Enforcing said appropriate social norms is a big part of the reason there is management in the first place. However it means that 1) Management has to be technically competent enough to understand the things being communicated about. 2) Management has to be motivated to enforce appropriate social norms. These are both pretty difficult to achieve in practice.

This article presents absolutely nothing as regards an actual argument about how to write computer programs. That's enough to say about it.

all of the above are great for well supported kids to learn about firsthand. resillience and perseverance are great traits to acquire young, especially when coupled with a healthy awareness of your own fallibility.

Fast as in did so two years ago?

This essay is pretty accurate in a lot of regards. However, many of the things that he gets on about are things that are massively wrong with the American economy at the moment(not that that doesn't make them any less real). He also completely neglects the fact that given the generally poor quality of technical evaluation skills at most companies, one rarely gets to "just be an engineer", but often has to learn how swim in political waters anyways. There's less bullshit to deal with just working in an office than there is being the quasi-celebrity that one must be as a CEO, but there's still a lot more bullshit than there ought to be. Nobody's out there just building awesome stuff, having people notice that they build awesome stuff and handing them fair amounts of money.

What could possibly go wrong?

This application needs to be something that runs on an open source ti-86 equivalent piece of hardware with no network connections and a battery life of forever instead of an iphone application, and then it will actually be successful. Until then, anyone smart enough to actually give a shit isn't going to be particularly interested.

People would certainly be more inclined to trust Microsoft, Apple, or Google with this sort of task than Joe Startup, and they haven't yet. Therefore, while this is a valid need, and really a very big market opportunity, I don't buy that anyone will succeed commercially with it unless they just set themselves up as the distributors of commodity open source hardware that does the job.

People do make shitloads of money selling commodities.

The network connection is an integral part of what makes our system work, and the ubiquity of smartphones is what makes it viable at scale. In terms of trusting a startup, we're working on exposing more of what we're doing to demonstrate its safety. The first part of that is a paper we're working on publishing this Spring at security conferences that details how Clef works using best practices and established security protocols to keep a user's information safe.

I'd like to say, big props for talking earnestly about your solutions to these problems -- that really does go a long way towards building trust. I've seen startups that basically take the "it's secret sauce, we can't tell you how it works!" approach, and that's more or less the kiss of death for anyone in security. :)

Thanks! We definitely want to be open about what we're doing to help demonstrate the safety we're offering. Making that dialog intelligible to users of different sophistications in terms of security knowledge is a major challenge for us.

You quit.

Hipsters begin losing interest in instagram at a reliable rate.