What else is opportunity cost in this case but risk that an early employee at a startup misses out on a much better financial endpoint at a non-startup with much higher salary and benefits (401k matching, etc)?
379 karma · joined November 7, 2010
I always imagine the interaction with supply (quality freelance developer) and demand (company needing work done) to be like this:
Company: "I need great freelancers!" Dev: "I'm a great freelancer! My rate is $100/hr [or whatever]!"
[Company interviews Dev, sees prev results, feels happy w/Dev]
Company: "Great! We'll pay you that for the first few days on this platform, then engage you for long term projects off the platform. That way, we don't have to pay Matching Site the finder's fee."
I get a ~90 day notice that my job is ending, during which time I continue to work the same hours and have time to apply to other positions inside and outside of Disney.
After that, if I don't have a job w/in Disney and separation occurs I get 10% of my annual salary. That's 5.2 weeks severance.
Am I missing something in the numbers?
There is certainly an emotional aspect to "training your replacements", but it does seem like Disney is trying to do right by employees and shareholders at the same time. Better balancing act than I've seen at most places.
Whatever your thoughts are on Java the language - would it not make sense to focus efforts on the OpenJVM project and all the languages it can support?
Genuinely curious if this seemingly "reinvent the wheel" approach is going to provide benefits.
Very well done!
"there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling"
As a former quant trader and a current (and forevermore) value investor - there is a big difference.
Vanguard's CIO (Gus Sauter) has mentioned in a CNBC interview (see http://www.cnbc.com/id/49434073) that the liquidity providing aspects of HFT tech are valuable - ie, the tools that help the real market makers fill orders on the other side. In the same breath he says the abusive practices (predatory trading) need to be reigned in.
Chris Stucchio's post seems to be defending the "predatory" side of HFT's as "spreading around" the information advantage conferred by hard work and due diligence into the workings of a company.
I'm refuting that by describing the actual effort that goes into attaining the information advantage obtained by Einhorn, Ackman, etc he describes and contrasting it with the effort involved in HFT predatory trading.
Which effort is more important and should be rewarded?
Here's a more fundamental question to ask:
What kind of behavior do you want to reward in the stock market?
If you view the stock market as a bunch of numbers that wiggle around, where "information" is conveyed by the actions of other people participating in the market (ie, what they’re buying and selling), then the HFT's play a legitimate role in spreading that information around.
If you view the market as a place to buy and sell businesses (equivalently - shares of businesses), where capital is allocated to businesses commensurate with the value they provide to society, HFT's are parasites on the effort of others.
There are participants in the market that spent an enormous amount of time, diligence and thought into deciding allocating capital to businesses according to the value they ascribe to the businesses. For these participants, the signal they send by putting out their orders is currently taken advantage of by other participants who spend enormous time, effort and money into trying to “tap into” the result of the efforts put forward by the first group and rush to another exchange to buy up that company before anyone else gets there.
So: Do we really want to reward all of the effort spent building faster machines, communication links, and algorithms to jump right in front of someone in line? Or do we want to reward those people who are actually determining which businesses have intrinsic value and which do not?
It's easy to hate Einhorn or Ackman b/c they're rich. What's important to keep in mind is that they are custodians of and act on behalf of thousands, probably even millions of other people to improve their financial situation. Pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etc make up the bulk of the funds that Einhorn, Ackman and others invest. The fact that they're rich an indication of their legitimate hard work at researching and allocating capital and enhancing the financial well-being of their clients. (Note: yes, there are always bad apples that get rich by illicit (read: insider) means, but that is an exceedingly small amount of participants and over time they usually get caught).
Warren Buffett has often said that a perfectly good stock market would be one which is open only one day a year, where participants put up orders based on the value they actually ascribe to a business. If those orders cross, then trades occur - all in one day.
Makes you wonder what would happen to society in that market. Would people would be able to find a way to channel all the frenetic activity currently employed in chasing prices and watching others’ actions into a more productive endeavor?
Very excited to get my hands on this IDE - I might actually start coding C++ again.
" If another language can provide 10x more performance in 2x the code of Ruby, that's a tradeoff I'd seriously consider.
If I do ever have a hit on my hands, and it starts scaling quickly, there's a cost, management, and maintenance issue to bottlenecking myself with Ruby. "
I realize that there are many parts to a system and that other parts encounter scaling considerations before the programming language does - ie database.
However, it seems there are known, quick to implement solutions that can solve the data scaling problem in a cost effective manner. Reimplementing my application logic with another language seems to be a very cost-ineffective and time consuming task.
I'd rather head that concern off at the pass by picking that language with 10x the performance and 2x the amount of code.
1. The routing layer is all about declaring a resource which gives you all 7 major REST operations, and
2. there's a nice facility for responding_to any data format (html, json, js, text, etc) you want.
With rails scaffolding, you can pretty much get all boilerplate code written for you, and have it very simply implement a REST backend for a more "heavyweight" javascript framework (angular, ember, etc).
I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past?
I think the article gets it right in that Ruby needs better concurrency primitives (promises are a nice idea), and esp better performance. If Javascript can be as fast as it is with V8, there should be nothing stopping Ruby from achieving similar levels of performance.
Very, very cool! Thank you for charging money so you can build a real business and keep improving on it.
Please, please work with the JetBrains folks to integrate w/their suite of products? Please?!
30-50x performance difference gets really... real, no? The standard refrain of "throw more hardware at it" must reconcile with the fact that a factor of 30-50x means real dollars for the same amount of load. Is the developer productivity really that much greater?