Any one else notice the self-justification of the comments?
> Cherrypicking. A great majority of startups fail and their ideas are proven as unworkable or impractical, so it is not unreasonable to summarily dismiss most of them.
Clearly read the article but is trying to justify his own negativity in the past and undoubtedly.
>Would love to see a post on how you define "great" in this context, Ben.
Who the fck, address someone they don't know by their first name like that?? Ending the statement with his name also seems a bit passive aggressive.
Enlightening check out the comments and see how many people actually respond to the article. All too often when reading articles or listening to other people, instead of listening or understanding, the goal is: 'let me read until I think think of something I can say'. This really hurts that person and just isolates people in their own point of view
(note this post could be ironic. Its not though, the article was freakin awesome! I will try to change my mindset towards a more positive one after reading and rethink what it means to innovate)
This was not brought up but is relevant when a lot of discussion on this article is revolving around the business-developer relationship.
>Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult.
This is exactly why developers (at least this one) have a pending distaste for business people. This should never, ever, be done. The difficulty of selling 'mediocre products' that are not in 'need' and to people who cannot 'afford' is awful and disgusting. It implies tricking the buyer for your own gain.
If you have a mediocre product do not misrepresent when you sell it. If you are trying to fck people out of their money, fck you.
The difficult case is what if you invest your livelihood in a product that turns out to be shitty. You are left with either tricking people in to buying it or facing the alternative -- debt, foreclosure etc.. This could include putting a family (wife or husband or partner and children out on the street). This sucks for all involved. Customers wish you had a good product, you wish you did too.
This decision comes down to responsibility. You built that product. You were in charge or you bought in to the company. Take the loss, be honest about the product (note sales is still involved just not sales that misrepresents).
To be clear, sales is great. If sales is the method of opening people's mind enough to see what you genuinely believe are the best parts of your product. If its to lie and convince them to lie and buy a product that is 'medicore' and they cannot 'afford' (implicitly that this purchase will hurt them in other ways) then fck sales. This 'lying sales' is what the statement indicated and what I, and I think other developers, do not like.
It is true a team ideally is made up of experts in different areas.
It is true having technical skills can make it easier to hire developers, get customers (only one way to make this easier), and appreciate the technical side.
If a 'developer looks down on you' why does this not make them an 'ideal candidate'?
And what is the value of an ideal candidate? Is finding one even possible? Isn't 'the ideal' hard to reach in anything? My ideal life is to make millions while making the word a better place, have a six pack, lots of interesting friends, write rap, write a novel, have an uberman sleep cycle and not go crazy, and have many beautiful and intelligent woman.
Isn't 'ideal' more of a standard then an actual possibility? If so, isn't not the end of the world if this developer is not ideal? Don't you only need a talented developer who will do the work that is asked of him?
And what is 'business or talent ' not 'convincing enough' for? (hiring the developer, creating a business etc..)
It'd be great to fully understand your point of view.
If any of the subsequent logic is flawed I'm very open to conceding points based on logically rebuttals.
Aside: This community is awesome, so much respect for this intelligent lengthy, conversation.
It seems 'regulated' vs. 'unregulated' is a false dichotomy, no?
A company in the US (there maybe some complications due to globalization) cannot kill a customer who writes a bad yelp review. This might be advantageous, if the customer will never use the company's service again and may convince others to avoid that company (and the killing does not cause PR harm) then it as a gain to have this customer, and their review, gone.
This is a regulation. So are anti-discriminatory laws (it is true that the market can potentially correct for racists attitudes by naturally punishing those who refuse do business with a segment of the population. This only holds when the discriminated group is large enough and the market is not saturated).
Lets look at this point:
> In most unregulated industries, quality rises and price falls (in the long run)
Can we instead substitute: 'In most industries, as you decrease regulation, quality rises and prices fall'.
Can we agree that if a company could force us to buy their products at gun point, they would sell us terrible products? Or at the other extreme, if the government regulates everything, companies often create shitty products (Products in some communist countries)?
If we can, what we are looking for is a 'sweet spot of regulation'. Maybe that allows the natural spirit of competition to create the best product given the constraint of cost?
To look even further, (I'm blanking on an example >_<) is it unreasonable to say that the advent of new technology can shift this 'sweet spot'?
So would a comprise to this question of 'should telecommunications be regulated?' fall to, yes, 'there should be a set of regulations which allow for competition' and that change when 'a new technology emerges that hopefully decreases (it could increase by the same logic. For example, advent of very expensive technology that is advantageous to have) the amount of regulation need (or even that changes the type of regulation).
In this picture, the government might be more akin to a gardner, the lump of citizen action (a tree) and the laws (in case the regulations) the frame used to shape the tree as it grows[1].
So if we accept this flow, we have arrived at, 'regulation which shifts as technology affects the barrier to entry meant to allow for competitive spirt to flourish and natural create the best product given cost constraints'
I'll readily admit this logically path takes a wide definition of what 'regulation' means.
Could you explain this a bit more and what you mean by 'self-promotion'?
1) If you are defining self-promotion as 'falsely giving the impression of ability or productivity' then it seems hurtful to any company (I hate seeing undeserving people praised).
2) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity' then I do not see any inherent negative value in it.
3) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity in order to receive some gain' then I do not know if this negative or positive.
My only experience is as a software engineer and not as a manger, but is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?
That is, as a manger do you not need to understand the ability of your employees while at the same time having limited time. In small companies a CTO etc... has little time because there is SO MUCH WORK to get done. I imagine that in larger companies there are too many people (and investment in oversight) to understand the value of each person's ability.
So it seems that self-promotion has served as a solution to this difficulty 'as a leader I need a hand on the pulse of my employees but have little time to do so'. Thus when an employee says 'hey I am good at this', it saves everyone time if they have an accurate understanding of their own ability. The problem in this solution is that it opens the doorway to these 'unsuccessful people.' The real solution is problem not to hire them in the first place (I know, I know, this is not an easy solution). Unless you want to turn your company into the worst place to work ever, will there not always be an opportunity for shitty people to game the system?
My only solace (and this is motivated by my recent reading of Plato's Republic) is that these people cannot possibly, truly be happy. I would think a lot of people who pretend are lazy (which means the rest of their life sucks) or untalented. The only person I have ran into that does this consistently is actually unable to code (not lazy). I hated him until I felt sorry for him. Again, I am drawing a lot of these conclusions from a small sample size.
Self-promotion, as I would describe it in this context, is simply selling yourself at all. This is highly frowned upon in cultures in the opposite end of the continuum as it comes out phony: "if he's so good then why does he have to underline it himself?" If you really are good, then it's something that's known and you'll hear others (your coworkers, peers, ...) saying the good things about yourself.
By self-promotion, I'm thinking of the following kinds of thing:
- I say something subtle or not-so-subtle that I perceive will impress other people concerning my (real) abilities, for the sake of impressing them.
- I intentionally say something that will make me look better than a peer.
Self-promotion is not so easy to define, but it's something you can recognize when you see it. This is behavior that in a previous time we would have thought of as immodest. Americans (I'm one) and others with similar cultural tendencies don't have a sense of how self-promotion comes across to people. Avoiding it is as much a matter of good taste as anything else.
is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?
It seems to me that a necessary qualification of a manager is that he or she take the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his or her reports at a level sufficient to have an opinion about their contribution, one that is not dependent upon them needing to be flashy in various ways. My sense is that anyone who cannot do this is either too busy or perhaps otherwise not in a good position to supervise a team.
You may intend differently but this sounds incredibly passive. And is deleterious to change.
Revolutions like the main stream popularization of the computer or the rapid boom of the iphone seem to 'just happen'. But this obscures the toil of the drivers of said changes. By encouraging us to let 'it just happen' you are encouraging the hacker community to be passive in determining its own outcome.
However, it does seems misleading to serve teaching the recursive solution to fibonacci to students learning recursion as an example of bad practice or of demonstrative of Math's secondary role in computing. Fibonacci's are a very intuitive, and instructive, application of recursion (its efficiency is irrelevant here).
What specific areas of modern computing underutilize mathematics in favor of abstraction despite any tenable reason?
What you say the article is missing is the whole point of the post. This is not a programmer way of looking at it on the whole. In fact, I think the goal of this post is to change programmers "way of looking at it'". 'this is only three lines of code' is a programmer's viewpoint. But it is only a hook into the post to grab programmers and then the post goes on to shift to a practical, business viewpoint. (this post changes the programmer's view point who reads the post)
In terms of
'People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them.'
Uhhh dur. And the post even addresses this:
'
There are a lot of lessons one can learn from this anecdote: the art of the graceful upsell, the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic that lets them charge $200/month for a glorified <li> element.
'
Note, "the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic".
"We really can do anything. The sky is not the limit in Cosmos. We can go beyond into outer space."
*pukes
Good article so far, but that line smh