Vertica says HELLO! Even though its -absurdly- expensive, it runs circle around anything open source.
Though in general, large (really large) databases is an area where you actually want commercial support, because things can go wrong in the most fucked up ways.
Open source dbs have companies doing that support, but few have the kind of manpower I'd want when things go very sour.
You know what it is. If you fight illegal immigration right now, you're instantly labeled racist and against "cultural diversity" (its not very diverse when it all comes from one part of a continent...)
I read somewhere that in the US, administration accounted for something silly like 40% of the expenses (Im making the number up from memory).
Mainly because its a constant fight between the hospitals and offices trying to milk the insurances for all they've got, and insurers trying to control costs without having to call bullshit on every single claim.
That has been my issue with the US health care system.
Now, don't let anyone else fool you: the Canadian health care system sucks balls. And since not EVERYTHING is free, to get decent care (plus dentist!), you need private insurance. And on my pay checks, all that cost more out of my pocket than it does with half decent insurance in Boston. I'm fully aware its because my employer is paying more and shit, but that's a debate for another day.
Anyway, because of some ongoing health problems, I've been to the ER way more often than I'd like, and am constantly going to the clinic. The copays aren't bad, wait times are nearly inexistant, all is good.
The problem is, the paperwork. I get a stream of letters asking me to verify this or that, a single visit ends up in 8 distinct bills, all coming from different organizations and have to be paid separately. Half of them can't be paid online (even from hospitals like MGH. Wtf? _MGH_!!! Those that do end up needing to be paid on weird shady sites.
And then I'll get 3 bills, all 3 of different amounts, to be paid to 3 different offices, and they all say "office visit".
When I call, I'm told one is for the doctor, one is for the hospital facilities, and one is for the in-office labs (But I get ANOTHER bill for the labs).
In the end its pretty obvious whats happening. They're milking my insurance. Bill from 3 different entities for the same thing, and the insurance will pay all 3 for the same service. During that time, I'm caught in the cross fire paying the co-pay 3 times, and the bill is far too vague for me to do anything about it.
And what can I do? Refuse to pay it? They'll just send it to collection.
And thats when they get it right. The secretaries in charge of the paperwork are usually not the brightest bulbs... I have an out of state PPO insurance, and they always forget to enter the prefix part of my insurance (because its not necessary unless its out of state). Then bill me for not having insurance instead of calling to work it out.
Pain in the ass.
I don't mind the cost. At all. The paperwork though can go to hell.
IE at this point is arguably better than Firefox, the later having fallen from grace quite a bit.
Also, I know you said web devs don't count, but recently, IE11's devtools have been updated to be pretty good. They're not on par with Chrome's, but for some stuff (sourcemaps), they're better (and are leaps and bounds better than anything available on Firefox).
Abortion laws in case of rapes are usually fine because the victim isn't a guy. And in most places, the state will prefer some family member taking the kid over adoption. So maybe an aunt on the side of the mother will take care of it during the 6-12 months the mother is in prison (because the rape was on a guy, so it will be considered a fairly minor offense).
Gonna need a citation for that one. Obviously rape is illegal and should be prosecuted. I don't see how it relates to this kind of responsibility, since the actual problem (if it's true) is that the police failed to investigate and prosecute a rape. If they had, the father could have put the child up for adoption immediately and be absolved of the responsibility to pay maintenance.
You won't, because its so common you can look it up in 3 seconds with statutory rapes instead of "guy being drugged". The laws are very clear the responsability is to the child, not the mother, and thus the fact that the mother is a rapist is irrelevent. The rape victim has to pony up the cash.
Something that makes things pretty shitty in this situation is that the guy basically had no chance:
If you read around, a lot of people pointed out no contractual agreement can legally be enforced over giving up rights and responsibilities to the child. It doesn't matter what was signed as far as custody or child support or whatever, give or take.
Now, when they were together, the girl had cancer, and wants to freeze her egg. No problem. But then they are told the eggs should be fertilized first. Now, you have a cancer patient in front of you begging you to help her keep her long dream of having a child.
If your answer is: "Sorry sweetie...but if shit was to hit the fan, no matter what we agree to now or sign, no matter how much you ask me to trust you today, if we don't work out, my life could be ruined because there's nothing we can do to force these eggs to be destroyed once we're no longer together".
Yeah, you'd be crucified on the spot by everyone who ever hears that story. So the guy more or less HAD to go through with it, or pay a very high moral/social cost.
And now that shit DID hit the fan, its basically: "Well, if you didn't want this to happen, you shouldn't have gone on with it!!!".
I personally just went and paid the social cost: When i got into a relationship, i made it very clear kids were not for me, period. Before we got married, I made it very clear yet again. Some people thought i was a horrible person for making these kind of "demands", but she was ok with it. 15 years later, she still is.
My wife interviewed for Google around that time, and pretty much all of that happened. There was a local Google office, and we know who the interviewer was, and it was a Google engineer. And pretty much everything described happened. And it was VERY common at the time (the google docs link was given on the spot, though. No video conferencing).
Interviewer who barely spoke english on speaker phone who barely seemed interested. Check!
"Brushing up" is not a solution as it takes precious family time away and perpetuates the fact that IT HR keeps relying on standardized interview loops to select established and employed senior industry hires. Why can't companies offer an easy to terminate 1 months trial period contract on a well matched technical background? A match can be easily established through documentation, interviews and presentations by the candidate - and after the trial period is over the hiring team can make a decision based on a minimum of 160h of actual work done by the candidate.
I brought that up at my current employer, because we're trying to hire a lot, and no interview process will be perfect. Make it too hard, you have too many false negative (and the smarter people even just walk straight out). Make it easier so you don't miss out on geniuses who are just bad at interviewing, and you suddenly find yourself with a ton of shitty people.
So yes, the solution is to hire fast, and to lay off faster (after a trial period). Netflix supposingly does this.
The problem: First, the trial needs to be longer. In the first month, a lot of issues will simply be attributed to ramping up. Depending on the problem space, you may need 3 months, or more (I worked somewhere once where the problem space was so large and the ramp up so long, you really wouldn't know until 6+ months in. Thats rare though).
Second, most people thought it was "immoral" to hire someone and then lay them off. "People have bills!". "The interview process should just be better!". "Don't make people pay for your mistakes! If you hired them, you keep them!".
So instead, all of the people who are begging to be given a chance, are just left in the cold.
The average is still in the 20s. If most of your team was in the 40s+, it is a fluke.
Google's interview process is also incredibly inconsistent. So of course, some people will have a better experience than the majority. You can brush up all you want, but there's countless algorithms, and it just takes ones.
And I'm just talking about the on-sites... the phone screens (if you're not skipping it via references)?. God forbid you're a little slow typing out a A* in fucking google doc (use coderpad or something, please?)
Google is a discrimination factory, but in this case, there's a deeper problem, and its, what I'll call, the "MIT culture".
You have a bunch of people who busted their ass off to go through MIT/CMU/CalTech/Whatever, to learn all those algorithms, the computer science core, etc, and are thrown in the real world where, while VERY useful, are only a small subsets of things that matter.
Then you ask these people, who spent 4 (or 6, or more) years being drilled that the only shit that matters was what they learnt in school, and worked REALLY hard to absorb that, to interview.
What do you think will happen?
You end up with an interview process that, regardless of the actual work, the further away from school you are (ie: the older you are), the less likely you are to pass the interview, give or take people who worked as data or algorithm scientists in the recent past.
Net result: you have a very high percentage of college hire, and your lateral hires will always lean toward the younger side. Any skill that come with experience is almost never tested in interviews to counterbalance it.
The marketing was good. The device sucked, and beyond the touch screen and including an actually adequate browser, was barely an incremental improvement over what was out there. Yeah, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile sucked, but the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't).
The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention. More importantly, they managed to make it cool and hip, instead of being a geek toy. With those 2 things, Apple could have pushed out a white Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone exactly like the ones that existed at the time, and ended with very similar results.
When they ace it, end up in one of the ultra competitive CS schools (or work environment) and haven't been exposed to whatever it is that causes female students to not do well right now, all in one shot? It would even out eventually, but the first few batches will be in for a rude awakening.
Yup, so here's the dirty secret that this ends up showing, assuming something like this became a lot more common.
Lower paying companies will end up with a higher percentage of women. The men will simply hold on offers and pick between multiple ones to get the higher paying ones. So you end up with lower paying companies full of women (who just took the job) and higher paying ones mostly with men who selected on that criteria (for better or worse).
Then in the news, the higher paying companies end up being called out for being sexist and not hiring enough women, even though it was basically self selecting by the candidates themselves.
All monetary transactions are like that. Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.
6+ figure long term transactions however always are... You can even negotiate your mortgage rate if you do business with someone who actually wants it (no, Citibank doesn't count)
Its so much more complicated than that. Roles and skill levels vary so much, along with the market itself, that the last rate previously negotiated may just not apply at all (right now, it would almost always be below unless you're hiring someone every other day).
Pretty much. And the issue is that tabs gone wrong is only visible once its viewed by someone with different settings, which will be uncommon in homogeneous teams ("Whats your tab setting?" "2 space width" "Ok, cool, ill use that too!")
Then people brush it off in the code review or don't notice, and 6 weeks later its a mess.
This can be pretty trippy lately as the various "products" are diverging quite a bit.
I hadn't used MySQL in ages, and recently moved to a company that did for their smaller transnational dbs. It messed me up big time to see queries that had stuff in the select part that were not in the group by clause or aggregates.
Then someone asked me for help with a Vertica query...and that is pretty bizzare in itself, being a vertical store with fairly high postgresql compatibility. Some stuff you expect to work just plain don't for weird reason (if you're not used to it. They all make sense once you understand the product's limitations). Other things that are completely unthinkable on a normal relational dbs however work just fine there (doing a where clause on a column ran through a function on a 500gb column, which would cause an impossibly slow full table scan in a normal relational db, run nearly instantly...)
But once you really understand how Git works, you're ruined for every other version control system. When I'm forced to use TFS for a project, I use Git locally and Git-TFS to keep them in sync. Now I commit often, all day long, tracking all my changes and (relatively) easy rolling them back or reordering them if necessary.
Yup. I can deal with any language (ok, aside PHP...), any operating system (yeah, I don't mind developing on Windows), any framework, any technology...but source control has to be on git or I'm out.
No other tool affects my workflow so deeply at this point.
Except when you forget the --rebase and now have hours of work fixing your tree.
Any merge conflict and you'll notice something fast what happened, and then you can simply abort. If someone there's no conflict, you can just look at the reflog and reset to the pre-merge commit.
Slashdot Mirror
Vertica says HELLO! Even though its -absurdly- expensive, it runs circle around anything open source.
Though in general, large (really large) databases is an area where you actually want commercial support, because things can go wrong in the most fucked up ways.
Open source dbs have companies doing that support, but few have the kind of manpower I'd want when things go very sour.
You know what it is. If you fight illegal immigration right now, you're instantly labeled racist and against "cultural diversity" (its not very diverse when it all comes from one part of a continent...)
Vaccines however are free game.
hard enough that IE11 will still be supported for a while in parallel.
Thats the whole point of Edge. So that Microsoft can have a real browser without leaving the big corps legacy shit behind.
I read somewhere that in the US, administration accounted for something silly like 40% of the expenses (Im making the number up from memory).
Mainly because its a constant fight between the hospitals and offices trying to milk the insurances for all they've got, and insurers trying to control costs without having to call bullshit on every single claim.
In a way, it works like the IRS.
That has been my issue with the US health care system.
Now, don't let anyone else fool you: the Canadian health care system sucks balls. And since not EVERYTHING is free, to get decent care (plus dentist!), you need private insurance. And on my pay checks, all that cost more out of my pocket than it does with half decent insurance in Boston. I'm fully aware its because my employer is paying more and shit, but that's a debate for another day.
Anyway, because of some ongoing health problems, I've been to the ER way more often than I'd like, and am constantly going to the clinic. The copays aren't bad, wait times are nearly inexistant, all is good.
The problem is, the paperwork. I get a stream of letters asking me to verify this or that, a single visit ends up in 8 distinct bills, all coming from different organizations and have to be paid separately. Half of them can't be paid online (even from hospitals like MGH. Wtf? _MGH_!!! Those that do end up needing to be paid on weird shady sites.
And then I'll get 3 bills, all 3 of different amounts, to be paid to 3 different offices, and they all say "office visit".
When I call, I'm told one is for the doctor, one is for the hospital facilities, and one is for the in-office labs (But I get ANOTHER bill for the labs).
In the end its pretty obvious whats happening. They're milking my insurance. Bill from 3 different entities for the same thing, and the insurance will pay all 3 for the same service. During that time, I'm caught in the cross fire paying the co-pay 3 times, and the bill is far too vague for me to do anything about it.
And what can I do? Refuse to pay it? They'll just send it to collection.
And thats when they get it right. The secretaries in charge of the paperwork are usually not the brightest bulbs... I have an out of state PPO insurance, and they always forget to enter the prefix part of my insurance (because its not necessary unless its out of state). Then bill me for not having insurance instead of calling to work it out.
Pain in the ass.
I don't mind the cost. At all. The paperwork though can go to hell.
IE at this point is arguably better than Firefox, the later having fallen from grace quite a bit.
Also, I know you said web devs don't count, but recently, IE11's devtools have been updated to be pretty good. They're not on par with Chrome's, but for some stuff (sourcemaps), they're better (and are leaps and bounds better than anything available on Firefox).
Abortion laws in case of rapes are usually fine because the victim isn't a guy. And in most places, the state will prefer some family member taking the kid over adoption. So maybe an aunt on the side of the mother will take care of it during the 6-12 months the mother is in prison (because the rape was on a guy, so it will be considered a fairly minor offense).
Yes, the law is broken...almost everywhere.
You won't, because its so common you can look it up in 3 seconds with statutory rapes instead of "guy being drugged". The laws are very clear the responsability is to the child, not the mother, and thus the fact that the mother is a rapist is irrelevent. The rape victim has to pony up the cash.
Isn't that great?
Something that makes things pretty shitty in this situation is that the guy basically had no chance:
If you read around, a lot of people pointed out no contractual agreement can legally be enforced over giving up rights and responsibilities to the child. It doesn't matter what was signed as far as custody or child support or whatever, give or take.
Now, when they were together, the girl had cancer, and wants to freeze her egg. No problem. But then they are told the eggs should be fertilized first. Now, you have a cancer patient in front of you begging you to help her keep her long dream of having a child.
If your answer is: "Sorry sweetie...but if shit was to hit the fan, no matter what we agree to now or sign, no matter how much you ask me to trust you today, if we don't work out, my life could be ruined because there's nothing we can do to force these eggs to be destroyed once we're no longer together".
Yeah, you'd be crucified on the spot by everyone who ever hears that story. So the guy more or less HAD to go through with it, or pay a very high moral/social cost.
And now that shit DID hit the fan, its basically: "Well, if you didn't want this to happen, you shouldn't have gone on with it!!!".
I personally just went and paid the social cost: When i got into a relationship, i made it very clear kids were not for me, period. Before we got married, I made it very clear yet again. Some people thought i was a horrible person for making these kind of "demands", but she was ok with it. 15 years later, she still is.
Thats not for everyone though.
That's pretty common in parts of the US, too, though.
My wife interviewed for Google around that time, and pretty much all of that happened. There was a local Google office, and we know who the interviewer was, and it was a Google engineer. And pretty much everything described happened. And it was VERY common at the time (the google docs link was given on the spot, though. No video conferencing).
Interviewer who barely spoke english on speaker phone who barely seemed interested. Check!
I brought that up at my current employer, because we're trying to hire a lot, and no interview process will be perfect. Make it too hard, you have too many false negative (and the smarter people even just walk straight out). Make it easier so you don't miss out on geniuses who are just bad at interviewing, and you suddenly find yourself with a ton of shitty people.
So yes, the solution is to hire fast, and to lay off faster (after a trial period). Netflix supposingly does this.
The problem: First, the trial needs to be longer. In the first month, a lot of issues will simply be attributed to ramping up. Depending on the problem space, you may need 3 months, or more (I worked somewhere once where the problem space was so large and the ramp up so long, you really wouldn't know until 6+ months in. Thats rare though).
Second, most people thought it was "immoral" to hire someone and then lay them off. "People have bills!". "The interview process should just be better!". "Don't make people pay for your mistakes! If you hired them, you keep them!".
So instead, all of the people who are begging to be given a chance, are just left in the cold.
The average is still in the 20s. If most of your team was in the 40s+, it is a fluke.
Google's interview process is also incredibly inconsistent. So of course, some people will have a better experience than the majority. You can brush up all you want, but there's countless algorithms, and it just takes ones.
And I'm just talking about the on-sites... the phone screens (if you're not skipping it via references)?. God forbid you're a little slow typing out a A* in fucking google doc (use coderpad or something, please?)
Google is a discrimination factory, but in this case, there's a deeper problem, and its, what I'll call, the "MIT culture".
You have a bunch of people who busted their ass off to go through MIT/CMU/CalTech/Whatever, to learn all those algorithms, the computer science core, etc, and are thrown in the real world where, while VERY useful, are only a small subsets of things that matter.
Then you ask these people, who spent 4 (or 6, or more) years being drilled that the only shit that matters was what they learnt in school, and worked REALLY hard to absorb that, to interview.
What do you think will happen?
You end up with an interview process that, regardless of the actual work, the further away from school you are (ie: the older you are), the less likely you are to pass the interview, give or take people who worked as data or algorithm scientists in the recent past.
Net result: you have a very high percentage of college hire, and your lateral hires will always lean toward the younger side. Any skill that come with experience is almost never tested in interviews to counterbalance it.
Let's ignore IQ then.
Still, the fact remain, by most definition of intelligence, someone very smart would know more things, be more "aware" of the world, etc.
And the world fucking sucks. The more you know and understand it, the more depressing it is.
The marketing was good. The device sucked, and beyond the touch screen and including an actually adequate browser, was barely an incremental improvement over what was out there. Yeah, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile sucked, but the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't).
The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention. More importantly, they managed to make it cool and hip, instead of being a geek toy. With those 2 things, Apple could have pushed out a white Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone exactly like the ones that existed at the time, and ended with very similar results.
When they ace it, end up in one of the ultra competitive CS schools (or work environment) and haven't been exposed to whatever it is that causes female students to not do well right now, all in one shot? It would even out eventually, but the first few batches will be in for a rude awakening.
Don't forget that in North America, people pop these pain killers like candies the moment their head feels a little stuffy.
That makes it a bigger deal (of course the fact that they're overused in the first place is an issue in itself)
Yup, so here's the dirty secret that this ends up showing, assuming something like this became a lot more common.
Lower paying companies will end up with a higher percentage of women. The men will simply hold on offers and pick between multiple ones to get the higher paying ones. So you end up with lower paying companies full of women (who just took the job) and higher paying ones mostly with men who selected on that criteria (for better or worse).
Then in the news, the higher paying companies end up being called out for being sexist and not hiring enough women, even though it was basically self selecting by the candidates themselves.
End result: everybody loses.
6+ figure long term transactions however always are... You can even negotiate your mortgage rate if you do business with someone who actually wants it (no, Citibank doesn't count)
Its so much more complicated than that. Roles and skill levels vary so much, along with the market itself, that the last rate previously negotiated may just not apply at all (right now, it would almost always be below unless you're hiring someone every other day).
Pretty much. And the issue is that tabs gone wrong is only visible once its viewed by someone with different settings, which will be uncommon in homogeneous teams ("Whats your tab setting?" "2 space width" "Ok, cool, ill use that too!")
Then people brush it off in the code review or don't notice, and 6 weeks later its a mess.
This can be pretty trippy lately as the various "products" are diverging quite a bit.
I hadn't used MySQL in ages, and recently moved to a company that did for their smaller transnational dbs. It messed me up big time to see queries that had stuff in the select part that were not in the group by clause or aggregates.
Then someone asked me for help with a Vertica query...and that is pretty bizzare in itself, being a vertical store with fairly high postgresql compatibility. Some stuff you expect to work just plain don't for weird reason (if you're not used to it. They all make sense once you understand the product's limitations). Other things that are completely unthinkable on a normal relational dbs however work just fine there (doing a where clause on a column ran through a function on a 500gb column, which would cause an impossibly slow full table scan in a normal relational db, run nearly instantly...)
Its a big, big world out there...
Yup. I can deal with any language (ok, aside PHP...), any operating system (yeah, I don't mind developing on Windows), any framework, any technology...but source control has to be on git or I'm out.
No other tool affects my workflow so deeply at this point.
Any merge conflict and you'll notice something fast what happened, and then you can simply abort. If someone there's no conflict, you can just look at the reflog and reset to the pre-merge commit.
Whoop-y-doo.