and increased our labor force participation rate from 59% to 66%.
That can be interpreted 2 ways: more who want to work can, or that more have to work to make ends meet instead of take care of family, etc. That's a bigger sprawling topic.
We keep bottoming out at around 5% unemployment between recessions.
But our recessions have arguably been getting longer and deeper.
That's why we have welfare and other social safety nets.
That's one approach to spreading the wealth, but another is to tax the rich and use it to expand vocational education. Our country would be more competitive in the process.
I designed a better one, too.
Link doesn't work for me.
Trump is an idiot. He thinks technical progress is bad, trade is bad, and going back to the Bronze age is good.
That may be true, but my point was and is that raw efficiency may be secondary to other human desires/emotions, which could be why T was elected. Logic and human nature/politics are not the same.
The purpose of the economy is to produce goods/services, it is NOT to create jobs.
Who made this rule? Society's well-being may depend on both. (I gave some examples in a nearby reply.)
what happens is that everyone goes up and of course the rich go higher up. Is this a problem ?
It can during slumps. Plus, the hugely wealthy are now buying politicians via campaign donations. Our democracy is being replaced by a plutocracy. The plutocrat-stuffed Supreme Court essentially ruled that political bribery is "free speech", using power to get more power.
what do you think the rich do with their money ? Stash it under the mattress or jump it in like Scrooge McDuck ? No, they invest it into something that creates even more jerbs.
Not necessarily. They often hoard cash during recessions, invest overseas, invest in robots, buy politicians (above), or invest in real-estate and jacking up housing prices for everybody. Less and less of their wealth is going to creating actual jobs for actual citizens. It made a big difference in the 1950's where expansive factories needed big funds, but a service-based economy is less big-up-front-investment-sensitive.
There's plenty room for new companies even though many of them get bought out eventually.
Yes, bought out by the big conglomerates. Your statistic may reflect that companies don't last as long as they once did, even the big ones. But during their reign, the big co's often yield great control. The length of the reign is secondary.
Average CEO pay is clearly larger than in the past, compared to average salaries, and the top CEO pay is very much larger.
Which is where? At least those farmers, and later factory workers, had jobs that could raise a family. It's hard to raise a family flipping burgers or greeting at Walmart. As mentioned in my original message, the benefits of automation/trade are often lopsided.
Anger over factory job loss is a large part of why we have an unusual President right now: the swing states happen to be those screwed by automation and lopsided trade.
If you benefit 60% by throwing 40% under the bus, the political backlash can be Yuuuuge. You may get a $12 lawn-chair, which is great for YOU, but another person loses a job: they'll tell you where you can put your $12 lawn-chair.
Hillary more or less told them "shut up and live with change", and look where that got her. What she should have done is level with them and say that better vocational education is the only realistic solution to factory loss, and that by taxing the rich, more can go to college and vocational school. She kind of did say that, but in a clunky indirect way. Bernie did it a bit better, but still was not forthright enough about the factory losses. T's pie-in-sky claims to resurrect the past ("MAGA") thus looked worth-a-try in comparison.
Human pride and dignity, per jobs, can be more powerful than cheap widgets. Whether that's "logical" may be moot. Humans be humans.
The math could be misleading. Without the bots, Fedex may be hiring more humans. With the bots, they keep the number of humans the same but expand with bots instead. If/when there's a slump, they then dump humans such that they employee less humans than they would otherwise.
As far as the argument that "automation has always made new jobs", that could be true, but the displaced people may not be qualified for them. It appears that on the larger scale, automation and global trade are creating increasing inequality as it becomes a winner-take-all economy. Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.
Therefore, the issue may not be so much "fear the bots" as it is "fear inequality".
I'm not necessarily arguing against such career choices, but merely warning all to be prepared. ALL professions are subject to change, fads, and bubbles. A hooker once claimed that automation would never replace her, but what if sex-bots get good enough that demand for the real deal drops in half? Can't rule it out. (New great field: sex-bot tester/reviewer.)
Because they don't have current skills. I work with these 60 yo programmers and can't get rid of them soon enough. They learned one niche skillset in the 80s and never learned anything again...Look at how much whining occurs when Rust, Go or Python shows up on Slashdot.
There are problems on both sides of the "ageism" issue. Yes, us older people tend to be skeptical of new stuff because we've seen wasteful and stupid fads come and go over time. Skepticism is good but not always welcomed.
On the flip side you have to go with the flow to some degree, and when in Rome you have to follow the Romans even if they do some things stupidly. It would be nice if each tool and tool part was carefully vetted, but it's human nature to skip such vetting such that fads shape much of the stack and you have to live with a degree of fad cruft to get stuff done. Humanity often has to learn the hard way*.
Parallelism/distributed application computing, micro-services, functional programming, "web-scale" DB's, the "flat look" (where you can't tell what's a button) and other things have been overblown and used/misused where they don't belong. But sometimes us oldbies have to shut up and move on about fads.
There is indeed a "culture war" between young and old in IT, and both sides usually do have legitimate points or at least partial points. People are just not very good at debating and articulating why they think X is better at Y such that it turns into a flame-war. Choosing tool X over Y is an art, not a science (unless you have big research bucks).
* A lot of IT fads are to solve specific problems or limits caused by new technology, and when that technology matures, the original need often diminishes or changes nature. For example, RDBMS at first lacked distributed "web scale" features. Vendors have since added them to RDBMS such that one doesn't need to toss the upsides of RDBMS to avoid their (original) down-sides. Faster smart-phone CPU's are also reducing the gap between desktop dev platforms and mobile platforms. But the original work-arounds often turn into religious-like movements that get carried away.
The hiring manager won't necessarily cooperate, inform, or agree with HR. A candidate will eventually get hired so someone had to fudge at least one side of the equation. You either fudge the left side, the right side, or half-fudge both sides.
"Solid, irrefutable proof" is not necessary to establish a legitimate mystery. There's a difference between the evidence threshold needed to establish "legitimate mystery" and "they are space aliens". The second indeed requires a very high level of evidence.
The witness evidence is incredible, I'd note. In the 1950's there was a military plane with a skeleton crew who watched a flying metallic disk in broad daylight roughly 40 feet from the plane. It looked clearly metallic and clearly like a manufactured/artificial item. The crew never sought publicity, and if anything, were freaked out by it.
The military being this open about military sightings is rather unusual. They usually are much more wiggly. This would normally trigger big news and a rush of talking heads, but that orange dude overshadows news interest. Coincidence? I'm just asking.
I view it as two hurdles: the resume has to get a pass by the HR drone, and then get a pass by IT or project manager. Each have different criteria and maximizing for one will diminish the other because the IT manager will catch most BS. Your choice is to try to please one or the other, or compromise between each. Accidental flubs by orgs will eventually happen and you'll get an interview.
One technique is to use vagueness such as "worked on.NET-like languages for 10 years" (using the 2000's job example) because you used MS languages for that long, and they share some similarities (MS-BASIC and VB classic). The "-like" suffix gives you wiggle room in case you are accused of lying. It's not a lie, just an exaggeration.
If you are pressed on it, just explain it's logically impossible to get past HR without fibbing a bit, for time-machines haven't been invented yet. The manager may be impressed that you can work around difficult office politics using a little salesmanship. (Sorry, "salespersonship" doesn't sound right.)
It smells too similar to the dot-com bubble for comfort. During the height of the dot-com bubble, co's didn't pay that well because they gave you stock options instead of big salaries as a signing bonus. And when the bubble popped, the market was flooded with programmers such that jobs were hard to find, at least on the west coast. Therefore, you had no savings because you got stock options that are now worthless, and you had no job. My legacy language experience was the only thing that saved me, and barely.
One could say "this time is different", but they also said that during the height of mortgage bubble, in terms of comparing that to the dot-com bubble. The reasoning was that homes had concrete value while dot-coms didn't. Didn't matter: the mortgage bubble created the second worse econ slump on record.
They are saying similar about AI: it's different from the AI bubble of the 80's because real and common products rely on AI now. That may be true, but as mortgages showed, that's not enough. And even if you are not in AI, an AI pop could affect rank and file IT because unemployed AI experts will flood non-AI IT job openings.
It may indeed be "different this time": a different path to misery. The only consistency is that if it smells bubbly, it probably is. The only real uncertainty is the size and scope of the poppage. Keep a rainy-day fund, people.
Obscure languages do tend to pay more because, first it's harder to find people specializing in it, and second because specialists in such niches have fewer career and location choices if their niche dries up, and thus expect a bit more for specializing. Php or "MS.net" may pay less on average, but it's usually easier to find gigs because they are ubiquitous. Specialists tends to have bigger gaps in employment.
I don't think it matters. Doing HTML/CSS well takes skill with the languages involved, especially dealing with brand/version/size differences, and fast-changing eye-candy fads. (Usually JavaScript is also involved). Language is language. Being Turing-complete is mostly moot. It takes intricate knowledge and balancing many trade-offs. Many shops split by specialties: back-end/DB, business logic, and UI, for example.
At first that tune just sounded weird to me. But after several listens it started clicking and I now consider it one of the greatest pop-tunes ever written.
To somebody who highly values beauty/coolness, it's "important" to them. I'm not making a value judgment on beauty here, only saying it's a key factor to many consumers.
Maybe if they knew there were a trade-off between beauty and repair-ability, they'd make a different decision. But that only happens in Ideal Land. Clueless consumers and clueless voters are the rule of the land. Humans be humans.
As a guy who has spent most of his time in Microsoft dev environments, I can tell you the momentum is going in exactly the opposite direction: "how can we dump Microsoft/Oracle/IBM and how fast can we do it" is the current direction of the smart enterprise. [Emphasis added]
That may indeed be true IF you consider that most enterprises are NOT smart.
There's a place for both dynamic and static/compiled (s/c) languages. The problem is that there's not enough mature competitors in the s/c field for general application development. It's mostly a race between Java and MS (C#/VBnet), but Oracle screwed up Java via lawsuits and other missteps, making MS more attractive relative speaking.
Dynamic language interpreters are generally easier to design and implement than compilers because the type system is simpler or non-existent ("tag-free typing"); and it's easier to fudge the weak-points with dynamism. "Big compile" apps have to have all the ducks lined up right to finish compiling. If a small corner of a dynamic app has language-related issues, it won't stop the other 99% of the app from working.
Therefore, there are fewer viable s/c competitors. The complexity of s/c languages means the "network effect" is stronger for s/c, and MS's large presence and deep pockets allow it to leverage the network effect so that it grabs a bigger percent of the s/c pie if the other s/c offerings get hiccups.
(There are dynamic strong-typed languages and vice versa, but they usually don't go mainstream for reasons that would take longer to explain.)
Slashdot Mirror
That can be interpreted 2 ways: more who want to work can, or that more have to work to make ends meet instead of take care of family, etc. That's a bigger sprawling topic.
But our recessions have arguably been getting longer and deeper.
That's one approach to spreading the wealth, but another is to tax the rich and use it to expand vocational education. Our country would be more competitive in the process.
Link doesn't work for me.
That may be true, but my point was and is that raw efficiency may be secondary to other human desires/emotions, which could be why T was elected. Logic and human nature/politics are not the same.
Who made this rule? Society's well-being may depend on both. (I gave some examples in a nearby reply.)
It can during slumps. Plus, the hugely wealthy are now buying politicians via campaign donations. Our democracy is being replaced by a plutocracy. The plutocrat-stuffed Supreme Court essentially ruled that political bribery is "free speech", using power to get more power.
Not necessarily. They often hoard cash during recessions, invest overseas, invest in robots, buy politicians (above), or invest in real-estate and jacking up housing prices for everybody. Less and less of their wealth is going to creating actual jobs for actual citizens. It made a big difference in the 1950's where expansive factories needed big funds, but a service-based economy is less big-up-front-investment-sensitive.
Yes, bought out by the big conglomerates. Your statistic may reflect that companies don't last as long as they once did, even the big ones. But during their reign, the big co's often yield great control. The length of the reign is secondary.
Average CEO pay is clearly larger than in the past, compared to average salaries, and the top CEO pay is very much larger.
Which is where? At least those farmers, and later factory workers, had jobs that could raise a family. It's hard to raise a family flipping burgers or greeting at Walmart. As mentioned in my original message, the benefits of automation/trade are often lopsided.
Anger over factory job loss is a large part of why we have an unusual President right now: the swing states happen to be those screwed by automation and lopsided trade.
If you benefit 60% by throwing 40% under the bus, the political backlash can be Yuuuuge. You may get a $12 lawn-chair, which is great for YOU, but another person loses a job: they'll tell you where you can put your $12 lawn-chair.
Hillary more or less told them "shut up and live with change", and look where that got her. What she should have done is level with them and say that better vocational education is the only realistic solution to factory loss, and that by taxing the rich, more can go to college and vocational school. She kind of did say that, but in a clunky indirect way. Bernie did it a bit better, but still was not forthright enough about the factory losses. T's pie-in-sky claims to resurrect the past ("MAGA") thus looked worth-a-try in comparison.
Human pride and dignity, per jobs, can be more powerful than cheap widgets. Whether that's "logical" may be moot. Humans be humans.
The math could be misleading. Without the bots, Fedex may be hiring more humans. With the bots, they keep the number of humans the same but expand with bots instead. If/when there's a slump, they then dump humans such that they employee less humans than they would otherwise.
As far as the argument that "automation has always made new jobs", that could be true, but the displaced people may not be qualified for them. It appears that on the larger scale, automation and global trade are creating increasing inequality as it becomes a winner-take-all economy. Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.
Therefore, the issue may not be so much "fear the bots" as it is "fear inequality".
Use science to bop Republicans and plutocrats on the noggin.
No, they keep the bugs in and squash the staff.
You mean "turned them into"
I'm not necessarily arguing against such career choices, but merely warning all to be prepared. ALL professions are subject to change, fads, and bubbles. A hooker once claimed that automation would never replace her, but what if sex-bots get good enough that demand for the real deal drops in half? Can't rule it out. (New great field: sex-bot tester/reviewer.)
There are problems on both sides of the "ageism" issue. Yes, us older people tend to be skeptical of new stuff because we've seen wasteful and stupid fads come and go over time. Skepticism is good but not always welcomed.
On the flip side you have to go with the flow to some degree, and when in Rome you have to follow the Romans even if they do some things stupidly. It would be nice if each tool and tool part was carefully vetted, but it's human nature to skip such vetting such that fads shape much of the stack and you have to live with a degree of fad cruft to get stuff done. Humanity often has to learn the hard way*.
Parallelism/distributed application computing, micro-services, functional programming, "web-scale" DB's, the "flat look" (where you can't tell what's a button) and other things have been overblown and used/misused where they don't belong. But sometimes us oldbies have to shut up and move on about fads.
There is indeed a "culture war" between young and old in IT, and both sides usually do have legitimate points or at least partial points. People are just not very good at debating and articulating why they think X is better at Y such that it turns into a flame-war. Choosing tool X over Y is an art, not a science (unless you have big research bucks).
* A lot of IT fads are to solve specific problems or limits caused by new technology, and when that technology matures, the original need often diminishes or changes nature. For example, RDBMS at first lacked distributed "web scale" features. Vendors have since added them to RDBMS such that one doesn't need to toss the upsides of RDBMS to avoid their (original) down-sides. Faster smart-phone CPU's are also reducing the gap between desktop dev platforms and mobile platforms. But the original work-arounds often turn into religious-like movements that get carried away.
The hiring manager won't necessarily cooperate, inform, or agree with HR. A candidate will eventually get hired so someone had to fudge at least one side of the equation. You either fudge the left side, the right side, or half-fudge both sides.
https://cn.pling.com/img//hive...
Somebody is a bag of hot air
"Solid, irrefutable proof" is not necessary to establish a legitimate mystery. There's a difference between the evidence threshold needed to establish "legitimate mystery" and "they are space aliens". The second indeed requires a very high level of evidence.
The witness evidence is incredible, I'd note. In the 1950's there was a military plane with a skeleton crew who watched a flying metallic disk in broad daylight roughly 40 feet from the plane. It looked clearly metallic and clearly like a manufactured/artificial item. The crew never sought publicity, and if anything, were freaked out by it.
The military being this open about military sightings is rather unusual. They usually are much more wiggly. This would normally trigger big news and a rush of talking heads, but that orange dude overshadows news interest. Coincidence? I'm just asking.
I view it as two hurdles: the resume has to get a pass by the HR drone, and then get a pass by IT or project manager. Each have different criteria and maximizing for one will diminish the other because the IT manager will catch most BS. Your choice is to try to please one or the other, or compromise between each. Accidental flubs by orgs will eventually happen and you'll get an interview.
One technique is to use vagueness such as "worked on .NET-like languages for 10 years" (using the 2000's job example) because you used MS languages for that long, and they share some similarities (MS-BASIC and VB classic). The "-like" suffix gives you wiggle room in case you are accused of lying. It's not a lie, just an exaggeration.
If you are pressed on it, just explain it's logically impossible to get past HR without fibbing a bit, for time-machines haven't been invented yet. The manager may be impressed that you can work around difficult office politics using a little salesmanship. (Sorry, "salespersonship" doesn't sound right.)
It smells too similar to the dot-com bubble for comfort. During the height of the dot-com bubble, co's didn't pay that well because they gave you stock options instead of big salaries as a signing bonus. And when the bubble popped, the market was flooded with programmers such that jobs were hard to find, at least on the west coast. Therefore, you had no savings because you got stock options that are now worthless, and you had no job. My legacy language experience was the only thing that saved me, and barely.
One could say "this time is different", but they also said that during the height of mortgage bubble, in terms of comparing that to the dot-com bubble. The reasoning was that homes had concrete value while dot-coms didn't. Didn't matter: the mortgage bubble created the second worse econ slump on record.
They are saying similar about AI: it's different from the AI bubble of the 80's because real and common products rely on AI now. That may be true, but as mortgages showed, that's not enough. And even if you are not in AI, an AI pop could affect rank and file IT because unemployed AI experts will flood non-AI IT job openings.
It may indeed be "different this time": a different path to misery. The only consistency is that if it smells bubbly, it probably is. The only real uncertainty is the size and scope of the poppage. Keep a rainy-day fund, people.
Aint there some grand AI grammer pluggin that would catch that danmed typo?
Obscure languages do tend to pay more because, first it's harder to find people specializing in it, and second because specialists in such niches have fewer career and location choices if their niche dries up, and thus expect a bit more for specializing. Php or "MS.net" may pay less on average, but it's usually easier to find gigs because they are ubiquitous. Specialists tends to have bigger gaps in employment.
I don't think it matters. Doing HTML/CSS well takes skill with the languages involved, especially dealing with brand/version/size differences, and fast-changing eye-candy fads. (Usually JavaScript is also involved). Language is language. Being Turing-complete is mostly moot. It takes intricate knowledge and balancing many trade-offs. Many shops split by specialties: back-end/DB, business logic, and UI, for example.
Pulling a Microsoft, eh?
The devil's probably in the details of the contract's wording.
That's probably not the Navy's fault. That's an issue between the vendor and reseller if the Navy only made their deal with the reseller.
There are different ways to say the same thing. I suspect the contract is vague, which will come down to a judge's or jury's interpretation.
At first that tune just sounded weird to me. But after several listens it started clicking and I now consider it one of the greatest pop-tunes ever written.
To somebody who highly values beauty/coolness, it's "important" to them. I'm not making a value judgment on beauty here, only saying it's a key factor to many consumers.
Maybe if they knew there were a trade-off between beauty and repair-ability, they'd make a different decision. But that only happens in Ideal Land. Clueless consumers and clueless voters are the rule of the land. Humans be humans.
That may indeed be true IF you consider that most enterprises are NOT smart.
The enterprise world is a Dilbertian distopia.
There's a place for both dynamic and static/compiled (s/c) languages. The problem is that there's not enough mature competitors in the s/c field for general application development. It's mostly a race between Java and MS (C#/VBnet), but Oracle screwed up Java via lawsuits and other missteps, making MS more attractive relative speaking.
Dynamic language interpreters are generally easier to design and implement than compilers because the type system is simpler or non-existent ("tag-free typing"); and it's easier to fudge the weak-points with dynamism. "Big compile" apps have to have all the ducks lined up right to finish compiling. If a small corner of a dynamic app has language-related issues, it won't stop the other 99% of the app from working.
Therefore, there are fewer viable s/c competitors. The complexity of s/c languages means the "network effect" is stronger for s/c, and MS's large presence and deep pockets allow it to leverage the network effect so that it grabs a bigger percent of the s/c pie if the other s/c offerings get hiccups.
(There are dynamic strong-typed languages and vice versa, but they usually don't go mainstream for reasons that would take longer to explain.)