So a fix for 90% of the problem is out because it's bad for a small percentage? Everything is a trade-off, a solutions for the vast majority of cases outweighs the inconvenience on a small minority
306 karma · joined January 30, 2017
It's a disservice to the brilliant visa holders I know as well as US citizens. it's extremely hard for them to get a job at a good company because so many of the visas are getting soaked up by those abusing the system.
If there was a huge engineer shortage you would see companies step in to provide developer training problems. This is clearly not happening.
At least from my experience (I used to be a consultant) consulting jobs mostly attract people that can't get a job elsewhere. They generally include low pay, long hours, and a lot of client interaction.
It's no surprise to me that the nation's biggest software consultancies are largely considered the worst places to work as a software developer.
H1B's know to apply at these jobs because they have a much better chance of getting them. They have a better chance of getting them because these same companies are generally the ones abusing the system to hire software developers below market rates.
I wouldn't disregard it so quickly if the source was more neutral.
If this was true you would see it across professions and at every level of position, yet it's something fairly unique to software development.
I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply.
The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor.
Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose
All the guys that live in MS world swear they're not missing out on anything. But these are the same guys that lived in the enterprise version of North Korea until a few years ago.
In Java I can run Jetty or Netty on whatever and use http2. Old Os or whatever doesn't matter because the protocol isn't tied to the OS network stack.
We also needed to use Redis in C# and the client is unstable. Nothing we can do about it besides catch the exceptions and randomly reconnect when it happens. Are we losing some data? Probably.
Even if the open source community embraces C# it will take 10 years before the offerings are comparable to Java. And for what? C# is nearly identical to Java in design and performance, it just has slightly prettier syntax
They may have changed course but open source software has for 10+ years largely avoided the platform. This means C# is Java with nicer syntax but 10% the libraries and terrible cross platform support.
There's been countless times at work when I needed a certain library and I already knew what the Java equivalent was, but what I was looking for simply didn't exist. Database clients, data processing, http2, image manipulation, etc...
With Java I get everything I do from C# plus all the stuff they've been raving about working on in .NET core . Plus I get choice. There's 3 full featured IDE's, 20 or so servers, 6 or 7 JVM's
You will eventually need to write stuff to connect a bunch of different systems together and aggregate data in special ways. Basically classic integration and database work. Similar to enterprise programming in a lot of ways.
What happens quickly with marketing is that you need tracking. Not soon after you need custom tracking because you need to track customer interactions like phone calls, page visits, clicks, form filling, appointments, emails, sales(and how much)... It really goes on until you've integrated the sales pipeline into every corner of your companies interaction with customers. It's very unrealistic to find a piece of software to integrate all this stuff for you so that's where code comes in.
The ultimate data driven marketing system tracks every interaction with every person your company ever talks to(or visits your site) and assigns a value to each one of those people to get you an estimated ROI you can feed back into your advertising channels to see how much money you make from X campaign or advertisement relative to him much it costs.
Some companies achieve this nirvana, most with a horde of people and a thousand spreadsheets, and a few smart ones automate it entirely
Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information.
I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally.
For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request.
In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.
The difference was that the rest of our content was bland marketspeak whitewash garbage stuff. "Expand your client list 5x TODAY" type bs. Also useless PDF whitepapers on project we completed. Pro tip, nobody reads PDF unless it's the only content available, and on Google that's rarely true :).
The new articles were all focused on specific issues that our clients would have. Some favorites: "TWC business modem speed up" "AdWords tracking conversions" "Choosing the right software development company" "Pros and cons of outsourcing development" "Online marketing for small businesses "AdWords overview for CEOs and VP s" "How to hire AdWords expert" "Company outing locations in (cityx)" "Most popular CMS for company websites" "Small business tax audit guide"
Articles with a clear purpose and tailored to what our kind of client, and person, would be searching for. Admittedly this takes some really creative thinking but the results can be amazing.
Not all of our articles were related to what we did at all. They were built so that our target customers would search for them. Business owners, especially local. People looking for custom software even if it's not what they initially have in mind.
Our only channel for these articles was google search. In all, about 95% of our traffic went to new articles straight from Google. We trailered content mainly to our location, and this is probably a wise choice for any small business.
The content raised Google's opinion of how good our site was, even when the article wasn't bringing in sales. Most of the time they would be first page for targeted keywords, about 40% of the time the first result. Some of them are years old now and still first on Google, if that gives you an idea of how powerful well written pieces can be.
Writing the actual content: make sure the article is long and well written. The times/WSJ/new yorker should be a guide for what kind of writing google likes. Long form and extremely focused on a subject. Pictures help too.
Google looks at how many people view your article, for how long, and whether they go back to search afterwords if it wasn't what they wanted. They track future searches related to the article they just brought you to, to see if it has stimulated the person to read more into whatever your article was talking about. So for example the best CMS article. Did the user that read your article end up checking out the CMS you mentioned? They track how often users return to the same article, and probably whether they bookmark it. They even know how deep your knowledge is by comparing the distribution of uncommon words in your article to more trusted sources like journals and high quality books on the same subject. This is all admittedly speculation but google is extremely good at rating the quality of your content. The new AI processing google uses probably doesn't even know why an article is good, it just knows that it is.
The thing that helped me most writing the good articles was a deep background in the subject. For things I didn't know as much about, like managing the business, I would pick the brain of somebody that did know a lot for an hour or two then put it to writing.
If you don't have much knowledge about the things you should be writing about you need to find a decent writer that does.
If you don't want to deal with all that just pay google money for ads, and get really good at "the game". AdWords is extremely competitive and you need somebody with the drive to win at any cost, because the road from the start of your first campaign to something profitable will be expensive and hard.
Channels are overrated IMO :) you can reach around 90% of all web users on Google alone, and close to 100% on Google+fb. To start out at least, just pick a few very pervasive platforms and get really good at using them
It wasn't a start-up but a consulting company I worked at that had stagnated for about 7 years.
6 months later we had redone our whole marketing setup. New site, new branding, new software, lots of advertisement $ shifted.
A year later revenue was almost 3x. We raised our rates so profitability was even more than that.
The problem is finding a great marketing expert is just as hard as finding good coders. The company blew through countless consultants and 3 "marketing majors" with no returns until they found me and we turned it all around.
I would say marketing and coding are equally important for a start-up, easily the two most important things. If you have two founders one should be a marketing guru. If you don't your first employee should be.
Another thing is don't hire any marketing expert that can't code. The actual marketing setup is more than 50% coding. You need to find a coder that loves marketing
Java Golang Rust Scala Maybe C# C
The semi famous techempower benchmarks shows several popular frameworks that can handle over 1mill/sec
Uber has pulled out of many cities rather than comply with their regulations(which cabs already had to follow) and left tens of thousands of drivers without jobs, sometimes overnight. The notion that they care about anyone stuck overseas is a joke.
Messaging indeed... Uber has sent a message that they give no fucks about their drivers a long time ago. This isn't the first or even the hundredth time Uber has done something terrible.
Let the tide of public opinion sink this shitty soulless company before were stuck with another Comcast for 20 years
On anything short of a supercomputer you can get about ten requests per second with the stock setup and zero content/plugins. Adding anything to the site just makes that number worse.
My rule has become don't use WordPress for anything but html generation. It's not a serious CMS for anything else
Any farmer trying to select for a plant with resistance could accidentally end up reproducing a "patented" plant.
I think there's a fundamental problem with patenting things that are self replicating. Given enough time a superior GMO plant could take over a field all by itself with no intervention... Is the land owner/farmer really to blame if this happens?
A related problem is that it's difficult/impossible to tell if you're growing a patented seed without expensive tests. As long as the plants are virtually indistinguishable patent enforcement should not be allowed.