chrisclark1729

"We have been spending our money innovating instead of lobbying." I'm happy you got this in there. Even though it's mildly elitist it's very true.

For what it's worth, the majors are also making fractional pennies. The gap is not as large as the fractional penny amount would make you think.

Perhaps this thread has gone too long, but the comments are overwhelmingly against doing work for free.

TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands.

My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time.

Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run. One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON.

If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against.

If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.

The Next Chapter button is not working for me in Firefox after completing the Hello World section

Two points:

First, if your product truly is amazing then there is nothing wrong with cold calling someone to alert them of it's existence. Particularly if you are offering them free use of said product. In fact, if your product truly would enhance their lives you owe to them to let them know about it.

If someone cold called me and offered me 25 hour days I would not call it spam.

Second, do your best to warm the cold call. At least narrow the distance between you and your prospects. You would be surprised at how connect you really are. Just remember specifically who your target is and how it can help them. Tell everyone you know to look out for these types of people and see if you can't get 5 minutes of their time.

Bottom line, targeting the right type of person with the mission of improving their lives is not spam. Mindlessly sending out requests to anyone and everyone is spam.

Combining the two points: If you can't come up with a subject line, it's probably best to do in person.

I like what danilocomaps said. I would also add, put your e-mail address and phone number at the bottom of every chalkboard. No sense alienating someone who likes it but is too busy to get to the end.

It's a cool feature idea. Although, I have a workaround. I usually just copy the link location and save it to my delicious account with the tag toread.

Maybe delicious is blocked at your company, so that's not an option.

Sort of a catch all answer, but bears repeating:

Did I need another search engine in 1996? Did I need another social network in 2007? Another mp3 player in 2002, etc.?

If you really want to do it, you should do it. It's all in the execution. I'm sure Startup Foundry is not serving everyone's needs (and they probably don't want to). Figure out who they aren't serving and cater to them.

I meant women, although in the cultural sense. This is to my knowledge the first generation of women who were raised to be supportive and nurturing at home while still feeling the pressure to earn as much men.

Having the role of nurturer be challenged, I'm going to assume, is more psychologically damaging for a woman. Especially when that woman has career woes of her own.

No doubt all of these cases have individual components, but doing something nice for your spouse is rarely bad advice. =)

Wow. I've been there. 3 times actually. Unfortunately, your question is deceptively complex. There are several smaller questions/concerns contained within your dilemma.

Financial:

Can you afford to quit? You say you are married. If you don’t have kids, you’ll need 6 months living expenses. Better yet would be to have a years’ worth. I have heard conflicting reports on how easy it is to get unemployment if you quit. For now, I would assume that you cannot get unemployment.

Next, Quit or Don’t?:

If you decide to quit - here’s what you should do:

1. Give tons of notice. Since you don’t have anywhere to go, you can keep earning money and be openly looking for a new gig. The fact that it’s out in the open should alleviate some of the stress for you.

2. Figure out why you’re so unhappy. Write down two answers. First, an answer that is well rehearsed. This is the answer you can tell your boss and co-workers so you don’t blow up and tell them they are killing you. Second, an answer that is the real reason. If you’re this miserable at a job you’re going to have to do some serious soul searching to figure out why and you’ll need a plan of attack to deal with these issues so they don’t disrupt you in the future

3. Find the person who will be most upset about your quitting and manager your relationship with them. This will be huge on down the line.

4. Ultimately, be nice. You’re leaving and the way you leave will stay with you forever in the minds of your bosses and co-workers.

If you decide to stay - here’s what you should do:

Don’t phone it in. The anxiety of being at a job that you hate and continuing to do half-assed work will crush you. Better to take risks on projects that have the chance to excite you and do great work for the company. If you’re going to leave anyway, just find a way to politely decline the work you don’t want to do and pick a project that has a chance to be a game changer.

Next, look for another job. I know this is obvious, although in my opinion, you have 3 ways to go with this:

Option 1: Get another job, any job. Call recruiters. Call everyone you know. Shotgun resumes. Apply to jobs you know you can get and get a new one. Once within the new job give yourself 6 weeks to determine if you like it. If you like it, great, you have a job you like. If you don’t, move on to Option 2 or 3 and figure out how the fuck you’re going to explain why you have been job hopping so aggressively. Just be happy that you have a job that doesn’t make you cry. If it does, go to therapy.

Option 2: Figure out what your dream job is with extreme detail. I mean everything where is it? What do you do? Who do you work for? What your boss is like? How much you will get paid? Size of company, revenue, industry, etc. EVERYTHING. Write at least 3 pages on this and find companies and positions that match your target and go after them with everything you’ve got.

Option 3: Start freelancing. Be slightly less selective about the projects you take, but find a market that you are comfortable serving and do whatever it takes to give them what they want. Maybe even finding a few projects that pay $15 or $20 an hour will give you and your wife more confidence that you can quit. And if you do well you might be able to parlay those into an even more successful full-time side gig.

And when it’s all said and done and you have your dream job, do something nice for your wife. Dealing with this type of thing really sucks for women and I think taking a trip with her and showing her that you’re happy will do wonders for both of your psyches.

DESIGN: It's cool and awesome for minimalist design nerds like myself, but I'm not sure if it will convert well. That's speculation, so you might want to get a more authoritative view point on that.

COPY: I think you need to get a little more niche on your target and add one more layer of benefits to your copy.

1.) Working in a small team? -- Of what? Of programmers? Of elephant trainers? Of baristas? You'd be surprise how good people feel when you call them out specifically.

2.) Use Xau to stay connected and task-focused. So what? I don't think anyone cares about staying task-focused. They want to stay task-focused so they can make money, or build a great product but staying task-focused for the sake of staying task-focused doesn't sound very compelling. I would personally change it to: Use Xau to stay connected and task-focused so you can...[insert benefit your clients care about most]

Hope that helped!

Statistically speaking, I would say this is not bad advice.

My guess is that less than 5% of bullies are prepared to actually fight. Therefore, even if you are setting your kid up for a beating it's only likely to happen with 4% or so of bullies. I would say this lean risk is far preferable to the daily torment that comes along with consistent bullying.

Just a different take on it. Comments have been good otherwise.

I agree. I, similarly, can't get this idea out of my head. I don't have much to add except that #3 no doubt often informs the gatekeepers of #1. So, consider the actual power of #3.

Do you have info on the way the lines change from initially being set to post time? That shit is totally fixed, if you could figure out what certain line changes mean in terms of predicting a winner you could perhaps make some money.

I commute on a bike, go to the gym every day and try and get up every time i'm NOT in "the zone."

Yeah, I think the functionality of toggling between search providers is really well done. It just came to mind.

You know what be pretty amazing, IMO, is listing top 10 or so URL's of Bing, Yahoo, Google right next to each other for comparison sake (removing the display window).

I like it. Any way to show multiple searches at one time?

Reason your an idiot: You refer to your potential clients as idiots and then insult their behavior.

"Shouldn't I make money first -- to fund my dream? The notion that there's an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn't find any."

Yeah I would say travel, if you have lots of money. Go out and meet people locally if you have some money. Get in amazing physical shape if you have no money.

Cool, yeah I definitely think you should delay the need to sign up. Combining #2 & #4, you'll likely want to fold the state to state logic into the questionnaire.

Best of luck.

Totally awesome, simple but useful business model.

I didn't sign up, but I have a couple of questions:

1.) How do you get around the witnesses, soundness of mind issue? 2.) Are there legal differences from state to state you need to consider? 3.) Do you have the capacity to/Would you want to upsell consulting to individuals with a net worth beyond a certain threshold? It works for someone like me with a net worth only visible with a microscope but for higher worth individuals I'd assume they want to speak directly with someone. 4.) Perhaps before getting someone to sign up, you could let them know "what they'll need to get started" (maybe in the FAQ). This is ultimately what prevented me from signing up. Didn't want to give out my e-mail address for something I wasn't prepared to finish.

Hope this helps and I truly do think this is a good idea.

Well I'm assuming you are the featured 'Michael Anderson', but if you're not why don't you just ask him how he did it?

You should really find a way to incentivize people who want to pay to join the site. I can't even figure out how to join as a payer, let alone a reason why I should.

Just say you need to move on. The longer you wait the worse it gets. Let them know without going into excruciating detail that it's better FOR BOTH OF YOU (be sure to emphasize the benefits of not relying on someone who doesn't want to be there). In the long run the client/friend will respect you more for being honest and saving them from someone who will do sub-par work.

And as someone who would similarly struggle with this type of problem, I can definitely say you should rehearse what you want to say beforehand and stick to that.

Best of luck!

Beware that advertising on a "job site or two" amounts to spamming the post everywhere.

Yeah, because there's nothing better than working with someone who thinks they know your business better than you do after being there for 5 minutes.

As others stated for me, to parse large text files of data.

Personally, I think pay-per-hour incentivizes me to "work a standard day" and then quit. Where the standard day is whatever fits into the company's cultural definition of a day.