Ask HN: Rate My Startup - <AUTHOR>

http://www.bzplnr.com
The first step toward creating what I am calling an ecosystem of startups - broadly related, semi-dependent startups that together will form a comprehensive whole covering a wide range of market segments.
Thanks in advance for the comments! <comment><USER2> This is going to be detailed. My thoughts, in order, as I use your site. These comments are mostly negative, but I hope you can take them constructively. It's not a personal thing =) I'm trying to help you.

1\. Name. Srsly?

2\. Color scheme. Fix it.

3\. Why should I use this? It creates a "business plan", but is it any better than the one I already made for my investors? As a user, I want to know that you can either

A) add pretty pictures / make up for my lack of design skills

B) Suggest things I might have forgotten, or otherwise improve what I could write in word / google docs

C) Add some sort of 'social' element to business planning (e.g. sending it to a list of people I manage, commenting, something like that)

Otherwise, I have no reason to use your product. You need to figure out what it is you are providing (i.e. value) and put it on the front page, where I can see it.

3a) Also, I want to see what the final result looks like. Sample business plans! Put the output formats in a bullet/feature list (PDF, hosted automagically, DOC, whatever it is you support, because i have no idea).

If I were a random user not reviewing your site, I would have left at this point.

5\. Why do you need an e-mail? I didn't receive any "Thanks for signing up!" mail from you, so I'm assuming you're going to spam me with feature updates later?

6\. What is a strapline, and why is it italicized?

7\. I'm assuming the "Author" is me? Don't you already have my name? Didn't I type it in 10 seconds ago?

8\. What is drstunner and why is it autofilled in every box?

9\. Explanation text is a good idea. Some of it appears to be voiced awkwardly. Random example: Why are those things "drivers"? Minor grammatical issues. Yes, i am a grammar nazi.

10\. Asterisks. So I'm expecting some type of markup?

11\. This autofilled text is really annoying. At minimum it should clear when I click in the box. Worse is the complete lack of grammar--my subconscious concern is one of these could end up in my final plan.

12\. I just realized that the stuff in the "Notes" green box has a section for each input field. You need to move that somewhere next to the input field I'm working with. Otherwise it's scroll-->type, scroll->type

13\. The Financials section is way simplistic. Maybe I'm thinking about a subscription or advertising model, or maybe I charge for something that is sufficiently different than (or unrelated to) primary costs or users. Imagine if eBay, or Google, or Mint were using your site. I looked for a way to turn off this section (impossible) or use my own chart (also impossible).

14\. Trying to use the "Plan" section on the right for navigation... it's not in any sort of order. I have no idea what section to go to 'next' in the flow. Wait, why is this a flow again? And why is the 'overview' the last stop?

15\. Ah, so it generates PDFs. Twenty minutes later, I now know what your product does.

16\. And those PDFs look like crap. Headings and normal text, aparrently. In landscape format. And advertisement for you on every page. Investors will be signing up in droves once they learn that I used "bzplnr".

17\. The asterisks... are asterisks.

18\. Clicking "generate..." again gives me "Matt Siegel's" business plan, which is certainly not me, generating FUD about trusting you with my secret plan.

You need to look hard at 3/3a, which is where most people will leave. What value are you providing? Right now, the only value is the somewhat-helpful text that I didn't realize was associated with input fields until halfway through. This app is one big form and you need to do some usability work here. Filling out forms isn't fun for anyone, but your task is to figure out a way to make it fun.

The finished PDFs look like crap (I can't even do bullet points). The lowest common denominator here is google docs-like markup. The real performance metric is Word templates. Until you at least support textile/markup/google docs styling, nobody's going to hand this PDF to an investor. And you're not really going to see users until you surpass word templates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Make sure to include Neal Stephenson's disclaimer from _Cryptonomicon_

"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril — you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony. Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business. "

</comment><comment><USER4> my immediate thoughts:

      - i dislike the name.  for something producing somewhat important documents, it has a trendy, difficult to remember/spell domain name.
      - i dislike the fact that i can't see any examples of what gets produced.  i *have* to sign up and go through everything just to see an example of the end product to see if the process was worthwhile.
      - i dislike the fact that i have to sign up before i can do anything.

i'll get back to you once i actually generate a plan. the idea is interesting, though, and does have potential for the right crowd.

<comment><USER5> Bizplanner might be a better name. That's what I said in my head once I figured out what he was trying for.

<comment><USER6> I said the same in my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think your name does need work and the principle behind the app is really good, I wouldnt want to waste my time writing a full BP.

But you should make that landing page more friendly, right now it's a like a shy kid in the corner. Nice & interesting once you read into that person, but not to enticing on the surface.

Add some bigger/bolder text to emphasize your value proposition. As well as pictures/videos of actual use.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1) Name is horrible. Srsly. :)

2) You should show screenshots at a minimum. Also show the final product/output. Maybe a sample Business Plan pdf to download.

3) Site looks like a blog not a web app.

4) Slogan is kinda wrong: Because Business Plans Are Hard. -> What are you doing to solve this? Would be like Basecamp saying: Because Online Project Management is Hard.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really do want to see what I am getting involved with. A visual example that walks me through the process.

</comment><comment><USER10> ... or you could write the plan out as plain text (i.e. the hard part of coming up with the plan is coming up with the plan, not formatting it):

<http://www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to everyone for the comments.

I have taken the site down for a few days whilst I implement some of the good ideas here.

Be back soon with v2.0!

Cheers once again.

</comment><comment><USER11> on top of what everyone said(horrible name, no screenshots, looks too much like a blog), the theme is just plain horrible, puke green isn't exactly a great color, and you made it so light, that it actually hurts your eyes to look at it</comment>


Ling's Cars: 3 Reasons Why the Worst Website on the Internet Is Actually Genius - <AUTHOR> https://thewhitelabelagency.com/lings-cars-3-reasons-worst-website-internet-actually-genius/ <comment><USER2> I went to the site and inadvertently discovered that there is a distinct mobile version as well (prepend "m." to the URL).

To steal a line from "Sealab 2021": "It's like a koala is crapping rainbows in my brain!"</comment>


Pogreb: Embedded key-value store for read-heavy workloads written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/akrylysov/pogreb <comment><USER2> This looks interesting. I wonder how well it handles multi-gig sized loads.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my language, pogreb means funeral.

Epic fail.

:)</comment>


Automate any GUI using screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/ <comment><USER4> A lot of folks on here are saying that this is cool but useless because there are better ways to click a button on a screen. If you read through their paper ([http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/sikuli/sikuli- uist2...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/sikuli/sikuli- uist2009.pdf)) you'll find more practical examples of what can be done with this type of system.

One such example is to track real time images of a webcam pointed at a baby and using Sikuli to watch for a yellow dot placed on the baby's forehead. Another is to track movements of something across the screen; in this case a bus moving along Google maps.

I agree that there are better ways to do most of the things in their examples and that they should probably re-work their videos a bit, but just because this system doesn't solve your problems the way you want it to doesn't mean its useless.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone is saying the technology isn't cool (and I see no one using the word "useless" but you).

I believe most people are warning about the demonstrated technology for this task:

> Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user > interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots).

As I said below, for personal scripting of known applications I think this GUI automation is great. But upon seeing it, we had all hoped to see a technology which would get over our biggest hurdles in GUI development/testing. As it doesn't sound like it would do that (well) for a number of reasons (i.e. localization, themes, OS/app versioning, design changes during development, coloring, etc), it loses a lot of its practical application appeal.

It's still really cool technology and is a cool way to think about this kind of problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hm, makes me think of [http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/06/22/observation...](http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/06/22/observations- on-test-driving-user-interfaces) .

It sounds... scary. Like it will work well enough at first, and then explode when someone changes their desktop theme (especially icon theme), or wants to upgrade to a new version of whatever. Treating things as change-controlled APIs when they aren't just seems dangerous. Still I guess there's at least some amount of change control coming from platform conventions and human interface guidelines, and this comes closer to operating at the correct level of abstraction to benefit from that.

<comment><USER7> Yes,

One problem with GUIs from the start has been that automating their behavior is fragile.

Automating actual keystrokes and mouse movements is the most fragile and kludgy of automations. Even drilling to the level of system messages is problematic.

Aside from it's other good qualities, the web is really nice for reducing possible user interactions to a very codified set of operations.

The article here points to ... _the wrong way of doing things_

<comment><USER8> I wondered about that, too---how fragile will this be in the face of minor GUI changes? (A fuzzy-match parameter would be a nice addition to the API.) One encouraging sign is that the screenshots are stored as .pngs in the file system. If an app update does nothing but change button graphics or text, the script could presumably pull new graphics from the same place.

That just leaves the other 90% of GUI changes that involve moving a setting to another screen, or changing the way an entire interaction works. ;-)

All the stuff you said about GUI automation being klunky is true. Still, this thing could come in handy as a kind of "GUI batch file," or perhaps as a tool to help produce screencasts.

<comment><USER9> The do say that it does fuzzy matching, so it can still work with minor changes.

I don't think any program guarantees that the GUI is a stable API! I do wonder about its ability to handle unexpected conditions, or for the scripter to know that these conditions exist in the first case. For example, if the GUI changes based on the day of week, the script will probably either get very confused, or do the wrong thing. I imagine there's some way to do conditionals (if you see this, then do thing 1, otherwise do thing 2) but it's hard for the scripter to discover all the possibilities. Still, might be useful for some things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes I see failures of HN to collaboratively discover this kind of interesting topics. I've posted the paper much earlier than the media coverage (more than 100 days ago): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810986> and there is no vote up.

<comment><USER11> There are a lot of interesting papers out there but, from what I've seen, HN voters tend to appreciate actual products and services a lot more than theory (and certainly don't appreciate PDFs). There's undoubtedly room for a more compsci/theoretically HN equivalent - unless such a thing exists (Reddit/compsci?)

Nonetheless, that's a cool paper and it's a shame it didn't make the front page first time round :-)

<comment><USER12> There used to be Academic Hacker News ( <http://hnacademic.com:40106/> ) but it mostly died from lack of activity. It's a shame.

<comment><USER11> Darn, that looks awesome. I suspect it died from the usual "launching a small online community" problems of hitting critical mass, etc. Maybe this - <USER2> something like it - could take off given the right amount of care by a group of dedicated folks..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The people dissing this have obviously never dreamed of automating a 16-bit Visual Basic 3 Windows app (that's Win16, not Win32) so it can be run from a webapp front-end and gradually obsolesced.

Autohotkey works, but matching by screenshots with computer vision would cut the amount of work required in half.

Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER14> I can imagine this being useful for knowing to stop when things start going wrong. One problem I've had with GUI-automators in the past is that they've just kept automating after something unexpected happened and put them into an invalid state. It seems like Sikuli could avoid this by literally knowing when the screen looks wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> Rube Goldberg would be proud.

(Sometimes you should take a step back and ask yourself, "is looking for pictures on the screen _really_ the best way to do this"? The example they show on the main page is a one-line "ifconfig" invocation, for example.)

<comment><USER16> Their example is a bit juvenile. Even so, keep in mind that it is a one-line ifconfig invocation _for those that understand the terminal and know about ifconfig_ , which does not hold for the vast majority of users. This is about making automation more usable. I'm not sure if it is a productive one because my perspective is adulterated by technical knowledge. But at the very least, it is a very interested approach which could prove fruitful for your average user.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but there's also a precondition for using this: you have to understand that it's actually even possible to automate repetitive tasks on a computer, and have the motivation to do so. Hell, I know programmers who don't do that.

How many people fit that description, but will still find this easier than ifconfig? My guess is few.

That said, I think this is a neat hack.

<comment><USER16> I think its usefulness (or lack thereof) can't accurately be critiqued by anecdotes from technical users, but rather needs to be quantified through usability testing. It's easy to blow this idea off, but the "solve something your users didn't know needed to be solved" advice I occasionally see on HN keeps echoing in my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two wonderful things about this: 1\. as frankenstein-ed together as the tech is, it works* 2\. this is arguably more natural than 'workflow' recording functionality like automator, and I found the actual 'code' highly readable(although inscrutably hard to debug or test or _run_ without the IDE...)

All in all I love the way the idea works right now, although Java feels less than elegant on the Mac.

*(er, although for me it's got a killer bug - using the hotkey to make a screenshot does not work, gives no option of cancelling... hardcore crasher in my book)

</comment><comment><USER19> This tool looks really interesting - and I love the idea that it can be programmed using python. I've used a number of GUI automation tools in the past like autohotkeys (which I can also highly recommend) - this one looks like it would make it easier to do certain tasks that are difficult in autohotkeys, for example: interacting with webpages or other applications that don't have standard interfaces that can be examined with system api's.

The screenshot approach this tool takes is very unique. My only criticism is that, judging by the video, the image processing approach seems slow compared to an autohotkey's script.

What I'm really waiting for is a tool that can take this one step further and do OCR on any on screen text. This would make it easy to interact with gui's that present text that can't be read using system api's - imho that would be the holy grail of gui automation.

</comment><comment><USER20> If someone could take this concept a step further and let you create a self contained process that users could download and run just by clicking (like tasks in photoshop), I could see some uses:

\- Some tech support situations where you have to have a user do x amount of steps on their computer that are the same for all users. Sort of like an automated Geek Squad.

\- Sell a prepackaged GTD style organization system that creates all the folders for you in the right places, downloads files (pre-made budget spreadsheet for example) into them, etc. (trivial, but it's a pain point for people)

\- Make a bunch of different productivity apps that mimic the steps a professional programmer/ photographer/ marketer etc does when they first setup a new computer (bookmarks, preference settings, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Clearly Sikuli has flaws, but for a research project, their presentation and execution is impressive. Their efforts should be commended. Hopefully they'll continue enhancing their scripting environment so that the scripts are robust to significant variation in the GUI.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very cool, but would have major limitations outside of the just making a "personal script" or, at best, a script for a heavily locked-down enterprise/academic setup.

Because it uses literal images, it seems like any change in OS theme, OS version, app version, localization (e.g. text or control shape), or colors (e.g. high contrast mode) would break the scripts.

It'd be neat to use for GUI automation during software development except for the fact that the GUI changes, the button wordings are tweaked, etc.

In all of these cases, back-end or OS GUI automation is probably better, but if you have an unchanging environment or want a quick on-the-fly test, the screenshot approach is novel and probably a bit cooler.

</comment><comment><USER22> Agreed the demo object is silly, but they are problems that are hard to solve without GUI automation. For example, this tool could be great for scrapping flash-based websites, which are notoriously painful to automate. And the integration with python means that you can easily mix and match with conditional statements, calls to OCR libraries, etc...

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a much nicer and an intuitive alternative for <http://autohotkey.com> on windows. I've tried introducing autohotkey at work to automate some of the mundane tasks, but the learning curve of autohotkey was difficult for most of my co-workers. I'm going to introduce this at my workplace.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you skip to the last 30 seconds of the first SIX MINUTE video tutorial, you can see the app in action. Otherwise, you have to sit through a whole class on how to use the app before you even know if you want to use it.

Little lesson in creating a good video demo....

Get to the point.

Then provide more videos for details.

(I guess you could say this should be expected from an MIT project website)

</comment><comment><USER25> cf. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069608>

</comment><comment><USER26> It looks like a more advanced version of tools like Quick Test Pro.

There is big money in tools like that, but I can tell you, its a real PITA to write test scripts using tools such as these. Given the option, you are better off exposing your app's object model to a scripting language, and letting testers script it like that.

Obviously that doesn't work for third-party or legacy apps. So it definitely has a market. And their computer vision algorithms have to be better than the godawful bitmap comparison tools that QTP used.

</comment><comment><USER27> The best use case I can think of for this is writing automated test cases for a browser-based app. Selenium does a pretty good job of that already.

The demo (automatically setting an IP) is a one-time job. How many times do we have to do this task? So there is no need for me to automate those kind of jobs. But having said that, this could still be useful in some use cases. One example I could think of is testing desktop apps.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is incredibly useful. That's why Redstone Software has been selling it for years, under the name Eggplant - <USER3> <http://www.testplant.com/products/eggplant_functional_tester> . It takes a lot of work in QA to figure out why this is useful (back me up on t his one, experienced QA engineers) and the right way to do it so I'll give you the Cliff Notes: This sort of bitmap recognition lets you automate that "last mile" QA groups can never seem to automate. autohotkeys, selenium, and other things all help automate lots of aspects of the interface with tons of caveats and gotchas. This is a much more useful, if less pleasingly elegant, solution. When you are automating testing it's relatively easy to automate back- endstuff, write unit tests, write scripts wrapping cli interfaces and so on, but every automation team that deals with GUIs eventually stubs their toe on automating the user interface. BY having the computer automate the GUI task in the same way a human user executes it ( "I want to click the Apple Menu - Where is the Apple icon I know is on top of the Apple Menu? - Ah! There it is! I'll click it" ) you make it easier, or even possible, for the people writing the qa automation to automate the GUI in a reasonable amount of time. There are some pitfalls. What if someone changes the theme on the automation rig? Well, you're an engineering team, not a preschool - DON'T change the theme! What if somebody changes an icon in the app you're testing? Fortunately you have access to the bitmap (it's saved with the rst of the build files, yeah?) and of course the change notes for the build tell you hte iocon has been updated. Well, of course it isn't in the change notes, but when a test that was working fails you can easily run to the point where it says "Can't find the foo button." This is a hint to look for the foo button and think about why it can't be found. Finally, all good scripting languages have an escape hatch to call otehr programs that can do things better than they can and return a result. Need to check an old COM object through its native interface? Write a small Windows app that your script calls to get that state. It takes a lot of experience and frustration with trying to fully automate tests on a GUI to understand why this is useful. and the cry of "Bitmaps break because things cahnge" - well, no they don't. Not on a computer . Not if you know what you're doing and have control of the source. (Please disable all auto-update systems on your test rig or you will be surprised at some point.)

</comment><comment><USER13> How often do you have to read and re-type an error message to Google, because the text cannot be copy and pasted? This technology could OCR the screen text and Google it for you automatically.

The demo video is proof of concept; make sure you read the paper.

<http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/documentation.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER29> I've had to use some non-scriptable, proprietary software that this might actually be useful for in doing repetitive tasks. This is especially true at some places where I have done some engineering consulting (non-software). It would probably fall in the category of ugly hack, but would also save some headache for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know if a sikuli script can be run from the command line without having to use the sikuli IDE?

<comment><USER31> they provide a command line tool for running sikuli scripts without the IDE

<comment><USER30> Perfect!

Tnx

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sikuli comes at the right time for me, going to use it to automate browser testing and generate reports :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's a more ambitious vision of this idea published in 2000:

[http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lsz/papers/slpz- cacm00.pd...](http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lsz/papers/slpz-cacm00.pdf)

<comment><USER10> But the MIT version using more state-of-art methods (MSER/SIFT hybrid local descriptor, ruby-like syntax etc.).

<comment><USER33> This also comes from MIT, but from the media lab.

I think it's a more ambitious vision because it talks about programming by example systems, which automatically generalize from examples.

But Sikuli is very cool even if it's generalization is limited to ignoring minor differences in images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How well this would work for game playing bots? If this can abstract away the detection and clicking of regions, it would make building one much more approachable.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if I can teach it how to leet at Team Fortress.</comment>


Activity To Go, a new Heroku add-on now in beta - <AUTHOR> https://elements.heroku.com/addons/activitytogo <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

If you're using Heroku, you might want to try Activity To Go which is in free beta now. It allows you to track any change to your Heroku app(s) in a Slack channel, or in files on S3 for compliance sake. It's essentially a step up from Deploy Hooks as it covers many other types of events and it supports Slack.

Please let us know what you think.

Thanks!</comment>


The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/the-tech-talent-shortage-is-a-lie/ <comment><USER2> This is an age-old issue that comes up at least once or twice a business cycle. Some perspective-- here's what Peter Drucker had to say...

In the mid-1950s, as the "automation revolution" swept America's factories, Peter Drucker called on corporations to take responsibility for providing something essential to their workers' fortunes, as well as their own: the training needed to master the new technology.

"Large companies in particular will have to become educational institutions,"

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/drucker/2012/06/05/why- businesse...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/drucker/2012/06/05/why-businesses- need-close-the-skills-gap/)</comment>


I regularly hire women for 65% to 75% of what males make - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/hvv2m/i_work_for_a_large_multinational_tech_company_i/ <comment><USER5> Having been a male engineer for a couple of years now, it is very disquieting to learn that there is any population of people anywhere who are getting ROFLstomped by male engineers in negotiating savvy. A potted plant could handle a salary negotiation better than many people (myself included at one point) -- at least the potted plant wouldn't divulge a salary history when asked.

<comment><USER6> As a woman engineer, who's a really bad negotiator, I'm not surprised. I know "how" to be better, but I do wilt and get scared when I've gotten an offer - <USER2> think only once or twice I've ever made any sort of counter.

I don't know why I don't act in my own best interest though. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some societal element to it, but it really seems strange/weak/victim-ish to blame something external for what really does feel like a personal shortcoming - after all my own sister doesn't seem to have the same sort of "conditioning".

Are there tips out there to help getting over the fear of negotiating? Not really thinking about looking for something else at the moment, but there always seems to be a "next job" out there somewhere.

<comment><USER7> > I think only once or twice I've ever made any sort of counter.

Argh! This kills me inside.

>Are there tips out there to help getting over the fear of negotiating?

It's the same with asking someone out.

The worst that can happen is they say no, and if they make such a big stink out of it you were better off with someone else in the first place because they are _douchebags_.

<comment><USER8> Makes me wonder if maybe men get better at asking for raises,and dealing with potential rejection, because they often are the ones who ask women out.

<comment><USER7> No. I think it's a good analogy, but the correlation stops there – I think I've asked a sum total of two girls out in my life. There are ample opportunities for women to get rejected as well.

My theory goes that men as a rule of thumb have more opportunities to get into LOUD OBNOXIOUS arguments with someone who is SO WRONG that you can't let it stand. Somewhere in that process you learn to push a few boundaries. We're just conditioned to be/are naturally more aggressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the UK the pay difference between males & females under the age of 40 in Tech roles is nominal. There is a difference but it's not even remotely close to the disparity you would find 20 years ago.

That being said, over the past twelve months, female candidates consisted of approximately 5% of the people I represented. There are very few women in the industry and I've rarely come across any who are afraid to argue their worth. On the contrary in fact. Occasionally I have come across one or two women who were demanding a salary that was simply far beyond their worth and I imparted the same advice to them as I would to a male candidate and both women were incredibly offended by my feedback and refused to budge whereas almost every single male that I challenged actually listened to my advice and adjusted their rate to suit.

The idea of negotiating salary offers still appears to be a relatively unknown phenomenon here in the UK. You'd be surprised how few candidates stand their ground and push for more than 5% of the original offer regardless of gender.

<comment><USER10> The concept of salary negotiation is alien to me. Given how difficult it is to find developer jobs in my part of the UK and given that employers are expecting to pay lower and lower amounts these days, I would consider a salary negotiation too risky. There's just too many people applying for too few positions.

That's why I like recruitment agents, when you apply for a job, you already know the salary (or at least the salary range). Obviously, there's disadvantages, like having no idea who you are applying for but that can be fixed with a bit of research.

<comment><USER11> It's attitudes like yours that are pushing the prices down. Your view is also wrong. There are lots of jobs and lots of workers to fill them. You could also just go abroad. There are lots of nice places to work and with English you can work in pretty much any big city in western Europe.

<comment><USER9> _Your view is also wrong._

He voiced his opinion and it was a valid one.

 _There are lots of jobs and lots of workers to fill them._

In certain parts of the UK and moreso throughout Europe jobs are in fact quite scarce regardless of your development ability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've hired a lot of people recently, so maybe my opinion here will be interesting.

With one notable exception, all the women flagged "negotiate me down" signals harder and more often than the men. I asked, "So your salary ask is $X monthly?" And instantly returned, "Yeah, but we can talk about it..."

That just _screams_ "negotiate me down."

I don't do it, because I want to pay my people top of market, have them think of themselves as the best, and build a culture of inspired performance. I actually negotiated that woman's pay _up_ 25% of her ask (which was too low), but even with cultural considerations in mind in a high-margin high-dollar industry, it was _still_ painful for me not to negotiate down.

To be very blunt and crass about it, hopefully for helpful illustrative purposes, it's like the guy who has a, "Please don't kick me" sign on his ass. You can restrain yourself not to, but it's painful.

<comment><USER13> Agree. Here's another way of looking at it.

If you're going to be their manager, it's in your interest to have their salary outcome have parity with other people doing similar work. Later on, if the employee gets unhappy with their comparative situation, it's much harder to fix a disparity with annual raises than it would have been to do the fair thing to begin with.

If their pay is too low, you have made yourself a persistent problem that will be hard to fix.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this. I recently left a pretty damn good job except that I was extremely underpaid. They tried to point out they were trying to fix it with a generous annual raise, which was nice, but no where near enough.

I've been struggling trying to explain the situation to myself but you nailed it.

<comment><USER13> If you still like the original place, you can always go back after a few years, using your new rate as a negotiating tool.

The other option (while still at the original place) is to get an offer from another company. Then, assuming you have your manager's support, take that to HR and ask for an out-of-cycle increase.

Often by the time it gets this far, people are discontented enough to be at the point of walking away anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This phenomenon was studied in a book called _Women Don't Ask_.

<http://www.womendontask.com/>

'When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask."'

Incidentally, for a while, the authors would _give_ a free copy of this book to women who would ask for one.

<comment><USER16> A professor of mine one asked the class: "How would you like to live your life 10% better?" Everyone was like "yeah, of course"

The professor's friend would always ask for discounts, everywhere he went. He would normally get a discount of about 10%. This was simply because he asked. His theory was that if he could get a discount, why not ask? It doesn't hurt anyone and you just have to get past the social stigma of "haggling."

So the professor's challenge for us until next class was to ask for a discount, or more simply "is that your best price?"

Some of the results:

A friend of mine got a free appetizer at a restaurant he frequents

At least 3 people found out that Taco Bell has a student discount program

One person used this in his salary negotiation (literally "is that your best offer?") and instantly got a 5K bump. He was going to take the job anyway, but got $5k more without any hassle.

<comment><USER5> If you had called the office supply chain where I previously worked and I was being very strictly attentive to policy "Is that your best price?" would not have been the magic words but probably would have gotten you the accommodation I'm about to describe from 99% of our CSRs.

Basically, we sell the same stuff via a variety of channels, and the catalog you have in front of you (if you're a regular customer) is systematically above the prices available to other customers like, e.g., schools districts, small businesses in California, people responding to our fall circular, etc etc. The actual software mechanism for this was a three character catalog code, which would cause the system to reprice everything when it was changed. If you were ordering from CAT (the big published book that 98% of orders came from, and you said the magic words -- canonically, "Can you do anything about lowering the price?" -- I would tell you that we had a competitive bidding process and, if you'd give me one second, the computer would come up with our best competitive bid for your business _deletes CAT, writes BID_ ahh, I see we can knock 10% off the order)

There was actually a Bids group, but you'd have to be ordering office paper by the truckload (literally -- some people do) to be worth their attention. The folks in charge of things had long since decided that it was cheaper to just give 10% to anyone who asked than to involve the folks in Bids on $400 accounts or lose business because a law firm secretary decided to do price shopping prior to placing her order.

Of particular note: there is literally nothing you can say, starting from "You're placing an order in CAT", that would cause you to pay more money than the CAT prices. Savvy purchasing managers understand this, which is why purchasing departments almost without fail spent the extra 5 seconds asking for a discount.

<comment><USER17> ... which is why nobody can quote a real price on a website when selling to big companies; they all have purchasing groups that are required to secure discounts.

<comment><USER18> Which is why you need to keep your price _under_ the purchase authority for department heads if you do want to sell to big companies via a website.

AKA "The Atlassian Model":

 _Scott realized that to get adoption, the software had to also be inexpensive. This meant there was often no need to get approval from the C-suite.

Another key was the simplicity of the sales process. "We have a standard contract and there are no discounts," said Scott. "We do not want to waste time and money on legal."_

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2011/06/14/atlassian-1...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2011/06/14/atlassian-100m-business- with-no-sales-people/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like one of the upsides of working at a place where I work now, where there is a salary scale.

Places that play these kinds of games with salary really annoy me. For my first post-college job, as a DBA, I was offered $29,000/year (this was in 2000). I knew they had just lost key people and had a bad reputation for compensation, so I laughed and walked out of the room.

In the parking lot, we agreed to $65k + stock. Most of my colleagues didn't bother, and got stuck with lousy pay for a couple of years.

<comment><USER20> Thats quite a nice improvement you got there. Care to elaborate on what happened (who said what, etc) between walking out and getting the offer?

<comment><USER19> The interviewer followed me, and asked in the stairwell what it would take to get me hired. I said that I had multiple opportunities in the Boston area north of $80k, but wanted to stay local. He countered with "I'll get you $35k, and review your compensation in 3 months". I kept walking.

In the parking lot, we reached an agreement. IMO, it was the first time someone had walked out on him, and he got flustered. I worked in a busy sales job when I was in college, so I was used to dealing with his style. Once they start following you, you've won the negotiation.

Basically, his strategy for any purchase was to dramatically low-ball and act very important. It worked enough that he was very proud of it -- he would extract huge concessions from unwary vendors.

<comment><USER21> I am not trying to offend you, and am only commenting because I believe stories like these hurt less experienced people who are trying to learn how to handle salary negotiations.

I personally do not believe this actually happened. Nobody will ever follow you out of an interview to beg you to take a job, or casually double a salary offer in a stairwell.

There is no "hard ball" negotiating like this where you walk out and somehow bring a company to its knees. It's just never that dramatic.

IF you receive a concrete job offer then you accept, decline, or counter. You should know the pay range by the time a company puts an actual offer on paper.

<comment><USER19> Sorry that you don't believe it.

The guy went from an offer that was low-ball to an offer that was basically market-rate at that time.

With a big company, there's no way this would have happened. But this was company that was somewhere between "startup" and "mid size" business. They hadn't really adopted normal corporate processes.

There was no paper offer. I reported to work on a saturday (to get oriented by my predecessor, who had left the company already). My paperwork was on my chair, and I turned it into the VP's secretary on Monday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If this practice is generally true, it suggests an obvious gender arbitrage strategy:

        1. Hire women instead of men.
        2. ???
        3. Profit.

Unlike the usual case, here ??? actually has a value:

        ??? = Save massively on labor costs vs. your competitors.

As other companies discover the same strategy, demand increases for a fixed supply, thereby bidding up the equilibrium wage and hence dramatically improving the negotiating position of women. (Nothing improves the results of your negotiation faster than a better negotiating position.) In a competitive market for labor, the equilibrium is for everyone to be paid based on their productivity and their risk profile. Whether the latter factor favors women or men isn't _a priori_ obvious; for example, men are more likely to die in a fight or a car accident, whereas women are more likely to take time off to have kids (and so on).

Unfortunately, market interventions typically have the opposite of their intended effect. Rules that punish companies for paying women less than men increase the risk of hiring women; rules that punish companies for not hiring enough women increase the risk of interviewing women; rules that punish not interviewing enough women increase the risk of recruiting women. All of these factors, _ceteris paribus_ , lower the wages of women. (Those who depend on the gender rage industry, on the other hand, make off like bandits.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've coached several of my female friends in how to ask for a raise. Often they'll complain that they're not making enough but are scared to ask for more. I'll tell them "your boss might say no, but they're not going to fire you". Of course, if your boss does say "no", it's a good opportunity to ask what progress you need to make to get the raise you want. You then have a concrete roadmap for getting where you want to be. For the guys on here, encourage the women in your life to speak up. Often they just need someone to tell them it's okay and that they're worth it.

<comment><USER11> I don't like this advice personally. If you want more money you need to change jobs. Asking what progress you need to make to get the raise you want is normally just going to get you strung along doing extra work for nothing.

<comment><USER24> Uh, while I realize the most common method for getting a raise in Silicon Valley is to switch jobs, the idea that it's the only mechanism or the most desirable one is very bizarre.

It also seems to imply that wanting more money is somehow mutually exclusive with wanting to continue working in your current job and/or for your current company.

You're also demonstrating another classic weakness in engineers, failure to recognize social capital. In asking for that information, you put management in the position of articulating their expectations, and when you meet or exceed them, it pressures them further to agree to a raise.

Management isn't just running some simple equation to determine your salary, they're exercising their own judgement as to what you're worth to them and what will keep you working there productively. That judgement can be altered through psychological means.

<comment><USER25> The point is that, all other factors being equal, switching jobs as an engineer is the _easiest_ way to get a raise. People tend to take the path of least resistance.

<comment><USER24> Really? Easiest for whom? I find switching jobs painful and stressful, and my largest percentage salary increases have come _without_ switching employers.

And how is that the point anyway? danssig didn't say anything like that, he just said "If you want more money you need to change jobs.", and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation. Do you have some insight that allows you to discern he meant something vastly different from what he said?

<comment><USER11> >I find switching jobs painful and stressful

This is just because you don't do it enough. I used to hate it enough that I once sued a company to try and make them not lay me off. Now I change every 16mo-5 years and I _love_ the interview part. I would never stay _anywhere_ (besides my own company) for more than 5 years as IMO it makes you appear not very sought after.

>and my largest percentage salary increases have come without switching employers.

I find this _very_ hard to believe. All companies have caps on how much of an increase you can get per year, per performance raise, etc. When you move it's mostly dependent on your negotiation skills (which get better the more they're used). The biggest raise I ever got in a company was during the dot com bubble (they were afraid we would leave). I got 28% (massive, massive exception to get this. Performance raises were the highest you could normally get and were capped at 15%). I moved to another company a few years later and more than doubled my salary. My latest move brought me another 40%.

>and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation.

Everywhere I've ever worked was this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ok, I'll be that guy.

1\. Testosterone promotes risk taking (<http://goo.gl/s2gf4>) 2\. Men have more testosterone. 3\. Salary negotiation is a risk game.

Now for the important part: this doesn't mean it's right. That would be the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. that because something is natural it must be o.k.

So, yes, absolutely combat this. Learn techniques to overcome the disparity. But do not, in a forum full of smart people, wonder WHY this is happening. The answer is obvious to anyone who doesn't mind unpleasant truth.

<comment><USER27> As others have pointed out in this thread, there is practically no risk to asking for more money.

<comment><USER6> But that may not always be obvious to people - in my case, for some reason I worry about my future manager "seeing" me in a negative way. Or perhaps they will decide that I'm not a team player and revoke the offer.

What makes it completely loony, is that I have been the manager, and I never looked at it that way. But yet, I assume everyone else has a very different view of things than I do.

<comment><USER27> If the testosterone hypothesis is true, then men who try t negotiate their salary _also_ falsely perceive that they are risking their jobs, but they do it anyway. I find that hard to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Strictly on economic terms, how much of a discount would you get on a developer if he/she is likely to take 1-2 year off at some point? During that time, you have to hire another person, train them and then tell them to leave.

<comment><USER29> You're being downvoted, but this is quite honestly something I've witnessed C-levels worrying about -- "does she seem like she might get pregnant immediately?".

I have to disagree with the concern.

There's a cost to hiring humans. People get sick, have babies, attend weddings and funerals and take vacations. Men take paternity leave, women take maternity leave. These are the costs of hiring humans.

In my mind, our company exists to turn a profit, but it also exists to employ human beings. Treating them like human beings is money well spent, not money wasted.

<comment><USER28> As an employer, I would do my utmost to attend to these human problems, especially it's a valuable employee. However, the costs, opportunity-wise, still exist and we pay them, willingly or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think this goes beyond just salary negotiations.

My wife typically comes to me when she has "business politics questions" (despite that she's been working longer and more successfully than me.)

Most of things we talk about involve how to get something (usually work or money) from a client without seeming like they're bothering them.

I'm definitely in the "just matter-of-factly send them an email." She's more in the "I don't want them to get irritated by me contacting them" camp.

This isn't universal though. I've had two experiences where it's been reversed. One male I recently hired accepted a position when he knew money would be a problem and didn't bring it up even though it's a bit of a hardship for him right now. A female I'm in discussions to hire has told me flat out what her salary requirements are. I actually appreciate this kind of discussion.

<comment><USER31> nah, that's just consensus building - another trait of the female of the species. I've seen it plenty of times before: it takes me 10 minutes to make a decision, and I call no one. It takes my wife two days, as she goes through her address book, calling friends and talking it out with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> When I was offered my current job, I replied that I thought the pay was on the low side, and asked if they could improve their offer. Two hours later, I received an email with a 15% improvement!

I'm _really_ not very good at negotiation, but getting a 15% raise just by asking? I'll be doing that again :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I discovered this a few years ago, about a large number of women and some men.

My wife got a job and the employer glossed over salary negotiations with an "assumed sale" of minimum wage! I asked why she accepted that, and she said "There wasn't an opportunity to negotiate salary. They just gave me the 'standard rate'." She's not a meek woman. No one had ever told her that you could ask for more. With my help she got a 2x raise just by assertively asking for it.

She's bragged to her parents about it and I learn that her mother _had never negotiated a salary or raise in her entire life_. So I ask all my female friends: same thing, my mom: same thing, then my ardently feminist sister: same thing! It was a twilight zone moment for me.

The reasons why varied, but they could be generalized as an expectation of fairness combined with a small amount of irrational fear.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm just sick of stuff like this.

An employer is expecting that an employee is loyal, but nevertheless he's trying to noble the potential employee from the beginning.

But you would be dumb doing it the other way, right? Sorry, but this kind of smartness harms the whole society.

So all the humble and self-doubting people are getting less than the loud and playing ones. Sure, the loud ones are the better, more loyal employees, right?

But you have to learn to be louder! No I don't have to and I don't want, because I like it the way I am.

<comment><USER35> It has nothing to do with loudness. It has everything to do with having a spine and it being a business. It really is not that hard to negotiate and I am an introvert. Yet a lot of women I know do not even try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A long time ago, I hired a PhD from a highly prestigious Brazilian university. She passed the interview with flying colors, way beyond my expectations, and I was a bit ashamed to tell her the maximum budget I had - it was much less than someone with her experience was worth. She seemed more than happy to take my offer (which was as far as I could possibly go). Later I learned I was paying her more than 4 times what she earned as a researcher at the university. I don't know whether her male colleagues earned much more, but I was shocked by how little she made as a scientist.

To this day I am bittersweet about this. I am embarrassed I never paid her what she deserved - and I should have, for she is an outstanding professional - but I am also happy I helped her transition from an dead-end job at an academic institution to a fast-paced tech company and that this transition had a very positive impact on her career (last time I heard, she had a team of kick-ass programmers solving some devilishly hard computer-vision-related problem). I left a couple months after hiring her, but it's still a great story.

Well... There are better stories around here, sure, but this is still a good one.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sheryl Sandberg (COO at Facebook) gives an excellent talk about different attitudes that women have in careers: [http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I think the same statement could be made about introverts. Not quite sure if this is a gender issue or just a personality/mentality issue.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think a large part of the problem is that there is no way to figure out how much each person is actually worth.

Sure we have sites like indeed and salary.com that can give you estimates for the position and you also have glass door that gives you some salaries in your area...but they aren't solid numbers.software developer" makes, is pointless since there are so many alternatives, a VB developer is going to be making less than a Python developer.

Same goes for glassdoor...sure the numbers help, but you don't know if the number you are looking at is current...or if it was added 10 years ago when the site launched.

So here is a startup idea...create a site like salary.com but one designed solely for programmers/developers. Then create an interface, where someone can build out a job description/location to get a good feel of what a fair salary would be for that specific position.

<comment><USER40> > _no way to figure out how much each person is actually worth_ //

You're not buying a person though. In employer terms you're usually buying the completion of a particularly series of actions. These actions can be analysed and given a money value.

<comment><USER39> yes, but employers don't have an incentive to give a fair value for this.

<comment><USER41> Neither employers nor employees have incentive to give a fair value in one of the directions. I'm sure there are plenty of overpayed employees that aren't exactly falling over themselves to get a pay cut, nor companies falling over themselves to give employees a pay raise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder what would happen if you tried to make the negotion process as transparent as possible; something along the lines of:

"Look, I've read all of the negotiation strategy books, and clearly you're an expert in your field, so let's agree on the value that I bring to your company and find the right compensation package."

</comment><comment><USER43> I also hire people for as little money as I can.

<comment><USER44> Yes, but consider, they may very well alter their effort-level to suit the salary you pay them, thereby saving energy for things that matter more to them.

<comment><USER45> When we've had budget issues and need to hire someone I try to find a balance between what we can afford and the effort we're looking for. A good way to do this for us is to hire less than 40 hours a week. A savvy employee enjoys this, as it leaves them time to work on their own projects (which we fully support) while having a base income. We've had this system now for a few years that has worked wonderfully, and even though we've lost some great people to their own startups I'm really proud of them and we keep goodwill that allows us to call them back in a contract basis if needed.

<comment><USER46> We need more like you.

<comment><USER45> Oh, that made me blush, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Another factor could be that earlier interviews weed out the forceful negotiators among the women, because that personality trait makes women less likable. On the other hand, a lack of aggressiveness makes men appear weak.

<comment><USER45> There are many ways to negotiate without appearing aggressive. I'm sure 50% of the population can alert you to some of these methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm a bit bewildered there's an entire discussion about this based on a reddit post. While the OP's circumstances may be true at his or her company, is it still universally accurate? I don't actually know the answer, but based on several articles released in the last year I would wager this discrepancy is no longer uniform for all industries:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/02/she_m...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/02/she_makes_more_money_than_he_does_so.html)

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-29/strategy/3007...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-29/strategy/30074989_1_computer- science-men-tech-companies)

[http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/01/young-single-women- ea...](http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/01/young-single-women-earn-more- than-men/)

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2010-09-01-single- wo...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2010-09-01-single-women_N.htm)

There are still some statistics floating around that compare salaries without factoring in control variables (mostly based on generic census data), but these tend to be less accurate.

<comment><USER49> I think you _have_ to look at this on a per industry basis. There are many industries which don't even have price negotiating. The government, unionized jobs, a lot of manual and blue collar positions just pay a certain rate for a particular job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> But that's not a rule, it's because women don't negotiate well. This title can create a bit of unnecessary controversy, imho.

<comment><USER51> Controversial titles drive clickthroughs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> if you read the actual text it ends with

 _the one person who got the most out of us was a highly aggressive, very smart, very confident woman_

I guess they wanted to point out women, in general, aren't as aggressive in demanding higher salaries. Which whilst being an interesting observation seems kind of a non issue, there is no discrimination here.

<comment><USER45> The poster was clearly not discriminating. Reading this from a female perspective he was just telling facts, and I don't see this as HR's problem either. We women need to learn to negotiate, and learn how to do this while maintaining the need for social inclusion. There are still a lot more men in the tech business which does affect the manner in which you discuss money and it's hard even for me to negotiate (and I've been in business for years). It's a matter of telling your social-brain to shut up and put your personal- survival-brain first, maybe.

I don't see this as a gender issue so much as a personality-type issue, it's secondary that many women happen to have the personality-type where social concerns come first. When clients ask me for a discount we'll almost always give it, but I'll be much happier to work with a client who approaches the matter in a sociable way rather than a direct request for a discount (I find it tasteless, even though the money-brain side of me completely understands what is happening).

Just a side note: I have male employees who also suck at asking for raises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> From a free market perspective, do the women then have a competitive advantage in being hired? (Since the company can get the job done for less). Also, why does the company simply hire at the lower end of the wage level since they can apparently get a lot of women and some men to work for that kind of pay?

<comment><USER54> It's hard to fill technology jobs in the current competitive marketplace. So it's easier to take a mix of market rates and below-market rates and keep an average that is still below market rate than it is to exclude people who want market rate and still fill all the positions with qualified people.

I can't really speak to other fields, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If women will do the same work for less money, why don't we see companies that rely on high volume and low margins hire a lot of females (so that 90%+ of their employees are female)?

A 30% cost savings on staff seems like it could be a huge competitive advantage.

If such a company exists, I would love to have someone point it out.

<comment><USER56> Because there aren't enough females in the field?

<comment><USER55> I'd think that if the average female was making 70% of fair salary, a company could offer them 80% and get enough to fill a vast majority of their positions while still saving an incredible 20% on those employees, giving them a great competitive advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Women aren't the only ones who suffer from this, and I don't even know if it is something that can be attributed to all or even most women.

I remember when I worked at Red Hat, several years after being hired, I found out that there were people making half as much as me... it blew my mind. I asked for a lot when I got hired, more than I was worth, but I stuck to my guns and they gave me slightly less than I was asking.

The people who made half as much only asked for half as much. What manager wouldn't hire them if they were willing to work for half the salary? These were great people, too, by the way, they worked hard and were very skilled, but they were interoverts and were happy to take the "prestige" of working for a company like Red Hat as a sort of currency. Fuck that. Word hard, but don't aim low, ever.

</comment><comment><USER58> This article is behind the times. By the time most professional women have learned to ask for raises like some men do in 2011, those men will have moved on to a more advanced strategy to make more. It's similar to how an expensive university degree is becoming less useful just as women are earning more than 50% of them.

My point is that these men are competitive and they have momentum and the current salary-negotiation-education strategy won't result in parity. I don't see any reason it has to be that way, of course.

<comment><USER34> "... those men will have moved on to a more advanced strategy to make more."

Yes, I think it will go this way. A perfect fit is also the article about the neuroenhancers on hacker news. If you don't want to get behind, you will have to take them.

But what kind of life is this, or will it be in a even more competitive future?

If your self-worth is mostly based on making money or your career, than you will have to go this way.

But is this really the best possible life, the best spend life time?

<comment><USER58> Yes, it's acedic to measure the worth of oneself and peers by money alone. But given that men and women are both in it for money, competing for equality/inequality measured by sex, it's necessary for the runners up to aim for the leaders as moving targets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So for those who think this is a societal problem or a symptom of structural sexism in the tech field or etc., a genuine question. The OP seems to state that he negotiates with all people in the same manner, but the women are less likely to fight for themselves. What kind of solution do you suggest to combat this symptom of structural sexism? Should HR managers negotiate easier with women? Offer a higher starting point for negotiation?

It's a genuine question and interested in what people would see as a fair way to combat these kind of systematic biases toward women. I think there should be a way to combat these effects of society, but I certainly can't come up with a solution to this problem that seems fair to all parties involved.

</comment><comment><USER60> A very obvious question arises - why aren't they preferring to hire women - <USER3> sounds like they are ideal employees - lower pay expectation for the same work and rarely ask for a raise.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm not sure I really see the problem, or even how gender is at all relevant.

I generally don't bother negotiating salary either. Money isn't (even close to) the most important thing to me and I will take the first offer that puts me in a comfortable financial position -- assuming I actually want the job and I am excited to work for the company, of course.

Clearly there are males who don't negotiate hard and females who _do_. It's not about their gender, it's about their negotiating tactics!

Seems to me the correct title for this would be "I regularly hire people who don't bother negotiating higher salaries at 65% to 75% of people who do." (And that's ok!)

</comment><comment><USER62> Why does HN keep pushing these sexist posts to the main news area?

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm so tired of the double standard.

If men are raised and "socialized" that they are the rightful leader of the family, and it's not only okay but right to hit their wives, we hold them personally responsible for their actions.

If women are raised and "socialized" not to negotiate, we blame society. Because… women aren't smart enough, or whole humans enough, to do anything but what they're told?

Ladies, take control of your own destiny, or be a victim of your own making. It's your choice.

<comment><USER64> There are a couple of differences that make your reasoning invalid:

\- Women having a lower salary isn't as visible or as visibly wrong as men hitting their wives

\- Hitting one's wife is an _action_ , while not negotiating salary (well) is a non-action

Both things are wrong, and we need to try to inhibit both on the society level (by trying to raise responsible men, and women to negotiate salaries).

Though, I'm very certain that I, as a man, also need lessons in negotiating salaries - I'm quite gullible/trusting.

<comment><USER63> The comparison doesn't matter.

The fact remains: if men do what "society" has "conditioned" them to do, we hold them personally responsible. If women do, we rush to take care of them and save them from themselves.

The moral of the story: women are delicate flowers who cannot decide for themselves, and must be protected.

<comment><USER65> Negotiating salary and hitting someone are not the same thing. One is a violent act of assault and the other is a conversation to decide your rate of pay. Furthermore, some people do make excuses for men who commit violent acts on the basis of their social situation and upbringing, even though it is flawed to do so.

Also, I have personally seen and continue to see news stories, editorials, and blog posts about social conditions for men, esp. in regards to men taking part in "traditional" female roles, such as child care, certain types of labor, and even certain kinds of hobbies.

It is deliberately misleading to say that social conditioning and social issues treat one gender one way and another gender the other way, not too mention that such a position completely erases and doesn't acknowledge the existence of those who are not cisgendered and have a different experience in regard to their social experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Is it really smart for a company to press down salaries so far that they underpay?

My experience is that if someone is underpaid, they won't be around for long. It is _expensive_ with high churn rates.

<comment><USER67> As a manager, I thought this initially too. But here's the kicker - <USER4> employees sit there and take it. Sure they may complain about being underpaid, but few will move to another job.

I remember in my previous job, I had a senior sysadmin who had been with the company for 10 years and earning $70k ... we were hiring new sysadmins off the street for $100k. He complained about it and I tried everything I could to get him a payrise because he was a good performer - but company policy was that pay rises could not be more than 10% without exec approval. So the best I could offer him was $77k - in my justification for more, I compared market rates, how much it would cost the company if we had to replace him ($100k in salary alone let alone recruitment costs) etc - but the reply back from HR was 'we bet he won't leave'. And sure enough he didn't. It really saddened me - the fact is he could get a job elsewhere that paid way more, but he was too 'comfortable' in his position.

In my experience, people tell themselves all sort of stories why they don't leave - I'm still learning lots, I like the people I work with, I need a little more experience etc - all of this may be true to a degree, but going by the number that complain about being overworked/underpaid, a lot of them simply are excuses.

Companies know and understand this - and hence people often may get underpaid.

<comment><USER68> You just described me. I am underpaid by about £5k but I don't move because I like the people I work with. Are the people I work with worth £5,000 a year?

I'm pregnant at the moment though. It don't think it would be wise to willingly enter the job market in my current 'condition'.

<comment><USER67> There are lots of very good reasons to stay in a job even if you are being underpaid - it very much depends on your individual circumstances - in your case, I would probably stay too.

Just make sure you periodically evaluate your reasons and circumstances to make sure you over time that you aren't falling into a trap of 'comfort' for not leaving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is bullshit: it is passing the buck. This is strictly blaming women for their problems, without acknowledging the structural sexism that exists in virtually all tech fields.

<comment><USER69> Here's an example of what I'm talking about regarding this topic: [http://acceptableparity.blogspot.com/2011/10/four-ways- men-s...](http://acceptableparity.blogspot.com/2011/10/four-ways-men-stunt- womens-careers.html)

<comment><USER70> That article is painting a fantasy where there's no information asymmetry or self-interested players in an organization. In reality no one's got the time or interest to follow along behind _every_ employee (male or female) going over their work product with a microscope in hopes of identifying and elevating talent.

The closest you see in the real world is fast-track programs where a few anointed employees are given challenging high-profile assignments and challenged to prove themselves before the next promotion. This approach doesn't scale, but it's better than nothing and so it's hard to resent companies for attempting it. As an employee outside of the fast track, it's up to you to change your situation. Often it's easier to get on someone else's fast track (i.e. at a new employer) rather than trying to catch a train you already missed at your current employer.

Given the limited attention and political capital your managers can use to help your career growth, one simply must take it upon themselves to craft and drive their own vision for career growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> What is the big deal? This is a reddit post in the feminist subredditum.... IMO this is just fear-mongering and exploiting the sensitivities of the (mostly male & slightly nerdy) tech workforce. The point is that women are NOT being actively discriminated against. If women do not want to ask for more salary, that is their own fault. You could say the same for recent immigrants/visa-applicants who do not want to piss off their employer and will work for pennies so that they can remain in the country.

</comment><comment><USER72> Oh thank goodness! It's all the women's fault. I was afraid people would have to address the residual sexism left in the corporate world.

Not to detract from the story, which by all anecdotal evidence in this thread appears to be valid, but this is a dangerous train to jump on - I would say akin to blaming racial disparity on 'cultural issues'.</comment>


Show HN: Mutato -Auto mute WhatsApp/slack/YouTube when you join conference call - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mutato/ikdcpjghdghlhnibgbilkbpamaobimio <comment><AUTHOR> µTato Auto mutes Chrome when you Join a Video Conference Call. No more whatsapp/Slack notification annoying you and irritating your team when you are on a zoom/meet call. No more frantically looking for that news website that started auto playing an ad in the middle if your conference call. And of course, you can unmute everything just with a click of a button.

Watch Demo here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLadb8gLNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLadb8gLNk)</comment>


Docstoc launches Itunes for documents. - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/docstore/

<comment><USER2> By "iTunes" they mean "iTunes store", not "iTunes library". For most companies, having a network-accessible iTunes library of documents would be more useful.</comment>


Ask PG: What are your thoughts on The Underground Myth? - <AUTHOR> http://phrack.org/issues.html?issue=65&id=13#article

<comment><USER2> Here is my take:

First, I observe two broad primary meanings of "hacker" in computer culture today. One is an individual whose interest is in computer security. The other is an individual whose interest is in creative programming. The person has a drive to create, invent, to make computers do things that they have not done before.

The former is what the article is about. The latter is what I understand PG means when he says "hacker".

Second, I don't buy in the least the phrack author's take on the future demise of the security industry do to drying up at the well of capability. This is bollocks. I read a lot of sour grapes coming from the author that the old style hacker as cracker culture may be dying or dead. That I don't know, I'm not nor have been part of that community. But if one looks at Common Criteria (<http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org> ), or DoD Instruction 8500.2 (<http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/html/850002.htm>) one will see that security quality is far from dead. One doesn't have to be part of an underground culture to "get security." Instead it has become very formalized and institutionalized, emerging from an "Art form" into an engineering discipline.

And for kicks check out the US Air Force Cyber Command ( <http://www.afcyber.af.mil> )

EDIT: I have to add: Yes I have experience working with DoD software security contractors. Some of whom are very capable even though they did not come from the underground.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know hardly anything about this world.

</comment><comment><USER4> Despite the author's assertion "There will be none of the nostalgia, melodrama, black hat rhetoric or white hat over-analysis" the article is just that. Don't read too much into it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm genuinely interested in what pg's commentary on this might be so I'll bump.</comment>


What Is the "Real Face of the Yakuza" Seen After Spending Half a Year with Them? - <AUTHOR> http://ignition.co/449 <comment><USER2> Where can I see this documentary?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is their official web. [http://www.893-kenpou.com/](http://www.893-kenpou.com/) The third row on the right you can watch a trailer. Now playing in mini theater in Tokyo and Nagoya Japan. Starting in February in Yokohama and Osaka. Let me know if you would like more info since all information are in Japanese.</comment></comment>


Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-cloud-platform-live-blending-iaas-and-paas-moores-law-for-the-cloud.html <comment><USER2> I run goread ([http://goread.io](http://goread.io)) on App Engine. Doing the math by hand, I'll get a 25% reduction in costs. This comes from cost reduction of instance hours and datastore writes, and free SSL and datastore small ops. I didn't get the advertised 30% because my largest single cost is datastore storage, which didn't drop. I'm happy with how this all went.

I saw another comment asking about app engine pricing. It is priced based on many different usages: instance hours (where instances are automatically added and removed by app engine itself), writes, reads, and storage to their NoSQL datastore (far and away its best feature, which no other provider in the world offers). They charged small amounts for other things, too. I was paying $9/month for SSL and other small one-offs. This new pricing basically eliminated all the other one-offs, making them free. It reduced the number of kinds of things that are billed. Before the datastore had 3 pricing tiers depending on the operation. They made the cheapest free and the other two the same price (reducing the price of the more expensive). Overall things got much simpler and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Google Storage pricing of $0.026/GB (or $0.020/GB for reduced durability) made my jaw drop.

I spend over $6k/month on Amazon S3, and this pricing from Google has me flabbergasted. Our architecture just uses S3 as a pluggable commodity, so a few hours of coding is going to result in a new $4000/month in savings from this announcement. Wow!

Edit: misplaced decimal!

<comment><USER4> As long as you don't need to use the external network with that data. The network costs dominate the price if you need to serve up any of that data.

<comment><USER5> Yes, what is that price ?

That is, what does 1 GB cost to upload and then store for one month ?

<comment><USER6> [https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud- storage/#pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/#pricing)

Almost all of these services have ingress free, its egress that costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS.

tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE.

In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually something much more basic: trust. After the abrupt deaths of services like Google Reader and Wave and surprises like the GAE repricing nightmare, customers simply don't trust that Google won't wake up one morning and decide that self-driving cars are actually a lot more interesting than running infrastructure-as-a-service -- and announce the death (or repricing) of GCE. AWS, by contrast, generates no such doubts: one can say what one will about Amazon (and there are certainly many reasons why I believe the future is not AWS's alone), but AWS services do not have a trust issue. (Or, to recast it in the aphorism once said of previous giants like IBM and Microsoft, no one gets fired for deploying on AWS.)

It will be interesting to watch the GCE announcement unfold, but previous Google announcements have lacked a critical ingredient: IaaS customers. (Amazingly, journalists don't seem to notice or demand this; smaller companies can't get away with this, but the aura of Google seems to give them a free pass.) If Google wants to really compete in this space, they should pull across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer -- at any cost. In doing this, they would probably learn both how profound the trust issue is -- and at the same time learn any remaining technical hurdles that they need to clear to really compete with AWS. There are several high profile AWS customers to pick from, but the obvious customer to start with is Netflix: they care about GCE's putative differentiators of price and performance -- and Amazon is a mortal threat to Netflix as a competitor, which should give some boardroom-level urgency to the discussion. Until Google gets Netflix (or an equivalent) on GCE, I don't think that the price drops will move the needle because they don't address the fundamental issue of trust. (Indeed, one could make the argument that they exacerbate it: if GCE is a money loser for Google, the feared slaying of GCE may actually be more likely, not less.)

Finally, if GCE can't get a marquis AWS IaaS customer, how about just a marquis Google customer? Knowing that new Google services are being deployed exclusively on GCE (by executive fiat if needed) may itself go a long way to make Google much more competitive in the space by knowing that GCE at least has the trust of Google, even if no one else...

<comment><USER8> This announcement make me even trust Google less.

First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore's law and how the service should be cheaper.

Why do I trust google less? Because I don't get a feeling Google has any long- term strategy here. It seems like they're winging it every 6-12 months. In contrast Amazon and AWS have been steadily marching in one direction.

I want to like GCE/GAE, I still run services from it, it's good for some use cases. But in back of my mind, I know google can pull the rug at any moment, depending on the popular flavor of the month.

So what am I saying? Use it at your own risk. It's good for somethings but there are other solutions and there are businesses where cloud services is their main or only business. You know those guys will steadily innovate and build up their services.

<comment><USER9> I would not touch this with a 10-foot pole. A few weeks ago Larry Page was asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at the expense of everything else)

Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

<comment><USER10> Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?

<comment><USER11> Probably not - Google is a big company and there are bound to be a number of employees not pleased with current direction at any time. It could be entirely personal reasons such as wanting to move to the GCE team but being denied because of a push towards mobile - maybe now he's forced to develop for Android and he likes iOS (if what he says is true, who knows?).

<comment><USER12> No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself.

Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.

<comment><USER13> > Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't.

I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.

Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.

<comment><USER14> It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions.

Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.

I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.

<comment><USER13> Okay, so turn into an incubator. Divest all of your groups except Adwords, and create a holding company for your cash for investing in startups.

The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and acquihires.

<comment><USER14> I think that's a viable option.

Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anyone planning to use google cloud storage as an s3/cloudfront alternative to host public content, pay close attention to request pricing. Retrieving an object through its HTTP url is considered a class B XML request type by Google Cloud Storage. That is 1.3x - 2.5x times more expensive than cloudfront and s3 respectively.

<comment><USER16> I don't understand why people expose files they expect to receive significant traffic on public buckets, instead of using a caching reverse proxy from somewhere with cheaper data transfer rates.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Especially when they can get a giant Google-sized, caching reverse proxy (CDN) simply by setting cache headers appropriately.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable- cac...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-caching-with- gae)

<comment><USER15> How does that help when your content is in Cloud Storage? Is there an app which serves content out of Cloud Storage and runs on app engine? (I haven't worked with app engine)

You can set caching headers on Cloud Storage also. But that doesn't help when 1\. you have a large number of requests with cold cache 2\. want the flexibility to keep cache time small. Unlike cloudfront there is no purge method in GCS. GCS doesn't guarantee to serve new versions until the old one's cache time has expired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh Boy ! This is quite a steep decrease.. So if I am reading it reading right, this makes S3 ~300 percent more expensive ( 2.6 vs 8.5 ).

Sounded more like a April 1 hoax ad to me at first ( too good to be true ). It will be also interesting to see how much this drives down S3 prices.

</comment><comment><USER19> Its an interesting choice of battlegrounds. I find the infrastructure vs infrastructure wars fascinating by how Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it.

<comment><USER20> > Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now > productizing the 'remainders'

This is a myth. Both companies created their infrastructure businesses as separate entities by leveraging their datacenter expertise, but they were not 'remainders'.

<comment><USER19> Very interesting, this doesn't match my experience, can you say more about how you reason to the claim that Google created a separate 'infrastructure business entity' ?

<comment><USER21> I am an ex-AWS employee. I can verify that AWS was founded as a new line of business using new servers purchased for AWS. The idea that AWS was started using Amazon's spare capacity is widely repeated but false. Amazon is definitely leveraging their expertise and not their physical machines. Source: I've seen the original pitch deck for Amazon S3.

<comment><USER22> AWS may not have used Amazon's spare _hardware_ , but it certainly used Amazon's spare _code_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku.

Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward.

I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers love, it should "just work".

<comment><USER24> Long-time Appengine developer here. I'm glad that GCE is here now, because a lot of the criticism of GAE came down to people expecting infrastructure (and infrastructure prices) instead of a platform. A massively and seamlessly scalable platform.

Which brings me to my point: yes, GAE does have a steeper learning curve, but almost all of that is due to scalability constraints. If you think you will ever need to scale past one server, it's well worth the initial pain.

Or put another way, you get to choose between a small development learning curve at the start for a pretty scary sysadmin learning curve when you need to scale your app.

<comment><USER25> Yep. AppEngine is a platform, not a pure infrastructure offering. GCE is the pure infra offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From @clstokes

With today's Google Cloud price cuts: \- an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month \- an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

<comment><USER26> Digital Ocean is still cheaper.

Amazing how competition works.

<comment><USER27> DO is a completely different service. It's Apples to Oranges. You don't go with GC or AWS just for a bare-bones VM, you use them if you already use (or want to use) their greater portfolio of services.

If you are just using EC2 or GC for VM hosting, you are doing it wrong and are throwing away a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone here have experience using Google's compute engine? In particular, I'm curious to know what the reliability is like, and how performant the storage is.

<comment><USER29> (I'm a Google employee, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)

I just took ownership of the godoc.org documentation service, and am running it on Compute Engine. It's been a great experience so far.

I've noticed a few benefits that Compute Engine has over EC2 (the other virtual machine service that I have used). The "gcutil" command line tool is more intuitive, Google's Cloud Console is more responsive than the AWS console, the general performance is better (especially disk and startup time), Compute supports live migration of running VMs (avoid downtime), and finally Compute bills by the minute, not the hour, so you can spin up a bunch of high- spec VMs for a quick test without running up big charges (I got a little burned by this with EC2, in the past).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice - it looks like for the Compute Engine, you essentially get "AWS Reserved Instance"-like pricing without requiring an up-front payment.

</comment><comment><USER31> This should drive Azure pricing down as well which is good for those of us using it!

</comment><comment><USER32> I did the comparison with AWS On-Demand and RIs, and I have to admit, very impressive! Here is the blog: [http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost- analysis/google-sl...](http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost- analysis/google-slashes-cloud-prices-google-vs-aws-price-comparison)

</comment><comment><USER33> My startup is probably going to use Google storage at this point. We are hosting video that only gets accessed a couple times, but needs to be available for 1 year, so the reduced storage cost is going to be big for us.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice to see support for both their free git private repo's and github.

There are probably use cases of just using free Google private repo's that might take some business away from github.

</comment><comment><USER35> Google is about 2 years too late. Many startups switched to AWS in droves and never looked back. The failure is that Google would have to give away GAE, GCE and friends in order for folks to switch because the work to change stack tooling would be very costly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does Google Drive support symlinks (symbolic links) on OS X like Dropbox does? If so, I will immediately stop using Dropbox and switch to Google Drive, because it's now five times cheaper than Dropbox.

<comment><USER6> I didn't see anything that mentioned this affecting google drive - did I miss something?

<comment><USER36> Sorry, it may not be directly related, but Google also slashed prices for Google Drive about ten days ago.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big- pri...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big-price- drop-100gb-now-costs-1-99-a-month/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If and when AWS responds will be quite interesting. GCE launched with lockstep product offering and pricing with AWS. This is the first real movement away from that lockstep position. On one hand it is competitive, on the other hand does it speak to other underlying issues: maybe GCE uptake has not been as expected and needs to do something drastic to compete with AWS?

<comment><USER38> You always need to do something drastic to compete with a widely perceived market leader; its the cost of being late to the party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Prices are effective April 1, 2014". Unfortunate date for such unbelievable price drops.

<comment><USER40> Exactly 10 years from when Gmail was launched to the public, with its massive 1 GB of storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I didn't see the automatic price reduction for AppEngine. Did I just miss that?

<comment><USER41> From the Google announcement, regarding AppEngine: "We've lowered pricing for instance-hours by 37.5%, dedicated memcache by 50% and Datastore writes by 33%. In addition, many services, including SNI SSL and PageSpeed are now offered to all applications at no extra cost."

Pricing is here: [https://cloud.google.com/products/app- engine/#pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine/#pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I hope there's comparison chart for cost per computation/memory of cloud services, based on benchmarking.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this partially an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of the Box IPO? If there's going to be a price war anyway, better to start it now and prevent a competitor from amassing a big war chest.

I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so could be way off base.

<comment><USER44> How does losing > $100e6 per year result in "amassing a big war chest"?

<comment><USER43> Raising a $250MM IPO is amassing a war chest. If that becomes harder, they become less competitive.

<comment><USER45> They're not competitive right now, from the sounds of it - they're losing a lot of money, very fast.

<comment><USER46> I don't see how Box could possibly compete on pricing with Google storage, considering the high volume of hardware purchases Google is doing and high volume discounts it's getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Maybe I'm the only one but the lack of ability for me to use GCE for a personal server to become familiar with the service is a huge deal.

AWS offers a free tier. This let me play with AWS on my own time gratis. I think GCE needs this... unless they have it and I'm just not aware.

<comment><USER48> I built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.

<comment><USER47> I'm not as concerned with the app engine as I am with the compute engine.

app engine is more like AWS beanstalk where as compute engine is more like ec2?

Maybe I'm wrong here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Now if only Google would announce spot pricing for the cloud compute instances much like EC2 has...

</comment><comment><USER50> This is great news for all cloud platforms and product development, amazon, azure and now google, repeat.

Don't you which there were multiple broadband providers like this that could continue commoditizing bandwidth rather than trying to limit supply?

</comment><comment><USER51> Can anyone explain the "App Engine Pricing" in layman terms?

</comment><comment><USER52> this is where, Google should keep focusing than going after and pursuing things which other people can do better. I meant I am a die-hard Apple fanboi, But If they launch a search engine, I am definitely not gonna switch at once.

Google is essentially a web-services company a SaaS at its best. Stay focused on these services, and keeping bringing awesome things like this.

PS: I'd love if they would drop Google apps pricing too ($5/user). Please Larry/Brin? and let's put a final nail into office coffin.

</comment><comment><USER53> Does the managed VM feature mean we can finally run any language / framework on it?

</comment><comment><USER54> Can you deploy and host websites like Microsoft Azure on this?

<comment><USER55> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Has there been any talk of getting some of the holes in google's cloud offering filled? I would switch to google in a heart beat but I am using route53, SQS, cloudfront, glacier and VPC. That is a lot to be giving up. I also didn't see anything about any sort of health/service checking/alerting support, but I probably just missed it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow. I'd drop AWS like it's hot if I was Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER58> Hi Larry,

Thanks for crapping on my IPO plans.

-Aaron</comment>


WorksHub issues, a brand new way of using your OSS contributions - <AUTHOR> https://www.works-hub.com/learn/introducing-workshub-issues-dot-dot-dot-f197c <comment><USER2> i definitely like to see companies open-source contributions ahead of applying to a new role</comment>