Because nodbody they know has built what they are building. If someone did, they would just copy it.
That's the thing non-programmers don't understand - software is effortless to copy (right click, copy & paste). So compared to other fields, software development runs into new problems more often that most other "building" projects (IT or otherwise).
I'm surprised that nobody has yet suggested that women be forced to study a STEM degree in college. If you want to 'fix' the 'problem', why not go back to the source?
"Oh, you wanted to do gender studies? Too bad, we need more women in STEM so enjoy EE"
Here's a better idea... make those studying humanities take the in-major STEM classes, not the watered down version. What they gain is less the knowledge of the course but more new ways of thinking. One does not get that in "rocks for jocks". If the in-najor STEM classes are too hard, perhaps the problem is with what they're being compared to... perhaps it's the in-major humanities courses which are not rigorous enough?
This guy gets it. Unless you've been to NYC lately AND understand a bit about the building practices here vs the rest of the US then the potential for savings might not be so obvious.
I would also add that the reliance on PTAC units is also a huge issue (basically, think of a hotels through-wall ac & heating unit). The extensive use of PTACs in new construction is because of labor costs to run ducting and to a lesser degree because of permitting costs: http://amp.gothamist.com/amp/a...
Young Johnny just graduated from "Bob's School of Typewriter Repair and Information Technology" and your telling me I can't filter him out?
While your degree doesn't matter as much after a certain point, it still matters. You want people to have a solid foundation and a mastery of the fundamentals. I don't really care what school, but I do care if it was in the top 10, 20, 50, or 100 for relevant degrees. Of course, if the resume indicates that they have the right skills and the overcame obstacles (no degree, non-technical degree, unranked school, etc) then that's a great candidate!! I just dont trust HR to make that call and I can't sift through all the resumes to find that diamond in the rough when there are diamonds right in front of me.
TL;DR: caveat emptor applies to hiring. At the heart of the issue is an overall inability for the job market to price the economic output of "developers" of different skill levels, not to mention the delta between economic value and market value based on the developers skill. A lot of developers' economic value is actually lower than market value (they get paid more than their worth) while for some, the opposite is true. The inability of the labor market to consistently align economic and market value, and the variance in that gap, is what's really causing the angst.
What we need to do is devise a better way to demonstrate economic value and work to tie market value to it.
There's no substitute for risk assessments by fully qualified engineers, of course. But those engineers also need communication skills â" including persuasive skills. Engineers who can find somebody in authority and convince them to take action save lives.
I have another idea for you - how about we hold decision makers accountable for their decisions? I would help to make sure those in authority have sufficient expertise in the area they're making decisions about.
I fully expect a structural engineer to base his persuasive argument around the physics and engineering issues and then frame those in terms of cost/benefit. If the person who is making the decision can't understand that type of argument, then I don't want them making the decisions.
Expecting an engineer to get up and make a persuasive argument like a professional orator or politician completely completely misses the point around the cold hard facts and associated judgement calls that it takes to engineer complicated projects.
With military service being an exception huh? I'll just assume you're ignorant so here's a quick list to enlighten you.
Infantry, Military Police => Police
Military Intel => National Intel, Public Policy
Military Mechanic => Aviation Mechanic
Military Food Service => Catering, Restaurant Mgr
Military Transportation => FedEx (drivers through corporate planning).... I could go on and on
I RTF but I didn't see anything in there that indicated the income tax wold be levied on tech employees who earn leas than $250, but the title sure makes it sound that way. If that is the case, there's no way that passes legal review.
Given that the city council knows what they're doing is currently illegal (b/c of the state constitution), I wonder if there is a case for damages to he levied upon the city by those impacted by this illegal tax.
We actually put blood and sweat in for society. What about disabled veterans who, in that vast majority of cases and despite service related injuries, continue as productive members of society?
I hate to be that guy, but this really sounds like "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need".
Calling something irrelevant because it hasn't been used in 40 years may not be the most enlightened approach. Both my penis and nuclear weapons would disagree. (Joking on that first part)
The real intent behind DevOps is to enable the rapid deployment of capability - at scale. The problem is that since windows came around, it's not uncommon for your average sysadmin to have no idea how to meaningfully scipt; even some RHEL admins are hostage to the GUI. This has been changing in the past ~5yrs, but it's not where it probably should be (blame the misalignment of pay and expectations). One of the elements of DevOps is to combine the skillets of developers and sysadmins to shorten the deployment timeframe. In places where it works, it works well. Of course, this wouldn't be required if we raised the expectations and pay of sysadmins (like a flat 15-20k bump, or more, afer passing some type of sufficiently hard qualifying exam)
TL;DR - The ROI for IT sucks in comparison to a lot of other fields. For whatever reason, women as a whole see this better and adjust.
I'd like to submit my perspective. These are my observations, so please don't take them as gospel. I grew up in IT back in the 80s as a SysOp for mainframes. I've had two great mentors on the technical side and the first was a women back in the mid 80's Back then, there was a much higher percentage of woman in the field and more importantly the level of skill across the board (all genders) was MUCH higher. For example, a junior SysOp (sysadmin in today's terms) was *expected* to know how to script and a senior SysOp was *expected* to know how to port C code between different Unix flavors (but not necessarily write C from scratch). I'll refer to these people as the pre-IT workforce. How does this relate to woman leaving the field? I'll get there. When windows hit the corporate world, the demand for IT skills soared. To help meet this demand, the industry developed the GUI and promoted it as a graphical ADMIN interface as opposed to a graphical USER interface. This reduced the level of skill for new sysadmins entering the field (we're finally starting to shed the GUI crutch thanks to cloud scalability). Most of the people who entered at this time were not as skilled as the generation immediately preceding them. The GUI made the easy easier and the hard MUCH harder. A lot of people who were in that preceding generation of pre-IT workers were accustomed to do very hard and difficult work (the women included of course). Unfortunately, windows was not only new but also made it much harder to do the difficult things the pre-IT workforce was accustomed to. Because of this and inadequate corporate training programs, a lot of the people from the pre-IT workforce did not transition over to the IT workforce in time and a lot of their jobs were lost because the large companies in which they worked were transitioning to the IT world. It doesn't help that a lot of these companies also saw this as an opportunity to replace their higher-paid pre-IT workforce with more junior IT workers. Those pre-IT workers exiting the workforce did not generally recommend IT careers to their children, especially the women.
So why didn't other women enter the workforce? When the easy was made easier and the hard was made harder, it really distorted the the ROI model for staff. Previously, anyone who got over the initial training hump and familiarization (command line and all) generally had what it took to eventually go on to porting C code if not writing it themselves (and other related advanced tasks). This all changed with the GUI. Large numbers of folks entered who were skilled enough to do some basic work with a GUI but a large percentage of them would not be able to handle the command line or scripting. This was entirely intentional as the workforce needed to grow and one way to do that is to lower the barriers for entry. Whereas before the pay scale took advantage of the fact that there was a relatively easy glide path to mastery, the new pay scale curve never adjusted to sufficiently motivate most of the new workforce to reach for a level of skill commensurate with/analogous to that of the advanced pre-IT workforce. Instead, that top-tier was effectively removed. Additionally, since the field really took off in the early 90's it required a significant amount of work just to maintain currency with emerging topics, let alone advance. All of this adds up to the fact that the ROI from a workers perspective is not as generous as other fields.
As a point of comparison other than medical school, how many times a month does a dermatologist or general practitioner expect to solve a new problem - or are they just re-solving problems they've already solved?
I'm not sure how true this was, but I've heard that R&D was counted as an expense back then and therefore could be taken out of revenue before determining profit and therefore taxes.
If my memory serves me correctly, then this helps explain why a lot of companies stopped investing in R&D as heavily as they did back in those days.
The key difference is that in your industry, you have knowledgeable buyers who can effective price quality. In many other fields, especially it and software development, that is very much *not* the case. Subsequently, a large segment of the market competes primarily on the aspects that buyers understand - price. Without an offsetting understanding of quality, and therfore value - you get a race to the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
This one gets it. I wish I had mod points.
More importantly, it's usually not the developers who make the schedule.
Because nodbody they know has built what they are building. If someone did, they would just copy it. That's the thing non-programmers don't understand - software is effortless to copy (right click, copy & paste). So compared to other fields, software development runs into new problems more often that most other "building" projects (IT or otherwise).
I'm surprised that nobody has yet suggested that women be forced to study a STEM degree in college. If you want to 'fix' the 'problem', why not go back to the source? "Oh, you wanted to do gender studies? Too bad, we need more women in STEM so enjoy EE"
Here's a better idea ... make those studying humanities take the in-major STEM classes, not the watered down version. What they gain is less the knowledge of the course but more new ways of thinking. One does not get that in "rocks for jocks". If the in-najor STEM classes are too hard, perhaps the problem is with what they're being compared to ... perhaps it's the in-major humanities courses which are not rigorous enough?
This guy gets it. Unless you've been to NYC lately AND understand a bit about the building practices here vs the rest of the US then the potential for savings might not be so obvious. I would also add that the reliance on PTAC units is also a huge issue (basically, think of a hotels through-wall ac & heating unit). The extensive use of PTACs in new construction is because of labor costs to run ducting and to a lesser degree because of permitting costs: http://amp.gothamist.com/amp/a...
Young Johnny just graduated from "Bob's School of Typewriter Repair and Information Technology" and your telling me I can't filter him out? While your degree doesn't matter as much after a certain point, it still matters. You want people to have a solid foundation and a mastery of the fundamentals. I don't really care what school, but I do care if it was in the top 10, 20, 50, or 100 for relevant degrees. Of course, if the resume indicates that they have the right skills and the overcame obstacles (no degree, non-technical degree, unranked school, etc) then that's a great candidate!! I just dont trust HR to make that call and I can't sift through all the resumes to find that diamond in the rough when there are diamonds right in front of me.
This guy gets it. Savings often don't get passed to the consumer.
TL;DR: caveat emptor applies to hiring. At the heart of the issue is an overall inability for the job market to price the economic output of "developers" of different skill levels, not to mention the delta between economic value and market value based on the developers skill. A lot of developers' economic value is actually lower than market value (they get paid more than their worth) while for some, the opposite is true. The inability of the labor market to consistently align economic and market value, and the variance in that gap, is what's really causing the angst. What we need to do is devise a better way to demonstrate economic value and work to tie market value to it.
There's no substitute for risk assessments by fully qualified engineers, of course. But those engineers also need communication skills â" including persuasive skills. Engineers who can find somebody in authority and convince them to take action save lives.
I have another idea for you - how about we hold decision makers accountable for their decisions? I would help to make sure those in authority have sufficient expertise in the area they're making decisions about. I fully expect a structural engineer to base his persuasive argument around the physics and engineering issues and then frame those in terms of cost/benefit. If the person who is making the decision can't understand that type of argument, then I don't want them making the decisions. Expecting an engineer to get up and make a persuasive argument like a professional orator or politician completely completely misses the point around the cold hard facts and associated judgement calls that it takes to engineer complicated projects.
They also grow bored....
This ia obligatory at this point: http://assets.nydailynews.com/...
With military service being an exception huh? I'll just assume you're ignorant so here's a quick list to enlighten you. Infantry, Military Police => Police Military Intel => National Intel, Public Policy Military Mechanic => Aviation Mechanic Military Food Service => Catering, Restaurant Mgr Military Transportation => FedEx (drivers through corporate planning) .... I could go on and on
I RTF but I didn't see anything in there that indicated the income tax wold be levied on tech employees who earn leas than $250, but the title sure makes it sound that way. If that is the case, there's no way that passes legal review. Given that the city council knows what they're doing is currently illegal (b/c of the state constitution), I wonder if there is a case for damages to he levied upon the city by those impacted by this illegal tax.
We actually put blood and sweat in for society. What about disabled veterans who, in that vast majority of cases and despite service related injuries, continue as productive members of society? I hate to be that guy, but this really sounds like "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need".
Calling something irrelevant because it hasn't been used in 40 years may not be the most enlightened approach. Both my penis and nuclear weapons would disagree. (Joking on that first part)
Covfefe much?
The real intent behind DevOps is to enable the rapid deployment of capability - at scale. The problem is that since windows came around, it's not uncommon for your average sysadmin to have no idea how to meaningfully scipt; even some RHEL admins are hostage to the GUI. This has been changing in the past ~5yrs, but it's not where it probably should be (blame the misalignment of pay and expectations). One of the elements of DevOps is to combine the skillets of developers and sysadmins to shorten the deployment timeframe. In places where it works, it works well. Of course, this wouldn't be required if we raised the expectations and pay of sysadmins (like a flat 15-20k bump, or more, afer passing some type of sufficiently hard qualifying exam)
proper used to cr/lf too stronk for me. sry. for whatever reason I can't edit the post either :/
TL;DR - The ROI for IT sucks in comparison to a lot of other fields. For whatever reason, women as a whole see this better and adjust. I'd like to submit my perspective. These are my observations, so please don't take them as gospel. I grew up in IT back in the 80s as a SysOp for mainframes. I've had two great mentors on the technical side and the first was a women back in the mid 80's Back then, there was a much higher percentage of woman in the field and more importantly the level of skill across the board (all genders) was MUCH higher. For example, a junior SysOp (sysadmin in today's terms) was *expected* to know how to script and a senior SysOp was *expected* to know how to port C code between different Unix flavors (but not necessarily write C from scratch). I'll refer to these people as the pre-IT workforce. How does this relate to woman leaving the field? I'll get there. When windows hit the corporate world, the demand for IT skills soared. To help meet this demand, the industry developed the GUI and promoted it as a graphical ADMIN interface as opposed to a graphical USER interface. This reduced the level of skill for new sysadmins entering the field (we're finally starting to shed the GUI crutch thanks to cloud scalability). Most of the people who entered at this time were not as skilled as the generation immediately preceding them. The GUI made the easy easier and the hard MUCH harder. A lot of people who were in that preceding generation of pre-IT workers were accustomed to do very hard and difficult work (the women included of course). Unfortunately, windows was not only new but also made it much harder to do the difficult things the pre-IT workforce was accustomed to. Because of this and inadequate corporate training programs, a lot of the people from the pre-IT workforce did not transition over to the IT workforce in time and a lot of their jobs were lost because the large companies in which they worked were transitioning to the IT world. It doesn't help that a lot of these companies also saw this as an opportunity to replace their higher-paid pre-IT workforce with more junior IT workers. Those pre-IT workers exiting the workforce did not generally recommend IT careers to their children, especially the women. So why didn't other women enter the workforce? When the easy was made easier and the hard was made harder, it really distorted the the ROI model for staff. Previously, anyone who got over the initial training hump and familiarization (command line and all) generally had what it took to eventually go on to porting C code if not writing it themselves (and other related advanced tasks). This all changed with the GUI. Large numbers of folks entered who were skilled enough to do some basic work with a GUI but a large percentage of them would not be able to handle the command line or scripting. This was entirely intentional as the workforce needed to grow and one way to do that is to lower the barriers for entry. Whereas before the pay scale took advantage of the fact that there was a relatively easy glide path to mastery, the new pay scale curve never adjusted to sufficiently motivate most of the new workforce to reach for a level of skill commensurate with/analogous to that of the advanced pre-IT workforce. Instead, that top-tier was effectively removed. Additionally, since the field really took off in the early 90's it required a significant amount of work just to maintain currency with emerging topics, let alone advance. All of this adds up to the fact that the ROI from a workers perspective is not as generous as other fields. As a point of comparison other than medical school, how many times a month does a dermatologist or general practitioner expect to solve a new problem - or are they just re-solving problems they've already solved?
I'm not sure how true this was, but I've heard that R&D was counted as an expense back then and therefore could be taken out of revenue before determining profit and therefore taxes. If my memory serves me correctly, then this helps explain why a lot of companies stopped investing in R&D as heavily as they did back in those days.
The key difference is that in your industry, you have knowledgeable buyers who can effective price quality. In many other fields, especially it and software development, that is very much *not* the case. Subsequently, a large segment of the market competes primarily on the aspects that buyers understand - price. Without an offsetting understanding of quality, and therfore value - you get a race to the bottom.
Please write back with something other than AC so I can get in touch with you.