I know you are trying to defend your point of view, that DevOps is THE solution to everybody's problems.
I agree that divide-and-conquer is an approach useful in algorithms (especially if you pass Google's recruitment tests), but it's much more difficult in real life.
Social loafing exists in groups, and has been known since a long time. Ringelmann measured the productivity at the beginning of the twentieth century, and discovered what is now named Ringelmann effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Ringelmann's original article explains that a team of 8 persons produces the work of 4. You may argue that you can optimize that by splitting in several groups, but the effect exists starting at 2 persons (85% of effort is produced).
To a certain degree, you can optimize a process by splitting tasks in independent subtasks, preferably assigned to one person each. However, there are several major problems: 1) some tasks are not as independent as you may imagine 2) some tasks require that people with multiple domains work on them 3) some tasks are so long that it slows down the entire process. It is well known in Supply Chain that a single bottlenecks reduce your output. 4) splitted tasks become boring as hell 5) working alone doesn't improve your knowledge
So no, you didn't show that the Mythical Man-Month has been disproved. You just showed that dividing tasks to a certain level may improve productivity, which is nothing new.
Also, applying efficiently DevOpt requires experienced managers. Experience comes from mistakes and mixing various techniques, like ITIL, Scrum, DevOps, etc. If you only use DevOps, I can assure you that you are bound to fail !
It's not about manipulating others or faking politeness, it's about respecting others. You don't have to be condescending to be respectful. And you can avoid bullying people when unnecessary. It's all about non-violence: you treat others as you expect that they treat you.
At my first job, 30 years ago, experienced people were bullying inexperienced people, just because they had a little bit more knowledge. Even though I was on the experienced part, it was a terrible experience for me, since toxic people endelessly badmouthed others and it was very demotivating. A few years after I quit, I learned that the toxic guys were badmouthing each others, to the point that there have been some revenge, and the police was called !!!
What I learned from that is that if you want to be alone, you can treat others like shit, it doesn't matter. But if you need to build a community, you have to learn how to behave, and encourage people to share knowledge and help them feel secure. From a non-violent point of view, you have to realize that your actions will cause unpredictable reactions, and by treating others like shit, you are perceived as what you really are: an asshole.
Linus probably believes that he's irreplaceable, but he's not, and I'm sure he won't be missed.
I don't really disagree with you, since it's obvious that money goes to people who already have money, and I see Apple making piles of cash, and keeping it to itself. At a given moment, the whole system will collapse, but is it really a bad thing ?
I see the advertising model as a way to create a fake good reputation. It's easier to invent a good self-image and ignore what's wrong, and that's where Apple, Google and Facebook excel.
Seriously, their business is to rip off small businesses. Their service can only be used once, because even dumb businesses realize instantly that it doesn't attract regular customers.
"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
Indeed, but do you believe that you would need a million dollars every year ?
I know we are in a period of opulence, but you don't need money to have a good life. I would say that you can easily be happy without money.
Disclaimer: my wife just died, and I'm currently reducing drastically my lifestyle, since most of my money was spent for/by her. Thus, the question I asked also applies for me. I can probably live with less than $1000 every month.
By their replies, I see here a lot of people slave to their job, as it was the sole meaning of their life. My job, my money, my family, my car, my house. WTF ?
What ? You don't have a job ? Go die, scum ! I don't want to help you, but if I'm in the same situation as you, I'll cry for help.
And you see that it works, when poor people feel miserable because they don't have a job.
Giving a minimal amount of money to allow people to live decently (food + housing) would make the society fairer. Of course, there will be abuses, from both sides.
"Poor" people will say: I have not enough money to feed my big dogs or pay for my car. "Rich" people will say: I won't pay slackers, because I work my ass off. I don't need anybody's help.
This will also help "normal" people to stop despising others because they cannot get a job. There are life accidents, for example, when people are disabled, should they have twice the pain: disabled and jobless ?
What is the minimal amount of money you would need to live decently ?
You are probably right. My mother was a polish peasant, and she was deported to Germany, as a peasant. At the end of WWII, her mother and sister were deported from Poland to Ukraine, since most peasants were killed there.
No way in hell. Britain plus the USSR would have finished it without us. Maybe one extra year at the utmost. And the US would have devastated Japan much faster without our own second front (which actually had priority). Then we would have swarmed into Europe in full undiverted force by 1944 or 1945.
I totally agree with you, except that the war was already coming to an end. USSR was already winning the war (the best german generals were sacrificed in Russia), and I believe that De Gaulle and Churchill asked the US to intervene before Stalin could invade the whole Europa. I believe that the progression of the US soldiers from France to Berlin was easy, while USSR's progression from Russia to Berlin was slow because nobody liked the russian soldiers.
Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.
I believe it was the polish peasants who were greeting their liberators and were slaughtered. Later, polish people sabotaged german trains. What a surprise !
What is important here is that the most acknowledged scientists developed both their "logical brain" and their "intuitive brain". We could say that they are rational and intuitive at the same time.
This also reminds me that the best scientists have several domains of knowledge, not once. The best engineers I have met have few interests outside of their domain, except the most brilliant ones. Scientists from long ago, like Euler or Newton, did not restrict themselves to one domain, and this made them stand above their contemporaries.
Whining only reduces your chances of getting a better job.
Whining just helps people to discharge their frustration. In fact, it encourages people to remain at their job.
When you stop whining, you start seriously to seek for another job. Since you stopped complaining, you don't have a distorted view of the reality, so it's easier to detect problems when your mind is clear.
I'm very happy to learn that you, the Head of Infrastructure Development at Amazon, have good working conditions at Amazon, but your opinion is absolutely irrelevant, since people being pressured at Amazon are not developers, but people doing physical work.
It's easy to defend your job when you have a comfortable position, but it's also very disrespectful towards people who do *real* manual work, who are forced to follow a fast pace and who are also badly paid.
I had countless death marches in my previous jobs (in videogames), and I know very well how it destroys people (and it took me more than one year to recover). But death marches cannot compare to physical repetitive fast-pacing tasks. The body suffers but also questions arise, because the mind is completely available.
As a software engineer, my minds is always busy, so I don't have doubts when I work. If I had a manual work, I would have plenty of time to wonder why I do a job that I dislike.
I have experienced the Stockholm syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in a few jobs, where I believed it was my duty to sacrifice myself for the company, so I understand people wanting to show that they can perform better than others. It's totally normal !
But please, Nick, don't compare your job to the mindless harassing jobs in Amazon.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
Who cares about GDP ? Frankly, what does it change to your life ?
it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression
In fact, you become depressed if you believe that you are useless to the society. There are tons of things to do to avoid feeling useless.
What irritates me is people who complain that they don't earn enough money, but they systematically have huge dogs, large televisions, etc. If people want to live on subsidies, I have no problem, but don't expect to live a luxurious life !
I remember a documentary about a company in India doing 3D animation. One manager explained how he monitored in real-time how people were working.
Then, the boss explained how he was proud of producing movies in India, and he showed a few seconds of the animated movie his company was working on (it was something similar to the Jungle Book). The animation was pretty miserable.
Their system encouraged finishing tasks the fastest as possible, not the best as possible, so it was absolutely talentless. If you try to measure work, you'll get quantity but not quality. How is it even possible to measure quality ?
Moral of the story: if you need robots, take robots, not human beings.
You are wrong, and this is because Scrum is not agile !
If you use only Scrum, you cannot succeed because Scrum is for managers, not for developers. For developers, you can use Extreme Programming, DevOps or Kanban, but please do not force developers to use Scrum, it's absolutely useless for them.
The devs should have the authority to not commit to a particular feature/tech/UX/whatever in a given time period.
When do the devs have some power in a company ? The problem is that the business guys want more and more features, so they try to cram as much possible tasks as possible. As a dev, you don't have time to polish your code, since you have to always remind the big picture, I mean the "vision" from the business guy.
I did a lot of game companies at the time, and people quit not because they were fired, but because they were burned out.
When you have death marches during 6 or 12 months, delivering the game becomes meaningless because you sacrificed so much. It's a matter of pride, but the company doesn't care about you in the end.
The best people quit to find a better company (such a company is quite rare, I must say), and only the incompetent ones remain. In the end, all valuable experience is gone, and the company's only assets is the game and the worst of the original team.
"the heart is on the left, but the wallet is on the right."
While I partly agree with you, I would like to share my own experience.
20 years ago, I worked for a game company where the boss wanted full equality, so he paid everybody around the same salary. While the approach is humanist, in the end it did more bad than good.
There was a huge trust between members, but beginners were terrible and were slowing down the experienced people. I wholeheartedly loved working for this company, but it collapsed after finishing the first game.
The lessons are:
1) pay people as low as you can, but as much as they need to live a comfortable life (and won't want to quit your company). Everybody has different needs, and I don't count "home cinema" as a need ! 2) pay well your better workers, don't count on their faithfulness especially if you fire people randomly 3) be frank. People (especially the awful workers) are obsessed why they don't earn as much as their colleagues. Tell them why they don't deserve a higher salary.
This has probably something to do with global/local scope. If your variable is declared with a "var", it's local, otherwise, it's global. You probably missed some var i, and your i variable is global, leading to random crashes if the loop is used at several locations.
Back in the 90s, I was working on a trucks game. Strangely, when playing via network, the trucks on some computers sometimes desynchronized. I spent one week locating the problem by digging into verbose logs: it was due to the FDIV bug, which was subtly changing the positions of some trucks.
More recently, I spent a lot of time figuring why some programs crashed on my computer. After a few weeks, I realized that some bits in the RAM were dead, writing into them returned random values.
In fact, people signing large contracts always expect large kickbacks in return, at least 15% of it. This will probably finance the next presidential campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Anders,
I know you are trying to defend your point of view, that DevOps is THE solution to everybody's problems.
I agree that divide-and-conquer is an approach useful in algorithms (especially if you pass Google's recruitment tests), but it's much more difficult in real life.
Social loafing exists in groups, and has been known since a long time.
Ringelmann measured the productivity at the beginning of the twentieth century, and discovered what is now named Ringelmann effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ringelmann's original article explains that a team of 8 persons produces the work of 4.
You may argue that you can optimize that by splitting in several groups, but the effect exists starting at 2 persons (85% of effort is produced).
To a certain degree, you can optimize a process by splitting tasks in independent subtasks, preferably assigned to one person each.
However, there are several major problems:
1) some tasks are not as independent as you may imagine
2) some tasks require that people with multiple domains work on them
3) some tasks are so long that it slows down the entire process. It is well known in Supply Chain that a single bottlenecks reduce your output.
4) splitted tasks become boring as hell
5) working alone doesn't improve your knowledge
So no, you didn't show that the Mythical Man-Month has been disproved.
You just showed that dividing tasks to a certain level may improve productivity, which is nothing new.
Also, applying efficiently DevOpt requires experienced managers.
Experience comes from mistakes and mixing various techniques, like ITIL, Scrum, DevOps, etc.
If you only use DevOps, I can assure you that you are bound to fail !
I'm sorry, but what Linus says is pure bullshit.
It's not about manipulating others or faking politeness, it's about respecting others.
You don't have to be condescending to be respectful.
And you can avoid bullying people when unnecessary.
It's all about non-violence: you treat others as you expect that they treat you.
At my first job, 30 years ago, experienced people were bullying inexperienced people, just because they had a little bit more knowledge.
Even though I was on the experienced part, it was a terrible experience for me, since toxic people endelessly badmouthed others and it was very demotivating.
A few years after I quit, I learned that the toxic guys were badmouthing each others, to the point that there have been some revenge, and the police was called !!!
What I learned from that is that if you want to be alone, you can treat others like shit, it doesn't matter.
But if you need to build a community, you have to learn how to behave, and encourage people to share knowledge and help them feel secure.
From a non-violent point of view, you have to realize that your actions will cause unpredictable reactions, and by treating others like shit, you are perceived as what you really are: an asshole.
Linus probably believes that he's irreplaceable, but he's not, and I'm sure he won't be missed.
I think you are too pessimistic.
I don't really disagree with you, since it's obvious that money goes to people who already have money, and I see Apple making piles of cash, and keeping it to itself.
At a given moment, the whole system will collapse, but is it really a bad thing ?
I see the advertising model as a way to create a fake good reputation.
It's easier to invent a good self-image and ignore what's wrong, and that's where Apple, Google and Facebook excel.
Hey, you are starting to rub off on me !
I detected a Bullshit Bingo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seriously, their business is to rip off small businesses.
Their service can only be used once, because even dumb businesses realize instantly that it doesn't attract regular customers.
"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
Indeed, but do you believe that you would need a million dollars every year ?
I know we are in a period of opulence, but you don't need money to have a good life.
I would say that you can easily be happy without money.
Disclaimer: my wife just died, and I'm currently reducing drastically my lifestyle, since most of my money was spent for/by her.
Thus, the question I asked also applies for me. I can probably live with less than $1000 every month.
This !
By their replies, I see here a lot of people slave to their job, as it was the sole meaning of their life.
My job, my money, my family, my car, my house. WTF ?
What ? You don't have a job ? Go die, scum ! I don't want to help you, but if I'm in the same situation as you, I'll cry for help.
And you see that it works, when poor people feel miserable because they don't have a job.
Giving a minimal amount of money to allow people to live decently (food + housing) would make the society fairer.
Of course, there will be abuses, from both sides.
"Poor" people will say: I have not enough money to feed my big dogs or pay for my car.
"Rich" people will say: I won't pay slackers, because I work my ass off. I don't need anybody's help.
This will also help "normal" people to stop despising others because they cannot get a job.
There are life accidents, for example, when people are disabled, should they have twice the pain: disabled and jobless ?
What is the minimal amount of money you would need to live decently ?
You are probably right.
My mother was a polish peasant, and she was deported to Germany, as a peasant.
At the end of WWII, her mother and sister were deported from Poland to Ukraine, since most peasants were killed there.
No way in hell. Britain plus the USSR would have finished it without us. Maybe one extra year at the utmost. And the US would have devastated Japan much faster without our own second front (which actually had priority). Then we would have swarmed into Europe in full undiverted force by 1944 or 1945.
I totally agree with you, except that the war was already coming to an end.
USSR was already winning the war (the best german generals were sacrificed in Russia), and I believe that De Gaulle and Churchill asked the US to intervene before Stalin could invade the whole Europa.
I believe that the progression of the US soldiers from France to Berlin was easy, while USSR's progression from Russia to Berlin was slow because nobody liked the russian soldiers.
Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.
I believe it was the polish peasants who were greeting their liberators and were slaughtered.
Later, polish people sabotaged german trains.
What a surprise !
What is important here is that the most acknowledged scientists developed both their "logical brain" and their "intuitive brain".
We could say that they are rational and intuitive at the same time.
This also reminds me that the best scientists have several domains of knowledge, not once.
The best engineers I have met have few interests outside of their domain, except the most brilliant ones.
Scientists from long ago, like Euler or Newton, did not restrict themselves to one domain, and this made them stand above their contemporaries.
Whining only reduces your chances of getting a better job.
Whining just helps people to discharge their frustration.
In fact, it encourages people to remain at their job.
When you stop whining, you start seriously to seek for another job.
Since you stopped complaining, you don't have a distorted view of the reality, so it's easier to detect problems when your mind is clear.
What can they hope to learn from this that they haven't/can't learn from the ISS?
Sexual behavior in confined space ?
Dear Nick,
I'm very happy to learn that you, the Head of Infrastructure Development at Amazon, have good working conditions at Amazon, but your opinion is absolutely irrelevant, since people being pressured at Amazon are not developers, but people doing physical work.
It's easy to defend your job when you have a comfortable position, but it's also very disrespectful towards people who do *real* manual work, who are forced to follow a fast pace and who are also badly paid.
I had countless death marches in my previous jobs (in videogames), and I know very well how it destroys people (and it took me more than one year to recover).
But death marches cannot compare to physical repetitive fast-pacing tasks.
The body suffers but also questions arise, because the mind is completely available.
As a software engineer, my minds is always busy, so I don't have doubts when I work.
If I had a manual work, I would have plenty of time to wonder why I do a job that I dislike.
I have experienced the Stockholm syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in a few jobs, where I believed it was my duty to sacrifice myself for the company, so I understand people wanting to show that they can perform better than others.
It's totally normal !
But please, Nick, don't compare your job to the mindless harassing jobs in Amazon.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
Who cares about GDP ?
Frankly, what does it change to your life ?
it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression
In fact, you become depressed if you believe that you are useless to the society.
There are tons of things to do to avoid feeling useless.
What irritates me is people who complain that they don't earn enough money, but they systematically have huge dogs, large televisions, etc.
If people want to live on subsidies, I have no problem, but don't expect to live a luxurious life !
you get what you measure.
I remember a documentary about a company in India doing 3D animation.
One manager explained how he monitored in real-time how people were working.
Then, the boss explained how he was proud of producing movies in India, and he showed a few seconds of the animated movie his company was working on (it was something similar to the Jungle Book).
The animation was pretty miserable.
Their system encouraged finishing tasks the fastest as possible, not the best as possible, so it was absolutely talentless.
If you try to measure work, you'll get quantity but not quality.
How is it even possible to measure quality ?
Moral of the story: if you need robots, take robots, not human beings.
You are wrong, and this is because Scrum is not agile !
If you use only Scrum, you cannot succeed because Scrum is for managers, not for developers.
For developers, you can use Extreme Programming, DevOps or Kanban, but please do not force developers to use Scrum, it's absolutely useless for them.
The devs should have the authority to not commit to a particular feature/tech/UX/whatever in a given time period.
When do the devs have some power in a company ?
The problem is that the business guys want more and more features, so they try to cram as much possible tasks as possible.
As a dev, you don't have time to polish your code, since you have to always remind the big picture, I mean the "vision" from the business guy.
I did a lot of game companies at the time, and people quit not because they were fired, but because they were burned out.
When you have death marches during 6 or 12 months, delivering the game becomes meaningless because you sacrificed so much. It's a matter of pride, but the company doesn't care about you in the end.
The best people quit to find a better company (such a company is quite rare, I must say), and only the incompetent ones remain.
In the end, all valuable experience is gone, and the company's only assets is the game and the worst of the original team.
There is a saying in France that says:
"the heart is on the left, but the wallet is on the right."
While I partly agree with you, I would like to share my own experience.
20 years ago, I worked for a game company where the boss wanted full equality, so he paid everybody around the same salary.
While the approach is humanist, in the end it did more bad than good.
There was a huge trust between members, but beginners were terrible and were slowing down the experienced people.
I wholeheartedly loved working for this company, but it collapsed after finishing the first game.
The lessons are:
1) pay people as low as you can, but as much as they need to live a comfortable life (and won't want to quit your company). Everybody has different needs, and I don't count "home cinema" as a need !
2) pay well your better workers, don't count on their faithfulness especially if you fire people randomly
3) be frank. People (especially the awful workers) are obsessed why they don't earn as much as their colleagues. Tell them why they don't deserve a higher salary.
It's my personal computer, but I am not the only one to get this kind of error:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n...
No, the game was named "Trucks". It ran on DOS+Vesa. DirectX was released at the same moment.
This has probably something to do with global/local scope.
If your variable is declared with a "var", it's local, otherwise, it's global.
You probably missed some var i, and your i variable is global, leading to random crashes if the loop is used at several locations.
I had a worst experience: hardware bugs.
Back in the 90s, I was working on a trucks game.
Strangely, when playing via network, the trucks on some computers sometimes desynchronized.
I spent one week locating the problem by digging into verbose logs: it was due to the FDIV bug, which was subtly changing the positions of some trucks.
More recently, I spent a lot of time figuring why some programs crashed on my computer.
After a few weeks, I realized that some bits in the RAM were dead, writing into them returned random values.
Exactly !
In fact, people signing large contracts always expect large kickbacks in return, at least 15% of it.
This will probably finance the next presidential campaign.
You should compare the rate of accidents, not two unrelated values.
Maybe there are 10000 drones in the world, and 100 accidents every year, which gives a ratio of 10%.
How much cars do we have in the world ?
I very much doubt cars have such a high rate of accidents.
Perhaps if you multiply the number of drones by a factor of 10, you'll be able to count deaths.
It's not really difficult.
You just need to setup a local proxy that filters ads, and tell Edge to use this proxy.