Mobility and information availability are built into the equation. If you aren't mobile then you're "worth" less than someone who can relocate at will. Collusion is a problem, yes, but historically it's happened in both directions. Unionization is essentially employee collusion. I'm all for regulations that limit the ability of employers to collude and for their rigorous enforcement. I'm against the idea that I can put a price tag on what I'm "worth" without basing that number to a large extent on "what employers are willing to pay for my services".
Who said anything about shit salaries? If it takes $200k/year to keep someone working for me then that's what I'll pay him or her, but not a penny more. That is, assuming I think his or her output is actually worth $200k/year. You keep on paying people more than their market value and see what happens to your labor costs relative to your competitors.
I'm actually in favor of subsidizing these costs, since it allows for a larger number of unskilled Americans to be employed. If employers had to bear the entire cost of their support many of these individuals would be unemployable. The sad fact is that many peoples' labor isn't worth a wage that would allow them to achieve a reasonable minimum standard of living (in the U.S., using U.S. standards for "reasonable").
I don't see how that invalidates what I said. One could argue that a ban on importing workers is actually the more artificial playing field, rigged to prop up the incomes of domestic IT workers. This also raises an interesting question: how would you propose we calculate the "value" of of a worker's labor if the answer isn't "the amount an employer is willing to pay to acquire it"?
Suppose I were to claim that my 40-hours a week is, in fact, worth $10M/year, even though I'm only getting paid $100k/year. On what basis would you dispute that claim?
Well, to argue against myself, I don't necessarily disagree with the claim that QE may end up having negative long-term effects. But I do disagree with this statement: "Inflation has been abnormally high lately and it's largely because of QE."
$100k, the minimum needed for one to be in the "six figures" bucket, is more than ~80% of U.S. households earn, many of which have two incomes. A household with two developers both earning $100k/year would be in the top 4% of all households.
As for the cost-of-living adjustment for the Bay area, relative to Austin, I used a number of online calculators and $100k in Austin seems to be the equivalent of about $162k in San Jose.
I personally didn't find college English classes that challenging, as a CS person, but then I'm somewhat of an outlier among CS people. I know plenty of folks who did decently well in their CS classes would would have had trouble performing in an upper-division English class. And I'm not even talking about the ones for whom English was a second language.
Top Golf has a number of different computerized games you can play, all involving driving. Pricey, but I guess it could be fun if you're competent enough to drive a golf ball. (Turns out I'm not. Heh.)
If the bounty amount were sufficiently large, i.e. larger than the amount of net profit a black hat could hope to gain by finding and exploiting security a given defect, couldn't a company create a scenario where even a black hat (acting rationally in order to maximize his profit, which is often not going to be the case) would be motivated to report it and claim the bounty rather than exploiting it?
Now, in theory, if there are truly infinitely many such flaws to be found and subsequent ones aren't any harder to find than the initial ones then a large enough bounty would bankrupt the company. But I have serious doubts at the presence of infinite (or even "practically infinite") security flaws that all require "about the same effort" to find. My suspicion is that the difficulty will increase the more flaws are found.
Start working at 25. Work until you're 60. Put $800/month, every month, into an account that earns 4% nominal interest (i.e. counting inflation) annually. Buy a home worth about $300,000 and pay it off over 30 years. Assume the value of your home increases at about the same rate as inflation, so 1.5% annually. This is probably a low estimate. When you retire your savings account should have about $550,000. Your home should be worth about $450,000. Voila, millionaire.
I'm not forced to pay the $30 fee. I could do my taxes by hand, if I wanted, and avoid it. TurboTax also has a free option which I could *probably* use, but for the $30 you get more hand-holding and sanity checks to make sure you didn't screw something up. To me, $30/year is worth it if it reduces my chance of being audited even slightly. Plus its way cheaper than what I'd pay an accountant or tax preparer.
I'm a senior mobile dev. at a ~30 person startup who's recently been asked to step into a "DevOps" role. It's being represented as a promotion, since in theory the role will involve more responsibility than my current "pure development" role. Its been pitched as a part-time thing with 30-50% of my time staying devoted to mobile development. At this particular company the DevOps role is seen as being responsible for deployment, but also the build environment and some internal productivity and monitoring tools that require some development effort but aren't part of the company's core product. We'll see how it goes.
Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM.
Uhh...not exactly. In fact, his subsequent logic about why lots of people don't need terabyte magnetic disks applies directly to this point about RAM. If your system supports 16GB of RAM but all you ever do is browse the web and check email then you almost certainly don't need to max out your system's RAM. In fact, you could probably make do with 4GB.
Unless your views would be well-received. Then you can publicize them all you want. Do you think Eich would be stepping down if it had come to light he'd donated in opposition to Prop. 8?
I always read complaints about the "disposable tech worker" but never the "disposable tech company". There's almost no company loyalty these days. Which is fine, since obviously there's not a lot of loyalty to employees either. That's the world we live in. But it cuts both ways. My company might lay me off rather than retrain me. Okay. But I might leave my company for another job if it happens to involve some cool new technology I want to learn. Or if they have beer in the break room. Or if they pay me a couple thousand more a year. Or if my manager looks at me funny one day. And, in doing so, I could totally leave my employer in the lurch in a way they, to be honest, can't do to me. If a tech worker has marketable skills (which is not true of every tech worker) then he's really in the driver's seat. Laid off? No problem; he can get another job inside two weeks. If he's an integral part of his current employer's team, though, then the potential for him to damage their bottom line by leaving suddenly is much bigger.
When I said "predict" I didn't mean there's actually someone crunching numbers somewhere and coming up with the line. I know how it's set. Nevertheless, Vegas odds can be used as a predictor. They "predict". Ignoring the fact that bracketology is concerned only with wins and losses, nor margins, if this guy were able to predict margins significantly better than "the crowds" (i.e. Vegas odds) then he'd have a license to print money and would likely want to keep it secret.
That's the hard part: defining precisely what is meant by "shortage". If there are more candidates calling themselves engineers than there are jobs does that mean there's not a shortage? If so then there's probably not a shortage. If every company could immediately fill all its positions by offering exorbitant salaries does that mean there's not a shortage? If so then there's probably not a shortage. In my limited experience interviewing candidates, though, we seem to get a lot of people who aren't that impressive relative to what they expect to be paid. So maybe there's a shortage of "good" engineers?
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Mobility and information availability are built into the equation. If you aren't mobile then you're "worth" less than someone who can relocate at will. Collusion is a problem, yes, but historically it's happened in both directions. Unionization is essentially employee collusion. I'm all for regulations that limit the ability of employers to collude and for their rigorous enforcement. I'm against the idea that I can put a price tag on what I'm "worth" without basing that number to a large extent on "what employers are willing to pay for my services".
Who said anything about shit salaries? If it takes $200k/year to keep someone working for me then that's what I'll pay him or her, but not a penny more. That is, assuming I think his or her output is actually worth $200k/year. You keep on paying people more than their market value and see what happens to your labor costs relative to your competitors.
I'm actually in favor of subsidizing these costs, since it allows for a larger number of unskilled Americans to be employed. If employers had to bear the entire cost of their support many of these individuals would be unemployable. The sad fact is that many peoples' labor isn't worth a wage that would allow them to achieve a reasonable minimum standard of living (in the U.S., using U.S. standards for "reasonable").
I don't see how that invalidates what I said. One could argue that a ban on importing workers is actually the more artificial playing field, rigged to prop up the incomes of domestic IT workers. This also raises an interesting question: how would you propose we calculate the "value" of of a worker's labor if the answer isn't "the amount an employer is willing to pay to acquire it"?
Suppose I were to claim that my 40-hours a week is, in fact, worth $10M/year, even though I'm only getting paid $100k/year. On what basis would you dispute that claim?
Disaster is always just around the corner, right? If that's your default view then, eventually, you'll be right.
Using Shadowstat's own custom formula, inflation post-QE is not significantly different from inflation in the 2-4 years prior to QE starting.
Well, to argue against myself, I don't necessarily disagree with the claim that QE may end up having negative long-term effects. But I do disagree with this statement: "Inflation has been abnormally high lately and it's largely because of QE."
Inflation since QE has not been outside historical levels. QE started around late 2008.
If someone will do the job for $X and not leave for greener pastures then $X is what they're "worth".
$100k, the minimum needed for one to be in the "six figures" bucket, is more than ~80% of U.S. households earn, many of which have two incomes. A household with two developers both earning $100k/year would be in the top 4% of all households.
As for the cost-of-living adjustment for the Bay area, relative to Austin, I used a number of online calculators and $100k in Austin seems to be the equivalent of about $162k in San Jose.
You would prefer a fixed money supply?
I personally didn't find college English classes that challenging, as a CS person, but then I'm somewhat of an outlier among CS people. I know plenty of folks who did decently well in their CS classes would would have had trouble performing in an upper-division English class. And I'm not even talking about the ones for whom English was a second language.
Top Golf has a number of different computerized games you can play, all involving driving. Pricey, but I guess it could be fun if you're competent enough to drive a golf ball. (Turns out I'm not. Heh.)
If the bounty amount were sufficiently large, i.e. larger than the amount of net profit a black hat could hope to gain by finding and exploiting security a given defect, couldn't a company create a scenario where even a black hat (acting rationally in order to maximize his profit, which is often not going to be the case) would be motivated to report it and claim the bounty rather than exploiting it?
Now, in theory, if there are truly infinitely many such flaws to be found and subsequent ones aren't any harder to find than the initial ones then a large enough bounty would bankrupt the company. But I have serious doubts at the presence of infinite (or even "practically infinite") security flaws that all require "about the same effort" to find. My suspicion is that the difficulty will increase the more flaws are found.
Start working at 25. Work until you're 60. Put $800/month, every month, into an account that earns 4% nominal interest (i.e. counting inflation) annually. Buy a home worth about $300,000 and pay it off over 30 years. Assume the value of your home increases at about the same rate as inflation, so 1.5% annually. This is probably a low estimate. When you retire your savings account should have about $550,000. Your home should be worth about $450,000. Voila, millionaire.
I'm not forced to pay the $30 fee. I could do my taxes by hand, if I wanted, and avoid it. TurboTax also has a free option which I could *probably* use, but for the $30 you get more hand-holding and sanity checks to make sure you didn't screw something up. To me, $30/year is worth it if it reduces my chance of being audited even slightly. Plus its way cheaper than what I'd pay an accountant or tax preparer.
I'm a senior mobile dev. at a ~30 person startup who's recently been asked to step into a "DevOps" role. It's being represented as a promotion, since in theory the role will involve more responsibility than my current "pure development" role. Its been pitched as a part-time thing with 30-50% of my time staying devoted to mobile development. At this particular company the DevOps role is seen as being responsible for deployment, but also the build environment and some internal productivity and monitoring tools that require some development effort but aren't part of the company's core product. We'll see how it goes.
Live in Texas, pretty simple tax return. I've always used TurboTax online and never had any complaints. I think I chose the $30 option.
Yeah, but swapping to disk will be so much faster with a SSD!
Uhh...not exactly. In fact, his subsequent logic about why lots of people don't need terabyte magnetic disks applies directly to this point about RAM. If your system supports 16GB of RAM but all you ever do is browse the web and check email then you almost certainly don't need to max out your system's RAM. In fact, you could probably make do with 4GB.
Unless your views would be well-received. Then you can publicize them all you want. Do you think Eich would be stepping down if it had come to light he'd donated in opposition to Prop. 8?
I always read complaints about the "disposable tech worker" but never the "disposable tech company". There's almost no company loyalty these days. Which is fine, since obviously there's not a lot of loyalty to employees either. That's the world we live in. But it cuts both ways. My company might lay me off rather than retrain me. Okay. But I might leave my company for another job if it happens to involve some cool new technology I want to learn. Or if they have beer in the break room. Or if they pay me a couple thousand more a year. Or if my manager looks at me funny one day. And, in doing so, I could totally leave my employer in the lurch in a way they, to be honest, can't do to me. If a tech worker has marketable skills (which is not true of every tech worker) then he's really in the driver's seat. Laid off? No problem; he can get another job inside two weeks. If he's an integral part of his current employer's team, though, then the potential for him to damage their bottom line by leaving suddenly is much bigger.
Expense is a reason.
When I said "predict" I didn't mean there's actually someone crunching numbers somewhere and coming up with the line. I know how it's set. Nevertheless, Vegas odds can be used as a predictor. They "predict". Ignoring the fact that bracketology is concerned only with wins and losses, nor margins, if this guy were able to predict margins significantly better than "the crowds" (i.e. Vegas odds) then he'd have a license to print money and would likely want to keep it secret.
That's the hard part: defining precisely what is meant by "shortage". If there are more candidates calling themselves engineers than there are jobs does that mean there's not a shortage? If so then there's probably not a shortage. If every company could immediately fill all its positions by offering exorbitant salaries does that mean there's not a shortage? If so then there's probably not a shortage. In my limited experience interviewing candidates, though, we seem to get a lot of people who aren't that impressive relative to what they expect to be paid. So maybe there's a shortage of "good" engineers?