Learn to Code
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Biden’s comment about coal workers is deplorable. I’d like to blame it on the dementia but I’m not sure. A comment like that can only come out of the mouth of someone who has never performed a proper hard days work in their life.
Also, It’s quite entitled and deluded to think that your role cannot be replaced or made redundant. It’s hard. But it’s reality.
On the ease of farming “You put a seed in, you put dirt on top”.
Michael Bloomberg
Another opportunity.
There was a memorial Mass held for my late mother (she passed in late May) at our old suburban DC parish on Saturday, and prior, one of our old family friends came to me in sheer terror and told me how grateful he was his daughter “survived the purge”.
They really do believe federal employment is on the level of sinecures.
And didn’t then-climate Czar, John Kerry suggest coal miners could work in the solar panel industry?
I understand that no one is irreplaceable and layoffs or “reductions in force” are a fact of life for most sectors of the economy. That said, I never gloat over anyone losing their job (except for certain elected officials) because it happened to me once with a job I thought was secure, and I do not ever want to go through that again.
I empathize Elaine, but the Feds have promoted the idea in recent decades that jobs are life sinecures. Considering reductions in force after every war that hit the military I find this passing strange and a testament to the joined at the hip nature of public employee unions and the Democrat party.
Federal employees who believe in life long employment by a single (government) employer are certainly out of touch with how employment in America currently functions. Furthermore, lazy, ineffective, or recalcitrant employees ought to be canned.
However, we should remember that it used to be very common in our country to work for the same company for decades and many even retired with a pension.
Our society continues to view everything, including people, as replaceable and needing continuous change (“upgrades”). This is not really for the better.
“Our society continues to view everything, including people, as replaceable and needing continuous change (“upgrades”). This is not really for the better.”
It’s not that people are replaceable, it’s that their jobs are. A persons worth should not be solely defined by their job. We are first sons and daughters of God, second we are valued by our importance within our families (whatever that is) and lastly we are what job we perform. That should be the order of how we value ourselves and others. I suffered redundancy once during the GFC and it felt horrible. I’ve also been at the other end of making a decision of letting someone go. It also felt horrible. But that’s life.
Nonetheless, jobs are not necessarily for life anymore because the world is ever changing and so is technology.
If a role is not serving the organisation anymore, or if the organisation is financially struggling to keep a person on or if a person is a lousy employee taking advantage of the organisation then it makes no sense to keep someone on. At the end of the day it’s what’s best for the organisations survival. Any business owner/manager will tell you this.
Learn to code?
There is a whole process to this.
You got to have a software requirements specification to state what you want the software to do. IEEE Std. 830.
Then you’ve got to have a software design description to explain how the software will do what you want it to do. IEEE Std. 1016.
You’ve got to have a software verification and validation plan so that you can ensure that the software does what you want it to do in the way you want it to work. IEEE Std. 1012.
You’ve got to have a software configuration management plan to explain how you’re going to name and control configuration items, perform configuration audits, do version control, and release the software for use. IEEE Std. 828.
You’ve got to have a software test plan and procedure to explain how you are going to do software component, integration, system, and acceptance testing. IEEE Std. 829.
For safety-critical software, you’ve got to have a software safety plan with a resulting software safety analysis to demonstrate that the software will operate correctly under abnormal conditions and events. IEEE Std. 1228.
And cyber security is a whole other ball of wax.
Coding is a very small portion of the work needed to be done. But it’s the sexy part that everyone wants to do. Populating a requirements traceability matrix with requirement line items, software design features, test procedure steps, and cross-referenced lines of code is something that almost all software coders hate doing. That’s why software is so damn buggy and there’s a Microsoft update every other week. And that’s why there have been several notable aircraft crashes due to problematic embedded Boolean logic in FPGAs controlling avionics.
PS, I wrote the software engineering programs for both digital I&C (operational technology) and non-I&C (information technology) at my current employer, Neutrons ‘R Us, and at several previous employers since the mid-1990s. My work has always met with acceptance by the regulator (US NRC); they never say, “Good job.” They only say, “It’s acceptable.” Therefore, I despise development systems like Agile and today’s mentality of simply coding and running self-driving Tesla cars. Remember, folks, this is how Artificial Intelligence is being developed: no adherence to standard software life cycle engineering, no real industry standards; just write lines of code and see if it works. These people are playing with fire, and as Donald has often said, they don’t know that fire is hot.
Yikes LQC. That’s frightening. AI is frightening.
I refuse to even use ChatGPT to help me write a paragraph. In fact I’ll go further and say if you use a computer to help you critically think or design or solve a problem, rather than pen and paper, you will always come up with an inferior result. Always.
We weren’t allowed to design on the computer many many years ago at design school. It was always a pen, yellow tracing paper and your brain. The computer was the last step to draw up and annotate your design. I tell my daughter this when she is writing a dissertation. Her best work will come putting pen to paper because that is how the brain works best.
Technology is a double edge sword.
Ezabelle:
“Technology is a double edged sword.”
Robots are driving farm equipment, harvesters, planters and all the rest. See Youtube.
Robots are replacing a great number of jobs, including surgery.
AI knows what the programmer knows. Mostly nothing creative. My two run ins with AI made me the loser.
AI is now handling the mail. My son’s package went to Michigan, then to Wisconsin. then back to New York and finally to Ohio where he lives.
Be prepared to suffer mediocrity for the savings.
“Be prepared to suffer mediocrity for the savings.”
True Mary
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“AI is now handling the mail. My son’s package went to Michigan, then to Wisconsin. then back to New York and finally to Ohio where he lives.”
I got a City of Springfield (IL) parking ticket in June after juuust missing the time limit on the parking meter. I mailed a check for the parking fine in on the day before the parking fine was supposed to double if still not paid. The post office I mailed it from is literally only 3 or 4 blocks down the street from city hall. About a week and a half later I got a notice from the city saying the parking fine was now double because it still wasn’t paid. I called the city treasurer’s office and they said the check still had not arrived, but if it did arrive and was postmarked on or before the deadline they would not charge me extra. They added that this is not uncommon because mail no longer travels directly from one part of Springfield to another anymore — it gets routed through Champaign or St Louis (80-100 miles away). I have never had anything lost in the mail before and yes, I should have just gone directly to city hall and paid the ticket in person, but this is insane. (I also see comments on Facebook and other forums blaming Trump for this situation, of course)
For decades Elaine I have not trusted the US Snail for anything valuable. Back in the nineties I had a fee check from a Bank in Dwight go missing which was mailed to my office a few blocks away. I courier anything of importance since then.
From what I’ve seen the tech sector has more than its fair share of moral and ethical lapses and wrongdoing. They were involved in social media censorship. Pushing DEI, having all manner of hype, and used as a shield for scam artists to carry out Wall Street swindles. A very morally impoverished environment in which to train general purpose AI. A real Oliver Twist world, with a ready supply of Fagins.
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From what I’ve seen the tech sector practices ageism. They often go for the cheapest hire over the most qualified. Many of the younger workers are treated like they are expected to be married to the job. When older workers do keep up with the tech they face the charge of being “over qualified,” when the primary issue is their wages as compared to a new younger hire. Much like the world of Logan’s Run, the only thing missing is the flashing crystal in the palm of the hand.
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The H1-B visas have been abused so they can import labor that is little better than indentured servants. Disney replaced their IT with foreign workers. Lots of problems.
LQC:
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I’ve noticed how often people don’t like to sweat the details. People with only vague, poorly thought out project ideas. Starting coding before having at least a rough program design can lead to a person painting(coding) themselves into a corner and making bad engineering tradeoffs.