eligottlieb

"Stupid and superficial" is a good description of today's low-need, low-investment, small-problem start-up environment.

>In other words, you will do what 99% of all applicants will do, even the ones that didn't really want the job in the first place: you'll tell the interviewer what you think they want to hear.

Well no, I tend to do the Luciferian thing: tell the complete truth and let them hear what they please.

This has, in its time, lost me a couple of opportunities because they didn't want someone who was aiming for research rather than aiming for their position. Of course, those opportunities were in entry-level software engineering positions.

Of course you can shop around for a doctor who will diagnose and prescribe what you want. All you have to do is find someone who will completely disregard medical ethics in the name of being paid to give you expensive happy pills.

Actually, I'd say the #1 thing not to ask me in an interview is "What is your passion?".

Did you really want to hear about my time between the sheets with my wife? No.

Did you really want to hear about my love of outdoor Humans vs Zombies games, or the different kinds of Munchkin games? No.

You probably wanted to hear about my work as a hobbyist Computer Science researcher, but I don't want to tell you about that. You would understand half of it and then decide that I'm a grad-school egghead who doesn't belong at your company.

Luckily, I applied to graduate school this year.

Frankly, if you can stretch your degree into an additional year or take summer classes, do it. My primary regret from university (May 2011) is that I graduated in 3.5 years.

On the one hand, I had no debt. On the other hand, crunching my requirements down that way meant that I often had scheduling conflicts with interesting but non-mandatory courses like Cryptography, Networking, Computer Graphics, Robotics, Philosophy, and Sci-Fi Films.

If you made $250k and lived off $50k/year, after taxes and about 6 or 7 years you'd have $1 million in the bank. After 10 years you'd definitely have enough to generate a perpetual income from your invested wealth.

But that's, again, different from STRIKING IT RICH(TM).

Take the libertarian claptrap somewhere else, please. The person entitled to determine whether you should take Adderall is your doctor.

Isn't this just really a nicer Craigslist with some social-trust components?

One of the few things that actually stands to make a difference in this zone is the possible implementation of crowdfunding laws. If small, new businesses like start-ups could actually raise investment through crowdfunding (ie: through people who don't have the 1%-er status to qualify as accredited investors), it would be possible to use capital sources not already controlled by the existing players.

Ah, the old Giga Drill Breaker model. Easily said, a joy if done willingly, but an incredible pain to make others go through. Group heroism is... difficult.

Welp, I need to work more. Google is quickly creating my customer base.

They advertise no jobs at all outside of San Francisco and Houston. They base everything on GitHub, screwing over those of us who have been using Sourceforge, Google Code, Bitbucket, or some other open-source hosting service since forever. The first problem they can fix; the second is the fault of basing a business model on the institutionalization of the fad for GitHub.

By that standard, what's not a dead-end job? Today you develop software, tomorrow you... develop more software?

>But I just wish more people would have the gumption to say 'I made a big set of money hats for myself, my investors and my employees, and I feel great about it'.

It would be great if making money for employees counted as a plus on the balance sheet. Instead, giving money to employees counts as an expense. Isn't capitalism wonderful?