spaghetti

You're right about the money being at the traditional app stores. I'm trying to think ahead and see if this will change.

The enforcement of Apple's "guidelines" for apps harm developers' ability to make money on the app store far beyond porn. I have a non-porn, totally above-bar app that serves a niche that makes $n/day. I re-skinned my app to serve a different, larger niche and it was rejected multiple times for bizarre, ambiguous reasons. If this second app were in the store today I would be making more money. I'd bet my income would be at least 2 * $n/day from the apps combined.

Indeed the feeling of safety from the app store is important. However I'd rephrase your last sentence as "If you can find a way to make the "free and open" system seem safe enough that average users believe it's safe then you have a winner".

I'd love to see control of the "mobile space" be in the hands of individuals instead of large, for-profit and often evil companies. Clearly mobile computing is here to stay. If it wasn't then companies like apple and google wouldn't be fighting so hard for control.

Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate. I suppose the major challenge is getting all the non-geeks into this ecosystem and away from iTunes and other privately owned app stores.

This is obviously wishful thinking. However given the importance of mobile computing going forward I think it's worth imagining the best mobile ecosystem possible.

Interesting. +1 for sharing actual numbers as that helps the learning process along quite a bit imo.

Indeed. Glad it's not a Friday!

I found the "myspace" trend interesting: https://www.google.com/trends/?q=myspace

Perhaps the facebook trend so far is a repeat of the myspace trend through mid-2007.

By what percentage did you increase your initial investment? I'm just curious about trading options in general. Would be interesting to learn how holding onto your postition for that time period paid off.

This is unfortunate. I worked like crazy yesterday to get a build out only to be thwarted early morning by this. Just FYI it seems like distributing an ad hoc build without validating doesn't work. The app won't run on the device.

The only bridges that were burned were from the candidate to the company. In other words the company made the mistake. Not the candidate.

Having a blanket policy on not walking out of interviews is ridiculous. The manner in which one walks out makes all the difference. The rockstar you mentioned probably walked out the wrong way. Namely sulking, pouting and not saying anything. The right way is to be polite, clear and concise. It's exactly what the company does when they think it's not working out.

Think about this from an employer's perspective. Someone cutting the interview short actually piques my interest. This is especially true if they pass all the technical interviews. I'd probably follow-up with them and see if they were interested in contract or part-time work. On the other hand I don't look too highly upon candidates that just sit through all the interviews by default. I want someone who will speak up, be confident etc.

Your first sentence implies that the interviewee wasn't acting professionally. I didn't get this impression from the post. It sounded like he just politely tried to end the interview process. Without more details and perhaps both sides of the story it's a mistake to label his behavior as inept.

You make a good point about moving careers forward. Gaining a useful industry contact is probably worth putting up with just a few hours of unwanted technical interviews (which are good, free practice like you said). This is true even if the culture is not a good fit. However the company was hostile and rude. They should have calmly and casually abided by the interviewee's request then followed-up with a non-confrontational email. The company's behavior during the interview process (when they should be on their best behavior) makes me highly doubt their value as a useful industry contact going forward.

It's 100% fine to end the interview early as the OP did. The interviewers/hr will end the interview early the moment they're sure it won't work out.

The fact that the interviewers acted rudely is a great sign that it's an awful place to work. Would be nice if the company were named so others can avoid interviewing there.

Memoization and dynamic programming come together in top down DP algorithms. These are also referred to as recursion with memoization. The recursive function often looks something like:

    f(arguments) {
        results = memoTable[arguments]

        if(results) // use results
        else
            results = // expensive recursive call to f
            memoTable[arguments] = results
    }

My suspicion is that EA has relationships with all sorts of overseas shops that do things like testing, artwork, prototyping etc. Part of PopCap's integration into EA is leveraging these low-cost service providers.

Would be nice if the article actually defined head count. Is it just full-time employees in Seattle? What about part-time employees and employees in Dublin? If the artwork for a game is completed by a team on contract in Bangalore is the "head count" temporarily increased to include those workers? What if they're only part-time? What if they outsource the work to an even cheaper local service provider?

My point is "head count" is vaguely defined if at all. I think this all boils down to "we can do the work for less money with other people or less people."

The "social web" is no where near as important as search. Imagine removing search from the net. Now imagine removing Facebook or other social networking sites. The difference is staggering.

I'd be interested to take a look at the research you've done. Either way your mission/goals are admirable and I wish you good luck!

Good point about the expiration. If I was betting on the $17 figure I would buy options that expire in a few months. The 48 cents was just a conservative number to throw out there (value of puts w/ $17 strike price would probably be higher if the stock is significantly below the strike).

I'm all for improving performance in the workplace. Many businesses desperately need it. However I feel like this product is striving to be a faster horse instead of tackling the underlying issue. Namely that performance reviews of any type can be gamed. Doesn't matter if they're every six months or every ten minutes.

I think performance reviews can be eliminated entirely. VPs that are in charge of products could be evaluated on how much revenue their product brings in. VPs could have the power to fire anyone working under them. Same with the managers working under the VPs.

The idea is to motivate employees to achieve one thing: bringing in more revenue (which is the goal of all for-profit companies anyways). There's no need to slice and dice the "performance" into pieces. Just empower people and measure revenue.

I've always been curious about trading options. It seems like now is a good time to buy the FB120818P00017000 put for example. I honestly don't see the downside to this. That option is trading at $4 for a block of 100. So investing $400 get's you 10000 options. If the price of the stock dips below $17 the option could trade at 48 cents in which case you've turned $400 into $2400 (minus transaction fees and taxes). On the other hand you could lose your $400 which isn't that bad. What's are the downsides here that I'm missing?

Only if you're doing a lot of string parsing. Just like learning about algorithms on graphs is a must only if you're working with graphs of a non-trivial size.

The iOS app review process is insanely long. So long that I started and released my first Android app while waiting for an iOS app to be reviewed.

FWIW there's some ways of mitigating the iOS review times. For example my apps download a small XML config file whenever they start up or come back from the background. So I can turn on/off features in the app remotely. Of course this requires the features to come bundled with the app. IMO it's worth it if you want to iterate.

Citing examples isn't necessarily rude. Present it like impartial analysis. That helps the audience actually learn something from the article.

Yeah it would be nice for the article to compare and contrast, say, Instagram and Color. The author could probably cite Color for an example supporting his argument. However Instagram is a notable counter-example that needs to be addressed.

This could be an opportunity for Google to leverage the strength of their maps product. Why not just ignore the iOS Google maps app? This would motivate me to switch to Android since the Google maps app is in my top three. Perhaps only second to phone and email. I'm feeling apprehensive about the iOS 6 update given what I've heard about Apple's maps.

When I mention this I receive the response "Google will just make their own iOS app." I'm skeptical given the history of their Gmail app.

Serious question: why do app developers choose iOS over Android today? I vaguely recall reading about developers having trouble with paid apps on Google Play. Any other reasons?

I was a hardcore Apple fan for the first few years of the app store. However the novelty of the iOS polish that Android is partially missing (but slowly gaining) has long since worn off.

The iOS app review process is astronomically fucked. I've had apps rejected for comically ambiguous reasons such as "app is just a website re-packaged as an app". Right. IMO one can argue this for many apps. I've had apps rejected because "app doesn't use enough native iOS functionality" when the app uses the accelerometer/gyroscope and all sorts of UIKit features.

The review process is also hilariously inconsistent. I've had re-skins of my own apps, that are live in the app store, that have solid 5-star reviews across 100s of users, that have 100k+ downloads rejected.

On a more positive note the Android development experience has been pretty decent so far. Porting a relatively simple iOS app took about two weeks. This time span includes reading the docs, getting a physical device and downloading the app from Google Play.

I've been doing iOS development since the start of the app store. However the "nuances" like provisioning profiles mess, $99/year fee and painfully long review process are getting really old.

You're right that no one is forcing the people to work the long hours. However imo programmers and gamers are often naive. Spending high school and college working alone or with friends of a similar mind-set can prevent someone from seeing the "real world" aka MBA-types who prefer making money to advancing interesting technology. So while no one is forcing the employees to work themselves into the ground there's still something to be said about cunning non-technical leadership taking advantage of 18-22 year old naive programmers.

Good question. I wonder what a good strategy would be for figuring out the near optimal pricing plan? The strategy would need to start off w/o painting yourself into a corner. In other words the initial pricing can't constrain future pricing adjustments by much. Also you'd want a strategy that allows for frequent adjustment down the road. Something like the Google "search algorithm" frequent tweaking.

Perhaps an increasing sequence of additional tiers could work? Start with just free. Then free or $10. Then free or $10 or $25 and so on. This avoids users feeling like they've been punished for being an early-adopter. Also users who aren't happy with their current tier can simply upgrade.

Here's an idea that's only partially a joke: segment the user-base by yearly membership fees. Have the free tier, $10/year, $100/year and $1000/year. All tiers are 100% quarantined from each other.

There's upsides for Twitter: when 90% of my friends get the $100 plan there's a huge incentive for me to do the same. When all of my friends keep the free plan then there's no incentive for a loser like me to pollute the higher Twitter echelons.

Might be some tricky cases where I follow a celebrity who has the $1000 plan.

I know these ideas sound ridiculous. However considering the mainstream nature of these services and peoples' insatiable appetite for competition and one-upping each other it could work out. The prices for each tier would probably need some iteration to get closer to some global maximum.

Also I wonder if this could work for Facebook?

First of all my advice is go for it. Don't let pre-conceptions about age hold you back. In my last job the older engineers were far more talented and productive than the younger fresh-out-of-college or college drop-outs.

Another thought: younger engineers are sometimes preferred simply because they're teeming with naive energy. When I think of hiring someone who I know will spend majority of their time grinding down a mountain of technical debt who do I look for? A naive 20-something college drop-out who will work themselves to the bone for 80k, beer and foosball? Or a 40 year old pro who's been through a successful acquisition, has enough money to not have to work and will figure out in about 2 days how lame the founders are for letting the technical debt grow into such a monstrosity?

The article reminded me of a thought I had regarding FB's monetization strategy: strictly local advertisements. The ad matching algorithm would place the most weight on geographical distance then interests etc. FB's ubiquitous nature today could make this work.

Here's a use case that motivated the idea: I live in a densely populated area where everyone around me has a car. Say I wake up to a flat tire. I'd much rather pay someone $20 to just fix it in 10 minutes than get the car towed or figure out how to do it myself. Imagine searching for "fix spare tire" on Facebook and receiving search results for five people that all live with-in two blocks. Choose a person, agree to pay with cash, they show up and fix the tire.

The service FB provides in this example has real value. If this service existed I'd actually use Facebook, take a good look at the ads and perhaps even pay a small monthly fee.

To use an over-used term I see this as "the Airbnb of everything else". It could be applied to simple plumbing tasks like fixing the toilet (which was a real pain-in-the-ass to figure out). It could even apply to borrowing vacuum cleaners! The point is there's under-utilized resources around people. Imagine FB helping people utilize these resources like Airbnb helps people utilize extra living space.