I wouldn't worry too hard about keeping your kids from seeing your movies -- they're too long to be interesting, mostly. The real issue is once your kid figures out how to click around on youtube. You'll start them with Sesame Street or something and when you turn back they're watching a kid pretend Elmo is being butt-raped, with graphic commentary.
YouTube "related video" links are the real problem in this space.
Why are people not offering higher salaries to encourage more skilled people from other parts of the country to move there?
I think we are. $150k/year is pretty good and that's the floor...but we've offered much higher. Add in great health insurance (medical, dental and vision), RSU grants, 20% yearly bonus, ESPP program, 401k with 125% match, $5k/yr educational benefit, $650/yr health benefit (gym, trainer, etc), $900/yr commuting benefits and you're looking at a package that's well over $200k.
For how many years experience, though? And anyways, one has to live in San Jose or wherever else in the valley to have this job. You'd need to offer me a lot more money than that to get me there.
And isn't your "4 years at google and a *Standford* CS degree" just the same arbitrary requirement as a recruiter that thinks "rails" is a form of transportation?
He was just giving an example of someone who has an obviously solid pedigree.
It's not obviously solid. I was a TA at Cornell for a few years. Some of the people who graduated were smart. Some weren't. I assume the same is true of people working at Google; after 4 years some will be getting promotions and responsibility, and some will be looking for an exit since they aren't getting promoted.
I'd interview the above theoretical candidate exactly the same as I would someone with a degree from University of Utah and no company I'd ever heard of on their resume. Because both smart and dumb people can be found everywhere.
Sorry; rereading what I said I realize what was confusing.
How do I, as a person who already has an MS in CSE, get to call myself a Software Engineer? I'm not going back to college for another, extremely similar degree. There wasn't a SE major when I was in college. So I assume there must be some other mechanism for people to be allowed to call themselves "Software Engineers" whenever the law that started limiting this was passed.
Now I find this alone fascinating. When I was in college, "Software Engineering" was one class in the CS major. There was no Software Engineering degree available at my school, and I suspect at no college or university.
Both places I've worked in my 11 years as a professional didn't really distinguish. I have a Computer Science and Engineering degree. I write and design software. I'm in the research and development arm (or the Engineering arm) of the company. It's several ways to say one thing.
Yes, some distinctions can be drawn, like whether you interface with customers, who does the architecture or design, etc., but in general the people I work with are all over the software life cycle, from beginning to end. We do development (of software) and the official job title has always had "Engineer" and sometimes "Development" or "Software" in it.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues..
Women need to be treated with respect for their boundaries. The same as men. There's not gender discrimination here; men can and have been sexually harassed, but in a place that is 90% male it's less likely. You seem to be confusing what's prevalent with what's possible.
The post actually presents an interesting issue (via the time.com link): why do corporations feel they have to take sides on the gay marriage issue?
As I recall, Microsoft's reasoning was made explicit at least once. MSFT believes that, by supporting issues such as same-sex marriage, it can attract the most talented gay people in the software industry as employees, who may see the company's support of such an issue as a reason to work for MSFT rather than a competitor.
True. I earned $14k per year stipend in graduate school, plus $6k per summer grading a summer-school course. I opted for that instead of a more lucrative summer internship.
So for the 2.5 years of graduate school I earned $20k per year instead of around $56k, so if it was $6k extra per year then I'm at break-even next year. If it was an extra $8k instead (since I am estimating) I was at break even a while ago.
Are you part of the interviewing process where you work? I am, and while I can't say what HR or our recruiter might do, I often don't even look at the part of the resume that lists where a candidate was educated, except for curiosity. I still need a candidate to prove to me that s/he can program and can think, and their educational source is only tangentially related in my experience.
My colleagues have interviewed new college graduates in CS who don't know big-O notation. That's a pre-requisite for understanding P versus NP. Though to be fair, there's a broad swath of problems one can solve for an employer where the algorithms don't reach that combinatoric complexity, and the data sets aren't large enough to make O(n^2) with low constants worse too often compared to O(n lg n) with high constants.
I personally see no value in this kind of master's degree if there is no need to write a thesis/dissertation.
The value for me of a course-based M.S. (dropout from a PhD program) was $6000 per year starting salary. That's a pretty decent bump that I likely kept with me my whole career, as raises tend to be percentage based. So after 11 years it may have been worth at least $66k.
Oh, and also I learned a bunch of stuff in those courses I hadn't yet learned as an undergrad. To my recollection, none of the specific things has been relevant to my job, but it is sometimes hard to tell.
I fully suspect the degree they will offer is worth every penny, but not a penny more - and you won't "fool" anyone with this Masters degree
I, as a interviewer, won't be "fooled". But since I work with some brilliant software people who never got a college degree, it won't necessarily be a barrier to getting at least a phone interview. If the interviewee knows their stuff, it doesn't matter how they learned it.
I mean, with someone who has 20 years experience, do you care if they went to Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Kansas? Of course not, you care if they're smart and have some relevant skills. A lot of times as an interviewer I don't even care if they have the relevant skills (i.e. I work in the storage industry, but candidates don't need to know anything about storage or filesystems to get a job here -- I certainly didn't know that when I started).
As an interviewer I care about two things, essentially: can you think, and do you understand some CS theory? If you can do the first but don't know the second, you can still get a job, we just won't start you as a senior level engineer.
It may be U.S. only (I hope so!) Others can talk all they want about "well-rounded" but the economic reality is that English, History, etc., courses do not produce graduates who earn more money. And so the only way those departments survive, since they can't on their own merits, is by forcing all students, some of whom *will* increase their earning potential, to take them.
It's pure economics -- there's a bunch of economically useless professors, who have plenty of time to petition the President of the school or the state legislature about why their brand of "well-rounded" is so useful, and thereby gain a fraction of a lot of student's tuition, instead of the very small piece they'd otherwise have.
Now ask yourself this: is college the only time in my life I am able to read classical literature or study art history or any of these other things that somehow make one well-rounded? Of course not. So the idea that one needs to study this in college is ludicrous, except to those departments that don't produce economic value trying to justify their existence.
Not sure how much it costs sine $WORK bought it for me, but all over these threads I see 1920 x whatever and it all sounds very small. I've been working for three years using a 2560x1600 and that's quite nice. I can get 4+ xterms wide at the top to monitor my cluster, and three emacs windows below that with space for a terminal window on either side for grepping through code and other tasks.
The company I work for has lots of openings, and we recently hired a guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics but no CS background to be one of our testers. The qualifications for the job involve some Python knowledge, and the ability to think.
Actually, we'd probably hire someone in Dev without a degree in CS as long as they again met the basic qualifications of knowing something about the relevant programming language (for us, C, C++, and Python), knew CS fundamentals (data structures, analysis of algorithms, etc), and had the ability to think.
I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.
In the software world, older has benefits too (from my perspective as a dev who's worked with both old and new devs). After 10 years in the industry I can foresee dozens of problems that newly minted college grads can't. Foresight means early prevention. My former colleagues at IBM with 25 years in the industry saw even further than I.
Send me your resume, or just go to the careers part of our site. EMC/Isilon is hiring; we have an office in Campbell though the main one is in Seattle. I'm 36, but there are people older than me doing dev work.
Now if by "no one wants older guys" you mean "won't pay what I demand", well, that is a part of economics. I'm paid significantly more than a starting employee. Maybe not quite as much as I could get elsewhere, but it seems comparable with industry pay for my level.
when does an embryo switch from being a mass of cells, to a baby?
I will take my own religion's answer: at birth.
Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?
See, it's not an easy question. With neonatal incubators babies as young as 23 weeks have survived.
I seem to remember a young man named Osama bin Laden committed terrorist acts in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out of it. So the Soviet Union did suffer terrorism.
only kids and low paying wages will be in software, in the US, soon enough
Well, I can't speak t your experience, but at the formerly-small company I work for (we were acquired a year ago and have grown headcount by at least 50% in the last year, and have budget for 60% more growth on the team I'm on) not only is it not a race to the bottom, but there's lots of jobs.
It's true that when I started, at 33, I was one of the older devs. As the company grows, we're hiring more college kids than older people, still. That has nothing to do with anything but the people who are applying -- I haven't seen a lot of resumes from older workers. But we don't look at age at all, we look at talent. Definitely there's been some age 50+ hired for our east-coast branch.
The "pointy-hairs" in the company I work for are former engineers, who in some cases realized they're not great at writing software and moved into management. The first line managers are expected to be technical contributors. The company founder / CEO was an engineer.
And to the point of outsourcing: it's a temporary thing. The problem is quality -- if you are a foreigner who can write software as well as anyone else, you will not continue accepting less money for the same work for long. The only people who cost less are the ones who don't do as good of a job.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't worry too hard about keeping your kids from seeing your movies -- they're too long to be interesting, mostly. The real issue is once your kid figures out how to click around on youtube. You'll start them with Sesame Street or something and when you turn back they're watching a kid pretend Elmo is being butt-raped, with graphic commentary.
YouTube "related video" links are the real problem in this space.
Why are people not offering higher salaries to encourage more skilled people from other parts of the country to move there?
I think we are. $150k/year is pretty good and that's the floor...but we've offered much higher. Add in great health insurance (medical, dental and vision), RSU grants, 20% yearly bonus, ESPP program, 401k with 125% match, $5k/yr educational benefit, $650/yr health benefit (gym, trainer, etc), $900/yr commuting benefits and you're looking at a package that's well over $200k.
For how many years experience, though? And anyways, one has to live in San Jose or wherever else in the valley to have this job. You'd need to offer me a lot more money than that to get me there.
And isn't your "4 years at google and a *Standford* CS degree" just the same arbitrary requirement as a recruiter that thinks "rails" is a form of transportation?
He was just giving an example of someone who has an obviously solid pedigree.
It's not obviously solid. I was a TA at Cornell for a few years. Some of the people who graduated were smart. Some weren't. I assume the same is true of people working at Google; after 4 years some will be getting promotions and responsibility, and some will be looking for an exit since they aren't getting promoted.
I'd interview the above theoretical candidate exactly the same as I would someone with a degree from University of Utah and no company I'd ever heard of on their resume. Because both smart and dumb people can be found everywhere.
Sorry; rereading what I said I realize what was confusing.
How do I, as a person who already has an MS in CSE, get to call myself a Software Engineer? I'm not going back to college for another, extremely similar degree. There wasn't a SE major when I was in college. So I assume there must be some other mechanism for people to be allowed to call themselves "Software Engineers" whenever the law that started limiting this was passed.
Can I do a web search in 1994 for this? Because I don't think there was a Software Engineering degree in 1994, or 1998.
Unless you have a degree in Software Engineering
Now I find this alone fascinating. When I was in college, "Software Engineering" was one class in the CS major. There was no Software Engineering degree available at my school, and I suspect at no college or university.
Both places I've worked in my 11 years as a professional didn't really distinguish. I have a Computer Science and Engineering degree. I write and design software. I'm in the research and development arm (or the Engineering arm) of the company. It's several ways to say one thing.
Yes, some distinctions can be drawn, like whether you interface with customers, who does the architecture or design, etc., but in general the people I work with are all over the software life cycle, from beginning to end. We do development (of software) and the official job title has always had "Engineer" and sometimes "Development" or "Software" in it.
FreeBSD 9.0 was dedicated to Dennis Ritchie.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues..
Women need to be treated with respect for their boundaries. The same as men. There's not gender discrimination here; men can and have been sexually harassed, but in a place that is 90% male it's less likely. You seem to be confusing what's prevalent with what's possible.
The post actually presents an interesting issue (via the time.com link): why do corporations feel they have to take sides on the gay marriage issue?
As I recall, Microsoft's reasoning was made explicit at least once. MSFT believes that, by supporting issues such as same-sex marriage, it can attract the most talented gay people in the software industry as employees, who may see the company's support of such an issue as a reason to work for MSFT rather than a competitor.
True. I earned $14k per year stipend in graduate school, plus $6k per summer grading a summer-school course. I opted for that instead of a more lucrative summer internship.
So for the 2.5 years of graduate school I earned $20k per year instead of around $56k, so if it was $6k extra per year then I'm at break-even next year. If it was an extra $8k instead (since I am estimating) I was at break even a while ago.
Are you part of the interviewing process where you work? I am, and while I can't say what HR or our recruiter might do, I often don't even look at the part of the resume that lists where a candidate was educated, except for curiosity. I still need a candidate to prove to me that s/he can program and can think, and their educational source is only tangentially related in my experience.
My colleagues have interviewed new college graduates in CS who don't know big-O notation. That's a pre-requisite for understanding P versus NP. Though to be fair, there's a broad swath of problems one can solve for an employer where the algorithms don't reach that combinatoric complexity, and the data sets aren't large enough to make O(n^2) with low constants worse too often compared to O(n lg n) with high constants.
I personally see no value in this kind of master's degree if there is no need to write a thesis/dissertation.
The value for me of a course-based M.S. (dropout from a PhD program) was $6000 per year starting salary. That's a pretty decent bump that I likely kept with me my whole career, as raises tend to be percentage based. So after 11 years it may have been worth at least $66k.
Oh, and also I learned a bunch of stuff in those courses I hadn't yet learned as an undergrad. To my recollection, none of the specific things has been relevant to my job, but it is sometimes hard to tell.
I fully suspect the degree they will offer is worth every penny, but not a penny more - and you won't "fool" anyone with this Masters degree
I, as a interviewer, won't be "fooled". But since I work with some brilliant software people who never got a college degree, it won't necessarily be a barrier to getting at least a phone interview. If the interviewee knows their stuff, it doesn't matter how they learned it.
I mean, with someone who has 20 years experience, do you care if they went to Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Kansas? Of course not, you care if they're smart and have some relevant skills. A lot of times as an interviewer I don't even care if they have the relevant skills (i.e. I work in the storage industry, but candidates don't need to know anything about storage or filesystems to get a job here -- I certainly didn't know that when I started).
As an interviewer I care about two things, essentially: can you think, and do you understand some CS theory? If you can do the first but don't know the second, you can still get a job, we just won't start you as a senior level engineer.
It may be U.S. only (I hope so!) Others can talk all they want about "well-rounded" but the economic reality is that English, History, etc., courses do not produce graduates who earn more money. And so the only way those departments survive, since they can't on their own merits, is by forcing all students, some of whom *will* increase their earning potential, to take them.
It's pure economics -- there's a bunch of economically useless professors, who have plenty of time to petition the President of the school or the state legislature about why their brand of "well-rounded" is so useful, and thereby gain a fraction of a lot of student's tuition, instead of the very small piece they'd otherwise have.
Now ask yourself this: is college the only time in my life I am able to read classical literature or study art history or any of these other things that somehow make one well-rounded? Of course not. So the idea that one needs to study this in college is ludicrous, except to those departments that don't produce economic value trying to justify their existence.
U.S. Steel companies had their most profitable quarters in decades just before going under. Read The Innovator's Dilemma.
Not sure how much it costs sine $WORK bought it for me, but all over these threads I see 1920 x whatever and it all sounds very small. I've been working for three years using a 2560x1600 and that's quite nice. I can get 4+ xterms wide at the top to monitor my cluster, and three emacs windows below that with space for a terminal window on either side for grepping through code and other tasks.
The company I work for has lots of openings, and we recently hired a guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics but no CS background to be one of our testers. The qualifications for the job involve some Python knowledge, and the ability to think.
Actually, we'd probably hire someone in Dev without a degree in CS as long as they again met the basic qualifications of knowing something about the relevant programming language (for us, C, C++, and Python), knew CS fundamentals (data structures, analysis of algorithms, etc), and had the ability to think.
I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.
In the software world, older has benefits too (from my perspective as a dev who's worked with both old and new devs). After 10 years in the industry I can foresee dozens of problems that newly minted college grads can't. Foresight means early prevention. My former colleagues at IBM with 25 years in the industry saw even further than I.
Send me your resume, or just go to the careers part of our site. EMC/Isilon is hiring; we have an office in Campbell though the main one is in Seattle. I'm 36, but there are people older than me doing dev work.
Now if by "no one wants older guys" you mean "won't pay what I demand", well, that is a part of economics. I'm paid significantly more than a starting employee. Maybe not quite as much as I could get elsewhere, but it seems comparable with industry pay for my level.
when does an embryo switch from being a mass of cells, to a baby?
I will take my own religion's answer: at birth.
Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?
See, it's not an easy question. With neonatal incubators babies as young as 23 weeks have survived.
I seem to remember a young man named Osama bin Laden committed terrorist acts in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out of it. So the Soviet Union did suffer terrorism.
only kids and low paying wages will be in software, in the US, soon enough
Well, I can't speak t your experience, but at the formerly-small company I work for (we were acquired a year ago and have grown headcount by at least 50% in the last year, and have budget for 60% more growth on the team I'm on) not only is it not a race to the bottom, but there's lots of jobs.
It's true that when I started, at 33, I was one of the older devs. As the company grows, we're hiring more college kids than older people, still. That has nothing to do with anything but the people who are applying -- I haven't seen a lot of resumes from older workers. But we don't look at age at all, we look at talent. Definitely there's been some age 50+ hired for our east-coast branch.
The "pointy-hairs" in the company I work for are former engineers, who in some cases realized they're not great at writing software and moved into management. The first line managers are expected to be technical contributors. The company founder / CEO was an engineer.
And to the point of outsourcing: it's a temporary thing. The problem is quality -- if you are a foreigner who can write software as well as anyone else, you will not continue accepting less money for the same work for long. The only people who cost less are the ones who don't do as good of a job.