I took a number of contract or temp jobs as an IT worker in companies with very corporate IT environments. From this I got two things: one was that I learned how the big boys do it, and the other was that I had some experience I could put on my resume that could be construed as consulting. I then applied for an IT director job with a very small company (I was employee #8) that was growing very rapidly (up to 150 people within six months), and convinced them that I would be able to build an infrastructure that would grow with their business. I also accepted relatively low pay for the job, which helped convince them to hire me because they didn't have a lot of money. So it wasn't a great job - in fact, it sucked. But it was a professional stepping stone.
Poof, I was a manager. I even got to hire someone to assist me after a while. After that I had an IT manager job on my resume, so when in the future I decided I wanted another IT manager job, I merely said "yes, I've been an IT manager before, at such-and-such company" and that was that: I was now an experienced IT manager.
I got my first IT manager position when I had about 1.5 years of IT experience, and no degree. Yes, having a degree always makes things easier, but not having one is not a solid barrier to entry.
The worst IT managers I've ever met (both in terms of their effectiveness at getting the job done and their treatment of their staff) all had MBAs, and had never been IT grunts. The best IT managers I've met all worked their way up through the ranks, and some had MBAs while others didn't.
Having an MBA teaches you certain skills, but if you don't have a good understanding of the technology the MBA doesn't make you a decent IT manager, and may even harm you by convincing you that you don't need to understand it. (I've met a number of managers who have said that they learned in MBA school that if you just have good management skills you can manage anything. They were, of course, godawful managers, and idiots.) Conversely, not having an MBA doesn't mean you don't have the skills an MBA learns. You may have learned them on the job.
What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem.
First of all, I've been working in software long enough to know that I can't trust it for a minute. Oh sure, they may say they're going to maintain all these special compatibility modes, but in reality one or more of the major browsers won't do it, or they'll try but they'll screw it up, or they'll do it for a while and then suddenly drop all the backwards compatibility stuff because they don't feel like maintaining it any more. Regardless, eventually it will come to pass that I can't trust the version specifying mechanism to do me any good, and I'll have to update my pages anyway.
Secondly, it encourages the web to come to a halt, technology wise. As an expensive consultant to big companies, my experience has been that they all want to try to tell you "our web site has to look perfect on every version of every browser ever invented, period." Of course that's impossible, so once I drill it through their head that it's impossible, they have to settle for some major subset, at which time they always want me to use ancient UI technology for maximum compatibility. (Seriously, I deal with people who freak out if I want to use CSS positioning or an iframe, and god help me if I mention AJAX.) If they got the idea that browsers have a magical compatibility mode so that all future browsers will support pages written for today's browsers, they'll instantly write up a corporate policy that basically says that nothing will ever change again and for the rest of time their web site will be maintained as if it is forever 2005, and then they won't change it until someone practically holds a gun to their head to force them to.
Now, you're asking yourself, why should you care? Because it's more than a few idiots, it's a substantial portion of the web. Sure, there will always be little guys who will come along and innovate, but do you really want to deal with a web full of sites that forever use 2005 technology and just a few sites that have caught on to the latest stuff?
That doesn't mean they're nearly as bad as Microsoft. Apple software doesn't downgrade all your video if you plug a monitor into your computer that isn't tied into their DRM scheme, unlike Vista. For that matter, Apple software doesn't downgrade all your video just for having a jack with which it's possible to plug in a monitor that isn't tied into their DRM scheme, unlike Vista. If you put an mp3 on your ipod, it doesn't convert it into a DRM'd file, unlike the Zune.
Apple has its problems, but you can use Apple products with completely non-DRM media and it'll behave as designed. Microsoft's stuff is so DRM-insane that it'll force you into a DRM environment even for your non-DRM media. Please, don't try to convince me Apple is as bad as Microsoft.
Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.
So, while I'm no fan of IE, I'm kinda baffled by your remark. My browser side code, which is some of the most complex I've ever seen, transitioned flawlessly from IE6 to IE7. I was stunned; I put aside a whole week just for tracking down the inevitable bugs that would crop up from the new browser, but I had zero bugs to fix and didn't have to change a single line of code. I haven't found any real improvements in IE7, but I didn't notice anything suddenly failing to work.
Can you elaborate on what, specifically, they broke?
Do you have efficient education? 4 year degree, graduate degree, PHD. Having or working on an MBA is a big plus.
I've been an IT manager at several companies and I find that a degree is unnecessary; good management skills are necessary.
As a manager of IT your jobs is looking out for the company first then IT second and make sure they work together.
Having not only been an IT manager at several organizations, but an IT grunt at several more, my experience has very solidly been that the #1 duty of the IT manager is to protect their employees so that the employees can get the job done without undue abuse or interference, and that this is the best way they can serve the company, because the company not only looks out for itself, it has an unpleasant tendency to chew up and spit out IT people before they can get their jobs done if the IT manager doesn't shield them.
Let's face it, corporate culture is generally abusive toward IT workers, although most IT workers I've known have at least genuinely tried to do a good job in as much as they knew how to. My experience has been that 100% of the time, the #1 hurdle to getting important things done has been upper management interfering to demand priority service to the IT tasks they perceive as being most important (fix the VP's printer so he can stop sharing a printer with his secretary right now or you're fired!) rather than the tasks that the IT professionals think are important (installing a backup system, removing the 12 viruses from the database server that has the only un-backed-up copy of the vital corporate data). When I have, as a manager, been able to get upper management to (at least temporarily) stop interfering with my staff's work, those were the times when things actually got done.
Corps aren't worried about running quickly, or taking up small amounts of memory with elegant programs. They just want it released. Now. No time to dilly-dally on making "good" code, just gotta keep cranking it out. If it's slow, just up the requirements. I long for the days of assembly and low level programming...
Okay. Let me give you an example from my career a few years ago.
I was running an IT group in a small university. We needed a new help desk management application. It had to store various data and produce various printable reports, some just of regurgitated data and some of statistical analysis thereof. It had to have interfaces which could be used by the support technicians to log data, and by the customers to view the status of their requests and make comments. These interfaces had to be useable via the internet from several campuses, in a mixed platform environment. Commercial systems for the purpose ran at about $250,000 for the cheapest suitable application I found, and that one would require additional consulting costs for configuration (which would take a month or two between waiting for a consultant to be available and actually doing the installation and configuration) and didn't tie in with our existing relational database or single signon solutions.
How long would this take you to program in assembly? (Hint: if your answer isn't measured in man-years, I'll laugh at you.) What would the cost be for all that programmer staff time? (Hint: too much.) How long would my team have had to go without the new application? (Hint: we would have needed it long before you'd finish.)
It took my team of programmers one calendar month to write a java/jsp/jdbc/sql web application that met all requirements and played nicely with our existing systems and was ready for use the minute it was done. If I was doing it again today, I'd use a higher level language and probably have it working in two weeks or less. The staff time cost $10,000.
So, the university saved $240,000+ because we had a high level language available to us. So why should I have wanted to do it in Assembly, or even C ?
IMNSHO, computer science is about improving the ability of computing devices to do work. Different languages are valuable in different ways. Languages closely related to computer internals are useful to deal with low level functionality. More abstracted languages are better for getting things done quickly without having to write a ton of low level code, and a quality optimizing compiler can write lower level code as optimally as the best human coder.
To say that lower level languages which relate more to the hardware are somehow better misses the point. A computer isn't an art piece, it's a tool. High level languages are legitimate CS material because they facilitate certain types of work better. If I can spend 5 minutes writing code in a very high level interpreted language to do something that would take a week to write in Java or a month to write in C++ or years to write in assembly, unless I really need every ounce of efficiency I can get out of the program I'd be nuts not to use the high level language, and my employer would be nuts to pay me not to. This is not to say that interpreted languages are always better; indeed, they're not. But, in some cases they are, and in those cases, no matter how much you like lower level languages, you're just wasting your time by using them, in the same manner that no matter how much you may like a zippy little red two seater sports car, it's lousy for transporting a family of 8 to grandma's.
I started my university studies of computer science with pascal, C, assembly, and FORTRAN. I learned all about different ways to sort stuff, linked lists, binary trees, etc. I learned about pointers, allocating and deallocating memory.
It's years later now, and I have worked exclusively in garbage collected languages since Java came out. It's not the only language I've used, I actually do almost all of my work in Water these days, but that marked the end of my messing with pointers. I recognize that there are needs for lower level languages, but that's not the kind of programming I do.
I find that in my present work, my knowledge of pointers, memory allocation, memory deallocation, etc are useless. The closest I've come to any of those in years was about a year ago when I noticed that the interpreter I was working with seemed to have a memory leak, so I communicated the fact to the interpreter's dev team and it got fixed. So, I had to know that pointers exist, but not actually use them.
I find that the programming skills which are much more important to my work, and to most of the programming I've seen in the last decade or so, are the ability to model real world information as data structures (which most programmers are remarkably bad at; they'll create an efficient but awkward structure) and the ability to structure a large and complex application in a manner which allows for future growth. These are skills which usually come from experience, not school, and have nothing to do with whether or not the language being used is garbage collected or how high level it is.
This isnt the end of studios, those amatuerish videos on YouTube may be entertaining but you will still need large organizations to produce anything complex. The only thing that will change is that some of the marketing and sales may be different.
I agree, but I think some additional considerations need to be made.
The barrier to entry is much lower today. It used to be that just the cost of a couple cameras and a darkroom and film and chemicals was prohibitive. Now you can get all you need to film a pro quality movie digitally for a few grand, and edit it on a desktop computer.
Special effects still take a lot of time and money, but they're also done on ordinary computers now, so if you limit the scope of the effects you could have a special effect or two in a cheap movie.
Another important aspect is to consider that these people could choose to organize differently than the existing studios. The existing studios were all organized on the model of a rich guy with a bunch of money hiring a bunch of people to make movies... so the studio pays the workers, and then the studio gets the profit from the movie. (Yes, we know that over time royalties have evolved, but nonetheless the studio gets the biggest cut and a lot of people still get no cut.) Now, these people could get together and start their own new studio that's employee owned, with profit sharing, so when they make a movie they also make the profits. It might not attract big stars who want to get absurdly large percentages, but it might result in some real art.
Sure, but once they've got training, if they're still constantly pestering you to do their work for them, you can start asking questions like "Why is Shirley constantly calling tech support for precisely the thing she took the training about?"
Actually, what I did was to point out that it can be built into the language so the programmer doesn't have to deal with it, and I gave an example. Other languages should be perfectly capable of doing the same.
Then again, if your language makes it hard for you to do things, maybe you *should* learn a new one.
Yes, and it didn't hurt that you and I both grew up with dads who were talented senior sysadmins who encouraged appropriate thinking about computers. Not to mention that we each probably inherited their brains.
Wish your parents a merry christmas for me, will ya? I hope you're all well.
Competence is not usually the reason people get hired or promoted. Learn that now and remember it, and you'll have a much better understanding of how organizations work.
What gets people hired is usually a combination of good resume writing skills (particularly, the ability to use all the right buzzwords so when HR plays buzzword bingo with resumes theirs wins) and good social skills (the ability to make managers like them, including dressing appropriately). (Sometimes a person gets hired just because the boss already knows them, but that means they exercised good social skills in the past or the boss wouldn't want them back.) What usually gets people promoted is good social skills. Most managers don't know how to assess an employee's actual skill set or their job requirements, so the boss is usually just hiring and promoting people who are good at giving the impression of being skilled, rather than those who are actually most skilled. Since the most skilled people are usually too busy doing a good job to waste time making sure the boss has the impression they're doing a good job, this means that what usually gets rewarded is mediocrity.
And you can't usually point out to a boss that someone's complete lack of computer skills means they're not qualified for their job, because the boss will take that as an attack on their hiring skills. All you can do is say "I think so-and-so would really benefit from some additional training for computer skills. Let me recommend some courses you could send them to, I think they'd be much happier with the training."
I think most of these so-called "voodoo users" are the older generation.
No, I've encountered them at all ages, including fresh college graduates. My observation is that they tend to have a profession which hasn't required them to use a computer much, or if they've used one, it wasn't for anything more complex than word processing or maybe a spreadsheet. So, they've maybe turned it on and off and know how to use one or two applications and their printer at home and that's all. They got started not knowing anything because they didn't have to, and then they continued not knowing anything because nobody made them. They've never considered the possibility that they could gain a holistic understanding of any complex system because doing so was not a direct part of their work or study. And, as I said, they often seem to have a very linear mindset which allows them to read, memorize, and regurgitate but not to learn how complex systems work (which is often okay for them because complex systems aren't part of their work). So, they've probably chosen a profession that goes well with that way of thinking. If they had a more systematizing mind, they would probably be doing something else.
So, when they hit that moment when their computer needs move beyond the simple one or two application approach, for them it's like being plucked out of the stone age and dropped in the 24.5th century and expected to intuitively understand how UFOs work. It's just completely foreign to not only their experience but their entire way of thinking.
I've had some of that, but more often they press the mouse button and then they whip their entire hand off of the mouse as if it was going to bite them, because I said "release it." But at least that works.
There's no way to win 100% of the time, but there are ways to reduce the amount of idiocy you have to deal with. That's all you can really hope for.
I sometimes wonder if this type of person is a byproduct of the American education system (although I know it's not exclusive to America, I've also heard that the British and Indian school systems are very similar). It seems to me it's designed around (for the most part) rewarding individuals that memorize and repeat word for word an exact set of instructions or information.
Perhaps in a few cases, but mostly I think what's really going on is that the person is inherently only capable of dealing with the world in that manner, and the american education system didn't make them that way, what it did was it allowed them to artificially seem to be successful because it rewards that kind of thinking while in fact they're unsuccessful because they can't *do* anything they haven't been shown precisely how to do. In other words, the education system facilitated them to rise above the level of their incompetence.
Have you ever met one of those women who is about the size of a baby elephant and as ham-fisted as a bulldozer, but is convinced she is a petite flower and does everything oh-so-delicately and always dresses in floral dresses with lace trim to prove it and will fly into a screaming rage the moment anything happens that might contradict her vision of herself?
I worked with a woman like that once. She was a consultant for my company, and I was IT director. She refused the model of laptop I had deployed for the rest of the consultants, and insisted that it was much too heavy and much too big and she couldn't possibly carry it or use it. The boss, being an idiot, told me I had to go along with her whim. So, at her insistence I bought for her what was at the time a top-of-the-line Compaq laptop, very small and lightweight. Then I found out why she wanted that model: it would fit in her purse. She insisted on having a laptop no less than four times the cost of the model everyone else used, because she was unwilling to carry a bag for it that didn't match her dress.
She went off for her first business trip with this expensive toy, and came back and it was broken. Oh, I thought, it must be defective. So I sent it in for repair. Meanwhile, she had to go on another trip, and refused to accept the loaner laptop that I kept on hand for consultants whose laptops broke, she demanded I had to buy another tiny one for her. I went to the boss, he decided that he'd like a tiny one too and was willing to pay for it, so he said I should buy another tiny one and give it to her and when her first one comes back from repair, he'll take that. Okay, fine. I got a new one, gave it to her, and she went off on her trip.
The laptop's manufacturer called to tell me that the problem was user damage due to rough handling, and detailed to me exactly what was wrong, and charged $300 for the repair. (Basically, she'd slammed it around while it was turned on, which ruined the hard drive.)
She came back with the new laptop and the screen was shattered. She can't imagine how that happened, she's so careful with it. I sent it in for repair. She again refused the loaner laptop, which was much more rugged. This time she went straight to the boss and demanded that she couldn't possibly work for us without the tiny laptop, and she was apparently very lucrative for the company, so the boss agreed... but he did decide that maybe possibly the problem is that things are banging into it in her purse, so he told me to get another tiny laptop and a padded case for the tiny laptop so she could put the case on it in her purse, and she agreed to live with this - probably because it allowed her to blame the contents of her purse rather than her overly meaty hands.
At this point, the tiny laptops, which were new and in high demand, were not available - they were sold out. I could only get a lower model which had the same form factor but a smaller hard disk, less memory, a slower processor, and a b&w screen. (Yes, this is long enough ago that they still made b&w laptops.) That being all I could get, I ordered it. Consultant lady threw a fit - actually flew into a screaming rage at me when she saw that the screen was black and white. She couldn't have that! Her clients might think she's inferior! I explained that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it because I couldn't get my hands on another one of the color model, and she'd just have to live with it until one of the others came back from repair, and suggested that she tell the clients that her regular laptop was in the shop and this was a loaner. So she stormed off to the boss, who somehow calmed her down, but told me to call the manufacturer to make them rush one of the color laptops back to us. (Yeah right, like that's going to work.)
Consultant lady went off with the b&w tiny laptop, and miraculously it survived a brief business trip of about two days. When she came back, she asked me to her office to discuss software she w
They want to test everything to make sure it works? Great, they're doing testing for you so you don't have to.
But you don't have to stand there. They can't stop you from leaving. Tell them you're delighted that they're so diligent and to call you if there are any further problems and to have a great day, and leave.
There are a couple of conditions I attached to my last IT job that I think worked well and will insist on if I take any future IT jobs.
I've seen departments go out and buy Norton AV because their "ad hoc computer guy" said they should, even though McAfee was site licensed.
I made it a rule that all software purchases must be made by IT, and required that top management inform all employees of this. If you bought software with your own money and filed for reimbursement, it would be denied, because IT should have bought it for you. If you bought software with your department's budget, it would be docked from your pay. In exchange, if anybody asked for something we would take their request very seriously, and we would either approve it, or work with them to learn why we should approve it, or work with them to find an even better alternative, or give them a darned good reason why we said no. I also made it a rule that if you bought software without IT's blessing, not only were we not obligated to support it, but we were not obligated to support whatever computer(s) it was installed on until and unless those computers were returned to us to be wiped and reinstalled with approved software.
The effect of this was that departments stopped spending vast amounts of money (it had been millions of dollars, in practice) on software that was garbage and/or never got used, and they tended to end up with solutions that made them happier - sometimes because we were able to find something better for them, and sometimes because we'd assign a programmer to create something custom tailored to their needs, at low cost. Overall, the departments that were most willing to call us for help acquiring software were the departments that were most happy with what they got.
In another case $PROFESSOR buys an unsupported scanner with grant money, and now IT is implicitly expected to support it because it is to be used in "university-blessed research."
We didn't have an approved hardware list, so it wasn't easy for us to just say no to hardware. So, our rule was, you were permitted to buy whatever hardware you wanted to if IT didn't agree to buy it for you, but if you did so, IT could refuse at any time to support it, wasn't obligated to replace it if it broke, and could at any time disconnect it from our hardware if we thought it was causing problems. If you had some hardware you wanted, you could ask IT for it, and if it looked okay to us we'd buy it and install it and support it. If we had concerns we'd work with you to solve them, and try to help you find even better alternatives. In the rare cases in which we said no, you'd be on your own.
The effect of this second policy was that some people with outdated hardware got new hardware that we could better support and were very happy, and one professor got very pissed off that I wouldn't replace her speakers that she used to listen to her music mp3s, because we didn't have any speakers or support them and she didn't have a professional purpose for me to order any for her. But that was her problem.
With the growing unwillingness of management to pay for adequate staffing for almost any job, IT workers are usually stretched to their limit just trying to keep up with daily maintenance tasks, and users calling with problems are an additional burden. If telling the user "please reboot and try it again and let me know if the problem is still there" makes the problem go away for a week or two or even a month, that's valuable IT time saved so IT can be working on more important things like making sure backups are occurring and keeping the servers up and fixing things that are too broken to be alleviated by a reboot.
Usually, if the time is wasted to track down the problem, it turns out to be software related. In today's usual business computing environment where the computer runs a proprietary OS and proprietary apps, tracing the problem down to discover that it's caused by software usually means, simply, "this problem can't be fixed and has to be lived with," because the company that made the software doesn't give a damn and you don't have source code so you can't fix it yourself and either the user will refuse to change apps (which can sometimes be dealt with) or, more often, there is no acceptable alternative app (which can't).
Hardware problems are usually more obvious and tend to result in the machine getting replaced promptly.
yeah, I agree. I think the suggested "solutions" are awful: when a user is abusive to IT, and IT gives them exactly what they want, IT has merely trained them that being abusive to IT is the way to get what they want, so they'll do it again or become worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a number of contract or temp jobs as an IT worker in companies with very corporate IT environments. From this I got two things: one was that I learned how the big boys do it, and the other was that I had some experience I could put on my resume that could be construed as consulting. I then applied for an IT director job with a very small company (I was employee #8) that was growing very rapidly (up to 150 people within six months), and convinced them that I would be able to build an infrastructure that would grow with their business. I also accepted relatively low pay for the job, which helped convince them to hire me because they didn't have a lot of money. So it wasn't a great job - in fact, it sucked. But it was a professional stepping stone.
Poof, I was a manager. I even got to hire someone to assist me after a while. After that I had an IT manager job on my resume, so when in the future I decided I wanted another IT manager job, I merely said "yes, I've been an IT manager before, at such-and-such company" and that was that: I was now an experienced IT manager.
I got my first IT manager position when I had about 1.5 years of IT experience, and no degree. Yes, having a degree always makes things easier, but not having one is not a solid barrier to entry.
The worst IT managers I've ever met (both in terms of their effectiveness at getting the job done and their treatment of their staff) all had MBAs, and had never been IT grunts. The best IT managers I've met all worked their way up through the ranks, and some had MBAs while others didn't.
Having an MBA teaches you certain skills, but if you don't have a good understanding of the technology the MBA doesn't make you a decent IT manager, and may even harm you by convincing you that you don't need to understand it. (I've met a number of managers who have said that they learned in MBA school that if you just have good management skills you can manage anything. They were, of course, godawful managers, and idiots.) Conversely, not having an MBA doesn't mean you don't have the skills an MBA learns. You may have learned them on the job.
Secondly, it encourages the web to come to a halt, technology wise. As an expensive consultant to big companies, my experience has been that they all want to try to tell you "our web site has to look perfect on every version of every browser ever invented, period." Of course that's impossible, so once I drill it through their head that it's impossible, they have to settle for some major subset, at which time they always want me to use ancient UI technology for maximum compatibility. (Seriously, I deal with people who freak out if I want to use CSS positioning or an iframe, and god help me if I mention AJAX.) If they got the idea that browsers have a magical compatibility mode so that all future browsers will support pages written for today's browsers, they'll instantly write up a corporate policy that basically says that nothing will ever change again and for the rest of time their web site will be maintained as if it is forever 2005, and then they won't change it until someone practically holds a gun to their head to force them to.
Now, you're asking yourself, why should you care? Because it's more than a few idiots, it's a substantial portion of the web. Sure, there will always be little guys who will come along and innovate, but do you really want to deal with a web full of sites that forever use 2005 technology and just a few sites that have caught on to the latest stuff?
Okay, apple is not our friend.
That doesn't mean they're nearly as bad as Microsoft. Apple software doesn't downgrade all your video if you plug a monitor into your computer that isn't tied into their DRM scheme, unlike Vista. For that matter, Apple software doesn't downgrade all your video just for having a jack with which it's possible to plug in a monitor that isn't tied into their DRM scheme, unlike Vista. If you put an mp3 on your ipod, it doesn't convert it into a DRM'd file, unlike the Zune.
Apple has its problems, but you can use Apple products with completely non-DRM media and it'll behave as designed. Microsoft's stuff is so DRM-insane that it'll force you into a DRM environment even for your non-DRM media. Please, don't try to convince me Apple is as bad as Microsoft.
Can you elaborate on what, specifically, they broke?
Let's face it, corporate culture is generally abusive toward IT workers, although most IT workers I've known have at least genuinely tried to do a good job in as much as they knew how to. My experience has been that 100% of the time, the #1 hurdle to getting important things done has been upper management interfering to demand priority service to the IT tasks they perceive as being most important (fix the VP's printer so he can stop sharing a printer with his secretary right now or you're fired!) rather than the tasks that the IT professionals think are important (installing a backup system, removing the 12 viruses from the database server that has the only un-backed-up copy of the vital corporate data). When I have, as a manager, been able to get upper management to (at least temporarily) stop interfering with my staff's work, those were the times when things actually got done.
I was running an IT group in a small university. We needed a new help desk management application. It had to store various data and produce various printable reports, some just of regurgitated data and some of statistical analysis thereof. It had to have interfaces which could be used by the support technicians to log data, and by the customers to view the status of their requests and make comments. These interfaces had to be useable via the internet from several campuses, in a mixed platform environment. Commercial systems for the purpose ran at about $250,000 for the cheapest suitable application I found, and that one would require additional consulting costs for configuration (which would take a month or two between waiting for a consultant to be available and actually doing the installation and configuration) and didn't tie in with our existing relational database or single signon solutions.
How long would this take you to program in assembly? (Hint: if your answer isn't measured in man-years, I'll laugh at you.)
What would the cost be for all that programmer staff time? (Hint: too much.)
How long would my team have had to go without the new application? (Hint: we would have needed it long before you'd finish.)
It took my team of programmers one calendar month to write a java/jsp/jdbc/sql web application that met all requirements and played nicely with our existing systems and was ready for use the minute it was done. If I was doing it again today, I'd use a higher level language and probably have it working in two weeks or less. The staff time cost $10,000.
So, the university saved $240,000+ because we had a high level language available to us. So why should I have wanted to do it in Assembly, or even C ?
IMNSHO, computer science is about improving the ability of computing devices to do work. Different languages are valuable in different ways. Languages closely related to computer internals are useful to deal with low level functionality. More abstracted languages are better for getting things done quickly without having to write a ton of low level code, and a quality optimizing compiler can write lower level code as optimally as the best human coder.
To say that lower level languages which relate more to the hardware are somehow better misses the point. A computer isn't an art piece, it's a tool. High level languages are legitimate CS material because they facilitate certain types of work better. If I can spend 5 minutes writing code in a very high level interpreted language to do something that would take a week to write in Java or a month to write in C++ or years to write in assembly, unless I really need every ounce of efficiency I can get out of the program I'd be nuts not to use the high level language, and my employer would be nuts to pay me not to. This is not to say that interpreted languages are always better; indeed, they're not. But, in some cases they are, and in those cases, no matter how much you like lower level languages, you're just wasting your time by using them, in the same manner that no matter how much you may like a zippy little red two seater sports car, it's lousy for transporting a family of 8 to grandma's.
I started my university studies of computer science with pascal, C, assembly, and FORTRAN. I learned all about different ways to sort stuff, linked lists, binary trees, etc. I learned about pointers, allocating and deallocating memory.
It's years later now, and I have worked exclusively in garbage collected languages since Java came out. It's not the only language I've used, I actually do almost all of my work in Water these days, but that marked the end of my messing with pointers. I recognize that there are needs for lower level languages, but that's not the kind of programming I do.
I find that in my present work, my knowledge of pointers, memory allocation, memory deallocation, etc are useless. The closest I've come to any of those in years was about a year ago when I noticed that the interpreter I was working with seemed to have a memory leak, so I communicated the fact to the interpreter's dev team and it got fixed. So, I had to know that pointers exist, but not actually use them.
I find that the programming skills which are much more important to my work, and to most of the programming I've seen in the last decade or so, are the ability to model real world information as data structures (which most programmers are remarkably bad at; they'll create an efficient but awkward structure) and the ability to structure a large and complex application in a manner which allows for future growth. These are skills which usually come from experience, not school, and have nothing to do with whether or not the language being used is garbage collected or how high level it is.
...you are not a corporation. Go back and re-read the posting. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
The barrier to entry is much lower today. It used to be that just the cost of a couple cameras and a darkroom and film and chemicals was prohibitive. Now you can get all you need to film a pro quality movie digitally for a few grand, and edit it on a desktop computer.
Special effects still take a lot of time and money, but they're also done on ordinary computers now, so if you limit the scope of the effects you could have a special effect or two in a cheap movie.
Another important aspect is to consider that these people could choose to organize differently than the existing studios. The existing studios were all organized on the model of a rich guy with a bunch of money hiring a bunch of people to make movies... so the studio pays the workers, and then the studio gets the profit from the movie. (Yes, we know that over time royalties have evolved, but nonetheless the studio gets the biggest cut and a lot of people still get no cut.) Now, these people could get together and start their own new studio that's employee owned, with profit sharing, so when they make a movie they also make the profits. It might not attract big stars who want to get absurdly large percentages, but it might result in some real art.
Sure, but once they've got training, if they're still constantly pestering you to do their work for them, you can start asking questions like "Why is Shirley constantly calling tech support for precisely the thing she took the training about?"
Actually, what I did was to point out that it can be built into the language so the programmer doesn't have to deal with it, and I gave an example. Other languages should be perfectly capable of doing the same.
Then again, if your language makes it hard for you to do things, maybe you *should* learn a new one.
(*snap*!)
Yes, and it didn't hurt that you and I both grew up with dads who were talented senior sysadmins who encouraged appropriate thinking about computers. Not to mention that we each probably inherited their brains.
Wish your parents a merry christmas for me, will ya? I hope you're all well.
Competence is not usually the reason people get hired or promoted. Learn that now and remember it, and you'll have a much better understanding of how organizations work.
What gets people hired is usually a combination of good resume writing skills (particularly, the ability to use all the right buzzwords so when HR plays buzzword bingo with resumes theirs wins) and good social skills (the ability to make managers like them, including dressing appropriately). (Sometimes a person gets hired just because the boss already knows them, but that means they exercised good social skills in the past or the boss wouldn't want them back.) What usually gets people promoted is good social skills. Most managers don't know how to assess an employee's actual skill set or their job requirements, so the boss is usually just hiring and promoting people who are good at giving the impression of being skilled, rather than those who are actually most skilled. Since the most skilled people are usually too busy doing a good job to waste time making sure the boss has the impression they're doing a good job, this means that what usually gets rewarded is mediocrity.
And you can't usually point out to a boss that someone's complete lack of computer skills means they're not qualified for their job, because the boss will take that as an attack on their hiring skills. All you can do is say "I think so-and-so would really benefit from some additional training for computer skills. Let me recommend some courses you could send them to, I think they'd be much happier with the training."
So, when they hit that moment when their computer needs move beyond the simple one or two application approach, for them it's like being plucked out of the stone age and dropped in the 24.5th century and expected to intuitively understand how UFOs work. It's just completely foreign to not only their experience but their entire way of thinking.
I've had some of that, but more often they press the mouse button and then they whip their entire hand off of the mouse as if it was going to bite them, because I said "release it." But at least that works.
There's no way to win 100% of the time, but there are ways to reduce the amount of idiocy you have to deal with. That's all you can really hope for.
Have you ever met one of those women who is about the size of a baby elephant and as ham-fisted as a bulldozer, but is convinced she is a petite flower and does everything oh-so-delicately and always dresses in floral dresses with lace trim to prove it and will fly into a screaming rage the moment anything happens that might contradict her vision of herself?
I worked with a woman like that once. She was a consultant for my company, and I was IT director. She refused the model of laptop I had deployed for the rest of the consultants, and insisted that it was much too heavy and much too big and she couldn't possibly carry it or use it. The boss, being an idiot, told me I had to go along with her whim. So, at her insistence I bought for her what was at the time a top-of-the-line Compaq laptop, very small and lightweight. Then I found out why she wanted that model: it would fit in her purse. She insisted on having a laptop no less than four times the cost of the model everyone else used, because she was unwilling to carry a bag for it that didn't match her dress.
She went off for her first business trip with this expensive toy, and came back and it was broken. Oh, I thought, it must be defective. So I sent it in for repair. Meanwhile, she had to go on another trip, and refused to accept the loaner laptop that I kept on hand for consultants whose laptops broke, she demanded I had to buy another tiny one for her. I went to the boss, he decided that he'd like a tiny one too and was willing to pay for it, so he said I should buy another tiny one and give it to her and when her first one comes back from repair, he'll take that. Okay, fine. I got a new one, gave it to her, and she went off on her trip.
The laptop's manufacturer called to tell me that the problem was user damage due to rough handling, and detailed to me exactly what was wrong, and charged $300 for the repair. (Basically, she'd slammed it around while it was turned on, which ruined the hard drive.)
She came back with the new laptop and the screen was shattered. She can't imagine how that happened, she's so careful with it. I sent it in for repair. She again refused the loaner laptop, which was much more rugged. This time she went straight to the boss and demanded that she couldn't possibly work for us without the tiny laptop, and she was apparently very lucrative for the company, so the boss agreed... but he did decide that maybe possibly the problem is that things are banging into it in her purse, so he told me to get another tiny laptop and a padded case for the tiny laptop so she could put the case on it in her purse, and she agreed to live with this - probably because it allowed her to blame the contents of her purse rather than her overly meaty hands.
At this point, the tiny laptops, which were new and in high demand, were not available - they were sold out. I could only get a lower model which had the same form factor but a smaller hard disk, less memory, a slower processor, and a b&w screen. (Yes, this is long enough ago that they still made b&w laptops.) That being all I could get, I ordered it. Consultant lady threw a fit - actually flew into a screaming rage at me when she saw that the screen was black and white. She couldn't have that! Her clients might think she's inferior! I explained that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it because I couldn't get my hands on another one of the color model, and she'd just have to live with it until one of the others came back from repair, and suggested that she tell the clients that her regular laptop was in the shop and this was a loaner. So she stormed off to the boss, who somehow calmed her down, but told me to call the manufacturer to make them rush one of the color laptops back to us. (Yeah right, like that's going to work.)
Consultant lady went off with the b&w tiny laptop, and miraculously it survived a brief business trip of about two days. When she came back, she asked me to her office to discuss software she w
They want to test everything to make sure it works? Great, they're doing testing for you so you don't have to.
But you don't have to stand there. They can't stop you from leaving. Tell them you're delighted that they're so diligent and to call you if there are any further problems and to have a great day, and leave.
The effect of this was that departments stopped spending vast amounts of money (it had been millions of dollars, in practice) on software that was garbage and/or never got used, and they tended to end up with solutions that made them happier - sometimes because we were able to find something better for them, and sometimes because we'd assign a programmer to create something custom tailored to their needs, at low cost. Overall, the departments that were most willing to call us for help acquiring software were the departments that were most happy with what they got.We didn't have an approved hardware list, so it wasn't easy for us to just say no to hardware. So, our rule was, you were permitted to buy whatever hardware you wanted to if IT didn't agree to buy it for you, but if you did so, IT could refuse at any time to support it, wasn't obligated to replace it if it broke, and could at any time disconnect it from our hardware if we thought it was causing problems. If you had some hardware you wanted, you could ask IT for it, and if it looked okay to us we'd buy it and install it and support it. If we had concerns we'd work with you to solve them, and try to help you find even better alternatives. In the rare cases in which we said no, you'd be on your own.
The effect of this second policy was that some people with outdated hardware got new hardware that we could better support and were very happy, and one professor got very pissed off that I wouldn't replace her speakers that she used to listen to her music mp3s, because we didn't have any speakers or support them and she didn't have a professional purpose for me to order any for her. But that was her problem.
With the growing unwillingness of management to pay for adequate staffing for almost any job, IT workers are usually stretched to their limit just trying to keep up with daily maintenance tasks, and users calling with problems are an additional burden. If telling the user "please reboot and try it again and let me know if the problem is still there" makes the problem go away for a week or two or even a month, that's valuable IT time saved so IT can be working on more important things like making sure backups are occurring and keeping the servers up and fixing things that are too broken to be alleviated by a reboot.
Usually, if the time is wasted to track down the problem, it turns out to be software related. In today's usual business computing environment where the computer runs a proprietary OS and proprietary apps, tracing the problem down to discover that it's caused by software usually means, simply, "this problem can't be fixed and has to be lived with," because the company that made the software doesn't give a damn and you don't have source code so you can't fix it yourself and either the user will refuse to change apps (which can sometimes be dealt with) or, more often, there is no acceptable alternative app (which can't).
Hardware problems are usually more obvious and tend to result in the machine getting replaced promptly.
yeah, I agree. I think the suggested "solutions" are awful: when a user is abusive to IT, and IT gives them exactly what they want, IT has merely trained them that being abusive to IT is the way to get what they want, so they'll do it again or become worse.