The amount of military force required to defend ourselves is less than a 10th of what we currently spend. Nobody's calling for the elimination of the military, but we certainly don't need a bigger military budget than China, India, and the entire EU combined.
It's ok, as soon as game companies figure out a way to outsource the art department extensively, costs will drop. So far they've only managed to cover engineering and customer service, but I'm confident most art and design will be done in India or China within the decade.
Then those companies should ACCEPT that they're getting inferior results, and shut up about it. They don't complain that the timing belts only last 5 years, do they? Of course not. They know that they're only there to fulfill some basic function and are replaceable. ACCEPT the bugs, ACCEPT the errors, ACCEPT the low performance, or else pay the piper, hire better people, and shut up! You aren't going to get better results unless you hire better people, period.
Any company that places price as the most important factor in an IT project is going to have a lower quality result than a company that places results as the number one priority. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get the best results without hiring the best people you can find. The better the people, the better the results.
The real irony of the people who just want a "low cost" solution is that 9 times out of 10 they resort to hiring a consulting firm like IBM that charges them 10 times what it would have cost to do it in house, and with lower quality results.
Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard brain surgery is?
Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard building space exploration vehicles is?
Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard creating a successful marketing campaign is?
Software engineering is difficult because it's a complex subject that takes a combination of intelligent people and training to produce good results. Just because businesses are too stupid to realize this doesn't make the problem go away. You can't throw complex projects at untrained, stupid, incompetent people and expect them to produce quality software. You can't just invent some magic formula for software development that will work 100% of the time to maximize efficiency.
Software engineering is NOT manufacturing. Accept it and move on for fuck's sake.
Between my wife and I, we watch the following shows on a regular basis:
(Winter):
- Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with commercials)
- Rome (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials)
- The Office (NBC 1/2 hour, 12 hours per year with commercials)
(Spring):
- The Sopranos (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials)
- Big Love (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials)
(Year round):
- The daily Show (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials)
- The colbert report (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials)
All told, that adds up to 416 hours that we actually care about per year. I'd estimate that we also watch about 100 hours or so of miscellaneous stuff (discovery health and the occasional sci fi miniseries). We'll round here and say 550 hours of programming per year, total.
This would cost us $1100 from iTunes or whatnot, but it costs us $720 from comcast.
In my case, the numbers are highly skewed because I watch the daily show and the colbert report; if I didn't, iTunes would be a much better deal (assuming that there was a really great way to get the content to my television set, of course).
"Season passes" to most of the shows I listed above can be bought from iTunes for $30-50 each. I'd gladly pay $350 a year for the 7 shows over what I pay for comcast.
-
Sorry, anyone who thinks that Cleveland is the most "intelligent" city in the U.S....probably lives in Cleveland. I'm sure there are some intelligent people there, but my experience (20 years of it) was that it was a mostly-dead rust belt city full of drunks and young people who just wanted to move to new york, la, or san francisco. The only other city on this list that I've been to is the ontario area, which, while decent, was far from one of the most "intelligent" cities.
How many of these "intelligent" cities have fostered innovative new companies in the last century? How many play host to world class universities? More innovative products come out every year from cities like Tokyo and New York than all the other cities on the list combined.
What a stupid article.
What resources do they have access to that others don't, again? Is there a law preventing tradespeople from reading manuals and using the Internet or something?
Engineering (in the U.S.) is one of the highest paying professions around, and it's by far the highest paying profession that doesn't require an advanced degree. Don't believe me? Do a search for it, you'll find dozens of studies over the last few years saying the exact same thing. That includes "IT". Couple that with the fact that software is one of the few fields where people who do the work actually enjoy what they do for a living, and you have an ideal situation for those who do it.
Last year, I made $75,000 in salary and was awarded bonuses worth ~$15,000. I get to work sometime between 10 and 11, and go home some time between 6 and 7. I have no real restrictions on how I work, I just have to meet the specifications within the desired time frame, and I get to make the vast majority of decisions on every project I work on -- and this is for a relatively low level position within the company.
There's a huge gap between software engineering and tech support, and anyone lumping them together is a moron. I suspect that anyone who thinks that "IT" jobs aren't "good jobs" is one of the following types of people:
1. Someone who's never had a good job in their life, and never will.
2. A clueless business management major who thinks that nobody could possibly be satisfied with doing actual work.
3. Someone trying to make the argument to justify outsourcing and expanded H1B programs.
$120k? What fucking college did you go to 12 years ago that cost $120k? That's 30,000 a year -- just slightly below what it costs to attend CMU or MIT (widely regarded as the best engineering schools in the country) today.
Of course, those schools are overpriced anyway. Maybe people looking for a bargain, quality education in software should consider UC Berkeley. In state tuition is only $8k or so per year.
If you really wanted the big bucks, though, you'd obviously go for your MBA, probably from Stanford. That'll cost you a cool $35k a year for 2 years. Stanford MBAs make about $25k a year more than the average bachelor's holder, and about $10k a year more on average than the average MBA holder from other universities, so it seems like a pretty good bargain to me.
Counting room & board into the college costs formula is a complete fallacy. Would your room & board be free if you weren't in college?
Now, to take a look at your math:
Compound interest at 5% a year (i'm being VERY generous here) for 12 years on a $120k investment yields $215,502.76.
That earned you $95,502.76.
I'll also assume that you worked for the 4 years that you weren't in school. I'll be generous here and assume you make well above what the average non-degreed individual makes and give you $30,000 a year for those 4 years.
Now you're up to $215,502.76 over this college-attending bastard.
But wait! You've got bills. You live in a relatively inexpensive state, and your expenses are as follows:
$800 mo. / rent
$200 mo. / car
$150 mo. / insurance
$300 mo. / food
$200 mo. / utilities
So that's costing you $19,800 a year. You're back down to $136,302.76.
So, after 4 years going, you've jumped a little under $140k ahead of your college-attending friends. If your friends make as little as $11k a year more than you when they graduate, they will be better off than you after 12 years. Your MUCH SMARTER friends, who attended cheaper, in state universities, will be vastly ahead of both of you, and probably have more fun. State college girls are way hotter than ivy leaguers.
Why doesn't anyone ask why Brain Surgery is hard?
Why doesn't anyone ask why writing good music is hard?
Why doesn't anyone ask why starting a successful business is hard?
Why doesn't anyone ask why designing an effective sales campaign is hard?
Software development is hard because it's complicated, just like all of the above. It takes dedication, time, and, most of all, a lot of intelligence.
Software development frustrates the business community because they want it to be manual labor. In manual labor, employees have no value because they can be replaced by anyone at any time. With skilled labor (such as software development), it isn't that easy. The standard for companies is to offer lower pay and attract worse engineers, which yields worse and worse code. In recent years, we've seen companies looking for lower-cost countries, hoping that would save them. It turns out that there was a huge shortage of good engineers in those countries, too!
Throwing more people at the problem doesn't help. Companies need to hire better people, and to get better people, they need to pay them more. Your product managers should not be making 2-3 times as much as your engineers. If that's the case, you're going to have shitty engineers, and shitty products, too.
You wouldn't trust your child's life with an unproven, unskilled, low-cost surgeon, why would you trust your business' life to an unproven, unskilled, low-cost engineer? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Well, that's not entirely true as the vast majority of software (either open OR closed source) is pretty crappy. The best programmers are easily better than 50 or 100 mediocre ones.
The overall quality of the average open source project isn't really any better or any worse than that of the average closed source project. There are some definite stand outs, to be sure, but being "superior" isn't the real advantage. The advantage is that they've made commodities out of what would otherwise be expensive, unnecessary junk.
If you pay close attention, you'll notice that there are actually alternatives which are at least as good as the open source solution. Open source's roll has really been about cost reduction for feature parity and the ability to easily customize rather than feature superiority.
Linux is vastly superior to Windows in many ways, but you shouldn't be comparing it to Windows, you should be comparing it to other unix-derived systems. Linux (and GNU) trivially copied most of the best features from previous unix systems, but after that the innovation curve drops off sharply.
MySQL and Postgres can easily trump MSSQL, but only a seriously ignorant person would claim that they beat Oracle if price weren't an issue.
Firefox blows IE out of the water, but both Safari and Opera give it solid competition.
And so on and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
As a California resident for nearly 2 years, I'm proud to say that I never use the internet, ever.
The amount of military force required to defend ourselves is less than a 10th of what we currently spend. Nobody's calling for the elimination of the military, but we certainly don't need a bigger military budget than China, India, and the entire EU combined.
It's ok, as soon as game companies figure out a way to outsource the art department extensively, costs will drop. So far they've only managed to cover engineering and customer service, but I'm confident most art and design will be done in India or China within the decade.
Then those companies should ACCEPT that they're getting inferior results, and shut up about it. They don't complain that the timing belts only last 5 years, do they? Of course not. They know that they're only there to fulfill some basic function and are replaceable. ACCEPT the bugs, ACCEPT the errors, ACCEPT the low performance, or else pay the piper, hire better people, and shut up! You aren't going to get better results unless you hire better people, period. Any company that places price as the most important factor in an IT project is going to have a lower quality result than a company that places results as the number one priority. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get the best results without hiring the best people you can find. The better the people, the better the results. The real irony of the people who just want a "low cost" solution is that 9 times out of 10 they resort to hiring a consulting firm like IBM that charges them 10 times what it would have cost to do it in house, and with lower quality results.
Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard brain surgery is? Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard building space exploration vehicles is? Why doesn't anyone complain about how hard creating a successful marketing campaign is? Software engineering is difficult because it's a complex subject that takes a combination of intelligent people and training to produce good results. Just because businesses are too stupid to realize this doesn't make the problem go away. You can't throw complex projects at untrained, stupid, incompetent people and expect them to produce quality software. You can't just invent some magic formula for software development that will work 100% of the time to maximize efficiency. Software engineering is NOT manufacturing. Accept it and move on for fuck's sake.
Between my wife and I, we watch the following shows on a regular basis: (Winter): - Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with commercials) - Rome (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) - The Office (NBC 1/2 hour, 12 hours per year with commercials) (Spring): - The Sopranos (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) - Big Love (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) (Year round): - The daily Show (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials) - The colbert report (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials) All told, that adds up to 416 hours that we actually care about per year. I'd estimate that we also watch about 100 hours or so of miscellaneous stuff (discovery health and the occasional sci fi miniseries). We'll round here and say 550 hours of programming per year, total. This would cost us $1100 from iTunes or whatnot, but it costs us $720 from comcast. In my case, the numbers are highly skewed because I watch the daily show and the colbert report; if I didn't, iTunes would be a much better deal (assuming that there was a really great way to get the content to my television set, of course). "Season passes" to most of the shows I listed above can be bought from iTunes for $30-50 each. I'd gladly pay $350 a year for the 7 shows over what I pay for comcast. -
Sorry, anyone who thinks that Cleveland is the most "intelligent" city in the U.S....probably lives in Cleveland. I'm sure there are some intelligent people there, but my experience (20 years of it) was that it was a mostly-dead rust belt city full of drunks and young people who just wanted to move to new york, la, or san francisco. The only other city on this list that I've been to is the ontario area, which, while decent, was far from one of the most "intelligent" cities. How many of these "intelligent" cities have fostered innovative new companies in the last century? How many play host to world class universities? More innovative products come out every year from cities like Tokyo and New York than all the other cities on the list combined. What a stupid article.
What resources do they have access to that others don't, again? Is there a law preventing tradespeople from reading manuals and using the Internet or something?
Engineering (in the U.S.) is one of the highest paying professions around, and it's by far the highest paying profession that doesn't require an advanced degree. Don't believe me? Do a search for it, you'll find dozens of studies over the last few years saying the exact same thing. That includes "IT". Couple that with the fact that software is one of the few fields where people who do the work actually enjoy what they do for a living, and you have an ideal situation for those who do it. Last year, I made $75,000 in salary and was awarded bonuses worth ~$15,000. I get to work sometime between 10 and 11, and go home some time between 6 and 7. I have no real restrictions on how I work, I just have to meet the specifications within the desired time frame, and I get to make the vast majority of decisions on every project I work on -- and this is for a relatively low level position within the company. There's a huge gap between software engineering and tech support, and anyone lumping them together is a moron. I suspect that anyone who thinks that "IT" jobs aren't "good jobs" is one of the following types of people: 1. Someone who's never had a good job in their life, and never will. 2. A clueless business management major who thinks that nobody could possibly be satisfied with doing actual work. 3. Someone trying to make the argument to justify outsourcing and expanded H1B programs.
$120k? What fucking college did you go to 12 years ago that cost $120k? That's 30,000 a year -- just slightly below what it costs to attend CMU or MIT (widely regarded as the best engineering schools in the country) today. Of course, those schools are overpriced anyway. Maybe people looking for a bargain, quality education in software should consider UC Berkeley. In state tuition is only $8k or so per year. If you really wanted the big bucks, though, you'd obviously go for your MBA, probably from Stanford. That'll cost you a cool $35k a year for 2 years. Stanford MBAs make about $25k a year more than the average bachelor's holder, and about $10k a year more on average than the average MBA holder from other universities, so it seems like a pretty good bargain to me. Counting room & board into the college costs formula is a complete fallacy. Would your room & board be free if you weren't in college? Now, to take a look at your math: Compound interest at 5% a year (i'm being VERY generous here) for 12 years on a $120k investment yields $215,502.76. That earned you $95,502.76. I'll also assume that you worked for the 4 years that you weren't in school. I'll be generous here and assume you make well above what the average non-degreed individual makes and give you $30,000 a year for those 4 years. Now you're up to $215,502.76 over this college-attending bastard. But wait! You've got bills. You live in a relatively inexpensive state, and your expenses are as follows: $800 mo. / rent $200 mo. / car $150 mo. / insurance $300 mo. / food $200 mo. / utilities So that's costing you $19,800 a year. You're back down to $136,302.76. So, after 4 years going, you've jumped a little under $140k ahead of your college-attending friends. If your friends make as little as $11k a year more than you when they graduate, they will be better off than you after 12 years. Your MUCH SMARTER friends, who attended cheaper, in state universities, will be vastly ahead of both of you, and probably have more fun. State college girls are way hotter than ivy leaguers.
Why doesn't anyone ask why Brain Surgery is hard? Why doesn't anyone ask why writing good music is hard? Why doesn't anyone ask why starting a successful business is hard? Why doesn't anyone ask why designing an effective sales campaign is hard? Software development is hard because it's complicated, just like all of the above. It takes dedication, time, and, most of all, a lot of intelligence. Software development frustrates the business community because they want it to be manual labor. In manual labor, employees have no value because they can be replaced by anyone at any time. With skilled labor (such as software development), it isn't that easy. The standard for companies is to offer lower pay and attract worse engineers, which yields worse and worse code. In recent years, we've seen companies looking for lower-cost countries, hoping that would save them. It turns out that there was a huge shortage of good engineers in those countries, too! Throwing more people at the problem doesn't help. Companies need to hire better people, and to get better people, they need to pay them more. Your product managers should not be making 2-3 times as much as your engineers. If that's the case, you're going to have shitty engineers, and shitty products, too. You wouldn't trust your child's life with an unproven, unskilled, low-cost surgeon, why would you trust your business' life to an unproven, unskilled, low-cost engineer? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Well, that's not entirely true as the vast majority of software (either open OR closed source) is pretty crappy. The best programmers are easily better than 50 or 100 mediocre ones. The overall quality of the average open source project isn't really any better or any worse than that of the average closed source project. There are some definite stand outs, to be sure, but being "superior" isn't the real advantage. The advantage is that they've made commodities out of what would otherwise be expensive, unnecessary junk. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that there are actually alternatives which are at least as good as the open source solution. Open source's roll has really been about cost reduction for feature parity and the ability to easily customize rather than feature superiority. Linux is vastly superior to Windows in many ways, but you shouldn't be comparing it to Windows, you should be comparing it to other unix-derived systems. Linux (and GNU) trivially copied most of the best features from previous unix systems, but after that the innovation curve drops off sharply. MySQL and Postgres can easily trump MSSQL, but only a seriously ignorant person would claim that they beat Oracle if price weren't an issue. Firefox blows IE out of the water, but both Safari and Opera give it solid competition. And so on and so forth.
Starting with the government. I'm sure China could do a much better job of managing the nation's affairs.