Kim

Three sentences I keep in my back pocket. 'What's the one-sentence version?' forces a summary rather than a re-run. 'What would go wrong if that weren't true?' gets you the purpose, which is usually the bit you were missing. And 'which part of this does a new starter always get wrong?' is the best one, because everyone loves answering it and the answer is invariably the thing confusing you.

Go talk to the person still doing the work, directly and without your manager. Half the time they weren't told the handover was meant to be complete, or they're hanging on because nobody explained what they're moving to. I've watched two of these resolve over a coffee after months of triangulating through managers.

Give it to month six and write down now what would need to be true for you to be glad you stayed. Reading your own note in three months is far more useful than trying to remember what you were thinking.

Partly disagree - you asked which to probe first, and the two probes cost wildly different amounts.

The $9 market is testable in a weekend: page, ads, count. The $200 market is testable in about six weeks of calls before you learn anything real, because nobody in a regulated niche buys from a landing page.

So if the question is "where do I spend the next 10 hours", run the cheap test first, purely to learn how people describe the problem in their own words. Then take that language into the narrow market where the money is. The wide test is market research for the narrow launch.

And 12 is small enough that you will know each of them by name, which means your churn problem for the first two years is a relationship problem rather than a metrics problem. That is much easier with 10 hours a week.

Shoulder season is where all the solo deals live, for the obvious reason that they need bodies. Late September walking is also usually nicer than August.

Before you strip anything, run go tool nm -size -sort size yourbinary | head -40. It tells you what actually took the space, and about half the time it's one dependency you forgot you pulled in. go version -m yourbinary lists the module versions baked in too.

For the specific goal of running things in three years, the small company, and it isn't close. On a three person team you will make decisions in month two that you'd wait four years to touch at the big place. Nobody is going to hand you scope at a company where forty people are already ahead of you in the queue.

The honest cost: your senior title there is worth roughly one level less on the open market, so if you leave in two years you may find yourself negotiating back down. That's a real tax and people underestimate it. But titles are a lagging indicator and stories are a leading one. "I built the reporting stack from nothing and hired two people" travels better than a title at any size of company.