Uber classifies (and pays) its drivers as independent contractors. California disagrees, but Texas, so far, does not.
And you can have any barrier you want -- pay for your uniform, pay for a car no older than X, whatever -- with an indie contractor.
Does your field (which sounds like app development) allow you to charge a premium rate so you can drive down the number of hours worked? Solo shops and microshops in other professional services (like PR/marketing) essentially plan on only 50% billable time, with the remainder going to biz-dev and a little admin.
But for that to work at a decent salary equivalence, your hourly rate (or equivalent if you do fixed-fee work) needs to be $100 an hour or more. Is that reasonable in your field?
China's energy needs -- in terms of year-over-year growth -- dwarf those of any other country. Their regulatory processes, for projects that the state deems necessary, can be incredibly streamlined. AND they've got money to spend. It's no surprise they're the hotspot for all kinds of energy investment -- clean and otherwise.
At some point pro-advertising people have to argue for the proposition that advertisers have an inalienable right to try to bother people with their commercial messages, and I'm willing to engage that point because I think it is wrong. I don't think they have that right -- quite the opposite in fact.
I don't think advertisers have an inalienable right to anything -- if this battle turns legal, it won't be advertisers suing end users or adblock developers.
But would advertisers sue publishers or content owners if the size and nature of the audience was fundamentally misrepresented? Oh, yeah -- that already happens in the offline media world.
That threat, if it becomes more commonplace, puts pressure on publishers to make sure those ads get seen. And that's where the trouble for end users could occur.
(It's also one reason Google's pay-per-click ad revolution shook things up so much: As an advertiser, you don't care if the ad was seen 10 times or 10 million times as long as you're getting the clickthrough rate you want and ONLY paying for that clickthrough rate. As someone else in the thread said: People who use Adblock don't click on ads, so the pay-per-click model actually helps perpetuate the current state of things by taking pressure off of publishers to deliver raw impression numbers.)
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.
Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.
If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.
He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.
Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
And that's OK -- but that doesn't mean it's a blanket risk assessment for everyone. Failure is always an option, whether you're holding down a desk and a w-2 paycheck or hunting and killing your own food.
If you artificially prop up prices for the benefit of a few, then competition and innovation that would benefit the broader consumer market can suffer.
It'll be interesting to see how they license the content.
An example of why licensing matters: ProPublica is another new investigative journalism operation, funded as a nonprofit and dedicated to doing deep investigative journalism at a time when many daily newspapers can no longer afford it. They make their content free (as in beer) to newspapers and online sites.
Sounds great, right? The problem is, their Creative Commons license does not allow for editing of the stories. On a day-to-day basis, that means newspapers and other content users can't localize the piece directly -- they'd have to write a sidebar. What's more troubling is that the license also means local editors can't legally alter the story if they find factual errors or want to add additional facts.
That's why licensing matters. It'll be interesting to see the approach HuffPo takes.
If they're managers of a publicly held concern, their first instinct is probably to do whatever supports shareholder investment. Because if they don't, the shareholders will put them out on the street.
If they manage a privately held firm, that doesn't mean there are no shareholders -- just that the owners have a bit more privacy and, sometimes, can afford to take the longer view.
In either scenario, the job of management is to run the company in such a way that it meets (or at least attempts to meet) the shareholders' objectives. It is not to protect employees, not to necessarily "try things like cutting unnecessary expenses" first and not to promote a social good.
If that sounds unfair, that's because it's not about fair -- it's about risk and reward. You want to weather the storm? Put up some capital, take some risk and start a going concern with a payroll to meet.
My wife and I cruise 1-2 times a year and, like the parent poster, we own our own business -- being 100% disconnected is not an option.
In addition to what the parent post stated, I've noticed that the larger ships have RJ-45 jacks in the walls, some of them in isolated spots where no one's really going to see you if you jack in.
Because they're there for things like photo-sales kiosks, etc., I'm gonna take a guess and say the network is DHCP enabled. Does that mean internet access-enabled? Dunno - but I'm on a ship in northern Europe for a dozen days in May, and plan to find out.
Although we don't handle IT, outsourcing is a growth area for my company and I can tell you a bit of what it looks like from our side:
* We want to keep the existing talent. We never claim to know the ins and outs of a particular client's culture and processes as well as the existing staff, and that's why we want to hold onto them. Do we hold onto everyone? No, because we get engaged is to reduce costs. But if you're talented and not just taking up space at a desk, we certainly want to keep you around.
* One of our biggest challenges is overcoming culture shock. We'll often move into situations where the prevailing culture is one of under-utilization -- an eight-hour day might have no more than four hours of actual work in it once you scrape away meetings, pointless process overhead and water-cooler idle time. While we want people to thrive, we want them to thrive in a high-utilization environment; at the same time, we're not interested in being slave drivers. So what's the answer? For us, it's been steep incentive curves -- if you want to make more money, we're very up front about giving you all the tools you need to essentially define your own salary based on productivity. (And I'm not merely talking about working more hours -- there are lots of ways to get more productivity without boosting hours.) The biggest challenge we find in taking employees out of an existing culture and transitioning them into ours is instilling that entrepreneurial spirit, the notion that if you want to make a third more next month or next year, it's within your power to do so.
I hate to sound like a pure fanboy, but I thought this was one of the most reasonable posts in the whole thread.
The fact is, if they're taking in that much income then they chose a wise strategy - one of several possible ones - for dealing with the tax implications. The IRS doesn't like nonprofits that take in ever-larger piles of cash without (somewhat) commensurate outlays, so this is a cash-management strategy as much as anything. Could the foundation start donating wildly to other open-source projects? Could they figure out a way to reimburse developers? Could they turn the money into an investment fund that would earn returns funding the project far into the future. Yes, they could do any of that and much more.
But the thing is, all of that takes time. This is a lot of cash in a relatively short amount of time; the activity that's been undertaken deals with some tax issues without walling off any options in the future.
What about the developers? Shouldn't they have a say in what happens to that money? I'm not a licensing expert (Slashdot is full of 'em - someone chime in), but it seems like a logical fallacy for folks to think that a license allowing free and easy forking would also, implicitly, offer contributory rights of future renumeration or use restriction. It seems like it would be very hard to have both.
The history of open source software is full of good products that forked into great products; if enough developers don't like what's going on, then this may be a case of a great product forking into a phenomenal product. But I frankly don't think that will happen because the brain trust at the foundation (and now, corporation) hasn't made too many mis-steps so far.
My wife and I just came through an addictive run with Oblivion and we're both wondering: Among Gamers Who Know (that would be you folks), what are the options for one-on-one, Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role playing games?
I left a job with about the same amount of travel you talk about when I was relatively early (five years or so) into my marriage - we simply couldn't cope with being apart that much.
Now, 16 years into it, I travel even more than that long-ago job required and, although we don't love it, we're at peace with it because we've got more shared history and shared stability together. So I guess I'd give you a classic consultant answer and say "it depends."
My disclaimer: We didn't have kids. There's no real way to make that much travel work with kids unless you make your peace with being the de facto equivalent of a divorced couple with visitation rights.
Craigslist is a bitter pill for newspapers - most metro dailies make a third of their advertising revenue from classifieds. McKinsey (insert genuflect here) has a new analysis piece on how papers can fight back. Relevant reading for anyone who follows the industry.
... than commenters cynically bitching about business and compensation issues? (Answer: No.)
I don't fault the Google guys for their compensation or their decision to try and defer some tax issues. Hell, I don't even fault them for turning their pseudo-salaries into a miniature news event. They're in the business of growing Google, and part of that is playing up the "Google mystique."
Yeah, they make a lot of money no matter how you count it. But you know what? So can you, if you come up with an idea that's good enough and get people to buy into it.
We should look upon home-run successes like Google for inspiration, not class jealousy.
You're right, of course - which is why I don't have employees but do have 1099 contractors. The hiring practices I spoke of were in prior gigs where I had hiring authority for W-2 employees, and they're all far in the past.
I do worry about the creeping notion that all discrimination is bad at all times; that's simply not the case.
Some people are better qualified -- not merely on technical skills but based on where they are in life, what they want out of the job and what they can bring to the table in terms of time -- than others. It is a manager's job hire these people through a process that adheres to the law and gets the best people on board.
Also, note that merely noticing a ring isn't the same, legally speaking, as asking about your marital status. Neither is thinking "OK, an impending marriage could chew up productivity," the same as a blanket rejection of engaged candidates.
Disclaimer: I don't hire coders or I.T. professionals, so your mileage may vary. I'm also spectacularly opinionated about hiring practices, so YMMV a lot.
When I interview candidates, I generally talk most of the time - in fact, it's about an 80/20 ratio of my voice to theirs in the first interview.
Why? Because the questions you bring up tell me more about you than any questions I could ask you directly.
What questions are good questions? Ask me how I got my job. Ask me (as another poster mentioned) what I like best about the work environment. Ask me what, if anything, ticks me off on a day-to-day basis. Ask me about the team structure, who you'd be working with and what happened to the guy before you.
What not to ask me: During the first interview, I don't want to hear questions about our family-leave or maternity policies - I am hiring you to work, not to hire on then take a bunch of time off.
Neither do I want to hear about your upcoming wedding/vacation/spiritual retreat "that's been scheduled for several months and can't be moved." Got one of those? Then bring it up during negotiations when I've decided you're the right candidate and you have some leverage... because I can tell you right now, in the first interview, it's all about me: My company, my leverage, my needs being met.
If you're female, don't wear an engagement ring without a wedding band, because I will think "OK, she's likely getting married soon and that'll chew up months of productivity." If you're male, don't mention to me that you coach your kids' soccer team because I'll have the same productivity concerns.
Again:You can be more human in the second and subsequent interviews, but the first interview is a screen, and the only criteria really come down to: Are you engaged and inquisitive? Are you utterly focused on showing me the value you bring to the table? And are you of lower risk/liability than other applicants?
Not to ignore your question, but the best answer may be to switch away from hourly rates to flat-fee pricing or retainers.
As someone who sells their time, your ability to succeed (beyond your technical skills, of course!) comes down to:
Your ability to win work;
Your ability to price work; and
Your ability to manage projects.
Going to flat-rate pricing or retainer models introduces risk, but it also dramatically lowers your overhead and increases your inventory of time available to sell. You get back the time you currently spend tracking time, tallying it up for billing purposes, etc. You'll find that customers like both flat-rate pricing and (for extended work) retainers because they give them solid numbers to budget against.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does Bill Gates have a "foundation" instead of just a foundation?
Uber classifies (and pays) its drivers as independent contractors. California disagrees, but Texas, so far, does not. And you can have any barrier you want -- pay for your uniform, pay for a car no older than X, whatever -- with an indie contractor.
Does your field (which sounds like app development) allow you to charge a premium rate so you can drive down the number of hours worked? Solo shops and microshops in other professional services (like PR/marketing) essentially plan on only 50% billable time, with the remainder going to biz-dev and a little admin.
But for that to work at a decent salary equivalence, your hourly rate (or equivalent if you do fixed-fee work) needs to be $100 an hour or more. Is that reasonable in your field?
China's energy needs -- in terms of year-over-year growth -- dwarf those of any other country. Their regulatory processes, for projects that the state deems necessary, can be incredibly streamlined. AND they've got money to spend. It's no surprise they're the hotspot for all kinds of energy investment -- clean and otherwise.
At some point pro-advertising people have to argue for the proposition that advertisers have an inalienable right to try to bother people with their commercial messages, and I'm willing to engage that point because I think it is wrong. I don't think they have that right -- quite the opposite in fact.
I don't think advertisers have an inalienable right to anything -- if this battle turns legal, it won't be advertisers suing end users or adblock developers.
But would advertisers sue publishers or content owners if the size and nature of the audience was fundamentally misrepresented? Oh, yeah -- that already happens in the offline media world.
That threat, if it becomes more commonplace, puts pressure on publishers to make sure those ads get seen. And that's where the trouble for end users could occur.
(It's also one reason Google's pay-per-click ad revolution shook things up so much: As an advertiser, you don't care if the ad was seen 10 times or 10 million times as long as you're getting the clickthrough rate you want and ONLY paying for that clickthrough rate. As someone else in the thread said: People who use Adblock don't click on ads, so the pay-per-click model actually helps perpetuate the current state of things by taking pressure off of publishers to deliver raw impression numbers.)
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.
Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.
If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.
He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.
Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
... the risk just isn't worth it.
The risk isn't worth it to you.
And that's OK -- but that doesn't mean it's a blanket risk assessment for everyone. Failure is always an option, whether you're holding down a desk and a w-2 paycheck or hunting and killing your own food.
Pedantic, I know -- but in the U.S., think tanks are generally not-for-profits set up to do research and advocacy. Stratfor is a for-profit business.
More accurately: A large part of America stubbornly refuses to trust government solutions.
I don't think an innate trust of corporations is what you see nearly as much as an innate distrust of government not to screw stuff up.
Not advocating for that position or against it; just sayin' that's how it looks out here in the heartland.
Labor laws don't recognize any difference in wage or work standards between for-profit and non-profit companies.
If you artificially prop up prices for the benefit of a few, then competition and innovation that would benefit the broader consumer market can suffer.
An example of why licensing matters: ProPublica is another new investigative journalism operation, funded as a nonprofit and dedicated to doing deep investigative journalism at a time when many daily newspapers can no longer afford it. They make their content free (as in beer) to newspapers and online sites.
Sounds great, right? The problem is, their Creative Commons license does not allow for editing of the stories. On a day-to-day basis, that means newspapers and other content users can't localize the piece directly -- they'd have to write a sidebar. What's more troubling is that the license also means local editors can't legally alter the story if they find factual errors or want to add additional facts.
That's why licensing matters. It'll be interesting to see the approach HuffPo takes.
Or is this just the first instinct?
If they're managers of a publicly held concern, their first instinct is probably to do whatever supports shareholder investment. Because if they don't, the shareholders will put them out on the street.
If they manage a privately held firm, that doesn't mean there are no shareholders -- just that the owners have a bit more privacy and, sometimes, can afford to take the longer view.
In either scenario, the job of management is to run the company in such a way that it meets (or at least attempts to meet) the shareholders' objectives. It is not to protect employees, not to necessarily "try things like cutting unnecessary expenses" first and not to promote a social good.
If that sounds unfair, that's because it's not about fair -- it's about risk and reward. You want to weather the storm? Put up some capital, take some risk and start a going concern with a payroll to meet.
In addition to what the parent post stated, I've noticed that the larger ships have RJ-45 jacks in the walls, some of them in isolated spots where no one's really going to see you if you jack in.
Because they're there for things like photo-sales kiosks, etc., I'm gonna take a guess and say the network is DHCP enabled. Does that mean internet access-enabled? Dunno - but I'm on a ship in northern Europe for a dozen days in May, and plan to find out.
Although we don't handle IT, outsourcing is a growth area for my company and I can tell you a bit of what it looks like from our side:
* We want to keep the existing talent. We never claim to know the ins and outs of a particular client's culture and processes as well as the existing staff, and that's why we want to hold onto them. Do we hold onto everyone? No, because we get engaged is to reduce costs. But if you're talented and not just taking up space at a desk, we certainly want to keep you around.
* One of our biggest challenges is overcoming culture shock. We'll often move into situations where the prevailing culture is one of under-utilization -- an eight-hour day might have no more than four hours of actual work in it once you scrape away meetings, pointless process overhead and water-cooler idle time. While we want people to thrive, we want them to thrive in a high-utilization environment; at the same time, we're not interested in being slave drivers. So what's the answer? For us, it's been steep incentive curves -- if you want to make more money, we're very up front about giving you all the tools you need to essentially define your own salary based on productivity. (And I'm not merely talking about working more hours -- there are lots of ways to get more productivity without boosting hours.) The biggest challenge we find in taking employees out of an existing culture and transitioning them into ours is instilling that entrepreneurial spirit, the notion that if you want to make a third more next month or next year, it's within your power to do so.
It'll auto-install the Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer!
The fact is, if they're taking in that much income then they chose a wise strategy - one of several possible ones - for dealing with the tax implications. The IRS doesn't like nonprofits that take in ever-larger piles of cash without (somewhat) commensurate outlays, so this is a cash-management strategy as much as anything. Could the foundation start donating wildly to other open-source projects? Could they figure out a way to reimburse developers? Could they turn the money into an investment fund that would earn returns funding the project far into the future. Yes, they could do any of that and much more.
But the thing is, all of that takes time. This is a lot of cash in a relatively short amount of time; the activity that's been undertaken deals with some tax issues without walling off any options in the future.
What about the developers? Shouldn't they have a say in what happens to that money? I'm not a licensing expert (Slashdot is full of 'em - someone chime in), but it seems like a logical fallacy for folks to think that a license allowing free and easy forking would also, implicitly, offer contributory rights of future renumeration or use restriction. It seems like it would be very hard to have both.
The history of open source software is full of good products that forked into great products; if enough developers don't like what's going on, then this may be a case of a great product forking into a phenomenal product. But I frankly don't think that will happen because the brain trust at the foundation (and now, corporation) hasn't made too many mis-steps so far.
My wife and I just came through an addictive run with Oblivion and we're both wondering: Among Gamers Who Know (that would be you folks), what are the options for one-on-one, Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role playing games?
Now, 16 years into it, I travel even more than that long-ago job required and, although we don't love it, we're at peace with it because we've got more shared history and shared stability together. So I guess I'd give you a classic consultant answer and say "it depends."
My disclaimer: We didn't have kids. There's no real way to make that much travel work with kids unless you make your peace with being the de facto equivalent of a divorced couple with visitation rights.
Craigslist is a bitter pill for newspapers - most metro dailies make a third of their advertising revenue from classifieds. McKinsey (insert genuflect here) has a new analysis piece on how papers can fight back. Relevant reading for anyone who follows the industry.
I don't fault the Google guys for their compensation or their decision to try and defer some tax issues. Hell, I don't even fault them for turning their pseudo-salaries into a miniature news event. They're in the business of growing Google, and part of that is playing up the "Google mystique."
Yeah, they make a lot of money no matter how you count it. But you know what? So can you, if you come up with an idea that's good enough and get people to buy into it.
We should look upon home-run successes like Google for inspiration, not class jealousy.
I do worry about the creeping notion that all discrimination is bad at all times; that's simply not the case.
Some people are better qualified -- not merely on technical skills but based on where they are in life, what they want out of the job and what they can bring to the table in terms of time -- than others. It is a manager's job hire these people through a process that adheres to the law and gets the best people on board.
Also, note that merely noticing a ring isn't the same, legally speaking, as asking about your marital status. Neither is thinking "OK, an impending marriage could chew up productivity," the same as a blanket rejection of engaged candidates.
When I interview candidates, I generally talk most of the time - in fact, it's about an 80/20 ratio of my voice to theirs in the first interview.
Why? Because the questions you bring up tell me more about you than any questions I could ask you directly.
What questions are good questions? Ask me how I got my job. Ask me (as another poster mentioned) what I like best about the work environment. Ask me what, if anything, ticks me off on a day-to-day basis. Ask me about the team structure, who you'd be working with and what happened to the guy before you.
What not to ask me: During the first interview, I don't want to hear questions about our family-leave or maternity policies - I am hiring you to work, not to hire on then take a bunch of time off.
Neither do I want to hear about your upcoming wedding/vacation/spiritual retreat "that's been scheduled for several months and can't be moved." Got one of those? Then bring it up during negotiations when I've decided you're the right candidate and you have some leverage... because I can tell you right now, in the first interview, it's all about me: My company, my leverage, my needs being met.
If you're female, don't wear an engagement ring without a wedding band, because I will think "OK, she's likely getting married soon and that'll chew up months of productivity." If you're male, don't mention to me that you coach your kids' soccer team because I'll have the same productivity concerns.
Again: You can be more human in the second and subsequent interviews, but the first interview is a screen, and the only criteria really come down to: Are you engaged and inquisitive? Are you utterly focused on showing me the value you bring to the table? And are you of lower risk/liability than other applicants?
As someone who sells their time, your ability to succeed (beyond your technical skills, of course!) comes down to:
- Your ability to win work;
- Your ability to price work; and
- Your ability to manage projects.
Going to flat-rate pricing or retainer models introduces risk, but it also dramatically lowers your overhead and increases your inventory of time available to sell. You get back the time you currently spend tracking time, tallying it up for billing purposes, etc. You'll find that customers like both flat-rate pricing and (for extended work) retainers because they give them solid numbers to budget against.