Posts by johnnorris10

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago

Is this fair?

The article mentions the billions that will be spent by South Korean and Taiwainese companies and yet they are the only companies that have already been spending on both process and fabs.

I think todays problems are from two sources. One is Intel and the missteps over process. It is behind in manufacturing because it went down the wrong path. And it would be strange to spend billions building fabs based on a process that does not work, so they haven't. They just spent billions on a process that did not work.

Secondly though TSMC and Samsung (and Intel) have spent to be able to build the latest and greatest, most companies have not. And the latest CPU/GPUs require the latest and greatest and those CPU/GPU are in more demand than ever. So blame all of the other companies that dumped their fabs to avoid the capital costs, leaving fewer and fewer manufacturing companies.

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

And if you are past a certain age ....

Despite the shortage of developers, agencies will reject those of a certain age. Past that age, stay where you are (if you can) because get a new role will be tough. Of course, rejection for reasons of age is illegal so it's because "the company wants people to be there long term".

The mystery is why an industry filled with educated people decided to outsource hiring to the recruitment industry, an industry filled with people that are smart in a different way.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Base it on time in contract

IR35 has been a mess since it was introduced. It is so subjective.

Why not have simple rules that say "if you have worked for a single client for more than x months then you pay full tax" and an extra rule to stop leaving for a month and rejoining. As far as the value of x, then 24 seems fair.

It is wrong that there are contractors who have out lasted all of the permanent staff. I worked with one chap who had been a contractor for 20 years at a Govt dept and previous to that was employed for 10 years. So hardly taking any risks.

It's a decade since DevOps became a 'thing' – and people still don't know what it means

If you look at the DevOps jobs on the various recruitment sites, they do seem to be operations plus git. So we have infrastructure as code which can be versioned. And maybe DevOps is development techniques applied to operations.

But, like the author, I thought DevOps was supposed to remove silos and encourage development and operations to work together. And no one seems to look after development tools now and work with developers; that has been taken on by operations and sysadmins. Which is a mistake because the culture is different. Operations is more cautious, quite rightly - this is production with the possibility of reputational loss. Development can be more experimental in things.

So, I do wonder if DevOps is actually DevOps in 90% of the roles advertised.

Trump's taxing problem: The end of 'affordable' iPhones

not another brexit dig?

Two comments - sterling had to fall - we have the highest current account deficit in the developed world. Brexit was an excuse to do what should have been done years ago.

And why should US workers be more unskilled? Less experienced perhaps but they can be trained, much like the overseas workers were. The US went abroad not because overseas were skilled but because they were cheap and that allowed higher margins and better profits.