There are two distinct roles you need to be aware of. An employee and an investor. An employee does the job, gets paid a salary and bears no risk. The only risk is that the company might go away and you will have to go be an employee somewhere else. Then there's an investor. As an investor you bear the risk of losing your investment which may mean losing your home if you've morgaged it to raise funding.
You can choose to be both by agreeing with your employer to take part of your salary and use it to purchase stock in the company you work for.
Stock options confuse the issue. Employers use options to give employees the illusion that they too are somehow investors and have a similar interest to founders and those who have purchased stock. Options are only worth something in the distant future when the company IPO's and even then their value is only the difference between the strike price and whatever the stock is being traded at.
With options you have no voting rights, no say in the day to day operations of the company, no right to see financial reports and in fact you don't even have the options until your vesting schedule says you have them.
Sure some employees have gotten rich from their options, but they are few and far between.
My advice:
1. Negotiate your salary without taking options into consideration because, lets face it, they're a long shot. Negotiate a salary that is appropriate for the level of risk/instability you feel you're exposed to.
2. Never confuse being an investor with holding a vesting schedule.
3. If you do want to be an investor, then negotiate a work-for-stock program with your boss and accept that you're risking a large part of your salary to invest in this company.
I'm a CEO who sold my first startup last year. I'm also a geek. I'm not at all a fan of options and often see them abused by CEO's managing employee perceptions.
I've submitted the story, but I think it'll take a while. A south african newspaper is reporting that ebay has been hacked and 400,000 credit card numbers (complete with CCV) have been compromised. The story is here. It's from a reliable publication in this country, so please hurry up and post this so folks can start cancelling cards. Sorry about the OT post.
400,000 credit cards have been compromized, including CCV numbers on the back. eBay is saying nothing and the only reason I found out about this is because I live in South Africa and they mentioned it on the radio. I've submitted a story, but just thought I'd try to get this out there so you can start cancelling cards.
Thanks for the feedback and to the 446 people who visited the site, tried the search and some who filled out our survey. I've definitelly been inspired to work my butt off to deliver the best search results.
Dave, our goal is to get the search algo working perfectly, then to expand the search to all english speaking countries. Most notably, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
We have kept stats on the number of jobs each site has in our own categories since 2000 and there has been a HUGE decline in IT job postings. The simple fact is that there are no IT jobs in the USA right now unless you are connected. As soon as a job is posted, it's moot.
I run workzoo.com, a job meta-search. We try to filter out work at home and (hope none of them are reading this) by simply looking for job titles in all caps.
Look at a company like MySQL AB vs. Microsoft. MySQL 4's release dates slipped and slipped, and when questioned, Monty responded that the software will be ready when it's ready. A company like Microsoft is driven by the marketing team. They set a launch date, and bugs or no bugs, the software will be launched with maximum fanfare on that date.
I think it's obvious which practice delivers the most stable software.
The timing on this is unfortunate for the USA. A hell of a blow to lose some of the bravest and brightest of the country. Petty GB is the president and is the face we have to put on the condolences to their friends and families.
May they all rest in peace.
Will Perl ever be enterprise ready?
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Do you think Perl will ever be considered an 'Enterprise' language, meaning 'ready for the bigtime' by the large corporates? Do you think there is anything holding it back? Do you think the TMTOWTDI motto of Perl is a negative because large corporate customers prefer languages like Java which enforce certain coding styles, and sandbox the programmer to a certain extent?
I'm a bit frustrated that they're fussin so much around regex when OO perl is a bit of a mess right now. The TMTOWTDI motto is a nightmare when it comes to OO because each developer has his own way of doing it and to build reusable class libs is tough! I would like to see more standardisation in that area - more than damian's OO book, which simply suggests a way of doing it, but there's no real accepted method, or no way of enforcing anything at all. I'd like to see some developments on the encapsulation front, for example!
We currently use MySQL 4 for www.workzoo.com and have been for the last 6 months since the first alpha release. We use it for the extended fulltext index support. We do up to 400 inserts and updates per search as we are a realtime meta-search engine and use MySQL to build a cache. We have had one or two minor problems which were solved by the Monty and his team (for free!) sometimes at 10pm on a friday night, simply by sending in a bug report to the list. We dont have a support contract.
We haven't had to reboot mysql for more than 3 months now - and it's version 4 Alpha!
BTW, MySQL currently supports transactions and foreign keys via InnoDB Tables - although we use MyISAM tables as InnoDB does not support the (ultra fast) full-text indexing of MyISAM.
Food for thought. I really like the point he makes about the Apple gave the user a sense that there was life inside. Perhaps we should start a thread analysing general user interaction with a PC. One could argue that any real work that happens on a PC - whether you're an executive secretary, a CEO or a developer - happens when you're typing stuff on the keyboard. The mouse is just a tool to launch stuff.
I think people underestimate the time it takes to remove one hand from they keyboard, scoot the mouse across the screen, click on one or two things, move your hand back to the keyboard, realign your fingers and continue doing actual work. And it pisses me off that I have to remove my eyes from the screen to align my hand on the mouse - who's position changes on the desk (so you have to find it each time).
Emacs, VI, Mutt, Pine, pico, screen, and all the other tons of command line tools are still hugely popular because they do not require a distracting mouse. Yes I run Gnome, but once I've launched a few Xterms - one for each host I'm connecting to (each with screen running so I can flick between multiple sessions) - I just use Alt tab to switch between them.
Perhaps the unix world should find a way to ween the Windows world off their mice. Windows is designed for maximum mouse use. So is OSX. Jobs's GUI that is 'good enough to lick' is attempting to turn everyone into a graphic design artist - one of the few proffesions that doesn't use the keyboard extensivelly for real work. M$ is following Apple with WinXP.
Perhaps we could have a standardised system of hotkeys in Linux/Gnome/KDE. One that is somehow advertised on the desktop, so that Windows users dont immediatelly go for the footprint/Start button in the bottom left of the screen. Somehow take the user back to where the work happens. Maybe just an awareness campaign of some sort will do it.
Interesting that google has been pushing their Adwords select for quite heavily latelly, and now slashdot is marketing it for them with a rather lame article who's only purpose is to explain how adwords works.
Buy a banner ad on this site if you want to advertise. Is this the MS of OS, OSDN and Google sandbox the open source community?
Both slashdot and OSDN are awesome, but c'mon guys, lets be a little more open about what's going on here.
second that. I think taking ownership of every standard out there and trying to be perceived as it's inventor by the (less tech savvy) public, and then adding your own proprietary extensions to your competitors disadvantage, really sucks.
Perhaps they should participate as a community member, rather than trying to turn it into a fascist regime.
..and they make money by doing what exactly? Since MS is a household name already, I doubt they are going to allow their competitors to shrinkwrap their hard work and make a buck out of it, purely for a bit of a marketing boost.
MS's business model is too deeply entrenched in commercial software (they invented the desktop OS as a commodity) for them to make a buck out of open source. To do that, they'd have to backpedal out of alot of their existing business.
Perhaps the only way for them to benifit is through code reuse i.e. using existing kernels, servers etc. that the open source community have produced. (or parts thereof) and honoring the GPL while doing it.
That may also be the only way they can compete with open source alternatives to their products. The team of 30 core kernel dev guys working on 2000 server can't really compete with a community of developers and testers the size of Linux for example.
I suspect this is why we'll see a move by commercial software vendors (Apple, MS, Oracle and friends) to enhancing the shrink-wrap e.g. tasty GUI front ends and feature rich administrative apps, rather than focusing on stability, performance and all that other difficult and more expensive to do stuff.
Besides security, we quit using Soap for our web services and use our own custom libs which we provide to clients because the performance is horrendous. When you're providing a web service API to thousands of clients, that becoms an issue quite quickly. Sure XML is platform neutral/agnostic, but is the parsing performance hit you take really worth it?
Slashdot Mirror
There are two distinct roles you need to be aware of. An employee and an investor. An employee does the job, gets paid a salary and bears no risk. The only risk is that the company might go away and you will have to go be an employee somewhere else. Then there's an investor. As an investor you bear the risk of losing your investment which may mean losing your home if you've morgaged it to raise funding.
You can choose to be both by agreeing with your employer to take part of your salary and use it to purchase stock in the company you work for.
Stock options confuse the issue. Employers use options to give employees the illusion that they too are somehow investors and have a similar interest to founders and those who have purchased stock. Options are only worth something in the distant future when the company IPO's and even then their value is only the difference between the strike price and whatever the stock is being traded at.
With options you have no voting rights, no say in the day to day operations of the company, no right to see financial reports and in fact you don't even have the options until your vesting schedule says you have them.
Sure some employees have gotten rich from their options, but they are few and far between.
My advice:
1. Negotiate your salary without taking options into consideration because, lets face it, they're a long shot. Negotiate a salary that is appropriate for the level of risk/instability you feel you're exposed to.
2. Never confuse being an investor with holding a vesting schedule.
3. If you do want to be an investor, then negotiate a work-for-stock program with your boss and accept that you're risking a large part of your salary to invest in this company.
I'm a CEO who sold my first startup last year. I'm also a geek. I'm not at all a fan of options and often see them abused by CEO's managing employee perceptions.
Regards,
Mark M.
Hey Indeeders!! I work at Jobster.com and we too have a job search engine. Tell Paul and Rony I say hi. :)
Regards,
Mark M.
You're about to eat your words. :)
Mod this up NOW!
I've submitted the story, but I think it'll take a while. A south african newspaper is reporting that ebay has been hacked and 400,000 credit card numbers (complete with CCV) have been compromised. The story is here. It's from a reliable publication in this country, so please hurry up and post this so folks can start cancelling cards. Sorry about the OT post.
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,, 2-7-1442_1563327,00.html
400,000 credit cards have been compromized, including CCV numbers on the back. eBay is saying nothing and the only reason I found out about this is because I live in South Africa and they mentioned it on the radio. I've submitted a story, but just thought I'd try to get this out there so you can start cancelling cards.
Thanks for the feedback and to the 446 people who visited the site, tried the search and some who filled out our survey. I've definitelly been inspired to work my butt off to deliver the best search results.
Dave, our goal is to get the search algo working perfectly, then to expand the search to all english speaking countries. Most notably, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
We have kept stats on the number of jobs each site has in our own categories since 2000 and there has been a HUGE decline in IT job postings. The simple fact is that there are no IT jobs in the USA right now unless you are connected. As soon as a job is posted, it's moot.
Mark
workzoo.com - Job meta search.
Hi,
I run workzoo.com, a job meta-search. We try to filter out work at home and (hope none of them are reading this) by simply looking for job titles in all caps.
Mark.
workzoo.com. Not sure if this is the worst of it all or the best. But it exists. I found a few good perl jobs in the bay area.
I suppose this could be either the worst of all evils, or a slight improvement on things: www.workzoo.com
Anyone know of any other job meta-searches?
Look at a company like MySQL AB vs. Microsoft. MySQL 4's release dates slipped and slipped, and when questioned, Monty responded that the software will be ready when it's ready. A company like Microsoft is driven by the marketing team. They set a launch date, and bugs or no bugs, the software will be launched with maximum fanfare on that date.
I think it's obvious which practice delivers the most stable software.
Typical fucking Yanks! If we dont own it, but we're interested in it, and you're doing it, then you're in conflict with us.
I'd say that summarises the general xenophobic, arrogant american attitude of late.
ps: I live in Orange County, so keep the johnnie foreigner comments to yourself.
The timing on this is unfortunate for the USA. A hell of a blow to lose some of the bravest and brightest of the country. Petty GB is the president and is the face we have to put on the condolences to their friends and families.
May they all rest in peace.
Do you think Perl will ever be considered an 'Enterprise' language, meaning 'ready for the bigtime' by the large corporates?
Do you think there is anything holding it back?
Do you think the TMTOWTDI motto of Perl is a negative because large corporate customers prefer languages like Java which enforce certain coding styles, and sandbox the programmer to a certain extent?
I'm a bit frustrated that they're fussin so much around regex when OO perl is a bit of a mess right now. The TMTOWTDI motto is a nightmare when it comes to OO because each developer has his own way of doing it and to build reusable class libs is tough! I would like to see more standardisation in that area - more than damian's OO book, which simply suggests a way of doing it, but there's no real accepted method, or no way of enforcing anything at all. I'd like to see some developments on the encapsulation front, for example!
We currently use MySQL 4 for www.workzoo.com and have been for the last 6 months since the first alpha release. We use it for the extended fulltext index support. We do up to 400 inserts and updates per search as we are a realtime meta-search engine and use MySQL to build a cache. We have had one or two minor problems which were solved by the Monty and his team (for free!) sometimes at 10pm on a friday night, simply by sending in a bug report to the list. We dont have a support contract.
We haven't had to reboot mysql for more than 3 months now - and it's version 4 Alpha!
BTW, MySQL currently supports transactions and foreign keys via InnoDB Tables - although we use MyISAM tables as InnoDB does not support the (ultra fast) full-text indexing of MyISAM.
~pHaze
Food for thought. I really like the point he makes about the Apple gave the user a sense that there was life inside. Perhaps we should start a thread analysing general user interaction with a PC. One could argue that any real work that happens on a PC - whether you're an executive secretary, a CEO or a developer - happens when you're typing stuff on the keyboard. The mouse is just a tool to launch stuff.
I think people underestimate the time it takes to remove one hand from they keyboard, scoot the mouse across the screen, click on one or two things, move your hand back to the keyboard, realign your fingers and continue doing actual work. And it pisses me off that I have to remove my eyes from the screen to align my hand on the mouse - who's position changes on the desk (so you have to find it each time).
Emacs, VI, Mutt, Pine, pico, screen, and all the other tons of command line tools are still hugely popular because they do not require a distracting mouse. Yes I run Gnome, but once I've launched a few Xterms - one for each host I'm connecting to (each with screen running so I can flick between multiple sessions) - I just use Alt tab to switch between them.
Perhaps the unix world should find a way to ween the Windows world off their mice. Windows is designed for maximum mouse use. So is OSX. Jobs's GUI that is 'good enough to lick' is attempting to turn everyone into a graphic design artist - one of the few proffesions that doesn't use the keyboard extensivelly for real work. M$ is following Apple with WinXP.
Perhaps we could have a standardised system of hotkeys in Linux/Gnome/KDE. One that is somehow advertised on the desktop, so that Windows users dont immediatelly go for the footprint/Start button in the bottom left of the screen. Somehow take the user back to where the work happens. Maybe just an awareness campaign of some sort will do it.
~mark.
..and graduate to the excellent mod_perl cookbook.
..that was getting kickbacks from google.
Interesting that google has been pushing their Adwords select for quite heavily latelly, and now slashdot is marketing it for them with a rather lame article who's only purpose is to explain how adwords works.
Buy a banner ad on this site if you want to advertise. Is this the MS of OS, OSDN and Google sandbox the open source community?
Both slashdot and OSDN are awesome, but c'mon guys, lets be a little more open about what's going on here.
...that makes apache worthwhile. OK so I'm exagerating, but c'mon Doug! When's it going to drop?!
second that. I think taking ownership of every standard out there and trying to be perceived as it's inventor by the (less tech savvy) public, and then adding your own proprietary extensions to your competitors disadvantage, really sucks.
Perhaps they should participate as a community member, rather than trying to turn it into a fascist regime.
..and they make money by doing what exactly? Since MS is a household name already, I doubt they are going to allow their competitors to shrinkwrap their hard work and make a buck out of it, purely for a bit of a marketing boost.
MS's business model is too deeply entrenched in commercial software (they invented the desktop OS as a commodity) for them to make a buck out of open source. To do that, they'd have to backpedal out of alot of their existing business.
Perhaps the only way for them to benifit is through code reuse i.e. using existing kernels, servers etc. that the open source community have produced. (or parts thereof) and honoring the GPL while doing it.
That may also be the only way they can compete with open source alternatives to their products. The team of 30 core kernel dev guys working on 2000 server can't really compete with a community of developers and testers the size of Linux for example.
I suspect this is why we'll see a move by commercial software vendors (Apple, MS, Oracle and friends) to enhancing the shrink-wrap e.g. tasty GUI front ends and feature rich administrative apps, rather than focusing on stability, performance and all that other difficult and more expensive to do stuff.
~mark.
http://www.workzoo.com/
Besides security, we quit using Soap for our web services and use our own custom libs which we provide to clients because the performance is horrendous. When you're providing a web service API to thousands of clients, that becoms an issue quite quickly. Sure XML is platform neutral/agnostic, but is the parsing performance hit you take really worth it?
~mark