If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Define "worth keeping". I don't recall the article saying that Doug was inept, just that he was a ruthless jerk. His "backstabbing" was pretty insightful, IMO, and for Kelly, keeping him around was probably the right choice given the economic climate.
Granted, that doesn't make the company the best place if you value touchy-feely more than breaking even -- especially if you are the type to infect the company network with viruses you introduce via your thumb drives and want a manager who will wipe your backside.
There is being "nice" and there is being an ineffective pushover. Hard to be Worlds Best Boss when you are out on your ass.
What you're describing is a manager.. not a lead developer.
Those are skills that a CEO, manager, team leader etc. should posses and be able to apply appropriately.
Of course a lead developer should be able to develop. But what is the point of employing a "lead" if they are to spend their time on trivial tasks? And if that isn't to be their job, why make it the basis of determining their qualifications?
This is like hiring a head chef and asking each applicant to prepare Rice-a-roni. Give me the applicant who says "WTF is this box for?"
Well, I started with the questions that I was asked in the interview for my own job. A lead developer should be able to fulfill the required abilities of his junior developer, shouldn't he?
There are wrong answers, but there are also poorly framed questions.
As for lead fulfilling the required abilities of junior -- not necessarily. In 10 years I have found no correlation between effective leadership and leaders who can fulfill the abilities of their juniors (trends towards the opposite, IME). Good leaders are effective advocates, delegators and motivators. There is a lot more to developing software than coding (hence this thread).
Frankly, I think your organization put you in a preposterous situation, and I wish you the best of luck. At least they are giving you an opportunity of sorts. However, I have witnessed unrealistic expectations founded on specious reasoning drag software down on several occasions.
I felt inadequate until I started interviewing other programmers to fill in the gap.
Okay but how did you make the transition from inadequate to qualified to determine the adequacy of others? You say that developers with 10 years experience can't explain things to the satisfaction of some one with 5 months experience? That proves nothing coming when it comes from the latter.
I'm not so sure it is laziness. Getting divorced is a hassle. Heck, getting *married* is a hassle. Neither is necessarily cheap either. There are probably lots of lazy people who drift from relationship to relationship but I am not convinced that they are responsible for the divorce rate.
Rather, I think that people are deluded. They pumped full of bogus sitcom representations "marriage", they have unrealistic views about their own desirability and unrealistic expectations of others. As such, they fail to appreciate a perfectly serviceable relationship when they are in one. They constantly think that they can do better and they always believe that they *will* do better -- thus they get divorced and re-married.
I would hope that the japanese biochemistry would allow them to make that sound, it would be pretty weird if it didn't! Sorry, I jest, and that's probably not even an incorrect use of "physiological."
Well I'll have to defer to you, as I am no physycist. . .
I am a native born English speaker, but I can roll my R's and correctly pronounce "karaoke". I have studied both languages for several years, which helps. Like many skills, certain people take to them better than others. Tonal languages, for example, completely confound me.
Generally speaking, any vowel, diphthong or on-glide that does not exist for any words in one's native language is difficult to pronounce without training. There are plenty of sounds in Japanese and other languages that English-speakers are physiologically capable of making, yet cannot without help.
This is technically true, but not convincing in this case. I'm sure you are aware the "one's native language" is far less meaningful when speaking of a Japanese speaker than an English speaker, given the multitude of non-native words that have been in common usage for over a century if you only consider "Western" influence and over a thousand years if you count Chinese.
You also specify "difficult to pronounce without training". Is foreign language training a rarity in Japan?
There are certainly some sounds that are not shared between Japanese and English, but I would not say that there are "plenty", and of the few that exist I would not expect "wi" to present a particular challenge.
As far as interpreting the depth of Japanese expression based on slogans and brands, that seems like a dubious proposition. There are plenty of instances where common parlance favors faddish terms, often foreign derived. That does not mean that there is no Japanese equivalent ("maikaa" being a perfect example).
You're more or less correct. The 'w' sound doesn't exist before the 'i' sound in any Japanese word, so they tend to say something like "uii".
I think you are confusing the lack of a concise method of representing a sound in writing with the inability to pronounce it with perfectly reasonable fluency. (There is a "wi" character, though it is long deprecated.) Its not like Japanese people are physiologically incapable of making the sound.
As far as "we" vs. "everyone" -- "watashi-tachi" vs. "minna-tachi"?
I think the key here is "when it makes sense", which is not very often IMO. Trying to turn the entire web into a 3D interactive environment is a lousy idea. On the other hand, being able to see 3D representations of certain objects (say products in an on-line store) does make sense. I *hope* that this is the kind of "sense" that is being considered here.
The same way a homeless guy can run up to your car when you are stopped at an intersection and "maintain" you windshield with a sheet of newspaper and a paper cup full of who-knows-what.
Not to mention the bogus assumption of a correlation between low grades and cruelty/violence.
Not very smart at all.
For that matter, I'm not sure of the correlation between getting good grades as a freshman in High School and being bright and talented. One could easily get ahead merely by being an annoying little kiss-ass who mistakes teacher's favor for proof of his superiority. That's called "cruisin' for a bruisin'".
From the article:
They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used the "Dildo Room" at "69 Dick Tard Lane." These idiots used their own real street address!?
If this consultant asked for this data to be sent via email in the first place, that is a big red flag to me. It suggests a pretty lax attitude towards sensitive data, possibly an indication of general cluelessness/laziness/hubris.
Frankly, I would be a little suspicious of any person who wanted to take custody of this information at all if test data can be used instead. I would never take on that kind of liability if I didn't absolutely have to.
In an environment where neither HR nor their contractor seem to have a clue, I would enumerate my concerns (in writing) and insist that they make the call (in writing). Too many weak links in this chain.
I live in new england, Massachusetts, the next town over from Boston. It gets below zero (F) in the winter, and gets above 100 (F) in the summer. It rains a lot. It has heat waves. Thanks for the warning. I'll just deal with the ants.
Have you any idea how many inspectors would be needed, or how long it would take? Too bad we don't have millions of people out of work. Heck, if there were zillions more trying to get into this country to work hard for low pay, we'd really be in business.
Its ridiculous how many problems this country could solve by utilizing the human resources that are currently sitting fallow. All because we stubbornly hold out for some high tech solution. We would literally rather watch our bridges collapse and live with the possibility of nuclear terrorism rather than do things the old fashioned way (i.e. the way that this country was built in the first place).
Actually, ants are the least of your worries. True. And the nukes don't rate that highly either. Neither worries me as much as the way that apathy increasingly passes for wisdom.
This isn't too different from a hypothetical employee whose home computer is infected, and who is working from home and emails a module to his boss, who merges it into the final product. If his home computer was infected, and the standard virus scans missed it, then the final product could end up having Trojan code buried inside. Its not different because this hypothetical scenario is also a total failure of acceptable development practice.
All the anime featuring mecha/cars/bikes that I've seen has much more realistic physics than that of Speed Racer. It occurs to me that the inevitable video game follow-up will likely have more realistic physics than the live action movie. I guess that is possible when you aren't working within the constraints of modern movie-making.
It was a kid, in a super-duper race car doing various improbable stunts to win races. For God's sake, one of the main characters is a monkey. Which is another reason to have extremely low expectations of this film. I mean, re-read your synopsis, which I think is pretty accurate. That is supposed to be an appealing premise for a full length movie? The original could barely stretch that into a half hour, low-budget cartoon show!
The previews for this film really bug me, particularly the way that the cars are constantly fishtailing back and forth. I realize that this is Speed Racer and this is not supposed to be realistic, but I believe that you need some inkling of reality to achieve any sense of excitement and drama.
Its based on a cartoon! What they have created is a caricature of a caricature of reality. Granted that makes the previews a caricature of a caricature of caricature. Still, it gives me the overwhelming impression of trying too hard, probably to cover up for the script.
Then again, I thought the Matrix series was kind of dumb.
IIRC, this was also a point when "designers" were establishing demand for a lot of questionable capabilities from editors that was probably a nightmare to provide for. I'm not blaming GoLive or Adobe specifically for this.
Would snooping around on your laptop or rifling through your e-mail accounts allow someone to "understand" you? Are you confident that it would portray the facet of your personality that you wanted others to see?
Obviously, this is a sad situation. I lost a sibling to suicide and the bottom line is that I don't think that any satisfactory answers can be had in a situation like this.
Whether or not the privacy of the deceased should be respected might be an ethical dilemma. But I think that if we are realistic about our own selves and what we choose to share with friends, family or no-one at all, we have to admit that breaking into this mans files would almost certainly be a violation of his wishes, and likely raise more questions than it answers.
Absent some purely administrative function like settling his accounts, I would not go this route.
I swore off WYSIWYG HTML editors with the first version of GoLive. I thought it was pretty slick until I looked at the HTML it was creating -- what a mess! I am sure the technology has advance since then. . . ? Still, I have been hand coding HTML or using some other tool to generate it ever since. This disincentives HTML overly complex layouts, which I think is a good thing.
Personally I hate the kind of fluff that WYSIWYG editors tend to encourage. Too easy to create pages that take way longer to load and way more effort to "interact" with in order to get the information that they are supposed to contain. I realize that these editors only enable bad presentation, but still.
If you have a content framework in place, fancy editors don't offer anything other than a way to add needless clutter and make things more difficult to manage.
Slashdot Mirror
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Define "worth keeping". I don't recall the article saying that Doug was inept, just that he was a ruthless jerk. His "backstabbing" was pretty insightful, IMO, and for Kelly, keeping him around was probably the right choice given the economic climate.
Granted, that doesn't make the company the best place if you value touchy-feely more than breaking even -- especially if you are the type to infect the company network with viruses you introduce via your thumb drives and want a manager who will wipe your backside.
There is being "nice" and there is being an ineffective pushover. Hard to be Worlds Best Boss when you are out on your ass.
What you're describing is a manager.. not a lead developer.
Those are skills that a CEO, manager, team leader etc. should posses and be able to apply appropriately.
Of course a lead developer should be able to develop. But what is the point of employing a "lead" if they are to spend their time on trivial tasks? And if that isn't to be their job, why make it the basis of determining their qualifications?
This is like hiring a head chef and asking each applicant to prepare Rice-a-roni. Give me the applicant who says "WTF is this box for?"
Well, I started with the questions that I was asked in the interview for my own job. A lead developer should be able to fulfill the required abilities of his junior developer, shouldn't he?
There are wrong answers, but there are also poorly framed questions.
As for lead fulfilling the required abilities of junior -- not necessarily. In 10 years I have found no correlation between effective leadership and leaders who can fulfill the abilities of their juniors (trends towards the opposite, IME). Good leaders are effective advocates, delegators and motivators. There is a lot more to developing software than coding (hence this thread).
Frankly, I think your organization put you in a preposterous situation, and I wish you the best of luck. At least they are giving you an opportunity of sorts. However, I have witnessed unrealistic expectations founded on specious reasoning drag software down on several occasions.
I felt inadequate until I started interviewing other programmers to fill in the gap.
Okay but how did you make the transition from inadequate to qualified to determine the adequacy of others? You say that developers with 10 years experience can't explain things to the satisfaction of some one with 5 months experience? That proves nothing coming when it comes from the latter.
I'm not so sure it is laziness. Getting divorced is a hassle. Heck, getting *married* is a hassle. Neither is necessarily cheap either. There are probably lots of lazy people who drift from relationship to relationship but I am not convinced that they are responsible for the divorce rate.
Rather, I think that people are deluded. They pumped full of bogus sitcom representations "marriage", they have unrealistic views about their own desirability and unrealistic expectations of others. As such, they fail to appreciate a perfectly serviceable relationship when they are in one. They constantly think that they can do better and they always believe that they *will* do better -- thus they get divorced and re-married.
I would hope that the japanese biochemistry would allow them to make that sound, it would be pretty weird if it didn't! Sorry, I jest, and that's probably not even an incorrect use of "physiological."
Well I'll have to defer to you, as I am no physycist. . .
I am a native born English speaker, but I can roll my R's and correctly pronounce "karaoke". I have studied both languages for several years, which helps. Like many skills, certain people take to them better than others. Tonal languages, for example, completely confound me.
Generally speaking, any vowel, diphthong or on-glide that does not exist for any words in one's native language is difficult to pronounce without training. There are plenty of sounds in Japanese and other languages that English-speakers are physiologically capable of making, yet cannot without help.
This is technically true, but not convincing in this case. I'm sure you are aware the "one's native language" is far less meaningful when speaking of a Japanese speaker than an English speaker, given the multitude of non-native words that have been in common usage for over a century if you only consider "Western" influence and over a thousand years if you count Chinese.
You also specify "difficult to pronounce without training". Is foreign language training a rarity in Japan?
There are certainly some sounds that are not shared between Japanese and English, but I would not say that there are "plenty", and of the few that exist I would not expect "wi" to present a particular challenge.
As far as interpreting the depth of Japanese expression based on slogans and brands, that seems like a dubious proposition. There are plenty of instances where common parlance favors faddish terms, often foreign derived. That does not mean that there is no Japanese equivalent ("maikaa" being a perfect example).
You're more or less correct. The 'w' sound doesn't exist before the 'i' sound in any Japanese word, so they tend to say something like "uii".
I think you are confusing the lack of a concise method of representing a sound in writing with the inability to pronounce it with perfectly reasonable fluency. (There is a "wi" character, though it is long deprecated.) Its not like Japanese people are physiologically incapable of making the sound.
As far as "we" vs. "everyone" -- "watashi-tachi" vs. "minna-tachi"?
I think the key here is "when it makes sense", which is not very often IMO. Trying to turn the entire web into a 3D interactive environment is a lousy idea. On the other hand, being able to see 3D representations of certain objects (say products in an on-line store) does make sense. I *hope* that this is the kind of "sense" that is being considered here.
With a property like BTVS, you have to strike while the iron is hot! If they wait to have a worthwhile game to offer, Buffy's relevance may fade.
Maybe she is avoiding you?
The same way a homeless guy can run up to your car when you are stopped at an intersection and "maintain" you windshield with a sheet of newspaper and a paper cup full of who-knows-what.
Not to mention the bogus assumption of a correlation between low grades and cruelty/violence.
Not very smart at all.
For that matter, I'm not sure of the correlation between getting good grades as a freshman in High School and being bright and talented. One could easily get ahead merely by being an annoying little kiss-ass who mistakes teacher's favor for proof of his superiority. That's called "cruisin' for a bruisin'".
If this consultant asked for this data to be sent via email in the first place, that is a big red flag to me. It suggests a pretty lax attitude towards sensitive data, possibly an indication of general cluelessness/laziness/hubris.
Frankly, I would be a little suspicious of any person who wanted to take custody of this information at all if test data can be used instead. I would never take on that kind of liability if I didn't absolutely have to.
In an environment where neither HR nor their contractor seem to have a clue, I would enumerate my concerns (in writing) and insist that they make the call (in writing). Too many weak links in this chain.
Its ridiculous how many problems this country could solve by utilizing the human resources that are currently sitting fallow. All because we stubbornly hold out for some high tech solution. We would literally rather watch our bridges collapse and live with the possibility of nuclear terrorism rather than do things the old fashioned way (i.e. the way that this country was built in the first place). Actually, ants are the least of your worries. True. And the nukes don't rate that highly either. Neither worries me as much as the way that apathy increasingly passes for wisdom.
The previews for this film really bug me, particularly the way that the cars are constantly fishtailing back and forth. I realize that this is Speed Racer and this is not supposed to be realistic, but I believe that you need some inkling of reality to achieve any sense of excitement and drama.
Its based on a cartoon! What they have created is a caricature of a caricature of reality. Granted that makes the previews a caricature of a caricature of caricature. Still, it gives me the overwhelming impression of trying too hard, probably to cover up for the script.
Then again, I thought the Matrix series was kind of dumb.
This reminds me of a sig I used to see, ironically, on an Outlook Admin mailing list:
"There are seldom good technological solutions for behavioral problems" (Ed Crowley)
This was Adobe's initial version.
IIRC, this was also a point when "designers" were establishing demand for a lot of questionable capabilities from editors that was probably a nightmare to provide for. I'm not blaming GoLive or Adobe specifically for this.
Would snooping around on your laptop or rifling through your e-mail accounts allow someone to "understand" you? Are you confident that it would portray the facet of your personality that you wanted others to see?
Obviously, this is a sad situation. I lost a sibling to suicide and the bottom line is that I don't think that any satisfactory answers can be had in a situation like this.
Whether or not the privacy of the deceased should be respected might be an ethical dilemma. But I think that if we are realistic about our own selves and what we choose to share with friends, family or no-one at all, we have to admit that breaking into this mans files would almost certainly be a violation of his wishes, and likely raise more questions than it answers.
Absent some purely administrative function like settling his accounts, I would not go this route.
I swore off WYSIWYG HTML editors with the first version of GoLive. I thought it was pretty slick until I looked at the HTML it was creating -- what a mess! I am sure the technology has advance since then. . . ? Still, I have been hand coding HTML or using some other tool to generate it ever since. This disincentives HTML overly complex layouts, which I think is a good thing.
Personally I hate the kind of fluff that WYSIWYG editors tend to encourage. Too easy to create pages that take way longer to load and way more effort to "interact" with in order to get the information that they are supposed to contain. I realize that these editors only enable bad presentation, but still.
If you have a content framework in place, fancy editors don't offer anything other than a way to add needless clutter and make things more difficult to manage.