Well, I'm still trying to figure out what all those people at Google are *doing*. There seems to be an awful lot of people working there and not much to show for it. For what they're showing right now 500 people would be more than enough.
6. If you ever want to work on your own or start a company, then you better have a partner who is good at #2/#3/#4, and you both better be ready to deal with #5.
That depends on the type of product/service you want to sell. My wife and I spent a while trying to make a go at consulting and decided that we needed to spend too much of our time trying to sell ourselves to make it enjoyable. Now we run a small software company producing shrink-wrapped software for consumers. We sell through retail stores and through our web site. We skipped enterprise sales for exactly the reasons you listed (we both have had long careers in enterprise oriented companies). We spend very little time on the sales gladhanding stuff you had listed as 2,3,4 (though we are both good-looking:-) though no longer as young as we might like to be). It helps that my wife is a marketing whiz who's done a great job of promoting our products in the media and making the packaging attractive, etc.
Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
I'm not quite an extrovert but I'm very comfortable doing meetings, explaining products and talking with people. The part of sales that I found to be extremely difficult is not doing the sales calls. It's all of the work that leads up to the call. The phone calls, and the rejection. Unless your product is one where all of your prospective call you (think Oracle databases) you will have to spend a lot of your time finding leads and getting rejected in order to make your quota.
Amen. Not only that but many customers ask for things they don't really want, they're just kind of curious. If the product does do it then they're happy but if it doesn't no big deal. If the feature *is* a deal breaker, telling them yes when it's really no just means that the deal will get broken later. Even worse, if they though that the feature was a deal breaker, you tell them "no" but they like the product or company, they may rethink a bit and decide that it's not a deal break.
Lying catches up with the company eventually. Unfortunately it often does not catch up with the salesperson doing the lying.
I've been a software developer or software developer manager for most of my career. There was one six month stretch, though, where because of some very strange reorganizations in the company I was working for I found myself a sales engineer in a field sales office.
The first problem was that the product I was selling, disk arrays, was so simple at the sales level that I was bored silly. You can only go over the feed and speeds on a disk array so many time before going completely batty. Second, I had no respect from the development team back at headquarters. When I installed the first unit off the assembly line at a customer and ran some benchmarks against it that came back really bad the response from HQ was "you don't know how to run benchmarks." I'd spent the previous 8 years as a supercomputer kernel developer. I knew a couple of things about benchmarking and also about what kind of performance customers were expecting and I turned out to be correct in everything (the company wound up withdrawing the product and upgrading all of the customers who had bought it to a more expensive, truly high performance system). It was very difficult to be put into a role where you can see problems and no one will listen to you or respect your knowledge. Third, salespeople are *BORING*. All they want to talk about around the office is money, leads and occasionally sports. No politics, no technology, no books, no movies, no Monty Python.
I look back on those six months as being very valuable as I learned a lot about sales from a worldclass sales team and I learned a lot about salespeople. But six months was really my limit (afterwards I returned to OS development for a few years). If you want to do it for the money and you think deals and money are exciting you'll enjoy it. Otherwise you'll be bored stiff.
Well, in all likelihood they held a knife to the throat of a screaming flight attendant and told the pilots either open the door or we start cutting throats. Or maybe they cut a throat and then said open the door or we do some more. The pilots were trained to co-operate with hijackers because *everyone* thought they would just want to take the plane to Cuba or somesuch. Maybe a few people would get killed but most would survive and more would survive than if you fought against the hijackers.
Isn't the whole point of Apple authorising service centers to assure a minimum level of quality? I should be able to pop in at the nearest place with a sticker on the window and not have to worry that they're going to be a bunch of retards.
Back when I was doing supercomputing the oil exploration guys always had the best stories. Pulling hydrophones around in the North Sea, thumper trucks in Borneo, cleaning weird tropical fungi out of tape drives.
So, you would have preferred that he use bold or italic tags? Why not just say so instead of being such a snarky ass with the rhetorical questions? Oops, there I go with the rhetorical question. How about - stop being a snarky ass!
Storing something with a looong half time for thousands of years is not trivial folks... Actually, things with loooong half lives are not a problem because they are not very radioactive!
As far as contamination of the ground water, consider: they found contamination moving from the nuclear bomb test sites. It's moved a few miles *and* and the amount in the water is well within safe limits. This is next to a place where they set off a NUCLEAR BOMB. The materials in the nuclear dump would be encased in glass which is not really water soluble. The dump is designed to remain dry. And people will be monitoring it for the foreseeable future.
Consider that many chemical pollutants remain toxic forever - they do not have half lives. Right now China is putting more and more coal-fired power plants on line. In addition to CO2 they also pump out tons of mercury which is contaminating the oceans and the food chain. Coal is also being pushed as the solution to US energy independence because of the vast reserves of coal in the US.
The supply of uranium is limited mainly by the demand. There has been little demand for uranium and hence we've put in little time to look for it. [url]http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/ura nium.html[/url]
Oh, and marking it in some sort of universal language so that in the event civilization collapses and we revert to a new stone age some hapless hunter gatherer doesn't try to eat it. Who cares? We should spend billions of dollars in order to ensure that one poor hunter gatherer far in the future doesn't go digging around in one location? The damage we're doing to the environment by burning fossil fuels far outweighs the possible hazard to anybody from a nuclear dump. There's lots of ways to make yourself dead if you go digging around in something.
Plenty. NTT is unionized, make no doubt. I just had NTT out to do an install today.
NTT dragged their feet on DSL through about 2001, pushing ISDN instead. Today NTT acts both as an ISP and as a line provider with other companies leasing access from them but without the passive-aggressiveness that US telcos used to destroy the layered ISP's. DSL is now ubiquitous and they are dragging *fiber* into people's homes and offices all over the place.
Why does it work in Japan? Well, the government said to NTT - "Thou shalt do it this way" and NTT said "Sir, Yes Sir" and went and did it. Sometimes slavish obedience to government bureaucrats is useful.
$25K a year as a gimme is not a bad thing at all. If anything, I think that SS should be indexed so that people who have the means aren't drawing it. However, poverty is not a virtue in my book and if I can avoid it I will (I can honestly say that I have been rich and I have been poor - rich is much better).
Well, SF is my home town for one. I do have opportunities to make obscene amounts of money in the Valley as well. Or not as is often the case:-). Monterey and Santa Cruz are only cheap by comparison to the rest of the area - when you look at the rest of the US they're still pretty expensive and I don't think you're going too far on $24K a year.
Well, as someone with 20 years experience as a software engineering on everything from desktops to supercomputers I will tell you that the math and theory is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to computers. I don't go back to CS theory that often - maybe once or twice a year. However, when I do need to pull that stuff out it is invaluable.
When I was in college I often lamented the lack of practical experience I was getting. Today I'm glad that I got a solid grounding in the theory of CS rather than a lot of classes about how best to optimize PDP-11 assembly code. Technology and training goes obsolete. A solid theoretical base lets you keep up with the constant change in the computer industry and keep your knowledge of the technology current.
There's a big difference between surviving and living the way I would like to. This is not a knock against Social Security. It's not supposed to be your entire retirement plan. In many parts of the country, $2116 a month does not go very far. I'm currently living outside of the US but when I move back I'll be living somewhere in California. The apartment I used to live in in SF that was around $1200 a month back in the mid-90's is now over $3000 a month. Even a lousy apartment in a bad neightborhood will set you back $800.
If I have a choice between working to have a decent lifestyle and staying in a skid-row apartment or living in west BF I'll take working.
There's rather a big difference between "Don't be evil" and "Be good". Evil is being pretty bad - there's a lot of room for bad behavior that is not "evil"
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm still trying to figure out what all those people at Google are *doing*. There seems to be an awful lot of people working there and not much to show for it. For what they're showing right now 500 people would be more than enough.
6. If you ever want to work on your own or start a company, then you better have a partner who is good at #2/#3/#4, and you both better be ready to deal with #5.
:-) though no longer as young as we might like to be). It helps that my wife is a marketing whiz who's done a great job of promoting our products in the media and making the packaging attractive, etc.
That depends on the type of product/service you want to sell. My wife and I spent a while trying to make a go at consulting and decided that we needed to spend too much of our time trying to sell ourselves to make it enjoyable. Now we run a small software company producing shrink-wrapped software for consumers. We sell through retail stores and through our web site. We skipped enterprise sales for exactly the reasons you listed (we both have had long careers in enterprise oriented companies). We spend very little time on the sales gladhanding stuff you had listed as 2,3,4 (though we are both good-looking
Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
I'm not quite an extrovert but I'm very comfortable doing meetings, explaining products and talking with people. The part of sales that I found to be extremely difficult is not doing the sales calls. It's all of the work that leads up to the call. The phone calls, and the rejection. Unless your product is one where all of your prospective call you (think Oracle databases) you will have to spend a lot of your time finding leads and getting rejected in order to make your quota.
Amen. Not only that but many customers ask for things they don't really want, they're just kind of curious. If the product does do it then they're happy but if it doesn't no big deal. If the feature *is* a deal breaker, telling them yes when it's really no just means that the deal will get broken later. Even worse, if they though that the feature was a deal breaker, you tell them "no" but they like the product or company, they may rethink a bit and decide that it's not a deal break.
Lying catches up with the company eventually. Unfortunately it often does not catch up with the salesperson doing the lying.
I've been a software developer or software developer manager for most of my career. There was one six month stretch, though, where because of some very strange reorganizations in the company I was working for I found myself a sales engineer in a field sales office.
The first problem was that the product I was selling, disk arrays, was so simple at the sales level that I was bored silly. You can only go over the feed and speeds on a disk array so many time before going completely batty. Second, I had no respect from the development team back at headquarters. When I installed the first unit off the assembly line at a customer and ran some benchmarks against it that came back really bad the response from HQ was "you don't know how to run benchmarks." I'd spent the previous 8 years as a supercomputer kernel developer. I knew a couple of things about benchmarking and also about what kind of performance customers were expecting and I turned out to be correct in everything (the company wound up withdrawing the product and upgrading all of the customers who had bought it to a more expensive, truly high performance system). It was very difficult to be put into a role where you can see problems and no one will listen to you or respect your knowledge. Third, salespeople are *BORING*. All they want to talk about around the office is money, leads and occasionally sports. No politics, no technology, no books, no movies, no Monty Python.
I look back on those six months as being very valuable as I learned a lot about sales from a worldclass sales team and I learned a lot about salespeople. But six months was really my limit (afterwards I returned to OS development for a few years). If you want to do it for the money and you think deals and money are exciting you'll enjoy it. Otherwise you'll be bored stiff.
Well, in all likelihood they held a knife to the throat of a screaming flight attendant and told the pilots either open the door or we start cutting throats. Or maybe they cut a throat and then said open the door or we do some more. The pilots were trained to co-operate with hijackers because *everyone* thought they would just want to take the plane to Cuba or somesuch. Maybe a few people would get killed but most would survive and more would survive than if you fought against the hijackers.
Isn't the whole point of Apple authorising service centers to assure a minimum level of quality? I should be able to pop in at the nearest place with a sticker on the window and not have to worry that they're going to be a bunch of retards.
Yes, and pencils don't go bad when you keep them in a box in a closet for 2 years.
And, you can't use Java to control a nuclear power plant. Sun is supporting global warming!
Here's a nickel sonny - buy yourself a real computer.
Back when I was doing supercomputing the oil exploration guys always had the best stories. Pulling hydrophones around in the North Sea, thumper trucks in Borneo, cleaning weird tropical fungi out of tape drives.
So, you would have preferred that he use bold or italic tags? Why not just say so instead of being such a snarky ass with the rhetorical questions? Oops, there I go with the rhetorical question. How about - stop being a snarky ass!
"When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun" - Stephen Hawking
As far as contamination of the ground water, consider: they found contamination moving from the nuclear bomb test sites. It's moved a few miles *and* and the amount in the water is well within safe limits. This is next to a place where they set off a NUCLEAR BOMB. The materials in the nuclear dump would be encased in glass which is not really water soluble. The dump is designed to remain dry. And people will be monitoring it for the foreseeable future.
Consider that many chemical pollutants remain toxic forever - they do not have half lives. Right now China is putting more and more coal-fired power plants on line. In addition to CO2 they also pump out tons of mercury which is contaminating the oceans and the food chain. Coal is also being pushed as the solution to US energy independence because of the vast reserves of coal in the US.
The supply of uranium is limited mainly by the demand. There has been little demand for uranium and hence we've put in little time to look for it.
[url]http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/ur
True. All you really need is the blue screen of death. And that should compress pretty well, it's mostly blue!
Plenty. NTT is unionized, make no doubt. I just had NTT out to do an install today.
NTT dragged their feet on DSL through about 2001, pushing ISDN instead. Today NTT acts both as an ISP and as a line provider with other companies leasing access from them but without the passive-aggressiveness that US telcos used to destroy the layered ISP's. DSL is now ubiquitous and they are dragging *fiber* into people's homes and offices all over the place.
Why does it work in Japan? Well, the government said to NTT - "Thou shalt do it this way" and NTT said "Sir, Yes Sir" and went and did it. Sometimes slavish obedience to government bureaucrats is useful.
Actually, the //e was toast after the first wash.
My Apple T-shirt, vintage 1982, outlasted my Apple //e by quite a few years.
$25K a year as a gimme is not a bad thing at all. If anything, I think that SS should be indexed so that people who have the means aren't drawing it. However, poverty is not a virtue in my book and if I can avoid it I will (I can honestly say that I have been rich and I have been poor - rich is much better).
Well, SF is my home town for one. I do have opportunities to make obscene amounts of money in the Valley as well. Or not as is often the case :-). Monterey and Santa Cruz are only cheap by comparison to the rest of the area - when you look at the rest of the US they're still pretty expensive and I don't think you're going too far on $24K a year.
Well, as someone with 20 years experience as a software engineering on everything from desktops to supercomputers I will tell you that the math and theory is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to computers. I don't go back to CS theory that often - maybe once or twice a year. However, when I do need to pull that stuff out it is invaluable.
When I was in college I often lamented the lack of practical experience I was getting. Today I'm glad that I got a solid grounding in the theory of CS rather than a lot of classes about how best to optimize PDP-11 assembly code. Technology and training goes obsolete. A solid theoretical base lets you keep up with the constant change in the computer industry and keep your knowledge of the technology current.
There's a big difference between surviving and living the way I would like to. This is not a knock against Social Security. It's not supposed to be your entire retirement plan. In many parts of the country, $2116 a month does not go very far. I'm currently living outside of the US but when I move back I'll be living somewhere in California. The apartment I used to live in in SF that was around $1200 a month back in the mid-90's is now over $3000 a month. Even a lousy apartment in a bad neightborhood will set you back $800.
If I have a choice between working to have a decent lifestyle and staying in a skid-row apartment or living in west BF I'll take working.
There's rather a big difference between "Don't be evil" and "Be good". Evil is being pretty bad - there's a lot of room for bad behavior that is not "evil"