What I am arguing is that some people are innately better at certain things than others, and that no amount of education will correct for that. Some people are "smart", others are gifted in art or music, others are athletically inclined.
Science suggests this is about as real a phenomena as Santa Clause, save for people having variation on how well they develop physical stamina or strength. Artists, musicians, and engineers aren't born; they're made; athletes *are* born--they're made, sure, but you actually have to start with the right stuff to work from, and not everyone has that. Everyone can learn and apply the same training methods and the same expertise in the play of various sports exactly as well as anyone else, but some people simply won't build muscle in the same way.
there are differences between people, and no amount of education or practice will magically "correct" those differences to the degree that you seem to be arguing.
The difference between you and I is I take in new information and assess it by using existing information as support; you take in new information and assault it by using existing information as a measure. As a result, when I encounter conflicts, I work out why they occur, and determine if this new information is correct or if the old information is correct, or if I've made a misassessment somewhere about the implications of any information I have; you have an emotional reaction to information that conflicts with what you already know, and so don't think too hard about it.
In my case, I've suppressed the emotional reaction--triggered inside the basal ganglia under these conditions, causing activation of the amygdala and deactivation of the prefrontal cortex--and taken a systematic approach of naive assessment: I approach new information as a naive, uneducated individual who happens to have a massive library at hand to research into these new facts. It's a skill you can learn as well: my brain is physically wired the same as yours, and I'm just leveraging the response-inhibition system.
Hawking, Einstein, and Steve Jobs do the same, to some degree. Everyone whose success has ever been found to be built on their willingness to listen and carefully assess new information, to recognize when the situation has changed--including when people have learned new things about old concepts--has developed this method of thinking. Those who do the greatest things, who appear as geniuses in the entire, are applying trained executive functions which any human can develop readily (with effort, just as you can develop your muscles with effort--regardless of whether you're genetically an athlete or not, building your muscles is going to be both painful and annoying).
Unlike physical training, the mind does not carry inherent variations in capability--so much so that normal individuals can fully emulate abnormal individuals, producing within themselves synesthesia and various defective modes of thinking by training themselves, although some individuals are obviously damaged. The debate over talent--what's left of it--is almost entirely over whether the mind carries inherent variations in expression, or if that's just a matter of environment during early childhood. In other words: scientists mostly are uncertain if a person starts at 60% or 40% of capability because of genetics or environment, but they're almost certain every person is 100% capable of exactly the talents and skills and intellect of the most skilled and intelligent people who have ever lived, if only they would train their minds.
Not all tautologies are obvious. For example, you suggest that bubbles rise to the top not because they're special, but by luck; however, they have to be bubbles, and not dissolved air molecules which have yet to nucleate into bubbles. You also claim human technological progress is inevitable, and yet give no respect to speed or efficiency.
Maybe I am ignoring historical context. Progress dictates that all solutions and observations are eventually proven incorrect--even my iron-clad economics will be shown woefully misguided in 20 years's time (if that; watch someone tear it down within 2 years and take us even further).
Fix education and solve poverty; repeal minimum wage; end all government intervention in education above the K-12 school level. End of homelessness causes major upheaval of market systems, as individuals no longer face starvation and death in the streets as counterpoint to low wage slave job, completely changing our culture. This allows repeal of minimum wage, which can be used as a published standard to make low wage values seem fair to the employee (strong diplomacy tool), thus leaving the employer negotiating with a stubborn candidate who won't settle for less than he believes he's worth. Without public access to individually-affordable college, businesses suffer unless they train their own workforce, making workforce development the only survivable business strategy (your competitors who do so will overtake you and throw you out of the market if you don't); they'll also risk loss of value if skilled employees quit, and so must create a workplace which makes the employee feel valued. Combined result? Every single individual employee now has the negotiating power of a trade union.
Fail? We continue on current welfare system, and with current broad education plans. Eventually, high minimum wages cause rapid overtake of automation, unemploying 47% of laborers. This cuts about half the consumer goods market, unemploying half of who is left, giving us around 70%-80% unemployment. Economy collapses. Food becomes scarce due to purely economic factors. America looks like France pre-French-revolution. Riots break out. Attempts to fix the economy by government force only increase production costs and make it impossible to provide enough goods (fuzzy projection; I have the converse theory, but it doesn't exactly apply here). Cities burn. Congress is executed. Union is dissolved, America is no more, weak states are consumed by larger states, and North America starts looking like Europe sans EU.
Both of these are utter chaos. One takes the path of making the economy more fluid and the laborer more powerful, causing rapid wealth growth, causing rapid technological development and rapid cultural changes; the other takes the path of letting the overweight system trip and fall and collapse into a flaming heap. Either way, I'll live in interesting times, not the stagnant and boring world I was born into (okay that's not fair: I was born into a world of rapid technological growth due to information management creating an economic bottleneck that computers opened up; now I'm trying to replicate that world by permanently widening the wealth channel, simultaneously protecting us from an economic collapse caused by mass labor displacement in already-stagnant markets. I didn't grow up in this boring world; I moved here against my will, and I intend to make it radical once more).
I didn't solve that problem, although the solution is something I can recognize.
He actually gives some ideas for how to integrate programmers to a project in a productive way. His point remains though, you can't just throw programmers at a project and expect it to work. You can't measure things in terms of "man months" and assume doubling the number of programmers will double the speed of completion.
That's a very rough assertion, and it's the one most people frequently cite. People are quite attached to the warm-body problem, and so make conflicting statements pulling from all kinds of sources about it, without ever addressing the distorted reasoning produced by asserting all of these things at once.
That's a general problem I've faced a lot, though: everyone just shouts dogma, and even the engineers only look at the surface--as engineers should, but they should be more mindful. The difference between science and engineering is that science digs down to understand the whole, while engineering throws out the ten-million-page collection of research and spits out five bullet points to leverage when building shit; but the engineers frequently conclude that they know all there is to know with those five bullet points, and then complain loudly that the established science which supports those conclusions is largely filled with bullshit. I've a psychological defect that causes me to do both (and to have no social life or human attachment), but I'm confident basically every single human on the planet can develop that skill without having such a mental disease inflicted upon their psyches--it's not like my brain contains advanced neurological structures not afforded to anyone else.
Perhaps it's just a matter of delivery, though. I didn't title my treatise on economics, "How to Solve the World's Problems Once and for All," and I'm not writing the leading sections as an explanation of how to end poverty. Making such assertions as a premise and then expanding the theory is just sensationalism, and frames your entire 500-page dissertation as a claimed solution to a problem backed up by a lot of irrelevant bullshit that doesn't directly or fully support that conclusion. That structure frequently involves making an outlandish claim, then tearing it apart bit by bit as you establish something more soft and theoretical, eventually demonstrating that your brilliant solution is neither brilliant nor a solution, and should have never been placed at the head of your work.
Your argument is the complement to the argument that a poor education can't produce a poor student.
General education can't, categorically, impart an IQ of 120 because we would simply settle that level of intelligence as an IQ of 100; however, yes, it turns out that adjusting our education system can provide for running poor, black, inner-city ghetto kids through a low-cost school system and getting out people who are competent engineers and capable of passing into MENSA by current standards.
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android, and Ubuntu touch compatibility; superior interoperability features; an updated UI; and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice, it is probably time to move over.
Appropriate use of commas and semicolons. This doesn't even cover the poor sentence structure (is The Document Foundation bringing new features, or is LibreOffice 5.0? Methinks submitter meant "which brings").
Its those factors specifically you have to manage for, not some amorphous weasel concept like "risk".
Thing is you can never identify those issues. You can identify the potential for issues--for communications problems and technical problems--but you can't walk in, look around and say, "Oh, I know what's happening. Here's how to fix it." It almost never works that way. Every problem you identify has a large or small probability of actually occurring, and a large or small impact. Management of these known unknowns is a well-developed science; management of unknown unknowns is a nightmare.
All the issues you cite are impossible to address without developed risk management. Those issues of communications which the book explains are also overblown: we use incremental and iterative development to break out large projects into components, and use program management to coordinate many projects together, reducing the amount and scope of communication between any given set of stakeholders. Programmers only need rough requirements in general and technical decisions in specific; most stakeholders only need rough requirements in general and progress updates. Nobody actually needs 100% of all of the information 100% of the time, but they all need some small percentage of all relevant information all of the time.
In practice, we handle projects behind schedule by crashing or fast-tracking. Fast-tracking uses more resources at once--if you have 4 programmers and 12 tasks that can all be done in parallel, you can often scale up to 12 programmers... if you can hire 12 programmers--while crashing goes ahead and does serial tasks in parallel, taking the risk of assuming we know the outcome of prior tasks--which doesn't always hold, and so can result in rework. Fast-tracking works quite well when your senior developer or team lead knows how to handle communications; it works poorly when you don't have design documentation, since it suddenly demands a hell of a lot of communication that shouldn't even be necessary.
The point of all that is those 12 tasks all come in sequence *after* some prior task where we define all the interfaces the modules those tasks will produce will use, and all the interfaces those modules will expose. At that point, you don't need any communication unless you decide to go back and rework a prior task, changing its interfaces; or unless you decide to change your design mid-flight, screwing everything up and making the project later regardless of how many programmers you've hired. All communications needs have been satisfied at this point by design documentation: we haven't omitted the communications, but rather optimized how we handle those communications.
Brooks makes a lot of other non-related observations to the ideal of scheduling. He comments on resource management, design practices, and so forth; his comment on resource management is accurate, but his conclusion that adding weight to a project just slows it down is woefully outdated. You can't dismiss that by padding your treatise on scheduling with an unrelated treatise on programming project management in general.
The simple fact of the matter, as you say, is everyone making blunt, complex observations. The results are all inefficient: teach people to code and hope the exercise forces them to magic up how to "think logically". Throw kids into $43k/year schools, when the worst performing schools consume $20k+ per student-year, and the best performing schools moderately cluster around the lowest cost (8 of the top 10 school districts consume under $9k/year, and two are the lowest-funded school districts in the country; one of the best is also like the third highest-funded school system in the country, and one of the worst ones is one of the lowest funded districts in the country). Excessive time, effort, and money all around to achieve simple results.
Poor kids come from an environment which doesn't train executive function as well as middle-class environments; I am a strong proponent of early-life executive function training because EF training *is* a silver bullet for a lot of things. Cognitive Therapy for depression is EF training (the therapist also attempts to identify and specifically draw your attention to your own distorted thinking), and 4 months of CT remains twice as effective at the 24 month mark as 24 months of continuous drug therapy in treating severe depression. EF training of people with ADHD minimizes the effect of ADHD, and synergizes well with drug therapy (and allows you to lower the dose). EF training in adults makes them markedly more capable of accomplishing any and all tasks. EF training in children not only dramatically improves their academic performance, but also reduces the impact of ADHD and depression, as well as improving risk behavior--they take more controlled risks, but control risks better--thus has a high probability of reducing both teen suicide and teen social problems (gangs, teen pregnancy, etc.), an impact I'd love to see some real studies on.
People talk about how programming teaches "logical thinking"--a term they use to simultaneously mean "problem solving" and "undistorted thinking"--and yet we can easily train these things directly. Learning to use your response-inhibition system properly is like learning to walk: it's the single skill that allows your brain to run, jump, play sports, and engage in martial combat. Nobody bothers using the broad body of literature and research into executive function training to develop first-graders in public school systems so they can use that prefrontal cortex of theirs, instead of going directly and exclusively for whatever most captures their interest at any given time. They're all daft.
MMM highlights an error in thinking but, as with most such observations, it also suggests a corrected view which is largely incorrect. We have processes and procedures to analyze projects and identify where we can accelerate them by adding manpower, as well as to analyze the risk of adding manpower and determine how likely it is to slow us down instead of speed us up. The whole business of managing risk is assessing just how imperfect our understanding is--which is as good as you're ever going to get, honestly.
The truth is even more subtle than that: these people not only have the luck of attention, but they have the collection of drive, vision, and technical understanding required to become these great figures.
Steve Jobs and Elon Musk carry a lot of skills developed by all good managers and CEOs: they can lead people, they can develop business strategies, and they can speak and engage in diplomacy. They also develop enough of an understanding of technology to recognize its limits and its potentials, and so can run high-level engineering and say, "Oh, if you plug this part into that part, you could do this new thing," without knowing how to actually go about that--but still understanding that, yes, that works. Compare this to Trump or Fiona, people who understand nothing of what they work with, and run entirely on command, power, and shouting loudly to draw attention to themselves. Even the really excellent CEOs aren't diplomatic politicians, able to envision a future in all the potentials of technology currently at hand *and* excite the masses (including their own workforce) about that future.
That's what our great visionaries are: they're damned good people motivators who have taken the time to understand the realistic limits of the things they want to plug together. Very few people put forth the effort to develop themselves as such.
The argument is that software is largely making things unique, and that functionality is not important.
Information systems are a hard science of process improvement. You are either solving off-the-shelf technical problems (this is why we have libraries), combining off-the-shelf technical solutions into business processes which meet requirements, or developing new solutions to technical problems (like process scheduling or video compression). The vast majority of computer programming, network engineering, and data center management are the second form: implementation of processes to produce a particular result.
The design and improvement of processes was described over a century ago as a scientific endeavor. In manufacture, scientific development of the workforce involves first identifying the best skilled laborer tasked with the process you intend to improve. From there, you, as an outsider with only general understanding (avoiding the taint of professional specialization), observe and eliminate all unnecessary motions from the worker's process. You then have that professional worker train other workers to perform his job in the way he does, and they in turn train other workers.
In Information Technology as the application of Computer Science, each task is carried out in the most efficient manner available. Availability hinges on understanding: nuclear quantum technology is all well and good, unless you have the box full of quantum components and don't have the know-how to assemble and put to effective use that which you possess. As such, your job is not to be an artist embellishing your programs and network topologies with creative, expressive forms; your job is to identify the needs of your process, to implement it, and then to examine it and identify where your process most suffers and how to make those particular parts more efficient. This is evidence-based scientific development.
This is no more of an art form than air plane design. Oh, you may be able to embellish an airplane with aesthetically pleasing shapes and curves; and you'll have to account for the impact on its drag, its stability, its fuel efficiency, its manufacturing complexity, and so forth in every modification, chiefly constraining yourself to those specific designs which maximize first the engineering considerations, and then selecting from variations thereof which sacrifice nothing in favor of better aesthetics--frequently, this means choosing the color. To do any less is to fail to understand your job as an engineer.
There is no best course of action for everybody. Some people aren't cut out for school and should get on with getting a skill.
You're assessing this in the wrong way.
Every single potential student is better off WITH A DEGREE than WITHOUT A DEGREE. Creating a market where EVERYONE CAN AND IS EXPECTED TO GET A DEGREE means should 10x as many people be in a position to get a degree as available jobs will support, the best decision for every single one of them is to get a degree.
If only as many students went for degrees as available jobs, you'd get the same amount of employment, but higher salaries, more worker power, and, of course, more time spent finding other jobs and employing your time (and money) in something profitable instead of wasteful college degrees in oversupplied labor markets; however, with everyone else going to get a degree independent of your better grasp of the situation as a student, your best option is to make the situation as a whole worse for you and all of your peers by getting a degree anyway.
Have you ever worked with a net negative worker? Someone who goes around creating 1.5 hours of cleanup for every hour they actually work?
You assume an entrant worker must be useless or outright toxic. The type of worker you describe is the type of worker whose work ethic is bad, not the type of worker whose experience and training is low. Good work-ethic employees consistently provide value, even when they're heavily engaged in on-the-job training; bad work-ethic employees constantly create costs, even when they're top-tier technical resources. This whole ideal of churning out endless cheap labor from college has produced a situation where hard work and dedication get you nowhere, and where such things are ignored in their value under the assumption that the well-trained "Chinese Army", as you put it, will automatically perform better--except the Chinese Army is better trained than your shitty American workers who, miraculously, do a better job anyway.
A 64GB NAND MLC flash chip trades for $1.60-$3.57. That means 1TB of MLC NAND costs about $57 at most ($25 at the least). This TLC uses half the die space to store the same amount of information--notably, it uses one multi-level transistor to store more data than one of some other type of multi-level transistor--so the production cost will be the same, but the first batches may have production problems cutting off a portion from usefulness, scaling costs (e.g. 50% fail, double the price). That means we could soon see $20/TB or cheaper NAND.
In the US, the "parking lights" on every car I've ever driven lights up all the same bulbs as turning the headlight on, minus the headlights themselves.
So, not the same bulbs as the headlights.
This includes the taillights, all the marker lights, license plate lights, and even the nighttime illumination for the gauges and controls inside the car.
Yes, parking lights. If you're driving a GM car from 1996, it probably has it marked "P" next to that setting.
In many jurisdictions it's actually illegal to drive with your parking lights on
It's also unwise to drive with your parking brake on.
professional economists don't understand real economics?
Somebody just published (in 2010) a dissertation explaining capitalism, how markets work, and how this affects economic policy creation. Dissertations add new knowledge to the field.
I encourage you to reflect on why economists frequently publish dissertations citing all of their peers's contributions as things they've identified as wrong.
I only get that line from people who hold up the Holy Writ of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. Too bad all modern economics is based on an equivocation fallacy in which the term "value" means several different things, yet is interchanged to justify things even when the definition of value is unfixed between two suggestions.
Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--dispenses with the term "value", applying only "valuation" in market economics to indicate what the market or a particular transaction sees as the acceptable price of a good. In macroeconomics--in discussing the wealth of nations--the term "value" is inapplicable; the correct terms are cost, price, and wealth. All discussions on economic principles to date have come disturbingly close to correct, yet have always been a hair's breadth away, with enormous implications, due to the mistaken ideal of value.
It's not that. The standard argument is SELF-ACCESSIBLE college gives people the ability to get jobs by allowing them to, on their own, by their own assessment, using their own resources (time at least; money, if doing student loans instead of government-paid college), obtain a marketable job skill.
In a market where students can reasonably self-propel (that is, where anyone not sufficiently rich can send themselves to college), the absolute best course of action for the individual is to go to college and get a degree. Further, the best course of action is to get the degree in whatever field appears to provide the best immediate employment opportunity. These are both direct manifestations of the Prisonner's Dilemma; the latter involves a massive amount of market analysis, much of which is blind and long, meaning a lot of uncontrollable risk.
In such a market, students primarily face the risk of other students trying to enter the same market. Students cannot readily project how many jobs will be available in a field, how the field will grow, or how many other students will gain credentials for that field. Because *not* studying in that field provides even *worse* results, students must simply accept these risks. This creates floods of labor in the market, dynamically, driving down labor costs by creating high unemployment and a reduction of labor power, all through the simple mechanism of making skilled workers an over-supplied and readily-interchangeable commodity.
Besides the bargaining power problem, I believe this is plainly inefficient as an overall market strategy. It's an expensive way to produce an effective workforce.
In a non-intervention college market (where the government focuses on K-12, but not career education), the great majority of individuals cannot send themselves to college. Businesses, thus, suffer from a lack of required skilled labor. This sharply impacts each employer's ability to execute business strategies, placing them at sharp disadvantage to any other business which can effectively execute their own strategies. It's incredibly painful and destructive to business.
In such a market, the best action for any business is to hire entry-level employees and train them. Entrants can, almost immediately, take over low-skill, time-intensive work. Even shit programmers can hunt down and identify bugs, clean up code, and so forth; these things take the most skilled programmers some time, sometimes even hours or days, and so letting your $40k worker grind it for a week or so instead of having your $100k senior software engineer spend five days trying to track it down is at least breaking even. Carpenters who can't make intricate carvings can at least build rough furniture; those who can't can plane floors; those whose skills are so poor can at least lay joists; and those who are too inexperienced and terrible to lay joists can, at least, spend the hours of the day cutting wedges and shims, tasks which are too time-consuming for an expensive artisan to waste his day on.
Businesses in this context have stronger (still imperfect) insight into their individual needs, their market growth, their departmental expansion, and so forth. Often during times of expansion we approve budget 2-3 years in advance of hiring new accountants, programmers, sales people, digital artists, and master control engineers; during normal times, we approve budget 6-12 months in advance, when the need is recognized on the horizon. No student can so accurately and consistently project that there is a job somewhere out there waiting for him after college.
This arrangement is undesirable to businesses, as it makes workers valuable (this is a lay-term, not an economics one; the term "value" must be ejected from economic theory, while the term "valuation" must remain for market economics). Valuable workers are problematic: you can't just fire them and hire another interchangeable part. Workers, in an economic sense, have an up-front cost and a continuous cost, which beco
I not only read it, I wrote it, along with new economic theory and large amounts of planning, market analysis, and risk considerations and management strategies.
in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries
Why is it people can understand this effect, but can't understand government-funded or government-backed (loans) college initiatives do this on a grand scale, deflating the value, power, and, ultimately, salaries of the individual? Even when I explain the whole of the mechanism fully in ways people can understand, they eventually go, "Well, yeah, that makes sense; but it's still empowering to be able to get an education!" when they just agreed it's the best and most effective way to strip employee power and make them tradable, low-cost commodities.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am arguing is that some people are innately better at certain things than others, and that no amount of education will correct for that. Some people are "smart", others are gifted in art or music, others are athletically inclined.
Science suggests this is about as real a phenomena as Santa Clause, save for people having variation on how well they develop physical stamina or strength. Artists, musicians, and engineers aren't born; they're made; athletes *are* born--they're made, sure, but you actually have to start with the right stuff to work from, and not everyone has that. Everyone can learn and apply the same training methods and the same expertise in the play of various sports exactly as well as anyone else, but some people simply won't build muscle in the same way.
there are differences between people, and no amount of education or practice will magically "correct" those differences to the degree that you seem to be arguing.
The difference between you and I is I take in new information and assess it by using existing information as support; you take in new information and assault it by using existing information as a measure. As a result, when I encounter conflicts, I work out why they occur, and determine if this new information is correct or if the old information is correct, or if I've made a misassessment somewhere about the implications of any information I have; you have an emotional reaction to information that conflicts with what you already know, and so don't think too hard about it.
In my case, I've suppressed the emotional reaction--triggered inside the basal ganglia under these conditions, causing activation of the amygdala and deactivation of the prefrontal cortex--and taken a systematic approach of naive assessment: I approach new information as a naive, uneducated individual who happens to have a massive library at hand to research into these new facts. It's a skill you can learn as well: my brain is physically wired the same as yours, and I'm just leveraging the response-inhibition system.
Hawking, Einstein, and Steve Jobs do the same, to some degree. Everyone whose success has ever been found to be built on their willingness to listen and carefully assess new information, to recognize when the situation has changed--including when people have learned new things about old concepts--has developed this method of thinking. Those who do the greatest things, who appear as geniuses in the entire, are applying trained executive functions which any human can develop readily (with effort, just as you can develop your muscles with effort--regardless of whether you're genetically an athlete or not, building your muscles is going to be both painful and annoying).
Unlike physical training, the mind does not carry inherent variations in capability--so much so that normal individuals can fully emulate abnormal individuals, producing within themselves synesthesia and various defective modes of thinking by training themselves, although some individuals are obviously damaged. The debate over talent--what's left of it--is almost entirely over whether the mind carries inherent variations in expression, or if that's just a matter of environment during early childhood. In other words: scientists mostly are uncertain if a person starts at 60% or 40% of capability because of genetics or environment, but they're almost certain every person is 100% capable of exactly the talents and skills and intellect of the most skilled and intelligent people who have ever lived, if only they would train their minds.
Not all tautologies are obvious. For example, you suggest that bubbles rise to the top not because they're special, but by luck; however, they have to be bubbles, and not dissolved air molecules which have yet to nucleate into bubbles. You also claim human technological progress is inevitable, and yet give no respect to speed or efficiency.
Maybe I am ignoring historical context. Progress dictates that all solutions and observations are eventually proven incorrect--even my iron-clad economics will be shown woefully misguided in 20 years's time (if that; watch someone tear it down within 2 years and take us even further).
We'd be much better off for social policy reasons, maybe. We'd be slightly better off for economic reasons, but only slightly.
That's my primary Xanatos gambit, honestly.
Fix education and solve poverty; repeal minimum wage; end all government intervention in education above the K-12 school level. End of homelessness causes major upheaval of market systems, as individuals no longer face starvation and death in the streets as counterpoint to low wage slave job, completely changing our culture. This allows repeal of minimum wage, which can be used as a published standard to make low wage values seem fair to the employee (strong diplomacy tool), thus leaving the employer negotiating with a stubborn candidate who won't settle for less than he believes he's worth. Without public access to individually-affordable college, businesses suffer unless they train their own workforce, making workforce development the only survivable business strategy (your competitors who do so will overtake you and throw you out of the market if you don't); they'll also risk loss of value if skilled employees quit, and so must create a workplace which makes the employee feel valued. Combined result? Every single individual employee now has the negotiating power of a trade union.
Fail? We continue on current welfare system, and with current broad education plans. Eventually, high minimum wages cause rapid overtake of automation, unemploying 47% of laborers. This cuts about half the consumer goods market, unemploying half of who is left, giving us around 70%-80% unemployment. Economy collapses. Food becomes scarce due to purely economic factors. America looks like France pre-French-revolution. Riots break out. Attempts to fix the economy by government force only increase production costs and make it impossible to provide enough goods (fuzzy projection; I have the converse theory, but it doesn't exactly apply here). Cities burn. Congress is executed. Union is dissolved, America is no more, weak states are consumed by larger states, and North America starts looking like Europe sans EU.
Both of these are utter chaos. One takes the path of making the economy more fluid and the laborer more powerful, causing rapid wealth growth, causing rapid technological development and rapid cultural changes; the other takes the path of letting the overweight system trip and fall and collapse into a flaming heap. Either way, I'll live in interesting times, not the stagnant and boring world I was born into (okay that's not fair: I was born into a world of rapid technological growth due to information management creating an economic bottleneck that computers opened up; now I'm trying to replicate that world by permanently widening the wealth channel, simultaneously protecting us from an economic collapse caused by mass labor displacement in already-stagnant markets. I didn't grow up in this boring world; I moved here against my will, and I intend to make it radical once more).
I didn't solve that problem, although the solution is something I can recognize.
He actually gives some ideas for how to integrate programmers to a project in a productive way. His point remains though, you can't just throw programmers at a project and expect it to work. You can't measure things in terms of "man months" and assume doubling the number of programmers will double the speed of completion.
That's a very rough assertion, and it's the one most people frequently cite. People are quite attached to the warm-body problem, and so make conflicting statements pulling from all kinds of sources about it, without ever addressing the distorted reasoning produced by asserting all of these things at once.
That's a general problem I've faced a lot, though: everyone just shouts dogma, and even the engineers only look at the surface--as engineers should, but they should be more mindful. The difference between science and engineering is that science digs down to understand the whole, while engineering throws out the ten-million-page collection of research and spits out five bullet points to leverage when building shit; but the engineers frequently conclude that they know all there is to know with those five bullet points, and then complain loudly that the established science which supports those conclusions is largely filled with bullshit. I've a psychological defect that causes me to do both (and to have no social life or human attachment), but I'm confident basically every single human on the planet can develop that skill without having such a mental disease inflicted upon their psyches--it's not like my brain contains advanced neurological structures not afforded to anyone else.
Perhaps it's just a matter of delivery, though. I didn't title my treatise on economics, "How to Solve the World's Problems Once and for All," and I'm not writing the leading sections as an explanation of how to end poverty. Making such assertions as a premise and then expanding the theory is just sensationalism, and frames your entire 500-page dissertation as a claimed solution to a problem backed up by a lot of irrelevant bullshit that doesn't directly or fully support that conclusion. That structure frequently involves making an outlandish claim, then tearing it apart bit by bit as you establish something more soft and theoretical, eventually demonstrating that your brilliant solution is neither brilliant nor a solution, and should have never been placed at the head of your work.
Your argument is the complement to the argument that a poor education can't produce a poor student.
General education can't, categorically, impart an IQ of 120 because we would simply settle that level of intelligence as an IQ of 100; however, yes, it turns out that adjusting our education system can provide for running poor, black, inner-city ghetto kids through a low-cost school system and getting out people who are competent engineers and capable of passing into MENSA by current standards.
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android, and Ubuntu touch compatibility; superior interoperability features; an updated UI; and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice, it is probably time to move over.
Appropriate use of commas and semicolons. This doesn't even cover the poor sentence structure (is The Document Foundation bringing new features, or is LibreOffice 5.0? Methinks submitter meant "which brings").
Its those factors specifically you have to manage for, not some amorphous weasel concept like "risk".
Thing is you can never identify those issues. You can identify the potential for issues--for communications problems and technical problems--but you can't walk in, look around and say, "Oh, I know what's happening. Here's how to fix it." It almost never works that way. Every problem you identify has a large or small probability of actually occurring, and a large or small impact. Management of these known unknowns is a well-developed science; management of unknown unknowns is a nightmare.
All the issues you cite are impossible to address without developed risk management. Those issues of communications which the book explains are also overblown: we use incremental and iterative development to break out large projects into components, and use program management to coordinate many projects together, reducing the amount and scope of communication between any given set of stakeholders. Programmers only need rough requirements in general and technical decisions in specific; most stakeholders only need rough requirements in general and progress updates. Nobody actually needs 100% of all of the information 100% of the time, but they all need some small percentage of all relevant information all of the time.
In practice, we handle projects behind schedule by crashing or fast-tracking. Fast-tracking uses more resources at once--if you have 4 programmers and 12 tasks that can all be done in parallel, you can often scale up to 12 programmers... if you can hire 12 programmers--while crashing goes ahead and does serial tasks in parallel, taking the risk of assuming we know the outcome of prior tasks--which doesn't always hold, and so can result in rework. Fast-tracking works quite well when your senior developer or team lead knows how to handle communications; it works poorly when you don't have design documentation, since it suddenly demands a hell of a lot of communication that shouldn't even be necessary.
The point of all that is those 12 tasks all come in sequence *after* some prior task where we define all the interfaces the modules those tasks will produce will use, and all the interfaces those modules will expose. At that point, you don't need any communication unless you decide to go back and rework a prior task, changing its interfaces; or unless you decide to change your design mid-flight, screwing everything up and making the project later regardless of how many programmers you've hired. All communications needs have been satisfied at this point by design documentation: we haven't omitted the communications, but rather optimized how we handle those communications.
Brooks makes a lot of other non-related observations to the ideal of scheduling. He comments on resource management, design practices, and so forth; his comment on resource management is accurate, but his conclusion that adding weight to a project just slows it down is woefully outdated. You can't dismiss that by padding your treatise on scheduling with an unrelated treatise on programming project management in general.
You know, a good quality education, and engaged parents can probably go a long way
Your parents should be married...
Not true at all, according to scientific understanding of the development of expertise. "Talent" is a myth.
The simple fact of the matter, as you say, is everyone making blunt, complex observations. The results are all inefficient: teach people to code and hope the exercise forces them to magic up how to "think logically". Throw kids into $43k/year schools, when the worst performing schools consume $20k+ per student-year, and the best performing schools moderately cluster around the lowest cost (8 of the top 10 school districts consume under $9k/year, and two are the lowest-funded school districts in the country; one of the best is also like the third highest-funded school system in the country, and one of the worst ones is one of the lowest funded districts in the country). Excessive time, effort, and money all around to achieve simple results.
Poor kids come from an environment which doesn't train executive function as well as middle-class environments; I am a strong proponent of early-life executive function training because EF training *is* a silver bullet for a lot of things. Cognitive Therapy for depression is EF training (the therapist also attempts to identify and specifically draw your attention to your own distorted thinking), and 4 months of CT remains twice as effective at the 24 month mark as 24 months of continuous drug therapy in treating severe depression. EF training of people with ADHD minimizes the effect of ADHD, and synergizes well with drug therapy (and allows you to lower the dose). EF training in adults makes them markedly more capable of accomplishing any and all tasks. EF training in children not only dramatically improves their academic performance, but also reduces the impact of ADHD and depression, as well as improving risk behavior--they take more controlled risks, but control risks better--thus has a high probability of reducing both teen suicide and teen social problems (gangs, teen pregnancy, etc.), an impact I'd love to see some real studies on.
People talk about how programming teaches "logical thinking"--a term they use to simultaneously mean "problem solving" and "undistorted thinking"--and yet we can easily train these things directly. Learning to use your response-inhibition system properly is like learning to walk: it's the single skill that allows your brain to run, jump, play sports, and engage in martial combat. Nobody bothers using the broad body of literature and research into executive function training to develop first-graders in public school systems so they can use that prefrontal cortex of theirs, instead of going directly and exclusively for whatever most captures their interest at any given time. They're all daft.
MMM highlights an error in thinking but, as with most such observations, it also suggests a corrected view which is largely incorrect. We have processes and procedures to analyze projects and identify where we can accelerate them by adding manpower, as well as to analyze the risk of adding manpower and determine how likely it is to slow us down instead of speed us up. The whole business of managing risk is assessing just how imperfect our understanding is--which is as good as you're ever going to get, honestly.
The truth is even more subtle than that: these people not only have the luck of attention, but they have the collection of drive, vision, and technical understanding required to become these great figures.
Steve Jobs and Elon Musk carry a lot of skills developed by all good managers and CEOs: they can lead people, they can develop business strategies, and they can speak and engage in diplomacy. They also develop enough of an understanding of technology to recognize its limits and its potentials, and so can run high-level engineering and say, "Oh, if you plug this part into that part, you could do this new thing," without knowing how to actually go about that--but still understanding that, yes, that works. Compare this to Trump or Fiona, people who understand nothing of what they work with, and run entirely on command, power, and shouting loudly to draw attention to themselves. Even the really excellent CEOs aren't diplomatic politicians, able to envision a future in all the potentials of technology currently at hand *and* excite the masses (including their own workforce) about that future.
That's what our great visionaries are: they're damned good people motivators who have taken the time to understand the realistic limits of the things they want to plug together. Very few people put forth the effort to develop themselves as such.
The argument is that software is largely making things unique, and that functionality is not important.
Information systems are a hard science of process improvement. You are either solving off-the-shelf technical problems (this is why we have libraries), combining off-the-shelf technical solutions into business processes which meet requirements, or developing new solutions to technical problems (like process scheduling or video compression). The vast majority of computer programming, network engineering, and data center management are the second form: implementation of processes to produce a particular result.
The design and improvement of processes was described over a century ago as a scientific endeavor. In manufacture, scientific development of the workforce involves first identifying the best skilled laborer tasked with the process you intend to improve. From there, you, as an outsider with only general understanding (avoiding the taint of professional specialization), observe and eliminate all unnecessary motions from the worker's process. You then have that professional worker train other workers to perform his job in the way he does, and they in turn train other workers.
In Information Technology as the application of Computer Science, each task is carried out in the most efficient manner available. Availability hinges on understanding: nuclear quantum technology is all well and good, unless you have the box full of quantum components and don't have the know-how to assemble and put to effective use that which you possess. As such, your job is not to be an artist embellishing your programs and network topologies with creative, expressive forms; your job is to identify the needs of your process, to implement it, and then to examine it and identify where your process most suffers and how to make those particular parts more efficient. This is evidence-based scientific development.
This is no more of an art form than air plane design. Oh, you may be able to embellish an airplane with aesthetically pleasing shapes and curves; and you'll have to account for the impact on its drag, its stability, its fuel efficiency, its manufacturing complexity, and so forth in every modification, chiefly constraining yourself to those specific designs which maximize first the engineering considerations, and then selecting from variations thereof which sacrifice nothing in favor of better aesthetics--frequently, this means choosing the color. To do any less is to fail to understand your job as an engineer.
There is no best course of action for everybody. Some people aren't cut out for school and should get on with getting a skill.
You're assessing this in the wrong way.
Every single potential student is better off WITH A DEGREE than WITHOUT A DEGREE. Creating a market where EVERYONE CAN AND IS EXPECTED TO GET A DEGREE means should 10x as many people be in a position to get a degree as available jobs will support, the best decision for every single one of them is to get a degree.
If only as many students went for degrees as available jobs, you'd get the same amount of employment, but higher salaries, more worker power, and, of course, more time spent finding other jobs and employing your time (and money) in something profitable instead of wasteful college degrees in oversupplied labor markets; however, with everyone else going to get a degree independent of your better grasp of the situation as a student, your best option is to make the situation as a whole worse for you and all of your peers by getting a degree anyway.
Have you ever worked with a net negative worker? Someone who goes around creating 1.5 hours of cleanup for every hour they actually work?
You assume an entrant worker must be useless or outright toxic. The type of worker you describe is the type of worker whose work ethic is bad, not the type of worker whose experience and training is low. Good work-ethic employees consistently provide value, even when they're heavily engaged in on-the-job training; bad work-ethic employees constantly create costs, even when they're top-tier technical resources. This whole ideal of churning out endless cheap labor from college has produced a situation where hard work and dedication get you nowhere, and where such things are ignored in their value under the assumption that the well-trained "Chinese Army", as you put it, will automatically perform better--except the Chinese Army is better trained than your shitty American workers who, miraculously, do a better job anyway.
A 64GB NAND MLC flash chip trades for $1.60-$3.57. That means 1TB of MLC NAND costs about $57 at most ($25 at the least). This TLC uses half the die space to store the same amount of information--notably, it uses one multi-level transistor to store more data than one of some other type of multi-level transistor--so the production cost will be the same, but the first batches may have production problems cutting off a portion from usefulness, scaling costs (e.g. 50% fail, double the price). That means we could soon see $20/TB or cheaper NAND.
In the US, the "parking lights" on every car I've ever driven lights up all the same bulbs as turning the headlight on, minus the headlights themselves.
So, not the same bulbs as the headlights.
This includes the taillights, all the marker lights, license plate lights, and even the nighttime illumination for the gauges and controls inside the car.
Yes, parking lights. If you're driving a GM car from 1996, it probably has it marked "P" next to that setting.
In many jurisdictions it's actually illegal to drive with your parking lights on
It's also unwise to drive with your parking brake on.
professional economists don't understand real economics?
Somebody just published (in 2010) a dissertation explaining capitalism, how markets work, and how this affects economic policy creation. Dissertations add new knowledge to the field.
I encourage you to reflect on why economists frequently publish dissertations citing all of their peers's contributions as things they've identified as wrong.
I meant it as a complete thought, not as an overly terse and flippant reply.
I only get that line from people who hold up the Holy Writ of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. Too bad all modern economics is based on an equivocation fallacy in which the term "value" means several different things, yet is interchanged to justify things even when the definition of value is unfixed between two suggestions.
Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--dispenses with the term "value", applying only "valuation" in market economics to indicate what the market or a particular transaction sees as the acceptable price of a good. In macroeconomics--in discussing the wealth of nations--the term "value" is inapplicable; the correct terms are cost, price, and wealth. All discussions on economic principles to date have come disturbingly close to correct, yet have always been a hair's breadth away, with enormous implications, due to the mistaken ideal of value.
It's not that. The standard argument is SELF-ACCESSIBLE college gives people the ability to get jobs by allowing them to, on their own, by their own assessment, using their own resources (time at least; money, if doing student loans instead of government-paid college), obtain a marketable job skill.
In a market where students can reasonably self-propel (that is, where anyone not sufficiently rich can send themselves to college), the absolute best course of action for the individual is to go to college and get a degree. Further, the best course of action is to get the degree in whatever field appears to provide the best immediate employment opportunity. These are both direct manifestations of the Prisonner's Dilemma; the latter involves a massive amount of market analysis, much of which is blind and long, meaning a lot of uncontrollable risk.
In such a market, students primarily face the risk of other students trying to enter the same market. Students cannot readily project how many jobs will be available in a field, how the field will grow, or how many other students will gain credentials for that field. Because *not* studying in that field provides even *worse* results, students must simply accept these risks. This creates floods of labor in the market, dynamically, driving down labor costs by creating high unemployment and a reduction of labor power, all through the simple mechanism of making skilled workers an over-supplied and readily-interchangeable commodity.
Besides the bargaining power problem, I believe this is plainly inefficient as an overall market strategy. It's an expensive way to produce an effective workforce.
In a non-intervention college market (where the government focuses on K-12, but not career education), the great majority of individuals cannot send themselves to college. Businesses, thus, suffer from a lack of required skilled labor. This sharply impacts each employer's ability to execute business strategies, placing them at sharp disadvantage to any other business which can effectively execute their own strategies. It's incredibly painful and destructive to business.
In such a market, the best action for any business is to hire entry-level employees and train them. Entrants can, almost immediately, take over low-skill, time-intensive work. Even shit programmers can hunt down and identify bugs, clean up code, and so forth; these things take the most skilled programmers some time, sometimes even hours or days, and so letting your $40k worker grind it for a week or so instead of having your $100k senior software engineer spend five days trying to track it down is at least breaking even. Carpenters who can't make intricate carvings can at least build rough furniture; those who can't can plane floors; those whose skills are so poor can at least lay joists; and those who are too inexperienced and terrible to lay joists can, at least, spend the hours of the day cutting wedges and shims, tasks which are too time-consuming for an expensive artisan to waste his day on.
Businesses in this context have stronger (still imperfect) insight into their individual needs, their market growth, their departmental expansion, and so forth. Often during times of expansion we approve budget 2-3 years in advance of hiring new accountants, programmers, sales people, digital artists, and master control engineers; during normal times, we approve budget 6-12 months in advance, when the need is recognized on the horizon. No student can so accurately and consistently project that there is a job somewhere out there waiting for him after college.
This arrangement is undesirable to businesses, as it makes workers valuable (this is a lay-term, not an economics one; the term "value" must be ejected from economic theory, while the term "valuation" must remain for market economics). Valuable workers are problematic: you can't just fire them and hire another interchangeable part. Workers, in an economic sense, have an up-front cost and a continuous cost, which beco
I not only read it, I wrote it, along with new economic theory and large amounts of planning, market analysis, and risk considerations and management strategies.
in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries
Why is it people can understand this effect, but can't understand government-funded or government-backed (loans) college initiatives do this on a grand scale, deflating the value, power, and, ultimately, salaries of the individual? Even when I explain the whole of the mechanism fully in ways people can understand, they eventually go, "Well, yeah, that makes sense; but it's still empowering to be able to get an education!" when they just agreed it's the best and most effective way to strip employee power and make them tradable, low-cost commodities.
This is the most vacuous thing I have read today.