I grew up in an area like that. One of my goals if I ever get wealthy is to simply open up something cheap and fun to do in small towns to combat this. Like rock climbing gyms for $30 a month. Or small indoor water parks.
I wouldn't even care if that chain of businesses made much money, I'd consider it a public service.
You could modernize an old idea that used to work pretty well for some people:
Cue the Village People singing: "Y.M.C.A...." :-)
Nowadays we live in a less Christian society that's also less accepting of even nominal gender segregation, but I think the old YMCAs and YWCAs still provide some evidence in favor of your idea.
So I hope to see the Young People's Rational Associations moving into small towns. :-)
Maybe some YMRAs can even cooperate with other educational and religious organizations that favor healthy exercise and the study of logic. :-)
How much do you think VR and Oculus Rift will impact the experience of growing up in a small town? A kid will be able to experience much of the world, no matter where they are.
I hope it has a positive impact; I don't see how it couldn't.
No more than video already does. VR is a gimmick on video. It's pretty cool in and of itself, but it's not a replacement for live experience. For example, no matter how cool your VR driving simulator, you don't get the feeling of your body's inertia being shifted around. Or the experience of a place without a big plastic lump on your face :)
The internet has already been a massive boon to fighting boredom in general, sure. If you are highly literate (~15%) it's difficult to be bored when all of the world's knowledge is at your fingertips. Even if you aren't highly literate, there are still X-box games. ;) And you're right, VR will just help even more.
That being said, I do see some issues with our youth habitually living in gaming ecosystems rather than in the real world. For instance, a couple studies lately have noted empathetic behavior sharply dropping among millennials, [1] which I would think comes from spending far less time interacting face-to-face with anyone during their formative years -- their emotional attachments are probably not as strongly imprinted when staring at a screen all the time.
Internet and VR are still a huge net win imo. Real-life, positive social outlets are crucial as well though.
I empathize and care more about my online friends than anyone I know in real life - including most of my intermediate family. While I could be the exception to the norm, the people with whom I interact seem to be similar. Of course, we could all be exceptions to the norm...
The study you linked does mention other causes which seem more likely than device use:
>As discussed previously, narcissism, which is negatively
correlated with empathy, has been rising in American college
students over a similar time period (Twenge et al.,
2008).
The current college generation are extreme narcissists. To a disgusting degree. Even terrible tragedies (such as the terrorist attacks in France) are met with "how can I make this about me?" attitudes. A brief browse through Twitter shows this isn't an uncommon thing.
I have no data on whether or not narcissism may or may not be correlated with internet/electronic devices. (I haven't bothered to search this statement, so if a study shows up on the first page of Google results - didn't bother looking! :) )
Either way - I look forward to habitually living in a gaming ecosystem rather than the real world.
I don't even like Facebook much, but I still strongly preferred the design of it over Google+.
Not to mention Google+ was truly asinine about forcing users to merge their YT and G+ accounts (and even gmail, iirc), it was all just very confusing and obtuse. I don't want a SSO. I don't want a G+ account for every Gmail account.
I didn't want to have to fuck around with merging my accounts, tethering each YT channel to my social network, etc. I want -- and have business needs for -- a division between the sites I use. I frequently need several different usernames and identities on different sites, even if the sites are owned by the same company, as sometimes I am creating social accounts for clients.
Google was, IMHO, trying to be shady and act like every youtube comment was actually Google+ activity, simply so they could claim, "We have XXX million active G+ users each month!!" They weren't and you don't. I'm glad their shady network and backhanded business practices failed.
> I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why
In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need, streamline the steps needed for the most common and/or important tasks, and spend a gazillion hours making it look pretty-- not only will no one be impressed, but someone will always complain about something. There is never any 'right' way to do it. It's a black hole.
With back end stuff, it's like, does it work without making a mess and not overuse resources? Ok, good job! What are we building next?
In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need
IMO that's the exact problem - you can't anticipate every need. You need to do user testing, iterate over UI layouts, etc. etc... by comparison, backend work is straightforward.
I think it's because it has historically been low-status work and stigma about working on the front-end persists. The majority of people I've worked with are eager to throw up their hands and commiserate with others about their lack of understanding about CSS (which, for some reason, indicates you are of higher status) rather than learning about how it works and doing a bit of memorization.
I personally have no problem doing front-end work when I have to and I think the fact that I don't drag my feet or complain about CSS has allowed me to learn it to a degree that has made it reasonable and quick to do.
Also most of the shitty parts of front-end development have been abstracted away with things like CSS vendor auto-prefixing and tools like ClojureScript and reagent. One of my favorite parts of the stack now, actually (when I can use those tools).
This isn't a web problem, this is a division of labor problem. There's plenty of specialization to be had to as you advance career wise, and by logical progression of the web platform. It sounds like you haven't found the right position fit, which isn't uncommon early in your career.
Totally comiserate with you. I'm not up on all of the latest frameworks but I hate not having a good compiler that catches syntax errors, typos, case mismatch, etc until runtime.
Right, but my question is more "what do you even mean when you say web?". For example, you could take a 'web' job and actually have nothing to do with frontend HTML/JS/CSS, and just be writing APIs.
"Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support.
The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply unable to learn fairly basic concepts. It mostly came down to raw intellect. I'm sure the same would be true for aspiring developers.
Don't count on it. I failed out of college due to my inability to take and pass tests, yet at work, I'm being promoted constantly to higher ranks due to my productivity.
Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend.
Source? It's all anecdotal but I know far, far too many great developers who never even took the SAT (or did horrible on them) and are wildly successful in their careers. I have a hard time believing this is "extremely rare" especially considering most colleges now don't rely on them to a large degree.
It is okay in the industry to discriminate employees based on whether they just graduated from a top tier school like Stanford. Or whether they have years of experience at a top tier company like Google. Or answer absurdly irrelevant puzzles, or implement red-black trees from memory on a whiteboard. Or whether they can answer aggressive questions demanding to explain their business value. Or whether they are a "culture fit" (too black, too old, too female, etc.) Or whether they have enough names of technologies you use in the resume. Or whether their resumes are well-formatted.
In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so. But suggest that we could ever choose employees based on measures of "intelligence" or academic performance, and you are obviously doing something horrible and nobody should see your post.
There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria - how well you can con the interviewers, or whether they think you're just like them, or whether you present social proof that you convinced sufficiently many other companies in the past, or whether you are literally a friend of an employee.
> In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so
No way. All those reasons you mentioned above you've really seen people on HN defend those without being downvoted? I only ever see HN against many of those items of discrimination you mention...
> There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria
Except they're not objective but you're right they are standardized. This is not a good way of measuring people for many reasons. The more importance you put into standardize testing the more you get teachers teaching only the content contained within and you put more weight against a teacher's grading styles (which can vary wildly even on standardized testing when they're graded away from the school).
Standardized testing probably has its place but as criteria for employment is laughable at best.
I still can't fathom how monetizing what are basically just shared network drives, a feature already built into windows, is a successful venture.
Hire an IT guy and have him setup network shares, done. But obviously there seems to be some need I'm overlooking, considering the revenue these companies are making.
I wouldn't even care if that chain of businesses made much money, I'd consider it a public service.