warcher

You don't have to catch them all, just enough to make some examples. If you're not doing some kind of greyball uber shenanigans, one semi-competent police officer can close the circle on somebody pretty easily.

I mean, they cut a deal with Japan that legalizes Airbnb rentals and allows for local regulation-- why not Canada?

Not that there isn't a whole industry revolving around bleeding you white, keeping you chained to the oars by debt until you're no longer useful. Those issues are orthogonal.... I think.

More and more I find myself reasoning about competitive advantage and stuff like that-- whenever I put up with something really unpleasant, I think "Hey, how many of my competitors did I just shake off?"

If everybody got funded, I think the market would just devalue ownership of a company, since, with the barriers to entry knocked down, it wouldn't mean as much. Think about the erosion of the market value on a college education over the years.

Untrue. Also untrue that you need funding-- you can replace funding with a brutal workload and a lot of patience. I did it, ask me how, haha.

I mean, don't get me wrong, you are gonna sign up to be broke. For a while. A lot of people have kinda boxed themselves in with a very comfortable middle-to-upper-middle class lifestyle that closes a lot of doors via their household burn rate. That's not the system being out to get you, that's a perfectly valid life choice that you and you alone are responsible for.

As somebody who's founded a couple companies, there just aren't enough people with the appetite for risk and drive needed to manage a controlling interest in a company.

And on an economic level, if the net compensation level, including crushing levels of stress and overwork, was so bad between founders and employees, you'd see a lot more founders until the system balanced itself out. And you do not. Most real good engineers just want a fat paycheck and a clear delineation of responsibility. Trust me, a senior valley level salary and not riding that ride is a good gig.

That said, the side of the bread with the butter on it is pretty clear. The reasons for that are less clear until you've done it, but nobody's standing in your way-- you want to be the daddy/get really rich, found a company.

It's a lot easier to get the money out of your investors than to beat it out of your competitors, haha.

Hedge funds are all the same at the end of the day.

Is there evidence of fund returns non-correlated to the public markets? Big IPOs in down markets? I see a lot of dot-bomb kinds of things, and the latest IPOs have been taking full advantage of the froth in the public markets. It's hard to imagine Snapchat making a go of it without the current stock pricing being so lenient.

Man, I loved working construction. Admittedly, I was young and strong, and my body could handle the workload. That stuff will flat out use you up over decades of strain.

But working outside, with my hands, making something tangible I could see at the end of the day? Fuck yeah man. It was deeply satisfying.

Unfortunately, I had the aptitude and training to do more demanding, less fun, arguably more important work, so no more ladders and hammers for me.

In fairness, the article is about executives, not employees, but everything you said is right.

One of the biggest and hardest jobs a startup exec/founder/whatever has is having a steady hand in the face of serious fucking freakouts.

It's a natural tendency to blame juniors for shit being all fucked up, even though a) shit being fucked up is your natural state of existence and b) shit being fucked up is all your fault. You fucked shit up.

My cofounder and I have talked each other down from the ledge many times. I'm maybe less patient with junior cats naturally than I should be, but I know my tendencies towards Jobsian ass-chewing and I am mostly successful in suppressing my bloodlust when things go wrong and I have to fix them.

Man if you learn one new technology a decade you're ahead of Alan Kay. I don't need to hear any more stories about PARC or Smalltalk. They were both wonderful, I am certain. We thank you for your service. Enjoy that Turing award, you earned it.

Silicon Valley is getting real weird, man.

Sure you can. I mean, no offense, but there are a lot of people who will sell you a display ad that gets in front of whoever you want. And lord knows there is nothing stopping you from doing cold outreach.

I think what a lot of people want is inbound warm leads for free, without actually reaching out to do sales.

And no, that's not gonna happen. That ship has sailed long ago. You could go viral, that's still a thing. Viral content has never been able to spread farther and faster, although it's pretty damned competitive these days.

Mine. I don't advertise through google and our SEO isn't anything special. Est 2010, thanks kindly.

Jesus, yes, how did I have to scroll down this far before I read "ATT was a government monopoly"?

Google doesn't have a monopoly on anything. They have the best search engine, but I can switch in seconds. Likewise the rest of their products all have very well established and really quite functional competitors. That I don't use, cause I like the big G, but I could if they annoyed me too much.

Perhaps you'd be happier with a fully featured keyboard, no computer required? They make some great stuff these days, and it all feeds back into the computer pretty easily if you come up with a riff or loop you like, and want to put it into a proper DAW for polish. Just flip a switch and you're rolling.

A startup theme that I'm seeing more and more often is domestic outsourcing, where the executive/biz-side team is in SF and the engineering team is someplace more economical, but still in the states. A tougher lift for sure, but you could potentially get the best of both worlds-- SF connections and cheaper labor elsewhere.

If you have to whiteboard code, I would strongly advise practicing. It's pretty loosely related to your day to day workflow, but some places are committed to it. You can get burned with a false negative just because you're not familiar with the paradigm.

It's like the SAT. You can't study but you can absolutely practice, and practice will improve your score.

But if you gotta spend time doing anything job hunting, spend time talking to people in your network.

That quote is gold and I am absolutely going to steal it.

Ugh. From your lips to god's ears.

Don't get me wrong, the inter-application intent stuff is really cool and good, but sometimes, guys, it's all in-app stuff. I need to tightly couple these objects. I need to pass actual non-serializable objects amongst activities within my app. I'm sorry, I just do. Marshalling and de-marshalling data out to a bundle or the database isn't going to cut it.

I think this may have been intended as sarcasm, but yeah man. I do C development for my real high performance mobile development. Everybody does. If you saw an app and wondered "Oh wow, that was cool, how did they do that?!", more often than not, somebody wrote some nasty old C/++.

You talking about the pseudo-restful activity/intent design? Cause I'm not gonna defend that, haha. It's a neat idea that simplifies corner cases at the expense of making a lot of common cases very counterintuitive. If the article was bitching about that, I'd take it a lot more seriously.

I dunno, I have a soft spot for Java. Yes, the verbosity can be annoying, but compare that to the scavenger hunt that modern web languages put you on when you're trying to figure out exactly who is doing exactly what.

C/Java interop is pretty painful still, and the tooling for native debugging in android studio is notoriously unreliable. (I hear it's better now, but I haven't had to get into those libs recently, so I can't say definitively. Last go round I had to roll Eclipse to debug ndk libs. Yeah. Eclipse.)

Well, the data comes from a substantial investment, which much be returned, or the business will be a failure. This is not a public service-- if you did some cool shit, but ultimately the bottom line is turning a dollar invested into fifty cents returned, you have explicitly and decisively failed in your work.

Man, I knew this was a troll when I clicked the link. I'll briefly vent my spleen and get on with a substantive comment.

I get real tired of web soft boys coming into native and complaining about how complicated it is on the metal. This stuff is hard cause you're not just churning html. It's harder work than writing a web page. Sorry.

Specifically, mobile is resource constrained in a way that server-side work just isn't. Your render thread is a hot thread, and you better not jam it up. That one singular concept is the underlying cause of so, so much of the obfuscation and confusion associated with mobile development.

But that's the gig.

No, switching to javascript won't fix it. Switching to javascript will actually make it much worse, as the kinds of industrial grade tools available to make concurrency manageable (though prone to removing fingers from script kiddies or the unwary), to manage memory, to deal with a database directly, to deal with bluetooth devices, on and on are wholly unavailable, or worse still, are abstraction libraries that require you to fluently deal with both your javascript interface and some really deep native interop libraries, lest you be entrapped in cut-and-paste script kiddiehood.

I could go on at length about the myriad pitfalls and difficulties associated with mobile development, but the simple fact is that doing something cool is hard work.

The problem as I see it is the difficulty in posing a problem that's interview-sized and still relevant to their actual workflow. I don't know how much whiteboard algorithm time you spend during your day to day, but for me it's vanishingly small.

What is relevant in my day to day is dumb shit like "What do you name things?" "How do you control access to classes internals?" "How do you construct an API?" "How do you communicate your designs to people living outside your head?"

Virtually none of which you can get done on a whiteboard with a problem set that you can define in five minutes or so.

Some people have done sorta ok with this as a fallback position when their business model failed. I think it's a pretty dicey proposition. Foursquare did it after failing at everything else, and while they're ostensibly 'profitable' they're deeply in the red with little hope of a return to their investors. They're surviving to fight another day, but... eh.

Always hiring for my chosen profession: horseman of the apocalypse. Sorry analysts; it was your turn I guess.

The real dangerous issue, as I see it, is good pickers trading on their edge for increased fees, because presumably they're pretty smart and can justify them based on past performance. But if the edge goes away.... you're still stuck with the fees. Caveat emptor.

Dunno. Maybe the wealthy have access to wonderful investments we don't; I certainly wouldn't know.

The essential problem, as I see it, is that the H-1B is being explicitly used to depress wages for US citizens in the vast majority of cases.

The solution (which we'll never see) is just to de-couple the H1-B from a particular employer. Go on the open market, get a job at market rates, but don't play the indentured servitude game they're forcing you into now. That's all.