Re: UCI Mischief

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Mon, 27 Jul 1998 12:00:47 -0700


> Unfortunate, isn't it? Most of the people who are any good (in my
> experience, anyway) are the ones who grew up tinkering with computers
> (or calculators, JoeBar :-)) -- who grew up with Sinclair ZX-81s and
> VIC-20s and Ataris and Commodore-64s... These days, many of the folks
> in our business are those motivated entirely by $$$ rather than by the
> coolness coefficient of working with 'puters.

Fred Brooks cites in his numbers that the top 20% of all
software programmers are 10-15 times more productive than
the bottom 20%, but only paid 20-30% more. It seems that
coming back from Jim's wedding my comment on salaries has
created quite a contraversy in some circles. I don't see
why it's okay for a mediocre Dr. to make $300k-$400k per year
but if a computer scientist makes over $150k for a 50 hour
work week he's being greedy. There isn't a health care
crisis involving a shortage of doctors. In fact they are
paying some schools *not* to produce them to keep
salaries high. Why is it that they would raise the
immigration cap once CS people start making the same amount?
I think that if they are technically skilled and can
spell 'mischief' then they have a place in the US
economy.

Anyways, Jim's wedding was extremely nice. I won't take away
from any pending wedding posts, but I would like to publically
apologize to Yaron for rudely butting into his conversation about
Microsoft. I thought I was going to say something clever about
the differntiators between ethical business practices and
illegal business practices and how nobody want's the government
involved in the software industry, but I believe I came off
as a wild-eyed Microsoft hater with too much wine in me.
I did however have a very nice conversation with Julia's
father about WebDAV and how Jim had wished they had made
digital cameras that were fully connected so that all the
people taking pictures with the little disposable wedding
cams could instantly post everything to their wedding site.
Alas, the updates will be done after their honeymoon.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/wedding/photos.htm

Greg