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Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by endisneigh on Thursday October 07, 2021 @07:25PM (#28793463)
what's wrong with blue-collar work? tech elitism never fails to amuse me.

anyway, there is a push to do the same for doctors [1] and lawyers [2], so your point is moot anyway. the problem is that with credentialed backgrounds it will never be as easy so it will always seem like tech is more accessible, which it is inherently.

finally, with respect to incarceration and being a part of a profession, unfortunately many hospitals and law firms will not hire felons, which is a problem in itself, but it's a fact. so this kind of website would be difficult for those fields. so even if med school and law school respectively weren't necessary, it would still be difficult. tech companies are very liberal in this aspect, actually.

[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/ama-s-strategic-pl...

[2] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/publications/l...

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by ditonal on Thursday October 07, 2021 @07:40PM (#28793616)
You literally directly contradict yourself. You link to two pages that have absolutely nothing to do with getting formerly incarcerated people into law/medicine, then immediately concede that there isn’t an effort to do so because they’re not welcome in those fields.

Your failure to keep two paragraphs of texts consistent and coherent badly undermines your overall point. It’s pretty clear tech as a whole is a lot less elitist than law/medicine.

People are “elitist” because there is non stop pressure to drive down wages of engineers and it’s often disguised as progressivism. It can also undermine the professional and political power of engineers if the field is constantly portrayed as easy for anyone to enter. The AMA knows this better than anyone as they’ve tightly restricted the number of new doctors for decades, so it’s highly ironic you’d even link to them at all.

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by endisneigh on Thursday October 07, 2021 @07:44PM (#28793648)
oh goodness, there's a lot to unpack here.

>You literally directly contradict yourself. You link to two pages that have absolutely nothing to do with getting formerly incarcerated people into law/medicine, then immediately concede that there isn’t an effort to do so because they’re not welcome in those fields.

I linked to the two respective institutions that lobby for physicians and lawyers respectively. They cannot be compared to some crappy random website for ex-felons going to tech. If that's what you're looking for I can find those for you, too.

Furthermore, it's disadvantaged or incarcerated. Or do you believe that people with disabilities (as referred to by both organizations explicitly) are not disadvantaged?

> People are “elitist” because there is non stop pressure to drive down wages of engineers and it’s often disguised as progressivism. It can also undermine the professional and political power of engineers if the field is constantly portrayed as easy for anyone to enter. The AMA knows this better than anyone as they’ve tightly restricted the number of new doctors for decades, so it’s highly ironic you’d even link to them at all.

there's a lot of problems with the AMA and medicine in general but it's a profession that inherently needs to be credentialed, as is law, due to the fact that failure to perform leads to more severe consequences as compared to tech.

finally you cannot compare doctors specifically to all of tech. if you're talking about health in general there has been a huge push to get more nurse practitioners and physicians assistants in the field to replace many of the doctors that PCPs have.

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by pbourke on Friday October 08, 2021 @02:40AM (#28796388)
> failure to perform leads to more severe consequences as compared to tech.

When “we” (people who write code) fuck up, things like this can and have happened:

- people die of radiation poisoning (Therac 25)

- cars crash (Toyota unintended acceleration, Tesla autopilot fails)

- rockets explode (Ariane 5)

- hundreds of millions of dollars are lost (Knight Capital)

- the financial information of millions is exposed (Equifax)

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by zactato on Friday October 08, 2021 @09:56AM (#28799342)
Isn't this why we have unit testing, code review, CI?

Also most of us aren't working in these industries. Most software developers build consumer apps for buying stuff or serving ads.

All of Facebook was just down from a single error. No one died.

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by nickthemagicman on Friday October 08, 2021 @03:44AM (#28796716)
This is crystal clear, to the point, and well put. The response to your comment makes no sense and is all over the place.

Anything that starts with 'there's a lot to unpack ' is going to be mental gymnastics communicated in a patronizing tone to defend someone's ego.

Just wanted to say I agree with all of your points and think it does tech a disservice to treat it like a blue collar job instead of a profession but at the same time the lack of professional strictness has led to alot of rapid innovation.

So it's hard to tell what's right.

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by endisneigh on Friday October 08, 2021 @05:46AM (#28797379)
> treat it like a blue collar job instead of a profession

Blue collar work isn’t a profession?

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by nickthemagicman on Friday October 08, 2021 @06:04AM (#28797484)
it's my impression that professionals are business people lawyers doctors etc
Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by Cd00d on Friday October 08, 2021 @10:15AM (#28799510)
Trades people are certainly professionals.
Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by nickthemagicman on Friday October 08, 2021 @11:11AM (#28800181)
Not saying that trades people aren't professional and work with professionalism.

But there's a common understanding of the noun professional as the upper tier White collar jobs.

accountants lawyers doctors etc

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by nomdep on Thursday October 07, 2021 @07:37PM (#28793582)
There is nothing wrong, except that, usually in a blue collar job, everyone is replaceable and the salaries are low to average.

Yes, all of this come from fear of not being able to make a living as a programmer in 10 years

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by auslegung on Thursday October 07, 2021 @08:01PM (#28793775)
> Yes, all of this come from fear of not being able to make a living as a programmer in 10 years

Caveat: I'm in the USA, so what I'm about to say may only apply here. I don't know the market for software engineers outside the USA.

In 10 years, you and I will have 10 more years of experience than we do now. We will probably be twice as valuable to a company. Anyone who joins the field today will forever be behind us in years of experience. Years of experience means nothing if the experience isn't valuable, so we need to continue improving. That's a good thing.

I don't know the exact distribution, but not everyone who joins the field today will even be able to compete with us for jobs in 10 years. I'm just guessing here, but I think the majority of people, or at least a very large minority, don't make it to senior level. Some quit and change careers, others don't want to or can't get there.

I'm in no way concerned about job security in 10 years. I see AI being a larger threat to our jobs than other developers. But I doubt it will be a threat to my career. I have about 30 years left, and each year I have more experience than before. So AI would have to overtake me at some point in the next 30 years, and in the meantime also overtake /lots/ of others. The software engineering field would be fairly decimated by AI before it took my job.

Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by nickthemagicman on Friday October 08, 2021 @03:53AM (#28796764)
Does experience matter in technology that much?
Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by petr25102018 on Friday October 08, 2021 @05:10AM (#28797184)
Exactly. We see it again and again that years of experience don't matter unless it is with a specific tech, and tech gets replaced all the time.
Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by navd on Friday October 08, 2021 @09:45AM (#28799222)
Yes but from the frame that the amount of diff problems you experience matters. Not your 10 years of experience solving 1 set of problems
Re:Underdog Devs: supporting formerly incarcerated and disad... by endisneigh on Thursday October 07, 2021 @07:48PM (#28793679)
everyone is replaceable in tech too (or basically any job for that matter).