> Don't glorify urban living to a fault, blowing money at bars for binge drinking well after college, spending too much on rent to be in a "trendy" area. You shouldn't have an iPhone, iPad, and MacBook and spend $1500/mo to live with 4 roommates, latte for breakfast ($4), buy all your lunches ($10), get dinner at the Whole Foods hot bar ($15) when you make $40k, then complain when you're 30 with a negative net worth!
No one making $40k a year is spending $1500 on rent. This is such a yuppie NYC/SF perspective. Try sitting in actual $40k shoes for a second.
Plenty of young people here (NY) do. Probably getting some supplementation with their parents' credit cards. I'm not sure how "yuppie" is supposed to be derogatory here considering we are talking about young urban professionals.
To be fair, I really do know people making incomes around that who spend money lavishly: every meal purchased, leased BMW, no retirement savings at all, credit card debt. It's sadly common.
It's not an apples to apples comparison though. The US can't "just implement" the same health care systems that are up and running in other nations because we differ from a those nations in a lot of ways. PBS NewsHour sums up a few reasons here[1].
That being said, our current health care system is broken and needs to be addressed. I'm not convinced ObamaCare is a good solution, but at least the issue is being tackled.
(Chuckle) Well seeing as how half the tech managers I talk to at private companies haven't ever heard of it, I think he should be given a little bit of a break.
Junior developers become CTO's of startups all the time, it's really not that remarkable, all you need to be is a co founder and since such teams are usually CEO and CTO, the roles are quite obvious.
The main mistakes that junior engineers make when they accept the role of CTO is to think it's a 100% technical job. It's not, especially when you have fewer than 30 employees.
The CTO title is pretty meaningless unless the company either has > 30 employees or has at least one successful product.
Becoming a CTO isn't that hard. There are tons of startups out there that are dying for a technical cofounder. The vast majority of them are not going to launch a revenue-generating product, let alone survive. Maybe it's a decent option if you can afford to go without money to build experience. But given the long odds, the opportunity cost is no joke. And if you've chosen your team poorly, you're in for a bumpy, frustrating ride.
Becoming a CTO of a company that can afford to actually pay you a salary, is tougher. Now, you probably need a solid track record of achievement, because they can afford to be choosy. Maybe even choosy enough to just make you "SVP of Engineering" instead of CTO. They'll want you to have shipped products you played a leading role in building from the ground up, to be able to build and lead an engineering organization, and to have very strong business sense. But now you've got the financial security of a salary and the tremendous upside of a founder's equity stake.
Becoming a CTO of a company that's actually growing is even harder, because you actually have to be competent enough to have led that company from some venture crazy enough to take a chance on you to real traction (at least on the investment front) and success. This really is the hard part, and I think that's what makes the author's perspective really valuable.
The OP worked for Google for some period starting in 2006 and then went to a funded startup called RedBeacon at some point after they were founded in 2009. RedBeacon had an exit through an acquisition by Home Depot in early 2012.
So to recap, the OP was an ex-Googler, who had been an early stage engineer at a funded startup which got a pretty massive exit. Who wouldn't want this person as a CTO? :)
Great developer != great CTO, by a long shot. Not saying the OP can't be a great CTO, but the things you are saying imply he is a good fit for the job are just... not as related as you think.
Okay maybe massive isn't appropriate here, but they had an exit. Compared to the hundreds of startups that just go out of business that's still a good resume booster.
The majority of the time, becoming doesn't CTO involve being the best technically/business wise. Just being there at the right time, I.E Early employee or co-founder.
Don't you know that on Hacker News the answer to every social problem is either make everyone code up a massively-successful website or become an engineer in the bay area?
Sounds like Google noticing people actually read your blog and now playing a game of CYA (cover your ass).
Some tech managers can be horrible people though, because some of them, (definitely not all, or even most) take their promotion to mean they're the next coming of Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg and are now allowed to step all over, manipulate, and lie to whoever works under them to get ahead.
I've worked for guys like this and management turns a blind eye to it because they too start to buy into that manager's fantasy.
Good on you for both pointing this bad guy out and getting a public apology from the company Michael.
Race relations are progressing but by no means fixed, but I'm sure you'd get quite the surprised reaction if you went back and told people the president was black.
