If you go to the MySQL web site, and do a search on data type integer, you’ll notice something strange. The first result is a MySQL newsletter from May 2010.

It wasn’t always like this. A few years ago I blogged about how Sun broke MySQL. Sun went on to claim that MySQL working out of the box was something that was broken with MySQL, even though lots of sysadmins every where relied on this to get servers up and running quickly.

If you compare the search with what they have on Google, you’ll see that the first result and the many results below are *all* relevant.

Why do large organizations break what works?

I’ve just moved to San Francisco. It seems that every coder I know is moving back to San Francisco these days. There’s a good reason for it. Startup investment in certain neighborhoods has gone up as high as 300% since 2009.

Let’s take a look at the 94105 zip code in San Francisco.

Investment in this area since 2005 looks like this (in millions of US dollars):

A more detailed analysis can be found in this spreadsheet.

Are you part of a startup looking to move into the 94105? WeWork, which is also in the 94105 and where I’m currently working, has lots of space available. We’re leasing about 5000 square feet at low prices which should accommodate a startup of 50 – 75 people.

Thanks Crunchbase for the raw data.

There are many technology companies where the coders are low status. A good example of one is Yahoo. Paul Graham points out that Yahoo tried to spin itself as a media company where flashy sales guys and executives in suits tricked the company out of the importance of technology.

Coders as low status is the rule in most US companies except for maybe the Silicon Valley.

What do I mean by low status? Don’t coders make better than average wages? I am not talking about raw capital here. I am talking about social and “track record” capital which are both zero sum games.

I am talking about who gets invited to social events reserved for elites in a city like Los Angeles and who doesn’t. Very few techies in SoCal are part of that social register. In San Francisco, it’s very different. You can be a techie like Marissa Mayer, and on the red carpet and have people comment on your awesome date or outfit.

On one side you have a company run by technologists and on the other you have a company run by everyone else.

Manipulating computers is “easy.” They simply are not as smart as we are. Manipulating people is hard, and actually the best manipulators are the ones who don’t show themselves to be that. When a product is technology, you have to wonder about the folks doing the “hardstuff,” the manipulating of people. Is it really contributing to the product or are they using their gift to create an inequitable, and in the case of Yahoo, profit ruining situation?

My personal bias is that technologists should rule a company. I’m completely in line with Mark Suster when he writes that the startup that’s most worth funding is all technologists. My reasons for this build upon Mark Suster’s in that you don’t have to “translate things into English.” It’s kind of insulting when I hear the phrase “translate things into English.” It puts the blame on the person on the team most equipped to solve the problem. The person, who wants “things translated into English,” is the problem, not the coder.

A company where coders do not have to translate into English and just can talk about solving technology problems in order to get the highest ROI possible is the most efficient.

Maybe with such a dynamic it’s no wonder most of the prestigious families in the US still think a career in tech sucks.
So if you are looking for work as a coder, how do you tell if your work will be considered low status or high status work?

• Does the CEO have a technical background? If she does, you’re in for some fun and get to call many of the shots in the same way coders at Facebook can.
• Does the software process *not* rely on rock stars? If one person is the key to fixing many issues, it is a sign of a software process gone awry. This is how Facebook ships code, and it’s worth a critical read.
• Is there talk of outsourcing?

Unfortunately, only 1 of the 3 things listed above can be found out during the interview process. If you’re at a company where coding is considered low status, what can you do? Stay tuned for my next blog post.

In Los Angeles, it’s pretty hard to find good coders for a startup in this market. I’d say even harder than in Silicon Valley. Social media experts are easy to come by here, though. Why? Most coders in LA are scared.

To start things off, I just want to say that I’ve tried and swung for the fences at an LA startup at a very reduced salary. I am still smarting psychologically and fortunately no longer financially from it, but as soon as I’m strong enough, like tomorrow, I will start swinging for the fences again.

I’ll talk about perks that companies in LA offer, the difference between the labor force in LA and Silicon Valley, and what companies in LA can do to hire new recruits for a startup.

Perks

Most startups provide the following perks:
1. A new laptop
2. A new phone
3. 1 to 2 telecommute days per week because the LA traffic is awful.

More established companies like Google & Microsoft can provide on top:
4. a stipend for further education ($2000 – $10000 / year)
5. daycare
6. “free” lunch — we know that this means shorter lunches and higher productivity
7. gym
8. trips to conferences like SxSW or the Web 2.0 Expo or Macworld

With the new Google office opening in Venice there will provide further strain on a small pool of coders.

The Talent Pool: LA vs. Silicon Valley

The pool is interesting. (source: http://www.calmis.ca.gov/htmlfile/msa/sf.htm & http://www.calmis.ca.gov/htmlfile/county/losangel.htm )

Silicon Valley Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, e.g. Apple, Intel, financial software which would total 387,000): 49,900

Los Angeles Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, financial software which would total 758,000): 106,100

Despite having a smaller pool of talent, Silicon Valley tech workers’ companies are able to produce 1% of the GDP of the United States or $174 billion annually.

Compare this with Los Angeles which despite having sheer numbers will only produce $10 billion this year.

Silicon Valley produces $3.8 million per worker and Los Angeles roughly $90,000 — just enough to keep the lights on.

How do we account for this discrepancy?

I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times. This means that Los Angeles is not taking advantage of innovations in automation.

Let’s take MySpace which many used to be a flagship of Internet technology in Los Angeles. In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.

Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10.

Also, the *big* main factor is that if you look at the graduating class of 2011 from Stanford for CS and compare it with UCLA, UCLA has only 60 CS majors out of 800 going to startups. Stanford has half!

How do you recruit? How do you get unscared?

The pool is so limited but deceptively so. In LA the coders are there, more than there are in Silicon Valley. The options seem to be:

1. Train people willing to take the risk on a startup.
2. Entice folks in already cushy Fortune 1000 jobs or similar to jump ship.

I’ve done option number 1 a few times already and it can take 6 months to a year assuming they’ve got the chops. Option 2 is still a bit of a mystery to me. If you have any thoughts for making LA coders take more risk, please feel free to comment below.

I got fired many years ago while working as a web developer. I won’t go into who or where. This is just a description of what it’s like to be fired and how to cope afterwards.

I am hoping this will help some folks out there for when this tech bubble bursts and more firings occur.

When I got fired many years ago in the 90s, it was a surprise to me. My boss the previous week had told me what a great coder I was. The CFO and CTO met with me in a room. They told me the cause for my termination and then said, “Because of that, we have to terminate your employment.”

They gave me 2 papers to sign. One was the grounds under which I would receive severance (i.e. do not mention that we fired you for 7 years), and the other mentioned that I had to exercise my stock options in 1 month or forfeit them. I signed both papers with tears almost ready to start running down my face while the CTO said, “I had nothing to do with this.”

If you get fired, 3 awful things happen if you are a coder:

1. In the startup, tech community, if you get fired, you become a persona non grata. That means all the social circles I had booted me out. I literally had to start from zero.

2. You cannot use the employer who fired you as a reference.

3. I know there’s no techie blacklist but the only 2 jobs I could find were as a spam engineer or in a totally different industry. I chose the latter.

I don’t regret getting fired. I became a wandering gypsy coder for a few years and saw different parts of the world. It takes awhile until you get enough experience so that gap of where you got fired is in the deep past. Also getting fired is something that shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’ve learned how to spot when a firing will happen. Here are some major signs:

1. You are scapegoated. Or have insurmountable personal difficulties that just can’t be ameliorated. If this is you, it’s best to just get out of Dodge. Develop more social skills.

2. You failed to deliver on a big project. There are two solutions: immediately work on a project that is in trouble. This is rough but if you make it succeed, then folks will forget the failure. The other solution is just leave.

3. Your skills don’t really match your job. This is the main reason for most firings, but is the easiest to fix. Get more training!

I really got into Google+ when I got an email from Guy Halford-Thompson, the author of the Cache Me blog that was sent to the Node.js mailing list.

Im sure many of you already have your Google Plus accounts. I for one
have finally got mine and am super excited.

Got my NodeJS circle set up but no one to add to it. Please add links
to your profile below.

Mine is https://plus.google.com/115891284931777059273/posts

About 24 hours later, more than 100 of the 5126 member list has jumped into the Node.js circle.

When you are on a mailing list, you don’t see faces, and there’s a lot of context missing. Google plus brings the context to the mailing list.

Here’s an example:

Now I know that Andrey speaks Russian. He might be in Russia so if he ever sends something on the list, replying to him around business hours at around Moscow time might be the way to go.

Here’s another example:

I just learned about the Google Plus Extension. Although this is information outside of the Node.js list, I’ve got a richer context. I also gave the link to the extension a +1.

Have you turned your mailing list onto Google Plus? Try it, because it might give you the warm fuzzies about folks on your list.

PS: This is a blatant plug for an awesome place I’ve been working, RadicalFusion. If you need an app built using BDD/TDD contact us!

I wrote a piece about the current state of job recruiting from a coder looking for work. I wondered:

What would it be like if you didn’t have to do a job interview?

(The non-tl;dr summary is below.)

By “job interview,” I just mean the normal process where I job candidate replies to an ad, contacts an employer directly, or works with a recruiter, and gets a job through that process. High-profile experts are courted, or work out a mutually beneficial deal where it doesn’t feel like an interview.

I asked around for folks that didn’t have to interview. One name that consistently came to the top was Zed Shaw.

Zed is the creator of the Mongrel Web Server, and a really great framework that is powered by Mongrel, Tir. Personally, I first heard of him from a video Leah Culver linked to on a talk that Zed gave, “The ACL is dead.” A careful viewing of that talk is always rewarded, especially if you are a coder freelancing for a corporation.

Here’s my interview with him (conducted over email). Thanks Zed!

Barce: What’s your own process for choosing the projects you want to work on?

Zed: Within my profession I try to just work on whatever is needed to get the
project or job done. Sometimes that ends up being a lot of crap work so
other people can do more important stuff. Professionally I don’t mind
this kind of work as it’s low investment and removes the pressure off
other folks who would rather do interesting things. I think I also tend
to pick off the lower level work because most of my original ideas are
usually too weird for a professional setting.

Personally, I tend to work on projects that match ideas I might have,
and usually they have a secondary motive that’s outside of programming.
Many times these ideas come from combining a couple of concepts, or
they’re based on a problem I’ve noticed, or they are just a kind of
funny joke or cool hack I thought up.

I think the most important thing is I don’t try to plan my inspiration
in my personal projects, but instead go with it when it comes. I don’t
have a “process”, and in fact I think “process” kills creativity.
Proess definitely helps make creative ideas a reality, but it doesn’t
create the initial concepts very well.

Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my
work.

Barce: What advice can you give someone who feels trapped by their job or surrounded by recruiters?

Zed: Well, if you’re trapped by your job then I’d say start working on
getting a new one. Nobody is every really *trapped*, but maybe you
can’t just quit right away. Instead, work on projects at home,
constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is. Even if
it’s temporary, moving to say San Francisco during the boom times could
be a major boost to your career.

I’d also say that going back to school is a good way to update your life
and change your profession. I’m a firm believer in getting government
student loans and using them to go to school. They’re cheap, low
interest, and the US government is usually very nice about letting you
pay them back. I’m not so sure about other places around the world
though.

Barcee: What’s the most disruptive technology you know about right now?

Zed: If I were to be honest, I’d have to say Facebook, even though I
absolutely hate it. It’s probably the one technology in recent history,
maybe after HTTP and the Browser, that is changing the way governments,
societies, and regular people work. It’s also sort of irritating that
the most important thing to hit most people’s lives is also one of the
most privacy invading companies in the world.

After that I’d have to say the rise of automated operations and
virtualized machines. Things like Xen, kvm, and even llvm as compiler
infrastructure are changing how systems are managed and deployed, which
then leads to bigger automation for large hetergenous networks. I’m
sort of waiting for operating systems to catch up and realize that their
configuration systems are getting in the way of real automation.

Barce: Thanks again, Zed, for the interview. The take aways that I hope readers get from this are:

• Zed has open source projects that free him from the normal interviewing process. Building your own open source project is one way to free yourself.
• “Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my work.”
• “[W]ork on projects at home,
  constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is.”
• Facebook is the most disruptive technology that’s changing governments… Virtualization / Cloud technologies are a 2nd.

I lost a week of billable last week. That’s how much it costs if you go all out and turn on the recruiter fire hose.

I got a face to face interview today. It was my $2400 face to face interview and I had to just turn it down because of the back log.

Right now my clients are less than happy, and now it’s a serious difficult march to get stuff done.

Now it’s great to be wanted, but to have that cost you money is pretty ridiculous. As a buyer, I shouldn’t have to spend money to buy what I want.

Recruiting is seriously broken. Only one recruiter really served my needs. The rest of them seriously wasted my time and their clients’ time.

What we need is technology to disrupt recruiting.

Who is in?

I’ve been working on reducing the amount of twitter spam.

To me Twitter Spam is any sort of @ reply or DM that links to a site that tries to hack you back, and it can do so more than you care for.

Here are 5 ways that work for reducing twitter spam:

1. The silent cannot be spammed. If you stay quiet for a few days the amount of folks who will spam you goes down.
2. Make your account private.
3. Prune your account of the spam-like and spam vectors. For me this means removing folks that follow more than have followers or act like bots (because they probably are). This also means using Echofon on the iPhone. Echofon is helpful in that it shows the vector a spammer used to get to me. In this case I might get spammed an at reply every time a certain user “ats” me back. Echofon makes this very obvious.
4. Actively block spammers and report them as spam.
5. Avoid using terms that spammers like. You know the one’s I mean. I’d mention it here but it would ruin my blog’s ranking.

I wrote an answer to a question using scientifically backed up data on Quora.

The result? My answer is totally at the bottom. Who’s on top? The Internet Famous.

Quora does a good job of giving you troll-proofed answers, but after Scoble burst onto Quora’s scene it’s not obvious that troll-proofing comes at the expense of a decent well-thought out answer with backed up data and a reputable reference.

So what is quora good for, or rather what’s in it for me? If I want a well-thought out, quotable sound byte that has to come from someone famous, this place is pretty much it. But if truth should, God forbid, come from someone like me still trying to make a name for himself, then ya, Convore is the place to be.