I suspect those that turned down other university offers for this one, only to find out they weren't accepted and no have no-where to go have basis for a lawsuit. And what about those that had scholarships at other schools and lost them? Mistakes like this, and such a critical point in your life, affect the whole of the rest of your life. It could change the entire trajectory of your career.
The article says people who can show actual harm like the situation you just gave (which was also given in TFA) would probably have a good case for a lawsuit. Although they also mention that because the apology email was sent only a few hours after the mistaken acceptance letters were sent, it is unlikely anyone was harmed. Hopefully most students smart enough to get into Carnegie-Mellon are also smart enough to follow due diligence and verify their financial aid is in order before contacting other colleges and withdrawing their applications.
but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.
First off median household income is $51,939. Household income is a better measure of what a household can afford in housing. On top of that, someone with median income is not buying a median price home. Since a large portion of the lower income population rents, the median home buyer makes more than median income.
The middle class is going away and with it the American Dream; there will be only well-to-do and poor people in a few years...
Will there be a revolt then?
The middle class going away doesn't mean the American Dream is gone. The American Dream will actually become even better for the few who reach it. But the number who reach it will be less of course.
The 1% isn't the only group making gains in today's economy. The top 5-10% contains the VPs, directors, doctors, lawyers, senior engineers, etc. who are making out like bandits (although admittedly not as well as the 1%). The upper middle class barely existed 30 years ago, which is why you don't find many 50 year old McMansions. The deterioration of the middle class has gone both ways, with most people falling to the working class and a select few moving into the upper middle class.
Even if/when most jobs are gone, the top 20% who are still worth employing will be doing very well.
There will be work in the service sector for a very long time. As the gap between the upper middle class and working class grows, it will become more common for people to afford maids, nannies, lawn care guys, etc. My household income is in the upper 5% and I currently have a maid who comes in every other week and someone who takes care of my yard. Still don't have enough for a nanny (while still saving for retirement that is), but that is what I currently have planned for my next $20k bump in salary. 20 years from now someone in my current economic bracket will probably be able to easily afford a maid to come to his house a few times a day and take care of laundry, dishes, cooking, etc. instead of just cleaning floors and bathrooms a couple times a month.
If I had my guess the middle class as we know it today will not be here 30-40 years from now. It will be replaced by an increasingly large upper middle class and a much larger working class. The working class will survive on a combination of governmental redistribution of wealth and abundant resources from ever increasing worker productivity.
It's not just professional hubris or exclusionism, it's about diluting the respect and reliability of our profession -- and in some cases, even public safety.
If you were just upset about people calling themselves electrical engineers when they are not, you would have a good point. But as others in this thread have already pointed out, none of the governing bodies you mentioned "own" the term engineer. Just like medical doctors don't own the term doctor; they have to share it with lawyers, audiologists, pharmacists, physicists, psychologists, etc.
The term engineer has shifted many times in the past few hundred years, and it will probably continue to shift. Many engineering disciplines do require licenses, but many do not. And many disciplines that do require licenses have plenty of waiver and exemption opportunities (like the industrial exemption). Software engineering even has an NCEES PE exam which was first offered in 2013, but like most engineering disciplines it is not a prerequisite to work in the industry. It may become required for some safety critical work in the future. I'm not sure how quickly the PE exam became required after it was introduced in 1966.
Just because its cost-competitive doesn't mean people will buy it. Who has $35k to shell out for a car?
Cars don't have to be affordable for people to buy them. A family that needs two cars should have a household income of well over $100k per year before they should be buying $30k+ new cars (IHMO, and based on the 20/4/10 rule). But they probably only have to make median income to qualify for the loans.
Painfully facile. Smokers use no social programs and social services as they are going through treatment? Because chemo, surgeons and cancer drugs are free?
The medical problems older people go through tend to be more expensive to treat than those caused by smoking (which tend to happen earlier in life also). There have been many studies which show both smoking and obesity end up saving money in the long term even if you only look at total lifetime medical costs. If you start factoring in social programs like Medicare and Social Security the savings become staggering.
While I admit I used wrong terminology when I called it a law, the FCC order still shows that the danger of regulation has been around for a long time. Later I found that the FCC first released a policy statement in 2005 stating its guidelines for an open internet. So the fact I used the word law incorrectly does not diminish the fact that companies have been worrying about net neutrality (or the lack thereof) for a long time.
considering the deal was likely in the works long before there was even a hint of the threat of internet regulation.
There has been the threat of internet regulation since at least the FCC Open Internet Order 2010 which was signed into law in December 2010.
There has been the hint of regulation since at least 2005, when the FCC released a poilicy statement establishing four principles of the open internet.
Verizon has been trying to shed their wireline service for years. [...] The timing just coincides with the FCC ruling, and a great opportunity for VZ to talk out of it's collective ass
How does them wanting to shed wireline services for years contradict their assertion that net neutrality laws had an impact on their decision? Net neutrality has been discussed by regulators for at least five years. The earliest ruling I could find was the FCC Open Internet Order 2010, signed into law in December 2010. I'm not sure how long before that these issues have been discussed by regulators, but I assumed it was for many years before 2010.
Even if net neutrality only became an issue recently, it could still impact a sale that was in the works for a decade or more. It would just impact the price. If they have been selling off wireline services for years, but only recently decided to sell lines in California, Florida and Texas, it must be because something tipped them over the edge recently. Otherwise they would have already sold these lines years ago.
I am not claiming Verizon isn't taking advantage of the situation to slam net neutrality laws, but you also cannot claim they are with any certainty without a lot more information than is publicly available now.
Indeed, the fact that someone bought it implies that someone thinks they can run the system profitably.
The worry is that regulation will cause less investment, not no investment. There will always be someone trying to make a buck, but in the case of wired communication we probably want as many companies as possible investing in our infrastructure.
I'm not making an assertion that net nuetrality may or may not hurt investment, I am only claiming that the fact a company was willing to buy the lines from Verizon is not a good indicator that the sale was a good investment for either side. For instance, there were still people buying Lehman Brothers stock for $10/share right before they declared bankruptcy. That was clearly not a good investment.
While I don't want to be as dismissive of this parent's accomplishments as horm was, you would need to know a bit more about the AC before determining if his/her results are common. While only about a third of individuals (34%) of people 25-29 have bachelors degrees, children in the top quartile of income ( > $80k family income) have a 77% chance of getting a bachelors.
So average results for a two child family with a decent income and at least one parent willing and capable of homeschooling is probably going to be one Masters degree and one Bachelors degree by the time they are 30.
Even with a lower income, having parents who care enough about their children's education to even contemplate home schooling probably have a far better than 34% of having their children graduate college. Regardless of if they choose to home school or not.
As other people have noted, the value of $40k or even $100k varies wildly depending on where you live.
It can vary wildly, but usually only at the extremes . In the vast majority of urban areas (where the vast majority of IT staff work), $40k is a low salary and $100k is a standard senior level IT staff salary.
And I "insinuated" nothing
You may not have meant to insinuate anything, but you did all the same.
It is not a false dichotomy every time someone lists two options. In fact the more inclusive term "false dilemma" allows for three or more options. What makes your statement a false dilemma/dichotomy is that you present the options as mutually exclusive. In truth, if you had just taken out the term "in exchange for all of my free time" your comment would have no longer been inflammatory (IMHO).
I have worked at jobs where I felt I was making a difference, and jobs where I was just making clients more money. But I was more likely to give up all my free time for the job I cared about than the one where I was just improving a company's P/L statements. The false dichotomy you used was insinuating a job where you are just making a good salary also means you will be worked to death. Not only is it a false dilemma, but in my experience it is simply just false.
It is not a false dichotomy. He states the most extreme solution (taking a child away from its parent) so you know how far he would go to protect children from crazy parents. That way he shows he would obviously be okay with less drastic options (mandating vaccinations) and prevents someone else from needing to ask how far he would go or insinuating the potential for a slippery slope.
Every time someone offers two possible options it is not automatically a false dichotomy.
It also is not reductio ad absurdum because he is not even claiming taking children from their parents is an absurd response. He is stating he finds it to be appropriate. Reductio ad absurdum would be if someone said "if you are okay with mandating vaccinations, why not just take away their children instead?" The parent poster goes all the way to the most extreme possible response and clearly states he finds it to be acceptable.
I agree that being somewhere for along time with no promotion can be a red flag, but I've also worked places where they'd rather hire externally than give someone too big of a raise.
There are clearly many companies that do not give big raises and do not promote from within. Part of the reason it is a red flag if an employee has not been promoted is because they were unable to realize they should have left that company a long time ago. It doesn't necessarily show a lack of technical skill, but it shows a strong lack of many other "soft skills". Once someone has a base level of technical competence, soft skills are usually much more important than technical skills.
I also tend to choose jobs based more on what I can learn than what I can earn. Then, so long as you can learn, the money comes naturally.
This is a great way to choose jobs. And like you mention, a company where you can consistently learn new skills is one where you are likely to have professional advancement (not always, but usually).
I for one would much rather live in a society were kids get taken away from superstitious and paranoid parents than one where kids have to die because their parents (or someone else's parents) are scientifically illiterate.
Logical fallacy; false alternative.
That is not a false alternative. The entire situation being discussed is people putting children at risk of death because of scientific illiteracy and/or superstition. He is not saying those are the only two options, he is simply stating one possible solution to this problem that he is okay with. He doesn't say it is the only alternative.
This is usually the problem right here. The last two times I've switched jobs, I ended up with a pay bump equal to about 10-15 YEARS worth of the wimpy raises I got for keeping my valuable institutional knowledge at the same place.
The limits most places put on promotions & raises mean you're usually shooting yourself in the foot if you stay someplace more than a few years.
Which only means your previous employer was able to enjoy having a sucker for an employee for 10-15 years before you wised up. A company is not going to pay more for someone if they aren't scared of losing you, and since you stayed for so long they probably made the right call by not giving you substantial raises.
One of the best things I can see on a resume is job advancement within a company. That means they weren't just able to convince a hiring manager they are good, they convinced their day to day managers they were good. I personally have had four 20%+ raises in my career; two from within two different companies and two when switching companies. I am far more proud of the promotions I received when within a current employer. Someone at a company for 5 years straight without a significant promotion is a big red flag (unless they were already a senior developer / architect / manager when they started). Being at a company for 10-15 years is enough time for a college grad to move into a senior developer position. In fact if I see someone at the age of 35 who doesn't at least hold a senior developer position I am going to start to be wary (unless they had a late in life career change).
You are correct that most employees work for decades with just 2-4% raises each year. And I doubt there is any better sign of a mediocre employee.
From my original post: "Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them."
By definition, a false dichotomy excludes other possibilities than the two presented, which I deliberately went out of my way to acknowledge in the original post. Both yourself and goose-incarnated are simply trolling.
You did not acknowledge other possibilities in your post. You insinuated that different people will make a decision between making the world a better place and giving up all their free time to their boss (for a livable paycheck). You only state they will calculate what's worthwhile to them when deciding between these two options. That is a perfect example of a false dichotomy.
The reality that luis espinal was explaining to you is someone usually does not have to make this decision. First off, you can do something worthwhile while still making good money. A $100k salary is not a difficult mark for someone in the software industry once you have 10 years of experience (in an urban area). You don't have to sell your soul or work 80 hour weeks to get it. That kind of salary is more likely to be accompanied by great benefits, around 30 days of PTO/holiday, and 45-50 hour work weeks. At worst you may have had to sell your soul at a consulting firm for 3-5 years to build a fantastic resume if you wanted a fast track to a great career.
A $40k per year job is an entry level software developer who struggled to find work after college. Ignoring people with an equity position in a start-up that is. In my opinion a $40k/yr developer is far more likely to have a poor work/life balance than a $100k/yr developer, just because the employer obviously doesn't value the $40k employee anyway.
Only those that have diversified assets and the ability to move them into different vehicles (transfer pricing is a key product in accounting firms). A lot of companies pay the full amount.
And those companies won't be the ones taxed by the initiative Obama is proposing. He is going after firms capable of taking advantage of complex tax breaks, not those who are paying full corporate taxes right now.
Your average person has well-founded and valid opinions on what they know.
I rarely find that to be true. Average people tend to have highly biased and largely un-researched opinions even within their area of expertise. My father is a farmer, but knows very little about GMOs. He does have very strong opinions in favor of GMOs but if you investigate you quickly find there isn't much basis for those opinions other than it saves him money (you would get a blank stare if you said the term bio-diversity for instance). I had a brother in law who was an auto-mechanic although he still wasn't a very good source of information when choosing a vehicle. Far too many personal biases.
It is very rare for people to thoroughly research almost anything. I remember people saying how things like home ownership, marriage, and parenting are things you simply cannot properly prepare for until you experience it. Although I have done all three and it really was possible to research and plan for all three well enough that there were no surprises. Although my daughter isn't even one year old yet, so I still have plenty of time to be wrong about that one.
Yet, you need to learn the story of Alibaba and the 40 thieves.
Alibaba was a woodcutter and not a thief.
Before you get too high and mighty, you might want to remember that Ali Baba stole from those 40 thieves which is what eventually got his brother killed (because of his own greed) and almost got Ali Baba killed as well. So the OP calling Ali Baba a thief is 100% accurate.
So what they get instead is a call asking if the SSD is user serviceable and depending on that answer I either don't buy it or I buy the 128GB and buy a replacement on newegg.
You are not a standard customer. A standard customer either lives without it or ponies up the money.
This doesn't seem so far fetched. I'm not sure the field of natural language processing is that far away from being able to create metrics which would determine the skill of developer by looking at their code. It could then be used by employers during the hiring process and during reviews.
While that may sound like a nightmare scenario (and it very well could be), a more intelligent software system may even be able to show why it thinks the code is bad, and give an interviewer or reviewer the chance to ask why something was done. Taking 10,000 lines of code and narrowing it down to 100 lines that could help make the determination between good employee or bad employee could be useful.
The big trick is how to train the system, since you would have to identify good and bad coders for supervised training. I doubt unsupervised training could do anything more than cluster like minded developers together. Although even that is useful, since you could identify a dozen good programmers manually and then have the system identify hundreds more by finding similar coding styles.
I don't think it is. I had a dumbphone and upgraded to a smartphone because I wanted a mobile web platform in my pocket. It happened to make my dumbphone unnecessary, so I no longer carry one. I, at least, did not buy a smartphone because I needed a cell phone. I *had* a cell phone already.
You are basically just repeating my same argument. From my original post:
If they have to carry the thing around anyway, why not use it as a computing device as well? The core reason they have the smartphone is still so they can call people and receive calls; they simply have found other uses for it as well.
You already "had" to carry a dumb phone, so you decided you might as well have a mobile web platform as well. So your core reason for having the smartphone is because you need to carry a phone, but have decided to extend its functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect those that turned down other university offers for this one, only to find out they weren't accepted and no have no-where to go have basis for a lawsuit. And what about those that had scholarships at other schools and lost them? Mistakes like this, and such a critical point in your life, affect the whole of the rest of your life. It could change the entire trajectory of your career.
The article says people who can show actual harm like the situation you just gave (which was also given in TFA) would probably have a good case for a lawsuit. Although they also mention that because the apology email was sent only a few hours after the mistaken acceptance letters were sent, it is unlikely anyone was harmed. Hopefully most students smart enough to get into Carnegie-Mellon are also smart enough to follow due diligence and verify their financial aid is in order before contacting other colleges and withdrawing their applications.
but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.
First off median household income is $51,939. Household income is a better measure of what a household can afford in housing. On top of that, someone with median income is not buying a median price home. Since a large portion of the lower income population rents, the median home buyer makes more than median income.
The middle class is going away and with it the American Dream; there will be only well-to-do and poor people in a few years...
Will there be a revolt then?
The middle class going away doesn't mean the American Dream is gone. The American Dream will actually become even better for the few who reach it. But the number who reach it will be less of course.
The 1% isn't the only group making gains in today's economy. The top 5-10% contains the VPs, directors, doctors, lawyers, senior engineers, etc. who are making out like bandits (although admittedly not as well as the 1%). The upper middle class barely existed 30 years ago, which is why you don't find many 50 year old McMansions. The deterioration of the middle class has gone both ways, with most people falling to the working class and a select few moving into the upper middle class.
Even if/when most jobs are gone, the top 20% who are still worth employing will be doing very well.
There will be work in the service sector for a very long time. As the gap between the upper middle class and working class grows, it will become more common for people to afford maids, nannies, lawn care guys, etc. My household income is in the upper 5% and I currently have a maid who comes in every other week and someone who takes care of my yard. Still don't have enough for a nanny (while still saving for retirement that is), but that is what I currently have planned for my next $20k bump in salary. 20 years from now someone in my current economic bracket will probably be able to easily afford a maid to come to his house a few times a day and take care of laundry, dishes, cooking, etc. instead of just cleaning floors and bathrooms a couple times a month.
If I had my guess the middle class as we know it today will not be here 30-40 years from now. It will be replaced by an increasingly large upper middle class and a much larger working class. The working class will survive on a combination of governmental redistribution of wealth and abundant resources from ever increasing worker productivity.
It's not just professional hubris or exclusionism, it's about diluting the respect and reliability of our profession -- and in some cases, even public safety.
If you were just upset about people calling themselves electrical engineers when they are not, you would have a good point. But as others in this thread have already pointed out, none of the governing bodies you mentioned "own" the term engineer. Just like medical doctors don't own the term doctor; they have to share it with lawyers, audiologists, pharmacists, physicists, psychologists, etc.
The term engineer has shifted many times in the past few hundred years, and it will probably continue to shift. Many engineering disciplines do require licenses, but many do not. And many disciplines that do require licenses have plenty of waiver and exemption opportunities (like the industrial exemption). Software engineering even has an NCEES PE exam which was first offered in 2013, but like most engineering disciplines it is not a prerequisite to work in the industry. It may become required for some safety critical work in the future. I'm not sure how quickly the PE exam became required after it was introduced in 1966.
Just because its cost-competitive doesn't mean people will buy it. Who has $35k to shell out for a car?
Cars don't have to be affordable for people to buy them. A family that needs two cars should have a household income of well over $100k per year before they should be buying $30k+ new cars (IHMO, and based on the 20/4/10 rule). But they probably only have to make median income to qualify for the loans.
Painfully facile. Smokers use no social programs and social services as they are going through treatment? Because chemo, surgeons and cancer drugs are free?
The medical problems older people go through tend to be more expensive to treat than those caused by smoking (which tend to happen earlier in life also). There have been many studies which show both smoking and obesity end up saving money in the long term even if you only look at total lifetime medical costs. If you start factoring in social programs like Medicare and Social Security the savings become staggering.
While I admit I used wrong terminology when I called it a law, the FCC order still shows that the danger of regulation has been around for a long time. Later I found that the FCC first released a policy statement in 2005 stating its guidelines for an open internet. So the fact I used the word law incorrectly does not diminish the fact that companies have been worrying about net neutrality (or the lack thereof) for a long time.
considering the deal was likely in the works long before there was even a hint of the threat of internet regulation.
There has been the threat of internet regulation since at least the FCC Open Internet Order 2010 which was signed into law in December 2010.
There has been the hint of regulation since at least 2005, when the FCC released a poilicy statement establishing four principles of the open internet.
Verizon has been trying to shed their wireline service for years. [...] The timing just coincides with the FCC ruling, and a great opportunity for VZ to talk out of it's collective ass
How does them wanting to shed wireline services for years contradict their assertion that net neutrality laws had an impact on their decision? Net neutrality has been discussed by regulators for at least five years. The earliest ruling I could find was the FCC Open Internet Order 2010, signed into law in December 2010. I'm not sure how long before that these issues have been discussed by regulators, but I assumed it was for many years before 2010.
Even if net neutrality only became an issue recently, it could still impact a sale that was in the works for a decade or more. It would just impact the price. If they have been selling off wireline services for years, but only recently decided to sell lines in California, Florida and Texas, it must be because something tipped them over the edge recently. Otherwise they would have already sold these lines years ago.
I am not claiming Verizon isn't taking advantage of the situation to slam net neutrality laws, but you also cannot claim they are with any certainty without a lot more information than is publicly available now.
Indeed, the fact that someone bought it implies that someone thinks they can run the system profitably.
The worry is that regulation will cause less investment, not no investment. There will always be someone trying to make a buck, but in the case of wired communication we probably want as many companies as possible investing in our infrastructure.
I'm not making an assertion that net nuetrality may or may not hurt investment, I am only claiming that the fact a company was willing to buy the lines from Verizon is not a good indicator that the sale was a good investment for either side. For instance, there were still people buying Lehman Brothers stock for $10/share right before they declared bankruptcy. That was clearly not a good investment.
While I don't want to be as dismissive of this parent's accomplishments as horm was, you would need to know a bit more about the AC before determining if his/her results are common. While only about a third of individuals (34%) of people 25-29 have bachelors degrees, children in the top quartile of income ( > $80k family income) have a 77% chance of getting a bachelors.
So average results for a two child family with a decent income and at least one parent willing and capable of homeschooling is probably going to be one Masters degree and one Bachelors degree by the time they are 30.
Even with a lower income, having parents who care enough about their children's education to even contemplate home schooling probably have a far better than 34% of having their children graduate college. Regardless of if they choose to home school or not.
As other people have noted, the value of $40k or even $100k varies wildly depending on where you live.
It can vary wildly, but usually only at the extremes . In the vast majority of urban areas (where the vast majority of IT staff work), $40k is a low salary and $100k is a standard senior level IT staff salary.
And I "insinuated" nothing
You may not have meant to insinuate anything, but you did all the same.
It is not a false dichotomy every time someone lists two options. In fact the more inclusive term "false dilemma" allows for three or more options. What makes your statement a false dilemma/dichotomy is that you present the options as mutually exclusive. In truth, if you had just taken out the term "in exchange for all of my free time" your comment would have no longer been inflammatory (IMHO).
I have worked at jobs where I felt I was making a difference, and jobs where I was just making clients more money. But I was more likely to give up all my free time for the job I cared about than the one where I was just improving a company's P/L statements. The false dichotomy you used was insinuating a job where you are just making a good salary also means you will be worked to death. Not only is it a false dilemma, but in my experience it is simply just false.
It is not a false dichotomy. He states the most extreme solution (taking a child away from its parent) so you know how far he would go to protect children from crazy parents. That way he shows he would obviously be okay with less drastic options (mandating vaccinations) and prevents someone else from needing to ask how far he would go or insinuating the potential for a slippery slope.
Every time someone offers two possible options it is not automatically a false dichotomy.
It also is not reductio ad absurdum because he is not even claiming taking children from their parents is an absurd response. He is stating he finds it to be appropriate. Reductio ad absurdum would be if someone said "if you are okay with mandating vaccinations, why not just take away their children instead?" The parent poster goes all the way to the most extreme possible response and clearly states he finds it to be acceptable.
I agree that being somewhere for along time with no promotion can be a red flag, but I've also worked places where they'd rather hire externally than give someone too big of a raise.
There are clearly many companies that do not give big raises and do not promote from within. Part of the reason it is a red flag if an employee has not been promoted is because they were unable to realize they should have left that company a long time ago. It doesn't necessarily show a lack of technical skill, but it shows a strong lack of many other "soft skills". Once someone has a base level of technical competence, soft skills are usually much more important than technical skills.
I also tend to choose jobs based more on what I can learn than what I can earn. Then, so long as you can learn, the money comes naturally.
This is a great way to choose jobs. And like you mention, a company where you can consistently learn new skills is one where you are likely to have professional advancement (not always, but usually).
Logical fallacy; false alternative.
That is not a false alternative. The entire situation being discussed is people putting children at risk of death because of scientific illiteracy and/or superstition. He is not saying those are the only two options, he is simply stating one possible solution to this problem that he is okay with. He doesn't say it is the only alternative.
... and pay-rises.
This is usually the problem right here. The last two times I've switched jobs, I ended up with a pay bump equal to about 10-15 YEARS worth of the wimpy raises I got for keeping my valuable institutional knowledge at the same place.
The limits most places put on promotions & raises mean you're usually shooting yourself in the foot if you stay someplace more than a few years.
Which only means your previous employer was able to enjoy having a sucker for an employee for 10-15 years before you wised up. A company is not going to pay more for someone if they aren't scared of losing you, and since you stayed for so long they probably made the right call by not giving you substantial raises.
One of the best things I can see on a resume is job advancement within a company. That means they weren't just able to convince a hiring manager they are good, they convinced their day to day managers they were good. I personally have had four 20%+ raises in my career; two from within two different companies and two when switching companies. I am far more proud of the promotions I received when within a current employer. Someone at a company for 5 years straight without a significant promotion is a big red flag (unless they were already a senior developer / architect / manager when they started). Being at a company for 10-15 years is enough time for a college grad to move into a senior developer position. In fact if I see someone at the age of 35 who doesn't at least hold a senior developer position I am going to start to be wary (unless they had a late in life career change).
You are correct that most employees work for decades with just 2-4% raises each year. And I doubt there is any better sign of a mediocre employee.
From my original post: "Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them."
By definition, a false dichotomy excludes other possibilities than the two presented, which I deliberately went out of my way to acknowledge in the original post. Both yourself and goose-incarnated are simply trolling.
You did not acknowledge other possibilities in your post. You insinuated that different people will make a decision between making the world a better place and giving up all their free time to their boss (for a livable paycheck). You only state they will calculate what's worthwhile to them when deciding between these two options. That is a perfect example of a false dichotomy.
The reality that luis espinal was explaining to you is someone usually does not have to make this decision. First off, you can do something worthwhile while still making good money. A $100k salary is not a difficult mark for someone in the software industry once you have 10 years of experience (in an urban area). You don't have to sell your soul or work 80 hour weeks to get it. That kind of salary is more likely to be accompanied by great benefits, around 30 days of PTO/holiday, and 45-50 hour work weeks. At worst you may have had to sell your soul at a consulting firm for 3-5 years to build a fantastic resume if you wanted a fast track to a great career.
A $40k per year job is an entry level software developer who struggled to find work after college. Ignoring people with an equity position in a start-up that is. In my opinion a $40k/yr developer is far more likely to have a poor work/life balance than a $100k/yr developer, just because the employer obviously doesn't value the $40k employee anyway.
Sigh, American really has no hope when (1) that is the level of discussion and (2) it is considered "insightful".
This
Only those that have diversified assets and the ability to move them into different vehicles (transfer pricing is a key product in accounting firms). A lot of companies pay the full amount.
And those companies won't be the ones taxed by the initiative Obama is proposing. He is going after firms capable of taking advantage of complex tax breaks, not those who are paying full corporate taxes right now.
Your average person has well-founded and valid opinions on what they know.
I rarely find that to be true. Average people tend to have highly biased and largely un-researched opinions even within their area of expertise. My father is a farmer, but knows very little about GMOs. He does have very strong opinions in favor of GMOs but if you investigate you quickly find there isn't much basis for those opinions other than it saves him money (you would get a blank stare if you said the term bio-diversity for instance). I had a brother in law who was an auto-mechanic although he still wasn't a very good source of information when choosing a vehicle. Far too many personal biases.
It is very rare for people to thoroughly research almost anything. I remember people saying how things like home ownership, marriage, and parenting are things you simply cannot properly prepare for until you experience it. Although I have done all three and it really was possible to research and plan for all three well enough that there were no surprises. Although my daughter isn't even one year old yet, so I still have plenty of time to be wrong about that one.
Yet, you need to learn the story of Alibaba and the 40 thieves.
Alibaba was a woodcutter and not a thief.
Before you get too high and mighty, you might want to remember that Ali Baba stole from those 40 thieves which is what eventually got his brother killed (because of his own greed) and almost got Ali Baba killed as well. So the OP calling Ali Baba a thief is 100% accurate.
So what they get instead is a call asking if the SSD is user serviceable and depending on that answer I either don't buy it or I buy the 128GB and buy a replacement on newegg.
You are not a standard customer. A standard customer either lives without it or ponies up the money.
This doesn't seem so far fetched. I'm not sure the field of natural language processing is that far away from being able to create metrics which would determine the skill of developer by looking at their code. It could then be used by employers during the hiring process and during reviews.
While that may sound like a nightmare scenario (and it very well could be), a more intelligent software system may even be able to show why it thinks the code is bad, and give an interviewer or reviewer the chance to ask why something was done. Taking 10,000 lines of code and narrowing it down to 100 lines that could help make the determination between good employee or bad employee could be useful.
The big trick is how to train the system, since you would have to identify good and bad coders for supervised training. I doubt unsupervised training could do anything more than cluster like minded developers together. Although even that is useful, since you could identify a dozen good programmers manually and then have the system identify hundreds more by finding similar coding styles.
I don't think it is. I had a dumbphone and upgraded to a smartphone because I wanted a mobile web platform in my pocket. It happened to make my dumbphone unnecessary, so I no longer carry one. I, at least, did not buy a smartphone because I needed a cell phone. I *had* a cell phone already.
You are basically just repeating my same argument. From my original post:
If they have to carry the thing around anyway, why not use it as a computing device as well? The core reason they have the smartphone is still so they can call people and receive calls; they simply have found other uses for it as well.
You already "had" to carry a dumb phone, so you decided you might as well have a mobile web platform as well. So your core reason for having the smartphone is because you need to carry a phone, but have decided to extend its functionality.