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How Can You Make the Prescription "Become a Coder" When Anti-Meritocrats Say "Knowledge is Racist"?
self | 04-30-01 | CharlesOconnell

Posted on 04/30/2021 8:48:12 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell

There are 30 million coders in China and India. They make about 1/6th as much as college-graduate/student-debt applicants are "supposed" to make in the U.S.

The old shibboleth "but they're not as creative as we are in the U.S." has been under relentless assault for many, many generations of dumbed-down socialist schooling (since 1880, when universal mandatory schooling was established on the Prussian model, dumb-down is built into the foundation).

So, now, it's no longer true that Americans have nothing to fear from their foreign competition.

The typical life-path was shown to me by a guy I met at a yearly philanthropic project, but who during his day job, was working at McDonald's. He had been a coder at both Apple and Intel, okay while he was able to work 80 hours a week, eating pizza overnight at his desk.

But as soon as his kids were old enough to need him to take them to soccer, and stay to watch the games, the big shops dumped him because he wasn't available for the OT rush.

He tried the wasteland of being a technical instructor in High Schools. But they want calculated, programmed failure, mandated from "educationalist" universities where the theorists never bother with actual students.

So I met him working at a volunteer, 4th of July fireworks stand. (We sent medical relief to the Philippines, where there is no govt. healthcare, where people who get illnesses we just go to the E.R. for, die there.)

He was a tragic figure, the disposable coder.

He is white, so I guess it serves him right for being a racist.


TOPICS: Education; Government; History
KEYWORDS: coder; racist

1 posted on 04/30/2021 8:48:12 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
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To: CharlesOConnell

They want people to be ‘acting white’? ... and be all learnin’ ‘n shee-it?


2 posted on 04/30/2021 8:51:40 AM PDT by Mr. K (No consequence of repealing obamacare is worse than obamacare itself)
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To: CharlesOConnell
What's it all about...?
3 posted on 04/30/2021 8:55:29 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
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To: CharlesOConnell

Having been an engineering manager, I laughed when I first heard Hillary say, “Learn to code.” She was talking to a group of blue collar workers. It took me a while to overcome a prejudice I had, that if anyone tried hard enough, they could do anything. I learned that if you didn’t have the requisite intelligence, it didn’t matter how hard you tried. Coding was one of the most difficult jobs I had to hire for. I was in charge of the test group in a major international defense company. We had to design and build test stations. The company wanted me to hire exclusively black engineers. Because our contracts with the government gave extra bonus money if we had “highly compensated” minority employees and I had the only open requisitions, which were for test, I was supposed to hire only blacks. I pointed out I had every other minority. The HR manager sighed and looked at me like I was an idiot. They don’t count, he said. Only blacks count. There are black engineers that are high enough caliber to do the job, but they command such a premium I couldn’t hire them due to budget. (Also, they tend to jump ship within months as the demand is that high for melanin enhanced skin.) HR ended up making my final pick, a just graduated black engineer. Because he couldn’t carry the load, the other engineers ended up doing the work and they were earning less than he was so they ended up quitting and going elsewhere. But the point is, coding is one of the hardest jobs and requires a kind of mindset and intelligence that is well above average.


4 posted on 04/30/2021 9:04:13 AM PDT by Gen.Blather (Wait! I said that out loud? )
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To: CharlesOConnell
Two things:


1 -- I'm hardly the only software engineer who worked his way up the ranks from a junior programmer (making the equivalent of $55K to $60K in today's money) to a software engineer (making $110K, all of that is in low-cost-of-living Alabama) with only a BS in computer science. The 50-60 hours per week lasts only a few weeks each year, with the exception of last year (the china virus put a yuuuge demand on software changes). So I call BS on the programmer-working-at-mcdonald's-cuz-the-overtime-was-killing-me thing he told you.


2 -- If China had so much creative talent why do they steal 1/4 to 1/2 treelyun dollars in IP (Intellectual Property) every year even though China literally has 5 times as many brains as the U.S.? LOL

5 posted on 04/30/2021 9:09:49 AM PDT by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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To: Gen.Blather

Very interesting frontline report. Thanx for posting.


6 posted on 04/30/2021 9:10:06 AM PDT by Pearls Before Swine
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To: CharlesOConnell

When such statements are made, ridicule the speaker mercilessly. Include howls of laughter.


7 posted on 04/30/2021 9:16:28 AM PDT by bk1000 (Banned from Breitbart)
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To: Tell It Right

If China had so much creative talent why do they steal 1/4 to 1/2 treelyun dollars in IP (Intellectual Property) every year even though China literally has 5 times as many brains as the U.S.? LOL


I am not an engineer of any kind, but no doubt they steal because they see no need to reinvent the wheel. But with 5 times as many brains, and those brains being pretty decent ones by all reports and those brains being well educated, I respectfully think we underestimate the Chinese at our peril.

We kind of did the same thing with the Japanese in the 30s. ‘Monkey see, monkey do’ was how we looked at their technical accomplishments, until Japanese tech surprised us.


8 posted on 04/30/2021 9:25:38 AM PDT by hanamizu
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To: CharlesOConnell

Coding has been a vocation for 20+ years. Easily outsourced. To some degree that is true of specifications.

Knowing how to link the why and what of IT is where the profession lies. That and high quality project management (and NOT than crap they sling in PMP certifications).


9 posted on 04/30/2021 9:26:59 AM PDT by freedumb2003 (No matter what, resist and stop the agenda of blow bidet and hairass the whore)
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To: Tell It Right

>>If China had so much creative talent why do they steal 1/4 to 1/2 treelyun dollars in IP (Intellectual Property) every year even though China literally has 5 times as many brains as the U.S.? LOL<<

Which is easier: stealing a car or building it? Before answering, put the car in St. Louis.


10 posted on 04/30/2021 9:28:46 AM PDT by freedumb2003 (No matter what, resist and stop the agenda of blow bidet and hairass the whore)
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To: Tell It Right

If China had so much creative talent why do they steal 1/4 to 1/2 treelyun dollars in IP (Intellectual Property) every year even though China literally has 5 times as many brains as the U.S.? LOL

Indeed. The more autocratic and micromanaged the country, the less likely they’ll have creative types. Creative types, by their very nature, are disruptive people who will break the status quo, and the ruling elites are *always* about preserving their status in the quo with a vengeance.

Reminds me of one of my favorite Heinlein quotes...

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

― Robert Heinlein


11 posted on 04/30/2021 9:33:47 AM PDT by Flick Lives (“Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.”)
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To: Gen.Blather
In 2016 I was just completing a contract and another government contract needed "surge support" to meet deadlines. I agreed to help. It was web work with workflow managers written in Ruby. The "manager" had zero technical competence and was writing up JIRA tasks with no concept of prerequisites or a reasonable order of feature generation/integration. It was a mess. He admitted he was in over his head and left. I was recruited to replace him. I had 20 people working. A separate, bigger group was burning a lot more money AND kept stealing 90% of the people that should have been working for me.

Fast forward, I lost all of my engineers to budget being reassigned to the other group who wasn't delivering the goods, but burning a TON of money. I ended up writing all of the backend Java code to make an incredibly complex XML document to share across government entities AND helping the other group fix their Javascript/React frontends with Remedy Java backends. It ramped up into 80 hour weeks to tie the ribbons on the contract.

Once again finished, looking for the next engagement. Quick like a bunny, study and pass the Security+ certification exam and off to do IA work for another agency.

IA contract complete...next gig...creating Docker containers to run legacy applications on AWS. Refactor the interfaces from RMI to REST. Update the internals to microservices patterns.

If you choose a career as a software engineer, plan to be perpetually updating your skills and taking continuously changing assignment to remain employed. Sometimes you'll have an opportunity to be an engineering manager. Other times, you're going to be the subject matter expert doing complex signal processing or kernel device drivers.

It's amusing to see the political class killing the blue collar work and believing they can just shove people into writing code. Some people can do it. Others can't. My son feels very comfortable in a physics environment with detailed work in the lab, but writing software is not his strong suit. My wife wrote beautiful Pascal code in the late 80s. She doesn't enjoy it. Being a police/fire/EMS dispatcher by day and enjoying her collection of bearded dragons, emerald tree skinks and day geckos in the evening is her preference.

12 posted on 04/30/2021 9:51:39 AM PDT by Myrddin
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To: Flick Lives
The small, productive minority is something I have observed over the years. I refer to it as the SWAT team. At my current and prior employer, I often found myself in a room with the same 10 to 15 people assembled to tackle an issue of high importance. We did it, then resumed our "ongoing" contract work. Inevitably, another crisis arises. A meeting is called to find a solution and the same SWAT team is called into action. That minority of real problem solvers that you keep around to rescue your bacon. I enjoy being part of the SWAT team. What concerns me is that we are all 55+ years old. I'm not seeing young blood that can be part of the rescue processes. We're not going to live forever.
13 posted on 04/30/2021 10:00:43 AM PDT by Myrddin
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To: All

software engineering management is still in the stone age. almost every software project has a 90 day timetable because of quarterly corporate reports. 90 day projects impose unrealistic limitations. impose those limitations, and you put extra john henry style pressure on your software engineers, who are already working 60 hour weeks.

over the years, the pressure leads to burnout, or premature layoffs aka age discrimination, and also adds to management incentive to outsource to india and russia. you can run a software coding project from silicon valley using one project manager and 15 bangalore software engineers. the project manager travels to bangalore for a week or so once a month, and rakes in a hefty salary (think: lamborghini in your garage hefty salary) for the money saved by paying the bangalore coders peanuts and defocusing on software quality (aka why so many everyday software bugs never seem to get fixed, or runs so slowly, or both).

the moscow software engineers are more capable and more proud, and do not need jetset software managers— otherwise they are the same as the bangalore software engineers. however, for the same reason, you don’t give them large projects, just well defined bugs to be fixed.

in 2001, many laid off gen x silicon valley software engineers folded their tents and went back to the midwest (to live with their parents, perhaps). over ~45 yo is (for all but a lucky few) over the hill and unemployable as will be discovered during the inevitable next round of musical chairs.

teaching seems as if it should be a natural extension of engineering. however, i do not know any silicon valley software engineers who have made a successful transition to teaching. there are probably a few out there, but they might be few and far between. older software engineers working volunteer gigs rings true.


14 posted on 04/30/2021 10:17:12 AM PDT by SteveH
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To: SteveH
I did the teaching first. Southwestern College. 1980 to 1983. I enjoyed it. 91% of my students were hired by DEC or IBM per feedback from the Regional Occupational Program that funded my class. At almost age 65, I would enjoy a return to the classroom. Nearly 40 years as a software engineer in industry would being a different perspective to the classroom.

I'm not ready to retire yet. Still adding new languages and certs to keep my customers happy. I need to replace my 7 1/2 year old i7 desktop with 32 GB RAM. The data science work needs 64 GB to 128 GB RAM. An i7 with 8 cores or maybe an i9. The ASUS ROG STRIX motherboard specs memory speed at 5333. Getting 64 GB of that is $$$. A 1 TB NVMe drive is suitable storage for the OS. Large data sets may need more. Cheaper on the 6Gbps SATA drives. An nVidia graphics card with GPU that can support TensorFlow execution for machine learning is good to have. Do I throw money at it now with the concern that the government crumbles? Will it pay back the investment?

15 posted on 04/30/2021 10:52:01 AM PDT by Myrddin
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To: Myrddin

more power to you. is southwestern college in chula vista? almost all of my professional experience is in silicon valley, which features daily king of the hill bouts with incoming fresh off the boat bottom dollar bangalore talent. what fun. i have a suspicion that fresh off the boat bangalore engineers target silicon valley more than chula vista. after a few decades playing king of the hill with fresh off the boat bangalore engineers gets tiresome. and then there are the offshore guys that one does not even see. one nice thing for current homeowners is that the immigrants jack up real estate prices. it leads to interesting observations, such as that the only white people in my local public schools are the teachers. all the local chinese (the few that remain, anyways) are complaining about the influx of kids who do not look like their kids (lol).

as for hardware, you may want to consider upgrading to AMD RYZEN CPUs, if you like multiple cores.. AMD is leaving intel in the dust with TSMC 7nm and 5nm technology.

as for me, i decided to leave engineering altogether and focus on investments (i make more money, go figure) and various side projects, none of which involve cubicles or boatloads of FOB bangaloreans. Not that there is anything wrong with FOB bangaloreans.

consider what kind of money would you be making if you devoted your talents to investing over software?


16 posted on 04/30/2021 12:24:39 PM PDT by SteveH
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To: Myrddin

i see chula vista is just north of tijuana. another plus!


17 posted on 04/30/2021 12:26:03 PM PDT by SteveH
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