Sorry if this is politically incorrect. I say this respectfully and with the hope that it would be useful to someone who reads it:
People typically save money for their kids. The 'mothering' or 'fathering' instincts are so strong that we protect resources for our progenys.
It appears that Tim Cook may never have a real progency. So what will he do with all this money? He could give it to his nephew. Maybe. He gets a thank you card from them. But his 'parenting' instincts are not triggered by it. So he has to do something else with it, like donating it to Charity.
Are you insinuating that he won't be having kids because of a weak correlator (his sexual orientation)? Why not use a better correlator, that he's the type of person that doesn't want kids?
1. Dropbox: NPV is less than 10B. Will probably get brought for 3-4B by bigco if bigco can transcend internal politics. Not sure who will buy them - most probably Microsoft under Ndella.
2. Palantir: I have some experience with working with Palantir FDEs who were marketed to BigCo as 'gift from god to solve all problems'. They were pretty useless.
I think Palantir is basically shit. Wait and watch.
Will probably get brought for 3-4B by bigco if bigco can transcend internal politics. Not sure who will buy them - most probably Microsoft under Ndella.
I'm asking in all sincerity - what does Dropbox have that Microsoft would want? Their OneDrive technology is "good enough" for the vast majority of users.
Latest statistics I could find were that DropBox has 200,000,000 users and that 96% of them were free user accounts. That means DropBox has about 8,000,000 paying users. Instead of buying the company for $4 billion they could instead pay each paying DropBox customer $500 to switch.
Or they could spend $4 billion on marketing / giving away their free 1 TB of OneDrive space with purchase of an Office 365 subscription for $6.99 per month.
Same reasons MS ended up buying Skype, despite having a near decade lead in tech (NetMeeting before MSN Messenger), 300M active users, etc. etc.? MS even had VoIP-to-PSTN in the 90s, albeit via a poor partnership with MCI.
Same reasons MS ended up investing in FB, instead of turning Messenger (think: you've already got everyone and their friends using it!) into a good social network?
> I think Palantir is basically shit. Wait and watch.
That's a pretty bold statement.
I've worked with them as well, and definitely don't buy into the hype either. But when the latest financing round (~Jan 2015) has them valued at $15 billion, there must be something to it.
I don't know what kind of access their private investors have to the financials, but it's been reported they have 100s millions in revenue from USG alone selling their platform as enterprise software, which typically has a longer sales cycle but more "stickiness" once the customer has committed (i.e. they are less likely to purchase another platform no matter how bad the current one is). On top of that, the alternatives in this space just aren't very good, and sometimes hype and brand are all you need to make the sale.
That being said, I'm pretty skeptical of the valuations of all the tier 1 companies SamA mentioned, with maybe the exception of Pinterest, and think that category of the three has the most likelihood of losing him this bet.
There are a LOT of hyped startups that deliver hugely mediocre products/services. From consumer (HomeJoy, FlyCleaners etc) to enterprise software, there's a lot of nonsense out there.
I just looked at the Box stock. Google Finance says institutional ownership of 0%. Never seen something like this before - perhaps gFinance has buggy data or else the smart money is not on Box.
Perhaps similar story on Dropbox. Not sure when their IPO is, but I hear the rumblings of it.
I think vast majority of Box's IPO buyers were institutional investors (not counting their existing investors before the IPO). Maybe the reports are not filed yet or Google hasn't aggregated recent data.
> We use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty good. Strongly recommended.
I'd like to pitch in until the parent clarifies but they probably mean OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business. To anyone reading this, please stay away from OneDrive for Business. It is NOT OneDrive and you will regret using it.
Yeah, I can confirm this comment... We are using OneDrive for Business for various reasons, I strongly advice to stay away from OneDrive for Business if you can...
yes - I was part of a recent acquisition and made a little over 4M (pretax). I had 0.1% of the company. I was 24th employee (engineer). The company had 55 people at the time of acquisition. I joined about 14 months before the acquisition.
Please don't try to deanonymize people who aren't sharing their own details - individuals are being frank with personal, sensitive financial information in this thread and that's a good thing.
It's the internet. People can do what they want. Everyone is in the pool. Sharks and swimmers. If swimmers want to risk, sharks can bite. End of story.
I for one support the uncovering attempts. I'm attempting to do that myself on all the stories as well.
I took Gilbert Strang's Mathematical Methods for Engineers course at MIT. Can't seem to find the link for it, but I would recommend the online version for anyone who wants to learn linear algebra.
If what surprised you was Figure 1 in the paper [1], note that it depicts only CS departments. The CS department at UW is widely considered among the best in the United States. Not that this is definitive, but it's ranked 6 in the US News and World report [2].
Which really proves nothing since the US News rankings are heavily biased toward perceived excellence, other non-objective measures, and objective measures that have no bearing on how well students are actually being educated. Is there really something so special about UWs curriculum that sets them apart from #20 or #100 or do they just have fancier gymnasiums and dorms and more donations from alums?
The main correlate is the impact of faculty output. This also is not necessarily correlated with the quality of the education students receive. But then, department rankings shouldn't necessarily reflect the quality of the education either.
UW is also considered one of the best medical schools (when I was applying, their matriculant MCAT score was a standard deviation above the national matriculant average. Even Harvard couldn't make that claim).
I am not sure if your response is relevant to the article, but I felt that there is some level of superiority complex that you and many fellow humans posses (in this case, about your superior knowledge and intellect).
Perhaps the biggest difference between you and someone applying for the job through the h1b visa program was that they were born in a different set of circumstances than you were. They were likely born in India whereas you were born I the United States. As a result of being born in India, they went to a local school there which didn't teach them about hash tables and concurrency. Your school did, and you had a better education. This person from India is trying to make a better life for himself despite starting at a disadvantage in life(being born in a poor country with access to lesser educational opportunities than you). You are welcome to reject him for the job(you can do so at the resume screening state, especially if they don't have the relevant skills and experience) but I think it would be useful to remember that the other person is a human, likely disadvantaged, and express some human empathy.
I'm perfectly happy interviewing people for junior positions. We did this quite a bit at larger companies where junior engineers were desirable, and there was structure that let them succeed.
But when I'm dealing with a professional organization that is basically trying to scam my company into doing mis-hires, that's when my empathy goes dry. I have a duty to my co-workers and my investors to not screw up hires. I see gaming the system as a legitimate opportunity to criticize someone else's behavior.
I agree, these junior level people are in a tough position. They're being mis-represented and taken advantage of. It sucks. I want people to succeed. But I don't do handouts, and the practices I've seen make me mad.
Everyone in this industry sees many, many resumes from people who cannot do the job. Everyone interviews people who don't pass. Probably everyone has seen people fired because they couldn't perform or were doing damage. This happens. It's not going away. And it's not pleasant.
So while it might not come across in what I wrote above, every time I affect someone's life like this -- every time I send a "Sorry, we're not going to proceed" email, or tell someone in an interview that we're cutting things short today -- I feel bad about it. Sometimes a little bad, sometimes a lot. Sometimes I agonize over a resume (and we spent quite a bit of time on a candidate the other day, trying to come up with reasons to proceed). But the alternatives (job charity? keeping someone on who does negative work?) are worse. Much worse.
And given all the people who should be given a chance, I won't countenance fraud. That makes me write responses that are direct and forceful and unapologetic. These job shops are poisoning the well for the individuals who are truly deserving, and that should make everyone mad.
Yes there is certain luck bestowed upon you when you are born in US. But you still need to do lots of work to get a good job.
Big multinational don't care about your visa status, several of my friend has been in Zurich (Google), Dubin (Google), London (FB) if they didn't make cut in H1B lottery system after they cleared the interview process.
Don't confuse empathy with competence. Are you looking for charity when you interview with the companies ?
Work hard, raise your competence level and you will have no problem finding a good job in any part of the world.
Your response has nothing to do with his post. He said he's looking for senior devs and keeps getting sent rookies. It doesn't matter what their background is, they clearly shouldn't be applying for something they can't do.
"You are welcome to reject him for the job(you can do so at the resume screening state, especially if they don't have the relevant skills and experience) but I think it would be useful to remember that the other person is a human, likely disadvantaged, and express some human empathy."
It is hard to do both when so many of the candidates in question are lying on their resume, lying during the interview, and they are lying to themselves about whether or not they are qualified for the job. Oh, and their recruiter was lying to since before you met them.
You are exhorting greater empathy from one side, while ignoring the entire lack of empathy from the other. Whenever I've seen people do this, it has usually been because they were fostering in-group biases they wouldn't admit to.
I admire and support immigrants who wish to better their lives. But if (as you state) the people receiving these work visas aren't especially skilled or educated, why treat them differently from the 1.2+ million immigrants who come freely to the US every year? Why not tell employers who are looking for IT help that they're free to hire anyone currently authorized to work in the US just like every other segment of the economy?
People typically save money for their kids. The 'mothering' or 'fathering' instincts are so strong that we protect resources for our progenys. It appears that Tim Cook may never have a real progency. So what will he do with all this money? He could give it to his nephew. Maybe. He gets a thank you card from them. But his 'parenting' instincts are not triggered by it. So he has to do something else with it, like donating it to Charity.