Lots of people make this claim with no evidence. It's understandable to feel insecure about future career prospects in our fast-changing industry, but honestly I'll believe it when I see it.
I bet a lot of the frontend guys will have problems when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web. It's harder now to develop a LOB app than when it was twenty years ago and I think this will change at some point. Same for a lot of "data scientists". Unless you are on the forefront of development there will be more and more tools that make the data accessible to regular people instead of having to go to data scientists.
Yes, software developers will always be in demand. The profession stays but the people in it get quickly marked as obsolete and replaced by new people.
The promise of visual designers has existed for the past 30 years and it has always blown up spectacularly because everything that can be made to conform to canned design principles is already there, and everything else actually requires non-trivial knowledge that is not easily automated.
Design guidelines change too, and accommodating existing software to new designs is not automatable either.
And for data science? Simple correlations are trivial, but doing useful data science requires domain understanding of the business and products and factors such as seasonality, markets and so on.
As someone who got into frontend as a more specific discipline from more generalized design/dev, I can say that my experience does comport. I don't know if I'd call it "blue collar" necessarily, but I'm looking for a job and it's tough to find the inspiration.
> when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web
Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.
Are you suggesting the fact that there is not much PHP work around means that the career prospects of the field are in decline? One language is not indicative of the whole, this comment is not evidence either. And besides you seem to be assuming both that legacy work does not happen and that people can't adapt. I know both a fresh out of school person who does cobol and a mid 50s JavaScript UX person who started on punch cards.
Actually, there is a quite a bit of jobs that require PHP considering the plethora of sites built on Drupal and WordPress. I guess it depends where you live.
I actually intepreted that as the jobs require a very low level of skill and provide low compensation—exactly what you’d expect from making a job “blue collar”.
Most of the skill in that area is not working with the CMS but doing the crazy complex integrations that clients ask of them. (And of saving the work of not-as-skilled/too-skilled-for-their-own-good crowd.)
Security through obscurity? Old technology and keeping disconnected from the Internet are probably decent additional security measures, although they shouldn't rely on it. Like the article says though, we still want these computers to be new enough to actually work
"Old technology and keeping disconnected from the Internet are probably decent additional security measures, although they shouldn't rely on it. "
It's called an airgap, and is easily the most effective countermeasure to cyber attacks, and, in conjunction with physical security and careful 2-man control/people management, should certainly be relied on.
The airgap technique didn't work so well for the Iranians. Stuxnet was designed to jump gaps via USB keys. Luckily, 8" floppies don't have enough capacity for a virus.
Assuming you have an impenetrable perimeter is a common reason for failing to secure the interior of a network. i.e. "It doesn't matter if we use Windows XP/don't patch things/don't use encryption because it's airgapped." Then, once someone does breach your impenetrable perimeter (through an insider, side-channel, whatever), the whole thing falls.
So yes, a network designed with the assumption that it will be constantly barraged with attacks is probably more secure than one designed be people who (subconsciously or not) discount the possibility of malicious traffic ever occurring.
It's a common meme - back in 1999, when I was running IT in a startup, a lot of the recent engineers who had come from Stanford were offended by our firewall. There claim was that our network should not have a firewall rule, because, by having a firewall, we believed that we were somehow "less vulnerable" than if we had no firewall, and that if we eliminated the firewall, then all of our servers, desktops, etc... would be secured, and, if someone were to get inside our network, they would not have any advantage.
The reality, is that you want to do both - have a rock solid firewall, and secure your internal servers.
In the case of a Nuclear Missile Silo, I'd like to believe that as much as possible was run with switches, dials, and manual controls which require physically penetrating the perimeter of the silo, and having all sorts of advanced credentials, procedures, and codes to actually accomplish anything. (Said PAL codes being supplied by the President or their designate).
Stuxnet also targeted more recent machines/networks. It'd be far harder to convince Lt. Smith to insert an arbitrary 8" floppy disk into their TS work computer than a USB drive.
I don't think anyone's said it yet, but... this is what an attorney is for. This website is stupid.
It's bad enough to trust any confidential information completely to a third party, let alone a website that could lose your information or go defunct in a few years. At least disclosures to attorneys are legally protected to the n-th degree, and the business is brick-and-mortar with a known location.
Add to that the fact that a regular e-mail is something that could easily be forgotten about, caught by a spam e-mail, lost when you switch accounts, etc. The problems with this idea are endless
Running an ad on mobile for a site that's not optimized for mobile is a HUGE red flag, not some afterthought that should be mentioned in the conclusion. I'd wager anything most of Facebook's traffic comes from smartphones and tablets nowadays.
The interesting thing to note is that he has different results for people that come from Google - maybe people have different expectations about the website depending on whether they're looking for it on Google or just sitting in an app like Facebook?
To be honest, I think Cook is doing a damn good job considering the big shoes he had to fill when Jobs left. Tim Cook will never be the dictator that Jobs was, nor will he command the same "respect" that Jobs had. When you not only founded a company, but also brought them from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world (a few months ago), you have a certain gravitas that your successor will never have.
Also, Tim Cook seems to be passionate about the company, especially given his emotional rebuttal of activist investors at the last shareholders meetings.[1]
Nope, probably not ever going to be profitable, but I barely have any operating costs either. My project is called Simple Blocker, and it's an extension for Chrome that lets you block websites to help you concentrate. It was designed to be as simple as can be (hence the name), while still having all the essential features.
I don't really have any plans to monetize it, and I think asking for donations is a bit tacky. But who knows - it's good practice with Javascript and the Chrome API even if it never breaks even.
@bigmario
I used your extension and liked it. (I'm currently trying a different one). I don't think it's tacky to put up a donate button. I'm happy to throw a cup of coffee amount to free apps. There's even a few that I use often where I donate yearly during the holidays.
