caseorganic

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
494
Submissions
49
Member since
Dec 2
Bipedal life form.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
Love this! It's very intuitive and fun to draw gears of different sizes and hook them together.

I'd love to be able to make more complex gears. I immediately tried to make a compound gear set with three gears and two different bands.

That got me thinking about "Incredible-Machine" puzzle features and how fun it would be to actually try to build working things like clocks, bikes and machines with this.

Comment · 13 years ago
While Esri HQ is in Redlands, there are an increasing number of R&D Centers around the world. Portland, OR, DC, Scotland, Zurich and China all hire front end and back end devs, UX and visual designers. While it was uncommon to work outside of Redlands only a few years ago, there are more possibilities for that now. This is a pretty recent development, though.
Comment · 13 years ago
While I follow your logic, there are a lot of companies out there like this. They're called "hidden champions" and modern industry has plenty of hidden stories like these. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

The main point here is that companies like this might not be as sexy as the short term vc-funded explosive growth companies that are always in the news, but like small stars, they burn for a much longer time and are much more stable than the massive stars that quickly run out of fuel and turn into dwarfs and black holes later on.

Source: our company was bought by Esri last year, and before then I didn't really know the company existed. I was looking for a way to grow our technology in the long term, not evaporate like so many other companies had before.

Comment · 13 years ago
Glad to see that Yahoo isn't shutting down Pipes yet. I still run a lot of data through that system.
Comment · 13 years ago
Thank you. Initially I sent this to people I knew, and the responses were to be included in a book to be distributed to people interested in hearing stories from programmers. Some of this is mentioned on the survey itself.

I'll make a new survey with less questions that address your concerns and takes less time to fill out.

Comment · 13 years ago
Thank you for your feedback! Made the full name optional and added an anonymous checkbox. All responses will be made anonymous by default.
Comment · 13 years ago
The problem with categories like 'millennials' is that it generalizes an entire generation of people and makes it easy for people not within that group to say rude and untruthful things about an entire set of people. Instead of trying to understand where a group is coming from, it makes it easy for people to simply brush off any differences as inappropriate instead of understanding where a group might come from.

I've hired plenty of what you might call 'millenials', many via text, and they have been some of the hardest working, most professional people I've ever worked with. I've also been courted for an exceptional job via text, Twitter and Facebook. The hiring manager was in her 40s, and she understood those interfaces better than I did.

Hiring should be very personal, not cold and professional. Hiring is about getting to know someone that is the right fit for the team so that the hire brings passion and cleverness to the table. Even at a larger company this should be the case.

Hiring is changing, and has changed for many people. I don't think it's fair to force people into what someone somewhere considered a proper 'hiring process' if you end up hiring someone from a piece of paper and not for who they are. This kind of process can cause companies to lose talent, flexibility, and ultimately money.

I'm not suggesting that everyone hire in the way I do, but in the way that's most suited to the person you're trying to hire. Having empathy and attempting to understand and respect people on a case by case basis is important, especially when you'll be working closely with them.

I'm not a 'millennial' or whatever generalization buzzword some individuals use to make themselves feel more comfortable with the uncertainty of different people in a workplace, but I work with people of all ages and understand each of them as an individual, not as a generation. I communicate in the format they are most comfortable with. I text my boss, who is two generations above me, and email some of the more formal, younger members of our team. The college student in this post is not in the wrong in his communication methods. I understand that the author may be trying to teach him a lesson, but it's not that cut and dry across all industries, especially tech.

Comment · 13 years ago
We ran a 4-5 person startup from our apartment (and had the servers running in the closet) for a year before we got free office space. I had a different experience where we worked longer and faster when we were all in the same room (my roommate and I slept in the back, which was our area and no one could touch). Once we got a little larger and had reasonable funding, we moved out and got a really nice office with the money we'd saved for a year.
Comment · 13 years ago
I thought the same thing until I watched the video. It looks like she categorizes the business as "consulting", which both justifies the prices and irregular schedule of visits and charges.

Those who pay for her services see a record of purchasing a consulting service on their credit card. Though this seems clever, she will technically have PII data on all of her customers if she is somehow caught in the future, but the chances of someone like her being caught may be smaller than most.

Comment · 13 years ago
There are plenty out there, but the overwhelming majority of them are doing their job instead of talking about it.
Comment · 13 years ago
Thank you. I'm much more interested in 'people' in tech and interesting founders. What about the most interesting founders in the class? The most interesting 'people' in the class? So many people are excited about one kind of person in tech that they draw attention in the wrong way.
Comment · 13 years ago
This is a truly wonderful writeup. I especially appreciated the insight that "Marketplaces need a big disconnect between buyers and sellers".

I try to tell this to startups that try to add indoor location-based technology to businesses like Men's Warehouse. What they fail to understand is that those places run better because they are staffed by people who understand their customers. When someone drives into the parking lot of a Men's Warehouse, they are already there to buy a suit. They don't need discounts or information about the products from an app on their smartphone, they need real customer service.

A skilled salesperson can upgrade anyone on warranties and other items. Having a piece of software do it, especially one built by a group of programmers and marketers that know nothing about suits, is ridiculous, and so is the idea of training skilled salespeople to also be system administrators for software that's not needed.

Comment · 13 years ago
My co-founder and I were sitting in Coupa cafe two years ago with a couple of VCs who told us that the Youtube co-founders had pitched them right from the same booth we were were sitting at. "Did you invest in Youtube?", I asked, to which they said, "no - the idea seemed preposterous at the time".

"Well", I said, smiling, "you'll probably think our idea is just as preposterous, and saying you didn't take the jump like it's a badge of honor probably means your firm won't work for us".

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