lrobb

It's one thing to say there's no set hours, it's another thing entirely to be in a place where you're surrounded by workaholics and your performance is measured on what you produce -- think about it: if you don't burn yourself at both ends, you'll be on the low end of productivity.

Ok... with correlation vs. causation out of the way, and a ridiculously small sample size to boot, it appears the average age of Forbes 400 tech company founders was almost 32 at the time of the founding their companies (http://goo.gl/iHAEe).

I have a feeling that's not what you meant when you said "young"...? Maybe you meant to restrict that to only founders that wrote the code their companies are based on? In which case, yeah, the founders of facebook, google, and Microsoft were all young when they started... I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions on that sample size, however.

Originally that was true, but the author mentions NT4 and I believe MS rewrote the engine specifically for NT...

   "Dropbox... It's a feature, not a company"! (Steve Jobs)

Not only that... but I thought Dropbox was a feature built on top of S3? Not true?

>> Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software

I wonder if the word "hackers" ought to be replaced with "young hackers of the type to apply to YC"?

If you're fresh out of school, or have only worked in big silicon-valley companies doing specialized tasks, I can see it. I have a hard time believing someone with even a few years experience in smaller companies haven't come to grips with "schlepness".

>> Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.

I don't think that's what the research shows:

""" Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. """

http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-s...

>> The first order engineering of making that happen, assuming you disable some Windows-specific functionality, was rather small (on the order of a few manweeks).

I have a hard time believing that. I used to write to the Windows internals API a lot (the kind of stuff you see on sysinternals), and I can't imagine the sql server team not doing the same. That stuff was not easily ported to Linux, at least in the late 90's / early 00's.

Yeah, I read it as 30k requests in a matter of seconds.

The reaction to this piece is interesting... I was sort of "ho-hum" about it, but I've written many a "web-app" in c/c++ - cgic on linux, isapi on windows... not to mention socket servers with thread pools implementing custom protocols...

I don't say that because I think it makes me special -- it's what we ALL used to do because that's the only thing we had.

After you've done that for a few years, you become VERY efficient at banging out code.

My favorites were bugs filed where numerous people would post about it, fb would never respond, then after a few months they would just "close" it due to inactivity!

Mind-boggling.

I solved a test problem for a company once (gt 500 LOC), but it was after a pre-screen and the stated salary was 130-140k base, not including generous bonuses, in the Midwest. It was also when I had a lot of downtime, so I didn't mind.

Now, I have a hard time finding enough time for my own projects, much less for contributing something to a company just for the chance to interview.

Since you're offering single digit equity, it might be worthwhile, but for the vast majority of companies, it would warrant a pass.

"... nobody seems to think that I'm anything more than a code monkey"

Are you talking to the wrong people?

I realized something similar when going through tech interviews with a company (in a field I knew well) and none of the dev managers could tell me anything about their products competitive landscape... The team leads were completely unfamiliar with their competitor's features.

hehe... I interviewed at a hedge fund once, 6 technical interviews in a row. One of the interviewers summed it up well when he said: "Brace yourself... The next guy is fresh out of CMU and is going to ask you questions you haven't thought about since school" (which had been about 10 years prior).

Correct... and that rule of thumb factors that into account.

I'm surprised at some of the low points on here... The general rule is to take your desired annual income and divide by 1000 to get your hourly rate. So if you want to make $120,000 year, your hourly rate would be $120.

I think a lot of "freelancers" must end up going through headhunters instead of finding clients directly? You might want to ask what your headhunter is making if that's the case -- I know of one body shop that only offers $50/hr to its contractors, while the client company is paying the headhunter $150/hour.

You can't even get a desktop support person out around here for less than $75/hour...

Your take on the whiteboard is interesting, and I can definitely see value in that. Of all the interviews I've been on however, it wasn't about brainstorming at all. It was a test to see how well you knew your data structures / algorithms. Examples: Solve a variation of the 8 queens problem; Determine if a graph is acyclic; etc...

I've asked this of recruiters before... Instead of flying me in to do a full day of white-board technical interviews, why not just give me a short project and see what I produce?

It's mind-boggling how broken our hiring practices are, yet how easily it could all be fixed.

I've telecommuted for over 10 years now... Last year I was given the "opportunity" to look for a new gig, and was horrified to find that the vast, vast majority of software companies are still stuck in a manufacturing mindset: show up at the factory, do your 8 hours (or 10). Even worse are the "local candidates only" job posts.

interesting

original article >> "This manifests itself by a very singular phenomena: programmers hate each other. They usually bash other programmers"

your reply >> "Then I realized, oh, (s)he's clueless."

From the article: "...look around for a profitable business... and build up a product that you can give away for free"

I don't understand why techies are so quick to flip the "Race to the Bottom" switch as the defacto product marketing strategy.

Consumer electronics compete on price because they're mainly commodities... Your Samsung TV is pretty much identical to your Sharp or your Sony. How do you differentiate? Price.

There's so much more innovation that you can do in software that competing on price is pretty lame.

"Clearly this is a more appropriate meta-idea for software / internet products where the cost of replication and distribution is almost zero."

S/he gives the example of Plenty of Fish... I guess it depends on how you define "almost", but scaling up to support that many users (which is required to make serious $ off of "free"), you certainly have real costs. POF has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in servers, not to mention bandwidth/elec costs.

"Well, with practically no increase in salary, I just don't see how this equity component makes it worth the risk to change jobs. Why should I take this offer? If we get bought or go public, I make about 50k for the next 3-4 years. That doesn't seem worth the risk and all the hours that this position is going to require."

VS

"Why do Software Engineers end up taking the percentages they do? ... Also, it's no secret that software engineers are seduced by cutting edge technology. I mean, you float something cool and exciting in front of a software engineer and he will almost begin twitching with excitement and he'll get all jacked up over the problem at hand."