Maybe I was a little off, but I doubt I was radically off. According to the above link, the median salary for a pediatrician (without further specialization) for >3 years in practice is $175K. And pediatrics offers some of the lowest compensation in that chart. For instance, Dermatologists (ostensibly not a super stressful job, since the likelyhood of actually killing someone should be pretty low) has median salary of $308,000.
... you didn't listen, and now look where you are!
Rock -- you are here -- Hard place
Seriously, an engineering "career" (if you can glorify it with such a high sounding noun) is a sucker's game. Pay a zillion dollars tuition, work your ass off to get an engineering degree, reach your earnings peak at age 35, and then watch as the lawyers/MBAs who run the place pull out every stop imagineable to marginalize you.
There is no such thing as an engineering career in the U.S. You'll get off to a fast start relative to your peers (salaries are pretty decent for the first 10 years), but then what do you have? You have no security, no defenses against being replaced by younger cheaper "talent", whereever it is located. You're smarter than the competition? Well if you are a true superstar, then you can probably make a decent living, either through entrepreneurship or as one of the engineering poster children working for corporate America. But there really aren't that many superstars. I know a dozen Ivy League/MIT grads who didn't make it, and are now scrambling at age 40 to figure out how to make a decent living.
At the end of the day, the rules of the game are defined (and constantly redefined) by law makers (lawyers) and the corporate masters. You are either one of them, or you are little people (meaning nobody gives a shit what you think). These people, by and large, have nothing but disdain for the "geeks"-- the same attitude they displayed towards you while you were in college. And now, they hold your fate in their hands.
Case in point. It's not enough that corporate America is moving at breakneck speed to offshore everything imagineable-- they are now complaining that they cannot find enough "talent" onshore and need a huge new supply of H1b visas. Actually, they are pushing for no limits at all, but if they can't get that, they'll settle for a mere 150K visas/year (not to mention all the other visas they have at their disposal). This is all because engineers have a mean salary of a whopping (ready?) 80K! 80K? What a joke. Corporations find it insufferable that they should have to pay such outlandish sums for what amounts to digital fruit picking.
Contrast this with medicine, which has the one of the most powerfull unions in the world (called the AMA). Doctors have a mean salary of roughly $300K, and how much momentum is there for visas that would allow "guest doctors"? Inflation in healthcare has been rising at double digit rates for quite some time, yet the careers of doctors are secure.
Very simply, the only talented people who will find it cost effective to pursue engineering careers are third-worlders (excuse me... people from the developing world). Their government will pay for their education, and that 80K salary will look like a kings ransom to them.
Wow, imagine that-- students making rational decisions. So of course policy makers should be worried.
Let's see, you can:
a) Work your ass off for 4-5 years in, what is usually, a very difficult academic program. Then you can, if you are super lucky, find an engineering job where your employers will work you to death. You will live under the cloud of being reminded that your salary is 5X higher than those equally talented people from 3rd world countries, any one of which could be brought in on a moments notice to occupy your chair (h1b, L1), should you stumble. Of course, since there is an near infinite supply of technical labor available to US companies, you will have zero salary mobility. Well, ok I'm exagerating, you won't have *zero* salary mobility-- you'll have some *nagative* salary mobility, which is what is currently happening to most of the engineers I know.
As you get older, if you are stupid enought to not switch careers, your peers will not get older with you. You will constantly be surrounded by 25-30 year old 3rd world engineers, as management continuously rotates in "fresh blood". Better not even think about having a family and working sane hours. All of your peers will be virtual slaves (h1b and L1 visa holders) who are forced to work up to 80 hours/week without any extra compensation for the overtime. That's because non-resident "guest" workers wouldn't dare complain about any request made of them from management-- if they did, they would be on the first boat back to Katmandu!
Then if you manage to survive to your mid-thirties as a practicing engineer, it's time to start thinking about a new career. Except for a handful of superstars, there is no such thing as a 40+ year old software engineer in the United States. You are regarded as a fossil by age 40. Just when your friends in other fields such as academia, law, medicine, business, are reaching their peak earnings and career potential, your career will be winding down. If you are lucky, you can maybe make the jump to management. However, you'll be at a competitive disadvantage against those who started earlier on the business track. In fact, those who skip the engineering altogether and go straight to business school are much more likely to get jobs managing engineers than engineers rising through the ranks. That's because US companies don't not require engineering degrees for the vast majority of their engineering management positions.
b) You can go to medical/dental/law/business/plumbing school. You will not have to perpetually compete with 25 year olds from China. That's because all of these "professions" are protected by guild systems. How many doctors hop off a boat from Bangalore to immedidately start practicing medicine in the US? Precisely 0.0. That's because it's illegal to practice medicine, law, or plumbing in the US without the appropriate guild credentials and licensing. That's because these professions are protected by powerful political lobbies that would never allow their golden egg laying geese to be killed.
In these professions you will have a *career*. There will be a recognizable career trajectory that can actually last past the age of 40! You can spend time with your family, have people work for you, have time to date.
All of my Win2K boxes work like I would want-- any changes to files in the folder changes the "date modified" on the folder. I just walked over to one and verified that this is true.
Only my new XP box has this insane behaviour.
Perhaps this behaviour is configurable? There is a huge number of poorly documented registry entries that can "customize" the behaviour of the filesystem. I stumbled upon a website devoted to these and was shocked at how far reaching the customizability is.
I just encountered the strangest artefact with the WinXP filesystem.
The "date modified" attribute of a folder never changes! It doesn't matter what I do in the folder, delete files, move files, add files, modify files; the "date modified" of the containing folder never changes.
How can this be? Win2k certainly worked the way you would expect. Has MS intentionally broken the XP filesystem to screw over all those 3rd party programs that rely on getting a reliable value for this attribute?
Corporations are working hard to lower their operating costs. And it's a safe bet that the corporate executives will exempt their own over-the-top salaries, which seem to be completely immune to performance considerations, from the chopping block.
IT is an easy costs target for two reasons:
1) corporations can't measure IT quality, so might as well get the lowest cost
2) the lawyer types who run government-industrial complex never liked geeks in the first place. They're the guys they made fun of in high school.
So corporate chieftans love sending IT work to the lowest cost corners of the planet. To rub some salt in the wound, they even import cheap pieces of the planet to take jobs in America (H1-B).
So as geeks, we have to lower what we charge corporations in order to stay competitive. But that's awfully hard to do when our input costs (like healthcare and housing) are growing at double digit rates.
So the only logical thing for us to do is export ourselves to the 3rd world in order to lower our costs and stay competitive.
Does anyone know if India or Australia will grant work Visas to Americans?
I agree, it would be wonderful if the U.S. could catch up to Japan with regard to modern technologies (working trains, working cell phones, etc). I would be thrilled to live in a country where things just worked.
Anyone have any luck tring to get a greencard in Japan?
Your wrong-- factory workers are smart enough to form unions, IT workers are not. That's because techies have been convinced by management that its "unsophisticated" (read, blue collar) to organize.
This despite the fact that doctors and lawyers have their own unions (AMA and ABA respectively).
IT workers aren't smart enough to unionize. They're "independent thinkers" who would never unionize because the management types have convinced them that such an action would make them look blue collar (like auto workers).
By cutting salaries, management is sending a signal: IT is not a highly valued part of the business, but strictly an operating expense. The semiotics of this action are clear. The smart employees will now leave (granted, harder in a down market). The stupid employees will hang around, be sacked en-masse, and will be replaced by H1b visa holders working for a fraction of their former salaries.
"Apparently 5 minutes of brisk pumping will give you 20 minutes of battery life"
Darn, there's so much "brisk pumping" that occurs naturally in society-- wouldn't it be more efficient if we could somehow capture the energy from that?
True, BountyQuest has not been a roaring commercial success so far. But gimme a break! The company is less than 3 years old. Did the Salon author really expect that our IP industry, a creature of hundreds of years of evolution and billions of dollars of entrenched interests, would turn on a dime?
The real question is: "What's wrong with the BountyQuest model"? Personall I think it makes a lot of sense. My understanding is that the major problem they are having is the conservatism of law firms. The BQ process starts with posted bounties. In order for a bounty to be posted, a law firm, or a corp legal department, has to cough up some money. Lawyers, even more than doctors, are notoriously conservative in their approach to new technology and new process. Even though BQ has been "on the radar screen" of techies, most ip lawyers probably still don't know about. And even if they do know about it, they are culturally hide-bound. They are unlikely to screw with the status quo until it bites them on the ass.
A good analysis of BQ wouldn't simply claim that it's unsuccessful. It would also attempt to explain why.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary_surveys/ph ysician-salaries.htm
Maybe I was a little off, but I doubt I was radically off. According to the above link, the median salary for a pediatrician (without further specialization) for >3 years in practice is $175K. And pediatrics offers some of the lowest compensation in that chart. For instance, Dermatologists (ostensibly not a super stressful job, since the likelyhood of actually killing someone should be pretty low) has median salary of $308,000.
... you didn't listen, and now look where you are!
Rock -- you are here -- Hard place
Seriously, an engineering "career" (if you can glorify it with such a high sounding noun) is a sucker's game. Pay a zillion dollars tuition, work your ass off to get an engineering degree, reach your earnings peak at age 35, and then watch as the lawyers/MBAs who run the place pull out every stop imagineable to marginalize you.
There is no such thing as an engineering career in the U.S. You'll get off to a fast start relative to your peers (salaries are pretty decent for the first 10 years), but then what do you have? You have no security, no defenses against being replaced by younger cheaper "talent", whereever it is located. You're smarter than the competition? Well if you are a true superstar, then you can probably make a decent living, either through entrepreneurship or as one of the engineering poster children working for corporate America. But there really aren't that many superstars. I know a dozen Ivy League/MIT grads who didn't make it, and are now scrambling at age 40 to figure out how to make a decent living.
At the end of the day, the rules of the game are defined (and constantly redefined) by law makers (lawyers) and the corporate masters. You are either one of them, or you are little people (meaning nobody gives a shit what you think). These people, by and large, have nothing but disdain for the "geeks"-- the same attitude they displayed towards you while you were in college. And now, they hold your fate in their hands.
Case in point. It's not enough that corporate America is moving at breakneck speed to offshore everything imagineable-- they are now complaining that they cannot find enough "talent" onshore and need a huge new supply of H1b visas. Actually, they are pushing for no limits at all, but if they can't get that, they'll settle for a mere 150K visas/year (not to mention all the other visas they have at their disposal). This is all because engineers have a mean salary of a whopping (ready?) 80K! 80K? What a joke. Corporations find it insufferable that they should have to pay such outlandish sums for what amounts to digital fruit picking.
Contrast this with medicine, which has the one of the most powerfull unions in the world (called the AMA). Doctors have a mean salary of roughly $300K, and how much momentum is there for visas that would allow "guest doctors"? Inflation in healthcare has been rising at double digit rates for quite some time, yet the careers of doctors are secure.
Very simply, the only talented people who will find it cost effective to pursue engineering careers are third-worlders (excuse me... people from the developing world). Their government will pay for their education, and that 80K salary will look like a kings ransom to them.
Yes,
Pixory is pretty good for managing over the home network, and then sharing it out.
Also, the author claims it will go Open Source soon.
Wow, imagine that-- students making rational decisions. So of course policy makers should be worried.
Let's see, you can:
a) Work your ass off for 4-5 years in, what is usually, a very difficult academic program. Then you can, if you are super lucky, find an engineering job where your employers will work you to death. You will live under the cloud of being reminded that your salary is 5X higher than those equally talented people from 3rd world countries, any one of which could be brought in on a moments notice to occupy your chair (h1b, L1), should you stumble. Of course, since there is an near infinite supply of technical labor available to US companies, you will have zero salary mobility. Well, ok I'm exagerating, you won't have *zero* salary mobility-- you'll have some *nagative* salary mobility, which is what is currently happening to most of the engineers I know.
As you get older, if you are stupid enought to not switch careers, your peers will not get older with you. You will constantly be surrounded by 25-30 year old 3rd world engineers, as management continuously rotates in "fresh blood". Better not even think about having a family and working sane hours. All of your peers will be virtual slaves (h1b and L1 visa holders) who are forced to work up to 80 hours/week without any extra compensation for the overtime. That's because non-resident "guest" workers wouldn't dare complain about any request made of them from management-- if they did, they would be on the first boat back to Katmandu!
Then if you manage to survive to your mid-thirties as a practicing engineer, it's time to start thinking about a new career. Except for a handful of superstars, there is no such thing as a 40+ year old software engineer in the United States. You are regarded as a fossil by age 40. Just when your friends in other fields such as academia, law, medicine, business, are reaching their peak earnings and career potential, your career will be winding down. If you are lucky, you can maybe make the jump to management. However, you'll be at a competitive disadvantage against those who started earlier on the business track. In fact, those who skip the engineering altogether and go straight to business school are much more likely to get jobs managing engineers than engineers rising through the ranks. That's because US companies don't not require engineering degrees for the vast majority of their engineering management positions.
b) You can go to medical/dental/law/business/plumbing school. You will not have to perpetually compete with 25 year olds from China. That's because all of these "professions" are protected by guild systems. How many doctors hop off a boat from Bangalore to immedidately start practicing medicine in the US? Precisely 0.0. That's because it's illegal to practice medicine, law, or plumbing in the US without the appropriate guild credentials and licensing. That's because these professions are protected by powerful political lobbies that would never allow their golden egg laying geese to be killed.
In these professions you will have a *career*. There will be a recognizable career trajectory that can actually last past the age of 40! You can spend time with your family, have people work for you, have time to date.
Tough choice.
nope, haven't tried this.
The problem with iPhoto is that it does not have a web interface. And sharing via iMac web services is tedious and limited in storage.
Pixory solves all of these problems. And best of all, of course, it runs on Linux!
www.pixory.org
All of my Win2K boxes work like I would want-- any changes to files in the folder changes the "date modified" on the folder. I just walked over to one and verified that this is true.
Only my new XP box has this insane behaviour.
Perhaps this behaviour is configurable? There is a huge number of poorly documented registry entries that can "customize" the behaviour of the filesystem. I stumbled upon a website devoted to these and was shocked at how far reaching the customizability is.
joe
I just encountered the strangest artefact with the WinXP filesystem.
The "date modified" attribute of a folder never changes! It doesn't matter what I do in the folder, delete files, move files, add files, modify files; the "date modified" of the containing folder never changes.
How can this be? Win2k certainly worked the way you would expect. Has MS intentionally broken the XP filesystem to screw over all those 3rd party programs that rely on getting a reliable value for this attribute?
any insight much appreciated.
the P.T. Barnum of the venture world.
Corporations are working hard to lower their operating costs. And it's a safe bet that the corporate executives will exempt their own over-the-top salaries, which seem to be completely immune to performance considerations, from the chopping block.
IT is an easy costs target for two reasons:
1) corporations can't measure IT quality, so might as well get the lowest cost
2) the lawyer types who run government-industrial complex never liked geeks in the first place. They're the guys they made fun of in high school.
So corporate chieftans love sending IT work to the lowest cost corners of the planet. To rub some salt in the wound, they even import cheap pieces of the planet to take jobs in America (H1-B).
So as geeks, we have to lower what we charge corporations in order to stay competitive. But that's awfully hard to do when our input costs (like healthcare and housing) are growing at double digit rates.
So the only logical thing for us to do is export ourselves to the 3rd world in order to lower our costs and stay competitive.
Does anyone know if India or Australia will grant work Visas to Americans?
No chicks and your job will be outsourced to India. Any wonder that all the tv shows are about lawyers and not geeks?
For an example of Tapestry in action, look at
www.pixory.org
UI/Control was very easy to implement and contains very little custom logic.
Look at Tapestry on sourceforge
There's still plenty of competition.
Via makes a rocking low power processor (C3).
There's also Transmeta and NEC, just to mention a few.
>waimate writes "Up until now, there's been fixed >wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it.
/.
What about ornithopters? None are in production, but several are in development, as has been reported on
You people are taking something written by Japan Today seriously?
It's a faaarr left wing, marginal paper dominated by Western expats. The Japanese don't read it.
Wait until you hear it from Yomiuri or Asahi shimbun-- then bother to burn some brain cells.
You can have best of both worlds! Pay them $20k, and have them live in one of the utility closets in the office.
I agree, it would be wonderful if the U.S. could catch up to Japan with regard to modern technologies (working trains, working cell phones, etc). I would be thrilled to live in a country where things just worked.
Anyone have any luck tring to get a greencard in Japan?
"In the 1990s, he came to dominate science fiction through "
I never even heard of the guy. I would hardly call that domination.
Huh, you mean this HAL model 10000 that I just paid $25K for might be a fraud?
Your wrong-- factory workers are smart enough to form unions, IT workers are not. That's because techies have been convinced by management that its "unsophisticated" (read, blue collar) to organize.
This despite the fact that doctors and lawyers have their own unions (AMA and ABA respectively).
IT workers aren't smart enough to unionize. They're "independent thinkers" who would never unionize because the management types have convinced them that such an action would make them look blue collar (like auto workers).
By cutting salaries, management is sending a signal: IT is not a highly valued part of the business, but strictly an operating expense. The semiotics of this action are clear. The smart employees will now leave (granted, harder in a down market). The stupid employees will hang around, be sacked en-masse, and will be replaced by H1b visa holders working for a fraction of their former salaries.
Please check out:
http://homepage.mac.com/zoe_info/
Zoe is way ahead of this curve.
"Apparently 5 minutes of brisk pumping will give you 20 minutes of battery life"
Darn, there's so much "brisk pumping" that occurs naturally in society-- wouldn't it be more efficient if we could somehow capture the energy from that?
True, BountyQuest has not been a roaring commercial success so far. But gimme a break! The company is less than 3 years old. Did the Salon author really expect that our IP industry, a creature of hundreds of years of evolution and billions of dollars of entrenched interests, would turn on a dime?
The real question is: "What's wrong with the BountyQuest model"? Personall I think it makes a lot of sense. My understanding is that the major problem they are having is the conservatism of law firms. The BQ process starts with posted bounties. In order for a bounty to be posted, a law firm, or a corp legal department, has to cough up some money. Lawyers, even more than doctors, are notoriously conservative in their approach to new technology and new process. Even though BQ has been "on the radar screen" of techies, most ip lawyers probably still don't know about. And even if they do know about it, they are culturally hide-bound. They are unlikely to screw with the status quo until it bites them on the ass.
A good analysis of BQ wouldn't simply claim that it's unsuccessful. It would also attempt to explain why.