smokey221

This comment perfectly underscores what's wrong with a certain section of the startup community. It underlines the complete and utter lack of respect towards developers as human beings. People like axiom and the Jason Calacanises of the world have created a toxic environment where employees are being totally dehumanized and treated as resource which must be exploited to their fullest extent rather treated as fellow human. And developers are mocked and called "entitled" for having perfectly reasonable demands as pointed out in this article. 90k was an example of a salary, if you have limited resources sure something like 50-60k a year with no overtime is a reasonable, but then as an employer don't demand or expect they work 60(or even more!) hrs a week for a meagre 40-50k.

"Running your own Apache Server"

What is this the 90s? Considering how many better alternatives that are available on the cloud advising someone new to programming to set up their own server is a waste of time. That energy would be better spent learning something interesting. A better idea would be to write your own simple CMS for your blog. That would be a better exercise and a better demo of your development skills than setting up an Apache server which just shows that that you can follow a long series of tedious steps rather than actual coding.

PHP is not an easy language for someone just learning programming, it has tons of annoying quirks and is hard to debug. Visual Basic is better, I'd also reccommend Ruby. Not only is it a very easy language to learn, it also provides him with decent career prospects.

We need to remember that Ruby on Rails is still a relatively obscure technology in the grand scheme of things. The average CS grad straight out of college does not know RoR. Most of them are looking for jobs with Java, PHP or some other language they learned in school. The demand for Ruby on Rails developers is greater than the supply. I don't think it has anything to do with VC funding.

If Zuckerberg was a more likable guy like Leo Laporte or Kevin Rose I'd feel sympathy for him. The Winklewosses might be tools but Zuckerberg is hardly more sympathetic.

This is a terrible terrible terrible idea. You don't want your users to feel that you are exploiting them. It will just pi$$ them off. Just go with a bunch of well placed ads.

Oh yes, damn learning. That pesky little utterly useless thing. Heck burning for eternity in the fires of the underworld is preferable to having learning "inflicted" upon oneself.

Not at all. The article mentions David Heinemeier Hansson but it completely misunderstands DHH's philosophy, if anything DHH in favor of this kind of approach- working on the side along with a stable job until you are reasonably confidant that your app has traction at which point you can jump onto your app and monetize it. There really is no point in trying to "build a business" when you don't even know your idea is even remotely feasable. The kind of obsessive tunnel vision about "building a business" is a waste of time of the programmer.

I second this. Although it does not have immediate practical payoff as learning something like Javascript or even Java would have. But spend a month of two manipulating memory at the low level and playing around with pointers in C and you'll be a better programmer for it.