cwilbur

7 ms·

1.
by cwilbur 14y ago
A beautiful theory. However, the bean counters and glad-handers who stand between you and a paycheck often ask difficult but irrelevant question, and if you don't worry about explaining yourself to them, you make it much harder to get that
2.
by cwilbur 14y ago
I have two experiences here that may be relevant. Some years ago I was in a comparable position, only I was working full-time at a salaried job when I was approached to be a partner in a new startup. The elevator pitch and cocktail-napkin
3.
by cwilbur 15y ago
A good programmer who can find a job in an urban market can earn $120K a year. But there are a lot of programmers who can't find jobs, and that puts significant downward pressure on salaries; and there are a lot of programmers in more rura
4.
by cwilbur 15y ago
I've taught introductory computer programming in Scheme and Pascal. (I think I just dated myself.) And I find myself concurring with this. People who taught themselves to program often have a hard time understanding what novices find diffi
5.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Bzzzt. Bad use of statistics, because it's not a matter of chance. The ideas that fit best with YC's ideas of what a Y Combinator startup should look like and look like they have the best shot at succeeding win. This is not a matter of c
6.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If your lawyer okays it, then it's fine. If you don't have a lawyer, why are you asking us? Ask your lawyer. Honestly, the questin is like asking "Is it okay to copy code from another project?" And the answer is the same: if it works th
7.
by cwilbur 19y ago
No, it means that building the site is not sufficient, no matter how wonderful it is, and no matter how much people who use it love it -- you also need to find a way to tell people about it. One of the most brilliant examples I've seen is r
8.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If you think you'll be unhappy doing the actual work that you'll be doing when you take the job, the job isn't worth it. There's no difference between being employee #9 or being employee #99999 in that regard. Also, if they're successful e
9.
by cwilbur 19y ago
One of the things you must realize to make sense of a lot of PG's advice is that the default business model for YC companies is to build a promising product so that venture capitalists will give you money or that a Yahoo/Google/Microsoft wi
10.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Right, but stupid business types don't distinguish between "web startup" and "non-web startup." You might be able to make headway by talking about core competencies and business expertise. Outsourcing programming tasks is a very reasonable
11.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Even then! I've seen programmers read the code, get it wrong, and rewrite it in a way that introduces bugs. Hell, I've been that programmer. It's clear, it's readable, it's concise, and it's wrong. Readability and correctness are ortho
12.
by cwilbur 19y ago
I'm talking about the ability to go to the doctor routinely, to get things like vaccinations and annual checkups. The government doesn't make you do sensible things elsewhere, but the cost of doing sensible things if you're in the US and
13.
by cwilbur 19y ago
The core of your business should be in-house. If the technology sits at the core of your business -- as it does for most web companies -- then outsourcing it is foolish. If your business is actually something else, like plumbing, and the
14.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If I wanted to be called by strangers from YC, I'd put my phone number in my profile.
15.
by cwilbur 19y ago
No, a hacker would implement someone else's ideas if the ideas were interesting to implement and possible. If a business guy has a vision that he shares with the hacker, the hacker will want to build it, though the hacker may want to build
16.
by cwilbur 19y ago
I'm a really good programmer. I want to implement my vision. I have several visions that I want to implement right now, as a matter of fact, and they're all vying for time with each other and with things like my day job and sleep. If yo
17.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Well, I've been talking to a couple business people about various startup stuff. One major thing I've noticed is that business people who don't have hacking experience do not have any experience to judge what's simple and what's hard. If y
18.
by cwilbur 19y ago
There's no evidence that reading the code and trying to make sure it is simple and straightforward improves the quality code, for that matter. The quality of the code is a combination of the quality of the programmers and the quality of the
19.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If you only count the initial development time as "development," writing tests will increase your development time. If you take a longer view, and consider maintenance and later development, having a good test suite makes it easier to find
20.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Seconded. In the past year I've wound up visiting the hospital twice for things that were, in the words of my doctor, "total random flukes" -- not lifestyle related, could have happened to anyone. Fortunately, they were fairly easy to fix
21.
by cwilbur 19y ago
What the lack of socialized health care in the United States means is that instead of the government paying a little bit for preventative and maintenance care, the government pays a lot as elderly and poor people who have lived a life with
22.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Depends on what the monthly plan is like. $100 is more than I've spent on my current cell phone in the year I've had it. The iPhone would have to be really sweet to justify spending that much each month on top of its purchase price.
23.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Here's your fundamental problem. It's a logical fallacy. You observe that a good employee is likely to have a high IQ. From this, you conclude that a bad employee is likely to have a low IQ, and that a person with a high IQ is likely to be
24.
by cwilbur 19y ago
Because they realize that there's more to happiness than money, especially in a job where you spend at least 1/3 of your waking time?
25.
by cwilbur 19y ago
There's no evidence one way or another, because there's no clear objective definition of "a good employee." For some of the jobs I've had, a willingness to think independently and critically -- far more important in a lot of cases than a hi
26.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If you can define objectively what makes a person good, you can probably, after a decade or so of research, put together a statistically significant test that will allow you to objectively determine whether a candidate is good or not. That
27.
by cwilbur 19y ago
If you take a serious look at the constraints under which C was developed, the systems it was to be used on, and the problems it was intended as a solution to, you will see that it is most excellently designed. Unfortunately for C, the cons
28.
by cwilbur 19y ago
I agree with this list - completely in spirit, though I'd probably recommend different languages in a few places - but I'd also recommend at least playing with a couple of "industry-standard" programming languages. Playing with C++, for i
29.
by cwilbur 19y ago
The value of learning all those different languages is not that they're immediately and obviously useful. The value is that each one has a different set of tradeoffs and assumptions, and being fluent in all of them will teach you how to th
30.
by cwilbur 19y ago
There are two fundamental problems here. One is that the customer can't easily discern between a good company and an evil company without doing business with them. Once they hit a certain size and have a large enough customer base, reputat

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