Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Tag: Evergreen

  • Student Startup Passion vs. Market Potential

    As part of being a professor, I’m trying to motivate student startups. Here, I want to talk about student startups coming out of a Master’s program. These are different from startups coming out of my research lab, which are based on work with my Ph.D. students. Master student startups are typically smaller, not based on…

  • Tabs vs. Spaces and Cause vs. Effect

    Stack Overflow of the “full stackoverflow programmer” fame just published a developer survey. Among the items was a question asking developers, what they prefer for indenting their code: Tabs or spaces? The majority of developers prefers tabs over spaces by a reasonable margin. What worries me, though, is the conclusion or the “trend” that the…

  • Founders vs. Success vs. Home-runs

    A student of mine pointed me to this article about who founds companies. It is a well-known fact (or at least lore as I have no reference at hand) that the highest success rate as a founder is with those around age 40 (38 according to the article). At that age, a founder has worked…

  • Do What You Are Great at Rather Than Follow Your Passion?

    Interesting commencement speech by Ben Horowitz. When I attended Stanford, I’d regularly listen to the VFTT (View from the Top) speeches of well-known entrepreneurs and executives. I quickly got bored, first, and then upset, second, when these speeches all seemed to be one long slog of follow-your-passion (and everything will work out) talks. “Give me…

  • How open source is changing the software developer’s career [Computer Magazine]

    How open source is changing the software developer’s career [Computer Magazine]

    Abstract: Software developers with open source project experience acquire verifiable technical expertise, peer-​certified competencies, and positional power—advantages that align with companies’ need to obtain a competitive advantage. Read more… Keywords: Software developer career, software labor economics, high-tech labor market, open source, inner source Reference: Dirk Riehle. “How Open Source is Changing the Software Developer’s Career.”…

  • M.B.A.s or Engineers for Product Management?

    I teach product management at a public German engineering school, where I am a professor of computer science. Product management is my nod towards “business informatics”, otherwise I only teach engineering courses (and one general how-to-perform-research class). There is an old debate as to who makes better product managers: M.B.A.s or engineers? Having worked on…