wolframarnold

How about saying just that then? If you want the person to create a culture, then giving them a $2.5k budget sends the wrong message there too, as to how much leeway they have. I don't think this will attract the right kind of candidate. Just my $.02

It's cute guys, I give you points for creativity. But as Rails consultant in San Francisco for many years and recent startup founder myself, I must say that the icon about $2500 for the hardware of your choice kind of backfires and I've advised my clients against using such incentives. On the one hand the new Mac Book with the retina display fully loaded runs about that in minimum configuration by itself. So no budget for an external Thunderbolt display? But more disconcertingly is the subtext which says, buy and set yourself up however you want, without regard to what makes for the lowest friction team, pairing and collaboration experience. In a way this is the cubicle of the 21st century. This is why shops like Pivotallabs don't give their employees individual machines, all they have is a room full of pairing stations, because they realize that ease of cooperation is far more important than personal preferences and customization.

Elected officials should be ashamed of themselves. What are they going to do when Side.cr or Lyft arrives in D.C. ? Ban private car ownership?

Only startup founders and not-quite-exec's at other companies have kids that are born with a special gene that programs them to wake up or be woken up at the precise time prescribed by some app only available on iphone. Everybody else's kids (or if you have an Android--sucks for you) wake up at random times at night, scream bloody murder and generally don't follow any schedule other than their own.

Go through all this trouble but forget to make the font size bigger and the encoding quality such that it's actually legible? Baffling.

It's fascinating to me that nobody has commented on the last few sentences of the article. To me this is where the real juice lies:

> A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets – a vast number of extremely engaged users, it’s social graph, Facebook Connect –to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don’t, it’s probably worth a lot less.

So long Facebook is a "nice-to-have" business models around paying for access or privacy are dead on arrival, users will just leave or go elsewhere. However if Facebook becomes a "must-have" in order to participate in society, then people will do whatever it takes. If Facebook is becoming an infrastructure provider then they have every incentive to encourage a rich ecosystem and businesses will pay for access, even consumers perhaps might. The comparison that comes back to me is the early phone system from 100 years ago. It was a "nice-to-have" to have a phone number. But phone companies invested in infrastructure and interoperability and lots of third party applications emerged that got deeply embedded into societal life. Thereby the telephone became a "must-have". Facebook today seems to have a similar opportunity in front of it. If they realize and leverage it, it could be huge.

Exactly. That's why I'm saying just be yourself. It's the candidate asking the question who starts the mindgame. So long external validation matters more than inner confidence, I'll always look like a mindgame you can't win. And dropping by the office can seem like madness if you're going down the line of outside validation thinking too far. At the other end of the spectrum, it's recon.

I like this idea a lot. Frameworks like Rails come with excellent log messages, granularity and a pub/sub mechanism. Often this can be a lower hanging fruit than throwing in a ton of custom instrumentation for some third party analytics tool, especially when you're pressed for time.

My question is how fluentd can be hooked into Rails so that Rails' native messages use it and how does it work in the Heroku infrastructure?

Uh, no. The one who's uncomfortable here is clearly you, if you have to ask. If you really don't know and it's important to you to 'blend in', then swing by the office in the morning or at night and see how people are dressed coming in or out. Or find the founders on LinkedIn or Facebook and see what they're wearing. Be a little bit less obvious about it.

If I got a note from a prospective candidate like this one, it would probably be a point against them because it broadcasts insecurity and helplessness neither of which is an attractive trait in a prospective employee. This is the part where resourcefulness and self-motivated behavior starts.

Yeah, I would agree strongly. The folks who'll use this are beginners and nothing sucks more than having some weird one-off environment that nobody else uses. I teach a lot of Ruby classes and I always tell people to do things in the most common way. That way, if they need help, the people helping them will feel right at home, and anything the beginners might google themselves will also apply. This is not the case if your one click installer doesn't follow the most common paths. It's convention over configuration, remember? Lastly, what I've been missing in the one click installer discussion is maintainability and upgradability. This is exactly the problem that brought about tools like bundler, rvm, homebrew or Debian/Ubuntu packaging.

The keys to success as a startup and as individual coder in the present world is not technical prowess, but culture and cultural fit.

There is a running joke in San Francisco that companies looking for "Code Ninjas" and "Rockstar Programmers" are not worth working for, because they haven't gotten the basic truth that the team matters more than the individual. They're falling prey to the "Talent Myth" (a reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article where he describes among others the reasons for the spectacular failure of Enron.)

What devbootcamp has cultivated in a classroom format is the actual vibe of a startup doing well: Excitement, vibrant, infectious energy. I visited at week 3 and at week 8. In any typical multi-week courses (e.g. college), the enthusiasm wanes pretty quickly after a few weeks. Not so with devbootcamp, it kept growing.

It's not the individual's technical skills that matter so much (there is always some else to ask or Google anyway), than it is to build a culture of resourcefulness and team spirit.

In full disclosure I should say I was a guest instructor, and I felt aweful that we let students run head-first into database joins--a concept we hadn't explained at all, but which was necessary to complete the exercise at hand (which was, coincidentally implementing a ranking for a Hacker News-like site). If you hit this in self-study, 99% of the students would give up and shelve their dreams of becoming a developer. Not so in devbootcamp. To my big surprise, not knowing joins didn't present much of a hurdle. Through pairing, people's resourcefulness quickly led to a variety of usable solutions. Perhaps not the textbook solution, but that's not what matters in real life.

It's this type of can-do, resourcefulness and team spirit which creates solutions and being exposed and immersed into that is what people paid the money for. This cannot be replicated in self-study, in my opinion, and it's well worth it.

We've been seeing the same behavior for mp4 with various codecs pretty much all day. Perhaps a new all-time record in YC application submissions? YouTube lets you do private uploads also, by the way.

The most effective setups I've seen and experienced are those that keep noise and distractions low, communication easy and incentives to drop into and stay in the zone maximized. Incidentally these factors are not limited to just workspace layout. I think overly focusing on work space at the expense of other crucial factors is another case of "sub-optimization" and thereby not "lean".

Some of these factors are:

* Gathering the team in one place and ideally at the same time. Standup meetings do this, as well as catered breakfasts and lunches.

* Open spaces that provide ready access to other folks, engineers, designers, product owners. It's amazing how high the hurdle of having to get up and open a door can be and how amazing the cost of inferior decisions made by coders is when asking someone requires overcoming hurdles. Remember that the desired behavior must also be the easiest behavior.

* No employee-specific workstations. The easier it is to move around and the more common the computer setup the better collaboration can ensue.

* Subdued noise levels. This can be accomplished through white noise generators, Dj Tiesto, sound swallowing wall fabrics and carpets, etc.

* Systems that capture project data in structured ways, minimizing the need and role of email.

* Separate gathering spaces for socializing, ping pong, lunches, meetings, phone calls to not disturb the main work area.

* A prevailing practice of pair programming and TDD.

Interestingly, some of the most successful development shops like Pivotal Labs and Hashrocket do exactly that.

+1

This all assumes conditions as usual. Which I think is a painfully mistaken notion. In an era of depleting fossil fuels, inferior ore quality of iron, copper and all the rare earth metals required to make modern electronics, water shortages and overpopulation, I doubt people will be worried about email overload in even 20 years. What's missing from this list are the real big issues of our time, such as quitting our reliance on fossil fuels, building a sustainable economy for the planet's resources, and creating a currency not solely based on debt expansion. In an economy with less energy surplus our problems will be more primitive than worrying about heart disease or faster computation or better search. Solving the shrinking energy surplus..., now that would be a really scary big startup of planet-wide implication.