I'm working at 1-800-Free-411, a company that's moving
through it's post-startup, not yet a midsized company
phase.
The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.
What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.
Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.
How is your company doing now that 1-800-GOOG-411 is out? A lot of Google's side businesses are just for the data but some are out to compete for real. It'd be interesting to hear from the inside.
It's great to see Google coming in and validating the market that we're in. The company's doing well financially, and continue to grow callers. It's an exciting place to work, and I'm glad to be here.
When Goog-411 first came out, I was impressed: They do Call-Completion (auto-dialing the number you called), which we don't, and I'll admit it's a nice feature.. It's just expensive to do. (They eat those minutes)
On the other hand, we have live operators, and were Google prefers automation, so there are always tradeoffs. .Our Automation is pretty great, but we know that some people won't get recognized, so we give a Liveop backup, and Google doesn't.
I'm afraid I can't really go into details more than that without breaking agreements.
That's enough for me, I'm glad to hear things are going well. While it's hard to compete with Google's pocketbook funding the minutes, I think for a lot of Google services, they have a hard time competing with any competitor that has a human available in loop. People really, really value that and I'm sure you guys are reaping rewards from doing it.
I'm a full-time student, a free-lance web developer and designer and marketing consultant, working on my own startup (ratemystudentrental.com), lead guitar for Flint-based rock band, Moment of Inertia, and work at a tier one automotive supplier as an engineering co-op.
I work as the IT manager in a distribution company in Trinidad in the West Indies. I've built the company LAN from scratch, with Windows/Red Hat/Slackware/VMware virtual servers/thin clients and the company intranet with Apache/PHP/FreeTDS. We program reports directly in PostScript just for the hell of it. I fall asleep every day in my office and deal of escaping to an all-UNIX environment, just me and a room full of servers. Lord, I hate Windows!
I alternate between being a freelance programmer and a lighting designer for a band. A project I'm working on fuses the two; I'm writing better lighting control software.
I work from home as an ATG (www.atg.com) Architect. At the moment there is a ton of demand, which lets me do things like work from home. I work on side projects and startups as much as time permits.
I love working from home. My stress level has dropped immeasurably since I left the office buildings of AT&T. No commute, no politics, no spending 5 hours/day trapped in a small conference room. My happiness, health, and waistline have all benefited from the change. Granted some folks can't work effectively from home, but I've found that since I generally really love what I do, it's easy for me to be productive without oversight.
I'm a full-time student at the University of Maine, working on my world shattering thesis. I also work for the Department of Sustainable Agriculture and a software development house run by my academic adviser.
I'm a college student working at my university's tech support desk while doing freelance web design jobs on the side while simultaneously working on my startups.
www.playforcleanwater.com
I'm working for a startup wireless carrier in Oklahoma. We're working to bring wireless phone service and wireless broadband to rural areas in connection with another major carrier.
Grew up with computers (started with a ZX-80) but for some reason lost interest as a teenager. Maths degree at university; mainly pure maths, group theory, number theory, topology etc.
Didn't want to do research so sought a mathsy job and joined an actuarial consultancy, advising pension schemes through calculations and mathematical models. Found out that it was less technical than I'd expected and consulting was quite repetitive. Unofficially carved out an hour or so each day to get better at broader finance theory (derivative pricing, corporate finance etc) and programming, and re-discovered why I liked computers so much as a youngster. Not a well-defined career path, but more a case of doing things I found interesting, earning trust, and pushing myself and the firm in different directions.
Then quit and did an MSc in artificial life for a year - unrelated but challenging and great fun.
Then back to the same company, doing similar things. I'm reminded of an article posted here a few months back saying that it's tough to be the best in a narrow field, but being in the top decile in lots of areas is easier and makes you valuable. I'm not the world's best programmer, mathematician, finance theorist, researcher or communicator; but I'm not too shabby at any of them and the combination seems to work well, particularly when coupled with a good knowledge of a particular domain (pensions in my case).
Some parallels to the startup world, even though I work for a big firm. In particular pg's The Power of the Marginal (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html) resonates and translates to my own experience.
I'm working for Truviso, a startup in the Valley. We're building a data stream management system on top of PostgreSQL -- essentially taking PostgreSQL, and giving it the ability to evaluate SQL over live streams of data in addition to static tables.
(BTW, we're always looking to hire good hackers -- send me mail if interested.)
The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.
What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.
Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.