Other candidates apply with 0 development experience - their resume frames them as "project managers" or "Search engine specialist" with no development related prior experience anywhere. I feel I wasted my time everytime I go through one of those.
2,323 karma · joined August 11, 2012
Other candidates apply with 0 development experience - their resume frames them as "project managers" or "Search engine specialist" with no development related prior experience anywhere. I feel I wasted my time everytime I go through one of those.
Honestly, if you'd seen the kind of resumes we received you would not think most candidates put any effort at all. Like another person said here, it looks like most of them are spamming all job listing on those sites.
I'm not a hiring manager, but as the CTO I do review a lot of resumes incoming for technical positions we are hiring for.
The vast majority of applicants do not appear to be taking any time at all aside from selecting their resume to upload and clicking submit. It doesn't seem like they even read the job requirements, since 90% of them do not meet the minimal requirements we post. Some of them are not even developers, but they apply for a developer position.
If someone does appear to be relevant and did also include a cover letter relevant to the position, I will respond, regardless if they're a fit or not.
For me the biggest pain is the sheer amount of irrelevant submissions, which makes you numb after a while. This is why I don't believe in job postings anymore and mostly do headhunting.
Hope this helps!
You can see hundreds of videos out there of police shooting people without apparent just cause - just because they "felt threatened". If they had the confidence they could deal with a physical confrontation if needed, I'm certain the amount of unnecessary shootings would decrease significantly.
Instead of passing stupid legislation (anyone who's used firearms extensively knows aiming for limbs is not realistic, you have to aim for center-mass), they should work on improving ongoing officer training and conditioning so that officers would feel much more comfortable controlling a suspect without killing them.
We are building a monetization platform for open-source, through dual-licensing and customization / integration services. We are a 10 person team, funded and generating revenue.
We are looking for help with marketing, content and community. You must have experience with software development, either in a technical or managerial role, and a strong understanding of the software development cycle. Compensation is market competitive + equity depending on background and experience.
If this sounds interesting, please get in touch at http://www.binpress.com/jobs/positions
I thought the top comment below reflected what I have seen in my 10 years in the industry, much better:
" This is a very well written piece, but it's only covering the frothy tip of a very deep phenomenon. I too am a Rails developer, have been coding professionally for 15 some odd years, and I too find what VCs are chasing nowadays to be mostly time wasting crap. But that's not what software, even web software, is really about right now. It's just the glam side of the game.
The real folks making real things happen are building tools and technologies that literally could not have existed 10 years ago. In my personal experience, I've built integrated web portals that show real-time electricity usage for factories, saving them 10-50 grand a month by lowering usage during peak hours. I've built sales management tools that allowed a 2 man company to scale to a distributed team of dozens. Online rental advertising systems to cut out costly newspapers. Medical order management systems.
It's not glamorous, it doesn't get on TechCrunch or Hacker News, but it's real value, delivered by real professionals. And that, more than the stupid photo sharing cruft, is what's really driving developer salaries.
During the late 90's, the joke/threat was "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" - the point being that lots of human work could be automated by a savvy developer. That threat has become a promise, and we (costly) web developers are the ones fulfilling that promise across a huge range of industries." - Rob Morris
If you're pitching to investors, a few things need to be sharpened / clarified -
* You say "0 marketing spend" - which most investors will call bullshit on that. Typically, what you really mean is that you spent nothing on ads. Unless you consider your time as worthless, you probably spent quite a bit on marketing. Even if you have the most viral product in the world, you need to kickstart it until it reaches critical mass. Investors want to know that you've given some thought on how to scale that operation (and not that you'll spend 0 on marketing going forward).
* Regarding marketing, you briefly mention that user acquisition is built into the product. You need to elaborate a little bit on that, cause right now it's not clear how that is the case.
* Dates on the x-axis of the user growth graph would be helpful. Did that growth happen mostly after the public launch or during the closed beta? most people would assume the latter unless you tell them otherwise.
* At the end you briefly group together your recruiting needs and fundraising goals. Depending on the audience, I would focus on one. If fundraising interest is the goal of the pitch, put a dedicated slide on that, and move the hiring part to a footnote on the team slide. If it's the reverse, do the opposite.
* I would make the contact details at the end way larger, and move it higher. In addition, it's always good practice to put the name of the company, a tagline and basic contact details in the header of every slide - for people who lost concentration, or want to put a note for themselves before you reach the last slide. Btw, it should be in header and not the footer, because sometimes people's heads obscure the bottom of the deck during presentations (depending on how the seats are arranged). That is also why you should move the contact details at the end higher, just in case.
* Again, investor audience only - add a slide about the market / opportunity size. Especially if you're aiming for a series A round, which typically means venture capital.
Hope this helps!
We are also in touch with the OSI for creating a 100% open-source compatible license of our own that could be officially sponsored by them. It's been a slow process, but we hope to get it done in the near future. Our own license was created with the help of copyright lawyer that has dedicated his professional life to supporting and advocating open-source. It is a compromise between closed-source / commercial and fully open-source (what we call "commercial open-source"). For many purposes, it is less restrictive than the GPL (no stipulation on releasing your source if you modify and distribute on other formats), which makes it more attractive to businesses building commercial products (for example, iOS application, which cannot use GPL).
Hope that makes sense!
The one you linked to only allows binary distribution. This is how those projects support themselves, by offering tiers of pricing depending on the user needs. We just require that at least one of the licenses allows redistribution of the source. So I'm understanding that by your world-view, Open-Core projects are not open-source? or that open-source can only be used if sanctioned by the OSI? I'm afraid that no one has monopoly on that term. It means different things to different people. We call our products "Commercial open-source", which you can find the usage of which on the web and wikipedia as well. Most projects on GitHub do not have a license, which means they are copyrighted by default. We vet licensing for each project on our site, to make sure there are no copyright or licensing breaches, and provide a range of licensing options to fit the developer POV. Not sure where all the hate is coming from.
I don't think it's that surprising that our most popular projects use our own licenses instead of FOSS licenses. Most people care about results and access to the code, and not whether the license was generated by the OSI or the FSF. You can go over our licenses and provide commentary if you feel the need to do so - but please don't accuse us of doing something we don't.
> open source doesn't necessarily mean "anyone can edit it and improve it".
I think you missed the point in the article - it was about how anyone can create or contribute to open-source. Not about submitting patches to existing projects and have them pulled upstream without any review process.
Maybe development is not for you - you might have the talent for it, but not the discipline required to constantly deliver working code. Only the first is not sufficient to be called a "great" developer. In fact, I would say that in most cases discipline and dedication are more important than raw talent. I have worked from home for a couple years, and yes, the temptation is there to put aside work on some days and just watch TV or play a game. And sometimes I did. But having discipline meant I knew I would make for those hours - later in the day or on the weekend if I had to, since I made a conscious choice to do something else.
About us
We are building a platform that helps developers build sustainable businesses around open-source and cultivate the next Red-Hat and MySQL. We are a small team of 7 located in Mountain View (some remote).
What we're looking for
* We are looking for an experienced content producer to join our team as our content marketer. You should have experienced in producing and directing the production of many forms of content, including articles / posts, podcasts, videos and infographics. Experience with producing developer related content is a big plus. This job can be remote if very qualified.
* A junior marketer - a person who has the marketing bug but not the experience. You are a doer and a quick learner. You will be working with our marketing team to implement our marketing plan, learning the full stack of marketing approaches. This position is onsite in our Mountain View offices.
If you are interested in what we do and in the intersection of open-source and commercial software, please get in touch through our jobs page - http://www.binpress.com/jobs/positions
They could distribute their code without your library, as you say, but that would require more hassle from the end-user, especially if there's some configuration / integration process that is required to make both work together.
The important information is (mostly) private - revenue, users, conversion, CPA, LTV, etc. Guess what - if you want to invest in private companies, you should be talking to founders and get the actual information.
Going back to the NASDAQ comparison - publicly traded companies have had market analysis software for years, and it hasn't been very good at predicting stock prices, even though there is much more information available, and historical data about a very important metric - stock price. Doing the same for private companies with the important data missing would produce the kind of results you can expect from it.
Having said that, the rule of thumb is that you want at least 12 months of runway, and that's at the rate you want to go at. It takes typically around 6 months (if things go well) to raise VC money (unless they come to you - which is pretty rare).
From what I understood, Groove had 8 months at the current runway - before hiring the additional people they want to bring on board. That's typically when you start raising before you go into the danger zone with your runway. Also, considering the current perceived drought of Series-A funding, a $5M offer for a business generating $16k monthly is an outlier.
Of course, I hope Groove does well and never needs this money. Also, it's possible the deal terms were not favorable, though it's not mentioned specifically in the post. If that was not the case, in my opinion they had a chance to significantly derisk their business and they choose not to take it. Time would tell if their gamble pays off or not.