throwawayjava

Actual past experience with specific, widespread, and demonstrably harmful discriminatory practices.

Widespread discrimination in housing during the 20th century -- and the negative effects that had on certain communities -- resulted in laws prohibiting discrimination in housing ads.

Widespread discrimination in employment during the 20th century -- and the negative effects that had on certain communities -- resulted in laws prohibiting discrimination in employment ads.

BTW, these categories also make sense. Housing (i.e., schooling) and employment have a huge impact on your life outcomes in the USA. Choice of hair product, not so much.

You won't get a sympathetic jury. People don't have a lot of empathy for algorithms. Maybe empathy for the people who write them, and then only maybe. But you'll be up against a huge slate of expert witnesses explaining how we already have lots of open sourced methods for teasing out these sorts of indirect indicators.

But "the algorithm was sexist, not me" is probably going to be a losing argument in any court case.

[1] Well, not entirely, but that's another can of worms.

Then I started tutoring and teaching. That's when I realized that I'm an extreme outlier. Most people are not particularly motivated and won't put in the hours upon hours of struggle.

The average experience of learning CS in university is just completely alien if you teach yourself how to program as a child. The biggest differences is the emotional labor. There are lots of things that my students would describe as "frustrating" that I have literally never thought of as frustrating (e.g., reading compiler errors). I think it's similar to learning a new language as an adult vs. as a small child.

Programming salaries are now very bimodal.

Also, NeurIPS reviewing has gone to absolute hell. I mean, peer review everywhere has problems. But I've never seen something quite this bad. At this point I think it's safe to say that most reviewers wouldn't even make it to an on-site interview for a faculty position at a research university. That's definitely nowhere near normal. You can't really blame anyone, I guess; the community is growing way too quickly for any real quality control.

Frankly, I think those conferences have outlived their usefulness as anything except marquee marketing events. I'm now mostly attending smaller and more specialized conferences.

But lots of people do need programmers.

These "is college necessary" posts suffer the same problem as "why are programmers making 200K right out of school" posts. The job title covers everything from hacking out WordPress plugins, to leading a team building an MVP, to building large distributes systems, to designing the software that goes into medical devices and autonomous vehicles.

Some programmers really do need a CS degree with at least a few years of math and a couple years of physics. Sometimes programmers need to know a minimal amount of PHP and JavaScript. The job title captures a huge range of actual jobs.

My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free... CMU's sophomore systems course is a lot more rigorus, let alone their OS course.

And that's in systems courses where the variance is actually a lot smaller than in other subfields. There was simply no course in my undergraduate institutions curriculum where you could learn what a Turing machine or even DFA was! We never saw real asymptotic complexity analysis (our algorithms course spent most of the semester reviewing basic data structures as interview prep). Obviously no AI or ML course. Even where there was coverage the material covered was so different. For example, the PL course was all about using a functional PL and didn't include any of the type theory, logic programming, language implementation work, etc. It was a watered down version of SICP, which is an intro course.

If you think the difference in quality between UNC and CMU is large, consider the massive difference between branch campuses and top-ranked public research universities. For all practical purposes, "CS" means something very different at regional branch campuses than at top tier research universities like UNC and CMU.

(Also, don't read anything into my user name. I just happened to make my first comment about something related to java and then never logged out.)

No. Not even close. Unless you're taking about flagships like uiuc and Berkeley (which are not local for 99%).

This may be true in the humanities but is nowhere near true in the mathematical sciences.

My final year analysis course at college only covered a fraction of the content in the FIRST year advanced math sequence at Harvard.

As someone who went to one of those truly local state schools then taught at a #1 CS school: the quality difference in CS educations is absolutely insane. See also the "Java Schools" rant.

ML isn't much higher paid than standard engineering, but new PhDs from top schools who would've been competitive faculty applicants tend to get jobs at top paying firms and enter toward the top of the non-executive ranks.

The only articles I've read claiming there isn't one have all been click bait pieces written by journos, not scientists or educators, and contain no data. Just wild ass speculation about the underlying causes of the pipeline problem.

Which, yeah. The pipeline problem has lots of causes. But saying "we don't have a pipeline problem because there are reasons women don't major in CS" makes no sebse. It's like saying the roof doesn't have a leaking problem because the real problem is that the gutters are clogged. I mean, sure, that's true, and we need to fix that to fix the roof. But the roof is still leaking...

The only real argument I've heard that isn't prime facie flawed in this way is the argument that you don't really need college educated computer scientists to fill your SWE roles. That may be true for some roles and some companies, but lots of positions (e.g. all the ones I hire for) do require a strong education in CS and math. PhDs in STEM fields that go on to good boot camps or masters programs in CS can be good fits, but those are even more rare.

And, again, even that argument has no data to back it in the articles I've read. It's just not prime facia illogical.

WeWork?

The problem with focusing on any particular role is that the other parts of the system will step in to force punishment.

Parties are still highly effective at consolidating power in countries with many parties.

> your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.

Yes, but the next step in your logical deduction is flawed because union membership does not necessarily dilute the power of your vote to signal other preferences (at least in countries with secret ballots and no proxy voting).

You're comparing these two things as if there's some sort of trade-off or mutual exclusivity. There isn't, especially in countries where politics is dominated by two parties such as the USA.

Here's how those mechanics tend to play out in the USA. A union voter leverages their union membership to make kings in the primaries. Then, after winnowing the field to a list of candidates who exclusively support their union's major priorities, union members are free to use their vote to exercise preference on other issues. That's not hypothetical -- it's exactly what happens in most US states with strong public sector LEO unions.

> But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power

But this is obviously false when broadened to include all associations.

Politics in literally every modern democracy is dominated by associations called political parties. That's not an accident, and it's not like that status quo happened without opposition. A lot of politicians in the history of democracy have attempted to limit the role of associations in democratic processes, and they mostly failed.

I don't really understand the argument you're making. Maybe your logical deductions are bulletproof, but in that case, there must be something wrong with your premises. Because hundreds of years of extraordinarily compelling empirical evidence contradict your final conclusion.

Large associations of voters really do have more power than the sum of their votes. Maybe not "theoretically", but certainly "actually" and "empirically".

But, basically, the question we should ask:

"is there a direct connection between Heidegger's philosophical prescriptions and his fascism?"

If so, that suggests a pretty serious problem with his prescriptions -- that, in certain milieu -- his ideas comfortably co-exist with or perhaps even feed/justify a fascist mindset.

IMO that line was always kind of obvious, but in any case, Heidegger drew it directly for us in his Black Notebooks.

Especially in Heidegger's case -- because of the very broad nature of the prescriptions that follow from his work -- I think that's quite different from mere "guilt by association".

...except when you can both be a member of a union and also exercise your vote.

I wasn't aware that in the USA joining a public sector union meant giving up your right to vote ;-)

I'm not sure how/why you figure that, or how it's at all relevant.

I'm not sure how/why you figure that because "over capacity" != "will build new prisons / hire new guards". I.e., it's not at all impossible for there to be prisons that are over-capacity and also a decline in the number of prison guard jobs.

It's not relevant because the entire point of unions is to counter-act the effect of supply/demand dynamics on labor (see: "there's always another scab"). Just because there's "no shortage of work for the prison guards" doesn't mean they will lobby against changes to laws that might one day create such a shortage.

The problem is pro-punishment politicians. Singling out any particular office/position misses the point.

Even when judges practice discretion, pro-punishment legislators step in and introduce mandatory minimums.

And even when prosecutors practice discretion, pro-punishment judges will step in and force them to prosecute cases that the prosecutors don't want to prosecute [1].

[1] See Suffolk County for a recent example

Good for those kids.

FWIW it's still fair to say these aren't normal. Plenty of students from top schools don't get offers from the top cos.

300k for a new grad is not something I've heard of, that's a tad high even for phds. For an undergrad, that would be something approaching an acquihire. That person is being hired for a specific and rare skill, not as a back bencher. A lot to live up to.

Even 200k is very high for new grads. Think "strong student at MIT/Stanford/CMU with proven track record of performing very well during internships, maybe some research publications, and multiple internal stakeholders vouching for them". In other words, perceived as "potential deadly weapon to a competitor and/or a possible founder", not "model employee". That is why they're being paid well.

Below 200, keep in mind that 150% of 80 is 120. SF sucks. NYC isn't much better.

Teachers are underpaid. Not sure how that's relevant to whether some other group of people is overpaid. It's not zero sum.

As for researchers, in CS they do well for themselves. Don't worry.

I think you are conflating what is possible with what is normal, and in the process under-estimate the amount of time and effort some people choose to invest into themselves during their 4 years of access to the best and brightest minds in their field. Speaking of, MIT gets disturbingly close to 6 figures all in these days...

Stock and signing/perf bonus accounts for anything over 130 or so for a new grad.