brianfitz

Assume I hire you as a manager in my organization and give you a hiring budget of $200k. You could decide that you want to hire 5 new college grads at $40k per year or 2 senior candidates at $100k each. Now assume that I tell you the minimum salary for any of your hires is $100k. My question to you:

What would be your incentive to hire two college grads you'll need to invest in training versus candidates with years of experience and skills?

I responded to this in a previous thread, but I think I can simplify it down to the perception versus reality of the change the CEO has enacted.

What many people believe: The CEO has set a minimum compensation bar to help those with market wages below $70k.

What has actually happened: The CEO has determined that going forward, he'd rather hire people with higher market wages and more experience versus paying lower wage workers.

Over the next few years, the company will slowly shift to one with a more experienced workforce. This could pay off, and would not be that unusual. What is different is he drew a specific line in the sand and grandfathered in his hires prior to the change.

For the CEO, success appears to be defined as keeping the minimum wage across the entire pool of job candidates set above $70k. The easiest move is the first shift to raise everyone's existing salaries as this is based on previous staffing behavior. The test will be if they have the discipline to continue hiring as they have previously going forward.

For example, if they were hiring new college grads out of school at $40k, will the continue to do so at the same pace? Will they continue to hire new college grads at all?

I mention this because if they don't, they won't meet the CEO's stated goal -- rather they will slowly shift their workforce to weed out those with market rates below $70k.

The only way to prevent this will be to ask managers to purposefully hire candidates with less experience while simultaneously handing them a larger hiring budget.

As a note, Scrum started outside of software development. It was created to deal with brand new problem domains with many unknowns.

I can't explain how to perform an appendectomy. When I can't explain something, I rely on the knowledge of experts:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/design/a3524/4278...

bonn1, regarding your issues with CSS and positioning, you may find the Fayde project interesting as it addresses the problem you describe. Ignore the part about silverlight as that is only a comparison -- but fayde does support rich applications in the browser without plugins, CSS, or HTML: www.fayde.io

Those who drink alcohol shouldn't become alcoholics. However, it's a risk. It's easy to say that a founder shouldn't go into debt to keep their dream afloat and protect their employees, but the reality of it is very hard. If it weren't a risk, pg wouldn't have written about it. Going back to the original question, a founder reaching into their own pocket might not involve acquiring debt, but rather cutting their own salary. When faced with making a payroll, the founder(s) are likely simply not to pay themselves to get through a cash squeeze.

The risk is on future rounds as these aren't guaranteed. The founders will be the ones to take the lowest salaries when cash gets low and possibly float the company on their own savings. Two very successful companies I'm familiar with (both with billion dollar exits) saw the founders max out their credit cards through the lean times. Not all success stories are just a straight line up and to the right -- those are the just the exceptions that get the most attention.

"However, the problem with all of these approaches is that they are all bound by the limitations and frustrations of HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, the problems with HTML aren't going to be solved anytime soon."

Nice work!

This is certainly possible. I should expand my definition as not only sustaining life, but rather avoiding two extremes: one scenario in which all matter repels from all other matter (on an infinite scale) and another in which all matter collapses on itself. These events would seem rather cataclysmic for our universe as a whole, but that could be chalked up to our limited understanding.

This is interesting. I had heard of this theory previously (Smolin), but didn't appreciate the Darwinian nature of it. You still get multiverses that each adopt their own distinct rules of physics, but natural selection plays in to how the universes are created. Some amount of information is transferred from the source universe to the one newly created, but the information is not lost -- something Susskin put forth some years ago by comparing the event horizon of a black hole to a hologram.

Said a different way, if you believe in the fine-tuned universe theory, then the multiverse theory would by definition predict our own outcome. It doesn't make either true, rather one of many puzzle pieces that happen to fit together. In 200 years, we may have proof of gravitational waves (or have found none) and many other interesting puzzle pieces that will continue to drive the thinking within quantum mechanics and string theory. Some believe the entire branch of string theory to be philosophy -- though I think this is limited by the belief that because we can't test many of these theories today that we will never find a way to test them in the future.

One more note on this.. fernly and others have correctly pointed out that these did come about as different theories, but there are physicists who have come to believe they are the same thing.

Right for sustaining life and that you and I are here and are having this discussion. This isn't a judgement of good or bad (though I'm glad to be here), just accounting for the the odds of arriving at our universe on chance alone. :)

That's one way to think of it, but when dealing with infinity, one event isn't time dependent on another. Think of a reality (or infinite realities) where you remove the dimension of time entirely out of the equation.

More at its core is that it means that the expansion exceeded the cosmic speed limit, the speed of light. Two of the competing theories have been a rapid expansion (inflation) and another that two branes collided and the big bang started in an expanded state. As of late, it appears there has been more confirmation of the former rather than the latter. From what I've read, it is as another commenter noted -- the universe in it's earliest state did not yet conform to the rules of physics as we know them today. This early state is something on the order of the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

An interesting implication of the multiverse theory is that it provides an answer for how we ended up with a universe with just the right combinations of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces. It's like the Goldilocks story -- tweak any of them to any other value and all matter would either repel into an nearly empty space or attract into one mass that would collapse under it's own density. There are other reasons for the multiverse theory, but under a theory of infinite multiverses, you would by definition create a universe where all the right combination of forces would come together to form our stars and planets -- including ones that can sustain life.

In both examples I am renting space in which to place my antenna. In the first example, I own a single antenna and pay fees to my landlord. In the second example, I own a single antenna and pay fees to Aereo. I would argue that the only difference is marketing.

All that effort to litigate Aereo out of existance, and technology marches on.

https://www.tivo.com/discover/antenna

I'm having trouble understanding the ruling, so maybe those here with more knowledge can help.

As a thought experiment, assume I live in a building that gets spotty OTA reception on my antenna. However, there is an apartment for rent on the top floor, and I decide to rent it for the sole purpose for storing property. If I set up an antenna in that apartment, but do not live in the space, and run a long cable from the top floor to my apartment, am I in violation of the law? I do not own the apartment that the antenna resides in, and I do not physically live there.

If this is not illegal, does it become illegal when I cut the cord between the apartments and instead encode the signal and stream it to my laptop?

So, said a different way, does the legality depend on whether I live in the same physical space as the antenna, or the fact that I have digitized the content between my two rented spaces?

It would seem that the courts view a company such as SlingMedia as a hardware provider and Aereo like the landlord of my second rented apartment. However, I can't resolve at what point what I do with my rented space and equipment becomes illegal.

Can anyone explain?

Bad behavior thrives under misaligned incentives -- especially when it goes unnoticed. In such cases, the best remedy is to shine a light on the problem. Accountability, rather than aggression, will garner far better results.

That article was intended to be a joke. 37signals (now Basecamp) is private and doesn't publicly announce revenue or profits -- though Jason has acknowledged both are in the millions.

Great idea. +1

Paypal is another company, based on existing platforms. Their success was directly tied to their ability to predict fraud and take real-time decisions to block or, at times allow, a high risk transaction to process (assuming their algorithm determined the cost of blocking the transaction was greater than allowing it to go through and issuing a refund). People believe their differentiator was payment processing, but its this very belief that allowed them to kill off their competition.

If you view Bitcoin as similar to PayPal, then that is at the heart of why we view this issue differently. I would compare Bitcoin much more closely to HTTP, or other protocols -- and PayPal as being akin to BitPay. When Bitcoin is compared to companies built on top of existing protocols and platforms, then I believe the premise is misguided. M-Pesa's success is directly tied to cheap mobile airtime. In Malawi, I purchased a new cellphone with minutes for $12 USD, and I was paying the airport rate. The same principal goes for Kenya -- there were M-Pesa booths everywhere I went in Nairobi, but only because of the amazing uptake of basic cell phones mostly used for SMS. Without that mature platform, the business could never survive.

Bitcoin could ultimately fail, but not due to the adoption curve as outlined in the article.

For an apples to apples comparison, you must start with the premise that Bitcoin is a platform. M-Pesa, built on top of multiple platforms, is a company. If you want a starting point as a comparison between between the two, you should start the clock on M-Pesa back to the origin of cell towers (platform #1) followed by SMS (platform #2). It was only when these two technologies matured that M-Pesa (a company) became possible.

A good article, but poorly titled. TL;DR -- there is a developer shortage, but you can overcome it by being smarter than your competitors.