Great points. When we shop we go for local and fresh as the top priority if we can. After that, fresh and not processed is better and I think that's a worthwhile hypothesis. Let's face it, if/. readers ate more vegetables that were fresh we'd be better off, organic or not:)
If and when we go to the theatre, it's usually for a blockbuster action or animated film the entire family would enjoy. We go to our local AMC before noon on weekends. The admission is $6/person and we rarely buy the popcorn (might as well eat bacon fat:) ). That's a price point I can deal with.
The whole business model and release cycle for movies and music is broken and the industry is too slow to react. I've even seen more progressive types in the industry post to/. and reddit on just how archaic the thinking is at the top.
Utter bullshit. Teacher's unions maybe costing the system more but without them, teachers would be treated like shit. They are already even with meagre protection. Once the unions are gone, I assume you'd blame the teachers. When they're all fired who do you blame next? There is only one problem with education, its the parents, period. Modern parenting is doing more harm than any school. Thing is, no parent wants to admit. Blame everyone else but ourselves.
You say teachers aren't cheap yet you quote 22,000 pounds? Surely you're not saying they're making too much at that salary? That's about half what a Canadian teacher makes (including currency conversion.) It's amazing how little the general public values teachers. Wonder why they have unions? They would be treated like utter shit if they didn't. They were before unions and they are again as their unions weaken.
Agree although its not unusual for individuals to be bumped up in a team without the team knowing. Compensation is still relatively confidential among employees in my experience. What does happen is that middle management is limited by an overall salary increase budget that requires stealing from other team members' raises in order to provide more for an individual. Those overall budgets have been hovering around 2-3% for almost a decade. Given that, a manager can't increase an individual salary much before it cuts into other people's increases.
Even if such contracts were possible in US and Canada (they aren't) your example illustrates why they don't work. Companies that have you locked in aren't going to use financial or other goodies to motivate you to stay. Employees will leave after the contract period and the company likely has a bigger problem than natural attrition from abusing employees the old way.
Isn't it amazing that the so-called business leaders in a company can't compare the cost of a relatively small increase in salary to the cost of hiring a new employee with recruiting, hiring, and training?
Let's not forget there's lots more to software development than writing the actual code. Experience in the whole software development lifecycle is critical as are the soft skills that are often learned rather than natural for techies.
..and you noted it because it's rare, right?
I'm 45 and the only way I could get another job is through my network of colleagues. I actually removed old experience on my resume so as to not immediately give away my age. Ageism is alive and well everywhere and its not a cost thing either. Very few managers want to hire someone significantly older then they are.
When folks here are saying "oh we so totally need experienced developers here, we can't, like, find any" they really mean experienced, young, cheap, exploitable resources. I'd like to see the pile of rejected resumes for every one of the unfilleable positions.
That is commendable, seriously. I can vouch for the previous poster, $1600/mth for a family in a major urban centre in Canada would be difficult. Assuming you've already sold your house and cars and moved to a small rental, you could likely make ends meet with the capital and the income. Note that EI doesn't last forever and you'd have to move to welfare benefits after that. If you go that way then you'd definitely have had to already divest yourself of any savings and other assets. Once there, it's a tough haul to get yourself out.
(Given my track record, I appear to be an insufferable ass, so next time I'm out the door I'll start my own business. )
Highly recommend. If anything, you'll stop getting fired!
It's worth pointing out that you don't qualify for EI in Canada if you are actually fired or leave a job willingly. Luckily (depending on your point of view) nobody gets fired, they get laid off. Even if there is no economic reason for your departure its easier on the employer to lay you off (firing is just too much work!) and easier on the hapless employee because they can qualify for EI. It's rare in technical jobs to actually get fired.
I was laid off from a job due to "restructuring" but knew it was coming and I was the only one in the group. It was a firing plain and simple. I got the appropriate form that lets me collect EI once my severance ran out and the company gets rid of me without all the hassle of firing me. They advertised for my job the following week. This company has repeated this pattern many times in the past. Provincial labour laws in Canada are quite weak (often less stringent than many states) so lay offs to get rid of people are common and easy if you're willing to pay slightly more than the legal minimum severance (1wk pay for each year of service is the de facto minimum.) Pay a littler more severance and you're clear. It's HR's nasty little secret.
Because I can hire an Eastern European, Indian, Oriental or Asian worker with a better work ethic with a living cost less than a quarter the fee I'd pay to an American and I don't even need to worry about employment contracts or benefits or anything. Right now more than half the programmers I use are foreign and I get better code from them for $500 a month than I did American and Canadian workers at 3k+ a month. Sorry, that's just reality.
I call bullshit on this. In my extensive experience this has not been the case. I have been in three different companies that used out sourced employees in Asia - Russia, India and China. In almost every case productivity was far less than equivalent North American developer but more importantly there was lack of creativity, direction, and motivation. If managing programmers is like herding cats then managing off shore programmers is like herding ferrets. This may get better over time as management expertise and multi-site development improves but for now, the risk/gain needs to re-evaluated and in fact, many companies are moving development back in-house all three of the companies I mentioned have done this.) One thing you also conveniently left out is that wages overseas are growing rapidly, considerably faster than in North America. Cost of living in Moscow and other major metro areas in Russia has skyrocketed, Indian and Chines developers are leaving poor paying jobs immediately for better paying jobs. In my current employer, we had to raise salaries at our Chinese development group by 30%. The advantage to off shore development in terms of costs is dwindling IMO.
You said it. It's import to point out that only a very small percentage of musicians make enough money from record sales in the first place. Cracker dude is one such lucky bastard and thus not even representative of the majority. I will pay for music when it goes directly to the artist no iTunes, no record company, right off their own website. Guys like Jonathon Coulton are spearheading this and he does quite well. I would bet he nets much more than many popular artists because his costs are minimal (he even hit the billboard charts last year, all with self produced and released albums.)
Metallica could easily self produce an album and sell it but I bet they are locked in solid to some contract that restricts this for years.
Although not a severe as your example, it's crazy witch hunt era we live in. A friend's son downloaded something that was likely a CP sting file (as in they were watching for the file to be downloaded.) He was 14 and didn't know what it was. The police stormed the house and broke the door down with guns drawn to a shocked and scared single mom and three kids. This is was in a low crime suburban Canadian city (this is not just a US problem.) Total over reaction and abuse of power. Luckily she has been able to get her son cleared of charges and is looking at pursuing excessive force. There is no excuse for this nor can it be justified.
Yeah right, you've been on the Internets before, right? If a reasoned and rational argument can be so easily given and accepted, people would go through the effort. When the most likely response is "you're a faggot" then you don't really feel like writing a full thesis.
In education, Gates maybe doing more harm than good. Having someone with little tolerance for people dumber than himself, Gates shouldn't be dictating educational policy. At least Steve Jobs knew he shouldn't be making those types of decisions.
Agree with the facts but I think forces at work are more subtle than they were 50 years ago. Standard of living has elevated yet the wage gap between rich and poor has widened. Widened so far that the former middle class is close to the bottom than the middle. Arguably, the elevated standard of living has come from cheap food and consumer products that are relatively cheaper than ever before. Why are they relatively cheaper? Industrial food production and overseas cheap production and labor.
We don't have segregation, yet there are more black males in prison than college. In fact, we've turned incarceration into a business. I imagine that health insurance wasn't common 50 years ago yet it's essential today (again, healthcare is a for-profit-business now) yet 40+ million Americans are uncovered. Crime statistics show a drop in crime every year yet Americans are more scared and armed than ever before.
My point is, yes things are better but things are worse too.
Couple of questions I've always had about the GPL:
a) Do developers understand the GPL when they license their code with it?
b) Do open source projects choose the GPL as a default because its the most common open source license? Do they understand the alternatives like Apache or BSD, for example?
c) Do companies using open source GPL code understand their obligations?
My general comment on use of commercial use of open source is that often, especially where its embedded in products, companies are using it because it's perceived to be free (as in free cost but also free-to-do-what-you-want.) Often companies don't understand the viral nature when GPL code is embedded in a product and that their obligations under the license extend to each and every product they ship. Many of the cases of chasing after infringers have been related to redistribution in products where the main vendor is unaware of the implications (Cisco/Linksys, Westinghouse HDTV.) The important point is that most (all?) open source software is licensed and thus carries obligations.
You're right, of course, except the "She freaked" part. She totally lost it and lashed out in a crazed manner that is shocking if you read through her blog posts and twitter rants. Not only that, she is garnering support as if she was some kind of victim of a liberal conspiracy (I'm not exaggerating.) I can't see how the Texas State Bar cannot look at this behaviour as unprofessional as minimum.
I worked on FORTRAN orbit prediction software and later wrote an entire satellite signal prediction system in FORTRAN (on a Mac, no less!) Like COBOL, FORTRAN has its comfortable place entrenched in legacy scientific and engineering software. I miss those days.
Good for you. Unfortunately, this attitude is not pervasive. At 45 I don't consider myself old yet when I see posts from 20somethings stating you don't see anyone older than 50, it's disheartening. I have an engineering background and approach software development as an engineering activity. I would hope companies want to hire disciplined, productive developers but the norm seems to be to hire based on an acronym alphabet soup. During interviews, it's rare to hear questions about your development approach, it's often about "how many years of XYZ do you have?" it's not the programming languages that are important or the brand of datavase server, it should be "how good of an engineer am I hiring." Also, equally unfortunate is the prefiltering HR departments do on resumes, older engineers often don't even get an interview. I've removed about half of my experience from my resume so it doesn't go so far back - age is easy to deduce when you experience going back to 80s.
So true! I participated in science fairs in Grade 7 and 8. A friend and I built a miniature but working wind tunnel (my Dad was an engineer but all he did was a rough sketch of the dimensions and template to cut some plywood.) We didn't do well because our poster sucked. I learned that all that hard work was a waste without he right marketing, spend time on a poster, forget the science/design/engineering/learning. In grade 8, I used a couple of experiments from my chemistry set showing electrolysis and osmosis and spent more time on the poster. I got 3rd place. The winner? A girl who's Dad worked on satellites, built a tin foil satellite but had a kick ass 5 foot high poster with lots of very neat writing.
Valuable lessons learned, none of them to do with science.
I would think that one of the primary objectives of the judges would be to determine who did the work.
Isn't really pretty stupid to think that a prestigious international competition like this would omit this issue from the judging process?
Others have stated that establishments such as research labs need to sign a form outlining their involvement. I think with science fairs at this level they have to go by the written word of the external bodies that the work was done by the student. Even others have stated that although this is done, the work is often not completely done by the student. I think the judging committees are between a rock and hard place - they can't dispute the written verification of a research lab nor that of the students. A clear case of the emperor's new clothes, no one is willing to risk their reputation and livelihood blowing the whistle here.
One thing I've noted from American colleagues (I'm Canadian) is that they will almost bankrupt themselves to see their kids get into "a good school." In my opinion, there are likely decent schools in their state where they could get in-state tuition at a fraction of what they pay. My philosophy is that the name brand of your school matters the most on your last degree. Do well in undergrad, go to a fancy school on scholarship for post-graduate work. I've worked with MIT, Stanford, USC, etc grads and after so many years in the business is doesn't matter where you came from. All this to say, perhaps many middle class folks are placing their bets in school brands over and above what they can afford.
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Great points. When we shop we go for local and fresh as the top priority if we can. After that, fresh and not processed is better and I think that's a worthwhile hypothesis. Let's face it, if /. readers ate more vegetables that were fresh we'd be better off, organic or not :)
If and when we go to the theatre, it's usually for a blockbuster action or animated film the entire family would enjoy. We go to our local AMC before noon on weekends. The admission is $6/person and we rarely buy the popcorn (might as well eat bacon fat :) ). That's a price point I can deal with.
The whole business model and release cycle for movies and music is broken and the industry is too slow to react. I've even seen more progressive types in the industry post to /. and reddit on just how archaic the thinking is at the top.
Utter bullshit. Teacher's unions maybe costing the system more but without them, teachers would be treated like shit. They are already even with meagre protection. Once the unions are gone, I assume you'd blame the teachers. When they're all fired who do you blame next? There is only one problem with education, its the parents, period. Modern parenting is doing more harm than any school. Thing is, no parent wants to admit. Blame everyone else but ourselves.
You say teachers aren't cheap yet you quote 22,000 pounds? Surely you're not saying they're making too much at that salary? That's about half what a Canadian teacher makes (including currency conversion.) It's amazing how little the general public values teachers. Wonder why they have unions? They would be treated like utter shit if they didn't. They were before unions and they are again as their unions weaken.
Agree although its not unusual for individuals to be bumped up in a team without the team knowing. Compensation is still relatively confidential among employees in my experience. What does happen is that middle management is limited by an overall salary increase budget that requires stealing from other team members' raises in order to provide more for an individual. Those overall budgets have been hovering around 2-3% for almost a decade. Given that, a manager can't increase an individual salary much before it cuts into other people's increases.
Not to mention violating various software licenses along the way...
Even if such contracts were possible in US and Canada (they aren't) your example illustrates why they don't work. Companies that have you locked in aren't going to use financial or other goodies to motivate you to stay. Employees will leave after the contract period and the company likely has a bigger problem than natural attrition from abusing employees the old way.
Isn't it amazing that the so-called business leaders in a company can't compare the cost of a relatively small increase in salary to the cost of hiring a new employee with recruiting, hiring, and training?
Let's not forget there's lots more to software development than writing the actual code. Experience in the whole software development lifecycle is critical as are the soft skills that are often learned rather than natural for techies.
..and you noted it because it's rare, right? I'm 45 and the only way I could get another job is through my network of colleagues. I actually removed old experience on my resume so as to not immediately give away my age. Ageism is alive and well everywhere and its not a cost thing either. Very few managers want to hire someone significantly older then they are. When folks here are saying "oh we so totally need experienced developers here, we can't, like, find any" they really mean experienced, young, cheap, exploitable resources. I'd like to see the pile of rejected resumes for every one of the unfilleable positions.
That is commendable, seriously. I can vouch for the previous poster, $1600/mth for a family in a major urban centre in Canada would be difficult. Assuming you've already sold your house and cars and moved to a small rental, you could likely make ends meet with the capital and the income. Note that EI doesn't last forever and you'd have to move to welfare benefits after that. If you go that way then you'd definitely have had to already divest yourself of any savings and other assets. Once there, it's a tough haul to get yourself out.
(Given my track record, I appear to be an insufferable ass, so next time I'm out the door I'll start my own business. )
Highly recommend. If anything, you'll stop getting fired!
It's worth pointing out that you don't qualify for EI in Canada if you are actually fired or leave a job willingly. Luckily (depending on your point of view) nobody gets fired, they get laid off. Even if there is no economic reason for your departure its easier on the employer to lay you off (firing is just too much work!) and easier on the hapless employee because they can qualify for EI. It's rare in technical jobs to actually get fired. I was laid off from a job due to "restructuring" but knew it was coming and I was the only one in the group. It was a firing plain and simple. I got the appropriate form that lets me collect EI once my severance ran out and the company gets rid of me without all the hassle of firing me. They advertised for my job the following week. This company has repeated this pattern many times in the past. Provincial labour laws in Canada are quite weak (often less stringent than many states) so lay offs to get rid of people are common and easy if you're willing to pay slightly more than the legal minimum severance (1wk pay for each year of service is the de facto minimum.) Pay a littler more severance and you're clear. It's HR's nasty little secret.
..or cannibalism
Because I can hire an Eastern European, Indian, Oriental or Asian worker with a better work ethic with a living cost less than a quarter the fee I'd pay to an American and I don't even need to worry about employment contracts or benefits or anything. Right now more than half the programmers I use are foreign and I get better code from them for $500 a month than I did American and Canadian workers at 3k+ a month. Sorry, that's just reality.
I call bullshit on this. In my extensive experience this has not been the case. I have been in three different companies that used out sourced employees in Asia - Russia, India and China. In almost every case productivity was far less than equivalent North American developer but more importantly there was lack of creativity, direction, and motivation. If managing programmers is like herding cats then managing off shore programmers is like herding ferrets. This may get better over time as management expertise and multi-site development improves but for now, the risk/gain needs to re-evaluated and in fact, many companies are moving development back in-house all three of the companies I mentioned have done this.) One thing you also conveniently left out is that wages overseas are growing rapidly, considerably faster than in North America. Cost of living in Moscow and other major metro areas in Russia has skyrocketed, Indian and Chines developers are leaving poor paying jobs immediately for better paying jobs. In my current employer, we had to raise salaries at our Chinese development group by 30%. The advantage to off shore development in terms of costs is dwindling IMO.
You said it. It's import to point out that only a very small percentage of musicians make enough money from record sales in the first place. Cracker dude is one such lucky bastard and thus not even representative of the majority. I will pay for music when it goes directly to the artist no iTunes, no record company, right off their own website. Guys like Jonathon Coulton are spearheading this and he does quite well. I would bet he nets much more than many popular artists because his costs are minimal (he even hit the billboard charts last year, all with self produced and released albums.) Metallica could easily self produce an album and sell it but I bet they are locked in solid to some contract that restricts this for years.
Although not a severe as your example, it's crazy witch hunt era we live in. A friend's son downloaded something that was likely a CP sting file (as in they were watching for the file to be downloaded.) He was 14 and didn't know what it was. The police stormed the house and broke the door down with guns drawn to a shocked and scared single mom and three kids. This is was in a low crime suburban Canadian city (this is not just a US problem.) Total over reaction and abuse of power. Luckily she has been able to get her son cleared of charges and is looking at pursuing excessive force. There is no excuse for this nor can it be justified.
Yeah right, you've been on the Internets before, right? If a reasoned and rational argument can be so easily given and accepted, people would go through the effort. When the most likely response is "you're a faggot" then you don't really feel like writing a full thesis. In education, Gates maybe doing more harm than good. Having someone with little tolerance for people dumber than himself, Gates shouldn't be dictating educational policy. At least Steve Jobs knew he shouldn't be making those types of decisions.
Agree with the facts but I think forces at work are more subtle than they were 50 years ago. Standard of living has elevated yet the wage gap between rich and poor has widened. Widened so far that the former middle class is close to the bottom than the middle. Arguably, the elevated standard of living has come from cheap food and consumer products that are relatively cheaper than ever before. Why are they relatively cheaper? Industrial food production and overseas cheap production and labor. We don't have segregation, yet there are more black males in prison than college. In fact, we've turned incarceration into a business. I imagine that health insurance wasn't common 50 years ago yet it's essential today (again, healthcare is a for-profit-business now) yet 40+ million Americans are uncovered. Crime statistics show a drop in crime every year yet Americans are more scared and armed than ever before. My point is, yes things are better but things are worse too.
Couple of questions I've always had about the GPL: a) Do developers understand the GPL when they license their code with it? b) Do open source projects choose the GPL as a default because its the most common open source license? Do they understand the alternatives like Apache or BSD, for example? c) Do companies using open source GPL code understand their obligations? My general comment on use of commercial use of open source is that often, especially where its embedded in products, companies are using it because it's perceived to be free (as in free cost but also free-to-do-what-you-want.) Often companies don't understand the viral nature when GPL code is embedded in a product and that their obligations under the license extend to each and every product they ship. Many of the cases of chasing after infringers have been related to redistribution in products where the main vendor is unaware of the implications (Cisco/Linksys, Westinghouse HDTV.) The important point is that most (all?) open source software is licensed and thus carries obligations.
You're right, of course, except the "She freaked" part. She totally lost it and lashed out in a crazed manner that is shocking if you read through her blog posts and twitter rants. Not only that, she is garnering support as if she was some kind of victim of a liberal conspiracy (I'm not exaggerating.) I can't see how the Texas State Bar cannot look at this behaviour as unprofessional as minimum.
I worked on FORTRAN orbit prediction software and later wrote an entire satellite signal prediction system in FORTRAN (on a Mac, no less!) Like COBOL, FORTRAN has its comfortable place entrenched in legacy scientific and engineering software. I miss those days.
Good for you. Unfortunately, this attitude is not pervasive. At 45 I don't consider myself old yet when I see posts from 20somethings stating you don't see anyone older than 50, it's disheartening. I have an engineering background and approach software development as an engineering activity. I would hope companies want to hire disciplined, productive developers but the norm seems to be to hire based on an acronym alphabet soup. During interviews, it's rare to hear questions about your development approach, it's often about "how many years of XYZ do you have?" it's not the programming languages that are important or the brand of datavase server, it should be "how good of an engineer am I hiring." Also, equally unfortunate is the prefiltering HR departments do on resumes, older engineers often don't even get an interview. I've removed about half of my experience from my resume so it doesn't go so far back - age is easy to deduce when you experience going back to 80s.
So true! I participated in science fairs in Grade 7 and 8. A friend and I built a miniature but working wind tunnel (my Dad was an engineer but all he did was a rough sketch of the dimensions and template to cut some plywood.) We didn't do well because our poster sucked. I learned that all that hard work was a waste without he right marketing, spend time on a poster, forget the science/design/engineering/learning. In grade 8, I used a couple of experiments from my chemistry set showing electrolysis and osmosis and spent more time on the poster. I got 3rd place. The winner? A girl who's Dad worked on satellites, built a tin foil satellite but had a kick ass 5 foot high poster with lots of very neat writing. Valuable lessons learned, none of them to do with science.
I would think that one of the primary objectives of the judges would be to determine who did the work.
Isn't really pretty stupid to think that a prestigious international competition like this would omit this issue from the judging process?
Others have stated that establishments such as research labs need to sign a form outlining their involvement. I think with science fairs at this level they have to go by the written word of the external bodies that the work was done by the student. Even others have stated that although this is done, the work is often not completely done by the student. I think the judging committees are between a rock and hard place - they can't dispute the written verification of a research lab nor that of the students. A clear case of the emperor's new clothes, no one is willing to risk their reputation and livelihood blowing the whistle here.
One thing I've noted from American colleagues (I'm Canadian) is that they will almost bankrupt themselves to see their kids get into "a good school." In my opinion, there are likely decent schools in their state where they could get in-state tuition at a fraction of what they pay. My philosophy is that the name brand of your school matters the most on your last degree. Do well in undergrad, go to a fancy school on scholarship for post-graduate work. I've worked with MIT, Stanford, USC, etc grads and after so many years in the business is doesn't matter where you came from. All this to say, perhaps many middle class folks are placing their bets in school brands over and above what they can afford.