Hacker News: wgyn

New comment by wgyn in "Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6BN"

wgyn — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:48:26 +0000

I’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin <-> Agentforce and Intercom <-> Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2024)"

wgyn — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 05:15:20 +0000

Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.

Our co-founder & CTO wrote a post recently on how we're using RAG with Reciprocal Rank Fusion to automate support responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40524759

Our open roles include:

- Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004

- Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/5175807004

- And more: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled#openings

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)"

wgyn — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 05:00:55 +0000

Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time

Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.

Our co-founder & CTO wrote a post recently on how we're using RAG with Reciprocal Rank Fusion to automate support responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40524759

Our open roles include:

- Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004

- Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/5175807004

- And more: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled#openings

New comment by wgyn in "Show HN: Riza - Safely run untrusted code from your app"

wgyn — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:40:28 +0000

really interesting direction! my company, assembled, builds software for customer support teams. i could imagine being on either end of this. on the one hand, we've built applications to run in the curated zendesk/salesforce sandbox. on the other hand, we get tons of requests to incorporate custom workflows or metrics natively in our application.

New comment by wgyn in "Airtable acquires Airplane"

wgyn — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 01:45:25 +0000

I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)"

wgyn — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 19:58:42 +0000

Assembled | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Software Engineer / ML Engineer — New Products

Assembled is building software to transform and elevate customer support teams. We help industry leaders like Brooks Running, Stripe, and Zoom get the right person, at the right time, with the right answers in front of their end customers. More specifically, our workforce and BPO management products enable efficient staffing of support agents and BPOs (outsourcing partners), while our AI-powered agent assist speeds up responses and facilitates deeper coaching. Founded in 2018, we’ve raised $70m in funding from the likes of NEA, Emergence Capital, and Stripe itself.

Our New Products team - a 4-person group led by our co-founder & CTO - is focused on bringing Cal, our bot, to more of our customers and into public launch. Cal's currently in private beta with ~10 existing Assembled customers. This startup-within-a-startup operating cadence is described more deeply in this post: https://johnjianwang.medium.com/how-we-built-assembleds-new-...

The specific job postings:

- https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004 (Software Engineer)

- https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4980238004 (ML Engineer)

More about Assembled here: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled

Please feel free to email me at ryan@assembled.com if you're interested!

A full guide on how to assimilate into the US as an H-1B1 holder from Singapore

wgyn — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 16:17:05 +0000

Article URL: https://keefay.medium.com/a-full-guide-on-how-to-assimilate-into-the-us-as-an-h-1b1-holder-from-singapore-9c8bbb5f71d9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274404

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by wgyn in "A probe intended to study the Trojan asteroids takes off shortly"

wgyn — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 00:48:46 +0000

How feasible is it to build/launch your own probe? A la backyard astronomy.

New comment by wgyn in "Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally"

wgyn — Sat, 22 May 2021 18:09:08 +0000

Perhaps, but it's possible to invest in Google via the stock market. I'm not sure it makes sense to bake in the stock market performance of a public company when considering value of their "equity." It seems like you should be using whatever your standard discount rate (S&P 500 or NASDAQ)?

New comment by wgyn in "Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally"

wgyn — Sat, 22 May 2021 16:40:13 +0000

This is compellingly well-written but wrong, in my opinion. There's been a steady trickle of articles on the top of Hacker News that make essentially the same argument: your odds of choosing a successful startup are miniscule (2% in this one). I think this does people considering startups a disservice.

The conditional chance of picking a successful company to join is way higher than 2%, or whatever the median success rate of all startups is. In particular, I think really intellectually curious, ambitious, hard-working people can, for the most part, identify each other. This is really different from reading about valuations or what other people think in the news, which leads to a lot more noise. If you meet a bunch of people at the company, you can assess the their caliber for yourself.

While it's not a perfect predictor of success, it's at least the case that such people are usually working on cool, worthy projects. Based on this, it's possible to get conviction on a group before their likely success becomes common knowledge—granted it's getting harder to do this because of how much money is floating around.

To put it another way, there are a handful of companies out there right now at Series A/Series B with a dense accumulation of talent. It's probably a reasonable bet to try and join them before they hit unicorn valuations, when room for growth is smaller. And in these cases, you could be #10-#40 at a relatively de-risked company and have a really great outcome.

On the flip side, if you even remotely enjoy learning and autonomy, working at Google/Apple/Amazon/etc is probably a great way to set yourself up for existential frustration. It's not even a great financial proposition. Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m, the hypothetical number from the article. Even if your first startup doesn't make it after 2-3 years, you can try again a few times and still come out ahead. This is a classic pg argument—I can't remember which essay—but the point of a startup is to compress decades of working life.

Caveat: I happened to join a startup whose success changed my life both financially and in terms of career trajectory. I'm very biased. But this is also why I feel passionately that this article's advice is bad.

Operators Ep 24: Jen Ong Vaughan (Stripe & Assembled)

wgyn — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:36:27 +0000

Article URL: https://delian.substack.com/p/operators-ep-24-jen-ong-vaughan-assembled

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26879047

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)"

wgyn — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 22:19:26 +0000

Assembled | San Francisco, CA (Distributed until at least September 2021) | Full-time

Assembled (https://www.assembled.com/) builds tools to transform and elevate customer support. Our workforce management platform helps modern support teams save time and staff more efficiently. Our customers include companies like Stripe, Harry's, and GoFundMe. We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including Stripe itself.

Open roles:

- Software Engineer (Fullstack): https://www.assembled.com/careers/software-engineer-fullstac...

- Software Engineer (Frontend): https://www.assembled.com/careers/frontend-engineer

- Product Designer: https://www.assembled.com/careers/product-designer

A Mysterious PostgreSQL Performance Bug

wgyn — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:43:53 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/notes-on-some-postgresql-implementation-details/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560756

Points: 14

# Comments: 1

New comment by wgyn in "Launch HN: Stacksi (YC W21) – Doing Security Questionnaires, So Your Team Isn't"

wgyn — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:48:38 +0000

Filling out questionnaires is such a time suck. It's extra painful because different companies use different standards (CAIQ, SigLite, VSAQ). Hopefully they solve the near-term questionnaire problem, but I'm also excited to see them eventually tackle the underlying problem—we want to prove to potential customers and users that we take security seriously, but right now it's prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to do so.

New comment by wgyn in "The Rise of Strategic Customer Support Teams"

wgyn — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 18:01:50 +0000

This was a great read. Allison Pickens is the former COO of Gainsight, so she definitely knows what she's talking about when it comes to Customer Success/Customer Support.

Think this topic doesn't get covered enough in the startup world, even though this is a direct quote from Sam Altman's Startup Playbook: "have great customer support."

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2021)"

wgyn — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 02:58:53 +0000

Assembled | USA (Plan to reopen office in San Francisco, CA) | Full-time

Open roles:

- Software Engineer (Fullstack): https://www.assembled.com/careers/software-engineer-fullstac...

- Software Engineer (Frontend): https://www.assembled.com/careers/frontend-engineer

- Product Designer: https://www.assembled.com/careers/product-designer

New comment by wgyn in "German digital bank N26 is facing outcry from its staff over management"

wgyn — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 23:04:18 +0000

+1 for Monzo. On a slightly different axis, their customer support is excellent and they invest a lot of resources, including technical ones, into making it so.

New comment by wgyn in "Ask HN: Has anyone else seen TCP connection issues in AWS US East this week?"

wgyn — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 17:35:33 +0000

We had a few minutes earlier this week where a machine saw packets in/out go to zero for no discernible reason.

New comment by wgyn in "Building Uber’s Go Monorepo with Bazel"

wgyn — Thu, 14 May 2020 15:59:36 +0000

I wish they had spent more time describing how/why Go's built-in build tool stopped working. Or perhaps that's part of the basics of Bazel. Anyone able to share more on that?

New comment by wgyn in "Go Developer Survey 2019 Results"

wgyn — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 22:31:48 +0000

My hot takes...

1) Fast adoption of GoLand/IntelliJ (and death of Sublime/Atom)

2) Nearly complete adoption of modules (my company is behind!)

3) "I feel welcome in the Go community" dipped from 82% to 75%. Anecdotally most people in Go are really nice but some people are aggressively pedantic (don't call it the Golang community!)