From what I've experienced, this is rapidly becoming untrue - CoL in Toronto has become very high, friends are paying comparable to what I paid in NYC but salaries are definitely lower. They're paying in CAD what I paid in USD, but are earning 20-30% less. Food is also more expensive (particularly eating out), on the whole, than NYC.
Most new construction apartments are quite small, and the older, larger ones command a significant premium. You can move out of the downtown core (to North York, Scarborough, etc) but then you're committed to a long commute on the slow TTC or sitting in traffic on the 401.
MTL is much cheaper, but salaries also lag even further.
'Veneer' is the term usually used. At that price, likely not solid, although butcher-block is not terribly expensive: a 240cm one is USD200 [1]. If the IKEA legs are just solid metal, it's entirely possible that it doesn't wobble provided they're affixed well.
Interesting product, maybe there's value in 3 different size slats to alleviate the seams problem while still providing flexibility?
It depends where you want to work. Here in NYC my experience, the plural of which is not data:
Enterprise-style jobs at non-tech-focused places (banks, pharma) don't care.
Big Consulting companies really don't care, they just want warm bodies.
Startups and small companies care a lot. I've been on both sides of the table and it's been a big differentiator. When I was screening potential candidates at another company, if you didn't have anything at all we were less likely to bring them in for an interview.
And it wasn't always tech stuff. One person did multiple research projects on bird species and submitted them to science journals. One person made a book of notes passed to tellers during bank heists. At a small company people spend more time with their colleagues than their SOs, and you need to like each other. Side projects are like cover letters, they let me know what you're interested in and that you're an actual human being.
Currently on lunch at a job acquired through a side project. I built it because I saw a problem, got upset enough about it to do something, and made it happen. I think that's the key - it's a combination of being interested in something and design/build/execute ability. Do it because you care, not because you want a job.
It hurts the field as a whole - when impossible-to-build CG renders and endless piles of pie-in-the-sky Post-Its becomes synonymous with 'design' it makes it that much harder to convince organizations to put resources behind including design in their planning and production.
I've met them in person a few times while working for a magazine that documented solutions in resource-constrained (not necessarily poor) environments.
IIRC, many of these projects came from actual farmers, not design students.
There's a related project, the Greenhorns [0] working to recruit new, young farmers and support them as they get going - part of that is cutting equipment and labor costs. I chatted a couple of farmers who were using the produce washers built from old washing machines.
Is it a solution for large-scale industrial farming? No. But from hobby farmers up to ones doing a 50-100 share CSA model, it makes a lot of sense and reduces barriers to entry.
Thanks for the link! I've seen similar initiatives here in NY and I love them. I think it's an excellent complement to some carrots and/or sticks that can get the spaces filled with more permanent tenants.
I'm in a similar situation - comfortable with the product, uncomfortable selling. These tips were excellent, do you have further information or some more examples?
Only because they scrap ones that don't work. There's a difference between consistently producing incredible work and consistently releasing incredible work. Curation is a big part of industry success.
I think in theory, it's fantastic - the basic tenets of computer science are really fascinating, even abstracted away. I may look like an adult, but it's just a disguise.
It may be that the sample chapter wasn't representative of the rest of the book, but I found it a bit confusing. From an admittedly quick read, I got:
- commentary on jargon
- a mention of red-black trees
- reference to the Traveling Salesman Problem
What I found confusing is that if you have no grounding in CS, you wouldn't even catch the references - they don't seem to play a real part in the story.
If the traveling salesman were trying to find the shortest route to visit everyone, and had been trying for years and years and years on his own, and some days found one that was just a little bit shorter, and it was just enough hope to keep him going...the idea that figuring this out is difficult or impossible is at least well-explained.
I'm sure my algorithms teacher is upset by this, but I've completely forgotten how red-black trees work, and I didn't get a better understanding from that chapter.
I'm not trying to be an armchair critic, and I certainly like the story, but from this particular chapter I'm not completely clear on how it explains CS concepts.
It will be bootstrapped here - the bike-sharing program will be injecting 10,000 bikes into the system as of next spring/summer.
And I defy anyone to spend time on a major non-recreational cycling route (Sands Street, 8th Avenue, the Williamsburg Bridge, Prospect Park West) when the weather is pleasant and state that the infrastructure is underutilized. Were it the ghost town that Cassidy and Weinshall claim, the DOT would not be putting in pedestrian safeguards (bollards, the wall at the bottom of the Williamsburg Bridge).
This debate has raged for the better part of this year, and the notion of Prospect Park West residents sitting with golf clickers counting cyclists in the dead of winter and claiming the paths are underutilized is ridiculous.
This is not the place for anecdotal arguments, they aren't productive. Anyone can cite stories of bad behavior on all sides: sidewalk cycling, oblivious jaywalking, and aggressive driving. It's what every cycling article on Gothamist, Streetsblog, and the NY Post stirs up, and I could write out the comments myself and be pretty close to accurate. Nobody wins, and everyone leaves feeling angry - not useful.
The article here is refuting a heavily biased New Yorker piece article by specifically refuting assertions based on fallacious assumptions.
We are where we are - everyone is behaving badly, and all sides are so deeply entrenched in their beliefs the arguments just cause people to dig in further and the ad homs and strawmen appear. HN is better than this.
The situation obviously can't continue, but it's time for a rational discussion of what's most effective, in terms of cost, and transportation efficiency, and safety for the largest number of people.
I'm prepared to have this discussion, and while I'll admit bias in a certain direction on this issue I'm open-minded enough to hear all sides. I'd like others to do the same, and we can all get onto having a fruitful and interesting discussion around solutions.
Some suggestions for potential discussion topics:
- Education/awareness
- Infrastructure costs and benefits (street parking, bike lanes, bus lanes, raised crosswalks, etc)
- Discussion of network effects
- Legislation to punish offenders (relative to cost/potential danger of the offense?)
- Maximum efficiency of moving the largest number of people (measure in average trip time)
- Externalities (pollution, business impact, etc)
- Psychology + behavior understanding and modification
They were acquired in 2009 by MOL[1], an online points and payments system. MOL already has gaming infrastructure and points mechanisms built out (as well as a Friendster-branded internet cafe and licensable cafe management software[2]) - this looks like a push to gain traction for game-related payments in the US market, already popular in much of Asia. If they can start to eat away at Zynga's share, it makes a world of sense.
Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.
Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.
For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.
My story is nearly identical (US, NY). I left after 5 years. No kool-aid drinking here.
Accenture is a culture you either fit into or you don't - a very 'up-or-out' mentality.
Some of the problems that commenters have noted are definitely attributed to the internal culture: an over-emphasis on face-time, long hours with no real work to do, and occasionally selling work that was undeliverable (technically unfeasible, impossible delivery schedule, etc).
Some management was good, a lot of it was poor, and generally the focus was on selling and looking good rather than delivering a viable product. At all levels, you're ranked against your co-workers for a very small number of promotion slots, particularly in recent times. This creates a strange dynamic: you're both trying to work with people at your level to create something useful for a client and prove that you're better/smarter/faster than your peers, some of whom are on the same project and most of whom you've never met.
Many of the complaints, however, are an effect of having large numbers of stakeholders on a complicated project. Clients are often unpredictable, and incented by a completely different set of goals. There's generally a lot of money and a lot of management involved, and people have their careers staked on these projects - disagreement is normal. Rework was extremely common due to constant spec changes, and I had to go to bat for my developers numerous times.
It's not a great work environment. Low and mid level people are generally dropped into a project with no background and the client has been told that they're experts on whatever giant, 30-year-old legacy system that the client is running. They fake it and learn on the job. There's often a hostile reception from the client employees - the perception is that you're a highly paid consultant coming to take their job or fire them. Travel is the norm, and you're expected to work long hours since you aren't going home to a family - just a generic hotel room.
Ultimately, what drove me out was the lack of interesting and rewarding work, the internal politics, and the isolation. Wish I had left sooner, but I hadn't figured out what I wanted.
Depends on where you live - here in NYC there's things like Makeville where you can take classes, would assume there are similar in most urban centers.
If there aren't any, it's the same as learning programming - pick a small project and look for how-tos (like this breadbox, for example: http://www.am-wood.com/nov97/bread.html) and have at it. Work your way up to more complicated things once you've got some skills and tools under your belt.
Learning a lot of these skills is easier than ever.
I wasn't raised doing a lot of around-the-house stuff, but in the past five years I've learned to do everything from recaulking a tub and rewiring lamps to fixing bicycles and repairing vintage rangefinder cameras.
I buy tools on craigslist and learn the steps online. Sometimes there's an unintended consequence to deal with (water spraying out of the sink, burned chicken, stripped set screws) that forums, skillshares, and hackerspaces are great at helping with.
None of this makes for a vocation, and I'm not advocating that people learn welding from eHow. But there's a lot to be learned from 'do it yourself' rather than 'do it for me'.
1. Ultimately, there's a fairly finite universe of cars that meet your criteria, even if you consider the much wider used market. If you pick, say, an EVO MR, how do you pick who gets the prize when multiple people would have suggested it?
2. We ran into this a lot on our automotive board. Someone says 'I want RWD, MT, 4 doors, under $35k' and got a bunch of answers.
But cars are ultimately pretty personal - e.g. I hate VW's interiors, but many love them. Since you've got to go look at them personally, at best you're narrowing down the universe of things to go check out. Unless you're committing to buy the one that gets the most votes.
Could be interesting collect the responses, graph them, and run some analysis on how vocal each brand's fan community is.
Most new construction apartments are quite small, and the older, larger ones command a significant premium. You can move out of the downtown core (to North York, Scarborough, etc) but then you're committed to a long commute on the slow TTC or sitting in traffic on the 401.
MTL is much cheaper, but salaries also lag even further.