As a white guy - born in Europe even! -- I can say that while working in Mountain View, California it was indeed overwhelmingly young, male, with mostly Northern European genes sloshing around. Some Asian but not as much as you'd think.

That said our boss was quite a progressive guy and reached out to hire a black guy and several typical American women. The women were a disappointment. It has to be said that they proved to be demanding low performers. Had high expectations of everything and everyone else, but didn't really put points on the board for the team. In talks about the women I learned the US English codeword PITA, not the flat bread, but Pain In The A**. It was true.

The black guy turned out well. In the first couple months he was very reserved and looking back I think he was very keen to not make mistakes or rub anyone the wrong way. But man, after that first 90 days or so, he relaxed and realized we weren't going to bite him, and he started learning the craft with real zeal. He was one of the hardest working fellows I ever met in my time in the U.S.

I think the dynamic is that black people in the U.S. are all too accustomed to having "the prize" and opportunity dangled in front of them, and then snatched away once someone has got what they wanted from that black person. So they I think have learned to regard the larger American system with suspicion or at least much caution. However if they see by actions and not words that something is the real deal, the team is there and they are part of it, no bait and switch, they really get fired up and loving it.

Has anyone else noticed that the avalanche of RT posters seems to have subsided? For a couple of months any mention of Crimea or the Ukraine was mobbed by dozens of scripted posts about "fascists in Kiev" and so on. Very much in the style of the 1980's information warfare efforts from the Soviets. But I'm getting the sense someone in Moscow has turned down the tap, and told the guys in the RT.com boiler rooms to hold off. Maybe Putin is giving up on this one?

If you follow the pros and cons around stuff like this down to the nub, it comes down to "but we have to grow the economy." Thankfully, a Plan B has been worked out over many decades and it's pretty appealing actually. I highly recommend reading up on Steady State Economics, either books or http://steadystate.org/

Waaay back I remember someone pointing out that Microsoft was spending enormous sums to hire researchers, especially promising ones in academia. The idea, apparently, was for MS Research to be a sort of "intellectual roach motel" (love that phrase) were IQ would check in, and nothing checked out. This made a certain amount of sense. As a monopolist you don't -want- any innovation. One way to do that is hire hitmen to kill potential innovators. But the risks there are huge. A much easier way if you have the money is to hire promising minds and then keep them neutralized. That's just what Microsoft did.

If a fellow gets married, *then* his creativity and productivity plummets. His time is no longer his own. When I regard the fellows I work with, the guys over 40 who avoided marriage, or have been divorced for a while, are the "top guns" to put in U.S. terms. They have both creativity *and* a lot of experience, which makes them almost impossible to beat over the course of many months.

I honestly don't see how a non-H1b person, especially if over 30, should be realistically planning on working as a programmer, at least in the Silicon Valley area.

http://www.livescience.com/181... If parents sought out a 6 point IQ boost for their children to be more successful, a side effect could be that conservative ideology will go the way of smallpox and polio.

What I remember in California was that one had approximately 4 categories of developers: 1. Journeyman level, typical employee, good enough 2. Short term hired guns, contractors 3. H1-b visa guest labor from India, very affordable at the time so very popular 4. Truly exceptional guys, the much talked about rockstar talent For the rockstar guys, they were so much more valuable and productive than the other 3 categories that it was well worth it to pay double the prevailing wages. The interesting thing in hindsight is that these rockstars really were all guys. No women. Given how the arithmetic behind averages works, I can't help but think that the pay packages of male rockstar techies in the U.S. skews the figures. If one removed the top and bottom 10% of the pay data for men and women in tech work, I think you'd find the average pay for men vs. women would be much closer.

there is no shortage but a glut in the U.S. of pretty much every type of skilled labor that traditionally would have earned a good living. It is very sad.

Does Dice Holdings take orders directly from Zuckerberg these days?

The U.S. is so messed up :( One thing that would make it a little less messed up would be to have an auction for H1b visas, rather than allocating them like IP address ranges to big companies. It would be interesting to see what happens when Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco start bidding up the price of cheap labor visas.

Commoditizing investment channels, eliminating the middleman, would be a nightmare scenario for Wall Street.

I wonder if Slashdot's minders have been overrun by Cato Institute people? There is logic problem here. If the population is ever increasing, then tweaking food production from finite resources is bound to end in tears as the realities of logarithmic growth curves (for supply) kick in, along with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Corrected version: "The pressure to move to GMO foods, along with the phenomenon of global warming, underscores the need to rein in human population growth"

Coming from a 100% scientist, I still have to give props to Buddhism as a very useful mental framework for our quirky human minds. I especially like the Buddhist insight that ego is at the root of a lot of human ills. See yourself as part of the world, not one man battling for respect and wealth, and life gets a lot easier and nicer. And oddly one seems to get more meaningful stuff done.

The only economics book that that doesn't wave hands and try to change the subject when the really hard questions come up.