At Close we have been offering an 80% salary / 4-day week option for engineering roles for a few years now. This originally was mandatory during early 2020 COVID-19 economic uncertainty as a way to cut costs without doing layoffs. Quickly it became optional – most people moved back to 100% but some people decided they enjoyed it and wanted to continue that arrangement.
What's interesting about 4d weeks is that it's 20% less work but 50% more days off, which can be very impactful for folks.
Our 80% option is a flexible thing, as in you can choose to do it for the summer but not the rest of the year. We try to adjust workloads accordingly. I've taken advantage of it myself for a period of time and it gave me more free time to be with family and also work on side projects.
Some people really love taking our 80% option / 4d and others absolutely don't want to.
Companies offering flexibility in work hours can really help retention IMO, and is a natural progression after (a) remote / freedom of location, and (b) freedom of specific work schedule.
I know a few companies offer "4-day week summers" to everybody or even "everyone always does 4-day weeks". But I like the "fairness" of giving people an option, since different people are in different life situations at different times where working more vs. less can be especially helpful.
> This originally was mandatory during early 2020 COVID-19 economic uncertainty as a way to cut costs without doing layoffs.
I'm surprised I've never heard of this solution before. I think it's brilliant, especially for engineering roles where we can still make rent on 80% pay.
I would gladly move back and forth between the options as I get more or less burnt out with work, or take on a new extra curricular.
The core Lexical library is really a framework for building such editors. However, we also provide many common rich-text features out-of-the-box via separate packages, such as @lexical/rich-text. We also expose bindings for React (and hope to have them for other frameworks soon). Check out the lexical-playground package on GitHub for an example of how you can create a rich-text editor by adding plugins to the LexicalComposer component in @lexical/react.
As a hiring manager at a startup-ish SaaS company:
I love seeing side projects, both because
- it shows you have entrepreneurial skills (care about and able to think about more than just code)
- as well as the technical side (shows you’re able to build from scratch, probably work across the stack, etc.)
Show off as much as you can:
- leave the websites up even if the business isn’t viable. Better to be able to see and play with a side project versus just seeing a line on a resume and having no idea how significant or good it was.
- open source what you can. It can be very helpful to point to code from real projects you wrote, especially if you have a gap in employment.
Try to foster great references. Even if they aren’t recent, you will do better if you have a few raving fans.
Unless you had a lot of management experience, I suggest trying to find a job as an IC. More open roles / people seem more desperate for developers. If you’re good, it won’t matter much if you have a gap. Personally I prefer to hire ICs who have a little management experience because they tend to be better employees as well as are more likely to be someone who can eventually lead/manage with us as well.
Overall: the biggest thing is you want to show that you have been doing good technical work over the last few years versus just some unemployable person who had “projects”.
I’m hiring frontend/React and backend/Python engineers: phil@close.com
As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more.
Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.
Just a few examples Stripe could handle:
- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.
- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.
- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.
Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.
[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.
Fully agree, I don't have a problem paying Stripe if it means they are properly incentivized to help me run my business.
I'd be happy to throw them a few more percent if they could handle more of the complexity you've mentioned above. Right now, Stripe is both too complex to set up and too simple from a feature perspective.
I'm optimistic though since it seems companies like Paddle, Chargebee and others are blazing that path. As much as I love Stripe and what they originally did for online commerce, they're already starting to look like the lazy incumbent compared to the challengers right now. Market dominance is not a great incentive to create better products.
I'd suggest putting the information directly on your site (at least the IPOs coming up in the next X days) and charge for the deeper access + email notifications. But that way people have a reason to visit your site even if they haven't decided to pay yet.
With an 8 year old codebase w/100s of thousands of lines of code and 100s of dependencies, this was no easy task.
We had read many of the blog posts about the Python 3 transition, and yet still had a number of surprises. Here were some of the more interesting ones.
I did some redirects without lambda's last year using s3 routing rules, which kind of worked. As figuring out this and several other things, I also wrote up some details on this.
IMHO, Amazon should be ashamed of themselves for making it so unbelievably convoluted and hard to host a simple website on cloudfront. It's the one thing almost every website out there has to solve and they made it super painful to get this right.
In the US, another way to make anonymous donations to charity is to use a Donor Advised Fund [1]. For example Fidelity Charitable [2] makes it easy to make grants anonymously if you choose.
Beyond that, there can also be additional tax advantages to giving to giving via DAF, especially if you have appreciated stock, bitcoin, etc. [3]
What's interesting about 4d weeks is that it's 20% less work but 50% more days off, which can be very impactful for folks.
Our 80% option is a flexible thing, as in you can choose to do it for the summer but not the rest of the year. We try to adjust workloads accordingly. I've taken advantage of it myself for a period of time and it gave me more free time to be with family and also work on side projects.
Some people really love taking our 80% option / 4d and others absolutely don't want to.
Companies offering flexibility in work hours can really help retention IMO, and is a natural progression after (a) remote / freedom of location, and (b) freedom of specific work schedule.
I know a few companies offer "4-day week summers" to everybody or even "everyone always does 4-day weeks". But I like the "fairness" of giving people an option, since different people are in different life situations at different times where working more vs. less can be especially helpful.