FollowSteph3

I just read the comment by the company and there was an early termination clause...

But did it have an early termination clause he omitted. Every single contract I've seen has an early termination clause in it.

The thing is we're only seeing one side of the story. It assumes both parties agree.

That being said generally all contracts have an early termination clause. He doesn't comment on what that is. Generally with 3 month contracts, it can be pretty short. It doesn't necessarily mean finish the 3 months.

To give you an analogy if you hire a general contractor to renovate your home for a 3 month contract, you can terminate the contract early if it's not working out for you. Maybe the contractor is amazing but you just ran out of funds. In any case the issue is that there is always an early termination clause in contracts. I would be curious what his is...

I hate to say this but whenever you relocate that is your decision. The company isn't really in any obligations to keep you or pay your move back unless you pre-negotiate that either with a signing bonus or as a clause in your contract. Generally a relocation is offset with a signing bonus and higher salary which is why the risk is worth it, but never doubt that it's a risk you have to take. I know because I've done it myself before, moving countries and all.

I've tried standing desks a few times and what I've found is that if your going to work more than regular hours it's a bad idea. That is you should not stand more than 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. And even then that should be punctuated by breaks such as lunch, meetings, etc.

The main difference I found say compared toa cashier is that you barely move. You don't twist side to side and so on. This might seem small but it's important.

The biggest issue though is that if you're doing a startup with long hours you need to be very careful. Like everything else overdoing anything is bad.

Most people compare it to the flu but what about norovirus. It's spread in a versus similar way and pretty much everyone in the US has had it at one time or another...

The best part of the analogy is that most of the work is post birth. That is maintenance and care of the baby, just like with software ;)

I really like the idea of getting texted for every purchase. It's immediate and you can do something fast. What can you do is another issue but at least you know now rather than maybe a month later when all he'll has broken loose.

The problem with completely free health care is that there's no incentive to be healthy. In other words if you smoke etc it has no negative impact to you financially. So there has to be some kind of balances to check for things like this. This drug is a very bad example but a lot of the arguments are for free health care and research, and this is one of the big issues with that...

I'm sure it's been said many times before but the book Code Conplete 2 is a great follow up read to this article.

Be careful on the iphone it hijacks your browser and it's hard to regain control. Otherwise a really good read.

Do NOT load from an iphone. Almost impossible to regain control of your browser!!

What about fedex or ups? The customer is paying for x bandwidth and not getting it.

I have 3 monitors and use ultramon as a utility to do this. I can totally appreciate that the population here is not the norm and whatever metrics we see here is an outlier.

In most cases I assume people use laptops with one monitor. The percentage of desktops with two monitors can't be too high. So when you combine laptop and desktop it lowers the total percentage. How many of us have a laptop in addition to out desktop that is never connected to another monitor ;)

I believe it's an economics problem at its heart. How do you justify the costs of porting for maybe a 1-3% increase in sales. I don't think you can. And that's why most ports are terrible. It's the classic chicken and egg problem. You see it with console vs pc games and that's a much bigger increase in sales...

I agree. A key part not mentioned is that you have to fund the salaries before and it's only paid much later! As in after you close your fiscal you then have to submit and it takes about a year before you're paid. So in total you have to cover the salaries for two 2+ years before you're paid. You also have no guarantee you will be paid.

It's also only on developer costs that are accepted and only on R&D work: none of the business costs etc are covered. In many cases these are just as significant or more.

There's also a reason that a consulting industry has started around it, it's a good amount of effort. Again helping more advanced companies as they can afford the costs for the 2+ year it takes before you can get it back. And again nothing is guaranteed.

Essentially it's not good for startups or smaller companies, it really only benefits companies of a medium size that were alreday going to cover this expenses by reducing some of their costs to increase them growth rate. But for a small company, less than 10 employees it's really hard to actually take advantage of the program in real life.

Can it cause issues with other living organisms in water?

What if the SaaS closes? Everyone but the people using non SaaS will be in big trouble, maybe enough to cause bankruptcy if they are very centric as that's all lost too.

What happens if the cloud service closes? Cloud services have some risks too: http://www.followsteph.com/2012/04/19/what-are-the-risks-of-... This is especially true for a government entity.

Landline phones generally have a fixed rate. You can use it 24/7 to call at a fixed price.

If you look at the history of the phone, which this is very similar too, initially the phone companies charged you for everything. Long distance call, oh that will cost you. Anything at all that will cost you.

Then eventually a player comes in that disrupts the model. What free long distance on weekends and evenings. How is that even possible.

Then one day competition takes over, et I mean logic ;) and suddenly the phone prices make sense. Long distance calls are something of the past.

I believe ISP are going through the same thing. However since they can't easily start charging by the call what they are trying to do is charge not only the person who is paying to have a phone line but also the caller. Except that now the caller has to pay for their own phone line and a fee to connect to the end line, which is already being paid for by the end customer. Aka the last mile is double dipping in fees cause they can because there is no competition. Just like the long distance calls from before. Amazing how quickly the phone companies went from recovering costs to can make profits from no fee long distance calling when competition finally came...

Landlines phones generally aren't metered but it works...

You're thinking techies vs the average user who just uses IE cause it's there. The average user barely knows there's other browsers, or even that xp is no longer supported. How many people still use xp :(

If it was easy everyone would only work 5-10 years ;)

You might be surprised to learn this but third class mail (junk mail) generates more revenue than first class mail. Not only that but first class mail is decreasing revenues each year.

That being said, the problem is that third class mail is a lot more revenue than most people realize. For example $5/mth is not enough to cover the loss revenues. In fact I would suspect that $20-$50/mth is not enough. Think how much mail you get on a daily basis, multiplied by x amount times 30 days. You're probably looking at closer to $100/mth...

In fact I can't just randomly go walking wherever I want. I can't walk through your backyard, or just stand and hang out there. I'll get arrested for trespassing. Right now the problem is that these rules haven't been defined, but most likely just like cars and walking there will be places where you can and can't go.

I highly suspect that the space above a private property up to the commercial line will be considered part of that's person's space. After that it will be like most everything else, there will be places you can and can't fly, just like there are places you can drive a car, take a walk, and so on.

I look at it the same as a car. You can't just drive anywhere. So why is a drone much different. At least under the height for a commercial license.

The problem is if too many people opt out then the junk mail business model fails because advertisers won't advertise. It's not the loss revenue from a few houses they case about its the number of addresses the junk mailers can ship to.

Deserving or not the spouse is still there. So why block them from working if they're already there. It's not as fair as giving someone else an h1b but at the same you can't view it as trading one for the other. Instead you're just expanding what an h1b means. Again the person is already there so why not let them be productive...

I've been listening for years and I can say you have some really great interviews. What I really like is how actionable some of your interviews are. That to me is the biggest differentiator for your interviews.

You might be surprised to hear this but I've used some of your interviews as training material for people working for me in the past.