For the same reason the military does use (at at least doesn't admit to using) fully autonomous armed drones: software can't make judgement calls. Sure, eventually, one day, the software may get there. I think it will be less than 20 years, within well-mapped cities. In the mean time, we can keep making computer-assisted driving better, which is what most car companies are actually doing. The few who aren't will still require you to pay enough attention to take over when things go wrong, which sounds dubious to me.
And for rural driving? That's a whole different world. We won't have fully autonomous cars on dirt roads, or heavy snow, or similar conditions that most humans find challenging, any time soon.
How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?
With much faster reflexes and understanding of suspension dynamics that the average driver.
How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?
Puny human without 360 degree night vision, LIDAR, and RADAR, calibrated for distance and speed says what?
How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?
You do realize you used an autonomous collision avoidance protocol with random exponential backoff to make your post, right?
There's a huge difference between "drive by wire" and fully autonomous. Signalling your driving intent through the wheel and pedals, and letting the computer work out how to make that happen safely, is still driving. Much like every fighter plane has worked that way since the F-16, but they're very different than autonomous drones.
An autonomous car wouldn't need a forward-facing driver's seat. The only controls would be the destination. That's a very different world from "computer-assisted driving", where you're still giving the car input moment-by-moment, and the car's just helping you overcome your limitations (puny human with no 360 degree night vision with distance calibration).
That's not a very high bar. I expect we'll be there software-wise in 10 years or so (with cars following a few years later) in well-mapped city areas. Rural America is a whole different topic.
Get over your puffery and credentialism - no one cares.
The degrees at most universities are a bit misnamed. The CompSci degree is an engineering degree, with a focus on writing software to solve problems. If you're building a repeatable process to solve real-world problems, you're an engineer. The few "Computer Engineering" degrees I've seen have been full of project management BS. I really don't understand the choice of name for that. Maybe it will correct in time.
The tiny percentage of people doing academic research work in the field also have CompSci degrees, and it doesn't really seem like you'd need a different undergrad degree program for that yet, as the work you do for your PhD will create the distinction.
So google employees only are expected to work 40 hours? I am calling BS on that one for sure, or are they not one of the Big 5? Also, if you require all of your employees to move to Silicon Valley for their job, aren't you kind of limiting your pool right there? I am not moving from where I am to some place where a condo costs more than my house in the mountains with a yard and such.
It's a different pace at each of the Big 5. I worked at 2 of them where only the junior guys still scrambling to learn the trade needed to work more than 40 hours on normal weeks. Crunch time is different, of course, but crunch time == bad management, always (still, if it's only a few weeks a year, one can't complain).
As far as moving - sorry, this is where the jobs are. If you want to be a coal miner, you're going to have to move to where a coal mine is. If you want to be a software dev, there are 10 or so areas where those jobs are dense and the big employers live, and you'll need to move to one of them if you want to have a nice career. (I think both Google and Facebook let you chose one of 6 or so cities to work from now). There are a lot of shit jobs in the field, and you really want to work for a software company (including cloud and IOT in that) to avoid those.
Also, stop the weird interview techniques that have absolutely nothing to do with programming. I am a programmer, and do not particularly care for an interview with a bunch of riddles
That's been out of fashion for ~10 years now. It's code on the whiteboard and some soft skill questions now.
Also, don't low ball me on pay. If there is such a huge shortage of workers... they basically want indentured servants who spend ridiculous hours churning out ill informed code
The big guys don't. They don't want to lose anyone on pay. Respectable startups also try to pay fairly, as most people know the game now and aren't fooled by options. The people who pay poorly tend not to be software companies, but have a different business focus and have a few devs as part of IT staff (and even then, banks pay OK, though those jobs can suck for other reasons). Those are the jobs you start your career with if you have to, not the ones you stick with.
I don't care at all if my software engineer has read the classics - that's just not a relevant. I care that they have gotten past the barriers that are hard to teach, and some people just can't learn: pointers and recursion and lambda (there are many other things, but once someone internalizes those ideas, the rest can be taught). I care that they have enough hands-on experience coding and debugging that they're fluent in some programming language. I care that they've learned all the basics of data structures and algorithms. None of that takes more than two years, and can even be self-taught.
I'll just never be interested in whether they also studied ancient Mesopotamian trade routes, or whatever filler courses they have in India or China (where most the world's software engineers come from).
Nor am I at all interested in "credentialism" or any sort of snooty puffery about what sort of degree someone has - past the first job, none of that matters.
It's not the job of the companies to train people up from scratch. Nor should it be, as there's just no telling whether someone will "get it". Getting together with other companies to fund coding schools seems a much more useful approach.
That being said, we always expect to spend that first 6 months training people on everything company-specific, along with the language we use in development if needed. But you have to demonstrate proficiency in coding during the interview in some language.
There's no shortage of qualified developers. What there's a shortage of, are qualified developers who are barely old enough to shave, have no family (wife/husband/kids), will work for next to nothing, will put in 80+ hours a week for months on end, and who you can basically treat like shit because they don't know any better and are just desperate for any job in the industry.
That all depends on what kind of job we're talking about. My first job was just such a shit job, and it was fine since it let me break into the industry.
But for the Big-5 software dev companies, and dozens of others in Silly Valley who model themselves on them, there is a shortage (and these companies probably employ the majority of software devs on the West Coast). If I average across the last 3 companies I worked at, so I'm not revelaing anything about any of them specifically: * We hire 1 in 20 people we phone screen * We hire 1 in 4 people we interview in person * We lose maybe 10% of offers due to salary offered being too low (hard to measure that well, but it's low, these companies don't like losing on price) * Normal work week is 40 hours, with crunch time being rare.
So, no for the big names, it's simply not about employee abuse, it's genuinely about finding people qualified to work at this level of expectation. And once you're past your first few years, almost no one cares where (or whether) you went to school. If 2-year programs broaden the talent pool to more people not following the traditional path, more power to them. Whatever helps those bright enough to make a career of it get in the door is a good thing.
That stuff you just wrote, about the timeliness of get-rich-quick plans? That stuff? That's called "economics", and you just dabbled in it.
There's plenty of economics, that describes events involving money and markets well, and is thus a useful tool. Can you call it a science if it's not predictive? Bit of a reach at best. But it's still something useful.
If Facebook had a rough year and the US part needed to spend $100M more than it took in for expenses, they'd just find a way for the Irish company to pay the US company $100M in fees (instead of the other way around). Since that's offset by genuine expenses, no tax there.
xcept there aren't two parties; there are two factions of what is essentially one party. The USA is effectively a single-party state.
This party even has a name: the Donor Party. The big money-donors give to both "sides", to insure lack of disruption to the current pay-for-play rules, and that's the only politics that matter.
The race to replace Boehner as Speaker has made this quite open, with the call for Dems to join in to support the establishment, and openly have a Donor Party speaker instead of a disruptive, conservative speaker. The GOP primary is sharply divided between the Donor Party candidates and the "never held office" candidates (anyone really think they won't be subverted into the Donor Party after election?). The Dem primary has Bernie as a disruptive, non-Donor Party candidate, and the last thing they want is another disruptive voice. They've got Biden lined up in case Hillary falls, just to ensure Donor Party control. Watch for the money bombs once the primaries near.
A project involving both Google and Mozilla? Of course it was going to need to appease all the SJWs with those companies. As a programmer, what can you do beyond shrug and move past it. Glad he has his head on straight.
While I hate it, I at least understand forcing a slideshow to cause bogus inflation of ad impressions. The same stupid js bs without ads on the page? They smoke some strong stuff over at wired; that they do.
UI people decided that "UI" wasn't pretentious enough, and so created "User Experience". The don't just fuck up the UI these days, they fuck up every part of the user experience.
There is no god but speed, and power is his prophet. You drive yoru beatup hippie wagon (never once tuned, blowing black smoke, naturally), and I'll keep driving my 420 HP luxury ride (until I get something with moar power), and you keep out of the left lane, and we'll all be happy.
Ford isn't the one having deep financial problems with retirees. It's Government Motors (and to a lesser extent, Fiat aka Dodge). It'll be funny if they get a fine followed by a bailout.
And yes, of course 401Ks are better than a fixed-benefit systems, because in the former case it's your money the whole time, and can't be lost to fraud, bankruptcy, or corporate raiders. However, the freedom to move money from company-defined 401K to personally-run IRA at any time would fix some cheating that goes on.
Right. One company. There might be a handful more among the Fortune 1000 that haven't yet figured out what to do - classic mismanagement (pay it out as a dividend if you can't figure out how to invest it in your business). It's not normal, and last I check, Apple was one of the "Big 5": one of the 5 destination software development companies, because they pay their engineers so well (and are quite large). While they're certainly douchbags for participating in that "no-poach" agreement, they still pay engineers on average somewhere north of 2x the median wage. Perhaps not the best example for a company screwing it's employees over?
people will want to live in place where they can get around fast and will not need a car
Speak for yourself: I have never wanted any such thing! Getting around without a car was what I did when I was a broke teen. How horrible. I want to live someplace I can get around fast in a car (ideally over 200 MPH).
Why would you imagine a corporation "hoards" money? Corporations mostly spend any money they get on growth growth growth GROWTH AT ANY COST. During downturns the smarter companies may keep a little back to help survive, and buy up the ones who don't, but that beats random hire-then-layoff.
Minimum-wage employees almost always work in low-margin businesses, so when wages go up either prices go up, the business goes under, or the business automates. When prices go up, that's usually a very regressive tax, given shopping habits of the rich and poor, but that obviously looks like "economic growth" since, hey, prices went up.
Google's self-driving cars are already being programmed to cheat a little on traffic laws - there was a/. story about that recently. I think autonomous cars will end up forcing changes in traffic laws in bigger ways, perhaps the first real re-think since cars became common. For example, once self-driving cars dominate, why have a government-imposed speed limit? The software will eventually become quite accurate in picking the max safe speed given 100 independent variables.
But bicyclists obeying the rules? Now you're off in fantasy land.
I don't trust their anything,but that's no different from US tech stocks. Speculative investments have a small place in my portfolio, and oddly the Chinese tech stocks have fared better than my biotech stuff in this downturn (though the latter had been up more).
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason the military does use (at at least doesn't admit to using) fully autonomous armed drones: software can't make judgement calls. Sure, eventually, one day, the software may get there. I think it will be less than 20 years, within well-mapped cities. In the mean time, we can keep making computer-assisted driving better, which is what most car companies are actually doing. The few who aren't will still require you to pay enough attention to take over when things go wrong, which sounds dubious to me.
And for rural driving? That's a whole different world. We won't have fully autonomous cars on dirt roads, or heavy snow, or similar conditions that most humans find challenging, any time soon.
How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?
With much faster reflexes and understanding of suspension dynamics that the average driver.
How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?
Puny human without 360 degree night vision, LIDAR, and RADAR, calibrated for distance and speed says what?
How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?
You do realize you used an autonomous collision avoidance protocol with random exponential backoff to make your post, right?
There's a huge difference between "drive by wire" and fully autonomous. Signalling your driving intent through the wheel and pedals, and letting the computer work out how to make that happen safely, is still driving. Much like every fighter plane has worked that way since the F-16, but they're very different than autonomous drones.
An autonomous car wouldn't need a forward-facing driver's seat. The only controls would be the destination. That's a very different world from "computer-assisted driving", where you're still giving the car input moment-by-moment, and the car's just helping you overcome your limitations (puny human with no 360 degree night vision with distance calibration).
That's not a very high bar. I expect we'll be there software-wise in 10 years or so (with cars following a few years later) in well-mapped city areas. Rural America is a whole different topic.
Get over your puffery and credentialism - no one cares.
The degrees at most universities are a bit misnamed. The CompSci degree is an engineering degree, with a focus on writing software to solve problems. If you're building a repeatable process to solve real-world problems, you're an engineer. The few "Computer Engineering" degrees I've seen have been full of project management BS. I really don't understand the choice of name for that. Maybe it will correct in time.
The tiny percentage of people doing academic research work in the field also have CompSci degrees, and it doesn't really seem like you'd need a different undergrad degree program for that yet, as the work you do for your PhD will create the distinction.
So google employees only are expected to work 40 hours? I am calling BS on that one for sure, or are they not one of the Big 5? Also, if you require all of your employees to move to Silicon Valley for their job, aren't you kind of limiting your pool right there? I am not moving from where I am to some place where a condo costs more than my house in the mountains with a yard and such.
It's a different pace at each of the Big 5. I worked at 2 of them where only the junior guys still scrambling to learn the trade needed to work more than 40 hours on normal weeks. Crunch time is different, of course, but crunch time == bad management, always (still, if it's only a few weeks a year, one can't complain).
As far as moving - sorry, this is where the jobs are. If you want to be a coal miner, you're going to have to move to where a coal mine is. If you want to be a software dev, there are 10 or so areas where those jobs are dense and the big employers live, and you'll need to move to one of them if you want to have a nice career. (I think both Google and Facebook let you chose one of 6 or so cities to work from now). There are a lot of shit jobs in the field, and you really want to work for a software company (including cloud and IOT in that) to avoid those.
Also, stop the weird interview techniques that have absolutely nothing to do with programming. I am a programmer, and do not particularly care for an interview with a bunch of riddles
That's been out of fashion for ~10 years now. It's code on the whiteboard and some soft skill questions now.
Also, don't low ball me on pay. If there is such a huge shortage of workers ... they basically want indentured servants who spend ridiculous hours churning out ill informed code
The big guys don't. They don't want to lose anyone on pay. Respectable startups also try to pay fairly, as most people know the game now and aren't fooled by options. The people who pay poorly tend not to be software companies, but have a different business focus and have a few devs as part of IT staff (and even then, banks pay OK, though those jobs can suck for other reasons). Those are the jobs you start your career with if you have to, not the ones you stick with.
I don't care at all if my software engineer has read the classics - that's just not a relevant. I care that they have gotten past the barriers that are hard to teach, and some people just can't learn: pointers and recursion and lambda (there are many other things, but once someone internalizes those ideas, the rest can be taught). I care that they have enough hands-on experience coding and debugging that they're fluent in some programming language. I care that they've learned all the basics of data structures and algorithms. None of that takes more than two years, and can even be self-taught.
I'll just never be interested in whether they also studied ancient Mesopotamian trade routes, or whatever filler courses they have in India or China (where most the world's software engineers come from).
Nor am I at all interested in "credentialism" or any sort of snooty puffery about what sort of degree someone has - past the first job, none of that matters.
Japan has had no real economic growth for 30 years, and in in the midst of population catastrophe. Maybe not the best example.
It's not the job of the companies to train people up from scratch. Nor should it be, as there's just no telling whether someone will "get it". Getting together with other companies to fund coding schools seems a much more useful approach.
That being said, we always expect to spend that first 6 months training people on everything company-specific, along with the language we use in development if needed. But you have to demonstrate proficiency in coding during the interview in some language.
There's no shortage of qualified developers.
What there's a shortage of, are qualified developers who are barely old enough to shave, have no family (wife/husband/kids), will work for next to nothing, will put in 80+ hours a week for months on end, and who you can basically treat like shit because they don't know any better and are just desperate for any job in the industry.
That all depends on what kind of job we're talking about. My first job was just such a shit job, and it was fine since it let me break into the industry.
But for the Big-5 software dev companies, and dozens of others in Silly Valley who model themselves on them, there is a shortage (and these companies probably employ the majority of software devs on the West Coast). If I average across the last 3 companies I worked at, so I'm not revelaing anything about any of them specifically:
* We hire 1 in 20 people we phone screen
* We hire 1 in 4 people we interview in person
* We lose maybe 10% of offers due to salary offered being too low (hard to measure that well, but it's low, these companies don't like losing on price)
* Normal work week is 40 hours, with crunch time being rare.
So, no for the big names, it's simply not about employee abuse, it's genuinely about finding people qualified to work at this level of expectation. And once you're past your first few years, almost no one cares where (or whether) you went to school. If 2-year programs broaden the talent pool to more people not following the traditional path, more power to them. Whatever helps those bright enough to make a career of it get in the door is a good thing.
That stuff you just wrote, about the timeliness of get-rich-quick plans? That stuff? That's called "economics", and you just dabbled in it.
There's plenty of economics, that describes events involving money and markets well, and is thus a useful tool. Can you call it a science if it's not predictive? Bit of a reach at best. But it's still something useful.
If Facebook had a rough year and the US part needed to spend $100M more than it took in for expenses, they'd just find a way for the Irish company to pay the US company $100M in fees (instead of the other way around). Since that's offset by genuine expenses, no tax there.
xcept there aren't two parties; there are two factions of what is essentially one party. The USA is effectively a single-party state.
This party even has a name: the Donor Party. The big money-donors give to both "sides", to insure lack of disruption to the current pay-for-play rules, and that's the only politics that matter.
The race to replace Boehner as Speaker has made this quite open, with the call for Dems to join in to support the establishment, and openly have a Donor Party speaker instead of a disruptive, conservative speaker. The GOP primary is sharply divided between the Donor Party candidates and the "never held office" candidates (anyone really think they won't be subverted into the Donor Party after election?). The Dem primary has Bernie as a disruptive, non-Donor Party candidate, and the last thing they want is another disruptive voice. They've got Biden lined up in case Hillary falls, just to ensure Donor Party control. Watch for the money bombs once the primaries near.
A project involving both Google and Mozilla? Of course it was going to need to appease all the SJWs with those companies. As a programmer, what can you do beyond shrug and move past it. Glad he has his head on straight.
"Did you hear the one about the Feminist?
That's not funny!"
The modern pinch-faced scold movement in a nutshell. Neo-puritans, the lot of them.
For me, the js broke at slide 5/8. What losers.
While I hate it, I at least understand forcing a slideshow to cause bogus inflation of ad impressions. The same stupid js bs without ads on the page? They smoke some strong stuff over at wired; that they do.
UI people decided that "UI" wasn't pretentious enough, and so created "User Experience". The don't just fuck up the UI these days, they fuck up every part of the user experience.
There is no god but speed, and power is his prophet. You drive yoru beatup hippie wagon (never once tuned, blowing black smoke, naturally), and I'll keep driving my 420 HP luxury ride (until I get something with moar power), and you keep out of the left lane, and we'll all be happy.
Ford isn't the one having deep financial problems with retirees. It's Government Motors (and to a lesser extent, Fiat aka Dodge). It'll be funny if they get a fine followed by a bailout.
And yes, of course 401Ks are better than a fixed-benefit systems, because in the former case it's your money the whole time, and can't be lost to fraud, bankruptcy, or corporate raiders. However, the freedom to move money from company-defined 401K to personally-run IRA at any time would fix some cheating that goes on.
Right. One company. There might be a handful more among the Fortune 1000 that haven't yet figured out what to do - classic mismanagement (pay it out as a dividend if you can't figure out how to invest it in your business). It's not normal, and last I check, Apple was one of the "Big 5": one of the 5 destination software development companies, because they pay their engineers so well (and are quite large). While they're certainly douchbags for participating in that "no-poach" agreement, they still pay engineers on average somewhere north of 2x the median wage. Perhaps not the best example for a company screwing it's employees over?
people will want to live in place where they can get around fast and will not need a car
Speak for yourself: I have never wanted any such thing! Getting around without a car was what I did when I was a broke teen. How horrible. I want to live someplace I can get around fast in a car (ideally over 200 MPH).
Why would you imagine a corporation "hoards" money? Corporations mostly spend any money they get on growth growth growth GROWTH AT ANY COST. During downturns the smarter companies may keep a little back to help survive, and buy up the ones who don't, but that beats random hire-then-layoff.
Minimum-wage employees almost always work in low-margin businesses, so when wages go up either prices go up, the business goes under, or the business automates. When prices go up, that's usually a very regressive tax, given shopping habits of the rich and poor, but that obviously looks like "economic growth" since, hey, prices went up.
Some of the dogfight drones may also shoot bullets in the air!
Google's self-driving cars are already being programmed to cheat a little on traffic laws - there was a /. story about that recently. I think autonomous cars will end up forcing changes in traffic laws in bigger ways, perhaps the first real re-think since cars became common. For example, once self-driving cars dominate, why have a government-imposed speed limit? The software will eventually become quite accurate in picking the max safe speed given 100 independent variables.
But bicyclists obeying the rules? Now you're off in fantasy land.
I don't trust their anything,but that's no different from US tech stocks. Speculative investments have a small place in my portfolio, and oddly the Chinese tech stocks have fared better than my biotech stuff in this downturn (though the latter had been up more).