bengrunfeld

"But we want to keep sending you heaps of spam... It's not fair, Google! It's just not fair!" – Marketing peeps

Cement colored offices make people sad, but you don't get much done at a coffee shop.

I think that making your office space awesome (e.g. Google's Tel Aviv office in particular – http://bit.ly/1ePziyy) is the ultimate solution. You need a place where people can be creative but productive, and still interact with others around them so that they don't feel alone and depressed.

If you want the best out of people, you need to give them the best.

IgorPartola, it's not about where we're at at the moment, it's about where we're going, and currently, that doesn't seem to be a good place.

No, this isn't Stalinist Russia, but the question is, if we continue down this route, could we BECOME Stalinist Russia, or something similar? I think that the consensus on that is definitely yes. Intimidation of journalists, secretive detainment, interrogation and assassination, the USA is definitely headed down a dark path.

Tell that to Lavabit.

I hear you. What city did you move to? (Melbourne is my home town).

Tell me about it! By being part of the tech industry here, you get to rub shoulders with the likes of Zuckerburg, Dorsey, & Bezos. That type of exposure just doesn't exist in Australia. Unfortunately there are some other issues though....

I don't know, barking. I make a lot of mistakes. Most of them before breakfast...

If you want me to justify my reasons for moving here, fine. Australia was starting to slide into a quiet recession(link below), and I was having serious issues with some of the decisions the government was making.

That and I had always been fascinated by the "American dream". We saw it in movies and theatre growing up and I wanted to check it out for myself. Is that so culpable?

http://www.news.com.au/business/worklife/brace-for-a-white-c...

Dude, not cool! Slightly trollish.

I was in love with the passion of the American people for civil rights. I visited in 2004 and read Archibald Cox "The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government" and "Freedom of Expression" in the Boston Public Library after some college student left it on a table, and then went and annoyed other Australians about it for years.

I came here because I wanted to create a better life (the same as any other immigrant), not because I had any axes to grind. Can you blame me for being disillusioned? Again, not cool.

chasing, when I was living abroad, I had a Palestinian friend who worked with me. One day he told me his neighbors had disappeared in Gaza because they were vocal against Arafat. I might be spoiled, but I've seen where a lack of freedom leads.

I just thought America was a place where this stuff wouldn't happen, and where the people were protected by the Constitution. Guess I was being naive and idealistic.

But why should that have to be something that you accept? Every government loves power, and it is the job of the people and the press to restrict that love.

"Lingering Effects of DOJ Snooping on Media" http://youtu.be/QOFLLDih9fw

Sarcasm, lazyjones. I was being sarcastic. I dream of a world where you can say what you want without getting persecuted for it, not the world represented in the following video:

"DOJ justifies searching Associated Press phone records" http://youtu.be/5CguKdc21AU

Just remember that the author knows the NSA is watching him, and if he goes too far (i.e. by outright saying that they or the president is lying), he might become a risk to national security. In this country, the people do not have the right to criticize the government, you know? ;)

“In America, we’re not supposed to have to worry about watching our words like this when we’re talking to the press,” Binnall said. (from article)

I am a new immigrant to America. I came with my wife from Australia 8 months ago. All my life I heard about how the US supported the freedom and rights of its people, and now that I'm here, I find that that was a sick joke. This place is a KGB state on the brink of happening.

According to Snowden's slides, PRISM began to receive information from Microsoft in 2007. So now in... wait for it.. 2013, Obama was juuust about to start looking into what those crafty NSA people were doing?? The amount of stupid here is Unbearable!!

This is just plain wrong. Instead of admitting that what they did was immoral and attempting to repair faith with the tech community and the country, they're now trying to automate IT so that they don't have to worry about SysAdmins with a conscience.

So their big plan is, "if our agents can use a UI to get all the info they need, we won't need to worry about those pesky left-leaning IT types."

The amount of stupid here is unbearable!! Good luck to them when they need another feature developed.

I agree with you. Small workarounds like E2E encrypted email aren't enough.

I think that it's time the tech industry had an open and frank discussion about about re-building our infrastructure from the ground up to avoid organizations with means (e.g. the NSA) from abusing the system. Privacy is essential to a healthy culture and a healthy economy. Can you imagine Putin taking advantage of similar tracking to hunt down homosexuals with his draconian anti-gay laws?

This is a pandora's box that needs to locked shut.

Snowden's future directly affects us all. If he was incarcerated against the will of other powerful countries, it would send a strong message that personal freedom is a thing of the past, and that if you do the right thing at the expense of the government, you will be hunted down and punished.

I would really like to see Snowden being more vocal and discussing his beliefs more. I think he could be a very powerful leader in the fight for privacy and policies that restrict the government's snooping activities.

Firstly, he is a legend. Having the guts to pull off a move like that is admirable and unique.

I think it's a shame that regardless of if he wins or loses, many people believe that "fine print" is a tool that only big institutions like banks or insurance companies are allowed to use in their favor.

"The story of one man is the store of the entire world".

I think it's easy to talk down to someone who has admitted failure, but the truth is we've all been through it, although some of us hide it better than others.

My custom web-development business tanked last year after customers refused to stop asking for changes. Insomnia & anxiety were frustratingly close friends of mine too.

Maybe the site is shutting down and maybe you could have done something different that would have succeeded more, but super-kudos for trying!

Funny, I saw a documentary about lawyers that showed very similar footage... =)

I think the viewpoint that the article expresses is a bit extreme.

The cost to companies of changing cloud providers from Amazon EC2 to anything else alone would be substantial enough to make most businessmen hesitate.

And if the NSA was ready to go to these lengths, and were indeed collaborating with other governments, I think it would be naive to believe that just because a Cloud provider wasn't based in the USA, they wouldn't have opened their data vaults to the intelligence agency of their respective country.

Prism definitely hurts the USA and its image, no doubt, but I don't think it will kill the US Cloud business.

Just my luck that a group of Drupal enthusiasts came upon my comment...

Seriously? Validation has no meaning for me at all. If I can program something, then that is all the validation I need. Why don't you pay me the $40k a year for private education, and I'll buy you an account on Lynda for $25/month and tell you'll be a team leader at Apple some day. Sound fair? ;)

It's easy if you have 4 years of school to soak up knowledge. But if your family can't afford to pay your school fees, you end up working somewhere full-time. So you have to study nights. Except you fall in love and get married to a wonderful woman, but then she wants to spend those nights with you. So then you end up not sleeping and begging her to get a night-job so that you can learn how to install arch linux on a virtual machine. Becoming a software engineer when you have life commitments is tough, and you end up reading programming language books on your iPhone every time you go to take a crap. Believe me, it's hard.

You have to do it respectfully, but why hire someone who can't prove their worth. And it would have been funnier if you'd written "SaaSy" ;)

Since I am in marketing and web development, I go through all of their online assets and their front-end code/design.

So far, this technique has gotten me 3 good paying jobs, because I'm not trying to please them in the interview, I'm trying to show them how I can help them become a more successful company. Plus you win the high ground. You just have to do it in a constructive and respectful way.

I was married when I started my computer science degree. My wife let me get through my first year and then told me I had to get a job. So I did all of my studies on Lynda, focussing only on practical subjects like PHP and AJAX. Even though I started in 2010 and dropped out at the beginning of 2011, I just got offered my first $100k job. Tell me, if I was able to accomplish all of that at home, then why would I pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend a University where I am considered a Junior when I leave and join the industry? It just doesn't make sense.

My method is to do a full analysis of their company, and then make a very nicely formatted doc listing everything that I thought was bad, and a full explanation of how I would improve it if I were hired there.

Essentially, by using this technique, you've created a job for yourself, and given yourself value before you've even started there.

Then, when it comes to salary negotiation, you choose the highest available figure of their range and say with enormous balls that you're worth it because of all the things you can do for them - re your doc.

Works a charm for me every time.

And that's why you go with Wordpress...

If you think being an old engineer is tough, try being a new one.