They should have more interviews with people who chose not to go for a PhD, and whether they feel they were successful in spite of (or because of) that choice.
Speaking of companies besides Google using Go: While I am aware that several companies use Go I am not sure if, worse-come-to-worst, one or several of them would invest in it if Google drops it. I would assume their thought process going something like: Should we invest to keep the language going or should we just let our Go apps run for now and rebuild them in something else? Or even worse, several dialects start popping up.
I hope I do not sound too negative, quite on the contrary I really like Go and most probably will go with it for a medium-sized project. It's just that I am still having an inner dialogue between the geek in me and channeling a very conservative pointy-haired boss :)
I don't have the task of managing leads, but I think salesforce is the standard certainly beyond a certain size. Not sure if that is too big for your use case.
I looked at salesforce and my understanding was "it has everything, at scale, and costly". The IBM or Oracle of sales was the impression I got. It seemed a bit too much for one person to use for themselves.
If long-term your plan is that company is just going to be _you_ then keeping it simple is the right idea. Using a simple workflow with a Google form feeding into a spreadsheet with status on it will work perfectly well.
If you think that you're going to be dealing with the same customer on multiple occasions so you'll want to record the history of your interactions then you'll need a CRM. If you want to build up a database of people who showed interest that you'll then talk to regularly, then you'll probably want CRM. Finally, if your intention is to scale the company and so have many people talking to prospects and customers then you definitely need CRM.
Salesforce is the most well-known and it's relatively easy to get started with, very Cloudy and has a platform so you can build operations on it. You reference Oracle, they (and Microsoft) have complete enterprise solutions which are at a different level. SF is more at the middle of the pack. It's well-known and many people are familiar with it. But you're right, it's a full CRM so it does far more than just tracking your leads.
There are other light-weight Cloud solutions out there, and SugarCRM is probably a good Open Source option that (as a technologist) you could easily use.
A mentor can be helpful to give you direction on where to focus your auto-didactic abilities.
I switched careers into software development several years ago thanks to the mentoring of several individuals.
Going to meetups in your area is one of the first places to look, and taking online or in-person courses are also helpful to find other like-minded people.
One thing to consider is that there need not be a formal "mentor-protege" relationship; you can get a lot of great one-off type advice from all kinds of people you come across.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but the downside of one-off type advice from varying people is that you are limited to only discussing topics which can be covered within a limited time frame. Surely a lot of good can come from that, but having a more long-term mentor lets you get quick feedback on things with little overhead, since the mentor will already be familiar with your current skill level, the project you are working on etc.
A lot of these offices seem to have devs stacked together along the same long tables.
The overall aesthetic of these spaces looks great, but I can't help but feel they are more designed/suited for lots of verbal collaboration and not for quiet, solo work, (both of which I'd argue are important).
Can anyone who works at any of these places comment on the atmosphere?
some big companies like cisco and sun micro doesnt even give out references except for information that you did work for them between this and that time.
I'm working on a personal project that uses Python for most of the page rendering and Go for the heavy lifting (receiving a large stream of data that I have to process quickly and efficiently).
The ecosystem has a long way to go (compared to Python), but goroutines and channels are a pleasure to work with. It's nice being statically typed again, and I really like object composition versus Python's inheritance. Resource usage for my cases is much lower, latency is much lower, throughput is much higher, and my deploy/provisioning scripts are a lot more simple due to Go's static compilation.
At my day job, we may start mixing in Go for background tasks that are a bit too slow/inefficient in our current Python stack. I could also see it being a good fit for some of our more high traffic HTTP APIs.
"We identified early on that Go had all the makings of a language that could supersede some of the places we would have traditionally turned to C and some of the places where we wanted to move away from Python."
I've been messing around with it for some internal infrastructure. I like it so far. Excellent performance characteristics, and the tooling is supremely good, making the dev workflow much less painful than traditional compiled languages.
I've been using Go for my company's backend api which communicates with Youtube movies, amazon movies, Netflix, etc and it seems very well suited to the work.
