krishnakv

The first I heard about jet.com was through this hanselminutes podcast - http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-....

Their tech stack looks interesting and despite the anecdotes from this thread and the fact that I haven't ordered anything from them yet (I am outside the U.S), I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Amazon monopoly needs some competition and better it come from a company that's innovating with a better tech stack. I am confused about why they decided to get off a membership model, though...

In this case, the article is clearly a piece that's advocating coffee drinking. When research crosses over from "setting up and experiment and proving/ disproving a hypothesis" to "advocating something as good or not good in general", its important to look at the source of funding and apply a heavy discount on the validity of the research if its advocating "for the money".

This is not research "related" to coffee, so your hypothesis is not valid in this instance.

> Proportions seem about the same to me.

Are you sure the proportion was the same? Reason I am asking is because for people who are bad at programming, there are various process/ management roles available that might better suit.

It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.

Beyond the 30's, I imagine people would be passionate about it to continue taking up programming roles. And this passion should translate into excellence.

Happy to be corrected if you have any data-points.

Some really good advice here, zedshaw, thank you!

One thing I might add is, develop a pipeline for writing (1) don't judge your first draft, (2) schedule time to review each draft and edit ruthlessly, (3) edit once more before publishing.

The most important way I have improved my writing is to give myself permission to just write when working on the first draft. Write without any judgement and trust that the subsequent steps in my workflow will catch any issues and produce polished writing.

Edit: A book recommendation "Weinberg on Writing, the fieldstone method" by Gerald Weinberg. Excellent advice from his experience writing several books as a consultant and technology writer.

I think the reason may be less nefarious. This election is a case study of how much reality can diverge from expectations. And how people can hold on to these expectations till the very last moment, even though data says otherwise.

For this reason, its a very interesting election to study and analyze from a technology perspective. E.g. has the internet really succeeded in disseminating data and viewpoints effectively, or has it made our "bubble walls" more rigid. What is the role of fact checking and factual reporting when it comes to the media, has technology made getting to the truth easier or harder?

Very interesting for the hackers on this site...

Also, in discussing this election, its unavoidable that Romney is painted in a bad light. He lost after a spirited campaign that was alas never as close as he and his team portrayed it to be.

I am not convinced this is important.

Look at the scale, against a base number of 12M+ facebook likes, losing hundreds is a rounding error. The OP seems to be getting the slant on his graph by manipulating it in rather grotesque ways.

P.S. Yes, people seem to be dissociating themselves from the Romney loss (and the man himself) in alarming numbers, none more so than within his party. But this does not seem to be a valid measure.

@Jacques, the people who host blogs on your network are lucky :-). I wish more businesses emulate the good example you are setting by thinking about your "customers" success...

Signed up!

Most programmers start-up something around the SAAS space, just because its within their field of expertise and I can see how a hybrid product + online app is a size-able competitive advantage. Its also a creative challenge. Looking forward to your book and discussion group to illuminate the product business side and how it fits in with software...

The page looks good overall, to the point. Some pics, maybe of the product itself or you with some customers and their pets would be a great idea. Looking forward to your updates.

Just one issue with that. If Microsoft is storing the hash, how does it know what the original password was and whether it was greater than 16 chars? If the algorithm is as above, then I just have to enter a password greater than 16 chars against ANYONE's username to be prompted for a password change and compromise their account.

So do I hear a +1 for good social security? Looks like a very clear line from having social security and a safety net to leading in science, tech and inventions/ start-ups, which is growth, i.e. the lifeblood of any economy.

@srean, I support your post as a balanced view.

What the author has written cannot be the median view, given its paints India as full of hucksters, crooks and people struggling by the roadside with unwashed shit on their clothes. Though the author tries to give opposite instances, he has put most of his effort and emotion into painting a bad picture. If this is the median, whats the bad side :-)?

The original article is not factual (no one is allowed on the tarmac in any airport, its a security risk, and India has known terrorism long before it became a word in the U.S), but my sympathies are with the emotion behind the article. Visiting India can be genuinely overwhelming and the cognitive dissonance can drive someone crazy without some level of apathy towards people still living penniless on the street.

My suggestion to the author, try to see if there is someway he can help, either with his skills or money. And no, "thinking up ways I can help", is not the same. Charity is alive and well in India and though life is too hectic here to help in kind (by volunteering etc), most people help with money, facilities and simple deeds like giving business to people who want to make a living e.g. there are mega malls and big stores in most metros, but many people I know make it a point to give business to the street-side hawkers, small businesses and vendors on a daily basis so that their work is supported.

Now that you have had the time to vent, lets get stuck into actually doing something.

cue the theme music for "Burn Notice" ... :-)

Its cool if the manager means it when he says - take this ninja and take pictures and do fun things and MEANS it

Its NOT cool if the manager gives you this stuffed toy because someone else told him it would be a good idea and its the new corporate direction

In short, the gesture is meaningless irrespective of who it comes from unless the person means it and its in keeping with his/ her character. i.e. not FAKED or FORCED

The line between cool and douche is driven largely by intentions (being in character v/s being manipulative)

Hope this helps

I think the author addresses this quite effectively in the article starting with:

"I'm sure some people reading this are going to say "But language FrobBub has had NoduleFoos for years cretin!"."

Priceless :-).

I program Go on both emacs and sublime text 2, very good support for both editors.

At that point, I would just drop the person who I dislike the most to the bottom of the bucket. After all, as a manager, I have no choice but to fill that slot, and given every-one has performed well on the job, what other heuristic can I use to select the "bottom 2"?

Or I may drop the person who I can get rid of with the least hassle, maybe the new guy who just joined the team or someone who has taken long leave during this period.

See how it works? Nothing to do with performance, and inevitably its the "A" performers who quit in disgust. And companies wonder why they cannot get talent to stay...

Read the article closely it says "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees". Are you saying the employees were lying or that the interviewee misheard? Its not possible to argue against this point.

Also, what you say about a sufficiently large group never happens. What actually happens is each lower level manager is forced to rank his or her team members along the curve so as to make the process "fair". And inevitably, this gives rise to a large host of harmful behaviors - slacking off on work by people who have low self esteem as they will get ranked low "anyways", grandstanding, people trying to take credit for others work, infighting, corporate politics, people waking up and starting to work hard closer to the appraisal cycle to capitalize on the "recency effect", dysfunctional teams that deliver only because of heroic efforts from a couple of the team members.

Any system can be gamed this one has got gamed out long ago, my experience - I have seen it do nothing but harm in every single case.

The major point the came out for me from the article is how destructing ranking people "against a curve" is.

"Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees"

This was originally popularized by GE and borrowed by dozens of companies as a HR best practice. Now every major corporation tries to rank their employees along a bell curve as 1's, 2's, 3's and 4's and inevitably, they lose the 1's who quit in disgust rather than put up with this.

My hope is at least a few HR decision makers read this article, look at what is happening in their own companies and come up with a better way to motivate and get the best of employees. Quickly before this cancerous policy eats up the best talent in in the organization.

Is it possible that our reaction to techies and what they can do comes entirely from within?

i.e. the geeks are not really doing anything to intimidate the rest of us, they are just going about their daily lives. Its us who are assigning special labels to them, assigning special meaning to what they say ("oh he just mentioned his stackoverflow reputation, big showoff" :-) )and getting intimidated.

Also, I see this in all walks of life. Chess players have ELO rating scores, cyclists and runners talk about miles per week, programmers talk about their stakoverflow score, SEO consultants talk about their # of twitter followers etc.

If you want to be really intimidated by child prodigies, look at other fields like mathematics (Terrence Tao?), chess (Bobby Fischer). Truly awe-inspiring (and dare I say, God given) talent from a very young age.

We have it OK here in IT. Probably time to work on ourselves to be satisfied and compare less :-).

+1 on "root cause" being the field rather than "person to blame".

"person to blame" pre-supposes that the root cause is a person, which is not true in most cases. While programmers do introduce bugs due to oversight, I have seen that systemic issues (build environment doesn't allow for tests to be written, missing patches in legacy architecture, bad staffing decisions etc...) introduce a large percentage of defects, especially in larger projects.

If your manager is really interested in reducing defect injection, you will want to champion root cause analysis (read up on it - Karl Wiegers and others have some some great work on this).

"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." - Nothing from the article suggests this is an edge case. Instead the author seems to perpetuate a very dangerous meme "toughen up and work insane hours if you want to get anywhere in the startup scene".

This meme is dangerous not just because of the effect it has on people who don't subscribe to this, but also because it is just plain wrong. People who work longer hours are not more productive and they do not get more done. Its a simple case of measuring input (hours spent) instead of output (quality code, decisions whatever...), because measuring what matters is not very straight-forward.

I know the statement above doesn't have backing data, just my experience/ observations, but have you seen anything to contradict this statement?

IMHO, its not fair to compare Go libraries (at this stage) with the more mature implementation of libraries in C++ and Java. That will come with adoption, but even at this early stage, the set of libraries that come with go offer a lot of power.

Agreed Java came out of the gates with a good (??) desktop programming library. Google Go's library on the other hand is very web oriented with the building blocks of http, templating, json all woven in - maybe its a better approach to take, seeing how desktop programming is fast disintegrating into a proprietary, incompatible mess with bottle windows (metro) and apple (ios) locking up their environments.

I agree heartily with the zen metaphor, when programming in Go, I find the language recedes to the background and allows me to focus on the task at hand. That's the hallmark of a great language design.

The very very very fast compilation times (you have to experience this to believe it), helps a lot. Gives it the fast turnaround of a scripting language without any loss of power/ expressiveness.

I second this. In addition, +1 for Eric Sink.

Also check out "The Knack" by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham.

In the end, though, no book can prepare you for starting up,

  I believe strongly in a set of "semi-religious" axioms (from advaita vedanta) that keeps me functional, productive and happy. I strive to be a good son, colleague, friend, etc but within the boundaries of this framework, it makes me happy and I believe it keeps the people I come on contact with happy and well too.

This essay leads to a question, though:

1. Would you rather have a world view that is as close to the truth as possible and live a life of angst and striving? (to change the various inequalities and other issues with the world).

(or)

2. Would you believe the appropriate "lies" (as per your "belief system") and live life happily?

3. How would the world change as a result of your choice? Its a cyclic dependancy here.

I don't find this essay controversial, just insightful. I can see there are places where you are exaggerated for effect etc, but overall, the essay rings true. Am I missing something :-)?