darrellsilver

Mostly because it's not productive. Ideas, especially early ones, are malleable and changing. Saying it "Sucks" is like building a brick wall. Instead you want to ask something that illuminates the way so the idea improves.

That being said, first time entrepreneurs benefit most from this approach while people more experienced can cut to the chase.

It's all about trying to be helpful.

I guess we're in this together: At the least, there's gotta be a way to up the "getSearchRecords" API quota limit from a measly 250. We asked if we could _buy_ more and were told flat out "No."

I can understand APIs and UIs are complex, evolving features, but simple API quotas should be changeable. Would a limit of 1,000 / day be that stressful on your system?

That's an elegant response, I gotta say. But here's a post on your forums about the back button not working from _5 years_ ago: https://forums.zoho.com/topic/back-button

I chose Zoho for our team, and as we grow am fielding more and more complaints about these kinds of issues. What am I supposed to tell them?

Neat article, but deeply undermined by zoho's mediocre execution in their crm product. The data model and search are solid, but the ui is wildly buggy (the back button doesn't work!) and the API is slow, missing features and poorly documented.

It's one thing to build, build, build. It's another to build well, build well, build well.

Yeah – This was too quickly worded. What I'm saying is that these middle-size companies are too large to be seen as sexy startups that can make you millions, yet still too small to provide the mentorship needed for jr talent. One or two jr hires can be mentored, but that won't meet the demand, and is super expensive.

Sorry – should be more clear: What I mean to say is that there isn't a fixed definition of becoming "an engineer." One's level of expertise and proficiency is defined by the hirer... It's not for me to judge, especially in the abstract, what it takes. If an employer thinks you're qualified, then you're qualified.

What's happening in the market right now is that people who may not have previously been considered qualified are now considered qualified. This is because there's so much demand.

The irony of James' point – that engineers are in such high demand because of how cheap it is to start a startup – is that engineering salaries are actually being prevented from going up as a result.

There's too little supply of qualified engineers, but startups can't afford to compete in salary with the big guys (basically Facebook, Google, Amazon and the financial sector). So we compete on cheaper things like nice offices, gym memberships, etc. Basically, feel good stuff that doesn't cost much.

Facebook's budget for engineers is a good 20-50% higher than the salary a startup can pay.

Thus, it's not actually crazy that a law school student can become an engineer worth $80,000/year in only eight months. It's the startup's only option.

And that's a good thing: Companies like ours (http://www.thinkful.com/) are finding a way to build products in a way that doesn't break our budget. We're also providing great opportunities to people who want to become engineers. The only caveat is for companies greater than 50 or so people – they're struggling most of all: Too small to attract great talent that wants stability, too large to attract hungry new talent or accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job.

There's an upper limit, but our research indicates that there's a durable demand for engineering. This demand will look decidedly less sexy once startups become less cool, but software engineering will be an in-demand skill well beyond the current hype cycle.

Exactly. Specifically because deep understanding of what works, what doesn't and connections are the drivers of strategy.

Aptitude is crucial for execution, but that's not the VC's job.

Now working on http://www.thinkful.com/ this one stands out as spot on and often ignored:

10. Growth solves (nearly) all problems.

I'm amazed at the number of people who don't understand the difference between improving conversion of people already on your website and driving new users _to_ your site.

While this one is spot on for team members, and opposite when finding investors:

19. Generally, value aptitude over experience.

After 10 years in the workforce it seems to me the most important thing to focus on is getting a job that'll give them exposure to new things.

Our students at http://www.thinkful.com often find themselves a couple years out of school, languishing in their 1st jobs since college, wishing and yearning for more.

Unfortunately, incredibly talented people take the safest job they're offered because they have crazy college debt. A couple years later they're totally unfulfilled and want more.

Planning how to "not sell your time for a living" while in college (or before) is just as important as not being compelled into a "steady" job at the point in your life when you should be exploring new things.

Agreed. Just after college is the time in your life when you're freest to take the biggest risks. However, way too many people are saddled with crazy college debt that the only logical option is to "play it safe."

An unfortunate dynamic. At http://www.thinkful.com/ I've encouraged our interns to consider how much savings or debt they'll have upon graduation. It's something they basically never consider, and immediately when they do all sorts of priorities change about their spending habits, goals, etc.

Well worth the exercise.

That's not fair. Unlike many areas of software engineering, web development uses a long list of technologies interchangeably. This set (HTML, CSS, js, rails, some db, lamp, aws, etc) is a mix of languages and platforms. A "full stack developer" is one who can choose the right set of tools from a long list and get a site built from scratch.

There is an element of breadth vs depth in this definition. In some types of software engineering it's crucial to have deep expertise of one or a two languages (oracle, or java) but on web development it's often better to have a much broader view of more things.

This is why 17 yo web full stack web developers are more common than deeply experienced .net developers. The former takes constant curiosity and the ability to stay up to date on what's new in a changing field. The latter takes thousands of hours of experience.

Ah – gotcha. It's interesting: We do get asked about the qualifications of the mentors by students before they start the class. But degrees and accreditation rarely matter.

What we've learned is that people want to be taught by those with experience – just like you want to be mentored by a co-worker with a lot of experience.

Virtually all of our students have full-time jobs, so perhaps this insight applies more to our market than others.

Also note that most education for adults advertises the _real world_ experience and prominence of their professors, rather than from where they received a degree.

Are you talking about credentialing for the student or for the mentors?

Wow - that's great to hear. I'm too embarrassed to put our company's URL in this comment because it'd be too obviously advertising. But man, are we doing exactly what you're asking for!

I'm sorry to hear you couldn't find a model to make it work – would love to learn more! You can email me directly darrell@thinkful.com

In our experience, and with companies that have large teams of teachers training is the most important piece of all this.

Pointing out freelancer rates in major cities is also not representative: Lower cost of living cities have lower market rates for freelancers. When you're delivering the service over the web as we do with http://www.thinkful.com/ each party (the freelancer and the hirer) can split the cost savings.

This is awesome. What's funny to me, and this is reflected in the comments here, is that people don't think this kind of service can scale. That is completely wrong.

Human-powered backends to internet services should not be nearly as scary to startups as people currently think. From telesales teams to customer support, and now mentoring / teaching it's all proving very possible.

In our market research for http://www.thinkful.com/ we found several beginners who described (WORD FOR WORD) access to experts like that which you provide as "the holy grail" of learning.

Best of luck!

I agree in the principle you're after (independence beats dependent on someone else) but not the method.

Quick response rates help people feel not alone. And that's really really important because alone is too close to helpless is too close to powerless is too close to giving up.

To develop independence you need a good teacher. That's one who helps you understand why the answer is the answer, rather than just gives you the answer. Teach a person to fish... basically.

Exactly!

Agreed. And that's a fair point – "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". However, coding knowledge doesn't suffer from this flaw... just look at the tech wishlist companies maintain. The list of projects they wish their engineers would implement for them "just to make our job a little easier" is almost infinite. Being able to knock off a bunch of those w/in your job instead of outsourcing it is really valuable.

Agreed. But note that it's not all "noobs" helping "noobs"... there's someone who knows chiming in with directional support along the way. That's a big difference.

Coursera tries "peer learning"... commonly referred to in the forums as "the blind leading the blind."

At Thinkful we definitely see a benefits from both peers and experts...

Intriguing! What's the tech under the hood?

Neat idea! We'll be following along as we've found students do better with a bit more structure than this program provides, but there are so many ways of learning it may work well.

What I like most is the personal help. It promises not just a video but guidance to the best video based on where the "noob" is located... that's awesome.

I would say that "passively by dropping comments to the blog" feels like a low bar (but maybe I'm reading too literally?). The response rates to questions must be prompt – the difference between getting an answer in 30 seconds and 10 minutes is huge for me, and I've been writing software for 15 years. It's only worse for beginners.

For our students at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) getting human contact promptly is key... our students only like banging their heads against the wall for so many minutes before getting demotivated!

How do you define "alone"? What I've found is that learning alone is a very high percentage of overall time spent, but being alone, meaning relying solely on google / stack exchange, is vastly more difficult than having a conversation with someone either in person or virtually.

This is so great! We find our students want help with only a small number of large concepts as they learn. Mostly, these are the basics of programming (conditionals, loops, control flow). This looks like a great tool!

(The other main area students struggle is how to fit HTML and JS together into a real project...)

Darrell (http://www.thinkful.com/)

In our experience, the best way to learn how to interview is to talk with hiring managers. The 2nd best way is to pretend you are one.

We SWEAR by this book: Who (http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389)

Skip to chapter 4.

It's structured our interviews as we grow our team at http://thinkful.com/ as well as work with students to improve their resumes as junior engineers.

Please elaborate. Unless "load of crap" fully articulates your argument. If so, thanks for the feedback.

We use a of free and paid – there's so much great stuff out there we generally find the value is in the filtering. That

There's some great CodeSchool work that we use and they're a paid source.

The projects and curriculum are all our own design.

Pacing is incredibly important to motivation. The thing is, there's no single answer. Even in traditional, full-time, in person classrooms where everyone puts in the same class hours, natural ability, different skills at the beginning and better attention mean that students will always learn at different speeds.

The ideal model is one of personalized education. What's kind of shocking is that online education so far has basically ignored this altogether. There's been zero investment in ways to continually pace and encourage students to learn at a speed that is both challenging and within reason.

This isn't too surprising: it's a hard problem, and it's much easier to have users paying a subscription fee forever (for those services that are paid) and blame themselves when they fall behind.

At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we see evidence that our learning model, which pairs experts and students together much more like you'd expect from tutoring, sees 10x the retention and completion as other online course options.