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  1. Team City Monitor (with coverage history) for GAE

    August 3, 2011 by sshadmand

    Per my last post about the splendor of GAE, below is one example of a tool I built for us at Socialize to keep an eye on code coverage and lets the group know if a build is broken (if our tests have failed.) This script is built to run on Google AppEngine, checks against a TeamCity Server install, and expects that each project in team city has code coverage outputted to its artifacts folder.

    What is C.I. Server and why is it important?

    C.I. stand for Continuous Integration, and is a system used to constantly/”continuously” checks to see if a code base is “working” or not. Team City (by JetBrains) is a product made for that process. Usually it is used to run tests against a code base to make sure it is working as expected, as a part of the QA life cycle. These tests are made up of “unit tests” that are created by the developers whom write code to test the code they are writing. It can be a bit odd for those that have not ever done so, but it is quite important when trying to deliver stable code. In short, and in its simplest form, this whole system makes sure new code/changes doesn’t break old code already in place. You can read more about these processes and purposes here: Unit Testing & Integration Testing.

    What is code coverage, and why is it important?

    Code coverage examines how much of your code is being tested. For instance, you may have a C.I. system in place, and a unit test frame work running within it, but if the tests only test/”cover” 1% of all of the code you aren’t really delivering a level of confidence you should be. In this tool we track the coverage percentage over time. Seeing it as a graph helps recognize dips in coverage easily.


    Download Team City Monitor for GAE


    Or fork and contribute on GitHub

    Category Feature Tech, featured, Technology | Tags: ,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  2. Leave the caves and create your tools! <3 GAE

    July 30, 2011 by sshadmand

    GAE offers a free to get started approach, along with an instant “hello word” initial environment, making sandboxing ideas and building helpful tools for productivuty a snap.

    To get started, download GAE, press the plus sign in the bottom left corner. Set the directory you would like to work out of and your almost done. Well, at least you are already at the stage you need to be to start playing with the system locally, in what we call the development environment (No one can see your system but you.) Just hit the [play] button on the GAE dashboard and you are running with your first environment. Just click the Browser (the compass looking thing), or go to http://localhost:8080 in your browser, and you should see your first “hello word“! It is quite reassuring to see it work so smoothly (if indeed it does), and if this is the first time you have coded, trust me they have taken out a hell of allot of pain out of the tedium it can take to get here.

    Without getting into the nitty gritty of code just yet, let’s push your baby to production (That means make it live/accessible to the world). That’s right, you are about to push a web application live to production!  First create a new app at the google app engine home page and follow the steps there (setting up your yaml for upload). Your yaml file tells google which app your are updating when you do so. Not making sure your yaml matches your project is like  you sending mail through the USPS without out a “from”/”to” address.

    Once complete, press the blue arrow pointing upward (the “deploy” button) and it will deploy (AKA: push to prod, go live.)

    Once deployed, you can update, monitor, or even share you application with the world. And all for free. Not that this baby would get allot of attention in its current state (just a “hello world”), but if it did, it would also be scalable. I mean 10 years ago this would have cost you quite a bit of time money, especially if you didnt know allot about server configurations, apache, linux, or windows server, or…well you get the idea.

    There are a few sample apps you can play with on the GAE site. If you are ready, start developing some code i Python. Maybe had a hellow world message of your own.

    When you start feeling saucy, try and create a model. A model is a data structure you can save, or persist, data to your system. Again to you newbies out there, this is the equivelent of your granfather telling you, “back in my day I had to walk up a hill in the snow to get to work, and up a hill in a blizzard to get back.” Setting up a database on a production server was a skill on its own, but to create one that is scalable, and without the need to architect it is amazing. You see, based on the models you create GAE intuitivley creates your “database”, stores it efficiently, and assumes where indexes need to be placed. You really don’t have to understand any of this, but if you want to you can look up those terms have at it: indexing, database, architecture, MVC…. Like I said, I’m just an old guy complaining about hills.

    If you are still a bit timid about getting started, don’t worry there is a baby step in between these tween sized steps that can help you get ramped up before you start churning out lines and lines of code. Click on the “SDK Console” button on the GAE dashboard. It will open up a web page that is running locally, on your stage environment, that gives you windows into your system to hack around with. (This console lives inside your development app, so don’t forget to run your new app to get access to it.) Once in the console, click “Interactive Console”. There you will have a very rudimentary terminal that you can write temporary test scripts in. The output is shown on the right of the screen. This is a great place to get errors, make mistakes, and go nuts! (Note: The SDK Console also houses your development DB, so you can check to see what data you are saving after you have attempted to save it.)

    Note: The easiest way to get started as a newbie, in my mind, is by using Python in GAE. Java, although awesome, is a bit more advanced.

    I recently used GAE to create a few projects to help out the team. One for TeamCity monitor to view coverage reports and if a build is broken or not. And also one for Pivatol Tracker to help our press and marketing interpret what is coming out of the product pipeline, if its ready, and what are the stories of value within. I will post templates for those projects in the near future.

    Category Technology, tutorial | Tags: ,,,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  3. What do you and Sonic the Hedgehog have in common?

    July 6, 2011 by sshadmand

    Sonic and his rings

    Sonic and his rings

    Have you ever played Sonic the hedgehog? Man, what a classic! The objective: Get your hedgehog, named Sonic, to jump, run and even roll through a stage, avoiding the array of animal-ish enemies, only to reach a guarded exit, protected by your arch nemesis, Dr. Evil. Beat him and the entrance to the next level is opened. Keep this up, level after level, enemy after enemy, and you will win the game. — But wait there’s more! If you are attacked without a collection of magical “rings” in your possession, you will die. With one or more rings you can narrowly avoid death by attack.

    So which was more important, getting to the next level, or acquiring the rings? Well, any kid would tell you: Duh, both! Obvi. If you only collect the rings you may never get to the end of the level. Alternatively, if you only try to get to the end of the level, rendering yourself ringless, you dramatically decrease your chances of survival.

    Of course, one could play the perfect game, dodging all would be attackers, and avoiding falling off cliffs to a spikey-floored doom. By doing so you would indeed win the game, just as anyone else. But who could make it through all those levels without one misstep, one slipped finger, or distracted moment when your Mom calls you down for dinner? I’m going to take a stab at it and say — not a single person. So, thanks to those gracious creators at Sega, you were given those wonderfully magic rings, giving you a fighting chance. You and everyone else jumped at the opportunity, capturing as many rings as you could. You mitigated risk, balanced your options, and grabbed on to what ever you could, outside of the clearly laid goal of completing the level, to of course do just that, complete the level and win the game; achieve success.

    That is not a theme reserved for just hedgehogs named Sonic, or any game for that matter. Success is a goal some of us can see, and once we see it, we direct our focus directly at achieving it. But it is often that deterministic direction that creates a far more subtle misdirection.

    Nine out of ten startups fail, right? I bet most of them are hard workers and/or have great ideas and/or have a focus and/or goals. A major hurdle to overcome, one that is far less obvious then the cliche advice to work harder/smarter, and the basis for why so many startup fall victim to those one-in-ten odds, is that it is the very focus on the goal that can cause the unbalance in your business, and ironically dooms your chances in achieving it.

    Success may live on a straight-line, but the line seen is not necessarily the path to take. The best path is almost always one that dances around the line formed. Looking away, towards an entirely different direction, can reveal a path with far less hurdles when the focus is returned to the goals directive. You must let something go in order to truly have it — a cliché theme that works in almost any environment, and often takes a lifetime to master. Simply put, our “rings” come in the form of friendships, support systems, a passion for what you do, mistakes that need to be made, failures to learn from, vacations to escape to, and random ideas that inspire. When we remember to grab onto those rings when the opportunity to do so arises, or even sometimes when it doesn’t seem like it can, we will be far more able to last the “attacks” the startup game will inevitably throw our way.

    So my fellow hedgehogs, should you grab at all the rings you can, even if at times by doing so you are unable to race towards the goal? Most definitely! Any kid who had a sega will tell you: you have to do both. Duh! Obvi.

    Category Business, Feature Concepts, featured, Philosophy, Style | Tags: | No Comments

  4. They say it’s 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration… I say that’s 99% oyster, 1% pearl.

    June 19, 2011 by sshadmand

    -Elizabeth Gilbert

    Category Quotes | Tags: | No Comments

  5. Diet: Start with — well — your diet.

    April 10, 2011 by sshadmand

    I was talking to a friend of mine about the perils of staying healthy as I find myself getting older and in the midst of spending every hour on growing my business and not my body. He apparently bumped into a friend of ours from collage that is now an MMA fighter and noticed how fit and in shape he seemed. My friend asked, this now professional athlete, for a short “intro to a healthy body ’201′”, becuase, as he put it, we have all heard the “101″ before. This is what he said followed by the email he sent to add some clarity. I figured it was postable. Some things you may know, somethings are just good to hear again and others may be new to you, so enjoy how ever you choose :)

    ======================

    Basically diet is everything, not just important, but everything. And breakfast is more important then people realize even though they may hear “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, all the time.

    ———————————–

    As soon as you wake in the morning, you should consume 16-32 oz of cold water. You body is in dehydration and starvation mode at this time, so the water starts your metabolism by up to 33%.

    You want to have something to eat within 30 minutes of waking up as well. I usually eat a bowl of oatmeal with a banana or egg whites. They are both easy to prepare and easy for the body to breakdown.

    Doing these two really simple/very important things will have you on you way to being health, losing weight, and having more energy.

    Two hours from when you eat breakfast you want to have a light snack. (Protein shake,health bar, powerbar, 10 almonds, pack of peanuts, yogurt, fruit, trail mix) Or some combo of the two.

    This helps to sustain your metabolism in between meals, and aids you in not overeating during lunch.

    You want to eat lunch 4 hours after breakfast.(Give or take 30 min)

    2 hours after lunch you want another small snack.

    2 hours after the snack you should eat dinner.

    2 hours after dinner you should have a light snack before bed. (If you want, but not needed) But you should go to bed hungry.

    So you are comsuming a meal every 4 hours and a snack every 2 hours in between. (This is VERY important)

    You should be consuming plenty of water throughout the day. I drink at least a gallon of water, sometimes more. Water helps push everything through your system and aid in digestion. It’s a no-brainer, but people still don’t do it. And NO, you will not be drinking too much water if you consume a gallon, so don’t worry. However you will be going to the restroom quite often.

    Stay away from fast food, fried foods, sweet snacks, candy, cakes, and other crap food. Once you start cleaning up what you eat, you’ll start feeling all the bad stuff you have in your food plan.

    You do want to pick one day out of the week to have whatever you want. Pizza, Beer, wings, donuts….you get the point. I use Saturday’s as my cheat day and I go to town. Eventually you want to take this Cheat day down to just one cheat meal, but it’s a gradual process. Starting off cutting everything ‘cold turkey’ has negative results, so don’t do it.

    Add this with a workout 3-4 times a week and you are off to the races. I’m including two meal plans my nutrionist had me on. You can switch foods around as you choose, but try to stick to the overall theme.

    Category Style | Tags: | No Comments

  6. Will you please “BeMyApp”?

    March 9, 2011 by sshadmand

    BeMyApp Presentations

    BeMyApp Presentations

    The BeMyApp Competition was held at pariSoma’s new building, an innovation “hotspot” and office space in San Francisco. There, a group of innovators, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs got together to try and create an iPhone application that would change the world in forty-eight hours.

    People who registered as innovators submitted their ideas on the BeMyApp site,
    and a select group presented at the pariSoma building to the rest of the attendees. After the innovators presented their strictly monitored (only one minute!) pitches, the attendees voted on their favorite idea. To cast a vote, each attendee used poker chips as tokens to represent one vote towards an idea. Innovators with the most chips made it to the next round.

    Forty-eight hours later, I returned to judge the submissions. I found the new team members, fully integrated with one another, preparing for the presentation. They were laughing, backing one another up and finalizing their demos for the judging. It was great seeing how quickly the camaraderie developed around the common objective of innovating through apps. It was even more surprising to see how dedicated they were to that objective as a single unit in such a short amount of time. The time was finally here: the five finalists presented their demos and a short summaries of their business objectives.

    Next, the other judges and I deliberated backstage to pick the winner. It was tough to essentially choose “losers” in a group of teams that did more in a weekend than many large companies could do in a month, but we made the decision.

    In the end, the decision went to a two-person team, a vast difference to the more common three- to five-person teams at the event. Their product, “FilmMe,” allowed users to upload ten- to twenty-second clips that would automatically stitch together to form a single video. YouTube made uploading and distributing video easy, which allowed the common PC user to become a producer. FilmMe took video a step further, solving the complexity and time drain that comes with composing multiple video clips from many sources. The presentation of the concept without the demo left me a bit skeptical about its usefulness, but after seeing their demo I was surprised to discover how entertaining it was to watch a single stream of videos mashed together about “who was your first kiss?” To give an example, think about interviewing a few friends at a birthday party. With one click, FilmMe automatically updates and converts all the videos into a single video you can post to Facebook or YouTube to share. Simple concept? Yes. But a huge time and energy saver. Simply put, with FilmMe I would try my hand in compiling and sharing short clips from a night out. However, I will—and have—avoided at any cost the effort it would take to copy videos from my phone, request clips from friends, load them into iMovie and render them into a single movie just for the sake of sharing.

    Live Twitter Updates

    Live Twitter Updates

    All in all, it was inspiring to be a part of the BeMyApp competition. It reminded me that losing red tape and doing away with corporate structure can allow for true innovation to occur and that forty-eight hours is all one needs to turn an idea into a working reality. All it takes is a few like-minded entrepreneurs to get together with a common purpose. I will certainly take what I saw at the event back to my company and encourage more adhoc, fun, innovative sessions like these for my team.


    pariSoma's New Digs

    pariSoma's New Digs

    Category Technology | Tags: | 1 Comment

  7. The Point is Not The Point

    February 15, 2011 by sshadmand

    Read my earlier post about another perspective on the point of life here: http://www.seanshadmand.com/2010/05/16/points-of-life/

    Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

  8. Old McDonald Kills Raccoons E-I-E-I-O

    January 30, 2011 by sshadmand

    Raccoon in Suit

    Raccoon in Suit

    I was just telling a friend about a story I heard when I was younger, about how farmers used to trap raccoons. It reminded me of business strategy — So, I thought I would share.

    Raccoons are notorious for destroying farmers’ crops. Because farmers are so resourceful they devise a way to trap raccoons in their fields by using only a piece of bread and a large silver spoon in a small jar.

    While walking through the field the raccoon sniffs out the jar and out of curiosity attempts to retrieve the food. While doing so, the raccoon, which is known for its love of shiny objects, is distracted by the silver spoon reflecting in the moonlight. It grasps the spoon, and since the opening of the jar is smaller than its closed fist, it relentlessly pulls on it for hours.

    The noise from the spoon clacking against the glass alerts the farmer of the raccoon’s presence. Determined  in removing the spoon, the struggling raccoon gives the farmer enough time to put down his dinner, grab his gun and make his way to the ill-fated rodent.

    In this example, the raccoon did some things well:

    1. It stumbled onto an abundance of food on a farm.
    2. It found some delicious bread and went after it.
    3. It found something shiny that it liked and went after it.

    What was its deadly mistake? It couldn’t give up on a bad situation once its investment went south. In other words, he wasn’t able to reassess risk/reward and how it compared to its higher purpose.

    The gist: Sometimes giving up on what we love/desire can be distracting from what we need to win. An entrepreneur is risky enough to take a chance on the delicious bread even though it is surrounded by a field of food, but it knows a shiny spoon in a small hole when he sees it. ;)

    Farm

    Farm

    Category Business, Stories | Tags: | No Comments

  9. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”.

    January 30, 2011 by sshadmand

    -Harvey MacKay

    Category Quotes | Tags: | No Comments

  10. I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them. So I got rich and gave back, to me that’s the win, win.

    January 29, 2011 by sshadmand

    Jay-Z,  Moment Of Clarity – Black Album 2003

    Category Quotes | Tags: , | No Comments

  11. Reg Ex: Replace all tags except style and script tags

    December 24, 2010 by sshadmand

    Took me a bit of hacking some regular expressions together using look aheads until I realized although it worked it’s not what I wanted after all….guess its late –

    I figured I would post it to have it be at least worth a bit of SEO since i couldn’t google it myself…

    Java String: “<(((/)|())(?!(/)|((script)|(style))).*?>)>*?”

    Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

  12. The ol’ switcherooo

    December 16, 2010 by sshadmand

    I realized todaythat with the advents of iPhone and Google voice free calling from my computer I now use my phone for computing and my computer for calling more then the other way around.

    Maybe this is anoter indicaton that mobile is more about sponetaity and look ups where the computer is used as a momemt in time reserved for an action. I am walking and curious about the weater i am about to enter, check phone. I need to talk to my mom at 8 sit down and use skype or gchat for 30 mins….

    Maybe ist just ironic, but it was a funny thing to notice today either way.

    Category Humor, Style, Technology | Tags: ,,, | No Comments

  13. Thesis: AppMakr

    November 23, 2010 by sshadmand

    So this is pretty cool. Your head is in the grinder day and night, in and out. Is it worth it? Does anyone care? And then you stumble upon some guy at Oxford writing a thesis about us. It’s small in some ways, but big in others. I mean someone we don’t know found out about us and was interested enough to write a thesis. I am not sure why, but it was a nice morning pick-me-up none the less.

    http://fundable.co/2010/11/what-does-fundraising-look-like/

    Category Technology | Tags: , | No Comments

  14. Hit the ground running

    November 21, 2010 by sshadmand

    I love focused ideas that get one thing perfectly right and easy. Remembering URLs is getting easier and easier and more and more tools will be used per day on purpose and app like based on social discovery (I’ll explain more in other blogs). For now here are two sites that are hella useful. The second you go to the site it gives you a unique idea. Simply save the unique url and share it to collaborate with friends. Super simple:

    Pirate Pad: Instant realtime collaboration document writer:  http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/newpad

    Thingler: Instant todo list: http://thingler.com/

    Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

  15. Kick Start Your Idea

    November 21, 2010 by sshadmand

    http://www.kickstarter.com/
    Fund your idea crowd source style. A startup for startups.

    Category Business, Technology | Tags: ,, | No Comments

  16. Google testing out preview pages in search

    November 10, 2010 by sshadmand

    I stumbled onto the google test list tonight and noticed a new preview feature in search. It works really well and takes good advantage of the excess white space on their search page. A nice bonus is the non forced nature of it. If you mouse over any of the results nothing happens unless you click on one of the magnifying glasses. The full length preview of the page immediately comes up (way quicker than I have ever seen on other search engines) and since its the full page scrolled you can read and browse it quite thoroughly. After the first magnifying glass is selected, subsequent search results show the preview by simply putting the mouse over it. Also if you scroll the preview does not flicker through mouse over events so you can browse the full preview. When you stop scrolling and mouse over a new result it then switches. Overall feel was great and I hope they roll this out.

    Google preview

    Google preview

    Category Technology | Tags: ,,,,, | No Comments

  17. “And”, and how it can kill your business

    August 17, 2010 by sshadmand

    Focus is extremely important when starting a company. It is easy to think that the best thing to offer your customers is everything they need. I mean wouldn’t you want to be the one stop shop for someone’s needs so they can keep wanting to come back for more? Unfortunately, that always sounds great in theory, but in reality it’s a concept that kills. McDonald’s does burgers, and even though now they have a fish fillet and a McRib now and again, they are a burger joint and when they started and took off they did burgers better then anyone in the biz. After a while they added more products to stay current and further saturate their market but they had to start somewhere, and dig into the dirt. Creating a business on the sidelines often gives people a chance to improve on a big company’s ideas, but they neglect to realize how long it took for the company to get there and build their brand off of doing one thing great.

    The mishap is much like a sub shop that notices that people on their lunch break often needs copies made, so they become a sub shop and copy center. Would you eat at a sub shop that does copies when you want subs and vice versa? The problem is everytime you add an “and” to a sentence about what you do when you are a growing company you are devaluing each individual thing in that claim by half. I mean if one person is great at flipping burgers and they put all their time into that skill what happens when that same person makes shakes? Well you can hire another person for the shakes, but the problems still trickles up — now the manager must be great at spending half his time on managing burger flippers and half of his time on shake makers. Make your core your focus and do that one thing better than anyone in the world. If you find yourself using the “and” in your value prop raise a red flag.

    Another way to think about it is that often times you try to increase value with increasing your offerings. So you say we are a company that focuses on the very best linens (but then you think how do I get the linens to the customer so you continue on) … and we deliver the linens to your door. What just happened there is once you started thinking about alternative ways to increase the value of your company you have inadvertently admitted that the “fine linens” part of your company’s offerings isn’t good enough to stand on its own. I have the finest linens – [period]. I am so focused and great at making fine linens you will want them – [period]. It rings stronger and internally, in every conversation and meeting that comes up if the discussion doesn’t ultimately improve the quality of your fine linens don’t waste your time talking about it. Every new offering (if you want it done well) deserves all the attention it needs and will suck attention from another offering unless you have the brand, management, money, exposure, customer base to help carry you onto something else.

    You just can’t avoid it no matter how smart or hard working you are you will give your customers mixed signals, employees diffused objectives and passion, and a mitigated product that can’t compete with a rival that could spring up and do everything they can to be better at one thing than you. Information gets around quickly and people know how to manage multiple systems, if they can save time by finding someone who does something important better than anyone they will use them in no time.

    Note: I should make one more point. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have new ideas, just recognize that the new idea will need focus and attention and if you think your original idea/business isn’t good enough to stand on its own you should decide whether to keep the old business or shift focus completely to the new one.

    Category Business, featured, Philosophy, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

  18. Difficult vs. Hard

    August 17, 2010 by sshadmand

    There is a major difference between difficult and hard for me.  I have noticed that professionals love to say they work hard. Over time it has become a badge of honor. I work harder then you and my parents told me hard work = success and therefore I will be/am more successful. That logic seems so screwy and I followed it for way too long.

    I propose that if you work hard you are bad at something. There are always difficult things in the world. It is difficult to create an atomic bottom, or be nice to your mom sometimes, it is difficult to start a company. But when something is hard, you are doing it wrong. Life is easier than I think we realize sometimes and with the mentality that working harder is better than not we fall into this brute force, power through mentality. For instance lifting a tree IS hard and people did it for years, building a pulley system was difficult and made lifting a tree less hard.

    There are so many red flags that pop up when this is happening. Talking in circles at meetings, staying up late every night, rearranging your pitch to others everytime you give it. Stop and think, am I proud of how hard I am working more than I am tackling the right difficult problem?

    It’s weird, is it actually lazier to work hard than find the right difficult problem? For instance, if I had an eating problem and I found myself rummaging through my fridge alot the lazy/hard way to solve it could be to put a lock around my fridge and the lock only opens if I ride my back for more then 3 hours. That’s alot of work and you “solved” the problem, but we know that that is a shit load of work and you didn’t really put any effort toward the actual problem. You simply solved all the points around it, but you worked so hard for it, right? Congrats you’re a hard working idiot. That is a red flag. The difficult thing here is you have an eating problem, go to a gym, go to a psychologist and find out why you find comfort in food, buy healthier foods, etc.

    Another example is in politics and law. The ROI for “catching someone in a crime” is low. Someone has to wait around and catch you. The question is why are they breaking the law, why are they angry, is the law right, are the roads safe, etc? Way more difficult but when figured out MUCH easier to maintain and way less hard. Try building a fence on the border of Mexico and the U.S. That’s alot of dumb level hard work. I mean the most similar things are the ancient Great Wall of China, and the BerlinWall…..really? Why don’t you want immigrants here, why do they want to be here and find a mutually beneficial result? If they are coming to the U.S. for healthcare, in order to get healthcare you must be a citizen, in order to be a citizen, you must do x. If it’s cash then offer cash to register, as it may be cheaper then manning and building a non interest aligning wall. Aligning interest and solving difficult problems allows you to not need to over manage tasks and decreases hard work. The best system is one that manages itself to be accommodating to everyone’s passions, interest and goals as closely as possible so that the management of themselves is the most efficient way to work. Regulating pirating music is way harder then making it cheaper and easier for users to download individual songs almost instantly instead of having to break the law, code, search, and wait for songs that are stolen.

    Category Philosophy, Style | Tags: | 2 Comments

  19. Hiring

    August 17, 2010 by sshadmand

    For years employees would hire veterans because after x amount of years of experience an employer knew they were getting a knowledgeable person based on track record, but that is kind of a lazy way to hire. It’s just like football, you hire skill and lose potential, you pay to mitigate risk. Employers would then hire young people at a low salary if they were bright, once again to mitigate risk. “You seem smart but you don’t have a track record so we will have to pay you less.” Much like football you are not setting your team up to win a super bowl in the coming years. (This also sounds similar to VC world)

    What FaceBook, Google, etc. well in addition to hiring smart veterans was they flipped the script a bit. They started hiring young people with alot of potential and paying them alot of money. A few years later they are winning super bowls. And the old employer style is having a hard time finding talent. Now everyone wants a young genius and they are in short supply.

    Time and time again this risk mitigation strategy is a red flag and one should be sure they are mitigating for the right reasons. Also, when you save time by mitigating it is a red flag because in a way you are being lazy, and when you are lazy you give opportunity to those that aren’t lazy to move ahead. (not lazy cause you don’t work hard but lazy because you are using a system to think for you and when you do that you get further and further from being different and different equals success because not everyone can be successful).

    Category Business, Philosophy, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

  20. Tan Le on TED

    August 16, 2010 by sshadmand

    Tan Le

    Tan Le

    Tired of your technology not being able to keep up with your awesome, fast paced brain? — Me too! Check this ground breaking product out that is breaking mind control into the affordably comercial landscape. (Video on Ted)

    Category Business, Feature Style, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

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