Jonathan Tang

"> At Google's scale, the usual mantra of "developer time is more expensive than machine time" isn't actually true, hence the decided lack of interpreted languages for high traffic parts of Google... Well, it's true for some uses - when Search UI wants to prototype something, we reach for Python and Django the same as everyone else. It's just that all that code needs to be rewritten in C++ to scale to normal search traffic - which is exactly what a startup would have to do if they got as big as Google, but the vast majority of them never get that big." - Jonathan Tang

"I don't think it's necessarily a money thing, because I experienced the same effect when I folded up my startup and got a job. And I still had enough cash in the bank to do one, maybe two more startups, and was never in any danger of running out of money. I think it comes from the sudden lack of responsibility. When you're in a startup, everything you do matters: if you succeed, it's because you rocked, and if you fail, it's because you screwed up. This makes you feel incredibly alive, but it's also incredibly stressful. When you go back to collecting a paycheck and have to grotesquely screw up to get fired, all that stress just evaporates, and it's like coming down off a massive high. I still wanna try it again, and hopefully end up with a success and a failure next time. But I felt like I'd reached the end of my endurance when I gave up: I'd given it my 110% and it still wasn't enough given my current experience level. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything though." - Jonathan Tang

"> It doesn't matter, change it to the ever-so-slightly different shade of blue you spent $30K to empirically verify was ever-so-slightly superior according to some metric The additional money they made from the change was *a lot* more than $30K." - Jonathan Tang

"Or sometimes a/b/c/d testing... /me gripes about having 3 days to implement 4 interfaces and get them all reviewed and deployed." - Jonathan Tang

"Thanks for doing this - JavaScript testing is a huge PITA, paricularly doing it cross-browser, and I'd welcome anything that lets us automate more of it." - Jonathan Tang

"With only a couple months of expenses saved up, you're taking a big risk. It sounds like you could live a couple months off savings and a few months off contracting. I have no idea what the economy will be like in 6 months, but you will probably not have enough revenue from your web startup to fund yourself. You may from contracting - good developers always seem to be in demand, even in bad economic times - but the contracting market is hurting from the economy too. OTOH, there're risks to staying in a dead-end job too, particularly to your sanity. It sounds pretty bad. And sanity is not something you should sacrifice for money. Honestly, if I were in your position, I'd do it. But acknowledge the risk you're taking and take steps to mitigate it. Cut your expenses to a bare minimum and line up contracting jobs well before you need them. It really sucks looking for work when you're running out of money - you're in a much better bargaining position if you've got income and plenty of..." - Jonathan Tang

"It sounds like he's a poor fit for Google. The data-driven decision making process really is central to Google (at least in Search; I dunno how it is in other departments), and if you're working at cross-purposes with that, the culture will and should reject you. That doesn't mean he's a bad designer - I'm sure he's not. But Google occupies a particular place in the market ecosystem: many of its users want a UI that's clean, spartan, and utilitarian. There're undoubtably market niches for stuff that's more visually stunning (wasn't one of PG's ideas for startups "A form of search that depends upon design"), but people interested in that would be far more economically productive seeking out new markets of people that are underserved by Google's spartan design rather than trying to force something visually impressive upon Google's existing users." - Jonathan Tang

"Microsoft products have also been successful through the years, as have Google's. And neither of them has a keen sense of design. The reason Apple's been successful is that they occupy a small but passionate niche of customers that are completely underserved by Microsoft. Most users don't care about design - but the ones that do care a lot, and will pay a premium for something that pays attention to their needs. There's probably room for a similar competitor to Google, but nobody's found it yet." - Jonathan Tang

"If they'd done that, they wouldn't even be in beta yet, let alone out of it. Look at how long Netscape 6, let alone Firefox, took to materialize. Remember that most of the Chrome team are ex-Firefox-luminaries: these are not stupid people, and you probably use their other products all the time." - Jonathan Tang

"Zed must've had fun writing this..." - Jonathan Tang

"I was basically a "problem child" in middle school - I kinda refused to do anything I didn't want to. So after I'd flunked the kitchen safety test in home ec for the 5th time (true/false test and I scored a zero for the last 3 times :-)), school administration basically said "There's this new thing called the 'Internet' that we just got access to. We've got a dialup modem in the computer lab; why don't you spend the 42 minutes there instead of wasting your time pissing off the home ec teacher?" and then handed me a bunch of things I might want to try typing in - mostly gopher links, though there was this new invention called the "World Wide Web" that they suggested I check out too. I thought it was horribly disorganized and spent most of my time with Gopher." - Jonathan Tang

"gopher:some.obscure.university.address.edu. It was late 1993." - Jonathan Tang

"Haven't there been recurrent musings on Hacker News about getting a bunch of friends together and buying up a whole city block in Detroit? Most of us could easily afford it, free and clear. I'd totally be in if Google would open a Detroit office. ;-) I predict that this is what'll happen with a lot of the rust belt cities: as prices drop low enough, people will move in and the city will be transformed into something no longer so rusty. Kinda like how Boston reinvented itself with high-tech after all the textile mills moved south in the 40s and 50s." - Jonathan Tang

"That was cperciva's point, I guess. I still think it's cool though." - Jonathan Tang

"I think it's cool that Linus Torvald's is using Linux to teach his daughters computing (with handy parental controls he wrote himself). I think it's cool that Guido van Rossum uses Python in most of his daily programming. I think it's cool that thet Lighttpd website runs on Lighttpd. I think it's cool that I use my own project for my daily websearching needs (okay, bad example, since I'm in Search UI and most of my job consists of putting a pretty web interface on the stuff the backend engineers do. I think it's cool that I use lacker's stuff that I slapped a frontend onto for my daily websearching needs. ;-))" - Jonathan Tang

"LiveJournal is a pile of crap (actually it's not, there're some things that LJ does right that FaceBook etc. still haven't gotten) and easily copied and yet...oh wait, Friendster ate them for lunch. Friendster is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, MySpace ate them for lunch. MySpace is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, FaceBook ae them for lunch. FaceBook is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, Twitter's eating them for lunch. ;-) Network effects tend to be strongest when they connect people who have never interacted before and would not interact without the service. For example, E-bay buyers and sellers don't have prior existing relationships - they need E-bay to find each other. If you're a buyer, you go where all the sellers are, and if you're a seller, you go where all the buyers are, and you can't communicate with a whole mass of buyers at once to say "Let's go somewhere else." Same with Microsoft: developers go where..." - Jonathan Tang

"It's kind of an unfortunate fact of life that high rewards require high risk, and high risk requires frequent failure. There's basically a continuum between doing what you're told, never taking on any risk, and collecting a steady paycheck, or shooting for the moon at every chance and falling on your face each time. FWIW, I had the same sort of existential crisis when I was about 13, and it was so depressing I almost wanted to kill myself. However, the real working world is not (always) that bad. I found it helpful to think of every job as a learning experience. When you've milked it for everything it's worth, move on and find a new job. If you don't have any possible new jobs, quit and found a company, take it as far as you can possibly go, and if that's not far enough, go and get another job that'll let you work on the reasons you failed as an entrepreneur. This, BTW, is false: "It's eight hours a day, almost completely absolutely and rigidly, five days a week, for forty-sixty years..." - Jonathan Tang

"...outside the Valley, most people have heard of neither FriendFeed nor Seesmic. ;-) The big advantage of living outside the valley is that you're closer to real customers - people who don't live and breathe technology 24/7. That can help you or hurt you, depending on your target market. Could something like MySpace, AOL or PlentyOfFish have started inside the Valley, considering that they succeeded by catering to idiots?" - Jonathan Tang

"Because some people really like it. I always feel claustrophobic in tiling window managers, for example. There is a significant geek population that likes tiling WMs. More power to 'em. But I think the general public probably like the freedom to overlap windows as they see fit." - Jonathan Tang

"Normally I'm all for sending folks to notirony.com, but from the site: > irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result. If one interviews for a Java/JavaScript position and then ended up doing C++ and Flash, isn't that's a little contrary to what one expects? Or perhaps you don't find it amusing, but I do, and hey, horses for courses." - Jonathan Tang

"That's not actually true if you're using Google Chrome - V8 is a specializing native compiler along the lines of HotSpot." - Jonathan Tang

"How do you expect to pay back debt then? If you're looking for ways to support talented people with pie-in-the-sky ideas, that's what the Macarthur Fellowships are for. Those are outright grants, so the people in question can concentrate on what they love and not have to worry about paying back a high-interest loan." - Jonathan Tang

"You didn't check far enough then. I was hired with just Java and JavaScript. (Well, and Haskell and Scheme and Python, but they only interviewed me on Java and JavaScript.) No C/C++ experience. Ironically enough, I'm now doing C++, Flash, and JavaScript. Go figure. ;-)" - Jonathan Tang

"No. I believe that good entrepreneurs are that rare." - Jonathan Tang

"You know you can get credit cards, right? If you're willing to pay 20% interest, it's not hard to find 4-5 companies willing to give you cards. (Well, perhaps not in this economy, but as of 6 months ago...) That's the problem I see with this idea: as soon as you start taking debt instead of equity, your competition changes. And there're lots of people already willing to give you money at 20% interest, even if your qualifications aren't stellar. Besides credit cards, you could just go to Prosper.com. BTW, I'd be far, far more worried about taking on $100k of debt than you seem to be. Companies fail for all sorts of reasons, and while I won't exactly say that they're beyond the control of founders (mine failed do to my own stupidity), they are often beyond the ability of founders to predict when they begin their venture. And while I was lucky enough to get a job at Google afterwards, it's important to point out that the first few firms to offer me jobs weren't all that great, and it was..." - Jonathan Tang

"A good entrepreneur can also get equity financing on reasonable terms, usually." - Jonathan Tang

""When people save, it does not mean that they do not produce, merely that they are refraining from consumption." Every transaction has two sides. Either somebody has to consume what you've just produced, or it goes into inventory. Inventory storage capacity is finite, and you see these major price crashes and production cuts (like in housing, or oil) when inventory reaches levels that are no longer sustainable." - Jonathan Tang

"You never hit the back button, or visit a website you've been to before?" - Jonathan Tang

"Why not count the web cache? You count Program Files (or /usr(/local)?/bin), don't you?" - Jonathan Tang

""I could 'fake it' for the rest of my career, or I could invest more effort in learning how to write better code faster in the first place." Uh, the techniques he describes are how you write better code faster in the first place. There's no magic "better code" fairy that comes along and instantly makes you a master programmer. You get better by deliberately seeking out ways in which you're failing, and then correcting them. And you use the techniques the article describes - code reviews, assertion, unit tests, and static typing - to do that. Eventually, those techniques become internalized, so that you still do them even when you take away the crutch of language and programming environment. Notice how studies of master Smalltalk and Erlang programmers found that they just don't make type errors, and that when you add a static type checker to those languages, existing programs pass unmodified? A lot of people have taken this as evidence that static typing isn't necessary. But there's..." - Jonathan Tang