hotshot

I don't think a bunch of hotshot crackers are prepared to play at the nation-state level. It's all fun and games until someone decides it's just easier to kill you.

Ask yourself this: if Mel's code was so useless how come some hotshot didn't re-write it using 'best practices' and zero 'clever tricks'? The answer: likely because it could not be done.

The cold hard fact is that you are still junior, very junior, no matter how much a hotshot you think you are. So the time they put into you makes it a pretty even trade for it not to be paid.

Convince every young hotshot college grad that it's a bad idea to go work for you. Lose whatever momentum you would have gained by attracting top talent.

I think I'm significantly dumber now than I was as a 19-year-old hotshot fresh out of high school. I can see all the alternative ways of doing things, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes I'm still making.

Give me a competent employee whom I can rely upon year after year vs some hotshot code slinger who is here today and gone tomorrow. I call it the "Mike Krzyzewski" team building strategy.

Well, let's just say that it's one of those times where looking like the young silicon valley hotshot works against you. Having a PR shot to pull out of the drawer that looks older, more serious and decidedly less hip would do well when people are worried.

And while you might get frustrated for those 2 years as an 18-year-old hotshot upstart startup-minded student, in 10 years you'll look back on it and think, "wow, that really was the most important part."

Three days go by and the hotshot young founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no health insurance and having to break the rental lease. Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring?"

The software engg prof was a glib, entreprenurial hotshot who said "my students have been placed at netscape, sun, microsoft, oracle". he talked about industry partnerships, internships, 1000s of lines of production code, maintenance, unit tests, refactoring...

I can't stand the broader attitude of this, which essentially boils down to "I'm a hotshot programmer therefore anything academic or computer-sciencey is stupid". A lot of people in general could be a little more humble and recognize the fact there's a lot of things that they don't know they don't know.

Just because you are a fancy-pants, hotshot startup and not a bigco, does not mean the same laws and liabilities don't apply to you. Founders, all that blood, sweat and tears will go down the drain if you ignore the stodgy, boring, beuraucratic 'nonsense' that was designed to protect humans from other humans, as soon as you have more than one human in your beloved startup.

To me, Wikipedia is embodiment of "less is more", which supposedly all of these hotshot designers are supposed to subscribe to, but apparently mistranslate it to "a metric butt-load of negative space".

For those that wrote negative comments about this article, imagine for a minute you weren't such a hotshot and couldn't negotiate a $10,000 increase in salary at your minimum wage job as a ticket taker at the movie theater. Imagine you were one of those mechanical turk workers that you use in your shiny web application being paid next to nothing for your time.

The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite.