Where I am there's AT&T UVerse and Time Warner. And, soon, Google Fiber. UVerse and Time Warner's cable offering are comparable in quality. There's also a small third company (Grande Communications) but they only serve certain parts of town. The competition between TW and AT&T seems, from an outside perspective, to be pretty fierce. Certainly if you judge by the amount of junk mail I get from both of them.
Additional revenue streams change the equation. Maybe with a huge influx of cash from somewhere other than its traditional customers an ISP might be able maximize profitability by lowering the rates it charges to end-users and stealing share from its competitors. Obviously its competitors will try to do the same thing. Hence the notion of equilibrium. The steady state may be for the providers to charge their end-users lower rates and instead gouge the big providers.
Consider this hypothetical: Foo and Bar each sell widgets. Their profit margins are approximately 10%. There's a new technological advancement that cuts their costs in half and takes their margin from 10% to about 50%. What you seem to be arguing is that such a development would have no impact on the price at which widgets are sold. I contend that it would almost certainly result in a decrease in the cost of widgets.
I'm not a Netflix customer. Netflix paying money to my ISP creates a new equilibrium in which the rates charged to me by my ISP may be lower. Moreover, I don't think the steady state is one where I have to choose my ISP based on which services it provides (e.g. contract with X if you use Hulu; contract with Y if you use Netflix, etc.)
I might be okay with this if it came with a regulatory requirement that ISPs practice full disclosure of their preferences w.r.t. traffic type. That way at least consumers can "vote with their wallets" in markets with more than one provider.
The difficulty of the problem has to be taken into account. Some dev tasks are "harder" than others. There's somewhat of a lower limit, though, given that even "easy" problems can be solved "poorly". Let's say your dev task is "moderately" hard. The $125k guy can produce a "reasonably good" solution. The $250k guy can produce a better solution, but his output isn't twice the output of the $125k guy. If you're okay with "reasonably good" then maybe two units of "reasonably good" has a more positive impact on your bottom line than one unit of "really great". But what about four $65k guys or eight $33k guys? At some point, the quality of dev you're going to get is so low that they'll produce "unacceptably poor" solutions to your task. Four units of "barely functional" or eight units of "utterly worthless crap" is not better than two units of "reasonably good".
I suspect that hiring managers underestimate the "hidden costs" of settling for "reasonably good" over "really great", but that's just me. Also, depending on geography, you probably don't have to spend $250k to go from "reasonably good" to "really great". If you take the compensation needed to get "reasonably good" and multiply it by 1.5 then that's probably enough to get you "really great". The question is whether the ROI also goes up by 50%
If the fines are set correctly then the DNA testing is essentially zero-cost to a non-offending owner in the building. The cost is entirely borne by offending owners. Paying someone to clean it up (and distributing that cost over all owners) results in non-offending owners bearing part of the cost. Of course, nothing says every condo has to handle it the same way. A building that offers a "free" (i.e. built into the dues) poo-scooping service will be extra-attractive to someone with a dog who hates cleaning up after it himself. A building that forces the dog owners to do the clean up (by way of fines) will be extra-attractive to non-dog owners and/or dog owners who don't mind doing their own cleanup.
For most dev positions two "pretty good" $125k/yr guys are going to give you more bang for your buck than one $250k/yr guy. For some dev positions that's not the case. Those guys do, in fact, get paid in the $250k/yr range.
No, attracting average talent also requires compensating "fairly". However, "fairly" will mean something different for someone of average talent. "Fairly" is more or less "the minimum compensation needed to fill a position with the caliber of candidate you're looking to hire". If an employer is offering a level of compensation that's "less than fair" then he will, by definition, not be able to fill a position with the caliber of employee he'd like to hire.
They get paid for placing people. So, yes, they want to find you a job. And, yes, there's a lot of turnover. And, yes, past colleagues are a great place to get jobs. That said, it doesn't hurt to maintain cordial relations with a few recruiters who seem competent and aren't obviously douchey/annoying. They're just one tool in the job-finding toolkit.
Build the overhead of "non-matches" into the fine amount when there is a match. If the cost to run the test is $60 and half of the samples tested don't belong to anyone in the building then make the fine $120.
This doesn't strike me as ridiculous at all. It would only be ridiculous if the apartment failed to build the cost of the DNA analysis service into the fines it assigns to offending dog owners.
I wonder how much it would cost to preemptively create a DNA database of all the dogs so you have a ready-to-go database for matching poop when its found. Then they wouldn't have to rely on humans "reporting" the offenders. Just get the poop, have it analyzed, and fine the owner.
Re #1: If I'm interviewing someone whose resume says they're proficient in "X" and, through asking them technical questions about "X" I find out their knowledge of it is actually inch-deep then that's going to be a huge black mark against them. Not because they don't know much about "X"; because it demonstrates they are duplicitous.
Re #3: You have to know your audience. When someone comes into an interview way overdressed it makes them seem clueless and/or desperate and/or "a bad culture fit". There's nothing weirder than interviewing someone who's wearing a suit and jacket when you're wearing shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops. It bears repeating, though: know your audience. If you have reason to believe the person who will interview will expect a suit then by all means wear a suit. Where I live, and for the jobs I'm applying for, I find khakis and a button down shirt to be sufficient. You'll probably be more nicely dressed than the person interviewing you, but not by a big enough margin to feel "weird". The goal is just to communicate "I put some effort into looking nice" and possibly "I'm capable of dressing nicely when needed." (Amazingly, some people aren't.)
You're requiring to work remotely. That rules out at least 50% of potential employers and likely more than that. I'm not convinced ageism is the issue here, but, just in case it is, go ahead and make your resume age-less:
1. Don't give a date for when you received your degree(s),
2. Don't include a picture (including on LinkedIn) or choose one that was taken when you were younger, and
3. Only list your last ~10 years of work experience.
I've also had good luck using head hunters and/or getting hired by people I've worked for in the past who are now employed elsewhere. I'm a known quantity to them.
How hard would it be for Futuremark to disguise their benchmark app so as to fool the device? If it just looks for the package name it should be easy. If Samsung reverse engineered the exact workload being done in each benchmark then micro-optimized for that workload...that's harder to fix.
Yeah, there were originally on two bullet points and I split the first one into two. Re-numbered the second half to "2" and forgot to change the original #2 to #3. Sue me.:)
I can only say that my experience has been different from yours. Every full-time position I've held since entering the U.S. workforce in 1999 has included vacation time. When I started (at IBM) it was 2 weeks. By the time I left (2004) it was 3 weeks even for new hires. I work at a small start-up right now and we get 3 weeks.
I've never actually done contract work, but last year I was offered a contract-to-hire position with a small organization doing DoD work. Work/life balance was explicitly discussed during the interview process and it was understood that crazy hours wouldn't be part of the job, both during the contract period as well as any possible full-time gig that might result from it. We didn't get to the point of negotiating a rate, but given I went in through a head-hunter (who knew my salary requirements up front) I expect they would have made an offer I wouldn't have had much trouble accepting.
Given the company did DoD work, and given how long it takes to get security clearance, their reliance on contract-to-hire was more about making sure new hires actually passed their clearance than it was about vetting people to weed out incompetency. Though, I'm sure they appreciated that as an added bonus. They really, really wanted to avoid the situation of hiring someone full-time then having them fail to gain the necessary security clearance.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I am there's AT&T UVerse and Time Warner. And, soon, Google Fiber. UVerse and Time Warner's cable offering are comparable in quality. There's also a small third company (Grande Communications) but they only serve certain parts of town. The competition between TW and AT&T seems, from an outside perspective, to be pretty fierce. Certainly if you judge by the amount of junk mail I get from both of them.
afaik each company is free to preference packets however they choose. Who owns the cable and who leases it is immaterial.
My contention is that if the law came with a disclosure requirement the end result would not differ significantly from the current status quo.
Additional revenue streams change the equation. Maybe with a huge influx of cash from somewhere other than its traditional customers an ISP might be able maximize profitability by lowering the rates it charges to end-users and stealing share from its competitors. Obviously its competitors will try to do the same thing. Hence the notion of equilibrium. The steady state may be for the providers to charge their end-users lower rates and instead gouge the big providers.
Consider this hypothetical: Foo and Bar each sell widgets. Their profit margins are approximately 10%. There's a new technological advancement that cuts their costs in half and takes their margin from 10% to about 50%. What you seem to be arguing is that such a development would have no impact on the price at which widgets are sold. I contend that it would almost certainly result in a decrease in the cost of widgets.
There's a small competitor where I live that (afaik) runs on top of the major carrier's existing cable. Not wireless.
I'm not a Netflix customer. Netflix paying money to my ISP creates a new equilibrium in which the rates charged to me by my ISP may be lower. Moreover, I don't think the steady state is one where I have to choose my ISP based on which services it provides (e.g. contract with X if you use Hulu; contract with Y if you use Netflix, etc.)
Voila, business opportunity for a third competitor to enter the market and immediately differentiate itself.
I might be okay with this if it came with a regulatory requirement that ISPs practice full disclosure of their preferences w.r.t. traffic type. That way at least consumers can "vote with their wallets" in markets with more than one provider.
The difficulty of the problem has to be taken into account. Some dev tasks are "harder" than others. There's somewhat of a lower limit, though, given that even "easy" problems can be solved "poorly". Let's say your dev task is "moderately" hard. The $125k guy can produce a "reasonably good" solution. The $250k guy can produce a better solution, but his output isn't twice the output of the $125k guy. If you're okay with "reasonably good" then maybe two units of "reasonably good" has a more positive impact on your bottom line than one unit of "really great". But what about four $65k guys or eight $33k guys? At some point, the quality of dev you're going to get is so low that they'll produce "unacceptably poor" solutions to your task. Four units of "barely functional" or eight units of "utterly worthless crap" is not better than two units of "reasonably good".
I suspect that hiring managers underestimate the "hidden costs" of settling for "reasonably good" over "really great", but that's just me. Also, depending on geography, you probably don't have to spend $250k to go from "reasonably good" to "really great". If you take the compensation needed to get "reasonably good" and multiply it by 1.5 then that's probably enough to get you "really great". The question is whether the ROI also goes up by 50%
If the fines are set correctly then the DNA testing is essentially zero-cost to a non-offending owner in the building. The cost is entirely borne by offending owners. Paying someone to clean it up (and distributing that cost over all owners) results in non-offending owners bearing part of the cost. Of course, nothing says every condo has to handle it the same way. A building that offers a "free" (i.e. built into the dues) poo-scooping service will be extra-attractive to someone with a dog who hates cleaning up after it himself. A building that forces the dog owners to do the clean up (by way of fines) will be extra-attractive to non-dog owners and/or dog owners who don't mind doing their own cleanup.
For most dev positions two "pretty good" $125k/yr guys are going to give you more bang for your buck than one $250k/yr guy. For some dev positions that's not the case. Those guys do, in fact, get paid in the $250k/yr range.
No, attracting average talent also requires compensating "fairly". However, "fairly" will mean something different for someone of average talent. "Fairly" is more or less "the minimum compensation needed to fill a position with the caliber of candidate you're looking to hire". If an employer is offering a level of compensation that's "less than fair" then he will, by definition, not be able to fill a position with the caliber of employee he'd like to hire.
They get paid for placing people. So, yes, they want to find you a job. And, yes, there's a lot of turnover. And, yes, past colleagues are a great place to get jobs. That said, it doesn't hurt to maintain cordial relations with a few recruiters who seem competent and aren't obviously douchey/annoying. They're just one tool in the job-finding toolkit.
I seem to be getting a fair bit of interest in Austin, and not just from local employers.
Silly example; clearly the potential for abuse is much higher with a massive database of human DNA.
Build the overhead of "non-matches" into the fine amount when there is a match. If the cost to run the test is $60 and half of the samples tested don't belong to anyone in the building then make the fine $120.
This doesn't strike me as ridiculous at all. It would only be ridiculous if the apartment failed to build the cost of the DNA analysis service into the fines it assigns to offending dog owners.
I wonder how much it would cost to preemptively create a DNA database of all the dogs so you have a ready-to-go database for matching poop when its found. Then they wouldn't have to rely on humans "reporting" the offenders. Just get the poop, have it analyzed, and fine the owner.
So this is kind of like letting them play with elemental mercury instead of chewing on chips of lead paint.
I strongly disagree with #1 and #3.
Re #1: If I'm interviewing someone whose resume says they're proficient in "X" and, through asking them technical questions about "X" I find out their knowledge of it is actually inch-deep then that's going to be a huge black mark against them. Not because they don't know much about "X"; because it demonstrates they are duplicitous.
Re #3: You have to know your audience. When someone comes into an interview way overdressed it makes them seem clueless and/or desperate and/or "a bad culture fit". There's nothing weirder than interviewing someone who's wearing a suit and jacket when you're wearing shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops. It bears repeating, though: know your audience. If you have reason to believe the person who will interview will expect a suit then by all means wear a suit. Where I live, and for the jobs I'm applying for, I find khakis and a button down shirt to be sufficient. You'll probably be more nicely dressed than the person interviewing you, but not by a big enough margin to feel "weird". The goal is just to communicate "I put some effort into looking nice" and possibly "I'm capable of dressing nicely when needed." (Amazingly, some people aren't.)
You might try looking for jobs here.
You're requiring to work remotely. That rules out at least 50% of potential employers and likely more than that. I'm not convinced ageism is the issue here, but, just in case it is, go ahead and make your resume age-less:
1. Don't give a date for when you received your degree(s),
2. Don't include a picture (including on LinkedIn) or choose one that was taken when you were younger, and
3. Only list your last ~10 years of work experience.
I've also had good luck using head hunters and/or getting hired by people I've worked for in the past who are now employed elsewhere. I'm a known quantity to them.
I'd buy a MacBook in black rubberized matte if they offered one. I prefer that to the silver aluminum.
FutureMark could always release "official" benchmarks using a version of their app with a random package name that they don't release to the public.
How hard would it be for Futuremark to disguise their benchmark app so as to fool the device? If it just looks for the package name it should be easy. If Samsung reverse engineered the exact workload being done in each benchmark then micro-optimized for that workload...that's harder to fix.
Yeah, there were originally on two bullet points and I split the first one into two. Re-numbered the second half to "2" and forgot to change the original #2 to #3. Sue me. :)
I can only say that my experience has been different from yours. Every full-time position I've held since entering the U.S. workforce in 1999 has included vacation time. When I started (at IBM) it was 2 weeks. By the time I left (2004) it was 3 weeks even for new hires. I work at a small start-up right now and we get 3 weeks.
I've never actually done contract work, but last year I was offered a contract-to-hire position with a small organization doing DoD work. Work/life balance was explicitly discussed during the interview process and it was understood that crazy hours wouldn't be part of the job, both during the contract period as well as any possible full-time gig that might result from it. We didn't get to the point of negotiating a rate, but given I went in through a head-hunter (who knew my salary requirements up front) I expect they would have made an offer I wouldn't have had much trouble accepting.
Given the company did DoD work, and given how long it takes to get security clearance, their reliance on contract-to-hire was more about making sure new hires actually passed their clearance than it was about vetting people to weed out incompetency. Though, I'm sure they appreciated that as an added bonus. They really, really wanted to avoid the situation of hiring someone full-time then having them fail to gain the necessary security clearance.