Yesterday I witnessed a pretty phenomenal panel at SES called “Are Paid Links Evil?” With a title like that, you know there is going to be some heat right off the bat. I wasn’t going to post at all, but I think I’ll throw my few cents in. First of all everyone on the panel (except Andy Baio) did a phenomenal job. Matt did a great job of toeing the company line, and diverting any questions into the question he wishes the attendee would have asked. Michael Gray in my opinion did a great job of hitting Matt’s points out of the park. Thats not to say that Matt doesn’t have some legitimate points, but Michael was able to pretty well knock down the ones Matt brought up. Todd Malicoat reiterated several of Michael’s points and added a few valid points of his own. I wouldn’t say he added anything earth shattering, but to be fair Michael covered almost everything. Greg and Todd added the “Look, we do this” perspective and I always love hearing Greg talk because he doesn’t mince words. This crack team really took a lot of the FUD-power out of the search-engine’s argument. Andy did a good job of convincing everyone that he wasn’t qualified to even sit at the same table as Greg, Todd, Michael, and Matt much less speak to the question of legitimacy of paid links.
So a few points:
- Matt argued that people are trying to muddy the water and accusing Google of saying that “all paid links are bad”. Matt drew a distinction between paid links that pass PR and paid links that would be clicked by users. If anything, I think Matt is muddying the water in this case. Look we all know what we’re talking about here, the buying and selling of PR. To say that some paid links are ok if they don’t pass PR is creating confusion, not clearing it up. Lets tackle the actual issue, is it evil to sell PR?
- It is in fact nearly impossible to rank in a competitive space without buying links. Google created this monster. You can’t just put your site out there and “do good” and expect to rack up links. It simply won’t happen. Buying some juice is critical. Unless Google can put a stop to it COMPLETELY, its futile to talk about doing it on any level.
- At the beginning of the session they showed this amusing video. As you can see I just linked to the video. The site is about home rentals. How is that a relevant link? How does that improve the user experience? It doesn’t. And yet before getting called out on it, Matt encouraged this type of thing as “creative”. So its ok to make an off-topic link-baiting piece, but buying a link from an on-topic relevant site to connect 2 sites that are in the same space is not ok by G/Y/M? Thats just ridiculous.
- One more thing I’m going to add in edit: lets not forget that this buying/selling links hurts Google’s OWN link-selling business. Like I said before, we’re talking about PR-passing links..but the reality is that this DOES affect their own bottom line with AdWords.
I think those are the key things I’d like to throw into the ring. Certainly no one “won” the argument, although if you were on the fence hopefully it pushed you either way more definitively. I think Google is going to go on a major PR offensive to spread FUD about buying/selling links. I do think it’s good that the search engines aren’t just getting a pulpit to spread their FUD like I’ve heard has happened in the past.
This video of Jim Cramer going ballistic about the Bear Sterns issue in the market last week is hilarious. This guy knows his stuff, and if you’ve ever seen his show you know how passionate he is. On this segment he goes absolutely off the handle and it’s awesome.
Best quote: “You can’t even get a loan if you’re rich like ME.” That’s aggressive.
The other day I was skimming through my feed reader and I came across a post by Leah Culver called A Computer Science Degree Doesn’t Hurt (Much). Having my own opinions about CS degrees (and degrees in general) this really caught my attention. Not surprisingly, I can’t help but disagree.
Like Leah says, you spend years in classes you don’t need. Writing an assembler in assembly for hardware that doesn’t exist is not a useful way to spend time. Poring over parentheses to write an artificially-intelligent tic-tac-toe game in ((scheme)) is not either. Learning some vague high-levelisms of operating systems isn’t going to help you when your web server is serving 1000 hits per second and you’re bumping up against the open file handle limit.
The skills you need to build real-world applications don’t come in school. In fact I don’t even think a CS degree gives you the faculties to learn this stuff. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met with a CS or CE degree that couldn’t do ANYTHING practical. I’ve interviewed them, I know this. Yes Leah, coding problems are hard. They can be fun. They’re not real though. Give your average CS major a programming problem and they’ll hammer out a solution in some obscure language. Ask them to architect the design of a high-traffic ad server with a db backend and they will run for the hills.
So why does the degree hurt so much? Because all that time you’ve spent in school is lost time. You’ll never get ahead of it. While the CS major was banging their head against some contrived optimization problem, the self-starter was re-writing a high traffic web application from scratch. While the CJ major was wasting their time in a college physics class, the hacker was learning how MySQL indexes affect in a real production database. While the CJ major is still trying to un-learn Scheme and Fortran and Java, the motivated hacker is hammering out a solution in Perl because its the best tool for the job and he’s been using it to build tools for all the years you spent in college.
Try it, get out in the real world. I absolutely PROMISE you that plenty of interesting problems will get thrown your way. They’ll come way out of left field and they will be a lot more fun to solve than something you’re going to get graded on. The tools you need to solve them are available to anyone. Especially if you don’t limit yourself to being a “programmer” who doesn’t know anything about the system underneath. Like I said, when you start banging against the open file handle limit or kernel memory limit, you’ll know you’ve arrived.
Our higher education system is flawed, most critically when it comes to fast-moving targets like Computer Science. While I doubt it will be our generation to stand up and make a change, I hope it happens soon. In the mean time, go do your thing. If you want to drop out and actually pursue something, don’t let anyone stop you.
P.S. It might be unfair to point out that Leah’s blog is toast from being dugg, but what the heck. Mine wouldn’t go down…. Got Experience?
I got an email from a recruiter with a GREAT OPPORTUNITY today. Since I usually get amused by how poorly they’ve done their homework, I gave her my number and she gave me a call. After trying to qualify how much experience with PHP I had, I just said “Look, you’re going to have to be pretty convincing to get me to stop what I’m doing right now.” So she says, “So why did you post your resume on Monster.com, just to see whats out there?”. Hold the phone, I’ve never even visited monster.com.
I think its pretty obvious that Monster and other job sites are scraping resumes. In fact, its a perfect crime because since they charge to see resumes you can’t even verify if you’re on there or not. If I was looking for a job, I’d post my resume. By scraping resumes you waste my time and the recruiter’s time.
To you recruiters (who will never read this because you don’t do your homework): seriously do your homework before you call someone. You have my resume. Type my name into Google. Find out a little bit about me. It should be instantly clear that there is only one David Dellanave. All of my work history is right in front of your face. Quite a bit about me personally is there too if you spend a little time.
Once you’ve done your homework, don’t call me unless you’re going to come hard. Don’t ask me how much PHP and MySQL experience I have. Don’t offer me a GREAT OPPORTUNITY at $35k and I’d have to move to the bay area. If you’re going to dial my number, or email me…bring it. Otherwise you’re just wasting my time, and I’m going to waste yours. If you want to take me out to lunch, we can work something out.
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