woan

There is no surplus of good opportunities for technical folks to co-found something they can believe in. There are plenty of other opportunities of course.

I think the article is solid in that you have to sell the potential technical co-founder that you have a great idea and will add value to the relationship. "decent salary" will get you a contractor for hire, not a co-founder.

You don't have a lot of choice than to network and try your pitch.

I was going to say something about this being flame bait, but I went back to MS's marketing material and it does seem like their vision marketing is at great odds from their execution: http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-plus-...

Unless by services they means software updates, CDDB updates, and downloading Office templates...

definitely should have been "skeptical on collaborating with Facebook"

Number one on any of these lists should be empathy for users. If you don't care about and understand those using your code, you will never be great, only good.

Old media WSJ and nytimes...

Oh crap, in .Net there is a OSS Linq to JSON provider I see.

They return the objects meeting the criteria and you set the property blindly. The query API I saw has a clone and replace API too which is good if concurrency is a concern.

I am not up on this but in XML world I would have used XPath. I see there are both JsonPath and JsonQuery gems that seem to be geared for this kind of stuff.

I think the original Team System pricing which was probably there to compete against IBM Rational in the enterprise ignoring they had a much broader customer base.

They eventually folded it into most of the MSDN freebie programs for partners and startups...

If this isn't a nearly $1b testament for real patent reform (not what is going through Congress now), I don't know what is...

A poster child for the Innovator's Dilemma of how traditional management excellence kills disruptive innovation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

I have to agree from my experience at IBM. Those rewarded tend not to be rewarded much by industry standards (years salary at best) and the entire team or even the most meritorious contributors are rarely rewarded.

I know of at least one team that came up with something major that asked for their compensation to be tied to their product success having their idea moved to another team because "they should do it for IBM purely". Of course that product failed for lack of vision and focus.

From an innovation standpoint, it might be interesting to go with the model of high benefits of success, low cost of failure. That relative skew is what has arguably made the US the leader in this field in the macro.

Startups given the market for engineers in particular actually only have a temporal starvation penalty. It's not like they can't get another job after they fail.

Doing this in a large company might lead to even more innovative products because startups are so under-resourced and governed by promises to investors that they risk becoming myopic and less agile.

Thought I should point out MS also has quite a concentration of languages folks that were famous before joining MS:

Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith, Anders Hejlsberg

It's amazing how many of these so called CS topics that fell out of favor in the 90s have come back in the web world in major ways.

Consistency, concurrency, parallelism, persistence. Yup we're back to basic distributed systems over larger networks.

The vast majority of developers don't need to know all of those things of course, i.e. forms enterprise or some level of RoR applications, but it is kind of interesting to see the resurgence in systems level skills needed in the industry. At one point OS and high transaction developers were down to a negligible percentage of practicing developers and we thought everyone would move to certification type education and high level abstractions.

I think its a good move but it isn't new. I think UC Berkeley moved the first CS class for CS/EECS majors to functional concepts and Scheme in 1989 and MIT even earlier, though the latter abandoned it later.

I remember my Berkeley compiler class implementing Scheme and APL subsets atop the gcc backend as well which was again a doubly good learning experience in learning other approaches to programming and their implications.

I have yet to see OO design taught well outside it's varying programming constructs well. What is the right level of abstraction for "finding objects" in the words of Bertand Meyer?

I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive.

There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem.

Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.

Could be more of a corporate culture statement than compensation...

I remember one of the promises my manager made me at IBM in the early 90s crisis was that he couldn't necessary be competitive in compensation but I would always have access to the coolest equipment and people... Yes he actually kept that promise, I managed to get one of almost every RS/6000 before they were publicly released in my lab...

Nor does every entrepreneur.

I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.

I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.

Really can't argue with the Oracle that there that the majority of these are over-valued. In a sense that just means they are priced for success though we know many will fail or be limited niche businesses.

The key statement though as it relates to a specific company is: “Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest.”

Or cultural, as in Tiger Moms break down the immediate gratification tendencies.

I think its worth exploring the rate of change in software development affording the time for mastery except in extreme specialization (yes you can spend a whole life on high transaction and OS development where things remain more stable).

With a team this size, I think it's spot on given their caveats: http://www.quora.com/Does-Quora-engineering-use-a-code-revie...

I assume they have a culture of shame and pride for power and responsibility afforded to each developer.

I doubt anyone would be offended, but I consider breaking bread with the rest of the company part of the job and corporate culture especially if folks not directly working together get together. It is an effective tool for informal interaction which helps folks adapt to each others unique communications styles.

I think it might be more in keeping with the spirit to suggest group lunch outings just to get out of the office. My old team at IBM used to take our lunches to the park across the street by the Charles River when the weather was nice or take lunch bicycle rides.

I haven't seen much evidence to the contrary that the music business is tanking. I don't really buy the disappointment with buying a crappy album argument. Radio stations used to play entire albums at launch when I was growing up. I might be disappointed with a track or two on an album but it was very rare that I would purchase a complete stinker.

His point that there aren't a lot of concept albums anymore where people listen to every track is an interesting one though there were hardly a lot of concept albums in the heyday of rock that those that were are very notable.

One issue that is not iTunes specific, but the ease that we can play digital music including custom and autogenerated playlists may also have something to do with it. With CDs and albums, there was a physical cost to jumping around and most of us were not ambitious enough to create mix tapes. Maybe just the convenience factor of accessing our existing libraries reduces the purchases of new music.

Ummm... IBM, MS, and Google are there as well, so they aren't the only ones present with deep pockets. They haven't done anything at SXSWi before that I am aware of.

It's amazing how SXSWi has grown into a legitimate conference as opposed to the poorly attended appendage to the Music and Film festival.

Which is why they clearly state:

If you had the good fortune to have bought 100 shares at the $21 offering price that day and sat on the investment for 25 years, it would have mushroomed into 28,800 shares over the course of nine stock splits and be worth about three quarters of a million dollars today.

I really enjoyed this story. I worked with a brilliant developer for a couple years batting cleanup. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it though I was a lead developer/architect before and after the experience. We just got tons done...

I completely agree. Nothing new ever comes if we just work within our comfort zones and don't continue to learn.

Kudos to Steve and Adam on hiring Danilo.

If you thought our patent system couldn't get any worse especially when it comes to software patents, we get this...

The wrong kind of reform. As the article indicates, it's clear that it makes a deeply flawed system in favor of large companies and patent trolls even more so.

Kasparov is spot on in that Watson's DeepQA has yet to prove itself in a meaningful way. If it proves itself as an effective medical advisor, that will be far more impressive than the Jeopardy win (as impressive as that was in itself).

I think everyone was disappointed in the applicability of the Deep Blue accomplishment in other fields. Were any of the special purpose ASICs used to defeat Kasparov used in any other application? As far as I know a significant part of the Deep Blue development team left IBM relatively soon after the accomplishment.