HN user
perhaps, but you have a ton of people going through 10 week crash course "learn how to program" courses and pulling down decent jr dev jobs.
there's a whole cottage industry around this, see: starterleague.com
basic html+css with some passing familiarity with Rails/Jquery and some common libraries = 80K, $100/hour programmer bro.
not too far off from '99...
When it screws you, trust me you'll remember it.
That said, while I use Apple Maps for the vast majority of the time, for certain non-major/obvious addresses, I find myself double-checking in GMaps.
What's really frustrating is that it throws out any errors at all in major cities like SF!
Fair enough. This is where I'm the cynical one in the sense that I don't see the point of having a visionary mission statement if you have to resort to spin and propaganda tactics to convince your employees to buy into it.
The qualification of "worthwhile" is really subjective to the point where unless you're literally doing something truly impactful (which I define as value + massive scale, e.g., cure to cancer, etc.), your value is at best a surface scratch and at worst a fad.
Consumer oriented startups like Snapchat spring to mind, which seems to have both a questionable mission statement + a shameless pursuit of founder enrichment. Not judging (I'm jelly), but I do think it serves the greater point I'm trying to make.
I think you can have both, something that rewards founders for their risk while also providing for your employees.
Remember that it's a bit of catch-22 in the sense that you need your employees in order to make your company into a big success. Rewarding your employees and creating a culture that's awesome incentivizes loyalty, hard work, etc.
Be careful of this founder-before-all mentality... no one wants to work in a fiefdom...
That's a bit too cynical...
I read that more as a "company should seek to provide sustainable financial prosperity for the employees". What's wrong with that? It's hard to provide for your customers if you and your employees are struggling.
If it does no good to the rest of the world, generating bonuses for its employees is... lame.
I don't know. Not every business produces world-saving value. And that's fine.
You shouldn't need kool-aid level propaganda to validate your business and motivate your employees...
A primary motivation for me and my business, is creating an institution that enriches the lives of those part of it. I want to create the type of company where everyone has some say, where the mission is bigger than any one individual, and whose employees feel empowered and respected. I've worked too many bigco jobs that wore and ground people down. My first job out of school was at a management consultancy. The pay was excellent, the projects were interesting (and truly made an impact), but the culture of the industry/company was such that people were ground down to the point that they became extremely jaded, materialist, negative, etc.
For my older co-workers and bosses that were married and had kids, I always wondered how that impacted their lives at home and how they treated their love ones, and in turn the ripple effect that would have.
From reading your blog, I know you have a similar background, so I think you know what I'm talking about.
The startupbro culture sneers at these "lifestyle business" sentiments, but there is no shame in a more modest (and I think, balanced) approach.
Yes you could do that, but again I don't see how its user-friendly to have to resort to creating multiple accounts to bypass the G+ requirements.
No one is saying that Google doesn't have the _right_ to do this, just that its obnoxious and goes against the very user-friendly/oriented image that Google itself tries to perpetuate. You've yet to address this very point.
That's not a fact, that's just a saying. Youtube is free to you, it's not free to advertisers. There can be products that come free to some and not free to others.
You're just splitting hairs about what constitutes an expense. Youtube is not 100% free to use. There are costs... like the time it takes to watch an ad before your video plays... that's a bit myopic on my part as well, but if you want to get technical...
No you're not. It's free.
Nothing is free bro. Business 101.
Who said anything about creators. They /OWN/ Youtube. They have made it /VERY/ clear what is happening. If you want to ignore that that's up to you, but you can't turn around and act as if it's some inexplicable weird move that makes no sense when they have detailed every step of it.
No one is saying its a weird move. I'm just arguing that the WAY they are doing it is extremely annoying and not very user-friendly.
You shouldn't have to have a public profile or be forced to share your comment on youtube. It's obviously advantageous from a google perspective, but not very user-friendly.
The value of G+ should incentive the user to want to share their comment. Google shouldn't FORCE you to do it. That's not very friendly/flexible.
There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things
Thats not the case if you registered for a google service (i.e. gmail) pre G+, which I imagine includes a TON of users. If you fall into this category (like me) and don't have a G+ account (i.e. a "Public Profile), you get spammed like crazy and constantly asked to join up.
And the service isn't free. I'm paying for it with my user information. Let's be real, Google isn't some savior upon high blessing us with "free" services from the goodness of their hearts. Be honest.
btw I'm a huge fan of Google, I just find their hyprocracy of "we're not a cunning business trying to maximize profits, we're a social enterprise saving humanity, that just happens to make money" annoying and insulting.
We need to get rid of this narrative that creators = god and users = proles that don't have the "right" to complain.
What happened to "don't be evil"?
The criticism is a bit thick, but the prompts to join G+ are increasingly manipulative and gimmicky, designed almost entirely to _trick_ the user to into signing up + spamming their gmail contacts.
A requirement to have G+ account to make youtube comments is just one part of a greater trend that includes:
1. Requiring a G+ account to review Android apps in the Play store 2. Cunningly worded join prompts for first-time Android users when they start up their new Android device(s)
You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives?
The moral superiority narrative that the valley likes to perpetuate vis-a-vis more traditional industries like banking, etc. is increasingly laughable and absurd.
Let's be real tech bros and broesses. Bidness is bidness.
One of the biggest myth about getting an MBA is that you learn anything at all.
The two primary motivations for getting an MBA are completely unrelated to obtaining an "education":
1. Career transformation (i.e. you're a marketer that wants to go into banking.. basically impossible to get interviews without going to bschool)
2. Obtain a professional network
"Learning" is really a tertiary priority.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Chicago / SF / Remote
EdTech startup in Chicago seeking native iOS developer. We build classroom management software around the language learning space and need some more engineering help to get an iPad version of our Mac app developed.
We're looking to hire someone okay with project-based compensation (a % upfront and fixed payments upon meeting milestones). We're targeting at least mid-high 5 figures for about 3-5 months of work.
Email for a more detailed description of what we'd like to build, but from a technical perspective, we're looking for an iOS engineer that knows (at the very least) the following backwards and forwards:
- Low-level media manipulation
- iOS multimedia frameworks (AVFoundation, AudioUni, CoreAudio)
- Fully asynchronous communication over RESTful APIs (NSURLConnection, Other supporting classes like NSURLProtectionSpace, NSURLCredential, etc.)
chicityedtech [a] gmail
Website looks great. I'm sure the crowdfunding niche will explode even more in the next couple of years.
That said, does anyone else think this will just feed into existing/new bubble?
Title III in particularly will bring in a flood of dumb money. What a beacon for #startupbros everywhere.
Silly analogy. Hollywood bros don't claim to be saving the world nor do they cast themselves in a superior light than all the other bloodsuckers.
When you take yourself this seriously (Saray Lacey... classic example), you're going to get ridiculed and made fun of. Rightfully deserved too.
IDK. Digging up people's private lives is not cool (e.g. valleywag's articles about Eric's open marriage), but pointing out blatant douchiness is admirable. We need more of that shit to keep us all in line (e.g. Sandberg's unpaid intern fuckup - which let's be honest is fucking disgusting).
Enough toeing the line brah.
It doesn't matter if you're building silly websites trying to get strangers to dine with each other.
If you're building anything at all complicated, a few years of web-dev work isn't going to cut it bro.
The benefit of experience is you gain a more holistic understanding of wtf is going on, so you're not writing code in a vacuum of ignorance.
Gossip rag aside, alot of the criticisms brought forth by valleywag is on point...
There is A LOT of dumb money. There ARE a ton of idiot startupbro/princesses.
Anything to deflate the delusional silliness bubbling up here is probably a good thing in the long run.
The HN hivemind loves to rally against the stuffy culture of the corporate world. Are the rapgenius bros any better?
Let's ditch the douchiness and get back to the good ole days of building meaningful, truly world-changing, shit out of our garages.
"We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype."
All you're measuring is hype though. Startups that rely on likes, follows, etc. as a gauge of success/traction are by nature, hype driven.
There are many industries - B2B, EdTech, etc. - where lack of social media traction is not at all an indicator of the health of a startup. I know because I run one. We have 0 likes, 0 mentions, 0 follows, but a hundred paying customers and on track to hit 1MM in revenue in less than 20 months since launch (with only 4 employees).
I hate to be critical of other founders, but all you're doing is contributing to and validating all the silliness that is the SV startup scene.