switch11

This is a very interesting comment so will add some thoughts to this

WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (or organization).

* agreed 100%

-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?

* yes, for people who don't know how stuff works, company culture, how to get things done

this is very bad

-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

* pretty sure there are more parents who wish they could WFO than want to work from home and also homeschool their kids

-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.

* depending on company 'coasters' can be 20% to 70%. For all of them WFH is superb because no one knows whether they are working hard or coasting. All their tricks like having certain things set up and certain screens on their monitors etc. - not needed any more

-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.

highly focused developers who like to shut off everything. WFH is great

Except the PM/Project Manager/Tech Lead goes crazy because then developers start making what they find interesting and there is no way to keep them on track

-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.

* yea, this is absolutely terrible for anyone who has a leadership role

much of the work you get done is by leadership, and sometimes by leadership by force of personality or by 'created' consensus

good luck getting that in a WFH scenario

*

The real test of WFH will be when we see how companies that choose WFH after Coronoavirus, do compared to companies that go back to WFO

lots of tech companies are slobbering at the thought of cutting out office costs and paying employees less

my money is on such companies getting trounced by teams that work together and interact in an office environment

Right now we are in the honeymoon phase of work from home and very few (if any) real products are being launched that were started after coronavirus forced work from home

let's see how people feel in a year or two

It just takes 1 or 2 lazy people to bring down an entire product launch. WFH makes it very hard to figure out who these slackers are, and even harder to cover up their mistakes/flaws

Mythical Man Month is even more dangerous when WFH scenarios are involved

interesting - read a lot of good things about you at the New Publishing blog

that guy thinks you are going to be very big

all the best. We sure need more people doing ebooks and audiobooks. Amazon is @#$#$ authors with all their exclusivity requirements and insanely high cut that they take

I agree 100% with you

Have worked as both PM and developer and now run my own very small software company

A) two years senior engineer is like one of those consulting companies where everyone in 2 years becomes DIRECTOR

B) In two years most new programmers have not even gotten their heads out of their asses

C) You should refer to Outliers

10,000 hours to master a task

And to that add

10,000 hours to make your first masterpiece

D) Even if you have managed to get 10,000+ hours of coding experience in high school and college and somehow become a very good programmer (which less than 3% of CS grads do)

it will still take you 6 to 10 years to get another 10,000 hours of working on masterpieces and making really good software that you can ship and make money from

E) a title like 'Senior Software Engineer' should be reserved for someone who has MADE and SHIPPED and GENERATED MONEY from a very good piece of software or some software product

F) Personally, I would think any company handing out Senior Software Engineer titles after 2 years is a joke

Between all the places my friends and college mates and I have worked (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, etc. etc) I can't think of any place that handed out Senior Software Engineer like it was candy

Even very, very good programmers had to EARN IT

Very interesting comment

I'll try and give my perspective as someone who has spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on Google Adwords and also gets a lot of organic traffic from them, and also does a lot of work on Apple Apps and Android Apps

*

you wrote:

TekMol 22 hours ago [–]

I think their idea is to combine that with signing the bundles, so a page from www.someserver.com can be served by anyone, aka Google. I guess this would mean Google can serve all content on the web.

There seems to be a strong urge in Google to cut the connection between then endpoints of the web and become the central authority. Make all traffic flow through their machines. Let no information arrive at the endpoints.

Right now, requests on the web are kind of p2p. A user requests a website, the publisher serves it any way they see fit. Directly via their servers or via a CDN of their choice.

Google seems to have a strong focus on ending this. Turning the web into Googlebook / AOLoogle.

I wonder why. Do they see their business model threatened on the open web? Or do they see a chance to increase their profit with a closed web?

@#$#$

@#$#$

OK, so think of Google as

THE STARTING POINT that everyone uses for the Internet

There are 3 critical things required

A) Trust

B) Efficiency

C) No other starting points

Now, Google's problem is that it knows (like all technology companies) that things change very fast in technology

look at Facebook having to buy Instagram and then WhatsApp and then having to GovernmentAttack TikTok and not being able to buy Snap chat

Google, on the other hand, has a very serious issue

A) Its main 'starting point competitors' are not 'buyable' or 'governmentAttackable'

It is Amazon for starting point for shopping, Facebook for starting point for 'people who think the Internet is Facebook', and then new competitors like completely different search methodologies and vertical search engines that are not even 'search engines' but take away Google position

B) It has been following a policy of 'shift everything to google properties'

This creates worsening search results

this leads to a loss of trust and efficiency

Efficiency is really hampered because now a typical search engine user is spending 60% of their time avoiding 2nd quality Google products, to find the remaining 40% and then sort through those to find THE BEST OPTION

C) See, the thing is, that to shift everyone on to Google properties, Google is not just throwing lots of Google results in search, it is also hiding the BEST of BREED services or plain stealing their data (like Yelp and Genius)

D) Trust is further eroded with so much spying and anti privacy

*

So Google is in this very unique situation where it has to do EXTREME measures

such as

try and shift everyone to AMP

try and shift everyone to Web Bundles

try and shift everyone to No Tracking Allowed except by Google

Think of someone who had the biggest trade port between two continents. And they make a TON of money

Then other ports started showing up

So what is their option?

buy up all the ports? what if that is not possible? What if peeping tom Facebook is not willing to sell their port?

then Google knows that sooner or later its port will become one of many and goodbye profits. Then they start pretending - only safe way to cross the ocean is on our ships. So EVERYONE can cross only on our ships

Very similar to FB being scared and starting Internet.org. Best way to eliminate competitors - control the ENTIRE internet and you choose who can be shown

by the way Tesla with StarLink and Amazon with Kuiper are also in position to do this (and not sure Tesla but Amazon definitely would)

turn the Internet into a Pay to Play zoo

*

There are lots of other signs too

1) Google click quality is down

2) amount of click fraud is going up

we see clicks coming from Google Servers. on customer service they admit a certain percentage are fake whenever we see fake clicks, they will still charge us and then (on their own) do a token refund

So we see $100 of fake clicks. 12 hours later there is a token $5 refund for fake clicks (they use some other term, will have to check what)

2) amount of organic traffic you get depends on who much you spend

3) If you spend less, then they start showing negative results in organic search to affect sales from people coming to you anyways

Google has already crossed the inflection point. Unless they can magically buy FB and/or Amazon they are basically dead

Just to elaborate on that

They are squeezing every little bit out, even using lots of wrong methods to do that, becoming less and less value

MANY verticals people have switched COMPLETELY to FB and other advertising

Google is still good for many, many areas. However, they are so saturated and so inefficient at giving you bang for the buck, it's crazy

Meanwhile, FB will let you do anything you want to FB users, provided you pay them enough

So for advertisers who don't mind such a set up, FB is 10 times better

* A lot of Google advertising money is INERTIA

It's unfortunate that TikTok is getting ticktocked. Otherwise it would have eaten massively into Google's earnings

Google also has very high costs to remaing 'default' in the web browsers

They're paying Apple $10 billion a year to be default search

Apple should give them a fitting gift for them stealing iPhone ideas and design for Android and build its own search engine. Google market cap would halve within a year if Apple did that

yes, it is

Firstly, the whole 60 days thing is NONSENSE

Your status ends ASAP. The day your job is ended

Secondly, getting H1B transferred is not automatic. You have to get lawyers and have to get it approved

Thirdly, now with so much talk of H1B being ended, and slow approvals, who will take the chance

Fourthly, most H1B are India and China. Both countries' tech firms and countries in general are being attacked by US Government as 'taking US jobs' etc

So all those H1Bs are particularly worried

H1B is basically bonded labor

everyone fixates on - you are taking US jobs and bad mouths them

they are coming here (to the West) to get a good life for themselves

If they do anything that their employer doesn't like, they are screwed and must go back to their home country and give up on their American Dream

*

To give you an idea of how crazy it is, I got a 44% salary increase when switching jobs (H1B to H1B)

That's life as an H1B. You are usually being paid 40% to 60% less than comparable skilled Americans

*

It is a system set up to HEAVILY FAVOR companies. That's why FB, Goog, Etc are screaming about 'competitiveness' . What they really want is

underpaid, trapped, bonded labor who have no choice when it comes to where they work

With extra long H1B and Green Card approval, they are getting 22 to 28 year olds who will have to work for them for 10 to 14 years (if India or China)

What company wouldn't want such amazing terms for hiring people

People don't understand the whole reason behind fake reviews not being removed

Let's go through a series of questions

A) Will lower review ratings lead to less sales at Amazon or more sales at Amazon?

B) will clear division between 'best in class' products and inferior products give Amazon more monopoly control over the market, or less?

C) Will the difficulty in getting easy fake reviews get more people to jump into selling things at Amazon or less?

Amazon needs a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation

That more and more small businesses jump in, generate sales using fake reviews, and give Amazon its cut

This in terms makes existing businesses smaller and more dependent on Amazon

They basically want 1 million companies each making $100,000 to $1 million a year at Amazon

Commoditization, so whoever Pays Amazon the most, can be boosted

And these 'pay to play' businesses are INDISTINGUISHABLE from the actual best businesses

*

Their aim is NOT

1) The best companies and the best products sell very well and get the best reviews

2) Customers buy more and more of those products

3) Those companies (providing the best products) become bigger and bigger

Their aim is 'Glorification of the Mediocre' - Commodification and Mediocritization of EVERYTHING

1) Every company's products sell almost the same

2) Companies are dependent more and more on 'advertising' at Amazon

3) Amazon's cut becomes higher and higher

4) An end point where Amazon can take 50% to 75% of what customers pay

Look at Audible and what terms they have there after becoming a monopoly

Same for ebooks where they are close to becoming a monopoly in US and UK

They first want 65% cut (if you don't give them exclusivity)

Then they want ebook and audiobook authors to spend out of their paltry 35% cut - to advertise their product on Amazon

So they are, in effect, asking for a 75% to 90% cut of what customers pay

This 100% -> Few minutes gain is simply not true. Its IMO closer to an hour. Having ability to jump asap to any letter on the screen and any file in the project in few keypresses without browsing trough the tree and son on, is massive speed up. It doesn't just save time, it saves focus.

* would argue that a lot of people who write things like 'it only saves a few minutes a day' have never actually tracked how much time it actually saves

* one good thing worth doing is to get a tool that tracks how much time you spend on different applications and websites during your work day

it will TRANSFORM your understanding of how you use your time

would be surprised if anyone came up with an actual self driving car in the next 2 to 3 decades

you and pretty much everyone else

can't believe the amount of 'wishful thinking can replace science' that Tesla pushes out

and now he has gotten into Neuralink and chips in the brains of pigs stupidness

I'll share a few points here. We've sold over 1 million paid apps. We've gotten to 5 million+ app downloads in 4 additional markets. So the approach is based on what worked and what didn't. However, we don't know how to get to 100 million or even 10 million users as we haven't done it yet. So keep that in mind

Our approach is VERY extreme. So it depends on whether you have the resources and persistence to do it

A) The Market Always Wins/Product Market Fit Always Wins

So every possible project you could do, its success will be determined PRIMARILY by whether the market wants your product or not

Everything else doesn't matter

B) So your approach should NOT be

I have a problem. I solved it for myself by building this app. How do I get users for it

It should be

What is a LARGE market which has a strong need that is UNSERVED

completely forget yourself and focus 100% on users who are dying for a product

In your post and responses there is a massive amount of me-centrism i.e. I'm building, I'm trying, I propose, I'm trying, I made, I contacted. I was hoping. I was wondering. I messaged. I was wondering, I could really use

Where is - Customer needs. Customer demands. Team aims. Do you have a team? or you did it all yourself? Where is your designer and tester? even if you did all the coding yourself?

C) If you build the right product, then getting users is automatic

List of 82 people is around 100 times smaller than it needs to be. Probably 1,000 times smaller. You can't derive any worthwhile data from this

1 out of 24. That's too small a sample size

At best, it gives us no information

At worst, it tells us that out of those 24 people only 1 cared about the product enough to sign up

These are such small data points that you can't learn anything from them

D) Yes, Getting Users is Hard

However, you can make it easier by making something people want and which has little to no competition

The old saying - Be First, Be Best, or Have the Most Money

So, are you the first? No, not really

The Best? depends on how good your app and overall service is

Have the most money? Don't know but would be surprised if you were as your marketing plan seems to be 'tell my friends'

*

E) Another VERY BIG mistake that lots of creators like developers, artists, musicians, etc make is

thinking their friends and family will boost them

For every 1 musician whose friends and family are going to buy 100 albums and give them a tiny boost at the start, there are 999 musicians whose friends and family won't

That is just not a viable business strategy, not even at the start

F) You should be going where your customers are. some forum where people are looking for a way to do quick events

such as knitting groups that are frustrated they can't meet up, or runner groups or bingo or book clubs

Find where they are and ask them to test your product

*

G) I think there is superb value in the people who are telling you that you got some painful feedback right at the beginning, before you had invested half a million and 4 years of your life

Take that feedback to heart

Put this product on hold. You're launching it during a pandemic. It's LITERALLY the worst time to test out such a product

Plus, keep in mind that - YES, you are inviting your users to get Coronoavirus and die or infect their loved ones and they die

This is a SHOCKING amount of lack of consideration for your users

Really, I wrote this for other people. Not for you. You can still benefit from it

Market Always Wins

Have Consideration for the well being of your users. A few companies that don't do that have become very big. However, those are exceptions. Most companies that are very successful provide lots of value to their users and care about their users' well being

I run a startup in Montreal

can attest to that

level of talent is insane

Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal are all blowing up

thank you US for sending all the best techies to Canada

Agreed with this: In fact, Zuckerberg strikes me as someone acting insincerely, making arguments in bad faith, with no regard to civic responsibilities, which makes perfect sense given his self-serving ideals and well-known financial incentives. And I come to that opinion based on his views and actions, notwithstanding the transparent attempts to buy good PR under the guise of philanthropy.

*

The guy has screwed over

1) Winklevoss Twins

2) a few of his co founders

3) Many of his developer partners

4) many of his product's users

5) many competitors via illegal means

*

his entire 'philanthropy plan' is donating to a FOR PROFIT which he owns and which so far is mostly investing in things like EdTech

you have to be a special kind of naive to fall for this BS philanthropy

*

You can tell from initiatives like INternet.org that he really does think most people are dumb f#$#$ who trust him

That is a simplified assumption

everyone starts off human

then money distorts things

I have seen a lot of very honest people get suckered into doing things they never would

once money starts coming in, people's morals change to accommodate how they make money

Not everyone can be like Craig Newmark etc. and be indifferent to money

agreed

yeah, and almost everyone would

You take a normal parent and tell them - This guy from Facebook is going to follow your teenage daughter around high school, the mall, her room, everywhere she goes, and keep a record of every single thing she does on the computer

and they would be running for their guns or their lawyers

Online, Facebook does all that and most people don't even have a clue

agree 100% with you

To me it's a miracle Facebook is allowed to do business given how many scummy things they do

The Western World claims to be honest and transparent and talks a lot about ethics etc

However, you never see stuff like Facebook or the Tik Tok ban in countries like China and INdia which are supposedly riddled with corruption

America it seems corruption is completely OK as long as there is enough bread and circuses for the common people

best of luck

hope it's nothing

my grandfather had something bad around 70, so i'm hoping it's not genetic. anyways, a long time until i have to worry about it

not supposedly, already bought

Warrent Buffett already bought a gold miner

It is a very smart move, tbh

If stocks at some point start falling, everyone will rush even more to precious metals

Agreed totally

there are parts of Microsoft that are also very honest

For that matter there are even divisions within Google that want to do good stuff

However, Amazon, Facebook and 90% of Google are basically just the precursors of The Matrix now

Their ideal is that all people are mindless zombies, living on universal basic income, like vegatbles/animals, and spending all their money on AmazooogleBook

Do you have any data that says it did not?

In general, it's important to figure out this question because

A) People who believe there should be a higher minimum wage tend to believe it has zero impact on businesses' likelihood of cutting jobs

WHEREAS

B) People who believe there should be a free market tend to believe that having a minimum wage reduces jobs

I've never seen either party show Good Data and Stats to prove their point

*

So if you're asking him for data (a good question), you should also be willing to show data

the radical transparency thing is very interesting

When you embrace it, you will definitely piss off a LOT of people

society is all about 'being polite' and 'wearing a mask'

if you stop being polite and stop wearing masks, while still maintaining common courtesy

life becomes MUCH easier

I'll give you an example

2 of your friends have problems which prevent them from having a good relationship

you have a frank talk with them

Hey, Jack, you need to get over your abandonment issues and commit to a woman and marry her. You've passed on some pretty amazing women just because your father walked away when you were 4

Hi Sophie, perhaps the reason you only date losers is that is your type. Perhaps your type is guys who will cheat on you. Perhaps when your mother divorced your father after he cheated on her with her sister, his secretary, and the school principal, you should have realized that's genetically your type. So you can either accept that you are making this choice and be at peace with it, or you CHANGE your decision making process

*

guess what's going to happen

usually, 1 of them will get mad at you, then realize you are right, and then make a change, and then your friendship will be much stronger

and the other will hate you for life. Well not hate you. Will avoid you forever

So that's what radical honesty and radical transparency does

*

of course you have to be prepared for people to also be radically honest with you

you find out things that are painful. Then you have to decide whether you will embrace the honest feedback you are getting or run away from it

he's a good guy

built a good company

AMAZING service

Amazon tends to buy up all the companies that could become a threat to them, and then slowly kills them off (Zappos, Quidsi/Diapers.com, etc)

What Tony could have and should have done is

get someone like Marc Lore and have him expand Zappos to the EVERYTHING store

Zappos customer loyalty was insanely high

precisely the question I had in mind

seems like a good dude. Hopefully he kept most of it

an interesting article

thanks for sharing this

thankfully Kindle is not selling very much (relatively) so it is not a big issue if they collect a lot of data

not sure why your comment is getting down votes

this flurry of IPOs is to take advantage of all the Liquidity the Fed is pumping into the markets

The IPO is the product

Tesla at 1,000 P/E

If you are running a tech company right now, you would have to be crazy to not IPO

you can raise half a billion or a few billion

that buys you 5 to 20 years of life as a company

see above for a very good answer

I'll give my answer

Fed is printing a lot of 'money' with its printing press

some of it is going to large tech because it is 'safe' and still 'growing'

However, there is $3 trillion of money printed, and even more being printed

So, where does this money get put?

Where can it get A RETURN?

Tesla is one answer. That's why Tesla is 1,000 P/E

Another answer is technology companies

Let's say there is Family X, friends of Fed and its printing press

Fed has printed $50 billion for them

Where can they put this $50 billion, so that it doesn't get killed?

A) Big Tech

B) tech that might become big Tech (like Tesla)

C) new tech IPOs

So any tech company that can IPO, should IPO

All this LIQUIDITY/Free Money/Printing Press Money is desperate to find ANY KIND OF RETURN

Also, they have so much money and no where to put it, their thinking is

17 different SaaS companies - at least 1 or 2 will become trillion dollar companies in 15 years

Invest in all 17

They literally 'printed' the money so it costs them nothing

this is super true

we also sell to both single users and to companies

single users will write things like

I will destroy your business

you have no idea how many followers I have

etc etc

A single user with 10,000 followers on Twitter thinks they should be treated like they are GM or GE or Ford

This is a Brilliant comment

I was wondering who was going to hit the nail on the head

LIQUIDITY

-> looking for a return, ANY RETURN

That's why all large tech stocks are booming

that's why Tesla has 1,000 P/E

Anywhere that all this Feb Printing Press Money can park itself, that might be safe and/or give return

IT WILL RUSH TO

Anyone who can IPO, should IPO

Kudos

absolutely great to see you do this

I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts

Anyways

Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.

Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened

They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that

Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google

Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone

Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari

Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either

avoid all google services as mucha s possible

Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games

well, I did find a grant in my own city (Montreal) which I did not know about

so there is some value to it

Grants are so oddly specific

most of the amounts are not game-changing, though

well, might be for someone starting off