Summary: “The tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations,” says HP’s CEO. The TouchPad was quickly becoming a money pit. HP CEO Leo Apotheker wasn’t shy about outlining the company’s challenges. He noted that the “tablet effect is real” and dinged HP’s PC business. In addition, the TouchPad failure was about to become a money pit.That reality led HP to move forward on plans to discontinue WebOS devices and plan a spin-off of the PC business. A spin off and evaluatio...

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group.It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physical labor, I felt like I had really made it. My job was challenging (making investing decisions always is) an...

As a software developer, I get to know a lot of other software developers. Many of the software developers I know are either running a startup, working as an early employee for a startup, doing contract jobs for a startup, or dreaming of one day starting a startup. My point is that software developers are very interested in startups, either starting them or working for them.My advice to anyone who’s interested in startups: Before you ever start a startup, try to make at least one cool and useful project. It doesn’t have to make money; in fact, it’s better if your...

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs. There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candida...

Usually if you see on your website a white/blank space instead of Adsense ads, this means that Adsense cannot show adds in that unit for some reasons (we are going to talk about possible reasons below) and also you have enabled the “Fill space with a solid color” feature (in the “Choose what to display if no relevant ads are available” settings of this ad unit). I probably should also say that if you set “Show public service ads” instead of the “Fill space with a solid color” one, the PSA will be shown instead of a blank space.If you notice no us...

When it comes to hiring practices, the tables have turned – capsized, actually. After a global recession saw thousands of jobs lost in IT departments everywhere, now the race is on to hire swarms of top talent. The trouble is: There isn’t enough talent to go around, and the threat of losing key staff to “poachers” is growing daily.“In the current war for talent in Silicon Valley, a lot of leaders believe that it is not possible to compete with the Google and Facebook phenomena and take it as a given that they will lose key team members to these giants,” sa...

Takeaway: Everyone seems to agree that IT is a tough field. But what does it take to overcome the adversities and become a successful IT pro? These qualities may be the key. I recently wrote a string of articles discussing various reasons to leave IT — and various alternative careers for dissatisfied IT workers. I received an amazing amount of feedback from readers who have always wanted to express similar sentiments. But that leaves out a huge swath of people: those who desperately want a career in IT, as well as those who are caught somewhere in Limbo, trying to...

Over the last few months, we have been recruiting developers, and we’ve started to get a sense for the type of developer who is a good fit for our team.  These attributes probably apply for developers at most web startups, so I wanted to share them with you.Before I get into it, the most important thing to know is that technical skill is a threshold requirement.  The assumption is that any person who is a fit for our team will have the relevant technical experience to do the job.Beyond that, here’s what we look for in someone as a good fit…PassionOne of our g...