When I wrote code in college, I started in C. And in C, a regular concern is memory management: malloc() and free(). The core problem is making sure my program can fit into available memory, and then there are a bunch of ancillary bugs that emerge because of manual memory management.
Later in…
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"In fact, Snowden’s lack of formal credentials made him mainstream, and maybe even the wave of the future. The Brookings Institution reported in a paper titled “The Hidden STEM Economy” that half of the nation’s workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math don’t have or need a bachelor’s degree. They do their work with an associate’s degree or even just on-the-job training. When you add in these less formally trained STEM specialists, you arrive at 26 million STEM workers, making up one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. The most common non-college STEM jobs include trades like auto mechanics, electricians, welders, and logistics supervisors, whose jobs all increasingly require a sophisticated mastery of both software and machinery. On average these workers earn 10% more than workers at a similar level of education who don’t have a mastery of any scientific or technical field."
—
Edward Snowden Didn’t Have a BA—Why That’s the Future of the Tech Industry | Fast Company | Business Innovation (via infoneer-pulse)
I work for (and believe in) General Assembly for a reason. The traditional liberal arts education is a wonderful luxury for some, but for many it will be the most expensive vacation of their lives. The world needs a vocational alternative.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Florida Polytechnic University’s re-envisioning of a public research institution is making some radical departures from the norm, including scrapping the idea of tenure. The state’s union leaders, however, say that decision should be reversed if administrators are serious about their aspirations for the university.
Instead of tenure, faculty members “will be offered fixed term, multi-year contracts that will be renewed based on performance,” the university-to-be announced on Tuesday.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
» via Inside Higher Ed
It’s common wisdom that all software startups should have a technical co-founder. Someone who can lay down code, it is said, allows the company to move fast and build a product well and cheaply. As a technical co-founder, I clearly agree with this statement.
Having a solid…
"Blade Runner came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) Blade Runner, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."
—
William Gibson
Thirty Years Later – Blade Runner (1982) | The Shadowzone
(via thegongshow)
(via thegongshow)
Lots of people have asked me how I define the role of a product manager, and, since there is so much variation, I thought I’d share my thoughts. Every company is different, but for companies that are similar to Amazon’s “2 pizza team” concept (1 tech/biz manager + 1 PM + 1 designer + 2-8…
(via khuyi)
WHO ARE WE?
General Assembly is a venture-backed, NYC-based startup focusing on education for individuals and enterprises in the areas of technology, design, and entrepreneurship. We currently have physical classrooms in 8 cities across 4 continents, with tens of thousands of students coming through our doors.
SEEKING Product Manager, Retail Systems
The Retail Systems team owns all systems that support General Assembly’s current on-campus education business, from lead management tools for course leads to student records systems to financial reporting and business intelligence. The PM will be paired with a Tech Lead and a dedicated small team of developers to create and improve these systems.
Some example products:
- We currently receive thousands of inquiries per month about the long-form courses we offer in 8 cities on 4 continents. A successful PM would talk to our course producers, sales team, Regional Directors, Finance team, and the senior management team to build the right solution for managing these leads through their lifecycle.
- The CEO and members of the senior management team need effective metrics dashboards to best make strategic decisions about the company. A successful PM would thoroughly understand the business, work with senior management to identify the best metrics, and then design the optimal UX for display and interpretation of the data.
- We currently have had tens of thousands of students come through our doors and over the next several years will grow that number to hundreds of thousands. A successful PM would be able to foresee which areas need to be well-defined as we scale and which areas should remain flexible, including being able to evaluate technical architecture recommendations by the Tech Lead.
General Responsibilities:
- Define a product roadmap at the 3-6 month level after working with the GM to set goals, translate that roadmap into a backlog, and manage the day-to-day execution to launch the right product at the right time with the right quality.
- Collaborate with developers to design UX and wireframes. There will be some design resources available but it will be the PM’s responsibility to excel at thinking through user interface workflows and getting functional designs implemented. It doesn’t have to be beautiful but people should love using it.
- Build rapport with stakeholders and understand their needs better than they do. Combine their needs with broader context to produce solutions that are thoughtful, balance tradeoffs appropriately, and have the support of stakeholders.
- Apply a deep understanding of business processes to fully map how General Assembly operates, identify where opportunities lie, and prioritize them.
- Bring a technical awareness and familiarity with distributed systems, databases, and structured data to properly understand which requirements to drop and which to keep when presented with technical solutions by the Tech Lead. No coding ability necessary but candidates should have a general sense of what is complex and what is not.
Qualifications:
- You have previous product management experience, including working directly with engineers to ship the right product at the right time with the right quality.
- You love creating and optimizing processes, systems, and workflows.
- You are excited by the idea of working across the entire organization, from the CEO to Finance to Marketing to Sales, to build the tools that will help scale the business 10X larger.
- Your analytical mind is combined with creativity and confidence to understand the challenges the other departments face and invent solutions they hadn’t thought of that surpass expectations.
Position is full-time in NYC with competitive salary, stock options and great benefits. Benefits include: 401k, iPhone (or equivalent) + cell plan, Macbook Air, medical + dental + vision insurance, MTA transit credit, and 50% discounted gym membership.
Neat job! Go work with my friend Dave!
1Keyboard is a virtual bluetooth keyboard application for OS X. Turn your Mac into a Bluetooth keyboard that works with all of your devices, comfortably type on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or game console.
(Source: onethingwell, via ericmortensen)
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Had we not seen IPO volumes fall off of a cliff in the last decade, the Kaufman Foundation estimates that we would have created an estimated 1.9 million new jobs. Even more significantly, Professor Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley has identified a multiplier effect with technology-related jobs. For every one new technology job, Professor Enrico estimates that five new service sector jobs are created.
To put the job numbers in context, the number of total US employees in 2001 was just shy of 138 million people; 10 years later, that number was only 139 million. Thus, the potential to add a minimum of two million jobs—and potentially more with the multiplier effect—to an otherwise stagnant employment environment is immense.
"—
Ultimately this article looks to return to a fraction based pricing scheme for financial markets which feels like a step backward but is a great synopsis of many of the issues facing IPO markets.
Steven Johnson on the impending electric car revolution being led by Tesla:
And if that’s the case, then the automobile industry will go through exactly what the computer and software world went through with the rise of the PC, the Web, and the mobile revolutions. Smaller companies that bet heavily on the new paradigm will become dominant in an amazingly short amount of time; behemoths who cling to the old models will swiftly become afterthoughts. The EV revolution will be like Hemingway’s classic line about going broke: it will happen gradually, then all of a sudden.
Agreed. This is going to happen sooner than most people think.
[via Daring Fireball]
The full post is worth reading.
“Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of “The Social Network,” from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of “House of Cards.” With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.”—
For ‘House of Cards,’ Using Big Data to Guarantee Its Popularity - NYTimes.com
Even if this isn’t true, it should be. Very cool
This used to be called “using a spreadsheet”.
"I know a lot of people who do technology for a living and almost universally, there’s a libertarian streak that runs through them — information should be free, do your own thing and leave me alone, that sort of mind-set. That’s very much what the Internet is. And almost to a person that I’ve talked to, they say, ‘Yeah, I would probably vote for Republicans, but I can’t get past the gay-marriage ban, the abortion stance, all of these social causes.’ Almost universally, they see a future where you have more options, not less. So questions about whether you can be married to the person you want to be married to just flies in the face of the future. They don’t want to be part of an organization that puts them squarely on the wrong side of history."
— Michael Turk, a G.O.P. digital strategist from Robert Draper’s excellent NYT Magazine piece: Can the Republicans Be Saved from Obsolescence? (via jkalifowitz)
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