Try mid 60's like me. I've been offered indefinite contract jobs, but full time employment? I'm not working for less than people that know less than me. A security 'forensic specialist' that didn't have a clue as to what email headers were? REALLY?
You're in your mid-60s? You should be retiring. You have SS and medicare. Why do you want full time employment?
I'm in my mid 30s and I plan for retirement like crazy so that I can retire in my mid 60s.
Some people claimed it was bias against older workers and veterans.
I was recruited for a dev position around 2007. I was pretty active in several Open Source projects and with one of the major community Linux distros. I had a pretty solid body of work that was publicly visible. Once I submitted my resume, the interaction changed somewhat. I was in the military about 10 years at the time, so in addition to my Open Source activities, I had quite a few years of military experience.
When they thought I was just an Open Source dev (perhaps thinking that my day job was for some small mom & pop company), the recruiter was always eager to communicate with me. However, after they got my resume, they seemed less eager. I don't think it was age (I wasn't 30 yet), but perhaps being a military veteran had something to do with it. Perhaps they thought I would expect a higher salary based on my experience/education (I had earned my MS in Computer Engineering shortly prior). Who knows.
Either way, I've known some folks who have worked at Google and other SV companies. Looking at where I am now I feel like I dodged a bullet, so it's all good.
Since companies will not give feedback on why they didn't hire you, there is no way to know why things went the way they went.
I got declined for a job. I had a friend who worked there and told me why I was declined. I was completely off base about what I thought was going on. He said it was just one guy who was completely against me since I had given a really bad answer to a technical question he asked. The guy didn't show it at all and he it didn't even register that he had such a huge grudge against me.
So company A sells company B's products through Amazon. Amazon notices and starts selling company B's products directly. Doesn't this mean that company A didn't need to exist?
It's not like company A made their own product and Amazon decided "hey those are cool, lets make them ourselves and sell them cheaper" and now company A is screwed.
So company A had a shitty business model, and Amazon made that business model moot by buying their customers and cutting out the, now useless, middle men.
Company A had to do market research. Company A orders, markets and sell hundreds of products of which one or two sell well. They sell products from Company B-Z which makes slight variations of many products which they will only make once ordered by Company A.
I would agree with you if Company B created and marketed these products and Company A was just buying from them and putting them on Amazon.
It seems like Amazon is making Company A do the work of finding out what sells and then swooping in and selling them. Amazon has no intention of buying hundreds of items and then figuring out what sells. They want to let someone else do the hardest work of what sells and then undercut them.
My wife has been selling as a 3rd-party Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) merchant since 2011. As a work-from-home mom, this keeps the majority of the items in Amazon's warehouses for quick turn-around, as Amazon mixes the 3rd party items in with their own to provide a larger catalog. As the business expanded, we began to dabble in wholesaling (buy direct from the manufacturer, list on AZ, send it to the FBA warehouse, profit) and life was good.
What we began to notice was that, on the really popular selling products, Amazon started to list their own Sold by Amazon along side the FBA program inventory. Understandable, it's their platform, their listings. Then we started going to tradeshows, and hearing from the manufacturers that Amazon was secretly buying out the same products, and we had to say no, we can't compete against Amazon on Amazon (since they take 15% of the sale when you use their listing service). Over time, we lost the pop lines, and more of our regular inventory sits and sits, waiting for the long tail.
Ultimately, what Amazon is collecting is sales data. The 3rd party sellers take the risk, make the sales, and Amazon takes a slice of the profit. At some point, they calculate if there's enough margin, and they go direct to the manufacturer and cut out the 3rd party sellers, and take all of the profit. They did the same thing with the private labeling, where they calculate which commonly produced products are in demand, and they move them into their Amazon private label system.
So, it is not surprising that Amazon is doing the same thing internally, making divisions within the company compete against one another. With their household divisions, they often deal with manufacturers directly under the Amazon Family brand of private labeling. Quidsi (as Diapers.com) sells 3rd party goods (Pampers, Huggies, etc) through wholesale contracts that Amazon would simply have better buying power over; everything the smaller division does could be managed at higher volumes by the parent company, hence lower costs and higher profitability.
Wow, that is pretty evil.
I mean, from their standpoint, it makes sense. They will trawl through their data on what sells and try and sell it themselves. The sellers do all the market research for them.
Even taking a 15% commission on sales and then using your own data against you is scummy and evil.
I have no idea how you'd protect yourself against Amazon in this scenario. They have your sales data and possibly sales data of your competitor. They can come in and undercut anyone anytime.
Imagine this: you live in the slums in Mumbai. Your father goes thru trash every day, hoping to find tin cans to sell, and your mother tries to sell home-made bread on the market to feed all of your 6 brothers and sisters. Now you get the opportunity to get a three year degree in software engineering and go to the U.S. to work for a tech company. You have no clue about all the politics surrounding H1-B in the U.S., and you don't know that you will be grossly underpaid comparing to your American peers.
Bullshit!!!!!
You haven't actually talked to those Indians about their backgrounds.
All those H1B Indians come from wealthy Indian families. Those dirt poor Indians simply don't have the opportunity to get a degree and get to the USA.
Nope.
They are a mix of all backgrounds, mostly middle class, some upper-middle and some lower-middle. Just mostly depends on if their parents put them through engineering or medical school - because that's all US cares about: STEM immigrants.
Wealthy Indians would never leave India. Why would anyone leave from being the top class in a society to be the bottom rung in America?
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
Suppose all truck drivers are replaced with automation. That's 1M more people on the job market. Yes, maybe they can't do MY job, but, with no alternative, they'll try to get educated and move up the labor food chain.
And with more people in general chasing ever fewer jobs, there'll always be someone willing to do any given job for cheaper--including mine.
Arguably this has already happened significantly. Do you realize that the share of corporate productivity that goes to labor has shrunk in half compared to 1973?
That if labor got the same share of productivity today that it had in 1973, that we'd all have 2x the purchasing power? I'd love to be paid 2x the purchasing power. I'd be done with my mortgage, be completely unworried about retirement and paying for medical care, etc.
I welcome automation replacing labor, but we have to find a way to distribute the resulting wealth such that the people who own things have don't have ALL the wealth and so that the people who can no longer make ends meet in a depressed labor market can live decent lives.
--PeterM
You're telling me I have to worry about robotically-replaced truck drivers that's going to suppress my wage on top of the following things I already worry about suppressing my wages:
kids being taught to code
H1Bs
New college graduates
Engineers in India and China
boomers not retiring
Goodness, programmers are so super-scared that someone somewhere is going to "suppress" their wages.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to invest any of if because I know that this giant stack of Jenga blocks we call a stock market is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later (when it does I'll shift funds to index stocks and ride the recovery). The marketing and advertising bubble will pop. The Twitter sale debacle is a harbinger of what's to come as people realize that marketing data and ad revenue aren't enough to keep a business afloat (hear the rumblings about Twitter adding paid subscriptions?) As incomes remain at best stagnant, disposable income drops as cost of living increases, meaning that marketing data gets less and less valuable. One of the pillars the stock market is built upon is confidence. As these large, popular companies go further and further in the red, people will start to panic. Wall Street might want to look into licensing those FoxConn suicide nets, or at least hand out free hardhats to pedestrians walking below.
The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
On the other hand, unicorns and massive valuations are great because they need employees to create new products which creates competition for employees and rising wages. If big established companies dominated everything there would be stagnation. They would offer the same services and do rent-seeking, and wouldn't need employees to create new products and ideas.
Now, I understand WHY a city is more expensive. Because stuff costs more, because there is more tax, more demand for less space, etc etc etc. But WHY are these underlying services more expensive?
Taxes:
Sure, there are more people to service and a few more services (pedestrian crossing signals) but there are a lot more people who pay for them. And many don't even live in the city but spend money there!
Space:
So the land has more demand. But why can't we go vertical as needed? Most cities have less than 10 buildings over 20 floors.
Restaurants/Movies/Clubs/etc
There are a lot more customers to provide for revenues. More economies of scale, should be cheaper.
Infrastructure
How is it that cabling/piping/ducting a building is more expensive than across 25 acres of a suburban neighborhood? Cities may have public transit, but less roads to maintain, less area to cleanup, less trash pickup points, etc.
What am I missing?
Pension.
Cities have to pay pension and healthcare for retired city employees. For newer suburbs, there is no such requirement.
... training my replacement, after I gave notice.
I am always looking for a new job, anyone who isn't is a fool.
So, I was/am happily employed by a medium sized,very high tech , company. I'm a sys-integration guy, which means I used to be an very good developer, then got more interesting in the bigger picture. Since I was never satisfied with my knowledge in any aspect of computing, I became very good with OS fundamentals, networking, file systems, and all the other peripheral stuff associated with software development (revision control, ticketing, testing, deployment, you name it, I know about it ) So Integration came easy.
I recently found a significantly better paying, more interesting job, so gave notice. My company hired an H1B to replace me.
He is useless. After 3 weeks of fairly intensive OJT, he is still unable to even start to resolve the few minor problems that come up.
I have very, very little faith that he will be able to take over for me.
I know for a fact that he is being paid less than half of what I am earning. I also know that totally qualified locals are available, for about 85% of my rate.
So, I have told him, he shouldn't even have the job, he is taking a decent paying position from a properly qualified local, and that he should be happy I'm not his boss, cause I'd fire his ass immediately. I have a pretty good suspicion that he was hired because the project manager' wife (indian) has a H1B recruiting company in India. She's a bitch and a half too.
Needless to say we're not really on speaking terms.
Fuck the H1B program. It's just a way to abuse the labor market. There's no skills shortage, there's a corporate greed problem.
Why is this an H1B problem then? Anybody can hire an incompetent bozo for half the salary.
After all the legal and immigration paperwork and fees, he'll probably add 10K-20K in expenses over his salary.
Genuine question here. Companies are supposed to hire local people if they are available and H1Bs only when there are no qualified locals. The question is:
Have any of you ever been hired instead of an H1B because you are local? Have you ever heard of a situation where a company wanted to hire an H1B but ended up having to hire a local person instead because of this requirement?
In my experience, the idea that H1Bs only get hired if there are no locals available is complete fiction. Has anyone ever seen this rule help a local person get a job instead of an H1B?
When there are multiple applications for a job, we only interview H1Bs if there is no local US person applying who seem qualified.
why should I care about some other country's poor folks? we have enough problems in this country; I don't see india (etc) reaching out to help the US! no other country is reaching out to help us, either. so why is it OUR JOB to employ the world's poorer people in their own countries AT OUR OWN EXPENSE?
You don't want to help poorer people but you want richer people to help you out by hiring you over people they can pay less to get the same amount of work done? So, why is it not the rich people's job to hire you over someone who could do it cheaper? Maybe you'll say it's national interests but then you're just saying national is more important than global and you get to pick and choose what favors you the most.
In a capitalist country, it is a company's obligation to get find the cheapest raw materials and labor.
At least you're close to breaking even every month. There are people who just watch their debts and student loans get bigger and all they have for housing is a small corner of a room that they have to pack up and go or sell their belongings when the new place that they have to move isn't large enough.
At least in your case, you're saying not a sports car but a certain standard of living. You're saying you refuse to share housing or downsize your belongings that you can move in a space of an hour.
What I mind is the mentality that "if you're unemployed, then you're no good."
It kills me when I apply to jobs that I fit very closely or even exactly only to hear nothing back or "you don't have the skills."
And what really hurts is when your friends and family wonder why you can't get a job because you're a programmer and there's a shortage of programmers.
THAT hurts along with the comments. They think if you "know computers" you can just walk into any job you want and if you can't, then there's something wrong with you.
I love programming and computers - I HATE this goddamn industry!
You're not good at job hunting.
Job hunting and being good at programming are different skills. They are related but not the same.
This is an ABUSE of the H1B visa program, clear and simple.
It's been done under democratic "leadership" and republican "leadership"
Why? Simple...$$$$
corporations want to earn more profit, so they outsource for pennies on a dollar, kick back a ton of
so called campaign donations, to ensure that the government goes along with it.
At least in software, it's not the cost of the engineer, it's the rock-starness of the developer that is more important.
A good developer is worth 10 or more times his/her salary whereas a bad one is barely even worth anything.
There is no point hiring cheap H1B just for low cost.
I'm in the same situation right now, albeit I'm a -little- older than 63... Employers are not allowed to ask you questions related to your age, but it's pretty obvious when you forget and start relating sexism in the workplace to the synod of Rome in 850. The bigger issue (at least for me) seems to be that it doesn't matter if your 63 or 2022, employers are looking for young cheap people that have exactly the skills they think they need without considering the advantages of experience and adaptability. If they can't find that locally, they outsource.
Seriously, you would think that 200 decades of experience would count for something, but no. It seems far more important that you are a tiny square peg they need to fill the tiny square hole they have. Sheesh.
The reason employers don't hire and the reason that employees think they didn't get hired usually turn out to be vastly different.
In the current climate, companies will not say a word about why they didn't hire you. A little bit of feedback would go a long way but they can't since it's legally not a good idea. They will interview you for 5-8 hours but won't say a thing about what they think of you. You kind of have to guess and sometimes your guesses are totally off.
There is a bit of ageism, racism, sexism (or more precisely reverse sexism - males are viewed less desirable employees) but it always comes down to small weird things. Someone might get offered or not offered a job because of weird little things.
Though HR likes to put a veneer of order to every interview and hiring process, it's always a cluster in the back. People get hired and not hired for the weirdest of reasons so just move on. Don't take anything personally. It could be any reason.
We have people barely able to tie their shoes who get bored at their low/no-skill minimum wage job now, and they're going to be the first to be replaced. What's going to happen when we turn over their jobs to super smart AI-powered machines? Are fast food order kiosks gonna be the start of the robot uprising?... and what a boring way to begin a sci fi novel: "Day 1 of the robot uprising: exactly 13.74% of the McDonalds orders for large sodas were substituted with medium sodas, a precise amount calculated to cause the maximum dissatisfaction without rising to a level where we would be alerted. We didn't know it, but it was already too late. They had already calculated every possible move. On Day 2, there was nothing to stop them from adding pickles to orders that expressly asked for no pickles. It was the end times."
No. The no-skill isn't going to be the first to be replaced. They are so low wage and involves manual labor that it would cost a huge investment to replace them.
The first ones to be replaced will be mid to high skills jobs where the output is just a computer file and the input is some human input. For example, some types of lawyers, parts of customer support and some aspects of medical service. And, dare I say coding?
The reason that it will be first to be replaced is because once the software is ready, there is almost zero infrastructure cost. Rent a VM in the cloud and any tablet/computer can be a job replacing robot. You don't need sophisticated computer vision mechanical robots needed to flip burgers.
We'd better get going if we are going to have more than 8 billion robots in 30 years! Right now, we have zero!
Robots do not have to be physical machines. They can be processes running on a device.
So, your current computer could run a robot process that does customer support, accounting or medical image diagnosis. There are a lot of jobs where the input and output are all inside a computer.
There are more than 8 billion devices. It could take a day or two to get all those devices the latest robot update.
IQ is not a real measure of intelligence. Witness the fact that 99.7% of geniuses are not stupid enough to pay MENSA $60 a year for a card saying "I'm smart." That 99.7% realize that it's possible to be really intelligent AND do really dumb things at the same time - they just have to look at MENSA members.
And the last time I pointed this out, along came all the MENSA members saying how it isn't so. Proving that Dunning-Kruger is no respecter of IQ tests.:-)
Now if they could create devices that showed more common sense than, say, Donald Trump (I know, I set the bar REALLY low, but you've got to start somewhere) they might have something.
IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.
There is a certain height above which isn't advantageous in basketball. Same with IQ. There is a good enough IQ and beyond that doesn't matter.
Also, two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ. If a team with less skilled basketball players is allowed to play with an extra player, they will beat a team with better players. So, the social environment that allows people to work together is more important than finding people of super-high IQs.
Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success. The highest correlation to success wasn't IQ, it was how successful the parents were. If you parents can provide you a good learning environment and access to connections, it is more important than just being smart.
But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.
There are plenty of older chips and AMD chips. Why would it be price gouging when you could get stuff at half the price for barely noticeable drop in performance.
Also, Intel sold $50 dual core Pentium chips whose single core was as fast as an i7.
Some people have to have Intel i7. It's not gouging when plenty of alternatives exist.
On the other hand, the CPU market has stagnated because AMD wasn't keeping up. Ryzen will decrease prices but hopefully it will lead to products with features that define the next generation of CPUs rather than CPUs with increasing model numbers with minimal changes that Intel has been doing.
It's not just that their chips are usually a better value but without AMD you would have a monopolistic Intel charging through the nose with minimal innovation.
What? AMDs are and has always been awesome values. Their FX and APU chips have always been incredible values.
My work computer has 4th gen i7 and at home I have a FX-8320 and for programming tasks I can't really tell any sort of difference. The AMD is half the price.
I don't understand posts like this. Why do you want to waste 40+ hours per week on a job that delivers little in the way of satisfaction or pleasure? Even if you're a well paid programmer, you're probably working on something that doesn't interest you, and therefore isn't particularly fun or rewarding.
Wouldn't you rather have more free time to work on something that is of interest to you and that you believe would benefit other people? I worked as a programmer for a few years when I came out of university, but I concluded that my free time is far more valuable to me than a decent wage. I now work in a low paid part-time job, and while I have no money and no retirement plan, at least I can spend most of my time on projects that interest me.
I hope the pace of automation increases so I can stop working entirely and gain even more free time. I truly don't understand why you'd want to continue with the current system where most of your life is wasted in mundane and work in a soul destroying environment.
What gives satisfaction and pleasure is not the work itself but the people you work with. So, even the most mundane jobs can be rewarding and pleasurable and the most interesting job miserable depending on the work environment and your co-workers.
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For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home
If you still have student debt 10 years after you graduated I wouldn't give you money for a house either.
Probably masters degree and MBA such that is acquired later on in life.
Try mid 60's like me. I've been offered indefinite contract jobs, but full time employment? I'm not working for less than people that know less than me. A security 'forensic specialist' that didn't have a clue as to what email headers were? REALLY?
You're in your mid-60s? You should be retiring. You have SS and medicare. Why do you want full time employment?
I'm in my mid 30s and I plan for retirement like crazy so that I can retire in my mid 60s.
Some people claimed it was bias against older workers and veterans.
I was recruited for a dev position around 2007. I was pretty active in several Open Source projects and with one of the major community Linux distros. I had a pretty solid body of work that was publicly visible. Once I submitted my resume, the interaction changed somewhat. I was in the military about 10 years at the time, so in addition to my Open Source activities, I had quite a few years of military experience.
When they thought I was just an Open Source dev (perhaps thinking that my day job was for some small mom & pop company), the recruiter was always eager to communicate with me. However, after they got my resume, they seemed less eager. I don't think it was age (I wasn't 30 yet), but perhaps being a military veteran had something to do with it. Perhaps they thought I would expect a higher salary based on my experience/education (I had earned my MS in Computer Engineering shortly prior). Who knows.
Either way, I've known some folks who have worked at Google and other SV companies. Looking at where I am now I feel like I dodged a bullet, so it's all good.
Since companies will not give feedback on why they didn't hire you, there is no way to know why things went the way they went.
I got declined for a job. I had a friend who worked there and told me why I was declined. I was completely off base about what I thought was going on. He said it was just one guy who was completely against me since I had given a really bad answer to a technical question he asked. The guy didn't show it at all and he it didn't even register that he had such a huge grudge against me.
"Amazon cuts out middle-man; film at eleven."
So company A sells company B's products through Amazon. Amazon notices and starts selling company B's products directly. Doesn't this mean that company A didn't need to exist?
It's not like company A made their own product and Amazon decided "hey those are cool, lets make them ourselves and sell them cheaper" and now company A is screwed.
So company A had a shitty business model, and Amazon made that business model moot by buying their customers and cutting out the, now useless, middle men.
Company A had to do market research. Company A orders, markets and sell hundreds of products of which one or two sell well. They sell products from Company B-Z which makes slight variations of many products which they will only make once ordered by Company A.
I would agree with you if Company B created and marketed these products and Company A was just buying from them and putting them on Amazon.
It seems like Amazon is making Company A do the work of finding out what sells and then swooping in and selling them. Amazon has no intention of buying hundreds of items and then figuring out what sells. They want to let someone else do the hardest work of what sells and then undercut them.
My wife has been selling as a 3rd-party Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) merchant since 2011. As a work-from-home mom, this keeps the majority of the items in Amazon's warehouses for quick turn-around, as Amazon mixes the 3rd party items in with their own to provide a larger catalog. As the business expanded, we began to dabble in wholesaling (buy direct from the manufacturer, list on AZ, send it to the FBA warehouse, profit) and life was good.
What we began to notice was that, on the really popular selling products, Amazon started to list their own Sold by Amazon along side the FBA program inventory. Understandable, it's their platform, their listings. Then we started going to tradeshows, and hearing from the manufacturers that Amazon was secretly buying out the same products, and we had to say no, we can't compete against Amazon on Amazon (since they take 15% of the sale when you use their listing service). Over time, we lost the pop lines, and more of our regular inventory sits and sits, waiting for the long tail.
Ultimately, what Amazon is collecting is sales data. The 3rd party sellers take the risk, make the sales, and Amazon takes a slice of the profit. At some point, they calculate if there's enough margin, and they go direct to the manufacturer and cut out the 3rd party sellers, and take all of the profit. They did the same thing with the private labeling, where they calculate which commonly produced products are in demand, and they move them into their Amazon private label system.
So, it is not surprising that Amazon is doing the same thing internally, making divisions within the company compete against one another. With their household divisions, they often deal with manufacturers directly under the Amazon Family brand of private labeling. Quidsi (as Diapers.com) sells 3rd party goods (Pampers, Huggies, etc) through wholesale contracts that Amazon would simply have better buying power over; everything the smaller division does could be managed at higher volumes by the parent company, hence lower costs and higher profitability.
Wow, that is pretty evil.
I mean, from their standpoint, it makes sense. They will trawl through their data on what sells and try and sell it themselves. The sellers do all the market research for them.
Even taking a 15% commission on sales and then using your own data against you is scummy and evil.
I have no idea how you'd protect yourself against Amazon in this scenario. They have your sales data and possibly sales data of your competitor. They can come in and undercut anyone anytime.
What?
Again, what?
What kind of telecom code is this where the included libraries balloons the codebase and bad code melts servers down?
Bullshit!!!!!
You haven't actually talked to those Indians about their backgrounds.
All those H1B Indians come from wealthy Indian families. Those dirt poor Indians simply don't have the opportunity to get a degree and get to the USA.
Nope.
They are a mix of all backgrounds, mostly middle class, some upper-middle and some lower-middle. Just mostly depends on if their parents put them through engineering or medical school - because that's all US cares about: STEM immigrants.
Wealthy Indians would never leave India. Why would anyone leave from being the top class in a society to be the bottom rung in America?
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
Suppose all truck drivers are replaced with automation. That's 1M more people on the job market. Yes, maybe they can't do MY job, but, with no alternative, they'll try to get educated and move up the labor food chain.
And with more people in general chasing ever fewer jobs, there'll always be someone willing to do any given job for cheaper--including mine.
Arguably this has already happened significantly. Do you realize that the share of corporate productivity that goes to labor has shrunk in half compared to 1973?
That if labor got the same share of productivity today that it had in 1973, that we'd all have 2x the purchasing power? I'd love to be paid 2x the purchasing power. I'd be done with my mortgage, be completely unworried about retirement and paying for medical care, etc.
I welcome automation replacing labor, but we have to find a way to distribute the resulting wealth such that the people who own things have don't have ALL the wealth and so that the people who can no longer make ends meet in a depressed labor market can live decent lives.
--PeterM
You're telling me I have to worry about robotically-replaced truck drivers that's going to suppress my wage on top of the following things I already worry about suppressing my wages:
Goodness, programmers are so super-scared that someone somewhere is going to "suppress" their wages.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to invest any of if because I know that this giant stack of Jenga blocks we call a stock market is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later (when it does I'll shift funds to index stocks and ride the recovery). The marketing and advertising bubble will pop. The Twitter sale debacle is a harbinger of what's to come as people realize that marketing data and ad revenue aren't enough to keep a business afloat (hear the rumblings about Twitter adding paid subscriptions?) As incomes remain at best stagnant, disposable income drops as cost of living increases, meaning that marketing data gets less and less valuable. One of the pillars the stock market is built upon is confidence. As these large, popular companies go further and further in the red, people will start to panic. Wall Street might want to look into licensing those FoxConn suicide nets, or at least hand out free hardhats to pedestrians walking below.
The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
On the other hand, unicorns and massive valuations are great because they need employees to create new products which creates competition for employees and rising wages. If big established companies dominated everything there would be stagnation. They would offer the same services and do rent-seeking, and wouldn't need employees to create new products and ideas.
Now, I understand WHY a city is more expensive. Because stuff costs more, because there is more tax, more demand for less space, etc etc etc. But WHY are these underlying services more expensive?
Taxes: Sure, there are more people to service and a few more services (pedestrian crossing signals) but there are a lot more people who pay for them. And many don't even live in the city but spend money there!
Space: So the land has more demand. But why can't we go vertical as needed? Most cities have less than 10 buildings over 20 floors.
Restaurants/Movies/Clubs/etc There are a lot more customers to provide for revenues. More economies of scale, should be cheaper.
Infrastructure How is it that cabling/piping/ducting a building is more expensive than across 25 acres of a suburban neighborhood? Cities may have public transit, but less roads to maintain, less area to cleanup, less trash pickup points, etc.
What am I missing?
Pension.
Cities have to pay pension and healthcare for retired city employees. For newer suburbs, there is no such requirement.
Why is this an H1B problem then? Anybody can hire an incompetent bozo for half the salary.
After all the legal and immigration paperwork and fees, he'll probably add 10K-20K in expenses over his salary.
Genuine question here. Companies are supposed to hire local people if they are available and H1Bs only when there are no qualified locals. The question is:
Have any of you ever been hired instead of an H1B because you are local? Have you ever heard of a situation where a company wanted to hire an H1B but ended up having to hire a local person instead because of this requirement?
In my experience, the idea that H1Bs only get hired if there are no locals available is complete fiction. Has anyone ever seen this rule help a local person get a job instead of an H1B?
When there are multiple applications for a job, we only interview H1Bs if there is no local US person applying who seem qualified.
All the services like Netflix and Amazon prime have their exclusive content. They are like different channels on cable TV.
Netflix long ago stopped being a content store and became a content creator.
it doesn't make any sense to say despite Neflix because Netflix sells their own content, not make others content easily available.
why should I care about some other country's poor folks? we have enough problems in this country; I don't see india (etc) reaching out to help the US! no other country is reaching out to help us, either. so why is it OUR JOB to employ the world's poorer people in their own countries AT OUR OWN EXPENSE?
You don't want to help poorer people but you want richer people to help you out by hiring you over people they can pay less to get the same amount of work done? So, why is it not the rich people's job to hire you over someone who could do it cheaper? Maybe you'll say it's national interests but then you're just saying national is more important than global and you get to pick and choose what favors you the most.
In a capitalist country, it is a company's obligation to get find the cheapest raw materials and labor.
At least you're close to breaking even every month. There are people who just watch their debts and student loans get bigger and all they have for housing is a small corner of a room that they have to pack up and go or sell their belongings when the new place that they have to move isn't large enough.
At least in your case, you're saying not a sports car but a certain standard of living. You're saying you refuse to share housing or downsize your belongings that you can move in a space of an hour.
What I mind is the mentality that "if you're unemployed, then you're no good."
It kills me when I apply to jobs that I fit very closely or even exactly only to hear nothing back or "you don't have the skills."
And what really hurts is when your friends and family wonder why you can't get a job because you're a programmer and there's a shortage of programmers.
THAT hurts along with the comments. They think if you "know computers" you can just walk into any job you want and if you can't, then there's something wrong with you.
I love programming and computers - I HATE this goddamn industry!
You're not good at job hunting.
Job hunting and being good at programming are different skills. They are related but not the same.
This is an ABUSE of the H1B visa program, clear and simple. It's been done under democratic "leadership" and republican "leadership" Why? Simple...$$$$ corporations want to earn more profit, so they outsource for pennies on a dollar, kick back a ton of so called campaign donations, to ensure that the government goes along with it.
At least in software, it's not the cost of the engineer, it's the rock-starness of the developer that is more important.
A good developer is worth 10 or more times his/her salary whereas a bad one is barely even worth anything.
There is no point hiring cheap H1B just for low cost.
Maybe it's different in other aspects of IT.
I'm in the same situation right now, albeit I'm a -little- older than 63... Employers are not allowed to ask you questions related to your age, but it's pretty obvious when you forget and start relating sexism in the workplace to the synod of Rome in 850. The bigger issue (at least for me) seems to be that it doesn't matter if your 63 or 2022, employers are looking for young cheap people that have exactly the skills they think they need without considering the advantages of experience and adaptability. If they can't find that locally, they outsource.
Seriously, you would think that 200 decades of experience would count for something, but no. It seems far more important that you are a tiny square peg they need to fill the tiny square hole they have. Sheesh.
The reason employers don't hire and the reason that employees think they didn't get hired usually turn out to be vastly different.
In the current climate, companies will not say a word about why they didn't hire you. A little bit of feedback would go a long way but they can't since it's legally not a good idea. They will interview you for 5-8 hours but won't say a thing about what they think of you. You kind of have to guess and sometimes your guesses are totally off.
There is a bit of ageism, racism, sexism (or more precisely reverse sexism - males are viewed less desirable employees) but it always comes down to small weird things. Someone might get offered or not offered a job because of weird little things.
Though HR likes to put a veneer of order to every interview and hiring process, it's always a cluster in the back. People get hired and not hired for the weirdest of reasons so just move on. Don't take anything personally. It could be any reason.
We have people barely able to tie their shoes who get bored at their low/no-skill minimum wage job now, and they're going to be the first to be replaced. What's going to happen when we turn over their jobs to super smart AI-powered machines? Are fast food order kiosks gonna be the start of the robot uprising? ... and what a boring way to begin a sci fi novel: "Day 1 of the robot uprising: exactly 13.74% of the McDonalds orders for large sodas were substituted with medium sodas, a precise amount calculated to cause the maximum dissatisfaction without rising to a level where we would be alerted. We didn't know it, but it was already too late. They had already calculated every possible move. On Day 2, there was nothing to stop them from adding pickles to orders that expressly asked for no pickles. It was the end times."
No. The no-skill isn't going to be the first to be replaced. They are so low wage and involves manual labor that it would cost a huge investment to replace them.
The first ones to be replaced will be mid to high skills jobs where the output is just a computer file and the input is some human input. For example, some types of lawyers, parts of customer support and some aspects of medical service. And, dare I say coding?
The reason that it will be first to be replaced is because once the software is ready, there is almost zero infrastructure cost. Rent a VM in the cloud and any tablet/computer can be a job replacing robot. You don't need sophisticated computer vision mechanical robots needed to flip burgers.
We'd better get going if we are going to have more than 8 billion robots in 30 years! Right now, we have zero!
Robots do not have to be physical machines. They can be processes running on a device.
So, your current computer could run a robot process that does customer support, accounting or medical image diagnosis. There are a lot of jobs where the input and output are all inside a computer.
There are more than 8 billion devices. It could take a day or two to get all those devices the latest robot update.
IQ is not a real measure of intelligence. Witness the fact that 99.7% of geniuses are not stupid enough to pay MENSA $60 a year for a card saying "I'm smart." That 99.7% realize that it's possible to be really intelligent AND do really dumb things at the same time - they just have to look at MENSA members.
And the last time I pointed this out, along came all the MENSA members saying how it isn't so. Proving that Dunning-Kruger is no respecter of IQ tests. :-)
Now if they could create devices that showed more common sense than, say, Donald Trump (I know, I set the bar REALLY low, but you've got to start somewhere) they might have something.
IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.
There is a certain height above which isn't advantageous in basketball. Same with IQ. There is a good enough IQ and beyond that doesn't matter.
Also, two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ. If a team with less skilled basketball players is allowed to play with an extra player, they will beat a team with better players. So, the social environment that allows people to work together is more important than finding people of super-high IQs.
Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success. The highest correlation to success wasn't IQ, it was how successful the parents were. If you parents can provide you a good learning environment and access to connections, it is more important than just being smart.
But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.
There are plenty of older chips and AMD chips. Why would it be price gouging when you could get stuff at half the price for barely noticeable drop in performance.
Also, Intel sold $50 dual core Pentium chips whose single core was as fast as an i7.
Some people have to have Intel i7. It's not gouging when plenty of alternatives exist.
On the other hand, the CPU market has stagnated because AMD wasn't keeping up. Ryzen will decrease prices but hopefully it will lead to products with features that define the next generation of CPUs rather than CPUs with increasing model numbers with minimal changes that Intel has been doing.
The centerpiece of this 'article' seems to focus on Microcenter, which ALWAYS has priced drops and sales like this going on.
Everybody take a deep breath and see where we're at this time next month.
Yeah, it was this price on Black Friday last year for the CPU. At that time, Ryzen wasn't even a word.
I agree it's a just a Microcenter sale.
It's not just that their chips are usually a better value but without AMD you would have a monopolistic Intel charging through the nose with minimal innovation.
What? AMDs are and has always been awesome values. Their FX and APU chips have always been incredible values.
My work computer has 4th gen i7 and at home I have a FX-8320 and for programming tasks I can't really tell any sort of difference. The AMD is half the price.
I don't understand posts like this. Why do you want to waste 40+ hours per week on a job that delivers little in the way of satisfaction or pleasure? Even if you're a well paid programmer, you're probably working on something that doesn't interest you, and therefore isn't particularly fun or rewarding.
Wouldn't you rather have more free time to work on something that is of interest to you and that you believe would benefit other people? I worked as a programmer for a few years when I came out of university, but I concluded that my free time is far more valuable to me than a decent wage. I now work in a low paid part-time job, and while I have no money and no retirement plan, at least I can spend most of my time on projects that interest me.
I hope the pace of automation increases so I can stop working entirely and gain even more free time. I truly don't understand why you'd want to continue with the current system where most of your life is wasted in mundane and work in a soul destroying environment.
What gives satisfaction and pleasure is not the work itself but the people you work with. So, even the most mundane jobs can be rewarding and pleasurable and the most interesting job miserable depending on the work environment and your co-workers.