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How Algorithms Rule the World


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Christopher Steiner

"The people who are in the sweet spot of the job market right now have two to three years experience in the newest coding languages," says Aisle50 cofounder and author Christopher Steiner.

Credit: Fast Company

When Christopher Steiner started researching his book "Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World," he planned to focus solely on Wall Street. However, he soon shifted his focus to explore how the power of algorithms has spread far beyond Wall Street and now touches all aspects of modern life, especially with today's young innovators.

Steiner recently spoke with Fast Company about his upcoming book and how algorithms affect the modern world. "If you look at who has the biggest opportunity in society right now, who's the most upwardly mobile and could just build something out of nothing, it's developers," Steiner says.

One of the chapters of the book is titled, "Wall Street Versus Silicon Valley," which discusses the ongoing competition between Wall Street firms and technology companies for the best developers. "People don't realize how many software engineers Wall Street takes off the market," Steiner says. However, he warns that the danger with Wall Street is that the whole system is focused so much on speed that there is no time to write tests. In addition, Steiner notes that "most people don't know that there are algorithms that decide how customer service calls get routed or how customer service requests will be treated."

From Fast Company
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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