I always find it interesting how a company that takes off and IPOs outside SV seems to gain almost no attention even when they have profits that would dwarf most of the hot startups. I work down the street from a startup that IPO'd a couple years ago for hundreds of millions, does double digits of daily trading on the NASDAQ, and seemingly nobody has heard of. Instagram selling for a billion is cool and all, but there are many companies like this who fly 100% under the radar. If I had to guess, it is probably a focus on B2C vs B2B. (Don't have the source, but I think I read it in Inc. this month) 80% of the startups filing for IPO this year are B2B. Food for thought.
As someone who grew up in Milwaukee and moved to Charleston, I agree 100%. One of my largest clients is in Milwaukee now and I can say definitively that I have lost all tolerance for that bitter cold. And to all you Canadians living north of the wall... I don't know how you do it.
If 37signals were to release basecamp, this would be a better comparison. At that point, I would probably call 37signals an opensource company, even if they ran a SASS model.
17.5k/yr for the lowest package was what I was quoted a couple weeks ago. It was actually not a terrible deal compared to most of the alternatives as far as value goes... but the starter package is way larger than you would need for most things. They essentially price segment the small startups out of the market. OTOH, many of the other GIS server licenses push 100k+, so that is why something like mapbox is getting people excited.
They most certainly do. I got a quote from Google for commercial maps use a few weeks ago. 17.5k/yr an up. Mapbox seems like a good alternative for serious web mapping. Google Maps is still pretty week in B2B type mapping though. Esri is the real competitor here.
> Students who are financially disadvantaged get help, both from the universities and the government.
I hate to add any more cynicism to this, but student aid is often higher ed's version of price segmentation. Out of state people pay the top prices, in state pay the middle, and low income pay a bit less (but often more over the long run due to loans). I know many people who will be paying interest on their student debt long after they would have paid back the entire principle. I was lucky and had parents who encouraged me to pace myself and go without much debt, but the system pretty much is stacked to rope in low info 18 year olds and extract as much from them as possible.
I read mostly because I find it enjoyable. I would consider a voracious desire to read and soak up knowledge a core tenant to being a hacker. Sure, we all need to get our hands dirty by doing things, but working in technology requires a nearly insane breadth of knowledge, and I just cannot imagine someone improving without lots and lots of research.
Wow, I was going to choose a quote as a prime example of this guy's utter horrible nature, but I got to the end and could not decide which was most terrible. Here's one anyway:
"I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night. When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over. I never have to worry."
All of them. The companies have people that are ostensibly part of the same system. These are the guys I have seen recommend a Silverlight app... in 2013.
> What happened for us is we tried to adopt it, but it was just so unworkably at odds with our current process, it got mostly ignored.
My issue with this criticism of kanban and many other agile practices is that it pretty much boils down to "X does not work; we did not actually do X".
I keep a 6 month emergency fund as well. Not only does it cushion me from something like a layoff, it also gives me the freedom to resign, should I run into something unreasonable or unethical. As a rule, I try to prevent myself from being backed into a corner.
> 2. Everyone will value their own time now much more, so you will automatically get paid for what you achieve, not for the hours you worked.
While a Star Trek Earth style system sounds awesome and utopian, I cannot help but thinking most people would just stay home and drink and/or watch Law and Order marathons all day. Hell, that does not sound too bad to me at all, and I love my work.
> There seems to be a certain aspect of the night owl that is present in many programmers
This seems likely and could be attributed to the fact that we receive above average artificial light from staring at screens too late into the evening.
Just a piece of advice for a fellow coder/architect: Try out some meditation of some sort after you get off work, and before you crack open the beer. I have noticed a huge improvement in my ability to relax at night after starting this about 6 months ago. All I really do is 20 minutes of yoga right when I get home, and it has made all the difference. I always love beer, but it just tastes better when my mind is not stuck on whether or not the hotfix I shimmed into the API earlier to have things ready for the big meeting will explode in the middle of the night and trigger a bunch of angry emails.
0,0 is where coordinate conversion fails end up. As a GIS developer, when something is not showing up on a map, I always zoom over to W Africa to see if it is showing up there.