If what the article says is true, it's great that executives are starting to understand the opportunity cost of technical debt.
Too many companies see software development as a menial "cost center" while hypocritically relying on it on a fundamental level for operations.
While I see where they're coming from - the ROI from software developers can be rather opaque for many industries - these companies are often hellbent on hiring as cheaply as possible (in-house junior developers with no experience) and cutting as many corners as they can get away with, all the while accruing massive amounts of technical debt.
> If what the article says is true, it's great that executives are starting to understand the opportunity cost of technical debt.
Nothing in the article implies tat "executives" (or anyone) has gained a better understanding of the cost of technical debt.
This is the main paragraph talking about technical debt:
> And yet, despite being many corporations' most precious resource, developer talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies today lose upward of $300 billion a year paying down "technical debt," as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications of bad software.
So the article author says that despite the skyrocketing value of developers, companies generally waste this scarce resource on technical debt and related mismanagement inefficiencies.
Sounds like your company is doing something similar to what my company was doing before I left. You're right - we weren't technically wrong, but it did feel disingenuous. I was never really sure if our customers actually derived value from our product in the way we wanted them to, or if it was simply a wildly speculative investment made by middle managers feeling FOMO after reading the Wall Street Journal.
If you must do whiteboard interviews, here's a technique I've used with great effect:
Have someone else pick a coding problem (that you as the interviewer don't know beforehand), and work on it from scratch together with the candidate.
Being upfront with the candidate that you don't know the answer yourself puts the candidate at ease, and you'll be able to better judge the candidate's soft skills (communication, critical thinking, empathy in case I don't understand the problem).
I like this idea. Personally, I struggle with knowing that the interviewer knows the answer. My wife's in medicine and she and her colleagues call this process "Guess what I'm thinking?" I prefer to have dialog and come to a conclusion together, and I feel it gets what you want out of an interview: how does the candidate think, how deep is their understanding of the technology, how do they communicate, and would you enjoy working with them.
Depends on what you're looking for. Charlotte is 90% finance-related jobs (I used to work there myself). I live in the Raleigh/Durham area, and it has a decent amount of engineering opportunities, especially in biotech.
It's not the Bay Area, but it's pretty comfortable.
It's not only money that drives these people, but also ego/prestige. I did my undergrad in finance - during that time, most of my peers looked down on my interest in technology. At one point, one of my friends (who is an investment banker now) even told me to stop having a "poor person's mentality".
Of course, many of these same people jumped into the tech industry (if such a thing exists) as soon as it became "prestigious". Although they have only a very shallow interest in actual tech, they've brought that same superiority complex with them.
I've legitimately overheard someone say in a SF cafe: "I couldn't be a doctor...it doesn't change the world enough and you don't actually earn that much." facepalm
I’ve never framed “change the world” as an ego drive but that really does make a lot of sense.
I honestly don’t think outcomes were that important for the folks who were in the industry in the 80’s and early 90’s. “No one became a billionaire back then” is something I’ve been told a few times.
I’m face palming so hard my hand is embedded in my face st the last one. Especially since surgeons earn 500k+ so even leaving aside the tremendous difference you can make in a person’s life as a doctor, that comment is just completely ignorant.
I've worked in medical finance as a consultant, and a huge problem that I've seen is that although private insurance was originally intended to encourage competition, it has made prices much more complicated and opaque for the end consumer (patient).
Generally speaking, each hospital/practice/clinical lab has to negotiate with individual insurance companies to get reimbursed at a given rate minus "contractual adjustments" - this negotiation process is highly inefficient, given that each payer may do things differently (a contract with BCBS of NC may be different than one with Florida Blue), and smaller providers simply don't have the bandwidth or resources to have any leverage in this process.
The complexity of this ecosystem only hurts consumers and providers (and helps the payers, of course), and although many insurance entities call themselves "non-profit", I seriously question their motives.
It's almost reminiscent of the era leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, where complex derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and other overly sophisticated financial instruments made those that worked in the industry fantastically wealthy, while the common people were left holding the bag when the stock market finally plummeted.
I hope we can find ways to simplify this system - the single payer system, for all of its flaws, seems like a step forward in the right direction.
Insurance companies are also incentivized to make every claim a battle of attrition with healthcare providers and patients through denying, delaying, and traps make of fine print.
Why hospital even need to negotiate with insurance company? Can't they just set the price they deem reasonable and then let the patient and insurance to work out the payment within themselves .
It works that way for 'out of network' facilities and doctors, and there are higher deductibles and lower limits on payouts for those as the insurance copany has no fiscal control.
The negotiations happen for 'in network' systems, and it's in the hospital's interests to be 'in network' for as many insurance companies as possible, as most people choose 'in network' care providers.
Firstly, why would a hospital relinquish control of payment to the patient? The hospital is the one getting paid, after all, and they want to maximize their profits (aka get paid as much as they can).
Secondly, if a provider doesn't negotiate with an insurance company, the insurance company would naturally reimburse a lot less. In the U.S., the lion's share of provider revenue comes from insurance companies instead of patient self-pay, so they have less leverage to negotiate here. Of course, a large hospital system could just say "screw you, we won't join your network" (in which case they have the upper hand, since people are more likely to pay insurance premiums for plans that include their current doctor/hospital).
"As discussed in the introduction, public information may be profitable if sophisticated investors like hedge funds are skilled information processors. Alternatively, private information may be more valuable when used in conjunction with public information." (pg. 19)
The paper goes on to show evidence suggesting that the predominant channel is the latter complementary private information mechanism.
It does seem counterintuitive that publicly-available information does indeed generate alpha, but the real valuable insight here is that hedge funds are able to generate alpha from using public data synergistically with private data.
> It does seem counterintuitive that publicly-available information does indeed generate alpha, but the real valuable insight here is that hedge funds are able to generate alpha from using public data synergistically with private data.
Even more than that: the best funds can generate alpha by simply combining different sources of public data without necessarily using any nonpublic data.
Honestly, a lot more, at least until we get them right.
I think we are going to see a cambrian explosion of crypto social media platforms as people experiment with different incentive structures, and learn what kind of content is created by particular structures.
And building the initial momentum is definitely going to be a big challenge, but one that will be mitigated by the reward system of a community-owned platform. The value of a social media platform is not in the software, but in the social network. With cryptocurrrency-based networks, it will be easier than ever for users to share in the fruits of creating that network.
I think the limiting factor for most people is motivation, not intelligence.
Reading books and doing tutorials will certainly help you, but you might get burned out quickly. Working on projects seems like a much better use of your time.
Eventually, you'll have to pick up some books and learn theory, but the main challenge is getting to that point where you'll find the theory useful.
We have ideas how to make relational databases secure while running everything server-side, thanks to recent research publications [notably CipherBase from Microsoft Research http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2013/Papers/CIDR13_Paper33.pdf] and advances in CPU hardware. Early days, but we'll probably test it first in the open source ZeroDB database [https://opensource.zerodb.com] and then apply the same method to existing relational databases.
Too many companies see software development as a menial "cost center" while hypocritically relying on it on a fundamental level for operations.
While I see where they're coming from - the ROI from software developers can be rather opaque for many industries - these companies are often hellbent on hiring as cheaply as possible (in-house junior developers with no experience) and cutting as many corners as they can get away with, all the while accruing massive amounts of technical debt.