throwaway1979

I don't see a big deal with 1 year tenures. Under 1 (3-4 months seems suspicious). I imagine people leave after 1 year if they took a job that wasn't a nice place but they had some incentives requiring them to stay a year (sign on bonuses are typically vested at 1 year; moving assistance also needs to be paid back if an employee leaves within a year).

So ... if a person leaves at the 1 year mark, it was likely they who chose to leave. Given the stories about bad employers in tech and the fact that there are many good employers too these days, I would say good for the moving employee!

Every update of the game I've encountered seems to make things worse. With the tracker debacle and a few new bugs that come up when come up when catching pokemon, I've almost stopped playing. Really sad where this game could have been as opposed to where it is. Also, it seems these guys are putting more effort stopping third parties fill in holes in their game rather than actually fix/improve the game itself.

I've lived in both the Bay area and NYC. I can tell you the culture in NYC is very strong and hard to match. My spouse and I often look back fondly at the fun times we had in NYC. Chicago also has a very fun vibe depending on where you are. The Bay area is weak in that department IMHO.

Err .. how does one get an SS statement? I'm 37 .. don't recall seeing one. Do you have to request it? As far as I know, I contribute into SS every paycheck.

As a single, insignificant data point: I just bought my first Windows laptop after 2008. I kept waiting for Apple to release Skylake professional machines. Just gave up waiting for them. Ended up getting a Windows Signature machine, which came with a free tablet. Guess I don't need to wait for the iPad Air refresh anymore as well.

I think Apple has lost its way. It has forgotten about its power users. I think they are trying to be a luxury brand now ... limited function devices that overpriced (but look really nice). I'm a bit bitter as I say this since I was a huge Apple fan.

How does 500K USD seen affordable? Also, try raising two kids in that condo.

Given that current prices were completely out of whack, and that the govt kept warning that something will be done ... people who bought at the peak deserve what they got. I've been sitting on the fence (since the math didn't make sense) for years. All we got for being prudent was annual moves and seeing other people's homes paying them more than a 1%er's yearly salary. I welcome this move by BC. Ontario needs this stat for the GTA. We also need to tax the gains from home sales. The situation has gotten so bad, young people are leaving in disgust.

I am not sure about the work less/work less hard comments. I get paid a decent, fair wage by my employer. I personally consider it "justice" if I do my best and give them my best. As a new father, I have to fight to work hard and also give my family time.

This is not correct. The weather in San Diego is a lot better than the Bay area but the cost of housing is a lot less. The tax is access to high-paying tech jobs.

Can you elaborate? Is this some kind of xenophohia like we see in other parts of the world? Or is it they want to learn how to do everything in the entire vertical chain (with a focus towards moving up the value chain)? Or something else entirely?

I see Chinese tech companies open up R&D shops in North America, and I'm curious what they really want out of it.

You are correct in principal ... we should all have it better. However, now that I'm a bit older, I ask questions about productivity and such. If we are earning more than we are actually producing, someone is paying the bills. It is either someone else (which is not fair), or coming from the pockets of our children (incredibly not fair). I think the previous generation screwed us badly. It is our responsibility to not pass it on. But you are definitely right about issues like CEO pay being unfair and beyond any true productivity.

According to the book (the author did do some financial analysis but I forget the details), if these states sell a small fraction of their assets, they will be able to pay off all their debt. I'm definitely not agreeing with the author's point of view, but that is something I had not thought about before. i.e. while your debt may be a lot higher than your income, if you have sizable assets, you an get away with it for a while.

I'm not well-versed in EU politics but I find some parts of what you say surprising. After Brexit, there were reports of racist signs some idiots had put up. These weren't against syrian refugees, but rather against a particular former eastern bloc country.

It isn't just sale of public institutions. In many cases, it is attempts to maintain the status quo when circumstances have clearly changed. Public sector pensions are a perfect example of this. I think most software engineers don't realize how good public servants have it. In a time of very little safe asset growth, defined benefit pension plans are simply unsustainable without massive increases in contributions. Yet everywhere it seems that contributions are not going up and the people are employing various tricks to keep things going. In a fair market, the new reality would be accepted and pension plans would change. But here we are.

Btw ... in the book Fate of the State, the author suggests states to privatize their assets to meet their funding shortfalls. So the neoliberals will truly profit while things get worse. Sad.

I just disabled forced update on my box. It was shocking that MSFT did not make the process straightforward. Ended up downloading a third party tool. Shocking!

Recent MSFT behavior was making me think they've changed. I guess not. This genius acquisition indicates the old MSFT is alive and well. Given the dollar amount, the good news is that they can't do too many of these moves without sinking their ship.

Completely agreed. When I tried my hand at gardening, weeding was the hardest part .. we ended up neglecting our garden for a few weeks and the weeds pretty much took over. And this is despite having laid down a layer of black plastic and mulch.

I've used Vyos and was generally impressed. The part where we used Vyos was not exercised to capacity. One thing that confused me was how most (all?) networking hardware of today makes use of custom ASICs (e.g. chips from Broadcom) to get line speed in routing etc. How does Vyos/Vyatta compare? If you had your VMs on the same host as the software router, I understand it is going to be really fast. But if you have a separate box, don't you see a significant slowdown?

Do you have any book recommendations?

Housing should follow the normal economic laws but it doesn't seem to. Part of it is regulation, and part of it is an odd kind of scarcity. If there were no housing regulations, I'm sure you' get a lot of new housing in the Bay area and people would live in there (despite it being potentially unsafe). Heck .. I was actually entertaining the live-in-a-container option :-p

I'm still struggling to understand the scarcity aspect of housing. Supply of land isn't increasing so you'd think the asset would increase in price over time. That said, population isn't growing that much - prices in a city like Toronto have reached epic proportions fueled by a combination of speculation and foreign investment. To me, the problem lies in the fact that we are living in a highly leveraged economy. Will that ever stop? Doesn't seem like it.

I thought each host needs an entire /24 subnet, and the pods that run on the host get individual IP addresses. Am I mistaken?

I've been playing with Swarm and like what I've seen so far. WRT Kubernetes, on a platform other than GCE, is Flannel required for networking?

Meta question. I only see upvote icons for the top comment and its first child. I see both up and down vote icons for children lower than that. Can anyone explain the logic?

I understand there is some logic in the voting mechanism to prevent flame wars. But this thread is over a day old. Whatever algorithm was in place here annoyed me enough to write this "meta" post and likely get downvotes for doing so.

Most systems I've worked with have a core piece that embodies the "hard" algorithm (as you say). The 80-90% of code required to make most user-facing systems work is not "hard" algorithm code in my professional experience. Why does every developer at a company that works on "medical devices, driverless cars, AI / game development, image manipulation, fraud detection, machine learning, data mining, scheduling" need to go through the same interview?

Maybe it was just me, but I found the data to be a bit depressing. I'm a GenXer and there are days when the tech industry seems to be run by a generation I have trouble identifying with. The data in this reports suggests I'm not just being paranoid (more millennials in workforce than other named generations).

I was also shocked by the % of people who think they can get a new online gig in < 24 hours. The slides pointed at Upwork and ThumbTack. The first seems to be a renaming of oDesk. It seems to be dominated by workers from outside North America (at least for tech work).

This also raises the larger issue of career for GenXers. I was at a conference recently and spoke to some other people my age. The collective feeling I got was there is no defined career track anymore. Apparently, you just move from one interesting gig to another. While this is something millennials may be totally comfortable with, this particular GenXer is not. I'm also reading a book (interesting and depressing) called "Company of One" that seems to suggest that the overall trend is not restricted to millennials but the economy as a whole.

If you are starting a new cloud provider and offering something like containers (say LXD), you have a big problem on your hands. IPv6 and v4 aren't really interchangeable from an end user perspective. Also, techniques are NAT64 are shocking when you look at them in detail (my jaw dropped at least ... not all protocols can be supported with NAT64, proxies need to be stateful etc.) We are in for a mess.

As a datapoint .. we're from the Toronto area ... we looked for renting a home in a remote community - a few hours away from Toronto. I am shocked to see how urban prices have creeped into the area. 450K for a nice house in the boonies? Also, rents are through the roof. All the landlords we spoke to who weren't professionals seemed to have 1 main home in the community and two or three others that they bought and renovated.

As someone who doesn't own land and was hoping to do so later in my career, I am scared. I knew I was priced out of major cities where the good jobs are (e.g. for my spouse). Since I can theoretically work remote for the most part, I thought .. it'll be okay. Now, I am getting a feeling of dread that I have been priced out of a huge chunk of the market.

I am beginning to think that a rise in interest rates won't dampen property prices where there has been significant foreign investment. It'll hurt the mom and pop landlords but not the foreigners putting up all cash.

Here is the frustrating part .. this chain of logic says I need to buy something right now ... buy into the bubble! (Housing in Toronto and Vancouver is widely considered to be a bubble). I've essentially held out for 7 years and it is getting to the breaking point. If I had bought into the same (but at that time smaller) bubble, my "investment" would have doubled.

Am I screwed?

This is going off on a tangent but I think you are spot on. It isn't just two incomes fueling the credit increase but also the insanely low interest rates. I don't think female workforce participation will/should go down, but I wonder if interest rates will ever go up to reasonable levels and pop the real-estate bubble (e.g. in Canada)? I have friends with crappy income situations buying houses for 600K+. I've been trying to hold off for as long as possible but we would really like to plant our roots somewhere (poor immigrant to the Western world so owning land in my new homeland was a dream from childhood). In places like Toronto and Vancouver, buying a home for people of modest means seems financial suicide (perhaps only if you have taken Econ courses). We live in messed up times.

I'm disappointed for a different reason. I'm just sick and tired of the delta new thing. Frontend dev as it is practiced today is horrible ... libraries and frameworks seem to have shelf lives measured in months!

I was watching a video posted this morning (how NYT uses Go) and the dev was mentioning how challenging their system used to be with different languages - Python, PHP, Java and Groovy ... so they decided to redo major chunks in Go. Seriously?

I don't pretend to have the answer ... stopping to innovate isn't going to cut it. But I increasingly feel that as a tech worker, I'm on a train careening towards a ravine without a bridge. But hey ... lets go faster and it'll be a fun ride!

Swarm isn't shabby either.

"Productivity ground to a halt for six months"

My experience feels the same way. I am beginning to think Agile works for UI dev and small teams of inexperienced folks building relatively simple projects. If you have a large team building something complex, the constant meetings and tool updates destroy productivity. What's worse ... they destroy developer morale if you are actually a good dev IMHO.