moocow01

A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected.

The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same".

Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc etc.

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority. Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life.

I also feel like these articles always skirt the issue that education has a very strong correlation to earnings - even still today. If you take on huge debt your actual earnings may be different but the macro-trend is that education increasingly correlates with high pay and high employment. At the same time, everyone needs to be realistic - look at the prospects for what you are getting educated in (ex. wanna-be social science majors and prospective law students should look before they leap).

Lastly I feel like everyone needs to get better at doing things themselves and being sustainable. Cant afford a ton of food - start learning to grow a small vegetable garden and cook for yourself - its cheaper and way better than the shit you are going to eat at Chiles. Cant afford a big screen TV - well congrats you dont need one, marketers are just going to tunnel shit to you through it. In other words, a lot of the things and systems that have been setup in US and integrated into normal living are really not needed and sometimes surprisingly undesirable - Im not suggesting we all live in huts but it wouldnt kill us to all be forced to learn skills that fall outside of going to work and swiping our credit cards for everything else.

I wouldn't bet on Facebook/Twitter/Social - its honestly a very hard business to be in for a megacorp. Slippery customers, monetization destroys product quality - there are lots of statements people like to make such as "but what if FB just does X" (charges a dollar, muscles into search, etc) - those what ifs in actuality are very difficult pivots. Additionally its telling that the number 2 social network (in terms of popularity) cant figure out how to consistently make money. Social networking in general is a graveyard of small rockstar companies that have generated more hype than dollars.

Apple is a behemoth - they may be at the top of their game but they have a looong looong way to fall if they start to. They may be the most valuable just by how large they are today. I think generally they will smartly stay at what they are good at (consumer devices/software).

Amazon is my vote - they are amazing at scale in almost every way. Im not too keen on seeing this happen but I think they are going to slowly eat almost all of retail. On top of it, it seems as if they are successfully trying to replicate their model for retail across other segments (AWS/digital/etc) - Amazon seems to want to be a provider for everything and the scary part is that they are doing it quite well and quickly.

Google I think has some good things ahead but in a lot of ways I think they have stagnated from a business perspective. Its a bit hard to see this perspective in that they deservedly uphold an amazing reputation amongst the tech community. They have great ideas but they are still 100% in the ad business after all these years and many years of trying diversification. They have great side projects that live great lives today but from a business perspective they are always still side projects. I think Google will see some moderate growth but am not too bullish on their version of glass or auto-cars ever being true business drivers for them.

Dropbox, Square - great services - will remain blips on the radar of history compared to the others.

I sort of agree but I think the danger with your exercise as it pertains to this article is that it takes into account everything - not just tech. My washing machine is way better, car runs longer, better medications, etc.

I think in terms of traditional Silicon Valley tech (as it is today) his point is largely correct and natural. While software is increasingly ubiquitous, the pace/rate at which its able to be a driver of new innovation/change is increasingly less in my opinion - computing and the internet has been maturing over the last 50 years and we should expect to see less life altering changes as a whole. It doesn't mean the gig is up - it just means computing progress is now eating away at the fringes and that the delta in how much computing drives innovation will be somewhat less through 2010-2020 than it was from 2000-2010.

There is no replacement - only temporary highs. You can get away with caffeine, drugs, etc in the short term but in the long term there will be some form of a consequence.

My advice would be to practice better time management rather than less sleep.

Programming is honestly a very tricky sector of work to understand how to make progress in the practice of it from here on out.

You have essentially an almost infinite number of ways to get to an endpoint with very few real constraints... this is good and bad.

We have lots of creative freedom within the constraints of code to achieve a certain piece of functionality. For example, authentication - Ive seen it done somewhat differently on every product Ive worked on not to mention the different languages and coding styles used. Most programmers enjoy the mental process of crafting their own implementation and there is usually a real reason for custom development - every product is a little bit different.

The bad... we seem to have to continually be rewriting custom implementations of very similar things which equals cost and usually mediocre reliability. We barely even have adhered to guides for something as common as authentication (at least that anyone pays attention to). This is quite vastly different than other professions. Take for example plumbing - while not every job will be done the same by every plumber, there are a set of standards that all plumbers leverage - specs on pipes, fittings, etc. Or take for example healthcare, most doctors have at most a few different treatments that are agreed upon as effective.

But its not like certain sections of the programming community haven't tried... we have open source libraries, plugins, published recommendations, etc but the problem is that the landscape is a mess not to the fault of any individual... programming languages, technologies, business requirements come and go every day effectively erasing much of the work/libraries/best practices/etc that were just starting to get established.

Its as if we need to only have one universal unchanging language and a set of universal devices we all agree on with an unbiased committee that organizes open source modules - I also live in the real world so realize this is a bad idea that will never come to fruition for a 1000 and 1 reasons but I have to agree with the author and dont have much hope in short term "real" advances in how software development gets done.

I overwhelmingly agree and think an additional problem is that a large portion of "technology companies" are not really technology companies. Most are actually consuming and applying technology - not developing new technology in any major sense. For example, is your run of the mill VC backed company churning out an app with a sprinkle of social integration and location awareness a technology company? - I would argue that calling what they do "technology development" is quite generous.

The resulting problem is that most of these companies do not really care about pushing technology forward or contributing relevance to the technological sphere - just figuring out the right arrangement of features to make the things not completely fall apart. Just as an anecdote during my career Ive worked with 4 Phds (Stanford, MITx2, Brown)... in each one of those cases they were essentially very educated software implementers - management would dole out tasks to myself and them that were just typical... we need an ad unit here, an app for this, analytics system for this, landing page for this. I don't criticize the Phds I worked with in that Im sure they were trying to pay their bills like everyone else but it was disheartening that our current system/environment had allowed such great minds to be puppets of management who were the least qualified in the room to be working with technology.

Seek out opportunities in other industries/segments of computing.

The reason a lot of work is CRUD work is because most web applications and business applications are just data/information management systems targeted toward a certain use. My unscientific guess would be that 95% of at least minimally complex web and business applications boil down to being CRUD with a UI and a lot of marketing spin. This means that if you work in this segment you are going to be mostly working in CRUD. There are many other segments of computing where your work will be incredibly different.

Examples:

- Computer graphics/gaming

- Embedded systems

- Networking

Caveat - after working in a new segment you most likely will find that they have their own 95% core competency skill set (like CRUD is for web/business apps)

I'm doubtful of the 3D printing revolution that everyone is expecting or is claiming is occurring.

Guns are an interesting example. Printing a 3D gun is somewhat viable but a 3D printer is not a dispenser where you can just press a button and a perfectly crafted glock pops out for your 5 year old. 1) You have to have strong enough materials for the casing 2) The inner surface of your barrel better be smooth (something even high precision 3d printers are relatively bad at) 3) If 1 or 2 is in any way flawed its going to be your own hand thats blown off - better get it right.

3D printing is going to have to compete with a global distribution system that is already extremely efficient. Take for example coffee cups - great example of something to print but I'd probably never print a coffee cup. Why? Because they are damn cheap and ubiquitous. By the time I get done with downloading the model, purchasing the materials, printing the cup, preparing the surface (shining, painting, whatever) Ive spent more time and money than just hopping over to Walmart and spending a few bucks. Guns within the rings of people who want them in mass who you are mostly likely worried about are in a similar situation - they can get one down the street.

On top of it, 3D printing currently competes pretty much only with the lower tier of manufacturing... stuff made out a single material with usually at most a few parts. Whenever I see what can be done with a 3D printer its honestly not that compelling - toys, utensils, models, etc. I think 3D printing has potential but also think it will be a long time until everyone is printing everything they want.

Personally I'd probably leave. I think there is a point where its healthy to try to change the system but it sounds like you are fighting a current that is too strong to encourage the way you want to work.

I believe you when you say your efforts are needed - the problem is management very frequently has a hard time being able to understand that there is an upfront cost that will eventually pay off. They are looking at spreadsheets and just want to see that profit column keep on going up - you essentially are proposing that the profit column should go down a bit (development costs) with the promise that it will eventually go up much faster.

I've found that software companies either qet the necessity of quality/process or don't (also some types of businesses do not really need much software quality). Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not. By the hiring practices you listed Im guessing they don't get how software quality and process impacts the bottom line.

My pessimistic view is that very little will change with the exception of burning yourself out - sorry for the dire prediction Ive just been there myself.

The thing that Ive found is that once you get into the upper-tier range (I define this as 125-150k and on average seems to include people with 5 to 10 years experience) it gets harder than before.

My first 5 years on average I had great raises - 15-20% on average (all mostly from job changes). Now it seems a little bit harder - I most likely can go out and convince someone to pay me 5 or 10k more but I feel my head starting to skim that glass ceiling. There are things I could do to change - I could go find a job doing financial transactions or blindly go work for the highest bidder with no care work conditions and other things, etc.

The point being is that developer salaries in the first part of the career can go up relatively fast but in my opinion top out relatively quickly (not such a bad thing necessarily). I think from there you need to go out on your own if you want to really make more.

Its anecdotal and Im sure getting older influences my opinion.

Im also one of these people who thinks Facebook creates a lot of weak ties in replacement of fewer stronger ties between people. No idea if Im wrong or right but despite the many good things technology has brought I wonder if its subtly making many of us more lonely on an individual/cognitive level.

There are also a number of cultural/social changes that influence my opinion. Real integrated communities within America seem increasingly rare, there seems to be less trust in "strangers", little to no focus on the common good, increased focus on one's self - on top of it you could argue that we have less of a need for certain types of relationships due to modernization.

I'd guess it has to do with a few things that are not at all related to the recession...

1) Globalization - the lessons learned and processes formed from globalization have in a sense come back to be applied domestically. Increasingly dominant corporations usually have numerous satellite offices to be able to tap the talent and resources throughout the country. For example if you are a Finance guy and you want to work for Google that doesn't mean you have to be working in the Mountain View office (I'd assume). Just about every city has a pretty diverse set of employment opportunities.

2) Increasingly Artificial Relationships - This one is very debatable but for a number of reasons (culture, technology, etc.) Id say that establishing light bonds with lots of people is incredibly easy these days but establishing a strong support network of friends is increasingly hard. I'd guess that due to this people will increasingly be incentivized to stay within the general vicinity of longtime friends and family rather than moving across the country with the risk of never being able to build and be surrounded by a network of "real" relationships. YMMV but I think its getting harder to find 3 new great "will pick you up when you're in the gutter" friends.

3) Similar to number 1 - the US geographically is becoming more the same than different in my opinion. There are certainly still differences but if you move to another state its highly likely that you will be surrounded by a mixture of city and suburbs that contain the same types of things just with different names. Probably mass media and the internet are responsible for this one.

This doesn't address the practical real-world problem...

Most developers are under at least moderate pressure to deliver and usually their priority is this...

1) Make thing appear to work

2) Make thing actually work

3) Clean up code to pass a code review or not be yelled at by a coworker

4) Comment where things are necessary

In many cases we barely get past step 1 and a half and usually its not even our fault - the business case has been mostly satisfied and according to the mucky mucks its best to move onto the next feature. Yes most of us dream of places where we can craft our code to oblivion but its probably not the average reality unfortunately.

I think its great when somebody takes the time to comment - commenting is not fun and has very little upfront reward but can be a lifesaver when traversing complex logic. If you have the ability to leave a profuse amount of comments I can hide them when I dont need them and use them when I have no idea whats going on - comment as much as you like.

I stopped at "you can edit the editor's source code in HTML/JS/CSS" For me personally, I want the best native editor I can find that makes doing my job easier/simpler - I don't want an editor that I can tinker around with its source code and accidentally shoot myself in the foot.

You should not ask for a number of stock options - you should ask for a percentage of the company.

In other words the number of stock options you get means nothing unless you put it in the context of total stock options. Its like saying you want 1000 coins and not mentioning the currency.

Without knowing your situation - tell them you want market salary and .1-.5% of the company in options. During negotiations value your options at $0 - if they happen to somehow materialize it will be a nice surprise bonus.

Use Flash or render your content as images. Neither of them are 100% locked down but its going to give anyone writing a scraper a run for their money.

Outside of preventing scraping, both of these ideas are likely to be seen as stupid.

1) Tell your manager first in private. Talk only positively. Despite being there for such a long time this is something managers deal with on a frequent basis and expect. (Do not tell your coworkers anything until everything is official)

2) Be open to negotiation. You may have no idea how much they may be willing to put on the table or you may be able to up your offer at the new place through a series of counter offers. (If you have already accepted the new offer, only talk to your current employer)

3) Allow for 2 weeks notice starting at the beginning of next week. Be proactive in putting together a plan to transition your work over to other members of your team. (Also while relatively uncommon do not be surprised if they happen to ask you to leave immediately - its typically nothing personal but can be policy)

4) Get the personal contacts of your close colleagues. Spam everyone there with LinkedIn invites to connect. Possibly ask any close colleagues or supervisors for recommendations.

5) Collect and return any company equipment. Arrange for your last paycheck including any unused vacation.

6) On the last day, you will most likely take part in an exit interview. Say nothing negative - even constructive feedback should not be given. They will ask you to sign some paperwork. Tell them you will take it home with you to read in full. Do not send in the paperwork - it only is meant to clear your employer of any liability and void your legal rights.

7) Take a week off before your new job and relax.

The education industry today is 100% a business and institutions are run more or less like corporations (this wasn't so true many years ago and is a horrible model for education for general society). It is their incentive to continue perpetuating the correlation between college and career success... and its not some sort of grand lie in many cases - there are many indicators that show its becoming increasingly important to have a college degree.

They do have a coming problem though. With the escalation in price and the well known stories of college grads moving back in with their parents, their next set of customers are starting to question if college is for them. Essentially the education industry has started to eat its young and does so even more every time prices rise above reasonable amounts. The other thing to consider is that the cost for college has risen much faster than the label price. Given that most students need loans, when you factor in interest paid and the long term rise in interest rates - the cost of education has REALLY gone up... much more than is reported.

At some point things will correct - either the government will step in (unlikely) or there will be a fall out when inevitably their customers realize that education is more of a liability than an asset.

But that last portion "(net of interest and other costs)" is my argument. Interest, property taxes, capital gains taxes, real estate agent fees are all apart of the cost of owning and selling the asset and it usually adds up to quite a bit. Within the first 5 years even with a 3.5% loan you pay around 20% of your mortgage balance just in interest.

Leverage by its definition is scary. As you said increased risk/reward...

$X,XXX,XXX - 50% chance of 1.2x, 50% chance of 0.8x - not so scary

$X,XXX,XXX - 1% chance of 50x, 99% chance of $0 - scary

Its only not scary if you have an infinite amount of money and infinite number of rolls of the dice.

Agree - I wanted to point out the problem with the seemingly rosy situation of using leverage to "get ahead." There are many people that think they are being financially smart by buying as much a house as the bank will give them with the assumption they will bank the difference while seemingly never paying attention to where their paycheck is evaporating each month.

I made the same argument lower in the thread but with omission of an instant price bump the instant you get the home or buying purely with cash, the idea of getting a very expensive home with the strategy of banking the difference in appreciation is typically a very bad idea. Banks will love to tell you its a great idea and that is because a million dollar loan held for 5 years at 5% interest will cost you 250k in interest to hold the asset effectively wiping out the 250k profit if that happens.

The only true reward is going to the bankers for taking the risk of loaning a million bucks.

"If my house in the bay area goes up 30% i sell that and relocate to illinois you can bet i will cover the short and come out ahead since home prices in illinois lag ca by a good 150-200k"

You need to factor in interest paid on your bay area loan to get the full picture. Just because your house value goes up by a certain margin does not come close to meaning you have profited by that much. This is especially important to understand in areas with large home prices in that the cost of holding the asset (interest) is very high especially early into the loan.

Quitting your job is the easy part. Legitimately replacing it is the hard part.

There are some nice thoughts here but I'd like to know what the plan is to survive. Its certainly possible to make it but I feel like this is glorifying a situation that most people once on the other side of the fence are going to be under stress and realize things are not necessarily so rosy. You have savings - great step. You have some things your working on - great step. Now how do you start making just enough money before your runway ends and you have to either go back to a job or start eating into your own time to do consulting (which is basically employment from my perspective).

Ill admit Im a relatively risk averse person but Id say the best plan is the 1 step plan where the time you are spending on your own business becomes more profitable than going to work - easier said than done but thats my 2 cents.

This is the most comprehensive (and correct IMHO) answer Ive ever read... http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

I wouldnt worry too much about it but if you still are, pay for an hour or two with a Lawyer. The cases where you DO NEED to talk to a Lawyer or your employer are if your current projects compete with your employers. Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes not. Employer makes accounting software and you make first person shooters - not a problem. Employer makes strategy games for the app store and you make first person shooters for the app store - might want to consult a Lawyer. As long as you are doing it on your own time, with your own equipment and it is not in your employers direct line of business - there is nothing to talk about if residing in California.

Additionally if your projects are somewhat aligned with your employers projects get them to sign something before you join - its your best time to negotiate this. Another alternative is to cross out any lines you dont like in your employee contract (although it may ruin the employment contract) - I cross out a significant amount in my employment contracts and usually dont hear much about it.

Where do you live?... if in California they put it in contracts all the time but its void unless extremely blatant meaning you literally are stealing code or leveraging your employment to compete directly against your employer.

I used to have a very seasoned colleague who used to say you cant steal code but once you move on you can always rewrite it. In other words, the skills and expertise you learn on the job are always your own intellectual property (in California at least). Knowing his experience Im pretty sure he's done this, gone through the legal gamut, and come out fine.

The fix: work remotely.

Besides call in meetings you can filter all your communications through electronic means. I check my email only every 4 hours. When I need to not be distracted I turn off my IM. It can be kind of lonely but Im overall much much happier.

"let mobile browsers download small apps and execute them within the browser window"

If you want to know how this turns out you only have to look at the evolution of browser plugins (applets->flash,silverlight,unity,etc) that has taken place for the last 20 years. We could also decide to skip all that and just concentrate on moving forward the HTML spec and tools to make better mobile web applications.

I guess what Im saying is if you could have a tool that could compare 2 pieces of source code, be able to merge them, and maintain the formatting of each persons local copy it would be great. Its probably a pipe dream because your version control would have to have an intimate knowledge of the specs of any particular language used in the source code (nevermind the version of the language you are using)