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While on this trip to San Francisco I ran into a “talent management” consultant.

I asked What is that? “We help companies figure out how to recruit and retain employees.”

How much do companies pay for his services? “Certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars would be the minimum engagement.”

Why would they pay that much when there are 15 million unemployed Americans presumably eager for jobs? “If there is a talented person among those 15 million then my clients haven’t found him or her.”

[Separately, the Wikipedia article notes that this field was created by McKinsey in 1997, i.e., right about the time that Enron was organizing all of its incentive structures according to McKinsey advice (Guardian).]

What kinds of companies are most interested in talent management? “We get a lot of technology companies. They have tremendous trouble with retention. There is no loyalty in Silicon Valley. Companies are paying signing bonuses of $100,000 and more. Before making real money people used to have to work for years, wait for stock options to vest, and hope for a startup to succeed. Today there are engineers at big companies earning $1 million and more as straight salary and bonus.”

A Mountain View resident confirmed that non-managerial engineers could easily earn $400,000 per year at Google or Apple [a huge step up from the 1980s, when a top engineer might have earned the equivalent of about $140,000 in today’s dollars] but thought that $1 million was rare. Why weren’t more people studying engineering trying to get in on this? “You have to remember that the cost of living here is crazy high. A decent house is $2 million. You pay the highest tax rates in the U.S., outside of New York City. There are very few women who want to hang around in the Valley longer than necessary to get pregnant and collect child support. You’ll be working and/or commuting through horrible traffic 60-80 hours a week, mailing child support checks to an address in Santa Cruz or Napa, then going home to your lonely single guy apartment.”

[Fact check from the Web:

• Zillow says the median home value in Palo Alto is $1.8 million ($1118/square foot; the median includes condos). A single-family home in Mountain View, on the other hand, has a median price of $1.35 million.
• See the San Jose Mercury News for some traffic data.
• According to https://www.cse.ca.gov/ChildSupport/cse/guidelineCalculator , a one-night encounter with a Silicon Valley engineer earning $400,000 per year and paying a mortgage on that “decent house” would yield tax-free child support of about $43,000 per year ($777,600 over 18 years). This is roughly the after-tax median household income for Californians ($61,400 pre-tax according to the Census Bureau, fed into the ADP calculator) and could be doubled or tripled by having additional children with additional engineers.
• This article talks about working hours at Apple.

]

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I am friendly with some children (centered around age 10) whose parents are in poor health and at least one of whom probably won’t survive until the children are college age. I would like to give these kids some money but I am concerned that if I did it will simply be taken away from them roughly 1:1 by their college in the form of reduced financial aid.

This Yale article says that “Student assets are assessed in the financial aid formula at a much higher 20 percent rate…” Does that mean that over a four-year period, 80 percent of a child’s savings will be taken by the college in the form of reduced financial aid? So a child who takes my money and spends it all on a gap year Burning Man pavilion will come out, after college, almost even with a child who saves the money until freshman year?

This article on grandparent-owned 529 accounts implies that funds in a 529 account owned by a non-relative would be safe if not tapped until senior year.

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During the reign of King Bush II, I wrote about the proposed $400 million new presidential helicopter (March 2008 posting), a pimped-out variant of the standard EH101 that Wikipedia says costs $21 million when customers buy it from Eurocopter/Airbus instead of from Lockheed Martin. It seems that under Barack Obama, the government and its contractors have become more efficient. The new Marine One helicopter will be a tweaked Sikorsky S-92, which have a list price of around $30 million each when they are bought by companies that need to fly out to oil rigs. This press release says that the federal government will get four pimped-out S-92s for only about $300 million each, with options to buy 17 more at an undisclosed (undetermined?) price. The Wikipedia page on the VXX program says that about $1.7 billion was spent on the old plan before it was scrapped and that the projected costs of the old program doubled before it was canceled.

Related: my 2009 offer to pay personally for all presidential helicopter transport, saving the taxpayers about $1 billion per year.

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Check out these photos from the Montgomery Ward 1960 Fall and Winter catalog. Here are some things that I found interesting:

• nothing could be more wholesome for a mass market retailer than a father and son going out to kill birds with a pair of shotguns (there was no suggestion of mom and sister joining!)
• as part of its full-service ethos, the store would loan you whatever tools you needed to do a home repair/install job
• sales tax in New York City was 3% (today: 8.875%), in Connecticut 3% (today: 6.35%), in Rhode Island 3% (today: 7%)…
• a subset of the functions of a modern mobile phone could be obtained at the following costs:
  • Rolleiflex still camera (uses “popular 127 film“): $68.50
  • Movie camera: $100
  • Movie projector: $100
  • Smith-Corona portable typewriter (only 21 lbs!): $119.50
  • Audio recorder (open-reel): $280
  • Portable television (“so light” at only 33 lbs.): $158

(total: $826 or $6594 in 2014 dollars)

• bathing oneself in ultra-violet light was considered “healthful”
• a person over 35 was considered “geriatric”
• you could order a 10×40′ steel building kit for $383

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I rented a Chevrolet Impala in Orlando last week. Orlando would seem to be one of the best places on Earth for radio reception, with the largest hill being about 10′ taller than the surrounding terrain. The car came with an HD radio. When I would tune in a station, the radio would display “Acquiring HD signal” and then sometimes switch to the same sound but at a different volume level. An HD-only station, 90.7 HD-2 classical, would cut in and out for no apparent reason. It was basically impractical. Is there something particular about Orlando or the Chevrolet that makes HD radio more challenging? Or is it broken everywhere and for everyone?

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For one more month the National Gallery is showing Garry Winogrand’s photos (exhibit home page).

Given that Winogrand worked with handheld 35mm black and white, why not simply look at the excellent books that are out there? The show does offer some interesting additional material. Probably the most significant extra is a video of Winogrand answering questions from students at Rice University (see it by following a link from the above exhibit home page). Winogrand talks about how he learned from doing, not from being taught.

If you know someone who is considering marrying a photographer and relying on that person’s income, the letter from Judy Teller on display may be a welcome caution. It seems that Teller was married to Winogrand in 1967 and divorced in 1969. In the letter, a demand for post-divorce cash, she complains of his grandiose ideas of the success that was always just around the corner. She notes that the culture at the time required a man to support his ex-wife, in particular because he had caused her to waste her prime child-bearing years (she was 28 years old at the time and did not have any children).

The exhibit shows a Guggenheim application where Winogrand explains what he wants to do (transcription here). The application is roughly 50 years old and it is interesting to see that what Winogrand thought was a crisis turned out to be a lifestyle to which Americans had no trouble adapting. (“Since World War II we have seen the spread of affluence, the move to the suburbs and the spreading of them, the massive shopping centers to serve them, cars for to and from. … Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, and I look at some magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, …”

Related: my own street photography article.

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A positive magazine review induced me to declare that You Should Have Known would be my one mystery novel for the year. The protagonist is a marriage therapist in Manhattan who writes a book about how women should have been able to predict, by carefully listening to the man they were were dating, exactly how that man would turn out to be an inadequate husband. The Manhattan men in the book do turn out not to have been prizes. Either they aren’t supportive enough emotionally (therapist’s remedy: divorce them) or they are having affairs. The ones who were secretly gay and are having affairs with other men are fairly harmless. When the men are having affairs with women, however, children are often the result and that leads to drama.

The first half of the book is interesting for its depiction of people finding out that they don’t know the folks around them as well as they thought (hint: the therapist finds out that her husband had a secret or two). The latter portion is seriously marred by a woman whose problems are solved by … finding a man. This is a sensitive non-threatening man who seems to be in touch with his feminine side, mind you, but there is no explanation of why this guy is trustworthy where all of the others turned out to be secretly gay/cheating/whatever.

Another interesting angle in the book is the lack of any security in a modern marriage (at least when one of the partners is a man). In New York, in the scenarios covered by the author, a woman who is married to a man has only a weak claim on his income, for example. If he has been exploring the town and quietly getting other women pregnant, it is the other women who have first bite at the guy’s income (example: by statute, Child Support Plaintiff #1 will get 17% of the man’s pre-tax income; Plaintiff #2 will get 17% of the remaining 83%; Plaintiff 3 will get 17% of 0.83 squared; after federal and state taxes, then, that leaves basically nothing for the wife and any children with that wife (also nothing for any fourth plaintiff)).

Finally there is the angle of therapy and therapists. Are they helpful because they wise? Are they helpful because attending psychotherapy sessions forces clients to focus and reflect? Or are therapists simply not helpful for most people?

The book could be better-written and better-crafted but it can be thought-provoking and it held my attention on a commercial airline flight.

What I’m reading now:The Great Texas Wind Rush

[Some excerpts, added by reader demand!

Inside the courtyard [of the fancy Manhattan private school], on the privileged side of the velvet rope, Grace saw that there were very few nannies in evidence. The concerned mothers of Rearden seemed to have decided, en masse, that some moments in a child’s life, like Max’s first school murder or Chloe’s first media circus, were just too sensitive to leave to a surrogate. So the mothers themselves had dropped everything and were here for their children, waiting for the kids to be released by Robert Conover’s grief counselors.

[the protagonist’s theme for her book] You knew he was in debt: You’re the one who paid off his Visa bill! You knew that when he went out at night he came back plastered. You knew he thought you weren’t up to his level intellectually, because he went to Yale and you went to U Mass. And if you didn’t know, you should have known, because it could not have been clearer, even back then at the very start.

[a friend reviews history with a woman who made an ill-advised marriage decision] I asked you to tell me what it was you loved about him, and then I asked you to tell me, for every one of those things, how you knew they were true. And you said, more or less, because they just were. And I asked you why you thought he was so estranged from his family. Why he seemed to have no other friends. I asked you if you were worried about how quickly he’d kind of become the most important person in your life. I asked you if the reason he seemed so perfect for you was that you had made it really clear to him what perfect for you meant, and he gave you back exactly what you wanted,

]

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I’m in Orlando right now. At the exit that I take from I-4 to get to my hotel there are the following: (1) a tattoo parlor, (2) a billboard advertising a physician-operated laser tattoo removal service.

Separately… would readers like to get together for breakfast (my treat!) on Saturday morning around 10:00 am? Somewhere close to Disney.

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A friend decided that he did not need his three-bedroom condominium in Cambridge anymore. Here’s an email from him:

Went on MLS this week. Today was the first public open house. Got two written offers. Accepted one for 1.325MM with no mortgage contingency.

The government assures us that inflation is non-existent, but if you would like to live in the Boston area without being stuck in traffic for an hour every morning, it will cost you about 20 percent more this year compared to last year. Brookline, as the only town that is both close to the center and has a school system with reasonable results, is getting particularly packed with newcomers.

What if you are willing to rely on the highways? The same friend just bought an 11,000 (!) square foot place in a suburb that has one of the Boston area’s top 10 school systems. He will be luxuriating on 10 acres of land and swimming in the pool. The “guest house” is nearly 4000 square feet. Cost of this Neverland-style ranch? $1.7 million. (Plus the Al Gore-sized electricity bills!)

[Separately, this does lead to the question of why realtors are making 5 percent on nearly every transaction in Cambridge. Unless grossly overpriced, places are sold within a few days. If buyers and sellers could determine a fair price from an appraiser at a cost of $500 or so, why are they paying $60,000+ to realtors to assist them? (The actual legal conveyance from seller to buyer will be done at an additional cost by lawyers, of course.)]

 

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A friend has a lightly used Magento-based ecommerce site that delivers pages more slowly than he would like. He reported that there were only about 100,000 page views per day, i.e., an average of about one per second. I said “Are you sure that you have enough RAM to keep the database in memory?” This was not an issue that his team of developers had considered. After some digging I found out that he was paying for two servers, each with 32 GB of RAM. On these two physical machines he was running three virtual machines, one for the MySQL database management system, one for the Web server, and one for a staging server. These VMs were allocated 16 GB of RAM for each production VM and 4 GB for the staging server. In other words, he was paying for 64 GB of physical RAM but the Gods of virtualization had set things up so that his production site could not possibly use more than 32 GB of RAM. The database VM ran on a physical machine by itself, leaving 16 GB of RAM entirely idle except for whatever the hypervisor was using.

Requests for the site and server documentation were answered with “What’s documentation?” (I pointed to “Software Design Review” for examples, but still not a single document was found for a site in which at least several developer-years have been invested.)

Does virtualization really make sense for people who aren’t going to do basic design work or write down simple documents that say (1) how much data there is, (2) where the data will be stored, (3) how much memory will be required at each point where data are stored? This particular site would almost surely have run better if the people who set up MySQL had never heard of VMware.

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