oh come on, in this economy, if anyone had a "make $$$ NOW" button under their desk, it would have been pushed long ago. their secret plan was to ride a bubble in the markets, but thats over. i feel bad for the rank and file, if zuck had done an ipo in mid-2007, the rank and file could have made some serious cash.
interviewing at facebook? my guess is that there will be plenty of openings soon enough, even in this downmarket. the fb crowd have been busting their asses old-skule/90s style...and for what? zuck put the ix-nay on their get-rich quick scheme of selling their options, and now a new valuation discussed for the company is just over $1 billion dollars (down from $15 billion). yawn! any notion that the FACE stock bubble would resemble YHOO 1999 or GOOG 2007 are just hopeless dreams at this point. by time markets recover in 2012, fb itself may be passe. i wouldn't be shocked to see more early burnouts throwing in the towel there.
yeah yeah, there's more to work than money. but that logic will only work for a few months. after a couple of years of 2am nights, you're going to want to get paid.
i recommend people always use -nw, it will ensure that on the client or remote, you always use emacs the same way. now kill all the menubars and other stuff too...if you are going to use emacs, use the keyboard and the help system. that is the emacs-way
Agreed. On my gentoo systems, I just compile emcs without X support. Makes life easy. Also, one critical skill when using emacs is learning to modify the .emacs.el file as time goes on. Over the years, the little things I accumulated in this file make using emacs a much more pleasant experience.
Rather than use .emacs, use .emacs.d/init.el. Put any extra modes or Emacs apps there, too. Then throw your whole .emacs.d under version control. Finally, stick it on http://bitbucket.org/ or similar. Now you can easily lug your whole Emacs configuration around.
this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...making a PC is easy....so what happened to the 10,000 strip-mall PC makers?
show me real examples outside of the web industry that this theory is even remotely correct
Any industry where the capital costs are low, or where a small group of niche specialists can add a significant multiplier to the value chain are candidates for this sort of effect. As more industrial tasks are farmed out to large companies that specialize in flexible production it is possible that you will see this show up in industries that are currently have strong vertical integration.
For example, ten people can't mass-produce a car. Ten people can provide spcialized bodywork and personalization of a mass-produced car. Ten people could probably design and oversee the outsourced manufacturing of discrete components in the car. Ten people could probably manage a company that deals with other small firms to create bespoke vehicles based upon mass-produced frames and engines. As you increase the specialization and make more parts interchangeable it is possible to decentralize and distribute a production chain to the point where a large collective of ten person companies can provide a higher-value good at a lower per-unit cost than a single large company.
Certain activities will always need large, high-capitalization organizations, but it seems that more and more of these companies and factories are being forced to become more flexible and nimble which is leading to a point where a larger and larger part of your world can be serviced by smaller teams than by large enterprises.
How do these things change with time, though? Do they always, invariably drop? Might computing conceivably go through another phase where things get consolidated into some kind of big servers that cost a ton of money? Doesn't sound likely to me, but I'm not very good at predicting the future. Actual research into these trends would be interesting to see.
Retyred is on to something here. Outside of web startups I think the trend may have actually gone the opposite way over the past 20 years or so. Companies are getting bigger, not smaller. Here are a few:
Retail: just went through a mass-consolidation. The more dynamic firms, the "places to be" if you wanted to do something interesting in retail, were the ones doing the consolidating. Think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, Walgreens, Best-Buy etc... While it may not be interesting to the crowd here, innovation in things like supply-chain has been stunning.
Consumer Goods: P&G has been unstoppable, and that's where most people in that business want to go because that's where the interesting things were happening.
Consumer Electronics: Dell, Apple, Sony etc... have crushed everyone.
Banking: Ditto. Where did all the ambitious young financial engineers want to go? Easy: Goldman-Sachs. Not that innovation here was a good thing... but that's another story.
Agriculture: ADM, Monsanto and the agri-business giants have almost completely taken over. Small farms are near-extinct.
This list could go on for a while, but I'll stop. I think you see a similar winner-take-all pattern playing out in most industries. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of all this: the percentages of people employed by institutions of different sizes.
Perhaps pg is right that it's starting to happen though. Maybe the web world is at the vanguard of what will be a broad counter-trend. I suspect that won't be as strong a force as he thinks though - the advantages of being big are still too great in too many fields.
Then again, maybe the mass-consolidation was artificial. Maybe all the M&As owe as much to artificially cheap money as to natural advantages of scale. I guess we'll see.
I have to disagree. it is true that the only reason we see small companies in the tech sector is that it is a young market that is still changing. but this change will continue, all indications are that tech will only change faster in the future. this means that the tech sector will perpetually act as if it were a new market.
sadly i think college credentials in the US have lost their luster because its always a let-down. without a doubt there is only one school that i have never met a single retard from: caltech. cmu is a close second. every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies.
my attitude is that i do not care where you went to school. in an interview, if you ace the questions, why do i care if you went to ball state? so what, maybe that is all you could afford. on the other hand, if you can't answer my questions, why do i care if you went to stanford?
furthermore its likely that most people here do not know what the best colleges in korea, japan, china and india really are. so best to just skip the education section of the resume entirely
I agree with this sentiment entirely. I went to a public magnet high school with SAT scores averaging around 1480 and at least half our graduating class every year ends up in an ivy / mit / stanford. I'd say more than half of those who made it to the top tier got in from legacy / extracurriculars / obsessive dedication to good grades and making teachers happy as opposed to genuine intelligence and love of learning. Also curiously, like you said, everybody from my graduating class who went to caltech, although not necessarily teh uberg3nius math wiz, was at least minimally competent in some technical field.
Although one could make the case that a lot of those schools, especially the ivies, are picking people based on their ability to lead and 'make a difference' in some general sense rather than pure raw ability. Therefore they may intentionally focus on apparently manifested soft qualifications like achievement in extracurriculars, personal discipline as exhibited by a flawless GPA, or well-established personal connections.
This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering.
"This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering."
That's not the case as I've witnessed it. I won't directly name names, but I am thinking about a school that is ranked number 4 for graduate engineering on U.S. News.
U.S. News has a fairly broken ranking system. I think they try and set things up so schools jump around with little rime or reason so people will buy this years ranking vs just reading last years. I mean if if my school will rise and fall 5-10 points while I am their why try and give a number just list those that make the cut.
"... every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies. ..."
Don't confuse 'intelligence' and 'education'. There are plenty of smart people who have never been to University. Likewise there are plenty of people who go to University who graduate but can't think beyond what they have been taught.
any type of creative field runs into this problem a lot. a lot of people reach a certain level and realize that they don't actually have any talent for X, they were just good at following the directions.
his comments on C are completely unfounded. C's type coercion means you can ram all sorts of things into places they aren't supposed to go. typecasting says to me that there is nothing orthodox about C at all. if anything it is modern protestantism, a faith that lets you ram in whatever you want, but one wrong move and you go to hell (segfault)
running ads on torrent tracker search sites...that is probably the only viable business behind this technology. not much there to sell a VC, but it is money in the bank.
oh jesus between allthingsD, valleywag, blodget and blogmaverick, they've saved yahoo twenty times in the last month in various blog posts. give it up folks, google won. but if its still an obsession, round up some of the thousands of former y's around the bay area and just build the company you keep blogging about building.
Well, speaking of obsessions, I'm puzzled as to why people are so obsessed with the idea that Yahoo and Google can not co-exist. Why does it have to be "google won", "yahoo lost" and because yahoo yahoo did not "win" they have "failed"?
Yahoo is wildly successful by a tonne of metrics, and yet they seem to be widely perceived as failures. This is something I don't understand.
Best I can explain it is that the tech savvy digerati have moved on from Yahoo personally and are unable to perceive that in the mainstream, Yahoo is widely used and liked.
if only Yahoo! would really embrace its people powered roots, nowadays evident in Flickr and del.icio.us, and keep these sites independent and geeky, and useful to feed bottom-up information and content into Yahoo! (remember? it was a directory 15 years ago), and accept the fact that most of the users of Yahoo! proper are not super technologically savvy anymore, and create a simple portal by the people and for the people, and never be afraid of being too "low" by appealing to normal people's fascination with, well, other people, famous people, singers, movies, sports, gossip etc.
yup, and also for companies whose stock prices are depressed (all of them), this is one of the only meaningful things they can do for investors in a recession. and frankly they can rehire people later for lower wages...i see a huge wave of salary resets going through the valley. developer wages were out of control, at one point last year i wouldn't even look at anything under $150k. now i have a lot of experience, but even i found these salaries absurd for developers. thats going to change.
absolutely. i was a programmer at yahoo for almost thirteen years and was laid off. i'm not worried about finding work again, but since i have a nestegg i think i will sit things out for a year or so since job reqs will likely be featuring lower salaries. this makes sense, if i was a hiring employer in a valley of perpetually overextended, consumption obsessed workers, i wouldn't offer top dollar either. people will be taking what they can get to pay their bills.
