no_wave

Main question - what led this company to think they could even get close to a $99 price? Did someone give them a misleading estimate early on, or did they just come up with that number out of thin air?

It's a euphemism for not working at all, though likely with one or two experiences that keep it from being a total lie (the majority of the money lived off of being either already saved or coming from family).

The guy just failed hard in a pretty limp way. The options are either to try to "grow personally" and then to try something similar again, or to buckle down with a normal job and develop your skills and knowledge into something that really has value. When you've been drinking the start-up kool-aid the second is a hard pill to swallow - having to actually compete with everyone else - but I think it's worth it.

I'm about four years younger than you, and perversely, I think the anti-intellectualism of startup culture (which was more pronounced three years ago than now) actually ended up doing a lot of Computer Science majors my age a favor. They ran away from academia and their lives are certainly better for it, even if they had to eventually re-learn the value of theoretical thought in programming.

You're going to hammered for this, but it's absolutely true.

I find that phone interviews actually work differently - I've been able to turn around an unenthusiastic interviewer and I've been able to lose someone who liked me. For that reason, I think questions of actual code aptitude are best done on the phone, as that's the only place where you really can evaluate someone's thought process isolated from mitigating psychological barriers that occur during face-to-face interactions.

The icky reality is that face-to-face impressions are pretty much determined by how you smell. I think there are two reasons for this - first, there's the concept that people naturally want to be around winners and if you come in looking like a loser they'll be predisposed to dislike you in ways that escape their conscious thought. To work this one, try to chalk up a win before your interview (or get laid - again, hate that it works this way).

The second is that as people we unconsciously recognize whether or not the candidate believes that they're a good fit for the position. If you go in freaked out, you're going to set off a bad feel no matter how hard you try to cover it up. The feeling a recruiter responds to in the first thirty seconds is "this could work". You can't fake this, and this is why being as good as possible at what you do really does matter. It definitely rewards intrinsic overconfidence, but the more intrinsically underconfident people are generally smarter anyways and will eventually be so much better at what they do than their peers that they'll win in the long run. If you feel insecure in your ability to fill a position, get better at what you do and prove it to yourself by having other people evaluate your work - the feeling will go away eventually. Code review is scary for people insecure in their abilities, but it's easily the fastest way to wipe away pathological insecurity.

The technology allowed him to confirm all of his already-existing suspicions. He'd already noticed that his wife was fawning all over the man that she was apparently really sorry about having slept with - a man who also had dumped her hard in the past and didn't really give much of a shit about her, going so far as to make a joke about their affair in front of her husband. I agree with Michael that following the logic of the episode the technology just sped up what was probably going to happen anyways. (There's also the fact that the main character probably gets obsessed for reasons involving his murky career failure.)

Not sure what you're implying with the "even women!" comment.

You don't have to just post a range. The listing just needs to communicate that you're paying well above market, which is a step beyond competitive (and I've never seen "above market" in a job listing). Of course, this is only if your company really is committed to doing so!

I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.

EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know?

EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant.

Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

By Paul Graham's description in that "Let in the 95%" article, companies are standing around with their dicks in their hands hoping that they find "the best" engineers, but on the cheap. If a company wants to hire 30 more "great" engineers, but isn't bumping up their pay to get at least 15 at a higher rate instead... there's something really off happening.

It's standard economic theory that wages are sticky. I think for a while, at least the past three years, junior developers (especially in web dev) have been overvalued and seniors undervalued. From my recent job search, I think this is starting to change, which is why the whole "not enough engineers" is reaching a fever pitch (ie, we can't find seniors at the traditionally understood market rate, as everyone realizes seniors are a better buy right now).

As it stands, career programmers in the US who are good but not celebrities generally try to move into management/consulting/whatever because their career stalls otherwise. Solve that problem (PAY MORE) and we've got our programmers.

By putting restrictions on what women can use their bodies for, aren't you (we) claiming ownership over them?

The author of that comment implied nothing of the sort. You're an idiot.

It should be 43 instead of 44, right?

Note that in any sane universe you'd feel able to talk to your parents about this. But we're in backwards-land, where parents exist to be impressed.

It's so upsetting that they're protesting the single most life-saving technology that's likely to be developed in our lifetime (self-driving cars). Life-saving for everyone, too - poor and rich.

You quit.

Both Snowden and Assange are avoiding apprehension while being non-violent.

I said nothing about violence - in fact, your comment is the first on this page to mention violence - so I don't really understand where you're coming from.

Why should someone consent to being apprehended if they are protesting the same laws that they are breaking?

"Scars" imply a growth that is abnormal. It an attempt to mark off my reaction as somehow freakish and thus not legitimate.

As for "deliberate"? Deliberate's got nothing to do with it. See also "The Yellow Wallpaper".

Mad Men; Yes, Minister; Louie (S2)

To believe that there is a problem with the current system is apparently a sign of mental illness (ie, a need for therapy).

Sure, why not? It's the end of history, after all.

Well, you could start by forcing children to sit still (!) in the same room every day, lecturing them about things that they do not care about, forcing them to do things that they do not want to do, finding ways to shame them if they do not obey, and then insisting that this is what education is and what the process of learning looks like.

That would be one way to teach them not to seek education.

Creativity isn't the creation of a product. It does not imply selflessness. It isn't de facto laudable, and "creative" need not even be a compliment. That's not the argument.

Instead - just look at what you need to justify in order to "support" me (what does this MEAN?)! Why, beyond mere curiosity, do you feel more need to "question" somebody for doing what they want when it is outside of the status quo? Why does this become an issue of approval?

EDIT: To clear up any miscommunication - I am talking about friends/acquaintances getting uncomfortable/upset about my spending my time, money, and life the way I want to simply because it does not conform to the status quo. I am not talking about soliciting anybody (that would be weird).

EDIT 2: Although the fact that multiple commenters assumed that someone else would have to be bankrolling me to do this shows how deep the "always have a job and spend what you earn" conditioning/lifestyle goes.

I can't understand this line of reasoning. Creativity is the result of a process, and that process is ignoring (or at least comparatively devaluing) the horrific and sneering grasp of the status quo.

To separate the result of the creative process from the process is an abstraction that ends up excluding the actionable content from the concept. To argue over which acts are and aren't creative will do nothing to serve you in your life, so why do it except to try to bring others down?

The key part is "they suspect". You don't have to tell them anything about their life. You don't even have to KNOW about their life. But they will still take your alternate lifestyle as a personal offense.

(as an aside, since when has "saving money for the future" been the habit in America?)

How is it "ludicrous"? The aim of every educational reform I have ever seen is "how do we make students do what we want and perform the way we want?".

I have NEVER seen the question "how do we encourage students to behave in ways that we do not expect?".

What does this signal?

I disagree. People get angry at the exercise of creativity.

Look at the reaction to the financial independence/lifestyle design. People HATE them. Tell many Americans that you're going to stop working for six months to read books in Thailand and they will despise you.

There are so many upsides to creativity, and so much human potential for it - the thing that stops most is the shame that gets splashed on you every time. And then you start splashing it yourself. And that's the game.

So what is the intended effect of forcing you to do things that you do not want to do and emotionally abusing you if you fail to comply, every day? How can you teach someone agency by traumatizing them if they attempt to exercise it?

So who's buying it in the case that the provider immediately converts it into USD?

The people who set the price will be those who are interested in holding bitcoin. People who hold bitcoin instantaneously do not affect the value almost by definition.

You can't.

This is going to be something that will come up again and again as the lifehackers do whatever they can to trim and prune themselves into the life that's most convenient.

You aren't broken - the framework that you're forcing yourself to operate in is. No matter how many drugs and how much adderall we take, we can only ignore what our minds are trying to tell us for so long.

There's something that you want to be doing right now, and it's not what you think it is. You'll have to figure it out or be stuck in limbo.

So do you disagree with the statement, or are you unsatisfied with the possible reality that it represents?

If you care about which chess player has the best stats, look it up.

Sports competitions have never been about who the best team is - it's about who wins. This is why it's fun.