And, yes, the economy tanked, the startup failed, and I had no way back to my prior job. But that in no way makes me regret the decision I made, nor how I made it.
This is an important factor: risk. Although you can't tell the future and no job is secure forever, you know where you stand in your current position. Jumping for the unknown is a risk and should be weighted as such in your decision to change jobs. The level of risk should be offset by compensation; money, flexible work schedule--whatever is important to you.
I can't afford the same level of risk I could have 10 years ago; if I found my dream job, but it was with a shaky startup with 3 months worth of cash, I just couldn't afford to take that offer at any reasonable salary. Of course for $300k/year, I would be more than happy to work the 3 months and see what happens.
I'm just now entertaining a job offer from a prospective new employer. There is the normal risk involved with making a move to a new employer, but one of the factors that is steering me away from taking the offer is the attitude that the director I would be working for had towards his current employees. When interviewing with him, his plans for the future involve adding many "resources" to the department. Not people; resources.
The quality of people that I work with and for currently is the largest reason I've stayed where I am up to now. They don't pay the best, but being treated as a human and working with legitimate friends rather than within forced relationships is worth a lot.
That being said, I have no illusions that the company would have any problem getting rid of me if the balance sheet said so. I have no loyalty to the company, just to the people I work immediately with.
Do any of us believe that DVDs via USPS are the future of content delivery? Of course not.
I stuck with Netflix during the recent price increase, specifically hoping that they would be able to use the increased fees to get more streaming content. We will see if that pans out. Right now 80% of their catalog is DVD-only; the future of their content delivery seems to hinge on their ability to sell the idea to their content providers.
Yes. In my original post, I wasn't very clear. I said these decisions shouldn't be up to any political party, but the reality is that the USPS seems to be in a no-win situation; congress seems happy to limit their ability to make a profit, but also seems happy to dictate how to spend revenues.
This shouldn't be up to any political party. The USPS is supposed to operate as an independent agency, separate from all three branches of the federal government.
I'm curious as to how this will play out. It seems to me that pushing their hand to the point of actually cutting back on services might backfire on the USPS. Many people will quickly realize that their lives would go on just fine without a steady stream of junk mail arriving daily to their homes.
According to this article (accuracy unknown), the postal service has actually been profitable for the last several years:
Under federal law, only the Postal Service can handle or charge postage for handling letters. Despite this virtual monopoly worth some $45 billion a year, the law does not require that the Postal Service make a profit -- only break even. Still, the US Postal Service has averaged a profit of over $1 billion per year in each of the last five years. Yet, Postal Service officials argue that they must continue to raise postage at regular intervals in order make up for the increased use of email.
There is definitely a market at that price (as evidenced by the recent HP Touchpad fire sale), the problem is that the performance just isn't there at that price point. The hardware that can be built to sell with a profit for less than $200 is just sub-par. Right now on my desk I have four different OEM tablets that have been shipping or we are evaluating to ship in some new products; screen size ranges from 7" to 10", resistive and capacitive touchscreens, ARM9 and ARM11 devices with clock speeds between 600 MHz and 1GHz. Our wholesale price for these ranges from around $80 to $160. To sell these through a retail channel at $200, there isn't enough meat there to be make it worthwhile, and the performance as a general purpose tablet would not be impressive.
It's still a bad deal... Yeah he may have gotten 3 new laptops, but always at the expense of the previous one breaking, plus all the hassle to try to return it and actually get them to give you a replacement. Also, that's 3 new laptops to set up from scratch and get just the way you like it, only to have it break soon afterwards. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'd rather have a reliable computer that lasts a long time and doesn't make me fight with it than always have shiny new toys that are going to fall apart soon.
I completely agree. My brother-in-law was gleefully telling me how he kept getting these new laptops, and in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "boy, you are getting some crappy hardware if it breaks this often." Also important to note was that the warranty did not cover any data recovery, so at each replacement incident, he shelled out $129 or whatever the Geek Squad charges to pull the drive and copy the data to the new computer. Apparently regular backups are key to working the Best Buy laptop warranty system.
You know when netbooks first came out, I thought the same thing would happen, prices would gradually fall. Except, they didn't, prices went up.
That's because netbooks started to migrate back towards the "laptop" scale of features. After adding just a bit more processor speed, some more RAM, a larger display, and a keyboard worth typing on, that $199 netbook is now $299. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the $399 laptop next to it with even better specs, replaceable battery, DVD drive, and Ethernet port might have continued to outsell it.
You had a 4 year old camera that could be substantially upgraded by purchasing a new camera today for less than $100. It's obvious what their tactic was: frustrate you to the point that you gave up and went away. They weren't going to spend any of their precious time and money to fix your obsolete camera.
I'd always thought that extended warranties are a sucker's bet. Then, my brother-in-law explained to me how he ended up with three new laptops on Best Buy's dime when they kept breaking after the current model went out of stock.
So, if the choice is between "have no income at all" and "do web development at the rates of an inexperienced programmer", I'll take the second one...
But it's often difficult to convince the hiring party to that. You will be labelled "Overqualified" which is translated in the potential employer's mind as one of two things: 1. This guy's desperate for a job. If he's any good, why is he still looking for a job at half pay? 2. This guy's desperate for a job. If I hire him, he's going to jump ship for the first better offer that comes along.
True or not on both ideas, they've got a single sheet of A4 and 15 minutes of chit-chat to measure you up, and the safe, no-consequence answer is usually "don't hire".
They will also tell you that the reason the WiFi is gone to shit is because of everybody trying to avoid the $1200 connection by bringing in their MiFi and thinking they'll sneak the connection over their 3G signal. Multiply this by 200 vendors, and it really isn't surprising that nobody can get a decent signal.
All iPods/iPhones using the standard 30 pin connector (and some earlier on the headphone jack as well) have a serial port as two of the pins on the dock connector. It is there for accessories to communicate with the device. You need to have an NDA in place with Apple to get the protocol commands, which are a PITA and very limited in function.
Jailbreaking just opens up the serial port for use as a general-use port, by running different software on the device.
Yes, there really are micros much smaller and cheaper than that. $2 in production quantities can get you 128k of Flash and 16k of SRAM on something with a CPU decent enough to run sloppy C code. You're thinking much too large; think $0.30-$0.40 for the cheapies. Google around for the Atmel Tiny4, Tiny12, or the Microchip 10F family for starters...
You are correct about the quantities of scale, but remember that if that electric toothbrush is $40 at retail, the company probably didn't spend more than $8-$10 in materials to build it. At those prices, $0.50 makes a big difference when you are shipping 100K or 1M each month.
The seem to be centralizing a location for all their services into 1 easy to remember domain. And they can't very well use Google because they already use it for something else.
Not really a bad idea.
But that's just the thing: 1 easy to remember domain. Somehow the mental connection of "g.co == Google stuff" is easier than "google.com == Google stuff", even though the latter is what everyone has been using for 10+ years?
Even nuttier: if I visit g.co in my browser, the landing page tells me that I've reached Google central, but I don't land on any Google properties. If I actually want to do anything with Google (maps, mail, videos, etc.) I still have to click the Google logo at the top of the page. Not even a search box!
Books last centuries. We're able to read Da Vinci's journal and Fermat's copy of Mathematica where he wrote down his famous last theorem. How long will an e-book last? Will notes and remarks remain for the life of the e-book?
But we're talking about Border's here. They couldn't give a rat's ass less if they were preserving a slice of human history; it's all about moving mass market books. They are a retail shop, after all, not the library of congress.
That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.
You know how I knew that before? If the link was in the google.com domain. Someone at Google must have seen the Overstock.com commercials explaining how o.co is also Overstock and think, "Damn, we need us some of that!"
I don't understand this. I get it, they think we're all two lazy to type the whole name with our thumbs on a smartphone, but for the last 10 years how many millions of dollars have been spent to persuade potential customers "when you're thinking bargains, think Overstock.com" or "google.com is the only site you need for search". Only to dilute that message now by introducing new domains?
While I agree with your main point, it seems to me they both went up in price. Wasn't single-disc DVD delivery along withstreaming $7.99/month before the change? Now, either service, by itself, costs $7.99.
It has been $7.99/month for streaming only, plus another $2 a month if you wanted one-at-a-time DVDs by mail.
Mr. Stoll's book is well worth your time. I've read it 3 or 4 times; leaving four or five years between readings, it's a delight to discover again. Also try the cookie recipe.:)
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And, yes, the economy tanked, the startup failed, and I had no way back to my prior job. But that in no way makes me regret the decision I made, nor how I made it.
This is an important factor: risk. Although you can't tell the future and no job is secure forever, you know where you stand in your current position. Jumping for the unknown is a risk and should be weighted as such in your decision to change jobs. The level of risk should be offset by compensation; money, flexible work schedule--whatever is important to you.
I can't afford the same level of risk I could have 10 years ago; if I found my dream job, but it was with a shaky startup with 3 months worth of cash, I just couldn't afford to take that offer at any reasonable salary. Of course for $300k/year, I would be more than happy to work the 3 months and see what happens.
I'm just now entertaining a job offer from a prospective new employer.
There is the normal risk involved with making a move to a new employer, but one of the factors that is steering me away from taking the offer is the attitude that the director I would be working for had towards his current employees. When interviewing with him, his plans for the future involve adding many "resources" to the department. Not people; resources.
The quality of people that I work with and for currently is the largest reason I've stayed where I am up to now. They don't pay the best, but being treated as a human and working with legitimate friends rather than within forced relationships is worth a lot.
That being said, I have no illusions that the company would have any problem getting rid of me if the balance sheet said so. I have no loyalty to the company, just to the people I work immediately with.
Weren't you one of the Little Rascals?
Well, he's not a dummy, after all. He knows who butters the bread.
Oh, now I understand what Springfield's escalator-to-nowhere was all about!
Do any of us believe that DVDs via USPS are the future of content delivery? Of course not.
I stuck with Netflix during the recent price increase, specifically hoping that they would be able to use the increased fees to get more streaming content. We will see if that pans out. Right now 80% of their catalog is DVD-only; the future of their content delivery seems to hinge on their ability to sell the idea to their content providers.
Yes. In my original post, I wasn't very clear. I said these decisions shouldn't be up to any political party, but the reality is that the USPS seems to be in a no-win situation; congress seems happy to limit their ability to make a profit, but also seems happy to dictate how to spend revenues.
Just running garbage collection.
This shouldn't be up to any political party. The USPS is supposed to operate as an independent agency, separate from all three branches of the federal government.
I'm curious as to how this will play out. It seems to me that pushing their hand to the point of actually cutting back on services might backfire on the USPS. Many people will quickly realize that their lives would go on just fine without a steady stream of junk mail arriving daily to their homes.
According to this article (accuracy unknown), the postal service has actually been profitable for the last several years:
Under federal law, only the Postal Service can handle or charge postage for handling letters. Despite this virtual monopoly worth some $45 billion a year, the law does not require that the Postal Service make a profit -- only break even. Still, the US Postal Service has averaged a profit of over $1 billion per year in each of the last five years. Yet, Postal Service officials argue that they must continue to raise postage at regular intervals in order make up for the increased use of email.
There is definitely a market at that price (as evidenced by the recent HP Touchpad fire sale), the problem is that the performance just isn't there at that price point. The hardware that can be built to sell with a profit for less than $200 is just sub-par. Right now on my desk I have four different OEM tablets that have been shipping or we are evaluating to ship in some new products; screen size ranges from 7" to 10", resistive and capacitive touchscreens, ARM9 and ARM11 devices with clock speeds between 600 MHz and 1GHz. Our wholesale price for these ranges from around $80 to $160. To sell these through a retail channel at $200, there isn't enough meat there to be make it worthwhile, and the performance as a general purpose tablet would not be impressive.
It's still a bad deal... Yeah he may have gotten 3 new laptops, but always at the expense of the previous one breaking, plus all the hassle to try to return it and actually get them to give you a replacement. Also, that's 3 new laptops to set up from scratch and get just the way you like it, only to have it break soon afterwards. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'd rather have a reliable computer that lasts a long time and doesn't make me fight with it than always have shiny new toys that are going to fall apart soon.
I completely agree. My brother-in-law was gleefully telling me how he kept getting these new laptops, and in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "boy, you are getting some crappy hardware if it breaks this often." Also important to note was that the warranty did not cover any data recovery, so at each replacement incident, he shelled out $129 or whatever the Geek Squad charges to pull the drive and copy the data to the new computer. Apparently regular backups are key to working the Best Buy laptop warranty system.
You know when netbooks first came out, I thought the same thing would happen, prices would gradually fall. Except, they didn't, prices went up.
That's because netbooks started to migrate back towards the "laptop" scale of features. After adding just a bit more processor speed, some more RAM, a larger display, and a keyboard worth typing on, that $199 netbook is now $299. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the $399 laptop next to it with even better specs, replaceable battery, DVD drive, and Ethernet port might have continued to outsell it.
You had a 4 year old camera that could be substantially upgraded by purchasing a new camera today for less than $100. It's obvious what their tactic was: frustrate you to the point that you gave up and went away. They weren't going to spend any of their precious time and money to fix your obsolete camera.
I'd always thought that extended warranties are a sucker's bet. Then, my brother-in-law explained to me how he ended up with three new laptops on Best Buy's dime when they kept breaking after the current model went out of stock.
So, if the choice is between "have no income at all" and "do web development at the rates of an inexperienced programmer", I'll take the second one...
But it's often difficult to convince the hiring party to that. You will be labelled "Overqualified" which is translated in the potential employer's mind as one of two things:
1. This guy's desperate for a job. If he's any good, why is he still looking for a job at half pay?
2. This guy's desperate for a job. If I hire him, he's going to jump ship for the first better offer that comes along.
True or not on both ideas, they've got a single sheet of A4 and 15 minutes of chit-chat to measure you up, and the safe, no-consequence answer is usually "don't hire".
Honestly, it was poorly designed from day one, and as a programmer if I was frustrated a "average joe" would have gave up 60 seconds in.
Sums up my experience with Android in general...
They will also tell you that the reason the WiFi is gone to shit is because of everybody trying to avoid the $1200 connection by bringing in their MiFi and thinking they'll sneak the connection over their 3G signal. Multiply this by 200 vendors, and it really isn't surprising that nobody can get a decent signal.
All iPods/iPhones using the standard 30 pin connector (and some earlier on the headphone jack as well) have a serial port as two of the pins on the dock connector. It is there for accessories to communicate with the device. You need to have an NDA in place with Apple to get the protocol commands, which are a PITA and very limited in function.
Jailbreaking just opens up the serial port for use as a general-use port, by running different software on the device.
Yes, there really are micros much smaller and cheaper than that. $2 in production quantities can get you 128k of Flash and 16k of SRAM on something with a CPU decent enough to run sloppy C code. You're thinking much too large; think $0.30-$0.40 for the cheapies. Google around for the Atmel Tiny4, Tiny12, or the Microchip 10F family for starters...
You are correct about the quantities of scale, but remember that if that electric toothbrush is $40 at retail, the company probably didn't spend more than $8-$10 in materials to build it. At those prices, $0.50 makes a big difference when you are shipping 100K or 1M each month.
What do you tell a vendor that needs their network for the demo?
The convention centers I've been to would probably tell you "then you should have bought a network connection from us, as indicated on your contract."
The seem to be centralizing a location for all their services into 1 easy to remember domain. And they can't very well use Google because they already use it for something else.
Not really a bad idea.
But that's just the thing: 1 easy to remember domain. Somehow the mental connection of "g.co == Google stuff" is easier than "google.com == Google stuff", even though the latter is what everyone has been using for 10+ years?
Even nuttier: if I visit g.co in my browser, the landing page tells me that I've reached Google central, but I don't land on any Google properties. If I actually want to do anything with Google (maps, mail, videos, etc.) I still have to click the Google logo at the top of the page. Not even a search box!
Books last centuries. We're able to read Da Vinci's journal and Fermat's copy of Mathematica where he wrote down his famous last theorem. How long will an e-book last? Will notes and remarks remain for the life of the e-book?
But we're talking about Border's here. They couldn't give a rat's ass less if they were preserving a slice of human history; it's all about moving mass market books. They are a retail shop, after all, not the library of congress.
That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.
You know how I knew that before? If the link was in the google.com domain. Someone at Google must have seen the Overstock.com commercials explaining how o.co is also Overstock and think, "Damn, we need us some of that!"
I don't understand this. I get it, they think we're all two lazy to type the whole name with our thumbs on a smartphone, but for the last 10 years how many millions of dollars have been spent to persuade potential customers "when you're thinking bargains, think Overstock.com" or "google.com is the only site you need for search". Only to dilute that message now by introducing new domains?
While I agree with your main point, it seems to me they both went up in price. Wasn't single-disc DVD delivery along with streaming $7.99/month before the change? Now, either service, by itself, costs $7.99.
It has been $7.99/month for streaming only, plus another $2 a month if you wanted one-at-a-time DVDs by mail.
Mr. Stoll's book is well worth your time. I've read it 3 or 4 times; leaving four or five years between readings, it's a delight to discover again. Also try the cookie recipe. :)
A-HA! The real reason for the raid comes out...