suffer more from sexism. I disagree very much about the "especially in STEM/academia"
I do as well, there are hardly any women in STEM/academia to discriminate against.
I remember being enrolled in a CS subject that had slightly over 50% female students - WTF did all those girls go? They didn't end up in the IT workforce.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to building of network connections, I was referring to the building of user services that rely on them.
You were clear, and I meant user services such as high quality video conferencing which will suck more bandwidth than seems sane if you let it as they are now. Also stuff designed to run on a LAN (with little thought of possible bandwidth limitations) becomes nicer to package up and deliver via VPN or whatever if you've got a fat pipe to the users home.
but it also enables fundamentally different and more useful technologies.
Stephen Hawking did a telepresence sort of presentation/performance from Cambridge to Sydney last week that was designed to look like a hologram. I'm sure that took a bit of bandwidth and I can see people going for that sort of thing in the future more than mere skype.
You need enough subject matter knowledge to know what questions to ask your experts - without that some situation is likely to come along and fuck you over. For example, an NDT manager who worked in the same place as I did came unstuck because he knew so little about industrial radiography that he did not know that you have to clear people out of the way before you start irradiating things. Thus he quoted on a very large project (testing of welds in a blast furnace under construction) without factoring in that a great deal of it would have to be done at night. A couple of weeks of reading or just watching his staff work for a few weeks and getting them to explain things to him probably would have given him enough background for him to do his job instead of mass resignations leading to his firing because he tried to cut wages to make up the shortfall in his stupidly low quote. His attitude didn't help but it's a common one with self declared "professional managers" instead of a managers assigned to a specific group - he never admitted mistakes or ignorance and never asked for help when he was well out of his depth, despite there being nothing to lose by asking subordinates who expected to have to bring him up to speed anyway. There are no magic words to shout at the universe to do what it's told and the closer management gets to technical issues the more it becomes clear that just telling people to "go do it" isn't going to work when you don't have a clue what "it" is.
A former boss of mine, who I owe a lot of my knowledge on management, put it best: When you're coaching an NFL team, you needn't tell them how to play football. They know that. You have to make sure they can do it.
To counter that I supply the almost exact parallel of Alan Jones - who knew fuckall about football, not even playing it at school, and took an Australian football team that was one the best in it's type of football (Rubgy Union) claimed a lot of credit when it won a lot after he'd barely turned up, then for some reason after he'd had some time there and got rid of the best players it didn't win any games any more. To prove it wasn't coincidence he then took the second rank team in another class of football and ran it down to position twelve.
He's a bit of an infamous figure in Australia and a symptom of how much damage an "old boys network" can do when personal connections become more important than ability. If he was in US boxing he'd be the one that would sack Ali at the top of his career for not being "the right sort".
No. It appears I should have. It doesn't change the point I'm making where with enough bandwidth available you would become much closer to the typical case NOW.
nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance
If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.
I could just about empty the office and send just everyone in one section of my workplace home if there was enough bandwith at their homes - ironically I'm the one that works remotely the most now but would have to be on the premises the most for hardware reasons. The groundwork was done in my workplace about six years ago and all it's waiting for is more than the two or three that telecommute every now and again to get enough bandwidth for it to be less painful for anyone that wants a GUI.
I'm also in the situation where source data comes in from people based in relatively large towns but the bandwith is shit so they courier tapes, or more recently USB hard drives, instead of just uploading it all in less than an hour which is what they could do if they were on fibre. I'm getting data from Laos many times faster than 50km away - sometimes a day or two earlier. Regional areas get filed under "residential" by Telecom companies in a lot of cases.
Like many of the oversimplistic bits of popular economics pushed by young political interns that only works with fictional interchangable work units. Actual workplaces are a bit more complex and normally have some association with the work that is being accomplished.
If they don't know enough to know who to trust then you can be in for a world of pain.
weren't good enough to make it into the ranks of "chief engineer / consulting architect / great poo bah of technicality" and felt their only scope for promotion was to take on management
When such a person gets promoted it's a very clear sign that whoever has promoted them does not know enough to know who to trust.
Small technical companies can be good places to work because the boss is not completely divorced from the work of the company and can shine lights into the corners where bullshit collects in larger places.
Spot on - you can manage and coach a world class football team with zero personal football experience at any level, but it's not going to stay world class for very long. Due to people getting parachuted in to positions due to personal or political connections that lesson gets repeated in just about every field you can think of over and over again. The ones who do the most damage are the ones that skip from role to role faster than the consequences of their actions.
Greg Egan did a pretty good book about a civilization living in orbit around a black hole - "Incandesance". Keeping pen and writing paper handy while the characters are working out their local laws of motion is recommended. The first "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment is when the concept of two different directions for up depending on where the character is standing becomes apparent.
Working from home in some cases could do with as much bandwidth as you can find. I've got a contractor at a town 500km away that has to wait more than an entire day to download the data that is sent to him before he can work on it. If he was on gigabit or that twice over he could get it very quickly or possibly even use a remote desktop to a machine that already has the project data on it's disk.
I stated "most relevant empirical scientific study".
Which doesn't even come close to being a figleaf on your blanket assertion - so not relevant as such at all.
Right now, all you have is an opinion ungrounded in logic nor facts
No, however that describes your position very accurately since it's contrary to job market statistics and observable reality. You've defined your "worldview" with no reference to reality - merely idealogy and then grasped at straws afterwards in an attempt to fuel some misguided polemic about how those girls/blacks/asian are taking our jobs. What a pathetic little creature you are.
What were you doing (that) you could be replaced that easily
Anyone can be replaced easily. Whether the replacement is able to pick up the job and continue is not always considered carefully enough - consequences may be bad but the act of throwing someone out the door isn't so hard. History is full of the best in a field getting shown the door because someone's nephew needs a job. Also, while it can be hard to replace someone in a niche role it's not impossible. When I was a contractor I replaced a few "indispensable" people myself for a while. It took a bit of time to quantify what they were actually doing but I could eventually pick up the threads and do the job the "indispensable" person failed to do and document it well enough for someone with the a similar background to the "indispensable" person to take over for the long term. Sometimes they really were doing shitloads of complicated stuff for good reason, sometimes it was a needlessly complicated shambles held together by brown paper and string and only the "indispensable" person knew the standard operating procedures to keep it going. Unless your job is to do things that have not been done before it's not so hard to replace you with a list of stuff you do handed to a person with a similar background to yourself.
I could replace you overnight. The replacement may never be able to do the job as well as you do, but often that's a problem for someone other than the person that has decided to replace you. Sucks on many levels but you are no more immune than the guy you've asked "What were you doing (that) you could be replaced that easily."
name one country - just one - that thinks its own citizens should be 2nd to 'guest workers'. ONLY the US fits that description.
Australia has decided to copy the stupid idea. That doesn't make it any less stupid though, it just means making influential people happy is seen by those in power as more important than local jobs. For example, we've got a large number of skilled unemployed meat workers that were replaced by unskilled workers from China almost overnight (there was a bait and switch where the meatworks "closed down", everyone was sacked, and then it started with imported staff a couple of weeks later). There's proposals to import the entire workforce for some large mining projects from overseas at the same time that a lot of layoffs have resulted in a lot of unemployed miners. There's plenty of IT examples as well.
Now that needs to be modded up to 11, especially considering how close it is to the indentured worker situation of a bit over a hundred years ago. There's a certain type of manager that never got the memo that slavery is bad. I've met one that needed his own personal lawyer to stop him from doing things with employee rights that could have landed him in prison (eg. employee tracking out of office hours, wanting to put cameras in places where people are naked etc).
Lesson 1 - try not to work in a place where they use fucking stupid euphemisms for employees such as "cast members". It's a bit of a clue that either employees are not valued as long term staff or that somewhere there is a total idiot drafting policies insisting on what employees with be called. "But it's showbusiness!" someone may exclaim - but no that does not fit because camera operators etc are not "cast members" - which means this is some weird shit for appearance sake and other arbitrary shit is bound to happen.
note that NASA sent people to the moon in less time
WTF? Do you really know so little about modern history that you do not know why? If you do, it's pretty fucking insulting to assume I do not and pull a fast one just so you can blow some patriotic bugle or similar shit. It's all a flimsy excuse to compare apples to aardvarks anyway. It's funny how you are comparing it to NASA in the 1960s and not the modern, much smaller, internationally spread NASA of today.
So you are comparing 50+ years of work kickstarted by even earlier stuff (Von Braun's body is a moulderin' in the ground so we aint got the moon no more) with something that started relatively recently? Blind patriotism is good for parades, but for this not so much, because the Chinese are going to use Russian, European and American stuff to get the job done just like Americans are using Russian stuff now.
Ah yes - shifting the goalposts because I made the mistake of mentioning "job interview", so any other factor that limits employment becomes irrelevant. Congrats, you win the cunning little amoral weasel stamp of the day, I hope you are proud. However, even limited to interviews observation makes your assertion extremely unlikely, so let's take a look on what you've based your mountain of bullshit upon - oh it's this molehill here: (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract) You've seriously taken a study on employment of scientists in Universities and applied it to employment in an entire country over a range of industries! Are you a fucking idiot or are you a manipulative prick? There doesn't appear to be room for a third option. What the fuck is it with this place that such whiny sociopathic shit keeps bubbling up every time there's a "women/blacks/asians want to take our jobs" opportunity to complain.
So now I suggest you lay off your copious helpings of irrelevant tripe because I'm not just some potential useless idiot you can infect with your whiny "why can't I get laid - it's the fault of women getting jobs" bullshit that was old in the 1920s.
PS - couldn't resist this commenting on this truly laughable bit of shit:
So those women who are interested in college sports participation have vastly more opportunities in college sports than men do
You mean making a living out of it like the men in college football where it can lead to a career? Where are those huge numbers of jobs in women's sport? You didn't think very hard before writing that did you?
At least it's getting a bit more clear why you want to skew the discussion away from the completely obvious. You have a petty little agenda to push and reality can go fuck itself.
I think everyone in my aero program had an offer before they graduated
That in itself is truly exceptional, so, with respect, your extreme edge case is not an illustration of the wider reality which is blatantly obvious to anyone who bothers to look. I'm mostly in IT these days and when I go to industry meetings the only women in rooms of more than fifty IT guys are non-technical sales reps - ridiculous.
Each time this sort of article comes up it attracts many far less intelligent posts than yours and I despair that the place is turning more into a "whiny little boy that didn't get his toy" site than anything else. We are facing a DECLINE of women in technical roles when we cannot afford to throw away interested people with talent and we especially do not want industries to become stagnant monocultures.
The women I graduated with who not only had better academic scores than me but later (after eventually getting work more impressive than the fixing pinball machines I did between jobs) had more impressive experience than me but have had longer periods of unemployment than I have. For example - five years in a cutting edge research lab (which was shut down after a takeover) then having to settle for being a University admissions clerk. Getting a doctorate and having to settle for being a web designer. The list goes on. Because HR weenies are scared that that if they employ a woman in an IT or engineering position they will leave a year later to have a baby they find it hard to get to the interview stage in a lot of places. If you get off your arse and take a look you'll see some statistics comparing graduate numbers and workplace participation that confirm what you can see if you look around - many fields of engineering are a sausagefest no matter who studied it. IT seems to be an order of magnitude worse than even mining.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the actual study. It only covers a small niche in employment and not even all of STEM.
I do as well, there are hardly any women in STEM/academia to discriminate against.
I remember being enrolled in a CS subject that had slightly over 50% female students - WTF did all those girls go? They didn't end up in the IT workforce.
You were clear, and I meant user services such as high quality video conferencing which will suck more bandwidth than seems sane if you let it as they are now. Also stuff designed to run on a LAN (with little thought of possible bandwidth limitations) becomes nicer to package up and deliver via VPN or whatever if you've got a fat pipe to the users home.
Stephen Hawking did a telepresence sort of presentation/performance from Cambridge to Sydney last week that was designed to look like a hologram. I'm sure that took a bit of bandwidth and I can see people going for that sort of thing in the future more than mere skype.
Only possible if the "business class" infrastructure exists - hence the article.
You need enough subject matter knowledge to know what questions to ask your experts - without that some situation is likely to come along and fuck you over.
For example, an NDT manager who worked in the same place as I did came unstuck because he knew so little about industrial radiography that he did not know that you have to clear people out of the way before you start irradiating things. Thus he quoted on a very large project (testing of welds in a blast furnace under construction) without factoring in that a great deal of it would have to be done at night. A couple of weeks of reading or just watching his staff work for a few weeks and getting them to explain things to him probably would have given him enough background for him to do his job instead of mass resignations leading to his firing because he tried to cut wages to make up the shortfall in his stupidly low quote. His attitude didn't help but it's a common one with self declared "professional managers" instead of a managers assigned to a specific group - he never admitted mistakes or ignorance and never asked for help when he was well out of his depth, despite there being nothing to lose by asking subordinates who expected to have to bring him up to speed anyway.
There are no magic words to shout at the universe to do what it's told and the closer management gets to technical issues the more it becomes clear that just telling people to "go do it" isn't going to work when you don't have a clue what "it" is.
To counter that I supply the almost exact parallel of Alan Jones - who knew fuckall about football, not even playing it at school, and took an Australian football team that was one the best in it's type of football (Rubgy Union) claimed a lot of credit when it won a lot after he'd barely turned up, then for some reason after he'd had some time there and got rid of the best players it didn't win any games any more.
To prove it wasn't coincidence he then took the second rank team in another class of football and ran it down to position twelve.
He's a bit of an infamous figure in Australia and a symptom of how much damage an "old boys network" can do when personal connections become more important than ability. If he was in US boxing he'd be the one that would sack Ali at the top of his career for not being "the right sort".
If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.
I could just about empty the office and send just everyone in one section of my workplace home if there was enough bandwith at their homes - ironically I'm the one that works remotely the most now but would have to be on the premises the most for hardware reasons. The groundwork was done in my workplace about six years ago and all it's waiting for is more than the two or three that telecommute every now and again to get enough bandwidth for it to be less painful for anyone that wants a GUI.
I'm also in the situation where source data comes in from people based in relatively large towns but the bandwith is shit so they courier tapes, or more recently USB hard drives, instead of just uploading it all in less than an hour which is what they could do if they were on fibre. I'm getting data from Laos many times faster than 50km away - sometimes a day or two earlier. Regional areas get filed under "residential" by Telecom companies in a lot of cases.
Like many of the oversimplistic bits of popular economics pushed by young political interns that only works with fictional interchangable work units. Actual workplaces are a bit more complex and normally have some association with the work that is being accomplished.
If they don't know enough to know who to trust then you can be in for a world of pain.
When such a person gets promoted it's a very clear sign that whoever has promoted them does not know enough to know who to trust.
Small technical companies can be good places to work because the boss is not completely divorced from the work of the company and can shine lights into the corners where bullshit collects in larger places.
Spot on - you can manage and coach a world class football team with zero personal football experience at any level, but it's not going to stay world class for very long.
Due to people getting parachuted in to positions due to personal or political connections that lesson gets repeated in just about every field you can think of over and over again.
The ones who do the most damage are the ones that skip from role to role faster than the consequences of their actions.
Greg Egan did a pretty good book about a civilization living in orbit around a black hole - "Incandesance". Keeping pen and writing paper handy while the characters are working out their local laws of motion is recommended. The first "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment is when the concept of two different directions for up depending on where the character is standing becomes apparent.
Working from home in some cases could do with as much bandwidth as you can find. I've got a contractor at a town 500km away that has to wait more than an entire day to download the data that is sent to him before he can work on it. If he was on gigabit or that twice over he could get it very quickly or possibly even use a remote desktop to a machine that already has the project data on it's disk.
It was pretty fucking close to that. I suspect copious consumption of cocaine had something to do with it but maybe he really was like that.
Oi! I'm not the slimy weasel trying to convince anybody of anything. I'm the one pointing out the lying prick spreading poison.
Which doesn't even come close to being a figleaf on your blanket assertion - so not relevant as such at all.
No, however that describes your position very accurately since it's contrary to job market statistics and observable reality. You've defined your "worldview" with no reference to reality - merely idealogy and then grasped at straws afterwards in an attempt to fuel some misguided polemic about how those girls/blacks/asian are taking our jobs. What a pathetic little creature you are.
Anyone can be replaced easily. Whether the replacement is able to pick up the job and continue is not always considered carefully enough - consequences may be bad but the act of throwing someone out the door isn't so hard. History is full of the best in a field getting shown the door because someone's nephew needs a job.
Also, while it can be hard to replace someone in a niche role it's not impossible. When I was a contractor I replaced a few "indispensable" people myself for a while. It took a bit of time to quantify what they were actually doing but I could eventually pick up the threads and do the job the "indispensable" person failed to do and document it well enough for someone with the a similar background to the "indispensable" person to take over for the long term. Sometimes they really were doing shitloads of complicated stuff for good reason, sometimes it was a needlessly complicated shambles held together by brown paper and string and only the "indispensable" person knew the standard operating procedures to keep it going.
Unless your job is to do things that have not been done before it's not so hard to replace you with a list of stuff you do handed to a person with a similar background to yourself.
I could replace you overnight. The replacement may never be able to do the job as well as you do, but often that's a problem for someone other than the person that has decided to replace you. Sucks on many levels but you are no more immune than the guy you've asked "What were you doing (that) you could be replaced that easily."
Australia has decided to copy the stupid idea.
That doesn't make it any less stupid though, it just means making influential people happy is seen by those in power as more important than local jobs. For example, we've got a large number of skilled unemployed meat workers that were replaced by unskilled workers from China almost overnight (there was a bait and switch where the meatworks "closed down", everyone was sacked, and then it started with imported staff a couple of weeks later). There's proposals to import the entire workforce for some large mining projects from overseas at the same time that a lot of layoffs have resulted in a lot of unemployed miners. There's plenty of IT examples as well.
Now that needs to be modded up to 11, especially considering how close it is to the indentured worker situation of a bit over a hundred years ago.
There's a certain type of manager that never got the memo that slavery is bad. I've met one that needed his own personal lawyer to stop him from doing things with employee rights that could have landed him in prison (eg. employee tracking out of office hours, wanting to put cameras in places where people are naked etc).
Lesson 1 - try not to work in a place where they use fucking stupid euphemisms for employees such as "cast members".
It's a bit of a clue that either employees are not valued as long term staff or that somewhere there is a total idiot drafting policies insisting on what employees with be called.
"But it's showbusiness!" someone may exclaim - but no that does not fit because camera operators etc are not "cast members" - which means this is some weird shit for appearance sake and other arbitrary shit is bound to happen.
WTF? Do you really know so little about modern history that you do not know why? If you do, it's pretty fucking insulting to assume I do not and pull a fast one just so you can blow some patriotic bugle or similar shit.
It's all a flimsy excuse to compare apples to aardvarks anyway. It's funny how you are comparing it to NASA in the 1960s and not the modern, much smaller, internationally spread NASA of today.
So you are comparing 50+ years of work kickstarted by even earlier stuff (Von Braun's body is a moulderin' in the ground so we aint got the moon no more) with something that started relatively recently?
Blind patriotism is good for parades, but for this not so much, because the Chinese are going to use Russian, European and American stuff to get the job done just like Americans are using Russian stuff now.
Apart from the fact that you've misrepresented one thing to cover everything? That's certainly enough and far more than you have.
However, even limited to interviews observation makes your assertion extremely unlikely, so let's take a look on what you've based your mountain of bullshit upon - oh it's this molehill here:
(http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract)
You've seriously taken a study on employment of scientists in Universities and applied it to employment in an entire country over a range of industries! Are you a fucking idiot or are you a manipulative prick? There doesn't appear to be room for a third option. What the fuck is it with this place that such whiny sociopathic shit keeps bubbling up every time there's a "women/blacks/asians want to take our jobs" opportunity to complain.
So now I suggest you lay off your copious helpings of irrelevant tripe because I'm not just some potential useless idiot you can infect with your whiny "why can't I get laid - it's the fault of women getting jobs" bullshit that was old in the 1920s.
PS - couldn't resist this commenting on this truly laughable bit of shit:
You mean making a living out of it like the men in college football where it can lead to a career? Where are those huge numbers of jobs in women's sport? You didn't think very hard before writing that did you?
At least it's getting a bit more clear why you want to skew the discussion away from the completely obvious. You have a petty little agenda to push and reality can go fuck itself.
That in itself is truly exceptional, so, with respect, your extreme edge case is not an illustration of the wider reality which is blatantly obvious to anyone who bothers to look. I'm mostly in IT these days and when I go to industry meetings the only women in rooms of more than fifty IT guys are non-technical sales reps - ridiculous.
Each time this sort of article comes up it attracts many far less intelligent posts than yours and I despair that the place is turning more into a "whiny little boy that didn't get his toy" site than anything else. We are facing a DECLINE of women in technical roles when we cannot afford to throw away interested people with talent and we especially do not want industries to become stagnant monocultures.
The women I graduated with who not only had better academic scores than me but later (after eventually getting work more impressive than the fixing pinball machines I did between jobs) had more impressive experience than me but have had longer periods of unemployment than I have. For example - five years in a cutting edge research lab (which was shut down after a takeover) then having to settle for being a University admissions clerk. Getting a doctorate and having to settle for being a web designer. The list goes on. Because HR weenies are scared that that if they employ a woman in an IT or engineering position they will leave a year later to have a baby they find it hard to get to the interview stage in a lot of places.
If you get off your arse and take a look you'll see some statistics comparing graduate numbers and workplace participation that confirm what you can see if you look around - many fields of engineering are a sausagefest no matter who studied it. IT seems to be an order of magnitude worse than even mining.