So the trick for them is to be sneaky. Do it only in areas without google fiber or other competition (thats still most of their market base). Then put the gap quite a bit above the average netflix watcher.
That 300gb is probably at least 100gb above that threshold. Marginalize publicly the crowd that uses torrents and stuff (youths and techies may see through that, but the average joe can still be convinced that piracy is "evil").
Then the people who bitch about the cap would get shut down pretty quick.
Evil as hell? Yes. Would it work? Absolutely. I mean, Comcast already has a soft cap in most areas after all.
It may sounds crazy, but it just seems like the lesser of 2 evils.
If the likes of Comcast had a vested interest in you using your connection as much as possible (imagine a world where there's no base monthly fee, at all...if you don't use it you pay $0, and then $0.001 per mb or something), yeah, there would be the occasional issue where someone would try to make you install software that sucks all your bandwidth and the kid who downloaded 50 movies without telling their parents...
But it still seems like those issues would be so much easier to handle and resolve than what we have to deal with. And then the big ISPs would have wet dreams about you watching Netflix 24/7 instead of nightmares.
And a standard exam before your specialize wouldn't be a big deal. I wonder how many of those doctors would be able to pass the same standardized exam 10-20 years AFTER they specialized.
And the top 30 hits and accepted answers that come up on stack overflow are all wrong. You need a fair bit of experience in the particular language to weed them out.
Generally, people who know "the right way" are too busy doing stuff to answer questions on stack overflow, leaving the peanut gallery to answer with the "I read somewhere once that this maybe will work" way.
I've hopped jobs a fair bit over the years, and every time I start at a new company, and look at their code, there's always a bunch of things that make me go::Gasp! I've done it wrong for years!::. Because short of the occasional company that open source some really cool stuff to show you how they did it, the "real solutions that work" are never published or talked about unless you work with them.
Pretty much. Reading comments on this article really shows that much. You have the California/Mass/NY people going "I can punch my boss in the face in front of everyone and make 300k/year!", followed by the "I asked for minimum wadge by an illegal got the Senior Architect job instead of me!!!".
As you said, extremely region dependant. Though culturally, developers are generally more prone to accept relocating.
Thats not too bad. Even though I haven't written a linked list in 15 years, I probably can spit out the basics.
What sucks is when they ask you to write the full code for a balanced n-ary tree on a white board, then throw in the extra "how would you generate a unique hash from it for a performance intensive application?" to add insult to injury.
Yeah, I write those everyday! Let me get right to it! The irony is that the greener you are, the better you'll be able to answer that question... I did those on paper during finals a million times in college. But that was over a decade ago.
Google and any companies that hire a large amount of people from big name CS schools. Its what they're taught, its how they have been interviewed, its how they'll interview.
Where I work currently also has the same interview style. Please pump out an algorithm that takes this or that and optimize it in so and so manner, and make sure it fits on this tiny little white board. You have 12 minutes.
Oh, and make sure to remember whats the specific backing algorithm for this particular data structure of the std. No I don't care that its log n, what is the SPECIFIC algorithm?
(nevermind the interviewer didn't know until they double checked their internal wiki 5 minutes before asking you).
Fun times. Even worse now that I'm the one forced to ask these questions to other people.
Your initial post I replied to started with "At a minimum, most programmers today need to be competent with SQL".
But what do most programmers do? Write little e-commerce websites that duplicate functionalities already available in open source CMS packages and a few in-house plugins you could write in a week? No.
Of course there's all the app developers for mobile that consume existing APIs. There's all the scientists who write all the algorithms necessary to do anything that hasn't been done a million time already. Embedded system devs. UX devs (the javascript ecosystem is quickly becoming deep enough that you need specialists to do meaningful stuff in that field). All those Hadoop shops you see everywhere (quite a few are pretty successful). All the desktop application developers. All the game developers (most new MMOs are not backed by transactional databases except for the part that handles $$$).
And so on and so forth. Its not to say database development is dead, or that its not useful. But you only need it for a very specific type of jobs. If you don't want to do databases, there's thousands of high paying, rewarding jobs that don't need any of it.
Transcriptional web apps are just a small fraction of what a programmer can do these days. Sure, in 2004 it was probably the majority. Today? Nowhere close. And if you want to work for a big name tech company, then you REALLY don't except for specific departments. You don't really think the guy who codes Amazon's website's UI is the same guy that writes the stored procedures, do you?
Only in small companies do everyone need to know everything, and again, only if that company even does everything.
You only need a transactional database for transactional system. Sure, your shopping cart needs ACID transactions. Bit if your website is letting people upload LolCats all day? Not so much. NoSQL in 2014 is the general case, not the specific one.
And lol. The vast majority of developers at Google don't do SQL, most don't know SQL (its not taught in big name schools in any mandatory class and they don't use it most of the time, why would they?), and its usually not part of the interview.
I work for a multi billion dollar e-commerce site. I've been a DBA, I worked on transactional portion of websites for a decade, but for my current role, I never have to touch the database. There's 40 million lines of code on top of anything data access related...hundreds of people are working on that part, and only a handful are working on the section that actually touch the various databases (we have probably 50, totally a few petabytes of data...and its only a few teams that ever have to deal with them. I'm not one of them).
Any meaningfully large project will require specialization, and the database is just a tiny portion of it. And that's if there's even a database.
The field is too broad, and everyone is dropped in the same bucket.
Designing a fully functional shopping cart (that handles everything from complex discount and coupon rules to credit card) from scratch is -hard-. Writing a proper video card driver from scratch that handles everything a game needs is also hard.
The two, however, requires such different skill set, they should not have the same title. Yet they do. They require the same degree from the same schools. Its a problem.
You see it at companies like Google or Amazon, where "one size fit all" interviews are the norm. They filter out people who didn't go to MIT or CMU, but their questions are so far off from anything you'd actually do day to day (even if you work there!), that they're really just gambling on the loose correlation between someone who can write a hash algorithm for a tree and the ability to develop software in the real world.
And that's why some of their stuff is amazing (ie: the search engine) and some is buggy piece of crap (ie: any desktop app they ever made)
SQL isn't that big of a deal anymore. It used to be. Lots of top colleges don't teach databases anymore, or only do it as electives. Big companies either don't use relational databases for anything you'd actually want to work for (Feel like working on an ERP? Yeah, neither do I), have specialized departments for it, or use one of many trendy data storage solution, NoSQL or whatever.
Sure, if you work on a shopping cart for an e-commerce company and you'll be expected to know it. But work at Google or Nvidia? Probably not.
If you're willing to relocate anywhere in the country, the minimum threshold is pretty damn close to "do you have a pulse?".
We had to fire a developer last year. The guy had severe personal issues, got wasted at work (and I mean black out for 20+ hours kind of wasted). He was so messed up once (during work hours!) that he propositioned our CTO (same gender, definately not interested), as well as pretty much every female in the company....in one afternoon.
Even when he wasn't wasted, he couldn't code the slighest thing (I would even give him exact code and exact line number to copy paste, and he would still manage to screw it up), couldn't handle source control, etc. Don't ask me how he originally got the job.
Oh, and if you googled him, the first hit that came up was his mug shot from driving under influence with a suspended license.
After we fired him, he got a new job. In a week and a half. FOR A BANK.
This is just one of many situations like this that I've seen over the past few years. The market is just too hot to the point of insanity.
If you're in one of the major tech hubs (SF, Seattle, Boston, NYC, etc), and you can write a while loop, you can get a job that will pay rent in that city. If you're mediocre and have some experience, 6 figures is your worse case scenario. If you're actually competent, you're the reason a million$ barely pays for a decent condo.
A -lot- of people have several devices, probably enough to make up that number. Also, its accounts activated, not active accounts. Big difference. All the people who switch phones every 6 months inflate the numbers a lot.
But don't underestimate the amount of people who have multiple active phones, be it because they have a work black berry, or because they're tools that need the latest iphone and the latest galaxy Swhatever...at the same time....
You're absolutely right. However on a lot of high profile projects, that won't get you anywhere.
I remember a while back I was using a very high profile/popular data access library which shall remain nameless.
I found a fairly breaking bug in a semi-common scenarios. I poke at the mailing list, not asking for it to be fixed, but simply if it was a known issue, as again, it was a fairly common case, and I could pin point the exact snippet of code in the source where the issue was (but, being unfamiliar with the code base, couldn't easily fix it myself).
Instead of a simple "yes or no", I was more or less told to write a failing unit test or shut it, in not so nice words.
So I write the unit test, after taking several hours to find the exact guidance on how to write it (making a test for a database access framework that stays within the realm of unit test and not integration test differs wildly from project to project), I do so, submit it...all around half a day of work.
In the meantime, I patched up something on my end that worked (but it was a hack, so I couldn't really submit a patch) in a few minutes.
2 _years_ later, I see in my email that my bug report just got rejected because of a small mistake in my unit test (that still didn't change the main code path it was testing), and to this day the bug is still present, and whenever this is raised in on Stack Overflow or whatever, people just say its a scenario that isn't supported, even though you can see in the code that it should be, and its just a naive sort order mistake when looping through some array.
I wish it was an isolated case, but it basically is always like that unless you're inside the project's "clique" or you happen to find a bug that is particularly interesting to fix. Yes, they're just volunteers, but if they don't want their project to be of world class interest, then don't promote it as such.
TL&DR: Big projects with a lot of marketing pushes saying they're great for real production use, then don't support it as such, are far too common.
The only thing that really rises up cost of living in cities is supply vs demand. People who live in cities want to live close by stuff, almost by definition, and they pay a premium for it. That raises up land price, which trickles all the way down to things like groceries (can you imagine the cost of the land to build a large grocery store in SF/Boston/NYC? yeah...).
That explains almost all of the cost difference. Not all of it, but almost.
The primary target audience is closer to web developers and app devs in general. That said, there's 800+ add-ons and packages that were created during the beta...if none of those are in, then yeah: most developers don't have any interest in using this kind of editor to write C code.
It kind of make sense if you think about it: the whole draw is you can use web technologies to hack it. There aren't a whole lot of C developers who could care.
If the H1-B system wasn't incredibly corrupt, you'd have a point. But only a portion of them end up on the people who they were originally meant for.
The whole immigration point is also kind of a sore spot in the US, because illegal immigrant are bordering on having legal status (they can drive, they can go to school, and in some case go to college and even get grants and scholarships), and there's so many of them, its hard to ignore.
So people end up tossing the baby with the bathwater in these issues. These people are wrong...but its kind of understandable.
If they're taking a job that was very hard to fill, you're right. It does no harm whatsoever (well, if you bring too many you start having cultural diversity issues, ironically. If you bring in too many Chinese and Indians, all countries will end up looking like China and India).
If the person is knocking over an American, and that american starts needing food stamps or whatever, its a net loss. A lot of H1-Bs are used for hard to fill position (though not all of them by a long shot). Their spouse? That will be another story.
Node.js (what this is built on) has very easy ways to load C++ add-ons, and those can link to C libraries just fine. In fact a lot of node package are done that way.
When you use it you can't tell its running in Chromium. Its the same development model used for the Blizzard launcher for Diablo/WoW/Starcraft, for a lot of Adobe applications, etc. Run in node.js, use a Chromium window (that looks like a native window) as the rendering canvas.
Developing in node still ends up calling native code (for I/O and stuff), and that has edge cases. A naive example would be, let say, if you didn't properly handle slash vs backslash, then you could break things in Windows vs Unix (its not the issue in this case, I'm just giving an example).
As to why another editor, its basically riding the javascript + node train, and giving an editor thats moddable with people on that train.
While it can be used for everything, since its built on node/chromium in pretty much all JavaScript, the majority of heavy JavaScript development ends up done on Macs, for better or worse (node.js originally didn't work on windows, and a lot of people don't want to deal with Linux UI....that leaves Macs).
Not saying I agree, but thats basically why. Bleeding edge web development is overwhelmingly done on Macs.
it only runs in a browser in the sense that its using a chromium window. Its still a client app that runs locally, and hooks up into native code for some operations.
They don't need to do a whole lot to make it work in other operating systems, just a few edge cases (and some people already got it to run in Linux and stuff).
Slashdot Mirror
It works in a lot of other countries.
So the trick for them is to be sneaky. Do it only in areas without google fiber or other competition (thats still most of their market base). Then put the gap quite a bit above the average netflix watcher.
That 300gb is probably at least 100gb above that threshold. Marginalize publicly the crowd that uses torrents and stuff (youths and techies may see through that, but the average joe can still be convinced that piracy is "evil").
Then the people who bitch about the cap would get shut down pretty quick.
Evil as hell? Yes. Would it work? Absolutely. I mean, Comcast already has a soft cap in most areas after all.
It may sounds crazy, but it just seems like the lesser of 2 evils.
If the likes of Comcast had a vested interest in you using your connection as much as possible (imagine a world where there's no base monthly fee, at all...if you don't use it you pay $0, and then $0.001 per mb or something), yeah, there would be the occasional issue where someone would try to make you install software that sucks all your bandwidth and the kid who downloaded 50 movies without telling their parents...
But it still seems like those issues would be so much easier to handle and resolve than what we have to deal with. And then the big ISPs would have wet dreams about you watching Netflix 24/7 instead of nightmares.
And a standard exam before your specialize wouldn't be a big deal. I wonder how many of those doctors would be able to pass the same standardized exam 10-20 years AFTER they specialized.
And the top 30 hits and accepted answers that come up on stack overflow are all wrong. You need a fair bit of experience in the particular language to weed them out.
Generally, people who know "the right way" are too busy doing stuff to answer questions on stack overflow, leaving the peanut gallery to answer with the "I read somewhere once that this maybe will work" way.
I've hopped jobs a fair bit over the years, and every time I start at a new company, and look at their code, there's always a bunch of things that make me go ::Gasp! I've done it wrong for years!::. Because short of the occasional company that open source some really cool stuff to show you how they did it, the "real solutions that work" are never published or talked about unless you work with them.
Pretty much. Reading comments on this article really shows that much. You have the California/Mass/NY people going "I can punch my boss in the face in front of everyone and make 300k/year!", followed by the "I asked for minimum wadge by an illegal got the Senior Architect job instead of me!!!".
As you said, extremely region dependant. Though culturally, developers are generally more prone to accept relocating.
Thats not too bad. Even though I haven't written a linked list in 15 years, I probably can spit out the basics.
What sucks is when they ask you to write the full code for a balanced n-ary tree on a white board, then throw in the extra "how would you generate a unique hash from it for a performance intensive application?" to add insult to injury.
Yeah, I write those everyday! Let me get right to it! The irony is that the greener you are, the better you'll be able to answer that question... I did those on paper during finals a million times in college. But that was over a decade ago.
Google and any companies that hire a large amount of people from big name CS schools. Its what they're taught, its how they have been interviewed, its how they'll interview.
Where I work currently also has the same interview style. Please pump out an algorithm that takes this or that and optimize it in so and so manner, and make sure it fits on this tiny little white board. You have 12 minutes.
Oh, and make sure to remember whats the specific backing algorithm for this particular data structure of the std. No I don't care that its log n, what is the SPECIFIC algorithm?
(nevermind the interviewer didn't know until they double checked their internal wiki 5 minutes before asking you).
Fun times. Even worse now that I'm the one forced to ask these questions to other people.
Your initial post I replied to started with "At a minimum, most programmers today need to be competent with SQL".
But what do most programmers do? Write little e-commerce websites that duplicate functionalities already available in open source CMS packages and a few in-house plugins you could write in a week? No.
Of course there's all the app developers for mobile that consume existing APIs. There's all the scientists who write all the algorithms necessary to do anything that hasn't been done a million time already. Embedded system devs. UX devs (the javascript ecosystem is quickly becoming deep enough that you need specialists to do meaningful stuff in that field). All those Hadoop shops you see everywhere (quite a few are pretty successful). All the desktop application developers. All the game developers (most new MMOs are not backed by transactional databases except for the part that handles $$$).
And so on and so forth. Its not to say database development is dead, or that its not useful. But you only need it for a very specific type of jobs. If you don't want to do databases, there's thousands of high paying, rewarding jobs that don't need any of it.
Transcriptional web apps are just a small fraction of what a programmer can do these days. Sure, in 2004 it was probably the majority. Today? Nowhere close. And if you want to work for a big name tech company, then you REALLY don't except for specific departments. You don't really think the guy who codes Amazon's website's UI is the same guy that writes the stored procedures, do you?
Only in small companies do everyone need to know everything, and again, only if that company even does everything.
You only need a transactional database for transactional system. Sure, your shopping cart needs ACID transactions. Bit if your website is letting people upload LolCats all day? Not so much. NoSQL in 2014 is the general case, not the specific one.
And lol. The vast majority of developers at Google don't do SQL, most don't know SQL (its not taught in big name schools in any mandatory class and they don't use it most of the time, why would they?), and its usually not part of the interview.
I work for a multi billion dollar e-commerce site. I've been a DBA, I worked on transactional portion of websites for a decade, but for my current role, I never have to touch the database. There's 40 million lines of code on top of anything data access related...hundreds of people are working on that part, and only a handful are working on the section that actually touch the various databases (we have probably 50, totally a few petabytes of data...and its only a few teams that ever have to deal with them. I'm not one of them).
Any meaningfully large project will require specialization, and the database is just a tiny portion of it. And that's if there's even a database.
In all the high demand areas, the average salary for a decent dev pushes you in the top 2 percentile in term of salaries.
Are the only people who don't count as "cheap" big bang execs to you or something?
The field is too broad, and everyone is dropped in the same bucket.
Designing a fully functional shopping cart (that handles everything from complex discount and coupon rules to credit card) from scratch is -hard-. Writing a proper video card driver from scratch that handles everything a game needs is also hard.
The two, however, requires such different skill set, they should not have the same title. Yet they do. They require the same degree from the same schools. Its a problem.
You see it at companies like Google or Amazon, where "one size fit all" interviews are the norm. They filter out people who didn't go to MIT or CMU, but their questions are so far off from anything you'd actually do day to day (even if you work there!), that they're really just gambling on the loose correlation between someone who can write a hash algorithm for a tree and the ability to develop software in the real world.
And that's why some of their stuff is amazing (ie: the search engine) and some is buggy piece of crap (ie: any desktop app they ever made)
SQL isn't that big of a deal anymore. It used to be. Lots of top colleges don't teach databases anymore, or only do it as electives. Big companies either don't use relational databases for anything you'd actually want to work for (Feel like working on an ERP? Yeah, neither do I), have specialized departments for it, or use one of many trendy data storage solution, NoSQL or whatever.
Sure, if you work on a shopping cart for an e-commerce company and you'll be expected to know it. But work at Google or Nvidia? Probably not.
If you're willing to relocate anywhere in the country, the minimum threshold is pretty damn close to "do you have a pulse?".
We had to fire a developer last year. The guy had severe personal issues, got wasted at work (and I mean black out for 20+ hours kind of wasted). He was so messed up once (during work hours!) that he propositioned our CTO (same gender, definately not interested), as well as pretty much every female in the company....in one afternoon.
Even when he wasn't wasted, he couldn't code the slighest thing (I would even give him exact code and exact line number to copy paste, and he would still manage to screw it up), couldn't handle source control, etc. Don't ask me how he originally got the job.
Oh, and if you googled him, the first hit that came up was his mug shot from driving under influence with a suspended license.
After we fired him, he got a new job. In a week and a half. FOR A BANK.
This is just one of many situations like this that I've seen over the past few years. The market is just too hot to the point of insanity.
If you're in one of the major tech hubs (SF, Seattle, Boston, NYC, etc), and you can write a while loop, you can get a job that will pay rent in that city. If you're mediocre and have some experience, 6 figures is your worse case scenario. If you're actually competent, you're the reason a million$ barely pays for a decent condo.
A -lot- of people have several devices, probably enough to make up that number. Also, its accounts activated, not active accounts. Big difference. All the people who switch phones every 6 months inflate the numbers a lot.
But don't underestimate the amount of people who have multiple active phones, be it because they have a work black berry, or because they're tools that need the latest iphone and the latest galaxy Swhatever...at the same time....
If the moment something bores you, you can't deal with it, yes, you're a useless dumbass.
Not everything in life is a party and you'll have to deal with it on a regular basis. May as well start in school.
You're absolutely right. However on a lot of high profile projects, that won't get you anywhere.
I remember a while back I was using a very high profile/popular data access library which shall remain nameless.
I found a fairly breaking bug in a semi-common scenarios. I poke at the mailing list, not asking for it to be fixed, but simply if it was a known issue, as again, it was a fairly common case, and I could pin point the exact snippet of code in the source where the issue was (but, being unfamiliar with the code base, couldn't easily fix it myself).
Instead of a simple "yes or no", I was more or less told to write a failing unit test or shut it, in not so nice words.
So I write the unit test, after taking several hours to find the exact guidance on how to write it (making a test for a database access framework that stays within the realm of unit test and not integration test differs wildly from project to project), I do so, submit it...all around half a day of work.
In the meantime, I patched up something on my end that worked (but it was a hack, so I couldn't really submit a patch) in a few minutes.
2 _years_ later, I see in my email that my bug report just got rejected because of a small mistake in my unit test (that still didn't change the main code path it was testing), and to this day the bug is still present, and whenever this is raised in on Stack Overflow or whatever, people just say its a scenario that isn't supported, even though you can see in the code that it should be, and its just a naive sort order mistake when looping through some array.
I wish it was an isolated case, but it basically is always like that unless you're inside the project's "clique" or you happen to find a bug that is particularly interesting to fix. Yes, they're just volunteers, but if they don't want their project to be of world class interest, then don't promote it as such.
TL&DR: Big projects with a lot of marketing pushes saying they're great for real production use, then don't support it as such, are far too common.
The only thing that really rises up cost of living in cities is supply vs demand. People who live in cities want to live close by stuff, almost by definition, and they pay a premium for it. That raises up land price, which trickles all the way down to things like groceries (can you imagine the cost of the land to build a large grocery store in SF/Boston/NYC? yeah...).
That explains almost all of the cost difference. Not all of it, but almost.
The primary target audience is closer to web developers and app devs in general. That said, there's 800+ add-ons and packages that were created during the beta...if none of those are in, then yeah: most developers don't have any interest in using this kind of editor to write C code.
It kind of make sense if you think about it: the whole draw is you can use web technologies to hack it. There aren't a whole lot of C developers who could care.
If the H1-B system wasn't incredibly corrupt, you'd have a point. But only a portion of them end up on the people who they were originally meant for.
The whole immigration point is also kind of a sore spot in the US, because illegal immigrant are bordering on having legal status (they can drive, they can go to school, and in some case go to college and even get grants and scholarships), and there's so many of them, its hard to ignore.
So people end up tossing the baby with the bathwater in these issues. These people are wrong...but its kind of understandable.
Note: I'm an immigrant in the US on a green card.
If they're taking a job that was very hard to fill, you're right. It does no harm whatsoever (well, if you bring too many you start having cultural diversity issues, ironically. If you bring in too many Chinese and Indians, all countries will end up looking like China and India).
If the person is knocking over an American, and that american starts needing food stamps or whatever, its a net loss. A lot of H1-Bs are used for hard to fill position (though not all of them by a long shot). Their spouse? That will be another story.
Node.js (what this is built on) has very easy ways to load C++ add-ons, and those can link to C libraries just fine. In fact a lot of node package are done that way.
Only a small fraction of H1Bs ever get greencards though.
When you use it you can't tell its running in Chromium. Its the same development model used for the Blizzard launcher for Diablo/WoW/Starcraft, for a lot of Adobe applications, etc. Run in node.js, use a Chromium window (that looks like a native window) as the rendering canvas.
Developing in node still ends up calling native code (for I/O and stuff), and that has edge cases. A naive example would be, let say, if you didn't properly handle slash vs backslash, then you could break things in Windows vs Unix (its not the issue in this case, I'm just giving an example).
As to why another editor, its basically riding the javascript + node train, and giving an editor thats moddable with people on that train.
While it can be used for everything, since its built on node/chromium in pretty much all JavaScript, the majority of heavy JavaScript development ends up done on Macs, for better or worse (node.js originally didn't work on windows, and a lot of people don't want to deal with Linux UI....that leaves Macs).
Not saying I agree, but thats basically why. Bleeding edge web development is overwhelmingly done on Macs.
it only runs in a browser in the sense that its using a chromium window. Its still a client app that runs locally, and hooks up into native code for some operations.
They don't need to do a whole lot to make it work in other operating systems, just a few edge cases (and some people already got it to run in Linux and stuff).