kunj2aan

What? Why in the world would increasing the S/N ratio be "terrible"? You want it to be greater than 1:1.

Also I dont understand these kinds of comments. Do you want us to email them that post with the quotes around them and attribute it to you?

The article starts by listing a couple of problems, at least one of which most software engineers will identify with.

Most of us have sometimes had our ideas turned down and a lot of companies do that for wide variety of reasons - not just to maximize quarterly earnings. Most of us have had our projects cancelled midway and usually the communications may not have been as you would have expected.

These don't make your jobs "crappy". Any company will have to make tradeoffs between the longterm vision and the short term earnings. I think quitting is not a good reaction to any of the above problems.

I would also try to address some of the allegations he makes about a company being "crappy".

Being profitable and stable means a lot of things. They are not a crutch that people hold on to. It means that there are people who are paying for what you make. It means that your team mates are doing a good job of selling what you make. It means that you are made something what people want. For most of us the pay is a small part of the equation on the job satisfaction. If I am making something that is profitable with people that I like and the company is trying its best to provide me some small perks,the low pay may hardly matter.

He also goes on another tangent expressing different frustrations about working in a company namely having "idiots with no technical background ... just because they have an MBA".

There are two different and unrelated points here. Why would someone without a technical background be an idiot? Why wouldn't he be competent to lead a team? Is your company hiring managers solely based on degrees? Does your company hire engineers just because they have a computer science degree? Would you have a person run a team just because he has a technical background?

There are a lot of reasons why people hate their companies. There are a lot of reasons why people love their companies. It is a good thing that the authors is trying to minimize the hateful relationship through your startup. However, he has provided no convincing argument to why some of the things that he listed make the company "mediocre" or "crappy" and why it is worth leaving the company.

What is this?

Relevant points to the question "Why would anyone post a parody in a root blog"

"The purpose of the piece was to satirize startup culture... I love HackNY, and I love startup culture although I find it really amusing at times. "

I think the post made the organization look very bad. I am not sure why anyone would want to post a self-parody on the root blog.

This reads like a satire.

Well tell us how you arrived to the conclusion that you are good at coding, pick up new things quickly and you are a good hire.

Did you solve a problem that no one else did? Did you create something that you found amazing? Did you collaborate with someone and he told you that you are good? Did your previous manager/professor tell you this or evaluated you positively in a coding project? Did your peers in the technical community do anything that lead you to believe you are good? Did you build something that some one is using and he liked it enough that you felt you could do it again? Did you ace some CS related subject and you are very confident in that domain? Did you win an award in a competition?

Just tell us how you arrived to that conclusion.

>I also think they were surprised that the inventor of #4,555,755 was funny, theatrical, and clever

I respect Rob as a programmer, but that came off as a little too self congratulatory.

I can speak to why there are alot of implementations of Lisp and Scheme.

Scheme seems fragmented because a lot of research work use it as the primary tool. For example, you have languages like Larceny which were primarily designed to study Garbage collections or even probabilistic language models using Church Scheme.

The ease in which Lisp and Scheme allows you to create new languages and perform exploratory work has spawned a lot of newer implementations.

And People also come up with newer implementations for a specific goal in mind. For example, Bigloo Scheme was created in order to enable Scheme programming style where C(++) is usually required.

I don't want to be negative but that was, in my opinion, a very poorly conducted interview. I wish the interviewer wouldn't stick to the script so much and that he would have followed up to some of the interesting comments Robert made. I wish the questions weren't so jumpy and that he had a theme or a linear form. And I wish he would stop looking at the paper and the camera so much and looked at the person he is supposed to be interested in.

One radical change to overcome some of the big deficiencies the interviewer has is to move behind the camera, clip the interview into a series a Q&As and completely avoid the "conversation type" interviews.

>Stallman makes it sound seems like he's saying he's superior to us because he's cool enough to not need all those fancy GUI dealies

I think you are completely missing his point. He is not claiming to be superior because he uses those tools, he thinks his freedoms are not restricted by them.