Not economically feasible given the size of the U.S. border. Not to mention, many undocumented folks crossed the border legally. More guards, fences and guns wouldn't have stopped them. If you want to stop undocumented immigrants from working you need to work on the "demand" side. For instance:
1. Raise fines on employers.
2. Devote more resources to policing employers.
3. Makes it as easy as humanly possible for employers to verify work eligibility.
4. Require schools to verify citizenship or legal residence before registering new students.
5. Create frameworks similar to the EITC that benefit low-wage domestic workers but that ineligible workers aren't able to access. For instance, wage subsidies available only to citizens.
Preventing illegal immigration by "securing the border" is a red herring.
If you don't want to be silenced then don't take the severance package. Title makes it sound draconian while, in fact, they're being "silenced" by being given large sums of cash.
Possibly. But primarily because there's an established history of discrimination against women that would lend credibility to the notion that it's happening now. There's no history of overt discrimination against men, and certainly not starting as far base as the late 1970s.
I agree it's no big deal. Was just addressing the claim that he was zero'd in on "tech" and motivated by the movement to get more women interested in STEM. I don't think that's what's going on.
Possibly because you're exaggerating. In 2012 the gap was 56/44. So 1.27 women for every man. It probably doesn't get reported on very often since women have outnumbered men in terms of total enrollment since 1979. One explanation might be that there are many more professions that are male-dominated but that don't require a college degree. Skilled tradesman, for example. Construction. Anything where physical strength is a prerequisite. So if you're a man who doesn't seem cut out for college then you have options. If you're a woman then, perhaps, you have fewer options. So there's greater motivation to get a degree.
It might also be worth noting that the gender gap decreases substantially among "traditionally aged" students (24 and under) as family income rises. So the gender imbalance is coming from poorer students and older students.
I don't know Auerbach, but I suspect he'd be "okay" if she wanted to be an attorney, doctor, CEO, astronaut, concert pianist, architect, prime minister, etc. I doubt he's laser focused on tech and primarily motivated by the lack of women in STEM. It seems more likely the problem is his daughter's choice of "princess" as a goal. It's nonsensical, for one, but it would also tend to irk someone whose hope for his daughter is that she "aim high" and not have as a goal merely "marry a prince".
How many 4-year olds male or female want to be a scientist or engineer when they grow up? Plenty of boys want to be things like firemen, astronauts, soldiers, pro athletes, etc. who don't eventually enter those fields. I'm a software developer and I never wanted to be a software developer growing up. Then again I was born in the 70s, so it wasn't on a lot of peoples' "radar" career-wise when I was a small child.
Does Belgium tax the perks as well? If so then it's a wash. I know in California they're starting to clue in to the fact that companies are essentially allowing their employes to dodge the income tax by providing "free services" in place of cash. Free food, free transportation, free daycare, free gym membership, free dry-cleaning, etc.
Agreed. I can envision a more credible doomsday scenario, however, where humanity becomes overly dependent on pseudo-AI type automation (think self-driving cars) and that automation breaks in some spectacular way. Probably wouldn't mean the end of the species, but could precipitate a big die-off. Of course that's not what Hawking is talking about.
One reason companies offer all the silly perks (pool table, excessive free food, etc.): it's a way to compensate employees tax-free. I can pay my guys $1000 more apiece but they'll only take home $700. Maybe $1000 worth of "free perks" and creating the perception of a "fun culture" offers better "bang for my buck" in terms of attracting and retaining employees than the extra $700 in take-home pay. Then again, maybe not. But I'm willing to entertain the argument that it does.
I find conclusions like those of the GP laughable at best.
Do you at least agree there's a kernel of truth? Having social skills > not having social skills when it comes to successful interviewing. You don't have to look like "rich frat boy", but, like it or not, it helps if you don't come across as "neckbeard with bad hygiene". The fact that corporate American also has huge problems doesn't change that.
If you get paid and can quit then you're not a slave. Quit with the histrionics. As to what "social skills and teamwork" mean, yes, the ability to accept someone else's authority is a necessary part of working on any team that has the notion of a leader. I will agree, though, that having an extreme aversion to others' authority doesn't necessarily mean you're "antisocial".
i've worked at a startup like this. [...] they want people at the office 16 hours minimum. if you calculate an hourly wage, you're getting around $20/hr.
Gotta ask: why? Are you not capable of getting paid more than $20/hr elsewhere? Or did you just want the extra hours/income? If any employer ever asked me to work more than 50 hr/week for more than 2 weeks in a row I'd probably take my ball and go home.
45 with three kids? No worries! Hope you like pizza fuelled all night gaming marathons and our monthly team trip to Vegas! Oh, you don't? Sorry, you aren't a cultural fit.
Fine by me if that's the criterion they want to use, so long as there are also companies out there refusing to hire young "rockster" devs who crave all-night gaming marathons and monthly team trips to Vegas in favor of 45 year-olds with kids. Honestly, if I applied at the company you describe, I'd be glad if they weeded me out due to "culture fit". It would save me the trouble of being hired then having to quit because of their ridiculous company culture.
Exactly. I can attest that the overall thrust of this article is true. The company I work for, as well as past companies, have all taken into account "culture fit" when evaluating candidates. On the other hand, most of the crap in the comments about what people screen for, e.g. weeding out introverts and/or selecting only for rich white frat boys, is not something I've ever experienced or heard about.
I get that competition leads to higher salaries. My point is that higher salaries, while it might be a "solution" for a given company's trouble filling positions, isn't an industry-wide solution. If I offer an above-market salary to fill my rec then I'm necessarily taking someone off the market who could be working for some other company. If all other companies increase their compensation equal to the amount I increased mine then I don't gain any advantage and I have approximately as much trouble finding talent as I do today.
What would likely ameliorate the "talent deficit" is that some tech jobs would either cease to exist or move overseas if the compensation level grew too high.
Here's why I'm not convinced that the answer is simply higher salaries. To be sure, some workers who could be doing tech decide to do something else. Maybe they go into academia, finance, IP law, etc. Raising tech salaries across the board, by everyone who employs tech workers, would steal some of these guys back. But would it be enough? You would probably also motivate some young people to go into tech that currently go into other fields. But that's for the future; it doesn't help the present. The fact is that there's a fixed supply of domestic talent at each point along the talent spectrum. You could pay 10x as much and it won't magically increase the amount of available talent. If there is, in fact, not enough talent to "go around", i.e. to fill all the tech positions employers want to fill, then we don't just have a salary problem.
Side note: what's good for the domestic tech worker may not be the same as what's good for the country. That is to say, an influx of highly-skilled foreign tech workers might depress salaries in the short term, but an abundance of cheap tech labor could juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole.
There's also anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is becoming less attractive to foreign talent and not more. Which, in my opinion, is terrible news.
The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).
One tactic utility companies could use is to just change their pricing structure. Most already have a fee structure where the highest price/kWh is only paid for electricity purchased at the margins. The first kWh purchased may be drastically cheaper than the last, especially if you're a heavy user. So they could simply exaggerate that structure and make electricity "artificially" cheap for the majority of users and then gouge the heavy users on usage over some threshold.
Alternately they could move to a price structure where there's a fixed "fee" to simply be a customer, and then use the revenue from that fee to offset the price-per-kWh and make it artificially cheap.
It's one way. I should have been more specific. "Amount of moderately difficult work completed at a moderate-or-higher level of quality." Another might be, "Ability to complete extremely difficult work at a extremely high level of quality in non-infinite time." Someone who excels at the first might not excel at the second, though generally I'd expect there to be a lot of overlap.
I've been doing software dev. for about 15 years. I'll grant that the level of productivity between "the worst" and "the best" is at least 10x, if not more, because "the worst" are essentially producing nothing. Or, worse, have negative productivity in the sense they're creating stuff that is totally non-functional and will need to be re-written by someone else at a later date.
That said, the difference between "the best" and "the average" is probably not 10x. At least not if productivity is measured in "amount of output produced at some acceptable level of quality". Where "the best" guys excel is in being able to solve problems that average guy is probably never going to be able to solve (well) no matter how much time he's given. On the other hand, those sorts of problems come up less often than most people think.
Slashdot Mirror
Not economically feasible given the size of the U.S. border. Not to mention, many undocumented folks crossed the border legally. More guards, fences and guns wouldn't have stopped them. If you want to stop undocumented immigrants from working you need to work on the "demand" side. For instance:
1. Raise fines on employers.
2. Devote more resources to policing employers.
3. Makes it as easy as humanly possible for employers to verify work eligibility.
4. Require schools to verify citizenship or legal residence before registering new students.
5. Create frameworks similar to the EITC that benefit low-wage domestic workers but that ineligible workers aren't able to access. For instance, wage subsidies available only to citizens.
Preventing illegal immigration by "securing the border" is a red herring.
If you don't want to be silenced then don't take the severance package. Title makes it sound draconian while, in fact, they're being "silenced" by being given large sums of cash.
Possibly. But primarily because there's an established history of discrimination against women that would lend credibility to the notion that it's happening now. There's no history of overt discrimination against men, and certainly not starting as far base as the late 1970s.
I agree it's no big deal. Was just addressing the claim that he was zero'd in on "tech" and motivated by the movement to get more women interested in STEM. I don't think that's what's going on.
Possibly because you're exaggerating. In 2012 the gap was 56/44. So 1.27 women for every man. It probably doesn't get reported on very often since women have outnumbered men in terms of total enrollment since 1979. One explanation might be that there are many more professions that are male-dominated but that don't require a college degree. Skilled tradesman, for example. Construction. Anything where physical strength is a prerequisite. So if you're a man who doesn't seem cut out for college then you have options. If you're a woman then, perhaps, you have fewer options. So there's greater motivation to get a degree.
It might also be worth noting that the gender gap decreases substantially among "traditionally aged" students (24 and under) as family income rises. So the gender imbalance is coming from poorer students and older students.
I don't know Auerbach, but I suspect he'd be "okay" if she wanted to be an attorney, doctor, CEO, astronaut, concert pianist, architect, prime minister, etc. I doubt he's laser focused on tech and primarily motivated by the lack of women in STEM. It seems more likely the problem is his daughter's choice of "princess" as a goal. It's nonsensical, for one, but it would also tend to irk someone whose hope for his daughter is that she "aim high" and not have as a goal merely "marry a prince".
How many 4-year olds male or female want to be a scientist or engineer when they grow up? Plenty of boys want to be things like firemen, astronauts, soldiers, pro athletes, etc. who don't eventually enter those fields. I'm a software developer and I never wanted to be a software developer growing up. Then again I was born in the 70s, so it wasn't on a lot of peoples' "radar" career-wise when I was a small child.
Does Belgium tax the perks as well? If so then it's a wash. I know in California they're starting to clue in to the fact that companies are essentially allowing their employes to dodge the income tax by providing "free services" in place of cash. Free food, free transportation, free daycare, free gym membership, free dry-cleaning, etc.
Agreed. I can envision a more credible doomsday scenario, however, where humanity becomes overly dependent on pseudo-AI type automation (think self-driving cars) and that automation breaks in some spectacular way. Probably wouldn't mean the end of the species, but could precipitate a big die-off. Of course that's not what Hawking is talking about.
One reason companies offer all the silly perks (pool table, excessive free food, etc.): it's a way to compensate employees tax-free. I can pay my guys $1000 more apiece but they'll only take home $700. Maybe $1000 worth of "free perks" and creating the perception of a "fun culture" offers better "bang for my buck" in terms of attracting and retaining employees than the extra $700 in take-home pay. Then again, maybe not. But I'm willing to entertain the argument that it does.
Do you at least agree there's a kernel of truth? Having social skills > not having social skills when it comes to successful interviewing. You don't have to look like "rich frat boy", but, like it or not, it helps if you don't come across as "neckbeard with bad hygiene". The fact that corporate American also has huge problems doesn't change that.
If you get paid and can quit then you're not a slave. Quit with the histrionics. As to what "social skills and teamwork" mean, yes, the ability to accept someone else's authority is a necessary part of working on any team that has the notion of a leader. I will agree, though, that having an extreme aversion to others' authority doesn't necessarily mean you're "antisocial".
Gotta ask: why? Are you not capable of getting paid more than $20/hr elsewhere? Or did you just want the extra hours/income? If any employer ever asked me to work more than 50 hr/week for more than 2 weeks in a row I'd probably take my ball and go home.
Fine by me if that's the criterion they want to use, so long as there are also companies out there refusing to hire young "rockster" devs who crave all-night gaming marathons and monthly team trips to Vegas in favor of 45 year-olds with kids. Honestly, if I applied at the company you describe, I'd be glad if they weeded me out due to "culture fit". It would save me the trouble of being hired then having to quit because of their ridiculous company culture.
#gamergate. AMIRITE?!?!
Exactly. I can attest that the overall thrust of this article is true. The company I work for, as well as past companies, have all taken into account "culture fit" when evaluating candidates. On the other hand, most of the crap in the comments about what people screen for, e.g. weeding out introverts and/or selecting only for rich white frat boys, is not something I've ever experienced or heard about.
Excellent. You sound like someone I wouldn't want to work with. Luckily, so long as you remain un (or self) employed we can both have our way.
Whereas in the 1960s the U.S. was more interested in "Keeping Up With The Kruschevs".
Perhaps to the average /. poster it does, but not to most reasonable people.
I get that competition leads to higher salaries. My point is that higher salaries, while it might be a "solution" for a given company's trouble filling positions, isn't an industry-wide solution. If I offer an above-market salary to fill my rec then I'm necessarily taking someone off the market who could be working for some other company. If all other companies increase their compensation equal to the amount I increased mine then I don't gain any advantage and I have approximately as much trouble finding talent as I do today.
What would likely ameliorate the "talent deficit" is that some tech jobs would either cease to exist or move overseas if the compensation level grew too high.
Here's why I'm not convinced that the answer is simply higher salaries. To be sure, some workers who could be doing tech decide to do something else. Maybe they go into academia, finance, IP law, etc. Raising tech salaries across the board, by everyone who employs tech workers, would steal some of these guys back. But would it be enough? You would probably also motivate some young people to go into tech that currently go into other fields. But that's for the future; it doesn't help the present. The fact is that there's a fixed supply of domestic talent at each point along the talent spectrum. You could pay 10x as much and it won't magically increase the amount of available talent. If there is, in fact, not enough talent to "go around", i.e. to fill all the tech positions employers want to fill, then we don't just have a salary problem.
Side note: what's good for the domestic tech worker may not be the same as what's good for the country. That is to say, an influx of highly-skilled foreign tech workers might depress salaries in the short term, but an abundance of cheap tech labor could juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole.
There's also anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is becoming less attractive to foreign talent and not more. Which, in my opinion, is terrible news.
The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).
One tactic utility companies could use is to just change their pricing structure. Most already have a fee structure where the highest price/kWh is only paid for electricity purchased at the margins. The first kWh purchased may be drastically cheaper than the last, especially if you're a heavy user. So they could simply exaggerate that structure and make electricity "artificially" cheap for the majority of users and then gouge the heavy users on usage over some threshold.
Alternately they could move to a price structure where there's a fixed "fee" to simply be a customer, and then use the revenue from that fee to offset the price-per-kWh and make it artificially cheap.
It's one way. I should have been more specific. "Amount of moderately difficult work completed at a moderate-or-higher level of quality." Another might be, "Ability to complete extremely difficult work at a extremely high level of quality in non-infinite time." Someone who excels at the first might not excel at the second, though generally I'd expect there to be a lot of overlap.
I've been doing software dev. for about 15 years. I'll grant that the level of productivity between "the worst" and "the best" is at least 10x, if not more, because "the worst" are essentially producing nothing. Or, worse, have negative productivity in the sense they're creating stuff that is totally non-functional and will need to be re-written by someone else at a later date.
That said, the difference between "the best" and "the average" is probably not 10x. At least not if productivity is measured in "amount of output produced at some acceptable level of quality". Where "the best" guys excel is in being able to solve problems that average guy is probably never going to be able to solve (well) no matter how much time he's given. On the other hand, those sorts of problems come up less often than most people think.