Wednesday, December 17, 2008

A few people have asked me recently what it's like working for a small software startup in the current economic conditions.

I can't speak for all small software startups, but at our company there has definitely been some belt-tightening. Expenses are being looked at carefully, there's a hiring freeze, and the fancy holiday party has been replaced with a potluck (which will probably contain neither pot nor luck).

However, one of the benefits of being a company that brings in exactly zero dollars in revenue each quarter is that a recession can't hurt us in the normal ways that corporations get hurt. I mean, even if we lose 99% of our revenue, that's only a $0.00 loss! I can replace that with the change in my pocket (from my other pants.) So, in that regard, we're doing awesome. We're untouchable!

Meanwhile, I've finally started the world's best task at work. I've been asked to figure out which of the tens of millions of web pages in our database are porn. We haven't yet decided if we're just going to mark web pages as porn or not, or maybe we'll go a little further and say exactly how porny they are. I'm figuring there's got to be some pretty damn porny stuff in there, but I guess I won't know until I look REALLY CAREFULLY, eh?

That is so goddamn sweet. It's like being paid to test chocolate, or watch baseball, or maybe devise a scale to measure orgasm quality. Hopefully that's next.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too small to fail!

Mike said...

I'm still going to ask for a government bailout.