Linux is certainly a hell of a lot better than using Windows and a terminal emulator to sign into some server. At the next job, everyone used Windows 3.1 with Procomm to sign into an overloaded SCO Unix machine. That was certainly a change from having an SGI Indy on my desk. But they paid better.

Yeah, for about as long as it takes to fill up my car with fuel and then use the restroom..about 10-15 minutes.

and more people are leaving the US for México than the other way around since the economy in that nation has been improving and is more diversified than before.

No, it's mechanization. If you were referring to just meat packing plants, you would have a point.

That's easy. Start recruiting at the engineering colleges in México and offer them TN visas for open positions.

Well, in many cases if you got rid of contractors, all that would be left would be managers and interns. Depending on the location, the pay may not be great as a contractor, but it's probably a little better than the equivalent position if you were a govt employee. On the other hand, it's easier for the contract company/govt managers to fire you than it would if the person was a govt employee.

and in some cases it's the salary. I had a .gov job during and after college. The pay was much lower than private sector jobs available at the time. However, they had interesting problems, I got to use real Unix workstations at a time when Linux hadn't reached a 1.0 release yet, and it was close to home.

Also, it is worth noting that the bulk of the employees at this and other civilian govt installations are contractors. The actual government employees were usually managers or interns. When the contracts for the facility were awarded to a different company, the workers were let go by the old contractor and then hired by the new contractor. Same job, usually the same pay, just a different company name on the check and different benefits package. Usually only the main contractor management changed. It wasn't hard to find someone who had worked at the place 15+ years who also had been employed by 3-4 different contractors over that time span.

The attitude towards work can be different too. Ever hear the phrase "it's good enough for Government work"? A good friend and mentor at the facility had once mentioned to me: "We both grew up on farms, so we know that this is a slack job....any office job with A/C is when you think about it...but we work our asses off compared to those in Reston". I would not be out of the ordinary for me to work late into the night or on weekends to find bugs, experiment with new things, wrap of projects, etc.....the sort of things that most software developers do, especially if they're not married. I would have gotten in trouble if I did that at the offices in VA.

The dress code wasn't too bad really. It was just the "business casual" standard that lots of places. The only times I remember having to wear a tie was when the bigwigs and/or some Congress-critters from DC was going to visit or when on travel. However, that was a stark difference between what passed as "ok" in Silicon Valley. In 1990 or so, another guy and I had to visit Pixar's offices in San Rafael to discuss some software of theirs that we were using. The lead engineer was to meet us at the office and we stood around in the parking lot for a while waiting for him (the building lobby wasn't open yet). We saw what appeared to be a homeless guy walking around in the parking lot in a daze. He stopped, looked at us, and asked who we were waiting for. We said the engineer's name and he replied..."oh, that's me...come on inside". There was only one or two developers per office and they had beaded curtains for doorways. Very different than our 70's era govt office decor. :D

You have it backwards. They pay people to take land out of production to reduce supply and drive prices up. It is usually reseeded with a mixture of different grasses and that helps build up the organic matter in the soil.

Are they using all of the space in Fremont? If not, why not move some of these functions to that location?

yer all noobs!

Then it would make sense for the pharma companies to set up horseshoe crab farms where the crabs are raised specifically for their blood. That would also allow them to know exactly when blood was last collected from a batch of crabs.

Most men don't like to code either and there usually aren't huge lines of people fighting to get into CS departments. Do the high schools still have kids take the ASVAB tests? Are they using those results to encourage kids who have the necessary skills to go into CS? Have they ever surveyed those people later to find out why they did or didn't choose a CS education?

Does the 25% gross margin include the zero emission vehicle credits that they sell to other manufacturers or is that just gravy?

Not to mention that Tesla is "green" by making money selling zero emission vehicle credits to other manufacturers. http://beta.fool.com/dcawrey/2...

I don't see why they just didn't refer the customer to another business or quote them a price significantly higher than any of their competitors and then subcontract it out to one of them.