Management is an *activity*, not a position. U.K. and American companies seem (as a rule) to have waaaaaay more managers than needed.
The best companies I've worked for had about 1 manager for every 30 to 40 individuals. I'm excited to see what Zappos can do here.
I've had similar experiences. I've done Win32 and OLE and all that jazz, and then.NET in its heyday. Although.NET has evolved, it seems to be falling further behind the JVM ecosystem overall. Here's what I mean by "overall":
1) the JVM itself is extremely battle tested now. There are even viable alternative JVMs. In terms of troubleshooting, reliability and management, the JVM is a non-issue. It's like the sun rising in the morning.
2) The knowledge base of solved problems, libraries, projects and skills for the JVM world dwarfs.NET. Further, it seems that with the exception of a few guys like Brian Beckman, the smartest people in the world have made their choice: they do their work on top of the JVM. If you want to do massive streaming and/or parallel computing, you're going to turn to one or more top level Apache projects running on the JVM.
3) Interestingly, the world of Java.next languages such as Groovy, Scala, Clojure is really getting traction. This is closely tied to #2, the smartest people in the world work in the JVM space. Clojure in particular is very nice, and you can deploy Clojure apps as Java jars, so in a stodgy big company setting, you can actually deliver.
4) Finally, a problem I've seen since with Microsoft over the years (still a problem) is that MS solutions tend to address a problem facing *Microsoft the company* but do not address problems facing *developers and customers*. MS is reactive. When Java began to shake up the scene, MS rushed to market with a "me too" version (the.NET runtime and C#). Same deal with Windows Phone (answer to iOS), Silverlight (answer to Flash), and on and on. Here's the kicker: Microsoft's track record in keeping their promises is not good. If you tied your fortunes to MS tech initiatives in the last 15 years, you've lost a lot of time invested. Whereas with the JVM ecosystem, similar to the *nix ecosystem, everything you learn retains value. And the JVM ecosystem just evolves around problems and grows even more--whole branches don't go extinct as with the Microsoft /.NET ecosystem.
Much as I love and admire my U.S. colleagues and am honestly grateful for what the U.S. has done as benevolent conqueror.. it is just too easy to imagine how the "Hell Yeah" school of American politics would deal with Danish ownership of a lot of oil.
Dumbass Danes, it's their own fault they have a weak military. Hell Yeah!
Here's hoping everyone has evolved far beyond that by the time anything like drilling for oil in Arctic is ever held feasible. If only there was a way to add 20-30 IQ points quickly to everyone in the developed world:(
It's pretty transparent really. To "sell" the idea of ever higher H1b quotas, the titans like Zuckerberg have to put on a convincing act, with feigned signs of desperation about hiring.
Part of that act is dog and pony stunts , astroturf campaigns, etc. Anything to create a "narrative" as they say in U.S. media where it becomes accepted wisdom that desperate measures are needed to bring on more programmers.
( As long as one doesn't look at actual numbers, such as wage changes indicating market forces responding to shortages, or anything like that )
From a Euro perspective it would be difficult to prefer Florida over California, all else held equal.
But you bring up a good point which is in CA's favor:
- in California, having crazy people means they will stick flowers in your car
- Florida, having crazy people means they will get amped on bath salts meth and try to eat your face
Various steady state economists seem to have thought this through pretty well. There's the notion of a citizen's income and so on. Highly recommend the books by Herman E. Daly, or the site at www.steadystate.org
Especially in the U.S., marriage + mortgage = monotone wage drone existence.
Don't step into that if you can possibly help it. Just the choice of building a life around GF/partner, two mature and independent adults, will work wonders for your spirit, physical health, and the energy level you bring to work and after work, every day. Wife = downward spiral for you. Look around if you don't believe me.
From what I've read this has only accelerated since I saw it happening working over there in Mountain View.
I finally found the right English word for the phenomenon of code.org and other astroturf campaigns about programmers in the U.S:
"mendacity"
This makes perfects sense, if you are a corp like Facebook, you want to say "we've tried everything, it's no use, please raise the H1b quota"
It's a lot like Microsoft cynically concluding that paying large anti-trust fines was a rational business decision, the revenues outweighed the penalties.
Reading her bio, she sounds really good. And the projects she's worked on make it clear that she likes technology.
If the U.S. won't take her, I hope Germany or the EU will.
I'm painfully aware of my own country's misdeeds in the past re: land grabs. But the pattern is clear and we must not forget the lesson:
A bully like Hitler in 1938, or Putin in 2014, only has his appetite increased by eating.
The West can stop Putin now at a small cost, or deal with him in a few years at a staggering cost.
The Russian people deserve better than what will happen to them eventually under Putin's direction. Berlin 1945 == Moscow 2020. For the sake of ordinary Russians, if no one else, Putin's gang must be checked *hard* in their attempts to eat Ukraine piece by piece.
Bugs can be isolated with unit tests, and / or fixed in future releases.
Executives who are over their heads, however, make decisions that cannot be unf#cked and destroy thousands of lives. You'll get much more bang for your buck by wiring executives and board members up to monitor their alertness and comprehension.
With one headset on one executive this could have been prevented:
"Metro UI everywhere? Uh...ummm....so tired, so many words, I want to go golfing so bad...sure, sounds good, Metro UI everywhere, do I sign at the bottom?"
As a white guy - born in Europe even! -- I can say that while working in Mountain View, California it was indeed overwhelmingly young, male, with mostly Northern European genes sloshing around. Some Asian but not as much as you'd think.
That said our boss was quite a progressive guy and reached out to hire a black guy and several typical American women. The women were a disappointment. It has to be said that they proved to be demanding low performers. Had high expectations of everything and everyone else, but didn't really put points on the board for the team. In talks about the women I learned the US English codeword PITA, not the flat bread, but Pain In The A**. It was true.
The black guy turned out well. In the first couple months he was very reserved and looking back I think he was very keen to not make mistakes or rub anyone the wrong way. But man, after that first 90 days or so, he relaxed and realized we weren't going to bite him, and he started learning the craft with real zeal. He was one of the hardest working fellows I ever met in my time in the U.S.
I think the dynamic is that black people in the U.S. are all too accustomed to having "the prize" and opportunity dangled in front of them, and then snatched away once someone has got what they wanted from that black person. So they I think have learned to regard the larger American system with suspicion or at least much caution. However if they see by actions and not words that something is the real deal, the team is there and they are part of it, no bait and switch, they really get fired up and loving it.
Has anyone else noticed that the avalanche of RT posters seems to have subsided? For a couple of months any mention of Crimea or the Ukraine was mobbed by dozens of scripted posts about "fascists in Kiev" and so on. Very much in the style of the 1980's information warfare efforts from the Soviets.
But I'm getting the sense someone in Moscow has turned down the tap, and told the guys in the RT.com boiler rooms to hold off. Maybe Putin is giving up on this one?
If you follow the pros and cons around stuff like this down to the nub, it comes down to "but we have to grow the economy."
Thankfully, a Plan B has been worked out over many decades and it's pretty appealing actually. I highly recommend reading up on Steady State Economics, either books or http://steadystate.org/
Waaay back I remember someone pointing out that Microsoft was spending enormous sums to hire researchers, especially promising ones in academia. The idea, apparently, was for MS Research to be a sort of "intellectual roach motel" (love that phrase) were IQ would check in, and nothing checked out.
This made a certain amount of sense. As a monopolist you don't -want- any innovation.
One way to do that is hire hitmen to kill potential innovators. But the risks there are huge. A much easier way if you have the money is to hire promising minds and then keep them neutralized. That's just what Microsoft did.
If a fellow gets married, *then* his creativity and productivity plummets. His time is no longer his own.
When I regard the fellows I work with, the guys over 40 who avoided marriage, or have been divorced for a while, are the "top guns" to put in U.S. terms. They have both creativity *and* a lot of experience, which makes them almost impossible to beat over the course of many months.
I honestly don't see how a non-H1b person, especially if over 30, should be realistically planning on working as a programmer, at least in the Silicon Valley area.
http://www.livescience.com/181...
If parents sought out a 6 point IQ boost for their children to be more successful, a side effect could be that conservative ideology will go the way of smallpox and polio.
What I remember in California was that one had approximately 4 categories of developers:
1. Journeyman level, typical employee, good enough
2. Short term hired guns, contractors
3. H1-b visa guest labor from India, very affordable at the time so very popular
4. Truly exceptional guys, the much talked about rockstar talent
For the rockstar guys, they were so much more valuable and productive than the other 3 categories that it was well worth it to pay double the prevailing wages. The interesting thing in hindsight is that these rockstars really were all guys. No women.
Given how the arithmetic behind averages works, I can't help but think that the pay packages of male rockstar techies in the U.S. skews the figures. If one removed the top and bottom 10% of the pay data for men and women in tech work, I think you'd find the average pay for men vs. women would be much closer.
there is no shortage but a glut in the U.S. of pretty much every type of skilled labor that traditionally would have earned a good living. It is very sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Management is an *activity*, not a position. U.K. and American companies seem (as a rule) to have waaaaaay more managers than needed. The best companies I've worked for had about 1 manager for every 30 to 40 individuals. I'm excited to see what Zappos can do here.
1) the JVM itself is extremely battle tested now. There are even viable alternative JVMs. In terms of troubleshooting, reliability and management, the JVM is a non-issue. It's like the sun rising in the morning. .NET. Further, it seems that with the exception of a few guys like Brian Beckman, the smartest people in the world have made their choice: they do their work on top of the JVM. If you want to do massive streaming and/or parallel computing, you're going to turn to one or more top level Apache projects running on the JVM. .NET runtime and C#). Same deal with Windows Phone (answer to iOS), Silverlight (answer to Flash), and on and on. Here's the kicker: Microsoft's track record in keeping their promises is not good. If you tied your fortunes to MS tech initiatives in the last 15 years, you've lost a lot of time invested. Whereas with the JVM ecosystem, similar to the *nix ecosystem, everything you learn retains value. And the JVM ecosystem just evolves around problems and grows even more--whole branches don't go extinct as with the Microsoft / .NET ecosystem.
2) The knowledge base of solved problems, libraries, projects and skills for the JVM world dwarfs
3) Interestingly, the world of Java.next languages such as Groovy, Scala, Clojure is really getting traction. This is closely tied to #2, the smartest people in the world work in the JVM space. Clojure in particular is very nice, and you can deploy Clojure apps as Java jars, so in a stodgy big company setting, you can actually deliver.
4) Finally, a problem I've seen since with Microsoft over the years (still a problem) is that MS solutions tend to address a problem facing *Microsoft the company* but do not address problems facing *developers and customers*. MS is reactive. When Java began to shake up the scene, MS rushed to market with a "me too" version (the
Much as I love and admire my U.S. colleagues and am honestly grateful for what the U.S. has done as benevolent conqueror.. it is just too easy to imagine how the "Hell Yeah" school of American politics would deal with Danish ownership of a lot of oil. Dumbass Danes, it's their own fault they have a weak military. Hell Yeah! Here's hoping everyone has evolved far beyond that by the time anything like drilling for oil in Arctic is ever held feasible. If only there was a way to add 20-30 IQ points quickly to everyone in the developed world :(
It's pretty transparent really. To "sell" the idea of ever higher H1b quotas, the titans like Zuckerberg have to put on a convincing act, with feigned signs of desperation about hiring. Part of that act is dog and pony stunts , astroturf campaigns, etc. Anything to create a "narrative" as they say in U.S. media where it becomes accepted wisdom that desperate measures are needed to bring on more programmers. ( As long as one doesn't look at actual numbers, such as wage changes indicating market forces responding to shortages, or anything like that )
the consequences follow.
From a Euro perspective it would be difficult to prefer Florida over California, all else held equal. But you bring up a good point which is in CA's favor: - in California, having crazy people means they will stick flowers in your car - Florida, having crazy people means they will get amped on bath salts meth and try to eat your face
Various steady state economists seem to have thought this through pretty well. There's the notion of a citizen's income and so on. Highly recommend the books by Herman E. Daly, or the site at www.steadystate.org
If this is the best that Zuckerberg and pals can do to sell H1b visas ... well then.
It's worth watching. Content free, and attribution free. Nice!
Especially in the U.S., marriage + mortgage = monotone wage drone existence. Don't step into that if you can possibly help it. Just the choice of building a life around GF/partner, two mature and independent adults, will work wonders for your spirit, physical health, and the energy level you bring to work and after work, every day. Wife = downward spiral for you. Look around if you don't believe me.
From what I've read this has only accelerated since I saw it happening working over there in Mountain View. I finally found the right English word for the phenomenon of code.org and other astroturf campaigns about programmers in the U.S: "mendacity"
Why the U.S. lets this happen is a mystery to me.
This makes perfects sense, if you are a corp like Facebook, you want to say "we've tried everything, it's no use, please raise the H1b quota" It's a lot like Microsoft cynically concluding that paying large anti-trust fines was a rational business decision, the revenues outweighed the penalties.
Reading her bio, she sounds really good. And the projects she's worked on make it clear that she likes technology. If the U.S. won't take her, I hope Germany or the EU will.
I'm painfully aware of my own country's misdeeds in the past re: land grabs. But the pattern is clear and we must not forget the lesson: A bully like Hitler in 1938, or Putin in 2014, only has his appetite increased by eating. The West can stop Putin now at a small cost, or deal with him in a few years at a staggering cost. The Russian people deserve better than what will happen to them eventually under Putin's direction. Berlin 1945 == Moscow 2020. For the sake of ordinary Russians, if no one else, Putin's gang must be checked *hard* in their attempts to eat Ukraine piece by piece.
Bugs can be isolated with unit tests, and / or fixed in future releases. Executives who are over their heads, however, make decisions that cannot be unf#cked and destroy thousands of lives. You'll get much more bang for your buck by wiring executives and board members up to monitor their alertness and comprehension. With one headset on one executive this could have been prevented: "Metro UI everywhere? Uh...ummm....so tired, so many words, I want to go golfing so bad...sure, sounds good, Metro UI everywhere, do I sign at the bottom?"
That said our boss was quite a progressive guy and reached out to hire a black guy and several typical American women. The women were a disappointment. It has to be said that they proved to be demanding low performers. Had high expectations of everything and everyone else, but didn't really put points on the board for the team. In talks about the women I learned the US English codeword PITA, not the flat bread, but Pain In The A**. It was true.
The black guy turned out well. In the first couple months he was very reserved and looking back I think he was very keen to not make mistakes or rub anyone the wrong way. But man, after that first 90 days or so, he relaxed and realized we weren't going to bite him, and he started learning the craft with real zeal. He was one of the hardest working fellows I ever met in my time in the U.S.
I think the dynamic is that black people in the U.S. are all too accustomed to having "the prize" and opportunity dangled in front of them, and then snatched away once someone has got what they wanted from that black person. So they I think have learned to regard the larger American system with suspicion or at least much caution. However if they see by actions and not words that something is the real deal, the team is there and they are part of it, no bait and switch, they really get fired up and loving it.
Has anyone else noticed that the avalanche of RT posters seems to have subsided? For a couple of months any mention of Crimea or the Ukraine was mobbed by dozens of scripted posts about "fascists in Kiev" and so on. Very much in the style of the 1980's information warfare efforts from the Soviets. But I'm getting the sense someone in Moscow has turned down the tap, and told the guys in the RT.com boiler rooms to hold off. Maybe Putin is giving up on this one?
If you follow the pros and cons around stuff like this down to the nub, it comes down to "but we have to grow the economy." Thankfully, a Plan B has been worked out over many decades and it's pretty appealing actually. I highly recommend reading up on Steady State Economics, either books or http://steadystate.org/
Waaay back I remember someone pointing out that Microsoft was spending enormous sums to hire researchers, especially promising ones in academia. The idea, apparently, was for MS Research to be a sort of "intellectual roach motel" (love that phrase) were IQ would check in, and nothing checked out. This made a certain amount of sense. As a monopolist you don't -want- any innovation. One way to do that is hire hitmen to kill potential innovators. But the risks there are huge. A much easier way if you have the money is to hire promising minds and then keep them neutralized. That's just what Microsoft did.
If a fellow gets married, *then* his creativity and productivity plummets. His time is no longer his own. When I regard the fellows I work with, the guys over 40 who avoided marriage, or have been divorced for a while, are the "top guns" to put in U.S. terms. They have both creativity *and* a lot of experience, which makes them almost impossible to beat over the course of many months.
I honestly don't see how a non-H1b person, especially if over 30, should be realistically planning on working as a programmer, at least in the Silicon Valley area.
http://www.livescience.com/181... If parents sought out a 6 point IQ boost for their children to be more successful, a side effect could be that conservative ideology will go the way of smallpox and polio.
What I remember in California was that one had approximately 4 categories of developers: 1. Journeyman level, typical employee, good enough 2. Short term hired guns, contractors 3. H1-b visa guest labor from India, very affordable at the time so very popular 4. Truly exceptional guys, the much talked about rockstar talent For the rockstar guys, they were so much more valuable and productive than the other 3 categories that it was well worth it to pay double the prevailing wages. The interesting thing in hindsight is that these rockstars really were all guys. No women. Given how the arithmetic behind averages works, I can't help but think that the pay packages of male rockstar techies in the U.S. skews the figures. If one removed the top and bottom 10% of the pay data for men and women in tech work, I think you'd find the average pay for men vs. women would be much closer.
there is no shortage but a glut in the U.S. of pretty much every type of skilled labor that traditionally would have earned a good living. It is very sad.
Does Dice Holdings take orders directly from Zuckerberg these days?