2,029 karma · joined December 10, 2012
They are doing a lot of expanding after they bought all the land around Hillsview, so it would be kind of bad if they started to cut really deeply, a lot of their buildings would be empty.
I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much.
All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.
For fun, I asked her to talk in an American accent, and what fascinated me, is that she talked with an almost exactly Southern accent. So maybe the Southern accent is a vestigial accent leftover from the transition from British to American accent.
There could be a variety of reasons: fiscal cliff concerns, startup series A crunch, etc. My guess is that the FB IPO debacle had a huge impact on funding in Silicon Valley, which probably killed a lot of jobs. Whether or not that's a big deal going forward I don't know.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. It's as simple as that. If the punishment were death for robbing a bank were death, and you still went ahead and did it, whose fault is that? People need to take responsibility for their own actions. They didn't accidentally rob a bank, or they weren't somehow tricked into robbing a bank. They knowingly decided to do it. If the sentence was 18 years, then I'm satisfied that justice was served.
That being said, I have no problems with the notion of helping ex-cons try to turn their lives around, after they've paid their debt to society. I am a supporter of Delancey Street organization in SF, which helps ex-cons reintegrate with society by giving them jobs in the moving industry, cooking, selling Christmas trees, etc.
The closest strike price for options expiring today, with the highest open interest, was the 500 strike price. If I remember correctly, there were 30k+ contracts at this price. On Thursday night, those options were priced at around $4.95, or $495 per contract.
There was a great deal of incentive for market makers to pin the price of AAPL at $500, rendering all those options worthless.
Looks like it worked.
Of course they goof off and sometimes make inexperienced decisions like every kid their age (ex. thinking that sharing a 1 bedroom apt with a stranger is a good idea, even though the bathroom is in the only bedroom). But I did the same things at their age, but they are surprisingly professional and make mature decisions at work. If I didn't spend a lot of time with them and only spent time with people my age, I probably would think the same thing, like my parents probably thought of me and my friends. It's the fallacy of age, and it happens every generation.
My wife, on the other hand, works with someone who is is the epitome of the article. Self-entitled, bratty, arrogant, etc. But I think this is more the case of the upbringing and not necessarily to do with the generation.
I think they're going to be just fine.
It doesn't have the same flair that a city like SF has. SF has major events throughout the year. It has a culture of weirdness, wackiness, lots of technology, lots of greed. It has very vastly different neighborhoods with vastly different cultures. Haight is completely different from Noe which is different from Castro which is different from the Marina. It's not like West End vs East End in Vancouver.
There is a culture of risk taking. People always coming up with stupid or crazy startups, trying to push it on the local businesses. There are lots of great restaurants as well. There is zero night life in Vancouver, and a few very good restaurants (but a lot of great sushi restaurants, much better than SF). Downtown is practically dead by 8pm, which is nice. Granville Street which should be like Market Street, is instead almost like a dead street, Robson has a lot of tourists, but no real culture except coffee shops.
So go back through the article, and you'll see most of the stuff on startup life doesn't apply at all. There is no craziness or wackiness, no real tech scene, not on the scale of SF or Seattle, no sense of early adoption (not very many people has iPhones in Canada because of the draconian cell phone contracts), the idea that neighborhoods are far away doesn't exist in Vancouver because the traffic isn't nearly as bad as it is here, not even 1/10 as much fog as SF, etc.
It's on a pace that we've never seen before.
Great post!
Yes, Vancouver has some tech companies, but I wouldn't call it anything like a tech hub like Ottawa or Toronto. Also, UBC and SFU do not have a strong tech program. I'm sure it's average compared to most cities, but you won't find the same amounts of tech people in Vancouver like you will in Seattle or Silicon Valley. In fact, I'd bet that most above average developers in Vancouver would move to a more tech-oriented city.
He also mentioned that the cost of housing in Vancouver is twice the amount of Seattle. Not sure how accurate that is either.
Vancouver, BC has barely any tech industry (a few software companies like Business Objects, and EA Sports are up there, but nothing meaningful), and the taxes are high. British Columbia has one of the highest tax rate in Canada. One of my Canadian friends told me that the 50% marginal tax rate started around $65k, although I haven't double-checked this for accuracy.
You can't compete between Washington State, with no state income tax, and Vancouver, BC.
It's sort of like martial arts. Real martial arts isn't guys jumping 30 ft at each other, or fighting 10 opponents at once, doing somersaults, etc. If kids go to martial arts training expecting this, they will be sorely disappointed. Most martial arts is practicing moves over and over again. It's tedious and boring for those that are expecting Jackie Chan or Jet Li. Over the course of many years, you can get to a certain level of expertise. But the martial arts movies are essentially a caricature.
Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this.
When I first came to the Bay Area, it took me an inordinately amount of time to realize that the BART didn't go all the way around the Bay. I just assumed that it did because it's what made the most sense.
In fact, the county of San Mateo voted against BART because they didn't want people from other counties to come and take their jobs. So, because of this, you have a ridiculous patchwork and mishmash of transit "solutions" from various levels of government, none of them really working well. If you had a BART that went around the Bay, you could eliminate Caltrain completely, and move that money into making BART even better. Of course, those are at different levels of government, which means that you couldn't really do that.
It's at the point now where, except for people that take Caltrain during rush hour, and MUNI in SF, most public transit around the Bay is for poor people. Most people with higher paying jobs can't afford how slow public transit is, and it creates this negative feedback loop where they don't get enough funding to justify a better schedule, etc.
Yes, Google has a great bus system that is a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring people. But this is private transit, and it doesn't directly translate to public transit. If you have to service an area like the South Bay, you have to not only service the areas that people need, but then you have to deal with unions, costs, etc.
As I mention in my post, the issue is that these Web 2.0 companies don't offer support contracts, and don't have a formalized API that guarantee backwards compatibility. THAT is the problem. We ALWAYS bought a support contract whenever we integrated with an API. The support contract gave us some legal rights, but these days there are no such legal rights, and that is what is really risky.
It seems these days that companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc, not only do not have any real forms of support, you can't even purchase a support contract if you wanted. Also, they don't have the professional courtesy to maintain their APIs to ensure backwards compatibility, unlike companies in the past.
I'm not sure why people would invest money and time into integrating with products that don't offer some level of formal support, as well as backwards compatibility. If you have no contracts and no stability with your underlying service provider, you are completely at their mercy. This means that any and all apps based on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc are suspect, and anyone who does business with companies like Twitter and LinkedIn who are notorious for screwing over their developer community by changing things willy nilly, is basically stupid. The only development use case is if their goal is to create a popular app quickly, and then exit quickly. If they intend to create a product/company with a long-term vision, they are completely at the mercy of these companies.
I didn't say they should mandate a fixed price. I said the book publishers should charge a fair price, one that decreases the amount of pirating because it's low enough so that it's not worth it for students to pirate. That's up to them. Until they do, I fully support pirating of textbooks.
Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.
After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time.
I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludgey its history is, how inconsistent the syntax is, etc, it really does work well. I'm now doing PHP development at my current job and it's been fine.
One thing I learned from a previous job was the saying "Your customers don't care about your technology. They care about you solving their problems." If you are solving their problems, they will pay you, regardless of whether or not your back-end is CGI, perl, PHP, or whatever.
Case in point, I got an endoscopy scheduled in 9 days. My friend told me that the average wait time in Canada for an endoscopy is 9 months. I had an MRI scheduled within 1 day. My friend's wife, who was suffering from gallstones, waited 4 months for her MRI. I just made an appointment to see a GI specialist, and it took 1 day. My friend who is a pharmacist for Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto told me she was amazed at how quick that was.