Almost everyone used to work on the farm. Now almost no one does. Amazingly, we don't have a 98% unemployment rate. With the automation of agriculture, everyone moved to manufacturing jobs. Food fell from almost all the family budget to about half the family budget, and people could buy manufactured goods, so there were lots of jobs.
With the automation of manufacturing (which, if you weren't paying attention, is almost finished at this point), everyone moved to service jobs and paper-shuffling jobs. Food fell from half the family budget to far less, and people started eating out regularly, and having food delivered. Manufactured goods became WalMart-cheap, and people spent money on many things they could never afford before.
Now the automation of those jobs is well underway (the paper-shuffling jobs have already been mostly automated). The cost of traditional services, especially logistics, is falling. You can order everything online these days, and everything gets cheaper as transportation costs fall. The cost of manufactured goods will keep falling. In-home manufacturing is a new industry, but it looks promising.
There has always been a new wave of jobs as the cost of what we're used to buying fell, and we found something new to buy. There will be this time too.
The study actually looked at LOL players and how often they were reported or given whatever in-game thingy LOL has to "like" someone. So they're not measuring their own arbitrary interpretation here of bad behavior, but instead community reaction. That seems like a reasonable measure. However, their definition of "anti-social names" could well be arbitrary.
I was quite amused that their finding of "old players nicer than young" was in the age range of 12-26, no older players were actually studied, just kids and young adults.
I agree with most of that, but I think you missed the most important point: why is key academic software not open source? I'm all for this guy's right to publish software under any license he chooses, but why would you embrace such software in the academic community? IMO, that's the lesson here.
Windows 10 bypasses the firewall and hosts file to phone home, so unless that third-party utility is altering your router's settings, then I'm not sure what it's supposed to do.
The spyware is in executable files, easy enough to kill. I haven't yet dug into which utility is safe, or I'd make a specific recommendation. Microsoft has created a market here, and a market that's appealing to "all Windows customers" gets multiple competing products pretty quickly.
I've been using a Surface 3 for a while now, which might still be relevant to the new stuff:
* It's a perfectly good lightweight touchscreen Windows laptop, solidly built it a bit pricey for the specs.
* It's a poor tablet for normal home tablet use without the keyboard, because Windows software especially games just expects a keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard lacks important keys like "Escape". (Plus there's not a single consistent right-click gesture.)
* It's great tablet for special cases like taking notes with the stylus, or anything that there's actually an app store app for (for me, Kindle and Audible are important, and it's just fine there).
So, if I think of it as a lightweight laptop, also usable as a table for a few specific needs, I think it's great. But I won't be sitting on the couch playing games with it.
Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.
You don't need to do that, you just need to run one of the many third-party utilities that kill the spyware. Updates may one day add more spyware, of course, but 99% of user install malware willingly anyhow, so it's hardly worse than what their used to - just run some sort of cleanup every so often.
It would be nice to see customers rejecting this kind of practice early on, rather than waiting for it to become so bad and widespread that government finally sees an opportunity (yet one more thing to regulate!) and steps in
TFA doesn't go into how this has been monetized before ad-serving: this is the new Neilson Ratings. Broadcast, stream, or torrent, a smart TV with an internet connection can report what you're watching to a ratings firm. The funny thing is: Neilson is an all-volunteer service, and had the TV makers been open about this I'm sure only a few/. nerds would have opted out, while most people would be delighted that their viewing habits were important to someone.
I somehow doubt there will be much pushback about this.
What I dread is the MPAA finding a way to start using this to sue random people. "We caught you watching the new Star Wars movie and you're no paying to stream it, so you're automatically a thief - pay up!" Remember when an idea like that was tinfoil hat material?
That wasn't true in the 90s either, though plenty of employers told that lie. There have always been companies whose whole business model is hiring kids right out of college and lying to them about everything. Fortunately, that's getting harder and harder to keep up in today's connected world.
No, wealth is a technical term. Understanding that is a big part of becoming wealthy (something any professional in America can do). Wealth is in many ways the opposite of bling. Wealth generates goods or services, and thereby generates income, while fancy cars and big houses and so on consume income.
All of that extraneous money going to the wealthy had to have came from somewhere. Most simply hoard it which is the biggest tragedy of all
The wealthily don't have piles of dollars. Scrooge McDuck is not a real person (or even a real duck) and his vault is not what wealth looks like. They own businesses, productive land, and so on.
There's no actual way to "hoard" a lot of money, Breaking Bad-style barrels of cash aside (and that strategy loses value quickly enough). You invest it in something, or you loan it to a bank that does that for you and keeps the profits. You can buy land and keep the land idle, of course. That does happen, but the value of such land is small in the scheme of things. Or you spend it on bling, which loses value quickly enough to be a solid redistribution plan.
All of that extraneous money going to the wealthy had to have came from somewhere.
Money does not affect your standard of living unless you spend it on goods or services. The total average standard of living of everyone is nothing more or less than the total amount we all produced, per capita. If you spend money to acquire wealth, then by definition you don't have that money, and you don't have a higher standard of living from that money: you made instead the choice to invest.
This is not a complicated concept. It's sad that we Americans are so poorly educated about even the very basics.
LOL the rich eat babies and several million in the US still go hungry every year.
Almost no one in the US goes hungry except by choice - that's the fraction of the bottom 1% with too much pride or mental disability to seek aid. Vastly more people starve themselves for fashion than from need, while a single trip to WalMart should disabuse you of the notion of poor people being predominately thin.
This is the f****ing problem. It isn't that the rich are rich it is that they are little scrooge bitches who won't even use the money they have.
Do you seriously imagine them swimming in Scrooge McDuck money vaults?
Just for reference, the total value of all the money in America is about $10 T, while the total value of all non-money assets in America is somewhere north of $100 T.
H1-B workers who are software developers can change jobs at will (L1 is the slave labor visa). Oh, the new company has to sponsor them, but that's a cost of doing business. H1-Bs are fully transferable. What gives the company extra power is the role of the company's lawyers in the green card process. IMO, if someone can hold down a full time professional job here for 2 years, and pass a background check, they should get a green card with minimal fuss. Welcome aboard, taxpayer!
Wealth is "ownership of the means of production", not "standard of living". Yes, it would be good if wealth were less centralized, but good luck with that idea, no one has ever made that work without complete social collapse. However, you don't have a materially lower standard of living because someone else has more wealth. The rich eat less than the poor in the US these days, and while they do have more material possessions it's not the middle ages. If the richest 0.1% consume 10x as much goods and services as the average, how much less does the average man have? Do the math.
Confusing wealth and standard of living is the main reason so few people are wealthy.
It's like you didn't even read what I said. I never claimed to have the moral high ground. ALL people the world over will eventually be dirt poor if the current situation continues. Including me, you, everyone.
Our collective average standard of living, as humans, is simply the amount of stuff we collectively made, per capita. As long as we don't start making less, as long as the centuries-old path of technology doesn't reverse itself, that standard of living will continue to improve.
Every product and service that exists will require less labor, less energy as time passes. That's what technology is: efficiency. But we keep inventing new goods and services, new jobs no one could have imagined a century ago. And we now live in a world where as many people are obese as are starving - it's certainly doesn't look like a race to the bottom from the perspective of history.
The automation is in the US factories. US manufacturing output has never fallen, decade-over-decade. US factories have become more and more automated first as jobs went overseas, and now China is seeing declines in outsourced-from-US jobs, as the robots are taking over and manufacturing increasingly returns to the US, job-free. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from the US was a temporary measure, slowly dwindling.
IT is at the front of this curve (unless you're a software dev, but I don't think of that as "IT"). The writing has been on the wall for years, and the destination is inevitable. Plan accordingly.
This is what technology is: efficiency. This has been happening for over 300 years, it's not going to stop now.
Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion. Eventually everyone who is not rich will be sleeping on dirt floors. You better believe that they are going to be really pissed off about it.
I, I see, redistribution is all well and good when it's someone else's wealth being redistributed, but when your job might go to someone poorer and more in need, well then that's a moral panic!
If you have a full-time job in the US chances are high you're a "world 1%er". All this outsourcing is very much the wealth of the 1% being redistributed to those in need - just at the whole-world scale. You don't actually have the moral high ground here, just so you know.
That's funny, I know people who have changed countries to continue working as a doctor, a lawyer, and a civil engineer (with some retraining on local law in each case).
What makes those jobs different is important: by their nature, you can't do them remotely. A lot of the medical industry has moved off shore, but not the part that requires direct patient interaction. Working in the trades is a great way to never be offshored, and unions have nothing to do with it: no one's going to sit in India and wire your house, or fix a busted sewer pipe. There's significant immigration into all those jobs, but it's absorbed naturally.
America and immigration go together, get used to it. The problem with the H1-B system is its awkward, non-tenure-track nature. Have an B1-B automatically become a green card in 2 years, and the wage problem will be solved.
Much like manufacturing: the offshoring is a temporary measure while automation replaces human workers. Meanwhile, the companies that provide the clouds are paying top dollar for US talent. Food for thought.
WalMart pays in the top 5 nationwide for IT and devs, just so you know (per a/. story on the best-paying employers).
And don't be so sure that civil service jobs will never go away: the pendulum has swung quite far in the "bloated government" direction, and one way or another, it has to swing back eventually.
Yep - I learned long ago that no matter what's on someone's resume, never bring them in without a phone screen where they do some simple coding. So many people can't code at all.
The difficulty at the low-level stuff is why Java became so popular - you can hire people who don't get pointers and bit-bashing but can still get work done.
a project is not delivered on schedule you failed at your job as a manager. You should be fired.
Fortunately, I'm not a manager - any company where the manager does the technical part of an interview has already failed.
Your wishes about how projects should go aside, your job happens in the real world, flawed as it is. And your co-workers have to live with the code you write under pressure.
Well, I want to know if you will write decent code under pressure (as in, the second half of every coding project). Even small examples are enough to see whether you talked through the design and asked questions before diving in, whether errors are handled or even checked for, etc, etc. Coding style shines through even small problems (as long as they're nontrivial).
What you can't measure is the stuff the IDE really does for you. There's nothing worse than "compiler trivial pursuit" -style questions, although getting the most common library calls right is important.
I will never work again at a company that doesn't screen programmers with some sort of difficult coding questions during the interview process. The last time I did, the place was full of people who couldn't code for shit (but had very impressive resumes). I hate "puzzle" questions, but proving you can code something non-trivial and being judged on the quality of that code seems to me to be the most objective and fair way to judge a candidate's technical ability.
I've worked at several companies that do this style of interview, and interviewed well over 100 people this way. Any question you can just Google the answer for is a stupid interview question - though is may be used for a phone screen, where the real test is: can you code at all, not can you solve it.
I use questions where everyone who codes for a living will get the answer eventually, and measure how quickly it was solved, how good the code is, were errors and corner cases thought through, and so on. I use problems related to real problems I've worked on in my career. I find that's a better way to reliably sort candidates.
Others use very difficult questions where they don't expect most people to solve them without hints. I don't like that approach myself. For those questions, learning the algorithms common to these questions (which go in and out of fashion) is good practice.
Four I'd refresh myself on before an interview are: * Code some graph-exploration with backtracking, like a maze explorer * Remember how A* works, and code it (or at least be able to code a breadth-first search without pause) * Look up how O(n) median (or k'th element) works, and code it (median problems used to be in fashion, and array-partitioning of some sort is ever popular) * Radix sort and hash tables - it seems the sub-O(n*log(n)) sorting question and related search questions never die
Questions to gauge your comfort with recursion and pointers are also common, but you really shouldn't have to practice those. (Pattern matching in strings used to be another popular question, but I haven't heard of anyone using that for a long time now).
The good questions will be stuff there's no way to practice for, but I've found those four to be just generally good practice to knock the rust off the stupid algorithmic stuff that only comes up in job interviews - but practice on a whiteboard, not a keyboard.
Hah, same experience here. My teacher was amazed I had one, and delighted to let me use it, because it kept you focused on hte problem, not the calculation.
Playing with sliderules gave me enough in the way of memorized log tables that I can estimate complicated exponentiation in situations where "rule of 72" doesn't work, e.g., taking the 8th root of some arbitrary number. I've found that handy on more than one occasion.
You don't. With skill you get 3 sig figs. That's all you need for much of engineering. You don't use sliderules for accounting.
I used a slide rule in my high school physics class, where we were forbidden to give any anwer to more than 2 significant digits, and forbidden from using calculators. The teacher was on a tear about how physics is not about the adding-up, but about understanding what the formulas meant. I liked that class.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost everyone used to work on the farm. Now almost no one does. Amazingly, we don't have a 98% unemployment rate. With the automation of agriculture, everyone moved to manufacturing jobs. Food fell from almost all the family budget to about half the family budget, and people could buy manufactured goods, so there were lots of jobs.
With the automation of manufacturing (which, if you weren't paying attention, is almost finished at this point), everyone moved to service jobs and paper-shuffling jobs. Food fell from half the family budget to far less, and people started eating out regularly, and having food delivered. Manufactured goods became WalMart-cheap, and people spent money on many things they could never afford before.
Now the automation of those jobs is well underway (the paper-shuffling jobs have already been mostly automated). The cost of traditional services, especially logistics, is falling. You can order everything online these days, and everything gets cheaper as transportation costs fall. The cost of manufactured goods will keep falling. In-home manufacturing is a new industry, but it looks promising.
There has always been a new wave of jobs as the cost of what we're used to buying fell, and we found something new to buy. There will be this time too.
What's with sociology and weasel words?
Toxic is meaningless.
The study actually looked at LOL players and how often they were reported or given whatever in-game thingy LOL has to "like" someone. So they're not measuring their own arbitrary interpretation here of bad behavior, but instead community reaction. That seems like a reasonable measure. However, their definition of "anti-social names" could well be arbitrary.
I was quite amused that their finding of "old players nicer than young" was in the age range of 12-26, no older players were actually studied, just kids and young adults.
I agree with most of that, but I think you missed the most important point: why is key academic software not open source? I'm all for this guy's right to publish software under any license he chooses, but why would you embrace such software in the academic community? IMO, that's the lesson here.
Windows 10 bypasses the firewall and hosts file to phone home, so unless that third-party utility is altering your router's settings, then I'm not sure what it's supposed to do.
The spyware is in executable files, easy enough to kill. I haven't yet dug into which utility is safe, or I'd make a specific recommendation. Microsoft has created a market here, and a market that's appealing to "all Windows customers" gets multiple competing products pretty quickly.
Honestly, you could do worse...
I've been using a Surface 3 for a while now, which might still be relevant to the new stuff:
* It's a perfectly good lightweight touchscreen Windows laptop, solidly built it a bit pricey for the specs.
* It's a poor tablet for normal home tablet use without the keyboard, because Windows software especially games just expects a keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard lacks important keys like "Escape". (Plus there's not a single consistent right-click gesture.)
* It's great tablet for special cases like taking notes with the stylus, or anything that there's actually an app store app for (for me, Kindle and Audible are important, and it's just fine there).
So, if I think of it as a lightweight laptop, also usable as a table for a few specific needs, I think it's great. But I won't be sitting on the couch playing games with it.
Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.
You don't need to do that, you just need to run one of the many third-party utilities that kill the spyware. Updates may one day add more spyware, of course, but 99% of user install malware willingly anyhow, so it's hardly worse than what their used to - just run some sort of cleanup every so often.
It would be nice to see customers rejecting this kind of practice early on, rather than waiting for it to become so bad and widespread that government finally sees an opportunity (yet one more thing to regulate!) and steps in
TFA doesn't go into how this has been monetized before ad-serving: this is the new Neilson Ratings. Broadcast, stream, or torrent, a smart TV with an internet connection can report what you're watching to a ratings firm. The funny thing is: Neilson is an all-volunteer service, and had the TV makers been open about this I'm sure only a few /. nerds would have opted out, while most people would be delighted that their viewing habits were important to someone.
I somehow doubt there will be much pushback about this.
What I dread is the MPAA finding a way to start using this to sue random people. "We caught you watching the new Star Wars movie and you're no paying to stream it, so you're automatically a thief - pay up!" Remember when an idea like that was tinfoil hat material?
That wasn't true in the 90s either, though plenty of employers told that lie. There have always been companies whose whole business model is hiring kids right out of college and lying to them about everything. Fortunately, that's getting harder and harder to keep up in today's connected world.
Wealth can be anything.
No, wealth is a technical term. Understanding that is a big part of becoming wealthy (something any professional in America can do). Wealth is in many ways the opposite of bling. Wealth generates goods or services, and thereby generates income, while fancy cars and big houses and so on consume income.
All of that extraneous money going to the wealthy had to have came from somewhere. Most simply hoard it which is the biggest tragedy of all
The wealthily don't have piles of dollars. Scrooge McDuck is not a real person (or even a real duck) and his vault is not what wealth looks like. They own businesses, productive land, and so on.
There's no actual way to "hoard" a lot of money, Breaking Bad-style barrels of cash aside (and that strategy loses value quickly enough). You invest it in something, or you loan it to a bank that does that for you and keeps the profits. You can buy land and keep the land idle, of course. That does happen, but the value of such land is small in the scheme of things. Or you spend it on bling, which loses value quickly enough to be a solid redistribution plan.
All of that extraneous money going to the wealthy had to have came from somewhere.
Money does not affect your standard of living unless you spend it on goods or services. The total average standard of living of everyone is nothing more or less than the total amount we all produced, per capita. If you spend money to acquire wealth, then by definition you don't have that money, and you don't have a higher standard of living from that money: you made instead the choice to invest.
This is not a complicated concept. It's sad that we Americans are so poorly educated about even the very basics.
LOL the rich eat babies and several million in the US still go hungry every year.
Almost no one in the US goes hungry except by choice - that's the fraction of the bottom 1% with too much pride or mental disability to seek aid. Vastly more people starve themselves for fashion than from need, while a single trip to WalMart should disabuse you of the notion of poor people being predominately thin.
This is the f****ing problem. It isn't that the rich are rich it is that they are little scrooge bitches who won't even use the money they have.
Do you seriously imagine them swimming in Scrooge McDuck money vaults?
Just for reference, the total value of all the money in America is about $10 T, while the total value of all non-money assets in America is somewhere north of $100 T.
H1-B workers who are software developers can change jobs at will (L1 is the slave labor visa). Oh, the new company has to sponsor them, but that's a cost of doing business. H1-Bs are fully transferable. What gives the company extra power is the role of the company's lawyers in the green card process. IMO, if someone can hold down a full time professional job here for 2 years, and pass a background check, they should get a green card with minimal fuss. Welcome aboard, taxpayer!
Wealth is "ownership of the means of production", not "standard of living". Yes, it would be good if wealth were less centralized, but good luck with that idea, no one has ever made that work without complete social collapse. However, you don't have a materially lower standard of living because someone else has more wealth. The rich eat less than the poor in the US these days, and while they do have more material possessions it's not the middle ages. If the richest 0.1% consume 10x as much goods and services as the average, how much less does the average man have? Do the math.
Confusing wealth and standard of living is the main reason so few people are wealthy.
It's like you didn't even read what I said. I never claimed to have the moral high ground. ALL people the world over will eventually be dirt poor if the current situation continues. Including me, you, everyone.
Our collective average standard of living, as humans, is simply the amount of stuff we collectively made, per capita. As long as we don't start making less, as long as the centuries-old path of technology doesn't reverse itself, that standard of living will continue to improve.
Every product and service that exists will require less labor, less energy as time passes. That's what technology is: efficiency. But we keep inventing new goods and services, new jobs no one could have imagined a century ago. And we now live in a world where as many people are obese as are starving - it's certainly doesn't look like a race to the bottom from the perspective of history.
The automation is in the US factories. US manufacturing output has never fallen, decade-over-decade. US factories have become more and more automated first as jobs went overseas, and now China is seeing declines in outsourced-from-US jobs, as the robots are taking over and manufacturing increasingly returns to the US, job-free. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from the US was a temporary measure, slowly dwindling.
IT is at the front of this curve (unless you're a software dev, but I don't think of that as "IT"). The writing has been on the wall for years, and the destination is inevitable. Plan accordingly.
This is what technology is: efficiency. This has been happening for over 300 years, it's not going to stop now.
Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion. Eventually everyone who is not rich will be sleeping on dirt floors. You better believe that they are going to be really pissed off about it.
I, I see, redistribution is all well and good when it's someone else's wealth being redistributed, but when your job might go to someone poorer and more in need, well then that's a moral panic!
If you have a full-time job in the US chances are high you're a "world 1%er". All this outsourcing is very much the wealth of the 1% being redistributed to those in need - just at the whole-world scale. You don't actually have the moral high ground here, just so you know.
That's funny, I know people who have changed countries to continue working as a doctor, a lawyer, and a civil engineer (with some retraining on local law in each case).
What makes those jobs different is important: by their nature, you can't do them remotely. A lot of the medical industry has moved off shore, but not the part that requires direct patient interaction. Working in the trades is a great way to never be offshored, and unions have nothing to do with it: no one's going to sit in India and wire your house, or fix a busted sewer pipe. There's significant immigration into all those jobs, but it's absorbed naturally.
America and immigration go together, get used to it. The problem with the H1-B system is its awkward, non-tenure-track nature. Have an B1-B automatically become a green card in 2 years, and the wage problem will be solved.
Much like manufacturing: the offshoring is a temporary measure while automation replaces human workers. Meanwhile, the companies that provide the clouds are paying top dollar for US talent. Food for thought.
WalMart pays in the top 5 nationwide for IT and devs, just so you know (per a /. story on the best-paying employers).
And don't be so sure that civil service jobs will never go away: the pendulum has swung quite far in the "bloated government" direction, and one way or another, it has to swing back eventually.
Yep - I learned long ago that no matter what's on someone's resume, never bring them in without a phone screen where they do some simple coding. So many people can't code at all.
The difficulty at the low-level stuff is why Java became so popular - you can hire people who don't get pointers and bit-bashing but can still get work done.
a project is not delivered on schedule you failed at your job as a manager. You should be fired.
Fortunately, I'm not a manager - any company where the manager does the technical part of an interview has already failed.
Your wishes about how projects should go aside, your job happens in the real world, flawed as it is. And your co-workers have to live with the code you write under pressure.
Well, I want to know if you will write decent code under pressure (as in, the second half of every coding project). Even small examples are enough to see whether you talked through the design and asked questions before diving in, whether errors are handled or even checked for, etc, etc. Coding style shines through even small problems (as long as they're nontrivial).
What you can't measure is the stuff the IDE really does for you. There's nothing worse than "compiler trivial pursuit" -style questions, although getting the most common library calls right is important.
I will never work again at a company that doesn't screen programmers with some sort of difficult coding questions during the interview process. The last time I did, the place was full of people who couldn't code for shit (but had very impressive resumes). I hate "puzzle" questions, but proving you can code something non-trivial and being judged on the quality of that code seems to me to be the most objective and fair way to judge a candidate's technical ability.
Learn the 40 examples in TFA off by heart
I've worked at several companies that do this style of interview, and interviewed well over 100 people this way. Any question you can just Google the answer for is a stupid interview question - though is may be used for a phone screen, where the real test is: can you code at all, not can you solve it.
I use questions where everyone who codes for a living will get the answer eventually, and measure how quickly it was solved, how good the code is, were errors and corner cases thought through, and so on. I use problems related to real problems I've worked on in my career. I find that's a better way to reliably sort candidates.
Others use very difficult questions where they don't expect most people to solve them without hints. I don't like that approach myself. For those questions, learning the algorithms common to these questions (which go in and out of fashion) is good practice.
Four I'd refresh myself on before an interview are:
* Code some graph-exploration with backtracking, like a maze explorer
* Remember how A* works, and code it (or at least be able to code a breadth-first search without pause)
* Look up how O(n) median (or k'th element) works, and code it (median problems used to be in fashion, and array-partitioning of some sort is ever popular)
* Radix sort and hash tables - it seems the sub-O(n*log(n)) sorting question and related search questions never die
Questions to gauge your comfort with recursion and pointers are also common, but you really shouldn't have to practice those. (Pattern matching in strings used to be another popular question, but I haven't heard of anyone using that for a long time now).
The good questions will be stuff there's no way to practice for, but I've found those four to be just generally good practice to knock the rust off the stupid algorithmic stuff that only comes up in job interviews - but practice on a whiteboard, not a keyboard.
Hah, same experience here. My teacher was amazed I had one, and delighted to let me use it, because it kept you focused on hte problem, not the calculation.
Playing with sliderules gave me enough in the way of memorized log tables that I can estimate complicated exponentiation in situations where "rule of 72" doesn't work, e.g., taking the 8th root of some arbitrary number. I've found that handy on more than one occasion.
You don't. With skill you get 3 sig figs. That's all you need for much of engineering. You don't use sliderules for accounting.
I used a slide rule in my high school physics class, where we were forbidden to give any anwer to more than 2 significant digits, and forbidden from using calculators. The teacher was on a tear about how physics is not about the adding-up, but about understanding what the formulas meant. I liked that class.