I would challenge your assertion that you need a core competency in bare metal. AWS and GCE are performant enough--you're just not using them correctly. Invest in IaaS expertise and be successful; invest in bare metal at this day and age and live to regret it forever.
For evolutionary features, you're right. But I think the point in the article is that if you're trying to get to product-market fit, your customers' feature suggestions are rarely the ways to get there; you generally have to watch, think, synthesize, hypothesize, and iterate again and again to get to the solution that actually does what you need done.
That's a little too hand-wavy for me. I think you solve a problem, produce an acceptably bad solution, and as you get traction you improve it. You do it evolutionary because you're not Steve Jobs and improving something continuously is a repeatable, adaptable technique in a way that spontaneous invention isn't. If you never get traction, and can't crack it, then you invested a minimal amount and you can move on. A portfolio approach.
I think this is true for both big ideas and little ones. I guess there may be some nuggets of truth deep down in the cw that "users don't know what they want until you give it to them" but I think it's mostly an over-used canard.
I think product-market fit is more then just making sales. It's having a sustainable company that can "service" those sales in a sane way. If your company is completely back logged and getting by by cutting corner after corner, you're not succeeding.. you're teetering on an edge.
There's an argument for the mental health of the founders as well as the soundness of the company.
I think that's repeatable and adaptable for two reasons:
1) technology keeps changing and it's usually easier to just write new software to take advantage of new infrastructure or design assumptions or whatever
2) almost nobody who has the expertise to do so gets paid to research pre-existing software, test it out, and find something that already exists that does the job. However, there is a large financial incentive to sell people on why they should use your new thing
So, there is never-ending opportunity to sell something new that solves the same old problem. It's a marketing-driven approach. You're basically just exploring the frontier of what people are willing to pay for, rather than the frontier of what's technically possible. It's "there's a sucker born every minute" style repeatable.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. People would have had to pay for research/adaptation to find an existing solution, so paying for development of a brand new solution is the same money. And marketing is one of those skills that's necessary no matter what your approach, so laying a foundation on top of it makes sense.
They're just two different approaches. The big idea approach isn't hand-wavy, it's just less common than the marketing driven approach. I think maybe it seems hand-wavy when people try to wear the big idea's skin like a mask cuz they don't actually have a big idea and everybody's like "grandma, what big teeth you have".
I just spent far too long reading both of those links, and I don't see anything there that contradicts anything Randi said in her post.
If someone is regularly and routinely attacked (and all the bullshit about "Randi can't code" / "Randi hasn't contributed" is just obnoxious), it's reasonable for them to be pissed off and get angry. That doesn't somehow negate the fact that they were badly mistreated.
In hindsight, it's telling that people making the above comments are posting links to longreads and not citing anything specific--just seems like more of the misogynistic campaign.
I think it's rather telling that this "exposé" Blogpost doesn't link to anything actually incriminating and tries to call someone a "rape apologist with neonazi friends" based on supposedly who they might have talked to once on Twitter, since there are links to RooshV who doesn't seem to have anything to do with the entire matter or FreeBSD in any way, but no links to what the accused supposedly did wrong. The links I posted indicate the moment these two people intersected, after Randi Harper was furious someone didn't like the idea of "safe spaces" and "Code of Conducts" and went after him, herself acting like a harasser on IRC and otherwise.
Not to say that this is not the only or first time Randi has behaved like this or done this to someone if you are aware of her larger Online presence, for instance she did it to Vivek Wadhwa: http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bul...
What exposing someone who pretends to lead an "Online Abuse Prevention Initiative" while being one of the biggest abusers has to do with a "misogynistic campaign" you'll have to explain.
It's very basic DARVO. It's a pattern of pathological behaviour with this person of attacking/going after someone and calling everyone that calls it out "bullies" or "harassers".
Thanks for the more specific links. She's definitely a strong activist for what she believes, and can certainly dish it out. I don't think any of that necessarily negates bad things that have happened to her, nor does it validate the long list of bad behavior directed toward her after her post.
For me, I think it comes down to who's outnumbered. I'm willing to give her the overall benefit of the doubt because I've seen the misogyny consistently over the past fifteen years I've been in the industry. I can't judge how much PTSD I would have after dealing with the harassment I've read just around this post she's made.
No. Even if she has been victimized, that does not give her the right to engage in sustained harassment and blacklisting campaigns against third parties. If she is suffering from such terrible PTSD that she cannot keep herself from lashing out at undeserving victims, I feel for her but she needs psychiatric care, not enabling comments such as we are seeing on this post.
Incidentally, the original definition of the word "privilege" is "private law." I'll leave that to others to decide how that applies to granting one person the permission to engage in the same harassing behaviors she wants others punished for.
I never said that it "gave her the right" to do anything. I said that it did not negate the bad things that happened to her. I said that we should not ignore the very serious and legitimate issues she raises because she's gotten very angry at people.
And here's the fundamental issue I see in all of these debates: the majority (here, young white males) tries to invalidate completely legitimate concerns because the person raising those legitimate concerns has done things that one can criticize.
You can see this rampantly in links that are provided to somehow negate her claim. "She's not a real contributor to FreeBSD, so her claims are invalid." "She gets angry at people, so her claims are invalid."
Look, Rodney King was not innocent of all crimes when he was badly beaten by the LAPD. Does that excuse those cops? Of course not. The only germane "counter-evidence" to Randi's post would be evidence that the FreeBSD has actually be incredibly and consistently welcoming to her. Because fundamentally her claim is that the FreeBSD community has been decidedly unwelcome to her. And yet all the "counter-arguments" here are repeated and painful reminders of how nasty and awful the "counter-arguers" are to her. It's mind-boggling.
Vivek Wadhwa wrote a book that she didn't like and upon being "criticized" even offered a free copy of it, she declined and told him to go die in a fire.
Anne Rice called attention to an article about this and she was declared a "bully" and a "harasser".
Ted Neward never had any conversations with her when she asked for him to be "driven out of the industry" and Iris Classon pleaded to be left alone because Randi was trying to use her for her own purposes.
Roberto Rosario was put on a "list of harassers" by her because he followed the "wrong kind of people" on Twitter and got subsequently harassed and she tried to get him removed from speaking at conferences.
These people ARE HER VICTIMS, not the other way around. She initiates these things. Similar with the FreeBSD community, this is the first time Johannes Meixner has ever talked to her, his supposed wrongdoing previously was that he criticized "safe spaces" and "Code of Conducts" saying that he agrees with this: https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC
Again she attacked him privately telling him to "go fuck himself", that he is a "piece of shit", a "privileged dumbass" and that he is supposedly "giving the project a bad name" while all he did was remaining calm and saying that he has different opinions: https://archive.is/9KGyX
Randi is just trying to change cause and effect. Nobody was "beaten by the police" in this case and most of these people didn't even know of her existence before. SHE is the harasser/abuser in most of these situations, if you have any proof pointing out otherwise, please feel free to share.
Her post is about how she felt profoundly unwelcome in the FreeBSD community. Your response is not a counter-argument to her feeling unwelcome. As far as I can tell, your response is, "Randi did bad things." That's a non-sequitur. It's not a response to her feelings of being made to feel unwelcome.
If you had a germane response, I am guessing it would be, "Randi should feel unwelcome, because she is not a good person." If that's your response, you're not actually disagreeing with her. She said she felt unwelcome, you're basically saying, "Good. Yes. That's a good result."
Why would I respond to "her feelings" when the facts of the matter is that SHE actually attacked and insulted/harassed the person she portrays as an evil harasser, and not the other way around? My response is that her account of what happened is wholly inaccurate and tries to reverse victim and perpetrator e.g. DARVO or "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender"
Not to say that she hasn't provided any proof for many of the claims made.
How do "her feelings" in any way matter over the facts of the situation? This doesn't make sense, I can't discuss anything based on "other people's feelings".
That's crossing the line of civility and you are actively making derogatory remarks of another HN member. who are you to judge her mental state? are you a doctor? Do you have a degree in psychology? No you don't.
You might read what happened and come to a different conclusion than what others have. That's fine. But you are making personal attacks with statements like that, and that has no place in this discussion. at all.
It's the commenter above me who was insinuating that someone was so mentally traumatized that they couldn't help but lash out at innocent parties; if you find that insinuation uncivil, perhaps you should direct your remarks in that commenter's direction, not mine.
I have zero problem with everything you've listed here that she's said and done. You link to these things like they are incriminating evidence; I just see someone pushing back against an onslaught on bullshit.
Your first example is literally a bad amazon book review. Did you see what she said?
> The author Vivek Wadhwa spends his time harassing women on twitter when they try to call him out on his approaches to feminism. He's not interested in inviting conversation, but instead thinks it's acceptable to intimidate and silence women from his book's twitter account when criticism is directed at his personal account. He's using feminism to profit, and not because he actually believes in empowering women. This is despicable behavior, and it's been confirmed by multiple women at this point.
> If you want to read about how to empower women, actually buy a book that has a woman listed first on the cover, at the very least. Even the highlighted review on his website is by a man. Men that are actually trying to help feminism don't profit off of it, financially or with cred. They empower women's voices and amplify them. While this may be a collection of contributions by women, Vivek's behavior online casts doubt on his intentions.
> No, thanks. I already know what it's like to be an empowered woman in tech, and to have men like Vivek Wadhwa speaking down to me.
Yeah she's REALLY going after someone with that kinda language. You know want that is? that's her OPINIONS. She's not attacking him, calling him names, trying to intimidate him.
At no point did she say he was fat, ugly, should go join ISIS, that she's rape his ass with a dildo at his next book signing, or leave a project he's been involved with for years.
She's attacking his behavior, not his personhood. That's called being mature, and civil.
That you had all these links ready to go... leads me to question your bias towards the matter.
But nothing you posted is of any actual merit or counterpoint to what she's said in her post.
"I have zero problem with everything you've listed here that she's said and done."
Then you might want to rethink your convictions regarding harassment and abuse, seeing as she's engaged in these things unrepentingly and repeatedly over time periods of years. As I've pointed out in the other comment above, none of these people had anything to do with her before she decided to attack them. Vivek Wadhwa among them least of all, he even offered her a copy of his book for free, which had many testimonials of "women in tech": https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/522547854477246464
"You link to these things like they are incriminating evidence; I just see someone pushing back against an onslaught on bullshit."
No. You are depersonalizing her actions as "pushing back" against some impersonal force. What she actually did was engage in sustained harassment, bullying, and blacklisting campaigns against specific individual human beings.
It's the difference between having great documentation and full sample applications and just having a skeletal description of bare API calls. The review of API Gateway does a pretty nice job of laying out how the latter can be a pretty awful DX.
What's worth reporting back is whether Rackspace is worth using in a world where AWS exists. A year ago, the answer was "No". OnMetal looks very interesting, though.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with being motivated by money as an employee, but there's lot of strong research that, as an employer, you keep more employees based upon non-monetary aspects of the job. If, as an employer, you start focusing on money, it better be because you (a) want that as your culture, and (b) can pay a whole lot.
In my experience, those who have made it to Series A have had enough humbling experiences to have learned how to hide obvious arrogance. I would agree with your assessment of brand-new CEOs, though.
I don't think that the mediocrity of other tech organizations implies that functioning ones are "badass". It's a sad state of the world that "actually shipping products that work" qualifies for awesome/genius.
Writing software is hard. To quote Douglas Crockford "Writing software is the hardest thing you can do."
So if as a team you are able to, manage client expectations, deliver on schedule, build a project that works to specifications, has good UI/UX, has a low user learning curve, meets performance requirements (obamacare site), is well received by users, I'd say your team is pretty great.
Then how about choosing a higher threshold than writing software well? How many programmers do you know who are above John Carmack's level, for example?
I think it does apply to non-startups as well, because the "outsourcing" I'm talking about with software development is really just using existing tools and frameworks, not bringing new developers into the fold.
For example, I think it makes more sense for the NSA to use existing databases than writing their own...
