12:05 – We’re doing our usual weekend stuff, plus cleaning up and de-cluttering.
CBC broadcasts the first episode of Heartland season eight tonight, which means it’ll be up on Pirate Bay tomorrow morning. I’ll download the HD episodes as they’re posted, but we’ll wait until next spring to watch them, after they’re all available. Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye on Amazon.ca for the release of the season seven DVDs, which I’ll order as soon as they’re available to replace the copies I got from Pirate Bay.
Nine days with no phone and no backup. Three more to go. Did not have to be this long, but the guys in my carrier’s company-owned store, sent me away, telling me I had to handle this all by phone because I am on an employee’s friends and family plan. Took me 2 days after that to get to a phone. Bottom line is that the store guys were reamed a new behind, and I was sent back to them. They apologized profusely — even taking me out of the queue of 10 people in front of me, to deal with my problem.
New phone arrives on Wednesday, and I did not sacrifice my upgrade to do this. Although I am eligible for an upgrade, I want to wait on the US release of the Samsung Alpha — or whatever will be its equivalent in this country. Supposedly, it is the only Android that will compete with the iPhone 6.
Like doing without television, this is not so hard. But it could have been disastrous if I had a video editing project ongoing. Yikes, that is scary. $11/mo is the insurance cost to get a phone overnighted with no questions asked. I would have paid $220 by now, instead of $75. Not sure if $145 additional would have been worth a 1 day wait, instead of what will be 12 days. No harm done this time, but I have to have a better backup plan for the future. Do not think it will involve $11/mo insurance, though.
Actually, it is not so much the phone that I miss in that Android; it is the calendar and its audible reminders, contact list (backed up at Google and available online, fortunately), GnuCash expense entry app, my daily morning BBC News streaming update, text messaging with my kids, the clock that replaced my watch, being able to Google in the middle of a conversation anywhere…I am definitely hooked.
“The Enemy in HR”
http://www.cringely.com/2014/09/28/enemy-hr/
“Right now, depending who you speak with, there is either a shortage or a glut of IT professionals in the USA. Those who maintain there is a shortage tend to say it can only be eliminated by immigration reform allowing more H1-B visas and green cards. Those who see a glut point to high IT unemployment figures and what looks like pervasive age discrimination. If both views are possible — and I am beginning to see how they could be — we can start by blaming the Human Resources (HR) departments at big and even medium-sized companies.”
I am loving my Galaxy 5S. The battery time is freaking awesome and it is tough. My cousin Ben dropped it about three feet onto a wood floor Friday night and it was Ok except the back cover came off. Excellent cpu response due to the quad core cpu. Works great on either 4G or wifi.
I have yet to dunk it in a toilet to see if the USB3 plug keeps it dry but, I am going to pass on that.
Having worked in IT in Australia for 35 years I wouldn’t recommend a career in that area. The salary is no longer good, unless you are at the top, or a contractor. Managerialism took all the pleasure out of it for me: I had to spend 50% or more of my work time getting various approvals and going through loops. In the late Eighties I was given a few tasks to do and just went ahead and did them without much supervision. Towards the end it got so bad that I was writing, on average, about five lines of code a week. Nothing could ever get done in a hurry because so many people had to sign off on the smallest change.
People I worked with agreed that our workplace had changed for the worse but were keeping their heads down because they wanted to keep their jobs.
A year ago I dropped my iPad about a metre on to concrete. A slight dent but otherwise worked fine. Repeated that in November, still no problems, apart from another small dent.
Been down to the beach lately Slim?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-29/surfing-dogs-competition-huntington-beach-california-photos/5776248
I want to see more doctors let in before IT people. There are 2 in the family in IT and their wages tell me there is no shortage. Both families have 1 car to share between the 2 adults of each family and neither couple yet owns a house. There are 2 US doctors in the family, neither of the spouses work, they have more bedrooms than kids and their houses are not mortgaged, they have very expensive cars — again, more cars than licensed drivers. The German doctor in the family makes the equivalent of a tenured teacher in her country. No shortage of doctors there.
When the IT folks in the family start living like the doctors, then it might be time to let in more of them, but let’s start with doctors and lawyers, of which there is a clear shortage.
I don’t get the H1-B visas. You can bring in lots of young Asian folk and put them into programming. Fine. But what is the real difference from hiring young Americans? I expect the main difference is simply discipline: you can expect the Americans to grouse about working hard, working through weekends to meet deadlines, etc.. Whereas the Asians are glad to come and happy to work hard. What do y’all think?
The average Asian on a H1-B visa is probably smarter and more motivated than the average Asian, the average American. All the same, working really really hard 18 hours a day seven days a week gets old quickly.
Chuck, when I was in the AT&T store a couple of days ago one tech was describing the Samsung Alpha as the phone closest to the iPhone. Reviews seem to mostly complain about battery life, and perhaps the lack of a microSD. As I recall the standard may be a 32Gb device, unlike the S5 which is only available as 16Gb in the US.
I’m currently using a Google Nexus 5, which I generally enjoy a fair amount. Similar to the Alpha in that the battery should be bigger and it has no microSD card.
The Motorola Moto G 2014 is being touted as “good enough” for most people. The price is certainly nice ($179 off contract). It has “only” a 720P screen.
Ageism in IT is indeed rampant. If you’re over 40 (and look it) you’re almost better off cross-training to another career field. This is probably closely followed by sizism (which is rampant in all career fields – not just IT). I feel sorry for the 55 year old obese guy looking for an IT job.
As for H1Bs. Those guys are borderline slave labor. An American will only tolerate working 70+ hour weeks for so long before saying “F_ck it!” and switching employers or careers. My neighbor just quit his IT job of 20+ years and now mows lawns for a living. The H1B guys will work those crazy hours year after year for less pay than citizens and then THANK their employer (and Visa sponsor) for the opportunity to be abused. I guess their worst day as an overworked underpaid IT employee in the US is better than their best day in their home country.
Towards the end it got so bad that I was writing, on average, about five lines of code a week. Nothing could ever get done in a hurry because so many people had to sign off on the smallest change.
I code to live, live to code. I might go postal in that situation. Nah, I would just leave for a real outfit.
“Ageism in IT is indeed rampant. If you’re over 40 (and look it) you’re almost better off cross-training to another career field. This is probably closely followed by sizism (which is rampant in all career fields – not just IT). I feel sorry for the 55 year old obese guy looking for an IT job.”
Indeed. I’m WAY over fotty but not obese; now 245 at 6’5″. But this has been the best I can do after my IBM layoff; Windows help desk support with forty-mile commutes each way and expected to stay late and do stuff on weekends and be available for emergencies. Which the PHB manglers define. The latter are always around when there are problems, but when everything is running OK, they wonder why they have us here.
I made some dumbass choices for career and jobs over the decades and here I am. Looking to do something else for the few remaining years on the planet, that’s for sure.
If I may massively overgeneralize: Many programmers from Asian cultures are trained to do exactly what the boss says, no more, no less and no questioning. When I have had to work with guys like this, I find it very frustrating. You cannot say: produce a program that does X, here’s the spec. Instead, you have to spell it all out: the GUI must look exactly like this, you must validate this field for these possible errors, that field for those possible errors, and so on. Anything you forget to specify precisely simply will not be done; anything you specify incorrectly will be blindly implemented. This seems deeply ingrained, at least, I have never seen someone with this mentality change to actually thinking for themselves.
The flip side is that young western programmers are sloppy. They will give you half-finished, half-tested, half-working code – and be irritated when you point out how crappy their work is. The thing is, they can be taught to do better – it’s not that they are incapable – they are just lazy and full of themselves.
I was no different, back in the day. I spent 4 months working on my first project. When I proudly claimed it was finished, it took about 5 seconds for my boss to totally crash the thing. That was a lesson…
The employment issue is going to be one of the most serious problems the US faces, and fixing it will require systemic changes no one in this country will readily accept. It is just blazingly clear that employees have become the enemies of business, just as customers long have been. Top level managers and owners nowadays in this country HATE employees. Employees know that. Yesterday, I was in a Michigan-based grocery chain’s store, in a location where I do not normally shop, and was talking to the clerk, who was actually a supervisor manning the register that day. The last 2 times I have been in that chain, the manned grocery lanes have been so overloaded that it took 20 minutes of waiting before I reached the clerk — yesterday was no exception.
She told me that management is moving toward the day when there will be zero manned lanes. There are 16 self-check lanes all of which were open, but only 3 manned lanes open. This supervisor told me that they do not want to pay for employees to do checkout; they want the customer to assume that expense by making them check themselves out. Same is already true for restaurants: they do not want to pay wait staff, they want YOU to pay that expense for them by leaving increasingly larger tips, and openly insisting you do that.
I have mentioned before that when I worked in Chicago, there were over 200 employees at my station, and virtually no part-timers (unions frowned on that). Last time I had inside information (several years ago) there were 38 fulltime people working there. That is a dramatic reduction in less than 30 years.
But this literal contempt for employees by almost all business managers today, is going to be very hard to deal with as the rest of the world moves forward faster than we do, and we continue to lose ground against all other of our worldly competitors.
And still, I note that both my wife and I were each making a German middle-class wage (between €45k and 65k/yr), — as immigrants, — working part-time (we were not paid for 8 hours every day as we had to travel from job to job) as English teachers. Since I have returned to the US, at my age, I am unemployable in my former industry, as no one past 45 will be hired there, and if you reach 45, you will be ejected for one specious reason or another, and thus my earnings have, many years since my return, been at or below what the IRS considers a poverty wage. Thanks to my lucky stars I am eligible for a monthly Social Security ‘death benefit’ due to my wife’s passing (which SS never told me about — I learned that from an insurance agent), or I would truly be up Mr. Shit’s creek.
Until the US once again values workers and makes employment a much, much higher priority, most people can only expect a worse-off life next year than this year. And let’s be honest: that change is not going to happen in my remaining years.
There is is, as both you and Dr. Bob and myself have said before; we, as normal ol’ regular 40-hour-week workers are being phased the hell out. ASAP. Ya gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet and lotsa people are just gonna be introduced to Mr. Shit Creek regardless, and in addition to, the tens of millions already intimately acquainted with him in this country.
We can forget about stupidly saving like cretins toward any kind of “retirement,” too; what a colossal joke that’s turned out to be. And our elders have pretty much told us “tough shitsky, kids” and “fuck you, we got ours coming.” We now turn around and tell our own kids, “yo, there’s nuthin’ left, kidz!” and “Y’all gonna be payin’ forever.”
I just read a big long interview with our own Bernie Sanders in the Stalinist online rag Salon; Bernie’s an alright guy and cares about veterans, but his proposed solutions involve massive State intervention across the board to solve all the problems and sticking it hard to the very wealthy and the corporations, who, of course, will not sit still for such treatment and will more likely mete it out in spades to the rest of us first, as they continue to methodically and with malice aforethought destroy the Murkan middle and working classes.
Dr. Bob can’t crank out that prepper book fast enough, in my estimation; we’re due for a long miserable slide ahead. And we’ll still be way better off than most of the rest of the world; Afrika, for example, will return to Hobbesian war of all against all, as will large parts of South America and Asia. Our own cities will become death traps.
What’s the time line for all this? I think we’re looking at some major disruptions this next year and within ten to twenty we’ll run the risk of another civil war.
I’m writing as fast as I can.
Incidentally, what you guys are talking about is stuff I’ve been saying for years. We are in a post-employment society and that’s not going to change, short of a complete collapse. The sad truth is that most people are economically useless. The makers and doers comprise a very small part of society, and ultimately they’re the only ones well placed to prosper.
This is why, despite my hard-core libertarian attitude, I support the idea of a Basic Income. I hate the idea of paying to support those who are unable to support themselves, whether from laziness or lack of ability, but I prefer doing that to having the 90% coming after me with torches and pitchforks.
As to timeline, I think we’ll see some disruptions over the next year or two, but not major ones as I’d define “major”. But I do think we’ll see pretty bad disruptions in the next five years or so, and certainly in the next ten. We are, as Margaret Thatcher pointed out, running out of other people’s money.
Agreed across the board; we are indeed running outta other folks’ money and the attitude out here is “so what?” One of the things that popped out at me, again, in the Sanders interview, is that way too many folks still think they deserve and damn well ought to get, SS and Medicare, forever and ever, world without end, amen, and that the State oughta pay for a whole lotta other stuff in their lives, too. They don’t like it that their jobs are being eliminated and that their lives are becoming harder and meaner (they ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!) but they will not countenance any cuts in the aforementioned piggie troughs nor any reductions in the Holy of Holies, sanctum sanctorum, the DOD and its legions of heroes and heroines who protect and save this blessed nay-shun through all the evils of the modern age, not to be questioned.
“Ima gon hab my big-screen color tee-vee, my six-pack of shitty Murkan lager, and my internet sports and porn, and a dozen Krispy Kremes in a soggy cardboard box, oozing grease and various by-products. Donchoo tell me I cain’t hab it!”
The speaker and his family of fellow porkers will likely find himself someday turning round and round on a homemade spit, maybe a truck axle, already well-greased, over a BBQ fire in some urban wasteland slag heap, danced round by howling revenants to a pounding hip-hop ditty.
Didn’t we see that movie already or was it in “Lucifer’s Hammer?”