[Citation Needed]. The lawyers I know of my graduating class are driving Ferarris and Lambos, with 700+k houses. The CS people, at best, are barely scraping 120k, 10 years after graduation.
Law school graduates have a very bimodal salary curve, and that remains throughout their career. A select few (about 20%) make around $160k+ right out of law school. Most of the rest make under $80k per year. Median starting salaries are at around $60k.
I know quite a few law graduates, and most of them either barely scrape by or move to another career. A couple of them have those huge houses you mention. My guess is either you have lost track with the unsuccessful members of your graduating class or you went to a very good school where most of your classmates were likely to succeed. Or its just an anomaly, since the statistics bear out that the results you claim are uncommon.
There are many places in this world where there are simply not many interesting tech jobs. I know I live in a smaller city where a large company let go of 600 people and now the entire market is saturated.
Not every location is going to support every industry. Being a software developer in a small town is kind of like being an actor in a small town. Maybe it works out for some people, but most should go where the jobs are.
Everyone knows that phone support sucks, but it's a great place to get in the door and hone troubleshooting skills. And, once you know the products of a company, you have a far better chance of moving into the engineering organization that does QA on those products... That's how I did it. Now I'm working at one of those companies that thousands of people try to get jobs at, and over 99% get turned away.
That may have worked for you but it is risky. The effects of taking lower paying jobs or those which are not a great fit for your career ambitions can remain for an entire career. For most workers the effects of a poor first job dissipate after about 8 years, but it take more average or slightly under average graduates far longer.
And research has shown these workers generally catch up by moving to new employers, not by getting their foot in the door and being promoted. I know someone who literally moved up from the mail room to becoming a senior developer, but that is by far the exception to the rule (it was a very small company when he was moving up the ranks). Everyone else I know who was in similar circumstances got stuck in low paying QA jobs and couldn't break out of that role.
Also: If you enjoy doing the actual work (instead of being Management), anything more than a Bachelors degree guarantees that you won't actually being doing work. Instead you'll be babysitting a bunch of people with less debt, less responsibility, and doing the actual fun part of the work.
Depends on what part of the "actual work" you enjoy doing. If you like the writing code aspect of software development, then managerial responsibilities will only get in the way. If you like designing large scale solutions to difficult problems, this work usually goes to IT trained individuals with managerial responsibilities. These are your CTOs, VPs of Software Dev / Architecture / etc, Directors, Software Architects and the like. A Masters degree often helps considerably in getting those jobs.
I have loved programming since I was about 10, but it was always about designing software and finding solutions to problems, not typing code. Now that I don't write much code but instead just design the systems others will do the grunt work creating, much more of my job is focused on the parts of software engineering I like. I still write enough code (often POCs and examples for others to use) and do enough code reviews that I know the details about systems I am designing, but that is at best 10% of my work.
I learned early in my career that the smart senior developers rarely get to make the important and interesting decisions. Their boss's boss does.
Getting an advanced degree is a huge gamble that not many people are willing to make.
It really depends on what you get your degree in. As long as you think of your education as another form of investment it shouldn't be too much of a risk. Sure people can get screwed if they make stupid decisions, but you can also get screwed by putting a $300k addition on your home where home values are only $200k. Making stupid educational investments is just as easy as making stupid real estate or stock market investments.
First off, let the education industry itself help you decide if you are a good fit for your chosen field. If you cannot get in a top 20 university for your PhD, what makes you think it is likely you will get into a top 20 employer after college? These colleges' admission programs are giving you valuable information about your marketability. Think of it like getting an appraisal on a home before you buy it. You might be an exception, but it's still probably a bad investment. The size of the market will also impact this decision. You might be willing to go to a lower ranked Comp Sci PhD program because of the high demand, but maybe shouldn't get an English PhD outside of the Ivy League.
Maybe for someone only 5 years out of school. But for someone with 15 or 20 years of experience, you better think long and hard about why they switched jobs so often before hiring them.
I was thinking of someone with more like 10 years of experience when I mentioned an average tenure of 2.5 years, but for someone with 20 years I would say the number doesn't go up much. Maybe 2.75 average tenure. This is of course an average, which after 20 years in the workforce could easily be brought down by a couple of opportunities that didn't pan out (leading to in exit in a year or so). If I see a 20 year career which is made up of 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6 years at 7 different companies I would not look unfavorably at that if they show progression throughout their career.
Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable.
Depends on what you consider high turnover. For me an employee who averages around 2.5 years per company is no risk at all. Many people here when discussing job-hoppers are referring to people with an average tenure of under one year, and I do agree they are a significantly risky hire.
For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits.
I doubt you would want to look at employer practices a millennia ago and try to use them today. If you are truly suggesting that you aren't worth replying to, but I'm assuming you were just using hyperbole.
But no one is saying employee loyalty programs are useless. But these loyalty programs better be focused on helping the employees instead of just manipulating them to stay or else they are far less effective today than 50 years ago. Employees who are consistently given opportunities for career advancement and who are paid for their intrinsic knowledge (which means above market rate) are very unlikely to leave regardless of their past history.
It isn't really that hard to do as an employer. Just make sure each manager reviews their retention strategy for each direct report on at least a quarterly basis, and reviews this with their boss on at least a yearly basis. Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities of management even though most of them ignore this role. If you are thinking long and hard about how you are offering better opportunities to each employee than they could get elsewhere, you deserve to lose them.
It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers.
From comments here it appears opinions differ on what it means to be a job-hopper. I do agree I would be very apprehensive about hiring someone who worked at five different jobs in three years unless they were all short term contracting jobs.
Each of the places I have worked with for the past 10 years have had a significant number of employees with 10+ years at the company. Most of these coworkers have felt more than two companies in 10 years would be job-hopping. For me I wouldn't be concerned until their average tenure over the past 10 years was 2 years or less.
Because of that, all of the guys like myself that have been here for over fifteen years can't take any time off. A payroll run is something you simply can't delay. It must run. Since I started here in 2000, I haven't taken more than two days off a year. Some of my coworkers haven't even taken that much time off. Of course, the junior people that have no clue often get an entire contiguous week off.
I can remember three meetings in the past six months where I point blank asked a coworker who was describing some workflow if s/he was ever allowed to even take a vacation because of how frequent and manual some process is. Each time that comment was met with a depressed smile.
You're right that it limits "scalability, maintainability, and extensibility," but how do you fix that when you have a system that is so complicated and has so many different layers and technologies?
I certainly cannot claim to know how to fix your particular problem, but I have fixed similar problems in the past (including my current company). My approach is as simple to say as it is difficult to implement: start small and keep building upon your successes. I am currently part of a roughly five year road map to fully transform a jumbled mess of in house applications developed over 15 years into a coherent application suite (just starting year 3). The overall approach right now is to treat our integration layer as the core of our system architecture. New projects abstract themselves away from existing applications, and we pick a couple subsystems to replace each year. Every once in a while we get lucky with an immediate project which will make the company a lot of money, so we get a budget infusion which can be used for some refactoring along with solving their specific problem.
The trick is we have a CTO who is investing in this transformation. Maybe not quite enough investment for my taste, but enough that we are making significant progress. And each year we are able to grab a little more money from various departmental budgets to tackle their problems since they have seen / heard of what we did for other departments. Just last week I had a hallway conversation with a VP after a meeting which ended with him setting up time to write a proposal to hire two more developers using his budget so we can extend our new web portal to include his department. We focus on IT projects like this which bring in more revenue as opposed to cutting costs (in most cases), because that seems to get the VPs the most excited.
The part most IT workers I have known end up missing is finding a way to promote transformational change with immediate return on investment of each project. No one cares or understands what technical debt is (sadly). But every time you can identify a project which will save / make money in the short term, add some time for refactoring into that project because the budget probably won't be as scrutinized. Don't tell anyone about it, just do it. It may sound unscrupulous but if you don't play the game you certainly cannot complain that you aren't winning at it.
But once again, your situation like everyone else's is unique and I have no idea what specific challenges you face. Good luck.
Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.
While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.
The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.
The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that we are no longer in a post-war economy with little global competition. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 40 years ago. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 10 years ago. I have seen many companies which cut their workforce 20+% during the recession, but ultimately found out they had too much bloat and never did rehire to previous levels when business picked up. It took a while for companies to realize how wasteful they were being with our country's human capital in the post-war era, and a more mobile workforce is one of the results.
Those people weren't thought to have "paid their dues and played the waiting game of "dead man's shoes" where they waited for someone above them to retire or get promoted. These were the good companies.
You think a situation where employees stay in a position they have outgrown simply because one out of millions of companies don't have an ideal role for them is a good thing? I strongly disagree, and I am very glad this is less common in today's workforce.
Mobile employees is similar to having high market liquidity in the stock market. High speed trading may have its drawbacks, similar to moving companies every few months, but overall high liquidity is a good thing. Enabling more mobile employees utilizes our economy's human capital with greater efficiency, with both employees and employers benefiting.
I do value an internal promotion greater than a "diagonal" one, but not necessarily if I see it took a decade to get it.
your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. [...] it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
If the employers really cared for their staff and supported long-term careers, they wouldn't care if the employee was previously a job hopper. They would be providing such a great work environment, pay, etc. that the employees wouldn't want to hop any more.
What you probably meant was employers who enjoy taking advantage of comfortable risk-adverse staff, and in that case I agree they wouldn't want a job hopping employee.
Recent technology advancements and social changes have made workers more interchangeable. On-boarding is quicker. Less institutional-specific knowledge is needed. There are fewer reasons in more job situations to keep people on for long careers.
During most of my IT projects one of our primary goals is identifying institutional knowledge and putting it in a workflow and/or training materials. Few things are worse than only a handful of people knowing how a company handles something or why it is handled that way. Institutional knowledge held by individual employees is one of the worst enemies of scalability, maintainability, and extensibility.
People keep saying this but it's not my experience. I don't really know anyone who has this experience, actually. I've done engineering work for decades and I just ignore all this stuff and pretend it doesn't exist, and I find that it doesn't. We have 10, 15, 20 year anniversaries here all the time. ASIC designers that are as old as dirt, software guys that have seen it all, etc. etc. Sure there are business cycles like always, but the gloom and doom seems to be limited in scope as near as I can tell./shrug
This is similar to why they say a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job. In general, people in your situation are hardest by layoffs. Everything is well and good in the past X number of recessions you weathered without issue, but all of a sudden you hit the workplace with questionably marketable skills. That certainly isn't the case for everyone, but most people in your situation are in a very risky spot.
Ultimately it is all about risk tolerance. Someone who put 100% of their retirement savings in Amazon over the past 20 years may not see the need to diversify his portfolio. Someone who had 100% of their retirement savings in Enron might understand it better. Someone who worked at one company with non-transferable skills but made it to retirement age without a layoff is like someone who put their full 401k in company stock. It might work out, but it often doesn't.
Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company
So what your saying is: Good jobs are now ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss,co-workers, and that prepares you for your next job either at your current employer or future employer.
This doesn't seem much different to me. Workers are simply taking more responsibility for their career development instead of just taking for granted that their company is doing it for them. Sounds like an all together better situation to me.
I have only read through the paper's methodology section and conclusion so far, but it appears they didn't look at the total number of pitches by companies with at least one woman founder. They only looked at companies which did receive funding. Their study therefore says nothing about whether women on your founding team has anything to do with whether you will get funding. It just says there are less women founders.
This isn't just a case of the article having a misleading title. The study itself makes conclusions it cannot back up.
So Obamacare was an improvement on what was before? Have we seen a population explosion as a result of Obamacare?
Infant mortality rates have dropped 15% in the past 10 years. That adds about 4000 children per year who would have died in infancy. Obviously not all of these saved lives are because of Obamacare, but the industry certainly cites increased access to healthcare over the past decade as a major driver of this trend.
Certainly not a population explosion, but then again you were probably merely mirroring the same level of hyperbole as the AC you were replying to.
I find it hard to believe the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, whose services heavily rely on AI for recommendations, image recognition, etc, has a limited knowledge of the AI industry. I'm not saying Zuckerberg is one of the world's experts but he most likely has a very firm grasp on the subject.
And whether or not Zuckerberg is correct, it is certainly a reasonable opinion that those who drum up negative sentiment towards AI research are acting irresponsibly. It isn't to the level of Edison spreading fears about AC current by electrocuting animals, but spreading fear about new technologies is likely not a good thing. Instead of more reasonable debates over AI caused displacement of jobs or privacy concerns, Musk is doom-saying about a robot apocalypse. I wouldn't use the term irresponsible, but it's close enough to me to not disparage those who do accuse Musk of irresponsible behavior.
Because they're... employed??? Look, it's a binary choice. They are either unemployed or employed. They are most assuredly not employed, unless you are prepared to pay taxes for them.
It is only a binary choice when using the most simplistic reasoning possible. It doesn't take much thought to realize this is not a binary issue, and that there are many reasons why someone is not making a wage which have nothing to do with the health of the economy. We have the workforce participation rate if you only care about the binary difference between employed and unemployed. But there is a reason there are a half dozen different unemployment metrics in order to have more useful measures of economic health. Not perfect, of course, but no macro-measurements of an economy will ever be perfect.
No... mock-up not the countermeasures, but the operators for the weapons you are building the countermeasures against.
That is what I thought you meant. But my point still stands: building countermeasures against real production weapons is much different than building countermeasures against mock ups.
How about you stick with "safe limited mock-ups" of the technology and develop countermeasures directly, instead.
Have you ever went from a mock-up to a production implementation without learning something new? I doubt you ever have on anything other than the most trivial of solutions.
The greatest threat is probably from stolen autonomous equipment getting into the hands of terrorists.
No, it really isn't. Without government scare mongering terrorists wouldn't be thought of as much of a threat at all. Your morning commute is more of a danger to you than terrorists.
Yet we use this 'luxury' [of holding back research] when it comes to many types of existing weapons [such as Chemical and Biological Weapons].
The important distinction here is that we did develop these weapons. We didn't just try to hold back the technology, we banned its usage on the battlefield. But a large part of our ability to trust in a ban of such weapons is that many nations understand their usage if someone breaks these treaties. If someone started using them, and it gave them a significant edge on the battlefield, other nations could use them in retaliation if necessary. I doubt we would choose to do that but only because we have access to more effective military weapons now.
We may be able to get the world to a point where autonomous weapons can be banned, but probably only once most developed nations understand the capabilities and limits of these weapons fully. Which probably means after both the development and usage of the weapons on the battlefield.
But once you have autonomous armies, you no longer need trained civilians. A government can indeed use that army to control citizens and ensure it remains in power against majority rule. The political implications of this should scare anyone - we have never really had such a threat before.
I completely agree about the magnitude of this threat which is why I want what I consider responsible governments to lead the way in developing the safeguards.
Slashdot Mirror
[Citation Needed]. The lawyers I know of my graduating class are driving Ferarris and Lambos, with 700+k houses. The CS people, at best, are barely scraping 120k, 10 years after graduation.
Law school graduates have a very bimodal salary curve, and that remains throughout their career. A select few (about 20%) make around $160k+ right out of law school. Most of the rest make under $80k per year. Median starting salaries are at around $60k.
I know quite a few law graduates, and most of them either barely scrape by or move to another career. A couple of them have those huge houses you mention. My guess is either you have lost track with the unsuccessful members of your graduating class or you went to a very good school where most of your classmates were likely to succeed. Or its just an anomaly, since the statistics bear out that the results you claim are uncommon.
There are many places in this world where there are simply not many interesting tech jobs. I know I live in a smaller city where a large company let go of 600 people and now the entire market is saturated.
Not every location is going to support every industry. Being a software developer in a small town is kind of like being an actor in a small town. Maybe it works out for some people, but most should go where the jobs are.
Everyone knows that phone support sucks, but it's a great place to get in the door and hone troubleshooting skills. And, once you know the products of a company, you have a far better chance of moving into the engineering organization that does QA on those products ... That's how I did it. Now I'm working at one of those companies that thousands of people try to get jobs at, and over 99% get turned away.
That may have worked for you but it is risky. The effects of taking lower paying jobs or those which are not a great fit for your career ambitions can remain for an entire career. For most workers the effects of a poor first job dissipate after about 8 years, but it take more average or slightly under average graduates far longer.
And research has shown these workers generally catch up by moving to new employers, not by getting their foot in the door and being promoted. I know someone who literally moved up from the mail room to becoming a senior developer, but that is by far the exception to the rule (it was a very small company when he was moving up the ranks). Everyone else I know who was in similar circumstances got stuck in low paying QA jobs and couldn't break out of that role.
Also: If you enjoy doing the actual work (instead of being Management), anything more than a Bachelors degree guarantees that you won't actually being doing work. Instead you'll be babysitting a bunch of people with less debt, less responsibility, and doing the actual fun part of the work.
Depends on what part of the "actual work" you enjoy doing. If you like the writing code aspect of software development, then managerial responsibilities will only get in the way. If you like designing large scale solutions to difficult problems, this work usually goes to IT trained individuals with managerial responsibilities. These are your CTOs, VPs of Software Dev / Architecture / etc, Directors, Software Architects and the like. A Masters degree often helps considerably in getting those jobs.
I have loved programming since I was about 10, but it was always about designing software and finding solutions to problems, not typing code. Now that I don't write much code but instead just design the systems others will do the grunt work creating, much more of my job is focused on the parts of software engineering I like. I still write enough code (often POCs and examples for others to use) and do enough code reviews that I know the details about systems I am designing, but that is at best 10% of my work.
I learned early in my career that the smart senior developers rarely get to make the important and interesting decisions. Their boss's boss does.
Getting an advanced degree is a huge gamble that not many people are willing to make.
It really depends on what you get your degree in. As long as you think of your education as another form of investment it shouldn't be too much of a risk. Sure people can get screwed if they make stupid decisions, but you can also get screwed by putting a $300k addition on your home where home values are only $200k. Making stupid educational investments is just as easy as making stupid real estate or stock market investments.
First off, let the education industry itself help you decide if you are a good fit for your chosen field. If you cannot get in a top 20 university for your PhD, what makes you think it is likely you will get into a top 20 employer after college? These colleges' admission programs are giving you valuable information about your marketability. Think of it like getting an appraisal on a home before you buy it. You might be an exception, but it's still probably a bad investment. The size of the market will also impact this decision. You might be willing to go to a lower ranked Comp Sci PhD program because of the high demand, but maybe shouldn't get an English PhD outside of the Ivy League.
Maybe for someone only 5 years out of school. But for someone with 15 or 20 years of experience, you better think long and hard about why they switched jobs so often before hiring them.
I was thinking of someone with more like 10 years of experience when I mentioned an average tenure of 2.5 years, but for someone with 20 years I would say the number doesn't go up much. Maybe 2.75 average tenure. This is of course an average, which after 20 years in the workforce could easily be brought down by a couple of opportunities that didn't pan out (leading to in exit in a year or so). If I see a 20 year career which is made up of 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6 years at 7 different companies I would not look unfavorably at that if they show progression throughout their career.
Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable.
Depends on what you consider high turnover. For me an employee who averages around 2.5 years per company is no risk at all. Many people here when discussing job-hoppers are referring to people with an average tenure of under one year, and I do agree they are a significantly risky hire.
For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits.
I doubt you would want to look at employer practices a millennia ago and try to use them today. If you are truly suggesting that you aren't worth replying to, but I'm assuming you were just using hyperbole.
But no one is saying employee loyalty programs are useless. But these loyalty programs better be focused on helping the employees instead of just manipulating them to stay or else they are far less effective today than 50 years ago. Employees who are consistently given opportunities for career advancement and who are paid for their intrinsic knowledge (which means above market rate) are very unlikely to leave regardless of their past history.
It isn't really that hard to do as an employer. Just make sure each manager reviews their retention strategy for each direct report on at least a quarterly basis, and reviews this with their boss on at least a yearly basis. Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities of management even though most of them ignore this role. If you are thinking long and hard about how you are offering better opportunities to each employee than they could get elsewhere, you deserve to lose them.
It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers.
From comments here it appears opinions differ on what it means to be a job-hopper. I do agree I would be very apprehensive about hiring someone who worked at five different jobs in three years unless they were all short term contracting jobs.
Each of the places I have worked with for the past 10 years have had a significant number of employees with 10+ years at the company. Most of these coworkers have felt more than two companies in 10 years would be job-hopping. For me I wouldn't be concerned until their average tenure over the past 10 years was 2 years or less.
Because of that, all of the guys like myself that have been here for over fifteen years can't take any time off. A payroll run is something you simply can't delay. It must run. Since I started here in 2000, I haven't taken more than two days off a year. Some of my coworkers haven't even taken that much time off. Of course, the junior people that have no clue often get an entire contiguous week off.
I can remember three meetings in the past six months where I point blank asked a coworker who was describing some workflow if s/he was ever allowed to even take a vacation because of how frequent and manual some process is. Each time that comment was met with a depressed smile.
You're right that it limits "scalability, maintainability, and extensibility," but how do you fix that when you have a system that is so complicated and has so many different layers and technologies?
I certainly cannot claim to know how to fix your particular problem, but I have fixed similar problems in the past (including my current company). My approach is as simple to say as it is difficult to implement: start small and keep building upon your successes. I am currently part of a roughly five year road map to fully transform a jumbled mess of in house applications developed over 15 years into a coherent application suite (just starting year 3). The overall approach right now is to treat our integration layer as the core of our system architecture. New projects abstract themselves away from existing applications, and we pick a couple subsystems to replace each year. Every once in a while we get lucky with an immediate project which will make the company a lot of money, so we get a budget infusion which can be used for some refactoring along with solving their specific problem.
The trick is we have a CTO who is investing in this transformation. Maybe not quite enough investment for my taste, but enough that we are making significant progress. And each year we are able to grab a little more money from various departmental budgets to tackle their problems since they have seen / heard of what we did for other departments. Just last week I had a hallway conversation with a VP after a meeting which ended with him setting up time to write a proposal to hire two more developers using his budget so we can extend our new web portal to include his department. We focus on IT projects like this which bring in more revenue as opposed to cutting costs (in most cases), because that seems to get the VPs the most excited.
The part most IT workers I have known end up missing is finding a way to promote transformational change with immediate return on investment of each project. No one cares or understands what technical debt is (sadly). But every time you can identify a project which will save / make money in the short term, add some time for refactoring into that project because the budget probably won't be as scrutinized. Don't tell anyone about it, just do it. It may sound unscrupulous but if you don't play the game you certainly cannot complain that you aren't winning at it.
But once again, your situation like everyone else's is unique and I have no idea what specific challenges you face. Good luck.
Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.
While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.
The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.
The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that we are no longer in a post-war economy with little global competition. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 40 years ago. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 10 years ago. I have seen many companies which cut their workforce 20+% during the recession, but ultimately found out they had too much bloat and never did rehire to previous levels when business picked up. It took a while for companies to realize how wasteful they were being with our country's human capital in the post-war era, and a more mobile workforce is one of the results.
Those people weren't thought to have "paid their dues and played the waiting game of "dead man's shoes" where they waited for someone above them to retire or get promoted. These were the good companies.
You think a situation where employees stay in a position they have outgrown simply because one out of millions of companies don't have an ideal role for them is a good thing? I strongly disagree, and I am very glad this is less common in today's workforce.
Mobile employees is similar to having high market liquidity in the stock market. High speed trading may have its drawbacks, similar to moving companies every few months, but overall high liquidity is a good thing. Enabling more mobile employees utilizes our economy's human capital with greater efficiency, with both employees and employers benefiting.
I do value an internal promotion greater than a "diagonal" one, but not necessarily if I see it took a decade to get it.
your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. [...] it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
If the employers really cared for their staff and supported long-term careers, they wouldn't care if the employee was previously a job hopper. They would be providing such a great work environment, pay, etc. that the employees wouldn't want to hop any more.
What you probably meant was employers who enjoy taking advantage of comfortable risk-adverse staff, and in that case I agree they wouldn't want a job hopping employee.
Recent technology advancements and social changes have made workers more interchangeable. On-boarding is quicker. Less institutional-specific knowledge is needed. There are fewer reasons in more job situations to keep people on for long careers.
During most of my IT projects one of our primary goals is identifying institutional knowledge and putting it in a workflow and/or training materials. Few things are worse than only a handful of people knowing how a company handles something or why it is handled that way. Institutional knowledge held by individual employees is one of the worst enemies of scalability, maintainability, and extensibility.
People keep saying this but it's not my experience. I don't really know anyone who has this experience, actually. I've done engineering work for decades and I just ignore all this stuff and pretend it doesn't exist, and I find that it doesn't. We have 10, 15, 20 year anniversaries here all the time. ASIC designers that are as old as dirt, software guys that have seen it all, etc. etc. Sure there are business cycles like always, but the gloom and doom seems to be limited in scope as near as I can tell. /shrug
This is similar to why they say a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job. In general, people in your situation are hardest by layoffs. Everything is well and good in the past X number of recessions you weathered without issue, but all of a sudden you hit the workplace with questionably marketable skills. That certainly isn't the case for everyone, but most people in your situation are in a very risky spot.
Ultimately it is all about risk tolerance. Someone who put 100% of their retirement savings in Amazon over the past 20 years may not see the need to diversify his portfolio. Someone who had 100% of their retirement savings in Enron might understand it better. Someone who worked at one company with non-transferable skills but made it to retirement age without a layoff is like someone who put their full 401k in company stock. It might work out, but it often doesn't.
Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion.
Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company
So what your saying is: Good jobs are now ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss,co-workers, and that prepares you for your next job either at your current employer or future employer.
This doesn't seem much different to me. Workers are simply taking more responsibility for their career development instead of just taking for granted that their company is doing it for them. Sounds like an all together better situation to me.
I have only read through the paper's methodology section and conclusion so far, but it appears they didn't look at the total number of pitches by companies with at least one woman founder. They only looked at companies which did receive funding. Their study therefore says nothing about whether women on your founding team has anything to do with whether you will get funding. It just says there are less women founders.
This isn't just a case of the article having a misleading title. The study itself makes conclusions it cannot back up.
So Obamacare was an improvement on what was before? Have we seen a population explosion as a result of Obamacare?
Infant mortality rates have dropped 15% in the past 10 years. That adds about 4000 children per year who would have died in infancy. Obviously not all of these saved lives are because of Obamacare, but the industry certainly cites increased access to healthcare over the past decade as a major driver of this trend.
Certainly not a population explosion, but then again you were probably merely mirroring the same level of hyperbole as the AC you were replying to.
I find it hard to believe the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, whose services heavily rely on AI for recommendations, image recognition, etc, has a limited knowledge of the AI industry. I'm not saying Zuckerberg is one of the world's experts but he most likely has a very firm grasp on the subject.
And whether or not Zuckerberg is correct, it is certainly a reasonable opinion that those who drum up negative sentiment towards AI research are acting irresponsibly. It isn't to the level of Edison spreading fears about AC current by electrocuting animals, but spreading fear about new technologies is likely not a good thing. Instead of more reasonable debates over AI caused displacement of jobs or privacy concerns, Musk is doom-saying about a robot apocalypse. I wouldn't use the term irresponsible, but it's close enough to me to not disparage those who do accuse Musk of irresponsible behavior.
hard to call them unemployed.
Because they're ... employed??? Look, it's a binary choice. They are either unemployed or employed. They are most assuredly not employed, unless you are prepared to pay taxes for them.
It is only a binary choice when using the most simplistic reasoning possible. It doesn't take much thought to realize this is not a binary issue, and that there are many reasons why someone is not making a wage which have nothing to do with the health of the economy. We have the workforce participation rate if you only care about the binary difference between employed and unemployed. But there is a reason there are a half dozen different unemployment metrics in order to have more useful measures of economic health. Not perfect, of course, but no macro-measurements of an economy will ever be perfect.
No... mock-up not the countermeasures, but the operators for the weapons you are building the countermeasures against.
That is what I thought you meant. But my point still stands: building countermeasures against real production weapons is much different than building countermeasures against mock ups.
How about you stick with "safe limited mock-ups" of the technology and develop countermeasures directly, instead.
Have you ever went from a mock-up to a production implementation without learning something new? I doubt you ever have on anything other than the most trivial of solutions.
Are murderbots likely to be the best counter to other murderbots though?
One would assume not, and rather that a focus on cyber- and electronic-warfare ought be a more prudent defence against others fielding them.
Which is why you need to develop your own murder bots so you can develop the electronic-warfare techniques to defend against them.
The greatest threat is probably from stolen autonomous equipment getting into the hands of terrorists.
No, it really isn't. Without government scare mongering terrorists wouldn't be thought of as much of a threat at all. Your morning commute is more of a danger to you than terrorists.
Yet we use this 'luxury' [of holding back research] when it comes to many types of existing weapons [such as Chemical and Biological Weapons].
The important distinction here is that we did develop these weapons. We didn't just try to hold back the technology, we banned its usage on the battlefield. But a large part of our ability to trust in a ban of such weapons is that many nations understand their usage if someone breaks these treaties. If someone started using them, and it gave them a significant edge on the battlefield, other nations could use them in retaliation if necessary. I doubt we would choose to do that but only because we have access to more effective military weapons now.
We may be able to get the world to a point where autonomous weapons can be banned, but probably only once most developed nations understand the capabilities and limits of these weapons fully. Which probably means after both the development and usage of the weapons on the battlefield.
But once you have autonomous armies, you no longer need trained civilians. A government can indeed use that army to control citizens and ensure it remains in power against majority rule. The political implications of this should scare anyone - we have never really had such a threat before.
I completely agree about the magnitude of this threat which is why I want what I consider responsible governments to lead the way in developing the safeguards.