Automating a datacenter is trivial. 19-inch standard racks made to hold boxes in multiples of "U" height. All you need is standard power and data bus points to avoid having to do custom wiring. Robots can easily slot in units or racks. Just back up an automated truck to the loading dock 2 or 3 times a week to deliver automatically-built new units and haul off the dead/obsolete ones to be disposed of.
A data center is a bastion of clean, easily accessed, regular layout, and computers are good at handling consistent and repeating patterns.
On the other hand any manufacturing industry location is the complete opposite - non-regular layout, abundant dirt and grime and all manner of inconstancies built on layer and layer of previous versions. If you wanted your typical manufacturing plant to be able to be serviced by a remote unit, you would have to tear it down and build it back up from scratch. And that is not economically feasible - unless you simply just scrap manufacturing in the US and build shiny those new plants from scratch in the $CheapLocationDeJour (did anyone say Africa????)
One word: Telepresence. Even surgery is being performed remotely nowadays.
While that probably is inevitable, it isn't going to make inroads into the tech field until you can have a remote unit that is as supple, dextrous and reliable as a person at a price point that makes it cheaper than having local guy (plus who services the remote units?) - that would require an Asimov level of technology.
The surgery works because it is a highly specialized, high cost environment that is extremely regulated and controlled - you currently don't just wheel any old patient into a telepresence surgery. Getting a single machine to change the radiator hose on your car (as an opposite extreme example), and then notice that your timing belt is looking iffy is a whole different ball game.
Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)
Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.
Note that a clearance doesn't imply a high paying job either. Recently I have seen ads for IT monkeys with a security clearance to go around various locations and perform some sort installation/maintenance/upgrade. The quoted rate was about $18/hr. And that surprised me as I thought a clearance would have garnered more of a premium. But I suppose an IT monkey is an IT monkey no matter who the customer is.
I agree. If you aren't your own boss, then you are vulnerable to offshoring.
Even if you are your own boss, if you work in a sector that is susceptible to offshoring,(and you don't offshore yourself), your potential pool of income will be diminishing in a race to the bottom.
From what I have observed among my friends and acquaintances, it is that nothing in the tech industry is safe from being offshored in our globalized world.
Any job that requires a physical presence can't be off-shored. And many tech jobs do require a physical presence.
1. Do something someone else can't do 2. Do something that someone else won't do
Example of #1: Be the best darn $LanguageDeJour expert. But this requires lots of functioning brain cells
Example of #2: Work in places that others would turn down. This only requires lots of guts.
Although in the case of #2 last year I didn't even think twice about not considering a $200k/yr job because it was situated close to a lot of drug cartel violence in Mexico - but the work was available. On the other hand, years ago I made good money on a 6 month engineering project in Siberia and had a great time.
Currently there is a lot of money to be made in large scale engineering projects the middle east. Or recently there was a lot of money to be made in Fly-in/Fly-out work in Western Australia in the mining industry (it seems to have peaked), and possibly the fracking industry in the US. Both of these required people onsite, but the work and living conditions are sub-optimal compared to cubical land anywhere.
The big money is with singing on with big pollution-laden fossil fuel companies to deny human-driven climate change. Instead the majority of opinion is with the science rather than the cashflow.
You're forgetting that scientists are left wing liberal hippies working in academia who hate capitalism - because if the liked capitalism then they would be working in private industry.
You're also forgetting that logic seems to have gone out the window in this debate.
Getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats.
The key to herding cats is to simply move their food-bowl.
And unfortunately that is also pretty well the basic counter as to why all the science agrees - it's because the scientist's food-bowl ($$$) was moved.
If Amazon drones can communicate with each other and hopefully perform collision avoidance, how will they do the same with drones from the random Drones'R'Us startup companies that will be popping up all over the place in the next X years?
Instead of asking your employees to knock their brains out, read the fucking Mythical Man Month and realize that the death march is an idiotic way to do things which doesn't really work.
The problem with this is that you need older workers to tell the younger workers that MMM even exists, or why a book written in the 70's is still relevant 30 years later (had to pull my copy out to verify the publishing date!).
Hiring older developers is the fastest way to put hundreds of security holes in your software. That's reality, people. They just simply don't keep up and don't have modern college training in the latest security threats and program hacking methods.
Remember that when you become an older developer.
Snide aside, while your argument has some merit, there is a flaw in your assignment of blame. Development is not a static process, you need to continually update your skills in order top remain relevant. And one of the major impediments to updating skills is companies not providing an environment when such updating is valued.
You could counter with a "well they can do it on their own time", but the rebuttal to that is two fold:
1. Older workers have a life outside of work and have other things to do. 2. Anyone who is forced to update skills outside of work hours because their company won't support them in work hours is eventually going to say "Fuck it, why should this company benefit from my self improvement - I'm going elsewhere."
And there you are.. back to square one. But of course an older worker would have seen this from the outset, due to all the workplace experience that they have gathered.
Uber is cheaper than a real taxi. They have better customer service. The drivers generally drive in a much more polite way. It probably *feels* safer. But you're taking a huge risk of financial ruin if there is an accident. Likely *nobody* will pay for your injuries and you will end up bankrupt. But that risk is hidden. It's unlikely that most uber users are thinking about this possible consequence.
Recently I saw an Airbnb horror story where by a guest ended up being savaged by the owner's dog, while on the property and had to spend 2 days in hospital (this occurred in Argentina, and apparently the dog had been OK with this guest for a couple of days prior). Until a journalist got involved, the Airbnb response was "Nah, not our problem". Then Airbnb came back with "Can we take a second look at those hospital bills?" and apparently they have now rolled out some sort of liability insurance - but on for the US.
It makes me wonder if any Airbnb operators ever consider what would happen to them if someone slipped and fell in the show and became paralyzed - because I know who the insurance companies would be targeting first.
An 8ms (falling phase of the 60hz power cycle) broad-spectrum burst of microwaves from a tired old oven won't cause even the slightest bit of damage to you.
Yeah.. but the microwave burst from that 50Hz power cycle in Australia is really nasty - its just like all the animals that either want to eat you or simply kill you.
Tacking "...or not" onto the end of a sentence is an extremely common construct in American English, which denotes acceptance of irony.
I am well aware of the concept of irony, but that was not the subject of my rebuttal. As it seems that you are more interested in playing word games rather than discussing the subject at hand, my feeling is that you are just trying to show off your stunning intellect and masterful debating skills, or not.
Having driven a large rig before I can assure you that usually the problem is NOT the big rig driver. It is the idiots in passenger vehicles who cut them off and do all kinds of stupid driving around big vehicles. You cannot really appreciate how little regard many people have for the risks they take until you've driven one of these.
I am not denying that car drives can be idiots and have seen a bunch of them as well, but I have seen just as many bad truck drivers. And FWIW I've also seen a fair share of bad cop drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Automating a datacenter is trivial. 19-inch standard racks made to hold boxes in multiples of "U" height. All you need is standard power and data bus points to avoid having to do custom wiring. Robots can easily slot in units or racks. Just back up an automated truck to the loading dock 2 or 3 times a week to deliver automatically-built new units and haul off the dead/obsolete ones to be disposed of.
A data center is a bastion of clean, easily accessed, regular layout, and computers are good at handling consistent and repeating patterns.
On the other hand any manufacturing industry location is the complete opposite - non-regular layout, abundant dirt and grime and all manner of inconstancies built on layer and layer of previous versions. If you wanted your typical manufacturing plant to be able to be serviced by a remote unit, you would have to tear it down and build it back up from scratch. And that is not economically feasible - unless you simply just scrap manufacturing in the US and build shiny those new plants from scratch in the $CheapLocationDeJour (did anyone say Africa????)
One word: Telepresence. Even surgery is being performed remotely nowadays.
While that probably is inevitable, it isn't going to make inroads into the tech field until you can have a remote unit that is as supple, dextrous and reliable as a person at a price point that makes it cheaper than having local guy (plus who services the remote units?) - that would require an Asimov level of technology.
The surgery works because it is a highly specialized, high cost environment that is extremely regulated and controlled - you currently don't just wheel any old patient into a telepresence surgery. Getting a single machine to change the radiator hose on your car (as an opposite extreme example), and then notice that your timing belt is looking iffy is a whole different ball game.
Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever
Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)
Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.
ANY USG security clearance, not just a high one.
Note that a clearance doesn't imply a high paying job either. Recently I have seen ads for IT monkeys with a security clearance to go around various locations and perform some sort installation/maintenance/upgrade. The quoted rate was about $18/hr. And that surprised me as I thought a clearance would have garnered more of a premium. But I suppose an IT monkey is an IT monkey no matter who the customer is.
I agree. If you aren't your own boss, then you are vulnerable to offshoring.
Even if you are your own boss, if you work in a sector that is susceptible to offshoring,(and you don't offshore yourself), your potential pool of income will be diminishing in a race to the bottom.
Dice - you could save $ by offshoring timothy's job....
Given the quality of "editing" I thought it had already been done years ago.
From what I have observed among my friends and acquaintances, it is that nothing in the tech industry is safe from being offshored in our globalized world.
Any job that requires a physical presence can't be off-shored. And many tech jobs do require a physical presence.
Either:
1. Do something someone else can't do
2. Do something that someone else won't do
Example of #1: Be the best darn $LanguageDeJour expert. But this requires lots of functioning brain cells
Example of #2: Work in places that others would turn down. This only requires lots of guts.
Although in the case of #2 last year I didn't even think twice about not considering a $200k/yr job because it was situated close to a lot of drug cartel violence in Mexico - but the work was available. On the other hand, years ago I made good money on a 6 month engineering project in Siberia and had a great time.
Currently there is a lot of money to be made in large scale engineering projects the middle east. Or recently there was a lot of money to be made in Fly-in/Fly-out work in Western Australia in the mining industry (it seems to have peaked), and possibly the fracking industry in the US. Both of these required people onsite, but the work and living conditions are sub-optimal compared to cubical land anywhere.
Nope. Most scientists want to do pure science, that's why they got into it.
I now see that I should have made the /sarcasm tag explicit.
The big money is with singing on with big pollution-laden fossil fuel companies to deny human-driven climate change. Instead the majority of opinion is with the science rather than the cashflow.
You're forgetting that scientists are left wing liberal hippies working in academia who hate capitalism - because if the liked capitalism then they would be working in private industry.
You're also forgetting that logic seems to have gone out the window in this debate.
Getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats.
The key to herding cats is to simply move their food-bowl.
And unfortunately that is also pretty well the basic counter as to why all the science agrees - it's because the scientist's food-bowl ($$$) was moved.
$9 is too much.
It would have been cheaper, but (as per TFA) it
runs a flavor of Debain* Linux
So they had to up the hardware specs in order to support Systemd
* Although they may have been better off spending that extra money on a proof reader.
If Amazon drones can communicate with each other and hopefully perform collision avoidance, how will they do the same with drones from the random Drones'R'Us startup companies that will be popping up all over the place in the next X years?
Instead of asking your employees to knock their brains out, read the fucking Mythical Man Month and realize that the death march is an idiotic way to do things which doesn't really work.
The problem with this is that you need older workers to tell the younger workers that MMM even exists, or why a book written in the 70's is still relevant 30 years later (had to pull my copy out to verify the publishing date!).
Hiring older developers is the fastest way to put hundreds of security holes in your software. That's reality, people. They just simply don't keep up and don't have modern college training in the latest security threats and program hacking methods.
Remember that when you become an older developer.
Snide aside, while your argument has some merit, there is a flaw in your assignment of blame. Development is not a static process, you need to continually update your skills in order top remain relevant. And one of the major impediments to updating skills is companies not providing an environment when such updating is valued.
You could counter with a "well they can do it on their own time", but the rebuttal to that is two fold:
1. Older workers have a life outside of work and have other things to do.
2. Anyone who is forced to update skills outside of work hours because their company won't support them in work hours is eventually going to say "Fuck it, why should this company benefit from my self improvement - I'm going elsewhere."
And there you are .. back to square one. But of course an older worker would have seen this from the outset, due to all the workplace experience that they have gathered.
Uber is cheaper than a real taxi. They have better customer service. The drivers generally drive in a much more polite way. It probably *feels* safer. But you're taking a huge risk of financial ruin if there is an accident. Likely *nobody* will pay for your injuries and you will end up bankrupt. But that risk is hidden. It's unlikely that most uber users are thinking about this possible consequence.
Recently I saw an Airbnb horror story where by a guest ended up being savaged by the owner's dog, while on the property and had to spend 2 days in hospital (this occurred in Argentina, and apparently the dog had been OK with this guest for a couple of days prior). Until a journalist got involved, the Airbnb response was "Nah, not our problem". Then Airbnb came back with "Can we take a second look at those hospital bills?" and apparently they have now rolled out some sort of liability insurance - but on for the US.
It makes me wonder if any Airbnb operators ever consider what would happen to them if someone slipped and fell in the show and became paralyzed - because I know who the insurance companies would be targeting first.
You can't tell me that it wouldn't be a tiny bit practical to have an IDE help you with the syntactic fun of bash in these cases.
That would require admitting that all is not right in paradise - something an ideologue could never do.
Thar she blows! Typo off the starboard bow! Give it the trusty nitpick, er, harpoon...
Close. It should be "Nuke the Whales"
Keep up please, now days it is Nuke the unborn gay whales
An 8ms (falling phase of the 60hz power cycle) broad-spectrum burst of microwaves from a tired old oven won't cause even the slightest bit of damage to you.
Yeah .. but the microwave burst from that 50Hz power cycle in Australia is really nasty - its just like all the animals that either want to eat you or simply kill you.
Even easier... Change the name of an existing city to "Mars" and you are done...
Oh yea, "I came home from Mars just last week.".. Or, "I'm going to Mars to live for the next 10 years."
You're a litte bit too late for that: Mars, PA
you're not my special snowflake.
Says the person who can't help but dish out abuse to me.
If you won't take criticism, you can never improve. But you can cry instead, if you want.
Ahh.. rationalization of abuse, combined with more abuse!
Hypocrite. I am discussing the subject at hand, with people who are doing better than playing clever word games.
Ahh .. online abuse. Almost more predictable than Godwin's observations.
Tacking "...or not" onto the end of a sentence is an extremely common construct in American English, which denotes acceptance of irony.
I am well aware of the concept of irony, but that was not the subject of my rebuttal. As it seems that you are more interested in playing word games rather than discussing the subject at hand, my feeling is that you are just trying to show off your stunning intellect and masterful debating skills, or not.
Having driven a large rig before I can assure you that usually the problem is NOT the big rig driver. It is the idiots in passenger vehicles who cut them off and do all kinds of stupid driving around big vehicles. You cannot really appreciate how little regard many people have for the risks they take until you've driven one of these.
I am not denying that car drives can be idiots and have seen a bunch of them as well, but I have seen just as many bad truck drivers. And FWIW I've also seen a fair share of bad cop drivers.