My guess is they're a victim of cargo cult thinking: Hugely successful companies have lots of employees and spiffy offices, right?
1,513 karma · joined March 7, 2008
Long-term results are mixed and (as henning notes) this sort of stunt does not attract the type of customer a business wants (that is, those willing to spend money on quality software).
Bogging down your support staff with a bunch of cheapskates looking for freebies can increase costs while doing squat for revenue, all while seriously cheezing off those of your customers who actually paid for your product.
If you're new and you're desperate, go for it. Otherwise, you might want to consider a different advertising strategy.
Learning how to break your software is one of the best ways of ensuring you stop writing software that breaks!
Test everything. Test it early. Test it extensively.
If testing 'isn't needed' and is a 'waste of time' for the simple thing you're doing, it'll only take a few moments away from your busy day. If it was needed, you'll be glad you caught the error when you did.
If in doubt, ask any veteran developer about the horror stories they ran into in production due to a minor bug that could have been caught at the point of development with a simple 'complete waste of time' test.
Edit: I cannot understand why this is being down-modded to negative territory. This is classic 'advice to a young engineer'! Your development career is headed to a dead end if you cannot create reliable software.
Has there ever been a "Meh, fuck it." generation?
You might have what it takes to walk the walk, but don't jump to conclusions before you've trod the path of a truly awful economy.
There are going to be a few of us in each generation which set out to be entrepreneurs and will tenaciously stick by that world-view our entire lives. The readers of this board are a self-selecting group (and aren't necessarily representative of the latest set of graduates) but many will still end up employee grist for the cubicle mill after their first dozen major setbacks.
I've run into a few companies who have painfully put an 'advertising guy' in charge of their marketing department and it's not worked well (in my limited sample). People are often great at advertising but couldn't put a decent product strategy together to save their life (or job!).
You wouldn't put your web developer or icon designer in charge of system administration or database scaling, right? Just like non-coders tend to lump everything technical together as 'computer stuff', technical folks can fall into the trap of lumping accounting, marketing, advertising, etc. into the same batch as 'business stuff'. That path leads to madness.
You wouldn't start coding without at least a rudimentary spec to guide what it is you want to make, right? So why start designing your product without first identifying what and for whom it is you are designing it?
Marketing is the process of identifying the target market for your product. The "what it does" and "who it's for" part that a design needs if you're going to "build something people want".
Read a bit more space program history and you'll find the military is actually far ahead as far as applications (and budget!) are concerned.
Our ad spending is going to remain about the same, but it's going to be targeted much more narrowly.
Mac is very slick, but Apple isn't particularly kind to third-party developers who build software for their platform.
Such a shame the SSTO funding went to that VentureStar thing instead.
It's a really nifty one to read.
For planes, there's already a nice inventory of used aircraft backing up thanks to the latest airline bankruptcies. Do you think an airline will be buying new (or any?) aircraft if vacation and business travel drops off a cliff?
I could do without all of those during hard times.
Do you know that Detroit was once one of the wealthiest cities in the United States? Things change.
What you're seeing now is a period of dramatic change. Approach it as you'd like.
It just occurred to me that folks here younger than 28 have never seen an actual recession (I'm assuming that under-12s could not care less about business news and missed the early 90s bust). It's just been one long boom for you, right?
I suspect the world is about to surprise you in a very unpleasant way.
If you're planning to spend your life cowering, it really won't matter whether your choice is a cubicle or a classroom.
Look, if you're planning to graduate over the next while, things are going to suck. Not "will I be able to get a job at cuulCmpny.com" suck, but "will I be able to both pay rent and eat" suck. Nasty, soul-crushing stuff that'll make you wonder if you were really as smart as you thought you were all this time.
Just keep your head and you'll come out of it fine. Your character will be stronger, you'll have superb perspective and your long-term earnings will be spiffy.
Don't waste energy worrying about whether or not you'll have a few more bucks on your paystub in 20 years. There are a whole ton of other factors which can affect that a lot more than the birth-sign of your economic zodiac.
I think you should research the process of bankruptcy (and the Great Depression) before proposing solutions. Bankruptcy is not evil and does not destroy wealth -- it shoves bad companies aside and makes room for those who stand the best chance of making use of the assets that remain.
It sounds like you're proposing what Japan has been doing for the past decade. Look up "Zombie Corporations Japan" to find out what ultimately happens when you back bad companies with taxpayer dollars to keep them from going bust in order to retain some daft idea of social harmony.
A capitalist system isn't born or sustained by government-managed compromise kicking in when your favourite team loses.
The assets remain intact, the investors who poorly judged the risk lose their investment and those who buy up the assets (to clean things up and bring about a recovery) rightfully reap the rewards of taking on a very high risk.
Enron, to take an example, went bankrupt, but energy kept being generated and traded under new management. Former employees went on to find work at the acquiring company(ies) or took their labour elsewhere. Would things have been better if Enron were still scamming around after a bailout today?
How about the dot.com collapse? What if Pets.com and WebVan were given billions of dollars to continue on?
Bankruptcy is good. It's the market's way of flushing out bad ideas and starting fresh.
Not that I'm bitter.
-sigh-
I miss Usenet.
Mass production and cheap launches would be a sure-fire money-maker, right? That it hasn't happened in a half-century of western rocket technology should raise a bright red flag that something other than willpower or a global conspiracy is keeping it from happening.
Satellite launch failures alone can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars -- and that's not even touching the issue of revenue lost to the broadcast company who bought the thing (and waited 3-4 years to see it constructed and launched). Although awful regulation has played a role in preventing launch vehicles from becoming a truly commercial market, The Man hasn't been the only issue keeping launch costs high -- this stuff is hard!
SpaceX has done an awesome job, but there's a ways to go before the system is confirmed as reliable with consistently reproducible performance.
(For what it's worth, I think they'll do it in time, but it may cost quite a bit more yet)