You're a rare exception if you managed to avoid lay-offs, plus staying in the same company (these days) generally means you're being woefully underpaid, because they'll give new hires better salaries than existing employees. Things were very different in the 70s than now.
With open-source software, a monoculture isn't that bad a thing, as the Heartbleed exploit has shown. When something bad is discovered, people jump on it immediately and come up with a fix, which is deployed very very quickly (and free of charge, I might add). How fast was a fix available for Heartbleed? Further, people will go to greater lengths to make sure it doesn't happen again. Look at the recent efforts to rewrite OpenSSL, and the fork that was created from it.
None of this happens with proprietary software. First off, the vendor always tries to deny the problem or cover it up. If and when they do fix it, it may or may not be really fixed. You don't know, because it's all closed-source. It might be a half-ass fix, or it might have a different backdoor inserted, as was recently revealed with Netgear. What if you think the fix is poor? Can you fork it and make your own that's better? No, because you can't fork closed-source software (and certainly not selected libraries inside a larger closed-source software package; they're monolithic). But the LibreSSL guys did just that in the Heartbleed case.
Finally, monocultures aren't all that common in open-source software anyway; they only happen when everyone generally agrees on something and/or likes something well enough to not bother with forks or alternatives. Even the vaunted Linux kernel isn't a monoculture, as there's still lots of people using the *BSD kernels/OSes (though granted, there's far more installations of the Linux kernel than the *BSDs).
That's funny, I interned in a shipyard (making aircraft carriers) for a while, and all the tradesmen told us college-kid interns "finish your engineering degree! Don't wind up like us!!!".
Why the hell would you want to relocate to some 3rd-world shithole where you have to worry about K&R (no, not the Unix guys)?
Go look at the quality-of-living indices, and the countries which dominate them. They're not 3rd-world countries with low costs-of-living. If you want to live someplace where it's extremely safe, the government isn't corrupt, there's good public services (public transit, healthcare, etc.), it's going to cost you. If you have a medical emergency in a mountain town in Morocco, you're probably not going to survive.
I don't claim to be an intellectual. I've never claimed that. You claimed that, not I.
This is basically incorrect. This site is billed as "news for nerds", and has long been famous for being a hang-out for "nerds" and "geeks". "Nerd" is synonymous with "intellectual", though with more of a bent towards science, engineering, and other technical topics, rather than literature or other arts. So the OP's statement is entirely accurate; people here think of themselves as "intellectuals", or else why would they come to a site that supplies "news for nerds"?
I don't know about his "Expanding Vacuum Theory", but he is correct, IMO, about the people on this site; they think they're intellectuals (again, if you're not a self-identified "nerd", what are you doing here? Trolling or shilling?), but they're frequently at least as anti-intellectual and Luddite-like as the general US public.
I'd been at my previous job for longer than 5 years, and more than once it was seen as a negative.
Really? What region/metro area have you encountered this attitude? I've got several less-than-2-year terms in permanent jobs, and I always get grilled on why I left those jobs. I'm in the NYC area (northern NJ, CT, etc.). All the companies here seem to have a big problem with anyone who doesn't stay at jobs for a really long time. The pay here isn't very good either, even though the cost of living is among the highest in the country. I'm looking forward to moving out.
I'm no expert on the teaching profession, but my understanding is that the salaries are highly variable by state, and that some states/districts are strong recruiters, going out-of-state to recruit good teachers. Obviously, this doesn't work out for someone who refuses to leave their hometown, but for someone who doesn't mind relocating, it can be quite lucrative. Also, job stability is something that teaching is usually well-known for, so California is probably an anomaly that way. Maybe she should look at relocating to a better state where the pay is higher and the stability much better.
Lay-offs in engineering are a fact of life, BTW. At least there, you can usually expect to get another job pretty quickly, depending on where you live, but if you think engineers enjoy highly stable jobs, you're sadly misinformed. As an engineer, you need to be able to relocate every 2-5 years, unless you stick to a very high cost-of-living metro area like Silicon Valley where your particular skills are in high demand and where there's lots of jobs in that area.
Commuting to NYC (Manhattan) is cheap. They have trains running to NJ, CT, and NY (north of the city); you can get monthly passes and it's pretty cheap, certainly much cheaper than gas + car maintenance + insurance. Of course, the trick is living near a train station, or having someone who can drive you to one. The stations have parking lots/garages, but these have reserved spaces and are quite pricey, so if you don't live close enough to walk/bike (and biking in this area isn't really safe, plus the weather sucks for part of the year), and you don't have someone who can drive you, that's going to change the equation greatly. You can also take a bus to the train station, but that adds a lot of time usually because the two don't coordinate well. You can also take buses directly to Manhattan from many places, but these are slower than trains and much less comfortable.
The thing that really affects what you need for salary, commuting to NYC, is housing costs. While obviously not as astronomical as Manhattan, the areas around it are still very expensive, at least on par with Silicon Valley prices from what I've seen, at least if you're renting. On top of that, property taxes are the highest in the country. Expect to pay over $10k/year on a $400k house (which is a pretty modest house, maybe 1500sf). We have school superintendents in every municipality who all need to get $250k, and every little high school needs a brand-new football field with artificial turf, and cops and firefighters all need to be able to retire at 55 with a full pension, so that money's gotta come from somewhere.
- Moving is good. Staying the same place, career-wise, is generally considered to be bad.
That depends on who you talk to. Here in the Northeast, it seems to be a huge negative on your resume if you haven't stayed in your previous jobs for 5+ years.
Also, the quality of work seems to suck in contracting; you mainly just work at crappy defense contractors or large companies like Qualcomm doing BS busywork. The really interesting jobs all seem to be permanent-only. Again, this may be a regional thing.
AFAICT, the "equal pay for women" thing is basically a BS political issue; they already DO get equal pay. The reason women make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns (or whatever the ratio is, I think that's close to the latest soundbite) is because women take lower-paying jobs than men, on average. This article is about tech people making 6 figures; how many female software developers have you met? A few perhaps, but they're a tiny minority. How many male schoolteachers have you met? While teaching is obviously important to society, K-12 teachers aren't paid 6 figures. Women can't expect equal pay for unequal jobs, and any laws to address this "problem" are going to be ineffectual since, just like any other discrimination, it's really hard to prove in court. Most people don't openly advertise their salaries, except for government employees (who have known pay grades).
No, it's not (unless you can prove they really were conspiring). Low-level managers aren't much different from engineers; they just parrot the orders from middle and upper management, and provide day-to-day guidance. They don't make strategic decisions. They frequently don't even get paid any more; they just hope to advance to middle management (or higher) where they eventually will get paid more. They're not responsible for making criminal decisions; they're just doing their jobs and hoping not to get terminated in this shitty economy.
The managers at or near the top are the ones who make decisions like this, or like the GM ignition-switch fiasco. They're the ones who need to go to prison. They get paid the most, and they make all the decisions, so they need to suffer when their deicisions result in loss of life or are otherwise grossly negligent.
Disney has done a horrible amount of damage to society, I think, with its ridiculous portrayals of relationships and courtship and what peoples' expectations should be.
I had some bad experiences in college too, with dating, since all I had as a guide was Hollywood movies and TV. (I was raised by a single mother who never dated.) I wised up pretty quickly and learned how not to be a creep, but it sure took a long time to actually get from there to having any successful relationships.
Where did the parent advocate having the government monitor code check-ins or ensure software quality? All he advocated was having criminal penalties for insecure software, which actually sounds like a good idea to me, provided people are able to pass the blame to their bosses and thus avoid all liability (if you fear for your job because your boss ordered you to do something insecure, then your boss should go to jail, not you. If your boss was just passing orders from his boss, his boss should go to jail, not him.).
I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it.
Me neither, but I also would like to add that I haven't exactly had a lot of opportunities to harass female colleagues. For instance, where I'm currently employed, there's only two female "colleagues" I could harass if I wanted to. One is the office secretary (who isn't much to look at), who I almost never talk to, and the other is the janitor (who's even less to look at), who I say "hi" to when she empties my trash can.
I kinda wonder if some men in this profession, growing up with almost no women around in school and later in work, develop poor attitudes about women largely because there just aren't any around. When you spend your entire adult life almost completely isolated from the opposite sex, how are you supposed to develop good social skills for dealing with them? Yes, some men have female relatives, some might be social enough to actually date outside of work and have female friends or lovers, but this profession is rather infamous for having a lot of men who aren't very social.
You're forgetting Redbox. Plus, there's Amazon's own video-on-demand service.
There's nothing stupid about abandoning local video stores. What kind of moron would pay $5 to rent a movie, plus ridiculous late fees? With Netflix at $8/month for all-you-can-view online, or maybe double that for online + 1 DVD checkout, it's a no-brainer. Or you can go to Redbox.
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The other 90% doesn't run critical infrastructure services.
Yes, I guess you could say that, but I'd add the qualifier "nearly", or maybe even "remotely".
You're a rare exception if you managed to avoid lay-offs, plus staying in the same company (these days) generally means you're being woefully underpaid, because they'll give new hires better salaries than existing employees. Things were very different in the 70s than now.
With open-source software, a monoculture isn't that bad a thing, as the Heartbleed exploit has shown. When something bad is discovered, people jump on it immediately and come up with a fix, which is deployed very very quickly (and free of charge, I might add). How fast was a fix available for Heartbleed? Further, people will go to greater lengths to make sure it doesn't happen again. Look at the recent efforts to rewrite OpenSSL, and the fork that was created from it.
None of this happens with proprietary software. First off, the vendor always tries to deny the problem or cover it up. If and when they do fix it, it may or may not be really fixed. You don't know, because it's all closed-source. It might be a half-ass fix, or it might have a different backdoor inserted, as was recently revealed with Netgear. What if you think the fix is poor? Can you fork it and make your own that's better? No, because you can't fork closed-source software (and certainly not selected libraries inside a larger closed-source software package; they're monolithic). But the LibreSSL guys did just that in the Heartbleed case.
Finally, monocultures aren't all that common in open-source software anyway; they only happen when everyone generally agrees on something and/or likes something well enough to not bother with forks or alternatives. Even the vaunted Linux kernel isn't a monoculture, as there's still lots of people using the *BSD kernels/OSes (though granted, there's far more installations of the Linux kernel than the *BSDs).
America doesn't come close to dominating quality-of-living indices.
That's funny, I interned in a shipyard (making aircraft carriers) for a while, and all the tradesmen told us college-kid interns "finish your engineering degree! Don't wind up like us!!!".
Why the hell would you want to relocate to some 3rd-world shithole where you have to worry about K&R (no, not the Unix guys)?
Go look at the quality-of-living indices, and the countries which dominate them. They're not 3rd-world countries with low costs-of-living. If you want to live someplace where it's extremely safe, the government isn't corrupt, there's good public services (public transit, healthcare, etc.), it's going to cost you. If you have a medical emergency in a mountain town in Morocco, you're probably not going to survive.
I don't claim to be an intellectual. I've never claimed that. You claimed that, not I.
This is basically incorrect. This site is billed as "news for nerds", and has long been famous for being a hang-out for "nerds" and "geeks". "Nerd" is synonymous with "intellectual", though with more of a bent towards science, engineering, and other technical topics, rather than literature or other arts. So the OP's statement is entirely accurate; people here think of themselves as "intellectuals", or else why would they come to a site that supplies "news for nerds"?
I don't know about his "Expanding Vacuum Theory", but he is correct, IMO, about the people on this site; they think they're intellectuals (again, if you're not a self-identified "nerd", what are you doing here? Trolling or shilling?), but they're frequently at least as anti-intellectual and Luddite-like as the general US public.
While it may have worked out ok in this situation it is a very bad president. I do not want to be pulled over for no fucking reason.
I agree that Obama is a very bad President, but what does he have to do with this?
It's not hard to get boots that cost close to that, or more. Good hiking boots are expensive.
I'd been at my previous job for longer than 5 years, and more than once it was seen as a negative.
Really? What region/metro area have you encountered this attitude? I've got several less-than-2-year terms in permanent jobs, and I always get grilled on why I left those jobs. I'm in the NYC area (northern NJ, CT, etc.). All the companies here seem to have a big problem with anyone who doesn't stay at jobs for a really long time. The pay here isn't very good either, even though the cost of living is among the highest in the country. I'm looking forward to moving out.
Sorry, I mis-typed, I meant to type "NE" (northeast USA).
pay attention -- the question is why does a woman get less for the same work
Where is the proof of this? I haven't seen any. These numbers come from nationwide surveys of everyone in all professions, all lumped together.
I'm no expert on the teaching profession, but my understanding is that the salaries are highly variable by state, and that some states/districts are strong recruiters, going out-of-state to recruit good teachers. Obviously, this doesn't work out for someone who refuses to leave their hometown, but for someone who doesn't mind relocating, it can be quite lucrative. Also, job stability is something that teaching is usually well-known for, so California is probably an anomaly that way. Maybe she should look at relocating to a better state where the pay is higher and the stability much better.
Lay-offs in engineering are a fact of life, BTW. At least there, you can usually expect to get another job pretty quickly, depending on where you live, but if you think engineers enjoy highly stable jobs, you're sadly misinformed. As an engineer, you need to be able to relocate every 2-5 years, unless you stick to a very high cost-of-living metro area like Silicon Valley where your particular skills are in high demand and where there's lots of jobs in that area.
Commuting to NYC (Manhattan) is cheap. They have trains running to NJ, CT, and NY (north of the city); you can get monthly passes and it's pretty cheap, certainly much cheaper than gas + car maintenance + insurance. Of course, the trick is living near a train station, or having someone who can drive you to one. The stations have parking lots/garages, but these have reserved spaces and are quite pricey, so if you don't live close enough to walk/bike (and biking in this area isn't really safe, plus the weather sucks for part of the year), and you don't have someone who can drive you, that's going to change the equation greatly. You can also take a bus to the train station, but that adds a lot of time usually because the two don't coordinate well. You can also take buses directly to Manhattan from many places, but these are slower than trains and much less comfortable.
The thing that really affects what you need for salary, commuting to NYC, is housing costs. While obviously not as astronomical as Manhattan, the areas around it are still very expensive, at least on par with Silicon Valley prices from what I've seen, at least if you're renting. On top of that, property taxes are the highest in the country. Expect to pay over $10k/year on a $400k house (which is a pretty modest house, maybe 1500sf). We have school superintendents in every municipality who all need to get $250k, and every little high school needs a brand-new football field with artificial turf, and cops and firefighters all need to be able to retire at 55 with a full pension, so that money's gotta come from somewhere.
I lived in a mid-70s house; the workmanship was crap. If you want quality workmanship, you need to get something pre-war.
- Moving is good. Staying the same place, career-wise, is generally considered to be bad.
That depends on who you talk to. Here in the Northeast, it seems to be a huge negative on your resume if you haven't stayed in your previous jobs for 5+ years.
Also, the quality of work seems to suck in contracting; you mainly just work at crappy defense contractors or large companies like Qualcomm doing BS busywork. The really interesting jobs all seem to be permanent-only. Again, this may be a regional thing.
AFAICT, the "equal pay for women" thing is basically a BS political issue; they already DO get equal pay. The reason women make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns (or whatever the ratio is, I think that's close to the latest soundbite) is because women take lower-paying jobs than men, on average. This article is about tech people making 6 figures; how many female software developers have you met? A few perhaps, but they're a tiny minority. How many male schoolteachers have you met? While teaching is obviously important to society, K-12 teachers aren't paid 6 figures. Women can't expect equal pay for unequal jobs, and any laws to address this "problem" are going to be ineffectual since, just like any other discrimination, it's really hard to prove in court. Most people don't openly advertise their salaries, except for government employees (who have known pay grades).
No, it's not (unless you can prove they really were conspiring). Low-level managers aren't much different from engineers; they just parrot the orders from middle and upper management, and provide day-to-day guidance. They don't make strategic decisions. They frequently don't even get paid any more; they just hope to advance to middle management (or higher) where they eventually will get paid more. They're not responsible for making criminal decisions; they're just doing their jobs and hoping not to get terminated in this shitty economy.
The managers at or near the top are the ones who make decisions like this, or like the GM ignition-switch fiasco. They're the ones who need to go to prison. They get paid the most, and they make all the decisions, so they need to suffer when their deicisions result in loss of life or are otherwise grossly negligent.
Disney has done a horrible amount of damage to society, I think, with its ridiculous portrayals of relationships and courtship and what peoples' expectations should be.
I had some bad experiences in college too, with dating, since all I had as a guide was Hollywood movies and TV. (I was raised by a single mother who never dated.) I wised up pretty quickly and learned how not to be a creep, but it sure took a long time to actually get from there to having any successful relationships.
Where did the parent advocate having the government monitor code check-ins or ensure software quality? All he advocated was having criminal penalties for insecure software, which actually sounds like a good idea to me, provided people are able to pass the blame to their bosses and thus avoid all liability (if you fear for your job because your boss ordered you to do something insecure, then your boss should go to jail, not you. If your boss was just passing orders from his boss, his boss should go to jail, not him.).
I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it.
Me neither, but I also would like to add that I haven't exactly had a lot of opportunities to harass female colleagues. For instance, where I'm currently employed, there's only two female "colleagues" I could harass if I wanted to. One is the office secretary (who isn't much to look at), who I almost never talk to, and the other is the janitor (who's even less to look at), who I say "hi" to when she empties my trash can.
I kinda wonder if some men in this profession, growing up with almost no women around in school and later in work, develop poor attitudes about women largely because there just aren't any around. When you spend your entire adult life almost completely isolated from the opposite sex, how are you supposed to develop good social skills for dealing with them? Yes, some men have female relatives, some might be social enough to actually date outside of work and have female friends or lovers, but this profession is rather infamous for having a lot of men who aren't very social.
You're forgetting Redbox. Plus, there's Amazon's own video-on-demand service.
There's nothing stupid about abandoning local video stores. What kind of moron would pay $5 to rent a movie, plus ridiculous late fees? With Netflix at $8/month for all-you-can-view online, or maybe double that for online + 1 DVD checkout, it's a no-brainer. Or you can go to Redbox.
People like me? Where did I spew any Libertarian ideology lately?
Yeah, the "bitter" part kinda covers that.