Are you serious? You can question everything you want as an ordinary citizen. The moment you sign a contract, specially for the military, you agree to keep your word.
So, right, how dare the government hold someone to their word?
You're basically advocating lying and not honoring your promises.
BTW - I basically make a living honoring promises and contracts, otherwise we wouldn't have customers ;)
Bottom line, he's a traitor. Beyond that, most of the laws that helped start this were set into effect years ago. Where were the people crying then?
Most people complain about having their privacy taken away when using free online services. All I see are a bunch of ignorant loud mouths who got angry too late.
Go anywhere outside of the US and Europe and they would laugh at you. Our culture (hispanic) takes it as a sign of weakness and petty complaints. Most people are too worried trying to feed themselves or their families to even think about being depressed. Furthermore, with the little money they have they tend to go to doctors for diseases that directly affect their bodies or ability to earn.
We came across this issue as well, we'd been wasting too much time setting up Postgres. RDS seemed liked a good choice, except that MySQL is just that much worse than Postgres.
We had just used things like concurrent indexes.
We ended up going with Heroku's hosted Postgres solution.
It costs the exact same we were spending w/ two High CPU instances w/ provisioned IOPS volumes.
Now we get fully managed, same price, and all the features of Postgres.
We still host our full application on AWS, the only thing is that we have a managed database. While Postgres makes it easy to setup replication and what not, AWS hardware just sucks. It takes time to properly tune it.
Seems stupid and pretentious. Furthermore, the market is so hot that I can reach whoever is employing directly.
Convincing them to pay more because they don't have to spend anything on recruiters or silly agents.
No reason someone else should make money for me finding a job.
First, an office less world is a dream right now. If you plan to be hyper-competitive, there's no substitution to 'water-cooler' talk. Technology is nowhere near being able to reproduce that.
Second, why would they put the picture of a communist leader who used to shoot defectors and kill artists? Why is he any sort of hero?
Super sweet, good luck. I personally got started in High School and would have loved more advanced classes.
The issue was that they bundled people together into the same computer class. We used to have people who didn't even know how to turn on a computer, much less make a Pascal game.
Absolutely agree, and I personally use this as a potential red flag for new people we hire.
Legacy systems have gone through so many fixes and shifts that it's almost impossible to recreate them without deep understanding of the business demands it meets.
The business part, I would say, is critical to being able to maintain (or re-write) a project.
Thinking about it, I'm sure they can be just as good. Regardless of age. I would guess it's like anything else. Constant exposure and practicing will breed excellence. I would just be scared of all the mistakes they haven't made yet.
It's funny you mention Brian Wong, his company is a competitor of the company i work for. He's a smart guy, from what i can tell, but he would actually be one of the examples i'd use to cite lack of experience.
In software development, lack of experience can be a really big issue. For example, with lack of experience you may choose core piece of technology based on hype. coughmongodb and kiipcough
But, I digress, thanks for the article. Learned a bit about the Canadian start up eco-system.
Not to be mean, but the author looks really young.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I find it really hard to take advice from such young people. My personal take is that they're bypassing a lot of the experience it takes to make a well rounded business person.
I personally feel like a douche trying to give advice to other people, particularly people older than me.
Thank God I've never HAD to do a complete re-write of anything.
What the author describes sounds like a complete nightmare.
On the projects I've worked on, I would like to think that a rewrite will not be needed.
If it does, it will be because we've now understood the problem space so well that we can start from scratch and avoid all the 'pivots' that happened in the original code base.
I'm a 'ghetto' kid. Grew up in LA and El Salvador.
The reason I haven't done a startup is because i simply don't have the monetary support.
I have to pay for my mom and family, pay rent, etc.
We don't have the privilege of a circle of people with money.
Our parents couldn't afford to send us to college, in fact it's better for them that we start working as early as possible.
Our past generations weren't scientists, lawyers, etc. They were immigrants, mostly farm and home workers.
So, we're one of the first generations to even have the opportunity to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.
The author is right, and a lot of people can't relate or even think about those types of problems.
But, the problems he listed are still pretty dear in our hearts and perhaps the next few generations will tackle it.
An average web developer in no way can compare to a lawyer or a doctor.
First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.
How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?
Average web developers are not that special.
However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.
Asking for telecommuting, equity, and time to work on other projects is ridiculous.
I've gotten these requests from developers who have only done basic Rails projects.
Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor?
I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.
The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it.
You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.
Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.
A hero and their army are useless when they're late to the war.
I don't honor traitors, but go ahead and worship him all you want.