That's very true, and it's only in recent decades that the US has been a signatory to the Berne Convention, however that's not true for patents. In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity.

BTW, you're right about other countries ignoring copyright but I only mentioned China because of its huge impact, essentially it's the quintessential example.

Which probably had more to do with the US officially endorsing patent theft and even paying out premiums to people who brought them stolen technology/knowledge.

Not because the US was so respecting of other countries patents, quite the opposite was actually the case [0].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news...

I also have to disagree that "twitter speak and memes" is not intelligent communication -- just because something is new, doesn't mean it's less intelligent.

One thing that is often missing from these conversations is that arguably the goal of education isn't really to teach you any specific skill, but rather to give you the capability to learn things by yourself.

Part of this process will necessarily mean teaching you things like reading and writing, but whenever I hear "My school didn't teach me X, so I had to teach myself, wasn't my school terrible", I think "no, probably not."

I'm British myself but I've been living in the US west-coast for the past 7.5 years because I get paid 2-3x more here for the exact same work (heck, even 4x if you don't count London).

The reasons for the disparity are as complex as they are legion - but I believe the size of the market you can sell to matters the most - and with the UK out of the EU the size of the effective market it can realistically sell to has shrunk considerably, so I don't see things getting better at all for the UK eng sector.

...secondarily, the UK is having the same problem the US is having with boomer-generation people still working and occupying senior positions... and housing... which limits opportunities for nominal upward mobility in younger professionals, which in-turn suppresses total-comp. This is especially a problem given the UK's entrenched business culture which I'm not personally a fan of.

https://qr.ae/pGP3SR

That does not say good things about the engineering culture in the UK.

I remember reading an article here on HN within the past year (lost the link, sorry) that ascribed it to traditional/establishment UK managerial thinking that all departments of a company, including engineering, are strictly subordinate to management. Consequently engineers of any level won't be involved in managerial discussions nor to set the direction of the company. Management wants people they can give orders to and won't have to listen to, and who they can sack if management's ideas fail, and keep the rewards for themselves (naturally). Of course the inherent problem with that approach is you lose-out on good ideas for the company's direction from engineering, and miss important early feedback.

Whereas my experience working here in the US, the west-coast, at least, is that eng is part of the decision-making processes at every level - though my experiences are necessarily limited as I only really have direct personal experiences with software-engineering companies - but I see that other west-coast companies do take their own SWEs seriously - take Nordstrom for example, they still run their own e-commerce division instead of just farming it out as other retailers would do - not to mention Amazon.

The exception to this are companies that pride themselves on their silicon valley culture (Google etc) although some of those still choose to take advantage of the cheap local market.

And it makes sense, if you can't rely on automatic systems to do part of your work, you will be trained by your daily tasks to be a more powerful thinker.

If what the company do is hard, being ok will not cut it. You cannot google your way into innovation, you can't copy/paste architecture design, and your calculator won't save you from a logical mistake.

I'm personnally very adapted to agile envs with margin of errors and a lot of feedback loops. But a waterfall is more challenging, because I'm not born in it. And you don't use scrum to build the path to moon landing.

More than that, I arised in the "a good dev is lazy" period, where working smart, not hard was praised. But hitting 30, reality calls back: there are no shortcut to awesomeness, you will have to work hard. And not many engineers are ready to do so. The ones who do often create their company.

My experience has been the opposite - though as this is based on observation it's obviously subjective - and opportunities for selection-bias are also present (i.e. how many of the last-generation that didn't get promoted-out of being a technical contributor was because they were more valuable to the company that way?)

Your remark about automated tooling is interesting - because I feel that modern tooling (TLA+, Z3, constraint-provers, and cutting-edge languages like Haskell, Idris, and so on) really do require almost a postgraduate-level of understanding of the CS theory involved - whereas if you look at _the SE scene_ in the 1970s and 1980s - or even the mid-1990s, the tooling certainly did require you to do more planning and reasoning ahead of time (VB6, lol) but I can't see the entire industry of the time doing their modelling and verification entirely by themselves: on the contrary (and based on the horror-inducing programming code I've seen) a lot of it was ad-hoc and trial-and-error - Visual Studio didn't get built-in support for unit-tests until 2008 (or 2005 if you had the expensive edition). Also consider that the old SE processes used back then (Waterfall, boxed software, slow-moving-and-big release cycles, etc) meant there was more room for less-rigorous folks in large software dev teams.

> and your calculator won't save you from a logical listake.

For that, you need a spell-checker!

UPDATE: Ah, you edited your post, which ruins the joke :/

I wasn't comparing them directly like that.

My point is that in the 1990s if you used VB in production systems then you would effectively be forced into investing a lot of company resources - and mental effort - into all kinds of entirely disconnected approaches for formalising, proving and even testing your system. Whereas the state of the art for formalising SWE work today currently lies in tools like TLA+, Z3, and others and how it's significantly easier to map those formal models to our production program code back-and-forth (when written in more expressive and formal-friendly languages like Haskell, etc) than it was 20+ years ago.

Back then the sheer effort involved to perform even automated unit testing and integration testing of VB6 code, and other languages of a similar nature, was massive because, not least, the VB6 tooling completely lacked that functionality, and their lack of terse expressivity meant time spent just writing repetitive code with little value - and things were tenfold worse if you were using one of the myriad proprietary other 4GL languages of the time because most of those vendors swore-off any kind of interoperability or extension mechanism because they saw them as a threat to their business model (as a textbook example see Progress' utterly laughable defense of maintaining their position here: https://www.progress.com/tutorials/odbc/open-source-database despite their market-share shrinking and the company quickly pivoting away from their own database system and onto being a generic component/tooling vendor).

Even so, I'm not being ageist: VB6 wasn't state-of-the-art when it came out: Java is older and far better in that regard (VB6's type system is very anemic). I was singling out VB6 for criticism specifically because even back then it wasn't very good, it's just disappointing that so many people used it as the basis for production systems.

[1] Whenever UK friends and relatives refer to me as "working in IT in the 'states" I outright deny it: I really don't feel that I work in "IT".

Anyway, thanks for the answer. I am not sure I completely agree with you, but at least now your point is more clear.

(Which in practice just means figuring out how to get their bloody “SQL Broker” processes running then dumping everything over ODBC. In order to circumvent the arbitrary and unfair “Users/Connections” licensing restrictions I reversed Progress’ super-seeekrit program code to figure out how their license keys worked and made my own keygen in a weekend, that was fun - I got paid to do that too!). The fact it’s possible to slam out software within a few days while drunk-and/or-stoned (I don’t remember, lol) that undoes Progress’ entire business-model built-around vendor lock-in shows what a house-of-cards they’ve built for themselves.

Still... drop me a line in mailbox, maybe? (You can find my contacts in the profile).

I have a theory on this. An architect in private practice told me a couple of years ago how he was having trouble getting good junior architects, so was resorting to graduates. He felt his small practice was not the best place for a rigourous training. He recounted that in the past there was a giant pool of qualified and experienced staff coming from the councils, railways and public utilities. There was also a similar pool of state supported industry, Rolls Royce, BA etc. These positions took graduates (or even apprentices) and trained them up. These were also jobs for life with opportunity for progression and final salary pensions attached. Most of these have been squeezed out by 30 years of privatisation and The Cuts post 2008.

I personally worked at a company that had grown out of a government research agency some years before. The majority of employees were from that original batch of junior engineers transferring over, even filling roles like HR, Health and Safety, purchasing etc. I don't see how this could happen today.

I feel like in lusting after what Silicon Valley has, we have undone what we had with nothing to replace it.

Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.

Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.

Learning to write and perform basic maths doesn't seem that hard to us, but for most of human history was the reserve of a select few. Perhaps the fact that it seems so easy is actually because school can be quite effective at times?

While I did learn reading, writing and math, my writing skills were subpar and this was never spotted or addressed. More importantly most of the writing skills taught were essay writing or letter writing. The former isn't particular relevant to the writing I do in day to day life and the latter was archaicly formal. The most valuable writing skills I got from school were actually science report writing (helped a lot with documentation and communication in a work setting) and even then I've learned far more from organisational roles in my hobbies and during my career than I ever did at School (or the formal education part of uni).

You can't expect a school to teach every child every skill they need for their adult life. It sounds like you were able to teach yourself the skills you needed to succeed -- in my eyes, producing children able to self-teach is the sign of a very successful school system.

I can on the otherhand link many things I did outside of school at that time to things I learned later in life.

I don't disagree with your view that the point of school is to teach children to self-teach. But I do disagree that the school system I went through helped very much with that.

From his perspective though, he doesn't lose anything by sending the follow up, and if it is the second case, may gain a sale.

It goes without saying that some of my outreaches get thrown there too by default.

So, as the sender, I don't really know if you saw the message and didn't want it, or if you were too busy to reply, or that you did not receive my message in the first place.

There are, of course, many email tracking tools available. I do not use them though.

A better solution would be to stop overproducing PhDs. We could reduce funding for PhD students and re-direct that towards more postdoctoral positions - perhaps even make research scientist a viable career choice?

I'm suggesting that we re-direct some of the funding for training PhD students into funding for postdoctoral positions (via either fellowships or research grants). Professors would still get their research team, but rather than consisting mostly of untrained PhD students, they'd have a smaller, but more effective team of trained researchers.

Immediately after undergrad is how it used to work in the golden days of science, more or less.

If the competitiveness is the problem maybe tenure should be a lottery that you enter once at a fixed stage, preferably before you're expected to start publishing in journals.

A tenure lottery seems like an extreme option - there has to be a middle ground between what we have now and something entirely random.

The act of producing a doctoral dissertation usually leaves something of a mark on one's outlook, skills, etc. I claim it is a _distinguishable_ achievement for life.

You want your speech to be free from consequences -- i.e if you were to call someone a liar / cheat, they can't change their opinion of you based on what you've said? How is that compatible with their freedom of thought?

To me, freedom of speech means I shouldn't worry about legal repercussions for expressing wrongthink.

There is perhaps a separate discussion to be had about the sort of society we want to live in - do we want to promote open discussion, even if it can be divisive? But I don't think it's really a rights issue unless the consequences progress from social / economic to legal.

For example, if the government allows its critics to speak freely, but then puts them in prison [1], is that free speech? No. So because of a consequence, speech is not free.

If someone says they hate you and want to kill your family, and you avoid them as a result, is that free speech? Yes - no significant number of people would say it is not. So here, despite a consequence, speech is free.

Some people connect free speech specifically with prior restraint. But prior restraint is also purely about consequences: if the government bans your book, what that actually means is that anyone distributing your book will be punished, and that's a consequence.

Some people connect free speech specifically with government action. But if a tech monopoly deletes its enemies from the internet, is that free speech? I would say it is not.

It's meaningless to be for or against free speech in some binary sense. What you can have is an opinion about the mapping from speech to consequences. You might think that speech should map to lighter consequences than it does at the moment across all speech, or to heavier consequences, for for some kinds of speech to be lighter and some heavier.

[1] Idi Amin is reputed to have said "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."

I think this is a very good way of putting things. However, when it comes to answering the question, there's two ways of thinking about it -- how do I map other's speech to consequences with my actions (i.e morally) and how does the government map speech to consequences (i.e legally). I think only this second way of thinking is where the "right to free speech" comes in.

The view that I'm advocating is that I want the government to support a relatively strong version of free speech (i.e you should be able to say what you want without fear of being persecuted by the government, bar a few exceptions), but my personal map of speech to consequences is for me to decide. This means, for example, that I may choose to stop supporting a particular business because of something one of their employees have said, and may even shout about it on Twitter, but doing so wouldn't be an infringement of their right to free speech (it may be morally questionable).

Then people should stop stating the former as an argument, because "all speech should be free from all consequences" is what it means.

Similarly, people say that some countries have freedom of speech, when in reality every country has ways of punishing people for making certain noises out of their mouths - they just differ in which noises and to what degree.

The effect of this dishonesty is there is a hidden social contract on what you are, or are not, allowed to say, and everyone has to negotiate that. The article is about how people are becoming more self-censorious as a consequence of this social contract tightening up.

That phrase is always proposed as a rebuttal to "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences," and always in the context that any consequences given will lead to a slippery slope. It doesn't contradict that premise at all if interpreted in the weak form, it only makes sense as a rebuttal in the strong form.

So either the so-called "free speech maximalist" side actually believes that people who argue free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences are referring to all consequences rather than any consequences, or else we're all just in violent agreement with one another, and really just haggling over what those consequences should be.

In the context of a workplace (being the topic of this post, after all), one such consequence is the loss of your job. Something that is very real these days, with so-called activists doxing people and trying to get them fired just because they dared to express a dissenting opinion.

Are you really saying that it should be impossible for someone to lose their job over what they say? If someone, for example, threatened to kill a co-worker, you don't think they should be fired? I appreciate that this is an extreme example, but when we talk about rights, don't we have to cover all examples of speech?

I'd agree that social media mobs trying to get people fired is a bad thing, that it's become too easy to whip up such mobs, and that as a society we should try to be more tolerant of other views. But I don't see somebody losing a job over something they've said as a rights issue - you don't have a right to a job.

The 'freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences' was popularized (repopularized?) and became a somewhat mainstream talking point in America around 2016-17 to justify political violence with the "punch a nazi" thing and stuff. It's the "paradox of tolerance".

The context of this thread (expressing political opinions at work) makes me think the other types of consequence are more relevant for this discussion though.

In non-America places (or in the few remaining unionised workplaces in America) you typically have some right to due process, and you can't just be terminated on a whim because you said something the boss didn't like.

If I was to say something offensive, I should be accorded due process, but the result of that process may be that I'm let go.

This might seem a bit pedantic, but I do think it's important. If something is a violation of someone's rights then there doesn't need to be any further discussion - it shouldn't be allowed. I think claiming that this is a free speech issue is not only wrong, but also shuts down much needed discussion about where we set the limits of our tolerance.

I don't consider myself a "speech absolutist", so I wouldn't agree that assigning, say, twitter mobbing to the category of "free speech issues" shuts down further discussion.

The European humans right is a good example of this. EU has countries with widely different religions, widely different politics, geographic regions and cultures. If you want freedom of speech in such a diverse area you can't allow discrimination for expressing wrongthink, because any speech is a wrongthink somewhere except for views about kittens and ice cream.

The only major hard lines are explicit and direct threat of violence targeting person or persons, fraud, and national security (the later being a topic of debate).

The issue of calling someone "a liar / cheat" if they're not belongs to libel. Same way yelling fire in a crowded cinema is a public safety issue.

Expression of ideas is neither, and should not have "consequences".

>To me, freedom of speech means I shouldn't worry about legal repercussions for expressing wrongthink.

So is it OK if a mob (not a legal or govermnet entity) stomped on you and beat you to a bloody pulp?

If a church (not a legal entity) asked its members to spit on your face and abuse you on the internet?

If you were immediately fired?

No - legally and morally, this is not OK.

> If a church (not a legal entity) asked its members to spit on your face and abuse you on the internet?

Morally, I'd say this was wrong, but legally, I think they would be within their rights. But equally, if I were to respond by encouraging my friends to protest outside the church, I wouldn't be violating their right to freedom of speech.

> If you were immediately fired?

This would depend on the country and my contract, but I'd hope that immediate dismissal would be a violation of my labour rights - not my right to free speech.

>Expression of ideas is neither, and should not have "consequences".

Both libel and inciting imminent lawless action are expressions of ideas, that term is so vague as to be all-encompassing.

And the latter example has been upheld by the Supreme Court as protected free speech.

And yet courts all over the world are able to separate them from "expression of ideas" (here in Europe e.g. where we have and use libel laws).

It's not that hard either, unless we specifically go for edge case.

"X is a thief" can be libel.

"The climate is in danger/is not in danger and we should or shouldn't do so and so" is an expression of an idea, and can't be libel.

As long as you don't speak about someone in particular (a person or set of named persons, as opposed to ideas and abstract groups), and don't accuse them of being something criminal or derogatory (especially something they're not) you should be able to express any idea you like, how about that?

If I was an employee of a climate action advocacy group, wouldn't publicly stating that the climate is not in danger cause harm to my employer? Should they be forced to continue employing me despite that harm?

Again, I'm not advocating that this person should be fired, but it feels like overreach to say that it shouldn't be possible for someone to be fired for what they say.

Should employees be fired for expressing political positions at work that their employer disagrees with? Should all employees be told to focus on their companies mission instead?

Previously progressives seemed happy for the former to happen, but now they seem annoyed that they also might have their free speech squashed.

What kind of consequences are acceptable?

What might have some support is the idea that an employer could fire someone holding positions that are incompatible with the majority of other employees. We can argue about the best way to regulate this, but it's a different and horizontal view of determining the boundaries of civil coexistence.

Personally, I'd prefer to live in a society where people are encouraged to have frank and respectful exchanges of views, and I'd prefer to work for a business where I'm not afraid to share my views, but equally where political discussion is not a large part of workplace culture.

But that's just my preference _- we're not discussing what should happen, but what rights people have, and no, I don't think you have the right to say whatever you like and keep your job.

That doesn't mean your boss should fire you because he disagrees with something you said, but it does mean it should be possible, provided you are accorded due process.

It's been a while since I read the book (Bad Samaritans I think it's called), but I believe he offered them large government backed loans to move out of palm oil production and into more profitable areas like semiconductors.

Any sectors that the Korean government is funding well or should be funding better these days?