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How much should you pay developers?

13 Jul

We’re at that time of year where we go through everybody’s salary and makes sure it’s reasonable. We’re up to about a dozen in-house software developers, and we’d been paying them based on a compensation system developed by our cousins at Fog Creek, which is different enough from Stack Exchange that there was some chafing.

So we sat down and thought out developer compensation from basic principles, and came up with what we feel is a pretty robust way to pay great people. Here were the core principles on which the system is built:

The development team at Stack Exchange is an amazing group of programmers who live up to our motto of “smart and get things done” every day.

We want to offer them compensation that is fair, easily understood, transparent, and competitive.

Fair means no games. Our compensation is not based on how well you negotiate or how often you ask for raises—it’s based on a repeatable predictable system. There’s no forced ranking, so other people don’t have to do badly for you to do well. We don’t have a range of possible salaries for every level, we have a single salary, so everything about the system is algorithmic.

Easily understood means that any developer can figure out what their salary should be according to this system. They can see what they need to do to move up in their career. And different managers can figure out how to pay their team members and get consistent and fair results.

Transparent reflects Stack Exchange’s core beliefs about running our business in the open, without secrets. It means that if a list of everyone’s salary suddenly appeared on Wikileaks, nobody would be surprised enough to be upset. Transparency is essential to insure fairness.

Competitive means that you’re earning at least as much at Stack Exchange as you would earn elsewhere. It’s critical to being able to attract and retain the kind of developers we want working for us. If our compensation system isn’t competitive, we won’t be able to hire the people we want without giving them an “exceptional” salary, and exceptions defeat fairness.

One important principle of Stack Exchange is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do. In that spirit I’ve uploaded a complete copy of the current compensation plan so you can see what goes into compensation decisions at Stack Exchange. The only thing that is not public is the actual, final computation that determines each individual’s paycheck, because we have to balance our own philosophy of openness against the individual developer’s right to personal privacy.

Stack Exchange Developer Compensation (PDF)

 
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Chinese Ghost Towns? Get Ready to Feel Good About Being American Again

13 Jul

There’s been this fear in recent years that the U.S. government is a completely mismanaged mess. To some extent, that fear is warranted. After all:

- Our budget deficit is over a trillion dollars.
- Our total debt is over $14 trillion dollars.
- Our political leaders would rather hold the line than look for real solutions.
- Our GDP growth is smaller than hoped for coming out of the recession, at 2%.

…we do have some very real problems.

As we’ve struggled there’s been a lot of mention about China’s economic vitality. China’s GDP growth has hovered around 10% for many years and sits at 9.1% in the latest data release. There is talk about all of the debt and how the Chinese should be seen as a real threat to surpass the U.S. as the world’s economic leader.

And that’s why the following video on ‘Chinese Ghost Towns’ so intriguing. It was from an Australian news outfit, SBS Dateline. You can find the rest of the story and aerial photos here.

It’s a little over 14 minutes long, but I think you’ll find it well worth the time.

It appears that a great deal of China’s economic growth has been through the strategy of the government building massive cities and universities that there is no demand for. All of the materials and labor that goes into these massive projects improves GDP. Unfortunately, its led to an estimated 64 million empty apartment units in China that are too expensive for most Chinese families to afford (there is only a little over 30 million multi-unit housing units in the U.S.). Occupancy rates in these new cities are at less than 25%. And the ‘world’s largest shopping mall’ is almost completely empty.

There is even an aerial photo of the Yunan University – built to accommodate 2.3 million students. How many students actually attend? 11,000.

All of this could ultimately result in a few little problems for China:

  • Massive government debt to build and maintain all of this when there is no demand for it and then eventually tear a lot of it down.
  • A housing bubble that will be so big it could potentially bring down the entire economy.
  • Civil unrest for the wastefulness of taxpayer dollars to create housing that nobody can afford.
  • Complete degradation of an already poor environment and habitat.

If this is what it takes to maintain economic growth… then China has some big problems. You get the feeling when watching this eery video that China’s government is completely mismanaged and it’s only a matter of time before that house of cards comes crashing down.

Chinese Ghost Towns? Get Ready to Feel Good About Being American Again is copyrighted by 20somethingfinance.com without consent to republish.


 
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Are We In A Tech Bubble? Here’s The History [INFOGRAPHIC]

13 Jul


We’ve spent the past year wondering whether we’re currently in a tech bubble akin to the last decade’s dotcom boom.

Mashable has offered facts and opinions on both sides of the question. We’ve heard that the current boom is much different from the heyday of the late 1990s and that we have cause for confidence.

But we’ve also heard (from the likes of legendary investor Warren Buffet, no less) that the newest crop of tech darlings are highly overvalued at worst and unpredictable at best.

And we’ve even asked you, our readers, what you thought about current startup valuations and funding amounts. (Most of you responded that you were not optimistic about the future of the tech startup ecosystem.)

Now here are a few straightforward graphs and charts (created by KISSmetrics and FeeFighters) to help you get some better perspective on the issue. Clearly, the dotcom era was a different beast. But looking back on that insanity should help temper our excitement about new technologies with realistic revenue expectations.

Click image to see full-size version.

Top image courtesy of iStockphoto, patrickheagney

More About: bubble, investment, startups, tech bubble, technology

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Microsoft Research Open-Sources Experimental Operating System

13 Jul

Microsoft Research ETH Zurich open-sourced an experimental operating system called BarrelFish, which it built in conjunction with Microsoft Research. The purpose of BarrelFish is to explore the best ways to structure OSes for multicore systems.

BarrelFish is a completely new OS "built from scratch," so it doesn't depend on any proprietary Microsoft components. The source code is available under an MIT license.

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The BarrelFish site actually runs on a BarrelFish server, but the OS is a long way from being used for mainstream applications. Still, it's a step forward for Microsoft to be working on an open source operating system, even if it is "just" Microsoft Research.

I've made the case that Microsoft needs to open-source something big. I wouldn't count this as "something big" yet, but it is progress.

One criticism I frequently hear of Microsoft, and the Research division in particular, is that it works on many cool projects that are ultimately abandoned and never released. Making work open source means that even if Microsoft decides to pull the plug on a project, other developers can continue the work if there's enough interest.

(Hat tips to Computer Weekly and James Governor).

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Computer Reads Manual, Plays Civ

13 Jul

We can no longer hide our secrets from the machines by writing them in books.
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab report that they have boosted the effectiveness of a game-playing AI by enabling it to read the manual: “When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.”

What’s most amazing about this is that despite the trial and error nature of this kind of machine learning, the ability to correlate text instructions with events in the game do seem to have a significant impact on the system’s capacity to learn how to play, as the article explains: “The researchers also tested a more-sophisticated machine-learning algorithm that eschewed textual input but used additional techniques to improve its performance. Even that algorithm won only 62 percent of its games.” So, you know, RTFM is sound advice, even if you are a machine.

 
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Triceratops Bones Support Asteroid Extinction Theory

13 Jul

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Palaeontologists in America have discovered the youngest known dinosaur bones, after digging up the fossilized remains of a Triceratops or Torosaurus’ 45cm-long brow horn.

But what makes this find — from the Hell Creek Formation in the wastelands of south-east Montana — even more special is its ramifications for the current theories on what wiped out the prehistoric lizards.

It’s generally believed that a colossal asteroid pummeled into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago, which led to a mass extinction of any animal that couldn’t fly, swim or burrow into the ground.

But some skeptics believe that the dinosaurs were already on a sharp decline, or even extinct, when the asteroid hit. This would have been thanks to climate change, unpredictable sea levels and intense volcanic activity.

This dissenting theory has come to prominence because no fossils have even been found within three meters of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary — an area in the sedimentary rock that’s packed with rare elements like Iridium and Quartz, which signifies when the asteroid impacted the planet.

This newly discovered brow horn was found just 13cm below that all-important line. It proves that this Ceratopsian dinosaur (probably a Triceratops or Torosaurus) was wandering about right up to the impact event, and the authors believe this debunks the dissenting theory.

In the paper, published in Biology Letters, the team writes: “The in situ specimen demonstrates that a gap devoid of non-avian dinosaur fossils does not exist and is inconsistent with the hypothesis that non-avian dinosaurs were extinct prior to the K-T boundary impact event.”

Image: Daderot/Wikipedia

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Infographics: Anticipation Builds For New Visualization Tool & Community

13 Jul

visuallylogo.jpgPeople love data visualization; when done well, it communicates new knowledge about otherwise inaccessible information in new and pleasing ways. Good visualizations can be efficient and effective; bad visualizations can be seductive and deceptive. That's why visually designed data-based content, both good and bad, is so popular online. People love infographics.

Today a startup called Visually drew back the curtains a little bit further on its data visualization technology and community. The company unveiled an index of 2,000 data visualizations, a cute Twitter visualization creation tool and promises to help anyone create their own visualizations with a series of self-service tools to be released throughout the year. Interest in the service is so heated that the Visually website melted early this morning.

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visuallyscreen.jpg
There are a number of services like this online already, but two things make Visually stand out. First, it appears that in the phrase data visualization, the company may focus more on the visualization than on the data. The gallery of infographics is beautiful. It appears heavy on color, text, fonts and design - more than being heavy on graphs or more complex ways of communicating deeply nuanced insights into information. That's what some other competitors focus on.

That's consistent with where the founders of the company came from: Mint.com. That wildly successful personal finance service gathered consumer finance data and then drew big picture conclusions about the state of the economy and consumer behavior. The resulting data visualizations were beautiful and a key part of driving consumer interest in the company's services. That consumer interest helped the company get acquired by finance giant Intuit in 2009.

Visually's co-founders are both from Mint; CEO Stew Langille was a marketing exec there, and Lee Sherman was the company blog's editor. (Disclosure: I actually recruited Sherman for that position as a part of the small consulting practice I do on the side, though before I was here at ReadWriteWeb.)

Mint reportedly didn't create its own infographics in-house; it gathered the data sets, then hired independent designers to visualize them. Then those infographics blew up on sites like then-hot social news site Digg and now-hot Reddit.

That strategy was parlayed into a great reputation for data visualization on the part of Langille and Sherman. Now they are working on a tool that will allow anyone to create such creative work for themselves. Visually also promises a search engine that will index "all existing Web-based data visualizations" (how they will be ranked and sorted, we don't know) and data warehouse that will help seed the visualizations of their customers.

The company has told press that it will charge power users $100 to $300 per month to use its tool and has said that it could "easily" be billing $300,000 per month just from client work it has secured, without launching any public tool at all.

If that's the case, it's not clear to me why the company is going to mess around with a long tail of customers at a low price point. Are there tens of thousands of organizations that are in a position to create valuable infographics, even with the help of the easy and effective tool that Visually is promising? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure that a demonstration app at launch that makes cute Twitter avatars based on the contents of your tweets are the most effective content marketing for a B2B service, but maybe it doesn't matter: the lust for infographic power is very, very strong.

As a result of that, there is no longer a shortage of other services online that promise to make it easy to create data visualizations. How Visually will stack up with ManyEyes or Tableau, much less visualization specialists for hire like JESS3 (apparently a Visually launch partner) or Bloom remains of course to be seen. Visually hasn't launched much so far, though 2,000 examples of infographic inspiration are certainly valuable.

It's widely believed that a tidal wave of value-laden data is just about to crash over the top of the Web and the world, though. As it does, huge pockets of opportunity should appear for new service providers to offer new forms of value. Data visualization is going to be a big area of opportunity for services like Visually and for their customers.

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

12 Jul
 
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How Frequent Fliers Exploit A Government Program To Get Free Trips

12 Jul

by David Kestenbaum and Robert Benincasa

Jane Liaw Liaw orders coins from the U.S. Mint to earn frequent-flier miles.
Jane Liaw

Jane Liaw Liaw orders coins from the U.S. Mint to earn frequent-flier miles.

We recently reported on the the government's failed effort to persuade Americans to use dollar coins.

But the coins have found at least one group of fans: Travel enthusiasts who buy thousands of dollar coins with credit cards that award frequent-flier miles for purchases.

Once in possession of the coins — shipped to them by the government for free — they can deposit them into their bank accounts and pay off the credit card bills. The result: a free ticket to anywhere.

"We've used them to go on trips around the world," says Jane Liaw, a 35-year-old public health researcher and science writer in San Francisco. Liaw says she and her husband, who use a variety of tricks for earning miles, are planning trips to Greece and Turkey, "all on miles and points."

Liaw says she spends some of the coins at the local farmer's market and stores.

The problem is that even if so-called "travel hackers" like Liaw put some of the coins in circulation, their purchases from the Mint contribute to a huge and growing buildup of one-dollar coins in Federal Reserve vaults.

 

The mountain of coins is the unintended result of a 2005 act of Congress. The law requires that more and more coins be minted, despite a lack of demand by the public. (For more, see our story "$1 Billion That Nobody Wants.")

The Mint's direct-ship program is aimed at getting the coins into everyday circulation.

Officials there first noticed something amiss in summer 2008, when they saw that a small number of customers were repeatedly ordering large numbers of one dollar coins. The top 20 customers bought between $219,000 and $696,000 worth, says Mint spokesman Tom Jurkowsky.

Another clue the hackers left was that dollar coins were arriving in banks still clad in their U.S. Mint packaging.

"Do we feel a little bit violated? Yes, and that's why we aggressively sought measures to eliminate what we called an abuse," says Jurkowsky.

Jurkowsky said the Mint sent letters to the top abusers and imposed a limit of 1,000 coins every ten days.

"It's not illegal," he said, "But it's an abuse of the system. That's not what the system was set up to do. The system was set up to promote the use of dollar coins and we are simply trying to do the right thing here."

Around this time, people buying dollar coins to get frequent-flier miles drew national attention in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

After the Mint acted, orders for Native American dollar coins, which are only available directly from the Mint, dropped – from 88.7 million in 2009, to 52 million last year and 19 million so far this year.

In total, the mint has mailed out 284 million one-dollar coins, including presidential and Native American coins, through the direct-ship program.

Native American coins bear the likeness of Lewis and Clark guide Sacagewea. By law, Sacagewea must appear on one in every five dollar coins manufactured, the legacy of political dealings on Capitol Hill.

While the Mint says the Native American coins are now popular enough to be back-ordered, a recent Federal Reserve study provided to NPR says nearly 60 percent of them come back to Federal Reserve vaults.

Both the Mint and Federal Reserve now support eliminating the Sacagewea quota.

The Fed, in its latest report to Congress, is also asking for additional changes that would allow it order only the number of dollar coins the economy needs.

As long as the dollar coin scheme is viable – without a crackdown by credit card issuers, for example – there will be enthusiasts like Ben Schlappig, who writes the travel hacker blog One Mile At A Time.

"I'm not as heavy a hitter as other people, I guess," Schlappig says. "I've ordered probably, maybe 30 or 40,000 worth."

Schlappig, who says he has "a few million miles" and top-tier status with several airlines, orders at the Mint's limit.

"Just last week I came back from a trip from Australia and Singapore and Malaysia all in first class, just on miles," he says, "partly thanks to the dollar coin program."

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
 
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:: H & A :: tumblr – firedfly: もあいの ねっこ

12 Jul

via http://handa.tumblr.com/post/3380214725/firedfly

 
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