I can almost guarantee he's Israeli, as that kind of questioning is routine for job interviews "over there". Apparently he forgot to learn the employment laws and norms of the United States when he immigrated. Dumb move.
How do you misunderstand this? The letter and spirit of the law does not matter. Companies do not follow the law, they follow the Code of Not Getting Sued. Those are completely different at this stage.
If you come up to me all smiles and "Hello Sir, can I help you", I don't think "Oh, that's nice", I think "What are you trying to sell?" and "How can I get rid of you?". If you try to learn my name, or start trying to steer me towards products, I actually feel more like a number, not like you're helping. And English sales assistants can't do smalltalk well at all, and you find them approaching you with an offhand comment about the weather before launching into sales patter as an example of their "engaging" with the customer.
Dude, nobody on Earth likes that style of customer-service outside the American South. I've always lived in the American Northeast, and I'm still not sure why companies insist on trying to export the South to the entire rest of the English-speaking world.
You do have to admit, being an atheist in Jerusalem, from what I'm told and what I've seen of the city myself, really does suck. Other cities/states/countries have blue laws. Jerusalem has non-blue laws as the exception. The whole city apparatus is bent around accomodating the Haredim and the Arabs.
It really doesn't. I live in Massachusetts. Programmers aren't exempt here.
That doesn't stop every single software company in the state from treating programmers as exempt and giving programmers job-offer letters claiming exempt status under Federal law.
I've reported it to the Attorney General's office, but I don't think they're doing anything about it.
They're desperate for talented programmers, but as far as I know, not so much that they actually increase salaries, increase hiring, or shorten hours. They're "desperate for talented programmers" in order to look really selective when they turn people down.
Yeah, I tried not fucking around and doing my job every day and going home. It got me an excellent relationship with my team leader, and a talking to from my "peer mentor" (our little company thingy had no formal supervisor except over the whole division) about how I needed to work at least 40 hours/week, not counting lunchtime.
If you don't force people to pay the developers' price, especially if they can just share and duplicate the software amongst themselves, nobody but the early-adopters will ever buy the software for money. Everyone will torrent it. This is an economic fact.
If you're trying to sell bits, someone else will sell competing bits in a shiny box that they don't need a network connection for that the customer can resell and run you right out of business.
The problem is that, often enough, that someone else is living in their mother's basement without paying rent, or permanently squatting at MIT with administrative permission (Stallman).
Even without "piracy", competitive markets cause prices to converge to the marginal cost of production. For bits, that cost is zero, so prices converge to free. The only way to counter this is to circumvent a competitive market: copyrights, patents, and ultimately Software as a Service (in which you keep the actual bits under lock and key but hire out your trained priests to operate on the bits for a monthly service fee), Cloud Computing (in which you compete to offer a pseudo-hardware paltform for other people's bits), and User as a Product (in which the user pays nothing, because someone else pays for access to the user).
Basic capitalist economics is, lacking government intervention on behalf of software firms, incompatible with making a living writing software-as-a-product. This is exactly the reason that some of the largest players in the software industry (IBM, Amazon, Google, large parts of Microsoft) have gone for these models, and many others (Apple, EA, Ubisoft, Sony, MS) have gone in for the Digital Restrictions Management tech necessary to lock down their products and pretend they have a nonzero marginal cost of production.
Our product is bits. Bits are arbitrarily reproducible by anyone with network bandwidth and storage space. Copyright laws are only a partial success in locking up our product as property we can sell in a shrink-wrapped box or rent-seek upon via licensing.
What we want is an income for our work. What companies want is ever-growing profits. What customers want is either free stuff (as always, ultimately) or a concrete product they can buy and own like a car.
Post-scarcity production and distribution technology is clashing with industrial-capitalist economics.
Textbook market? You think there's a textbook market? No, academics themselves get practically nothing for writing textbooks. Almost all of the money goes to the publishers.
Oh, it gets better. We mostly don't have "real" capitalism anymore, not industrial capitalism in the sense we knew it. Under that system, a prudent person could at least pour their savings into investing for reasonable long-term gains, buffering themselves against the sways of the labor market. No, we have rentier-capitalism, under which a special rentier-monopolist class of credit-creators and IP-holders get to extract money from everyone else in exchange for pretty much nothing.
What you call "overvalued", the economics world calls "arbitrage". It's a very popular way to cheat the free market: mobility of capital without mobility of labor.
Complain as you like about fossilized professors, but the chance to at least take a shot at a research job with results-only hours and tenure has at least impelled me to retry applying to graduate school and academia. And I'm 22!
No, contract offers are just often deliberate lowballs. I've had a contracting recruiter offer me $10k less than the job I quit a while ago, with insurance coming out of post-tax dollars. If we call my last salary the zero-point, my previous job offers have been at -$8k, -$10k (start-ups), +$7k, and +$1k (established companies), all of which came with a normal benefits package. Contracting recruiters assume that anyone looking to contract must be an unemployed loser with obsolete skills, and they try to lowball you. Interview the same person with real companies, and you start numbers more "within range" bandied about.
No, actually, those are social-democratic countries. Social democracy has proven vulnerable to regulatory capture and, thereby, rollback of all social-state policies.
Most of the housing stock and materials are the same between the $150k houses and the $450k houses. The difference already is the land-value.
One other thought on making houses cheaper by eliminating human labor: will only construction jobs be in decline because of this, or will all wages drop a bit? I'm not a luddite, just a socialist. If technology concentrates wealth and income, we need some way to democratize it again.
I keep seeing points like these made throughout the Slashdot thread, but aren't those all the common, basic traits of engineering colleges/universities? So where's the difference?
Slashdot Mirror
Should be fixable with a quick sonic screwdrivering, then.
I can almost guarantee he's Israeli, as that kind of questioning is routine for job interviews "over there". Apparently he forgot to learn the employment laws and norms of the United States when he immigrated. Dumb move.
Or, we can look at it the other way: protecting the planet costs nothing, but damaging it is a subsidy to planet-harming businesses.
How do you misunderstand this? The letter and spirit of the law does not matter. Companies do not follow the law, they follow the Code of Not Getting Sued. Those are completely different at this stage.
I don't have to imagine. I can stay in the USA and find out live!
If you come up to me all smiles and "Hello Sir, can I help you", I don't think "Oh, that's nice", I think "What are you trying to sell?" and "How can I get rid of you?". If you try to learn my name, or start trying to steer me towards products, I actually feel more like a number, not like you're helping. And English sales assistants can't do smalltalk well at all, and you find them approaching you with an offhand comment about the weather before launching into sales patter as an example of their "engaging" with the customer.
Dude, nobody on Earth likes that style of customer-service outside the American South. I've always lived in the American Northeast, and I'm still not sure why companies insist on trying to export the South to the entire rest of the English-speaking world.
You do have to admit, being an atheist in Jerusalem, from what I'm told and what I've seen of the city myself, really does suck. Other cities/states/countries have blue laws. Jerusalem has non-blue laws as the exception. The whole city apparatus is bent around accomodating the Haredim and the Arabs.
Because Einstein was a Jew and a Cultural Zionist, as I recall, something like one of the founders or early Presidents of Hebrew University.
It really doesn't. I live in Massachusetts. Programmers aren't exempt here.
That doesn't stop every single software company in the state from treating programmers as exempt and giving programmers job-offer letters claiming exempt status under Federal law.
I've reported it to the Attorney General's office, but I don't think they're doing anything about it.
They're desperate for talented programmers, but as far as I know, not so much that they actually increase salaries, increase hiring, or shorten hours. They're "desperate for talented programmers" in order to look really selective when they turn people down.
Yeah, I tried not fucking around and doing my job every day and going home. It got me an excellent relationship with my team leader, and a talking to from my "peer mentor" (our little company thingy had no formal supervisor except over the whole division) about how I needed to work at least 40 hours/week, not counting lunchtime.
Cool efficiency, bro.
Why are we calling it Voldemort Syndrome?
If you don't force people to pay the developers' price, especially if they can just share and duplicate the software amongst themselves, nobody but the early-adopters will ever buy the software for money. Everyone will torrent it. This is an economic fact.
You are agreeing with me quite vehemently.
If you're trying to sell bits, someone else will sell competing bits in a shiny box that they don't need a network connection for that the customer can resell and run you right out of business.
The problem is that, often enough, that someone else is living in their mother's basement without paying rent, or permanently squatting at MIT with administrative permission (Stallman).
Even without "piracy", competitive markets cause prices to converge to the marginal cost of production. For bits, that cost is zero, so prices converge to free. The only way to counter this is to circumvent a competitive market: copyrights, patents, and ultimately Software as a Service (in which you keep the actual bits under lock and key but hire out your trained priests to operate on the bits for a monthly service fee), Cloud Computing (in which you compete to offer a pseudo-hardware paltform for other people's bits), and User as a Product (in which the user pays nothing, because someone else pays for access to the user).
Basic capitalist economics is, lacking government intervention on behalf of software firms, incompatible with making a living writing software-as-a-product. This is exactly the reason that some of the largest players in the software industry (IBM, Amazon, Google, large parts of Microsoft) have gone for these models, and many others (Apple, EA, Ubisoft, Sony, MS) have gone in for the Digital Restrictions Management tech necessary to lock down their products and pretend they have a nonzero marginal cost of production.
Our product is bits. Bits are arbitrarily reproducible by anyone with network bandwidth and storage space. Copyright laws are only a partial success in locking up our product as property we can sell in a shrink-wrapped box or rent-seek upon via licensing.
What we want is an income for our work. What companies want is ever-growing profits. What customers want is either free stuff (as always, ultimately) or a concrete product they can buy and own like a car.
Post-scarcity production and distribution technology is clashing with industrial-capitalist economics.
Textbook market? You think there's a textbook market? No, academics themselves get practically nothing for writing textbooks. Almost all of the money goes to the publishers.
Oh, it gets better. We mostly don't have "real" capitalism anymore, not industrial capitalism in the sense we knew it. Under that system, a prudent person could at least pour their savings into investing for reasonable long-term gains, buffering themselves against the sways of the labor market. No, we have rentier-capitalism, under which a special rentier-monopolist class of credit-creators and IP-holders get to extract money from everyone else in exchange for pretty much nothing.
What you call "overvalued", the economics world calls "arbitrage". It's a very popular way to cheat the free market: mobility of capital without mobility of labor.
Complain as you like about fossilized professors, but the chance to at least take a shot at a research job with results-only hours and tenure has at least impelled me to retry applying to graduate school and academia. And I'm 22!
No, contract offers are just often deliberate lowballs. I've had a contracting recruiter offer me $10k less than the job I quit a while ago, with insurance coming out of post-tax dollars. If we call my last salary the zero-point, my previous job offers have been at -$8k, -$10k (start-ups), +$7k, and +$1k (established companies), all of which came with a normal benefits package. Contracting recruiters assume that anyone looking to contract must be an unemployed loser with obsolete skills, and they try to lowball you. Interview the same person with real companies, and you start numbers more "within range" bandied about.
No, actually, those are social-democratic countries. Social democracy has proven vulnerable to regulatory capture and, thereby, rollback of all social-state policies.
There are millions of qualified ditch-diggers in the world. What do you need bulldozers for?
Most of the housing stock and materials are the same between the $150k houses and the $450k houses. The difference already is the land-value.
One other thought on making houses cheaper by eliminating human labor: will only construction jobs be in decline because of this, or will all wages drop a bit? I'm not a luddite, just a socialist. If technology concentrates wealth and income, we need some way to democratize it again.
I keep seeing points like these made throughout the Slashdot thread, but aren't those all the common, basic traits of engineering colleges/universities? So where's the difference?
Never get a PhD if you want money. It's pretty obvious, really.
You're right. I should have compared Bachelors and Masters of Engineering or Science degrees to law or medicine or business.