Project 31-A

Many people look for a panacea to fix modern economic woes. One of these dreams is to return to the gold standard. Doing a little arithmetic reveals some interesting results. First how much “money” is there in the world? In US deposits (M3), its around 10 trillion dollars, 10,000,000,000,000 The world total is about 70 trillion dollars How much (mined) gold is there in the world? 5.3 billion troy ounces How much (mined) silver is there in the world? 45 billion ounces So if money is to be gold base, we just divide 70 trillion by 5.3 billion =$13,200 /oz for gold. or $1500/oz for silver.   If both are used (with a 10 oz of silver = 1 oz of gold), then gold drops to $6,600 /oz and silver to $750/oz. One of the old (real) silver quarter dollars was 0.18 oz, it would be worth $140 .   Of course, the money in circulation would be match by government gold reserves. If 10% of the gold is privately owned, then the mone...

Last Friday I had a long discussion on different type of developers and their relevant value for an ongoing company. I am not talking about a startup-pancake (typically venture capital based whose model is to sell or flip into an IPO – then walking away with the money).   Support/Maintenance Developer This is a developer that is completely happy doing high quality fixes, dotting I’s and crossing T’s. It is typically a destination career – one that is grossly underpaid for their value.  In terms of construction industry, he is someone that comes in an fixes leaky roofs and windows, change furnace filters and all of the way up to doing minor additions. If you are familiar with Holmes on Homes , we talking of Mikes, and not the type that he ends up undoing and redoing.  A good one will often spend their entire career at one company, well appreciated (but likely underpaid!).   Release Developer This is where most developers ends at being.  Typically the...

Today I happened to look at a software company profile that I am working with -- which is not too different from what I inferred from other companies that I am currently dealing with.   What do we see in this software company, 11+40+104+131+121 / 750= 54% with Bachelor Degrees or above in Computer Sciences. It’s interesting because for the ‘going some where’ startups that I have worked with in the last few years, this pattern is not uncommon (typically 30+%).  I also see startup which are successful but tending to have reach a coasting level and go into a holding pattern where the percentage is < 10%.   The explanation may be that one group is well funded and the other is under funded. If you are in a hiring position, you may wish to give preference to people with a Bachelor’s degree or higher – especially those in Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics. They may provision your firm for the future better.

In my current development project, my MVVM pivot app needed to create a pie chart from a collection of objects. I read David Anson’s ( @DavidAns ) blog about using Charts in Windows Phone 7 (WP7) development. His example uses a detailed Resource Dictionary for the style of the chart. I’m so new to Silverlight that the XAML markup of David’s example tripped me up. This blog post is for other newbies trying to rework static resources into dynamic binding. In Silverlight, static resources are those that are already defined, hence static. This is great for a known set or for working in the Visual Studio Design-time environment. Dynamic resources can only be viewed in the runtime environment where they can also be changed. In this article, I’m using the Silverlight Toolkit, found here . A chart is a parent with child nodes of legend and pieseries. Since the Chart is a parent with several children, I wasn’t sure where to bind my collection of dynamic objects which would determine t...

After my last post, I got some email asking me to add on mobile developer. I added some cloud jobs to the list. The results are below.   Job Number of Jobs (Washington) Salary (Average) Blackberry Developer 241 $64K iPhone Developer 650 $83K Windows Phone developer 750 $81K Android Developer 580 $85K IOS Developer 198 $86K Windows Mobile Developer 800 $83K Azure Developer 704 $80K Cloud Developer 2500 $88K EC2 Developer 463 $87K Solution Architect 3600 $98...

Supply and demand drives earnings. In an email thread today, one person assumed a bunch of things about relative salary and availability of developers. I use InDeed.com as a quick and dirty statistical source. The number of jobs is a good proxy for the number for available resources and salary tend to reflect shortage or surplus of developers with those skills.   So here’s the table of the results: (Area was: Washington) Search Term Number Salary VB Developer 323 78K VBA Developer 31 90K C# Developer 4700 84K PHP Developer 750 72K JAVA Developer 5900 85K JavaScript Developer 3500 77K Oracle Developer 15...