no one listens to 'workers'. the execs are full of ego and can do no wrong.

what they all have gotton used to: hiring a bunch of chair-warmers who are almost universally from south east asia, h1b mostly, and all are young. the exact formula for 'dont make waves, dont challenge the boss'.

the bosses are not used to hearing anyone voice opinions! we have the worst engineering now, walking the hallways of cisco, intel, you name it. they hire 'to a price' and you get monkeys if you pay peanuts.

they go out of their way to hire 'diversity' but that means NOT hiring the real minority, the US-born person who is over 35 and HAS the experience.

silicon valley is a sweatshop, becoming more like what we had 100 years ago when the US finally got fed up and 'did the union thing'. that changed history. things got better for a while.

now, they're back to being company-owned - the world, that is. people don't matter. companies do. and you just better do what you are told. there are 1000 more indians waiting to take your job, here or elsewhere, if you dare say 'no' to a boss.

similarly, raise issues of safety or product design and you won't be continuing there much longer (personal experience on that one).

fuck sillicon valley. it stopped being a place of innovation when it became a place to concentrate chair-sitters from across the world. quantity is all that matters. do we have 'body count'? did we save a lot on it? then we're good (that's how they think).

if you are young, sure, come here. but you won't be able to stay long-term. just be aware of that. and be aware of the fact that companies laugh behind your back when you are gullible enough to believe this 'loyalty' shit they want you to swallow. don't believe it, though. eventually YOU will be replace by someone even cheaper. my years are numbered, but then again, so are yours.

no one is safe in the bay area, job-wise. it stinks here.

love the weather and the culture (well, the old culture, that some people still remember). but the days of the 'hp garage' is long gone. now, its stupid social bullshit, twits and disgracebook lead the pack. ie, no product at all, just hot air and advertising.

"If a shooter is holed up and alone, can they be qualified as an imminent threat to life?"

In this case, definitely yes. Obviously a blanket judgement cannot be made for all cases. Each situation is entirely different.

... dearth of inspiration or even otherwise useful things to say. It's all transparently self-serving but so conspicuously lacking in substance and foundation.

If you really wanted to ensure a solid influx of STEM university students a few years down the line, you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today. You'd make sure they get a solid grounding in the basics. You know, spelling, grammar, thinking, coming up with things to say. And, of course, math. Not "new math", but actual real math taught in a way that is maybe not huggy-feely, but certainly imparts the skill without putting off. Mathematicians have known for years that the math grounding is awful (along with the rest of highschool), and that it only gets interesting once you "catch the bug" and dive in, later, much later. Do something about that and raise the expected literacy and math proficiency floor from "typically functionally illiterate" to, well, somewhat higher at least.

But that isn't sexy. That's boring and hard work. Companies and politicians don't want to sponsor that.

Anon for obvious reasons.

I will hire a woman over a man for a tech role, even if the man is marginally better. If it's drastic, I'll hire the man - but if it's close, the woman wins out on one very simple factor: male dominated offices/teams/companies have a higher probability of disfunction. Having a female perspective, presence, and balance is actually worth the hit on pure skill.

In other words, a boys club is bad for life balance, moral, and eventually product quality and employee retention.

So this doesn't really surprise me. Hiring managers WANT women in the office. Yeah, this is sexist. But I've worked on teams where there have been zero women, and it's not a good balance.

There's still no std::string split() method.

I look back fondly at "c with objects". At least I could decipher the error messages.

Unmanaged code is inherently unsafe. C++ may be necessary in places but it doesn't belong in a line of business application

C++ aficionados, your vexing problem has been solved! That is to say, your complex language has added a new "if" structure with more side-effects to enhance the impenetrability and opportunity for obscurantism that we all value so much.

C++ is still my favorite language, but I gave up on many features long ago. Even on templates ! Why ? Because just one stupid mistake can produce hundreds of compile errors. And also, I don't want my code to become Perl like : a write only language.

I can see an international purchase on my bank's transaction history in one hour. Why does it take US banks 3 days to discover there's no money in a cheque writer's account? Why doesn't the seller wait a week before sending the item?

This interview is full of classic self-justification;

"I like to think I am a businessman. Not a criminal."

"I like to think my victims are rich and won't miss the money I'm stealing."

"I like to think those I'm stealing from had the opportunities I didn't. This makes us even."

"I like to think that because scamming is hard and takes time, it's like a real job."

"I like to think it's my victim's own fault I'm scamming them. It's not my fault they don't follow the rules and don't know the game."

I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.

The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.

Interesting idea that I could get behind... I'd say 2x prevailing wages for the skillset/title and a minimum of 2x average household income would be sufficient to make it unpalatable to use an H-1B for anything short of someone you legitimately cannot find or train. It'd also drive local wages up for anything in demand because they could save money by hiring local vs. hiring someone on a visa. It'd create fierce competition among the best and brightest all over the world to get in on the program because it'd give them instant high salaries, increase local salaries to what the market would actually bear for the skills, draw more people into unskilled work they consider below them (because they could live on the now-increased incomes), etc. It'd also kill a lot of crufty companies that aren't actively profitable in their space to make way for ones that will be. Everyone would win except MBAs trying to goose quarterly statements.

I just want to know what level of crazy this person really was. Did he really have a novel piece of code, and just didn't know how to deal with the loss. Or are we dealing with a nutcase who saw a fellow student use a linked list the same way he did, and assumed that they must have gotten it from the teacher.