2 is an exponent :)

I apologize for misspeaking. I remembered that drag increased with velocity according to some power, but didn't remember which one. Thus, my sloppy language.

Most German cars (which is who Tesla competes with) have undercarriage engineering for reasons of sound and high-speed aero concerns. They are expected to sustain 200kmh, and the relevance of drag rises exponentially with speed, but also, controlling airflow is important so that the car doesn't have too much high speed lift. What you do NOT want is a vehicle that loses significant grip as speed rises, yet most cars are shaped like (poor) airfoils so this is a concern.

You may recall that the first gen Audi TT did not have a rear deck spoiler, but real world driving showed that there were many high speed loss-of-control accidents with the vehicle, so a rear spoiler was fitted later.

Of course.

I would say it is more of an exceptional case, but I've worked with folks who have non-technical degrees (Philosophy) and those who have no degree at all.

I think most of our listings say they require a 4 year degree in CS or a related field. So, that's a pretty harsh filter.

If you're the kind of person that doesn't match resume filters, your best bet is to know somebody already in the company, and get referred by them.

It's probably easier than ever to get noticed in the software industry though. There is a whole world o open source projects out there for you to contribute to, and all of that work is, by definition, public knowledge.

When I see someone has listed work they've done on OSS projects on their resume, that tells me way more than whatever they write about education or school projects.

Your conclusion -- that good candidates never make it to my inbox because of recruiter filtering -- is certainly possible.

I think you've misunderstood what I wrote, however, on criteria.

Not only do we not have a policy of only hiring the top 20%, we don't even know how to measure that.

I am basing those comments on the observation that we talk to many more people than we're actually able to feel good about extending an offer to. I surmised it might be the top 20% based on the # of people I personally have had to "no hire" before I could recommend a hire. I apologize for not making that clearer.

I suspect that, as a college hire, you'd have been an ideal candidate for us. Clearly you had passion in the software space, given what you'd accomplished before finishing college. It's always possible that you'd bomb an interview question about doing something perverse in C with linked lists, but, that's really a matter of your technical competence and if you have any hangups about technical interviews (some people do).

fwiw, I went to a boring state university, and had a pile of UNIX/linux experience before and during college.

We have no restrictions or criteria at all as far as what universities people come from (we do have a finite amount of university recruiting money, so, we don't send campus recruiters to every college in the US.)

Regarding recruiting -- the recruiters we have are not programmers, but technical recruiting is the entirety of their job. And, they are not the only way people get into the pipeline. For instance, when I do campus recruiting trips, there is little to no pre-filtering of the resumes I get.

The conclusion I really want you to take away is that just because somebody has a degree in CS doesn't mean we can hire them.

You can do a quick search to see the # of open positions at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.

For just Microsoft, the # of open IT & Software engineering positions in the US is in the thousands. Most of them stay open for months.

I've been interviewing software engineers at Microsoft for over a decade. For a given position, I normally talk to around 5-10 folks before we find one we can make an offer to.

You might argue that that's because all the really good people won't talk to us, because we pay so poorly.

I don't think that's true. We pay pretty well, especially for entry level positions. I've interviewed outside the company on a few occasions over my career. For any smaller company, trying to match my existing compensation package is usually a non-starter. I figure that if I lose my job, I'm taking a 50% pay cut to come onboard somewhere else.

Furthermore, as per federal law, the salary range for every open position for which we are entertaining H1-B applicants is posted internally. The idea is that people here on H1-B cannot be left "in the dark" about what "normal" pay is for their job title and level.

So, the bottom line is this: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc all have deep pockets and are competing with each other for labor. Apple and Goog may have been doing their collusion thing but in general, I don't think the problem with Microsoft hiring folks is the money. Often the people we're hiring could get by just fine on less money; what they want is more autonomy or to work on something they perceive to be cooler. Basically, any number of non-compensation related issues.

Despite the outrageous comp packages we offer, there simply aren't enough qualified people applying for positions.

And, by the way, the issue isn't, "we need 15 years of .net experience" or other such requirements. We try as much as possible to hire on aptitude and passion. Unless its a special situation, I don't care what technology people are familiar with when I interview them; I care that they can explain an algorithm to me, and that whatever code or pseudocode they use is plausible (and explainable by them)

Seriously. Finding people who can develop and explain a basic algorithm is difficult. We can't find enough of them.

It isn't a new thing, or even an MS specific thing, btw. When I was interviewing developers at a much, much smaller company, I came across A candidate who didn't know about binary search. She had absolutely no idea where to start.

She had a CS degree.

If you're holding out for great talent, you're competing with a lot of other companies, and all of them have deep pockets. The need is simply greater than the domestic supply.

You can look at the # of American kids going into CS, EE, CompE, etc in American Universities. Then you can look at how many come out.

A quick web search told me: in 2009, the number of CS undergraduates from American universities was 38,000.

Suppose that we want only the top 20% of those graduates -- and that 100% of them are American.

That's 8000 people. Can you see how every company in America chasing after the same 8,000 people may make it difficult to fill positions?

We need more people going into CS (something I'm helping with by volunteering at a local highschool), and we need more of them to be really, really good.

Until then, we're going to try and get the best people we can get from anywhere we can get them.

One other point -- it is horribly expensive to take on foreign workers. There are binders of lawyers at MS that deal with employee visa and immigration problems, on an ongoing basis. We have employees that go on vacation and then can't get back into the US. That's months of lost productivity. Even if someone is here and working, they have all kinds of immigration bullshit to deal with. That's time they're not working, and that's time they're keeping our immigration lawyers busy. It's all a huge tax that domestic workers do not incur.

So, in conclusion, i think the oft-repeated meme that H1-B is all about saving rich companies money is mostly bullshit.

In my experience, it's about getting good people from anywhere we can get them. Not all of the smart hard working folks were born in the US.

I suggest you look at the $metadata document for the service I linked to.

The property names, conceptual storage types, relationship info, etc, is all in there.

I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve, exactly.

You could be right.

OData predates SPARQL 1.1, however, and supported all CRUD operations from its inception.

SPARQL appears to be read only, and to be restricted to data in kvp or 3-tuples.

OData supports mutable entities, change and request batching, and http GET semantics for data access. It would appear to map much better to real-world databases and business use-cases.

OData is (now) a standard for how applications can exchange structured data, oriented towards HTTP and statelessness.

OData consumers and producers are language and platform neutral.

In contrast to something like a REST service, for which clients must be specifically authored and the discovery process is done by humans reading an API doc, ODATA specifies a URI convention and a $metadata format that means OData resources are accessed in a uniform way, and that OData endpoints can have their shape/semantics programmatically discovered.

So for instance, if you have entity named Customer hosted on http://foo.com/myOdataFeed, I can issue an HTTP call like this:

GET http://foo.com/myODataFeed/Cus...

and get your customers.

furthermore, the metadata document describing your customer type will live at

foo.com/myODataFeed/$metadata ... which means I can attach to it with a tool and generate proxy code, if I like. It makes it easy to build a generic OData explorer type tool, or for programs like Excel and BI tools to understand what your data exposes.

Suppose that your Customers have have an integer primary key, (which I discovered from reading $metadata), and have a 1:N association to an ORders entity. I can therefore write this query:

GET http://foo.com/myODataFeed/Cus... .. and get back the Orders for just customer ID:1

I can add additional operators to the query string, like $filter or $sort, and data-optimization operators like $expand or $select.

OData allows an arbitrary web service to mimic many of the semantics of a real database, in a technology neutral way, and critically, in a way that is uniform for anonymous callers and programmatically rigorous/discoverable.

Examples of OData v3 content are available here:

http://services.odata.org/V3/N...

OData V4 is a breaking protocol change from V3 and prior versions, but has been accepted as a standard

And, shameless plug: If you want to consume and build OData V1/V2/V3 services easily, check out Visual Studio LightSwitch :)

Places with state-paid or state-assisted university programs tend to have a sieve mechanism (like entrance exams) that sort people into programs of different cost (and life outcomes). E.g. a test determines if you enter vocational school or a university program.

In the US, there is still a test-score aspect of things, but if you pay for it, generally, we let you do whatever you like. That's good, in its own way. Some people are tremendously motivated folks who are bad at taking tests. They ought to be free to choose a difficult path and rise to the occasion.

The problem in the US is the state involvement in financial aid. The policy of "college for everyone" may not make Americans smarter so much as it makes college dumber.

If the state has any interest at all in funding college educations (and this is debatable), presumably, that funding should go to people with insufficient means, better than average motivation and/or talent, and only in subjects for which there is a compelling state interest (I'm looking at you, STEM).

Furthermore, such financing needs to be contingent on them NOT taking a job on wallstreet when they are done. The public already funds those bozos enough; there's no reason to use federal scholarship money as a 4 year long interview for some wallstreet firm. Wallstreet can start doing its own talent recruiting. If those guys are as good as they tell their clients, it should be no problem for them to predict the "winners" and only offer private scholarships accordingly..

What also doesn't make sense is that the government allows anyone with a pulse to borrow 30k/year to go to school for 6 years and maybe get a communications degree.

This is simply not in the public interest, nor is it in the interest of the students, nor is it in the interest of the higher-ed system.

I absolutely agree that there is an education bubble. I think certain people should attend university in certain situations. I went to a small state school with an academic scholarship. I make the same amount of money as people who went to much more expensive places -- without scholarships.

I think University was valuable in my case -- but it was much cheaper back then, and my field has much higher salaries than average.

Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.

An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.

So, government creates a problem (employer involvement in health insurance), makes it worse (subsidizes employer involvement with health insurance) and then tries to fix it by making it illegal for employers to provide insurance that is too good, and illegal to provide insurance that is too bad, and too expensive to provide any insurance at all, with the predictable effect that lots of employers are simply dropping insurance.

So, it is a fantastic outcome that some peoples insurance situation is being divorced from their employer / employment situation -- this is goodness -- but it is costing people more money, in many cases.

In my case, if I tried to buy health insurance on the BCBS ND exchange, it would be hugely expensive compared to the reduced, employer subsidized coverage I have, and, it would be much worse coverage.

In my state, many more people have lost their existing coverage than have gained coverage due to ACA.

Basically, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in this mess in the first damn place, back during WW2, I think a lot of teeth gnashing could have been avoided.

Instead, the feds are trying to claim a great achievement for maybe partially a little bit addressing a problem that is their own damn fault.

If the point is to look for pathogens in other peoples fluids...

well, I'm not real excited about holding the thing mm from my eye :)

(somehow having a giant metal/glass column as a buffer seems less creepy)

haha.

Oops :)

Ok, Feynman ridiculed NASA about the _other_ shuttle disaster :)

My apologies :)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...

I've read the booklet and I found it persuasive.

Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster

I think it's important to understand what powerpoint is good for. It is good for helping an average presenter guide the delivery of low-bandwidth information into a low-attention span audience who are not subject matter experts.

In other words, it's good for 90% of the people, 90% of the time.

If you are trying to send people to space, or create controlled black holes on the European mainland, do not use it.

Another situation where PP can be used effectively is to present visual information - photos, charts, etc.

Ironically enough, I borrowed the Tufte powerpoint rant from the Microsoft Library here at work :)