If you ban "after work" email, you also prevent me from having flexible hours. It's pretty common that I'll just take a random day for giggles, then make it up on a Saturday, or at night.
Sure, I can just take an actual day off and not make it up (and I do!), but I'll be less likely to do it when I need it if I can't just make up for it.
Coding is today's "get rich quick" scheme. By the time those 4th graders get into the marketplace, it will have crashed and they'll just be the future version of today's burger flippers.
People kind of forgot about the dotcom crash already. Yeah, people probably should learn basic coding...but that isn't why it's so trendy to point it out in the news.
It's trendy because right now it's an absurdly high paying job with low barrier to entry.
When we are done vilifying all manual labor and every carpenter and plumbers are pushed aside and snobbed by the swarm of 3rd rate coders, and there's so many programmers salaries tank to nothing and there's a real crash (not the tiny one we got in january)...then what? Will we keep pushing everyone to have masters in whatever is trendy then?
What we need is comprehensive push to re-glorify apprenticeships of all kinds (including, but not exclusively, programming), so that people who don't want to or can't go to college can still be useful and make a nice life for themselves. Anyone who's played an MMO knows what happens when people who find a "make gold and become rich quick" schemes become overly popular: they become a waste of time.
Even if you pay 200k+ (and I'm not talking about SF/SV where it doesn't mean that much), you still have issues finding "highly skilled programmers".
I dunno what world you live in, but trying to staff a reasonably sized team where everyone would be paid significantly more than that doesn't exactly scale: you have to be able to sell something that will pay for it, and there's a limit to how much the market will bear.
The reality is right now the market is jam packed with 2 bit coding bootcamps bozos, people who switched fields when they realized software engineering paid better than their chosen one, and all around wannabes. A small percentage of those people are really into it, worked hard, and are actually good. There's still a shortage.
If your definition of highly skilled is "I learnt Rails in a few weeks and I can make a web page but I'm asking for 150k+ a year", well, yeah, there's a lot of that.
I don't really find Edge slow, but the fonts just kill it straight up for me. Unless you have a 4k display, the grayscale antialiasing they use make my eyes bleed.
Even if your company does direct deposit, often the first check is physical. My bank doesn't have physical locations where I am, and has a very low limit on online deposits.
I just opened an account on some random credit union, took a picture of the check and uploaded it, and then did a (free!) transfer.
Dunno about you, but the only banking products I take for granted are the ones I get online. My mortgage officer never saw me face to face. I never talked to a human being to open any of my credit cards. I'm an immigrant to the US, so I had a worse credit score at first than some of my friends who work in fast food restaurants. I'm white, but the country where my name is most common is Haiti (a coincidence, but people reading it don't know that).
As far as I could tell, all of those loans were essentially granted based on my FiCO score, my current debt burden and my payslips. It wouldn't even be my address or employer, since both my first apartment in the country and my first employer's office were located in districts known for large amount of minorities.
Maybe people get discriminated against when they go face to face...but then, just don't do that (heck, even if you're white. It's a pain in the ass). CapitalOne will give a credit card and checking account to literally anyone who didn't go bankrupt.
Now, if it's someone who can't afford an internet connection or cannot go to a local library...then ok, those people do need help (for real, not in the insult way). But "generally shut out" sounds like way more people are getting screwed then just that group.
Well, for one, when your mom is single or she actually goes to work like everyone else as opposed to staying at home doing nothing else but caring for the house, having 3 home cooked meals a day becomes much more challenging. Not impossible, but you have to do some serious planning and get into pretty specific time habits to make it happen.
So more people will resort to eating out, ordering, etc. And it goes downhill from there.
If I'm in a rush in the morning and don't have time to patch up breakfast, my only option around here is to go to a local pastry shop. Yeah, that doesn't end well.
If you write a blog post that gets reasonably popular, someone MITM it and changes a link you recommended to one that has a shadier purpose, it can screw over some visitors.
If you're over 50 and in the interview, it's obvious that you're up to date (that doesn't mean knowing the API of the latest trendy bullshit, but it does mean you don't think SVN is new and scary), and you have the skills of someone with 25+ years of experience, not only will you get an offer before you have time to get in your car, in any of the tech hubs (not just SV and the west coast), the conversation will start at over 300k total comp and you'll be able to milk them up from there.
The problem is that there just wasn't that many software engineers back then (compared to today), and the vast majority jumped ship when the dot com bubble crashed. Of what's left, a large section are scared of SQL as something too technical, or are too scared of new tech to learn them enough to explain why we shouldn't use them, from experience.
The rest though (which leaves very very few)? You can't hire them because they're never on the job market.
As the huge influx of engineer gets older, it's a problem that will go away. Eventually there will be more older engineers than younger ones, and we can go back to the good old days where no one could get a job without 10 years of experience in a technology that's 5 years old.
While there's problems everywhere, since the biggest issue is long before any tech company can get (directly) involved (how parents raise kids, school, TV, etc), there's starting to be statistics showing that women right of college are starting to make quite a bit more than men (because of all the big tech companies under fire desperately trying to hire them).
So unless you're critically incompetent, right now if you come out of CS and you're a girl, you're basically an instant-hire and you can negotiate your salary to oblivion.
Welp, since my wife is a pretty successful software engineer, I indirectly benefit...but...
In addition to this, the US' culture is very much "It's only illegal if you get caught and the cops will do something about it". About -everything-.
If you tell someone they really shouldn't do something because it's dangerous/irresponsible, they'll blankly stare at you and go: "But...how will they ever catch me? I don't understand". No matter their age or what you're talking about. There's no critical thinking. It's just about scoring by sticking it to the man.
I mean, everywhere has a little of that, it's just human nature, but when I moved to the US, I was really amazed by how far they push it.
Part of this come from the younger workers themselves though. I remember back 15ish years ago when I was coming out of college, there was a HUGE sentiment that you needed 10+ years of experience and a master in CS to get hired anywhere. When you finally got a job and looked around, those people were often not that great.
Now of course it's being pushed to the extreme, where people learn javascript or ruby on rail, go to San Francisco and expect 150-200k/year bullshit, and companies hire a ton of them, which essentially just cause more senior employees to work around the clock to babysit them.
The right answer's somewhere in the middle, obviously.
Ok, so software engineering is a fairly recent field (or rather, it's recent that it's so "big"...but even in absolute, it's more recent than, let say, law, finance or construction. My orders of magnitudes).
Now, the first big influx of tech worker was pre-dotcom crash, when anyone who knew basic HTML could get a job (we're seeing some signs of that lately as it's happening again, but that's a different topic). Then the bubble crashed...all the tech workers at the bottom of the barel had to switch career, leaving only a small fraction. That weeded out most of the people that today would be 40+
In early 2000s, going in CS wasn't exactly the prestigious career path (because of said dotcom crash). Anyone who went to college then would be around 32-35ish depending on the date range you're looking at and how much education they had. And there wasn't that many.
My wife went to college after that, and it still wasn't a big craze. She's now just over 30.
It's after that it started booming, and it keeps growing and growing. So most of the people available would be 30.
During that time, some percentage of people figure out it's not for them, move to management, etc. That means you have very few older workers left.
On the portion that's left, in a field that changes all the time, you really have 2 groups: older workers who kept up to date, and because of experience, are now Principal Engineers, Architects, Tech leads, etc. And you have those who didnt, or forgot the strong fundamentals that are making a come back (eg: functional programming), refuse to pick it up, etc. Those are becoming less and less employable.
Obviously I don't have any statistics, but as someone who entered the field right before the dotcom crash, that's roughly what I've seen. Essentially, there just can't be that many mediocre or above older workers. And things changed so much in the last 15 years or so, that having 20+ years of experience is just not gonna give you that much unless you're doing lead/architecture/management, and there's only so many positions for those roles (plus, getting the right architect with the right company is hard).
All around, while there's totally some age discrimination, even without it things probably wouldn't be very different.
Note that a lot of companies are optimizing for younger employees not just out of greed or to exploit them, but simply because there's more of them.
Tech wasn't all that hot until recently, so the majority of software engineers ARE 30. If you're looking to scale up quickly, in an industry where even 3 months coding bootcamp graduates that can pass a basic interview are in high demand, you don't have a whole lot of choice. I guess your alternative is to whine for more H1B visas or something.
Bingo. But don't forget that IT is pretty divided, and it's why a lot of arguments on slashdot start over these things...
On one hand you have software engineers: while tough, and require a fair amount of time investment to keep up to date, etc, is incredibly rewarding, and usually you can keep a decent work/life balance, make 200k+/year once you're good, etc.
Then you have coders, tech grunts, support, game developers, etc. Those are usually underpaid, under appreciated, taken advantage of, etc.
A lot of people put both those categories in the same basket....confusion follows.
Pretty much. My computer was purchased in early 2011. It has late 2010 hardware in it (at least if i trust a google search for 580GTX, which I got at the same time as the entire rig).
The whole machine was roughly the cost of the Macbook Pro (with jacked up specs, mind you) I bought in December that's on the floor behind me.
This is totally an apple and orange comparison, lap-top vs desktop, the desktop has a shitty non-standard SATA3 controller that runs slower than SATA2, etc etc.
But for most practical scenarios, they perform the same. The macbook pro has a much better SSD and a faster CPU. The Desktop has a significantly better videocard (even though its obsolete, it runs most new games at pretty good settings in 1080p...it's not 4k, but it's adequate) and more cores.
And the hardware they contain was released 4-5 years apart, or more.
I'll upgrade once I get a game my PC can't run, or once the hardware fails.
I was surprised by how much of a discount Apple gives for bulk to companies. All manufacturers have discounts, but Apple is kind of notorious for being conservative on that front...
Then I asked a friend who's at the head of a company of a few hundred employees that all use Macbook Pros how much they were paying for them. It wasn't a "little" cheaper. It was drastic (obviously Apple has higher margins, so they can mark them down more...i just never knew they actually did).
Like, marked down enough to be in line with mid range PC hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
If you ban "after work" email, you also prevent me from having flexible hours. It's pretty common that I'll just take a random day for giggles, then make it up on a Saturday, or at night.
Sure, I can just take an actual day off and not make it up (and I do!), but I'll be less likely to do it when I need it if I can't just make up for it.
Coding is today's "get rich quick" scheme. By the time those 4th graders get into the marketplace, it will have crashed and they'll just be the future version of today's burger flippers.
People kind of forgot about the dotcom crash already. Yeah, people probably should learn basic coding...but that isn't why it's so trendy to point it out in the news.
It's trendy because right now it's an absurdly high paying job with low barrier to entry.
When we are done vilifying all manual labor and every carpenter and plumbers are pushed aside and snobbed by the swarm of 3rd rate coders, and there's so many programmers salaries tank to nothing and there's a real crash (not the tiny one we got in january) ...then what? Will we keep pushing everyone to have masters in whatever is trendy then?
What we need is comprehensive push to re-glorify apprenticeships of all kinds (including, but not exclusively, programming), so that people who don't want to or can't go to college can still be useful and make a nice life for themselves. Anyone who's played an MMO knows what happens when people who find a "make gold and become rich quick" schemes become overly popular: they become a waste of time.
I'm trying to think how much $ a ride must cost before I'm willing to deal with a normal taxi driver... That's a lot of $.
The main question is how far from home must I be that I rather take a taxi than just walk home...
Yeah, I really fucking hate taxis.
Even if you pay 200k+ (and I'm not talking about SF/SV where it doesn't mean that much), you still have issues finding "highly skilled programmers".
I dunno what world you live in, but trying to staff a reasonably sized team where everyone would be paid significantly more than that doesn't exactly scale: you have to be able to sell something that will pay for it, and there's a limit to how much the market will bear.
The reality is right now the market is jam packed with 2 bit coding bootcamps bozos, people who switched fields when they realized software engineering paid better than their chosen one, and all around wannabes. A small percentage of those people are really into it, worked hard, and are actually good. There's still a shortage.
If your definition of highly skilled is "I learnt Rails in a few weeks and I can make a web page but I'm asking for 150k+ a year", well, yeah, there's a lot of that.
I don't really find Edge slow, but the fonts just kill it straight up for me. Unless you have a 4k display, the grayscale antialiasing they use make my eyes bleed.
For a job many people would pay to be able to do, minus the report filling...
Yup. I think Citibank had a $1000 when I tried, which was a problem too.
I ended up just opening an account online with a credit union that had a $10000 limit. Problem -> solved.
Even if your company does direct deposit, often the first check is physical. My bank doesn't have physical locations where I am, and has a very low limit on online deposits.
I just opened an account on some random credit union, took a picture of the check and uploaded it, and then did a (free!) transfer.
Dunno about you, but the only banking products I take for granted are the ones I get online. My mortgage officer never saw me face to face. I never talked to a human being to open any of my credit cards. I'm an immigrant to the US, so I had a worse credit score at first than some of my friends who work in fast food restaurants. I'm white, but the country where my name is most common is Haiti (a coincidence, but people reading it don't know that).
As far as I could tell, all of those loans were essentially granted based on my FiCO score, my current debt burden and my payslips. It wouldn't even be my address or employer, since both my first apartment in the country and my first employer's office were located in districts known for large amount of minorities.
Maybe people get discriminated against when they go face to face...but then, just don't do that (heck, even if you're white. It's a pain in the ass). CapitalOne will give a credit card and checking account to literally anyone who didn't go bankrupt.
Now, if it's someone who can't afford an internet connection or cannot go to a local library...then ok, those people do need help (for real, not in the insult way). But "generally shut out" sounds like way more people are getting screwed then just that group.
Making heat (for your home) is a heck of a lot simpler and more efficient than turning burning fuel into something that can power an engine.
Well, for one, when your mom is single or she actually goes to work like everyone else as opposed to staying at home doing nothing else but caring for the house, having 3 home cooked meals a day becomes much more challenging. Not impossible, but you have to do some serious planning and get into pretty specific time habits to make it happen.
So more people will resort to eating out, ordering, etc. And it goes downhill from there.
If I'm in a rush in the morning and don't have time to patch up breakfast, my only option around here is to go to a local pastry shop. Yeah, that doesn't end well.
If you write a blog post that gets reasonably popular, someone MITM it and changes a link you recommended to one that has a shadier purpose, it can screw over some visitors.
https helps with that.
If you're over 50 and in the interview, it's obvious that you're up to date (that doesn't mean knowing the API of the latest trendy bullshit, but it does mean you don't think SVN is new and scary), and you have the skills of someone with 25+ years of experience, not only will you get an offer before you have time to get in your car, in any of the tech hubs (not just SV and the west coast), the conversation will start at over 300k total comp and you'll be able to milk them up from there.
The problem is that there just wasn't that many software engineers back then (compared to today), and the vast majority jumped ship when the dot com bubble crashed. Of what's left, a large section are scared of SQL as something too technical, or are too scared of new tech to learn them enough to explain why we shouldn't use them, from experience.
The rest though (which leaves very very few)? You can't hire them because they're never on the job market.
As the huge influx of engineer gets older, it's a problem that will go away. Eventually there will be more older engineers than younger ones, and we can go back to the good old days where no one could get a job without 10 years of experience in a technology that's 5 years old.
While there's problems everywhere, since the biggest issue is long before any tech company can get (directly) involved (how parents raise kids, school, TV, etc), there's starting to be statistics showing that women right of college are starting to make quite a bit more than men (because of all the big tech companies under fire desperately trying to hire them).
So unless you're critically incompetent, right now if you come out of CS and you're a girl, you're basically an instant-hire and you can negotiate your salary to oblivion.
Welp, since my wife is a pretty successful software engineer, I indirectly benefit...but...
In addition to this, the US' culture is very much "It's only illegal if you get caught and the cops will do something about it". About -everything-.
If you tell someone they really shouldn't do something because it's dangerous/irresponsible, they'll blankly stare at you and go: "But...how will they ever catch me? I don't understand". No matter their age or what you're talking about. There's no critical thinking. It's just about scoring by sticking it to the man.
I mean, everywhere has a little of that, it's just human nature, but when I moved to the US, I was really amazed by how far they push it.
Part of this come from the younger workers themselves though. I remember back 15ish years ago when I was coming out of college, there was a HUGE sentiment that you needed 10+ years of experience and a master in CS to get hired anywhere. When you finally got a job and looked around, those people were often not that great.
Now of course it's being pushed to the extreme, where people learn javascript or ruby on rail, go to San Francisco and expect 150-200k/year bullshit, and companies hire a ton of them, which essentially just cause more senior employees to work around the clock to babysit them.
The right answer's somewhere in the middle, obviously.
Ok, so software engineering is a fairly recent field (or rather, it's recent that it's so "big"...but even in absolute, it's more recent than, let say, law, finance or construction. My orders of magnitudes).
Now, the first big influx of tech worker was pre-dotcom crash, when anyone who knew basic HTML could get a job (we're seeing some signs of that lately as it's happening again, but that's a different topic). Then the bubble crashed...all the tech workers at the bottom of the barel had to switch career, leaving only a small fraction. That weeded out most of the people that today would be 40+
In early 2000s, going in CS wasn't exactly the prestigious career path (because of said dotcom crash). Anyone who went to college then would be around 32-35ish depending on the date range you're looking at and how much education they had. And there wasn't that many.
My wife went to college after that, and it still wasn't a big craze. She's now just over 30.
It's after that it started booming, and it keeps growing and growing. So most of the people available would be 30.
During that time, some percentage of people figure out it's not for them, move to management, etc. That means you have very few older workers left.
On the portion that's left, in a field that changes all the time, you really have 2 groups: older workers who kept up to date, and because of experience, are now Principal Engineers, Architects, Tech leads, etc. And you have those who didnt, or forgot the strong fundamentals that are making a come back (eg: functional programming), refuse to pick it up, etc. Those are becoming less and less employable.
Obviously I don't have any statistics, but as someone who entered the field right before the dotcom crash, that's roughly what I've seen. Essentially, there just can't be that many mediocre or above older workers. And things changed so much in the last 15 years or so, that having 20+ years of experience is just not gonna give you that much unless you're doing lead/architecture/management, and there's only so many positions for those roles (plus, getting the right architect with the right company is hard).
All around, while there's totally some age discrimination, even without it things probably wouldn't be very different.
Note that a lot of companies are optimizing for younger employees not just out of greed or to exploit them, but simply because there's more of them.
Tech wasn't all that hot until recently, so the majority of software engineers ARE 30. If you're looking to scale up quickly, in an industry where even 3 months coding bootcamp graduates that can pass a basic interview are in high demand, you don't have a whole lot of choice. I guess your alternative is to whine for more H1B visas or something.
Bingo. But don't forget that IT is pretty divided, and it's why a lot of arguments on slashdot start over these things...
On one hand you have software engineers: while tough, and require a fair amount of time investment to keep up to date, etc, is incredibly rewarding, and usually you can keep a decent work/life balance, make 200k+/year once you're good, etc.
Then you have coders, tech grunts, support, game developers, etc. Those are usually underpaid, under appreciated, taken advantage of, etc.
A lot of people put both those categories in the same basket....confusion follows.
So, is there a good programming language aside Haskell?
Non-binaries counted twice maybe? ;)
The "we'll pay you to watch ads" businesses was one of the signs before the DotCom crash.
This is scary as hell.
Pretty much. My computer was purchased in early 2011. It has late 2010 hardware in it (at least if i trust a google search for 580GTX, which I got at the same time as the entire rig).
The whole machine was roughly the cost of the Macbook Pro (with jacked up specs, mind you) I bought in December that's on the floor behind me.
This is totally an apple and orange comparison, lap-top vs desktop, the desktop has a shitty non-standard SATA3 controller that runs slower than SATA2, etc etc.
But for most practical scenarios, they perform the same. The macbook pro has a much better SSD and a faster CPU. The Desktop has a significantly better videocard (even though its obsolete, it runs most new games at pretty good settings in 1080p...it's not 4k, but it's adequate) and more cores.
And the hardware they contain was released 4-5 years apart, or more.
I'll upgrade once I get a game my PC can't run, or once the hardware fails.
I was surprised by how much of a discount Apple gives for bulk to companies. All manufacturers have discounts, but Apple is kind of notorious for being conservative on that front...
Then I asked a friend who's at the head of a company of a few hundred employees that all use Macbook Pros how much they were paying for them. It wasn't a "little" cheaper. It was drastic (obviously Apple has higher margins, so they can mark them down more...i just never knew they actually did).
Like, marked down enough to be in line with mid range PC hardware.