2,241 karma · joined April 20, 2010
On the other hand, I had all kinds of problems working for upper management I didn't believe in. When I didn't trust the folks above me, it was very difficult for me to implement even fairly benign changes.
In the post above, the whole bit about being from "Google Corporate Development" is shady. We're only hearing one side of the story, but it seems someone at Google is using a famous name and the fuzzy promise of an acquisition to try to trick him into coming to California for a job interview.
-Don't expect to work on cutting-edge stuff. They're the conservative choice for conservative clients.
-Most consulting companies are "up or out". If you're not on the partner track you're an interchangeable cog.
-Most of the folks who make partner are project managers, business analysts, and rainmakers. Coding skills can get you on good projects, but advancement is about how many other people you can leverage. The techies that make partner are generally "architects" and "practice leads" who can lead a bunch of junior people.
-Work/life balance isn't a thing that exists at a lot of big consulting firms.
-You will often be forced to become an instant expert next project. Most big consultancies are not afraid to invest in training, but it's also up to you to fake it for a while until you know it.
-You can learn a ton of non-technical skills from the partners. These people are often at handling people, delivering bad news, making presentations, gathering input from others, etc. There's a reason they make tons of money and it's not because they're 10x programmers.
I can't say I enjoyed my time there, but it was an educational experience really helped my career.
Sure, there's extra overhead involved in those big firms, but there's no way you'll come out of that experience thinking you're only worth $50/hour.
This is exactly what market rate means. That's why apartments are so expensive in SF or NY.
Companies play games with the experience levels and titles to force wages lower. An "architect" or "developer" gets replaced with an "analyst" or "engineer" making 2/3rds as much.
I once posted a job on monster.com and we rejected probably 50 resumes for each one we interviewed. We were looking in the wrong place. At a different job, we had a terrible time trying to find somebody with 10+ years of embedded systems experience in a town that didn't really have that kind of industry. In retrospect, we probably could have found a less experienced person that we could train. We were looking for the wrong person.
> Maybe those graduates aren't any good.
In my experience, it's because companies don't want to pay to train somebody in all the basics of office work. New grads (especially STEM grads) don't know how to run a meeting, write a status report, or do a thousand other things that a modern company requires. Instead they list job openings for two or three years of experience and hope to profit off of somebody else's investment.
Increased sales taxes which was an especially dumb thing to do. The folks that spend the largest percentage of their income are hardest hit by sales taxes.
When I was young, my friend's dad managed the K-Mart in our town. In the 70's and early 80's, K-Mart gave a lot of autonomy to store managers to set sale prices and do promotions. He would nearly always have loss-leader sales going for basic stuff like toothpaste and laundry detergent. He assumed that if he could just get customers in the door for toothpaste, they'd buy enough other stuff to make up for the loss. It worked, too. After a while, many people didn't even bother stopping by Target. K-Mart finally forbade loss-leaders in the late 80's, his sales tanked, and he quit to become a buyer for another chain. The K-Mart is still there, but it's a ghost town compared to Target and Wal-Mart.
I wonder if Wal-Mart can pull off the reverse of what my friend's dad did. Could they get people who ordinarily wouldn't think of going to Wal-Mart in the habit shopping there by discounting big things?
Now it looks like Netflix was inevitable, but it took a few huge blunders by other companies for them to succeed. Remember when Starz basically gave away the rights to thousands of shows and movies (for $30 million/year)? We could just as likely be talking about Viacom Streaming and all those silly things that Netflix did.
It was a fairly miserable failure. Unless your teacher was really loud it was too hard to hear lectures. It was too hard to concentrate during tests and too easy for one disruptive class to ruin six other classes. (On a minor note, most teachers really hated only having one chalkboard instead of a whole wall.) By the time I got there (twenty years after the school opened), there were temporary walls everywhere and the school had mostly switched back to a traditional layout.
Most large cities have their own police academy or there's a regional academy that several cities use. Police academy is usually three or four months of intensive training that new recruits go through (a little like boot camp for the armed forces). After graduating from an academy, the officers are sometimes rotated through probationary assignments and then given a more permanent assignment.
Detectives and other specialists are generally promoted out of the ranks of police officers.
>> Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo.
I wonder if this isn't part of the problem. Many of the massive open-source blow-ups have been between people who are being paid to do it. It's not like a guy from Red Hat, for example, can just pick a different project to contribute to. His jobs depends on working in these abusive environments. The only way to stop contributing would be to get a different job.
This is a false dichotomy. You can tell people to go away or get better without telling them it'd be better if they'd never been born or wishing violence upon them. I honestly don't have a problem with Linus telling somebody their code is terrible. Linus has often taken it to another level in belittling and abusing the people around him.
Linus has a pattern where his first (or second) reaction to an issue is to START SHOUTING AND NAME CALLING in an attempt to shut down discussion. If the issue blows up he comes back and gives a reasonable, considered response. It's a pattern that's not helpful.
Or outsource some accounting work...
I made a similar mistake once as a manager and experienced this kind of thing more than once as an employee. Certain words like "layoffs" or "merger" are so loaded because employees know that you know more than they do. Even if you think you're being totally transparent, employees are correct to assume that you're holding some things back because you are. It's your job to understand the state and direction of the company and give your employees the information they need to do their jobs. Employees, especially the smart ones, are going to try to infer additional information from what you tell them even when you think you've told them everything they need to know. Leaders need to be aware that a certain amount of "Kremlinology" happens in every company.
He made things worse by being vague about the company's real situation and contradicting himself a couple sentences later when he said, "...we'll survive (though not with much headroom..." If he's talking about layoffs, who is this "we"? Everybody? Rand and Sarah? If you're going to be transparent, you also need to be specific and direct. A better approach might have been, "Sarah and I modeled out some worst-case scenarios last week and this stretches our break-even point an extra six months, which will constrain our growth."
It's a small sample size, but I think Minecraft is destined to be a kids' game with a minority of adult enthusiasts. (That's not necessarily bad--Lego and Pokemon fit that description, too.)
I don't think there's the revenue growth potential in Minecraft like there is in Instagram. On the other hand, Mojang made $330 million in revenue and $129 million in profit last year. They can probably hold on to those margins because their sales system doesn't share revenues with retailers or distributors (or Valve, Google, or Apple for that matter).
The interesting question is whether Minecraft has legs to continue selling for ten or twenty more years. I think it might. I know lots of parents that don't let their kids play video games except for Minecraft. When I pick my kids up from school, I always see a handful of kids wearing Minecraft shirts and carrying Minecraft lunch boxes. It could become like Lego--a toy that's viewed as educational and beneficial by parents.
If I was Microsoft, I'd do two things: First, I'd work on performance and clean up the presentation a bit, especially on the loading screens and menus. Second, I'd roll out a service to make it easy for parents to set up a locked-down server for their kids. You wouldn't believe the number of parents who have asked me for help in setting up a Minecraft server for their kid and his/her friends. I finally stopped showing them because it's too complicated for them to keep running. A service that cost $4.95/month and was reputable, simple, and secure could make a killing.
It has to do with the way we train people to write books as opposed to how we train people to make video games. English degree programs often spend as much time on literary theory as they do on the practical aspects of composition. Most CS and video game design programs are almost entirely practical. I think this has allowed literature to move alongside and even in front of the culture at large while video games lag the rest of the culture.
Maybe this explains why we've gotten used to plenty of topics and themes in books that are still stunning in video games. Think about how shocking it was to some people that we could play a gay character in Fable or Bully. Nobody even notices when a best seller has a gay protagonist.