I'm an occasional iTunes user on both the Mac and Windows versions. I usually start using it when I'm trying to figure out why sync isn't working, or to perform a reset on a phone. My experience, similar to what I've seen with other programs, is that Apple is using the "UX" excuse to dumb down the program. The problem is that since you can manage your phones completely independent of it now, you usually go into iTunes for 2 reasons - to fix problems or to use your music collection on the local machine. In my opinion, neither of these functions are optimal. Too much functionality is hidden or in places you wouldn't expect. This is the problem with consumer-focused software; it has to be completely idiot proof and look pretty, but that makes it less functional.
I'm not defending "GUI by engineer" applications like the ones I have to support at work either. I work with one right now where the configuration part of the app is simply a massive properties tree and XML editor for a 5K+ set of data. But the other extreme is no good either. When a reasonably intelligent person has to spend several seconds trying to figure out which magic gesture or barely-visible hotspot hides the functionality you need, something's wrong.
It's funny you mention that, but it makes sense. Simple software with simple features is hard to screw up security-wise. Abstraction, feature bloat, relying on massive third-party libraries you don't control, etc. are usually the root cause of these problems.
Then again, in the Windows world, once in a while an exploit comes completely out of left field. I think a few years ago there was a patch for Windows Paint of all things, and an exploit in the code for the font subsystem. Talk about stuff that never changes...
I work in an industry whose IT ecosystem has lots of legacy baggage, and has strata of old systems that can be pinpointed to Programming Fad of the Year in the year they were built. Worse yet, my specialty is end user stuff, so my job lately has been to try to clean some of this up. We've got insanely complex Java applets, lots of really old Flash web stuff, Visual Basic 6 that heavily relies on towers of COM+ libraries, web apps that use every single quirk of IE 6, massive ActiveX applications that require scary levels of local permissions to function, and so on. To make it fun, the nature of our industry is such that these are mostly bespoke, one off applications written by companies that don't exist anymore, people we can't find, or consultancies that want millions of dollars for upgrades. Getting this all working on modern systems is a huge challenge, especially when your new normal is supporting non-quirky applications from the present day that are pretty well behaved.
Oracle doesn't make this any easier by not patching flaws in older JREs or other software if you don't pay for extended support. In fact, one issue I had that's thankfully gone now was Oracle's own financial product relying on Oracle's own recompiled JRE (the "JInitiator." Under the covers, Oracle still is patching these security holes for customers who pay an exorbitant license fee to run the "free" client side JRE. They don't release them to the public, ostensibly to get consumers to upgrade, but we know the real reason.
I know companies can't support software forever, but the previous (pre Sun/Oracle merger) environment encouraged client side Java use by giving away the JRE and JDK for free and keeping them patched. Now, applets and browser plugins are a bad idea, everyone realizes this now. But software from the early to mod 2000s relies heavily on them.
For the low end -- Maybe this can be chalked up as another "cost of being poor." Mobile carriers charge an arm and a leg for data now since they're not making money on calls or SMS anymore, plus low income people are less likely to have a service contract and have to do pay as you go rates. So, if you can't afford a cable bill and a mobile phone, the phone wins out. These costs of being poor really suck, and include things like having to rely on check cashing places to do your banking or buying expensive unhealthy packaged food because your neighborhood lacks access to fresh food.
Not sure about the high end though, It would seem to me that the average high income household would have 20 devices installed, several XBoxes for the kids, etc. That kind of hardware requires a wired service of some kind to power its Internet consumption. I can see lots of people cutting out TV, especially high income folks who don't have time to watch it, but not Internet service.
Regular companies have slashed their R&D or eliminated it completely. Bell Labs barely exists anymore, HP, IBM and Microsoft's Research arms are so product focused that very little long-term groundbreaking science comes out of there these days. Product manufacturing being shifted overseas means the engineering around manufacturing and product development is slowly shifting closer to the factories. Add in the fact that science in the academic world is a notoriously unstable, low-paying area to be in, and it's no wonder that basic research gets underfunded. It's not the same in other countries -- foreign students come back from their education here and are treated quite well compared to students here.
The problem is that to continue innovating, you need that R&D pipeline. The public market and the MBA crowd prohibit investment in anything further than 2 quarters out, so something has to come in and pick up the slack. The golden age of for-profit companies paying for R&D is over unless some major shift happens. Not that I want to go back to the Cold War era, but look how much money got poured into the Space Race and defense programs. When the limitations of budgets, etc. were removed, progress was made quickly. The goal was to beat the Russians to the Moon, or to protect the country from a nuclear attack at all costs, and the work got done.
tl;dr: Yes, throwing money at this particular problem will work, and it has in the past. It just takes the will to do it.
The official unemployment numbers are based off a small random sample and don't capture a lot, so there's that issue.
The other issue is that the raw unemployment number doesn't address underemployment, such as - Displaced workers who have to work crappy jobs but want better ones - People who have to work part time but want more hours - Long-term unemployed that stop getting counted when their benefits run out
If these factors were thrown in the mix, that raw percentage would go way up. I remember reading a statistic a little while back that showed that every net job gain since (I think) 2005 has been due to "gig economy" types of arrangements like Uber driver, etc. That's great for Uber and Taskrabbit and the like, but lousy for someone who needs stable full time work to support a family.
I'm one of those crazy people that thinks full employment for anyone who wants it in well paying jobs should be the macroeconomic goal. Unfortunately, it seems that most people don't agree anymore and are perfectly willing to throw the middle class away.
I just got put on a project at work as "the systems guy" for a project being built in Azure. This is in support of a reasonably critical system, and the development staff are salivating over the chance to self-deploy code and infrastructure. It sounds like this problem was caused by the first thing I noticed as a risk -- if you don't limit what Azure users can do, it's just like giving them the keys to the data center. And this isn't in an "evil BOFH control freak" sense, this is just the fact that everything in Azure is virtual and easily changed either manually or through automation. So, someone who's having a bad day could easily make a mistake and get rid of things they have permissions on -- it's possible in AWS too.
It's a really different mindset than even a hosted IaaS service. There, if you do something stupid, at least the physical infrastructure doesn't get rolled up and carried off. Now hopefully you have backups if that happens and can just restore the VMs and storage as needed, but if developers are running the show I would highly doubt it. (In Marco's case, I would imagine this was caused by the classic "run as root, because I'm the boss" issue.
So, in summary, all the (good) sysadmins worrying about the cloud taking their jobs need not worry. The rules of designing a safe computing environment have changed, but they haven't gone away entirely! I'd be a little worried if I were a savant-level EMC or Cisco guru right about now, but generalists with good heads on their shoulders are still in demand.
I'm always glad to see union workers standing up for what they want, and I've never worked in a position where I've even had the opportunity to join a union. It's a nice contrast to the ultra-Libertarian crowd in IT who doesn't realize they're being taken advantage of.
If IT and software development were unionized, or better, entry was controlled by a professional organization, people would have a better quality of life. The H-1B visa abuse wouldn't exist and employers who routinely understaff positions and demand 70-hour work weeks to make up for it would be curbed. If we had a professional organization instead of a union, we could actually train new entrants instead of relying on overpaid consultants and/or dealing with incompetence. Instead, we have the lone ranger mentality, and people are convinced that nothing bad will ever be done by their employer.
From what I've read, the union is entirely justified in this case - Verizon is trying to slowly take away things like employer-paid health care and hoping people don't notice by giving them a salary increase. These things are basics, and should be part of everyone's benefits package. It's executive and shareholder greed, pure and simple. Verizon makes massive amounts of profit and their workers should get their fair share, period.
That's what everyone screaming "taxation is theft!" isn't processing. It's not really loan forgiveness -- the year it's discharged, you get a 1099-C just like any other cancelled debt. So, take a timely example, let's say a student takes out $250K in loans thinking they're going to be a partner at a white shoe law firm after going to law school at Kansas State University. Even if they managed to get on permanent and total disability, that $250K would be fully taxable as income, so you're just swapping one creditor (the DoE) for another (the IRS) who also makes it very difficult to forgive debt.
I think the desired effect of the program is to just give disabled people a break from the student loan debt collectors. From what friends have told me, Sallie Mae and the like are absolutely merciless, calling 20 times a day, calling your neighbors and friends, etc. and harassing you. I've actually had good luck with the IRS as a creditor in the past when I was broke and couldn't pay my tax bill for a year. As long as you communicate with them, it's a lot better than dealing with a collection agency. Ignoring them is when the horror stories start from what I've heard.
I know everyone's going to scream "evil socialism! disability fraud!" but people who actually qualify for a permanent and total disability are never going to be able to fully benefit from their education. Whether it's the inability to do physical work or acknowledging the discrimination that disabled people encounter in the workplace, the result is the same.
In this case, it makes sense to make it easy to get rid of the debt. If I recall correctly, student loans are almost impossible to discharge any other way. Bankruptcy doesn't get rid of them, nor does crippling financial hardship. There is a process to forgive them due to hardship but it's so onerous that no one in a normal situation would qualify.
Note that I didn't necessarily say a "tech CEO" because a lot of tech CEOs are just politicians in disguise. However, I would definitely like to see our country run by intelligent, thoughtful people at some point before I'm gone. Politics is too corrupt now, and relies too much on cronyism, connections and money to be effective. There are just too many people giving politicians money to get their way that nothing gets done in favor of less-wealthy individuals. Having someone who's incredibly rich already might actually be a good thing, because the lobbyists would have less of an effect. Your average Congressman is a lawyer or mid-tier businessman if they're not a career politician, so they're not exactly hurting. But, they're obviously not immune to lobbyists offering money, trips, favors, or anything else.
I think even a dispassionate technocratic leader would restore a lot of balance to the economy and society in general. Even a really rich tech CEO with rich friends would probably take a step back and say, "Hey, is it such a good idea to remove all middle-class jobs from the US? Maybe we should keep some." Not because they care, but because they know that a strong middle class continues to consume, and poor/unemployed/unstable people don't buy things.
I think a lot of that, even with well-informed people, is that people know there's corruption they can't do anything about. Some people are connected, and others aren't. Wealthy people will be able to pay for loopholes that allow them to hide their money, just like tech companies use the H-1B visa rule loopholes to skirt the spirit of the original program.
My reaction to this was twofold: 1. This is going to be a very interesting election cycle in Europe - but nothing will change in Russia or China 2. The US already has so many 100% legal, custom-created tax shelters onshore that there's no need for rich people to transfer their wealth somewhere else.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to play the corruption game yourself. Get a bunch of like minded citizens together, take up a collection, and hand your politicians paper bags of money. Most people don't want to do this, so the system goes on as it always has. FYI, local politics is way more corrupt than national politics, but the scale is smaller so it's less noticeable.
What a lot of people don't realize is that social media and the various ad clickbait sites are becoming a primary form of entertainment, much like TV was a generation ago. Everyone looks at this stuff, not just "computer people" anymore. Try this experiment -- go wait for a train for 5-10 minutes, or go to the DMV or any task that requires sitting still for a few minutes. Every single person who has one and knows how to use it is going to take out their phone and start playing. Advertisers and junk food websites like BuzzFeed or Medium are going to want to capitalize on that. TV is almost 100% reality garbage now because most people who still watch "regular" TV aren't all that swift, so the advertisers give them their junk food.
I like the fact that you can still ignore the Internet's junk food for the most part, but the aggregator portals like Yahoo or MSN are full of it. Seriously, people complain about Slashdot but it's actually not bad compared to some of the alternatives.
One of the things with any cloud-based service (video streaming, AWS, etc.) is that prices are artificially low right now. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. are practically giving away capacity to get companies hooked on their services. At the same time, all the VC-funded startups are subsidizing this cloud build-out so they can continue operating. Netflix and Hulu are pouring money into original content to get more eyeballs a la 1999.
The thing to consider is how fast the price on all these things will go up when Social Mobile Streaming Bubble 2.0 pops. I think this entire market is being propped up by the bubble and will have to come back to Earth sometime. Video streamers are going to have to increase their prices or not offer as much expensive content for the same price, and cloud providers are going to have to cut back on the freebies and crank up their rates.
ITT Tech and DeVry have never been good places to get a solid education. Now that that's pretty well known by most people, they're enrolling the people who don't know or are so desperate that they'll try anything to get a better job. It's no surprise that these schools would try to take advantage of a vulnerable population. I'm not saying universities get free passes on this either, because I've seen lots of students who graduate with a $150K BA in Art History and wonder why they can't get a job. But the for-profit schools just milk unsophisticated people for their student loan money and leave them with nothing.
I consider myself extremely lucky to have started in IT around the mid-90s, when you could still get solid entry-level work. I also am very lucky to have graduated around a time where just getting through a 4-year degree, let alone getting a STEM degree, was an automatic guarantee of at least some kind of middle-class employment. The root problem is that neither of these are true anymore. Offshoring and outsourcing have killed lots of entry-level help desk or support tech jobs, where people get the experience they need to move on to the next level in IT. In development, junior developer jobs have also gone away, so it's not easy for a n00b to get assigned simpler tasks on software projects.
I really think the long-term answer to this is to bring back entry-level employment and set up some sort of apprenticeship system to guarantee the quality of skilled work in IT and development. Offshoring everything pulls the ladder up so people just starting out can't get that first job that they build into a successful career progression.
Have the Gmail designers forgotten that email is now the "old fogey" way to communicate, and that it's a lot more official than IMs or text messages?
I probably wouldn't have fired anyone over this, but responding to an email thread with a "mic drop" by King Bob is the ultimate childish way to end a conversation. I'm reminded of my wise-beyond-his-years 5 year old just turning his back on a conversation he doesn't want to have. There are some people I'd love to do this to because they drive me nuts, but surprise, some people do still act like adults. Something like this could be interpreted as very rude; there's a reason why Exchange/Outlook doesn't have this feature.
It's cute, but it belongs in an IM or one of those social coder tools like Slack, not in email. Email is the new paper mail.
"They'll be in for a shock once they figure out that business owners are not hiding a money printing press in the basement, that they could use to pay their entry-level workers $15/hr. They simply don't have the money, and no amount of radical, left-wing socialist propaganda is going to change that. "
Let's say minimum wage is $8 an hour now and rises to $15. Are there seriously businesses out there that don't make enough profit per employee per hour to absorb a $7 increase? Pizza places around my area charge around $20 for a large pizza. At 50% margin (a very conservative number for pizza given the cost of ingredients) one pizza per hour per employee will cover the increase and still leave $3 in profit, not to mention full margin on all the other pizzas sold that hour.
I'm just saying that this, coupled with the fact that business owners get huge advantages in terms of taxes, is a good counterargument. $15 an hour is not going to kill a business owner, and if it does, then they shouldn't be in business.
One thing I've never understood about these arguments is this -- something is seriously wrong if paying a kid to deliver pizzas $7 more an hour is the one thing that's going to tank your business. This is not a big deal, and is necessary in an environment where low-skilled work is no longer enough to cover basic expenses. Unless we want to switch to the Star Trek model and give everyone enough money or resources to live on, we're still stuck with the old work-for-pay model.
I'm sure not all small business owners are like this, but the ones I've come in contact with strike me as very greedy, entitled people who feel the world should praise them mightily for being such a successful entrepreneur. These are the kind of people who never pay invoices on time even though you know they're good for it, or treat their employees like "the help." The more vocal among them are the ones who complain about things like minimum wage hikes or the "job-killing" tax burden they face. Everyone knows that small business owners don't pay tax the way wage-earners do. Everything (including labor costs and taxes!) is deductible from earnings, including most of the owners' personal expenses through one way or another. That's why business owners have accountants do their taxes -- the accountants know exactly what will trigger audits and help them structure their income and expenses to match it.
When your mindset is based around US-style ACH bank payment, it's confusing that this isn't a reversible thing. I've had the experience of being overpaid several times, and the company just reverses the transfer. I guess wire transfers are just like handing a bag of cash over to the recipient?
This is an interesting story - I guarantee there are people in the company I work for who would happily fall for something like this and be in a position to approve a transaction of that size.
It's interesting to see such a large company letting a bug like this slip by, especially in an operating system. You would think even with an Agile "ship it broken, we'll patch later" mentality, they would have armies of QA people and automated scripts banging away at every corner of the OS. Something like "clicking on any link in our bundled browser with JavaScript turned on crashes the application" seems to me like a showstopper bug.
I'm all for getting stuff rolled out in a reasonable time frame, but core stuff like an operating system needs to be tested a lot more intensely than some social media/dating app. Not everyone is connected 24/7 with easy access to patches...the product I currently do systems engineering work for is used almost exclusively in offline environments.
Even the NSA allowed Snowden, a SharePoint administrator working for a contractor, access to some pretty critical data. If they can't properly control access to information, especially given how many tools there are out there to do so, it's not a shocker that private businesses fail to do so also.
The ransomware epidemic illustrates a very good point -- companies still treat their internal networks as 100% trusted. Once a machine is plugged in, there's nothing stopping it from roaming around the interior. This is the main problem -- laptops get taken home, executives demand admin access to the OS, they bring a virus, Trojan or other nasty in, and suddenly everyone has a bad day.
Internal networks should at the very least have separation of critical systems, preferably air-gaps between seriously critical systems. But that's expensive and companies refuse to spend any money on IT.
None of these "lean and nimble" things end up working out in the idealized, hoped-for way. I've been at a few mega-large corporations and even some medium sized ones that had developed a massive bureaucracy and an authoritarian culture. You don't change that overnight. I know a lot of long-tenure IBMers who have 2 full time jobs -- their real job and the internal political navigation job. Microsoft is like this now. GM is like this. Even if you went through with a chainsaw and cut all the management layers off the org chart, the business just wouldn't function without radical mind-shifts on everyone's part.
This is some McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group pre-packaged consulting engagement that got sold to the board. I'll bet they came in with the same PowerPoints they used on the last one, with the logo changed. This usually involves one or more of the following: - Encouraging "collaborative workspaces" by adopting open-plan offices and removing personal space, replacing it with white, pink and green Ikea office furniture - Rearranging management deck chairs, maybe by getting rid of 1 or 2 layers - Forcing managers to establish things like open door policies - Hundreds of hours of trainings and meetings on the new collaborative, startup-inspired Samsung
Nothing else will change, I guarantee it. Korean work culture is like Japanese work culture -- authoritarian is putting it mildly when discussing management style. The idea is nice, but you can't run a huge corporation whose employees depend on its continued existence as a startup. There's just too much chance some hotshot MBA in some division will end up tanking the whole thing. I've been at companies where it has somewhat worked out, but only after the company realizes they're still huge and bureaucratic, and focuses on getting individual teams to work better together.
"No thank you. IT is one of the last places where smart people who don't want to kiss the iron ring can still ply a worthwhile trade."
Agreed somewhat, but consider this fact -- IT is also one of the only places where someone can: - Slap any old system into place to solve a problem, even claiming "best practice" or whatever - Screw up so badly that they lose data or cause a company to lose massive amounts of money - Get fired, clean up their resume and go get another job as if nothing happened - Repeat over and over again, with no repercussions
I've worked with a lot of incompetent people -- not just ignorant, because no one knows everything. I'm talking about people who are completely unsuitable for the job and get past HR filters and incompetent managers. There is nothing wrong in my mind with guaranteeing a basic level of knowledge, education and experience for each level of employee you hire. It would really cut down on the people with only paper certification knowledge, people who went to "coder bootcamp" because they heard they could make lots of money in IT, and so on.
The key, which you allude to, is striking the balance between a professional organization and an all-controlling guild.
Fortunately, most people won't have the weight of something like this when faced with the decision to keep pushing your position or keep your mouth shut. I've had a number of times where I've suggested something isn't going to work the way people think it will, or that a course of action isn't the right one. Sometimes I've been listened to, and others I've been told I'm "too negative" or "overly cautious" or similar. It happens a lot in IT -- most of us don't work on safety-sensitive systems and don't design things that may fall down and/or kill people. Because of this, lots of projects fail and billions of dollars are just flushed down the toilet. Look at any ERP implementation in a large company; almost none are completely successful and yet those same consulting firms keep raking in money year after year.
I heard this guy's story on NPR a couple months ago, and it really is a sad end; he was tortured for the rest of his life by the fact that he felt there was something more that he could do. It's similar to a development project getting taken over by the salesweasels and marketing people -- the actual engineers who know what's really possible are just ignored and an unrealistic date is promised, a vaporware feature that can't be built is sold, etc.
Before I retire, I would like to see IT including software development start acting more like professional engineers (real PEs) and less like a bunch of cowboys with no guidance or standards. Things that work should be standardized to some extent so they're easily repeatable. Civil engineers, for example, don't go back to first principles designing a run of the mill highway interchange. They use reference designs and only get inventive/creative when the situation warrants it. Contrast that with IT, where Web Framework Of the Month changes every month and there's no standard anything.
I can't believe people don't see what's going to happen when all the unskilled work either disappears or pays so little that you have a permanent underclass of people. Driving a cab is pretty much a last-resort job for people who need to moonlight or can't get any other job. It's unrealistic to think that all these people have the intelligence or resources to train for a higher-level job. Look at all the factory workers who can't get anything better than a home health care aide job. I'd sure hate to be thrown out after 20 years on an assembly line to clean up after dementia patients.
Don't be surprised when the "knowledge worker" jobs are gone too. I consider myself reasonably smart and a hard worker, but no job is immune to this. I also worry about a massive glut of middle-skilled people getting displaced. I work in IT services, and there are so many "customer account coordinators" and "relationship specialists" and "technical project enablers" who fit this mold. They're not deeply technical, most are ex-fraternity or sorority types from Big State University who partied their way through a business degree or maybe even an MBA, and they'll be absolutely screwed when big corporations get around to cutting them out too. The thing is this - those C students pay taxes, buy stuff with their salaries and have children. When the safety net of stable work is cut, no one is going to want to spend or procreate, and then we're really stuck.
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I'm an occasional iTunes user on both the Mac and Windows versions. I usually start using it when I'm trying to figure out why sync isn't working, or to perform a reset on a phone. My experience, similar to what I've seen with other programs, is that Apple is using the "UX" excuse to dumb down the program. The problem is that since you can manage your phones completely independent of it now, you usually go into iTunes for 2 reasons - to fix problems or to use your music collection on the local machine. In my opinion, neither of these functions are optimal. Too much functionality is hidden or in places you wouldn't expect. This is the problem with consumer-focused software; it has to be completely idiot proof and look pretty, but that makes it less functional.
I'm not defending "GUI by engineer" applications like the ones I have to support at work either. I work with one right now where the configuration part of the app is simply a massive properties tree and XML editor for a 5K+ set of data. But the other extreme is no good either. When a reasonably intelligent person has to spend several seconds trying to figure out which magic gesture or barely-visible hotspot hides the functionality you need, something's wrong.
It's funny you mention that, but it makes sense. Simple software with simple features is hard to screw up security-wise. Abstraction, feature bloat, relying on massive third-party libraries you don't control, etc. are usually the root cause of these problems.
Then again, in the Windows world, once in a while an exploit comes completely out of left field. I think a few years ago there was a patch for Windows Paint of all things, and an exploit in the code for the font subsystem. Talk about stuff that never changes...
Define "Actively Supported," Oracle.
I work in an industry whose IT ecosystem has lots of legacy baggage, and has strata of old systems that can be pinpointed to Programming Fad of the Year in the year they were built. Worse yet, my specialty is end user stuff, so my job lately has been to try to clean some of this up. We've got insanely complex Java applets, lots of really old Flash web stuff, Visual Basic 6 that heavily relies on towers of COM+ libraries, web apps that use every single quirk of IE 6, massive ActiveX applications that require scary levels of local permissions to function, and so on. To make it fun, the nature of our industry is such that these are mostly bespoke, one off applications written by companies that don't exist anymore, people we can't find, or consultancies that want millions of dollars for upgrades. Getting this all working on modern systems is a huge challenge, especially when your new normal is supporting non-quirky applications from the present day that are pretty well behaved.
Oracle doesn't make this any easier by not patching flaws in older JREs or other software if you don't pay for extended support. In fact, one issue I had that's thankfully gone now was Oracle's own financial product relying on Oracle's own recompiled JRE (the "JInitiator." Under the covers, Oracle still is patching these security holes for customers who pay an exorbitant license fee to run the "free" client side JRE. They don't release them to the public, ostensibly to get consumers to upgrade, but we know the real reason.
I know companies can't support software forever, but the previous (pre Sun/Oracle merger) environment encouraged client side Java use by giving away the JRE and JDK for free and keeping them patched. Now, applets and browser plugins are a bad idea, everyone realizes this now. But software from the early to mod 2000s relies heavily on them.
For the low end -- Maybe this can be chalked up as another "cost of being poor." Mobile carriers charge an arm and a leg for data now since they're not making money on calls or SMS anymore, plus low income people are less likely to have a service contract and have to do pay as you go rates. So, if you can't afford a cable bill and a mobile phone, the phone wins out. These costs of being poor really suck, and include things like having to rely on check cashing places to do your banking or buying expensive unhealthy packaged food because your neighborhood lacks access to fresh food.
Not sure about the high end though, It would seem to me that the average high income household would have 20 devices installed, several XBoxes for the kids, etc. That kind of hardware requires a wired service of some kind to power its Internet consumption. I can see lots of people cutting out TV, especially high income folks who don't have time to watch it, but not Internet service.
Regular companies have slashed their R&D or eliminated it completely. Bell Labs barely exists anymore, HP, IBM and Microsoft's Research arms are so product focused that very little long-term groundbreaking science comes out of there these days. Product manufacturing being shifted overseas means the engineering around manufacturing and product development is slowly shifting closer to the factories. Add in the fact that science in the academic world is a notoriously unstable, low-paying area to be in, and it's no wonder that basic research gets underfunded. It's not the same in other countries -- foreign students come back from their education here and are treated quite well compared to students here.
The problem is that to continue innovating, you need that R&D pipeline. The public market and the MBA crowd prohibit investment in anything further than 2 quarters out, so something has to come in and pick up the slack. The golden age of for-profit companies paying for R&D is over unless some major shift happens. Not that I want to go back to the Cold War era, but look how much money got poured into the Space Race and defense programs. When the limitations of budgets, etc. were removed, progress was made quickly. The goal was to beat the Russians to the Moon, or to protect the country from a nuclear attack at all costs, and the work got done.
tl;dr: Yes, throwing money at this particular problem will work, and it has in the past. It just takes the will to do it.
The official unemployment numbers are based off a small random sample and don't capture a lot, so there's that issue.
The other issue is that the raw unemployment number doesn't address underemployment, such as
- Displaced workers who have to work crappy jobs but want better ones
- People who have to work part time but want more hours
- Long-term unemployed that stop getting counted when their benefits run out
If these factors were thrown in the mix, that raw percentage would go way up. I remember reading a statistic a little while back that showed that every net job gain since (I think) 2005 has been due to "gig economy" types of arrangements like Uber driver, etc. That's great for Uber and Taskrabbit and the like, but lousy for someone who needs stable full time work to support a family.
I'm one of those crazy people that thinks full employment for anyone who wants it in well paying jobs should be the macroeconomic goal. Unfortunately, it seems that most people don't agree anymore and are perfectly willing to throw the middle class away.
I just got put on a project at work as "the systems guy" for a project being built in Azure. This is in support of a reasonably critical system, and the development staff are salivating over the chance to self-deploy code and infrastructure. It sounds like this problem was caused by the first thing I noticed as a risk -- if you don't limit what Azure users can do, it's just like giving them the keys to the data center. And this isn't in an "evil BOFH control freak" sense, this is just the fact that everything in Azure is virtual and easily changed either manually or through automation. So, someone who's having a bad day could easily make a mistake and get rid of things they have permissions on -- it's possible in AWS too.
It's a really different mindset than even a hosted IaaS service. There, if you do something stupid, at least the physical infrastructure doesn't get rolled up and carried off. Now hopefully you have backups if that happens and can just restore the VMs and storage as needed, but if developers are running the show I would highly doubt it. (In Marco's case, I would imagine this was caused by the classic "run as root, because I'm the boss" issue.
So, in summary, all the (good) sysadmins worrying about the cloud taking their jobs need not worry. The rules of designing a safe computing environment have changed, but they haven't gone away entirely! I'd be a little worried if I were a savant-level EMC or Cisco guru right about now, but generalists with good heads on their shoulders are still in demand.
I'm always glad to see union workers standing up for what they want, and I've never worked in a position where I've even had the opportunity to join a union. It's a nice contrast to the ultra-Libertarian crowd in IT who doesn't realize they're being taken advantage of.
If IT and software development were unionized, or better, entry was controlled by a professional organization, people would have a better quality of life. The H-1B visa abuse wouldn't exist and employers who routinely understaff positions and demand 70-hour work weeks to make up for it would be curbed. If we had a professional organization instead of a union, we could actually train new entrants instead of relying on overpaid consultants and/or dealing with incompetence. Instead, we have the lone ranger mentality, and people are convinced that nothing bad will ever be done by their employer.
From what I've read, the union is entirely justified in this case - Verizon is trying to slowly take away things like employer-paid health care and hoping people don't notice by giving them a salary increase. These things are basics, and should be part of everyone's benefits package. It's executive and shareholder greed, pure and simple. Verizon makes massive amounts of profit and their workers should get their fair share, period.
That's what everyone screaming "taxation is theft!" isn't processing. It's not really loan forgiveness -- the year it's discharged, you get a 1099-C just like any other cancelled debt. So, take a timely example, let's say a student takes out $250K in loans thinking they're going to be a partner at a white shoe law firm after going to law school at Kansas State University. Even if they managed to get on permanent and total disability, that $250K would be fully taxable as income, so you're just swapping one creditor (the DoE) for another (the IRS) who also makes it very difficult to forgive debt.
I think the desired effect of the program is to just give disabled people a break from the student loan debt collectors. From what friends have told me, Sallie Mae and the like are absolutely merciless, calling 20 times a day, calling your neighbors and friends, etc. and harassing you. I've actually had good luck with the IRS as a creditor in the past when I was broke and couldn't pay my tax bill for a year. As long as you communicate with them, it's a lot better than dealing with a collection agency. Ignoring them is when the horror stories start from what I've heard.
I know everyone's going to scream "evil socialism! disability fraud!" but people who actually qualify for a permanent and total disability are never going to be able to fully benefit from their education. Whether it's the inability to do physical work or acknowledging the discrimination that disabled people encounter in the workplace, the result is the same.
In this case, it makes sense to make it easy to get rid of the debt. If I recall correctly, student loans are almost impossible to discharge any other way. Bankruptcy doesn't get rid of them, nor does crippling financial hardship. There is a process to forgive them due to hardship but it's so onerous that no one in a normal situation would qualify.
Note that I didn't necessarily say a "tech CEO" because a lot of tech CEOs are just politicians in disguise. However, I would definitely like to see our country run by intelligent, thoughtful people at some point before I'm gone. Politics is too corrupt now, and relies too much on cronyism, connections and money to be effective. There are just too many people giving politicians money to get their way that nothing gets done in favor of less-wealthy individuals. Having someone who's incredibly rich already might actually be a good thing, because the lobbyists would have less of an effect. Your average Congressman is a lawyer or mid-tier businessman if they're not a career politician, so they're not exactly hurting. But, they're obviously not immune to lobbyists offering money, trips, favors, or anything else.
I think even a dispassionate technocratic leader would restore a lot of balance to the economy and society in general. Even a really rich tech CEO with rich friends would probably take a step back and say, "Hey, is it such a good idea to remove all middle-class jobs from the US? Maybe we should keep some." Not because they care, but because they know that a strong middle class continues to consume, and poor/unemployed/unstable people don't buy things.
I think a lot of that, even with well-informed people, is that people know there's corruption they can't do anything about. Some people are connected, and others aren't. Wealthy people will be able to pay for loopholes that allow them to hide their money, just like tech companies use the H-1B visa rule loopholes to skirt the spirit of the original program.
My reaction to this was twofold:
1. This is going to be a very interesting election cycle in Europe - but nothing will change in Russia or China
2. The US already has so many 100% legal, custom-created tax shelters onshore that there's no need for rich people to transfer their wealth somewhere else.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to play the corruption game yourself. Get a bunch of like minded citizens together, take up a collection, and hand your politicians paper bags of money. Most people don't want to do this, so the system goes on as it always has. FYI, local politics is way more corrupt than national politics, but the scale is smaller so it's less noticeable.
What a lot of people don't realize is that social media and the various ad clickbait sites are becoming a primary form of entertainment, much like TV was a generation ago. Everyone looks at this stuff, not just "computer people" anymore. Try this experiment -- go wait for a train for 5-10 minutes, or go to the DMV or any task that requires sitting still for a few minutes. Every single person who has one and knows how to use it is going to take out their phone and start playing. Advertisers and junk food websites like BuzzFeed or Medium are going to want to capitalize on that. TV is almost 100% reality garbage now because most people who still watch "regular" TV aren't all that swift, so the advertisers give them their junk food.
I like the fact that you can still ignore the Internet's junk food for the most part, but the aggregator portals like Yahoo or MSN are full of it. Seriously, people complain about Slashdot but it's actually not bad compared to some of the alternatives.
One of the things with any cloud-based service (video streaming, AWS, etc.) is that prices are artificially low right now. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. are practically giving away capacity to get companies hooked on their services. At the same time, all the VC-funded startups are subsidizing this cloud build-out so they can continue operating. Netflix and Hulu are pouring money into original content to get more eyeballs a la 1999.
The thing to consider is how fast the price on all these things will go up when Social Mobile Streaming Bubble 2.0 pops. I think this entire market is being propped up by the bubble and will have to come back to Earth sometime. Video streamers are going to have to increase their prices or not offer as much expensive content for the same price, and cloud providers are going to have to cut back on the freebies and crank up their rates.
ITT Tech and DeVry have never been good places to get a solid education. Now that that's pretty well known by most people, they're enrolling the people who don't know or are so desperate that they'll try anything to get a better job. It's no surprise that these schools would try to take advantage of a vulnerable population. I'm not saying universities get free passes on this either, because I've seen lots of students who graduate with a $150K BA in Art History and wonder why they can't get a job. But the for-profit schools just milk unsophisticated people for their student loan money and leave them with nothing.
I consider myself extremely lucky to have started in IT around the mid-90s, when you could still get solid entry-level work. I also am very lucky to have graduated around a time where just getting through a 4-year degree, let alone getting a STEM degree, was an automatic guarantee of at least some kind of middle-class employment. The root problem is that neither of these are true anymore. Offshoring and outsourcing have killed lots of entry-level help desk or support tech jobs, where people get the experience they need to move on to the next level in IT. In development, junior developer jobs have also gone away, so it's not easy for a n00b to get assigned simpler tasks on software projects.
I really think the long-term answer to this is to bring back entry-level employment and set up some sort of apprenticeship system to guarantee the quality of skilled work in IT and development. Offshoring everything pulls the ladder up so people just starting out can't get that first job that they build into a successful career progression.
Have the Gmail designers forgotten that email is now the "old fogey" way to communicate, and that it's a lot more official than IMs or text messages?
I probably wouldn't have fired anyone over this, but responding to an email thread with a "mic drop" by King Bob is the ultimate childish way to end a conversation. I'm reminded of my wise-beyond-his-years 5 year old just turning his back on a conversation he doesn't want to have. There are some people I'd love to do this to because they drive me nuts, but surprise, some people do still act like adults. Something like this could be interpreted as very rude; there's a reason why Exchange/Outlook doesn't have this feature.
It's cute, but it belongs in an IM or one of those social coder tools like Slack, not in email. Email is the new paper mail.
"They'll be in for a shock once they figure out that business owners are not hiding a money printing press in the basement, that they could use to pay their entry-level workers $15/hr. They simply don't have the money, and no amount of radical, left-wing socialist propaganda is going to change that. "
Let's say minimum wage is $8 an hour now and rises to $15. Are there seriously businesses out there that don't make enough profit per employee per hour to absorb a $7 increase? Pizza places around my area charge around $20 for a large pizza. At 50% margin (a very conservative number for pizza given the cost of ingredients) one pizza per hour per employee will cover the increase and still leave $3 in profit, not to mention full margin on all the other pizzas sold that hour.
I'm just saying that this, coupled with the fact that business owners get huge advantages in terms of taxes, is a good counterargument. $15 an hour is not going to kill a business owner, and if it does, then they shouldn't be in business.
One thing I've never understood about these arguments is this -- something is seriously wrong if paying a kid to deliver pizzas $7 more an hour is the one thing that's going to tank your business. This is not a big deal, and is necessary in an environment where low-skilled work is no longer enough to cover basic expenses. Unless we want to switch to the Star Trek model and give everyone enough money or resources to live on, we're still stuck with the old work-for-pay model.
I'm sure not all small business owners are like this, but the ones I've come in contact with strike me as very greedy, entitled people who feel the world should praise them mightily for being such a successful entrepreneur. These are the kind of people who never pay invoices on time even though you know they're good for it, or treat their employees like "the help." The more vocal among them are the ones who complain about things like minimum wage hikes or the "job-killing" tax burden they face. Everyone knows that small business owners don't pay tax the way wage-earners do. Everything (including labor costs and taxes!) is deductible from earnings, including most of the owners' personal expenses through one way or another. That's why business owners have accountants do their taxes -- the accountants know exactly what will trigger audits and help them structure their income and expenses to match it.
When your mindset is based around US-style ACH bank payment, it's confusing that this isn't a reversible thing. I've had the experience of being overpaid several times, and the company just reverses the transfer. I guess wire transfers are just like handing a bag of cash over to the recipient?
This is an interesting story - I guarantee there are people in the company I work for who would happily fall for something like this and be in a position to approve a transaction of that size.
It's interesting to see such a large company letting a bug like this slip by, especially in an operating system. You would think even with an Agile "ship it broken, we'll patch later" mentality, they would have armies of QA people and automated scripts banging away at every corner of the OS. Something like "clicking on any link in our bundled browser with JavaScript turned on crashes the application" seems to me like a showstopper bug.
I'm all for getting stuff rolled out in a reasonable time frame, but core stuff like an operating system needs to be tested a lot more intensely than some social media/dating app. Not everyone is connected 24/7 with easy access to patches...the product I currently do systems engineering work for is used almost exclusively in offline environments.
Even the NSA allowed Snowden, a SharePoint administrator working for a contractor, access to some pretty critical data. If they can't properly control access to information, especially given how many tools there are out there to do so, it's not a shocker that private businesses fail to do so also.
The ransomware epidemic illustrates a very good point -- companies still treat their internal networks as 100% trusted. Once a machine is plugged in, there's nothing stopping it from roaming around the interior. This is the main problem -- laptops get taken home, executives demand admin access to the OS, they bring a virus, Trojan or other nasty in, and suddenly everyone has a bad day.
Internal networks should at the very least have separation of critical systems, preferably air-gaps between seriously critical systems. But that's expensive and companies refuse to spend any money on IT.
None of these "lean and nimble" things end up working out in the idealized, hoped-for way. I've been at a few mega-large corporations and even some medium sized ones that had developed a massive bureaucracy and an authoritarian culture. You don't change that overnight. I know a lot of long-tenure IBMers who have 2 full time jobs -- their real job and the internal political navigation job. Microsoft is like this now. GM is like this. Even if you went through with a chainsaw and cut all the management layers off the org chart, the business just wouldn't function without radical mind-shifts on everyone's part.
This is some McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group pre-packaged consulting engagement that got sold to the board. I'll bet they came in with the same PowerPoints they used on the last one, with the logo changed. This usually involves one or more of the following:
- Encouraging "collaborative workspaces" by adopting open-plan offices and removing personal space, replacing it with white, pink and green Ikea office furniture
- Rearranging management deck chairs, maybe by getting rid of 1 or 2 layers
- Forcing managers to establish things like open door policies
- Hundreds of hours of trainings and meetings on the new collaborative, startup-inspired Samsung
Nothing else will change, I guarantee it. Korean work culture is like Japanese work culture -- authoritarian is putting it mildly when discussing management style. The idea is nice, but you can't run a huge corporation whose employees depend on its continued existence as a startup. There's just too much chance some hotshot MBA in some division will end up tanking the whole thing. I've been at companies where it has somewhat worked out, but only after the company realizes they're still huge and bureaucratic, and focuses on getting individual teams to work better together.
"No thank you. IT is one of the last places where smart people who don't want to kiss the iron ring can still ply a worthwhile trade."
Agreed somewhat, but consider this fact -- IT is also one of the only places where someone can:
- Slap any old system into place to solve a problem, even claiming "best practice" or whatever
- Screw up so badly that they lose data or cause a company to lose massive amounts of money
- Get fired, clean up their resume and go get another job as if nothing happened
- Repeat over and over again, with no repercussions
I've worked with a lot of incompetent people -- not just ignorant, because no one knows everything. I'm talking about people who are completely unsuitable for the job and get past HR filters and incompetent managers. There is nothing wrong in my mind with guaranteeing a basic level of knowledge, education and experience for each level of employee you hire. It would really cut down on the people with only paper certification knowledge, people who went to "coder bootcamp" because they heard they could make lots of money in IT, and so on.
The key, which you allude to, is striking the balance between a professional organization and an all-controlling guild.
Fortunately, most people won't have the weight of something like this when faced with the decision to keep pushing your position or keep your mouth shut. I've had a number of times where I've suggested something isn't going to work the way people think it will, or that a course of action isn't the right one. Sometimes I've been listened to, and others I've been told I'm "too negative" or "overly cautious" or similar. It happens a lot in IT -- most of us don't work on safety-sensitive systems and don't design things that may fall down and/or kill people. Because of this, lots of projects fail and billions of dollars are just flushed down the toilet. Look at any ERP implementation in a large company; almost none are completely successful and yet those same consulting firms keep raking in money year after year.
I heard this guy's story on NPR a couple months ago, and it really is a sad end; he was tortured for the rest of his life by the fact that he felt there was something more that he could do. It's similar to a development project getting taken over by the salesweasels and marketing people -- the actual engineers who know what's really possible are just ignored and an unrealistic date is promised, a vaporware feature that can't be built is sold, etc.
Before I retire, I would like to see IT including software development start acting more like professional engineers (real PEs) and less like a bunch of cowboys with no guidance or standards. Things that work should be standardized to some extent so they're easily repeatable. Civil engineers, for example, don't go back to first principles designing a run of the mill highway interchange. They use reference designs and only get inventive/creative when the situation warrants it. Contrast that with IT, where Web Framework Of the Month changes every month and there's no standard anything.
I can't believe people don't see what's going to happen when all the unskilled work either disappears or pays so little that you have a permanent underclass of people. Driving a cab is pretty much a last-resort job for people who need to moonlight or can't get any other job. It's unrealistic to think that all these people have the intelligence or resources to train for a higher-level job. Look at all the factory workers who can't get anything better than a home health care aide job. I'd sure hate to be thrown out after 20 years on an assembly line to clean up after dementia patients.
Don't be surprised when the "knowledge worker" jobs are gone too. I consider myself reasonably smart and a hard worker, but no job is immune to this. I also worry about a massive glut of middle-skilled people getting displaced. I work in IT services, and there are so many "customer account coordinators" and "relationship specialists" and "technical project enablers" who fit this mold. They're not deeply technical, most are ex-fraternity or sorority types from Big State University who partied their way through a business degree or maybe even an MBA, and they'll be absolutely screwed when big corporations get around to cutting them out too. The thing is this - those C students pay taxes, buy stuff with their salaries and have children. When the safety net of stable work is cut, no one is going to want to spend or procreate, and then we're really stuck.