December 2009
4 posts
On Soldiers and Ninjas
It’s been a topic of hot debate around the GameChanger offices over the past few weeks as we focus on our next hire.
Do we need, or in fact even want, a “Ninja” for our next programmer? And what does that mean?
A lot of job postings look for Ninjas, Gurus, or Hackers, and I think what we’re trying to select for is the ego and ambition of an alpha programmer. Indeed, many of the best coders I...
7 tags
Programmer Productivity & Hiring
It all started in 2005. I had just joined Eliot Horowitz (now of 10gen/MongoDB) and Dwight Merriman at ShopWiki’s new closet-sized office in SOS in NYC (funnily, I write this post from GameChanger’s digs a couple of hallways down: same floor, better light). Eliot had been hacking for 6 months in Starbucks and his apartment (with an XServe on the coffee table, back in that brief...
Being infinite
I find it’s a common problem in building a startup that the pipeline of work approaches infinite length while the hours in the day and LOC output level I can sustain remain markedly finite.
There are a few tricks I’ve found for keeping a semblance of sanity in the face of it all.
First is GTD. I’ve never really been a structured-process guy, but incorporating some basic principles of Getting...
Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect
cdixon:
Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is...