I just looked up The Bay of Fundy on Google maps, having not heard of it before. I'm interested, can you explain what about this particular bay will make it interesting?
Yes, and it is always COLD. (Newly engaged I took my fiancée to a beach west of Saint John and decided to go for a swim. I mean, I should have known better, I grew up there. It was a shallow slope, so by the time it was deep enough to dive in, I couldn’t feel my ankles. It was a short swim. It’s not like I was going to wimp out and turn back in front of my sweetie. Ah, the pride of youth.)
Re the tides: when Charles ame Diana visited NB in 1983, they disembarked at high tide in the Saint John harbour. The gangplank was at about 45 degrees, slopes down to the dock. A few hours later, it was 45 degrees down to the royal yacht. Some of the sailors, many of whom had long experience, having served in the falklands, among other places, had never seen anything like it.
True, true. But imagine those tides in a slightly larger bay: 52km wide at the entrance (compared with ~14km for Severn), mostly linear (48km near its neck, compared with ~2km) and over 155km long.
The amount of water that comes in an out twice a day is, well, nuts. Yes, that's the technical term.
(Summer ferry crossings between Digby Neck and Saint John are 2.5 hours, 3.0 hours in the winter (slower due to rougher water), but I do know people who took ~12 one February: the water was so rough they hugged as close to the shores of NB and NS as they dared, just to make things a little calmer. There have also been cases of transport trailers falling over in the hold. Yes, they were lashed down.)
(I once spent a terrible several hours sprawled on a lounge chair staring out the window on the opposite side of the boat: For seven seconds I could see nothing but sea, the ship swung, and for seven more, nothing but sky. Repeat. Ad nauseam. The swings took about a second. When I finally did get up to head to the heads to unload that nausea, let's just say planning was involved in every step.)
(Another trip, I also spent an uncomfortable few minutes on the observation deck bow-ward of that lounge, because young and dumb: It was fall, I was heading back to Uni, it was cold (duh), I was wearing a hoodie and shorts, and I'd stepped out for fresh air. Got talking to American tourists in long slacks and sweaters. Felt expansive and loquacious, kept them out there as long as I could. They finally excused themselves on account of the cold, very polite, and I turned to and leaned upon the bow rail until I felt enough time had gone by that I could return to the lounge. Man, it was cold. Ah, youth. :->)
Yes. I've seen its tides in person. It's almost unreal. Boats go from sitting on their sides on dry land to floating in 3+m of water and back every tidal cycle.
At first I was thinking that that doesn't sound all that unusual; here near Antwerp, Belgium we also have tides high enough that small boats can go from sitting dry to floating clear. But then I looked it up and it turns out that the tidal range in the Bay of Fundy is about 16 metres (52 feet)! That really is a lot, and much more than the about 5.5 metres we have here.
I've just read the article you linked[1], as well as several others [2][3][4] and cannot find any information about this:
>all companies foreign or not must provide unencrypted access to data to the Chinese government and must do so in secrecy
either plainly stated or implied.
Can you provide a source for this claim? I don't doubt that this may occur, but I'd like to speak with _my own_ managers about my china & encryption concerns in an informed way.
In an effort to promote transparency and to help new developers with information asymmetry, for the last 3 years I've conducted a survey of web developers and software engineers who are members of UtahJS. The topics are about compensation, education, experience, and job titles. I think the results are interesting, especially the comparing types of education & experience to pay.
There are a million reasons to agree that the data is never actually deleted
* need to retain data to fulfill government requests
* internal auditing
* it's all backed up in some "data lake" somewhere to do internal ml or analytics on
* hundreds of copies in database backups from different times
* internal logs that contain the data
* it's already been analyzed and aggregated into learning products and models that aren't going to be recomputed
It's not being "paranoid". As someone who has worked on large scale saas, I say: there is zero, 0, ZERO, 0.00 chance of that data every actually being deleted
> As someone who has worked on large scale saas, I say: there is zero, 0, ZERO, 0.00 chance of that data every actually being deleted
Unless that is built by design. I happen to also work on a large scale SaaS where we take this stuff very seriously and I can say it is possible to protect this data. However I will agree that this adds considerable complexity, but for some organizations, that is totally worth it.
> need to retain data to fulfill government requests
That's a choice, not a requirement. If you encrypt the data and purposely don't store the keys yourself but instead have the customer store them, then you don't have anything of value for the government.
> internal auditing
Personally Identifiable Info is not something we want to peruse. In fact we purposely don't want to see it because that eliminates a potential for mishandling.
> it's all backed up in some "data lake" somewhere to do internal ml or analytics on
That kind of application shouldn't give carte blanche to disregard retention policies. You can run those applications against replicated shards of the original data; and when the original gets reclaimed, so does the replica.
> hundreds of copies in database backups from different times
Storing useless data forever is not cheap, especially at scale. Better store what needs to be stored and free up what can be freed when retention policies kick in (or user requests it).
> internal logs that contain the data
That's ground for failing certain compliance audits. Logs should never contain PII in the first place, that's an operational failure.
> it's already been analyzed and aggregated into learning products and models that aren't going to be recomputed
That's a tricky one, but if those are actual models instead of giant lookup tables, one could assume the data is not reconstructible. However, that needs to be a design consideration of the models themselves, to prevent user data from persisting.
For similar reasons, I doubt very much that they actually deleted everything they said they did. I know that they were backing up to tape and storing it at Iron Mountain years prior.
But someone has to pay that bill. If Facebook ever fails, I doubt that someone would keep data centers full of information around without getting paid.
I recently interviewed with a "large SF based social network" and their COL equivalent salary for what I make here in Salt Lake City would have been like taking a 50% pay cut!
It's my intuition that salary increases with experience for that time until you have basically "capped out" what the market will pay for your skills. After 9 or 10 years, talent and skill are probably a more a factor than experience.
Another way of saying that would be the difference in pay between a 1 and 3 year developer would be pretty easy to explain on experience alone. But, the difference in pay between a 12 and 18 year developer would be more explained by their skills and specific experiences (not time).
Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers? Does one need to move into management/consulting/something in order for ones salary to keep increasing?
Lately I've been feeling like I've hit my ceiling and I need to start investigating where to go from here but that may just be my perception/pessimism.
Sort of.. For a given area, experience level, and skillset, there is going to be a general range that will give you an idea of where you are. Recruiters are sometimes helpful for figuring that out, and so are reports like this.
I don't know that switching paths is always a good bet - on more than one occasion, I've made more than my boss - and often not by a little bit. Principal-level developers are often compensated at director or even low-level VP amounts. Of course, at this level, you're not heads-down coding all of the time, even if you aren't managing people.
Going into management and getting stuck as a mid-level dev manager is probably not going to net you as much compensation as improving your skillset as a developer will.
There's no ceiling for developer pay (or at least, you're likely nowhere close to it). Large companies with technical tracks pay 1MM+/year for high-level engineers. Mid-level ("Senior" in title) engineers can easily clear half that.
A few things to note:
* Salaries like that are basically only possible at large public, engineering-driven companies, or finance firms (possibly also high-end consultancies, but I have little knowledge there)
* As you get more senior, a larger and larger percent of your take-home pay will be in the form of stock and bonuses; base salary rises much more slowly
* At the highest levels, you're unlikely to be writing much code. Mostly you'll be leading projects, reviewing technical designs, working with execs, etc.
I think it's important to note that this is very location-dependent.
In Utah, where this survey was taken, I'd be willing to bet the number of people with developer-like titles consistently bringing home > $250k take-home probably is less than 0.1% of the dev population, whereas in a place like SF/Seattle/NYC, it is a lot more common.
It's definitely location-dependent. My experience is primarily Bay Area/NYC/Seattle, and salaries will likely be lower outside those hubs. However for very skilled or in-demand specialists, it's definitely possible to get SF salaries while working remote in a cheap CoL area.
>Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers?
Yeah I think there is a limit to what the market will pay for any particular skill, including developers. That limit will be constantly in flux year-to-year (see the 2017 results for comparison), and will vary from person-to-person though as skills, experience, etc. vary. Hard to quantify what that cap might be for any specific person, but looking at all the data in aggregate you can see that salary growth isn't linear with experience.
I believe that pay discrimination does happen and I don't want to invalidate anyone experience if that has happened to them, but I've been pleased to work with very competent men and women over my career who I believe were all compensated fairly from my observations.
That's a good point about potential bias (those making more are more likely to respond). It's my intuition from living and working in this area for a long time that the responses are pretty representative. The surveyed group (UtahJS slack channel) I think skews more toward the less experienced (which shows in the years of experience chart), so if anything the data may be skewed that direction.
