Sure, I'm in much the same boat. I did my last programming in COBOL in the 1980s, and it wasn't even the main part of my job. I've made no effort to keep my knowledge current. I'm simply not a techie, if ever I was.
But reading Hacker News is always interesting, so here I am.
It's more complicated than that. Becoming a go-to person may get you promoted, if the company has an adequate value system. No company is perfect, but they vary a lot and you need to find companies where they at least try to promote the right people.
It also depends on what you're the go-to person on and what the promoted position is. Being the expert on some low-level technology isn't necessarily going to help you get promoted to a managerial position or the upper tiers of technical positions.
Exactly! it varies by organization and you need to find what your organization cares about, what it values more or less. This is where talking to your manager, observing who gets promoted, etc; The worse organizations are those that say one thing and do another. No organization is perfect, but they're also not equal by far, some of them try to do the right thing, even if imperfectly.
Location: Seattle, USA.
Remote: Sure, and for a lower wage.
Willing to relocate: Probably not.
Technologies: None. I'm an office flunky mostly, but I'm good at it. It's actually the only thing I'm good at.
Résumé/CV: https://www.douggles.com/p/workwanted.html
Email: dougocotton@gmail.com
It is paranoid of me to envision conversations planning this, a conspiracy amongst corporations? I don't remember ever seeing prices rise so steadily, so quickly (and I am old).
Yes, it's a conspiracy called "unchecked late-stage capitalism", and "feckless anti-monopoly policies".
You don't need much of a conspiracy when virtually every industry, everywhere has gone through significant consolidation.
It's even a problem for the military. Private contractors are gouging the US Government to the tune of *billions* and we can't do anything about it because critical parts, once produced by a few competitors, now have only one producer.
Not at all tech-oriented. It's just me — a cranky, anti-social old man — and my opinions, about old movies, public transit, news, politics, my mom who gets on my nerves, and long-ago memories of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.
For me it's just the paywall. I pay for my local newspaper, pay for the NY Times, pay for The New Yorker, but I'm not made of money and I know of nothing at medium.com worth paying for.
I never met the guy. It's entirely possible he was a raging racist. I've read some of the papers in question, though, and while it's been some years and maybe I missed the white pointy hoods, I don't remember the racism in his writing, and I think the author at Scientific American has misread the work.
E O Wilson never said anything like "genes determine who's smart and who's dumb," which would be racist. He said something like "genes are a contributing factor," and fuckall, if that's racist then just pull the plug on science.
"Genes determine who's smart and who's dumb" would not be racist unless you suggested (or, worse, demonstrated) that the smart genes were concentrated in specific breeding communities, or lacking in (presumably other) such communities.
We have reason to believe that some such "smart genes" are inherited. That's not very egalitarian, but it is also not racist. The implication is that these smart genes are rare not only in your dispossessed underclass, but rare everywhere. In any place where their promise fails to be nurtured and cultivated, humanity is the poorer for it. By the numbers, if the genes are more-or-less equally distributed, the dispossessed include absolutely many more stewards of these genes than the privileged. Then, it is a crime against society for the privileged to have failed to nurture them wherever possible.
But of course it is not only carriers of "smart genes" who could provide a strong net benefit society as a whole by being well nurtured. Arguably, for every "smart gene" carrier who would give back more than the cost of the nurturing, there are many others who would also effloresce. The only way we know to identify and nurture them all is to nurture everybody and see who blooms. But that would cost money.
Genes absolutely determine who is smart and who is dumb. This is an incontrovertible fact. There is no single other factor that has more effect. And the truth cannot be racist; it is inherently non-ideological.
But reading Hacker News is always interesting, so here I am.