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darklighter3

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crwohlfeil@gmail.com @crwohlfeil

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www.city-journal.org 5y ago

The New Productivity Revolution

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medium.com 9y ago

The productivity paradox (gaming and work)

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www.vox.com 9y ago

Marc Andreessen Explains How AI Will Change the World

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github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Automatically track time spent on Git commits

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www.vox.com 10y ago

Technology is changing how we live, but it needs to change how we work

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mobile.nytimes.com 10y ago

What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

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www.vox.com 10y ago

A comprehensive map of human poop on San Francisco sidewalks

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medium.com 10y ago

An XT FAQ

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kottke.org 10y ago

The thousands of bombs exploded on Earth

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www.chris-granger.com 10y ago

Eve Version 0

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www.davefarley.net 10y ago

What if we had vast memory that was fast and, crucially, non-volatile

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gizmodo.com 11y ago

Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption

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rameznaam.com 11y ago

Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

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www.ft.com 11y ago

Lunch with Marc Andreessen

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www.vox.com 11y ago

Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers

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time.com 11y ago

Why Apple Didn't Use Sapphire for iPhone Screens

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www.wired.com 12y ago

What's the Pressure Inside an Exploding Whale?

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www.farnamstreetblog.com 12y ago

How to Think

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www.theatlantic.com 12y ago

Why Writer Are The Worst Procrastinators

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www.theatlanticcities.com 12y ago

How East Coast Tech Startups Became a Downtown Phenomenon

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marginalrevolution.com 12y ago

Is the Fourth Amendment Now Illegal?

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www.infoq.com 13y ago

Development at the Speed and Scale of Google

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blogs.reuters.com 13y ago

Why mobile payments will never take off

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www.washingtonpost.com 13y ago

The rumors of Silicon Valley’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

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www.theatlantic.com 13y ago

A Reddit Co-Founder's Devastating One Line Takedown of Facebook

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www.theatlantic.com 13y ago

The Philosophy of Netflix

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www.linkedin.com 13y ago

Beyond Planes, Trains & Automobiles: Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop'

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blogs.reuters.com 13y ago

Where banks really make money on IPOs

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www.forbes.com 13y ago

Misunderstanding the Benefits of High-Skilled Immigrants

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www.youtube.com 13y ago

A Guy Who Saw Lincoln Get Shot Was on a TV Show in 1956

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Agree with the points around increasing equity and comp. One thing about option plans is that the devil is in the details. How things play out in a liquidity event or the tax ramifications can be large based upon how the plan was set up years prior. My guess is founders probably don't spend a lot of time sweating these details and the lawyers are concerned about protecting the company. YC could help by pushing for plans that are employee friendly. Publish articles about how to set up plans in a good way. Publish articles about what employees should look for when comparing offers. Possibly publish legal docs that companies can start from similar to other sets of documents you've published.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (US) I am a senior full-stack Java developer and DevOps/infrastructure engineer. I can help you with:

  * Understanding your goals and translating them to a technical solution
  * Prototyping/MVP
  * Full-stack development work
  * Improving your development tools
  * Setting up continuous integration and deployment
  * Automated testing
  * DevOps and automating your infrastructure
Technologies: Java, JavaScript, Chef, Jenkins, AWS

GitHub: https://github.com/crwohlfeil

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigwohlfeil

You can get in touch with me at crwohlfeil@gmail.com.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (US)

I am a senior full-stack Java developer and DevOps/infrastructure engineer. I can help you with:

  * Understanding your goals and translating them to a technical solution
  * Prototyping/MVP
  * Full-stack development work
  * Improving your development tools
  * Setting up continuous integration and deployment
  * Automated testing
  * DevOps and automating your infrastructure
Technologies: Java, JavaScript, Chef, Jenkins, AWS

GitHub: https://github.com/crwohlfeil

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigwohlfeil

You can get in touch with me at crwohlfeil@gmail.com.

Successful startups go through a couple of phases as they grow. At each phase the skills needed from the team will change because the challenges to get to the next level are different. And the team will often turn over along the way. Not everyone who was there in the beginning will be there at the end. And that's okay. Now maybe you have the skills and experience to grow with the organization along the way or maybe you don't. Lots of people maybe can and maybe can't. Sometimes it depends upon where you are in your career. Was this your first time managing? Then maybe you need more experience and growth to be the CTO of such a large org. It can often feel like a demotion when you are passed over and senior positions are filled from the outside. I understand where you are coming from. I've been in your position.

Whether the CEO lied to you or not really depends upon context. When did he tell you this? Obviously things have changed as the company has grown. Perhaps he didn't foresee the need for a CTO at the time but now he does. Things change and the needs of the company change with them. And remember he himself is growing and learning as a manager. If he was inexperienced he probably just couldn't foresee the need. Also how realistic is it that a growing/successful technology company won't have a CTO? I find it unusual that it took until ~450 people to get one.

Where do you go from here? If you'd like to be CTO (of your current company or another) the first step is an honest self assessment of the skills and experience you'll need to attain and perform in the position. Second you'll want to talk to the CEO about where you fit in to the company and your room for growth. You'll need to convey your understanding of the need to bring in senior management but also convey that you feel that you can grow along with the org to accept more responsibility. See if you can lay out a plan to do that. If you don't like what you hear coming out of that process then its time to start looking around.

Ben Horowitz has a really good blog post that touches on a lot of this stuff. http://www.bhorowitz.com/demoting_a_loyal_friend

It's helpful to remember that the British took very different methods of governance among different colonies at different times. They very much used different means depending upon the local situation and what they were trying to get out of a colony. Also colonies that were populated by British people (US, Canada, etc.) have a very different cultural and social heritage than the colonies where Britain showed up in a pre-existing society with established norms.

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people who leave school 'for a little while' with full intentions of going back can find it difficult to do so and then never go back. When you're in the 'real' world you can start to accumulate commitments and the more of these you have the less compatible college is with your life.

From other comments it sounds like your main motivation is to make yourself more marketable to future employers. CS grads are already highly marketable especially when combined with internships and/or part-time work. It sounds like you already have good experience and presumably you will have more during college with an internship or some such thing. If you complete a degree you'll have the qualifications that hiring managers would look for. Having full-time experience instead of part-time isn't going to give you any added benefit. And it probably won't get you a higher starting salary - you'll be in the same hiring pool with all of the other new grads.

And there are costs to be considered. You'll be delaying your college experience by a year. Your friends will be meeting smart interesting people and going to parties and spending late nights in the lab working on cool projects and learning about things they hadn't even heard of before. You'll have to get up early for work tomorrow. You'll be delaying the start of your career by a year. Your salary can rise pretty quickly in your first five years after school. How fast it goes up will be determined on how you perform on your first job(s) not on some work you did when you were 18. The money you earn next year probably won't make up for delaying that process by a year. Also note that salaries can vary widely by geography and are much higher in the Bay Area, New York, etc. If you want to move to a higher earning location you'll be delaying that by a year.

It's mostly an ecosystem thing. Large companies follow the lead of their vendors and Oracle/IBM/HP all push Java. There is a vast array of third party tools and software packages for doing boring enterprisey stuff like monitoring and integration. If you want to integrate or extend one of the big ERP or CRM systems that is mostly Java. At this point there are lots of people that can be hired with passable Java skills and most consulting outfits have large Java programs. Admittedly this is something of a positive feedback loop that got started because the big vendors stared it 15 years ago.

As for team delivery speed it is certainly possible to deliver quickly. The dynamic languages have definite advantages over Java. There is less XML/property/configuration stuff to manage for instance. But the Java frameworks are actively developed and they get better all of the time too. Delivery speed is mostly a team and organization thing. Large orgs can take forever to deliver the simplest of things. It can take forever for people to decide what they want. You might have to get permission from three different VPs. You may have to schedule a series of meetings to have a decision made and it can take a couple of weeks the find time when all stakeholders have open time on their calendars. You may be dependent upon cooperation and resources from another team that isn't really motivated to help you because they have their own stuff going on. So it's not really a technology problem, it's a management problem.

Abolish LLCs? 15 years ago

He's talking about the corporate form in general not LLCs specifically.

I'll second the advice of building something that displays your skills. Another option would be to use your testing experience and look for a position building an automated test suite. Once you've proven yourself and gained some experience you'll probably get an opportunity to take on other projects. Are you looking to get hired in a startup or anywhere? There are employers that hire less experienced programmers regularly - usually larger companies. With a year or two of experience there you should then be in a position to get a job wherever else you like.

SEEKING WORK - REMOTE ONLY

I have been doing Java web development for 12 years with skills in related tools (Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Javascript, jQuery). I have also done some Python and App Engine.

Contact info is in my profile.

I have also experienced extreme slowness with ios 4 on 3G. Clearing the safari cache and restarting made things quite a bit faster - but still slower than ios 3.

One option is to have your code manage the database schema it needs rather than managing the schema externally. You would have some kind of initialization routine that checks the schema and creates anything that it needs. This probably makes a little more sense if you are using some kind of OR mapping scheme so you don't have to duplicate data (some OR mapping tools can do this for you).

Well yes but I think it has more to do with the incentives that are placed before people. As an organization gets larger it gets harder to tell who really contributes what. It also gets harder to socially police people who are attempting to game the system. If some people are successful gaming the system others are incentivized to do so as well. It can be easy to label a sub-optimal outcome as bad management but those managers usually aren't dumb. They usually have perfectly rational reasons for the things they do - it's just not what the policy designers had in mind.