I'm pretty sure the original 10+k/yr/employee for good ppo coverage is a radical underestimate, for what it's worth, though I guess "way more than ten" is technically part of the "ten+" range, haha.
The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.
Just as an FYI, that is a massive outlier based on available data.
My employees are about $500 per month in a major metropolitan area, and a family of 4 can run up to $2000 a month for the most expensive plans (I cover individuals and their spouses in full for standard plans, and could cover one dependent for basic plans).
I looked at marketplace plans in WA because I was curious, and it looks like it's about the same as where I am but nowhere near what you were quoted 5 years ago.
I got the $10k a year employee from chatgpt with "Assume I have a company with 100 employees in New York, how much on average does it cost to provide health insurance" and it gave me poor, moderate and good ppo plan prices. I figure this seemed reasonable for ballpark figures from employer friends, so the numbers may be very well off.
Sorry to focus on just one aspect of your (excellent) post, but do you have recommendations for reading up on A*/SAT beyond wikipedia? I'm mostly self-taught (did about a minor's worth of post-bacc comp sci after getting a chemistry degree) and those just hasn't come up much, e.g. I don't see A* mentioned at a first glance through CLRS and only in passing in Skiena's algorithms book. Thank you!
Not sure. I covered them during my Comp Sci degree in the mid/late 90s. I'm probably not even implementing them properly but whatever I do implement tends to work.
Just checked my copy of TAOCP (Vol 3 - Sorting and Searching) and it doesn't mention A* or SAT.
Trip report of size one, fwiw: I have a JetKVM device at home and it's been super handy in my small homelab (half dozen or so older dells and lenovos). I haven't experienced any problems with my device. It seems solidly built, the software works well and is receiving updates, and the price was very fair from what I recall. One feature that I thought was particularly a nice touch was that you can store OS images on it and have it show up as storage on the target machine (though some of my older gear doesn't seem to want to boot from it for whatever reason -- which I suspect has more to do with decade+ old workstations that last got a firmware upgrade when Obama was president than anything JetKVM is or isn't doing).
I can't say as to what it might've been like 80+ years ago, but years back I was with a friend on a trip through a PX and there was a rotary display (perhaps like you might see used for postcards in other contexts) with rank insignia and other small uniform bits for fairly low prices (single-digit dollars iirc, though this was 20+ years ago). Even if they had to pay out of pocket or deal with an irritable quartermaster, the urge to give a small remember-me-by token to a friendly (and let's be honest, beautiful) face when facing down imminent chaos and barbarity is probably strong. Similarly, I recall hearing of troops throwing their coins to kids along the embarkment route in the UK as they headed to Normandy; after all, where they were going they wouldn't need them.
The display probably exists just because soldiers need that stuff, as a practical matter.
When they're required to be in uniform, then that's a requirement.
So if yesterday a uniform got ruined (by whatever mechanism that happens -- shit does happen to clothes sometimes), then today they can scrounge together another one.
Or they put together a spare one.
Or whatever.
(But it certainly is romantic to think that extra uniform parts exist for sale primarily to give as keepsakes to the Betty Whites of the world.)
doctors and nurses have enough power to demand fixed professional(0) wages that "unskilled labor"(1) does not. no one _wants_ to make $2/hr(2) and to have to rely on the generosity of the general public for a living; in other words, it isn't the waitstaff having special privileges but rather the opposite case of them lacking better protections.
(0) which is to say, much higher
(1) a propaganda term if there ever was one. work one shift as a waiter and tell me it take no skill afterwards!
(2) $2.13 barring state-level increases over the federal minimum, to satisfy the pedants
Location: UK/Scotland, easily commutable to both Glasgow and Edinburgh
Remote: highly preferred, inclusive of US employers (see notes below)
Willing to relocate: not at present, might be a different story in a few years
Technologies: (just some keywords for searchers, see resume) Java, PHP, Go, Python, Kotlin, C, SQL and NoSQL data stores e.g. Postgres/MySQL, backend API and scalable system design, Linux, AWS/Cloud
Hi, I'm Mike; I've been a backend polyglot SDE / sometimes SRE / sometimes engineering manager with around twenty five years of experience in total. I'm a pretty flexible guy; whether it's code, systems, or people I try hard to be a useful mammal. Some of the places I've worked that you might recognize: Yahoo, Oracle (at their AWS competitor), the New York Times. I've also worked at a fair number of startups and mid-size companies over the years, and spent time acting as a consultant. tl;dr for why I'm on the market is that upper management at my last employer decided to let international remote employees go (I'm a US citizen in the UK on a spousal visa; I have full right to work for both US and UK employers without undue paperwork/visa hassles on their end).
What I'm looking for: I'm happy to dive in either as a senior individual contributor or as an engineering manager. I have no strong preferences on org size; having worked at both ends of the spectrum they each have their benefits. I'm flexible on industry too (I might have to think hard about defense). I can work US compatible hours as well as UK ones. I am not a zealot about any particular technology stack or engineering process but in an ideal world I think I'd be happiest working in something like Java or Kotlin in a linux environment building things like APIs, data pipelines, etc. or leading a team doing the same. I'm open to consulting but all things considered a full-time role is more what I'm looking for at present.
Thank you for reading, and good luck to all searching for a job or a new hire! :)
Open Maryland, Not Indiana :) (So named in this case because the company that released it, OmniTI, is based in Maryland. Source: worked there at the time) It's a good OS, as I imagine the other Illumos derivatives are, but sometimes the relatively small size of the community can be felt, e.g. in breadth/depth of available third party packages and update availability/timelines.
tbh I was guessing Volvo 240-series. I suspect cockroaches will be driving those battleships around after the bomb/climate collapse/asteroid/big crunch.
The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.
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