I think it's a good idea to encourage everyone to try to get paid more, since (a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees and (b) programmers are bad at the type of social and interpersonal skills that are required for negotiation.
That said, as someone who has been through this, I think your advice is a naively optimistic oversimplification of the forces that hold programmers back from getting paid more and, for the most part, people who follow your advice will still end up getting paid less than business analysts and project managers for cultural reasons expressed by some of the answers on that page.
The only difference is, with your approach, they may feel as if they have done everything they could, rather than suffering in quiet resentment (and, from a psychological perspective, this is not to be underestimated).
(a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees...
Depends on the corporation. Walmart only makes about $10,700/employee in profit, for example (about $6/hour if all employees work 35 hours). Since walmart typically pays $10-12/hour at minimum, employees are capturing about 2/3 of the value they create.
That undermines my assumptions. Thanks for the link. I'm very surprised a company of Walmart's size has such low profit per-employee. I would have assumed some accounting tricks were responsible but maybe it's the nature of their business.
Walmart is the canonical example of a low-margin / high-volume business. Especially during their growth phase, every time they would find a way to reduce costs, they would funnel that savings into lower prices, rather than taking the savings in the form of a higher profit margin.
But I found data more useful to the tech industry. If MS or GOOG pays their employees $200k/year, then employees are capturing about half of the value they create [1]. Worse than Walmart, but not that bad.
To address the fallacy: Just state that labour and capital get half the returns each. We don't need to decide who or what creates value to make that statistic interesting.
It's a retail business - they are inevitably tied to the price they get from the manufacturer, and compete extremely strongly with a million other places, big and small. That really limits the margins they can make. Some retail businesses can get slightly higher margins due to exclusivity or just general scarcity, but overall the vast majority of profit is probably due to either 1. Cost Savings or 2. Economies of Scale such that you can eek some additional padding out of your vendors (WalMart is notoriously aggressive with vendors).
More men are not needed in childcare/teaching because women are naturally - from birth - better at the type of empathy and communication that is required in those fields.
It's the same reason that women excel in technology management roles (while generally being inferior in technical roles because of inadequate training or aptitude, exceptional cases like Marissa Mayer excepted).
Even a woman with average communication/empathy skills relative to other women (emphasis on 'empathy' - because this is what really separates men from women in communication) is often far better at management/planning than 99.99% of male technologists.
In the 'olden' days, we used to have discipline in schools. So male teachers were extremely useful to have. Bad pupils used to get told off, disciplined, and snapped into line.
Now, naughty kids get 'diagnosed' and given a cool label, get a 'teachers assistant' assigned to them - effectively praised for being naughty.
I agree with your point about women excelling at empathy and communication, but I'd say the movement away from male teachers has also been due to the removal of discipline in schools, and a movement toward empathising with bad behavior rather than correcting it.
When I was a kid of 9 and in school, going into my first class with a male teacher, I had the same theory. It turned out I was wrong, though. My least favorite classes from then on out were all taught by women. It was like women had to be extra bitchy to maintain distance or something.
"More men are not needed in childcare/teaching because women are naturally - from birth - better at the type of empathy and communication that is required in those fields."
If you empathise with someone, it is harder to cause them discomfort because it causes you discomfort also. Thus, someone with lesser empathy would be better at discipling children.
"I disagree that men are better at disciplining children than women are."
You can't have it both ways, Sarkozy. Which is it?
Are you saying women are, on average more empathethic/ have better communication skills, or women are innately 'guaranteed' to be better in these areas?
Any man with the skills needed to perform well in childcare(especially) and teaching jobs are discouraged from taking those jobs, as any woman would 'naturally' be better in such roles (not to mention the significant 'pedo scare' barrier). This is the sort of latent discrimination that forces people away from the jobs they are best suited to.
That's silly. Most men will naturally also be able to lift heavy weights. That's not to say women aren't allowed to work in jobs where you need to lift big weights, but it'll be more natural for most men.
The sexes have obvious physical differences, as well as obvious mental differences. To deny either of them is stupid.
But the question is not about whether some men are suited to the job. It's about who is on average more suited to a particular type of job. It is well established scientifically that women are - generally speaking - so I would prefer to see more women taking roles that are suited to their innate capacities whether it be in technology management, education or any other role that takes advantage of their innate higher capacities in empathic communication.
You're defining 'successful' in monetary terms while I'm more concerned with the psychological health of the working environment.
I'm saying women are better managers because they are less prone to the types of socially tone-deaf interpersonal problems you see lampooned in Dilbert.
In other words, if I had to choose between a male manager who could create a succesful company versus a female manager who knew how to foster a harmonious working environment, I would choose the harmonious working environment over monetary "success" every time.
In the end, what does it matter to me if the company I work for is financially successful or not? On the other hand, if my manager is able to help create an environment that is more pleasant for every involved, that's something I'm interested in and that's where I think women in general are more naturally capable than men.
But perhaps not an appropriate response to scientific fact. Countless psychological studies have documented women's higher innate capacities for communication and empathy. So if you disagree on that fact, you are simply misinformed. What I'm saying might not be popular and might even sound prejudicial but there is no debating the innate genetic differences between men and women.
Really? Let's debate. Do you have a study documenting the case of a statistically significant number of children raised in an environment where every single other person isn't constantly treating them like they should behave a particular way because of their genitals? Because otherwise you're just redemonstrating the already well-documented fact that children tend to behave the way they are expected to behave, which doesn't tell us anything useful about genetics.
Okay, that's a cheap shot. I know you don't have any such study. Tell you what, I'll settle for any study demonstrating that the divergence between the mean of all women and the mean of all men is greater than the divergence between individuals of either gender.
As far as I can tell, sarkozy doesn't have a study proving his point (or proving your straw-man version of his point) and you don't have a study proving yours.
Now, why is it that you are entitled to an opinion and he is not?
As far as I can tell, the person bringing up "countless psychological studies" has a responsibility to provide their own evidence.
I have no problem with other people having opinions. I likewise have no problem with publicly disapproving of opinions which I think are socially harmful.
I don't have any illusions about changing a bigot's mind, but I can hope that others will see my disapproval and think that bigotry is just that much less cool.
I'm intrigued by your willingness to use and to admit to using the metric "socially harmful" (as opposed to, say, "correct") to judge an opinion.
For example, what would you do if your own opinion (that is, your honest best assessment of what the truth actually was) was an opinion you judged to be socially harmful? Would you continue to hold the opinion, but try to avoid mentioning it? Would you publicly lie about your opinion? Would you express the opinion and expect public disapproval? Would you intentionally try to change your own opinion somehow?
Ooh, that's a fascinating question. I'm not completely sure how to respond, since I think the two are tied together— I use a more or less evidence-based definition of harm.
I mean, looking at it logically, thinking that all women want to have children wouldn't be prejudiced if all women actually did want to have children. Would it still be wrong to say so? I can't see how.
I guess if my assessment of the facts were greatly opposed to my values it'd probably imply some more significant cognitive dissonance.
Why are you calling me a bigot? Is it possible you could find a less offensive way of engaging in this discussion? I would appreciate it. I also disagree with you, after all, but have not resorted to calling you names.
I apologize— I didn't mean to call you a bigot personally, so although I do feel that sex prejudice is a very important and undervalued issue in our culture, I'll admit it was a poor choice of words.
I was merely trying to elucidate the broader point that shaming can be appropriate in the case of "differences of opinion"— after all, bigotry is just the extremity of the belief that one's personal prejudice is well-grounded in fact.
Of course I appreciate that you're willing to discuss this civilly, and I hope you'll forgive the hyperbole.
> like they should behave a particular way because of their genitals?
Come on. There are countless studies that show the biological differences between the sexes and the way their brains work. It's not rocket science.
If you believe in evolution, surely you believe that over time, the female and male brains have developed for different functions. I've never understood why people disbelieve this and try to pretend that the sexes are identical.
Show me a study that proves that men and women think in exactly the same ways and that there are no biological differences in their programming.
I really can't understand how anyone who accepts evolution (Surely most people), but doesn't accept the idea that perhaps the female and male minds have evolved and optimized to different things.
Given that we have obvious and numerous physical differences, it seems terribly unlikely that we have no mental differences. Especially given that physically and internally the sexes brains differ quite a lot (size, weight, number of neurons etc).
For example:
Number of neocortical neurons (females) = 19.3 billion
(Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner,L., Bundgaard, M.J.,
Gundersen, H.J.G., Nyengaard, J.R. and Regeur, L. Aging
and the human neocortex. Exp. Gerontology, 38:95-99, 2003
and Pakkenberg, B. and Gundersen, H.J.G. Neocortical
neuron number in humans: effect of sex and age. J. Comp.
Neurology, 384:312-320, 1997.)
Number of neocortical neurons (males) = 22.8 billion
(Pakkenberg et al., 1997; 2003)
Males were traditionally hunters, which is why they have greater spacial abilities. Women were traditionally carers, which is why they have greater communicative and caring ability. This isn't cutting edge stuff. Look up the numerous studies. Look at the anecdotal evidence.
I think that if you disagree with the above, there's no point continuing. It'd be like trying to argue with someone who denies evolution.
I completely get that we should not discriminate UNFAIRLY based on any attribute of anyone. But to deny obvious differences that clearly exist is just silly.
Show me a study that proves that men and women think in exactly the same ways and that there are no biological differences in their programming.
"The following specific differences in behavior are attributable to biological differences between male and female: _____" is a rather different claim from "There exist biological differences between male and female." I believe the former claim is the one being challenged. Disproof of the latter claim, while sufficient to disprove the former, is not strictly necessary.
Google is your friend. I'm not about to spoon feed you common sense, just like I can't be bothered to find studies that show the earth isn't flat right now.
And if you're serious, you have to respond to all my other points. For example:
Do you believe that evolution exists
Do you accept that women are physically different to men
Do you accept that womens brains are different to mens
We're talking scientifically here. On average.
Is it racist to say most basketball players are black due to them being on average taller? Or maybe you think their extra height is caused by their environment :/
Since you mentioned spatial awareness, you'll probably like this one. Having both groups play Medal of Honor for only 10 hours total narrowed the spatial gender gap into nonsignificance, with women benefitting much more than men. The benefits were still visible months later, without any instruction to continue playing.
Considering the wildly different toys and games we encourage boys and girls to play from infancy through adolescence, to say that this calls the idea that the spatial gender gap is genetic into question is quite an understatement.
You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a cheap shot, but nope— Wikipedia lists the difference in mean height for Americans as about 5" (~5'10" for men, ~5'5" for women). If you get three guys together in a room, you've probably already got more variation than that.
The general point here is that there is much, much more overlap between the sexes than there is difference between them. That's why although you certainly can make interesting statistical inferences about populations, applying the same statistics on an individual level (this person is a woman, she's probably [whatever]) is very likely to be false and is equivalent to blind prejudice.
Look at page 11. 19 year old women in the 90th percentile are still shorter than 19 year old men in the 50th percentile. Now, while I was never very good at statistics, I'm pretty sure if we had a running bet over who was taller in any random male/female pairing, I would drain your bank account dry.
It's studying adults, so it can't and of course doesn't make any claims about genetics like you're trying to.
I can only find one place with any information about individuals (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/fig_tab/natu...), but according to that one graph the difference among all men is more than twice the difference between the average of all men and the average of all women. Even the cultural implication isn't valuable for making statements about individuals.
Doesn't really look like it answers either of my points.
It's one of many studies that demonstrate empirically that women are more empathic than men. My assumption is that the difference relates to genetics but what matters is that there is an observable difference that will have an impact in the real world - especially in the workplace - which is what this discussion is about.
The second page has a graph of individuals by "empathic concern" (ignoring the brain activity axis, which is what the study is actually demonstrating...)
Note that although women, on average, have higher scores than men (a mean difference of 2 on a scale of 1-20), almost half of the men have scores higher than the female average, and a quarter of the women have scores lower than the male average.
In more intuitive terms, out of this sample of 16 men and 16 women, the 7 most empathic men were more empathic than the 8 least empathic women. If you were trying to guess how empathic someone you meet is based on their sex, you would do slightly better than just flipping a coin. From this you're getting that "women are more empathic"?
Or are you using a slight statistical association to rationalize your cultural prejudice?
On the "Empathy Quotient" test, the average female score is 47 while for males it is 42.
So, no, I'm not using "a slight statistical association to rationalize" either (a) "a cultural prejudice" or (b) "bigotry" (which you unfairly accused me of in an earlier comment). I could just as easily accuse you of denying the weight of the scientific evidence because of misogyny but that would be silly. The fact is, there is room here for reasonable debate and your attempt to paint this issue in black and white is unjustified.
I don't think you see my point here. You can't use statistics to judge individuals.
If that study were a hiring situation and you figured that, since "women are more empathic than men", you should only consider the female applicants, you would be tossing out nearly as many qualified applicants as you'd be keeping. It's just not a useful thing to say based on that data.
When you add in the fact that saying "women are more empathic than men" contributes to the broader social condition that empathy is encouraged in women and discouraged in men, and that mean women get a free pass because they're women and caring men can't get a job teaching children because they're men, it becomes a positively damaging thing to say.
I agree on the importance of caution when applying statistical conclusions in individual cases - especially hiring decisions. I don't deny that there are, as you said, "mean women and caring men". But I don't believe in denying the existence of gender differences simply to avoid supporting the status quo. It can be useful to be aware of these patterns because, with a broad brush, we can cautiously identify where people's skills are most likely to reside.
If you have a man and a woman in a room together, it's going to be more or less a toss-up which of them happens to be more suited for a particular task, since what the body of research mostly shows is that, in general, men and women are pretty much the same.
Considering that, it strikes me as disingenuous to say something like "men are better at [x] than women" — which is vague by the most generous reading, outright false by the most literal — when what you really mean is "the mean for [x] among all men is 5% higher than the mean among all women."
I think the reason people don't say that instead is because it's obviously a very weak statement.
I think you're right that outright theft of the car is unlikely. But the advantage that Zipcar has over this p2p system is Zipcar personnel can keep a log of everything related to a vehicle - the condition of all of its parts and a full inventory of its accessories. This also allows Zipcar to make final decisions about who has caused damage or theft. In a p2p system, there is no central authority to adjudicate these issues - which requires relying on the word of either the owner or the renter to decide who is responsible.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted either but I suspect it was for the same reason I was for asking similar questions.
As you point out from the faq, the onus seems to be on the owner and the only consequence for the dirtiness is the ability to rate the user. I think a more serious question relates to the adjudication process in the case of more serious violations such as scratches, damage or theft of items from the car. Do they automatically take the word of the owner - and what happens in the case of false claims against a renter by an owner - what appeal process does the renter have in that case?
Sounds like you live in an affluent or at least broadly educated area, if people broadly have such high-minded concerns about the welfare of the community. Your experience may not translate to more economically-mixed neighborhoods.
I wonder how easy it would be for someone to sign up with fake id, pass the screening process and then steal a really nice car.
Or, worse, remove some of its engine parts and replace them with cheaper ones.
Do I need to tag each part in the car and strip it down each time it's returned to make sure no one has swapped anything out? (Some internal parts are expensive enough that it might be worth someone's time to rent my car and remove a new part for their own car rather than buy a new one themselves.) If this happens, how I prove it?
What about scratches? Does the car need to be photographed by both parties before and after each rental session. Otherwise either party could make a false claim about scratches or other cosmetic damages.
How are damage or theft claims verified and what role does getaround play in all of this?
One speculation on the parts issue... Most rental companies only rent cars which have been produced in the past couple of years. Because those vehicles are almost always under warranty, I wonder if the black market for used parts for them is small and therefore doesn't provide much of an incentive for such theft? Almost all repairs involving mechanical failure (as opposed to an accident) on newer cars are handled by dealers because of warranties.
Let's consider slightly older vehicles. Or, for that matter, even newer ones. How many parts on a car could be profitably swapped out with low value replacements while allowing the vehicle to remain operable? One could certainly replace a water pump with an older one, but it couldn't be so badly damaged that the vehicle could not be driven a few miles. What's the marginal difference in the value of the stolen part vs. the semi-operable one? Is the sum total of these marginal differences minus the cost of renting the vehicle sufficient to make this crime worthwhile? For non-commodity vehicles (a Honda Civic w/ many aftermarket parts, etc.), I can see positive ROI for the thief, but owners of such vehicles would no sooner rent them out than they would offer up their pets or girlfriends by the hour.
You're right. The "marginal difference", as you say, is key. So let's assume theft of parts happens rarely. Don't we still need a process in place to adjudicate when it does happen? Let's say the theft is not of a water pump but a car radio or, let's say, the owner left his radar detector or his daughter's ipod in the car and the renter walked off with it. What's the process for adjudicating that claim? Does getaround need to get involved? What if it's a false claim and the renter is unfairly charged for it? The same applies to scrathes and damages. If the owner claims the car was scratched during the rental, does he need to back up that claim with photographic evidence - before and after pictures? And what's the process for authenticating those pictures as valid? All I'm saying is there's a minefield of potential disputes here, especially because there is not necessarily a hand-off between the owner and the renter when the car is returned.
The same issues are faced with rental of any high-value item, whether it be a house, boat or car. The answer is both scale (many items) and in-built pricing that expects, say, 1 in 100 people to steal/break something. You've got to price in the expectation of replacing certain items.
For the individual owner without fleet economics to back them up, however, one individual event (ie, theft, major damage) can be enough to put them out of the pool.
Just like an insurance company -- by maintaining a car fleet across which relatively few instances of damage/theft/etc will occur. They can afford to take a significant hit on a few cars, and they can afford to hire people to maintain/verify/qualify the cars at scale.
Normal rental car companies have employees whose job it is to maintain the car, fix any cosmetic damages and notify the administrative unit if they believe a significant damage or theft has taken place. However, this is a different situation. The owner of the car seems to be the one who is repsonsible here for carrying out any checks and my question is, what is the process for negotiating any claims of theft or damage in this case? In the case of a normal car company, they simply make an outright decision as to whether the driver has damaged or stolen and then they put a charge on the person's credit card. In this case there are three parties - the renter, the owner and the middleman (getaround). So, if a claim of damage is made by the owner, in order to bill the renter, there needs to be a process on getaround's part to verify that claim. Similarly, if the renter claims that a false damage/theft claim has been made by the owner, there needs to be a way for the renter to be able to support that claim. My question is, what is that process? Does it require both the owner and renter to document all aspects of the car before an after each trip? Because to me that seems like the only way to ensure that fraud does not occur at some point in this process.
I hope they have a very good screening process... the fact that you have the key at some point means > go to locksmith and make duplicate > steal things from it a month later after a few others have rented it
I would prefer personally approving people who want to rent my car...
It's getting better with the NIH forcing the deposit of a free to access version of a paper if public money has been spent on it, Pubmed Central is getting quite large.
There was a time in my life, where every single time my girlfriend and I were about to enjoy some adult time, my employees would call. Without fail. There has to be some sort of twillo app idea in there somewhere.
We just need to tap into the accelerometer, do an FFT and low-pass on the microphone, and check for a correlation between the frequency of a rhythmic acceleration and the frequency of grunting.
There is actually a project going on at my university that basically does that. It's an iPhone app that takes the accelerometer and sound input into consideration. They guys doing that app are graphing the data and have an algorithm rating the "performance". It's supposed to be a little criticism about the current state of privacy (and it includes abilities to share your scores in Twitter and Facebook :) )
Reminds me of this best man who setup a Twitter account for the sole purpose of automatically tweeting when the newlyweds were having sex (recorded using a pressure sensitive device):
That said, as someone who has been through this, I think your advice is a naively optimistic oversimplification of the forces that hold programmers back from getting paid more and, for the most part, people who follow your advice will still end up getting paid less than business analysts and project managers for cultural reasons expressed by some of the answers on that page.
The only difference is, with your approach, they may feel as if they have done everything they could, rather than suffering in quiet resentment (and, from a psychological perspective, this is not to be underestimated).