I don't know him, so I can only go by what he wrote there. So all I see are two things he cites as accomplishments, yet with that, he is nearly guaranteeing a hit. I don't know of anyone -- writer, filmmaker, etc -- who'd base any sort of track record on just two outings. Hell, even Spielberg had a bomb when he was hot: 1941. Here is Steve Jobs on designer Paul Rand, who Jobs wooed from IBM to have him design the NeX…
That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale. Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names. Bzzzt. Hor…
But... he's a household name for some reason, right? There was some original core non-meta reason he became famous. I suspect the reason had to do with some combination of the following: women find him attractive, men admire him and/or want to be as cool as him, PLUS arguably he's actually a pretty decent actor given the right role/script.
Up until halfway into the third sentence I thought you were still talking about Mike Lee. My bad.
To everyone who thinks he's crazy, a single, solitary counter that is in no way indicative of a trend or a pattern: when it comes time to have someone build our iPhone app, I know who my first e-mail will be. You wanna know why? I know his rate without having to fill out a goddamn "contact me" form and his portfolio signals that he's worth the rate. Now, I have no idea how many hours it would take to build our app, b…
Really? It's that problematic to go talk to someone who'll want to talk to you about your needs and see what works out for both of you? You'd prefer the guy with that vague portfolio and a flat published rate instead? I don't publish my rate (let's just say it's not even half of $1k/hr except in extraordinary circumstances, like most developers I know consulting on non-specialized stuff), but I am at no shortage of c…
I don't publish my rate (let's just say it's not even half of $1k/hr except in extraordinary circumstances, like most developers I know consulting on non-specialized stuff), but I am at no shortage of clients right now. If I could actually slow my flow of emails from interested individuals, businesses, and recruiters for consulting and jobs, I'd be so happy...
This is a signal from the market that you're not charging enough. What if you could get fewer emails and calls, work half as much, and make more money?
I find it more interesting that you're using a blog post to judge the author's quality as a human being.
Writing things on the Internet is part of human behavior. What a person says reveals aspects of who they are. The Internet is not some special place that is exempt from all normal expectations of conduct that otherwise hold in meatspace. Just as simply being part of a business enterprise does not exempt one from being judged as a human based on your behavior. Also note I said "suspect" not "knew for certain" or anyth…
What a person says reveals aspects of who they are.
I'm not involved with Tapulous and therefore I'm not really at liberty to say. Actually I probably should have kept my mouth shut on this thread, because I despise when people do what I just did, but I just could not sit by while that credential got thrown out there as if Tap Tap Revenge was his brainchild or something.
I don't know anyone inside Tapulous personally, so this is pure hearsay. Take it as you will.
What I've heard is Mike thought Tap Tap was too low brow and that by focusing on that app to the exclusion of their other apps at the time (Twitterific and FriendBook) they were betraying his vision for the company.
After he expressed his opinion about this he was asked to leave.
Was that last part necessary? I think it's a bad idea to declare someone not a good human being based on the one blog post you read. (Especially since he wrote a few others about saving endangered species and homeless people.)
You're totally right. I have never met either man in person. I only said I suspected that, based on the personal behavior I've seen expressed in both cases. I've never seen Carmack behave badly. What I read in the Lee post constitutes bad behavior, in my ethical system. YMMV.
What part do you deem unethical? I am conflicted about the ethics of driving high speed sports cars myself :-)
To everyone who thinks he's crazy, a single, solitary counter that is in no way indicative of a trend or a pattern: when it comes time to have someone build our iPhone app, I know who my first e-mail will be. You wanna know why? I know his rate without having to fill out a goddamn "contact me" form and his portfolio signals that he's worth the rate. Now, I have no idea how many hours it would take to build our app, b…
I'm sorry but that makes you bit of a sucker. If his rate was a few hundred I could buy that the added cost was worth the convenience; but at over six times the going rate it isn't really worth it.
Wow, he might be good at programming, but from his writing, he sure seems like a jerk (Zed Shaw's long lost twin?). I've known many professionals who, being very good at what they do, charge both less and more than $1k/hour, but none of them would ever mention their rate in public, much less feel the need to explain why they deserve it. On the other hand, this is great PR for software engineers: a couple more posts l…
I really don't get why it's generally assumed that Zed is an asshole. I exchanged a few technical emails with him when he was just getting started on Mongrel (v1) and his replies were always friendly (as well as being relevant). He's put a lot of code out there and the parts that I have used have been great. Remember when Bear Stearns fell? He was leading some Rails project there at the time (IIRC) and he used his ha…
Because most of us don't know him and his online persona is pure asshole. It's that simple. I've read that he's a nice guy in person all over the place and that's great, good for him. He writes like a spoiled, attention-grabbing 15 year old, and he's very insulting and arrogant. Then we have to read about it on news.yc and reddit for a week after every rant. I mean look at this thread, one mention of the guy and all of us are talking about him instead of the topic at hand. Someone described him as poison and I agree 100% with that assessment.
To be fair, there's a long history of self-aggrandizing blog posts with which to judge him by.
That still seems like an curious criterion with which to judge someone's humanity. Gary Vaynerchuk, DHH, Zed Shaw, and a lot of the people admired by many HNers are very self-aggrandizing. Sidenote: It seems that people like this have to deal with a trough on their way up where a lot of judgment gets thrown their way for their outgoing manner. If they hit it big, though, that seems to be quickly forgotten and everyon…
Zed, for example, is very much like that. In the other hand he produces lots if great code and ideas. That is why he earned respect.