If you're big enough to have millions of dollars to spend on a big ERP (remember: the big names in the ERP industry charge you a % of your business...so if it cost millions, you're making hundreds of millions...), you probably have requirements that aren't exactly trivial to build in house.

If you're, let say, a large international retailer with brick and mortar stores, several factory plants and warehouses, etc... writing the software to handle all the international regulations, the warehouse transfers, handling prepacked product manufactured by third party, etc, will be tens of millions of lines of code. Not exactly something you wipe out in a year.

Of course, if you're just an e-retailer that ships stuff internationally and skip the few countries that make it hard, that's a LOT easier, and a couple of average in-house devs and a good logistic analyst and you're good to go. Bonus point if you outsource your warehousing.

When these big ERP projects fail, its usually companies who have exotic, meaningless processes and refuse to change it, so they have to customize the ERP to hell and beyond. Its normal to have to customize it a bit: everyone is a little different. But there's a point where its the company's fault. I worked somewhere where the concept of SKU. which was used as a unique identifier everywhere (normal, common way to do things) didn't have a 1:1 correlation with a product (ie: they would reuse SKUs for completely different products, and had interns "guess" what it mapped to depending on context in spreadsheets). Thats never gonna work, and things go downhill from there.

Business ownership is a pain in the ass though. If it ends up only paying enough to survive, no one will do it.

Not quite, but almost. A big chunk of the people being laid off aren't even in the US. Then from what's left, a chunk aren't even in the same field as what the H1Bs are used for (ie: HR, managers, etc). Of what's left after that, they absolutely can do internal transfers if they can relocate and whatsnot. Of what's left after that, some people just don't have the correct skillsets and may be hard to train in a pinch.

And yes, of what's left some people will slip through the crack. The Microsoft open reqs aren't exactly secret. If you think you qualify, and are ok with the location, go ahead and apply. Living right around the corner from a Microsoft office, a lot of my friends are H1Bs...they all make a heck of a lot more money than I do, and definitely don't fit the stereotype... (For the most part the ones I know are Canadians from Waterloo who preferred coming on H1B over TN1...)

The problem is still the lack of competition in the market. If everyone had the choice between 4-5 ISPs, considering the popularity of Netflix, consumer ISPs would be paying Level 3 truckloads of money to ensure Netflix works flawlessly...and the roles may even be reversed (where Level 3 tries to gouge Verizon, since they'd know Verizon would have no choice or lose a ton of customers).

But since there isn't any competition, Verizon takes their own customers hostages...

So when Netflix decided to pay Comcast, they were able to upgrade all of those remote trunks in ~24 hours, even though they cost of fortune?

Netflix pays level 3 to get their bits from their servers all the way to the edge. Customers pay to get bits from the edge all the way to their house. Level 3 and Verizon make an agreement for the parts where those 2 networks touch each other.

Verizon is saying: "The direction of bits matter. Because our customers are paying to receive bits and not to send bits, YOU owe US more money. If our customers paid to SEND that much bit instead of receiving them, then we'd owe you money....like if it changes anything on the network".

Thats bull. Customers pay for a certain amount of bits coming from any edge to their house. Who cares exactly where it came from?

I definately gained a lot of weight when I moved to the US. Restaurants everywhere, and so cheap, it takes a fair bit of willpower to resist.

Aside for availability and quantity though, its not that different from Europe, especially not Montreal. Sounds like you went to the wrong area of both cities. (All the easily accessible restaurants in NY are just shitty fast food making a buck because of their location, too, which doesn't help)

Its semi-common in financial industries (who generally are mostly *Nix/Java based, but always have a substantial percentage of Windows development for either client or specialized server side use. They often get steep discounts because of all the exchange/office licenses they get).

The neat thing about F# is that its an ML dialect, and thus is fairly good for complex/mathy algorithms that are best written functionally. Then C# can consume the F# DLL's transparently. Don't get me wrong, there isn't hundreds of millions of lines of code written in it, but when I was in that industry, I worked at a few company (one among the "big 3") that has a substantial F# department, to write operational research algorithms to help balance portfolios and stuff.

The valuable and talented employees will not be laid off and they know it. Microsoft pays fairly well and their benefits are pretty darn good. So unless their projects are boring them and they have nowhere to move to, they're not going anywhere.

The majority of the people they're letting go are people who joined via acquisition. That's fairly different. Then its probably going to be operation, redundant managers, etc.

I'd be surprised if a single engineer that was hired by Microsoft and who's actually performing, was let go.

Generally when a successful company has massive layoffs, the number would technically be much, much higher, but the majority of people are transferred, moved to other initiatives, offered to relocate, etc.

The ones getting laid off either have incompatible skillsets (let say, embedded developers in a company that doesn't do embedded development...sure, you could retrain them, but they probably won't even want to), are weaker, or are in offices where the entire office is shut down.

Also, this isn't 18000 software engineers getting laid off. You only need so many HR people and project managers. Microsoft also has a LOT of open reqs, and anyone willing to relocate and who's qualified will be able to internally apply for those positions.

You can retrain and reorganize, but there's management overhead for that, and you can only do so many at one given time.

You can be pretty sure they're not going to lay off senior engineers, unless they're closing down certain offices and said engineers don't want to relocate, and its those they have issues finding. The junior mobile app devs and the HR people? Tough luck for them.

A/C repair doesn't pay very well, however with global warming, demand should skyrocket, so salaries may go up up and up!

Bonus point if you do that now, as there's only 1 year left for usage of Freon in condenser maintenance, and a lot of people will have to replace their systems with new ones (and they're not even slightly compatible, so you have to replace the whole thing, which is brutally expensive).

So I'd definitely recommend going that route.

LEDs that run warm? Can it even be called an LED at that point? I mean I guess if it uses very poor internals...but the whole point of LEDs is that the portion that generates light doesn't generate heat, and the rest of the "device" isn't much different from any other light.

You'd be hard pressed to melt ice cream on a "real" LED bulb.

A decent CFL can fail for a large number of reason...they don't like extreme temperatures, they're very fragile in general, and, as a whole, have a wide variation in failure rate, even from the same batch. Those limitations are fairly well documented, so its not isolated case.

They can last for years, they can fail in a few months.

LEDs are quite consistent. If you buy really cheap ones, their support can fail I guess, but that is very rare. The LEDs themselves basically never fail, they just dim over the years, pretty much by definition of what an LED is. They're more or less immune to temperature swings and thus won't fail if left outside in a nordic winter.

Of course, your millage will vary depending on the brand and quality, but given similar conditions, LEDs are way, way, way better than CFL.