Not clear. Electricity travels through wires significantly slower than light travels through a vacuum.
True, though not really relevant for the demonstration in question (which I found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Grace Hopper actually clarified that she was talking about the maximum possible distance that could be traveled in a nanosecond, so she used the speed of light in a vacuum. As it turns out, she also did show a microsecond length, in largish coil. She apparently handed out "nanoseconds" to the students she was speaking to.
The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero.
Let me re-phrase that for you, the ability for YOU to be able to interrupt other people from doing their work to get something you need is valuable to you. However, there is a loss in the other person's productivity. That's why we schedule meetings remote or on-site.
There's a middle ground. Use an ignorable electronic mechanism to query whether the person you'd like to talk to is interruptible. If so, wander over to their desk and proceed to talk; much lower overhead than scheduling a meeting, finding a room, et cetera. When I worked in an office I routinely used instant messaging to ask a co-worker sitting right next to me if they were available. I'd send "IRQ", and they would reply with "NAK", "ACK" or even just ignore me (implied NAK, I suppose).
I now work remotely full time, and while I love the freedom and flexibility that provides me, I often wish that ad hoc discussions were easier. I even have a video conferencing unit in my home office, and another in the area of the office where my colleagues sit, but that's still not as good as being there.
I remember seeing a demo by someone (Grace Hopper??) holding up a piece of wire, and saying "This is a microsecond"
You mean nanosecond, not microsecond. Light travels about 300 meters in a microsecond, which would require a spool of wire. Light travels approximately 30 cm in a nanosecond.
"...Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off.
Kudos to TFS for cutting through the bullshit to identify the real reason ageism exists.
I grow tired of looking for other excuses when it's rather obvious what the cause is.
Greed.
And no, there does not appear to be an escape from that.
There's no escaping greed, it's a basic human characteristic. However, the effect you're talking about is a good thing, and you don't want to lose it.
Greed is the engine that drives development and distribution of competitive products at competitive prices. It's what gave you the high standard of living you have. Free markets are so effective at providing goods and services for the lowest prices only because greed drives all the participants to maximize their own profits.
I'd like to point to the outcome of a society that abolished greed, but there's never been one, not beyond very small scales for very short periods of time. The USSR and other states that tried communism attempted to build greed-free economic structures, and they did create an economic structure that was not propelled by greed, and without that drive their system plodded along ever slower, unable to provide adequately for the populace. Meanwhile, the free(ish) markets of the west filled stores to bursting with every kind of good that the public might want. The difference? One harnessed greed to positive effect, driving innovation and productivity up, while the other failed to channel it, resulting in a culture of endemic corruption that persists in most of the former Soviet countries even today.
Greed is good. Yes, even when it motivates employers to choose the least expensive workers who can do the job adequately.
If as a senior software engineer you want to get paid more for working less, you need to bring something to the table that justifies your higher pay. You need to be more effective, demonstrably so.
So you say all techies must be both expert techies and expert people people
No, senior techies must be both expert techies and competent people people. Junior techies can know just the technology. 50-somethings who want to be junior techies will find themselves either paid like junior techies or (more likely) unemployed, because employers have this idea that older people should be paid more, and therefore must be worth more (I don't actually get why a 55 year-old who performs on the same level as a new grad can't just be paid like the new grad... but apparently that's not allowed).
That's typically how it works. One provides data for one's claim, along with warrants, rebuttals, etc.
Only if one actually cares to convince. If, on the other hand, one is an old hand explaining to younger guys what it takes to stay in demand at a much higher salary, then one doesn't really care whether said younger guys get it or not, and if they demand data/evidence etc., one will simply shrug and walk away.
FWIW, my perspective on the question is that the 50 year-old guy who has no greater technical ability than the fresh grad, and less energy and higher salary requirements, should not be surprised when he gets passed over in favor of the new grad. This isn't "ageism", it's simple value for money. On the other hand, if you've been doing the job for 25 years, you really should have learned 25 years worth of stuff that the new grad doesn't know, can't know and won't know for a couple of decades. That knowledge won't be some programming language, because those don't take decades to learn (not even C++).
Keeping up with the latest fads is a lot of work and often pointless, both because the fad will be gone in a couple of years and because after you've been around enough tools and technologies, picking up another one because it happens to fit the new project is easy. You shouldn't have to already know it.
But where the "learn all the things!" approach goes really wrong, IMO, is that it doesn't give you any obvious advantage over the young guys who learn the same new fads. "But I know two dozen other languages that we're not using on this project" offers no clear value that is visible to your typical non-technical hiring manager.
So what can offer that advantage? Learning things that can't be picked up in a few weeks or months.Thing like deep specialization in a particularly gnarly area of software development, or broad and deep knowledge of an industry. I know a guy who commands hourly rates that would make senior lawyers salivate, because he knows the credit card industry inside out and backwards, not just the technology, and its history, but the business side as well. My own area of expertise is security, especially of the cryptologic sort, and especially in relatively tiny devices.
The other thing older software developers should be doing, IMO, is broadening their scope of influence. If you're just cutting code it's hard for people to distinguish your value from a fresh college grad doing the same thing (note that I'm not saying that you aren't much better than the new grad, just not in ways that are easy to see). Take advantage of your depth of experience -- and your wealth of industry/technology expertise -- and start thinking bigger, identifying problems that could be solved and evangelizing those solutions. This requires networking, and politicking... but those are two other things that take many years to learn to do, and you should learn to do them.
To use the jargony phrase: become a "thought leader". A real one, with useful and valuable ideas and the ability to execute on those ideas.
Note that in some companies (but not most, in my experience) the only practical way to broaden your scope is to move into management. If that's not what you want to do, you may have to either create a new sort of position for yourself within the company, or move somewhere else that allows you to have greater influence and impact while staying technical.
If this sounds harder than keeping up with the fads... yeah, it is. It requires you to branch out, learn things outside of what would normally be your area, develop "soft" skills, look for the bigger picture and how you can create a role for yourself in that bigger picture. But if you do it, then you clearly and obviously deserve to make a lot more money than that new college grad, perhaps several times as much, because you do what the new grad, or even a team of new grads, cannot, and everyone can see it.
Thus their attempts to suppress concepts and ideas that they disagree with is an act of censorship, tyranny and oppression.
They aren't censoring or suppressing anything. You can still put publish whatever. For free! To the whole world! They just won't attach ads to your speech if it's offensive to advertisers.
I don't see anything in the article to indicate that Walmart is going to try to argue that they aren't employees. And I think that would be basically impossible to get past employment regulators. Uber has something of an argument given the flexible work schedules, etc, but these *are* employees, no question about it.
That's the only way this kind of thing can work and be any different than hiring a run of the mill delivery driver.
Nonsense, unless you think you can hire a bunch of drivers to do just one run per day, and pay them only for the deviation between their delivery route and their normal drive home.
From a more prophetic standpoint I think the various devices are turning into de-facto cable boxes and I think Hollywood is looking into making their content available only to exclusive devices - let alone services as they do now.
How do Domino's, UPS, FedEx, etc. deal with it? I suspect the company buys coverage. Note that UPS and FedEx employees occasionally do deliveries in their own vehicles, and AFAIK all Domino's employees do. This has been figured out a long time ago.
Grocery chains are either near a person's house or their place of work.
I live quite a ways from a grocery store, and work from home. Home-delivery groceries for a reasonable price would be awesome. Actually, I should say it is awesome. I use Amazon for many non-perishable grocery items.
Also, Wal-mart carries a lot more than groceries, including lots of stuff that is often purchased from Amazon.
No, I'm not going the wrong way, unless you can think of some way other than taxes to internalize the fossil fuel-burning externalities. Merely hoping that other technologies will magically become cheaper than fossil fuels when fossil fuel-burners remain free to ignore the costs they're imposing on others won't work.
I'm a strong believer in the power of free markets, but they only work when all costs are internalized.
Unfortunately, there's really no practical way to internalize the cost of carbon emissions. The only impractical way I can think of doing it is also to use government: ban all CO2 emissions. That would force fossil fuel burners to find a way to capture and sequester all of their output which would do a marvelous job of internalizing the costs, but it seems completely impractical.
True, but your next sentence seems to imply you think it's a zero-sum game. Far more of that money will come from increases in productivity as from lost wages of professional drivers. In fact, assuming Intel's estimated figure is correct, it's not possible to get that much money from lost wages, unless each driver makes millions per year, which they manifestly do not. Further, unless the current wave of automation bucks the trends of all previous technology-driven economic restructurings (which is possible, but not certain), then all of those driving jobs will migrate to other areas of the economy. That's not to say that all of the drivers will be able to make the transition, of course.
What experience shows is that such technology-driven restructurings provide a massive boost to the economy and to people as a whole, but create significant challenges in the lives of some individuals whose jobs no longer exist.
I said I will believe the government is interested in removing gasoline fueled cars from the roads when they remove the road taxes from gasoline. If the majority of cars on the road will be electric in ten years, or whatever the claim is this week, then to pay for the roads we will need a funding mechanism for the roads that does not rely on those cars burning gasoline.
Ah, okay. I wondered if the word "road" was the point of distinction.
Sure, the government(s) should stop calling gasoline taxes "road" taxes, and should start thinking about alternative highway funding mechanisms. Personally, I like mileage taxes, assessed on a scale that increases based on gross vehicle weight, based on the amount of road damage heavier vehicles do. I'm told that damage increases with the fourth power of GVW, but I've never seen that substantiated. We already have the core measuring tool for a mileage tax in place, the odometer, though we might find it necessary to increase the penalties associated with altering odometers. Or we can just go to toll roads everywhere, though that requires deploying a lot of infrastructure.
However, we should also begin seriously increasing taxes on fossil fuels, of all forms, in direct proportion to the amount of CO2 emitted by burning them. There should be a mechanism for getting a rebate on the taxes for provably-recaptured and sequestered CO2. This would harness the power of the market to find and deploy low- and zero-emission alternatives to fossil fuels as well as recapture and sequestration technologies. To avoid hammering the economy, the taxes should be phased in over a few years -- but everyone should be made aware of the phase-in schedule so they can prepare for it.
To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".
You failed to rephrase honestly. An honest rephrasing is "We found that people in the age category where people typically attend post-secondary schools did work less, so we assume they went to school instead". The reduction in paid work was only seen in that one category.
That single line torpedoes their entire "study".
No, it just means that another study should be done to find out what people in that age category actually did.
Much of the money to pay for UBI would come from UBI. Most taxpayers would see their tax burden increase by an amount that is very close to their UBI, making it a wash for them. Also, keep in mind that UBI would replace most existing welfare programs, on which we currently spend on the order of $1T. It should also replace much social security spending, which currently accounts for almost another trillion annually.
The "left" was big on population reduction 40 years ago. You know how Europe collectively did that reduction? Mainly by leftist policies like access to birth control and sex education.
I'm completely uninterested in this leftist vs rightist crap, but I don't think you can substantiate this claim. The strongest indicators of low birthrate are per-capita wealth, infant/child survival rate, and median level of female education. Cheap/free access to birth control and state-mandated sex education likely have some effect, but it's down in the noise.
Now, you can argue about whether it's the left's policies or the right's policies which most help the relevant factors.
I'll believe that the federal government is interested in getting off of oil when they get rid of the road taxes on gasoline. We should be using gasoline for fueling airplanes, as a paint thinner, and nothing else. That will happen precisely when we run out of oil or the government gets rid of the taxes.
How will eliminating gasoline taxes discourage the use of gasoline in cars? It will make fuel cheaper, so make operating gasoline-powered vehicles cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely agree, but that only works for a 1-on-1 conversation and it doesn't matter whether you're physically present in the office or not.
The IM doesn't... but the discussion that follows does.
Also, you don't have to physically schedule a conference room, at my work we all have conference bridges.
Teleconferences are nothing like a face to face conversation. Video conferences (what we use) are slightly better, but still not the same.
Not clear. Electricity travels through wires significantly slower than light travels through a vacuum.
True, though not really relevant for the demonstration in question (which I found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Grace Hopper actually clarified that she was talking about the maximum possible distance that could be traveled in a nanosecond, so she used the speed of light in a vacuum. As it turns out, she also did show a microsecond length, in largish coil. She apparently handed out "nanoseconds" to the students she was speaking to.
The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero.
Let me re-phrase that for you, the ability for YOU to be able to interrupt other people from doing their work to get something you need is valuable to you. However, there is a loss in the other person's productivity. That's why we schedule meetings remote or on-site.
There's a middle ground. Use an ignorable electronic mechanism to query whether the person you'd like to talk to is interruptible. If so, wander over to their desk and proceed to talk; much lower overhead than scheduling a meeting, finding a room, et cetera. When I worked in an office I routinely used instant messaging to ask a co-worker sitting right next to me if they were available. I'd send "IRQ", and they would reply with "NAK", "ACK" or even just ignore me (implied NAK, I suppose).
I now work remotely full time, and while I love the freedom and flexibility that provides me, I often wish that ad hoc discussions were easier. I even have a video conferencing unit in my home office, and another in the area of the office where my colleagues sit, but that's still not as good as being there.
I remember seeing a demo by someone (Grace Hopper??) holding up a piece of wire, and saying "This is a microsecond"
You mean nanosecond, not microsecond. Light travels about 300 meters in a microsecond, which would require a spool of wire. Light travels approximately 30 cm in a nanosecond.
"...Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off.
Kudos to TFS for cutting through the bullshit to identify the real reason ageism exists.
I grow tired of looking for other excuses when it's rather obvious what the cause is.
Greed.
And no, there does not appear to be an escape from that.
There's no escaping greed, it's a basic human characteristic. However, the effect you're talking about is a good thing, and you don't want to lose it.
Greed is the engine that drives development and distribution of competitive products at competitive prices. It's what gave you the high standard of living you have. Free markets are so effective at providing goods and services for the lowest prices only because greed drives all the participants to maximize their own profits.
I'd like to point to the outcome of a society that abolished greed, but there's never been one, not beyond very small scales for very short periods of time. The USSR and other states that tried communism attempted to build greed-free economic structures, and they did create an economic structure that was not propelled by greed, and without that drive their system plodded along ever slower, unable to provide adequately for the populace. Meanwhile, the free(ish) markets of the west filled stores to bursting with every kind of good that the public might want. The difference? One harnessed greed to positive effect, driving innovation and productivity up, while the other failed to channel it, resulting in a culture of endemic corruption that persists in most of the former Soviet countries even today.
Greed is good. Yes, even when it motivates employers to choose the least expensive workers who can do the job adequately.
If as a senior software engineer you want to get paid more for working less, you need to bring something to the table that justifies your higher pay. You need to be more effective, demonstrably so.
So you say all techies must be both expert techies and expert people people
No, senior techies must be both expert techies and competent people people. Junior techies can know just the technology. 50-somethings who want to be junior techies will find themselves either paid like junior techies or (more likely) unemployed, because employers have this idea that older people should be paid more, and therefore must be worth more (I don't actually get why a 55 year-old who performs on the same level as a new grad can't just be paid like the new grad... but apparently that's not allowed).
Well, yes.
That's typically how it works. One provides data for one's claim, along with warrants, rebuttals, etc.
Only if one actually cares to convince. If, on the other hand, one is an old hand explaining to younger guys what it takes to stay in demand at a much higher salary, then one doesn't really care whether said younger guys get it or not, and if they demand data/evidence etc., one will simply shrug and walk away.
FWIW, my perspective on the question is that the 50 year-old guy who has no greater technical ability than the fresh grad, and less energy and higher salary requirements, should not be surprised when he gets passed over in favor of the new grad. This isn't "ageism", it's simple value for money. On the other hand, if you've been doing the job for 25 years, you really should have learned 25 years worth of stuff that the new grad doesn't know, can't know and won't know for a couple of decades. That knowledge won't be some programming language, because those don't take decades to learn (not even C++).
Keeping up with the latest fads is a lot of work and often pointless, both because the fad will be gone in a couple of years and because after you've been around enough tools and technologies, picking up another one because it happens to fit the new project is easy. You shouldn't have to already know it.
But where the "learn all the things!" approach goes really wrong, IMO, is that it doesn't give you any obvious advantage over the young guys who learn the same new fads. "But I know two dozen other languages that we're not using on this project" offers no clear value that is visible to your typical non-technical hiring manager.
So what can offer that advantage? Learning things that can't be picked up in a few weeks or months.Thing like deep specialization in a particularly gnarly area of software development, or broad and deep knowledge of an industry. I know a guy who commands hourly rates that would make senior lawyers salivate, because he knows the credit card industry inside out and backwards, not just the technology, and its history, but the business side as well. My own area of expertise is security, especially of the cryptologic sort, and especially in relatively tiny devices.
The other thing older software developers should be doing, IMO, is broadening their scope of influence. If you're just cutting code it's hard for people to distinguish your value from a fresh college grad doing the same thing (note that I'm not saying that you aren't much better than the new grad, just not in ways that are easy to see). Take advantage of your depth of experience -- and your wealth of industry/technology expertise -- and start thinking bigger, identifying problems that could be solved and evangelizing those solutions. This requires networking, and politicking... but those are two other things that take many years to learn to do, and you should learn to do them.
To use the jargony phrase: become a "thought leader". A real one, with useful and valuable ideas and the ability to execute on those ideas.
Note that in some companies (but not most, in my experience) the only practical way to broaden your scope is to move into management. If that's not what you want to do, you may have to either create a new sort of position for yourself within the company, or move somewhere else that allows you to have greater influence and impact while staying technical.
If this sounds harder than keeping up with the fads... yeah, it is. It requires you to branch out, learn things outside of what would normally be your area, develop "soft" skills, look for the bigger picture and how you can create a role for yourself in that bigger picture. But if you do it, then you clearly and obviously deserve to make a lot more money than that new college grad, perhaps several times as much, because you do what the new grad, or even a team of new grads, cannot, and everyone can see it.
So why is this not an issue with other delivery drivers? There are a lot of them.
Thus their attempts to suppress concepts and ideas that they disagree with is an act of censorship, tyranny and oppression.
They aren't censoring or suppressing anything. You can still put publish whatever. For free! To the whole world! They just won't attach ads to your speech if it's offensive to advertisers.
I don't see anything in the article to indicate that Walmart is going to try to argue that they aren't employees. And I think that would be basically impossible to get past employment regulators. Uber has something of an argument given the flexible work schedules, etc, but these *are* employees, no question about it.
That's the only way this kind of thing can work and be any different than hiring a run of the mill delivery driver.
Nonsense, unless you think you can hire a bunch of drivers to do just one run per day, and pay them only for the deviation between their delivery route and their normal drive home.
Do the insurance companies just not notice? I guess a lot of the time employees may report accidents without mentioning they were working.
From a more prophetic standpoint I think the various devices are turning into de-facto cable boxes and I think Hollywood is looking into making their content available only to exclusive devices - let alone services as they do now.
Where do these devices get content?
I'm a strong believer in the power of free markets, but they only work when all costs are internalized.
I believe the costs of CO2 emissions have been internalized. We did this by informing people of the costs.
Dude, you're nuts. Just telling people about the costs will not change their behavior.
The only impractical way I can think of doing it is also to use government: ban all CO2 emissions.
Oh c'mon, I can think of at least two impractical ways to do it.
Good point. I'm sure there are lots and lots of impractical ways :-)
What about insurance?
How do Domino's, UPS, FedEx, etc. deal with it? I suspect the company buys coverage. Note that UPS and FedEx employees occasionally do deliveries in their own vehicles, and AFAIK all Domino's employees do. This has been figured out a long time ago.
Grocery chains are either near a person's house or their place of work.
I live quite a ways from a grocery store, and work from home. Home-delivery groceries for a reasonable price would be awesome. Actually, I should say it is awesome. I use Amazon for many non-perishable grocery items.
Also, Wal-mart carries a lot more than groceries, including lots of stuff that is often purchased from Amazon.
Like: why did you order granola bars from Walmart and have it shipped to Fedex and THEN complain about the excessive packaging?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? creimer explained this in a post replying to you, 20 minutes before you posted this.
No, I'm not going the wrong way, unless you can think of some way other than taxes to internalize the fossil fuel-burning externalities. Merely hoping that other technologies will magically become cheaper than fossil fuels when fossil fuel-burners remain free to ignore the costs they're imposing on others won't work.
I'm a strong believer in the power of free markets, but they only work when all costs are internalized.
Unfortunately, there's really no practical way to internalize the cost of carbon emissions. The only impractical way I can think of doing it is also to use government: ban all CO2 emissions. That would force fossil fuel burners to find a way to capture and sequester all of their output which would do a marvelous job of internalizing the costs, but it seems completely impractical.
Remember, that money has to come from somewhere.
True, but your next sentence seems to imply you think it's a zero-sum game. Far more of that money will come from increases in productivity as from lost wages of professional drivers. In fact, assuming Intel's estimated figure is correct, it's not possible to get that much money from lost wages, unless each driver makes millions per year, which they manifestly do not. Further, unless the current wave of automation bucks the trends of all previous technology-driven economic restructurings (which is possible, but not certain), then all of those driving jobs will migrate to other areas of the economy. That's not to say that all of the drivers will be able to make the transition, of course.
What experience shows is that such technology-driven restructurings provide a massive boost to the economy and to people as a whole, but create significant challenges in the lives of some individuals whose jobs no longer exist.
I said I will believe the government is interested in removing gasoline fueled cars from the roads when they remove the road taxes from gasoline. If the majority of cars on the road will be electric in ten years, or whatever the claim is this week, then to pay for the roads we will need a funding mechanism for the roads that does not rely on those cars burning gasoline.
Ah, okay. I wondered if the word "road" was the point of distinction.
Sure, the government(s) should stop calling gasoline taxes "road" taxes, and should start thinking about alternative highway funding mechanisms. Personally, I like mileage taxes, assessed on a scale that increases based on gross vehicle weight, based on the amount of road damage heavier vehicles do. I'm told that damage increases with the fourth power of GVW, but I've never seen that substantiated. We already have the core measuring tool for a mileage tax in place, the odometer, though we might find it necessary to increase the penalties associated with altering odometers. Or we can just go to toll roads everywhere, though that requires deploying a lot of infrastructure.
However, we should also begin seriously increasing taxes on fossil fuels, of all forms, in direct proportion to the amount of CO2 emitted by burning them. There should be a mechanism for getting a rebate on the taxes for provably-recaptured and sequestered CO2. This would harness the power of the market to find and deploy low- and zero-emission alternatives to fossil fuels as well as recapture and sequestration technologies. To avoid hammering the economy, the taxes should be phased in over a few years -- but everyone should be made aware of the phase-in schedule so they can prepare for it.
To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".
You failed to rephrase honestly. An honest rephrasing is "We found that people in the age category where people typically attend post-secondary schools did work less, so we assume they went to school instead". The reduction in paid work was only seen in that one category.
That single line torpedoes their entire "study".
No, it just means that another study should be done to find out what people in that age category actually did.
Much of the money to pay for UBI would come from UBI. Most taxpayers would see their tax burden increase by an amount that is very close to their UBI, making it a wash for them. Also, keep in mind that UBI would replace most existing welfare programs, on which we currently spend on the order of $1T. It should also replace much social security spending, which currently accounts for almost another trillion annually.
The "left" was big on population reduction 40 years ago. You know how Europe collectively did that reduction? Mainly by leftist policies like access to birth control and sex education.
I'm completely uninterested in this leftist vs rightist crap, but I don't think you can substantiate this claim. The strongest indicators of low birthrate are per-capita wealth, infant/child survival rate, and median level of female education. Cheap/free access to birth control and state-mandated sex education likely have some effect, but it's down in the noise.
Now, you can argue about whether it's the left's policies or the right's policies which most help the relevant factors.
I'll believe that the federal government is interested in getting off of oil when they get rid of the road taxes on gasoline. We should be using gasoline for fueling airplanes, as a paint thinner, and nothing else. That will happen precisely when we run out of oil or the government gets rid of the taxes.
How will eliminating gasoline taxes discourage the use of gasoline in cars? It will make fuel cheaper, so make operating gasoline-powered vehicles cheaper.