That will come out to at least 2 hours door to door each way, that is four hours traveling per day. While you can do some work on the train, most employers don't really want to count that time against your eight hours of office time.
What is interesting is that if people do this, it can fundamentally threaten the US economy; Hell it could even destroy it. The US is completely dependent upon the debt cycle. As a interesting contrast, China has had a problem where they can't get people to spend money / go in debt. It is one of those things that is a good idea for an outlier, but does not work when applied to the general population.
I would argue that most white collar workers no longer have a 40 hour work week. Companies just start hiring everyone as exempt / salary and un paid on call.
I hate it when leaders do this. "Here, I will go do this job to show whatever." It is shallow showmanship. A job is something that someone might do for many years; How safe is the job if you do it for 1000s of days? What repetitive injuries can be expected, how many times has the 1% chances of getting crushed by machinery been actualized. This type of showmanship is offensive to the people who do the actual work.
There are professionals out there that can audit these types of safety problems. I hope they are hiring and listening to them and the people on the ground.
I have seen this in much larger shops. They build their systems in a non robust way because they are cheap and just throw people under the buss when it goes bad. Companies try to implement the cool side of continuous dev without paying the dev ops price. It is just the same old same old, lets demand the good parts of a paradigm, but ignore the requirements to make such a system viable ex: continuous development, agile etc.
Having IT work on brittle systems just offsets stress to the devs / techs and makes their jobs suck. I once brought this up to a manager and he said something along the lines "Those guys who work on skyscrapers don't work with harnesses..." they do, and have been for a long long time. It is not the f'ing 1930s.
The exception is the rule? I wonder what is the age distribution of programmers / engineers at google (I hear it leans heavily to the left). I suspect the perceived ageism at google and in IT in general is coincidental; It probably has to do more with human development maybe a natural tendency to for example:
* Not care as much about new tech, same old same old. * Not really fit in with the younger culture in the office (this one is circular). * Not willing to work over time without pay. * Not wanting to live in over inflated regions. * Not interested in studying for technical interviews (feel that it is not professional).
Maybe there is something inherent in big IT shops like Google that end up having the same end result that ageism would have; If the end result is the same, is it still ageism? I think so, but at the same time I think the problem is bigger than Google, that is a systemic problem in the entire IT field, one that might just be part of its very nature.
Please remember just because you are the exception, you might not be the rule. It would be much more productive to add that maybe there are a lot of 50 year olds at google etc. It is like someone seeing a war veteran and saying oh war x might not be so bad, that person made it out.
The problem with efficiency is that more work is not created but lost to the system. Do you really think there will be as many software jobs as truck drivers etc. You can have plenty of people with skills, and no work for them to do; There are many examples of just this thing happening all over the world.
Yes these things do work themselves out, but the problem is in the details. There are examples during the industrial revolution of large populations of people being put out of work, economies failing and causing multiple generations of impoverishment and significant long term suffering. Just because things happen in history does not mean we do not have to deal with them.
Your right, this is a good question. Most of the studies I am referring to were those that were brought up when I was studying math education year ago and I no longer have access to an actual research databases. The studies subjects covered how testing and actual math proficiency are ambiguous, how GPA and SAT scores don't strongly correlate with success etc. It is very hard to find actual information specific to IT proving one way or the other. There have been interviews with google HR about https://techcrunch.com/2013/06... , but this is not a study but just semi anecdotal head scratching.
However, with a cursory understanding of pedagogy, the dangerous assumptions that are made in many tech interviews are blatantly obvious. Creating meaningful test is a very hard thing to do, maybe even impossible; It just rubs me the wrong way how people in IT are so sure of something they know so little about. It really should not be up to unqualified employers to vet the education or life experiences of a professional, we really need a sort of accrediting body to develop a more meaningful baseline.
These technical interviews always give me the silly image of some manager throwing a engineer a bunch of toothpicks and tape and then with a serious face, asking them to build a bridge; It would be considered ridiculous in any other field.
I am also not being obnoxious, but are there any studies that help clear up what does work? There has to be formal work on this somewhere.
Questions not relevant to the actual job done are not a good indicator of future success. These types of questions are great for recent students or people who enjoy riddles problems though. There is a whole field of study about learning and testing. There has been numerous studies done showing that these types of things don't correlate. Interviewers use them because they are a cheap and fast way to weed people out.
Colleges should add a pedagogy classes to help interviewers understand how to test people more effectively, and to understand the limitations of the different methods of assessment. IT interviewers are put in a almost impossible situation, they need to test a candidates knowledge, but they have no way to review their actual work history (the only thing that actually does correlate to success) so they are left grasping at straws.
True, the world owes me nothing, but the government and this country owe us a at least a level playing field. A country that can draft and kill our children, has drafted and killed our ancestors by the millions does not just get to sit on its ass when its people are in need; If they did not ask so much, then maybe they would not owe so much. I expect our government to act in the best of all of its citizens, and not just the rich. A country that lets its poor starve, the sick suffer, and its mentally ill wander the streets does not deserve to be a community, let alone a country.
Maybe they will consider allowing people to work remotely in the US. It might take a few years to turn the trend around, but more young people might even consider a career in tech (or whatever) if they hear it is in high demand. Maybe companies will have to stop with their retarded tech interviews. I don't mind competition, but there should be a even playing field. Hell, maybe they will have reason to keep older workers.
Part of the problem with a lot of tech interviews is that by focusing on mostly academic questions, you will naturally end up with more younger recent grads than programmers who have been in the industry for a while and have not had to transverse a binary tree in 10+ years.
Utah has more than enough good CS grads. Maybe if there were better opportunities for the CS university grads than marketing shops and web dev people might move there. What a waste of human capital.
We live near MS land and my son just finished a course where they sent a few programmers from MS to teach the course. While they did seem like capable programmers, they were not very good teachers. I think only 20% or so of the people who started the class finished. I tried to make my son drop the class because it was taking so much time from other classes that it was negatively impacting his grades.
Interestingly enough, he did pass the AP exam, but I mark that more up to his participation in the First Robotics program and his actual enjoyment of making things. While he had a lot of fun coding, the overall experience left him with a bad taste in his mouth and he does not want to program anything again (did not want this). In some ways this makes me happy because he wants to go into mechanical engineering and I don't want him to get distracted by the software industries shinies.
The problem with citing talent is that it is very ambiguous. If talent is not coupled with raw intelligence then what is it coupled with; is it an amalgam of intelligence memory, and even soul? It is hard to say that others lack talent when it is not specifically defined. I agree that coder quality is on a "race to the bottom", but I doubt it is because people are not genetically predisposed to programming. I would guess that has to do more with little no barrier to entry and the promise of riches. Most programmers I have worked with don't have a genuine interest in programming.
Example: I recently had a case where a large customer needed some advanced piece of C code
I really doubt that you were more talented than their 10k IT people, but have specialized knowledge and experience that made you the most efficient choice.
I agree that teams are too large and that there are not many talented programmers out there.
I define talented people as those that:
are genuinely interested in the subject
have the money to be educated by high quality mentors
live in the right geographic location or can move to one
are economically (able to feed themselves while they learn)
have at least average brainpower
willpower and dedication
ability to put up with a lot of BS
luck to get your food in the door
have a good mentor
I do not think talent means being genetically above average, having an abnormally high IQ, or anything else comparing to the fantasy of genius / unicorns. sorry about the formatting, I have to run
I guess it depends on how you define it; Any person of average or better intelligence is capable of becoming a programmer or mathematician intellectually. However, I doubt that many have access to living conditions, environment, willpower, and desire to become a highly skilled programmer or mathematician etc. I just want to point out that the special snowflake attitude predominant in the programming industry is bull shit, lucky snowflake would be more apt.
I have discouraged my children and most others that I know in IT / Software are discouraging their children from pursuing CS / IT degrees. While there are plenty of jobs, there are few careers.
Wouldn't it have to be so limited that it might as well not exist? Things like FDA, DoD, EPA simply will not work without significant power to back them up.
Too bad "smart" does not directly correlate productivity. I would rather have a average dependable person that can communicate well, understand requirements, and keep their code only as complex as it needs to be. Yes, there are people who are smart and have all of those qualities but they don't go to interviews.
Slashdot Mirror
That will come out to at least 2 hours door to door each way, that is four hours traveling per day. While you can do some work on the train, most employers don't really want to count that time against your eight hours of office time.
This is amazing. It's the first thing I ever heard of that can work on all versions of windows. They should patent that and make bank.
What is interesting is that if people do this, it can fundamentally threaten the US economy; Hell it could even destroy it. The US is completely dependent upon the debt cycle. As a interesting contrast, China has had a problem where they can't get people to spend money / go in debt. It is one of those things that is a good idea for an outlier, but does not work when applied to the general population.
I would argue that most white collar workers no longer have a 40 hour work week. Companies just start hiring everyone as exempt / salary and un paid on call.
I hate it when leaders do this. "Here, I will go do this job to show whatever." It is shallow showmanship. A job is something that someone might do for many years; How safe is the job if you do it for 1000s of days? What repetitive injuries can be expected, how many times has the 1% chances of getting crushed by machinery been actualized. This type of showmanship is offensive to the people who do the actual work.
There are professionals out there that can audit these types of safety problems. I hope they are hiring and listening to them and the people on the ground.
I have seen this in much larger shops. They build their systems in a non robust way because they are cheap and just throw people under the buss when it goes bad. Companies try to implement the cool side of continuous dev without paying the dev ops price. It is just the same old same old, lets demand the good parts of a paradigm, but ignore the requirements to make such a system viable ex: continuous development, agile etc.
Having IT work on brittle systems just offsets stress to the devs / techs and makes their jobs suck. I once brought this up to a manager and he said something along the lines "Those guys who work on skyscrapers don't work with harnesses..." they do, and have been for a long long time. It is not the f'ing 1930s.
The exception is the rule? I wonder what is the age distribution of programmers / engineers at google (I hear it leans heavily to the left). I suspect the perceived ageism at google and in IT in general is coincidental; It probably has to do more with human development maybe a natural tendency to for example:
* Not care as much about new tech, same old same old.
* Not really fit in with the younger culture in the office (this one is circular).
* Not willing to work over time without pay.
* Not wanting to live in over inflated regions.
* Not interested in studying for technical interviews (feel that it is not professional).
Maybe there is something inherent in big IT shops like Google that end up having the same end result that ageism would have; If the end result is the same, is it still ageism? I think so, but at the same time I think the problem is bigger than Google, that is a systemic problem in the entire IT field, one that might just be part of its very nature.
Please remember just because you are the exception, you might not be the rule. It would be much more productive to add that maybe there are a lot of 50 year olds at google etc. It is like someone seeing a war veteran and saying oh war x might not be so bad, that person made it out.
The problem with efficiency is that more work is not created but lost to the system. Do you really think there will be as many software jobs as truck drivers etc. You can have plenty of people with skills, and no work for them to do; There are many examples of just this thing happening all over the world.
Yes these things do work themselves out, but the problem is in the details. There are examples during the industrial revolution of large populations of people being put out of work, economies failing and causing multiple generations of impoverishment and significant long term suffering. Just because things happen in history does not mean we do not have to deal with them.
Your right, this is a good question. Most of the studies I am referring to were those that were brought up when I was studying math education year ago and I no longer have access to an actual research databases. The studies subjects covered how testing and actual math proficiency are ambiguous, how GPA and SAT scores don't strongly correlate with success etc. It is very hard to find actual information specific to IT proving one way or the other. There have been interviews with google HR about https://techcrunch.com/2013/06... , but this is not a study but just semi anecdotal head scratching.
However, with a cursory understanding of pedagogy, the dangerous assumptions that are made in many tech interviews are blatantly obvious. Creating meaningful test is a very hard thing to do, maybe even impossible; It just rubs me the wrong way how people in IT are so sure of something they know so little about. It really should not be up to unqualified employers to vet the education or life experiences of a professional, we really need a sort of accrediting body to develop a more meaningful baseline.
These technical interviews always give me the silly image of some manager throwing a engineer a bunch of toothpicks and tape and then with a serious face, asking them to build a bridge; It would be considered ridiculous in any other field.
I am also not being obnoxious, but are there any studies that help clear up what does work? There has to be formal work on this somewhere.
Questions not relevant to the actual job done are not a good indicator of future success. These types of questions are great for recent students or people who enjoy riddles problems though. There is a whole field of study about learning and testing. There has been numerous studies done showing that these types of things don't correlate. Interviewers use them because they are a cheap and fast way to weed people out.
Colleges should add a pedagogy classes to help interviewers understand how to test people more effectively, and to understand the limitations of the different methods of assessment. IT interviewers are put in a almost impossible situation, they need to test a candidates knowledge, but they have no way to review their actual work history (the only thing that actually does correlate to success) so they are left grasping at straws.
True, the world owes me nothing, but the government and this country owe us a at least a level playing field. A country that can draft and kill our children, has drafted and killed our ancestors by the millions does not just get to sit on its ass when its people are in need; If they did not ask so much, then maybe they would not owe so much. I expect our government to act in the best of all of its citizens, and not just the rich. A country that lets its poor starve, the sick suffer, and its mentally ill wander the streets does not deserve to be a community, let alone a country.
Maybe they will consider allowing people to work remotely in the US. It might take a few years to turn the trend around, but more young people might even consider a career in tech (or whatever) if they hear it is in high demand. Maybe companies will have to stop with their retarded tech interviews. I don't mind competition, but there should be a even playing field. Hell, maybe they will have reason to keep older workers.
Does someone pay people to say these things? It is much higher at least twice that in many states. https://www.washingtonpost.com... http://www.forbes.com/sites/mo...
Part of the problem with a lot of tech interviews is that by focusing on mostly academic questions, you will naturally end up with more younger recent grads than programmers who have been in the industry for a while and have not had to transverse a binary tree in 10+ years.
Fantastic post.
Utah has more than enough good CS grads. Maybe if there were better opportunities for the CS university grads than marketing shops and web dev people might move there. What a waste of human capital.
Actually, I have heard of many digs going over. I even have a local example:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
We live near MS land and my son just finished a course where they sent a few programmers from MS to teach the course. While they did seem like capable programmers, they were not very good teachers. I think only 20% or so of the people who started the class finished. I tried to make my son drop the class because it was taking so much time from other classes that it was negatively impacting his grades. Interestingly enough, he did pass the AP exam, but I mark that more up to his participation in the First Robotics program and his actual enjoyment of making things. While he had a lot of fun coding, the overall experience left him with a bad taste in his mouth and he does not want to program anything again (did not want this). In some ways this makes me happy because he wants to go into mechanical engineering and I don't want him to get distracted by the software industries shinies.
Not really. I think a lot of them are going to MSPs or the sort.
Example: I recently had a case where a large customer needed some advanced piece of C code
I really doubt that you were more talented than their 10k IT people, but have specialized knowledge and experience that made you the most efficient choice. I agree that teams are too large and that there are not many talented programmers out there. I define talented people as those that:
I do not think talent means being genetically above average, having an abnormally high IQ, or anything else comparing to the fantasy of genius / unicorns.
sorry about the formatting, I have to run
I guess it depends on how you define it; Any person of average or better intelligence is capable of becoming a programmer or mathematician intellectually. However, I doubt that many have access to living conditions, environment, willpower, and desire to become a highly skilled programmer or mathematician etc. I just want to point out that the special snowflake attitude predominant in the programming industry is bull shit, lucky snowflake would be more apt.
I have discouraged my children and most others that I know in IT / Software are discouraging their children from pursuing CS / IT degrees. While there are plenty of jobs, there are few careers.
Wouldn't it have to be so limited that it might as well not exist? Things like FDA, DoD, EPA simply will not work without significant power to back them up.
Too bad "smart" does not directly correlate productivity. I would rather have a average dependable person that can communicate well, understand requirements, and keep their code only as complex as it needs to be. Yes, there are people who are smart and have all of those qualities but they don't go to interviews.