At (low ball) 120k-160k for a mediocre unix dev in the big tech centers... you can deal with a lot of shit from Microsoft before hitting that price tag.

Because aside for landline/cable providers (no competition and "revolts" haven't done a thing), and health care (revolt is a daily thing...), things in the US are overall so much cheaper than anywhere else, its a bit hard to complain.

Regardless, you're correct that it goes two ways. The easiest way to see it is in other countries. US beliefs, as well as stereotypes (including negative ones), are being pushed around via the internet. Certain ultra liberal countries have started having abortion debates, when no one had ever questioned it before.

A particularly bad one: I've heard someone call a black person a "slave" as a slur...in a country where pretty much anyone of color is a rich investor immigrant or professional and no history. So not only its racist as hell, but it also doesn't even fit.

The internet is just putting everyone in a melding pot and the lowest common denominator comes out. Since people rarely check facts and have no ability for critical thinking, whatever is loudest and most visible will be the belief of the majority after a while.

People in general are gullible and believe whatever they hear. Being skeptical, double checking facts, looking at references...those are things people don't even think about anymore (well, they never did, its not new).

Schools need to push more on THAT. Teaching people to prove what they say, that its not because everyone says something that its true, and to learn how to separate facts from made up stuff. The rest will follow.

The argument about local workers being displaced aside...its a slap in the face for foreign workers who can't get an H1B and are actually the original target audience for those visas.

I have friends who Canada with credentials up the wazoo, who have been working on TN1 visas for a bit, and want something more permanent. Those are 150-300k/year jobs (lead software engineers and architects) that aren't easy to fill outside of California.

And they have to hit the lottery like anyone else, and more likely than not they won't get their H1B...and so they have to stick with TN or looking for an american to marry =P

Not cool.

Not any more. Providing Windows server 2012 was also part of the announcement. SQL server I'm sure you can install yourself.

Maybe Im blind, but i only see 2008 in the announcement, not 2012.

Write a resume that includes a CS degree at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Cal Tech, whatever...then fill your employment history with Starbucks barista, scratching monkey's backs, picking your nose and for good measure, add a sabbatical as part of your job history too.

You're still gonna get half decent offers if you can pass the phone screen.

The type of degree isn't relevant for a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to immigration or certain employers.

In this case, that employer worked simply with post-secondary years, and counted a master as 6 and PhD as 10. So someone who did 2 bachelors in 6 years was equivalent to someone with a master. What happened before that, or which country or type of degree you had, was irrelevent.

For immigration, its total years of schooling. So how long high school takes in your particular country is relevant. here.

Its dumb, but that's how it works. It just depends who you talk to. My current employer doesn't give a damn and is purely performance based, so without a degree at all I have a higher title (and salary) than some people with PhDs.

I once interviewed for one of the big investment banks (not gonna give a name, but its one of the big evil wall street banks that everyone knows about). That one has the usual silly "4 year degree with 3.0 GPA or we don't even talk to you, no exception, not even if you're a well known superstar in the software world" rule.

I didn't know that, and I only have a 3 year degree (from a country where thats common). I aced the interview as that particular job wasn't even very computer science-ish, and they had been looking for someone for months to fill that position. Then they noticed the little issue of me not having the mandatory degree.

The hiring manager (not someone from an agency, but someone on their payroll) just modified my resume without telling me and passed it over to HR for final signoff. I got hired.

Fast forward a year, they're updating the HRIS system and verifying that all the info is correct. I get an email from HR asking me to confirm that I indeed have a 4 year bachelor with 3.0 GPA from Big Name College XYZ with my boss CCed.

My boss quickly replied, before I had time to go "WTF?!", that I indeed had such a degree.

Needless to say, him and I had a little talk afterward. That was awkward.

You touched the problem. When the CDN servers are inside the ISP's facilities. And often, the owner of the CDN servers is the content provider. So you have a content provider striking a deal with an ISP -directly- to have better service. Since its within the ISP's facilities, of course they're gonna have to pay something. So its gray area.

If CDN providers were their own, neutral, "dumb" entities in between, it wouldn't be an issue, but that's not always the case.

Exactly. People and companies already pay from both side. You pay for incoming and outgoing, the other side pays for incoming and outgoing, and the providers who take that money then pay for peering agreements (if any, often they don't need to pay since those go both ways).

So paying for your outgoing pipe AND paying for the provider that delivers, when that provider is already getting money (or other benefits in lieu of money) for peering, is silly.

When it gets confusing is with CDNs and how those need to be handled...

They're intermediaries because from the customer's point of view (customer in this context being residentials and office), they're behind their ISP. The ISPs deal with them, make deals with them, call them when there's an issue, not you or me.

This is more about the behavior of the community than the content of the game though.

The issue can be experienced first hand by anyone in a big tech center trying to build a team or expand one.

Finding people isn't too hard. Finding good people, at a price where there's SOME return on investment (that is, as much as you'd like to, you can't pay everyone 7 figure...but you can still pay them high enough to all toss them in the top 2%, and still be looking), is really hard.

If you put your office in the middle of nowhere, you won't have enough people. If you put it in a tech center, you'll be competing with google, twitter, amazon and all the other big names, so that even if you offer more money and benefits than they do, you still lose. You can offer telecommuting, but only a small portion of people work effectively like that (a few days out of the week, most people can handle, but all the time, not so much), so that doesn't scale either.

So you're boned, boned, or boned. Pick your poison. Oh, or you can hire the peanut gallery, train them for a year or two, and then lose them to Google or a video game company the moment they get good.

Its a big problem in general. I work for a large company with a massive usability and creative department.

Yet, the usability people, who spend weeks after weeks doing studies after studies with focus groups, still end up with justifications such as "Well, I personally think this is easier" and "I think this is ugly, lets do it another way".

Then the creative people just ignore every rules, guidelines, and standards, and we end up with applications where every screen looks different, just so it can be pretty. And for the web stuff, they want mouse overs everywhere!!! (even though 40% of our viewers are on ipads and can't even see mouse overs).

And god forbid we use the built in input components. Native drop down menu (which looks different per environment to suit it better....ie: tablet vs desktop)? FORGET IT. Lets write our own that looks like crap everywhere!