RandomOpinion

>Retraining for millions of jobs in the skilled trades.

Are you under 40? I assure you that it's really quite challenging to undergo retraining after 40 and then essentially start your career all over again as a fresh graduate. Yes, having had life experience helps somewhat but not all that much.

It's easy to say "Just do X" but pretty much everything becomes harder to do after 40 or so.

> e.g. block chain, deep learning, etc.

Most bootcamps that I'm aware of are for training web developers, with a few going into mobile app development. That will give you some basic coding skill but is probably not going to get you very far in the direction you want to go.

You'd most likely be better off seeking an online CS degree.

I think you're losing track of your narrative: this is about finding skilled engineers, not about money. The EU, Singapore, New Zealand, etc. have plenty of talented people.

Face it, even cutting off H1-Bs entirely, which thankfully is not what is being proposed by Trump, would not make weak candidates attractive to hire.

>If your company didn't have access to foreign H1-B guest workers, you would have two primary options: 1.) hire and train American workers, or 2.) recruit more aggressively by paying even higher wages.

Or 3) offshore the work. This effectively gives smart people overseas on-the-job training, sends money into the economies of the nations of which they are citizens, and teaches them how to compete with US businesses.

Protectionism _never_ works.

>Then again, I don't really use SO anyway - I know some people use it daily.

Out of curiosity, what do you do professionally? I'm impressed that you have so much domain knowledge memorized that you seldom ever need to look up anything.

#11 of the Spolsky test is "Do new candidates write code during their interview?". I think Joel would agree that a take-home test would fall under that.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

That's a terrible analogy. In a production crisis, you have full knowledge of and access to the system being diagnosed, have all your standard tools and information sources available to you, and are able to enlist your co-workers to aid you. Been there, done that and it's's nothing like a interview whiteboarding session.

>I love pair programming

Yes, but do you love pair programming:

-with a person you met less than 5 minutes ago?

-on a non-standard programming task you've been given less than a minute to think about?

-with a person who is focused on assessing you rather than assisting you?

-with your future job at stake and potentially your ability to ever interview at that company again at stake as well?

I enjoy pair programming too but I still choke on whiteboard programming questions during interviews. And this is after 20 years in the industry.

>This system is interesting but has a crucial flaw: I legally can't take part. I have a job now, which claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create.

By that interpretation, you can never legally take part in a whiteboard coding session during an interview either since the code you whiteboarded also belongs to your current employer.

There is such a thing as being too literal.

>How else can a bunch of very different people work together and be productive together without some level of decorum and safety? So, we get rid of 'political correctness' (i.e. respectfulness), and what then?

Live and let live.

(Which is exactly what "safe spaces" and "check your privilege" and the political correctness under threat of ostracism _isn't_.)

>Have you actually checked your privilege?

I'd check my privilege but President Trump already cashed it. /s

Please never use that condescending phrase again. As last nights election shows, a lot of people are tired of being condescended to.

My apologies, I had assumed that you were American.

Since this is a thread on an American presidential election, on the American political spectrum, Mrs. Clinton would be considered to be on the left or center-left.

You'd be surprised. The left is no more unified that the right, in many ways, and members of the mainstream left have been cautioning against this derisive labeling issue for quite some time now. See, for example, Rensin's "The smug style in American liberalism" linked to on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106004

Stop. The. Name. Calling. Stop it right now. Even if your demographic breakdown were correct[0], those are your fellow citizens your're referring to. That tone is why the left is in the state it is right now.

Trump is, perhaps, not going to help "those people" but neither, in their minds, was Clinton. They are simply going with the "perhaps" rather than (again, in their mind) certain no.

[0] For example, suburbanites support Trump in about equal numbers and about 1/3 of college graduates and postgraduates support Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

Not surprised; a day of reckoning was bound to come for the left. Consider that even if Trump had lost, his power base would still have existed afterward. Trump is not the problem, Trump is a symptom.

The American left took its eyes off of what's important, namely the working class, and instead spent its time and political capital on frivolous[0] causes. This is a wake-up call to refocus.

[0] Lots of things some might consider important are frivolous when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.

>when I was just starting at Google

If you're working / have worked at the Big 5, your experience is vastly different than the rest of the profession toiling away at CRUD apps and web sites 9 to 5. Lucky doesn't begin to describe it.

>It was fantastic marketing imho, seeing a row of those in the window of a coffee shop is a fairly strong signal.

Walking into a gathering with all those Apple logos lit while carrying a ThinkPad did make me feel like a bit of a rebel. Rather ironic.

>Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has 200 billion dollars laying around.

And? If any of the handful of people on the entire planet capable of building an ARM capable of rivaling Intel's current x86 designs were hired by Apple, it would be all over the tech industry news sites instantly. 200 billion doesn't mean a thing if it isn't applied properly.

Slack is a chat application, one of a vast multitude. There's not all that much secret sauce to give away.

>As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why. If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.

By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.

> spies on you

Enough with this rubbish claim, please. Everyone I've asked to actually substantiate it resorts to angry handwaving. How about you?

The telemetry collects crash and feature usage data, the same as macOS and all of the phone OSes does. You want that on because it tells MS where the bugs are. If you turn it off, you don't get to complain about bugs because MS has no idea you encountered any.

> Another is finding those developers roles that suit them better. Maybe that's some other aspect of the software pipeline like QA or testing ...

As a QA professional, I regret greatly that HN's rules restrain me from giving your post the appropriately pithy response it deserves.

QA is not your dumping ground for failed devs; we do not want them either. If they couldn't hack it as a SDE, they are certainly not going to be able to hack it as a SDET either.

>Seniors'/leads' skills diverge from engineering over time.

That's exactly the kind of "senior" person we _don't_ want.

>If you want to be a life sciences researcher then you need all the expensive equipment that only institutions can afford

Agreed. The same goes for most engineering fields too.

Software development is one of the few high-tech fields where one can reasonably attempt to get an education through online courses, but it's becoming so commoditized that the bottom is going to drop out and drop out hard, eventually.

Yep, have to agree with this. People who don't know big-O notation (and other CS fundamentals) are the ones gluing together libraries and code built by people who do. Now there's nothing wrong with that; there's enough work to be done for all of us. However, it's not something to crow about either.

>What's the running cost of a huge ups?

A UPS will require a battery replacement every 10 years or so, regardless of whether you ever have to go on battery power or not. The UPS should automatically sense the status of the battery and warn you when a replacement is needed.

Pick a model from one of the major manufacturers and look up the replacement battery costs to get an idea of what it will cost.

> yet they've seemed to given up on mobile

Though we'll never know for sure, there's some conjecture that that Intel's cancellation of the Broxton smartphone chip in May torpedoed MS's plans for an x86 Windows Phone this year.

5/3/2016 - "Late on Friday night, Intel snuck out the news that it’s bailing on the smartphone market. Despite being the world’s best known processor maker, Intel was only a bit player in the mobile space dominated by Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, and it finally chose to cut its losses and cancel its next planned chip, Broxton."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576216/intel-atom-smartph...

Well, I'm at work so I can't dig around my library but it was easy enough using date range restrictions to find an academic example in Google that dates back to '99: http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/105/LinkedListProblems.pdf . (It was actually the first hit.) Searching further backwards in time is left as an exercise to the reader.

Multi-level pointer dereferencing is a fundamental C / assembly language skill and Linus' example was just about the most basic example there is.

For heaven's sake, everyone, please stop getting hung up on the fact that there's no error checking. Example code usually doesn't show error checking because it obscures the main point of the example.

You have 20 years of experience on this kind of stuff and don't recognize the textbook example code for handling the head pointer case of a linked list? Well, okay...

(It's at least 23 years old because I learned from textbooks that have this example code way back then. It probably dates all the way back to K&R.)