skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alternate theory: "BigCo"'s internal processes have poor ability to distinguish talented developers from commodity developers, so all the good developers evaporate away, leaving BigCo with a poor of mediocre developers and a higher overall cost of getting things done. (This greater cost and reduces flexibility makes them vulnerable to smaller companies that can distinguish talent and attract it.)
As someone who is deeply involved in a church I feel your comment illustrates the problem. You appear to think you have a greater depth of relationship/community than you do.

I have noticed that the set of values is very much the binding force that holds, at least the church community that I am part of, together. I have very different interests with the people I have most to do with, but we live by similar moral codes. It's hard to describe but very different to what you are discussing. And the level of involvement is much higher than normal relationships.

Tightly woven communities are absent from modern lives as there has been a big push for individualism and materialism.
It's hard to believe I may have useful information about this, but I used to know a guy from the University of Colorado at Boulder who was getting his master's degree in bassoon performance by day and sneaking out to the physics lab at night to work on machining reed-making equipment. Now he's got a company, http://www.bartoncane.com/, that seems to be way better than mass produced and way cheaper than custom... or at least, that's how it seems to me, a guy who doesn't play the bassoon.
The people I know in that range tend to work at:

* Google

* Facebook

* Amazon

* Microsoft

* Apple

They work on security, mobile, back-end, and "I can't tell you what I'm working on," the last being the most common answer, unfortunately. The common thread is that they're all good developers. I got my offer in large part because of Android development skills on top of low level skills, which on Android means I'm comfortable and experienced with the NDK. But I also know Windows, full-stack web, high performance servers design, scalable server design, multithreaded programming, game development, and a half dozen other interests/skills.

Most of the compensation comes in the form of stock grants and/or signing bonus. My compensation was $160k "salary" plus nearly that much in signing bonus+stock grant. Actually if I hadn't left the company, their new stock price would have meant higher total compensation this year, but I wanted to pursue my own things.
...excluding the dead victim. Because, you know, he's lost his rights.
> Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.

Yes, once you train a person you need to pay them more. You might feel like they owe you, but unless there is a real understanding between the two of you that you are investing in them and expect to pay them less for some period of time to recoup the cost (eg in the form of a contract you both signed stipulating a minimum term after training, with claw back provisions), this is what you should expect.

Depending on how much it costs you (besides their salary) to train them, it can still be cheaper to hire and train than getting someone experienced, since everyone needs some time before they're really effective and you're paying them at a lower rate while you train them.

There is something to be said for small startups just not being able to support that kind of load, but I feel like once you hit about 20 engineers it's just people being lazy and not wanting to do things any differently, rather than any true constraints.

The fetishization of the 10x developer leads us to ignore the fact that lots of the work developers are tasked with doing is really quite repetitive, intellectually unchallenging and uninspired.
Don't even have to go as far as fiction.... SDF is a common abbreviation for the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
I work at a Fortune 5 Company and our director sent us some YouTube links because there isn't any training budget.
There is a major flaw in this article. Software developers are not cogs. Just because someone has an engineering degree does not make them just as good as any other developer. Being able to write great software usually comes from passion and practice, not a piece of paper that says "Computer Science BS". Some of the best developers I know didn't even get an engineering degree. Is there a shortage of people with pieces of paper? Maybe not. Is there a shortage of people that love writing software enough to spend most nights and weekends doing it? Yes.

This is based on my experience interviewing candidates for two small tech companies.
The U of P may have some serious problems, but they are certainly not a diploma mill.
I don't believe the author is quite as shocked by the reaction to her poster as she would like us to think. When she asks rhetorical questions like, "Is it so unheard of that I genuinely care about my teammates?" it comes across as feigned ignorance more than anything else.

Her main argument is also a little too wide-eyed - she basically says that because the poster is factually correct (she is an engineer, she works at One Login, she likes working there) it shouldn't be receiving all the attention and criticism.

Except, it's not that simple, because advertisements aren't just lists of facts - they have embedded values in terms of who they are trying to target and what they are trying to communicate.

So when people criticize the ad, they aren't calling into question its facts, but rather its motive - who are they targeting and why? The author tries to discredit the idea that this ad is targeted at men by saying the entire concept is sexist, but I don't buy it. They chose to put her on the ad because she is an engineer, yes, but the fact that she's a pretty female engineer was not accidental, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
FWIW I consider the Yamaha YHR-862 horns to be your pFrenchHorn: at around $3,000 not exactly ultra cheap, but a lot of players have owned one as their first double horn.

Mass manufactured, good enough for orchestra playing, can take an unbelievable amount of damage (I took the valves out myself for heavy duty maintenance, something I would never do on my gold brass 1103), a gateway to the much more expensive Alexanders that an all-brands trial will inevitably result in you purchasing...

I think Yamaha is trying the same approach with pianos but do not believe (from experience) their officious claim that their grands are anywhere close to Steinways. There is nothing in the world like a Model C or D, yet.
Thanks for the insightful comment.

I avoided singling out the larger corporations at the end of my comment (Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts) as I don't have any friends who will be working service jobs for these chains.

I graduated undergrad a couple of months ago, and I do have a fair amount of friends who gave up looking for work in the finance/startup field full time and are now working at trendy restaurants/bars in the SF NY area to make ends meet while searching on the side. Anecdotal evidence, but that's what I've seen.
Enjoy:

http://pastebin.com/bakX4RRZ
> "So if you inherit a $10M business, the only way to pay > your tax bill is to liquidate the business..."

False.

Any business in good financial condition can obtain loans easily, especially in the current economy.

And why would the need to "liquidate the business" be bad? The seller still gets the value of the business plus the flexibility of investing that value forward.
More interesting than you think: we have an open-source FPGA architecture out there now and cheap[ish] processes to implement it.

http://pastebin.com/bakX4RRZ
If only those bad developers were "0x developers", it would have been the problem of spending money on their salaries. In reality there are many "-10x developers" which may increase the costs for maintaining the software, or cause a lot of performance problems with the results of their work.
I don't see the vast majority of these young programmers recruited by this type of propaganda as being enthusiastic, sadly.

They see the salaries, see that all of the other good middle class jobs have dried up and think "well, it's either learn javascript or be stuck in Starbucks forever". The fact that so many persist at it even while hating it makes me sad.

These kids should have a multitude of options to a good middle class job, not just one.

That's thanks to decades of vicious economic policy directed by billionaires like the ones smiling at you in that promotional video.
>...quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.

This shows up a lot, and it's worth debunking. Salary is not the only reason that people take a job, and it's not the only reason that people switch jobs. There can be huge costs (for all parties) to casually switching jobs, and most employees stay put longer than the training period. Additionally, there are standard contract terms that enforce retention periods in exchange for certain types of training (e.g., advanced degrees, etc.). Finally, "salary for engineers" and "training for engineers" are not the only headings in the ledger for running a company - and the value of a company is not a zero sum game; a well-trained technical workforce is more valuable than the alternative, but it has lately been more cost effective and lower risk to transfer that responsibility to (prospective) employees.
>> The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. ... I've been trying to hire, and my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. The money isn't the issue; I'd pay way more than that for someone good. But six figures is crazy high for the average developer in SF. >>

How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000?

Sure, it is plausible that if all the companies in SF tried to pay virtually unlimited amount of money for exceptional programmers, they'd eventually run out of those programmers. After all even in major league baseball there are only so many 100 MPH pitchers to go around. But it's hard to credit claims that we are in that situation rather than one where the money _is_ the issue, when you aren't seeing numbers that would make a BigLaw junior partner or investment bank managing director jealous, much less a professional baseball player.
Hudson, I wasn't planning on responding to you but I think you could use some honest advice.

I'm sorry for whatever you had to go through in your life to develop such an inflated and hostile perspective, but I think you're completely missing the point here. As for my previous comment -- there's nothing like sexism right at home.

This concept might blow your mind, but if you really knew me as a person you'd understand how FAR from shallow I am. I'm an introvert, I have a small handful of amazing friends and I see them for the human consciousness that I allocate my time to; it has very little to do with physical presence. You could be the most conventionally physically attractive person on the planet but I will not want to waste even a minute in your presence if you don't have a good heart. Physical appearances are relatively ephemeral, people who put too much value on looks are setting themselves up for extreme amounts of disappointment in life.

A wise man once said "There is more to life than being really really ridiculously good looking... and I'm going to find out what that is."
What if Google+ failed because Google already has a social presence?
Actually, gun violence has been on a downward trend since the early nineties across the entire population. You'd expect police firearm fatalities to trend downward accordingly, regardless of the use of body armor.

Police wearing body armor, armored cars, AR-15s, and the like are part of a different trend: the militarization of US police using surplus equipment from the Department of Defense, in a DOD program 1033.

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-reporting-on-the-...
EDF étend son parc éolien en Turquie pour davantage de puissance
The Revolving Door Between Google and the DoD
Your experience is not my experience.

First, when a company lays off 20,000 people there is generally little regard for who the individuals are. You see this over and over again. Except for the very top performers who end up protected, these are usually projects / divisions / etc. getting killed en masse. Sometimes people have the opportunity to spend a few months interviewing to obtain another job in the same company, but not always.

I've not been out of work for a moment of the 22 years since I left school, and have no problem with the Visa programs, etc. I personally believe we all benefit from opening up competition for positions.

Having said that, what I've seen is that looking strictly at technical ability I would say that Visa employees have in general been no better and no worse than the average US employee, but when it comes to "soft skills" are typically much worse off (and not just communication because of language barriers, but in other areas as well). They've fared no better when it comes to upkeep of their skills. They've fared no better when it comes to "leveling off" and hitting a ceiling where they no longer advance in terms of salary, etc. Like the typical US worker, they get married, have kids, get a social life, and generally stop improving their skills. By that point most have green cards and/or citizenship.

All of the companies I've worked for are large prestigious companies, some of which have set records for number of resumes received per month in the industry at different points in time, so again your experience might be different if you're talking about IT shops or start-ups.
I don't know much about Zapier but IFTTT seems to me to be more like the infra-structure for software agents. IFTTT you are still creating recipes. I would like to say that Agent 2.0 would look like the Knowledge Navigator of the Apple videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0). Many moons ago, I remember seeing this video in a graduate computer science course on CHI and freaking out. Now the question is what does Agent 1.0 look like?
Standing Alert with the UPS Hot Spares
Interesting.

I wonder if this phenomenon might at least partially explain the repeated misguided calls we see for encryption software to have back doors for law-enforcement use. Roughly speaking, people might be thinking that such a back door would not be used for nefarious purposes, because that is not what it is for.
>How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce.

Or just cheap labor.

>Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.

I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are. That's why several of them engaged in a wage fixing cartel.
Downvoted this for being snotty and egotistical. Regardless of whether it's true, it's annoying.
'World's nicest boss' – Dan Price – falls on hard times
HFT firms pay very well for systems and HPC developers, especially when you count the bonuses. I'm not sure when/if the total salary reaches 500k, but I've heard that total salaries from 200-300k are fairly common.

A recent graduate friend of mine just started in the field and he has a base salary of 160k (don't know what the bonus is), so 250k for a senior developer doesn't seem out of the question.
>The people coming in on visa's (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts.

I have worked with a lot of visa workers. It's as mixed as local workers. Some are way more skilled than average, others below average.
The hospitals do have to pay for medical school. If they didn't, nobody would go through it.

Here's a cleaner example: suppose getting an M.D. required a filing fee of $800,000. You don't think that would show up in what hospitals paid doctors?
This H1-B problem is not a "silicon valley" problem. Those companies are unfortunately the companies that are probably doing H1-B the way it was designed.

The real issue is the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley providing services to everyday companies. That is truly where the injustice is and where the meat of this article is pointing at.
Here's a listing of Google H1B's base salary:
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEE...

Keep in mind that equity makes up a relatively high percentage of a Googlers' compensation. Salary is usually only 40-60% of total comp.
> lots of the work developers are tasked with doing is really quite repetitive, intellectually unchallenging and uninspired.

Then why the fuck isn't work automated away? We're developers, for God's sake! We develop things!
>often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards.

That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries.
> <div style="display:table;">

In a perfect world, we don't need wrap layers of div of divs for styling, why don't we invent a more semantic tag called "table". Oh wait...
The problem with "prevailing wage" is that if you classify someone as the lowest tier programmer (not developer or software engineer), the prevailing wage is like 65k. So it's really quite easy to meet that, even for Infosys.

As someone working in the states on a visa, I feel like the prevailing wage should be set at least at some high percentile of salary, the same way O-1 visas require* pay in the 95th percentile, though I don't think you want to get rid of the grades of developers so that companies can still hire excellent junior developers.
> Does not pay properly or on time.

Say 'goodbye'. That's a sin for companies to commit.

Do you have equity? If not, you don't need to worry about the company, especially when the CEO is providing you no support.
Thanks for this! My wife and I found it very helpful when we were in Reykjavik last year. Actually stitched the tiles together and printed it on one page on our color laser printer... didn't quite do it justice but seeing the actual buildings was super-helpful finding our way around.
The tech industry's managers have been whining about this at least since I entered the workforce in the early 80's. I tend to think it's because the rise of the MBA and the consequent unwillingness to invest in people. MBA's want to hire engineers like they buy office furniture. And then manage them like a group of accounts payable clerks. Doesn't work.

Then add in the managements favorite predilection 'downsizing for success' In order to boost profits over the next couple of quarters, can a a few well oiled engineering teams. Then wonder why you don't good house engineering resources for the next big thing.

Frankly what they want, it's not possible.
When I was in college, I was doing engineering. Many of my friends got bored and wanted to go MBAs. I almost went that path until I started programming.

Ever since then I went from a commodified drone to feeling like a kid.

It felt like escaping the capitalist matrix. I almost was seen upon as a hippie. I told my dad that "I have no interest in pursing an MBA, I just want to spend me time in a cave with a terminal and a few books"

He was almost shocked by it.

I notice it all over in society these days.

If you read about how tuition fees are rising and students are in debt, people make insane arguments like "well on average a person earns X more over their lifetime by having a degree"

I never noticed how ridiculous these arguments were.

I have been reading a lot on economics lately and karl marx predicted this outcome.

We have in many ways reached the end of capitalism, before capitalism as a system breaks apart. We are trying hard to commodify labour - but the great paradox is if you commodify labour then the free market stops existing !

I can go on and on, but yes - we need to get rid of capitalism and this free market darwinist bullshit and return to a more social and morally right form to organize society.
In this thread there's a lot of complaining about mediocre developers. I'm still finishing my undergrad, and looking to go the PM route, but how do I avoid being the type of developer complained about here?
The documentary "Once Upon Atari" explains the story of the consumer division (Atari 2600). Some of their best game developers left to form Activision after they tried to renegotiate their compensation with the new CEO and failed (this was post-Bushnell when Atari started making real serious money). After third-party games became legitimized, dozens of game companies sprouted up and tried to poach people from Atari. This put enough pressure on the Atari management to give release bonuses and $0.10/cartridge royalties that made a bunch of the developers millionaires.
This article makes the perennial mistake of assuming all "STEM graduates" are equal. This is flawed in three main ways:

1. STEM graduates includes many fields where there genuinely is a huge surplus of labor (we don't really need more physicists).

2. Talent is critical and sadly a large number of CS graduates do not have the talent to be good developers. Many fresh graduates just don't have the skills to cut it as a high-quality professional developer, yet the best ones have six-way auctions going. Companies are absolutely desperate for good developers, with the operative word being good. (Don't even get me started on bootcamp graduates.)

3. The shortage of developers is most acute for senior developers. It takes about 10 years to become a truly senior developer and 10-15 years ago not many people were interested in starting a career in CS (the dot-com bust was still raw). This shortage can only be solved with time or immigration and until then senior developers can command considerable salaries ($250k+ all in).
I created a page at https://society6.com/constantchaos where these can be ordered as prints.

I was so intrigued with the drawings that I started to look for additional patent drawings to add. My favorite new ones are the Gameboy patent drawing and 3 drawings related to Curta mechanical calculators.

I developed my own vectorization and re-rasterization process that I believe offers a slight improvement in faithfulness to the original drawing (took a few tries to get the Curta ones right).
We plan to write a great guide, similar to DO model, once Kong (https://github.com/mashape/kong) will support Postgres (https://github.com/Mashape/kong/issues/331)
Why enterprises are embracing rogue IT
Yep. The problem with schools in poor neighborhoods is the students have to go to school with other poor kids. If money were the problem, D.C. public schools would be the best in the nation.