Haha, seriously I don't know why they don't just offer free email,cloud storage,and messaging... it would have to be orders of magnitude cheaper than what they are doing now.
I'm always surprised to find out that even great writers were skeptical of their masterpieces. I wonder if it is false humility, or genuine lack of self efficacy
Fantastically generous post. I wish more engineers were as publicly honest about their own, and their team's failures so that other engineers and engineering teams can learn from the experience.
All this will do is to hurt the smaller web retailers who will inevitably have to track and pay sales tax. Some of whom are already on the brink and will have to trim their payrolls, or fall to amazon.
Gardens have elements that are impossible to control so gardeners have to deal with randomness. With code, there is no randomness, the outcome of a piece of software will be exactly what people have written, down to the microcode, it is completely predictable.
In many ways software engineers are more engineers than civil, because we completely control our environment.
Maybe your organization is out of control, but your code is not.
The most important thing for founders to remember, even if they are under the gun is that keeping employees working longer hours for a sustained duration will result in a less reliable product.
I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher.
If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner.
I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc...
Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.
The ad model is truly dying, and I agree that facebook's current revenue model is a placeholder, but facebook has so much cash that they can buy a real business when one comes along. Perhaps that is the idea...
I wish I could say that I didn't fall victim to this sort of thinking all through school, but I'd be lying if I say that I hadn't. There is indeed a culture of not pushing to your top potential academically, or at least there was when I was in school.
I seem to have moved on from that, and now work pretty darn hard at learning stuff, but only once I was away from my peers culturally as well as physically. It sucks but it is the truth.
Totally biased toward the iPhone. Nothing about Android and Java, being that there are nearly as many Java developers as JavaScript developers. This may as well have been an Apple press release.
Google deals with this situation pretty well on Android. You have 16 MB of heap to work with, and you have to deal with their garbage collection.
I agree with the person writing the article. I'd rather have 16 MB of guaranteed RAM available, than maybe 40, or maybe 2. My iPhone app sometimes can't even initialize my tab view controller without crashing depending on the state of the users' iPhone. You can usually get away with using the keyed archiver to page in and out once your app is loaded, but it is typically getting loaded that is the challenge.