rick888

It seems like most startups aren't even thinking about running a long-term business...their main goal is to get bought out by bigger companies.

I saw a show about startups on msnbc the other day. They were all trying to get funding at some sort of demo day. When none of them got funding, many talked as if that was it it..they lost.

Yeah, like we should be listening to Amazon.

They won't allow non-pro merchants to collect sales tax and they charge 3% to collect taxes on pro-merchants.

"I dislike the whole anti-counterfeit programs because companies want you to spend $2000 for a leather bag with their name on it, but the bag is only really worth $20. They're not even complaining that you're not willing to pay for it (like pirating a movie), they're complaining because you're unwilling to spend a massively unreasonable amount on it."

This just isn't true. Many times, the $20 bag uses inferior materials and doesn't go through the quality checks of the bigger companies. It's also about brand name. Some brands are worth more than others.

"There's no reason to target the counterfeitters as they're not hurting your business model. They're selling to people who know they're getting ripped off, but Gucci and what not are selling it to rich idiots who don't know they're getting ripped off."

It does hurt their business model. There are many people selling counterfeits as the original. If the company does nothing about it, people will not only expect to get it at the cheaper price in the future, but will complain if the quality sucks or it falls apart after a few weeks of use, which will hurt the companies image.

You are only telling one side of the story...just like all of the OWS propaganda.

You can make money with amazon affiliates, but it's such a small percentage of the sale. It's much better to come up with your own product or dropship something.

You take on more responsibility but you can also make more money.

hmm, something happened to my post and there's a funny number next to it.

I suppose you would rather have bullets?

I suppose you would rather have bullets?

Can people please stop posting this?

Yes, I see the passive-aggressive reviews from OWS supporters. Rather than trying to make a difference, we have people taking the lazy way out and writing this garbage.

I wouldn't want to find out.

If customs seizes your stuff, you could get in trouble with the law or lose money.

well, it's not my fault.

It's the fault of the person that named a ruby development tool "Dojo" when it's clear there was already a javascript framework with the same name.

so..maybe they should be downvoting themselves? (like I have your responses)

How does this invalidate my point?

The link title includes "Dojo" and I was stating my opinion. I see the Dojo fanbois have downvoted me.

Dojo has already lost the battle.

I used it for awhile and it is a cool framework. However, Jquery has it beat in terms of documentation (code and usage) and community support (I can find pretty much any component I need with Jquery).

"Because FLOSS enables much of this software as a service (SaaS), then it becomes the root cause of the reduction in jobs."

Rather than hiring more developers to create the SaaS, a business now is able to just get free OSS and hire less developers (and less experienced developers).

How is this not putting developers out of a job?

"There are plenty of good 8 hour/day engineering jobs that pay well and have interesting problems to solve."

If I can't take vacations whenever I want or have the freedom to come and go as I please, I consider it slaving away. No job will allow you to do this.

"I wasn't assuming consulting/freelancing at all. If you're going to run a business you're going to have customers. These customers need support and can be much worse than anyone you deal with in office politics."

Possibly. However, you can always fire customers. I know I have. Also, when you are consulting, it's just like having another boss. They tell you exactly what needs to be done. I ran a consulting company a couple of years ago..and I won't do it again.

When you are running a product/service, you may take customer input, but you make the final decisions. That's the difference.

"If 'might make [you] rich' is why you want to do a startup you're probably going to be disappointed."

I'm already making more than I was making at a job. I've only been running my company for a year. The reason many startups don't succeed is because many of them don't think about how to monetize it. Making money is almost always my first priority. If I know it's going to be difficult to monetize an idea, I usually move on. Another problem is that many people think the answer to success is getting bought by a larger company or getting VC.

"The odds are stacked against you and the risks are high. If you're really good at tech, most of the top companies pay well and give job stability which is what many people want."

High risk = High reward. Most companies aren't as stable as you might think. At least with my own company, I make the choices that directly lead to my success or failure. I've worked for too many companies that made ridiculous decisions that led to major profit loss or huge layoffs..and there was nothing I could do about it.

"Because the item is a copy, and (digital) copies actually do cost nothing. That is just the physical fact, and people will always have some underlying sense of it -- as they should."

So why don't people have the same mindset about currency?

It's just ink and paper that represents a perceived value...very similar to the way digital items work.

How about art? It's just paint and paper.

Digital copies may cost nothing, but the original usually costs thousands of man-hours and or lots of money.

"The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural"

In the programming community, it seems only unnatural when it involves proprietary software. If a company uses GNU software without giving back to the community (the currency involved with OSS), people here want heads to roll. Just look at any discussion here in HN that involved the thesis theme. Many, many people called him a "thief" and that he "stole" code from Wordpress. In reality, nothing was "stolen" (using your logic).

Your mindset will eventually cause the following:

1) Developer wages will decrease over time 2) Most companies will just have a web service as opposed to an app. It means you will be paying a monthly fee for software and it will cost more to the end-user in the long-run.

"I am not sure the world would be a better place if most engineers shifted to becoming business owners."

I know plenty of engineers that aren't capable of owning a business. They need to be told what to do..otherwise nothing will get done. Owning a business requires self-discipline and many people just don't have it.

"but so are most successful businesses"

It depends on how you define success. There are plenty of businesses that make enough in profit to give the owner a good lifestyle (as good or better than working for someone else).

I've worked for other people for the 15 years (I quit a little over 2 years ago to start my own company). In every single job, no matter how good it seems like in the beginning, it eventually turned bad.

You will almost always be asked to work on something you don't like, work extra hours, or get denied vacation time. I got tired of it. I got tired of being forced to ask someone if I can take a day off of work to go to the doctor or visit family after Christmas. It felt just like when I was in school. I suppose school is good training for real life.

As a business owner, I have more freedom. There are many times when I don't want to work on something, but it's still enjoyable to me because it's mine. Life also seems to pass by much slower. I don't feel like I'm wasting my life.

The downside is that I have more responsibility (if you can call it a downside). I can't just go into work and collect my check at the end of the month.

"What if you get a crappy client? How about a demanding one or one who doesn't pay."

You are assuming the business is consulting/freelancing, which in my opinion is just as bad as a regular job.

"either will suck at some point"

I would much rather slave 12 hours a day for something that might make me rich rather than my boss.

"It causes unemployment (at least short term) in the country outsourcing its work"

This isn't a problem with outsourcing. It's a problem with technology. Technology has now made it so everyone must compete on a global level. An small mom and pop shop now competes with Amazon and every other website in the world that sells similar merchandise.

If you control it in the US, business owners will just incorporate elsewhere to remain competitive. The US should provide tax incentives to business owners that keep jobs in the US.

"There is obviously something wrong, and the poor are being exploited."

Rather than blaming companies, which are actually providing people with a living, blame governments. In many of those countries (especially China), bribing government officials is the only way you can do business.

"But these stories are really more about greed and exploitation, which we should definitely stand against by asking for more regulations, monitoring and rules for outsourcing"

It's interesting because outsourcing has many parallels with software piracy. Many people don't want to pay the price for some software (businesses don't want to pay American wages) so they download it for free instead (businesses go to a foreign country and pay peanuts). We see what happens when you try to control these sorts of situations.

More regulation and control isn't the answer. It needs to make sense business-wise to keep jobs in the US rather than outsourcing. Some jobs are already gone forever. But it doesn't mean there won't be something else to take its place. It will just require different types of education.

This is only the beginning.

Open source will eventually either put developers out of a job, or massively decrease salaries. Why would a business owner pay for a software engineer when they can pay for a software mechanic (someone with much less experience and at a lower pay-scale)? Open source developers are giving out the difficult parts for free, most business owners only need to make additions.

Right now, we are in a transition. Many business owners don't realize this. In 5-10 years, this won't be the case.

This is one of the post passive-aggressive rants I've seen in awhile. Bravo.

I usually spend time in a research phase. Writing out the main goals/ideas, writing pseudo-code, then actually coding. I find it works much better than the hack it all out approach, but takes a little longer before I actually start coding.

Many people don't like this because it takes some of the fun out of it. But, I usually end up with less re-writes and bugs in the end.

"Not all that fair I'd say."

If you have a more expensive house, you are paying a much higher tax rate and not actually getting much more out of the money you are putting into the system.

If their kids are in private schools, they are also paying double or triple what the average person is paying, yet not actually using it.

There are also many taxes wealthy people pay for but never actually use.

so it's fair. Also, whatever happened to "paying your fair share"? This phrase seems to be going around a lot, yet it only seems to involve people at a certain income level.

I just wish people would be a little more honest.

If electricity is paid through my taxes, why am I paying $300-$500/month to DTE?

Don't they also store all of the uploads?

This was only a matter of time.

I've been using Grooveshark for a couple of years now and I didn't even know they were illegal (I figured they had deals with all of the record companies) until I saw info posted about it here on HN.

I take a different approach, mostly because I've fought hard to do the right thing..and it rarely works..and I usually end up looking like the bad guy.

I do what my managers want and when things start falling apart, I remind them about the warnings I gave them before-hand (sometimes with a smile)

I don't worry about the business-side of things because I'm not a partner in the company and it's not my job. If these situations happen too often, or I get blamed, I leave and find another job (usually with better pay).

I saved my last company from many disasters because the boss decided to let his 20 year old wife with absolutely no experience make business and marketing decisions based on what she was feeling that day. It was actually pretty interesting, because I used it as kind of a testing ground for the worst ideas ever. In many cases, the results were predictable and entertaining.

In 2008, we saw that things were getting bad. Orders were slowing down and management asked me to give them some marketing ideas. I gave a bunch of ideas that were inexpensive to implement, but would take time. They didn't listen. Fast-forward to 2010. They want to start trying my ideas. When they weren't making money in 2 weeks, the ideas were considered worthless and dropped.

Sometimes you just have to let children touch a hot iron to see what it's like to get burned. The smart ones will learn from this and not get burned in the future.

If they did this, people that normally would just pay $10/month to watch one movie a month would only be paying $1. It would definitely eat into their current business model.

I solved this problem by working from the library. It's a quiet place with free, fast Internet access.

Another key is keeping a regular schedule. I wake up at 8am and go to bed at around 11 or 12, unless I'm working extra hours to get something released.

If I release a proprietary software app and users start sharing copies of it for free online, I should have some legal recourse.

I'm really tired of hearing the same old arguments about how somehow this is helping me as a business by giving me "free advertising" and that "it doesn't actually affect sales negatively". It's not and it does. My own stats over the course of 10 years shows me that this is true. Big companies like Microsoft and Adobe can handle it because they have billion dollar budgets. I can't.

The problem isn't necessarily that one copy that's taken. It's the fact that when piracy isn't stopped, people start to first think that it's okay to get your stuff for free..and then they start to expect it, potentially putting you out of business.

Open source falls into a similar category. Except, it's your future job that's getting cheapened. Why would someone hire a software engineer to build an app when they can take a free one and hire much cheaper software mechanics? I've seen it happen already. In 10 years when the current generation (which is used to getting software free and is even more tech savvy than the previous generation) starts taking over current businesses, tech job salaries will be on the decline. I predict a developer union at some point.

I'm not going to take this and just let my business get ruined. I've converted all of my software products to services. Customers essentially are paying per-month for something they would have gotten for a flat-fee.

I don't mind, because it means I can more easily determine my profits for the year and I will make more money in the long-run.

I've done this a few times in my career. I'm smart enough now to always backup before I make any potential mistakes and test everything on a staging server.

The worst was executing "DELETE FROM <table>" instead of "DELETE FROM <table> where userid='X' on a production server.

I don't agree with this law, but there seems to be this underlying sentiment on HN and other communities that copyright holders don't have rights and that there should be a free-for-all with their content.