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gawker

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Forcing people to be in the office will not boost morale and productivity. There's probably a reason why personal and "side projects" are being done by her employees. Their work probably does not motivate them enough for them. And there's nothing wrong with dedicating some time for activities outside of the company - if it makes a happier employee, I'd say go for it.

How I Fired Myself 13 years ago

Agree with the point that humans are fallible. We should always have back ups. A company with 1000s of paying customers should at least take steps to protect itself from this sort of catastrophe.

Startups have limited amount of funds to invest in their human resources so they will always be look for the best, the ones who take initiative, who goes all out to make something done right. I wouldn't give up hope just yet - start building something outside of what's formally required of you. Make an app, publish it, sell it and talk about it. You'll need to wear multiple hats in a startup so in addition to coding, if you can do the other stuff, you'll be a huge asset.

I definitely commend you for taking the effort :) If I had a company, I would love to have you on my side to help me point out my flaws.

Your manager needs a reality check to realize that while he's good at starting a company, he can't really manage it.

Agreed. I feel like it's more of an exercise to have some sort of vision but in reality, it's really difficult to predict what the environment will be like in 4 years.

Looking at what I have learnt just 2 years ago, some of it is already starting to get irrelevant!

I think you've outlined just how undervalued managerial skills actually are. I have seen many that have claimed that they can take up a manager's position yet can barely manage relationships with their friends.

I think that relationship skills are key to being a manager, in addition to all the other planning etc.

I'm not sure how approachable your manager is but it sounds like he needs help from you to bring moral up. A leader does not necessarily have to be a manager but of course, with everything, do at your own discretion.

I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia :) Congratulations. It's heartwarming to know that although there are some free loaders, you were still made a pretty penny.

On the other hand, how come all the design work, copy writing, etc are considered free? That's just masking the actual cost of the product.

Essentially, that's what happens when you take in outside investment. If you can build a cool product and bootstrap it, it need not be that way. Once you're taking in external shareholders, you're semi-bounded by their wishes.

As with most comments, I'd say very slick and straight to the point demo. The typing text did kinda annoyed me abit - it's probably a give or take as I don't have patience reading things - would prefer to let me jump in and play around with it.

Just curious, did you have to write all the graphing yourselves or did you use a library?

I'm interested to know how this compares to private/Ivy League schools. It seems to me that you would also have a price to pay in order to gain access to top education although certainly, in the Chinese case, it's more extreme since there are so many students vying for the same few spots at top universities that everyone is trying to gain some sort of edge.

Great great job! I love the demo and love the clean interface compared with Trello. I think eventually you'll reach a point where you need to decide if this is still a side project or there's some potential there. Leaving it free for now is perfectly fine but eventually as more and more people use it, it might cost you a whole lot more (in which case, it might be a good thing). Good luck!

I think that's a very interesting thought. I deleted my Facebook account after I felt that it sucked up too much of my time just browsing status updates. Before, every so often, I would check Facebook to see if anything new had been posted. It got to the point where I had enough and now I feel less anxious about constantly going on the Internet. Information was overloaded for me.

Seems like it doesn't work for me on Ubuntu Google Chrome. I get 3 JS errors trying to run the tutorial. Does anyone else have the same problem?