davidhansen

When a company like GRPN, who lies about its own revenue in its own S1 filing, loses money on every deal, and whose idea of scaling is "just add more sales people", pops off a wildly successful IPO in the middle of a very volatile public market, that's when you throw your hands in the air and stop trying to see rational behavior where there is none.

If you're old enough, you would remember this story from 1996-2001 repeating itself.

Of course, there's no end to the supply of twenty-something startup hipsters who will breathlessly inform you that this time it's different. Sure it is, kid. Sure it is.

companies are most usually looking for ... team working skills

I believe there is an operating assumption here that active membership and following in a given community is a solid indicator that the individual in question has very good team interaction skills, as well as working knowledge of the community's domain focus.

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Welcome

Also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2784086

Clearly, you don't have any instances running in their Fremont datacenter. Hurricane Electric is like an unreliable, abusive alcoholic, and Linode is like a doting battered wife who stays with him because "someday he'll change".

Was there some epic battle that is so well-known that Winer doesn't feel the need to explain or even give footnotes for?

But as a board seat and shareholder, it is my responsibility to concern myself with the overall direction of the company. This means I work with the other founder and executives to formulate strategy and make decisions on matters that have nothing at all to do technology.

These are two separate roles, as far as corporate governance is concerned. There is the possibility for conflict, but this is unlikely.

To give an analogy, if you have access to all the food you want, but you voluntarily limit yourself to kumquats and bananas for arbitrary, irrational reasons, in the long run you will develop health problems.

Likewise, a business that irrationally limits itself to a subset of all available talent will, in aggregate, lose out to those who are not thus limited.

I admit to not having citations of statistical evidence at hand, although I have seen many publications in the past that indicate diversity of employee populations is correlated with innovation and success. I did not provide evidence because I believe as a Gedankenexperiment, the conclusion is self-evident.

But one thing that ought to be pointed out is that free markets tend to punish companies, over the long term, that intentionally deny themselves access to talent due to bigotry. Conversely, companies who acquire talent with rational screening procedures will have a competitive advantage over those who use irrational screening procedures.

It's a sort of corporate karma. In aggregate, bigotry in hiring procedures will eventually harm you, legal or not.

"While going to projects' pages at github I looked up Issues in a hope to see some feature requests. But most of issues was bug reports or pull requests. I didn't want to work on bugs, I wanted more to add new features."

This is a huge problem in open source projects, and you're not alone. Throngs of developers who get off on clean, functioning code, but then turn their backs when presented with an opportunity to replace ugly and/or broken code with something better. I don't get it. Why the hesitance to engage in the pursuit of what you profess to care about?

Everything from source control commit logging, to conflict resolution, to development database snapshot sanitation scripts, to audit/error log management, to configuration management, to compliance, to QA handoff, to deployment automation, etc. These things are not trivial to begin working on while training new hires, working on new feature requests and existing bug lists, at a time when 99% of domain knowledge is in that person's head. And all of them are necessary for your CTO to be able to delegate effectively for his role.

Not knowing anything about your exact situation, my guess is that none of these things were properly set up from the beginning, and now your CTO is faced with nearly impossible circumstances that he's either unwilling or embarrassed to acknowledge. He may believe that trying to explain to the other stakeholders about the importance of process and technical debt reduction will go over poorly in the face of increasing business requirements that must be done nownownow. Horrible approach, but it happens, and happens often.

As the cofounder of a bootstrapped business myself, I'm no fan of the shadow we operate in, but I understand it. The story of a company that doesn't have the luxury of positive cash flow to fall back on when things get tough is fundamentally more risky, and therefore exciting. You get larger magnitude successes and a larger number of failures, which is far more dramatic. And narratives with more risk, more reward, and higher drama, are the kind of narratives human beings love.

When someone initiates physical force against you, it is an action being done to you, the consequences of which you cannot avoid due to the laws of physics. We take actual threats of physical violence seriously because of this.

When someone says mean things, the above attitude presumes that the consequences to you are entirely within your own mind. One can either be offended or not offended, angry or not angry, etc. The presumption is that the onus of response is on the trollee, not the troll.

Modern psychology and neuroscience have some things to say about the degree of distinction that the human mind makes between physical and verbal "forces". It also has some things to say about how much control we actually have over our responses to these forces. But so long as humans like to believe that they are in full control of their own actions, and that lacking this control is a personal fault, the mentality you describe will persist.

We are relatively unknown, but growing, and profitable. According to our rose-colored glasses, we have a lot of potential.

I say this as someone who has direct experience in these matters.

If you get a lot of questions, I may be completely wrong about my perspective, here.

Or at least they do in my idealized fantasy world, where the role of HR is to acquire, foster, encourage, and compensate talent.