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  Pay Your Programmers $200/hour

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 eq...

   Salary,Programmer,Responsibility,Urgency,Value     2011-12-31 15:34:57

  How To Find a Great Start-Up Idea

Most people believe that the first step to starting a new company is to have a great idea. Back in business school, there were countless “idea brainstorming” sessions where groups of students would try to come up with the next billion dollar idea. None of them ever turned into anything.Great businesses are not built on ideas for marginal improvements or incremental features, they solve real problems and require a deep understanding of what those problems are. So the absolute worst th...

   Startup idea,Implement,Quickness     2012-03-18 00:26:22

  SOME LESSONS LEARNED

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.Today, I wanted...

   Investor,Startup,Lesson,Experience,Investment     2011-10-12 11:47:02

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  How to Ace a Google Interview

Imagine a man named Jim. He's applying for a job at Google. Jim knows that the odds are stacked against him. Google receives a million job applications a year. It's estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 high-school students applying to Harvard gets accepted. Jim's first interviewer is late and sweaty: He's biked to work. He starts with some polite questions about Jim's work history. Jim eagerly explains his short career. The intervi...

   Google,Interview,Questions and answers,Job     2011-12-26 09:17:36

  Do we need other languages other than C and C++?

There were hundreds of or thousands of programming languages created since the invention of computer. All these languages have the same target which is to make the computer do what we want it do. So we may find that many languages have the same functions, i.e, one task can be completed by one language can be completed by another language as well. Now we may wonder why we need so many different languages. Can we just have C or C++ since they provide the best performance we need. The answer obviou...

   programming language,C,Erlang     2014-06-14 19:39:40

  How To Write A Good Programming Test

I’ve taken and marked a lot of programming tests in the past. I love doing them as it’s always good to see what challenges different programmers have come up with when designing them. Unfortunately, however, most of them aren’t very good. Below is a list of general ideas to help increase the quality of programmer tests. 1. Keep it relevant Too many of the tests have questions on content that simply isn’t relevant to the job. The whole idea behind a programming test i...

   Programming test,Interview,Questions,Pro     2011-08-26 02:46:44

  Is programmer really profession for youth only?

- dedicated to the new programmers just into the workplace.

One young Chinese friend asked me: is programmer meant only for less experienced youth? Should I consider transition once if I work on it until 30 years old?

   Programmer,Youth,Product,Project,Career,Analysis     2012-03-18 07:06:44

  Are NSA engineers better than engieers at Microsoft?

NSA is the US government department which takes care of the information and data security of US. It's said to be one of the largest of U.S. intelligence organizations in terms of personnel and budget. There are many excellent engineers working on information and data security and developing algorithms and software help US government to collect intelligence information from all around the world. Many people may be curious about whether NSA has better engineers than IT companies like Microsoft and...

   NSA,Microsoft     2014-01-09 07:24:43

  Tips for Putting a Price on Your Work

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With th...

   Development,Price,Worl,Negotiation     2012-01-29 04:37:17