I don't know why you are so angry, I may have hit a nerve. I tried to be neutral, though.
Failure is easy to define, since it's the inability to have a result. Success is harder to define, since you have to define what you want to reach, and sometimes it's very elusive. I don't know any 'successful' people. I know a lot of people that had to sacrifice a lot to get what they have now.
In the failure case, I wanted to say that focusing on the result is not the correct way to do things. I was a game programmer during 18 years, and I saw a lot of people unable to finish their work, because they were paralyzed by the idea of final result.
And I still maintain that genetics has nothing to do with education. But I'll be glad to hear about your opinion instead of your rants. I remember that some of the best students were people who loved to learn, but I don't remember any of them speaking about their future at this time.
Soooo - what would a shrink have to say about a guy who has changed careers a half dozen times?
Wow ! You have a very rich life ! I'm really jealous. You should be very open-minded. It took me a lot of time to accept myself and the others, I'm sure it's easy for you.
Personally, I have been a game programmer during 18 years, and did almost all companies at the time. I lost interest in game programming, and I accepted a job of developer in a startup, just for extrinsic reasons (earning money for my wife). Recently, I evolved incredibly, thanks to a work on myself since 15 years. I know myself pretty well now, but I also discovered that I have no real limit, since all my limits were self-imposed: I can probably become a CEO or develop an innovative product, or become wealthy. But what interests me after all these years of working behing computers is humans. I have to admit that I never had a lot of interaction with people, and now, I love that.
That's all well and good, but if your deep-seated intrinsic motivation is to be a poet or daydreamer or something, it's not going to help you get a job, never mind a well paid one. People on slashdot tend to forget that not everyone is a software developer/computer scientist and therefore capable of a financially rewarding, interesting career.
Well said ! It's not my intention to become a poet, but I don't intend to live in poverty, I'm a developer, but I intend to have a more interesting work (coding become boring after 25 years of work). The most important thing is to cover your basic needs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs Personally, I'm currently working on self-actualization. And you ?
You also fail to see other forms of intrinsic motivation that drive the really successful people.
I don't think so. I just hope we have the same definition of "success". "Success" means that you have "failure", and thus I'm not sure we have the same definition.
Work ethic is, I'd say, an intrinsic form of motivation that can be learned or ingrained. If you think otherwise go talk to some immigrants from Asian or Easter Europe. They can't not work, it's in their very blood and nothing short of death will make them stop (and in some cases they try to make sure even that isn't a barrier via instructions to their kids).
Wow, the educational system in Asia is definitely entirely based upon extrinsinc motivation. The goal is always to have the best grades in school. Competition may be useful, but not when you are young. It just spoils all your life.
You should read what is Maslow's pyramid. Maslow explained that once your basic needs were covered, you tend to search for self-fullfilment needs. In poor countries, basic needs are not covered, so people just focus on survival.
On an individual level, people over 40 encounter their mid-life crisis. Those who were the most dedicated on extrinsic motivators start to search intrinsic motivators. Some of them try to have sex whenever possible, other tend to have an happy family because they failed one before. I guess you are below 40.
That last one is by the way apparently genetic and correlated well with long term success. If you don't understand it then, well, sorry to hear that.
You just proved my point ! I don't believe on genetics, but on parental education: perhaps these students have parents that are less focused on results and more on the joy of learning. Personally, my parents were completely focused on me having good grades, and it put me tremendous pressure.
BTW, stop speaking about success !
What is success ? Frankly, I'm over 40, and I still don't know what is success. Do you think that getting rich means success ? Do you think that having 3 wives means success ? I'm pretty sure all these external signs are just bragging...
So, your point only seems to apply to a very small group of people who have intrinsic motivation but lose it because the extrinsic motivation drives it out. I've never met anyone like that.
When performance is the single focus at the top of certain companies, people tend to use drugs. And yes, I met people like that.
The point of a true education is to enable one to find *intrinsic* motivation.
Not really, if education was about finding intrinsic motivation, why doesn't it search for it first ? You can't find something that you don't search.
I don't remember a single thing that I enjoyed learning at school. Also, grading is just spoiling all joy, because it's in general completely arbitrary. The only thing that grades show is how good the teacher is !
I agree, but "motivation" is the psychological terminology.
In my opinion, it's not the destination that is important, it's the journey.
I would like to quote Buddha: "Happiness is the way". It means that happiness is not the aim of your journey, happiness is your journey. It's very difficult to find happiness in what we live:-(
Intrinsic means that you do the things for the pleasure of doing them. In your case, creating games for your enjoyment.
Extrinsic means that you do the things to get a reward or avoid a punishment. In your case, it's about getting money.
If the extrinsic motivation becomes bigger than the intrinsic motivation, you don't enjoy your work anymore, and you get bored.
Education encourages extrinsic motivation, by grading people, which basically kills enjoyment in learning when grades become more important than learning. The more educated you are, and the more you are dependent on extrinsic motivation, which makes people search for fame or money. People with strong extrinsic motivation (and who have good grades at school) tend to fail in real life, because they search for the immediate rewards.
To avoid being bored, the only way is to do things with intrinsic motivation, and that doesn't mean not getting paid ! If you enjoy what you do, you'll be happier, and you can get paid for it, sometimes making a lot of money, but that's not the main goal. But this also requires to determine if you can accept to earn a little less money in exchange of being happier...
The problem is not that these body images are harmful, but that girls are trained to think that their appearance is their most important attribute.
It's probably true, but it's also men's fault, because most of them are only attracted by women's appearance.
The real problem is that we tend to focus only on external attributes, because it's easy to change them if you have money. It reminds me of somebody who said that 50 years ago, people tended to focus on attitudes (internal behaviour), and now, people tend to focus on easy ways to influence people (external behaviour). External improvement has a much better return on investment than internal improvement.
What worries me the most is the merchandising about all our social relations. What is the easiest way to attract people, so I'll be liked ? How many friends can I collect, so that my value increases ? How much money do I need to spend to possess things that'll make jealous my neighbours ?
It's a typical case of extrinsic/intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is when you don't use incentives. People will likely behave as they believe they should. In this case, they try to show to their children that they are good parents, so they are not late.
Extrinsic motivation appears when you introduce incentives. The problem with incentives is that once you introduced them, abolishing incentives make people do even less effort than before. It has been verified with a lot of different studies.
If you think so, start a blog about your expertise. Try to write what you know, and share your knowledge. The more you share, the more you learn. You'll learn how to communicate your knowledge, which is a very important skill. You'll probably learn a lot of human skills in the process, because these skills are not common in the computing world.
If you have nothing to share, it means that you don't know your value.
In 6-12 months, you'll probably get some audience, interested in what you explain. At your work, try to negotiate 4 days of work per week, and extend your capabilities outside of your work. Your work is just the security you need, so don't sacrifice everything for your pleasure.
You totally miss the educational/motivational part of such internships !
Once the students have worked during 3 months in these factories, they'll learn the following values: 1) if you fail your studies, that's where you'll work until the end of your life 2) if you succeed in your studies, you'll probably want to change the future working conditions in China. 3) if you excel in your studies, you'll be the next bosses, and these are good lessons on how to exploit people.
Disclaimer: I've been a game programmer during 25 years. My first games were done alone, and my last games were with teams of 40+ people. I quit 8 years ago.
What Jaffe says is totally true NOW.
Hollywood had always been jealous of the success of the games industry (a game costs a fraction of the price of a movie), and games companies always wanted to become like movies companies (because there is a real promotional network). In France, the most famous example is Cryo, which was so much oriented towards movies that it finally disappeared.
In my opinion, these are totally wrong points of view. Cinema cannot be games, and games cannot be cinema, because a movie and a game are not built the same way:
- a movie can be storyboarded from the beginning to the end, with every plan drawn to maximize the impact. There is no place for improvisation.
- games are software. You cannot plan software, it's a totally different way of thinking. A game evolves until it's finished.
I worked on heavily storyboarded games, and they were shitty, there was no sense of "freedom". And I'm pretty sure that a movie will fail if it's not prepared enough before starting its filming.
Before, I explained that Jaffe was true NOW. Around the year 2000, I witnessed an interesting game project, which was an adventure game where the ending was changing along with the hero's actions (at that time, I was working on Omikron the Nomad Soul). The project never appeared, because I think that people were too much focused on technology instead of concentrating on finishing the game.
So, now, I'm pretty sure that storytelling needs to be rethought to give a proper game. Storytelling for cinema cannot be transposed to videogames, a new level of abstraction is required. A few ideas appeared, but no formalisation has been done, so I guess storytelling for videogames is not enough mature.
In the future, I think that storytelling will evolve to match the challenge of designing games. Currently, it's like creating games in 2D, and expecting that they will transpose in 3D without any effort.
Most of the products start by copying the competition at a lower price, but at a lower quality. Over the time, the quality increases, and the leader has to innovate more and more to avoid being taken over. At some point, for the customer, the cheaper option is the best choice. There is still psychological inertia that keeps the old clients tied to their original supplier, but such beliefs disappear over the years.
The correct solution is to stop having regularly scheduled meetings.
No, you are wrong. What is important is to stop spending time on meetings without concrete results. When you participate in a meeting where no decision has been done and where not everybody was necessary, it was just a waste of time.
I'm a retrospectives facilitator, and I can assure you that holding regular retrospectives helps the teams evolve incredibly. The goal of a retrospective is to discover what were the lessons to learn.
If you don't use this kind of regular meeting, nobody progresses in your teams, because they repeat over and over again the same behaviours. This is the best way to stop being reactive (that is: to solve events after they happen, like fixing bugs when a customer discovers them) and to start being proactive (prevent problems before they happen, like writing tests to avoid future regression). As long as you don't reflect on what has been done since the last meeting, no insight is gained.
The suicide rate at Foxconn is less than half of the national rate
In fact, the Wikipedia article is comparing apples and oranges. What is important to measure is not the national rate of suicide, but the national rate of suicide at work.
Perhaps Foxconn is the only company in China where there are suicides. Who knows ? Suicide is sending a desperate message (one of my friends suicided himself). Doing it at work is even stronger !
Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects.
Wow, you don't understand human, aren't you ? Let's talk about cognitive dissonance. On one hand, Google encourages people to start new ideas, during 20% of their time. On the other hand, Google cuts the new ideas, and buys external companies that have new concepts.
How do you think the engineers feel ? Of course, they won't trust Google for encouraging them of having ideas in their 20% time. If they have an interesting idea, the best way is to quit Google, set up a startup and sell it to Google. Of course, who would bother giving ideas to Google, when you see what they do with that.
What Google shows now is that they don't care their internal innovation. Basically, nothing good can come up from Google, so they'll buy any kind of technology from outside.
I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway!
I'm an agile developer and coach. It seems that you didn't discover the hidden truth of agile: management doesn't want to be agile. Management is the new bureaucracy: you try to live without them, and they try to justify their existence.
I bet that you are using Scrum, Scrum is a gift for management, since the team manages itself ! The team changes, but why would the management change, when they can continue to work with their old ways. Read the interesting article here: http://targetprocess.com/rightthing.html
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why you are so angry, I may have hit a nerve. I tried to be neutral, though.
Failure is easy to define, since it's the inability to have a result.
Success is harder to define, since you have to define what you want to reach, and sometimes it's very elusive.
I don't know any 'successful' people. I know a lot of people that had to sacrifice a lot to get what they have now.
In the failure case, I wanted to say that focusing on the result is not the correct way to do things.
I was a game programmer during 18 years, and I saw a lot of people unable to finish their work, because they were paralyzed by the idea of final result.
And I still maintain that genetics has nothing to do with education. But I'll be glad to hear about your opinion instead of your rants.
I remember that some of the best students were people who loved to learn, but I don't remember any of them speaking about their future at this time.
Soooo - what would a shrink have to say about a guy who has changed careers a half dozen times?
Wow ! You have a very rich life ! I'm really jealous. You should be very open-minded. It took me a lot of time to accept myself and the others, I'm sure it's easy for you.
Personally, I have been a game programmer during 18 years, and did almost all companies at the time.
I lost interest in game programming, and I accepted a job of developer in a startup, just for extrinsic reasons (earning money for my wife).
Recently, I evolved incredibly, thanks to a work on myself since 15 years. I know myself pretty well now, but I also discovered that I have no real limit, since all my limits were self-imposed: I can probably become a CEO or develop an innovative product, or become wealthy.
But what interests me after all these years of working behing computers is humans. I have to admit that I never had a lot of interaction with people, and now, I love that.
That's all well and good, but if your deep-seated intrinsic motivation is to be a poet or daydreamer or something, it's not going to help you get a job, never mind a well paid one.
People on slashdot tend to forget that not everyone is a software developer/computer scientist and therefore capable of a financially rewarding, interesting career.
Well said !
It's not my intention to become a poet, but I don't intend to live in poverty, I'm a developer, but I intend to have a more interesting work (coding become boring after 25 years of work).
The most important thing is to cover your basic needs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Personally, I'm currently working on self-actualization. And you ?
You also fail to see other forms of intrinsic motivation that drive the really successful people.
I don't think so. I just hope we have the same definition of "success".
"Success" means that you have "failure", and thus I'm not sure we have the same definition.
Work ethic is, I'd say, an intrinsic form of motivation that can be learned or ingrained. If you think otherwise go talk to some immigrants from Asian or Easter Europe. They can't not work, it's in their very blood and nothing short of death will make them stop (and in some cases they try to make sure even that isn't a barrier via instructions to their kids).
Wow, the educational system in Asia is definitely entirely based upon extrinsinc motivation.
The goal is always to have the best grades in school. Competition may be useful, but not when you are young. It just spoils all your life.
You should read what is Maslow's pyramid. Maslow explained that once your basic needs were covered, you tend to search for self-fullfilment needs.
In poor countries, basic needs are not covered, so people just focus on survival.
On an individual level, people over 40 encounter their mid-life crisis.
Those who were the most dedicated on extrinsic motivators start to search intrinsic motivators.
Some of them try to have sex whenever possible, other tend to have an happy family because they failed one before.
I guess you are below 40.
That last one is by the way apparently genetic and correlated well with long term success. If you don't understand it then, well, sorry to hear that.
You just proved my point !
I don't believe on genetics, but on parental education: perhaps these students have parents that are less focused on results and more on the joy of learning.
Personally, my parents were completely focused on me having good grades, and it put me tremendous pressure.
BTW, stop speaking about success !
What is success ? Frankly, I'm over 40, and I still don't know what is success.
Do you think that getting rich means success ?
Do you think that having 3 wives means success ?
I'm pretty sure all these external signs are just bragging...
So, your point only seems to apply to a very small group of people who have intrinsic motivation but lose it because the extrinsic motivation drives it out. I've never met anyone like that.
When performance is the single focus at the top of certain companies, people tend to use drugs.
And yes, I met people like that.
The point of a true education is to enable one to find *intrinsic* motivation.
Not really, if education was about finding intrinsic motivation, why doesn't it search for it first ?
You can't find something that you don't search.
I don't remember a single thing that I enjoyed learning at school.
Also, grading is just spoiling all joy, because it's in general completely arbitrary.
The only thing that grades show is how good the teacher is !
I agree, but "motivation" is the psychological terminology.
In my opinion, it's not the destination that is important, it's the journey.
I would like to quote Buddha: "Happiness is the way". :-(
It means that happiness is not the aim of your journey, happiness is your journey.
It's very difficult to find happiness in what we live
Everyone does something for a reason. For me, programming was a way to create the games and sandboxes I dreamed of and enjoyed.
In psychology, the motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrinsic_motivation
Intrinsic means that you do the things for the pleasure of doing them. In your case, creating games for your enjoyment.
Extrinsic means that you do the things to get a reward or avoid a punishment. In your case, it's about getting money.
If the extrinsic motivation becomes bigger than the intrinsic motivation, you don't enjoy your work anymore, and you get bored.
Education encourages extrinsic motivation, by grading people, which basically kills enjoyment in learning when grades become more important than learning.
The more educated you are, and the more you are dependent on extrinsic motivation, which makes people search for fame or money.
People with strong extrinsic motivation (and who have good grades at school) tend to fail in real life, because they search for the immediate rewards.
To avoid being bored, the only way is to do things with intrinsic motivation, and that doesn't mean not getting paid !
If you enjoy what you do, you'll be happier, and you can get paid for it, sometimes making a lot of money, but that's not the main goal.
But this also requires to determine if you can accept to earn a little less money in exchange of being happier...
Yes, you are right, but our western culture encourages skinny people, but it has been showed that they are less fertile than moderately fat people.
The goal of men is to reproduce as much as possible to spread their genes, so young and fertile women are preferred.
What is amusing is that fashion for women is generally designed by people who don't have an interest in women ;-)
The problem is not that these body images are harmful, but that girls are trained to think that their appearance is their most important attribute.
It's probably true, but it's also men's fault, because most of them are only attracted by women's appearance.
The real problem is that we tend to focus only on external attributes, because it's easy to change them if you have money.
It reminds me of somebody who said that 50 years ago, people tended to focus on attitudes (internal behaviour), and now, people tend to focus on easy ways to influence people (external behaviour).
External improvement has a much better return on investment than internal improvement.
What worries me the most is the merchandising about all our social relations. What is the easiest way to attract people, so I'll be liked ?
How many friends can I collect, so that my value increases ?
How much money do I need to spend to possess things that'll make jealous my neighbours ?
It's a typical case of extrinsic/intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is when you don't use incentives.
People will likely behave as they believe they should. In this case, they try to show to their children that they are good parents, so they are not late.
Extrinsic motivation appears when you introduce incentives.
The problem with incentives is that once you introduced them, abolishing incentives make people do even less effort than before.
It has been verified with a lot of different studies.
Is there a lesson here?
The lesson is well known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
In France, people use these breathalyzers to compete on who's the most drunk.
There is also a famous joke (in french):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mad1CwKmh8I
It was a bargain at $15.999.999.
Wow, it seems that I'm infected: I get a weird page for http://megaupload.com/ !
Are you sure you are an expert ?
If you think so, start a blog about your expertise. Try to write what you know, and share your knowledge. The more you share, the more you learn.
You'll learn how to communicate your knowledge, which is a very important skill.
You'll probably learn a lot of human skills in the process, because these skills are not common in the computing world.
If you have nothing to share, it means that you don't know your value.
In 6-12 months, you'll probably get some audience, interested in what you explain.
At your work, try to negotiate 4 days of work per week, and extend your capabilities outside of your work. Your work is just the security you need, so don't sacrifice everything for your pleasure.
You totally miss the educational/motivational part of such internships !
Once the students have worked during 3 months in these factories, they'll learn the following values:
1) if you fail your studies, that's where you'll work until the end of your life
2) if you succeed in your studies, you'll probably want to change the future working conditions in China.
3) if you excel in your studies, you'll be the next bosses, and these are good lessons on how to exploit people.
These are valuable work and life skills !
Disclaimer: I've been a game programmer during 25 years. My first games were done alone, and my last games were with teams of 40+ people. I quit 8 years ago.
What Jaffe says is totally true NOW.
Hollywood had always been jealous of the success of the games industry (a game costs a fraction of the price of a movie), and games companies always wanted to become like movies companies (because there is a real promotional network).
In France, the most famous example is Cryo, which was so much oriented towards movies that it finally disappeared.
In my opinion, these are totally wrong points of view.
Cinema cannot be games, and games cannot be cinema, because a movie and a game are not built the same way:
- a movie can be storyboarded from the beginning to the end, with every plan drawn to maximize the impact. There is no place for improvisation.
- games are software. You cannot plan software, it's a totally different way of thinking. A game evolves until it's finished.
I worked on heavily storyboarded games, and they were shitty, there was no sense of "freedom".
And I'm pretty sure that a movie will fail if it's not prepared enough before starting its filming.
Before, I explained that Jaffe was true NOW.
Around the year 2000, I witnessed an interesting game project, which was an adventure game where the ending was changing along with the hero's actions (at that time, I was working on Omikron the Nomad Soul). The project never appeared, because I think that people were too much focused on technology instead of concentrating on finishing the game.
So, now, I'm pretty sure that storytelling needs to be rethought to give a proper game.
Storytelling for cinema cannot be transposed to videogames, a new level of abstraction is required.
A few ideas appeared, but no formalisation has been done, so I guess storytelling for videogames is not enough mature.
In the future, I think that storytelling will evolve to match the challenge of designing games.
Currently, it's like creating games in 2D, and expecting that they will transpose in 3D without any effort.
Most of the products start by copying the competition at a lower price, but at a lower quality.
Over the time, the quality increases, and the leader has to innovate more and more to avoid being taken over.
At some point, for the customer, the cheaper option is the best choice.
There is still psychological inertia that keeps the old clients tied to their original supplier, but such beliefs disappear over the years.
Read also how cheaper competitors win:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
Also, Google's antispam is very efficient and included in the price.
In comparison, if you want a good antispam with your Exchange server, you need to take Forefront licences.
The correct solution is to stop having regularly scheduled meetings.
No, you are wrong.
What is important is to stop spending time on meetings without concrete results.
When you participate in a meeting where no decision has been done and where not everybody was necessary, it was just a waste of time.
I'm a retrospectives facilitator, and I can assure you that holding regular retrospectives helps the teams evolve incredibly.
The goal of a retrospective is to discover what were the lessons to learn.
If you don't use this kind of regular meeting, nobody progresses in your teams, because they repeat over and over again the same behaviours. This is the best way to stop being reactive (that is: to solve events after they happen, like fixing bugs when a customer discovers them) and to start being proactive (prevent problems before they happen, like writing tests to avoid future regression).
As long as you don't reflect on what has been done since the last meeting, no insight is gained.
Yes, but they cost an arm and a leg.
No, you are wrong, there is no negative correlation.
Let's check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
The suicide rate at Foxconn is less than half of the national rate
In fact, the Wikipedia article is comparing apples and oranges.
What is important to measure is not the national rate of suicide, but the national rate of suicide at work .
Perhaps Foxconn is the only company in China where there are suicides. Who knows ?
Suicide is sending a desperate message (one of my friends suicided himself).
Doing it at work is even stronger !
Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects.
Wow, you don't understand human, aren't you ?
Let's talk about cognitive dissonance.
On one hand, Google encourages people to start new ideas, during 20% of their time.
On the other hand, Google cuts the new ideas, and buys external companies that have new concepts.
How do you think the engineers feel ? Of course, they won't trust Google for encouraging them of having ideas in their 20% time. If they have an interesting idea, the best way is to quit Google, set up a startup and sell it to Google. Of course, who would bother giving ideas to Google, when you see what they do with that.
What Google shows now is that they don't care their internal innovation. Basically, nothing good can come up from Google, so they'll buy any kind of technology from outside.
I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway!
I'm an agile developer and coach. It seems that you didn't discover the hidden truth of agile: management doesn't want to be agile.
Management is the new bureaucracy: you try to live without them, and they try to justify their existence.
I bet that you are using Scrum, Scrum is a gift for management, since the team manages itself ! The team changes, but why would the management change, when they can continue to work with their old ways.
Read the interesting article here:
http://targetprocess.com/rightthing.html
BTW, try to read William Edwards Deming: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edwards_Deming
He's the father of agile, back in 1950. And nobody listened to him until 1990 !
Wrong, every psychic knows that aliens crashed in 1947:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident