The problem with introducing software development is that environments like Scratch are the easiest way these days to get a kid to write something and get immediate feedback. How many old timers remember: 10 PRINT "I am Cool" 20 GOTO 10 as their first BASIC program on one of the old home computer platforms of the 80s?
Scratch is like that. You stitch together simple statements and make something actually happen on the screen. You could argue that you could teach them a little JavaScript or something similar. but you still need enough syntax and backstory to get them to do something interesting. This is especially true now that most kids are being raised with "consume only" mobile devices and tablet OSes as their main computing platforms. The Wolfram language is similar -- very easy to pick up, -but- for a beginner the syntax is a barrier. Now that programming is so abstract from the actual hardware, it takes a little effort to introduce the concepts slowly and walk back all that abstraction.
I work with lots of serial-to-Ethernet stuff, various gateways, etc. in an industry with a lot of old technology. The truth is that the vendors of this stuff make it easy to set up, open access by default, and almost never updated. Patches for known things like ssh vulnerabilities or kernel bugs take months. What often happens is some lowest-bid contractor is hired by the utility company to implement control systems, leaves them wide open and the company has no idea how to secure them.
Remember Windows XP SP2? This was the first client OS update after Microsoft started acknowledging security issues. Before that, the firewall was off and everything was on by default, including remote access to system files and services. That was a pretty big shift - before this, very little in the way of security hardening was done because the goal was to make it as easy as possible to use the system. The same thing probably has to happen for these SCADA vendors and other "magic Ethernet converter" device manufacturers to make it difficult to access things remotely by default.
The problem with online ads now is how much CPU/battery/data they use up. Since people are desensitized to them now, the advertisers respond by making the ads more interactive, flashier and in-your-face, which eats all these resources. Your computer needs to run a million JavaScript snippets that go out to all sorts of web addresses to collect content, update cookies, etc.
I don't run ad blockers at some, simply because I'm not really bothered by them that much. But on my work PC, which is on a very slow connection (proxy server in another country,) I have to run them to make browsing tolerable. The problem is that if ads go away, people will need to pay for content. I doubt many people are under the illusion that Google is giving its massive amount of (very helpful) services for free. Given how helpful Google is to my daily work, I'd gladly pay a monthly fee for a "do not track me" version. But how many others would do the same?
This is going to get very interesting as the IoT bubble continues inflating. I'm not in the industrial space, but I do work in an environment with lots of legacy serial devices. There is serious denial that these things still exist to a big extent -- most non-technical people assume everything is USB or has some other connectivity. PC manufacturers have gotten away from shipping PCs with serial ports, and often the solution touted is serial-to-Ethernet bridges like the ones in the article. This is especially true as the pressure to lighten up the edge devices increases (i.e. replace a PC with a tablet.)
The truth is that in any vertical market, very little is done to keep up with security. Look at the link - it took from November 11 to December 30 for the vendor to patch the firmware, and this was for a public, open-authentication level bug. If the IoT is going to catch on, stuff like this needs to be fixed. You can't just put a magic "put it on the Internet" box in front of a legacy device and assume the vendor is doing everything possible to find and fix flaws. This goes double for stuff like serial gateways that don't get much use outside of a few key sectors. (Hint: those key sectors tend to control a lot of very important infrastructure!!)
Microsoft really wants everyone off Windows 7 ASAP, apparently. They probably just want to make sure there are no more XP-style holdouts like last time. By saying you can't put anything other than Windows 10 on new hardware you get from manufacturers, that's a pretty big stake in the ground for traditional enterprise desktop customers. Traditional desktops are on an 18-month production cycle, but companies typically stick with the same OS version for as long as possible unless there's a real reason to upgrade. This is going to pretty much force enterprises to move to 10 at the next hardware cycle. So, Windows 7 will probably be done on new hardware pretty soon. I'm not a big fan of making PCs appliances, but I'm an old fart so I might as well get with the times.:-)
On the other hand, it might be interesting to see what happens to Windows when the need to support all the legacy hardware falls away. Part of OS design for an open platform is a compromise because you can't use every single cool new chipset feature, you have to provide support for IDE hard disks, you need to allow for 10 year old architectures, etc. Phone manufacturers like Apple write the OS directly for the processor and hardware in the devices which might allow them to take advantage of a very specific feature and assume it will always be available on any system the OS runs on.
It's very strange to look back on the Cold War now -- Russia and the US wasted trillions of dollars and built a huge nuclear arsenal basically to stare each other down. If Epcot opened a few years later (mid to late 80s) I wonder if they would be targeting the Japanese pavilion as a possible hotbed of industrial espionage. When you walk through there today, you can feel a little bit of the ghost of the Japanese economic bubble. For those not old enough to remember, this was the time where there were breathless articles published about Japanese takeovers of the US economy. They were also buying up landmarks like Rockefeller Center in NYC basically as "trophies." And it was an interesting time, Japanese car makers had cracked the US car market, their semiconductor and computer industry was going like crazy, and even Marty McFly said "All the best stuff is made in Japan." It's not unlike the Chinese manufacturing takeover we're experiencing. The question is this - Japan's economic bubble popped, but China has much more control over their markets and population...so will this "takeover" last?
I actually like Epcot, but I know it's not as well loved as the other Disney parks. It kind of represents an ideal science-driven technocratic vision of the future that I'd like to see sometime before I'm dead. It also allows typical Muricans to at least be exposed to a couple of sanitized new cultural ideas here and there -- it's very telling that the population holding a passport is still pretty small. (Yes, yes, I know the US is a huge country, but I've never heard people complain so bitterly about getting a passport to go to whatever Caribbean destination their cruise is stopping at.)
1. To quote The Matrix, "The problem is choice." There are tons and tons of choices for news services these days, and they're of varying quality. By quality, I'm referring to well-researched reporting mostly sticking to the facts (I'm well aware that all news sources have some bias.) Quality costs money. You have to pay for an NYT subscription to keep their journalists writing, the BBC has to collect TV license fees to run World Service, and the major news channels need to be paid by advertisers. By nature, people are cheap and gravitate to "free" services. Online, that means random blogger dudes paying the bills using Google ad revenue, or targeted news sites that have an obvious agenda and may be funded by someone without the best of intentions. Random blogger dudes don't have the resources to do actual investigative journalism, i.e. exposing corruption or keeping officials honest. Outside groups have an interest in selling people on their way of thinking, so the bias that's there anyway gets magnified many times over in favor of that group's POV.
2. This leads to Internet journalism becoming a sort of echo chamber for some people. Someone who's conservative isn't going to read the Huffington Post, no matter what they say. A liberal wouldn't read the Drudge Report. This is magnified _again_ by social media honing in on your preferences and likes, and only presenting you content that you would personally be interested in. You may think you're immune to this, but the unfortunate fact is that the Public writ large is not very bright, and many are very influenced by targeted news. (Mainstream examples: MSNBC, Fox News, etc.)
3. Finally, there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory -- and yes, I never thought I'd ever reference this in a post. People love to tout how awful SJWs are and how stifling political correctness is, but frankly there is a lot less civil discourse of any kind these days. People who make the most bombastic statements are the ones who are listened to. People aren't nice because nice doesn't get noticed in all the chaos. Look at Trump -- agree or disagree with his agenda, but he gets attention because he's loud, angry, and taps into the loud angry conservative mindset. Even the mainstream Republicans are trying to keep things somewhat civil, but people gravitate towards the angriest most outrageous voices.
It's really too bad, because I've been feeling lately like we might as well just pack it in and establish a monarchy to keep order. When people aren't educated in politics, and can't see the compromises that are required to run a civil society that doesn't end up eating itself alive, the only thing to do is just take the decisions out of the hands of the common man. I don't think it should happen, but I think it could if it gets bad enough!
This is a pretty interesting reminder that many drugs' mechanism of action aren't fully understood. Even those that are well known operate solely by suppressing or enhancing some specific chemical reaction chain, so in reality they're pretty blunt tools. It's really interesting to think about the drug discovery process; everyone assumes that they at least won't die if the drug has made it to human trials, but apparently that's not the case!
Agreed mostly. The thing I'm seeing is that developers write for the abstraction layer they're using, not really understanding all the magic that goes on under the hood. That wrapper on top of a framework on top of a client-side language runtime running in a Docker container running on a virtual machine running on an IaaS platform of choice eventually talks to a final operating system, and eventually to real, physical hardware. If a developer doesn't have at least some CS background that touches on how the magic happens at a low enough level, solving performance problems becomes difficult. No one should be coding in assembler unless there's no other choice, but assuming the OS or runtime is going to do everything for you really limits what you can do.
I can definitely sympathize with someone who went on vacation and came home to all their possessions floating because of a burst pipe. But -- here's a good example of how not knowing how the magic box works under the hood is a problem. In a real emergency, you can hook the control wires together to force the heat on in most systems until the problem is fixed, or worst case, you buy a new thermostat. So, people complaining about having no heat could have at least made do while the problem was worked out.
I actually have one of these, but didn't experience the bug. Guess I'll go reset it just in case when I get home...
Unfortunately, this is one of the things that make Agile development and the cloud/IoT look bad. I don't want to go back to a complete waterfall software process, but pushing out random releases with the mentality you can always patch it later makes software quality very sloppy. At the very least, control software like this needs to be tested a little better than your average website/app back-end.
Everyone who works for a big enough organization has probably run into people who you have no idea how their salary is justified. I'm not just talking about "oh, I'm better than him because I know more," I'm talking about the secrets that confidential salaries can hide: - Board members' less-than-qualified family members/business associates/friends getting paid a relatively huge salary compared to their role/contribution - Senior level people who have been "parked" after a division closure or similar event -- often because they have lots of knowledge that would otherwise disappear, more often because they are politically connected - Revealing how much politics really affects salaries would be a huge morale-buster.
The bigger the organization, the more these become apparent. For example, look at HP laying off 30,000 employees or IBM laying off 20,000. Most of it is probably offshore talent replacement in these cases, but I'm sure there are plenty of highly-compensated people left over from acquisitions, etc. that they're just taking the opportunity to purge because they were making a lot of money and not contributing a lot.
The state university health system that most of my doctors belong to started using EHR software in earnest about 6 or 7 years ago. It amazes me that the designers and developers of EHR software seem like they design stuff that's intentionally frustrating to use. I've seen worse UIs, but they tend to be for things like buzzword-compliant ITIL based service desk ticketing software, or things that are so proprietary that a functional GUI is not something the customers will pay for. Every time I've gone for an appointment, especially when I'm a new patient (even within the same health system,) the first 10 minutes of the appointment is a frustrated doctor asking question after question, followed by 6 keystrokes, 20 clicks, dropdown here, expand button there, etc. etc. etc. It's as if an offshore code factory was handed a spec, coded exactly to that, and no integration work was done to ensure it would be usable -- and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. You might say doctors are a pampered, privileged class who are used to having nurses and medical assistants to do all the "work" but from what I've seen the software is a mess. My dermatologist gave me a "tour" when he found out I was an IT guy -- if I were a doctor I'd be running back to the paper charts in a flash.
Contrast this with the industry I work in -- airlines. Yes, it's old, proprietary, ancient, slow dinosaur technology.at the core, but the GUIs are designed for maximum throughput. An experienced reservation agent can do a booking in under a minute without taking their hands off the keyboard, and everything in the application is actually designed to minimize cognitive load. As an example, I've never worked behind the counter on real passengers, but I can sit down in front of the GUI and understand the flow, look stuff up, etc. That's because the reservation system companies do actual time-and-motion studies and watch real people use the product. I highly doubt the EHR companies do this, nor do they have anyone on staff who uses their software regularly.
"but I honestly don't know how they would catch me in the first place."
Lots of people think that. What usually happens in these white collar cases is that the crime goes undetected for quite some time, until something somewhere (however unrelated) triggers a red flag. Then the forensic accountants come in, walk back methodically through everything and find something that points to the original perpetrator. The only reason this one was caught so fast was most likely because the people getting scammed realized quickly that they weren't able to file returns.
I have had access to lots of personal data, credit card details, etc. in previous jobs also. Other than being an honest person, the spectre of a forensic accountant whose sole job is to find things that don't balance out keeps most smart people honest.
There was a story a few years back about a Verizon Wireless employee who RMA'd millions of dollars in working Cisco equipment and sold it on eBay; took years before he was caught. Apparently VZW has/had a "zero haggle, just throw it away and don't return it" advanced replacement policy with Cisco and this guy had the authority to mark the parts as repaired. There's a tempting target if I ever saw one -- he probably assumed it would go on forever once he realized the loophole he found was so huge.
The whole security by obscurity thing happens way more than people think. Why do you think e-file refund scams work in the first place? Because (most likely) when the core system was designed, it was assumed that an IRS employee was entering the paper returns received in the mail by hand into an IRS-controlled computer. Therefore, the system only does a cursory SSN-to-name match as a sanity check before issuing a refund for whatever amount the return shows (as long as the math checks out.) The IRS is processing millions of returns a year, so this is only noticed when a taxpayer tries to file their return and is told they've already done so; it happened to a relative of mine a couple years ago.
Not knowing the architecture, e-file really feels like a security by obscurity mess. Perhaps the IRS gives "trusted e-file providers" encryption keys for an Internet-accessible gateway, and the tax software just pumps the raw data directly into the main filing system from the end user. Also, once it gets inside the IRS, the data is probably considered "trusted" and not encrypted as it's passed around from system to system. People love to hate the IRS, and I'm sure that's reflected in budget appropriations, so whatever system is in place is probably never upgraded beyond skeleton crew maintenance stuff and new regulations coding.
This is going to be the interesting part of the Internet of Things push -- take existing systems and slap them onto the Internet, no matter what it takes. I'm seeing this a lot in the private sector as well -- cloud cloud cloud! Get our previously inaccessible, vulnerable product out on the Internet before the competition does! IoT!! We're Agile, we'll fix all the problems as we go! Social! Apps! Etc...
In this case, it's interesting psychology. The article even states it - people assume that their data is safe once it makes it inside the IRS. Same way people assume their banking or health data are safe, then find out it's not as protected as they think.
IPv6 is a very different beast from IPv4. One of its strengths is also a weakness - NATless wide open host to host routing of traffic. This is great as long as everyone adequately protects their internal network from outside access. However, the vast majority of home and small business networks are hidden behind a consumer-grade NAT router. Given the low level of understanding of what's actually under the hood, IT people (and consumers) have been conditioned for years to believe anything plugged into the inside of their router is safe from outside access or discovery. It would seem to me that the safest thing would be to continue using IPv6's NAT feature for networks like this. Not many people understand what actually makes IP routing work at a nuts-and-bolts level, so this would be a safe default. 20 years ago, when IPv6 was new, I would have more faith that the average IT person would have a better grasp of details like this. These days, it's abstracted away for the most part. I doubt non-network focused IT people learn the stack to the same depth they had to in the past.
Even large enterprise networks I've seen implicitly trust traffic on the inside. Obviously that's not the best way to go, but re-architecting the network for trust-nothing operation is a slow process the larger the entity.
I'm squarely on the "systems" side of computing, having risen through help desk monkey, support tech, system admin, and finally landing on the systems integration/engineering spot. Every time I've considered taking on more development-focused roles, I've always backed away because of how much generic low-level coding work is being automated, abstracted away or offshored/outsourced. Any dev work that I do is focused on automating installs and tasks (PowerShell, Linux shell scripts, orchestration stuff, etc.) The "appealing to women" crowd is probably going to be strong in their condemnation of this approach, but I do feel that knowing CS concepts is important for a broad range of tech-related jobs and tasks, more so than "spoon fed introductory Java and a little discrete math, we'll teach the interesting stuff later" that you see in intro to CS courses. Therefore, having a "concepts" AP course is a good way to allow people to see if they have the aptitude for either development or IT work in general.
The truth is that low level coder positions, as in "here's the spec, code exactly to it" work, is going to be less lucrative. Same thing with expert-level systems work, as in "Cisco IOS guru" or "EMC storage wizard" or "VSphere administrator." Offshoring is driving the low level coders out, and cloud is driving the systems guys who are so far into a particular niche that they can't think outside of it anymore. Of course, you are still going to need genius-level people in both spots, but there will be fewer of them, and they will tend to work for service providers -- Azure and AWS run on physical hardware somewhere down the stack and that's where the genius level guys are going to wind up.
What I think is going to end up being a reasonably stable place to be is a generalist who is capable of seeing the whole end-to-end stack regardless of where it runs or who is coding it. What we will need fewer of is pure CS grads, especially those who don't really understand what's going on under the hood in their language/OS/database/network of choice. So yeah, give high school students a broader taste of what's out there, get them thinking logically and some might end up in CS.
I'm not discounting what pharmacists do -- they know more about drugs than most doctors. I am saying that they have a very nice, protected work life, the entry into the field and licensure is limited to keep supply low, and demand is high; you can go anywhere you want and get a pharmacy job. If I could tell "19-year-old Me" anything, it would be to study hard and get a job in s profession, rather than fight tooth and nail for the last remaining IT or developer jobs.
The reason CVS and the like haven't removed pharmacists from the stores, beyond liability reasons, is the fact that pharmacy is a licensed profession. It's a profession with a strong political lobby, just like doctors have and lawyers had. (The ABA sold out the legal profession by flooding the job market and allowing offshoring.) This serves as a very important lesson to techies everywhere -- even if you don't form a "union", which I think wouldn't work, we need to work together to stop things like H-1B abuses, offshoring of critical work, and rampant incompetency in the software and systems "profession." I've said it before, IT people and developers need to pool their resources, set up an engineering-style profession, and buy a few favorable laws. I don't know whypeople are so opposed to this - every large company pays for legislation, including laws that reduce employment and salaries for IT/dev.
I think it would be a huge step forward: - No more idiot snake oil consultants selling magic tools -- I do systems management and can't even count the number of dashboards, data aggregators, etc. that are super-simple tools, get bought for 6-figures, and end up shelfware. - Salary progression over a whole career, not just the under-40 part. - Real training (not vendor propaganda) - While there will always be different levels of talent, the idea of not working with complete morons fresh out of coder bootcamp or vendor certification academies is very appealing.
"ESPN is a huge part of Disney's revenue, and profits, and ESPN has been losing subscribers since 2010."
That, and content for ESPN costs a bundle to acquire. Paying for the rights to a major sport's broadcasts requires astronomical sums, so they have to be sure profit is there. They've been losing subscribers, in my opinion, because there just aren't as many sports-crazed people as there once were. There's so many other entertainment choices, many of them having nothing to do with athletic activity. Earlier on there were fewer choices -- Sunday afternoons were dominated by the NFL way more than they are now. As the hardcore sports nut demographic ages out, there's fewer newbies to take the place of the older fans. That's not saying there are no sports-obsessed people out there; no one would argue that. It's just that the replacement rate is trending lower. ESPN needs to deal with that fact by lowering costs.
Yup, definitely agree on this, have seen it several times.
I'm by no means a model parent, but one of the things we've been pretty good about is not succumbing to every single demand. You'd be surprised how many parents have trouble with this; it's easier to agree than say no. I've seen lots of workaholic families who replace their kid time with stuff, parents going through divorces and other major crap just buying off their kids, etc. Advertisers/marketers love this because they don't even have to try too hard.
I'm an "old" dad of 2 little kids. They're both Disney fanatics as well as big fans of other "corporate media" properties. I think some perspective is required here. Of course it makes sense for Disney to buy up things like the Star Wars franchise, LEGO (perhaps) and other 80s-kid favorites. Why? Because people who were kids in the 80s and 90s are now in their 30s and 40s, and have a lot of discretionary income to spend. I was born in '75, so I do remember my childhood being filled with a lot of true innovations in technology -- personal computers, all sorts of "new" electronic toys, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. These days, the innovation is focused mainly on getting that computer in your pocket to do cool new things, but this era was a little different in that everything "computery" in the kid space was totally new. So, Disney is targeting the older parents for 2 reasons -- first, people are waiting longer to have kids, and second, those who do are having fewer and are in a better position to buy stuff from Disney. I'm sure they go after younger parents too, but younger parents are usually stretched pretty thin compared to someone who's had time to acquire some stability in their lives.
I think the key is to make sure your kids understand that even though they love their media properties, they need to remain skeptical of marketing. I'm completely unaffected by advertising, but I am seeing that my 5 year old is now starting to inquire about add-ons to "free to play" apps. I don't love the fact that the marketers are manipulating his brain, but it's a fact of life. I've explained to him (in 5 year old terms) that things cost money, that parents have to work for money, that advertisers are only trying to get you to spend more money on their product and that he shouldn't believe everything they say. It's semi-effective. We don't let them sit in front of the TV, computer or iPad forever, and don't expose them to a million commercials.
It's fine to let kids and adults enjoy Disney or whatever -- they're an entertainment business, it makes sense that people enjoy their output. The problem comes when people shut off their brains and let the advertisers in.
As people and the article have pointed out, a massive data center build (often in the middle of nowhere) doesn't really benefit the local population of an area. Unless the company is moving a ton of admin jobs along with it, the tax base doesn't even increase when all these incentives are factored in. You'll have security guards, facility engineers (HVAC etc.) and a very small rack-stack-fix type of staff. Also, in the case of public cloud style data centers, everything beyond the physical hardware replacement is software-controlled once the core is built out, so you won't have as many traditional sysadmins employed. Plus, the added power and public utility costs add up as well when you consider generation costs, building or improving roads, etc.
The thing about these special tax breaks is that states have to play Prisoners' Dilemma with each other. I live in a high-tax state (NY) and we're always hearing large companies with big New York operations threatening to move to North Carolina, Florida, Texas, etc. if they don't get a special tax deal. They do this because they know they can - the low tax states will do crazy deals to get companies to move there. A company I worked for moved to Orlando, and the state and city were practically building the company a new headquarters, building new roads and easing building restrictions to suit their needs. Plus, they got some insane tax abatement for 10+ years and cheap utility rates on top of that. When companies don't have to pay normal levels of tax, the only possible upside is increased property, sales and payroll taxes from employees that move in. The high tax states have to do at least some of this also, but it's an even worse deal for them usually since they have greater expenses to cover. Florida and other low tax states spend a lot less on education, they don't have to remove snow in the winter or perform as much road maintenance, etc.
Wasn't Flint the city that basically got abandoned by GM when they closed their plants years ago? They're held up as a poster child for Rust Belt decline, much the same way my hometown was back in the 80s. So the question is where the lead is coming from -- is it a natural source? I thought most large-scale industrial activity that could cause that much lead emission outside of auto production was done in Michigan long ago.
Whatever the cause, talk about a crappy set of circumstances. A city now has an environmental mess to deal with after losing all of its industry and chance of a recovery.
There is currently a massive migration of people from New York to North Carolina. It seems like every day I hear someone I know tell me they got a job in Charlotte/RTP, and how happy they are to be free of the horrible yoke of property taxes. (Yes, taxes in NY are very high, but you get what you pay for.)
What people who move there tell me after being there is the same people who abandoned northern states for Atlanta in the 90s. They love paying comparatively no taxes and living in huge mansions within the Relocation Zone. Companies are moving most of their paper-pushing mid level jobs to regions like this because they don't have to pay as much for run-of-the-mill employees, so there is work for most people. And I agree with them somewhat -- where I live in metro NY, a 60-year old tiny 3 bedroom house starts in the half-million dollar range in a location that's a reasonable commute to the city. Take someone out of that environment and put them in a 5000 ft^2 mansion on 2 acres of land for the same amount, and why wouldn't they be happy?
However, they also tell me that once outside of the Relocation Zones, things get a whole lot less progressive. You know, full of people like the townspeople in the article. I heard the exact same thing from the Atlanta relocators last decade -- great inside the enclave, backwards outside of it. I'm sure there is change afoot, but change takes a long time to come around.
I wonder if Canada is accepting the few remaining intelligent, informed Americans as refugees.:-) I've only half-considered moving -- I work for a multinational and could pretty easily get a European work visa through the company. Maybe if Trump wins the election, I'll finally go hand in the old passport.
This sounds a lot like the same folks who get scammed by homeopathic "doctors" and buy thousands of dollars in quack remedies. Or the people who are scared by exposure to "electromagnetic radiation" and cite it as a cause of health problems.
I like a previous poster's idea of setting up "dumb people elections" and running the government via a secret bunch of smart people. When all the candidates are going for the dumb people, the outrageous stuff they say should be very amusing, even more than it is now.
I can just see some non-technical IT manager in your average in-house IT department looking at this as a replacement for "expensive" developers. "Hey, look, I can get a bunch of kids and desperate age-discriminated developers to do your job for half the price!" In that way, it is the Uber of coding -- driving out any way to make a living from low-end work.
People like to point to the recent $15/hr minimum wage debate and laugh, but I'm not surprised it's coming up. If average people who would otherwise have a decent corporate job with a good salary and benefits have to resort to hustling for work, a fast food job might be a better option. At least you'd only have to string 2 or 3 of those jobs together to make ends meet instead of hustling 9 or 10 "gigs".
I doubt high-end development will be impacted, but your average "write me a web front end for this data set" coder might be in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with introducing software development is that environments like Scratch are the easiest way these days to get a kid to write something and get immediate feedback. How many old timers remember:
10 PRINT "I am Cool"
20 GOTO 10
as their first BASIC program on one of the old home computer platforms of the 80s?
Scratch is like that. You stitch together simple statements and make something actually happen on the screen. You could argue that you could teach them a little JavaScript or something similar. but you still need enough syntax and backstory to get them to do something interesting. This is especially true now that most kids are being raised with "consume only" mobile devices and tablet OSes as their main computing platforms. The Wolfram language is similar -- very easy to pick up, -but- for a beginner the syntax is a barrier. Now that programming is so abstract from the actual hardware, it takes a little effort to introduce the concepts slowly and walk back all that abstraction.
I work with lots of serial-to-Ethernet stuff, various gateways, etc. in an industry with a lot of old technology. The truth is that the vendors of this stuff make it easy to set up, open access by default, and almost never updated. Patches for known things like ssh vulnerabilities or kernel bugs take months. What often happens is some lowest-bid contractor is hired by the utility company to implement control systems, leaves them wide open and the company has no idea how to secure them.
Remember Windows XP SP2? This was the first client OS update after Microsoft started acknowledging security issues. Before that, the firewall was off and everything was on by default, including remote access to system files and services. That was a pretty big shift - before this, very little in the way of security hardening was done because the goal was to make it as easy as possible to use the system. The same thing probably has to happen for these SCADA vendors and other "magic Ethernet converter" device manufacturers to make it difficult to access things remotely by default.
The problem with online ads now is how much CPU/battery/data they use up. Since people are desensitized to them now, the advertisers respond by making the ads more interactive, flashier and in-your-face, which eats all these resources. Your computer needs to run a million JavaScript snippets that go out to all sorts of web addresses to collect content, update cookies, etc.
I don't run ad blockers at some, simply because I'm not really bothered by them that much. But on my work PC, which is on a very slow connection (proxy server in another country,) I have to run them to make browsing tolerable. The problem is that if ads go away, people will need to pay for content. I doubt many people are under the illusion that Google is giving its massive amount of (very helpful) services for free. Given how helpful Google is to my daily work, I'd gladly pay a monthly fee for a "do not track me" version. But how many others would do the same?
This is going to get very interesting as the IoT bubble continues inflating. I'm not in the industrial space, but I do work in an environment with lots of legacy serial devices. There is serious denial that these things still exist to a big extent -- most non-technical people assume everything is USB or has some other connectivity. PC manufacturers have gotten away from shipping PCs with serial ports, and often the solution touted is serial-to-Ethernet bridges like the ones in the article. This is especially true as the pressure to lighten up the edge devices increases (i.e. replace a PC with a tablet.)
The truth is that in any vertical market, very little is done to keep up with security. Look at the link - it took from November 11 to December 30 for the vendor to patch the firmware, and this was for a public, open-authentication level bug. If the IoT is going to catch on, stuff like this needs to be fixed. You can't just put a magic "put it on the Internet" box in front of a legacy device and assume the vendor is doing everything possible to find and fix flaws. This goes double for stuff like serial gateways that don't get much use outside of a few key sectors. (Hint: those key sectors tend to control a lot of very important infrastructure!!)
Microsoft really wants everyone off Windows 7 ASAP, apparently. They probably just want to make sure there are no more XP-style holdouts like last time. By saying you can't put anything other than Windows 10 on new hardware you get from manufacturers, that's a pretty big stake in the ground for traditional enterprise desktop customers. Traditional desktops are on an 18-month production cycle, but companies typically stick with the same OS version for as long as possible unless there's a real reason to upgrade. This is going to pretty much force enterprises to move to 10 at the next hardware cycle. So, Windows 7 will probably be done on new hardware pretty soon. I'm not a big fan of making PCs appliances, but I'm an old fart so I might as well get with the times. :-)
On the other hand, it might be interesting to see what happens to Windows when the need to support all the legacy hardware falls away. Part of OS design for an open platform is a compromise because you can't use every single cool new chipset feature, you have to provide support for IDE hard disks, you need to allow for 10 year old architectures, etc. Phone manufacturers like Apple write the OS directly for the processor and hardware in the devices which might allow them to take advantage of a very specific feature and assume it will always be available on any system the OS runs on.
I wonder how Microsoft is going to handle VMs.
It's very strange to look back on the Cold War now -- Russia and the US wasted trillions of dollars and built a huge nuclear arsenal basically to stare each other down. If Epcot opened a few years later (mid to late 80s) I wonder if they would be targeting the Japanese pavilion as a possible hotbed of industrial espionage. When you walk through there today, you can feel a little bit of the ghost of the Japanese economic bubble. For those not old enough to remember, this was the time where there were breathless articles published about Japanese takeovers of the US economy. They were also buying up landmarks like Rockefeller Center in NYC basically as "trophies." And it was an interesting time, Japanese car makers had cracked the US car market, their semiconductor and computer industry was going like crazy, and even Marty McFly said "All the best stuff is made in Japan." It's not unlike the Chinese manufacturing takeover we're experiencing. The question is this - Japan's economic bubble popped, but China has much more control over their markets and population...so will this "takeover" last?
I actually like Epcot, but I know it's not as well loved as the other Disney parks. It kind of represents an ideal science-driven technocratic vision of the future that I'd like to see sometime before I'm dead. It also allows typical Muricans to at least be exposed to a couple of sanitized new cultural ideas here and there -- it's very telling that the population holding a passport is still pretty small. (Yes, yes, I know the US is a huge country, but I've never heard people complain so bitterly about getting a passport to go to whatever Caribbean destination their cruise is stopping at.)
I think it's a two-fold problem:
1. To quote The Matrix, "The problem is choice." There are tons and tons of choices for news services these days, and they're of varying quality. By quality, I'm referring to well-researched reporting mostly sticking to the facts (I'm well aware that all news sources have some bias.) Quality costs money. You have to pay for an NYT subscription to keep their journalists writing, the BBC has to collect TV license fees to run World Service, and the major news channels need to be paid by advertisers. By nature, people are cheap and gravitate to "free" services. Online, that means random blogger dudes paying the bills using Google ad revenue, or targeted news sites that have an obvious agenda and may be funded by someone without the best of intentions. Random blogger dudes don't have the resources to do actual investigative journalism, i.e. exposing corruption or keeping officials honest. Outside groups have an interest in selling people on their way of thinking, so the bias that's there anyway gets magnified many times over in favor of that group's POV.
2. This leads to Internet journalism becoming a sort of echo chamber for some people. Someone who's conservative isn't going to read the Huffington Post, no matter what they say. A liberal wouldn't read the Drudge Report. This is magnified _again_ by social media honing in on your preferences and likes, and only presenting you content that you would personally be interested in. You may think you're immune to this, but the unfortunate fact is that the Public writ large is not very bright, and many are very influenced by targeted news. (Mainstream examples: MSNBC, Fox News, etc.)
3. Finally, there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory -- and yes, I never thought I'd ever reference this in a post. People love to tout how awful SJWs are and how stifling political correctness is, but frankly there is a lot less civil discourse of any kind these days. People who make the most bombastic statements are the ones who are listened to. People aren't nice because nice doesn't get noticed in all the chaos. Look at Trump -- agree or disagree with his agenda, but he gets attention because he's loud, angry, and taps into the loud angry conservative mindset. Even the mainstream Republicans are trying to keep things somewhat civil, but people gravitate towards the angriest most outrageous voices.
It's really too bad, because I've been feeling lately like we might as well just pack it in and establish a monarchy to keep order. When people aren't educated in politics, and can't see the compromises that are required to run a civil society that doesn't end up eating itself alive, the only thing to do is just take the decisions out of the hands of the common man. I don't think it should happen, but I think it could if it gets bad enough!
This is a pretty interesting reminder that many drugs' mechanism of action aren't fully understood. Even those that are well known operate solely by suppressing or enhancing some specific chemical reaction chain, so in reality they're pretty blunt tools. It's really interesting to think about the drug discovery process; everyone assumes that they at least won't die if the drug has made it to human trials, but apparently that's not the case!
"the new age programmer, the Web 2.0 guy"
Agreed mostly. The thing I'm seeing is that developers write for the abstraction layer they're using, not really understanding all the magic that goes on under the hood. That wrapper on top of a framework on top of a client-side language runtime running in a Docker container running on a virtual machine running on an IaaS platform of choice eventually talks to a final operating system, and eventually to real, physical hardware. If a developer doesn't have at least some CS background that touches on how the magic happens at a low enough level, solving performance problems becomes difficult. No one should be coding in assembler unless there's no other choice, but assuming the OS or runtime is going to do everything for you really limits what you can do.
I can definitely sympathize with someone who went on vacation and came home to all their possessions floating because of a burst pipe. But -- here's a good example of how not knowing how the magic box works under the hood is a problem. In a real emergency, you can hook the control wires together to force the heat on in most systems until the problem is fixed, or worst case, you buy a new thermostat. So, people complaining about having no heat could have at least made do while the problem was worked out.
I actually have one of these, but didn't experience the bug. Guess I'll go reset it just in case when I get home...
Unfortunately, this is one of the things that make Agile development and the cloud/IoT look bad. I don't want to go back to a complete waterfall software process, but pushing out random releases with the mentality you can always patch it later makes software quality very sloppy. At the very least, control software like this needs to be tested a little better than your average website/app back-end.
Everyone who works for a big enough organization has probably run into people who you have no idea how their salary is justified. I'm not just talking about "oh, I'm better than him because I know more," I'm talking about the secrets that confidential salaries can hide:
- Board members' less-than-qualified family members/business associates/friends getting paid a relatively huge salary compared to their role/contribution
- Senior level people who have been "parked" after a division closure or similar event -- often because they have lots of knowledge that would otherwise disappear, more often because they are politically connected
- Revealing how much politics really affects salaries would be a huge morale-buster.
The bigger the organization, the more these become apparent. For example, look at HP laying off 30,000 employees or IBM laying off 20,000. Most of it is probably offshore talent replacement in these cases, but I'm sure there are plenty of highly-compensated people left over from acquisitions, etc. that they're just taking the opportunity to purge because they were making a lot of money and not contributing a lot.
The state university health system that most of my doctors belong to started using EHR software in earnest about 6 or 7 years ago. It amazes me that the designers and developers of EHR software seem like they design stuff that's intentionally frustrating to use. I've seen worse UIs, but they tend to be for things like buzzword-compliant ITIL based service desk ticketing software, or things that are so proprietary that a functional GUI is not something the customers will pay for. Every time I've gone for an appointment, especially when I'm a new patient (even within the same health system,) the first 10 minutes of the appointment is a frustrated doctor asking question after question, followed by 6 keystrokes, 20 clicks, dropdown here, expand button there, etc. etc. etc. It's as if an offshore code factory was handed a spec, coded exactly to that, and no integration work was done to ensure it would be usable -- and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. You might say doctors are a pampered, privileged class who are used to having nurses and medical assistants to do all the "work" but from what I've seen the software is a mess. My dermatologist gave me a "tour" when he found out I was an IT guy -- if I were a doctor I'd be running back to the paper charts in a flash.
Contrast this with the industry I work in -- airlines. Yes, it's old, proprietary, ancient, slow dinosaur technology.at the core, but the GUIs are designed for maximum throughput. An experienced reservation agent can do a booking in under a minute without taking their hands off the keyboard, and everything in the application is actually designed to minimize cognitive load. As an example, I've never worked behind the counter on real passengers, but I can sit down in front of the GUI and understand the flow, look stuff up, etc. That's because the reservation system companies do actual time-and-motion studies and watch real people use the product. I highly doubt the EHR companies do this, nor do they have anyone on staff who uses their software regularly.
"but I honestly don't know how they would catch me in the first place."
Lots of people think that. What usually happens in these white collar cases is that the crime goes undetected for quite some time, until something somewhere (however unrelated) triggers a red flag. Then the forensic accountants come in, walk back methodically through everything and find something that points to the original perpetrator. The only reason this one was caught so fast was most likely because the people getting scammed realized quickly that they weren't able to file returns.
I have had access to lots of personal data, credit card details, etc. in previous jobs also. Other than being an honest person, the spectre of a forensic accountant whose sole job is to find things that don't balance out keeps most smart people honest.
There was a story a few years back about a Verizon Wireless employee who RMA'd millions of dollars in working Cisco equipment and sold it on eBay; took years before he was caught. Apparently VZW has/had a "zero haggle, just throw it away and don't return it" advanced replacement policy with Cisco and this guy had the authority to mark the parts as repaired. There's a tempting target if I ever saw one -- he probably assumed it would go on forever once he realized the loophole he found was so huge.
The whole security by obscurity thing happens way more than people think. Why do you think e-file refund scams work in the first place? Because (most likely) when the core system was designed, it was assumed that an IRS employee was entering the paper returns received in the mail by hand into an IRS-controlled computer. Therefore, the system only does a cursory SSN-to-name match as a sanity check before issuing a refund for whatever amount the return shows (as long as the math checks out.) The IRS is processing millions of returns a year, so this is only noticed when a taxpayer tries to file their return and is told they've already done so; it happened to a relative of mine a couple years ago.
Not knowing the architecture, e-file really feels like a security by obscurity mess. Perhaps the IRS gives "trusted e-file providers" encryption keys for an Internet-accessible gateway, and the tax software just pumps the raw data directly into the main filing system from the end user. Also, once it gets inside the IRS, the data is probably considered "trusted" and not encrypted as it's passed around from system to system. People love to hate the IRS, and I'm sure that's reflected in budget appropriations, so whatever system is in place is probably never upgraded beyond skeleton crew maintenance stuff and new regulations coding.
This is going to be the interesting part of the Internet of Things push -- take existing systems and slap them onto the Internet, no matter what it takes. I'm seeing this a lot in the private sector as well -- cloud cloud cloud! Get our previously inaccessible, vulnerable product out on the Internet before the competition does! IoT!! We're Agile, we'll fix all the problems as we go! Social! Apps! Etc...
In this case, it's interesting psychology. The article even states it - people assume that their data is safe once it makes it inside the IRS. Same way people assume their banking or health data are safe, then find out it's not as protected as they think.
IPv6 is a very different beast from IPv4. One of its strengths is also a weakness - NATless wide open host to host routing of traffic. This is great as long as everyone adequately protects their internal network from outside access. However, the vast majority of home and small business networks are hidden behind a consumer-grade NAT router. Given the low level of understanding of what's actually under the hood, IT people (and consumers) have been conditioned for years to believe anything plugged into the inside of their router is safe from outside access or discovery. It would seem to me that the safest thing would be to continue using IPv6's NAT feature for networks like this. Not many people understand what actually makes IP routing work at a nuts-and-bolts level, so this would be a safe default. 20 years ago, when IPv6 was new, I would have more faith that the average IT person would have a better grasp of details like this. These days, it's abstracted away for the most part. I doubt non-network focused IT people learn the stack to the same depth they had to in the past.
Even large enterprise networks I've seen implicitly trust traffic on the inside. Obviously that's not the best way to go, but re-architecting the network for trust-nothing operation is a slow process the larger the entity.
I'm squarely on the "systems" side of computing, having risen through help desk monkey, support tech, system admin, and finally landing on the systems integration/engineering spot. Every time I've considered taking on more development-focused roles, I've always backed away because of how much generic low-level coding work is being automated, abstracted away or offshored/outsourced. Any dev work that I do is focused on automating installs and tasks (PowerShell, Linux shell scripts, orchestration stuff, etc.) The "appealing to women" crowd is probably going to be strong in their condemnation of this approach, but I do feel that knowing CS concepts is important for a broad range of tech-related jobs and tasks, more so than "spoon fed introductory Java and a little discrete math, we'll teach the interesting stuff later" that you see in intro to CS courses. Therefore, having a "concepts" AP course is a good way to allow people to see if they have the aptitude for either development or IT work in general.
The truth is that low level coder positions, as in "here's the spec, code exactly to it" work, is going to be less lucrative. Same thing with expert-level systems work, as in "Cisco IOS guru" or "EMC storage wizard" or "VSphere administrator." Offshoring is driving the low level coders out, and cloud is driving the systems guys who are so far into a particular niche that they can't think outside of it anymore. Of course, you are still going to need genius-level people in both spots, but there will be fewer of them, and they will tend to work for service providers -- Azure and AWS run on physical hardware somewhere down the stack and that's where the genius level guys are going to wind up.
What I think is going to end up being a reasonably stable place to be is a generalist who is capable of seeing the whole end-to-end stack regardless of where it runs or who is coding it. What we will need fewer of is pure CS grads, especially those who don't really understand what's going on under the hood in their language/OS/database/network of choice. So yeah, give high school students a broader taste of what's out there, get them thinking logically and some might end up in CS.
I'm not discounting what pharmacists do -- they know more about drugs than most doctors. I am saying that they have a very nice, protected work life, the entry into the field and licensure is limited to keep supply low, and demand is high; you can go anywhere you want and get a pharmacy job. If I could tell "19-year-old Me" anything, it would be to study hard and get a job in s profession, rather than fight tooth and nail for the last remaining IT or developer jobs.
The reason CVS and the like haven't removed pharmacists from the stores, beyond liability reasons, is the fact that pharmacy is a licensed profession. It's a profession with a strong political lobby, just like doctors have and lawyers had. (The ABA sold out the legal profession by flooding the job market and allowing offshoring.) This serves as a very important lesson to techies everywhere -- even if you don't form a "union", which I think wouldn't work, we need to work together to stop things like H-1B abuses, offshoring of critical work, and rampant incompetency in the software and systems "profession." I've said it before, IT people and developers need to pool their resources, set up an engineering-style profession, and buy a few favorable laws. I don't know whypeople are so opposed to this - every large company pays for legislation, including laws that reduce employment and salaries for IT/dev.
I think it would be a huge step forward:
- No more idiot snake oil consultants selling magic tools -- I do systems management and can't even count the number of dashboards, data aggregators, etc. that are super-simple tools, get bought for 6-figures, and end up shelfware.
- Salary progression over a whole career, not just the under-40 part.
- Real training (not vendor propaganda)
- While there will always be different levels of talent, the idea of not working with complete morons fresh out of coder bootcamp or vendor certification academies is very appealing.
"ESPN is a huge part of Disney's revenue, and profits, and ESPN has been losing subscribers since 2010."
That, and content for ESPN costs a bundle to acquire. Paying for the rights to a major sport's broadcasts requires astronomical sums, so they have to be sure profit is there. They've been losing subscribers, in my opinion, because there just aren't as many sports-crazed people as there once were. There's so many other entertainment choices, many of them having nothing to do with athletic activity. Earlier on there were fewer choices -- Sunday afternoons were dominated by the NFL way more than they are now. As the hardcore sports nut demographic ages out, there's fewer newbies to take the place of the older fans. That's not saying there are no sports-obsessed people out there; no one would argue that. It's just that the replacement rate is trending lower. ESPN needs to deal with that fact by lowering costs.
Yup, definitely agree on this, have seen it several times.
I'm by no means a model parent, but one of the things we've been pretty good about is not succumbing to every single demand. You'd be surprised how many parents have trouble with this; it's easier to agree than say no. I've seen lots of workaholic families who replace their kid time with stuff, parents going through divorces and other major crap just buying off their kids, etc. Advertisers/marketers love this because they don't even have to try too hard.
I'm an "old" dad of 2 little kids. They're both Disney fanatics as well as big fans of other "corporate media" properties. I think some perspective is required here. Of course it makes sense for Disney to buy up things like the Star Wars franchise, LEGO (perhaps) and other 80s-kid favorites. Why? Because people who were kids in the 80s and 90s are now in their 30s and 40s, and have a lot of discretionary income to spend. I was born in '75, so I do remember my childhood being filled with a lot of true innovations in technology -- personal computers, all sorts of "new" electronic toys, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. These days, the innovation is focused mainly on getting that computer in your pocket to do cool new things, but this era was a little different in that everything "computery" in the kid space was totally new. So, Disney is targeting the older parents for 2 reasons -- first, people are waiting longer to have kids, and second, those who do are having fewer and are in a better position to buy stuff from Disney. I'm sure they go after younger parents too, but younger parents are usually stretched pretty thin compared to someone who's had time to acquire some stability in their lives.
I think the key is to make sure your kids understand that even though they love their media properties, they need to remain skeptical of marketing. I'm completely unaffected by advertising, but I am seeing that my 5 year old is now starting to inquire about add-ons to "free to play" apps. I don't love the fact that the marketers are manipulating his brain, but it's a fact of life. I've explained to him (in 5 year old terms) that things cost money, that parents have to work for money, that advertisers are only trying to get you to spend more money on their product and that he shouldn't believe everything they say. It's semi-effective. We don't let them sit in front of the TV, computer or iPad forever, and don't expose them to a million commercials.
It's fine to let kids and adults enjoy Disney or whatever -- they're an entertainment business, it makes sense that people enjoy their output. The problem comes when people shut off their brains and let the advertisers in.
As people and the article have pointed out, a massive data center build (often in the middle of nowhere) doesn't really benefit the local population of an area. Unless the company is moving a ton of admin jobs along with it, the tax base doesn't even increase when all these incentives are factored in. You'll have security guards, facility engineers (HVAC etc.) and a very small rack-stack-fix type of staff. Also, in the case of public cloud style data centers, everything beyond the physical hardware replacement is software-controlled once the core is built out, so you won't have as many traditional sysadmins employed. Plus, the added power and public utility costs add up as well when you consider generation costs, building or improving roads, etc.
The thing about these special tax breaks is that states have to play Prisoners' Dilemma with each other. I live in a high-tax state (NY) and we're always hearing large companies with big New York operations threatening to move to North Carolina, Florida, Texas, etc. if they don't get a special tax deal. They do this because they know they can - the low tax states will do crazy deals to get companies to move there. A company I worked for moved to Orlando, and the state and city were practically building the company a new headquarters, building new roads and easing building restrictions to suit their needs. Plus, they got some insane tax abatement for 10+ years and cheap utility rates on top of that. When companies don't have to pay normal levels of tax, the only possible upside is increased property, sales and payroll taxes from employees that move in. The high tax states have to do at least some of this also, but it's an even worse deal for them usually since they have greater expenses to cover. Florida and other low tax states spend a lot less on education, they don't have to remove snow in the winter or perform as much road maintenance, etc.
Wasn't Flint the city that basically got abandoned by GM when they closed their plants years ago? They're held up as a poster child for Rust Belt decline, much the same way my hometown was back in the 80s. So the question is where the lead is coming from -- is it a natural source? I thought most large-scale industrial activity that could cause that much lead emission outside of auto production was done in Michigan long ago.
Whatever the cause, talk about a crappy set of circumstances. A city now has an environmental mess to deal with after losing all of its industry and chance of a recovery.
There is currently a massive migration of people from New York to North Carolina. It seems like every day I hear someone I know tell me they got a job in Charlotte/RTP, and how happy they are to be free of the horrible yoke of property taxes. (Yes, taxes in NY are very high, but you get what you pay for.)
What people who move there tell me after being there is the same people who abandoned northern states for Atlanta in the 90s. They love paying comparatively no taxes and living in huge mansions within the Relocation Zone. Companies are moving most of their paper-pushing mid level jobs to regions like this because they don't have to pay as much for run-of-the-mill employees, so there is work for most people. And I agree with them somewhat -- where I live in metro NY, a 60-year old tiny 3 bedroom house starts in the half-million dollar range in a location that's a reasonable commute to the city. Take someone out of that environment and put them in a 5000 ft^2 mansion on 2 acres of land for the same amount, and why wouldn't they be happy?
However, they also tell me that once outside of the Relocation Zones, things get a whole lot less progressive. You know, full of people like the townspeople in the article. I heard the exact same thing from the Atlanta relocators last decade -- great inside the enclave, backwards outside of it. I'm sure there is change afoot, but change takes a long time to come around.
I wonder if Canada is accepting the few remaining intelligent, informed Americans as refugees. :-) I've only half-considered moving -- I work for a multinational and could pretty easily get a European work visa through the company. Maybe if Trump wins the election, I'll finally go hand in the old passport.
This sounds a lot like the same folks who get scammed by homeopathic "doctors" and buy thousands of dollars in quack remedies. Or the people who are scared by exposure to "electromagnetic radiation" and cite it as a cause of health problems.
I like a previous poster's idea of setting up "dumb people elections" and running the government via a secret bunch of smart people. When all the candidates are going for the dumb people, the outrageous stuff they say should be very amusing, even more than it is now.
Brawndo -- it's got what plants need!
I can just see some non-technical IT manager in your average in-house IT department looking at this as a replacement for "expensive" developers. "Hey, look, I can get a bunch of kids and desperate age-discriminated developers to do your job for half the price!" In that way, it is the Uber of coding -- driving out any way to make a living from low-end work.
People like to point to the recent $15/hr minimum wage debate and laugh, but I'm not surprised it's coming up. If average people who would otherwise have a decent corporate job with a good salary and benefits have to resort to hustling for work, a fast food job might be a better option. At least you'd only have to string 2 or 3 of those jobs together to make ends meet instead of hustling 9 or 10 "gigs".
I doubt high-end development will be impacted, but your average "write me a web front end for this data set" coder might be in trouble.