taylonr

>But hearing it come up -- and like this -- during an interview without solicitation just reeks of a toxic environment.

That was my thought. As I was reading this, the voice in my head said "Run! Run for the hills!"

I think that there are a lot fewer people using that feature than you'd assume. Even lots of developer coworkers don't know about that ability, even fewer use it. So I can't imagine there are a lot of non-techie people out there doing [email protected].

Just to nitpick, the article says aggregates have been in SQL for 3 or 4 decades, but SQL wasn't an ANSI standard until 1986 (28 years ago, almost 3 decades.) I get that a language exists before it is standardized, so were aggregates in SQL in the 70s/ early 80s or is this just a hyperbolic statement?

100% this. I spent the first 12 years of my career not writing a single line of production JavaScript or CSS. I did it on the side for my own purposes, but never professionally. Why? I didn't want to. (I still don't really want to, but I like the job I'm at more than I like writing JUST server side code.)

So am I a front end developer? No. Will I be in a week, month, year? No. Why, I DON'T WANT TO BE. Can I use js to manipulate the DOM? Yes. Have I used Backbone.js and Angular and others? Yes. But I will only mention that technology in passing, to show "Hey look, I learn new things"

>I wonder what would happen if students would learn to build simple apps like that in school, instead of Excel?

If there is a school that is teaching people Excel, there is a problem with the school, and I'm not sure having easy frameworks solves that problem.

I think it goes with the territory. In a lot of senses, this guy gave up his personhood and became a corporation. The things we take for granted as individuals he puts before the board.

For example, he was able to convince them that he wanted to date the second girl, but that's not something any of us have likely had to deal with. The one exception being if you're still at home and you try to convince your parents you want to date a specific person.

In that context, the statement was a little chilling, but no more so (to me) than all the other decisions. The entire thing was chilling to me.

It's not that it hasn't been tried before.

I would guess it's similar to Atwood and his new Discourse platform. It looks nice, and developers & designers get excited about it. But one reason forum software hasn't been dramatically overhauled in the last 10-15 years is because it's working for most people.

I've sold plenty of junk on craigslist and I've bought a few things from there as well. I did the same thing with Freecycle and Cheapcycle when we lived in a town that did those. None of those were glamorous. In addition, the people I met there were from all walks of life.

I get why startups think CL is ugly and not useful, but go do a UI overhaul and sit back for the barrage of hate that is going to come from the core users.

I get nervous every time the federal gov't tries to mandate things in school. It always seems like something from either the 50 facts & fallacies of software development and/or the mythical man month. It's as if they realize things are screwed up so they try to slap some tape on the side and hope that fixes it.

Problem for me wasn't so much my manager. He did a good job, as far as he could. It was higher than him. But the last job I left was due to management.

I essentially did this throughout my college career. I don't think it was 5pm, though, more often 7pm. What set me off was getting so frustrated one night doing Calculus at 10pm. I tend to need 8+ hours of sleep per night, so by 10 I wasn't in the best mood for studying.

It got easier once I moved out of the dorms. I'd have most (if not all) of my work done by supper and finish up a little bit after. I studied Saturdays but not Sundays. That left my nights open for things like irc or setting Red Hat up on my machine.

I found I was a lot less stressed than my friends that played N64 all day and STARTED studying at 8pm.

My favorite part was the 3 primary & 3 secondary factors they looked at to identify. So if the people doing this can tweak those factors it will help them out.

So you didn't "accidentally" hire people. You did it with a lack of foresight. To me, that's different.

Saying you accidentally hired people makes it sound softer than it really is. If Raytheon or Boeing hired 2,000 people ahead of a defense contract they were sure they'd get, and didn't that wouldn't be an "accident." That would be poor planning (counting your eggs before they hatch kind of thing.)

Either way, I don't really care either way about Zynga. I don't think I've ever played their games, but at the same time I'm not hoping they fail.

So it's not really an accident. They meant to hire those people, they were just bad at forecasting. To me, those are separate issues.

Aren't points 1-8 commonly referred to as "advertising"?

How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

I could see two people both hiring a janitor without realizing it, but not "accidentally" hiring a lot of developers, designers or whatever else.

That's a fair point. But I think if you look at most non-startup companies that stay around for 3-4 years they don't typically have the valuations that the startups do in the same time.

For example, Joe's Plumbing shuts down after 2 years because Joe realizes he has to manage his books, do advertising, manage any junior plumbers etc. In the end he spends 50% of his time doing plumbing and 50% of his time doing "business." So he pays off his small business loan (maybe) of $100k and goes to work for Tom's Plumbing where at least he gets to do plumbing all the time.

He had a run of 2 years, but at no point was his company sitting on millions of dollars.

Interesting thing is that even if it's the end of the line for Microsoft developing new versions of Windows(and I don't think it is), there is still an entire ecosystem that won't be going anywhere.

I'm working for a client right now writing a few apps (away from Access/Excel type apps) so that they can upgrade to Windows 7 by mid-year 2013. And they're upgrading from XP.

So even if Windows 9 never comes out, I would guess there is plenty of work for Windows developers (for better or worse.)

I did misunderstand. My bad.

I doubt it. In fact, I think of the majority of the people I know if they were to try and download Tweetbot and couldn't, they'll be mad at Tweetbot.

Even if Tweetbot states something like "Twitter has limited the number of clients we can sell" they'll still think Tweetbot is stupid. But most of them won't think "I wonder if there is a way around this." And then head to some warez type solution.

Instead they'll look and see if there is an alternative, or more likely, just stick with Twitter's website.

I just don't buy the "This will drive people to pirated software" argument.

And a lot of today's startup community was watching Sesame Street

I see this as two problems. 1. Too many options. They even mentioned it "Did I log in with Facebook or Google or Twitter or what."

2. Having both social & native logon.

You could actually solve both by either 1. Only using native logon. or 2. Picking one (maybe 2) social logins.

I went with #2. Granted it was on a small test site, but the trade off of managing customer logins sucks. I'd rather have google get busted for getting hacked than for my little SQL DB getting attacked.

The way I look at it, I have time to write code and secure it to the best of my ability. However, Google and other social logins have whole teams that can manage security and keep up to date with the latest technology etc.

So there is more to social logins than the actual act of logging in. And some of the problems listed aren't really with social logins, but rather with a particular implementation.

Funny you mentioned VB6 days, that was the first thing that came up at work when we saw it.

I haven't downloaded it yet, so perhaps I'm missing something. But our thought was that it mimicked the VB6 "Place Code Here" mentality.

Are you tailoring your job application process to each company? If I'm at Amazon see a bunch of Java I might think "Ok, I can find 20 people with these Java skills." Instead of showing Amazon why YOU are indispensable for THEM.

Also, I'm guessing that Google, Twitter, Facebook & Amazon get several applicants a day. So having a contact on the inside might be more helpful.

A somewhat similar story was I tried to work at a consulting company here in town, and got turned down. Two years later I had worked with a couple of their consultants at another job, spoke at a user group meeting (where the leader was another of their consultants). When I left my job for a different one I had 2 people from the agency talk to me about applying with them.

I had already accepted the offer from another place, but in that time I was able to showcase my skills to the point they were at least interested in talking to me. Whereas 2 years prior they weren't.

The lesson? Network, if you're as good as you say you are, do some user group speaking or showcase your code to some people. Hit a couple local/regional conferences and start talking to people. As they get to know you, not only might they hire you, but they might also pitch your name to someone else.

This approach made me think of MFC calls. Instead of having multiple return values you'd have a single return value and multiple out parameters.

It's been years since I've done any MFC work, but calls like:

HWND myWin = GetTopWindowTitle(region, out title, out size, out whateverElse);

Then you'd have to either assume that myWin was not an error code and just use the out parameters, or you'd explicitly check the myWin value each time.

I'm not convinced this is a problem specific to startups. People don't know how to do presentations. I saw it while in school. I had to take a technical writing class that required a presentation at the end. Most engineers suck at presenting.

But I'm also not convinced it's limited to engineers. I've sat in countless presentations that have sucked and a few that have been amazing.

Part of the problem is, presenters rarely ask "What would I want to hear if I was in the audience?" If you answer that question you'll be better than 80-90% of presenters, regardless of if your speech doesn't flow perfectly etc.

For example, when I was 8 or 9 my sister made us chocolate pudding. When it had set, we started eating it. She said "I don't think this tastes right" and washed it out. I was happy to have pudding and ate my whole bowl. Next morning I woke up with 103 degree fever, couldn't stand up straight, etc.

My mom takes me to the doctor who runs some tests. He comes back in the room, looks at me laying on the table and says "Looks like you've got food poisoning. I'll be back in a minute." He leaves and in my mind I picture bottles of bleach, skulls and cross bones, TV dramas where someone had been poisoned etc. My mom can easily detect this. She chases the doctor down and says "I think you need to go back there and explain what food poisoning is."

Doctor comes back explains in simple terms that I'm not going to die, the milk had spoiled etc. I got some medicine and bed-rest for the next 2 days and was fine.

Twenty-six years later and that account is still vivid in my mind, in part because my doctor didn't think "What would an 8 year-old need to hear about food poisoning?"

It's not just about start-up pitches, it's about communication. And we, as an industry, suck at it.

I agree. Many "work outside their chosen field" doesn't equate to "Many are flipping burgers." I have a degree in electrical engineering, but I write software for a living. And not the cool stuff I used to do at Caterpillar, but websites and applications. Thing is, I'm good at it and I enjoy it.

I know of many classmates who got degrees in EE but went to work for a petroleum company, or people with degrees in Mech. Engineering who graduated and started writing code day 1.

I know of none of my classmates who got out and went into counseling or marketing (although I'm sure some exist.)

Sorry, my clearly US centric bias was showing. I didn't even think about someone who actually has decent insurance replying on this thread :)

I've been fortunate enough to get promoted & change jobs over the past 5 years so I've actually out-paced insurance costs. We'll just see if that continues.

"The details and evolution of healthcare costs in particular were eye-opening"

How long have you been working? I ask out of curiosity, because I've been working for the past 12 years as a software developer. For the last 8 years if I didn't change jobs or get a promotion there was only 1 time that my raise out-paced the insurance increases.

The fact that the lowest paid guy got paid via pre-paid debit card is only surprising because I assumed it was cash under the table. I know that in central Missouri that if you work construction it's common practice to pay you in cash for the first 2 weeks because too many people don't stay on for two weeks. As a result employers see it as too expensive to fill out all the paperwork etc.

I guess I just thought most (if not all) of this was common knowledge, and I'm in a upper-middle bracket and come from an upper-middle class family, so it's not like I "came up from welfare" and saw all this first hand.

However, I assume that the stories of these family run a lot deeper. I just kept thinking "Is it really news that a dishwasher gets taken advantage of and lives in a scary neighborhood?"