Great response. It's hard to get any real work done when you have to constantly context switch between different things. Ed didn't know that he'd have to waste 3 hours of his time. It was only supposed to take 10 minutes after all.
I had something similar happen to me earlier in the week. The conversation went something like this:
Boss: Hey, we've got an urgent production issue that needs to be looked at. I'm getting some heat on this one and I need someone to diagnose it to see if it's a blocker for our release.
Me: Would you be able to ask X and Y to investigate? It seems they are on the support rotation for production issues. It'll take me at least an hour to clean up what I'm doing and switch over to run the old production instance locally.
Boss: It's urgent, I think you need to drop whatever you're doing and look at this.
Me: OK, sure.
(50 minutes later, as I'm almost done building the old production instance)
...
X and Y come back from a meeting.
Boss: I'll have X and Y look at this, you can go back to working on your stories for this sprint.
Either the article is completely wrong about GPA or I must be an outlier. I barely had a 3.0 in college and got multiple internships at "Major" companies.
'Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett was feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.”'
'So, Buffett has pledged to match one for one all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And, I’ll even go three for one for McConnell.” That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me: “I’m not worried.”'
Apparently Jean-Louis was one of the few people that stood up to Steve in Europe when he visited back in the 80s, and this earned him Steve's respect. Back then, Jean-Louis was in charge of Apple France and didn't cave to setting Steve's unrealistic sales forecasts for the Macintosh.
Later on, Sculley (then CEO of Apple) chose Jean-Louis to replace Steve as head of the Macintosh division (which the Lisa team was folded into). Steve would later reflect on Jean-Louis as a "terrible" bozo--probably because he thought he was betrayed by him.
One thing I did notice about Steve from reading Isaacson's book is that he categorized people into two camps. They were either bozos or heroes, and nothing in between. Either an idea was the most amazing thing ever, or it was utterly shit.
1. Netflix is at the mercy of media companies that control the content. Media companies can basically charge whatever they want for their content on Netflix. If Netflix can't afford it, they'll let their contracts expire and people will no longer get to see the movies and shows they want to watch. Unfortunately, the pricing hikes made consumers realize that it was extremely expensive to spend $16 a month to rent 1 DVD a week with streaming, whereas before at $10 they could justify the cost.
2. Netflix is in a crowded market with Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Google, and the media companies themselves. Sooner or later Starz, HBO, Warner Bros, and all these other media companies may decide to start their own version of "Netflix" and cancel all their existing contracts entirely. This would be more profitable for them, and would essentially kill Netflix.
3. Poor customer relations. The Qwikster snafu significantly hurt their brand, and a lot of customers (800k so far) have already left their service. Not only are they going to have to convince their existing customer base to stay, they need to convince more customers to join, as to drive revenue growth.
4. Netflix is predicting that its combined loss of customers and European launch will push it into the red next year where it may stay for all of 2012, according to a letter to its shareholders. http://goo.gl/3VdED
I believe the author would have a different opinion if he watched Steve's 2005 commencement speech. http://goo.gl/l7scw
Steve said the reason he was successful later in life was from learning from his previous failures. This doesn't seem characteristic of a man who is unable to reflect on his past.
Perhaps the reason he chose not to do so later in life was because he knew of his impending death. The man who lives every day like his last doesn't spend time reminiscing about the past—he lives in the present and enjoys every waking moment.
I'd like to think that in the last months of his life Steve tried to do just that.
Good developers are hardly ever on the market. The majority of them are happy at their current jobs, and they know they could go anywhere else they wanted because their skills are highly valued.
I'm sure it gets annoying when they frequently receive emails about "Technically Forward High Frequency Trading Firms" from recruiters who happened to find them through playing buzzword bingo.
These recruiters tout that this new "opportunity" will give more money, benefits, responsibility, good looks, and sexual prowess, but never do the due diligence to make sure that their client is actually a good fit.
It's the shotgun approach that most recruiters use that turns good developers off.
Maybe once these recruiters treat developers with more respect, so will they.
If in-house recruiters are bad, what about headhunters?
I've received emails from a headhunter 3 times within a month asking me to apply for the same position. After the second time, I notified them that I was perfectly happy with my current position, and was not interested (noting that I had already respectfully declined the week before).
They didn't respond.
A week later I receive the same exact email.
Of course none of this trumps a friend of mine who was asked if he was interested in a "fantastic opportunity" at the company he currently worked for. After asking if he would get a referral bonus for recruiting himself for a job he already had, the recruiter hung up.
* Pay attention to fees. Avoid actively managed funds.