1. I expect 20M LOC within three years, 5x30=150 2. No way we can hire a perfect A-team at this size, so, 3 to 1 and try to get some talent we can nurture: 150x3=450 3. We are aiming to replace 100M+ LOC, so need people with expertise in the current systems (say 600 people.) 4. Chuck in a few PMs, auditors, HR, etc: that's another 100.
Agreed. That's why my group implemented a rather brutal "it must be done so that an average person can understand it" policy. We reject code for spelling mistakes, bad idioms, pointless design pattern layers, etc.
Of course, you need senior management buy-in to do this kind of thing: you have to able to fire managers who don't get the "code produced by programmers is just like text produced by lawyers" kind of thing.
I wish I had a dollar for every screwup who tried to justify her project with "but it works!" Sorry, I don't care. It's a complete mess. You lose, clear out your desk. We will rewrite.
The article also goes on about that there's no documentation, no process etc. From my experience agile projects are better documented via tests than other projects via "documentation". And because of this maintenance is easier in the long run.
Agile is not an excuse to lower quality and neglect software engineering.
Exactly right. Tests are requirements are documentation.
Want a new feature? Add a test. Want to report a bug? Add a test. Want to understand the system? Read the tests.
My current project has >1K devs, and >1M LOC. The doc is under a hundred pages, and that is mostly "how-to" stuff. There are also hours of "why we did X" videos to explain the design. Almost no comments in the code: if the code is unclear or poor, we just reject it: no one is allowed to use comments to explain how something works.
One critical module (approx 20K LOC) has >1K tests. Its release cycle is essentially daily, numerous devs in various teams have contributed to it, and it almost never breaks. The test pack is what allows it to be agile and replace >1M LOC of legacy system code.
Actually rail lines aren't a problem -- they are stretched when installed so that when the air temperature is ~100 degrees there's no stress on the line.
Dead on right. It's all about peers. At a good (top 10) firm I joined, in the first week two senior people asked me to review a) the mail one was about to send, and b) the math in a document. The culture was seriously "we look professional, we do not let mistakes get out into the wild."
Now I'm at a much larger firm. Some of the mail I receive sounds as if it were penned by someone with final stage rabies. Makes me think the author's entire management chain isn't doing its job.
Um, you're a technologist in charge of a network of computers, and you want to use a manual system to document your own network so that "other members of the administration and support teams can find devices on the network"?
This is like some dystopian sic-fi satire.
That "network" thing you have, with all its "devices," can actually tell you what it's doing! Better yet, some of those devices can "execute code," which is technology talk for stuff like generating lists of devices and their attributes, putting the results in a spreadsheet, etc.
Google "ping" and "traceroute." Then work your way into the 1990s, then the 2000s, then take a look at some of the tools we have today.
So we pull up the non-farm payroll numbers for the past 40 years. Chart the time series. Nothing. Do some stats on the data: nothing significant on a 4 year cycle. Hell, let's do the stats on NFP^2 (maybe there is a volatility effect?) Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Businesses may be hesitant to make major investments in hiring (or anything) until they know which way the wind will blow after November.
Businesses hire because they need more people to do the work they have in the pipeline. Outside of a few firms in Washington, presidential elections have about 0% impact on that.
Anyone saying otherwise is has either never run a business or has an agenda to push.
Microsoft, like RIM, is basically doing unloved corporate infrastructure at this point. They are seriously 3 iPhone apps away from becoming a non-entity:
Mail: I get 1000+ messages a day. I ignore and/or delete. Calendar: Still useful, but not as a real calendar, I have triple booked time slots. Powerpoint: Mostly just a tool to get the pacing of a talk right. Excel: When's the last time you saw a what-if scenario in excel? This is now just a data presentation tool.
There are N startup ideas that can grab $1B from microsoft in a few years. When the young crowd are ignoring them, and us old-timers have our PAs deal with the tools, you gotta figure they are hurting.
Seriously, the last hot person I saw using a Microsoft OS had taped "INTP" over the logo on their laptop. Microsoft == ConEd.
Manhattan is one of the richest places on earth (in terms of income per sq mile.) It could handle a 10 meter sea level rise if it needed to: 40 miles of dikes, beef up the pumping infrastructure, etc, is quite doable for one of the world's major financial centers.
Florida, Louisiana, the Carolinas, sorry, you are in the bye-bye zone.
The "hire a great CEO" problem is very similar to the "hire a great programmer" problem.
The real deal in both roles commands a huge salary, and is totally worth it. The trouble is, if your company doesn't already have one, it has no expertise to judge if the person they want to hire is worth the money.
The second-rate software company that hires a $500/hour consultant is no different from the big firm that hires a $5000/hour CEO. They have little ability to judge skills, and so tend to get suckered by a smooth, well-groomed candidate.
The firms with the expertise in place (e.g. Google for technical hires, Goldman Sachs for management hires) do not make this mistake, and shell out big bucks for the people who are actually worth it.
The few people who benefited from my work (besides myself) were already so wealthy (the minimum net worth requirements are ridiculous) that every single one of them could stick their money in a savings account and spend it at a rate of $200K a year for the rest of their life with no risk of going broke. Hard to get excited by the prospect of letting them spend $300K a year...
You can add 50% value and it's hard for you to get excited?
Why not just open the conversation with "what in IT is holding you back from making more money?" You will get an earful. Fix it. You will get rewarded. That is the hedge fund way.
Maybe I'm oblivious to age discrimination or it isn't as prevalent with sysadmin types. I'm 49 yrs old with no degree and have done very well since being laid off in 2009. I am making 25% more money at the expense of a longer commute which is offset by working from home part time. I don't think I'm a statistical outlier, I am mundane skillset wise and quite inarticulate. When should the ageism kick in? 55? 60? I'm not bragging just trying to understand why experienced coders have this trouble but the datacenter / infrastructure people don't seem to have as much trouble.
The reason is this:
Management, even if totally technically clueless, can roughly evaluate an older sysadmin based on how his career has progressed in terms of size of site administered, etc. It's not a great metric, but a person running a 2K desktop, 20K compute farm installation is a pretty safe bet just based on the trust that their current management has in them.
That same management, faced with a coder who worked on a 10 MLOC project, has absolutely no basis to evaluate if he was a star or a negative contributor. They can ask for a code sample, but they have no way to judge it unless they already have an expert coding staff (in which case they are no longer technically clueless.)
So programming jobs bi-furcate into the $200K+ jobs in which firms are able to identify experts, and the rest (hire the cheapest) where the firms cannot test for quality.
Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
This is basic science. You are like a person saying "in high school, I got to have sex with 160lbs women, but now I only get sex with 180lbs women, so Anthropogenic Women Largening is obviously happening." Now me, I still bag the baseline 115 in La Perla, so scientifically (based on sample size) the effect you are whining about is just not happening.
You simply do not understand weather at all. Your rudimentary facts about humidity and temperature differentials and winds and stuff prove you are a fool. Every basic weather site explains that if the temperature goes up, the snow goes away. Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow. Simple logic therefore proves that if there is snow, AGW is false.
This is not true if you are talking about government positions, other than the military (why should they be expected to enjoy the freedoms they are supposedly dying for?).
As I am sure you know, the military holds a unique position in any government (they have the guns, and thus the ability to effect change unilaterally.) That's why we severely constrain what a soldier can do when representing himself as a soldier. In the old days, "crossing the Rubicon" was automatic treason, not an expression of freedom.
That's the key point. As soon as Alice or Bob lose isolation (e.g. by deciding on a stock trade,) the state collapses and there is no information from the future.
So, are they working on something that makes light travel a long distance and/or go slower before making that "decision", thus achieving a substantial delay that could actually be used for "time travelling information"?
Under the simple interpretation, nothing "goes back in time." It's essentially two Schrodinger's cats (A & B) being in a superimposed state for several nano-seconds. Then V adds a constraint, and eventually the A, B, and V information bubbles interact and collapse into an observed state that the scientists record.
The meta-computer that runs our universe probably printed a log message like 'ATOMIC MERGE-OP unexpected long delay on eval: d=7m, t=23ns.' If scientists persist in this sort of research, the person running this universe will probably just ^C the app.
C will teach you how computers work. Python will teach you how programming works.
Ideally, you want to know both. The question is just which one you want to learn first (and if you even want to learn about the other one.)
There's no right answer. My 8 year old daughter figured out Universal Turning Machines from watching minecraft videos*. If she wants education I'd probably teach her Python. But I could also see showing her NAND gates, working up to a general purpose computer, then C. It's all about her interests and aptitude.
* She ran into my room excitedly to say: minecraft runs on a computer. I can build a computer in minecraft. So it could do minecraft. I probed a bit, and she explained that it was just like a book ("Diary of a Wimpy Kid" was her example) referencing the book itself by name. Of course, her current career choice is helicopter door gunner, so nothing may come of this.
Seriously, who cares about what happened 5 years ago?
When did you last look at that porn clip you downloaded in 2002? How many emails do you really need to keep for more than a month? Would Battlezone 2 even run anymore if you tried it?
When did you last get audited by the IRS? Screw that, my accountant should have copies anyway, and most info was electronically reported anyway.
Between the cloud, my iPhone, 4 synced home boxes, a drop box for some important stuff, Google, I can recover anything non-trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way for plain English to be as clear as code. Code does what it says it does. English says what it wants or thinks should happen.
Seriously, it's the difference between having sexing with someone and reading a story about having sex with someone.
5 devs, 700K LOC seems reasonable.
1. I expect 20M LOC within three years, 5x30=150
2. No way we can hire a perfect A-team at this size, so, 3 to 1 and try to get some talent we can nurture: 150x3=450
3. We are aiming to replace 100M+ LOC, so need people with expertise in the current systems (say 600 people.)
4. Chuck in a few PMs, auditors, HR, etc: that's another 100.
Welcome to big project hell.
Agreed. That's why my group implemented a rather brutal "it must be done so that an average person can understand it" policy. We reject code for spelling mistakes, bad idioms, pointless design pattern layers, etc.
Of course, you need senior management buy-in to do this kind of thing: you have to able to fire managers who don't get the "code produced by programmers is just like text produced by lawyers" kind of thing.
I wish I had a dollar for every screwup who tried to justify her project with "but it works!" Sorry, I don't care. It's a complete mess. You lose, clear out your desk. We will rewrite.
Unless by >1M LOC, you could have also have said >10M LOC, your example doesn't seem to speak very well for agile.
My last two projects were 50M LOC and >10M LOC. Both agile.
My current project is only a couple of million lines of code because it is young. I am planning for 20M LOC by 2016.
Where's the tests?
The article also goes on about that there's no documentation, no process etc. From my experience agile projects are better documented via tests than other projects via "documentation". And because of this maintenance is easier in the long run.
Agile is not an excuse to lower quality and neglect software engineering.
Exactly right. Tests are requirements are documentation.
Want a new feature? Add a test.
Want to report a bug? Add a test.
Want to understand the system? Read the tests.
My current project has >1K devs, and >1M LOC. The doc is under a hundred pages, and that is mostly "how-to" stuff. There are also hours of "why we did X" videos to explain the design. Almost no comments in the code: if the code is unclear or poor, we just reject it: no one is allowed to use comments to explain how something works.
One critical module (approx 20K LOC) has >1K tests. Its release cycle is essentially daily, numerous devs in various teams have contributed to it, and it almost never breaks. The test pack is what allows it to be agile and replace >1M LOC of legacy system code.
Actually rail lines aren't a problem -- they are stretched when installed so that when the air temperature is ~100 degrees there's no stress on the line.
Until you get outside of the design parameters:
http://www.inquisitr.com/271960/d-c-metro-derailment-caused-by-heat-kink/
Dead on right. It's all about peers. At a good (top 10) firm I joined, in the first week two senior people asked me to review a) the mail one was about to send, and b) the math in a document. The culture was seriously "we look professional, we do not let mistakes get out into the wild."
Now I'm at a much larger firm. Some of the mail I receive sounds as if it were penned by someone with final stage rabies. Makes me think the author's entire management chain isn't doing its job.
Maybe you'd like to mark your "inflection points" on that chart. We'll give you bonus points if you can ascribe meaning to them without laughing.
My seven year old does better charting hot temperatures to why she really needs an ice cream.
Um, you're a technologist in charge of a network of computers, and you want to use a manual system to document your own network so that "other members of the administration and support teams can find devices on the network"?
This is like some dystopian sic-fi satire.
That "network" thing you have, with all its "devices," can actually tell you what it's doing! Better yet, some of those devices can "execute code," which is technology talk for stuff like generating lists of devices and their attributes, putting the results in a spreadsheet, etc.
Google "ping" and "traceroute." Then work your way into the 1990s, then the 2000s, then take a look at some of the tools we have today.
Really?
So we pull up the non-farm payroll numbers for the past 40 years. Chart the time series. Nothing. Do some stats on the data: nothing significant on a 4 year cycle. Hell, let's do the stats on NFP^2 (maybe there is a volatility effect?) Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
You are wrong.
Businesses may be hesitant to make major investments in hiring (or anything) until they know which way the wind will blow after November.
Businesses hire because they need more people to do the work they have in the pipeline. Outside of a few firms in Washington, presidential elections have about 0% impact on that.
Anyone saying otherwise is has either never run a business or has an agenda to push.
Nice charts, and on the money.
Microsoft, like RIM, is basically doing unloved corporate infrastructure at this point. They are seriously 3 iPhone apps away from becoming a non-entity:
Mail: I get 1000+ messages a day. I ignore and/or delete.
Calendar: Still useful, but not as a real calendar, I have triple booked time slots.
Powerpoint: Mostly just a tool to get the pacing of a talk right.
Excel: When's the last time you saw a what-if scenario in excel? This is now just a data presentation tool.
There are N startup ideas that can grab $1B from microsoft in a few years. When the young crowd are ignoring them, and us old-timers have our PAs deal with the tools, you gotta figure they are hurting.
Seriously, the last hot person I saw using a Microsoft OS had taped "INTP" over the logo on their laptop. Microsoft == ConEd.
Manhattan is one of the richest places on earth (in terms of income per sq mile.) It could handle a 10 meter sea level rise if it needed to: 40 miles of dikes, beef up the pumping infrastructure, etc, is quite doable for one of the world's major financial centers.
Florida, Louisiana, the Carolinas, sorry, you are in the bye-bye zone.
The "hire a great CEO" problem is very similar to the "hire a great programmer" problem.
The real deal in both roles commands a huge salary, and is totally worth it. The trouble is, if your company doesn't already have one, it has no expertise to judge if the person they want to hire is worth the money.
The second-rate software company that hires a $500/hour consultant is no different from the big firm that hires a $5000/hour CEO. They have little ability to judge skills, and so tend to get suckered by a smooth, well-groomed candidate.
The firms with the expertise in place (e.g. Google for technical hires, Goldman Sachs for management hires) do not make this mistake, and shell out big bucks for the people who are actually worth it.
The few people who benefited from my work (besides myself) were already so wealthy (the minimum net worth requirements are ridiculous) that every single one of them could stick their money in a savings account and spend it at a rate of $200K a year for the rest of their life with no risk of going broke. Hard to get excited by the prospect of letting them spend $300K a year...
You can add 50% value and it's hard for you to get excited?
Why not just open the conversation with "what in IT is holding you back from making more money?" You will get an earful. Fix it. You will get rewarded. That is the hedge fund way.
Maybe I'm oblivious to age discrimination or it isn't as prevalent with sysadmin types. I'm 49 yrs old with no degree and have done very well since being laid off in 2009. I am making 25% more money at the expense of a longer commute which is offset by working from home part time. I don't think I'm a statistical outlier, I am mundane skillset wise and quite inarticulate. When should the ageism kick in? 55? 60? I'm not bragging just trying to understand why experienced coders have this trouble but the datacenter / infrastructure people don't seem to have as much trouble.
The reason is this:
Management, even if totally technically clueless, can roughly evaluate an older sysadmin based on how his career has progressed in terms of size of site administered, etc. It's not a great metric, but a person running a 2K desktop, 20K compute farm installation is a pretty safe bet just based on the trust that their current management has in them.
That same management, faced with a coder who worked on a 10 MLOC project, has absolutely no basis to evaluate if he was a star or a negative contributor. They can ask for a code sample, but they have no way to judge it unless they already have an expert coding staff (in which case they are no longer technically clueless.)
So programming jobs bi-furcate into the $200K+ jobs in which firms are able to identify experts, and the rest (hire the cheapest) where the firms cannot test for quality.
Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow.
Yes, but 90 degree days have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I live in New England and I can attest that months where the temperature is around 30 degrees are much snowier than months where the temperatures are in the single digits. I can also attest that 30 degrees is much warmer than 10 degrees, but if you don't believe me ask a 9 year-old.
This is basic science. You are like a person saying "in high school, I got to have sex with 160lbs women, but now I only get sex with 180lbs women, so Anthropogenic Women Largening is obviously happening." Now me, I still bag the baseline 115 in La Perla, so scientifically (based on sample size) the effect you are whining about is just not happening.
You simply do not understand weather at all. Your rudimentary facts about humidity and temperature differentials and winds and stuff prove you are a fool. Every basic weather site explains that if the temperature goes up, the snow goes away. Even an 9 year old can understand this: it's 90 degrees outside, therefore no snow. Simple logic therefore proves that if there is snow, AGW is false.
HTH
This is not true if you are talking about government positions, other than the military (why should they be expected to enjoy the freedoms they are supposedly dying for?).
As I am sure you know, the military holds a unique position in any government (they have the guns, and thus the ability to effect change unilaterally.) That's why we severely constrain what a soldier can do when representing himself as a soldier. In the old days, "crossing the Rubicon" was automatic treason, not an expression of freedom.
That's the key point. As soon as Alice or Bob lose isolation (e.g. by deciding on a stock trade,) the state collapses and there is no information from the future.
So, are they working on something that makes light travel a long distance and/or go slower before making that "decision", thus achieving a substantial delay that could actually be used for "time travelling information"?
Under the simple interpretation, nothing "goes back in time." It's essentially two Schrodinger's cats (A & B) being in a superimposed state for several nano-seconds. Then V adds a constraint, and eventually the A, B, and V information bubbles interact and collapse into an observed state that the scientists record.
The meta-computer that runs our universe probably printed a log message like 'ATOMIC MERGE-OP unexpected long delay on eval: d=7m, t=23ns.' If scientists persist in this sort of research, the person running this universe will probably just ^C the app.
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game.
Most people use the term "most people" as shorthand for "me and the people I associate with."
In reality, in the USA, "most people" either have to make a hard choice to buy a $20 game or have no problem at all paying $70.
C will teach you how computers work.
Python will teach you how programming works.
Ideally, you want to know both. The question is just which one you want to learn first (and if you even want to learn about the other one.)
There's no right answer. My 8 year old daughter figured out Universal Turning Machines from watching minecraft videos*. If she wants education I'd probably teach her Python. But I could also see showing her NAND gates, working up to a general purpose computer, then C. It's all about her interests and aptitude.
* She ran into my room excitedly to say: minecraft runs on a computer. I can build a computer in minecraft. So it could do minecraft. I probed a bit, and she explained that it was just like a book ("Diary of a Wimpy Kid" was her example) referencing the book itself by name. Of course, her current career choice is helicopter door gunner, so nothing may come of this.
Seriously, who cares about what happened 5 years ago?
When did you last look at that porn clip you downloaded in 2002? How many emails do you really need to keep for more than a month? Would Battlezone 2 even run anymore if you tried it?
When did you last get audited by the IRS? Screw that, my accountant should have copies anyway, and most info was electronically reported anyway.
Between the cloud, my iPhone, 4 synced home boxes, a drop box for some important stuff, Google, I can recover anything non-trivial.
Welcome to global climate change. That billion dollars of infrastructure of reservoirs, pipes, dams, etc, is now a skate park.