thejteam

1)Whatever metric you are looking to determine merit, whether it is University affiliation, GPA, or performance on a coding evaluation, don't think of the result as a single number. Think of it as a range. Even a probability distribution. The mean value of technical merit may be higher but the variance is so large that the metric may be meaningless unless you have a large number of applicants.

2)Whatever metric you are looking at, recognize ahead of time that you might be getting it wrong. So you might want to include a sample of candidates from the rest of the pile just to evaluate your evaluation methods. Unless you are the type of company getting dozens of applications from people at top schools then this shouldn't be a problem.

3)Hiring somebody right out of college is a roll of the dice anyway. No matter what their ability, you have no idea how well they work with other people, how well they listen to instructions, or how well they can handle the grind of the 9-5. Once you get to the interview phase I would look more for maturity than technical merit so long as they meet a minimum acceptable criteria. But I also suppose this depends on what stage your company is at.

I have worked on the writer side rather than the tech side but I have noticed some changes recently. I've seen 1)more obnoxious clients and postings and 2) fewer actual awards being made.

A penny or two a word used to be the bottom end, now that seems to be mid-range and some clients are demanding downwards of half a cent per word or less while at least pretending that they want high quality work.

Needless to say I've spent even less time on there than I used to.

Diamond Age is one of those awesome books where what you get out of it depends on where you are in life. I read it both before children and after children. I enjoyed it both times. But it was a different experience.

SEEKING WORK - MD/VA/DC or remote

Technical Writing. I'm a former software developer turned freelance technical writer. Do you need a user manual developed? Some tutorials? Use Cases for marketing?

But I specialize in white papers for B2B marketing. If your SaaS app is for businesses then you need a white paper as part of your marketing strategy. Contact me at jason@jrsummers.com and we can discuss what I can do for you.

Everything is negotiable. If they present you with an NDA that you aren't comfortable signing then counter with something you are willing to sign. These things are negotiated all the time.

Not that long ago I was presented with a copyright assignment contract that if I signed would allow their lawyers to enter into arbitrary agreements for me without even telling me. I simply emailed them back and asked them to remove that clause. They did without complaint.

And just today I presented a Statement of Work to a client and we exchanged emails over making sure the rights to the work were defined correctly for what they wanted. I had intended to allow them to do what they were asking but my original wasn't clear. So I reworded it so it was clear to everybody.

I would hardly call C "archaic". But that's beside the point. If you are a physics person then the problem will not be learning the language. You will pick up everything you need in a few weeks to a month at most.

In my opinion the hardest part is learning about how a web app is put together and about all the moving parts. I don't know of any good resources for that. Please, somebody chime in with something because that is what is holding me back.

SEEKING WORK - MD/DC/VA or remote

Does your company need better technical marketing material? How about a white paper describing your solution for enterprise customers? A well-written white paper can be used to communicate to business customers the value of your SaaS solution and how it can solve their problems.

I am a technical writer who spent over a decade in software engineering and leading R&D projects before turning my focus to technical writing.

Contact me and we can start a discussion about how my experience and writing skills can help your business.

jason@jrsummers.com

I've read Automated Insights automated summaries of fantasy football games for yahoo. If that is indicative of their capabilities, then the role of human writers looks to be secure for some time to come.

I do some work on Elance as a writer. The only item in my "portfolio" on Elance is a short 500 word piece on why looking at portfolios is worthless. A few reasons:

1)There is some portfolio fraud. Every once in awhile a job listing pops up from somebody who says they are looking to be a freelance writer and need samples for their portfolio. It probably happens even more often but I usually filter out listings from India, etc.

2)At least on the writing side, most Elance clients forbid you to use the work you do for them in your portfolio. This means the work you see is usually work they polished specifically for the portfolio and is not indicative of their normal work.

5 star ratings are a dime a dozen on Elance. At least on the writing side the convention is that anything less than 5 is a serious knock on them. If a person is merely competent then you usually don't leave feedback at all.

And please don't take the advice of the person saying to ask the proposal writer to put a keyword in the proposal. A lot of good people take that as an insult. Do what you do and only look at proposals that address the requirements. That is what my portfolio piece says people should do instead. Look at the strength of the proposal and not the portfolio.

By the way, if you are ever looking for a writer for any of your websites feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.

The source code for the winner of the first competition, iocaine powder, is at http://dan.egnor.name/iocaine.html, along with a good explanation of its algorithm.

It did well in the second competition even after the publication of the algorithm and source code.

For a nerdy take on it, read John Allen Paulos's book "Mathematics and Humor." It has been quite some time since I've read it so I don't remember if there are any practical takeaways, but I remember I enjoyed it.

Keep in mind there is a big difference between doing stand up comedy and writing jokes. Many stand up comics don't write their own jokes and most joke writers don't have the stage presence to be stand up comics. There is also a big difference between a joke intended to be read and a joke intended to be heard.

I knew somebody would have beat me to it.

The one time I encountered this was in 9th grade. The health class teacher wasn't used to people writing good essays. I got an A on the first essay of the year, and she wrote on the paper "Good job, if you actually wrote it."

Her and I did not get along very well that year.

Without knowing anything about your product, I'm going to focus on your last line. "Another issue is our product makes things convenient. It saves money which is a hard thing to sell."

I think you and them might be using a different definition of saving money. If your service replaces several others that they are currently paying for then they are saving money. If you are doing something like making things more efficient then perhaps from an accounting standpoint it is "saving money", but if it is just saving a few hours a week then in practice what you are doing is giving their employees a few extra hours to surf the net. You have to quantify real, actual dollar savings or real, actual sales increases.

You also mentioned a competitor. Are the people you pitching to using your competitor? If not, then they probably also think your competitors are too expensive. If you really are better and cheaper then try pitching to people who use your competitor and see what happens.

In addition to the comments about liability coverage, also remember that in most accidents your car will not be totaled. The cost of repairs only goes up over time.

The DOD has a fair number of SBIR topics each release on various types of autonomous vehicles, including air, land, and sea based drones. Look at http://www.dodsbir.net and look through the recent archives, say the last two years, and you will see what the DOD thinks some of the major challenges are.

I haven't delved into it, but I hear you can learn quite a bit of programming from Minecraft. And even if nothing else comes of it he gets to play a game his peers are playing and can talk to them about it.

I don't have data on how this works with web development or SaaS, but in many industries direct mail is still the way to go. Crafting a sales letter is like crafting a landing page on your website.

There is a reason you still get junk mail. It costs more but has a much better response rate. I can only imagine this must be even more true with development given the high value per client.

There are two tricks to it. Having a good list and having a good sales letter. Get the list first. Then write (or pay somebody to write) a sales letter based on the characteristics of the list. The list should be as focused as you can make it. Not knowing who you are targeting I can't say more than that. Then the sales letter should be written to the needs of the people on the list.

So is this the politically correct version of the "avoid ghetto" function that people joke about?

In all seriousness though, it is pretty cool use of data mining and crowdsourcing.

I will second InDesign. I was having a conversation not that long ago with somebody who used to work in the printing business and that is what she used. And she had horror stories of people trying to do things with Word and HTML.

The main disagreement I have is the assertion that the majority of jobs (at a nationwide level) is for web based languages. While it is trending in that direction from what I see the majority of jobs are still Java and C++ with a bit of C thrown in. And while there may come a time when Javascript overtakes Java and C++, I don't think we are there yet, at least not nationally.

Just a few thoughts. The parent poster is absolutely right that people will not pay for education, as all of the failed tutoring centers outside of cities will attest to. I almost started one myself but caught myself before I lost a lot of money.

While they may not spend money on education, one thing that people will spend a lot on money on is daycare and summer camps(for the daycare). The brick and mortar classes here have a real potential to expand into full blown licensed after school daycare.

To expand, this could possibly be a franchise model, or possibly just be a training class for people who want to start something on their own. And then they can sell them class materials as well.

SEEKING WORK: Remote (Based in Maryland)

I'm a former software developer turned freelance writer. You need user documentation or internal technical documentation, but your developers are too busy making money for your company. I can create and maintain your documentation for you with minimal handholding.

I used to do development in C and C++, but I have reading level understanding of most major languages.

I can work either one-off or ongoing. In addition to user documentation, I also do B2B whitepapers and sales copy.

Email is in profile.

$1: Mega Millions ticket

$10: Two five dollar scratch offs

$100: Books

$1000: Depending on the company, now you can start looking into mutual funds. Personally, I would invest it in a nice vacation

$10000: This is firm mutual fund territory. Simple Vanguard index fund.

$100000: At this level I like real estate, but I've never made it this high so I can't really say. But I've been close enough that I've thought about it.

And any higher I am just blowing smoke because I have no real knowledge of monetary numbers that high.

I was hesitant to submit this because I don't want to start a gun control flame war. Pretty please, if this does make it to the front page can we keep it civil?

Personally, I find the intersection between tech and law in this instance very interesting. It is an instance of a law whose writers wanted to promote a technology having the opposite effect and hindering it instead.

Well, I don't like cities much at all. I prefer to live on a street with more chickens and goats than people. I literally have to wait for the chickens to cross the road

If I HAD to live in a city I would live in a small coastal city like Portland, Maine. Right on the water. Fresh lobster. Walkable. Relatively safe. Enough jobs that employment for a technical person isn't an issue, even if it isn't in software.

Only reason I don't is that family is close by (helps when having children) and that moving is such a pain.

Do you have friends who graduated 6 months to a year ago? Where did they find jobs and are those places any good? Or even people who you kind of knew. Many companies offer referral bonuses so even somebody you knew casually will usually be willing to help.

I'm not sure what you mean by "applied experience." Do you mean a job? Or do you mean you hacked together some open source projects?

Unless you have experience outside of what you wrote here, you are entry level. You may be a good coder. You may be a better coder than people who have been doing the job for 10 years. But you are still entry level because you haven't yet proved that you can do the coding in a work environment, day in and day out, when somebody else tells you too and not when you feel like it. That is the difference between a job and a hobby.

All that said, if you feel you are better than entry level you will want to look for smaller companies where you will have the ability to quickly get a visible project. It is easier to contact these companies because they usually have a direct email to HR instead of through a 3rd party website and can ask any questions you want free form. Be professional and have somebody double check for grammar.

Good luck.

A function that consisted of a giant switch statement, with each case consisting of another switch statement. Half of the sub-cases contained GOTO statements back to the top of the function.

Even worse... I wrote the code. It was 2am, I had been working for 18 hours straight to get everything ready for a demo the next morning.

Even worse than that... the code worked so management wouldn't let me change it. I tried my best to find an edge case it wouldn't handle but never could. So the code shipped.

The startup may be able to fly under the radar for personal property tax considerations, but in many states if the company owns property in the state then they have to file a personal property tax return, with the proper filing fee, etc. This could get pretty burdensome if the employees are spread out over a few states, to the point where they may just let the employee own the property.

This varies by state, of course, and if all the remote employees are in the same state is probably not a big deal.

If you have a college degree and work in certain professions then there is a separate visa process for Mexican citizens. You will need to get a job offer from a US company like an H1-B but if I recall unlike the H1B there is no limit to the number of visas issued.

http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/employment/naf...