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Coder on the Cross
Salon has a nice story of start-up greed and stupidity. It's not the first, and it's not the last, but it's good reading, in a schadenfreude sense. :)
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Salon's about to get kicked off NASDAQ. They should have their writers talk to their financial department.
It's a total crapshoot.
Once I got to go to a faraway land, work on strange and interesting projects and kill deadlines, helping to score a $15M contract right out from under the nose of a competitor. I was one of 5 Golden Boys and we did nothing but eat sleep and drink code for almost 3 months straight. I got paid well and got a vacation out of it at their expense in the end.
Most recently, I went back in the barrel for two months, coded my ass off, gave the demo of my life and practically brought tears to the eyes of the CEO. She still canned the lot of us 2 minutes later, citing problems with their "burn rate".
What did I learn?
It's a total ride and a total crapshoot. When you win, you win big, when you don't you tend to create new and interesting geographical features known as "impact craters".
Also, just my personal experience, you tend to win more often when the project's scope is more than just "owning the space" or "conquering the market segment" and not just in a karmic,spiritual sense either.
Why sign up for a 3-5 year gig when your owners(and I do mean owners) have a 3-month (1 Quarter) attention span?
I don't buy this at all. A lion is not evil when it kills an antelope; that just the way it is. The lion is simply living according to its nature, which might be bad news for the antelopes, but moral good and evil don't even come into the picture.
In fact, the lion is living exactly as it is supposed to. If anything, that is the definition of good, from its own perspective (apologies for the anthropomorphication, but good/evil is a human concept).
Now you say that for man to live according to his nature - i.e. self-interest as motivator - is evil. But I ask you, how can it be evil? If this is how we are, how do we gain by denying it? You don't see lions trying to grow crops, do you? And you don't see lions forging weapons to fight hunters on their own term either.
I will leave you with some Nietzsche:
"Think again before postulating the drive to self preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is will to power - self preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it".
What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
:-)
Good question. It's not the industry, as such, that's eating people, far as I can tell - it's this sort of universal "corporate disease" that hits technology companies, or at least the tech divisions of companies, hardest. But why THIS sector of the economy? Why THESE companies?
Maybe it's the "gold rush" mentality. I mean, people don't get burned out doing architecture, or doing graphic design (usually), maybe that's because in those industries, you have to BE one before you get put in a position to manage. In high-churn sectors, like the dotcom craze at its peak, you get a lot of nontechies owning companies and putting other nontechies in positions of power. Managers who don't understand what's really involved with a ship date, or who don't understand the mental stresses of keeping huge blobs of code straight in one's head for days on end. Leadership who thinks "if I don't understand it, it must be simple." And for that matter, leadership with dollar sign eyeballs, who simply don't care about anything except profit and don't even notice the burned-out empty husks of programmers sitting around the computer room. On the other side, programming isn't like manual labor, where your body wears out before your brain; most people don't understand mental stress and what it does, and thus will continue to put in 70 and 80 hour weeks, not making the connection between that and the routine fainting spells.
Or maybe, this crap happens in EVERY industry, we just don't hear about it.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The idea of working illness-provoking hours to demonstrate your loyalty to the company is slowly becoming passe as small, high tech firms are dying.
All of the people who decided to sacrifice their social lives, their families and their health for some nebulous pot of gold at the end of the dot-com rainbow are now realizing what people like my dad (at age 70) learned a few decades back: There's more to life than making a bucket load of cash.
While money is a great tool that lets you do the things that you want to do, work can also be a horrible way to keep you from enjoying the parts of life that make existence worthwhile.
It seems to me that the moral of the story is that working a brutal schedule and producing a lot of product isn't always the winning combination for a successful life. I guess my dad wasn't such a dummy after all.
BTW, I've figured out my own secret of success. I'm an engineer at a big electronics company. I work 40 hours a week. And that's it. And I go home, forget about work, mow my lawn, go for a walk, watch the sunset and enjoy my life. And still make enough money to do everything that I want to do.
-h-
. It is OK to love your spouse, OK to love your kids, yet, for those with neither, it should be OK to love you job equally
But can your job love you back?
That may, in the end, be the moral that we all need to learn...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
nobody owes you nothing!
working too hard means one thing: you let yourself get worked to death.
it means precisely "dick" to the planet.
get up and dust yourself off and maybe don't make the same mistake next time
What makes people tick? (in the sense of why choose a particular course of action). If we take a leaf out of the spy business, money is actually one of the least effective motivators. GNU appeals to ideology of "free software" whereas ESR notes the power of the ego in scratching an itch. Example of conviction motivated work (citatioation anyone?) was hersay about someone who released some gee-whiz tools (implmeneted nearly single-handedly) just for genomic analysis purely because he didn't want the for-profit group to do it first and fence off that intellectual common. Looking at this example shows the destructive tendences of choosing a task for the wrong reason (stock options + geek-lek comparison with superstar programmer).
... whether stock options, coolness factor, kudos or just appeal to ego, increasing use of these psychological tricks is likely to be an indicator of dysfunctional companies. One prof once said that the difference between normal engineering and software engineering is that you can look at a bridge design and say you can't build it in 90 days with 6 people but customers expect otherwise with software (even though the complexity may be equivalent).
One thing you have to admire about Bill Gates is his ability to motivate a bunch of geeks. Yes, it is possible to produce a bunker mentality (cough*North Korea*cough) and studies have shown that you can accomplish superhuman feats. However, our psychology is not designed to be running in war-zone 24 hours a day. There are reasons why troops are rotated out. The problem is that complex software often requires really convoluted linkages and the optimal unit for holding it is one brain. However smart you are, you have a finit working memory unless you encode stuff at higher abstractions (one of the tricks mathsmatics train you). This leads to dimishing returns in that to progress software (shorter release cycles) more work can only be accomplished by concentrating the thinking into a smaller group of people which naturally leads to burn-out. So managers have to continually come up with tricks or one-upmanship to motivatae the microserfs to stay committed
So given the horror stories and even web-sites describing the non-living (former employeees of Intetel, Amazon, Microserf, etc), why do people continue to act this way? Why become an economic slave for an absentee landlord (Wall Street sentiment)? How many talents will leave the industry because their bodies can't handle the stress? What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
LL
I worked at a software company when I was 17 (this was before the whole dot.com thing -- this was back in 1989). I got paid $8 an hour (it was my first job -- I didn't know any better!). Before I knew it I was coding on some of their core products and working on some custom projects. (I later found out they were billing my time to their clients at $80 an hour). Everything was done using some libraries that my boss had written (all in Pascal). These libraries has, shall I say, some "deficiencies", so I kept my own copy of them and took to improving them for one of the projects I was doing. Of course, being 17 and never having worked with a team before, I never told anyone -- but hey, they liked the results!
Somewhere around this time I found out that the two co-founders of the company had met in prison (one for Medicare fraud, the other for drug smuggling), and had some feud going on between them. One worked in an office in the city (they did hardware development), and the other (where I worked) ran the software end in an office upstate. Well, one day when my boss was out of town at a convention, a big moving van showed up and some guys came, told us we were all fired, and started taking all the computers.
About a month later I heard from my ex-boss that he had heard that no one could compile any of my code, so they had had to hire a bunch of new programmers to rewrite everything from scratch. I then told him about my custom libraries. He gave me a big pat on the back and took me out for drinks.
I think he's back in prison now.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
How to handle Managers
to whom the Latest Crisis is the one with Top Priority
Most common result of the above strategy:
Boss looks at your task list for a couple of minutes, then goes, "Ummm. . . ahh, ohhhh nevermind," then departs looking for someone less busy.
Listen, you may abhor unions but it's a necessary evil and the alternative is much, much worse: unchecked capitalism. History shows us most of the inhumane ills: women and children working 70 and 80 hour weeks and worse. Like it or not, without unions the common worker has NO power in the present system at all. In a world that runs on money, only the corporations have the power to lobby, bribe, give campaign contributions, etc to politicial candidates. Only the threat of socialism (which incidentally didn't arise out of a vacuum, but was a reaction to the worst excesses of capitalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s) and repeated striking and unionization among the people have the autocrats of the United States decide to give SOME assurances to the workers: 8 hour days, safety regulations, etc. And we see them trying to slickly circumvent those all the time, don't we?
It's unfortunate that people like you who only care for their own upward progress in the present system forget the past so quickly and have no sympathy for the people who live in the world with them. After all, it's just evolution right? Get rid of the stupid, the lazy, the ugly, the outcast. What right do they have to a decent living? None, if they're in your path up the corporate ladder and a six-figure salary. The sad thing is people like you are rewarded, climbing that ladder, firmly grinding your heel on the fingers of those below you because you are firmly convinced they don't climb fast enough, though perhaps they just chose to enjoy the scenery, actually have a social life, a significant other, or a family.
And, by the way, for every person that has been "rewarded for being excellent in their jobs", there is another one who has been taken advantage of just like the one in the article. Yes, he could have voted with his feet, but they had tied him to his cubicle with bonds stronger than any chains: the American Dream*.
* Incidentally, the American Dream is largely a myth. History has shown that at least 90 percent of the obscenely rich have risen from the upper middle-class or upper class. The remaining 10- percent is paraded out and overdramatized in hollywood, as a lure to keep the rest of the people working hard.
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
Well, OK. But there have been a bunch of people left a lot worse off than him, like the poor slobs with the worthless stock options who owe thousands of dollars they don't have on the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for someone who, by comparison, not only got off easy but did it to himself.
And the brethren went away edified.
Unions WERE a necessity back during the first half of the 1900's, but the battles were won
I agree with your sentiment, but not your literal statement.
Read Marx - he's still as accurate as ever, if you can apply the appropriate contextual changes. His model of "industrial production" described the situation where a few individually expensive machines were assembled into factories, and the work was carried out by large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled workers. This situation hasn't gone away; it has just shrunken or moved overseas. Nike's child sweatshop workers in Vietnam need a union today as much as Victorian miners or millworkers ever did.
Even in the "high tech" world, unions still have a place. Look at call centres; they're classic instances of industrialisation on the Marxist model. How many bank or mail-order service operators can leave tomorrow and work for themselves, without the owners of the call-centre operation behind them ? Even back in the affluent west, there are still plenty of workers who need unionisation and would benefit from them.
This simplistic view of industry doesn't cover skilled geeks, and those who work in similar areas, because the capitalist owner has no means of controlling my means of production. A PC and a mobile are cheap - I can start work tomorrow as an independent consultant, and make a good living without my large corporate employer. This is my current defence against exploitation, and (in the context of similar workers) it works better than joining a Union would.
There's also a US / UK issue here. The UK has had inept, greedy and self-destructive unions (BECTA !), but we were spared the widespread corruption and graft that blighted the US union system.
It seems to me that the most natural assumption one can have about life is that there are highs and lows. It's a cliché, I know, but that doesn't make it any less true: what goes up must come down. No-one ever thinks that far ahead, though. Everyone thinks he can milk it for more. The smart ones get out when they should get out. But we never hear about them except when the company experiences yet another meteoric rise afterwards -- then they're the stupid ones that could've been even more rich.
I fancy myself a scientist, so I don't believe in karma in any honest respect. But I think it has an uncanny way of working out. Greed never accomplishes much of anything. It's astounding to me that it's so often seen, so commonly cherished. In terms of money, past a certain point, you really don't have use for more. Why do people want to live in luxury? Comfort is enough for me. Money can get you that, but not peace of mind (the red tape of modernity is driving me insane). People that live in luxury, even, want something more. They want paradise. And those that can afford paradise? They still want more.
People often tout money. They say, happily, "You can never have enough." And use it as an excuse to seek more. That doesn't make sense to me. If you can never have enough, what value is more? Part of the problem with modern society is that we have hundreds of billions of dollars locked up in the hands of a few people that aren't putting it back into the economy. There are people starving, of course, but I need to have the closest thing to the Garden of Eden that has ever existed in my backyard.
Enough is enough. It's time we start to learn that money isn't everything, it's not the only thing, and it's not the most important thing. It's just more red-tape. I'm not against Capitalism, I don't argue against the foundations of our economy, but after a while, you begin to see that it's all just exo-structure built to obscure that we're all greedy and no-good. Hobbes was right, I guess, in that respect. We need to make society so complex we can fool ourselves into thinking we're doing something good. 99.999% of us aren't. Me included.
Sometime down the line, I'm hoping, we can see the fractal nature of our life, how it's neatly reflected in sport and art to such a high degree. It's the NBA playoffs and I've seen a lot of teams down by 3-6 points as the game is coming to an end. They have time to do things the right way, to build it up, make solid moves, and win the game. But they go for the dagger, the deathblow, the dramatic rise to heroism and victory. Their hopes rise with the desperation shot that they didn't need to take. And the fall from that emotional high is swift and hard. So often they end their hopes by placing it all in one place, everything on one shot, and when it rims out, it's game over. You can see the same in art just as well. And in other sports. Life is full of microcosms we choose to ignore. We're an amazingly reflective society, but astoudingly blind to the messages we're sending ourselves.
Maybe I won't be a millionaire in my lifetime. But I won't die trying to be one.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Looks like things were good from the word go!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
That, of course, depends on what your goals are; I would never sacrifice my efforts for a place of business-- unless doing so directly solved my own goals. Money, of course, is not a goal.
A few years back, I was seventeen and working as an IT manager - yes, manager. And, I worked whenever I wasn't in school.
I worked a lot of overtime hours - but for me, the goal was ca$h - college costs money, and I wanted to go. My parents can't help me out, and despite my grades and test scores, scholorships were lacking (due to my choice of major, my sex/ethnic background, and the trend towards diversity severely limiting offerings.)
So - I worked my tail off to earn money. And you know something? It paid off in a very big way - I learned every aspect of system administration - from the corporate UNIX machines to Macs, to PC's to dummy terminals; and what's more: This has given me a serious advantage now that I am in school, and am using software packages and tools that only exist for UNIX - I can finish my projects with ease, where others are bashing their heads in just to start the program!
There is a healthy attatchment - but only when it serves your personal interest directly. The hope for 'future recognition' is a useless endeavor.
In my experience those who live for and wait for the future do little more than waste their time waiting for it to happen.
Nothing is going to happen if you aren't working to your own goals first.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Is worth what he put in. No way. It's just not worth trying to kill yourself - or was it a protracted form of suicide? I can appreciate what he went through as I have done such things myself.
You have to have a balance. Sure, working to get ahead, do that, it may work out, even if in this case it didnt. But you have to ask yourself - is it me I put first, or the company? Is it really worth it?
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
As an interesting side note, I work with Zeio. He's the "IT guy" mentioned below...
Several things struck me immediately in this article:
This is me, except for the "meeting deadlines" part (I'll be the first to admit that long-term concentration is not my strong point). Where I work, I'm having my "top priority" constantly jerked out from under me by my boss. Then I rush to get acquainted with the new situation, rush to get something accomplished, get 50%-90% done, and then get my "top priority" reset again.
The most frustrating experience I can recall in recent memory is when I had been working on learning our new system and porting my bug fixes to it (despite being told that I'd be a valuable team member, come up with neat stuff, etc, I ended up getting assigned to bug fix after bug fix) when I was told that I absolutely needed to drop everything and work on getting a new QA server set up. So I did. I got in sometime in the morning and worked completely straight until 1900, no breaks of any sort, my coworker hovering over my shoulder and breathing tobacco-smoke-tinged breath on me. Finally, I finished what I could do, and with a splitting headache, I took my laptop and sat on one of our futons.
"Did you finish the bug fixes?" I look up to see my boss standing over me. "What?" I am the tiniest bit incredulous. "What's the status of the bug fixes?" "Not done." "Why not?" "Because you told me I had a new top priority." "Well, yes, but you have other priorities as well." Apparently "drop everything" has a different meaning for different people.
Anyway, this is pretty much par for the course. When I do get a moment to myself, I'm unable to just sit down and code. I can't just hack new code in between 5e6 other things; my mind doesn't work that way. I'm not blaming anyone else for this, either — I know I'm not getting anything done — but it sucks to want to be creating new code, to add a little piece of myself to our product, but to sit and fester when I have the chance to do so.
So I'm unproductive, unhappy, and unfocused. Yippee. This is not at all the environment I was promised when I was hired, and a number of coworkers have exactly the same cheated feeling. I'm the butt of all jokes, the person all odd jobs get handed to, and the assumption is always that I can pick up whatever crap J. Random Sloppy Coder left lying about. My suggestions are mocked, my self-esteem is shot, and at the core, I know only I can earn any respect for myself, but I'm sick of trying to impress these people. Oh, and when I had a deadline the next morning and did my best to stick to my word and have it ready, I was openly insulted for being so gauche as to spend the night at the office.
My resumé's up now, and I've got a few job offers coming in, but I don't know how firm they are, and I really don't want to leave one company in which I have stock options (no matter how few) and a decent salary for another one which might be just as bad.
I've taken to sitting around with our IT guy and posting to Slashdot. I don't feel like a vile festering leech; I'm actually helping get things done for the company, but it's not what I was hired to do, and I know that my "projects" are getting held up while I cower in the corner. I'm just hoping that I can work myself back up to writing something decent tomorrow or this weekend (yay for wasting my weekends doing a poor job of recovering the time lost during the week).
AND I HATE THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS!!! They give me painful headaches and destroy my concentration. But what am I supposed to do? Sabotage the circuit breakers?
Whee. What a rant. :-P
If you're a manager, the one useful thing I hope you get from reading this post post is to give your people a chance to accomplish what you've assigned them, and treat them as competent professionals.
--
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
It's all very well to criticise the programmer but managers are hired for their communication and project management skills, programmers are hired for their programming skills. Good managers are at least as rare as good programmers.
--- Nukes don't kill people psychopathic megalomaniacs do.
Salon has a nice story of start-up greed and stupidity.
Micheal, you just threw everyone who works in the Valley down the drain. The millions who work here, not all are working for making millions the next day. We are here because we believed in something, we loved the work we were doing and we love the weather down here. Not just because we wanted to be millionaires (ofcourse the thought of that obviously helped). But the way you say it makes it look as if you were some high and mighty puratinist who never cared for a dollar and does editing and readiing all day. Yeah right. Go ask Andover.net..or else..Go figure.
I know its kinda Flaming.. But I just couldnt help it. The idiot had some nerve...
Rapid Nirvana
Two years out of college back in 1988 or so I went to work for a "startup" in a small town. I was underpaid and worked long hours, while I didn't have stock options I had "promises" of an ownership stake and visions of store expansion into multiple locations. As time went on my responsibilities increased and my pay went up, not alot, but up. I would stay late to get a head start on the work for the next day. Allways trying to move the company forward. The crushing blow came when I realized that I had wasted 8 years and this "startup", wasn't ever going to get beyond the point where one person, the owner, could be rewarded well.
I was living to work instead of working to live.
So what did I do? I went back to school to get a CIS degree and here I am now ready to enter the brave new world.
When in high school, I did the same kind of thing. At 15, I was expected to maintain an ISP, repair and build PCs, teach classes (even a week-long computer camp), and maintain our network.
We were an Internet cafe, web portal, ISP, and computer store--and why not? Every one of those was making money back then.
Quickly enough, the CEO found it quite easy to just fire everybody but me and have me do everything. Don't read that sentence as hyperbole--I'm being quite literal. Eventually, I worked there, his wife was the secretary, and a middle-aged guy took on web design without being paid for 4 months (then, not at all).
I had EXCELLENT job security. The small town afforded no one who could replace me, and I was not about to go home without my paycheck. The CEO kept me paid, and I got bonuses if I seemed disillusioned (yes, I know that's poor business practice). When I was promised a Christmas bonus, I got it in writing. And I got it (a $1500 bonus is really nice when you're in high school). But nobody else was being paid.
Remember what I said about being a web portal? Imagine eFront, but more ghetto. We had tons of regional offices, who paid an absurd fee to be able to sell advertising space in a region of our web site (divided by state, county, and city). Eventually, as the CEO guzzled away the finances of the company and my moral side got the best of me, I did the only thing I could do:
I destroyed the company.
At that point, I'd get $50/hour when I came in on off-hours, and $20+ at normal times. But it felt like hush money, and as the regional license money was pissed away and not invested into the company, I knew we were going down the toilet, and I wasn't about to go with them. Of course, the FBI snooping around town helped me decide, as well.
I warned the regionals. Without me, the server would soon go down--it could maintain itself, to a degree, but if you have ever managed a 8 GB+ web site that's using FrontPage extensions to an extreme (yes, NT, sorry), you will know how unstable it can get. They prepared to wrest the company from my boss.
At that same time, he was preparing to leave town. He didn't want to go to jail, so he fled to California. The server was co-located, and I remotely managed it. My assistant, who was hired on later, also managed the checking account for our office location.
My paycheck was coming due, and the account had $600. I was owed $2000, and my co-worker was owed $800. We called to find out how we were getting paid, and we got the runaround. My co-worker liquidified the bank account, and kept it all (which I agreed to--since I had no expenses, I thought he might want to actually pay his bills and live). I moved all the office equipment into the back of my truck, and we sent out our resignations.
The company decided it was in their best interest to provide me with the hardware as payment, and then the CEO gave a horrid speech about how terrible employees we were to all the offices. They already knew the true situation, and have now taken the company from the CEO (in prison, I've heard).
The company never made it big, but I think that prevented them from dying in the dot-com crash. One of the regional offices appears to manage everything now, and they're doing a decent job, and offered to re-hire me, but I like college better.
However, from the experience, I learned a few things:
If you're being screwed, you should leave.
If you're watching someone be screwed, you should leave.
If you're screwing someone, then you're the CEO.
-k.
(sorry for the scattered nature of the post, I'm sleepy).
Sorry for the brutality, but Bullshit.
Unions are a collective bargaining force. They are paid to make sure that the average member is happy. Unions do not allow for the reward of those people who excel, and do not allow for the (easy) removal of those who do not. Unions protect the job, not the person.
Without unions, those people who are excellent at their jobs would be better rewarded for it. Thos people who are poor at their jobs would be encouraged in to a new vocation which would perhaps be better in the long run.
Unions do nothing more than enforce mediocrity.
Never underestimate a person's ability to vote with their feet.
.. if only.
Life is a long, hard road, and many lessons are learned on the way (My grandfather told me this....). In his terminology, this story would be described as school fees. School fees are the price you pay for an education.
The education in this context, is not that it is bad or wrong to sell yourself or your sould to your job, the real lesson is that you should be more careful about who you sell your life to. There are jobs which are worth giving up your life for. Speak to Nuns. Speak to pop-stars.
Still, the lesson is that you need just reward, or the consequences are school-fees.
It is a great thing to see a person who is sold out to a good cause. It is OK to love your spouse, OK to love your kids, yet, for those with neither, it should be OK to love you job equally.
.. if only.
I am currently under the employ of a Silicon Valley startup. I was allured by the prospect of becoming rich from the stock options. While I did receive a 16% raise in pay, I moved 2800 miles from home to come to this new position as an 'IT Manager'.
.com deaths... It's not all that bad, but I would have been better off leveraging my offer with a counter offer with my former employer.
So, with my new salary in hand I go off to the land of the high-tech, the SI Valley, the birthing place for the greats. Yeah, the land of high rents, outrageous gas prices, ludicrous state taxes and the best weather this earth has ever seen.
I arrive at the startup to find this mongoloid 'IT Manager'. My dreams of truly attaining a higher rank are smashed in a single moment. I have to get into a dick waving contest with a valley kid who covets Microsoft. We were officially deemed both IT Managers. I knew I just had to wait this loser out.
Finally, the hard rain falls and economics kicks in. Valley boy gets the boot and I get to pick up all the slack. Under-funding is abound. The two fools before me squandered $750,000 and I have no budget. The end result is a lot of time spent on AIM, email and Slashdot. Hopefully, I'll be moved from the IT group to something more intelligent, I can only hold my breath.
So here I am, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley during job-nuclear-winter. I'm afraid to get too cocky to be fired because jobs aren't growing on trees. So I keep coming back for budget-less existence. The one thing that stands out the most - the job I left which was paying rather well was sending me to school/training/etc. I received several certifications under their employ. Now I will get nothing, unless it is done under my own volition.
Here I am with my worthless stock, high rent and outrageous taxes from the foul state of California (good weather though). It's not all that bad, its really a long, almost paid vacation without any schooling.
All in all the company is interesting, I have the possibility of expanding my horizons with some new things to administer, and luckily this startup has weathered the storm of
Don't fall into the trap, and make sure a bonus, schooling/education/training is in the contract!
There is no free lunch.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Schadenfreude doesn't translate well directly into English. Better to give a description of what it is. You know that kind of good (albeit selfish) feeling you get when you see bad things happen to other people (probably deservedly so)? That's schadenfreude.
As I read the article, I couldn't keep from thinking that this new trend in the press is really depressing. The whiz-bang new economy left a lot of good people burned. They cried, I cried, the v.c's cried. Now isn't there something else to report on? I'm not saying it's not valid news, but at this point everyone's heard this story more times than they can count, and yet they still keep wanting to hear it again.
I wonder how long it will be before some instrument of the press sees that the profitability of these articles exceeds the number of available stories. What then? Hire a journalist with a creative talent and a fair technical vocabulary? Good heavens no! From the article:
About the writer
David Wadler is a writer, performer and techie in New York.
The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everybody else. ~F. Bastiat
I remember working in a startup company. I was one of the 3 developers. The company consisted of 40 people, 37 of whom were managers/admin/sales types, who made coffee all day. They worked upstairs amongst the plants and bay windows. We worked downstairs in this dimly lit dungeon with no windows and a small pipe supplying air to us. We'll to cut a long story short, the company went bust when it was discovered that the MD was taking all the venture capital for himself. Motto of the story is you ae getting less air than management, then you should leave. There is no point in working 100 hours a week when management works 40 hours a month.