Launch HN: DailyBot (YC S21) – in-chat automation for work
12 by maomorales | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN — we're Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot ( https://ift.tt/2KjWIsm ). We're building an automation platform and chat assistant for modern work that integrates with Slack, Discord, MS Teams and Google Chat, with others coming soon. Here's a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g Even after six years of managing distributed teams, async work remained a challenge for us. We faced pains like having too many meetings, overusing calls instead of having asynchronous check-ins, and having processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized, like managing our releases’ change control, getting reminders on a teammate’s birthday, or running a quick poll. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few slack bots with partial solutions, but they lacked privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us! Using DailyBot, you have access to features that aren’t available on Slack - our aim is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one, with a web dashboard that summarizes insights from these add-ons. It’s a world of possibilities: @DailyBot automates daily stand-ups, regular team meetings, surveys, employee recognition and team morale, random 1:1 coffees, watercooler convos, and even knowledge bases across the company – all inside your chat. We made it customizable, so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined messages or with data from their APIs. We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we’ll be SOC2 compliant in 2022, plus we don’t read messages from your chat channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @DailyBot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, also we encrypt data in transit and at rest and include roles/permissions management. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams to run stand-ups, agile routines and build chat-ops. We offer a free plan, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user. We’d love to hear any ideas on what repetitive processes you have to deal with that you’d like help automating, for example: a) scheduling a meeting with a chat command; or b) getting feedback on a task by sending automated reminders to the other person until it’s done, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!
By BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, JASON KARAIAN, SARAH KESSLER, STEPHEN GANDEL, MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED, LAUREN HIRSCH AND EPHRAT LIVNI from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3cZQlFL
Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?
19 by brayhite | 10 comments on Hacker News. I've worked at my current company since my college internship in 2012, and have not sought a new gig in all of that time. The company was a travel tech startup that I joined as an early employee, and it was acquired a few years ago. The app is still active and supported, but it feels time to start exploring what else is out there. In case it matters, my background is largely in various QA and product roles, most recently transitioning from project management to product management. Are the traditional places like Linkedin and Indeed the best places to upload resumes, update skills, etc.? Do I need to fully dive into the job-hunting waters and network with recruiters to get a good idea of where I "stack" so to speak?
By BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, JASON KARAIAN, SARAH KESSLER, STEPHEN GANDEL, MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED, LAUREN HIRSCH AND EPHRAT LIVNI from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3rk6gH1
Ask HN: Software Engineer hitting 40: what's next?
52 by man-next-door | 36 comments on Hacker News. I've been working in software engineering for 18 years. I worked mostly as individual contributor (now as a Senior Staff Engineer), also I was an Engineering Manager for couple years. Now I am interviewing after a few years at the company, and I am hit by harsh reality. For the context, I am in Europe, not in the US. I like technologies and programming, I want to further improve my skills in designing and developing reliable and maintainable distributed system, make better technical decisions. Also, I want to keep learning and playing with new techs. I am now interviewing for the roles like Staff / Principal Engineer, My expectations for the roles like Staff / Principal Engineer are that while staying hands-on, say for 30%, I will primarily use more my skills in architecture, engineering, and communications to focus on large, important pieces of functionality, technical decisions with big impact, etc. I expect that I would report to a Director or VP level manager, so that I could be exposed to a big picture, collaborate with and learn from a professional who operated on strategic level. In reality, I am now interviewing for Staff / Principal roles and see a few problems that make me rethink my carrier plans. First, the definion for the most of those positions looks Senior Engineers with a few more years of experience: so you are limited to the scope of a single team scope, report to an Engineering manager, just be a worker at a feature conveyor, just be faster, mentor young workers, maybe get some devops skill. I feel limited in impact in such roles, my borders and carrier are defined by Engineer Managers, who are usually less experienced in engineering and leadership topics than I am. The work is also very repetitive, there is not much meaningful progression, next level. I think those titles are created to cover problems caused by diluted Senior titles: an illusional career progression candy for ICs with some salary increase. I saw a few Staff / Principal roles that put a very high bar on technical expertise, when only 3-4 percent of all the engineers have such levels, and again usually limited to a lot of coding and a single team scope. They usually have long exhaustive interview process. An important problem with Staff+ IC roles is that there is a low salary limit as well, and you will face much more competition for top roles. Mostly salaries top at the level of a director of engineering. It is typical for a company to have 10 directors, but only 1-2 IC with a similar compensation. I want to work hard, and see meaningful progression: in salary, in impact, in respect. I would like to ask for advice. I believe there are qute a lot 35+ engineers here that faced similar problems and made some decisions for their careers. Now I think to plan switching to a EM track or to Technical Product management. Thank you!