I think the only way how this can be fixed it that they pass SOPA since western democracies seems to be broken beyond repair.
This bill will severely affect the very last growth engine in the US (that is internet) and the US (and the rest of the world) will sunk into even deeper recession. In other words, this bill will slow down or even prevent "paradigm shift in the economy" which is needed to start recovery of the global economy.
And this prolonged deep recession will fuel occupy WallStreet and similar movements and eventually, after a lot bad things (wars, riots, etc.), the new version of democracy will arise: the democracy were the constituents are people and not corporations.
This is my pessimistic view but history seems to be on my side :(
On a separate note (by reading your comment), isn't funny how you need to be lawyer in order to find out whether you are breaking the law or no for trivial things as this one.
USSR perfected that approach but we are getting there.
You don't need to be a lawyer to know whether you are breaking the law for something like this. It's very simple:
Are you trying to buy stuff? --> You're okay, unless...
Are you trying to buy stuff that you know is stolen? --> That's a crime.
I wonder why there are no internal talent in HP to replace CEO (you know, the second in command which will take control of the ship if CEO is hit by a bus).
Is there a company which is actively working on internal talent pool capable of replacing the acting CEO? (I can think only of Apple, but they are not typical corporation).
This is so funny. A while ago recruiter (expensive one) which was working for me to fill up a senior position in my team (I was a dev manager in a big company) sent me an email trying to recruit me...
Regarding design candidates, there are some very very good designers working in big corporation and they don't have online portfolio or personal site (in many cases because HR does not allow it). For example, as far as know, designers working at Apple (which are probably people you want to hire) will not have online portfolio or personal blog site.
True. But if they don't have that, it's hard to tell if they're really good. In a startup, that may be a reason to reject them by itself :-/
With engineers, at least there's a semi-reasonable way to see in a few hours if they can code. It's not clear that you can do anything similar for designers.
How could a startup take that sort of chance on someone, though? Hiring and firing is the most important job you have as you scale beyond a small team. A big mistake at this early stage could sink a startup, while getting it right could be the key to explosive success. Without a portfolio, you're guessing.
Also, someone who excels in the corporate world, where there are a dozen people working on the website, a dozen people working on any given project, and a couple of managers to make sure it all blends seamlessly, may not do so well in an environment where they are expected to create and deploy without guidance or oversight.
I completely agree that startup should minimize chance on hiring wrong people (that is reason I'm arguing that pay in startup must be market rate (no 20% less as many startup try) - otherwise your are gambling with the most important asset you have).
Yes, without a portfolio, you're guessing, but the problem with requiring candidate to have portfolio is that you will narrow the search to consulting/freelancer group which might not be the best pool of candidates.
Also many intelligent people which had startups or consulting end up working for corporations (Comcast, Apple, Oracle, etc.) because... because they are very very good and corporation pay with gold to get these kind of guys.
I think the main problem is that in brave new world of "connection is everything" landing job is really really hard if you just sending resume thru HR/normal process. If nothing you should always edit resume based on the job posting (so you can match lingo used in the posting) - but chances that the resume will land on managers desk is near zero (it like sending unsolicited business plan to VCs...)
The most efficient way to land the job it to establish direct contact with hiring manager (or somebody in the team). I.e., pay $50 for linkedin so you can send email directly saying exactly what you want ...
I think the problem is that good jobs (you can save to buy house) are gone. Basically, in SV, you can get 150K salary with 20 years experience and PhD only at Facebook, Google, Oracle, etc. However, these companies are extremely picky and positions like that are rarely open.
Smaller companies (and startups) are just looking for programmers - preferable fresh from college.
I predict this trend will continue: low end of programming business will grow and salaries will be suppressed because level of entry will be lowered as time goes. The high end of programming will shrink and it will be available only in big corporations.
Not really. Actually, my friends in other professions with similar education (lawyers, public servants, marketing, advertising, hedge funds) have no problems saving for a house. In other words, real estate market in San Francisco seems to be healthy: people are buying houses. It is just not for programmers.
> Basically, in SV, you can get 150K salary with 20 years experience and PhD only at Facebook, Google, Oracle, etc.
Absolutely false. If you've got 20 years experience and a Ph.D and are getting $150k at Google, you're getting seriously screwed (a senior/staff SWE is makes more in base + year-end bonus + RSUs). If you're at Facebook, you're still probably making more in _base_ and (again) get RSUs and bonuses worth something.
Outside of these companies, there are tons hiring -- especially for mid-career folks. In fact, Google is a great place for folks early in their career, but they have issues hiring mid-career folks (but they've been getting better about it).
My advice is, know something other than "read text from a database and display it on the screen". Writing basic business/consumer CRUD applications is a solved problem. Yes, it used to be that one would have to use C/C++ and much "tricky" programming to reliably do this (I still remember how complex CRM, ERP and CMS packages from the 1990s were!), but that's not the case now. Nowadays this involves stringing several open source / commercial libraries together, rather than actually building core technology. Not only is building these applications a solved problem, for non-software companies it's actually more beneficial to purchase and customize these applications rather than build their own.
I remember reading stories (in Coders at Work, I believe) where a young programmer working for a hospital (building a record keeping system) had to code/debug assembly. These days he'll be lucky to write a few lines of PHP, but most likely will just end up customizing an existing EMR system.
If you want your programming ability to be an asset you can leverage, there are two ways: you can be a systems/networking/distributed systems developer, or you can learn a topic like computer vision, AI/machine learning/NLP. In first case you should know C, C++, socket programming, distributed systems and (for few companies) general JVM basics (garbage collection, performance) like the back of your hand (this is something you can still do to a large extent on your own time). In the second case, you should be sure to have a solid grasp of the Computer Science / Math / Stats involved.
Both of these are applicable in many areas: from finance, to highly scalable web applications, to stand-alone products (web browsers require a lot of systems programming chops, there is also data mining software, enterprise search, security/spam prevention...). You don't need a Ph.D for both of these, and (unfortunately) outside of Google, Oracle, Facebook and a few other companies (that have a healthy relationship with the academia) a Ph.D. is considered a negative. They do require persistence, passion and willingness to invest time and take risks: taking jobs in companies willing to take a risk _on you_ by giving you challenges and responsibilities.
My auto mechanic lives right next to my parents, but has slightly more expensive home. My dad is a mathematician, my mom is a software engineers and this is all in Silicon Valley. Yes, they're in Almaden and not in Menlo/Atherton.
A rank-and-file software engineer working on say business applications or relatively non-specialized software can still afford a home in Fremont (even less expensive).
If you want to buy a home in the 280/101 corridor or in Manhattan, yes, you need to do something different. Don't expect to have a 98-99th percentile income without being at 99th percentile in your profession (but again, doable for a Staff Engineer at Google, or someone who joined a relatively safe-bet pre-IPO startup like Facebook).
I just want to point one thing: As China is becoming the super-power (engine of the world), their view how copyright should be handled will become prevalent.
In other words, the majority of money to be made will be in Chindia and not in Europe and US. We need to prepare for that.
The USA will find the weapon of IP law etc. it has been building all over the world turned against it.
One would expect China and India to follow USA commercial practice and use the established structures of IP. But USA-IP is not intended to be good economics in the real sense, it is supposed to benefit the USA. When the USA is a net importer, it will be the loser. It will start to disavow international IP.
But IP is fairly dumb in an information economy so it must die out in the not too distant future anyway.
Historically speaking, it is far more likely than in 10-20 years, China will "see the light" and institute much stronger IP laws, once they have more stuff to protect, because your proposal is unstable; if the US starts disrespecting Chinese copyright, the historical outcome is a treaty, not mutual disrespect. If mutual disrespect were the stable outcome, we'd already see that.
This bill will severely affect the very last growth engine in the US (that is internet) and the US (and the rest of the world) will sunk into even deeper recession. In other words, this bill will slow down or even prevent "paradigm shift in the economy" which is needed to start recovery of the global economy.
And this prolonged deep recession will fuel occupy WallStreet and similar movements and eventually, after a lot bad things (wars, riots, etc.), the new version of democracy will arise: the democracy were the constituents are people and not corporations.
This is my pessimistic view but history seems to be on my side :(