Well, we already got examples with companies implementing the "take as much PTO as you like" benefit, the counterintuitive result is that employees tend to take as much or less days off than what they had before in fixed amount, without QoL improvements.
The thing is, the fact that something is possible doesn't mean that people will feel comfortable doing it. Cultural norms, management style or habits aren't easy to change.
I live and work in France, where you legally have 5 weeks of PTO. The 5th week has been introduced 40 years ago. And yet, it's still hard for a lot of HR departments to make sure that employees properly take all of their PTO each year.
Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, left unsupervised with goals to reach, it seems that most people tend to overwork themselves rather than laze off.
So, you think the French networking infrastructure builds and maintains itself? Companies tend to only build infrastructures in very populated areas where it will quickly turn to profit. French government and collectivities have to incentivize, legalize and pay for them to properly cover the territory. (and to this day there are still a few zones where internet is only available through satellite).
It is almost already the case. However, there is a loophole. To avoid crashing starting businesses, the current tax is on profits, not on revenues. What big internet companies like Google and Apple do is splitting their companies in several entities. One entity is making the revenues. The other is "administrative services". The administrative one, located in a low-tax country, bills (highly) the one that makes the revenues. So the revenues are made in rich european countries, but the profits are made in the low-tax ones. (The example is oversimplified, but you get the idea). This is clearly cheating, but it's legal. Europe didn't manage to close the loophole because of the countries who profit from it. And no single cheated country has yet acted because the US backs this behavior.
This lacks data. We'd need to know the efficiency, life expectancy and energy production cost of the cells in order to know if this is really interesting.
If you need more energy to produce the cells than the amount they'll provide throughout their lifetime, it's not worth it.
Sure, it looks cool, but it's too soon to publicize.
I tried hyper v2 recently, took some time to fiddle with plugins and config everything to my liking. It was usable, though missing the ability to launch different shells in different tabs (I'm a windows user, so being able to have a git bash tab, a cmd tab, a powershell tab, a wsl tab, etc. is kind of a must).
This morning I was prompted to upgrade to hyper v3, I clicked yes, it refreshed. All my plugins and configs were gone. No prior warnings, no suggested upgrade path, just full wipeout. I uninstalled hyper and went back to cmder.
Clickbaity title but I think the article makes a good point and we should invest time and thinking into expanding the capabilities of our fw instead of iterating over things that have been done to death.
Agreed that it looks more like an investment plan than a loan, especially with the funds being unlocked gradually upon completion of assignments and courses attendance.
My point was that if you strip out the marketing "good intentions" part (not saying that the good intention aren't there), then this looks like a financial product of sort. Which made me wonder why bother combining the financial part with the school. But I got the answer about that.
Note that I'm not in the US, so I can't really get a feel of how risky this is for the student. Is 40k/y a common starting salary for a beginner or is it usually higher? 15% is due when you get to 40k salary, so that would leave you at 34k/y. Is that comfortable, or is that 6k loss hard to absorb?
So, basically, your company is part school, part loan agency. The loan business is offering to students a loan which covers scholarship in the school + 10k, and then bets on the job market for interests at 2 years terms.
This way to put it is sure less appealing than "we pay you to learn" but closer to the actual business model.
Looks like you could have partnered with an existing program (or several) for the teaching part, and only run the lending/revenue sharing. What pushed you towards handling the school yourselves? More confidence in the results? Difference in the legal/financial stuff due to the business structure? PR value? Taste for teaching? Bit of all that? Something else?
The thing is, considering the current state of web development, "front-end/back-end/full stack" labels just don't hold up. Knowing cache strategies, all the subtleties of consuming full blown services, orchestrating computing distribution, etc. used to be deemed "back-end" because the webserver did it. Now with service workers, background workers, fetch api, indexedb and many new browser apis and frameworks, you can run all that in a browser. Does that make it in fact "front-end stuff" ? And all the complex tooling to set to do efficient SSR/code splitting, with all this transpiling and bundling, forcing you to understand http, resource and module loading, file system, componentized architecture... Is it more "backendy"?
I recently interviewed for a "full stack" job, first thing I did was asking what they imagined the daily tasks to be. Turned out, it was mostly about dealing with stuff involving data and request flow orchestration spanning on both services and browser, and wiring up some react components to handle the data flow / rendering. The "UI" components are handled by a team of specialists in UI/UX/semantics/accessibility/animation... So what should the job be called ? Client-server app developer? Glue developer? Backend guy who knows the browser as an app platform? Developer of all the stuff you can't see on screen?
I've seen other companies using "full stack" for other meanings. "UI guy who knows how to deploy", "service guy who knows enough to diagnose and patch the front when UI guy has higher priorities", "guy who make templates render data", "guy who will be able to perform maintenance tasks accross all the layers while specialists handle the features"...
So for me, the true problem is that we are collectively bad at describing what we do, and give to non-tech people some umbrella terms that spread more confusion.
There are things mixed up here, and it's my fault for bringing two different things in the mix.
In the case of the advice given to OP to give their phone number because recruiters won't use their contact email, it's situational.
If the resume is good enough and the position not easy to fill, the recruiter will use the email, because it would be unprofessional in these conditions to pass on a good applicant just because of lazyness.
If you work for a company where good applicants are legion and you can be that picky, well, considering the competition in the space, lucky you ^^'
Now, for the prospection case, I don't think the reason for trying to go for the phone call is data collection. Point is, emails get people to think. A developer considering changing jobs will read them, but only reply if the content is tempting enough: company clearly stated, guarantees that everything will be great (recruiting process, salary, advantages, work environment...)
However let's face it, most jobs are average / low bar, and developers knowing their worth won't even consider them. So recruiters who aren't lucky enough to have dream jobs amongst there clients have two options:
- refusing to work for companies with low standards, and specialize in giving only good positions. This is a risky long game, requires investment in assessing the companies, then building trust and reputation.
- forget about it, and play the numbers game. This is the setting where phone calls are more "efficient": it's all commercial techniques, don't give away much, favor direct contact to force people to agree to things they wouldn't if they had all the data and thinking time. This produces more matchings, so more money for the recruiter. Downside: it allows companies with crappy practices to still get a share of the applicants' pool, especially if they can afford a big turnover anyway.
Note: of course you can consider that playing the numbers is what gives you food, so, too bad for the developers who wasted time in crappy recruitment processes or even crappy jobs because of that. And I'm not saying all the pairings are for crappy jobs anyway, you can also have average or underestimated ones that just don't stand out in the market.
My point here is mostly that no, using email isn't a stupid way to get the job done, it's efficient if what you have to offer is demonstrably good. If your job offers are unattractive though, that's when you need to use phone calls and persuasive techniques.
And that's the reason I refuse discussions made through phone or in person contact right at the beginning: it doesn't let me fact check and explore options, and I may be pushed to agree to a pointless interview just because of a good "salesman recruiter". It's a waste of time.
" As a recruiter I am far too busy to be bothered emailing people who provide only an email address as their primary mechanism of contact. 999/1000 resumes include a phone number."
I find this one especially funny, being constantly spammed by unsollicitated recruiters asking for a phone number to "discuss opportunities". My answer is usually "if you have a good offer, write down the specifics without hiding stuff and sent it by email. As a developper with a good full time job and a social life, I am far too busy to be bothered on the phone for no good reason."
I can't understand this belief that phone is faster and more convenient. Real-time interactions are disruptive, and if you don't agree on a timeframe (using async communication like email...), Most of the time the phone call will be made at a wrong time, causing frustration for everyone.
So, not giving a phone number before some fruitful written exchange is a great way to check if a recruiter care enough about efficiency and other people's time. If not, well, too bad.
The question is tricky, because it suggests that getting things done and having quality code somewhat differ.
For me it doesn't.
In my company, code of poor quality is just not done. To get code in master branch you must have made a design document to explain your assumptions and decisions, it must pass automatic checks and code review, it must be tested, and pass regression checks on CI.
When this is at the core of how the team works, this doesn't decrease time to market, and actually helps accelerate as you can add new features with confidence that you don't have to stop because of breaking something.
Everything depends on your experience, but in my opinion, companies that would only hire based on tech stack aren't worth working for anyway. And marketing yourself on your stack is a bad idea. Ask yourself, what kind of problems are you able to solve? Which domain do you know? When you find the answer, sell that. If you know really well how to solve some issues, you can solve them in any language. And you're not paid for the code you produce, but for the problems your code solves.
Too bad the differences in translation styles make it really easy to spot which is which without even having to really read. :/ And I'm not even a native English speaker.
Well, maybe, I don't know, my only data points are personal experience and testimonies, which are not really the best building blocks for fully informed opinions.
However, I'd argue that this depends a lot on what you value in life. If I get paid less than someone for the same job, but that "less" is already way enough to live my life in full, am I really screwed?
I don't know. I think that yes, I am screwed if that makes me jealous and pushes me to want stuff I don't need for the sake of it.
As I said, I'd rather take more time over more money.
Or I'd be satisfied if I knew that additionnal wealth was given where it's useful.
In my opinion, race to more and more personal wealth is damaging.
But that's just my opinion, on an absolute scale, I may be putting in the same amount of work as others for less pay (aren't we all?), and that can be considered unfair, true. And it would surely bug me if the difference was high enough for me to struggle, so my 'positive attitude' may as well be just me not caring because I lack nothing anyway :/
Depends on what you call decent and how far from the center you go.
I'm currently outside of Paris, having 15 minutes on foot plus 15 minutes on train plus 15 minutes in Subway to go to work.
I share a large two bedrooms flat (73 square meters) with a friend, and my share is 700€. (this includes water, electricity, heating, garbage collection and unlimited internet connection)
Sure if you insist on having a big flat right inside Paris it may go up to 3k, but if you tolerate commute time you can find better rates.
Hum, I don't know how the system works in the US, but in France a lot of money is taken from the salary to cover for health insurance, unemployment insurance and retirement plan. Plus we have 5 weeks paid vacation automatically included.
And I think cost of life is lower than in the US, even in Paris which is the more expensive area.
To go with numbers, I currently earn 50k€ per year (gross), which makes for 3k€ per month (net). I don't have a car (no need in Paris). This income is enough for me to live my life without any privation, going to bars, cinema, restaurant, weekend trips, etc whenever I want, and still save 10 to 40% of it each month. Last year I bought a new computer, a new phone, and 2 weeks vacation in Iceland without even touching my savings account.
All that knowing that if I go unemployed, I stay at full pay several months, if I'm sick I'm covered, and when I reach 65 yo I'll get retirement rent until end of life. Oh, and I'm only in my early 30's, meaning I get to get paid more and more.
After my next raise, which should occur this year considering I got a title upgrade, I'm even considering stopping asking for money and asking for additionnal time off instead.
So, I don't know how your 100k+$ reflect on your life in the US, but sorry I don't feel any need for it :)
I live and work in France, where you legally have 5 weeks of PTO. The 5th week has been introduced 40 years ago. And yet, it's still hard for a lot of HR departments to make sure that employees properly take all of their PTO each year. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, left unsupervised with goals to reach, it seems that most people tend to overwork themselves rather than laze off.