jaabe

Oh, I think it’s unfair. I probably could have added a little context, but I was stating a fact, not my opinion on it.

The guy I mentioned is 30, and in 20 years when both apartments are paid out, he’ll be a multimillionaire (in Danish kroner), as well as having a passive monthly income that exceeds most lower class jobs. Just by having some starting capital from his rich parents.

I’m not particularly against having rich parents helping you, but because real estate taxes are so low and prices so high, it’s just extremely hard to catch up if you don’t, and I think that’s unhealthy for society in general.

I live in a 3 room 90m^2 apartment in central Aarhus in the middle of the university. It’s worth $350,000, but and you can rent out each room for $700-$800 a month, to an endless stream of students.

The guy who was elected head of our ownership organisation/community (might be a danish construct) bought two apartments when he moved in. He did have $150,000 to make both loans not-bank loans (again this might be a Danish thing, but we have special loan institutions that cover 70-80% of personal house loans at really low rates). Anyway, the one he rents out pays for both loans, taxes and added expenses and after 20 years those loans will both be paid out.

It’s really kind of silly how easy life can be if you start out with a little money and use them wisely.

We’ve seen a couple of examples with BI and analytics, I think you can put them into two categories. Prediction and automation.

Prediction simply isn’t good enough. It may work well for google and Facebook, but that’s because failure is relatively harmless in advertising. No one dies just because you see a commercial for something you just bought. The failure rate is simply too high for us in the public sector, maybe that’ll change, but probably not. I say that because we’re severely limiting the access to data these years over privacy concerns. You could probably do some interesting things with medical data, but to get there, you’ll need to look at medical data and that’s just not happening in the current political climate.

Then there is the automation. IBM wanted to sell us Watson analytics on the premise that it could recognise patterns and build the BI models our dedicated team does. So we let them try, and none of the models they came up with was even remotely useful. I can see this changing, but when? And what will our analytics department look like by then? It’s hard to say.

We knew upfront that ML was going to be a proof of concept and that the job was going to be done manually either way. We are many things in the public sector, but we’re not big risk takers, and this was a job that had to be done as fast as possible because the missing documents are required by law. So what we did was that we cloned the data, and let the business do it’s thing while we did ours.

This of course presented us with unique data on the results. The things we measured were quality, speed, economy and employee satisfaction.

Quality was measured by keeping track of casefiles, that were flagged as missing the document by each process. That gave us two lists, one with the casefiles found by the manual team and one found by the ML team. We then made a few random checks of casefiles that appeared on both lists, and we checked every casefile that was only on one list. The ML team flagged more casefiles correctly, it both found more and made fewer errors. Of course this doesn’t tell us how many casefiles we didn’t find, but it does show us that ML was better.

Speed was relatively simple, it was start to finish and ML was faster. We did rent a lot of iron in Azure to achieve this, we could have never done it without a major enterprise cloud agreement. We needed Microsoft to allocate the stuff we needed, it wasn’t even a simple task of using the automatic systems.

Economically it’s a bit of a touchy subject. I won’t go into details on that, but basically we know what work costs. Renting iron in Azure wasn’t expensive compared to having that many full time workers dedicated to the task.

Employee satisfaction is hard, but we don’t have people on staff who’s job it is to go through half a million casefiles and look at millions of documents. We had to pull people away from their regular jobs to do so, and even with 7000 people on staff, it’s really hard to find people who actually want to do this kind of work. HR did a bunch of HR magic, and basically people would prefer ML to do this sort of thing in the future.

I think ML has potential that Blockchain doesn’t, but not in all the areas that are being hyped.

I work in the public sector of Denmark, and we’re targeted by a lot of the hype. Which is worrisome, because it might actually lead to stupid projects if it becomes a political focus. So far it hasn’t though, and blockchain never did, so who knows.

The thing about ML is that all the BI is worse than what we are already doing. Because it’s hyped we’ve naturally done proofs of concepts, with universities and with big tech, and no one has been capable of providing ML based analytics or BI that is even remotely close to what we already do. Because the simple truth is that we have been working with data for four decades. We have full time analysts who do nothing else, and they are simply lightyears ahead of anything ML we’ve seen, and, they can actually explain their results to our politicians and decision makers.

Where ML does work, and the fact that it does separates it from blockchain, is for recognition. We have a lot of data, often in poor quality, and ML can troll through it faster and with higher quality than our human workers. We had to go through every casefile in a specific area, and identify which ones were missing a specific form. A casefile can be 500 A4 pages long, sometimes scanned in really terrible quality, and we had 500.000 of them. It took 12 people 6 months to do so, simultaneously we did a ML poc. It took 3 months to train the algorithm, but only one employee, and once it was done being trained, it took around five hours with a lot of Azure iron to troll through the data. ML had better results than our human effort and it was obviously way cheaper.

So ML and AI may be a lot of hype, but it’s also more than that.

I think social media does far better when it isn’t political media. One of the reasons HN and LinkedIn are the only two forms of social media I personally use today is exactly the fact that the absence of politics on both platforms make them tolerable.

The internet and politics in general seem to be a truly bad combination. I think it’s understandable too, because it’s just so much easier to say radical hurtful stuff when you don’t have to witness the devastating effect of your words in person. I mean, can you even imagine calling the parent, of a child who was mass-murdered, out to be an actor paid by George Soros face to face? You would have to be stone cold dead inside to do that, and I really doubt a lot of the alt-righters are that evil. On the internet though, it’s as easy as ordering a pizza.

I think platforms should be held accountable for the content they host, even if it’s produced by their users. I know that’s not a popular opinion on HN, but the fact is that Facebook has been used to organise genocide and that just shouldn’t happen.

Did it really die though? It seem to live on well enough in enterprise. Less popular now that Microservices are back in fashion, but still lurking around waiting for the pendulum to swing back in 2-8 years when we have had enough of microservices (again).

At least we improve on the paradigms on each iteration. Maybe one day one day both of them will be good enough to let us swing toward something new.

Are you saying that the Roman Empire, was at any point, lead by someone self-sacrificing and honest who was focusing on the greater good?

Because that’s really not what I took away from classical history.

I work in a Danish municipality with 7000 employees where we replace around 2000 people each year of which half are education-interns[0]. So I think it’s fair to say that we have a good deal of experience with hiring people. I’ve been involved with quite a few of these processes, and I’m truly fascinated by how many resources and how much effort Americans seem to put into hiring.

Our data shows that if you filter by education, then it’s actually relatively easy to hire someone who will perform well. If you get 100 applicants and pick the best 10 based on their A4 sized application letter, their education results and their CV, then you’ll typically end up with a pile of at least 10 people who are going to be good enough. Hell once you build that pile of 10 people, you don’t even have to read through the rest of the applications because it really won’t matter.

I say this fully aware that hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake any manager can make. It’s just that people aren’t really unicorns, and good enough is good enough.

Part of our success is how we onboard people. Because we do use resources on hiring people, we just save them for when people are actually hired. We try to make sure people get the best start they possibly can, because we have found that achieving great employee performance is our responsibility more so than the fresh hire.

As a result our interview consists of 30-45 minutes of small talk where we try to find the person with the best chemistry to fit in their coming team. Don’t get me wrong, once in a while we do get an interviewee who flunks completely, but it’s very rare.

We have tried a lot of the tricks by the way. We’ve done code reviews, we’ve done whiteboard algorithms, we’ve done live code and it really, really didn’t help us get better workers but it did waste a tremendous amount of our time.

Our process is a little different when we hire managers. They get to go through a more standard HR process with personality tests and such. I’m not personally sure it helps though, but I don’t have any data to back that last statement up.

0: I’m not sure what they are called in English, they work for half a year as part of their education.

Which society has collapsed because of this? I minored in history, and I can’t think of a single one.

Even modern America was largely born out of giants of industry serving their own self interest and fucking everyone else including the climate over.

Governments are build by people who serve a greater good, and they typically get replaced once they become too corrupt, but they become corrupt exactly because society as a whole is typically very self-serving.

I don’t agree. I work in the Danish public sector, which means we handle healthcare related software that could potentially lead to deaths.

Our managers aren’t technical wizards, and especially not in the field of healthcare. They are mostly doctors with a masters in management. Their job is to listen to what everyone has to say, and then make a decision based on that.

Our job is to make sure they don’t miss important points related to subjects they may not fully understand. Burying a “may cause significant damage” on a text-heavy slide like that is simply put poor communication.

It should’ve been the only words on a slide, it should have been in bold red, and, it should have said “if you ignore this, people may die”.

We have them in the supermarket where I shop, and I detest them.

If I want to use my own bags, I’ll need to have each signed in as legal extra weight by the clerk. If I want to buy alcohol, I need to be verified as over 18 by the clerk. They are situated lower, than the regular checkouts, so I have to bend my back a lot more to use them.

I know this makes me sound like an angry old man, but I’m not alone. Because I detest them I’ll happily queue up for the regular checkouts. I say queue, exactly because I’m not alone. I’ve stood in 10 minute queues for the regular checkouts while the self-checkout right next to me was empty for the entire time.

I don’t see myself ever using one again unless the supermarket starts paying me to do so, so I’m actually not too concerned they’ll take over too much work.

I’d be much more worried about the Amazon take on shopping. I mean, that’s automation that actually improves my experience as a customer, these self-checkouts are not.

Yes you are right, ours too are for protection, not fighting off an invasion. I should have made that more clear.

We still have them in Denmark too, I can see two from my apartment. For a long time, and possibly even today. You were required to build bunkers if you build an apartment building. Sometimes that was done by building the basement in such a way that it would hold storage units that could easily be converted into bunkers. Other times it meant building actual bunkers near the apartment complex.

A lot of the cold-war stuff was rather secret and simply build into the design of public buildings.

My school (from age 6-14, not sure what that’s called in English) had really wide hallways, wide doors, wide elevatory and a huge basement full of stuff that no one outside of the school administration really knew what was. Turns out my school had been designed and build to be converted into a hospital in the case of nuclear war.

Later when I attended the next step in my education, my gymnasium had a water leak. To everyone’s surprise the city closed the entire school for a week and brought in specialists to fix it even though it would typically be up to the local administration to do so. 25 years later we learned that the command center bunker for our region was located under the school.

My story might sound special, it’s not. Almost every public building from that period had a secondary cold-war purpose, but the extend of it has only recently been revealed. It really impresses me, just how prepared our society was, and that my generation never really noticed. Maybe our parents did but mine have never shared much about their cold-war experiences.

Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work. Recently when Russia opened their soviet archives, it was revealed that they knew every location of every command centre bunker we had, or at least admitted to having.

I work in the European public sector, I can name you a few reasons to pick Azure over AWS. None of them are technical though, so you certainly have a point.

Microsoft is just better at selling the whole package to enterprise where your primary function isn’t tech.

They were first to incorporate EU legislation, and are frankly still the only of the three big cloud suppliers that can show us exactly where our data has been or passed through at any time.

Their support is also excellent. We pay Microsoft a lot of money, much more than the cost of Azure because of licensing, but with it comes support. If something breaks down, I can call Seattle directly after which we will receive hourly updates by phone until the matter is resolved.

With google you get to fill a form or chat with a bot. AWS is better, but again mostly to their big customers, and since we aren’t buying office 365 or licenses from them, we’re just not big enough to qualify for the support we need.

I think the hype is really, really dangerous. I work as an external examiner for CS students at an academy and bachelor level. 10 years ago, maybe 20 students would finish from a single school, in 2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands. If I look at my average grading over the years, there is a clear trend too. People are either really good or really bad, where 10 years ago it was far more spread out, and a lot more people were “average”. It’s anecdotal but I think it’s because hype has pushed too many people into CS.

There will always be a need for excellent CS students, preferable with candidate or masters, just like there will always be a need for excellent biologists or great escimologists. I don’t think there will always be a need for below average CS students, especially not at the rate of which we’re producing them right now, again thanks to the hype.

One of the reasons I say this is because of automation. If you look at operations, the cloud has really killed a lot of jobs in enterprise IT departments, because it’s so much easier to operate your stuff in AWS or Azure than when you had to have your own infrastructure. Sure there are still operations people around, but notice how they are the best operations guys not the averages, because the people who were average 10 years ago are unemployed today.

It’ll be the same for development. We already see bits of it, at least if you’ve been around for a while. 19 years ago we build our first web based enterprise tool to handle employee vacation, sick leave and tax-refund on corporate related driving. It was a massive JSP undertaking that took 20 guys and 6 months. In 2017 it was replaced by a modern web tool build in .NET framework web-app and Angular, it took an intern three weeks to do it.

If you look at what areas are becoming useful, it’s not really CS. Sure you’ll be able to use some CS students for ML, but you’d rather have a mathematician or a statistician who can code. Sure you can use some CS students for robotics, but you’d rather have an electrical engineer.

I’m Danish, our jobmarket is different, but we too hype STEM and especially CS, but the truth is, that what we’re really going to need is electricians, pumblers and other craftsme because every young person wants to learn to code.

I miss IRC, for a lot of the same reasons the author misses Facebook. Being above 35 like the author, I think it’s more the fact that people just aren’t chatty anymore. It’s anecdotal of course, but if I look at myself, I’m really not that chatty anymore either. I too used to have late night chats about random stupid things, but right now, I can even remember when I last saw 3AM unless it was to feed a baby or clean up after a sick child.

So when I say I miss IRC, it’s probably more true to say that I miss the freedom that comes with having almost no responsibilities. Maybe I should work on making more of my time, mine though.

It’s probably because I know very little about how Hollywood works, and I’m definitely coloured by how much of HR departments we seem to be able to automate and digitise these years. But why do writers need agents? Why does anyone really need an agent in 2019?

I mean, I understand the value of lobbying and networking, I use it quite a bit in my own life, but is it really so hard for writers to connect to employers, that they need to pay someone to do it?

I minored in history, reminding myself how things always go in the grand scheme of things, has been a tremendously efficient way of keeping myself optimistic about our future. At least in terms of our civilisation, because the climate is fucked.

Anyway. If you look at the big picture of human civilisation, then it’s really been one long line of progress. Some times there are set-backs, and sometimes those set-backs last four a century, but over all, it’s an endless line of progression toward a better world.

Yes there is famine, but poverty is decreasing. Yes there is murder and terrorism, but we’ve never been less violent. Yes there are fake news, but we’ve never been more educated. Yes there is totalitarianism, but we’ve never been more democratic or free.

Another thing I do that helps a lot, is that I select my sources of news carefully. I don’t really care what happened today if it isn’t important enough to remember tomorrow. I do like to keep up with current events though. As a solution to this predicament I found a high quality news paper that only comes out once a week. I buy it as paper and I digest the weeks events over the weekend. Other than that I stay away from news unless something drastic happens. I also avoid social media (with HN and LinkedIn being the only exception).

The last thing I’d suggest is finding a hobby, and spending time on that instead of worrying. The less useful it is the better, because if your hobbies are about self-improvement, then you’ll end up getting stressed about them.

I work for a Danish municipality, we’ve bought a few SaaS products in recent years. The fastest implement was two days, and we had a working product before we were even done with the contract. We bought it from a local software house, that knows how political organisations operate, they host in AWS, but they could have hosted it in Azure for all we care. (We would prefer Azure because they are better in Europe, but AWS is fine).

So government operations and contracts can work fast. Until you meet a certain amount of cost that is. We have laws that govern how we buy software, and once they kick in, the process is long, tiresome and really, really, ineffective.

Because often the company who wins a bidding war, underbids, and end up delivering a lot less than promised unless you pay ridiculous extra money, and nothing in those laws protect us from this, not really.

The big issue is that government isn’t similar, so you have to govern in for the lowest common denominator. My ciry has technical competences on staff, this allows us to actually utilise SaaS products that require integration into our business processes and 300 existing systems. Our neighbouring municipality doesn’t, and as a result, they don’t even really know what the word SaaS means. The government has to write laws that work for both of us.

I think the real issue is lack of technical competences in the public sector, and the reason is really beyond me. Sure I have a vested interest, but I think I can defend it by my ability to write software in a few weeks that would cost us half a million on the private market. That’s not the primary importance of technical staff though, I don’t think we should build all those 300 systems ourselves, but we need to know how to cooperate with the private sector, and we need to build an enterprise architecture to support that, and to do that, we need technical staff.

The fact that this isn’t obvious in the political command structure in 2019 is just silly. Especially in Denmark where we’re competing with Estonia for having the most digitised public sector in the world. But to add some numbers to it, we have 7000 employees, they use a digital device or a computer for an average of 5 hours a day. We have 245 physical locations with network (schools, libraries, child care institutions and so on). We have more than 300 different systems, some major some minor. We’re expected to operate this with 5 people in operations, two people in development and architecture and 3 people in support.

I think I know why though. We don’t have a single elected official in my entire country who knows how to program.

I subscribe to a paper that comes out each Friday, called weekendavisen. Until May last year it didn’t have news on the web, they do have an electronic paper now but I’ve never visited.

It’s high quality news in lengthy articles, in fact I’m not even in its demographic because it has a lot of culture stuff as well and I don’t really care about that.

I really like the fact that it’s relevant though. Because it only comes out on Fridays, only the stuff that actually mattered during the week makes it in there.

If something big happens I’ll turn to internet public service, but otherwise I mostly ignore news outside of my weekly paper. I highly recommend it if you want to stay informed but cut the bullshit and have a similar option.

The thing with web-development is that you don’t actually have to follow the trends to be productive.

A few years ago I read an article on LinkedIn, about how a local development company he helped our neighbouring municipality switch from ASP Web-Forms to the first version of AngularJS and Web-API because it was a more modern tech that would make them future proof, especially in regards of hiring.

I laughed at it at the time, and sure enough, they’re in trouble now because AngularJS didn’t actually stick around for long enough for anyone to really learn it. Where as the newest versions of ASP .Net Core are actually being build in a format that is extremely similar to ASP web-forms.

I’d like to say that I don’t think you should actually use ASP web-forms if you can avoid it, because it is dated, but it still runs half the internet in my region of the world and it’ll probably continue to outlive a lot of trendy techs for the foreseeable future.

Our goal is that if something changes radically every few years, then it’s not really worth adopting to our generalist stack, because we can’t afford to waste resources re-learning React or Angular or X every two years.

I think it’s more interesting that if I load up a job-index site or search for techs on linked in, you get a significantly different picture of what is actually “wanted”.

Maybe that’s from being Scandinavian but 90% of our jobmarket is still .Net framework (not core), JAVA and PHP.

I think Python is trending up because it’s a general purpose language that’s easy to learn.

Django basically does what Ruby on Rails does, not exactly but close enough. Flask does what Node.JS does, to the extend that we’re talking about building quick prototypes, not running Netflix. So you have most of your web-based needs covered. Python also does data though, and is to ML and BI what NPM is to web-development, and lastly Python does systems scripting. Basically Python does most things, well enough. By comparison, ifyou’re a .NET house like we have been, you’ll use C#, Microsoft SSIS/SSRS, Powershell and probably Python to do what you could do with all Python.

So I think that’s a big part of it. The other big factor is that Python has replaced JAVA in most of Academia. JAVA was great and all, but being something a very high percentages of CS majors learned surely helped it.

The city isn’t responsible for what gets thrown on its streets, we still sweep them.

I think the time for platforms and major tech companies to dodge their responsibility has passed. At least in large parts of the western world and I personally welcome it. I’m European though, we (at least some of us) tend to like regulating companies.

I’ve been involved with hiring and I do part time work as an examiner for CS students, both those who go straight through their education, but also on diploma degrees where people upskill after having worked for a while. Kind of like a masters but at bachelor level.

I’ve seen one or two rockstar developers in my time, but even they, would have had trouble keeping up with the silver foxes I know.

I think young programmers have an easier time picking up X framework because they have more time. That’s not really as valuable as knowing computation though, and I frankly think a lot of the YouTube and MOOCs you praise are to blame for the general lack of CS knowledge among a lot of young programmers. Some of them (the college ones) are great introductionary courses, but the majority of MOOCs are amateurs teaching amateurs.

Maybe that works in software because software is in high demand. I mean, I build a RPA process in a few days by google programming. It certainly works, sure, but I also know that it could have been build a lot smarter and more efficient by someone who knew how. That’s the thing with software though, you can get by if you deliver something that works okish. At least until you have to work in a field like medical software, where you code is quite literally never allowed to fail. Because someone will die if it does. At that point you’ll want the 25 years of experience, every time, and if that’s true for medical software, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true everywhere.

That is exactly how I would define the reverse.

I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal.

Personally I’m a little worried about ageism, something that doesn’t even enter the mind space of any of my friends with degrees in the humanities.

So maybe there is something to it. I mean, they had much harder times finding jobs than me, and aren’t rigoursly headhunted, but every one of them found jobs.

I actually think it’s the opposite. On traditional social media a mediocre post will still get a few likes. On 4chan a new thread needs to achieve quick popularity or it’ll get deleted within 5 minutes.

I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.

Inheritance isn’t an anti-pattern in academia. I do part time work as an examiners for CS students, and I see their car/animal examples everywhere in introductionary courses.

When we have interns, they’ll sometimes build things with inheritance. So it’s certainly still a thing.

I’ve yet to see a real world use of it, where you wouldn’t have been better of not using it though. My real world is the relatively boring world of enterprise public sector software, however, and maybe I’m simply oblivious to where inheritance might be worthwhile.