Well, as an "EE fresh out" in '88, I couldn't get arrested in NYC - I might have landed a $7/hr intern gig with Kepco in Flushing, and if I got a whole lot of.X25 for my resume I might have become a cable squirrel for $25K/yr.... then, I had a currently in-style $50 haircut, and I got a $2 shoe shine before an interview, paired up with a $2 red silk tie from a street vendor and the hiring agent was sure she could get me a job with the Kidder Peabody investment banking firm because I had "the look", confirmed by overtly checking out my shoes through the glass interview table. She just glossed over my resume - University of whatever - computer stuff, right? Yeah, they need computer guys there. Probably starting around $30K. A tiny one bedroom apartment in the city ran around $1200/month at the time - so, 25% of your salary in taxes, 50% in rent, unless you bunk up with someone - would have left a whole $20/day to live off of - kingly.
I think the HFT guys can at least afford a terrace.
Recode from the ground up, congratulate the well respected member of the permanent team on taking the app as far as he did - explain the time required to add the requested functionality - if they don't like your time estimates, find another job.
If you add your signature to the broken code, the steaming pile becomes your legacy, not his.
If you provide a good replacement without trumpeting what an incompetent ass the previous author was, nobody is really going to know or care that you ditched all his code and replaced it.
C'mon what kind of consumer are you? When the vacuum gets full, you're supposed to pitch it and go buy another - or, from Dyson's perspective level, don't you have people who empty the vacuum for you?
Friend of mine took her fresh BS degree to work as an Assistant manager at a bank. The pay was o.k. - nothing great, but the next level up, the branch manager - who rolled in around 10, then sat and read the paper most days, but did handle the occasional off the hook customer when they happened, they made double what the Assistants made, the Assistants were the ones responsible for making sure that the daily cash count checked out, directly managing the tellers, opening and closing the branch, etc The branch managers would take an annual retreat to a different fancy resort every year where they, among other things, would decide salary levels for the upcoming year. On good years, the tellers and assistants would get cost of living raises - 2 to sometimes even 5%, while the branch managers and higher ups would usually congratulate themselves on their brilliant strategic handling of the banking business with a 10% raise, plus a bonus of whatever the bank could afford. On years when the bank wasn't doing so well, the rank and file would have to suck it up and keep level pay, or even once a decrease, while the managers would find some reason that they still deserved a 10% raise.
So, the best suck-up assistants, who also happened to have family connections to the branch managers, might find themselves one day promoted to branch manager when a spot opened up - but, without the family connections, you might spend 20+ years as an assistant. My friend took her BS degree elsewhere after a couple of years of watching this lesson in life up close.
I like to believe that effective management does contribute value to an organization, perhaps even in proportion to what higher level managers are paid.
The problems with this are manifold: starting with too many Chiefs and not enough Indians - the unwillingness of higher management to keep lower performing managers at lower levels / pay-grades means you get a bunch of people "up there" who really don't belong, but have managed to not get fired for long enough that they are raised up just based on longevity, or maybe a few rare good performance quarters. Not that there's not value in longevity, loyalty, and deep knowledge of an organization that comes from years of experience, just that longevity by itself isn't valuable.
Another problem is simple, short time horizon metrics that reward "making it happen NOW" with no regard for long term damage. Constantly moving goal posts that erase long term mistakes from the incentive structure - and higher level management that just doesn't care about the 5 or 10 year horizon.
Then you've got the ever expanding golden hiring carrots. In order to get talent in the door, inflated positions are offered, sometimes beyond the value of the position to the company, just to win a valuable player away from the competition. This, of course, reaches epically absurd proportions at the CEO level, but I found myself "in line" for a promotion from top-of-the-technical-ladder to a management spot that was open and advertised, but really just a placeholder for someone the company wanted to snag away from a competitor. In theory, there was no top-of-the-technical ladder, but in practice, at that company of 1000 employees, there were roughly 6 engineers at my level, one at the next level up (who was given that spot as a hiring incentive), and no promotions at or above that level in the company history - contrast this with dozens upon dozens of management track promotions, that, regardless of title, were making 10-20% higher base salary and 30% bonuses instead of 10% - just at the next level up, and the bonuses continued to climb to 100% of salary and beyond for the higher levels - which again outnumbered the top-of-the-technical-ladder people by a significant multiple. Except in ethically dubious fields (automated securities trading, anyone?) nobody seems to feel the need to offer large compensation incentives for technical work, but it's out there for management.
And, thus, even an incompetent manager bringing home $170K/year can be passed off as "Well, at least we're not paying him $300K like that last jerk." but an engineer who makes $125K is "oh my god, we can get 2, maybe 3 good kids from the University for that money."
Roughly 1983 through 1991 Florida was doing exactly this, providing scholarships to state residents to attend private universities in the state - and they were picking up the cost difference between private and state schools, for high level STEM courses.
Like any good idea, it eventually got shouted down by the political process, but it worked for / on me, I stayed in-state, got my degree, and now I work here in STEM jobs.
I laugh at the fvwm bug reports from the 1990s that still haven't been addressed - other than that, it's pretty o.k. if you never change your desktop configuration.
Laugh if you want, I'm working on a product that's still shipping fvwm2 (recently updated from fvwm95...)
It's... sufficient, and the devil whose face we know - all of its shortcomings, bugs, and workarounds are well known and documented - unlike a "cutting edge" desktop that throws you a mystery quirk every so often that nobody knows about.
Some jobs maybe not, but experience from my outside interests have proven highly valuable to my "day job" on many occasions, and has also helped me land new jobs on occasion.
If you're 19 years old and didn't start coding until you were 17, sure - live, breathe, sleep and dream code - you need to to get up to speed. If you like that lifestyle, I think EA is still running their revolving door....
I have had these thoughts about unlit back country roads, mostly at times when police response time might be expected to be extraordinarily long (New Year's Eve, for instance...) you don't need a kill switch to take somebody down out there, just a big truck and a shotgun - pull up alongside, blow out a tire or two and the target is just as disabled as if you had shut off the engine with some gee-whizzery. Variations include parking the truck across the road and pointing the shotgun in the driver's face when they slow to go around on the shoulder, team play with two road blocks penning the prey in, etc. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone ownership and coverage has made the world seem a little safer from these sorts of things, but it doesn't take much to make (or buy on e-bay) a cell phone jammer, either.
There are plenty of systems on today's roads that are open for abuse, but aren't generally abused - like the IR receivers on traffic lights to make them go/stay green for emergency vehicles. If the penalty for abuse of vehicle disablement systems was roughly somewhere between false arrest and kidnapping, it would mostly be abused in the movies, not in real life.
But, make no mistake, some people who shouldn't would occasionally abuse the system, just as they have abused firearms, knives, and every other form of weapon since forever.
Sorry, I'm in the 99% that spent more time jotting out a one line comment than RTFA- what I got from my skim is that they have created magnetic monopoles, but not in isolation - meaning that there is a S for every N, but they have been separated from each other far enough in space that they behave as a monopole?
If you have read the article to a deeper level of understanding and can quickly summarize or convey that knowledge, please do.
If you're looking for Abuse, that's down the hall.
It takes a couple hours of "brain time" to go from not understanding bitcoin to having a functional account that you trust.
I don't blame Linus if he'd rather spend his free time re-watching Ender's Game on DVD instead of figuring out bitcoin so he can (maybe) claim the price of a nice dinner for two in Portland / Helsinki.
The question to me is, was this a $2 tip left 3 years ago?
I sold a copy of software for 1 bitcoin back in mid-2012, worth $5 at the time. I sold said bitcoin in mid-2013 for $125, not a bad gain, but of course I would have done 1000% better to go stand at a cash register and say "you want fries with that" for the time spent writing the software in 2012, put all the income in bitcoin and sold in late-2013 instead.
Anybody got that crystal ball thing figured out yet?
Not the theory put forth by Paul Dirac 85 years ago.... but, otherwise, yes - this is essentially a different source of magnetism from that created by moving electrons.
Some people need structure, and work better when being told what to do constantly.
Then you can get into nature vs nurture and wonder if the people who need structure need it because they've never been taught how to deal without it.
I think that a U.S. Bachelor's degree (with decent grades, from a reasonable large school) is as much a sign of some capacity to function without rigid structure as any indication of learning the material in the degree specialization. At least when I went to High School, it was regimented like jail, and then University was like - show up, or don't, whatever dude. I did O.K., but the top 2 graduates from my High School were "flunking out" by sophomore year, not actually booted out for bad grades, but grades bad enough that they elected to pursue other schools / programs - these were the 4.0 kids in high school.
I'll subscribe to your newsletter, but I don't think you've got a snowball's chance in hell of seeing this kind of change become mainstream in your lifetime.
There's a chaotic mix out there, and some of the larger, evidence driven organizations are finding just what you say - reduce regimentation and get more productivity for less cost, and they attempt to drive that through the company structure to make themselves more competitive in the marketplace.
There's also a tremendous holdover of WWII boot camp mentality about "sir, yes, SIR" being productive and efficient, and when the touchy-feely crap has a bad day that boot camp mentality makes a resurgence - usually from grass roots believers who can't stand seeing their subordinates screwing off without getting punished the way they did back in the day.
At least most of us have stopped beating our children regularly as a teaching tool.
When kids (or adults) are hemmed in by rules and basically made to "sit down, shut up and wait," that's when they find ways to do things...
When "freedom" keeps them actively engaged doing things they find fun, why would they look for trouble?
Unfortunately, I think it's a self-regulating state, like happiness or heroin, get a little and you feel great - next time you'll need more to get that good feeling back. Unfortunately for the schools, if they "liberally up-regulate" freedom 13 years in a row, the children will be ill-prepared to deal with a world demanding attendance, labor, and good behavior in-between.
So, just re-structure society to abolish the 40 hour on-site workweek, need to scratch together free-market money to feed and house yourselves, and we'll all be feeling fine with no bullies on our playgrounds.
The rep-rap I saw working wasn't anywhere near as smart as you describe - it had 2 colors and basically wasted a bunch of whatever it was working with at each change. It was also finicky as hell about ambient room temperatures, etc. and ultimately got returned for refund.
When technology is allowed to progress without interference, what's expensive today will be in everyone's garage in two or three decades.
Other times, it stagnates... Manned Space Travel, the internal combustion engine (remarkably unchanged since the 1800s steam engine, and precious little improvement from computer controlled fuel injection), electrical power generation, flying machines, so much potential for improvement and increased adoption - but so little actual progress in the last 50 years. Sometimes it's market forces, sometimes the market pounds away as hard as it can and still can't make a 10x improvement in 50 years (batteries?)
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Well, as an "EE fresh out" in '88, I couldn't get arrested in NYC - I might have landed a $7/hr intern gig with Kepco in Flushing, and if I got a whole lot of .X25 for my resume I might have become a cable squirrel for $25K/yr.... then, I had a currently in-style $50 haircut, and I got a $2 shoe shine before an interview, paired up with a $2 red silk tie from a street vendor and the hiring agent was sure she could get me a job with the Kidder Peabody investment banking firm because I had "the look", confirmed by overtly checking out my shoes through the glass interview table. She just glossed over my resume - University of whatever - computer stuff, right? Yeah, they need computer guys there. Probably starting around $30K. A tiny one bedroom apartment in the city ran around $1200/month at the time - so, 25% of your salary in taxes, 50% in rent, unless you bunk up with someone - would have left a whole $20/day to live off of - kingly.
I think the HFT guys can at least afford a terrace.
Recode from the ground up, congratulate the well respected member of the permanent team on taking the app as far as he did - explain the time required to add the requested functionality - if they don't like your time estimates, find another job.
If you add your signature to the broken code, the steaming pile becomes your legacy, not his.
If you provide a good replacement without trumpeting what an incompetent ass the previous author was, nobody is really going to know or care that you ditched all his code and replaced it.
C'mon what kind of consumer are you? When the vacuum gets full, you're supposed to pitch it and go buy another - or, from Dyson's perspective level, don't you have people who empty the vacuum for you?
I'll believe there's a STEM shortage when top engineers are receiving higher than CEO level pay in significant organizations around the country.
Is there also a CEO shortage?
Friend of mine took her fresh BS degree to work as an Assistant manager at a bank. The pay was o.k. - nothing great, but the next level up, the branch manager - who rolled in around 10, then sat and read the paper most days, but did handle the occasional off the hook customer when they happened, they made double what the Assistants made, the Assistants were the ones responsible for making sure that the daily cash count checked out, directly managing the tellers, opening and closing the branch, etc The branch managers would take an annual retreat to a different fancy resort every year where they, among other things, would decide salary levels for the upcoming year. On good years, the tellers and assistants would get cost of living raises - 2 to sometimes even 5%, while the branch managers and higher ups would usually congratulate themselves on their brilliant strategic handling of the banking business with a 10% raise, plus a bonus of whatever the bank could afford. On years when the bank wasn't doing so well, the rank and file would have to suck it up and keep level pay, or even once a decrease, while the managers would find some reason that they still deserved a 10% raise.
So, the best suck-up assistants, who also happened to have family connections to the branch managers, might find themselves one day promoted to branch manager when a spot opened up - but, without the family connections, you might spend 20+ years as an assistant. My friend took her BS degree elsewhere after a couple of years of watching this lesson in life up close.
I like to believe that effective management does contribute value to an organization, perhaps even in proportion to what higher level managers are paid.
The problems with this are manifold: starting with too many Chiefs and not enough Indians - the unwillingness of higher management to keep lower performing managers at lower levels / pay-grades means you get a bunch of people "up there" who really don't belong, but have managed to not get fired for long enough that they are raised up just based on longevity, or maybe a few rare good performance quarters. Not that there's not value in longevity, loyalty, and deep knowledge of an organization that comes from years of experience, just that longevity by itself isn't valuable.
Another problem is simple, short time horizon metrics that reward "making it happen NOW" with no regard for long term damage. Constantly moving goal posts that erase long term mistakes from the incentive structure - and higher level management that just doesn't care about the 5 or 10 year horizon.
Then you've got the ever expanding golden hiring carrots. In order to get talent in the door, inflated positions are offered, sometimes beyond the value of the position to the company, just to win a valuable player away from the competition. This, of course, reaches epically absurd proportions at the CEO level, but I found myself "in line" for a promotion from top-of-the-technical-ladder to a management spot that was open and advertised, but really just a placeholder for someone the company wanted to snag away from a competitor. In theory, there was no top-of-the-technical ladder, but in practice, at that company of 1000 employees, there were roughly 6 engineers at my level, one at the next level up (who was given that spot as a hiring incentive), and no promotions at or above that level in the company history - contrast this with dozens upon dozens of management track promotions, that, regardless of title, were making 10-20% higher base salary and 30% bonuses instead of 10% - just at the next level up, and the bonuses continued to climb to 100% of salary and beyond for the higher levels - which again outnumbered the top-of-the-technical-ladder people by a significant multiple. Except in ethically dubious fields (automated securities trading, anyone?) nobody seems to feel the need to offer large compensation incentives for technical work, but it's out there for management.
And, thus, even an incompetent manager bringing home $170K/year can be passed off as "Well, at least we're not paying him $300K like that last jerk." but an engineer who makes $125K is "oh my god, we can get 2, maybe 3 good kids from the University for that money."
Roughly 1983 through 1991 Florida was doing exactly this, providing scholarships to state residents to attend private universities in the state - and they were picking up the cost difference between private and state schools, for high level STEM courses.
Like any good idea, it eventually got shouted down by the political process, but it worked for / on me, I stayed in-state, got my degree, and now I work here in STEM jobs.
I laugh at the fvwm bug reports from the 1990s that still haven't been addressed - other than that, it's pretty o.k. if you never change your desktop configuration.
Laugh if you want, I'm working on a product that's still shipping fvwm2 (recently updated from fvwm95...)
It's... sufficient, and the devil whose face we know - all of its shortcomings, bugs, and workarounds are well known and documented - unlike a "cutting edge" desktop that throws you a mystery quirk every so often that nobody knows about.
This actually looks powerful and flexible enough to keep me from getting bored, and easy and rugged enough to get the kids involved...
Not sure about $400 to get a capable kit, but I know we've got nearly $400 in Legos so far, and haven't even bought any smart parts yet.
Some jobs maybe not, but experience from my outside interests have proven highly valuable to my "day job" on many occasions, and has also helped me land new jobs on occasion.
If you're 19 years old and didn't start coding until you were 17, sure - live, breathe, sleep and dream code - you need to to get up to speed. If you like that lifestyle, I think EA is still running their revolving door....
Monster.com can be your very good friend...
Depends on where you go, I've seen age-ism cut all four ways, for and against me, in my 20s and in my 40s.
I have had these thoughts about unlit back country roads, mostly at times when police response time might be expected to be extraordinarily long (New Year's Eve, for instance...) you don't need a kill switch to take somebody down out there, just a big truck and a shotgun - pull up alongside, blow out a tire or two and the target is just as disabled as if you had shut off the engine with some gee-whizzery. Variations include parking the truck across the road and pointing the shotgun in the driver's face when they slow to go around on the shoulder, team play with two road blocks penning the prey in, etc. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone ownership and coverage has made the world seem a little safer from these sorts of things, but it doesn't take much to make (or buy on e-bay) a cell phone jammer, either.
There are plenty of systems on today's roads that are open for abuse, but aren't generally abused - like the IR receivers on traffic lights to make them go/stay green for emergency vehicles. If the penalty for abuse of vehicle disablement systems was roughly somewhere between false arrest and kidnapping, it would mostly be abused in the movies, not in real life.
But, make no mistake, some people who shouldn't would occasionally abuse the system, just as they have abused firearms, knives, and every other form of weapon since forever.
6 years to launch and it's "out," either not a secret at all, or a very poorly executed one.
Sorry, I'm in the 99% that spent more time jotting out a one line comment than RTFA- what I got from my skim is that they have created magnetic monopoles, but not in isolation - meaning that there is a S for every N, but they have been separated from each other far enough in space that they behave as a monopole?
If you have read the article to a deeper level of understanding and can quickly summarize or convey that knowledge, please do.
If you're looking for Abuse, that's down the hall.
It takes a couple hours of "brain time" to go from not understanding bitcoin to having a functional account that you trust.
I don't blame Linus if he'd rather spend his free time re-watching Ender's Game on DVD instead of figuring out bitcoin so he can (maybe) claim the price of a nice dinner for two in Portland / Helsinki.
The question to me is, was this a $2 tip left 3 years ago?
I sold a copy of software for 1 bitcoin back in mid-2012, worth $5 at the time. I sold said bitcoin in mid-2013 for $125, not a bad gain, but of course I would have done 1000% better to go stand at a cash register and say "you want fries with that" for the time spent writing the software in 2012, put all the income in bitcoin and sold in late-2013 instead.
Anybody got that crystal ball thing figured out yet?
Not the theory put forth by Paul Dirac 85 years ago.... but, otherwise, yes - this is essentially a different source of magnetism from that created by moving electrons.
This just in, sun rose in the east, West Virginians declare scientific discovery.
Some people need structure, and work better when being told what to do constantly.
Then you can get into nature vs nurture and wonder if the people who need structure need it because they've never been taught how to deal without it.
I think that a U.S. Bachelor's degree (with decent grades, from a reasonable large school) is as much a sign of some capacity to function without rigid structure as any indication of learning the material in the degree specialization. At least when I went to High School, it was regimented like jail, and then University was like - show up, or don't, whatever dude. I did O.K., but the top 2 graduates from my High School were "flunking out" by sophomore year, not actually booted out for bad grades, but grades bad enough that they elected to pursue other schools / programs - these were the 4.0 kids in high school.
I'll subscribe to your newsletter, but I don't think you've got a snowball's chance in hell of seeing this kind of change become mainstream in your lifetime.
There's a chaotic mix out there, and some of the larger, evidence driven organizations are finding just what you say - reduce regimentation and get more productivity for less cost, and they attempt to drive that through the company structure to make themselves more competitive in the marketplace.
There's also a tremendous holdover of WWII boot camp mentality about "sir, yes, SIR" being productive and efficient, and when the touchy-feely crap has a bad day that boot camp mentality makes a resurgence - usually from grass roots believers who can't stand seeing their subordinates screwing off without getting punished the way they did back in the day.
At least most of us have stopped beating our children regularly as a teaching tool.
Idle hands = devil's workshop.
When kids (or adults) are hemmed in by rules and basically made to "sit down, shut up and wait," that's when they find ways to do things...
When "freedom" keeps them actively engaged doing things they find fun, why would they look for trouble?
Unfortunately, I think it's a self-regulating state, like happiness or heroin, get a little and you feel great - next time you'll need more to get that good feeling back. Unfortunately for the schools, if they "liberally up-regulate" freedom 13 years in a row, the children will be ill-prepared to deal with a world demanding attendance, labor, and good behavior in-between.
So, just re-structure society to abolish the 40 hour on-site workweek, need to scratch together free-market money to feed and house yourselves, and we'll all be feeling fine with no bullies on our playgrounds.
The rep-rap I saw working wasn't anywhere near as smart as you describe - it had 2 colors and basically wasted a bunch of whatever it was working with at each change. It was also finicky as hell about ambient room temperatures, etc. and ultimately got returned for refund.
Sometimes:
When technology is allowed to progress without interference, what's expensive today will be in everyone's garage in two or three decades.
Other times, it stagnates... Manned Space Travel, the internal combustion engine (remarkably unchanged since the 1800s steam engine, and precious little improvement from computer controlled fuel injection), electrical power generation, flying machines, so much potential for improvement and increased adoption - but so little actual progress in the last 50 years. Sometimes it's market forces, sometimes the market pounds away as hard as it can and still can't make a 10x improvement in 50 years (batteries?)