This is why it's unreasonable to have any faith in the contemporary Silicon Valley. Cold-calling used to work out there, because it was full of people who just wanted to do a good job and help each other succeed. Now, you need an introduction because it's full of emasculated social climbers who need some way of determining whether a person is of sufficient social status to merit 30 seconds of consideration. Because of that, the positive-feedback loops that occur when hard-working people want each other to succeed have completely stopped in the Valley.
Oh, please. This intro etiquette isn't about status; it's about respect for people's time.
People still generally want to help people succeed. But people are also busy. I do intros like this pretty much any time I talk to two people who are likely to benefit by talking. I'd guess I average 2 a week.
I've been in San Francisco 14 years, and I think this place is even easier to navigate now than when I got here. Few cold call anymore, but that's more because we've got better things than phones. Meetups, conferences, mailing lists, on-line groups, and Twitter all allow people to connect in ways much better than strangers using a loud mechanical bell to interrupt somebody in the middle of whatever they were actually trying to do.
People still generally want to help people succeed.
Doubt it. Rents and house prices are at a record high due to horrible NIMBY regulations and no one's doing a damn thing about it. Startup equity slices are tiny, and the old Silicon Valley guarantee (that working for a startup meant the founders would take a personal interest in setting you up to be a founder in your next gig) is long gone. VCs are funding lots of well-connected rich idiots, but if you don't come from the "right" social milieu, it's nearly impossible to get.
What used to be a quirky and different society is now a shitty knock-off of Manhattan that copies its worst parts but none of its good ones.
Few cold call anymore, but that's more because we've got better things than phones.
s/call/email/g. You know what I mean. Obviously calling someone you don't know is considered pretty rude these days.
Full of emasculated social climbers who need some way of determining whether a person is of sufficient social status to merit 30 seconds of consideration.
There's some truth to what you're saying, but it has always been the case in complicated industries. It's the cost of doing business. It reminds of this brilliant quote by Robert Henri:
In new movements the pendulum takes a great swing, charlatans crowd in, innocent apes follow, the masters make their successes and they make their mistakes as all pioneers must do. It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior.
That being said, in my four years in SV I've asked hundreds of people for advice and help, and I honestly can't remember anyone ever saying no. The collaborative spirit is very much alive, people are just busy and it helps immensely to have some basic respect for their time.
I upvoted this because you make an interesting point that goes against popular opinion. I think the ensuing discussion would be interesting, and I'd hate it if opinions were buried only because they were unpopular.
While it is harder to cold call for sure (the fact that you are referred to someone means they will at least read and/or listen to what you have to say) not being referred is not a show stopper at all.
You just have to be more creative in your approach in order to stand out.
If you don't have that skill simply practice at it with less valuable targets to start. Make your mistakes there and learn from them what works and what doesn't.
I've been cold calling from back before the internet. But one of the first things I learned from when I used to get free press by writing to reporters was to start out the email by telling them what a great article they wrote as opposed to telling them something that they could add to the story that they might have missed.
The emails where I contacted them that way almost always got a reply. So I continued with that formula and got a pretty good amount of major press writeups (NYT, WSJ etc.)
Agreed. Most people are just too busy doing what they do best: building something or helping others build something. All of those "coffees" that build a bridge to nowhere add up.
The purpose of the college degree is to provide insurance against economic change. Learn a trade, and you're good as long as that trade is valued (and not outsourced). College is supposed to provide general-purpose skills that guarantee residence in, at least, the middle class.
That's no longer true, because college degrees have been overproduced and there's a shortage of people who (a) can actually do things and (b) want to do them.
The real problem, though, is that society doesn't train people up in the trades (and help them relocate) when their jobs go away. They're just discarded, and the fear of that happening is what keeps middle-class people going into college-- which is designed to insure against the ups-and-downs of specific trades (e.g. plumbing). Widespread college is a partial solution that is now clearly failing.
Why is there an onus on "society" to train people? Shouldn't the onus be on the individual or perhaps businesses that need folks with unique skills? (Think Ross Perot's famous training boot camps for EDS where they hired teachers or English majors and taught them systems engineering)
It's the same concept in programming. No one learned COBOL and stopped (at least most didnt). You are constantly learning new skills to stay relevant. The business world is indeed moving faster and it used to be true that you could learn a single skill and have a career (e.g. assembly line workers). Clearly that is no longer the case and if you havent realized this you've been asleep at the wheel of life.
You are right, college is not solely about learning discrete skills as it is about learning efficient ways to gain new skills. I am sure most people on hacker news would agree with my experience that the first 6 months of working in the "real world" post graduation I learned more discrete skills than my 4 years in undergrad. However undergrad gave me a solid base from which to build those skills on.
I'd argue that a certification from a technical school (auto tech, HVAC guys, plumbers, electricians, etc) is worth more than a lib arts degree from a state uni at this point.
I sometimes think the "T" in STEM should stand for "Technology/Trade skills".
Most corporate managers would observe B's rate and demand it of all bricklayers, without bothering to figure out why B built such a good wall. They'd hire cheaply (cost-cutting, HR says this is as much budget as we get) and end up with a bunch of A-type bricklayers, require B-esque timeframes from these A-type people (without bothering to train them in whatever made B so much more efficient) and get terrible walls built by mediocre bricklayers in 2 hours. That is what would actually happen.
And then while they are employing 50 of these brick-layers and notice that their brick structures aren't being built fast enough, they will question bricklayer B again about why even though the walls aren't going up fast enough he's going home at 5 while all of the other bricklayers are going home at 9.
Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.
Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
> A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed
A good product manager, having done their job, has provided the good engineer with enough information about goals, features, requirements, user profiles and so on that the good engineer can run with that information and build something kickass. In many cases, the good engineer has enough information that they can make informed decisions about things that were not covered by the PM, such as what color to paint the bike shed.
Sure, but the process can become wildly unbalanced. If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen and the 10% remainder consists entirely of mission-critical features, then a PM doesn't have much value proposition and it makes sense to combine the engineer and PM roles (supplemented with a culture of "why are you doing that" at standups to prevent tunnel-vision).
The opposite can happen too, of course, when the engineers focus on features that nobody actually wants. I think grandparent's point was that PMs aren't always a good cure for this problem.
> A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
This highlights exactly how badly she failed at Google. Many Google products are invidiually well-designed. Google makes lots of fantastic things. But the overall product line of Google has always been an incoherent mess, and is only now in the modern era of Plus and Android getting collectively organized.
And since a solid engineer can design a solid product, where does the Product Manager come in? The larger vision. The whole interconnectedness of their entire product line.
I'm on the fence about this. I've worked in an organization with product managers for nearly 8 years now. The good product managers know how to drive the product (and understand the market, something engineers may not be interested in) but allow engineers to do their thing. The not-so-good product managers get caught up in small details (like what color to paint the bike shed) and attempt to tell engineers how to implement features.
About 18 months we were acquired by a larger company which had product management in one business unit but not another. We were allowed to keep our PM structure. 18 months later, guess what units have the highest revenue? And guess what unit bled money?
In my experience, a good PM says "no" to things. I've worked on projects with a weak/ineffectual PM that suffer badly from "feature creep", because the engineers on the team continually moved to make "minor" changes to improve things that ultimately customers didn't want or need. To me, this is where a PM comes in to set the pace and keeps the engineers on track for specific goals.
Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.
And, a good PM also says "no" or "can it wait" or "ok, if you insist, but here's the downside" to folks on the other side of the line - customers, senior management.
Yes, this. Dealing with the upstream is the part of product management that most engineers severely dislike. Also, dealing cross-functionally with all the parts of a product team that aren't engineering (are marketing up to date on the launch? what's our ops plan?) -- and reaching out across teams to collaborate and build new products. I've worked with some great tech leads who were almost entirely PMs in terms of what they did, but that left them with very little time to actually write code.
A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.
Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.
> If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time
Sure, for 1 or 2 stakeholders. What if there are dozens? Big projects have lots of requirements and lots of people to coordinate. This is not a small task that can just be hand-waved away.
> If your culture isn't engineer-driven..
Engineers are important and there are notable examples of companies being engineer driven, however you are dismissing the vast majority of companies with your statement. Considering a good chunk of startups are CRUD apps on top of a UI framework of some variety, I doubt many tech startups even need to be engineer driven these days.
I've spent a lot of time in technology product management (PM) and I still frequently encounter "Product Managers" who are doing entirely project management (PMO). And there's business analysts and other technical product management functions that are centered around requirements and specifications rather than market discovery, product fit and strategy, plan for making actual money, etc.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the thread is conflating PM and PMO in this way, but it's a challenge for the profession and I wouldn't be surprised if given posters perspectives reflect different views on what the PM role is actually supposed to be the expert on. I don't think it's their fault. We use a hyper-generic name that is almost indistinguishable in full and acronym'd form. We also tend to write awful job postings, though that's a rant for another thread.
Well, the PM job is so fluid depending on the product, the team, and what's needed to get it shipped. I've worked with engineering teams that just needed project management from me, although I think PM-style project management may involve more ruthless decision making as it's usually a case of fitting a very large peg into a very small hole.
Except that PM is about hell of a lot more than PMing the work of an engineer. It is called "Product" management for a reason. Dealing with engineers is just 1 aspect of it.
"A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed."
You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?
i fully agree with your last statement and please spread this mindset far and wide. it really should be engineers making all product designs/decisions. from UI and complex business workflow coverage to all the nice roadmap conversations with customers. and all those devs complaining about "distractions" from their coding? all BS, they like spending 90% of their time fiddling with the above.
Most tech companies have parallel career tracks for engineers and product managers with equal "ranks" on both tracks.
Good engineers can do some PM work. But in vertical markets where the engineers lack personal experience in that field it's unrealistic to expect them to make good decisions about what customers need. For example, good luck finding an engineer who really understands how physicians use EMRs. That's why you have to bring in specialist PMs.
Shorting Bitcoins would be a terrible idea. I hate Bitcoin, and expect it to eventually crash, but if you nakedly short something and it goes up in the meantime (which BTC could) you can get whacked with margin calls and lose money even if you're right. That happened to a lot of people who shorted the Nasdaq (at, say, 3000) and tech stocks in the '90s. They were right, but they still lost their shirts.
It's that old line that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid.
In betting against a bubble, you're not placing a bet that the underlying assets are over-valued. You're placing a bet that something will pop the bubble in the timeframe you can afford. Essentially, you're not betting against the bubble, you're betting on the pin.
With put options, you're betting on a timeframe. You make a profit if the price drops below a certain level by expiration.
With naked shorting, you're betting on it not getting above a certain level (the level at which you face margin calls you can't meet). It could go up 10x tomorrow and kill you.
Your description of 'naked shorting' isn't accurate. Options are derivatives based on an underlying (BTC in this case). Short selling is the process of borrowing the assets you would like to short (for a fee) from another party and selling the them effectively leaving you with a negative position. If you decide to cover your position or if the lender demands you return the loaned instruments, you will have to buy back the assets. This is the standard process of shorting and you will usually not wait to cover until you get a margin call from your broker, but do it if the trade doesn't work out. 'Naked' short selling is the same process, except you never borrow the assets in the first place. You effectively sell something that you don't have. This is possible if don't have to deliver the sold assets immediately, but it will eventually lead to a 'failure to deliver'. This practice is usually illegal and your broker won't let you engage in it.
I expect bitcoin to crash as well, but I'm curious, why do you hate it? As much as the crypto-currency fans can be annoying, I'd rather see them get rich on speculation than see the credit industry keep its oligopoly on online consumer payments.
I'd like to try an IDE, since I usually end up using vim due to the fact that my projects often mix languages (Python, C, Clojure, occasionally Scala). How do Intellij, LightTable, SublimeText, etc. perform on those sorts of polyglot projects?
College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources.
The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.
If you read the article, he argues that the essential cost is high given the services provided: housing, healthcare, education, etc.
Imagine you're going on vacation for four years. How much would that cost? Right, if you compare that to college, you would say college really is quite cheap. Now, it's an educated vacation; you get lots of things, but the amount of stuff that you're getting is really quite incredible, so the experience is amazing. I don't think it's expensive for what you're getting.
