go1979

I was greeted with a "can't play this video in your country" error (in Canada). The irony ...

Naive question ... is the key difference between the Arduino,RPi,etc. and your vanilla laptop or PC with respect to physical computing that the first class of devices has a ADC and pins for hooking up sensors? Does that first class of devices have a name?

Canadian real estate prices are a case in point. Crazy/greedy real estate brokers egg buyers on to take ever larger mortgages at current low rates. Buying a starter home should not take 30 years to pay off for the average buyer.

I'm not an expert ... I dabbled a bit in Angular and found it really confusing and hard to debug. React worked mostly as expected. There were some gotchas but I managed to get through them in a few days.

I just wish we had a non-proliferation treaty on Flux frameworks.

Agreed on the "lack of declared types" thing. While I'm exceptionally fast writing new Python code, reading other people's Python code is a different story - particularly, if they are new to Python.

While there are a lot of concurrency options to not get you in trouble with the GIL, it is annoying that there is no canonical way or pythonic way of doing it. I saw people using things like monkey patching, which made my jaw drop. I had to implement Websockets recently and was totally confused as to the right way of doing it. I ended up evaluating NodeJS and Go for this function, and went with Go.

Overall ... I love Python. It is perfect for small projects. For larger codebases (3KLOC+), I am slightly skeptical. It can be done but developers need to have quality code and strong test coverage.

I regret the PhD. To be precise, grad school won't just not make you richer, it will make you poorer.

Forgetting about the money bit (ha!), lets talk pure knowledge. I learned a lot more on the job than I did in school. In my specific case, I wouldn't have gotten those jobs without the PhD. However, I firmly believe there are high learning jobs that can be had without a PhD.

In CS, a PhD gets paid mid 6 figures. That is also what the average mid career developer gets paid. Go figure.

What does YC think of founders who are working on a project on the side (of their job), wanting to turn it into a startup? I presume there are lots of people who have day jobs to pay the bills before they can get some initial funding.

Was your degree in CS? Curious how thing turned out for you in industry? Did you ever teach courses on the side? Did you ever consider or dip your foot into entrepreneurship?

I'm a bit confused about the sign up. Do you just login at 1pm PT and everyone (lol) gets in?

I see some good advice on this thread so a followup question.

I'm about to quit my job with the aim of starting up my own company. I don't have a lot of non-tech contacts - i.e. potential customers and angel investors. That is my biggest worry.

I can't really bootstrap while on the job since I am currently in a large corporate job where the company owns everything I dream up.

So .. while I agree with all the advice about not quitting a job until one has another one lined up (I've given the same advice to others) ... I am about to go against this advice myself.

Any words of advice on how to manage this? Am I bonkers? Some stats ... have 6 months of living costs in liquid savings. No kids. Going to be leaving a job that pays north of 120K (which is not much in elite companies it seems).

Totally agree on your comment on agile. It is a blight on our profession. I was having beers with an old friend from undergrad yesterday - our career paths have taken us very different places. What's common is that both of our employers have been instituting agile in very dysfunctional forms. My friend and I are both in our 30s and we were jokingly thinking how long we can take this crap before we have to either move to management or change careers completely (unlikely since we love tech so much).

I would not put unit testing in the same camp - frankly, my employer doesn't care about unit testing at all - to my chagrin. Senior developers sneak in unit tests on the minutes of breathing room we get. I actually got a lecture on "company cares about customer visible features". Well .. you know what? Software that doesn't crash is a pretty darned customer visible feature.

What makes me very uncomfortable is that my current situation reminds me of what I saw on the news about the BP oil spill incident. Management asks very pointed and specific questions - engineers answer truthfully. Mgmt makes wild decisions based on half information. I fear this kind of crap is rampant in organizations not run by technical people. Is it any better at places run by technical people?

The fundamental problem plaguing our industry is perhaps not agile - that is a mere symptom of it. The core problem IMHO are treating people like cogs and the need to continuously move faster.

Rant over. I needed that. Off to sneak in some unit tests.

I like his office setup. Dual monitors, raised base for monitors, plexo? lamp, white board, real keyboard.

I'm a fan of weave. Is remote a possibility? North America - east coast - short hop across the pond, not so bad tz difference, etc.