We are better than this.
229 karma · joined November 28, 2013
I see your motivation is seeing your peers "get ahead" of you. We all do through that. I've gone through that. I chased after something because I wanted to keep up with my friends. It made me miserable. It's years long misery to achieve something that is unhealthy and not what I decided what I wanted for me.
I'd avoid being allowing others progress and achievements place pressure on you.
What do you think is the significance of that for Basecamp? Poor branding? Poor conversion? What's the business impact?
This has the added disadvantage of not making it clear in one place what the structure of things is. You have to hold it in your head or on paper what the defined structure is.
The learning curve and full fledgedness of Qt was not needed for me.
However, I disagree that a vague verbal or non-verbal understanding is sufficient to make one's commitment to the other concrete. It is not enough to inspire confidence in anyone. If your commitment is really that concrete and real what is keeping you from registering it with the government? It shouldn't really bother you - a mere formality. From making it widely known to everyone around you that yes, you are committed to me. Surely if I mean that much to you, and you are as committed as you say you are, this shouldn't be a problem.
Who we end up with is mostly a function of chance. No one is replaceable.
Hate to assume too much about your cultural background but my thinking is: unless there is a concrete commitment between you and your SO in the form of marriage, you should not be tied down to your current location no matter how good of a person they are and how well they treat you etc. when something like this comes up.
I have relocated to different cities during my career - 3 times to be exact. I have recently relocated to a new country in a another continent. You're right there is some amount of churn and stress involved in the process of the change. But that is only for the first 3-4 months after which you settle into a level of comfort.
However, every time I made the move I have looked back and felt that making the move, enduring the stress of change, was totally worth in the end in terms of the vast improvements in opportunities, personal development, financial gains and the many many new avenues that opens up and the new people that I met were totally worth the short term 'pain'.
It has been my observation that this is a conscious decision. If you can build a culture where you can have people being willing to show up for work at all the odd hours as the norm then you can afford poor software practices. In places like these rushed software that has bugs but meets the majority of the use cases well enough is what is expected. And you ARE expected to show up at odd times to fix what breaks.
I mean, its not as if it costs the company more to have you come in late or have you working at all the odd hours. They still pay you only what they pay you. To hell with your work life balance - it's not as if doing this as had any blowback in terms of attrition.
This person seems to have remained in Amazon for over 6 years - where they likely created millions of dollars in value in return for whatever money they made.
If you grow a backbone and turn down the calls at odd hours, you can expect to receive blowback and unreasonable treatment from a direction you didn't expect.
1. Being able to contribute to expectation / well at work while trying to do so.
2. As a developer, you will likely have to retain a deep domain knowledge so shifting between the domain of your own creation and the one of your employer isn't going to be lossless.
3. Having the discipline to ship when you are the only one working on it and not keep on building because you can.
4. Technical skills aside, doing the marketing work to get buyers for the product. Marketing tends to be a shot if you don't have a pre-existing audience to pitch to in the dark until you test and tweak down to the the source that converts the most while keeping you profitable. Where do you even start? etc.
5. Keeping yourself motivated though to completion.
6. Not burning out and managing your emotional well being while making your product as well as doing your job. How much of your free time are you okay with spending on this idea?
All of this for even a simple product is not a trivial undertaking. All things considered, technical skill is only one of the many requirements for someone to be able to pull this off. Technical skill may be just a very tiny portion of what you will need to succeed.
http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/07/16/the-science-that-u...
If the company's data is an aggregate from many different sources and how can the original sources' claim be established?
That is actually not true. This kind of employee low balling is condoned behavior.
I applied for a position at Automattic and had Matt Mullenweg (CEO) pull this on me.
Everything seemed to have gone perfectly well - everyone involved in the process seemed impressed with my abilities but when it came to this point and I declined I was told "I seem to be senstive about being Indian" out of nowhere. I don't know where that came from.