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Actually, it was a bad example.

Suppose you spend $1M to produce something worth $100k. You lost $900k.

But suppose you borrowed at 0% while inflation was (to use round numbers) 10%. After about 50 years of borrowing at 0%, your $100k is now worth more than $1M. (I'm too lazy to use logs to figure out the exact breakeven point right now.) You made a profit.

With 0% interest rates, your investment that destroyed $900k of value was (eventually) profitable. If you can avoid mark-to-market accounting, you can just borrow, wait for inflation, and eventually sell for a profit.

When interest rates are less than inflation, a capital-destroying investment can seem profitable.

Finance is complex because:

1. If a transaction is complex, it's easy to sucker people into buying. Why would anyone buy a structured product?

2. If a transaction is complex, both sides can claim an immediate profit based on their idea of how it should be valued.

3. A lot of complexity in finance is driven by the fact that big banks can borrow at 0% while true inflation is higher. Via various derivatives, this government interest rate subsidy is packaged and sold. For example, I can't borrow at 0% to buy stock, but if I buy a call option, the bank can borrow at 0% to finance their hedge.

4. Because different people have different interest rates (banks borrow at 0%, large corporations borrow at 5%), banks can price a derivative at 3%, and both sides can LEGITIMATELY claim an immediate profit on the trade. (Bank borrows at 0% and lends at 3% to finance the derivative hedge. The corporation is borrowing at 3% instead of the 5% they normally would pay.)

My employer originally had a Wordpress-based blogging product.

They spent more than $2M writing their own blogging system, and it still was missing many features that come with Wordpress.

They ditched it and switched back to Wordpress.

It depends on whether you are a recent college grad or not.

A recent college grad will probably believe the hype.

An experienced candidate is more likely to see it as just another job and another step in a career. (hence the preference for recent grads over experienced candidates)

Answer: There is some neat stuff happening at Google, but the typical employee is doing the boring maintenance that any large business requires. As a bonus insult, they're ridiculously overqualified for grunt work and they didn't think that was what they signed up for.

For a typical software engineer at Google, it's like being a janitor at NASA. Some neat stuff is happening there, but you aren't a part of it.

Also, if you have a couple of years at Google or Facebook, future employers/investors will automatically assume you're qualified, even if you aren't. That opens lots of opportunities. It's also a big contrast from what a typical software engineer sees, where they're asked FizzBuzz on every job interview.

My attitude is that, if they're going to close a question as offtopic, then put it in your robots.txt for Google to exclude that page.

Why is StackOverflow polluting Google with content its moderators deem "not appropriate for the website"?

Do you realize how many times I've had a question, googled it, and the #1 result was "StackOverflow - offtopic, closed"?

What makes this a HARD puzzle is that the pieces don't completely fill the area. That dramatically increases the solution search space.

Run your own mailserver - postfix + roundcube.

It'll take you some time to set it up, but it will be educational!

Your main problem would be getting enough paid subscribers to cover the cost.

Also, you should do it as a website rather than a print newspaper.

There already are several "conspiracy theory" websites.

They are transferable skills BUT it's very hard to find a job that isn't a keyword match for your previous job.

I have a lot of C/C++ experience, but that experience has a market value of $0 when applying to other jobs. There are transferable skills, but employers don't want transferable skills, they want someone who's already an expert in their stack.

I.e., most of my current work is LAMP, but I'm not getting any serious interviews for non-PHP jobs. Learning new stuff on your own doesn't help much, because most HR/Headhunters say "Only paid experience in a tech stack counts."

Regarding mobile development, my current interest is Unity. With Unity, you can use the same code on Windows/Android/iPhone.

I thought Facebook is killing it because they have a large lock-in network effect for their users. You have to be on Facebook if all your friends are on Facebook.

1. Math - You probably should know real analysis, abstract algebra, linear algebra, and some logic.

2. Whatever else interests you

That's what I figured - a lot of people who say "Java is as fast as C" aren't doing proper compiler optimizations on their C. I suspected that was true, but I didn't spend the time on a proper test.

-O2 or -O3 does some neat stuff like unrolling loops and inlining functions

--fast_math is another one I use