Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you.
Pedantic, but I've always wondered why that phrase was necessary. In a contract with a severance clause (like every EULA ever), if the exclusion isn't legal, it just gets severed from the contract and the rest remains in full force. So why specifically mention it?
Two possible reasons: 1. Even with severability, there is the question of how much of the contract remains in force. This clause tries to define the portion of the contract that will be severed. 2. Even with a severance clause, you may not have a severable contract. The judge may just decide it's not severable: a contract is between two people, it has no power to tell the courts what legal reasoning they must apply in a dispute.
If you can actually design a solution, throw together a suite of unit tests (that ideally show the basic API,) and deploy it to production, you are already ahead of 95% of the "software engineers."
I wish I had mod points. I lived in the south and was saddened by what I was seeing:
Many of the smart and ambitious leave. The culture, though, remains in place: an ever more pointless divide between the rich and poor (or lucky and unlucky.) Low taxes mean low social services for the poor and insular privately provided schools and social services for the rich, and pretty soon you have an out-of-touch and uneducated rich class and an out-of-touch and uneducated poor class.
If you don't get out of the south at age 21, you are screwed.
There are a ton of jobs out there for people without "3-5 years experience," but who do understand how software works. We basically hire anyone who is not a lunatic who is able to answer all questions along the lines of:
1. What's a hashtable? Time to find/insert/delete? How would you implement one? Issues to consider? 2. Explain the execution time of strcmp("apples", "apple") 3. Describe how a couple of sorting algorithms work. 4. You have X on your resume, please explain it clearly.
It's scary how many people (even PhDs) can't answer these questions. It's like interviewing a lawyer who is a bit unclear on procedure, but figures his raw talent will win you your case.
Start tracking what you are doing (helping users, babysitting machines, provisioning, upgrading, debugging, etc.) Then track time wasted by your co-workers, users, etc. Then track hardware costs, licensing costs, etc.
Estimate dollars/year for the stuff you can see/could improve. Focus on the high cost stuff: ask the users of that stuff if they would prefer you to take ownership and get the cost down, or if they would prefer to just manage the stuff themselves.
Then start fixing the stuff they would prefer you to own.
Comparing a work from home sysadmin's salary with an enterprise architect's salary is like trying to get an average salary for lawyers (add one public defender to a credit default swap lawyer, divide by two.)
IT jobs cover a lot of space. $78K/year is just a silly summary statistic.
Exactly. Last month I watched $30K in salaries, etc, being wasted because engineers couldn't whiteboard a concept well enough to get buy-in or good feedback from the people in the room.
You want responsibility for a year-long multi-person project? You better be able to explain it well.
Wow. I don't care if a candidate says "I need a paycheck," but I'd never hire someone if I didn't feel they had the potential to double their salary within a few years.
I only want to hire people who will grow into bigger roles (and yes, I expect them to hire the person who will do their old job.) The bigger role doesn't need to be management, writing code that is more strategic works just as well.
If I want someone to be in the same role for 5 years, I'd hire a consultant. But, ideally, I'd hire someone to fix the underlying problem that we need a body in a pointless role in the first place.
1. Go for books with strong imagery over dense plot (e.g. Stross's Jennifer Morgue, Gaiman's Neverwhere, Lewis's Blind Side.) You get interrupted so much on planes that a 40 page idea is hard to enjoy: go for simple ideas done vividly. 2. Pack three unstarted paperbacks in carry-on. Don't be afraid to switch books if the current one isn't gripping you. 3. If all else fails, drink and then sleep. 4. Be in the first-class cabin.
Yeah, let's try to hire technically competent people and scare them with a joke technology "magic lie detector." Sort of ensures your target hire is either an idiot or cynical.
Why not just find the right people and pay them $300K/year?
There is no "upper half" that is fairly and reasonably chosen. I have a lot of experience in the field, and politics, knowing your manager's favorite flavor of ice cream, and selling your work to everyone is worth a lot more than actually being the talented guy who delivers rock solid work. Work environments are full of politics. It's wrong, and it's lame, but it's true.
To be fair, the article was more talking about the "upper 1%" rather than the upper half.
If you are really a 10X contributor, you just leave environments that are too political.
Screw the ice cream, if you are in a serious group, you all have a company credit card and can get it delivered. If senior management is doing their job, they will fire any middle manager who is not rewarding/promoting his talent based on results.
Remember that back in the late 1970s a startup was hard to do (no internet, etc.) Good engineering jobs had defined benefit pension plans, a good medical plan, maybe an expense account, etc. You had to have the shot at a lot of money in a startup to compete with that.
Some did it (Intel, Data General, etc,) but most engineers settled for a good corporate job in those days.
If we really are so focused on producing things with the new ideas (tech innovation and such) then where are the things we produce? the iPhone? That's designed here but made in China. Everything I've got on my desk right now is made in Malaysia, China, or Japan. What we are producing here leads to real goods but it sure isn't us making the real goods. Maybe you would argue this doesn't matter, but I think it does.
I would argue that it matters a lot. We are driving innovation (and that leads to a lot of millionaires in the USA,) but killing the US middle class (the line-workers.) I worry this is not a good outcome for our society.
What good are new ideas and innovations if we eventually lose the skills and technologies to put them into practice?
On the other hand, there still are industries (agriculture comes to mind) where we are not only innovating but actually producing real products too. Most of the large machines I see on farms in North America are made right here in North America, and exported around the world. It's one of the few areas left where North America actually exports and parts of the world depend on their products.
As the USA transitioned from a largely agricultural economy to an industrial one, these same issues were raised: we lost the "farming class." We never really "lost" the skills and tech though: we just commoditized them.
We could rebuild a manufacturing empire (with $20K/year jobs,) but a $30K/year dog-walker is just a better job given that almost anyone in the world can solder while my dog-walker needs to live nearby.
The economy is only going to get weirder, and I fear we will not like what it becomes.
"Don't just create ideas, also make products here," she [Hockfield] said. "Buying back technologies that we invented changed our surplus into deficit. We need to have a substantial fraction of technologies that are made in America."
Right now the US and Canadian economies are not focused on producing anything with the new ideas that come out. The startups get bought out by the existing big companies if they have any hope of success, who immediately commoditize technology and ship it overseas for manufacturing.
The US & Canadian economies are intensely focused on producing based on new ideas: 1980 onwards was all about tech innovation. Sleepy companies got killed, we got a new tech startup culture, big companies bought little innovators (and made the little guys rich in a way only dreamed off in 1970.) AT&T would never have produced Google or Facebook.
In some ways, the massive tax changes of the 1980s were responsible for this (as well as general improvements in tech & manufacturing, of course.) Cutting top tax rates from 70%+ to 40% or so made the startup bet much more attractive. Of course, the downside of giving people a chance to be a billionaire by age 30 is that it makes the career engineer/scientist role (IBM research, AT&T labs, Xerox Parc) rather obsolete and a waste of money. So lots of innovation, but goodbye middle class.
What's sad is that by 1980 white collar folk realized blue collar jobs could be outsourced. Most of them didn't realize they were next on the chopping block. The early 1990s saw the big research career dead along with the useless middle manager role and the standard secretary role.
Goodbye middle class, at least you have an iPhone.
These are unvested shares at issue. If you quit, or are fired, you lose them. If you are fired because you would not give back the shares, you might have a case to get them back, or a settlement of some sort.
Yep, courts tend to take a pretty dim view of the "we agreed you get X if you are working for us, please give up X or we will fire you" gambit: it's almost bad faith by definition.
Happened to me once: I just printed the memo and put in on my cube wall; got a few lawyers/mangers dropping by to "explain why I needed to sign." I sweetly said no: they said "ok" and got out of the room fast: they were smart enough to figure that concocting a paper trail to fire a well-rated employee, given a memo like that, was somewhere between "bad" and a felony.
A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
If you're designing iphone apps. CS PhDs tend to be more focused in cross-disciplinary work rather than writing user applications. I doubt you would get an Engineering PhD to design a toaster.
My work is more in the multi-billion dollar, multi-thousand people space: CS PhDs seem to have a hard time functioning in that environment (perhaps because it requires a lot of multi-disciplinary knowledge rather than deep CS knowledge.)
Oh, and many of our hot engineers rant about the mis-design of everyday objects (doors, vending machines, toasters, etc.) Improving/fixing a simple thing is much harder than building giant green-field technology visions.
How you structure the education almost doesn't matter: 1/10 graduates, at most, will have really mastered the basics of their field; Magna cum laude hardly means anything in terms of the graduate being effective.
After interviewing junior STEM hires for 25 years, I can see almost no correlation between education and effectiveness. That's no saying there is none (obviously, we don't see many high-school only types,) but, of the pool we do see, philosophy majors, college drop-outs, etc, seem to do pretty well. A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
All the education in the world simply will not turn an average intelligence person into a great engineer.
Years ago the kit you used at work was faster, better and more powerful than your home consumer devices. Today it's the reverse and what you are forced to use at work is totally crappy next to what you have at home. Thus consumerization of IT is necessary to even get your own work done.
Or to put it more simply, my companies OS is XP with Office 2003.
I see this all the time.
Luckily, at my current job I sat down to a 12-core, 48gig desktop. The guy next to me just smiled and said "you write code, you are expensive, machines are cheap."
The nightmare for me is when the Chief Executive Officer spots some new "toy" and wants it to work seamlessly in the corporate environment. The CEO has the weight to throw around to make it happen - then their administrative assistant needs to have the same new "toy," but it has to synch with the CEO's toy...
Instant insomnia!
It's terrible when management wants something and "throws their weight around."
Sorry about the insomnia, but that sounds like you have trouble doing a day job.
Slashdot Mirror
Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you.
Pedantic, but I've always wondered why that phrase was necessary. In a contract with a severance clause (like every EULA ever), if the exclusion isn't legal, it just gets severed from the contract and the rest remains in full force. So why specifically mention it?
Two possible reasons:
1. Even with severability, there is the question of how much of the contract remains in force. This clause tries to define the portion of the contract that will be severed.
2. Even with a severance clause, you may not have a severable contract. The judge may just decide it's not severable: a contract is between two people, it has no
power to tell the courts what legal reasoning they must apply in a dispute.
Truer words were never spoken.
If you can actually design a solution, throw together a suite of unit tests (that ideally show the basic API,) and deploy it to production, you are already ahead of 95% of the "software engineers."
I wish I had mod points. I lived in the south and was saddened by what I was seeing:
Many of the smart and ambitious leave. The culture, though, remains in place: an ever more pointless divide between the rich and poor (or lucky and unlucky.) Low taxes mean low social services for the poor and insular privately provided schools and social services for the rich, and pretty soon you have an out-of-touch and uneducated rich class and an out-of-touch and uneducated poor class.
If you don't get out of the south at age 21, you are screwed.
There are a ton of jobs out there for people without "3-5 years experience," but who do understand how software works. We basically hire anyone who is not a lunatic who is able to answer all questions along the lines of:
1. What's a hashtable? Time to find/insert/delete? How would you implement one? Issues to consider?
2. Explain the execution time of strcmp("apples", "apple")
3. Describe how a couple of sorting algorithms work.
4. You have X on your resume, please explain it clearly.
It's scary how many people (even PhDs) can't answer these questions. It's like interviewing a lawyer who is a bit unclear on procedure, but figures his raw talent will win you your case.
No, xkcd thinks you are an idiot.
Start tracking what you are doing (helping users, babysitting machines, provisioning, upgrading, debugging, etc.) Then track time wasted by your co-workers, users, etc. Then track hardware costs, licensing costs, etc.
Estimate dollars/year for the stuff you can see/could improve. Focus on the high cost stuff: ask the users of that stuff if they would prefer you to take ownership and get the cost down, or if they would prefer to just manage the stuff themselves.
Then start fixing the stuff they would prefer you to own.
Exactly why this type of survey is so absurd.
Comparing a work from home sysadmin's salary with an enterprise architect's salary is like trying to get an average salary for lawyers (add one public defender to a credit default swap lawyer, divide by two.)
IT jobs cover a lot of space. $78K/year is just a silly summary statistic.
Exactly. Last month I watched $30K in salaries, etc, being wasted because engineers couldn't whiteboard a concept well enough to get buy-in or good feedback from the people in the room.
You want responsibility for a year-long multi-person project? You better be able to explain it well.
Wow. I don't care if a candidate says "I need a paycheck," but I'd never hire someone if I didn't feel they had the potential to double their salary within a few years.
I only want to hire people who will grow into bigger roles (and yes, I expect them to hire the person who will do their old job.) The bigger role doesn't need to be management, writing code that is more strategic works just as well.
If I want someone to be in the same role for 5 years, I'd hire a consultant. But, ideally, I'd hire someone to fix the underlying problem that we need a body in a pointless role in the first place.
HR will never pass your résumé up to the person who can actually appreciate your experience and knowledge.
Any shop that has let HR insert themselves into the hiring process like that is pretty much doomed. Avoid at all costs.
and don't get me started about New Yorkers. The 5% that suck make it so that I don't want to know the other 95% of really nice and interesting people.
Some of the smallest minded people I've ever met in my travels around the world are from NYC and California.
OTOH, if they allowed telecommuting and didn't make me visit either location more than a few times annually, perhaps .. perhaps, we could talk.
Life is too short to work for pricks. It isn't worth the hassle.
Bitter much?
You seem made for Houston, TX.
1. Go for books with strong imagery over dense plot (e.g. Stross's Jennifer Morgue, Gaiman's Neverwhere, Lewis's Blind Side.) You get interrupted so much on planes that a 40 page idea is hard to enjoy: go for simple ideas done vividly.
2. Pack three unstarted paperbacks in carry-on. Don't be afraid to switch books if the current one isn't gripping you.
3. If all else fails, drink and then sleep.
4. Be in the first-class cabin.
There are some pretty moving speeches there. Go geeks!
Yeah, let's try to hire technically competent people and scare them with a joke technology "magic lie detector." Sort of ensures your target hire is either an idiot or cynical.
Why not just find the right people and pay them $300K/year?
There is no "upper half" that is fairly and reasonably chosen. I have a lot of experience in the field, and politics, knowing your manager's favorite flavor of ice cream, and selling your work to everyone is worth a lot more than actually being the talented guy who delivers rock solid work. Work environments are full of politics. It's wrong, and it's lame, but it's true.
To be fair, the article was more talking about the "upper 1%" rather than the upper half.
If you are really a 10X contributor, you just leave environments that are too political.
Screw the ice cream, if you are in a serious group, you all have a company credit card and can get it delivered. If senior management is doing their job, they will fire any middle manager who is not rewarding/promoting his talent based on results.
I love my job :)
Remember that back in the late 1970s a startup was hard to do (no internet, etc.) Good engineering jobs had defined benefit pension plans, a good medical plan, maybe an expense account, etc. You had to have the shot at a lot of money in a startup to compete with that.
Some did it (Intel, Data General, etc,) but most engineers settled for a good corporate job in those days.
If we really are so focused on producing things with the new ideas (tech innovation and such) then where are the things we produce? the iPhone? That's designed here but made in China. Everything I've got on my desk right now is made in Malaysia, China, or Japan. What we are producing here leads to real goods but it sure isn't us making the real goods. Maybe you would argue this doesn't matter, but I think it does.
I would argue that it matters a lot. We are driving innovation (and that leads to a lot of millionaires in the USA,) but killing the US middle class (the line-workers.) I worry this is not a good outcome for our society.
What good are new ideas and innovations if we eventually lose the skills and technologies to put them into practice?
On the other hand, there still are industries (agriculture comes to mind) where we are not only innovating but actually producing real products too. Most of the large machines I see on farms in North America are made right here in North America, and exported around the world. It's one of the few areas left where North America actually exports and parts of the world depend on their products.
As the USA transitioned from a largely agricultural economy to an industrial one, these same issues were raised: we lost the "farming class." We never really "lost" the skills and tech though: we just commoditized them.
We could rebuild a manufacturing empire (with $20K/year jobs,) but a $30K/year dog-walker is just a better job given that almost anyone in the world can solder while my dog-walker needs to live nearby.
The economy is only going to get weirder, and I fear we will not like what it becomes.
Right now the US and Canadian economies are not focused on producing anything with the new ideas that come out. The startups get bought out by the existing big companies if they have any hope of success, who immediately commoditize technology and ship it overseas for manufacturing.
The US & Canadian economies are intensely focused on producing based on new ideas: 1980 onwards was all about tech innovation. Sleepy companies got killed, we got a new tech startup culture, big companies bought little innovators (and made the little guys rich in a way only dreamed off in 1970.) AT&T would never have produced Google or Facebook.
In some ways, the massive tax changes of the 1980s were responsible for this (as well as general improvements in tech & manufacturing, of course.) Cutting top tax rates from 70%+ to 40% or so made the startup bet much more attractive. Of course, the downside of giving people a chance to be a billionaire by age 30 is that it makes the career engineer/scientist role (IBM research, AT&T labs, Xerox Parc) rather obsolete and a waste of money. So lots of innovation, but goodbye middle class.
What's sad is that by 1980 white collar folk realized blue collar jobs could be outsourced. Most of them didn't realize they were next on the chopping block. The early 1990s saw the big research career dead along with the useless middle manager role and the standard secretary role.
Goodbye middle class, at least you have an iPhone.
>either way, you've still go the shares.
You only get to keep vested shares.
These are unvested shares at issue. If you quit, or are fired, you lose them. If you are fired because you would not give back the shares, you might have a case to get them back, or a settlement of some sort.
Yep, courts tend to take a pretty dim view of the "we agreed you get X if you are working for us, please give up X or we will fire you" gambit: it's almost bad faith by definition.
Happened to me once: I just printed the memo and put in on my cube wall; got a few lawyers/mangers dropping by to "explain why I needed to sign." I sweetly said no: they said "ok" and got out of the room fast: they were smart enough to figure that concocting a paper trail to fire a well-rated employee, given a memo like that, was somewhere between "bad" and a felony.
A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
Conditioned on applying for the job you are offering.
Um, which was exactly what I said in my post:
That's no saying there is none (obviously, we don't see many high-school only types,) but, of the pool we do see,
A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
If you're designing iphone apps. CS PhDs tend to be more focused in cross-disciplinary work rather than writing user applications. I doubt you would get an Engineering PhD to design a toaster.
My work is more in the multi-billion dollar, multi-thousand people space: CS PhDs seem to have a hard time functioning in that environment (perhaps because it requires a lot of multi-disciplinary knowledge rather than deep CS knowledge.)
Oh, and many of our hot engineers rant about the mis-design of everyday objects (doors, vending machines, toasters, etc.) Improving/fixing a simple thing is much harder than building giant green-field technology visions.
The problem is simple: STEM is hard!
How you structure the education almost doesn't matter: 1/10 graduates, at most, will have really mastered the basics of their field; Magna cum laude hardly means anything in terms of the graduate being effective.
After interviewing junior STEM hires for 25 years, I can see almost no correlation between education and effectiveness. That's no saying there is none (obviously, we don't see many high-school only types,) but, of the pool we do see, philosophy majors, college drop-outs, etc, seem to do pretty well. A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
All the education in the world simply will not turn an average intelligence person into a great engineer.
Years ago the kit you used at work was faster, better and more powerful than your home consumer devices. Today it's the reverse and what you are forced to use at work is totally crappy next to what you have at home. Thus consumerization of IT is necessary to even get your own work done.
Or to put it more simply, my companies OS is XP with Office 2003.
I see this all the time.
Luckily, at my current job I sat down to a 12-core, 48gig desktop. The guy next to me just smiled and said "you write code, you are expensive, machines are cheap."
Would still prefer a mac, though :)
The nightmare for me is when the Chief Executive Officer spots some new "toy" and wants it to work seamlessly in the corporate environment. The CEO has the weight to throw around to make it happen - then their administrative assistant needs to have the same new "toy," but it has to synch with the CEO's toy...
Instant insomnia!
It's terrible when management wants something and "throws their weight around."
Sorry about the insomnia, but that sounds like you have trouble doing a day job.