That's disappointing. Someone needs to fork this and make it at least look reasonable in IE8 and preferably at least visible in IE7.
214 karma · joined August 2, 2010
What you are creating for $53B is not a couple of a million jobs but a couple of million "start-up ready" employees. Frankly these employees are not that valuable and would be out performed by the couple of million already start-up ready and much cheaper to hire college graduates that are going to have an increasingly hard time finding a good job out of college. Also, are there really that many entry level start up jobs that need to be filled? I think that people who currently have the skill set you are describing are already having a hard time finding a job. The "talent drought" is only for highly trained, highly talented, technical people that have years of practice, experience and professional training as well as the in built drive that lead them to get those skills in the first place. Even a fresh out of school completely green CS grad has usually dedicated thousands and thousands of hours mastering their technical skills before and during their academic career.
Anyways, I do think you bring up some really great points and I do think some kind of reform is needed. Using tax dollars for valuable high quality vocational education is a great idea. Figuring out how to structure that vocational education to be efficient and effective is another whole problem to figure out.
Also, the product you described is interesting but it has serveral problems. One, it's going to be more expensive than doing the shopping on my own and keeping cost down of my food budget is one of my primary goals. Two, being able to shop locally at Farmer's markets, etc... is going to be important for a lot of users including myself.
Anyways, thanks for the feedback. You do make some good points about Mint and why it's not a 1 to 1 comparison.
What I am qualified to do is share that I honestly love working at Mahalo under Jason Calacanis. I knew I would take greif for that but I wasn't going to let that stop me from just being honest about the fact that I love my job.
Thanks for the feedback.
The purpose of the post was 1. to have a discussion about the level of commitment founders should expect from employees and 2. brag about the fact that I love my job and Mahalo it is actually a really cool company.
While I agree that hearing from previous employees would be less "biased", Mahalo has never been healthier than right now. The only people who know what Mahalo is like are those that are currently working there.
That being said, there are obviously a ton of people who have worked with Jason over the years who each have their own experiences. I can't and don't want to speak for them. Just sharing my own personal experience.
I also agree that it is fantastic that these discussion happen for the sake of making founders think about things like engineer burn out. Thank you for writing your post and furthering the discussion.
When we talk about the work environment at Mahalo we often throw around the 80 hours a week because there are weeks like that and people need to be ready for it. Those statements seem to get focused on. Jason has also publicly stated several times that it isn't 80 hours EVERY week and that there is great culture at Mahalo. Those statements don't tend to get talked about because there isn't much to argue about there.
Final thing, is that I was very careful in my post to never so that great results ONLY can be achieved by great sacrifice. There is clearly evidence that is not the always the case. I tried to be very careful in wording things to just point out that generally, the amount of success is usually tied closely to the amount of commitment.
Thanks, again for your feedback.