After 7 years in IT I found myself in a real rut. I wasn't motivated to keep-up with new technology and was frustrated with the same old hassles. Over that time I took up a completely non-IT related hobby and that became my primary interest. It involved being active, outdoors, working with my hands, traveling. Somewhat serendipitously I got a job opportunity in a related industry. I figured that my passion for what I would be working on would more than make up for the large pay-cut. I was wrong.
First, don't underestimate your financial requirements or fall into the trap of the "I'll just live more simply and focus on what matters" rationalization. I'm not saying it can't work that way, just don't put the cart before the horse. I think that if I had taken 6 months to try to live on what I would be making before taking the actual pay-cut, I would never have done it.
Second, a job is a job. Every job has aggravating bosses, frustrating institutional inertia, annoying co-workers etc. If not those, they have equivalent hassles. Sooner or later you are likely to find yourself in the same boat, but with lower seniority, less experience and possibly less pay.
Our society and economy being what they are, chances are you are going to be in some sort of building looking at some sort of screen all day. You may as well do that and get paid for the knowledge and experience you have amassed.
After 2.5 years, I returned to IT and took another pay cut because of the lapse in experience. (Shrugs)
I suspect that there are specific issues that are at the root of your malaise. Stagnation at your current job? Latent interpersonal conflict? If I were you I would take a good hard look at whether it is IT you are disillusioned with, or just the environment you are in.
Not that I don't think you should jump ship if the right opportunity comes up. Just make sure that you are jumping to the right place for the right reasons.
I think a universal "undo" command would go a long way. Most people will just try to guess their way through things as a first resort, either because they assume they know more than they do, or they just don't feel like poring over documentation. In many cases it is difficult to read that stuff while making changes to begin with, so they are unhelpful unless you already know what you are trying to do, a situation that probably comes up more often after something gets screwed up.
If software adhered to a universal "undo" command, people who follow the first instinct to click whatever button isn't "Cancel" would at least have some way to back out of their mistakes and get it right on a subsequent try. It would also give us some protection against developers who create crap software and crap documentation.
Instead of needlessly ferrying them back for millions of dolalrs, we could just wait for them to commit suicide or have a coronary from liteally being worked and scheduled 24x7 for months at a time, and chuck their worthless carcases out the airlock. Or we could plan missions with the idea of using the time effectively and getting them home again before they go stir crazy.
Yeah, yeah, I am being a buzz-kill here. But seriously, it has to cost a lot of money to have astronauts up there. Shouldn't maximizing their productivity be the priority here? I realize that everyone gets burned out, and probably all the more so in orbit, but there has to be a more efficient way to manage human-hours in space.
For example, the teacher will have been silent, and there's nothing to take notes on at the moment, and you hear several people typing like crazy and snickering oblivious to their surroundings--more annoying when that person's right next to you. So not only should instructors expect students to hang on their every word, but they want undivided attention when they are doing absolutely nothing?
Agree completely. If affordable laptops were available when I was in school I would have a whole database of useful reference material now instead of boxes of illegible notebooks and dog-eared readers in the back of my closet.
I would consider it a serious detriment to the value of my education if some professor refused to allow me to take legible, searchable notes using the commonly available tools we have now.
Banning net surfing in class won't force people to pay any better attention. They will just go back to etching geeky graffiti on the furniture like in the "good old days".
Why would the school or university care if their students are wasting their own time and money by surfing the web in class?
I graduated before the age of ubiquitous laptops and wi-fi, so this wasn't a problem. Even still we had our distractions and it probably irked certain professors to know that they didn't have the rapt attention of every single person in the room. Generally speaking though, we were left alone as long as our snoring didn't disturb others.
I wonder if these profs take a roll call before every lecture. Does the school have truant officers on staff to keep these law students on the straight-and-narrow?
At 329 pounds, that's about $650.00 bucks. You can get a full-sized laptop with twice the ram, more than 10x the storage, a bigger screen, etc., for under $500.00
Smaller electronics have traditionally cost more even as they offered fewer features (think what you could get in a desktop for $500 these days). Perhaps people balk in this case because this machine has so many features that they simply don't think it is worth more? Wait. . .
I don't see a solution to the problem of promoting incompetence and alienating talent without some kind of objective measure of performance.
I haven't noticed any correlation between the best managers I have had and their knowledge of the technologies that I was working with. Instead, they focused on making sure that I had the information and resources needed to do my job optimally.
That relationship works great as long as we are both good in our respective roles, but it does not equip management with the best perspective for judging my competence. Sure, if the projects fall apart that is a clue, but I all I really need to do to appear competent is to do just well enough.
Meanwhile, the worst managers I have had interfered with my role based on their perception of their own expertise rather than doing their own job well.
If the responsibility of judging performance sits with managers, either "just good enough" is the most you can expect or you likely have managers who have been promoted above their own level of competence (i.e. good IT people who have been promoted to managerial roles based on time-served rather than applicable skills and experience).
The question (to which I don't have an answer) is how to have staff filling a certain role judged by other staff who's core competency is in that same role. In the typical hierarchal organization, this never happens. Instead, personal predjudices, jealousy and fear are more often the basis for making. Some kind of system whereby engineers evaluate each other would be vulnerable to the same negative aspects of human nature, but it might provide for better decision making, if not the best.
They're firing 10% of their workforce. Not "shedding" them. Is "lay off" not enough of a euphemism? Now we're going to use "shed"? Don't be naive. What goes on in The Shed defies euphemism.
Precisely the sort of naive objection I would expect on an internet forum.
What else, pray tell, did you think was going to be our motivation? Altruism? The beautiful view?
Organisms, including those that fly spaceships and use computers, compete with other organisms for resources. It's a zero-sum game. Those who compete best win, and are able to then pass some advantage to their children to give them a leg up in their own competition. Securing any advantage is good, securing that advantage while denying it to your competitors is logically BETTER.
Either program - lunar or asteroidal - is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, those dollars could be spent on many other things that are beneficial to our people or yes, our country. When deciding where to spend those dollars, I bloody well HOPE that someone is doing some sort of cost-benefit-time analysis. And if those dollars can be spent giving us something that is an advantage to us in terms of commercial, scientific or even - shudder to think of it! - military, doesn't it stand to reason that's worth pursuing?
Unless of course you're one of those starry-eyed Utopians who believe that somehow we're gong to evolve into a future where people don't compete? Then you're simply irrelevant to the conversation, because if that's the case, there's no reason to spend the resources on space exploration in the first place when there are so many other pressing immediate human needs here on earth. And that is precicely the type of mypoic response I expected in return.
Allow me to submit that as a species we have our work cut out for ourselves competing against a fundamentally hostile universe. We are talking about forays into the functionally infinite beyond and you are still menacing your neighbor with a sharpened rock, grunting about "zero-sum games"? Irrelevant indeed.
2) long-term value: geopolitical, military, commercial, geographic - as you dismissively point out, there are theoretically (only!) 2 places where solar power access is continual. Possibly more importantly these two places (the poles) are also the only places where the sun, the earth, in fact the entire ecliptic (north or south) is in clear line of sight. How much are those two spots worth today? How much will they be worth in a century? Want to surveil deep space while having a straight line-of-sight link to earth? Want to have a launch point for a flinger that could theoretically put lunar materials anywhere in the earth-moon system with the simplest ballistic solution? I'd argue that being the first with a permanent base there has an INCALCULABLE value over longer timespans. And if you have the first base on one pole, it's not a giant stretch to put a second one on the other pole and monopolize both. The lunar poles - for near-earth space - are practically 21st Century Suez or Panama canals in their strategic value. Jeez, if monopolizing lunar (or martian) resources is what is to motivate our space programs, we may as well forget the whole thing. We should just cut to the chase and focus our resources on killing each other here on earth rather than wasting them extending our greed and petty bickering into space.
What will stop is the creation of music for profit, like the Britney Spears and American Idol singers. Music is way overpriced anyway. $10 or $15 for a CD is not reasonable (particularly in poorer countries, where legit CDs are the same price as in the west). The market will choose what the correct price of music is. Not the record companies. If that means the end of the Britney Spears, then I think we're better off. Even the end of music for profit won't stop these media whores. Popular media is driven by the desire of certain people to command more attention than they deserve and the desire of even more pitiful people to idolize someone. Look at how many no-hopers devote their lives to becoming famous.
There will always be people making good (and bad) music because they a) love to make music and/or b) love an audience. I'm pretty sure there was music before there was a recording industry.
Employ a bunch of codemonkeys to build a project, try to extend it, stress it, and you get a pile of race conditions, scalability problems, architectural design flaws, and an unmaintainable mess. If PHBs are in charge, it won't occur to them that they should have hired a team with better clue than "PHP experts". Is this a CS education issue or a Business Management education issue? Leading a successful team requires understanding the requirements and finding people who's specific talents meet those requirements. A sophisiticated software project is going to require talent at many levels. The programmer who excels at low level issues may not be the best UI designer or adept at translating business knowledge to code logic (or even understanding what the PHBs are trying to communicate).
Not only does more accessible CS education extend the species of codemonkeys that the informed PHB can assign to a project, but it also increases the number of PHBs, project managers etc. who have a clue about what the codemonkeys are actually doing.
But He is saying that learning to programming in Java does not make you a computer scientist - and you seem to agree with that!
I do agree, but when does an undergrad degree make anyone a scientist? My point is that more accessible technologies like Java have made programming relevant to more than eventual computer scientists.
Attracting more people to CS probably won't drastically change the number of people who will become good compiler writers. Are you suggesting that switching to Java will turn off those who might? I would assume that the kind of person who will excel at that level of programming will be motivated to pursue the correct skills to do so. Schools need only provide that opportunity. If he is saying that schools don't, then I absolutely agree that there is a problem.
I am one of those "fake" programmers building web and database apps with VB, ASP, JavaScript and the like. FWIW, have I never referred to myself as a "programmer" of any type, as I suck at math and have no formal training in CS. I just use tools that are easily accessible and best allow me to make myself a more valuable to my employers. Every once and a while I get the bug to read-up on something like C++ or even Assembly but it is soon obvious that these are not relevant to the problems I was trying to solve and I would rather do other things with my time.
The author strikes me as a typical "You kids have it easy -- I used to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways" type who resents the fact that his formative experiences are no longer relevant. How does the field progress if everyone is forced to retrace the same steps from the same start point? That is not to say that his specific concerns are invalid. But it seems to me that the evolving state of software requires a broader range of programmers. If Java introduces people who will never become excellent programmers to programming concepts, why is that a bad thing? There are many roles to play, and hardcore math geeks can't fill them all. Rather than chase everyone else out of the field, perhaps the next step is for schools to adpot a more sophisitcated approach to organizing their CS programs.
I see an advantage in distributing programming skills as widely as possible. Being able to create my own tools makes me much more useful to my employers, and the combination of business knowledge and programming knowledge make my overall skillset more difficult to outsource. Win-win. Even a programmer who "only" knows Java is infinitely more useful to society than a technophobe with a Liberal Arts degree (speaking as a non-technophobe with a Liberal Arts degree).
Slashdot Mirror
After 7 years in IT I found myself in a real rut. I wasn't motivated to keep-up with new technology and was frustrated with the same old hassles. Over that time I took up a completely non-IT related hobby and that became my primary interest. It involved being active, outdoors, working with my hands, traveling. Somewhat serendipitously I got a job opportunity in a related industry. I figured that my passion for what I would be working on would more than make up for the large pay-cut. I was wrong.
First, don't underestimate your financial requirements or fall into the trap of the "I'll just live more simply and focus on what matters" rationalization. I'm not saying it can't work that way, just don't put the cart before the horse. I think that if I had taken 6 months to try to live on what I would be making before taking the actual pay-cut, I would never have done it.
Second, a job is a job. Every job has aggravating bosses, frustrating institutional inertia, annoying co-workers etc. If not those, they have equivalent hassles. Sooner or later you are likely to find yourself in the same boat, but with lower seniority, less experience and possibly less pay.
Our society and economy being what they are, chances are you are going to be in some sort of building looking at some sort of screen all day. You may as well do that and get paid for the knowledge and experience you have amassed.
After 2.5 years, I returned to IT and took another pay cut because of the lapse in experience. (Shrugs)
I suspect that there are specific issues that are at the root of your malaise. Stagnation at your current job? Latent interpersonal conflict? If I were you I would take a good hard look at whether it is IT you are disillusioned with, or just the environment you are in.
Not that I don't think you should jump ship if the right opportunity comes up. Just make sure that you are jumping to the right place for the right reasons.
I think a universal "undo" command would go a long way. Most people will just try to guess their way through things as a first resort, either because they assume they know more than they do, or they just don't feel like poring over documentation. In many cases it is difficult to read that stuff while making changes to begin with, so they are unhelpful unless you already know what you are trying to do, a situation that probably comes up more often after something gets screwed up.
If software adhered to a universal "undo" command, people who follow the first instinct to click whatever button isn't "Cancel" would at least have some way to back out of their mistakes and get it right on a subsequent try. It would also give us some protection against developers who create crap software and crap documentation.
Aren't they supposed to be studying the effect of zero gravity on tiny screws or something?
Yeah, yeah, I am being a buzz-kill here. But seriously, it has to cost a lot of money to have astronauts up there. Shouldn't maximizing their productivity be the priority here? I realize that everyone gets burned out, and probably all the more so in orbit, but there has to be a more efficient way to manage human-hours in space.
Agree completely. If affordable laptops were available when I was in school I would have a whole database of useful reference material now instead of boxes of illegible notebooks and dog-eared readers in the back of my closet.
I would consider it a serious detriment to the value of my education if some professor refused to allow me to take legible, searchable notes using the commonly available tools we have now.
Banning net surfing in class won't force people to pay any better attention. They will just go back to etching geeky graffiti on the furniture like in the "good old days".
Why would the school or university care if their students are wasting their own time and money by surfing the web in class?
I graduated before the age of ubiquitous laptops and wi-fi, so this wasn't a problem. Even still we had our distractions and it probably irked certain professors to know that they didn't have the rapt attention of every single person in the room. Generally speaking though, we were left alone as long as our snoring didn't disturb others.
I wonder if these profs take a roll call before every lecture. Does the school have truant officers on staff to keep these law students on the straight-and-narrow?
At 329 pounds, that's about $650.00 bucks. You can get a full-sized laptop with twice the ram, more than 10x the storage, a bigger screen, etc., for under $500.00
Smaller electronics have traditionally cost more even as they offered fewer features (think what you could get in a desktop for $500 these days). Perhaps people balk in this case because this machine has so many features that they simply don't think it is worth more? Wait. . .I don't see a solution to the problem of promoting incompetence and alienating talent without some kind of objective measure of performance.
I haven't noticed any correlation between the best managers I have had and their knowledge of the technologies that I was working with. Instead, they focused on making sure that I had the information and resources needed to do my job optimally.
That relationship works great as long as we are both good in our respective roles, but it does not equip management with the best perspective for judging my competence. Sure, if the projects fall apart that is a clue, but I all I really need to do to appear competent is to do just well enough.
Meanwhile, the worst managers I have had interfered with my role based on their perception of their own expertise rather than doing their own job well.
If the responsibility of judging performance sits with managers, either "just good enough" is the most you can expect or you likely have managers who have been promoted above their own level of competence (i.e. good IT people who have been promoted to managerial roles based on time-served rather than applicable skills and experience).
The question (to which I don't have an answer) is how to have staff filling a certain role judged by other staff who's core competency is in that same role. In the typical hierarchal organization, this never happens. Instead, personal predjudices, jealousy and fear are more often the basis for making. Some kind of system whereby engineers evaluate each other would be vulnerable to the same negative aspects of human nature, but it might provide for better decision making, if not the best.
That's dandy and all but it re-introduces several headaches that POD was designed to cure in the first place.
What else, pray tell, did you think was going to be our motivation? Altruism? The beautiful view?
Organisms, including those that fly spaceships and use computers, compete with other organisms for resources. It's a zero-sum game. Those who compete best win, and are able to then pass some advantage to their children to give them a leg up in their own competition. Securing any advantage is good, securing that advantage while denying it to your competitors is logically BETTER.
Either program - lunar or asteroidal - is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, those dollars could be spent on many other things that are beneficial to our people or yes, our country. When deciding where to spend those dollars, I bloody well HOPE that someone is doing some sort of cost-benefit-time analysis. And if those dollars can be spent giving us something that is an advantage to us in terms of commercial, scientific or even - shudder to think of it! - military, doesn't it stand to reason that's worth pursuing?
Unless of course you're one of those starry-eyed Utopians who believe that somehow we're gong to evolve into a future where people don't compete? Then you're simply irrelevant to the conversation, because if that's the case, there's no reason to spend the resources on space exploration in the first place when there are so many other pressing immediate human needs here on earth. And that is precicely the type of mypoic response I expected in return.
Allow me to submit that as a species we have our work cut out for ourselves competing against a fundamentally hostile universe. We are talking about forays into the functionally infinite beyond and you are still menacing your neighbor with a sharpened rock, grunting about "zero-sum games"? Irrelevant indeed.
There will always be people making good (and bad) music because they a) love to make music and/or b) love an audience. I'm pretty sure there was music before there was a recording industry.
Not only does more accessible CS education extend the species of codemonkeys that the informed PHB can assign to a project, but it also increases the number of PHBs, project managers etc. who have a clue about what the codemonkeys are actually doing.
But He is saying that learning to programming in Java does not make you a computer scientist - and you seem to agree with that!
I do agree, but when does an undergrad degree make anyone a scientist? My point is that more accessible technologies like Java have made programming relevant to more than eventual computer scientists.
Attracting more people to CS probably won't drastically change the number of people who will become good compiler writers. Are you suggesting that switching to Java will turn off those who might? I would assume that the kind of person who will excel at that level of programming will be motivated to pursue the correct skills to do so. Schools need only provide that opportunity. If he is saying that schools don't, then I absolutely agree that there is a problem.
I am one of those "fake" programmers building web and database apps with VB, ASP, JavaScript and the like. FWIW, have I never referred to myself as a "programmer" of any type, as I suck at math and have no formal training in CS. I just use tools that are easily accessible and best allow me to make myself a more valuable to my employers. Every once and a while I get the bug to read-up on something like C++ or even Assembly but it is soon obvious that these are not relevant to the problems I was trying to solve and I would rather do other things with my time.
The author strikes me as a typical "You kids have it easy -- I used to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways" type who resents the fact that his formative experiences are no longer relevant. How does the field progress if everyone is forced to retrace the same steps from the same start point? That is not to say that his specific concerns are invalid. But it seems to me that the evolving state of software requires a broader range of programmers. If Java introduces people who will never become excellent programmers to programming concepts, why is that a bad thing? There are many roles to play, and hardcore math geeks can't fill them all. Rather than chase everyone else out of the field, perhaps the next step is for schools to adpot a more sophisitcated approach to organizing their CS programs.
I see an advantage in distributing programming skills as widely as possible. Being able to create my own tools makes me much more useful to my employers, and the combination of business knowledge and programming knowledge make my overall skillset more difficult to outsource. Win-win. Even a programmer who "only" knows Java is infinitely more useful to society than a technophobe with a Liberal Arts degree (speaking as a non-technophobe with a Liberal Arts degree).