How does someone who makes 100k cost 250k? Really, how?
Building cost- Same (maybe slightly higher if the perosn has a bigger cube) Insurance costs - Same (maybe slightly higher if you assume someone more experience may be old and have a family) Bonus cost- 2x (assume same bonus%) Other $$ costs (401k matching, etc)- 2x yearly raise cost 2x (this compounds, but the 2-3% typical increase is just not worth it.) training costs- probably higher, but with higher return as well. Adminitrative costs (people to handle HR, payroll, etc)- Same, maybe slightly higher if the person has a complex bonus or pay structure
My company assume 2x cost, and even that is absurd when you look at the reality of the situation
I'm not sure what you mean by 'same' - I was referring to what's called the 'fully loaded cost' of personnel. In a large company you can't count the building as a fixed cost - in my particular example I worked in a brand new three-building office park filled with 1600 or so engineers and support staff. This was back when an SW II made about $15000, so the costs mentioned below are in reference to that salary. The buildings (in a dedicated 150 acre office park) cost $multimillions - I don't recall but it was probably in the $100/sq. ft. range back then, so given 250 sq. ft. per engineer including hallways, bathrooms, cafeteria, and all the other stuff that's $2500 per cube, amortized over five or six years. The cost of the cube itself is more than you might think. There were three mainframe computers (a couple $mil each, which came with three full time vendor support people and inhouse support of 20 or so. Every desktop CAD workstation cost several $thousand. Right off the top, FICA employer contribution cost 7.5% above the salary. Support staff (secretaries, draftsmen, parts supply, facilities, networking, cafeteria) was about one for every three or four engineers - one for six minimum (the place had a grounds crew of a dozen). Insurance is a much larger component than you might think, especially health plan. Today in the small company I'm at, the cost of health insurance for a family, paid mostly by the company is more than half as much as the bottom-level employees' gross pay (we're in Massachusetts, land of Romneycare). Then you add in the cost of management and operations (HR, etc.) that are assignable to engineering. So it adds up. Some of those costs might be less these days, particularly the cost of computing; but others might be more (relative to salary).
Anyway, much as I hate ads, I'd rather control their methods than try to eliminate them. I pay for home delivery of the ad-stuffed New York Times and subscribe to Public TV and radio. Those are habits I made before the web and AdBlock and 'information wants to be free' came along - I'm not sure I'd make them today. And ultimately, that's a shame. I want there to be a New York Times, a PBS and an NPR - and a slashdot..
I occasionally ponder just what percentage of air time PBS/NPR takes up in pledge requests, 'underwriter thanks', and other essentially advertising messages. Counting pledge week, it seems to me that the total is the same as, or even more than, the commercial stations. And I _really_ hate those unending repeats of crappy infomercials selling bogus 'self-help' books and tapes, that they run during pledge week - as if anyone were really interested in that crap. Every time I see Dr. Feelgood flogging his/her "Instant Secrets of a Healthy Prostate", it actually deters me from pledging.
I've used noscript for a long time. It takes quite a while before the interruptions gradually reduce down to a low level, but there seems to always be some new thing that websites will start using - especially the news and media sites. In my case one particularly annoying one is the set of several facebook scripts that I want to keep blocked most of the time, but then once a month or so I have to go to facebook to see something, and have to temporarily unblock them. To do that I generally just click on 'allow all temporarily' - not ideal, but hey. Generally I will allow scripts that don't cause disruptions (RU reading this doubleclick.net?), and AFAICT aren't scraping personal info. And managing the state of NoScript is now a regular, if minor, part of my web surfing. There are many sites now that I don't realize are irritating, until for some reason I turn off NoScript, and then I understand other people's complaints.
I recall a year or two ago that NoScript won the 'most appreciated' and 'most annoying' prizes for firefox addons, at the same time.:)
The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
'Chipping' the car would seem to fit into the "damage while in the possession... or by unreasonable use" exception for the reason that installing an aftermarket or home-programmed chip could potentially, for example, cause the fuel/air ratio to become too lean and result in burning the valves of the engine. But I would suppose that a maker of an aftermarket chip intended for consumer street use would at least try to interact with the engine maker to avoid that.
There was a big commotion about NoScript vs. AdBlock a few months ago, and the NoScript guy apologized profusely. He said it was partly an accident, partly a miscommunication, and partly him behaving badly. AFAICT it all got resolved in the end.
So, the GP was not lying. The present situation on the NoScript page is not the problem referred to.
When I worked at an F500 high-tech company, they accounted the total cost of each software and hardware engineer as 2.5 times salary. This included the buildings, computers, training, and all the other stuff necessary to keep the engineer productive. For big companies that's probably still pretty reasonable.
I generally extend to the third ninety - the last 1% of the code take the third ninety percent of the time. This is a pretty good model for the difference between a good, working program and one with a shiny user interface and most of the beta-bugs worked out.
Or, as someone I worked with who had been at BBN working on the original ARPAnet said, "Take whatever schedule the engineers give you, double it and convert to the next higher units." (two weeks => four months, etc.)
Ya know, about 30 years ago, that statement could have been written thusly:
C programs are per se incompatible with the structured programming model. It's a bad programming practice and if you use it, you are doomed to repeat yourself.
Your statement is pretty much equivalent to "never end a sentence with a preposition".
Structured programming eventually failed to take over the world because it imposed too much artificial, restrictive structure. Back then I remarked that "structured programming" was merely a way to force all programs to fit on a flat two-dimensional surface with no crossing lines. Admittedly, such programs are easier to analyze, but are a tiny, tiny subset of the set of interesting and useful programs. For example, one can look at the entire internet as one rather large, complex, multithreaded program.
MVC is a good model, but it ain't the be-all and end-all. All models are an attempt to impose an rational order on what is essentially a linguistic medium (with a veneer of logic). The languages that survive are those that allow the maximum flexibility, with enough support for the tools of analysis and good practice to allow programmers to succeed. C, for example, continues to succeed because it does not have such artificial constraints, but can be adapted to the constraints that the programmer (and the organization) considers important at the time. As a counterexample, see Pascal, or Algol. And don't forget Gõdel.
So, use MVC and DRY. But one day you will find a situation where they get in the way of the most elegant solution. Or, more likely, they will get in the way of hacking a new feature into some legacy POS in time to meet the deadline that Marketing already promised to the client!:D
gaack. If it's worse than the Nuvi, it must be really worthless. I'm _this_ close to donating it to Goodwill and buying a TomTom or something. I would love to see the Google Maps interface on a car or handheld GPS. And my Nuvi is relatively poor at realizing which road it is on, in complicated areas. I have determined that its positioning is only accurate to within about 100 feet, and it just fakes the rest. This is mostly with regard to the lateral position, not the distance which it has travelled down the road. But the infinite regression of button menus is a total loser in this day of multitouch. Everything takes too many touches, and navigating up and down the menu system. Things that should be right there on the main travel screen or one button away are three clicks down in the settings menu. If you touch the screen to see the north-up view, it doesn't continue to update the map so your little car finally wanders off the screen. (I used to use north-up all the time, but in this funky Massachusetts maze they laughingly call a 'road system' sometimes you have to have the 3D perspective to get any kind of idea of how to navigate some of the abortions they call intersections.) And why can't I adjust the route, like Google Maps? [/rant]
Actually, I would argue that "giving blowjobs to whoever passes by", done in the right location, would arguably have a much higher chance of earning significant money.:P
One time a bunch of us software and hardware geeks were sitting in the company cafeteria, and some were rating the ladies going by. One of us remarked, "Hah - I just realized, this is a bunch of 3s and 4s, rating 6s and 7s!":D
Another thing that makes the paper not really applicable to real life is that it assumes you can choose to bet any amount. In reality, if you're in a casino playing blackjack, one of the most common ways for the management to detect that you're counting cards and throw you out is that they notice that you're varying your bets according to a certain pattern.
I don't frequent casinos (there are few places more boring to me), but my understanding is that they generally allow, if not encourage card counting because most folks do it badly, and lose. The _hope_ of winning brings people in with their latest 'guaranteed winning scheme'. Card counting is hard, and as I understand it casinos have mostly changed their shuffling schedule and other things to make it harder. If, despite all these impediments, you appear to be doing too well, I suspect that they start to wonder if you have a wire of some kind. Whether that is true or not, I think that they will generally just gently escort you out - and keep pictures for future reference, in case you show up repeatedly at several casinos and do the same thing. But it's important for the casinos to keep enough winners around to encourage people to come. I've read that one out of four visitors to Las Vegas leaves a winner. If there were no winners, there would be no visitors. Since big winners make more news, that draws more visitors. So even an occasional big winner is a good thing for them.
Considering that your chance of winning is somewhat less than that of being hit by lightning, I'd say there are lots of ways with similar odds. (Walking across the street and getting gently struck by a car driven by)|(Doing a good turn for)|(Some other event involving) a rich elderly person who makes you his/her sole heir is probably at least as likely.
Reminds me of a successful scam I read about, from back in the late 1950s or thereabouts. They put an ad in the classifieds of many papers, saying simply "Send your dollars to GEB, PO BOX 123". Lots of people thought this was some charity and sent money. The Postal Inspectors (US Postal Service police) came after the guy, charging him with mail fraud. His successful defense was that he made no promises, only asked people for money.
AFAIK this particular trick was quashed in the future, as newspapers refused to take ads like that.
In 1970, my friend had a Super Beetle, and the turn signals stopped working. In most other cars at that time, the cure was to replace the $7 blinker module with a new one from the dealer or from NAPA. In the VW, the turn signals were controlled by the electronic control unit, cost about $150, not field repairable.
I believe it, but I'd bet its the manufacture thats paying for the repairs, so I really don't care as car prices now days really are low. EVERYONE owns a car.
Ten years ago it was the case that all mfgrs except Toyota, dealer mechanics were paid less per hour for warranty repairs than for customer-paid repairs. This obviously motivated the mechanics to use more shortcuts on warranty repairs - not a good system.
You reminded me of one case, back in the 1970s IIRC, in Eugene Oregon. Two bicyclists were riding full-tilt in opposite directions on a bike path (one of those skinny ones with a white line down the middle) through a park, in the middle of the night. It was dark so they were both riding down the white line. This was a real 'head-on' collision. Both died.
I have a friend who regularly argues with me about how bicycles are fine for driving down the road and that drivers need to be more careful. My response is always 'you should use the damn sidewalk' to which the response I get back is 'there are more accidents on sidewalks resulting in injury than on the street'.
Every place I've lived, it's illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk.
It is not retarded interfaces that killed. It is the retarded users that didn't take the time to learn it, and took their eyes ff the road too long.
No, sometimes it is the radio design. I have had several cars over the last couple of years (long story), and the radio front panel designs vary a lot. Some of them can be completely controlled by feel, some are difficult, some are downright impossible to do anything to without looking. My favorite (a Pioneer that I installed in my truck in about 2002) had a remote, which seemed a bit silly at the time but was really great, because I didn't even have to reach for the radio. It was by far the safest of all.
There is no real need to do this, it's just a way to lock the consumer into buying replacement parts from the manufacturer.
I think another reason is that the standard DIN design greatly restricted the interior designers' options. It was undoubtedly frustrating for the designers to have this rectangular blob forced into the middle of all their nice designs. I haven't looked underneath any recent cars, but I hope & expect that they actually have a DIN-shaped radio underneath, nicely plugged in to their fancy dashboard 'skin'. Since most car audio systems above the bottom price range have had removable front panels for a long time, this makes pretty good sense - the audio folks don't have to build custom hardware, and the car designers don't have to pay for custom hardware, just the designer UI.
For that matter, there's no particular reason the audio even has to be built into the dashboard any more, although it is a nice, climate controlled environment.
It came with a 1 year free trial of some crappy voice navigation feature that I never ended up using because the Google Navigation app on my phone is superior
Wow, it must have been bad, because Google Navigation is shit.
I dunno. I have a two or three year old garmin Nuvi 1490 (I finally coughed the $85 to get unlimited updates, which I think is now bundled), and the UI sucks (lost in the 1990s), the mapping is poor to fair, and the routing in Google Maps on my laptop is much better.
Slashdot Mirror
How does someone who makes 100k cost 250k? Really, how?
Building cost- Same (maybe slightly higher if the perosn has a bigger cube)
Insurance costs - Same (maybe slightly higher if you assume someone more experience may be old and have a family)
Bonus cost- 2x (assume same bonus%)
Other $$ costs (401k matching, etc)- 2x
yearly raise cost 2x (this compounds, but the 2-3% typical increase is just not worth it.)
training costs- probably higher, but with higher return as well.
Adminitrative costs (people to handle HR, payroll, etc)- Same, maybe slightly higher if the person has a complex bonus or pay structure
My company assume 2x cost, and even that is absurd when you look at the reality of the situation
I'm not sure what you mean by 'same' - I was referring to what's called the 'fully loaded cost' of personnel. In a large company you can't count the building as a fixed cost - in my particular example I worked in a brand new three-building office park filled with 1600 or so engineers and support staff. This was back when an SW II made about $15000, so the costs mentioned below are in reference to that salary. The buildings (in a dedicated 150 acre office park) cost $multimillions - I don't recall but it was probably in the $100/sq. ft. range back then, so given 250 sq. ft. per engineer including hallways, bathrooms, cafeteria, and all the other stuff that's $2500 per cube, amortized over five or six years. The cost of the cube itself is more than you might think. There were three mainframe computers (a couple $mil each, which came with three full time vendor support people and inhouse support of 20 or so. Every desktop CAD workstation cost several $thousand. Right off the top, FICA employer contribution cost 7.5% above the salary. Support staff (secretaries, draftsmen, parts supply, facilities, networking, cafeteria) was about one for every three or four engineers - one for six minimum (the place had a grounds crew of a dozen). Insurance is a much larger component than you might think, especially health plan. Today in the small company I'm at, the cost of health insurance for a family, paid mostly by the company is more than half as much as the bottom-level employees' gross pay (we're in Massachusetts, land of Romneycare). Then you add in the cost of management and operations (HR, etc.) that are assignable to engineering. So it adds up. Some of those costs might be less these days, particularly the cost of computing; but others might be more (relative to salary).
Anyway, much as I hate ads, I'd rather control their methods than try to eliminate them. I pay for home delivery of the ad-stuffed New York Times and subscribe to Public TV and radio. Those are habits I made before the web and AdBlock and 'information wants to be free' came along - I'm not sure I'd make them today. And ultimately, that's a shame. I want there to be a New York Times, a PBS and an NPR - and a slashdot..
I occasionally ponder just what percentage of air time PBS/NPR takes up in pledge requests, 'underwriter thanks', and other essentially advertising messages. Counting pledge week, it seems to me that the total is the same as, or even more than, the commercial stations. And I _really_ hate those unending repeats of crappy infomercials selling bogus 'self-help' books and tapes, that they run during pledge week - as if anyone were really interested in that crap. Every time I see Dr. Feelgood flogging his/her "Instant Secrets of a Healthy Prostate", it actually deters me from pledging.
I've used noscript for a long time. It takes quite a while before the interruptions gradually reduce down to a low level, but there seems to always be some new thing that websites will start using - especially the news and media sites. In my case one particularly annoying one is the set of several facebook scripts that I want to keep blocked most of the time, but then once a month or so I have to go to facebook to see something, and have to temporarily unblock them. To do that I generally just click on 'allow all temporarily' - not ideal, but hey. Generally I will allow scripts that don't cause disruptions (RU reading this doubleclick.net?), and AFAICT aren't scraping personal info. And managing the state of NoScript is now a regular, if minor, part of my web surfing. There are many sites now that I don't realize are irritating, until for some reason I turn off NoScript, and then I understand other people's complaints.
I recall a year or two ago that NoScript won the 'most appreciated' and 'most annoying' prizes for firefox addons, at the same time. :)
Ah, I get it. That makes sense. that would be where the argumentXXXXXXnegotiation would start. :)
thx. From this quote in the Wikipedia article:
The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
'Chipping' the car would seem to fit into the "damage while in the possession... or by unreasonable use" exception for the reason that installing an aftermarket or home-programmed chip could potentially, for example, cause the fuel/air ratio to become too lean and result in burning the valves of the engine. But I would suppose that a maker of an aftermarket chip intended for consumer street use would at least try to interact with the engine maker to avoid that.
Yes. I hope it encourages advertisers to play nice, so their ads won't get blocked.
There was a big commotion about NoScript vs. AdBlock a few months ago, and the NoScript guy apologized profusely. He said it was partly an accident, partly a miscommunication, and partly him behaving badly. AFAICT it all got resolved in the end.
So, the GP was not lying. The present situation on the NoScript page is not the problem referred to.
When I worked at an F500 high-tech company, they accounted the total cost of each software and hardware engineer as 2.5 times salary. This included the buildings, computers, training, and all the other stuff necessary to keep the engineer productive. For big companies that's probably still pretty reasonable.
I generally extend to the third ninety - the last 1% of the code take the third ninety percent of the time. This is a pretty good model for the difference between a good, working program and one with a shiny user interface and most of the beta-bugs worked out.
Or, as someone I worked with who had been at BBN working on the original ARPAnet said, "Take whatever schedule the engineers give you, double it and convert to the next higher units." (two weeks => four months, etc.)
Ya know, about 30 years ago, that statement could have been written thusly:
C programs are per se incompatible with the structured programming model. It's a bad programming practice and if you use it, you are doomed to repeat yourself.
Your statement is pretty much equivalent to "never end a sentence with a preposition".
Structured programming eventually failed to take over the world because it imposed too much artificial, restrictive structure. Back then I remarked that "structured programming" was merely a way to force all programs to fit on a flat two-dimensional surface with no crossing lines. Admittedly, such programs are easier to analyze, but are a tiny, tiny subset of the set of interesting and useful programs. For example, one can look at the entire internet as one rather large, complex, multithreaded program.
MVC is a good model, but it ain't the be-all and end-all. All models are an attempt to impose an rational order on what is essentially a linguistic medium (with a veneer of logic). The languages that survive are those that allow the maximum flexibility, with enough support for the tools of analysis and good practice to allow programmers to succeed. C, for example, continues to succeed because it does not have such artificial constraints, but can be adapted to the constraints that the programmer (and the organization) considers important at the time. As a counterexample, see Pascal, or Algol. And don't forget Gõdel.
So, use MVC and DRY. But one day you will find a situation where they get in the way of the most elegant solution. Or, more likely, they will get in the way of hacking a new feature into some legacy POS in time to meet the deadline that Marketing already promised to the client! :D
Haha. :D
gaack. If it's worse than the Nuvi, it must be really worthless. I'm _this_ close to donating it to Goodwill and buying a TomTom or something. I would love to see the Google Maps interface on a car or handheld GPS. And my Nuvi is relatively poor at realizing which road it is on, in complicated areas. I have determined that its positioning is only accurate to within about 100 feet, and it just fakes the rest. This is mostly with regard to the lateral position, not the distance which it has travelled down the road. But the infinite regression of button menus is a total loser in this day of multitouch. Everything takes too many touches, and navigating up and down the menu system. Things that should be right there on the main travel screen or one button away are three clicks down in the settings menu. If you touch the screen to see the north-up view, it doesn't continue to update the map so your little car finally wanders off the screen. (I used to use north-up all the time, but in this funky Massachusetts maze they laughingly call a 'road system' sometimes you have to have the 3D perspective to get any kind of idea of how to navigate some of the abortions they call intersections.) And why can't I adjust the route, like Google Maps? [/rant]
I think that most warranty clauses have exclusions for actions of that type. IANAL so I don't know how those survive in court though.
Actually, I would argue that "giving blowjobs to whoever passes by", done in the right location, would arguably have a much higher chance of earning significant money. :P
One time a bunch of us software and hardware geeks were sitting in the company cafeteria, and some were rating the ladies going by. One of us remarked, "Hah - I just realized, this is a bunch of 3s and 4s, rating 6s and 7s!" :D
Another thing that makes the paper not really applicable to real life is that it assumes you can choose to bet any amount. In reality, if you're in a casino playing blackjack, one of the most common ways for the management to detect that you're counting cards and throw you out is that they notice that you're varying your bets according to a certain pattern.
I don't frequent casinos (there are few places more boring to me), but my understanding is that they generally allow, if not encourage card counting because most folks do it badly, and lose. The _hope_ of winning brings people in with their latest 'guaranteed winning scheme'. Card counting is hard, and as I understand it casinos have mostly changed their shuffling schedule and other things to make it harder. If, despite all these impediments, you appear to be doing too well, I suspect that they start to wonder if you have a wire of some kind. Whether that is true or not, I think that they will generally just gently escort you out - and keep pictures for future reference, in case you show up repeatedly at several casinos and do the same thing. But it's important for the casinos to keep enough winners around to encourage people to come. I've read that one out of four visitors to Las Vegas leaves a winner. If there were no winners, there would be no visitors. Since big winners make more news, that draws more visitors. So even an occasional big winner is a good thing for them.
Considering that your chance of winning is somewhat less than that of being hit by lightning, I'd say there are lots of ways with similar odds. (Walking across the street and getting gently struck by a car driven by)|(Doing a good turn for)|(Some other event involving) a rich elderly person who makes you his/her sole heir is probably at least as likely.
Reminds me of a successful scam I read about, from back in the late 1950s or thereabouts. They put an ad in the classifieds of many papers, saying simply "Send your dollars to GEB, PO BOX 123". Lots of people thought this was some charity and sent money. The Postal Inspectors (US Postal Service police) came after the guy, charging him with mail fraud. His successful defense was that he made no promises, only asked people for money.
AFAIK this particular trick was quashed in the future, as newspapers refused to take ads like that.
In 1970, my friend had a Super Beetle, and the turn signals stopped working. In most other cars at that time, the cure was to replace the $7 blinker module with a new one from the dealer or from NAPA. In the VW, the turn signals were controlled by the electronic control unit, cost about $150, not field repairable.
I believe it, but I'd bet its the manufacture thats paying for the repairs, so I really don't care as car prices now days really are low. EVERYONE owns a car.
Ten years ago it was the case that all mfgrs except Toyota, dealer mechanics were paid less per hour for warranty repairs than for customer-paid repairs. This obviously motivated the mechanics to use more shortcuts on warranty repairs - not a good system.
You reminded me of one case, back in the 1970s IIRC, in Eugene Oregon. Two bicyclists were riding full-tilt in opposite directions on a bike path (one of those skinny ones with a white line down the middle) through a park, in the middle of the night. It was dark so they were both riding down the white line. This was a real 'head-on' collision. Both died.
I have a friend who regularly argues with me about how bicycles are fine for driving down the road and that drivers need to be more careful. My response is always 'you should use the damn sidewalk' to which the response I get back is 'there are more accidents on sidewalks resulting in injury than on the street'.
Every place I've lived, it's illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk.
It is not retarded interfaces that killed. It is the retarded users that didn't take the time to learn it, and took their eyes ff the road too long.
No, sometimes it is the radio design. I have had several cars over the last couple of years (long story), and the radio front panel designs vary a lot. Some of them can be completely controlled by feel, some are difficult, some are downright impossible to do anything to without looking. My favorite (a Pioneer that I installed in my truck in about 2002) had a remote, which seemed a bit silly at the time but was really great, because I didn't even have to reach for the radio. It was by far the safest of all.
There is no real need to do this, it's just a way to lock the consumer into buying replacement parts from the manufacturer.
I think another reason is that the standard DIN design greatly restricted the interior designers' options. It was undoubtedly frustrating for the designers to have this rectangular blob forced into the middle of all their nice designs. I haven't looked underneath any recent cars, but I hope & expect that they actually have a DIN-shaped radio underneath, nicely plugged in to their fancy dashboard 'skin'. Since most car audio systems above the bottom price range have had removable front panels for a long time, this makes pretty good sense - the audio folks don't have to build custom hardware, and the car designers don't have to pay for custom hardware, just the designer UI.
For that matter, there's no particular reason the audio even has to be built into the dashboard any more, although it is a nice, climate controlled environment.
It came with a 1 year free trial of some crappy voice navigation feature that I never ended up using because the Google Navigation app on my phone is superior
Wow, it must have been bad, because Google Navigation is shit.
I dunno. I have a two or three year old garmin Nuvi 1490 (I finally coughed the $85 to get unlimited updates, which I think is now bundled), and the UI sucks (lost in the 1990s), the mapping is poor to fair, and the routing in Google Maps on my laptop is much better.