Meh, there is a wide variety of rigor and selectivity in these programs. While I admit there are a lot of junk grads from junk programs right now, hiring from the top third/half of the more selective bootcamp programs (e.g. App Academy which requires no upfront payment, ~10% acceptance rate, 10% attrition, taught by an ex-googler) and you'll find people who are ready to start implementing features and adding value to your business without a lot of handholding. You'll find people from other technical backgrounds, who wanted to learn web development in an intensive environment. You'll find people from very good universities. You'll find people who have demonstrated ability to work long hours and ramp up quickly. And they're the kind of people who believe enough in themselves to go all-in, often quitting jobs and moving across the country with their life savings to learn how to build things for the web.
Bootcampers lack the mathematical rigor of fresh CS grads, but most of the value in web products doesn't come from writing proofs or optimizing algorithms. And if bootcampers are creating value, I don't see why they shouldn't be compensated appropriately. The market seems to agree, since these people are getting hired.
> The market seems to agree, since these people are getting hired.
Not to take away from most of the rest of your statement, but remembering 1999, I'd like to point out that the market is dumb as a bag of hammers. The only thing it excels in is short-term profit maximization.
Nothing wrong with that, if that's your goal. But if you plan on a business that lasts a bit longer, you might want to ignore "the market" in determining if people add value.
It's not as many as you think. I'd guess it's measured in hundreds? Possibly low-thousands? And not everybody in these courses is a beginner, and they're not all trying land a software engineering job. Of the 3 people I personally know who've enrolled at App Academy et al, 1 is an experienced BE developer who wanted an accelerated immersion class in app development, 1 is a product manager who wants to pick up more programming skills to make him a better startup founder, and one legitimately was a beginner who wanted to land a software engineering job. So far, a couple months after successful completion, she hasn't had any offers yet.
I think you can have both, something that rewards founders for their risk while also providing for your employees.
Remember that it's a bit of catch-22 in the sense that you need your employees in order to make your company into a big success. Rewarding your employees and creating a culture that's awesome incentivizes loyalty, hard work, etc.
Be careful of this founder-before-all mentality... no one wants to work in a fiefdom...
I read that more as a "company should seek to provide sustainable financial prosperity for the employees". What's wrong with that? It's hard to provide for your customers if you and your employees are struggling.
> If it does no good to the rest of the world, generating bonuses for its employees is... lame.
I don't know. Not every business produces world-saving value. And that's fine.
You shouldn't need kool-aid level propaganda to validate your business and motivate your employees...
A primary motivation for me and my business, is creating an institution that enriches the lives of those part of it. I want to create the type of company where everyone has some say, where the mission is bigger than any one individual, and whose employees feel empowered and respected. I've worked too many bigco jobs that wore and ground people down. My first job out of school was at a management consultancy. The pay was excellent, the projects were interesting (and truly made an impact), but the culture of the industry/company was such that people were ground down to the point that they became extremely jaded, materialist, negative, etc.
For my older co-workers and bosses that were married and had kids, I always wondered how that impacted their lives at home and how they treated their love ones, and in turn the ripple effect that would have.
From reading your blog, I know you have a similar background, so I think you know what I'm talking about.
The startupbro culture sneers at these "lifestyle business" sentiments, but there is no shame in a more modest (and I think, balanced) approach.
I certainly do know what you're talking about, and definitely agree that that should be one of the primary objectives of a company... But I think if it's the only one, then something's wrong.
The company should have an objective to do something good and worthwhile for people outside of the business. Even "lifestyle businesses", whatever they may be, should.
All three are fundamentally necessary, sine-qua-non: making money, doing something worthwhile, and doing it in a way that builds people up rather than grinding them down.
Fair enough. This is where I'm the cynical one in the sense that I don't see the point of having a visionary mission statement if you have to resort to spin and propaganda tactics to convince your employees to buy into it.
The qualification of "worthwhile" is really subjective to the point where unless you're literally doing something truly impactful (which I define as value + massive scale, e.g., cure to cancer, etc.), your value is at best a surface scratch and at worst a fad.
Consumer oriented startups like Snapchat spring to mind, which seems to have both a questionable mission statement + a shameless pursuit of founder enrichment. Not judging (I'm jelly), but I do think it serves the greater point I'm trying to make.
To give you a tangible example, GrantTree's mission has been, from day one, to help UK startups, by being one of the better players in the UK startup ecosystem. It's a tangible positive difference which we can all feel we're making.
Of course, making money is also important, if only because money allows us to hire better people and do a better job, and it was also a primary reason of starting GrantTree... but it's not a good enough reason to put all the energy to grow it past the stage where it is an extremely profitable hobby, to the stage where it is a genuine business.
The criticism is a bit thick, but the prompts to join G+ are increasingly manipulative and gimmicky, designed almost entirely to _trick_ the user to into signing up + spamming their gmail contacts.
A requirement to have G+ account to make youtube comments is just one part of a greater trend that includes:
1. Requiring a G+ account to review Android apps in the Play store
2. Cunningly worded join prompts for first-time Android users when they start up their new Android device(s)
You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives?
The moral superiority narrative that the valley likes to perpetuate vis-a-vis more traditional industries like banking, etc. is increasingly laughable and absurd.
Let's be real tech bros and broesses. Bidness is bidness.
> You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives?
They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things.
I think if anything what this has proven is that you cannot rely on your customers to read the slightest thing from you, but if you change how they expect things to work, they will get incredibly angry even if the service is totally free. Even if you are IMPROVING the service you will get anger.
I like my YouTube account. I don't like Google+. Stop forcing it on me. I'd be happy with a YouTube that doesn't let me comment but let's me upload videos and everything else I'm doing now. Instead, I'm packing up and leaving.
The irony is your moral might just work. Google will end up with less and less customers if they keep behaving in this way. Only people willing to tolerate Google+ will be left. Maybe that's what they want.
> I like my YouTube account. I don't like Google+. Stop forcing it on me. I'd be happy with a YouTube that doesn't let me comment but let's me upload videos and everything else I'm doing now. Instead, I'm packing up and leaving.
Literally nobody cares.
> The irony is your moral might just work. Google will end up with less and less customers if they keep behaving in this way. Only people willing to tolerate Google+ will be left. Maybe that's what they want.
I hope so! I can only imagine if Youtube was as full of interesting content as G+, and not so filled with people whining that a terrible terrible system isn't being kept soley for their own preferences.
For the most part yes. There are always naysayers, always conservatives. If you listen to them, no progress can ever be made. You have to decide on a course and take it.
Ultimately, if integration with Google ruins Youtube, then a competitor will eviscerate them. If it ultimately improves it, the criticisms will fade away.
I guess you're not on FB either, or you'd be upset that half the websites you join want you to sign up with FB Connect. Similar with Apple's services. Single shot services are growing few and far between on the web.
If a site requires facebook, I won't use it. If a site where I previously had an account forces me to shift to signing in with facebook, you bet your ass I'm leaving.
> There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things
Thats not the case if you registered for a google service (i.e. gmail) pre G+, which I imagine includes a TON of users. If you fall into this category (like me) and don't have a G+ account (i.e. a "Public Profile), you get spammed like crazy and constantly asked to join up.
And the service isn't free. I'm paying for it with my user information. Let's be real, Google isn't some savior upon high blessing us with "free" services from the goodness of their hearts. Be honest.
btw I'm a huge fan of Google, I just find their hyprocracy of "we're not a cunning business trying to maximize profits, we're a social enterprise saving humanity, that just happens to make money" annoying and insulting.
We need to get rid of this narrative that creators = god and users = proles that don't have the "right" to complain.
> Thats not the case if you registered for a google service (i.e. gmail) pre G+, which I imagine includes a TON of users. If you fall into this category (like me) and don't have a G+ account (i.e. a "Public Profile), you get spammed like crazy and constantly asked to join up.
Right, because they're amalgamating the accounts. They've been telling people this forever.
> And the service isn't free. I'm paying for it with my user information
No you're not. It's free.
> We need to get rid of this narrative that creators = god and users = proles that don't have the "right" to complain.
Who said anything about creators. They /OWN/ Youtube. They have made it /VERY/ clear what is happening. If you want to ignore that that's up to you, but you can't turn around and act as if it's some inexplicable weird move that makes no sense when they have detailed every step of it.
>Who said anything about creators. They /OWN/ Youtube. They have made it /VERY/ clear what is happening. If you want to ignore that that's up to you, but you can't turn around and act as if it's some inexplicable weird move that makes no sense when they have detailed every step of it.
No one is saying its a weird move. I'm just arguing that the WAY they are doing it is extremely annoying and not very user-friendly.
You shouldn't have to have a public profile or be forced to share your comment on youtube. It's obviously advantageous from a google perspective, but not very user-friendly.
The value of G+ should incentive the user to want to share their comment. Google shouldn't FORCE you to do it. That's not very friendly/flexible.
That's not a fact, that's just a saying. Youtube is free to you, it's not free to advertisers. There can be products that come free to some and not free to others.
> You shouldn't have to have a public profile or be forced to share your comment on youtube
You aren't, choose the option to create a page and your account name is kept, your identity is kept and the public page contains the same info as your Youtube profile. You can then switch between your two identities as you see fit. I fail to see how this is such an objectionable solution.
Yes you could do that, but again I don't see how its user-friendly to have to resort to creating multiple accounts to bypass the G+ requirements.
No one is saying that Google doesn't have the _right_ to do this, just that its obnoxious and goes against the very user-friendly/oriented image that Google itself tries to perpetuate. You've yet to address this very point.
>That's not a fact, that's just a saying. Youtube is free to you, it's not free to advertisers. There can be products that come free to some and not free to others.
You're just splitting hairs about what constitutes an expense. Youtube is not 100% free to use. There are costs... like the time it takes to watch an ad before your video plays... that's a bit myopic on my part as well, but if you want to get technical...
> They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things.
Now, yes, and some people don't like that. Of course it's 'free' for whatever that's worth - and you can do whatever you want. Just don't expect that people are going to be thrilled. Free doesn't buy you free approval.
There's no post API and all sharing is done manually so spamming anyone with G+ is impossible unless you actively use it.
I think what they're effectively trying to do boils down into unifying the Google account: instead of every Google product maintaining its own divorced account/sharing infrastructure they're effectively retconning all of their products so they're now all based off one source, the Google+ Profile. This allows any change they make to the underlying G+ architecture to instantly propagate across all their products, as well as much more effective user data collection.
The problem is while the setup has plenty of benefit to Google, they've barely explained the benefit to the user.
There's no post API and all sharing is done manually so spamming anyone with G+ is impossible unless you actively use it.
That's a little naive. Of course there's an "API", it's what your browser uses to post something. Just because it's not designed for automated programs it doesn't mean it can't and won't be used.
Yeah, too true. A quick strole through the internet "freelance" boards will show that there's no shortage of people looking for comment bots for all of the major platforms.
EdTech startup in Chicago seeking native iOS developer. We build classroom management software around the language learning space and need some more engineering help to get an iPad version of our Mac app developed.
We're looking to hire someone okay with project-based compensation (a % upfront and fixed payments upon meeting milestones). We're targeting at least mid-high 5 figures for about 3-5 months of work.
Email for a more detailed description of what we'd like to build, but from a technical perspective, we're looking for an iOS engineer that knows (at the very least) the following backwards and forwards:
Half a century of paparazzi and celebrity gossip has now deflated the delusional silliness in Hollywood--it's time to bring that style of hard-hitting journalism to Silicon Valley.
Silly analogy. Hollywood bros don't claim to be saving the world nor do they cast themselves in a superior light than all the other bloodsuckers.
When you take yourself this seriously (Saray Lacey... classic example), you're going to get ridiculed and made fun of. Rightfully deserved too.
IDK. Digging up people's private lives is not cool (e.g. valleywag's articles about Eric's open marriage), but pointing out blatant douchiness is admirable. We need more of that shit to keep us all in line (e.g. Sandberg's unpaid intern fuckup - which let's be honest is fucking disgusting).
there's a whole cottage industry around this, see: starterleague.com
basic html+css with some passing familiarity with Rails/Jquery and some common libraries = 80K, $100/hour programmer bro.
not too far off from '99...