Even better: for years Barnes & Noble bought out the contract of every location that Borders tried to open in NYC, and opened a B&N there for the exact same reason -- and also to keep Borders out of NYC. In the rest of the country they did the open-across-the-street trick whenever possible.
Of course, Borders went on to screw the pooch all by itself later, but that's a different story.
Agreed. Totally awesome cellist. Fantastic use of looping to create 16-32 part cello pieces live, on stage, as a one woman show. And yes, she's hot, in a way that's at once kind of manly and very feminine. I don't know quite how to describe it.
I think the interviewee made a very solid case that there is a hiring gap in the area of experienced specialists. He seemed to think that was the major chunk of the "skill gap" employers complain of.
I have seen that.
On the other hand, he described an army of job-hungry young people striving to get the right education for entry level work... but missing the boat on just the right tech -- again for overly-constrained hiring processes. That does not match my experience: I see students coming out of the educational system -- reputable universities -- with a huge gap in fundamental knowledge.
I fear that universities, colleges, and vocational schools, in their effort to deliver workers with fashionable resumes, are failing to deliver the fundamentals.
Yes, you can teach yourself the fundamentals if you know you need them. But if you've gone through 4-6 years of university under the theory that they are teaching you what you need to know, it may be harder to realize that, in fact, you have learned how to look good, but not how to be good.
The problem he described with colleges has been going on for a very long time. I was interested in both engineering and Journalism when I started college.
I vividly remember attending a lecture by a noted career counselor my first week in school. They had just laid off tens of thousands of engineers nationally when the space program wound down. He told us if we got the engineering degree and weren't in the top twenty percent of our class we wouldn't find work.
But if we went the journalism route there would be four jobs for every graduate. I was more passionate about Journalism so that's what I majored in.
So what happened? Four years later I literally couldn't find work in my chosen field. But my buddy with his engineering degree and 2.1 gpa had employers fighting over him. All of this happened in four years time.
The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version).
I suppose the population of Digg users is probably small enough at this point that the new proprietors aren't worried too much about whether they stay or go, though...
> That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.
That's either ignorant or boastful (or both). Any decent programmer will admit that they can't build a good and scalable anything in a week from scratch.
If you count your "toolset" as an entire framework that does what you want already, then sure, maybe it's possible. Otherwise you're just being foolish.
Not really though, everyone knew that V4 was a terrible idea and they simply went forward without caring much for the community. I mean what kind of marketing research could you do to prove that using promoted stories is a good way to build a community?
"Promoted Stories" myth needs to end. It wasn't the case, there was a severe bug whereby a Regular Expression only matched RSS content. The Regular Expression acted as a gateway into the Popular Algorithm. I worked at Digg and I fixed that bug.
It wasn't noticed before launch because we echoed the v3 popular stories into the beta version of v4.
Digg was never paid for stories hitting the frontpage. And for all the flack it gets for this myth, it should have been.
Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.
And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.
You can find a research firm to tell you anything you want. They may have to torture the numbers more in some scenarios than in others, but there's no shortage of people willing to take your money in exchange for telling you what you already want to hear.
Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant.
The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors:
1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.)
2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely.
You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."
I flew first class the other day. I don't usually. I found myself startled -- and not pleasantly so -- when the flight attended used my name when asking whether I might like something to drink.
Yeah - once you're on the plane there's really no need for your image, because you're virtually guaranteed to be in the seat you're assigned to (especially in business class and above), at least until you've taken off.
BA actually issue their senior cabin crew with iPads, both to digitise various pieces of paperwork but also to allow them to get more direct access to things like seating plans and passenger manifests, allowing them to welcome people by name, etc etc.
They, now, do the same thing at some fast food restaurants to create a more personalized customer experience. It always gives me the creeps. I wonder if this is going to be a generational division. Perhaps, the up and coming generation will expect everyone to already know who they are.
Would love to hear the follow up after a couple of years. I did freelancing for six years & the benefits and drawbacks both become a lot more starkly drawn -- & somewhat different -- over time.
It's a big topic. To the author's point, the role of free time changes a bit once you have been able to plan your free time over a period of years rather than months. It takes on a very different rhythm.
Beyond that, probably the biggest single evolution was in my relationship to the work itself. In the early months and years I loved being able to go heads down on a project without ever worrying about the politics of the project or the organization: I was there to get the thing done. However, I am the kind of guy who cares about his work. Eventually I found this same experience to be dissatisfying. I felt that I was abandoning my children into a hostile corporate world with no one to look after them.
Moreover, as a freelancer you have much less influence over the product and the process. You're a hired gun. Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.
Back to the author's very excellent point, I also found the management of benefits and finances to go from a source of engagement to just another hassle. When you are setting up your system, it's fun. When you are executing it, and occasionally screwing it up (taxes!), it's just another headache.
> Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.
This is a big one. I semi-solved it by becoming a freelance architect/netadmin. Engaging the customer before it's time to write code can help a _lot_. Be full service! (It's also more work = time = money, too. I like money.)
I'm keen to know whether you ever expressed these concerns?
My recent (and limited in comparison to yours) experience is that as a freelancer demanding a certain wage my knowledge and feedback is taken in very high regard and if I feel something needs changing it has been.
Sure, and some jobs I had more influence and others I had less. But at the end of the day, it's not your baby. You don't have to live with consequences, and you don't get to. I eventually went back to a full time day job. Yes, I miss the opportunity to take a month or three off; I will probably bounce back to the freelance life at some point; but right now I have the satisfaction of working really hard as the true owner of a product.
The other path here is starting your own company, owning your own product. But if what you love about the freelance life is bountiful free time, that is not the path for you!
Thanks blu3jack. I'll be honest I'm not sure how I'll handle that when the time comes. I'm hoping that as long as I always leave the job knowing I did the best I could, even if I believe the decision made were the wrong ones, I'll be happy.
I'm less security paranoid; I would be content with universally accessable/syncable cloud storage at a reasonable price that simply worked and wasn't tied to some particular corporate entity's efforts to monopolize some market or another.
Of course, Borders went on to screw the pooch all by itself later, but that's a different story.