- Robots Will Take Our Jobs (Wired) — I agree with Kevin Kelly that (in my words) software and hardware are eating wetware, but disagree that This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots. Civilizations which depend on specialization reward work and penalize idleness. We already have more people than work for them, and if we’re not to be creating a vast disconnected former workforce then we (society) need to get a hell of a lot better at creating jobs and not destroying them.
- Why Workers are Losing the War Against Machines (The Atlantic) — There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
- Early Quora Design Notes — I love reading post-mortems and learning from what other people did. Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s tricky and not always the first page in the flow. Ideally, you should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.
- Free Data Science Books — I don’t mean free as in some guy paid for a PDF version of an O’Reilly book and then posted it online for others to use/steal, but I mean genuine published books with a free online version sanctioned by the publisher. That is, “the publisher has graciously agreed to allow a full, free version of my book to be available on this site.” (via Stein Debrouwere)
ENTRIES TAGGED "jobs"
Four short links: 1 January 2013
Silicon Beats Meat, Workers against Machines, Quora Design Notes, and Free Data Science Books
Overfocus on tech skills could exclude the best candidates for jobs
Is the unemployment problem about a lack of qualified applicants in the workforce?
At the second RailsConf, David Heinemeier Hansson told the audience about a recruiter trying to hire with “5 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.” DHH told him “Sorry; I’ve only got 4 years.” We all laughed (I don’t think there’s anyone in the technical world who hasn’t dealt with a clueless recruiter), but little did we know…
Economic impact of open source on small business
Results from an in-depth study of open source's role in small and medium businesses.
A few months back, Tim O’Reilly and Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO of Endurance International Group (EIG), had a discussion about the web hosting business. They talked specifically about how much of Hari’s success had been enabled by open source software. But Hari wasn’t just telling his success story to Tim, but rather was more interested in finding…
O'Reilly Radar 12/20/11: Kindle Lending Library, a step forward for indoor nav
Information related to the 12/20/11 episode of O'Reilly Radar.
Access the script and associated links from the December 20, 2011 edition of O'Reilly Radar. Featuring: Why Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library is a bad deal for publishers, the arrival of indoor navigation, and Reid Hoffman on how technology can create jobs.
Developer Week in Review: Two giants fall
Steve Jobs and the App Store, goodbye to Dennis Ritchie, and an internal Google critique goes public.
Better late than never, a few thoughts on Steve Jobs. Also, a Unix pioneer leaves us, and Google's dirty laundry is accidentally hung out to dry.
Hiring trends among the major platform players
The battle for the Internet's points of control requires amassing talent.
Consistent with the recent flurry of articles about hiring wars, many platform companies have increased their number of job postings. Winning the battle for the Internet's points of control requires amassing talent.
Amazon's cloud platform still the largest, but others are closing the gap
Measured in terms of (U.S.) job postings, Amazon's Cloud Computing platform is still larger than Google's App Engine. What's interesting is that the gap has closed over the past year.
The number of Hadoop jobs continue to rise
While still a small fraction of data management job postings, the number of job posts that mention "hadoop" continue to grow steadily. Year-over-year, there were 300% more such job posts in the first seven months of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009. The fraction of "hadoop" jobs posted by California companies remain high, but is definitely lower than what it was last year.
The US Online Job Market Improved Slightly in July
Measured in terms of online job postings, the U.S. job market† improved slightly in July. This blog entry shows two views of the number of job postings per day: note the slight uptick in July 2009 in both graphs. The worst year-over-year decline occurred in April, the online job market subsequently shed less postings in May and June. Given that July was an improvement over May/June, one would hope that the stage is set for a sustained upward trend.
The US Online Job Market Was (still) Down Big In June 2009
Updating my post from early June, the U.S. online job market still hasn’t shown signs of recovering from steady declines that began in September of last year. Compared to the same period last year, there were 50% less job postings in June 2009.
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