It's about the IRS and the state governments not liking that there are 162,037 independent contractors they have to go after for taxes, rather than going after a single choke-point for those same taxes. Thus they would prefer that Uber drivers be employees, rather than contractors.
The answer for Uber is obvious: The cheapest S-corp incorporation runs $39. So to get those 162,037 incorporated as contracting agencies with a single employee would cost $6,319,443.
I'm sure Uber would be happy to pay that out of petty cash. Now the IRS has 162,037 contracting agencies to deal with, all under the total number of employees thresholds that would subject them to most of the government regulations that Uber would be subject to, were they Uber employees.
So they are back in the same regulatory boat they started in, without the ambiguity that regulators are trying to exploit to get their hands on the money, and leaving with exactly the same enforcement issues they wanted to avoid.
They could probably also spin off an "Uber Business Services Division" that charges a flat fee for:
Business license Business name and/or DBA registration Account for taxes Sales tax account Federal and State Tax ID Business checking credit accounts Merchant account (to process credit cards) (or used the new "Uber Payment Provider Gateway" instead) Insurance (business, liability, property, if applicable) Accounting software (or use the new "Uber Books" online accounting system)
Or they could just create a damn franchising company, and make them all franchisees, with Uber's take coming as franchise fees.
P.S.: I suggested a similar approach to AirB&B to incorporate them all as actual B&B's...
If I'm reading your multitude of comments on this subject correctly, you're saying, "fuck the wild honeybees, private industry will just make more of them and truck them around more and everything will be okay. yay capitalism!"
Quiet please.
We are having a moment of silence for the wild cows.
If you'd been watching the attack maps, you'd know that:
(1) It's China (2) It's likely at the government level
If you'd been watching current events, you know that:
(3) China's economy has been crashing, going on three weeks now (4) They're really unhappy about people taking money out of, and shorting, Chinese stocks, adding to the crash (5) They've lost $3.25T in market cap since June 12th (6) That's just over 20% of their Gross National Product
So it's likely they are attacking our financial markets over that.
I'm surprised the researchers were not aware that you can build robots with servos that aren't even in the same room as the "business end" of the robot. Plastic parts don't have to be actuated by locally mounted servos.
As a bonus, you don't have to build tiny servos, or have them packed together in a tiny volume, which drastically reduces the overall cost of the robot itself, as well as them being a heck of a lot easier to repair (making them even cheaper in terms of lifecycle cost).
The key difference is that if you spend an hour sorting out your credit card you continue to live the rest of your life afterwards with few ill effects.
Steve Jobs persuaded an engineer to reduce boot time lower than the engineer though possible by making the equivalence argument. It goes something like this:
Average human life expectancy is 71 years.
Humans are on average conscious for 16 hours per day.
Doing the math, this means you would only have to force 414,915 people to spend an hour "sorting out their credit card" before you've effectively done the equivalent time-damage of killing someone.
Since you can always get the information by showing legal cause and obtaining a court order, I really don't see what use de-anonymizing domain name registration serves, other than to make it less expensive to obtain large amounts of information for relatively little cost, as opposed to having to be sure enough of something that you can justify the court order.
The ICANN proposal as it stands is pretty stupid, and Doug Brent would likely have never had his name associated with it while he was COO, and Jon Postel sure as *hell* would not want his name associated with it.
The trend is away from this for software developer positions, unless you are willing to do contract work. There are several major things driving this right now:
(1) The employer doesn't have to allow it in order to be able to recruit talent, so they don't. A lot of managers engage in "management by walking around", and you are unlikely to get one of these types to sign off.
(2) Stacked ranking. If you're not in the office, and not "seen as being a strong contributor by your nominal coworkers, you'll get ranked poorly, and you will be the first person "PIP'ed" (Performance Improvement Program), and, if there are layoffs, you get to be near the top of the list.
(3) If they don't care where you are working from, be pretty sure that the job isn't going to be landing in a country with expensive labor, like the U.K., the U.S., and so on; if they are going to take on a remote worker, it's not going to be from your neck of the woods.
(4) Employer culture is considered important; if you want to have an employer, expect to come into the office so that they can culturally indoctrinate you. Yahoo laid off all their remote employees over this, and it's been the trend at Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is somewhat part and parcel with the stacked ranking, but it's the other side of the coin.
JailBreakMe.com did a similar thing on iPhones: patched the tiff library exploit that it used to get on the phones in the first place, making it impossible to re-exploit.
I did the same thing with the Commodore Amiga in 1985, modifying a boot virus to include a payload that would patch the MOVE from processor SR. This let me install a 68010, which let me run SVR3 on the thing, without breaking a lot of popular software like Magic Sack and Transformer, both of which used the privileged version of the instruction for no good reason.
In all seriousness though, have you ever tried to analyse unstructured text? It's hard. How would you realistically improve it? Do you start with a preconceived list of technology key words and count them in the resumes? People misspell words. Words have multiple meanings depending on context.
I've been writing code like this since 1985. Then, it was in LISP.
It's actually trivial to me at this point. You end up with a meaning trie with differential probability vectors, and some of the roots wither away as you go down. Making a machine decision is harder, but not entirely impossible.
I get incredibly annoyed at people like Lazlo Bock who want to put everyone's resumes into a form that basically allows Google (Lazlo Bock works for Google) or other companies to magically allow you to come into a new job under the horse collar of a performance review of your previous job which they were in no way involved with.
The whole "HR metrics" industry... uh... kinda pisses me off? I pick companies based on criterion other than standard metrics. If they pick me that way... they do not deserve me. Mostly they stumble into me, I fix them, and then I exit.
I understand the "OMG we need people who know what they are doing and not recent graduates!" panic. Does not mean I sympathize.
the really valuable work is done while I'm in the shower or in bed
This together with the question "Why would anyone want to watch someone code?" makes me think in the lines of pornstars pretending to be programmers in the shower.
And then he opened the SPARCStation pizza box to reveal... a Zilog UART!
"I think that’s pretty cool, given we’re generating that automatically from job descriptions posted on our site. We also tried using the resume dataset, but the results were of a lower quality, as the skills extracted from resumes can be from different jobs."
It was extracted from job-postings, which would only identify Schelling points in the hiring industry, not skill clusters common to people with certain desirable skill sets; in other words, it "how to fudge your resume", rather than "how to find employees like the ones I have which I like".
They took the similarity vectors from the job postings, not from resumes, so rather than "what you're likely to know", they computed "what an employer is likely to want at the same time as wanting something else", and then declared that a similarity due to an already skewed cosine similarity metric. This happens because employers are more likely to copy other, similar job postings, or other job postings for companies in a similar business as them, or those of a company whose employees they wish to hire away.
They claimed that they tried using resumes, but that the resulting data was not as "clean"; uh... duh?
This visualization was not actually very useful, unless you are trying to design a resume to get yourself hired, regardless of your actual current capabilities.
How can you tell? Just because the plaintiff says so? Some of those reviews look legit and yes a few look fake. I notice he doesn't complain about the obviously fake good reviews (how does a company in Cali get a positive review from a teen in New Jersey.)
If the images are anything to go by, then one of them is a Hasidic Jew from Israel, another is an actress in Chicago, and another is some guy in New York.
Unless they aren't, in which case their picture icons are being used in violation of Copyright, unless they have written permission from the image owners...
The stories about jobs and careers are getting so tiresome. I realize Dice bought Slashdot to datamine the comments (free focus group!), but it seems like half the stories are a variation on the same these days.
It's the non-engineers.
They have this misconception that people used to dealing with the intricate semantics of programming languages are going to be unaware of the intricate semantics of English. Therefore, if they ask a question once, and do not get an answer they like, they will repeatedly ask the same question in different guises, hoping to obtain the answer they wanted to hear.
This really comes down to who is more patient than whom.
I usually attempt to buffer my answers in order to soften the blow, but you can ask the same question as many ways as you want, and the answer will likely not change, so long as it is fundamentally the same question. And I usually have the patience of Job. However, there was one incident where I was up against a deadline, and was being asked to "just cobble together something that works, and we'll (read: you'll) fix it (read: in a binary compatible way) later. Which was an impossibility (I was working on some very complex database code written in C++ which did subschema definitional enforcement on an upper level database schema, and the semantics had to be correct for the data stored in the binary backing store to be usable going forward, when we did the next update). The code had to be *right*, as opposed to *right now*, and the time difference was important.
We had a UI person who was in a management position, and they brought her over to argue their case that immediate was better than correct (correct would fit under the deadline, but only if everyone left me alone to finish the code). The UI person was constantly revising the UI in each release, and each release was practically a full rewrite. And she did not understand why I could not write my code the same way she wrote hers. Finally having had enough, I explained "It's OK if your code is crap; you are going to rewrite it in the next release anyway. My code has to work now, and it has to continue to work going forward, and therefore it needs to be correct. I understand that you are feeling the approaching deadline. So am I. However, while your code can be crap, mine can't be because I have to maintain it going forward. Now if you will get the hell out of my office, I will be able to finish the code by the deadline."
Needless to say, there were some ruffled feathers. The director of engineering sided with me. I completed the (correct, rather than expedient) code by the deadline, and the product didn't turn into unmaintainable crap vis-a-vis the update process going forward.
What's the moral to this story?
Well, with specific regard to DICE:
(1) Repeatedly asking the same question in different ways is not going to get them a different answer, if the first answer was correct. Any other answer than that answer would be incorrect, for the question asked.
With specific regard to the current topic:
(2) Engineers who actually reliably, repeatedly, and consistently deliver what they are asked to deliver, within the timeframe that was agreed upon, can, and often do, wield more authority than the managers nominally set above them in the food chain, so it's not like going into management is going to give you any more real authority than you already have by way of your relationship with the team, and their trust of your judgement.
A management path can be a good idea if:
(A) You want more perks (stock options, etc.), although in a good company, if you are a great engineer, you will get those anyway
(B) You are tired of doing engineering for a living (which probably means you didn't qualify as "great engineer" under option 'A' anyway)
(C) You feel you would be more useful and/or happier in such a position (but if your happiness is based on power, don't expect it will necessarily follow)
Slashdot Mirror
We all know what this is really about.
Revenue collection.
It's about the IRS and the state governments not liking that there are 162,037 independent contractors they have to go after for taxes, rather than going after a single choke-point for those same taxes. Thus they would prefer that Uber drivers be employees, rather than contractors.
The answer for Uber is obvious: The cheapest S-corp incorporation runs $39. So to get those 162,037 incorporated as contracting agencies with a single employee would cost $6,319,443.
I'm sure Uber would be happy to pay that out of petty cash. Now the IRS has 162,037 contracting agencies to deal with, all under the total number of employees thresholds that would subject them to most of the government regulations that Uber would be subject to, were they Uber employees.
So they are back in the same regulatory boat they started in, without the ambiguity that regulators are trying to exploit to get their hands on the money, and leaving with exactly the same enforcement issues they wanted to avoid.
They could probably also spin off an "Uber Business Services Division" that charges a flat fee for:
Business license
Business name and/or DBA registration
Account for taxes
Sales tax account
Federal and State Tax ID
Business checking credit accounts
Merchant account (to process credit cards) (or used the new "Uber Payment Provider Gateway" instead)
Insurance (business, liability, property, if applicable)
Accounting software (or use the new "Uber Books" online accounting system)
Or they could just create a damn franchising company, and make them all franchisees, with Uber's take coming as franchise fees.
P.S.: I suggested a similar approach to AirB&B to incorporate them all as actual B&B's...
If I'm reading your multitude of comments on this subject correctly, you're saying, "fuck the wild honeybees, private industry will just make more of them and truck them around more and everything will be okay. yay capitalism!"
Quiet please.
We are having a moment of silence for the wild cows.
If you'd been watching the attack maps, you'd know that:
(1) It's China
(2) It's likely at the government level
If you'd been watching current events, you know that:
(3) China's economy has been crashing, going on three weeks now
(4) They're really unhappy about people taking money out of, and shorting, Chinese stocks, adding to the crash
(5) They've lost $3.25T in market cap since June 12th
(6) That's just over 20% of their Gross National Product
So it's likely they are attacking our financial markets over that.
See also:
"Key things to know about China's market meltdown"
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/08/...
I'm surprised the researchers were not aware that you can build robots with servos that aren't even in the same room as the "business end" of the robot. Plastic parts don't have to be actuated by locally mounted servos.
As a bonus, you don't have to build tiny servos, or have them packed together in a tiny volume, which drastically reduces the overall cost of the robot itself, as well as them being a heck of a lot easier to repair (making them even cheaper in terms of lifecycle cost).
Test engineer says... big companies need to hire more test engineers.
Are we surprised?
I'm not so sure I agree that this make sense...
Comcast does; they just opened up about a million public WiFi hotspots in peoples houses.
The key difference is that if you spend an hour sorting out your credit card you continue to live the rest of your life afterwards with few ill effects.
Steve Jobs persuaded an engineer to reduce boot time lower than the engineer though possible by making the equivalence argument. It goes something like this:
Average human life expectancy is 71 years.
Humans are on average conscious for 16 hours per day.
Doing the math, this means you would only have to force 414,915 people to spend an hour "sorting out their credit card" before you've effectively done the equivalent time-damage of killing someone.
It's no longer open; you missed it by a day.
GNSO Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group Initial Report
https://www.icann.org/public-c...
I am pretty sure the actual cause of the floods... was water.
Also, if they'd just let it float across the Pacific to California, like it used to, it'd solve a lot of problems for everyone.
Since you can always get the information by showing legal cause and obtaining a court order, I really don't see what use de-anonymizing domain name registration serves, other than to make it less expensive to obtain large amounts of information for relatively little cost, as opposed to having to be sure enough of something that you can justify the court order.
The ICANN proposal as it stands is pretty stupid, and Doug Brent would likely have never had his name associated with it while he was COO, and Jon Postel sure as *hell* would not want his name associated with it.
Generally? You don't.
The trend is away from this for software developer positions, unless you are willing to do contract work. There are several major things driving this right now:
(1) The employer doesn't have to allow it in order to be able to recruit talent, so they don't. A lot of managers engage in "management by walking around", and you are unlikely to get one of these types to sign off.
(2) Stacked ranking. If you're not in the office, and not "seen as being a strong contributor by your nominal coworkers, you'll get ranked poorly, and you will be the first person "PIP'ed" (Performance Improvement Program), and, if there are layoffs, you get to be near the top of the list.
(3) If they don't care where you are working from, be pretty sure that the job isn't going to be landing in a country with expensive labor, like the U.K., the U.S., and so on; if they are going to take on a remote worker, it's not going to be from your neck of the woods.
(4) Employer culture is considered important; if you want to have an employer, expect to come into the office so that they can culturally indoctrinate you. Yahoo laid off all their remote employees over this, and it's been the trend at Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is somewhat part and parcel with the stacked ranking, but it's the other side of the coin.
JailBreakMe.com did a similar thing on iPhones: patched the tiff library exploit that it used to get on the phones in the first place, making it impossible to re-exploit.
I did the same thing with the Commodore Amiga in 1985, modifying a boot virus to include a payload that would patch the MOVE from processor SR. This let me install a 68010, which let me run SVR3 on the thing, without breaking a lot of popular software like Magic Sack and Transformer, both of which used the privileged version of the instruction for no good reason.
In all seriousness though, have you ever tried to analyse unstructured text? It's hard. How would you realistically improve it? Do you start with a preconceived list of technology key words and count them in the resumes? People misspell words. Words have multiple meanings depending on context.
I've been writing code like this since 1985. Then, it was in LISP.
It's actually trivial to me at this point. You end up with a meaning trie with differential probability vectors, and some of the roots wither away as you go down. Making a machine decision is harder, but not entirely impossible.
I get incredibly annoyed at people like Lazlo Bock who want to put everyone's resumes into a form that basically allows Google (Lazlo Bock works for Google) or other companies to magically allow you to come into a new job under the horse collar of a performance review of your previous job which they were in no way involved with.
The whole "HR metrics" industry... uh... kinda pisses me off? I pick companies based on criterion other than standard metrics. If they pick me that way... they do not deserve me. Mostly they stumble into me, I fix them, and then I exit.
I understand the "OMG we need people who know what they are doing and not recent graduates!" panic. Does not mean I sympathize.
Ah, you're right. Thank you for that correction.
No problemo
I miss subtle stuff all the time. I rely on really strict semantics in place of "not trusting people", which I have a hard time doing (data is data).
the really valuable work is done while I'm in the shower or in bed
This together with the question "Why would anyone want to watch someone code?" makes me think in the lines of pornstars pretending to be programmers in the shower.
And then he opened the SPARCStation pizza box to reveal... a Zilog UART!
And your code directly from your head just compiles and does what you expect with every permutation of inputs the first time around?
For my 22K of code...
Yes. 3 bugs.
Side Comment: why slashdot.org is the only site not allowing to edit your posts?
Errors are less of a problem than revisionist history.
I spent 4 weeks thinking, and then I coded 22,000 lines of C++ in about two weeks.
Ended up in wrist braces.
The code was worth it.
Give me the fixed cell VT102 (yes, I need a printer) font any day.
Also it is much better for code.
Read the blog post again. http://insights.dice.com/2015/...
"I think that’s pretty cool, given we’re generating that automatically from job descriptions posted on our site. We also tried using the resume dataset, but the results were of a lower quality, as the skills extracted from resumes can be from different jobs."
It was extracted from job-postings, which would only identify Schelling points in the hiring industry, not skill clusters common to people with certain desirable skill sets; in other words, it "how to fudge your resume", rather than "how to find employees like the ones I have which I like".
It's not very reliable data.
They took the similarity vectors from the job postings, not from resumes, so rather than "what you're likely to know", they computed "what an employer is likely to want at the same time as wanting something else", and then declared that a similarity due to an already skewed cosine similarity metric. This happens because employers are more likely to copy other, similar job postings, or other job postings for companies in a similar business as them, or those of a company whose employees they wish to hire away.
They claimed that they tried using resumes, but that the resulting data was not as "clean"; uh... duh?
This visualization was not actually very useful, unless you are trying to design a resume to get yourself hired, regardless of your actual current capabilities.
Secret struggle...
Thanks a hell of a lot. Now it's no longer a secret!
How can you tell? Just because the plaintiff says so? Some of those reviews look legit and yes a few look fake. I notice he doesn't complain about the obviously fake good reviews (how does a company in Cali get a positive review from a teen in New Jersey.)
If the images are anything to go by, then one of them is a Hasidic Jew from Israel, another is an actress in Chicago, and another is some guy in New York.
Unless they aren't, in which case their picture icons are being used in violation of Copyright, unless they have written permission from the image owners...
The stories about jobs and careers are getting so tiresome. I realize Dice bought Slashdot to datamine the comments (free focus group!), but it seems like half the stories are a variation on the same these days.
It's the non-engineers.
They have this misconception that people used to dealing with the intricate semantics of programming languages are going to be unaware of the intricate semantics of English. Therefore, if they ask a question once, and do not get an answer they like, they will repeatedly ask the same question in different guises, hoping to obtain the answer they wanted to hear.
This really comes down to who is more patient than whom.
I usually attempt to buffer my answers in order to soften the blow, but you can ask the same question as many ways as you want, and the answer will likely not change, so long as it is fundamentally the same question. And I usually have the patience of Job. However, there was one incident where I was up against a deadline, and was being asked to "just cobble together something that works, and we'll (read: you'll) fix it (read: in a binary compatible way) later. Which was an impossibility (I was working on some very complex database code written in C++ which did subschema definitional enforcement on an upper level database schema, and the semantics had to be correct for the data stored in the binary backing store to be usable going forward, when we did the next update). The code had to be *right*, as opposed to *right now*, and the time difference was important.
We had a UI person who was in a management position, and they brought her over to argue their case that immediate was better than correct (correct would fit under the deadline, but only if everyone left me alone to finish the code). The UI person was constantly revising the UI in each release, and each release was practically a full rewrite. And she did not understand why I could not write my code the same way she wrote hers. Finally having had enough, I explained "It's OK if your code is crap; you are going to rewrite it in the next release anyway. My code has to work now, and it has to continue to work going forward, and therefore it needs to be correct. I understand that you are feeling the approaching deadline. So am I. However, while your code can be crap, mine can't be because I have to maintain it going forward. Now if you will get the hell out of my office, I will be able to finish the code by the deadline."
Needless to say, there were some ruffled feathers. The director of engineering sided with me. I completed the (correct, rather than expedient) code by the deadline, and the product didn't turn into unmaintainable crap vis-a-vis the update process going forward.
What's the moral to this story?
Well, with specific regard to DICE:
(1) Repeatedly asking the same question in different ways is not going to get them a different answer, if the first answer was correct. Any other answer than that answer would be incorrect, for the question asked.
With specific regard to the current topic:
(2) Engineers who actually reliably, repeatedly, and consistently deliver what they are asked to deliver, within the timeframe that was agreed upon, can, and often do, wield more authority than the managers nominally set above them in the food chain, so it's not like going into management is going to give you any more real authority than you already have by way of your relationship with the team, and their trust of your judgement.
A management path can be a good idea if:
(A) You want more perks (stock options, etc.), although in a good company, if you are a great engineer, you will get those anyway
(B) You are tired of doing engineering for a living (which probably means you didn't qualify as "great engineer" under option 'A' anyway)
(C) You feel you would be more useful and/or happier in such a position (but if your happiness is based on power, don't expect it will necessarily follow)
(D) You
Show me a pilot that has to rely on their instruments and I'll show a pilot who can't fly.
Contrarywise, show me a pilot who *can* rely on their instruments, and I'll show you one who can land at SFO in the fog.