IT going forward doesn't need a dozen people with BS degrees. When you're building a house you only need so many civil engineers and architects. At some point you need a fleet of plumbers, electricians and general contractors. Some people insist that a BS is required so management finds the cheapest BS they can. For 10% of my job I would love to hire a 17-18 year old apprentice and just train them in the hands on tools.
I don't need a BS. I don't need an Indian. I just need someone thirsty and willing to learn. I was lucky enough to have an engineering 'apprenticeship' at 16 and it influenced the rest of my career. It was hands on "do this" style learning, exactly how you see journeymen training apprentices.
There will always be a need for advanced degrees but the ratio of degreed:apprenticed needs to change. Doctors have moved to train physician assistants, RNs, and a host of other positions to do most of their job so they can concentrate on what they were trained to do.
If you're a manager looking for 'cheap labor' start talking to the local voctech high schools. Factor in rework and communication 'costs' and pay them well for their age. You'll come out loads ahead. They'll have relevant job experience for the future and you'll have cheap labor. If you have someone set to retire in 5 years just have the 16 year olds shadow them and do any work that they can.
You'll have 'cheap' labor that knows your system inside and out and you can pick the best to hire after HS. It's how all of the CNC and tool and die shops in my area do it. Kids wrap up highschool and get hands on training in something they're interested in. After HS the CNC shops have 18-19 year olds that are getting paid well for their age with no debt.
Right now there's a pretty easy to switch. Both our Alexa and Google Home have different... 'levels of education'. The Echo is a bare bones dumb box that can do a few basic things. Google is much better at finding arbitrary search results. It's like confusing 2 co-workers because they happen to both speak English.
For the corporate environment there are going to be internally hosted solutions. University of Michigan has http://lucida.ai/, it started as a PhD project and entirely self hosted. We still host all of our Git servers behind corporate firewalls, we're not going to be sending voice data out to the Big 3. (Google, Apple, Amazon) any time soon.
There is no equivalent of "the guy who solders my boards".
There absolutely is. My local voctech high school is training them.
You want a 16 year old kid to create your Makefiles? Fuck that.
Why not? Make is probably the first thing that I'd teach them. It drives everything else.
You want a 16 year old kid to grok your network?
Why not? I was about that age when I got into our school's network. Our IT admin went with 'security through obscurity'. You just had to enter your own proxy server. And at the library I found out that I could check my mail and log into IRC from the 'telnet only' card catalog machines.
you are good at doing that level of tedious stuff, you are worth a lot of money..
Not really.
it's almost certain that they are, at best, a cheap prototype vehicle.
Yeah. And if they didn't exist your 'cheap prototype' would still be done by the lowest paid engineer and still need to get done. That's exactly how they should be used, cheap idea and protoype generators.
We've already seen it. It's called offshoring.
Offshoring has an entire different set of problems. It has everything to do with communication. There were times I had enough trouble communicating my idea to peers with advanced degrees in the same location. They were brilliant but had ESL and so there was a communications gap. And that's with people I knew were competent.
I've seen it take a week just to convey a simple thought of what what needed. It's something I could have gotten across to a 16 year old standing next to me in a few minutes. I would absolutely hire a dozen people that went through a Python bootcamp to do work. I only ask that they have the same native language as myself and that I can talk to them in person at least once a week. Beyond that I don't have any need for a BS graduate.
think you need "digital laborers" to make copies of the finished product.
I don't "need" them. They'd just make my job a lot easier and produce higher quality content than what we're getting out of India.
You should be constantly handing your work off to someone else so you can focus on the next thing. If you're just a peon turning a crank you are going to get replaced.
There are lost of qualified IT professionals that are getting passed over.
Because I don't need and IT professional. CS and IT hasn't had shift towards the trades that all other degrees have had for a while.
When you're building a house you only need so many civil engineers and architects. At some point you need a fleet of plumbers, electricians and general contractors. That's where the engineering and IT work is at my company. Right now people are trying to cut the corner by outsourcing and it's having predictable results.
I don't need a BS CS major. I don't even need a AS. I want a 16 year old that is eager to be in "IT" and I can converse with in English. That's it. I would hire a dozen if my manager would allow it but we're stuck outsourcing to India for the time being.
IT and CS need to come to a realization that part of your job does not need a college education. It needs the skill sets that can be learned in 10-16 week vocational tech training. Every single other industry has a stake in that space but for some reason CS majors insist that the entirety of their job must be done by people with a CS degree.
Hell I would hire someone that could grok Python and just write documentation. I don't even need them to understand it. Turn my trash into perfectly valid Google Style documentation. That would take a huge weight off of my shoulders and improve code around the company. Maybe they might pick up some Python on the way. That's the sort of work that tradesmen give to the grunt apprentices. Doctors have moved to train physician assistants, RNs, and a host of other positions to do most of their job so they can concentrate on what they were trained to do.
As long as the gray beards insist that the only people that can replace them have BS degrees then the company will find the cheapest "BS" degree they can and hire them. Mechanical engineers have had mechanical engineering technologists for a while and they're amazing. It would take me twice as long to do something they do and it would be half as good. It doesn't mean I don't have a job it means I get to concentrate on the engineering.
If you want to see CS and IT shift back to the US then you need to sell your manager on hiring 16 year olds to do your tedious work so that you can concentrate on the hard bits of it. And when those hard bits become the tedious bits, train them and move on. Rinse and repeat. If you're a manager looking for 'cheap labor' start talking to the local voctech high schools. Factor in rework and communication 'costs' and pay them well for their age. You'll come out loads ahead. They'll have relevant job experience for the future and you'll have cheap labor. If you have someone set to retire in 5 years just have the 16 year olds shadow them and do any work that they can.
Remember when computers, CAD, compilers, Simulink, linkers, etc all replaced Engineers?
They replaced the job an engineer did before the time they were invented, it just means Engineers learned to use them and move on. I couldn't imagine trying to write a modern controller / plant model in pure assembly. I can have one done in an hour with Simulink. It just means that I can do that much more.
Scotty's still an engineer even if he doesn't have to do the 'boring tedious' work that we have to do now.
Same shift has happened in the medical field. Doctors of the 1950s have been replaced by physician assistants, registered nurses, and a whole host of other careers. It just means that the title of "doctor" moved on to doing other work.
AI proponents better deliver on their threats. I have way too much work to do and my boss and labor laws won't let me hire 1,000 interns to do a bulk of it.
No, it's closer to saying everyone needs to learn to type.
I'm a magician to my fellow Mechanical engineers because I know some Regex. Nothing fancy. No massive libraries just a simple tool to change some data. In the future if you don't have a minimum level of competency in typ^H^H^H programming of some sort you'll be near useless.
How many engineers these days will get hired saying they can't type? It'll be that way in 20 years if not sooner.
Not just that but the bug fixes are cumulative. Find a bug with someones' winter driving and they can take a winter driving course to fix it. It doesn't magically update the firmware in all the other humans.
Developers should avoid writing code by hand and instead write abstract high-level programs that generate code. This rule aims to reduce human errors and save time.
Which is why we've been abstracting away the hard bits for a while now. We're not manually flipping in digits. We made punch cards, automated punch cards, compilers, and higher level languages.
I couldn't imagine doing non-linear control algorithms with C or assembly. Did simple PIDs in college, understand how to do it and just let Simulink write the DO-178C and MISRA 2012 code for me. It's already certified for critical code.
It's also easy to build a plant model to unit test against and add in SIL/MIL/HIL level testing. I let Windriver and other compilers handle the assembly generation. Again, they're already tested and certified.
Every decade some non-programmer discovers visual programming and says we are all going to be creating programs by dragging blocks around.
I've been using the same one for the last decade. They're great. What is your issue with them? Or if you have a problem with them do you also have a problem with compilers?
.... That's still better than I grew up, better than my grandparents on back grew up. It wasn't too long ago that you didn't know if anyone was a live unless you somehow saw them again in person.
Now, if you work in a strictly controlled and regulated environment,
Funny you should mention that.... it's more or less what I'm doing. We have voodoo scripts and Excel files turning out software because that is what got certified.
We're coming up on getting certification on future devices and the build environment. I've moving all of that to Jenkins and automated builds. And code compliance checking (MISRA C : 2012).
No more "oh, I guess that merge didn't work". We're ~15 years behind other industry devops.
Same goes for unit testing physical I/O instead of having a test engineer running dSpace, all automated.
How well should I know it before I'm allowed to? If I had to rank it at that time I'd probably fall between my Matlab and C. Now I'd probably put it between my Simulink and Matlab on the scale of Simulink, Matlab, C, PHP, C++, VBA, C#, to Java. Last week I had to write a CDLL wrapper. Next week it may be C#. I'll grab the C# documentation, run it through some regex and have it spit out a mostly assembled Python class.
And if my industry started moving to a new language I might hack out a few scripts in one year. Then in year 2 start playing around with it at work. 5-10 year cycles for migrating technology and languages should be expected to be the norm. So if in year 5+ I get laid off I can put the 'shiny new thing' and still have all the 'they're never going to get away from this' tech. It's a rather employable niche.
If a job called for it I'd go on and on about my ClearCase experience. However I don't even put that on my LinkedIn out of shame. It'd take me a week of being laid off to re-write v2.0 of my Python Clearcase Voodoo
I just don't understand those that do the same thing year after year. That's more than enough time to get bored and move on. The future is waiting. It's going to be pretty cool if we eventually get there.
chosen to live in an incredibly high cost of living area of the country
I live in the middle of the country on 20+acres. ~3000 sqft house with land and a pole barn was around $250k. I earn ~3x the median household income of $40k for my county.
chosen to spend more hours
No.
chosen to educate yourself further in your non working hours,
1. Mostly during my working hours.
2. Oh god not an education. Stop. Make the learning stop!. No wonder your type can't find a job.
all in order to compete with your fellow workers who can't switch jobs without losing their visas.
All of my American peers aren't on Visas. The Indian ones live in India.
anyone else having unreasonable expectations.
Like I've said of your type before. You graduated college and thought you were done learning until retirement. You want to sit around doing 1990s work being paid adjusted for inflation and never have to worry about work. Personally I think the future sounds fun so I'll work like it's 2017 so that in 2030 I'm not doing 2017 work anymore.
What ever you want to believe. But these "the sky is falling" comments are getting old. I've read slashdot for 17 years at this point and during college I have believed them. I was terrified of my 30s. That time came and went. I went out job searching and found none of the problems I had been hearing about.
Then I figured out at work exactly 'who' those people were making these comments. They're useless warm bodies that are only kept around because it's too much of a hassle to get rid of them, for now. They graduated college and thought they learned everything they ever needed to learn and never bothered to learn anything new again. They gnash their teeth when you suggest something new. It's not India's problem it's their own. I see people in their 60s being hired back half time because they want the work and they managed to stay up to date on the technology (and in some cases they invented it).
If you have relevant skills for 2017 you should have no problem finding a job anywhere in the US. Hell, we're hiring. Every company I know of is hiring right now because there is a shit ton of work to do. From big companies all the way down through their nth tier suppliers has a lot of work that needs to get done. Instead there are a bunch of whip repairmen whining that it's everyone else's problem they didn't bother to learn something other than how to repair whips.
Those job listings I posted to above are real. If you're not getting them that's your problem. Not industry's.
Spoken like a raving sociopath that hasn't felt a real connection to anyone, ever.
Because I don't have a problem moving for a job? With modern technology my son talks to his grandparents 'face to face' more than I ever did growing up.
Slashdot Mirror
IT going forward doesn't need a dozen people with BS degrees. When you're building a house you only need so many civil engineers and architects. At some point you need a fleet of plumbers, electricians and general contractors. Some people insist that a BS is required so management finds the cheapest BS they can. For 10% of my job I would love to hire a 17-18 year old apprentice and just train them in the hands on tools.
I don't need a BS. I don't need an Indian. I just need someone thirsty and willing to learn. I was lucky enough to have an engineering 'apprenticeship' at 16 and it influenced the rest of my career. It was hands on "do this" style learning, exactly how you see journeymen training apprentices.
There will always be a need for advanced degrees but the ratio of degreed:apprenticed needs to change. Doctors have moved to train physician assistants, RNs, and a host of other positions to do most of their job so they can concentrate on what they were trained to do.
If you're a manager looking for 'cheap labor' start talking to the local voctech high schools. Factor in rework and communication 'costs' and pay them well for their age. You'll come out loads ahead. They'll have relevant job experience for the future and you'll have cheap labor. If you have someone set to retire in 5 years just have the 16 year olds shadow them and do any work that they can.
You'll have 'cheap' labor that knows your system inside and out and you can pick the best to hire after HS. It's how all of the CNC and tool and die shops in my area do it. Kids wrap up highschool and get hands on training in something they're interested in. After HS the CNC shops have 18-19 year olds that are getting paid well for their age with no debt.
Right now there's a pretty easy to switch. Both our Alexa and Google Home have different ... 'levels of education'. The Echo is a bare bones dumb box that can do a few basic things. Google is much better at finding arbitrary search results. It's like confusing 2 co-workers because they happen to both speak English.
For the corporate environment there are going to be internally hosted solutions. University of Michigan has http://lucida.ai/, it started as a PhD project and entirely self hosted. We still host all of our Git servers behind corporate firewalls, we're not going to be sending voice data out to the Big 3. (Google, Apple, Amazon) any time soon.
There is no equivalent of "the guy who solders my boards".
There absolutely is. My local voctech high school is training them.
You want a 16 year old kid to create your Makefiles? Fuck that.
Why not? Make is probably the first thing that I'd teach them. It drives everything else.
You want a 16 year old kid to grok your network?
Why not? I was about that age when I got into our school's network. Our IT admin went with 'security through obscurity'. You just had to enter your own proxy server. And at the library I found out that I could check my mail and log into IRC from the 'telnet only' card catalog machines.
you are good at doing that level of tedious stuff, you are worth a lot of money..
Not really.
it's almost certain that they are, at best, a cheap prototype vehicle.
Yeah. And if they didn't exist your 'cheap prototype' would still be done by the lowest paid engineer and still need to get done. That's exactly how they should be used, cheap idea and protoype generators.
We've already seen it. It's called offshoring.
Offshoring has an entire different set of problems. It has everything to do with communication. There were times I had enough trouble communicating my idea to peers with advanced degrees in the same location. They were brilliant but had ESL and so there was a communications gap. And that's with people I knew were competent.
I've seen it take a week just to convey a simple thought of what what needed. It's something I could have gotten across to a 16 year old standing next to me in a few minutes. I would absolutely hire a dozen people that went through a Python bootcamp to do work. I only ask that they have the same native language as myself and that I can talk to them in person at least once a week. Beyond that I don't have any need for a BS graduate.
think you need "digital laborers" to make copies of the finished product.
I don't "need" them. They'd just make my job a lot easier and produce higher quality content than what we're getting out of India.
You should be constantly handing your work off to someone else so you can focus on the next thing. If you're just a peon turning a crank you are going to get replaced.
I keep hearing that, I'll get back to you when it actually happens.
There are lost of qualified IT professionals that are getting passed over.
Because I don't need and IT professional. CS and IT hasn't had shift towards the trades that all other degrees have had for a while.
When you're building a house you only need so many civil engineers and architects. At some point you need a fleet of plumbers, electricians and general contractors. That's where the engineering and IT work is at my company. Right now people are trying to cut the corner by outsourcing and it's having predictable results.
I don't need a BS CS major. I don't even need a AS. I want a 16 year old that is eager to be in "IT" and I can converse with in English. That's it. I would hire a dozen if my manager would allow it but we're stuck outsourcing to India for the time being.
IT and CS need to come to a realization that part of your job does not need a college education. It needs the skill sets that can be learned in 10-16 week vocational tech training. Every single other industry has a stake in that space but for some reason CS majors insist that the entirety of their job must be done by people with a CS degree.
Hell I would hire someone that could grok Python and just write documentation. I don't even need them to understand it. Turn my trash into perfectly valid Google Style documentation. That would take a huge weight off of my shoulders and improve code around the company. Maybe they might pick up some Python on the way. That's the sort of work that tradesmen give to the grunt apprentices. Doctors have moved to train physician assistants, RNs, and a host of other positions to do most of their job so they can concentrate on what they were trained to do.
As long as the gray beards insist that the only people that can replace them have BS degrees then the company will find the cheapest "BS" degree they can and hire them. Mechanical engineers have had mechanical engineering technologists for a while and they're amazing. It would take me twice as long to do something they do and it would be half as good. It doesn't mean I don't have a job it means I get to concentrate on the engineering.
If you want to see CS and IT shift back to the US then you need to sell your manager on hiring 16 year olds to do your tedious work so that you can concentrate on the hard bits of it. And when those hard bits become the tedious bits, train them and move on. Rinse and repeat. If you're a manager looking for 'cheap labor' start talking to the local voctech high schools. Factor in rework and communication 'costs' and pay them well for their age. You'll come out loads ahead. They'll have relevant job experience for the future and you'll have cheap labor. If you have someone set to retire in 5 years just have the 16 year olds shadow them and do any work that they can.
Remember when computers, CAD, compilers, Simulink, linkers, etc all replaced Engineers?
They replaced the job an engineer did before the time they were invented, it just means Engineers learned to use them and move on. I couldn't imagine trying to write a modern controller / plant model in pure assembly. I can have one done in an hour with Simulink. It just means that I can do that much more.
Scotty's still an engineer even if he doesn't have to do the 'boring tedious' work that we have to do now.
Same shift has happened in the medical field. Doctors of the 1950s have been replaced by physician assistants, registered nurses, and a whole host of other careers. It just means that the title of "doctor" moved on to doing other work.
AI proponents better deliver on their threats. I have way too much work to do and my boss and labor laws won't let me hire 1,000 interns to do a bulk of it.
No, it's closer to saying everyone needs to learn to type.
I'm a magician to my fellow Mechanical engineers because I know some Regex. Nothing fancy. No massive libraries just a simple tool to change some data. In the future if you don't have a minimum level of competency in typ^H^H^H programming of some sort you'll be near useless.
How many engineers these days will get hired saying they can't type? It'll be that way in 20 years if not sooner.
Not just that but the bug fixes are cumulative. Find a bug with someones' winter driving and they can take a winter driving course to fix it. It doesn't magically update the firmware in all the other humans.
ASIL-D. ISO 26262. IEC 61508.
If you live in the automotive space you're used to all of this by now. If this is what Nvidia is targeting then Nvidia has taken that into account.
Every ASIL-D chip I'm aware of does exactly what you think it should. End to end ECC and lock step cores.
Is there something OSCAR does that the Jabber protocol doesn't?
We still have DVD rental stores and RedBoxes everywhere.
Turns out you can't stream much on 0.9 Mbps DSL.
Simulink to run modern automotive drivetrains (and about everything else).
Developers should avoid writing code by hand and instead write abstract high-level programs that generate code. This rule aims to reduce human errors and save time.
Which is why we've been abstracting away the hard bits for a while now. We're not manually flipping in digits. We made punch cards, automated punch cards, compilers, and higher level languages.
I couldn't imagine doing non-linear control algorithms with C or assembly. Did simple PIDs in college, understand how to do it and just let Simulink write the DO-178C and MISRA 2012 code for me. It's already certified for critical code.
It's also easy to build a plant model to unit test against and add in SIL/MIL/HIL level testing. I let Windriver and other compilers handle the assembly generation. Again, they're already tested and certified.
"100001010011" and "000010011110"
Great guys.
Every decade some non-programmer discovers visual programming and says we are all going to be creating programs by dragging blocks around.
I've been using the same one for the last decade. They're great. What is your issue with them? Or if you have a problem with them do you also have a problem with compilers?
That's not how engineering works. It shows up on my Resume like this:
"Validated Simulink plant models against test cell data".
and I can claim I know every language on my resume.
Do it and report back.
.... That's still better than I grew up, better than my grandparents on back grew up. It wasn't too long ago that you didn't know if anyone was a live unless you somehow saw them again in person.
Now, if you work in a strictly controlled and regulated environment,
Funny you should mention that.... it's more or less what I'm doing. We have voodoo scripts and Excel files turning out software because that is what got certified.
We're coming up on getting certification on future devices and the build environment. I've moving all of that to Jenkins and automated builds. And code compliance checking (MISRA C : 2012).
No more "oh, I guess that merge didn't work". We're ~15 years behind other industry devops.
Same goes for unit testing physical I/O instead of having a test engineer running dSpace, all automated.
It's just another language.
How well should I know it before I'm allowed to? If I had to rank it at that time I'd probably fall between my Matlab and C. Now I'd probably put it between my Simulink and Matlab on the scale of Simulink, Matlab, C, PHP, C++, VBA, C#, to Java. Last week I had to write a CDLL wrapper. Next week it may be C#. I'll grab the C# documentation, run it through some regex and have it spit out a mostly assembled Python class.
And if my industry started moving to a new language I might hack out a few scripts in one year. Then in year 2 start playing around with it at work. 5-10 year cycles for migrating technology and languages should be expected to be the norm. So if in year 5+ I get laid off I can put the 'shiny new thing' and still have all the 'they're never going to get away from this' tech. It's a rather employable niche.
If a job called for it I'd go on and on about my ClearCase experience. However I don't even put that on my LinkedIn out of shame. It'd take me a week of being laid off to re-write v2.0 of my Python Clearcase Voodoo
I just don't understand those that do the same thing year after year. That's more than enough time to get bored and move on. The future is waiting. It's going to be pretty cool if we eventually get there.
Consulting: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
chosen to live in an incredibly high cost of living area of the country
I live in the middle of the country on 20+acres. ~3000 sqft house with land and a pole barn was around $250k. I earn ~3x the median household income of $40k for my county.
chosen to spend more hours
No.
chosen to educate yourself further in your non working hours,
1. Mostly during my working hours.
2. Oh god not an education. Stop. Make the learning stop!. No wonder your type can't find a job.
all in order to compete with your fellow workers who can't switch jobs without losing their visas.
All of my American peers aren't on Visas. The Indian ones live in India.
anyone else having unreasonable expectations.
Like I've said of your type before. You graduated college and thought you were done learning until retirement. You want to sit around doing 1990s work being paid adjusted for inflation and never have to worry about work. Personally I think the future sounds fun so I'll work like it's 2017 so that in 2030 I'm not doing 2017 work anymore.
What ever you want to believe. But these "the sky is falling" comments are getting old. I've read slashdot for 17 years at this point and during college I have believed them. I was terrified of my 30s. That time came and went. I went out job searching and found none of the problems I had been hearing about.
Then I figured out at work exactly 'who' those people were making these comments. They're useless warm bodies that are only kept around because it's too much of a hassle to get rid of them, for now. They graduated college and thought they learned everything they ever needed to learn and never bothered to learn anything new again. They gnash their teeth when you suggest something new. It's not India's problem it's their own. I see people in their 60s being hired back half time because they want the work and they managed to stay up to date on the technology (and in some cases they invented it).
If you have relevant skills for 2017 you should have no problem finding a job anywhere in the US. Hell, we're hiring. Every company I know of is hiring right now because there is a shit ton of work to do. From big companies all the way down through their nth tier suppliers has a lot of work that needs to get done. Instead there are a bunch of whip repairmen whining that it's everyone else's problem they didn't bother to learn something other than how to repair whips.
Those job listings I posted to above are real. If you're not getting them that's your problem. Not industry's.
E-mails? I'm getting phone calls.
If you want to be pedantic. Then yeah. It was fairly obvious that I was talking about post HS education.
Spoken like a raving sociopath that hasn't felt a real connection to anyone, ever.
Because I don't have a problem moving for a job? With modern technology my son talks to his grandparents 'face to face' more than I ever did growing up.