The ROI for any salaried employee means that there's an upper limit for any individual contributor role. The difference in ROI between someone with 10+ years and 1-3 years experience is large, and their respective salaries reflect that. However, someone with 20 years experience doesn't necessarily generate 2x ROI over someone with ~10 years experience. From what I've seen in my industry, salaries for experienced engineers is about 2x what a junior engineer with 3-5 years experience make. Total compensation on the other hand can differ by more depending on stock performance though...

Please mod this up. I work as a CPU design verification engineer and the parent post describes most accurately what designing and verifying a part with millions (and billions) of transistors is all about. Hundreds of people are involved in the design and verification of these things; defects are bound to slip through.

Selection is key for me as well. I often find myself buying tools and gadgets online because my local Home Depot or Best Buy only carry a limited selection of what I'm looking for. I've often wasted an hour looking for something at Home Depot only to go home empty handed and ordering on Amazon anyways. I don't mind paying 5-10% more on Amazon if I can get exactly what I want; not to mention saving myself the hour that it would take to drive to the store, find what I want, pay at the cash, then drive back home.

In many cases the employees get a share of the wealth through stock options, RUS, stock purchase plans etc. If you want the whole pie then you should start your own company and work for yourself.

What would you use as an alternative to Solr? One of the things I use it for is to index several internal wikis so that we can have a centralized search engine (also the default search engines suck). In this case, I need to index the content as well. The thing that gave me the most difficulty was tweaking the config so to get page rankings "just right".

I had never heard of it either until I needed to create an internal search engine where I work. After a few days of research, I found that Apache Solr/Lucene is often used for intranet search engines and for e-commerce sites.

I use KeePassX and MiniKeePass on my iPhone. I sync the password db using dropbox. This works well for me because I can generate strong passwords for ALL sites and I have access to them when I'm on the go.

Yes, I guess the fact that encryption was never properly integrated into Outlook/Exchange has prevented its widespread adoption. However, I believe that the added hassle of encrypting attachments is justified when sending sensitive/confidential information via email. I worked for a large tech company that had very strict rules for dealing with confidential information, including using encryption for emails. I'm amazed that more companies don't require it because the repercussions of a breach can be severe.

What if they had used encryption? Seems to me that had they send an encrypted attachment they wouldn't have had to go through all this trouble.

Your comment made me chuckle. I tried modding funny but somehow "Troll". Replying to this to undo moderation.

I've got a Lenovo T530 with Linux Mint 15 installed and it works great. It even works well with my docking station and dual-monitor setup... very happy with it.

Interesting data. However, I don't think that salary entirely explains the trend. I know 3 elementary teachers who refuse to teach anything higher than grade 3 because the prefer teaching younger kids. One teacher said her reason was because she felt she had a greater impact on the development of the child at that age.

I didn't say it was a good thing, just that men don't tend to go into teaching just as women don't tend to go into programming. It's true that there's sexism and hostility to women in IT (and many other fields). However, even if we could wave a magic want and made all that bad stuff go away we're never going to see a 50/50 split in the technology field.

I don't agree with that. Off all the women I know from childhood, only a small fraction have gone into technology. The rest have gone into fields like accounting, law, finance, sales, marketing, teaching and medicine (doctors, pharmacists and nurses). They didn't choose these fields because they were "pushed away" from programming.

Wish I had mod points. I have a female friend who works as an elementary school teacher and she told me that 100% of the teaching staff at her school are *women*. So what? Who cares? I think women are drawn to other fields, simple as that.

I'm sure it differs per industry, but in my area most employers want 40+ hours a week from contractors. Therefore, somebody only wanting to work 10-20 hours a week wouldn't even be considered for the job.