411–420 of 506 posts
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But it isn't in your creditor's interest that you go bankrupt either.
This. Being able to get debt should, in general, be a good indicator that your company might actually be valuable.
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I wouldn't dream of speaking for Patrick but I believe it's something along the lines of: unreasonable deadlines, non-existent documentation for existing systems, non-existent QA processes, unavailable/non-existent support staff, undocumented/unclear requirements, etc.
It sounds like the person that tolerates bad management well, wont try to change things so that they are better managed and simultaneously is autonomous enough to manage own responsibilities well. I see how last one is a bit in contradiction against first two. Such people exists, but are indeed rare and hard to recognize.
I would add: some organizations make fistfuls of cash and don't have much in the way of a technology team. Others pump billions of dollars through Excel macros. Not every company has a great IT team following all the latest buzzwords.
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I went to a polytechnic university (i.e. one with a "learn by doing" focus). Our engineering students definitely had to have some programming classes, but they were taught separately from the CS ones. Most engineering students considered them an annoying roadblock in the way of getting back to their "real" work, and I (a CS student) spent a fair amount of time tutoring friends. I'll have to ask some of them if they u…
>A grad student who wasn't a decent programmer was either a cheater in undergrad, or didn't come from our school. This particular student came from a different engineering background. Yet, he still got admitted into a top 5 CS program. And whether he did CS or not in his undergrad is beside the point. I think this is a task any engineering grad should be able to do. If not, the university should not be listing progra…
I hope you helped out as good as you could to bridge the gap and maybe you were rightfully disappointed if the student hadn't prepared to catch up to undergrad material in spare time.
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I'm canadian so have never taken these tests, but I was under the impression that a large component of scoring well on them is cramming?
Not really. I think of the SAT as a great equalizer since a brilliant kid in rural Nebraska will do well and be able to go to an elite college, while a silver spoon heir will spend thousands and maybe improve their score but certainly not max it out. Not to toot my own horn but I got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT with little prep, and I've tutored others on the same and only managed to eke out a little…
The truth is more nuanced [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these...
If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz. So true, and something that stumped me when I sat at the other side of a hiring table myself. I couldn't figure out why until it was pointed out to me that pe…
People should be allowed to leave the industry for some amount of time without being marked as damaged goods.
In fact, based on how poorly technical interviews have evolved, I have no faith that a hiring manager wouldn't just blindly ignore all candidates with an employment gap on their record after reading posts similar to yours, and that really is a damn shame. It's not a humane practice.
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You might have noticed that I said that I am a software consultant. And the pipeline is pretty good. But it's a different thing than actually having something consistently interesting to do. I don't enjoy entrepreneurship.
Same here, I work independently for a few years now and it just becomes less interesting, and for interesting problems where you'd learn something new (I.e. where you are not good but you know you'd get there quickly) you cannot maintain your rate. I keep wondering if I should take the rate cut for a year or just study mathematics at the local university (which is free here) ...
> Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt. A corollary to this is that if you're fundraising and can get debt, you should take it over equity almost every time. Many founders are skeptical of debt because everyone takes equity, yet ev…
I wonder if debt is "not available" simply because it's not the standard for SV. I would bet that companies like Slack, Stripe, Stitchfix, etc could have raised considerable amounts of debt instead of raising money through their last rounds. It's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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> Parent showed them a generalist skill set and they saw a lack of professionalism. Yeah, thats part of the pattern. Generalists often do not appear as professional as specialists (which does not mean that everybody who looks unprofessional is a generalist).
Right. And believe me, I'm not the pinnacle of professionalism, but I have core values of respect and a motivation to do work that people find valuable. Last time I checked they are pretty well intact. I believe this person mistook specialism and accolades for professionalism.
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I think you framed your anecdotal evidence as supporting the OP's statement, but also that you misunderstood such statement; and you actually present evidence against it. If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions, _and_ you're a generalist as you claim, then you would find it _easy_ to get a job.
> If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions, _and_ you're a generalist as you claim, then you would find it _easy_ to get a job. It's incredibly hard to get a job. But your versatility will ensure job security for as long as you care once you're in the door, thanks to your ability to get into the critical path of different department's operations. I'm a competent, high performing generalist who…
Practice-wise, it astounds me how many people/institutions expect different results from everyone else while hewing to the same practices as everyone else. Why do you think you'll be the exception? Why can't you look at the reality of what is working and what isn't?
This applies to so many areas of life, but it is extremely pronounced in business, where everyone cargo cults every little practice of AmaGooFaceSoft and believes that is what made them who they are. It's like there's an extreme deficit of original thought.
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You're making the mistake of assuming open source means "something you that's not your job." This is false. Most open source development is paid work . Many people "get into open source" by accepting a regular day job. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-devel...
I've done open source work for 10 years. I'm pretty sure I know what open source means. You can have a look at GitHub; there are 25 million active repos on there; at least 99% of them are not sponsored by any company and nobody gets paid to work on them. People like the OP and yourself are spreading distorted ideas which harm open source and the software ecosystem as a whole. Putting open source projects on the same…
I have worked on many open source projects that would appear to be entirely the work of individuals, when they are in fact working on company time.