201–210 of 213 posts
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When it worked, it was great. When it was down or slow (Friday at 4:15 PM, anyone?), it was miserable.
Hey wait, doesn't everybody at Google stay till 10:00 PM on Friday??!
I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?
This isn't just Dropbox deciding to hire Guido, it's Guido deciding to work for Dropbox and, perhaps most interestingly, deciding NOT to work for Google anymore. Surely a company the size (and type) of Google could come up with some pretty amazing projects for an engineer like Guido to work on if he got bored but, for some reason, Guido left. The reason could be something as boring as a big raise or a shorter commute…
I'm sure it depends on where you're working, but there seems to be a lot of that Marissa Mayer "excellence means putting other people down" attitude. And because of that, there is a lot of mediocre talent at Google despite its reputation.
I have no idea whether any of this has to do with Guido's decision, a lot of engineers like to change jobs for all sorts of reasons, sometimes for the sake of it, but I'd probably prefer Dropbox to Google as well.
" the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting " What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?
I've always liked Steve Blank's definition: "A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." I would say Dropbox has found a repeatable and scalable business model.
IMHO, Python would have been in a far better place if Guido and his team would have been getting paid to maintain and evolve Python, the language, rather than apps and platforms based on Python. I think in the early days at Google he was able to do so, later, appengine took most of his time.
Dropbox is still a startup - despite the substantial investments rounds - since it is still relying on external money (investments) to grow.
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You wrote 513 characters about a subject you don't know anything about. Why is that ? You didn't use dropbox, you don't know how it works (hint, what made it so popular is the desktop client that syncs your data in the first place. And it's written with wxpython.), but you felt compelled to write 513 chars about your ignorance and wild speculation ("Maybe in their earlier days blabla"). Then comparing apples to orang…
I'm sorry if I annoyed you, but there's really no need to be rude. It's a subject I never claimed to know a lot about, but it's also false to say that I don't know "anything" about it. I'm here to learn more, not to show off what I already know. If you were actually here to contribute, you might give a concrete example of why Python is more cross-platform compatible than other interpreted languages (because someone b…
" the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting " What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?
On my more cynical days my observed definition from context clues would be: "A company that isn't profitable, but isn't as unhappy about it as I would be yet." [edit: Worth clarifying that I doubt Dropbox probably ever qualified under my definition... but that's fine. Who wants to be a startup? I'd rather start a company.]
Now I AM going to get cynical by saying it's in the VCs' interest for this to happen, because they can swoop in and grab the few that do turn out to be profitable. The HN dream is a bit like Hollywood - most of the hopefuls who chase the HN dream are going to end up eating ramen through three or four pivots, before they realise quite how bad the odds are against them. Sorry for such a black thought at the start of the week!
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Meaning Apple is a startup?
No. A growing company is not necessarily a company designed for growth. Startups are rarely profitable since a company designed for growth reinvests its revenue back into the company to create future growth (think a "ramen profitable" startup vs a "lifestyle business"). Large profits mean the company has run out of investment opportunities.
Apple is designed for growth since their inception (when they were still a startup, by anyone's definition of startup) and that haven't changed much ever since (except, perhaps, on the Scully phase... and probably now, under Cook): they kept iterating fast on new products, predating their own margins with internal competition and all those other small things companies designed for growth do...
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When I was there, everyone I knew used it and sang its praises. But it is a large company with a lot of teams. I am sure there were people somewhere who thought it was awful.
I use Rietveld (not in Google) and I'm not particularly impress. It makes the job, but I don't think is a GREAT tool. After all, there are not many ways you can do a code review... I'd love something that will be more integrated with source control (git in particular), maybe I'm asking too much...