Researchers say that their study "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species". Well, maybe. But I still prefer to do it my way.
You might wanna try jacking up that bill rate a bit. Then the gaps get longer! What I'm earning seems to be ok for a consultant with my experience here in the UK. Er, are we drifting off topic?
That's actually more and more the norm. Why not take a new approach....don't fight it. Incorp. yourself, become a contractor...and MAKE that kind of money, have that kind of freedom. I am a contractor, but I don't make that kind of money. There are a lot of overheads: insurance, pensions, holidays, accountants, gaps between contracts and so on that don't necessarily show in a payslip. I earn about the same as a contractor as I did as a permie, but I get a lot more variety in my work. Oh, and when it comes to office politics, the contractor is often the fall-guy (it's not unknown for that to be why the contractor is brought in in the first place).
Remember the johnson report you created three weeks ago? I WANT THAT ON MY DESK IN 5 MINUTES OR YOU ARE FIRED BECAUSE WE WILL BE SUED!
"But it already is on your desk, under the pile of unread finance magazines and your coffee mug, between the leaving card for the guy who left last month that you've not signed yet and all those unpaid invoices!"
But I do believe that a really tidy desk is a sure sign that the owner doesn't have enough to do.
"Did not work with my equipment" could have been the problem. IANAL, but IME "Not fit for the purpose for which it was sold" might have got you further. Failing that, there's always the small claims court -- assuming that there was a genuine issue with the DVD and you're not trying to use it on a DVD player with a different region setting to the local one.
More often than not, the answer is "Not very". And the training is "when in doubt, refer to company policy" - and I've seen plenty of examples in recent years where company policy is in complete contradiction to statutory rights. Yes, but in my experience if you know your ground they'll cave in. I've had just this problem with Asda (the UK Wal-Mart subsidiary) and I just kept asking to speak to somebody who could "override company policy and give me my statutory rights under the Sale of Goods Act 1979 the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982, the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994 and The Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002". The clerk on the counter eventually called the manager who gave me the refund.
Oh, now. See, it's only about nine references deep. (Unless you get caught in an infinite loop between documents 27 and 187.) Or the one between documents 233, 228 and 222. Or cut out the middle-man and get caught directly in the cycle between 233 and 222.
Mod parent up one more, he deserves a +5. As an engineering student in the later 70s/80s, Fortran was all I knew or cared to know. My one Comp Sci course was beginning Fortran programming -- the whole thing is probably learnable in a few hours today. My final year thesis was a 6000 line Fortran simulation used to determine the feasibility of building a "Two Stage Spouted Bed Coal Pyrolysis Plant" in China (it was). Mine was on the optimum profile of high-voltage busbars, also in FORTRAN and using what later became known as simulated annealing. But a few years later I refused a promotion because it would have involved maintenance of FORTRAN code. As others have said, FORTRAN was a horrid language, but so so much better than what came before, and it was only by experiencing the problems of FORTRAN that language developers were able to do better, so it really was a giant leap for computer-kind.
Read the article you linked: "In the most literal sense, to say a "Correlation does not imply causation" may sometimes be incorrect."
Nerds can be pedants too, you know!
We work in a different space. I can update code in about a day in production, less if it's mostly isolated or there's an overriding need. On the flip side, we are called on to do more and different things with the same code, so it's not like a heart monitor or anything like that. Yep, seems we do. Do you have a feeling for how many of those changes you have to do are down to genuinely changed requirements, how many because the requirements weren't captured properly, how many bug fixes, and so on?
It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right.
I'm sure it exists in some industries (it probably also tends to be Ada code), but I have never seen code like that. Pascal in that particular case, but yes, it does seem to be the bondage & discipline languages that work with that style.
Normally, with code that bloated, it's blindingly obvious that the programmer was cutting and pasting and tinkering until it mostly worked, and probably never did really understand it. Furthermore, it's *not* obvious what it is doing, and I really only come to understand it as I clean it up, shrinking it (nothing off the wall, just eliminating redundancies) and fixing several bugs along the way. So you don't actually have to do anything you might call creative along the way, then?
But is it fragile or hard to update? Nobody knows. It ran without needing any changes for the life of the equipment in which is was embedded -- well over 20 years.
From a business angle, this is the typical attitude and approach. The problem is that it isolates and compartmentalizes the entire effort (and its costs). Business types like this because it makes projects predictable. They know how much it costs to reinvent the wheel. So the programmers plow through the project, build something that creaks and barely holds itself together, and performs horribly. But it passes its tests, and additional hardware can be purchased to deal with the performance problems, so the company moves forward and onward. You seem to be too focused on the programming effort. In my experience, business types like this model because if they have something that works then they don't want to risk breaking it just because some coder has come up with a neat idea that can cut 0.5% off a loop execution time. Just look at the recent discussion about whether Ubuntu is fit for the enterprise. The debate wasn't about isolation and compartmentalisation of effort and costs, it was about patches breaking things that were already working.
You can't manage IT like other organizations. IT is all about creativity and collaboration. Collaboration yes. But where's you justification for the claim that it's "all about creativity"? As far as I can see that's just wishful thinking -- and I wish it were true too, but wishing don't make it so.
When you manage IT like an assembly line, you never get better at what you do. You just churn out widgets. Who cares that Bob's team built a widget already for that other project? They steamrolled through it and produced something hard to maintain and understand, and since we too are due date-driven, it's faster for us to reinvent it than retrofit their solution. Don't forget the success of that triumph of retrofitting solutions: Ariane 5.
It is possible, however, that IT managers have actually considered all of this, and have determined that buzzwords like "reusability" and "componentization" aren't worth implementing, because it's cheaper to churn out shitty work that just barely meets business requirements than it is to produce good work, because the good work saves us less in the long run than just building something new from scratch and paying more to support it. It all depends on your definition of "good". Maintainability is always going to be in my definition of "good", but reusability less so. I'd sooner have a piece of code that does a single thing well than an incredibly flexible module that has got so many configuration options that it's impossible to test and nobody is quite sure what it does in any particular case, which is what I see in too many code libraries.
programmers have been allowed to be too creative, at least at the design level (I haven't seen their code) chucking in features that look neat (especially at exhibitions and demonstrations) that haven't properly been thought through.
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
I know that but I had to move up a couple of levels because as I said I've not seen MS's code.
that thinking is the problem.. a proper company needs BOTH the safe version now and the most creative version developed and tested properly. Why? If a company has a safe version that works just fine, why do they need a different version? They should be moving on to do the next thing. And sure, there will be creativity in identifying the next thing, but not in the coding if the correct working is in any sense critical.
Why do you think we have so many Windows security problems? I believe that's primarily because correct working has not been a critical concern for Microsoft (though that might be changing), and as a result programmers have been allowed to be too creative, at least at the design level (I haven't seen their code) chucking in features that look neat (especially at exhibitions and demonstrations) that haven't properly been thought through. Though general purpose software is something of a special case. If I see that an approach will be demonstrably safe but inefficient then I'm faced with a choice "Do I put hundreds of lives at risk or do I chuck a bigger processor/more memory at it?" which for me is a no-brainer. If Microsoft see the same choice they have to say "What will sell best", go for the relatively efficient but less reliable solution and write clauses in the EULA that exclude the use that puts lives at risk.
That's one thing the Linux group does very well... they don't throw out good code, but revel in the idea that there's more than one "right way" to solve a problem. When the problem changes or the system evolves there is a new, better way somebody thought of and worked thru. Actually I think the strength of the free open source model is that the coders are the users, not the marketeers, so they do have a vested interest in it working right.
People write 1000 lines of code to solve a problem when it could have been done in 150 if they were more creative.
Of course, if the "uncreative" 1000 line version is 7-times bigger for the right reason, it is avoiding clever-clever tricks so it is easy to determine that it does what it's supposed to and it's easy to maintain.
The most bloated, boring and uncreative code I have ever seen in my life was a safety critical system that had the potential to kill hundreds of people if it went wrong. It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right. There is a place for creativity in software, but there are also some places in which creativity can be a bad thing -- and as well as the safety critical domain, the financial sector is probably one. Sorry folks, but I think the place for creativity is likely to be in novel applications, not the mainstream, and as somebody else has pointed out that means that the interesting stuff is in the small software houses.
It sucks lsee than any alternative that I know of. The defendant only has to "prove" themselves innocent better than the prosecution proves them guilty; that's what "Balance of probabilities means". If he can prove he wasn't in the State in which it happened, what are the RIAA going to have against him that trumps that?
Genetic engineering is not a panacea, but nor is it a boogieman. Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same. The pests on pest resistant GM strains don't find that they're digested just the same. How come your argument doesn't apply to them? Oh, hold on, isn't "modify[ing] their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins" precisely what they do in those cases?
And not, you know, circular. Well, not in a Euclidean plane, anyway. Lets see, circumference/diameter smaller than for a Euclidean plane -- thet means spherical geometry doesn't it? So he'd be talking bal[no carrier]
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"But it already is on your desk, under the pile of unread finance magazines and your coffee mug, between the leaving card for the guy who left last month that you've not signed yet and all those unpaid invoices!"
But I do believe that a really tidy desk is a sure sign that the owner doesn't have enough to do.
"Did not work with my equipment" could have been the problem. IANAL, but IME "Not fit for the purpose for which it was sold" might have got you further. Failing that, there's always the small claims court -- assuming that there was a genuine issue with the DVD and you're not trying to use it on a DVD player with a different region setting to the local one.
But I did! Oh -- wait -- you mean...
Read the article you linked: "In the most literal sense, to say a "Correlation does not imply causation" may sometimes be incorrect." Nerds can be pedants too, you know!
Nah -- never be able to get the thing off porn sites for long enough to do a letter.
I'm sure it exists in some industries (it probably also tends to be Ada code), but I have never seen code like that. Pascal in that particular case, but yes, it does seem to be the bondage & discipline languages that work with that style. Normally, with code that bloated, it's blindingly obvious that the programmer was cutting and pasting and tinkering until it mostly worked, and probably never did really understand it. Furthermore, it's *not* obvious what it is doing, and I really only come to understand it as I clean it up, shrinking it (nothing off the wall, just eliminating redundancies) and fixing several bugs along the way. So you don't actually have to do anything you might call creative along the way, then?
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
I know that but I had to move up a couple of levels because as I said I've not seen MS's code.All I got was:
The ****** ***** over ** ********
I tried to post the entire article censored, but slashdot's "lameness filter" wouldn't let me. Honestly! I think that says it all.
That's exactly why I wrote about being uncreative for the right reason. I'm well aware that there are lots of wrong reasons.
Of course, if the "uncreative" 1000 line version is 7-times bigger for the right reason, it is avoiding clever-clever tricks so it is easy to determine that it does what it's supposed to and it's easy to maintain.
The most bloated, boring and uncreative code I have ever seen in my life was a safety critical system that had the potential to kill hundreds of people if it went wrong. It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right. There is a place for creativity in software, but there are also some places in which creativity can be a bad thing -- and as well as the safety critical domain, the financial sector is probably one. Sorry folks, but I think the place for creativity is likely to be in novel applications, not the mainstream, and as somebody else has pointed out that means that the interesting stuff is in the small software houses.
It sucks lsee than any alternative that I know of. The defendant only has to "prove" themselves innocent better than the prosecution proves them guilty; that's what "Balance of probabilities means". If he can prove he wasn't in the State in which it happened, what are the RIAA going to have against him that trumps that?
...I can stop adding "-lolita" when searching for "Nabukov"?
The leading zeros on the month and day are the killers. Plus the fact that I don't expect to be around in 3141.