Many here are quite convinced that H1Bs have to get paid the same as equivalent American workers. The company also has legal fees associated with this. Therefore, H1Bs must cost the company more than equivalent American workers.
If this is all true, why do companies do it? What could motivate them? For example, I find it implausible that there really isn't anybody available in Raleigh that can do network-protocol programming in C (despite what my employer's Labor Condition Applications say), but that's the only explanation, if we believe the comparable-pay arguments. It also presupposes that companies will pay more for higher-quality employees; also rather implausible.
I know the law says they have to get paid comparably... the law also says you can't use Kazaa, but it happens...
I once saw a software job ad posted by my then-employer, mentioning "40 hours per week". I went to the HR guy to tell him that might get us in trouble; mere 40-hour weeks were not tolerated at that time. He told me not to worry, it was just for immigration purposes anyway, and that the immigration lawyers would tell him who to "interview" and "disqualify" for the position (yes, even speaking the scare quotes).
I guess that by rejecting a certain number of "unqualified" applicants, the company can then defend their H1B salary rate by saying "look, we couldn't find any qualified Americans for this job!"
IANACryptographer, but ISTR that encrypting something twice can be less secure than either of the two methods. Of course an attacker might have to know you did that. At any rate, you might not want to use multiple encryption without the advice of a professional cryptographer.
Nobody's asked about your location, we assume you're in the U.S. I guess.
Is programming still a good idea as a career in the U.S.? Aren't people still looking for backup careers in fields that require physical presence? Certainly, getting a feel for the future of the field matters when trying to decide about spending time and money on training therein.
routing my email through my ISP's email server (which is static), although it was very annoying to have to do that
MailHop Outbound from dyndns.com solves this problem quite well for me. My personal domain's mailserver sits on my residential RoadRunner (servers are not against their ToS, as long as it's not for an "enterprise purpose"). I route outbound mail (except for mail to rr.com addresses, which goes to my RR-provided SMTP relay) through MailHop, $10 a year for 150 messages / day.
did I answer "jones" or "jones elementary" or "jones elementary school" or "Jones"
What I do for these is to make up answers (this defeats an attack where someone finds out where I went to school, etc.), then put that answer in my password-safe program along with the password.
It doesn't add any extra types of security anyway. It's just a secondary password, same as those "we'll ask you this question to reset your password if you forget it" questions sites used to have. Those I would just answer with random gibberish, not logged (a well-backed-up password safe means I won't be forgetting the password anyway, unless I forget the safe's encryption key:-)
a surge of babies 9 months after the northeast power blackout
Did we really? From what I read on snopes.com here and here, most of the time local reporters will latch onto statistically insignificant upticks in local birthrates 9 months after disasters. Since "everyone knows" disasters cause people to seek solace in eath others' arms, people go looking for these correlations.
if I was a complete dick, I'd just reject applications with no feedback whatsoever, not even a rejection letter
This is what typically happens to me... maybe it's me, maybe it's the standard.
Generally I either apply and never hear from them again, or get some followup questions then never hear from them again, or (infrequently) interview then never hear from them again.
I've never understood this. I'm a U.S. programmer in a company who has more engineers in its India office than here. As a result, I live like the sword of Damocles is hanging over my head all the time. (It's pretty liberating, as this means termination is no threat. "Yes, I know we have a no-moonlighting policy. If I give it up, that means I can keep my job for what? One more day?")
Everyplace I've ever worked has an application you sign stating you accept at-will employment. And then a handbook that does the same. Typically there are more mentions of employment-at-will than of not murdering your colleagues:-)
I know companies want to protect themselves from wrongful-termination lawsuits. Maybe it just takes the perception that there are a lot of such suits for companies to avoid firings. I have trouble seeing how an employee could win such a suit, with the above legal language above their signatures (and, often enough, an agreement to use binding arbitration, for even more business-friendliness), unless something blatantly illegal happened, like discrimination against a protected group or sexual harassment.
...like most these days, I'm a throwaway employee.
From what I've read, the way to make the biggest positive environmental impact, for most people, is to live close to work (ideally walking/biking distance). As somewhat of an eco-freak, that would be nice, but jobs just don't last long enough these days to plan where you live around.
Right now I live in northeast Raleigh, NC. My day job is a stone's throw from RDU Airport, in Morrisville (a bit to the west of Raleigh, 20-odd miles from my house). If I moved to downtown Morisville, I'd save a ton of money in commuting (even with a Prius).
What happens, though, when this job finally gets around to transitioning to India? I might end up in RTP (close to Morrisville), Durham (10 miles or so from there), Wake Forest (5 miles from my current house, 30 or so from the airport), who knows? (Of course, I might have to move to a new city, and as such move anyway, but that's a different problem).
destroying the American standard of living, while fattening the pockets of the ultra-rich
Interestingly enough, I believe that our following of that trend will solve our immigration problems soon enough. Once the U.S. has been plundered down to a third-world standard of living, people will stop wanting to come here. Mission accomplished!
Spamhaus claims to not do this... the only time they list IPs that are not spam sources are pre-emptively when a spammer on their ROKSO list gets an account, and sometimes ISP's corporate mail servers (not the customers' ones, and not customer machines).
Many people here are pointing out that nobody has an expectation of privacy in public. This is certainly true in American law.
However, once there's a sophisticated / ubquitious-enough network of cameras covering public places, that means that anyone's movements can be retroactively reconstructed.
Once that happens, people are going to lose the anonymity of their sexual partners. For example, today, if you hook up with someone at a bar, and you're not spotted by people who know you, it can be reasonably assumed that only you and your partner know you hooked up (unless one of you tells people). Once the two of you can be tracked leaving the bar together and making your way to (wherever), then anyone who cares to look (and has access) can find this out (possibly making a public disclosure).
This may not sound like a big threat, but there are a lot of people (including politicians) who would prefer not to live in a society where they could never cheat. Also, what if adultery, pre-marital sex, or gay sex becomes a crime? (Gay sex was a crime until recently, in some places in the USA. Unmarried opposite-sex cohabitation is still a crime in my home state of NC). Does anyone want to try to make sure that their present-day sex lives can pass the scrutiny of future legal and moral climates?
We might be able to get regular people to care about this by bringing up the "no more incognito sex" angle.
My thought exactly. My first impression upon reading this was "the migration will never actually happen, they're just using the threat as a lever to get lower prices from Microsoft."
When I used to work with IBM token-ring switches (back before and during the sell-out of IBM Networking Hardware Division to Cisco), any customer could just make vague noises about switching their network infrastructure to Cisco to immediately get their price quotes dropped substantially. Given that I've heard about lots of OSS migration plans, but they always seem to get canceled, I suspect something similar is going on.
My guess is that it's the most restrictive one, i.e. "uttering a statement that one knows to be provably false".
This does not count misdirection, omissions, etc. Everyone knows people (politicians and executives of course, but many first-line managers are like this too) whose statements have to be carefully analyzed to determine the exact meaning, e.g.:
"We don't have any plan to do that." (Today, maybe...)
"We mustn't think that [by helping co-workers in the India office] we're grooming our own successors." (Just because we mustn't think it doesn't make it untrue...) (A real example from my second-line a year or so ago)
"Read my lips, no new taxes" (the most famous of all; this statement says nothing about not raising existing taxes)
I'd got to thinking about this when talking to a former manager of mine (my boss, at the time) about why I didn't trust management; I asserted that lying to the employees was an inherent responsibility of the position. He took great offence, and (pretty angrily) asserted that he had never lied to anyone at the company. This amazed me. I asked around a few people (both gruntled and disgruntled) whether they thought this could be true. The consensus view was that the boss was probably using the above very restrictive definition of "lie".
does continued incarceration serve any useful purpose to society?
There are better chances of an answer to this if the crime was a murder, or some other crime.
Even if the offender was provably cured, anyone calling for his release can easily be slandered as "hates the children" at best and "must be a pedophile himself" at worst.
I don't see anything wrong with believing in free will.
If there is no free will, then it obviously doesn't matter whether you believe there is or not (or what you believe on any matter). It seems psychologically healthier to believe in free will (because you then feel you have some control over your destiny). If there is free will and you don't believe in it, you might make suboptimal choices based on your illusion of not having a choice.
The telcos have a choice. Nobody forces telcos to sign these franchise agreements. They could simply not provide service at all to a city if they don't want to provide service to the whole city.
By restricting the free market in this way, the regulators are only going to hurt the industry, stifle competition, and make things worse for the consumer.
I do. I spend lots of time at work surfing the Internet, reading/., etc. instead of working. I really ought to quit, but can't muster the willpower. I've also been pigging out the last few months. I'll probably have to hit rock bottom like addicts do (have a heart attack and/or get fired). I don't consider it an addiction, though, just good old-fashioned laziness.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because your crew makeup is all married couples doesn't mean you won't have jealousy and love triangles, possibly fatal ones.
Source: "Stranger in a Strange Land"
There's something I don't understand...
Many here are quite convinced that H1Bs have to get paid the same as equivalent American workers. The company also has legal fees associated with this. Therefore, H1Bs must cost the company more than equivalent American workers.
If this is all true, why do companies do it? What could motivate them? For example, I find it implausible that there really isn't anybody available in Raleigh that can do network-protocol programming in C (despite what my employer's Labor Condition Applications say), but that's the only explanation, if we believe the comparable-pay arguments. It also presupposes that companies will pay more for higher-quality employees; also rather implausible.
I know the law says they have to get paid comparably... the law also says you can't use Kazaa, but it happens...
And how's the market rate determined?
I once saw a software job ad posted by my then-employer, mentioning "40 hours per week". I went to the HR guy to tell him that might get us in trouble; mere 40-hour weeks were not tolerated at that time. He told me not to worry, it was just for immigration purposes anyway, and that the immigration lawyers would tell him who to "interview" and "disqualify" for the position (yes, even speaking the scare quotes).
I guess that by rejecting a certain number of "unqualified" applicants, the company can then defend their H1B salary rate by saying "look, we couldn't find any qualified Americans for this job!"
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
IANACryptographer, but ISTR that encrypting something twice can be less secure than either of the two methods. Of course an attacker might have to know you did that. At any rate, you might not want to use multiple encryption without the advice of a professional cryptographer.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Shhh! If word gets out, the government might spend trillions of dollars in a War On Fish...
This happens to me, even though there is no union.
You may be making an incorrect assumption about hard work and/or competence leading to a reward.
Nobody's asked about your location, we assume you're in the U.S. I guess.
Is programming still a good idea as a career in the U.S.? Aren't people still looking for backup careers in fields that require physical presence? Certainly, getting a feel for the future of the field matters when trying to decide about spending time and money on training therein.
MailHop Outbound from dyndns.com solves this problem quite well for me. My personal domain's mailserver sits on my residential RoadRunner (servers are not against their ToS, as long as it's not for an "enterprise purpose"). I route outbound mail (except for mail to rr.com addresses, which goes to my RR-provided SMTP relay) through MailHop, $10 a year for 150 messages / day.
What I do for these is to make up answers (this defeats an attack where someone finds out where I went to school, etc.), then put that answer in my password-safe program along with the password.
It doesn't add any extra types of security anyway. It's just a secondary password, same as those "we'll ask you this question to reset your password if you forget it" questions sites used to have. Those I would just answer with random gibberish, not logged (a well-backed-up password safe means I won't be forgetting the password anyway, unless I forget the safe's encryption key :-)
Did we really? From what I read on snopes.com here and here, most of the time local reporters will latch onto statistically insignificant upticks in local birthrates 9 months after disasters. Since "everyone knows" disasters cause people to seek solace in eath others' arms, people go looking for these correlations.
"Darryl Freehorn, Canadian Secret Service. We have one too."
This is what typically happens to me... maybe it's me, maybe it's the standard.
Generally I either apply and never hear from them again, or get some followup questions then never hear from them again, or (infrequently) interview then never hear from them again.
I've never understood this. I'm a U.S. programmer in a company who has more engineers in its India office than here. As a result, I live like the sword of Damocles is hanging over my head all the time. (It's pretty liberating, as this means termination is no threat. "Yes, I know we have a no-moonlighting policy. If I give it up, that means I can keep my job for what? One more day?")
Everyplace I've ever worked has an application you sign stating you accept at-will employment. And then a handbook that does the same. Typically there are more mentions of employment-at-will than of not murdering your colleagues :-)
I know companies want to protect themselves from wrongful-termination lawsuits. Maybe it just takes the perception that there are a lot of such suits for companies to avoid firings. I have trouble seeing how an employee could win such a suit, with the above legal language above their signatures (and, often enough, an agreement to use binding arbitration, for even more business-friendliness), unless something blatantly illegal happened, like discrimination against a protected group or sexual harassment.
...like most these days, I'm a throwaway employee.
From what I've read, the way to make the biggest positive environmental impact, for most people, is to live close to work (ideally walking/biking distance). As somewhat of an eco-freak, that would be nice, but jobs just don't last long enough these days to plan where you live around.
Right now I live in northeast Raleigh, NC. My day job is a stone's throw from RDU Airport, in Morrisville (a bit to the west of Raleigh, 20-odd miles from my house). If I moved to downtown Morisville, I'd save a ton of money in commuting (even with a Prius).
What happens, though, when this job finally gets around to transitioning to India? I might end up in RTP (close to Morrisville), Durham (10 miles or so from there), Wake Forest (5 miles from my current house, 30 or so from the airport), who knows? (Of course, I might have to move to a new city, and as such move anyway, but that's a different problem).
Interestingly enough, I believe that our following of that trend will solve our immigration problems soon enough. Once the U.S. has been plundered down to a third-world standard of living, people will stop wanting to come here. Mission accomplished!
Spamhaus claims to not do this... the only time they list IPs that are not spam sources are pre-emptively when a spammer on their ROKSO list gets an account, and sometimes ISP's corporate mail servers (not the customers' ones, and not customer machines).
Many people here are pointing out that nobody has an expectation of privacy in public. This is certainly true in American law.
However, once there's a sophisticated / ubquitious-enough network of cameras covering public places, that means that anyone's movements can be retroactively reconstructed.
Once that happens, people are going to lose the anonymity of their sexual partners. For example, today, if you hook up with someone at a bar, and you're not spotted by people who know you, it can be reasonably assumed that only you and your partner know you hooked up (unless one of you tells people). Once the two of you can be tracked leaving the bar together and making your way to (wherever), then anyone who cares to look (and has access) can find this out (possibly making a public disclosure).
This may not sound like a big threat, but there are a lot of people (including politicians) who would prefer not to live in a society where they could never cheat. Also, what if adultery, pre-marital sex, or gay sex becomes a crime? (Gay sex was a crime until recently, in some places in the USA. Unmarried opposite-sex cohabitation is still a crime in my home state of NC). Does anyone want to try to make sure that their present-day sex lives can pass the scrutiny of future legal and moral climates?
We might be able to get regular people to care about this by bringing up the "no more incognito sex" angle.
My thought exactly. My first impression upon reading this was "the migration will never actually happen, they're just using the threat as a lever to get lower prices from Microsoft."
When I used to work with IBM token-ring switches (back before and during the sell-out of IBM Networking Hardware Division to Cisco), any customer could just make vague noises about switching their network infrastructure to Cisco to immediately get their price quotes dropped substantially. Given that I've heard about lots of OSS migration plans, but they always seem to get canceled, I suspect something similar is going on.
What definition of "lie" was used in this study?
My guess is that it's the most restrictive one, i.e. "uttering a statement that one knows to be provably false".
This does not count misdirection, omissions, etc. Everyone knows people (politicians and executives of course, but many first-line managers are like this too) whose statements have to be carefully analyzed to determine the exact meaning, e.g.:
I'd got to thinking about this when talking to a former manager of mine (my boss, at the time) about why I didn't trust management; I asserted that lying to the employees was an inherent responsibility of the position. He took great offence, and (pretty angrily) asserted that he had never lied to anyone at the company. This amazed me. I asked around a few people (both gruntled and disgruntled) whether they thought this could be true. The consensus view was that the boss was probably using the above very restrictive definition of "lie".
There are better chances of an answer to this if the crime was a murder, or some other crime.
Even if the offender was provably cured, anyone calling for his release can easily be slandered as "hates the children" at best and "must be a pedophile himself" at worst.
I don't see anything wrong with believing in free will.
If there is no free will, then it obviously doesn't matter whether you believe there is or not (or what you believe on any matter). It seems psychologically healthier to believe in free will (because you then feel you have some control over your destiny). If there is free will and you don't believe in it, you might make suboptimal choices based on your illusion of not having a choice.
I think that covers all the cases.
The telcos have a choice. Nobody forces telcos to sign these franchise agreements. They could simply not provide service at all to a city if they don't want to provide service to the whole city.
By restricting the free market in this way, the regulators are only going to hurt the industry, stifle competition, and make things worse for the consumer.
I do. I spend lots of time at work surfing the Internet, reading /., etc. instead of working. I really ought to quit, but can't muster the willpower. I've also been pigging out the last few months. I'll probably have to hit rock bottom like addicts do (have a heart attack and/or get fired). I don't consider it an addiction, though, just good old-fashioned laziness.