synnik

This is one of those issues in which I clearly see generational differences. I am pushing 40, and my opinions are at odds with most of the commenters.

In your personal language, your choice to curse or not is none of my business. But in the business world, it is unprofessional.

I won't think you are a bad person for cursing. But it will lose my respect. I will most likely stop taking you seriously. And the likelihood of my choosing to do business with you in the future is minimal.

...says the student to the 20 year veteran who lived this path.

If all you care about is startup work, yes this is bad advice. If you want a solid career in technology, this is a viable path. You don't have to agree, and I don't expect anyone to like it, but denying its viability is just short-sighted.

Get a helpdesk job at a company with an internal helpdesk. (NOT a call center). Those jobs truly are entry level, and will hire people without experience. Once you are there, start building tools on the side to help your department. If you do well, they'll see the value and give you more programming work. If not, at least you now can put real IT experience, including programming on your resume.

Admittedly, this is not an exciting path, nor a fast one. But it is an effective one.

No, I respectfully but vehemently disagree. To-Do apps are a dime a dozen. No matter how much better any given app may be than another, there is very little reason to pay for a solution to the problem of to-do lists. There are just too many free options, and it is an easy problem to solve with a home-grown solution. Or Notepad. Or an actual notepad.

They need more.

I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so.

At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a critical asset to the company.

After 3 years, I've optimized everything, the ROI slows down, and I move on.

This pattern is not a tragedy. It doesn't crush your soul. It makes you a prized commodity in the business world, with a chance to make a change in your life every few years.

I have usually alternated between 3 years doing this, then 2 years doing startup work. It has given me a much broader base of experience and skill than anyone who stick to one one side of the coin. It also has given me years of experience in large industries (banking, energy, etc.) which I then use to find very real problems to which a startup can be applied.

I have led a very satisfying career, doing this for almost 20 years now.

Multiple Redundancy IS reliability. As long as everything stays running from the customer/business perspective, you are reliable.

When you start to define reliability as a specific layer of your infrastructure, you are setting yourself up for problems. You should be redundant at all layers, thereby reliable across your entire stack.

Agreed - the app itself looks fine, but it is trying to enter a very crowded market that has no real barrier to entry. And also no real killer features.

So I worry whether or not there is an actual underlying business model that can sustain such a large team.

Something in there just does not add up.

This article really comes off as a prima donna developer, who may understand how infrastructure works, but not why strategic decisions are made.

Security is the primary driver for VPNs, and a significant driver for IT-controlled devices. Maintainability of the infrastructure is another large drivers for devices. And finally, cost control of your support organization is easier when they have a limited scope to what devices and configurations they will support.

It isn't that his points are incorrect -- They are just pretty minor compared to the actual business drivers of Enterprise IT.

I'm very turned off by the violent imagery on the first 2 slides. I find it extremely unprofessional and it makes me have no interest in the content, and think very poorly of the people who put this together.

Obviously, I'm just one person with one opinion, so that it for what it is worth.

It is not quite that simple. In most jobs, you will learn confidential and proprietary information. Posting about your interview shows that you care more about publicly sharing your internal knowledge of a company than you do about providing value to that company. That choice is not a trait that I want in my employees.

Even more so, I would not even interview Jason for our company after seeing this. It isn't like anything was said that is negative... it is just that the hiring process (or anything HR-related) is private. Posting it online shows a lack of professionalism that would make me go to other candidates.

Maybe it is because I have been stuck working with .NET environments so much, but they seem to be focusing on stuff that is too complicated.

The basic FizzBuzz test is about the right level of complexity. It weeds out those people who cannot even do as simple loop while still giving real coders enough rope to work with to show their stuff.

To be honest, the more advanced concepts in programming can be mentored and corrected if the basics are in place. In my experience, once they pass a basic coding test, you are interviewing for culture, to determine if they are a junior or senior coder, and whether or not they know they are a junior coder and will therefore be open to improving.

Whether or not this is good or bad depends on how experienced you are -- On a platform I have been using for years, in which I have expertise... this would be a tragedy.

But, as an example, I just picked up rails 2 weeks ago, and have written a fairly complex app with it. I google quite a bit, not as a crutch to thinking, but to gain insights from people who know the platform better than I. Each new component I need for my app instigates some research to see how other people have done it. I do not copy and paste the results... I analyze and critique them for my own purposes. The next time I need a similar function, I think for myself. Over time, I become an expert and no longer need Google to get a project done.

As someone who works for a Nigerian boss, I get very tired of this kind of racism. I see it frequently. I see people refuse to do business with us because of his origin. I also see people try aggressively to scam us because of his origin, assuming we are naive.

But you cannot judge an entire country based on some highly visible scammers from there. Not all Nigerians are trying to scam you. And many Americans ARE trying to scam you. Many Nigerians have left their country, gotten educations, and become highly successful businessmen throughout the world.

This specific guy who runs this site? I have no idea. But I will judge him on his own merits, not his country of origin.

So... you can get up to 50 points for the fastest code, and 20 points for the smallest code. And you only lose up to 20 points for code that doesn't work.

I think I just detected a wonderful loophole in this scoring method.

oh, its a podcast! I couldn't tell at first. The front page is just images and captions, with no immediately visible info on what I am looking at. As the top center image is shoes, I thought it was some weird storefront... at least until I moused over something.

They might want at least a one-liner saying what that page is. There is such a thing as a design that is TOO minimal.

Not to nitpick, but founding Google doesn't automatically qualify you for a job at any large company, as the article states.

Not that I would refuse him a job... but it would require the same interview process as anyone, because I need to find out what he knows about my industry, what his current skills truly are, learn his philosophies, and find out how he would fit culturally.

Even brilliant people are sometimes crappy fits for the specific roles a large company may have to offer.

Oh, all you have to do is write a million dollar product and find a million dollars worth of customers? Is that all?

This is old advice. From Steve Martin. On SNL: "How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." - Steve Martin

I've used the jquery-ui datepicker before. You can customize it to make the year a drop-down, similar to what you have. I forget what the default range of years is, but we modified it to suit our needs anyway...

But can't you just modify your widget? Somewhere in your code must be the range of years provided...

I'm 39. My birth year is not even selectable in the drop-down. I had to go to 1974, then scroll back 2 years. Not exactly a positive experience.

I use RSS primarily on intranets, to help the guys in the field, who spend maybe 10 minutes a day in front of a computer, keep up on what is going on in our industry. I control which feeds are displayed - they just need to open a browser and read the news page.

Yes, many governments (including the US) are setting up funds to support renewable energy projects. However, we are finding more support from developing nations, who are not as entrenched in fossil fuels as the US.

Not yet - we do have a web site: http://www.globalenergyinitiatives.com

As we are in the midst of funding talks, we don't have much public info to share on a blog right now. Once we close on funding, I intend to increase our social communications.

I'm doing my own renewable energy startup right now, with our own innovations in turbine design. And while the engineering is critical, it is not the problem with the industry.

Energy startups fail primarily due to a lack of appreciation for the intensive capital required to make renewable energy work.

This is an industry where every project will cost millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, or even a billion for truly large-scale operations.

And that is EVERY project. You do not just come up with a design, test it, then repeat it 500 times. Each site has its own unique properties, each turbine need to be manufactured and shipped, connected into a grid, operated and maintained.

So you need a permanent source of massive amounts of cash to operate. Your standard VC firm normally is not an option because the ROI is likely to be 10 years out, and that is too long for most investors.

When the ROI does come in, it is massive. But this is a high-risk, long-term play, and it just doesn't match the interest of most VCs.

We have built our first production units, field tested them, and are ready to roll, but have spent the last 3 months lining up finances because we do not want to be another failed company added to the list.

College graduation is also a good indicator that you can choose a path for yourself, stick to it for multiple years, and complete a goal.

The problem is not only finding someone who truly deeply understands the language, but knowing how to tell that they do.

I've seen way too many "Senior" developers who really have just done the same junior-level coding for 15 years in a row. These people also tend to have a poor grasp of where their skills really stand.

People reading HN probably are self-directed enough not to fall into this trap, but we are not the majority of developers.

The brilliant part of the logistics is that Morton's really had no risk here, other than the cost of the food itself and some time. If they didn't find him, missed his flight, etc, no biggie - they just go home, forget it, and go about their business.

That is the real lesson here - that it is OK to try to pull marketing stunts, especially if there is no real downside to your company in the case of failure.

In my experience good developers act as architects no matter what their title is. But the purpose of a single formal 'architect' is more of a mediator between developers. Someone to find common ground when two viable technical solutions are presented, and be accountable for those decisions.

I earned a degree in Fine Arts many years ago, and one of the hardest lessons to learn was to listen to your audience. The artist always had a message to send, and the audience usually got a different message.

As the originator of any message, it is important to hear the feedback and respect that feedback. Telling your audience that they got your message wrong shows disrespect for the audience, and a misunderstanding of how communication works.

Try clarifying the message instead of dismissing the audience.

One size does not fit all.

I prefer a 99 dollar ergonomic chair, as sitting and standing both exacerbate my bad hips. I prefer 3 22" monitors at half the cost of a 30". I prefer total resolution available, not size of the monitor.

I just saved him $1500 bucks, and I'm happier than I would be if I was forced into their setup.