Considering other factors that is still a fairly small adjustment. I meant what I said that the conditions should be fixed. It should, for instance, be easier for people to change jobs and find jobs on the open market. That would make salaries somewhat more competitive.
But that doesn't mean everyone are going to make the same salaries. Foreigners are always going to be more willing to pay their dues, be less knowledgeable of the local market and have more variable skillets.
People are talking about fixing H-1B by things like salary requirements. That isn't so much fixing it as excluding one set of people and giving preference to another set of people.
Of course it does? It's getting better, but companies like Google have been very honest with that they (at least in the past) preferred hiring from top schools. The "right language" is of course a bit simplified, but some experiences are definitely seen as more favorable although it's not clear they are. Often more academic or community knowledge over practical or enterprise. As far as I know it's much easier to get hired by such a company early with based on your academic record and "culture fit" than it is later in life trough experience, as the median age also indicates. What are you basing your opinion on?
> If you look at the Finnish or Nordic welfare model in general, most of the income transfers go to to middle class who also pays for them.
Right, but I don't see the difference to basic income in that regard. How do you avoid a politician going "let's cut basic income and lower taxes" benefiting the majority of people that are employed?
> Unions in Finland have abandoned part time and low income people and only look after people who have full time jobs (who are members in the unions).
A union is a membership organisation that looks after the interest of it's members, I don't see how they could have abandoned people that aren't members. What has happened in other Nordic countries though is that politicians have worked hard to lessen the power of unions by decoupling things like unemployment and introducing other form of employment. Therefor it makes less and less sense to be a member of a union. But that is to a large extent a political question not a choice by the unions.
I also think maybe one of the biggest unanswered question with basic income is how you can guarantee it long term. We already know that things like minimum wage, unemployment benefits, student benefits and social insurance don't keep up over time despite the power of the institutions and the unions. Now people are saying that we should put all those things in one basket and hope that the politicians don't screw us over later?
I dislike poor working and visa condition as much as, if not more than, anyone else. But other than that I don't really see the problem. You're saying that the people you're hiring aren't particularly talented and get payed less. Not everyone can go to the right school, learn the right languages and get accepted to companies that pay $100k with perks.
It sound like, other than fixing some of the things with H-1B, what really should happen is some sort of easier O (-1A) visa with mainly a salary requirement.
To me that sort of makes things worse. I have nothing against using GitHub as such, but I also think it's important that projects like this should lead by example. If you centralize things that are inherently decentralized it's hard to make a case that decentralization is important.
> many people (including myself) prefer the command line where possible, which is essentially universal and not hard to pick up at all.
As someone who, at least thinks they, understands how DVCS works I find the git command line quite unintuitive. It's a mix between more low level commands and added shortcuts. The solution becomes "just run these three commands you know and use Github".
> In a worst case scenario the entire project could be preserved with history and exported.
That's not really realistic, unless something really drastic happens. People often use Github for more than git itself, it becomes an integral part of the workflow. If it's was easy to switch people would run something else in parallel (which some projects do).
All in all I think the pragmatic solution is to have your own system and then interface Github as one channel. If you can't set up your own system that is competitive as a completment to Github, well then you are effectively dependent on Github.
To keep it polite and short, that's really not how the world works anymore. These days your (at least financial) success in life is very much correlated with the wealth of your parents. If you're from Sweden (as your username would indicate) you can take Stockholm as an example. My non-independent friend (and their parents) there are millionaires from housing appreciation and savings, while my independent friends are are spending all their salaries on renting short lease 3x normal rent sublets.
Pay is such a variable thing though. I mean, just being able to move, dealing with everything and ending up liking it long term is such a statistical anomaly that it seems silly to generalize pay (even though there might not necessarily be a correlation between the two). I would at least look into things like working for a US company in Singapore or consulting/freelancing (since the taxes are low?). Often things look quite different on paper than in reality (especially on an individual level).
China is in a totally different league though. There's nothing else like it in the world today. Completely understandable that not everyone can or want to go there (especially since there are also many downsides), but you can't take that away from them.
Uhm, I think you're overthinking it. There's million other challenges and reasons why you might not like Singapore (or another similar city). If you can and want to go you should go.
What I'm saying though is that we perceive "coding marathons" as good because we can only do them when we are in a good state. Say you have five coding sessions and in four of them you run into some problem, you get disturbed (or demotivated) or something else that halts your progress. While in the fifth none of that happens, so you end up having a long period of "flow". Then one might conclude that it's the coding marathon or the flow itself that is good when in reality it's the really the other factors that correlate with having a long session that really matters. And if you practice you can make more headway each day, even achieving flow in shorter sessions, than you ever could only being motivated to do coding marathons sometimes.
These arguments always comes up in these types of discussions. In reality though personal information has far less protection than commercial information. If you take nude pictures of yourself you might as well keep your credit card in frame, since that's essentially the only way someone would be sentenced for copying them later.
I used to do this early in my career too, until I realized how counterproductive it was. I've found that it isn't "coding marathons" themselves that are good, but being motivated, undisturbed, structured etc. Few people are that everyday, so we have to work on it.
Nowadays instead of coding full out until I go home and crash on the couch I try to spend the last hour of the work day documenting what I've done, what need to be done tomorrow and even what I'm doing this evening. That way I've probably had some decent time off, I know what to do the next day and can more easily get started. Even if I'm not motivated I can do something simple for a couple of hours, at which point I usually get motivated again.
Coding marathons feels good when you do them, but they also builds up debt. Both in the structure of the project and in motivation. It's quite natural that it's hard to get started if you don't have an obvious starting point and you anticipate that you have to do a full 8 to 10 hours and be completely spent at the end.
But that doesn't mean everyone are going to make the same salaries. Foreigners are always going to be more willing to pay their dues, be less knowledgeable of the local market and have more variable skillets.
People are talking about fixing H-1B by things like salary requirements. That isn't so much fixing it as excluding one set of people and giving preference to another set of people.