Customer research is always quantitative. The start the next Google with venture capital. That’s not true. The research is really what allows you to distinguish yourself from your competition so that when someone comes to your site.

No SEO wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Damn, I have a WordPress problem.” They wake up in the morning and say, “Damn, I have a business problem.”

As an example:

You’ve gotten this level of traffic so far with your existing site. You want to double that over the course of the next year. You were saying that the roadblocks that are stopping you are a) you’re on an outdated architecture where you, personally, have to write everything, and b) it’s been impossible to find someone who is a subject matter expert at this who can also make web pages, because that combination of interests just does not exist.

The response:

I totally understand that it is impossible to find someone who is both good enough of a journalist in the space to work for a genuine published magazine and also can edit HTML pages. I have an idea for you. I’m going to make a CMS for your website. That’s just a page that they can go into, like WordPress, and they can do their writing like they do so well. The CMS will ship it over to you, and you figure out which business model that you experimented with will work well with this content.

I pay them pretty well. I have passed on hiring engineers who may be more technically proficient, but they didn’t understand what I wanted. Honestly, guys, as a business owner, do you think I care if you’re using this technology or that? I just don’t give a damn [about technology]. I really don’t.

Nothing motivates people like having their own words repeated right back to them, which is something that you should try to do more often.

Even if you’re building a website for someone, it’s not just a website, right?

There is some particular need that they have for that website, whether it’s for their business purposes or because a lot of business owners are very personally invested in their business.

By the way, guys, for all the engineers in the audience, you sell engineering services to for profit companies because they are the only people who can pay actual professional engineer rates.

The CEO only sees it in the “This is the tool that someone I trust is doing something incredibly valuable with me on. It is cheap at any reasonable price."

Focus on taking your B+ customers/prospects to be A customers. Don’t focus on the D people, trying to turn them into A customers. It will never happen.

Author blog about the business of making and selling software: https://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software. [...] Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity. [...] It does not matter to the company that the reporting form is the world’s simplest CRUD app, it only matters that it either saves the company costs or generates additional revenue.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. [...] Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals. [...] You really want to be attached to Profit Centers [notion from Peter Drucker]. [...] If you can’t, either a) work elsewhere or b) engineer your transfer after joining the company.

About programming languages:

In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.

Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends: You should be a good person to everyone you meet — it is the moral thing to do, and as a sidenote will really help your networking — but do not be under the delusion that everyone is your friend.

“Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment: Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see here).

Networking just means a) meeting people who at some point can do things for you (or vice versa) and b) making a favorable impression on them.

Academia is not the real world. [...] Your major and minor don’t matter.

Be better at negotiation:
a) Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face.
b) Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something.
c) “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately.
d) Always have a counteroffer. Be comfortable counteroffering around axes you care about other than money. If they can’t go higher on salary then talk about vacation instead.
e) The only time to ever discuss salary is after you have reached agreement in principle that they will hire you if you can strike a mutually beneficial deal.
f) Read a book. Many have been written about negotiation. I like Getting To Yes. It is a little disconcerting that negotiation skills are worth thousands of dollars per year for your entire career but engineers think that directed effort to study them is crazy when that could be applied to trivialities about a technology that briefly caught their fancy.

The author is negative about equity grants.

So would you recommend working at a startup? Working in a startup is a career path but, more than that, it is a lifestyle choice. This is similar to working in investment banking or academia. Those are three very different lifestyles. Many people will attempt to sell you those lifestyles as being in your interests, for their own reasons. If you genuinely would enjoy that lifestyle, go nuts.

Your most important professional skill is communication.
Communication is a skill. Practice it: you will get better. One key sub-skill is being able to quickly, concisely, and confidently explain how you create value to someone who is not an expert in your field and who does not have a priori reasons to love you.

Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait: The right tone to aim for in interviews, interactions with other people, and life is closer to “restrained, confident professionalism.”

All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill.

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career. Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.

Ok, that's funny

J'utilise Famileo depuis plus de 2 ans, et c'est effectivement quelque chose qui manquait jusqu'à maintenant. Cela devient même un réseau social puisque chacun partage ses actualités, qui se retrouvent livrées chaque mois aux grand-parents

A brand backed by 37Signals.

Minimal and efficient products: Campfire to chat and Writebook to publish books online. Free of use.

But here’s what happened while everyone celebrated the democratization: the real challenge should have shifted from “how do we build this?” to “what should we build that people actually want?”

The barrier to building dropped to zero. The bar for what users expect shot through the roof.

Skills that matter now:

1. Understanding real user needs (not assumptions)
2. Business literacy (understanding the economics)
3. Communication skills (translating needs into solutions)
4. Craft and polish (building something truly outstanding)

When the market gets flooded with mediocre-but-functional products, users become more discerning, not less. They start caring more about how products make them feel, not just what features they have.
Start optimizing for user understanding, clear communication, business value, and thoughtful execution.

I realized that, if we look back on many of those projects she worked on, it wasn’t as simple as she made it sound. In retrospect, a lot of the projects she got assigned to were initially not glamorous. They didn’t initially call for net new design work, many of them weren’t even that fun to start out on. In fact, I can recall many times she got assigned to projects and teams that were in a slump, and were slogging through the work. I could really only think of one or two examples in years of working together where she was handed something that was a desirable project from the very start. [...] What made those projects glamorous and desirable was her and how she approached the work. There’s that old nugget about making your own luck and that is something she excelled at. She had a unique ability to take really hard or nebulous problems (both design and team-related) and morph them into something amazing that got people excited. Instead of getting discouraged, she’d respond to friction with more energy, more enthusiasm. In so many ways, she was a transformative presence on any team and project.

Because over time, I found that she was someone who could take that hard, unamazing stuff and make it seem effortless and amazing.

he projects weren’t good. They were made good.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros.

Computer hardware changes so much faster than personal habits that programming practice is usually ten to twenty years behind the processor. At places like MIT they were writing programs in high-level languages in the early 1960s, but many companies continued to write code in machine language well into the 1980s.

Piccalilli seems to be a good studio. They provide tool, experiences and insights for others.

I always wanted the studio to do net good and give back as much — if not more — than it takes. The thing is, running a studio that supports staff is hard, so naturally, you take on projects that you might not fully be behind. We’ve done great work — and continue to do so — but collectively, we’re all a bit burned out with Marketing™ oriented and KPI-chasing work.

How to share as much as possible and provide free real world education material?
How to make the work focus on campaigns, movements, and other efforts that bring tangible progressive change to society?

They will try supports/sponsorship system.

Detailed insights are available at https://bell.bz/im-getting-fed-up-of-making-the-rich-richer/

A better method to hire devs.

La micro-entreprise me correspondrait alors mieux: sans engagement, et comme activité annexe, sans frais.

Deux écueils :

• La fisca­lité se fait sur le chiffre d’af­faire et pas sur le résul­tat. Si vous avez des frais, ils ne se retran­che­ront pas au montant impo­sable. Le régime peut alors deve­nir bien moins inté­res­sant.
• Le chiffre d’af­faire est plafonné (77 k€ par an pour de la pres­ta­tion de service) et un dépas­se­ment deux ans de suite vous fait sortir du statut.

A future vision of the work.

1. Leaders who determine Policy
2. AI that gathers State from everywhere
3. Everything is done according to SOPs
4. SOPs are regularly updated
5. GOTO

The most valuable asset of companies is trust

Le raisonnement semble bien pertinent

• AI
• Brick and Mortar 2.0
• Carbon Removal Technologies
• Cellular agriculture and clean meat
• Diversity
• Education
• Energy
• Enterprise Software: make the extensive cheap, knowledge workers, digitizing every industry
• Financial services
• Future of work
• Government 2.0
• Healthcare
• Improving memory
• Longevity and Ati-aging
• One million jobs
• Supporting creators
• Transportation and Housing
• Underserved Communities and Social Services
• VR and AR

See also the past requests for Startups

• Cleaner commodities
• Computer security
• Programming tools
• Robotics
• Safeguards against fake video
• Voice apps