A friend of mine in 7th grade signed up for a cosmetology class thinking it was cosmology, and boy was he surprised. At least it was only one of those 1 hours per week deals to fill in a gap with our weird rotating schedule (7 classes for 6 periods).
Good book, and one of the central tenets is that in a technical organization there will be a competence inversion. Good engineers will defy the Peter Principle by way of "Creative Incompetence", such that excellent technical leaders will stay at the bottom levels due to bad personalities, poor hygene, and similar.
Excellent book, but expect to be depressed as you see the behaviors it talks about in your own organization.
Dead wood needs to be cleared out, and I am curious if that is what is going on, or if it is just creating a climate of fear. Dead wood generally doesn't up and leave because of a bad review, good talent with other options does. Think Wally vs. Dilbert. Wally learns to burrow in year after year, Dilbert pulls his hair our over the failures he didn't cause but gets blamed for. So in the common stack system, dead wood tends to accumulate despite poor reviews, and good guys who just had a rough year end up motivated to leave.
Cubeville is bad enough. I'm having to overhear folks politics the next row over right now (not my politics...). For real design work you need to be able to shut out enough outside noise and distraction to really immerse yourself for a couple hours at a shot, and a door would be awesome right now...
I'm curious if all those particulants are partially contributing to current drought conditions by seeding clouds to dump their load into the Pacific before getting to the West coast.
A point of frustration is that every gosh darn system has gotten idiosyncrasies about these extra characters, and the end result is bad practices.
Somehow authentication needs to go away from the password, as it has been empirically proven many times over that people will screw it up. With dozens of accounts out there, all with slightly different rules for both username and password, I end up trying my top few burner combos and then go into the annoying reset pit of despair.
My horrifying to me is Fidelity. They REQUIRE you to use a number only password, which is about as weak as you can get for surviving a brute force attack.
Interviewers all too often forget that this is a two-way process. I am evaluating them as much as they are evaluating me. In a recent interview a manager (not the hiring manager) really started to put the screws to me about my job history, really harping on how long I'd been at certain places that are just plain normal these days. Engineering has become somewhat nomadic, moving on as contracts dry up, or after the place gets bought up to be run like a puppy mill.
My takeaway was they were out of touch the industry they were looking to break into, and further probing by me bore this out. At that point I was still smart enough not to "blow up" the interview, as as others have noted, niche industries are alarmingly small and interbred. You never know who you will run across again down the road.
I can tell you as someone who has interviewed a lot of engineering candidates, PhD's tend to get a very skeptical eye. Occasionally you find a great one, but usually they are a nightmare of disfunction, and almost never anything in the middle. It is too bad we can't accept more of a skills based compensation model, instead of one that automatically pays a large premium for an extra slip of paper, no matter how much of walking horror show it makes you skill wise.
Even hospice is just trying to manage the pain and suffering while waiting for death to come. It can be an agonizing experience depending on what is leading to death. The loved one is often still miserable, just that the aim is not to cure/fix/solve the underlying condition, just to keep the associated pain and suffering managed as best as possible.
Plenty of terminal conditions do not respond well to pain killers (especially some cancers). Other conditions, like mouth/throat cancer can literally result in the person starving to death once they are unable to eat.
Nobody is mandating forced euthanasia one people, rather it is a modest request to keep options open when a sick or dying person really has no good options left.
I helped my grandmother in her final days, and it forever ended any doubts I had about the ethics of assisted suicide. Very little will wrench your heart harder than listening helplessly to a suffering relative curse and beg God to put and end to things. In the epilogue it turns out that all three of the family members that were present came very close to offering the entire bottle of morphine she had at different points. I wish it had been legal, I would have done so without regret.
Yep, you got it. When I run the math, it just is not in my favor yet.
I drive a truck now, and have been looking to get a second car to commute with to keep the miles off the truck, as I like having a truck but never want to have to buy another one. When I run the math on a Leaf, or Focus EV the break even point is way out there. $35k ballpark vs. ~15k for gasoline. At $4/gallon that is 5000 gallons of gas for a break even point of roughly 200k miles. Given my commuting use of about 5k miles per year I am looking at a 40 year break even compared to a 40 mpg econobox. I'll still be racking up about 5k miles per year on long trips in my truck. So for me, despite the desire, the math stinks.
I have seen this trend on a lot of the for sale Leaf's, commuting modest distances doesn't rack up many miles. Lots of folks end up selling simply because they change jobs and end up with a long commute, but the range isn't adequate. Sort of a catch 22.
Yes, you are actually totally correct. The problem we have today is we are in the twilight zone between automation and human control. A simple autopilot alleviates the pilot from drudgery and reduces fatigue related human errors. But we have moved so far from that to a point where it promotes ineptitude, but is not self sufficient for the hard crap.
I think we need to see rules that curtail how much an automation system does to just automate the drudgery (smooth level flight at cruising altitude) unless it is certified to do it ALL. Until such time that automated systems can handle bad weather, false sensor readings, and other crisis at least as well as a good pilot, they should not be given too much responsibility. The same steps are already applied to a co-pilot, he doesn't get the pilots seat as soon as he can handle the easy crap, he has to put in thousands of hours as co-pilot before he gets full command of the aircraft.
Wrong. There is Quit Pro Quo of talk to me and answer my questions or you are getting a fine. The cop has discretion in writing you a ticket, something that has always irked me. Having power plus too much discretion means that those of without blonde hair and a D-cup get more tickets than those those that do, and those folks who assert their rights can get tooled for doing so.
It really appears like all this mining for microseconds is a giant waste of resources, and very prone to corruption and mis-use. I see no value in it for 401k folks, or businesses looking to sell stock to fund new ventures.
Why not institute trading on a minute scale? Trades are all resolved between:00 and:01 seconds, and you have 59 seconds to arrange the next set of trades. This would allow a level playing field between humans and machines, and it is hard to believe that trading more often than on a minute by minute basis adds any positive value to the economy.
I know there are solutions out there, but pure GHz means little to me these days. I want to actually do stuff with my PC besides play games and surf the web, my tablet has taken over those duties.
Maybe a USB Geek port so even my tablet can get in on the action?
Yep. If UPS or Fedex had a lost package rate anywhere near what the airlines do there would be riots in the street and mass lawsuits by big shippers who had to eat the losses. Imagine if you had a Jeff Bezos/Amazon using their rather large soap box to bash a bad shipping company.
How come such bad service and terrible (i.e. non-existent) bag tracking is just fine for airlines handling your neglige, but not OK for a UPS/Fedex getting it to you in the first place?
Heck, a $4 cable from Chine via ebay gets better tracking than my luggage on a $2k trip to Alaska.
Agreed, too slow, too many bland blue pages. At the very least someone with a half a days time should program up a simple algorithm to only display things that are not solid boring blue.
Like evolutionary forces, the free market ensures the survival of the fit (good enough to keep going), not the fittest as so many people have erroneously come to believe. Unless a product is bad enough to sink a company, the company will stumble on with the same folks making the next generation of products. Bad management almost assures that even if the company halves in size as the result of a string of bad products they will not actually fix their internal company problems, as management can hardly tell a good employee from a terrible one (heck they look on the mirror daily and fail to immediately quit for the good of the company...).
So the free market will never drive companies to perfection, only weed out the weakest serial non-performers at best. Even then, those weeded out are weeded out based on profit, not product excellence (see: Firefly). At worst bad companies will have other large operations that will let them subsidize terrible behaviors for decades in their badly run groups (see: Microsoft).
A lot of this boils down to the engineers often having neither a clue there is a problem, nor the power to do anything about it when they have a clue. A group of good engineers can be powerless in the face of an awful product roadmap managed by a pointy haired buffoon. See Putt's Law for many more details.
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A friend of mine in 7th grade signed up for a cosmetology class thinking it was cosmology, and boy was he surprised. At least it was only one of those 1 hours per week deals to fill in a gap with our weird rotating schedule (7 classes for 6 periods).
Good book, and one of the central tenets is that in a technical organization there will be a competence inversion. Good engineers will defy the Peter Principle by way of "Creative Incompetence", such that excellent technical leaders will stay at the bottom levels due to bad personalities, poor hygene, and similar.
Excellent book, but expect to be depressed as you see the behaviors it talks about in your own organization.
Meh.
Yeah, that caught my eye too.
Dead wood needs to be cleared out, and I am curious if that is what is going on, or if it is just creating a climate of fear. Dead wood generally doesn't up and leave because of a bad review, good talent with other options does. Think Wally vs. Dilbert. Wally learns to burrow in year after year, Dilbert pulls his hair our over the failures he didn't cause but gets blamed for. So in the common stack system, dead wood tends to accumulate despite poor reviews, and good guys who just had a rough year end up motivated to leave.
The head of engineering at a former job told the crowd after a nasty layoff "We are ALL temporary employees" several times over.
Get used to it. In most jobs your loyalty is purchased in 2 week increments. Check your contract, or rather your lack thereof.
Cubeville is bad enough. I'm having to overhear folks politics the next row over right now (not my politics...). For real design work you need to be able to shut out enough outside noise and distraction to really immerse yourself for a couple hours at a shot, and a door would be awesome right now...
I'm curious if all those particulants are partially contributing to current drought conditions by seeding clouds to dump their load into the Pacific before getting to the West coast.
This.
A point of frustration is that every gosh darn system has gotten idiosyncrasies about these extra characters, and the end result is bad practices.
Somehow authentication needs to go away from the password, as it has been empirically proven many times over that people will screw it up. With dozens of accounts out there, all with slightly different rules for both username and password, I end up trying my top few burner combos and then go into the annoying reset pit of despair.
My horrifying to me is Fidelity. They REQUIRE you to use a number only password, which is about as weak as you can get for surviving a brute force attack.
Interviewers all too often forget that this is a two-way process. I am evaluating them as much as they are evaluating me. In a recent interview a manager (not the hiring manager) really started to put the screws to me about my job history, really harping on how long I'd been at certain places that are just plain normal these days. Engineering has become somewhat nomadic, moving on as contracts dry up, or after the place gets bought up to be run like a puppy mill.
My takeaway was they were out of touch the industry they were looking to break into, and further probing by me bore this out. At that point I was still smart enough not to "blow up" the interview, as as others have noted, niche industries are alarmingly small and interbred. You never know who you will run across again down the road.
Excuse me while I go take care of my sudden onset nausea...
At least methane breaks down with a half life of about 20 years. CO2 will live eternally until it is absorbed by the ocean, or consumed by a plant.
It sounds like this stuff has no good mechanism to be taken out of the air.
I can tell you as someone who has interviewed a lot of engineering candidates, PhD's tend to get a very skeptical eye. Occasionally you find a great one, but usually they are a nightmare of disfunction, and almost never anything in the middle. It is too bad we can't accept more of a skills based compensation model, instead of one that automatically pays a large premium for an extra slip of paper, no matter how much of walking horror show it makes you skill wise.
Even hospice is just trying to manage the pain and suffering while waiting for death to come. It can be an agonizing experience depending on what is leading to death. The loved one is often still miserable, just that the aim is not to cure/fix/solve the underlying condition, just to keep the associated pain and suffering managed as best as possible.
Plenty of terminal conditions do not respond well to pain killers (especially some cancers). Other conditions, like mouth/throat cancer can literally result in the person starving to death once they are unable to eat.
Nobody is mandating forced euthanasia one people, rather it is a modest request to keep options open when a sick or dying person really has no good options left.
I helped my grandmother in her final days, and it forever ended any doubts I had about the ethics of assisted suicide. Very little will wrench your heart harder than listening helplessly to a suffering relative curse and beg God to put and end to things. In the epilogue it turns out that all three of the family members that were present came very close to offering the entire bottle of morphine she had at different points. I wish it had been legal, I would have done so without regret.
Yep, you got it. When I run the math, it just is not in my favor yet.
I drive a truck now, and have been looking to get a second car to commute with to keep the miles off the truck, as I like having a truck but never want to have to buy another one. When I run the math on a Leaf, or Focus EV the break even point is way out there. $35k ballpark vs. ~15k for gasoline. At $4/gallon that is 5000 gallons of gas for a break even point of roughly 200k miles. Given my commuting use of about 5k miles per year I am looking at a 40 year break even compared to a 40 mpg econobox. I'll still be racking up about 5k miles per year on long trips in my truck. So for me, despite the desire, the math stinks.
I have seen this trend on a lot of the for sale Leaf's, commuting modest distances doesn't rack up many miles. Lots of folks end up selling simply because they change jobs and end up with a long commute, but the range isn't adequate. Sort of a catch 22.
Yes, you are actually totally correct. The problem we have today is we are in the twilight zone between automation and human control. A simple autopilot alleviates the pilot from drudgery and reduces fatigue related human errors. But we have moved so far from that to a point where it promotes ineptitude, but is not self sufficient for the hard crap.
I think we need to see rules that curtail how much an automation system does to just automate the drudgery (smooth level flight at cruising altitude) unless it is certified to do it ALL. Until such time that automated systems can handle bad weather, false sensor readings, and other crisis at least as well as a good pilot, they should not be given too much responsibility. The same steps are already applied to a co-pilot, he doesn't get the pilots seat as soon as he can handle the easy crap, he has to put in thousands of hours as co-pilot before he gets full command of the aircraft.
I got it just fine.
Wrong. There is Quit Pro Quo of talk to me and answer my questions or you are getting a fine. The cop has discretion in writing you a ticket, something that has always irked me. Having power plus too much discretion means that those of without blonde hair and a D-cup get more tickets than those those that do, and those folks who assert their rights can get tooled for doing so.
It really appears like all this mining for microseconds is a giant waste of resources, and very prone to corruption and mis-use. I see no value in it for 401k folks, or businesses looking to sell stock to fund new ventures.
Why not institute trading on a minute scale? Trades are all resolved between :00 and :01 seconds, and you have 59 seconds to arrange the next set of trades. This would allow a level playing field between humans and machines, and it is hard to believe that trading more often than on a minute by minute basis adds any positive value to the economy.
I know there are solutions out there, but pure GHz means little to me these days. I want to actually do stuff with my PC besides play games and surf the web, my tablet has taken over those duties.
Maybe a USB Geek port so even my tablet can get in on the action?
While some folks choose to pronounce giga as jigga, it always makes me cringe and think less of them. Ugh.
Yep. If UPS or Fedex had a lost package rate anywhere near what the airlines do there would be riots in the street and mass lawsuits by big shippers who had to eat the losses. Imagine if you had a Jeff Bezos/Amazon using their rather large soap box to bash a bad shipping company.
How come such bad service and terrible (i.e. non-existent) bag tracking is just fine for airlines handling your neglige, but not OK for a UPS/Fedex getting it to you in the first place?
Heck, a $4 cable from Chine via ebay gets better tracking than my luggage on a $2k trip to Alaska.
Agreed, too slow, too many bland blue pages. At the very least someone with a half a days time should program up a simple algorithm to only display things that are not solid boring blue.
Effective marketing is often cheaper, easier, and more profitable than good engineering. Nuff said.
Like evolutionary forces, the free market ensures the survival of the fit (good enough to keep going), not the fittest as so many people have erroneously come to believe. Unless a product is bad enough to sink a company, the company will stumble on with the same folks making the next generation of products. Bad management almost assures that even if the company halves in size as the result of a string of bad products they will not actually fix their internal company problems, as management can hardly tell a good employee from a terrible one (heck they look on the mirror daily and fail to immediately quit for the good of the company...).
So the free market will never drive companies to perfection, only weed out the weakest serial non-performers at best. Even then, those weeded out are weeded out based on profit, not product excellence (see: Firefly). At worst bad companies will have other large operations that will let them subsidize terrible behaviors for decades in their badly run groups (see: Microsoft).
A lot of this boils down to the engineers often having neither a clue there is a problem, nor the power to do anything about it when they have a clue. A group of good engineers can be powerless in the face of an awful product roadmap managed by a pointy haired buffoon. See Putt's Law for many more details.