In the "old" days (late 80's / early 90's) there were more than a few predominently IT companies that paid 100% of your benefits. Now there are so few of those that they are coined "Camelot" companies.
One of them, Computer Associates, stopped paying 100% about (I'd guess) a year ago. I'm not sure how many of these companies still exist, but I'd daresay not many.
Given this - like iggymanz said - the cost of benefits is significantly less than it used to be.
One of the earlier posters said that there is an overhead cost associated with administrative "stuff" that occurs as a natural result of my hiring as a full time employee. My response is that I should not be penalized for this: you (read: the company) want me to come to work for you because of the skills and experience I bring. That, and that alone, should be the determining factor when considering what my salary should be. It's even more laughable when you consider that, for the larger companies at least, these administrative costs are much further reduced due to "economies of scale."
For example: in its heydey, IBM employeed over 200,000 employees worldwide. How much expense, do you think, is incurred when a new employee is added to the roster? The HR / Accounting framework is already in place, procedures are already established, and I guarantee you that processes such as payroll are fully automated.
So where's the expense? It's in data entry and (data) maintenance. That, I claim, is nominal when compared to the supposed costs of administration that companies try to claim.
You make (mostly) valid points, but I disagree with the figures you use to quantify them. If I'm a 1099 consultant, my tax deductions alone should reduce the conversion rate to significantly less than 30% because the difference between my "net effective income" as a 1099 consultant and what it would be (sans tax deductions, since I would no longer have my own business) as a full-time employee is less.
The one point that I disagree with strongly is that full time employees are considered long-term investments by companies. I recall reading somewhere that, in the "old days," someone who was at a single job for 10 or 15 years was considered "stable," while now they are considered "behind the technology curve" because they didn't get exposed to a diverse set of technology environments.
In other words, companies are explicitly hiring people who have been at previous positions for less time (the threshold, if I recall correctly, was 4-5 years) because it gives them a wider range of experiences on which to draw so that they may fulfil their current responsibilities more effectively. Consequently, after you've been at a job for 4-5 years (unless you've managed to somehow become elevated to some sort of leadership position [technical lead, project lead, manager, etc.]) the company is not going to have any qualms about letting you go to bring in someone else.
All of this being said, I do not disagree that there will be a drop in pay. My contention is that it should be closer to 10%, perhaps 15%, but definitely not 25-30%.
(On an unrelated - to my original posting at least - note, consultants are not paid more because they are out of work in between jobs. The consultants who are better at what they do than others are not out of work, excepting exceptional circumstances, for more than a few weeks in between contracts.
They are paid more because the traditional way of thinking was that consultants were specialists in what they did. "Guns for hire" is what we were called years ago, and we were paid accordingly. However, with the Dot Com Run-up, everyone wanted to be consultants, which diluted the available pool of resources, causing the vast majority of hourly rates to be driven downward significantly.
This is otherwise known as Supply / Demand Economics.
Note that if you have skills were the supply is limited (like the old days) you can still make an exhorbitant salary. I recall seeing some job postings on Dice.com for Ph.D holders [in math] that were fluent in C++ where the base salary would range from $250K-750K per annum.)
Call me a simpleton, then, because we would stagger reboots on a 4 server farm when I was working for a prestigious Wall St. firm. There's no need to claim that staggered reboots have to occur only when there are "thousands of servers all over the country managed from one location."
I'll agree that lost employee productivity is an issue, but - for the larger companies at least - patches are not applied willy-nilly. And even when they are applied, the application of the patches (and subsequent verification that machines will not be affected adversely) is tested in an environment specifically created for the sole purpose of avoiding employee downtime due to this reason.
At said Wall St. firm, there were 15,000 workstations company-wide. I tell you now that patches, service packs, etc. were tested for weeks in advance sometimes to ensure that the application of those patches would be smooth. They weren't 100% problem-free, but the number of problems that occurred was nominal compared to what it could have been.
I'm not going to lie to you and say that the copious numbers of MS patches should be ignored. But I will say that the threat posed by not installing the patches the second they are released can be significantly migitated in other ways (firewalls, anyone?) while testing occurs and solutions / workarounds to problems discovered are developed.
Kangro also points out the report doesn't mention costs associated with rebooting systems after a patch is applied.
I didn't RTFA but any company that is going to lose more than a few pennies from a reboot is going to have redundant servers in place already. It is not difficult to stagger the application of patches to server machines in a farm, which all but eliminates the cost of a reboot.
Anything from Novell that is spoken against Microsoft is suspect anyway. I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but the animosity between the two companies is well documented.
I'm a software developer / architect working in Manhattan and here's what I've seen in this area over the past year or so.
In spite of the fact that there are more jobs available, companies are still only willing to pay salaries in line with the Dot Com Bust era. In other words, I get calls almost every day (and frequently multiple calls) from recruiters who are representing clients that want to pay 35% less than what I was making as a full-time employee in 2002 and 25% less than I'm making now as a 1099 consultant now.
The ones who are willing to pay the higher salaries (read: Wall St.) expect skillsets that are so specific that they will not talk to you if you do not have every one of them. In my opinion, they are asking for trouble because the technologies in use there are used very rarely outside of those sectors. When the IT staff they have in place now decide to move on, they will be hard-pressed to find trained people to replace them.
I actually had an HR employee at a company who was interested in me as a potential employee tell me that their guideline for translating 1099 to full-time salary was to subtract 30%. I asked her how they arrived at that figure and her response was that it took into consideration benefits, vacation time, sick days and retirement plans.
Color me stupid but benefits these days are not what they used to be from the perspective of the amount the company contributes. I pay less than double than others at full time companies do, but I'm paying 100% of the cost. This isn't your father's IBM where the company paid for nearly everything and you had an amazing medical, dental, vision, etc. plan.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people do not take a lot of sick days each year and you have me scratching my head and wondering what drugs that HR person was on when she told me 30% and expected me to accept it like it was a given.
Bah. KLocs ("Thousands of Lines of Code" for those of you who aren't familiar with the term) have been in use as a metric of productivity since at least 1988 when I was a cooperative education employee at IBM's Application Systems Development lab in Cary, NC.
Andy Grove once said, "You're only paranoid if you're wrong."
If Linus is asking for a proof-of-concept exploit implementation then I can understand his request. But simply ignoring it is indeed asking for trouble.
Maybe the next release of the kernel should be codenamed "Ostrich?":D
BUT you will also NOT see a SINGLE case of any email being forwarded to the cops/FBI for legal action regarding communicating a threat.
Not
a
single
one
.
Meanwhile, if it were you or I who received an emailed death threat, we would have the appropriate message and headers carried to the local authorities for investigation and possible arrest.
That's because Dvorak still thinks his mouse is a microphone for the business PA system? He couldn't operate a computer if it were fully prescient.
Him and the other bozos (Stewart Aelsop anyone?) at the magazines should be taken with a grain of salt because they aren't worth much more than that.
I seem to recall reading that diamonds as electrical insulators were extremely efficient. Man-made diamonds could have a drastic effect on the electronics industry if my memory serves me correctly.
With all of the talk of colored diamonds being of less worth, be aware that yellow diamonds are indeed not infrequently found. However the other colors are rarer and can increase the value significantly over a colorless diamond with the same shape and clarity.
This information comes from a good friend of mine in the diamond business for 30 years.
So fine. IE and Netscape were both guilty. That doesn't make the action correct.
I agree with the original poster's implication that sticking to the specifications is better than attending to the needs of users. The ISO and ANSI committees exist for a reason: when new features need to be added to an existing specification, the committees consider them and update the specification so that all implementers of the specification can do what's "best for the user" at the same time.
Granted, I'm living in a pipe dream but this is the ideal situation: where the focus on writing specification-constrained (note the qualifier) software is in its extensibility (read: ability to rapidly adapt to new changes to the specification) and performance.
(Note: this says nothing about portions of software or entire applications even that are not bound by the terms of an approved specification. For example, a POP3 email client has to follow the POP3 specification when it communicates with the mail server but it can add all sorts of features to the client that have nothing to do with the specification.)
I wonder. If we posted this discussion thread on Craigslist and indicated that it is permissable to beam it to outer space, what would Luke think when he read that it's impossible for light sabres to exist.
Darth: I have you now, young Skywalker.
Luke: It is time for me to finish this once and for all.
[Pulls out light sabre handle and pushes the button]
Pppppppphhhhhhhhhhhhhhhllllllllllllbt
Luke: Oh no! I knew I shouldn't have used those cheaper AA batteries!
Darth: [Maniacal laughter] I have you now! I will put you in eternal torment by inflicting the worst punishment known to pre-Jedi man: Barry Manilow on perpetual shuffle on my i-Pod. Bwahahahahaha...
And in related news, a nuclear reaction melted down today when the Excel spreadsheet controlling it threw a Divide by Zero exception at the same time that the Internet Explorer browser used on the same machine was hijacked by Spyware developed in Russia.
The few professional photographers that I know (the majority of them are "high-end" shooters) tell me that, if they were ever to go digital as their primary camera, it would be from Canon.
The point seems to be moot, however, as I cannot recall ever hearing any of them say that they would abandon their medium- or large-format film-based camera for digital.
A looooong time ago in a galaxy far, far away when I was in college, there was a graduate student (Bill Crossman, if I recall, was his name) who one day decided to clear out his home directory before packing up to go home for the summer. So he typed "rm *" at the shell command line and thought all was good.
He forgot he had logged in as root.
From that point on he was known as "arr emm star Crossman":D
Slashdot Mirror
In the "old" days (late 80's / early 90's) there were more than a few predominently IT companies that paid 100% of your benefits. Now there are so few of those that they are coined "Camelot" companies.
One of them, Computer Associates, stopped paying 100% about (I'd guess) a year ago. I'm not sure how many of these companies still exist, but I'd daresay not many.
Given this - like iggymanz said - the cost of benefits is significantly less than it used to be.
One of the earlier posters said that there is an overhead cost associated with administrative "stuff" that occurs as a natural result of my hiring as a full time employee. My response is that I should not be penalized for this: you (read: the company) want me to come to work for you because of the skills and experience I bring. That, and that alone, should be the determining factor when considering what my salary should be. It's even more laughable when you consider that, for the larger companies at least, these administrative costs are much further reduced due to "economies of scale."
For example: in its heydey, IBM employeed over 200,000 employees worldwide. How much expense, do you think, is incurred when a new employee is added to the roster? The HR / Accounting framework is already in place, procedures are already established, and I guarantee you that processes such as payroll are fully automated.
So where's the expense? It's in data entry and (data) maintenance. That, I claim, is nominal when compared to the supposed costs of administration that companies try to claim.
The one point that I disagree with strongly is that full time employees are considered long-term investments by companies. I recall reading somewhere that, in the "old days," someone who was at a single job for 10 or 15 years was considered "stable," while now they are considered "behind the technology curve" because they didn't get exposed to a diverse set of technology environments.
In other words, companies are explicitly hiring people who have been at previous positions for less time (the threshold, if I recall correctly, was 4-5 years) because it gives them a wider range of experiences on which to draw so that they may fulfil their current responsibilities more effectively. Consequently, after you've been at a job for 4-5 years (unless you've managed to somehow become elevated to some sort of leadership position [technical lead, project lead, manager, etc.]) the company is not going to have any qualms about letting you go to bring in someone else.
All of this being said, I do not disagree that there will be a drop in pay. My contention is that it should be closer to 10%, perhaps 15%, but definitely not 25-30%.
(On an unrelated - to my original posting at least - note, consultants are not paid more because they are out of work in between jobs. The consultants who are better at what they do than others are not out of work, excepting exceptional circumstances, for more than a few weeks in between contracts.
They are paid more because the traditional way of thinking was that consultants were specialists in what they did. "Guns for hire" is what we were called years ago, and we were paid accordingly. However, with the Dot Com Run-up, everyone wanted to be consultants, which diluted the available pool of resources, causing the vast majority of hourly rates to be driven downward significantly.
This is otherwise known as Supply / Demand Economics.
Note that if you have skills were the supply is limited (like the old days) you can still make an exhorbitant salary. I recall seeing some job postings on Dice.com for Ph.D holders [in math] that were fluent in C++ where the base salary would range from $250K-750K per annum.)
Um...Are you hiring? :D :D :D
I'll agree that lost employee productivity is an issue, but - for the larger companies at least - patches are not applied willy-nilly. And even when they are applied, the application of the patches (and subsequent verification that machines will not be affected adversely) is tested in an environment specifically created for the sole purpose of avoiding employee downtime due to this reason.
At said Wall St. firm, there were 15,000 workstations company-wide. I tell you now that patches, service packs, etc. were tested for weeks in advance sometimes to ensure that the application of those patches would be smooth. They weren't 100% problem-free, but the number of problems that occurred was nominal compared to what it could have been.
I'm not going to lie to you and say that the copious numbers of MS patches should be ignored. But I will say that the threat posed by not installing the patches the second they are released can be significantly migitated in other ways (firewalls, anyone?) while testing occurs and solutions / workarounds to problems discovered are developed.
I didn't RTFA but any company that is going to lose more than a few pennies from a reboot is going to have redundant servers in place already. It is not difficult to stagger the application of patches to server machines in a farm, which all but eliminates the cost of a reboot.
Anything from Novell that is spoken against Microsoft is suspect anyway. I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but the animosity between the two companies is well documented.
In spite of the fact that there are more jobs available, companies are still only willing to pay salaries in line with the Dot Com Bust era. In other words, I get calls almost every day (and frequently multiple calls) from recruiters who are representing clients that want to pay 35% less than what I was making as a full-time employee in 2002 and 25% less than I'm making now as a 1099 consultant now.
The ones who are willing to pay the higher salaries (read: Wall St.) expect skillsets that are so specific that they will not talk to you if you do not have every one of them. In my opinion, they are asking for trouble because the technologies in use there are used very rarely outside of those sectors. When the IT staff they have in place now decide to move on, they will be hard-pressed to find trained people to replace them.
I actually had an HR employee at a company who was interested in me as a potential employee tell me that their guideline for translating 1099 to full-time salary was to subtract 30%. I asked her how they arrived at that figure and her response was that it took into consideration benefits, vacation time, sick days and retirement plans.
Color me stupid but benefits these days are not what they used to be from the perspective of the amount the company contributes. I pay less than double than others at full time companies do, but I'm paying 100% of the cost. This isn't your father's IBM where the company paid for nearly everything and you had an amazing medical, dental, vision, etc. plan.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people do not take a lot of sick days each year and you have me scratching my head and wondering what drugs that HR person was on when she told me 30% and expected me to accept it like it was a given.
Am I living in a pipe dream?
Bah. KLocs ("Thousands of Lines of Code" for those of you who aren't familiar with the term) have been in use as a metric of productivity since at least 1988 when I was a cooperative education employee at IBM's Application Systems Development lab in Cary, NC.
But she swore that third nipple was a prosthetic that was part of a costume for the local theater! I couldn't help myself, and just gave her the CD.
Andy Grove once said, "You're only paranoid if you're wrong."
:D
If Linus is asking for a proof-of-concept exploit implementation then I can understand his request. But simply ignoring it is indeed asking for trouble.
Maybe the next release of the kernel should be codenamed "Ostrich?"
Not
a
single
one
.
Meanwhile, if it were you or I who received an emailed death threat, we would have the appropriate message and headers carried to the local authorities for investigation and possible arrest.
That's because Dvorak still thinks his mouse is a microphone for the business PA system? He couldn't operate a computer if it were fully prescient.
Him and the other bozos (Stewart Aelsop anyone?) at the magazines should be taken with a grain of salt because they aren't worth much more than that.
I seem to recall reading that diamonds as electrical insulators were extremely efficient. Man-made diamonds could have a drastic effect on the electronics industry if my memory serves me correctly.
Silicon on Diamond, anyone?
With all of the talk of colored diamonds being of less worth, be aware that yellow diamonds are indeed not infrequently found. However the other colors are rarer and can increase the value significantly over a colorless diamond with the same shape and clarity.
This information comes from a good friend of mine in the diamond business for 30 years.
Why not? This strategy has worked rather well for Microsoft in the past.
I agree with the original poster's implication that sticking to the specifications is better than attending to the needs of users. The ISO and ANSI committees exist for a reason: when new features need to be added to an existing specification, the committees consider them and update the specification so that all implementers of the specification can do what's "best for the user" at the same time.
Granted, I'm living in a pipe dream but this is the ideal situation: where the focus on writing specification-constrained (note the qualifier) software is in its extensibility (read: ability to rapidly adapt to new changes to the specification) and performance.
(Note: this says nothing about portions of software or entire applications even that are not bound by the terms of an approved specification. For example, a POP3 email client has to follow the POP3 specification when it communicates with the mail server but it can add all sorts of features to the client that have nothing to do with the specification.)
I wonder. If we posted this discussion thread on Craigslist and indicated that it is permissable to beam it to outer space, what would Luke think when he read that it's impossible for light sabres to exist.
Darth: I have you now, young Skywalker.
Luke: It is time for me to finish this once and for all.
[Pulls out light sabre handle and pushes the button]
Pppppppphhhhhhhhhhhhhhhllllllllllllbt
Luke: Oh no! I knew I shouldn't have used those cheaper AA batteries!
Darth: [Maniacal laughter] I have you now! I will put you in eternal torment by inflicting the worst punishment known to pre-Jedi man: Barry Manilow on perpetual shuffle on my i-Pod. Bwahahahahaha...
Luke: NOOOooo...
I think most Bostonians would be happy if The Big Dig were finished before Duke Nukem Forever is.
...would be to Slashdot the spammers websites. :P
Aren't "Microthrusters" what Bill uses when he and Melinda have sex? Only stands to reason since he did name the company Micro-soft. :D
And in related news, a nuclear reaction melted down today when the Excel spreadsheet controlling it threw a Divide by Zero exception at the same time that the Internet Explorer browser used on the same machine was hijacked by Spyware developed in Russia.
Perhaps, but someone needs to tell Him that Mary's been hanging around underneath the overpass near the truck stop again.
The few professional photographers that I know (the majority of them are "high-end" shooters) tell me that, if they were ever to go digital as their primary camera, it would be from Canon.
The point seems to be moot, however, as I cannot recall ever hearing any of them say that they would abandon their medium- or large-format film-based camera for digital.
...Microsoft announced today that it's next major release of Windows will require 290G of disk space to be installed.
...it's evil. :D
:D
A looooong time ago in a galaxy far, far away when I was in college, there was a graduate student (Bill Crossman, if I recall, was his name) who one day decided to clear out his home directory before packing up to go home for the summer. So he typed "rm *" at the shell command line and thought all was good.
He forgot he had logged in as root.
From that point on he was known as "arr emm star Crossman"
Your argument would have had more weight if you had said: If you are not able to answer that question, all your base are belong to us!!!1!!1!
Will they call the religious zealots that will inevitably go there "Earthies?"