1. get a job in NYC for $200k.
2. convince them to let you telecommute (will not be easy).
3. move to Austin TX.
4. profit.
Some of my co-workers were hired in California and moved to Salt Lake City. Many paid cash for their home in this area due to selling their home in CA.
In a large corporation, the downside of such a decision -- even though I know you meant the above somewhat tongue-in-cheek! -- is that someone paid at the high end of the bell curve is frequently passed up for raises due to the cost-of-living differential, regardless of job performance. The short-term benefit can be magnificent, but the long-term downside of promotions without attendant raises due to already having a salary "above" what the management manual suggests for the position in that area catches up with you.
Mexico does not have the time-zone disadvantage of India, and recently (due to various political and monetary factors) is very cost-competitive. Our Guadalajara office is chock-full of brilliant, dedicated people -- just like our India office -- but getting things done with their help is considerably easier due to the better time zone alignment.
Given the choice of hiring otherwise-equal software engineers in India for $25K/year vs. Mexico for $25K/year, I'd go with Mexico every time due to the time zone differential. Travel costs are cheaper. Conversations with US-based co-workers occur more frequently. Training time is quicker due to quicker turnaround on questions and feedback. You can obviously work around issues working with teams on opposite schedules -- and we do, every day! -- but it will never be as trivial as simply having most of your workers share common core hours.
Like I said at the start of the conversation: location and risk/reward are two fundamental aspects of how much one gets paid. It affects how easy it is to land a good-paying job, as well. In today's market, one's longitude matters a whole lot more than one's latitude; it's a lot easier for me to work with my great team-mates in Mexico during my normal working day than to stay up past midnight to meet with equally-talented teammates in India, Singapore, or Sydney.
Great link! Thanks for that. It shows pretty clearly something I've long suspected: that Salt Lake City, Utah is a "bellweather" area, smack-on the national average for technology pay. The more prospective employees educate themselves about these statistics, the better enabled they are to determine the right career path and negotiate fair pay.
I'd change jobs if my job consumed my life. Here's a breakdwon of a typical healthy week for a happily married father:
168 hours in a week.
15 hours spent alone with your spouse. Dates, hanging out, get a sitter for the kids, go to the gym together, go shopping together, etc. Yeah, I'm serious, if you aren't getting 15 weeks alone with your spouse you're probably
15 hours spending time with your kid(s). This can include chores together, hanging out, whatever. If no kids or they've moved out, you get this time back!
40 hours a week working (maybe 50; 60+ weeks should be a rarity, not a regular thing!)
10 hours commuting. Less if you can swing it.
56 hours sleeping (yeah, as if, but budget it anyway).
12 hours eating, shaving, showering, using the restroom, getting dressed, doing laundry & other chores, etc.
What's that leave you with? 20 hours a week that you can decide what to do. If you're working 70 hours a week, you've cut into the time with spouse and/or kids and have ZERO time for yourself.
Work/life balance matters differently to different people. Employers routinely expecting heroic effort is abusive. Luckily, I live very close to work and can work from home a good deal; the quality-of-life improvement from a reduced commute makes up for a LOT...
Two factors to consider: Location and risk/reward ratio.
The "$200,000" figure -- as mentioned earlier in the discussion -- is extremely location-dependent. Let's say you live in Salt Lake City, UT and make $100,000 per year. I'm from the area, and $90K-$110K seems to be a very typical pay rate for sysadmins and programmers with 10 or more years of experience in their field, if you include health and other benefits in the W-2 (all the employers do!). Then let's cross-reference that with the Cost Of Living calculator at http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/ . To enjoy an equivalent quality of life, here's what that guy needs to make (these are all area averages, not the specific cities referenced):
San Francisco, CA: $171,987
Los Angeles, CA: $140,380
Seattle, WA: $123,784
Raleigh, NC: $99,154
Austin, TX: $97,991
Washington, DC:$151,479
New York, NY (Manhattan): $231,289
New York, NY (Queens): $162,684
Advice for earning the big bucks? If you want to earn a high-end "salary", move to one of the technology hubs. Get an education in finance and high-end mathematics. Or get a security clearance, shine up your resume and skills, and plan to have no life outside of work due to travel abroad. Get some solid experience, get in on some high-profile projects, and job-hop when you're at the apex of your visibility in your company for much better pay.
If you don't want to live in Silicon Valley or New York, then be your own boss. Write your own products. Innovate in a field that lacks innovation. Develop software nobody has really thought of before. Monetize it and make a living. Cash out by selling the company to a bigger fish, and start working on your next idea. My company, for instance, buys small companies who create innovative software a LOT and integrates that software into its other offerings. And that strategy works very well for continually expanding the customer base and revenue. Sometimes it works out well for the little guy, sometimes not. It's a risk of running your own business.
Working for someone in a "typical" IT or software engineering field is typically not gonna make you rich. It can make you a good living with solid pay and far less stress than running your own business or working in high-pressure financial and security markets, though. And you're less likely to lose several fortunes on your way to making a fortune if someone else takes the risk, and you get paid the salary. Risk/Reward.
For me, quality of life matters a lot. I've been on both sides of the fence (trying to make it in business for myself vs. drawing a salary), and right now in my life it makes more sense to draw a reasonable salary doing a job that I love in a great environment working with quality people and making a positive difference without feeling that my job is my life. But I know I'm probably not going to strike it rich doing so... and I'm OK with that.
But man, how atheists go on and on and on and on and on.... about how stupid it is to believe in god...
I'm an atheist. Haven't ever told anybody that they are stupid to believe in their God. Your statement is disproven.
I'm really an "apatheist": a subset of atheism that simply believes it's a waste of time & resources to debate an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I don't care if the supernatural exists, and there is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that caring about the question matters in the slightest. There are a lot of atheists like me: we don't care what you believe in or don't believe in as long as you don't try to force us to believe what you do. Most of us are not the vocal minority you apparently assume all atheists to be.
Absolutely fair comments, thanks for the information that new tapes have a higher cost on a tape drive than used tapes. I should have said "millions upon millions of feet of tape", which would have been a correct statement. I stand corrected.
A drive wears down in a few months if it is constantly writing to new tapes.
That's what the cleaning tapes in your silo are for. The heads are typically good for millions upon millions of read/write cycles as long as they are kept clean. The motors driving the reels are typically of the brushless, multi-speed variety, capable of decades of reliable operation with quality bearings. Cleaning tapes, on the other hand, must be replaced regularly as they wear out.
I frequently see bizarre claims on Slashdot, but the claim that using new tapes "wears down" your tape drive is a new and strange one. Where on earth did you get this idea?
Unless there are legal reasons to keep 5-10 years of backups, or you are dealing in more then 3-5 TB of storage to be backed up, or taking things off-site daily via courier tape is just too expensive.
I like your summary of three important reasons for tape archive. I'll restate in different terms.
1. Mid-term to indefinite data retention.
2. Large quantities of data, where "large" is a value greater than a single hard drive can reasonably store.
3. Disaster recovery planning.
But there are more.
4. "Oops".
That's the category of this KDE git issue. Recovering from an "oops". People screw up. How do you recover? I'm a big fan of having multiple layers in that onion: online snapshots, near-line replicas, and off-line tape backups are a basic three-tiered framework for figuring out how to protect the data. I'm amazed as big as KDE is, they don't have storage/backup expertise helping them keep their data secure. Makes me think I may have found my next open-source niche to fill.
5. Reliability. Contrary to the "fragile, expensive" opinion above, tape failure rates are demonstrably lower than hard drive failure rates despite regular handling. Research left to the reader; hard drives fail at a rate about fifteen times higher than their rated MTBF, which was already considerably higher than tape. Data on tape is far more resilient than data on a hard drive.
6. Cost. If you have to store data long-term, consider tape. Administrative, electrical, power, cooling, and storage requirements are all cheaper.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head; I'm sure there are more reasons for tape to be a good choice. The reality for many people that want to store their data "in the cloud" also is this:
I back up your "cloud" storage onto tape drives. Your cloud storage is only as reliable as my ability to recover it from a disaster.
I agree with you, except for this part:
If you use HDDs you'd have more storage...
It all depends on the scale. If you're talking a small project with a small budget, I agree with you: tape backups are overkill, too expensive, and kind of pointless. Your average open-source project is usually just a few gigabytes at most. Use a snapshotting, journaling filesystem, always keep each version in at least three different places, create a retention policy that makes sense for you based on the needs of your project, and you're good.
And you're right. Today's modern tapes are good for about 4,000 read/write cycles. Even if you get the tapes at a substantial discount, a 5TB+ tape is expensive to destroy!
But when you are talking large enterprise data archiving needs, high-end hard drives do not compete with high-end tape drives in the slightest. And in today's risk-averse corporate climate, a reasonable disaster recovery strategy is a MUST, and providing multiple tiers of storage -- online, near-line, and off-line -- is attractive. 9/11 showed everybody how quickly DR plans can melt.
I could go into a lot of specific numbers talking about how a few modern tape drives in a modestly-sized tape silo outperform similarly-sized hard drives for near-line storage in just about every category except random seek time by several orders of magnitude, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I do storage & backup for a living on an extremely large scale. Your post is correct in the main, except for this:
You *never* overwrite your backups, EVER.
You must overwrite tapes if you want to keep media costs reasonable. In our enterprise, we typically use $30,000 T10Kc tape drives with $300 T10K "t2" tapes. Destroyed/broken/worn-out media costs already eat the equivalent of several well-paid sysadmin salaries each year. Adding additional cost for indefinite retention is a huge and unnecessary cost.
Agreed, though, this KDE experience isn't quite like that. Source code repositories commonly have 7-year-retention backups for SLA reasons with customers; most of my work deals with customer Cloud data, which kind of by definition is more ephemeral and we typically only provide 30, 60, or 90-day backups at most, in addition to typical snapshotting & near-line kinds of storage.
No reasonable-cost disk-based storage solution in the world today provides a cost-effective way to store over a hundred petabytes of data on site, available within a couple of hours, and consuming just a trickle of electricity. But if you have a million bucks, a Sun SL8500 silo with 13,000+ tape capacity in the silo will do so. All for the cost of a little extra real-estate, and a power bill that's a tiny fraction of disk-based online storage.
Tape has a vital place in the IT administration world. Ignore this fact to your peril and future financial woes.
Right there with you on "citation needed". I use my Macbooks day in and day out for mass-scale storage administration, and have found the build quality and longevity exceptional compared to the dozen or so HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba laptops I've owned over the past decade.
1. The batteries last longer: 3+ years instead of the 1-2 years typical of every other laptop I've ever owned since laptops went to Lithium instead of NiMH.
2. The keyboards hold up under my hands, while the Toshiba, Dell, and HP nearby -- all newer than the macbook I'm typing on, by the way -- are all sidelined with keyboard problems, doing duty as servers or using an external monitor and keyboard for my kids to do their homework and play Minecraft.
3. The underlying OS is UNIX. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop operating system since 1998. OSX -- with the addition of a few GNU utilities -- has a very usable CLI and I feel right at home.
I bought my wife a Macbook in early 2007. Other than the superficial cracking on the thin plastic where you open the unit (endemic to that generation of white Macbook), it has performed great. I liked hers so much that in 2010 I picked up a 2007 Macbook myself, and am typing on it while taking a break from coding a routine to handle some mass changes on a farm of hundreds of storage appliances. I type all day, every day, and my Macbook does about half that work.
Please provide more details on the "empirical testing" of ASUS and Lenovo. If they truly are longer-lasting than my two six-year-old Macbooks which have been worth at least three Windows-based laptops apiece, then I am extremely interested. It's the amazing reliability of Apple's products that drew me to them. I don't need latest, greatest, or shiny anymore. I need reliable, reasonably quick, and comfortable to use.
Also sigils are what make variable interpolation in strings possible...python must resort to sprintf-like formatting.
$foo = 'scalar';
print "foo is a $foo variable";
vs
foo = 'python'
print "foo is a %s variable" % foo
The Python example can also be written:
foo = 'python'
print('foo is a ' + foo + ' variable')
You're right in that Perl provides much more compact nomenclature, but Python doesn't require sprintf-like syntax for the same output. Python's two possible approaches to this problem are very javascript-like.
Bruce,
I've been a long-time fan of your work, and we met briefly when you spoke in Utah years ago. It was worth the five-hour drive.
There's a great quote from "Ever After" that applies, I think. "Last night, I had a revelation. I used to think that if I cared about anything I'd have to care about everything and I'd go stark raving mad but now I've found my purpose, it's a project actually inspired by you and I feel...the most wonderful freedom."
Take some solace, at least, that this "dumb" Apple-loving, Facebook-using technologist thinks it's time for a personal change. You've inspired me in this post to reclaim my digital life. I want to be an owner of my data; I'm no longer interested in my data being a product to be marketed for profit.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
