ruraltechnocrat

Love it. I live in Missoula and would love the idea of a space like that in western montana.

What does the butte community need? Commercial kitchen space is at a very high premium here in Missoula, might a commercial kitchen help start/accelerrate a foodtruck scene in Butte? The building could be thought more of as a maker-space instead of a hacker-space, so encouraging other forms of creativity (writing, cooking, etc.) which might draw in more folks.

Rooting for you guys!

Hiring is very difficult. I think looking at a prospective hire with the same lens you'd use to review them is helpful.

So you're trying to understand how this perform as:

1. Employee - are they capable (motivation + skill) of doing a good job across the dimensions of quality and speed?

2. Owner - are they the kind of person who can display ownership of an area? This can be demonstrated by outside activities/projects they worked on, or ways they made their former work environment better/more efficient

3. Teammate - are they going to be a good teammate, a nice person, and collaborate well with others?

If you see red flags in any of these areas, probably not a good hire. If you see excellence in these, probably a great hire.

I can echo your experiences. I did manage to find a project management gig on oDesk, but after that have applied to many with no luck. The barrier to entry is too low, by allowing jobs that are $50 or even $500 for what amounts to a lot of work, everybody is usually driving towards the bottom dollar, versus having real companies/people looking for serious work.

I've also heard from the person that did hire me that they had been burned several times by developers that would give them poorly-built products, but because they weren't familiar with the details of how it was built, only found out weeks/months later when things started to break down.

The problem with Microsoft hasn't been that they've never been able to inspire excitement with a product (remember currier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier, or Kinect) but rather their execution on those products.

Only half of Apple's genius is their design, the other half is their incredible execution machine, in large part thanks to the work that Tim Cook did. Microsoft used to have an incredible execution machine, with mediocre design. Now they are struggling with both.

Microsoft has gotten a lot better in design, particularly in the hardware space, but the questions is:

Does Microsoft have the needed DNA to align their incredible resources/brain power around a small set of products that will really make a difference for them?

Despite hololens and the surface products, this remains very unproven for me.