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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the show-me-the-money dept.

The "real" challenge technology presents isn't that it replaces workers, but rather displaces them.

The robots perform tasks that humans previously performed. The fear is that they are replacing human jobs, eliminating work in distribution centers and elsewhere in the economy. It is not hard to imagine that technology might be a major factor causing persistent unemployment today and threatening “more to come.”

Surprisingly, the managers of distribution centers and supply chains see things rather differently: in surveys they report that they can’t hire enough workers, at least not enough workers who have the necessary skills to deal with new technology. “Supply chain” is the term for the systems used to move products from suppliers to customers. Warehouse robots are not the first technology taking over some of the tasks of supply chain workers, nor are they even seen as the most important technology affecting the industry today.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/scarce-skills-not-scarce-jobs/390789/

 
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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday April 30 2015, @08:25AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday April 30 2015, @08:25AM (#176990) Homepage Journal

    A large problem is the interview process itself; it sets people up to fail. In recent history, I interviewed with two large companies, with a large resume of open source code behind it, many years at my then current employer, and letters of recommendation; etc. Both times, I got hit with coding questions out of a CS textbook, and struggled with them. I'm self-taught, and only took a few programming classes in college for an easy A. Algorithms are not something that comes naturally to me, and when I have to write a large one, I either google something close to what I want, or go through several iterations working out specific behaviors and such.

    Coding questions do nothing to help weed out bad employers especially if you're dealing with shit that comes out of CS101. I've met plenty of people who could write an algorithm to detect if two rectangles are overlapping, but couldn't handle managing or working with a major codebase.

    When I did hiring interviews, I never asked any specific coding questions, or ask them to write me a piece of code in X period of time. If they had open source work on their CV, I'd go to github, sourceforge, or whatever, and take a look at their contributions. If I couldn't get an answer that way, I would pose questions on how you would solve it and be intentionally vague, and have them take me through their answer. Open ended questions lets you see the thought process and if they can look at a larger picture, usually by the questions they ask.

    Of course, that requires interviewers to put actual effort into the process. If I wanted to recruit devs for a business and was in charge of HR practices, I'd go headhunting, find people in the community, and not insult them by asking themselves to prove themselves; but seeing if they're actually what they appear to be. We haven't had a huge dev shortage on SoylentNews, but if we 1. had money 2. were going to hire someone from outside SN, I'd go hunting through commit logs of other CMSes, maybe some preference to Perl, and try and get in contact.

    Strangely enough, when you go looking for something, and treat people like a human being, you tend to get much better results.

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