ewoodh2o

It’s definitely not zero effort. But every time I’ve seen it draw out the timeline, it’s been because the expectations weren’t clear at hire time, nor in the PIP. You’re looking for a specific number of “significant PRs/week”, or story points, or something with subjectivity where you the manager still get to decide.

It’s a warning shot, and sometimes it only lasts a week.

BigCo HR can definitely make it take months, but the practice in general doesn’t have to be that way. We did this at startup size as small as 20 people, and I never regretted it.

I haven’t personally seen that work in practice. I’ve been in situations where we considered it, but people usually have picked a role with salary considerations in mind, and often can’t really walk that back, and if they do it’s demotivating. And they may be able to perform elsewhere in a way that meets the need at your senior comp level.

I think it’s easiest to cut the relationship and let them start clean somewhere else.

You absolutely need to consider how the rest of the team will interpret you actions. Most probably know this individual is underperforming already. Teammates usually have a sense before the manager does.

But the way you handle it will also be observed. Others need to know you won’t just fire someone on the spot if performance doesn’t match expectations. Life happens, people have personal life issues that may occasionally require attention, and you don’t want everyone else assuming they are one bad sprint away from unemployment.

In most of the US at least, start with a performance improvement plan. Ideally one crafted with HR’s help. It should lay out specific expectations for a Senior Engineer, and call for immediate and sustained improvement. Use that to initiate a conversation and clearly lay out that they are not meeting expectations for the level at which they were hired. Present meeting those goals as a requirement for continued employment. You may also present a severance option here if you want them to have an out.

This makes it clear to everyone that you treat all employees with respect, offer a clear warning, and then so long as you expectations in the PIP are clear, it’s a lot cleaner if you end up needing to part ways a week or four weeks later.

This varies from US state to US state, but at least in Georgia the answer is no. We have to register ahead of time (usually when obtaining a driver's license for our current address), and voter registrations are cross-checked against other records of residency. On election day, we have to vote at an assigned location, and that location has a list of the people who are allowed to vote there that day. When you check in, they check you off of that list. People who vote early or have requested a mail-in ballot are scrubbed from that list ahead of time.

A fake ID, let alone a photo of a fake ID, is not going to get you past the registration step nor the in-person verification step. At best a truly good physical fake ID might get you through to vote in another person's name, if you know where they were registered and beat them to it. But that is not what this tool enables.

This system is not without its flaws. Plenty of people are disenfranchised because they either failed to properly register ahead of time, or failed to show up at the correct polling location with proper ID on election day. But AI-generated photos of fake IDs is not one of this system's weaknesses.

This is really frustrating, and sorry you're on the receiving end of this. I don't work for Twilio, but we spend a lot with them (and some other telecoms) so I see a bit further up the chain than most.

The retail wireless carriers are really driving a lot of this with recent 10DLC A2P changes. In particular, T-Mobile is waving around threats of $10k fines per message for messages they deem to be in violation of their content rules. (Which obviously prohibit fraud and such, but also somewhat-arbitrarily anything relating to marijuana.) The way it's written T-Mobile will fine Twilio, who is supposed to pass it on, but knows they'll struggle to collect that.

Meanwhile, on my personal cell phone AT&T can't even seem to figure out that when they get a message from a Nexmo number that starts with "ATT Free Msg" that they didn't send, maybe they shouldn't deliver it. As a consumer I'm glad someone is trying to squash these scams, but they're breaking more than a few eggs in the process.

I'd echo the advice to get off the SMS channel for notifications if at all possible, unless you're sending enough and spending enough to have named support contacts. The rules are being written for people sending thousands of messages per day. We serve small businesses who send maybe 100 messages per month, and it's been a mess trying to get carriers to recognize that these businesses exist and need a solution that works for them too.

Besides what others have pointed out, there's also the economic angle. It may be worth the estimated $X (for whatever value of $X you believe) to predict a collision, forge a cert, and MITM all of a website's traffic. It may not be worth nearly as much if the prize is only the ability to MITM 2% of that website's traffic. Maybe it's 6% under oppressive regimes, but it's still the same amount of work for a much smaller prize.

Of course we'd like to protect all 100%, but this is about tradeoffs. Assuming downgrade attacks are as preventable as they claim, I think it's respectable that they're making this kind of effort to reduce the impact.

Atlanta, GA - CallRail - On-site - http://www.callrail.com

We build call tracking analytics software for small and medium sized businesses and the digital marketing agencies that serve them. The company is profitable, with a paying customer base of 18,000 companies, and recently raised a small series A round. The current product team consists of 8 people, all Atlanta-based. We're looking to add two or three more to help us build out the platform faster. Current tech stack is Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, Postgres, and Redis.

Senior Software Engineer - Looking for full-stack engineers who can help us expand the platform. Upcoming projects include refactoring key components into services, building out automated call scoring using machine classifiers, deeper integrations with other services, and improving our analytics tools.

Senior Mobile Engineer - We have aspirations of building native mobile applications, but nobody to do it. Looking for someone with experience building apps from the ground up, part of which will be scoping what features the app should include. No strong opinions on pure native vs hybrid vs Cordova vs Xamarin, but regardless there will eventually be some WebRTC components. Prefer to start with iOS, as that's where most of our customers are.

More at http://www.callrail.com/careers, or email me directly.

Atlanta, GA - CallRail - On-Site - www.callrail.com

We build call tracking analytics software for small and medium sized businesses and the digital marketing agencies that serve them. The company is profitable, with a paying customer base of 18,000 companies, and recently raised a small series A round. The current product team consists of 8 people, all Atlanta-based. We're looking to add two or three more to help us build out the platform faster. Current tech stack is Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, Postgres, and Redis.

Senior Software Engineer - Looking for full-stack engineers who can help us expand the platform. Upcoming projects include refactoring key components into services, building out automated call scoring using machine classifiers, deeper integrations with other services, and improving our analytics tools.

Senior Mobile Engineer - We have aspirations of building native mobile applications, but nobody to do it. Looking for someone with experience building apps from the ground up, part of which will be scoping what features the app should include. No strong opinions on pure native vs hybrid vs Cordova vs Xamarin, but regardless there will eventually be some WebRTC components. Prefer to start with iOS, as that's where most of our customers are.

More at https://www.callrail.com/careers, or email me directly.

I worked at Oracle up until last year. At Oracle HQ in Redwood City, yes, many developers have private offices. But our office and the other offices I visited elsewhere that had been built-out more recently were open-plan environments.

That was probably editorialized by TC. I work at Vitrue, and Reggie regularly corrects people around the office who refer to the company as a "startup".

Besides fire/flood/theft/etc, is the garage clean and climate controlled? I used to run a server in a basement during college, and burned through 2 disks and one motherboard before I finally figured out that warm, damp, and dusty basements with dirty power supplied by 1920's wiring weren't a great place to run servers.

For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware.

Also, read the fine print on that Comcast plan. Their residential service is now capped at 250GB (not sure about business-class). In my experience, Comcast is the last company I would want involved anyways. Our service goes out frequently enough that I now have a backup WiMAX modem for my laptop.

Edit: thanks olalonde

I found the SitePoint book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" (http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/097...) to be very informative as well. It's a great introduction to a lot of different aspects of design that programmers generally don't think about when trying to mimic more professionally-designed sites. I read it two years ago, and it was a bit easier to digest at the time because most of the designs presented still felt current.

However, keep in mind that while the designs presented in many of these resources may look outdated, the principles behind them are solid. Tastes and trends may change, but running through a few Photoshop tutorials will get you up to speed on the execution of the latest styles. More importantly though, design basics such as readability, whitespace, proximity, alignment, proportion, color, texture, etc are timeless. If you can distill those important aspects from the materials you're reading, you'll be much better off in the long run than if you just try to copy techniques from whatever the most modern resource currently is.

This really sucks. I had something similar happen last December, except the laptop was stolen out of a locked hotel room. Not a shady place either...skyrise elevator-access place downtown in a big US city.

Hotel was of little help, and police don't do much except write down the S/N and alert the local pawn shops not to buy the machine.

Best bet is homeowner's or renter's insurance. Most policies will cover something like this. If you're in school, your (his) parents' coverage usually extends to cover your belongings. I have the basic $15/mo type coverage from State Farm - the kind that reduces your car insurance payment by more than $15/mo under their multi-policy discount - and they replaced my 3 year old MBP no-questions-asked.

As an EE or CS major, an iPad isn't going to cut it as your portable device. Like others have said, you're going to want something that can run IDEs or hardware interfaces in labs or at group project meetings.

YMMV, but don't obsess over being able to take notes on it in class. In my experience (Computer Engineering degree from Georgia Tech three years ago), professors will move so fast that you'll find a keyboard limiting. Engineering degrees especially are all about diagrams and graphs, and it's just not easy to get those into a computer quickly enough in class. This is less important in CS classes, but you'll shuffle through the same core Calc and Physics classes and run into the same problem.

Also, if you go the EE route, you're going to have to run Windows occasionally. Lots of the specialized lab software, board design tools, circuit simulators, etc just aren't available for OS X. Don't get me wrong - I love my MBP and finished out my degree on the first gen Core 2 Duo MBP running Parallels. But make sure you get something beefy enough to do that, and I'm not sure the 13" MBP is going to be future-resistant enough in that respect.

My advice - figure out how to afford a 15" i5 MBP, even if it means adding $500 or so to your loans.

Wow...I just went through this last week. Definitely didn't think they'd be dumb enough to encrypt the applet but not the chat traffic. But I was a little sketched out by the fact that you go through this entire official ordering process on their website through which you provide all your contact details, then some low-wage support guy in who-knows-where asks for your SSN. I refused to give it to him, which meant I had to put down a $100 deposit. On my credit card. Which I had to type into that unsecured chat box.

As they say, it's Comcastic!

Looks well thought out - I think the idea has great potential! Just a few points on the marketing pages:

* Why do the Twitter / Yahoo / Digg links on the home page actually link to those sites? Maybe it's because the arrow pointing up to the T for Twitter, but I clicked one of those links expecting more information about how your service integrates with that site. Instead was swept off your site. I'd gander that most of the people in your target audience are well aware of what these sites are.

* Is there really no audio on the screencast? A little explanation along with it would go a long way.

I'll look into it a bit more later on. Seems to have promise though! Good luck!

Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you. Hacking together hardware isn't quite the same as software, because mistakes are expensive. Debugging noise on a signal line with an oscilloscope takes eons compared to watching a value in memory. And if it's a significant screw-up you've got to re-spin the PCB which costs real $$. Hell I have an EE degree and I still find it annoying as crap.

If you're looking at running Linux, don't bother with your own PCB. Even the smallest possible system that runs that is going to be using high-speed data lines, processors with 100+ pins, multi-layer boards...it's just not something you worth spending your own time on. Get one of the development boards people are mentioning here.

However, don't assume something like the Picwing needs to run Linux and Flash and WiFi. Companies like Microchip, TI, and Freescale sell processors that run in the $5-$10 range and have their own built-in code memory and RAM. These things are programmed in C, and although being way less powerful, are more than capable of running a basic TCP/IP stack and graphics/touch library once you learn to think outside of having an operating system. You interface them with external components such as an LCD display, Ethernet or WiFi controller, and an SD card or USB stick for extra storage (or stand-alone serial flash chip, depending on your needs). Microchip for example also provides software libraries that handle things like the TCP/IP stack, graphics/touch interface, FAT file system, etc, and I believe the competitors do the same. (Disclaimer of sorts: I used to work for Microchip and wrote parts of those libraries, so I'm most familiar with their stuff. When I left Microchip's graphics library was limited to QVGA, but I'd imagine either they or a competitor has stepped that up recently.)

Reason I mention this is that this is the cheap way to go if/when you want to get towards mass-production. You can go ahead and develop on the expensive dev boards with Linux while you get the interface right and figure out the business model, but plan to hire someone to design custom HW the right way when you want to do volume. China and India are full of design shops that do nothing but clone iPhones all day long...I'm sure someone around here has a few contacts that could get this done cheap once you can specify exactly what you want.

Apple also aggregates payments. I use my PayPal account (somehow that lets me avoid sales tax...who knows why...) for iTunes. Typically they'll bill me immediately for the first song (presumably to make sure my PayPal account still works), then they seem to aggregate anywhere from 1 day to 1 week worth of purchases up to about $30 before billing again.

They did this aggregation when I just had my plain old credit card number linked as well, although I don't think they ran the first charge immediately (probably just reserved funds).

Georgia Tech also lets you keep your @gatech.edu address permanently, for free. Just having a .edu address does not prove you're associated with higher-ed.

When I signed up for GitHub, the free and a paid accounts were differentiated (to me at least) by the need to keep source code secure. If you remove that distinction by offering free student accounts, you'll end up with a lot of ex-students using them. The movie theaters out here in Arizona figured that out and now only offer student tickets on Thursday nights.

Any group of students trying to launch a website with any chance of turning into a profitable company will have figured out how to come up with $12/month.

I'd wager most college students don't know this. I graduated 2 years ago and I wish someone had told me this. And I still try to convince friends of the same when they're out interviewing.

It's even worse when you're graduating because you're nervous about finding a job and these big companies throw a huge signing bonus at you. (In stock of course, which you can't touch unless you stay for 4 years - but at the time you'd never imagine leaving!) That stock is pocket change to the company but a huge sum of cash to an undergrad and it's hard to risk losing it.

I did convince one guy to push back on the exploding offer. He did, and they bumped it up 10% just to try to sweeten the deal. If it's that prevalent, it's the kind of thing the career services folks should warn you about.

Well I've got the viewpoint from the other side here. I work for a large company in the US that has set up an office abroad for outsourcing some of the engineering. (I'm actually planning to leave to start my own thing soon, but that's a different story.)

I think points 1 through 7 you made are typical in any large company. I've found that I've had to just pick a few things, and learn to ignore the rest. It helps to have at least one higher-up who agrees with you...find that person and get them to like you. It's probably better for your career not to be the one who always complains and upsets people. This is pretty difficult when you get attached to a project and think that the contributions of others are making it worse, but you have to be diplomatic about it.

Your last two points are intriguing thought. I recently had to sit through a training session on "How to work with India". It was chock full of ridiculous generalizations, mixed in with a few useful comments on the cultural differences. They have an equivalent "How to work with the US" class over there and I'd love to sit through that one too.

However, the two things you mentioned echo a lot of my experience with our foreign counterparts. I rarely get a "no" or any pushback, and I really wish I did. Our management here relies on the low-level engineers to make the implementation decisions. They, after all, are closest to the problem and have the most information to base their decision upon. For some reason our management here however treats our Indian counterparts as a black box project factory - requirements go in, solution comes out, and there's little to no feedback in between. The class we sat through made this out to be a cultural difference, where it's disrespectful to disagree with a superior, and the manager is always supposed to have all the answers. Maybe that is a cultural difference, but it's not benefiting either party in the long-term. I tend to think it's really because we've treated them as cut-rate engineers for so long that it's now an ingrained behavior. Of course, if we didn't and instead genuinely expected their productivity to match ours, then we'd have to pay them a full engineer's salary and that sort of defeats the purpose. I'd love to hear some comments on how this plays out at other companies...

In any case, it sounds like you're unhappy. In that sort of situation, your output will eventually decline to average, at which point you're doing neither them nor yourself a favor by staying. At a minimum you now know what to look for when finding a new job. But if you take a job at another big company, know that some of these issues will follow you there and you'll have to learn to pick your battles. But if you can at least find a boss you respect (and get him to respect you), it'll really help to mitigate the issues.