rnugent

Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.

Find a product manager in the business to champion you. There are many regional meet ups for product management professionals such as this - http://www.svpma.org/

Just emailed you with a great opportunity to stretch your skills and make a mark for yourself in the consumerization of enterprise software, one of the hottest markets for designers today.

I had lasik in my late 40s and , while I had great medium and long range vision results, I could not see thing 3 feet in front of me - including a computer monitor. Now I have to carry glasses everywhere I go to read a newspaper, smart phone, labels and so on. If you're 40 or over be careful or you might trade one problem for another...

We have an interesting and challenging web application that needs a bit of redesign. I promise this will stretch your skills to new highs!

Ray

Older founders are more likely to tell you to shove your advice. Hence insecure investors choose an audience they can control more easily.

We take PDFs and convert them to XML, CSV or put them in a DB and provide an access API. Can anyone think of a use case for this type of system?

It's not what you know, it's who you know. Invest in your network and everything else will fall into place.

This article is so wrong, on so many levels it's hard to imagine that this was in a respected newspaper. The idea that some folks should not go to college is, at best, quaint. This reason that people attend college varies a great deal. Not everyone looks at it as a means to a financial end (otherwise there would only be several majors - Finance, Medicine, Law, Engineering). Do you think an English Lit major expects a job at Goldman Sachs upon graduation? Educators are suggesting this because they are dealing with a wave of unprepared Freshman and it costs them more money to teach remedial classes and then risk these folks dropping out. This is a "business" problem for the higher education industry. Wait, think about that phrase, "Higher Education Industry". College has become a big business. No longer do Universities exist to educate our population, they are now a for profit business. In California, it's easier to be admitted to a public university if you're from out of state than if you're a resident because the schools can charge more for out of staters.

The problem is that funding for K-12 schools has dwindled leaving our US grown kids unprepared for the riggers of university. At the same time the Higher Education Industry is looking for the highest profit students to attend and they are coming from out of state and out of this country. That leaves us with a workforce that is not home grown and a culture that underachieves.

Just looked up this company on Glassdoor. As I suspected this jerk has created a company culture of suspicion and hate. He himself is not respected by his team as is proved by his abysmal rating. As a potential employee I'd take one look at this review and head for the hills. An example -

"“Lord of The Flies Meet Corporate America.”

Pros

Product works well and is fully supported by a highly skilled team. Some positions offer work from home.

Cons

Management plays favorites for their friends and plays immature games. Nothing you shouldn't expect from a company that had a fight club. Overall the upper management doesn't seem to care about their employees rather tech support or sales. Constant turn over in the sales department lead by myopic management team. You will love the atmosphere with your coworkers but despise the management for their lack of respect and unethical conduct.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat your employees with respect. You can not expect your customers and channel to respect you when you constantly cut good people from your team. I would advise the executive team to seriously look at their management who has regular turnover. Sometimes its the process not the person."

This ain't Baseball, it's a horrible result. I would NEVER hire a manager or leader that fired a full 1/3 of his hire. It just shows a lack of any kind of management skill and behavior like this will quickly tell your remaining 2/3rds that you are not very good at management. They will leave soon thereafter. Now, I realize that a lot of the folks on YN are young and probably thrust into their first management role without any training or mentorship. Best advice I can give is to NOT discount the generations of study on this topic and try to make shit up on your own. Read a few books on how to motivate and make employees more productive and you'll be a lot more successful than the idiot blog author

Exactly! This concept of "firing" is the purview of assclowns. People that have no management skill yet who lust after director or VP titles after a year in the industry. These people are doomed to building small things. Small companies, small product, small careers. You better wake up and realize the world is made up of people not code.

2 years Nope, didn't apply as I'm not 22 Nope again. They aren't exactly funding many companies right now... www.smartscalesystems.com

There are no absolutes. Sometimes early is good. Sometimes not. Next Question?

Except that is NOT what happens. Take the case of a large Chinese network company that now competes with Cisco. This company stole intellectual property from Cisco via a corrupt Indian software engineer. This code formed the basis for a company, funded by the communist government, that is now quite large and succesful. This is not a case of innovation but, rather, Industrial Espionage.

The problem US companies have to worry about (and by extension US workers) is not a hyper-innovative third would. We have to worry about unfair competition from places like India and China. Dear Professor, would you kindly address that in your next "research" paper?

Why can't the venture capital go there. Every article on Venture these days says American VCs are looking overseas more than here. Surely they'll find the best and brightest with great ideas and can invest at a better exchange rate by keeping entrepreneurs local. We have more than enough innovation in this country. Our problem is once the idea is proven we can't make an industry out of it without being undercut.

Geez, I had a similar experience with a guy named Ryan. I think this is some rouge clown masquerading as a lot o different people.

This is great except one still has to manage on a machine by machine basis. Not scalable. Why do we move the ball forward with cloud computing only to go right back to old habits?

1/5th of the worlds population. 0/5ths of the worlds killer apps. Nothing of any value has come from India or Indian nationals.Except more Indian Nationals...

India is a factory, nothing more. In this context this clown is right. No US Grad is employable as a mindless drone code monkey. We train our Grads to think on their feet, question the status quo, innovate and create. 1 Billion Indians and you will you will NEVER find one of those.

This is a really good idea. VCs sort of do this but they exact to high a price. YC sort of does this but they are more focused on funding. Then there are the legions of consultants that do some part of this but not the whole thing.

The H-1B program has been discredited by study after study. US Innovation did not suddenly begin with the presence of foreign "talent". Indeed if you examine the impact of this talent in their own countries you'll see that there is very little innovation coming from those geographies when the talent is there. Think about it, why would a country encourage it's most skilled to come to the US in the first place? Because the best talent in the world is right here and they want their citizens to gather knowledge from the most innovative system and bring it back home. The H-1B program exports our most valuable resource - our competitive edge.

This article is about age discrimination in high technology. It suggests a number of reasons for it not the least of which is foreign immigration under the flawed H1B program. Other causes are that young people promote it and try to justify it with all the the above arguments. Each of you are complicit in this and will, in time, fall victim to it.

What did you figure you'd do when you turn 35?

First of all forget the "humble" requirment. Anyone that is senior and has crew knows what his value is and is not going to be impressed with a suit.

Second, if you have a M$FT based idea then you're in the right place. If not you need to look at California. That's where the rest of the talent is.

Lastly, avoid the offshore crowd. They will pick your pocket as sure as if you where there in person. There is no such thing as a $10/hour software engineer

Why do you need servers on the West Coast?

Ray

yes