Now if you can explain how a comment about starting a career is applicable to a seasoned veteran, you might just weasel out of it.
It is decidedly not applicable to a "seasoned veteran". That is the point: seasoned veterans tend not to be willing to do the kinds of things that kids starting out are willing to do. That was your very own diagnosis. That means that companies like Google are not engaging in age discrimination, but rather that older workers are objectively different from younger workers.
As for the rest, you are being snotty because I didn't fall on my knees and kiss your feet when I saw your obviously divine correctness. Mighty big attitude for a willing slave boy.
Honey dearest, you are a boring engineer eeking out a living in the South and apparently feeling bitter about it. That's why you keep chiming in about what politicians should do to address supposedly horrible injustices in high tech. And, to be certain, I wouldn't want you to kiss any part of my body.
A bias is something preconceived, i.e., something you believe before taking data into account. If it's "baked into the data", it's not a bias, it's a rational inference based on data.
This cycle is why Philadelphia has far higher insurance rates than either other cities
Just because you can pull an explanation like that out of your ass doesn't mean it's true. In fact, the state's no-fault law combined with the generally shitty state of Philadelphia is more likely responsible than that "cycle".
And regardless of what the causes of the higher insurance rates are, you are not going to fix them by artificially lowering them.
when the information that a loan applicant is female is not included in the data set, but gender can be inferred from other data factors which are included, such as whether the applicant is a single parent
It can be, but the concept of "gender" or "race" is meaningless to a machine learning system for loan evaluations, and it has no biases or prejudices. If a properly trained machine learning system disproportionately rejects applications of some gender or race, then that reflects an actual statistical regularity in the world, not the result of discrimination or bias. Furthermore, if you force that system to make decisions that are representative of national demographics, it will make suboptimal decisions. The Google paper actually points this out. What they do is provide a method that allows for some degree of discrimination, but even their system is still suboptimal.
Yes, there are big statistical differences between different genders and racial groups in their propensity to commit violence, commit crimes, and repay loans. And these differences are increasing rather than decreasing because politics currently encourages a "multicultural society" and cultures differ enormously in a lot of areas.
Actually, you claimed that the 40 hour workweek has never been a thing for professionals.
I'm sorry, but you need to read that more carefully. What I said was "this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like." Do you understand the qualifications "starting", "successful", and "competitive"?
As for the rest, if you think embedded devices and microcontrollers are somehow obsolete
You misunderstood. I was just referring to your skills, based on your web site.
I suggest you scroll up a few messages to remind yourself what you were saying.
I suggest you do the same thing. You'll find that I simply concluded that these complaints lacked a rational basis and even if they were true, wouldn't matter.
As for the rest, This month actually except for the BIOS. Working smarter has it's advantages.
I'm sure you "delved" into these things, they are simply dull and boring, that there are tons of other people with similar skills, and that there is little demand or need for those skills in the job market anymore. If you interviewed anywhere, companies wouldn't discriminate you based on your age, but based on your skillset and your attitude, and they would be perfectly justified in doing so. On the other hand, being an older worker, you managed to find an economic niche that (apparently) works for you and have learned to be satisfied with it, so you don't need to go job hunting.
Really? What argument did you imagine I was making?
As for my work, it's quite interesting actually. I have at various times delved into supercomputing, BIOS, embedded hardware and microcontrollers. Hardware and software.
There is nothing "new" about it: if you want to be on the top of your field, whether it's music, science, engineering, computer programming, business, law, medicine, or anything else, you have to work very, very hard. Some of the hardest working and lowest paid workers are, in fact, grad students and early career academics. I don't see why it should work any differently for some of the top corporations in the country.
Maybe you missed the mobile device revolution, but keeping memory and CPU usage within sane bounds matters an awful lot these days.
That's a losing battle, since the frameworks (Java, JavaScript, Swift, etc.) themselves end up being extremely bloated. Furthermore, phones have GB of memory these days, which is vast overkill for the trivial little programs people tend to write for them.
Of course, the real answer is that they don't want to hire the senior guy even if he finds the offer acceptable because they intend to boil the frog.
Correct: the more senior an applicant is, statistically, the less malleable and the less flexible they tend to be. Furthermore, the older applicants get, the less they are willing to put up with b.s., if not for any other reason than that they usually have more job options. Hence, companies are not discriminating based on age, they are discriminating based on malleability and flexibility.
Mentally divide that pay they're offering by 1.5-2 to see what they're really offering you for the standard salaried position then kiss that work-life balance goodby.
Again, correct: this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like. And anybody career oriented with their head screwed on has figured that out since their college days. It's a necessary consequence of having a merit- and performance-based society.
So what's the need for age discrimination? Let the company make the offer it intended to make and leave it up to the applicant to accept or not.
Where is the evidence that that's not exactly what they are doing, for applicants that actually meet their requirements?
Nobody need some old codger who can't hear that whooshing sound unless he turns up his hearing aid.
Well, you sure missed the whooshing sound.
See, what was getting at is that the "Old Skills" post was wrong both in the literal and in the sarcastic interpretation. In reality, companies do need "old codgers", just not very many of them; that's why many "old codgers" have trouble finding jobs even though their skills are still needed.
Plenty of companies need those "old codgers", and big tech companies, including Google, have hired them: Gosling, Thompson, Weinberger, Pike, plus thousands more.
But memory, CPU, hardware, memory management, etc. don't matter for the bulk of computer programming. That's why these companies need only a small number of "old codgers" and a large number of coding drones who grind out large amounts of Java and JavaScript, and do all the other, boring, tedious tasks that software development requires these days.
These companies want malleable young employees who have no self-esteem or regard for others. They want to shape them into being slaves who accept shit and thank their lucky stars they're allowed to suck on the toes of those better than them.
Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep fryers? What 40+ experienced French chef would even want such a position?
Just like lots of other industries, the software industry is constantly changing. Companies like Google are the software equivalent of large, fast-food restaurant chains. There is no point in complaining about it, and there is nothing to be done about it. Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference between "Newsweek" and the "DNC", or between "accessing E-mails" and "DDOS attack".
I have no doubt Russia tries to access the E-mails of all US officials. I have no problem with them trying, it's the job of spy agencies. It's the responsibility of US politicians to make their systems secure, and they shouldn't whine and complain if their dirty laundry gets aired by the Russians.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The sad thing is that you will never understand how apt that quote is as your signature: you are so stupid, you don't even recognize it.
Pretty much agree with your points, although historically white women did get burnt as witches and treated badly in various ways, they've had a relatively less painful time compared to various minorities throughout history.
White men were also massively oppressed, used as cannon fodder, used as indentured servants, without political representation or economic freedom.
The fact that a small elite of white men were oppressors doesn't generalize to white men in general.
And Hillary is much closer in her social, economic, and professional status to white male oppressors than to the average white male. Her pretext of speaking for women and minorities is simply to distract you from her greed, lust for power, corruption, and dishonesty.
That's not a "market failure", it's a government failure: the way liability is handled for software and security, companies get away with selling insecure crap without anybody being able to sue them for damages.
Are you actually interested in a discussion about programming languages or is this some sort of dick waving instead?
I'm mostly interested in people's misconceptions about programming languages and programming, because it helps me understand why big projects go off the rails and badly designed languages sometimes succeed.
I actually gave reasons for WHY it's inherent to those languages
Yes, and your reasons fall into one of the common ways in which people think about safe and garbage collected languages; there is no point arguing with you about it, I already know what you're going to say.
Depends on the complexity and if it really reduces it and it depends on the application. For something like web browsers and other core infrastructure components, performance is actually important. Think how many instances even a 0.1% saving is time is multiplied by.
A 0.1% savings is still just a 0.1% savings no matter what you multiply it by. And that assumes that there are savings at all, which is doubtful. There are big hidden costs to using something like Rust, both in performance and effort.
All of the major browser engines are written in C++. Not one of them has fine grained parallelism because that's just too hard to get right in C++.
It's not hard to get fine-grained parallelism right in C++. It's hard if you use constructs like threads.
And it's written in Rust.
True. People write code in all sorts of languages and swear by it. It's a sociological and cultural phenomenon, but tells you little about any kind of technical merit.
Of course, at some point, people simply stop caring. According to progressives and Democrats, I'm a homophobic, racist misogynist, and you know what? I've learned to live with it. Just as I had to learn to live with being a gay man in a homophobic society, and an immigrant in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you do need a citation for your bullshit claim that there is a "push to avoid hiring citizens".
It is decidedly not applicable to a "seasoned veteran". That is the point: seasoned veterans tend not to be willing to do the kinds of things that kids starting out are willing to do. That was your very own diagnosis. That means that companies like Google are not engaging in age discrimination, but rather that older workers are objectively different from younger workers.
Honey dearest, you are a boring engineer eeking out a living in the South and apparently feeling bitter about it. That's why you keep chiming in about what politicians should do to address supposedly horrible injustices in high tech. And, to be certain, I wouldn't want you to kiss any part of my body.
A bias is something preconceived, i.e., something you believe before taking data into account. If it's "baked into the data", it's not a bias, it's a rational inference based on data.
Just because you can pull an explanation like that out of your ass doesn't mean it's true. In fact, the state's no-fault law combined with the generally shitty state of Philadelphia is more likely responsible than that "cycle".
And regardless of what the causes of the higher insurance rates are, you are not going to fix them by artificially lowering them.
It can be, but the concept of "gender" or "race" is meaningless to a machine learning system for loan evaluations, and it has no biases or prejudices. If a properly trained machine learning system disproportionately rejects applications of some gender or race, then that reflects an actual statistical regularity in the world, not the result of discrimination or bias. Furthermore, if you force that system to make decisions that are representative of national demographics, it will make suboptimal decisions. The Google paper actually points this out. What they do is provide a method that allows for some degree of discrimination, but even their system is still suboptimal.
Yes, there are big statistical differences between different genders and racial groups in their propensity to commit violence, commit crimes, and repay loans. And these differences are increasing rather than decreasing because politics currently encourages a "multicultural society" and cultures differ enormously in a lot of areas.
I'm sorry, but you need to read that more carefully. What I said was "this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like." Do you understand the qualifications "starting", "successful", and "competitive"?
You misunderstood. I was just referring to your skills, based on your web site.
I suggest you do the same thing. You'll find that I simply concluded that these complaints lacked a rational basis and even if they were true, wouldn't matter.
I'm sure you "delved" into these things, they are simply dull and boring, that there are tons of other people with similar skills, and that there is little demand or need for those skills in the job market anymore. If you interviewed anywhere, companies wouldn't discriminate you based on your age, but based on your skillset and your attitude, and they would be perfectly justified in doing so. On the other hand, being an older worker, you managed to find an economic niche that (apparently) works for you and have learned to be satisfied with it, so you don't need to go job hunting.
Really? What argument did you imagine I was making?
Sure--a decade ago.
I notice. I love what I'm doing, and it benefits me as much as my company (since I get paid to work on open source projects).
Of course, this may be hard for you to understand, given that your business appears to be supporting outdated Linux cluster solutions.
There is nothing "new" about it: if you want to be on the top of your field, whether it's music, science, engineering, computer programming, business, law, medicine, or anything else, you have to work very, very hard. Some of the hardest working and lowest paid workers are, in fact, grad students and early career academics. I don't see why it should work any differently for some of the top corporations in the country.
That's a losing battle, since the frameworks (Java, JavaScript, Swift, etc.) themselves end up being extremely bloated. Furthermore, phones have GB of memory these days, which is vast overkill for the trivial little programs people tend to write for them.
Correct: the more senior an applicant is, statistically, the less malleable and the less flexible they tend to be. Furthermore, the older applicants get, the less they are willing to put up with b.s., if not for any other reason than that they usually have more job options. Hence, companies are not discriminating based on age, they are discriminating based on malleability and flexibility.
Again, correct: this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like. And anybody career oriented with their head screwed on has figured that out since their college days. It's a necessary consequence of having a merit- and performance-based society.
Where is the evidence that that's not exactly what they are doing, for applicants that actually meet their requirements?
Well, you sure missed the whooshing sound.
See, what was getting at is that the "Old Skills" post was wrong both in the literal and in the sarcastic interpretation. In reality, companies do need "old codgers", just not very many of them; that's why many "old codgers" have trouble finding jobs even though their skills are still needed.
Well, that's a big "if". Most senior developers wouldn't be willing to be hired into an entry level position at entry level salaries.
Yes, that's kind what I'm getting at, Captain Obvious.
However, companies should be free to screw themselves in whatever way they want.
Plenty of companies need those "old codgers", and big tech companies, including Google, have hired them: Gosling, Thompson, Weinberger, Pike, plus thousands more.
But memory, CPU, hardware, memory management, etc. don't matter for the bulk of computer programming. That's why these companies need only a small number of "old codgers" and a large number of coding drones who grind out large amounts of Java and JavaScript, and do all the other, boring, tedious tasks that software development requires these days.
Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep fryers? What 40+ experienced French chef would even want such a position?
Just like lots of other industries, the software industry is constantly changing. Companies like Google are the software equivalent of large, fast-food restaurant chains. There is no point in complaining about it, and there is nothing to be done about it. Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference between "Newsweek" and the "DNC", or between "accessing E-mails" and "DDOS attack".
I have no doubt Russia tries to access the E-mails of all US officials. I have no problem with them trying, it's the job of spy agencies. It's the responsibility of US politicians to make their systems secure, and they shouldn't whine and complain if their dirty laundry gets aired by the Russians.
The sad thing is that you will never understand how apt that quote is as your signature: you are so stupid, you don't even recognize it.
I suspect a lot more lives have been ruined by the incompetent hacks at The Grauniad than by Big Data.
Bullshit. Most men throughout history were horribly oppressed, usually by other men and the women at the oppressors' sides.
Note that Hillary is pretty much repeating that pattern.
White men were also massively oppressed, used as cannon fodder, used as indentured servants, without political representation or economic freedom.
The fact that a small elite of white men were oppressors doesn't generalize to white men in general.
And Hillary is much closer in her social, economic, and professional status to white male oppressors than to the average white male. Her pretext of speaking for women and minorities is simply to distract you from her greed, lust for power, corruption, and dishonesty.
That's not a "market failure", it's a government failure: the way liability is handled for software and security, companies get away with selling insecure crap without anybody being able to sue them for damages.
I'm mostly interested in people's misconceptions about programming languages and programming, because it helps me understand why big projects go off the rails and badly designed languages sometimes succeed.
Yes, and your reasons fall into one of the common ways in which people think about safe and garbage collected languages; there is no point arguing with you about it, I already know what you're going to say.
A 0.1% savings is still just a 0.1% savings no matter what you multiply it by. And that assumes that there are savings at all, which is doubtful. There are big hidden costs to using something like Rust, both in performance and effort.
It's not hard to get fine-grained parallelism right in C++. It's hard if you use constructs like threads.
True. People write code in all sorts of languages and swear by it. It's a sociological and cultural phenomenon, but tells you little about any kind of technical merit.
Of course, at some point, people simply stop caring. According to progressives and Democrats, I'm a homophobic, racist misogynist, and you know what? I've learned to live with it. Just as I had to learn to live with being a gay man in a homophobic society, and an immigrant in the US.
Yahoo already has a big morale problem and trouble attracting people. I'm sure this kind of gender bias will do wonders for their ability to recruit.