American here, and ISO is better than the common American format, though US military date style is also better than the more common American format, and maybe better than ISO for some uses.
In everyday business, when dealing with dates, the month is usually what you care about most, followed by the day, and then the year (which is often redundant or implicit).
Thus, month/date/years is more "ergonomic" or "user friendly," if one is equally used to either format.
A similar example is time. The hour is usually what you care about most, followed by the minutes, with seconds most often being irrelevant. Fortunately, that's how everyone writes time.
In everyday business, I would generally start with the day and then follow with the month if it's relevant (often it's not, if talking about a date in the near future), and finally by year if needed. I can't imagine when I'd start with the month, really, but that might be because in Finnish you'd almost always say and write dates with the day first.
As far as date formats go, apart from the ISO format, "21 Jul 2020" is definitely my favorite and always unambiguous. The only downside is that it's language dependent.
I think prices today are to some extend inflated by government action. But it is hard to tell by how much, since also the global economy will grow again very soon. And if anyone benefits from more digitization and remote work it is MSFT.
Also for MSFT specifically, I think the company is in a very good spot right now with its cloud business, gaming and office, developer and productivity software
I suspect MSFT is reaping a huge gain from the combination of business tooling (office, applicaitons, infrastructure), cloud-hosted environments and high-touch customer management. With all those workers remote, companies have huge IT workloads to support them. Would you rather be calling your MS rep these days or trying to find a human at Google?
My feeling is that best Indian software engineers are in the US (or even Europe) already. I have great Indian and Pakistani colleagues at my company, but we had very mixed results with outsourcing.
I believe this is true also, but is changing quickly. Anecdotally I know of some pretty good engineers that are moving back home because the quality of life difference (having a cook, housekeeper, driver), and because salaries have gotten a lot better than say 5 or 10 years ago.
Like others have mentioned, the current political atmosphere is one that seems to have embraced xenophobia, thus making it harder for talent to emigrate. If you can't move the talent to the work, you can move the work to the talent. In that sense the internet is a great equalizer.
This reminds me of a quote from my international econ class in college: "You can take our tomatoes, or our workers. It's up to you to pick which you want" - Mexico to US
I've also seen very mixed results with outsourcing, but I don't know if I would blame Indian (or Polish, or Ukrainian or whatever) engineers. I think often it's just how the "mothership" works with the outsourced entity. If the process is to ship a spreadsheet of specifications and expect to get back a great product in 3 weeks, it's not ideal.
You need to be very controlling with outsourcing. You cannot just hire resumes, you need to carefully interview to ensure that they can do what is claimed and be hands on to watch the work.
There are great people in India, but you have work to find them.
I am in Germany (where software engineers are ridiculously undervalued) and would consider 80k an underwhelming mid-level salary. According to levels.fyi, salary in the netherlands is quite a bit better.
I only read Pandora's Star so far, but I really liked the fact that it was a rather optimistic vision of the future. Humanity had colonies on dozens or hundreds of planets, and due to life extension people were basically immortal and could even choose the shape of their body.
It's cool technology, but I guess ebooks might have been even more effective.
Side note, for once I am happy to be in Germany and not the US. Here Libraries are open. I go to the gym. Next week I even have a movie date at the local cinema.
It will go away. I'm in Europe where things are closer to normal already. I meet friends, people go shopping (with hygiene measures and masks), schools and gyms are opening.
Also keep in mind that there was always a threat of infectious diseases. And it will persist until we find a universal cure for all viruses. Being somewhat of a germophobe myself, I was always aware of it.
Hopefully, people will stay at home when they are sick, though.
Europe tech has always been different than US tech scene.
The societies are very different. Here, the armed protesters demand haircuts and tattoos. In Europe, the French are flooding Spanish border towns in search of cheaper booze and smokes.
Yes, hyperbole, but a lot of Americans have legit apprehension about cramming into elevators to ride up office towers to work. It's seen as glamourous in the UK to work in a Canary Wharf office tower with a view. In the US, notsomuch.
Edit: I know people who still won't go into tall buildings post 9/11. Something that Europeans don't have in their psyche.
The fatality rate is below one percent. It's quite a bit higher for the old and sick, much lower for healthy people. The only rational and sustainable solution is to isolate the vulnerable and let the other people live their lives with the appropriate hygiene and safety measures as well as extensive testing.
Based on what? It seems like there is always an intrinsic value judgement here because reopening for young people means more old people will die, even with isolation. That's maybe a necessary cost to pay, but don't elevate your moral judgements to the "rational" when they are anything but.
