Also, none of my friends are as attractive as the models used on the Facetime page. Stop faking my friends. Apple, please fix this.

Broken down to bullets:

* Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.

* Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent.

* Stay as small as you can.

* The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful.

* Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.

* Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/

* Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions.

* Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers.

* Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.

Well, to be fair, you were infringing on their trademark (or whoseever trademark it was previously).

  > ==Live with Your Parents==
  > I'm serious: This is what I did! 

How to save money: Spend other peoples' money.

Doesn't everyone have an ego? Isn't it really hard to check it at the door? I think students of Buddhism have been trying to figure out how to do this for centuries. I don't think it's as simple as checking it at the door.

I posit that Zed gets far more recognition than he deserves because he puts himself out there and actually does manage his PR pretty well.

There are people at the Googleplex that have done amazing work - filesystems, webservers, machine-learning algorithms, core changes to the ranking algorithm, all significantly higher performance & quality than what Zed has written, stuff that gets millions of queries per day and is crucial to folks' everyday existence. If you Google their names, you might come up with a lone blog post on the Googleblog giving a 5-minute soundbite on what they do, or an academic paper from 1994 detailing some obscure technical contribution to a programming language that nobody knows.

I remember that when I was working for startups and small companies, I thought that most software development happens "out there", in the open-source cloud, and really looked up to the prominent figures in the open-source world. Then I got to Google, and realized that what I knew from the public papers was barely the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Now I have to assume that other large corporations - other tech companies, Wall St. - have similarly impressive secrets locked up behind their confidentiality walls, stuff that we'll never know about but that is far better than the best open-source alternatives around.

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

It's not that they are not trying to innovate. It's that they are trying to navigate a rapidly changing environment in a big battleship that is slowly sinking.

The hell of being the NYT is that you're too big to pivot all the time, so you need to pick a plan and stick with it. And if, ten years from now, it turns out you picked the wrong plan, you will feel awful because you lost the New York Times, for gods sake, when all you had to do was follow the soon-to-be-obvious-in-hindsight Plan X.

What is happening here seems clear: the Times is freaking out about iOS apps. Apple has cleverly offered the dead-trees publishers something that looks like the model they know, where they control the experience and the design and, not incidentally, the ad placement. And now the Times gets confused. Do they buy Apple's offer? The way the music publishers did? If they do, will their glass look half-empty in five years, or half-full? Or should they continue the earlier plan and try to compete on the open web where the mass of people are? And can either of these models support anything that resembles the existing staff and properties of the Times?

Unfortunately there's a large, politically-influential group of Cuban exiles in Florida. In pretty much every recent presidential election cycle, Florida has been a crucial swing state that could go to either side, so neither party has wanted to upset that group by normalizing relations with Cuba. From a political standpoint there's a lot to lose and nothing to gain from it, unfortunately.

Isn't this obvious to anyone seeing the ads? I don't think people skiing are actually going to fly out of my TV when I see those ads, or that a humanoid rabbit is actually going to try to steal my Trix.

"Let's try an experiment. Think of a project you use all day. Maybe it's Rails or Python or something. Now, name 4 people on the core team without looking them up. I can't do that for anything I use. Alright, let's say you can do that. You know a myriad of things about the people who make your tools, but can you honestly say you know as much about them as you do about the tools they made you? Be honest with yourself and really look at how much you know about the people behind your gear as you do about the gear itself."

This is very bizarre. Isn't this true for all tools/man made artifacts we use? I have no idea who exactly designed my car, my guitar , my cellphone, or even the apartment I live in. And when I do know their names I certainly don't know them better than I do my tools. Why should I want to?

"I still have to do programmer interviews like everyone else. No matter how much code I put out, I still have to solve stupid puzzles about coconuts and manholes. No matter how many web servers or email frameworks or database servers or chat servers or assemblers I write I still have to prove I can code. No matter how many copies of my software get deployed I still have to prove I can make reliable software."

I wouldn't want to comment on what Zed's personal experience is , but I know many programmers who wouldn't have to "prove that they can code". "Fame" sees to correlate inversely with having to jump through hoops. I doubt if anyone really wants to test Linus (or Carmack or DHH or any other "famous" programmer) for "ability to code". Outside the MegaCorp, and especially in startups, a reputation for Open Source contributions helps you avoid stupid questions/tests etc, at least in my limited experience. It is often the undistinguished guy with the undistinguished cv that has to go through the technical nitpick interview.

I think this experience may be somewhat unique to Zed. No harm in that of course. Just pointing out that is far from universal.

Just my perception, but Zed seems to get weirder with every post he writes. I don't mean that he is crazy or anything, just that the logic in his posts seems increasingly frayed.

Or perhaps the value of working for TechCrunch.