I joined as their 3rd employee - as a junior developer to assist the current senior. When they saw how good I was, they sacked the senior. I was given a pay cut, ostensibly to keep the lights on, prettied-up with a new contact saying if after a year they were still in business I'd get my salary restored, but a major bonus if they reach profitability or were bought out within a year. Cue 12 months of being an idiot, regularly working weekends and all-nighters to add major features on little notice for meetings with potential customers and developers. New projects were piled on with no regard for workload or realistic deadlines. They needed a new DC, but rather than hire a sysadmin they passed it to me because I'd had experience on my CV.

By this point I'd lost sight of salary and bonus - I was working to try to avoid letting the team down by missing deadlines. As absurd as it sounds now, the atmosphere in the office made me feel I was part of something special, I was doing my part, and I was going to anything I could to keep up my part. I'd been hired part-time, but I worked full time, and then some, spurred on by my mis-placed sense of loyalty and necessity to cope with my workload. Then at the end of the year they said they couldn't afford to give me back the pay cut, and a couple of months later they announced they were going to be acquired - conveniently close to the year end to be a coincidence. I realised that I wasn't part of the team, I was just employee 3. I'd already started to suffer major burn-out / a bit of a breakdown, so I quit. That was years ago and I'm only just starting to get myself back together.

I blame myself entirely - I was naive and let myself be manipulated and used. By that point I was so deep into the "we're all in this together" that I couldn't see what was happening. But you're not in it together - there may be more honorable founders out there, but at the end of the day, you're working to line their pockets, and just because you've got a bit of paper saying they'll be nice doesn't mean they will. Trust no-one, get everything you're owed up front, and remember at all times that for you it's just a job.

Work to live, don't live to work.

(From a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Ahh, that's better ;) )

To every generation there is a film technique which defines it. There was the smokey grey/green from the Matrix films. Michael Mann had his desaturated shallow-DOF look. David Fincher uses silver-retention on his film development to extend the dynamic range while underexposing his shots (thats why interiors in Seven were so "dark" yet exposed).

Part of the device of cinema is extending the mise-en-scene outward and upward to the representational devices (projection, development and treatment).

Part of the study of film is tracing how the use of technique defines generations of film makers. Often, technology serves as an impetus for a style (i.e., Robert Altman and the use of multi-track audio on Nashville precipitated very "talky" films from the 70's/80's), or the developments in computer motion controlled rigs.

Or lets not forget: lens flares.

Color grading (ie, the orange/blue compliments in this article) are also defined by outward influences like magazine photography, trends in CGI, etc.

Anyhow, in a few years a new dominate "look" will pervade cinema and we'll all have something new to complain about.

1st time I was naive didn't get all the details and ended up getting screwed, was also a really good exit. was hired as first engineer.

2nd time was a little more than a quarterly bonus at last corporate job, so yeah wasn't much. was 2nd engineer hired.

I know its anti karma saying this but working at startups suck.

edit- I see people putting 18 / 20k and is probably good depending on what area you live in but for perspective my last quarter bonus was 10k.

This raises several important issues.

The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes.

This has several important implications.

- It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume; and

- Again I'll say something I've said here repeatedly: the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything.

Secondly, businesses like Yelp risk going down the comScore route. 10 years ago comScore was the source for visitor numbers, which drove advertising revenue. If you paid you got accurate numbers. If you didn't, comScore "guessed", and for some reason those numbers always seemed low, so much so that lots complained.

The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted.

It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business. We're great at connecting people to things they want. If we're one of those things they want then we have at least the potential for the appearance (if not the actuality) of impropriety, at the very least.

I just don't see local reviews and social search going, well, anywhere, certainly anytime soon.

"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."

Okay, I call shens on this whole article.

Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.

The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.

"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.