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The church is the corporation of religion, using religion to bend the will of man and keep power. I know it sound harsh, but I spend a lot of time in the Philippines where the church has way to much power and people suffer because of it, contraception, sexual education, divorce etc. Families do it tough here, but some dude at the front of an alter decides a lot of the rules.

However on the other hand even though I am not religious myself, I see nothing wrong with faith. Especially faith which someone challenges themselves.

My point of view with this is that it is more of a problem with government rather than a problem with the wealthy. If a government is bought off by the rich, it isn't a government for the people in the beginning to start off with.

Great customer acquisition cost, less than $1 per user. With ROI at 10 to 20 times, that was a pretty good investment for $35M.

> It's a lot harder than you might think.

Sounds like those spam emails for Viagra

> Yup, that's where I live. Maybe you could let my employer know that's what he's supposed to be like.

Hey it's your employer so maybe you should speak to them. It is not an unusual practice.

> This doesn't sound like the Asia that I live in.

Well I have seen it in ; Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia. (note: when I refer to Asia, it is the SEA section)

> It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either.

Although I do not live in the US, I gather that like many countries I have lived in is the view is that training is no longer such a large responsibility of the employer and is rather costly.

However in my travels and work in Asia, there is a concept of bonding in many countries where an employee is offered a job and training and in return agrees to work for a company for X amount of time or pays the employer. This reduces the overhead in regards to the cost of training.

They bought a massive customer base in developing countries, and they manage to secure all of those users who use a messaging app without probably doing any deals with any telcos.

Not only that, they gained a potential advantage in the payments space. Potentially turning their users into being able to make payments within the facebook & partners networks.

Look at what is happening in China with companies turning their chat apps into taxi booking apps like WeChat.

The majority of these points relate to all outsourcing development whether if it's onshore or offshore. In fact it applies for in house development.

Cheaper does not mean bad code and bad practices, and more expensive does not mean better code and better practices. The simple fact is that someone has to take responsibility and implement stuff right.

> 1. It’s extremely difficult to judge the quality of outsourced work without your own local engineer

It can be difficult measure any quality if you do not have the knowledge to do it. As this article is aimed at the "non-tech" founder, I have to question how that person would know good quality code or bad quality code without a technical advisor.

> 2. Prepare to work some odd hours and deal with communication issues

Some outsourcing companies work the hours of the client. If not then planning just needs to be done to organise communication. Even in the US (I am not in the US), there are different time zones which need to be compensated for.

However I do realise a 12 hour difference can be difficult.

> 3. Things will get lost when you transition to a permanent local team

Bring on any new developer to an established codebase and they are going to need time to catch up.

> 4. Each feature can become a line item in your technical debt

This point does not even make sense. Technical debt is not related to offshoring it is related to poor design and implementation.

> 5. Hiring and retaining local engineers could be more difficult

Well this might be true, but then again it would probably be true of any bad codebase whether developed in house or outsourced. I am sure there are in-house projects with massive God Objects also.

> so I can't see advertisers being too interested with "targeted" advertising being so current

Gary Vaynerchuck had an interesting point in one of his many many interviews. Basically SnapChat is instant focus, you cannot see an ad and file it away for later, you must act on it before it disappears. That functionality may be important to some advertisers.

Me I joined SnapChat and have never received one naked selfie so I never use the app. I guess that use for it created a lot of the user base. I do not know how much I would value the app because of that and how scalable their user base is, and their tech is easily replicated.

Do people use paragraphs anymore ?

BOFH day

> this is ridiculous. from what I read the "harm" that happened was really the fact that it was prominently placed in the search engines, which the blogger really had no direct control over.

If you do a google search and "the place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino", it would not matter if it was 1st or 21st, and that seems to match the judgement. Ms Doudet makes the claim in regards to the search rank.

Reading the pastebin text, it seems a little petty and most of all a bit of a big emotional rant.

So the author does not agree with the valuation, many people do not agree with valuations of companies, in fact companies which lose money in some situations still have high evaluations as the valuation is market driven in some cases.

People getting fired, well that happens all the time. Lawsuits happen to companies, HR not getting fired happens, companies hiring for growth happens.

The problem with the author is the way they have stated their case, there is common problems framed with insinuating remarks which are further compounded by a use of profanity. Not to say if the post is true or not, but the author could have done a great deal better to establish credibility.

Great stuff ... congratulations .... now send me Dars :)

> You wouldn't do 24x7 with 3 people, but you could do 24 hours x ~5.5 days with the rest on call.

Thanks, I hope I didn't sound too harsh as I just wanted to understand how you were doing this.

> You hire them as self employed contractors.

If you are an Australian company you may want to be careful with this. A contractor is not necessarily a contractor in Australia, there are some strange guidelines as to when a contractor may actually become an employee.

> A lot of people will take the opportunity to do this kind of work for a decent wage ($65k in Brisbane, $55k in regional centres).

I worked in Brisbane for 12 years and that sounds about right. Although the need for Linux admins seems to be increasing so there is some interesting salaries being offered.

> I know people who do this work, move to Thailand and live in luxury on similar dollars.

One can only dream, although I now live and travel around Asia .... I am just missing the $$$ :)

> and not lose that simplicity.

Very interesting point

> Once you can afford 3 people this can become a very effective way of ensuring 24 hour coverage.

How can you run 24/7 with 3 people ? In Australia that would mean you would have to be above the allowed 38 hour working week as it would be a 56 hour working week, overtime and possibly penalty rates would apply. Even if it is on call a lot of companies in Australia pay extra for that.

> Not to mention rates for a lot of those countries are cheaper then FTE's in the US

I do not know who you are employing in Australia but I would suggest that there is only about 5000 - 10000 USD p/a price difference for mid-level guys.

> It has been heavily reported that AWS has cut their pricing quite a bit over the past few years. Yet, how many times has Heroku reduced its price?

This is the bit which confuses me. It is easy to think that there should be correlation between Heroku pricing and AWS pricing.

However just because AWS drops their pricing does not mean the capex for Heroku is dropping.

> No sane person running a business will take a 1PM outage over 1AM.

Hey what about us people in Asia who use Heroku ... a early US AM outage is likely to be in our early PMs.

As a person who is hovering between a tmux+vim setup and rubymine, I find vim rather convoluted. I was hoping vim was going to be my goto editor, as I was looking for something which was multiplatform, and was a polygot platform ( the one thing I really do not like rubymine for).

Maybe it is just me but the idea of having to go from one mode to the other to use the standard navigation keys seems like a strange thing to do. Having to hit ESC (now I have CAPSLOCK remapped) also seems rather inefficient. On top of that having to find the right plugin to install also drove me nuts, then no intuitive short cut keys and normal vs visual mode again.

Now I did like vim because it was a console app, and with tmux I could run many terminal windows in the same session. I just do not know if vim is right for me or I haven't spent the 10,000 hours mastering it yet. I am sure I will get there with more practice.

:wq

Yes, some African Americans may get offended by this. HOWEVER slave does not mean black, in fact there were black people around the world who were in fact Masters.

I could take offence by the limited perspective you put on the word relating it to only African Americans, there are many from Europe who fall in the sex slavery trade who are not black.

In Australia the word 'root' has sexual connotations, so if I was to work on your team would you be happy to change this word, so no more root access, root directory, if I said it was offensive ?

Words can be offensive, but generally they are offensive because of the context. For example, should it be offensive for me to say the night sky is black, black is an offensive word but it is also a valid contextual description.

Have to agree here in south east Asia a lot of this is run by crime syndicates, only part of the money goes to people on the street.

Who says it is broken ? Most of all what is actually broken ?

We know the outcome, there are fewer woman in IT. However the problem is normally touted in 2 ways .... the first that woman are discriminated against .... and the second that woman need to be more active.

I think the author's approach is a great one, ignore the diatribe and get in there and do. If woman are being treated as second class then doing shows that it is a wrong opinion, if woman are less active then having them do is also solving the issue.

However if the issue is caused by factors such as a lack of interest in the industry by women, or the lack of study in the field by woman, then how are going to "fix" it, force women into tech ?

There are many industries where woman are a majority, should we "fix" these industries also ? Maybe all these tech savvy people who are focused on the tech industry can come up with some sort of algorithm to "fix" all of this issues.

Due to recent complaints the black tie ball is now and Amish style. This is to prevent the objectification of women by making them less appealing.

Call me ignorant (although I would rather refer to myself as not really focused or caring on the matter), that just because there are 2 good looking woman promoting an event which hopefully should also be fun does not make it objectifying women.

Maybe people are just paying to much attention to the small things.

> "Through work to bring materials and perspectives from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged in the curriculum, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended."

Ok I read this then stopped. The word "overprivileged" is shockingly biased and ridiculous, and most of all deceptive.

> We should assume she is being truthful and accurate unless there is a reason to doubt her.

I come from a different school of thought. Firstly she only mentions a few people but the entire company and an entire industry are being brought into question.

Generally I have found what has been echoed by TechCrunch to be lacking in details and specifically from one persons point of view which shows a very self indulged narrative.

My response is not to suggest it did not happen, but given what has been said, how it has been said, and whom it is being said about, I suggest that before we tar people in such a way that more evidence should be presented.

We are only hearing one side of the story, but it may be interesting to note the comment: " I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. ", it seems that there may have been some legitimacy to the other non-few if we are going to take a black and white view of things.

While the details on this matter seem very clear, the statement " I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation." does not imply no discussion it implies that when she got up she had no idea of what was going on. It may be a case of a lazy co-worker, and/or a case that the co-worker discussed the issues with her at a latter stage.

She is very succinct in her description of the actions of others, and then describes her response in an emotional unclear way. In her own way in this example, she has used passive aggressiveness to mask the actual event.

TLDR; We do not know if there was no discussion, and we are only hearing one side.

> Why are you making excuses for these people?

Probably because there are ample reasons why someone may revert someone's code for legitimate reasons.

> Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this.

It seems hula hooping is ok, until men start watching. This is the most confusing bit she is saying. It basically equates to saying that strip clubs are not strip clubs until men start watching.

Woman hula hooping are bound to attract attention, for a variety of reasons. Julie, associated that with strippers, she could have associated it with entertainment or fun. The implication is that it is the men's mindset, I personally find that a rather sexiest statement on it's own towards men.

It seems the techcrunch article is very full of hyperbole.