As long as we're talking incentives, your plan gives a huge incentive to fire someone just before the end of their first year of employment. At the end of the year you're faced with paying a recruiter 2 years of salary, but if you fire them you just got a year of work for free.
But seriously, I think this sort of service would be aimed at employers looking for long term professional employees, not some temporary code jockey. In that case, dismissing a proven employee in order to save a years' salary would be counterproductive.
However, your criticism is valid, and measures would have to be taken to keep employers like that at bay.
The article mentions "arrested for a felony" not "convicted". Obviously these are very different things, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people have a problem with people found innocent still having their privacy invaded, not to mention the incentives it gives authorities to arrest more people. It almost encourages 'fishing' by arresting people with little to no evidence (or on unrelated charges) to get the DNA sample, and then releasing them without pressing charges. Groups that already feel targetted by the police might be wary of policies which give incentives for making questionable or spurious felony arrests in order to get data for investigations into future or previous crimes.
Ah yes. It does say arrested. My bad. Still doesn't really concern me. Groups that already feel targeted by police also tend to over-exaggerate the possibility that maybe at some point in the future someone may misuse it.
From California Prop 69 in 2004 [1]:
Upon Enactment of Measure
• Adults and juveniles convicted of any felony offense.
• Adults and juveniles convicted of any sex offense or arson offense, or an attempt to commit any such offense (not just felonies).
• Adults arrested for or charged with felony sex offenses, murder or voluntary manslaughter (or the attempt to commit such offenses).
Additionally, Starting in 2009
•Adults arrested for or charged with any felony offense.
So we have 7-8 years of them getting DNA from people arrested for felony sex offenses, murder or voluntary manslaughter and 3-4 years of them getting DNA from people arrested for any felony. That should be enough data to draw some conclusions. Anybody have any studies to show the uptick in spurious felony arrests in California since Prop 69 passed in 2004? I would also expect to see a drastic shift from that small subset of offenses after 2009 when any felony arrest qualified since it would be a lot less risky to falsely arrest people for felonies far less important than sex crimes and murder (like tampering with a mail box or something stupid like that).
"weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school."
Wow. Since the rest of your post seems to equate "top-tier school" with the Ivy's (plus maybe MIT/stanford or whatever) this is just amazingly wrong to the point of being offensive.
There are tons of smart, driven and dedicated high school students in America who have no chance of getting into Ivy League schools. If you're lucky enough to be born into the right family so that you can go to the right private jewish prep school in one of a handful of posh suburbs, then being smart, driven and dedicated means you can probably get into one of the Ivy schools.
For every kid going to a public school in the midwest, who has to check the "will need financial assistance" checkbox (if the application fee alone didn't make them skip applying) and doesn't have any legacy or connections, then applying to Harvard is a lottery ticket even with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a long resume of extra-curriculars.
There are plenty of smart, driven and dedicated 18 year olds who won't be heading to Harvard or Yale next fall. Admittance to one of those schools correlates more with growing up privileged than it does about intelligence.
I didn't say those are the only people who are weeded out, just that, in general, people who don't have those qualities are less likely to get into "top-tier" schools.
Admissions at these schools actually work a little bit like hiring at prestigious firms in this sense, right? Plenty of awesome applicants get rejected or are priced out of even applying (as you pointed out). But since the average applicant is still quite qualified, that doesn't really matter to the institution, nor to our discussion.
As something of a footnote, I really didn't mean to imply that only Ivy League grads are smart, driven and dedicated. I'm definitely not one, and I like to think I'm reasonably bright.
I'd be more excited if they gave me the option to disable the annoying "spin the map when you try to pinch-zoom" feature. I've never wanted my phone to give me a map where north is some arbitrary direction spun with my fingers and it's difficult to zoom without accidentally rotating the map.
// I know it's off topic, but it makes the map barely usable and I can dream that some google engineer will see my plea and consider it.
Account created 45 minutes ago, to post a wildly unlikely and almost certainly embellished if not entirely fictitious anecdote.
What is it about sexism on HN that brings out every troll, sock puppet, white knight, astroturfer, and any other internet message board cliche?
The most sexist thing I've ever heard in a decade of real world work and interactions in the software industry can't hold a candle to what anonymous internet posters apparently see on a daily basis.
Yeah, I did create this account because this is an issue very dear to my heart.
I blogged about some of this when it happened about a year ago on livejournal, and that post made it to the front page of hn back then. I've experienced a lot of bullshit from brogrammer types. Of course, sometimes there's no bullshit. Some of my fellow CS grad students are awesome to work with. I'm dating one, and he's a champ. Others have 'calendar girls' up at their offices, or make lame jokes like "Do you taste pineapple? That's funny, cause I've been eating it all week." (Which is an oral sex joke, kids). When people gossiped that I'd been sleeping with the Algorithms prof (who was like 65) because I got into the class without taking the prerequisites, other guys came to my defense. There's good and there's bad, and it's certainly not all bad. But some people are really, really awful, even in the real world.
Edit: And to be fair, I go out to the bar on Fridays with my coworkers (fellow grad students), which is where some of these things happen. At my undergrad institution, some of this happened while bowling on our weekly bowling night. Most of this stuff didn't happen at work - it happens at events that are guy programmers and me. If I had kept in social circles outside of my field and only interacted with these people in a professional setting, and never ever networked, I would have been fine.
Or it could be a real thing, that is common but not absolutely pervasive. I never SEE all sorts of problems that I care about (murders, rapes, etc) but I don't assume all reports are bogus.
Nothing in the post above sounds unbelievable to me.
How? Because parents, teachers and mass media said to 'do what you love and the money will follow' or some variant, so kids picked majors with no demand in the labor market.
Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.
Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.
In other words, the average lit major spent 50% more time unemployed than the average engineering major. That actually shows that field of study does make a major difference, even when times are hard for both.
My point may have been a bit subtle. The argument is not about absolute levels (no one would dispute that techies have better employment outcomes than fuzzies, both in getting a job and compensation).
People are claiming that recent youth unemployment is due to bad choice of major: the argument seems to go that, as technology is introducing serious economic disruption, people who get humanities degrees are disproportionately left at a significant market disadvantage, which is causing the recent uptick in college graduate unemployment. This, however, doesn't account for the actual historical data, as engineering and literature majors show similar relative employment rates as in 2001.
This is misleading because it doesn't factor in desire for work, pay, or even hours etc.
If I get a CS degree then make 100k a year for 2 years, then quit because I want to take a 6 month vacation and then go run my own startup that looks on average in bulk identical to someone with a "soft" degree working two separate part time jobs for $10 an hour hopping from job to job every year or so with 3 months of unemployment in between.
Plenty of students go into school not knowing what they want to do, with no direction for finding their talents. If you don't take the first steps to discover what you like to do and build on your talents, you simply have no direction at all, which is much worse than us overflowing with artists or musicians who made music and art with terrible income. At least then we have somewhere to go and funnel talent into.
What you major in isn't that important. This community needs to break out of the "choose a major for the job you want" shell. That same line of thinking is partly to blame for this whole mess anyway, since college departments can't possibly keep up with changing job markets. College students should learn skills, and their major is simply one way to do that.
Speaking as someone who puts his life in engineers', chemists', and clinical biologists' hands on a regular basis, I think there's at least some wisdom to the idea that folks should be specifically educated for the job they're going into.
Granted, there's also a whole range of people who major in subjects that aren't closely tied to much in the way of non-academic jobs, and end up in careers that aren't closely tied to much in the way of academic subjects. For that case, I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to reconsider the basic structure of higher education from the ground up, rather than picking at the margins.
The standard bachelor's degree program is fabulous for certain purposes, but other cases make it look very similar to the "bundled channels" thing that is popular with cable and satellite TV providers: An archaic business model which primarily serves to disserve customers by forcing many of them to choose between paying for much more service than they actually want, need, or will use, and getting no service at all. In one corner, you have lots of people who don't really need a full bachelor's degree, but end up going into serious debt pursuing one anyway because no better option is available. In the other, you have lots of people who would love to take some individual classes, but find that the university won't let them if they are not enrolled in a 4-year program. Even if they already have a bachelor's degree. Even if it's in a related field.
Better yet, people should stop thinking that a 4-year arts&science college degree is a prerequisite for any sort of grown up job. More people would be better served by going to trade or technical schools, or learning on the job, and spending their free time indulging their educational passions or intellectual hobbies via self-study instead of digging themselves into 5 figures of debt learning nothing more than what they could with a mere library card.
Yeah, I dunno - people like us were also talking shit on the people who chose CS or MIS or whatever back in '99 based on the fact that there was strong demand in the labor market until the first crash. Now we're talking shit the other way.
To play devil's advocate, the moment the government gets involved, so do politics.
Contraception and sexually transmitted diseases - will the religious right / moral majority voters turn against a representative who supports medical research for these?
What about diseases associated with lifestyle - smoking, alcohol, obesity. Will a parent group ask why X million is going to emphysema research when it could have gone to childhood cancer research instead? What about the anti-vaccine groups? Vegan/Vegetarian groups? Whatever other special interest group or political viewpoint?
I really don't want to see Bill O'Reilly or Rosie O'Donnell on tv expressing their outrage at why funding is going to curing the wrong diseases/disorders.
Does anyone have experience with cost of living in the bay area vs Austin, TX? According to the cost of living calculator on CNN Money, $120,000 in San Francisco is equivalent to $70,000 in Austin.
Has anyone here moved from Austin to Silicon Valley or vice versa? How accurate are the online cost of living calculators to what you experienced in person?
Having lived in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin, my estimation is that the amount of money required for a family to live the same lifestyle (owning similar level home, access to good schools, reasonable commute, etc.) in Austin as in Silicon Valley / SF is at least 2x. I'd estimate the differential to be significantly less for someone single or DINK.
Its unfortunate but you'll typically win the adjusted salary comparison by comparing any other place in the US (of course except NY and possibly LA). The sense that Ive gotten is the average salaries float around 85-95 in Austin TX
Google says the group of major players colluding together in a joint bid for patents is anti-competitive. Google did not want to join this anti-competitive collusion. How is this inconsistent, shocking, or bad?
Couldn't the simple explanation be "If we join forces with Microsoft and Apple to jointly buy these patents, the DoJ is going to come down on all of us for illegal anti-competitive behavior"? Why are people acting like Google did something wrong by not wanting to join the cartel that they are now publicly saying is anti-competitive and that the DoJ should impose limits on?
There is 'general public' and there is 'tech-savvy android users'. The former you have probably characterized correctly, but I suspect you are underestimating the size of the latter. As the grandparent mentions, if people are posting on forums to help support the devs, then at least some people are being persuaded to use the service because they believe they're helping the developers.
Many people do go out of their way to support independent musicians or indie game makers. It's not unreasonable to believe that there are people who want to help support small mobile development shops.
It is helping the developers. It is getting them a broader userbase than they would otherwise have by having it promoted front and center on the app store, and also it being free. I think it is pretty humorous people would assume they would just get free money from Amazon for this.
As these developers discovered, all a broader user base brought them was increased infrastructure and support costs, with zero uptick in subsequent sales.
"A broader userbase" that doesn't pay anything isn't "help" by any stretch of the imagination for a number of business models.
