That's why you don't aim your sights for the entry level job, but aim beyond that. Because there will always be someone better and cheaper for you for the low level jobs. And don't go after the common jobs that are glutted with an oversupply of workers.
Sometimes this is the fault of parents. Parents are full of anxiety that their children might not get a job and so they'll look for the career choices that seem very popular and point their kids in that direction. That's why this huge emphasis on coding, it's been around for at least 30 years, and examples include the infamous Apple II commercial which played on parental fear.
Because the average user doesn't know what "Run Content" means. Meanwhile they're being told to never disable scripts, never enable adblock, always accept all defaults, and Microsoft is never wrong.
You ask an accountant to balance your books, no problem. Ask the accountant to analyze the data coming back from the Mars probe and they're out of their depth. Similarly, ask a "coder" to modify a web page and it's no big deal. Ask them to fix a bug in the Mars probe firmware and they're out of their depth. It comes down to what you want to work on for the rest of your life; simplistic stuff that will be outsourced any day now, or really interesting stuff that stretches their skills?
Let's say it's an MRI machine. I wouldn't expect the programmers on it to necessarily understand the physics or the number crunching of a mass of analog signals into a picture. But I would absolutely expect those programmers to understand operating system internals, how to at least read and follow a device driver, what all the data paths and high level control in the system are, and so forth. And certainly the junior programmer should be able to attend a meeting with the scientists and not look like a fool (my god, at least *pretend* to be smart).
The "intuition" that I have is really about having an internal model and applying that model. So I can spot some bugs a mile off just by thinking "what would I do if I was the processor with this input?" Fixed a problem earlier in the week by just sitting back and thinking about how it was possible to get the machine into the state it was in. Then the answer hit me, not because of intuition but because I could see the sequence of events that would lead there. Though anyone walking by would have assumed I was just taking nap...
You *learned* the math though. That's part of what you get from a college education - you learn things that you don't necessarily use later in life, but the process of learning it has molded your brain. You learn how to learn, you learn to think abstractly, you can look at an equation and see that there are relationships going on even though you may not remember the details of it all.
So I have run across programmers who were clueless about floating point. They just didn't understand very basic concepts, like that just because the computer prints out 10 digits after the decimal point does not meant that the 10th decimal point has any sort of reasonable accuracy, or that 1/10 is not expressible exactly in binary, and as such they would make really bad errors and then get stuck wondering why their computer wasn't given them good answers. Or they'd use double instead of float to try and improve their accuracy rather than just fix their broken formula. Which indicates that they're treating the computer as a mystical black box in a way without knowing how things really work under the hood. But then, I've seen physicists get some basic math principles wrong because they were treating the computer as a black box.
Reminds me of that scene in Office Space. Change the wording a bit: "Can't the customers just create a script too?" "Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn computer so the customers don't have to! I have programming skills! I am good at dealing with code! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Intuition is not logic. Logic is necessary, but as the original author seems to not understand, logic is a part of mathematics. Analyzing an algorithm is mathematics. Proving that the sort algorithm has a minimum of n*log(n) is mathematics. Math is everywhere in computer science.
Vector calculus is everywhere in computers. You need it to graphics, so even the kiddies who only want to write games need to know that. You need it to solve equations. You need it to know how to multiply matrices (no fair using a library, because you are the one assigned to write the library, in assembler).
Statistics is everywhere in computers too. You think people do stats long form on paper? Big data crunching needs stats, little data crunching needs stats, scientific computing needs stats, even social media web apps need stats. Forget computers, that's a red herring here, you need statistics for every day life as well!
The idea that the old style was bad because it required "deep math skills" is wrong headed. Computer science *requires* deep math skills; computer science is a branch of mathematics essentially. The writer wants us to focus on logic, but logic is mathematics!
If we lower the bar and say that we just talking about 9-to-5 programming for a basic salary with no leadership or design expectations, then maybe you don't need any math or engineering or domain knowledge. But that's not aiming high, that's aiming for an entry level job that lasts 40 years.
We're not trying to keep people out by being snobs, instead we're trying to stop the long slow decline of computer science and computing. There are applications of computers that require absolutely top notch people, especially as the uses of computers become more common you want computers to be designed, built, and programmed by very smart people. Do you really want to fly on a plane programmed by someone who skipped college because it was too time consuming?
Look at the math this way.. Student: I don't need to learn boring calculus because computers can do that for us. I'm a cool programmer dammit, not a math nerd. Teacher: Ok, write a program to take the derivative of this equation. Student, one week later: This is too hard... Don't they have experts for this sort of thing? Teacher: Never mind. Just give me the burger and small fries.
Debugging my program is my job. No information needs to go to Microsoft unless I am talking to them directly and I offer to send it. Maybe they ask me to send them a core file or whatever post-mortem info I have. There is no legitimate reason for telemetry here, "telemetry" means that data is being sent to Microsoft rather than just being an event stored locally. For Microsoft to know how often my program ran and how often it crashed without my telling them, then that is indeed spyware. They're not offering to help debug everyone's code, no way do they have that amount of manpower, so this is in no way a service to help out customers.
I don't program on Windows. Still, I find it suprising that the justification from MS was that this could help them with debugging a customer's problem. Seriously, if *my* program is broken then Microsoft is offering to help debug it? Sounds like a fantasy world.
They disabled achievements not because of cheats (console is still there for cheats), but because achievements on consoles are worth money or discounts or something like that. But achievements are reinstated by using a mod (via DLL, something impossible on consoles).
There is a stealing mods thing; I don't care about it myself but some people don't like their free stuff being taken and another name put on them.
Single player games, who cares who cheats? Yet the console players are calling anyone using mods in Fallout 4 a cheater. There'sa completely different mindset.
I still think about Eraserhead and wonder "what the hell did that mean?" Is an AI going to have the same sort of lasting value that haunts you through the years?
Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room. So you get a million plot holes, a bizarre conception of how society works, laughable science, and so forth. In a single hour episode they can't manage to keep continuity. They focus on entertainment and ignore reality, and you see fans who don't mind this ("but it had a great fight scene!", "I thought the cast was cute", "you science types are just so picky, sit back and enjoy it!").
Both parties are against it also because neither party has all members in lockstep. Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle are against this. Quite a lot of politicians are against this, at least those who don't go around spouting about how we need to get tougher on crime. However because law enforcement gets a share of proceeds from civil forfeitures there is a lot of pressure and lobbying from law enforcement agencies to keep civil forfeiture.
On the federal side, I think it's no longer allowed to take cash in civil forfeitures. However this has no affect on the individual states.
This story is about Oklahoma. You can't get elected there without promising to do everything you can to get rid of crime. Any politician there who gave a hint that suspected criminals would be allowed to keep their money would find it an extremely difficult election to win. Voters only care if an innocent person is caught up in this; which means a person who *looks* innocent and is photogenic enough to get in the news (which discounts most minorities and poor whites).
It's a legal fiction that is generally supported by the supreme court. It's a civil action taken against the property, not a criminal action against the owner of the property. You can recover the property through a suit and be partially reimbursed by the government if you win, but not a lot of people know this or think it will be too expensive to get ahold of a lawyer (most of this civil forfeiture is against poorer people like suspected-but-not-proven drug dealers). Because the property isn't being taken as evidence then the restrictions for warrants are less stringent.
Since the seized assets are shared with law enforcement this means there is a lot of motivation to do a lot of civil forfeitures and less motivation to make sure the letter of the law is absolutely followed precisely.
Reagan helped create this civil forfeiture problem. And of course lots of congress members. It's a problem across the board, you can't lay the blame on any one party, as both parties are seeking to reform it and both parties are seeking to enhance it because both parties are a mix of conflicting viewpoints. It's easy to get elected by being tough on crime, and this crosses political parties. But there are some who may have a civil liberty pang of conscience (a vestigial organ in politicians).
The laws have been around for a very long time. However the modern misuse ratcheted up with a laws that allowed law enforcement agencies to get a share of seized funds. So of course it looks like a good way to balance the budget to a lot of those agencies. There have been reforms off and on, but only when the public seems overly concerned at the moment, but then when the public's not looking the law enforcement agencies are actively lobbying congress to keep relaxing the reforms.
The supreme court of the US has upheld the general principle of civil forfeiture, sadly. So we need congressional reform. And there are people for reforming it. While some Republicans are for it (as reintroduced by the Reagan administration) there is still opposition to it from the more libertarian wing of the Republican party, there's support against it from Democrats too. Currently though the "tough on crime" sorts are winning, so even a congress member worried about civil rights can be timid about seeming to be soft on crime during election years.
The modern system of civil forfeiture took off during the Reagan administration as part of the war on drugs. It had been used in the past, such as during prohibition, but was rarely unsed until the war on drugs started.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you don't aim your sights for the entry level job, but aim beyond that. Because there will always be someone better and cheaper for you for the low level jobs. And don't go after the common jobs that are glutted with an oversupply of workers.
Sometimes this is the fault of parents. Parents are full of anxiety that their children might not get a job and so they'll look for the career choices that seem very popular and point their kids in that direction. That's why this huge emphasis on coding, it's been around for at least 30 years, and examples include the infamous Apple II commercial which played on parental fear.
Because the average user doesn't know what "Run Content" means. Meanwhile they're being told to never disable scripts, never enable adblock, always accept all defaults, and Microsoft is never wrong.
The calculus thing is freshman level intro programming, from chapter one of a calculus book. Approximation using a sequence of trapezoids. Easy peasy.
You ask an accountant to balance your books, no problem. Ask the accountant to analyze the data coming back from the Mars probe and they're out of their depth.
Similarly, ask a "coder" to modify a web page and it's no big deal. Ask them to fix a bug in the Mars probe firmware and they're out of their depth.
It comes down to what you want to work on for the rest of your life; simplistic stuff that will be outsourced any day now, or really interesting stuff that stretches their skills?
Let's say it's an MRI machine. I wouldn't expect the programmers on it to necessarily understand the physics or the number crunching of a mass of analog signals into a picture. But I would absolutely expect those programmers to understand operating system internals, how to at least read and follow a device driver, what all the data paths and high level control in the system are, and so forth. And certainly the junior programmer should be able to attend a meeting with the scientists and not look like a fool (my god, at least *pretend* to be smart).
The "intuition" that I have is really about having an internal model and applying that model. So I can spot some bugs a mile off just by thinking "what would I do if I was the processor with this input?" Fixed a problem earlier in the week by just sitting back and thinking about how it was possible to get the machine into the state it was in. Then the answer hit me, not because of intuition but because I could see the sequence of events that would lead there. Though anyone walking by would have assumed I was just taking nap...
You *learned* the math though. That's part of what you get from a college education - you learn things that you don't necessarily use later in life, but the process of learning it has molded your brain. You learn how to learn, you learn to think abstractly, you can look at an equation and see that there are relationships going on even though you may not remember the details of it all.
So I have run across programmers who were clueless about floating point. They just didn't understand very basic concepts, like that just because the computer prints out 10 digits after the decimal point does not meant that the 10th decimal point has any sort of reasonable accuracy, or that 1/10 is not expressible exactly in binary, and as such they would make really bad errors and then get stuck wondering why their computer wasn't given them good answers. Or they'd use double instead of float to try and improve their accuracy rather than just fix their broken formula. Which indicates that they're treating the computer as a mystical black box in a way without knowing how things really work under the hood. But then, I've seen physicists get some basic math principles wrong because they were treating the computer as a black box.
Reminds me of that scene in Office Space. Change the wording a bit:
"Can't the customers just create a script too?"
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn computer so the customers don't have to! I have programming skills! I am good at dealing with code! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
You seem to think that computer science is the same as programming. In much the same way that people think that accounting is the same as mathematics.
Intuition is not logic. Logic is necessary, but as the original author seems to not understand, logic is a part of mathematics.
Analyzing an algorithm is mathematics. Proving that the sort algorithm has a minimum of n*log(n) is mathematics. Math is everywhere in computer science.
Vector calculus is everywhere in computers. You need it to graphics, so even the kiddies who only want to write games need to know that. You need it to solve equations. You need it to know how to multiply matrices (no fair using a library, because you are the one assigned to write the library, in assembler).
Statistics is everywhere in computers too. You think people do stats long form on paper? Big data crunching needs stats, little data crunching needs stats, scientific computing needs stats, even social media web apps need stats. Forget computers, that's a red herring here, you need statistics for every day life as well!
The idea that the old style was bad because it required "deep math skills" is wrong headed. Computer science *requires* deep math skills; computer science is a branch of mathematics essentially. The writer wants us to focus on logic, but logic is mathematics!
If we lower the bar and say that we just talking about 9-to-5 programming for a basic salary with no leadership or design expectations, then maybe you don't need any math or engineering or domain knowledge. But that's not aiming high, that's aiming for an entry level job that lasts 40 years.
We're not trying to keep people out by being snobs, instead we're trying to stop the long slow decline of computer science and computing. There are applications of computers that require absolutely top notch people, especially as the uses of computers become more common you want computers to be designed, built, and programmed by very smart people. Do you really want to fly on a plane programmed by someone who skipped college because it was too time consuming?
Look at the math this way..
Student: I don't need to learn boring calculus because computers can do that for us. I'm a cool programmer dammit, not a math nerd.
Teacher: Ok, write a program to take the derivative of this equation.
Student, one week later: This is too hard... Don't they have experts for this sort of thing?
Teacher: Never mind. Just give me the burger and small fries.
So if you brother sells crack on the street then it's ok for you to do it?
Debugging my program is my job. No information needs to go to Microsoft unless I am talking to them directly and I offer to send it. Maybe they ask me to send them a core file or whatever post-mortem info I have. There is no legitimate reason for telemetry here, "telemetry" means that data is being sent to Microsoft rather than just being an event stored locally. For Microsoft to know how often my program ran and how often it crashed without my telling them, then that is indeed spyware. They're not offering to help debug everyone's code, no way do they have that amount of manpower, so this is in no way a service to help out customers.
I don't program on Windows. Still, I find it suprising that the justification from MS was that this could help them with debugging a customer's problem. Seriously, if *my* program is broken then Microsoft is offering to help debug it? Sounds like a fantasy world.
They disabled achievements not because of cheats (console is still there for cheats), but because achievements on consoles are worth money or discounts or something like that. But achievements are reinstated by using a mod (via DLL, something impossible on consoles).
There is a stealing mods thing; I don't care about it myself but some people don't like their free stuff being taken and another name put on them.
Single player games, who cares who cheats? Yet the console players are calling anyone using mods in Fallout 4 a cheater. There'sa completely different mindset.
I still think about Eraserhead and wonder "what the hell did that mean?" Is an AI going to have the same sort of lasting value that haunts you through the years?
Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room. So you get a million plot holes, a bizarre conception of how society works, laughable science, and so forth. In a single hour episode they can't manage to keep continuity. They focus on entertainment and ignore reality, and you see fans who don't mind this ("but it had a great fight scene!", "I thought the cast was cute", "you science types are just so picky, sit back and enjoy it!").
So ya, the AI is probably better.
Personally I don't find Hillary's hair that amusing.
Both parties are against it also because neither party has all members in lockstep. Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle are against this. Quite a lot of politicians are against this, at least those who don't go around spouting about how we need to get tougher on crime. However because law enforcement gets a share of proceeds from civil forfeitures there is a lot of pressure and lobbying from law enforcement agencies to keep civil forfeiture.
On the federal side, I think it's no longer allowed to take cash in civil forfeitures. However this has no affect on the individual states.
This story is about Oklahoma. You can't get elected there without promising to do everything you can to get rid of crime. Any politician there who gave a hint that suspected criminals would be allowed to keep their money would find it an extremely difficult election to win. Voters only care if an innocent person is caught up in this; which means a person who *looks* innocent and is photogenic enough to get in the news (which discounts most minorities and poor whites).
It's a legal fiction that is generally supported by the supreme court. It's a civil action taken against the property, not a criminal action against the owner of the property. You can recover the property through a suit and be partially reimbursed by the government if you win, but not a lot of people know this or think it will be too expensive to get ahold of a lawyer (most of this civil forfeiture is against poorer people like suspected-but-not-proven drug dealers). Because the property isn't being taken as evidence then the restrictions for warrants are less stringent.
Since the seized assets are shared with law enforcement this means there is a lot of motivation to do a lot of civil forfeitures and less motivation to make sure the letter of the law is absolutely followed precisely.
Reagan helped create this civil forfeiture problem. And of course lots of congress members. It's a problem across the board, you can't lay the blame on any one party, as both parties are seeking to reform it and both parties are seeking to enhance it because both parties are a mix of conflicting viewpoints. It's easy to get elected by being tough on crime, and this crosses political parties. But there are some who may have a civil liberty pang of conscience (a vestigial organ in politicians).
The laws have been around for a very long time. However the modern misuse ratcheted up with a laws that allowed law enforcement agencies to get a share of seized funds. So of course it looks like a good way to balance the budget to a lot of those agencies. There have been reforms off and on, but only when the public seems overly concerned at the moment, but then when the public's not looking the law enforcement agencies are actively lobbying congress to keep relaxing the reforms.
The supreme court of the US has upheld the general principle of civil forfeiture, sadly. So we need congressional reform. And there are people for reforming it. While some Republicans are for it (as reintroduced by the Reagan administration) there is still opposition to it from the more libertarian wing of the Republican party, there's support against it from Democrats too. Currently though the "tough on crime" sorts are winning, so even a congress member worried about civil rights can be timid about seeming to be soft on crime during election years.
The modern system of civil forfeiture took off during the Reagan administration as part of the war on drugs. It had been used in the past, such as during prohibition, but was rarely unsed until the war on drugs started.