Many plans now have a co-insurance percent, so something like 20-80% is billable back to the patient after the deductible up to the out of pocket maximum (or Really Real Deductable as I call it)
Yes, but it will be a while, I think, before they actually offer something based on it. I don't see any service based on it at this point. AWS ECS is based on Docker.
We started doing challenges like this in our hiring process some years ago. Our challenges are open-ended so the time spent on it really is up to the applicant, but you can come up with a good solution in a few hours.
The feedback from candidates (including those we didn't hire) has been extremely good - they much prefer this to puzzles or whiteboard coding sessions.
Note that we give such challenges to candidates after they passed through a phone screen and a first interview with a pair of engineers.
>"The feedback from candidates (including those we didn't hire) has been extremely good - they much prefer this to puzzles or whiteboard coding sessions."
This whole idea of asking people do use up their nights and weekends to do free work is completely ridiculous. And the justification is always the same - "we think its better than implementing algorithms on whiteboards."
Well who ever said writing code on a whiteboard was necessary? This justification is ridiculous as it suggests there are just two possibilities for hiring people - algorithmic puzzles and unpaid work.
This is why it needs to be a challenge related to the employer, but not an actual feature they're going to go and use.
At my last place we used one, said "please don't spend more than 5 hours on it" - it was a challenge to read a specific industry format (e.g. test you can go and find something to read it, not implement a library to do so ... not reinventing the wheel) and present it in a basic RESTful web app (testing that you know what REST is, and can implement basic CRUD).
Never had an issue getting it done, and it was very illuminating, some people who passed through the initial interview with flying colours turned in absolute crap.
Stated another we don't want you to give up more than an "entire evening" or your "entire Saturday afternoon." This is messed up.
What's even more messed is that you generally won't be given the opportunity to you discuss your thinking or choices on your project. It's just pass fail.
Did you go over your reviews with the candidates that put in 5 hours who failed? And while a company says things like "don't put in more than X hours", the reality is people will put in much more time than that because they know they being put under a microscope and judged as if its production code.
We always gave feedback, even to those we didn't invite back.
It's either that, whiteboard interviews, or restrictive probation period if we don't test their coding ... each have their downsides, and it was decided the coding project was the most fair.
I don't think age as a numerical thing is the issue here. The problem is probably more related to people that stopped learning / being interested in new stuff when they landed a stable job. So they've been using the same skill base for a long time, and suddenly they realize they are obsolete.
Sure they may have grown their skills inside that particular silo, and that is worth something, but maybe outside the whole world has taken a different direction.
Never forget that the cool tech you're learning now will be out of fashion in a few years, and completely obsolete a few years more down the road (replace years by months for any JS framework out here :p).
This also creates a bias against older engineers. People assume that since they meet a lot of "dinosaurs" (in terms of technology) out there, 40+ engineers will probably be dinosaurs as well.
Also, there's some unspoken assumption, that if you're 40 or even 50 and "still" an engineer, something is wrong with you - you should have been a CTO or something years ago, so you either have bad personal skills or are untalented, kept for some Job-Security-Tech you know.
The sad thing BTW is that this attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy, causing talented engineers to push up the ladder and become bad managers, or go into marketing/sales/etc. Even if they're not bad at it, we are losing great engineers due to that, who were just scared to remain engineers.
BTW to me personally tech is a second career, although I've been programming since I was a child, my first career was in journalism, and later web content and product management. I've only started working professionally as an engineer at 29.
Your line of thought relies very strongly on the assumption that the skills of software engineers are tied to the particular language or framework they are using. Surely that's just complete nonsense?
> the skills of software engineers are tied to the particular language or framework they are using
Well, not all of them of course, but yes, knowledge of a particular language matters.
For example:
a) idiomatic code in a given language is easier to maintain, a programmer who doesn't know this language won't write idiomatic code for awhile
b) lack of knowledge of available libraries may result in reinventing them poorly, leading to NIH syndrome, which is bad for maintainability... and just bad in general
c) std lib of a language is a special case here: without having memorized what it has to offer you're going to work many times slower due to having to google all the time
and so on.
You can either know a lot of languages and technologies and bet your career on ability to learn new things very quickly, or you can be content with one language and become a master in using it. In the latter case much of your skills do become tied to the language and particular technology, so just be sure to pick one which is not going to stop being popular in a year.
Well, I wasn't thinking of specific skills for a given language/framework, but maybe more how those frameworks help you evolve along with the tech landscape.
I started my career around 15 years ago, working on a complex server system written in C++. The important skills back then were all about managing concurrency using mutexes, RW locks, events, and so forth.
Fast forward to now (with lots going on in between), and I find myself working again on server software, but this time the approach is much different: now for dealing with concurrency I'm relying on immutable state, and using Futures or actor systems to coordinate parallel work. It's been years since I've had problems with a deadlock.
Bottom line, it's true that a good programmer doesn't care about language or framework, since he can pick those up pretty fast anyway. But it's a skill that needs practising, and I've seen people neglect this and then regret it later.
Hmm I'm not sure I agree with that. From my experience the period where family is most likely to be a problem with a demanding job is when kids are very young. The short nights, demanding daycare schedules, having to clean them, feed them, and provide a mostly continuous watch, etc. It's pretty gruesome. If I look around me this tend to happen around 28-30 years old.
Of course family remains #1 priority afterwards, but there is enough flexibility to go along with a demanding job (provided you like said job).
I've been working remotely for the larger part of may "young father years" so I guess this helped a lot, too.
Where I have lived, the age of getting children has been getting higher and higher. It's not unusual for couples to have their firstborn in their mid-30's.
I've been using a Pi running XBMC for about a year. It's connected to a big hard drive. I can copy stuff there from my laptop (movies, music, etc.) It works pretty well; I don't remember having to "service" it in any way since I plugged it in.
It works fine to stream stuff from YouTube, too. Shows for kids, etc. The XBMC remote on my phone is pretty handy too.
I write code on a Mac and script-built VMs seem to be the way to go. Sharing host folders the VM mounts and letting the actual code run on the VM is much closer to the server environment (leading to much fewer surprises). While it may hide a bug that would manifest itself under OSX (or other Unix) it's a useful setup.
Having said that, I've also worked a lot with slimmer environments - venv on top of the native OS - with reasonable success.
That's a fair point, but now you can develop in VS on Windows and target pretty much every platform out there. They've also announced official support for Cordova, and they have the whole Xamarin thing going on. VS already has Python support, and Node.js tools are also being added.
This is starting to look like a pretty decent environment to work in.
(I have no knowledge of health care in the US - both countries I lived in have free health care)