RE: National Sign-On Letter to House on H-1Bs, U.S. Immigration

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From: Meltsner, Kenneth (Kenneth.Meltsner@ca.com)
Date: Thu Jun 08 2000 - 08:07:58 PDT


This isn't new, of course. I used to be an over-ambitious kid without any
experience in the real world (about 20 years ago) and wrote a text formatter
in 50 pages of 8085 assembler. Nobody had told me that doing that was a bad
idea long-term. [NB: I still liked one feature I had -- instead of an
embedded scripting language for the formatter, the formatting module was
designed to be embedded into a C-Basic program as an external function.]

Still, it's gone way past that. I'm also adding to my list of danger signs
for small companies:

* too many fresh PhD.s

* a CEO who is a fresh PhD.

[PhD.s are like yeast for bread -- a great ingredient, but it shouldn't be
the primary ingredient or the main flavor.]

My sister was at a biotech startup as their token grown-up. The company was
founded on the strength of the CEO's dissertation before its ink was dry.
When I sent her an email asking her opinion of him, she called me instead
because he had set up the email system himself and she was worried he still
was using his system administrator privileges to spy on the employees.

Ken


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