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Tech Jobs and Apple: Every Bit As "Fun" As Pleasure Island?
theodp writes: On the eve of Apple's big Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the lack of diversity in tech is 'our fault' — 'our' meaning the whole tech community. "I think in general we haven't done enough to reach out and show young women that it's cool to do it [tech] and how much fun it can be," Cook explained. Indeed, the WWDC scholarship winners shooting selfies with Cook at the San Francisco Four Seasons to celebrate their iPhone apps and other WWDC attendees looked to be having as much fun as, well, Pinocchio at Pleasure Island. But, as the NY Times recently pointed out, Cook can be guilty of overlooking inconvenient truths. Which here is that most young women (and men) wouldn't find it 'cool' or 'fun' to live with 8,000 co-workers in factory dormitories where they can be roused out of bed in the middle of the night by Apple for an emergency 12-hour shift to fit glass screens into beveled iPhone frames, although that too conjures up a scene from Pleasure Island.
OK, I've worked in the industry for a very long time now, and it can be 'fun' for the few bits where you actually get to prototype or work on the bulk of the features. That takes 10 percent of the time. The rest of the time you are going to be trying to find obscure bugs, introduced by crappy programmers rushing to get features out. Meanwhile you will be micro-managed through the 'agile' process asking you to account for every hour of your time. Then we will throw ill defined features at you, and expect them to be done within this two week time period, and be shocked when you reach the end of two weeks, and they are not done. This is usually due to the fact that meanwhile 16 support tickets were also thrown at you that are all critical in nature. Then you have those late night calls with your Indian counter parts that you can barely understand or stay awake for. But it is fun!
I don't know what planet these people live on. It is a tough career with crazy deadlines and weird policies. You have to constantly keep up on the latest trends, or you will be viewed as 'too old' for the job. Meanwhile, computers never sleep, nor do they expect you to. You have to push back constantly to maintain your personal time.
That said, I love computers. I love programming. I just don't love the industry as it is now. There is a reason that most women don't want in. They may in fact be much smarter than men in this regards.
Why is Tim Cook even wading into this discussion? Mainly because the SJWs are shaming companies such as Apple and Intel to do something about what they perceive to be an epidemic of gender skew in technology professions. Funny how they're nowhere to be found when it comes to nursing or other female-dominated professions, nor all the factory positions in China where men are worked to the death. Yet all the idiot CEOs take the bait and run with it.
What they all fail to realize is that equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Nobody gets me out of bed in the morning, brushes my teeth, forces me to do a particular job or anything else, so it's up to me to do that. Same with careers. If you have a specific problem, there are LOTS of legal protections to prevent this kind of thing - lawsuits, DoL complaints, and so on.
Ask any person of any identifiable group whether they feel good about being hired not because they were the best candidate, but because of some identifiable characteristic. You'll get two groups of answers - the majority who would feel awful about it, and the minority who would feel proud and entitled because of it. As long as that difference exists, this nonsense will continue.
Its "our" fault that we don't magically undo a hundred thousand years of evolution and make every woman think being in tech is cool and make them want to do all the same things as men.
Its "our" fault that women and men are different.
Can someone please explain to me WHY WE HAVE TO HAVE EQUAL REPRESENTATION WHEN WOMEN AREN'T FRAKING INTERESTED IN THE JOB.
Oh wait ... you know why? Because they can treat women to lower pay thanks to the required time off for most who want to have children not being able to dedicate every hour of the day to working their fingers to the bone like males can in most cases.
Yes, as a white male you are automatically a racist sexist homophobe on the verge of a hate crime. Its in our DNA apparently ...
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Those jobs are factory assembly work, not "tech". They are in the same category as assembling car parts, radios, or toy wagons. Cook is talking about creative development where you work with your mind, not simple low-skilled labor.
Yes, it sucks. But conflating the two in this article is dishonest.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Diversity for the sake of diversity is NOT a good thing. Granted, if a company has a thousand employees, and the only black face in the crowd belongs to the janitor, then there is a problem. But - if the company's demographics perfectly reflect community demographics, then we all know that the company is more absorbed in public relations and catering to special interest groups, than it is in BUSINESS.
I work for a woman. I work with women. Women work for me. I prefer the company of women, truth be told. But - I'm sure as HELL not going to hire a female because she's female. Or black. Or Asian. Or gay. Or whatever. I'm going to hire the MOST QUALIFIED PERSON FOR THE JOB! If that happens to be a straight white male - so be it. If it happens to be a gay Chinese woman, again, so be it.
Screw diversity. It's a waste of my time, waste of your time, and a HUGE waste of company resources.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
IQ never changes upward after birth
Of course it can, here is one example. You are on crack or something. More specifically, you are only looking at studies that confirm your preconceived viewpoint, which is how you are able to remain racist.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
None of that is set in stone. A century ago, the IQ gap between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics was bigger than the current gap between whites and blacks. Today, that gap is completely gone, probably because of not eating potatoes for three meals a day. We should not look at the current gaps as something that should be accepted, but as something that should be fixed. Blacks in America have worse nutrition, and more exposure to lead and other environmental contaminants. They are much less likely to be breastfed, which can change IQ by 3 points. They have less stimulating early environments. When I was a kid, while other boys where learning how to talk to girls, I spent a lot of time working through puzzle books and doing recreational mathematics. I don't think many black kids are exposed to that. Motivation can also make a big difference. When I took assessment tests, I was focused, and tried hard to do well. The black kids in my class didn't seem to care.
. "I think in general we haven't done enough to reach out and show young women that it's cool to do it [tech] and how much fun it can be,"
Do "we" reach out for the young men?
Nobody ever "reached out" for me, yet here I am. Have I just been living under a rock?
This is the most rote, politically correct, by-the-numbers news story I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. Are you building a portfolio to try to apply for a job at a North Korean news bureau? Are you getting paid or graded based on the number of silly, college-student-activist, progressive bromides you can pack into a paragraph?
People don't buy apps based on the "diversity" of the programming staff. App users don't care. It's a 100% equal opportunity for everyone. But that's not really what you want, is it?
Bleeding heart, emotion based reasoning is part of the legacy, pseudoscience, pseudo-liberal mindset.
Whether Timmay wants to admit it or not, the meritocracy matters -- blacks, women, christians struggle when faced with asians, males, and jews, at least when faced with a difficult test. The world of physics blossomed after the Ivy League finally allowed Jews into their schools in the 1920's and 1930's. All that immersion in the Torah as a child really pays off.
So it's bad enough that we use emotional reasoning and group based resentment to address deep, legacy, historical issues within our society, such as blaming modern tech or white men, but the problem gets far worse upon consideration.
The US central government was built up to compete with the Soviet Union and China. Vast expansions of the President's cabinets have taken place over the last 60-70 years. Unlike the USSR and China, the US federal government has never collapsed or reformed.
Instead, our central government employs hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, with aggregate salaries in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and their raises are linked -- by contract -- to increases in the minimum wage.
A quick scan of the President's dozens of cabinets shows vague, overlapping mission statements. Unlike the DoD and NASA, both of which are regularly audited for program management efficacy, progress towards goals, verification and validation of milestones, and the like, these other cabinets were established by our grandparents or great-grandparents, in a time of emotional reasoning and limited information sharing. They have "forever funding" and no clear goal or issue to be resolved with permanence.
Instead of solving problems, the two party, republicrat system uses OPM (Office of Personnel Management, or Other People's Money) to house and feed the legion of party faithful, those who serve not to fix issues for We the People, but to assist the candidates in their never ending quest for incumbency.
So don't be surprised to see the number of shrill, race-baiting, gender-baiting, propaganda start increasing as the election approaches. Hillary 2016 will be the first-pumping mantra for the for the two primary, blue city, propaganda streams as the Presidential election approaches. The pseudo-liberal, modern democratic party leadership will say or do anything to protect the executive cabinets from a slim down or "Reverse BRAC". The New York and Los Angeles propaganda streams will be working overtime to steer the election. Their gravy train is on the line too.
Remember just how far they are willing to go -- in the aftermath of Ferguson, the President spoke out against the nation's police, even though the teen in question was proven to have "bum rushed" an armed officer. Within days, two cops were dead in NYC, and one was shot in the face in Ferguson. The race baiting paused temporarily, but the streams were flooded again as an angry teen was handcuffed by a white officer this week.
Note that, in nation of 300 M. people, 1 M of them cops, and an unknown number of armed felons walking the streets, an occasional tragedy is going to happen. Welcome to planet earth, it happens to white families too. A true liberal might manage this by erasing most of the laws and regulations every few decades. The Libertarians sometime make recommendations along these lines.
True liberals and scientists would let service levels and wages float. We'd transition much of the executive cabinets and their funding to the private sector -- and use modern management techniques to insure problems are actually solved. HUD has been funded to the tune of 30 B. a year for decades, but a house is still terribly expensive and difficult to buy for most people. Perhaps the brightest people in the private sector could be tasked to find a way to make a comfortable home that is as easy and cheap to buy as a car.
Why any executive cabinet needs more than about 10-20 tenured, PhD level management experts is puzzling, unless one considers the nati
You do realize that those of us who got into tech were not exactly popular in the guys department either, right? I mean in highschool it was not the computer club guys getting the dates to the prom, it was the football jocks and such. I got into tech despite the many, many social pressures against being a smart kid. This is true for both genders in America. So don't believe that some magical boys club is promoting up our youth in this industry. The entire pressure in high school for both genders was to shut up, be stupid, and fit right in.
Sports are cool, math is for nerds is what society pushes. Both genders get this until college, and even then the girls didn't want to date the comp sci guys and went for the hockey players. I stuck with it despite all of this, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
It should also be noted that in those same studies..... whites are pretty moronically stupid in comparison to their asian cousins :p
Actualy a white's IQ level (which is used as a "base" also) is *on average* at 100, an (Chinese/Japanese/Korean/etc) Asian's is at 105 (other Asians, e.g., Indians, Arabs are much less than that, about 90), and a black's at 80...
So, it is the blacks who have a very low IQ (if i use YOUR words: "moronically stupid in comparison to" others). A good starting point for -scientific- research (without so much of the other "stuff" that are usual in this kind of discussions) is the book "The Bell Curve" - contains many IQ studies.
Unfortunately this fact (i.e., blacks have lower IQ than other races) is so problematic to discuss because it "paints" anyone who express it as a racist who *hates* blacks - i am a racist, but i don't hate blacks, i just believe in racial differences (actually, i believe that i love blacks more than many people who try to suppress their low IQ fact, because i think that they can be helped socially if we recognize the *biological* fact, in the right way: there is a reason we WHITES have special education programs for our WHITES with low IQ...)
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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I've had sat psychologist administered IQ tests a year apart and had my score differ by 10 points. I've been told that, in fact, this is perfectly normal and well within the accuracy expected of IQ tests by psychologists who take them seriously. I wouldn't worry about IQ scores changing (they may well do that, but it is equally likely measurement error). IQ is a very imperfect measure to begin with. Our ability to measure it, even under the best of conditions, is extremely poor. Take most IQ studies with a grain of salt.
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I now have proof that time travel exists, as I appear to be back in the 1950s.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it