Consulting Rates, Building Tech Teams

Great conversation going on on the New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) mailing list regarding building tech teams and hiring/contracting developers and CTOs; I feel obligated to quote Jonathan Vanasco, acting CTO of an IAC property:

Having an 'agency' contract you developers in NYC is 150-275 /hr. It makes sense to do that when you don't have the time to assemble a team from start.

It's an employee market right now. 8+ years experience can be from 120-200k base, with a bonus on top. Hourly you'll expect 100-160hr.

Yes you can find people who are 40-80/hr -- but they almost always lack the experience and skills to bring a project to fruition on time , budget & expectations -- that's why they're still entry level. If you have a solid CTO or some Sr devs -- then sure, hire the junior people and develop their skills. Otherwise, what the fuck are you thinking? Stop trying to cut corners on your own product.
For a "CTO" to come in, its all over. Rates are different as well, esp with equity packages. My compensation from Startups is vastly different than what Corporations pay me.

SOLVED: 5GHz 802.11n networks not showing up with Dell DW1520 wireless-N adapter

In rebuilding/building out my home office network, I've been adding some wireless-N equipment that finally seems reliable -- the Netgear WNDAP350 and WNDR3700. After poor experiences with N since late 2007, I had purchased a new laptop (Dell Studio) in May with a G-band wifi card only. My more recent, happy experiences with N led me to purchase a replacement mini PCIe 802.11n adapter from Dell - the DW1520.

The adapter arrived yesterday, and I of course eagerly popped open the back of my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 laptop to install it. Everything in place, machine rebooted, and ... it got a great signal from my G-band access points, but not a sign of the N-band APs.

I rebooted the PC, the router and the AP, all to no avail. No sign of the Ns. Did some research online, found problems with previous adapters in the series, but researched the Broadcom component on the DW1520 to find that 5GHz was, in fact, supported. I was stymied.

Hours later, I took another stab at it. In reviewing the driver settings, I found that my Location value was set to Japan, and I had no way of changing it! Recalling the multiple sets of localized drivers on the driver CD provided by Dell, I made the lucky assumption that Windows had found the wrong set of drivers and regional telecom/wireless compliance mismatch was probably interfering with the adapter finding my 5GHz networks.

I uninstalled the network controller and driver via Device Manager, making sure to specify the Windows should delete the driver software to ensure I replaced it with the properly localized binaries. Scanned for hardware changes, specified browsing for the driver, made certain to select the Win7\DRIVER_US folder for searching.

Voila! The wifi adapter reinstalls painlessly, and this time my location is correct:

Now connected to my nearby N-band AP with speeds of up to 300mbps (varies):

Now Tumblogging ...

Been playing with a tumblr microbog instead of this Blogger blog. Conclusions yet to be drawn. Join me over there as well.

And in other new tools testing, today it's Amplify's turn. http://bit.ly/aRk0bf

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

In addition to these theories, I would also guess that developers have realized that Twitter could simply replicate their feature sets and make their client/service the default choice. This is of course, Twitter’s prerogative, and is also the risk developers undertake when building for a platform they don’t control.

I have no doubt that Twitter wants an ecosystem to thrive around its platform, much in the same way that Facebook wants an ecosystem around its social network. However, as I wrote all the way back in July of 2008, VCs must wise up to the fact that investing in accessories that can be reproduced and easily packaged as part of a core offering may not be the best business strategy.

link: Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups – CNET