The agonizing for me at least isn't the $1, its the time I would need to spend to get to know the app and how it works and evaluate if it is the right one for me. The time spent on an app that turns out to be a dud was worth way more than the $1 outlay. That's where the real loss is.
I'm sure I am in the minority, but I am proud of the fact that I got rich as a programmer and not by being a suit. How did I achieve that? I co-founded a small software company that was acquired by a large tech company. True we didn't pay ourselves much until we started making some good revenue, and it took us 7 years before we were acquired, but ultimately my ownership stake in the company got me more money in the end than if I had been working as an investment banker right out of college. I didn't turn into a manager or director or some suit who forgot his developer roots, I remained pretty much an architect/developer the whole time. I am really proud of that achievement.
But anyway, my salary at the acquiring company was quite good ($135k with bonus, stock, etc.). I checked on glassdoor.com and it looks to be comparable to other developers at the company. I agree with some previous posters that if you want to be treated more than just a code monkey, work for a company that understands what developers bring to the table, that programming is very much a creative art and not at all like a bricklayer. If you work for a company whose core business is far away from tech (off the top of my head I am thinking a manufacturer or an insurance company, etc.) you will probably not be thought of as key and so I would assume your salary would reflect that. Check out salaries for software developers at companies like Cisco, Apple, Google, and Oracle and you will see they are pretty good.
Now you do have to consider the location. These companies are all based in expensive areas (Silicon Valley, east coast areas like NY and Boston) so their salaries will have to be higher just because of that. But still, overall I do believe that tech companies will give better salaries for developers than other companies.
True, I guess it all comes down to what is more important for people. I would venture a guess that its having convenient, easy-to-use video at your fingertips than having HD and better optics (if that was important, why not get a full-fledged HD video camera). So if you can get that on an iPod anyway people will take that over a dedicated camera. Just a guess.
I wonder how much the Flip's marketshare will be affected by the Nano getting a camera. Sure its not HD, but the original Flip was a huge seller and the Nano has that and a lot more while still retaining ease of use (though a single button to record is still probably a bit easier). I know if I were the founders of Pure Digital I am psyched Cisco acquired the company for $600 million a few months *before* this announcement! I wonder how much Cisco would acquire them for now?
A colleague of mine has his own domain and creates a separate e-mail address from that domain for each and every newsletter, internet site, etc. Basically any site that needs an e-mail, he creates a unique address for (i.e. worldofwarcraft@mydomain.com).
What this does is tell him *exactly* who has been selling his address. He has actually had several times where sites people would consider "legitimate" would deny that they sell the address but after he explained his system to them they admitted that they did. Another good thing about this is that you can disable an e-mail address if one of them is compromised.
Its a lot more work than just using a single e-mail for everything but it works well.
Yes, my company (Fortune 100 tech company) also makes everyone get a laptop. As a developer, I prefer using 2 screens and we have the tall monitors (1600x1200) that are so much better than the widescreen ones since it lets us see more code vertically.
My big beef is that I prefer to use a Mac and I've been wanting to upgrade to a Macbook Pro to replace my G5 desktop and use it instead of my crappy company-provided Lenovo. The problem is that even the Pros don't support 2 external monitors like docking stations on the PC do. Sure I can use one extra monitor and the laptop screen but that is not ideal. Until then, I'll probably stick to my desktop.
I remember when all minifigs were always smiling. I think they introduced minifigs with different expressions including *shockingly* frowns, when they started doing the commercial tie-ins (though I could be wrong here). My preference would be somewhere in the middle, everyone shouldn't have a smile, but then there shouldn't be minifig faces that are o specific to a genre or theme that its not that reusable.
We publish tons of documentation that has to explain XML formats. What we do is include DTD diagrams in our documentation that shows the structure of the XML document graphically. The tool we use to generate them is Tibco's TurboXML and we've been using it for years. Obviously we include examples, but the DTD diagrams really show you all you need to know.
I know, I know its commercial software. Maybe there's something open source out there that does something similar, not sure.
Hope this helps!
I think what the parent poster was saying was that by default OS X has many services that can be compromised turned off and they remain turned off no matter how many times you perform an update or reboot. The article mentioned that all these services were manually turned on to perform the test so out of the box OS X is so secure they didn't even bother to test it out of the box.
Did anyone see the picture of a screen showing what they claimed to be WOW? It was Starcraft! Hmm, I wonder if anyone in that office has even played WOW... They probably did a stock photo search for Blizzard and got that picture and probably thought Blizzard didn't exist before WOW came out so ofcourse the picture has got to be of WOW.
Clueless journalists...
I have been trolling Slashdot for years and never posted. I just has to make my first post to add what our experiences have been trying to hire good software engineers. I can only say what we have seen and we are just starving for good software engineers and its extremely difficult to find good people.
We are a small software company in New York City and we pay competetively, quite a bit higher than the numbers that I have seen floating around on these forums (but then again, we are in NYC). Now, of all the resumes we get or we pick up from job posting sites 80% are people from India and China. Maybe it is the fact that we are in NYC, maybe its the sites we are looking at, maybe its the way we recruit, but we see almost no US-born applicants for programming jobs.
What we value the most is excellent problem solving capabilities. The few US-born people we have interviewed have shown very good problem solving skills and very good communication and written skills, and we'd obviously prefer hiring top-notch people who could do hard core programming, talk to our customers, and write internal and external documentation that people can understand. We have frequently had a problem where we know we can't expose an engineer to a customer because their English is not very good, or we prod our engineers to write more readable documentation, things that a US-born person should take for granted (yes I know, many Americans are probably just as bad, but its a matter of scale - we've actually rejected good candidates because we simply can't communicate with them).
We found that other companies also realized how rare these traits are and the process of attracting and hiring someone with these abilities has become brutal. Even if you manage to secure someone, there is always the risk that they get poached a few months later by some other company that is willing to give up more. I have a hunch that most good US-born engineers never put up their resume somewhere because they are snatched up before they get to that point. With that in mind, every meeting we have internally we urge our employees to send along any resumes of friends or anyone they think is good so we can try to get them before they put themselves out on the market (one of our best developers I recruited right out of a programming class I was teaching). So from my vantage point, the demand is enormous and the supply tiny. And so we will hire Chinese and Indian programmers because we have to. Of our development team 65% were born in either China or India, even though all the founders were US-born.
So when people say that there are plenty of American programmers out there that can't get a job, I say I don't see it. In fact I see the opposite, the ones we do interview know they are in such high demand and have been asking for higher salaries as a result.
One last thing that I haven't seen a comment about yet. I don't know about any other software engineers out there, but I got into this because I absolutely love to program, not because I looked at it from a pure money perspective. I mean, are college students really choosing majors and choosing jobs only because they pay the most and not at all because of what they actually like to do? And I don't consider this a dead end career. Does anyone truly think that all demand for good developers will simply dry up? That 10 years from now there will not be a need to write software anymore or that there won't be any challenges in software development anymore and that all software will be written by sweatshop programmers? Do you truly believe that salaries are the only criteria companies use to evaluate employees? If so, you really have your head in the sand.
So in conclusion, I'm hiring US programmers (that means you slashdotters)! If you are a good problem solver and Java is your language, go to http://www.audiumcorp.com/ and send us your resume. Do it not just for the excellent opportunity, not just for the good salary, not just because you love new challenges, do it for your country:)
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The agonizing for me at least isn't the $1, its the time I would need to spend to get to know the app and how it works and evaluate if it is the right one for me. The time spent on an app that turns out to be a dud was worth way more than the $1 outlay. That's where the real loss is.
I'm sure I am in the minority, but I am proud of the fact that I got rich as a programmer and not by being a suit. How did I achieve that? I co-founded a small software company that was acquired by a large tech company. True we didn't pay ourselves much until we started making some good revenue, and it took us 7 years before we were acquired, but ultimately my ownership stake in the company got me more money in the end than if I had been working as an investment banker right out of college. I didn't turn into a manager or director or some suit who forgot his developer roots, I remained pretty much an architect/developer the whole time. I am really proud of that achievement.
But anyway, my salary at the acquiring company was quite good ($135k with bonus, stock, etc.). I checked on glassdoor.com and it looks to be comparable to other developers at the company. I agree with some previous posters that if you want to be treated more than just a code monkey, work for a company that understands what developers bring to the table, that programming is very much a creative art and not at all like a bricklayer. If you work for a company whose core business is far away from tech (off the top of my head I am thinking a manufacturer or an insurance company, etc.) you will probably not be thought of as key and so I would assume your salary would reflect that. Check out salaries for software developers at companies like Cisco, Apple, Google, and Oracle and you will see they are pretty good.
Now you do have to consider the location. These companies are all based in expensive areas (Silicon Valley, east coast areas like NY and Boston) so their salaries will have to be higher just because of that. But still, overall I do believe that tech companies will give better salaries for developers than other companies.
You spelled submitted wrong (submited). 8-)
Lol good one! I am assuming you are referring to this.
True, I guess it all comes down to what is more important for people. I would venture a guess that its having convenient, easy-to-use video at your fingertips than having HD and better optics (if that was important, why not get a full-fledged HD video camera). So if you can get that on an iPod anyway people will take that over a dedicated camera. Just a guess.
I wonder how much the Flip's marketshare will be affected by the Nano getting a camera. Sure its not HD, but the original Flip was a huge seller and the Nano has that and a lot more while still retaining ease of use (though a single button to record is still probably a bit easier). I know if I were the founders of Pure Digital I am psyched Cisco acquired the company for $600 million a few months *before* this announcement! I wonder how much Cisco would acquire them for now?
What this does is tell him *exactly* who has been selling his address. He has actually had several times where sites people would consider "legitimate" would deny that they sell the address but after he explained his system to them they admitted that they did. Another good thing about this is that you can disable an e-mail address if one of them is compromised.
Its a lot more work than just using a single e-mail for everything but it works well.
Yes, my company (Fortune 100 tech company) also makes everyone get a laptop. As a developer, I prefer using 2 screens and we have the tall monitors (1600x1200) that are so much better than the widescreen ones since it lets us see more code vertically. My big beef is that I prefer to use a Mac and I've been wanting to upgrade to a Macbook Pro to replace my G5 desktop and use it instead of my crappy company-provided Lenovo. The problem is that even the Pros don't support 2 external monitors like docking stations on the PC do. Sure I can use one extra monitor and the laptop screen but that is not ideal. Until then, I'll probably stick to my desktop.
I remember when all minifigs were always smiling. I think they introduced minifigs with different expressions including *shockingly* frowns, when they started doing the commercial tie-ins (though I could be wrong here). My preference would be somewhere in the middle, everyone shouldn't have a smile, but then there shouldn't be minifig faces that are o specific to a genre or theme that its not that reusable.
We publish tons of documentation that has to explain XML formats. What we do is include DTD diagrams in our documentation that shows the structure of the XML document graphically. The tool we use to generate them is Tibco's TurboXML and we've been using it for years. Obviously we include examples, but the DTD diagrams really show you all you need to know. I know, I know its commercial software. Maybe there's something open source out there that does something similar, not sure. Hope this helps!
It hatched!
I think what the parent poster was saying was that by default OS X has many services that can be compromised turned off and they remain turned off no matter how many times you perform an update or reboot. The article mentioned that all these services were manually turned on to perform the test so out of the box OS X is so secure they didn't even bother to test it out of the box.
Did anyone see the picture of a screen showing what they claimed to be WOW? It was Starcraft! Hmm, I wonder if anyone in that office has even played WOW... They probably did a stock photo search for Blizzard and got that picture and probably thought Blizzard didn't exist before WOW came out so ofcourse the picture has got to be of WOW. Clueless journalists...
We are a small software company in New York City and we pay competetively, quite a bit higher than the numbers that I have seen floating around on these forums (but then again, we are in NYC). Now, of all the resumes we get or we pick up from job posting sites 80% are people from India and China. Maybe it is the fact that we are in NYC, maybe its the sites we are looking at, maybe its the way we recruit, but we see almost no US-born applicants for programming jobs.
What we value the most is excellent problem solving capabilities. The few US-born people we have interviewed have shown very good problem solving skills and very good communication and written skills, and we'd obviously prefer hiring top-notch people who could do hard core programming, talk to our customers, and write internal and external documentation that people can understand. We have frequently had a problem where we know we can't expose an engineer to a customer because their English is not very good, or we prod our engineers to write more readable documentation, things that a US-born person should take for granted (yes I know, many Americans are probably just as bad, but its a matter of scale - we've actually rejected good candidates because we simply can't communicate with them).
We found that other companies also realized how rare these traits are and the process of attracting and hiring someone with these abilities has become brutal. Even if you manage to secure someone, there is always the risk that they get poached a few months later by some other company that is willing to give up more. I have a hunch that most good US-born engineers never put up their resume somewhere because they are snatched up before they get to that point. With that in mind, every meeting we have internally we urge our employees to send along any resumes of friends or anyone they think is good so we can try to get them before they put themselves out on the market (one of our best developers I recruited right out of a programming class I was teaching). So from my vantage point, the demand is enormous and the supply tiny. And so we will hire Chinese and Indian programmers because we have to. Of our development team 65% were born in either China or India, even though all the founders were US-born.
So when people say that there are plenty of American programmers out there that can't get a job, I say I don't see it. In fact I see the opposite, the ones we do interview know they are in such high demand and have been asking for higher salaries as a result.
One last thing that I haven't seen a comment about yet. I don't know about any other software engineers out there, but I got into this because I absolutely love to program, not because I looked at it from a pure money perspective. I mean, are college students really choosing majors and choosing jobs only because they pay the most and not at all because of what they actually like to do? And I don't consider this a dead end career. Does anyone truly think that all demand for good developers will simply dry up? That 10 years from now there will not be a need to write software anymore or that there won't be any challenges in software development anymore and that all software will be written by sweatshop programmers? Do you truly believe that salaries are the only criteria companies use to evaluate employees? If so, you really have your head in the sand.
So in conclusion, I'm hiring US programmers (that means you slashdotters)! If you are a good problem solver and Java is your language, go to http://www.audiumcorp.com/ and send us your resume. Do it not just for the excellent opportunity, not just for the good salary, not just because you love new challenges, do it for your country :)