HalibetLector

How do IDEs factor into this theory? It's easy to make pretty code these days in a variety of languages without actually writing it yourself.

The other factor that comes into play is time to implement. Most startups are always in crunch mode of one type or another. Everything needs to be done last week, so getting it done quick is more important than getting it done right (this is the manager's viewpoint, not mine, but it is a popular one). So you do it and you tell yourself you'll fix it later, but later comes and you're on to the next deadline, so it never gets re-written. Are you a bad programmer?

I appreciate the idea of beautiful code, but it doesn't survive contact with the real world, especially if the real world is running scrum.

I don't know about other people, but cubicles instill in me a sense of paranoia I don't get in an open office plan. It actively raises my stress level and makes it harder to focus knowing anybody can show up behind me at any time and I can't see them coming.

"there's real harm done"

Not really. Having been a low-level employee on several of these sinking ships in the past few years, the pattern is despicably predictable. Everyone who works for a startup knows the game they are playing. Many of the experienced ones will even see the writing on the wall and bail early. The laid off employees have no trouble finding their next job. Just like in Vegas, there's always another game starting up in Silicon Valley.

The VPs plan for failure going in. They may lose some money, but they'll cover the loses with some of their other investments. They play the odds.

I think the only real harm is to the state of California when hundreds of people are suddenly on unemployment for a month or two between jobs.

Or a false sense of moral superiority.

It does matter. I'd love to do my social game development in Linux (and I even tried it, for a while) but the technologies I use are Flash and Unity 3d. There is no effective way to develop with either of those technologies in Linux. So I settle for the one supported OS with a shell: OS X.

that's simple: people lie on their resumes and can talk a good game. Until you actually ask them to write code (or they have public code available), it's impossible to tell if they used PHP for a week per employer (making up 5 years of 'experience') or if they work with it day to day.

I don't see how that invalidates my argument. I don't mention paid vs unpaid at all, just closed and open.

Everybody here assumes the smaller sized phone is the obvious choice, design wise. Why? I personally hate the small screen on the iPhone. I find it hard to read, especially on the go. I also don't have to use two hands to use it on the go (it's not an iPad, after all). I will admit my hand position is different than when using a smaller phone, so maybe this is a simple case of dogmatic "you must hold it THIS way" thinking.

The overall point isn't lost on me. Apple does seem to have less bureaucratic nonsense than other companies, like Samsung. Then again, Samsung makes a far wider variety of phones. Which is worse, a company that assumes everybody has the same tastes and should do everything the same way, or a company who understands variety? As somebody who frequently is at odds with the apple way of thinking, I appreciate the latter.

I appreciated the explanation of how he uses git in a workflow. Everyone does things differently and DVCS is not just "another VCS". Treating git like you would treat svn is a recipe for heartache.

I used to think this too, until I realized something I didn't thoroughly understand until I read the OP. The reason Stallman wants a "pure" system with no closed source code is because if there's even one proprietary bit of executable code, you can't guarantee your system isn't spying (or capable of spying) on you. Or tracking you or restricting how you use your data.

Seen through the argument I just made, when you say closed and controlled systems are an unstoppable force of nature and must be accepted, what you're really saying is digital spying/tracking/restriction is an unstoppable force of nature and must be accepted. It really is an all or nothing proposition at this point.

"Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim?"

Why not? If the site is unstable and can't stay up, you can either throw 50 programmers at it and still have it crash regularly or you can take far fewer and re-write it from scratch.

You're right about programmers not liking the cruft, but we also don't like most of the management processes that occur in large companies. I don't know if things have changed, but back when I worked for a large brake corporation, web programmers were devalued and distrusted. All of our decisions had to be signed off (in triplicate!) by a manager who didn't know how to program or the implications of the decisions being made.

To give you on example, one of the official company-wide policies was that if you wanted to transfer files between company offices over the internet, you had to use FTP for "security purposes." We were technically not allowed to use SSH or SFTP because, when I asked, my boss said nobody had heard of it. This was in 2006.

I couldn't agree more.

Facebook started college only and had no competition in that space, so they did well but had the luxury to expand slowly, essentially the B&J model in the article. When it was obvious the next step was to open themselves to the public at large, the social network lockin effect worked against them. Everyone at the time was using MySpace or Friendster or whatever else was popular at the time (I honestly don't remember). In order to make a dent, they had to hit hard and fast, so they took some funding and exploded out of the gate.

The point I'm trying to make is, Facebook mixed both the Amazon and the B&J model for growing a company. They did one, then the other, which really made sense for them considering the position they were in at the time.

Social games has been doing this for 2+ years already, with JSON log files scraped into various databases and viewed using web tools for everything from A/B test impressions to virality to monetization to error logging (especially useful when you can't get the error to reproduce locally).

Sources? beagle3 offers concrete examples, you don't. I'd love to be proven wrong here, but I've found nothing that suggests honor was ever valued in the united states and certainly not the way you say it was. Japan, certainly...

No, you don't. I work for one of the top social gaming companies around right now and programmers do specialize to a ridiculous degree. The programmers who write code for the actual game are rarely web developers. It's simply a different domain.

I can confidently say this because I'm a web developer in a studio of game developers and most of them don't even know how to run mysql locally. They aren't stupid, they could, if they spent the time to learn it. But they are much more interested in improving the efficiency of their A* pathing algorithm.

I noticed that he switches between the keyboard and mouse so fast it seems like he always has one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. How is he so fast at switching? For me, touching the mouse is the slowing thing I do in a text editor.