varelse

108 ms·

931.
by varelse 13y ago
Wow, if I'm reading that table correctly, the odds of playing the slots are still better than funding startups blindly: http://wizardofodds.com/games/slots/
932.
by varelse 13y ago
Between this and Eric Schmidt's wacky antics, I gotta wonder if this isn't some sort of mid-life crisis hitting the execs all at once.
933.
by varelse 13y ago
Colossal Cave versus The Great Underground Empire? Hurkle versus Mugwump versus Wumpus for the trifecta?
934.
by varelse 13y ago
I would counter that if any such properties existed in SF, and there was an opportunity for this sort of arbitrage, it already happened. There are just too many agents scouring this market for bargains at all times for me to believe otherw
935.
by varelse 13y ago
Unless you are a real estate pro, it is utter folly to rent your house out in SF due to the many provisions of the Ellis Act. http://www.sftu.org In here you will find so many overly tenant-friendly rules and rights that unless
936.
by varelse 13y ago
I once went there for a meeting. It's easy to miss the place because it's in a nondescript residential building in the middle of a somewhat iffy part of the Mission district. I arrived in the middle of a confrontation that almost
937.
by varelse 13y ago
When I was at Google, I was told over and over again that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size. Whenever I pointed out that the bigger the company, the more teams ther
938.
by varelse 13y ago
If the Agile Manifesto were just that and little more, I'd agree with you... But instead it has become an enormous metastasizing moneymaker for minting Certified Scrum Masters, Certified Scrum Product Owners, Agile Certified Practition
939.
by varelse 13y ago
Except that every incarnation of Agile that I've encountered is a rigid implementation of scrum plus sprint planning plus Jira. And this quickly becomes Waterfall with scrum. And it really sucks. While I agree that this is against th
940.
by varelse 13y ago
I'll go even further and state that the problem is using MBAs to formulate how to manage creative sorts cough agile cough cargo-cult coding cough . if the area under your productivity curve is greater than everyone else around yo
941.
by varelse 13y ago
Does that really matter? From my perspective, Google recruited me aggressively away from a long-term gig where I had an absolutely stellar reputation. I uprooted my career with the mistaken belief that they wouldn't do this unless the
942.
by varelse 13y ago
I was in a core technical area trying to transfer into another core technical area in both cases (really, they needed me elsewhere, I could have made a genuine difference, and the blind allocation process completely hosed that up). I also d
943.
by varelse 13y ago
Over the years I've come to realize that what once felt like procrastination is actually my brain working out the solution to a problem, and it quite literally prevents me from reducing the solution to code until it's damned well
944.
by varelse 13y ago
I've gone on about this elsewhere (search my comments), but it comes down to the utter stupidity of blind allocation for experienced engineers. There were projects that literally needed my exact skill set, and engineers on those teams
945.
by varelse 13y ago
While their standards have definitely dropped because they hired me in 2011, they then proceeded to assign hirees like myself to all the work no one else wanted to do around the googleplex. I suspect this was one of Larry's failed expe
946.
by varelse 13y ago
1,000x yes! My productivity comes in intense bursts of effort, with quiescent periods of research and reflection between them (or what looks like goofing off to rigidly process-oriented sorts). Combine that variability with mandatory dail
947.
by varelse 13y ago
And I'm cool with that as I don't get along well with ideologues of any slant anyway. Mark me a bad cultural fit. As for my reasons, I filed them defensively with large companies so that I wouldn't get out-patented by some T
948.
by varelse 13y ago
Developer 1 is just fine with sufficient networking/publishing. I don't have a single commit on github. But I have no problem with job offers. I suspect that's because I have author credits on a lot of refereed publications
949.
by varelse 13y ago
GMail and Google Maps were my go to apps on Android for years (since 2009 in fact). They both suck now. Combine that with the brick-like interactivity of my less than 2 year-old Galaxy Nexus and I'm abandoning Android for iOS as soon
950.
by varelse 13y ago
Not in this case, even the CEO would have walked away empty-handed. Too many funding rounds had transpired with ever-increasing multipliers on the liquidation preferences. Still, I think there's an argument that had he taken the buyou
951.
by varelse 13y ago
To which I'd respond that from personal experience, on a large corporate project, it's difficult to get authorization to do just that. And even so, testing just two different designs is rolling the dice rather than exploring featu
952.
by varelse 13y ago
I've always thought the problem with A/B testing is that it's mostly hill-climbing optimization which is likely to hit and get stuck at a local optimum.
953.
by varelse 13y ago
Nothing about liquidation preference, which can make these options absolutely worthless even in the midst of a seemingly successful acquisition. http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/16/beware-the-trappings-of-li...
954.
by varelse 13y ago
Perhaps the the notion of good stress and bad stress comes into play as well? If I'm working to a deadline because an unexpected opportunity has arisen and the entire team is energized, I'll happily knock myself out to grab the pr
955.
by varelse 13y ago
A bit off-topic, but it aligns with why I find daily standups to be a soul-crushing waste of time. Scrum Master Jar Jar ( http://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-master... ) went into more detail
956.
by varelse 13y ago
I'm not attacking his words, he's an eloquent guy. But I'm personally not into motivational speeches, I'm a hard-core believer in follow-through and results (and little else). And while that has problems of its own, the
957.
by varelse 13y ago
Steve Yegge is 100% talk and no action. He wants to go cure cancer? Well then dive right in and join the fight! I'm sure he has Google lucky megabucks so what he does with his remaining time on Earth is entirely up to his whims. Tho
958.
by varelse 13y ago
This could be mostly addressed overnight by abolishing the Ellis Act. This will never happen.
959.
by varelse 13y ago
This admittedly simple analysis pretty much sums up my rules of thumb for why I don't accept startup jobs post seeding rounds. Along those lines, I just saw the first engineer at a startup make chump change compared to an absolute idio
960.
by varelse 13y ago
You'll probably make more money at a large company than at a startup unless you get in with single digit or better equity and you get lucky. Other than that, I prefer the creative chaos of startups to the process and tools over inter

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