hughguiney

This advice might work at Uber or as a consultant but for FTEs it sounds like a great way to get fired. I consider myself a product-minded software engineer, but trying to be this person has been a sisyphean task pretty much anywhere I’ve worked. In fact I have come to view that impulse to challenge assumptions, to strive to do work I’m proud of, as an example of my naïveté as a junior developer. Executives are not too interested in quality software; they are interested in shipping whatever is in their head, whether it’s good for customers or not. In startups they are interested in shipping literally anything at all to meet insane growth targets so they don’t lose funding or get replaced by the board. IME the only time interest in the product actually helps engineers is during the initial interview where you need to demonstrate your interest in the company’s mission. The reality is that despite how brainy the job happens to be, employers do not pay developers to think; they pay us to do the geek stuff they don’t understand. They view us, if you will, as pure functions that take a set of orders as input and produce a functioning app as output—no side effects please. This is why we’re going to be replaced by AI as soon as it’s good enough, and are currently being replaced by no-code products: we are already robots to management.

Yeah, the main reason I would pay for this would be to put the project in my portfolio. I have my own portfolio page though; I wouldn’t be interested in hosting it on a third-party site. Even if it was just something I would link to from my site, I would be concerned that potential employers would see it was “just a tutorial” and write me off as not having the experience in question. That said I don’t often get asked for source code during interviews these days, so probably the ability to host the minified code for a demo would be enough.

> XML is also pretty difficult to read

I’d say this is schema-dependent. If you’re talking about plist files, sure; those are ugly and unintuitive. But on the whole I find XML far easier to read than JSON. With closing tags, what you lose in terseness is made up for with scannability: it’s easier to understand the document hierarchy at a glance, and find your place again after editing. Whereas with JSON I often have to match curly braces in my head, or add comments like `// /foo` which isn’t even possible outside of JS proper or a lax-parser environment.

I was furious with that. First off, all I knew was that invites were being sent out on Tuesday. Then after intermittently refreshing my inbox all morning and into the early afternoon, I went to Twitter and saw some people claiming they don’t get sent out until 10 PM Pacific. Thought it strange for them to come so far outside of business hours; not to mention 10 PM Pacific is 12 AM Central (my time), 1 AM Eastern. But I stayed up past my bedtime and still, nothing. At 1 AM Central I finally said f it, and went to bed. This morning I got my rejection with a timestamp of 2:42 AM. Seriously?? Now I have to start my day off with a rejection instead of ending my day with a rejection where I could sleep on it and probably feel better in the morning. So incredibly inconsiderate.

While I appreciate your viewpoint, it is not obvious to the reader. I think it is more important to not alienate women any more than already happens in this industry, than it is to form a sentence that has a certain rhythm. I would also examine why male pronouns “sound right” while non-male ones “don’t”.

And I agree with @sidawson that gender-neutral pronouns maintain the same rhythm besides.

Edit: And thank you for the upvote. I am glad that you are open to constructive criticism even if the crabby status-quo-loving anonymous users aren’t.

Downvoted already! Sexism in tech is alive and well I see.

This, more than anything else I have read on the subject (plenty), is the most compelling reason I can see for having a cofounder.

However, solo founders are not necessarily “alone”. Support networks exist outside of business partnerships: friends, colleagues, spouses, mastermind groups, etc. can all help alleviate loneliness.

Pat Flynn’s site and podcast: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/

As someone who has been stressing over “needing a cofounder” lately, this is an encouraging and timely post.

However, I dislike the phrasing here:

> a 100% owner requires half the earning power of 50/50 partners–that gives him a huge advantage.

…which assumes the founder is going to be a man.

Ah OK, I was just going off of a quick glance at a Wikipedia timeline.

And I’m saying “CSS 1” etc. the same way people call the original Playstation “PS1”. Hindsight is always versioned.

I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that “view source” was not as easy as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when “frontend development” was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn’t matter as long as it rendered correctly. It’d be like looking at a candidate’s PDF resume in a hex editor.

Do entrepreneurs ever make good employees?

“Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page.”

This is beyond trippy.

As someone who is looking for work and finds nearly all of it through LinkedIn, canceling my account is not something I can afford to do at this time. As much as I empathize with the Open Web mission, opting out of LI is the privilege of happily employed developers.

It's horrible for usability. If you don't have JavaScript on, you lose the ability to submit comments entirely. Not that Facebook was very usable with JS off to begin with, but still.