areeve

This is very timely as I'm currently studying to sit the GRE in August, with the hope of applying MS CS programs at the end of the year (Stanford, CMU, Princeton, etc). Perhaps I should reconsider this?

I'm a non U.S. citizen/resident and I'd like to work in Product Management in the U.S.; I had hoped that an MS CS from a top university would help bridge the gap between my design undergraduate from an unknown international university – helping me land a job at a top tech company as an Associate Product Manager or the like.

Thoughts from the savvy HN crowd?

You need to step away from all this. You clearly have a toxic mindset (though not necessarily by any fault of your own), and the fact that you insist on perpetuating it and projecting it on arguably unrelated situations is evidence of that. I feel like every thread I read has an identical anti-corporation or anti-manager comment from you!

I've said this before, but you often have some great insights in your posts. This negativity achieves nothing and simply works to discredit the rest of what you say.

So you had a bad experience, so what? The world isn't out to get you. Learn what you can from it and move on.

I got to the 3rd paragraph and thought: "Christ, this sounds almost as pessimistic as a Michael O. Church comment!"

Then I looked at the comment author.

Despite this pessimism I think you make some great points, but I do feel that your persistent negative bias towards corporations (and people in general) can detract from what are often great insights within your comments.

Which bootcamp? What would you learn at a bootcamp that you couldn't for free on your own volition?

Not criticising, genuinely curious as I've considered attending one myself.

You can also use something like Market Samurai to do keyword analysis. But by god, do NOT give them your daily email address, they will spam the crap out of you. Handy tool though.

Much appreciated – thanks so much for taking the time to review, and for the actionable advice! I'm considering living off savings for the next 3-6 months and really focusing on a few self-initiated projects that allow me to boost my UX creds – potentially an iPhone app, a SaaS tool, etc.

One of the downsides about living in Australia is that there's barely a handful of tech companies based here (that aren't just marketing/sales offices), and most agencies are just churn and burn (Facebook pages and banner ads, etc).

Do you think that having a few (i.e 3-4) strong personal projects where I ran both design and development solo would boost my creds for the likes of Google & Co?

Edit: As an aside – do you think it's preferable to have quality over quantity? I.e. ditch a few of the weaker pieces of work in favor of having say, 4-5 really strong portfolio pieces?

If you don't mind me asking – what kind of revenue do you generate off these?

I'm curious as to your reasoning behind spending 2 years developing this in HTML5? The art style is great and all, but you could have knocked up a game like this in an engine like Unity within 3 months and deployed it to iOS, PC/MAC, even Xbox Arcade.

Thanks!

Fascinating interview, Elon Musk is quite incredible.