This is actually pretty interesting to me, because we've been looking at solar. I dunno about solar at scale to replace plants, but residential setups are pretty damn cool. Even without any tax benefits or subsidies, a setup at my place that would cover most of my energy needs (even in winter, selling the extra in summer to pay for the cost of conventional power in the winter and nights)) would pay for itself in about 6 years, and they can last for 30 or something. That's not half bad.

I'm not sure that's the full story. A lot of the well known companies that are accused of ageism will happily pay you 500k/year if you're worth it. The main issue is what "worth it" means.

As I'm getting older (I'm in my mid thirties, so not old at all by non-tech standards, but in tech all these articles say its the end of the road), I'm getting more cynical, more conservative, I value foresight over doing things quick and having them blow up in my face later. I've seen countless of projects fail, and I know why they failed. I see these things happening over and over and can't help but going "Gah! I told you so!".

The college kids think I'm just a cranky old man and don't listen, and usually jump to the next company before the shit they did explode, and I clean up after them.

Many companies don't value that (often because they think someone like me is just misguided or flat out wrong). The value in someone who "goes fast and break shit to ship an MVP blazingly fast" is very high in their eyes. They'll pay for that. If as you get older, you use your experience to just implement shit faster and faster, those companies will pay you a premium. Most people don't go that route as they get older though.

But there are companies that value things other than shipping shit fast, and those will happily pay good engineers in their 40s, 50s or more several hundred thousands no problem.

Of course, you have the issue of people who get older, don't keep up to date, let their experience go to waste, and then bitch no one wants to hire them.

It really won't change much. As you said, a chunk of people will simply lie or jump the border.

The rest will be able to simply skip the requirement. Eg: Because of my line of work and the country I came from, even though I half assed my green card application and didn't submit half of the crap they asked for, I got approved super quickly anyway. They have a huge amount of discretion in what they can overlook.

It would be way better if they didn't. Some people from certain countries will get overlooked on purpose, some people won't even try to apply when we'd love to have them...but a lot of people will go through just fine without handing over any extra info, too.

Those associations predate the "everyone is a snowflake in their own special way" movement though. Most software communities are growing into ecochambers where everyone is telling everyone else that they're all right and that we should embrace every opinion as equally valid.

That makes it impossible to set any kind of standards anymore.

The chance to do this was 15 years ago.

And the records will: because you can get whatever numbers you want out of these things depending on what factors you control for.

Not everyone would buy it, for sure. But the amount who would is absolutely non-zero.

I remember when I was in school, before piracy was huge. When a new big console game would come out, a bunch of my friends who go crazy distributing newspapers and mowing lawns or other ways to make small amounts of money just to be able to afford the game. You could rent it, but for big games you want to play a lot, that got expensive too. Pirate copies existed, but they were not free and often didn't work well.

These days? No one would ever do that. They'd just pirate it instead.

If all mainstream movies were impossible to pirate, what would happen? Some people would just go read a book instead. Some would borrow them. Some would buy them used. Maybe the indie industry would grow bigger.

But you can bet your butt that a non-trivial amount of people would find a way to buy it that don't right now. Heck, most people I know who pirate stuff are software engineers with 6 figure salaries who are just used to it from when they were poor college students and don't feel the need to change how they do things. But man do they NEED to see THAT movie.

For sure, there's way too many factors and there's always going to be inequality. The problem is that unless our moral values change to "round up the "lessers" and gas them all" (which most people seem to not be okay with), we have to do something, otherwise the people who got the short end get unhappy and when they're unhappy in large enough numbers it causes issues.

Right now, the solution is to have hundreds of programs that don't really work. Foodstamp, "affordable housing" (lol, more like yet another inequality generating lottery scam), tax deductions, and all around a shitload of complexity to try to steer people on the track we want and usually fail. People who quality or not bend the rules, etc.

It's a hell of a lot easier to just say "Everyone qualities if they want to, you get the bare minimum if you feel like it, if you want more than that you'll have to get up and do something for it". There's still some edge cases (eg: people with mental disorder) that will need stronger nets than that, but for the common case, that would work better than what we have now.

The remaining issue though is that then we just raise what people consider the minimum from "begging in the street" to "living on just enough for a tiny apartment and basic food", and then given a generation or two, they'll be unhappy with -that- and we'll be screwed again.

Humans are hard.

Gross generalization: Software Engineer arrogance is infinite and even the most junior one thinks they know everything.

It's nearly impossible to get people to agree on stuff within a company. Never mind beyond that.

We got hit really hard at work by this. 2 of these emails went around, and they appeared to be sent from 2 of our engineers who routinely DO send google docs. The app was setup reasonably convincingly, and because oauth and so called "single sign-on" are really more like "a million sign on" because they never work quite right or ask you for credentials way too often, people are just used to having to approve everything all the time.

So hundreds of people clicked the damn thing. Including a lot of pretty accomplished engineers. I probably would have to, except my teammate got hit first and warned me before I saw the email.

The problem is compound by how free speech is quite dead. Say what you just said openly in a workplace of a semi-famous company. You will get fired faster than you can finish your sentence.

And yeah, it's basically impossible to control for all factors here. It could be a genuine gender difference (after all, people keep trying to drill in our head that things need to be done differently to attract female engineers, so they have to be different somehow), and it's not even necessarily negative either. It could be that men are more likely to just bypass the peer review process altogether. Or that women are more receptive to feedback. It could be that the schooling level is not the same at hire (after all, one of the big tenets of diversity hiring is to hire through different channels, including bootcamps, more, which would lead to different ratios). And it COULD be sexism. But it's simply too hard to figure out like this.

However, I could just post a "My guts feeling tells me females are getting screwed at company XYZ" and it would be headline news worthy and taken as truth.

I was recently reading an article that said "Women feel they are being passed up for promotion more often than men". While I'm pretty sure it IS true that they get screwed on promotions, what kind of stupid metric is that? EVERYONE feel they get screwed on promotions, ESPECIALLY people who don't deserve promotions. Wash, rince, repeat with every possible topic.

Yup. My current employer, while pushing hard for diversity, is doing pretty good at pushing to improve the company to attract said diversity, instead of just widening the net and bringing whatever they catch.

We have a pretty high ratio of female engineers (and even better ratio at the lead/director/vp level) for the kind of company we are. Not 50/50, but higher than the Google and Facebook of the world.

Pretty much all of the female engineers I've interacted with, including our junior ones, were top notch. High quality code, super hard workers, cares about the craft. Good stuff.

On the other hand, my previous employer had put a diversity activist in charge of hiring female engineers. Not only did we only have a handful, while half of them were really good, the other half were hired through shitty coding bootcamps, or were self "taught" (as in, they had read a book on coding and that was about it). Terrible. We had to lay off a couple within a few months, some were burning a crazy amount of hours in training (a lot more than a junior engineer should). In the end, we ended up with 2 in a team of 100+ Not cool.

It's "up to 17-24" (seems like it might go up to 30k if you have a disability)

You mean as opposed to living next door to the houses in practically every suburban neighborhood where the kids have a garage band 'rehearsing' after school?

The thing is those are not mutually exclusive. There's a certain level of things we tolerate as a society. And those things add up. I have a few neighbors with noisy kids. Not all my neighbors have noisy kids, because statistics. If I have neighbors with noisy kids AND neighbors with noisy AirBNB, that's just twice as bad.

It seems to me that a private homeowner should be given the maximum amount of freedom to do with his property as he pleases

Yup. As long as it doesn't prevent other people from enjoying their properties.

It's so much more complicated than that. We don't have many laws to handle things people don't generally do. Laws are almost always drafted as a reaction to things.

There's no law stopping llarge amount of strangers coming in an out of a peaceful neighborhood at any hour of the night. Because in a residential, high owner ratio neighborhood, that just doesn't happen.

Until AirBNB comes in and changes everything in a few years. AirBNB itself is often breaking municipal zoning rules (using a residential zoned area as mix use), which are a pain in the ass to enforce...because we usually don't need to enforce them.

It's not just people doing parties. The mere act of existing changes the character of neighbors semi-randomly (the same way renters do at a much, MUCH slower pace).

In a world where AirBNB itself is not doing anything illegal, hosts are almost constantly in the "fucking annoying, but not illegal" territory. The kind of thing that can ruin people's peace of mind and quality of life in a way they can't do shit about it.

As long as its kept out of purely residential zoned areas, follow all municipal rules, condo rules and rental lease rules, it's really not that bad. But I'd be surprised if even 5% of AirBNBs did.

AirBNB is pretty good for the customers, no real argument there.. It just forces the neighbors who signed up to live in a residential area to live like they were next to a hotel.