I am Product in a large corporation, and it's a certainly a fine balance. In a previous life, I was a developer, and I dealt with similar issues. I have a lot of respect and empathy for the the Tech team. Therefore, I asked my Tech team to inform me when things are getting out of hand -- that's the responsible Product thing to do. I instituted that technical debt is part of our KPIs. If it's not captured, it's not actionable. A few examples:
- Documentation: required when method's cyclomatic complexity is high or method is just plain long (we defined what we consider "long"). Every customer facing method has a working usage example (%), etc.
- Test Coverage: % unit tests (defined by modules) -- higher is not necessarily better, but it gives us a sense of where we stand. % of test automation: manual vs. automated.
- Refactoring delays: # of TODO comments, # of compiler and static code analysis warnings (e.g., “this method is deprecated”) --> that is a sure sign that things will break in the future and an investment is needed.
There's some development work to be able to capture these things, but it gives visibility and power to Tech to inject some maintenance work into normal sprint development.
I'd love to hear what other people are doing.
To increase credibility:
1. You should add an "About" page and tell us about your background and what makes you best suited for providing this service
2. Give 2-3 examples of questions+answers (for 2-3 roles) to set expectations / give a taste of the type of practice one would get by signing up for the service
Countries like Sweden (or maybe it's the only one) also adjusts the fine for speeding according to one's income. If you make a lot, $250 fine isn't going to deter you from speeding. But $200K might (there's probably an upper limit?)
"If you take a 3500 $ Swedish salary with all the taxes applied, your life level might be equivalent as a 7000 $ salary in US." Completely agree.
I live and work in Manhattan. I love the city (!) But between Federal taxes, state taxes, and city taxes, the reality is that I pay over 40% taxes. Yet, I receive none of the benefits European countries offer their citizens: state sponsored healthcare, subsidized (and good) education, etc. It's a real shame because I think it reflects very poorly on us, as a "first world" society.
For those not from the area, a few figures to give you a sense of things:
- the truth is that public schools have a bad reputation. There are a few exceptional public schools (Stuyvesant, Hunter, Bronx Science), but they're highly selective and certainly can't fit every kid in the city. I know many who send their kids to private schools (>$30K or $40K per year in tuition fees)
- health insurance is tied to one's employer, and while some is subsidized by employer), it is paid out of employee's paycheck to a private insurance company.
So, yeah, taxes may be high in France, Germany, and many other countries, but there's some return.
Again, I love NYC and all it has to offer. Objectively, one has to be honest about the pros and cons living here.
Disclaimer: I am married to a European. Perhaps I've been drinking the kool-aid :-)
This.
What if OP inspected the script and highlighted potential harmful commands? Changes in security configurations, manipulation in critical libraries, start-up scripts, and so forth.
Not sure how much that would help to the novice, but it's at least actionable (user can look the commands up and understand the implications.
However, when the going rate for daycare in NYC is $3K/month per child, you need to make an extra $50K/year (pre-tax) to just cover that (if you were to maintain your pre-kids lifestyle). Then there are other expenses. Point it, kids aren't free.
That's where you need to start making choices (less eating out, etc.)
I'm not sure whether it's a practice everywhere, but many shops in NYC also indicate the "per unit" price: per gallon/oz/pieces etc. I use it all the time, and I wish it was mandatory by law for all products.
I wish there was a way to run the embedded javascript when the image is loaded. I have a legitimate use case for it (imagine you send an image URL as a JSON response and wanted to track it was loaded, or send other params back to the service)
I have mixed feeling about this. Although Amazon is one of my favorite companies with great customer service, I am asking myself whether the day will come where they'll eat up all the competition, make the cost of entry to any domain prohibitive (by negotiating great distribution deals for themselves -- deals that no one else can strike), and then raising the prices. Just to be clear: if Amazon can buy a pencil at 1c due to bulk orders, and everyone else can only get it at 3c (due to smaller volumes of sales), Amazon could sell it for 3c, make profit, and still not allow anyone else into the market.
As a consumer, what do I care, right? I'm always getting the lowest price. But as an entrepreneur and someone who wants to see things get better, it's an issue if no one else can "disrupt" the market in a financially responsible way ( <-- and I'm specifically phrasing it this way because I think it's in mode these days to get a lot of VC money to "scale," and worry about profit later. I find it hard to believe that with just VC money anyone could "scale" to Amazon's dimensions).
Unless they (knowingly or unknowingly) are going to follow Apple's iPhone path where "private", home users started pushing their employers IT departments to switch to iPhone from BB. At the beginning, iPhone was not considered "secure" for financial and medical applications, but as iPhone market share grew, Apple started investing in "enterprise" features (Outlook integration, etc) that it became feasible to do the swtich.
Every few months we get an email from our employers telling us that we cannot install Dropbox on our office computers. Eventually, some higher-up who's using Dropbox at home will make enough noise that s/he cannot sync his work docs from home that it will become "ok" to do it (and the org will switch to it)
this is a little off topic, but related: I've seen it time and again where an applicant DOES spend the time to do work for free/part of the interview process (I won't get into this religious war), and then not get any response back from the potential employer. Not a yay, nor a nay. That, my friends, is exploitation.....
Ha. Still sticking to their guns: "...while the Upshot mobile app used pre-existing code, this did not violate the hackathon rules. Use of pre-existing code was allowable as long as the code did not comprise the majority of the app and did not violate any third party's rights." I think it does more damage than good
I think it's less the fact that the individual has worked for Salesforce for 9 years, rather that the winning app was not developed for the hackathon. Heck, the product was even shown at a Meetup on Oct 8, weeks before the hackathon was announced.
Edit: just to add another layer to my response -- I had formed a team for the hackathon, but ended up not flying to SF for the hackathon (so I'm definitely not bitter about money/time spent, although we did meet several times to come up with ideas, etc.). One of the things we feared most was that some company will indeed present a polished product it had worked on for the past year, but never launched it. It's always a concern in any hackathon, and we figured it would be even a bigger one at a hackathon with a grand prize that big. HOWEVER, what's infuriating about the Salesforce hackathon is that the winning team had actually presented their product prior to the announcement of the hackathon! To me, it's very clear cut and enforceable. Although I'm not a lawyer, I think it's similar to a patent: if you are making your invention/app public, it's already in the public domain and shouldn't be given protection/eligibility to compete.
I think it's more typical to issue, for example, 10M shares, take 3M for yourself, and leave the rest for employees/VCs/whatever (rather than issue new ones, in a first round)
I'm not sure I understand the question. What do you mean by "you have money in your personal bank account?" Are you saying that some of the money put in by a VC ends up in your personal bank account? If it does, it's through a salary you withdraw from the company. VCs, or any investor, will want X seats in your board, which will also give them a say about your salary. So if you got $1M in funding, no sane board will allow you to take a $700K salary.
Your win from the investment is that now your company has money to move faster, by hiring more talented people, buy equipment that is important to the business, pay vendors, etc. In short, to scale. You, the founder, keep a % of the company throughout this time, but you'd only see it translate to real money in the case of an acquisition/IPO/sell off. Your motivation, then, is to increase the value of the company so that % you have in the company will translate to more money in the cases I mentioned.
After this long answer, I feel like I still haven't actually answered your question because you're probably asking about something more subtle :-)
"Innovator's Dilemma" describes a similar process. An underdog comes along, creates an inferior product or a product addressing slightly different needs, and then slowly but surely builds up its feature set to address the big dog's other customers.
I think it's iterating through queries as well. I can't imagine Hebrew is such a "hot" language and that is used so heavily, so that I see the same query repeated over and over (population of Israel has about 7 million people, where only 5-6 would probably use Hebrew as their main language...).
good point. The only issue with Amazon that I found was that the first sample chapter might be 5 pages long, so you don't really get a flavor of the book. I might be wrong though (maybe they now do it by total length rather than chapters)
I read on my commute to/from work. Not sure about the # of books I finish a month, but I can say that I may be willing to "experiment" more with books I wouldn't have otherwise. No downside to read the first 3 chapters and then switch to another book, if you don't like it. I think, therefore, that it might be a nice DISCOVERY tool.
true, unbreakable now, but probably breakable in a few years....
You store whatever SIGINT you pick up now, and understand it in a few years. A lot of it will still be valuable in 5,10, 15 years
Jonas Salk, the developer of the Polio vaccine who chose not to patent his discovery, is a prime example as well: "When he was asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk
I'm not intimately familiar with the situation nor their org structure(though I recently spoke with one of their directors in NY, and it was a pleasant experience -- it may bias my comment), so this is just speculation: I am guessing a large portion of these layoffs are of temp, hourly employees. My first reaction to the title was more of a "uh oh," but now I am thinking it's more of "they closed their positions with their temps, and they are relocating their permanent employees to NY." Is that so bad? Did it come as such a surprise to their temps?
I could be wrong, however....