By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV. The minimum rate we see here in South Florida is $38 to $40 for "virtual ditch digging" work (and that's the lowest I've seen in a while and only for people w/o experience.) Starting hourly rates tend to be between $43 and $45 (about $89K to $95K)... and a lot more with experience.
$25/hour (what you call top rate), that's what I see for administrative/clerical jobs here in South Florida, with benefits (without benefits, you see that rate go up.
And South Florida is not cheap to live, but it is more affordable than SV. I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
I was on KDE for around 15 years. Never used GNOME.
But when I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, there were many annoyances here and there. For example, no weather widget. Also, the notification history was gone. Dumbing down the user interface is rampant and have reached KDE.
So, I bit the bullet and switched to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04), and it is fast, nimble and just works.
Then learning the ropes of XFCE, and adjusting the settings.
Yep. Xubuntu FTW. I keep having to work with multiple distros out of necessity. Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS. I keep falling back to Xubuntu to retain my sanity.
The thing I hate the most is not the desktop wars, but the fact that there's never a one single way to set up network interfaces or installing packages, or in some cases like RHEL, the inability to transparently migrate a system between major releases (you simply can't upgrade a system, but instead have to build a new one from scratch.)
The change to systemd has also been a pain. Many installation systems for turnkey-products simply stop working and you have to treat pre and post-systemd as truly different operating systems. Whatever the reasons they might be, these changes have been awfully disruptive.
I hope that, years from now, we get to see an ROI from it.
I actually think the Kushners are half-way reasonable people
"In the summer of 2004, Kushner was fined $508,900 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so.[8] In 2005, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey,[9] U.S. Attorney Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with Kushner, under which Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.[10] The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner's act of retaliation against William Schulder, husband of his sister Esther, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged for an encounter between the two to be secretly recorded, and had the tape sent to his sister.[11][12][13][14] Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison[11] and served 14 months at Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery in Alabama[15][16] before being sent to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey to complete his sentence.[15][16][17] He was released from prison on August 25, 2006.[18]
As a result of his convictions, Kushner was disbarred from the practice of law in New Jersey,[19] New York,[20] and Pennsylvania.[21]"
He said "half-reasonable", which is not the same as "guiltless" or "honest". You can deal with a corrupt person. You cannot do the same with a dangerously dogmatic person, specially one whose dogma is of the racist kind.
This is not an endorsement for the Kushners (fuck them.) This is an acknowledgement that we are truly in "pick your poison" territory. And we simply cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that this shit will go away (for that's exactly how we are where we are now, as a nation.)
Hillary Clinton was barely tolerated by half of the Democrat voters. That's why Hillary lost. Trump was a barely tolerated candidate among Republicans, but not quite weak enough to be defeated by Hillary Clinton. For example, take a look at her first-amendment positions and you'll see someone who is way to the right of center. When you have a choice between a Republican running as a Democrat and a Libertarian running as a Republican, is it any surprise that the latter wins?
As a Republican that opted to vote for Kasick in the primaries and Clinton in the prez race, I'd say that any GOP candidate (not just Trump) would have defeated Hillary. And by the same token, any Democrat candidate other than Hillary would have beat the fuck out of Trump's campaign.
These was a fight among unlikeables (sp). With that said, the notion that Trump won because he was a Liberatian in Republican disguise is absolutely ridiculous. The motherfucker was a birther, a goddamned George Wallace who dog whistle the right tunes. Oooooh the Mexicans, oooooh the Muslims, etc, etc.
Trump cemented his popular power way before Hillary was in the picture. The "better than Hillary" slogan came as an afterthought, a revisionist sophistry with which to hide the fact they voted for a fucking Birther bigot.
The guy is on record spouting what appeared to be a statement against having too many Asian CEOs in SV/tech. From that angle, I think this shit is nerd-relevant.
Yes and no. You can't afford a car, but you can easily afford a live-in housekeeper and nanny for your kids.
Is it just me, or would you be scared to leave someone making barely more than slavery wages alone in your house with your child?
It's not slave wages for them, and you are going to find out people are, for the most part, decent and whom can be trusted to do this type of job.
Stop spouting that kind of crap. Get out of wherever you are and travel the world. Look around. Look abroad and learn. You are going to find a lot of your notions about other countries to be nothing but an assortment of unsubstantiated, superficial bundles of bullshit.
Never heard that term, and I've been a programmer for over 33 years.
The reason we object to having go work with incompetent people that are poorly educated is because they create more work for us.
I agree with this partially. I say partially because:
1. Not all H1B are incompetent, and in fact, many are actually good and pleasant to work with. I've been in this IT/software industry rodeo for 23 years (not as long as you, but still, long enough), and I know that this is true.
2. We have a lot of "native" incompetent dead weight among us.
I want to see less H1B abuse and make sure we do not get incompetent people in. But at the same time, I want to see the competent ones to come in and kick our native dead weight out.
I have no compassion for dead weight, native or foreign. I'm not one to prevent a foreign born person to seek new opportunity just to protect dead weight.
What you saw was a fraud. There is nowhere in the U.S. where employers are not required to be fully insured for such accidents. Even if the person had to pay on their own, the normal process would be for the hospital to do everything possible to save the fingers. They would then write off any loss or apply to one of our many charities that help cover the costs in cases like this. One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive here for those that can pay is because we subsidize those who can't.
Like in Japan or Germany or all the other dozen 1st world examples that I can think of. That is not the reason why healthcare is so expensive. You are making a conscious choice to believe and propagate a lie.
What you saw was a fraud. There is nowhere in the U.S. where employers are not required to be fully insured for such accidents. Even if the person had to pay on their own, the normal process would be for the hospital to do everything possible to save the fingers. They would then write off any loss or apply to one of our many charities that help cover the costs in cases like this. One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive here for those that can pay is because we subsidize those who can't.
This survey proves that American workers aren't being harmed by workers with H-1B visas.
Err, maybe, maybe not. I know of a couple of cases were very talented teams have been eliminated completely by offshoring. So, in a way, they were "harmed" for something that is borderline illegal (replacing existing American positions with offshored and H1B replacements.)
OTH, they weren't really "harmed". They got their severance packages, and because they had their shit together, they landed jobs somewhere else.
I'd say there is H1B abuse. But I also say there is a bigger problem: there is a lot of IT dead weight in America.
As an US citizen, I don't care if a person is a US worker or a H1B worker. I care if said person is worth a damn as a worker or dead weight.
In America, with all its wealth, opportunities and educational resources, there is no reason to be dead weight in such a versatile, well-remunerated industry such as IT/software.
The irony is that the homosapien's violent nature wouldn't necessarily be enough to beat down on neanderthals since they were bigger and smarter than us, and that it was our SOCIAL nature that allowed us to gang up on them. Irony being that despite it (social behavior) being quite possibly the reason we became the dominant (and I suppose only remaining) hominid, we still can't get along.
Not only that. They have better tools and were built better for running and long distance trekking than Neanderthals.
There is very little to suggest Homo Sapien killed off Neanderthals in direct confrontations. It was more a function of out-breeding them and out-competing them in harvesting resources. Barring a plague, over-predation or genocide, to go extinct, you do not need to get killed off or fail. You just need to succeed less often over millenia.
Where do you draw the line on being an engineer? Seems like a good topic for a discussion.
One that designs based on actual data and tolerances.
What the overwhelming majority of programmers do has nothing to do with engineering, and more to do with jerry building.
As someone that works under the title of software engineer, I agree with this, except with the jerry building part. There is jerry building and there is jerry building, one on actual data and tolerance, one done as a craft, and one where people throw shit at the wall and package whatever sticks.
If you apply the scientific method to your work, have clear tolerances and work on actual data, or data inferred by some type of model, then shit, a lot of software jerry building then also accounts as engineering (and there is lot of that.)
But it is also true a lot of what is done in software is not engineering, not even craft (but shit flinging.) The field of software is still too young to clearly define what is engineering and what is craft (and far more dynamic than most fields that have come before it.)
We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.
Globalism works. Now if you are incapable to compete, then shit, you are out of luck, but whose fault is that? Specially in a versatile industry such as software and IT?
Obviously it can be done better, and many of the pains we see have nothing to do with globalism but with this country having
1) an inexcusable lack of basic social contracts,
2) millions of people (mostly males in their late 30's and 40's) who are, also inexcusable, illiterate (and I'm not talking about uneducated immigrants, but US born citizens),
3) entire regions that have been chronically and systematically poor since fucking forever, predating globalization,
4) a non-existent vocational education system for adults (specially for adults who lose their jobs and need to switch gears.)
The Japanese overtook America in car manufacturing in 1972, due to incompetence and complacency. That's 45 years ago. Coal has been bleeding jobs since the 1930's, more than 80 years ago. Steel has been bleeding jobs since it started recycling, decades ago.
People act as if globalism is a new phenomenon that wreck their innocent lives for no reason, and that they, unlike every other fucking human being in history, must be sheltered for competition, and their incompetence rewarded.
I live in the mid-west, and until a recent job change, had a shorter commute than everything in that list - plus a 3 bed house for less than the vast majority of that list. My income is on par with national averages for my job title, yet I have a vastly below average cost of living.
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to live in a big city. Every perk I hear touted, I can beat. It's quiet, I have a yard, and I have more spending money that the saps choking on smog.
Because the job pool is greater within a 45-minute commute ratio. When shit hits the fan (which always happens) it is best to have several dozen leads as opposed to just 3 or 4 at the most in the middle of nowhere. I've had colleagues that moved to charming, lower-cost towns to work with that one great employer. Then, shit, poof! Gig is gone and now have to commute 2-3 hours to the big city because they have a house, kids are in school and wife is working in that charming lower-cost town.
I've been in this rodeo for 25 years, and I've seen that played out so many times I know those incidents aren't a fluke. I rather deal with the nasty 45 minute suburban commute and the ridiculous prices to avoid dealing with that.
It's a matter of risk taking. I take risks, but I don't take those kind of risks (specially in a world when turn-over is almost certain every 4-6 years at best, and 2 years at worst.)
I've been in IT for nearly 25 years and I've always worked shoulder to shoulder with women and men alike. Uber has an HR and a culture issue. This isn't a widespread tech industry issue.
WTF? Your anecdote if it's even true is well and truly out of the ordinary for the tech industry. You don't even need to look to the industry why, you can see why just be peeking into a university IT lecture.
Kudos to you and your workplace for having gender equality. But that is far from the norm.
Bullshit. I've post this several times and I second what the OP said. I've worked in multiple industries (insurance, services, DCIM, defense contractors). This behavior is an anomaly of tech in general.
This shit is concentrated in SV's startup culture and some niches in Academia.
Your anecdote isn't data. It's nice that you've worked for progressive companies and that you yourself are good about working with women, but it's absolutely a systemic issue. Story after story after story confirms it.
Rather, I think you and the companies you work for are outliers. Congratulations on that; I hope you keep your streak.
It is a systemic issue in SV's startup culture. This is not normal behavior. It hasn't been anywhere else since I've been working in this shit (mine is a second 25-year anecdote.) Take it for what it is. If you look around you and you see sexual harassment in general, time to move to change fucking pastures dude.
Please stop putting a "sexism in tech" story on the front page.
It's a major problem in technology that really needs to be addressed if this country is going to be competitive in the future. It's unfortunate that it's so inflammatory, but it needs to be addressed.
No. It is a major problem in the SV startup culture (and in some areas in Academia).
Tech is a lot wider (much wider) than that.
See, I've worked in tech for more than 25 years in multiple industries (product development, insurance, service providers and defense contractors.) Anything remotely resembling sexual harassment and gender discrimination gets you fired on the spot.
Uber might be a general symptom of SV's startup/tech culture, but SV is a behavioral anomaly in tech in general.
My thoughts exactly. The recruiter might have been commiserating, and God knows how awful being in such a position is (being a women herself and all.)
But it was a mistake. She could have said something different, like "We are working on it, we are changing, we need people like you and by the way, despite everything, we have some wonderful people ready and capable to implement change. Please don't throw us all under the bus."
I don't think there was any malice or cruelty, just a lack of common sense.
Exhaustion of having to deal with candidate rejections because of sexism? The recruiter is human too.
There has been a number of ammunition depot explosions over the last 15 years in across Eastern Europe. 2 in Serbia, 6 in Bulgaria since 2000, Gerdec in Albania, Cobasna in Moldova, Ukraine itself in 2015. Cold War explosives are becoming unstable and they tend to explode on their own, especially when there is insufficient money to maintain proper storage.
My father told me a story from the cold war, specifically the Nicaraguan civil war in the 70's. He was an officer in Somoza's army at the time. They found a cache of explosives and improvised bombs left behind by the rebels, and he and others were in charge of destroying them (a controlled explosion.) Alas, some pro-government reporters were demanding (yep, demanding) the troops to "re-arrange" the explosives to take better pictures.
My dad, as he told me, had a bad feeling about it (given how badly improvised explosives and old ammo could be) and left the site to report the anomaly. Just after walking a hundred yards or so, BOOM!. People without limbs, eyes popped like water balloons by the shock wave, flesh splatted everywhere.
Ammo and things that go kaput, you gotta respect that volatile shit.
Admission of non-citizens into the US is not a right and is not subject to due process. Non-citizens can be denied entry for arbitrary reasons, not just in the US but also in all other countries on the planet.
On the other hand, the US signed a treaty (actually a couple) that says my wife and son, both not citizens of the USA, can wander into the USA any time they want. According to the American Constitution, treaties are the second highest law of the land, just below the Constitution. Of course America being America, all it takes is a Supreme Court Justice to say, "no, the Constitution actually means something else" and America has a long history of breaking their own laws and especially treaties. Probably the reason they dropped the u out of honour.
Through other treaties and such, my son also has the right to go to a few other countries as well.
As someone (also) married to a foreign national, what he said.
The OP's arbitrary posture on non-nationals is in the same category as people demanding immigration vetting of Puerto Rican and people from Guam and American Samoa (who are US citizens) moving to the mainland (yes, I've heard this, multiple times.)
Posturing about the law, and ignorance of the law, them two make a saucy shit sandwich. Every. Time.
Sure, people will buy the cheapest thing if there is no compelling reason to buy the more expensive thing. That is how capitalism is designed. Consumers look for the best deal and corporations try to spend as much money as possible. It is up to the government to strike a balance between the two. What needs to be done is to convince people 'buying local' is a compelling reason on its own. The government has not been successful at doing that.
Actually no. It's not just capitalism. It is culture. Travel the world. Go to Germany. Italy, and the best example of all, Japan. People buy less, but when they buy, they tend to buy quality (and typically home-made.) They just don't buy cheap made abroad nilly willy unless there is a specific intent or when practical.
What is happening, and I keep referring to this, is that we are a rich country of really poor people who see themselves (quite realistically) at the bottom of a barrel. Struggling to make ends meet coupled with a culture that worships consumerism and pays lip service to savings, we have masses who simply cannot opt to buy unless the cheapest thing they find.
You do not typically see this kind of mass behavior in a developed country (but you do see it, by necessity, in poor countries, like the one I come from.)
Quality has a cost (in particular American-made quality), and that is something not within reach of the American blue collar worker.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you must not be very important if the company can survive an entire month without you.
Or his company is big enough and/or has its shit together so that a person is never a single point of (knowledge) failure. Just sayin'
By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV. The minimum rate we see here in South Florida is $38 to $40 for "virtual ditch digging" work (and that's the lowest I've seen in a while and only for people w/o experience.) Starting hourly rates tend to be between $43 and $45 (about $89K to $95K)... and a lot more with experience.
$25/hour (what you call top rate), that's what I see for administrative/clerical jobs here in South Florida, with benefits (without benefits, you see that rate go up.
And South Florida is not cheap to live, but it is more affordable than SV. I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
I was on KDE for around 15 years. Never used GNOME.
But when I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, there were many annoyances here and there. For example, no weather widget. Also, the notification history was gone. Dumbing down the user interface is rampant and have reached KDE.
So, I bit the bullet and switched to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04), and it is fast, nimble and just works.
It was as simple as:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop sudo apt-get purge plasma-desktop
Then learning the ropes of XFCE, and adjusting the settings.
Yep. Xubuntu FTW. I keep having to work with multiple distros out of necessity. Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS. I keep falling back to Xubuntu to retain my sanity.
The thing I hate the most is not the desktop wars, but the fact that there's never a one single way to set up network interfaces or installing packages, or in some cases like RHEL, the inability to transparently migrate a system between major releases (you simply can't upgrade a system, but instead have to build a new one from scratch.)
The change to systemd has also been a pain. Many installation systems for turnkey-products simply stop working and you have to treat pre and post-systemd as truly different operating systems. Whatever the reasons they might be, these changes have been awfully disruptive.
I hope that, years from now, we get to see an ROI from it.
Just waiting for you to fly there buddy.
Ooooh, you got him #sarcasm
I actually think the Kushners are half-way reasonable people "In the summer of 2004, Kushner was fined $508,900 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so.[8] In 2005, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey,[9] U.S. Attorney Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with Kushner, under which Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.[10] The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner's act of retaliation against William Schulder, husband of his sister Esther, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged for an encounter between the two to be secretly recorded, and had the tape sent to his sister.[11][12][13][14] Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison[11] and served 14 months at Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery in Alabama[15][16] before being sent to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey to complete his sentence.[15][16][17] He was released from prison on August 25, 2006.[18] As a result of his convictions, Kushner was disbarred from the practice of law in New Jersey,[19] New York,[20] and Pennsylvania.[21]"
He said "half-reasonable", which is not the same as "guiltless" or "honest". You can deal with a corrupt person. You cannot do the same with a dangerously dogmatic person, specially one whose dogma is of the racist kind.
This is not an endorsement for the Kushners (fuck them.) This is an acknowledgement that we are truly in "pick your poison" territory. And we simply cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that this shit will go away (for that's exactly how we are where we are now, as a nation.)
Hillary Clinton was barely tolerated by half of the Democrat voters. That's why Hillary lost. Trump was a barely tolerated candidate among Republicans, but not quite weak enough to be defeated by Hillary Clinton. For example, take a look at her first-amendment positions and you'll see someone who is way to the right of center. When you have a choice between a Republican running as a Democrat and a Libertarian running as a Republican, is it any surprise that the latter wins?
As a Republican that opted to vote for Kasick in the primaries and Clinton in the prez race, I'd say that any GOP candidate (not just Trump) would have defeated Hillary. And by the same token, any Democrat candidate other than Hillary would have beat the fuck out of Trump's campaign.
These was a fight among unlikeables (sp). With that said, the notion that Trump won because he was a Liberatian in Republican disguise is absolutely ridiculous. The motherfucker was a birther, a goddamned George Wallace who dog whistle the right tunes. Oooooh the Mexicans, oooooh the Muslims, etc, etc.
Trump cemented his popular power way before Hillary was in the picture. The "better than Hillary" slogan came as an afterthought, a revisionist sophistry with which to hide the fact they voted for a fucking Birther bigot.
Does this matter? Seems debatable to me.
It does matter, but not in a nerdly way.
The guy is on record spouting what appeared to be a statement against having too many Asian CEOs in SV/tech. From that angle, I think this shit is nerd-relevant.
Yes and no. You can't afford a car, but you can easily afford a live-in housekeeper and nanny for your kids.
Is it just me, or would you be scared to leave someone making barely more than slavery wages alone in your house with your child?
It's not slave wages for them, and you are going to find out people are, for the most part, decent and whom can be trusted to do this type of job.
Stop spouting that kind of crap. Get out of wherever you are and travel the world. Look around. Look abroad and learn. You are going to find a lot of your notions about other countries to be nothing but an assortment of unsubstantiated, superficial bundles of bullshit.
> "indo-chimps,"
Never heard that term, and I've been a programmer for over 33 years.
The reason we object to having go work with incompetent people that are poorly educated is because they create more work for us.
I agree with this partially. I say partially because:
1. Not all H1B are incompetent, and in fact, many are actually good and pleasant to work with. I've been in this IT/software industry rodeo for 23 years (not as long as you, but still, long enough), and I know that this is true.
2. We have a lot of "native" incompetent dead weight among us.
I want to see less H1B abuse and make sure we do not get incompetent people in. But at the same time, I want to see the competent ones to come in and kick our native dead weight out.
I have no compassion for dead weight, native or foreign. I'm not one to prevent a foreign born person to seek new opportunity just to protect dead weight.
What you saw was a fraud. There is nowhere in the U.S. where employers are not required to be fully insured for such accidents. Even if the person had to pay on their own, the normal process would be for the hospital to do everything possible to save the fingers. They would then write off any loss or apply to one of our many charities that help cover the costs in cases like this. One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive here for those that can pay is because we subsidize those who can't.
Like in Japan or Germany or all the other dozen 1st world examples that I can think of. That is not the reason why healthcare is so expensive. You are making a conscious choice to believe and propagate a lie.
What you saw was a fraud. There is nowhere in the U.S. where employers are not required to be fully insured for such accidents. Even if the person had to pay on their own, the normal process would be for the hospital to do everything possible to save the fingers. They would then write off any loss or apply to one of our many charities that help cover the costs in cases like this. One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive here for those that can pay is because we subsidize those who can't.
Hehehe, you are a funny guy.
This survey proves that American workers aren't being harmed by workers with H-1B visas.
Err, maybe, maybe not. I know of a couple of cases were very talented teams have been eliminated completely by offshoring. So, in a way, they were "harmed" for something that is borderline illegal (replacing existing American positions with offshored and H1B replacements.)
OTH, they weren't really "harmed". They got their severance packages, and because they had their shit together, they landed jobs somewhere else.
I'd say there is H1B abuse. But I also say there is a bigger problem: there is a lot of IT dead weight in America.
As an US citizen, I don't care if a person is a US worker or a H1B worker. I care if said person is worth a damn as a worker or dead weight.
In America, with all its wealth, opportunities and educational resources, there is no reason to be dead weight in such a versatile, well-remunerated industry such as IT/software.
I guess he did not like getting the boot.
Which is kind of fucked up because getting the boot once or twice is part of life.
The irony is that the homosapien's violent nature wouldn't necessarily be enough to beat down on neanderthals since they were bigger and smarter than us, and that it was our SOCIAL nature that allowed us to gang up on them. Irony being that despite it (social behavior) being quite possibly the reason we became the dominant (and I suppose only remaining) hominid, we still can't get along.
Not only that. They have better tools and were built better for running and long distance trekking than Neanderthals.
There is very little to suggest Homo Sapien killed off Neanderthals in direct confrontations. It was more a function of out-breeding them and out-competing them in harvesting resources. Barring a plague, over-predation or genocide, to go extinct, you do not need to get killed off or fail. You just need to succeed less often over millenia.
Where do you draw the line on being an engineer? Seems like a good topic for a discussion.
One that designs based on actual data and tolerances.
What the overwhelming majority of programmers do has nothing to do with engineering, and more to do with jerry building.
As someone that works under the title of software engineer, I agree with this, except with the jerry building part. There is jerry building and there is jerry building, one on actual data and tolerance, one done as a craft, and one where people throw shit at the wall and package whatever sticks.
If you apply the scientific method to your work, have clear tolerances and work on actual data, or data inferred by some type of model, then shit, a lot of software jerry building then also accounts as engineering (and there is lot of that.)
But it is also true a lot of what is done in software is not engineering, not even craft (but shit flinging.) The field of software is still too young to clearly define what is engineering and what is craft (and far more dynamic than most fields that have come before it.)
We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.
Globalism works. Now if you are incapable to compete, then shit, you are out of luck, but whose fault is that? Specially in a versatile industry such as software and IT?
Obviously it can be done better, and many of the pains we see have nothing to do with globalism but with this country having
1) an inexcusable lack of basic social contracts,
2) millions of people (mostly males in their late 30's and 40's) who are, also inexcusable, illiterate (and I'm not talking about uneducated immigrants, but US born citizens),
3) entire regions that have been chronically and systematically poor since fucking forever, predating globalization,
4) a non-existent vocational education system for adults (specially for adults who lose their jobs and need to switch gears.)
The Japanese overtook America in car manufacturing in 1972, due to incompetence and complacency. That's 45 years ago. Coal has been bleeding jobs since the 1930's, more than 80 years ago. Steel has been bleeding jobs since it started recycling, decades ago.
People act as if globalism is a new phenomenon that wreck their innocent lives for no reason, and that they, unlike every other fucking human being in history, must be sheltered for competition, and their incompetence rewarded.
Lie yourself if you must with this bullshit.
I live in the mid-west, and until a recent job change, had a shorter commute than everything in that list - plus a 3 bed house for less than the vast majority of that list. My income is on par with national averages for my job title, yet I have a vastly below average cost of living.
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to live in a big city. Every perk I hear touted, I can beat. It's quiet, I have a yard, and I have more spending money that the saps choking on smog.
Because the job pool is greater within a 45-minute commute ratio. When shit hits the fan (which always happens) it is best to have several dozen leads as opposed to just 3 or 4 at the most in the middle of nowhere. I've had colleagues that moved to charming, lower-cost towns to work with that one great employer. Then, shit, poof! Gig is gone and now have to commute 2-3 hours to the big city because they have a house, kids are in school and wife is working in that charming lower-cost town.
I've been in this rodeo for 25 years, and I've seen that played out so many times I know those incidents aren't a fluke. I rather deal with the nasty 45 minute suburban commute and the ridiculous prices to avoid dealing with that.
It's a matter of risk taking. I take risks, but I don't take those kind of risks (specially in a world when turn-over is almost certain every 4-6 years at best, and 2 years at worst.)
I've been in IT for nearly 25 years and I've always worked shoulder to shoulder with women and men alike. Uber has an HR and a culture issue. This isn't a widespread tech industry issue.
WTF? Your anecdote if it's even true is well and truly out of the ordinary for the tech industry. You don't even need to look to the industry why, you can see why just be peeking into a university IT lecture.
Kudos to you and your workplace for having gender equality. But that is far from the norm.
Bullshit. I've post this several times and I second what the OP said. I've worked in multiple industries (insurance, services, DCIM, defense contractors). This behavior is an anomaly of tech in general.
This shit is concentrated in SV's startup culture and some niches in Academia.
Your anecdote isn't data. It's nice that you've worked for progressive companies and that you yourself are good about working with women, but it's absolutely a systemic issue. Story after story after story confirms it.
Rather, I think you and the companies you work for are outliers. Congratulations on that; I hope you keep your streak.
It is a systemic issue in SV's startup culture. This is not normal behavior. It hasn't been anywhere else since I've been working in this shit (mine is a second 25-year anecdote.) Take it for what it is. If you look around you and you see sexual harassment in general, time to move to change fucking pastures dude.
Please stop putting a "sexism in tech" story on the front page.
It's a major problem in technology that really needs to be addressed if this country is going to be competitive in the future. It's unfortunate that it's so inflammatory, but it needs to be addressed.
No. It is a major problem in the SV startup culture (and in some areas in Academia).
Tech is a lot wider (much wider) than that.
See, I've worked in tech for more than 25 years in multiple industries (product development, insurance, service providers and defense contractors.) Anything remotely resembling sexual harassment and gender discrimination gets you fired on the spot.
Uber might be a general symptom of SV's startup/tech culture, but SV is a behavioral anomaly in tech in general.
The woman was not an "applicant"... She was actively RECRUITED by Uber thru LinkedIn.
Doesn't that fact actually discount a large portion of the current claims of sexism?
Only if both things were mutually exclusive. They are not. Welcome to logic 101.
Sorry, transcript.
My thoughts exactly. The recruiter might have been commiserating, and God knows how awful being in such a position is (being a women herself and all.)
But it was a mistake. She could have said something different, like "We are working on it, we are changing, we need people like you and by the way, despite everything, we have some wonderful people ready and capable to implement change. Please don't throw us all under the bus."
I don't think there was any malice or cruelty, just a lack of common sense.
Exhaustion of having to deal with candidate rejections because of sexism? The recruiter is human too.
There has been a number of ammunition depot explosions over the last 15 years in across Eastern Europe. 2 in Serbia, 6 in Bulgaria since 2000, Gerdec in Albania, Cobasna in Moldova, Ukraine itself in 2015. Cold War explosives are becoming unstable and they tend to explode on their own, especially when there is insufficient money to maintain proper storage.
My father told me a story from the cold war, specifically the Nicaraguan civil war in the 70's. He was an officer in Somoza's army at the time. They found a cache of explosives and improvised bombs left behind by the rebels, and he and others were in charge of destroying them (a controlled explosion.) Alas, some pro-government reporters were demanding (yep, demanding) the troops to "re-arrange" the explosives to take better pictures.
My dad, as he told me, had a bad feeling about it (given how badly improvised explosives and old ammo could be) and left the site to report the anomaly. Just after walking a hundred yards or so, BOOM!. People without limbs, eyes popped like water balloons by the shock wave, flesh splatted everywhere.
Ammo and things that go kaput, you gotta respect that volatile shit.
Admission of non-citizens into the US is not a right and is not subject to due process. Non-citizens can be denied entry for arbitrary reasons, not just in the US but also in all other countries on the planet.
On the other hand, the US signed a treaty (actually a couple) that says my wife and son, both not citizens of the USA, can wander into the USA any time they want. According to the American Constitution, treaties are the second highest law of the land, just below the Constitution. Of course America being America, all it takes is a Supreme Court Justice to say, "no, the Constitution actually means something else" and America has a long history of breaking their own laws and especially treaties. Probably the reason they dropped the u out of honour. Through other treaties and such, my son also has the right to go to a few other countries as well.
As someone (also) married to a foreign national, what he said.
The OP's arbitrary posture on non-nationals is in the same category as people demanding immigration vetting of Puerto Rican and people from Guam and American Samoa (who are US citizens) moving to the mainland (yes, I've heard this, multiple times.)
Posturing about the law, and ignorance of the law, them two make a saucy shit sandwich. Every. Time.
Sure, people will buy the cheapest thing if there is no compelling reason to buy the more expensive thing. That is how capitalism is designed. Consumers look for the best deal and corporations try to spend as much money as possible. It is up to the government to strike a balance between the two. What needs to be done is to convince people 'buying local' is a compelling reason on its own. The government has not been successful at doing that.
Actually no. It's not just capitalism. It is culture. Travel the world. Go to Germany. Italy, and the best example of all, Japan. People buy less, but when they buy, they tend to buy quality (and typically home-made.) They just don't buy cheap made abroad nilly willy unless there is a specific intent or when practical.
What is happening, and I keep referring to this, is that we are a rich country of really poor people who see themselves (quite realistically) at the bottom of a barrel. Struggling to make ends meet coupled with a culture that worships consumerism and pays lip service to savings, we have masses who simply cannot opt to buy unless the cheapest thing they find.
You do not typically see this kind of mass behavior in a developed country (but you do see it, by necessity, in poor countries, like the one I come from.)
Quality has a cost (in particular American-made quality), and that is something not within reach of the American blue collar worker.