People are indeed going to have to check their privacy settings (assuming Facebook will allow the Jobs stuff to respect them.) Over-sharers are the obvious target (old sage advice about not posting keg stand videos or political opinions applies here.) But, there's something more insidious -- recruiters will buy access to Facebook Jobs, and start randomly trawling through profiles looking for a match. What happens when they see someone like me, a 41 year old dad with 2 young kids? I can just imagine some 22 year old cold-calling recruiter fresh out of their business degree saying "Oh, let's skip him, he'd never fit in at Company X." It would just be another way to side-step rules on age discrimination. Unlike the stereotypes, I work my butt off to stay current and not be an old stick in the mud. It's a lot of fun being the "adult" in a younger group of peers because I do enjoy sharing knowledge and teaching people. But, I do know that if I'm ever caught out in a layoff situation and don't have any luck with my contacts, I'm pretty stuck when it comes to getting cold recruited for a job. This is why my LinkedIn profile doesn't have a photo, even though I look pretty young.
I wish we could just get beyond the whole recruiter thing. Often, these guys are the only way to get your resume even looked at in big companies, and they're basically sponging off your salary. It's kind of like real estate agents -- they still get a huge commission even though most of their job is now automated (MLS sites replace books of Polaroids, Zillow and friends replace their knowledge of the market, and people generally drive themselves around looking for houses now.) Back in the day, recruiters had the same advantage as intermediaries even though most professionals put some or all of their qualifications out on LinkedIn or similar for people to see. The company I work for uses recruiters, and the worst offenders are the big temp companies they make us recruit through (TEKSystems, etc.) We have had painful interviews with people who have been presented to us as experts and quite obviously have had their resumes doctored by these guys. (And, we're not a bunch of hipster recent CS grads asking stumper questions -- we're looking for generalists with amazing troubleshooting skills mostly.)
Bottom line is that you have to keep the professional network going, lest you be at the mercy of these recruiters.
The thing I really don't like about the H-1B program is the abuse. There's nothing wrong with keeping a few visa slots open for truly exceptional people. I've seen the program used for this purpose and it mostly works. The problem is the companies that use it to directly replace older workers in routine, run of the mill IT and dev jobs. Companies are totally aware of what they're doing when they hire Tata, Infosys or Cognizant -- it's a "Pontias Pilate" move that lets them wash their hands of the IT department. That's what has been happening with the big stories making the news (Disney, Southern California Edison, etc.) The outsourcer comes in, has to make a profit on the deal, and so they offshore everything they can and slowly replace domestic workers with H-1Bs for things they can't. These are not the best and brightest -- its mostly DBA and dev work that requires just enough on site interaction to make offshoring ineffective. I've worked in outsourced IT environments -- everything takes twice as long and nothing new will ever be attempted in a company that has someone else running their iT, partially because change orders cost so much.
Allowing the abuses is essentially a brake on IT workers' careers and an artificial salary cap. I've been lucky enough to become the senior guy in our engineering group over years of experience, and feel very strongly that we oldies (I'm 41:-) ) have to develop the next generation. I don't want the pipeline of newbies to dry up because they're worried there's no future in technology. Young students are going to make rational choices and we're going to be stuck the same way the mainframers are now...no one will take the leap to learn enough to replace the retirees.
Also, I totally don't buy the argument that there's no domestic talent. No one is a drop-in replacement for the last guy, and especially today it's impossible to be an expert at everything. That narrative that paints offshore consulting firms as world-class experts on technology has to change. I would love to hear accounts of domestic hires that had zero talent -- I just haven't experienced it!
When they breathlessly proclaim that Millenials are the ultimate nomadic tribe willing to pick up and move at a moment's notice, people forget that the economy supports different types of people. Lots of people like the idea of not being a permanent transient, picking a community and trying to stay in it for an extended period. You'll find way more of these people in the ranks of parents -- unless you're moving for truly greener pastures it's a good idea to keep your kids in the same school system for at least a few years at a time if not their entire school career. I can think of a lot of reasons why moving is less attractive:
Moving is expensive. Even a small collection of stuff costs a lot in time and money to move from place to place constantly. You could say that Millennials don't have anything that can't fit inside an SUV, but people haven't magically reduced their piles of stuff.
If you own a house, moving is VERY expensive. Most people don't realize how much of a waste of money frequent real estate transactions are. Fees, various recording taxes, professional services, etc. can easily run in the double digit thousands even for a simple cash sale. Most people just roll this into a new mortgage, but if you do this every 4 years or so, its a massive waste of money that can't be recovered.
Jobs aren't worth moving for anymore. In the golden age of company loyalty and gold-watch retirements, it was expected that you would relocate several times during a career to work on new projects, and be rewarded with a stable job and increasing income/responsibility. For better or worse (worse IMO,) company loyalty is dead and both sides of the relationship are to blame. As a result, companies are less willing to pay to relocate you unless you're some kind of superstar.
It's the top of another dotcom bubble. Smart people are starting to see the 1999-2000 news articles filtering out about insane startup valuations, ill-advised IPOs, massive layoffs, VC punchbowls being taken away, etc. and might be subconsciously preparing for another crash. People might be (should be?) trying to plot out their next steps, and staying put might be one of them. An interesting statistic to monitor to confirm this might be job-hopping. In the first dotcom bubble it was common for employees to stay for 6 months at any one job and move on for massive raises.
Personally, I think the Millenials are just growing up and realizing that there's more to life than working for some web startup cranking out JavaScript or the Googles and Apples of the world 100 hours a week. They might be settling down, getting married, having little "Millenials++" and rediscovering the value of having some stability in life. If you need to move where the jobs are, that's one thing. But if you have a stable situation with a few employers to pick from in case yours flakes out on you, I highly recommend staying somewhere, getting involved in the community and actually putting down roots. Upending your life once every few years sucks, especially if you have a family.
A perfect example of basic income working is the longshoremen's unions in the US. Before containerized freight and automated cargo terminals, thousands of men would stand on the stones every morning and work a back-breaking job hauling loose cargo off ships with hooks. After containerization, instantly, there was no more work for the vast majority of these people. Since most of them were completely unskilled, and not capable of retraining into any other job that paid the same or better, they could have been in danger of seing the same fate we assign to the unemployed today -- eventual destitution. However, the longshoremen's unions implemented what amounts to a tax on cargo handled through these automated terminals that goes towards paying "retired" longshoremen a basic income. This is one example, and let's just say the union has a lot of muscle behind it that helped this get passed, but it does show a way to help the unemployable -- and make no mistake, that's going to be 90+% of us sometime before I'm dead (in the next 50 years or so.)
I guess my problem with people who argue against a basic income is that they don't have a better alternative in mind. Sometime in the near future, the vast majority of low level service jobs will be automated. At the same time, the use of intelligent systems will come and cannibalize the top end of the spectrum too. Think about doctors for a second -- they're smart enough to have a regulated profession and should be fine because of that. But what if they didn't? Medical education is basically academic hazing, from the MCAT to the preclinical firehose to 100 hour weeks as an intern. Med schools select for people with photographic memories and perfect grades because that's basically the only way to survive the training as it is today. Well, thanks to Google we don't need photographic memories anymore, so the only skill left will be synthesis of all the stored knowledge. This is why IBM basically sold off their entire business and are building Watson and other AI-type systems. Soon as these algorithms get good enough, most work that requires intuition is toast. Hospitals won't have to pay doctors when they can feed test results and live observations of patients into a machine and get a diagnosis.
I think basic income is the only reasonable transition vehicle to move the world away from traditional employment. Imagine telling everyone who's about to retire that people entering the workforce now won't have to save. Or, tell people who define themselves by their work that they've all been made redundant at the same time. Or, try to divide up the accumulated property among people when money stops being critical -- who determines where the renters go, or who gets to keep the houses they own? All of these are too much stress for the economy to bear all at once and will lead to a mess. Phase in a low-employment world over time with controls, and it makes the shift easier.
I can definitiely see human traders playing less of a role. As HFT has gotten better over time, people are less reliant on traders going with their gut or even reasoned research. The trades move too fast for traders to keep up with anyway.
The next frontier is the advisors. Whenever I run into anyone who's a professional "financial advisor" I get used car salesman vibes. Every one of them is trying to pitch products guaranteed to make them money, but "not guaranteed - not insured - may lose value" on my side. The worst are the life insurance salesmen who branch out into financial services -- I wonder how many naive people have been tricked into buying variable annuity life insurance instead of investing. It seems to me that the machines are going to squeeze out the advisors living on tiny commissions as it is. Kind of like travel agents -- they disappeared for the most part the second airlines stopped paying them commission to sell tickets.
I work a fairly normal job doing systems architecture stuff for an IT service provider. I have a spouse and 2 kids, and some semblance of a life outside of IT/dev. I seriously doubt I'd have the family and normal life part working for some of the crazy SV employers. I think the key reasons are crazy work environment and cost of living:
I've never worked for a startup or a tech company notorious for crazy culture, but I have plenty of acquaintances who do. I say "acquaintances" because they're never around to talk to -- they're always working. I love my job; it's great getting paid to solve complex problems. But I don't love it so much that I work 90 or 100 hour weeks constantly. Even established companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are famously "all inclusive" -- 3 meals a day at work, bus service to and from work and an implicit expectation that you belong to them. Startups are even stranger with the founder-driven work or die culture. Having a relationship is incompatible with this. In a startup, I've heard you barely see anybody outside the company...that limits the pool to other workaholics trying to win the buyout lottery...and they don't have time for each other either.
The second thing is cost of living. I live in New York, and I think the cost of living here is crazy. California and SV take it to a whole new level. Either you perpetually rent a tiny apartment with roommates, or you go into permanent indentured servitude to buy a $1.5M house that costs $300K elsewhere. Who has the money available to go out and play the field in a situation like that?
Another poster mentioned something about basement-dwelling nerds, but don't forget that that's mostly not SV anymore. Most of SV is these hyper-social startup companies where the stereotype "brogrammer" was born. I'm sure there are still plenty of nerds, but most of them are migrating to places like cloud providers or established software vendors.
I think one of the problems with mathematics is that it's pretty hard to get the average person to see it as anything other than a tool. Maybe that's how it's taught, but how do you get average students interested in math the same way mathematicians are? Where is the hook in people's minds that turns them on to it as something other than a bunch of formulas and operations? I know it's a cop-out to say I suck at math, but I really do feel I'm mathematically challenged. I wonder if it was just because I didn't get some magic spark early on. I remember all of my elementary and high school math being a long slog of memorization with very little understanding. I was never very good at it and just learned enough to handle the exams. Like every high school student, I still remember to this day that x = -b +/- (sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)/2a) but I have no idea why that is or what it's good for other than getting the answers to a quadratic equation. I think my lack of math background kept me out of civil or chemical engineering, despite a huge interest in both.
One reason why I think proper teaching may play a role is because I had a similar experience studying chemistry in college. I had a very good introductory chemistry teacher and something just clicked. Almost everyone saw it as a bunch of nonsense formulas and equations for various phenomena that had to be memorized for the exams and forgotten, but somehow I got a little more out of it and it was interesting enough that I got a degree in it. Good thing too -- by the second year of engineering school I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up with my poor math background and didn't want to end up a generic business major!
One thing I don't know if Google could match is the legacy support. Microsoft wants everyone off on-premises Windows and onto Azure badly and is investing a lot of money to do it. I come from a very legacy industry with lots of ancient Windows software, and Microsoft's attitude has been "bring it in, refactor it and move it to cheaper PaaS stuff if/when you can." They're offering lots of help too -- as soon as they saw companies were OK with Office 365 permanent revenue lock-in, the strategy is now to get everyone's workload in their cloud and charge perpetually.
AWS and Google in my experience seem to be much more focused on the "cloud only, mobile only, desktops are for LUDDITES, apps!" crowd. And it makes sense -- if you're a startup and have no identity management needs, no ties to Active Directory or an on-premises infrastructure, then why not throw out the rulebook and develop from scratch? How many thousands of web frameworks are out there? I'm sure AWS and Google have a pre-built template for all of them. AWS has virtual machines, and they even do a sorta-DaaS service. But you can tell their heart's not really in it...yeah sure, here's some VMs to run your Luddite stuff but check out all these cool new microservices! Microsoft's approach so far has been that they have all the cutting edge stuff, but are willing to invest the time and infrastructure money to host IaaS stuff as first-class citizens.
One thing I think Microsoft could step their game up on is catering to "IT Pros" which is their name for non-developers. Yes, we're all going to be DevOps ninjas or whatever the hipsters are calling us, but IT guys need to come up to speed fast on this stuff, and fill in the gaps in their knowledge. I've been doing this like crazy over the last year -- if you're not a full-time web developer the documentation is a little opaque at first until you get some backstory.
I live in New York, and prices for cigarettes are incredibly high (for the US.) Go to South Carolina, and by comparison they basically give them away because SC is a tobacco state. It's been proven over and over again that long-term smoking causes expensive end-of-life health problems, and when the majority of people who smoke are poor and uneducated, everybody pays in the form of increased charity health care. And in the US, if a smoker makes it to 65, Medicare has to pay a lot more to get the average smoker through the end of their life so everyone pays regardless of the person's income in Medicare taxes. In my opinion it's fair to tax cigarettes to a high degree as long as the proceeds go directly to health care or smoking cessation programs.
In NY, smoking is a very expensive habit and it's hard to even smoke in public anymore. Go elsewhere in the country (Texas, Nevada, lots of Southern states) and everyone can smoke in public along with most businesses being smoker-friendly indoors. The problem is that the US isn't a monoculture and a small country -- each state has its own agenda. New York is dealing with a city the size of a small country combined with a poor rural upstate region...that's why high tobacco taxes make sense. A smaller state is going to have lower overall public health expenditures regardless of ability to pay just based on population. Also, tobacco-producing states aren't going to be happy with any taxes because they want a market for their product. Back in the 50s, the majority of men smoked and something like 35% of women did too. Now, it's way less than that and dropping.
I think taxing tobacco heavily is a good compromise. Unless you want an outright ban (which I don't think is the best idea even if it would improve public health,) this is the best way to recover the additional costs a smoker places on society.
I have very little problem with the original intention of the H-1B program -- giving companies a safety valve to import a small number of workers who actually possess skills that can't be found domestically. I work for a multinational and we use internal transfers a lot for that purpose...and most of the people they bring in are actually the kind of people that the program originally targeted.
What I don't like is the abuse. Any time a company's IT costs get too high for the MBA's liking, they can turn to any number of "IT services" providers. These companies will always come in cheaper than FTEs, both from a cost and an accounting perspective. Since the company has to make money, they'll offshore most of the work and bring in a few H-1B's to displace all the FTEs over time. In places that do this, I have yet to see evidence that any of these H-1B replacements are exceptional in any way. Often, they're just swapping out a DBA or sysadmin who's been working for 20 years with a DBA who will work much cheaper regardless of quality. What bothers me more is that the company can just pull a "Pontias Pilate" and wash their hands of their entire IT department. This is what happened with the bigger swap-outs that have made the press like Disney and others. All they have to do is point to the fact that their IT is now in control of one of the body shops and they had nothing to do with replacing domestic workers.
I have absolutely no doubt that (a) there is plenty of domestic talent, and (b) if you don't set an expiration date on people's careers, even more people will study CS and engineering. I say the program should be kept to some degree, but the obvious avenues for abuse should be shut down. My suggestions would be to crack down on the fake labor certification processes, and raise the minimum H-1B wage to a certain percentage over the average prevailing wage for the area they're going to work in. If people see that the program is fair, and don't feel like it's a serious threat for their future earnings and career, then everything will work out for employers over time. The workforce will be happier, and there won't be as much of a language/timezone barrier.
I don't know -- maybe I've been lucky and have worked with very talented domestic people. But I don't believe companies who say they can't hire people domestically -- they just don't want to pay for it.
We may never know what happened - but airlines are coming off their holiday change freezes so I'll bet one of their releases went bad. I don't work for Delta, but I do work in the industry, including some stints at airlines. The central problem is that airlines are incredibly low-margin businesses. Yes, they charge for everything and flying is expensive, but for every last minute $1000 ticket are hundreds of people demanding the same flight for $129 and getting it, even though they barely break even on those customers. Airlines' biggest costs are fuel, labor and planes. When it comes to IT, it's just massive amounts of technical debt built on a very old core set of systems. All that customer facing tech is really driving some ancient stuff several layers deep, collecting the information and presenting it in a nice format like your phone screen. All of these abstractions, wrappers on wrappers and middleware have to work perfectly and it's a rickety tower sometimes. Also, airlines are run by MBAs who don't consider their IT a "core competency", so it either gets minimal funding or dumped off on a contractor. Often, the contractors develop stuff like the phone app or one of a billion middleware components and there are always integration issues...but the people in charge love the ability to pay someone $x to implement "that phone thing" or "the ability to do X without talking to an agent."
With all the negatives, it's a very challenging and fun environment to work in for the right kind of person. I've been doing it for 20+ years and on balance I really like it. Resourceful types do very well in airline IT, as do IT geeks who understand and care about the business they're supporting. It's extremely frustrating at times as well, and there's way more firefighting than there should be. Typical businesses will just throw money at a problem until it goes away or they run out, which is why there are so many software tool vendors and expensive hardware systems out there. Go to an airline and tell them to spend 5 million bucks, and you can forget it unless it's required for compliance, safety related or guaranteed to return an immediate increase in revenue. Unfortunately this is where the technical debt comes from because there's never enough people, and all those people are running around putting out fires all the time. If I were working for Delta right now, I guarantee I wouldn't have been sleeping for the last 24 hours as everyone tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
Actually I find myself agreeing with this, having been through two tech startup bubbles in my working life now. There's plenty of "real work" out there if we could just reallocate the resources that get flushed down the toilet in startup-land. One of the best things we could do is something similar to what the Chinese did around 2008 -- pump massive amounts of money into infrastructure. We'd be able to rebuild a lot of the stuff that's been slowly rotting away since our last golden age of the postwar era, and we'd have something to show for it rather than BS marketing-driven tech bubble companies.
At the same time, yes, give people who aren't doing anything useful money to stay out of the workforce. It's a lot cheaper than paying for the increased crime that comes with poverty that comes with unemployment. It's sad, but as even knowledge worker jobs get automated away, there will only be a subset of the population that is capable of doing the level of work that remains. Think about your average big company -- what percent of the staff could you get rid of today with minimal impact? That percent has been creeping up pretty high in recent years and it's only going to get worse. Does an IT services company need thousands of "account executives" whose sole job is to take customers to lunch and get them to buy more BS services contracts? How about all the people in marketing? Most could go with no impact. Once you do that, however, you have the problem of what to do with everyone. So, either we incentivize busy work in the private sector, create make-work jobs in the public sector, or just pay people to stay away. Anything else will lead to a complete breakdown in society; look what happened when unemployment got around 10% in 2008-2009 -- now triple or quadruple that.
The wearable device bubble is ending, mainly because manufacturers are finding that they're not Apple. Even Apple is having trouble convincing the true believers to buy their first Apple Watches, let alone upgrade them. Fitbit and friends probably saw the following: - A lot of the purchases are gifts or corporate giveaways from a company's health insurance plan. They get used for a while, then thrown in a drawer. - Even among the hardcore users, there's very little reason to upgrade unless new must-have features, so you're not going to get the once-every-18-months cash infusions that Apple had recently been getting for iPhones. - It's expensive to build and maintain the apps that attach the devices to the users' phones, and the data can't really be monetized the same way Google search history can.
Microsoft even dumped the Microsoft Band, probably realizing very similar things Fitbit did. The question is, are they hoping for an acquisition from a watch maker or something, and just trying to hold out long enough to get the founders their exit money? Also, why so many employees to design a hardware specification once, then build a simple phone app? Did they just get pumped full of startup money and go on a hiring spree?
Wearables are neat - I have one of the Garmin ones and it works well. But I'm not buying a new one every year.
I went to a large, well funded state university and got a degree in chemistry back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (1997.) Even for undergrads, with the ancient lab equipment we had, I'm sure the actual costs to educate me were many times higher than a business or philosophy student, for example. Scientific instruments, even basic ones like gas chromatographs or IR spectroscopy machines are extremely expensive. Universities have to pay STEM professors more than English professors. In most cases, the humanities professors who are lucky enough to get tenure are happy enough to be working in their field; finding a stable job teaching English or Philosophy is not easy. Science professors need to bring in massive grants for their research, go to conferences all over the world, and operate a real running lab doing science. Even if you are using postdoc slaves, there's still a cost involved that's much higher than a humanities professor who basically needs an office, access to library collections and classroom space.
However, I don't think it's fair to charge more for expensive-to-grant degrees. Don't we want more technical people in the world these days? And on the other end, I think most people understand the need to balance science and humanities, and that most people benefit from an exposure to both. Even my cursory exposure to the non-science courses in my otherwise heavily science oriented degree made me a better individual. Also, from my experience the science students were much more serious about their work than business or English students...you really have to want to work to actually major in a hard science and it's very difficult to just skate through.
Funding public colleges seems to be to be the best investment possible, regardless of whether your degree cost the university $100,000 or $25,000 to give you. Even with the extraneous programs and expensive add-ons, college remains a time where 18 year old kids get the opportunity to grow up. I know it helped me, and yes I know that some people never grow up regardless of college attendance. But on balance, I'd rather have more people educated than fewer. Not to get political, but the presidential election we just had shows what happens when people don't objectively verify claims and let their emotions make their choices. Having more people that take the time to pick apart both sides' arguments and actually think about the choice they're making is a good thing. In addition, having more educated people may finally make companies stop complaining that they can't find any domestic workers.
I guess this coupled with the announcement about Solaris last week means Oracle is finally finished squeezing the last pennies out of the SPARC/Solaris architecture. Admittedly it's very rare to see new implementations of a proprietary UNIX...every place I've dealt with in the last few years is trying to rid themselves of all the legacy code and hardware that keeps them on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.
I wonder what kind of cost/benefit calculation they came up with. The company I work for has a bunch of mainframe stuff still in production, and they pay a king's ransom to CA to license a package that hasn't changed in ages, but must keep running no matter what. I can't imagine Oracle is giving away Solaris and SPARC support contracts and licenses...it must be a massive amount and certainly enough to keep a bunch of Solaris engineers on staff to fix the occasional bug. 1000 people is a lot though -- I wonder how many of those were in sales? Salesmen are expensive in terms of all the meals, rounds of golf and strip club visits they have to give away to customers.
You know what would suck? Oracle kills the old Sun, then miraculously opens a new office in a "low cost geography" so they can keep squeezing for another 20 years! This is what HP did with OpenVMS for a long time before they got tired of supporting it and sold it to a third party.
I hear so many people saying what a wonderful thing the gig economy is -- how much freedom they have, how much they love not working a traditional job, etc. All of that may be true, but just wait until all the traditional jobs go away and most people are forced into squeezing out a tiny living doing things like driving for Uber. I highly doubt everyone would be super-happy at that point.
The relative economic stability of the last century was driven by consumers consuming, buying stuff, paying taxes, etc. and that was driven by those consumers having a stable paycheck or other source of income to fall back on. When that gets kicked away in the name of disruption, society needs to have a better answer than "oh, we'll figure something out later." I've been lucky to have stable work, but I know that I cut back on spending when I think something might be afoot at work. I can't imagine never knowing whether I'm going to have a good or bad week coming up.
I think a lot of the gig economy cheerleaders are mistakenly thinking that Uber drivers are in the same league as, say, a flavor-of-the-moment software or IT contractor making $200+ an hour. I know a lot of people like this, who do nothing but travel around the country and get paid obscene amounts of money to implement the new hotness at random businesses. It's not super-stable, but they make enough to survive bad times. Uber drivers are barely breaking even, especially if they're financing their own vehicle purchases, etc. Like them or not, their business model is exploitative at best. Driving a cab is often the last resort job for people.
I think my major concern with the next few years is that he's a bit of a loose cannon. You don't want a loose cannon who's obviously quite sensitive when pushed on things negotiating with other countries or making impulsive decisions that are hard to undo. I doubt he'd start a war (intentionally) but I really think he has to lay off the late-night Twitter. Telegraphing exactly what bothers you to your adversaries isn't a smart move. Sure, you can argue it's all a show, but some of the anger he's displayed with the press, his critics, etc. show that it's very hard to hide his feelings and just keep quiet.
Here's what I'm mainly worried about -- now that Trump's President, the gloves come off of every single loud-mouthed, opinionated angry citizen who loves to moan and complain. By providing an example of "acceptable" behavior via his constant personal attacks on people, I think he's going to signal to everyone that they no longer need to be civil to one another. I know a lot of people who just aren't happy unless they're railing loudly against anyone and anything. Having that be the starting point for any discussion or debate for the next 4 or 8 years is going to lead to further retrenchment of people into their respective camps. I for one can't stand engaging with people who come out swinging, looking for a fight on every little thing...it's just not a personality type I'm interested in dealing with. The world's complex enough already and life's short, so why waste processor cycles arguing pointlessly?
One thing I did like about the Obama years was that he was a very approachable President. Even when the political rancor was at its worst, with a few exceptions he took the high road in these arguments. I doubt we're going to see that very much anymore -- it's going to be years of angry press conferences and sound bites.
If you're among the 1-percenters' offspring whose parents either went to these elite institutions or can afford to donate something substantial to get you in, why is it surprising that elite schools have more well-off students? There will always be efforts by the institutions in the form of scholarships and flexible admissions practices to diversify the student body, but the top colleges are definitely a pay-to-play operation.
There's basically 4 factors that determine where you end up in life -- how smart or successful your parents are, how wealthy they are, how much raw potential you have, and usually a whole lot of dumb luck. Smart or successful parents can afford to live in a good school district and provide a stable environment for their kids. Really rich parents can buy their way into the elite prep school track. Really smart students can often succeed enough to overcome a bad environment. Anyone can get lucky and just have things sort of work out for them. In my case, it was a combination of a good home life and a lot of right place/right time luck. I wasn't a good enough student to be in the scholarship bucket, and my parents weren't rich, but I did go to a decent K-12 school system and had involved parents who kicked my butt enough to do reasonably well. My dumb luck was getting a part time job doing tech support for the state university I went to, eventually doing it just short of full time, and using that to get my foot in the door at my first IT job.
The reason the elite schools will always have the lock on the 1% crowd is that once you're in, regardless of how you got there, you don't have to rely on luck. It starts with non-religious elite private schools. If your family can afford college level tuition for a K-12 education, there's a tacit agreement that one of the elite universities will have a spot for you. (Seriously, one school near us charges almost $40K for grade school tuition, but it's in the top 15 or so among elite boarding schools.) If you can get into and graduate from a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or similar, the school and its alumni network will not let you fail. White-shoe management consulting firms exclusively hire from the elite universities, and that's probably one of the most lucrative jobs a new graduate can have. The same goes for investment banking -- going from being a broke college student to making $250K a year is a big change. People who work for investment banks, management consulting firms and other similar employees mysteriously tend to wind up in very lucrative positions at their clients eventually, and the old boys'/old girls' network perpetuates.
This is why I feel states need to invest in public universities. It's basically the only lever the non-elite among us have to get ourselves to a better situation. If you're not smart enough or have a unique enough situation to get a full scholarship to a private university, your best bet in most states is to go to a big public college and milk your time there for all it's worth. I'm socking away money for my kids' college education, but unless they turn out to be absolute geniuses this is going to be the advice I give them too. Life may be a matter of who you know or dumb luck sometimes, but it never hurts to increase your chances. If you work hard and have a good run of luck, it is still possible to at least be comfortable. We'll see what the future holds though.
Whenever I see stories like this, and there are a lot of them, I'm reminded that the executive crowd is seeing the same news. Has anyone ever stopped to consider the possibility that part of the offshoring and outsourcing has been to mitigate against the "anti-social jerk sysadmin" issues? I'm not perfect, but one thing I do as part of my job is to be as professional as possible. There are always bad apples, but it's rare to see stories about a lawyer stealing client funds or a doctor intentionally mistreating patients. Actually in this case, the equivalent would be a fired corporate lawyer taking all their clients' paperwork and lighting it on fire to spite their bosses. I'm sure one of the big selling points of the Tatas and Infosyses of the world is that their customers have a legal contract and that they have very "compliant" employees compared to the average US-based IT guy (in the exec's minds.)
Revenge is never the best course of action, no matter how much of a dick someone is to you. In my particular sub-specialty in IT there are maybe a thousand or so people who really know everything end to end and rotate from employer to employer. If I pulled anything like this, I guarantee I'd never get a job in my field again -- I've been working for 20+ years in the business and keep running into the same people over and over -- and they talk to each other! The IT field is smaller than most people think, especially when you get beyond the first-level support jobs.
"Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too."
I doubt this is possible. Mechanization replaced subsistence farming and reduced the number of people in agriculture from 80+% to 2% of the US population. Factories replaced individual craftsmen with assembly line workers and also took up the unemployed farmers. Large organizations developing around manufacturing companies took up the slack of workers being replaced by machines and put them in desk jobs. This went well until the first downsizing waves of the 90s, which were largely driven by computers replacing manual clerical work like typing memos, routing correspondence and filing/records retrieval. This was the first time we didn't have a ready answer for what people could do next when they no longer needed a typing pool, etc. Some people wound up in IT, some people wound up in various other corporate positions, but a lot of them were forced out of the workforce. Now, this growth in the capability of computers and the amount of work they can automate threatens to remove another huge pillar of strength in the economy. All those corporate employees pushing around reports and being good little salesdroids (and using Salesforce in lots of places!) are about to see their ranks thinned as well. I don't see a good future for them unless we find some way to give them jobs that produce a similar standard of living.
I'm in IT (systems engineering, not operations) and see this every day -- every new system out there is shipped with automation capabilities that just didn't exist 15 years ago. One of my side projects is gluing together all this vendor automation into a Chef-like framework for the many small system on-site installations we do for customers. Having a way to have a tech follow "rack systems like so, attach cables here, plug in laptop here and power on" would save huge amounts of time and money since these systems are deployed to places where tech knowledge is spotty at best.
I hope executives like Benioff don't just assume everything is going to work out. Ask yourself this question -- what are we going to do with the millions of people who make large organizations work when a computer is in charge of most routine processes? Maybe 10% of them have the aptitude to move up to the "robot repairman" level of employment, so where does the other 90% go? While growing up in the Rust Belt, I saw factory closures that dumped thousands of low-skilled workers out onto the job market all at once. Sadly, the answer to this question in that case was that the 90% ended up moving away, employed in menial minimum wage jobs like home health care aides and fast food workers, or perpetually broke. Some sociology student should do a study negatively correlating income with increases in the number of shady personal injury lawyer advertisements around town...I know it's true but it just has to be proven! When people have no income and no way to get the old lifestyle they had, they're going to be hoping for a lottery payday or similar.
The work I'm actually most concerned about being automated is upper-middle class office work. Otherwise, unless the rules change completely and we stop using money and property as a store of value, economic activity will slowly wind down as people can't buy things and don't feel secure.
I work and have worked in large companies almost exclusively over a 20 year career. In environments like this, you will always have a distribution of abilities and skills. However, doing IT systems engineering work, I tend to agree with this report's findings. There are tons of jobs that could easily be automated with a little work. In banks I've worked at, as an example, there are people whose sole job is to accept documents mailed and faxed in for mortgage verification, enter the information into a computer, and take a fixed switch...case type action based on inspection. There used to be tens of people processing checks on two or three shifts. These jobs and hundreds more are the equivalent of an assembly line skill level, just working with paper or electronic files. Outside of the paper-processing world are tons of questionably-useful jobs in sales and marketing -- things like coordinating trade shows and putting out press releases. Across the organization are things like liaisons, project managers, business analysts, and other jobs that simply involve taking information from one group and passing it along to another. Yet, these jobs pay middle class salaries and give average-ability people something to do, regardless of how much raw revenue or cost saving they add.
I think a lot of the instability we see now is what's currently happening in companies - these simple jobs are either being eliminated or offshored in the desire for companies to save a few bucks here and there. The typical occupant of these jobs is a product of the last 30-40 years' obsession with sending everyone to college instead of giving them a trade or skill-based education. I went to a large state university, and back then just as now, they were pumping out thousands of generic business majors into the job market, most of whom were/are the typical C student partying their way through school. Here's the difference between then and now -- back then, that C student would just roll up to the career counseling office during their senior year. Recruiters from big companies would interview them, they'd get a couple offers, and accept some random entry-level position. Now, no one's hiring the C students and even the A and B students are having trouble finding that first job. (I was a B student, but that was in a hard science and I worked full time.) Fast forward, and that C student is working their way up the ladder with salary increases along the way -- paper pusher associate, senior paper pusher, supervisor of paper pushers, Manager of Bulk Pulp Transport, Director of Document Services...
The problem now is that the ladder is broken for an increasingly large swath of the population. Once the career progression is gone, that kills the salary increases that occur over time and allow for things like buying a house. 30 year mortgages are painful in the beginning but are supposed to get easier as you age because your income is expected to increase. Car manufacturers can't sell cars to people who don't feel comfortable enough in their jobs to take out a car loan or spend a little extra for a non-base model. And, companies can't sell products to their employees if the employees are worried about whether the axe will fall tomorrow. This squares with everything we've been hearing about Millenials - they don't want a car mainly because they can't afford one, they don't want to own a home because they're not secure in their employment, etc.
In my mind, this is why we got Trump. His rhetoric about rolling the clock back to the late 1940s was an easy sell for blue collar workers, but I think enough white collar workers took a hard look at their situation and remembered stories from their parents/grandparents about times when companies showed loyalty, when th
My guess is that they're just extrapolating out an estimate of the number of people it will take to run their new in-house FedEx/UPS service and staff warehouses. Also, if I were a retailer, I'd be banking on trying to capitalize on Sears and Macy's likely bankruptcies in the next 18 months. Macy's might survive in a smaller form but I'm sure Sears is going to be parted out because it's being run by a hedge fund. I doubt technical jobs will be a double-digit percent of this amount -- it's going to be line-level grunts packing boxes, flying planes, driving delivery trucks, etc.
I've also heard many stories about how Amazon is to work for in both technical and ground level positions. I don't think I'd want a tech position there, even though they're working on really cool stuff with AWS. Accounts from alumni I've heard describe it as a huge employer who's insanely tight-fisted and never grew up out of startup crunch mode. Their perfect employee is a fresh grad with no previous experience that will say nothing of working nights, weekends, etc. for low pay. I think the phrase "Seattle hundreds" was coined there initially. Add that to the pressure-cooker back stabbing culture I've heard described many times, and I think I'll pass!
It sounds to me like these people are trying to get a retirement plan paid for by Microsoft. It makes sense -- I'm pretty sure people saw some disturbing things -- but I doubt it rises to the level of PTSD. No one with two brain cells to rub together would share anything truly illegal over Hotmail or any of the other platforms provided by Microsoft. Everyone (should) know that free email and social networking sites will mine every single byte of data you give them, and that includes scanning it for terms of service violations.
Also, I think there's different levels of tolerance people have for disturbing stuff. A lot of people can just take it at face value and report the offenders without internalizing it. People who don't have this personality type shouldn't work in a position like this. Microsoft was dumb on two counts -- forcefully transferring employees to this group and not finding something else for them to do when they started showing signs of cracking up. Microsoft's a big company -- I highly doubt there is no wiggle room in the HR budgets to "park" people someplace until you find them a permanent spot after they don't work out on one team. It seems to me like you need to rotate people in and out of this duty to keep them somewhat mentally healthy.
I'm pretty dead on the inside in terms of being negatively affected by things I see, but I don't know if I could do this work full time. It would really depend on what they actually were looking at on a daily basis. I just don't think it rises to the level of "PTSD." Unless people are really more fragile than I think, I have a hard time believing most claims of PTSD, even in combat situations or similar. Unfortunately, unless AI becomes 100% reliable, there are going to have to be groups of people like this who do nothing but trawl through sick stuff so that other people don't have to see it.
I can definitely see less smoking being a huge contributor to lower cancer rates. It's no surprise that lung cancer is still the most prevalent cause of cancer death though. Smokers are almost guaranteed to have expensive health issues later in life, and a shorter lifespan overall. Consider that more than half the male population and almost 30% of the female population smoked in the 50s, and in 2017 smokers in the US and many other countries are relegated to a sad little corner away from basically any public place. People used to smoke heavily in their offices, their homes, etc. In the circles I run in it's very rare to find smokers; if they are they're older and just don't want to quit...in for a penny in for a pound I guess!
If the study went back further than 1991, I'd also think that deindustrialization and environmental regulation in the US might have something to do with it. Around the 70s and 80s was the time people got serious about not letting companies dump toxic waste into the groundwater, and companies also offshored a lot of their manufacturing. Reduction of air pollution might also contribute - it still amazes me when I drive through big cities with terrible traffic and imagine thousands of pre-catalytic converter 1970s GM/Ford/Chrysler V8 tanks pumping crap into the air.
That said, I don't think I'd want to fight cancer if it turned out I had it. I'd rather have the option of a quick painless death than endless rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery that would only give me a few years of painful life at best. We can't live forever -- even though average lifespan keeps increasing. What kind of shape would most people be in at 100? 110? 115? I'd rather get my 85 or so years in and make the most of them than end up in a progression from assisted living to nursing home to the hospital. It really seems like cancer is an evolutionary check on longevity given that it's a spontaneous uncontrolled cell growth. Pediatric and mid-life cancer is sad, but cancer at an old age is almost expected.
It wouldn't go over well if Apple just said, "Sorry, we don't support this, so we're going to stop selling apps and iThings in China." There's a market of billions of people to sell things to, and I doubt they're willing to fight with the Chinese government over their censorship policy.
I think reaction to this is actually bigger than Apple -- it's the way the US in general acts towards the rest of the world. We have no tolerance for anyone who does anything differently and are convinced that our way is superior and everyone else is just backwards. This happened during the Cold War (the containment policy) and is happening now in the Middle East (refusing to close the power vacuum and insisting that democratic governments be installed in places that aren't ready for them.)
China has chosen a system where they have total central control over the population, media and economy. Honestly, the country has beneifted greatly from it -- there's no opposition when huge projects are undertaken, for example. When the recession hit in 2008, the government plowed untold sums of money into infrastructure to prop things up. Try doing that here -- it's impossible given the stalemate we have today. The government also directly supports industry, another thing that would be impossible to do in the US. I think in the long run they're going to be better off for it because they can just make tough decisions by fiat rather than arguing over it for years. Honestly, I don't care whether or not they let their citizens read the New York Times -- it doesn't affect me.
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People are indeed going to have to check their privacy settings (assuming Facebook will allow the Jobs stuff to respect them.) Over-sharers are the obvious target (old sage advice about not posting keg stand videos or political opinions applies here.) But, there's something more insidious -- recruiters will buy access to Facebook Jobs, and start randomly trawling through profiles looking for a match. What happens when they see someone like me, a 41 year old dad with 2 young kids? I can just imagine some 22 year old cold-calling recruiter fresh out of their business degree saying "Oh, let's skip him, he'd never fit in at Company X." It would just be another way to side-step rules on age discrimination. Unlike the stereotypes, I work my butt off to stay current and not be an old stick in the mud. It's a lot of fun being the "adult" in a younger group of peers because I do enjoy sharing knowledge and teaching people. But, I do know that if I'm ever caught out in a layoff situation and don't have any luck with my contacts, I'm pretty stuck when it comes to getting cold recruited for a job. This is why my LinkedIn profile doesn't have a photo, even though I look pretty young.
I wish we could just get beyond the whole recruiter thing. Often, these guys are the only way to get your resume even looked at in big companies, and they're basically sponging off your salary. It's kind of like real estate agents -- they still get a huge commission even though most of their job is now automated (MLS sites replace books of Polaroids, Zillow and friends replace their knowledge of the market, and people generally drive themselves around looking for houses now.) Back in the day, recruiters had the same advantage as intermediaries even though most professionals put some or all of their qualifications out on LinkedIn or similar for people to see. The company I work for uses recruiters, and the worst offenders are the big temp companies they make us recruit through (TEKSystems, etc.) We have had painful interviews with people who have been presented to us as experts and quite obviously have had their resumes doctored by these guys. (And, we're not a bunch of hipster recent CS grads asking stumper questions -- we're looking for generalists with amazing troubleshooting skills mostly.)
Bottom line is that you have to keep the professional network going, lest you be at the mercy of these recruiters.
The thing I really don't like about the H-1B program is the abuse. There's nothing wrong with keeping a few visa slots open for truly exceptional people. I've seen the program used for this purpose and it mostly works. The problem is the companies that use it to directly replace older workers in routine, run of the mill IT and dev jobs. Companies are totally aware of what they're doing when they hire Tata, Infosys or Cognizant -- it's a "Pontias Pilate" move that lets them wash their hands of the IT department. That's what has been happening with the big stories making the news (Disney, Southern California Edison, etc.) The outsourcer comes in, has to make a profit on the deal, and so they offshore everything they can and slowly replace domestic workers with H-1Bs for things they can't. These are not the best and brightest -- its mostly DBA and dev work that requires just enough on site interaction to make offshoring ineffective. I've worked in outsourced IT environments -- everything takes twice as long and nothing new will ever be attempted in a company that has someone else running their iT, partially because change orders cost so much.
Allowing the abuses is essentially a brake on IT workers' careers and an artificial salary cap. I've been lucky enough to become the senior guy in our engineering group over years of experience, and feel very strongly that we oldies (I'm 41 :-) ) have to develop the next generation. I don't want the pipeline of newbies to dry up because they're worried there's no future in technology. Young students are going to make rational choices and we're going to be stuck the same way the mainframers are now...no one will take the leap to learn enough to replace the retirees.
Also, I totally don't buy the argument that there's no domestic talent. No one is a drop-in replacement for the last guy, and especially today it's impossible to be an expert at everything. That narrative that paints offshore consulting firms as world-class experts on technology has to change. I would love to hear accounts of domestic hires that had zero talent -- I just haven't experienced it!
When they breathlessly proclaim that Millenials are the ultimate nomadic tribe willing to pick up and move at a moment's notice, people forget that the economy supports different types of people. Lots of people like the idea of not being a permanent transient, picking a community and trying to stay in it for an extended period. You'll find way more of these people in the ranks of parents -- unless you're moving for truly greener pastures it's a good idea to keep your kids in the same school system for at least a few years at a time if not their entire school career. I can think of a lot of reasons why moving is less attractive:
Personally, I think the Millenials are just growing up and realizing that there's more to life than working for some web startup cranking out JavaScript or the Googles and Apples of the world 100 hours a week. They might be settling down, getting married, having little "Millenials++" and rediscovering the value of having some stability in life. If you need to move where the jobs are, that's one thing. But if you have a stable situation with a few employers to pick from in case yours flakes out on you, I highly recommend staying somewhere, getting involved in the community and actually putting down roots. Upending your life once every few years sucks, especially if you have a family.
A perfect example of basic income working is the longshoremen's unions in the US. Before containerized freight and automated cargo terminals, thousands of men would stand on the stones every morning and work a back-breaking job hauling loose cargo off ships with hooks. After containerization, instantly, there was no more work for the vast majority of these people. Since most of them were completely unskilled, and not capable of retraining into any other job that paid the same or better, they could have been in danger of seing the same fate we assign to the unemployed today -- eventual destitution. However, the longshoremen's unions implemented what amounts to a tax on cargo handled through these automated terminals that goes towards paying "retired" longshoremen a basic income. This is one example, and let's just say the union has a lot of muscle behind it that helped this get passed, but it does show a way to help the unemployable -- and make no mistake, that's going to be 90+% of us sometime before I'm dead (in the next 50 years or so.)
I guess my problem with people who argue against a basic income is that they don't have a better alternative in mind. Sometime in the near future, the vast majority of low level service jobs will be automated. At the same time, the use of intelligent systems will come and cannibalize the top end of the spectrum too. Think about doctors for a second -- they're smart enough to have a regulated profession and should be fine because of that. But what if they didn't? Medical education is basically academic hazing, from the MCAT to the preclinical firehose to 100 hour weeks as an intern. Med schools select for people with photographic memories and perfect grades because that's basically the only way to survive the training as it is today. Well, thanks to Google we don't need photographic memories anymore, so the only skill left will be synthesis of all the stored knowledge. This is why IBM basically sold off their entire business and are building Watson and other AI-type systems. Soon as these algorithms get good enough, most work that requires intuition is toast. Hospitals won't have to pay doctors when they can feed test results and live observations of patients into a machine and get a diagnosis.
I think basic income is the only reasonable transition vehicle to move the world away from traditional employment. Imagine telling everyone who's about to retire that people entering the workforce now won't have to save. Or, tell people who define themselves by their work that they've all been made redundant at the same time. Or, try to divide up the accumulated property among people when money stops being critical -- who determines where the renters go, or who gets to keep the houses they own? All of these are too much stress for the economy to bear all at once and will lead to a mess. Phase in a low-employment world over time with controls, and it makes the shift easier.
I can definitiely see human traders playing less of a role. As HFT has gotten better over time, people are less reliant on traders going with their gut or even reasoned research. The trades move too fast for traders to keep up with anyway.
The next frontier is the advisors. Whenever I run into anyone who's a professional "financial advisor" I get used car salesman vibes. Every one of them is trying to pitch products guaranteed to make them money, but "not guaranteed - not insured - may lose value" on my side. The worst are the life insurance salesmen who branch out into financial services -- I wonder how many naive people have been tricked into buying variable annuity life insurance instead of investing. It seems to me that the machines are going to squeeze out the advisors living on tiny commissions as it is. Kind of like travel agents -- they disappeared for the most part the second airlines stopped paying them commission to sell tickets.
I work a fairly normal job doing systems architecture stuff for an IT service provider. I have a spouse and 2 kids, and some semblance of a life outside of IT/dev. I seriously doubt I'd have the family and normal life part working for some of the crazy SV employers. I think the key reasons are crazy work environment and cost of living:
I've never worked for a startup or a tech company notorious for crazy culture, but I have plenty of acquaintances who do. I say "acquaintances" because they're never around to talk to -- they're always working. I love my job; it's great getting paid to solve complex problems. But I don't love it so much that I work 90 or 100 hour weeks constantly. Even established companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are famously "all inclusive" -- 3 meals a day at work, bus service to and from work and an implicit expectation that you belong to them. Startups are even stranger with the founder-driven work or die culture. Having a relationship is incompatible with this. In a startup, I've heard you barely see anybody outside the company...that limits the pool to other workaholics trying to win the buyout lottery...and they don't have time for each other either.
The second thing is cost of living. I live in New York, and I think the cost of living here is crazy. California and SV take it to a whole new level. Either you perpetually rent a tiny apartment with roommates, or you go into permanent indentured servitude to buy a $1.5M house that costs $300K elsewhere. Who has the money available to go out and play the field in a situation like that?
Another poster mentioned something about basement-dwelling nerds, but don't forget that that's mostly not SV anymore. Most of SV is these hyper-social startup companies where the stereotype "brogrammer" was born. I'm sure there are still plenty of nerds, but most of them are migrating to places like cloud providers or established software vendors.
I think one of the problems with mathematics is that it's pretty hard to get the average person to see it as anything other than a tool. Maybe that's how it's taught, but how do you get average students interested in math the same way mathematicians are? Where is the hook in people's minds that turns them on to it as something other than a bunch of formulas and operations? I know it's a cop-out to say I suck at math, but I really do feel I'm mathematically challenged. I wonder if it was just because I didn't get some magic spark early on. I remember all of my elementary and high school math being a long slog of memorization with very little understanding. I was never very good at it and just learned enough to handle the exams. Like every high school student, I still remember to this day that x = -b +/- (sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)/2a) but I have no idea why that is or what it's good for other than getting the answers to a quadratic equation. I think my lack of math background kept me out of civil or chemical engineering, despite a huge interest in both.
One reason why I think proper teaching may play a role is because I had a similar experience studying chemistry in college. I had a very good introductory chemistry teacher and something just clicked. Almost everyone saw it as a bunch of nonsense formulas and equations for various phenomena that had to be memorized for the exams and forgotten, but somehow I got a little more out of it and it was interesting enough that I got a degree in it. Good thing too -- by the second year of engineering school I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up with my poor math background and didn't want to end up a generic business major!
One thing I don't know if Google could match is the legacy support. Microsoft wants everyone off on-premises Windows and onto Azure badly and is investing a lot of money to do it. I come from a very legacy industry with lots of ancient Windows software, and Microsoft's attitude has been "bring it in, refactor it and move it to cheaper PaaS stuff if/when you can." They're offering lots of help too -- as soon as they saw companies were OK with Office 365 permanent revenue lock-in, the strategy is now to get everyone's workload in their cloud and charge perpetually.
AWS and Google in my experience seem to be much more focused on the "cloud only, mobile only, desktops are for LUDDITES, apps!" crowd. And it makes sense -- if you're a startup and have no identity management needs, no ties to Active Directory or an on-premises infrastructure, then why not throw out the rulebook and develop from scratch? How many thousands of web frameworks are out there? I'm sure AWS and Google have a pre-built template for all of them. AWS has virtual machines, and they even do a sorta-DaaS service. But you can tell their heart's not really in it...yeah sure, here's some VMs to run your Luddite stuff but check out all these cool new microservices! Microsoft's approach so far has been that they have all the cutting edge stuff, but are willing to invest the time and infrastructure money to host IaaS stuff as first-class citizens.
One thing I think Microsoft could step their game up on is catering to "IT Pros" which is their name for non-developers. Yes, we're all going to be DevOps ninjas or whatever the hipsters are calling us, but IT guys need to come up to speed fast on this stuff, and fill in the gaps in their knowledge. I've been doing this like crazy over the last year -- if you're not a full-time web developer the documentation is a little opaque at first until you get some backstory.
I live in New York, and prices for cigarettes are incredibly high (for the US.) Go to South Carolina, and by comparison they basically give them away because SC is a tobacco state. It's been proven over and over again that long-term smoking causes expensive end-of-life health problems, and when the majority of people who smoke are poor and uneducated, everybody pays in the form of increased charity health care. And in the US, if a smoker makes it to 65, Medicare has to pay a lot more to get the average smoker through the end of their life so everyone pays regardless of the person's income in Medicare taxes. In my opinion it's fair to tax cigarettes to a high degree as long as the proceeds go directly to health care or smoking cessation programs.
In NY, smoking is a very expensive habit and it's hard to even smoke in public anymore. Go elsewhere in the country (Texas, Nevada, lots of Southern states) and everyone can smoke in public along with most businesses being smoker-friendly indoors. The problem is that the US isn't a monoculture and a small country -- each state has its own agenda. New York is dealing with a city the size of a small country combined with a poor rural upstate region...that's why high tobacco taxes make sense. A smaller state is going to have lower overall public health expenditures regardless of ability to pay just based on population. Also, tobacco-producing states aren't going to be happy with any taxes because they want a market for their product. Back in the 50s, the majority of men smoked and something like 35% of women did too. Now, it's way less than that and dropping.
I think taxing tobacco heavily is a good compromise. Unless you want an outright ban (which I don't think is the best idea even if it would improve public health,) this is the best way to recover the additional costs a smoker places on society.
I have very little problem with the original intention of the H-1B program -- giving companies a safety valve to import a small number of workers who actually possess skills that can't be found domestically. I work for a multinational and we use internal transfers a lot for that purpose...and most of the people they bring in are actually the kind of people that the program originally targeted.
What I don't like is the abuse. Any time a company's IT costs get too high for the MBA's liking, they can turn to any number of "IT services" providers. These companies will always come in cheaper than FTEs, both from a cost and an accounting perspective. Since the company has to make money, they'll offshore most of the work and bring in a few H-1B's to displace all the FTEs over time. In places that do this, I have yet to see evidence that any of these H-1B replacements are exceptional in any way. Often, they're just swapping out a DBA or sysadmin who's been working for 20 years with a DBA who will work much cheaper regardless of quality. What bothers me more is that the company can just pull a "Pontias Pilate" and wash their hands of their entire IT department. This is what happened with the bigger swap-outs that have made the press like Disney and others. All they have to do is point to the fact that their IT is now in control of one of the body shops and they had nothing to do with replacing domestic workers.
I have absolutely no doubt that (a) there is plenty of domestic talent, and (b) if you don't set an expiration date on people's careers, even more people will study CS and engineering. I say the program should be kept to some degree, but the obvious avenues for abuse should be shut down. My suggestions would be to crack down on the fake labor certification processes, and raise the minimum H-1B wage to a certain percentage over the average prevailing wage for the area they're going to work in. If people see that the program is fair, and don't feel like it's a serious threat for their future earnings and career, then everything will work out for employers over time. The workforce will be happier, and there won't be as much of a language/timezone barrier.
I don't know -- maybe I've been lucky and have worked with very talented domestic people. But I don't believe companies who say they can't hire people domestically -- they just don't want to pay for it.
We may never know what happened - but airlines are coming off their holiday change freezes so I'll bet one of their releases went bad. I don't work for Delta, but I do work in the industry, including some stints at airlines. The central problem is that airlines are incredibly low-margin businesses. Yes, they charge for everything and flying is expensive, but for every last minute $1000 ticket are hundreds of people demanding the same flight for $129 and getting it, even though they barely break even on those customers. Airlines' biggest costs are fuel, labor and planes. When it comes to IT, it's just massive amounts of technical debt built on a very old core set of systems. All that customer facing tech is really driving some ancient stuff several layers deep, collecting the information and presenting it in a nice format like your phone screen. All of these abstractions, wrappers on wrappers and middleware have to work perfectly and it's a rickety tower sometimes. Also, airlines are run by MBAs who don't consider their IT a "core competency", so it either gets minimal funding or dumped off on a contractor. Often, the contractors develop stuff like the phone app or one of a billion middleware components and there are always integration issues...but the people in charge love the ability to pay someone $x to implement "that phone thing" or "the ability to do X without talking to an agent."
With all the negatives, it's a very challenging and fun environment to work in for the right kind of person. I've been doing it for 20+ years and on balance I really like it. Resourceful types do very well in airline IT, as do IT geeks who understand and care about the business they're supporting. It's extremely frustrating at times as well, and there's way more firefighting than there should be. Typical businesses will just throw money at a problem until it goes away or they run out, which is why there are so many software tool vendors and expensive hardware systems out there. Go to an airline and tell them to spend 5 million bucks, and you can forget it unless it's required for compliance, safety related or guaranteed to return an immediate increase in revenue. Unfortunately this is where the technical debt comes from because there's never enough people, and all those people are running around putting out fires all the time. If I were working for Delta right now, I guarantee I wouldn't have been sleeping for the last 24 hours as everyone tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
Actually I find myself agreeing with this, having been through two tech startup bubbles in my working life now. There's plenty of "real work" out there if we could just reallocate the resources that get flushed down the toilet in startup-land. One of the best things we could do is something similar to what the Chinese did around 2008 -- pump massive amounts of money into infrastructure. We'd be able to rebuild a lot of the stuff that's been slowly rotting away since our last golden age of the postwar era, and we'd have something to show for it rather than BS marketing-driven tech bubble companies.
At the same time, yes, give people who aren't doing anything useful money to stay out of the workforce. It's a lot cheaper than paying for the increased crime that comes with poverty that comes with unemployment. It's sad, but as even knowledge worker jobs get automated away, there will only be a subset of the population that is capable of doing the level of work that remains. Think about your average big company -- what percent of the staff could you get rid of today with minimal impact? That percent has been creeping up pretty high in recent years and it's only going to get worse. Does an IT services company need thousands of "account executives" whose sole job is to take customers to lunch and get them to buy more BS services contracts? How about all the people in marketing? Most could go with no impact. Once you do that, however, you have the problem of what to do with everyone. So, either we incentivize busy work in the private sector, create make-work jobs in the public sector, or just pay people to stay away. Anything else will lead to a complete breakdown in society; look what happened when unemployment got around 10% in 2008-2009 -- now triple or quadruple that.
The wearable device bubble is ending, mainly because manufacturers are finding that they're not Apple. Even Apple is having trouble convincing the true believers to buy their first Apple Watches, let alone upgrade them. Fitbit and friends probably saw the following:
- A lot of the purchases are gifts or corporate giveaways from a company's health insurance plan. They get used for a while, then thrown in a drawer.
- Even among the hardcore users, there's very little reason to upgrade unless new must-have features, so you're not going to get the once-every-18-months cash infusions that Apple had recently been getting for iPhones.
- It's expensive to build and maintain the apps that attach the devices to the users' phones, and the data can't really be monetized the same way Google search history can.
Microsoft even dumped the Microsoft Band, probably realizing very similar things Fitbit did. The question is, are they hoping for an acquisition from a watch maker or something, and just trying to hold out long enough to get the founders their exit money? Also, why so many employees to design a hardware specification once, then build a simple phone app? Did they just get pumped full of startup money and go on a hiring spree?
Wearables are neat - I have one of the Garmin ones and it works well. But I'm not buying a new one every year.
I went to a large, well funded state university and got a degree in chemistry back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (1997.) Even for undergrads, with the ancient lab equipment we had, I'm sure the actual costs to educate me were many times higher than a business or philosophy student, for example. Scientific instruments, even basic ones like gas chromatographs or IR spectroscopy machines are extremely expensive. Universities have to pay STEM professors more than English professors. In most cases, the humanities professors who are lucky enough to get tenure are happy enough to be working in their field; finding a stable job teaching English or Philosophy is not easy. Science professors need to bring in massive grants for their research, go to conferences all over the world, and operate a real running lab doing science. Even if you are using postdoc slaves, there's still a cost involved that's much higher than a humanities professor who basically needs an office, access to library collections and classroom space.
However, I don't think it's fair to charge more for expensive-to-grant degrees. Don't we want more technical people in the world these days? And on the other end, I think most people understand the need to balance science and humanities, and that most people benefit from an exposure to both. Even my cursory exposure to the non-science courses in my otherwise heavily science oriented degree made me a better individual. Also, from my experience the science students were much more serious about their work than business or English students...you really have to want to work to actually major in a hard science and it's very difficult to just skate through.
Funding public colleges seems to be to be the best investment possible, regardless of whether your degree cost the university $100,000 or $25,000 to give you. Even with the extraneous programs and expensive add-ons, college remains a time where 18 year old kids get the opportunity to grow up. I know it helped me, and yes I know that some people never grow up regardless of college attendance. But on balance, I'd rather have more people educated than fewer. Not to get political, but the presidential election we just had shows what happens when people don't objectively verify claims and let their emotions make their choices. Having more people that take the time to pick apart both sides' arguments and actually think about the choice they're making is a good thing. In addition, having more educated people may finally make companies stop complaining that they can't find any domestic workers.
I guess this coupled with the announcement about Solaris last week means Oracle is finally finished squeezing the last pennies out of the SPARC/Solaris architecture. Admittedly it's very rare to see new implementations of a proprietary UNIX...every place I've dealt with in the last few years is trying to rid themselves of all the legacy code and hardware that keeps them on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.
I wonder what kind of cost/benefit calculation they came up with. The company I work for has a bunch of mainframe stuff still in production, and they pay a king's ransom to CA to license a package that hasn't changed in ages, but must keep running no matter what. I can't imagine Oracle is giving away Solaris and SPARC support contracts and licenses...it must be a massive amount and certainly enough to keep a bunch of Solaris engineers on staff to fix the occasional bug. 1000 people is a lot though -- I wonder how many of those were in sales? Salesmen are expensive in terms of all the meals, rounds of golf and strip club visits they have to give away to customers.
You know what would suck? Oracle kills the old Sun, then miraculously opens a new office in a "low cost geography" so they can keep squeezing for another 20 years! This is what HP did with OpenVMS for a long time before they got tired of supporting it and sold it to a third party.
I hear so many people saying what a wonderful thing the gig economy is -- how much freedom they have, how much they love not working a traditional job, etc. All of that may be true, but just wait until all the traditional jobs go away and most people are forced into squeezing out a tiny living doing things like driving for Uber. I highly doubt everyone would be super-happy at that point.
The relative economic stability of the last century was driven by consumers consuming, buying stuff, paying taxes, etc. and that was driven by those consumers having a stable paycheck or other source of income to fall back on. When that gets kicked away in the name of disruption, society needs to have a better answer than "oh, we'll figure something out later." I've been lucky to have stable work, but I know that I cut back on spending when I think something might be afoot at work. I can't imagine never knowing whether I'm going to have a good or bad week coming up.
I think a lot of the gig economy cheerleaders are mistakenly thinking that Uber drivers are in the same league as, say, a flavor-of-the-moment software or IT contractor making $200+ an hour. I know a lot of people like this, who do nothing but travel around the country and get paid obscene amounts of money to implement the new hotness at random businesses. It's not super-stable, but they make enough to survive bad times. Uber drivers are barely breaking even, especially if they're financing their own vehicle purchases, etc. Like them or not, their business model is exploitative at best. Driving a cab is often the last resort job for people.
I think my major concern with the next few years is that he's a bit of a loose cannon. You don't want a loose cannon who's obviously quite sensitive when pushed on things negotiating with other countries or making impulsive decisions that are hard to undo. I doubt he'd start a war (intentionally) but I really think he has to lay off the late-night Twitter. Telegraphing exactly what bothers you to your adversaries isn't a smart move. Sure, you can argue it's all a show, but some of the anger he's displayed with the press, his critics, etc. show that it's very hard to hide his feelings and just keep quiet.
Here's what I'm mainly worried about -- now that Trump's President, the gloves come off of every single loud-mouthed, opinionated angry citizen who loves to moan and complain. By providing an example of "acceptable" behavior via his constant personal attacks on people, I think he's going to signal to everyone that they no longer need to be civil to one another. I know a lot of people who just aren't happy unless they're railing loudly against anyone and anything. Having that be the starting point for any discussion or debate for the next 4 or 8 years is going to lead to further retrenchment of people into their respective camps. I for one can't stand engaging with people who come out swinging, looking for a fight on every little thing...it's just not a personality type I'm interested in dealing with. The world's complex enough already and life's short, so why waste processor cycles arguing pointlessly?
One thing I did like about the Obama years was that he was a very approachable President. Even when the political rancor was at its worst, with a few exceptions he took the high road in these arguments. I doubt we're going to see that very much anymore -- it's going to be years of angry press conferences and sound bites.
If you're among the 1-percenters' offspring whose parents either went to these elite institutions or can afford to donate something substantial to get you in, why is it surprising that elite schools have more well-off students? There will always be efforts by the institutions in the form of scholarships and flexible admissions practices to diversify the student body, but the top colleges are definitely a pay-to-play operation.
There's basically 4 factors that determine where you end up in life -- how smart or successful your parents are, how wealthy they are, how much raw potential you have, and usually a whole lot of dumb luck. Smart or successful parents can afford to live in a good school district and provide a stable environment for their kids. Really rich parents can buy their way into the elite prep school track. Really smart students can often succeed enough to overcome a bad environment. Anyone can get lucky and just have things sort of work out for them. In my case, it was a combination of a good home life and a lot of right place/right time luck. I wasn't a good enough student to be in the scholarship bucket, and my parents weren't rich, but I did go to a decent K-12 school system and had involved parents who kicked my butt enough to do reasonably well. My dumb luck was getting a part time job doing tech support for the state university I went to, eventually doing it just short of full time, and using that to get my foot in the door at my first IT job.
The reason the elite schools will always have the lock on the 1% crowd is that once you're in, regardless of how you got there, you don't have to rely on luck. It starts with non-religious elite private schools. If your family can afford college level tuition for a K-12 education, there's a tacit agreement that one of the elite universities will have a spot for you. (Seriously, one school near us charges almost $40K for grade school tuition, but it's in the top 15 or so among elite boarding schools.) If you can get into and graduate from a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or similar, the school and its alumni network will not let you fail. White-shoe management consulting firms exclusively hire from the elite universities, and that's probably one of the most lucrative jobs a new graduate can have. The same goes for investment banking -- going from being a broke college student to making $250K a year is a big change. People who work for investment banks, management consulting firms and other similar employees mysteriously tend to wind up in very lucrative positions at their clients eventually, and the old boys'/old girls' network perpetuates.
This is why I feel states need to invest in public universities. It's basically the only lever the non-elite among us have to get ourselves to a better situation. If you're not smart enough or have a unique enough situation to get a full scholarship to a private university, your best bet in most states is to go to a big public college and milk your time there for all it's worth. I'm socking away money for my kids' college education, but unless they turn out to be absolute geniuses this is going to be the advice I give them too. Life may be a matter of who you know or dumb luck sometimes, but it never hurts to increase your chances. If you work hard and have a good run of luck, it is still possible to at least be comfortable. We'll see what the future holds though.
Whenever I see stories like this, and there are a lot of them, I'm reminded that the executive crowd is seeing the same news. Has anyone ever stopped to consider the possibility that part of the offshoring and outsourcing has been to mitigate against the "anti-social jerk sysadmin" issues? I'm not perfect, but one thing I do as part of my job is to be as professional as possible. There are always bad apples, but it's rare to see stories about a lawyer stealing client funds or a doctor intentionally mistreating patients. Actually in this case, the equivalent would be a fired corporate lawyer taking all their clients' paperwork and lighting it on fire to spite their bosses. I'm sure one of the big selling points of the Tatas and Infosyses of the world is that their customers have a legal contract and that they have very "compliant" employees compared to the average US-based IT guy (in the exec's minds.)
Revenge is never the best course of action, no matter how much of a dick someone is to you. In my particular sub-specialty in IT there are maybe a thousand or so people who really know everything end to end and rotate from employer to employer. If I pulled anything like this, I guarantee I'd never get a job in my field again -- I've been working for 20+ years in the business and keep running into the same people over and over -- and they talk to each other! The IT field is smaller than most people think, especially when you get beyond the first-level support jobs.
"Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too."
I doubt this is possible. Mechanization replaced subsistence farming and reduced the number of people in agriculture from 80+% to 2% of the US population. Factories replaced individual craftsmen with assembly line workers and also took up the unemployed farmers. Large organizations developing around manufacturing companies took up the slack of workers being replaced by machines and put them in desk jobs. This went well until the first downsizing waves of the 90s, which were largely driven by computers replacing manual clerical work like typing memos, routing correspondence and filing/records retrieval. This was the first time we didn't have a ready answer for what people could do next when they no longer needed a typing pool, etc. Some people wound up in IT, some people wound up in various other corporate positions, but a lot of them were forced out of the workforce. Now, this growth in the capability of computers and the amount of work they can automate threatens to remove another huge pillar of strength in the economy. All those corporate employees pushing around reports and being good little salesdroids (and using Salesforce in lots of places!) are about to see their ranks thinned as well. I don't see a good future for them unless we find some way to give them jobs that produce a similar standard of living.
I'm in IT (systems engineering, not operations) and see this every day -- every new system out there is shipped with automation capabilities that just didn't exist 15 years ago. One of my side projects is gluing together all this vendor automation into a Chef-like framework for the many small system on-site installations we do for customers. Having a way to have a tech follow "rack systems like so, attach cables here, plug in laptop here and power on" would save huge amounts of time and money since these systems are deployed to places where tech knowledge is spotty at best.
I hope executives like Benioff don't just assume everything is going to work out. Ask yourself this question -- what are we going to do with the millions of people who make large organizations work when a computer is in charge of most routine processes? Maybe 10% of them have the aptitude to move up to the "robot repairman" level of employment, so where does the other 90% go? While growing up in the Rust Belt, I saw factory closures that dumped thousands of low-skilled workers out onto the job market all at once. Sadly, the answer to this question in that case was that the 90% ended up moving away, employed in menial minimum wage jobs like home health care aides and fast food workers, or perpetually broke. Some sociology student should do a study negatively correlating income with increases in the number of shady personal injury lawyer advertisements around town...I know it's true but it just has to be proven! When people have no income and no way to get the old lifestyle they had, they're going to be hoping for a lottery payday or similar.
The work I'm actually most concerned about being automated is upper-middle class office work. Otherwise, unless the rules change completely and we stop using money and property as a store of value, economic activity will slowly wind down as people can't buy things and don't feel secure.
I work and have worked in large companies almost exclusively over a 20 year career. In environments like this, you will always have a distribution of abilities and skills. However, doing IT systems engineering work, I tend to agree with this report's findings. There are tons of jobs that could easily be automated with a little work. In banks I've worked at, as an example, there are people whose sole job is to accept documents mailed and faxed in for mortgage verification, enter the information into a computer, and take a fixed switch...case type action based on inspection. There used to be tens of people processing checks on two or three shifts. These jobs and hundreds more are the equivalent of an assembly line skill level, just working with paper or electronic files. Outside of the paper-processing world are tons of questionably-useful jobs in sales and marketing -- things like coordinating trade shows and putting out press releases. Across the organization are things like liaisons, project managers, business analysts, and other jobs that simply involve taking information from one group and passing it along to another. Yet, these jobs pay middle class salaries and give average-ability people something to do, regardless of how much raw revenue or cost saving they add.
I think a lot of the instability we see now is what's currently happening in companies - these simple jobs are either being eliminated or offshored in the desire for companies to save a few bucks here and there. The typical occupant of these jobs is a product of the last 30-40 years' obsession with sending everyone to college instead of giving them a trade or skill-based education. I went to a large state university, and back then just as now, they were pumping out thousands of generic business majors into the job market, most of whom were/are the typical C student partying their way through school. Here's the difference between then and now -- back then, that C student would just roll up to the career counseling office during their senior year. Recruiters from big companies would interview them, they'd get a couple offers, and accept some random entry-level position. Now, no one's hiring the C students and even the A and B students are having trouble finding that first job. (I was a B student, but that was in a hard science and I worked full time.) Fast forward, and that C student is working their way up the ladder with salary increases along the way -- paper pusher associate, senior paper pusher, supervisor of paper pushers, Manager of Bulk Pulp Transport, Director of Document Services...
The problem now is that the ladder is broken for an increasingly large swath of the population. Once the career progression is gone, that kills the salary increases that occur over time and allow for things like buying a house. 30 year mortgages are painful in the beginning but are supposed to get easier as you age because your income is expected to increase. Car manufacturers can't sell cars to people who don't feel comfortable enough in their jobs to take out a car loan or spend a little extra for a non-base model. And, companies can't sell products to their employees if the employees are worried about whether the axe will fall tomorrow. This squares with everything we've been hearing about Millenials - they don't want a car mainly because they can't afford one, they don't want to own a home because they're not secure in their employment, etc.
In my mind, this is why we got Trump. His rhetoric about rolling the clock back to the late 1940s was an easy sell for blue collar workers, but I think enough white collar workers took a hard look at their situation and remembered stories from their parents/grandparents about times when companies showed loyalty, when th
My guess is that they're just extrapolating out an estimate of the number of people it will take to run their new in-house FedEx/UPS service and staff warehouses. Also, if I were a retailer, I'd be banking on trying to capitalize on Sears and Macy's likely bankruptcies in the next 18 months. Macy's might survive in a smaller form but I'm sure Sears is going to be parted out because it's being run by a hedge fund. I doubt technical jobs will be a double-digit percent of this amount -- it's going to be line-level grunts packing boxes, flying planes, driving delivery trucks, etc.
I've also heard many stories about how Amazon is to work for in both technical and ground level positions. I don't think I'd want a tech position there, even though they're working on really cool stuff with AWS. Accounts from alumni I've heard describe it as a huge employer who's insanely tight-fisted and never grew up out of startup crunch mode. Their perfect employee is a fresh grad with no previous experience that will say nothing of working nights, weekends, etc. for low pay. I think the phrase "Seattle hundreds" was coined there initially. Add that to the pressure-cooker back stabbing culture I've heard described many times, and I think I'll pass!
It sounds to me like these people are trying to get a retirement plan paid for by Microsoft. It makes sense -- I'm pretty sure people saw some disturbing things -- but I doubt it rises to the level of PTSD. No one with two brain cells to rub together would share anything truly illegal over Hotmail or any of the other platforms provided by Microsoft. Everyone (should) know that free email and social networking sites will mine every single byte of data you give them, and that includes scanning it for terms of service violations.
Also, I think there's different levels of tolerance people have for disturbing stuff. A lot of people can just take it at face value and report the offenders without internalizing it. People who don't have this personality type shouldn't work in a position like this. Microsoft was dumb on two counts -- forcefully transferring employees to this group and not finding something else for them to do when they started showing signs of cracking up. Microsoft's a big company -- I highly doubt there is no wiggle room in the HR budgets to "park" people someplace until you find them a permanent spot after they don't work out on one team. It seems to me like you need to rotate people in and out of this duty to keep them somewhat mentally healthy.
I'm pretty dead on the inside in terms of being negatively affected by things I see, but I don't know if I could do this work full time. It would really depend on what they actually were looking at on a daily basis. I just don't think it rises to the level of "PTSD." Unless people are really more fragile than I think, I have a hard time believing most claims of PTSD, even in combat situations or similar. Unfortunately, unless AI becomes 100% reliable, there are going to have to be groups of people like this who do nothing but trawl through sick stuff so that other people don't have to see it.
I can definitely see less smoking being a huge contributor to lower cancer rates. It's no surprise that lung cancer is still the most prevalent cause of cancer death though. Smokers are almost guaranteed to have expensive health issues later in life, and a shorter lifespan overall. Consider that more than half the male population and almost 30% of the female population smoked in the 50s, and in 2017 smokers in the US and many other countries are relegated to a sad little corner away from basically any public place. People used to smoke heavily in their offices, their homes, etc. In the circles I run in it's very rare to find smokers; if they are they're older and just don't want to quit...in for a penny in for a pound I guess!
If the study went back further than 1991, I'd also think that deindustrialization and environmental regulation in the US might have something to do with it. Around the 70s and 80s was the time people got serious about not letting companies dump toxic waste into the groundwater, and companies also offshored a lot of their manufacturing. Reduction of air pollution might also contribute - it still amazes me when I drive through big cities with terrible traffic and imagine thousands of pre-catalytic converter 1970s GM/Ford/Chrysler V8 tanks pumping crap into the air.
That said, I don't think I'd want to fight cancer if it turned out I had it. I'd rather have the option of a quick painless death than endless rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery that would only give me a few years of painful life at best. We can't live forever -- even though average lifespan keeps increasing. What kind of shape would most people be in at 100? 110? 115? I'd rather get my 85 or so years in and make the most of them than end up in a progression from assisted living to nursing home to the hospital. It really seems like cancer is an evolutionary check on longevity given that it's a spontaneous uncontrolled cell growth. Pediatric and mid-life cancer is sad, but cancer at an old age is almost expected.
It wouldn't go over well if Apple just said, "Sorry, we don't support this, so we're going to stop selling apps and iThings in China." There's a market of billions of people to sell things to, and I doubt they're willing to fight with the Chinese government over their censorship policy.
I think reaction to this is actually bigger than Apple -- it's the way the US in general acts towards the rest of the world. We have no tolerance for anyone who does anything differently and are convinced that our way is superior and everyone else is just backwards. This happened during the Cold War (the containment policy) and is happening now in the Middle East (refusing to close the power vacuum and insisting that democratic governments be installed in places that aren't ready for them.)
China has chosen a system where they have total central control over the population, media and economy. Honestly, the country has beneifted greatly from it -- there's no opposition when huge projects are undertaken, for example. When the recession hit in 2008, the government plowed untold sums of money into infrastructure to prop things up. Try doing that here -- it's impossible given the stalemate we have today. The government also directly supports industry, another thing that would be impossible to do in the US. I think in the long run they're going to be better off for it because they can just make tough decisions by fiat rather than arguing over it for years. Honestly, I don't care whether or not they let their citizens read the New York Times -- it doesn't affect me.