I was talking to a college professor I know a couple weeks ago about this exact thing. And what they said comprised a substantial amount of the expenses of their 4 year private college made perfect sense, because it's happening to every business.
Health insurance costs.
Now, add to this:
salaries and other benefits to both staff and educators.
liability insurance.
increased food costs.
I'm certain facilities have increased costs also, from new construction to utilities.
*Plus anything else I've left out.
Let's face it, everything has become more expensive. The Five Guys meal of a little cheeseburger, little fries, and regular drink which cost me $12 4 years ago in March, 2020 (I keep records), would cost me $17-18 today (I checked the prices today at noon and walked away). That's a 40-50% increase.
Why would we expect higher education to not be effected?
It's always difficult for people to ask for help. The best thing senior engineers can do is set the example and ask for help when they get stuck on something--even if it's something they could figure out on their own with some time.
In the mid-/late-80's, you could easily get full PII (SSN, Name, DOB, address, mother's maiden name, etc) green-bar paper reports someone tossed in the trash when finished.
Plus,the University of Nebraska mentions this regarding winter wheat:
A review of seedling rates vs. yield potential is helpful. On average, there are 22 seeds per head and 5 heads per plant, or 110 seeds per plant. With an average seed size of 15,000 seeds per pound or 900,000 seeds per bushel, a pound of average-sized seed with 80% germination and emergence has a yield potential of approximately 1.5 bushels per acre. Seeding 40 lb of seed with a weight of 15,000 seed per pound has a yield potential of 60 bushels per acre.https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2019/determining-seeding-rate-wint...
A three year savings of $10B would be equal to their stated investment into OpenAI. Assume there is a global slowdown, and a corresponding decline in revenues; layoffs may be the way they've decided to free up cash flow to pay for the investment.
I don't think the drones flew over the installation. Rather, the article states, "features YouTube videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51". (emphasis mine)
So long as the areas are either public lands, or he has permission from the owners, and follows FAA regs on drone operations, nothing wrong with it.
There are a few variables to this. Are you a contractor or consultant (there is a difference). What you offer (warm body or solution). Location. Target companies size and industry sector. Economy status. Personal relationships with clients.
I started in '09 in the midst of the Great Recession, and did well. Companies were laying off, but still had projects needing done. Between 2010-2020, I also did well. 2020-now, I'm doing OK, but half the work, with regular (non-tech sector) clients have been worried about the economy, holding back on non-essential projects.
The biggest intangible though is how hard you're willing to go out and sell yourself. You have to have more than just knowledge, you have to have belief in what you're selling--which is yourself. If you can sell yourself, you'll do ok.
While remote work has made it easier and more prevalent, "hiring fraud" has been around forever. Especially in larger corporations, where interviewing was done by loosely associated teams, and the faces of all the in-person candidates blended together or were rapidly forgotten. I personally witnessed this 3 or 4 times back in the 90's, while an employee of a Fortune 5 company.
Contracting agencies were the worst with the bait-and-switch game though, even prior to H-1Bs.
>But because a lone Product Owner sees a path to promotion if they can figure out that one single killer feature that will get a massive new adoption of hypothetical new users (hardly ever realized).
This++. It's also the young hotshot phenomenon, where they come in and decide they can do everything better than the old timers (the previous hotshots 3-4 years ago), and change everything they can. We've all been there.
I have elderly family members, 85-plus, who can't understand why the UI changes all the time and they have to continually relearn. Explained this way, they get it, but still say, "they need to remember that not everyone wants to relearn everything every couple of years".
It sounds like we're roughly the same age, so I won't go completely into "get off my lawn" mode. But most families in the 80s could not scare up $3K easily, it was a boatload of money; and if they could, it was for emergencies.
It's easy to remember our youth, and think of how easy it was. And it may have been for us (well, I was working or in college most of the 80s), but not our parents who foot the bills.
In 1995, I started replacing the WYSE VT-100 terminals at my small workplace with Pentium desktops, in order to prepare for the switch to client-server in the next ERP version. They averaged fron $2700/ea ($5100 today) data entry models, to $3500 for mine, to $5200 ($9800 today) for the mechanical engineering system. (I still have my notes.)
"By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer."
As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no practical reason for them.
Someone I dated last year has worked on the administrative side of hospitals for years. Her statement was "everyone is hooking up in them, and it's typically
ignored. Unless they use a patient bed, then all hell breaks loose."
I run my business' email on a cloud VPS. It's a two step solution, with a FreeBSD host running a tightly configured Postfix as my mail gateway, and a Windows server running hMailServer (This is a great piece of Windows-based open source software. Highly recommend.).
This solutions captures the majority of spam and phishing. Occasionally, a well-crafted piece of spam gets through, and I check the Postfix config to see if I can close that hole.
What I do monitor closely are the valid emails that Postfix rejects. This happens a couple times per month, and is mainly due to the sender using GMail, and Google's mail servers being marked as sending spam.
Overall, I'm pleased with this solution. It's minimal configuration, minimal maintenance, maximum usefulness.
If you're into medtech or healthcare, Rochester, MN. Rochester itself is around 80-100K, but in the middle of rural SE MN with several smaller communities around it.
I grew up on a farm in the US Midwest. When I was 4 (early 1970s), I was given my chores of watering livestock. I also started bottle feeding my first orphan lambs, and started getting other orphans from neighbors. It became quite an income stream.
When I was 5, I started driving an older tractor. When I was 6, we were fixing
a pasture fence when my dad told me to go drive the pickup the 50 yards or so to
where we were at. He verbally walked me through it, and let me go get it. I remember that moment like it was yesterday.
And that was not a unique experience, for farm kids at least.
Now, parents would be criminally charged with something.
Health insurance costs.
Now, add to this: salaries and other benefits to both staff and educators. liability insurance. increased food costs. I'm certain facilities have increased costs also, from new construction to utilities. *Plus anything else I've left out.
Let's face it, everything has become more expensive. The Five Guys meal of a little cheeseburger, little fries, and regular drink which cost me $12 4 years ago in March, 2020 (I keep records), would cost me $17-18 today (I checked the prices today at noon and walked away). That's a 40-50% increase.
Why would we expect higher education to not be effected?