Being profitable allows you degrees of freedom you don’t have when you rely upon other people’s money.
Suster inhabits a completely different universe than the one bootstrapped, profitable businesses do. The reality is very much the opposite. Being constrained by cashflow while watching new semi-competitors burning through OPM freely is absolutely maddening, particularly for technical development.
Yeah, I was wondering what the hell the OP was referring to when it was claimed that web frameworks are stuck in the 90s. We use wicket both for our customer-facing sites, and most of our various departmental administration sites. It's a great, modern, component-oriented framework that doesn't have any XML hell.
My default reaction to HN hipster kiddos eschewing Java for web development based on hearsay/generational bias/fashion is to roll my eyes and simply not post, but in this case I'm glad to see there's at least someone else on this site that experiences the virtues of Wicket.
The mythical high paying jobs are in the "private sector."
Well, no. In my local market, $120k is very, very well paid for a typical developer at a typical company. The > $120k salaries you see mentioned on HN are an artifact of two types of companies:
1. Venture-backed startups who don't particularly care about cost management.
2. Large, highly profitable software enterprises like GOOG, MSFT, AAPL.
Step outside these two realms, and developer compensation drops very rapidly.
It should be noted that developer evangelist is a position that evangelizes on behalf of the developers, not the company. The role is generally one of ensuring that the non-developer parts of the business remain respectful of the unique needs of programmers, test engineers, and tech project managers.
So unless MSFT handed him a meaningless title, he likely does NOT evangelize for the company, and in fact is likely the strongest voice inside the company against SOPA( e.g. extolling the developers' position to the SOPA supporters in the piracy-prevention-related divisions, etc ).
it's nice to be reminded that there's a world outside SV/London where people can actually get started (and funded).
It's also nice to bear in mind that there's a world outside SV/NYC/London where people can get started and succeed without playing the "getting funded" game at all.
We developers are getting evermore control and power on the internet
No, we're getting far less control and power, compared to the free-for-all of the Internet's early days. SOPA is just one example of longstanding power structures extending their control over engineering domains.
In the real world, the people with the guns win. Sometimes it takes time for them to realize the importance of new technologies, but eventually they win. Always.
Well, you'd be wrong. Speaking from personal experience, nobody cares about bootstrapped businesses. There is no glory, admiration, or external social validation of any kind to be had by bootstrapping a business. The money, the challenge, and the freedom of control makes the obscurity worthwhile, though.
A spouse, a mortgage, children, student loans -- life quickly throws you all kinds of things that you don't have the option of escaping.
Once you've made the choice to get married and have children, yes, you cannot escape your choice. But life does not "throw" these things at you; you choose them. Some people do not make these choices, and therefore remain free of these constraints forever, regardless of age.
but a lot of people similar to Candidate A who can actually code are being presented with questions about linked lists and similar structures no-one who has written code for years would remember, let alone use in their daily work lives.
Your reference to "remembering" is entirely irrelevant. What is relevant here is whether the candidate can reason through the problem - and more power to the candidate if s/he's been out of school for N years. What I strive for with technical questions is not to find out how well the candidate remembers their Knuth( although finding someone who actually read Knuth is nice ) - it is to determine how well they think through problems. And with no offense intended, if you can't at the very least come up with some ~3N complexity stupid-but-it-works stack-based solution to the problem of reversing a linked list, you probably shouldn't be a professional developer.
I'm not sure why the author of this article somehow thinks that geeks deny the existence of sexism in geek culture. The reality is that it's widely known and accepted. If the author wants to find something to rail against, he should have chosen the fact that everybody knows, but nobody cares.
I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people bring up one of the most important factors in its existence, one which has nothing at all to do with objectification. It has more to do with envy, anger, and an amazing ability to hold a grudge.
Many HN readers are from a younger generation than myself. Many of you grew up always equating geek with "cool", and have no conception of what it would be like to be treated as nearly subhuman for liking computers. Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely rejected, but openly mocked by girls during the most critical time in a young man's life when he is supposed to develop his sense of social status and sexuality. Frustration and humiliation is quick to turn to anger, and from anger, a deep rooted misogyny.
The result of this kind of upbringing is often a socially stunted man who, despite all his powers of logic and reason, finds it difficult to reason away the anger that he knows shouldn't be there, but is. He witnesses sexism and mistreatment of women around him, but he lacks the empathy required to say or do anything about it.
This concludes my armchair psychologist's analysis of one possible dimension of a hypothesis of why many of my generation permits geek culture to allow rampant sexism.
Caveats: I have no data or training in psychology to suggest this is at all a significant factor. But I am quite familiar with the phenomenon, and I know several other nerds who experience the same thing. I mention it only because it seems the zeitgeist is that men don't even see the sexism. I posit that many do see it, but it doesn't matter to (a good portion of) them. And that a possible cause of this in geek culture specifically is latent adolescent anger at women.
I've worked in software for roughly 14 years, and I've worked almost exclusively for startups during this time. I understand the concept of nepotism, so I get your point - I guess my question is not really "how do these people keep their jobs" so much as it is "how do these people even exist?" The notion that a conscious human being could behave in the manner described is unfathomable.
I can't speak to social networks or social media tools, but I can assure you that ecommerce has a lot of difficult problems to solve. To a first approximation, it's easy to throw up a LAMP site and sell random crap. Once you get beyond this and start trying to squeeze out profits by building and executing on various optimization problems, things get significantly more complex. Companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart have invested huge amounts of money into esoteric research to optimize supply chains, fulfillment processes, inventory control, promotional returns, energy usage, expected customer value, etc, etc, ad infinitum.
The product is probably about 90 % done already, the last 10 % should take no more than two weeks
Spoken like a true non-technical cofounder :)
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the the pareto principle applies heavily to software development projects. It's quite likely that the "last 10%" will take much longer than you think.
That said, I've seen this happen quite often from inexperienced developers, and it sounds like you have one on your hands. It's easy for passion and ego to carry a project from a blank slate to a state of mostly-functioning. Hackers usually get a great rush from this stage of the project. It's their code, their architecture, their baby. Sure it's got some rough edges, but the important stuff is done. Their genius has been imbued into it, now comes the drudgery of polishing the edges - oh wait, this sucks. The process of turning something that works into something that's usable or salable is boring. What a letdown. They just solved this intractable problem in O(log n) time, and now you want them to make the interface's corners rounded or add some copy? Bah. They'd rather stare at the wall.
This is a total shot in the dark here, but I've seen it often enough that I'm fairly sure it's the mentality you're dealing with. And I can't say there's an easy solution. It's nearly impossible to motivate hackers who think creating software is all fun, all the time. You either chose a bad cofounder, or just a young one who needs some exposure to real software development projects. either way, I'd recommend a confrontation, followed up by hiring out if things don't change.
The completely honest answer to your question is that I'm not willing to start killing people. Seriously, no troll.
I understand that the popularity contest driven plutocracy we currently operate under will never create a sane government. This is not because voting doesn't "work" - I am not suggesting conspiracy here. But affluent societies don't give a shit. On the whole, so long as you feed, clothe, house, protect, and entertain your electorate, you can do whatever you please, and your power will likely not be challenged. My vote does not, and never will, count, when I am vastly outnumbered by the votes of people so comfortable in their lives that they don't bother with silly things like political introspection.
So, my only alternative is to participate in the only historically viable means of effecting meaningful change: a violent overthrow of the system. I am not willing to do this. That is why I don't "do something".
I'm not calling you a liar, but I'm skeptical about stories like this. I can't even fathom any scenario in which someone more intelligent than a cucumber could behave in this manner. How does this PM manage to get and maintain any job at all, let alone one that requires the ability to understand software development process and constraints?
You've also probably seen thousands of variants on "what ever happened to do no evil?" posted to myriad Google articles over the years, as well. Such is the nature of discussion. Sometimes the same idea in a slightly different context is unique enough to qualify for positive value. Does my comment qualify? I don't know.
I will just note that some of us lived through the dot com bust, and we remember quite clearly what the mentality was like, especially for insiders. For us, the environment today is damn near identical to what it was like then; we just had slower connections and hardware. When we post semi-snarky comments like this, we do it partly as a warning. Profits do matter. At some point, the kids will realize it.
Suster inhabits a completely different universe than the one bootstrapped, profitable businesses do. The reality is very much the opposite. Being constrained by cashflow while watching new semi-competitors burning through OPM freely is absolutely maddening, particularly for technical development.