Wrong. This was a mistake, and it's interested in this matter do align with their customers.
You have no proof that it was a mistake, and the skeptics have no proof that it was deliberate. Nobody has any proof about anything, that's why there's discussion.
We all agree, though, that the public needs to be vigilant and observant.
Yea maybe I didn't get enough hugs, whatever, but it's pretty humorous to see a bunch of people here belly-aching about how horrible it was in the office without air conditioning or how much pressure it was to work [gasp] on the client's site. Even on your worst day you have it made.
This thread is kind of silly. Even on your worst day, you probably still aren't:
1. Dodging gunfire, war, or lawlessness 2. Hungry or living off of what you can find 3. Working dangerous manual labor that is likely to kill or maim you 4. Making less than, say, $10 a day
Which puts you firmly among the best working conditions in the world.
I don't see how Twitter is all that different than IRC. The only thing it's got going for itself, really, is that it appeals to the beret-wearing Web 2.0 crowd.
I'm probably in the minority, but I believe that putting unauthorized easter eggs in your employer's program is pretty unprofessional, and should probably be grounds for termination.
1. Your new code does not serve to meet a functional requirement of the system. 2. Your new code does not resolve a defect. 3. Your new code could be buggy or have unforeseen side effects, increasing risk without any end-user benefit. 4. Your new code could possibly expose a buffer overrun or other security flaw, increasing risk without any end-user benefit.
Every line of code you add to software is a line that will probably have to be debugged some time in the future. Are you willing to foot the bill for any future problems the code might cause?
Save your "ego eggs" for personal software you're writing on your own time.
If you don't like it, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you work there. Go work a nice comfortable 9-5 job writing accounting apps for MegaIndstroCorp.
For software engineering, I'd be in favor of following the successful medical model: Schooling, Internship, Residency in multiple specialties, passage of a standardized exam, and certification by a non-profit board.
I'd stop short of legally requiring the above process, because generally, nobody dies if you write bad software. But if that kind of certification practice became common, having the legal requirement wouldn't matter because no company in their right mind would hire an un-certified engineer.
Are you honestly that paranoid? You talk about being attacked as if it is a certainty. A lot of conservative pundits use similar language: "When the next attack comes" as if it's some inevitable future event.
Countries don't generally attack one another without provocation. If you're afraid someone's going to attack you, look in the mirror--you'll probably discover what their problem is with you.
"Hit them before they hit us" is never a good policy if peace is your goal. Using "hit first" logic, I should go over and shoot my neighbor because of the chance he might be planning on killing me tomorrow.
Lawyers can charge what they do and sell themselves as highly skilled practitioners because they passed the Bar exam, which acts as both a hurdle to keep everyone and their uncle out, and as an indicator of some standard level of performance.
"Coders" have no such yard stick. Anyone and their uncle can call themselves "coders" or, even more outrageously, call themselves software engineers. There's really no certification, standardized exam, or prestigious private college out there whereby one can stand out as highly skilled. So, the field is flooded with tons of mediocre and unskilled coders, punctuated by the rare skilled programmer. This drives salaries down. Everyone in the field is forced to undersell themselves lest they be underbid by one of the many who are all talk and no skill.
What software engineers need are credible and selective certification programs so that the few very talented professionals who pass can authoritatively show themselves to be skilled. This would definitely help weed the field of posers and amateurs and bring salaries up to where they should be.
I've seen my share of products fail miserably because nobody brought in the business analysts or consultants to gather functional and end-user requirements and spec out the system, and, generally, drive the project. Consequently, the engineers are left with an incomplete or incorrect idea of what to build or of what the acceptance criteria should actually be.
3) erected a 6 foot fence around his 4) above ground pool
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
5) strung up a clothesline.
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
It is in my best interest, and those of my other neighbors, to ask the HOA to sue him and get him to resolve these issues if he doesn't do so after asking politely because it has a detrimental effect on the value/selling prices of our homes.
What are you all, a bunch of Donald Trumps, "flipping" your houses for profit every month? A home is not an investment. It's thinking like that that got this country into the economic shitter that it is in. A home is a place to live, and unless your neighbor is doing something to prevent you from living in your home, you need to STFU and let live.
I moved away from my HOA controlled "neighborhood" because of nosy ninnies like you.
Actually I'm probably mid-career. I'd say I identify more with the older folks in the office than I do the younger folks. The point was, there are certain things younger employees are good at or are willing to put up with, and there are certain things more experienced employees are good at, and a company must play on both groups' strengths. The blanket statement about 21-year-olds being smart as a bag of hammers downplays this age group's potential.
Sure, I've worked with dumbass kids who write their own linked lists because they don't know that STL exists, and ones who have to look up how to change their clothes on Google. But I've also worked with old curmudgeons hung up on The Way It's Always Been Done, and super experienced primadonnas who are too busy "designing" and "engineering" to get their hands dirty and crank out code that was due yesterday. Got to fully use each person's unique strengths.
We can start with a one page written (in English, using appropriate grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation) paper correlating the business of IT for the IT associated with their business.
Irrelevant. I know CEOs who make 5x my salary who can't even use commas correctly.
Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points.
This is a job skill?
we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12.
Might as well have a slide-rule or abacus-operating competition.
such as generalizing the differences between event driven programming and object oriented programming, or perhaps why using binary implementations to represent money isn't the brightest idea, and why overnormalizing a database used for reporting is going to result in unreasonably long wait times during the batch cycle.
Academic exercises. If the underlying system works and is on time, NOBODY cares how nicely architected it is. We had to ship YESTERDAY.
Maybe top if off with simply Googling each other and finding just how many pictures of us doing stupid (or illegal) shit on the net we can find of each other
Now we're just getting ridiculous.
OK, old man, since you're so big on these little competitions, I'll pit you vs a random 21 year old at the following skills (which are much more business relevant than the ones you mentioned above):
* Our next project is in (insert computer language of the month you don't know). Learn only you need to start coding. We're starting next week.
* Summarize the results of our last trade show and the people we met and send them in a text message to me. You have twenty seconds.
* Write a device driver for this un-documented piece of hardware. Just keep trying until something works.
* We need to get a proposal done for a high value customer and have 72 hours. Need you to stay here at work until it's done. I don't care if you have a wife and kids at home.
* Swallow your pride and get me my coffee.
* I'm going to pay you $30,000. How does that sound?
My guess is that your average professional who has "advanced in years" will not be suitable for accomplishing these tasks.
One typical libertarian response to the pollution problem is that if you cared about stopping pollution, you could individually donate to a charity that goes around cleaning up pollution. Not saying I agree with it, but that's pretty much a standard response to the question "Without government, how does that $(ALTRUISTIC_PUBLIC_SERVICE) get done?"
I'm not specifically targeting you, but there have been a lot of people in this thread so far just tossing that out (Country living being less stressful) as if everyone agrees with it. Is there any evidence that living in a city is actually more stressful than living in rural areas?
To me, country living, at least in the USA, represents:
* long commutes to work
* having to drive everywhere (even for groceries!!)
* no culture/nightlife
* few/no high-tech businesses
* chain stores and restaurants
* local politics dominated by religious people
* more fear of discrimination based on religion/skin color/sexuality
* rednecks and pick-up trucks
Whereas city living represents:
* public transportation
* everything is within walking or biking distance
* great nightlife/entertainment
* multicultural
* diverse choices of markets and restaurants
* ok-to-great high-tech jobs, depending on the city
* progressive local politics
* tolerance of different lifestyles
Of course, you pay extra for all this so it's more expensive, but to say it's more STRESSFUL??
The important thing is not to force each language and use the "lowest common denominator" but really learn a language in order to appreciate it's differences from the others. You can write procedural programs in each of these languages trivially. DON'T. If you learn C++, use template metaprogramming and multiple inheritance (of templated classes, passing through template parameters up the inheritance chain). Use operator overloading for everything from combining 2 lists, write the complex number class everyone writes. Write a sparse matrix class if you're up to it. Learn boost. Learn ANTLR...
I'd like to recommend the exact opposite. Your co-workers will thank you.
95% of what you are going to see in commercial software is "lowest common denominator" code. For a C++ project, for instance, that means, it will look like C with classes. You're not going to see any clever use of the language. You're not going to see templates (besides USE of template classes such as STL). You're not going to see very interesting uses of inheritance, function pointers, polymorphism, etc.
And if you start barfing all those language acrobatics into the code base, your co-workers are going to hate your guts. By and large, your co-workers want to go to work, do their job, and go home to play with their kids. If they have to sit there and figure out that what they're looking at is your overloaded () operator because it's a neat way to implement the "Visitor" design pattern, or something, it makes their job harder, they're not going to like you, and the whole project is going to suffer because the code is no longer readable to the team.
Learn the basics of the language REALLY WELL and be able to crank out functional, readable, SIMPLE code, quickly.
Of course, this whole post applies only if you're going to write software for a living. If you're learning a language for the challenge and fun of programming for yourself, disregard.
I haven't really heard much "uproar" over anything the Obama administration has done (have they actually done anything yet, really?) In fact he still seems to have a pretty high favorability rating. I admit, however, I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, so my experiences might be somewhat biased towards reality.
In the absence of professional experience or coursework, I'd look for a portfolio of non-professional software projects you've worked on. Have you worked on any open source projects? If so, in what capacity? Did you submit patches, fix bugs, assist in documentation? Can you provide an example of a routine or software module you have written and are particularly proud of?
Also, good organizations will ask interviewees to discuss, at an abstract level,
And really good ones will ask interviewees to write and read/explain source code during their interview. Be prepared to do that.
Watch out for organizations that demand a certain level of niche domain experience or knowledge of a particular API/language/library/technology, yet claim to be looking for "entry-level" people. You're probably wasting your time talking to someone like that, if you're just getting into the biz.
I don't understand how you (and many others, apparently) can make the enormous leap from "It's a good idea and we all should do it." to "The government should make it mandatory and force people to do it under threat of fines and imprisonment."
Imagine: you get hit by an uninsured motorist, and wind up in the hospital with serious injuries, miss work, maybe lose your job, have a totaled car, and are unable to climb out physically and financially.
This is why you carry uninsured motorist coverage. You do carry uninsured motorist coverage, DON'T YOU?
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. This was a mistake, and it's interested in this matter do align with their customers.
You have no proof that it was a mistake, and the skeptics have no proof that it was deliberate. Nobody has any proof about anything, that's why there's discussion.
We all agree, though, that the public needs to be vigilant and observant.
In the end, Amazon listened to their customers, and reversed an unpopular policy very quickly. If anything, this is good news.
I don't know--it reminds me of the veloco-raptors in Jurassic Park methodically testing their electrified cage for things they can get away with...
You can bet this kind of "censorship" will happen much more slowly and gradually next time, so people don't notice.
Yea maybe I didn't get enough hugs, whatever, but it's pretty humorous to see a bunch of people here belly-aching about how horrible it was in the office without air conditioning or how much pressure it was to work [gasp] on the client's site. Even on your worst day you have it made.
This thread is kind of silly. Even on your worst day, you probably still aren't:
1. Dodging gunfire, war, or lawlessness
2. Hungry or living off of what you can find
3. Working dangerous manual labor that is likely to kill or maim you
4. Making less than, say, $10 a day
Which puts you firmly among the best working conditions in the world.
I don't see how Twitter is all that different than IRC. The only thing it's got going for itself, really, is that it appeals to the beret-wearing Web 2.0 crowd.
I'm probably in the minority, but I believe that putting unauthorized easter eggs in your employer's program is pretty unprofessional, and should probably be grounds for termination.
1. Your new code does not serve to meet a functional requirement of the system.
2. Your new code does not resolve a defect.
3. Your new code could be buggy or have unforeseen side effects, increasing risk without any end-user benefit.
4. Your new code could possibly expose a buffer overrun or other security flaw, increasing risk without any end-user benefit.
Every line of code you add to software is a line that will probably have to be debugged some time in the future. Are you willing to foot the bill for any future problems the code might cause?
Save your "ego eggs" for personal software you're writing on your own time.
What do we get out of it?
Umm.. a job writing video games?
If you don't like it, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you work there. Go work a nice comfortable 9-5 job writing accounting apps for MegaIndstroCorp.
Yea, I can see how "What papers do you read?" is a hostile, "gotcha" question. I guess she should have started with "What is your favorite animal?"
For software engineering, I'd be in favor of following the successful medical model: Schooling, Internship, Residency in multiple specialties, passage of a standardized exam, and certification by a non-profit board.
I'd stop short of legally requiring the above process, because generally, nobody dies if you write bad software. But if that kind of certification practice became common, having the legal requirement wouldn't matter because no company in their right mind would hire an un-certified engineer.
Are you honestly that paranoid? You talk about being attacked as if it is a certainty. A lot of conservative pundits use similar language: "When the next attack comes" as if it's some inevitable future event.
Countries don't generally attack one another without provocation. If you're afraid someone's going to attack you, look in the mirror--you'll probably discover what their problem is with you.
"Hit them before they hit us" is never a good policy if peace is your goal. Using "hit first" logic, I should go over and shoot my neighbor because of the chance he might be planning on killing me tomorrow.
Lawyers can charge what they do and sell themselves as highly skilled practitioners because they passed the Bar exam, which acts as both a hurdle to keep everyone and their uncle out, and as an indicator of some standard level of performance.
"Coders" have no such yard stick. Anyone and their uncle can call themselves "coders" or, even more outrageously, call themselves software engineers. There's really no certification, standardized exam, or prestigious private college out there whereby one can stand out as highly skilled. So, the field is flooded with tons of mediocre and unskilled coders, punctuated by the rare skilled programmer. This drives salaries down. Everyone in the field is forced to undersell themselves lest they be underbid by one of the many who are all talk and no skill.
What software engineers need are credible and selective certification programs so that the few very talented professionals who pass can authoritatively show themselves to be skilled. This would definitely help weed the field of posers and amateurs and bring salaries up to where they should be.
I've seen my share of products fail miserably because nobody brought in the business analysts or consultants to gather functional and end-user requirements and spec out the system, and, generally, drive the project. Consequently, the engineers are left with an incomplete or incorrect idea of what to build or of what the acceptance criteria should actually be.
He has 1) put up a shed on a .2 acre property,
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
2) parked his camper alongside his garage,
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
3) erected a 6 foot fence around his 4) above ground pool
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
5) strung up a clothesline.
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
It is in my best interest, and those of my other neighbors, to ask the HOA to sue him and get him to resolve these issues if he doesn't do so after asking politely because it has a detrimental effect on the value/selling prices of our homes.
What are you all, a bunch of Donald Trumps, "flipping" your houses for profit every month? A home is not an investment. It's thinking like that that got this country into the economic shitter that it is in. A home is a place to live, and unless your neighbor is doing something to prevent you from living in your home, you need to STFU and let live.
I moved away from my HOA controlled "neighborhood" because of nosy ninnies like you.
Actually I'm probably mid-career. I'd say I identify more with the older folks in the office than I do the younger folks. The point was, there are certain things younger employees are good at or are willing to put up with, and there are certain things more experienced employees are good at, and a company must play on both groups' strengths. The blanket statement about 21-year-olds being smart as a bag of hammers downplays this age group's potential.
Sure, I've worked with dumbass kids who write their own linked lists because they don't know that STL exists, and ones who have to look up how to change their clothes on Google. But I've also worked with old curmudgeons hung up on The Way It's Always Been Done, and super experienced primadonnas who are too busy "designing" and "engineering" to get their hands dirty and crank out code that was due yesterday. Got to fully use each person's unique strengths.
It's a failure of democracy, as these people tend to vote in great numbers.
We can start with a one page written (in English, using appropriate grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation) paper correlating the business of IT for the IT associated with their business.
Irrelevant. I know CEOs who make 5x my salary who can't even use commas correctly.
Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points.
This is a job skill?
we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12.
Might as well have a slide-rule or abacus-operating competition.
such as generalizing the differences between event driven programming and object oriented programming, or perhaps why using binary implementations to represent money isn't the brightest idea, and why overnormalizing a database used for reporting is going to result in unreasonably long wait times during the batch cycle.
Academic exercises. If the underlying system works and is on time, NOBODY cares how nicely architected it is. We had to ship YESTERDAY.
Maybe top if off with simply Googling each other and finding just how many pictures of us doing stupid (or illegal) shit on the net we can find of each other
Now we're just getting ridiculous.
OK, old man, since you're so big on these little competitions, I'll pit you vs a random 21 year old at the following skills (which are much more business relevant than the ones you mentioned above):
* Our next project is in (insert computer language of the month you don't know). Learn only you need to start coding. We're starting next week.
* Summarize the results of our last trade show and the people we met and send them in a text message to me. You have twenty seconds.
* Write a device driver for this un-documented piece of hardware. Just keep trying until something works.
* We need to get a proposal done for a high value customer and have 72 hours. Need you to stay here at work until it's done. I don't care if you have a wife and kids at home.
* Swallow your pride and get me my coffee.
* I'm going to pay you $30,000. How does that sound?
My guess is that your average professional who has "advanced in years" will not be suitable for accomplishing these tasks.
One typical libertarian response to the pollution problem is that if you cared about stopping pollution, you could individually donate to a charity that goes around cleaning up pollution. Not saying I agree with it, but that's pretty much a standard response to the question "Without government, how does that $(ALTRUISTIC_PUBLIC_SERVICE) get done?"
I'm not specifically targeting you, but there have been a lot of people in this thread so far just tossing that out (Country living being less stressful) as if everyone agrees with it. Is there any evidence that living in a city is actually more stressful than living in rural areas?
To me, country living, at least in the USA, represents:
* long commutes to work
* having to drive everywhere (even for groceries!!)
* no culture/nightlife
* few/no high-tech businesses
* chain stores and restaurants
* local politics dominated by religious people
* more fear of discrimination based on religion/skin color/sexuality
* rednecks and pick-up trucks
Whereas city living represents:
* public transportation
* everything is within walking or biking distance
* great nightlife/entertainment
* multicultural
* diverse choices of markets and restaurants
* ok-to-great high-tech jobs, depending on the city
* progressive local politics
* tolerance of different lifestyles
Of course, you pay extra for all this so it's more expensive, but to say it's more STRESSFUL??
The important thing is not to force each language and use the "lowest common denominator" but really learn a language in order to appreciate it's differences from the others. You can write procedural programs in each of these languages trivially. DON'T. If you learn C++, use template metaprogramming and multiple inheritance (of templated classes, passing through template parameters up the inheritance chain). Use operator overloading for everything from combining 2 lists, write the complex number class everyone writes. Write a sparse matrix class if you're up to it. Learn boost. Learn ANTLR ...
I'd like to recommend the exact opposite. Your co-workers will thank you.
95% of what you are going to see in commercial software is "lowest common denominator" code. For a C++ project, for instance, that means, it will look like C with classes. You're not going to see any clever use of the language. You're not going to see templates (besides USE of template classes such as STL). You're not going to see very interesting uses of inheritance, function pointers, polymorphism, etc.
And if you start barfing all those language acrobatics into the code base, your co-workers are going to hate your guts. By and large, your co-workers want to go to work, do their job, and go home to play with their kids. If they have to sit there and figure out that what they're looking at is your overloaded () operator because it's a neat way to implement the "Visitor" design pattern, or something, it makes their job harder, they're not going to like you, and the whole project is going to suffer because the code is no longer readable to the team.
Learn the basics of the language REALLY WELL and be able to crank out functional, readable, SIMPLE code, quickly.
Of course, this whole post applies only if you're going to write software for a living. If you're learning a language for the challenge and fun of programming for yourself, disregard.
I haven't really heard much "uproar" over anything the Obama administration has done (have they actually done anything yet, really?) In fact he still seems to have a pretty high favorability rating. I admit, however, I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, so my experiences might be somewhat biased towards reality.
In the absence of professional experience or coursework, I'd look for a portfolio of non-professional software projects you've worked on. Have you worked on any open source projects? If so, in what capacity? Did you submit patches, fix bugs, assist in documentation? Can you provide an example of a routine or software module you have written and are particularly proud of?
Also, good organizations will ask interviewees to discuss, at an abstract level,
* Algorithms
* Data structures
* Pointers
* Recursion
* Object oriented design concepts
And really good ones will ask interviewees to write and read/explain source code during their interview. Be prepared to do that.
Watch out for organizations that demand a certain level of niche domain experience or knowledge of a particular API/language/library/technology, yet claim to be looking for "entry-level" people. You're probably wasting your time talking to someone like that, if you're just getting into the biz.
I don't understand how you (and many others, apparently) can make the enormous leap from "It's a good idea and we all should do it." to "The government should make it mandatory and force people to do it under threat of fines and imprisonment."
The length of the yellow light in no way plays into the decision of whether or not you should stop.
So, how would you handle a 100 millisecond yellow light?
Imagine: you get hit by an uninsured motorist, and wind up in the hospital with serious injuries, miss work, maybe lose your job, have a totaled car, and are unable to climb out physically and financially.
This is why you carry uninsured motorist coverage. You do carry uninsured motorist coverage, DON'T YOU?
but yes, overall, if your society has less children than another society, the other society inherits the earth
so it behooves any society to have children
That must explain why sub-Saharan Africa is taking over the world.