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Absurd Alhazred posted:I went to a presentation for a startup called Truxx, which is basically Uber for moving things. One of the questions from the audience was "what are you going to do when established businesses complain about regulations you might be violating", and the response was that there's nothing relevant yet or something. Jesus christ, this is actually real.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:38
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silence_kit posted:Aren't most taxi drivers independent contractors? Varies from place to place, but there's definitely a misclassification issue with a lot of taxi and delivery drivers as well. Generally, independent contractors are supposed to perform work that's outside the "core" business of the contracting company. This is really problematic for Uber because they're clearly in the business of ferrying people around. They'd have no problem at all if they were simply a middleman to pair passengers with drivers, but seriously presenting that as their business model would mean giving up almost all of the control they currently exert over drivers. That said, Uber isn't unique in loving this up and 1099 misclassification didn't start with the sharing economy. It's a problem in general, Uber is just incredibly blatant about it.
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Feb 9, 2016 22:48
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Flip Yr Wig posted:But it's not totally crazy to believe that Uber does add something via their platform that could survive labor regulations and overall be a positive for the customer, is it? The questions to ask are how much value does Uber derive from its control over its drivers, and how much value is derived from its pricing scheme? A legitimate operation building off of Uber's model would have to sacrifice at least one of those advantages, by either allowing drivers to behave as truly independent operators (in which case they can no longer control prices) or by treating them as employees (in which case they need to raise prices significantly).
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Feb 11, 2016 05:26
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icantfindaname posted:welcome to capitalism The culture of serial entrepreneurship that exists in startup land really is something unique and hosed up, though.
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Feb 13, 2016 08:21
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lol if you don't launch literally all apps by just hitting winkey and typing (a feature which has been a part of the OS since vista) Seriously, though, I use Windows 10's virtual desktops on my work laptop on a daily basis. They're barebones as hell, but feel way better to use than just about every third party option that existed pre-10. Windows 10 has a lot of nice quality of life features.
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Feb 15, 2016 22:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The only reason it got replaced was because it died. Yeah, I do a moderate amount of gaming on my PC and I've basically only replaced parts over the last several years as they've died or if a really, really good deal popped up. I remember the constant upgrade cycle of the 90s and early 00s, and things are just a lot different now. The idea of a 4+ year old midrange computer still being capable of playing games maxed out would have been unthinkable back then.
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Feb 16, 2016 16:46
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Summit posted:edit: by 1099 I mean I have an S-Corp (with 1 employee) that bills a large company hourly for the work I do — they give me a 1099 for this so I think it counts? People are almost universally talking about gig economy bullshit like Uber when they complain about 1099 stuff. I'm a 1099 too (I'm a self employed software developer) and I'd never even consider trading it for a "stable" job, but that's because I get to reap all the actual benefits that come with self employment. That's a lot different from people who are employees in all but name.
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Feb 23, 2016 05:23
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Mozi posted:29-year-olds are millennials now? I'm no drat millennial. You aren't even close, friend. Millennial goes down to somewhere around 1979-1980 if you want to get fuzzy with your demography, but if you were born after 1980 you're dead on.
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Feb 24, 2016 02:22
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computer parts posted:A lot of people don't like uprooting everything every few years, even though that's the prevailing trend these days. Making big moves for work also tends to be easier for young people. I have several friends in their early 30s who have started to complain about hitting career brick walls because it's not something they're willing/able to do anymore.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:03
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Mr Cuddles posted:This is true. I had a contract for two months where I literally did nothing for the first three weeks and at first I was thinking it was a sweet gig then I actually started to get annoyed and bored by the whole thing so just started making improvements everywhere I could, left a bunch of pull requests open and went on my merry way to my next contract. This is basically my life right now, except it's tolerable since I primarily work remotely so I can get actual work done on other projects. I'd feel like I'm ripping this client off if not for the constant email exchanges and meetings where I find new and exciting ways to explain that I am literally doing nothing. I couldn't imagine actually dragging myself into an office every day for this without wanting to stick a gun in my mouth.
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Mar 12, 2016 17:56
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the talent deficit posted:Programming internships are almost universally paid at close to market rate. You can expect to make ~20k for 4 months at Google/FB/Apple etc You people really need to stop talking about literally the biggest, most desirable tech companies in the world as if they're representative of anything. Even SV pay scales aren't representative of the industry as a whole. $60k/year is pretty close to the nationwide median salary for software developers so, no, companies don't "universally" pay their interns that much. Edit- Not trying to be a dick or anything, it just seems like D&D has an unusually high number of people who either work for or have worked for these companies, and that is absolutely not the typical career path for software developers. It ends up taking these discussions in odd directions. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 18:23
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shrike82 posted:Having done recruiting for finance analyst and then consulting associate roles, I've come to the conclusion that top firms make the hiring process onerous more for the signalling/prestige effect than necessarily just finding the "best" talent. It also just makes practical sense. If you're desirable enough as an employer to be competing for only the best potential hires, why bother sifting through a huge number of potential applicants when you can just recruit graduates who will definitely want the job from the "best" schools? There's nothing particularly bad about doing this, it's just that the effect it ultimately has on the rest of the labor pool is horrible.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:12
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Google et al. are basically saying they think someone mediocre from a top university is always better than the best from a normal university. Not really. They're saying that they can still find enough qualified hires even if they limit their pool to top universities only. I'm not familiar enough with Google's hiring process to say this for sure, but I assume they literally don't just look at top schools and offer jobs to every single graduate with the right degree. It's perfectly fine as a hiring practice even if you assume that the distribution of talented graduates is identical at all schools.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:40
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foobardog posted:I also know that I'm practically living the dream coming from a great school in a great field that tolerates so much bullshit from me. I just think that really should be the case for everyone. This is how I've felt for the last few years, although I tend to describe it as a kind of economic survivor's guilt at this point. Tech (and development work in particular) really is a kind of ridiculous field at the moment if you aren't killing yourself to work at a company that expects 12 hour days from you.
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Mar 17, 2016 05:15
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Arsenic Lupin posted:My liking the service doesn't mean it's sustainable, but I haven't seen online qualms about Taskrabbit's viability, not since a 2014 shake-up of their business model (referenced in the article I link above). I don't know too much about Taskrabbit and I couldn't find much more information on this after a cursory search, but it doesn't look like they have the same 1099 abuse issues as Uber. Do their contractors have more or less total control over things like rates and equipment?
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Mar 17, 2016 21:59
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Subjunctive posted:They provide ratings, search, criminal record check, insurance against damages, and handle payment I think. More than just a directory, certainly. Still sounds like they're functionally very different from Uber, though. Uber's problem is that their drivers are effectively employees, and the broadest definition of independent contractor is that there's no employer-employee relationship at play. If Taskrabbit isn't trying to exert that kind of control over its users then it doesn't seem like they're in the same category as other gig economy companies that people complain about.
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Mar 18, 2016 20:28
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computer parts posted:and I'm not really convinced that it's all that useful outside of the FPS & Bethesda game genres. I'd be surprised if you don't see serious adoption in niche space and flight sim communities, probably at a much higher rate than with people who just play traditional first person games. It's the one area where a Vive/Oculus is actually the cheaper option compared to the ridiculous triple monitor setups that some people use. That said, a lot of the excitement in the indie space seems to be focused on more whimsical, casual stuff and I think that's going to end up being a massive mistake that's ultimately going to cost a lot of small developers a lot of money. The hardware itself (and the supporting computer hardware) is just way, way too pricey for me to imagine that there's going to be much demand for that kind of stuff outside of early adopters desperate for any software. These VR headsets are legitimately exciting, though. If it wasn't for the price point, the hardware requirements, and the fact that the devices themselves are ridiculously cumbersome they'd absolutely be revolutionary. From my tiny bit of experience with the Vive, I really do feel like VR is the future of gaming. The problem is that it's the future five or ten years from now, not next year.
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Mar 21, 2016 03:29
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Neo Rasa posted:My favorite parts are how shocked they are by the bamboo scaffolding as opposed to "traditional metal" like nothing more than five feet high was built ever built by humanity before aluminum or glass fibre hybrid and this sentence: "It was a great meal, but felt very foreign." I stopped reading around that point, but also because the writing style feels like a 5th grader's school paper about their family vacation. Knowing I was actually reading something written by an adult was... off putting.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:56
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red19fire posted:Is it safe to say that 'going viral' is circling the drain? Like the local news always starts their fluff stories with 'In a viral video released earlier this week...' and it's some video with 500k views that I've never heard of. What's like the cutoff point for making money on youtube? Because this article warms my black heart. I'm not really sure why that article makes you happy, to be honest. The fact that everyone except the very top content creators are effectively working extremely poorly paid full time jobs to add an incredible amount of value to platforms like youtube is... not great. Actually it's really, really bad. It also doesn't have much to do with "viral" videos since big content creators actually rely on having a longer term, more reliable fanbase. A lot of the "democratization" that the internet supposedly brings to content is wildly skewed to favor platform and service creators over actual content creators. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Mar 24, 2016 |
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Mar 24, 2016 03:45
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Randler posted:Eh. I already finance various African militias, child labour camps and dictators through purchasing various consumer goods that rely on resources and labour produced in the third world. Financing a few criminal organizations more or less by buying Steam codes on the grey market doesn't really register as an ethical issue at this point. Yeah, it's this. You can't exist in the modern world without funding a lot of terrible things, and you're almost certainly sending more money to bad people just through your normal daily life than you are by buying a cheap Steam code every now and then. It sucks, but there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Saying "well, I know for sure that this Steam code came from some shady places so I won't buy it" is just a meaningless gesture.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:51
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Chokes McGee posted:It's really terrifying to me as a tech worker. Yeah, Silicon Valley is the biggest, most visible example of this bullshit, but it's getting bad at a ground level. Eventually I'm gonna have issues finding a job. I've mitigated it by moving more and more into management and saving my coding for personal projects, but a lot of people are going to end up screwed if this goes as sideways as I think it will. This is purely anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but my experience is that there's very much an extreme shortage of programmers outside of major tech hubs. I do contract work and prefer being self-employed so I'm not in any way actively looking for a regular job, and I still get contacted by recruiters a few times per month. I've been brought in on interviews and been given offers by local companies even when I make it explicitly clear from the beginning that I'm not looking for a career change. All of this in spite of the fact that I maintain no real social media presence or online resume outside of what I provide to prospective clients. Part of why I got a little salty upthread (or maybe it is was in one of the other tech threads? these things are starting to blend together) with people talking about SV wage levels is that it feels to me like there's a huge divide in the tech industry when it comes to employment. Maybe everything really will go to hell when the tech bubble bursts and programmers start streaming out of the tech hubs in search of work, but for the moment I'm not too concerned.
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Mar 27, 2016 18:49
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It's hard to make any kind of informed comment without knowing your specific needs, but I can't help but feel that your hiring process is too restrictive if you're seriously competing with Google, et. al. Like, if the expectation is that the only programmers who can/should get jobs are ones that can command six figure salaries right out of the gate then we really are in for an incredibly hard, incredibly painful correction in the tech labor market. Keep in mind that the median salary for developers in the US is somewhere south of $70k/year. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 19:21
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I agree with the comment about "not all companies need developers who can get hired at Google". I will say, however, that "developer" is pretty elastic, and can cover anything from Javascript front ends to firmware to big-iron (as we used to call it) cloud stuff. The average developer may well be working at the power company overseeing the legacy invoice-processing system. Yeah, I definitely agree, which is why I felt the need to qualify that post. Still, I don't think there's any reasonably wide definition of "developer" (especially at entry or junior levels) where you'd find a median national salary approaching $200k/year. The trendiest job title I could think of that still falls under the development umbrella is "data scientist," and Glassdoor is telling me that the nationwide average is around $113k/year. The point I was really driving at in my original post is that there are way, way more working developers out there than there are developers who would even make it past Google's screening process. The person overseeing that legacy invoice-processing system is still a developer, and jobs like that are where a lot of developers will (and should) end up working ultimately. There's nothing wrong with that.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:55
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Sure, but I was originally responding to someone who was worried about the labor market for programmers post-hypothetical collapse. All I was saying is that I don't think it's going anywhere. Edit- I also feel like the massive gap between startup/tech darling wages and the rest of the development industry is pretty relevant to the topic at hand.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:02
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shrike82 posted:Whether it's bubble-driven or not, you have to wonder whether devs are being paid what they should and other white-collar jobs are being grossly underpaid. I don't see how a millennial making 40-50K in a major city can afford the standard milestones of middle class life - home ownership, healthcare without worry, kids, retirement savings etc. They can't. And just to be clear, none of the posts I've made in this thread were intended to imply that it's a bad thing that developers are pulling in six figure salaries in big tech hubs. The problem is that a tech crunch where high end (and possibly low and mid-end) compensation ends up being slashed is a lot more likely than tens of millions of employees suddenly having their wages doubled. But yes, median US income isn't even close to where it needs to be for the lifestyle that most people expect/are promised.
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Mar 27, 2016 21:12
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Is this chart basically lumping all freelance workers into the gig economy?
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Mar 27, 2016 23:23
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shrike82 posted:Relevant chart Jesus, I had no idea contract staffing had taken off like that over the last ten years.
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Mar 27, 2016 23:33
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If it even occurs to you that there might be more than one way to write fizzbuzz or, hell, if any solution at all occurs to you in a minute or less then fizzbuzz and that whole class of problems are not for you. They're screening questions designed to quickly rule out candidates for development jobs who literally cannot program. It's pretty much "did you completely lie about your qualifications y/n?"
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Mar 30, 2016 15:41
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I can see no way in which unleashing a 3-cu-foot robot unattended among a mass of people with a lot of free time on their hands could end badly. Menlo College itself is a business college, but there are a lot of drama-hungry geeks nearby. People keep saying this, but I don't think it's going to matter. There's going to be a lot of resistance to this stuff and I'm sure a lot of these things will end up damaged or destroyed, but ultimately they're going to have cameras installed, "accidents" will be prosecuted, and people will settle down and let it happen. There's no way that a lot of small deliveries aren't automated in 5-10 years if the the technology to cheaply do so exists.
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Apr 7, 2016 04:46
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Liquid Communism posted:If they solved the case handling in the next ten minutes it'd take at least 5 years to clear the legal hurdles that will come with the question of who is actually responsible for the car's behavior once the first one kills someone. This is actually a somewhat solved problem. Volvo, for example, has already just said that they'll take responsibility directly for accidents involving any sort of autonomous mode in their cars. If self-driving cars ever become commonplace, it's going to be because manufacturers are confident enough in their systems to just accept full liability and bypass the need for complex legislation. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 04:39
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cheese posted:And thinking that "rich" people (who apparently spend a lot of time driving around in their cars) are going to push for all the plebs to get self driving cars so they will be safer is just some odd, twisted thinking. Mostly because I assume the people who are so rich they have that kind of pull take their helicopter straight to their private jet. If there's any kind of push to sunset manually driven cars within the next few decades (and I really doubt there will be), it's almost definitely going to come from manufacturers touting the safety benefits of more connected roadways and ultimately looking to reduce their own exposure to liability. I do think we'll start seeing requirements for new cars to include progressively more sophisticated level 2/3 autonomous systems, though.
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Apr 11, 2016 16:05
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Subjunctive posted:Car-to-car is a whole other can of worms. cheese posted:And connected roadways? We are spending less on infrastructure, not more. Freeways and highways around the country are falling apart at the seams in a political climate that prizes low spending. Total pipe dream straight from Wired magazine. Whoops, sorry, I just wasn't very clear. I was talking entirely about car-to-car communication, not actual road infrastructure.
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Apr 11, 2016 21:49
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Subjunctive posted:What would the cars communicate with each other that isn't better handled by sensors on the vehicles? Simple things like knowledge of intentions (ie, "I'm braking and intend to slow down to at least [x] miles per hour") would drastically improve the efficiency of highway traffic. Like, I'm pretty good at maintaining following distance in general, but I'd be ten times better at it (and put less wear on my brakes and use less gas) if I had the intentions of the driver that I'm following beamed directly into my head. The point wouldn't be to replace sensors, it'd be to allow a pack of autonomous cars in close proximity to drive in the most efficient way possible.
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Apr 11, 2016 23:47
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cheese posted:I love when we go full circle and come back to the awkward reality of automated cars: they will exist largely to fill the role that should be occupied by widespread public transportation. That's because "autonomous cars will/won't happen within our lifetime" and "we should have better public transportation" are completely separate arguments that have no relationship to each other. Human driven cars and public transportation already fill the same roles. Autonomous cars, if they ever exist, would fill the same demand that exists for personal transportation. If you can convince people to take the bus instead of an autonomous car then you can convince them to take the bus instead of their regular ol' manually driven car too. I mean, you won't get any argument from me that public transportation is and always will be the better option. That has nothing to do with feasibility or likelihood of autonomous cars, though.
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Apr 12, 2016 00:01
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cheese posted:I disagree. A number of the arguments for self driving cars have to do with efficiency, as in "think how much we could lower congestion on the freeways in rush hour if all the cars could communicate and computers could pack them in 3 inches from each other". This is directly a moving lots of people efficiently question, and one we could address with public transportation. The safety angle is another, although again, I'm confident the deaths/injuries per million miles traveled for rail, buses, etc is probably lower than personal cars. The only reason self driving cars make sense is that we have already invested so much in turning America into a personal auto country that its probably too late to turn back now. You're missing the point, though. People in these threads are almost always talking about the feasibility of autonomous cars, or why manufacturers and ultimately consumers might choose them over manually driven cars. Getting people onto public transportation is about killing off the demand for personal transportation, and if you can't do that with manually driven cars (where public transportation already offers the benefit of not actually having to drive), then you'll never be able to do it with autonomous ones.
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Apr 12, 2016 00:28
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Liquid Communism posted:You're still not considering the full picture. A road convoy is useless for handling the reason that we have semis in the first place, that being that the population of the US is so spread out that rail service isn't practical to get goods delivered where they need to be in a timely manner any more. Road trains will work fine for going distribution center to distribution center, but they are useless if you don't have multiple trucks worth of load going to the same locality. They actually might not be a bad idea if you aren't starting from the assumption that the purpose is to outright replace all the drivers or that all the trucks need to be going to the same destination. You could have one lead driver directing several trucks that are going in the same general direction, with each truck just peeling off when it needs to to get wherever it's going. That'd be a pretty huge reduction in workload assuming the lead truck/driver was switched off regularly. Of course, then you've just got a semi-automated convoy and convoys are hilariously dangerous for pretty much everyone else on the road.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:46
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How are u posted:Why do insufferable nerds always dream of a world full of autonomous self-driving cars?? Driving cars yourself is fun. gently caress the self-driving car crew. I'm the kind of nerd that still insists on driving a stick shift because it's fun, and probably will until it becomes impossible for me to buy/maintain one at any reasonable price. I love to drive and I'm not dreaming of anything, but at the same time cars are kind of a huge negative for society and there are a lot of benefits to autonomous cars over manually driven ones. Whether it happens in a decade or a century, manually driven personal transportation isn't going to be around forever. It's okay.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:24
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Disabled people who can't drive, children and adolescents, and the elderly find themselves cut off from most of the community's life because they can't get from their homes to yoga classes, after-school meetings, churches, doctors' offices, and so on. Poor people can't get jobs because there's no way to get from their neighborhoods to the places that are hiring. This is more legitimately the kind of thing that needs to be addressed by public transportation, though. Yeah, it's possible to dream up scenarios where we have fleets of autonomous taxis running around and servicing people wherever they happen to be, but realistically that's not going to happen. And the problem with autonomous cars as a solution to the transportation struggles of poor people is that car ownership is unbelievably expensive, and if you don't make a lot of money it's one more thing that can lead to unexpected and disastrously large expenses.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:25
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The X-man cometh posted:How do taxi companies get away with classifying drivers as independent contractors? Medallions (where they exist) confuse things. In a lot of cases there's an argument to be made that any control the medallion owner might exercise over the taxi driver doesn't actually constitute an employer-employee relationship because the medallion owner is simply requiring that the driver follow the usage guidelines of the medallion that they're leasing. A lot of taxi drivers also have the freedom to set their own rates and otherwise operate as a business. The fact that Uber sets fares for driver is actually a pretty core part of the problem.
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Apr 24, 2016 00:39
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Rhesus Pieces posted:This isn't exactly a disruptive tech breakthrough. My local Stop&Shop has a program that does the same thing and allows for either pickup or home delivery, and it's been around for a few years at least. Yeah, there are several grocery stores around here that do this and have been for years. I've actually been making use of it for a while and the pickers generally do a really, really excellent job with selecting meats and produce. If I wasn't already using it out of laziness and my general hatred of grocery shopping, I might still use it just for that.
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May 17, 2016 23:14
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