
Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers - swombat
http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc?pli=1
======
adamt
[quote from link] Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.
[/quote]

Yes, but will it ever be worth anything? ;-)

~~~
oscardelben
If you have to ask then maybe it's not worth. I think that wherever you go you
have the chance to make something meaningful if you really want to.

Edit: I didn't realize the date at first, so the downvotes are in order. I
still believed in what I said tough.

~~~
pascal_cuoq
You got downvoted for accidentally raising the very good point that the e-mail
does not contain enough information to allow a prospective candidate to decide
what equity would be worth? I don't know who gets downvoting power around here
but they sure do not have much of a sense of humor.

~~~
daleharvey
what does an email that has sufficient information to valuate a company look
like?

That email has more than enough information to tell me that its probably a
good candidate to find out more about.

~~~
mkramlich
An email only has sufficient information to gauge the future value of some
startup _if_ that email has been sent back in time from the future. Preferably
it is still smoking and glowing blue and placed in your hands directly by
Christopher Lloyd himself.

------
swombat
On a serious note, this is exactly how you should write job ads if you want
exceptional hackers, imho.

~~~
j_baker
Perhaps minus the degree requirement though.

~~~
vinhboy
so, we always say this... but doesn't the success of amazon, and other
"degree" driven companies mean we are wrong??

maybe having a degree does matter?

~~~
cookiecaper
There are many counter-examples. What about the success of non-degree-driven
companies like Microsoft, where the founder dropped out before completing
school? Does that prove that degrees are silly and worthless?

The thing is that degrees might mean something or they might not; it's not too
hard to get through higher education without retaining anything or even
learning anything relevant in the first place, but by the same token, some
people do some really cool and meaningful work at college and it means a lot.
You just have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

~~~
jbarham
No, it's a false dichotomy to say that because Bill Gates dropped out of
college that all degrees are therefore "silly and worthless". He dropped out
of Harvard (where simply being accepted is an achievement in itself) in order
to found the the company that would eventually make him the wealthiest person
in the world. There is no doubt that he would have been capable of completing
his degree had he chosen to.

For regular people who need to persuade someone else to hire them, having a
degree certainly helps and is often a requirement.

~~~
chc
That is the point. Not having a degree doesn't imply that one wouldn't be
capable of completing a degree. Bill Gates is an example of that. People here
also aren't saying that that a degree isn't "often a requirement" in job
listings — they're saying it shouldn't be, not that it isn't.

Incidentally, I would bet most people who don't have degrees could have one if
you gave them a full free ride. Getting a degree these days requires several
years of your life and huge gobs of money, but that's pretty much it.

------
Scriptor
If anyone doesn't recognize the name of the poster (like me), this is what
ended up happening:

<http://amazon.com/>

~~~
swombat
Looks like an interesting start-up, but with the IPO market still frozen, how
will they ever exit? Their investors will clearly never get their money back.
Maybe Google will buy them to hire their engineers.

------
TorKlingberg
This part is cute:

"Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary."

Shows just how new the web was in '94.

~~~
wmf
A great contrast to all the other job openings in 1994 that required five
years of Java, HTML, and Linux experience.

~~~
paulitex
Wow, that's a _really_ tough requirement. Java was first publicly announced in
1995.

~~~
zackattack
You get one point for being smart enough to notice that Java wasn't announced
til 1995. You lose two points for not being smart enough to realize he was
joking.

~~~
ehsanul
It may not be obvious that it was a joke, given that impossible requirements
have been asked of before. Case in point: requiring 3 years of rails
development when it had only been in existence for 2 or so years.

~~~
fgcc
..that was the joke

------
durbin
Maybe this guy Larry should apply.

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa10845061c8ba?pli=1)

------
imp
Hmm.. I didn't know their original name was Cadabra.

~~~
kirpekar
Bezos changed the name from Cadabra to Amazon because Yahoo would return
search results alphabetically.

~~~
tigerthink
Holy shit.

~~~
nfnaaron
No, that's alphabetically worse, but good suggestion.

------
starnix17
I find it even more amusing that his one other newsgroup posting is on finding
a good dog obedience school in the Seattle area:
[http://groups.google.com/group/seattle.general/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/seattle.general/browse_thread/thread/4565a0ffdb19670b/0f3ba2135943ce01#0f3ba2135943ce01)

~~~
leftnode
Funnily enough, it's not even him posting, it's his wife, Mackenzie, posting
under his account.

~~~
reduxredacted
My wife did that for a while on a bunch of amazon forums bashing the Twilight
series.

It was one of the driving factors for me buying her a laptop of her own that I
_never_ log into. I really need a prospective employer or friend Googling my
name and seeing that I not only read Breaking Dawn, but that I felt strongly
enough about it to bash it with a bunch of other ladies.

EDIT: Just to clarify: the forum was 99% women according to my wife. I am not
implying that Real Men don't read Twilight, just that I'd feel like less of a
man if I read it. To each his own.

------
theycallmemorty
Note the signature on his message.

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." -- Alan Kay

~~~
SkyMarshal
Saw it, and to be pedantic, isn't that a bit of misquote? I've always seen it
as:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

<http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html>

------
ams6110
Heh.. I was actually job-hunting about that time. Wish I'd seen it....

------
barmstrong
I like how he says "you should be able to do so in about one-third the time
that most competent people think possible"

~~~
jimbokun
My first thought was "How do I become someone who designs and builds large and
complex (yet maintainable) systems in about one-third the time that most
competent people think possible?"

~~~
justinlilly
The best way is to have done it before. Its easy to implement something in
1/3rd the time as someone else, if you've done it before and they haven't.

------
frouaix
Amazon is still hiring ;) www.amazon.com/jobs

I don't know if we're developing 3 times faster than possible, but from the
inside it's amazing to see how many projects launch on any given week without
any part of the machinery ever stopping.

~~~
zackattack
There's a bug with my amazon prime account. Every time that I pay, I have to
manually select "use my amazon payments" balance. I can't save this
preference, in a payphrase or just as a normal cookied setting. Thanks!

------
enntwo
If Google offered its first public services in '98, where did these posts
originate from? Did Google merge an existing message board system into Groups
when it was released?

~~~
jonknee
Usenet. They bought Dejanews and have archives back to the early 80s.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Dejanews had been archiving usenet as far back as the mid-90s but they (now
google) actually have usenet archives donated by others dating back to 1981.

------
Raphael
Sadly, the logo no longer contains capitals.

~~~
jmtame
why would that make anyone sad?

------
swolchok
(1994)

------
lsd5you
poorly-Capitalized uk Start-up seeks Money

------
iseff
Only very tangentially related, my scrappy, not-too-well capitalized (from
Founder's Co-op: <http://www.founderscoop.com>) Seattle start-up (AppStoreHQ:
<http://www.appstorehq.com>) is also seeking developers:

[http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-
look...](http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-looking-for-
one-developer-entrepreneur)

EDIT: Err, why the downvotes?

~~~
graywh
Inappropriate. There are better way to announce jobs on HN.

