Futurebot

'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers). Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified in computer software and performed by machines.'

http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...

Opposition comes from the wealthy, whose taxes would go up, and insurance company execs (and employees) since it keeps them in business.

58% support universal health care: http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...

62% support debt-free college: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-01/majority-...

92% would prefer wealth distribution to look like Sweden: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/american...

What some believe Americans want or will accept is still odds with the reality. The actual problem in this country is that our representatives do not represent most Americans; they represent the interests of the wealthy. We live in a plutocratic oligarchy with only the trappings of representative democracy:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-second-gilde...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oli...

"The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2350964

- the wealthiest/most financially supportive parents/relatives

- upbringings that are conducive to academic success

- the most free time

as those are the ones who, by a large margin, attend top schools, work at top companies, and have time to spend on self-learning. Another data point of confirmation of a well-studied idea.

Assortative mating: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

Few poor at rich schools even all these years later: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/education/despite-promise...

Why people care about elite schools: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-e...

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." -RMS

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic...

'Over the three decades following US entry into World War I, as working-class and socialist parties burgeoned throughout the industrialized world, American elites chose to deal with the problem by radically restricting access to the ballot. In state after state, petition requirements and filing deadlines were tightened and various forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of the democratic world, became the norm.

The new restrictions came in waves, usually following the entry of left-wing parties into the electoral process. According to data gathered by Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, in 1931 Illinois raised the petition requirement for third-party statewide candidates from one thousand signatures to twenty-five thousand. In California, the requirement was raised from 1 percent of the last total gubernatorial vote to 10 percent. In 1939, Pennsylvania suddenly decided it was important that the thousands of required signatures be gathered solely within a three-week period. In New York, according to one account, “minor-party petitions began to be challenged for hyper-technical defects.

"Although these statutes have been assailed on all sides,” a 1937 Columbia Law Review article reported, “their severity is constantly being increased, probably because the interests oppressed seldom have representation in the legislatures.” Indeed, when the Florida legislature found socialists and communists advancing at the polls, it responded in 1931 by banning any party from the ballot unless it had won 30 percent of the vote in two consecutive elections; naturally, when the Republican Party failed to meet that test, the state immediately lowered the threshold.

By comparison, in Britain getting on the ballot was never a major concern'

1) Parents are deceased (mine have been dead for decades, for example, so they couldn't)

2) Estranged from parents (people I know have had little no/contact due to irreconcilable differences)

3) Parents are too poor to help

4) Adult child makes enough money to not need help

"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the...

Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.

A coherently articulated, normative counterfactual security platform would be a better place to argue from.

It's a cousin to the negative liberty arguments: they only list what not to do to in order to avoid hurting people, rather than what we can do to help them (positive liberty.) Maybe we could frame the question as "If we let the EFF and Bruce Schneier redesign the United States security apparatus from scratch, what would it look like?"

We already have excellent critiques, and are good at articulating "what's bad," but far too little on "what would a good system look like that strikes the 'right' balance?"

https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-...

http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-comput...

“For a long time we wondered why more people didn’t major in computer science,” Alex Aiken, chair of Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, told Times Higher Education. “Everyone in the field believed it was the future and that [it] represented an important way of thinking. Now the world believes us, and we have an overwhelming number of students.”

Still, good start

- Be willing to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, staring at characters on a screen, paying attention to tiny details that would drive many non-devs mad, and work in deeply-focused, high-concentration mode

- Be willing to keep with the latest technology trends on your time and often on your own dime. For many people this means essentially jettisoning the idea of a healthy social life

- Have the financial resources, talent, and drive to get through challenging academic material for 4-8 years at a university or spend all your free time teaching yourself everything you need to know, which can even harder, meaning again, no healthy social life

- Live in an area with an incredibly high cost of living that only gets higher each year (occasional pullbacks notwithstanding.) This can mean spending 30, 40, even 50% or your income every month just on rent or living with a gaggle of roommates through your twenties, thirties, even forties.

- Be part of an industry that, despite fierce competition for talent, will decline to hire qualified candidates on that basis of age, perceived "poor culture fit," having attended a "bad/wrong" school (or no school)

Devs are also value multipliers; they're worth more than some marginal value. When you hire a dev, you're hire them to bring in 2,3,5,10 times what you're paying them in value, not 120k so that they can bring in 130.

The fact that devs are paid high salaries is good and makes perfect sense. It's part of the reason doctors are paid so much (and if we were really fair, currently underpaid professions that are similarly demanding would be paid far more than they are now.)

Now, the "this hurts startups" issue is something to be concerned about, but not at the expense of workers. What can be done here?

- Get used to needing more VC money. Adjust expectations

- Figure out ways to make startups cheaper (#1 on the list should be massive housebuilding. If rents were 1/3 of what they are, we would likely not be even reading this article. Right now all that would-be "extra" money gets directly funneled into the pockets of landlords. Tech bigwigs should be pouring massive resources / clout into changing this. Density, public housing to take pressure off the low end, all of it: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisi...)

- Get used to having fewer, but better capitalized startups

- Developers (and sometimes others that need quietude, like art/graphics people) get either a private office each or a shared, developer-only office

- Marketing and sales that need constant communication / thrive on motion and energy get open plans

- A mix of full-on conference rooms and small, private phone/meeting rooms

- Account managers, finance, managers get their own space, which can be cubes or shared offices.

Putting people who need to concentrate in with people whose job is to constantly talk and/or socialize is a recipe for (asymmetrically) poor productivity. The fact that office designs are sometimes dictated by the vicissitudes of management fads and a misguided desire to save money by just building one-size-fits-all layouts, even though a good design will pay for itself many times over, is very unfortunate.

We might not get world-changing, paradigm-changing, transcendental, strong social commentary-inflected art, but we are getting some cool stuff people like looking at. Not to mention meme material ("Dog or Bagel" and friends) that uses stuff like this as part of its input (which, I would argue, is its own kind of art.)

- Team has to do speculative development for ill-formed or understood problem domain

- Requirements that are improperly gathered

- Requirements that are underspecified

- Poorly understood problem in general

- Fighting bugs in system libraries

- Fighting bugs in third party libraries

- Fighting issues with integration on deployment and/or third party anything

- Complex underlying technology requiring its own kind of discovery (like in the OP)

- Poor/incorrect documentation

- Project members that go off on their own, refuse to communicate, deviate wildly from the project style, break things

- Management that insists on doing things from scratch

- Management that insists on using buggy, broken, etc. 3rd-party or even in-house systems/libraries for political or faux-business reasons

- Constant software developer interruptions

- Long meetings that consist of circular discussions, politics, back-and-forth arguments about personal preferences disguised as "important project stuff"

- Administrative minutiae that never stops adding up

- People leave a project partway through, taking project knowledge with them

- Broken/buggy tools/environments/systems

- People getting pulled off a project to work on another project

- Bad use of project management, source code management, other tools

- Insistence on wheel reinvention for well-understood problems for career advancement, resume building, or boredom-relief purposes

- Low morale / poor focus due to bad management, co-workers, bad tools, bad work environment

- Low morale / poor focus due to reliance on: late night work (leading to insufficient sleep), weekend work, little/no time off or breaks, reliance on crunch/death marches

- Dealing with company/project politics in general

- Lack of focus due to team member resume-polishing/interviewing part way through a bad project

- Occasional project sabotage

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/05...

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-second-gilde...

The rental increase treadmill keeps turning faster and faster, and the need to keep moving neighborhoods every few years is not a picnic.

I was born in Brooklyn and have lived in NYC my whole life, and the rental situation just gets worse every year. Unless and until we start dealing with the issue seriously, it's just going to keep eating more and more of people's incomes. I wrote a post on this a while ago summarizing the issue:

https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisi...

My rental history looks like this:

1995: 300/month sublet (Kensington)

1997: 625/month 1BR walkup (Brighton Beach)

1999: 675/month

2000: 1450/month 1BR walkup (Upper East Side)

2001: Above raised to 1650, moved

2002: 1125/month studio (Yorksvillle)

2009: 1175/month studio (Yorksville) - landlord wanted the apartment for a relative, had to move

2010: 1750 1BR walkup (Lower East Side)

2011: 1800

2012: 1850

2013: 1900

2014: 1950

2015: 2000

2016: 2180

All the old apartments I lived in are now at least 400-500+ more. It's out of control. I'm probably heading back to south BK when my lease is up; at least studios under 1400 still exist there.

- poor nutrition

- a home or neighborhood situation wracked with neglect, abuse, or addiction and the associated stress and anxiety that goes along with them

- impoverished relatives that are forced to move frequently for new, low-paying jobs

- general situational instability and lack of access to money

The school's money could fix the underpaid teacher/poor facilities problem (but that only helps in cases where students can afford the schools in the first place, obviously.) In our system, we use phrases like "problems with K-12 education" as a laughable shorthand for "enormous societal problems we're not even trying to tackle in a serious way because they would require lots of work, taxation, redistribution, and government 'intrusion'." The people starting these schools would never have done so if they'd realized this; there is no silver bullet for the problem. It requires major systemic changes (and many of these things apply just as much to higher ed as well.)

For all the alleged shortages, can it really be that all these years later companies are still unwilling to gamble on training because they feel like people will leave too quickly?

http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...

Here are a few prominent ones:

http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-g... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=... http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-a...

[1] Autor, Ford, Cowen, Krugman, Acemoglu, Brynjolfsson, McAfee just to name a few

It's true that this doesn't always get stated, but it is the most likely reason.

1) Try to make your fortune early. Most won’t, but try anyway. Better to have given it a shot in your twenties/thirties/maybe forties, than to sit around at 56 wondering what you’re going to do with yourself.

2) Never stop learning. Everyone has to become lifelong learners in this new hyper-competitive economy. Even moreso for those with traditional “disadvantages” like being considered too old. Keep up with trends, keep reading those whitepapers, go back and review the basics every so often (this is a good idea anyway, IMO), learn at least the basics of the new whiz-bang thing that comes out (even if it’s just the “hello world” equivalent), and generally keep yourself “interview ready.”

3) Physical appearance matters. They may not be able to ask your age, but they can look at you, and they’ll form an opinion either consciously or subconsciously; though many find this incredibly distasteful, it is the reality. That means consider carefully whether smoking/alcohol/other intoxicants that affect your physical appearance are worth it. It behooves you to keep a regular exercise schedule. Cosmetic surgery is also an option; there are many tells for age you can fix: eyelid and eyebrow droop, under-eye and various other facial lines, hanging chin. Hair dye and grafts are also worth considering, as a receded hairline and whites/grays are obvious tells.

4) It probably goes without saying to keep up your professional network.

5) Another distasteful one, but perhaps worth thinking about: if you’re someone who is in the age bracket that is often considered “very likely to have a family,” but you don’t (especially if you don’t ever plan to), state it. Signaling that you don’t have large, difficult-to-discharge obligations could give you the edge you need; you might get mentally re-bracketed. I haven’t tried this one, since I’m not yet in the bracket nor do I appear to be, but I would probably do so if I were.

6) Companies that are truly hard up for good people (and not just the “we can’t hire (at the wage we wish to pay)” companies) will just have to be more flexible. Maybe they already are.

Until we can fix the social / economic issues that underlie (some parts of) ageism, the above might help someone dealing with it on the ground.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561580

Short version:

Does anyone do this in software for certain specialties (like application security, DevOps, etc.) either for people with no experience (or more likely) generalist dev experience? What Dan Luu termed "trainingball" and what Matasano (sort of?) used to do with its proverbial .NET programmers:

https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7260087