31reasons

Zynga lives by this advice :)

um why is this on the front page ?

Yes, Jobs are so hip right now.

Robotics companies and now AI companies, Google seems to have much higher ambitions than the internet. May be they watching too many sci-fi movies in their 20% time. :)

This is gold. It will take me some time to digest it and actually turn into actionable items but Thank you for taking time and writing this. Much appreciated. I wish there was a training course for this :)

If you are really good with programming, I guess the only reasonable thing to do is start a Software firm as a solo practitioner or as a partner with other Software developers.

Woz is someone who is straight out of fairytales. I wish I had a friend like him.

Thanks Patrick!

>>You can use software development to achieve very quantifiable results for companies.

Can you direct me to books / resources to understand more in depth what you are talking about here. I have read what you are saying many times but never quite get it. I am struggling to understand why would someone want to pay me % of their profit when they can hire some programmer for $50/hour. Is it about how you present yourself to the client s or types of clients you go after ? I am working as a freelancer and all I am getting is very budget sensitive clients who doesn't want to pay more than their cleaning maid.

May be the author is trying to say "For him its pretty easy to not get the difference between good and bad sushi"

You mean "Mad house of trading" = Millions of dollars in bonuses.

By that analogy, Can I get free mobile advertising if I work at Facebook or free Adwords at Google ?

I am sure if there was profit to be made from these kind of performance metrics for Programming, you would see entire industry spring up to solve that problem.

The geography perfectly reflects the life stages of a middle class american. SF is young, fun and eat-out place and as you go south its gets older. San Jose is a middle-age boring place where people are busy with kids and other house chores.

So it seems you are better off working in a profession with a very clear quantifiable performance metrics. Software development is not one of them unless you work for your own company. I am curious about making a list of professions that have quantifiable performance metrics.

1.Sales and Marketing

2.SEO

3.Bloggers

4 ..

Is there too much competition to be a trader or anyone can become one ? If so, its seems much better idea to toil away to make millions than toil away at a remote chance to make a million in a startup.

Thats because most startups don't have revenues, so they use that as a heuristics instead of a revenue figure. But since revenues are yearly, the value of a developer is implied to be yearly.

Exactly. I am not even a drug abuser, never even smoked in my life :) and why the trader's job is not outsourced to someone in indian and china yet ? looks like a very "protected" profession to me.

I heard some estimate that each software engineer adds $1 million (not necessarily to a start up). But there should be a way to reward based on quantitative performance than evaluation by a manager who have no clue about software development.

I am just wondering, are these Wall Street traders smarter than an average techie working in Silicon Valley ? Are they so irreplaceable that they are offered so much salary and bonuses ? It just doesn't seem right. I am afraid to even ask for 150k salary in SV for the same amount of cerebral work.

So the problem of converting Satellite data to Maps is still not possible with algorithms ? Google is able to find all Cat photos in the youtube videos, how about finding streets ?

It was kind of funny to read the whole "Struggle" part. My response is, Nobody is forcing you to go through the struggle. Live in Bangladesh for $1/day and you will know Struggle. Whoever wrote it is seriously need to get some perspective.

Is it worth it ?

>>would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation)

I think the App was more about the implementation than the idea. He created extremely efficient implementation of jpeg compression with 50000 lines of C++ code as far as I remember from the dev's blog. So Apple is obviously more interested in the guy than anything else.

>>Who is saving money? The small minority who have existing conditions are, but not the majority of healthy people.

I am saving money. I quit my job 2 years ago to be a freelancer and was declined health insurance due to a "high" cholesterol condition and was kindly offered a $1200/month plan. I declined to pay such a high premium. Now me and thousands of entrepreneurs are free to choose and get whatever insurance they want at group rates.

>>These plans are incentivized to keep people tied to their current employers. The costs of self-insurance is now just shy of a mortgage payment. Self-employeds are looking for a job, so they can be covered by obamacare.

You must be out of your freaking mind to say that

>Health care in the U.S. is dauntingly expensive.

It has become much better with new laws. For $200/month you can have a decent health insurance in California.

Are you suggesting modern medical science not helping people live longer by treating Cancer, Organ Transplants, Bypass surgeries etc ? I am seeing so much pessimism on HN , it seems unlikely that majority of people here are hackers.

Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.

Living longer means signification rise in population on earth and given the unsustainable state of our planet, it makes more sense to look for other similar planets for habitation. And if we invent faster than light travel in future it will be natural for people to leave earth in the spirit of exploration just like Europeans did to find the New World.

With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution. I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.

Yup. There may be thousands of earth like planets in our galaxy alone. Shouldn't we explore them some time in future ?