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>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough
by marcoperaza 10y ago
>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
- thesmallestcat 10y agoTIL that the React ecosystem is a conspiracy against the poor.
- marcoperaza 10y agoIt's interesting really. Systems that give you more flexibility and power might make good engineers more productive, while making many more mediocre engineers less productive. Of course, the former largely drive these innovations. I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.
- vertex-four 10y agoYou realise that something can have bad outcomes for a given group without anyone intentionally seeking those outcomes, yes?
- thesmallestcat 10y agoYes, it was a joke.
- joe_the_user 10y ago"I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get." Maybe but it doesn't matter that much. If some breakthrough in education made it easy for 60% of the population to become good quality coders, it would lower the wages of existing programmers, somewhat increase the pool of working programmers but not give that 60% good jobs. The type of coding done at Uber, for example, is specifically valuable because it replaces the lower paid labor of other people. We can't all have jobs automating each other out of jobs, now can we?
- euyyn 10y agoI work on developer tools, with the explicit long-term goal to automate developers out of their job, and we need all hands we can get :)
- joe_the_user 10y ago1) Developer tools don't really eliminate jobs, not any time soon, not in way a robot can entirely eliminate a line welder position or a self-driving car could eliminate a taxi driver position. 2) Sure, you need all the hands you can get in the current market. Still, you wouldn't hire a ten thousand new developers tomorrow even if ten thousand people as competent as your most competent lead developers showed up on your doorstep tomorrow.
- euyyn 10y agoThe current market is precisely that there's so much low-hanging fruit in automating a developer job that we aren't going to entirely eliminate developer jobs any time soon; and hence why any new pair of hands helps. The tech companies in SV told the Obama administration that if they gave a million more H1Bs to engineers, they'd hire them all. And plenty of them put resources on improving developer tools.
- bluedino 10y ago>> you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Wouldn't a greater number of coders with lower abilities not work very well? Today's 10x programmers would become 20x or 50x