The UK is at risk of losing the contract for the expansion of a flagship European weather research centre based in Reading because of Brexit. From a report: The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has been based in Berkshire for the last 45 years but its future EU-funded activities are now the subject of an international battle. At stake is a planned new facility with up to 250 jobs, and nine countries — including France, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Italy — are vying for the business. “As a consequence of Brexit, a competition to relocate all ECMWF EU-funded activities from Reading in the UK to an EU member state is taking place during 2020,” an official briefing note from one member state said. ECMWF, which is also a key body for climate-change research, is backed by 34 countries, 22 of them EU member states. In addition to weather forecasting, it operates a number of EU-funded programmes, including two services from the EU’s Copernicus satellite Earth-observation programme, monitoring the atmosphere and the climate crisis.

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Source: Slashdot – UK Risks Losing Contract For New Climate Research Centre Because of Brexit

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, writing at CNBC: In the first few years of Netflix, we were growing fast and needed to hire more software engineers. With my new understanding that high talent density would be the engine of our success, we focused on finding the top performers in the market. In Silicon Valley, many of them worked for Google, Apple, and Facebook — and they were being paid a lot. We didn’t have the cash to lure them away in any numbers. But, as an engineer, I was familiar with a concept that has been understood in software since 1968, referred to as the “rock-star principle.” The rock-star principle is rooted in a famous study that took place in a basement in Santa Monica, California. At 6:30 a.m., nine trainee programmers were led into a room with dozens of computers. Each was handed a manila envelope, explaining a series of coding and debugging tasks they would need to complete to their best ability in the next 120 minutes. The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program execution than the programmer with the lowest marks.

This study has caused ripples across the software industry since it was published, as managers grapple with how some programmers can be worth so much more than their perfectly adequate colleagues. With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one “rock-star” and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary. Over the years, I’ve come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying, “A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated). I started thinking about where this model applied outside the software industry. The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn’t unique to programming. The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can’t.

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Source: Slashdot – Netflix CEO on Paying Sky-High Salaries: ‘The Best Are Easily 10 Times Better Than Average’