81–90 of 209 posts
I've heard something similar before: "Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization." -- http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
Amazing story. Please post it?
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"If you have a decent reputation there will always be somebody practically begging for you to take their money to do some work for them." That's not the same as being able to make money working on anything you want to work on. Of course you can make money working for someone else on their boring stuff, that's never been a question. "I have interviewed about 20 programmers and only 1 blew me away. " ...so why was he o…
He wasn't out of a job. He was working at Microsoft and was shopping around. I suppose there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise. All I can say is speak to really good programmers, and by that I mean people that can 1) code 2) not only communicate with people but communicate effectively and lead groups, and 3) understand the bigger picture and how their work fits into it. They can move from attractive job t…
What does that have to do with programming? A lot of programmers find the notion of management extremely distasteful. ;)
"They can move from attractive job to attractive job"
Then I guess they keep ending up in jobs that weren't what they really wanted to do after all!
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Absolutely. I think the meaning of "hacker" is being diluted, I'm seeing people use it interchangeably with "programmer" on this site. When I think of great hackers, guys like Richard Stallman, Justin Frankel, or DHH come to mind. They're most certainly idealistic and only a couple of emails away from getting hired at Google.
Google is large enough it can take on people with almost any expertise. But what if DHH wanted to get a job hacking the Linux kernel? Or Frankel wanted to get re-hired to AOL to work on the stuff they didn't like? And RMS doesn't even program anymore from what I understand. What you're looking at is freedom due to financial independence. If you're financially independent, you don't have to work someplace you don't wa…
We're talking about freedom in hacking abilities here. If you're severely financially strapped then, yes, you're restricted. No one is saying otherwise.
"Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)" Does this not worry anyone? It's bas…
But remember - there's more than just blind hope at work here. These companies are delivering real value to customers, they just don't know how to capture that value. The whole field of finance is based on providing capital to people who deliver real value but do not yet have the means to capture that value. If that weren't a necessary function, we'd have no need for loans - every business would be able to finance itself from retained earnings. People pay back loans all the time, even though they don't have the money on hand at the time the loan is written.
They just have to watch out for what happened with the subprime market. Statistically, this was a really solid bet: a certain proportion of mortgages default in any given year, that proportion is relatively constant, and so by dividing these mortgage pools into tranches, you could get predictable risk & reward streams. The problem was that by securitizing the mortgages, they changed the market. Since banks no longer had to live with the consequences of bad loans, they started writing loans to riskier borrowers, which threw all the statistical models out the window. Graham risks a similar problem if, by letting more marginal startups get funded, he changes the assumptions that let him be reasonably confident that any startup that builds things people want will be able to make money off it.
BTW, this doesn't always end badly. Fractional reserve banking is based on a similar principle - it's statistically very improbable that all of a bank's customers will want their money back at once, and so it's fine to loan out 90% of the money. Or the logic behind retained earnings vs. dividends: if a firm is reinvesting its capital wisely into the business, then it should create just as much shareholder value as if it's been paid out in dividends.
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I'd imagine that if DHH really, truly wanted to work on the Linux kernel, he'd have no trouble getting hired to do so. Or if Frankel really wanted to work at AOL. The objection to hiring them is that given their past programming projects, it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that. Nobody wants to hire someone who doesn't want to do the job that has to be done.
"I'd imagine that if DHH really, truly wanted to work on the Linux kernel, he'd have no trouble getting hired to do so." That's pretty silly. Just because someone is famous for a Ruby project doesn't mean they'd know they first thing about low-level kernel code. "it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that" I'm not talking about working on something they DON'T want to work on. Obviously! I'm talking about…
My last job had two main projects - a Netbeans plugin and a JSF webapp. I had no JSF and no Netbeans experience, though I'd done Java Swing development before and written several PHP or Perl webapps. My coworker on the JSF project was a former COM and .NET developer who didn't know Java.
Peter Drucker said much the same thing: profit is the cost of doing business, not the purpose . The true purpose of a business is to provide goods & services to its customers. The "profit motive" is essentially a check on the resources consumed by the business, to ensure that it's not spending resources inefficiently, much as PG mentions in the 2nd footnote. Up until the 1970s, it was common for corporations to be ma…
Recommendations for good Drucker books, particularly those with appeal for the Startup and/or Hacker mentality?
(To be honest, all the business books I read kinda run together in my head, and I'm lucky if I can even remember who said what, let alone where they said it.)
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He wasn't out of a job. He was working at Microsoft and was shopping around. I suppose there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise. All I can say is speak to really good programmers, and by that I mean people that can 1) code 2) not only communicate with people but communicate effectively and lead groups, and 3) understand the bigger picture and how their work fits into it. They can move from attractive job t…
"and lead groups" What does that have to do with programming? A lot of programmers find the notion of management extremely distasteful. ;) "They can move from attractive job to attractive job" Then I guess they keep ending up in jobs that weren't what they really wanted to do after all!
These people usually like to make excuses, and refer to the Dilbert PHB effect as the root cause of the problem. That's a very cynical way to view the workplace. Although, Dilbert is quite funny I'll give it that. The Dilbert-style programmer is going the way of the do-do. It used to be that a programmer could be an asshole of a person and have no communication skills, because so few people understood computers. The market simply had to put up with these people. Circumstances have changed. There are people with great personalities that have compelling leadership traits that know how to program these days and they are finding the best jobs and exerting the greatest influence on the industry.
On another note, what makes you think that jobs are static experiences? Working at Google in 2001 would be far different from working there today in 2008. Good people move on from jobs because they out-grow them, the same way people move on from friendships but might never have had a falling out with the other people in those relationships.
Cheers, we'll just agree to disagree!
I have no idea how Digi-Key is interacting with Octopart, but I have been buying parts from them for a long time and have nothing but good things to say about them. I like the company so much that I called to see if they were public so that I could buy stock; they're not. Although Octopart and its investors may be frustrated, it does Digi-Key a disservice to characterize it as "evil", not "good" or a company that isn…
It seems to me there is more to being good than having good customer service, which is the only evidence you mention here.
Even if I had no evidence, my default assumption would be that they were good until confronted with significant evidence that they were evil. And between good and evil there's a nice-sized neutral middle area which it appears you have transited in one fell swoop based on your sole piece of evidence.
I'm not sure what other evidence of goodness you seek than customers' experiences with them. I have found their prices competitive - as another poster said - lower on some items and higher on others. They have treated me fairly. I don't believe that they are engaged in any immoral enterprises. I agree it would be nice if they cooperated with Octopart but to say that makes them evil is absurdly hyperbolic.
I can immediately think of some (non-evil) reasons for Digi-Key to prefer not to have Octopart include its pricing. It has invested in a web site which provides an excellent user experience and they would prefer not to make it easier for customers to use Digi-Key's web site as a reference manual for lower cost competitors (whether or not you believe this is inevitable). They would like to avoid doing business with customers who are concerned solely about price. They would like customers to purchase their higher-margin items based on past experience purchasing lower-margin items even though the higher-margin items might be cheaper elsewhere.
"Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)" Does this not worry anyone? It's bas…