The question isn't whether I'm representative of most individuals with GEDs, but whether I'm representative of individuals holding GEDs who happen to have pursued careers involving substantial software development duties.

I assumed that was implied. My mistake. To clarify, I don't think you're representative of individuals with GEDs who have pursued careers in software development. I will suggest that a random high school student who has just finished his junior year and who wants a career in software would be better served by finishing high school and getting a 4-year C.S. degree (from the highest-ROI university available to him) than he would by getting a GED and spending the next five years doing something else.

Do you think you're representative of most GED-havers? I don't.

Check out the map of drops. Westlake, Tarrytown and Northwest Hills (between Mopac and 360) were completely skipped.

Seems like it should be roughly quantifiable. We know how many workers are in the class. So we'd need to estimate the difference between what they hypothetically would have been paid in the absence of the anti-competitive practices and what they were actually paid. Then multiply that by the number of years the companies engaged in those practices.

Day care, if done right, can be as stimulating as staying at home with mom. Even the average U.S. day care is light years away from an Eastern bloc orphanage.

Haven't looked at D in any detail, but I was under the impression it was more different than C++ than what I had in mind. I was imagining C+++ as staying as close as possible to C++ but with whatever modest improvements are enabled by the omission of C compatibility. But maybe that's in fact what D is.

Seems like someone (or a consortium of someone's) should take C++, drop the C compatibility requirement, make whatever "cleanup" changes that allows, and call it C+++. Just make sure there's a module ready to go for gcc.

Perhaps leaning that way, but the stereotypical person I'm thinking of isn't consistently libertarian. He likely supports increased funding for NASA. He's not a big fan of open borders. ("The H1B visa guys are going to take my job!") Etc.

IBM underpays.

Which also supports my point. It means my ~$65k salary in 1999 was potentially lower than it should have been, which strengthens the case that the poster's claim of $80-90k being the norm for Ph.D.'d data scientists in the Bay area is a huge exaggeration.

For me, gmail is superb at filtering spam. I have 167 emails in my "Spam" folder over the last 30 days. Maybe 1 or 2 have gotten through over that same period.

Perhaps the Lawrence-blamers skew conservative, but I'd not be so quick to color them with one brush. There's a certain brand of person I like to call "arrogant techie dude", in no short supply on slashdot, who bucks the trend. He unswervingly believes in evolution and AGW, is pro-choice, holds theists in disdain if not outright contempt, will support almost any effort at manned space exploration (cost be damned). But he has no patience for anyone who is suffering due to his or her own mistakes (such as, for instance, storing nude pics in the cloud). He's very much of the view that if someone's situation is shitty that it must be his own fault and he should just pull himself up by the bootstraps. (Oddly, a frame of mind most often ascribed to conservatives.)

Your experience supports what I was saying, though. If Microsoft is going to pay you $80k for an internship in Seattle, it beggars belief that companies in the Bay area are offering $80-90k to data scientists with Ph.D.s.

who in their right mind would go into computer science in America right now?

Someone who enjoys coding. Someone who likes being compensated pretty well without having work lawyer-hours. You can whine about H1-B visas all you want, but the situation for software devs is pretty comfortable.

I've been working for 15 years. In that time, I've held five jobs. The shortest of them lasted 2 years, and that's because I chose to leave. I have no vendor certifications nor would it help me to obtain them. At my current company we hardly ever do reviews. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but, then again, maybe yours wasn't either.

The city where I grew up had about the same population (when I was living there) as Wyoming's current population. It was urban, but not especially progressive and not located in a state known for its awesome education system. We probably had 10 people take the AP C.S. exam at my school alone. Granted, it was a magnet school with an engineering focus, but I'm sure there were also some other exam-takers from the other schools in my district. So something weird is going on in Wyoming.