Common sense will never come into style, and "they" will never hire people to think and actually produce useful/actionable insights. You see, it's a bit of a catch-22. No one will make good decisions until someone sensible is in charge, but we'll never put sensible people in charge until we've started making good decisions. It's ignorant sociopaths all the way down.

Surely that's the very question they asked, and are not hiding it? I mean that's what the article flat out says, right? People want to both hire and work with the top people regardless of where they're from, and the general US attitude towards issuing foreign visas makes it hard to hire the top foreign guy and practically requires you to hire the mediocre guy just because of where they're from?

So, what, I'm supposed to sit back and accept an attitude of 'fuck U.S. workers, they all suck, we'll hire from overseas because they're better'?

That's not what he said. He said the best workers are not ALL from the USA. Guess what? He's dead goddamn right and who the hell are you to get pissed off because someone who runs a business pointed out the obvious, bleeding truth - America does not have a monopoly on software engineering talent, far from it? That means it's totally expected and understandable that given a choice between some American workers and some foreign workers, that employer might legitimately prefer the foreign workers because they are better than you are?

If this makes you mad then you need to learn about anger management. If you think it's all about working cheaper (which US law makes illegal anyway) then you need to get your head out of your ass and realise that foreign workers are hassle, can be expensive, and can still be worth it if they are better than you.

Tech skills are hard to objectively verify. Technical results are hard to objectively verify. We collectively proxy that by having lots of tests, competitions, selection, and other heuristics. But that's not a symptom of us respecting skill more than other jobs(maybe more than other specific office jobs, but not more than lawyers, doctors, manufacturing technicians, similar things), it's a symptom of it being really hard to tell.

How many technical interviews have you done, as an interviewer, in your life?

I have done about 220. Evaluating technical skills is dramatically easier than evaluating many other types of skill, in particular, it's a lot easier than evaluating skills in management, marketing, customer service .... anything with a large component of soft, people skills. You can ask a technical person to achieve a very specific, tightly scoped technical task during an interview and if you know the question well quickly get a feel for how good they really are. I wouldn't want a hiring decision to be made based on just one interview, but in the hands of a good interview it still yields valuable data. For someone without specific technical skills you end up having to rely on much vaguer and more gamaeble questions like "Tell me about a time you overcame a problem of type ", the answers to which are both hard to verify and easily manipulated by people who want to make themselves look good.

I'm afraid I must agree with the original statement. The difference between someone who is merely OK and is great, well, that's huge. Someone who is merely OK will come in to work each day and will (probably) resolve the bugs or implement the features you set them. They will probably not come up with a solution that puts you ahead of the pack. They may waste large amounts of time on trivial things or produce something that sucks because they are only familiar with technology X but that's a poor fit for problem Y. Their technical judgement may be flaky - in the worst case you will have to spend a lot of time double checking what they're doing, yet they will start demanding more responsibility because they've stuck around for a while. The very best will teach you algorithms and techniques you never knew about. They'll come up with the unique feature that makes you stand out from the competition. They'll be fun to work with and help you recruit other great people. The difference is not to be sneered at.

When Google offered me a job, I could not believe how little they wanted to pay me. 67% of what I was making at a megabank

Er, you could probably replace "Google" in that sentence with any company. You're comparing your salary to one at a fucking bank, companies so famous for absurd compensation packages that it triggered street protests ....

Beside, best techs from other countries are already in demand at home, no need for them to move. "The best" is not someone US would get from H1B visa program.

Reality check: tech companies hire all sorts of people in all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons.

Back in 2006 I got a job with Google SRE (at the age of 22) and they gave me a choice of locations. I chose California. But it was 2006 and the economy was booming, and that year they hit the H1B visa cap. I wasn't considered important enough to use up one of the last H1Bs they had (fair enough), so ended up moving to Switzerland instead. Over the following years I was promoted several times, invented a major new spam filtering technology they now use on all their biggest products, and earned a hell of a lot of money. Which I spent in Switzerland. I left in January to form my own company, although Google wanted me to stay.

Had I obtained an H1B, I would probably have done substantially similar things in the USA, but thanks to attitudes like yours that wasn't possible. I'm not complaining though. Having spent plenty of time in the Valley I came to appreciate my luck in not ending up there. Why would I want to live in a suburban desert like the bay area, or San Francisco where it seems the local population viscerally hates tech workers, when I can live ten minutes walk from a lake so clean people swim in it every day during summer and the local population still thinks Google is cool?

Looking back, I got lucky that I was denied an H1B. But economically speaking that was Switzerland's gain and America's loss.

Did you not read the summary, even?

Yes, ultimately physical security is always an issue. They can try to make the devices difficult to access, but as you've pointed out, that's always going to be a problem.

But this is a different level of "insecure". These things are controlled through open, unencrypted wireless networking. There are no passwords. It's like the difference between saying, "Your home is never completely secure, since someone can always break a window or crowbar the door open," vs. "Let's just leave our valuables sitting out on the lawn, completely unattended."

If you RTFA you'll see that Lewman has zero evidence for this assertion. The headline paints it as a statement of fact but in reality all Lewman knows is there are people who appear to be reading the source code and reporting bugs anonymously. That's it. They could be NSA/GCHQ moles. Or, more likely, they could be anonymity fans who like security audit work. They really have no idea.

I don't know. I my experience, a lot of poor security isn't caused by incompetence. It's caused by someone saying, "But that will cost more money..." or "That will take too much time..." or "But I want to buy from this supplier because the owner is my brother-in-law..."

I mean, they don't necessarily say those things out loud, but those are often the reasons. It's not necessarily that they're too dumb to understand that it's bad security. They just don't care. They're not thinking about the potential for problems down the road. They're not thinking about long-term maintenance. They're not really thinking about public safety. They're just thinking about, "I have to get this job done in a way that makes my life better/easier. I want to work less and make a big bonus."

Not that I work in a traffic-related industry. That's just been my general professional experience as to why security is usually terrible.

Fair? Put fair aside a moment. What will the result of putting him in prison be? Will it improve society in any way? Odds are sharply against it.

Uh no. It involves leveling and lowering the site, backfilling with a proper bed, laying asphalt or concrete (asphalt if you're smart, due to its repairability) and then typically also doing some landscaping. There's curbing, there's permitting, there's drainage which you've ignored completely and which I'm glossing over which might cost as much as laying the surface itself... Adding some conduit, wiring (which can be Aluminum since it's just going to lie there) and some meters does significantly add to the cost of the whole thing, but not overwhelmingly as you seem to believe. Also, the parking lot becomes a profit center rather than a drain which is simply necessary to do business. People will be paying for charging. You'll be charging them a premium for the electricity, and they'll be happy to pay for the convenience — it'll still be markedly cheaper than driving on gasoline. It's actually a win for everyone, and you start with just a few spaces near the existing electrical services, keeping initial costs down. The demand for full lots isn't there yet.

If you're trying to engage in some against-the-rules sort of moderation, at least try to select a mod that makes sense. In this case, you would have wanted "overrated", which is always bullshit but much more likely to make it through metamod.

Nah. Figure out the pricing so that the customer pays a flat fee for a swap, always give them a charged battery meeting some basic specification standards. That eliminates the need for any crap like that, which you can never trust.

If these hydrogen fuel cells are so wonderful and practical, where are they? The first production fuel cell vehicle is still on the horizon. Also, please explain where this hydrogen is coming from, since our present production is typically very dirty.

Don't make them superchargers, just make them chargers. It will still provide range extension. The billing will be contracted away, if in fact the whole system is not. There is already parking lot security.