It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
Well there could be one of those coming vacant soon.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
Well there could be one of those coming vacant soon.
Shadow whipping operation in full swing to try and gloss over Munira Mirza’s unexpected resignation. Here’s the party line - and who’s tweeting it - at Chris Pincher’s request*
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.
My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.
But yes, other than that, spot on.
But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.
I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
I knew an academic that insisted on only using emacs for everything. I don't just mean writing some c++ code, I mean literally everything, from code to diagrams to slides. Any talk of you could use Illustrator or Powerpoint for that, was met with a reaction akin to suggesting their mother was a dockside hooker.
At the other extreme I've seen people (not naming names but Accenture) use Powerpoint to project plans because they didn't have Project...
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.
I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.
The IT world outside finance has caught up - it used to be double the rate of pay in the banks. Now it is fairly even.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
There's a lot of randomness. A friend of mine learned some obscure old database system in his first job out of university. And has earned a six figure salary as a contractor since.
Other friends ended up with skills for which there was no demand, and struggled to find work.
Re Johnson, seriously most of the people won’t give a fuck about the aides.
To misquote Sherlock Holmes, what’s more interesting is the dogs that are not barking, namely that (so far) few of the ERG / anti-lockdown / Red Wall factions have called on him to go. If they thought Sunak / Truss was such a winner, they would have done so. Which basically means they don’t. And which basically means we are stuck with BJ until an alternative acceptable to them emerges.
This seems right to me.
Not sure if anyone else mentioned it, but I bet some of those aides were at parties/organised them and see the writing on the wall.
My colleagues and I would value the collective wisdom of the PB readership. We live in North East Bedfordshire, a constituency with such a large Conservative majority that they don't count the votes but weigh them by the bushel. Labour and LibDems put up notional candidates, but essentially our MP is chosen by the selection committee of the local Conservative party. Sometimes they strike lucky, as with the wonderful and much missed Alastair Burt; sometimes less so. A group of us, by nature 'small c' conservatives, are fed up with BoJo and all that he stands for, and are preparing to put up a proper candidate at the next election, to give the good folk of North East Bedfordshire a once in a lifetime choice. We have a group of people who have the time, money and skills to run a proper campaign. We will register a party, but we are looking for a name. The best we can come up with is 'Let's have a Party'. Can the collective brains of PB come up with a better name?
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.
The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.
What a terrible name.
It’s terrible. They could have gone for easy such as Washington presidents, Washington senators.
I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.
I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.
The IT world outside finance has caught up - it used to be double the rate of pay in the banks. Now it is fairly even.
Either you target the future with something like Go or do something super niche where there's not much demand but almost no supply. Contractors in those languages can make well into six figures per year and have multiple clients.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.
My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.
But yes, other than that, spot on.
But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.
I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
What?
I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.
This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
The requirement to hand write the skeleton of the page in decent HTML is still there. And understand the interaction between the static and dynamic elements is actually far more skilled than understanding flat HTML.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where
- The UK was not in the EU - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office - Inflation problems - Energy price shocks - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)
As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.
We joined what became the EU in 1973.
Pedant alert - it nonetheless was not the EU. The Brexiteers are are always telling us that the EEC was fine. The EU turned up around 1990 (ish)
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.
The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
I'd also add - the attitude that a new technology you haven't seen before is *an opportunity for fun*
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.
My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.
But yes, other than that, spot on.
But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.
I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
What?
I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.
This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
Everything is some kind of typescript from my limited web experience.
Look at you with your fancy tools and MS's strongly typed language. The web is built on Livescript (renamed to Javascript rapidly when it was believed that web pages would end up hosting multiple Java applets and those applets needed a language to connect them together). Plus Java was the latest greatest thing and plan old web pages were old hat given that CSS didn't exist and everything looked bad.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
I had a similar experience albeit 15 years earlier. I loved Cobol mainframe programming, couldn't believe I was being paid to effectively do puzzles all day.
But... to get on I had to move into project and programme management and leave the programming behind. Project management required a very different set of skills, I was just lucky I was able to adapt. Helluva lot of ball-ache and stress though compared to programming.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.
The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
I'd also add - the attitude that a new technology you haven't seen before is *an opportunity for fun*
To an extent I'm past that point now, people say blockchain and I go a trusted third party with a database is so much easier and cheaper...
Now, if you want to be a web developer, you will need to know CSS/JQuery/etc. You will need to be - basically - a computer programmer.
Dude. JQuery is at least five years out of date now.
(Which, to be fair, only emphasises your point. Keeping up with the state of the art in web development is crazily difficult. I make a slightly contrarian point of using the previous generation of tech or the one before that... you would go insane trying to use the 'in' technology all the time.)
In other news, I went out to the pub for a meal when only Munira Mirza had resigned; had a very good steak and two pints of Old Rosie; came back, read Twitter, and omfg. I am now off to get a carry-out with more cider.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
My favourite was at a company where we all sitting in open plan. The team of customer engagement people - selling shit to the customers while helping them - next to us, wanted the same pay.
They even tried (being mostly ladies) the equal-pay-for-equal-work thing .....
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where
- The UK was not in the EU - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office - Inflation problems - Energy price shocks - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)
As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.
We joined what became the EU in 1973.
Pedant alert - it nonetheless was not the EU. The Brexiteers are are always telling us that the EEC was fine. The EU turned up around 1990 (ish)
To be exact, 1st November 1993.
I would get out more, but it's much more fun being an anal pedant...
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
I had a similar experience albeit 15 years earlier. I loved Cobol mainframe programming, couldn't believe I was being paid to effectively do puzzles all day.
But... to get on I had to move into project and programme management and leave the programming behind. Project management required a very different set of skills, I was just lucky I was able to adapt. Helluva lot of ball-ache and stress though compared to programming.
Often wish I'd gone into C++ or Java.
I became an employment lawyer specialising in getting rich people out of messes of their own making. I’ve done okay.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
Really? Where?
I just did a quick search on a job site.
IT Managers £60K Senior A/P - £35K
Current rate for a Dynamics 365 developer would be £80-90k but £500 outside or £650 inside IR35 so anyone good contracts.
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Apple did use Objective-C but they are now using a revamped version of it called Swift
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
What's becoming more and more common is big companies (mine included) having to wholesale copy startup hiring and employee retention practices to get decent people. For a long time we couldn't hire any developers simply because as a bank the hours were unsociable, the benefits were not very good, working days and time completely inflexible, options/share schemes non-existent outside of exec level and in work training and professional advancement limited to three or four well defined paths that developers have no interest in. In the end we recruited a new talent person from a recruitment agency that specialised in placing people into startups and she rewrote everything. Suddenly our recruitment issues went away, it also helped that we formed a new subsidiary rather than advertising jobs under our corporate name.
Now we have great people, loads of opportunity, a very fast growing list of clients and eventually the chance for our unit to be floated on the exchange.
The corporate world is having to adjust to competing with start ups for workers and this is driving them to create better working conditions all around. I think what's happened is that people have realised they'd rather take a high five figure salary and live easy than a into six figures and live with the bullshit you describe of poor management who don't know what they're talking about.
It's all very well these senior Johnson allies and aides leaving Downing St (and in some cases, it *is* well that they have), but who is filling the considerable gap left behind?
It's all very well these senior Johnson allies and aides leaving Downing St (and in some cases, it *is* well that they have), but who is filling the considerable gap left behind?
If Boris had planned this the replacements would be in place ready to start on Monday.
Given that no-one is in place to start on Monday it's clear that these people are going at a timing of their own choosing and as rapidly as they can get away.
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
Give us a job mate
I used to work in IT. I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much. I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers. It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades. Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
Really? Where?
I just did a quick search on a job site.
IT Managers £60K Senior A/P - £35K
We just recruited a senior data engineer for almost six figures and a generous options scheme.
A friend of mine is a mid level typescript developer and he's just got a new job at north of £80k per year.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
If you want something cross-platform, look at Flutter.
It uses a language called Dart (basically a dialect of JavaScript) and it has the heft of Google behind it. You can trivially build for iOS and Android, and it'll even build Progressive Web Apps if you like.
I don't use it for anything that needs to get close to the metal, but for reasonably unambitious apps it's pretty good.
My suggestion to deal with the energy price rises. Per household, Increase the price of of petrol for 1st cars, double it or more for 2nd cars, and triple it or more for 3rd cars. And so forth. P/S My dad shared his car with us four kids.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
Now, if you want to be a web developer, you will need to know CSS/JQuery/etc. You will need to be - basically - a computer programmer.
Dude. JQuery is at least five years out of date now.
(Which, to be fair, only emphasises your point. Keeping up with the state of the art in web development is crazily difficult. I make a slightly contrarian point of using the previous generation of tech or the one before that... you would go insane trying to use the 'in' technology all the time.)
The latest fad is definitely a thing in some areas of IT. It used to annoy the heck out of me. I nearly died laughing when I saw Dave Thomas's video "Agile is dead"
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Apple did use Objective-C but they are now using a revamped version of it called Swift
but swift isn't much use if you want the same code base for both IOS and Android.
Then you options are Xamarin and C#, Google's weird Dart based solution and a ton of Javascript options.
Xamerin and c# is probably the best option if you used to write Java.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
And Python is to scripting what Radiohead is to music.
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.
What a terrible name.
It’s terrible. They could have gone for easy such as Washington presidents, Washington senators.
I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).
Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where
- The UK was not in the EU - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office - Inflation problems - Energy price shocks - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)
As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.
The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Came in to effect in 1958.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.
He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.
But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.
there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.
Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.
Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.
Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.
Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.
Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???
Wow.
More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.
We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+
The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.
There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.
But let me ask you a question.
Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?
This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.
Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue
Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.
What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
And.. a sensible senior figure who has all the way through this told me that, while it's bumpy, the PM should be able to survive, tonight says PM can probably get thru it for the moment but it's looking very hard post May (after local elections). That's a clear shift https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1489346993977802752
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
I'd recommend Flutter with Firebase backend. Makes cross platform App development very easy. Language is called Dart which is very similar to Java/C#. Having never coded my own app before (although lots of over coding in the past) I was able to build something from scratch and get it on the app stores in a few weeks.
As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)
Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
It's almost like Guido didn't have the {} symbols on his keyboard.
“It's not just that the rats are leaving the sinking ship. They're also fighting in a sack. The question tonight in the Tory party is now when the threshold for 54 letters will be reached — not if.”
If they get this done quickly (before the police finish their work) they can avoid the mess of a sitting Pm being sanctioned under criminal law, or the even greater calamity of Raab having to write letters to the Trident sub commanders.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
And Python is to scripting what Radiohead is to music.
I had done a few things in Python out of curiousity more than anything else and I can see how the massive choice of code libraries that exist can be really, really useful, but I found the language itself to be really clunky like having to pass "self" as a parameter in member functions, or the complete omission of arrays when they went to the trouble of having lists, dictionaries, sets and tuples.
I had assumed that the language would be "quirk" free. Then I moved from Python 2.7 to Python 3 and Oh My God!!!!! Everything just broke.
As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)
Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
GCP is approaching $20bn ARR from a standing stars a few years ago. It's incredible how much the big three have come to dominate cloud services so totally.
One thing is worth noting about resignations is this. Just as with Partygate - where plenty had experience of losing out at family occasions (what Aaron Bell expressed so well) - there will also be people in Parliament and/or No 10 who have personal experience or knowledge of child abuse or sexual abuse. And this may well inform their actions even if it is not made public.
If you do you will be disgusted as most are at such behaviour. But it it will also feel personal and hurtful and so maybe make you more likely to act.
We all have Red Lines and they can sometimes be intensely personal ones that others may not have a clue about. It is not the first time the PM has shown in Parliament a complete lack of empathy for what women go through. Not odd - given his own history - but also a bit odd given Carrie's, especially in light of her supposed control over him.
As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)
Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
GCP is approaching $20bn ARR from a standing stars a few years ago. It's incredible how much the big three have come to dominate cloud services so totally.
It always make me chuckle when people say Google Cloud is losing, how many businesses ever grow as fast as that? Basically none.
“It's not just that the rats are leaving the sinking ship. They're also fighting in a sack. The question tonight in the Tory party is now when the threshold for 54 letters will be reached — not if.”
If they get this done quickly (before the police finish their work) they can avoid the mess of a sitting Pm being sanctioned under criminal law, or the even greater calamity of Raab having to write letters to the Trident sub commanders.
I would not worry about Raab. He will probably post the letters in a postbox and hope the Royal Mail can find "The Captain / Submarine with nukes / At sea"
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
I am not sure your point?
Just that it isn't just a Gridiron issue.
I am still not sure of your point. We were talking about a racial profile for dedicated positions in the game.
African nations choosing a white coach, its because most international teams are looking to hire somebody with a fantastic track record coaching in the top leagues e.g. Egypt has Carlos Queiroz, ex Portugal (and a load of other international teams and of course Man Utd assistant.
Its why England hired a load of foreign managers.
The wider point about coaching is that the model of they were a pro leads to manager is becoming less so. In many cases, you have to be dedicating yourself to the job of coach or manager rather than ever playing (or not for very long).
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.
I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.
I think the other thing that helps is working for a company that sees software as one of its core competencies, not as a cost centre that it grudgingly funds as little as possible while it gets on with the important stuff. I get the impression that the latter kind of company is much more prone to outsourcing, paying worse, and hanging on to obsolete technology.
There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
At Just our (mostly UK based) coders (not managers) are on £70-90k.
But we've always followed the principle that it's better to get one great £80k a year developer than three mediocre ones at £20k each.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
It's almost like Guido didn't have the {} symbols on his keyboard.
I've been doing a lot of typescript lately, dealing with rogue square/curly braces is about as bad as indents in python. Python is better for what I want to achieve. I do like the arrow functions in typescript though and the ternary operators.
So they’re bereft of senior staff after a dramatic exodus this evening while the leader frantically tries to shore up support among a disgruntled, furious fan base? Interesting https://twitter.com/aljwhite/status/1489349333027893248
Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.
What a terrible name.
It’s terrible. They could have gone for easy such as Washington presidents, Washington senators.
I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).
The Washington Scandals
The Washington Georges
The Washington Tyne and Wears
But the Washington Commanders. Weak.
Washington Senators was the name of the notoriously unsuccessful, and now defunct* baseball team. Washington. First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
Personally, I like that python forces me to write readable code.
And it's a lot easier to spot the missing indent than the missing curly bracket.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
Perl is the world's premier write only language.
I dunow about all these languages. I always found Fortran very easy and natural to use and the language used by "Mathematica" goes OK for me. All these for maths calculations.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
It's almost like Guido didn't have the {} symbols on his keyboard.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
Personally, I like that python forces me to write readable code.
And it's a lot easier to spot the missing indent than the missing curly bracket.
Ha ha ha...
You said "python" in the same sentence as "write ... code"
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
I am not sure your point?
Just that it isn't just a Gridiron issue.
I am still not sure of your point. We were talking about a racial profile for dedicated positions in the game. African nations choosing a white coach, its because most international teams are looking to hire somebody with a fantastic excellent track record coaching in the top leagues e.g. Egypt has Carlos Queiroz, ex Portugal (and a load of other international teams and of course Man Utd assistant.
Its why England hired a load of foreign managers.
This is how the conversation started:
The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.
There are now a few black coaches and managers in the EPL, but still quite unusual considering the number of black players. Few black match officials either.
Quite why black players don't get into management positions is something that I notice but cannot explain.
Another Conservative MP critical of Boris Johnson adds:
“So BJ has his Poundland shadow whips & Carrie to manage the country now. You think it can’t get more ridiculous & somehow he manages to make it worse.”
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
Personally, I like that python forces me to write readable code.
And it's a lot easier to spot the missing indent than the missing curly bracket.
As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)
Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
GCP is approaching $20bn ARR from a standing stars a few years ago. It's incredible how much the big three have come to dominate cloud services so totally.
It always make me chuckle when people say Google Cloud is losing, how many businesses ever grow as fast as that? Basically none.
Indeed, one of the group subsidiaries is on a complete AWS stack right now and it's been interesting watching from a distance as AWS are giving gigantic discounts to hold on to them now that the rest of the company has started the big shift over to GCP. I was shocked as to how much more money GCP is compared to AWS, yet GCP keeps on trucking and growing.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
It's almost like Guido didn't have the {} symbols on his keyboard.
Guido? PERL was created by Larry Wall
Guido wrote Python and Python uses indents for syntax separation rather than saner characters.
If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.
I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.
QB / Tight End - White RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
I am not sure your point?
Just that it isn't just a Gridiron issue.
I am still not sure of your point. We were talking about a racial profile for dedicated positions in the game. African nations choosing a white coach, its because most international teams are looking to hire somebody with a fantastic excellent track record coaching in the top leagues e.g. Egypt has Carlos Queiroz, ex Portugal (and a load of other international teams and of course Man Utd assistant.
Its why England hired a load of foreign managers.
This is how the conversation started:
The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.
There are now a few black coaches and managers in the EPL, but still quite unusual considering the number of black players. Few black match officials either.
Quite why black players don't get into management positions is something that I notice but cannot explain.
And as stated, the idea of because you were a top pro then you become a coach / manager is going out of the window, especially with highly technique analytical games like NFL. Its a totally different skillset and one you need to develop instead of playing for 10-15 years.
You only have to look at some of top managers in football over the past few years e.g. Wenger, Mourinho, Tuchel, none were top pros. Even Kloop wasn't really a top player.
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
Personally, I like that python forces me to write readable code.
And it's a lot easier to spot the missing indent than the missing curly bracket.
Yes agree, typescript is a nightmare of different brackets and semi-colons.
Also, I've got a code formatter for VScode which is great, it mostly catches where I've fucked up the indentation in python.
The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.
I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.
I think the other thing that helps is working for a company that sees software as one of its core competencies, not as a cost centre that it grudgingly funds as little as possible while it gets on with the important stuff. I get the impression that the latter kind of company is much more prone to outsourcing, paying worse, and hanging on to obsolete technology.
When people start talking about "Not our core business" I think of this
Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
If you want something cross-platform, look at Flutter.
It uses a language called Dart (basically a dialect of JavaScript) and it has the heft of Google behind it. You can trivially build for iOS and Android, and it'll even build Progressive Web Apps if you like.
I don't use it for anything that needs to get close to the metal, but for reasonably unambitious apps it's pretty good.
I can give a thumbs up for flutter if you after quick mobile apps (not tried the desktop stuff yet).
Much easier to get stuff done that objective-c/swift or java/kotlin. The main thing I like he having something works on iOS and Android without too much bother. Something quite depressing about implementing the same thing twice on two different platforms
Comments
I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
*individually crafted tweets preferred to retweets, he told MPs tonight https://twitter.com/AVMikhailova/status/1489339772791365637/photo/1
I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.
The IT world outside finance has caught up - it used to be double the rate of pay in the banks. Now it is fairly even.
Other friends ended up with skills for which there was no demand, and struggled to find work.
Not sure if anyone else mentioned it, but I bet some of those aides were at parties/organised them and see the writing on the wall.
We live in North East Bedfordshire, a constituency with such a large Conservative majority that they don't count the votes but weigh them by the bushel. Labour and LibDems put up notional candidates, but essentially our MP is chosen by the selection committee of the local Conservative party.
Sometimes they strike lucky, as with the wonderful and much missed Alastair Burt; sometimes less so.
A group of us, by nature 'small c' conservatives, are fed up with BoJo and all that he stands for, and are preparing to put up a proper candidate at the next election, to give the good folk of North East Bedfordshire a once in a lifetime choice. We have a group of people who have the time, money and skills to run a proper campaign.
We will register a party, but we are looking for a name. The best we can come up with is 'Let's have a Party'.
Can the collective brains of PB come up with a better name?
The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).
The Washington Scandals
The Washington Georges
The Washington Tyne and Wears
But the Washington Commanders. Weak.
Them and Wix are counter examples.
But 99.9% of websites by views are not made like that.
https://twitter.com/johnjohnstonmi/status/1489340347209633797
In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
Not showing my age here at all am I?
But... to get on I had to move into project and programme management and leave the programming behind. Project management required a very different set of skills, I was just lucky I was able to adapt. Helluva lot of ball-ache and stress though compared to programming.
Often wish I'd gone into C++ or Java.
(Which, to be fair, only emphasises your point. Keeping up with the state of the art in web development is crazily difficult. I make a slightly contrarian point of using the previous generation of tech or the one before that... you would go insane trying to use the 'in' technology all the time.)
In other news, I went out to the pub for a meal when only Munira Mirza had resigned; had a very good steak and two pints of Old Rosie; came back, read Twitter, and omfg. I am now off to get a carry-out with more cider.
They even tried (being mostly ladies) the equal-pay-for-equal-work thing .....
Is there one platform/language that can cover both?
Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
I would get out more, but it's much more fun being an anal pedant...
I just did a quick search on a job site.
IT Managers £60K
Senior A/P - £35K
QB / Tight End - White
RB / Wide Receivers - Black
Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
Now we have great people, loads of opportunity, a very fast growing list of clients and eventually the chance for our unit to be floated on the exchange.
The corporate world is having to adjust to competing with start ups for workers and this is driving them to create better working conditions all around. I think what's happened is that people have realised they'd rather take a high five figure salary and live easy than a into six figures and live with the bullshit you describe of poor management who don't know what they're talking about.
With Lister, Frost, Cummings, Cain, da Costa, and Stratton all already gone, there are in effect no senior figures left in Downing Street.
https://twitter.com/harrytlambert/status/1489309648587010048
This is a good point.
It's all very well these senior Johnson allies and aides leaving Downing St (and in some cases, it *is* well that they have), but who is filling the considerable gap left behind?
Every chance that Johnson becomes even more directionless and random.
https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1489343678845960196
Given that no-one is in place to start on Monday it's clear that these people are going at a timing of their own choosing and as rapidly as they can get away.
A friend of mine is a mid level typescript developer and he's just got a new job at north of £80k per year.
It uses a language called Dart (basically a dialect of JavaScript) and it has the heft of Google behind it. You can trivially build for iOS and Android, and it'll even build Progressive Web Apps if you like.
I don't use it for anything that needs to get close to the metal, but for reasonably unambitious apps it's pretty good.
Per household, Increase the price of of petrol for 1st cars, double it or more for 2nd cars, and triple it or more for 3rd cars. And so forth.
P/S My dad shared his car with us four kids.
Then you options are Xamarin and C#, Google's weird Dart based solution and a ton of Javascript options.
Xamerin and c# is probably the best option if you used to write Java.
Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1489346993977802752
Corey Quinn
@QuinnyPig
Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
“It's not just that the rats are leaving the sinking ship. They're also fighting in a sack. The question tonight in the Tory party is now when the threshold for 54 letters will be reached — not if.”
If they get this done quickly (before the police finish their work) they can avoid the mess of a sitting Pm being sanctioned under criminal law, or the even greater calamity of Raab having to write letters to the Trident sub commanders.
I had assumed that the language would be "quirk" free. Then I moved from Python 2.7 to Python 3 and Oh My God!!!!! Everything just broke.
If you do you will be disgusted as most are at such behaviour. But it it will also feel personal and hurtful and so maybe make you more likely to act.
We all have Red Lines and they can sometimes be intensely personal ones that others may not have a clue about. It is not the first time the PM has shown in Parliament a complete lack of empathy for what women go through. Not odd - given his own history - but also a bit odd given Carrie's, especially in light of her supposed control over him.
African nations choosing a white coach, its because most international teams are looking to hire somebody with a fantastic track record coaching in the top leagues e.g. Egypt has Carlos Queiroz, ex Portugal (and a load of other international teams and of course Man Utd assistant.
Its why England hired a load of foreign managers.
The wider point about coaching is that the model of they were a pro leads to manager is becoming less so. In many cases, you have to be dedicating yourself to the job of coach or manager rather than ever playing (or not for very long).
But we've always followed the principle that it's better to get one great £80k a year developer than three mediocre ones at £20k each.
They do, however, still have a CEO.
https://twitter.com/RobJ_Cricket/status/1489318396386754564
So they’re bereft of senior staff after a dramatic exodus this evening while the leader frantically tries to shore up support among a disgruntled, furious fan base? Interesting
https://twitter.com/aljwhite/status/1489349333027893248
Washington. First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.
*They are actually the Minnesota Twins now.
And it's a lot easier to spot the missing indent than the missing curly bracket.
You said "python" in the same sentence as "write ... code"
Didn't you mean "write untested kiddy scripts" ?
The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.
There are now a few black coaches and managers in the EPL, but still quite unusual considering the number of black players. Few black match officials either.
Quite why black players don't get into management positions is something that I notice but cannot explain.
“So BJ has his Poundland shadow whips & Carrie to manage the country now. You think it can’t get more ridiculous & somehow he manages to make it worse.”
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1489350661573644288
Perl just loved the $ symbol.
You only have to look at some of top managers in football over the past few years e.g. Wenger, Mourinho, Tuchel, none were top pros. Even Kloop wasn't really a top player.
Guardiola was obviously was.
Also, I've got a code formatter for VScode which is great, it mostly catches where I've fucked up the indentation in python.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te8DWOdM-ZU
for some reason. Then I ask if they are trying to hurt my feelings.
😟
Much easier to get stuff done that objective-c/swift or java/kotlin. The main thing I like he having something works on iOS and Android without too much bother. Something quite depressing about implementing the same thing twice on two different platforms
MrB