I think this has to do more with the amount of glucose in the judges brain.

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The only case where this could be acceptable is when you work in the R & D dept. of a company. If you are hired for specific tasks (which is usually the case) then everything else you do should belong to you, only. Einstein produced most of the work that led to the relativity theory while he was an employee of a patent office. Should the patent office claim anything related to his work in physics? It would be really absurd, if it did.

"Never build a business based on a missing feature of a popular software product"

First time I see this, is it really a fundamental piece of business advice?

It's something I've heard many times, and something that I agree with.

You want to build a business, not a feature. Unless you can come up with more features, it's difficult to grow the business.

Then of course there is the risk that your feature will come standard in the next version of "popular software product." If your audience is niche, then you are likely safe, but if your feature appeals to all users of the product, it's inevitable that it will eventually be included in a future version of the product. You end up doing the R&D for free.

"7. Do you have a spec?"

I've written succesful applications without any spec, just talking with users, writting things down myself, showing them prototypes, repeating. In some cases users are not able to produce a spec and even if the do they don't always really "know what they want", that's why prototyping is so important.

That only works if you can have short iterations and client that cooperates.

I've worked on projects that didn't have usable spec, and monthly meetings had client saying "oh, that's not what I've meant, can you redo this like that?".

Also, there are many apps/teams that don't have "clients", and a spec is not really worth writing, much less maintaining. Specs are great when you are a larger team with stakeholders who aren't part of that team, but if you're a small tech-heavy startup moving quickly, I'd consider even the presence of a spec a symptom of mismanagement.

So you did have a spec, you just did the work of producing it yourself. That's sometimes necessary for a developer to do, and for small projects it can be the best approach as well.

Oh, and users never know what they want, even when they think they do. What they know is the problems they have and the job they're trying to do or want to do. It's the job of the software designer (both spec writer and programmer if they're different) to figure out what the software has to do to give the users what they need.

In that case, you are essentially growing a spec. Probably not what Joel meant, but it does work in some situations.

Can someone explain why companies should pay taxes at all? Their shareholders should and they do pay taxes according to their income but what's the purpose of an extra taxation to a legal entity?

When the corporate tax rate is low, people have a large incentive to create corporations to shelter their income. This already happens now quite a bit given corporate deductions and the low tax rates on dividends, but if you got rid of corporate taxes altogether, you'd just increase the amount of money that stayed within those little corporations, thus decreasing the total overall tax revenue.

If the money stays in the company forever, why should they be taxed? Imagine a company that makes billions but never distributes income in any form, a 90% shareholder could starve to death. Income should be taxed only when distributed, it's like it doesn't exist if it's not.

Using tax havens is certainly not one of these cases.

You probably mean "tax haven", which is a rhetorical slight-of-hand to suggest that jurisdictions competing for attention via tax rates are somehow enticing people to sin. Competing via tax rates is just another way of enticing people to behave differently. Some people are under the impression that this happens only internationally. This is incorrect.

One of the healthiest features of the American experiment is a federal system where you have a broad spectrum of options in terms of tax rates versus social services. People (and companies) can, and do, pick legal regimes which optimize for the outcomes they find important. You may have heard people sort of like living in California, especially if they work for political subdivisions of it: that comes at a price -- you'll pay a gobsmacking amount of money in taxes relative to a similarly situated individual in Texas. (I managed to pay California several hundred dollars in taxes last year and I don't even live there. Yay, hotel tax.)

Competition among governments internationally is also healthy, for much the same reason. The market in tax and legal protection encourages governments to not just expropriate all the surplus from their wealth-creating constituents.

My point was that when a company uses a foreign tax regime (which is what google does, btw) it completely escapes any incentives created by it's own government that are related to tax avoidance. Apparently the parent of my previous comment (pg) doesn't think that US government's purpose is to give incentives to US companies to move to Bermuda. Btw, I never implied that moving to tax havens is some kind of a sin.

Hey, nobody's saying that businesses that don't operate in America and consume American gov't services should pay taxes. Airbus probably doesn't pay much in American taxes, and I'm not upset about it.

But if a corporation has a significant presence here and is consuming an american-educated work force, american highway spending, american police spending, american state dept actions to ensure supply of various things (the oil industry would grind to a halt without the cloak and dagger stuff)..

then they pull an accounting hack and we're supposed to believe 98% of their operation is in the Cayman Islands? We're getting ripped off. You don't like taxes, I get it. How do you like the idea that you're paying higher taxes (or taking on more gov't debt) because other people are bilking the system?

yes 'tax haven' is a slur invented by the high-tax rich countries to belittle their competing nations who have lower tax rates to attract individuals and corporations.

you never hear Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong being called 'tax havens' (they are), the word is usually associated with 'Dutch Antillies, Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey' (ie. evil nations who are taking our money)

I guess I'm being downvoted for stating the obvious.

Every positive number is a power of 2. Yes, I know, but there is no mention of "integer". Btw, I would just check if log2(x) is an integer.

positive, real

Right, if you are going to be pedantic, you should go all the way to the end.

Many thanks for sharing all this. Since you seem to know how the UK agents think, is locality of candidates a crucial factor for the agents? I live in the continent and had little luck whenever applied for UK based contracts, much more interest from the same UK agents when the contract position is based in my country. Is there a workaround to this, given that I'm perfectly ok with relocation?

UK agents definitely want easy. Either be in London or say you you are if you're not but canget there quickly (eg eurostar from Paris).

There is a practical reason for this. Once a position can be filled it is often filled very quickly. Getting a position can come down to who is available right now. This can even hinge on whether someone can be reached by phone that afternoon.

Also if you have a choice of interview slot, pick the earliest you can, later interviews will often get cancelled if a suitable candidate is found earlier. Companies don't want to waste time.

I got a job once that caused the next TWO DAYS of Interviews to be cancelled. This came down to being reachable by mobile phone and having access to a fax machine (this was 2001).