Document the system after the fact - that's the funniest post I've seen in weeks. We all know there's no business case for documentation once the system is working and live. =)
I'm not sure if your 18 month cycle between versions sounds miraculous or scary. It would be nice to actually follow a project through to completion, as opposed to shipping the abortion which is the most cost effective approach. However, I worry that an environment that allows that could ship the same quality, but have a lot more pointless methodology that makes 18 months the minimum cycle time.
I actually have worked on requirements and design documents with an outside vendor, but it never sat right with me that both documents read like feature lists of the products the vendor wanted to sell us. In cases where we needed something that contradicted the product's capabilities, we compromised and settled on a way of wording the requirements so that they specified the product's existing capabilities. I never understood how taking someone else's proposal verbatim was a compromise, but that's probably the lack of vision that is holding me back from upper management. =)
Of course they are, but why would they cut the scam short? People who steal money aren't likely to say "ok, I better stop now because I have enough money and I found a patsy." They can pin it on you at any time, even after you leave if they only use information that was available to you at the time you left.
Are there actually companies that write proper specs? I've only been doing IT for 19 years and I have yet to find any place where it actually happens. It's something I've always heard of, but never ran into anyone who had actually seen it happen. Generally, I've found the organizations least capable of writing specs to be the ones most likely to outsource, not the other way around. I think the idea is that if you don't know what you're doing, you may as well pay as little as possible since you already know you're going to fail. I agree with that philosophy, which is why I expect to be paid more for projects that people want to succeed. =)
The real goal is to ensure that the developers and users/customers are trying to address the same problem. The specs/requirements/design phases are just ways to document everything so that when it doesn't happen, someone can point to a document and said "this is what you said you wanted, pay us". It's a legal CYA. This is why it's more important to have these documents when the users and developers aren't part of the same small group of employees.
What the law says and how it works are very different. Anyone who takes a hard stand based on being legally in the right is in for a firm reality check.
Depending on the size of the company, there is a very real possibility that the people in management got there by knowing the law well enough that they can violate it with plausable deniability. I work in a large bank where I see that happen all the time. I have pointed out numerous security problems and blatant violations of company policy, but management is willing to take those risks. We have people telling us what we need to do because sarbox has teeth, but there's absolutely no consequences for when we blatantly ignore them. The reality is that the worst that can happen is the offender gets transferred to another department, or in extreme cases, they could get fired.
Everyone has a potential security breech waiting to happen. The laws exist to point fingers after the fact. The law isn't going to help someone who is just pointing out a potential flaw. What's worse is that if someone exploits the hole this person identified, the law has good reason to consider him a suspect since he's obviously thought about it.
Your theory presumes that someone has yet to steal a bunch of money. I don't share your unbridled optimism. I wouldn't be surprised if management set it up this way so they can skim money themselves without anyone being able to figure out who is doing it. Transactions don't have to be untraceable if you can ensure there is a large enough suspect pool to minimize the chances of getting caught.
I think it's even more likely that there are no safeguards in place at all. Security is an expense with the goal of having nothing to show for it, except for a lack of problems. It makes for a horrible powerpoint presentation.
My cynicism comes from working for a major bank where I have to keep resetting my idea of "bare minimum" to include things like mailing unencrypted CD's of personal identifiable information and account numbers to third parties. At first I was disappointed to see this happening, until I learned that the same people who think this is acceptable are the ones auditing the security for the third parties. The atrocities know know bounds. Every morning I wake up without a complete collapse of our banking system I am amazed.
That would be an interesting approach to measure progress over time. However, the data collection and reporting needs of something like that would make it hard to do, especially for the people who are already complaining that it's hard to do what they're doing now.
That would be a really cool software project to implement though. It would need to scale to millions of students and handle students moving between districts with incompatible testing criteria. I can design the whole thing if you can get law makers to allocate the funds. Given the way government projects are run, I think the whole thing could be done for a mere 4 billion. =)
I never said performing at that level was a good thing. I was just saying that someone can fake teaching math as easily as they can fake teaching english. Focusing on getting the right answer is the easy way for an incompetant teacher to game the system and look like they're doing something.
I'm a big fan of people comprehending what they are taught. I consistently see people in the outside world doing things wrong because they were taught wrong and never understood WHY they were supposed to do something. However, it's easy to measure scores on tests and hard to measure how many students actually comprehend the topic beyond the test questions, so we end up with the easier approach because people are lazy.
Are you telling me you never had a teacher who either didn't know their subject or couldn't communicate with students and used the same overhead transparencies for the last 15 years? They seemed to be plentiful throughout my academic experience. My point is that with math, it is possible to squeak by on just knowing the end result without knowing how to get there. The better students will know that the teacher is faking it, but why would the administration care?
I had a HS Geometry teacher who marked a question wrong for 80% of the class on a test because the better students (not the other 20%) said a proof could not be completed. His answer: we were supposed to assume that two lines were perpendicular. That's specifically one of the things you're not supposed to do in proofs, as stated numerous times in the book.
One time I had a pascal programming teacher who was an electrical engineer with no programming background. They needed someone to teach the class, so they gave it to someone who could stay one chapter ahead of the class. He was a decent guy and wanted to do a decent job, so I helped him out a bit. He was smart, so the whole thing worked out fine. However, I doubt it's that rare that schools push teachers into filling a role that is outside their zone of competance.
Performance is a hard thing to measure. Qualifications are a measure of a minimum skill set, often at a particular point in time. When you try to measure performance, people tend to maximize for the criteria being measured, even if it's counterproductive to doing their primary job.
Teachers get rated based on how their students do on standardized tests, so they teach students to be good at the test, regardless of how relevant that information is outside of the test. People complain about teaching to the test, but insist on metrics that require some manner of measurement. It's a catch 22.
This is even worse since the teachers get no choice in their students. How would you feel if your performance was based on your ability to get a bunch of goldfish to do math?
I'm all for rating people based on their performance, but in practice it always comes down to something documented clearly in such a brain dead manner that people aren't afraid of being sued. Once that happens, it becomes very difficult to see the difference between someone who is really good at their job and someone who is good at gaming the system.
One doesn't have to be comfortable with math to teach it any more than an english teacher needs to be literate. Teachers have answer books to help them. Unlike english, math is easy for a moron to teach since the answer is either exactly right, or it's wrong. There's no comprehension needed to perform at that level.
Sure, it would be nice if the teachers were interested in their field and had some talent/experience. However, when you pay near the bottom of the scale for educated/certified people, you get what you pay for.
That's the beauty of the scam. No matter how idiot proof someone makes something, a manager driven entirely by perceived (as opposed to actual) bottom line cost will find a less capable idiot.
I also appreciate the blissful ignorance these people choose to live in. I certainly don't want to have to get a real job either.
Didn't you get the memo? In any organization, no package is more useful than the most knowledgeable person maintaining it. Since training is skipped as an unnecessary cost in most companies, it shouldn't be surprising that most companies will never get more than the most basic functionality.
Re:I thought it was rather good.
on
DIY Laptop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While I can appreciate the value of doing something yourself, this seems totally useless. I figure I can find HP48's for $20 if I try hard enough and those are infinitely more practical, portable, and useful. Reinventing the wheel for the sake of being the millionth guy to do it as a cube seems kinda silly.
He used premade components like chips and LCD displays. That's hardly building a laptop from scratch.
With a $50 budget, he could have picked up a 486 laptop that would be much more useful. I have a stack of old thinkpads that I paid nothing for and could part with for $50/ea.
I work for a major bank that leaves telnet on all over the place, in spite of the 1997 company policy of replacing it with SSH as soon as possible. Sensible configuration and maintenance are impossible when business people micromanage the technology side. You'd think that putting a gun to their head would be enough to make people do it, but you'd be wrong. They're one step ahead of us all. Business people cannot be harmed by a bullet to the brain. They're already brain dead.
Yes, they did. In PHBthink, it's cheaper to bring in a consultant at any cost when a problem occurs instead of spending the money on maintenance. The results of the money spent on maintenance are invisible, whereas consultants address known, specific problems. I think the management-by-russian-roulette philosophy is all the rage in MBA schools now.
I'm a contractor so I'm restricted to working 40 hours unless they want to pay more. However, it's clear that the expectation from FTE's is 60+, more if you want to be promoted. It's also been suggested that I can work as many hours as I want, as long as I only bill for 40. I interviewed with another company that outright said they discouraged their contractors from billing actual hours worked. I'm pretty sure that's a blatant violation of federal labor law, but it's so common that no one thinks twice about it.
Not any time soon. The language barrier makes training difficult. It's one thing to teach the "point this end away from self" lesson. The ones who don't get that lesson will not move on in their class anyway. The hard part is getting them to wear a uniform and only shoot at anything that wears a different uniform.
They're trying to get into politics. Lucky for us they haven't realized that a politician can only fling poo when the other guy's back is turned and there's a scapechimp to blame it on. If they ever figure that out, we're going to see them on the ballot. Some believe chimps have learned to shave and this has already happened. Lucky for us, the majority will vote for tall people to prevent the chimps from taking over.
More importantly, I wonder how many meetings and levels of management they needed to develop the sharpened stick. This information would greatly help us understand our own evolution. I suspect the answers to both questions would be 0, which leads us to the discovery of the engineer chimp. If we can find out which genes separate these chimps from others, we can isolate this group of chimps and give them jobs in large companies and government organizations. This will allow an increase in the average productivity level while decreasing cost since our labor laws do not apply to chimps. Step aside India and China, now we can outsource to the zoo. =)
I would argue that the majority of business people hiring programmers to work cannot tell the difference between a well designed solution and a horrible kludge. The horrible kludge will always take less time in the short term than the well designed solution. Business people have no long term memory and only acknowledge short term goals. A horrible kludge is a cost effective short term solution.
Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that in many environments, Perl is an ideal tool for the problem at hand. It can be used in ways that are not horribly short sighted, but it's flexible enough to still be useful in the situations that are.
Then again, my view of the world may be skewed by having spent too much time working for people who believe that russian roulette is the only viable way to make decisions. It's always worked in the past and the brain dead cannot be harmed by the game, so we don't do backups of our production databases. Our disaster recovery plan is to drive across town and get a job at a company that didn't have a disaster. I'm not kidding, we have senior VP level support (working in a bank) for this plan.
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If you can go one step further and setup your backup server as a virtual machine on your primary server, you can be promoted to management. =)
Document the system after the fact - that's the funniest post I've seen in weeks. We all know there's no business case for documentation once the system is working and live. =)
I'm not sure if your 18 month cycle between versions sounds miraculous or scary. It would be nice to actually follow a project through to completion, as opposed to shipping the abortion which is the most cost effective approach. However, I worry that an environment that allows that could ship the same quality, but have a lot more pointless methodology that makes 18 months the minimum cycle time.
I actually have worked on requirements and design documents with an outside vendor, but it never sat right with me that both documents read like feature lists of the products the vendor wanted to sell us. In cases where we needed something that contradicted the product's capabilities, we compromised and settled on a way of wording the requirements so that they specified the product's existing capabilities. I never understood how taking someone else's proposal verbatim was a compromise, but that's probably the lack of vision that is holding me back from upper management. =)
Of course they are, but why would they cut the scam short? People who steal money aren't likely to say "ok, I better stop now because I have enough money and I found a patsy." They can pin it on you at any time, even after you leave if they only use information that was available to you at the time you left.
Are there actually companies that write proper specs? I've only been doing IT for 19 years and I have yet to find any place where it actually happens. It's something I've always heard of, but never ran into anyone who had actually seen it happen. Generally, I've found the organizations least capable of writing specs to be the ones most likely to outsource, not the other way around. I think the idea is that if you don't know what you're doing, you may as well pay as little as possible since you already know you're going to fail. I agree with that philosophy, which is why I expect to be paid more for projects that people want to succeed. =)
The real goal is to ensure that the developers and users/customers are trying to address the same problem. The specs/requirements/design phases are just ways to document everything so that when it doesn't happen, someone can point to a document and said "this is what you said you wanted, pay us". It's a legal CYA. This is why it's more important to have these documents when the users and developers aren't part of the same small group of employees.
What the law says and how it works are very different. Anyone who takes a hard stand based on being legally in the right is in for a firm reality check.
Depending on the size of the company, there is a very real possibility that the people in management got there by knowing the law well enough that they can violate it with plausable deniability. I work in a large bank where I see that happen all the time. I have pointed out numerous security problems and blatant violations of company policy, but management is willing to take those risks. We have people telling us what we need to do because sarbox has teeth, but there's absolutely no consequences for when we blatantly ignore them. The reality is that the worst that can happen is the offender gets transferred to another department, or in extreme cases, they could get fired.
Everyone has a potential security breech waiting to happen. The laws exist to point fingers after the fact. The law isn't going to help someone who is just pointing out a potential flaw. What's worse is that if someone exploits the hole this person identified, the law has good reason to consider him a suspect since he's obviously thought about it.
Your theory presumes that someone has yet to steal a bunch of money. I don't share your unbridled optimism. I wouldn't be surprised if management set it up this way so they can skim money themselves without anyone being able to figure out who is doing it. Transactions don't have to be untraceable if you can ensure there is a large enough suspect pool to minimize the chances of getting caught.
I think it's even more likely that there are no safeguards in place at all. Security is an expense with the goal of having nothing to show for it, except for a lack of problems. It makes for a horrible powerpoint presentation.
My cynicism comes from working for a major bank where I have to keep resetting my idea of "bare minimum" to include things like mailing unencrypted CD's of personal identifiable information and account numbers to third parties. At first I was disappointed to see this happening, until I learned that the same people who think this is acceptable are the ones auditing the security for the third parties. The atrocities know know bounds. Every morning I wake up without a complete collapse of our banking system I am amazed.
That would be an interesting approach to measure progress over time. However, the data collection and reporting needs of something like that would make it hard to do, especially for the people who are already complaining that it's hard to do what they're doing now.
That would be a really cool software project to implement though. It would need to scale to millions of students and handle students moving between districts with incompatible testing criteria. I can design the whole thing if you can get law makers to allocate the funds. Given the way government projects are run, I think the whole thing could be done for a mere 4 billion. =)
Why? Given what they pay, it's not like there are a lot of more competant people waiting to take the job.
I never said performing at that level was a good thing. I was just saying that someone can fake teaching math as easily as they can fake teaching english. Focusing on getting the right answer is the easy way for an incompetant teacher to game the system and look like they're doing something.
I'm a big fan of people comprehending what they are taught. I consistently see people in the outside world doing things wrong because they were taught wrong and never understood WHY they were supposed to do something. However, it's easy to measure scores on tests and hard to measure how many students actually comprehend the topic beyond the test questions, so we end up with the easier approach because people are lazy.
Are you telling me you never had a teacher who either didn't know their subject or couldn't communicate with students and used the same overhead transparencies for the last 15 years? They seemed to be plentiful throughout my academic experience. My point is that with math, it is possible to squeak by on just knowing the end result without knowing how to get there. The better students will know that the teacher is faking it, but why would the administration care?
I had a HS Geometry teacher who marked a question wrong for 80% of the class on a test because the better students (not the other 20%) said a proof could not be completed. His answer: we were supposed to assume that two lines were perpendicular. That's specifically one of the things you're not supposed to do in proofs, as stated numerous times in the book.
One time I had a pascal programming teacher who was an electrical engineer with no programming background. They needed someone to teach the class, so they gave it to someone who could stay one chapter ahead of the class. He was a decent guy and wanted to do a decent job, so I helped him out a bit. He was smart, so the whole thing worked out fine. However, I doubt it's that rare that schools push teachers into filling a role that is outside their zone of competance.
Performance is a hard thing to measure. Qualifications are a measure of a minimum skill set, often at a particular point in time. When you try to measure performance, people tend to maximize for the criteria being measured, even if it's counterproductive to doing their primary job.
Teachers get rated based on how their students do on standardized tests, so they teach students to be good at the test, regardless of how relevant that information is outside of the test. People complain about teaching to the test, but insist on metrics that require some manner of measurement. It's a catch 22.
This is even worse since the teachers get no choice in their students. How would you feel if your performance was based on your ability to get a bunch of goldfish to do math?
I'm all for rating people based on their performance, but in practice it always comes down to something documented clearly in such a brain dead manner that people aren't afraid of being sued. Once that happens, it becomes very difficult to see the difference between someone who is really good at their job and someone who is good at gaming the system.
One doesn't have to be comfortable with math to teach it any more than an english teacher needs to be literate. Teachers have answer books to help them. Unlike english, math is easy for a moron to teach since the answer is either exactly right, or it's wrong. There's no comprehension needed to perform at that level.
Sure, it would be nice if the teachers were interested in their field and had some talent/experience. However, when you pay near the bottom of the scale for educated/certified people, you get what you pay for.
That's the beauty of the scam. No matter how idiot proof someone makes something, a manager driven entirely by perceived (as opposed to actual) bottom line cost will find a less capable idiot.
I also appreciate the blissful ignorance these people choose to live in. I certainly don't want to have to get a real job either.
Didn't you get the memo? In any organization, no package is more useful than the most knowledgeable person maintaining it. Since training is skipped as an unnecessary cost in most companies, it shouldn't be surprising that most companies will never get more than the most basic functionality.
While I can appreciate the value of doing something yourself, this seems totally useless. I figure I can find HP48's for $20 if I try hard enough and those are infinitely more practical, portable, and useful. Reinventing the wheel for the sake of being the millionth guy to do it as a cube seems kinda silly.
He used premade components like chips and LCD displays. That's hardly building a laptop from scratch.
With a $50 budget, he could have picked up a 486 laptop that would be much more useful. I have a stack of old thinkpads that I paid nothing for and could part with for $50/ea.
I work for a major bank that leaves telnet on all over the place, in spite of the 1997 company policy of replacing it with SSH as soon as possible. Sensible configuration and maintenance are impossible when business people micromanage the technology side. You'd think that putting a gun to their head would be enough to make people do it, but you'd be wrong. They're one step ahead of us all. Business people cannot be harmed by a bullet to the brain. They're already brain dead.
Yes, they did. In PHBthink, it's cheaper to bring in a consultant at any cost when a problem occurs instead of spending the money on maintenance. The results of the money spent on maintenance are invisible, whereas consultants address known, specific problems. I think the management-by-russian-roulette philosophy is all the rage in MBA schools now.
I'm a contractor so I'm restricted to working 40 hours unless they want to pay more. However, it's clear that the expectation from FTE's is 60+, more if you want to be promoted. It's also been suggested that I can work as many hours as I want, as long as I only bill for 40. I interviewed with another company that outright said they discouraged their contractors from billing actual hours worked. I'm pretty sure that's a blatant violation of federal labor law, but it's so common that no one thinks twice about it.
Not any time soon. The language barrier makes training difficult. It's one thing to teach the "point this end away from self" lesson. The ones who don't get that lesson will not move on in their class anyway. The hard part is getting them to wear a uniform and only shoot at anything that wears a different uniform.
How many Pan Troglodytes do you find in cubes spending all day reading slashdot?
One could argue that they are already smarter.
They're trying to get into politics. Lucky for us they haven't realized that a politician can only fling poo when the other guy's back is turned and there's a scapechimp to blame it on. If they ever figure that out, we're going to see them on the ballot. Some believe chimps have learned to shave and this has already happened. Lucky for us, the majority will vote for tall people to prevent the chimps from taking over.
More importantly, I wonder how many meetings and levels of management they needed to develop the sharpened stick. This information would greatly help us understand our own evolution. I suspect the answers to both questions would be 0, which leads us to the discovery of the engineer chimp. If we can find out which genes separate these chimps from others, we can isolate this group of chimps and give them jobs in large companies and government organizations. This will allow an increase in the average productivity level while decreasing cost since our labor laws do not apply to chimps. Step aside India and China, now we can outsource to the zoo. =)
I would argue that the majority of business people hiring programmers to work cannot tell the difference between a well designed solution and a horrible kludge. The horrible kludge will always take less time in the short term than the well designed solution. Business people have no long term memory and only acknowledge short term goals. A horrible kludge is a cost effective short term solution.
Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that in many environments, Perl is an ideal tool for the problem at hand. It can be used in ways that are not horribly short sighted, but it's flexible enough to still be useful in the situations that are.
Then again, my view of the world may be skewed by having spent too much time working for people who believe that russian roulette is the only viable way to make decisions. It's always worked in the past and the brain dead cannot be harmed by the game, so we don't do backups of our production databases. Our disaster recovery plan is to drive across town and get a job at a company that didn't have a disaster. I'm not kidding, we have senior VP level support (working in a bank) for this plan.