I know my college offers a "free" digital subscription to NYT's. I wonder if they're counting the ones that they give out to schools? I know that's how I get mine...and my college not an ivy league or anything. I would be curious to see how many of the 1 million are paid subscriptions...

When I was in high school, one of my first "computer projects" was upgrading to Windows 95 over the summer. I remember installing RAM to bring it up to 8MB and 250 MB HDD's into old white box computers that were in use at my school. All of them were already 486's with math co-processors. We installed 3COM Ethernet adapters and removed the old BNC cards. There were already Ethernet drops done.

It took about 2 weeks to upgrade 60 computers, all installs done via the network. This was in 1997, and it was an awesome experience to a 15 year old kid who was just realizing that he had a knack for computers :) When I graduated in 2000, we had gotten all Dell work stations running Windows NT 4 with 64MB of RAM and Pentium III's. Ah memories, makes me want to go build a desktop for old times sake!

Whoops I did mean 16 bit LOL

I'm working on a project to replace a legacy system that runs on Fox DB and is completely DOS based. It's so old that it can't actually be run on desktop systems without a VM because it's 8bit and all of our current systems are 64Bit.

Completely agree. Most companies are looking for the purple cow. They are less and less willing to invest the money in developing resources so they can obtain the experience needed to succeed and fill those important positions later. They continually complain about the lack of graduates; however, they would not spend the capital to invest in new graduates anyways.

I just did a very simple litmus test. I went to indeed and searched for:

Jr Developer in San Diego. Results: 82
Sr Developer in San Diego. Results: 536

Does anyone else see a problem here? We are getting to a point of diminishing returns here!

I would not relish anyone trying to gain experience in today's market. I was fortunate 14 years ago to be at a rapidly growing company who was willing to take a chance on a pretty good tech support agent whom preformed pretty well and tried out new things. I doubt such a thing would happen in today's job market.

It scares the hell out of me to think what kind of troubles my daughter will have if she decides to follow in my foot steps. I honestly hope she follows in my wife's (she's a nurse) because that's an industry that is still grudgingly willing to take recent grad's.

I generally loath government interference in business; however, I think a nice tax credit to companies whom hire new grad's might be in order. It might help with the default rates of student loans at the very least, and it would also help increase the pool of experienced candidates in a few years and maybe make us less dependent on H1B (which generally are not much better than recent grads in my experience).

I have interviewed and worked with several H1B's, and one thing that I have noticed is that while they're slightly cheaper, there is a cultural problem that is endemic. A lot of these folks are not able to innovate or thinking outside of the box. These are essential qualities in a good software developer (at least in my opinion). I have worked with one H1B whom is VERY good, and is able to think in addition to work.

I do believe that they are hard workers and that they try, I don't know how successful they will be in the long run. Most of the candidates I have interviewed have generally been hard-put to think through problems. For example, I would ask them how would they generally approach a problem (e.g. your users need to do x, tell me how you would do this). Most were stumped by this. I would even try to lob easy questions such as database normalization (You have a table that repeats the same fields like reference name 1, reference name 2, is this correct and if not why?).

There is also another problem, they aren't really that much cheaper ! The U.S. is an expensive place to live, and you can not really cut corners that much. We are talking about a difference of maybe 10-15k a year (at least in the ones I've spoken to). Most of the time, if you take the additional meetings that need to take place to re-review the requirements due to a little hiccup (see point about not being able to think though problems) and the costs could actually go UP. If you have to have an additional hour of meeting per week (very generous) with a PM, 3xDevelopers, BA (average if you have multiple dev streams). That's 52*5=260 hours. Average of $55/hour across all three roles, that is $14,300 for a single meeting hour long weekly meeting for the year. So the potential savings you got from one of the developers could be a wash. I have also noticed that non H1B programmers tend to work faster (again see point about working more independently).

So my point is that this maybe a situation of self correction. The trend might re-balance itself as more companies realize some of these realities; however, that would assume that the companies take such things into account instead of being penny wise and pound foolish.

And we all know that computers are ALWAYS rational :P

I'm a Salesforce.com developer, which uses Salesforce's custom language "Apex" as well as "VisuaForce". These two languages are bastardized versions of Java and JSP respectively. They are highly in demand because Salesforce enforces governor limits which enforces "best practices" to be followed. For example, you can only have 100 queries in a single run so you can't do a loop and query the datbase. I make mid 100k a year in southern California, but can demand more, especially if I wanted to do full time consulting. Consultants can make $100-200 an hour.

I'm a Salesforce.com developer and am constantly getting hit by recruiter spam. In the last week I have gotten 15 requests, only 5 of which are in my area. The rest? Over 500 miles away at the very least!

Whenever you are working with a popular technology set, you are going to get hit up by non stop recruiters. The part that drives me nuts is the non intelligent ways that they shotgun blast. In my current position (I work for a major non IT recruiting company), I'm working with a Salesforce based recruitment engine. I KNOW what options are available to many of these systems. It seems like they do not utilize any intelligence beyond a keyword search. In the engine that I've aided in developing, we have many different options available to better target appropriate candidates. For example, something simple, like a zip code radius! Heck we even incorporate state based filters if you don't have zip codes.

Unfortunately, there is not much that I can think of to combat this other than unsubscribe. The only issue there is you might later miss out on a legitimate job opportunities. I mean heck even terrorists manage to get lucky at times in action movies, and these folks might get one in 200 right :P

If I were you, I would try implementing MAC Address filtering (basically you white list MAC Addresses that should be allowed to connect). This can be a pain when connecting new devices, but worth it from a security standpoint.

I would also change your SSID and disable broadcast. Reducing transmit power may also help. If you don't have enough coverage with the reduced power, you could also go with power line adapter and setup another AP in the weak area.

Oh and you can also try reducing your key regen time too. If you leave at the default 3600 seconds, then you're also giving him a longer time to try to breakin if he spoofs your mac.

Finally, you can always go with static IP's or if your router is capable, setup DHCP to assign specific IP's to specific MAC Addresses.

Hope this helps!