It seems to me, bearing in mind my numerous career changes, that honest self-assessment is in order so that you can identify: 1) other (complementary or divergent) strengths you have and 2) what intrinsic drives of yours could be harnessed in a next career.
At times (for me) it has even been helpful to get professional career-counseling to discover careers (or even avocations) whose shape and impact have changed in preceding decade since I last looked at it. There are useful psychological batteries for assessing the fit between fit/vocation that take such assessment far beyond navel-gazing/tea-leaf-reading.
Another approach would be to involve yourself with an organization (vocation or volunteer) with a project that appeals to your vision for a better world - and discover what roles beyond traditional mathematician you find you can make a contribution to. Hope that's some help.
> But companies aren't afraid to cheap out on programmers. If a project fails or is late, there is a perception that that's just how software goes, no decision they could have made could have changed the outcome.
I'm in no position to judge this, but I wonder: With increasing visibility for the cost of digital security/privacy to a corporation, isn't there hope for better valuation of programming by the "C-suite execs"?
I think the whole perception around software quality is changing, and security is a great example.
I think smart phones are also a good example. I think people are willing to put up with crappier software on their desktop than on the thing that they rely on to make calls, send important e-mails, etc. If the iPhone was as glitchy as say Win95 Apple wouldn't make any money.
OTOH: if Windows 8 were as glitchy as say Windows 95, it wouldn't make it in the market, either, and I bet you could have sold thousands of iPhones with the stability of Windows 95 in '95 for $10000 a piece.
The market is more competitive and there is progress in the crap people accept, not only in phones, but everywhere (still too little, though. Recently, someone asked me to figure out how to set their new €100 or so radio alarm clock. I read the manual. The thing looked nice, but was a nightmare to operate. Things like "wake me an hour earlier tomorrow" were impossible to set, even with the manual in hand. So, I advised to return it. The guy listened, but I would hope that, sometime in e future, people would not need my advice to vote with their wallet)
But did you hear it from a tax attorney / certified accountant?
That being said (and: I've no experience in Sweden, and I'm neither atty nor acct) the idea that a US tax liability could be incurred by an international corp/business purchasing a service (e.g., AWS) from company in U.S. ...seems pretty outrageous.
If you're selling a product/service then where you're servers are located can matter for state sales tax collection. For instance Texas considers databases warehouses for state tax reasons, which creates "tax nexus" a term of art in taxation with Texas. Once tax nesus has been created then you would have to collect texas state sales tax which is 8%+ (check rates) for everything you sell in state, and if you don't collect it from customers when you sell it you still owe it to the state and can't go back to the customers to get it!
Now Amazon does everything they can to not collect state sales tax, thus most of the AWS bits are in states that avoid the collection of state sales tax.
All I can say is that it's a lot cheaper to spend money on an hour or two of an experts advice before you do something than to fix a mess later. If you're in startup mode it sucks, but may be required.
No, he was not a tax attorney. I agree, it seems outrageous but it doesn't seem completely impossible. If the servers are located in the US one could argue that the company is doing business in the US.
If you were providing services to AWS - that would "be doing business in US". I don't see how renting a service (AWS) from Amazon is "doing business in US" any more than would be buying a book from Amazon.com N'est-ce pas?
> doesn't feel like something anybody wants to be chasing any more
A reasonable speculation. Of course the best data will take a while to become available.
The one data point (showing in headlines this morning) is that, judging that it took only 1 hour for iP5 shipping time to move back from 1 week to 2 weeks, this phone is selling several times as fast as any iPhone predecessor.
> Due to rule xyz, we would technically have to freeze...
This leaves me wondering, how clearly are PayPal's rules spelled out (I've just avoided PP like the plague, since I can) to help merchants avoid gotchas? Are freeze-worthy violations presented boldly ...or only buried in tiny TOS-like legal documents?
Actually, in the details of the story you find that you can "enjoy" the infection elsewhere...
"Only five states — New York, California, Texas, Oregon and Illinois — report the disease, and the data is inconsistent. Oftentimes, departments rely on each other to deal with paperwork, and the numbers are never recorded, Smith says. As a result, not much is known about tapeworm outbreaks in the U.S. — or the parasites themselves."
It also sounds as though the long dormancy of the symptoms make it extremely difficult to determine where it was contracted.
