IDEs... did little to actually change, this basic alienation
As far as I can tell, although they do make the day-to-day job of programming computers much easier (and yes, I did start coding before there were any IDEs), they've made things worse in terms of expectations. Even as getting programs correct is getting harder, the people who don't do it are looking at the tooling and the support, and the how simple the very basic stuff is, and thinking, "this looks easy, therefore it must be easy, therefore if this guy can't get it done in a couple of hours, the only possible explanation is that he's incompetent."
You're attributing much longer memories to them than they seem to have. A co-worker and I were talking about refactoring and tech debt (and why we had so much still floating around) and he made an observation that (to management) tech debt is like a leaky roof. You don't have to fix it when it's not raining.
I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.
You don't understand the principal rule of managing software projects (according to the MBA's who manage software projects): if anything takes more than a couple of hours to do, it's not worth doing.
Careful 'bout that line of thinking bud - because if there's somebody out there willing to do our job for $20k a year, there's surely somebody out there willing to do your McJob for $500/year.
Argh, Slashdot and it's no-editing, no-deleting commenting policy. That should say "we use a language that our PETS don't understand". In other words, one possibility is that our AI overlords start caring for us as we care for our pets.
Well, modern corporations have an answer for that - have you noticed the rise in "performance goal setting" over the past few years? You have to dream up three or four "useful" things you're going to accomplish before the end of the year, have those things approved by the department of usefulness for their contribution to the corporate direction (and if they're not spectacular and unattainable enough, they'll be rejected and you'll be sent back to the drawing board until you think of a list of things that are ridiculously unachievable). Then at the end of the year, after you've spent all your time being interrupted by everybody else asking for help to achieve their unachievable, but approval-worthy goals, you'll have to justify why you didn't achieve any of the things you said you'd achieve (and what are you complaining about, after all, you're the one who picked these goals after we rejected your first 8 proposals!) and if your manager likes you enough personally, you get to keep your job and if not, you're out the door for not achieving your own goals.
(using a language of their own invention that we don't understand [slashdot.org]) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us
Well, we use a language of our own invention that we don't understand, but we don't conclude that we don't need them - on the contrary, we go out of our way to make their lives as comfortable (yet boring and safe) as possible.
I don't know about "morally bankrupt", but there are quite a lot of pointless jobs. Even computer programming, which could actually, theoretically, provide a valuable service that robots can't replace (yet), is managed in the most ridiculous way possible so as to make it near-useless after all the "management" has been piled on to it. To actually be useful and provide a beneficial service to mankind, programming ought to be mostly a research-type position where you spend the bulk of your time studying, learning, trying out new things, figuring out what works and eventually producing something useful. Programming as it's actually practiced in modern corporate open-office panopticon dystopias is a clock-punching, account-for-every-minute-you-spend, always-be-typing-under-baleful-eye-of-the-floor-supervisor, make-sure-you're-in-the-office-for-at-least-40-hours-a-week replacement for a factory job assembling typewriters and oh, by the way, you're out the door the minute you turn 40.
What difference does it make to you? You hate them, they hate you, this reduces the chance that you'll ever cross paths. You should be happy about this.
Yeah, why should employers care? If you die, there's a line of them waiting to replace you. Plus they don't have to pay out severance. The less you sleep, the better it works out for them.
Got caught up in that myself. Worked for a startup back in the late 90's that was acquired and made a lot of money for the founder and the ground-floor employees (but nothing for me, jumped on that bandwagon too late). Years later, the founder reached out to me, told me he was starting up a new venture, wanted me as employee #1, VP position, stock options, chance to lead the technical direction of the company. I jumped at the opportunity - although by then I was old and jaded enough that I wouldn't normally fall for that sort of talk, in this case, I knew the guy personally, and I knew he'd done it at least once before.
Well... after a couple of years of working nights and weekends and not having much of anything to show for it I started to realize that even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while... lesson learned, I guess.
Even the summary, actually. We're told the Bill Gates got a lucky break when his mother had contacts with IBM. But then, how did IBM establish such market share that their momentum carried along everybody that was caught up in it? Maybe if you want to be rich, don't emulate Bill Gates, but do emulate Thomas Watson.
Mine required me to learn calculus, statistics, number theory, probability and linear algebra. Do I sit around and calculate eigenvectors or determinants or differential equations all day? No. Am I glad I learned all that. Hell yes. Would I ever have learned that if I'd skipped the degree? Definitely not.
I'd be more sympathetic if they weren't trying so hard to invert that sentiment - "If you had to go to college to learn to program instead of from 'teach yourself programming in 21 days', you're a retard" or "I'd rather hire somebody with 20 years of real experience than one of those computer science 'big O notation' snobs any day" (missing that you can actually do both) are pretty common Slashdot platitudes.
I can't be the only one who is proud of their CS degree.
I can never quite get my head around the anti-CS sentiment that pervades (and has always) Slashdot. I guess there's this group of people who managed to get into programming without any kind of degree who assume that everybody who does have one spent their teenage years smoking pot and playing video games and, when they turned 18, thought, "Oh shit, I'd better go to college and learn something useful so I can get a job - maybe I'll do one of those computer thingies!" On the contrary, though, when I was a CS major, most everybody I was in school with had already spent their teenage years teaching themselves to code and had gone to college to study computer science formally for a couple of reasons: a) you need a degree (or we thought we did) to get a good job and b) maybe there's a possibility that some of those egg-head college professor dudes might know a thing or two I actually didn't know and I might learn something I otherwise wouldn't have learned.
Slashdot is surprisingly anti-programmer, but seeing this modded up is something even for slashdot. Even the developer boot camp people never suggested you could learn to code in a couple of days.
Slashdot Mirror
IDEs ... did little to actually change, this basic alienation
As far as I can tell, although they do make the day-to-day job of programming computers much easier (and yes, I did start coding before there were any IDEs), they've made things worse in terms of expectations. Even as getting programs correct is getting harder, the people who don't do it are looking at the tooling and the support, and the how simple the very basic stuff is, and thinking, "this looks easy, therefore it must be easy, therefore if this guy can't get it done in a couple of hours, the only possible explanation is that he's incompetent."
Don't forget the expectation that everything worth doing should be doable in about an hour.
You're attributing much longer memories to them than they seem to have. A co-worker and I were talking about refactoring and tech debt (and why we had so much still floating around) and he made an observation that (to management) tech debt is like a leaky roof. You don't have to fix it when it's not raining.
I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.
You don't understand the principal rule of managing software projects (according to the MBA's who manage software projects): if anything takes more than a couple of hours to do, it's not worth doing.
Careful 'bout that line of thinking bud - because if there's somebody out there willing to do our job for $20k a year, there's surely somebody out there willing to do your McJob for $500/year.
$200 million in government grants to fund offshore initiatives.
Argh, Slashdot and it's no-editing, no-deleting commenting policy. That should say "we use a language that our PETS don't understand". In other words, one possibility is that our AI overlords start caring for us as we care for our pets.
Like they're not actually doing much?
Well, modern corporations have an answer for that - have you noticed the rise in "performance goal setting" over the past few years? You have to dream up three or four "useful" things you're going to accomplish before the end of the year, have those things approved by the department of usefulness for their contribution to the corporate direction (and if they're not spectacular and unattainable enough, they'll be rejected and you'll be sent back to the drawing board until you think of a list of things that are ridiculously unachievable). Then at the end of the year, after you've spent all your time being interrupted by everybody else asking for help to achieve their unachievable, but approval-worthy goals, you'll have to justify why you didn't achieve any of the things you said you'd achieve (and what are you complaining about, after all, you're the one who picked these goals after we rejected your first 8 proposals!) and if your manager likes you enough personally, you get to keep your job and if not, you're out the door for not achieving your own goals.
(using a language of their own invention that we don't understand [slashdot.org]) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us
Well, we use a language of our own invention that we don't understand, but we don't conclude that we don't need them - on the contrary, we go out of our way to make their lives as comfortable (yet boring and safe) as possible.
I don't know about "morally bankrupt", but there are quite a lot of pointless jobs. Even computer programming, which could actually, theoretically, provide a valuable service that robots can't replace (yet), is managed in the most ridiculous way possible so as to make it near-useless after all the "management" has been piled on to it. To actually be useful and provide a beneficial service to mankind, programming ought to be mostly a research-type position where you spend the bulk of your time studying, learning, trying out new things, figuring out what works and eventually producing something useful. Programming as it's actually practiced in modern corporate open-office panopticon dystopias is a clock-punching, account-for-every-minute-you-spend, always-be-typing-under-baleful-eye-of-the-floor-supervisor, make-sure-you're-in-the-office-for-at-least-40-hours-a-week replacement for a factory job assembling typewriters and oh, by the way, you're out the door the minute you turn 40.
For every less person at the register there is a person^H^H^H^H^H robot who is needed to deliver the food
FTFY
What difference does it make to you? You hate them, they hate you, this reduces the chance that you'll ever cross paths. You should be happy about this.
Why should employers be involved?
Yeah, why should employers care? If you die, there's a line of them waiting to replace you. Plus they don't have to pay out severance. The less you sleep, the better it works out for them.
Don't imitate the dropping out of college part.
Got caught up in that myself. Worked for a startup back in the late 90's that was acquired and made a lot of money for the founder and the ground-floor employees (but nothing for me, jumped on that bandwagon too late). Years later, the founder reached out to me, told me he was starting up a new venture, wanted me as employee #1, VP position, stock options, chance to lead the technical direction of the company. I jumped at the opportunity - although by then I was old and jaded enough that I wouldn't normally fall for that sort of talk, in this case, I knew the guy personally, and I knew he'd done it at least once before.
Well... after a couple of years of working nights and weekends and not having much of anything to show for it I started to realize that even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while... lesson learned, I guess.
Google suggests otherwise
Support the most fashionable presidential candidate and you can be forgiven a LOT.
cherry picking to support "privilege" propaganda
Even the summary, actually. We're told the Bill Gates got a lucky break when his mother had contacts with IBM. But then, how did IBM establish such market share that their momentum carried along everybody that was caught up in it? Maybe if you want to be rich, don't emulate Bill Gates, but do emulate Thomas Watson.
Why not both?
why do a computer science degree if all you want to be is a coder?
"All"? Code is all there is.
Mine required me to learn calculus, statistics, number theory, probability and linear algebra. Do I sit around and calculate eigenvectors or determinants or differential equations all day? No. Am I glad I learned all that. Hell yes. Would I ever have learned that if I'd skipped the degree? Definitely not.
trying to make sure they are not seen as inferior
I'd be more sympathetic if they weren't trying so hard to invert that sentiment - "If you had to go to college to learn to program instead of from 'teach yourself programming in 21 days', you're a retard" or "I'd rather hire somebody with 20 years of real experience than one of those computer science 'big O notation' snobs any day" (missing that you can actually do both) are pretty common Slashdot platitudes.
I can't be the only one who is proud of their CS degree.
I can never quite get my head around the anti-CS sentiment that pervades (and has always) Slashdot. I guess there's this group of people who managed to get into programming without any kind of degree who assume that everybody who does have one spent their teenage years smoking pot and playing video games and, when they turned 18, thought, "Oh shit, I'd better go to college and learn something useful so I can get a job - maybe I'll do one of those computer thingies!" On the contrary, though, when I was a CS major, most everybody I was in school with had already spent their teenage years teaching themselves to code and had gone to college to study computer science formally for a couple of reasons: a) you need a degree (or we thought we did) to get a good job and b) maybe there's a possibility that some of those egg-head college professor dudes might know a thing or two I actually didn't know and I might learn something I otherwise wouldn't have learned.
The article refers to England specifically - for some reason, developers aren't paid much in general throughout Europe. I don't know why.
Slashdot is surprisingly anti-programmer, but seeing this modded up is something even for slashdot. Even the developer boot camp people never suggested you could learn to code in a couple of days.