The Worlds Left to Conquer

The Worlds Left to Conquer(ludic.mataroa.blog)

15 points by tao_oat 8 days ago | 8 comments

I remember the author from https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-... and https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/flexible-schemas-are-the-min.... Basically: “almost everyone around me is incompetent”.

Here he explains that he’s launched a successful startup and is making wild amounts of money. Relatively speaking, maybe he’s right.

EDIT: worth reading: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-burnout-mental-health-and...

ludicity 2 days ago | |

For the sake of honesty, I should say that these aren't wild amounts of money, it's just a high effective hourly rate. If we achieved 100% utilisation, it would be, but really we're just making enough to get close to our corporate salaries, but on a fraction of the hours. As a business, we need to make more than this in the long-term to be sustainable, as a business is a lot more susceptible to shocks than an employee is. I don't get redundancy if sales dry up!

anitil 4 days ago |

On the competence question I find my own experience frustrating. I can be very competent in certain areas, and barely functional in others.

I've also thought about taking on technical recruiting because it's done so poorly (at least in Sydney, the author is in Melbourne). I think one of the limitations is that it's an industry issue rather than specifically a recruiter issue. I remember patio11 had a summary of his StockFighter (StarFighter?) platform in an old podcast and the issue he ran against was that he'd present pre-vetted, high quality candidates, who would then be put on the normal HR-driven hiring track.

Edit: Best summary I could find was from his co-founder here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37988758

ludicity 2 days ago | |

I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:

1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time

2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts

anitil 15 hours ago | | |

Interesting! I suppose my thought is that once you scale up to running a team of recruiters you end up incentivising behaviours like 'build a list of CVs', 'pattern-match on keywords' and other pointless nonsense. I have run in to a couple of decent recruiters and their behaviour was much closer to 'have a coffee and chat'. I hope you'll talk about your experience because I'm keen to hear about it.

bryanrasmussen 8 days ago |

>If you’ve learned everything, there’s no real reason to open up another book,

there is a certain type of thinker that never considers fiction or art as giving sufficient reason for anything.

Michelangelo11 8 days ago |

Very fascinating and worth a read, but the seemingly neverending stream of violent metaphors gets old after a while.

ludicity 2 days ago | |

Thank you for the kind words! I did end up taking that five month break in my writing to try and develop a different voice, but it's a struggle. Because our company runs pretty smoothly, the original source of stuff I was angry about has sorta dried up. I still see people do crazy things, but I'm a distant observer.