Having done phone screening on a bunch of intern positions, I can vouch for the high fraud level among foreign resumes in general, but especially Indian resumes. Alarming numbers of eye catching experiences crumbled after slight probing. Why tell blatant lies if you can't even bluff your way through follow up questions?!
Depends a lot on WHY you get a Master's. In full disclosure, I did not finish mine, but did take an extra year of graduate courses with the original intent of getting it (and then being reached the point of being badly burnt out of school).
In EE there are some great master's level classes that can be really helpful. I stuck around the extra year to take a power electronics class, an antennas class, and the microwave class. I also took an advance numerical analysis class.
All of those have been at the heart of the work I've done over the last 19 years since graduating. A Master's often gets counted at as equivalent to a few years of experience, which has become increasingly hard to get if you only have a BS when you hit interview circuit.
Next great idea would be to improve the original education, as it is woefully lacking. At least in Electrical Engineering we see quite a number of awful candidates from Indian schools. Fundamentals of how to make basic transistor level circuits easily stump most.Hands on skills are rarer than even the lousy Berkeley graduates I've had to interview.
A couple years back we had the benefit of having a really good Indian engineer who could decypher the school names on a resume. Many schools apparently are known to be glorified degree mills that he quickly would warn us to avoid.
Bust them up, or regulate their business practices. Profit margins at telecoms and cable companies are way too high. One option is to put into place a profit cap, or regulate the prices of standardized service packages.
So long as large companies can buy their own senators it is useless to put laws in place that will get passed with semi-truck sized loop holes and with key provisions watered down to homeopathic levels. Unfortunately it is also futile to try to pass campaign finance reform while big corporations and billionaires control congress, as those laws will have loopholes and be toothless as well.
I fear that basically we have lost control of our own governance at this point. We'll get to pick the color of the paint on congress, but are mostly powerless to actually wrestle control back again.
Having the ability to have a stay at home spouse could and should be viewed as a form of luxury spending in some cases, or a complete failure to make available affordable childcare for many spouses who would like to be working but for whom the cost/wages ratio sucks in many other cases.
In many parts of the US it is far to expensive to get childcare for 2+ kids, making it cheaper to have one spouse stay home. If getting everyone to be working was a priority we would have deeply subsidized childcare and a higher emphasis on flexible and even reduced working hours to allow families to more easily juggle work and family.
Maybe we should be looking at employment within the context of the local living wage. Beyond having a job it would be useful to know what proportion of workers are above starvation/serf wages, as it is hard to say the labor market is "healthy" when so many are at or near our crappy minimum wage.
To have a valuable statistic for unemployment you need to come up with a criteria and stick with it over a useful length of time. Sure some folks are working less than they would like, some folks want unicorns and ponies as well. Should we start counting folks who are full time, but earning less than they think they should as semi-unemployed?
We've had multiple measures for unemployment to allow nuances, but you still can't just throw out every statistic they does not perfectly meet your own definition, that is telling a lie to yourself.
More important than the low unemployment rate is the very stagnant wages. Lots of folks have jobs, but the jobs market is lacking exuberance. We've not seen this show up is robust wage growth. Basically it seems that workers are still to fearful/truamatized to demand raises (or job hop to get them), but on the whole the low wage growth in the face of low unemployment does not add up.
You sir do not understand what it takes to make a modern IC.
If intel hypothetically open sourced a recent i7 layout, HDL code, and synthesized netlist it would not help almost anyone except a direct competitor. Mask sets alone for the current nodes are many millions of dollars (ho-hum 28 nm for example STILL costs well over $1M for masksets alone, 7-10 nm are obscenely more). But it gets worse, intel's masks are only compatible with intel's own fab, so you would have to go re-layout the chip, which is many $M's of man hours of effort. After layout of each block you have to spend many more $M's for the tools to properly extract and simulate each piece to assure it functions at a decent clock rate, as often the testing and verification of digital chip IP exceeds the actual design effort.
Open source software sort works in large part due to the very low barriers to entry. You can get a cheap PC and a free compiler for well under $1k and get started coding and compiling pretty quick. Getting any hardware running near state of the art takes large teams and deep pockets, and each botched fab run can cost many $M's.
But when you stick a "Compare At" price on something that is completely fictional you cross the fuzzy line entirely. You can't tell me I "saved" $5 if there was never a sticker for $5 more on the widget. We've mostly been lulled into being scammed and lied to constantly, so I welcome a modicum of push back.
Example: I search on "camalot #2", only option that matches the cheapest end of the $52-92.50 "prime" price for "Camalot C4 2nds" is an outside seller (non-prime) who charges a hefty bit for shipping. No way to get the bottom final price shown with a "prime" logo next to it.
Regularly I search on a specific item, see a price, click and no buying option matches that price. Seems scammy to me.
Similarly I regularly get a picture for the version/option/color I searched for, but the price shown is for a different version/option/color once you click. Wastes my time, and is also scammy.
My broader old gripe is searching for a very specific item (say a GTX 1070 card) and getting lots of "related" crap (AMD cards, GTX 1060 cards) that make it hard to actually compare. You have to resort to the check boxes to whittle down the results to what your original search should have accomplished in the first place.
Employee/Employer relationships are hugely lopsided. It is reasonable for the state to step in and protect the rights of the little guy. Try red-lining and negotiating your terms of employment next time you get a job. Good luck with that.
I find it especially hypocritical that you have large companies who lobbied and won "Right to Work" laws in most states (i.e. at-will employment) to turn around and put in non-compete clauses. If you want to make it hard for employees to unionize and make it very easy/cheap to kick them to the curb to balance the books every quarter, you can't in good faith expect individual workers to have zero job security AND be disallowed to get another job in their area of expertise.
But this is America where trickle down voodoo economics is still held in pretty high regard a good 30 odd years since it was demonstrably wrong and damaging.
I like the idea of requiring 1.5x salary for the duration of any non-compete term. If the feared damage is so great as to deprive gainful employment, then such a sum should be chump change.
Well, the "Music" app is horrible now, which is what i think the OP might have been meaning. Ever since Apple Music debuted and the Music app was rototilled to work with streaming it has been a disaster for non-streamed music. Try to play and album and switch from non-shuffle to shuffle. I'll wait while you try that.
Sucked, didn't? Yep, bet you had to go google how, since you have to go find the Album/Playlist again, and begin with "Shuffle All". Now you are on a different song, crap.
The Music app manages to be as bad or worse that iTunes has been for years.
Yep, revolutionary engineering is only able to make incremental improvements at this point. At what point will buyers stop seeing the point? Will facial recognition be enough better than a fingerprint for people to actually be wowed?
The real frustration I have is that iOS itself, regardless of hardware changes, is become unwieldy and going backwards in usability with too many features have been saddled on an OS aimed at simplicity. It is faltering under that weight. I used to be able to easily switch to shuffle and start a playlist on a specific song with one click. I can't easily do several simple things like that anymore, and google gets consulted way too often to figure out where to find lesser used settings lost in a see of crap. Basic music functionality has been mangled to be streaming friendly first, tossing old simple stuff for ghastly now stuff. my old ipod touch stuck on iOS 6 is a great time capsule that "just works", while my ipad air 2 is a frustrating PITA for a lot of the same basic stuff.
My notes varied with the lecture. In easier areas my notes might be the date, and below that any homework assignment. In harder classes I might end up with a half dozen pages.
Laptops mostly preclude decent sketches of visuals like waveforms, graphs, and equations that do not slow down a pencil and paper note taking style at all. Given that my engineering and math classes had a lot of those I just can't see how a laptop in most of my lectures would have been helpful for my learning style.
I did find having a laptop in my engineering labs to be handy. You could plot your data and even do a good portion of your lab report as you went.
Universities and health professionals are some of the worst at learning from studies carried out at by universities and medical researchers. They should study why this is.
+1 I only bring the laptop if I expect to need to present, otherwise if I have it I will go looking for something relevant and lose track of what is going on in the meeting. Even when I am NOT distracted by the internet or social media, I still end up distracted while trying to listen and use the laptop as a tool at the same time. Almost none of us can truly multi-task, even the majority of those who think they can.
My phone needs, and my wife's phone needs would be handled nicely by any number of $200 or so Android phones. I need a decent camera, a little space for some tunes, a battery for a week of standby operation, and a decent enough screen to have maps on it. I use it for very little.
But the few $200-300 phones we bought were mangled incarnations of Android, full of bloatware and crapware. Those apps got auto-updated to the point where the phone ran out of space and was horrible to use for even a phone call.
So I spent $400 for a older model iPhone 5 for the wife on VM, and she was happy. I spent $400 on a closeout Nexus 6 a year later. We are now both on Ting and spend $35 on average for our usage (well, $30 for her usage, about $5 for my proportion...). $400 was too much for what we want the phones for, but I see the likelihood of having to shell out about $600 for an older model 6s for her in the next 6-12 months as her 3 year old phone is getting rather worse for wear.
So no way in hell am I shelling out anywhere near $1200 for an iPhone, or a Pixel knockoff of it, or a Samsung Flamer 8, etc. I'll troll the closeouts for something about 1/3 of that at most, and still be cranky for wasting so much on an appliance I primarily use to receive grocery list texts on.
The flip side is that we have business world that uses degree requirements as a blunt screen. You can be just as competent as everyone else, but without a slip of paper from ACME University you won't get past the initial screen by HR. You need to either be exceptional, or be in a super desperate field to manage to get around that barrier.
So unless the whole business world changes to one where they look at candidate skill instead of candidate credentials it won't matter if you get a Harvard quality education off of Youtube, Uni-Flix, or Net-Degree.
Entry level tracks simply have dried up for many fields. My current design group is all over 40, and wants 15 years experience when we do hire. We have a couple college interns, but there are no 10 year experience positions for them to ever move into. The manufacturing support based entry level track I used to get into design is long gone, sent overseas 15 years ago. The way things are there are far too few ways in the US to get that first 5 years experience out of school in my field. It is no wonder that an ever increasing number of candidates are visa holders, green card holders, and so on.
Not really 2-3x. The battery example cited is an easy one. A soldered/glued in battery is NOT 1/2 the cost of one that can be unscrewed or unsnapped. The trade off is a small increase in the thickness of the phone, or a small reduction in operating time if the form factor is kept constant.
In a lot of ways we have a race to the bottom, where initial impressions matter a lot, so making a slimmer phone wins compared to a longer lifespan phone that is slightly thicker, or has a larger bezel, so all manufacturers ditch the removable battery or go out of business. Some companies go to bigger extremes, making the phones intentionally irreparable with funky screws (Apple), key locked fingerprint sensors (Apple), and fully glued together stuff (latest MS Surface).
I would also add a mandate for required security updates for web enabled products until less than 10% of the shipped product is still operating in the field, and the same for keeping alive any servers needed to keep major functionality going. We have become awash in orphaned products that are still perfectly hardware functional but often lose support before they even finish shipping their last units.
Jail time for every technician involved, and at least a few layers up in management. Folks need to be scared to participate in illegal activities, even when ordered by their superiors.
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Having done phone screening on a bunch of intern positions, I can vouch for the high fraud level among foreign resumes in general, but especially Indian resumes. Alarming numbers of eye catching experiences crumbled after slight probing. Why tell blatant lies if you can't even bluff your way through follow up questions?!
Depends a lot on WHY you get a Master's. In full disclosure, I did not finish mine, but did take an extra year of graduate courses with the original intent of getting it (and then being reached the point of being badly burnt out of school).
In EE there are some great master's level classes that can be really helpful. I stuck around the extra year to take a power electronics class, an antennas class, and the microwave class. I also took an advance numerical analysis class.
All of those have been at the heart of the work I've done over the last 19 years since graduating. A Master's often gets counted at as equivalent to a few years of experience, which has become increasingly hard to get if you only have a BS when you hit interview circuit.
Next great idea would be to improve the original education, as it is woefully lacking. At least in Electrical Engineering we see quite a number of awful candidates from Indian schools. Fundamentals of how to make basic transistor level circuits easily stump most.Hands on skills are rarer than even the lousy Berkeley graduates I've had to interview.
A couple years back we had the benefit of having a really good Indian engineer who could decypher the school names on a resume. Many schools apparently are known to be glorified degree mills that he quickly would warn us to avoid.
Bust them up, or regulate their business practices. Profit margins at telecoms and cable companies are way too high. One option is to put into place a profit cap, or regulate the prices of standardized service packages.
So long as large companies can buy their own senators it is useless to put laws in place that will get passed with semi-truck sized loop holes and with key provisions watered down to homeopathic levels. Unfortunately it is also futile to try to pass campaign finance reform while big corporations and billionaires control congress, as those laws will have loopholes and be toothless as well.
I fear that basically we have lost control of our own governance at this point. We'll get to pick the color of the paint on congress, but are mostly powerless to actually wrestle control back again.
Having the ability to have a stay at home spouse could and should be viewed as a form of luxury spending in some cases, or a complete failure to make available affordable childcare for many spouses who would like to be working but for whom the cost/wages ratio sucks in many other cases.
In many parts of the US it is far to expensive to get childcare for 2+ kids, making it cheaper to have one spouse stay home. If getting everyone to be working was a priority we would have deeply subsidized childcare and a higher emphasis on flexible and even reduced working hours to allow families to more easily juggle work and family.
Is removal covered/required when you leave the company?
Maybe we should be looking at employment within the context of the local living wage. Beyond having a job it would be useful to know what proportion of workers are above starvation/serf wages, as it is hard to say the labor market is "healthy" when so many are at or near our crappy minimum wage.
To have a valuable statistic for unemployment you need to come up with a criteria and stick with it over a useful length of time. Sure some folks are working less than they would like, some folks want unicorns and ponies as well. Should we start counting folks who are full time, but earning less than they think they should as semi-unemployed?
We've had multiple measures for unemployment to allow nuances, but you still can't just throw out every statistic they does not perfectly meet your own definition, that is telling a lie to yourself.
More important than the low unemployment rate is the very stagnant wages. Lots of folks have jobs, but the jobs market is lacking exuberance. We've not seen this show up is robust wage growth. Basically it seems that workers are still to fearful/truamatized to demand raises (or job hop to get them), but on the whole the low wage growth in the face of low unemployment does not add up.
You sir do not understand what it takes to make a modern IC.
If intel hypothetically open sourced a recent i7 layout, HDL code, and synthesized netlist it would not help almost anyone except a direct competitor. Mask sets alone for the current nodes are many millions of dollars (ho-hum 28 nm for example STILL costs well over $1M for masksets alone, 7-10 nm are obscenely more). But it gets worse, intel's masks are only compatible with intel's own fab, so you would have to go re-layout the chip, which is many $M's of man hours of effort. After layout of each block you have to spend many more $M's for the tools to properly extract and simulate each piece to assure it functions at a decent clock rate, as often the testing and verification of digital chip IP exceeds the actual design effort.
Open source software sort works in large part due to the very low barriers to entry. You can get a cheap PC and a free compiler for well under $1k and get started coding and compiling pretty quick. Getting any hardware running near state of the art takes large teams and deep pockets, and each botched fab run can cost many $M's.
But when you stick a "Compare At" price on something that is completely fictional you cross the fuzzy line entirely. You can't tell me I "saved" $5 if there was never a sticker for $5 more on the widget. We've mostly been lulled into being scammed and lied to constantly, so I welcome a modicum of push back.
Example: I search on "camalot #2", only option that matches the cheapest end of the $52-92.50 "prime" price for "Camalot C4 2nds" is an outside seller (non-prime) who charges a hefty bit for shipping. No way to get the bottom final price shown with a "prime" logo next to it.
Scammy.
Regularly I search on a specific item, see a price, click and no buying option matches that price. Seems scammy to me.
Similarly I regularly get a picture for the version/option/color I searched for, but the price shown is for a different version/option/color once you click. Wastes my time, and is also scammy.
My broader old gripe is searching for a very specific item (say a GTX 1070 card) and getting lots of "related" crap (AMD cards, GTX 1060 cards) that make it hard to actually compare. You have to resort to the check boxes to whittle down the results to what your original search should have accomplished in the first place.
Employee/Employer relationships are hugely lopsided. It is reasonable for the state to step in and protect the rights of the little guy. Try red-lining and negotiating your terms of employment next time you get a job. Good luck with that.
I find it especially hypocritical that you have large companies who lobbied and won "Right to Work" laws in most states (i.e. at-will employment) to turn around and put in non-compete clauses. If you want to make it hard for employees to unionize and make it very easy/cheap to kick them to the curb to balance the books every quarter, you can't in good faith expect individual workers to have zero job security AND be disallowed to get another job in their area of expertise.
But this is America where trickle down voodoo economics is still held in pretty high regard a good 30 odd years since it was demonstrably wrong and damaging.
I like the idea of requiring 1.5x salary for the duration of any non-compete term. If the feared damage is so great as to deprive gainful employment, then such a sum should be chump change.
But Lasers!!!
yawn.
Well, the "Music" app is horrible now, which is what i think the OP might have been meaning. Ever since Apple Music debuted and the Music app was rototilled to work with streaming it has been a disaster for non-streamed music. Try to play and album and switch from non-shuffle to shuffle. I'll wait while you try that.
Sucked, didn't? Yep, bet you had to go google how, since you have to go find the Album/Playlist again, and begin with "Shuffle All". Now you are on a different song, crap.
The Music app manages to be as bad or worse that iTunes has been for years.
"Just works" my arse.
Yep, revolutionary engineering is only able to make incremental improvements at this point. At what point will buyers stop seeing the point? Will facial recognition be enough better than a fingerprint for people to actually be wowed?
The real frustration I have is that iOS itself, regardless of hardware changes, is become unwieldy and going backwards in usability with too many features have been saddled on an OS aimed at simplicity. It is faltering under that weight. I used to be able to easily switch to shuffle and start a playlist on a specific song with one click. I can't easily do several simple things like that anymore, and google gets consulted way too often to figure out where to find lesser used settings lost in a see of crap. Basic music functionality has been mangled to be streaming friendly first, tossing old simple stuff for ghastly now stuff. my old ipod touch stuck on iOS 6 is a great time capsule that "just works", while my ipad air 2 is a frustrating PITA for a lot of the same basic stuff.
Personal pet peeve: Low contrast slider bars. Awful, and not user fixable.
You can switch to high contrast, but it changes everything just to get the sliders right.
Basically Win10 is still behind Win7 in basic usability, and makes desktop usage more of a chore than it needs to be.
My notes varied with the lecture. In easier areas my notes might be the date, and below that any homework assignment. In harder classes I might end up with a half dozen pages.
Laptops mostly preclude decent sketches of visuals like waveforms, graphs, and equations that do not slow down a pencil and paper note taking style at all. Given that my engineering and math classes had a lot of those I just can't see how a laptop in most of my lectures would have been helpful for my learning style.
I did find having a laptop in my engineering labs to be handy. You could plot your data and even do a good portion of your lab report as you went.
Universities and health professionals are some of the worst at learning from studies carried out at by universities and medical researchers. They should study why this is.
+1
I only bring the laptop if I expect to need to present, otherwise if I have it I will go looking for something relevant and lose track of what is going on in the meeting. Even when I am NOT distracted by the internet or social media, I still end up distracted while trying to listen and use the laptop as a tool at the same time. Almost none of us can truly multi-task, even the majority of those who think they can.
My phone needs, and my wife's phone needs would be handled nicely by any number of $200 or so Android phones. I need a decent camera, a little space for some tunes, a battery for a week of standby operation, and a decent enough screen to have maps on it. I use it for very little.
But the few $200-300 phones we bought were mangled incarnations of Android, full of bloatware and crapware. Those apps got auto-updated to the point where the phone ran out of space and was horrible to use for even a phone call.
So I spent $400 for a older model iPhone 5 for the wife on VM, and she was happy. I spent $400 on a closeout Nexus 6 a year later. We are now both on Ting and spend $35 on average for our usage (well, $30 for her usage, about $5 for my proportion...). $400 was too much for what we want the phones for, but I see the likelihood of having to shell out about $600 for an older model 6s for her in the next 6-12 months as her 3 year old phone is getting rather worse for wear.
So no way in hell am I shelling out anywhere near $1200 for an iPhone, or a Pixel knockoff of it, or a Samsung Flamer 8, etc. I'll troll the closeouts for something about 1/3 of that at most, and still be cranky for wasting so much on an appliance I primarily use to receive grocery list texts on.
The flip side is that we have business world that uses degree requirements as a blunt screen. You can be just as competent as everyone else, but without a slip of paper from ACME University you won't get past the initial screen by HR. You need to either be exceptional, or be in a super desperate field to manage to get around that barrier.
So unless the whole business world changes to one where they look at candidate skill instead of candidate credentials it won't matter if you get a Harvard quality education off of Youtube, Uni-Flix, or Net-Degree.
Entry level tracks simply have dried up for many fields. My current design group is all over 40, and wants 15 years experience when we do hire. We have a couple college interns, but there are no 10 year experience positions for them to ever move into. The manufacturing support based entry level track I used to get into design is long gone, sent overseas 15 years ago. The way things are there are far too few ways in the US to get that first 5 years experience out of school in my field. It is no wonder that an ever increasing number of candidates are visa holders, green card holders, and so on.
Not really 2-3x. The battery example cited is an easy one. A soldered/glued in battery is NOT 1/2 the cost of one that can be unscrewed or unsnapped. The trade off is a small increase in the thickness of the phone, or a small reduction in operating time if the form factor is kept constant.
In a lot of ways we have a race to the bottom, where initial impressions matter a lot, so making a slimmer phone wins compared to a longer lifespan phone that is slightly thicker, or has a larger bezel, so all manufacturers ditch the removable battery or go out of business. Some companies go to bigger extremes, making the phones intentionally irreparable with funky screws (Apple), key locked fingerprint sensors (Apple), and fully glued together stuff (latest MS Surface).
I would also add a mandate for required security updates for web enabled products until less than 10% of the shipped product is still operating in the field, and the same for keeping alive any servers needed to keep major functionality going. We have become awash in orphaned products that are still perfectly hardware functional but often lose support before they even finish shipping their last units.
Jail time for every technician involved, and at least a few layers up in management. Folks need to be scared to participate in illegal activities, even when ordered by their superiors.