If your algorithmic skills are good enough to ace the problems in that book, you can probably get a job at one of the big three software companies (Google, MS, Amazon). The vast majority of programming jobs are enterprise development work (think endless CRUD apps) that require nowhere near that level of skill.
I liked this article, but, to use journalist lingo, he "buries the lede" a little.
"It’s also tough because since breaking the news to our current set of 3 customers, I’ve received very positive feedback..."
A grand total of three customers. This isn't like Google Wave going away. Or, then again, maybe it is. After all, he had three more customers than they did.
Kidding aside, Google Wave is an interesting case because it's a product that actually was very popular, just in a use case that was completely different than what it was intended for, and in a way that didn't serve Google. Many startups/companies were using Google Wave as a simple project collaboration tool, and honestly, I still think it was one of the better tools out there for that, and I haven't found a decent replacement.
Haha, I completely agree with you - which is why it's so silly I'm feeling like I'm letting people down - it's just 3 people. I need to get over it and move on.
I'm not sure if English is your first language, but the writing in this article is actually very good. I don't have any problem believing that people are willing to pay Somers for his writing. (And $10K is, by magazine standards, a princely sum.)
> I especially find Maven unreliable in combination with eclipse.
Well there's your problem right there. Use Maven with Netbeans, and the integration between the two is so slick you'll wonder why you didn't use it to begin with. My biggest complaint in Netbeans now is that it doesn't have equally slick support for SBT and Gradle, but that's just because I've been spoiled.
Actually, it's one of the problems, not /the/ problem. There were many more listed :) I would really like to sit down with a netbeans fan to convince me. I have tried my hands on it a few times but I never understood why some people use it. Intellij, sure, netbeans... not convinced :/
I thought the usual exit plan for models was to use their beauty and talent to attract a wealthy husband. That said, I did know one who used her modelling money to put herself through med school, but that woman was a bit of an outlier in the brains department.
I have the flip side of this story. I was good friends with two musicians in the early nineties. I went to their rehearsals, hung out with their friends, and saw most of their gigs when they played out in clubs. Videos, demo tapes, meetings with managers. They spent the better part of a decade trying to make it, and while they became absolutely phenomenal musicians, they never became famous -- for the simple reason that the music industry is full of amazing musicians, only a few of whom will ever become stars.
And this isn't just the case in music. I've been privileged to know several very big writers -- people who can sustain large houses and art collections on the strength of what they've written. But for every one "star" I know literally dozens of hard-working writers for whom the career has simply not clicked. The heartbreaking thing, in both writing and music, are watching the ones who almost make it, who pour all of themselves into a project and who, for whatever reason, just don't break through for their audience.
There's a thing called "sunk cost fallacy," where you've put so much of yourself into your chosen vocation that you literally can't imagine quitting. But the sad reality for most of us -- and why inspiring stories like Ang Lee's can be more damaging than helpful -- is that knowing when to quit can put you ahead of the game.
> in fact, [Good Will Hunting] seems intensely concerned with the insufficiency of Will’s education; his lack of formal education is implicated in his inability to engage in supposedly normal social and professional behavior.
Um, actually no. The character's "inability to engage" is very clearly rooted in his having grown up in an atmosphere of severe emotional and physical abuse. I'm wondering what movie this guy watched that he missed that.
> it is not a accepted selling point of professionals. Rather, it will get you in serious trouble in many professional environments.
Not to defend Sqoot at all, but... um... booth babes? Every large trade show has them. They are there specifically to excite the hormones of the male professionals in attendance. Their use is as sexist as it is effective.
Had Sqoot quietly hired a bunch of models to serve beer to the attendants, and had they had the sense not to publicly high-five themselves for doing so, there would have been no controversy. The reason Sqoot landed in the soup is because they wore their sexism on their sleeves, and handled their communications like obnoxious rubes rather than responsible business owners. Their crime was lack of finesse.
Just because a form of sexism is pervasive doesn't mean it isn't also offensive and demeaning to people. Part of being professional and encouraging diversity is not promoting a frat-like or male-dominated business culture.
I completely agree. I was just pointing out that sexism of this nature had gone on for years without apparent protest. I was not defending the practice.
Booth babes are a problem and the protests have gone up about them (to the point of misidentifying a women as a booth babe will get you in trouble).
If they had quietly done it and female developers had showed up, the damage would have been worse, much worse. Words are one thing, pictures of scantily clad models serving beer at a hackathon would have been a little too juicy for the bloggers. Twitter pictures turn into mainstream media articles rather quickly these days.
Their crime is thinking it was acceptable. As my Dad told me (constantly as a youth it seemed), "I'm amazed you thought of that, and appalled you actually did it." Fantasy is best kept out of the professional workplace / event planning.
There are crimes of state and of the heart and mind. Some require paperwork and lawyers. Others result in groups of people expressing their disapproval in various ways. Both can be very serious and poor times for levity.
This was obviously a throwaway account, but nevertheless I just thought I would say that if you want to find out where your ego is too strongly invested, you need only look as far as those areas of your life where you are unable to laugh at yourself. I mean come on, man. I actually agreed with the rest of what you wrote...
It just struct me as a snippy reply and someone trying to laugh off a subject that keeps coming up in our industry. I hate when people laugh off this type of stuff. I figured I'd try (not much of a writer really) to give a less snippy answer. I didn't really succeed. I apologize if that wasn't your intent for the reply and thought behind it.
I can laugh at myself (and I do quite often). If I didn't I think I would have gone insane by now. I don't even have a problem with Hooters, Playboy / Playgirl, or any of the thousands of other places sex is used to sell things. Like I said, hormones and money.
I'm just a little sick of the lack of empathy in this situation. The "midwestern" discussion had the same vibe (obviously not as damaging). Maybe I'm just sick of TV Shows showing a buffalo every damn time they talks about ND, or (much, much more importantly) I'm just sick of thinking about how many developers we have lost because of stuff like this. Can't really be a Meritocracy if stuff isn't based on merit.
It's fine, I'm not offended. The thing is it's very clearly not a meritocracy. There was a comment recently about how Linus got about $1M out of his RedHat shares, and how this seems totally unfair next to someone like Zuckerberg or even say GitHub. The easy money flowing around this current startup bubble is what's attracting the frat boy mentality. As far as empathy is concerned, I think it's pretty much a write-off when mediated by technology. Hell, we can't even get the tone of each other's posts right. And to generalize quite a lot, empathy and making money are just sort of fundamentally odds with each other. I'm sure you'd never see booze bitches (their mindset, not mine) at a free software hackathon.
I worked at Goldman briefly in the 90s, and I remember being pleasantly surprised at how little cynicism, and how much genuine enthusiasm for helping others I found there. It was a bank, sure, in the business of making money, but there was always this sense -- emanating from the top -- that money was not its sole purpose. I can see where this writer was coming from, and I agree with him that if this bank has lost its unique culture, then it has lost touch with what made it successful in the first place.
