I've been working with speech systems on and off since 1998. They're all pretty bad in my opinion. They're not even almost there yet.
I remember studies from years back that speech is far lower throughput than typing for nearly every language except Chinese.
I hate talking, especially to a computer, when I have a typing interface. Speech is such a serial, synchronous information channel. That fact paired with how context-limited speech systems are makes for a very poor experience. It's really going to take an inventive design to get people to use speech regularly for machine interaction. We're just not there yet.
If you're a competent programmer who uses these terms and phrases, then indignation is not an unreasonable reaction.
However, I think it's a completely valid article if you've ever experienced the interactions between an unproductive programmer and their non-technical manager. I've witnessed this dance every week for the past 3 years. The programmer in this case has used every one of those phrases except "platform independent".
The thing is, you just can't detect a programmer is bullshitting by just hearing those terms - thus making it a misleading article. There are all sorts of programmers out there - those who use these terms and work a lot (on those things), those who don't use them but still work on them, those who use these terms but don't actually work satisfactorily, and those who neither use these terms nor work. Correlation is not causation here is what I want to say.
When I ditched cable TV about 7 years ago I lost track of these outlets. I can't say I've missed them. I occasionally open cnn.com if I'm bored, mostly because it's quick to type.
I have a (physical) subscription to the Economist, which is where I get all my serious news. I can't tell you how great it is to read the news without the page content shifting all around because of ads loading.
The latter was difficult. I was emotionally attached; it felt good to put that issue on the counter ("I'm smart, informed, discerning!"); and there was nothing else. But alas, as soon as The Economist started with their tech and software focus spreads it quickly dawned on me that these guys just know how to sound authoritative. That was a bad move on their part.
Having been a "salaried contractor" for my second job, I learned to avoid those positions like the plague. When customers stop buying the company's software, guess who's the first to get the ax? Also, you get to sit by and watch project managers agree to all sorts of outlandish features that you'll be stuck implementing.
It really wasn't that bad as a first job out of college. The travel was sometimes enjoyable, and I was really close with my coworkers, most of whom were of a similar age and place in their life.
As for getting the ax, that didn't happen to me, but even if it had, I've never had problems finding a job, nor have I ever lived paycheck-to-paycheck. It'd be inconvenient but that's about it.
Agreed. Avoid any software consulting job where someone technical isn't in the feature design phase. It will suck your soul out, crush it, and then the project will fail anyway.
I interviewed there in 2012. The engineer called me, did his little talk and we jumped into the questions. His first question was the subset sum problem. The literal problem. It wasn't even couched in a practical application. So I said "this is subset sum. You can solve it with dynamic programming. I would look it up in a book." His response was "but I want you to solve it." I stopped the interview and thanked him for his time.
I'm a senior engineer. Those types of interviews are to stoke the egos of green engineers who remember the solutions to their algo finals questions. If I can look it up in a book, it's not worth the time to quiz me on it.
Yeah, no. Senior people don't want someone to waste time coming up with their own bug ridden solution when it's readily available elsewhere in a peer reviewed form. That kind of experience is what makes gives them the senior qualifier.
And I would bet in a large subset of those cases it's because the person implementing those tests and the person interpreting the results aren't the same. And that neither understands basic statistical hypothesis testing.
I remember studies from years back that speech is far lower throughput than typing for nearly every language except Chinese.
I hate talking, especially to a computer, when I have a typing interface. Speech is such a serial, synchronous information channel. That fact paired with how context-limited speech systems are makes for a very poor experience. It's really going to take an inventive design to get people to use speech regularly for machine interaction. We're just not there yet.