This advice works in other scenarios where companies string you along hoping you will give up and disappear.
Once my car was badly damaged by someone who ran a stop sign. It was clearly the other driver's fault. Her insurance was Allstate. They strung me along for more than a month "investigating" this obvious situation.
My car was an older one that was worth about the cost of the repairs, and they probably thought I would just give it up. But it was my only transportation and I needed it for work.
I did some research on California's insurance regulations and discovered their requirement that claims be settled within 40 days. After 40 days passed, I wrote a email similar to the letter examples in this article, giving then five days before I reported them to California's insurance department.
It was astonishing to see the immediate change in their behavior. The adjustor who had been playing telephone tag for weeks called me within an hour and arranged for a body shop near my home to start work immediately.
They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them.
Actually, nobody interviews carpenters. You either:
A. Call the carpenters' union and take whoever they send over.
B. Ask some carpenters you trust if they know any decent carpenters who are looking for work, and when they show up at the job site sober with appropriate tools, you put them to work.
It's a slightly different process than programming.
Q: So, your resume says you've been a systems administrator for 10 years. Have you worked much with Linux?
A: Sure, almost all my experience has been with Linux.
Q: How much experience do you have with Red Hat. That is what we use here.
A: Hmmm. Red Hat. Most of the servers I've worked on are Debian based. But I worked a lot with Fedora in college.
Q: But not Red Hat?
A: Well I have some Red Hat experience. I had a temp job where I was setting up Red Hat servers back in 2008.
Q: How long was that.
A: About six months.
Q: Well, perfect! We have an internship available to someone with six months of Red Hat experience! But wait a minute... What version of Red Hat was that?
I'm definitely not as beautiful as I think. In my mind, I'm still a dashing handsome 25-year old. But the stupid mirror keeps insisting that I'm in my fifties with the wrinkles and sags to prove it.
I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.
I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it, and my three kids turned out fine.
As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do great.
How about the fourth kind of lazyness--not knowing what the hell to do out of the many choices available, so you sit around hoping the right choice will make itself obvious. It can turn into a very long wait.
I interviewed for a job with them (Nintendo of America), and also did some freelance work over the past couple of years, and I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.
They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.
In Japanese, the work "Manma" is a baby-talk word that means food. "Mama" is used for mother sometimes, but I think this is a recent influence from the West. "Haha" is the normal (non-polite) word for mother, although children are taught to use the more polite "o-kaa-san." "Haha" still has those repeated "ah" sounds.
I think it's because they have a dream, and know that if they tried to accomplish that dream in a big corporation, they'd have to sell it to people at multiple levels of bureaucracy whose job description often includes killing dreams. Even if it was accepted, it would no longer be their dream, it would be the corporation's dream, under corporate control and ultimately susceptible to being morphed into something totally unrecognizable or killed at the corporate whim.
Entrepreneurs feel to their bones that their dreams are too great a part of themselves to so totally put under other people's control. And they don't believe anybody but themselves can truly understand their dream or pull it off.
Emotions do sell things. I like to think of myself as a rational person, but it certainly works on me.
For example, when I was living in Japan around 1996, we needed a kerosene heater for our apartment. We went to the big department store, and they had a lot of different ones. Each of them had a sticker affixed describing the various features and advantages, but they were mind-numbingly similar. But one of the stickers had a photo of Mai-chan, the cheerful and engaging child star of a cooking show that we had enjoyed on Japanese TV a couple years earlier.
My wife pointed it out to me, and we ended up getting that heater. Not because it was any better, but because we liked Mai-chan, and her photo was on it. Of course Mai-chan has absolutely nothing to do with heaters, and we knew it. But we didn't care.
We always called it the "Mai-chan" heater, and even though we left it behind when we returned to the states, I guarantee if I mention the Mai-chan heater to my wife today, nearly 20 years later, she'll smile and know exactly what I'm talking about.
The puppy screenshot in the original post has a similar effect on me. A part of me wants to reach out and pat the cute dog on the head. But I can't. But I can click the button, which is what he obviously wants me to do. Sure it's not at all rational. But it motivates people. I suggest keeping the dog and adding it all your advertising. Make it your mascot. You can't go very wrong with a puppy!
In 2001, I was going from one Intel factory to another, teaching Nikon technicians about VMS, which ran on the Alpha stations Nikon was still putting into its steppers (big machines used to make computer chips). They switched over to Windows NT and Linux a few years later, but I'm sure many of those VMS-based steppers are still operating.
I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to changing circumstances.
A couple of examples of my own:
Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.
It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.
In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.
I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.
It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.
I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.
I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.
When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.
So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.
The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.
It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.
In the mid-Seventies, the era the OP was talking about, the only way a kid could access computers was at school, and pretty much only high schools had them available to students.
The computer would typically be one single minicomputer or a timeshare terminal. His school had both (he was lucky). The teacher was the gatekeeper and decided who had access. Back then, there was no way to start programming at 9 or 10.
It took a lot of dedication to learn programming. You'd have to wait in line with a bunch of other students to submit your program on cards or paper tape, run it once, debug and fill out new cards, and repeat the next day. The output would be printed on paper (no video). I wrote a blackjack program, but the teacher wouldn't let me run it because it was too interactive. He wanted us to write batch processing programs that calculated water bills. It was a big reason why I stopped programming and didn't come back for 15 years.
You forgot the fact that riding one makes you look like a total geek, and not in a good way. Al Yankovic's song "White and Nerdy" captures the image perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw
I spent years as a technical translator. When I understood the source documents well, typing speed was the main limitation to how much money I could make in an hour, and so the keyboard I used was very important.
I discovered the key to fantastic typing under those conditions was not the mechanics of the keyboard--it was the layout of the letters.
After working at it full-time for a year or so, I started suffering wrist pain so bad I had to use voice recognition software (which sucked). I switched to the Dvorak layout and by the time I was proficient, the pain had disappeared, and I could type about 10 WPM faster. The pain never came back
It took about six months to remap my brain and muscle memory. Nowadays, it's sometimes a pain if I have to temporarily use another computer and I don't have access to the settings that change the layout. If I see that situation coming, I just bring my own keyboard to work. The only time it became a bigger problem was in a job where IT required a doctor's note before even allowing me to connect another keyboard to the computer or change the setting. I solved that problem by getting another job.
I use a keyboard that can be switched between Dvorak and normal, mainly for the convenience of non-Dvorak users who need to use my computer from time to time (This one: http://www.typematrix.com/), but I find the mechanics or type of keyboard (for example ergonomic or not) fades into insignificance compared to the difference between Dvorak and QWERTY.
Still, a nicely built keyboard can really improve the typing experience. My laptop is a Lenovo, and I love the feel of the keyboard on it.
I don't care what the keycaps say, because I totally touchtype. I bought the cheapest keyboard available for my Raspberry Pi, and the cheap feel is kind of annoying, but the difference between that one and the Lenovo is like between 70% and 90%, despite the quality difference, and most of that is based on having to get used to a different layout of the non-letter keys like delete and control, and not the quality of the mechanism.
I've been coding a lot these days and the work happens much more in the brain and less on the keyboard than in translation. That being the case, I think the appeal of a very high-quality keyboard for programming is probably more a matter of taste than practicality. It's like owning a Ferrari. You will never push it near its limit, but its really fun to drive.
Another consideration: programming makes very heavy use of symbols compared to text writing, and I think a true programmer's keyboard would be one that puts those symbols in easy reach.
So my keyboard recommendations to hackers would be: Find a keyboard with a layout that supports your programming efforts. Next consider what feels good and appeals to your taste. Finally, if you write a lot of text in other contexts besides coding, and if you have some time to suck at typing for six months before getting much better at it, try Dvorak. It will speed up those really long HN posts.