It's a zero-skill job. Since the barrier of entry is so low, their numbers are growing faster than the number of available positions. Placing 1 programmer will pay as much as 2-3 months of any post-college entry level job. So the job attracts too many desperate kids who still think they are immortal and who don't realize that their lack of scruples is building them a lifetime reputation.
And make sure that you don't spoil them with descriptions of error messages. They should be lucky if the compiler prints out "error" when it finds one.
Autocomplete expands the range of your available tools. Looking things up is only useful if you have a vague idea of not only how things work, but also of what is available. Autocomplete won't help someone doesn't understand algorithmic complexity to write efficient code. Nor will it help someone who has no clue how to identify and manage abstractions. When your tools have autocomplete, then you choose languages and solutions most appropriate for the job. When you have to research everything, your ability to pick the best available solutions becomes severely MORE limited by time constraints. There is a vaaaaast difference between what you don't know and what you know but don't remember in detail. Without autocomplete, most esoteric api doesn't get used. People, being what they are, often drop the ball on doing exhaustive research on everything available. With autocomplete, one of the levels of complexity is removed. So the research that you do ends up being on more high-level solutions. To be more concrete, if you don't have autocomplete, you spend X amount of time on looking up API and Y amount of time on looking up best solutions to a particular problem. If you do have autocomplete, you spend Y+some fraction of X on looking up solutions. I actually find, that I remember MORE api when I use autocomplete. Just because the amount of code that I write multiplies by a factor of roughly 5. There is a large difference between not knowing how to do research and knowing what is too trivial to have to be researched. If a machine CAN figure it out for you, then it should be figured out by a machine. This whole attitude that computers should not be used to assist with trivial tasks reminds me of how someone who just learned arithmetic might look down on those who use calculators to do arithmetic (even though every accountant who is much more proficient in arithmetic than grade school student would use a calculator).
To a degree. There is a tipping point, however. A short look will show that there is more recruiters on Dice than there are actual employers. Which means that everyone and their cousin is now acting as a gate keeper to a programming job. EVERY recruiter is in the business of staking out territory (once they submit your resume to a particular job, no other recruiter can submit your resume to the same job or both submissions get ignored). Which means that once the headhunting industry got saturated enough with people whose only skill is putting on a tie, it actually became an impediment to matching talent with prospective employees. Let me try to quantify this. Both false negative and false positive do some damage. Let's assign weights to both. Once that is done, there is a brake even point at which enough false negatives outweigh 1 false positive. If the gatekeepers are incompetent and heavily biased towards a negative, then the ratio of false negatives to false positives increases. And since recruiting requires no actual skills, the number of incompetent gatekeepers is growing. I have never heard of a qualifications test for recruiters. Have you?
Testing somebody from a cold start, on subjects they have no practical way to prepare for seems like a good way to hire a trivia expert, but the productivity of an employee should be evaluated by his resume and portfolio.
Only if you want them to do the things they have already done. If you want to hire people who can adapt to problems as they arise, you test people's ability to solve problems they have not encountered before.
Normal human response to uncertainty (noise behind a big rock): a spontaneous decision between fight or flight. If the interview is testing your human response to being faced with solving unknown problems, then the puzzles work. If the interview is testing your experience with any particular technology, then they obviously don't. Of course, if all they want is your expertise, then it's not a place that will let you grow in your skills. It's a place that's looking to squeeze you until your skills are obsolete and then replace you. Because technology changes fairly rapidly, you should be looking to solve unknown problems as new technology emerges. If you are not, then your shelf life is too short for a company to make a long term investment in you.
No more than a competent mathematician should be able to do arithmetic. A good programmer should be able to manipulate concepts. Anyone who commits API to memory is most likely writing terrible code.
Remembering finer points of an API is not an "ability". In fact, if a person does remember finer points of API, they more than likely have difficulty understanding the difference between what's important and what isn't. As a result, they probably write extremely unreadable code. So, in fact, people that you are judging as able are most likely to do more damage than good to your code base. Remembering API base is about as much a skill as spelling is a skill. If a machine can perform a task, then testing people in performing the same task will only get you people who are replaceable with machines.
Of course, he's an engineer, so he probably lacks in the social skills department, and that might be much worse for trying to maintain that minimal majority.
As a university faculty, he most likely does have social skills. And as someone how ran a department in a university he most certainly has political skills.
Anyone who produces that many views most likely has multiple IPs. I can only see them limiting to 25k per IP, but then any heavy user would find a way to balance it out across all their address space. Of course, any "light" user who uses more than 25k views a day would probably find 0.4 cents per view cheaper than any extra development effort.
As for the assertion that I am "confused", I am not. I am fully aware of where you are coming from. I am, however, trying to expose an inaccuracy which has slipped into the vernacular.
Let's go with another statement that will sound weird but which is equivalent to your statement as far as logical validity: "high-risk promiscuous behavior causes AIDS." At that point anyone who's been involved in high-risk promiscuous behavior and did not contract HIV would claim that your statement is false.
If you miss the two out of three people, then the analogy still doesn't hold. It's 1 in 3 people who do smoke. So you have to shoot 3 people in the head... not try to shoot them... but you do shoot them -- the bullet makes its target. And then only one of them dies. You can't say at that point that head shots cause death. Semantically, maybe you could say it, but it would be considered misleading by anyone aware of what the odds are.
You simply reversed in your analogy what there was 1 of and what there was 3 of. So let me try again, if 3 people got shot in the head and only 1 of them died within a year of receiving the wound, we would not be saying that head shots cause death. We might, after some deliberation, start saying that they increase the chances of death. 1 in 3 is simply not enough to call it a causality. You are trying to rile up as if I argued that smoking is not harmful. You do remember that I said that it increases the risk of cancer, right? It's just not accurate to call it causality.
Furthermore, the hypothesis that humans burning fossil fuels would increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which would in turn lead to warming was put forth over 100 years ago.
You are trying to hide 2 deductions in one here:
burning fossil fuels would increase concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Since we don't know long-term trends in algae population, this is not established as a long term trend. At best you can show it as a time-axis local trend. We also don't know the net total of CO2 emission/absorption by forests (Freeman Dyson has actually studied this issue and, according him, the instrumentation of such observation is just beginning).
Which actually means there are two possible measurable scenarios which would break the causality link between burning fossil fuels and levels of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the long term.
which would in turn lead to warming was put forth over 100 years
This does not need control to prove. The amount of drag that CO2 presents on escaping heat can be measured in a lab. So we can measure this in a controlled experiment.
Here's how your logic translates back into the world in which everyone thought that earth resided on the back of a turtle:
If a ship goes too far away from the dry land, it will eventually reach the edge of the world and fall off. We ran an experiment: a few ships tried to travel far away from the dry land and they never returned. Obviously, we don't have a control for this experiment. Because that would require an earth which DIDN'T reside on the back of a giant turtle. And we just don't have that. So your argument is just a way to conveniently challenge a well-understood explanation for how the world works which is supported by no less than the mother Church.
You may FEEL that you are on the side of the right scientific argument, but if you step away from your emotions, you'll realize that you are forced to make arguments which are not scientifically sound in order to defend your position. This, of course, will upset you. It upsets everyone who is personally emotionally invested in thinking of themselves as a rational persons and who believes that they must subscribe to AGW theory in order to remain rational persons. Of course, once they get upset, they start burning heretics.
It's the same as ID proponents who explain away all evidence for evolution.
Not at all. Evolution has other evidence for it. So, while observing the results of evolution is a good way to establish it as a credible hypothesis, observing it in repeatable events (mutations of viruses, for example) establishes it to scientific certainty.
You logic doesn't hold water. Scientific proof does rise to a greater level of certainty than "best explanation available." So if your level of certainty is only "best available explanation", then you can't claim that it's established to scientific certainty. Scientific certainly requires that in the absence of the purported cause, the purported result would not happen. Since long-term cycles of fluctuations in temperature happened before homo sapiens, such a claim is not at all obvious. It may still be true if more subtle trends can be shown, but simple correlation over a veeery local time span is not even close to showing causality when so many variables have not been accounted for.
Smoking doesn't cause cancer. It increases the risk of cancer. Only 1 in 3 smokers develop cancer. If smoking caused cancer, you'd expect all smokers to premature die of cancer. If you think I am playing semantic games, then consider this: if only 1 in 3 people with HIV developed AIDS, HIV most likely would NOT be considered the cause of AIDS.
China and 3rd world nations will actually make a grab for American businesses
Not sure about "American businesses", but certainly they would make a grab for the natural resources. If we make it artificially expensive for ourselves to use our fossil fuels, it will make it cheaper for China to buy them. And they won't restrict their use. In fact, given that EVERY country subsidizes international campaigns which favor their own business interests, for all you know, the AGW campaign could be sponsored by China behind the scenes.
The best explanation available is often a result of not considering certain variables. "The earth is flat and resides on the back of a giant turtle" was the best available explanation at some point. It was based on observing the world with tools available at the time. The turtle bit was probably a failure to separate observation from fantasy, but not the "flat" bit. Just, please, don't use "I don't know of anything else" as a reason to assume causality. "I don't know" is not an argument. "This is the only possibly explanation I can think of" is not a proof of causality. It's a proof that it's a good place to look for causality.
Warmer temperature generally favors primitive organisms with higher proliferation rates. Compare, for example, ants in Africa vs ants in Europe. Which means that as the base temperature gets higher, the algae population shifts in favor of the species with higher proliferation rates. Algae with higher proliferation rates should uptake CO2 faster than the algae species with lower proliferation rates. Since the increase in such a population of algae most likely would have a rate of increase which follows a logistic model (rather than a linear model), it would appear as insignificant (but growing exponentially) initially. The main consequence of that is that looking at correlations is not very informative (they only measure linear correspondence relationship -- completely missing locally exponential ones). Once the dominant algae species are the ones with higher proliferation rates, they would uptake CO2 too quickly. This would start a long term trend of cooling until these species would be at a disadvantage. Then they would drop in population. The cycle would continue. For all you know, this IS the cycle. And given that primitive organisms have very short adaptation time ( you do believe in evolution, I presume), species should emerge which proliferate even faster than the currently existing ones. Assuming, by the way, that sometimes this process overshoots (with the length of the cycle being normally distributed), this would explain the occasional ice ages.
4%, but the point still stands. Don't you know that everyone is to "savvy" to fall for pump-n-dump now. To make money, the shills are forced to nag-n-bag.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a zero-skill job. Since the barrier of entry is so low, their numbers are growing faster than the number of available positions. Placing 1 programmer will pay as much as 2-3 months of any post-college entry level job. So the job attracts too many desperate kids who still think they are immortal and who don't realize that their lack of scruples is building them a lifetime reputation.
And make sure that you don't spoil them with descriptions of error messages. They should be lucky if the compiler prints out "error" when it finds one.
Autocomplete expands the range of your available tools. Looking things up is only useful if you have a vague idea of not only how things work, but also of what is available. Autocomplete won't help someone doesn't understand algorithmic complexity to write efficient code. Nor will it help someone who has no clue how to identify and manage abstractions. When your tools have autocomplete, then you choose languages and solutions most appropriate for the job. When you have to research everything, your ability to pick the best available solutions becomes severely MORE limited by time constraints. There is a vaaaaast difference between what you don't know and what you know but don't remember in detail. Without autocomplete, most esoteric api doesn't get used. People, being what they are, often drop the ball on doing exhaustive research on everything available. With autocomplete, one of the levels of complexity is removed. So the research that you do ends up being on more high-level solutions. To be more concrete, if you don't have autocomplete, you spend X amount of time on looking up API and Y amount of time on looking up best solutions to a particular problem. If you do have autocomplete, you spend Y+some fraction of X on looking up solutions. I actually find, that I remember MORE api when I use autocomplete. Just because the amount of code that I write multiplies by a factor of roughly 5. There is a large difference between not knowing how to do research and knowing what is too trivial to have to be researched. If a machine CAN figure it out for you, then it should be figured out by a machine. This whole attitude that computers should not be used to assist with trivial tasks reminds me of how someone who just learned arithmetic might look down on those who use calculators to do arithmetic (even though every accountant who is much more proficient in arithmetic than grade school student would use a calculator).
To a degree. There is a tipping point, however. A short look will show that there is more recruiters on Dice than there are actual employers. Which means that everyone and their cousin is now acting as a gate keeper to a programming job. EVERY recruiter is in the business of staking out territory (once they submit your resume to a particular job, no other recruiter can submit your resume to the same job or both submissions get ignored). Which means that once the headhunting industry got saturated enough with people whose only skill is putting on a tie, it actually became an impediment to matching talent with prospective employees. Let me try to quantify this. Both false negative and false positive do some damage. Let's assign weights to both. Once that is done, there is a brake even point at which enough false negatives outweigh 1 false positive. If the gatekeepers are incompetent and heavily biased towards a negative, then the ratio of false negatives to false positives increases. And since recruiting requires no actual skills, the number of incompetent gatekeepers is growing. I have never heard of a qualifications test for recruiters. Have you?
Testing somebody from a cold start, on subjects they have no practical way to prepare for seems like a good way to hire a trivia expert, but the productivity of an employee should be evaluated by his resume and portfolio.
Only if you want them to do the things they have already done. If you want to hire people who can adapt to problems as they arise, you test people's ability to solve problems they have not encountered before.
Normal human response to uncertainty (noise behind a big rock): a spontaneous decision between fight or flight. If the interview is testing your human response to being faced with solving unknown problems, then the puzzles work. If the interview is testing your experience with any particular technology, then they obviously don't. Of course, if all they want is your expertise, then it's not a place that will let you grow in your skills. It's a place that's looking to squeeze you until your skills are obsolete and then replace you. Because technology changes fairly rapidly, you should be looking to solve unknown problems as new technology emerges. If you are not, then your shelf life is too short for a company to make a long term investment in you.
A competent programmer should be able to do that.
No more than a competent mathematician should be able to do arithmetic. A good programmer should be able to manipulate concepts. Anyone who commits API to memory is most likely writing terrible code.
Remembering finer points of an API is not an "ability". In fact, if a person does remember finer points of API, they more than likely have difficulty understanding the difference between what's important and what isn't. As a result, they probably write extremely unreadable code. So, in fact, people that you are judging as able are most likely to do more damage than good to your code base. Remembering API base is about as much a skill as spelling is a skill. If a machine can perform a task, then testing people in performing the same task will only get you people who are replaceable with machines.
and a B.S. in Math.
Of course, he's an engineer, so he probably lacks in the social skills department, and that might be much worse for trying to maintain that minimal majority.
As a university faculty, he most likely does have social skills. And as someone how ran a department in a university he most certainly has political skills.
was an electrical engineer (PhD).
Anyone who produces that many views most likely has multiple IPs. I can only see them limiting to 25k per IP, but then any heavy user would find a way to balance it out across all their address space. Of course, any "light" user who uses more than 25k views a day would probably find 0.4 cents per view cheaper than any extra development effort.
As for the assertion that I am "confused", I am not. I am fully aware of where you are coming from. I am, however, trying to expose an inaccuracy which has slipped into the vernacular.
Let's go with another statement that will sound weird but which is equivalent to your statement as far as logical validity: "high-risk promiscuous behavior causes AIDS." At that point anyone who's been involved in high-risk promiscuous behavior and did not contract HIV would claim that your statement is false.
If you miss the two out of three people, then the analogy still doesn't hold. It's 1 in 3 people who do smoke. So you have to shoot 3 people in the head... not try to shoot them... but you do shoot them -- the bullet makes its target. And then only one of them dies. You can't say at that point that head shots cause death. Semantically, maybe you could say it, but it would be considered misleading by anyone aware of what the odds are.
You simply reversed in your analogy what there was 1 of and what there was 3 of. So let me try again, if 3 people got shot in the head and only 1 of them died within a year of receiving the wound, we would not be saying that head shots cause death. We might, after some deliberation, start saying that they increase the chances of death. 1 in 3 is simply not enough to call it a causality. You are trying to rile up as if I argued that smoking is not harmful. You do remember that I said that it increases the risk of cancer, right? It's just not accurate to call it causality.
Furthermore, the hypothesis that humans burning fossil fuels would increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which would in turn lead to warming was put forth over 100 years ago.
You are trying to hide 2 deductions in one here:
burning fossil fuels would increase concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Since we don't know long-term trends in algae population, this is not established as a long term trend. At best you can show it as a time-axis local trend. We also don't know the net total of CO2 emission/absorption by forests (Freeman Dyson has actually studied this issue and, according him, the instrumentation of such observation is just beginning).
Which actually means there are two possible measurable scenarios which would break the causality link between burning fossil fuels and levels of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the long term.
which would in turn lead to warming was put forth over 100 years
This does not need control to prove. The amount of drag that CO2 presents on escaping heat can be measured in a lab. So we can measure this in a controlled experiment.
Here's how your logic translates back into the world in which everyone thought that earth resided on the back of a turtle:
If a ship goes too far away from the dry land, it will eventually reach the edge of the world and fall off. We ran an experiment: a few ships tried to travel far away from the dry land and they never returned. Obviously, we don't have a control for this experiment. Because that would require an earth which DIDN'T reside on the back of a giant turtle. And we just don't have that. So your argument is just a way to conveniently challenge a well-understood explanation for how the world works which is supported by no less than the mother Church.
You may FEEL that you are on the side of the right scientific argument, but if you step away from your emotions, you'll realize that you are forced to make arguments which are not scientifically sound in order to defend your position. This, of course, will upset you. It upsets everyone who is personally emotionally invested in thinking of themselves as a rational persons and who believes that they must subscribe to AGW theory in order to remain rational persons. Of course, once they get upset, they start burning heretics.
It's the same as ID proponents who explain away all evidence for evolution.
Not at all. Evolution has other evidence for it. So, while observing the results of evolution is a good way to establish it as a credible hypothesis, observing it in repeatable events (mutations of viruses, for example) establishes it to scientific certainty.
You logic doesn't hold water. Scientific proof does rise to a greater level of certainty than "best explanation available." So if your level of certainty is only "best available explanation", then you can't claim that it's established to scientific certainty. Scientific certainly requires that in the absence of the purported cause, the purported result would not happen. Since long-term cycles of fluctuations in temperature happened before homo sapiens, such a claim is not at all obvious. It may still be true if more subtle trends can be shown, but simple correlation over a veeery local time span is not even close to showing causality when so many variables have not been accounted for.
wrong analogy. unless you mean to say that hiv causes aids even if you got 3 hiv's and only one of them developed into aids.
US is #1 producer of coal and natural gas in the world. China is on its to becoming a #1 consumer of coal.
Smoking doesn't cause cancer. It increases the risk of cancer. Only 1 in 3 smokers develop cancer. If smoking caused cancer, you'd expect all smokers to premature die of cancer. If you think I am playing semantic games, then consider this: if only 1 in 3 people with HIV developed AIDS, HIV most likely would NOT be considered the cause of AIDS.
China and 3rd world nations will actually make a grab for American businesses
Not sure about "American businesses", but certainly they would make a grab for the natural resources. If we make it artificially expensive for ourselves to use our fossil fuels, it will make it cheaper for China to buy them. And they won't restrict their use. In fact, given that EVERY country subsidizes international campaigns which favor their own business interests, for all you know, the AGW campaign could be sponsored by China behind the scenes.
The best explanation available is often a result of not considering certain variables. "The earth is flat and resides on the back of a giant turtle" was the best available explanation at some point. It was based on observing the world with tools available at the time. The turtle bit was probably a failure to separate observation from fantasy, but not the "flat" bit. Just, please, don't use "I don't know of anything else" as a reason to assume causality. "I don't know" is not an argument. "This is the only possibly explanation I can think of" is not a proof of causality. It's a proof that it's a good place to look for causality.
Warmer temperature generally favors primitive organisms with higher proliferation rates. Compare, for example, ants in Africa vs ants in Europe. Which means that as the base temperature gets higher, the algae population shifts in favor of the species with higher proliferation rates. Algae with higher proliferation rates should uptake CO2 faster than the algae species with lower proliferation rates. Since the increase in such a population of algae most likely would have a rate of increase which follows a logistic model (rather than a linear model), it would appear as insignificant (but growing exponentially) initially. The main consequence of that is that looking at correlations is not very informative (they only measure linear correspondence relationship -- completely missing locally exponential ones). Once the dominant algae species are the ones with higher proliferation rates, they would uptake CO2 too quickly. This would start a long term trend of cooling until these species would be at a disadvantage. Then they would drop in population. The cycle would continue. For all you know, this IS the cycle. And given that primitive organisms have very short adaptation time ( you do believe in evolution, I presume), species should emerge which proliferate even faster than the currently existing ones. Assuming, by the way, that sometimes this process overshoots (with the length of the cycle being normally distributed), this would explain the occasional ice ages.
4%, but the point still stands. Don't you know that everyone is to "savvy" to fall for pump-n-dump now. To make money, the shills are forced to nag-n-bag.