tom_rath

Put someone on your payroll full-time with benefits, paid vacation and sick leave and then encourage them to start a business on their own time while you pay them full wages. Then you'll have something to crow about.

If you retain a contractor, you're one of their clients and any improvements they make to their business benefits you.

If an employee on your payroll starts a business, they're not doing so with your best interest in mind and their work's focus will change accordingly.

You cannot work for another person while running your own business. A business becomes the centre of a person's universe and an employee's work will suffer if they are building a genuine business on the side. No amount of dramatic profanity will change that reality.

Of all the vigorous down-mods and "you're wrong!" comments I've received here in response, I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business, or who is a full-time employee working on their own business while being paid a salary by another company.

Why? Because you're an employee or you're an entrepreneur. Those are not compatible mind-sets.

If you work for me and want to start your own company, great! I'll happily send you on your way and offer every bit of support I possibly can to ensure your success, but I won't pay you to build your own business.

There's a big difference.

Let me know then how well you'd do as an employee working for someone else, and if you'd be eager to hire on staff with the same "starting a company on-the-side" mindset.

Running a business isn't a hobby: It takes all of your attention, day and night.

I'm not paying employees to start their own business, I'm paying them to work on mine.

edit: I know this chafes with the 'free spirits' on this site who haven't found the guts to start an actual business yet, but I promise you'll find it's true when it's your cash going out as wages.

Running a separate business is a different story altogether. Do you really have productive employees who are operating software development companies on the side? If you do, I can guarantee their primary attention does not lie with you (even though their primary income is being paid by you).

Participating in them outside of office hours would tend to _increase_ your productivity at work by giving your head a rest.

I'd tend towards overly-harsh on this one: You're either an employee or an entrepreneur. The choice is binary. We'd love to have you as an employee, but a person building their own business and riding on the salary we (a small business ourselves) pay while they do it is not welcome.

Every employer I had before heading off and starting my own company had an air-tight IP policy which basically owned my software-developing ass. That makes sense: You're either an employee or an owner, you don't mix the two.

Your best option would be to focus on how you present yourself in writing (watch that spelling!) and (if you have cash to spend) purchase some appropriate clothing you feel good in instead.

If you don't have enough space to store extra rice and underwear, you're unlikely to have sufficient assets to invest in the first place.

That's not sarcasm. You'll be eating and wearing out your stuff one way or another and buying a year's worth of rice, grass seed, socks, underwear, cat litter, detergent, toothpaste, etc. when you spot it on sale could shave 20%+ off your living expenses.

So, a greater than 20% return. No risk, no taxes, and no commission paid. You really can't do better than that to put an extra $500 in your pocket two years from now.

The impression I gained from your blog post was that of willy-nilly denormalization and data duplication to accommodate edge-cases (which often become anything but) as they're discovered to make problems quickly go away. After working on a few development, refactoring and data conversion projects, I was astounded to discover how often those sorts of kludges crop up and how costly they become.

Perhaps you could write a sequel pointing out the pitfalls of what appear to be easy database fixes to design errors but turn out in the long-run to be anything but.

How about that user who has two locations? Sure, you overlooked that in the initial design, but a permanent fix needs to be made to ensure the system will accommodate the next one which arrives.

A profile for someone located outside the US? Pretty likely you'll see that happen again if the system grows. Why not account for it correctly rather than rely upon duplicate data or another such hack?

Your urge to 'fudge and hack' is natural but the professional solution is to resolve the root cause by correcting the data model, not fiddling with the data to 'just make it work'.

After the initial glory of creating Software v1.0, much of the remaining work involves fixing the system to better reflect reality. The reason mature software takes 'exceptions and outliers' in stride is that it's been coded to do so after a great deal of trial and error in on-going analysis and discovery.

Ignoring those exceptions and working around them rather than fixing them permanently leads to madness.

The individual who wrote this is dead wrong and either headed for a lifetime of maintenance pain or a well-deserved reputation of being "that guy who caused all the problems" after he's moved on to cause pain elsewhere.

Nonsense like this is why corporate DBAs are such hard-asses when it comes to changing the schema.

Casually reading a broadsheet on a Sunday afternoon is a decadent pleasure (pretty-much gone now that many newspapers have moved to a smaller format) and I will truly miss it.

They're actually quite vile: The webcomic artists depend on the ad revenue received from people visiting their sites, so the scrapers which aggregate other web comics end up leeching bandwidth while snatching revenue from the content creators.

The 'platform' seems to be dominated by idle people who prefer free services that let them spend their day throwing virtual sheep at each other. That's not a particularly valuable demographic for businesses seeking to advertise their wares.

Much better, by far, to purchase targeted advertising on Google.

That confessional reads as though she's swimming through it all alone.

Roger Ebert, yet again you have enriched my life!

Read a number of articles on the subject. Write out the definition in your own words or explain it to a friend. Complete a few textbook exercises to calculate the values you want to understand.

Taking the time to internalize a subject is significantly more helpful than quickly scanning words you do not yet understand.

The greatest value I gain from books is in identifying how the subject discussed can apply to my own circumstances. That insight often comes to me in the pauses between pages and paragraphs where I find myself thinking on what was just read.

I might be able to absorb a bit more information from speed-reading, but I don't think I could process and internalize the text nearly as well. Since that's why I'm reading the book in the first place, speed-reading seems of little benefit to me.

By all means mix with like-minded people, but your morale and motivation shouldn't depend upon whether or not your neighbour thinks you're 'cool'.

I'm not too sure about that. If other people's opinions will strongly influence your mood and business outlook, entrepreneurship might not be for you.

For myself, visualizing how those politely nodding and smiling "that's nice" people would one day be green with envy was a delightful motivator.

These days, the condescension is gone and smiles are a bit tighter.