How about the art of "getting out of the building"? Sending students into the real world on three or four customer development projects for hypothetical products would be very valuable.
If you've ever tried to write such a thing in Python or Javascript (node.js anyway) you will eventually come running back to the JVM. Java is not perfect but the JVM is close to it.
No kidding. They're using php as a template language to call thrift services. That's hardly "using php" in the sense that most people would think of it.
Good times are better for working at startups for one reason - switching costs are lower. When you know that if $employer runs out of cash but you can find another job in a week, there's very little risk involved as a startup engineer.
That said, as an engineer being a startup "employee" is a sucker's game. You'll never get enough equity or intangibles to compensate for the risk/effort/opportunity cost.
Except that Oracle is a platform company. As a CIO you are buying into a platform on top of which your in-house developers, or overpaid consultants, will be building a solution. ERP platforms are not Bingo Card Creator.
This is effective in the short term, yes. But "businessmen" do not create the future, they sell (or buy) the present. And the people creating the future are almost entirely aligned against the Oracle ecosystem.
This is what I do not get about Oracle. Are we (tech influencers, i guess) all commie hippies that can't make a damn difference at all to their long term business?
Because the answer is either yes or no, and if there is a good possibility that it is no (Oracle's behavior is long term financially detrimental) you might think shareholders would care. But I do not see $ORCL shareholders marching in the street in protest about the apparent pillaging of the company's future. Where are the pitchforks?
It's often hard to look back and attribute success to the things that one did not do. I think this more than anything is Marissa Mayer's problem here on HN - it's tough to publicly point to anything she did, except play the totally critical role of saying no a million times over. Few people can do that, fewer still are right.
I'm having a hard time imagining what could be more scandalous than enriching the super-rich, looting the middle class and leaving the US economy in the shitter for years to come. That's old news.
I don't know that they had connections so much as they had a hook. The hook was about a couple of students taking on the massive, evil facebook with open source software.
If you want press, think about your story and make it a good one.
Depends on the market. If you're opening an online store for vitamins, then no, maybe you don't need a technical co-founder. But a good technical co-founder would expand the world of the possible. The BATNA for such people is too high to be your employee.
That and life stage. By the time you graduate from b-school a spouse, family and house are coming soon. The years in which one can earn ramen wages are precious and b-school takes up two of them, often at what might otherwise be your living expenses vs experience peak.
Go to law/medical/dental school and in about 10 years open your own practice. Anything else is a lottery and you should be playing for the fun of it, not to make money.
Yeah, that feels like a strange middle ground between "founder" and "employee"... You would never get enough equity to make the tradeoff a good deal. I'd be surprised if situations like this happen very often.
+1 on this. Any decent NAS software (FreeNAS, OpenSolaris, etc) with an iscsi target will work great with the (free) GlobalSAN initiator and Time Machine.
Yeah, like everything else here what you can reasonable ask for depends on company stage. It's not unreasonable for employees 2-10, say, to ask for a general characterization of the cap table and liquidation preferences.
Also find out whatever you can about the current cap table. A cap table will tell you a lot about the history of the company any demons hiding in the closet that might prevent a buyout or later stage investment in the company. If say, a pool of 30 dentists owns 30% of the preferred stock with a 3x liquidation preference, run and run fast.
I don't disagree but the FA does say: "In Australia, where gardeners have grappled with droughts for a decade, aquaponics is particularly appealing because it requires 80 to 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods."
Please. There's enough bullshit in the world to outlast oil, water and sunlight. A few less MBAs, at best, means that some of that bullshit will have to find real jobs and will make slightly less money. More environmental engineers, now that would be something to celebrate.
Anyone have real world experience to share with HBase or Hypertable? Or Cassandra, for that matter. None of these projects strike me as "mature" software but I'd love to learn otherwise.
I have to agree with the more general case if not his exact point. middle class is the enemy of rich and dysfunctional is probably highly correlated with household income.