I don't really care what languages people know when I'm interviewing. I care how they think, that they have the ability to solve problems, and that they know how to research to get themselves out of holes. The specifics of any given language can be learned on the job by a reasonably smart person who understands how to break problems down and solve them algorithmically, and if they know how to use Google they'll be able to pick up the syntax of whatever the language of the day happens to be.
I really don't understand this fascination with checklists and expecting people to have memorized giant chunks of specific languages or libraries when it comes to programming. Just show me some stuff that you've built on your own time, in any language, and talk with me about it intelligently and convince me that you didn't plagiarize the code. That's what matters most at entry level, not whether or not somebody has used closures or promises or whatever. They can learn that stuff as they go, usually in short order, if they're actually smart.
I haven't read the book, but I was under the impression that the theory was that higher executives see someone being, say, a great programmer, and assume they'll be a great manager over other programmers as a result. So they promote the programmer, and this happens up the chain until eventually the person is promoted exactly one tier higher than their actual capability.
That said, it seems like the easy solution would be to down-promote this person one final time after reviewing their performance and then you'd have an organization where everyone was running optimally, but that presumes that the highest-tier managers/executives are actually competent too.;)
No, of course not. We've just found a better way to do it that we're not going to tell you about, and we're keeping some fluoride going as a backup measure...;)
Except they can probably make robots that do a better job of killing/destroying than humans do, which is another thing we are already seeing happen (drones, etc).
It's kind of buried above, but this is actually an important question looking, say, a hundred years into the future.
The problem is that there are two answers to this question. First, it could end up that the "history proves there are new jobs with new tech" people are right, and we end up with a glut of entirely new jobs that we're having trouble imagining right now. (I don't believe actual evidence supports this happening, not yet anyway.)
The second answer is more problematic (and I believe more likely). People who are currently wealthy are the same people who end up owning most of the new robot/AI technology. It is critically important to realize that even design and creative jobs are not immune to automation, so these people will end up with: all the land, all the natural resources, all the manufacturing faciliities, and all the robotic workers and AI designers. In other words, they won't need anyone to buy anything because they won't have any use for money - they can just directly convert physical natural resources into whatever they want with a minimum of other humans involved.
In the second scenario, there's really no need to care about people buying things, or really whether or not they starve en masse for that matter.
The issue isn't that there isn't enough busywork that we can hand everyone to keep them busy if we really wanted to.The issue is that the value of that work is decreasing to next to nothing, because 1) the truly essential jobs are filled, stagnant, and increasingly automated, and 2) the non-essential jobs are as vulnerable to automation and AI as the essential jobs (there are burger-making robots now, and no, creative jobs aren't immune to this).
As a result, our resource distribution models mean that resources (money, if you like) are not going to be distributed in such a way that will guarantee people a means of living if they perform these non-essential jobs, because 1) the competition for those jobs is going to be ever-increasing, and 2) the value of them is going to drop because of human AND machine competition.
It's pretty simple to see, if you're willing to see it.Sure, there'll always be plenty of work for everyone willing to work for nothing or close to it, but we already have trouble as a society paying researchers or musicians as it is, and your "supportive" jobs are increasingly untenable as career paths outside of fairly specific geographic areas unless you're willing to live from paycheck to paycheck perpetually. Even some of your "essential" jobs are done on a largely volunteer basis in communities outside major cities (69% of firemen in the US are volunteers, not paid, for example).
Hence my initial conclusion:
...it's highly unlikely that there will ever be "enough" jobs again, so we need to consider what to do with people who just don't really cut it in terms of productivity and how we want to treat them as a society.
I partially agree with you, but I'd point out that you often need a fine arts degree ("Illustrator" or "Graphics designer" typically being concentrations pursued in the course of such a degree) in order to be considered qualified to teach it. You're correct that it probably doesn't help you in terms of selling artwork, but it is essential if you're looking for a job in that field.
As for sociology, if you want a master's degree or PhD in sociology, an undergraduate sociology degree is a much more direct path to such a program than a degree in psychology or anything else, and there is a significant body of literature that a graduate-level sociology student will be expected to be familiar with that most likely s/he will not be exposed to in other disciplines.
I guess my point is that the value of a particular degree is highly dependent on what you actually intend to do with it - if you aren't intending to work in a specific field where you know (by actually looking at job listings) that your specific degree is required (or is a step along one of the direct routes there), there's no reason to get it. And in general, if you are intending to pursue an entrepreneurial path, then any degree at all is mostly useless. Clients and customers care more about feedback from other people who've handed you money before than they do about your educational pedigree.
And really, the whole conversation feels a little silly considering that the evidence is mounting that the value of human labor as a whole is on a downtrend that is unlikely to recover, both in terms of population pressures and automation/AI pressures. My advice to my friends and their children, speaking as someone with a master's degree from a global top-ten university, is that it's only really worthwhile in two cases: 1) if you can get it for free or very near it (scholarships, rich family, etc.), or 2) you're one of those unusually driven people who knows exactly what you want to do with your life and will sacrifice anything, including creature comforts, to get it (since you'll be paying off student loans for years, particularly if what you're driven to do isn't high-paying). I strongly believe that the obsession with educational choices, millennials and their work habits, etc. are all primarily side effects of America's refusal to recognize that the future of work looks pretty bleak and that we need to rethink the means by which basic resources are provided - it's highly unlikely that there will ever be "enough" jobs again, so we need to consider what to do with people who just don't really cut it in terms of productivity and how we want to treat them as a society.
I'm reasonably sure that the gun isn't supposed to be "AR." I'd say it's an actual prop that their AR system is presumably "recognizing" and generating specs on, like other systems we've seen that use game-specific props for AR through cell phone cameras or whatever. That said, who knows how much of the rest is "real" - without some way that the entire room is part of the AR system, there's no way it should know to avoid rendering the lower part of the robots behind that divider...that's the obvious big question mark.
Obviously. The learning is the "something that was previously only our domain," not the playing, which is precisely what people are reacting so defensively to, and what I find funny.
Once AIs using ANN or whatever the ultimate technologies end up being can actually learn at a human level, it'll be "meh, wake me when it can appreciate a sunrise" or "Yeah, but a computer still can't fall in love!" My point is just that we move the bar in order to preserve our collective sense of being special snowflakes.
You gotta love humans. Every time an AI starts to be able to do something that was previously only our domain, it's all "Meh, wake me when..." and "Yeah, but a computer still can't..."
This. I love coding and languages both, but they aren't even remotely the same. I think learning actual languages does two things that coding doesn't: it gets you to speak to real people (hopefully, if you're doing it right) and it helps you learn a little bit about another culture. Practicing your ability to deal with differences and similarities and maybe even to empathize with other people is a really important life skill that you aren't going to get at all from coding.
Plus, even from a business perspective, it seems to me that in general people who can talk to people end up making more money than people who only know how to talk to machines.
As someone who was homeschooled off and on (and finished the last ~5-6 years being homeschooled and working part-time), I agree that the answer is "it depends" - this can't be overstated. It works for some kids and not for others, and probably some parents and not for others. I was perfectly happy to have my nose buried in books most of the time and I liked learning new stuff so it worked pretty well for me (and the part-time job in my parents' store gave me plenty of interaction with people of all ages, ethnicities, even languages). My brother, on the other hand, hated doing schoolwork and my parents struggled with him a lot just to get him to do the basics and I think he would have been better off in a more structured environment, realistically - plus, I think he really craved much more interaction with kids his own age than I did, so it was a lot harder on him to be at home and/or primarily around adults all the time.
So agreeing with the parent, the summary question is really strongly dependent on the actual people and kids involved. It probably wouldn't hurt to try out both options. Ultimately, whatever is making the kid happiest and encouraging him/her to learn the most is what's ideal, and I'm not certain that you can make that judgement without having tried both courses.
As other people have noted, the value of $40k or even $100k varies wildly depending on where you live. However, as I've already stated, my point wasn't about the actual numbers. I could have chosen "free" and "ten million dollars a year" if I was trying to suggest that these were the only two options.
And I "insinuated" nothing - I stated exactly what I meant: other people will weigh various factors that may or may not include the two I was using as an example in their decision of whether or not a particular job is worth their time. I have no way of knowing what the variables or the weights are in your or anyone else's calculations, which is why I didn't say "other people will choose jobs by deciding between altruism and greed depending on their personal value systems." If the original sentence made you or anyone else feel defensive, then perhaps you/they should examine why that is.
From my original post: "Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them."
By definition, a false dichotomy excludes other possibilities than the two presented, which I deliberately went out of my way to acknowledge in the original post. Both yourself and goose-incarnated are simply trolling.
Reading comprehension on Slashdot is seriously weak. I stated a personal preference between two hypothetical jobs for simple illustration of a point other than the one you're making, and nowhere did I say that those were the only choices available to myself or anyone else for that matter. The point that you and the preceding response make is irrelevant to the topic and to my point, which is that money isn't the only thing people consider when looking for a job and just waving high salaries at top-end developers ignores the possibility of soft factors playing a part in their decision-making processes.
The extremes were for illustration, obviously. If you read my entire post rather than cherry-pick, the point is that what works for one person isn't likely to work for someone else, and a company doing recruiting needs to realize that there's no "spend $x on solution Y and your team will magically appear" answer to the question posed. Unnecessarily pointing out that there are options in the middle doesn't change that.
As already noted in the comments, "this is your startup" doesn't mean much if I don't have a meaningful equity stake, but that's only one part of the equation. At least in my social circle, the most competent tech people are wanting to work for companies that are actually changing the world, and if your company isn't doing that, then the only thing it has to offer is money. If it's actually doing something interesting that affects the world at large, you'll have a better chance of attracting my interest even if the pay is likely to be lower.
If all you have is money and Wednesday beer nights and a pool table in the office or whatever, that's great, but that mostly just translates to "trying to keep you at the office as much as possible" usually, so that sort of cultural stuff is less interesting.
Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them. Also, obviously, family and location play into it - the "best pay" may not be in the most family-friendly markets, and you could easily make yourself unattractive to highly-skilled engineers with families no matter what your pay is like if your company is located somewhere with crazy real estate prices.
I'd just note that by "don't get it" I meant exactly this. By your own admission, you haven't tried any social media site whatsoever, and yet you feel qualified to handwave them all off as "bullshit" while making assertions that have little to do with social media ("1:1 comms" are rarely a part of what is basically a broadcasting service, for example - even younger people still use email or text messages for that more often than not).
You should try one sometime, if only to get a sense of how they actually work. The best ones are basically "RSS for people" - you subscribe to the people you want to hear from, and it helps you keep track of what matters to them. The worst ones are data-mining honeypots for corporations intent on selling every scrap of information they can extract from you. Most of them are somewhere in between.
...but almost all of the posts that hit it are private, posted by people who deliberately use G+ precisely because there's more plausible deniability about how active they are. It's anecdotal, but I've heard a lot of my G+ friends say that they've gone there either to avoid people they'd otherwise have to interact with on Facebook, or because circles are easy to use and they can pretend to be lurkers/have dead accounts there but they're really just not posting anything visible to you.
That said, I freely admit there are a ton of people not on G+. It seems to mostly be a hit with the 25-45 crowd, if my feeds there are any indication. Older people don't get it, and younger people seem to care more about Instagram than either Facebook or G+ at this point.
Isn't part of the reason we need lifeguards because often victims are either unresponsive or panicky? Lifeguarding is dangerous, sure, and faster responses are good, but just dropping rings on people in danger doesn't seem like it's going to help all that much. Maybe one day robots can do this sort of work, but right now humans are still the best, I'd think.
The last photo of all the cubicle-cars in a warehouse is pretty amusing. If you install a toilet and a bed in these things, you can just put food in and get work out - no need to let your workers "go home" or anything else that could compromise productivity - just keep them locked in their transparent cells and put them wherever you need them. Seriously, how can he look at his design and not think of prisons?
Slashdot Mirror
...the proper answer should be "none."
I don't really care what languages people know when I'm interviewing. I care how they think, that they have the ability to solve problems, and that they know how to research to get themselves out of holes. The specifics of any given language can be learned on the job by a reasonably smart person who understands how to break problems down and solve them algorithmically, and if they know how to use Google they'll be able to pick up the syntax of whatever the language of the day happens to be.
I really don't understand this fascination with checklists and expecting people to have memorized giant chunks of specific languages or libraries when it comes to programming. Just show me some stuff that you've built on your own time, in any language, and talk with me about it intelligently and convince me that you didn't plagiarize the code. That's what matters most at entry level, not whether or not somebody has used closures or promises or whatever. They can learn that stuff as they go, usually in short order, if they're actually smart.
So now we know you prefer a QWERTY keyboard layout...dox are on the way!
I haven't read the book, but I was under the impression that the theory was that higher executives see someone being, say, a great programmer, and assume they'll be a great manager over other programmers as a result. So they promote the programmer, and this happens up the chain until eventually the person is promoted exactly one tier higher than their actual capability.
That said, it seems like the easy solution would be to down-promote this person one final time after reviewing their performance and then you'd have an organization where everyone was running optimally, but that presumes that the highest-tier managers/executives are actually competent too.;)
Except that these jobs are on the way out too...
See http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/... or http://www.businessinsider.com...
No, of course not. We've just found a better way to do it that we're not going to tell you about, and we're keeping some fluoride going as a backup measure...;)
Except they can probably make robots that do a better job of killing/destroying than humans do, which is another thing we are already seeing happen (drones, etc).
It's kind of buried above, but this is actually an important question looking, say, a hundred years into the future.
The problem is that there are two answers to this question. First, it could end up that the "history proves there are new jobs with new tech" people are right, and we end up with a glut of entirely new jobs that we're having trouble imagining right now. (I don't believe actual evidence supports this happening, not yet anyway.)
The second answer is more problematic (and I believe more likely). People who are currently wealthy are the same people who end up owning most of the new robot/AI technology. It is critically important to realize that even design and creative jobs are not immune to automation, so these people will end up with: all the land, all the natural resources, all the manufacturing faciliities, and all the robotic workers and AI designers. In other words, they won't need anyone to buy anything because they won't have any use for money - they can just directly convert physical natural resources into whatever they want with a minimum of other humans involved.
In the second scenario, there's really no need to care about people buying things, or really whether or not they starve en masse for that matter.
The issue isn't that there isn't enough busywork that we can hand everyone to keep them busy if we really wanted to.The issue is that the value of that work is decreasing to next to nothing, because 1) the truly essential jobs are filled, stagnant, and increasingly automated, and 2) the non-essential jobs are as vulnerable to automation and AI as the essential jobs (there are burger-making robots now, and no, creative jobs aren't immune to this).
As a result, our resource distribution models mean that resources (money, if you like) are not going to be distributed in such a way that will guarantee people a means of living if they perform these non-essential jobs, because 1) the competition for those jobs is going to be ever-increasing, and 2) the value of them is going to drop because of human AND machine competition.
It's pretty simple to see, if you're willing to see it.Sure, there'll always be plenty of work for everyone willing to work for nothing or close to it, but we already have trouble as a society paying researchers or musicians as it is, and your "supportive" jobs are increasingly untenable as career paths outside of fairly specific geographic areas unless you're willing to live from paycheck to paycheck perpetually. Even some of your "essential" jobs are done on a largely volunteer basis in communities outside major cities (69% of firemen in the US are volunteers, not paid, for example).
Hence my initial conclusion:
I partially agree with you, but I'd point out that you often need a fine arts degree ("Illustrator" or "Graphics designer" typically being concentrations pursued in the course of such a degree) in order to be considered qualified to teach it. You're correct that it probably doesn't help you in terms of selling artwork, but it is essential if you're looking for a job in that field.
As for sociology, if you want a master's degree or PhD in sociology, an undergraduate sociology degree is a much more direct path to such a program than a degree in psychology or anything else, and there is a significant body of literature that a graduate-level sociology student will be expected to be familiar with that most likely s/he will not be exposed to in other disciplines.
I guess my point is that the value of a particular degree is highly dependent on what you actually intend to do with it - if you aren't intending to work in a specific field where you know (by actually looking at job listings) that your specific degree is required (or is a step along one of the direct routes there), there's no reason to get it. And in general, if you are intending to pursue an entrepreneurial path, then any degree at all is mostly useless. Clients and customers care more about feedback from other people who've handed you money before than they do about your educational pedigree.
And really, the whole conversation feels a little silly considering that the evidence is mounting that the value of human labor as a whole is on a downtrend that is unlikely to recover, both in terms of population pressures and automation/AI pressures. My advice to my friends and their children, speaking as someone with a master's degree from a global top-ten university, is that it's only really worthwhile in two cases: 1) if you can get it for free or very near it (scholarships, rich family, etc.), or 2) you're one of those unusually driven people who knows exactly what you want to do with your life and will sacrifice anything, including creature comforts, to get it (since you'll be paying off student loans for years, particularly if what you're driven to do isn't high-paying). I strongly believe that the obsession with educational choices, millennials and their work habits, etc. are all primarily side effects of America's refusal to recognize that the future of work looks pretty bleak and that we need to rethink the means by which basic resources are provided - it's highly unlikely that there will ever be "enough" jobs again, so we need to consider what to do with people who just don't really cut it in terms of productivity and how we want to treat them as a society.
Right. I wasn't saying that any of it is impossible, just looks like a bit more is involved than a headset.
I'm reasonably sure that the gun isn't supposed to be "AR." I'd say it's an actual prop that their AR system is presumably "recognizing" and generating specs on, like other systems we've seen that use game-specific props for AR through cell phone cameras or whatever. That said, who knows how much of the rest is "real" - without some way that the entire room is part of the AR system, there's no way it should know to avoid rendering the lower part of the robots behind that divider...that's the obvious big question mark.
You mean like this?
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/...
Obviously. The learning is the "something that was previously only our domain," not the playing, which is precisely what people are reacting so defensively to, and what I find funny.
Once AIs using ANN or whatever the ultimate technologies end up being can actually learn at a human level, it'll be "meh, wake me when it can appreciate a sunrise" or "Yeah, but a computer still can't fall in love!" My point is just that we move the bar in order to preserve our collective sense of being special snowflakes.
You gotta love humans. Every time an AI starts to be able to do something that was previously only our domain, it's all "Meh, wake me when..." and "Yeah, but a computer still can't..."
Funny stuff.:)
This. I love coding and languages both, but they aren't even remotely the same. I think learning actual languages does two things that coding doesn't: it gets you to speak to real people (hopefully, if you're doing it right) and it helps you learn a little bit about another culture. Practicing your ability to deal with differences and similarities and maybe even to empathize with other people is a really important life skill that you aren't going to get at all from coding.
Plus, even from a business perspective, it seems to me that in general people who can talk to people end up making more money than people who only know how to talk to machines.
As someone who was homeschooled off and on (and finished the last ~5-6 years being homeschooled and working part-time), I agree that the answer is "it depends" - this can't be overstated. It works for some kids and not for others, and probably some parents and not for others. I was perfectly happy to have my nose buried in books most of the time and I liked learning new stuff so it worked pretty well for me (and the part-time job in my parents' store gave me plenty of interaction with people of all ages, ethnicities, even languages). My brother, on the other hand, hated doing schoolwork and my parents struggled with him a lot just to get him to do the basics and I think he would have been better off in a more structured environment, realistically - plus, I think he really craved much more interaction with kids his own age than I did, so it was a lot harder on him to be at home and/or primarily around adults all the time.
So agreeing with the parent, the summary question is really strongly dependent on the actual people and kids involved. It probably wouldn't hurt to try out both options. Ultimately, whatever is making the kid happiest and encouraging him/her to learn the most is what's ideal, and I'm not certain that you can make that judgement without having tried both courses.
As other people have noted, the value of $40k or even $100k varies wildly depending on where you live. However, as I've already stated, my point wasn't about the actual numbers. I could have chosen "free" and "ten million dollars a year" if I was trying to suggest that these were the only two options.
And I "insinuated" nothing - I stated exactly what I meant: other people will weigh various factors that may or may not include the two I was using as an example in their decision of whether or not a particular job is worth their time. I have no way of knowing what the variables or the weights are in your or anyone else's calculations, which is why I didn't say "other people will choose jobs by deciding between altruism and greed depending on their personal value systems." If the original sentence made you or anyone else feel defensive, then perhaps you/they should examine why that is.
From my original post: "Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them."
By definition, a false dichotomy excludes other possibilities than the two presented, which I deliberately went out of my way to acknowledge in the original post. Both yourself and goose-incarnated are simply trolling.
Reading comprehension on Slashdot is seriously weak. I stated a personal preference between two hypothetical jobs for simple illustration of a point other than the one you're making, and nowhere did I say that those were the only choices available to myself or anyone else for that matter. The point that you and the preceding response make is irrelevant to the topic and to my point, which is that money isn't the only thing people consider when looking for a job and just waving high salaries at top-end developers ignores the possibility of soft factors playing a part in their decision-making processes.
The extremes were for illustration, obviously. If you read my entire post rather than cherry-pick, the point is that what works for one person isn't likely to work for someone else, and a company doing recruiting needs to realize that there's no "spend $x on solution Y and your team will magically appear" answer to the question posed. Unnecessarily pointing out that there are options in the middle doesn't change that.
As already noted in the comments, "this is your startup" doesn't mean much if I don't have a meaningful equity stake, but that's only one part of the equation. At least in my social circle, the most competent tech people are wanting to work for companies that are actually changing the world, and if your company isn't doing that, then the only thing it has to offer is money. If it's actually doing something interesting that affects the world at large, you'll have a better chance of attracting my interest even if the pay is likely to be lower.
If all you have is money and Wednesday beer nights and a pool table in the office or whatever, that's great, but that mostly just translates to "trying to keep you at the office as much as possible" usually, so that sort of cultural stuff is less interesting.
Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them. Also, obviously, family and location play into it - the "best pay" may not be in the most family-friendly markets, and you could easily make yourself unattractive to highly-skilled engineers with families no matter what your pay is like if your company is located somewhere with crazy real estate prices.
I'd just note that by "don't get it" I meant exactly this. By your own admission, you haven't tried any social media site whatsoever, and yet you feel qualified to handwave them all off as "bullshit" while making assertions that have little to do with social media ("1:1 comms" are rarely a part of what is basically a broadcasting service, for example - even younger people still use email or text messages for that more often than not).
You should try one sometime, if only to get a sense of how they actually work. The best ones are basically "RSS for people" - you subscribe to the people you want to hear from, and it helps you keep track of what matters to them. The worst ones are data-mining honeypots for corporations intent on selling every scrap of information they can extract from you. Most of them are somewhere in between.
...but almost all of the posts that hit it are private, posted by people who deliberately use G+ precisely because there's more plausible deniability about how active they are. It's anecdotal, but I've heard a lot of my G+ friends say that they've gone there either to avoid people they'd otherwise have to interact with on Facebook, or because circles are easy to use and they can pretend to be lurkers/have dead accounts there but they're really just not posting anything visible to you.
That said, I freely admit there are a ton of people not on G+. It seems to mostly be a hit with the 25-45 crowd, if my feeds there are any indication. Older people don't get it, and younger people seem to care more about Instagram than either Facebook or G+ at this point.
Isn't part of the reason we need lifeguards because often victims are either unresponsive or panicky? Lifeguarding is dangerous, sure, and faster responses are good, but just dropping rings on people in danger doesn't seem like it's going to help all that much. Maybe one day robots can do this sort of work, but right now humans are still the best, I'd think.
The last photo of all the cubicle-cars in a warehouse is pretty amusing. If you install a toilet and a bed in these things, you can just put food in and get work out - no need to let your workers "go home" or anything else that could compromise productivity - just keep them locked in their transparent cells and put them wherever you need them. Seriously, how can he look at his design and not think of prisons?