Again, if you have other priorities, that's your call, but if you want to become wealthy, you can live on half your pay and invest the rest. Anyone can do that on a professional salary... if they make that a priority.
Which would be in some way relevant of outlawing pot in any way reduced pot use. Since it does not in fact achieve that goal, the negative effects of pot smoking are irrelevant. Outlawing things because we disapprove of them is a stark miss-use of the legislative process. Pass laws because the actual consequences of the law will make the community better off, not because you want to signal disapproval.
Once enough states legalize, the federal legislature will find the courage to do likewise. It may even be the GOP who steps up - or at least there's been a lot of discussion from conservative bloggers about the prospect, it's just a matter of the elder social conservatives aging out of the GOP. (And, to be fair, SilkRoad does look like actual interstate trade).
... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime. That will certainly be the end for a black market for that particular good. How much of Silk Road's market (in terms of money actually spent) is for similarly innocuous stuff? For all the hype, I doubt the assassination market is real. There are of course some drugs that will never be legal - anyone know if that's a big business?
The business for botnets is probably with us forever, but amazingly the price of cloud servers is coming down low enough where it won't make much sense to use a botnet except directly for criminal activities (DDOS etc).
The notion that "renting is just throwing money away" is too simple. Owning has lots of costs too. The break-even point is about where the price of the house is ~100 months rent for an equivalent place. In Cali I saw houses priced 2-4x what would make sense. Just nuts.
If you want to retire, you must invest. Again, so simple I'm surprised I have to say it. Maxing out your 401k is a good start, but you have to start doing that in your 20s and you're still retiring at 60. Past 30 in a professional career, you should be living on half your take-home pay and investing the rest. You'll be able to retire within 20 years.
Of course, if you care more about some noise than escaping wage-slavery, well, you'll get the result of such priorities. If your primary goal is financial self-sufficiency, it's achievable, and it's not even that with where west-coast dev salaries are these days.
Why would you live in SF in the first place? Silly Valley is near SF, but is like an hour's commute in traffic to most of San Jose. It always baffled me that so many people working in tech wanted to live there.
But in any case, you work where pay is high, you retire to where cost of living is low (unless you really did well). Seems so obvious it's hardly worth saying, but there it is.
I found a nice enough place to rent when I worked in Silly Valley - $1800/month for 2 bedrooms, modern, and a garage. Of course no yard and shared walls -- that's what it means to live in a dense urban area -- but at long as it's not too loud who cares? And Seattle has similar pay scales but is cheaper unless you have to live downtown, or next to MS. Of course, you can also buy a million-dollar high-rise condo (or a million dollar tiny ancient shitbox of a house, in SF or the Valley - rents and house price are totally out of alignment there) .
Every company I've worked at on the West Coast has a relo package, except the start-up. And they all paid at least 50% more than Houston, Orlando, and research triangle payscales (three areas I've looked at). Some senior guys might make double if they're undervalued where they are (which I've seen a lot of for senior guys not I the hotspots).
You seem very pessimistic, and I'm not sure why - the jobs here pay well, and you don't have to live in the most expensive spots.
We're primates, but not monkeys. The vaccine works nasally for monkeys, so now I just need a monkey nose and I'm safe - hopefully the Aggies will get full monkey nose funding soon.
Sure, when it's actually done, then it's worth the attention of others. But the internet is full of easy explanations (if you ignore half the data) for just about everything in cosmology. And WIMPs mat actually be wrong. But any alternative needs to be better: this isn't politics, we can't just ignore inconvenient data.
Amazing that they haven't already ruled out common particles as a source of dark-matter anomalies in the galaxy rotation curves... you'd figure that would be the first suspect analyzed?
You can't rule them out from galaxy rotation, that's why MACHOs were just as viable as WIMPs early on, and none of those hypotheses were particularly credible.
But the important data is the CMBR data, which tells us, to 2 significant figures, the ratio of dark matter (does not interact with photons even at very high energy densities) to normal matter - more than 5:1 dark. It also tells us that the dark matter must be "cool" (not moving at or near the speed of light).
At this point, any hypothesis that doesn't explain galaxy rotation and the CMBR data and the gravitational lensing from galaxy-sized objects we can't see and make some useful prediction that the current WIMP models don't is just a crackpot idea: junk science.
but determination and self-discipline to succeed at what? Perhaps, to take a bigger piece of the pie for themselves so that everyone else has less?
The economy is not a zero-sum game. The harder each of us works, the more pie there is for everyone. Doubly so for anyone creating new technology.
Don't try to get kids to be more motivated. Try to get them to realize that having a more expensive designer handbag doesn't actually make someone a better person.
SO what you're really saying is: do teach them to be motivated, and also teach them a strong moral compass and proper values. I can get behind that idea.
Oh, geez, are we back to "teach self esteem" and "participation trophies"? We need to teach some self-discipline and determination - if we don't teach kids to keep going especially when it seems hard, how are they going to find success as adults? A proper "positive self image" is the result of success. You do the hard things not because you think you're great, but because you don't give up.
What you advocate leads to college grads who don't know what to do when no one hands them a great job at graduation, so they can only complain instead of persevere.
Eh? My team has 11 open reqs, last I looked, and we don't care about visa status one way or the other. H1-Bs aren't cheaper for companies who care about staying legal.
Yes, that's the movie nerd stereotype. I've only ever met a couple (one was my boss, which was odd, he had a hard time giving presentations). All engineers push against silly rules of course - when someone's profession is gaming the system, what else can you expect?
"Companies need to come to me" is a useless attitude for future employment. Seattle, BTW, has the Cali payscales without the crazy local government of CA, or the income taxes. Really, the only excuse not to follow your career to where the best jobs are is that your spouse has a better job, and you're following that instead.
Remote development is just a pain in the ass. Actually sitting and writing code is a small part of any software job, and in-person collaboration is important for a lot of the rest of it. And companies satisfied with remote dev shops have no reason to look in the US when there are far cheaper places to hire from.
But in any case, employers want what they want. In the actual world that we live in, it you want a well-paying software job, move to where those jobs are.
If you want a career in software development, stay far, far from the places where there stuffed suits run the shop. It's a small and dirty corner of the industry. If you want a job at a big-name software-centric company, it's important not to look like a stuffed suit yourself.
Remember, in the modern world recruiters and hiring managers find your resume online, it's all "pull-based" now. Hiring manager want to solve specific kinds of problems. You want to list the specific kinds of problems that you've solved, because that's what they're actually looking for. Sure, sure, make sure to work in the keywords that recruiters search for, that's quite important, but those keywords can be anywhere.
Why do you need to own a house? Seriously? Home ownership isn't the norm in dense urban settings, but there are plenty of very nice places to rent.
Other than that, all the big companies have relocation packages that are pretty nice. It's not the dot-com days when they'd buy your old house from you, but certainly costs of moving and travel (and I know MS provides temp housing for a month while you look, but I don't think that's the norm).
Assuming you have a sane budget and are saving some each month, then 50% more pay with 50% more expenses means 50% more savings going forward. And depending on where you live, the pay premium might be higher still.
But don't hold your breath for telecommuting - you're competing with the whole world market at that point, and the rural US isn't so cheap by that standard.
Sure, in Canada. And in India developers can make twice what doctors and lawyers make. But in the US you can pay $250k in malpractice insurance for some specialties, and there are states with a drastic shortage of OB/Gyns because of the liability risks to no one wants to take.
On the West coast, a manager-equivalent senior engineer should be making around $200k (+/- 20%), all-in, and a director-equivalent can make $300k+ (though there are few enough of those in the industry, as it hasn't matured to where half the software devs have 20+ years of experience - still a young field).
Simultaneity doesn't mean what you want it to mean. There's no arbitrary universal time in which things can be said to happen simultaneously. Even the order of events can be different depending on the frame of reference of the observer (but causality is always protected). You can pick an arbitrary frame, of course, but you can only observe distant events after the speed-of-light delay, which itself depends on relative velocity. Since we're constantly accelerating, even that comes down to arbitrary choices.
Or in other words, if you and I are moving relative to one another, each of us can have a definition of simultaneity, but we can't agree on what events are simultaneous. Two atomic clocks at different places on Earth won't have any reference frame in which they keep exactly the same time (though they'll agree to quite a few significant digits).
And MDs can pay half their salary in malpractice insurance. It's only certain technical specialties (more years of additional training) that pull ahead of senior software developers.
You need to show the cool problems you've solved. If you're fresh out of school, well, what did you do in your internships to prove you can actually code. What open-source projects have you made some important contribution to? There are several hundred million candidates with no experience who are clamoring for attention, you need something to make hiring managers take you seriously. It's a hard field to break into.
Once you have a couple years experience, you're already in a far smaller crowd. A couple years experience with actual commercial code and you stand out. But it can be a long road to that first real coding job.
The work a software developer does to break into this industry is still nothing compared to a medical internship (unless you work at someplace like EA). Highly paid professions often have high barriers to entry.
That's almost an urban legend. I've worked with a couple hundred developers over the course of my career, and likely interviewed a hundred more, and can only think of a couple who fit the movie-nerd stereotype. Most are simply professionals working a professional job.
The problem is that so few working devs actually have good problem-solving skills. You simply can't be good at this job through memorization.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, if you have other priorities, that's your call, but if you want to become wealthy, you can live on half your pay and invest the rest. Anyone can do that on a professional salary ... if they make that a priority.
Which would be in some way relevant of outlawing pot in any way reduced pot use. Since it does not in fact achieve that goal, the negative effects of pot smoking are irrelevant. Outlawing things because we disapprove of them is a stark miss-use of the legislative process. Pass laws because the actual consequences of the law will make the community better off, not because you want to signal disapproval.
Once enough states legalize, the federal legislature will find the courage to do likewise. It may even be the GOP who steps up - or at least there's been a lot of discussion from conservative bloggers about the prospect, it's just a matter of the elder social conservatives aging out of the GOP. (And, to be fair, SilkRoad does look like actual interstate trade).
... It will NEVER stop.
... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime. That will certainly be the end for a black market for that particular good. How much of Silk Road's market (in terms of money actually spent) is for similarly innocuous stuff? For all the hype, I doubt the assassination market is real. There are of course some drugs that will never be legal - anyone know if that's a big business?
The business for botnets is probably with us forever, but amazingly the price of cloud servers is coming down low enough where it won't make much sense to use a botnet except directly for criminal activities (DDOS etc).
*not even that hard
The notion that "renting is just throwing money away" is too simple. Owning has lots of costs too. The break-even point is about where the price of the house is ~100 months rent for an equivalent place. In Cali I saw houses priced 2-4x what would make sense. Just nuts.
If you want to retire, you must invest. Again, so simple I'm surprised I have to say it. Maxing out your 401k is a good start, but you have to start doing that in your 20s and you're still retiring at 60. Past 30 in a professional career, you should be living on half your take-home pay and investing the rest. You'll be able to retire within 20 years.
Of course, if you care more about some noise than escaping wage-slavery, well, you'll get the result of such priorities. If your primary goal is financial self-sufficiency, it's achievable, and it's not even that with where west-coast dev salaries are these days.
Why would you live in SF in the first place? Silly Valley is near SF, but is like an hour's commute in traffic to most of San Jose. It always baffled me that so many people working in tech wanted to live there.
But in any case, you work where pay is high, you retire to where cost of living is low (unless you really did well). Seems so obvious it's hardly worth saying, but there it is.
I found a nice enough place to rent when I worked in Silly Valley - $1800/month for 2 bedrooms, modern, and a garage. Of course no yard and shared walls -- that's what it means to live in a dense urban area -- but at long as it's not too loud who cares? And Seattle has similar pay scales but is cheaper unless you have to live downtown, or next to MS. Of course, you can also buy a million-dollar high-rise condo (or a million dollar tiny ancient shitbox of a house, in SF or the Valley - rents and house price are totally out of alignment there) .
Every company I've worked at on the West Coast has a relo package, except the start-up. And they all paid at least 50% more than Houston, Orlando, and research triangle payscales (three areas I've looked at). Some senior guys might make double if they're undervalued where they are (which I've seen a lot of for senior guys not I the hotspots).
You seem very pessimistic, and I'm not sure why - the jobs here pay well, and you don't have to live in the most expensive spots.
monkeys like us or monkeys like monkeys?
We're primates, but not monkeys. The vaccine works nasally for monkeys, so now I just need a monkey nose and I'm safe - hopefully the Aggies will get full monkey nose funding soon.
Sure, when it's actually done, then it's worth the attention of others. But the internet is full of easy explanations (if you ignore half the data) for just about everything in cosmology. And WIMPs mat actually be wrong. But any alternative needs to be better: this isn't politics, we can't just ignore inconvenient data.
And the CMBR data? Fail.
Every problem has a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer.
Amazing that they haven't already ruled out common particles as a source of dark-matter anomalies in the galaxy rotation curves... you'd figure that would be the first suspect analyzed?
You can't rule them out from galaxy rotation, that's why MACHOs were just as viable as WIMPs early on, and none of those hypotheses were particularly credible.
But the important data is the CMBR data, which tells us, to 2 significant figures, the ratio of dark matter (does not interact with photons even at very high energy densities) to normal matter - more than 5:1 dark. It also tells us that the dark matter must be "cool" (not moving at or near the speed of light).
At this point, any hypothesis that doesn't explain galaxy rotation and the CMBR data and the gravitational lensing from galaxy-sized objects we can't see and make some useful prediction that the current WIMP models don't is just a crackpot idea: junk science.
but determination and self-discipline to succeed at what? Perhaps, to take a bigger piece of the pie for themselves so that everyone else has less?
The economy is not a zero-sum game. The harder each of us works, the more pie there is for everyone. Doubly so for anyone creating new technology.
Don't try to get kids to be more motivated. Try to get them to realize that having a more expensive designer handbag doesn't actually make someone a better person.
SO what you're really saying is: do teach them to be motivated, and also teach them a strong moral compass and proper values. I can get behind that idea.
Oh, geez, are we back to "teach self esteem" and "participation trophies"? We need to teach some self-discipline and determination - if we don't teach kids to keep going especially when it seems hard, how are they going to find success as adults? A proper "positive self image" is the result of success. You do the hard things not because you think you're great, but because you don't give up.
What you advocate leads to college grads who don't know what to do when no one hands them a great job at graduation, so they can only complain instead of persevere.
Eh? My team has 11 open reqs, last I looked, and we don't care about visa status one way or the other. H1-Bs aren't cheaper for companies who care about staying legal.
Yes, that's the movie nerd stereotype. I've only ever met a couple (one was my boss, which was odd, he had a hard time giving presentations). All engineers push against silly rules of course - when someone's profession is gaming the system, what else can you expect?
"Companies need to come to me" is a useless attitude for future employment. Seattle, BTW, has the Cali payscales without the crazy local government of CA, or the income taxes. Really, the only excuse not to follow your career to where the best jobs are is that your spouse has a better job, and you're following that instead.
Remote development is just a pain in the ass. Actually sitting and writing code is a small part of any software job, and in-person collaboration is important for a lot of the rest of it. And companies satisfied with remote dev shops have no reason to look in the US when there are far cheaper places to hire from.
But in any case, employers want what they want. In the actual world that we live in, it you want a well-paying software job, move to where those jobs are.
If you want a career in software development, stay far, far from the places where there stuffed suits run the shop. It's a small and dirty corner of the industry. If you want a job at a big-name software-centric company, it's important not to look like a stuffed suit yourself.
Remember, in the modern world recruiters and hiring managers find your resume online, it's all "pull-based" now. Hiring manager want to solve specific kinds of problems. You want to list the specific kinds of problems that you've solved, because that's what they're actually looking for. Sure, sure, make sure to work in the keywords that recruiters search for, that's quite important, but those keywords can be anywhere.
Why do you need to own a house? Seriously? Home ownership isn't the norm in dense urban settings, but there are plenty of very nice places to rent.
Other than that, all the big companies have relocation packages that are pretty nice. It's not the dot-com days when they'd buy your old house from you, but certainly costs of moving and travel (and I know MS provides temp housing for a month while you look, but I don't think that's the norm).
Assuming you have a sane budget and are saving some each month, then 50% more pay with 50% more expenses means 50% more savings going forward. And depending on where you live, the pay premium might be higher still.
But don't hold your breath for telecommuting - you're competing with the whole world market at that point, and the rural US isn't so cheap by that standard.
Sure, in Canada. And in India developers can make twice what doctors and lawyers make. But in the US you can pay $250k in malpractice insurance for some specialties, and there are states with a drastic shortage of OB/Gyns because of the liability risks to no one wants to take.
On the West coast, a manager-equivalent senior engineer should be making around $200k (+/- 20%), all-in, and a director-equivalent can make $300k+ (though there are few enough of those in the industry, as it hasn't matured to where half the software devs have 20+ years of experience - still a young field).
Simultaneity doesn't mean what you want it to mean. There's no arbitrary universal time in which things can be said to happen simultaneously. Even the order of events can be different depending on the frame of reference of the observer (but causality is always protected). You can pick an arbitrary frame, of course, but you can only observe distant events after the speed-of-light delay, which itself depends on relative velocity. Since we're constantly accelerating, even that comes down to arbitrary choices.
Or in other words, if you and I are moving relative to one another, each of us can have a definition of simultaneity, but we can't agree on what events are simultaneous. Two atomic clocks at different places on Earth won't have any reference frame in which they keep exactly the same time (though they'll agree to quite a few significant digits).
And MDs can pay half their salary in malpractice insurance. It's only certain technical specialties (more years of additional training) that pull ahead of senior software developers.
You need to show the cool problems you've solved. If you're fresh out of school, well, what did you do in your internships to prove you can actually code. What open-source projects have you made some important contribution to? There are several hundred million candidates with no experience who are clamoring for attention, you need something to make hiring managers take you seriously. It's a hard field to break into.
Once you have a couple years experience, you're already in a far smaller crowd. A couple years experience with actual commercial code and you stand out. But it can be a long road to that first real coding job.
The work a software developer does to break into this industry is still nothing compared to a medical internship (unless you work at someplace like EA). Highly paid professions often have high barriers to entry.
That's almost an urban legend. I've worked with a couple hundred developers over the course of my career, and likely interviewed a hundred more, and can only think of a couple who fit the movie-nerd stereotype. Most are simply professionals working a professional job.
The problem is that so few working devs actually have good problem-solving skills. You simply can't be good at this job through memorization.