markokocic

I like first email more (the one marked as bad example). It's simple, and to the point. After reading it you know exactly what is changed and why. It's a bit harsh, but we are not kids, we can handle it.

The other mail (the one marked as good example) is apologetic, lengthy, and doesn't get to the point cleanly. It might be good when talking to other managers, investors, customers or suits, but not when talking to your developer employees. If you write specifications like that, the job will never get done.

Most of the errors in estimating time when programmers do estimations is the assumption that requirements are final. The requirements are never final, and never will be.

Sold 3000 records fro 10k$. I bet he spent much more when he was buying all those records, say 20k$? So, I could read the story as someone lost 10k$ in 10 years because of Facebook ads.

And I'm sure someone creating facebook ad analytic service would claim that facebook ads are effective.

If you are in a position to dictate this NET 10 or late fees conditions, then by all means, go for it. Work has to be paid. This can work well in markets where it works in your advantage. The only problems is that in many markets on can't enforce such rules, because there are many providers to the same service driving price and terms down.

While some of those things don't have alternatives, some certainly have. You just need to use them.

> Gmail + Google Calendar + Chrome + Google Drive + Google Search + Google Docs + Android Phone + Google Maps + ...

What about: Gmail + Google Calendar + Firefox + Dropbox/Wuala + DuckDuckGo + Live Docs + Android Phone + Nokia Maps + ...

Of course, you could go Google free if you want, I just pointed the alternative that doesn't regress in usability and convenience from what you currently use.

Does anyone know of any cloud storage with client side encryption that is convenient to use? I'm using Wuala, but would like to hear about alternatives.

I really liked Sublime Text, but each time I try to search for some word in 20MB log file it reminds me how slow and unresponsive it is compared to Emacs. The closest to my ideal editor would be Emacs with visual appearance of ST2.

Why would you assume that someone will work on solving the puzzle only for karma? Curiosity, challenge and fun are also valid reasons, and I can see that a lot of people got curious about the message, and some of them took the challenge and had a good fun solving it, and maybe trolling the OP after that.

> Yes. Java is getting closer and closer to native code performance. In some rare cases it can even beat C. But this is after billions of dollars have been thrown at trying to make Java fast.

Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast. Do you want to say that there haven't been billions of dollars in both money and man-hours thrown at trying to make C/C++ fast? There's no free performance.

Clojurescript is an interesting language, with great potential for easy porting. I wish there is a direct JVM port of Clojurescript.

I would be able to leave with Clojurescript limitations compared to Clojure if it provides smaller jar files and better performance of compiled code. That would make it really usable on constrained targets like Android.

It's true that you can't learn programming in few months, or even a year, but if you are already solid programmer learning yet another language or framework is easy. Heck, some of us are doing it just for fun.

Learning a new language _is_ easy for a good developers. I know of a lot of companies that are doing just that, trying to find good developers, and then train them on the fly in new language. And it works well for them.

The reason why some companies have "hiring problem" is that they require X years of experience with framework Y in language Z, although that language Z takes 1 month to master, and framework Y another two weeks.

Why are they doing it? Because HR is doing hiring, and because "hiring is problem" they get bigger budget for hiring, instead development department getting bigger budget for training.

Please don't. If they really hurry up to fix things they could just create another breakage ;) Let them time to really think through it and fix the damage, instead of trying to do a "quick fix in production".

Will I be able to use latest Android OS without installing this?

In that case, if it indeed works like that, sounds like a nice place to work.

I would go even a step further, if all work is result driven, why having work hours anyways? Why not just agree on what has to be done in some future time period, and forget about hours completely?

That way, employees will feel more relaxed, and accomplish more.

I'm sure I can do more in 20 "high hours" than in 40 "forced hours", but if you don't let me work only 20 "high hours" a week, and assign me 20 more "forced hours", it would inevitable lead back to 40 "forced hours" with much more work and less done.

That's why I never bid based on hourly rate, but based on some agreed amount of work, when doing contracts.

More work for USA lawyers. Everyone want to sue over everything, and then complain when someone else sues over only slightly different reasons :-)

> Sure, you can work more, but you're not expected to.

Are you sure about this? I tend to believe you really mean this, but it's hard to believe that you, or other managers are not looking at someone doing 20 minutes of work a week as a weasel that hacked a system.

What you measure (and reward) is what you will get.

If long hours are mandatory, people will just tend to do the same, if not lower, amount of work in those 12 hours than what they would otherwise do in 8 hours.

And why would they care about quality if that's not rewarded? They could always say: "But I worked for 12 hours a day.".

The point still stays. Why having to write even integration test for something that can be easily checked by compiler. Better focus on writing tests that cover functionality instead of making sure return types are correct.

So, you are basically proposing that Germany should ruin its own economy just because some countries irresponsibly spent more money than they had, and are now in debt?

That would make crisis even worse for everyone, and I can't see why Germany would do something like that.

Just note a pattern. There are some countries that were spending more than they have, and those countries are in big problems. Just take a look at Greece, Italy, Ireland, and, to some extent Spain. Then, there are countries that didn't spend more than they were able to service, and they are doing fine. Take a look at Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Slovakia, Poland. Then, there are some countries in between, that are neither too good, nor bad.

It's easy to draw a conclusion what is the way out of crisis, and I hope Germany will be able to lead a way.

But I don't want to do that. I don't want to store anything broadcasted on radio or tv to disc. Why would I have to pay in that case? Make it optional, make it opt-in. Allow people to go to GEMA or equivalent and buy one year subscription if they want to use the "right to make copies of copyrighted content", but please don't force me, or anyone else to pay for it if we don't want it.

I wouldn't call it international since it only supports a handful of counties. If you really want international go with 2checkout and moneybookers.

As long as offering counter offers provokes a mixed feelings (as shown in this very HN thread) it is a valid strategy to try in order to keep employee until they find/train a replacement.

Actually, ClojureScript worked just fine in Rhino, JS implementation that ships with the JDK, last time I checked.

Darcs is not "another", it is "the first distributed" version control system that gained some traction in open source projects. Before git usage exploded, darcs was almost exclusively used by haskel and lisp libraries.

What killed darcs, besides performance issues with darcs 1, was "one repo one branch" mode, and tedious way of maintaining long lived forks, which wasn't that convenient as what git provides.

However, I'm glad that Darcs is still actively developed and used, since it has very nice theory and model behind it, and it still has some very useful concept which are quite unique for it.

But winning those $66 while your friend just lost $2, (or the other way round) could be fun ;)

Lottery, as a form of innocent betting, can really provide a lot of fun for a small price. I would be bored to death to watch a soccer game, but when I bet 1€ on it, it suddenly becomes 2 hours of fun. And I don't expect to "win the ticket", cause I already got more than I paid for.

Looking at everything from the profit/cost point of view can lead to a very boring life, for most of the people.

Seems like everyone in discussion focuses on vacation, sick leave and salary in the US, and noone is talking why is the software engineer salary in Austria, and similarly in the rest of Europe less than in the US.

The reason is simple. Try to remember one software package developed in Austria? Can you name one software company based in Austria that is successful in selling software or services? Do you know of any, even moderate, company from Austria whose primary role is creating and selling software? That's right, you can't.

That's because software engineers there work for companies where spending money in producing software is a cost, not an investment. If software is not a primary line of business, than there are two things in place. One is that developers are an expense. Second is that you don't need that good or experienced developers working on glorified enterprise internal applications.

So, if you want money, either work for a company where software development is primary line of business and be paid accordingly, or work on your own. You can't make good bucks working for cost center.

Does anyone knows areas where jobs will be cut? Sales, engineering, software, ...?

I'm glad simplicity is taken into consideration early on, because simple is not easy[1] to achieve when language goes into production.

[1]http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy