They do have offices all over. But the moment the amount of cities with high enough concentration of qualified tech workers is limited, because...the amount of large cities is limited.
Some cities (eg: Montreal) have "resisted" crazy wage increases somewhat, because of things like rent control-ish policies, but even there it still jumped up a lot.
And all those companies fight for any half decent college grad, too. And while Google may not, many other companies will literally hire any idiot. And even then, there's still shortages of idiots.
Fact remains that there's more and more high skill jobs openings, and less and less low skill ones. And that's just not how human society stacks up. So it is hurting.
They did that. And its why it became unreasonable. Once you have a big company with a successful IPO minting a few thousand millionaires, all jumping on the real estate at the same time, things get out of hand.
Add that if I open my company in the middle of fucking nowhere, I wont be able to hire fast enough. If Google opens an office in Mississippi and pay 350k/year for a Sr engineer, they're still going to struggle to find good people.
In Silicon Valley it's not uncommon for someone straight out of college to start at 100-110k these days. One of my friends is working -remotely- (while living in the middle of nowhere, so cost of living is super low) for a west coast company as a Sr Engineer and makes 200k~.
I'm on the east coast and while my title is one notch above Sr, I'm still just your every day software engineer, and I make about 230k. I'm not leading a team. I'm not architecting anything large. I used to, and I'm qualified to, but right now I don't.
The market for qualified software engineers is -brutal-, because you need software engineers to do ANYTHING, and the market is getting flooded by "I didn't finish highschool but I went into a bootcamp so I'm awesome at Rails" and "I have an MIT degree so it means im good, right?" peanut gallery folks (even though I do know a lot of good engineers who went that route). Even paying in the 200k+ range, giving every benefits under the sun, giving people everything they want, the hardware they want, the software they want, the money they want, the projects they want, the location they want (including remote), it's STILL hard to find good people.
H1B is supposed to help with this. And the idea is good: if a position cannot be filled locally, get someone from abroad so we're not at a disadvantage. If it worked that way, it WOULD be perfect.
But it doesn't. I know a bunch of TN1s from Canada who are fantastic engineers, and are filling positions that would take forever to fill up, and are commanding 250k+ a year...and because they're not lucky at the H1B lottery, they're stuck with the TN1 leash, year after year.
During that time those subcontracting crooks are using up all of the H1Bs for bullshit that goes against the spirit of the program. And then we allow spouses of those H1Bs to work, so it takes up low skill positions (which the country has a huge shortage of), forcing people on food stamps. Its terrible.
Yes, there is a shortage of H1Bs for the companies that have genuine need for the system in the spirit it was meant for. The solution isn't to increase quotas though, its to make sure it's used the way its meant to be.
Dunno, worked at plenty of companies where PMs thought crap like that was a good idea (I obviously didn't stay at those companies very long).
You know how in IT, software engineering, etc, there's always all of these idiots that shouldn't be there, that seriously don't have any kind of talents but somehow managed to pass the interviews and they never seem to get fired?
Well, they exist in other fields too, including at big companies.
She explains this already: the company deactivate all access right away, and tell the person they've been fired when they show up the next day.
She just called her manager right away and got an unofficial confirmation. She was still going to get an official notification the moment she stepped in the office.
Yeah, and now times are changing. Right now most places offer significantly longer leave for the women. PAID leave. So if the father wants to stay longer, they can't (unless they don't want to get paid).
Money is powerful.
Some countries have equal leave for both men and women, or have a pool of time that can be distributed as the man and woman chooses. Not in the US (unless a company has some kind of exotic benefit)
One thing is how maternity leave encourages the women to take the brunt of it.
At all companies I've worked at in the last few years, even if you adopted (so there's no medical reasons, and potentially no breast feeding or anything involved), the woman get most of the child care benefits.
So the woman stays at home, and the kids are used to it. So if someone decides to be a stay at home parent, most of the time, it will be the woman. Because it was set up to be that way from the start.
Just have paternity and maternity leave be equal, for the women's sake. So the decision (aside for the first few weeks after child birth. For obvious reasons) can actually be made reasonably, instead of being pre-determined.
Doesn't really matter. I got laid off recently, and I had 125 thousand bucks in liquid assets, as well as about 200k~ in stocks and shit (probably 100k after this last week...fucking crash).
More than enough to pay for my mortgage and other expenses for quite a while. And if things got really dire, my condo's in a high demand area, so even now I could flip it for over a million and make quite a profit after paying off my mortgage.
YET EVEN WITH ALL THAT, saying no to my severance package would have been pretty hard. Spitting in the face of about 20 thousand bucks (the sum that was agreed on) plus various other benefits, isn't easy.
Fortunately my previous employer was actually pretty great, downsized for good reasons (well, they made mistakes leading to the layoff, but they weren't replacing anyone laid off with cheaper workers or anything), so I can, in good faith, just say the truth and how i really feel, and still not be in conflict of anything in the severance contract.
Back in the early 2000s, after the dotcom crash, there were thousands of talented people out there (and even more trash). You could, with proper interviews and connections, grab 50 superstars, build a new company, and eventually be successful. A lot of the crazy IPOs we've seen a couple of years ago came out of that.
These days, you have 2 problems:
1) Way too many people fighting over too few "good devs". So most startups and unicorns are staffed with a couple of superstars, and dozens or hundreds of people from the peanut gallery. Whoever gets the most superstars that are proper culture fits and won't just fight with each other, wins. Everyone else dies in a fire.
2) The moment a company doesn't meet their numbers or things go even a little wrong, the superstars jump ship. Everyone else dies in a fire.
You can't reliably sustain anything like that. There's always been a lot of luck involved in building a successful business, but this is beyond lottery level. Add that no one knows how to properly interview candidate, and saying its random would be an understatement.
Forget the no knock raid here. People were quick to point at how bad the cameras everywhere policies were in some other countries... The US has a lot of cops. if they all have always on cameras and are just walking around in public...the state now has cameras everywhere. Congratz.
Not like Firefox is a saint in the web standard world. They have their share of sins.
ES6 proxies and arrow functions come to mind, where they implemented bullshit versions that didn't match standard very quickly. Worse, a bunch of peanut gallery would go around complaining that the standard compliant implementations were broken because they didn't match Firefox...
The point of the vendor prefixes was so vendors could implement experimental, non-standard, or all around "stuff that is not meant for all browsers".
That way, I can put a webkit prefixed property to do something webkit specific (maybe to compensate for a bug), and not have to worry about other browsers. It's not perfect: webkit is a very broad subset of rendering engines, there's differing versions, etc...but it could be worse.
And so Firefox will make it worse. What happens when the latest evergreen version of both browsers diverge? We need to fall back to hacks and bullshit, without browser specific properties to fallback on. Time to go back to the good old days of browser hacks and browser specific stylesheets?! I can't wait!
Some people mentioned it already, and it doesn't really make things better, but the reality is that software engineering is a new field (relative to, let say, building houses), and like anything that doesn't have rules set in stone behind it, 20something years old who think they're the best at everything and are invincible will aggressively push their ideas and act as if anyone else is an idiot (unless they're at risk of being fired, and even then).
I've worked at countless companies both as consultant and on payroll, and it doesn't matter that I'm a guy: all the members of the peanut gallery will act like they know everything and push any other idea away as non-sense unless their boss tell them to shut the fuck up. Other 20something, or even older, guys are "used to it", but when you look at it from the side line, its the same kind of psychological abuse and toxic treatments women will talk about, with the main difference that it's gender neutral.
Yes, I've never had a software engineering pull me in a corner and threaten to rape me if I don't shut up. I TOTALLY however had someone pull be in a corner with an arm across my throat threatening to beat me to death if I got in the way of his promotion though.
The misogyny and discrimination is a symptom. The root cause that needs to be taken care of however, is a gender neutral society problem.
Rails is terrible, but the Rails -community- is what is making me keep my distance from Ruby. I've worked at countless companies, in pretty much all mainstream programming languages and got involved in a lot of communities, but none made me step back so much as the Rails community. Freagin viruses taking every best practices and flipping them upside down then looking at you like you're an idiot for challenging them.
Then when that falls apart they spread to other communities and try to push their Rails bullshit in every other language so everything can be Rails-like.
That's always been the issue with this whole thing... On one hand, the record industry will spout numbers assuming almost every copy is a lost sale. On the other hand, content pirates will spout that exactly 0 illegal copy would ever have been a sale instead (which for some individuals is absolutely true, but definitely not all), and often that it benefits the record industry 100% of the time, always. The truth is somewhere in between the two extremes, but the discussion is so black and white and stupid, it's impossible to meaningfully fix the problem beyond token attempts.
In most cases I agree with you. Though some issues I've hit on certain projects, including at my current job, is when the software starts becoming really complex with a lot of dependencies. When you start making tweaks and changes to the foundations, you have so many things to understand and test that its just more efficient to do the process with multiple people in parallel. Some people write the test scripts, the test plans, the impact analysis, etc, and others execute.
Moving doesn't help. In cities you have to deal with idiots who think throwing a party at 1am is okay, and dogs barking because owners forgot they let them outside, or cars who think its fun to come on our private street and stay there for half an hour with their engine running 2 feet from my walls...
In the burbs you have little kids screaming outside as loud as possible with everyone thinking its so cute.
You can be in the middle of literally nowhere, unfortunately I'd need to change industry altogether to be able to live that way...
There's the option to just live in a condo with crazy soundproofing in a penthouse so there's no one above, and on a floor high enough that people below are no longer a problem...it's what I did in the end, but that seriously sucks for people who can't afford it (which is obviously the vast majority).
People just need to fucking learn how to control themselves. I remember in my last apartment, which also had some of the craziest soundproofing Ive ever seen...the neighbors kids would be so loud I could barely sleep after 5 am. I originally thought the soundproofing actually sucked. That is, until I had my door partly open once and my wife tried to call out to me from the hallway, talking pretty loud (louder than she should have in the shared hallway...), and I could not hear her AT ALL.
Realized those stupid kids were screaming louder, day in day out, than I am physically able to scream myself. And their parents thought that was cute (masochists...)
Yes, companies sometimes push employees too hard. Lately in engineering though, you can punch the CEO in the face and he/she'll say "Sorry, please don't quit", with the current market. Obviously not true of all IT positions, but in engineering, it almost is.
So there's really no reason to screw over your work life balance, aside for maybe a pager rotation for emergencies (but the company should have a level 2 or 3 support to handle he common cases...I guess those guys work/life balance is fucked. Sorry)
Engineers however, are arrogant as fuck, and want to be at the top of the food chain, so a couple of them will willingly fuck over their work life balance. Then they'll get promoted for it (which is a problem with the company...but its hard to say no to someone who delivered twice as much for the same pay, even if he/she screwed over their life over it).
Then, people will feel they have to do this to compete. And thus, the New York Times Pseudo-Amazon is born.
Employers should not reward those people, and other engineers should NOT worship them. You don't need a union to make things reasonable, but please for god's sake, don't encourage your peers who do that shit.
Its kind of scary how when I google for an app for android, for reviews or something, I have to wade through all the pirate site links. Often, the legitimate links are several entries below the pirate links.
And yeah, there's a lot of people at this point (and not FOSS zealots), who will just not pay for software.
At the office, I'm always seeing people who make 150k+ a year balk at the idea of paying 10 bucks for a piece of software they use every day in their side projects, and they pirate it instead. Paying for a mobile app? Impossible!
Or do they not count the ones partially rolled out? I filled up my green card application online, and got my interview, etc, through it.
It wasnt rolled everywhere at the time, and there was a few minor hiccups while on site (my stuff was in the system, but the person doing the interview didnt have access to it, whoops!), but it seemed like they were pretty close to having an end to end solution.
Most of the rest of the process was online and worked fine though.
And i think the price takes that risk in consideration. Over 2 billion a year in revenue, but bought for 6b~. In the current unicorn bubble, that's on the low side.
Slashdot Mirror
They do have offices all over. But the moment the amount of cities with high enough concentration of qualified tech workers is limited, because...the amount of large cities is limited.
Some cities (eg: Montreal) have "resisted" crazy wage increases somewhat, because of things like rent control-ish policies, but even there it still jumped up a lot.
And all those companies fight for any half decent college grad, too. And while Google may not, many other companies will literally hire any idiot. And even then, there's still shortages of idiots.
Fact remains that there's more and more high skill jobs openings, and less and less low skill ones. And that's just not how human society stacks up. So it is hurting.
They did that. And its why it became unreasonable. Once you have a big company with a successful IPO minting a few thousand millionaires, all jumping on the real estate at the same time, things get out of hand.
Add that if I open my company in the middle of fucking nowhere, I wont be able to hire fast enough. If Google opens an office in Mississippi and pay 350k/year for a Sr engineer, they're still going to struggle to find good people.
In Silicon Valley it's not uncommon for someone straight out of college to start at 100-110k these days. One of my friends is working -remotely- (while living in the middle of nowhere, so cost of living is super low) for a west coast company as a Sr Engineer and makes 200k~.
I'm on the east coast and while my title is one notch above Sr, I'm still just your every day software engineer, and I make about 230k. I'm not leading a team. I'm not architecting anything large. I used to, and I'm qualified to, but right now I don't.
The market for qualified software engineers is -brutal-, because you need software engineers to do ANYTHING, and the market is getting flooded by "I didn't finish highschool but I went into a bootcamp so I'm awesome at Rails" and "I have an MIT degree so it means im good, right?" peanut gallery folks (even though I do know a lot of good engineers who went that route). Even paying in the 200k+ range, giving every benefits under the sun, giving people everything they want, the hardware they want, the software they want, the money they want, the projects they want, the location they want (including remote), it's STILL hard to find good people.
H1B is supposed to help with this. And the idea is good: if a position cannot be filled locally, get someone from abroad so we're not at a disadvantage. If it worked that way, it WOULD be perfect.
But it doesn't. I know a bunch of TN1s from Canada who are fantastic engineers, and are filling positions that would take forever to fill up, and are commanding 250k+ a year...and because they're not lucky at the H1B lottery, they're stuck with the TN1 leash, year after year.
During that time those subcontracting crooks are using up all of the H1Bs for bullshit that goes against the spirit of the program. And then we allow spouses of those H1Bs to work, so it takes up low skill positions (which the country has a huge shortage of), forcing people on food stamps. Its terrible.
Yes, there is a shortage of H1Bs for the companies that have genuine need for the system in the spirit it was meant for. The solution isn't to increase quotas though, its to make sure it's used the way its meant to be.
Dunno, worked at plenty of companies where PMs thought crap like that was a good idea (I obviously didn't stay at those companies very long).
You know how in IT, software engineering, etc, there's always all of these idiots that shouldn't be there, that seriously don't have any kind of talents but somehow managed to pass the interviews and they never seem to get fired?
Well, they exist in other fields too, including at big companies.
She explains this already: the company deactivate all access right away, and tell the person they've been fired when they show up the next day.
She just called her manager right away and got an unofficial confirmation. She was still going to get an official notification the moment she stepped in the office.
Yeah, and now times are changing. Right now most places offer significantly longer leave for the women. PAID leave. So if the father wants to stay longer, they can't (unless they don't want to get paid).
Money is powerful.
Some countries have equal leave for both men and women, or have a pool of time that can be distributed as the man and woman chooses. Not in the US (unless a company has some kind of exotic benefit)
One thing is how maternity leave encourages the women to take the brunt of it.
At all companies I've worked at in the last few years, even if you adopted (so there's no medical reasons, and potentially no breast feeding or anything involved), the woman get most of the child care benefits.
So the woman stays at home, and the kids are used to it. So if someone decides to be a stay at home parent, most of the time, it will be the woman. Because it was set up to be that way from the start.
Just have paternity and maternity leave be equal, for the women's sake. So the decision (aside for the first few weeks after child birth. For obvious reasons) can actually be made reasonably, instead of being pre-determined.
Doesn't really matter. I got laid off recently, and I had 125 thousand bucks in liquid assets, as well as about 200k~ in stocks and shit (probably 100k after this last week...fucking crash).
More than enough to pay for my mortgage and other expenses for quite a while. And if things got really dire, my condo's in a high demand area, so even now I could flip it for over a million and make quite a profit after paying off my mortgage.
YET EVEN WITH ALL THAT, saying no to my severance package would have been pretty hard. Spitting in the face of about 20 thousand bucks (the sum that was agreed on) plus various other benefits, isn't easy.
Fortunately my previous employer was actually pretty great, downsized for good reasons (well, they made mistakes leading to the layoff, but they weren't replacing anyone laid off with cheaper workers or anything), so I can, in good faith, just say the truth and how i really feel, and still not be in conflict of anything in the severance contract.
Not everyone is so lucky.
It's a very big problem too.
Back in the early 2000s, after the dotcom crash, there were thousands of talented people out there (and even more trash). You could, with proper interviews and connections, grab 50 superstars, build a new company, and eventually be successful. A lot of the crazy IPOs we've seen a couple of years ago came out of that.
These days, you have 2 problems:
1) Way too many people fighting over too few "good devs". So most startups and unicorns are staffed with a couple of superstars, and dozens or hundreds of people from the peanut gallery. Whoever gets the most superstars that are proper culture fits and won't just fight with each other, wins. Everyone else dies in a fire.
2) The moment a company doesn't meet their numbers or things go even a little wrong, the superstars jump ship. Everyone else dies in a fire.
You can't reliably sustain anything like that. There's always been a lot of luck involved in building a successful business, but this is beyond lottery level. Add that no one knows how to properly interview candidate, and saying its random would be an understatement.
Many do in Uber Black, which was the original Uber service and is often a lot closer to "legal" than UberX.
Forget the no knock raid here. People were quick to point at how bad the cameras everywhere policies were in some other countries... The US has a lot of cops. if they all have always on cameras and are just walking around in public...the state now has cameras everywhere. Congratz.
Not like Firefox is a saint in the web standard world. They have their share of sins.
ES6 proxies and arrow functions come to mind, where they implemented bullshit versions that didn't match standard very quickly. Worse, a bunch of peanut gallery would go around complaining that the standard compliant implementations were broken because they didn't match Firefox...
The point of the vendor prefixes was so vendors could implement experimental, non-standard, or all around "stuff that is not meant for all browsers".
That way, I can put a webkit prefixed property to do something webkit specific (maybe to compensate for a bug), and not have to worry about other browsers. It's not perfect: webkit is a very broad subset of rendering engines, there's differing versions, etc...but it could be worse.
And so Firefox will make it worse. What happens when the latest evergreen version of both browsers diverge? We need to fall back to hacks and bullshit, without browser specific properties to fallback on. Time to go back to the good old days of browser hacks and browser specific stylesheets?! I can't wait!
Some people mentioned it already, and it doesn't really make things better, but the reality is that software engineering is a new field (relative to, let say, building houses), and like anything that doesn't have rules set in stone behind it, 20something years old who think they're the best at everything and are invincible will aggressively push their ideas and act as if anyone else is an idiot (unless they're at risk of being fired, and even then).
I've worked at countless companies both as consultant and on payroll, and it doesn't matter that I'm a guy: all the members of the peanut gallery will act like they know everything and push any other idea away as non-sense unless their boss tell them to shut the fuck up. Other 20something, or even older, guys are "used to it", but when you look at it from the side line, its the same kind of psychological abuse and toxic treatments women will talk about, with the main difference that it's gender neutral.
Yes, I've never had a software engineering pull me in a corner and threaten to rape me if I don't shut up. I TOTALLY however had someone pull be in a corner with an arm across my throat threatening to beat me to death if I got in the way of his promotion though.
The misogyny and discrimination is a symptom. The root cause that needs to be taken care of however, is a gender neutral society problem.
It's too bad Rails gave it such a bad wrap
Rails is terrible, but the Rails -community- is what is making me keep my distance from Ruby. I've worked at countless companies, in pretty much all mainstream programming languages and got involved in a lot of communities, but none made me step back so much as the Rails community. Freagin viruses taking every best practices and flipping them upside down then looking at you like you're an idiot for challenging them.
Then when that falls apart they spread to other communities and try to push their Rails bullshit in every other language so everything can be Rails-like.
The Ruby language takes the brunt of it.
That's always been the issue with this whole thing... On one hand, the record industry will spout numbers assuming almost every copy is a lost sale. On the other hand, content pirates will spout that exactly 0 illegal copy would ever have been a sale instead (which for some individuals is absolutely true, but definitely not all), and often that it benefits the record industry 100% of the time, always. The truth is somewhere in between the two extremes, but the discussion is so black and white and stupid, it's impossible to meaningfully fix the problem beyond token attempts.
Can blame MacOSX for that one.
In most cases I agree with you. Though some issues I've hit on certain projects, including at my current job, is when the software starts becoming really complex with a lot of dependencies. When you start making tweaks and changes to the foundations, you have so many things to understand and test that its just more efficient to do the process with multiple people in parallel. Some people write the test scripts, the test plans, the impact analysis, etc, and others execute.
Its simply about scaling people.
Moving doesn't help. In cities you have to deal with idiots who think throwing a party at 1am is okay, and dogs barking because owners forgot they let them outside, or cars who think its fun to come on our private street and stay there for half an hour with their engine running 2 feet from my walls...
In the burbs you have little kids screaming outside as loud as possible with everyone thinking its so cute.
You can be in the middle of literally nowhere, unfortunately I'd need to change industry altogether to be able to live that way...
There's the option to just live in a condo with crazy soundproofing in a penthouse so there's no one above, and on a floor high enough that people below are no longer a problem...it's what I did in the end, but that seriously sucks for people who can't afford it (which is obviously the vast majority).
People just need to fucking learn how to control themselves. I remember in my last apartment, which also had some of the craziest soundproofing Ive ever seen...the neighbors kids would be so loud I could barely sleep after 5 am. I originally thought the soundproofing actually sucked. That is, until I had my door partly open once and my wife tried to call out to me from the hallway, talking pretty loud (louder than she should have in the shared hallway...), and I could not hear her AT ALL.
Realized those stupid kids were screaming louder, day in day out, than I am physically able to scream myself. And their parents thought that was cute (masochists...)
How much time does a modern developer spend waiting for the compiler to finish
In C/C++? All the freagin time. Large applications can take -forever- to compile, even if its not a clean compile.
Yes, companies sometimes push employees too hard. Lately in engineering though, you can punch the CEO in the face and he/she'll say "Sorry, please don't quit", with the current market. Obviously not true of all IT positions, but in engineering, it almost is.
So there's really no reason to screw over your work life balance, aside for maybe a pager rotation for emergencies (but the company should have a level 2 or 3 support to handle he common cases...I guess those guys work/life balance is fucked. Sorry)
Engineers however, are arrogant as fuck, and want to be at the top of the food chain, so a couple of them will willingly fuck over their work life balance. Then they'll get promoted for it (which is a problem with the company...but its hard to say no to someone who delivered twice as much for the same pay, even if he/she screwed over their life over it).
Then, people will feel they have to do this to compete. And thus, the New York Times Pseudo-Amazon is born.
Employers should not reward those people, and other engineers should NOT worship them. You don't need a union to make things reasonable, but please for god's sake, don't encourage your peers who do that shit.
Its kind of scary how when I google for an app for android, for reviews or something, I have to wade through all the pirate site links. Often, the legitimate links are several entries below the pirate links.
And yeah, there's a lot of people at this point (and not FOSS zealots), who will just not pay for software.
At the office, I'm always seeing people who make 150k+ a year balk at the idea of paying 10 bucks for a piece of software they use every day in their side projects, and they pirate it instead. Paying for a mobile app? Impossible!
::gasps:: are you implying piracy may hurt revenue streams?
Or do they not count the ones partially rolled out? I filled up my green card application online, and got my interview, etc, through it.
It wasnt rolled everywhere at the time, and there was a few minor hiccups while on site (my stuff was in the system, but the person doing the interview didnt have access to it, whoops!), but it seemed like they were pretty close to having an end to end solution.
Most of the rest of the process was online and worked fine though.
Did that go away?
Are you thinking Zynga?
And i think the price takes that risk in consideration. Over 2 billion a year in revenue, but bought for 6b~. In the current unicorn bubble, that's on the low side.