I apologize for the off-topic comment but I am hoping a few of the folks on here who are familiar with Hadoop can help me with a small career decision.
I'm fortunate enough to be up for two systems positions with companies in my area, and one of them is part of a group maintaining a Hadoop cluster. I've never maintained Hadoop infrastructure before so I'm wondering if it's worth the "career capital" investment. There don't appear to be too many openings that I know of for Hadoop Sys admins, and while I don't expect to lose any skills working on it, I wonder if this platform is realistically expected to grow, and maybe become something I could maybe build a valuable niche set of skills for...
I would say go for it. Hadoop is becoming more of a norm in industry and I can tell you from personal experience that having prior hands-on Hadoop work makes your resume pop a little more.
Even better is if you're able to muck around in core Hadoop versus abstracted management layers like Cloudera. The things you have to learn in maintaining a Hadoop cluster like cloud systems management, tuning, running jobs, etc. makes for valuable experience, even if niche.
I don't see exploding demand in this. However, the experience will likely translate over to other domains and make you better for it. I'm not a sys admin but setup a small hadoop cluster ... but wow ... talk about learning experiences!
I am not trying to offend you, and am only commenting because I believe stories like these hurt less experienced people who are trying to learn how to handle salary negotiations.
I personally do not believe this actually happened. Nobody will ever follow you out of an interview to beg you to take a job, or casually double a salary offer in a stairwell.
There is no "hard ball" negotiating like this where you walk out and somehow bring a company to its knees. It's just never that dramatic.
IF you receive a concrete job offer then you accept, decline, or counter. You should know the pay range by the time a company puts an actual offer on paper.
The guy went from an offer that was low-ball to an offer that was basically market-rate at that time.
With a big company, there's no way this would have happened. But this was company that was somewhere between "startup" and "mid size" business. They hadn't really adopted normal corporate processes.
There was no paper offer. I reported to work on a saturday (to get oriented by my predecessor, who had left the company already). My paperwork was on my chair, and I turned it into the VP's secretary on Monday.
They were pigs, not hogs. The original investors walked away with a majority of the final round of funding. I don't think Google's $6bn offer would have allowed them to do that. The people left holding this junk are now trying to pawn it off on the public...
I feel the same way and think I have something that might work. I don't know that it's legal but I think you can pay for access to Slingboxes with the different sports packages. It's what I'm considering so I can drop cable all together...
The only thing holding me back now is how attached my kiddo is to the DVR. We've tried a few things and it always proves too complicated or buggy...
I have the image of the injured bird in "Up" limping along burned in my memory. I actually thought the scene was a little mature for the kids watching the movie, so I agree with you about them convincingly conveying emotion.
I remember seeing it in the theater w/ family and my (then) four year-old niece saying "this movie is really sad". The first 20 minutes are about how the old man lost his best friend and wife and is left all alone.
It wasn't sad in the same sense that Toy Story 3 was sad, because I don't think little kids can really relate to Toy Story 3 story like adults can. Kids could realize, at least on some level, the loss felt by the old guy in Up.
I didn't do it for my mom, but helped my ex-wife launch a small business on Etsy. I would recommend looking into some hobbies she has and stuff she is familiar with.
My ex-wife orders cute buttons for clothes from japan/korea, repackages them individually, and sells them on Etsy. It works pretty well and makes her some nice extra money...
If your mom does it, make sure she pushes through to the christmas holiday... sales are practically guaranteed then, and even though its gross rev, the sales can be very motivating!
Have any of you ever considered building something on your own, and trying to bring someone on-board with something in hand, instead of joining a co-founder dating site?
This is becoming a repeating theme here on HN and it seems like its another way for the people who aren't doing anything to feel like "entrepreneurs". It also seems like what takes place at a lot of conferences these days and especially on twitter.
If you're serious about building something, build it. If it's any good, even if incomplete, people will want to join you. It doesn't matter what it is. Really. The guys building the traffic/headline grabbing companies today are just farther along in the process. You can't get there without starting somewhere.
Are you a business guy looking for help building your idea? Outsource it. Pay someone to build it for you. Don't try to "convince" someone else to join your vision and build it for you.
This stuff has to be obvious to 95% of the members on this forum.
Sorry for the rant but this nonsense is getting old...
Absolutely... but that assumes two things:
a) you're the person with the idea AND
b) you're the developer.
If you're not A or B then you need to find somebody that is...
I came up with this idea because I was A for quite a while... but I did want to get into the space. I'm good at executing, but at the time wasn't so good with coming up with ideas (you may still think that is the case ;) )
I also know that business-development and marketing are not my strongest areas of knowledge....
so I went in search of business guys who had a great, marketable idea but nobody to build it for them...
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one... though maybe I'm in the minority on this particular news site :)
Also - I'm not sure if I read it from Seth Godin or 37signals, but I do like the idea that if you can't convince at least one other person, then maybe you should reconsider the idea...
It's difficult and usually becomes more about managing business finance than the products in my opinion. It seems like this type of business is mostly covered in Entrepreneur magazine, or Inc, but they're always feel good success stories.
I helped build a fairly successful online business that sold a single laptop accessory which we had produced, packaged by hand, and sold directly to consumers. The site generated 60k in yearly revenue on somewhere between 5-10k (Christmas peaked at 20k+) unique visitors per month. The margins were really good since we had it produced ourselves and priced high. It was great business while it lasted but I ended up walking away from it because of partner issues.
My old partner still operates it today and it's nearly 4 years later! She tells me that it still generates about half of what it did at peak, but it's slowly fading away because of bigger companies that deliver a better, and cheaper product.
It's great experience and takes time but isn't hard to do.
I've read both magazines and agree that there is not much depth to their coverage (or most business magazines for that matter). My background is in math/business, so I do enjoy the logistics and finance aspects. The interesting challenge seems to be the initial market research/product development. Finding the right thing to sell and then putting together that thing seems to be the toughest part (someone correct me if I'm wrong because I have no experience in this).
The web in general is flooded with stores selling the same dropshipped products, so to stand out I believe someone has to take the path you did and have something unique produced, otherwise you're just competing with Amazon and the like.
I remember reading an article in Business 2.0 about "micro-multinationals" [1] and the thought has always been in the back of my mind to try creating a completely distributed company, with ecommerce being the initial distribution channel. Work and grad school kept me too occupied to give it much thought, but reading about things like this always reminds of the article.
I'm fortunate enough to be up for two systems positions with companies in my area, and one of them is part of a group maintaining a Hadoop cluster. I've never maintained Hadoop infrastructure before so I'm wondering if it's worth the "career capital" investment. There don't appear to be too many openings that I know of for Hadoop Sys admins, and while I don't expect to lose any skills working on it, I wonder if this platform is realistically expected to grow, and maybe become something I could maybe build a valuable niche set of skills for...
Any help would be appreciated...