His blog post about his reasons is absolutely tragic and highlights some of the issues faced by individuals working in large companies. I can’t comment on some of his gripes as they’re very specific to his circumstance but I guess it’s a warning to everyone.

“Most of all I have learned that I am happiest when I am coding and being creative.”

Amen and Good Luck.

There is nothing I’d rather do than give up this day job with $BIG_COMPANY and survive on my writing while I whiled away the days trying to learn to code to maybe build an app that I want. Apparently (according to a thread on Twitter) startup businesses require passion and if you’re not willing to code for pizza then you’re not showing passion. And not showing any balls.

That’s shite.

I can’t do this because I have responsibilities. I have a mortgage, kids to feed, a house to run. It’s just not an option. And the answer I get? Rent! WTF? Have you seen the prices of rental properties these days? You might as well pay a mortgage because at least then you have a long term gain in equity.

Five years ago this month I was in the unenviable position of finding out that the directors of the company I was working for were in cahoots and were embezzling. I’d been hired to run the technical department which, in the end, turned out to be the only pat of the business that actually made any money - everything else just made loss after loss which is how you burn through half a million pounds worth of debt in six months. They got off scot free (typically) and disappeared to their other business in England (where, for a annual fee you can get substandard techno-luddite telephone support for your Mac). I had a couple of weeks to act and there were livelihoods to take into account. I had a young child and one on the way so I had responsibilities but the choice was to go find another job or stick my neck out. I convinced Apple’s UK MD to take a chance with us, took my savings and started Mac-Sys. During the next year I would realise that business and friendship are not compatible - and as a result I lost some friends who wouldn’t work. I would discover that the only people who truly believe in you are your children - and god bless them for that (and they’ll grow out of it soon enough). And I would find that I’m not as hard nosed in business as I should be but I’m enough of a cvnt to make something work. These were not lessons that came easily.

For the last two years I’ve been trying to start a software company. Iteration 1 was when Aidan took on SyncBridge. He worked his ass off and produced some real miracles but a shaky API and Apple undercutting us with Calendar Server put paid to our dreams. As it would happen we were a year ahead of the competition, a market for syncing that is now over-run with competitors. For Iteration 2, we hired Steve into Mac-Sys and he wrote the first rendition of ‘macserv’, a web application designed to make the running of an AASP easier. To Steve’s credit, he had a job herding cats to get the processes defined but he managed it. And this only stopped because I recruited him into $BIG_COMPANY (which had been my way of escape). For Iteration 3, we tried again with Aidan, Steve, Philip and Jordan on board but everyone is pulled in different directions. It was always our ‘other job’ and frequently lost out to family, the fact that the day job killed my enthusiasm for things and everyone had priorities. I’m left wondering what to do next.

You see. The first and third Iterations were all done ‘for pizza’. There was a promise of rewards but there were a lot of steps to bypass between now and then. Both ended up falling over because, end of the day, if it’s not putting the bread on the table, it’s not a priority. The second Iteration worked because we had someone working on it and yeah, perhaps we need to look at that again.

I don’t want to ask anyone to code for pizza again.

Anyway, the SDK release.

This is, to be honest, much sooner than I expected and I think there must be quite a few happy people around who are loading apps onto their phones and enjoying the novelty. I’ve been fighting for some time at lunch just to try Interface Builder but something has always come up for the last 7 days. It’s frustrating and when I mention the frustration, the helpful response is ‘Well, if it mattered to you, you’d find time.” Brilliant.

I don’t know what sample code will work on the iPhone with the latest beta and I don’t know whether or not it’s safe to load my iPhone with the beta firmware and still want to use it as a phone. And there’s no way to check because Apple still have an NDA on all discussion on the technical aspects of the SDK and firmware.

As this is very much still a learning experience for me, it’s slow and boring. I’ve kinda decided to strike out and work on something else in order to maybe build some momentum. I would like a cashflow-type application for the iPhone.

As you can see, it’s a work in progress.

I don’t know anyone who thought this was a good idea. Apart from Yahoo shareholders who were looking to cash out. It would be equivalent to Microsoft spending $50 billion of their ‘hard earned’ cash to buy an empty bag (though, they did spend $15 billion to buy a sliver of FaceBook which amounts to an empty bag).

It remains to be seen whether or not anyone at Yahoo has the balls to actually make something of it or whether Yahoo will just continue to decline in relevance.

“So, Flickr extends it’s programme to give Pro accounts away to charities. Forgive me for being a cynic, how are charities really going to benefit from unlimited Flickr space? I’m fairly cynical about charities at the best of times, but the idea seems a bit hollow.”

Geez, Alexia, cut them a break. When all you have is lemons, you gotta make what you can make (lemonade requires sugar too). I don’t know of any charities that would say no to unlimited image storage space considering that they have to pay for all sorts of hosting anyway and images take up a lot of that space especially now we all have 12 Mp cameras. Charities survive on PR.

Damien writes:

“Ingenuity, it seems, thrives in environment where there’s scarcity.”

I’m somewhat speechless at the obviousness.

That said - it reminds me of a story told by an IT guy who was from South Africa. During the Apartheid years he had a lot of work because every civilised country had sanctions against South Africa for their oppressive regime. His job was to maintain computers. As software needs increased (downloaded over a 300 baud modem), he couldn’t get hardware to ship across to him so they invented all sorts of ingenious hacks to get things working including RAM bank splitters allowing you to double- and triple-load RAM banks to increase the memory capacity of the machines.

One for the news-junkies as well. The Associated Press has created an iPhone-compliant version of their site at http://apnews.com. It’s a bit US-centric but then what isn’t these days? Loads well under EDGE and plays well with kids and pets. What more could you want?

“If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.

…Bruce F. Webster aptly named this phenomenon the Dead Sea Effect.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in this. I worked for Nortel for 6+ years and when I left, the relationship was over. I still had a few friends (those who were bothered to be on instant messenger networks other than MSN) but for the most part, I was the ex and not an alumnus by any means.

I have hoped, in my management of Mac-Sys that this is different. I still speak to many past employees (the exceptions generally being those who left under a cloud because they wanted something the company couldn’t provide during the first year or so when we were fighting just to stay alive.)

I think when my tenure with $BIG_COMPANY ends, it’ll be similar to Nortel which is a shame. Big companies should have more resources to hook up with past employees rather than treating them like the Ex with the onerous personal habits.

Aidan, as a Thoughtworks alumnus (never mind Inktomi, Blackstar etc) gets a lot of street cred for being a developer who gets things done. I find it heartening that Thoughtworks has an alumnus system - it’s such a positive aspect of company-employee relationships and certainly colours the way the employee will speak of the employer in years to come.

Would I rather have a good relationship with a past employer? Hell yeah. So what can you do as an employer?

1. Don’t be a dick. People are going to leave and while it could be because of personal issues with you, it’s more likely it’s personal issues which they cannot escape
2. Don’t be a dick. This bears repeating because sometimes the employee will make an effort to make life difficult unintentionally. They may be in all sorts of turmoil in their personal lives and dropping the job may be their response. Don’t make it more difficult
3. Don’t be a dick. Keep in contact with these folk. Why not even start a mini social network for them? Create the FaceBook group, keep their Jabber login active. For security remove their logins to core systems but don’t be doing a global find/replace on their uid in the systems - that’s stupid.

IrishFlirtySomething writes:

“So I have been desperately pitching for new business to lots of dusty old men who say things like;
“aren’t you a ‘great girl’, running your own business – do you work all on your own?”
Which roughly translates as;
“Is there anyone with a Penis involved or is it just you and your Vagina?”

When I started running my own business, I experienced similar sentiment. I ‘looked’ young. Having been burned before by competitors who went out of business, they wanted to know would me and my business still be around in a year. They wanted to know would I still be around when they needed me or was I planning to swan off on holiday - or would I have any backup?

I don’t necessarily believe that they were being ageist in my case just as I don’t believe the antagonists were being sexist necessarily in her case. I took a load of shithere and here last year because I think that equality starts with not patronising people or giving one sector of the community better treatment than others.

In her case, I don’t think she didn’t get the contract because of her cleavage.

P.S. Flame on!

“That doesn’t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other people’s money to do it with and a few years of practice.”

“If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you can’t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.”

It’s true. Twitter’s scaling issues are a bugbear in their sides because as their userbase is growing, the Potential Value (in terms of Attention) of the company grows but the Actual Value (in terms of revenue) stays stagnant. And they have a huge amount of Virtual Debt in the shape of investors who will want a return. So, yes, the service itself is cool but is it sustainable?

It seems to me they have three options:

1. Someone buys them for a gazillion dollars. This is what happened to Jaiku. Google bought them and then kinda ignored them. I guess it was a defensive buy? It then becomes someone else’s problem at how to make money out of it? I must say I don’t mind the way Twitterific handles it - advertising sponsored play is good enough. This is the model that the investors will likely want.
2. They find out a way to make money. What about building in the feature that Twitter-ites (Twitterlanders? Tweeters?) could make their own adverts? Anyone can tweet but Tweetvertising allows graphics? Maybe even audio or video? Maybe even some opt-in tracking (as if I’m being forced to watch adverts, at least make them interesting to me!). Or maybe offer Tweets separate to SMS to mobile phone companies? Make it unlimited for people who have signed onto Tweet plans but limit those of us who slip in under the radar with data. That’s certainly going to reduce some of the ‘noise’. I am guessing here that they already get a percentage of every SMS sent them? Unless this is truly revolutionary, it’s probably not going to please the investors.
3. They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

End of the day, it’s not my problem but I wonder what happens when they spent the last cent of the VC money they have received. Does the world go dark?

“First one I’ll call it Broadcasting Mode. Fucking annoying. I un-followed Guy Kawazaki for this reason. 200 tweets per day with hyperlink.Duh!! Have you heard about RSS feeds?? What are you trying to do? The worst usage someone can do of Twitter is definitely Broadcasting.”

This is why I unfollowed Jason Calacanis last week and unfollowed Scoble and Kawasaki today. It’s all adverts and ‘aren’t we having a great life’. I went onto Twitter because of the promise of less advertising (though it seems that’s coming as they monetise their assets blah blah)

But these A-listers whom we all flock to for wisdom and who follow thousands of people (and thoughtfully ignore most of them) They provided absolutely nothing in content. All noise.

On my Mac:
MacBook-Pro:~ mjohnstn$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}' | sort -rn | head -10
69 cd
55 ssh
42 ls
38 ping
37 say
31 top
23 ifconfig
23 curl
19 sftp
15 whois

I must say, Steve is a ‘ls’ freak.