Cymen

I think it comes down to trust. In a lot of teams where the trust is poor, one can't ask a question without your competency coming into question in a subtle way: many developers will latch onto it and try to exhibit their business-specific or technical knowledge in a form of one-upmanship. So they have turned it into a competition instead of a conversation.

A good way to detect these environments is when you observe those who have been there longer not asking obvious questions. That usually means the trust issue is there. When you start asking those obvious questions, at first you get that feedback loop of slight condescension. But then others start asking questions and you often get a fruitful conversation.

Having worked outside of the startup world and in the startup world, I think this is a little more prevalent in the startup world because there is another axis besides experience involved in these conversations: how long the person has been with the startup. It's common to have an official or unofficial hierarchy based on experience but in the startup world, there is another hierarchy based on how long you have been at the startup. That additional axis means it comes up a little more in the startup world (in my experience so far).

I worked on a robust client-side web application built in React. There was a product decision to make public one of the main pages with less information than a paying logged-in user would see. It was fairly straight forward, if somewhat of a quick hack, to do a server-side rendering of that page, cache it in Redis and expose it to the public web (along with building sitemaps and publishing those). It resulted in the company showing up in search results a lot more thus positively impacting growth.

I hesitate to hold this example up as a shining beacon of the great power of using the same language on server and client. There were a fair number of pros and cons. But the end result was very useful and execution was relatively fast.

Oddly, that doesn't help much as the same author wrote multiple books with very similar titles.

Or, you know, you could pick positions that require growth in skills you need to grow for your own side projects you're bootstrapping or plan on to bootstrap. I've used that strategy since college and it's worked well for me. I've had some really bad overall experiences [1] at startups here and some great ones but no matter what, I came out the other end with what I went in to get.

Maybe this way of looking things is more useful as a software engineer. I've also mostly given up on the whole idea of VC and see bootstrapping as the best way once you have the experience you want/need, the plan and the cash to bankroll it.

The reality of startups is if you're purely going into it with the roll of the dice for money, you're totally screwed. You're much better off getting experience and then jumping ship to megacorp, assuming you're good enough, to maximize real income. Or if you want to gamble or want to just do it, trying to do your own startup. Or going for experience and living cheap, then bootstrapping.

You should always be getting something more than just money out of working at a startup. If you're not, you're wasting your time.

[1] So far, worst thing is working for a startup where middle management comes from gaming industry. After 2 for 2 bad experiences, that is a deal breaker for me. In both cases, it didn't seem to work out well for the startups either.

I worked for an ISP (Berbee or BINC) that was merged with CDW. It was exactly as outlined above -- the private equity company had a big stake in both and merged them together for a later IPO.

In my experience, it was painful because a small highly technical organization was smashed onto a huge sales-centric company. The cultures were not the same at all. It wasn't horrible and I wasn't there long enough to benefit from anything (the Berbee founder gave some ownership to people who had been there longer -- my stay was brief during and after college so it was fine by me). But the resulting company wasn't as interesting to work at and today many of the people I knew who worked there moved on to other competitors in the local market. Nothing wrong with change but it was an awesome company before the merger.

So you might expect in the future to be merged with a company that looks good on paper but is painful in practice. But of course from the PE viewpoint, the point is to make money so as long as that happens, it's a win. It's just their interests are probably not aligned with yours.

Isn't there a big button to just show the article? There was for me but I opted in to ads and it's just a tiny banner ad at the top. I figure if it is a smaller site and they ask to opt-in for ads, they are going to be good citizens with their ads. Actually, I went back and there are more ads than I noticed initially so it is a bit over the top compared to the actual amount of content.

Summary: Youtuber who does surface-mount component repair of Apple laptops on video demonstrating that Apple's repair stance is silly (ie 15-30 minutes to fix an issue instead of just swapping out the logic board) is threatened by unknown party over (unofficial) schematics used. Schematics likely unofficial from Chinese sources. Youtuber doesn't name who is threatening them but assumed to be schematics source or Apple.

Is only the Principle Cloud Architect remote or are all of the positions potentially remote?

P2W is pay to win. I had to google it too. But basically, requiring IAP in order to win -- not possible (or maybe extremely difficult) to win without making some in-app purchase(s).

Working on vehicles has always been dangerous when they weigh 2,000+ pounds and are often supported by flimsy equipment. I don't disagree that batteries are lethal but it's just one more thing in a long list of things that can kill you while working on cars.

History keeps repeating itself. That is what they said about those new fuel injected motors and control systems. It's just lag as the knowledge of how to fix new things spreads to the aftermarket. The stories about the Prius/Toyota battery pack corrosion and the DIY fix (instead of a complete battery pack replacement per Toyota standard operation) are an example of this. There is always a group that resists change and says it's the end and then within a few years, people adapt and figure out how to fix things all the same.

Admittedly, if completely locked out of the control system, what Tesla is doing may be more effective at blocking the aftermarket. But at some point, someone will just rip out the whole processing unit and replace it with a homegrown solution. The refrain has been "oh, all these sensors and who knows and ...". But the aftermarket keeps getting smarter.

They kind of have that with Amazon Locker but I found in practice, it was kind of annoying as not everything fits in the locker. If it's a smaller item (or items), it works great.

If you still want to bring your old MBP back to life, I just replaced the battery on my sister's 2011 MBP with an aftermarket one from Amazon. There were a lot of pro/con reviews and it's only a couple weeks in but so far it's great. I went the one branded by Anker and it came with the correct screwdriver which was a nice touch. Installation was very simple. She also needed a new HDD so I put in an SSD and the machine is surprisingly zippy with the latest OS X.

So next up ntp clients that support blacklists?

Sometimes the heatsink compound dries out and temperatures raise. So in a data center, the glue, if it works as well or better than compound, is a good thing. For a home machine, I agree with you -- I'd prefer the flexibility of being able to swap out my heatsink.

Exactly. It's not fetishism of the military, it's advertisement.

My theory is we, as subscribers, have hit rock bottom or close to rock bottom in terms of content on Netflix that is not produced by Netflix. This is okay with me. I like Netflix content. But I think Netflix original content is a stick that is useful. It proves Netflix itself can survive without licensing content, that globally available content is useful (see all the people trying to use VPNs to get content available in some markets), and that Netflix original content may become high quality enough that it competes with other networks. So my theory is Netflix original content is useful both in the short term to weather the content draught (due to high licensing costs) and the long term (as outlined earlier).

My fingers are crossed that this gamble is fruitful in bringing the cost to license content back down again to levels that are sustainable for Netflix. I also wonder if we'll ever see Netflix license Netflix original content to another network.

This is all conjecture purely as an enthusiast of Netflix.

The last couple rounds on this have talked about experience at startups but they neglected to go into the value of that experience. From the startup side, people will say the experience is valuable and what they mean is the experience of getting to make more technical choices and experiencing what it is like to have to make compromises to get something shipped in an early stage company.

So the startup people talk about experience in the context of assuming you will also want to do a startup.

The author of this piece kind of ignores the value of having to make those difficult choices in the face of shipping something. But that value is only towards actually starting a company. It's not nearly as valuable at a large company.

So that bias shows through in the writing although I agree with the rest of it. It's just a tiny argument towards the value of startup experience that in context for some people does have immense value while for others it is negligible.

I wouldn't use the word romantic but maybe we're talking about the same thing: the excitement and joy you get from building something from scratch as a small team. You truly have to understand the whole solution and the team is small enough that rapid changes in direction are still possible and happen regularly. I agree that has immense value and getting experience with it is worth the cost. This is why I work in startups.

But what are you going to do with that experience you have gained. To go back to the romance option, if you can't get someone else into the bed, romance can become very sour.

I too see that the Box guy got more value than just the earnings on the options. But that more value is largely theoretical unless he can turn around and put what he learned into practice (and get compensated for it).

That is the issue: $350k is not enough of a reward for the risk when most fail. It's like going to the bookies and finding the favorite horse is paying 1:1.0001. What's the point of betting?

As a non-single guy, I was initially surprised and then later not so surprised when this was one of the primary reasons many of my single friends from back home didn't want to relocate here. So a lot of people are indeed deciding that no, it's not worth it.

There is nothing wrong with being motivated by both doing excellent work and being well compensated for it. If the motivation is purely money, sure, I see a problem. But you're painting both sets with the same brush.

Well said and I think that is the exact problem. It's also coupled with a 10-11 year to IPO duration. In the past, it was much shorter. The equity game doesn't make sense anymore. You can see it in how hard it is to hire in SF as a startup and as more people see it, it is only going to get harder unless things change.

The problem here is that the dream is dying for those of us coming to SF to work in startups. The harsh reality is that more and more of us are going to look towards the better deal at the bigger companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc. Companies that provide both excellent salaries and benefits along with potentially as lucrative stock grants.

It's time for the startup community to reevaluate the idea that your early employees (say pre 50) should get 0.05% of the company when they take the monetary risk of working for a startup. With such small ownership, it is starting to become a sucker bet.

So for those coming here, keep your eyes open and know that right now it's only founders, management and investors making out and if you are not looking to hit the lottery, you'll do much better working at a bigger company, maxing out that 401k and investing the rest. Or go for lottery but be a founder -- sure, get the experience of working at a startup but keep a careful eye on your personal burn rate (in regards to your potential earnings). And if you're not learning and you still want to learn more, make the move to the next startup. The options just aren't worth the wait.

Not always. I wasted a day interviewing at TrueCar (well, some faction of TrueCar) and paid for my own lunch. Never heard back from them or the recruiter. Talk about a real waste of time (with footnote I clearly learned I never want to work for TrueCar).

When working on it a year ago at another employer, we had a list of edge cases. I don't recall them all but some were off by quite a bit. Enough so that the work around was to do everything in SVG except text and use plain DOM position on top for text. That was a bit better. It would be wonderful to do everything in SVG.

Have you tried them though? Now check it out with kerning and/or italics. Do you see overhanging when you draw the rectangular box found via the API? Good example is strings that end with a character like f.

Works in theory. In practice, it does not. That is what I found but again, I'd be happy to be wrong.

For SVG to truly rise, it needs better font/text support. It should be easy to programmatically determine the width of a string of text in a given font. Unfortunately, it is not. You can go look how libraries like D3.js do it. But ultimately, pixel-perfect text with SVG is difficult/impossible. I'd really like to know if I'm wrong about that.

On the positive side, ReactJS plays great with SVG. I'm working on some basic line charts that I want ReactJS-managed so I can render them server-side too. My line chart isn't done but I tried the server-side rendering and it's working great.

I didn't name names because I didn't recall who did what. But when we were looking for people with SVG experience, I went down the contributor list to both projects and something like the top 10 were all now at Adobe. This is my recollection from over a year ago so I may have some details slightly wrong.

I think the more interesting aspect is that Adobe hires so many developers with vector graphics experience that it is harder to find them in the SF Bay Area (from the talent pool who is interested/willing to work at a startup). Obviously, this is conjecture.

But definitely a huge thanks to Dmitry for his work and for sharing it.

But it is now end of life. The people behind it went on to Snap.svg[1]. Raphaël was great for VML fallback but now that is no longer needed. It is interesting to see just how many people Adobe has hired that worked on SVG (and projects around it like Raphaël). When I was at Teespring, we used Raphaël and some plugins in the web-based design editor before we wrote our own equivalent (without VML support).

The huge pain point in SVG is fonts. Native SVG fonts died. Trying to do exact pixel-perfect layout in SVG for text is now very difficult. See trying to measure the width of a string in a given font.

http://snapsvg.io/

> There are indexers that help find content that does not suffer from this problem but they come and go.