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I find this extremely hard to believe. I completed two internships at IBM in my undergrad years when I was here on an F1 visa (international student visa). While I was on my F1 visa, I was making more than a lot of my American counterparts and lesser than others who were doing internships as well. The only things that factored into pay were the number of credits you completed in college, and whether you were a returning employee. Nothing else.

I worked for IBM for almost 12 months before I got out of undergrad. There were 4 hiring managers and a senior VP in a hardware unit who was personally vouching for me. Yet, IBM didn't hire me because they were ridiculously careful with hiring H1-B visas because of a snafu they had in the early 80s when the immigration dept cracked down on them. At least IBMs engineering divisions were only hiring H1B folks only if you had 2 years of experience with a Bachelors, or a Masters. I was extremely pissed at the time because I felt like I had more credibility based on merit and my time at IBM than many other interns who were getting offers left and right after spending most of their time playing counterstrike in the labs. They were being ridiculously paranoid about sticking with the books on this one. And sure enough, after I got my Masters I did have and continue to be able to get offers from IBM.

Like some folks said, this probably has to do with third parties who place folks at IBM. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to support them (I'm still sour about my undergrad days and not getting a job purely based on immigration status), but I'm just refuting the whole point about IBM hiring H1B folks just to save money. Just ask around your H1B friends who work at Fortune 100 companies (I'm sure most of you have many). The only ones that I've heard of doing shady things with H1B candidates are small consulting shops and third party staffers.

I started the article off with the good things about the 5 and clipped it because I don't need to rattle off about all the awesome things about it that folks here know about. I just wrote the article about the one thing I didn't like about the 5. I like both the 4 and the 5. In fact, I'll be buying the 5 (I didn't just because it was out of stock, and not because of the not flush glass) :).

Btw, I just now realized that when I said "I didn't like it", the "it" was referring to the glass sticking out, and not the iPhone 5. Bad wording on my part there.

"But how are we to know what Jobs would and wouldn't have allowed?". Thanks for pointing out the obvious. My statement of what Jobs would have done was purely hypothetical. I could have ended that with "Hell yes!" and that would be an equally plausible scenario. When did I say it was a step backwards? I just pointed out one thing on the phone that bothered me (and clearly isn't bothering many people), and that I didn't like it. That's all!

Blame is a strong word, which is not what I did. I just said I didn't like it, which is a personal opinion and that doesn't demean anyones working on these things at Apple. You are just repeating what my blog said, which is that they made a decision that I didn't like :)

In fact, I did say in my blog that "I’m no industrial designer and I’m not saying that both sides must be flush, because of some kind of design philosophy that I might not know." The purpose of writing something like this is to spur a discussion, in which I express a personal opinion, hear counter points, and maybe learn something along the way. Your "sigh" does neither, and I don't need your judging skills to tell me whether I think or am a designer.

Maybe they do, but I wasn't literally comparing the glass sticking up above the bezel when it came to the Rolex.

I never had an issue figuring out the front or back. Usually my fingers run over the home button or the ear piece which is what tells me what the front is. Honestly, I didn't even feel the edge till I repeatedly turned the phone around quite a few times, which is when I looked at it. Not sure this would let me determine what the front was, but that might be my personal opinion, or my insensitive fingers.

This is especially sad considering a recent cab experience I had in Boston. I lived in Boston for a about 5 years before moving out to Seattle, where I recently started using Uber. Boston has one of the worst cab situations especially if you go out late at night. I was back in Boston a few weeks ago, and ended up running into a few friends and stayed up till 3AM. When it was time to go home, there were either cabs that had passengers, or ones that just didn't want to stop despite waiting for 10 minutes. I pull out the Uber app and get a ride in literally a couple of minutes. My friends hadn't heard of the service and they were just dumbfounded that something like this existed, and they all became customers on the spot.

In Seattle, I use Uber only when I have to since cabs are easy to get. I can't imagine using Uber in Manhattan. But in a city like Boston with a shortage of cabs, and just generally grumpy cab drivers I can imagine Uber was just putting a serious dent in the cab business, more so than other cities.

I've always felt that we should brag about efficiency, instead of talking about being busy. A blog post from a few months ago: http://fayezmoh.tumblr.com/post/21470081227/efficiency-matte...

Wait, why do some of these "cheat" mode exist in production games? Isn't that the problem to begin with? Why does omething like "invincibility" exist in the game? Am I missing something here, or is this a noob question from a non-gamer?

This and the other startups like Interview Street seem to be focusing on the less lucrative side of the hiring problem. Like Joel Spolsky said, and like I know from personal experience, my best developer friends aren't in the market salivating to take interview tests, and do code sprints to prove they are good. They are passionate about developing, have many great jobs to pick from at a given time if they tried. If they have free time, they would rather put it on an open source project that excites them, or a smartphone/web app that they are making for themselves.

If you look at filtering mechanisms themselves, there are companies that try to have puzzles that they ask you to solve before joining (eg: ITA software). But they are really challenging puzzles that I would solve just for fun anyway, (which is what I did for months till I one day decided to apply for a job there). The fact that these puzzles are also made by the company (and not a third party website) makes a difference. It tells me about the people that work there and potentially about their culture. On the other hand, building a random web app to prove basic skills is not something I would imagine most talented web developers would like to do anyway.

If you look at it from the perspective of a company that is hiring, tools like this solve merely one part of the puzzle. It takes the subset of developers who are already in the market for a new job and filters them. As a startup though, what I want to do is lure the great engineers who are content at their regular jobs and not looking at all because of inertia. It sounds like there is more of a "search for developers" problem that will expand the breadth of all the developers available to me, instead of focusing on the ones who are already out there (and are most likely not the cream of the crop by definition).

In short, I don't mean to be negative, and am not saying that there might not be a market for a tool like this. But I am pretty certain that if you are a great developer, you don't have an incentive to make a web app on this.

I think part of the issue with talking like we do in our living room, or with our friends, is that articles like this focus purely on the execution of the presentation, and not enough on prepping the content and setting up a theme. The basic purpose of a presentation is to convey something to an audience. How many of us actually sit and think about the audience, and why they need to give you a few minutes of their time, before churning out slides? I believe that many presentations fail at a fundamental level because the content and sequence of presentation is not thought out well enough.

I think back to all the terrible presentations I did when I was in college, or when I presented at several academics conferences. People typically jump in front of PowerPoint/Keynote when it comes time to preparing for the presentation. By now you are already doomed, because you have given absolutely no thought to a theme, a story or a takeaway. After you set up a sequence of slides that's likely to be incoherent on first try, techniques like stopping your 'Ums' or practicing in front of a mirror can only get you so far. These are minituae that may help make you a good speaker, but won't fix the underlying issue that you haven't given enough thought about the content, theme or storyline. You have barely given a thought to your audience and why they care about your talk.

I recently became a Product Manger at a startup (was a developer for 5 years prior to that). Presenting, communicating and convincing is a big part of my job now and I've been iterating every week on getting better. Here is my take and what I've found to work for me. There are two parts to this:

- Content, Theme or Story: Please don't go to slides or bullets when you start preparations. In fact, stay away from slides till you have completely visualized what an ideal version of your talk should sound like. In other words, if you were to explain your startup, a weekend project or a cooking recipe to a handful of people in your living room, how would you go about doing it? What sequence of explanation makes most sense? What do you want the audience to take away. Think about this hard. Replay it over and over in your head. Talk to your peers and A/B test it over lunch/coffee. You'll figure out the basic structure of the talk soon enough. Getting to a slide set becomes a piece of cake after this. And you'll notice that when you go up in front of people that slides truly end up becoming an auxiliary to your presentation, instead of the primary focus point. I've seen a major difference in the quality of my presentation purely by the amount of work I put in refining the theme of the presentation. It gives you focus on what to talk about, and gives clarity to your audience as they listen to you.

- Delivery: This can be solved and made better with practice. This could get involve figuring out a routine, stopping your 'Ums' or practicing 150 times in front of the mirror. I have a much better and effective solution that will get teach you how to control nervousness, stop your 'Ums', and just generally train you into being confident while going up on stage (wow that last sentence sounds like a scam :)). No seriously though, take an Improv Class. They typically cost $200 for 8 sessions and is no where as intimidating as it sounds (take this from someone who used to be a very shy person). I guarantee that a few improv sessions teach you the fundamentals of conveying a non realistic scene to your audience will blow 150 practice sessions in front of the mirror.

Yes, my brother had a stem cell transplant using my stem cells. At one point a year after transplant he got some graft-vs-host disease and one of the first tests they do is a Chimerism test to see how much percent of his blood stem cells are actually mine. The way they do that is by comparing his blood to a base sample of mine. Or otherwise, they could compare his blood to his hair sample (which retains his old DNA), and see if its different. I'm obviously over simplifiying it, but as far as the crime situation some others are talking about on this thread, note that the identical footprint will only be in the DNA in blood. If you take skin/hair etc, it will still have the original DNA set.

My brother had a bone marrow/stem cell transplant a couple of years ago and I was a matching sibling able to donate. Yes, it's unfortunate that there are so many of us who don't understand how risk free this procedure is to a donor. There are a couple of problems that contribute to this in my opinion.

First, the name of the procedure itself is misleading. It's called a "Bone Marrow Transplant". A lot of times however, there is not even bone marrow taken directly from a donor. I was not even poked in the bone at all. In my case, I was hooked up to an apheresis machine for a few hours, and it basically pumped blood out of one arm, and then pumped back the blood minus stem cells into the other arm. A bag of stem cells is then intravenously given to the patient which then makes its way to the bone cavities and starts growing new bone marrow. The donor goes back home on the same day and hangs out like its any other day.

Second, there are some blood disorders for which they require bone marrow from the donor. Now, again, this is not scary as it sounds. They extracted bone marrow a few times from my brother for tests. There is no "drilling" involved. Yes, its a bigger needle, that they insert into your hip bone after administering local anesthetic. I don't know first hand how much it hurts, but they don't even admit you in the hospital for a day. And for the next couple of days, you are a bit sore from it. My brother has average pain tolerance and I didn't see him writhe in pain at all at any time once the procedure was done (happened in less than 10 minutes). I suspect that a torn ACL, a broken ankle or arm which many people on this list would have experienced are far far much worse.

Third, unlike other types of donations involved in transplant like a kidney or liver, this process doesn't take anything from the donor that is not completely replaceable. If you donate stem cells, they will replenish in your body automatically, and the same with bone marrow. Really, there is no easier way where it costs you almost nothing but average pain and minor discomfort for a few days at the most.

I spent over three months in the hospital with my brother in India when he had the transplant. Fortunately, I was a matching sibling so we didn't have to look in any registry. But I spent my days and evenings with countless families who had a loved one undergoing chemo, while just waiting hopelessly to see if they could find a matching donor in a registry. Few things are as heartbreaking to see as families just not being able to do anything and watch someone in their family just hinge on hope from a database. The least we can do is increase their chances for hope with a cheek swab.

The timing of this post is a coincidence because I just did the "status game" this past weekend at my improv class. It's a fun insightful game and Amir is spot on about the fact that we are always playing this game. In fact, we were in a class with 12 people, and after walking and interacting around the room (while only knowing the numbers of everyone but yourself on the forehead), the instructor asked us to arrange ourselves in ascending order in a line. It was amazing how almost everyone knew where exactly they were with respect to everyone else (especially when a #5 and a #6 interact, its hard to figure out if you are the superior or not, but the subtleties do tell quite a bit). Both times we did the exercise, only one person was out of place, and that too, they were right next to each other.

Like mindcrime says, there is quite a bit of wisdom in improv. I enrolled in classes because I wanted something very different to break up my usual routine that mostly involves writing code. What was really enlightening to me was that most of improv was not about being funny, but really about the fundamentals of how to communiciate and convey something to a fellow improviser as well as the audience, in the least amount of time (short scenes).

There are plenty startups that sponsor H1-Bs. Sponsoring an H1-B is not the bottleneck sometimes when it comes to hiring. Even small consultant shops with less than 5 people do H1-Bs. But many applicants will want to think twice about it in case they plan on applying for employment based permanent residency. An H1-B is valid for three years and can be extended for another three for a total of 6 years. After that you can continue to extend it IF you have a permanent residency application that is pending.

The issue for startups happen when you take a permanent residency application into account. For instance, I had a friend who got into two great startups who were willing to sponsor H1-Bs. He really wanted to work at either. However, he also wanted to apply for his permanent residency within 2 years to continue staying in the US. However, a company needs to have certain revenue (besides other minimium requirements) to be able to apply for a green card. Both the companies checked with their lawyers and they did say that it was a big risk factor when it came to applying for a permanent residency. So he actually ended up passing both offers.

In retrospect he would have been fine since both companies ended up getting acquired by Intel and Google, where he would have been fine. But that is part of the risk involved.