$50,000 is on the higher end of the spectrum for teachers. In Texas, the starting teacher salary is around $38,000. Plus, teachers have to provide their own supplies, be at the school by 7 am every day, stay late helping with extracurriculars / helping students, and work late grading among other things.
That's another thing as well, there's the line that teachers have to provide their own supplies. But the degree to which is left up to the teacher.
And then there's the months off.
I'm pretty orthogonal to it now considering my wife is an elementary school teacher. And there is a degree of truth to the complaints, but they are often exaggerated as well. She still complains about how much I work.
The median personal and household incomes in 2016 were $31k and $59k, so at $38k you're starting your career well ahead of the median for US citizens of all ages. I happen to think teachers should be paid much more because of the importance of what they do, i.e. I think they're paid less than their potential worth, but I don't think it makes sense to paint teachers as low-earners in an absolute sense. Unless the point is that the median american is a low-earner in an absolute sense, which is fair enough.
If I found myself continually grousing about my low pay relative to other professions, and all of the indignities and hardships I suffered, I'd find another job.
Ok role playing time. Your a teacher. You majored in some subject like music or English. You probably spent 4-5 years in school. Maybe you have some debt. Your working as a teacher right now making 45k. What do you do? Getting an education in something useful could take 4 years + debt. You could goto trade school , 2 years?
I always though of them as a hardware company having seen their name on laptops, but they did have their own brand of Unix and I am currently working on a CDN originally written by them.
I tried to go from SFO to South Bay a while back around midnight and eventually took a cab after being cancelled by multiple Uber drivers. Some even called me, asked where I was going, then angrily said they don't go to South Bay and cancelled.
Heh, I've always had the opposite experience. They either want to go to the city or somewhere far South. Something close like Millbrae, South City or Burlingame? They cancel the ride.
I believe all of these stories; I just don't understand why people expect or believe taxi drivers and Uber drivers are fundamentally different people with different incentives.
The frustrating part about Uber is that I have to wait 10 minutes for each one before they refuse to take me somewhere. With a taxi I can just walk down the row of taxis at the airport. On the other hand, the only reason taxis can get that benefit is because they lobby so hard to kick the Ubers out to a parking lot 10 minutes away.
Computer Science is a new field and individual developers can have reaching effects on society, direct or indirect, that extend further than any other engineering discipline. My belief is that it 100% is on the responsibility of researchers and developers to think of the ethical and social implications of their work. As an example, a podcast I listened to recently was interviewing CS researchers working on "deep fake" videos. When asked if they thought their work could have negative societal impact, their response was along the lines of "its just really cool to make this". CS as a whole has a lot of maturing to do and I hope we can get their sooner rather than later.
There is definitely room for improvement among pay in Canada, but it really is an exceptionalist view to base the pay in USD. Especially so because I always see people convert salary in CAD to USD, then not convert the cost of goods and living to USD as well. There are also certain nuances living in Canada that decrease your expenses compared to the US such as decent public transit (unheard of in the west coast), decent healthcare of which health benefits from the company then boost the healthcare quality way higher than what I was able to find in America, and a much more collectivist culture than America which, in my opinion, is the biggest draw to living in Canada.
On the other hand, there are expenses that are higher! Taxes are higher for one as well as the cost of goods such as groceries. Although, the groceries case doesn't really hold because I find that groceries in SV or Seattle to be higher than where I am now in Canada.
The main point I'm trying to make is that is that straight up converting salary in another country straight to USD is a bad comparison of wealth.
Sure, but i found - as you mentioned - groceries, including conversion to USD, to be more expensive in Toronto than LA. Eating out was definitely cheaper. Rent, for an equivalent place in Toronto is, I think, slightly cheaper, but probably not 50% or so cheaper.
You're right that you need to convert both sides of the equation but I still think that all things considered Toronto pay is pretty poor compared to the US.
I understand how great this is, but does anyone else get a little upset when GCP, AWS, and Azure are able to buy their way into a market and are pretty much guaranteed to hurt the small players in the infra tooling market?
I take it as a sign that the value bar keeps getting raised for small players to exist. CI is becoming so commodity that it doesn't really matter if you get it from Google or Codeship. If a slow-moving corporate machine can replicate what you do...maybe you need to move faster.
> does anyone else get a little upset when GCP, AWS, and Azure are able to buy their way into a market
There's benefits to smaller, hungrier teams building things, but unless they have paying customers on day one they're also buying their way into the market one way or another...
Yes. I have no skin in this game personally but I feel bad when Google or one of the other behemoth's of tech decide to offer a service that small players are already thriving in. Google can compete with a scale of development that can easily drive the small guys out of business. What's worse is that they then get bored with the product at some point, or a pointy haired boss looks sadly at a revenue chart and the thing suddenly disappears with no recourse and the small players are gone.
I understand this, my company is currently dealing with a similar situation. We have a small vendor that hosts things, but I am pushing to drop them for Azure because it offers so many more features and tools that the vendor just can't match. It's kind of an acquisition thing, we acquired a company that deals with this vendor, we were already using Azure. It's much harder to go off the cloud than to go on it, imo. You just lose so many great features when you move off of it. It's sad, but at the same time it's becoming impossible for smaller people to compete in a cloud world. I don't think that's going to change. My biggest fear is that once all the small players are killed off Google, Microsoft and AWS will agree in some back room to not compete on price to protect their margins. I have a feeling that something like that is merely a decade away, if not less.
this is the reason companies build platforms. If you own the platform, you get a big advantage over third-parties building tools on your platforms. they aren't buying their way into the market with money, they're buying their way into the market with years and years of work building the platform. I don't think it's anything to get upset about.
Also, the big cloud platforms aren't shy about acquiring smaller players, and that's an exit that a lot of the people building tools for cloud platforms are looking for. I think it's safe to say that without GCP, AWS, and Azure there'd be a lot fewer companies building CI tools.
eh, i don't know about that one. In most countries outside of America, "engineer" is a reserved word for licensed engineers and Software Engineers can not legally call themselves engineers, thus developers.
How does Shopify not give enough control? Anyone can write Shopify apps to extend extra features with their API or pay someone to create an app (less than paying someone for a full ecommerce site)
Not all aspects of Shopify can be customized -- especially with the checkout workflow (eg you can only set a logo for the checkout page, but not style it). Also the non-ecommerce pages are woefully lacking in content management functionality (anything more complex than a blog is impossible without using a third-party app to store custom content in meta fields).
And writing apps yourself is not always ideal because they need to run on your own server (thus mitigating the benefit of using a hosted platform to avoid infrastructure maintenance), and any frontend modifications can only be done via JavaScript (you can't modify the outputted HTML itself, so it's a lot more difficult to make robust, performant and accessible customizations to functionality).
