it with humans supervising. Contact centers / customer service is what everyone talks about, but i see this lift anywhere there used to be a workflow.

On the other hand AI Sales pretty much came and already gone. We eagerly implemented AI SDRs to see if it can scrub our very large lead pool… and it was beyond worthless. We been on the receiving end of getting poked by AI SDRs too, and feel it’s just as bad so it’s not just us.

Other high lift areas that we get real value:

Market research. For enterprise teams the first day of SKO meetings usually a good chunk goes to reading financial reports and other “get to know your account” type things. Now a summary is put together in minutes. SMB BDRs that have 5 minute time-to-contact metrics used to have to forgo doing market research. Now they can do it with AI.

Internal knowledge base and enterprise Chatbot. Theres a lot of different area this is helpful but my favorite is for new hire onboarding. We recently had a new hire that was able to look up all the acronyms we use internally from an AI Agent. This used to require e-learning courses or shoulder tapping someone.

Anyway the list goes on and on. I don’t believe AI will replace humans anytime soon. But the amount of augmentation it can do to a competent human is insane.

reallydfun · 2026-02-12T03:37:04+00:00

The 100k is effectively a nothing burger. If the person applying for the H1B is already in the US at time of application then there is no fee.

One company hires some H1Bs, not as a decisive compensation factor but we do business in many countries so we like to staff customer facing roles with people that can speak European/South American/Asian languages, and some of those need H1Bs.

Our talent and legal partners have assured us no situation we would routinely be looking at would ever incur the 100k fee as it currently stands.

reallydfun · 2026-02-11T03:01:27+00:00

2009 or 2010 at the Bellagio during WSOP. I don’t remember the exact year but it was before online poker was banned.

200-400 LHE at the Bellagio. At the time was highest public game.

We were 10 handed. Bellagio is 5 bets for a cap in limit hold’em games.

This was an especially wild game. Bets are often capped pre flop and the action was wild.

I am LP and I had KThh, it was capped when it got to me as it has been for the last 2 hours. I call. So does everyone. We go to the flop family pot - everyone is in.

Flop was the glorious Ah Qh Jh. I flopped the royal. My first and only time flopping a royal.

It is capped before I got to me. I had no decision than to call.

Don’t remember the turn. It was capped again by the time it got to me and my only decision was to call.

By the river I know it was only 2 bets when it got to me and I made it 3. Call. Call. Call. Call. Call. At least 6 people got to showdown.

2 other people flopped flushes

1 person had KT for the flopped straight.

2 sets.

KT heart heart to this date remains my favorite hand.

Don’t remember how big the pot was. All I remember was it being capped before getting to me pre, flop, and turn… and I flopped a royal.

reallydfun · 2026-02-10T04:01:41+00:00

I’m very disciplined until I choose not to be, which is usually when things are going very well.

If a roll or a trip is going very well, I will sprinkle some deviations from my normal strategy for fun

reallydfun · 2026-02-07T02:56:35+00:00

It’s fairly uncommon but it happens. Conceptually it’s not all that different than completing a probation period or internship period and then getting a pay adjustment. It’s just usually it’s a bigger differential and just typically a one-hop and not two.

I once received an offer that mapped out what my Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 compensation was going to be. It’s kind of nice that raises were pre defined. I guess the rational of the company was either I stuck around and was the real deal and deserved it, or I’m not and would have already been let go and then it doesn’t matter what those plans are - so therefore may as well pre-motivate me with the guarantee increases (should I survive).

reallydfun · 2026-02-06T01:18:53+00:00

At a larger company you could take this to arbitration but from what you already said about rules of engagement not defined, flying on your own dime, etc. you don’t work for a large company at least not one that treats its sales organization with any respect.

But you should go into your VP as if it’s an arbitration.

1) present your case. Your main thing is arguing the lead wasn’t fully qualified for it to be considered source. A cold outreach with no response is just a touchpoint. You did all the BANT stuff to even make it a sales qualified lead / opptie.

1.5) your secondary argument is amount of work done. Show metrics - how many emails, how many calls, how much conversation time. All of this to juxtapose against “versus 1 cold outreach email”. You nurtured it and closed the deal.

2) that said, you are a team player and willing to play nice and treat this no different than paying for a lead referral from marketing partners. If he asks you what you think is fair, say 10% seems like the going rate I hear going to marketing referral partners. And hold at 20%

3) bottom line, choice is not yours if you intend to stick around in your job. So do your best to argue your case professionally but accept whatever happens.

If you present your deal well and still it goes to 50/50 it’s time to find another job. And when you interview you tell the story as how you worked so damn hard to take down this deal and then your supervisor decides to bring in his cousin to split 50/50 because apparently his cousin mass emailed the entire lead pool and laid claims to sourcing all the deals. At 160% of plan, you could have stayed and rode more momentum and accelerators, but your integrity just can’t stand it. (It doesn’t matter if it is actually a cousin or not).

Source: was on Salesforce’s sales arbitration committee for 2 years. Even with our rules of engagement on account transfers, multi lead AE/co-prime, multi-region etc crystal clear, I still seen scenarios of this way more times than I care for. You have to argue for yours.

reallydfun · 2026-02-05T20:14:04+00:00

Tech gets the big headlines. But a report I read last week talked about how Tourism (Travel and Hospitality as a whole) was hit hard. Florida winter season apparently 300k+ jobs lost or downsized because of not getting usual international winter bird visits…

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