"Oh, that explains it.:) Thanks anyway. I've installed a separate chat client and this old-mode thing is really fast and all (I've forgotten how Gmail used to be fast and all)."
What chat client did you end up getting and using?
Well art is fixing stuff. It is fixing stuff to make it pretty. Same idea. Fixing, making, creating are all just becoming things of the past.
I partly agree. I no longer use pencil and paper. These days, I just draw digitally. And I expect that by the time my daughter is my age, there won't be too many illustrators and artists doing their work in conventional media. I accept that. Times have changed.
Ten or twelve is a fine time get into computers. Even earlier may be fine for some children but kids are not playing as much any more. We are making them in to little adults at too early of an age.
Oh yeah. Preschoolers are now doing maths and writing in kindergarten. I never had to do that. Does that make me an idiot? I'd rather believe it doesn't. I wish they cut the kids some slack (and I'll try to contribute to that happening).
But you see I am not sure that is helping. I am very fond of the idea of playing with stuff. Crayons, paste, paper, scissors, blocks, and Popsicle sticks. Way too many people can not fix the simplest things around the house or build anything. I think that a child that learns to use the physical world at an early age will be better able to use all the tools available.
I see to many kids and teens that think they know how to use technology but in reality they only know how to be technology users not creators.
I had no contact with any sort of electronics (apart from a TV set and a transistor radio) until I was something like 10 y/o. Yet, I've always been more interested in art than fixing stuff, so I'm not interested in fixing stuff today. A kid that's interested in such things, unless you're really fucked up, you cannot stop. When we finally got a 286 PC in early '90s, no amount of physical abuse could not stop me from using it. Sadly, the story is true.
Not only will she learn to use a computer, but it will cause her immune system to develop a wide spectrum of antibodies.
No such thing here where I live.:) Although I can clearly see the benefits of having a second-hand machine that was previously owned by an Ebola victim.:)
"Oh, right. That. I meant the actual contact list and chat window."
Hmm...I've never actually seen a contact list/chat window I guess.
:)
Oh, that explains it.:) Thanks anyway. I've installed a separate chat client and this old-mode thing is really fast and all (I've forgotten how Gmail used to be fast and all).
Where computers don't help much is at the elementary level.
I wouldn't bet on that. My little daughter learns to recognize individual icons and folders on the screen at 6 months of age. I guess she'd be clicking around the screen with confidence by now had I had resources to allocate a machine for her use. Alas, I work on the same machine, so I couldn't let her just do anything to it.
Point is, if you want a computer-centric and/or Internet-centric education, many things that are valid in what we know as schools simply change. Kids forget to use pencils, etc. They may learn to read, but they may have problems writing, because typing, for people to whom typing is not an occupation, is essentially the same as reading. So, she doesn't need to write in order to learn letters. She just needs to recognize them. I think, if you really go deeper into this, we'd find a lot more would change.
Management has a right to expect that programmers should have basic programming skills and not be lazy.
And you've also sort of claimed that such expectation should be enforced. Accountability means you're liable for not meeting the expectations of the manager, as outlined in the contract, if I'm not mistaken. In a more extreme case, hire a fool to do your job, no contract will save you from disaster. In a more common case, most people will make some sort of mistake at some point. Nobody is perfect, never was, never will be. Again, no contract will save you from disaster. Only a fool would expect it to prevent disasters. If a piece of legal document could save you from flying bullets, you wouldn't need a bullet-proof vest.
I've said that training is an efficient alternative for a company. It's not about class struggle, but a constructive approach to the problem, proposed as an alternative to a destructive solution: the loose-lost contracts.
I find rather amazing the people who are trying to come up with all sorts of things to dispute this or try and make it management's responsibility to educate
Management's responsibility? No. It's in their best interest to do so, given that not all programmers fall into the category of all-knowing, and ever-self-improving in all fields. Companies hire people based on some other factors, too, like "He's got black belt in SQL", "Her jQuery visual effects are amazing!", "He knows the company, has worked here before." You can imagine all the possible reasons why the imperfect guy gets the job over someone who knows about XSS and CSRF inside-out. In reality that is. I've already given the Yahoo example. What did you think the management should have done in that case? Sue it's team and sack them? I'm sure most of the guys working at Yahoo at that time were not incompetent fools and lazy.
I'd understand if you say that this is not efficient, although I would still disagree. But instead you say you're pissed off because it sounds like I'm talking about blame-shifting.
Ok, sorry I thought I was being clear earlier in the thread - I'm not necessarily supporting contracts specifying particular coding requirements. It seems to me that company coding standards are sufficient and if you don't apply the known coding standards then you are penalized or fired (personally I'd fire someone who thought it was ok to write data of unknown length into a buffer but that's just me). I'm not against company training but I don't think companies should need to teach so-called programmers the kind of things they ought to have learned in their 1st year courses.
Ok, we agree that contracts won't save you.
Now about the degree. Buffer overflow? I don't know about it because I code in high-level languages that handle this for me. But, say, XSS is fairly new thing. Hindsight is smarter than foresight, but I remember an article that was published just a few years back, about how Yahoo allowed XSS attacks on its sites, and how such companies should invest more time in training its staff to handle these emerging attack vectors better. So this is the reality. It may be in curriculum today, but it wasn't before. A degree is still not be-all-end-all kind of thing, nor is curriculum. Today's curriculum will cover the top 25 from OP. But tomorrow there is a new top 25. And today's graduates are automatically out-of-date. And you must agree security is not trivial. You really have to invest a lot of time if you want to learn all things yourself. Training from a specialist is far more efficient, and saves more money, than relying on your employees self-teaching themselves everything.
I don't have any problem with Buzz showing up. I run the 'older version' of Gmail...
If you are on the newest version, just scroll to the bottom of the screen and click older version. This is not the HTML only version, but the one just before the new interface upgrade. I find it responsive, less cluttered...and no buzz.
Also, no chat for those google chat junkies, like me.:)
On the rest... this stuff should be taught in University (or whatever) and the employer should be able to count on the employee knowing this stuff. Of course people cheat and some schools are better than others etc. etc. But there is something wrong somewhere when someone having a university degree does not know simple things like checking buffer length and my suspicion is that what is wrong is not going to be fixed by employer training. Of course YMMV.
Well, there are always idiots. But in most normal cases, I'm sure proper training yields better results than insisting on degrees and/or threatening with lawsuits.
Also consider this. There's a new threat discovered. Annex your contract with a new accountability clause or training?
And before you ask, I think a degree is not a proof of anything useful other than you passed the tests, simply because you can pass by getting 8 problems out of 10 right. What about the remaining 2? Who cares. You've passed. And one of those 2 problems happens to be SQL injection. Yeah, it's basic, but you still passed without it.
That isn't what I said. If you want to argue fine but please don't put words in my mouth.
No humour day? OK, it was a joke. Of course you didn't say degrees should be enforced. I just wrote that to point out this:
Since you've (you = a company, etc) employed people that posses skills that I said they should be trained for by you, and you said that a degree certifies that... Holding someone accountable is supposed to what? Force them to exercise their know-how? Isn't simply having a degree proof enough that the person is capable of handling the petty problems that they've learned about on the Uni? Of course not. That's why I think training by a skilled expert is more than welcome, at least as a refresher, and a far better alternative to contracts that can only be enforced after the shit's already hit the fan.
Continuing with the car analogy (what a suprise) most modern cars's locks can't be picked up open.
Criminals nowadays don't even try to pick it open. They just pick it up.:) Seriously, there are other methods to steal a car. Can you really make a car that nobody can possibly steal in any way? A 200-ton monster with full metal armor that deploys as soon as you hit the switch on the key ring, extending 5 feet long nails that bite into the ground below, runs high-voltage electric charge through the armor, and activates motion sensors connected to anti-missile, anti-infantry, and anti-tank weapons system. Try stealing that. Who buys such cars is a totally different question. As is how much you pay for engineering such a vehicle.
Exactly. Why do you see that as a bad thing? Suppose instead of "contract" we say "these are the design/coding standards at this company and as an employee of this company you are required to follow them. If you don't then we will penalize you." What exactly is wrong with that?
I would argue that it would be far more efficient and beneficial for the company if they simply trained their people to pay attention to stuff like common errors mentioned in OP.
Not to mention the most unusual ways 'normal' people use software. Like trying to go to a website by typing the URL in the YouTube search box, locating a video that happens to be related to that site, clicking the link in the info box. That person now believes that it's the correct way, because it worked a few times. How can you predict those things? You can't. People are creative like that.
Except what really happens is that American coders won't sign the documents. That's where Indian and Chinese agencies will sign "whatever", cash the check, and farm it out to low paid code monkeys. Legally, they're not in the USA so your contract is Worthless.
Or they will be pressed to sign bullshit contracts (I'm talking about those Americans who actually read them) and then suffer full consequences.
I've had the unfortunate experience of having such an arrogant ass working for me, and the only way to fix this is to kick his incompetent butt off the team.
In human resource management, there is a personality type called "maverick". This is the type of person that will do the job much better than anyone only as long as s/he is not made to follow rules, protocols, regulations and such BS. In other words, they suck at following rules. If you push them to follow rules, they might appear as any other incompetent jack ass, or they may even sabotage your work, or even do it your way, but subtly twisting your words just to prove a point. Now, in such cases, most managers simply sack the maverick, and hire a normal dude. But in reality it sometimes pays off big time if you let the person have her/his own way. And they also sometimes excel when working in isolation or from home, too, because they do believe (and sometimes partly justifiably) that everyone's a moron. It's a gamble, of course, but as with all gambling, jackpots are huge.
Of course, your particular worker might be an asshole, but I also know from my own experience of working at a company that has plenty of workers with really bad attitude (newspapers are like that usually, not a very friendly place to work in) that lots of managers think their worker is at fault or being an asshole simply because bad attitude gets to them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh, that explains it. :) Thanks anyway. I've installed a separate chat client and this old-mode thing is really fast and all (I've forgotten how Gmail used to be fast and all)."
What chat client did you end up getting and using?
At work on Windows XP: Google Talk
At home on Linux: mcabber
Well art is fixing stuff. It is fixing stuff to make it pretty.
Same idea. Fixing, making, creating are all just becoming things of the past.
I partly agree. I no longer use pencil and paper. These days, I just draw digitally. And I expect that by the time my daughter is my age, there won't be too many illustrators and artists doing their work in conventional media. I accept that. Times have changed.
Ten or twelve is a fine time get into computers.
Even earlier may be fine for some children but kids are not playing as much any more. We are making them in to little adults at too early of an age.
Oh yeah. Preschoolers are now doing maths and writing in kindergarten. I never had to do that. Does that make me an idiot? I'd rather believe it doesn't. I wish they cut the kids some slack (and I'll try to contribute to that happening).
LOL @ ebola victim
Where are you at? There are at least 10 thrift stores around here, maybe I can find you something usable and get it to you at cost.
I'm in Eastern Europe, so I gues the cost of shipping alone would null any benefits. And the germs might wear off by the time it gets here. :D
But you see I am not sure that is helping. I am very fond of the idea of playing with stuff. Crayons, paste, paper, scissors, blocks, and Popsicle sticks.
Way too many people can not fix the simplest things around the house or build anything.
I think that a child that learns to use the physical world at an early age will be better able to use all the tools available.
I see to many kids and teens that think they know how to use technology but in reality they only know how to be technology users not creators.
I had no contact with any sort of electronics (apart from a TV set and a transistor radio) until I was something like 10 y/o. Yet, I've always been more interested in art than fixing stuff, so I'm not interested in fixing stuff today. A kid that's interested in such things, unless you're really fucked up, you cannot stop. When we finally got a 286 PC in early '90s, no amount of physical abuse could not stop me from using it. Sadly, the story is true.
Get her a thrift store computer.
Not only will she learn to use a computer, but it will cause her immune system to develop a wide spectrum of antibodies.
No such thing here where I live. :) Although I can clearly see the benefits of having a second-hand machine that was previously owned by an Ebola victim. :)
"Oh, right. That. I meant the actual contact list and chat window."
Hmm...I've never actually seen a contact list/chat window I guess.
Oh, that explains it. :) Thanks anyway. I've installed a separate chat client and this old-mode thing is really fast and all (I've forgotten how Gmail used to be fast and all).
Yes they had. Wow, education must be getting pretty bad.
They could record motion pictures using manually driven contraptions that are simply called cameras. But, no, they didn't have video cameras.
So, GP's remark was partially correct, as was yours.
Where computers don't help much is at the elementary level.
I wouldn't bet on that. My little daughter learns to recognize individual icons and folders on the screen at 6 months of age. I guess she'd be clicking around the screen with confidence by now had I had resources to allocate a machine for her use. Alas, I work on the same machine, so I couldn't let her just do anything to it.
Point is, if you want a computer-centric and/or Internet-centric education, many things that are valid in what we know as schools simply change. Kids forget to use pencils, etc. They may learn to read, but they may have problems writing, because typing, for people to whom typing is not an occupation, is essentially the same as reading. So, she doesn't need to write in order to learn letters. She just needs to recognize them. I think, if you really go deeper into this, we'd find a lot more would change.
Unfortunately, this guy was also incompetent in the quality of his coding.
I think those types are called an "ass" in HR management. :D
Management has a right to expect that programmers should have basic programming skills and not be lazy.
And you've also sort of claimed that such expectation should be enforced. Accountability means you're liable for not meeting the expectations of the manager, as outlined in the contract, if I'm not mistaken. In a more extreme case, hire a fool to do your job, no contract will save you from disaster. In a more common case, most people will make some sort of mistake at some point. Nobody is perfect, never was, never will be. Again, no contract will save you from disaster. Only a fool would expect it to prevent disasters. If a piece of legal document could save you from flying bullets, you wouldn't need a bullet-proof vest.
I've said that training is an efficient alternative for a company. It's not about class struggle, but a constructive approach to the problem, proposed as an alternative to a destructive solution: the loose-lost contracts.
I find rather amazing the people who are trying to come up with all sorts of things to dispute this or try and make it management's responsibility to educate
Management's responsibility? No. It's in their best interest to do so, given that not all programmers fall into the category of all-knowing, and ever-self-improving in all fields. Companies hire people based on some other factors, too, like "He's got black belt in SQL", "Her jQuery visual effects are amazing!", "He knows the company, has worked here before." You can imagine all the possible reasons why the imperfect guy gets the job over someone who knows about XSS and CSRF inside-out. In reality that is. I've already given the Yahoo example. What did you think the management should have done in that case? Sue it's team and sack them? I'm sure most of the guys working at Yahoo at that time were not incompetent fools and lazy.
I'd understand if you say that this is not efficient, although I would still disagree. But instead you say you're pissed off because it sounds like I'm talking about blame-shifting.
It's on the left hand side of links on my page...:
Oh, right. That. I meant the actual contact list and chat window.
"Also, no chat for those google chat junkies, like me. :)"
Actually, I do have a link for Chat even with using the 'older version' option.
That's odd... I don't see it. Could you... err.. give me a hint?
Ok, sorry I thought I was being clear earlier in the thread - I'm not necessarily supporting contracts specifying particular coding requirements. It seems to me that company coding standards are sufficient and if you don't apply the known coding standards then you are penalized or fired (personally I'd fire someone who thought it was ok to write data of unknown length into a buffer but that's just me). I'm not against company training but I don't think companies should need to teach so-called programmers the kind of things they ought to have learned in their 1st year courses.
Ok, we agree that contracts won't save you.
Now about the degree. Buffer overflow? I don't know about it because I code in high-level languages that handle this for me. But, say, XSS is fairly new thing. Hindsight is smarter than foresight, but I remember an article that was published just a few years back, about how Yahoo allowed XSS attacks on its sites, and how such companies should invest more time in training its staff to handle these emerging attack vectors better. So this is the reality. It may be in curriculum today, but it wasn't before. A degree is still not be-all-end-all kind of thing, nor is curriculum. Today's curriculum will cover the top 25 from OP. But tomorrow there is a new top 25. And today's graduates are automatically out-of-date. And you must agree security is not trivial. You really have to invest a lot of time if you want to learn all things yourself. Training from a specialist is far more efficient, and saves more money, than relying on your employees self-teaching themselves everything.
I don't have any problem with Buzz showing up. I run the 'older version' of Gmail...
If you are on the newest version, just scroll to the bottom of the screen and click older version. This is not the HTML only version, but the one just before the new interface upgrade. I find it responsive, less cluttered...and no buzz.
Also, no chat for those google chat junkies, like me. :)
On the rest... this stuff should be taught in University (or whatever) and the employer should be able to count on the employee knowing this stuff. Of course people cheat and some schools are better than others etc. etc. But there is something wrong somewhere when someone having a university degree does not know simple things like checking buffer length and my suspicion is that what is wrong is not going to be fixed by employer training. Of course YMMV.
Well, there are always idiots. But in most normal cases, I'm sure proper training yields better results than insisting on degrees and/or threatening with lawsuits.
Also consider this. There's a new threat discovered. Annex your contract with a new accountability clause or training?
And before you ask, I think a degree is not a proof of anything useful other than you passed the tests, simply because you can pass by getting 8 problems out of 10 right. What about the remaining 2? Who cares. You've passed. And one of those 2 problems happens to be SQL injection. Yeah, it's basic, but you still passed without it.
That isn't what I said. If you want to argue fine but please don't put words in my mouth.
No humour day? OK, it was a joke. Of course you didn't say degrees should be enforced. I just wrote that to point out this:
Since you've (you = a company, etc) employed people that posses skills that I said they should be trained for by you, and you said that a degree certifies that... Holding someone accountable is supposed to what? Force them to exercise their know-how? Isn't simply having a degree proof enough that the person is capable of handling the petty problems that they've learned about on the Uni? Of course not. That's why I think training by a skilled expert is more than welcome, at least as a refresher, and a far better alternative to contracts that can only be enforced after the shit's already hit the fan.
Ummm isn't that what the degree (or whatever) is for? I mean this is pretty basic stuff....
So you want to enforce a degree through contract? Why didn't you just say so!
Oh, and I forgot the invisibility cloak.
Continuing with the car analogy (what a suprise) most modern cars's locks can't be picked up open.
Criminals nowadays don't even try to pick it open. They just pick it up. :) Seriously, there are other methods to steal a car. Can you really make a car that nobody can possibly steal in any way? A 200-ton monster with full metal armor that deploys as soon as you hit the switch on the key ring, extending 5 feet long nails that bite into the ground below, runs high-voltage electric charge through the armor, and activates motion sensors connected to anti-missile, anti-infantry, and anti-tank weapons system. Try stealing that. Who buys such cars is a totally different question. As is how much you pay for engineering such a vehicle.
Exactly. Why do you see that as a bad thing? Suppose instead of "contract" we say "these are the design/coding standards at this company and as an employee of this company you are required to follow them. If you don't then we will penalize you." What exactly is wrong with that?
I would argue that it would be far more efficient and beneficial for the company if they simply trained their people to pay attention to stuff like common errors mentioned in OP.
Whatever you make someone will break it.
Not to mention the most unusual ways 'normal' people use software. Like trying to go to a website by typing the URL in the YouTube search box, locating a video that happens to be related to that site, clicking the link in the info box. That person now believes that it's the correct way, because it worked a few times. How can you predict those things? You can't. People are creative like that.
Except what really happens is that American coders won't sign the documents. That's where Indian and Chinese agencies will sign "whatever", cash the check, and farm it out to low paid code monkeys. Legally, they're not in the USA so your contract is Worthless.
Or they will be pressed to sign bullshit contracts (I'm talking about those Americans who actually read them) and then suffer full consequences.
I've had the unfortunate experience of having such an arrogant ass working for me, and the only way to fix this is to kick his incompetent butt off the team.
In human resource management, there is a personality type called "maverick". This is the type of person that will do the job much better than anyone only as long as s/he is not made to follow rules, protocols, regulations and such BS. In other words, they suck at following rules. If you push them to follow rules, they might appear as any other incompetent jack ass, or they may even sabotage your work, or even do it your way, but subtly twisting your words just to prove a point. Now, in such cases, most managers simply sack the maverick, and hire a normal dude. But in reality it sometimes pays off big time if you let the person have her/his own way. And they also sometimes excel when working in isolation or from home, too, because they do believe (and sometimes partly justifiably) that everyone's a moron. It's a gamble, of course, but as with all gambling, jackpots are huge.
Of course, your particular worker might be an asshole, but I also know from my own experience of working at a company that has plenty of workers with really bad attitude (newspapers are like that usually, not a very friendly place to work in) that lots of managers think their worker is at fault or being an asshole simply because bad attitude gets to them.
Nice of you to include the 's/', though statistically speaking, racists are more likely to be male ;)
Yeah, but I'm pro-equal-opportunity. :)