Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars (which won for Best Technical Achievement).

Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.

Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.

Yours,

Banksy The Lucky Stiff

As much as I like "Geek wins, hah!", I would suggest not modeling this as a good practice for self-employed folks here. It is 2011: GoogLinkedBookTwitEtc have ensured that you have exactly one professional reputation. You may think future clients will see the righteousness of your actions. Consider whether available evidence suggests that you are a good judge of the character of clients.

Come back to this post in two months if you don't buy this prediction: it is highly likely he doesn't get paid.

There are better ways to avoid nonpayment. Work with better customers - reputation works both ways. Get references if required. For projects of nontrivial length, agree to milestones and bill on successful completion. Delivery of functional code should practically always be a milestone, which would eliminate most of the downside risk here. Charge a premium, both to scare away bad clients and to cover the numerous sources of risk to your ability to pay rent, of which total refusal to pay is only one.

As I interpret the sentiment, the author is indicating that he is writing simply to express his frustration at being an innocent victim of collective punishment. He is stating that he is aware of the causes of the situation, and that there may be ways to engage in productive change, but neither of those things changes the basic personal injustice he is directly experiencing. In other words, he is not attempting to make a counterargument, he is disinterested in engaging in debate, he is simply very irritated by obstacles he encounters through no fault of his own.

To be honest, though, you already had 98% of the delegation problem solved. The biggest hurdle isn't telling employees "here's what we stand for, I trust you to make decisions according to our philosophy". The biggest hurdle is to actually find people you can trust with it. It sounds like you already had a team of competent, skilled people whom you just micromanaged, and then realised they were competent enough to act on their own and let them.

This is trivial compared to actually finding such people (at least for me, I guess).

They just used the name because it sounds catchy/linkbaity.

I hate to pile on, but please revert this change. It also makes HN feel too much like reddit.

I think this is an attempt to create a soopersekrit easter egg standard so that the guys who write a site can pat each other on the back without the customer needing to know about it.

Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous.

Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they had any friends that needed work.

Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr. Show them what to do." And that was that.

To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the warehouse. But I even did this same approach when I needed a CTO. ("Anyone have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK - tell him to start tomorrow.")

But maybe that they were friends-of-friends helped with the trust part.