That sounds like a guy who regrets some investment decisions, wants to sell, but can't.
1,298 karma · joined May 1, 2014
My topcolor is #bada55
This is what I'm getting at. Is that extent of it? Before the housing crash, most institutional investors thought it would be confined to the subprime market... but that wasn't true at all.
Where are the VCs getting all their money? Are mainstream banks exposed? Hedge funds? Corporations? Retirement funds?
But then I did the math:
Speed of light = 186 miles per millisecond. Satellites orbit at about 380 miles above earth (Source: Hubble). So it only takes ~4 ms for a round trip to a satellite directly above?
I did not know that. Weird, wild stuff.
If someone knows specifics about why satellite communication is currently so slow (both internet and video), I'd be interested in the EL5 version.
EBay, for instance, was there at the right time to take recent technology advancements, set up a network-effect marketplace and milk it for, oh, 2 decades. They stopped being a technology company a long time ago.
So how does this relate to Tesla? Answer: The supercharging stations. If Tesla owns the most charging stations then EV buyers have a good reason to buy Tesla over a hypothetical Ford or Toyota EV, putting Tesla at a major advantage. Eventually it'll be on Ford and Toyota to bet the farm on a massive supercharger network of their own and launch an EV to compete against Tesla's entrenched domination of the marketplace. Right now, Tesla is in a fleeting moment of technological and branding advantage which they are correctly leveraging to quickly set up their charging network.
It's a lot like telcos bragging about their coverage networks. Eventually all the (surviving) car companies will be doing something similar, running TV ads about their charging station maps.
Companies are either A) marketing companies or B) distribution companies or a blend of both.
Nike is a marketing company that happens to sell shoes. Ditto Taco Bell and cheap Mexican food.
Amazon, Akamai, Google and Facebook are distribution companies --- they own the network or marketplace.
Disney (mostly distribution), American Airlines (mostly distributiom) Walmart (mostly distribution) and Apple (mostly marketing/branding, but appstore and itunes are distribution powerhouses) are a little of both.
Edit: Nielsen, Google are distribution comapnies. They have prohibitively large or complicated information ingestion systems set up to and then resell the results.
Newspapers and TV are too, but their distribution monopolies are crumbling.
Interesting. That means solar advancements are very bad for Tesla. If people don't need to stop and charge, then the distribution network is worthless.
This particular story is about a Google service that is an extremely late entrant into the market (Amazon Glacier, etc) and offers almost nothing new. I'm not saying it's a bad product or not useful to folks, but it's not, by any means, groundbreaking. I'd much rather see the top spot of HN occupied by some startup's new idea or a researcher's new findings.
I also don't mean to imply that "big corporate" == bad. Certain products -- self driving cars, Space X automated landings, etc -- are absolutely worthy of our attention and discussion. I just hope that people would think twice before upvoting a story merely because it's from Google.
This is why I have completely written off consumer-side entrepreneurship forever -- I can build products, but I'm utterly clueless as to how to get the general public to actually try them. How do you get anyone's attention nowadays without breaking the bank?
When I worked at a CDN company, we frequently got inquiries from customers saying that a security audit they ran threw up a red flag for MITM. And it was my job to tell them why it wasn't anything to worry about.
PS, most origin-www.destination.com origins are extremely vulnerable to DDoS since, at that hostname, there is no CDN to protect them.
I think you're right. They set salaries low and the bar insanely high, reject a bunch of candidates to make themselves feel like they can be the next Google, then ultimately settle on a lucky person who just happens to be there as they've gotten acutely desperate and given up hope of finding a mythical 10x engineer.
Coding positions might be a whole different ballgame, though. I probably wouldn't have much patience for coding tests with a recruiter which undoubtedly makes the process harder for all 3 parties.
- The ridiculously broad yes or no honor question (e.g. "So are you familiar with data structures and design patterns?”)
- The ridiculously specific-to-the-company question (e.g. " Here is a batch of the data our systems generate. How would you process it for triggering of requests to our api?")
- The vaguely worded trick question: "OK that looks good... But how would you do it if you didn't have all these nice Java objects and methods?")
- The Prove-it Take-home that doesn't change anything. "We use ruby and you've mostly used Java, do this ruby take home assignment." Two days later. "Your assignment looks great but we're really looking for someone with more Ruby experience."
- The post-coding interview, resume-based rejection AKA "why the fuck did you ask me to come in in the first place?" rejection. (E.g. "Your coding interview went well but you've jumped around to different projects and we're not sure you wouldn't leave us if given the chance.")
- The didn't drink enough kool-aid rejection. "Don't know the CEO's full bio? Don't know the intricate details of our public API? Didn't read our blog post from this morning? For shame."
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/04/25/amazon.price.algorith...
But that'll never change unless all of a sudden we say "Ok, on the count of 3, everybody stop giving away their hard-earned expertise for free. 1... 2... 3..." We're like musicians nowadays. We love it, so we do it without insisting on compensation.
A few months ago, I Show HN'd an open source project, but reserved the copyright to the code. The commenters immediately took note of this and I felt compelled to switch it to an MIT license. (It was open source for security reasons, if you're wondering.) I'm glad I did, but the point remains: there was pressure to conform.
There is some nonmonetary value in giving it a shot, I guess, but that value diminishes with each successive failure, even as the chance of success increases as a function of one's previous experience.
A friend and I were remarking recently that for all our entrepreneurial effort {10+ years each) and meeting with other entrepreneurs, we don't know anyone who has "made it". (A guy from my class in college sold a company for 170 mil, but I didn't know him before.) That's dozens or hundreds of people trying and zero successes.
In short, I think the odds are much longer than most are willing to believe, and that sapped my motivation to keep trying.
To hear him write in such a holier-than-thou manner... It doesn't compute. Yes, he's important. Yes, he is busy. But I think it's proper courtesy to assume people understand this fact when they come to meet. If they don't then you handle it on the fly and, what's more, you've learned something about that person's interpersonal judgement. Was this a pitch meeting that went awry? Well maybe you've learned not to invest with them.
Regardless, having people Google how to meet with you is absurd on a level that only someone in a yes-man bubble would think is an OK policy to have and then write a blog poat about it.
Honestly, I doubt it was an Akamai issue. If Akamai experienced network problems, dozens or hundreds of sites would be affected. If an Akamai config issue (ie human error) were to blame, then it would probably only affect one site, not several. Neither FB nor Akamai is dumb enough to push multiple site changes at once.
In trying to put my thoughts into words here, I found it easier to whip up some pie graphs instead.
http://www.fivedogit.com/2015/the-problem-with-technical-hir...
Damn! I forgot to include "Do you have exp with the company's stack?". Oh well. That's more about getting the interview in the first place, so I guess it's ok.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016
Timing is everything, I guess.
I really respect Joel Spolsky's accomplishments (I've mentioned him recently in my own comments), but I found the blog post you cited wrong at best and offensive at worst. It perpetuates one of the most frustrating things I experienced while job hunting: the stigma of unemployment.
Even though I voluntarily left my last position, companies looked at my candidacy very skeptically. Things I was told by companies:
- "To be honest, we think you're an entrepreneur just looking to make enough runway to move on to the next thing."
- "Well, we're really impressed with you and you have the technical chops, but we're concerned that you like to think on a higher level and might tire of the daily nitty gritty." (Not true, and basically the same as above.)
- "You did well on your coding interview, but we've got enough candidates in our local area that we've decided to restrict our search to it." (i.e. relocation jitters. Not coincidentally, when I finally found a position, it was in my city.)
There are also people who are competent programmers, but come from strange backgrounds, like the music major-turned-coder who posted the other day. I, personally, am almost entirely self taught, haven't worked with other engineers and have only coded on my own projects (you can see my github if you want). People making hiring decisions are scared for their own jobs: they don't want to be the guy who hires the guy who never had a "real" coding job before. If it doesn't work out, I can see where that would come back on them pretty hard. (Conversely, having worked at Google or Apple is a major bonus for the opposite reason.)
Oh, and plenty of people underperform in on-the-spot coding interviews. Some people are affected much more strongly than others by anxiety. It goes both ways. I've read hiring managers on here gripe that they hired someone who interviewed well but sucked in reality. And my guess is it goes the other way, too.
So I find his assertion that people actively looking for work aren't the ones you want to hire incredibly naive, elitist and just plain wrong.
There are so many benefits to solo-founding, it's not even funny. Without co-founders, there's no delay in getting started. There's no drama. The development cycle is fast and the code can be remarkably clean. Personally, I make changes to my production code all the time because the whole thing is in my head and I know what effect my changes will have. (And if I screw something up, I know how to fix it in minutes, not hours.) With a team, that's simply not possible.
Investors are going to wake up to this reality soon and accelerators will trip over each other to claim to be the "accelerator of solo founders".
Corollary to this, MBAs and other non-tech types are screwed in the years to come. Engineers won't need them anymore. 1. Make a product. 2. Get some baseline traction. 3. Join an accelerator or raise a seed round, if you need it. 4. Hire the founding team. 5. Profit.
I fail to see how anybody but the "me too" accelerators lose with this trend (and they were losing already, obviously). Startup founders shouldn't have been taking money from them anyway, so the fact that they're dying off just saves naive founders from making at least this one mistake.
Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor of immigration reform.
1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is offensive.
2. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."