The US is awash in certain kinds of skilled tech workers: Java programmers, web programmers, iOS app programmers, and more. It's not hard to find them, nor is there any kind of shortage.

My employer has had trouble hiring competent Android devs in a moderately tech-centric metro area outside California. As an Android guy myself I can say that I get 2-3 emails a week from local head hunters, so it seems like other employers are finding it challenging as well.

But for more complex work, the best qualified workers are from overseas.

Yes and no. Generally speaking the absolute best people in the world are probably not going to be U.S. citizens simply because the U.S. represents a minority share of the world's "really bright people". The U.S. share will far outstrip its share of the world population, but it's still going to be a minority. That said, if you limit the question only to the U.S. labor pool, it's not my experience that the very best developers are predominantly non-citizens.

Go look in any US comp-sci graduate program, and try to find the Americans.

My dept. was about 60/40 in favor of U.S. citizens, but that's just from memory and I can't find current stats. It looks like nationwide the split is approx. 55/45 in favor of permanent residents vs. temporary residents among graduate C.S. students. Link here (appendix table 2-21).

I can't speak to the quality of perm. residents vs. temp. residents except to note that most employers aren't in the market for "cream of the crop" graduate students. Undeniably there are some that are. But most aren't, because those guys don't come cheap and are highly selective about what they're willing to work on (because they can afford to be), and a lot of companies just don't need someone with that level of theoretical "chops". At least, not badly enough to merit what they'd have to pay such a person to come work for them.

"It's getting pretty frustrating when you won't compete on salary for a skilled job..."

This is decent advice. Usually the only time I see significant bumps in pay is when I switch jobs. Still, I hate interviewing with the heat of a thousand white-hot suns, so I tend to stay at places longer than I should.

It's not a myth. It's just considerably more rare than some folks seem to think. The guys getting hired by financial firms to write their HFT algorithms probably are smarter / more capable than 99% of software developers. Trust me, they're not farming that work out to India.

More close to home, I'm relatively certain that a "cheaper junior person" could not do what I do at my current job. Apparently my employer is similarly certain or they'd find a cheaper junior person to do it.

If you think can realistically do better than your current job then stay in your current job only as long as you need to for it not to "look bad" that you left. Also try to avoid leaving your current company in the lurch.

"Better" can be defined in a ton of different ways. Interesting work, an opportunity to get your feet wet in a new technology, high pay, low workload, way-above-average coworkers, short commute, etc. Be sure to take into account however many of these matter to you.

As a rule of thumb, I try to stay at least a year unless the place is truly intolerable. So far I've never worked anywhere that I felt justified bailing in less than a year.

Part of the problem is that it's easier to hire new folks than to reallocate existing ones without getting into political turf wars -- let alone shrinking some departments* that don't need the headcount. This means that the utility of a new employee is automatically greater than one that's been there forever, even if they are equal in skill, just because they can be put in the most useful position.

This is a facet of downwards-stickiness -- it's easy to tell an overstaffed* department that they don't get to hire new folks, it's nearly impossible to tell them to give up folks. But both of those are equivalent in terms of overall allocation of resources.

* Note: I don't mean to say that these folks are incompetent, only that demands change and a team that might be stretched thin one year because of a large project might have few demands the next. In fact, it's exactly the opposite -- the most talented teams end up overstaffed because they build things well and end up without much maintenance to do, rather than constantly chasing their tails duct-taping things up. We should be moving talent from those teams to where it's needed the most.

If they do, it's because other large corporations have declined to become as involved as Google has.

Floods can help to irrigate land and forest fires clear away deadfalls, but I don't think many would say the positives outweigh the negatives.

Who ever said that the IRS definition for the purposes of taxation is the correct one to apply to a RFRA claim over contraception?

I highly doubt that the Waltons would qualify, given that billions of dollars of WalMart stock is held and traded publicly.

The opinion restricts itself to "closely-held corporations" (a phrase used dozens of times) rather than /all/ corporations. They don't define with precision what that exactly means -- that kind of drudgery is the domain of the lower courts -- they did point out that Hobby Lobby is privately held by a small number of folks from the same family. It would seem clear to infer that "closely-held" is sort of an antonym to "publicly-held" here, so I think there's virtually no chance any lower court would allow Wal Mart or Exxon to assert a RFRA claim.

Now, since companies under 100 employees are already exempt from most of PPACA, the net net of this only covers the rare company that simultaneously large enough to be hit by the mandate but still owned closely enough to merit RFRA protection. In other words, not too many in the scheme of things.

[ Full Disclosure: I don't support what Hobby Lobby believes, I think they deserve to lose on the merits. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to make a molehill into a mountain for rhetorical or fundraising purposes. ]

Corporations are people too.

As in the Citizen's United case, this ruling is a complete perversion of constitutional rights on the American Public, and both as abominable as Plessy v. Ferguson. Here's the train of logic that the majority took:

1) Take a piece of legislation originally designed to protect sacred American Indian worship sites, though more broadly individual religious freedoms,
2) And extend those freedoms to corporations with this hocus-pocus incantation: "The purpose of extending rights to corporations is to protect the rights of people associated with the corporation, including shareholders, officers, and employees." (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Syllabus, pg. 3)

And while I was never a fan of Ginsburg in my younger years, given the recent evolution of the SCotUS, that opinion is rapidly changing, especially when she has this to say on the matter (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Ginsburg dissent, pg. 14):

Until this (Citizens United) litigation, no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law...the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities. As Chief Justice Marshall observed nearly two centuries ago, a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 [1819]).

Should just rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution now to read, "We the Corporations of the United States..."

I don't fear flying... In fact, I used to thoroughly enjoy it back in the '80s/'90s...

But flying isn't nearly as fun/humane as it used to be. And the additional security theater is annoying.

These days it just isn't worth the hassle. If I have to go somewhere, I'll drive. It certainly makes for longer travel times... But it's a far more enjoyable experience, so I don't mind.

Yes, you are right, I mistyped.

Public: { H(CC+Salt), Salt, Amount of money spent on porn, Amount of student debt }

[ where + is just shorthanded for "mixed with" ]

It's not at all within the realm of possibility for an attacker to brute force the CC space for each salt separately. So yes, an attacker can run through (2**CC_entropy) hashes to brute force a single entry, but that exercise provides him no help when he goes to do the next entry. Moreover, he can't spin up a few TB of storage on S3 and pre-compute anything useful.

The point of the scheme is to turn a pwn-once-win-forever game into a pwn-one-win-one game. This guy paid once and won the entire database. I would like him to have to pay that cost once for each entry.

Mensa isn't even all that selective in the grand scheme of things. They admit anyone who scores +2 sigma or higher on a variety of tests, not all of which measure IQ very well. So we're talking about the top 2.2% of all individuals. In terms of the pre-1995 SAT that would be 1250 and higher.

Yes, a secret salt is no salt at all.

But there are very important uses for salting that make it better than assigning a random number -- it allows someone that does know the input value look up the relevant entry without any involvement from the secure side.

Imagine you had the following two datasets that you've partitioned:

Private: { Credit Card Number, Random Salt }
Public: { H(CC+Salt), Amount of money spent on porn, Amount of student debt }

Now whenever you want to obscure an entry, you do need to go to private one. But if you want to answer the question "How much money did a person with CC X spend on porn", you can look it up without entering the secure domain. But no one without access to the private side can find credit cards in the DB or other stuff -- to within the computational costs of the operation multiplied by the entropy of the salt.