I work at a medium sized public sv company that’s competitive with the ones discussed here and work life balance is amazing, things are very relaxed and definitely don’t feel burnt out at all.
People very regularly wfh for all sorts of reasons, time off whenever you want that people actually take, probably a little bit less then a 40 hour work week and every sprint my manager is usually making the case for how we don’t want to take on too much or over commit ourselves.
I’m thinking about leaving because frankly it’s maybe a little too slow and relaxed, I sort of think I work well in a more intense environment, but if that’s what you’re looking for I can pass your resume on to recruiting haha
Feel like some of the other comments are sort of missing the point of the article although the author probably could have been clearer in what his point was.
My take is that this is targeted toward people without any sort of traditional/university CS background trying to get into tech from scratch and in addition to taking a basic javascript course or whatever are following the standard advice you hear of "you need to have some side projects to get employers attention." Think its just trying to give some pointers to people going down that path with the very specific larger goal of it leading to a full time job.
So ya, I would bet the author would probably agree that side projects are almost valuable in and of themselves, but some are going to be more likely then others to lead towards a full time position, etc.
I guess to me the main point of the new article seemed to be that the prestige and “signaling of strength” associated with the .com is what makes it important, while the older article argues having a traditionally prestigious name can actually be a negative, in signaling that maybe the founders “have more money then brains”. (I understand he's referring here to names that are obviously bought from squatters, but still the main point seems to be don't worry if a name fits into the traditional mold or seems 'prestigious' as long as its unique, memorable and ideally communicates something about your business. I'd also never expect a newer startup to be able to find "stripe.com" or "parse.com" without paying significantly for them today.)
I’d also say the proliferation of new TLD domains has made them more, not less acceptable for new companies, especially ones like .io and .ly that have come to be pretty closely associated with the startups in general. Like you say, in 2006 nearly everything still was .com so a non .com might have stood out more as a negative, and even then pg says he still had no problems with del.icio.us
Also the last section stood out for me as a contrast with the title of this one:
"Whatever name you choose, be careful. Names stick. You need a way to refer to things, and whatever you call something rapidly becomes its name."
It’s also strange to me since more then once when discussing startup naming I’ve quoted this earlier article Paul wrote where he makes nearly the opposite argument: http://aux.messymatters.com/pgnames.html
People very regularly wfh for all sorts of reasons, time off whenever you want that people actually take, probably a little bit less then a 40 hour work week and every sprint my manager is usually making the case for how we don’t want to take on too much or over commit ourselves.
I’m thinking about leaving because frankly it’s maybe a little too slow and relaxed, I sort of think I work well in a more intense environment, but if that’s what you’re looking for I can pass your resume on to recruiting haha