dj_axl

> you won't see that money for 8-10 years

Amen. Not such a good notion to trade salary for options, when that extra salary could have been invested all that time. $10k in 2005 is equivalent to $17k in 2015, $21k if you consider dividends reinvested.

On Windows, Microsoft Security Essentials warns when a hosts file change is detected. Fortunately it's a simple click to decline any further action. Related, I've witnessed AdBlock Plus spontaneously removed from Firefox, I assume due to anti-virus software, but possibly also due to MSE.

SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles, CA - Onsite or Remote

14+ years experience as enterprise software engineer/architect including scalable n-tier web applications serving millions of users.

Keywords: C#, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DBA, ASP.NET, MVC, SOA, web services, Python, R, C, machine learning

los [dot] angeles [dot] engineer [dot] 310 [at] gmail [dot] com

> Look at Salesforce, Workday, Amazon, etc. They are all negative or razor thin. Oracle and SAP are used to 85% gross margin on software.

Workday has a profit margin of 62% versus Oracle's profit margin of 82%. It's less but it's not that big of a gap.

> How do I go about valuing myself in the market without wasting a ton of time?

It takes a ton of time, but interview people. Seriously, you would not believe what the applicant pool is like, even after resume filtering and phone screening. After interviewing 20-30 people you may have a very different perspective on which decile of value that you fall into. If you are in the top 10% of developers, then your value is the top 10% as well.

> Twitter is headed the way of MySpace

Possibly. Once Instagram's number of users (150 million) hits Twitter's number of users (232 million) it won't be looking so good for Twitter, if Instagram continues to grow. Maybe Twitter will take over SnapChat (26 million users) though. Twitter just isn't gaining, they seem pretty stagnant, taking over a younger company could give them some growth.

> Most of the people who are making 100-200k would make at the very least double that if they were in the private sector.

The base salary would double. However they'd be left without a pension, and other benefits though I think the pension is easily the largest monetary value.

You have to pay for the one electron. Since it's the only electron, the cost is infinite. This results in a buffer overflow. Your utility bill is an overflowed unsigned short, divided by 100. This is why the maximum utility bill you will ever see is $655.35.

> So if they say there are no qualified engineers then that's the end of discussion.

Actually my company (which hires tons of foreign developers) does have applicants rejected. They then hire some lawyers to help reword the application. I'm not sure these are all H1-B, there are other hiring visa designations, but it definitely is the case that the government can reject applications. Frankly the government should reject even more of them, and then also reject some of the resubmitted ones, however the government is easily fooled by clever wording.

They've already raised $44 million, and probably have a near $1 billion valuation.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/17/how-king-com-crushed-...

> Why does everyone seem to hate Eclipse?

Echoing what others have said, you will notice if you've tried other IDE's. Since my main IDE is Visual Studio, I notice the lag / slowness / clunkiness immediately. YMMV. Maybe on a newer blazing fast CPU it's not so apparent. Definitely not OS dependent. I've tried Eclipse on both Windows and Linux, it's slow on both.

> The cynic in me just doesn't get over the value handed over by competitors to the sponsors

I would think you don't have to hand over your algorithm, if you forego the prize money. Another way of looking at it... as alluded to by other posters, the "winning" data model may not be the best, so there might be less value handed over than you think.

> Did you want a skilled programmer, or someone who memorized their Foobar Enterprise Framework cheat sheet? Because you're only interviewing for one of those.

People who ask common/simple insert language/framework here interview questions are sometimes looking to see if you at least minimum care enough to memorize the answers. Alternatively a sideways answer might work, like "I find that's no longer necessary since..." or "I'll be attending a 3-day dev conference that includes that topic..."

That said, it makes it look like they don't care enough about interviewees, when they put so little effort into the questions asked. To hire a skilled programmer, you need to present yourself as a skilled interviewer.

Small (<10 people) companies that I've worked for will sometimes quote an hourly rate, however they quote different hourly rates for different types of work, or different roles. An individual may (or may not) be able to do the same thing. Bill $500 an hour for managing/consulting, $25 an hour for super simple HTML editing (making text bold), and various rates for everything in between.

> is this even legal?

At least this is a stock, not a commodity like ahem oil.

> Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part-time job or downsizing your position at a company?

Once, at a contract gig, I was offered to work "flexible hours" which meant 16-32 hours a week. That was after putting in 12 months of 40-45 hours a week, essentially proving that I was good, reliable, etc. So it could happen, by switching to hourly pay, and/or becoming a contractor, working for people who already know you. And as theabraham notes, this may result in losing benefits.

> Personally I'm in love with R's data.frame. It allows very concise, robust and elegant manipulation and subsetting of a data set.

The performance is terrible though. For data of more than ~10,000 observations SQL is much better performance wise, is more robust, and is as good at subsetting. Although it's maybe not as elegant for everyone's definition of elegant.

More explanation here: http://www.ehackingnews.com/2012/09/new-zero-day-ie-exploit-...

"The only stalwarts here appear to be Backbone (other than its default routing feature, it works on IE6) and Knockout (which for now at least insists on total IE6 support)."

IE6 support is a must-have for me (corporate clients).

> If what you're working on is important enough and you love it enough, you would never need this.

If what you're working on is important enough and you love it enough, you can afford a second desktop/laptop/tablet/smartphone that is designated "work only" and so offers fewer distractions than your primary device.

'Over-architected' and 'over-optimized' are the terms I prefer. Whatever term(s) is(are) used, criticism should emphasize 'non-pragmatically-built', instead of emphasizing 'startups don't need any design, engineering, or optimization, whatsoever'.

"Lehman Brothers is hardly going out of business." - 2008

> For $300, you're typically not getting as well thought out a design as you would for $10,000.

You're likely to get a temporary logo that lasts you 6-12 months until you need a real logo. On the other end of the pricing extreme, Vancouver supposedly spent $239,000 on a logo design.

http://archive.citycaucus.com/2009/12/239000-dollars-for-gre...

> I'm confused over the significance of the P/E ratio.

Ratios have to be considered in context of expected future growth and expected future profit margin (revenue grows a little but profit grows a lot). Even considering that, some ratios seem extreme.

FB Forward P/E: 44.85

FB PEG Ratio: 1.67

AMZN Forward P/E: 85.52

AMZN PEG Ratio: 5.92

CRM Forward P/E: 69.06

CRM PEG Ratio: 3.29

> Non-competes might prevent this, but I was under the impression that they're not terribly enforceable in California.

It is enforceable (in California) when the employee holds "significant" equity and the company the employee is leaving for is a competitor. If you're not developing a social networking site, Facebook should be able to hire you AFAIK.

> Facebook also owns your social graph

Any email provider also has your social graph. The only problem with email is that it is seen as "old" compared to the "new" of Facebook and Twitter. Something else will come along and be the new "new" and that will be the end of Facebook.

> You are fortunate not to have any pre-existing conditions

THIS. Although in many states there is a high risk pool that you can sign up for, when insurers deny you. I know someone who's done this in California and while there was a 6-9 month waiting list, and the coverage wasn't great, it was much much better than no coverage at all.

States with high risk pools:

http://www.naschip.org/states_pools.htm

> What's to stop Facebook from going after this exact same space? (snip) [To be fair, they don't currently have all the stored credit card info that Apple does. So that's a big hurdle to starting up.]

Google (Android) is probably more likely right now. Or PayPal. If Google or Facebook were to takeover PayPal, or PayPal (Ebay) were to takeover Square or whoever's huge in mobile payments right now, things might start to get interesting.

> is there a big difference in salary afterwards?

Yes, if you're good and that's what you want to do. I know someone who knows someone who went to UC Irvine (not one of the top 10) and got a $40,000 signing bonus, which on average wipes out a UC Irvine MBA's outstanding debt.

> The problem is the driver situation.

100% agree. Anecdotal data point, installing on a new Gigabyte motherboard, Fedora 16 was the distro that worked for me. The other distros were CentOS and Ubuntu. So the issue in my case wasn't even wireless, bluetooth, or video camera. It was the newness of the motherboard/chipset.