Implementing that policy is almost surely illegal, and arguably immortal, but not necessarily idiotic. Planning to do something illegal and then broadcasting that fact to your entire work force, however, is idiotic. If the story had just been that a CEO tried to illegally exclude older workers I probably wouldn't have commented, because I wouldn't have been surprised. What surprised me is that someone intent on a policy like that would be so transparent about it, given that transparency likely works against his goals.
Your former CEO was an idiot for stating publicly that they're going to focus on hiring younger engineers. Even if he was planning to do that, broadcasting the fact that you're going to illegally discriminate is a pretty dumb move.
I get the sentiment here. I really do. And there are certainly things I suspect I would be interested in learning about. Most things, though? Not so much. Even though I don't use it at my job, I could teach myself python in my spare time. It's highly marketable. I haven't. Why not? Because learning yet-another-language doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. It's a chore. I'd rather spend time with my kids. Watch a good movie. Read a good book. Sleep. Now if I needed to know python to do my job, or if I thought my job could be done better or more efficiently using python, then I'd learn it. But that isn't the case.
Agreed. I'm of the opinion that a great interview strategy would be to just hand the candidate a bunch of buggy code snippets (where the bugs are at least somewhat tricky) and ask them to fix them all. Couple that with a couple of reasonably simple programming exercises designed such that there are a number of subtle edge cases the author could fail to account for. See if the candidate recognizes and accounts for them.
If you consider the age range to be 22 to 62, if the population graduating with tech degrees were constant over time and there were no bias you'd expect an average age of 42. But there are a number of factors that I suspect skew that average downward that have nothing to do with bias:
1. The pool of potential tech workers in each year's cohort has likely grown over time.
2. Some older employees may no longer be counted as "tech workers" by virtue of having "graduated" to upper management.
3. People die; the oldest cohort is going to have shrunk purely by virtue of people dying off.
4. There may not be enough women for this to actually affect the average, but there's also the phenomenon of women working when young/childless and then quitting or working part-time when they have kids (i.e. when they're older).
I have no idea to what extent, if any, these explain the average age being ~30 instead of ~42, but I can at least imagine they might have a significant effect.
Not that I think the trend would be any different, but I'd like to see the average (and median) age of first time fathers. And mothers, for that matter.
...is that I want to be able to watch whatever I want, whenever I want. To accomplish that I would most likely need local broadcast + multiple streaming services, some of which aren't supported by the same hardware. Not a deal breaker, but the costs add up the more I have to pay for additional streaming services.
My ideal situation would be: single streaming device, pay for movies on a per-movie basis, pay for TV shows on a per-season basis or per-episode basis (discount for purchasing whole season), pay for sporting events on a per-event basis or per-"team season" basis.
I view products with few reviews to be a complete unknown in terms of quality. So if there are similar products with many reviews (and a decent rating) I'm going to prefer those, because (in theory) they're more of a known quantity.
Without additional context, I can't judge whether an average age of 29 is "bad" or not. Is that for the whole company, or just technical staff? How do other tech companies compare? i.e. is Google much worse than its peers?
The fact that that's the only thing you think matters is telling. I say that as someone who hires programmers. For instance, in addition to wanting a candidate to be a good programmer, I also want him to bathe, and to not be an egomaniacal dipshit. One could credibly argue the set of non-bathers and egomaniacal dipshits skew male.
I got a fellowship that paid my tuition + a stipend that covered housing. The stipend was only available to Ph.D. seekers, but I ended up leaving in 2 years after getting a Master's degree. Granted, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to get fellowship.
That's not my experience. Most of the folks I know who are still at IBM, where I worked from 1999 to 2004, are white or Asian men. And Asians don't count for diversity purposes.
Sure. But the article (at least the summary) seems to be saying that you're guaranteed to get the axe these days because all companies are inherently disloyal and will fire you at the drop of a hat. Things may have moved that direction relative to 30-40 years ago, but it's not uniformly true of every employer. Some employers allow for people to be "lifers".
Having only read the/. summary, this sounds like an excellent and cogent article. My one push back would be that there do still exist companies that hire employees for the "long haul". I have friends who've been working at IBM for the past 15 years.
Having is more jobs is nice because there's more variety, but what I care about as someone who wants to have an easy time finding and keeping a job (and who wants to be paid well) is the number of jobs relative to the number of qualified workers. I'm not convinced the situation is better in Dallas than in Austin.
Does it make sense to compare Python to SQL to HTML? Completely different beasts. Seems more reasonable to zoom in on specific use cases and gauge popularity in those particular contexts. For instance, web applications. Results from Stack Overflow jobs:
In that particular context Python is more-or-less last place. Thing is, Python is used for plenty more than just web application back-ends. Much like Java. But there's a big difference from doing hard-core stats/science stuff with Python and doing Django dev. They both use Python, but they're completely different.
IMO, anyone considering which language to invest in should first ask him or herself: what kind of software development do I actually want to do? Then, within that context, evaluate the contenders.
People don't typically mutilate their sons' genitals unless you consider male circumcision to constitute "mutilation", in which case clearly they do. I said "daughters" because, since I don't equate male circumcision with mutilation, female mutilation is the more common offense. For the record, neither of my two sons is circumcised.
Examples of irrationality in the world at large are of interest to rational people when said irrationality might potentially impact their wellbeing and livelihoods. For instance, if a sizeable movement arose in American society to incarcerate programmers because computers are the work of Satan, that would be 100% irrational and stupid yet still imminently newsworthy to a rational computer programmer.
In this case, to the extent you think the narrative is false and this law suit is entirely without merit, that actually argues for the newsworthiness of the story. In that case the "story" isn't that a law suit was filed, per se, but that a completely ridiculous and baseless lawsuit was filed that might result in the ouster of an innocent CEO.
Slashdot Mirror
Implementing that policy is almost surely illegal, and arguably immortal, but not necessarily idiotic. Planning to do something illegal and then broadcasting that fact to your entire work force, however, is idiotic. If the story had just been that a CEO tried to illegally exclude older workers I probably wouldn't have commented, because I wouldn't have been surprised. What surprised me is that someone intent on a policy like that would be so transparent about it, given that transparency likely works against his goals.
Your former CEO was an idiot for stating publicly that they're going to focus on hiring younger engineers. Even if he was planning to do that, broadcasting the fact that you're going to illegally discriminate is a pretty dumb move.
I get the sentiment here. I really do. And there are certainly things I suspect I would be interested in learning about. Most things, though? Not so much. Even though I don't use it at my job, I could teach myself python in my spare time. It's highly marketable. I haven't. Why not? Because learning yet-another-language doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. It's a chore. I'd rather spend time with my kids. Watch a good movie. Read a good book. Sleep. Now if I needed to know python to do my job, or if I thought my job could be done better or more efficiently using python, then I'd learn it. But that isn't the case.
Agreed. I'm of the opinion that a great interview strategy would be to just hand the candidate a bunch of buggy code snippets (where the bugs are at least somewhat tricky) and ask them to fix them all. Couple that with a couple of reasonably simple programming exercises designed such that there are a number of subtle edge cases the author could fail to account for. See if the candidate recognizes and accounts for them.
42. Still employed in tech.
If you consider the age range to be 22 to 62, if the population graduating with tech degrees were constant over time and there were no bias you'd expect an average age of 42. But there are a number of factors that I suspect skew that average downward that have nothing to do with bias:
1. The pool of potential tech workers in each year's cohort has likely grown over time.
2. Some older employees may no longer be counted as "tech workers" by virtue of having "graduated" to upper management.
3. People die; the oldest cohort is going to have shrunk purely by virtue of people dying off.
4. There may not be enough women for this to actually affect the average, but there's also the phenomenon of women working when young/childless and then quitting or working part-time when they have kids (i.e. when they're older).
I have no idea to what extent, if any, these explain the average age being ~30 instead of ~42, but I can at least imagine they might have a significant effect.
Not that I think the trend would be any different, but I'd like to see the average (and median) age of first time fathers. And mothers, for that matter.
CitiBank has one of these as well. You get 1% at the time of purchase and 1% when you pay down your balance:
https://www.citi.com/credit-cards/credit-card-details/citi.action?ID=citi-double-cash-credit-card
...is that I want to be able to watch whatever I want, whenever I want. To accomplish that I would most likely need local broadcast + multiple streaming services, some of which aren't supported by the same hardware. Not a deal breaker, but the costs add up the more I have to pay for additional streaming services.
My ideal situation would be: single streaming device, pay for movies on a per-movie basis, pay for TV shows on a per-season basis or per-episode basis (discount for purchasing whole season), pay for sporting events on a per-event basis or per-"team season" basis.
I view products with few reviews to be a complete unknown in terms of quality. So if there are similar products with many reviews (and a decent rating) I'm going to prefer those, because (in theory) they're more of a known quantity.
If true, that's not only bad but highly illegal.
Without additional context, I can't judge whether an average age of 29 is "bad" or not. Is that for the whole company, or just technical staff? How do other tech companies compare? i.e. is Google much worse than its peers?
The fact that that's the only thing you think matters is telling. I say that as someone who hires programmers. For instance, in addition to wanting a candidate to be a good programmer, I also want him to bathe, and to not be an egomaniacal dipshit. One could credibly argue the set of non-bathers and egomaniacal dipshits skew male.
21% of all employees, or 21% of technical staff?
This is only slightly more weird than spelling bees.
Why? I did one that didn't require a thesis. So, basically, I just took 4 more semesters of graduate level C.S. coursework.
I got a fellowship that paid my tuition + a stipend that covered housing. The stipend was only available to Ph.D. seekers, but I ended up leaving in 2 years after getting a Master's degree. Granted, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to get fellowship.
I just load Slack in a browser on my (Mac) desktop. Seems fine in Firefox. Also use the iOS app on an iPhone with no issues.
That's not my experience. Most of the folks I know who are still at IBM, where I worked from 1999 to 2004, are white or Asian men. And Asians don't count for diversity purposes.
Sure. But the article (at least the summary) seems to be saying that you're guaranteed to get the axe these days because all companies are inherently disloyal and will fire you at the drop of a hat. Things may have moved that direction relative to 30-40 years ago, but it's not uniformly true of every employer. Some employers allow for people to be "lifers".
Having only read the /. summary, this sounds like an excellent and cogent article. My one push back would be that there do still exist companies that hire employees for the "long haul". I have friends who've been working at IBM for the past 15 years.
Having is more jobs is nice because there's more variety, but what I care about as someone who wants to have an easy time finding and keeping a job (and who wants to be paid well) is the number of jobs relative to the number of qualified workers . I'm not convinced the situation is better in Dallas than in Austin.
Does it make sense to compare Python to SQL to HTML? Completely different beasts. Seems more reasonable to zoom in on specific use cases and gauge popularity in those particular contexts. For instance, web applications. Results from Stack Overflow jobs:
node.js: 304
Spring: 180
Rails: 172
ASP.NET: 111
django: 80
In that particular context Python is more-or-less last place. Thing is, Python is used for plenty more than just web application back-ends. Much like Java. But there's a big difference from doing hard-core stats/science stuff with Python and doing Django dev. They both use Python, but they're completely different.
IMO, anyone considering which language to invest in should first ask him or herself: what kind of software development do I actually want to do? Then, within that context, evaluate the contenders.
People don't typically mutilate their sons' genitals unless you consider male circumcision to constitute "mutilation", in which case clearly they do. I said "daughters" because, since I don't equate male circumcision with mutilation, female mutilation is the more common offense. For the record, neither of my two sons is circumcised.
...Musk is the Howard Hughes of our time.
Examples of irrationality in the world at large are of interest to rational people when said irrationality might potentially impact their wellbeing and livelihoods. For instance, if a sizeable movement arose in American society to incarcerate programmers because computers are the work of Satan, that would be 100% irrational and stupid yet still imminently newsworthy to a rational computer programmer.
In this case, to the extent you think the narrative is false and this law suit is entirely without merit, that actually argues for the newsworthiness of the story. In that case the "story" isn't that a law suit was filed, per se, but that a completely ridiculous and baseless lawsuit was filed that might result in the ouster of an innocent CEO.