my @something;
open my $filehandle, '<', $filename or croak "Can't read file";
while (my $stuff = )
{
____push(@something, $stuff);
}
close $filehandle;
Perl was actually my first scripting language, and I do get all the wierd perl syntax, but not everyone else does. Given that on of perl's general paradigms is to provide a lot of ways to do the same thing (unlike python), I would opt to do things in a way that more people, many less fluent in perl, would still understand, even if it takes a few more lines.
Elegance doesn't even necessarily mean fewest lines of code. If your code is 10x as many lines of code as it needs to be, then you've clearly got a problem, but a few extra here and there that make things *more* understandable for some people is fine.
Ultimately I don't have a problem with any of these except for the unnecessary reference.
What might be even nicer is if the program was able to process the info as it's reading it, and get rid of the array altogether. That way it won't cause your system to run out of memory if you happen to run the script on a 2 TB file.
Won't be in our lifetime most likely even accounting for the pace of progress that of our great-great-grandchildren. Many jobs are simply not very easy to automate and others that seem simple turn out to be shockingly difficult to do economically even when they are possible at all. I run a manufacturing company and there are a lot of jobs I would love to automate that simply cannot be done economically with any reasonably foreseeable technology. Humans are much more adaptable than any robot you or I are likely to ever see.
I have no idea how long you plan on living, but I plan on living long enough to see a lot more automation happening. Humans are incredibly versatile. The advent of automation is the result of human ingenuity. It seems like what you are saying is that "Humans are so adaptable they could never make machines that are more adaptable than themselves", which I find to be pretty questionable.
You really think my grandmother is going to want to order food via a robot at a restaurant?
I don't know your grandmother. But I don't think your grandmother wanted to use a smartphone 10 years ago either. That didn't mean that smartphones weren't going to happen.
I think you badly underestimate the need for a human touch. Hell I'm a geek and *I* don't want to get served food by a robot.
The same argument was made when ATMs came out. And now we have humans when you want to talk to a human and machines when you can't or don't want to. Does it bother you that the french fries are lifted out of the hot oil automatically based on a timer?
Yes it is technologically possible to deliver food via robot. It is NOT so easy economically and it certainly isn't very good at dealing with mistakes. You also are underestimating the capital cost of such devices.
I am not underestimating the capital costs. They would be huge. But once made, economies of scale would make it cost efficient after enough time. Robots are not as good at dealing with *some* mistakes as humans. You have the humans do the jobs that they are better at (e.g. dealing with some mistakes), and have the machines do the jobs they are better at (i.e. not getting bored or unhappy doing tedious labor for free). Eventually the machine will take over more and more jobs as their software gets more and more advanced.
Even simple robots are not cheap, not terribly flexible, have all kinds of safety issues. There are some very significant liability issues and costs when you have robots in close proximity to humans.
I think you have a very rigid idea of what a robot is. Yes a terminator style humanoid robot string enough to kill people would be a liability. The kind of robot that would bring your food to you at a restaurant would be the kind you wouldn't have to worry about.
Not going to happen in our lifetimes most likely and frankly I doubt it ever will happen completely.
I never said it would happen completely. It is already the case that most jobs are done by machines.It just doesn't seem that way because we don't consider them to be jobs anymore.
The notion that we will get to a "post scarcity society" is an absurd myth. This is the real world, not Star Trek.
Won't happen. First off, any time you are dealing in tangible goods there is a resource constraint. There is a finite amount of any element and so the material costs will rise when demand exceeds supply.
Well it depends which resources you are talking about. We have plenty of raw materials on earth. And it helps that we don;t actually consume these materials when we use them, we actually just change them into different more useful configurations. The only resource that is truly scarce (in that we consume it) is energy.
That incentive exists a priori. You can make a contract that requires "high quality" work. But unless you are a software engineer, you probably don't have a good idea of what high quality software is. It is only unitl you try to hire a new software engineer to add a feature or fix a bug, and he tells you your existing software is crap that you finally learn that you didn't get the "high quality" software you wanted.
I go through the same thing every time I hire a plumber or an hvac guy. I have to balance price with who I think will do a good job. I've been burned by people who did really shitty jobs and I found out too late. And I've been burned by people overcharging for a task that was easier than I had thought. You can't be an expert in everything and there is a good chance you are hiring someone else to do a job because you do not have expertise in that area.
And yes to be a good employer you need to use good judgement to determine if someone you hire is likely to do a good job, or whether they are actually doing a good job once you hire them. But you can't know for sure, and it takes time to become more sure. Even if you figure out the guy you hired is crap and fire him, it can still be a costly mistake.
If you make a contract that says "I won't pay you until the work is finished and it is up to my standards", good luck getting anyone to work for you for any extended period of time. They have no idea if your standards are reasonable.
I wasn't saying that living on the street was a great life. It isn't. I am contrasting this with a time when there was no social safety net, and if you didn't work to provide for yourself or have someone to support you, you literally starved to death.
The real meaningful metric is the labor force participation rate (all those working or actively looking for work), which is rarely above 70% in any economy, ever.
It is not more meaningful for the point I am making. Maybe it's more meaningful for the discussion you seem to think we are having but aren't.
And are the other 95% going to be living on $1200 a month welfare, or will that be cut off after two years?
And this gets to the crux of the issue. Why do you even need money? To buy the things you need and want to survive and lead a meaningful life. Things like housing, food, entertainment, etc cost money because they require a great deal of human labor to produce and sustain. If robots are doing all the work, then you don't need a lot of money to get those things. This isn't even just about the US. This is a revolution that will eliminate poverty worldwide.
Your argument is absurdly full of flaws.
First off, there simply are not and will not be robots available to replace most jobs any time soon.
I don't recall my argument specifying a time frame for when this is going to happen.
Replace waitstaff in a restaurant being paid $4/hour+tips with a robot? Not going to happen in my lifetime.
Of all the things that humans do, taking orders, and bringing food to a table at a restaurant is probably one of the easier things to automate. For one thing, the thing that takes your order can live right in the table and transfer this info to the kitchen wirelessly. Bringing food to a table is pretty trivial from an AI standpoint. We could probably do this right now if there was enough restaurants willing to try it to benefit from economies of scale.
Second, you are forgetting the very important point that wages are relative. There are places where $10/hour will let you live like a king and places where $10/hour will barely allow you to survive. The US is relatively wealthy but there is no assurance it will remain so. What's important is the relative amount $10 lets you buy.
I'm not forgetting this. It was just completely unimportant to the point I was making.
Finally, NOBODY benefits by people sitting on their ass watching TV. Your argument that they are better off being couch potatoes than making $10/hour is complete BS. All that means is that someone else has to support them.
No that was not my argument at all. My argument was that we won't people to do manual labor anymore because automation will do the work more cheaply than any human could. This will also make the price of many goods and services so cheap that you can sit on your ass all day and watch TV, because things like couches, houses, food, tv's, etc will be so cheap that they are practically free. You don't need a lot of money, if you can get stuff nearly for free.
So no you are not productive by watching TV. But you don't need to be. And yes somebody else has to support you. That "somebody" is the generations of people that furthered technology to the point where robots did all the tedious work.
You say that from the mindset that 4 hours of work per day is not excessive. There are a lot of people right now that view the 8 hour work day as a cakewalk, especially one that involves sitting in an office and looking at a computer screen for 8 hours. It's all relative. Maybe one day you will only need to put in 1 week or 1 day of work per year to earn your keep in society. Or maybe people will be fighting for the few prestigious jobs sustaining humanity and you'd be lucky to ever get to work in a job that was necessary rather than one that was for leisure or personal improvement.
In the United states you can get away with not working at all. You can take advantage of homeless shelters and welfare. The wealth of our society makes it possible for more and more people to be non-producers. I am not saying this in a fox news "moochers are the downfall of society" kind of way. I am saying it in a "look we *can* actually sustain a fairly large moocher population, and how many we can support is continuing to grow.
So it *has* already come true to some extent, and it is continuing to become more true as time goes on. Right now only about 50% of adults work. It's doesn't take a leap of faith to imagine a world where only 10% or 5% of people are working, and the rest of the jobs are done by robots and computers.
I write computer software. I do it for both fun and for employment. We sure as hell don't need computer software to survive. We survived as a species for hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the programmable computer. Whether I get paid to write software, or I am just doing it for fun and get all the stuff I want given to me, doesn't really matter. Human beings have evolved to the point where we are travelling to space and changing our own DNA. I think we can adapt to a world where we no longer have an obligation to work but rather the option to work.
I know you're right in the grand scheme of things, esp. in corporate employment, but for a dollar an hour difference I will keep my human.
Why? It's a waste of human effort to be working for $10 an hour. Sure someone with no skills is willing to do it, but I think it makes more sense as a society to have only jobs that pay $20/hr, have all the other jobs done by robots, and have all those people learning new skills or just watching TV or something.
I know "more jobs" is on the lips of every politician, but actually the goal should be less jobs (for humans to do). We should be focusing on maximizing production using the least resources including human effort. I know that for all of human history we've had to work hard to get the stuff we want/need, but at some point we may just be able to get what we need/want with minimal effort or no effort at all. No one will have any money, but luckily we won't need money to buy things anyway. An economic system that gives the biggest producers more money was important for incentivizing production, but one day we won't need to incentivize production if it no longer requires human effort to do so. Rationing limited resources will be the name of the game.
I would also like to point out that people who don't know what they are doing will take a lot longer to complete a job to the same level of quality, if they are capable of it at all. This is more true in software than many other fields. A good programmer/software engineer can do the work of 20 mediocre programmers. And it usually takes a good programmer/software engineer to undo the damage caused by a bad programmer.
Sure hiring mediocre or bad programmers is cheaper, but you are paying them to learn (or to fail to learn) on the job.
It's cheaper to pay a good programmer $1000/day and have a finished product in 5 days, than it is to pay a dunce minimum wage and have an poorly designed, unmaintainable, bug-filled piece of shit that sort of kind of works 4 months later.
Sometimes the most "efficient" solution for getting money is to do a shitty job rather than spending the effort to do a good job. Efficient for him is not necessarily efficient for me.
every year, it gets harder to convince potential employers/clients that 10-12 years of hands-on experience doing what they need done, trumps an additional 2 years of general IT education.
Both are pretty meaningless if you don't actually have the necessary knowledge to do the job properly. There are plenty of people with degrees that don't know anything. There are plenty of people with lots of experience that don't know anything. I know lots of people who talk a good game, and can't deliver. There are plenty of people paying for software development that don;t know what good software is, and that's what allows these hacks to survive. The fact that you want to get a BS in computer science with doing the least amount of effort, makes me not want to hire you. What it says to me, is that you don't think the knowledge gained by going through a real CS program is very important. There is also quite a difference in quality between "accredited" computer science programs, and most employers are aware this difference. Maybe you think you know the material already, but I have literally never seen a single "self-taught" person who knew a damn about proper software engineering. Maybe you are a genius and an exception, but I also wouldn't take the word of some self-proclaimed CS/IT genius. Everyone who does computers thinks their a genius, myself included. It's a psychological disorder that's rampant in the field.
Don't be surprised if a fastest cheapest accredited degree (i.e. where you learn the least), doesn't yield the results you were hoping for.
1. maximizing profits != making a profit. It can also mean minimizing losses (minimizing negative profit).
2. You are allowed to fail at maximizing profits. (i.e. you are allowed to suck) You are however responsible for upholding your end of a contract with your employer saying you will try to maximize profits.
3. Even in the examples you cite for when corporations may wish to lose money for some reason that undoubtedly involves exploiting some kind of tax loophole, the greater purpose is to maximize profits overall (i.e. the point of exploiting a tax loophole).
Actually, no. They have an obligation to do what the corporation was intended to do.
Maybe you should try reading my whole post. If you did you might have gotten to the part where I said:
This is because the executives in a company are the employees of the shareholders, and presumably the shareholders hired the executives under under a contract that mandates the executives would do the job they were hired for, which undoubtedly includes maximizing profits.
Making profit is not a goal of Apple? So they are using wage slave in underdeveloped countries in order to maximize what exactly? Suicides?
While companies that tried to improve profits every quarter are sinking exactly because of that.
I don't know why you equate "maximizing profit" with "maximizing profit every quarter". Nor do I understand why you seem to be equating Apple "Not trying to maximize profit every quarter" with Apple "never had the goal of making profits".
Any viruses you get will be limited in how much damage they can do because of how slow Symantec will make your computer.
Computer viruses and anti-virus applications are in a game of cat and mouse. Only the best virus writers can make viruses that are resource efficient enough to run on a machine with Symantec products.
I wouldn't want to be some malware trying to compete with Norton anti-virus for CPU time. It's no contest. Symantec will easily take 90-95% of the total CPU capacity, leaving you only a few cycles with which to steal credit card numbers, mine bitcoins, or try spread yourself to other hosts. You will be so marginalized that no one will even no you're there, like an unpopular girl hiding in a dark corner at a high school dance.
Corporations have the obligation to pay dividends to shareholders based on profits, but have no government-enforced mandate to make those profits larger.
They don't have an obligation to make them larger. They have an obligation to *try* to make them as large as possible. Executives don't go to jail for failing to make a larger profit. Executives will get sued and lose a civil trial if a shareholder can convince a judge that the executives did not *try* to make the company more profitable. This is because the executives in a company are the employees of the shareholders, and presumably the shareholders hired the executives under under a contract that mandates the executives would do the job they were hired for, which undoubtedly includes maximizing profits.
This is similar to hiring someone to tile your floor, paying them up front, and then finding out they never did anything. This is breach of contract.
My company hires tons of old programmers, and most of them suck. They right shitty code, and they're too stubborn to change. Maybe we can switch HR departments with whoever you have dealt with.
I've seen old programmers who only use pointers (because it's faster), one who refuses to use pointers (because they are confusing), one who uses only global variables (because he doesn't like to hide data from himself) and just got fired, one who can't stand using accessor methods because they are slower than direct memory access (who cares about versatility, thread safety, etc.)
I know there are some good old programmers out there. Our companies best programmers tend to be between 30 - 50. But judging by our history, the old guys tend to be duds.
They tend to be perfectly content writing bug prone code (that's 1 clock cycle faster assuming you are using a 20 year old compiler) and spending a bunch of time hunting down their own bugs. They don't have any interest in learning how to write code that is less prone to mistakes, not to mention more maintainable and scalable, etc.
I would say that 1 good programmer is probably worth more than 10 bad programmers. However I have not found that age translates directly to ability. There are plenty of 40 year old programmers who suck. I think this is the real reason it's hard to get a job as an old programmer. At least with a new grad, you expect them to suck, and you can mold them into what you want/need. Old programmers are stubborn, which can be a good thing, if they are also really good, but it's an expensive gamble.
Sometimes programmers work at jobs where there are hazards other than those related to programming. My programming job is pretty safe. However one time someone got burned by a radar that was transmitting. The hardware guys try to make stuff as idiot proof as possible, but at some point you still have to turn the thing on and test that your program can control it properly, and if have a bug you might get irradiated.
I honestly don't think silicon valley is that racist. They hire tons of chinese and indian people.
Black people tend to be poor. Poor people tend not to have good schools in their neighborhoods. Having a bad education makes you less qualified to do certain jobs. Rather than trying to get people to hire more black people, we should be trying to fix the massive gap in the quality of schools in rich and poor neighborhoods.
Rather than trying to implement quotas, we should be trying to eliminate the need for quotas.
Maybe chinese and indian people have some kind of stigma (good or bad), that they are good engineers. Maybe with a good education system, this prejudice that only certain races are good engineers can be eliminated. My point is that the best way to do this is actually fixing inequalities of opportunity that started in the school system. By the time people are adults, giving them jobs that they are not qualified for (even if it is not their fault), is not actually helping the situation.
Now that Jesse Jackson is on the case, we can all rest knowing that, as long as there is any discrimination, he will never give up trying to exploit it for personal gain.
Are you being accused of being racist? Are you actually racist? It doesn't matter. All you need to do is give Jesse Jackson money, and he will promise not to make your problems worse than they already are.
There was a period when almost every programmer had to develop all their own paradigms. It's not surprising that even the best programmers at that time developed some suboptimal habits. One of the best innovations was making it hard for people to do bad things. It turned bad programmers into people who could actually kind of make things that sort of work, and good programmers into supermen. Not everyone wanted to use these new tools. And employers gradually figured out that they didn't want to hire people unwilling to use tools that made them more productive. There was a time when most of these people were in the "over 40" group. That group has been getting older and older. Even the stubborn people over 40 have been successfully correctly brainwashed into using most of these tools. The old "over 40" crowd is now "over 50".
As an analogy, look at old doctors. They are not bad doctors. Doctors that learned medicine before the germ theory of disease, if they were alive today, would probably suck. It's not how old you are. It's about whether you've missed some key revolution in your field due to your age and are also unwilling to adapt.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly I'd prefer this:
my @something;
open my $filehandle, '<', $filename or croak "Can't read file";
while (my $stuff = )
{
____push(@something, $stuff);
}
close $filehandle;
Perl was actually my first scripting language, and I do get all the wierd perl syntax, but not everyone else does. Given that on of perl's general paradigms is to provide a lot of ways to do the same thing (unlike python), I would opt to do things in a way that more people, many less fluent in perl, would still understand, even if it takes a few more lines.
Elegance doesn't even necessarily mean fewest lines of code. If your code is 10x as many lines of code as it needs to be, then you've clearly got a problem, but a few extra here and there that make things *more* understandable for some people is fine.
Ultimately I don't have a problem with any of these except for the unnecessary reference.
What might be even nicer is if the program was able to process the info as it's reading it, and get rid of the array altogether. That way it won't cause your system to run out of memory if you happen to run the script on a 2 TB file.
Nope, it's abstractions all the way down....
Won't be in our lifetime most likely even accounting for the pace of progress that of our great-great-grandchildren. Many jobs are simply not very easy to automate and others that seem simple turn out to be shockingly difficult to do economically even when they are possible at all. I run a manufacturing company and there are a lot of jobs I would love to automate that simply cannot be done economically with any reasonably foreseeable technology. Humans are much more adaptable than any robot you or I are likely to ever see.
I have no idea how long you plan on living, but I plan on living long enough to see a lot more automation happening. Humans are incredibly versatile. The advent of automation is the result of human ingenuity. It seems like what you are saying is that "Humans are so adaptable they could never make machines that are more adaptable than themselves", which I find to be pretty questionable.
You really think my grandmother is going to want to order food via a robot at a restaurant?
I don't know your grandmother. But I don't think your grandmother wanted to use a smartphone 10 years ago either. That didn't mean that smartphones weren't going to happen.
I think you badly underestimate the need for a human touch. Hell I'm a geek and *I* don't want to get served food by a robot.
The same argument was made when ATMs came out. And now we have humans when you want to talk to a human and machines when you can't or don't want to. Does it bother you that the french fries are lifted out of the hot oil automatically based on a timer?
Yes it is technologically possible to deliver food via robot. It is NOT so easy economically and it certainly isn't very good at dealing with mistakes. You also are underestimating the capital cost of such devices.
I am not underestimating the capital costs. They would be huge. But once made, economies of scale would make it cost efficient after enough time. Robots are not as good at dealing with *some* mistakes as humans. You have the humans do the jobs that they are better at (e.g. dealing with some mistakes), and have the machines do the jobs they are better at (i.e. not getting bored or unhappy doing tedious labor for free). Eventually the machine will take over more and more jobs as their software gets more and more advanced.
Even simple robots are not cheap, not terribly flexible, have all kinds of safety issues. There are some very significant liability issues and costs when you have robots in close proximity to humans.
I think you have a very rigid idea of what a robot is. Yes a terminator style humanoid robot string enough to kill people would be a liability. The kind of robot that would bring your food to you at a restaurant would be the kind you wouldn't have to worry about.
Not going to happen in our lifetimes most likely and frankly I doubt it ever will happen completely.
I never said it would happen completely. It is already the case that most jobs are done by machines.It just doesn't seem that way because we don't consider them to be jobs anymore.
The notion that we will get to a "post scarcity society" is an absurd myth. This is the real world, not Star Trek.
Won't happen. First off, any time you are dealing in tangible goods there is a resource constraint. There is a finite amount of any element and so the material costs will rise when demand exceeds supply.
Well it depends which resources you are talking about. We have plenty of raw materials on earth. And it helps that we don;t actually consume these materials when we use them, we actually just change them into different more useful configurations. The only resource that is truly scarce (in that we consume it) is energy.
Second the labor cost issue is more complicated
That incentive exists a priori. You can make a contract that requires "high quality" work. But unless you are a software engineer, you probably don't have a good idea of what high quality software is. It is only unitl you try to hire a new software engineer to add a feature or fix a bug, and he tells you your existing software is crap that you finally learn that you didn't get the "high quality" software you wanted.
I go through the same thing every time I hire a plumber or an hvac guy. I have to balance price with who I think will do a good job. I've been burned by people who did really shitty jobs and I found out too late. And I've been burned by people overcharging for a task that was easier than I had thought. You can't be an expert in everything and there is a good chance you are hiring someone else to do a job because you do not have expertise in that area.
And yes to be a good employer you need to use good judgement to determine if someone you hire is likely to do a good job, or whether they are actually doing a good job once you hire them. But you can't know for sure, and it takes time to become more sure. Even if you figure out the guy you hired is crap and fire him, it can still be a costly mistake.
If you make a contract that says "I won't pay you until the work is finished and it is up to my standards", good luck getting anyone to work for you for any extended period of time. They have no idea if your standards are reasonable.
I wasn't saying that living on the street was a great life. It isn't. I am contrasting this with a time when there was no social safety net, and if you didn't work to provide for yourself or have someone to support you, you literally starved to death.
The real meaningful metric is the labor force participation rate (all those working or actively looking for work), which is rarely above 70% in any economy, ever.
It is not more meaningful for the point I am making. Maybe it's more meaningful for the discussion you seem to think we are having but aren't.
And are the other 95% going to be living on $1200 a month welfare, or will that be cut off after two years?
And this gets to the crux of the issue. Why do you even need money? To buy the things you need and want to survive and lead a meaningful life. Things like housing, food, entertainment, etc cost money because they require a great deal of human labor to produce and sustain. If robots are doing all the work, then you don't need a lot of money to get those things. This isn't even just about the US. This is a revolution that will eliminate poverty worldwide.
Your argument is absurdly full of flaws. First off, there simply are not and will not be robots available to replace most jobs any time soon.
I don't recall my argument specifying a time frame for when this is going to happen.
Replace waitstaff in a restaurant being paid $4/hour+tips with a robot? Not going to happen in my lifetime.
Of all the things that humans do, taking orders, and bringing food to a table at a restaurant is probably one of the easier things to automate. For one thing, the thing that takes your order can live right in the table and transfer this info to the kitchen wirelessly. Bringing food to a table is pretty trivial from an AI standpoint. We could probably do this right now if there was enough restaurants willing to try it to benefit from economies of scale.
Second, you are forgetting the very important point that wages are relative. There are places where $10/hour will let you live like a king and places where $10/hour will barely allow you to survive. The US is relatively wealthy but there is no assurance it will remain so. What's important is the relative amount $10 lets you buy.
I'm not forgetting this. It was just completely unimportant to the point I was making.
Finally, NOBODY benefits by people sitting on their ass watching TV. Your argument that they are better off being couch potatoes than making $10/hour is complete BS. All that means is that someone else has to support them.
No that was not my argument at all. My argument was that we won't people to do manual labor anymore because automation will do the work more cheaply than any human could. This will also make the price of many goods and services so cheap that you can sit on your ass all day and watch TV, because things like couches, houses, food, tv's, etc will be so cheap that they are practically free. You don't need a lot of money, if you can get stuff nearly for free.
So no you are not productive by watching TV. But you don't need to be. And yes somebody else has to support you. That "somebody" is the generations of people that furthered technology to the point where robots did all the tedious work.
You say that from the mindset that 4 hours of work per day is not excessive. There are a lot of people right now that view the 8 hour work day as a cakewalk, especially one that involves sitting in an office and looking at a computer screen for 8 hours. It's all relative. Maybe one day you will only need to put in 1 week or 1 day of work per year to earn your keep in society. Or maybe people will be fighting for the few prestigious jobs sustaining humanity and you'd be lucky to ever get to work in a job that was necessary rather than one that was for leisure or personal improvement.
In the United states you can get away with not working at all. You can take advantage of homeless shelters and welfare. The wealth of our society makes it possible for more and more people to be non-producers. I am not saying this in a fox news "moochers are the downfall of society" kind of way. I am saying it in a "look we *can* actually sustain a fairly large moocher population, and how many we can support is continuing to grow.
So it *has* already come true to some extent, and it is continuing to become more true as time goes on. Right now only about 50% of adults work. It's doesn't take a leap of faith to imagine a world where only 10% or 5% of people are working, and the rest of the jobs are done by robots and computers.
I write computer software. I do it for both fun and for employment. We sure as hell don't need computer software to survive. We survived as a species for hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the programmable computer. Whether I get paid to write software, or I am just doing it for fun and get all the stuff I want given to me, doesn't really matter. Human beings have evolved to the point where we are travelling to space and changing our own DNA. I think we can adapt to a world where we no longer have an obligation to work but rather the option to work.
I know you're right in the grand scheme of things, esp. in corporate employment, but for a dollar an hour difference I will keep my human.
Why? It's a waste of human effort to be working for $10 an hour. Sure someone with no skills is willing to do it, but I think it makes more sense as a society to have only jobs that pay $20/hr, have all the other jobs done by robots, and have all those people learning new skills or just watching TV or something.
I know "more jobs" is on the lips of every politician, but actually the goal should be less jobs (for humans to do). We should be focusing on maximizing production using the least resources including human effort. I know that for all of human history we've had to work hard to get the stuff we want/need, but at some point we may just be able to get what we need/want with minimal effort or no effort at all. No one will have any money, but luckily we won't need money to buy things anyway. An economic system that gives the biggest producers more money was important for incentivizing production, but one day we won't need to incentivize production if it no longer requires human effort to do so. Rationing limited resources will be the name of the game.
I would also like to point out that people who don't know what they are doing will take a lot longer to complete a job to the same level of quality, if they are capable of it at all. This is more true in software than many other fields. A good programmer/software engineer can do the work of 20 mediocre programmers. And it usually takes a good programmer/software engineer to undo the damage caused by a bad programmer.
Sure hiring mediocre or bad programmers is cheaper, but you are paying them to learn (or to fail to learn) on the job.
It's cheaper to pay a good programmer $1000/day and have a finished product in 5 days, than it is to pay a dunce minimum wage and have an poorly designed, unmaintainable, bug-filled piece of shit that sort of kind of works 4 months later.
Sometimes the most "efficient" solution for getting money is to do a shitty job rather than spending the effort to do a good job. Efficient for him is not necessarily efficient for me.
every year, it gets harder to convince potential employers/clients that 10-12 years of hands-on experience doing what they need done, trumps an additional 2 years of general IT education.
Both are pretty meaningless if you don't actually have the necessary knowledge to do the job properly. There are plenty of people with degrees that don't know anything. There are plenty of people with lots of experience that don't know anything. I know lots of people who talk a good game, and can't deliver. There are plenty of people paying for software development that don;t know what good software is, and that's what allows these hacks to survive. The fact that you want to get a BS in computer science with doing the least amount of effort, makes me not want to hire you. What it says to me, is that you don't think the knowledge gained by going through a real CS program is very important. There is also quite a difference in quality between "accredited" computer science programs, and most employers are aware this difference. Maybe you think you know the material already, but I have literally never seen a single "self-taught" person who knew a damn about proper software engineering. Maybe you are a genius and an exception, but I also wouldn't take the word of some self-proclaimed CS/IT genius. Everyone who does computers thinks their a genius, myself included. It's a psychological disorder that's rampant in the field.
Don't be surprised if a fastest cheapest accredited degree (i.e. where you learn the least), doesn't yield the results you were hoping for.
Is your sarcasm detector nonfunctional?
1. maximizing profits != making a profit. It can also mean minimizing losses (minimizing negative profit).
2. You are allowed to fail at maximizing profits. (i.e. you are allowed to suck) You are however responsible for upholding your end of a contract with your employer saying you will try to maximize profits.
3. Even in the examples you cite for when corporations may wish to lose money for some reason that undoubtedly involves exploiting some kind of tax loophole, the greater purpose is to maximize profits overall (i.e. the point of exploiting a tax loophole).
Actually, no. They have an obligation to do what the corporation was intended to do.
Maybe you should try reading my whole post. If you did you might have gotten to the part where I said:
This is because the executives in a company are the employees of the shareholders, and presumably the shareholders hired the executives under under a contract that mandates the executives would do the job they were hired for, which undoubtedly includes maximizing profits.
Making profit is not a goal of Apple? So they are using wage slave in underdeveloped countries in order to maximize what exactly? Suicides?
While companies that tried to improve profits every quarter are sinking exactly because of that.
I don't know why you equate "maximizing profit" with "maximizing profit every quarter". Nor do I understand why you seem to be equating Apple "Not trying to maximize profit every quarter" with Apple "never had the goal of making profits".
Any viruses you get will be limited in how much damage they can do because of how slow Symantec will make your computer.
Computer viruses and anti-virus applications are in a game of cat and mouse. Only the best virus writers can make viruses that are resource efficient enough to run on a machine with Symantec products.
I wouldn't want to be some malware trying to compete with Norton anti-virus for CPU time. It's no contest. Symantec will easily take 90-95% of the total CPU capacity, leaving you only a few cycles with which to steal credit card numbers, mine bitcoins, or try spread yourself to other hosts. You will be so marginalized that no one will even no you're there, like an unpopular girl hiding in a dark corner at a high school dance.
Corporations have the obligation to pay dividends to shareholders based on profits, but have no government-enforced mandate to make those profits larger.
They don't have an obligation to make them larger. They have an obligation to *try* to make them as large as possible. Executives don't go to jail for failing to make a larger profit. Executives will get sued and lose a civil trial if a shareholder can convince a judge that the executives did not *try* to make the company more profitable. This is because the executives in a company are the employees of the shareholders, and presumably the shareholders hired the executives under under a contract that mandates the executives would do the job they were hired for, which undoubtedly includes maximizing profits.
This is similar to hiring someone to tile your floor, paying them up front, and then finding out they never did anything. This is breach of contract.
My company hires tons of old programmers, and most of them suck. They right shitty code, and they're too stubborn to change. Maybe we can switch HR departments with whoever you have dealt with.
I've seen old programmers who only use pointers (because it's faster), one who refuses to use pointers (because they are confusing), one who uses only global variables (because he doesn't like to hide data from himself) and just got fired, one who can't stand using accessor methods because they are slower than direct memory access (who cares about versatility, thread safety, etc.)
I know there are some good old programmers out there. Our companies best programmers tend to be between 30 - 50. But judging by our history, the old guys tend to be duds.
They tend to be perfectly content writing bug prone code (that's 1 clock cycle faster assuming you are using a 20 year old compiler) and spending a bunch of time hunting down their own bugs. They don't have any interest in learning how to write code that is less prone to mistakes, not to mention more maintainable and scalable, etc.
I would say that 1 good programmer is probably worth more than 10 bad programmers. However I have not found that age translates directly to ability. There are plenty of 40 year old programmers who suck. I think this is the real reason it's hard to get a job as an old programmer. At least with a new grad, you expect them to suck, and you can mold them into what you want/need. Old programmers are stubborn, which can be a good thing, if they are also really good, but it's an expensive gamble.
Sometimes programmers work at jobs where there are hazards other than those related to programming. My programming job is pretty safe. However one time someone got burned by a radar that was transmitting. The hardware guys try to make stuff as idiot proof as possible, but at some point you still have to turn the thing on and test that your program can control it properly, and if have a bug you might get irradiated.
I honestly don't think silicon valley is that racist. They hire tons of chinese and indian people.
Black people tend to be poor. Poor people tend not to have good schools in their neighborhoods. Having a bad education makes you less qualified to do certain jobs. Rather than trying to get people to hire more black people, we should be trying to fix the massive gap in the quality of schools in rich and poor neighborhoods.
Rather than trying to implement quotas, we should be trying to eliminate the need for quotas.
Maybe chinese and indian people have some kind of stigma (good or bad), that they are good engineers. Maybe with a good education system, this prejudice that only certain races are good engineers can be eliminated. My point is that the best way to do this is actually fixing inequalities of opportunity that started in the school system. By the time people are adults, giving them jobs that they are not qualified for (even if it is not their fault), is not actually helping the situation.
Now that Jesse Jackson is on the case, we can all rest knowing that, as long as there is any discrimination, he will never give up trying to exploit it for personal gain.
Are you being accused of being racist? Are you actually racist? It doesn't matter. All you need to do is give Jesse Jackson money, and he will promise not to make your problems worse than they already are.
There was a period when almost every programmer had to develop all their own paradigms. It's not surprising that even the best programmers at that time developed some suboptimal habits. One of the best innovations was making it hard for people to do bad things. It turned bad programmers into people who could actually kind of make things that sort of work, and good programmers into supermen. Not everyone wanted to use these new tools. And employers gradually figured out that they didn't want to hire people unwilling to use tools that made them more productive. There was a time when most of these people were in the "over 40" group. That group has been getting older and older. Even the stubborn people over 40 have been successfully correctly brainwashed into using most of these tools. The old "over 40" crowd is now "over 50".
As an analogy, look at old doctors. They are not bad doctors. Doctors that learned medicine before the germ theory of disease, if they were alive today, would probably suck. It's not how old you are. It's about whether you've missed some key revolution in your field due to your age and are also unwilling to adapt.
Newsweek should find out who invented bitcom!