I wouldn't necessarily say so. Rightfully pointing out that someone has made a statement which doesn't add anything to the discussion or support their argument is a valid counter to ad-hominem attacks which aren't automatically themselves ad-hominem.
The entire basis of the argument I am replying to is that people shouldn't be criticizing because "meanwhile back in their own lives, they still have to argue with project managers over the "right" way to get code done."
So that is the very definition of an ad hominem. The comment had no actual rebuttal to said 'shitting' that it was attacking.
Buffet doesn't claim it's impossible to beat the market. He only says that the vast majority of investors cannot pick individual investments accurately enough to beat a diversified, low-cost index fund in the long term. There are a bunch of caveats in here, namely LONG TERM – you might get lucky and strike it rich once or twice, but you are very unlikely to have those lucky investments pan out over decades.
Yes, Buffet is incredibly skilled. Buffet actually claimed once that he was born with a preternatural ability to invest in companies. The whole "you can't beat the market" quote is meant more to say that we mere mortals are to Warren Buffet what normal people playing pickup basketball are to Michael Jordan.
A better way of saying it is that the whole of investors are better at accurately predicting the value of a company than individual investors. Which sounds almost like a truism when you put it in those terms.
It probably depends on the company but I think this is right. If I interview someone with little working experience it definitely helps that they have some work on Github. But it would be strange to reject a senior candidate with a great resume who did very well in the technical interview just because they didn't have anything on Github.
Exactly. The biggest impediment is going to be insurance and liability. What do you think it will cost to insure a robotic driving vehicle? On whom does the liability fall in the case of an accident – the owner, or the manufacturer?
Robots in safety-critical applications are not new. Who do you sue if the fire alarm in your building fails to detect a fire? Who do you sue if the railroad crossing gates don't go down when a train is coming? Who do you sue when you're walking on the sidewalk, a bicyclist yells at a cab driver, the cab driver gets flustered, jumps the curb, and amputates one of your legs?
The answer is: it's complicated. That's why we have courts. We don't even have it sorted out for human drivers yet; if you kill someone with your car, you may get off without even a ticket, you may end up in prison for manslaughter. I honestly don't think robotic drivers add any complexity: there's already infinite complexity ;)
If they are really safer than human driven vehicles, then it will likely cost less to insure them than human driven vehicles. And as a higher percentage of vehicles become autonomous, the roads as a whole should get safer (assuming self driving cars are actually safer) and that will also lower insurance costs.
As for liability, there is already generally strict liability when products malfunction. If the product didn't malfunction, then that would mean someone else was at fault, and the cases where there was no malfunction and no one else at fault should be rare. Regardless, there's a huge body of law out there regarding product liability.
Once again, I'm assuming that autonomous vehicles deliver on the safety promises. If they become as safe as a lot of people think they can be, there will be so many fewer accidents that I don't think insurance and liability will be as big of an issue as they are now for human driven vehicles.
It will likely cost less to insure self driving systems. Especially over time. It won't get ever get drunk, it won't get tired. It will be less likely to operate a vehicle that is in disrepair, it will be less likely to operate a vehicle in weather it can't cope with. It won't be in a hurry. It won't be eating. It will learn from mistakes made by other self driving systems.
It's also pretty likely that whatever framework develops to license the systems will address liability (I think by requiring the operator of record to insure the vehicle).
It is unclear how the existing insurance system will translate to a future where all liability is concentrated on the manufacturer. Currently major fatal accidents often result in bankruptcies and may even incur criminal charges. They are not fully covered by insurance.
All precedent is that auto manufacturers are responsible for manufacturing defects that lead to injury or death, not the owner or driver. Even the term "operator of record" has new meaning in the fully autonomous era. Bottom line if software bugs cause injury it's the software writers that are responsible.
You mention many problems with human drivers. But software has been known to have bugs too, and the world is an almost infinitely complex learning environment. It is most likely that the safer future will involve the intersection and mutual augmentation of these two control systems, not the swift replacement of one by the other. As is the case for example with aircraft.
Even if fully insured, most policies have a limit under $100k/person. The really serious accidents result in millions of dollars in damages (especially when lawsuits are involved). What would have been isolated to a personal backruptcy is now concentrated on the autonomous auto manufacturer.
As for criminal charges, the key question is whether a bad bug can constitute negligence. That will no doubt be tested in courts when lives have been lost.
Even if fully insured, most policies have a limit under $100k/person.
What does 'fully insured' mean here? A sensible approach is to have liability coverage sufficient to protect your assets. That might be a lot more coverage than the legal minimum, but a large personal umbrella policy might be hundreds of dollars a year. People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance, not because it is onerously expensive.
> What does 'fully insured' mean here?... People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance
Not necessarily. Even "large" policies will not protect your assets from the worst cases where damages run into the millions of dollars, e.g. where you kill a family or hospitalize someone for months.
You propose that everyone with coverage less than "sufficient to protect your assets" is guilty of being "under insured". But there is no amount of coverage you can pre-determine to protect your assets in all possible cases. Not unless you purchase a policy with no upper limit -- but those are rare in the auto insurance world.
Thus, even if you have a "large" policy that falls on the high end of typical coverage limits, truly catastrophic cases often result in personal bankruptcies. Bankruptcy courts cap the payouts. There are no such caps on auto manufacturers responsible for accidents... unless they go bankrupt too.
I'm pretty skeptical that there are a large number of these huge claims. I tried looking for some info about it but it gets obscured by advertising for liability insurance.
I would expect many of the largest settlements to involve negligence like drunk driving or excessive speed (a system might have the wrong speed for a stretch of road, but it mostly will have accurate speeds). Of course there are also ways that a driving system could be implemented negligently that don't apply to a human driver (but I sort of expect the licensing process to address that).
The idea that a EULA will protect manufacturers from lawsuits over injury and death due to their error is complete hand wavy fantasy. No such precedent exists.
You need only look up the average cost of a major hospitalization to gauge what the at-fault party is responsible for. They can run into the millions.[1] That's before we even get to tort damages awarded by a court for things like negligence (and you're certainly right that those can be even higher).
By licensing I meant the state granting a license for the system to operate on public roads. It won't be individuals signing away their rights, it will be the state declaring what rights they have.
Also, I'm sure there are large claims. My contention is that there aren't a lot of them.
I think the companies that hire an army of 23-25 year olds are planning to fail fast anyway. Why bother trying to recruit older, more senior talent that is going to expect higher benefits if the skills that they bring to the table vs. a 25 year old (knowledge of scalability, long-term decision making, planning, deep technical knowledge, etc.) aren't going to be used unless the company survives the first few years?
There's a difference between poor design and performance optimizations. Lacking any information, I'm inclined to commit an appeal to authority and guess that it's probably a performance optimization.
I wish this happened more often in companies. Unfortunately I usually see the following happen.
A mid-level developer, let's call him Dave, becomes a critical employee after a few years with the company. He silently become "senior" without anyone really asking him to. Other developers notice this and often come to him for help. Management, however, doesn't notice, because nobody in management is exposed to Dave's actual contributions to the team. All they see are completion metrics – story points, etc. – and a project moving forward. Dave is too humble to point out that he did 80% of the work, and he doesn't have regular meetings with his supervisor anyway, so the subject would never come up. After a few years with the company, Dave gets bored and finds another job.
The company now has to pay recruiting costs and the ramp-up time that comes with a new person on the team. Dave, meanwhile, gets what he wanted – a promotion, and a higher pay check. The company could have saved money by giving Dave a 20% raise and a promotion (even a nominal promotion, to make him feel valued) but the management structure wasn't there.
This is how it normally goes, and this is exactly why there is such a short length of tenure in the tech industry compared to other industries.
They already are. I've talked to some recruiters who laugh at bootcamp programs on a resume. A few years ago nobody would ask me about my academic background in a job interview, but now they've started asking explicitly. I've been out of school for seven years, and nobody cared about my CS degree until this year.
The reality is that degrees and certifications will be used in hiring as long as they are a useful indicator of aptitude. HR departments need to eliminate candidates from the hiring pool. At their zenith, the bootcamp programs were useful for recruiters because only the truly dedicated survived the bootcamp long enough to graduate. But with the proliferation of such programs, I think the day is quickly approaching when the market will be oversaturated with graduates and it will cease to be a useful indicator of aptitude.
Degrees and certifications aren't about finding aptitude. They're about protecting the hiring agent from the political fallout of bad hires. "It's not my fault I hired someone who couldn't program well. I mean, he went to Stanford."
If you have exactly one opening at a fixed salary for the offer and that's all you know about the two candidates, sure. If I magically knew their technical aptitude and employability in perfect detail, being a high school dropout is not just irrelevant, but actually a positive for the candidate. Other companies are looking to hire developers as well, and you're competing over the best-looking candidates. Like, there are plenty of great developers that you can't hire because they're happy making $250k/yr at Google.
I do not live in SF. In fact in my town, dev salary tops out somewhere near 100k.
Hiring is all about filtering. What people are going to be bad news? You need to do some rough filtering to get the resume count down to a reasonable number to look through. Maybe someone mentions his hobby is building bombs. Maybe ok, but maybe it's ok to pass him over to avoid getting blown up. Or in a less extreme example, one guy has a lot of rails experience, and one guy has a lot of .net experience... if hiring for a rails job, you get more experience in hiring the guys with rails experience.
Now is filtering on college graduation always right? No. If you have a lot of patience, totally dig through and look for the gems without a degree. But if I get 100 resumes and I need to turn that list down to 20 to do a phone screen, I will prefer people that pass obvious filtering signals (college education being high on the list).
That is my personal experience to prefer people that made it through college. Obviously not everyone agrees. That is fine.
Yeah, I totally agree with you about how hiring is about filtering. The concern I have is that there's only so much filtering power you have, so anything you apply on things irrelevant to job performance will end up detracting on things you care about. There's a fairly narrow band of able-to-pass-your-hiring-filter that you're targeting. Anyone below it gets rejected, anyone far enough above it works for Google or founds a company or something. If you turn up one parameter in your filter, you're going to end up turning down the others.
Like, I remember hearing a story about a college that ran some statistics on the SAT scores of incoming students. They found that math SAT scores for their students was inversely correlated with their verbal SAT score - yet, among the general population, this correlation doesn't hold. What was happening was students with low verbal + math were getting rejected, and students with high verbal + math were going to MIT and the like, so given that they went to that particular school, they had to have lower math scores if their verbal is high and their overall suitability is in a narrow range.
I'm basically trying to make a similar argument here - given that the person you're interviewing accepts an offer there, they've got a certain level of ability-to-get-employed-as-an-engineer. If more of it comes from "having a college degree", then less of it comes from all the other things.
Or you can offer a perk google and other's WON'T offer. For example 100% remote. That brings the guy in the middle of Alabama into your candidate pool. He is not competing against an offer to Google.
Yup, it's all about knowing what you care about, what other companies care about, and what tradeoffs you're willing to make. "Being willing to hire engineers who do not have a college degree" is one.
I think you're confusing tech recruiters with those who recruit students for bootcamps.
The ITT recruiters are aggressive in getting students into the program. You are referencing agency recruiters (or perhaps internal recruiters at companies)'discriminating against candidates without a degree (or with a Bootcamp cert).
If they weren't using inflation-adjusted numbers, I'm pretty sure that would be MUCH bigger news. Assuming people have their kids at 25, that would mean, in inflation adjusted terms, that would correspond to a 40% DROP in inter-generational income for the population mentioned here.
Just assume that all newspaper headlines will use the version that maximizes sensationalism.
"In our baseline analysis, we measure income in pre-tax dollars at the household level when parents
and children are approximately thirty years old,
adjusting for inflation using the CPI-U-RS."
So essentially this whole debate centers around how realistic one thinks the CPI-U-RS rates are... If you think they underestimate the purchasing power of money in 2016, then you'll disagree with the conclusions of the washpost article.
