Weâ(TM)re on the cusp of 5G. Weâ(TM)ll get fiber speeds without the wires. At that point, why bother with fiber at all? Hell, why bother with cable companies at all? The cell companies will be able to offer faster internet speeds than cable companies. Then, everyone will finally be able to dump Comcast.
"The modern gaming era began long before 1999." No, it didn't. Pong is a 1 on 1 game at most. The "modern gaming" refers to massive multiplayer online games. You're being stupid intentionally, it's normal for here.
You're drawing an arbitrary line and assuming people agree with you. Modern gaming could just as easily be defined as any sort of video game. That's how I'd define it.
I think the article is trying (poorly) and failing (badly) to imply that the "Modern Gaming Era" means online multiplayer and mobile-based gaming. So in that context, it's only really been a widespread part of gaming culture since around 2001 when Halo introduced the "Everyday Joe" to online 1st person shooters.
And to answer the inevitable response yes, I'm aware that there was online gaming prior to that, aware that Quake was the first massively popular online shooter, etc. but it was the Xbox and Halo that really catapulted gaming in general, and online gaming in particular, into the realm of "acceptability" to regular people. Prior to that, gamers were still widely regarded as "nerds and geeks and losers."
Mobile-based gaming didn't really take off until smart phones came around 12 years old. That was long after the start of the "modern gaming era."
Between PC, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, the XBox is only a portion of the overall market. Halo meant nothing and continues to mean nothing to anyone who doesn't own an XBox. It didn't matter how "acceptable" it was to anyone else. Further that first came out in 2001, years after online multiplayer had already gone mainstream on PCs.
Quake was certainly the game that popularized online deathmatch starting in 1996. That I could see as the start of the widespread online multiplayer era.
What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months.
The modern gaming era began long before 1999. Pong was one of the earliest video games. That came out in 1972. The modern gaming era is almost 50 years old.
What's surprising is that Republicans willfully support blatant treason and hacking groups...
What, you think the Russians only hacked the Democrats? The Russians went after the Republicans as well. Only, the Russians didn't release the Republican emails. Why? What do you think? To use as kompromat. That's why Republicans are going along with Trump. Russia has dirt on them as well.
This is the exact problem right here. There's no incentive to buy newer phones anymore since they're not adding dramatically new must-have features. Yet, that didn't stop Apple from dramatically increasing prices as if it were adding those features. Sorry, I'm not going to pay $1000+ for a phone that's just marginally better than the one I currently own.
Were Apple to spend a bunch of their cash on research and come up with new features that people wanted, they could jump start the market again. But, that's not happening.
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of Gordon Teal, a man born in 1907. He was not a Baby Boomer.
The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. Maiman was born July 11, 1927. He was not a Baby Boomer.
ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, was started in 1967. The first message was sent in 1969. The very youngest of the Boomers worked on it. However, the majority of that work was done by older generations.
Same goes with the manned moon landings. The majority of the work was done prior to 1969, the year of the first landing. The last moon landing was 1972. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. He was not a Baby Boomer. Most of the work done to get us to the moon was done by non-Boomers.
As for "manufacturer to the world", I'm not sure what this is. Again, manufacturing peaked in the US prior to the time Baby Boomers controlled the majority of businesses.
It would make more sense if you gave Boomers credit for Apple and Microsoft, the two companies responsible for the PC computing boom and the smartphone.
Well if you have a degree in Comp Si you spent the last 3 years of your academic career not programming.
What in the hell kind of university/college offers a comp sci degree where that is even remotely true?
None. Slashdot has a lot of people who didn't finish university for whatever reason. Perhaps they thought they'd be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Or, they thought they were smarter than their professors. Or, they got tired of their non-CS classes intended to provide a well-rounded education. Or, they took music composition and couldn't find a job in their field. Or, they never went to college in the first place.
So what's so special about university that makes it worth thousands of dollars? The knowledge is in books. Figure out the books used in a curriculum and buy'em used. Couple that with someone willing to help you in sticky situations and you can avoid college altogether.
Simply reading a book is not the same as studying a book before quizzes or an exam. Further, most professors lecture on topics not covered in the books. Only shitty profs work straight from the book. Lab work and homework problems drill those lessons into your head.
Computer science courses are much more difficult than other courses at university. On weekend nights, the business majors are out drinking beer and hitting on girls. The computer science nerds are busy writing their programs. After 4 years of spending weekend after weekend writing code, you end up learning quite a bit. And no, it's not the same as just reading a few used books.
I had two particular grads from the University of Washington come in for an interview for some openings I had for software engineers. They both had almost no ability to write code. I was so pissed that they both got their degrees and I was left wondering just how did they get their Comp Sci degrees.
Frankly, I'd question your interviewing skills before I'd question their coding skills. They had at least 4 years of progressively difficult software education. You had what sort of training for interviewing? How often do you do it? How many years of progressively difficult interviewing have you put in? How often were you tested and reviewed on your interviewing skills by educated interviewing experts?
Software engineers who are more used to constantly dealing with machines are typically poor judges of people. Add in the Dunning-Kruger effect and you get engineers who think their shitty interviewing skills are much better than they actually are and can't recognize their own interviewing deficiency.
On top of that, the software interview process is broken at most companies. Interviewers will base their hiring decision entirely on whether the candidate can answer some random algorithm question. If the candidate hasn't encountered that exact question previously and can't solve it exactly to the interviewer's requirements, which can often be ridiculous, then they're screwed. If the candidate has encountered the problem before, then they win the job lottery. You're not determining whether they can "write code" or not. You're finding out whether they've seen that problem previously.
Further, I bet you're not sitting them in from of an IDE and giving them plenty of time to complete the task. I bet you're doing it on a whiteboard or a text editor on a short time scale with the added pressure of an interview. The typical coding interview is so completely alien to the way that developers normally work that I'm surprised anyone gets hired.
And for what? Writing algorithms are maybe 10% of a modern software engineer's job. It makes no sense that you'd base your whole hiring decision on something that's relatively so trivial.
Or mandating a $15 minimum wage without studying it first and then seeing it decrease earnings of those it was designed to help, at least according to one recent study (more research over time is still needed to say for sure). There's a much longer list for someone crankier than me to make.
It's well meaning but it's almost universally poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
Bullshit. I was part of the effort to raise the minimum wage in Seattle to $15. The effort was studied and argued ad nauseam. We looked at all the data. Study after study shows that paying people a living wage is not only feasible, but improves the economy. It may be shocking to learn, but putting money into the hands of people who'll actually spend it in the community boosts the economy. Your spending is my income, my spending is your income. You get paid more, then you spend more. Then I make more and pay you back. That's how economies work.
(What hurts an economy? A few rich assholes sucking up all the money for themselves and then sending that money out of the economy to their Swiss bank accounts.)
This recent study came out contradicting previous results. It stated that increasing the minimum wage hurts workers. Turns out the new study wasn't peer reviewed. Another shocker. One problem of many is that the new study excluded minimum wage employers with multiple locations. Why? No good reason. If a restaurant was successful and opened a second location, it wasn't included in the study. No surprise that increasing the minimum wage looks bad if you methodically cut out the successful businesses.
Like this income tax idea, which will perversely drive out the people who pay the most in property taxes and push them into driving into work from the suburbs. And Seattle already has miserable traffic.
Everyone wants to live close to downtown. Part of that is precisely because of the miserable traffic. We've got the hottest housing market in the nation. If a few people leave over the income tax, there's 10 times the number of people who'd love to buy their homes, move in, and pay that income tax. Our housing market will be completely fine with this tax change.
But, again, while the economic sun is shining the city has the leeway to try these grand but foolish experiments. Unfortunately, at some point the tech boom here will end and there will be a nasty bill to pay for it.
Yeah, sure. The internet is just a fad. It'll end soon. Keep telling yourself that.
An accountant who obtained training 20 years ago can still find value and use most of those skills today. That is not the case for those in IT, and more people outside of IT need to understand that instead of looking down upon the highly skilled IT professional who can still provide great value without being a ringknocker with a sheepskin under their belt.
This statement might be true for lower-end IT jobs, but it's bullshit for development work.
A computer science degree from a decent school teaches students a number of things including data structures, algorithms, hardware architecture, project management, etc. Lists, sets, and maps haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Algorithms don't change either. Dijkstra's algorithm were first published in 1959. Hardware architecture hasn't changed all that much over the years. As for project management, the main significant change in that time is that agile processes have become popular. Agile isn't exactly hard to pick up. All of this knowledge I've personally used in my years since graduation and plan to continue to use in the future. In fact, having this base level of knowledge helps me pick up and understand new technologies, which come and go.
Developers definitely benefit from computer science degrees. That's true even 20 years after the fact. Frankly, I wouldn't hire a developer without a degree. Yeah sure, maybe I might miss out on that diamond in the rough. I'd rather not deal with the uncertainty. With a degree, a developer shows that they've been exposed to a basic set of information and persevered through difficult circumstances.
No, we get women coming through the system. Almost universally, they're from other countries such as India and China where there are fewer opportunities for women. We hire many of these people.
American women have countless career options. Due to that, it's relatively rare to find an American woman interested in writing code over every other career possibility. We see few American women entering computer science. We see fewer of these women graduating in computer science. We see yet fewer American women applying for development internships. Fewer yet stick it out over years, gain experience, and apply for the jobs requiring experience that we hire for.
Start hiring women? Every company I've worked at has gone out of their way to hire as many women as they could find. All the interns we've hired were women. We want women working with us. The problem is that they're damn difficult to find.
Some things simply cannot be solved by laissez faire capitalism. In fact it creates many problems, which is obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes for two seconds. That does not mean that the solution is the opposite, a totally planned central economy, but a sensible mix of the two. The knee-jerk reactionary repugnance to anything with even the mildest whiff of small-s 'socialism' is seriously damaging. It damages the health and happiness of every person, and now it is seriously damaging the planet. Nothing is black or white, perhaps a little subtlety should be given its chance. People have been sold the right-wing view for so long now they've forgotten what the middle ground even is. Centre-right policies are seen as far left, which is ridiculous.
It's not a mild whiff of "socialism". It's a massive restructuring of our society and economy on shaky grounds. What happens when the next imaginary ecothreat comes through? If we continue to use the same decision-making process as we're doing here, then it's going to be a long stream of poor decisions and a descent either into regional dissolution or even a new dark age, if the whole world should buy in for the duration.
Imaginary threats don't harm us. Real threats do. We're facing the real threat of global warming. Instead of taking an honest look at the science and possible solutions, you look the potential bill and say any solution is impossible. Nevermind if the bill would include the price to get the world off fossil fuels and eliminate our gas payments forever. Nevermind if the bill would remove the motivation behind wars for oil and the trillions we've spent for those. Nevermind if the bill would clean up our air and eliminate smog and cut our medical payments for lung conditions. So, we live with your shortsightedness in a worse world where we constantly pay for gas with our money and lives.
I think capitalism could solve it, it's just that by the time AGW began kicking the living shit out of the economy and causing widespread ecological damage, much of it would be irreversible.
But guys like the Koch's want it that way. They'll walk away with vast amounts of money and insulate themselves from the woes being suffered by everyone else.
Hell, the Kochs don't need to spend any money to insulate themselves. At their age, they'll be dead before the worst negative effects are felt.
My other niece works for Disney.com . My former roommate is now a software engineering intern in Mountain View.
Women can do it. The question is why are male hiring managers and execs so afraid of hiring them?
There's no reason to be afraid. They don't bite.
What world are you living in? Women working in technology are so rare that tech companies bend over backwards to find and hire qualified women. In fact, given the choice of an equally qualified man or woman, tech companies will damn near always choose the woman.
Of course women can do the work. The argument is that they generally don't want to do the work. There's about a million other jobs that women find more interesting. Hence, discussions like this talking about the lack of women in technology.
What's this got to do with women's interest in STEM?
Pay attention. Women aren't interested in engineering work in modern, egalitarian societies. They'd rather take other options such as teaching or nursing or other professions where they can help care for kids, adults, animals, plants, the environment, etc. When women have options, they move away from topics like engineering which they generally find boring. You see that in multiple cultures across the world. In fact, it's such a universal preference that researchers attribute the cause at least partially due to a biological difference between the sexes.
To get women to accept jobs in engineering, you'd need to take away their other options. You need to make society less equal. That's why we see so many female engineers from places like India. Women from countries like that don't have the same options as women in the US. They study engineering because they don't feel they have any other viable options.
The root of the problem isn't what you seem to think it is. The root of the problem is that guys like you continue to push bullshit like
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines.
Women, it was once believed, didn't have the constitution to be doctors. Women, it was once held true, didn't possess the analytical minds required for a career in the law.
Women could do without your sexist arse telling them what they are and aren't, and what they can and can't do.
Gender studies promotes the idea that men and women are exactly the same except for our genitalia. This assertion or hypothesis hasn't been shown true by actual science conducted by biologists. In fact, studies by actual biologists show the opposite. The brain controls hormone levels. The amount of testosterone in the bloodstream effects whether a child is interested in traditionally male-oriented or female-oriented toys. This is has been shown true for children as young as one day old. That's before a child has any chance of getting corrupted by societal influences.
Further, studies across 53 societies show that as cultures grow more egalitarian and allow men and women to do whatever job they like, we actually see more men doing traditionally male jobs and more women doing traditionally female jobs. It's only in less equal societies where men and women face unequal choices of work where we see men and women doing largely the same kinds of work. Were the differences in preference of job only a difference in culture, then we should also see different results in different cultures. That isn't the case. When given the choice, men almost always prefer traditionally male jobs and women traditionally female jobs. That suggests a biological difference between the preferences of men and women for the kind of work they prefer to do.
Here's a good video on these facts. Although, whoever posted the video to Youtube definitely should have chosen a better title. I suggest watching the whole thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A bunch of SJWs are wrestling with it. Silicon Valley is doing just fine.
When women wanted to become doctors, they fought their way into med school, fought to earn a proper education, fought for credentials, and fought for equal standing amongst male doctors. When women wanted to become lawyers, they similarly fought their way through the system. Same goes for every other job women wanted to do. Women fought their way to get the jobs they wanted. Some of those fights took decades.
In tech, jobs require less qualifications than working as a doctor or lawyer. You don't need to spend years getting a masters, PhD, or going through a post-doc program. The pay for high-end IT workers can reach the same amount as the pay for low-end doctors or lawyers. The work environment in IT is often better than what doctors or lawyers encounter. Yet, tech companies can't give away the jobs to US women.
Why? Answer that question and you get to the root of the problem.
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines. Machines don't need help. They don't care about making the next hipster app. They could care less about the coolest new programming language. They don't give a shit about all the things that cause religious wars in the tech community.
Most women don't want tech jobs because they find the work meaningless. Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense. Say, I spend 3 months improving the performance of an app. Then users login half a second shorter. Big whoop. Do users even notice? Do they care? No, probably not. Does it really improve their lives? Definitely not.
When tech companies start doing truly meaningful work, then women will beat down their doors. Until then, all this effort to attract women won't matter.
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently?
It's more they desire the culture of hanging out indefinitely. They want people to never leave work. Companies don't give a damn if that burns out employees.
We can't change the fact that we work with machines. However, we can change the fact that we work alone. Make programming more social by adding pair programming at all levels, including academia, and you'll get more women willing to join and stay. You'll also get the rest of the benefits which come along with pair programming such as fewer bugs and higher quality code.
Indeed. I find it more than coincidence that the majority of women stay away from fields where they need to work alone with machines. IT, auto mechanics, construction, and engineering are all male-dominated fields. Why? Sexism? Yes, some fields are more sexist than others. However, medicine and law were also extremely sexist in the recent past. And yet, we have tons of women doctors and lawyers. The main difference I see with those fields is that doctors and lawyers actually work with other people. The work is often group work. Frankly, it appears that most women simply don't like IT work once they get a chance to perform it in the industry. If they truly loved the work, I'm sure we'd see many more women rushing to come into tech and stick around.
This brings to mind an interesting solution. You want to see more women in tech? Then make tech work more social. We already have an answer to that: Pair programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Weâ(TM)re on the cusp of 5G. Weâ(TM)ll get fiber speeds without the wires. At that point, why bother with fiber at all? Hell, why bother with cable companies at all? The cell companies will be able to offer faster internet speeds than cable companies. Then, everyone will finally be able to dump Comcast.
"The modern gaming era began long before 1999." No, it didn't. Pong is a 1 on 1 game at most. The "modern gaming" refers to massive multiplayer online games. You're being stupid intentionally, it's normal for here.
You're drawing an arbitrary line and assuming people agree with you. Modern gaming could just as easily be defined as any sort of video game. That's how I'd define it.
I think the article is trying (poorly) and failing (badly) to imply that the "Modern Gaming Era" means online multiplayer and mobile-based gaming. So in that context, it's only really been a widespread part of gaming culture since around 2001 when Halo introduced the "Everyday Joe" to online 1st person shooters.
And to answer the inevitable response yes, I'm aware that there was online gaming prior to that, aware that Quake was the first massively popular online shooter, etc. but it was the Xbox and Halo that really catapulted gaming in general, and online gaming in particular, into the realm of "acceptability" to regular people. Prior to that, gamers were still widely regarded as "nerds and geeks and losers."
Mobile-based gaming didn't really take off until smart phones came around 12 years old. That was long after the start of the "modern gaming era."
Between PC, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, the XBox is only a portion of the overall market. Halo meant nothing and continues to mean nothing to anyone who doesn't own an XBox. It didn't matter how "acceptable" it was to anyone else. Further that first came out in 2001, years after online multiplayer had already gone mainstream on PCs.
Quake was certainly the game that popularized online deathmatch starting in 1996. That I could see as the start of the widespread online multiplayer era.
What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months.
The modern gaming era began long before 1999. Pong was one of the earliest video games. That came out in 1972. The modern gaming era is almost 50 years old.
What's surprising is that Republicans willfully support blatant treason and hacking groups...
What, you think the Russians only hacked the Democrats? The Russians went after the Republicans as well. Only, the Russians didn't release the Republican emails. Why? What do you think? To use as kompromat. That's why Republicans are going along with Trump. Russia has dirt on them as well.
... the iPhone 6s isn't obsolete...
This is the exact problem right here. There's no incentive to buy newer phones anymore since they're not adding dramatically new must-have features. Yet, that didn't stop Apple from dramatically increasing prices as if it were adding those features. Sorry, I'm not going to pay $1000+ for a phone that's just marginally better than the one I currently own.
Were Apple to spend a bunch of their cash on research and come up with new features that people wanted, they could jump start the market again. But, that's not happening.
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of Gordon Teal, a man born in 1907. He was not a Baby Boomer.
The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. Maiman was born July 11, 1927. He was not a Baby Boomer.
ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, was started in 1967. The first message was sent in 1969. The very youngest of the Boomers worked on it. However, the majority of that work was done by older generations.
Same goes with the manned moon landings. The majority of the work was done prior to 1969, the year of the first landing. The last moon landing was 1972. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. He was not a Baby Boomer. Most of the work done to get us to the moon was done by non-Boomers.
As for "manufacturer to the world", I'm not sure what this is. Again, manufacturing peaked in the US prior to the time Baby Boomers controlled the majority of businesses.
It would make more sense if you gave Boomers credit for Apple and Microsoft, the two companies responsible for the PC computing boom and the smartphone.
Millennials: Facebook. Twitter. Selfies. Selfie sticks.
Zuckerberg is a millennial. So yes, Facebook is their creation.
The co-founders of Twitter are all Gen-X.
Well if you have a degree in Comp Si you spent the last 3 years of your academic career not programming.
What in the hell kind of university/college offers a comp sci degree where that is even remotely true?
None. Slashdot has a lot of people who didn't finish university for whatever reason. Perhaps they thought they'd be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Or, they thought they were smarter than their professors. Or, they got tired of their non-CS classes intended to provide a well-rounded education. Or, they took music composition and couldn't find a job in their field. Or, they never went to college in the first place.
So what's so special about university that makes it worth thousands of dollars? The knowledge is in books. Figure out the books used in a curriculum and buy'em used. Couple that with someone willing to help you in sticky situations and you can avoid college altogether.
Simply reading a book is not the same as studying a book before quizzes or an exam. Further, most professors lecture on topics not covered in the books. Only shitty profs work straight from the book. Lab work and homework problems drill those lessons into your head.
Computer science courses are much more difficult than other courses at university. On weekend nights, the business majors are out drinking beer and hitting on girls. The computer science nerds are busy writing their programs. After 4 years of spending weekend after weekend writing code, you end up learning quite a bit. And no, it's not the same as just reading a few used books.
I had two particular grads from the University of Washington come in for an interview for some openings I had for software engineers. They both had almost no ability to write code. I was so pissed that they both got their degrees and I was left wondering just how did they get their Comp Sci degrees.
Frankly, I'd question your interviewing skills before I'd question their coding skills. They had at least 4 years of progressively difficult software education. You had what sort of training for interviewing? How often do you do it? How many years of progressively difficult interviewing have you put in? How often were you tested and reviewed on your interviewing skills by educated interviewing experts?
Software engineers who are more used to constantly dealing with machines are typically poor judges of people. Add in the Dunning-Kruger effect and you get engineers who think their shitty interviewing skills are much better than they actually are and can't recognize their own interviewing deficiency.
On top of that, the software interview process is broken at most companies. Interviewers will base their hiring decision entirely on whether the candidate can answer some random algorithm question. If the candidate hasn't encountered that exact question previously and can't solve it exactly to the interviewer's requirements, which can often be ridiculous, then they're screwed. If the candidate has encountered the problem before, then they win the job lottery. You're not determining whether they can "write code" or not. You're finding out whether they've seen that problem previously.
Further, I bet you're not sitting them in from of an IDE and giving them plenty of time to complete the task. I bet you're doing it on a whiteboard or a text editor on a short time scale with the added pressure of an interview. The typical coding interview is so completely alien to the way that developers normally work that I'm surprised anyone gets hired.
And for what? Writing algorithms are maybe 10% of a modern software engineer's job. It makes no sense that you'd base your whole hiring decision on something that's relatively so trivial.
Or mandating a $15 minimum wage without studying it first and then seeing it decrease earnings of those it was designed to help, at least according to one recent study (more research over time is still needed to say for sure). There's a much longer list for someone crankier than me to make.
It's well meaning but it's almost universally poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
Bullshit. I was part of the effort to raise the minimum wage in Seattle to $15. The effort was studied and argued ad nauseam. We looked at all the data. Study after study shows that paying people a living wage is not only feasible, but improves the economy. It may be shocking to learn, but putting money into the hands of people who'll actually spend it in the community boosts the economy. Your spending is my income, my spending is your income. You get paid more, then you spend more. Then I make more and pay you back. That's how economies work.
(What hurts an economy? A few rich assholes sucking up all the money for themselves and then sending that money out of the economy to their Swiss bank accounts.)
This recent study came out contradicting previous results. It stated that increasing the minimum wage hurts workers. Turns out the new study wasn't peer reviewed. Another shocker. One problem of many is that the new study excluded minimum wage employers with multiple locations. Why? No good reason. If a restaurant was successful and opened a second location, it wasn't included in the study. No surprise that increasing the minimum wage looks bad if you methodically cut out the successful businesses.
http://www.epi.org/publication...
Like this income tax idea, which will perversely drive out the people who pay the most in property taxes and push them into driving into work from the suburbs. And Seattle already has miserable traffic.
Everyone wants to live close to downtown. Part of that is precisely because of the miserable traffic. We've got the hottest housing market in the nation. If a few people leave over the income tax, there's 10 times the number of people who'd love to buy their homes, move in, and pay that income tax. Our housing market will be completely fine with this tax change.
But, again, while the economic sun is shining the city has the leeway to try these grand but foolish experiments. Unfortunately, at some point the tech boom here will end and there will be a nasty bill to pay for it.
Yeah, sure. The internet is just a fad. It'll end soon. Keep telling yourself that.
If you can afford a 2000+ sqft home, you are rich.
Bullshit. Middle class people can afford 2000+ sqft homes throughout the US. That doesn't make them rich.
If you can afford to buy a decaf latte grande every day, you are rich.
Again, bullshit. A latte is $3. It's not fucking Patrón. Middle class and poor folk buy lattes every single day. It doesn't make them rich.
An accountant who obtained training 20 years ago can still find value and use most of those skills today. That is not the case for those in IT, and more people outside of IT need to understand that instead of looking down upon the highly skilled IT professional who can still provide great value without being a ringknocker with a sheepskin under their belt.
This statement might be true for lower-end IT jobs, but it's bullshit for development work.
A computer science degree from a decent school teaches students a number of things including data structures, algorithms, hardware architecture, project management, etc. Lists, sets, and maps haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Algorithms don't change either. Dijkstra's algorithm were first published in 1959. Hardware architecture hasn't changed all that much over the years. As for project management, the main significant change in that time is that agile processes have become popular. Agile isn't exactly hard to pick up. All of this knowledge I've personally used in my years since graduation and plan to continue to use in the future. In fact, having this base level of knowledge helps me pick up and understand new technologies, which come and go.
Developers definitely benefit from computer science degrees. That's true even 20 years after the fact. Frankly, I wouldn't hire a developer without a degree. Yeah sure, maybe I might miss out on that diamond in the rough. I'd rather not deal with the uncertainty. With a degree, a developer shows that they've been exposed to a basic set of information and persevered through difficult circumstances.
No, we get women coming through the system. Almost universally, they're from other countries such as India and China where there are fewer opportunities for women. We hire many of these people.
American women have countless career options. Due to that, it's relatively rare to find an American woman interested in writing code over every other career possibility. We see few American women entering computer science. We see fewer of these women graduating in computer science. We see yet fewer American women applying for development internships. Fewer yet stick it out over years, gain experience, and apply for the jobs requiring experience that we hire for.
Start hiring women? Every company I've worked at has gone out of their way to hire as many women as they could find. All the interns we've hired were women. We want women working with us. The problem is that they're damn difficult to find.
Some things simply cannot be solved by laissez faire capitalism. In fact it creates many problems, which is obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes for two seconds. That does not mean that the solution is the opposite, a totally planned central economy, but a sensible mix of the two. The knee-jerk reactionary repugnance to anything with even the mildest whiff of small-s 'socialism' is seriously damaging. It damages the health and happiness of every person, and now it is seriously damaging the planet. Nothing is black or white, perhaps a little subtlety should be given its chance. People have been sold the right-wing view for so long now they've forgotten what the middle ground even is. Centre-right policies are seen as far left, which is ridiculous.
It's not a mild whiff of "socialism". It's a massive restructuring of our society and economy on shaky grounds. What happens when the next imaginary ecothreat comes through? If we continue to use the same decision-making process as we're doing here, then it's going to be a long stream of poor decisions and a descent either into regional dissolution or even a new dark age, if the whole world should buy in for the duration.
Imaginary threats don't harm us. Real threats do. We're facing the real threat of global warming. Instead of taking an honest look at the science and possible solutions, you look the potential bill and say any solution is impossible. Nevermind if the bill would include the price to get the world off fossil fuels and eliminate our gas payments forever. Nevermind if the bill would remove the motivation behind wars for oil and the trillions we've spent for those. Nevermind if the bill would clean up our air and eliminate smog and cut our medical payments for lung conditions. So, we live with your shortsightedness in a worse world where we constantly pay for gas with our money and lives.
I think capitalism could solve it, it's just that by the time AGW began kicking the living shit out of the economy and causing widespread ecological damage, much of it would be irreversible.
But guys like the Koch's want it that way. They'll walk away with vast amounts of money and insulate themselves from the woes being suffered by everyone else.
Hell, the Kochs don't need to spend any money to insulate themselves. At their age, they'll be dead before the worst negative effects are felt.
My other niece works for Disney.com . My former roommate is now a software engineering intern in Mountain View.
Women can do it. The question is why are male hiring managers and execs so afraid of hiring them?
There's no reason to be afraid. They don't bite.
What world are you living in? Women working in technology are so rare that tech companies bend over backwards to find and hire qualified women. In fact, given the choice of an equally qualified man or woman, tech companies will damn near always choose the woman.
Of course women can do the work. The argument is that they generally don't want to do the work. There's about a million other jobs that women find more interesting. Hence, discussions like this talking about the lack of women in technology.
What's this got to do with women's interest in STEM?
Pay attention. Women aren't interested in engineering work in modern, egalitarian societies. They'd rather take other options such as teaching or nursing or other professions where they can help care for kids, adults, animals, plants, the environment, etc. When women have options, they move away from topics like engineering which they generally find boring. You see that in multiple cultures across the world. In fact, it's such a universal preference that researchers attribute the cause at least partially due to a biological difference between the sexes.
To get women to accept jobs in engineering, you'd need to take away their other options. You need to make society less equal. That's why we see so many female engineers from places like India. Women from countries like that don't have the same options as women in the US. They study engineering because they don't feel they have any other viable options.
Yes, women dominated a lot of traditionally male-oriented fields in the 1940s because the men left for WW2. That's why the early pioneers were women.
The root of the problem isn't what you seem to think it is. The root of the problem is that guys like you continue to push bullshit like
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines.
Women, it was once believed, didn't have the constitution to be doctors. Women, it was once held true, didn't possess the analytical minds required for a career in the law. Women could do without your sexist arse telling them what they are and aren't, and what they can and can't do.
Gender studies promotes the idea that men and women are exactly the same except for our genitalia. This assertion or hypothesis hasn't been shown true by actual science conducted by biologists. In fact, studies by actual biologists show the opposite. The brain controls hormone levels. The amount of testosterone in the bloodstream effects whether a child is interested in traditionally male-oriented or female-oriented toys. This is has been shown true for children as young as one day old. That's before a child has any chance of getting corrupted by societal influences.
Further, studies across 53 societies show that as cultures grow more egalitarian and allow men and women to do whatever job they like, we actually see more men doing traditionally male jobs and more women doing traditionally female jobs. It's only in less equal societies where men and women face unequal choices of work where we see men and women doing largely the same kinds of work. Were the differences in preference of job only a difference in culture, then we should also see different results in different cultures. That isn't the case. When given the choice, men almost always prefer traditionally male jobs and women traditionally female jobs. That suggests a biological difference between the preferences of men and women for the kind of work they prefer to do.
Here's a good video on these facts. Although, whoever posted the video to Youtube definitely should have chosen a better title. I suggest watching the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A bunch of SJWs are wrestling with it. Silicon Valley is doing just fine.
When women wanted to become doctors, they fought their way into med school, fought to earn a proper education, fought for credentials, and fought for equal standing amongst male doctors. When women wanted to become lawyers, they similarly fought their way through the system. Same goes for every other job women wanted to do. Women fought their way to get the jobs they wanted. Some of those fights took decades.
In tech, jobs require less qualifications than working as a doctor or lawyer. You don't need to spend years getting a masters, PhD, or going through a post-doc program. The pay for high-end IT workers can reach the same amount as the pay for low-end doctors or lawyers. The work environment in IT is often better than what doctors or lawyers encounter. Yet, tech companies can't give away the jobs to US women.
Why? Answer that question and you get to the root of the problem.
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines. Machines don't need help. They don't care about making the next hipster app. They could care less about the coolest new programming language. They don't give a shit about all the things that cause religious wars in the tech community.
Most women don't want tech jobs because they find the work meaningless. Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense. Say, I spend 3 months improving the performance of an app. Then users login half a second shorter. Big whoop. Do users even notice? Do they care? No, probably not. Does it really improve their lives? Definitely not.
When tech companies start doing truly meaningful work, then women will beat down their doors. Until then, all this effort to attract women won't matter.
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently?
It's more they desire the culture of hanging out indefinitely. They want people to never leave work. Companies don't give a damn if that burns out employees.
We can't change the fact that we work with machines. However, we can change the fact that we work alone. Make programming more social by adding pair programming at all levels, including academia, and you'll get more women willing to join and stay. You'll also get the rest of the benefits which come along with pair programming such as fewer bugs and higher quality code.
Indeed. I find it more than coincidence that the majority of women stay away from fields where they need to work alone with machines. IT, auto mechanics, construction, and engineering are all male-dominated fields. Why? Sexism? Yes, some fields are more sexist than others. However, medicine and law were also extremely sexist in the recent past. And yet, we have tons of women doctors and lawyers. The main difference I see with those fields is that doctors and lawyers actually work with other people. The work is often group work. Frankly, it appears that most women simply don't like IT work once they get a chance to perform it in the industry. If they truly loved the work, I'm sure we'd see many more women rushing to come into tech and stick around.
This brings to mind an interesting solution. You want to see more women in tech? Then make tech work more social. We already have an answer to that: Pair programming.