188 karma · joined October 28, 2010
I suggest that few companies will object to you asking about their timeframe for decisions, or (once that has expired) asking for feedback. Some companies won't be set up to provide it, which is unfortunate, but I suspect many will.
This may be why subscriptions are so expensive - because part of the cost of the subscription is customer support, and the less expensive it is the more customer support costs.
*alternate, complementary theory: the less it costs the more poor people have it where they have to do more financial juggling and get into weirder situations. Thoughts, HN?
Lazy is a very loaded term - I'm hesitant to subscribe to the notion that keeping up with Game of Thrones is any less an investment of time. As examples of the value of such an investment, you can then discuss it with your friends and coworkers, facilitating social cohesion and acceptance. You can use it a tool to encourage you to take a step back, and look at other things you are doing from a different perspective.
Sleep is another investment, the value of which has been much-discussed here and elsewhere. I'd encourage you to invest in it.
Perhaps your investments have been commercially focused - this is no bad thing. You will have learned directly about the work you have been doing, people's behaviour around you and yourself. You have learned some of what you are capable of - working so hard in impressive in itself, this is a capability you can understand and rely on later! You will have gained a reputation with some of the people you have been working with. If you are still on good terms with any of them, you can use this to better understand yourself, and you can seek recommendations from them.
That said, not all investments work out. I'm sorry your investment has not brought you what you expected.
Please try to focus on what you have learned and gained, and keep actively choosing your investments. You're almost certainly doing fine, and if not, please ask for help.
Case b: This is a one-time deal, they have no reason to care. be more careful.
I am in no way an expert, but looking at the incentives the other side of the negotiating table is surely more important (and way cheaper and quicker) than lawyering up a contract?
done well is the tricky bit. You need people who get on ok with it, social skills need to be developed, and you need discipline around not committing code which hasn't at least been reviewed. Social skills is the hardest part IME: knowing you can ask for a break, some time to think, or to split for some research before resuming work as a pair.
I am more interested in what it does to your typical team in your something-like-typical corporate environment: I think it would tank team productivity. Instead of programmers getting up to maybe 6 hours' writing software done, programmers would get significantly less time doing that. And we would all hate it.
This effect would happen because a) there are interruptions, and communications overheads to being part of a team; and b) because you need a bigger team to cover the reduced productivity, all of your things that scale poorly with the size of a team mean you need an even bigger team, with each person therefore doing less development.
I think companies which are smart about this whole building software thing are more interested in teams and their capabilities than individuals and their capabilities, and I think many of those would look at this in the same way as I just did.
The big limitations are probably on photons coming in at one end, and data going out at the other end - in the middle, I'd believe it does something so close to what it claims that you won't notice the difference.