This is only true if a) the system is trivial enough or b) if the manual is well-written and the system's usage is self-evident and easily deductible from its interfaces. Most systems do not fit that description.

RTFM can only take us so far, in particular if the users are not technically savyy beyond some business-specific competency (for general systems, neither they have to, nor should we make it a requirement.)

Any complex system, be it software, electric, mechanical, whatever, will be used in manners and conditions not expected, but that yet will fall within its normal operations. It is simply a combinatorial problem that no manual will ever be able to cover.

Systems like these (for example, Chrome) are typically self-evident in usage for the general consumer. It is true, however, that utter reliance on the cloud for help is a big design no-no for me as well. I guess now "help" means "google".

It certainly simplifies design, but it doesn't necessarily simplifies users' experience.

That last part in bold made no sense.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA. Oh, sorry, you were serious. Oh well, MUAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAH!!!!

On a serious note, those of us who are in the knows, who have done some type of IT work, we know that that is bullshit. Tier I support has never been done, and can never be done with a IVR system.

For example, let's consider IVR systems, which is where these supposed "software machine" silver bullets can fit in. Call your cell phone or cable provider, and you will see that at most, what you get is an IVR system that leads you to an specialist (or sometimes someone who is reading a script of instructions) after the IVR has tried to collect some basic problem description that, in theory, helps facilitate the specialist.

That is all.

Let's call the IVR system a Tier-0 support system (or more appropriately, a routing system that takes a customer to actual Tier I support.) That is all. It's only when a human being in Tier I support fails at resolving the issue, that Tier II and Tier III get summoned. One would have to create one hell of an expert systems to barely begin to mimick Tier I support for the general-case type of problems.

All you would do is piss the customer. Case in point, look at AT&T and Bank of America, and other cell providers. They are phasing out IVR systems (or severely reducing them) in favor of actual human beings (couple that with a minor shift away from offshore call centers, but that's another story.)

And that is just for mundane tasks.

Yeah, because IT is like pulling levers or flipping burguers (no offense, since I once pulled levers and flipped burguers.)

Serious question: Do they even know what the hell robotics mean?????

I bet they actually do but they are simply latching to the next buzzword (since manufacturing and robotics are the hot pancakes of the day), hoping for the next business-type offsourcing dumbass to actually fall for it.

Up next on Fox News, they invented software-based monkey coders (and thus circumvented Turing's Halting Problem.)

Why is this surprising? Government is not one, homogeneous thing. Here we have a state government indirectly trying to tax an agency of the federal government.

Again, why is this surprising? Look at any corporation of sufficiently large size. Such a corporation would be divided into either departments or business units (each with their own specific budgets). When one renders a service to another, or when two or more need to engage into some type of cross-organizational project, they need to decide how to fund them from their budgets. And if one causes costs to run higher than a certain cap, that one unit has to compensate the others' budgets from its own.

A more tangible scenario in IT is when IT is its own department with its own budget and its own infrastructure. Other departments deploy their systems with them with some specific SLA agreements. Such SLA agreements typically include IT to pay a penalty (from its annual budget) to the other departments whenever that department(s) experience a downtime during core hours (because those "core hours" down times cause said departments to bleed money in terms of lost transactions, idle employee/users time, etc.)

Large organizations (public or otherwise) do not have a universal budgel like a cookie jar where everyone puts his hands on. Budgets get allocated per department or business unit, with money flowing among them when rendering a service or paying a penalty for loss of service.

'Compare a plumber to going to Harvard College — being a plumber, actually for the average person, probably would be a better deal'

Bloomberg has a point. For the longest time, and while the majority of the world was mired in poverty, the US, with its highest rate of HS graduates, was well equipped to be the predominant manufacturing/economic engine of the world. Now that world poverty has been cut in half, and with increased literacy rates world wide, stuff simply moved overseas.

And the country, all of the sudden, had an emergency need to re-educate its masses. The solution? College!!!!

We treat/treated college as if it were a silver bullet, while all this time we have been treating vocational education like a pariah concept, a joke. Part of a good solution would have included a revamping of vocational education at the HS and community college level. We need that, we desperately need that.

So, Bloomberg is right. For many people, plumbing or any vocational skill set would be a much better deal. We have a shortage of vocational workers, and we have an excess of college graduates (many who graduate in degrees for which there is no economic demand.)

So, it is not a matter of who is intelligent and who is not (having a STEM degree doesn't necessarily indicate practical intelligence, nor lacking one indicates stupidity.) It is a matter of economics, plain good old supply and demand.

It is ridiculous to contemplate a nation with HS graduates and college graduates, and nothing in between. Alas, that's what we have been collectively aiming for the last 20 years, as if that is going to solve the challenges of globalization.

Cost. Risk of change. Ain't-broken-don't-fix-it, etc, etc. Some companies exaggerate these, but in general, these are real, valid concerns.

Companies and orgs exhibiting such ridiculous policies, though large, are not common. Really, they are not. They are not the norm, and are not representative of the general problem companies face when they deliberate on whether to keep or change large, expensive legacy systems.

Companies that keep a policy for using IE6 (or similar follies.) That's an uninteresting, not-so-relevant problem, one that exists in the realm of stupidity and cargo cult practices, not worthy of a /. front page.

OTH, Companies that have aging, yet good-enough-functional (or at least functionally tolerable) multi-million (if not multi-billion) dollar investments, that is a interesting problem to study (and hopefully solve.) This is a genuine business/software engineering problem worthy of a /. front page.

But how often does that happen? What is the general prevalence? And how much does such practices intrude in day-to-day business activities?

OH, NOW I SEE!!!! Stop the presses, for no one in the history of interweebzkind has ever realized this till now!!!

Are you familiar with the history of the sewing machine, and how such an innovation caused large, though eventually temporary unemployment of seamstresses and taylors? Same here, same with any other technological breakthrough or innovation. Yesterday news, obvious, self-evident news.

Sorry, but the answer is self-evident: It goes into raises, building new infrastructure or new investments, business expansion, etc, etc. Money wisely invested. Money absurdidly wasted. Some of one or the other. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not so much. Business and human nature as usual as they have always been, and always will be.

Really, how much is "a small portion"? And how much a "small portion" is enough to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards (whatever that means)? Besides why exactly would you want to upgrade? If you have a COBOL-based banking system that has worked well for 20 years, why would you want to upgrade (and engage the inherent risk of such a change)?

You are talking about money that can do this or that in a business setting, and yet you fail to discuss the ROI of such changes. A discussion on a business change without discussing ROI is not a legitimate business discussion. It is hand waving.

Because it is true. Do the math. Seriously, do the math. Number of engineers involved in a migration process times average yearly salary time 2 (typically the cost of an engineer for a business is 1.5 to 2 times the cost of said engineer's salary.) Then add up the cost of transition, then the cost of retraining users, the cost of violating SLA agreements, the cost of having downtimes due to problems with the transition, then the cost lost money in salaries by having idle users due to retraining or down time, etc, etc.

These are the functional/operational requirement costs. What about the non-functional ones? You might need to invest in new platforms (in terms of leasing, licensiong or re-training) to support development, testing and deployment. You might need to negotiate new SLAs if said platform change involves changing vendors (or changing existing SLA agreements). Then, there is the cost of migrating data (which you will most likely incur), the legal requirements to retain data, the legal requirements to comply with certain standards (say, SOX or HIPAA) which your outdated systems might already be compliant with, etc, etc.

Yes, any system of significant size will cost millions to change. You better have a significant ROI on the change to compensate for the cost (and inherent risk.) It is not rocket science.

More software engineering 101:

1. An outdated system does not necessarily imply an inefficient system. In fact, an efficient system is the one that runs the longer without incurring in substantial changes/enhancements/bug fixes.

2. A "modern" system does not imply an efficient system. Just look around at the mounds of shitty software built anew everyday with the "hawt" modern tools currently at our disposals. A "modern" system is a new system. A new system is an unproven system. While it remains unproven, it carries an inherent, hard-to-calculate cost. To prove it as "proven" will inevitable incur in another cost. None of these costs are trivial.

3. A willigness to pour money on an old but known system does not necessarily imply a waste. Instead, it acts as a de-facto insurance cost against a known risk. 4. Cost is not necessarily horrible if it is a function of a known/understood risk. It is the unmeasurable cost of an unknown/not well known risk that it is horrible and unacceptable.

Kunstler's op-ed piece provides some compelling counter-arguments arguments that are sadly cobblered up together with invectives to the point of being emotional. If we wanted emotional we could simply tune to BravoTV or some crap like that.

The "Atlantic" is simply running a hypothetical "what-if" scenario, and the potential consequences of it. It is a "what-if" (something you always want to see and debate if you are truly open-minded), not a "will-be" article as it is being presented (demonized/ridiculed) by the interweebz borg bovine-mind collective (many whom I'm sure have not had even RTFA in question, with the opening sentence quoted below):

Again, it is a "what-if" article pointing to a nightmarish scenario, not a nilly-willy "fuck solar/wind, let's burn moar dino juize" corporate campaign. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to most.

The fault lays squarely on the developer. You got to stick to your guns with your ballpark or negotiate with the caveat of greater risks of failure as the estimated time is decreased (w/o ever decreasing it substantially.)

I'm on the same boat. I dread working from home, even though I have, at times, done it full time. A friend of mine suggested me next time I do offsite consulting to simply rent a small office (they can run very cheap) and work from there at any time that I need. However, I do find it useful to telecommute to put a lot of extra hours. Checking my e-mails and calendar first thing right after I wake up; logging at night from home to check for any urgent e-mails or if I happen to have an epiphany on how to solve an issue or to fire a time-consuming job to have it ready in the morning. Putting a few hours during the weekend as needed.

Lo and behold one can gradually sustain long hours that way. Long hours are never desirable but often unavoidable. Though I do not like to work from home, I certainly would not want to do 50-60 hour work weeks on premises either.

So, what is the percentage of the economy that was directly/substantially afflicted by this brief fluctuation on the stock market?

Then whoever is programming these HFT algorithms should be shot. Having them susceptible to tweets is just ridiculous speculation.

Profits are not finite, or more precisely, bound in such a manner that forces someone's win to match someone's losses.

This ^^^.

F* bingo!

Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.

We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.

Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?

Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.

The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.

the fact that so many people has voted my original post as "Troll" shows me how unsecure so many "men" in ./ are when facing the prospect of one company, ONE SINGLE COMPANY decides to slightly favor women, all in a male-dominated, employment-plentiful industry. Pathetic.

Well, as a similar analogy, it is not good, and it is discriminatory, to let women and children take the rafts before men when the ship is sinking. If we taken an absolutist POV, then this practice is discriminatory as well. Poor us men.

Of course not, but it is neither ok to take my original argument and try to 'falsify' it by extending it to a complete different context. This is right up the alley of Godwin's Law when it comes to conjuring emotional arguments.