I've been doing technical interviews for 15 years. And any day of the week I'd take someone with a degree over someone with 5 or 6 years more experience without one. Oh, I'll miss a few good hires that way, but I'll miss out on more bad ones. And that's what far more important- its better to miss making a good hire than make a bad one. In those 15 years I have seen perhaps 4 people without a degree have even a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of the craft-- and 2 of those I'm thinking of dropped out their senior year of college for medical or family reasons. The rest have all been language of the week cruft who I wouldn't hire to write webpages. I won't even interview them anymore- too many have failed, the small percentage of useful hires you'd find aren't worth the time.

Umm, Einstein wasn't bad at math. Apparently you're bad at history though.

http://content.time.com/time/s...

But equivalent work experience is a lot longer. I might believe that someone with no degree and a decade plus of experience is as good as someone with a degree and 3-4 years, but he'd have to prove it. I find almost nobody without at least 3 years of college has a decent grasp of the fundamentals of computer science- data structures, algorithms, critical thinking and design. The people without degrees tend to just know how to google for answers and copy the results, and god forbid you change frameworks or languages on them- they're hopeless. Its to the point that no degree and less than 6 or 7 years of experience isn't going to get an interview over a guy right out of college because the odds favor the college grad having a higher ceiling.

Google Play Store and Google Play Services aren't free, and Google doesn't sell them to individual users. You can pirate them, but you can't use them legally.

Not legally. You can pirate Google Play Store, then download Play Services through it. But you can't get a legal license to Play Store without paying Google.

Yes, if you pirate it you can run it. The reason it isn't shipped with those devices is Google won't license it to them. Its not licensed to the ROMs either.

Not the Play Store, Google Play Services. Totally different things. Google Play Services is a bunch of functionality like maps, geofencing, fusion location detector, activity detection, etc that they only license for a fee to OEMs that agree to a large list of terms they have to agree on. Google Play Services is basically the carrot they use to force OEMs to play by their rules.

If you want to run a custom rom for any reason (for example, privacy and securtiy) you can't run google play services.

But the smartphone allowed people to do things they couldn't already do. The smartwatch allows them to.... not take their smartphone out of their pocket. That's it, its a subset of all the functionality of their phone, and it doesn't do most of them that well. There's nothing compelling about them.

And I gave my reasoning. You can keep on to your infantile libertarian dreams, but a government agency is always more trustworthy than a private company- a government agency has at least some checks and balances and accountablility. A private agency has absolutely none, and is motivated solely by profits. Belief that they will actually do their job is asinine.

Private regulation is no regulation

Sure he does- he says a private organization. There is no way in hell a private organization would ever be legit. First off, a private organization could make more money by reducing their oversight and rubber stamping, at least in the short term. And that's all most care about. Secondly, even if they didn't drug companies could make more money by setting up sock puppet regulators so they'd eventually just do that.

Private regulation is no regulation- period.

Oh look, the Libertardians are out in full force.

Yes, the FDA is supposed to be enforcing efficacy. That's its entire point- to ensure that drugs do what they say.

Nor would regulating apps be about efficacy and not safety. If an app says you should take a certain drug and that drug has side effects, its a safety issue. If it provides a diagnosis and that's wrong, its a safety issue.

In other words, provide no oversight at all while an "independent" firm rubber stamps all the industry's apps for a completely legal fee which ends up going to the executives of the fake company via bonuses, then let it fold and start up a new one.

Privatized enforcement is no enforcement. If it can't be overseen by the government it needs to either be banned. You can open up the question of if it needs to be regulated at all, but providing the illusion of safety and regulation when there is none is far worse.

15 years experience in a mix of small companies (I'm at my 3rd startup, the other two were successfully sold) and large (including HP and Amazon). This includes stint as principal at some of those companies and lead developer at one of the startups.

Net positive shouldn't be more than a month. They're already trained programmers, even if they don't have the business knowledge to take on whole features they can be used as an assistant and start being worth their pay almost on day 1. The only way to be net negative is to take more time from senior programmers than they save by doing work, the only programmers that should have that issue for more than a week are juniors.