And why isn't this "hostile work environment" a problem for all the places that do have open salaries, like every government and union shop in the world

It is. The professors at the public college I went to were ALWAYS bitching about this. I also worked in the IT department of a manufacturing company and watched the shop workers cheer and applaud as they signed the dismantlement of their union, partly because of this.

The reality is that almost everyone thinks they deserve more than the next person. No one will ever admit they're second rate even if they are. With hidden salaries, there's just 2 people "fighting" with each other. The company to pay as little as possible, the employee trying to get everything they can.

When everyone knows, then everyone starts looking at each other. "Well, I'm better than THIS person. The 10 people I play pingpong with during lunch TOTALLY agree". It's already bad enough that this happens with titles. To properly gauge why I make a certain amount of money, everyone comparing themselves to me need to know not only my salary, but everything I've done, all my contributions, all of the deals I might have made (eg: special vacations or waving certain benefits I can legally wave). There's also plenty of other things that can affect compensation that are simply no one's business (maybe someone has some health issues that reduce productivity and they made a deal to work smaller days and don't want the world to know).

It's fine that HR and maybe my manager knows this. The rest of the company simply doesn't need to. Right right now that asymmetry is often used to discriminate against minorities, so people want to get rid of it. It won't always be that way (heck, right now in a lot of companies the other way around is happening). You don't want that shit public.

Sure, some type of organizations do, and some have to, and they make it work. Doesn't mean it's optimal.

Usually Google suffer from poor marketing, and this is part of the issue here. Android Wear, however, is a major part -technical- issues.

I got 2 android wear watches so far. The first was the LG one from launch. It was slow as hell and very buggy at the beginning.

I eventually got a Moto 360 second gen. It was better, but also buggy. Connectivity issues, weird glitches, random battery drains. The stupid flat tire meant none of the watch faces looked good, too.

It got worse though: when they updated to Android Wear 2, a lot of options changed or were hard to find. Worse, now when I get a new phone, because of the requirement to reset the watch to pair, it becomes semi-incompatible with the current version of the phone software. That makes pairing incredibly difficult. If you try enough times it eventually works. Or you can just download an APK of an old version on a sketchy website and have it work for sure (wtf?)

If they could just get the software to work reliably and consistently, they'd have a chance.

The part that really worries me is the reliance on unqualified developers. This was very much the case during the dotcom bubble. There was so much investment money floating around, it didn't matter if 5, 10, 30% of your software developers were barely useful. Know html tags? You're hired!

It's not quite this bad now, but we still have a huge influx of people who can barely copy paste from stack overflow to make things "work" (until they don't). They rely on the few experienced devs in the team to clean after them, or worse are just happy with half baked things that barely work.

When the next big market adjustment happens, all these people at the bottom will end up competing for the few junior roles left and wondering how they're going to fuel their 100k+/year lifestyles.

Yup, if you have someone with a decent background (CS, self taught seriously, or from an adequate bootcamp) who actually want to learn, it's pretty easy to turn even the most junior dev into a fairly productive member of the team pretty quickly.

Right now, a non-trivial amount (I almost want to say the majority) of new devs just quote whatever latest blog article they found interesting (we're in a world where someone, somewhere, wrong an article about any position about anything) and get pissy if you don't do everything they say.

Those aren't worth training.

People leave because companies don't pay them what they're worth

And if that was the only thing happening, sure. We're in an industry right now where in some cities, someone with 3 months of reading books and doing a few projects goes out and cry a river if you don't over them 110k+/year. That's not "not paying them what they're worth", its them being full of themselves.

I've seen people who can't even build a simple app on their own do the job hopping dance.

The "Geez, wonder why" part is a little silly. It's not like people don't hire junior devs or that there's not enough open positions. It's the actual reality that there's a million entry level devs, including a lot of very, very low level ones (you can thank universities that cut corner, and crappy bootcamps, on top of the "self taughts" who really aren't, for that) flooring the market.

You can only train so many people at a time. The majority of people we hire at my company are entry level and co-ops. In a single cohort, we can easily have 25% of our software engineers be entry level of some sort. And we keep doing it. Still, we get an absolutely insane amount of applications (hundreds per day, and we only have 250~ engineers). We need these folks to gain some experience (or hire more senior engineers laterally) before we can take more in. That takes a while, when the ratio of applicant junior to senior can literally be 1000:1.

What makes matters a lot worse when it comes to supply and demand, is that "being close to work" has a pretty high value to you when you have everything else.

I don't live in California, but I do live in one of the other big tech centers. Same deal, housing prices out of control.

Which isn't too surprising: when talking to most of my teammates, a good chunk of them don't want kids (so more disposable income), want to live by the subway (no car payments), and put an extremely high value to short commute (many live a block from the office).

When you're making 150, 200, or 300k a year on your own, and your significant other may also be in tech and make the same amount, who cares if 50% of your income is going to housing (especially if you bought). Quickly enough, half the money you're putting in is going to you anyway (equity), and a tiny fraction of your income is more than enough for food, utilities, insurance, and saving for retirement.

That means anyone NOT in that situation is completely hosed, obviously. That's the problem.

> single family housing permits

What does that mean exactly? Only single family houses? because if we were in a housing shortage, I'd expect the target to be multi family buildings and condos, by design. Kind of hard to improve density by building bungalows.

I found out a while ago that even on Nexus devices (which Google mostly controlled), if there was a change to certain drivers, whatever carrier your sim card was registered to could still block the update by not approving it.

That's some next level bullshit there. If the phone wasn't that popular (eg: Nexus), then it could take forever to get an update. I love Android, and despise Apple, but they're such a joke in that regard.

Agreed. I mean, those people trying to limit NN do have a point: in some scenario, it can hurt customer choice. Like, if i wanted to pay for an internet package that only allowed Netflix and nothing else, but was drastically cheaper...why not?

But that only really works if I can choose one of 20 providers, all with various price points, packages and features, all competing against each other. When there's 1-3? That can only go wrong.

So NN is really not the first choice. It's the last resort.

Thanks to aria attributes, ours work just fine (we have some people frequently testing with screen readers)

JavaScript off is harder, but for actual line of business applications (as opposed to documents), it's just not worth the trouble.

This is an OLED screen, which is all about picture quality. Getting screens this size isn't a big deal. Getting an mass produced OLED TV at this size is.

As long as people keep blaming "tech culture" for stuff that's really an omnipresent cultural problem across all groups no matter how you slice and dice it, tech companies will have to do stupid useless shit like this to show "they're doing something".

This is a society problem, not a tech problem. If we can't get people to raise kids properly, then it will have to be done in public schools I guess. I remember my wife telling me the (extremely famous and highly rated) university she went to had mandatory sex ed where they had to teach people how to use a condom. I got thought that shit in 6th grade (yeah, elementary school). Everything else (like, you know, rape is bad, m'kay) was drilled in my head since I was a toddler.

By the time people are 18-20, it's already too late.

Thats why the person you replied to said "the fix is to put you on welfare as you improve your skills".

Hard to get that to fly in the US, but it is a reasonable fix: employers have to pay employees more than what welfare would, else they just take a government pay check until their worth is high enough that someone will pay them more.

There are countries where things loosely work that way, and it's not too too bad.

The problem is really people being hired as contractors without the usual client/contractor relationship. Else this would be a non-issue.

I've done contracts where I've lost money, which means I was paid less than these folks are (since I was in the negative). Didn't happen often though.

So the line between contractors and employees is too blurry here.