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The Truth About Hiring "Rock Star" Developers
snydeq writes "You want the best and the brightest money can buy. Or do you? Andrew Oliver offers six hard truths about 'rock-star' developers, arguing in favor of mixed skill levels with a focus on getting the job done: 'A big, important project has launched — and abruptly crashed to the ground. The horrible spaghetti code is beyond debugging. There are no unit tests, and every change requires a meeting with, like, 40 people. Oh, if only we'd had a team of 10 "rock star" developers working on this project instead! It would have been done in half the time with twice the features and five-nines availability. On the other hand, maybe not. A team of senior developers will often produce a complex design and no code, thanks to the reasons listed below.'"
The whole article could be summarized like this: "We have no fucking clue how to manage rockstar developers".
If management or MBAs don't click with devs, the project is ripe for crashing.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Rock Star Developers, seriously? None of them are that good.
Agreed. Rock Stars suck as developers. And most of them suck at rock, as well.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Article is weak on expertise.
1) No, you don't need 10, idiot, you just need ONE, and about a dozen or so relatively obedeient and competent non-novice developers.
2) Those weren't senior developers.
I'm not sure about how unions work in America, but in Germany the purpose of an organised workplace is to have a forum between workers and management. The union wants the company to be productive because that secures jobs and usually results in higher wages. The management want the workers to be happy because then staff turnover is reduced, productivity increased and honesty maintained.
The UK and the USA are falling further behind as they put short-term executive profit over the needs of all classes of people.
In my experience, anyone tossing off terminology like "rock star developer" is some kind of a poseur.
it's the lack of a single, piercing intellect who is given the power to do their best. You need SINGLE intelligence to coordinate complex maneuvers, and many minds to search out the plain of solutions like hunters of old. Coding is actually quite holistic, occurring in natural stages. Maybe the problem isn't that there too many or too few people; a good software team should be inspirational, allowing the members to spend time for excellence, even if its not obvious (to you, the hiring boss).
No surprise efficiency is an issue in some places; if one builds a "well oiled" machines for it's consistency of action, trouble us not about these tiny changes (in all honesty) that leave managers hoping humans can be better machines. The art you are looking for, and the people, aren't found where that idea lives.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
"Rock stars" - we called them divas in my company - are notoriously unmanageable: many of them are temperamental, don't work well with others, tend to do what they "know" is right instead of doing what they're told, and have an overinflated sense of ego. It's a high price to pay to exploit their expertise.
At any rate, one diva per project, provided a good supervisor is found to manage them and the project is in early development, is okay and probably does bring added value. A team of them however is sure to bring chaos, as individual personalities will inevitably clash. And forget about getting these guys to work on products that are in the middle of their product lives.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No-one who identifies himself as a rockstar developer is a rockstar developer, and no good developer would call himself a rockstar. The only thing certain is that in any article about "rockstar developers", a few dozen people will wander in and complain that the only reason the world isn't perfect is because rockstars like them just aren't looked after well enough.
So, for all of you thinking about making this claim: if you're so fucking great, go out and start your own business and rewrite every single software product in your own image. Be the rockstar you think you are, identify everyone's desires, and out-compete every other firm on the planet. Internet capitalism is more meritocratic than most forms of capitalism - if you write a killer operating system or office suite or CRM system or time&billing app or whatever, people will take notice. So team up with as many people as your ego will allow (you're a rockstar so you already have considerable savings) and go get 'em, tiger!
in Germany the purpose of an organised workplace is to have a forum between workers and management. The union wants the company to be productive because that secures jobs and usually results in higher wages.
Sounds like Germany still has labor unions. In the USA, we have organized crime posing as labor union organizers, and their purpose is to tax the workers to pay for hookers and blow for mobsters and politicians.
One big problem is that many of these so called "Rockstars" are too interested in the technology rather than getting the job done. Technology to them is like fashion, you have to use the latest simply for bragging rights and ego when a proven more mature solution would be the correct descision to take.
This video is funny but makes a simpliar point, the irony being he's promoting mysql as the solution when mysql itself was in itself once an object of ridicule by peoeple who knew what they where doing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
The title should read My 6 opinions on senior developers
Sound far-fetched?
Yes.
10 rock stars are as difficult to manage as 10 idiots, every lead knows that the good development team is a balanced one , 2 idiots , 2 experts , and 6 normal guys, never involve an even number of women!! never!!
'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses, drivin' fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny with her bleach blond hair
And well, hey, hey, I wanna be a Rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a Rockstar!
i assume they mean guys from with Phds from Stanford and MIT? Sorry but it just sounds like all the self-taught C# losers are just jealous.
Have you seen the rate of Germany's GDP decrease in the recent years? I think it's hard to claim the USA and UK are falling back when pitted against Germany for that reason.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Just finished a project. Involved were myself and another senior guy - we are both near our 40s (no, it wasn't cobol, it was in fact HTML5) - whom I consider in the rock star group. There was also a junior involved.
Well, I loved working every minute with the senior rock star. The process had a great flow. Reading each other's mind and just fucking go for it, develop and ship it.
Junior was unreliable, didn't add any insight to the team - just barely contributed the minimal and quite trivial things (due to the time pressure we couln't have done it without him, so still he did contribute some value).
But really, I'd work with non-soloing rock star any day. I can not work with somebody who can't follow my tempo.
And it's the same weather I'm in developer or manager role.
Not all developers can be rock stars all the time. Developer-rockstarism requires a fair bit of ground work ... it's a supersaturated state ...bit of a shake and it's gone!
For projects & companies to succeed you need a good balance between the rock stars & others [ well trained, well read, high IQ, high tenacity, high experience, high business, high spirit etc. ] ... If a company lets you pace your self in between these two then you know u are working for a geek-friendly outfit. That's priceless!
I thought the whole point of hiring a senior developer is that he doesn't behave like a rock star, even if some of them do look like Keith Richards...
Description starts by talking about rockstar developers, then makes assertions about senior developers. These two groups are not even close to equivalent. Seniority (generally) implies experience -- not "rockstar" status.
I think it's hard to claim the USA and UK are falling back when pitted against Germany for that reason.
USA and UK are falling back to slave labor.
echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
...No, you don't need 10, idiot,....
That's the attitude and one of the things that made my time as a developer miserable. It wasn't enough that I was under constant pressure to meet unrealistic dealines and spending all my free time keeping up with new tech, I had to put up with that kind of abuse and the constant intellect pissing contests and penis measuring.
The other was the fact that you couldn't say "I don't know. Let me research it." Any sign of ignorance or weakness would get you fired or the very least treated like a moron by one's colleagues.
Last year, I saw the National Geogrphic show on Stress. To make a long story short, the guy who was researching monkeys made some observations about them that reminded me of working in software development.
This sounds like a desperate justification for doing it on the cheap. And the "truths" are badly flawed. First, the term "rockstar" is already pretty bad and way off. A very senior engineer is not a "rockstar". Rockstars are people that crave attention and can generate it.
As to the items:
1. Wrong. If you hire highly competent and professional people, the savings in time, maintenance, etc. will be far higher then the higher salary you have to pay them.
2. Wrong. People in the described situation have trouble seeing the big picture, and will get details wrong as well. Their code will basically barely good enough if you are lucky, but it will be a nightmare of maintenance, architecture and design issues.
3. Wrong. This is confusing "rockstars" with very senior engineers. Very senior (by experience and capability, not age) engineers will know this pitfall (hint: Brooks calls it the "second system effect", a really senior coder will know about that) and will know how to avoid it.
4. Well, yes. But what is the point? If the hiring process is run incompetently, of course you will get bad people. That is in no way the fault of the good people that are out there as well. Seems to me the author needed an excuse to bring it up to 6.
5. Wrong. This is a typical problem of people that may think they are senior when in fact they are not. Also see 3 and 4.
6. And here the truth is revealed. This person does not want senior individuals that actually know what they are doing and may criticize as stupid plan. In fact this person wants no individuals on the team, so everybody can be replaced easily and knows it. Yes-men preferred. Unfortunately that is a sure recipe for disaster.
Bottom line: All there "truths" are wrong or irrelevant and show the real problem: The author of this article has no clue and is a "rockstar" himself. But not one of those that can actually do things right. Just one of those small people that cannot handle others being better at something than he is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Another lame MBA trying to make excuses for hiring substandard workers. "See I told you so! We should have hired H1Bs instead! I put a few assholes who were full of themselves and they didn't get anything done!" The fact is there are tens of thousands of qualified American candidates for programming and other IT jobs. Do they get hired? No, even though they will work for the same wage nowadays in this lack luster Oconomy. It's because businesses want to be able to pay shit wages AND take the tax deductions for hiring H1Bs. That's why I left the IT industry. A bunch of MBA assholes running the show that don't have a clue about what they are doing to their companies or the country, where they are going, or who they are hiring. It's funny how most MBA's degrees don't mean shit, ooooh ooooh tell me how you took macroeconomics again, and how that makes you better than everyone else.
Now I use my programming skills in another industry, make a ton more money, and don't have to put up with corporate asshole MBAs.
I don't. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth
Looks as if Germany's GDP is managing just fine.
Do you even have a credible source to back that up? Our minimum wages in the UK have been increasing, which seems to counter the implication of slave labor type situations.
Curl is not usually available on older UNIX systems. Also, I haven't verified in years whether or not Slashdot still produces those headers.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Lay back, shut up, and let Angus pound you back into shape <screeching guitar riff>
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You ruined my stage, this would have been so hilarious. :(
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Labor unions are what is causing problems for the auto companies in Europe. They have too many factories with too many workers, and not selling all the cars produced in Europe, but can't close the unprofitable factories or lay off people who aren't needed, because labor unions won't let them do that.
and every really hotshot piece of software I have ever encountered (and I'm talking world-wide success here) has been written by a very small team of highly-motivated developers working very long hours at very odd times of day with no management interference at all. They weren't rock stars before the project or they would have been managed into oblivion. After they had completed the product and it became successful, then they were rock stars. The self-motivation usually came from "fuck you, manager, I'm going to prove that my ideas are correct" One of these projects, where I knew the people well, became one of IBM's top 5 most profitable products world-wide (you've never heard of it), and those guys broke every rule in the book. They worked nights, never went to meetings, smoked cigars at their desks, suppressed all records of how many hours they were really working. By working those hours, the two of them held the entire structure of a big application, its database, and all its interactions with the operating system in their heads, and that mental state enabled them to write vast quantities of simple clear code that contained no serious errors on shipment, and none revealed in the first year. Later people added on to the project for subsequent releases never found any serious errors in the backbone written by the first two guys, nor did they have any problems adding to the code.
Code written during the normal working day, with constant interruptions, will never soar like that.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
If you have 40 people writing spaghetti code, then you need _one_ good developer and code reviews, and reject bad code until they learn. Many bad developers are bad because they haven't learned how to do it better. Those that can't learn - sorry, but their productivity is negative, so let them go. What you don't need is a dozen "rock stars". You need developers who can lead by example and let them do it, and who can solve difficult problems that turn up, and you need more people who are reliable, not necessarily bright, who can do all the boring bits - of which there are usually lots.
What I can't understand is how the author talks about smart people making smart designs that don't work. If the design doesn't work, it wasn't smart in the first place. If someone creates a design that isn't smart in the first place, that person wasn't smart. So this seems to be about people who can bamboozle others into thinking they are smart, creating designs that nobody understands.
What are you talking about? One of those three countries still has a solid AAA credit rating and is now loaning money at negative interest, the two others do not (well UK has the rating but has been warned it will fall unless things improve). The country in question is Germany. US is failing and UK is not looking too great either.
Credit ratings agency Moody's has changed its outlook for Germany's AAA credit rating to negative, the first step towards a possible downgrade.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18963810
The characteristic of failed software projects is poor management,
Until organizations realize that, they are doomed to fail, again and again.
Yeah, with good project management, even moderately competant coders can produce good results - the problems reported here are entirely due to poor managers, not poor programmers.
The stars can produce excellent results, but not if the management is doing it's best to derail the project at every turn.
Look at the games industries greatest failures :)
"Your arguments would probably be more listened to if you didn't use Marxist terminology"
It's not "marxist terminology" capitalism is enforced and came into being by men with guns, only in america would someone say something so ignorant of history. More proof america is under the spell of mass political propaganda.
The problem with "Rock Star" developers is, that they might lose focus when the job they're doing is too simple for them. They may like to code on your internet-enabled office-style application for a while, but in the end they long for more interesting, worthwhile and complicated matters that are on the edge of scientific discovery.
So eventually you'll lose them, and you're stuck with the code that they left.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Well, in America "unions" mean very powerful quasai-political entities like SEIU or UAW which basically make american labor unprofitable (see the insane costs of auto-workers). These "unions" extort huge fees from their often-unwilling constituents and in turn donate large sums to our Democratic/socialist party.
Source: my uncle worked in Detroit from high school-> retirement. He loves American cars but told me it's one of the most corrupt systems out there.
There's quite a bit of truth to the article allthough I'd say that true rockstar programmers do use the right tool for the job. If a programmer builds a custom Java CMS where Joomla would do, he isn't a rockstar. He's an idiot.
Then again, the best programmer in the world is worth nothing without the environment or the right people around him. That includes higher ups that keep people off his back, maintainers that can handle the pipeline and clear objectives to work against.
If a rockstar doesn't have those, he'll be faster than others in producing workable stuff, but if he gets hit by a bus it will be just as much worth as the other unfinished stuff.
Many programmers I know hat are considered rockstars are quite mediocre. They only were at the right place at the righ time and didn't have any scruples in building a complex key product only they could understand, without docs, concept comments or usecases, as a means of job security.
My last teamlead was a nice guy and a demigod in Perl, but absolutely incapable of any sort of productive or result oriented teamwork-organisation or inter-team communication. In itself not very rockstarish, allthough people did think of him that way when he saved the day on some billing system or something every once in a while.
Bottom line:
Rockstar is always relative. Very relative.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Existing teams where everyone has know each other and worked together for a long time have their own functional relationships, but for new teams you kinda need a hierarchy.
I don't think this matters if its a team of developers putting together an inside sales support system or a team of carpenters putting up a barn. You simply can't have a team of all equals because if you do everything becomes a debate and no actual work gets done. Or even worse everyone needs to shine and get some recognition outside the team and so is pushing for their 'plan' so they can be the hero.
You have to have some social order. Teams are happiest when the guys at the top are their tacitly because of their widely acknowledged talent, and or successful experience. It really helps if those guys are also personable but is not always a requirement. Nobody wants feel someone has arbitrarily stifled their career so that Bob can be tech lead. OOTH some competent but not so senior developers might love working with RockStar Bob on a project. They would feel its an opportunity to learn how Bob does does it, technically or socially, so they can use that knowledge going forward for their own gain.
In the mean time you'd hope Bob is happy that he has some people he can farm out tasks to and after pointing in a general direction, perhaps even taking some feedback, can just leave them to it without having to hold their hand the whole time or worry he is going to get 10KLOC of useless spaghetti as a 'deliverable'.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
... is not rockstar developers it's that making and understanding how software will perform and it's impacts is a hard problem. It's not like engineering where the laws of nature are relatively fixed and known and is a matter of trade offs (time vs cost), ANY change to a program has potential impacts and ripple effects on all other subsystems effectively changing program behavior to some extent. The real issue is the tools for software development and making these things understandable in complex systems is a hard problem. It's a matter of framing problems and solutions in ways that you can actually understand their impacts. Too much software development is undefined and uncharted because of the nature of coding itself. There is a lot of research going on in visualization trying to make these ethereal systems of code easy to grasp and understand in ways that are much easier and more natural for our senses as human beings.
http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
It's a matter of being able to grasp what is that you are trying to do and it's impact. Most developers (even rockstars) have issues with not even knowing where they are headed and what will be needed down the line as projects grow and outstrip human ability to understand them. Software has long since passed the complexity where the human mind has the ability to full grasp all the complex interactions. The real problem now is getting the research and data to make demystify this complexity (i.e. complexity partially being a synonym for not being able to see/understand what a problem and solutions are and it's impacts).
The UK and the USA are falling further behind as they put short-term executive profit over the needs of all classes of people.
You can add Australia to that list.
If I think 'Rockstar devs' Todd is the first person who comes to mind. Todd designed the first commercial graphics tablet and had it released by Apple, was an early (and flagship) user of the Video Toaster and released arguably the first interactive album which he helped code for Phillips CDi.
Do we have any other notable examples of people successful as both devs and rock stars? There have to be more than just Todd.
Surely the recent past has shown you what 'ratings' are worth.... These are the same people who stamped all those dubious mortgage backed securities as AAA, remember how that turned out..
These ratings are simply an opinion that is correct until it isn't - it's worth bat shit.
Never happened. True story.
Only because of the Eurozone crisis.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Actually, thanks to workfare it seems that people do end up doing work for less than minimum wage. There is an, admittedly anecdotal, story that a woman was dismissed from a paying job and then ended up at the same place doing the same job under workfare. Not exactly the definition of slave labour but makes a mockery of minimum wage laws.
How about hiring COMPETENT developers to begin with? the companies that have those problems have the fault lie with the management. managers that cant actually manage, pay scale for the actual developers is too low, budget for the department or project is too low, and the upper management focus is not on quality, but on profitability.
Yeah, let's lay blame on the guys that are actually doing the work. In reality, every failed project has the person managing it to firmly blame for it's failure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do you even have a credible source to back that up?
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=illegal+immigrants+working+us+farms
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
I never have mod points when I need them ... Well said.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
A slgihtly different definition to the one in the article but the only rockstar developer I can think of off the top of my head is Notch - I don't know when it happened but suddenly everyone knew who he was and he has legions of fans all over the internet. That seems to have died down a bit now but it amused and pleased me to see a developer elevated to the level of rockstars.
Wonder if he got groupies?
We've known about this issue ever since we started to write complex code. The classic reference is 'The Mythical Man-Month'.
The case can be made that one or two really good programmers will do a better job than a team. That seems to contradict TFA.
Prison–industrial complex
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
I don't understand, how does that apply to both the UK and US simultaneously?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
A truly terrible manager will ruin a project, even if you give him/her the best people.
Rock Stars make great performances not great software.
Ego has little place in software development and in most cases those that consider themselves 'Rock Star Programmers' are suffering from a chronic case of Dunning Kruger syndrome
Great Programmers are masters at listening and comprehension. They are humble, asking questions before offering solutions. They not only accept criticism they solicit it. Their code is simple and elegant, capable of being comprehended by the most junior and appreciated by experts.
You've got it quite backward. In most cases, it's the "divas" and "rockstars" who forcefully suggest the use of certain technologies solely because they're "trendy", rather than out of any technical merit.
So the software product ends up getting built as a web app using Ruby on Rails, NoSQL, and JavaScript. Then it goes live, and it's a complete disaster. The Ruby on Rails code ends up being horribly slow, with all sorts of performance problems. Furthermore, the code is damn near unmaintainable, since the "rockstars" insisted on using techniques like monkey patching. Of course, the NoSQL database is a pain in the ass to query, and the data quickly becomes corrupt thanks to a complete lack of referential integrity and other constraints. Sometimes it just loses data completely. Then there's the front-end JavaScript code. Besides being slow, it also only works correctly on some browsers. The users hate the new web-based UI, because it's less productive than the native apps they were using before.
When a software project with no code goes bad, it's usually because of "architects". When a software project with code goes bad, it's usually because of "rockstars" or "divas".
Every time somebody brings up the topic of unions in the US, I find myself wondering whether "union" is one of those terms like "potato chips" or "football" that means something completely different over there.
Well, in America "unions" mean very powerful quasai-political entities like SEIU or UAW which basically make american labor unprofitable (see the insane costs of auto-workers). These "unions" extort huge fees from their often-unwilling constituents and in turn donate large sums to our Democratic/socialist party.
Source: my uncle worked in Detroit from high school-> retirement. He loves American cars but told me it's one of the most corrupt systems out there.
Not all countries unions work the same way. I know that here in the UK unions are very different from unions in the US and also different to unions in Germany.
The fact that the union system in the US was infiltrated in organised crime does not mean that happened anywhere else. I think it might be one of the only developed western countries where this happened actually, it is certainly not the case in the UK.
I dont read
That's a ho hum salary for programmers with experience. That's less than $50/hour. Ten years ago, I knew Unix people in the financial area ( NYC ) making 50% more than that.
It isn't just the money that makes a programmer work harder. A good working environment ( not the physical ) gets people to be more productive. Things like flex time, tele-commuting and accessible day-care goes a long way towards fostering an effective work force. Trust and respect goes a long way.
Oh, well, not going to happen with all the psychotic managers running the place.
CPT (Chief Programmer Team) had one chief programmer (your "rock star") that could carry out design, but was not necessarily the team leader. The chief programmer would guide other programmers in the task of programming, but the project leader would make sure schedules were kept. Frequently the chief programmer would also be the project leader, but it wasn't a fixed rule.
Well, most tuthes in the article are perceptions of the auther. Not truthes.
The whole article is rather mood anyway. I so far never was in a project where the development team needed managing/management.
The project might need management ... defining what is in scope, what is out of scope and what is done in what timeframe, basically talking to external stakesholders.
But a team? What do you want to manage in a team? Let them define their work alone ... if you have 10 senior developers that should be no issue, if youo have a team with only one it might be difficult. Best teams imho are 50/50.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
He is projecting his own incompetence and poor work ethic onto all senior developers.
Bloody socialists!
Meanwhile rock star MBAs run rampant collecting bonuses by forcing 2 developers to do the job of 10 while working on an ever tightening schedule. To hell with quality of product, it has to ship by yesterday otherwise the investors won't give the C*O his bonus for the quarter. If the company sinks the rock star MBAs just float their parachutes to the next company and rehire everyone at even lower salary.
not sure why he equates senior developers with rock star developers, for me rockstar developer is someone able to do very complicated piece of functionality that a team of ordinary (even ordinary senior developers) would need a month for, and do it alone in less than one week with ten times less bugs, you know people that not only have 10+ year experience but also high intelligence
"capitalism is enforced and came into being by men with guns"
Yes, I think I know quite a lot about history and you won't mind if I ask you for some clarification on this? Where exactly is this capitalism you refer to and when were these 'men with guns' promoting it?
Can you please point me to this country you refer to as "america"? Are you speaking about Canadians perhaps?
I am a Mechanical Engineer but I also have a CS degree. It was interesting in school to see how software engineering being a relatively new field is struggling with what other engineering fields have had to deal with for a long time.
Staffing a project is not a linear function. A project with twice the complexity doesn't take twice as many people. It may take 4 times as many because now you have to coordinate those people. This requires project managers and system engineers. This begs the question what is the right project size for a team?
I've been on small teams that have done amazing things in limited time because we were all in one room without distractions. I've also been on large projects that have gone nowhere because nobody knew what to do.
Very occasionally I've been on a large project with a good manager that can break the project down into subsystems with clear requirements small enough for a small team to handle. The manager handles the conflicts with interfaces between these subsystems but otherwise stays out of the way. This is the type of manager I like to work with.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"
"It will take one year," said the master promptly.
"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"
The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."
"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"
The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.
Also, I'd treat anyone calling themselves a "rockstar anything" with suspicion. What they're telling you is that they're flashy, have a huge ego, expect to be treated and paid like royalty, may have a drug habit and might possibly (but not probably) have some actual singing ability.
Unions in the United States needs massive reform. However no one is really wanting to admit it. When ever someone says to the Union "Dude, you have some major problems, you need to fix them!" they go back and spout all the good stuff they did in the past. Weekends, Overtime, Vacation....
The problem now the Unions main goal is to increase the size of the Union. So I have seen Unions agree to something similar to the following example
Lay Off 50% of the IT Staff (say 10 People at an average of $70k a year), and Expand Factory workers by 20 average $30k a year. To save $100k, for the company. But the Union ends up getting more money out of dues.
Also because the Unions are structured there is a deep dislike towards Outside Consultants and Contractors for temporary work. (For example the Auto Union hired workers to do nothing until there is a surge in work, so they sat around all day and watched TV except for a few time a month or year) Because they would get more unioned members vs. hiring contractors to pick up the extra slack when it is needed, but they are not paying union dues so they are not welcomed.
Union shops tend tries to make sure no one does anyone elses job. You request and get approved for a whiteboard. The board is shipped to you. If you hang it yourself your are in trouble, you will need to wait an other week to get a Unioned employee to take 5 minutes to hang it for you.
I once got in trouble from the union because I was consultant commissioned to create a Web Application for them. The commission came from the Application Development group, I did the work to the best of my abilities... Apparently it pissed off the Web Group because my application looked better then what they could do, and they demanded more tools so they can make their apps look better then mine...
There is also a fear amongst union members to bad mouth the union. When I was taking my MBA class, and the Unioned Professor trying to teach how to deal with collective bargaining, she would close the door and talk quietly. When I use to work as a consultant, I was told to avoid these people because they are big in the union, and if I did anything to make them look bad there will be a lot of trouble.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My personal experience hiring rock star developers led me to believe they're more of pain than they're worth. I'd rather hire the number 2 programmer with a better attitude.
Rock star developers most often work the hardest at feathering their own nest at the expense of everyone else on the project. Trying to become immune to layoffs and working themselves into a position they can demand more money.
Many of them will keep junior programmers from learning enough to be really useful and are ultimately counter-productive to the health of the project.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Except they/we are rockstars because they get the job done, despite a bunch of MBA's trying to stop them. I agree with him about too many senior developers, they cancel each other out. I've use teams of 3-4 people, usually one rockstar and 3 who are happy to play second fiddle and follow his lead.
When I've done the rockstar roll (before I moved into managing them). The number of times I've had ineffective programmers try to trip me up. A typical pattern is the 'spec says X', I'm well into the spec, X is already written, a programmer on some other platform is falling behind and hasn't gotten to X yet. What do they do? Typically they will start changing the spec, now X is Y and I have to go back and re-implement X as Y.
Do this often enough and I have to WAIT for the slow coach to decide what he's going to implement from the original spec. before I can clone it on my platform.
Then there's the IBM type guys (I think EDS are the same, but I haven't personally had experience of them yet). I couldn't get them to code at all in any way. I'd receive a mountain of design documents for the most trivial of things, and a million excuses why it would take 10 years and more resources than we had. If I simply went ahead and coded their part, they'd send in the 'Rock Star Business Analysts' to claim it's spaghetti code and the distraction of it was the reason they couldn't code their part.
I've seen IBM do a hatchet job on a Danish software producer, so much that the Danish company refused to continue with the project. Yet I never saw an IBM guy deliver a single line of code that tackled a single problem. All they every did was produce meetings explaining what is wrong with the code (which was nothing but a few bugs they were hired to fix but didn't).
That's the other problem superstar programmers face, superstar bullshitters whose real agenda is to delay a project.
I often think there are superstars in every company, and the difference between a Google and a Microsoft is that one company can tell the superstar developer from the superstar bullshitter, the other can't.
I don't see any x-fry/x-bender headers :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hey now guano used to be highly valuable and is still a useful fertilizer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano#History
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
We are better then you are because we choose a particular measurement to show that we a better then you.
The GDP is a good indicator but like most indicators they are not the big picture. The problems exist in the details, not the aggregated big number. Back during the Bush year the Stock Market was at a record high (S&P Dow Jones Nasdaq they are good indicators as well) But the details was in the fact they are high off of lies. So when the truth came out the collapsed. But during this high Republicans and Democrats were going Hey Things are going good! No the Democrats wanted to get power so they choose other indicators to show where the problem is, while the republicans show others to say things are great. But that is normal politics.
For complex problems like the economy I don't like to look at any particular number. You need to look at the details who are the the guys that are Upward forcing the GDP who are the guys lowering the GDP.
So for example you see that a few companies are the biggest player in your GDP, while you have a lot of small companies lowering it. It could be big trouble. as your economy is based on few company where they can do one mistake and kill your economy) However if you see that you have a lot of small companies raising your GDP and a few firms lowering it, then that gives you a stronger stance to weather a lot of problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
not sure why he equates senior developers with rock star developers, for me rockstar developer is someone able to do very complicated piece of functionality that a team of ordinary (even ordinary senior developers) would need a month for, and do it alone in less than one week with ten times less bugs, you know people that not only have 10+ year experience but also high intelligence
In sw many times it has come up that 2-4 developers("rock stars", though you would call them just "developers") can do what the 100+ team people can't - the amount of people attached to the project is usually proportional to budget, not to what the project is supposed to come up with.
usually it just boils down to politics and that the whole project is such that it suits 2-4 developers better than 100+ people who are trying to keep their jobs, leading to every change needing a meeting with 20 stakeholders-for whom that meeting is the only "work" they do all week - and the few guys churning out code being isolated from each other by 3 levels of middle management.
The downgraded the US rating only because our leaders are a bunch of asses. Not about our ability to pay off our debt.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Definitely a lot of organised crime in relatively strong Australian unions.
In the days of strong militant unions in New Zealand OC in unions was a big factor (surprising considering that New Zealand is nearly the least corrupt place on the planet), but unions were thankfully mostly broken in 80's, (with partial exception of waterfront), at the point where they had come close to destroying the economy with uncompetitive labour practices and the Labour govt of the time was left with no choice but massive reform.
There's no "the auto companies in Europe". Most german manufacturers currently enjoy records profits, except Opel that was riddled by management failures for the last two decades. Fiat is doing ok coming out of a difficult restructuring as well. The french manufacturers are hurting badly, but their inability to close factories is not due to unions, but because of government intervention, and the british car industry has been dead for ages now anyway
And you really think that anybody here in Germany gives a fu*k about what an american credit rating company says about this country? What kind of reputation do you think they have here? Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds, and lower interest rates that anyone else (US included) on 10 year bonds.
A low-level german factory worker with middle school education makes 50K a year, cannot be fired if not for just cause, can vote for 50% of the seats in the Council of Surveillance (what you call "board of directors" in america) so the company is substantially co-managed by workers themselves and shareholders have limited power compared to the US (yes, it's a semi-socialist system, and it works great!). And he/she gets complete and high quality healthcare coverage from the government, a generous pension benefit when he/she retires (67% of the last salary, and completely tax free), all paid for by a highly progressive tax system. Of course also education is free, college included.
Instead, if you're american, you live in a country where the richest 10% of the population has 70% of the wealth, and the remaining 90% are beggars brainwashed by trashy hollywood movies since birth. That's the "american dream", right? Just keep it.
You just need a really strong lead but programming itself works better in a mixed team. Too many great minds in the same project might just make the project stale.
How many people on here are taking this to heart and going on the offensive? Brilliant.
well the union job training ideas are needed over say just pure classroom. The tech / trades schools do better but they can use a on the job training / apprenticeship part as well.
These days, sadly, /. is increasingly regurgitating any bullshit article they know is going to get developers/IT staff/geeks 'inflamed' with righteous indignation.
It's perfect because they get all the site traffic without being seen to be agreeing with the opinions of the author.
Feel free to Reply with your righteously indignant refutal of the BS article.
I've been in unions - the above is nonsense. It's self serving BS put out by our overlords - and greedily slurped up by some (see above) and regurgitated ad nauseum - and always without substantiation. A scared professor - my words - it's usually put as the shrill voices of the elite - not scardey cat profs. What right wing propaganda we have in the above.
That's okay, the banking executives in the United States caused the biggest recession in 80 years without a single criminal prosecution or even getting fired. When the people on top of the economy get their house in order, I'll start listening to their advice for curbing the excess of the working class.
What about TPS reports / poor metrics / rushed time line / high over time.
Stuff like that leads to poor code.
Also how much documentation do you want them to do any ways??
nothing really changes..
Why is this modded funny? It's the truth!
Just remember the Golden Ratio: 3 Brogrammers per RockStar (and certainly no more than 2 Ninjas per team).
This is Germany, where the union system is reputed to be one of the best in the world.
This is typically the kind of compromise that seems impossible to achieve in France. Don't know about the US and UK.
He considered a bunch of knuckleheads who over engineered because they are bored rockstar developers? Being a star developer includes having common sense. Just because you can punch out code quickly, does not mean you are a star. Being a star includes common sense. This guy does not know the difference.
About junior people writing better code than senior people when the code is simple. Again, that is only the case if the senior person is a knucklehead. People with alot of experience can get stuff done faster. Junior people will still need help and need some reviews. The other issue that junior people have is they may find 1-2 ways to solve a problem, but senior people have seen lots of different things and have more options at their disposal (this does not include making stuff unnecessarily complex).
Mixing Junior/Senior developers is a good idea, so that the junior guys can learn from the senior guys. Smart Rockstar developers will learn from Junior people too because you will never know everything. The smart senior guys are articulate enough to help the junior people out. I do agree that a project is about a team and process. Alot of the success of a project is based on the management and the processes in place. When you have incompetent managers and silly processes, you end up with delays.
A technical person irregardless of skill set (DBA, SA, Tester, whatever) who lacks the common sense to keep things as simple as possible is not and never will be a rockstar. They are just a nuissance.
The problem isn't your "WorkFare" program itself, but how it is implemented. In my opinion, everyone on welfare SHOULD have to do something. They can't sit around all day playing world of warcraft or watching soaps on the telly. I would force them to attend mock interview sessions, resume writing seminars, do community service, and things of that nature. Do you have kids and can't afford childcare? Fine. The "Workfare" program should provide for child care. But I'm sure most people would rather work hard to find a real job instead of cleaning up trash on the side of the freeway. Having them do work for the rich or corporations is just plain non-sense. If they need people do to work, they should hire people. If they don't want to hire someone, too bad for them!
They didn't have the budget for unit tests, realistic deadlines or an architect. They probably adopted "Agile" and had the project manager set all the deadlines, using the process mostly as a method of flogging the developers. And they probably never had clear requirements. You don't need rockstar developers to insure a project success. You don't even need rockstar managers. You just have to put some thought into the project, and that, sadly, is what's lacking in most of these badly-executed software projects.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...I would rather hire a classically trained pianist.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Union shops tend tries to make sure no one does anyone elses job. You request and get approved for a whiteboard. The board is shipped to you. If you hang it yourself your are in trouble, you will need to wait an other week to get a Unioned employee to take 5 minutes to hang it for you.
Here in Toronto, you just described the TTC. I have a younger brother and a friend of my father-in-law in there who both said the same thing.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Surely the recent past has shown you what 'ratings' are worth.
The markets continue to place trust in ratings agencies. Ergo, they're worth something (although unclear exactly what, since Moody's and S&P and the like don't provide any kind of public price listing). I agree that they may be nonsense, but they apparantly have value to somebody.
And don't call me Shirley.
I am officially gone from
Sounds like you're describing a Lisp developer.
That's more or less what they are in the USA. But in the US workers are subject to a lot of propaganda. Further we have a culture of individualism that conflicts with the basic understanding that to management their employees are cogs.
They shouldn't be titled "THE truth about..." since they're seldom true, complete, or offer any proof. This one has nothing but a bunch of opinion.
Can we vote down submissions to slashdot so we can start getting less slash and more dot?
and every really hotshot piece of software I have ever encountered (and I'm talking world-wide success here) has been written by a very small team of highly-motivated developers working very long hours at very odd times of day with no management interference at all. They weren't rock stars before the project or they would have been managed into oblivion. After they had completed the product and it became successful, then they were rock stars. The self-motivation usually came from "fuck you, manager, I'm going to prove that my ideas are correct" One of these projects, where I knew the people well, became one of IBM's top 5 most profitable products world-wide (you've never heard of it), and those guys broke every rule in the book. They worked nights, never went to meetings, smoked cigars at their desks, suppressed all records of how many hours they were really working. By working those hours, the two of them held the entire structure of a big application, its database, and all its interactions with the operating system in their heads, and that mental state enabled them to write vast quantities of simple clear code that contained no serious errors on shipment, and none revealed in the first year. Later people added on to the project for subsequent releases never found any serious errors in the backbone written by the first two guys, nor did they have any problems adding to the code.
Code written during the normal working day, with constant interruptions, will never soar like that.
That happens but it is rare. I too have been doing this for a long time, more than 25 years. It has taken me a while to get my head around how to create an environment for the team where success can be replicated. In my experience what was described, what I call coders in a cave, can be extremely successful but it is rarely replicated. While the developers involved can often reflect on what they accomplished they can rarely replicate it again. What you (and I) have experienced is amazing but it is somewhat down to being a huge coincidence of timing with respect to developer/team abilities, market knowledge, energy levels, management attention (or not), etc. It happens, but it is rare. I have also been on very successful projects that were built using processes that are highly interactive with management and basically the opposite of what was described. But, I prefer to find a balance in the middle, one that allows some of the freedoms of coders in a cave but with the feedback and guidance provided by the parts of the company that matter.
For a company that is trying to create an environment for success I would suggest that you need to think about process more than rockstars. Rockstar is a management term BTW, as true rockstars are very humble and most often just consider themselves to have a 'good' way to get things done, not the only way.
For the management types out there:
1. Focus on a 'rockstar' R&D manager, someone who lives to drive the process but understands when to drive and when to get the hell out of the way
2. Make sure your infrastructure is there to guarantee throughput. The larger and more complex the project the more important this is. Pay attention to the little things that keep developers happy, do not cheap out on systems or networks.
3. You need a single architect to be in charge of the overall design even if you have a team of architects as nothing will kill a projects momentum more often than the 'architectural committee'. Even in large scale projects that single architect has to make tough design decisions that can only be made in developer land. Managers please step aside
4. Do not promote your best developers to be managers, hire great managers to be managers if you need them. Pay your top developers more if you want to make them happy. In my experience the best developers are not corporate ladder climbers anyhow except when they think they have to be to improve their lives at home (which never works out) so just pay them more AND/OR
"... but in Germany the purpose of an organised workplace is to have a forum between workers and management."
I'm really off-topic here:
I am speaking as a blue-collar worker, but Unions are next to useless here in Canada. The only forum between workers and the company where the Unions are active are when workers are facing disciplinary charges. Lack of regulation, greed and elected officials who have corporate interests as a priority are quickly stripping wages from the middle-class and outsourcing more and more work to other countries. AVEOS, Canada Post, Air Canada, are all situations this year that show that nobody is interested in the well-being of a company or jobs.
It's not really anyone's fault but our own for feeling like we're powerless.
Fucking faggets.
If you're not a rock star manager, you vastly overrate your ability to identify, attract, hire, and retain rockstar developers. You're far more likely to hire people who have massive egos who don't realize their own faults, and who can succeed in pulling the wool over your eyes because you don't know any better.
Credit Rating measure you capacity and willingness. From an investor point of view it does not really matter if you are not paying off your debt because you can't or because you don't want.
Rock Star Developers, seriously? None of them are that good.
Agreed. Rock Stars suck as developers. And most of them suck at rock, as well.
There's not great at astronomy either.
Get out of here with your 'logic' and 'sensible suggestions'! USA! USA! USA!
Seriously, though, I totally agree. I agree that welfare should not be a handout with no strings, but at the same time the helping hand should be there to help them change their lives to the point where they no longer need government assistance. Sometimes there are mental health issues that need to be addressed, or untreated medical conditions that aren't being adequately covered by our Medicaid/Medicare programs. Sometimes there needs to be skills training to make them more employable. The private sector can help as well; instead of exploiting the fact that the job market sucks by hiring these people into no-benefit, minimum wage jobs that nobody would take under normal circumstances, they could hire people into positions that have potential for raises and promotion based on hard work. I guarantee you that 99% of the jobs listed at your local unemployment office are dead-end garbage that only reward hard work with more hard work, and pay so little that frequently a person would be better off without the job at all. (At least then they might be eligible for Medicaid and have SOME health coverage.)
Your child care suggestion? You'd get laughed out of the room if you proposed that. The attitude is that they had the kids, it's their problem. They're literally being punished because they had children.
And yes, there are some who game the system to collect benefits without putting in any sincere effort. It's human nature for some people to want something for nothing (hell, it's probably human nature for all of us) but the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater. The system isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the alternative.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Uhm, all economic and political systems came into being and have been enforced by armed men. Not once , ever, have the people in power just said "You have a great idea so I am going to step down and let you take charge". They had to be forced out of power. To try to pin that fact solely on capitalism is downright silly. Everyone's hero is someone else's evil foe. Marxism is a beautiful Utopian dream that can never exist in reality. Capitalism, while no where near perfect, is at least realistic.
Except they/we are rockstars because they get the job done
The problem with rockstar developers is they often write code that mere mortals cannot read or maintain.
Sure, they can whip out version 1.0 or impressive enhancements quickly, but if it becomes a maintenance nightmare later, isn't the cost just being shifted from up front to later? Rockstar developers are often more trouble than they're worth.
Good, solid, dependable non-rockstar developers are better, in my experience, because they're more likely to write code that their colleagues can actually maintain later.
FTFY. Also, that's why the developer unemployment rate in CA and NY is 7-8% and why it's 3% in the Midwest.
Lay Off 50% of the IT Staff (say 10 People at an average of $70k a year), and Expand Factory workers by 20 average $30k a year. To save $100k, for the company. But the Union ends up getting more money out of dues.
The company also couldn't get away with that if the IT staff were unionized, because to do that would probably cause the remaining 50% to walk off the job too.
Also because the Unions are structured there is a deep dislike towards Outside Consultants and Contractors for temporary work.
Of course there is: Temporary workers are competitors to unionized workers. Using your example of a unionized factory workforce of people getting ~$30k / year, which is a decent living but certainly not an extravagant one: it's about half of the median US household income, about 50% above the poverty line, probably no more than 40% of what you make as an IT consultant, and about the going rate for, say, welders and machinists. Now, if management brings in temps at $7.50 an hour, that's half the cost of your union wage, which means that if management can do so it will fire its entire unionized workforce and replace them with the temps. Sure, the formerly unionized workers could possibly go to the temp agency and get their old jobs back with a 50% pay cut, but could you understand why they might see temps as a fairly direct threat to their own livelihoods? A strong parallel here would be the hostility most US-based IT folks have to H1B holders from India and China.
Union shops tend tries to make sure no one does anyone elses job.
Again, this is a case of union members protecting their own jobs, trying to ensure that management doesn't fire the unionized workforce and just do without. You'd do the same if you were in their shoes.
I once got in trouble from the union because I was consultant commissioned to create a Web Application for them. The commission came from the Application Development group, I did the work to the best of my abilities... Apparently it pissed off the Web Group because my application looked better then what they could do, and they demanded more tools so they can make their apps look better then mine...
And how did that hurt you, exactly? I mean, some folks in a company you didn't work for were pissed off at you - big deal.
When I use to work as a consultant, I was told to avoid these people because they are big in the union, and if I did anything to make them look bad there will be a lot of trouble.
How different is that from the basic rule that embarassing the wrong executive is at best a career-limiting move?
I am officially gone from
And remember that opel is under US management (it's part of General motors)
bickerdyke
If you want a close analogue to the US union situation, the closest in Europe would be the France dock worker's union. The people in unionized positions in the US get paid 4-5x more than their managers who work on salary out of union. Its so bad the manual labor in my company make more than anyone in the company they work for. Anon for obvious reasons.
And groceries are about half the price that they are in the states...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
If you want this in Germany, you need to be part of an insurance company.
My brother used to work summers fixing lawn mowers for Sears. He was forced to join the Teamsters (fell under delivery, I guess).
The masthead for his monthly Teamsters newsletter looked like the dramatis personae for a mob movie. There were like 15 names, and every single one was Italian with a nickname in quotes in the middle. Crap like "The Knife" aand "Lefty".
If running for union leadership was a class in an MMO, the character creation sheet would have a line for "Enter nickname here. This is your mob handle and will show up in double quotes over your head between your first and last name."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This.
I think the problem is that very few managers, even people with technical background, have a good idea about what a top developer/software designer should be like. In my interviews I've been asked to demonstrate what design patterns I know, I've been asked about intricacies of programming languages (such as C++ templates), I was asked about all sorts of technical know-how.
Yet I've never had anyone ever ask me about the maintainability of my code (beyond asking about coding guidelines), or clarity and simplicity of design.
All the while IMO this is the very mark of a great developer - the ability to find elegant, maintainable solutions to any problems.
It's actually quite baffling to me why managers don't look for these things - the 'Keep it Simple Stupid' lesson has been in their books for decades now
'Cause we all just wanna be code rock stars
And live in suburb houses, drivin' hybrid cars
Mod points come easy and ideas come late
We'll all stay horny 'cause we just won't mate
And we'll hang out in the coolest threads
About kernel scheduler overheads
Every bitcoin miner's gonna wind up there
Every ESR fanboy with his unwashed hair
And well, hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Absolutely, I agree 100% that they need extra help sometimes. And I am willing to bet that in most communities there are unemployed people who are able to offer some of the skills they need. For the other skills, the unemployment agencies can hire or contract the support they need. In the short term it would probably cost quite a bit more than our current welfare program, but in the long run I'd be willing to bet it would save the entire country a lot of money. I am a very conservative person (don't get me wrong, I dislike both Rupublicants and Democraps equally), but there is no benefit to the economy to let people die or suffer from poverty. It doesn't help business, and it doesn't help the government either. It just leads to crime and other social problems.
Don't forget if you hire Rock Stars you also need to hire those Little Mouse types that can scurry around doing all of the little things like fetching a "Cinnamon Soy Latte with extra whip and a dusting of dark Cacao" and a bunch of BLUE peanut M&Ms.
(and yes this might be a Jug of Double strength Merkat Coffee and Bison jerky (Ghost Pepper flavoured) but ....)
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The problem with Rockstars is that they insist on re-inventing the wheel. Managers do not have the technical expertise to say no or the brows to keep from being brow-beaten into accepting it. It usually turns into a tar pit.
Rock Star Developers, seriously? None of them are that good.
Agreed. Rock Stars suck as developers. And most of them suck at rock, as well.
There's not great at astronomy either.
Tell that to Brian May! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May)
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
The link between labor and organized crime is an important one but not for the reasons you want people to think.
The link between labor and the mob formed because US corporations had their own private armies that were able to gun people down. The labor movement in the US quickly turned violent and labor needed it's own muscle.
The mob is just the other side of the coin.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he'll eat for a lifetime. -- I personally believe if more assistance programs were run with this mentality in them that we'd all be better off. It's true that if you're teaching someone to fish they'll starve unless you give them a few fish to get going. But, they'll do better for themselves and their community in the long run if they know they have to learn to fish on their own.
Many of us have been forced, thanks to corruption/special interests, to join unions and we've seen the crap that goes on first hand. Not everyone who is in a union is bad or unproductive but too many of them are and they get away with it because the union protects them.
For some historical perspective:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence#Labor_unrest_in_1892
For a more recent example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochet
If that isn't enough, I can come up with more. An economic system that put control of resources in the hands of a small minority of the wealthy tends to be supported by violence.
USA only of course. Most US citizens couldn't find Canada on a map, less correctly identify it as part of North America.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Im surprised that nobody has mentioned that Edward Yourdon has written a book or two about what happens when projects go BAD.
In the situation given the best thing to do is send in a Forensics Team to extract what bits can be transplanted and then START OVER.
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Instead, if you're american, you live in a country where the richest 10% of the population has 70% of the wealth, and the remaining 90% are beggars brainwashed by trashy hollywood movies since birth. That's the "american dream", right? Just keep it.
Nice. Normally the slightest criticism of USA here earns you a flamebait moderation.
Mind you, it's still early there so maybe they're still choking on their morning coffee after reading that.
For their proclivities, unreliability, flashes of brilliance (when in the view of an adoring audience), and total degeneration (when out of the public eye). Blood-doping notwithstanding, you want a Lance Armstrong to lead your team. He keeps his eyes on the prize, knows what it takes to succeed, and is willing to let others take the lead when necessary for the success of the team.
I've had a few rock star developers on my projects in the past. And, when managed well they can make a project a breeze. But, if you let them run wild they will produce some of the most insane code you've ever seen. The big thing is simply to remind them that a much less experienced developer has to support the project after they move on and unless they want to be called at 2:00 AM when something breaks they should make it easy for an inexperienced developer to read. We do elegant coding where speed is needed (financial transactions) and we do less elegant/slow code where we simply need things to work. If you can keep driving these points home you can keep your projects sensible. Now on the other hand my employer often times chooses to hire some of the most inexperienced developers out there to do coding and has us senior engineers try to manage their work. The results vary quite a bit... I often times wished I had a rock star.
Indeed, the article is not actually talking about "rock stars" but about poaching senior developers. It is also quite possibly the most perniciously agist thing I have ever read. "People do their best work when their head is barely above water," huh? How about the "truth" that the person who's "slogged through it 100 times before" also knows where the pitfalls are? The entire article reads like a bad stereotype of crotchety old developers too arrogant to follow directions.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
A senior developer is more like a great studio musician. The person everyone wants for a recording session because he/she will make the product sound great.
A rock star is the personality who jumps around on stage, grabs his crotch, bites the heads off a few chickens and otherwise puts on a good show for the audience. He or she could be a good musician as well. Or not.
In the development world, rock stars are usually brought onto a project by management to impress the board of directors, customers, etc. Once, they may have done something great. But by the time they have achieved developer rock star status, they are coasting on their past achievments.
OK, give the guy a tambourine. But don't mic it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Correct, and our 'armed men' of course, were... wait for it... US.
You can keep your Euro socialist crap over in Europe.
Rock Star Developers, seriously? None of them are that good.
Agreed. Rock Stars suck as developers. And most of them suck at rock, as well.
And despite being mainly composed of hot gas, they suck at being stars too.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"He'd be perfectly healthy if it weren't for that terminal cancer."
Funnily enough, the only time I was ever described as a "rock star" developer was by a company that wanted to hire me, but it was quickly obvious that what they actually wanted was "yes men". The CTO literally said in interview "If I tell you what to do, then I will not tolerate any discussion or debate, you just have to do it without question". I'm thinking, why hire someone at that salary level if you just want to bark orders at them (I'm 40, with 17 years in the relevant industry).
(That was only one out of four red flags I got *during interview*. So glad I declined that offer.)
If making a change requires 40 people in a meeting, you don't need to change the developers - you need to fire the buck-passing assclowns in management. Of course, a manager-focused pub like Infoworld certainly isn't going to tell THAT truth...
That kind of attitude will not hold up in industries where talent is difficult to find (aka tech). I will work where management respects me and is willing to discuss decisions that affect my life. In fact, I will actually work in that sort of environment for way less money. Douchey companies get the "FU price" from me and most other devs I know.
I'm a porn-star developer!
The best outcome of a project I have ever been a part of was during a project for an unnamed automobile manufacturers website. The project was far behind when we came on and the original development group was let go. :-) We put together a group of a few "Rock Star" developers together with a group of experienced developers that we knew form previous projects would take direction and understood design. It was only because of the urgency of the project and the potential profit that management allowed us to form this group. We placed them in what we used to call the prison. They were not allowed contact with the rest of the project team (Business, Graphic Arts, PMs etc). I had short standup meeting with them every morning. Then the "Rock Stars" rocked away. They implemented an elegant, workable, well executed design. There were 12 of them when normally we would have used more like 25 or 30.
My point being they were real "Rock Stars". They could design and code. They were not above doing the actual work. The idea that there are only two kinds of developers: ivory tower academics who know UML and Patterns but can't code, and spaghetti coders who hack through crap but get it done, is the real problem. We hire everybody who can understand an if then statement as a developer these days. What needs to happen in the development business is that hiring managers need to learn that developers are not all equal and resumes can lie.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Okay, I'll bite. What army deposed the German Democratic Republic?
Think carefully before you answer—it's a trick question.
A report authored by lawyer Ian Temby, QC and accountant Dennis Robertson found that $20 million was paid by the HSU without any form of tendering or contract. This included $5 million paid to companies operated by former HSU boss Michael Williamson and his wife. Prime Minister Julia Gillard commented ‘‘It’s clear that there have been real problems at the HSU. That’s distressing I think to everyone who cares about working people.’
4 years and counting since this scandal became public, but no serious action due to protection by union mates:
The former HSU national secretary (and Labor MP) Craig Thomson, faced allegations from 2008[4] that he used an HSU union credit card to pay for escorts, and other financial improprieties with the card. Amid the allegations, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) suspended the HSUs' membership.[5] Thompson maintained his innocence, but in May 2012 a report by Fair Work Australia recommended that civil court action be taken against Thomson for what the report says was a "substantial misuse of members' funds".
The worst part about this is that the majority of the Health Services Union members are lowly paid female staff.
"..unless they want to be called at 2:00 AM when something breaks they should make it easy for an inexperienced developer to read."
This is a good reminder for anybody that gets to hand something off and isn't responsible for the day-to-day operations of it. The proverbial "don't shit where you eat."
You and the OP suck at English.
These are the hard truths about rockstar developers:
1. Your singer can suck.
2. Your guitar player can suck.
3. Your music can suck.
4. Your management can suck.
5. Your drummer and bass player (rhythm section) must not suck.
6. Your hair stylist must not suck.
When developing rockstars, abide by these truths, and you can be successful.
In my opinion, everyone on welfare SHOULD have to do something
That sounds like a good ideology, but I fear you are too far detached from the system to make such an assertion. Everywhere I know of institutes cash assistance as a loan. Once you get a paying job, there are courts and liens that take that money back. If they want to squander a loan on doing nothing, I say, let them. The problem is inherently that people try to stay on assistance forever, so that they don't have to pay back said loan. The focus should be on terminating welfare (or prosecute fraud) under abused conditions, not making people take jobs because "that is what they should be doing"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Certainly, it's a shitty thing that there's a recession, but last I checked, being bad at business isn't illegal, unless it's also fraud. The usual way of letting businesses pay the price for their bad decisions is to let them go out of business.
These guys played fast and loose with their money, and then lost it. They lent to people who could not pay, and then packaged those bad deals into securities. Then other people didn't do their homework on the securities and lost money. They deserved to because they suck at business. You know those people who jumped out of windows in 1929 during the Stock Market crash? They took care of themselves for us because they went broke and the government didn't bail their asses out. I imagine that there was more than a little justice that happened on that day.
I'm more upset that the bad businesses and auto industry were bailed out than I am about prosecutions for stuff that isn't even illegal. That's not even a crime either, but it feels more like one to me. We just all insured these morons against losing anything when they take stupid risks. It's not capitalism or a free market when you do that, it's just reverse socialism. The kind of socialism where only the rich people get welfare.
That said, I am not in favor of necessarily more regulation. You pull the regulation out, this is what you get, a free for all of people going bananas... until they lose their shirts. Then you are left with people who either aren't screw ups or people who have learned their lessons the hard way. When the government steps back in and makes everything "better" they might as well slap the regulation back on, because now they are bolstering the idiots in the market and keeping it broken.
I know that the government felt it had to do "something", because we all expect it to do that, but honestly, the government should just stay as far out of business as it can. Presidential candidates who say they are going to "create jobs" might as well be liars. They can throw money at things, but they can't create supply and demand like real economies need. The government solution is more programs where you start hiring people from big corporations (the only ones who have the scale to actually bid governmental contracts) at inflated rates to do what could be done more efficiently without government involved in the first place.
Build a man a fire, he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life --Terry Pratchett
The anecdote is warn and generally an inappropriate point of view. You ignore the cost (time/resources) of teaching a man to fish, over just giving him one and walking away.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
If you believe it was the military of anything other than western free market societies, meaning the USA, I am quite curious what it is you are thinking.
One of the biggest problems with a capitalist system with a welfare safety net is that there is usually a dangerous gap between welfare coverage and financial independence. It doesn't do any good to be on welfare getting all the health care you need and then get a "real" job that offers no health benefit or a health benefit that you cannot afford. Another thing that Germany is doing well is their private health insurance system. It's actually similar to the US system under Obama, except that everybody pays the same percent of their income to fund the system. In the US programs like social security and medicaid tax the working and middle class, but incomes over $100k are not taxed. If the higher incomes were taxed for social security at the same flat rate then all people could enjoy a more secure retirement. As for health care, insurers in Germany are more regulated and can't just screw their policy holders like they do in the US.
Point is, welfare programs become a trap because making just enough money to no longer qualify for the aid will leave you exposed to so many economic barriers that you inevitably fall back into welfare whether wanting to or not. Someone on welfare may love to walk away with a job paying $40k+ per year, but maybe not so much if the job pays only $25k with bad work conditions, unflexible scheduling, no benefits, and the recipient has special needs children. In the later case I could understand why a single parent would try to game the system to stay protected by the welfare umbrella.
An alternative would be a form of socialism where everyone has a right and equal access to a baseline level of support, such as government hospitals and clinics, access to community gardens and food pantries, affordable housing projects, etc. When access to such basic needs is universal, then there is no counter-incentive to productivity. People may naturally prefer to work at a job or start a business to have nicer things in life than a subsistence serving of raw vegies, a half-day wait at a community clinic, a shared room in a dormitory, and mandatory 20 hours of labor for the able-bodied to qualify. Knowing that the safety net is available would encourage more lower-income and middle-class to take some risks in starting a business which is good for the economy as a whole. People might be motivated to save a reasonable amount of money - which is good, but also motivated to spend and invest, which also drives the economy. Such a system, however, cannot allow the able-bodied to just lounge and accept a passable existence. Those receiving the aid would have to also provide the labor, but it would ensure that "unemployment" would be virtually non-existant - there would only be those employed at the subsistence level and those employed independently.
Such a system doesn't necessarily make people "dependent" on the state, since they can attempt at any time under any circumstances to work independently to earn a higher standard of living without being fearful of earning too much and losing benefits, and they aren't "dependent" on the major corporations because they could always quit at any time, endure a short term on subsistence benefits, and then choose to work somewhere else or be self employed. The only risk to such a system is if the government outsourced the "management" of the system to some private for-profit corporation, which is how the US likes to do things.
Software engineering is definitely plagued by all sorts of "self-taught" idiots who are only doing this because they have heard about all the dollars that can be made in this industry.
If the management talent/scum would only hire people who know the basics (things like algorithms/data structures), there would not be so much crap software and so much abandoned projects around. If "management" weren't Clueless Fucks, they would appoint one of them as the "technical director of project XXX" and give this guy sweeping powers to ensure that all the technical parts fit together nicely. Instead they try to fuck with the details and promote those who can talk nicely but have very few hard skills. But salesmen don't get systems working reliably. All they can do is to sell stuff or to show off nicely in the meeting room.
This industry is full of incompetent people and arguing for mediocrity is plain insanity. If companies would actually hire proper Computer Science people (those who know the difference between a proper Hashtable and the fuck that comes with MFC, for example), their software project would succeed like they do at Google. They only hire the best and brightest.
Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds
How does that work? Why would anybody buy a bond at all if you then had to pay for the privilege of owning them?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Rockstar knows how to tune hashtables, when to use tries, how to optmize multi-threaded access to a single harddisk. Rockstar is not a CS bureaucrat and he will code at least every second day. Rockstar is not an expert in Powerpoint and all those blinky-blinky tools. Instead, he queries text and code files using bash, awk, perl, sed, grep, bash.
I work in the entertainment industry and am a brother with an IATSE local. Our board of directors are all people who work and have established careers, our organizers and field reps are attentive and always available for questions, the union holds regular meetings and mixers, I have good wages and excellent benefits and even though our health plan's been taking a hit lately, the leadership's been very communicative and always has time to talk to people about the negotiations.
To each his own.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Overconfidence in a developer is a major flaw.
It makes them arrogant. THAT makes them difficult to work with.
Everytime I see a job request looking for a "rock star" to join a team, I do not bother any further.
If they want a rock star, then they don't want me. I think they don't have a clue and it will just make my life hell. There are better jobs.
It is like the "idea man" who just needs a dev to knock out a week of work for his $500M idea to be achieved. Idiots.
For example, look at the Qt and GTK devs who decide that backwards compatility isn't important. Arrogance. Idiots. They may be fantastic developers, but they shouldn't be allowed to develop code because of these personality flaws.
The key observation is that, in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one. For example, if you were in New York and compared the best taxi to an average taxi, you might get there 20 percent faster. In terms of computers, the best PC is perhaps 30 percent better than the average PC. There is not that much difference in magnitude. Rarely you find a difference of two-to-one. Pick anything.
But, in the field that I was interested in -- originally, hardware design -- I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.
Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. That's what we've done. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That's what I've tried to do.
(Steve Jobs, In the Company of Giants)
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/news/coladvice/book/bk981106.htm
Lol, armed men, do not necessarily mean an army. The threat of massive mob violence is often enough. However, as far as I know the GDR was never deposed. Merely engulfed within the larger German government. However, I am no expert on Germany and could certainly be wrong.
if you act like a rock star, then you had damn well better be a rock star coder.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What happens when you teach the man to fish, then pollute the lake in which he fishes?
It's about a section manager's time working in a Ford plant during unspecified years (though it's not hard to figure out) and how the Union was
The kind of union you describe I could support; the kind of union we actually have I can't. The UAW is (I think) one of the reasons we should have let our auto industry fail; even with companies going into the red, the UAW still demanded 100% of all their benefits ( Crash Course
Of course, these are empirical examples of only one union, and I'm sure there's a bit of bias, but in my experience it's a fairly accurate picture of labor unions in the US. They used to be good, but now they're over-powerful and corrupt.
People do in fact need help when they fall on hard times, and it is necessary sometimes for that help to come in the form of a handout. But, if you never make it possible for them to help themselves again they will only become dependent on you to provide for them. How is that an inappropriate point of view? I know people who are exceptionally good at self motivating and when they've fallen on hard times all they needed was a little help to get through the rough patch and they got themselves working again. I admire them for their strength and resolve. I also know people who have been perfectly happy to live off the public "doll" for most of their lives because it's just easier. They have no incentive to work, sure they could make more money working a decent job but they wouldn't have all the free time they want. People like that will continue to game the system until such time as the system stops enabling them. Public assistance programs facilitate these people because they incorrectly assume all people are like the former group, hard working and just needing a temporary helping hand. But, there is more than enough evidence both anecdotal and factual to show that in any nation with an ongoing social welfare program that has no limits that we have generations of the same family living off of public assistance. So, no, it's not an inappropriate point of view at least not from someone who ultimately helps pay for the programs that enable this poor behvior.
"The threat of massive mob violence is often enough"
Not accepted, the USSR, had they the will, would have had no hesitation whatsoever to put any unrest in DDR to a quick and unpleasant end and had this happened there is no question who would have won. You cannot avoid this.
The question is why the USSR at the time had not the will. One may argue that it was the threat of massive mob violence in Moscow, but we still need to look at the root cause. The threat of, or actual use of, overwhelming force in the end is what lead to these societal upheavals, and the mobs you speak of were simply no match for the states they opposed - they could produce no credible threat and no significant force was used.
And I say "I don't know. Let me research it." at least once a week. Sometimes multiple times a day.
I think your employer sucked.
No, I think he was pointing out that we're not doing the "walking away" part, so the man know he never really needs to learn how to fish.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I don't know where you are from, but in the US, welfare is not a loan. You do not have to pay it back. Same with unemployment. So yes, they are getting money that they do not need to repay, and therefore should be doing something to give back to their community, or to improve their career skills.
If people had the mean to actually raise their children instead of going to work at any cost and leaving them with strangers all day, our world would be much more less fucked up... more contact with nature would help too.
Tomorrow is another day...
You also dont factor in the pleasure one can have teaching others to fish and see them become more and more independant. This usually happens best on a personal level, thus the social network (NOT social medias) is crucial in society's progress.
The most fulfilling year of my entire life is when I gave my time and some money to help establish a small music studio that offers affordable demos recording and rehearsing space. Part of the initiative was teaching street kids how music is made, haw they can produce their own concerts (small scale) to motivate them to do something else than drugs... and it worked! For me it was a financial disaster, for the homeless to have dreams again and little support to get off the street and do something with their lives is priceless. Individualism do to promote this behavior, but that is how humanity's culture and education evolved and got where it is today.
Tomorrow is another day...
The solution to this is not having "workfare", but just having a graded welfare system where you can still receive welfare while working a normal job. Have people not working receive the most money (but less than they do now), and slowly wean people off welfare while working normal minimum wage jobs. This way people still get health insurance, can still live, and encourages people to work (because they can make more total money and be in a better situation insurance-wise by working).
I slightly disagree with you about point #1. The majority of tasks that have to be done for most projects do not need great developers. When I pass off work to junior developers, it is usually because I know they will do it just as fast as me. If we need code to map data between persistent storage and DTOs, I am not going to write that any faster than a fresh college grad. And my company pays them about half as much. They would rather me be working on something where my experience and ability provides them far more than twice the productivity as junior developers.
If you only have "rockstar" developers, you are overspending for much of the work they are doing.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds
How does that work? Why would anybody buy a bond at all if you then had to pay for the privilege of owning them?
Because there generally are limits to bank deposit insurance. Eg. in the US, a depositor was only protected up to the first $100k. It was briefly unlimited, and I believe it's something like $250k now.
Regardless: if you have more than x in the bank and the bank fails, then you lose all of your money in excess of x. Sovereign debt (bonds) from trustworthy countries is not subject to this problem, because the only risk is risk of the country defaulting. Greece, et al, might but Germany is unlikely to do so.
Also, because you are clever you probably already realized that one could split their wealth into x sized chunks and put each chunk into a different bank, thereby gaining insurance for it all. Yes, that does work, but it's a significant pain and usually not worth it. First, the negative interest rate is small enough not to matter. Second, such a loss is generally tax deductible. Third, money split among n banks is generally rather illiquid: if one wishes to make a major portfolio purchase then it requires transfers from several/many banks, which may not be fast enough to take advantage of an opportunity.
In summary, one could view the negative interest rate as the cost of an insurance policy. The value of this "insurance" is always priced into the bonds, reducing the interest rate. When the prime rate reaches close to zero, then one is likely to see these negative interest bonds crop up.
expensive crack-heads on my development team? http://alcoholism.about.com/od/slang/g/rock_star.htm/
"punished because they had children"? What, is there a right to have as many children as you want without consequence?
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
For having a couple of rough patch in my life, I can tell you living on assistance is no fun at all. Sometime you cannot even afford transportation to go to an interview, that makes you feel worthless and it is a real downward spiral... Have you ever spent weeks eating rice cause you cant afford anything else? Try yo conduct a good interview in that circumstance... not an easy task. Working under the table to put some money aside becomes the only mean to escape the system and eveybody that got off it that I know did it that way (including myself). The cheaters are like the nude dancers (drug dealers, etc) making couple THOUSANDS a week earning black money that are on welfare to justify not paying taxes... a couple bad apples do not mean we should stop helping the ones who really needs it as bad apples are the exception, not the norm.
Tomorrow is another day...
Wow, someone has been watching a lot of movies!
Unions in the USA have been under systematic attack from little right wing reichsfuhrers like the poster above for some 30 years now.
The article reads to me as worse. Infoworld is posting an article that basically suggests senior level developers aren't worth the price tag. It's merely a ripe lump of FUD in an effort to depress salaries.
I guess the people are starting to wake up to the fact their (USA) system is failing big time. It sails on it's own momentum at the moment, and this will get out of fuel eventually. The saaddest thing is, most americans are brainwashed in thinking if they dont vote for on of the rich people's party (D and R) they lose their vote... strategic voting is bullocks, vote with your hearth, not with the telly! And good luck to you all, I love the US and it's people and hate to see them in this downward spiral. And regarding the debt of USA, it is hugely astronomical (federal+states+municipal) and future (long term) capacity to repay it is shaky at best as it is. So much that it is belived congress actually prepared for a potential coming civil war...
Tomorrow is another day...
Same thing in Quebec... I assume it is similar in the rest of Canada.
Tomorrow is another day...
The best outcome of a project I have ever been a part of was during a project for an unnamed automobile manufacturers website.
It's a web site. Web sites are rather routine jobs by now. For an auto web site, most of the effort should be going into the graphical design and marketing, not the underlying machinery. Some ridiculously fancy sites with interactive 3D models have been built, but they don't sell cars. Read Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters".
There are times when you need really good developers. Real-time control. Advanced mobile robotics. Real-time financial trading. Optimizing compilers. Database internals. Digital signal processing. Speech recognition. Image processing. MMORPGs.
Web sites,no. 3-5 years of experience and a string of competently completed jobs.
I disagree. Everyone should get welfare. Donald Trump should get a welfare cheque each month, the same size as anyone else.
Why? People who are unsafe make me unsafe.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
There are different types of rockstar coders. One type will get shit done under ridiculous deadlines. The other will write great code quickly and meet sane deadlines. Most of the time you want the later. Sometimes, you need to bring in your pinch hitter (the first group) and get stuff done. Most of the really bad spaghetti code can be mitigated by having good requirements and not wasting your rockstars on stupid, simple projects, and of course, strong helpful management.
I think rockstars get a bad wrap precisely because they are called in to fix things when projects are getting over deadline for the exact reason that the requirements suck. You really can't hold them accountable for spaghetti code or not exact solutions when the project requirements were the reason they had to step into the mess in the first place.
Because your money is insured in full by a stable government. If you keep it in a normal bank account and the bank goes bankrupt, you'd lose everything but the federally insured amount (which isn't much if you have millions). Of course you could also keep the cash at home for free, but then you're still taking a gamble you won't get burgled.
In my experience, hiring temps are very bad economics. I was in major corporate event planning, mainly shareholders meetings. Hiring temps was a two year exercise, first year we hired a guy to help us about 1 month before our big season and it was a burden cause of lack of experience, basically we paid him to do serious training and once he knew enough we lost him quickly. Next year we tried hiring our "temp" 6 months before our big surge of work, but still not enough time for him to become proficient... again we paid his training and he left. At the end of the day, it was simpler, and better economics, to skip the temp and simply work ous ass 100 hours a week couple of months a year.
Different industries may have different results, thsi post represents my experience and opinions and do not represent the data extracted form a serious, rigorous and scientific study. (nit-picky whiners please abstain) Also, engrish is my second language. ;-)
Tomorrow is another day...
"The problem with rockstar developers is they often write code that mere mortals cannot read or maintain."
You need to learn you job if you can't read or maintain code, that's a deficiency in you. Your employer can always just hire another superstar programmer who CAN maintain code.
Do you imagine that the company is run down to the level of it's most incompetent staff? Is that a recipe for competing in the world? Do everything at the level that your most incompetent staff can do it???
One method continues the cycle of dependency, and one method gives the person the opportunity to overcome the limitation long-term. Now, there are some people who won't be trained, and there are circumstances where they need the help immediately vs having time to learn and increase knowledge gradually, but giving someone hope and ability is an important part of helping them make a positive contribution to society. I think if we had guided programs whose purpose was to get people back on their feet instead of waiting for the next handout we'd have happier, more productive people who can see a real future.
And of course none of this applies if you truly can't be trained or can't do something because of a true disability or handicap. There will always be a certain percentage who need help because they just can't help themselves. The hard part is sometimes determining which type of person you're dealing with -- judging their ability and intent vs their potentially very applicable limitations.
This is why we, the Rest Of the World (ROW) should try to emulate what works best instead of shoving our heads in sands shouting WE ARE THE BEST. No one have absolute truth but some people do some things better and it deserve more recognition.
Tomorrow is another day...
Very insightful. Give them the means to help themselves, and assist them along the way. Make the process reward achievement and effort.
The alternative is to destroy hope, drop benefits quickly, punish initiative and keep them chained to the system. With no hope, crime soars and lives are wasted in a socioeconomic limbo.
I think you're spot on in your first two paragraphs there, but I can't say I agree with your solution. I fear there are simply too many people who would be comfortable with living in the safety net that they wouldn't step up to find more significant employment - the gap between rich and poor would just keep growing as more people from the middle class drop out of the job market. Money alone is not a powerful enough motivation for many people when they can do their mandated 20 hours of work and play video games the rest of the time.
Address health care and child care - then start working the "motivate to work" end of things.
+1 Disagree
+5 insightful. Well said fellow canadian! (I am from quebec, but im canadian first and would not separate anytime soon)
Tomorrow is another day...
...
Does anyone else know what this guy is talking about? What do you mean by 'unsafe'?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
A thousand times this.
Me neither. I definitely remember that they used to be there, but probably Rob took them with him.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
The speak better English then you, mong-dong.
And with that attitude, you should rightly go out of business due to not being able to find anyone worth a shit to work for you.
Unions in the United States needs massive reform.
No they don't. What needs reform is the system at the top. Once that has been reformed, then you can worry about taking things from the working class.
even with companies going into the red, the UAW still demanded 100% of all their benefits
So fucking what? Are you trying to tell me that during that time all of the executives and management were willing to give up any part of their benefits and pay? Are you telling me that you've ever volunteered to give up any part of YOUR benefits and pay when your company wasn't doing so hot?
Taking it in turns? Sounds fair.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When minimum wage goes up 1% in an economy that is inflating at 2%, that is not a raise.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Except you can't buy them because the shops only open for three hours a week.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm an American, and AC has it totally right. German labor dynamics are awesome. Union/mgmt relations in the US are almost inherently adversarial. It's about how best to screw the other guy, not how to succeed together. My dad has been a machinist (tool and die, now primarily CNC) for 40 years, and has worked in union shops and non-union shops. The union shops were only marginally better, if at all. The best shop he ever worked at (and has worked at for 20 years now) is a non-union shop, run by... Germans.
You appear to be confusing Europe with France.
You're not alone in that. Bonaparte, de Gaulle, Sarkozy...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's a lot of prima-donna developers in this industry who think they're hot ####. And they think they're rockstars, this all comes back to the time when Silicon Valley marketing wonks wanted to turn the s/w developer professional into some sort of "rock star" capable type person back in 2007--to glamorize the profession? ...that surely crashed and burned, much like TFA.
And is usually takes that one project you successfully worked on to fall into that psychological trap.
TFA talks about these people, not the true Rockstars that are likely generalists and know that this is a business: use case, budget and time is all that matters and get the job done with a team.
I do agree with the OP that creating the educational environment is critical for a successful team though.
I'm talking about the acts of desperate men.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Now the next question: how does an American go about moving to Germany?
I didn't say that management was so great either. They had gold faucets, new cars every month (IIRC) and free fuel. Their benefits were as lavish as the Unions.
The entire thing was fucked up. I wasn't trying to condemn any single party (though I do dislike unions), as I stated at the beginning: "for an intriguing read..." That's all it's supposed to be, interesting, not some deep analysis of who screwed over who or o a comparison of one party being better than the other (apologies if it came out that way).
To answer your question though: yes, I have.
Yes, it's the American dream. Why? Because it was stated (apparently by George Carlin), you'd have to be asleep to believe in it.
Look at Wall Street. The people who fucked the economy are still employed. Some of them gave up a fourth yacht. Boo hoo.
I like the free market when it works. Toyota eating Ford's lunch ten years ago? Awesome. Google taking the lead in search? Awesome. iPhone destroying Blackberry and Palm? Awesome. But clearly that kind of free market competition has been prevented from working properly in the banking industry.
The speak better English then you, mong-dong.
And apparently better than you too.
You can mainly thank Fox News for making anything right wings disagree with "evil".
I wasn't trying to condemn any single party
Yes, you were. You simply blamed the unions for balking at cuts to their compensation. I fail to see how you can actually criticize them for that, given that just about everyone else would balk at cuts to their compensation as well. Why should unions be special in this regard?
Sex and drugs and source control
Is all my brain and body need
Sex and drugs and source control
Are very good indeed
Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds
How does that work? Why would anybody buy a bond at all if you then had to pay for the privilege of owning them?
It's probably non-negative in the long-term.
Thank you!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You hire a Rockstar developer when you want a Grand Theft Auto game made.
John Maynard Keynes imagined a 15-hour week by the beginning of the 21st century. Henry D. Thoreau is said to have worked an average of 10-20 hours per week after his days at Walden Pond. If one chooses a simple life it has been shown time and again that a person can provide most of his own needs for less, often much less, than 20 hours of work each week. But we live in an age of dependency on and servitude to the "military-industrial complex" as described by Eisenhower (a Republican). In order to generate unimaginable wealth for a fortunate few and to fund years of armed occupation at bases around the world, some dating from the Spanish-American War, individuals are pushed to work 40+ hours each week IF they are fortunate to have the right skills, education, cultural background, social/professional network and brown-nosing. The rest of America is often juggling two to three jobs, working in excess of 60 hours each week, no vacation, and watching their net worth sinking deeper into negative. For many, unpaid bills and a trashed credit score are the least of their problems. Even when struggling people try to work together, their efforts come under attack, such as when working mothers band together to help babysit each other's kids - they are often accused of running an unlicensed daycare and shut down. Same for other efforts to make ends meet. Just this month there was a story of a woman facing fines for feeding poor neighborhood kids: http://rt.com/usa/news/philadelphia-woman-food-prattis-966/.
If people were free to provide for themselves and each other a basic subsistence then they would have true freedom to pursue their own destinies. Sure, some may put in their 20 hours and lounge around the rest of the time, but it has been shown that the mega-rich do not get where they are unless they can convince thousands of minions to propell them there. In a world that promises guaranteed employment for everyone willing and able-bodied, reasonable accomodations for those who are not able-bodied, and freedom to earn well above their needs, even if the gap between rich and poor (where "poor" never means impoverished) grew even greater, the extravagant lifestyles of the rich would not necessarily be a burden to the content and simple subsistance earners.
Why should everyone have to work 40 or 60 hours a week to earn more than they need or even want? There are countless numbers of Americans who are more than capable of earning $100k+ salaries but are content to maintain a simple, happy, and productive living pursuing careers that provide them with more enjoyment and/or opportunities to pursue causes that are important to them. Teachers, social workers, fire fighters, and park rangers come to mind. But how many of these workers today are questioning their career choices now? How many young students are changing their minds about making the world a better place because they are fearful that economic conditions will leave them paying insurance premiums they cannot afford while simultaneously paying every last penny out of pocket for essential and mandatory health care (try denying your kids cancer therapies because you think the bill is too high and see how fast you go to jail).
Now, such a system as I propose would change the nature of how we understand free markets. People would have much better control of their budgets because most spending would be for desireable but non-essential items, such as smart phones, automobiles, fashion, and comfortable housing, which would motivate most people to work. But it wouldn't be wealth and prosperity for all. 40 hours working low-skill, low-demand jobs might only pay enough to cover the cable TV bill in your public funded dormitory that you have to share with a unkempt redneck and his pet racoon. Given such a possibility most people would try to achieve some level of eduction, try to climb the corporate ladder, start a consulting business, or whatever it takes to get what they want o
Am am aware of that and I agree with you. (Comment was to the point as much as possible, this is ./, after all.) If these are competent and professional junior developers, you can and should do that and you should have them available just for that. If the junior developers are incompetent or unprofessional, handing off work causes more trouble than doing it yourself.
Let me clarify 1 to say, "competent and professional people, for the specific different levels of experience and skill needed in a project"
I should also say that I view being competent and professional more as an attitude or a goal in life. Sure, junior people will get it wrong more or less often. But the competent and professional ones will realize and try to do better. In particular, they will first invest a reasonable time to figure it out themselves and then ask somebody with more experience. And if the person with more experience is competent and professional, it will realize this is a great opportunity to contribute and spend the time and effort needed to explain what went wrong and how to avoid it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The people who make complex designs are the show-offs. You don't want those. Good programmers solve the problem with the minimal amount of effort, carefully placing few well designed features at strategic locations to make the problem fold itself.
Then those features can be turned into small amounts of code which is designed to be readable first, and only optimized if it's really necessary.
Make alcohol/entertainment too expensive for those on welfare and when they see other people having fun because they work, they may have incentive to not play with dirt for fun.
Have a separate monetary system for essentials vs luxury. Only pay welfare people with money that can be used for essentials.
Crime is dramatically lower in countries with good welfare.
This discussion reminds me of the setup for the Sherlock Holmes story/novella "The Valley of Fear."
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3776
I remember as a child, my dad going in late to work. He told me most of the time the "job" was something simple enough that a janitor could do with instructions over the phone in less than a minute. Effectively "press a button". Instead, he would get called in, drive 45min to work, walk 30min across the building, press the button and walk out. He got paid not only for the time there, but also his travel time, while getting overtime.
Then the stories of the "drunk" worker that no one liked. He would punch in, go to a bar, head back to work 8 hours later, and punch out. Work fired him and the union sued the employer because the employer is NOT allowed to fire anyone without getting permission from the union.
Yep, great system.
I'm not talking about some small shop, but an international industrial company.
One of the measures of someone who is good at what they do in a creative job is being able to get shit done, even if it is a difficult or stupid request. It isn't about being "right" it is about making the customer happy.
All the developers that I respect the most (I'm a sysadmin, not a developer) are the ones who are able to solve stupid problems, problems that shouldn't have to be solved, and solve them well. They will call me and bitch about how retarded the client is (I swap 'stupid request' stories with a friend at least once a week) but in the end they make it happen, make it work well, get it done on time, and make the client happy.
If we are going to put a silly label like "rockstar" on it then that is what I define it as. They are the people who can get shit done. It may involve stupid specs, changing specs, and so on they still get it done and don't make a hash of it.
Any programmer should be able to implement something based on well defined, detailed, unchanging specs for a clear and simple problem. It takes a much better programmer to deal with half done, changing specs on something stupid and ill defined.
Indeed. And much of the childcare can be provided by, hold on, workfare participants. Some trained childcare oversight would be needed obviously to protect the kids, but probably one for every five workfare workers.
Legitimate workfare programs in the private sector make sense though when they are offering training and a possible entry into a job they would never have qualified for without that on the job training. The numbers need to work though -- the employers should be expected to dismiss workfare workers that are not showing promise as quickly as possible and should be expected to hire a high percentage of those that they don't dismiss. Unfortunately, such programs are run by bureaucrats who make up volumes of rules because they really can't use common sense -- both because too many of them and their workers don't have it and because to avoid claims of "discrimination", a rule is needed for everything. The result is gaming the rules by workers and employers.
Many of the children of chronic welfare families would be better off taken from their parents and put in well run boarding schools.
This would be expensive, but it would break the multi-generation cancer of welfare with kids whose grandmother birthed their mother when the grandmother was 14 and whose mothers birthed them when their mother was 14 and grandmother and mother have been on public assistance most of their lives and neither finished high school.
If these people want public assistance for more than 12 months out of seven years in times of low unemployment, they give up the kids and understand that if they EVER have another child they will NEVER be allowed on ANY form of public assistance. Give them birth control for free if they want it.
Often the "Rock Stars" are either programmers who self identify with this and often have some form of seniority; or are blowhards who have the upper management sold on their amazing mad skills. A quick bit of digging will turn out that the database "overhaul" that he did in one weekend that would have taken mere mortals 6 months that resulted in the reports running 20x faster was actually an upgrade of an 8 year old server with an 8 CPU SSD drived, 64GB beasty; so a 20x improvement is actually a bit of a disappointment. Another sign of rockstars is often certifications coming out of the wazoo. I agree with previous posters: Cowboy is probably the better title.
Sometimes the RockStars are stupid but it is even worse when they are really smart. That is when they start coding in assembler knowing that they are creating a dependency on them of mega proportions.
A term I like is rarefied programmers. These programmers are usually quiet and usually leave people scratching their heads; not in confusion; but with puzzlement as to why they didn't see such an easy solution. The code is usually small and understood by all. Often things just get done and all around them benefit. An interesting way to detect these programmers is that they use an odd mix of the old an new. They might be using C++ right along with some NoSQL solution. C++ because they are very good at it and NoSQL because it was the logical tool for the job.
Where these rarefied programmers can get into conflict and "cause trouble" is when they have to deal with the RockStars. Some RockStar with management support will reject unit testing (slows me down) insist on using something (cool) like Go and then need to alter the Linux Kernel as it (I have witnessed this). The rarefied programmer will move on and take the two best programmers with them.
I have noticed quite a few people blaming MBAs for the problems of RockStar programmers; this is due to RockStars providing the MBAs with a good story for sales. "Our guy was the first certified Oracle DBA in the state." "Our guy singlehandedly programmed a NASA Sub system." "Our guy is certified to level 20." "Our guy worked 20 straight days for 16 hours a day to finish a project." MBAs need zest and sizzle or they don't get an obscene bonus. Why do they get the obscene bonus because they golf with the CEO and brag about how they have a RockStar programmer.
The rarefied programmer is usually too boring for the MBAs. "Our guy found an open source product so we canceled my pet project and just used the OS product." "Our guy added unit testing; whatever the hell that is." "Our guy switched the programmer's editor from Eclipse to Sublime Text 2" "Our guy showed the accountants how to make a better macro."
English Mutha' Fucker, Do - you - speak - it?
"Have you seen the rate of Germany's GDP decrease in the recent years?"
Have you seen the rate of Germany's population decrease in the recent years?
What happens when Ken leaves? The company is well and truly fucked, right?
This is why even the smart guys have to play by the rules. The best ones know that they're good, but that not everybody else is, and this is a job and not a hobby. Frankly, what Ken needs is a manager with the balls to tame him, or fire him.
I'm also glad I'm not working with Synopsis if that's indicative of anything.
It's not "marxist terminology" capitalism is enforced and came into being by men with guns,
Um, so was communism, Karl...
75% of people on welfare are too old and too young to work. Stop with this silly myth that welfare makes people lazy.
Bottom line here, the worst investment in business is in the overqualified. Don't hunt house flies with howitzers.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I don't think I can stay in software much longer.
"...something to be desired. I do work in a pretty edge case kind of field though (geospatial analytics), that has a good bit more math than your average business dev work."
"While this is probably true for some people, especially above average people who have only worked at small companies where they are the best developer with no real competition I think there's a second problem that can make good people appear like that:"
"If rock stars programmers work with genuine peers, the diva part of them will be suppressed. It is hard to feel superior when working with people against whom you are just average. Some of them can still lack in social skills(*), but you can often minimize the damages that could cause. Of course as a company you still need to be able to afford top talent and have a project that challenges or otherwise interest them."
Above average. Below average. Senior developer. Junior developer. Rockstar programmer. Cowboy programmer. What do ANY of you know about "average"? What constitutes below average, and what constitutes above average? It's complete and utter subjective nonsense.
Do you want to go by lines of code written? Do you want to go by number of licenses sold? Do you want to go by pay? Do you want to go by your GPA in college (though I'm sure some of these "rockstar programmers" are not computer scientists or even college graduates).
You have no metrics, no basis. So stop using the word average. Software has become egomaniacal and elitist.
The measure of worth for a developer has become so utterly blurred and has been replaced with elitism, egos and exclusivism.
As I go on through my career in software, should it last that long, I will measure my worth by number of successful projects. You all can use whatever you like- pay, lines of code, size of teams, IQ...I don't care.
For this reason I'm looking to get out of software. I've only just begun my career but I already want out. The whole mindset is different in hardware. Because in hardware, it has to work. If it doesn't work, people are at risk. In software, you get angry calls. The mindset is different with hardware engineers and embedded developers- they don't think about rockstars or cowboys...They work together to make things work.
You know a lot about Germany and nearly zero about the United States.
Long before there was Fox News, I knew Unions were a bad deal. They were necessary in the early 1900s because of corporate abuses. But the laws have caught up. Now, far too often, Unions prevent bad workers from getting fired, good workers from giving a darn after a few years (because the bad workers have tenure and get paid better), and are a general cancer to business.
Add to that the Unions grease the palms of one particular political party, as the party returns the favors with favorable laws and contracts. The actual workers, middle and poor classes, and the tax payers all get hurt in the process.
A programmer who always says OK, I can do it and does it? No bugs, no excuses, any domain, only the time it takes to. And then happens to play music like a rock star... Rock star programmer. You need only ONE case to get the general tag and this discussion. But if you follow the idea concept... the rock star programmer is not hired: he is the one hiring, to round corners and chores, but the code and design and idea is his, otherwise there is trouble! But the problem exposed in this discussion is more general: when do technical resources acquire fame? Some actors are simply so... :|
our Democratic/socialist party
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
...like food stamps?
+1 Disagree
Whenever someone says "Rock Star" programmer, I always picture Keith Richards or Ozzie going in for a development interview...
"So... what you're looking for is a programmer who shows up late, strung out on coke, hungover, and hoping that the roadies (interns) took care of most of the work, who will likely have sex with the girl at the front desk, and will only finish a job if he has a number of people screaming 'ENCORE!' to encourage him on?"
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
At Microsoft back in the day, we called them HRHs, his or her royal highness or highnesses.. they could not be fired and could do whatever they wanted, get up walk out of meeting, take a smoke break for 3 days, show up whenever, but when they knew they needed to deliver, they would code the best code ever in a 60 hour non-stop marathon. Did the PMs I know like them, hell no, could they fire them? hell no. Did they wish they could, hell yeah! Me? I was a developer on a scale of 1 to 10 like a 12, but these HRHs were code warriors. I loved them and I was non-traditional management and ex-military. An old saying, don't screw with black-ops, and Microsoft's code warriors were definitely trusted warriors. crazy, but true. traditional management and HR could not get a grip on Rock Star programmers. it was not in their play book and it should never be in their playbook. HR is a cost center and idiots at best - remember folks, HR services management, not the other way around. HR cannot bind contracts, Management can.. blah blah blah
Am I a rock star developer. I know plenty of musicians that think they are Rock Stars, but they ain't. If a developer is writting a billion lines of untested code, I would say they are just a Bad Developer. Not like MJ bad, like, you suck bad.
This is what Sweden had, until they started outsourcing the whole lot to private entities. Now nothing works, and everyone is paying for it, along with additional health insurance.
They did the same to the pension system, schools, public transport etc.
The simple fact is that free public healthcare cannot exist alongside private healthcare.
There is no incentive for politicians (and the most influential) to keep the system functioning if they can just pay whatever necessary to get good healthcare, and undermine the public healthcare for profit.
There is a middle ground though, if only research and cutting edge medicine were allowed to be private, and only for a *very* limited time, you'd get the best of both worlds, public and private healthcare.