Again, that's a good way to get sued. It's easy to do; you just have someone else call your old employer, posing as a new employer, and do the same thing. Any decent company now has a strict policy of NOT answering such questions for this exact reason. Now, smaller employers may still operate this way many times, because they're not as attractive targets for lawyers (no deep pockets). But just try pulling that trick with a big tech employer like Intel or Microsoft. They absolutely will not answer any question other than position and dates of employment.
Also, their manufacturing is getting better and better all the time. Cellphones are all made there now, and those are pretty close to the state of the art in electronics technology. They're making cars there now too; they're quickly advancing up the technological ladder in which things they manufacture. Pretty soon, they'll probably have their own state-of-the-art semiconductor fabs.
Not likely. China's economy is built on building cheap crap to export to us. Long before they generate enough wealthy people of their own to consume what they produce we will be too poor to sustain their rise at the current rate. So on the current course everybody is going to lose.
China's economy is changing very rapidly. There's tons of people buying Buicks and other, what we consider middle-class cars. There's more and more engineers coming out of their schools (or ours). They're sending people to space and just sent their first female taikonaut and did a docking maneuver IIRC. The middle class there is growing by leaps and bounds. Considering where they were 20 years ago, they're catching up very quickly. The West's (esp. US) fall isn't going to be overnight, it'll take some time; in 20 years, as things are getting really bad here and looking more like Somalia, they'll have surpassed where we were at our peak.
Such a contract would never be enforceable in America; it's called "right to work". In most states, the employer can fire you at any time without cause (as long as it isn't discriminatory; i.e. they find out you're gay or had a kid or whatever), and similarly, you can quit your job at any time without cause.
They can make contracts requiring you to repay your relocation bonus, or your hiring bonus, or your training costs etc. (or more likely a pro-rated portion of such) if you quit too early (like within 2 years), but the idea of not being able to quit your job at all is utterly ridiculous. If you can't quit, why would you even bother to keep working? Just show up and surf the web and play solitaire all day long; if you can't quit, then they surely can't fire you either. And if they can fire you, why not give them a good reason to if you don't want to work there any more anyway?
If that reason is "they'll give you a bad reference to your new employer", then you've got a pretty bad employment system. Here in America, while it obviously isn't great as you can see from all the comments here, one nice thing is that if your old employer bad-mouths you to a new employer, you can sue them. It doesn't even matter if it's true; it's pretty hard to prove poor job performance, as it's really a matter of opinion, so libel and slander laws apply here, and a lawyer can easily get your employer to pay a giant settlement to avoid a nasty trial. So what's happened now is that most companies have a policy of NEVER discussing old employees with any new employers, to avoid any problems; they will only do the minimum required by law: they'll verify your dates of employment, and that's it.
Exactly. However, if you're really unhappy in your job, it might be worth checking out; who knows, maybe you'll have a walled office in the new job (not likely, but they are out there in a few places). You should be able to tell in an interview if the place is really horrible or not; just make sure they show you where your desk is, and check out the building to see if it's a nice place to work or not before you leave. Also, if your current job sucks and the commute sucks too, a new job might have a shorter commute, which (with salary being equal) might be worth it all by itself.
Really? Silicon Valley is "starving" for high-experience engineers to, but what they don't tell you, like this guy found out the hard way, is that if you're over 40, you might as well not apply.
What evidence is there that Pittsburgh employers are any different?
Worse yet, it takes many years for skilled employees to be developed: they have to go to college (4-6 years) for a degree in that profession, then they need to work in that field for a while (2-5 years) to be able to work on their own generally. So if the industry makes the profession unattractive to kids thinking about a college major, it's going to be a bare minimum of a decade before you can turn things around. In reality, it'll be more like 2-3 decades because kids will be hearing about the profession from people who are in it or were in it (and quit because they were unhappy), and it takes a lot of time to change perceptions.
We probably can't return to the old 'company man' ways and it isn't even clear we want to. So we can't go back and we can't stay where we are either; so what next?
I think it's pretty simple: we can't go back, so we won't. So what'll happen is Western society will crumble as it loses the ability to master technology, and China will take over. We'll eventually become low-paid idiot workers, assembling products for wealthy consumers in China and doing other crappy jobs for them.
Exactly; it's a combination of the two. Not many skilled people are going to take a job paying half as much just because the work environment is better, but not many people are going to give up a nice work environment for a job paying only 5% more. But not that many employers these days like to provide a good work environment, because they're cheap bastards and would rather set up an "open plan work area", and then try to convince employees this is good "for collaboration" (in a job that has very little collaboration), while the dipshit managers who spew this bullshit sit in their own walled offices.
If you don't want your valuable employees poached, then pay them more than they'll make somewhere else, and make sure their work environment is good so they won't want to leave. It's that simple. You don't even need to pay the absolute max, you just have to be in the top 80% probably, and make sure that they like their job; not that many people will jump ship to a risky new job (where they might hate the work environment) for just a few $K more. But if your work environment sucks (because you have an "open plan work area", for instance), then expect people to leave as quickly as they get a better offer.
There is basically zero unemployment for good software developers right now. Things are so bad I can't even find qualified people to take interviews, which is sort of a prerequisite to make them that upwardly spiraling offer.
Except that these offers aren't "upwardly spiraling" at all, that's complete bullshit. Salaries have been frozen for years.
As another point of evidence, new grad offers are now roughly 2.5X the national average for other BS degrees
And what does that have to do with people with 10+ years experience? Absolutely nothing. As usual, employers want cheap workers, and want to fire everyone that's been around too long because they're "too expensive".
There is no shortage, period. There's only unwillingness to pay more.
Exactly my point: it's a belief, not a "truth". You can believe it's "true", and I might even agree with you personally, but people believing something doesn't make it objectively true. Basically, we're a "mob" that holds the same beliefs, and those beliefs change over time, just as long before the DoC or the Magna Carta, people generally had very different beliefs about freedom, believed that slavery was OK (even the slaves believed it in some ancient societies! They even took oaths to that effect!), etc. So just because we in the 21st Century developed countries think something's a "right" doesn't mean it really is; people long before us had very different opinions, and people long after us will probably also hold very different opinions. (A few hundred years from now, the idea of "personal freedom" will probably be considered a quaint historical curiosity, as people swear oaths of fealty to various megacorporations.)
what percent of americans found nothing wrong with slavery prior to the US civil war?
This is a red herring. For one thing, slavery was already illegal in the North, and had been for a long time, so there wasn't much support for slavery up there even then. Finally, any such poll would be invalid, because it wasn't asking the slaves.
Comparing this to media file sharing is invalid, since you can't ask the media files if they want to be shared or not.
Your other examples are similar; you're singling out specific groups of people, instead of asking all people. So what's your point?
What "code"? They're only asking for specs to be released, not source code (though that'd be nice too). You don't need source code to access a hardware device, you only need specifications.
A fairly well educated guess is, however, that if nursing (for example) paid twice as much as doing CS, I would guarantee we'd see many more men in that field.
Yes, of course. But instead, we just hear a bunch of whining from employers that there's a nursing "shortage!!!". But they never actually bother to raise the salaries, as the laws of supply and demand would require if there were a real shortage.
Moreover, why should anyone care about the founding principles of one particular country? How does that make these "truths" for people on the opposite side of the planet?
The women being pushed out or deciding they would rather work somewhere that the hatred is more muted are more likely to be elite, verbal, and willing to make a stink about the problem.
Seems to me that women smart enough for this profession would do much better in a different profession, such as medicine, law, or finance. After all, that's where the smarter men are going. The ones left in IT are the ones who either don't have the resources and time for medical school, or more likely just don't have the social skills some of those other jobs demand, and also many of them feel driven to work with computers full-time; I've never met a woman who had that much passion about something like programming, they tend to be much more pragmatic.
None of us wants to take away your clubhouse. We just want an equitable chance at good pay for clean, indoor work, without being taunted, groped, or otherwise made to know how unwelcome we are.
What "clubhouse"? I still fail to see why women would want to work in IT to begin with. It's a shitty profession, and it's rapidly being outsourced overseas. The pay levels off after 5 years or so, and you can't get hired in it past the age of 40. They demand ridiculous hours, and it's totally not conducive to family life (for either sex). Why are you so bent on getting into a crappy profession? Just because a bunch of employers are crying about a "shortage" doesn't mean there really is one; it's all lies.
Um, I think there's some confusion here. I'm not talking about driver users (end users), I'm talking about the paid developer who works for the hardware mfgr, and who's developing a driver to enable the HW's use in Linux. A stable API benefits him because it makes his job much easier if he intends to keep his driver out-of-tree. However, it creates a giant amount of work for the kernel devs to support that. That's why they don't do it, and tell everyone to submit their driver to be in-tree. Microsoft maintains stable APIs because they support the closed-source model, and they can do it because they can afford to hire an army of developers to do nothing but maintain that API (or rather, multiple versions of it to support backwards compatibility). The simple fact is, you're not going to find a bunch of Linux devs willing to volunteer their time to do absolutely nothing productive, and instead spend all their time doing something that will only benefit companies that refuse to submit their drivers for inclusion in the kernel tree.
If you (any reader, not just the one I'm replying to) think it's sooo important to maintain a stable API, why aren't you volunteering for the job? If you aren't willing to dedicate your free time to the job, then clearly you don't think it's that important. It's interesting how people are so willing to criticize how an open-membership project uses its resources (many of which are unpaid volunteers), but are never willing to step up to volunteer to do it the way they think it should be done.
So you want the Kernel developers to do a lot of extra work so some paid developer doesn't have to do as much work to maintain his out-of-tree driver? I'd say that warrants a big "FUCK YOU".
The kernel devs are right: if you want to maintain a driver out-of-tree, because you're too fucking lazy or stupid to submit it for inclusion upstream, then YOU should be the one jumping through hoops, not them.
The Declaration of Independence has absolutely zero legal weight in the US, and means nothing outside it.
Again, I'm asking what your authority for "inalienable rights" is. A piece of paper written by long-dead men is not an authority, and the only reason you think it is is because there's a bunch of other people who agree to the same concept, which means you're agreeing with a "mob".
This is a good point, but what I think you were getting at is that the binary Nvidia drivers are hard-coded to cheat on many benchmarks. Open-source drivers wouldn't have this, and would show the hardware's true performance instead of taking shortcuts that result in higher numbers on certain benchmarks, and of course, Nvidia wouldn't like that.
Wrong. Greg K-H has explicitly said he doesn't care if a driver serves an audience of 2, he still wants it in the kernel because of network effects: code in that driver may be useful somewhere else, or may be useful in creating a new subsystem that many small-market drivers use.
A stable API is not a good thing. Microsoft had that back in the pre-WHQL days, so any vendor could just release drivers willy-nilly, and the result was not good: Windows crashed all the time, MS was blamed for making crappy software, when in reality many of the problems weren't with MS's software, but with poorly-written third-party drivers. Allowing anyone (esp. hardware makers, who seem to almost always do a terrible job writing software for some reason) to release kernel-level device drivers without any quality checking has proven to be a disaster.
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Again, that's a good way to get sued. It's easy to do; you just have someone else call your old employer, posing as a new employer, and do the same thing. Any decent company now has a strict policy of NOT answering such questions for this exact reason. Now, smaller employers may still operate this way many times, because they're not as attractive targets for lawyers (no deep pockets). But just try pulling that trick with a big tech employer like Intel or Microsoft. They absolutely will not answer any question other than position and dates of employment.
Also, their manufacturing is getting better and better all the time. Cellphones are all made there now, and those are pretty close to the state of the art in electronics technology. They're making cars there now too; they're quickly advancing up the technological ladder in which things they manufacture. Pretty soon, they'll probably have their own state-of-the-art semiconductor fabs.
Not likely. China's economy is built on building cheap crap to export to us. Long before they generate enough wealthy people of their own to consume what they produce we will be too poor to sustain their rise at the current rate. So on the current course everybody is going to lose.
China's economy is changing very rapidly. There's tons of people buying Buicks and other, what we consider middle-class cars. There's more and more engineers coming out of their schools (or ours). They're sending people to space and just sent their first female taikonaut and did a docking maneuver IIRC. The middle class there is growing by leaps and bounds. Considering where they were 20 years ago, they're catching up very quickly. The West's (esp. US) fall isn't going to be overnight, it'll take some time; in 20 years, as things are getting really bad here and looking more like Somalia, they'll have surpassed where we were at our peak.
Such a contract would never be enforceable in America; it's called "right to work". In most states, the employer can fire you at any time without cause (as long as it isn't discriminatory; i.e. they find out you're gay or had a kid or whatever), and similarly, you can quit your job at any time without cause.
They can make contracts requiring you to repay your relocation bonus, or your hiring bonus, or your training costs etc. (or more likely a pro-rated portion of such) if you quit too early (like within 2 years), but the idea of not being able to quit your job at all is utterly ridiculous. If you can't quit, why would you even bother to keep working? Just show up and surf the web and play solitaire all day long; if you can't quit, then they surely can't fire you either. And if they can fire you, why not give them a good reason to if you don't want to work there any more anyway?
If that reason is "they'll give you a bad reference to your new employer", then you've got a pretty bad employment system. Here in America, while it obviously isn't great as you can see from all the comments here, one nice thing is that if your old employer bad-mouths you to a new employer, you can sue them. It doesn't even matter if it's true; it's pretty hard to prove poor job performance, as it's really a matter of opinion, so libel and slander laws apply here, and a lawyer can easily get your employer to pay a giant settlement to avoid a nasty trial. So what's happened now is that most companies have a policy of NEVER discussing old employees with any new employers, to avoid any problems; they will only do the minimum required by law: they'll verify your dates of employment, and that's it.
Exactly. However, if you're really unhappy in your job, it might be worth checking out; who knows, maybe you'll have a walled office in the new job (not likely, but they are out there in a few places). You should be able to tell in an interview if the place is really horrible or not; just make sure they show you where your desk is, and check out the building to see if it's a nice place to work or not before you leave. Also, if your current job sucks and the commute sucks too, a new job might have a shorter commute, which (with salary being equal) might be worth it all by itself.
Really? Silicon Valley is "starving" for high-experience engineers to, but what they don't tell you, like this guy found out the hard way, is that if you're over 40, you might as well not apply.
What evidence is there that Pittsburgh employers are any different?
Worse yet, it takes many years for skilled employees to be developed: they have to go to college (4-6 years) for a degree in that profession, then they need to work in that field for a while (2-5 years) to be able to work on their own generally. So if the industry makes the profession unattractive to kids thinking about a college major, it's going to be a bare minimum of a decade before you can turn things around. In reality, it'll be more like 2-3 decades because kids will be hearing about the profession from people who are in it or were in it (and quit because they were unhappy), and it takes a lot of time to change perceptions.
We probably can't return to the old 'company man' ways and it isn't even clear we want to. So we can't go back and we can't stay where we are either; so what next?
I think it's pretty simple: we can't go back, so we won't. So what'll happen is Western society will crumble as it loses the ability to master technology, and China will take over. We'll eventually become low-paid idiot workers, assembling products for wealthy consumers in China and doing other crappy jobs for them.
Exactly; it's a combination of the two. Not many skilled people are going to take a job paying half as much just because the work environment is better, but not many people are going to give up a nice work environment for a job paying only 5% more. But not that many employers these days like to provide a good work environment, because they're cheap bastards and would rather set up an "open plan work area", and then try to convince employees this is good "for collaboration" (in a job that has very little collaboration), while the dipshit managers who spew this bullshit sit in their own walled offices.
Call the wahmbulance!
If you don't want your valuable employees poached, then pay them more than they'll make somewhere else, and make sure their work environment is good so they won't want to leave. It's that simple. You don't even need to pay the absolute max, you just have to be in the top 80% probably, and make sure that they like their job; not that many people will jump ship to a risky new job (where they might hate the work environment) for just a few $K more. But if your work environment sucks (because you have an "open plan work area", for instance), then expect people to leave as quickly as they get a better offer.
There is basically zero unemployment for good software developers right now. Things are so bad I can't even find qualified people to take interviews, which is sort of a prerequisite to make them that upwardly spiraling offer.
Except that these offers aren't "upwardly spiraling" at all, that's complete bullshit. Salaries have been frozen for years.
As another point of evidence, new grad offers are now roughly 2.5X the national average for other BS degrees
And what does that have to do with people with 10+ years experience? Absolutely nothing. As usual, employers want cheap workers, and want to fire everyone that's been around too long because they're "too expensive".
There is no shortage, period. There's only unwillingness to pay more.
Exactly my point: it's a belief, not a "truth". You can believe it's "true", and I might even agree with you personally, but people believing something doesn't make it objectively true. Basically, we're a "mob" that holds the same beliefs, and those beliefs change over time, just as long before the DoC or the Magna Carta, people generally had very different beliefs about freedom, believed that slavery was OK (even the slaves believed it in some ancient societies! They even took oaths to that effect!), etc. So just because we in the 21st Century developed countries think something's a "right" doesn't mean it really is; people long before us had very different opinions, and people long after us will probably also hold very different opinions. (A few hundred years from now, the idea of "personal freedom" will probably be considered a quaint historical curiosity, as people swear oaths of fealty to various megacorporations.)
what percent of americans found nothing wrong with slavery prior to the US civil war?
This is a red herring. For one thing, slavery was already illegal in the North, and had been for a long time, so there wasn't much support for slavery up there even then. Finally, any such poll would be invalid, because it wasn't asking the slaves.
Comparing this to media file sharing is invalid, since you can't ask the media files if they want to be shared or not.
Your other examples are similar; you're singling out specific groups of people, instead of asking all people. So what's your point?
What "code"? They're only asking for specs to be released, not source code (though that'd be nice too). You don't need source code to access a hardware device, you only need specifications.
A fairly well educated guess is, however, that if nursing (for example) paid twice as much as doing CS, I would guarantee we'd see many more men in that field.
Yes, of course. But instead, we just hear a bunch of whining from employers that there's a nursing "shortage!!!". But they never actually bother to raise the salaries, as the laws of supply and demand would require if there were a real shortage.
Moreover, why should anyone care about the founding principles of one particular country? How does that make these "truths" for people on the opposite side of the planet?
What "truths"? Why are the things in this document "true"? How can you prove that?
You sound just like Bible-thumpers who claim the Bible is "true" and "inerrant" because it says it is.
The women being pushed out or deciding they would rather work somewhere that the hatred is more muted are more likely to be elite, verbal, and willing to make a stink about the problem.
Seems to me that women smart enough for this profession would do much better in a different profession, such as medicine, law, or finance. After all, that's where the smarter men are going. The ones left in IT are the ones who either don't have the resources and time for medical school, or more likely just don't have the social skills some of those other jobs demand, and also many of them feel driven to work with computers full-time; I've never met a woman who had that much passion about something like programming, they tend to be much more pragmatic.
None of us wants to take away your clubhouse. We just want an equitable chance at good pay for clean, indoor work, without being taunted, groped, or otherwise made to know how unwelcome we are.
What "clubhouse"? I still fail to see why women would want to work in IT to begin with. It's a shitty profession, and it's rapidly being outsourced overseas. The pay levels off after 5 years or so, and you can't get hired in it past the age of 40. They demand ridiculous hours, and it's totally not conducive to family life (for either sex). Why are you so bent on getting into a crappy profession? Just because a bunch of employers are crying about a "shortage" doesn't mean there really is one; it's all lies.
Um, I think there's some confusion here. I'm not talking about driver users (end users), I'm talking about the paid developer who works for the hardware mfgr, and who's developing a driver to enable the HW's use in Linux. A stable API benefits him because it makes his job much easier if he intends to keep his driver out-of-tree. However, it creates a giant amount of work for the kernel devs to support that. That's why they don't do it, and tell everyone to submit their driver to be in-tree. Microsoft maintains stable APIs because they support the closed-source model, and they can do it because they can afford to hire an army of developers to do nothing but maintain that API (or rather, multiple versions of it to support backwards compatibility). The simple fact is, you're not going to find a bunch of Linux devs willing to volunteer their time to do absolutely nothing productive, and instead spend all their time doing something that will only benefit companies that refuse to submit their drivers for inclusion in the kernel tree.
If you (any reader, not just the one I'm replying to) think it's sooo important to maintain a stable API, why aren't you volunteering for the job? If you aren't willing to dedicate your free time to the job, then clearly you don't think it's that important. It's interesting how people are so willing to criticize how an open-membership project uses its resources (many of which are unpaid volunteers), but are never willing to step up to volunteer to do it the way they think it should be done.
So you want the Kernel developers to do a lot of extra work so some paid developer doesn't have to do as much work to maintain his out-of-tree driver? I'd say that warrants a big "FUCK YOU".
The kernel devs are right: if you want to maintain a driver out-of-tree, because you're too fucking lazy or stupid to submit it for inclusion upstream, then YOU should be the one jumping through hoops, not them.
The Declaration of Independence has absolutely zero legal weight in the US, and means nothing outside it.
Again, I'm asking what your authority for "inalienable rights" is. A piece of paper written by long-dead men is not an authority, and the only reason you think it is is because there's a bunch of other people who agree to the same concept, which means you're agreeing with a "mob".
There's something else "tricky" that NVIDIA is doing in their drivers: cheating on certain benchmarks. It's been documented many times.
They don't have to do any work at all. They only have to release their specs.
This is a good point, but what I think you were getting at is that the binary Nvidia drivers are hard-coded to cheat on many benchmarks. Open-source drivers wouldn't have this, and would show the hardware's true performance instead of taking shortcuts that result in higher numbers on certain benchmarks, and of course, Nvidia wouldn't like that.
Wrong. Greg K-H has explicitly said he doesn't care if a driver serves an audience of 2, he still wants it in the kernel because of network effects: code in that driver may be useful somewhere else, or may be useful in creating a new subsystem that many small-market drivers use.
A stable API is not a good thing. Microsoft had that back in the pre-WHQL days, so any vendor could just release drivers willy-nilly, and the result was not good: Windows crashed all the time, MS was blamed for making crappy software, when in reality many of the problems weren't with MS's software, but with poorly-written third-party drivers. Allowing anyone (esp. hardware makers, who seem to almost always do a terrible job writing software for some reason) to release kernel-level device drivers without any quality checking has proven to be a disaster.