I appreciate your eloquent insights, but perhaps you should read up on Kerry's history in the Senate and his approach to fighting terrorism. Foreign policy is about more than just "defense". I don't agree with every aspect of the Kerry approach, but your generalizations are uninformed:
Kerry Would Fight Terrorism Better delineates the approach Kerry would take to try and not only fight terrorists but stop them from sprouting up in the first place.
Kerry Faces the World discusses how Kerry's foreign policy approach is very similar to that of the first President Bush.
Bluster and determination are not enough to fight terrorists. You have to be smarter and more flexible than they are. And you have to believe that a free and open society is inherently stronger than a society run by a closed, secretive government. In my opinion Bush believes that only by severely curtailing the very freedoms we are fighting to preserve and insisting on blind obedience can we beat terrorists. To me, that is playing right into their hands.
Politics is about compromise, and in a democracy people will always be bitching about how much the President (and the alternatives) suck. I think we all have a tendency to look back the "the good old days" with a bit too much nostalgia.
Remember that Lincoln was exoriorated constantly during his Presidency. JFK barely got into office. Truman was dirided as a spineless puppet of the Missouri Democratic Party machine. The now venerated Reagan was lampooned as being out of touch with reality.
How often is it in the course of your daily life that you find someone, even a best friend, with whom you agree on all major political issues? Now look around and take into account the fact that the United States encompasses urban high-tech professionals, rural farmers, recent immigrants, long-established families, people who grew up with the Internet, people who grew up before the arrival of television, Catholics and Atheists, followers of Ayn Rand and believers in social justice, and tell me how you could possibly find someone who could run for President of a land this diverse in a two-party system and not be a compromise candidate?
You'll never find a candidate that appeals to you 100%, but that's the nature of the beast. The real question is which issues matter most to you. Saying that the candidates both suck masks the fact that they have widely divergent views on a broad range of basic issues, from how to fight terrorists to how to manage our natural resources. I'm not wild about Kerry, but I do think that he's going to be far more effective at fighting terrorists than Bush, I think he doesn't mistrust democracy as much as Bush does, and I think he understands that our natural resources are worth protecting. So I'll be voting for Kerry. Your criteria may vary widely from mine, but I don't think Kerry sucks.
America's system of government is flawed to be sure, but Democracies in general are messy. There are systems that are easier (hey, the Italian trains ran on time in Mussolini's day, right?) but they've got problems of their own.
As a point of clarification, there are several varieties of CC licenses (one of the great things about CC), some of which specifically allow derivative works and some of which do not.
Hey, I'm not arguing with you. I have read plenty about the atrocities in Chechnia. I resent the assertion that everyone in the United States thinks they know everything. Only Bush, Rumsfeld and the neocons think they know everything. I certainly don't know everything, and I get as much of my news from abroad as possible.
My point was simply that people in very different circumstances, with very different history and religion and societies have a difficult time even talking about peace.
The experience of Russia and Chechnia only confirms that.
Actually I was only using the example of Americans, Germans, Finns, etc. because there are some shared religous and cultural norms that would allow me as an American to convince one of these people as to the need for disarming. By the same token it would be difficult for a North Korean or Chechen to convince me of the need for disarmament.
My point was that for a wide variety of reasons it is difficult for the message of peace to pass through these religious and cultural walls. It becomes doubly difficult given that most often it is leaders talking to leaders, rather than regular individuals talking to regular individuals.
I agree with you that the world is beautiful. I just happen to think that while the variety of cultures and religions across the world make life interesting, human nature is to define each other by our differences rather than our similarities. So finding worldwide peace is not something we'll reach for a long, long time.
I understand completely what you're saying. Yes, there are plenty of people who view the US as expansionist brutes. Believe it or not, a lot of Americans aren't interested in bombing people who have never been a threat to Americans.
But that sort of underlines my point. It's difficult to even get Americans to understand that bombing the crap out of people isn't always the smartest way to make the world a safer place. It's that difficult for me to convince the guy sitting next to me that invading Iraq wasn't the smartest way to fight terrorism, or that constraining freedoms in the US isn't a good example of democracy in action.
So if it's that difficult for me to convince another American of this, and we have the same cultural and religious background, and I'm in the same freakin' room with the guy, how difficult is it going to be to convince someone whose cultural and economic reference points are completely different?
I'm not saying this means we should not try to engage people from other cultures. I've done a lot of traveling and I always try to elicit opinions about the United States, our leaders, our foreign policy, and the impact of American culture. But I do think that while people are people, people are also not the same. Their beliefs and values are shaped by their culture and history, and not everyone follows the Judeo-Christian beliefs that have defined the United States and Western Europe.
Even if the United States put down its weapons today, the world would still be full of war and conflict. If the United States laid down its weapons and completely demilitarized, would that truly make the world a more peaceful place in the long run?
Maybe it would, but I'm not so sure. With the US out of the picture, someone else would step into the power vacuum. Maybe it would be Russia, and maybe it would be China. Would a dominant Russia be more peacful than the US? Would China?
The unfortunate problem is that even if some are ready to give up the study of and preparation for war, others are not. I might be able to convince another American that it's a good idea, and I might even be able to convince a German or a Finn. But as an American how could I convince a Chetchen, or an Iranian, or a North Korean? Would their own leaders even want to convince them of the rightness of disarming? Leaders of "good will" have always been few and far between.
How can we all stop preparing for war? That is the challenge, but so far I've not encountered any plan that seems even remotely practical, given the cultural, ethnic, and religious schisms that divide people across the globe.
I suppose you don't want to go back too far, or you'd wind up back at ARPANET. Unless you think of a DOD-funded network as "our" network.
I live in a part of the country where many people continually complain about the newcomers. "Gotta stop those Valleys, man!" But then you ask them what the cut-off date should be. Should it be 2000? 1990? 1983? And by the way, when did you arrive here? Chances are you'll want the cutoff date to be right after your arrival.
As this article states, both major parties have prepared battalions of lawyers across the country in preparation for a close election. It seems the Bush vs. Gore decision wasn't really a decision at all, and we can expect the courts to be intimately involved in American elections for many years to come.
I certainly hope you (and Ray and others) are right. To me it seems that at present we're in a struggle between people who are embracing everpresent change and people who are frightened by the dramatic rate of technological and social change of our era.
Militiant Islam and those who want to teach "creationism" in public schools are flip sides of the same reactionary coin in my opinion. Open societies can embrace change, closed societies recoil at change. Let's hope the reactionaries don't win.
As for our back and forth discussion, you've opened my eyes to the possibility that I may be too pessimistic. It's time for me to read Kurzweil in more depth and re-evaluate my own assumptions. Thanks.
As for difficulty of predicting the future, it varies.
I definitely agree with you on this one. Your steam engine example is an excellent illustration of this. However, I think that this statement, "the only thing that remains is to follow the speed of progress and construct a simple timeline..." is a prime example of how logical thinking can be inconsistent with the group behavior exhibited by human beings.
For example, look at what the Nazi embrace of eugenics did to the study of genetics. To this day discussions about altering human genetic makeup are under the dark cloud of eugenics.
Nuclear power is another example. Fifty years ago everyone thought that by 2001 we'd all be riding around in nuclear-powered airplanes, but the negative effects of nuclear waste and the possibility of events like the Chernyobyl disaster were not forecast.
The social reaction to these potential and real dangers is often radically out of proportion to their actual threat. It is a well-known fact that most people are woefully incompetent at threat assessment. Societies at large are characterized not only by poor threat assessment, but by historical bias, religious doctrine, and other factors that are completely outside the scope of any "pure" extrapolation of technology trends.
I support the notion that some people disagree with Ray's predictions because they don't like his predictions. But at the same time I think it is worth taking any long-term predictions with a grain of salt, simply because the course of human events is not driven solely by technology.
No, it's just that some people (including Ray) see things
I understand the notion that some people are able to grok the future with more discernment than the rest of us. But even very intelligent people can make tremendous errors in judgement. I'm not saying that Kurzweil is necessarily wrong in taking scads of pills every day, but it does give me pause.
I agree with you that most people are "blind" to the future, but I'm curious if you're saying that predicting future trends is easy. Even people who devote all of their professional lives to being "futurists" have pretty bad prediction rates.
History will reveal the accuracy (or innacuracy) of Kurzweil's predictions, but the only future trends that are "obvious" are those we're viewing in the rear view mirror.
For some humorous examples of future predictions from the last century, check out this site.
are there any studies out there showing that historical figures have a higher instance of mental instability than the general population?
I remembered reading something about this, so I Googled it. There was a Harvard/U Toronto study about the linkage between creativity and "latent inhibition". Basically the conclusion is that highly creative people with high IQs don't filter incoming information in the same fashion that the rest of us do.
This is just one study, of course. But it is interesting. One thing I've noticed about the mentally instable people I've met (not that my sample is large), is that they do tend to exhibit more outward manifestations of creativity. Perhaps it's because they are less bound by the need to categorize the world in which they live. We certainly do have a lot to learn about how the mind works.
So are you saying that the D&D computer games and novels are based on some sort of weird setup where people sit together in a room and socialize while throwing dice and fondling small painted pieces of lead?
How truly bizarre.
In all seriousness, D&D deserves kudos for being the icebreaker that allowed fantasy to break into the mainstream of American culture. I vividly remember my first exposure to the game, way back in 1980. I was in Junior High School, and I encountered this odd group of kids talking about whether Asmodeus could defeat Orcus.
A few days later I found myself rolling up my first fighter (yeah, my imagination needed a kick-start) and going on my first dungeon crawl. Through D&D (and a host of other games, many of which I prefered to D&D for game mechanics) I met some of my best friends, and found an "in crowd" of my own. Of course nobody else thought of us as the "in crowd" but that didn't matter. We had a lot of fun and exercised our imaginations.
As others have stated, the specifics of Basic vs. Advanced, 2nd Edition vs. 3rd Edition, etc. don't really matter. What matters is that D&D opened the door for everything from Aftermath! to Call of Cthulhu to Neverwinter Nights and the DragonLance world.
My cap is off to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax for getting the ball rolling, and for the countless game designers, module builders, DMs, and players who have brought fantasy to life for so many people over these 30 years.
He may be a genius, but history is replete with examples of genius going hand-in-hand with mental instability. I'm not saying Kurzweil is crazy, but I do think that sometimes people like him project their desires into their predictions while discounting superfluous things like politics, social mores, and economics.
The point of the article is not that programming will die, but that the profession of "programmer" will. The question is open to debate, but I do find people's unwillingness to even enterain the notion somewhat disconcerting.
Is it really difficult to believe that at some point in time most programming will simply not require highly-trained individuals? It might not take place in our lifetime, and I agree wholeheartedly that the masses of less-educated programmers still need help, but the nature of what we call "programming" could change radically and with it the workplace for programmers could change as well.
What if biotechnologists became the new leaders of the technology revolution? What if advances beyond binary computing totally disrupted the nature of computing itself?
I just can't help but feel that we're willfully ignoring this potential, because for the last 50 years programmers have been on an upward path in terms of pay, relevance, and prestige. Nothing lasts forever.
Your assumption is incorrect, in that it fails to take into account the author's detailed analysis. This is not another "the sky is falling" piece of fear-mongering.
His primary rationale is this:
The advent of the Codeless Development Environment (CDE): Beyond the IDE, new efforts such as Builder(TM) from Skyway Software, the recent release of Sun Java(TM) Studio Creator and the entire raison d'etre for Codeless Technology, B.V. (the Netherlands), point to the emergence of tools that do not require traditional programming skills in order to create world-class networked applications. The advent of the CDE will make traditional programming skills as well as IDE approaches moot.
The emergence of the software factory: While a bookkeeping factory may never be viable, a software factory is. That at least is the view of Microsoft, as "patterns of industrialization" finally give rise to an ASIC-like assembly process for software components.
The decrease in the number of programming jobs in IT: It's not that IT is disappearing. But the number of actual programming jobs is diminishing, as measured by jobs in IT. (See the blog "The Incredible Shrinking Workforce" and links therein.)
Fewer students enrolled in computer science courses: The actual number (not just the percentage) of computer science students has shrunk considerably since the peak. Just as the Dow Jones Industrial Average is something of a barometer, measuring the sentiment of the aggregate of investors at a particular juncture, the number of computer science students is a measure of the market viability of the set of occupations that have typically required such skills; a canary-in-a-coal-mine indicator of the increasingly reduced demand for hardcore programming competence.
Note that the author posted this in a Java forum, so some of the underlying assumptions are based on the notion that OO and other programming trends are making it easier for less trained people to program. While this has been said for decades, over time it has become easier to program. As it becomes less difficult to program, the need for specifically-focused and highly-trained programmers will diminish. His point is not that programming itself will go away, but that the nature of the work itself will change so much that programming specialists will become obviated.
I wrote:...jobs that were once seen as the exclusive domain of Big Brains are now seen as just another part of the Information Economy.
My point is that management perception of IT has changed, which is part of the problem. Managers often seem to regard IT workers as easily replaced, because there are so many of them when compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago. IT people are not the rare creatures they used to be.
This is a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, rather than understanding. Many IT people are being mismanaged. But my fundamental point is that EVERYONE is mismanaged. Managing well is not easy, and most managers are never truly trained as *leaders*, so they don't know how to lead effectively.
The difference is that now IT people are not in a position where they can easily walk away in search of greener pastures at some other employer. So in many fundamental respects IT people are now dealing with issues that the rest of the workforce takes for granted as part and parcel of having a job.
As you state, technical people are the victim of bad management. To which I say, this is what happens when your skillset is becoming more available to employers. It's not pleasant for IT workers, and it doesn't make for well-implemented projects, but it's the reality.
Coders who lack the necessary financial or social rewards in their lives sometimes choose the dark side of the force.
Bank tellers who feel they are being underpaid embezzle from Wells Fargo.
Athletes who know they'll get huge endorsement deals if they win will take performence-enhancing drugs to win.
Junior executives who want to advance up the corporate ladder will look the other way when their bosses employ crooked accounting methods.
IT people are no differen than anyone else. We all face difficulties in the workplace - boredom, underpayment, stress, extensive overtime, ignorant bosses, ignorant subordinates - you name it, most of us have experienced it whether we're techies or not. Moral challenges abound for us all.
The trend I've seen over the last two or three years is that techies are increasingly thinking of themselves as victims. Perhaps this is because the IT industry is maturing, and the jobs that were once seen as the exclusive domain of Big Brains are now seen as just another part of the Information Economy.
It's not an easy thing to confront, particularly if your ego is wrapped up in your job. But market forces, technical innovation, and other forces are making IT jobs in the United States less attractive for those individuals who for whatever reason are not in a position to start their own company or work as consultants.
Those IT folks who are willing to accept that getting ahead in this industry no longer is risk-free will be fine. But the days of wine and roses are over. IT is becoming a commodity. We hammer on the RIAA for failing to alter its business model in the face of technical and social changes, but what are we doing if we keep looking back to the glory days of the late 1990s, rather than preparing for the future?
I always thought that freedom of speech originated in part because the framers wanted to protect political speech.
Well yes, that is what the framers wanted. You don't equate the FCC of 2004 with the framers of the Constitution do you?
Do new publishing models make sense?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Have you contemplated using any sort of alternative to traditional copyright for your works of fiction, such as a flavor of Creative Commons license? Do you feel that making money as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term, or do you think that writers like Lessig who distribute electronically via CC are merely indulging in a short-lived fad?
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true. But which other countries in the Americas have the name "America" in them?
I appreciate your eloquent insights, but perhaps you should read up on Kerry's history in the Senate and his approach to fighting terrorism. Foreign policy is about more than just "defense". I don't agree with every aspect of the Kerry approach, but your generalizations are uninformed:
How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank describes how Senator Kerry dealt a huge blow to terrorist financing in the 1990s.
Kerry Would Fight Terrorism Better delineates the approach Kerry would take to try and not only fight terrorists but stop them from sprouting up in the first place.
Kerry Faces the World discusses how Kerry's foreign policy approach is very similar to that of the first President Bush.
On the one hand (and on the other) gives The Economist's view of Kerry's foreign policy approach.
Bluster and determination are not enough to fight terrorists. You have to be smarter and more flexible than they are. And you have to believe that a free and open society is inherently stronger than a society run by a closed, secretive government. In my opinion Bush believes that only by severely curtailing the very freedoms we are fighting to preserve and insisting on blind obedience can we beat terrorists. To me, that is playing right into their hands.
Politics is about compromise, and in a democracy people will always be bitching about how much the President (and the alternatives) suck. I think we all have a tendency to look back the "the good old days" with a bit too much nostalgia.
Remember that Lincoln was exoriorated constantly during his Presidency. JFK barely got into office. Truman was dirided as a spineless puppet of the Missouri Democratic Party machine. The now venerated Reagan was lampooned as being out of touch with reality.
How often is it in the course of your daily life that you find someone, even a best friend, with whom you agree on all major political issues? Now look around and take into account the fact that the United States encompasses urban high-tech professionals, rural farmers, recent immigrants, long-established families, people who grew up with the Internet, people who grew up before the arrival of television, Catholics and Atheists, followers of Ayn Rand and believers in social justice, and tell me how you could possibly find someone who could run for President of a land this diverse in a two-party system and not be a compromise candidate?
You'll never find a candidate that appeals to you 100%, but that's the nature of the beast. The real question is which issues matter most to you. Saying that the candidates both suck masks the fact that they have widely divergent views on a broad range of basic issues, from how to fight terrorists to how to manage our natural resources. I'm not wild about Kerry, but I do think that he's going to be far more effective at fighting terrorists than Bush, I think he doesn't mistrust democracy as much as Bush does, and I think he understands that our natural resources are worth protecting. So I'll be voting for Kerry. Your criteria may vary widely from mine, but I don't think Kerry sucks.
America's system of government is flawed to be sure, but Democracies in general are messy. There are systems that are easier (hey, the Italian trains ran on time in Mussolini's day, right?) but they've got problems of their own.
My point was simply that people in very different circumstances, with very different history and religion and societies have a difficult time even talking about peace.
The experience of Russia and Chechnia only confirms that.
My point was that for a wide variety of reasons it is difficult for the message of peace to pass through these religious and cultural walls. It becomes doubly difficult given that most often it is leaders talking to leaders, rather than regular individuals talking to regular individuals.
I agree with you that the world is beautiful. I just happen to think that while the variety of cultures and religions across the world make life interesting, human nature is to define each other by our differences rather than our similarities. So finding worldwide peace is not something we'll reach for a long, long time.
But that sort of underlines my point. It's difficult to even get Americans to understand that bombing the crap out of people isn't always the smartest way to make the world a safer place. It's that difficult for me to convince the guy sitting next to me that invading Iraq wasn't the smartest way to fight terrorism, or that constraining freedoms in the US isn't a good example of democracy in action.
So if it's that difficult for me to convince another American of this, and we have the same cultural and religious background, and I'm in the same freakin' room with the guy, how difficult is it going to be to convince someone whose cultural and economic reference points are completely different?
I'm not saying this means we should not try to engage people from other cultures. I've done a lot of traveling and I always try to elicit opinions about the United States, our leaders, our foreign policy, and the impact of American culture. But I do think that while people are people, people are also not the same. Their beliefs and values are shaped by their culture and history, and not everyone follows the Judeo-Christian beliefs that have defined the United States and Western Europe.
Even if the United States put down its weapons today, the world would still be full of war and conflict. If the United States laid down its weapons and completely demilitarized, would that truly make the world a more peaceful place in the long run?
Maybe it would, but I'm not so sure. With the US out of the picture, someone else would step into the power vacuum. Maybe it would be Russia, and maybe it would be China. Would a dominant Russia be more peacful than the US? Would China?
The unfortunate problem is that even if some are ready to give up the study of and preparation for war, others are not. I might be able to convince another American that it's a good idea, and I might even be able to convince a German or a Finn. But as an American how could I convince a Chetchen, or an Iranian, or a North Korean? Would their own leaders even want to convince them of the rightness of disarming? Leaders of "good will" have always been few and far between.
How can we all stop preparing for war? That is the challenge, but so far I've not encountered any plan that seems even remotely practical, given the cultural, ethnic, and religious schisms that divide people across the globe.
I suppose you don't want to go back too far, or you'd wind up back at ARPANET. Unless you think of a DOD-funded network as "our" network.
I live in a part of the country where many people continually complain about the newcomers. "Gotta stop those Valleys, man!" But then you ask them what the cut-off date should be. Should it be 2000? 1990? 1983? And by the way, when did you arrive here? Chances are you'll want the cutoff date to be right after your arrival.
I certainly hope you (and Ray and others) are right. To me it seems that at present we're in a struggle between people who are embracing everpresent change and people who are frightened by the dramatic rate of technological and social change of our era.
Militiant Islam and those who want to teach "creationism" in public schools are flip sides of the same reactionary coin in my opinion. Open societies can embrace change, closed societies recoil at change. Let's hope the reactionaries don't win.
As for our back and forth discussion, you've opened my eyes to the possibility that I may be too pessimistic. It's time for me to read Kurzweil in more depth and re-evaluate my own assumptions. Thanks.
I definitely agree with you on this one. Your steam engine example is an excellent illustration of this. However, I think that this statement, "the only thing that remains is to follow the speed of progress and construct a simple timeline..." is a prime example of how logical thinking can be inconsistent with the group behavior exhibited by human beings.
For example, look at what the Nazi embrace of eugenics did to the study of genetics. To this day discussions about altering human genetic makeup are under the dark cloud of eugenics.
Nuclear power is another example. Fifty years ago everyone thought that by 2001 we'd all be riding around in nuclear-powered airplanes, but the negative effects of nuclear waste and the possibility of events like the Chernyobyl disaster were not forecast.
The social reaction to these potential and real dangers is often radically out of proportion to their actual threat. It is a well-known fact that most people are woefully incompetent at threat assessment. Societies at large are characterized not only by poor threat assessment, but by historical bias, religious doctrine, and other factors that are completely outside the scope of any "pure" extrapolation of technology trends.
I support the notion that some people disagree with Ray's predictions because they don't like his predictions. But at the same time I think it is worth taking any long-term predictions with a grain of salt, simply because the course of human events is not driven solely by technology.
I understand the notion that some people are able to grok the future with more discernment than the rest of us. But even very intelligent people can make tremendous errors in judgement. I'm not saying that Kurzweil is necessarily wrong in taking scads of pills every day, but it does give me pause.
I agree with you that most people are "blind" to the future, but I'm curious if you're saying that predicting future trends is easy. Even people who devote all of their professional lives to being "futurists" have pretty bad prediction rates.
History will reveal the accuracy (or innacuracy) of Kurzweil's predictions, but the only future trends that are "obvious" are those we're viewing in the rear view mirror.
For some humorous examples of future predictions from the last century, check out this site.
I remembered reading something about this, so I Googled it. There was a Harvard/U Toronto study about the linkage between creativity and "latent inhibition". Basically the conclusion is that highly creative people with high IQs don't filter incoming information in the same fashion that the rest of us do.
This is just one study, of course. But it is interesting. One thing I've noticed about the mentally instable people I've met (not that my sample is large), is that they do tend to exhibit more outward manifestations of creativity. Perhaps it's because they are less bound by the need to categorize the world in which they live. We certainly do have a lot to learn about how the mind works.
How truly bizarre.
In all seriousness, D&D deserves kudos for being the icebreaker that allowed fantasy to break into the mainstream of American culture. I vividly remember my first exposure to the game, way back in 1980. I was in Junior High School, and I encountered this odd group of kids talking about whether Asmodeus could defeat Orcus.
A few days later I found myself rolling up my first fighter (yeah, my imagination needed a kick-start) and going on my first dungeon crawl. Through D&D (and a host of other games, many of which I prefered to D&D for game mechanics) I met some of my best friends, and found an "in crowd" of my own. Of course nobody else thought of us as the "in crowd" but that didn't matter. We had a lot of fun and exercised our imaginations.
As others have stated, the specifics of Basic vs. Advanced, 2nd Edition vs. 3rd Edition, etc. don't really matter. What matters is that D&D opened the door for everything from Aftermath! to Call of Cthulhu to Neverwinter Nights and the DragonLance world.
My cap is off to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax for getting the ball rolling, and for the countless game designers, module builders, DMs, and players who have brought fantasy to life for so many people over these 30 years.
The point of the article is not that programming will die, but that the profession of "programmer" will. The question is open to debate, but I do find people's unwillingness to even enterain the notion somewhat disconcerting.
Is it really difficult to believe that at some point in time most programming will simply not require highly-trained individuals? It might not take place in our lifetime, and I agree wholeheartedly that the masses of less-educated programmers still need help, but the nature of what we call "programming" could change radically and with it the workplace for programmers could change as well.
What if biotechnologists became the new leaders of the technology revolution? What if advances beyond binary computing totally disrupted the nature of computing itself?
I just can't help but feel that we're willfully ignoring this potential, because for the last 50 years programmers have been on an upward path in terms of pay, relevance, and prestige. Nothing lasts forever.
His primary rationale is this:
Note that the author posted this in a Java forum, so some of the underlying assumptions are based on the notion that OO and other programming trends are making it easier for less trained people to program. While this has been said for decades, over time it has become easier to program. As it becomes less difficult to program, the need for specifically-focused and highly-trained programmers will diminish. His point is not that programming itself will go away, but that the nature of the work itself will change so much that programming specialists will become obviated.My point is that management perception of IT has changed, which is part of the problem. Managers often seem to regard IT workers as easily replaced, because there are so many of them when compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago. IT people are not the rare creatures they used to be.
This is a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, rather than understanding. Many IT people are being mismanaged. But my fundamental point is that EVERYONE is mismanaged. Managing well is not easy, and most managers are never truly trained as *leaders*, so they don't know how to lead effectively.
The difference is that now IT people are not in a position where they can easily walk away in search of greener pastures at some other employer. So in many fundamental respects IT people are now dealing with issues that the rest of the workforce takes for granted as part and parcel of having a job.
As you state, technical people are the victim of bad management. To which I say, this is what happens when your skillset is becoming more available to employers. It's not pleasant for IT workers, and it doesn't make for well-implemented projects, but it's the reality.
Bank tellers who feel they are being underpaid embezzle from Wells Fargo.
Athletes who know they'll get huge endorsement deals if they win will take performence-enhancing drugs to win.
Junior executives who want to advance up the corporate ladder will look the other way when their bosses employ crooked accounting methods.
IT people are no differen than anyone else. We all face difficulties in the workplace - boredom, underpayment, stress, extensive overtime, ignorant bosses, ignorant subordinates - you name it, most of us have experienced it whether we're techies or not. Moral challenges abound for us all.
The trend I've seen over the last two or three years is that techies are increasingly thinking of themselves as victims. Perhaps this is because the IT industry is maturing, and the jobs that were once seen as the exclusive domain of Big Brains are now seen as just another part of the Information Economy.
It's not an easy thing to confront, particularly if your ego is wrapped up in your job. But market forces, technical innovation, and other forces are making IT jobs in the United States less attractive for those individuals who for whatever reason are not in a position to start their own company or work as consultants.
Those IT folks who are willing to accept that getting ahead in this industry no longer is risk-free will be fine. But the days of wine and roses are over. IT is becoming a commodity. We hammer on the RIAA for failing to alter its business model in the face of technical and social changes, but what are we doing if we keep looking back to the glory days of the late 1990s, rather than preparing for the future?
Well yes, that is what the framers wanted. You don't equate the FCC of 2004 with the framers of the Constitution do you?