If Facebook is serious about setting an example with prodding employers, they should take it a step further and expose which employers have asked for this information and make it public. I am sure Glassdoor.com would love to add this information to their database of reviews and having this viewable by those looking at prospective employers could be good metric to see how the company or management actually values their employees. It would be a deciding factor to me to work somewhere if a company I was interviewing for was trying to gain access to employee accounts and they were flagged publicly.
I am fortunate to have a desk that has adjustable legs, so I was able to try out with a standing desk. I have been doing this for about two weeks now and my verdict thus far is the same as yours.
The first week was a bit brutal and my heels were really sore at the end of the day, but luckily my dad does ergonomic consulting and had an anti-fatigue mat lying around, now I can stand 8+ hours a day and not feel any pain or soreness. I get to walk around more and I feel a lot more productive than when I was sitting. Oh, also I am burning about 1300+ calories for standing each work day, which is about an hour of intense cardio.
If you have been on the fringe about working standing up, I say do it. Just make sure you get an anti-fatigue mat because that will take a lot of pressure off your feet.
Merry Christmas everyone. This is the best community I have seen ever on the internet and hope we all have have a strong finish to 2010. The content shared here has made me a (subjectively) better person since I joined. What a great gift, thank you!
I learned to code before I took up the design end. I always keep in mind in how to code the site when I design, and it makes an over all trouble-free experience when I get to work on the code. But I learn all the time that a simple design aspect can be a bear to code, something that I wouldn't think about if I didn't have to code it.
Coming from the non-technical perspective, I see little value that a non-techie can offer to a company for <=97% of the shares. Someone making you this kind of proposal surely does not understand how a web startup works because the value is in the development team and their resulting product.
In every endeavor I (try) to embark on, I always offer 50-60% of equity to the technical person, to show that im not a control freak and value their expertise.
Well put. While people say dont worry about the business plan, just get your product launched, they really need to look at the overall idea of how the big the market is. Know exactly who you are targeting and how big that target is. Personally, i find the best way to do this is to write a detailed plan out for your teams own benefit. Its worth the time to write your plan out now and make changes before you spend hours on end coding the product, only to change course. But thats the business students perspective for you...
Not to mention that even an informal business plan forces you to do away with your own fluff and focus on stone-cold reality that will not go away until you address the questions it poses.
Uh ... not sure what business plans your talking about, but I would take the worst business plan any VC gets and wager that more people would pay money for whatever it describes, however poorly, then stuff that most programmers put up on the web with a "me and all my programmer friends think it's cool, so give me your money, how about it?" approach ...
I'm sure he, like all VCs everywhere, says exactly what he means and would never tell an audience of prospective entrepreneurs what they want to hear just so he doesn't narrow his own investment options in the future.
Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ...
Let's say a "business" is defined as "getting a venture capitalist to write you a check."
Try to get him to follow through with cold, hard cash for for, say, a problem you face that nobody else cares about, let alone cares enough to pay for.
For example, go call him up and tell him, "I have this problem: there's this annoying poster on Hacker News called "NSX2" and rather than manually respond to posts he puts up that I disagree with, or, for that matter, rather than respond to any such posters, in a flash of inspiration I created this superb program that summarizes all the key points of my essays into a set of 79, prioritizes their uses as responses, and anticipates what annoying posters are most likely to say based on empirical data I've collected since starting Hacker News and matches their anticipated annoying posts with a point in one of my essays that has the most statistical probability to express what I disagree with and how. Fund me."
"Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ..."
VC's are an integral part of the setup for many startups that go on to become successful businesses. The list includes Google, Cisco, Ebay, and almost all other big tech companies.
Perhaps you're aware that these days VCs are exponentially more likely to invest in you if you have paying customers than if you have a solution you think is interesting but nobody else agrees with you enough to pay you for it.
And I think Ebay was actually making money and showing a clear proof of concept before it got funding. Google began during a period of collective insanity; I doubt they'd be able to raise a penny with a similar starting proposition today.
Cisco I have no idea about.
But as for "all others", not sure what you mean but Microsoft, for example, was making money as a private company before getting VC to help with the IPO process, and the terms they got investment on a clear indication of their cash-based negotiating leverage at the time.
Oracle if memory of my reading serves correctly was making money first.
SAP had paying customers ...
When you say, "almost all other big tech companies" started off with VC as a prerequisite, can you specify what you had in mind?
What I mean is that not all products can be developd using only your own money, and even less can be grown to successful business without taking in money from investors. This is a normal procedure in many startups, where the goal is to grow fast. This requires money, and this money comes from investors.
And if the best search engine we had today was Altavista I don't think it would be a problem for Google to raise money today.
I'm pretty sure PG could build such a thing. You have my blessing. If it works out for you guys you can make even by hooking me up with some programmers.
I know this is amateur question, but I am taking my intro to programming class this quarter, and we are learning with Python(and pseudo-code, if that counts) am I doomed to being a crappy programmer? I was notorious for being a Lego addict when i was a kid, and i am taking the classes because i need a formal education on programming, so i would like to think I am not part of this group, but am I getting off on the wrong foot?
If you're not a 'hacker' now, then the odds are against you becoming one.
On the other hand, you don't really need to be a hacker to make a good living. I know quite a few really excellent programmers / software engineers / designers who can perform all those roles, and who are emphatically not hackers.
For most programming tasks, like billing software, or web-sites, there is a fairly straight-forward way to design something, and a reasonably straight-forward way to implement it. Reliable, predictable timelines and implementations are the high-end of business software consulting.
You can be pretty good at software engineering, and be fairly well-paid, even working regular hours and not letting it consume your life.
You can get a good education at almost any school in almost any language. Like much of your life, it depends entirely on what you put into it. If you only do enough to satisfy the core requirements of the class, and you are not motivated to explore the field on your own, then you're going to end up being a "crappy programmer."
