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Comment Re:You always have a choice (Score 1) 171

What is interesting is that if people do this, it can fundamentally threaten the US economy; Hell it could even destroy it. The US is completely dependent upon the debt cycle. As a interesting contrast, China has had a problem where they can't get people to spend money / go in debt. It is one of those things that is a good idea for an outlier, but does not work when applied to the general population.

Comment Re:Anyone care to post Tesla's side of the story? (Score 3, Interesting) 317

I hate it when leaders do this. "Here, I will go do this job to show whatever." It is shallow showmanship. A job is something that someone might do for many years; How safe is the job if you do it for 1000s of days? What repetitive injuries can be expected, how many times has the 1% chances of getting crushed by machinery been actualized. This type of showmanship is offensive to the people who do the actual work.

There are professionals out there that can audit these types of safety problems. I hope they are hiring and listening to them and the people on the ground.

Comment Throw under the buss (Score 1) 418

I have seen this in much larger shops. They build their systems in a non robust way because they are cheap and just throw people under the buss when it goes bad. Companies try to implement the cool side of continuous dev without paying the dev ops price. It is just the same old same old, lets demand the good parts of a paradigm, but ignore the requirements to make such a system viable ex: continuous development, agile etc.

Having IT work on brittle systems just offsets stress to the devs / techs and makes their jobs suck. I once brought this up to a manager and he said something along the lines "Those guys who work on skyscrapers don't work with harnesses..." they do, and have been for a long long time. It is not the f'ing 1930s.

Comment Re:Ageism in The Vally of the Silly Con (Score 1) 312

The exception is the rule? I wonder what is the age distribution of programmers / engineers at google (I hear it leans heavily to the left). I suspect the perceived ageism at google and in IT in general is coincidental; It probably has to do more with human development maybe a natural tendency to for example:

* Not care as much about new tech, same old same old.
* Not really fit in with the younger culture in the office (this one is circular).
* Not willing to work over time without pay.
* Not wanting to live in over inflated regions.
* Not interested in studying for technical interviews (feel that it is not professional).

Maybe there is something inherent in big IT shops like Google that end up having the same end result that ageism would have; If the end result is the same, is it still ageism? I think so, but at the same time I think the problem is bigger than Google, that is a systemic problem in the entire IT field, one that might just be part of its very nature.

Please remember just because you are the exception, you might not be the rule. It would be much more productive to add that maybe there are a lot of 50 year olds at google etc. It is like someone seeing a war veteran and saying oh war x might not be so bad, that person made it out.

Comment Re:How short term is short term to this guy? (Score 1) 99

The problem with efficiency is that more work is not created but lost to the system. Do you really think there will be as many software jobs as truck drivers etc. You can have plenty of people with skills, and no work for them to do; There are many examples of just this thing happening all over the world.

Comment Re:How short term is short term to this guy? (Score 1) 99

Yes these things do work themselves out, but the problem is in the details. There are examples during the industrial revolution of large populations of people being put out of work, economies failing and causing multiple generations of impoverishment and significant long term suffering. Just because things happen in history does not mean we do not have to deal with them.

Comment Re:Focus on a few key things (Score 1) 347

Your right, this is a good question. Most of the studies I am referring to were those that were brought up when I was studying math education year ago and I no longer have access to an actual research databases. The studies subjects covered how testing and actual math proficiency are ambiguous, how GPA and SAT scores don't strongly correlate with success etc. It is very hard to find actual information specific to IT proving one way or the other. There have been interviews with google HR about https://techcrunch.com/2013/06... , but this is not a study but just semi anecdotal head scratching.

However, with a cursory understanding of pedagogy, the dangerous assumptions that are made in many tech interviews are blatantly obvious. Creating meaningful test is a very hard thing to do, maybe even impossible; It just rubs me the wrong way how people in IT are so sure of something they know so little about. It really should not be up to unqualified employers to vet the education or life experiences of a professional, we really need a sort of accrediting body to develop a more meaningful baseline.

These technical interviews always give me the silly image of some manager throwing a engineer a bunch of toothpicks and tape and then with a serious face, asking them to build a bridge; It would be considered ridiculous in any other field.

I am also not being obnoxious, but are there any studies that help clear up what does work? There has to be formal work on this somewhere.

Comment Re:Focus on a few key things (Score 2) 347

Questions not relevant to the actual job done are not a good indicator of future success. These types of questions are great for recent students or people who enjoy riddles problems though. There is a whole field of study about learning and testing. There has been numerous studies done showing that these types of things don't correlate. Interviewers use them because they are a cheap and fast way to weed people out.

Colleges should add a pedagogy classes to help interviewers understand how to test people more effectively, and to understand the limitations of the different methods of assessment. IT interviewers are put in a almost impossible situation, they need to test a candidates knowledge, but they have no way to review their actual work history (the only thing that actually does correlate to success) so they are left grasping at straws.

Comment Re: Lack of talent my ass!!! (Score 1) 318

True, the world owes me nothing, but the government and this country owe us a at least a level playing field. A country that can draft and kill our children, has drafted and killed our ancestors by the millions does not just get to sit on its ass when its people are in need; If they did not ask so much, then maybe they would not owe so much. I expect our government to act in the best of all of its citizens, and not just the rich. A country that lets its poor starve, the sick suffer, and its mentally ill wander the streets does not deserve to be a community, let alone a country.

Comment Re:It's a start! (Score 1) 221

Maybe they will consider allowing people to work remotely in the US. It might take a few years to turn the trend around, but more young people might even consider a career in tech (or whatever) if they hear it is in high demand. Maybe companies will have to stop with their retarded tech interviews. I don't mind competition, but there should be a even playing field. Hell, maybe they will have reason to keep older workers.

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