I... don't think that's true. There's more jobs being created and more and newer technologies, and not every skill is universally applicable. If anything students should be more prepared to learn and apply themselves because there are actually lucrative careers waiting for them (assuming they choose to go into this field). Once the machines start writing their own code and scripting their own automation and plugging in their own power cords... well, then we've got bigger problems
How "lucrative" it will be at the end only seems to play a small factor, it's all just too abstract for some people to understand how they can go from Hello World to 100k a year.
Out of 2 college classes of pure cs and cs/business students 200 or so students (graduated 2017), I only think 25% (maybe less) went on to actually write build software/web/apps.
Also once machines smart enough to writing their code i'm sure we will have much bigger societal issues then just us programmers. I see that point written/said so much it's the biggest platitude of the decade.
Isn't that true of anything you don't understand? That is to say it's not always easy to connect a -> b -> c with only a cursory understanding of something. But trivially we can see that technical expertise is valuable - and surprisingly (still) increasingly so at that. Furthermore, knowing how to solve problems will always be valuable. As far as your statistic goes, that's quite a hand-wavy and unsupported assertion. To what population does this generalize? What is the source? And if only 25% are going on to careers as developers, does that not imply that the labor market isn't necessarily growing fast enough to outstrip available need and thus lower salaries?
Absolutely true. Safety, good schools. Most major cities compromise on both if you're middle class or below. In our case we're already planning our move away in time for public school and it's a few years out yet.
My guess would be that the long tail of proprietary (due to existing market, mergers, de-facto standards, etc.) favors a greedy incumbent, which has basically never in history worked in the favor of the many. But published, open standards allow for greater adoption and participation, as well as a longer support lifespan.
This isn't a fair comparison. Community kitchens and public parks aren't undergirding every modern functional information-enabled economy. I'm not speculating who should be charged or how much/in what way, but it needs to be supported somehow if we want to continue to reap its benefits. There is no free lunch.
Bloomberg ran a story [1] about a supply chain attack against apple, amazon, and others. It made big headlines, but evidence never emerged. It is now generally believed that the story was false.
No one has found these chips and shown them, and the likes of apple and amazon have issued very direct denials (that would be very clear securities fraud if they were false). Much more direct than statements by corporations usually are.
So... not that I think it's necessarily easy but how did you score such a lucrative gig at google? How can I do the same? Do they hire generalists? Thanks.
I'm a generalist as well. I can't help you out too much. It's mostly luck.
If you study Cracking the Coding Interview, and you know that book inside and out, and you feel confident you can solve all of the questions in it (you can ignore the Java/C++ stuff if you're not applying for one of those jobs) -- you have a /chance/ to get hired.
But there's lots of smart people with those skills who fail the interview every day.
