ahlatimer

2. What technologies do they specialize in? I see lots of job posts for Rails and React and relatively few for COBOL. I see a lot of jobs for Java, but a higher percentage of those are of the lower paying variety. This is likely location dependent and is a bit of a catch-22.

3. Are they any good, but perhaps more importantly, are they able to demonstrate that they're any good in an interview setting? There are a fair number of truly bad programmers out there. There's also a fair number of programmers who may be good but are unable to demonstrate that in an interview. Interviewing is hard to get right -- everyone has their own take on it, and it's rarely backed up back actual data.

The people you see getting tons of offers probably have the right combination of location, resume, and interview ability. If I had to pick the single most important factor in getting a lot of offers, it's location. If you are in an area with limited tech jobs, the number of offers you can get is obviously going to be limited as well.

When I get particularly frustrated with it, I pause the game and go do something else for a good 15-20 minutes, then come back so I can at least fast forward through some of them.

Obviously a significant portion of those cars remain on the road, just with new drivers. As of 2012, the average age of cars on the road is 11 years: https://www.mainstreet.com/article/how-long-do-you-keep-car-...

How is this particular to BASE as opposed to any of the myriad of other things that people are allowed to do in national parks? It seems to me that a horse blocking my view would interfere with scenery, or seeing a line of people walking up the cables, or climbers dotting the peak, or any number of other things would interfere just as much, if not more. A BASE jump is over in minutes. It can take days to climb some of the bigger faces.

Edit: I still contend you're making a mountain out of a molehill. This kid asked a reasonable questionable in an unreasonable way. He could've avoided a lot by simply redacting the names of the companies; I think we both agree on that. That said, I kind of expect a kid fresh out of college to make a few mistakes with regards to professionalism. An organization hiring those individuals should be set up to mitigate that damage and gently steer them in the right direction, not crucify them publicly. While I expect the occasional flub of professionalism from new employees (and I think on a scale of unprofessionalism, this ranks pretty low), I expect a great deal more from CEOs of corporations with a valuation in the billions. Both messed up with regards to professionalism, but one made a much bigger screw up, and it was the one who I would most expect to behave professionally.

Where you work will have an impact on your career (I think that's obvious). Part of that is simply the social proof of which company. It helped my career by working for various YC companies, for instance. Were they necessarily better than non-YC companies? No, of course not, but people put stock in it anyway.

The first company you work for may very well have an outsized impact on your career compared to subsequent positions. You should make that decision carefully.

Most importantly, when I go to work somewhere, they shouldn't expect that I will work there the rest of my life. Staying at a company 2-5 years is pretty normal. That's a short enough timespan that you should be thinking about how the company will impact your career after your time with them is done. Furthermore, part of the behavior of a good manager and company is to encourage and facilitate your career growth, even though they realize that doing so may very well cause you to grow out of your position at that company.

He's also a kid, looking at his first career out of college. Did you know the right things to look for immediately and inherently? Do you now? Did some of the things you looked for then end up getting discounted as you got more experience? Do you maybe think you shouldn't hold it against him that maybe he also doesn't know everything?

So no, I wouldn't say that that kid was wrong for thinking about several different aspects of the opportunities he was presented, name-recognition amongst them, even if I would contend that he should maybe put less of an emphasis on it, but that's just the thing he might have heard when he asked the question. Nor do I think that he's more likely to up and leave the company when the going gets rough.

Edit: Here's a link that has the quote about rescinding the offer: http://www.quora.com/Zenefits-CEO-Rescinds-Job-Offer-May-201...

In the 2.5 years I was there, the only communities we launched were ones we were paid to launch.

It wasn't particularly accurate, in my experience. It told me to get a medium when a small actually fit better, but it also didn't have my favorite shirt in its database, so I had to go with something that had a decent but worse fit as a comparison.

It seems to me that the argument for legislation seems to come from the idea that smoking is bad, smokers are bad people, so anything that looks like smoking is also bad.

That said, love the idea and execution otherwise. It's great to get some insight into the beginnings of a product/startup. Even for those of us with experience in earlier-stage companies, unless you've founded it yourself, you don't usually see the beginnings like you've been presenting on your blog.

Isn't that directly contradicting the point you made earlier? If every cent counts at the lower level, then even earning 90 cents on the dollar extra is still plenty incentive to attempt to earn more.