Strategy? This is something that CS completely LACKS. It is a twitch game. It is COD without all the stupid killstreaks. Run shoot die repeat.
Competitive CS play is often very different. Very slow paced, running is rare, tactics matter a lot. I found it boring to play, myself (perhaps because I'm not that good at CS to begin with), but it can be great to watch - sometimes very tense as the teams creep around the map.
Quake 2 was the peak. Quake 1 wasn't quite right yet - it was the most moddable, and had some of the most entertaining mods, but Quake 2 is just as raw and fast, with a lot more richness to the base game (and it's own amazing world of mods), and the 3D is done right.
The people running the companies are absolutely short-term obsessed.
CEOs do what makes their boss, the board, happy. If the board wants quarterly earnings improvements, the CEO may well wreck the company long term to deliver that goal. If the board wants a 20-year growth plan with progress against internal, non-revenue metrics, that's what the CEO will optimize for.
Sure, there will always be boards who only care about the quarter, and when those companies fail new ones just like them will step up. But if you care nough to learn the difference (as might be well advised before switching jobs), listening to earnings calls makes the patterns clear.
It's not a coincidence that most of the "destination software companies" are the long-term-plan sort.
Since when are Amazon and Uber software companies?
Amazon Web Services is exactly what a modern software company looks like. Shrink-wrapped boxes are a relic of the second millennium. Maybe you've heard of this new-fangled "cloud" thing? Modern software companies either write "apps", or they operate a service in the cloud (or both).
Uber is a bit of a stretch, but their software is the reason people use their real business.
The real problem with people hiring developers is that they often see development as a first step in life
Every large company (software or hardware) I've worked for (7 of them now) has some technical track where you can at least match the paygrade of a 2nd level manager if you're good enough (top few % of engineers). It's always better (unless you really want that startup experience) to work at a place with a real career tech track, even fresh out of college, as senior engineers shape a company culture in important ways.
Actually, for canvassing CVs, get rid of all experience not directly related to the job you're applying for. Try to make it all fit on one page. Make sure your CV touches on all the points mentioned in the job ad.
You can tell you're getting old when you remember the Elder Days when resumes were in "pages". Yes, it's true kid, they were printed out, and later were Word docs or PDFs that had page boundaries! LinkedIn and the like hadn't been invented yet, you see. No, it's true!
The point is still true though - your resume will get 20 seconds of attention. Put something at the top that makes you interesting enough for 2 minutes of attention. Make sure there's stuff in the body of the resume (or LinkedIn profile, or whatever) that will stand out and make someone want to call you to ask more.
As far as ageism, I know a few people my age who now list just the first 10-15 years on their resume and profile, and at the end of the resume (but not online!) add "additional work history available upon request". If you go that way, just don't ruin the effect by listing the year you graduated from college.
Yeah, sure I might use limits.h too, but that wasn't always dependably there, and it's one more #include with that many more lines of code to parse when compiling - stuff that used to matter.
I remember that! It's why the C standard allows a void* to be bigger than an int* - char*s on Cray's needed extra bits for sub-memory-address-addressing.
Is a shortcut reliant on the finer details of a cpu - say for example the finer points of 2s complement arithmetic for type int - elegant (because it's cool) or an ugly hack (because it will probably break on some future architecture and is hard to read for the newbie)?
C originally supported many architectures when it came to number representation - 1 vs 2s compliment, 9 vs 8 bit-bytes and so one. But the current architecture is a self-fulfilling prophesy: software expects it as it's been the nom for so long, and hardware is built that way because software expects it. It's not going anywhere until we get some architecture that breaks everything anyway, even at the highest levels of abstraction, like a quantum computer. Standardization benefits everyone.
And if you're not comfortable with bit twiddling and bytewise struct layout, C probably isn't for you. Plenty of other languages in the world. Certainly if trivial stuff like (unsigned) -1 as a way to get max int bothers you, you'd probably feel more at home with high-level languages.
So which one is a "software development engineer"? It's all the same job, modulo seniority. Banging out code is the core of it, to be sure, but it's not what most of us spend our time doing, unless you throw in "design" and "testing" into "programming" - which is fine, but then we're back into people skills being part of it.
Further, he's perpetrating the myth that the most talented programmers "drive away others, but you have to put up with them", which falls outside the definition of "talented" that most people would accept. Sure, you do very rarely hear about that cliche - the guy who you only give solo projects, but he's hyper-productive - but that's maybe 1 in 1000?
The truth is, for most companies with full-career technical tracks and VP-equivalent top technical pay grades, the more senior you are, the less you code (though hopefully it never goes to zero), and the larger the organization you must have technical influence over. Since you have to build that influence yourself through a combination of leadership skills and writing code everyone uses, you'll never make it if you "drive people away".
OTOH, you don't belong in this industry if you take code reviews personally. Every day the compiler will call you illegal, invalid, and wrong, and you co-workers might say the same about your code in CR. If you start taking that as personal criticism, you're not going to last. We're not writing opinion pieces here.
Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.
There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
And of course, Tolkien was a linguistics geek himself, and the world of Middle Earth with all it's history was in fact created as a "teaching tool", or at least a learning tool. All the migrations of the Elves to and from the West, and the interactions between the Elves who returned and the Dark Elves (who never saw the light of the Two Trees) - all of that business - was a sandbox to think about how languages evolved.
By making his own languages, and his own history, he could think about how specific words would evolve, how they'd diverge as the populations lost contact, and then came back into contact, and so on. Plus, he liked to write poetry, and you can write some damn fine poetry if you make up the sounds of the words as you go (if you haven't heard the poems in LOTR read out loud by someone skilled, pick up a good audiobook - they are marvelous to hear).
The better answer, from the full lore, is: union rules. The Ents and the Eagles were created to watch over flora and fauna, respectively, mostly to protect them from man. The Wizards were created to watch over man. These duties were handed down directly from the god of Tolkien's world (who's name escapes me). It simply wouldn't be right for Gandalf to ask the Eagles to do his own damn job for him.
Rescuing Gandalf personally, that's a favor to a coworker "sure, I'll give you a ride to work - pick you up where? A tower? OK, that's convenient, thanks."
But of course all of that is based on stuff from the Silmarillion - none of it is in the actual LOTR story, so it's no more canon than Mordor having emplaced 88s protecting Mt Doom.
I was recently on a jury for a young black man with a volunteer defender. He was acquitted on the most serious charge - the lawyer was quite good, and just bored of defending DWI cases for a living. That's how the system is supposed to work. It's a pity that it doesn't usually, but that's human systems for you. The fact that he's black never mattered to the case (it might have to the cops choosing him to speak with in the first place, but it was definitely his choices that got him arrested).
If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that. Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? No one has the right to compel these gentlemen to do anything, or take their land, just as they have no right to set the use of anyone else's land. If, however, this is public land (as seems likely), then the government gets to decide what to do with it.
I don't know what their beef is anyhow - build the damned thing on top of the volcano, and if the freaking volcano god doesn't like it, well, I'm sure He'll think of something.
Whoever has the bigger military owns the land (or gets to say who owns the land if they don't want it). That's the entirety of "international law". Land ownership is similar.
When a nation turns its back against God, the church, and its citizens (abortion), it is all down hill from there.
I'm sure you're right. Which god again? I know I don't believe in 9999 of them, but I sometimes forget what the one is that I don't disbelieve. If these religious whackjobs are elected leaders, and represent the will of the majority, then that's that - doesn't matter why they believe. But if they're some vocal minority trying to use the state as a weapon of their religion, that's clearly not religious freedom, is it?
So what part of "land owners or majority in a democracy" was unclear to you? People are free to believe in whatever invisible sky grandfather makes them happy, and do with their own land according to those beliefs. But trying to block construction on someone else's land, or on public land if you're not the majority, is the opposite of religious freedom - it's using the state as an instrument of religion.
More religious whackjobs blocking progress. If they own the land, or represent the majority in a democracy, so be it; otherwise a does of "separation of church and state" would be welcome here. No one should get a free pass on being a religious whackjob simply because they aren't a Christian whackjob.
Equally? Probably not, but it's damn common for both men and women. Everyone has different tastes in what arouses, of course, but Fifty Shades of Grey is no more targeted towards men than Twilight or a Harlequin romance or Sex in the City was.
Slashdot Mirror
If archery and stationary target shooting are considered Olympic sports, then competitive team video gaming surely qualifies as a sport.
Chess is an Olympic sport. But few players would argue that "e-sports" are "sports". They're "e-sports"; they're their own thing.
Strategy? This is something that CS completely LACKS. It is a twitch game. It is COD without all the stupid killstreaks. Run shoot die repeat.
Competitive CS play is often very different. Very slow paced, running is rare, tactics matter a lot. I found it boring to play, myself (perhaps because I'm not that good at CS to begin with), but it can be great to watch - sometimes very tense as the teams creep around the map.
Quake 2 was the peak. Quake 1 wasn't quite right yet - it was the most moddable, and had some of the most entertaining mods, but Quake 2 is just as raw and fast, with a lot more richness to the base game (and it's own amazing world of mods), and the 3D is done right.
The people running the companies are absolutely short-term obsessed.
CEOs do what makes their boss, the board, happy. If the board wants quarterly earnings improvements, the CEO may well wreck the company long term to deliver that goal. If the board wants a 20-year growth plan with progress against internal, non-revenue metrics, that's what the CEO will optimize for.
Sure, there will always be boards who only care about the quarter, and when those companies fail new ones just like them will step up. But if you care nough to learn the difference (as might be well advised before switching jobs), listening to earnings calls makes the patterns clear.
It's not a coincidence that most of the "destination software companies" are the long-term-plan sort.
Since when are Amazon and Uber software companies?
Amazon Web Services is exactly what a modern software company looks like. Shrink-wrapped boxes are a relic of the second millennium. Maybe you've heard of this new-fangled "cloud" thing? Modern software companies either write "apps", or they operate a service in the cloud (or both).
Uber is a bit of a stretch, but their software is the reason people use their real business.
The real problem with people hiring developers is that they often see development as a first step in life
Every large company (software or hardware) I've worked for (7 of them now) has some technical track where you can at least match the paygrade of a 2nd level manager if you're good enough (top few % of engineers). It's always better (unless you really want that startup experience) to work at a place with a real career tech track, even fresh out of college, as senior engineers shape a company culture in important ways.
Actually, for canvassing CVs, get rid of all experience not directly related to the job you're applying for. Try to make it all fit on one page. Make sure your CV touches on all the points mentioned in the job ad.
You can tell you're getting old when you remember the Elder Days when resumes were in "pages". Yes, it's true kid, they were printed out, and later were Word docs or PDFs that had page boundaries! LinkedIn and the like hadn't been invented yet, you see. No, it's true!
The point is still true though - your resume will get 20 seconds of attention. Put something at the top that makes you interesting enough for 2 minutes of attention. Make sure there's stuff in the body of the resume (or LinkedIn profile, or whatever) that will stand out and make someone want to call you to ask more.
As far as ageism, I know a few people my age who now list just the first 10-15 years on their resume and profile, and at the end of the resume (but not online!) add "additional work history available upon request". If you go that way, just don't ruin the effect by listing the year you graduated from college.
Yeah, sure I might use limits.h too, but that wasn't always dependably there, and it's one more #include with that many more lines of code to parse when compiling - stuff that used to matter.
I remember that! It's why the C standard allows a void* to be bigger than an int* - char*s on Cray's needed extra bits for sub-memory-address-addressing.
Is a shortcut reliant on the finer details of a cpu - say for example the finer points of 2s complement arithmetic for type int - elegant (because it's cool) or an ugly hack (because it will probably break on some future architecture and is hard to read for the newbie)?
C originally supported many architectures when it came to number representation - 1 vs 2s compliment, 9 vs 8 bit-bytes and so one. But the current architecture is a self-fulfilling prophesy: software expects it as it's been the nom for so long, and hardware is built that way because software expects it. It's not going anywhere until we get some architecture that breaks everything anyway, even at the highest levels of abstraction, like a quantum computer. Standardization benefits everyone.
And if you're not comfortable with bit twiddling and bytewise struct layout, C probably isn't for you. Plenty of other languages in the world. Certainly if trivial stuff like (unsigned) -1 as a way to get max int bothers you, you'd probably feel more at home with high-level languages.
So which one is a "software development engineer"? It's all the same job, modulo seniority. Banging out code is the core of it, to be sure, but it's not what most of us spend our time doing, unless you throw in "design" and "testing" into "programming" - which is fine, but then we're back into people skills being part of it.
Oh, what's the "talent" of a software developer then? It's shipping working software as a team. Banging out code isn't the majority of the job.
Further, he's perpetrating the myth that the most talented programmers "drive away others, but you have to put up with them", which falls outside the definition of "talented" that most people would accept. Sure, you do very rarely hear about that cliche - the guy who you only give solo projects, but he's hyper-productive - but that's maybe 1 in 1000?
The truth is, for most companies with full-career technical tracks and VP-equivalent top technical pay grades, the more senior you are, the less you code (though hopefully it never goes to zero), and the larger the organization you must have technical influence over. Since you have to build that influence yourself through a combination of leadership skills and writing code everyone uses, you'll never make it if you "drive people away".
OTOH, you don't belong in this industry if you take code reviews personally. Every day the compiler will call you illegal, invalid, and wrong, and you co-workers might say the same about your code in CR. If you start taking that as personal criticism, you're not going to last. We're not writing opinion pieces here.
Feeds it to the goats and puppies, obviously.
Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.
There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
And of course, Tolkien was a linguistics geek himself, and the world of Middle Earth with all it's history was in fact created as a "teaching tool", or at least a learning tool. All the migrations of the Elves to and from the West, and the interactions between the Elves who returned and the Dark Elves (who never saw the light of the Two Trees) - all of that business - was a sandbox to think about how languages evolved.
By making his own languages, and his own history, he could think about how specific words would evolve, how they'd diverge as the populations lost contact, and then came back into contact, and so on. Plus, he liked to write poetry, and you can write some damn fine poetry if you make up the sounds of the words as you go (if you haven't heard the poems in LOTR read out loud by someone skilled, pick up a good audiobook - they are marvelous to hear).
The better answer, from the full lore, is: union rules. The Ents and the Eagles were created to watch over flora and fauna, respectively, mostly to protect them from man. The Wizards were created to watch over man. These duties were handed down directly from the god of Tolkien's world (who's name escapes me). It simply wouldn't be right for Gandalf to ask the Eagles to do his own damn job for him.
Rescuing Gandalf personally, that's a favor to a coworker "sure, I'll give you a ride to work - pick you up where? A tower? OK, that's convenient, thanks."
But of course all of that is based on stuff from the Silmarillion - none of it is in the actual LOTR story, so it's no more canon than Mordor having emplaced 88s protecting Mt Doom.
I think one of the reasons people accept this is the tradition of racism in this country, for example in Texas with its death penalty cases.
What a bunch of SJW horseshit. Makes me ignore the rest of your posts.
I was recently on a jury for a young black man with a volunteer defender. He was acquitted on the most serious charge - the lawyer was quite good, and just bored of defending DWI cases for a living. That's how the system is supposed to work. It's a pity that it doesn't usually, but that's human systems for you. The fact that he's black never mattered to the case (it might have to the cops choosing him to speak with in the first place, but it was definitely his choices that got him arrested).
If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that. Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? No one has the right to compel these gentlemen to do anything, or take their land, just as they have no right to set the use of anyone else's land. If, however, this is public land (as seems likely), then the government gets to decide what to do with it.
I don't know what their beef is anyhow - build the damned thing on top of the volcano, and if the freaking volcano god doesn't like it, well, I'm sure He'll think of something.
Whoever has the bigger military owns the land (or gets to say who owns the land if they don't want it). That's the entirety of "international law". Land ownership is similar.
When a nation turns its back against God, the church, and its citizens (abortion), it is all down hill from there.
I'm sure you're right. Which god again? I know I don't believe in 9999 of them, but I sometimes forget what the one is that I don't disbelieve. If these religious whackjobs are elected leaders, and represent the will of the majority, then that's that - doesn't matter why they believe. But if they're some vocal minority trying to use the state as a weapon of their religion, that's clearly not religious freedom, is it?
So what part of "land owners or majority in a democracy" was unclear to you? People are free to believe in whatever invisible sky grandfather makes them happy, and do with their own land according to those beliefs. But trying to block construction on someone else's land, or on public land if you're not the majority, is the opposite of religious freedom - it's using the state as an instrument of religion.
More religious whackjobs blocking progress. If they own the land, or represent the majority in a democracy, so be it; otherwise a does of "separation of church and state" would be welcome here. No one should get a free pass on being a religious whackjob simply because they aren't a Christian whackjob.
Equally? Probably not, but it's damn common for both men and women. Everyone has different tastes in what arouses, of course, but Fifty Shades of Grey is no more targeted towards men than Twilight or a Harlequin romance or Sex in the City was.