I'm sure somebody with a bright MBA father will figure out that they can spare the child the challenges of learning anything themselves and maximize the fun of specifying what they want the program to do;)
Nobody is walking into EBGames to buy music. Why they hell are they trying to plug music players there? If they'd like to cut some costs, fire the marketoid who came up with that brain fart. If it's going to be a legitimate music device it needs to be in electronics and music stores, not game shops taking up space next to the Pokemon trading cards.
One of the quickest things I learned after only a few months out of college is that the guys
sitting in the ivory towers of my university were there for a reason: they didn't know a thing about working in
industry. Many had never spent any time actually applying knowledge and skills from the piles of degrees they had earned, or had only worked 20+ years ago in some corporate research lab (read same environment as academia). Like my compilers instructor who went off about how the Ariane 5 rocket failure would have been avoided if they had used his pet language (Haskell). The real answer is of course software testing, not silver bullet languages. That's not the type of thing you'll learn in an ivory tower setting though.
What they didn't tell you is that you need to spend a bit more money and only put forth 1/2 the effort of your CS degree (your real degree) to get an MBA so that you can deal with the dipshits who run the world. The CS degree alone lines you up for a bumpy ride at best while you put together the business sense that your engineering courses are structured in complete contrast to on your own in your working life. I would tell anyone who wanted to do CS today to minor or get a double bachelors in business (if not, enjoy a light couple of semesters and stick around to get an MBA - it's a non-thesis "masters" for cryin' out loud!).
If you have skills that can't readily be replaced by an untrained foreigner, then you are WASTING the time and money spent on that self-study and new job opportunities.
Uh. No. I didn't say anything about the foreigner being untrained. How do you know that your doctor is qualified to examine you? Your specialist can perfrom surgery? Your lawyer knows enough court procedure to stand a chance of representing you? A body of their peers stakes the group reputation that they can do so. Now tell me, how many MBAs can recognize an experienced software developer? I'll give you a hint: they think thier 16 year old kid "built" a great web site on myspace.com, so how hard can the stuff you do be. They have no freaking clue and there's no way to identify quality IT work from crap when you don't know what you're doing.
If offshore outsourcing was SOO wonderfull and IT work was SOO simple, all western IT work would have dried up by now. But you know what? It's not wonderfull. It's not simple. It takes exactly what I said above. It's just taken time for the recognition that not all skill sets are equal.
If your skills are not demanded by a market which is satisfied with low quality and low wage employees, learn better skills. Don't walk around complaining about how nobody wants to overpay for what you can do anymore, or how the market has moved on and left your antiquated skillset in the dust.
That has happened slowly. A lot of people who got into IT work have said, "screw this" when jobs got scarce and pay went south. Same thing happend to nursing in the past. But you've used a great word for the crux of the problem "the market". The real problem with "the market" is that the greedy bastard capitalists won't free up the 3rd component - labor. Goods are moving more and more freely, capital moves in the blink of an eye, but our antiquated system of geographical government is preventing labor from doing what it needs to do - move freely. The ONLY reason IT people in India or China or wherever are draining off jobs in the US, Canada and Europe is because they can't freely move here to do the work and we can't move there to do the work.
As far as labor goes, I'll play devils advocate: open the borders - let's have a nice global economic labor balancing. Let people who want to move to western countries with the skills do so. Let people who want to do the same work for pennies on the dollar but live like f*&king kings for thier mastery of western english & cultural skills (asside from having more than 5 years experience and not in 10 differnet companies) go to India or China or wherever. Untill that happens, don't be too full of yourself and your "free market" B.S. - Only when goods, capital, AND labor can move freely will there be a level playing field.
The market doesn't owe you anything, if you can't do anything that others find useful enough to pay for, the only person to blame is yourself.
That's not quite true. The market doesn't exist in a vaccum. It is eeks out an existance like the rest of use depending on the social and political climate of the times. Ask Shell Oil in about 5 years after Venezuela seizes and nationalizes all thier assets in the country if they might reconsider the ROI of having to "owe" a little more to employees than what the executives felt kind enough to scrape off the bottom of their shoes in order to keep massive profits through the roof and shareholders smiling.
No offense, but you sound like the worst kind of capitalist - seems you see no difference between goods and labor. In the real world, "labor" is worth far more than goods or capital since it's the only one of the three that can directly produce the other two. In the case of intellectual work, "labor" can even produce goods and capital out of almost thin air.
I have yet to meet anybody in Detroit (and I lived in MI for 15 years) go into debt with student loans so they could learn to fit nut A onto bolt B. Comparing task-based assembly with the modern skills needed to build software (communicating with customers, unit testing, integration, design & design patterns, refactoring, multiple computer languages, framework knowledge, OS knowledge, databases, & ongoing professional development) is insane. My father got paid a tidy sum at the time in the late 70's to seal and fit the back windows onto GM cars. With only on the job training and a barely passed high school diploma? That's a windfall. Not something earned. His work tallents could have been just as well applied to sweeping floors & emptying trash and he wouldn't have made nearly the same money.
The real problem? Software development & other IT people are PROFESSIONALS who have to build and maintain professional skill sets through self-study and/or taking new job opportunities. The cryin' shame is that we aren't smart enough to set up a cartel like the lawyers (bar assc.) and doctors (medical board) do in order to prevent competition from low-quality & low-wage sources as well as establish peer-review for the needed skills and recognition in hiring process.
Since Starbucks won't learn how not to burn their beans, just ask for a Ristretto shot (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ristretto) which is the sweeter part of the shot. It compensates for the burnt crappyness if you must drink Starbucks.
I saw the presentation he mentioned and there's no clear answer at the end of it to the question "where to tomorrow's novices opportunities come from?". Outsourcing today takes the opportunity to gain footing on the bottom 2-3 rungs off the 5 step skills ladder. We can't all be advanced and experts without having spent the time to get there.
Saw his presentation on this and there's no clear answer at the end to the question "where to tomorrow's novices opportunities come from?". Outsourcing today takes the opportunity to gain footing on the bottom 2-3 rungs off the 5 step skills ladder. We can't all be advanced and experts without having spent the time to get there...
The next thing you need to do is hire some testers. TDD and CI can help make fantastic improvements in the quality of your code, but you will never replace the time and effort of another human working to break your code.
They should have thought about that before swinging the axe to make the share-holders happy. Of course, how many execs will get canned because of this? Yeah. Zero. Bastards...
Oh wait.. we're talking about a Republican established government entity operating under a Republican controlled White House & congress... never mind. No ACTUAL Intelligence to be found I guess...
I'm in a simular boat. My company is in a niche market that is best served by Agile methods. In terms of development, there's no way we could produce as well and as fast without pair-programming and TDD. While the damage done from the article concerns me as well, there's a small part of me that hopes it's the competition that reads and believes it. "No, no.", I might say, "That blogger is right. Agile is full of problems. You should go back to waterfall. Or better yet. Here's a boxed copy of Microsoft Project you can have. Also, have you tried using RUP and encorporating _ALL_ the tools IBM has to sell you for it? " *DEVILISH GRIN*
It seems the problem is that you can't force a paradigm shift (I shudder and ask for forgivness for using that buzz word, but it is the most appropriate). People are either open enough to _THINK_ and _LOOK_ for themselves, or they aren't. And the personalities drawn to building software somehow historically seem to be the most shift challenged on top of it!
Wow. Is it just me, or does anybody else get the impression that this guy is too smart to play well with others? I'm sure he does great things all on his own. For the other 90% of us mere mortals, Agile (yes, with a big "A") puts us in an environment where we can contribute, learn, and grow while producing business value. Even up against deadlines. Agile is a way to deal with the toxic cocktail of business chaos and technology potential. It's not a silver bullet - it's wolfsbane, garlic, holy water, a steak, a torch, some leather armor and a few other things to fend off the monsters of the Death March. You need to take the items (practices) that work for you. And to the author from TFA, the cards are a direction of what you need to do. Not gospel. If your project broke down over what could or could not be put on an index card, your problems were not with Agile. Agile was just exposing that you did indeed have serious problems (and Agile is *GREAT* for doing that!).
Even the much maligned (indirectly) Kent Beck went back and wrote version 2 and relaxed from the strict rosary of the 4 values and the 12 practices to a more organic view of values (still all required, up to 5 with "Respect" added) and practices (try 'em, but use what you need). The spirit of Agile is more about "Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.". Keep in mind, that phrase gets pulled like a gun when somebody tries to build up big seminars. I'm not saying people aren't making money off the Agile name, but it's flat out wrong to think it's a snake-oil sales system. Anyone with an Agile community around them can get in touch and talk face to face with practicioners (we're a friendly buch, honest;). All it will cost is the time, the gas, and perhaps a cup of coffee.
Google may be small 'a' agile, but it seems it can only afford to do so because it has a cash cow and technologists at the helm. The grad school/hippy commune the author describes can't exist in the smog of capitalism unless it can be hidden away somwhere because some moron with a bigger paychack is always saying "at the end of the day, we gotta do somethin'". In the rest of the corporate world Agile tools and practices not only gives the dev team a chance of "doin' somethin'".
You wanna teach the little whipper-snappers something about using computers? Network some X terminals with Linux and have them learn BASIC, or LOGO, or hell, even Ruby or something. Give them the books and have them figure out how to create a number guessing game, draw a picture, whatever. Put them on an intranet-free LAN and let them build web pages. There's tons of stuff they can do that will teach them more about computing than learning how to use the reveal transition in a crappy piece of presentation software that will be outdated by the time they graduate.
That's why garbage collection is so popular. Even if it's not your code, it could always be your co-workers code (added in a hurry under a tight deadline), or some proprietary 3rd party library kept on life support via the lowest offshore bidder (which you still pay full US sales & marketing Lexus buying price for). In those cases, give me a GC platform any day. Because the people who will be screaming for your head on a platter don't care who's fault it is for not cleaning up, and you have better things to do (like solve their problems and make working software) in the 1st place...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure somebody with a bright MBA father will figure out that they can
spare the child the challenges of learning anything themselves and
maximize the fun of specifying what they want the program to do;)
Nobody is walking into EBGames to buy music. Why they hell are they trying to plug music players there?
If they'd like to cut some costs, fire the marketoid who came up with that brain fart.
If it's going to be a legitimate music device it needs to be in electronics and music stores,
not game shops taking up space next to the Pokemon trading cards.
..has got to be one of the best I've seen on /. in a long time.
Mad props for combining a classic movie line with concise tirade on the Right Wing nutjobs!
My sides hurt. I need to go stop laughing now;)
One of the quickest things I learned after only a few months out of college is that the guys sitting in the ivory towers of my university were there for a reason: they didn't know a thing about working in industry. Many had never spent any time actually applying knowledge and skills from the piles of degrees they had earned, or had only worked 20+ years ago in some corporate research lab (read same environment as academia). Like my compilers instructor who went off about how the Ariane 5 rocket failure would have been avoided if they had used his pet language (Haskell). The real answer is of course software testing, not silver bullet languages. That's not the type of thing you'll learn in an ivory tower setting though.
What they didn't tell you is that you need to spend a bit more money and only put forth 1/2 the effort of your CS degree (your real degree) to get an MBA so that you can deal with the dipshits who run the world. The CS degree alone lines you up for a bumpy ride at best while you put together the business sense that your engineering courses are structured in complete contrast to on your own in your working life. I would tell anyone who wanted to do CS today to minor or get a double bachelors in business (if not, enjoy a light couple of semesters and stick around to get an MBA - it's a non-thesis "masters" for cryin' out loud!).
Check the moderation;) It happened. Glad to see the Funny. Puzzled at the Insightful...
Yeah. I'll burn the Karma.
Uh. No. I didn't say anything about the foreigner being untrained. How do you know that your doctor is qualified to examine you? Your specialist can perfrom surgery? Your lawyer knows enough court procedure to stand a chance of representing you? A body of their peers stakes the group reputation that they can do so. Now tell me, how many MBAs can recognize an experienced software developer? I'll give you a hint: they think thier 16 year old kid "built" a great web site on myspace.com, so how hard can the stuff you do be. They have no freaking clue and there's no way to identify quality IT work from crap when you don't know what you're doing.
If offshore outsourcing was SOO wonderfull and IT work was SOO simple, all western IT work would have dried up by now. But you know what? It's not wonderfull. It's not simple. It takes exactly what I said above. It's just taken time for the recognition that not all skill sets are equal.
If your skills are not demanded by a market which is satisfied with low quality and low wage employees, learn better skills. Don't walk around complaining about how nobody wants to overpay for what you can do anymore, or how the market has moved on and left your antiquated skillset in the dust.
That has happened slowly. A lot of people who got into IT work have said, "screw this" when jobs got scarce and pay went south. Same thing happend to nursing in the past. But you've used a great word for the crux of the problem "the market". The real problem with "the market" is that the greedy bastard capitalists won't free up the 3rd component - labor. Goods are moving more and more freely, capital moves in the blink of an eye, but our antiquated system of geographical government is preventing labor from doing what it needs to do - move freely. The ONLY reason IT people in India or China or wherever are draining off jobs in the US, Canada and Europe is because they can't freely move here to do the work and we can't move there to do the work.
As far as labor goes, I'll play devils advocate: open the borders - let's have a nice global economic labor balancing. Let people who want to move to western countries with the skills do so. Let people who want to do the same work for pennies on the dollar but live like f*&king kings for thier mastery of western english & cultural skills (asside from having more than 5 years experience and not in 10 differnet companies) go to India or China or wherever. Untill that happens, don't be too full of yourself and your "free market" B.S. - Only when goods, capital, AND labor can move freely will there be a level playing field.
The market doesn't owe you anything, if you can't do anything that others find useful enough to pay for, the only person to blame is yourself.
That's not quite true. The market doesn't exist in a vaccum. It is eeks out an existance like the rest of use depending on the social and political climate of the times. Ask Shell Oil in about 5 years after Venezuela seizes and nationalizes all thier assets in the country if they might reconsider the ROI of having to "owe" a little more to employees than what the executives felt kind enough to scrape off the bottom of their shoes in order to keep massive profits through the roof and shareholders smiling.
No offense, but you sound like the worst kind of capitalist - seems you see no difference between goods and labor. In the real world, "labor" is worth far more than goods or capital since it's the only one of the three that can directly produce the other two. In the case of intellectual work, "labor" can even produce goods and capital out of almost thin air.
I have yet to meet anybody in Detroit (and I lived in MI for 15 years) go into debt with student
loans so they could learn to fit nut A onto bolt B. Comparing task-based assembly with the
modern skills needed to build software (communicating with customers, unit testing, integration,
design & design patterns, refactoring, multiple computer languages, framework knowledge,
OS knowledge, databases, & ongoing professional development) is insane. My father got paid
a tidy sum at the time in the late 70's to seal and fit the back windows onto GM cars. With only
on the job training and a barely passed high school diploma? That's a windfall. Not something earned.
His work tallents could have been just as well applied to sweeping floors & emptying trash and he wouldn't
have made nearly the same money.
The real problem? Software development & other IT people are PROFESSIONALS who have to build and
maintain professional skill sets through self-study and/or taking new job opportunities. The cryin' shame
is that we aren't smart enough to set up a cartel like the lawyers (bar assc.) and doctors (medical board) do
in order to prevent competition from low-quality & low-wage sources as well as establish peer-review for
the needed skills and recognition in hiring process.
Since Starbucks won't learn how not to burn their beans, just ask for a Ristretto shot (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ristretto) which is the sweeter part of the shot. It compensates for the burnt crappyness if you must drink Starbucks.
I mean come on..
"Daredevil"?!?!?!
"Red Planet"?!?!?
"Miss Congeniality"?!?!?!
If anything this guys is serving 3 months for having bad taste...
I saw the presentation he mentioned and there's no clear answer at the end of it
to the question "where to tomorrow's novices opportunities come from?".
Outsourcing today takes the opportunity to gain footing on the
bottom 2-3 rungs off the 5 step skills ladder. We can't all be advanced
and experts without having spent the time to get there.
End of the Knowledge Worker?a ctices/ValueWorker.rdoc
http://blogs.pragprog.com/cgi-bin/pragdave.cgi/Pr
Saw his presentation on this and there's no clear answer at the end
to the question "where to tomorrow's novices opportunities come from?".
Outsourcing today takes the opportunity to gain footing on the
bottom 2-3 rungs off the 5 step skills ladder. We can't all be advanced
and experts without having spent the time to get there...
(since it isn't) and make it so you don't have to do stupid crap like this.
Lessie... memory management, process scheduling, storage, parsing & rendering HTML.
Which of these doesn't fit again?
First off, you should be practicing TDD (Test Driven Development) as discribed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_driven_developme nt ast egration.html.
well as Continuous Integration as discribed here: http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIn
The next thing you need to do is hire some testers. TDD and CI can help make fantastic improvements in the quality of your code, but you will never replace the time and effort of another human working to break your code.
I can hear it now: "We'll be happy to offer you the position at a full $40k per year. It is however, a mandatory 120 hour work week..."
..who will be making more money than the average IT slave in 10 years
since they have a union and work that can't be outsourced....
Massive layoffs at Legoi d=16811796&BRD=985&PAG=461&dept_id=161556&rfi=6
http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/news.cfm?news
They should have thought about that before swinging the axe to make the share-holders happy.
Of course, how many execs will get canned because of this? Yeah. Zero. Bastards...
Oh wait.. we're talking about a Republican established government entity operating under a Republican controlled White House & congress... never mind. No ACTUAL Intelligence to be found I guess...
I'm in a simular boat. My company is in a niche market that is best served by Agile methods. In terms of development, there's no way we could produce as well and as fast without pair-programming and TDD. While the damage done from the article concerns me as well, there's a small part of me that hopes it's the competition that reads and believes it. "No, no.", I might say, "That blogger is right. Agile is full of problems. You should go back to waterfall. Or better yet. Here's a boxed copy of Microsoft Project you can have. Also, have you tried using RUP and encorporating _ALL_ the tools IBM has to sell you for it? " *DEVILISH GRIN*
It seems the problem is that you can't force a paradigm shift (I shudder and ask for forgivness for using that buzz word, but it is the most appropriate). People are either open enough to _THINK_ and _LOOK_ for themselves, or they aren't. And the personalities drawn to building software somehow historically seem to be the most shift challenged on top of it!
http://www.stinkymeat.net/
That steak might work pretty good after a week;)
Wow. Is it just me, or does anybody else get the impression that this guy is too smart to play well with others? I'm sure he does great things all on his own. For the other 90% of us mere mortals, Agile (yes, with a big "A") puts us in an environment where we can contribute, learn, and grow while producing business value. Even up against deadlines. Agile is a way to deal with the toxic cocktail of business chaos and technology potential. It's not a silver bullet - it's wolfsbane, garlic, holy water, a steak, a torch, some leather armor and a few other things to fend off the monsters of the Death March. You need to take the items (practices) that work for you. And to the author from TFA, the cards are a direction of what you need to do. Not gospel. If your project broke down over what could or could not be put on an index card, your problems were not with Agile. Agile was just exposing that you did indeed have serious problems (and Agile is *GREAT* for doing that!).
Even the much maligned (indirectly) Kent Beck went back and wrote version 2 and relaxed from the strict rosary of the 4 values and the 12 practices to a more organic view of values (still all required, up to 5 with "Respect" added) and practices (try 'em, but use what you need). The spirit of Agile is more about "Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.". Keep in mind, that phrase gets pulled like a gun when somebody tries to build up big seminars. I'm not saying people aren't making money off the Agile name, but it's flat out wrong to think it's a snake-oil sales system. Anyone with an Agile community around them can get in touch and talk face to face with practicioners (we're a friendly buch, honest;). All it will cost is the time, the gas, and perhaps a cup of coffee.
Google may be small 'a' agile, but it seems it can only afford to do so because it has a cash cow and technologists at the helm. The grad school/hippy commune the author describes can't exist in the smog of capitalism unless it can be hidden away somwhere because some moron with a bigger paychack is always saying "at the end of the day, we gotta do somethin'". In the rest of the corporate world Agile tools and practices not only gives the dev team a chance of "doin' somethin'".
You wanna teach the little whipper-snappers something about using computers? Network some X
terminals with Linux and have them learn BASIC, or LOGO, or hell, even Ruby or something. Give them the books and
have them figure out how to create a number guessing game, draw a picture, whatever. Put them on an intranet-free LAN
and let them build web pages. There's tons of stuff they can do that will teach them more about computing than learning
how to use the reveal transition in a crappy piece of presentation software that will be outdated by the time they graduate.
(With apologies to the great digerati Senator Stevens ;)
That's why garbage collection is so popular. Even if it's not your code, it could always be your co-workers code (added in a hurry under a tight deadline), or some proprietary 3rd party library kept on life support via the lowest offshore bidder (which you still pay full US sales & marketing Lexus buying price for). In those cases, give me a GC platform any day. Because the people who will be screaming for your head on a platter don't care who's fault it is for not cleaning up, and you have better things to do (like solve their problems and make working software) in the 1st place...