OT: Kellingley pit shuts and causes leftist dilemma

[Mike Lander]

The rest of the service sector. And financial services won't go t*ts up anyway. If they didn't this time and during the Great Depression, it isn't going to happen.

[Martin]

The successful ones succeed in making BBC drama nearly unwatchable.

What about film studies and environment studies?

[Mike Lander]

I meant trained in Ireland by the state for free. Why would they pay to be trained in the UK when they can get that for free at home ?

[Mike Lander]

That has been changed recently with intangibles.

[Martin]

Closing coal mines before we are self reliant is asking for trouble.

The quantity of gas available in UK using fracking is an unknown at the moment. UK waited until local skills had gone before ordering new nuclear power stations. They should have been built 20 years ago

[dennis]

You said building!

So you were a bit vague about that one.

[Tim Watts]

Sure I can. The GPP was asserting that it was uneconomic to base certain operations in the UK as "the difference in wage rates is so dramatic"

I disproved that with the example of the call centre.

The question is not whether we need to encourage RBS, but rather encourage the others to do that same.

RBS have shown it is perfectly viable, even if it is perhaps not as cost effective in absolute terms.

No -

You ring any of the John Lewis chains or Andrews and Arnold (as a known example) and you will speak to someone on shore.

Ring Three and you'll get someone far far away.

Therefore it is not impossible to base call centres here - think about that 1.7 million unemployed. Fine, many are not suitable for call centre work but a significant percentage are.

And the great thing with call centres is you can socially engineer incentives to base them in areas where there is high unemployment and cheaper land.

The correct thing to do in this case is not to work out how to punish firms who go offshore, but how to give large breaks to those who would use on shore facilities.

RBS have been using on shore for years. IIRC HSBC have been using Indian centres for at least a decade. There's no reason the on shore ones need to cease and if it becomes likely out of corporate greed that the firms do start trying to move off shore, then state intervention IS needed.

If you talk to the average person, the biggest complaint about any given firm that I hear is not "so and so is a quid a month more expensive". It's "that bloody call centre is crap".

USA for a start:

"Companies can also take advantage of incentives from federal, state and local governments that are aiming to bring manufacturers back to the United States."

That's aimed more at manufacturing, but could easily be applied more generally.

In fact, to my personal surprise, it seems to be happening here too naturally.

Perhaps some weaker incentives are all that are needed to bring the majority of companies on board.

Does not alter the fact it is deeply deeply broken.

Scrap it and put it all on VAT is my solution. Scrap income tax too.

[Tim Watts]

Yes - that is a mess too.

[Adrian]

If financial services goes t*ts-up, then it doesn't matter where manufacturing is based, because it'll go t*ts-up too.

[Adrian]

Both of which are correct.

If somebody is self-employed, they cannot be "unemployed". They can be short of business, but they are still employed - if they cease to be self- employed, and sign on, then they are unemployed.

If somebody is on a zero-hours contract, they're working. If they cease to be on that zero-hours contract, and sign on, then they are unemployed.

[The Natural Philosopher]

ah, they go into creative writing as a career as climate scientists.

Blair showed us that the most successful skill to have in the 21st century was the ability to lie, and that with that skill, you could be more than a third rate lawyer.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I spoke to someone who was there at the time. 'The word came down, coal was too political, the interest rates went up and made huge capital projects like nuclear uneconomic to build, and North Sea gas was cheap and there were no Unions. So we built gas.

At the time it was the right decision. Now with interest rates lower than a politicians integrity, nuclear makes complete sense.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bless!

[Andrew Gabriel]

Once you know a procedural language and an object oriented language, not long (although in some languages there are swathes of libraries to learn which take time however you do it). That's necessary, but only about 1% of the requirements.

A harder part is finding people who can quickly understand large programs well enough to diagnose bugs earlier authors left in them, and to be able to add functionality. This takes experience with working on programs from many different authors to become familiar with different techniques/styles.

However, before you can diagnose problems in programs, you often need to be able to diagnose problems in systems containing very many interacting programs, in order to understand where the cause of a problem is. These systems will have varying levels of diagnosability, but usually less than you would like. This will often mean catching and understanding network protocol traces, use of debuggers, understanding how to analyse coredumps and system crashdumps, etc.

When you have a good understanding of a system, you will need to be able to suggest how to improve it by redesigning components and present your findings for review by peers and customers.

These are all things you build up gradually through experience and exposure to more systems and more problem solving. Any interview is going to ask you to run through some issues you hit and how you worked through them.

There are normally many people working on systems because the work load exceeds what one person can do and because a company doesn't want all the knowledge vested in one person. The ability to work in a team is thus essential with all that entails in mutual support and communication, and often across timezones/continents/cultures. (I've seen many potentially good developers in my career who cannot work with others, and they are worse than useless in a team.)

This just scratches the surface, but suffice to say, learning a programing langauge is not a significant part of the skills problem in the computer IT sector, at least, not in the parts I work in.

[Martin]

that costs UK a vast amount of money. Why is it rarely mentioned?

If I buy from Amazon UK the VAT goes to Luxembourg, where Amazon pays very low taxes.

If I buy from Symantec the VAT goes to Ireland where Symantec pays very low taxes

...

[Martin]

Unfortunately true, especially in the case of Green Peas and FotE.

Politicians have always lied. How many politicians have started with nothing and finished as millionaires?

[The Natural Philosopher]

How many did not?

[Martin]

Although oil and gas reserves were known to be limited to a few decades?

It has always made sense except in UK. France & Germany had cheap gas from the Netherlands and N Africa. Both had the foresight to build nuclear power stations. It took UK 5 years from scratch to build the world's first nuclear power station, nowadays they spend longer discussing building one. The decision on Heathrow's third runway is being managed in a similar manner. In the meantime Schiphol has gone from a three runway airport to a five runway airport, helped by government support and investment. Tata owned steel works in IJmuiden has not been shut down although near identical Tata owned Llanwern steel works was closed and bulldozed flat.

[tim.....]

I know it's not - try telling that to PMs

I work as a freelancer

I have 10 years solid Experience in ARM 7/9/10 and then everyone started moving to Cortex.

And then I had two people, technical people who had interviewed me, not dumb recruiters before interview, say "sorry can't use you - you don't have any Cortex exp".

Fortunately, one of my previous employers called me back to work on a Cortex project

and how long was the conversion period?

2, 3 perhaps 4 HOURS!

It's this sort of blind ignorance that cause a skill shortage not lack of suitably qualified people (of which, in the technical arena, due to the contraction of Defense and Telecoms needs there are 100,000 people who have left the industry completely because they couldn't find anyone to retrain them in something that was a simple step)

tim

[tim.....]

up to about 1900 all of them (they would fail the first part of you test)

tim