Surprised actually. If she really did run the company "day to day", seems like she would be in a position to give him the boot (grab the accounts) vs. what actually happened.
Actually, those guys make only a tiny slice of the value per click. Banner advertising is a low return game.
Now...if you control the landing page and conversion funnel, basically delivering paid customers (vs. clicks) to a paying merchant, your value per visit goes up by a factor of 10 - 50. $.25/click vs. $10 - $30 (varies by product).
Now imagine a company that launches dozens of offers with hundreds of variations and plows it's bankroll back into the best (most profitable) version (for years at a time).
You make a great point that advertising and ecommerce have no clear demarcation. Revenue for all online commerce is divided among layers of players performing specialized steps in the process, so any sizing of the online advertising market starts with an arbitrary distinction.
That seems very anti-competitive. So basically, if fasting is a free treatment for diabetes, you can't promote it without paying these guys a royalty? Boooooo
Telling a patient to fast is basically a clinical practice. Almost like checking blood pressure. No actual supplies needed, just behavioral counseling.
By the same logic, could I patent checking blood pressure?
That's not awful, btw. The one upside of a large consulting firm is you can retain decent talent for boring projects by bouncing them around between assignments.... but you still have a single entity to hold accountable afterwards.
Plus a certain percentage of these people take the diverse base of experience and go start something useful. Teaching a bunch of smart, ambitious people about how the process actually works and then letting them go start their own operation seems like a recipe for job creation.... (and finding better ways to replace the status quo)
The trouble is that the government systems that are created are typically something only the government can/wants to do. Like "a system for issuing a permit" or "a system for quantifying the impact of permits issued". I think there is a more limited chance at job creation than you might think.
Also, in practice, contractors build a thing as fast as they can, then leave and never come back. Agencies that lean heavily on contractors generally don't have a deep bench of technical talent, so they get stuck with a maintenance nightmare that they didn't build and have a hard time understanding.
My feeling is that contractors tend to build differently than people who will have to support the system for however long the law it is enacting exists...
Sadly that is trivial to get around these days, especially if someone at the new company knows someone at the old one.
Most professionals I know are happy to "bend" policy to give a respected colleague or personal friend a good reference, especially if that person is on the street.
If the company clams up and limits its response to name, rank and serial number, that's a huge red flag.
=> "makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company"
Our competency on projects where we are being paid a full domestic consulting rate is quite high, thank you.
Now, if you're asking us to compete with cut-rate bids from some online freelancer exchange, we will reduce the level of service and QA to match our competitors in that space....
Eg. you may have Nordstrom's service for a Nordstrom's price. Wal-mart service for a Wal-mart price. But don't expect Nordstrom's service for a Wal-mart price; that usually isn't going to fly....
- Display advertising makes the web suck; while display ads fund a large share of general market content sites, from a purely technical perspective they kill site performance.
- All major market participants suck equally, rendering no alternatives for end-users or advertisers to defect to; this inherently limits any incentive for real change.
AMP / Mobile index (new development from Google) breaks the gridlock: divert traffic to sites who deliver a good (fast) mobile experience and (assume site owners are economically rational - we are) is supported by something other than old school display advertising. Solving the 2nd part is left as an exercise to the student....
Interesting enough, you can make a banner ad load really fast. Just host images on your site and load it directly from your server without all the tracking scripts and separate calls from your advertising network (plus others). Or go completely native and render text links in html. Granted, this requires you to actually market your content and merchandise an offer (affiliate marketing).
Display advertising actually isn't the highest CPM option for a website; I did a study on small site auction data a while back and it was the lowest CPM model (admittedly, laziest to implement):
Another old geezer here (43!); had a good run in my twenties and wound up in technical management a few years ago.
A couple of tips:
- The "hands on" technical skills that launched your career have capped (top salary) and declining value
- If you take time to learn / think about how the underlying technology works (vs. just cut / paste / edit code), you can master related new technologies faster than the average bear.
- It is also worth noting that technical challenges tend to repeat every couple of generations; the software developer community is operating within the same set of fundamental constraints (coder time, CPU speed, network, data, etc.), the main thing that changes is which constraint matters. And they repeat: at some point, CPU will be the constraint again and all ninja coder tricks of my twenties will matter again.
- Architecture, process design, and people herding skills only grow with time; 80% of my value as a manager consists of making unnecessary work go away (without drama). I am much better at using these skills at 42 than I was at 24.
- If you ever see an opportunity to build a side project that could turn into a business, take it. Even if you don't replace your income, this gives you additional control over the direction of your late career and skills you acquire. Note that I said side project and not startup; the intent to get more control over your direction without walking away from your day job and associated income / benefits.
I'm 38, and I now find myself being coaxed into management. I was away from the Valley for about a decade and returned 4 years ago. My career has basically continued from where I left it despite not knowing most of the hot technologies when I returned. I simply learned them, and avoided the fads. Experience definitely helps you sidestep cargo cult development, spinning your wheels and wasting company time.
I've worked with many junior devs over the years and I can see two axes along which engineers develop: those who know/learn actual computer science and software design (the math, software patterns, etc.) and those who don't; those who learn new technologies, and those who don't. If you're in both of the "don't" categories, your career stalls after about 4-5 years.
Learning processes rather than technologies is very valuable, because processes produce things. Technologies are just the building blocks. I've seen too many developers who are one-trick ponies. They build the same systems over and over, only changing what technologies they use. "Sure, I can build you an MVC content management system in PHP!" -> "Sure, I can build you an MVC CMS in Rails!" -> "Sure, I can build you an MVC CMS in Node.js!" Those developers don't age well.
Also, like you mentioned, I highly recommend trying your hand at entrepreneurship. If you have enough process skills, you can eventually handle designing and pushing a product. You might feel uncomfortable moving away from your vim window into the meeting room, but that's where the greater rewards are. And those 20-somethings are going to help you do that.
"You might feel uncomfortable moving away from your vim window into the meeting room, but that's where the greater rewards are"
Greater financial rewards, maybe. But not necessarily greater intellectual or emotional rewards. Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business.
There are people who just love getting their hands dirty in tech and hate meetings, power point presentations, kissing up to and hobnobbing with upper management, making up budgets and writing reports, herding cats, giving pep talks, dealing with HR issues, and the rest of the things that managers often have to do to be "successful".
I'm happiest when I can just go nose down working on interesting technical problems, when I'm collaborating with other engineers on the same, or mentoring junior engineers, with all the corporate BS taken care of by my manager.
"Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business."
That type of thinking will do you in. If you can take technical resources and produce a functioning system, then you're cut out for management. The people problems you'll encounter are largely irrelevant. Learning your charges' quirks, dislikes and styles is like learning a new language or API.
And if you believe in Alan Turing's compelling philosophical argument that people are just fleshbound Universal Turing Machines, then it's easy to carry over from development to management. You just end up putting a fleshy, slower, intelligent computational layer between you and the dumb, fast calculators you normally solve problems with. Program the people to program the machines. Abstraction is a core concept in development.
At some point you'll see that you can create bigger things by commanding a team or department. A single person rarely ever makes a huge contribution on their own.
Speaking as a hiring manager, I will absolutely notice any delays or interruptions in your education (unless ancient); in the event you don't give the years, it often becomes obvious when you list high school degree or summer jobs.
The key is to have a reasonable story about the situation. Finishing a liberal arts degree in five years after you spent the first four partying doesn't send a good message. Finishing a degree after taking a break to handle <other important responsibility - family, startup, etc> or as a consequence of a major change that helps employer? Not a significant issue....
And keep the explanation simple, even if you have complex feelings about it. Think about it, identify a clear cut explanation, and give it when asked. Avoid the "doth protest too much" problem at all costs.
When does concisely articulating an obvious conclusion become a rant? What makes it a rant? Is it the fact that you disagree? Or the fact that he uses the word "absolutely" ?
From the information available to me, it appears to me that there is absolutely no altruism in Apple's programming classes.
I didn't actually state it was a rant, only that the quoted statement was about as close to a rant as I could find. Personally I didn't find it to be a rant either.
Oh, I apologize. When you said "That's about as X as it gets" I thought you were using the common US idiom conveying an extreme degree of X. (I usually make this mistake in the opposite direction, misunderstanding an idiom by taking it literally, rather than mistaking literal writing for an idiom)
Yes, I don't see this as a "rant against commercialism" at all. There are some very specific criticisms being made about one company's approach. The author seems to think non-profits do one particular task better than for profits, but that's not criticism against "commercialism" as a whole.
Further, its clear that this is a carefully considered position being presented in this blog. Why would anyone call such "a rant"?
