Because of business loans and tax breaks it looks like companies will come out of this profitable and the government will pay for the workers during this period.
>Based on the success of bootcamps etc.... I do wonder if software engineering would be better as a trade skill rather than university
There's plenty of data plumbers (myself included) who are writing a check a month to pay for skills they don't use but a lot of them don't have degrees in the first place. That blurry line between corporate IT and software development is where people would probably benefit most from trade programs.
Edit: Apparently a lot of people took offense at this comment and I'm not sure why. Please explain.
I think that this hits the nail on the head. That often the bulk of the people who use enterprise software are not the true end-user.
Think of Salesforce which people who use it complain about daily. The end-users are actually all the people who get the reporting and sales management out of Salesforce. They love it as a tool. The sales people are only data entry people... Therefore its optimized towards the true end-users.
I think that this is a critical point to understand and it highlights why Scrum has been so successful. We know from research in the 80's, and 90's 90% of Software projects failed, due to things like poor estimates or wrong requirements or delays.
Agile/Scrum has addressed a significant portion of those concerns by introducing lean processes. This visibility has enabled the business to understands what is happening in the SDLC quickly and can reprioritize and redirect if things are no longer matching expectations.
Where Scrum tends to fail (IMHO) is that it doesn't integrate well with other business units. I think the industry needs to focus on release management (predicting outcomes) as a process to help marketing teams, sales teams, etc... if they need to know what is happening in the next quarter, etc...
Either that or everyone needs to wait until engineering is finished before talking about new features (sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog)
Thank you! This post starts to show some of the huge complexities that GDPR has for business and their understanding of what the terms of the law mean.
A point is that often statements of a law are defined not by the language but by the ruling of lawsuits that occur around those statements and that is what most companies and lawyers are waiting for, what do courts rule when these lawsuits happen.
The biggest issue that I have heard of (Im no expert) is what does the right to be forgotten actually mean ? Does that mean all your backups are now illegal as you are retaining the customers information after they asked you to remove their records?
I think some of the fear that smaller business have is that this will encourage lawsuits until people understand how the courts will rule on each item.
I think the parent's reply is a good one. We could probably debate some of the finer points, but I think when we get some time to see how it all shakes out in the end we'll have a better vantage point.
I can't find it right now (and I have to get back to work), but there is a reasonableness requirement for requests. So things like backups might be covered by that. I wish there was some direction on that because it's a problem for me at work as well.
My opinion is that the directive's view is that all personal data retention should be temporary. There should be a defined point where the personal data is deleted. Either that's when it's no longer necessary for the contract, or when you no longer have a legitimate interest in it, or when the user asks for the removal.
Up to this point, most of us have been building databases with the intent of retaining the information indefinitely. So we never thought about this. Although I'm a fan of this law, I admit that it's going to be troublesome transitioning from where we were to where we need to go.
And as the parent briefly stated, immutable databases are going to be a serious problem.
I think the UK agency had some text on erasure and backups, and it basically boiled down to this:
If a data subject requests their data to be erased, you should remove their data from active systems so that it is no longer being processed, but you don't have to remove it from backups or other passive systems. You should however store some sort of marker so that if you need to restore data from backups, the data subject's data will be re-erased or otherwise stopped from entering active systems again.
And if a data subject asks, you have to tell them how long you store your backups of their personal data.
I think that's perfectly reasonable. And if your backup retention policy is "forever", now might be a good time to re-evaluate that policy.
Neither the UK nor the EU previously had any general provision for a right to erasure. At EU level, considerable waves were made when the "right to be forgotten" ruling was issued, but that came from a court that was considering a specific case.
I think some of the fear that smaller business have is that this will encourage lawsuits until people understand how the courts will rule on each item.
That concern really is unfounded, though. The primary means of enforcement of the GDPR will be action by national data protection regulators. It isn't some carte blanche for trigger-happy lawyers to start suing every business that gets a little detail wrong or anything like that.
The general concern that the picture is unclear until something happens to clarify it is, unfortunately, much better founded.
100% agree, Im a little surprised how shocked everyone is in this "exposure" as if you look at any AdTech they talk about this as a standard feature (audience matching etc...)
> 100% agree, Im a little surprised how shocked everyone is in this "exposure"
I'd recommend you try and spend more time with 'regular' people rather than tech bubble then. What you're seeing here is this knowledge breaking further in to the mainstream.
I disagree. What we're seeing here IMO is targeted influencing in it's own right. "Regular people" are way too susceptible to influence - period. In this case it is the joint forces of old media (who are vying to keep their obsolete business idea of peddling influence using paid ads), and governments who are seeing their tax-base dwindle when global tech companies move to tax havens, and certain tech competitors pointing fingers away from themselves: all whom are targeting Facebook to set an example.
Add a sprinkle of righteous outrage at the unethical tactics of Cambridge Analytica and how the Trump Campaign was able to use data that the DNC would rather have exclusive access to.
"Regular people" don't care that their data is hoarded, they only start caring when it is framed nefariously (and disingenuously) by interests like the above.
> "Regular people" don't care that their data is hoarded, they only start caring when it is framed nefariously (and disingenuously) by interests like the above.
If the framing is a good or bad thing is just a matter of opinion. A 'good' way of flipping what you've written is 'we've finally found a way to break through to regular people about these issues on a level they understand and resonate with'.
To call general articles on websites like cnn.com "targetted influencing " is a bit of a stretch.
I think it's the other way round. We are not "breaking through to regular people", the current campaign against Facebook is rather exploiting peoples superficial knowledge and unfounded fears to build a disingenuous case.
Facebook has been too slack, and the good part about this whole thing is that they may finally might get their sh*t together. At least they have the power to bring this under control, as the various decentralized alternatives being touted here on HN won't have.
> To call general articles on websites like cnn.com "targetted influencing " is a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, well. Depends on your definition of targeting, but influencing it is. And as usual, how good or bad you think that influencing might be depends on if you like what you are being led to believe or not.
I'm not OP, but... The fact that it is not consistently connected to other instances of political campaigns previously is a big one. The narrative is that the West is radicalizing to the right because of the evil propaganda, unlike the pure and virtuous honest reporting that brought us "change we can believe in" or "Clinton is 95% sure to win" and so on.
When the good tribe does it, it's "remarkable insight into the political base and clever use of modern technology", when the bad tribe does it, it's "disturbingly sophisticated targeting and an automated violation of consent". Really, go read the write ups about previous democrat campaigns, the narrative was of tech savvy modern progressives leaving the conservative old timers in the dust.
Russel conjugation is the favorite trick or the press today as they hawk their narratives:
"I am trying to get an important message out. You are running a political campaign. They are spreading harmful propaganda."
But 99% of harvested data is gathered with only proxy consent of 1% of the users, and most of either group is unaware of what's happening. Ignoring this ratio in order to haggle about exactly how the 1% was or wasn't tricked is entirely beside the point.
The bigger problem with this whole affair is that people correctly diagnose a breakdown in the mechanisms for forming consensus reality, which makes a lot of information suspect. This should make you question your in-groups' world view as much as the out-group. But instead of going back to primary sources and reevaluating what they know, people only double down on it more, and use it to justify why the out group is even more clueless/insidious than before. But one of the biggest hallmarks of propaganda is that the enemy is both horribly inept and terrifyingly powerful at the same time, swapping between the two seamlessly to serve the current narrative.
This is a very US-Centric view. I suppose that's the root of the disagreement here - a misunderstanding of each other's starting points.
The coverage in my country has been more about castigating Facebook et al and both major parties have copped flack for their voter-intelligence operations.
The fact that your personal information is being sold (with your name, user id, email address, possibly physical address + political opinions) is probably news to most people.
Another thing: Did you know that facebook recorded your phone calls (time and recipient)? Or, it sold your personal info to brands for marketing outside of facebook, say by email?
