351–360 of 655 posts
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What advances in computer science were necessary for HipHop? It's a bog-standard JIT system of the kind we'd been building for years. Sure, it's well-executed, but it's hardly a "revolutionary project" to those who weren't born yesterday.
Ok, fair enough. HipHop was not the first JIT. I'd like to hear your opinion on MapReduce.
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> It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being the worst possible product of US politics and that starts to impact the standard of living thing. It would be nice, if there were some rough guidelines, how much more I'd need to ask salary in the US, that would cover the extra fees for insurance and health care, that I get for free in most Western European countries?
Health care isn't free in ANY country. You pay for it, even if indirectly. The high taxes and high 'social charges' in a place like France results in much lower salary. One could argue, that in France your purchasing power is much less than someone in the US paying for health insurance out of pocket. Rails devs in France might make 35k euros per year, so one could argue that, compared to a $120k salary in the US, tha…
I am not arguing against that. But I didn't mean to be political about this. I was just interested in the net salary, and the more-or-less compulsory costs that you need to pay from the net salary, before you know how much you pocket, or spend, every month.
Comparing income tax levels is, while not as easy as it could be, quite doable. So it is possible to estimate one's net income in different countries. Also craigslist etc. make it relatively easy to compare the cost of hiring an approximately same level of apartment in different countries.
But healthcare (and pension) systems in different countries are, in my experience, more difficult to understand and compare. In some countries you need to pay some amount from your net income for a health insurance, in other countries you get healthcare for free (i.e. without needing to pay some monthly fees). In some countries you automatically accrue some pension, but the system is typically quite opaque and difficult to understand how much pension you actually accrue per year. In other countries, you need to save for the pension from your net income.
This concept of a "great programmer" is something I find very suspicious. A competently trained engineer who works with distributed systems may implement a trivial fix and save her company tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills. Someone with a strong background in programming languages might implement a PHP -> C++ cross-compiler and double the throughput of her company's web servers. The capability to recognize th…
1. the speed with he/she learns new skills/knowledge/points. 2. the depth of knowledge he/she is able to acquire. 3. how much he/she has learned in his/her career.
1. This first measure is important, because in a startup the situation can change drastically and you have to have a team that can adapt. 2. The deeper he/she can dig the broader is the set of problems they can solve. 3. The third measure also plays a large role, because while you can have some body that is really bright and has "the skills" - but if they don't use them over time efficiently enough, their strength in the first two skills won't carry them far.
i.e. personally I would measure the value of a developer has a product of the three factors - they amplify each other.
> The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US. This assumption is repeated throughout the essay, but I'm not particularly convinced it's true. Why would the qualities be evenly distributed between first world countries such as the US where programming is respected and well…
IMHO the real issue isn't that they many companies can't find great programmers, its that they only want great programmers who live in their locality. For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested. They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies).…
I'm currently working at a place that produces 30,000 euro machines. It's pretty handy to be in the same place as the other developers, so they don't have to ship everyone their own 30,000 euro machine to work with. And that's just the developers; if there's a problem with the motors or other bits and pieces, that's another department that needs to be called in to have a look. Not very convenient if everyone lives in…
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This is so screamingly correct. Let's go see the startups hire some old COBOL (or now, VB) programmers and train them on the new stacks, before we listen to anymore of this "there's not enough programmers in the USA" garbage.
I used to be shocked at the 9-to-5 programmers. Those who code during the day and go home and (egads!) do not code on side projects. The day of the company Halloween party was always the most jarring. All these 9-to-5 programmers would bring in their kids for the parade. For one afternoon, young, naive me saw that the true meaning of life is your impact on the world. These kids were the world for their parents. Comin…
IMHO the real issue isn't that they many companies can't find great programmers, its that they only want great programmers who live in their locality. For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested. They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being the worst possible product of US politics and that starts to impact the standard of living thing. It would be nice, if there were some rough guidelines, how much more I'd need to ask salary in the US, that would cover the extra fees for insurance and health care, that I get for free in most Western European countries?
Health care isn't free in ANY country. You pay for it, even if indirectly. The high taxes and high 'social charges' in a place like France results in much lower salary. One could argue, that in France your purchasing power is much less than someone in the US paying for health insurance out of pocket. Rails devs in France might make 35k euros per year, so one could argue that, compared to a $120k salary in the US, tha…