I kinda hate the way "privilege" gets thrown around a lot of the time, but this is pretty much the clearest sense of privilege here.
This is not an intelligent comment. The folks who succeed in getting high-paying software jobs are not privileged. They are the ones who are (1) able to identify where the good jobs are, and (2) take the steps needed to obtain that goal. I don't consider taking the time to learn software skills as some sort of "privilege". If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.
This report is like any news article. You can believe it, or you can refuse to believe it. Whatever makes you feel better about your career and your salary.
I bought a wireless Mamba a few years ago. I had an extraordinarily hard time getting it out of the box. It comes mounted on some plastic pedestal, and I was trying for 15 minutes to remove it for fear of breaking off some piece of the plastic mouse. Maybe you guys should try to make the unboxing experience better.
If any of you are having a hard time believing the $1200 price tag of the new Sony NWZ-ZX2, then I recommend you check out the Astell and Kern AK240 priced at $2499.
Get with the news. Celebrities have been importing water this year. In this report dated August 26, 2014:
But the most famous Montecito resident of all is Oprah. Ms. Winfrey owns at least two homes here, and last year her water bill almost topped $125,000. This year, it's about half of that, thanks to the dramatic measures she's taken to curb her use of the city water supply. But that doesn't means she's cutting back on water consumption. Noooo. She and many other celebs are now having their water imported.
It doesn't say where the water is coming from, though.
That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized and rumored that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.
I bought an iPhone 3G back in 2008 with the AT&T unlimited data plan along and a dirt cheap voice plan. I don't have to worry about going over my data limit, and voice calling time is a non-issue. I am NEVER going to give up this combination. With a corporate discount, I pay $65 with tax each month.
I don't know about Verizon, but AT&T takes care of its long-term customers. There has not been any indication that they will end the grandfathered plans.
I graduated with a CS PhD degree about 10 years ago and also had a hard time finding a first job. After several months I had to take an industry postdoc position for only $95K. The climate is totally different now in 2014, but here are some thoughts.
If you have a PhD, you can play that off in one of two ways: (1) either you are generally very smart, or (2) you have expertise in a specific and valuable field.
For (2), if your field is in high demand, e.g. machine learning, computer vision, numerical optimization, etc., then just look for a job for this specific area. Big or small companies will want your talent if their business revolves around that field. Interviewers will drill you on that topic.
For (1), this is more difficult particularly if your PhD topic is general, e.g. programming language semantics or operating systems. Interviewers will drill you on hardcore programming questions because they think the number of years doing your PhD equates to professional software programming experience. I fell into this category and was drilled mercilessly by Google, Microsoft, and the like when I graduated. I also got the feeling that the interviewers were especially hard because they wanted to prove they were smarter than a PhD. Don't let that get you down, though. You worked hard for your PhD, and there is no reason you can't work as hard preparing for software engineering positions. Later in my career I landed such a job, and I owe it to focused preparation. Study the algorithms books (e.g. Cormen, et al.), master at least one programming language inside out (C++ or Java), read interview programming books (I recommend the one by Mongan, et al. as a starter), and know how to think on your feet at a whiteboard.
Oklahoma has recently had a spate of earthquakes. From the LA Times:
The state had 109 temblors measuring 3.0 or greater in 2013 — more than 5,000% above normal. There have already been more than 200 earthquakes this year, Holland said.
There is controversy in that the quakes have occurred after the start of fracking (and the disposal of wastewater), and the oil companies refuse to acknowledge the connection. However, I find this stance akin to the cigarette companies refusing to acknowledge a direction connection between smoking and lung cancer.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was such a good game! I remember playing that back in 2002-2003 when I was in grad school. I can still visualize the Omaha Beach multiplayer level in my mind, like it was an actual physical layout. Land on the beach from the landing craft, use the sniper rifle to take out the machine gunners in the high turrets, storm the base, and make your way to plant the dynamite on the big guns at the back of the map. Good times.
Mr. Devine said he told his lawyers that he found the settlement inadequate as it was being negotiated, but they ignored him. Lawyers in the case declined to comment on Sunday....
As a class representative, he is eligible for an incentive award for the time and effort he put into the case. His lawyers have asked the court to approve a $20,000 payment for each representative from settlements reached last year against three other defendants in the suit — Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit. A similar payment might be forthcoming from the settlement with Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if the case went to trial and the plaintiffs got the full $9 billion, he would not get much more.
I actually do have almost 200 hours in community service, but almost all between high school and grad school. I volunteered at hospitals, homeless shelters, and habitat for humanity. Since becoming a professional, though, I have little time for that now. What's most disturbing is that I've now become more libertarian, i.e. disgusted that I have to pay so much tax for socialist services after having spent the entirety of my 20s in CS degree programs.
I finished my CS PhD about 10 years ago at a top-20 US university. My first year I was not paid, but after I hooked onto an advisor later, I received an RA or TA position for $23k/year, and in my last few years, I received a fellowship for about $40k/year.
That first year was horrible. I recall eating spaghetti and ketchup, and I distinctly remember having to ask one of my rich friends for a $500 loan just to pay my rent one month. That was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, and it really shaped my financial planning. Now, 10 years later, although I'm making well over $150k/year, I keep my expenses very low like I'm still a grad student, and I always have at least 6 months' expenses in short-term accounts.
I'm fairly certain that if a person has attained a CS PhD from a top-20 US university, then the person should know what "computer science" is. All other things being equal, someone with a CS PhD knows much more about "computer science" than someone who does not possess a CS PhD.
Hello, anonymous coward. I would say I know about computer science because I have three degrees in the field, namely BS, MS, and PhD from top-20 US universities. I would also say I know about programming because I've worked at some of the biggest companies in software and online services. I also know how to distinguish between "you're" and "your". Now, regarding your comment, computer science is in general the application of the theory of computation to practical computers and practical applications. There are fields in CS which are purely theoretical, but in general CS applies theory to real computers (e.g. Von Neumann architectures; you should look that up some time when you're not too busy with your HTML and CSS). CS is thus an extremely broad field.
"Computer Science" is a very broad field covering both theory and programming. Here are some great books:
-- Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed., by Cormen, et al. ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ.
-- Computer networking: a top-down approach, by Kurose and Ross. Great book; skips the physical layer.
-- The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie. This is the one book you need on programming language pragmatics.
-- Modern Operating Systems, by Tanenbaum.
-- An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R, by James, et al. Have not read this machine learning book myself, but the Amazon reviews say it's great.
Motorola has a distinguished history as a great American company. It was founded in 1928 and outlasted all its electronics contemporaries from that era, including RCA and Dumont. It had a great hit in the Razr (the iPhone before the iPhone). Now Google has sold Motorola to China.
Perhaps you should have applied better parental supervision and not just check up on him after "a couple months later." Apple is not in the business of being your child's parent.
MapReduce has no recursion. It is a programming framework for applying user-defined functions and aggregating results by value.
Further, it is a full working implementation that handles communication, shuffling, and data IO on a distributed, massively-parallel cluster of servers.
No, you are not a super genius, and no, you're not making anywhere close to $3M a year.
I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.
In Silicon Valley the salary for principal engineers is well in excess of $170k, and if you're at a company with a healthy stock price, an additional $100K in vesting RSUs per year is definitely not out of the question.
Slashdot Mirror
I kinda hate the way "privilege" gets thrown around a lot of the time, but this is pretty much the clearest sense of privilege here.
This is not an intelligent comment. The folks who succeed in getting high-paying software jobs are not privileged. They are the ones who are (1) able to identify where the good jobs are, and (2) take the steps needed to obtain that goal. I don't consider taking the time to learn software skills as some sort of "privilege". If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.
The average starting salary is $66K. Being average, it means that half the graduates are paid far less than that amount.
The fact that you don't understand the difference between "average" and "median" closely correlates with your other statement:
I'm paid well under that average
This report is like any news article. You can believe it, or you can refuse to believe it. Whatever makes you feel better about your career and your salary.
I bought a wireless Mamba a few years ago. I had an extraordinarily hard time getting it out of the box. It comes mounted on some plastic pedestal, and I was trying for 15 minutes to remove it for fear of breaking off some piece of the plastic mouse. Maybe you guys should try to make the unboxing experience better.
I'm posting in this thread to mark the day and time (2/26/2015) at 3:10pm PT when Slashdot's UI changed, perhaps for the worse. History will tell.
If any of you are having a hard time believing the $1200 price tag of the new Sony NWZ-ZX2, then I recommend you check out the Astell and Kern AK240 priced at $2499.
But the most famous Montecito resident of all is Oprah. Ms. Winfrey owns at least two homes here, and last year her water bill almost topped $125,000. This year, it's about half of that, thanks to the dramatic measures she's taken to curb her use of the city water supply. But that doesn't means she's cutting back on water consumption. Noooo. She and many other celebs are now having their water imported.
It doesn't say where the water is coming from, though.
That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized and rumored that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.
I don't know about Verizon, but AT&T takes care of its long-term customers. There has not been any indication that they will end the grandfathered plans.
If you have a PhD, you can play that off in one of two ways: (1) either you are generally very smart, or (2) you have expertise in a specific and valuable field.
For (2), if your field is in high demand, e.g. machine learning, computer vision, numerical optimization, etc., then just look for a job for this specific area. Big or small companies will want your talent if their business revolves around that field. Interviewers will drill you on that topic.
For (1), this is more difficult particularly if your PhD topic is general, e.g. programming language semantics or operating systems. Interviewers will drill you on hardcore programming questions because they think the number of years doing your PhD equates to professional software programming experience. I fell into this category and was drilled mercilessly by Google, Microsoft, and the like when I graduated. I also got the feeling that the interviewers were especially hard because they wanted to prove they were smarter than a PhD. Don't let that get you down, though. You worked hard for your PhD, and there is no reason you can't work as hard preparing for software engineering positions. Later in my career I landed such a job, and I owe it to focused preparation. Study the algorithms books (e.g. Cormen, et al.), master at least one programming language inside out (C++ or Java), read interview programming books (I recommend the one by Mongan, et al. as a starter), and know how to think on your feet at a whiteboard.
The state had 109 temblors measuring 3.0 or greater in 2013 — more than 5,000% above normal. There have already been more than 200 earthquakes this year, Holland said.
There is controversy in that the quakes have occurred after the start of fracking (and the disposal of wastewater), and the oil companies refuse to acknowledge the connection. However, I find this stance akin to the cigarette companies refusing to acknowledge a direction connection between smoking and lung cancer.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was such a good game! I remember playing that back in 2002-2003 when I was in grad school. I can still visualize the Omaha Beach multiplayer level in my mind, like it was an actual physical layout. Land on the beach from the landing craft, use the sniper rifle to take out the machine gunners in the high turrets, storm the base, and make your way to plant the dynamite on the big guns at the back of the map. Good times.
Mr. Devine said he told his lawyers that he found the settlement inadequate as it was being negotiated, but they ignored him. Lawyers in the case declined to comment on Sunday. ...
As a class representative, he is eligible for an incentive award for the time and effort he put into the case. His lawyers have asked the court to approve a $20,000 payment for each representative from settlements reached last year against three other defendants in the suit — Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit. A similar payment might be forthcoming from the settlement with Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if the case went to trial and the plaintiffs got the full $9 billion, he would not get much more.
I actually do have almost 200 hours in community service, but almost all between high school and grad school. I volunteered at hospitals, homeless shelters, and habitat for humanity. Since becoming a professional, though, I have little time for that now. What's most disturbing is that I've now become more libertarian, i.e. disgusted that I have to pay so much tax for socialist services after having spent the entirety of my 20s in CS degree programs.
I finished my CS PhD about 10 years ago at a top-20 US university. My first year I was not paid, but after I hooked onto an advisor later, I received an RA or TA position for $23k/year, and in my last few years, I received a fellowship for about $40k/year.
That first year was horrible. I recall eating spaghetti and ketchup, and I distinctly remember having to ask one of my rich friends for a $500 loan just to pay my rent one month. That was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, and it really shaped my financial planning. Now, 10 years later, although I'm making well over $150k/year, I keep my expenses very low like I'm still a grad student, and I always have at least 6 months' expenses in short-term accounts.
Japan Display manufactures the iPhone screens.
Apple has already thought of that: Apple's A8 Chip Production for iPhone 6 Underway at TSMC.
I'm fairly certain that if a person has attained a CS PhD from a top-20 US university, then the person should know what "computer science" is. All other things being equal, someone with a CS PhD knows much more about "computer science" than someone who does not possess a CS PhD.
Hello, anonymous coward. I would say I know about computer science because I have three degrees in the field, namely BS, MS, and PhD from top-20 US universities. I would also say I know about programming because I've worked at some of the biggest companies in software and online services. I also know how to distinguish between "you're" and "your". Now, regarding your comment, computer science is in general the application of the theory of computation to practical computers and practical applications. There are fields in CS which are purely theoretical, but in general CS applies theory to real computers (e.g. Von Neumann architectures; you should look that up some time when you're not too busy with your HTML and CSS). CS is thus an extremely broad field.
-- Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed., by Cormen, et al. ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ.
-- Computer networking: a top-down approach, by Kurose and Ross. Great book; skips the physical layer.
-- The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie. This is the one book you need on programming language pragmatics.
-- Modern Operating Systems, by Tanenbaum.
-- An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R, by James, et al. Have not read this machine learning book myself, but the Amazon reviews say it's great.
Motorola has a distinguished history as a great American company. It was founded in 1928 and outlasted all its electronics contemporaries from that era, including RCA and Dumont. It had a great hit in the Razr (the iPhone before the iPhone). Now Google has sold Motorola to China.
Perhaps you should have applied better parental supervision and not just check up on him after "a couple months later." Apple is not in the business of being your child's parent.
That's one of the most ridiculous numbers I've ever seen pulled out of any asshole.
That's a great line. I'm going to steal it.
I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.
In Silicon Valley the salary for principal engineers is well in excess of $170k, and if you're at a company with a healthy stock price, an additional $100K in vesting RSUs per year is definitely not out of the question.