I have credit cards at a bunch of banks here in Russia and what they do is they send you a one-time password in a text message every time you make a purchase online. It's the same VbV/SecureCode window and everything but you don't get to create your own password.
No doubt that list is different for everyone, but here's mine:
1) Replace employer-sponsored and lottery green cards with a points-based self-petitioning system that can be tuned annually according to the nation's needs. Such a system would award points for basic criteria for age, language, education and experience, with bonus points for experience in occupations for which there are shortages.
2) Eliminate H1B and its byzantine rules, replacing it with a simpler short-term work visa that has a 2 year limit and no renewal. Anything longer in not temporary, and falls in the category above (and if the person does not qualify for 1) then why is it necessary to hire this person and not an American?)
3) Crack down on USCIS backlogs. There is no excuse for it taking years to process visas. Quite apart from the fact that people people's live on hold for that wrong is unjust, it costs American businesses real money. If they need an expert in a certain field, they need it now, not at some indeterminate time.
Shouldn't they be able to get B1 visas with the company they founded? It's most probably registered in the US. But then again, the US immigration system is seriously broken.
A friend of mine moved to the US in the late 90's using something like this founder visa. He and his parents opened a restaurant in Orlando, FL. The basic premise was they invested about US$ 100K in their business and were granted resident status, with the limitation they could not work in a company other than their own.
And that reminds me once more I still owe them a visit.
It says they're on a tourist visa (B2) - a B1 really wouldn't gain anything - they'd still have to leave every 3 months, and be questioned more closely each time they come back.
I wonder about this, too. I mean, it's funny how people have all these rights including freedom of movement and residence, but only within the country.
The economists usually praise mobility of the population. I wonder if the current state of affairs is simply due to historical reasons.
It seems there are roughly equal numbers of Europeans wanting to live in the US, and USians wanting to live in Europe. I imagine it being possible (albeit hard) to set up some kind of exchange system.
I think it would work out ok. There are plenty of wealthy Americans who would flock to Italy, for instance, if it were easier. And plenty of Europeans who might give a job in the US a whirl and then go home. And plenty of Americans who would love to spend a year working in Europe. And vice versa.
I don't think you'd see big imbalances between areas with roughly equivalent living standards.
Just in case someone from the Dropbox team is reading this, I wanted to compliment on the web UI. Really, it kicks some serious ass. I'm usually very picky when it comes to websites and their design, but this one is just a piece of art.
When I worked at a large company, their reason for storing passwords (to an online ordering system; for some 1.5 million clients) as plain text was the ability to impersonate users when debugging their problems. Then, after a while, even that became too hard for them so they added a special backdoor: on the live system, you could go to a special page (it was not linked from anywhere, but it was conveniently named Login.aspx) and enter the user ID and a shared password that worked for all users. I'm still amazed why this had never been taken advantage of while I was there.
If it's properly secured and leaves an audit trail (sounds like yours wasn't) an "impersonate user" feature is pretty much a must have for debugging problems on any site has content or behavior that varies per-user.
I worked at a company that had properly encrypted passwords, but the customer support people would just ask the user for their username/password and login through the front door. Once I found out about that, I implemented a simple yet secured impersonate system and it has served us very well.
I agree, it's an extremely useful feature to have.
The way I set it up is that the user must first log in to an administrator-level account before they can impersonate another user by entering a username or ID.
I would go as far as to say there really are only two things a lower- to mid-level manager should focus on. First--and this is by far the most important thing--she should make sure her subordinates have the best possible environment to do their jobs. The second responsibility is hiring the right people. With these two ingredients in place, whatever she does on top of this would actually harm the performance of her team.
What usually surprises me about large organizations is how little power the managers have over these two points. A manager in charge of internal applications development may negotiate the functional specs with the business, but have no influence whatsoever over the hardware that's supplied to the developers.
Luck is disguised as genius all the time! Not only do we tend to see just the winners (survivorship bias), those winners honestly mistake their lucky guesses for great decisions (hindsight bias).
I would love to study more examples of failed startups. But people are not that fond of sharing with others how they screwed up (again, it's easy to see your own mistakes in the past). We need Anti-TechCrunch.
And with selection bias it's all so subtle that most times everybody fails to find it.
For instance, in this article one of the points was "make friends with the press" That's all fine and dandy, but a zillion other guys are also making friends with the press. If you're a YC alum, know a bunch of other "friends", live in the Valley, etc, you're going to have an easier time of it.
Lots of seemingly insignificant factors work cumulatively to make an easy piece of advice actually doable. Too often when the winners throw out the advice, however, there's no mention of all the dozens of little supporting pieces -- most of the time because they don't know or haven't really thought about them.
