The most interesting aspect of this is that starting salaries follow a bimodal distribution, with one cluster around $50K and another around $165K. This is very unusual. You would think that lawyers would follow a normal distribution, peaking in the middle, but instead the salaries suggest that there are a bunch of stars and a bunch of laggards, with very few falling between the two extremes. Bottom line: law school is very risky. If you don't reach the $165K starting peak, you fall off the cliff.
It sounds from this like you aren't being challenged enough. For some people that is a good thing, as they like the idea of sitting around doing nothing 90% of the day. But it sounds like you want something more, and I expect you will not find it unless you are working in a much more challenging environment. Bluff yourself into a place where you have little idea what to do. Once you're scrambling around trying to keep your head above water, you'll lose your laziness. Or realize that's what you prefer.
One argument against saying "whatever works for you" is that it makes it appear that you don't have anything else important to do. This can lower your status, particularly with alpha male top gun types (VCs, I'm looking at you) whose minds naturally slot people into a pecking order. If you want a hierarchical-thinking person like this to respect you, you have to convey that you too are an important person with important things to do and other important people to see. So consider the context: say "whatever" to your friends but never say "whatever" to status-obsessed people you need to get money from.
This is an impressive list of articles, and includes some of the best articles I have read on these topics. However, seeing so many of these articles in one place made me think two seditious thoughts: (1) Larry and Sergey didn't need a single one of these articles to start Google, and (2) if everyone else reads and acts according to these articles, you should probably do the opposite. Just as generals fight the last war, advice articles seems determined to duplicate the last success. If you want the next out-of-left-field success, you need to be where no one else is even thinking to look.
EDIT: Yes, I realize I've just added another advice article to the pile.
Interesting that more than half of these 23 fonts are from just three designers: Carter, Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Carter alone accounts for 30%. Carter's Georgia, not included here, is an unsung masterpiece of a display font, tarnished a bit by ubiquity, sure, but still so easy on the eyes.
This article argues that with all the raves for Khan Academy we shouldn't lose sight of the value of the in-person teaching experience. If the traditional teaching experience was so great, there wouldn't be a need for Khan Academy to fill. But there is. And I expect so long as traditional education adheres to a one-size-fits-all model, in which we must march in lock-step down the learning path, there will be a need for Khan Academy and other non-traditional learning solutions.
Apple does not disclose compensation expense. The closest it comes to that is its "selling, general and administrative" expense figure. This is about $128,000 per employee but, to be clear, it includes more than just compensation and so is only a ceiling.
This article is wrong-headed in other ways too. The author attributes Apple's higher return on capital to the fact that it makes things. That has nothing to do with it. GM makes things and where did that get GM? Google doesn't make things but it has a very nice return on capital.
I would guess the number of start-ups who got it right the first time is infinitesimal. Failure is an essential but underrated part of the development process. Perhaps instead of saying "failure" we should re-brand it as "learning opportunity."
A similar article could be written asking why so few men go into elementary school teaching or nursing. Men are just as qualified as women for these positions, but pursue them at a far lower rate than women do. Looking at qualifications clearly isn't enough. The hard question to answer is why so many qualified women choose careers other than CS.
This article is ostensibly about a bad board member, but in reality it is about a bad board. A bad board member is only one director out of many, and cannot, on his own, do much more than disrupt meetings. A good board will shut up a bad board member and not allow him to lead them astray. A bad board allows the bad board member to run amok and follows him there. A founder must manage the board and assume there will always be a rotten egg in the bunch. Herding cats isn't easy, but it must be done.
Government debt is a deferred tax on a country's citizens and their descendants. So it can be a real drag on future growth and, like credit cards, feels cost-free until the bill comes due. What's more insidious is that it is often run like a Ponzi scheme, in which current citizens benefit at the expense of their descendants.
But it is hard to say where the "point of no return" is for the U.S. Many countries have higher government debt as a percentage of GDP than the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub...). Some of these high debt countries have reached their point of no return (Zimbabwe, Greece, Sudan) while others have not (Japan, Singapore). The U.S. is richer than all these countries and also has the advantage of a de facto worldwide dollar standard, so the U.S. is better able to withstand high debt loads than most countries. But then that's like saying the U.S. can afford to run up a huge credit card bill. The U.S. will feel richer than it is while charging, and the U.S. will be much poorer than it is once it pays it off.
The headline posted here is not the headline of the article, nor is it supported by the article. The article makes the point that corporate profits are going up while unemployment is staying high. The article does not say that profits are up because unemployment is high. In fact, I expect corporate profits would be even higher if unemployment were lower, as more paid workers means the economy expands even further, creating more demand for products and services and higher profits.
The article pokes fun at Netflix for purchasing little-known, unpopular titles, as if Hollywood is somehow putting one over on Netflix. But what drew me to Netflix initially was its ultra-deep selection of DVDs, which was far better than the local video store. Seems to me Netflix is trying the same thing with streaming, building the biggest catalog as fast as possible so people will view it as the #1 streaming choice, even if Warner Brothers withholds its marquee movies and sticks it with "Pushing Daisies."
If the job requires tangible skills that can be demonstrated in a 20 minute interview, the resume has never been that important. Similarly, if you are poaching someone with a proven track record from somewhere else, resumes have never been important.
But if the job requires intangible skills that cannot be demonstrated in a 20 minute interview, and the candidate does not have a proven track record, employers have to use some method to filter and find. Resumes are far from perfect, but they are one way to do this, and I expect any rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated.
Seems to me the product here is the "plush toy experience." It involves buying plush toys while participating in a plush toy community. Even if Amazon isn't selling the plush toys today, presumably it could do it tomorrow, and at cheaper prices. But it will be a lot harder for Amazon to replicate the community, and that is how this site can compete with a 900-lb. gorilla.
Enhancing creativity through artificial restriction is an old idea. The "Oulipo" movement in literature tried things like removing random letters from writing (try writing a story without using "e"), or transposing random words. When you put in restrictions like this, you get a much higher variance in outcome, with the bad being truly awful and gimmicky but the good occasionally being sublime.
A fine example of parochial thinking. Point is NY tech funding surpassed New England's, so, naturally, New England sucks. Of course, by this logic, Silicon Valley tech funding surpassed New York's, so, naturally, New York sucks.
The world is too complex for a small cabal to be controlling everything. This complexity is difficult for our puny minds to comprehend, so we instinctively latch onto simple models with a Wizard of Oz at the center, pulling all the levers and pushing all the buttons to make everything work the way it does. The ancient Greeks thought Zeus and the other gods on Mount Olympus controlled everything. The modern mind turns to secretive cabals. Same idea.
What went wrong at Borders? Easy. They have a ubiquitous competitor who offers customers 1,000x the selection at lower prices. The only benefit Borders offers is immediate gratification for those who can't wait a few days, or a week, for their books. Borders has had the stench of death for a long time now. I'm wondering whether Barnes & Noble is next.
I'm waiting for some honest soul to start the Lightning Strikes Twice Fund. Whenever someone succeeds massively, intellectually we may "know" that there's a great deal of randomness in that but instinctively we want to believe it must have happened because they are smarter, better, etc. So for their next venture we throw our money at them hoping lightning will strike twice. This phenomenon is most acute where markets are most efficient, such as in the stock market.
There are two distinct skills. One is building a great product. That can be done with a tiny team. The other is building a great organization. That obviously cannot be done alone. To me an interesting question is whether we need great organizations. There is a great imperative once you have a great product to grow and scale, to go from being a product builder to being an organization builder. It is undeniable that an outstanding organization allows us to leverage our talents in ways we could not do alone, and I suspect success in the massive monetary sense depends more on an ability to build great organizations than on building great products. But I would like to think building great products is enough, and unless you need massive monetary success I expect it is.
Securities laws are antiquated, rooted in the paper-and-ink world. This makes it difficult to do anything online, but not impossible. So why hasn't it happened? My guess is that it is the companies that are not eager to participate. They are shy about widely disseminating their business plans, their financials, their cap tables, their need for capital. So even though it seems madly inefficient to raise money the old fashioned way, knocking on one door at a time, and even though eventually "everyone" knows everything (so it's hardly secret), I suspect this company shyness explains the odd persistence of that old model.
"I have made it longer because I have not had time to make it shorter." ("Je N'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.") -- Blaise Pascal.
In this article Jenny McCarthy defends the British scientist whose fraudulent anti-vaccine article killed or sickened countless children. The mind reels.
Blandness is in the eye of the beholder. The writer of this piece places a high value on his site's design. Others have a different view of good design. Still others value content over design. The beauty of the internet is that we can all consume this content in whatever form makes sense for us. This amazing multiplicity seems anything but bland to me.
In high-performance management cultures it is very difficult to avoid developing a cover-up culture. I've seen companies avoid this either by (1) going out of their way to reward early disclosure of bad news, and severely punishing cover-ups, or (2) inculcating a scientific inquiry attitude throughout the organization, as if we are all scientists working in a lab where it is expected that our hypotheses will not always pan out, to the point where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity and those who do not fail every so often are thought of as not pushing themselves hard enough.
I think if you're smart and you've earned a PhD from a good program, you've proven you have the ability to dig deep into a subject and figure it out and move the ball forward a bit. This is an economically valuable skill that should be broadly transferable into many fields, even those far afield from your PhD studies. I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty. A lucky few can continue to specialize in academia, but for the rest the real world requires them to get a lot more general and interdisciplinary in order to succeed, something I fear a lot of them are unwilling to do. Hence our glut of unhappy PhDs. This is not a new problem.