biznerd

How this got 6 upvotes and posted to Ask HN while my stuff never sticks is beyond me.

If you want to retire in 10 years, you'll need to save 65% of your income.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

It's going to take a huge change in habits.

If you're determined, I would say don't listen to the haters. I've been a member of FIRE since college, downshifted and it's amazing. I never really enjoyed working (actually, hated it) so I get to spend my time on this earth doing what I want to do (read classic books right now.)

If you want to use the roads to Rome example, I'm sure there are some roads that have lots of pot holes. I guess you technically still get there, but there are easier roads that are quicker and safer.

He said his cousin was female so I just wanted to highlight a positive for her.

But you bring up a good point.

I did one.

I HIGHLY suggest vetting the placement "statistics". For me, I just read 95% get a job, went to the open house, listened to a couple "rah rah" testimonials and did it. It was a big mistake.

A friend of mine from the class estimated that only 30-40% of us got actual dev jobs. The rest are either in customer service at a tech company, sales or testing (keep in mind this is people who dropped $15k+ to do the bootcamp), back in our old industry or in the case of one, working at Trader Joes.

I was under the impression that 95% get good jobs. If I had known only 30-40% did I would have never done the boot camp.

How did they manipulate the numbers? I never dug deep but here are my thoughts:

* to qualify as "actively looking" you can't have a job to support yourself. That's right you're supposed to not have an income while job searching, kinda hard when it can take more than six months. If you get a job, you get dropped from career support and your statistic gets placed in the "not actively looking" category

* "industry related jobs". If you go to a dev boot camp, you want to be a dev. You're paying $15k to do it. A customer service job at a tech startup is better than nothing but you don't have to pay $15k to do it. Likewise for sales.

As a positive point, all the females in our cohort got dev jobs, including the only one who actually failed the class. Startups are pretty aware of the gender discrepancy and actively looking to hire those with double x chromosomes. Not complaining about affirmative action, just wanted to give you as full picture as possible

Profit!

I felt the bootcamp really exaggerated outcomes. They said like 95+% got jobs. In reality, probably only roughly 30% got "real" coding jobs (a bunch got support or testing jobs at well.) Some ended up empty handed, one of us is working at Trader Joes.

Bewares statistics! They can be easily manipulated.

great site! if you didnt do any marketing, how did your customers find you?

Well not only does he build quality products but he's an esteemed member of the mISV and HN community. His blog is popular and very educational.

Can't it be long term if you get to 500+ employees like some of the firms mentioned in this thread?

Because I have a job related to accounting right now. Most of the knowledge is on-the-job training. How much you can learn in a class room setting is limited.

Yeah so what would you do differently?

aunimh you have no contact information in your profile

Contacted you both

I'm not an engineer/programmer. Is that okay?

Well the thing is he's never used the framework so he won't be hitting the ground running. He's not in school.

Mattermark

"#2 Hard work beats Talent when talent doesn’t work hard."

Interesting. So which is more important, working hard or working smart?

I'm sorry but this is consulting BS. Any acquisition could be framed under one or even several of these types.

I remember reading the giddy business articles on HP+Compaq being a "transformational" merger and we all know where that went.

2. Corn-Fed Beef

The expert: Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms and author of half a dozen books on sustainable farming

This screams conflict of interest.

Interesting article that brings up some valid points but did this author attend a community college? Whenever I see a generic "Top 10" post on a blog I get really suspicious.

This is going to sound condescending, but remember those kids who had no inclination to try in school and go to a good 4 year college? That's going to be at least 75% of the students there. My brother took some summer classes there and he said they were a joke.

I've heard that teaching at one sucks, and the one or two students that are truly motivated really make the job worthwhile.

I would expect to find this especially true for a math-oriented subject like programming or engineering.

The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search for Afghanistan, say may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

This argument is disingenuous.

Sure, the big G doesn't make any money off of news searches. But the triple-A content provided by newspapers are what makes Google so useful in the first place.

Google is then able to monetize its relationship with users when they do highly profitable product searches. It's like people going to the gas station and picking up a candy bar from the convenience store (where all the money is made.)

Before Latin American countries privatized their telecom companies, it would often take weeks or even months to get a new phone line. Despite being owned by the government and not operated to generate a profit, a monopoly service resulted in extremely poor service.

I think it's a good comparison to Google. The big G can say "We're not being evil!" all it wants. But the fact is that it has a near monopoly on search engine advertising which allows it to treat its advertisers awfully. Imagine a radio station randomly pulling ads without a proper explanation. What would happen? The radio station next door would get the ad dollars.

Try calling Google Adwords phone support (trust me it exists, my friend works there.) You won't find the number listed on their site. I googled and found it on some obscure forum. I was answered with a teleprompt, asking me for my adwords customer number. I'm not a high roller (couple hundred bucks a month) so after the system identifed me it dropped my call. I had to use their crappy email system, where I was answered by a cut-and-paste response that didn't answer my question.

I've had no trouble reaching Yahoo and MSN's search engine marketing groups by phone.

Could this facebook game thing be a fad?

I remember back in high school when web games like Earth 2025 (games.swirve.com/earth/) were quite the rage and everybody was playing them. This lasted for a year or so until the novelty wore off. Some still play but the casual players are gone and the audience is a tiny fraction of what it once was.

I've noticed that my FB friends that play FB games tend to stop playing after a couple months. The games are mindless, cookie-cutter and repetitive for the most part.

<EDIT>I don't think WoW is a good comparison as there is clearly a huge depth between it and Zynga games. The experience is entirely different.

"Easy come, easy go" could apply to this market. I mean these games come out of no where to millions of players. These are not hardcore gamers that develop strong loyalty and build communities, but "casual" players that probably started playing because their friends are.

"Casual" gamers are notoriously fickle. Look at the Nintendo Wii, which is the most popular console but has the least average amount of titles bought per owner (which is where the real money is.)

In 2-3 years I would not be surprised that after all this over-exposure these x-ville games will be significantly less popular. These "games" have more in common with Tamagotchi and Beanie Babies than Wow or Call of Duty... </edit>

"Being first mover doesn't give you the right to assert every piece of your argument."

I'm not. You're just playing devil's advocate. The way you are responding, you have no interest in actually debating the idea.

Can you explain why media companies "greatly benefit" from being excluded from major search engines?

First of, Microsoft is providing an option for beleaguered newspapers. More options is universally better than less options right?

Second, they're getting cash. And the newspaper companies (struggling with shrinking advertising and layoffs) are seriously considering the cash. So it seems the media thinks that cash is more beneficial.

Can you show why this means that "beneficial" investigative journalism continues, increasing the overall welfare of citizens moreso than open access for search engines? For that matter, can you show that newspapers do more "long form" and expose more government corruption than bloggers do in aggregate?

Yes. I'm not sure how to exactly prove this in an excel spreadsheet for you.

What if newspapers accept this deal and transition to more "blog" articles and fewer "investigative" articles, leaving citizens with "no" investigative articles and no single search destination?

Completely irrelevant to the argument at hand. Microsoft would have no hand in this.

You've made no effort to argue with me, you've merely tried to deconstruct my argument like I was writing a proof in a ethics class.

Unfortunately this is hacker news, not philosophy news. Provide a counter-argument that is based on the topic because I have no desire to argue with a troll trying to sound smart.

This guy sounds like a techno-evangelist. Evil? George Bush used those same words.

The world is much more complex than "good" and "evil".

Notice he doesn't even mention that media companies will greatly benefit? Journalism positions will be preserved. And I'm sorry, blogs for the most part digest and regurgitate news. It's newspapers for the most part that need to cover expensive journalism such as "long form" and stuff like government corruption. So the average citizen will benefit as well.

"That could make San Francisco-based Zynga the third-largest U.S. video-game publisher by market capitalization, bigger than Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., the maker of crime-game franchise Grand Theft Auto."

Awful. A company that uses sleazy monetization tactics (until someone called them out on it) and blatantly ripoffs games from competitors will be worth more than one of the most innovative game developers.

Mobwars > GTA?

I guess the valuation though reflects the business fundamentals of social vs console gaming.

Many of them as well are "lifestyle" businesses that are probably not going to need capital scale (and thus do not need any VC)

What would CarbonMade do with a $3 million investment?

They should rename the company to MediaGlow (the division that owns all their blogs).

http://www.mediaglow.com/

The AOL name is tarnished with both investors (from the disastrous merger with Time Warner) and consumers (nightmare cancellation tactics) alike.