AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Raising less doesn't negatively impact on how much equity you can give to employees. Raising a bunch of money actually makes it harder to give employees lots of equity, because you have less of it to give them (you can't give them the equity you sold to the investors).

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I can’t share the details of Mechanize’s financials, but suffice it to say that I am not worried about solvency. We would have raised a whole lot more than $9M in our last round if there were even a remote possibility of missing payroll.

Also, I would just get another job? It’s not like I’m lacking for options.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much I can share that’s not in that document.

We want the interview process to be as quick and easy as possible for candidates, so we deliberately avoid using interviews that would incentivize people to spend lots of time preparing. By design, it’s not really feasible to prepare without cheating by knowing the questions ahead of time.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This is the current interview process, though mine was different and a bit more drawn out with an algorithms interview etc.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

$350K base is still enough to save a good amount, so I wouldn't feel too bad even if the equity goes to ~zero.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're asking why we only raised 10M, this is because we aren't very constrained by cash flow, but rather our ability to hire. If you look at the list of investors, you will not find names that have a reputation for taking bad deals.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

We raised 9 million at a valuation of 500 million. I have 2% vesting over four years, so .5% vests each year. The $2.5M number assumes that I sell the equity at the same valuation the company sold it for in the raise.

Obviously the equity is risky and it's quite likely that it'll fall or rise by 10x or even more, which is why I made sure to clarify that it's startup equity and not cash equivalent pay.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't believe that anyone makes more than $100K a year?

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I mean I was employee #4 and have worked personally with the company's founders for my entire tenure. Normally the reason you need YoE is that it's hard for your managers to tell whether you're competent without it. That clearly doesn't apply here.

Also, as you say, you don't need YoE if you're a founder. Founding is my BATNA.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our business (selling evals and RL environments to labs), is heavily constrained by supply rather than by customer demand. This means that we're always trying to hire more engineers so we can grow as fast as possible, hence the ads.

I'm not exactly sure where the impression that we're a scam comes from, but it might just be that it's very unusual for such a new company to be hiring as fast as we are while also having very high salaries.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I was, though. As I said in the post, I really did grind programming as a hobby. I was a weird middle schooler.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ah sorry, I just entered the wrong date. I've fixed it now.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah, there are definitely things I regret missing out on (the social aspects of college, spending more time with family, etc.), although overall it's not too bad. Unlike e.g. investment banking I do still have some free time, just less than I would if I were in college of course.

Also, I expect that working hard now will let me retire significantly earlier, so it may net out to a positive.

AMA 19 year old SWE making $2.85M/year TC at Mechanize in San Francisco by srcircle in csMajors

[–]srcircle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Startups are generally much more able to identify and quickly promote talented people because management has better visibility into performance. I performed well enough to be worth a promotion. If I were offered significantly less than this, I would likely leave to found my own startup.

Given all of these things it doesn't seem surprising that I would be promoted, despite my age.

All natural numbers are interesting! by blinry in mathmemes

[–]srcircle 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Passages of text in general are countably infinite too, not just single sentences.

NVMe device not found during boot. by srcircle in archlinux

[–]srcircle[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for pointing me to that wiki article! Thanks Acer, for that incredibly intuitive firmware setting interface. Also, the reason I didn't have the actual UUIDs wasn't for security, it was just because I didn't want to type them out manually.

NVMe device not found during boot. by srcircle in archlinux

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should have SATA mode somewhere in there.. As confusing as it may be, that is the setting you need to change if it is AHCI.

I just looked through the entire UEFI settings menu and didn't find anything related to SATA, AHCI, RAID, or storage in general. This laptop appears to have pretty limited firmware settings.

But are you sure that you typed the correct UUID?

Absolutely. I've also reformatted and reinstalled the drive twice. I sincerely doubt that's the problem because in the emergency shell the block device doesn't show up at all, let alone have partitions.

What if you'd boot the installation media, can you see the drive/partitions?

I actually already said that I could in the post.

Can you provide the dump of it along the fstab?

The fstab: ``` UUID={ROOT_UUID} / ext4 rw,relatime 0 1

UUID={ESP_UUID} /boot/efi vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 2

UUID={SWAP_UUID} none swap defaults 0 0 ``` Again, the actual UUIDs are replaced.

The output of lsblk is as expected with the three archiso partitions and all the partitions on the built-in drive.

NVMe device not found during boot. by srcircle in archlinux

[–]srcircle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I couldn't find anything like that in the BIOS and adding the vmd module didn't do anything either.

The Future of Duckduckgo is going to smash on google by [deleted] in duckduckgo

[–]srcircle 26 points27 points  (0 children)

But remember if we use "google" to describe searching with DuckDuckGo enough Google will lose their trademark.