I'm not willing to chalk it up to a lack of education. Concurrency is legitimately more difficult than straightforward single-threaded code. Some developers can handle it; some can't.
I used BBS's in the early 90s roughly like I do facebook now. Chatting/arguing w/ folks about religion and politics. Except, I also played door games (SRE/BRE and the Risk clone) and occasionally downloaded files (Wing Commander was 6 MB and took like 6 hours to download over 2400 baud).
This Reuters article has more detailed info. Among U.S.-based tech employees the stats are 3% Hispanic and 1% black, vs. 4% and 2% respectively among Facebook's global workforce. 17% of its global tech employees are women.
As one data point of comparison, here is some demographic data for AP Computer Science test takers in California for the year 2012. Looking at students who take the AP exam may be a good proxy for identifying students who will one day be applying for top-tier positions. Among this group, 7% were Hispanic, 1% were black and 21% were women. If those stats are representative of the pool of top-tier talent in the workforce, then Facebook isn't far off in terms of its hiring of blacks and women. It seems further off with respect to Hispanics. Though, California has a higher-than-usual Hispanic population, so maybe nationally the % of Hispanic AP Exam takers is less than 7.
This article in USA Today also has some stats. They looked at the demographics of CS and CE graduates from "top" U.S. universities. Not sure what "top" means. They claim that 4.5% of such graduates are black, 6.5% are Hispanic. They didn't report on what % were women.
I recant the part about Apache then, and limit my answer to running Rails in process-per-request mode. Unfortunately the project I work on has a ton of legacy code that's probably not thread-safe, so rather than go through the pain of refactoring it it we've elected to just buy more RAM, i.e. have more instances in the pool.
Was going to be sarcastic and answer "Ruby on Rails", but I'll go with "process per request" instead. That is, the Apache model, or for Rails the model where you keep a pool of instances that only handle one request at a time.
Terrible in terms of scalability, but generally works for small workloads. Plus it largely sidesteps developers having to understand how to write thread-safe code.
No list, obviously. But it's easy to make a reasonable guess. I don't work on crypto. I don't have a lot of friends from "suspect" foreign countries. I'm not a terrorist. I don't associate with terrorists. I don't say incendiary things about elected officials. I'm not an "activist" of any kind. I don't traffic in protected IP, child porn, weapons or drugs. I'm not a black hat.
Basically, the NSA has no reason to care about me. I'm a nobody. And my online profile makes it extremely unlikely that I'd be tagged by an algorithmic solution.
LA apparently turned a profit in 1984. But it's an outlier. That article also suggests there's some gain in the host country's equity markets relative to the rest of the world.
Did you miss the part where I said I don't begrudge them their decision to leave for greener pastures? Employee loyalty to company is almost entirely dead. Company loyalty to employee is also dead. It's not fair to employers to expect them to be loyal to their employees when those same employees aren't loyal to their employer.
Honestly, I'd rather my employer not risk spending money to train him (not to mention having to keep him on for another six months) only to have him perform exactly the same at the end of that period. I'd rather "we" as a development organization start to have actual hiring standards, and apply those standards retroactively to current employees based on the body of work we've already seen from them.
"They" (meaning employees where I work) frequently "discard" my employer whenever a higher paying position comes along; there's no real "company loyalty" any more. (And I don't begrudge them that decision.) So why should my employer feel an obligation to not respond in kind? Besides: I'm not convinced training would help. The guy writing bloated, buggy, poorly performing code isn't going to magically starting writing clean, robust, succinct, performant code if we send him to a 3 week class.
I'm relatively certain I could go get another job inside a week or two, possibly making more than I do now. So I'm winning to risk being the one who gets laid off. It's pretty liberating, actually, being in that position. Or, at least, perceiving myself to be in that position. I can speak a-politically about things at work (hard truths, etc.) and have no anxiety about possible consequences.
Certainly seems as if the market considers it the right move w.r.t. the success of Seagate, Inc. If you disagree, and feel Seagate should have retained those 6500 employees, why should that be the steady state? Couldn't Seagate afford to take on additional employees? What should factor into Seagate management's calculus when they try to determine what the size of their workforce should be? As large as possible with the constraint that the company remain profitable? Whatever size maximizes long-term growth? Something else?
Honestly, I often wish my employer would lay off 15% of the company. Or, better yet, lay off the lowest-performing 30% and back-fill half of those positions with more competent new-hires. Productivity would stay roughly constant but payroll would shrink by ~10%. (This assumes the new hires would need to be paid more in order to guarantee the caliber of employee likely to be more productive than those being replaced.)
Well, first off, you come off as bitter and spiteful. Need to tone that shit down. That said, a couple points/questions:
1. I would only move to the Seattle area if I thought I could roughly match my current standard of living. Given cost-of-living differences I'd need to make 15-20% more in Seattle for that to be the case. I say "roughly" because I consider there to be certain intangibles that favor Seattle. Namely, the ability to drive an hour or two out of town and be at Mt. Ranier or Olympic Natl. Park. My current mortgage payment + insurance is something around $1500/mo for a home that's comparable to the one you mentioned. To absorb a $4000/mo payment I'd need to earn $30k more per year. If I couldn't at least approach that then I probably wouldn't move.
2. Your home tripling in value is still meaningful even if you're not planning to move any time soon. Eventually you're going to move, most likely to a geography w/ cheaper housing, at which point you'll reap the rewards of that appreciation. This same phenomenon is happening in Austin too, so that's somewhat of a wash. I bought my place in 2003 for $240k; 13 years later its appraised at around $475k.
3. I'm curious why you're so derisive toward the newcomers who, because of housing prices, subject themselves to a long commute. We have the same folks here; they live out in the suburbs (because you get a lot more house for your money) and commute in to central Austin. It's a trade-off; you get more living space in exchange for a longer commute. Personally I'd rather have a smaller place and live closer in, but I don't begrudge them their decision.
4. I personally know some folks who work (or worked) at MS and they're good people. Perhaps you're painting them with too broad a brush? I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that Amazon and MS have a higher-than-normal ratio of jerkwads per capita compared to other tech companies, but that doesn't mean everybody there sucks.
Gee, chip on your shoulder much? Hypothetically speaking, if I were to move from Austin to Seattle (which I'm not considering) it would be for the following reasons:
1. More tech employers = less likelihood of my ever being without a job.
2. More / better outdoor stuff. Texas is kind of "meh" in that regard.
Haven't run the numbers, but I've always suspected that cost-of-living differences (not just Seattle, but generally speaking) are to a large degree offset by differences in salary. Places that cost more also pay more. It may not be enough to completely offset the difference in cost-of-living, but I'm sure it blunts the effect somewhat.
Caveat: I've never lived in NYC. That said, I AirBnB'd a family's apartment for 2 weeks in Washington Heights while I was there on vacation. On a lark, I looked up how much it would cost me to buy a condo in a nearby building that was being remodeled. Roughly two bedrooms and ~1200 sq. foot. If I recall correctly, I think it was around $550k. Granted it's not the best part of town, but on the particular block where we stayed I never felt in danger. It was a 2 block walk to the A-line so I could be downtown in 20 minutes.
My not-super-nice 1500 sq. foot home in north-central Austin is appraised at around 475k (mostly because of the land; not the structure) and it just gets worse the closer you move toward the city center. The inverse is also true; suburbs (e.g. Cedar Park, Leander) are very reasonable, albeit devoid of character. The nicer close-in neighborhoods (Rosedale, Tarrytown, etc.) run about $425/sqft.
Point being: Considering only housing and not taking into account other factors in cost-of-living it seems like I might be able to relocate to NYC without taking a big hit to my "real" income.
Could an employee live in a central location and reasonably commute to any of the three? (Honest question; I've never lived there.) If so, then it makes sense to treat them as a single employment market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not willing to chalk it up to a lack of education. Concurrency is legitimately more difficult than straightforward single-threaded code. Some developers can handle it; some can't.
Dates, including time zones and daylight savings time. Constant source of bugs.
I used BBS's in the early 90s roughly like I do facebook now. Chatting/arguing w/ folks about religion and politics. Except, I also played door games (SRE/BRE and the Risk clone) and occasionally downloaded files (Wing Commander was 6 MB and took like 6 hours to download over 2400 baud).
I'd like to see a Mac version of this, pitting Chrome, Firefox and Safari running natively on the latest OS and recent hardware.
Caveat Emptor.
So, at least 0.5%.
This Reuters article has more detailed info. Among U.S.-based tech employees the stats are 3% Hispanic and 1% black, vs. 4% and 2% respectively among Facebook's global workforce. 17% of its global tech employees are women.
As one data point of comparison, here is some demographic data for AP Computer Science test takers in California for the year 2012. Looking at students who take the AP exam may be a good proxy for identifying students who will one day be applying for top-tier positions. Among this group, 7% were Hispanic, 1% were black and 21% were women. If those stats are representative of the pool of top-tier talent in the workforce, then Facebook isn't far off in terms of its hiring of blacks and women. It seems further off with respect to Hispanics. Though, California has a higher-than-usual Hispanic population, so maybe nationally the % of Hispanic AP Exam takers is less than 7.
This article in USA Today also has some stats. They looked at the demographics of CS and CE graduates from "top" U.S. universities. Not sure what "top" means. They claim that 4.5% of such graduates are black, 6.5% are Hispanic. They didn't report on what % were women.
I recant the part about Apache then, and limit my answer to running Rails in process-per-request mode. Unfortunately the project I work on has a ton of legacy code that's probably not thread-safe, so rather than go through the pain of refactoring it it we've elected to just buy more RAM, i.e. have more instances in the pool.
Was going to be sarcastic and answer "Ruby on Rails", but I'll go with "process per request" instead. That is, the Apache model, or for Rails the model where you keep a pool of instances that only handle one request at a time.
Terrible in terms of scalability, but generally works for small workloads. Plus it largely sidesteps developers having to understand how to write thread-safe code.
No list, obviously. But it's easy to make a reasonable guess. I don't work on crypto. I don't have a lot of friends from "suspect" foreign countries. I'm not a terrorist. I don't associate with terrorists. I don't say incendiary things about elected officials. I'm not an "activist" of any kind. I don't traffic in protected IP, child porn, weapons or drugs. I'm not a black hat.
Basically, the NSA has no reason to care about me. I'm a nobody. And my online profile makes it extremely unlikely that I'd be tagged by an algorithmic solution.
Don't do anything the NSA would care about. It's pretty easy.
LA apparently turned a profit in 1984. But it's an outlier. That article also suggests there's some gain in the host country's equity markets relative to the rest of the world.
Did you miss the part where I said I don't begrudge them their decision to leave for greener pastures? Employee loyalty to company is almost entirely dead. Company loyalty to employee is also dead. It's not fair to employers to expect them to be loyal to their employees when those same employees aren't loyal to their employer.
Honestly, I'd rather my employer not risk spending money to train him (not to mention having to keep him on for another six months) only to have him perform exactly the same at the end of that period. I'd rather "we" as a development organization start to have actual hiring standards, and apply those standards retroactively to current employees based on the body of work we've already seen from them.
"They" (meaning employees where I work) frequently "discard" my employer whenever a higher paying position comes along; there's no real "company loyalty" any more. (And I don't begrudge them that decision.) So why should my employer feel an obligation to not respond in kind? Besides: I'm not convinced training would help. The guy writing bloated, buggy, poorly performing code isn't going to magically starting writing clean, robust, succinct, performant code if we send him to a 3 week class.
I'm relatively certain I could go get another job inside a week or two, possibly making more than I do now. So I'm winning to risk being the one who gets laid off. It's pretty liberating, actually, being in that position. Or, at least, perceiving myself to be in that position. I can speak a-politically about things at work (hard truths, etc.) and have no anxiety about possible consequences.
Certainly seems as if the market considers it the right move w.r.t. the success of Seagate, Inc. If you disagree, and feel Seagate should have retained those 6500 employees, why should that be the steady state? Couldn't Seagate afford to take on additional employees? What should factor into Seagate management's calculus when they try to determine what the size of their workforce should be? As large as possible with the constraint that the company remain profitable? Whatever size maximizes long-term growth? Something else?
Honestly, I often wish my employer would lay off 15% of the company. Or, better yet, lay off the lowest-performing 30% and back-fill half of those positions with more competent new-hires. Productivity would stay roughly constant but payroll would shrink by ~10%. (This assumes the new hires would need to be paid more in order to guarantee the caliber of employee likely to be more productive than those being replaced.)
He [Comey] has done it before and lived to tell the tale. Also worth noting he was George W. Bush's AG.
Well, first off, you come off as bitter and spiteful. Need to tone that shit down. That said, a couple points/questions:
1. I would only move to the Seattle area if I thought I could roughly match my current standard of living. Given cost-of-living differences I'd need to make 15-20% more in Seattle for that to be the case. I say "roughly" because I consider there to be certain intangibles that favor Seattle. Namely, the ability to drive an hour or two out of town and be at Mt. Ranier or Olympic Natl. Park. My current mortgage payment + insurance is something around $1500/mo for a home that's comparable to the one you mentioned. To absorb a $4000/mo payment I'd need to earn $30k more per year. If I couldn't at least approach that then I probably wouldn't move.
2. Your home tripling in value is still meaningful even if you're not planning to move any time soon. Eventually you're going to move, most likely to a geography w/ cheaper housing, at which point you'll reap the rewards of that appreciation. This same phenomenon is happening in Austin too, so that's somewhat of a wash. I bought my place in 2003 for $240k; 13 years later its appraised at around $475k.
3. I'm curious why you're so derisive toward the newcomers who, because of housing prices, subject themselves to a long commute. We have the same folks here; they live out in the suburbs (because you get a lot more house for your money) and commute in to central Austin. It's a trade-off; you get more living space in exchange for a longer commute. Personally I'd rather have a smaller place and live closer in, but I don't begrudge them their decision.
4. I personally know some folks who work (or worked) at MS and they're good people. Perhaps you're painting them with too broad a brush? I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that Amazon and MS have a higher-than-normal ratio of jerkwads per capita compared to other tech companies, but that doesn't mean everybody there sucks.
Gee, chip on your shoulder much? Hypothetically speaking, if I were to move from Austin to Seattle (which I'm not considering) it would be for the following reasons:
1. More tech employers = less likelihood of my ever being without a job.
2. More / better outdoor stuff. Texas is kind of "meh" in that regard.
Haven't run the numbers, but I've always suspected that cost-of-living differences (not just Seattle, but generally speaking) are to a large degree offset by differences in salary. Places that cost more also pay more. It may not be enough to completely offset the difference in cost-of-living, but I'm sure it blunts the effect somewhat.
Caveat: I've never lived in NYC. That said, I AirBnB'd a family's apartment for 2 weeks in Washington Heights while I was there on vacation. On a lark, I looked up how much it would cost me to buy a condo in a nearby building that was being remodeled. Roughly two bedrooms and ~1200 sq. foot. If I recall correctly, I think it was around $550k. Granted it's not the best part of town, but on the particular block where we stayed I never felt in danger. It was a 2 block walk to the A-line so I could be downtown in 20 minutes.
My not-super-nice 1500 sq. foot home in north-central Austin is appraised at around 475k (mostly because of the land; not the structure) and it just gets worse the closer you move toward the city center. The inverse is also true; suburbs (e.g. Cedar Park, Leander) are very reasonable, albeit devoid of character. The nicer close-in neighborhoods (Rosedale, Tarrytown, etc.) run about $425/sqft.
Point being: Considering only housing and not taking into account other factors in cost-of-living it seems like I might be able to relocate to NYC without taking a big hit to my "real" income.
Could an employee live in a central location and reasonably commute to any of the three? (Honest question; I've never lived there.) If so, then it makes sense to treat them as a single employment market.
Guess their recruiters didn't get the memo. They keep contacting me despite it being clear from my LinkedIn page that I'm over 40.
Unscientific tests:
careers.stackoverflow.com: Rails: 237. Django: 93. Python: 713. Ruby: 430.
indeed.com: Rails: 16,479. Django: 2,219. Python: 43,411. Ruby: 17,525.
...which means no more security patches for Rails 3.x, right?