Star employees are worth ten to one hundred times as much as ordinary employees.
Facebook bought Friendfeed for $50 million just to get its highly talented engineers (co-founder Brett Taylor is now Facebook’s CTO). Last year, Google made a $3.5 million counteroffer to a staff engineer to keep him from going to Facebook. And this year, it paid two top product managers as much as $150 million to keep them from going to Twitter.
Stars Versus Great Teams.
Management, Tech
“In terms of chip design and software in general, we’re still the leaders,” Allen said. “But you have to ask yourself about 20 years from now and 50 years from now. It would be great if we could focus more effort on the competition, because it’s coming in spades.”
Source – Wired Interview: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Talks Tech, Bill Gates, Chemo and Guitars.
Tech
I just had to convert a big SQL Server DB 2005/2008 into a MySQL DB 5+, and decided to share my (successful) experience.
Ultimately you’ll want to use some tool to automate the process, specially because you don’t want to deal with data-type conversions (i.e. SQL Server’s varchar is not the same as MySQL varchar, etc), foreign key constraints, etc.. I used SQLyog, which is a great (Windows) application. The trial version allows for the import of two tables (schema and data) at a time. I had to create a File DSN (ODBC) to connect to my remote MS SQL Server.
Essential information:
MySQL: Migrating from Microsoft’s SQL Server
SQLyog
Creating a (File) DSN ODBC Connection
DBMS, SQL, Tech
