The creeping IT apocalypse

> ...their nearly complete inability to transfer those requirements into software without complex implementations that they could never hope to implement themselves.

I wouldn't even mind if they even had "those requirements". That would be a huge step up. Oftentimes the requirements are not written down and stuck in tribal knowledge. And woe betide you if the tribe is an outsourcer or offshore team. About half the time, they're unintentionally leaving knowledge in the heads of their meat-robots, and getting the information transferred out of those heads is painful and time-consuming, because "set of procedures for meat-robots" is effectively what they're hired for.

If the procedure is periodically performed, I often get pretty good results just asking for copies of the resultant emails reporting completion, and working backwards from there. Automation at this layer of staff work is considered exotic developer-realm, needs-a-budget-and-a-project-manager effort, even for what most HN readers would consider relatively trivial multi-hour or multi-day scripting work.

The abruptness and agony of automation sweeping through these layers in the upcoming years as the tooling to discover, capture, distill, and maintain these requirements with tight synchronization to software teams maintaining the code behind the automation are going to be politically challenging, as a lot of these people have zero notion what they're doing can be automated away, even as they consume the results of ML in their daily lives.

And I'm rather glum about teaching these people how to perform the automatation themselves. The reception I've gotten to my offers to help them get on the track to learning programming and automation have been very underwhelming. Even if someone doesn't "get it" about coding, just the exposure to the thinking patterns would help me enormously cut down on unnecessary meeting times, as there are still way too many people whose conception of automation is closer to "can't they/you just...[magic/mind-read]?"

Why they're hardly even Scotsmen at all! Less humorously I'd say your definition of working class differs from that of the public. If you ask those tradesmen if they're working class, I'd wager upwards of 90% of them will say yes.

Working class to most people just means that they do manual labor. They work outside and in factories building and moving physical things be it burgers or buildings or balloon animals. The key seems to be that they don't generally sit at a desk with a computer on it for 8hrs a day.

> Will VR be the new "hot thing" like smartphones were after the 2008 recession

I don't think so. Mobile phones were already a significant thing before 2008 and the morph to smartphones was already in train (first iPhone was 2007).

VR still has to emerge from a relatively small set of niche use cases. Augmented / Mixed reality is more likely, given the ubiquity of good cameras on smartphones. Arguably AR/MR will let the phone manufacturers keep pushing device upgrades for longer, as the smartphone market saturates.

One idea I heard recently was to include a copy of the job description that the HR person wrote in your resume. You include it in such a way that it can’t be seen visibly. For example, make the font size really small and the colour the same as the background colour.

The theory here is that programs that automatically scan resumes for keywords will always find the ones they are looking for.

I can’t say I have tried this or know how well it would work in practise.