Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group. (via this guy, via this guy) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: on...

I often get asked what a product manager is. What do they do? Where do they come from? Why do they like sharpies so much?In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience (hint – only a product manager would define themselves in a venn diagram). A good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with pract...

Being a programmer, you have an invaluable skill that you need to learn to harness. Investors realize this already which is why they’ll spend stacks of cash to have you build them something that’ll someday be profitable. Large corporations realize the value in good developers and sometimes bend over backwards trying to retain their top talent. To be able to program well is a skill that people clearly value but why do programmers tend to place such little value on their own talents?I know amazing developers who have spent the last decade building other people a fortune in IP while...

It's always a tough decision to make to fire an employee. No matter he/she performs how bad, it's hard for the boss to say one person is fired. How to fire an employee who is not good enough? On Quora, there is one such question asked and we think one answer is very attractive and useful.The answer is given by Michael O. Church who is a New York functional programmer. The best employees are multipliers who make others more productive, and next are the adders (workhorses). Subtracters are the good-faith incompetents who cost more than they bring. Dividers are the worst kind of problem employee:...

If you are hiring programmers, you should pay them $200/hr. This breaks through otherwise impenetrable psychological barriers, helps solve the agency problem, and ensures you are only hiring programmers when you really need them.Expectations$200/hr is an open declaration of your expectations. It states that you are expecting to hire both a professional and an expert in the field.As a programmer, I treat contracts that pay me $200/hr differently from jobs/contracts that pay me $65/hr equivalent salary in two key ways. First, I treat issues and requests with far greater urgency. I’ve been...

How to be outstanding and get the offer after a job interview? Besides the strong technical background, we may still need some other skills such as how to ask questions during interview. Sometimes you may even do some crazy things. There is one question on Quora which is "What's the craziest thing you ever said (or did) at an interview and still got the job?". Among the answers, one answer is worth to be mentioned, the answer is from Stan Hanks and his answer is liked by 3859 people(As this article is being written). Let's have a look at what he said.The interviewer, a very senior technical gu...

Stuff we startups do that doesn't delight users:Office spaceLaunch partiesHealth insurance plansSalary negotiationsFounder equity splitsSeries F stockOffice Food Team-building activitiesCRM systemsBookkeepingHead countWorking in SOMAConvertible debt capsValuationsTechCrunchKarma scoresISOsPowerpointBusiness CardsBanksLawyersDesks1099sBug TrackersAgile ProcessesAdvisory BoardsHiringCap TablesPayrollMeetupsMeetingsOf course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.  And some of it really is important to the process that eventually creates delight for users. ...

Experts often end up where they started as beginners.If you’ve never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it.Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see.Beginning computer science students think that computer science is all about programming. Then they learn that computer science is...