Murphy's Law doesn't distinguish between good intentions and sleazy trolls. Haven't any of you ever had a hard drive crash a day before a major project was due?
Actually, he's right. Despite the assertion of the original post, the details of the upcoming bill are NOT known in detail yet except for some vague strokes described by ministers, and his assertions about the content of it are entirely speculation.
I and other H-1B's get paid exactly the same, if not better, than my American citizen counterparts.
While the base salary isn't breaking $100k a lot of the time, Microsoft gives everyone (H-1B or otherwise) a bucketload of benefits that would easily push the cost to MS well over $100k.
Add into the mix the fact that Microsoft has to pay shiteloads of money for legal services, filing fees, premium processing, etc. just to keep us in the country, and you realize that it costs MS a decent amount more to keep H-1Bs in the country. Plus, the stupid Americans like to randomly tear up your visas from time to time if you come from a "suspicious" country, and let me tell you, those are expensive battles.
A population of 298 million, and how many of those:
- Educated in computer science/engineering (to at least a bachelor's degree, and preferably higher) - With practical software development experience. - That desire to work for Microsoft? - Not already employed by Microsoft or a competitor.
The intersection of all four of those points, even in the US, is exceedingly low.
A club in Ontario swiped my license for 'verification'.
My next birthday, I got a cute little letter at my home inviting me to celerbate at their club. Needless to say, I don't let people swipe/scan my ID anymore.
Thankfully, Canada's PIPEDA privacy law now makes it illegal for them to deny providing you a service because you didn't provide personal information unrelated to the essential requirements for the service.
I wouldn't worry. Sure a lot of even development tasks are being farmed out to India or China. But there's still more than enough demand and competition for the top CS graduates to ensure a healthy and lucrative career.
My only advice is to get a good education, and build a good resume while you can. If you spend 6 months getting a certification-of-the-week, write a little text adventure in Visual Basic, then wonder why you're not getting six-figure salary offers to start, you're probably next on the list to be outsourced. If you've got a CS undergrad degree (or better yet, a master's degree) from a top school, then people are going to be literally fighting over you, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Yeah Amazon is the classic example people use. They're fairly well-known for beating MS salaries. Of course, that means you have to work at Amazon though. Uck.
Having worked in several software development companies of various sizes, including Microsoft, I can tell you that Microsoft is most definitely not below the curve in terms of compensation and benefits in recent times. Unless this does not scale well at all as you're promoted, then I would presume it's the same at senior levels as well. It's certainly above average for rank and file engineers.
I suggest, if you're a member of the IEEE, you check out the salary survey this year. While it may be biased a bit low for the top software companies, you'll still find the Microsoft salaries compare very favorably. Their benefits package... I'd be hard-pressed to even imagine what one could add to it. It's sweet.
When the boss is on the road, why pay for long distance through the hotel circuit when you can just use the cheap/complimentary Internet to place a Skype call?
I don't see how Skype is any different from ANY other Internet traffic! If you're communicating to the net, you could potentially be sending secrets out. Better Skype than SSH.
It's a shame my ISP explicitly bans all portscanning in the TOS. Oh yeah, and looking at naughty pictures too, so you can imagine how seriously I take the TOS.
Sorry if I offended anyone: I did not mean to limit the campaign against Night Elf cybering in Ironforge to the GLBT community. It's a problem that all dwarves must face, regardless of orientation. I hope that many brave Dwarven communities from all walks of life will pick up the mantle against this horrific practice.
And with the argument of, "We will be nice to the slaves, and since other companies would undoubtedly step in and be cruel to them - we are justified in our assistance," we complete the similarities.
Like all those people who bought slaves and subsequently freed them. Yeah, I hate those guys. They were evil for supporting slavers.
The slave trade was permitted, not required. If Google was operating back then, it could simply not use slaves and therefore do no evil.
Also, the motto is "Do no evil", not "Do good". Google can try to minimize the effect of evil, but its motto doesn't in any way require it to take a stand to oppose it in others.
I was recently hired by a major software company in the USA.
On my team, we have Chinese, Indian, some from the middle east, one or two I'm guessing are from Spain, a few North American born and bred (including Canadians... haha!), several Eastern Europeans.
We have no women, but in sister teams I see a few, at least in a ratio that I would call normal for software.
So no, no racism here.
Back at my University, you noticed a bit of that. Most professors would hire the best candidates regardless of, but then there'd be one or two who would exclusively accept Egyptian students or something.
Racism is out there, but it's disappearing. Most techies I know don't really care which races they work with anymore, more on other issues like the skill and qualifications. They may still have racial tendancies, but they save them for their personal lives.
I've seen talks and papers that have come out of Microsoft research, and while it may look good as a website summary, the quality of the actual projects and results varies wildly. They may talk big, but in the end, I've only ever seen a couple of projects out of MSR that were even worth talking about, and the research labs of places like IBM, HP, and even Sun do many far more interesting things.
One other big problem from MSR - on the occasional project that's actually good, they somehow manage to kill it, or at least never tech transfer it into products. I cry when I think of some of the awesome dev technologies MSR was working on a few years ago that never made it out.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php has some good comments on the two recent studies from the CRIA, plus some interesting comments on how various groups have been viewing them.
This was released in a special Civ3 collector's edition with a video about the making of Civ3.
The answer is yes.
I believe it involved realising it was 3 in the morning, that the Aztecs were never going to crumble, and completely forgetting what bug they were looking to reproduce.
The implication that the open nature of other kernels gives us any sort of real defence is pure fantasy.
- Every practical OS kernel allows, in some security state, for the kernel to be modified on disk. This is required to update your kernel. If you can update your kernel, you can install a rootkit. Simple as that.
- Any malicious kernel can hide its effects from userspace apps.
No OS I've encountered to date can reasonably defend against this in software. In hardware, you can use read-only media to prevent the first condition, and a TPM to prevent the second (but I'm sure everyone will tell me how 'evil' TPMs are since the threat of DRM is more important than detecting rootkits).
I'd be surprized to see that again. The response seems unique to Blizzard, who is obsessive about shielding their developers away from the real world at all costs.
Plus, Firaxis doesn't have a huge revenue stream from Civ4 yet, so can less afford to insult their community pre-release.
Slashdot Mirror
... oh wait.
Murphy's Law doesn't distinguish between good intentions and sleazy trolls. Haven't any of you ever had a hard drive crash a day before a major project was due?
Actually, he's right. Despite the assertion of the original post, the details of the upcoming bill are NOT known in detail yet except for some vague strokes described by ministers, and his assertions about the content of it are entirely speculation.
I and other H-1B's get paid exactly the same, if not better, than my American citizen counterparts.
While the base salary isn't breaking $100k a lot of the time, Microsoft gives everyone (H-1B or otherwise) a bucketload of benefits that would easily push the cost to MS well over $100k.
Add into the mix the fact that Microsoft has to pay shiteloads of money for legal services, filing fees, premium processing, etc. just to keep us in the country, and you realize that it costs MS a decent amount more to keep H-1Bs in the country. Plus, the stupid Americans like to randomly tear up your visas from time to time if you come from a "suspicious" country, and let me tell you, those are expensive battles.
A population of 298 million, and how many of those:
- Educated in computer science/engineering (to at least a bachelor's degree, and preferably higher)
- With practical software development experience.
- That desire to work for Microsoft?
- Not already employed by Microsoft or a competitor.
The intersection of all four of those points, even in the US, is exceedingly low.
A club in Ontario swiped my license for 'verification'.
My next birthday, I got a cute little letter at my home inviting me to celerbate at their club. Needless to say, I don't let people swipe/scan my ID anymore.
Thankfully, Canada's PIPEDA privacy law now makes it illegal for them to deny providing you a service because you didn't provide personal information unrelated to the essential requirements for the service.
No. That would be nice, but I don't know of any country with such a law.
In fact many companies simply buy patents, being purely tech litigators and having no product or development or technical expertise.
... for the last time, no you don't.
I wouldn't worry. Sure a lot of even development tasks are being farmed out to India or China. But there's still more than enough demand and competition for the top CS graduates to ensure a healthy and lucrative career.
My only advice is to get a good education, and build a good resume while you can. If you spend 6 months getting a certification-of-the-week, write a little text adventure in Visual Basic, then wonder why you're not getting six-figure salary offers to start, you're probably next on the list to be outsourced. If you've got a CS undergrad degree (or better yet, a master's degree) from a top school, then people are going to be literally fighting over you, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Yeah Amazon is the classic example people use. They're fairly well-known for beating MS salaries. Of course, that means you have to work at Amazon though. Uck.
Sorry, have to disagree with you there.
Having worked in several software development companies of various sizes, including Microsoft, I can tell you that Microsoft is most definitely not below the curve in terms of compensation and benefits in recent times. Unless this does not scale well at all as you're promoted, then I would presume it's the same at senior levels as well. It's certainly above average for rank and file engineers.
I suggest, if you're a member of the IEEE, you check out the salary survey this year. While it may be biased a bit low for the top software companies, you'll still find the Microsoft salaries compare very favorably. Their benefits package... I'd be hard-pressed to even imagine what one could add to it. It's sweet.
When the boss is on the road, why pay for long distance through the hotel circuit when you can just use the cheap/complimentary Internet to place a Skype call?
I don't see how Skype is any different from ANY other Internet traffic! If you're communicating to the net, you could potentially be sending secrets out. Better Skype than SSH.
Nmap is my favourite video game ever.
It's a shame my ISP explicitly bans all portscanning in the TOS. Oh yeah, and looking at naughty pictures too, so you can imagine how seriously I take the TOS.
Sorry if I offended anyone:
I did not mean to limit the campaign against Night Elf cybering in Ironforge to the GLBT community. It's a problem that all dwarves must face, regardless of orientation. I hope that many brave Dwarven communities from all walks of life will pick up the mantle against this horrific practice.
Like all those people who bought slaves and subsequently freed them. Yeah, I hate those guys. They were evil for supporting slavers.
Your argument is flawed.
The slave trade was permitted, not required. If Google was operating back then, it could simply not use slaves and therefore do no evil.
Also, the motto is "Do no evil", not "Do good". Google can try to minimize the effect of evil, but its motto doesn't in any way require it to take a stand to oppose it in others.
I was recently hired by a major software company in the USA.
On my team, we have Chinese, Indian, some from the middle east, one or two I'm guessing are from Spain, a few North American born and bred (including Canadians... haha!), several Eastern Europeans.
We have no women, but in sister teams I see a few, at least in a ratio that I would call normal for software.
So no, no racism here.
Back at my University, you noticed a bit of that. Most professors would hire the best candidates regardless of, but then there'd be one or two who would exclusively accept Egyptian students or something.
Racism is out there, but it's disappearing. Most techies I know don't really care which races they work with anymore, more on other issues like the skill and qualifications. They may still have racial tendancies, but they save them for their personal lives.
I've seen talks and papers that have come out of Microsoft research, and while it may look good as a website summary, the quality of the actual projects and results varies wildly. They may talk big, but in the end, I've only ever seen a couple of projects out of MSR that were even worth talking about, and the research labs of places like IBM, HP, and even Sun do many far more interesting things.
One other big problem from MSR - on the occasional project that's actually good, they somehow manage to kill it, or at least never tech transfer it into products. I cry when I think of some of the awesome dev technologies MSR was working on a few years ago that never made it out.
Sure, if you measure sales by mass. That would be quite the thick book!
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php has some good comments on the two recent studies from the CRIA, plus some interesting comments on how various groups have been viewing them.
This was released in a special Civ3 collector's edition with a video about the making of Civ3.
The answer is yes.
I believe it involved realising it was 3 in the morning, that the Aztecs were never going to crumble, and completely forgetting what bug they were looking to reproduce.
This should read: "No defence against rootkits"
The implication that the open nature of other kernels gives us any sort of real defence is pure fantasy.
- Every practical OS kernel allows, in some security state, for the kernel to be modified on disk. This is required to update your kernel. If you can update your kernel, you can install a rootkit. Simple as that.
- Any malicious kernel can hide its effects from userspace apps.
No OS I've encountered to date can reasonably defend against this in software. In hardware, you can use read-only media to prevent the first condition, and a TPM to prevent the second (but I'm sure everyone will tell me how 'evil' TPMs are since the threat of DRM is more important than detecting rootkits).
I'd be surprized to see that again. The response seems unique to Blizzard, who is obsessive about shielding their developers away from the real world at all costs.
Plus, Firaxis doesn't have a huge revenue stream from Civ4 yet, so can less afford to insult their community pre-release.
Yeah, Mother Brain sitting in my cube would give me nightmares for weeks.
Oh wait. The WORK sort of boss!
(strangely, the difference is minor)