I respect Geohot's reputation and this company looks amazing. I might be in the market to work there... except "No Remote."
For such a smart guy, locking yourself out of a ton of talent by requiring software developers to be on-site in 2023 seems...out of character, to put it politely.
(Rephrased, my original post was a bit too ad hominem and accumulating downvotes rapidly. I wanted to delete this entire comment but apparently HN no longer allows comments to be deleted.)
Let's be honest here: remote and in-person is a major tradeoff with significant pros and cons on both sides. Remote work increases your talent pool by 5 orders of magnitude and removes commute overhead, but in-person work increases your communication bandwidth and team cohesion in similarly dramatic ways. Hybrid solutions put a hard cap on the upside of either path and therefore tend to give you the worst of both worlds. It makes perfect sense to be opinionated about this, especially at the startup stage. I respect the decisiveness (even though I would be very reluctant to go back to full-time commute).
Also in person is a good filter if you are getting too many applications, which I am sure this will assuming the pay is good (but those $100 bounties implies maybe not - anyone who could do those in say 15 minutes would be worth more than $400/h)
Let's say that you are someone with a dedicated drive to contribute to AI, with the ability to grasp the complex program space, and spend many hours figuring out the solution to the problem. I.E the perfect tinygrad candidate.
There is a high chance that you are probably neurodivergent to some extent.
So instead of WFH, where you can remove distractions and work on your own time, you are now forced to abide by someone else's schedule, take time commuting, e.t.c
In office work is for people/positions that require hands on work with hardware, or you are hiring for replaceable positions where people don't have dedication to the cause and are going to do as little work as possible for the same pay. Tinygrad is neither.
Software is part of it, sure, but I doubt anyone can realistically work on this project/company without being around a bunch of specialized hardware and iterating on prototypes. Hard to contribute to any of that from home.
If culture is the thing that is holding your company to it's purpose, you aren't going to succeed.
In the same way Comma went from "Our goal is to solve AI, Comma body is the next big thing" to George peacing out because now they are just doing the busy work to make more money.
> For such a smart guy, locking yourself out of a ton of talent by requiring software developers to be on-site in 2023 seems...out of character, to put it politely.
I mean a lot of smart people seem to do their hacking by themselves. I'm thinking like Fabrice Bellard. This is at least a step beyond that.
Remote work requires very different management and tooling. I've seen remote companies fail the last couple of years where this was not taken into account. It's hard to run a remote company.
A lot of people have now had the direct experience that new things which are highly technical or highly collaborative are not really compatible with the remote work thing. I know that's hard for a lot of people to hear, but the world is not web apps (which do remote well) and a lot of projects benefit hugely from being able to grab the two or three people and get into a room with a whiteboard.
For such a smart guy, locking yourself out of a ton of talent by requiring software developers to be on-site in 2023 seems...out of character, to put it politely.
(Rephrased, my original post was a bit too ad hominem and accumulating downvotes rapidly. I wanted to delete this entire comment but apparently HN no longer allows comments to be deleted.)