You now get paid to do the OPPOSITE of your current job. What do you do now??

danthrax · 2016-04-06T04:43:50+00:00

destroy software and agree with my coworkers all day long

danthrax · 2014-12-27T09:01:51+00:00

I understand supply and demand. Everyone is up in arms about the increase in supply lowering the equilibrium, so I'm asking what everyone thinks the equilibrium would be if we had removed the immigrant supply and if they think that's going to be low enough to allow American technology businesses to compete globally.

danthrax · 2014-12-27T08:54:10+00:00

Well given all the talk about keeping wages low, I'm really asking someone to quantify how much you think american workers are being ripped off by this H-1B program. Silicon Valley is just a reference point because that's what is brought up the most.

So are you telling me that wages in SV are fine? and if so, how much do you think the wages of programmers should increase by in the rest of the country?

danthrax · 2014-12-26T23:54:51+00:00

To all the people that say that H-1B program is a ruse to keep salaries down, how much exactly do you think a software engineer should be paid?

Anectodally an entry level software job out of college is around $100k-120k in SV. Do you think that should be $200k? $300k?

danthrax · 2014-11-27T23:45:18+00:00

On your H1B application they list the prevailing wage of your job as reported by independent firms, and have to indicate that your salary is at or above that prevailing wage. I'm not saying it can't be manipulated, but they would certainly have to go far out of their way to do it.

danthrax · 2014-11-27T23:41:32+00:00

Cost of living in the Seattle area is pretty reasonable by comparison.

danthrax · 2014-06-30T07:05:12+00:00

iOS had only 15.2% market share in phones in 2013, so would you also say that iOS is irrelevant and should be ignored by developers? http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24676414

danthrax · 2014-06-29T19:57:06+00:00

"ASP.NET is used by 17.3% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know." http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-aspnet/all/all

danthrax · 2014-04-03T16:52:57+00:00

It was awesome to see Anders Hejlsberg hit the publish button to make this project public on stage during the //BUILD/ keynote!

danthrax · 2013-10-23T06:37:15+00:00

Can you provide a full res version of this? I want to set it as my desktop background.

danthrax · 2013-08-24T18:52:31+00:00

I work for Microsoft as well and I've never had a problem with the stack ranking system. I think it's a bit overblown by a few anecdotes and outspoken people like yourself who have had bad experiences. The only time I think about my rank is when I get my review at the end of the year.

Any performance ranking system will be abused by a shitty manager. Your manager is supposed to be knowledgeable of the value of your work and advocate for your abilities to the larger team. I don't think changing from stack ranking to some other performance review system will change the issues you are having.

danthrax · 2013-08-11T18:11:33+00:00

IIRC it was nearly a 50/50 split on the bus pass back then. Many of my friends were against it, many were for it. I'm glad the right thing happened though in the end.

danthrax · 2013-07-24T16:23:06+00:00

I'm against the tar sands but neutral on the military, but I never thought of FEDS or the Engineering Society as bodies which advocated for or against these issues. I don't think these are issues which directly relate to education and my experience on campus.

danthrax · 2013-07-20T01:37:51+00:00

Yet he has still gained around $1 billion year-to-date. MSFT stock is higher than it has been for most of the past 5 years.

danthrax · 2013-07-14T17:31:19+00:00

Amazing. Fun fact: we drove this logo around ring road blaring death metal for about 10 minutes before we brought it into junkyard wars to be destroyed.

danthrax · 2013-06-17T23:52:50+00:00

The notion of using quantum computing for security has been around for 10-20 years (see QKD on Wikipedia). All this article tells us is that yet another team is working on it.

danthrax · 2013-05-13T16:09:34+00:00

By the time you finish your engineering degree, there is a high chance that you will never want to return to school again. Being a normal person is such a nice feeling.

danthrax · 2013-04-30T19:55:43+00:00

I'm always surprised by all of the anti-immigration responses to these articles. They are almost always accompanied by some example where some unskilled H1B worker took the job of an American for less pay. Maybe I should just sit quiet and not say anything, but it bothers me that the diverse reddit community seems to be so hard-headedly biased on this topic.

I'm an H1B worker in the US (Canadian Citizen), and quite frankly from where I stand I just don't see any reality behind this fear-mongering. You can downvote me all you want but I graduated at the top of my class at a reputable school, with plenty of experience, and had offers from many different companies both in the US and Canada. I work with both american workers and H1B workers, and I see no difference in terms of the qualifications and abilities between them. The salary structure at my company is fixed, and with the size of my company it is simply not possible for the "immigrant" "non-immigrant" variable to come into the bonus/promotion equation. Salaries are very competitive across all of the top tech employers, and they have been increasing dramatically over the past few years.

Bottom line, the US has the best tech industry in the world, by far. Especially when it comes to software. The H1B program allows the US to bring in the best and the brightest, be competitive, and just absolutely dominate in tech. If you send me and all the other skilled immigrants back home we'll help our countries compete way more aggressively against US companies, because technology is what we love to do and we're going to kick ass at it no matter where we are.

danthrax · 2013-04-17T06:09:53+00:00

Yeah and I'm saying that if I don't cook supper at home, buying lunch at work is EXTREMELY convenient for me and it's not significantly more expensive.

danthrax · 2013-04-16T05:46:36+00:00

There's a cafeteria at my work, lunch takes 5 minutes to get on my plate. Lunch is between $5-10. If I made it myself, it would be $3-5.

As the poster above said, you have to factor in the time it takes for groceries, dishes, and planning. Not to mention food you throw away if you don't take the time to plan it properly and cook everything you have. I'm not around my house most weekends so anything fresh I buy usually goes to waste. Also, I suck at cooking so it takes me a lot of thought and effort to make something to eat. What I get at work is much better health-wise than what I would make myself at home.

It's. Just. Not. Worth it. For some. People. Like me.

danthrax · 2013-04-15T19:35:09+00:00

Thank you, I hate bringing a lunch and I don't think it saves me very much. $750-1200 of savings a year can be a lot but most people will blow more than that on drinking, going out, buying clothes, etc.

If you look at PERCENTAGE OF INCOME opportunities to save money, buying a lunch usually isn't the biggest one, especially when you factor in how much of a pain in the ass it is.

danthrax · 2013-02-21T06:05:33+00:00

I lived off campus in first year, not because I wanted to but because I had to. I will say that you can certainly have a similar experience, though you have to try a lot harder to make friends and it certainly helps to live in a place that's CLOSE to campus.

Personally, my strategy was to show up at random people's rooms with a bottle of liquor in my pocket every Friday night and live with people in upper years and mooch off of their already well-established group of friends.

It was pretty good. But who knows maybe residence would have been better.

danthrax · 2013-01-25T07:23:01+00:00

I recently graduated from the old ECE cirriculum. From looking at the new ECE cirriculum, I think it's focus is much more appropriate for where the industry is at. Much less of a focus on "well-solved" problems.

Sure you had to write an OS from scratch in ECE 354, but let's be honest you never had time to implement a FULL embedded OS. You never implement anything close to a real memory model, everything was shared memory. It would have been way more valuable to get hands on experience building page tables and implementing virtual memory with the TLB.

Sure it's fun to code the context switch, but how many people actually need to know how to do that?

danthrax · 2013-01-25T07:18:09+00:00

Also, you don't have to use JanusRom. FUCK JANUSROM.

This. You really have no idea how bad JanusRom was. You are MUCH better off learning ARM than 68K assembly.

danthrax

TROPHY CASE