Ask HN: If you could work for any company, which would you choose and why?

10 points by jaredsilver ↗ HN

9 comments

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which would you choose?

Fogbeam Labs

why?

Because it's my company, and by virtue of that I get closer to being able to "call my own shots". I also stand to reap more a substantial share of the rewards if we are successful, unlike working for a salary, which amounts to peanuts, somewhere else.

Sadly, we're not at a point of making money yet, so I still have to do the dayjob thing for now. But our time is coming...

At this second, I'd have to say that Microsoft is incredibly appealing to me.

Why? Microsoft has somehow turned its image around after being loathed by developers and users alike forever. None of it was a fluke either. They became a far more developer friendly, open-source friendly company, and they've also done a ton of things no one would have believed 10-15 years ago.

Linux on Windows? A browser based on Chromium? OSS collaboration and support? Providing the best damn code editor on Earth for the price of 'on the house'? These are all insane when you consider Microsoft of the past, and these are just a few things they've done to win back developers. They're doing the same thing in the Xbox division and Azure.

They're heading in a positive direction while it seems like everyone else is going to the dark side. I hope the trend continues because I'm really enjoying seeing Microsoft using their resources for this sort of thing. Not to mention, they're making cool shit like xCloud and Hololens.

It just seems like a really great place to be currently.

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I've been thinking about creating a company, or foundation, around the idea of owning your own data. You'd have a hardware device like a powerful tablet always connected at home, and use a "generic" third party to do backups and enable pocking holes at NAT. You'd use this to store your music and listen it from anywhere, to run your email, instant messages, storing your photos, streaming movies from your downloaded collection...

I'd love to be working in that project, however it does not exist yet and I haven't found enough interested people.

FWIW, I’m focused on the photos bit for now. You can read more about it here: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
Yeah, I actually tried something similar some time ago (lyfepedia.com but it's not up). I also did a video-call app (wupi.io which does work) but these are not decentralized. Perhaps we could join forces? I had in mind starting with a "spotify" kind of thing, based on a local server running on a tablet device or surface, but if it also has something like photostream that would be cool.
RAD Game Tools. I'm following the owner and some of the employees and these guys seem to really take writing software seriously (probably in part because in their domain, if they sell crappy annoying middleware, their clients will just not buy it - the purchases are not driven by MBAs). Also, the people that work there are absolutely top-notch technically. Thirdly, what they work on is interesting and challenging.