FWIW I would never, ever, consider a job for less than 120/hr. I work with people who get paid around my level, and some of them I consider to be … not very great. Meaning, even a shit developer is making 10G a month right now working from home and taking a few naps a day.

From what I can see as well, remote is the new norm in dev. In my company (I work with a consulting group), they have staffed up with like 50% remote talent – integrated into the team. So I’m sure those folks are making like … lets say even 50/hr. They are not amazing good as well.

So, if someone is slinging front pages on upwork right now … I mean. They will be reaaaal bad. Since remote is now the norm, and you cant steal a persons job that is making 200K a year, by low balling 50K a year lets say, then you are not even 1/4 as good as them.

So those people go work on upwork I guess?

We can disagree on that. I’ve done 2 startups. One is past Series A, and I did the method above. The second, I tried to cody code, and for reasons above it failed.

In the early stages, the problem is, the CTO’s job is extremely diverse, and the business job is focused. As time progresses, the trend reverses (Business becomes diverse, tech becomes focused.). Day one is a good example:

Choose the best tech stack. Even from there, in the failure example, I spent weeks on tech selection, getting it wrong. However, in the Series A company, we tossed 5K at a handful of experts.

So my advice to all tech people starting out, is to discover and leverage expert talent, not to be the expert.

the general idea is that the CTO should help you manage dev resources not be the dev resources.

The reasons for this are extremely numerous, but two are:

- you want the CTO incentivized to keep costs down. you cant do this if they are rewarded for their individual time and effort

- your CTO will be 10x in their area of understanding, and terrible in most others. Thus they should be delegating and managing to the real 10x resources

Plus, dozens of more compelling reasons :)

Walk away. Study the contracts, lessons, and try again with a new partner.

FWIW: I lost 300K this way, in a similar situation, and the person I chased for years issued me shares and contracts FINALLY, that he later diluted by 10000x (meaning, now they are worth 32 dollars).

At the end of the day, unless you own a large percentage, the founder can screw you in about 1000 ways – once they show they are willing to do this – walk away.

I would just give yourself 1K a month on a schedule, and leave the rest, while you learn how to live a sustainable life.

I come from abject poverty, like homeless level poverty, and I can say that if I was given the money I have now, back then, it would have evaporated. As advice, I would learn how to save up 50K worth of your own money before even considering touching more than 1K a month of the 250.

250 seems like a lot, but it can go fast.

True story. Someone in my life close to me, a some years ago, got a settlement of around 150K. Around that time I had saved for many years and had 70K, working for like 25K a year (at that point). 7 months later we talked, and I had maybe 80K, and they had 10K left, and they were asking me for cash so they could make a home purchase. I was flabbergasted – where did the 150K go in like 6 months ?!.

This is someone I grew up with, family. So be careful is what I am saying – once you start using that money … it can go

you need a good product manager (or at least a project manager). A good product manager can get the best out of a dev.

It takes many, many, years to get good at managing devs. If you are managing your own project, I recommend taking some courses.