jwwest

Could someone explain what the point of Dropbox as a company is now? They literally own their space, everyone loves them, and I'm sure they're making money hand-over-fist.

However, they raised another round? Why?

Link bait title aside, I'm a little bored with these "We don't like x, so you shouldn't use it" articles.

The main downside of MongoDB is that it's new. This means less knowledge of best practices, incomplete or missing support in third party integrations, and feature-lacking tools. It also takes a different approach to architecting systems than you would take when using a SQL approach.

> or remove useless buttons like the calculator and timer buttons

Pure opinion here. Personally I use the calculator a lot on my phone, and love having a quick way to access it. The timer icon is actually the clock app, I got confused by the icon too.

After playing around with the Beta for a while, I can say that the design doesn't make sense until you actually use it. Give it some time.

...and those of you who were laid off will no doubt be reading this email on our website as security has shut down your network access and escorted you from the building.

I really liked this part:

>Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.

Basically Jobs is saying "Hey, we can be in this together. Let's just give it a try." - which is rather humanizing in a way, and masks the negotiation as a soft sell.

You're making a pretty big assumption that everyone works in consumer-facing markets, and not with small- to medium-sized businesses.

The app store model is broken because it has too much Internet in it. Anonymity + Platform = arsehat. Dealing with clients one-on-one is really rewarding.

I'm an iOS developer in Dallas too. Without going into too much bagging on our terrible developer community, I will say that you have a couple of choices:

1. Bag a few freelance gigs. Build up your skills and confidence.

2. Try to get your foot in the door with a creative agency. Dallas has a lot of agencies and they generally are always looking for iOS developers for projects. The work is usually pretty simple.

3. Get in touch with Bottle Rocket. They're a local iOS development shop and may have need of junior developers.

If you ever want to grab coffee let me know. My contact info is in my profile.

Someone coming in cold to freelancing will spend time building up to this level.

They may need to take $50/hr jobs for a few months to build up a portfolio and references, and gradually raise your rates. Good, reputable clients will stick with who they know before hiring someone from the 'outside'. After that, referrals from their current contractors, then friends at other companies. You'll be working at this tertiary level for a while when you start. It sucks, but you just have to put in your time.

As a general rule of thumb, I also do not recommend taking gigs with individuals. The line can be blurry, but generally 'guy with an app idea' is not anyone you want to work with.

> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail and Gmail in front of it.

I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.

Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.

Pretty common in BigCorp land. The problem is that many of these IP Agreements are very badly worded. The spirit is that you should not take work you do for your employer and turn around and create a product that directly or indirectly competes with them in the same industry.

I'm not sure how enforceable these agreements are. Like anything with our legal system in the US, they're used often to bully people into submission with the threat of legal action, regardless of the company's actual intent. In California, there's a wide range of employee protection laws in place that would make these difficult, if not impossible to enforce. Not sure about elsewhere in the country. (standard IANAL disclaimer applies)

One place I worked at had a pretty boilerplate IP Agreement. I worked with them to change some of the wording so it was less vague. There is often a section on these things where you can provide "prior inventions" that are excluded from the agreement. I took the opportunity to list every idea (as vaguely as possible) I might want to pursue in during the expected course of my employment.

Where are the lies? Where's the fraud? How is any of this misrepresented?

This is more of the ever-popular "eat the rich" sentiment. Frankly, until someone can show that:

a) she doesn't have a daughter, or sons for the matter.

and

b) she pockets the money instead of spending on her daughter's hobby

there is no fraud. Basically if the mother wasn't worth north of a million no one would have batted an eye at this.

> Assuming I Am Only The Last Thing I Was

I can't tell you how much this annoys me. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, and I've done a lot of things: C#, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Taking a look at my resume, you would assume a rational and logical person would say: "oh, this guy's been in it a while, he could probably pick up anything" -- but this rarely happens.

I get it, you need deep technical expertise in X framework working with Y platform. Actually, no, I don't get it because a decent developer will pick up and run with anything you hand them, regardless of what they've worked on professionally in the past.

> Care

Passion != Success.

Look, I know you're oozing passion for building Twitter for Barnyard Animals, but don't expect me to show enthusiasm for your niche. Honestly, I've probably never heard of it before now. Maybe in time I'd come to really understand it and be interested in it, but right now I'm more interested in the scaling issues and optimizing my productivity through my tools.

Everything seems to come back to that good ol' fashioned advice:

"Do what you love and the money will follow"

It's pretty cliche, but the point is that you need to actually enjoy what you're doing and worry less about the money (unless you're in love with money, in which case go get a job on Wall Street). Sure, the chance to cash out big is a huge plus, but as Mark pointed out unless you're a founder it's very unlikely.

This is most likely a contributing factor to the talent crunch in the Bay Area. No one wants to take the chance on being the #1 or #2 engineering employee since the odds are weighed heavily against you. I imagine most sane people would look at it like this:

C-level / Founder: Risky, less salary now but larger option grants. Lots of hours.

Early employee: Riskiest. Less salary and less options. More hours.

Later employee: Least risky. Salary approaching market rate. No significant options. Hours that approach a normal work week (~40).