Was reading the notes from the startup school 2007 and some slides/quotes caught my eye
Limited Life Experiences + Over-Generalizations = ADVICE
When someone tells you, "That's impossible:" it should be translated as "According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that's very unlikely."
Try adding words "that actually works" when briefly describing your product. (i.e. "search, that actually works", "email, that actually works")
When you build something, you're trying to create value
Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless — (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable
There is a big confusion between people with Talent and "people like us"
Research shows diverse teams are more innovative. It is easier to hire people who look and think like you than it is to have a truly diverse working environment, which can be more innovative.
Take culture seriously — every action & inaction sends a message
Walk the walk yourself — mind the gap between stated values and actual practice
Hold people accountable — are you tolerating abusive behavior by star performers
So Scheff turned to Reputation Defender. Founded last October, the
company says it monitors what's written about clients online for a
monthly $10 fee and will have specific content "destroyed" for an
extra $30. The removal of content usually involves polite take-down
requests that occasionally escalate into cease-and-desist letters
and legal threats when necessary, says the company's chief
executive, Michael Fertik.
But Reputation Defender recently began offering users a subtler
approach: hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive,
Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged
up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of
search-engine results.
This is really bad-shit. The possibility of gaming the system is real
and there are companies building business around it. This is
perhaps where Y! answers provide an edge, though even they can be
gamed (post your own questions and then use another user id to
post the answers. An even crafty way would be to pay the top
answerers to "plug-in" your company). Is the problem of finding out
the reputation of an entity a machine-solvable problem ? My bet is
"Yes".
A few weeks back I was talking to my manager about why some people are
"self managers" and some people need someone to tell them what to do
next (i.e. being "driven"). I proposed that people with more years of
work experience are self-managers since they are "experienced". If
you have been around in the industry for sometime, you might have an
idea of the weight placed on your "work experience". However, my
manager had a different point of view about this. The following is a
largely abridged version of the 45 minutes discussion we had about the
matter of being "engaged".
Years of experience do not matter when it comes to your proficiency
with a tool or a language or the amount of insight you have into a
problem. What matters is how "engaged" you are with it. For
example, take the example of a fresher deeply interested in the
topic of starting and keeping a website running. This means that he
should know about writing user facing webpages as well as designing
database schema that will give back results in milliseconds as well
as know about design patterns to help him write better code. He
will also research on how to do load balancing, take backups,
kickstarting a system (to replace failed hardware), which kernel
parameters to tune to increase tcp throughput, which algorithm to
use to search your database faster etc.
Someone who is not "engaged" will be happy putting up webpage by
copy/pasting snippets of code. Even if he has on the job for 5
years, it will not make him wiser about how he can increase the
throughput of his site or how to save his server from being pwn3d.
Hence, saying that someone with less (or null) years of experience
cannot be a self manager does not make sense. It all boils down to
how interested he is in what he is doing.
As a sidenote, this insight too came from the same discussion
What happens when you read a book ? If the book is well written,
what you are effectively doing is "absorbing" the experience of the
author. A well written book, in most of the cases, tell you about
pitfalls and alternative ways of approaching a problem (the design
patterns book or programming pearls are good examples of this case).
Also, many, many factors affect how much you get out of each
charge, as well as how long the battery will last overall. The
main factors include charging patterns, the routine amount of
discharge (i.e., Do you use it until it dies? Use it for an hour
or two and recharge?), temperature, storage, usage frequency,
etc. Lithium ion batteries do not take kindly to frequent full or
complete discharges. When possible, the optimal usage pattern -
for any lithium ion battery - is a partial discharge, followed by
recharging. A partial discharge can be anything less than a full
discharge. However, an occasional full discharge is desirable
(e.g., once every 30 charges) to calibrate the battery. Lithium
ion batteries do not significantly degrade, or develop "memory",
even if charged at irregular intervals; irregular charging is
acceptable. An iPod can also safely be attached to external power
for extended periods of time. (For extremely extended periods of
time, such as months, the battery will essentially be the same as
if it were in "storage"; lithium ion batteries do not store well
for extended periods of time at full charge. However, there is no
way around this under these circumstances.) When possible, always
use the AC adapter (or vehicle adapter) for extended charging, not
a FireWire cable attached to a computer.
I have been in Sunnyvale, California since the 17th of April. The
work, traveling and shopping have kept me pretty busy.
USA is an experience. I think it is a great country with absolutely
brilliant people. The flickr stream of my pictures will give you an
idea of all the weird and cool stuff this place has.