4 people on 300k+? I assume these are contractors working on legacy apps in the banking sector with a day rate of 1.5K+ * 200 days a year. I can't think of any other scenario. Is this common?
Unless they are CEO+developer of an already medium business (50+) but that amount would not come from base salary (right?)
I disagree. Having spent 6 years working in one, my tasks ranged from spreadsheets and decks to coding java, dev ops, all forms of testing and plenty of technical design work. It's hard to lump entire big consulting companies into one category as once you get to 100K+ employees the company is like an entire world within itself. I agree that in general, the consulting arms of said companies do not do complex technical work. When you are integrating and upgrading a SAP implementation with 70+ existing systems, across 6 continents, with hundreds of stakeholders, things get complex.
Learning a language requires constant effort and practise and finding a method that works for YOU. For me what works ( I am learning Korean):
* 1 lesson a week on cafetalk.com (not related to them, great/easy website). We sometimes do grammar/vocab or just free talking
* 1 book. There is a great one for korean called: Magic Korean which has a very good learning style. I have tried another 3-4 books but they did not click
* Podcasts while at the gym . I listen to "talk to me in korean" which has over 1000 lessons recorded and still going
* 3 hours studying a week. I usually do it during commute. This includes homework for the online lesson and studying the book
* Live group lessons every Saturday morning. I did these for 10 weeks and stopped due to no availability of lessons at the appropriate level
So in total:
* 1.5 hours of podcasts at the gym
* 1 hour lesson
* 3 hours homework and learning
* (I used to do 2 hour sessions with a group but stopped)
Total: 5.5 hours a week
Also, going to Korea yearly for 1-2 weeks has helped.
It would be useful to get a comparison on standard macbook cost and what it costs through here over a normal product refresh cycle. What happens with discontinued products? If apple remove their 13 inch air and release a new 12 inch "aero" macbook for 10% less cost, is that included? Are savings passed on to the consumer?
There are definite flaws in the criteria developed but I acknowledge no system is going to be perfect. I don't necessarily agree with the effect of sprawl on overall quality of life and ranking of a city. I like cities less densely populated.
I've toyed with this a couple of times with an HP screen that would go into portrait mode. I found it best when I coded on my primary monitor on landscape mode but had my secondary monitor in portrait to either review other section of code or browse stack exchange etc.
I have my app dock on the left rather than the bottom so in portrait mode, horizontal real estate takes a hit. Maybe without that it would work better.
The only one that comes to mind was a performance bug while doing data migration.
Started putting logging in the code, recompiled and deployed and with essentially what was a binary search nailed it down to a chunk of code that was taking too much time.
It happened to be an update or insert statement and we had removed all indexes from all tables for migration. Once the table grew sufficiently it was taking ages to search through it and update. Adding the indexes sped up the process about 5 times so instead of 5 weeks we were now looking at < 1 week for migration.
I think this is the way forward and to take it a step further, iterative exploratory data mining/analysis is the way to go(according to me).
There is a lot of value in getting a list of all the data you can gather, having the business people explain it to the techies, putting your heads together and coming up with ad-hoc queries and data cuts that provide any insight. There is a disconnect between what data can be gathered which when combined with existing metrics leads to a-ha moments.
Targeting works but in very complex/unexplored business ecosystems it might be better to go rogue to get "quick wins".
About cost: I did 9 months in Asia for 12K$ and never felt stressed for cash.
My main problem on the go was motivation for side projects. It is so easy to get caught up in meeting locals, doing activities that it can fill up your whole day. There are so many interesting distractions.
If I wanted to travel and get work done now I wold probably revisit some of the same countries.