>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money
I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.
Indeed, I feared they suggested something viable, but luckily, nothing of the sort.
A proprietary, centralized communication service is about the last thing the world needs, ripe for monopolistic abuse due to its network effect based lock-in, and at a high risk of attracting attention from all kinds of unwelcome organizations (intelligence agencies and the like), for no sensible reason at all, given that the transport layer below allows direct communication for federated and peer-to-peer services.
Turning back to Twitter, I like the service, and find 140 characters refreshingly brief. I don't know how to preserve it, but they've got huge mindshare and should be able to leverage that profitably.
I think Bostonians would take issue with your assumption:
- Boston has one of the best public transportation systems in the country (ranked #4 by Us news) [1]
- Boston and the surrounding area is very densely populated making things generally not far away. In fact, Boston is about 4x as dense as Atlanta and the surrounding cites of Cambridge and Somerville are more dense still. [2,3,4,5]
- Boston is pretty much covered in college campuses. They're in the middle of the city, edges of the city, and outskirts of the city.
The author's grip puts the home button halfway outside his "thumb zone" forcing an awkward claw whenever you need to multitask or return to the springboard. Our grip puts the home button in a much more natural position.
Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:
1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)
2. lack of preparation for the interview
3. lack of ability for self-reflection
4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.
Or, failure could show that the candidate has an understanding that how he handled "previous successes" and "previous failures" is almost certainly irrelevant to the job being applied for. Unless the new company's line of business is substantially similar to the previous company's, a candidate's experiences, success, failures, and how he handled them are at best useful as an aggregate measure of "stuff he's done." When the line of business is substantially similar, the candidate's prior experience at the similar company is only marginally more applicable, because actual differences in the internal operations figure more prominently. It doesn't indicate, necessarily, any thing at all about his personality, how he will do his job with the new company, or really anything else other than that "candidate has worked places."
Human interactions are complicated, stochastic things and I can't help but think that interview processes that include "describe a success/describe a failure" in order to "get a feel" for the person are a hackneyed attempt to distill these complicated things into overly simplistic checklists and scores.
I'm not disagreeing with your point regarding wealth, but football is the most popular men's high school sport (by participation) in the country so your experiences aren't likely the norm. Also track, tennis and gymnastics are mostly individual sports so they're less likely to be the ones driving the same level of school-wide support and pride (logos on the masthead, trophies in the hall, etc).
Also HN readers might be unlikely to have had the average American high school experience.
You're right it's more difficult to pull off a soft launch on mobile if you're also aiming for a feature in the App Store (Apple seems to favor new-ness when selecting apps for features). I've heard of iOS apps launching into a subset of the regional app stores as a way to soft launch (ie. excluding the US store and thus preventing Apple from featuring there before the developer is ready).
This is exactly what Supercell, maker of Clash of Clans (currently ranked 81 in the App Store), is doing with its new game Boom Beach, which is Canada only
If there really is a substantial difference in the quality of two software developers then that should play out in the amount of value delivered. The article lost me at:
> Conversely, what about the guy sitting in the corner who works 9 to 5, and seems to spend a lot of time reading the internet? Is he just very proficient at writing stable reliable code, or is his job just easier than everyone else’s? To the casual observer, the first chap is working really hard, the second one isn’t. Hard work is good, laziness is bad, surely?
If the brilliant developer is spending a lot of time reading the internet, never staying late, and producing the same output (minus bugs) as the weaker team, then maybe he's not providing quite as much comparative value as he thinks he is.
Note: Some discussion on here regarding sys admins. I agree the situation is different in the maintain-working-systems roles vs. the create-new-products roles.
I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.