Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mandrill.com/important-changes-to-mandrill.html <comment><USER2> I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this:

1\. Any HN user trying to figure out what to do next, leave me your email on this Google Form: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgf...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgfEh7r11OmPiTo_7e0/viewform)

2\. Any transactional email provider, write a blog post or something with how to migrate to your platform. Include differences vs. Mandrill with regard to pricing, API, DNS, etc and anything else you can think of to ease our transition - maybe promise of an upcoming Mandrill template importer, coupon to price-match, etc. Email me the link (contact info in HN profile)

3\. In one week (Thursday, March 3, 1200 UTC), I'll email everyone in (1) the responses I get from (2)

I promise not to spam people who leave their email address and will only ever send just the single email next week, and then delete the Google Form and its responses. Check my HN history, I'm just a developer trying to figure out what to do now. My hope is that enough hot leads in one place will be incentive enough for the various competitors to spend a bit of time writing a detailed migration plan (which would help me!), and they probably can't make a good one while this thread is still on the front page.

<comment><USER3> Hi this is Joshua Perina, CEO of Elastic Email.

[http://elasticemail.com](http://elasticemail.com) has a very simliar pricing structure to Mandrill (their old pricing) including 25000 emails per month free.

We've been around since 2010, are growing fast and have sent billions of emails. Plus, we love our customers.

Mandrill refugees are welcome!

<comment><USER4> We are using actually on my company Mandrill and Elastic Email and, given this mandrill change, are migrating from both services to a new one.

Elastic Email has been buggy for us since day one. The whole hooks system is very buggy and has cause serious damage to our image with some clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a long time user... What the hell are they smoking over there.

Edit...

Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further.

Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you.

Since there is fuck all chance they will backflip on this, who should I migrate to, I've honestly been using mandrill for years and have no idea who offers comparable services because I was so fucking happy with mandrill I didn't need to look elsewhere... I hope a mandrill employee is on HN because if this actually happens they're going to lose 10 paying customer accounts when I find someone else hope your shitty management plan is accounting for loss of goodwill and loss of customers.

<comment><USER6> FWIW We're switching to Sparkpost (I'm not affiliated with Sparkpost). They do the transactional email for the big dogs like Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc and have a pretty simple UI. Just throwing that out there for all the fellow Mandrill refugees.

<comment><USER5> I just checked out Sparkpost, and unfortunately, they seem to have a crippling price discrepancy. Their new "express" plan is sort of comparable to what Mandrill charged, but as soon as I grow to the point where I need more, they are x3 the price. Not sure what they were thinking with that sort of thing, are they trying to discourage customers from growing their email volume on the platform?

I find this sort of "nonsensical pricing" very off putting. If your pricing page is so obviously 'wtf' like this, how can I take them seriously, even if they do the emails for Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, they could be the secret real host for Gmail for all it matters to me... Their pricing page tells me they have a screw loose.

<comment><USER7> We tweaked our pricing today so 100k free and fixed the confusing plans - check it out [https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing](https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing) We have been doing transactional email for 15 years for the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, Zillow smaller developers and startups and are not going anywhere - we are very developer friendly. Also check out [https://developers.sparkpost.com](https://developers.sparkpost.com)

<comment><USER8> Which pricing is correct? [https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing](https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing) or [http://pages.sparkpost.com/sparkpost-vs- mandrill](http://pages.sparkpost.com/sparkpost-vs-mandrill)

<comment><USER7> We were midway through our pricing update at the time - but both pages should now have the latest prices, including our 100K free tier. Please try it out and if you have questions you can find us at developers.sparkpost.com and slack.sparkpost.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Got the mail this morning (Europe) and my first thought was "WTF"? Then "How the hell do I migrate all my customers"?

I've used Mandrill for transactional mails for 4-5 years now. And always when I've had a project that requires some kind of e-mail notifications, password resets etc. I've always recommended Mandrill to my customers.

So here I am, running and handling 8+ Mandrill accounts (many customers requires exclusive access to account, have one for personal projects etc. ). A few of them in the free tier, most of them payed.

These changes will involve a whole lot of headache for me, and will sadly affect a few of my customers too.

Firstly; from around $40/month as our e-mail costs are today; to more than a total of $240/month. Not the end of the world in itself, but:

Secondly: NOT A SINGLE ONE of my customers, or me, want or have any use of MailChimp. They are two very different services with two very different purposes. Now I will have walk through with my customers on how they set up a Mailchimp account, explain to them why they have to do this and merge the account with their Mandrill one, explain to them "Oh, no – this is just a $10/month service that you don't need, or want, but have to signup to to enable those password reset emails or yours".

Oh man... Of course I will change service in most of these cases, but that's also a pain, have to get in touch with the customers IT-departments to change DNS-settings, verify senders and all that – not a great start to this day...

The whole idea is what we in Sweden call "hål i huvudet"; "Hole in the head" (as in missing a brain, not shooting someone).

<comment><USER10> Completely agree with all of your points. I just finished migrating from Mandrill to a new Sendgrid account and it was pretty seamless (although I had a head start because I have used Sendgrid before). It took me about 45 minutes to update everything, including: creating an account, adding appropriate DNS records for whitelisting, and updating my application and server settings.

It's extremely unfortunate that we have to do this, but no way would I stay with Mandrill after this decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is something more serious than migration and price increase. By migrating to mailchimp you are agreeing to mailchimp's terms and service. If I understand it correctly, now they can read all your customers' email address and content (presumably for machine learning & send optimization). This is in direct conflict with the agreement we signed with our customers on data sharing. Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be deliberately omitted in mandrill communication to mislead and collect data to create "network effect" from our customer data.

<comment><USER12> Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous: [http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.com/privacy/) vs new: [http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/](http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/) Item 5.1

Changes from:

      That information may include your IP address, name,
      physical address, email address, phone number, credit
      card information, and other details like gender,
      occupation, and other demographic information.

to

      That information may include your and your Subscribers'
      IP address, name, physical address, email address,
      phone number, credit card information, operating
      system, as well as details like gender, occupation,
      location, birth date, purchase history, and other
      demographic information.

<comment><USER11> "your Subscribers' email address, credit card information, purchase history" \- These are super sensitive! It takes more than 3 months of legal process and convincing to get our customers to share these under strict data privacy clause. And here comes mailchimp and want to sniff it under the hood in the name of migration. They will literally land us in jail, if we don't migrate.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, this is a very big change in policy, and I suspect it might catch out Mandrill customers who don't read the fine print. The privacy policies for a couple of web applications I work with, for example, are incompatible with this new policy.

<comment><USER13> Guys, are you sure about this? Mailchimp subscribers and Mandrill users are not the same thing... Otherwise the Mailchimp cost would skyrocket, as they charge users in terms of subscribers amount

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is too bad. Mandrill was a great product I've put several clients and my own apps on. None of these have any use for Mailchimp integration.

In December, they began to require the more strict DNS configs for new accounts... that was fine, but this latest change is horrendous in that it's giving business' who've used this service for years, an ultimatum... one that favors finding a new service.

It's going to be work one way or another so I guess I'll be moving mine and client apps over to a more stable provider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like you're in the same boat as me.

Just quickly tried out Mailgun and SendGrid today as alternatives. SendGrid looks more stable, but Mailgun has the advantage of at least being able to see subject lines in emails sent (which can be a great help when troubleshooting for clients).

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I saw your other post... same boat. It was so nice to confirm emails were sent/received while testing.

There's one project we integrated a private messaging system deeply into their APIs. There's not gonna be a choice on moving that one, but all others will move.

Not sure if it's more greed or incompetence behind the flippant decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Copying my comment from another thread because I want my rage to be heard!

Seriously cannot trust a new product offering from _anyone_ these days.

Newsletters and transactional emails are _not_ the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a _second_ monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally _free_ until recently.

Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.

I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.

I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.

</comment><comment><USER16> At work we have built an email delivery platform on top of Mandrill for marketing/transactional emails. We have many clients that signed up for their own accounts and give us api tokens to send on their behalf.

This is going to suck. Not only are they doing this but now we only have 45 days to migrate those customers to mailchimp accounts they neither want nor need and we don't get to see the headaches there until March 15th. What the actual fuck?!?

</comment><comment><USER2> Wait, so is there more detailed pricing information somewhere? I'm trying to figure out how this will affect us.

What does a "a paid monthly MailChimp account" mean? The cheapest such plan seems to be +$20/mo, so that's not so bad. Effectively just a small price bump.

However, the MailChimp plans are confusing. Does every transactional recipient need to be a "subscriber"? If that's the case, then we're looking at more than a +$1000/mo increase! An order of magnitude more than we're paying for Mandrill now!

Edit: Just saw I missed this from the post - "Our billing and pricing model is also changing ... Mandrill credits will be sold in blocks of 25,000 emails. Blocks will start at $20 per month." So the transactional pricing seems to be increasing about 4x as well.

<comment><USER17> I just contacted the mailchimp service twice and they confirmed it to me.

you have to take the monthly plan that matches your mandrill users. So if you are using mandrill to send mails to 90.000 users, you have to buy a monthly plan of 90.000 users AND the mandrill package prices, which means 450$/month for mailchimp and 4*20$ for mandrill.

<comment><USER5> This confirms my worst fears. We just added a large wave of new email addresses to one of our routine emails, taking it from 2k per day to 17k per day.

We currently expect to pay approximately $75 to $100 USD per month with this volume of email.

With the new "MailChimp pricing", this will cost us $150 for a MailChimp account with enough subscribers, then between $270 and $400 USD per month in data packs.

So from about $75 to $100 USD we get forced up to $420-$550

About a 5x price rise.

Nice going MailChimp...

Clearly this is an attempt to squeeze more profit out of Mandrill. Was there a management change at MailChimp or something?

<comment><USER17> ok, i just received a mail from mailchimp that the information provided to me by two of their service agents is indeed wrong. You really "just" need a monthly paid account, which still is pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Based on their latest release of pricing information, I've done an old vs new pricing comparison. Hopefully no errors - the tiered pricing is more complex to calculate than a flat pricing.

From what I understand, if your volume is i.e. 1,000,000, you pay for 20 blocks (25,000 ea) at $20, plus 20 blocks at $18 for a total of ($20 * 20) + ($18 * 20) = $760/month, plus $10 for MailChimp account.

      Volume	Old Pricing	New Pricing
      10,000	9.95		30
      25,000	9.95		30
      50,000	14.95		50
      100,000	24.95		90
      300,000	64.95		250
      700,000	144.95		554
      1,000,000	204.95		770
      2,000,000	365.2		1410
      4,000,000	656.2		2450
      8,000,000	1157.45		4050

So, pricing has gone up 3x to 4x across the board. They're much more expensive than both SendGrid and Mailgun now, and even more expensive than Postmark, and their credits expire at the end of the month. Hoooly crap.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh great. Now we'll have to go and touch a system that has been working flawlessly for years. That'll end well won't it? So as a big thank you I'll migrate it to another provider while I'm there.

There is something off in the tone of the announcement.

<comment><USER19> Definitely. I noticed the tone too. Somewhat brash and arrogant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Two months notice and a huge price increase ultimatum. This heavily affects a lot of Discourse open source installs as we recommended Mandrill as an email provider for almost two years.

Free product so they can do what they want, but this feels a bit abrupt (how about six months to transition) and cruel (forced MailChimp account plus giant leap in pricing).

Would it cost them so much in brand loyalty to be a bit more generous with time to transition and cost?

<comment><USER12> They mentioned abuse of the free service as rationale - there are plenty of things they could have done to avoid this. Charge $1 for the free tier, for example. Massive slap in the face - we'll be reviewing our use of MailChimp for our marketing as well. Campaign Monitor might get a knock on the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost vs support.

Hit our support team (firstname.lastname@example.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.

Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> So, realtime feedback...

I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.

Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.

I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since Mandrill is dead to me.)

      > Every Mandrill account comes with 2,000 free trial sends.
      > Once you've finished your free trial, it's $9.95/month for 25,000 emails.
      > After that, we charge on a per-thousand-email basis.
      > Since we build discounts into our payment structure,
      > your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email.
      >
      > $9.95             up to 25k emails per month
      > $0.20/thousand    next 1m emails per month
      > $0.15/thousand    next 5m emails per month
      > $0.10/thousand    remaining emails
      > Add a dedicated IP for $29.95 / month.

      Old Mandrill pricing: $10 + $X per email (with volume discounts)
      New Mandrill pricing: $X per Y emails
      MailChimp pricing: $X per Y emails per Z recipients per month
      Sendwithus (You) pricing: $X per Y email recipients per month

Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.

<comment><USER21> That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds up more than the cost of each individual send).

<comment><USER22> I'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs for providing that value.

I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> $20 w/MailChimp Transactional: 25,000 mails

$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails

So let me know if you're thinking about switching. I'd be happy to intro you to someone on our team.

Disclosure: I'm with SendGrid. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for our clients).

<comment><USER23> That makes a lot of sense! On the backend, we've already built a way to view content samples (for compliance reasons, e.g. if something looks spammy and we need a human to confirm). It would certainly be possible to expose that functionality to users. I'll run that by the PM on the relevant team - you're not alone in wanting that feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just tried SendGrid out now, unless I'm mistaken you can't even see subject line in the emails that are sent, is this correct?

<comment><USER23> You can look in the Email Activity tab to see a history of events, along with their category (you might use this for "receipt", "forgot password", etc.).

[https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html](https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html)

If you're doing one-to-many campaigns, we also have a marketing email product called Marketing Campaigns that offers a more detailed content history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As an aside from the topic at hand, this article is 3 hours old and has 52 points. Why is this hidden on the 11th page?

<comment><USER20> It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.

<comment><USER24> Possibly Mandrill/MailChimp employees flagging it because it's casting a bad light on them. They've disabled comments on their blog posts too.

There seems to be a lot of backlash against what they're doing and they likely don't want people to see that.

<comment><USER12> Yeah... I can't imagine any of their customers are happy about this. I haven't seen a single positive reply about it on twitter, HN, reddit etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Add me to the list of people very shocked by this. We've been exceedingly happy paying customers of Mandrill since its beta, and we use it in all of our services that we offer. This change really makes no sense to me and pretty much ensures we'll be looking elsewhere. Pretty frustrating having to move aside actually important user-facing projects to completely re-do our e-mail systems.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ok, from the sounds of it, all MailChimp has to do to keep our business (and thousands others from the sounds of it) is to change the requirement to a Free-Tier MailChimp account instead of being a Paid MailChimp account.

I _get_ their desire to have a single unified system that manages everything, but our situation is: we use Mandrill to send the System Info emails on [https://www.whatismybrowser.com](https://www.whatismybrowser.com) to thousands of people per month. We have absolutely zero requirements for a mailing list.

If they're asking us to pay for a whole system we won't use; it's not even a discussion, we'll be leaving and they lose money.

Go figure.

MailChimp's competitors must be rubbing their hands in glee.

Personally, I don't blame them.

<comment><USER27> The per-message pricing is still way more expensive, but that's not nearly as bad as how they've dumped this on customers.

If a PaaS provider doesn't realize that people build tons of code, businesses, infrastructures, pricing models, etc. off of them than they'll never gain the trust of savvy purchasers. The way they've effectively end-of-lifed Mandrill w/ 2 months notice and zero response to complaints is a slap-in-the-face to a customer-base that has largely loved their product.

Short of a response that recognizes they went about this badly it would be hard to ever depend on a Mailkimp product again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Bye Bye Mandrill. I have been a very happy customer for several years, but your actions will now leave me with many hours of unwanted work. This is unacceptable, so I'm moving to SendGrid (probably).

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been a paying customer of Mandrill for years (migrated two different employers to them, ran probably tens of millions of emails through them) and am a) really sad to see it go and b) completely freaking baffled by the tone and out-of-the-blue nature of the announcement.

If I wanted Mailchimp, I'd have Mailchimp. It's not the slightest bit useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is such a shame.. I have no idea need for any of mailchimps services, yet now I'm forced to pay for it? Why? From what I can figure out from the pricing page, this nearly 10x's our monthly cost. NOPE

Later Mandrill.

I'm more sad than angry.. it was an incredible product.

</comment><comment><USER31> Fuck this. Fuck this so fucking hard.

Fuck you, Mandrill. Fuck you.

(I'm a lil mad)

</comment><comment><USER32> Time to fire up HN search for that product where you host your own Mandrill clone that relies on SES on the backend and is like 5 times cheaper. Anyone remember what it was?

Hmm: I guess I was thinking of [https://sendy.co](https://sendy.co) which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.

<comment><USER33> Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to this service, having previously used Sendy.

Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES, which include SendGrid, Sparkpost, Leadersend, Elasticemail and MailGun. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel communication will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh Man-drill . . . I wish they would have went with a lower limit on their free plan or even low cost plan that replaces current free plan. I use them on lots of client sites with low volume emails. This is going to take some time to sort out.

SendGrid's interface and dashboard are horrible.

Plus they don't store the message text for recent messages like Mandrill where it's viewable from the dashboard.

Any other options out there for free or low cost or with a decent dashboard.

<comment><USER21> If you want to enjoy SendGrid deliverability but a different interface, check us out: sendwithus.com

We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)

<comment><USER35> Jeez man I think we all get it. You have a product you want to sell. Spamming is not the way to promote your email product.

<comment><USER21> We had more than a few really worried people reach out (before this thread), this change is very worrying to some. I'll dial it back though, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder in what Venn diagram do the sections of "People who need newsletters" and "People who do transactional emails" overlap that much that this really makes sense?

There's also a blogpost about this by the founder: [http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to- mandrill/](http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/) (side note: comments seem to be open there but when posting there, first I got a "you are posting too quickly", then trying again it went into moderation)

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't believe this. I use their free plan because I send a minimal amount of email per month. Absolutely no way I'll consider going to $20 per month for my basic needs. I'll probably go ahead and switch newsletter services over to something else too. Who knows when they may get a wild hair and do away with their free account there too.

<comment><USER38> It's actually $30/mo minimum with Mailchimp's new pricing. $10/mo for the Mailchimp account + $20/mo for up to 25,000 monthly emails via Mandrill

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow MailChimp. SES as a replacement for Mandrill? What are they smoking. Maybe they don't even understand their own product...

<comment><USER39> I haven't used SES, but I'm guessing it is complex, and "bare bones".

I got the vibe Mandrill didn't want to send any business to their _actual_ competitors.

The time period to make this change sucks. I accept they want to change, and they can do that. But I have paid them money for a service, and the rug is being pulled from under my feet with such a short period of time to work out what to do, and do it.

<comment><USER12> SES is pretty bare bones, and has had recurring issues with IP reputation management. It's well suited for integration but there are no straightforward simple APIs or dashboards as with Mandrill/SendGrid etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I went on a rather large rant about these Mandrill Policy Changes last night. I picked apart the post by Kaitlin as well as Ben Chestnut. It is interesting how they locked down the post so no one could publicly comment on the blog announcement. I have never seen them do that before. If anyone wants an in depth look at the policy changes, competitors available, or simply a good laugh then I recommend giving it a read. Feel free to comment or give feedback on the post.

[https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill- policy-...](https://upshotmediagroup.com/blog/marketing/mandrill-policy- changes/)

</comment><comment><USER41> For folks looking for alternatives, there's a good list here with some indicators on the quality of delivery as well.

[https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

<comment><USER12> Wow this is really interesting. Poooor showing from Mailgun!!!

<comment><USER42> As I mentioned in the other thread, we're looking into the details concerning this test. It's not at all reflective of the _actual_ customer experience.

<comment><USER12> It's a pretty good sign that you're posting here to be fair :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This was an unwelcome surprise.

We've loved using Mandrill at Open Exchange Rates[0], and enjoyed their simple "just works" approach. We've never trusted Mailchimp's primary product for some reason.

Now we'll be switching to a brand we can trust not to tell us "FYI we're shutting down your account in 45 days."

Personally feel disappointed that they seem to have transformed from a value- giver to a value-extractor.

Looking at Sendgrid - but open to any providers who wish to get in touch (email: cto@our domain).

[0] [https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org)

</comment><comment><USER44> As a non-user of Mandrill or MailChimp I look on this whole episode as a classic example of how not to make product changes. I suspect YC17 will be studying this as how not to go.

One thing I don't understand if this is all about the Benjamins while not just increase the price and leave the functionality unchanged. This way you would only lose the customers who are price sensitive and not those that now have to change their back ends.

<comment><USER45> This! Exactly! If money is an issue, then deal with that. What they're doing here is just messing with everyone at a level that is way too deep.

<comment><USER44> Mandrill was a commodity service much like electricity or water which people relied on it just working.

If the service was not making enough money then raise the price to whatever you need to and either grandfather in old customers or give very long lead times so your customers have the time to transition away if they wish.

This is such an obvious way to go that I think there must be something very dysfunctional within the leadership of Mailchimp. Did nobody there foresee what was the likely outcome of this move and advise against it? Did they talk to any of their customers before making this change?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Bye Mandrill. I've converted some of my clients' free accounts to paid once they started needing more features or sending more email, but going forward I'll be using someone else.

Amazon SES or alternatives might be a pain but at least they are an option for people who need good deliverability for transactional email but don't have the budget for a paid MailChimp account.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've been looking for a good alternative since I received this news.

Someone mentioned sparkpost, and it seemed to be the one that was closest to what mandrill was offering (they offer 10,000 instead of mandrill's 12,000).

So I just tried SparkPost and at a quick glance, here is what I found

\- You have to specify the "sending domain". In Mandrill, I could just do "from email@example.com" and it worked. But with SparkPost, I have to specify "whatever.com" as a sending domain. But you have to verify the ownership of the domain, so the bottom line is you can't just change the "FROM EMAIL" address to anything.

\- Also, I just sent a test email and it went straight to GMail SPAM folder. This never happened with Mandrill.

<comment><USER47> SendGrid it is. From what I've tested, it matches almost on par with what Mandrill offers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This really doesn't make sense. Why not just implement Mandrill into Mailchimp like they wanted and keep Mandrill around also? I don't see it as an either or thing.

This move was probably more about the bottom line than anything else.

<comment><USER49> what isn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just made a small calculation: for 3,000,000 subscribers, our costs are moving from 1,500$ to about 13,000$ if we go through Mailchimp. I don't understand why they're making us pay for only storing an email list.

<comment><USER33> Better I would suggest to use email delivery services from easysendy and connect it through sendgrid / amazon ses / mailgun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Bye Mandrill, Hi Mailgun

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you prefer Mailgun over SendGrid for any particular reason (both offer free accounts)?

<comment><USER51> Never tried Sendgrid but will check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: Their free plan is down at the bottom of their pricing page

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> now I'm happy that we used SMTP plus tags in mail headers and not their API. at least we can hot swap their service. any recommendations on transnational email provider without initial sender domain verification?

</comment><comment><USER53> I pay for both services currently so moving from free isn't necessarily a problem. But I am struggling to figure out what the pricing will be after these changes. I am surprised at the lack of clarity.

</comment><comment><USER54> Hi, guys! We are eCentry, a company which provides digital marketing solutions since 1999, and our focus product now is Maildocker - Transactional emails for developers. Some of our features: Digital Signature + Email Tracking + Customizable IP Pools + Sandbox + Docklets (Independent customizable servers) among others. Try free: [http://maildocker.com/us/](http://maildocker.com/us/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Bye Mandrill.

<comment><USER56> Agreed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> They had a pretty relaxed strategy on sender domain verification. which was great for white-labeling transnational email on multiple domains.

Goodbye Mandrill.

</comment><comment><USER39> Has anyone here got any experience with using SMTP.com for sending transactional and bulk email via SMPT relay? I would love to know what you think of their service? I'm looking at potential services, and this is one on my radar that doesn't appear to be getting discussed here. But that makes me wonder if there is an obvious reason why not...

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been reading conversations here on Hacker News and noticed that this has created a lot of frustration among existing Mandrill users, especially for those that have setup the system for their customers.

I believe that MailChimp was aware of this before making this decision and knew that they are going to loose some customers. At this point they will become a bit expensive, even more expensive than SendGrid and a lot of their customer base will migrate away.

However, I do believe that this is something they wanted with this move, so that people using the service for free which took advantage and sent spam and also small businesses that cannot afford to pay a high end service will move away.

Then, they will keep the MailChimp fans, those that afford the service and will spend more on the service.

In conclusion, it's a bold strategy change that will weed out some of the bad accounts and will ultimately improve the revenue stream for MailChimp.

What is really sad is the fact that they are going to also lose a lot of their genuine customers who do not want or need MailChimp.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's as simple as that. This is a data mining exercise - to read our customer's subscribers data and to move from a "dumb pipe" to a "personalization engine". From mailchimp CEO's blog: "We came to a fork in the road, and choosing the "personalized transactional" path with Mandrill suits us and our customers better than the "utility" path."

[http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to- mandrill/](http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/)

<comment><USER57> I agree with you. They are essentially saying "bye" to those that used Mandrill only for the "utility" path.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> FUCK YOU MANDRILL. FUCK YOU MAILCHIMP

</comment><comment><USER59> I moved from mailjet to mandrill a couple years ago. Mailjet was great, make sure you check'em out when you are doing comparsions. Really sad about the mandrill change. Most of my projects I have no use whatsoever for mailchimp. Best regards.

</comment><comment><USER60> We have Mandrill implemented in a lot of past projects and can't easily switch now. We'll get the mandatory MC account there, while screaming F U to them.

What we can and will do is dissuade all future clients from using Mailchimp.

</comment><comment><USER61> Tinyletter is also a Mailchimp product. So I'll have to avoid using that now, in case they decide to fold it in with a paid Mailchimp sub later. Fool me once ...

</comment><comment><USER62> I've signed up with Mailgun to try out, but there's also SendInBlue, which I've used to migrate out of Mailchimp several months ago.

</comment><comment><USER63> Does anybody need a self-hosting transactional email app with Amazon SES integration? Similar to sendy but for transactional emails.

<comment><USER64> Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?

<comment><USER65> I don't use SES, but a quick search led me to this page[0] which suggests they do have an SMTP gateway.

What I'm more curious about is things like deliverability stats (in aggregate and for individual emails), which is the biggest value-add Mandrill provides us right now.

[0] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send- em...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email- smtp.html)

<comment><USER63> They have Bounces, Complaints and Delivery notifications[0]. Is it what you need? or are you talking about open/read email notifications?

[0] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notifications.html)

<comment><USER65> Thanks. Very useful to know. As I mentioned, I never used SES.

I'm sure SES provides great building blocks for something similar to Mandrill. But the value-add of ESP is tying those things together, so one can easily, e.g. search for an email address and find all previous emails sent, the delivery status etc, not to mention a nice web interface...

Open/Click tracking is also quite useful in some cases, and probably isn't supported by SES either(?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> BTW, a fun new latest development.. they've banned mass mailing from Mandrill with immediate effect.

<comment><USER45> do you have reference to this? No one has spoken to us and we do mass mailing in Mandrill.

<comment><USER66> Mailchimp sent a further email yesterday saying they had updated their TOS and AUP with immediate effect. So I decided to re-read the AUP: [http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/](http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/)

.. and it now says, under Prohibited Actions: "Send bulk emails, meaning emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content, through Mandrill."

I don't think it became news because not many people are as crazy as me and read pages full of legalese when they change :-D

<comment><USER45> hm that sucks. We certainly do this, i wonder when they'll start to try and enforce it. This seems very unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your suggestions and why?

<comment><USER68> My experience with SendGrid is not very good. Slow delivery, random halts on e-mails due to low activity on account, which I was not notified about, the list goes on. They did update their UI recently which was a good step, but the other issues remain.

I'm thinking about trying SES.</comment></comment>


For the absolute beginner: How to make games - <AUTHOR> http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2012/01/06/how-to-make-games

<comment><AUTHOR> In this article I discuss the process of designing, prototyping, testing and releasing a game for the uninitiated.

Interestingly, you don't even need to be a programmer to achieve this these days...

Hope you enjoy it!

Cheers, Paul.</comment>


Passion is self-centered crap. Find your Ikigai - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/your-passion-is-self-centered-crap-8ef57cfd3054 <comment><USER2> I kinda see the point of defining "passion" as "a self-centered crap".

We recently hired a guy that claims to be "passionate" about the tech we use. Indeed he is, but he shows basically zero interest in anything outside his "passion" and we're having a hard time getting him up to speed with regards to things that maybe he's not passionate about, that maybe are a bit boring, but that are still a very important part of the job.

I don't see this "passionate" guy going very far.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started reading this thinking it was going to be a long form piece. What I thought was the intro was interesting enough to get me hooked and then it abruptly ended.

If anyone is wondering what Ikigai means without clicking, it's a Japanese concept that (apparently) can be interpreted to mean the intersection of what you're passionate about and what you're good at.

I guess it doesn't need anymore explanation than that.

<comment><USER4> That's literally missing half of ikigai. Ikigai is the intersection of four concepts:

1\. What you LOVE

2\. What you are GOOD AT

3\. What the world NEEDS

4\. What you can get PAID FOR

This is my favorite graphic to describe the various combinations: [https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*qNNzYd3SE1Z09d_IaJOdGA.jpe...](https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*qNNzYd3SE1Z09d_IaJOdGA.jpeg)

<comment><USER5> That's a fantastic graphic. All the intersections are called out. [Perhaps we can give those last four just missing one ingredient names too.]

It's subtitled "A reason for being" with hit me with two-sided feelings of fulfillment and dystopia. The positives are readily apparent and the negative is where my mind goes to examine the flip-side. One problem in Japan seems to be that there's a sort of monoculture of success that is damning. Sort of like if everyone follows this exact formula in a the top select endeavours we could end up with everyone being fulfilled but dying off as a group. I guess this could get wrapped into (3) to prioritize what isn't being done/enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have yet to find a Japanese source that talks about a Japanese concept called "Ikigai". Even the Japanese Wikipedia page refers to western sources. The Venn Diagram that is commonly associated with it originally had nothing to do with "Ikigai".

[https://www.sloww.co/ikigai/](https://www.sloww.co/ikigai/)

Let's not disregard that Japanese society is highly conformist and anti- individualist and that social isolation is very common, with birth rates among the very lowest in the world. If there really is a philosophy of "Ikigai" in Japan, it doesn't seem to be working.

On the flip side, here's my 1-2-3 recipe for your very own "Ikigai": Take any pseudo-profound concept, slap a "Made in East-Asia" label on it, then become a motivational speaker. Tell people what they want to hear, make them feel better, pat yourself on the back, and get paid.

<comment><USER7> >Take any pseudo-profound concept, slap a "Made in East-Asia" label on it, then become a motivational speaker.

Why not? It worked for "bushido."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I know that everything sounds cooler in Japanese (which is why anime characters call out their ultimate attack names in English), but is there a reason we can't use the perfectly cromulent English word "vocation" with a bit of explanatory text differentiating it from "passion"?

<comment><USER9> Because everyone has different emotions, preconceptions, etc. attached to the existing word. Introduce a new one, and you can define what it means without worrying about people misunderstanding you (unless they already know what Ikigai is, and I'd be willing to bet in that case that they'd disagree with the author's over-simplification or mischaracterization of the word). There's also an "exotic" attraction to concepts from other cultures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> OK, so my initial response to the title was anger; the video which is the substance of this post, however, has a much less contentious message. Your "passion" is the intersection of what you love and are great at. The concept of "Ikigai" is that it is also important to consider what others need and are willing to pay for, a self-evident idea wrapped in provocativeness, condemning people for being concerned for their own wellbeing and fulfilment.

The final sentence of the article is somewhat nonsensical: "feelings are exactly the things that distract us from our wantings". "Wantings" are feelings!

<comment><AUTHOR> "Passion" is what you love and you are good at.

Ikigai is also what others need and others are willing to pay for. Ikigai requires empathetic understanding of others.

<comment><USER10> "Empathetic understanding of others."

Empathetic understanding of others should make one hesitate to tell them that being primarily focused on doing what they're passionate about is "self- centred crap", rather than using a less needlessly excoriating phrase. It touched a nerve for me specifically because I feel I, like most people, have prioritised doing things that other people need and are willing to pay for, and then felt attacked for my wish to be doing something I actually enjoy and have an aptitude for.

Edited: to be more empathetic to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This post is crap. Instead of posting in the article comments someone made a dedicated medium post that completely misses the point of the linked article. Following your passion is only half the way toward a meaningful life.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This feedback is terrific. Thank you for commenting.

I'm revising the article right now to incorporate more of the video.</comment>


The 5 Most Laughable Terms of Service On the Net - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/09/03/2130233.shtml "Google owns any content you create using its Chrome browser".  What happened to their "don't be evil" slogan?  This seems to go a little too far for my taste. <comment><AUTHOR> It looks like Google is removing some of the EULA wording: [http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Removes+Big+Brother+Clause+i...](http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Removes+Big+Brother+Clause+in+Chromes+EULA/article12856.htm)</comment>


My experience as 'product owner' - <AUTHOR> I recently began working for a European government agency specialized in domain specific IT. My assigned role is "product owner". One of my products is mostly a central data hub. This means that I have conducted interviews with many people in the organization. And this has given me pause:
1) I'd suspected a greater level of IT-knowledge. But hardly any product owners have any coding skills. Many do however have deep domain knowledge, which is more important.
 2) The few project managers we have, take charge of larger projects with many products. These people are hired only on generalized project capabilities. In my experience, project management  in IT is quite different from many other projects. The experienced project managers have gain IT skills - but only in the way 'things are done here'.
 So the best project managers we have, kind of optimize locally, instead of looking beyond our own organization.
 3) We do not have an 'IT-Vision' for our products. Instead we just go with whatever company who wins the bi- or quarter annually tender suggests.
 4) The vision we have is organizational: "we want to be the best"...
 5) I guess because of point 1 above, we spend horrendous amounts of time on 'design' and specifications. I am by no means a big fan of scrum,
 but in our organization 'design' and 'specifications' basically means that a product owner with no IT skills sits down with the IT company's service manager, project lead, business consultant (yes - up to three people) - none of whom have ever built an IT product themselves. The design end up as balsamiq mockups and 100 pages of specified functionality.
 5) The agreed price is very often far from the real cost, as many things 'outside of the specification' arises later on.
Is this normal for an agency like mine (ca. 100 product managers, product owners + secretaries and other staff)
What do you think I should do to change our practices for the better? <comment><AUTHOR> My own response:

I am considering proposing a draft for a product vision. Something like this:

Our _products_ should aim to be: a) Self-reliant: as few 3. party cookies, cdn's and technologies as possible. b) Private : respect the user's privacy. Don't log more than we have to. Be explicit about what we do. GDPR. Combined with self-reliant, this means no Google analytics e.g. c) Robust : Must work on most platforms. Old and new. d) Simple : Nobody wants complex - but we certainly don't strive for simple. Simple means: Have e.g. pure txt fallback instead of "mobile optimized" pages. e) Connected : Use loosely coupled micro services. Don't do what we have done a lot: take existing solution and add functionality ad infinity. This complicated the code and tests. f) Get first, visit later: Advocate decentral solutions, like mail, rss etc. Don't force the user to check our webpages. Let us deliver the data. g) Open : So many things require a user profile, just to consume info. If the info is not sensitive, don't require a user profile. If the user profile is an option, e.g. to save preferences etc. then, as per the privacy guideline, allow 'fake profiles'. Email etc. should be optional.

Internally we should: i) Try to develop projects as closely as possible with the developers who do the actually work. This is what we did in my former company. And it worked very well. ii) Product owners should be allowed greater say in tech choice. And should bear larger responsibilities (e.g. bonus related) for project costs. iii) Product cost should explicitly include e.g. maintanance and bugs the first year. iV) Product owners should at least one month a year, work with coding on some level. v) We prefer open source software: Easier to support and staff, better life support (e.g. flash and Silverlight gives us problems) and often much better documented than the tools we build ourselves.

I think the gov.uk blog post currently trending here, is a good example of what I hope the points above could result in. But I also feel the bullets are kind of 'hot air', with little value. Not sure...

I hope some of you have some reflections on this.</comment>


Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers? - <AUTHOR> I'm a self-taught engineer. I took a programming class my freshman year of college, but that's been it. Everything I know I've learned on my own building various things over the years.
Most of my co-workers (90%+) are not self-taught. Most of them have CS degrees. In my 5 years of professional programming, I've only worked with one person who was self-taught.
I'm currently looking for a new job, but I'm not sure if I should downplay my status of a self-taught developer or display it prominently. <comment><USER2> I would say: neither.

Don't play it down, and don't make a thing of it. To do one makes it look like you're hiding something, to do the other could easily look dickish.

In my experience, no-one ever learned to code by studying (undergraduate) computer science. Some people learned to code _while_ studying, but mostly the people who could already code perhaps became better grounded programmers by studying comp sci while those who couldn't still couldn't after they graduated. The best coders I knew in college either left for jobs before graduation or did the absolute minimum to graduate because they were already employed more than full time while still studying.

Also in my experience, most of the companies I would want to work at don't place much weight on an undergraduate CS degree. A degree may stop your CV from being ignored, but five years of professional experience and some basic interpersonal skills will count for more than a degree. There are some places where degrees are indispensable -- some companies have a thing about them (e.g. they may need to meet certain accreditation requirements). Sometimes you see jobs where applicants are expected to have graduate qualifications in CS (usually because they think they're doing something very hard core, and the graduate degree is seen as a _pons asinorum_ ) but you seldom see undergraduate degrees being required.

</comment><comment><USER3> Make education a non-issue, lead with what you have done, and what you know.

I am a self-taught programmer, granted with a bit more experience than you. I have actually very seldom if ever been asked about my educational background during an interview, and hint: Those companies that made a big deal of it? I usually ended up turning down their offers, due to a very distinct lack of interest in working there that had nothing to do with them questioning my education.

The education check, if it does come up, is usually more to check for generic knowledge, algos, patterns, etc. Know these things, and know them well. Understand testing software. Understand SCM. In short, be a professional developer, and I'm pretty sure it won't be much of an issue, unless you make it one.

Relevant Experience: Worked as an engineer, senior engineer, lead developer, senior lead developer, and currently, a VP, Engineering...for companies ranging from 1-50,000+ employees. I have built and led multiple teams ranging from 2-21 developers in various mixes of on and offshore developers.

Edit: Unlike many of the commenters, I am not afraid of looking for work, and I don;t think you (or they) should be either! Its a great new adventure, I generally move within 3 years at this phase in my career, and I seldom if ever have any issue lining up interviews and competing offers, following the advice above!

</comment><comment><USER4> My experience has varied wildly with person to person ( _disclaimer: I am self taught_ ).

In my limited experience there exists a spectrum of programmers in the self- taught category. On the extreme left you have people whose sole experience with programming is just getting the damn computer to do what they want with as little effort as possible: copy and paste some code that seems like it fixes the problem, run it, and tweak as necessary. On the far right you have people who fell into programming as kids and took to it like a moth to a flame. Without any prompting they taught themselves assemblers for the various CPU architectures they came across, learned about cellular automata and dove into artificial chemistry, and could debate the finer points between normal and applicative orders. They've probably toyed with developing their own language using operational semantics or devoured texts on geometry and linear algebra at the breakfast table. Most of us, fortunately, sit somewhere in the middle.

I don't relish having to look for work as I am now. In my experience it comes down to a handful of scenarios:

1\. You're sitting across the table from someone who is at least 10 years younger than you and has landed a senior role fresh out of school. AFAIK they'll self-select towards people their own age that look like them... and have similar life-experiences. You might not want to lead with your self- taught badge and down-play it if you can. Don't hide it though: you never know who you may come across and if you have the experience to back you up you can be a very strong contender.

2\. HR drone at Big Co. is staring at your resume to figure out who you are. You're candidate X out of 5 they have to interview today and 28 they will sift through this week. They're also simultaneous scanning for keywords and will likely ask you where your education experience is located on your CV. You can't do anything but be candid. Hopefully you can knock the socks off of the developers in the next few rounds of interviews and exploit the poor communication channels between HR and staff. Unless the bureaucracy rules the roost: then you're just not in the right place.

3\. You come recommended by someone you know who works at the company you're applying to. You just have to get through the interview. Play up your self- taughtness. It's really an advantage.

My rule of thumb is to wear my badge on my chest. I just have to ace the technical interview (which is the hardest part for me... my typing speed shrinks to nothing under pressure from a smooth 56-60wpm). What's the worst that could happen?

<comment><USER5> I would contend that the variability is about equal to a formally educated candidate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is far from the most interesting thing you could say about yourself. What in the last 5 years suggests you'll make your next employer a lot of money? Focus on that, instead.

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't go down the traditional CS route either. My advice is to state your and accomplishments and demonstrate your abilities without making a big deal of being "self taught".

Learning doesn't stop once one leaves university, and you've probably noticed your CS educated colleagues taught themselves a lot over the years too.

</comment><comment><USER8> So let me add a couple of data points.

I've spent a lot of time experimenting with hiring pipelines and have found 0 correlation between education and good development hires. That is, when I did double blind experimental data collection, educational certification is noise.

That said, when I talk to the developers I know that I consider "great" who don't have CS education, they have a nearly 100% rate of regret, in at least wishing they had the experience of a CS education. There are things that are easier to learn in an academic setting than in any other setting.

So, the short answer is I would highlight your professional experience, but would not hide your lack of education.

The longer answer is, if you are getting into a resume/web form search cycle you are probably doing it wrong. Your best bet is for personal recommendations. If after 5 years in the industry you do not have colleagues that can sherpa you into a job that you are interested in, education is not your problem. Either you have neglected your professional network, or your abilities are lower than you think. In either case, changing your educational status will not help.

</comment><comment><USER9> I used to be very biased against self-taught engineers until one passed our very difficult hiring gauntlet and turned out to be one of the best developers I've ever worked with.

Edit: I think my takeaway is to primarily judge people on demonstrated knowledge rather than declared knowledge.

Edit 2: But having said that I still wouldn't draw attention to the self taught thing if I were you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Note: I am self-taught.

Here is what you need to know: It doesn't matter. Most people are biased in one way or another. Stop trying to make other people happy.

The most important thing is that you have the skills to do the job required. In interviews, draw on your skills and past experiences to answers the interviewer's questions to the best of your ability. If that isn't enough, believe me, you don't want to work there anyways.

Most people are biased in one way or another. Maybe your interviewer is self- taught and maybe they aren't. Perhaps they've worked with a terrible engineer that was "self-taught" or maybe their self-taught engineer was the best thing since sliced bread. You can't pretend that this won't cost you a few job opportunities, but is that so bad? Ask yourself honestly, do you want to work with someone who doesn't think you're competent because you didn't go to Stanford?

</comment><comment><USER11> As others have said, position yourself in terms of skills and accomplishments. If you have other attributes, such as some significant hobby, people skills, have managed large projects, or other people, include that too.

Let them know who you are and tell them what they can expect to get when they hire you.

That is what they want to know. How you got there, whether it's the school of hard knocks --a fine school mind you, or through University, or apprenticeship, or all of the above isn't anywhere near as important as making sure they very clearly understand who you are and what they will get.

And on your end, make double damn sure you can add value appropriate for the position you seek. Do the work to remove doubt, and it will show and when they see it, your opportunity is that much improved. The bonus is when you walk in the door, you are ready to get after it, not worried about things that should have been sorted before you got there.

It's a two way street, and I've often thought a simple "has degree = 1" type filter to be sort of a crutch. Both the prospect and the employer need to reach a place of confidence so that it works.

An approach to this, business minded and technology minded, is a little harder, because you do raise the bar some, but it's self selecting in a good way. I've made a couple of pretty big jumps doing this and it was all good. There is getting the work done, and that's hard and that's what you get paid for. Not having the doubts there helps immensely.

It's not that you want to be a dick. You just want to feel really good about the whole thing, and they want to feel good too, so make sure that happens and that it's true and you can't lose.

Everybody, you included, need to do that, because it's just a pig expensive when it doesn't, and everybody gets hurt a little, sometimes a lot.

If they question any of it, tell 'em that too. Make sure they know these things matter and you take it seriously.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm politic science MA and currently goes my 14th year in programming for living. From my experience - and I've been working with self-taught passionates and academic-taught masters over the years - you can assume sort of rule about your future employer. If he's wise and know programming market he'll never toss out anyone who doesn't have academic degree in programming. Best specialists I know had no science degree in IT field. They were all crazy about programming, fascinated about possibilities and they were always improving themselves. Wise employer will know this and take advantage of it. So - yes, You should state fact You have no college degree in programming. I do and I had never regreted it :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ultimately where you are going to be happy is a place that accepts you for who you are, how you are and how you're always learning and improving yourself.

It's not about what your degree makes of you, but what you make of your degree. In your case, being self-taught, and remaining self-taught in having a body of knowledge that you're always learning is in some ways, as a developer, more relevant than a degree.

There are just as many CS devs who think they're done learning and stay stuck and don't push themselves. The difference makers are always the ones who are building in their own time. Build your body of work and keep it public.

</comment><comment><USER14> It'll depend on who's on the other side of the hiring table.

I'm largely self-taught, but I have a CS degree from a good school. (It's a long story...the CS degree came after the self-teaching, for the most part.) If I were the hiring manager, someone who's self-taught would be a mild bonus: it shows initiative and passion. Other people think differently - some won't hire any without a degree, some would rather not hire someone without a degree, many don't care. You can to some extent choose who you work with and what they value by how you position yourself.

<comment><USER15> Ultimately, as in all professions, you want to be supported by your manager. Building that trust is what earns you promotions, helps proliferate your work, and contributes to your career goals. So I completely agree with your comment, and would go further to say that if the OP makes it a point of stating they are self-taught, they will self select. They may have to churn through more interviews to make up for the bias, but in the long run it will be more worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my experience it doesn't matter as long as you have enough experience. Or in other words, any difference in behaviour/knowledge fades away after a few years of working on serious projects. After 5 years your initial formation might not matter anymore if you kept on learning new things regularly.

For the image aspect, I often worked with self-taughed people who lacked generic knowledge like design patterns, but where openly enthouthiastic about learning anything new. Overall it's a wash.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the current context, I would say that being self-taught is more of an advantage. Programmers today are normally expected to be pragmatic and demonstrate their autonomy and dedication, which I assume you did. While a computer science degree is a nice addition, it is no substitute for having something to show for. Unless you're applying for a position which focuses on a CS curriculum, it really comes down the the value you have to offer.

However, because ignorance is bliss, try to keep humble about your advantages over those university graduates who came to focus on other aspects of the trade. Be aware of your own value and sell what you're good at. Also, make sure that you are legally allowed to refer to yourself as an engineer. In some countries, it's a very specific title controlled by a professional organisation.

Believe me, it's much harder for a CS graduate to get a job without adequate practical experience than it is for someone with a decent portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find that self-taught people have a bias towards self-taught. They see it as a reflection of passion, because that's someone who took their own initiative to learn.

I see it differently, for two reasons:

1\. The best programmers I've ever worked with (directly, and also the best programmers in the company) were NOT self-taught. They did CS undergrad, possibly MS, and (rarely) PhD. So I simply observe a strong correlation.

2\. To me, if you chose another degree for your undergrad, then that's a signal that you were NOT most passionate about computers at that age. Film school, art school, poli sci... you either liked those fields more than computers, or were stronger in those areas. Fantastic. But I could not imagine myself having chosen any degree except CS, having programmed since a wee lad.

Now, I've met and worked with plenty of self-taught awesomes, including with non-CS degrees, or without any undergrad at all.

For me, degree isn't a must-have on a resume. But I like the signal.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm all for it. You learn by your own method. It is just hard for people to understand when they spent years of their lives earning a degree they can place next to their names.

That being said, formal education can teach a wider range of skills and provide guidance to understanding larger concepts.

All in all, I am self taught and respect people heavily for it.

</comment><comment><USER20> To be honest, there are no real different experiences with self-taught engineers compared to university grads-

It's difficult to say what makes a good engineer, but in my opinion it's more the tinkering and curiosity kind of stuff that really matters. Some may call that soft skills, so odds are it's equally likely to find those characteristics in both autodidacts and grads.

Maybe that's the reason why Facebook is on PHP: They they: We need a personality kind of guy as developer no matter what he has learnt or not, so we take PHP as we can teach him that very quickly.

One thing which is more common in self-taught people is humbleness and modesty.

So, what you should do is display it prominently: Being a self-taught guy highlights the curiosity you need for being an engineer at most, in my believs

hth

</comment><comment><USER21> My advice is to completely downplay your [lack of] education. If they ask you about it, just tell them you are self-taught, and wait for the next question. You should focus on what you've _done_ at your job and outside projects. Emphasize the results you've gotten and the systems you've built.

You might have a slight disadvantage during the initial part of the recruitment process (resume submission). My advice in regard to that is to try and get in touch or meet the non-HR people at the company. That way you get can a referral and your resume is just a formality. If this isn't an option for you, the just make sure you keyword your work experience well, and pray. :)

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a degree, but it's in math and physics, not in programming. I had one programming class in high school (Fortran) and one in college (Basic - but by that time, I already knew Basic).

I've known at least two other self-taught programmers, at least one of whom didn't even have a college degree. They were good engineers. There wasn't any "you're lower in status because you're self-taught" stuff (at least not among the programmers - management may have rated them lower, I don't know).

I wouldn't downplay it, and I wouldn't display it prominently. In this world, pretty much you are what you can do. If you can do it, who cares how you got there?

</comment><comment><USER23> The distinction/dichotomy is over-blown. It may be that most people you work with have CS degrees, but that doesn't mean most people you work with aren't self-taught.

That's because most self-taught programmers end up with degrees -- either in CS or other fields. All of the good programmers I know had substantial personal projects and/or open source contributions before starting college, and continued throughout college.

The answer also depends on what problems you'd like to work on and where you'd like to work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: I am a self taught programmer.

Personally I prefer self taught engineers over university or other education. Autodidacts are generally more motivated to learn in my experience and represent the very best engineers I have had the pleasure of working with.

The best university educated minds I have worked with have tended to come from non-CS backgrounds, specifically mathematics and physics.

This is not to say CS degrees are not useful, just my personal anecdotal evidence leads me to favor the self taught, mostly for their attitude and general grit.

</comment><comment><USER25> All good engineers are self taught... to a degree.

That doesn't mean they don't hold advanced degrees in whatever, but great engineers IMO are the types who whether they spend their 20th birthday in a dorm or on the job, have been interested/passionate/doing something in engineering since before they even knew to call it engineering.

YMMV, but I've never met a great software (or mechanical) engineer that wasn't into it before school COULD have happened, regardless of whether they went.

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to be biased towards self-taught engineers--probably because I am one-- but now I am indifferent. For an entry level job, I'll probably still lean towards the self-taught candidate. But, mid or upper range? I don't think it is relevant anymore at that stage in their career. I place more value on someone who actually has a passion for the field over one where it's simply a means to pay the mortgage.

</comment><comment><USER27> Others have mentioned similar but here is my advice. As a self taught engineer what goes on my CV are roles with responsibilities , then specific accomplishements and values I delivered in those roles. That's it. Apply for roles that will give you more experience and responsibilities. Consider you prior experience and CV evidence you are up to the task. Exude confidence in this. Have fun.

</comment><comment><USER28> IMHO if you have 5 years of professional experience, having a CS degree is merely an afterthought (unless you are going for a teaching or highly specialized occupation).

One can only really teach one's self to program.

List your work experience prominently and highlight your responsibilities and achievements.

</comment><comment><USER29> Ever think of getting a degree? College graduates write better and have depth that takes a long time to absorb in an unstructured environment. It's called take classes at night. And over lunch. Self taught that sacrificed time and got the degree is impressive.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wouldn't call attention to it. Not because it's bad, but because it sounds like bragging.

We all learned to code. Calling attention to your self taught background makes it sound like you think your way was more a more legitimate experience.

Focus on what you've built instead.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would suggest not focusing on it either way. Just focus on the projects you have built, the technology you used, and your skills in delivering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats what I've been doing. My resume lists the dozens of projects I've completed. Out of every 50 resume's I send out, I get maybe one interview. I don't think anyone even looks at my github. As soon as they see I don't have a degree, they throw my resume out.

<comment><USER6> You should not primarily be attempting to get interviews by sending in 50+ resumes. Instead, try to get 5 coffee dates with people with the authority to hire engineers.

Resumes are an institution created to allow people to throw out resumes.

<comment><USER32> I'm curious, how does this sort of thing work when you're in japan? Or remote in general. Send them a coffee voucher and get them on the phone?

<comment><USER6> Meeting people on the phone is totally doable, especially if you have an introduction to them or have pre-demonstrated credibility somehow. It doesn't 100% play to my strengths, so I did a _lot_ of flying around back when I was doing active consulting. My engagements were worth ~$50k apiece so taking a $10k trip to a conference (or just a target-rich area like, say, SF) was totally doable if it got me four later stage conversations with a 25% chance of closing apiece.

Typically it would look something like "4 week prospecting trip, fill up 2~3 quarters worth of consulting engagements, fill up last quarter while delivering." This was a hard schedule to sustain after getting married, which is one reason I'm not actively consulting anymore.

But there are many, many ways to do this. A more successful consultant _in Ogaki_ does 90% of his prospecting over Skype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Same as you OP, except about 4.8 years less.

</comment><comment><USER34> Dammit they keep on learning things!

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm confused. Are you an engineer or a programmer?

<comment><USER36> Are you really confused? Seems more likely you're being needlessly snarky. Dude's clearly a programmer by trade who chooses to refer to himself as an "engineer", as is extremely common.

<comment><USER37> There's a legal distinction in some countries. Guy might be from one of those countries.</comment></comment></comment>


Top businesses started in a garage - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsmart.com.au/business-planning/top-10-businesses-started-in-a-garage/201112014735.html

<comment><USER2> Time for a case study on garages!

It's about the people, not about the place where it all started!</comment>


Andrew Chen: 10 tips for meeting people at industry events - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/02/how_to_meet_peo.html <comment><USER2> What's with this guy and top 10 lists? :P</comment>


Blogging is the hardest "conversation" I've ever had - <AUTHOR> http://dubroy.com/blog/2008/08/26/blogging-is-the-hardest-conversation-ive-ever-had/

<comment><USER2> Aren't trackbacks automatic with most blog software?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think _pingbacks_ are, but I don't believe trackbacks are, because they require a URL which is different than the entry permalink.

Although, that's part of my problem -- it's not at all obvious if it's okay to stop doing trackbacks and just rely on pingbacks.</comment></comment>


Evertracker - Making an iPhone App Video - <AUTHOR> http://blog.danielna.com/post/27534911835/making-iphone-app-video

<comment><USER2> Awesome description how you made the video! Must have taken a long time, but the video is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff Dan, makes me want to try it out next time.</comment>


I'm starting a Single Founder mastermind group - <AUTHOR> http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/single-founder-mastermind-group/ <comment><USER2> A couple other founders and I do something we call the "Bootstrappers Scrum". It's every week on Monday and we cover what we are working on, what we have gotten done, and then talk about any tough decisions or ask for advice. We have been doing it almost a year now and it has worked out great, I would highly recommend it to other people getting started who need more feedback and motivation.

I think the key to making something like this work is to limit the size of the group. It's five of us right now and that is about perfect, we tried adding another and the calls started getting too long and it didn't feel right. (he quit anyway)

It also helps if you know each other in some capacity, talking about your business in an honest way and sharing information requires a good amount of trust. We all knew each other before starting the call.

The other thing that helped was to create an IRC room for chatting and asking ad-hoc questions (although it tends to just be five friends hanging out some days too, which is cool too)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a great idea, do you all meet in person or just set up a group video conference? I like the possibility of doing this locally, ideally to meet up face to face.

<comment><USER2> We just do Skype, meeting up face to face would be great but I chose people I knew over location (we are currently spread across Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My initial comment was, "Oh, like the Brain Trust on Scrubs" (<http://scrubs.wikia.com/wiki/Brain_Trust>). Then I noticed that was actually the name of his startup.

</comment><comment><USER5> "I haven't diagnosed why"

There's nothing to diagnose; for many people it's best to be a single founder.

PG's strong emphasis on having more than one founder has made may people insecure of founding a startup all on their own. I think this belief of PG was influenced by his experience with Viaweb and the great symbiotic relationship he had with RTM.

But what's good for one person, is not necessarily good for others. Many people are the most productive when they work by themselves and when they are in full control of what they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been doing something since October that was initially just two of us, but is now three.

The criteria for joining was the person had to be of sound character, open- minded and ambitious. They dont necessarily have to be part of a start-up.

I initially did something on Skype, but i didnt feel it worked as well as it could have, so moved it offline.

We meet once a week, and we congratulate each other on our achievements on the week, then we 'reflect' on our challengers from the previous week, and then we discuss our challenges for the next week. the whole thing lasts about 3 or 4 hours.

I took some inspiration from another mastermind group i attended online last january, and then built upon it further in the way that i felt it worked for me.

I'm really glad i took the step. Initially it was really hard to come up with a working structure, but the guy that joined the group was me was very flexible and open-minded, so got the thing refined in just a few weeks, and now i feel it works great. Has really helped me think differently about things, and learn more than i could have done on my own, and with assurity i can say, its had the same result for the other 2 guys now.

We just felt it works much better face to face. We've all been very dedicated to it, and we dont just discuss professional achievements and challenges , but personal ones too (within reason).

Just thought i'd share (not bragging ;-) )

</comment><comment><USER7> Best of luck, although I can't help a smile at the irony of creating a group for loners.

</comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like a good idea, but with that name I just couldn't help but think of this: <http://scrubs.wikia.com/wiki/Brain_Trust>

</comment><comment><USER9> I believe that single founders need a commercial-use only "open source" software license:

[http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/XyY72JZhjYJ/Open- source-...](http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/XyY72JZhjYJ/Open-source- licenses-requiring-minimum-price-Do)

<comment><USER10> so you are okay with some other guy taking your software for free, packaging it up, and selling it to someone else, but not okay with the same other guy taking your software for free, packaging it up, and giving it away?

I guess there might be a small advantage to it on server software... "you can use my software to run your webapp, but you must charge more than I do for customers to use your webapp." - still, makes it a lot less likely that I'm going to use your software (and any time you step away from the established licenses you incur lawyer costs you don't if you use the standard licenses.)

<comment><USER9> This sort of license would make more sense with libraries than with complete apps that people can just package up and sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was expecting this to be a group to play mastermind with other like-minded single founders. Oh shucks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha I've been developing this same idea on the side - good to see someone else has it covered already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Might as well join up

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> After mastermind you should have added "Bwahahahahaha" (maniacal mastermind laughter)

</comment><comment><USER14> This sounds great. Where is it located?

</comment><comment><USER15> Which city is this happening in?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't have to be local per-se. I've gotten 50 responses so far, so I'm trying to figure out how to go about assembling this in a sensible way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a Da Vinci action figure: <http://www.shakespearesden.com/11520.html>

I'm not saying he's better than Charlie, but I find it easier anthropomorphizing a (brilliant!) action figure. (Not only is he great at debugging code, he's also pretty darn creative).

<comment><USER17> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging></comment></comment>


Why Credit Card Companies Are Scared Of Change - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/a-woman-a-cupcake-a-bank-and-a-square-why-credit-card-companies-are-scared-of-change/

<comment><USER2> Several years ago I was helping a small community theatre get off the ground. One of the things we needed to figure out was payment processing. We got tons of salespeople and junk-mail about it.

I consider myself a smart person, but figuring out the multi-variable equation in figuring out which processing service would be the best was nearly impossible. They wanted to know a _ton_ of information about our business, which hadn't even opened its doors yet.

\- What would our average transaction total? We had no idea. We hadn't figured out ticket prices yet, and didn't know how many the average person would buy.

\- How many debit vs credit transactions would we have? How many would use a pin, how many would be manual swipe, how many would be over the phone? Again, we had some projections, but it really wasn't something we could accurately say in the short or long term.

They wanted to lock us in, have us buy a machine, had various types of statement fees and monthly fees, transaction fees, overage fees, fees for using too few transactions, higher fees for Amex vs Visa, etc.

Simply put, figuring out the exact % of our incoming money that this would take was impossible. And they all seemed like companies that I didn't feel I could trust the customer service. Frankly, it all felt like a scam of some sort. The application process to each was also very in depth.

In contrast, I signed up for a Square. I didn't know what I'd use it for specifically, but it turns out that I joined a few bands right after, and it turned out to be massively useful. "I'd totally buy your CD, but all I have is a card." - no longer a problem. Some of the bars we played didn't even accept cards, and we did. Application process was easy, and understanding what it could cost me was super easy.

Why in the world other credit card processors can't do similar just seems to equate to nothing but greed on many levels. The fixed cost to them of doing a digital transaction is almost zero, yet they act like they have a fixed floor on it that can't be bypassed. Where this money goes, I'll never know.

<comment><USER3> Complex pricing schemes tend to be a sign of a monopoly or oligopoly. The sellers of the market use these complex pricing schemes to skim off as much consumer surplus as possible.

In my opinion, the best way to disrupt an oligopoly or monopoly is to create a product that makes the original offering irrelevant. Square is doing just that - making the credit card processing industry irrelevant with simple technology and pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I were the Square founders, and I was expecting conventional credit card processors to go on the offensive, I might offer them a red herring: a simple technical limitation, something on which the competition would focus exclusively. The trick is that I would choose this technical limitation such that I could suddenly correct it at a later date, leaving my competitors without any ammo.

If I were feeling _really_ clever, I might choose this herring such that my initial costs were also reduced. For example, I could make my initial card scanner _so_ simple that it doesn't even require a watch battery or Hijack- style power[1]. Of course, I couldn't encrypt data passing through the jack ... until I decide to send out a new version of the card scanner with an extra $3 worth of microcontrollers and batteries inside. (Wait for it...)

P.S. - I doubt very much that I would have thought of that ahead of time. But, maybe the Square guys are smarter.

[1] <http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a nice PR piece for Square.

</comment><comment><USER6> While we're on the topic of processing credit card payments, anyone have recommendations for processing monthly subscriptions online? (Merchant account and gateway). Similar to this article, there are many hidden and weird pricing schemes.

<comment><USER7> I know it gets a lot of stick, but I'm a fan of PayPal. Yeah, once in a while, you hear horror stories, but by & large, I've had only positive experiences. Their site sucks but their API is responsive, predictable, reliable & generally well documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was at a farmers market on Thursday. Can I get a commission for signing up square users? Almost all were cash only and could totally benefit from square.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article is misleading in that it depicts Square as being cheaper than most merchant accounts. If you sell one cupcake a month then I suppose it is, but for most merchants Square isn't even an option. It's far more expensive and there are other limitations that reporters tend to gloss over. (See [http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Of-Round-Pegs-and- Squar...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Of-Round-Pegs-and-Squares- Holes) .)

Credit card companies are scared of change because change could easily put them out of business. They're protected, not by a good product or world-class service, but by lobbyists and other artificial barriers to entry. (See [http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Held-Hostage-How-the- Ba...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Held-Hostage-How-the-Banking- Sector-Has-Distorted-Financial-Regulation-and-Destroyed-Technological- Progress) .) Once those are overcome, it's just a matter of time before cards are thought of just like casette tapes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's important to remember with any service like this the deal today is not the deal in 6 mos. or a year. And the trouble is that switching your processing (because of the complicated nature) is not easy. That being said it obviously makes sense to go with square at the current pricing. But the rate will change and there will be extra charges once they get established most likely.

<comment><USER11> Why do you think that? %2.75 is a perfectly sustainable rate for a credit card processor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think Square is a fantastic company and they have a very disruptive product, but this is a puff piece. Using a $3 average transaction size plays to its strengths. Square is in fact cheaper for anyone with a small transaction size. However, it isn't going to be a cheaper option (than a reasonable merchant account) if you're average transaction size is over $17 or so - use this calculator to figure it out... <http://feefighters.com/square-calculator>

That being said, it is very easy to get setup on square and that is a huge plus point. We at <http://feefighters.com> do our best to make it easy to get setup with a merchant account but still recognize that Square makes sense for some merchants (and thus show it in bids and refer a lot of business their way when it makes sense).

EDIT: Earlier had the inflection point at 10, it's actually higher if you don't include the cost of the iPhone service... There is no easy number, you have to play around because of the number of variables. Thanks for the correction dhbanes. Interestingly enough, Squares average transaction size is MUCH larger (close to $80 last time I checked). They have a lot of contractors that use it for 000's of dollars.

Disclosure: we are partners with Square but also with many credit card processors. Our system is completely impartial. We think Square is wicked awesome.

<comment><USER13> _...However, it isn't going to be a cheaper option (than a reasonable merchant account) if you're average transaction size is over $10 or so..._

Using your calculator and a total monthly volume of $4,000 (the default setting), there isn't a single average transaction size that makes Square more expensive than a merchant account - all the way up to $10k.

Even when increasing total monthly volume to $10,000, I have to raise the average transaction amount to $50 before the merchant account becomes $20 cheaper per month.</comment></comment>