If only it were that easy. We have thousands of years of common law and practice that tried to balance personal opinions and utterances against defamation campaigns. Then the internet happened: speech that would have been ignored or settled with a duel suddenly rises to the level of publication (in the eyes of the law.)
We are in somewhat uncharted territory here, but perhaps it is good: reputation is important, and having people resolve disputes and moral issues in public is better than doing it in private. Having the courts suppress or punish speech is weak compared with stating your side of the issue in the same forum (assuming your costs to post are similar - a flamewar is cheap, if your oppononent publishes a book defaming you, sue by all means.)
They like to be stressed, over-worked, exploited, have no personal time and also appreciate being handed enough rope with which to hang themselves?
Guess I'm one of those guys (although a mere 80 hours/week seems a bit slacker.) On the plus side:
1. Stressed? Yes. But if I want a day off, I just take it. No one is counting vacation and personal days in any real way. 2. Over-worked? Sure. I get stuff done on time and with zero supervision: tell me what you need and it happens. Heck, half my time is spent browsing the web to get up-skilled. 3. Exploited? Hmm... I produce results, you pay me obscene amounts of money. I can deal. 4. No personal time? Maids, nannies, accountants, PAs, etc, fix a lot of this. True that I don't get a few long Sundays fishing with the kids, but I still have time to read them a book every night. 5. Hanging rope? Bring it on! I'm doing what I think is right, and if it ever gets to the point that management and I can't agree on the right course of action, I expect to be fired -- I'm happy to do tactical, but I won't do stupid. The few times this has happened in my career, I've bowed to the inevitable and taken a 20% pay raise at a new company.
All comes down to how good the boss is. I was talking to a serious animal boss-dude (80+ hours a week, still writes good code, gets paid super-well) and asked him how he got to be the way he was. Simple, he said, on his first project, he spent months building a widget for the military. He evetually presented it to his boss (all nicely rigged up in a test harness.) His boss looked at it for a few minutes, then took a can of freon and sprayed a corner of the casing. The widget failed within 10 seconds. Then and there, he pledged to adopt the management approach of always beng more expert than the people you are managing, even if it means working 16/7 for years on end.
Not so oddly, most people who worked for that guy say that time was the best work experience of their lives.
Honestly, why do people stay in this high-tax state?
A bit of paradox, I agree. But easily resolved: the high tax states tend to be high income states, and higher incomes mean people want to outsource most stuff (high incomes imply more specialized skills, so that makes sense.) So, in extreme cases, like sections of Manhattan, people outsource:
1. Cooking. Restaurants and catering save time, and let you have a smaller kitchen to boot. 2. Cleaning. Maids go it better at a better price. 3. Child care. Nannies save time. 4. Security. Why bother to lock your door, etc, doormen, etc, are cheaper and better than alarms and owning guns. 5. Shopping. Sure, you pay more, but it's easier to delegate quality control to an agent. 6. Driving. Cabs, limos, subways. Easier and better. 7. A ton of other stuff.
All this complexity requires more infrastructure costs (management does not scale linearly,) so you need a lot of policemen, judges, restaurant inspectors, train supervisors, etc. Hence, taxes go up in a non-linear fashion.
Reporting is useful and part of my job. Reporting unimportant facts (like how many hours I worked this week, or why I flew to Tokyo) to stupid people is not.
Hey, my boss sits 3 feet away from me. Once a week, or so, he asks me to do something specific. 25% of the time I'll apologize and get to work on it. The other 75% of time, I'll tell him it's already implemented and in production - amazing how productive you can be when you listen to all the phone calls, etc, going on around you:)
And when I use the word "required" it is because that is one of your duties in that position. They are PAYING YOU to do a certain job and that job is to be a cog that fills out status reports. If you don't like that and don't wish to do it, nobody is holding a gun to your head...go work somewhere else. Just don't complain when you sign-up for a job and then they ask you to do what was actually in the job description.
Screw that! The only position I have is sitting in my Aeron. The only duties I have is making lots of money for the firm and not getting a drunken quote in the NYT where names are involved.
It's a simple life, but a satisfying one. I show up at work when I want, the company pays me what it thinks will keep me happy. No one is complaining, it's all at will.
Well, most programmers, like most people, are just cogs in the machine. It's sad, but that is just reality.
I'm more interested in the top.1% or so: the people who read SICP for fun, and also are experts in their business. Their multiplier is on the order of 100: they can take a project with a 1000 man-year estimate, and deliver it in six months with a 10 person team.
In many ways, they are the foundation of the machine. Good businesses grow fast today mainly because they have a great, but largely invisible, software infrastructure. Good software infrastructure lets people concentrate on what they are good at. In the old days, business needed hordes of secretaries, accountants, lawyers, telephone operators, middle managers, etc: now, we can do most of that with code, and ramp up a good idea, or shut down a bad idea, in days rather than years.
Well, paperwork does get created, just not by the professionals - that's why God gave us admins and junior employees.
This I know because I sometimes get email about an expense report or timesheet that I supposedly submitted. Then, a half hour later, I get another email thanking me for fixing the problem.
Your point is cogent. I do not advocate the elimination of all management, just the elimination of inexpert management of professional projects.
To take the lawyer example, the senior partner reviews the associate's draft. He's looking at the work, not a status report. For fighter pilots and traders, it just gets easier: the results are plain and status flows from them naturally.
A good IT project runs the same way: the manager is a domain expert, and can evaluate the product as it is being created. If she can't do this, or relies on self-assessment of her reports, the product is going to suck.
Periodic status reports are a tool to manage low-level white-collar workers, not skilled professionals.
Do you really think lawyers, doctors, talent agents, sitcom writers, fighter pilots, traders, salespeople etc, fill out status reports?
We don't, and we just say "fuck you, I'm doing my job, fire me if you're not happy with the way I'm doing it. Oh, if you have anything constructive to offer, please say it, otherwise, go away. Company policy? Great, have an admin write the status report or enter the hours worked or whatever - that's what we pay them for. Actually, what the fuck is your value-add in this deal? You explain what management want to us, and then explain what we did to management? You are a cost-center, do you earn enough a year to make it worthwhile for me to get you fired? Get the fuck out of my desk space and don't come back until you have something useful to contribute."
It's quite simple really. In other news, Bank of America to lay off 30K "workers." Fuck em, maybe they can use their mad management skillz at Burger King.
C++ is C with optional safety-less AK-47s. The top 1% enjoy it, the next 9% live with it, and the other 90% die bemused in a hail of friendly fire.
Bjarne is now dissing the students. While this is a time-honoured prof activity, he might watch to consider that the students you get is more a reflection on yourself than the pool as a whole. You build shit, and they will come.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Good Lord, "people looting grocery stores for food and water" is more just efficient use of national resources than anything else. More law enforcement wouldn't have helped: it would have compounded the problem. What would have helped is rapid national disaster response. So, some shops lost a few bottles of water and diapers - that's what insurance is for.
I've walked 1/2 the length of Manhattan twice: once on 9/11 and once for the big blackout. Both times I was offered a bunch of free stuff (water, food, tissues for improvised masks, and even beer as the cooling failed.) Just small businesses and their employees behaving decently.
If someone wants to lock down their basic supplies super-store in the midst of a week-long emergency, I'll be there with a saws-all and spend my day handing out bottled water.
Roughly since the start of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, it was mostly the church.
I understand this internet thing has caused some changes over the last decade. Numerous journalists have assured me that this fad allows consumers to "search" for news, and find information from experts in the field involved. Obviously, lacking a journalist to intermediate, this leads to a lot of confusion and wasted effort.
I was lucky enough to have a 10+ MLOC codebase, plus version control history on 500+ developers going back 10 years. After writing a shredder/hasher to look for cut and paste programming, was pretty easy to divide commits into new development vs "maintenance." This gave rough $/line numbers.
Then asked a number of developers to estimate their time spent checking/maintaining compatibility with existing code. Numbers mostly agreed with the version control numbers.
Finally, went to some managers and asked how much they would pay to have 1K, 10K, 100K LOCs removed. Again, numbers matched reasonably well.
I don't claim science here: estimates varied from $1 to $100 per line, but $10 was a number most people were comfortable with.
I guess I didn't express myself well. I don't care about KLOCs, I want problems solved.
I get very annoyed at programmers who claim they are productive because they wrote 20K lines of rubbish. So, I fire them and give the freed-up money to the guy who wrote 10K lines of useful code.
And, yes, I do understand that some things are one-shot projects (e.g. data migrations.) Using my super-manager powers, I explain we will get paid for getting the job done, not for writing pretty stuff.
I took the opposite approach at my current job. After computing the cost to maintain a line of code (around $10/year,) the logical solution was to delete all unused code. The payoff was great: no more worrying about breaking compatibility, smaller, cleaner codebase, etc.
Another plus was that shelved code tends to be bad code: if it didn't suck, it would still be in use. Maybe it had some useful gems in it? Possible, but doubtful: usefully gems should have been in a common library, not a cesspool application.
A final benefit was that it made paying the programmers much easier. The author of 10K lines of code that were being used got paid a lot more than the author of 20K lines of code that were deleted.
You messed this up a little. The universe is unbounded (this is easy to show if you analyze boundaries -- you have to conclude that boundaries are all imaginary and non-physical; sorry there's no room for full analysis), and the machines, by definition, are bounded, since they are products of bounded human labor with bounds on their behaviors, which is what makes them so valuable.
The problem is that the tape going into the Turing machine is unbounded, and on the account of its theoretical endlessness is not part of the machine as such. Were the tape bounded, it could be considered to be a part of the machine. If the tape is endless, then the Turing machine is a machine like a water mill is a machine and the tape is a non-machine like the river is a non-machine.
Sometimes, it's better to say "I have no fucking idea what I am talking about, please pass the bong." This will generally make the people around you (stoned and unstoned,) cut you some slack and maybe even like you more.
A lot of Monty Python is like that: the humor is in how a perfectly ordinary and unfunny event becomes an outrageous farce after something goes very wrong, because someone in the situation simply refuses to admit that anything is out of the ordinary.
This is the core of all good theatre. Slapstick is easy, but everything else requires actors denying, then accepting, reality.
Groundhog day would have sucked if BM had just immediately accepted his situation. The Terminator would have sucked if Sarah Connor initially believed Reese. Or the cops believed, etc. The entire Faulty Towers series.
Heck, 80% of all jokes are about this: the puchline is always someone denying or explaining the reality of the situation. E.g.:
"Bob, thank god you found me - robbers took everything I had, stripped me naked, and tied me to this tree!" Bob sez, while removing his pants: "well Vern, this just ain't your lucky day."
Um, given the US transitioned from quoting in mostly $1/8s to quoting in pennies during that time period, that is really not very surprising. Prior to that, the 12.5 cent tick size acted as a low-pass filter.
You've hit on the home-schooling paradox. The h-s crowd is pretty much two different demographics:
1. Highly educated parents with enough money that one adult can stay at home and educate the children better than a school could. 2. Ideologically extreme parents who don't want their kids exposed to ideas they don't like.
Because the data on h-s kids is lumped together, it looks awesome: lots of kids going to ivy league schools, etc. Tease it apart, and not so good: an elite doing well, some students going on to get diplomas at ideological "colleges," and most just GEDiing out without a real education.
Generally, very little. Yes, most low-level things in CS have been patented in some sense (XOR cursors, one-click checkout, run-length image encoding, multi-hash lookup, stacktrace error display strategies.)
In theory, all software development grinds to a halt. In practice, no one gives a damn.
Trying to enforce a very broad software patent usually just gets the entire patent invalidated. Even if you win, you get to play whack-a-mole with a thousand open-source projects. And most software is bespoke stuff within corporations: good luck tracking that down to enforce patent claims.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court. Bad press, skeptical judge (unless you are suing a direct competitor,) workarounds from the peanut gallery provided pro-bono, countersuits from others with overlapping clainms: it gets ugly fast. Better to just cross-license and get on with life.
Slashdot Mirror
If only it were that easy. We have thousands of years of common law and practice that tried to balance personal opinions and utterances against defamation campaigns. Then the internet happened: speech that would have been ignored or settled with a duel suddenly rises to the level of publication (in the eyes of the law.)
We are in somewhat uncharted territory here, but perhaps it is good: reputation is important, and having people resolve disputes and moral issues in public is better than doing it in private. Having the courts suppress or punish speech is weak compared with stating your side of the issue in the same forum (assuming your costs to post are similar - a flamewar is cheap, if your oppononent publishes a book defaming you, sue by all means.)
They like to be stressed, over-worked, exploited, have no personal time and also appreciate being handed enough rope with which to hang themselves?
Guess I'm one of those guys (although a mere 80 hours/week seems a bit slacker.) On the plus side:
1. Stressed? Yes. But if I want a day off, I just take it. No one is counting vacation and personal days in any real way.
2. Over-worked? Sure. I get stuff done on time and with zero supervision: tell me what you need and it happens. Heck, half my time is spent browsing the web to get up-skilled.
3. Exploited? Hmm... I produce results, you pay me obscene amounts of money. I can deal.
4. No personal time? Maids, nannies, accountants, PAs, etc, fix a lot of this. True that I don't get a few long Sundays fishing with the kids, but I still have time to read them a book every night.
5. Hanging rope? Bring it on! I'm doing what I think is right, and if it ever gets to the point that management and I can't agree on the right course of action, I expect to be fired -- I'm happy to do tactical, but I won't do stupid. The few times this has happened in my career, I've bowed to the inevitable and taken a 20% pay raise at a new company.
All comes down to how good the boss is. I was talking to a serious animal boss-dude (80+ hours a week, still writes good code, gets paid super-well) and asked him how he got to be the way he was. Simple, he said, on his first project, he spent months building a widget for the military. He evetually presented it to his boss (all nicely rigged up in a test harness.) His boss looked at it for a few minutes, then took a can of freon and sprayed a corner of the casing. The widget failed within 10 seconds. Then and there, he pledged to adopt the management approach of always beng more expert than the people you are managing, even if it means working 16/7 for years on end.
Not so oddly, most people who worked for that guy say that time was the best work experience of their lives.
Honestly, why do people stay in this high-tax state?
A bit of paradox, I agree. But easily resolved: the high tax states tend to be high income states, and higher incomes mean people want to outsource most stuff (high incomes imply more specialized skills, so that makes sense.) So, in extreme cases, like sections of Manhattan, people outsource:
1. Cooking. Restaurants and catering save time, and let you have a smaller kitchen to boot.
2. Cleaning. Maids go it better at a better price.
3. Child care. Nannies save time.
4. Security. Why bother to lock your door, etc, doormen, etc, are cheaper and better than alarms and owning guns.
5. Shopping. Sure, you pay more, but it's easier to delegate quality control to an agent.
6. Driving. Cabs, limos, subways. Easier and better.
7. A ton of other stuff.
All this complexity requires more infrastructure costs (management does not scale linearly,) so you need a lot of policemen, judges, restaurant inspectors, train supervisors, etc. Hence, taxes go up in a non-linear fashion.
Reporting is useful and part of my job. Reporting unimportant facts (like how many hours I worked this week, or why I flew to Tokyo) to stupid people is not.
Simple, no?
Hey, my boss sits 3 feet away from me. Once a week, or so, he asks me to do something specific. 25% of the time I'll apologize and get to work on it. The other 75% of time, I'll tell him it's already implemented and in production - amazing how productive you can be when you listen to all the phone calls, etc, going on around you :)
Screw that! The only position I have is sitting in my Aeron. The only duties I have is making lots of money for the firm and not getting a drunken quote in the NYT where names are involved.
It's a simple life, but a satisfying one. I show up at work when I want, the company pays me what it thinks will keep me happy. No one is complaining, it's all at will.
Well, most programmers, like most people, are just cogs in the machine. It's sad, but that is just reality.
I'm more interested in the top .1% or so: the people who read SICP for fun, and also are experts in their business. Their multiplier is on the order of 100: they can take a project with a 1000 man-year estimate, and deliver it in six months with a 10 person team.
In many ways, they are the foundation of the machine. Good businesses grow fast today mainly because they have a great, but largely invisible, software infrastructure. Good software infrastructure lets people concentrate on what they are good at. In the old days, business needed hordes of secretaries, accountants, lawyers, telephone operators, middle managers, etc: now, we can do most of that with code, and ramp up a good idea, or shut down a bad idea, in days rather than years.
Well, paperwork does get created, just not by the professionals - that's why God gave us admins and junior employees.
This I know because I sometimes get email about an expense report or timesheet that I supposedly submitted. Then, a half hour later, I get another email thanking me for fixing the problem.
the reason developers, regardless of skill level, are required to fill out such things is because they are considered a RESOURCE by the company.
Words like "required" and "RESOURCE" just say "I am a cog in the machine."
Professionals, by definition, know this is BS.
Then again, most programmers are hacks, not professionals. (some are seasoned hacks, but so what?)
Your point is cogent. I do not advocate the elimination of all management, just the elimination of inexpert management of professional projects.
To take the lawyer example, the senior partner reviews the associate's draft. He's looking at the work, not a status report. For fighter pilots and traders, it just gets easier: the results are plain and status flows from them naturally.
A good IT project runs the same way: the manager is a domain expert, and can evaluate the product as it is being created. If she can't do this, or relies on self-assessment of her reports, the product is going to suck.
Periodic status reports are a tool to manage low-level white-collar workers, not skilled professionals.
Do you really think lawyers, doctors, talent agents, sitcom writers, fighter pilots, traders, salespeople etc, fill out status reports?
We don't, and we just say "fuck you, I'm doing my job, fire me if you're not happy with the way I'm doing it. Oh, if you have anything constructive to offer, please say it, otherwise, go away. Company policy? Great, have an admin write the status report or enter the hours worked or whatever - that's what we pay them for. Actually, what the fuck is your value-add in this deal? You explain what management want to us, and then explain what we did to management? You are a cost-center, do you earn enough a year to make it worthwhile for me to get you fired? Get the fuck out of my desk space and don't come back until you have something useful to contribute."
It's quite simple really. In other news, Bank of America to lay off 30K "workers." Fuck em, maybe they can use their mad management skillz at Burger King.
C++ is C with optional safety-less AK-47s. The top 1% enjoy it, the next 9% live with it, and the other 90% die bemused in a hail of friendly fire.
Bjarne is now dissing the students. While this is a time-honoured prof activity, he might watch to consider that the students you get is more a reflection on yourself than the pool as a whole. You build shit, and they will come.
Good Lord, "people looting grocery stores for food and water" is more just efficient use of national resources than anything else. More law enforcement wouldn't have helped: it would have compounded the problem. What would have helped is rapid national disaster response. So, some shops lost a few bottles of water and diapers - that's what insurance is for.
I've walked 1/2 the length of Manhattan twice: once on 9/11 and once for the big blackout. Both times I was offered a bunch of free stuff (water, food, tissues for improvised masks, and even beer as the cooling failed.) Just small businesses and their employees behaving decently.
If someone wants to lock down their basic supplies super-store in the midst of a week-long emergency, I'll be there with a saws-all and spend my day handing out bottled water.
Roughly since the start of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, it was mostly the church.
I understand this internet thing has caused some changes over the last decade. Numerous journalists have assured me that this fad allows consumers to "search" for news, and find information from experts in the field involved. Obviously, lacking a journalist to intermediate, this leads to a lot of confusion and wasted effort.
I was lucky enough to have a 10+ MLOC codebase, plus version control history on 500+ developers going back 10 years. After writing a shredder/hasher to look for cut and paste programming, was pretty easy to divide commits into new development vs "maintenance." This gave rough $/line numbers.
Then asked a number of developers to estimate their time spent checking/maintaining compatibility with existing code. Numbers mostly agreed with the version control numbers.
Finally, went to some managers and asked how much they would pay to have 1K, 10K, 100K LOCs removed. Again, numbers matched reasonably well.
I don't claim science here: estimates varied from $1 to $100 per line, but $10 was a number most people were comfortable with.
Now make the other 9,999 lines of code per year look as easy and clean as that, and you'll have your $4M pretty soon.
I guess I didn't express myself well. I don't care about KLOCs, I want problems solved.
I get very annoyed at programmers who claim they are productive because they wrote 20K lines of rubbish. So, I fire them and give the freed-up money to the guy who wrote 10K lines of useful code.
And, yes, I do understand that some things are one-shot projects (e.g. data migrations.) Using my super-manager powers, I explain we will get paid for getting the job done, not for writing pretty stuff.
I took the opposite approach at my current job. After computing the cost to maintain a line of code (around $10/year,) the logical solution was to delete all unused code. The payoff was great: no more worrying about breaking compatibility, smaller, cleaner codebase, etc.
Another plus was that shelved code tends to be bad code: if it didn't suck, it would still be in use. Maybe it had some useful gems in it? Possible, but doubtful: usefully gems should have been in a common library, not a cesspool application.
A final benefit was that it made paying the programmers much easier. The author of 10K lines of code that were being used got paid a lot more than the author of 20K lines of code that were deleted.
It is sad this was moderated "funny" rather than "interesting"
You messed this up a little. The universe is unbounded (this is easy to show if you analyze boundaries -- you have to conclude that boundaries are all imaginary and non-physical; sorry there's no room for full analysis), and the machines, by definition, are bounded, since they are products of bounded human labor with bounds on their behaviors, which is what makes them so valuable.
The problem is that the tape going into the Turing machine is unbounded, and on the account of its theoretical endlessness is not part of the machine as such. Were the tape bounded, it could be considered to be a part of the machine. If the tape is endless, then the Turing machine is a machine like a water mill is a machine and the tape is a non-machine like the river is a non-machine.
Sometimes, it's better to say "I have no fucking idea what I am talking about, please pass the bong." This will generally make the people around you (stoned and unstoned,) cut you some slack and maybe even like you more.
A lot of Monty Python is like that: the humor is in how a perfectly ordinary and unfunny event becomes an outrageous farce after something goes very wrong, because someone in the situation simply refuses to admit that anything is out of the ordinary.
This is the core of all good theatre. Slapstick is easy, but everything else requires actors denying, then accepting, reality.
Groundhog day would have sucked if BM had just immediately accepted his situation.
The Terminator would have sucked if Sarah Connor initially believed Reese. Or the cops believed, etc.
The entire Faulty Towers series.
Heck, 80% of all jokes are about this: the puchline is always someone denying or explaining the reality of the situation. E.g.:
"Bob, thank god you found me - robbers took everything I had, stripped me naked, and tied me to this tree!" Bob sez, while removing his pants: "well Vern, this just ain't your lucky day."
Um, given the US transitioned from quoting in mostly $1/8s to quoting in pennies during that time period, that is really not very surprising. Prior to that, the 12.5 cent tick size acted as a low-pass filter.
You've hit on the home-schooling paradox. The h-s crowd is pretty much two different demographics:
1. Highly educated parents with enough money that one adult can stay at home and educate the children better than a school could.
2. Ideologically extreme parents who don't want their kids exposed to ideas they don't like.
Because the data on h-s kids is lumped together, it looks awesome: lots of kids going to ivy league schools, etc. Tease it apart, and not so good: an elite doing well, some students going on to get diplomas at ideological "colleges," and most just GEDiing out without a real education.
Generally, very little. Yes, most low-level things in CS have been patented in some sense (XOR cursors, one-click checkout, run-length image encoding, multi-hash lookup, stacktrace error display strategies.)
In theory, all software development grinds to a halt. In practice, no one gives a damn.
Trying to enforce a very broad software patent usually just gets the entire patent invalidated. Even if you win, you get to play whack-a-mole with a thousand open-source projects. And most software is bespoke stuff within corporations: good luck tracking that down to enforce patent claims.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court. Bad press, skeptical judge (unless you are suing a direct competitor,) workarounds from the peanut gallery provided pro-bono, countersuits from others with overlapping clainms: it gets ugly fast. Better to just cross-license and get on with life.