seahawks78

what happens to labor markets in places like India if robots are able to accomplish that would have ordinarily required 5 manual labors at a fraction of the cost say (1/100th)?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.

Great article by PG! Too bad he did not specify the play book, i.e. to enter the public market at highly unrealistic inflated valuations so that VCs and founders can make bank while the general public become bag holders for next 5-10 years. I got mine, up yours!

Cant upvote this comment enough. This comment should be at the top of this thread!

I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day. At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech, dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked.

Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.

> Personally, I’d rather protect the employees at the risk of the shareholders.

Sorry, but thats not how capitalism operates. Modern corporations are created for the benefit of share holders and they operate for only one reason and one reason only i.e. "to maximize" shareholder value [1].

Honestly, you seem to be living in some alternative "la la la la" land where you perceive reality in a very different way or at least want reality to be what you want it to be than what currently it is. I am not quite sure how to argue with people who hold beliefs similar to yours. Please note, we are not arguing here as to what is fair or not (read my response carefully) as per some definition of fairness.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

> As a side question, is your objective to ‘win’ the argument, or be correct? To me, it sounds like the former.

My objective here is to get to the truth - nothing more and nothing less. Unions can be "every bit harmful" since they are a power structure and power corrupts. Unrestrained, unfettered, corrupt unions can do more harm than good. They are not a cure all remedy for all problems a modern "evil" corporation might have [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBudiVNsW2E

So you have basically decided not to answer the relevant question but to parrot an idiotic left wing garbage narrative.

Okay! in that case, I rest my case that unions can actually be very harmful due to it being a power structure and particularly if they are not subjected to any check and balances.

No I am asking for a situation when the unions have an agenda of extracting maximum benefits out of the company while actively encouraging its members to put in the absolute bare minimum of effort. This will in a few years time will make the company's products prohibitevly expensive due to the associated cost inflation. As a result of which the company's products are no longer competitive in the free market unless heavily subsidized by tax payer dollars (think UAW and its role in gutting American car mannufacturing. These days except for states in rural US, cars made by American car companies: GM, Ford, Chrysler are mostly considered as jokes all over the world).

I mean the very simple question is: who pays? What protects the shareholders, management and the employees?

This is all good in theory so here is my question: since unions are essentially a power structure at its core what happens when they try to abuse their positions? What is the check/balance or counter to that?

Why do so few CS majors end up being professional Software Engineers even including the ones that graduate from top schools like MIT/Stanford/Harvard etc.? Even bigger question - among the few CS majors who do end up being Software Engineers why do so few of them remain Software Engineers 10+ year into their careers? Both of these two observations are based on my own anecdotal experiences but have nevertheless puzzled me for long.

RIP Bob Lee! I was highly inpired by some of your Java talks in Youtube and other places. Aside from that alas! what have things come down to in San Francisco? It has become an utter lawless city.

In the article that has been cited in the link the abstract says "Science says". I wonder if the writer even knows what Science is or means? No wonder our mass media today and public discourses are filled with utter quality garbage rhetoric and discussions that are not even worthy of two minutes of reading time.

No, that is what I am talking about. As one of the points below have mentioned more succintly- utility of a degree in terms of monetary renumaration is already determined by free market forces. For degrees that are determined as less useful, I find that there is no reason whatsoever to burden the tax payer with a bill so that "so and so" can satisfy his/her intellectual curiosity.

For degrees that are determined as less useful from a market perspective still one could make a case that there is a need to provide funding at graduate i.e. at the PhD level. I would give you that since most PhD students do go on to make significant contributions to scholarly literature therby vastly increasing human understanding and frontiers of knowledge.

But clearly this is not the case at undergraduate level. Sorry but the argument that tax payers should foot a bill just so that someone can satisfy his/her intellectual curiosity does not sound convincing at all.

Colleges and universities as institutions were never meant for commoners. Most people forget that barely a few centuries colleges and universities were places that primarily catered to two distinct classes of people: first, sons/daughters of rich aristocracies who had plenty of time in their leisure to pursue intellectual ideas; and second, were the clergy where it was considered a pre-requisite for the job.

Colleges and universities were never meant to be a way to riches and fortunes. If interested a degree is worth pursuing just for knowledge's sake regardless of the material benefits it may bestow upon the owner at some later point in their life. Hence I find the "college is so expensive" argument to be quite disingenious honestly. What exactly were you expecting may I ask?

Also, for people who want to learn something as a way to earn a living - may I humbly suggest vocational training instead?

I hope metaverse does not go the same way as Libra/Novi. If that happens somehow I think Meta will face an existential threat. I think Zuck understands this.

What happened to the Libra project? Anyone has any idea?

> "This is just one of the ways an unprincipled "builder culture" can backfire, particularly if you have people running the show who have no problem putting their own gains ahead of the company. They'll push all kinds of garbage if it makes them hit their goals and get a bigger bonus, a promotion, or some kind of shiny new position."

In lots of places I have worked there is a particular term that is often used to precisely describe this situation, it is called POA aka "Promotion Oriented Architecture". In POA, you deliberately add a lot of accidental complexity to come up with a fiendishly complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. In short, the complexity stems from the solution space rather than the problem space.

This is mostly accurate and true. A PhD degree is basically "knowing absolutely everything about practically nothing".

Don't do a PhD in either US/Canada unless you were in top 1% of the class and practically slept through all advanced Math courses (e.g. Convex Optimization, Linear Programming, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker etc.) and still ended up with an A. Asking someone to do a PhD just because they are bored/not challenged enough in their work is an incredibly bad piece of advice!!! Stay away! Academia in US/Canada is mostly a lost cause today (apart from a few bright spots which are doing cutting edge AI/ML/DL or Nano Tech research). Academia in US/Canada is as much corrupt today as Catholic Church was in the middle ages!

For me personally, I am still mystified by how subjective interviews like System Design/Behavioral are graded. E.g. if asked to design a large scale distributed system like Uber what would be the pass/fail criteria when calibration of responses is done w.r.t. YOE (5/10/15)? What would indicate that such and such is a good response for someone at Principal level but not so for someone who is at Senior level or vice versa.

"Instead, I'm on a team that has and horrendous turnover and is staffed with below-average IQ people." "This company builds EVERYTHING in house, and the toolset is like going backwards in my career 10 years."

I am guessing this is either Amazon or Google. I would think that this is most likely Amazon ("horrendous turnover": 50% of people who join Amazon leave within the first 2 years). In LinkedIn you will routinely find people from Amazon showing their badges stating that they completed X+ number of years. Have you seen people from other places routinely doing this? That itself is a dead giveaway to the critical eye.

Btw, your IQ comparison is extremely derogatory. So please edit that out.

> I wish we as a culture/society, acknowledged the luck and timing factor more as a factor in career development.

I would argue that this would be too cruel for the "unwashed masses" to digest/fathom. The myth of meritocratic rise in a capitalistic system rests on the fundamental premise that luck plays little to no role in one's success. That is why you often hear bunkum like "the harder I work luckier I become" and others in desperate attempts to trivialize externalities. The very fact you you won/or didn't win the genetic lottery (born to rich/high IQ/hard working parents) could be a big strike in favor/against you. Furthermore, there is also ample anecdotal/research evidence to show that people who think that they are self made or downplay the role of luck in their success also tend to be more selfish and more uncaring for the less fortunate. I don't exactly recall who said this (most likely a leader from some socialist country a while back) that: since majority of life's success (wealth/riches) is mostly due to luck it can't be morally wrong/unjustifiable to take some of that away through high taxation.

No I didn't mean blanket 5k to everyone. It could very well be dependent on the place you live. 1k - 5k might be an acceptable range. If you live in NYC you get more, rural Alabama may be not so much. But you get the idea.

Assuming that not everyone can be successful in life (in spite of having boatloads of IQ + work ethic) UBI might be one of the few ways left to reduce generational in-equality. Don't get me wrong - I am no fan of socialism/communism and I understand the problems that come with a collectivist mindset. But I am also practical. I certainly don't want to live in a dystopia where a select few "masters of the universe" type rule over vast swathe of humanity.

I don't think it is especially if you are living in one of metro regions/tech hubs i.e. SF Bay area, Seattle, NYC etc.

We need universal basic income (UBI)! Period. I believe that in a country like US every working adult (18 - 64) should get a minimum of 5k a month for paying basic expenses. Furthermore, Payflow should be integrated with the government UBI program so that anyone can withdraw money against it similar to what is being done now. This will go a long way in solving the Payday problems/worker exploitation issues as mentioned above.

Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x notch harder than interviews at FB, MSFT, AMZN and other tier-1 places for comparable level.

Hopefully, there will be a day/release in the Java world when we will be able to write 10x - 20x shorter programs (in terms of LOC) with most mundane stuffs disappearing under the hood. Sighs!!

It will be interesting to see the reaction of project managers some of whom still measure productivity in terms of lines of code/# of commits! (yeah, they do and still exist).

I am curious where does it leave libraries like Lombok that basically ports a non-record type Java class to make it more record type-e by adding things like @Value, @Data annotations. Are those libraries/frameworks going to become obsolete now?

And they call themselves "Robinhood"! Nauseating.