Parent comment is dead on. The fact that Bill Gates is giving away money and doing all these wonderful things does not negate his unethical business practices that got him rich in the 1st place.
Most customers are business people. Most business people are idiots. Therefore: most customers are idiots. Given that fact, the only thing that can save you from spending months cranking out a specification/contract that will never be fully read, or pounding out garbage that's a nightmare to maintain is to go Agile. I favor XP, but anything where the process includes delivering the most important features using Test Driven Development, small iterations, acceptance tests, etc. will work. Besides, by the time you get something working in front of them, they'll "reprioritize" to the newest Shiny-Thing and you'll be glad not to have produced the 1/2 ream of dead tree UML (that was out of date on day two of "coding"), or the rat's nest in your source tree (mostly written by the guy who quit two monts ago after his wife divorced him for never being home).
Thats what some of the full time blue badges at one point liked to call any of the vendors/contractors (they get e-mail addresses that start with a "x-" before the username and the different letters stood for differnt contracting & temp agencies. A friend of mine used to work there (went from Orange to Blue badge) said that there were a number of full timers who completely looked down on the contactors. They would ignore thier e-mails, not co-operate with them and brush it off since the temps were just "dash trash". If this is still happens and full time employees still get away with it, they could use a support forum or two...
It's competition that keeps U.S. companies honest.
Aparently you've missed the recent headlines about the ex-Qwest executive's wire fraud charges and the current state of the Enron fraud case. U.S. companies are dishonest slime, just like companies everywhere else. There's a reason why the term "business ethics" gets used as a classic oxymoron - they have none!
In fact, it seems like competition makes companies less honest. Competition seems to get the credit quite often for IBM covertly outsourcing jobs to India and Nikie paying pennies a day for child slave labor in Indonesia. Competition is an excuse to behave like sliime, not a force to keep companies "honest".
In all seriousness, make sure you take some accounting and/or business classes and learn to understand and talk to the people that will hold all the power and make your life in the real world a living hell. The coolest code in the world doesn't mean crap to someone who only sees a balance sheet or P&L numbers. Learn to deal with these weasels now before it gets harder to as you get older:)
that this sort of right-wing christian fundie crap required the ruling of a federal judge to stop. Worse thing is, I'm sure it's still not over in that we haven't had to put up with the last of this yet.
I don't know who the quote is accredited to, but it is very true. Everything else has to be learned (even some babies need help w/ the nipple). Now the real question is, what GUI is most 'intuitable' given some users background. That's a tough one. But, bring that into play (and account for people's backgrounds) and you might be able to find more interesting things about your statistics you piled up.
Seriously folks, this is good news. The more toolmakers who drop plug-in support for Microsoft's windows only junk in favor of cross-platform targeted tools, the better. It seeds a nice message about the future legitimacy (or lack thereof) of locking into Windows...
The Prince by Machiavelli (edit & notes by Daniel Donno) is worth picking up. This book has been one of the "bibles" of executive swashbucklers and other power-hungy egotists for centuries. That means sales, marketing, and the CXO types who don't know binary from hex but run(ruin?) your working world. Get to understand how they think and operate for your own self defense and preservation.
Yes, I know the text itself is public domain and can be D/L'd from project Gutenburg. But the real value here are the extensive historical end-notes that put things in context and explain things you would miss otherwise. It's a good view into the thoughts and training of those who seek power so that you know what you're up against.
"I want to be like him. I am a huge admirer," said 24-year old Naveen Rao, a development engineer with the outsourcing company Aditi Technologies.
Well, for starters, you need to drop out of an elite college just before you would have been thrown out for skipping classes. If you've already earned a college degree, forget everything you've learned. Get the point here? Next, since you're mom is rich and has big business connections through charity work, use those connections to steal someone elses product (a crappy OS simular to CPM) and pass it off as yours to a big dumb company with deep pockets.
Are you getting the point now? After a few years of screwing the company you sold the product to, cut a deal with them to make a better product. Screw them over again by stealing yet another product by hijacking a product team working nearby that's been cancled (perhaps its a GUI on top of VMS by a guy named Cavid Duttler). Use this stolen product team to plow the compnay that gave you the big start (don't worry, your mom's friend moved on long ago).
Is it starting to sink in yet? From there, you just keep going with whatever makes you money and screws hard working programmers over. Hijack a web browser from some poor startup (make sure they rhyme with "eyeglass"). Through all of this, if you want to go after something, just throw money at it and duplicate features other companies have done the hard work for. By version 3 you'll figure it out more or less. If not, you can just spend them out of the market.
Truth is, if you want to be like Bill Gates, all you don't need any technical tallent. And, if you admire Bill Gates, you have a serious lack of ethics.
It doesn't take long to get sick of hear over 20 min. every hour of ads on the air in any market where almost all the stations are owned by the same bunch of morons (Hi there Clear Channel, you bastards!). If you're not hearing the same add when you skip stations on the dial, you're hearing the same "crossed over" music on the today's mix station that you hear on the so-called hard rock station (one more round of Photograph by Nickleback and I'm going to say 'Goodbye' and move right to Satellite. Big stupid companies have been killing "Free FM" for years. It's sad, but it's just gone to hell and that's the way the people who are about to lose all thier money choose to run it.
A couple months ago, there was a great article in the Seattle PI about some conservative (read Republican) house frau wanting the government to go after all the nasty things on TV. Oblivious to the irony that this expands the role and spending of the federal government, she was going on about how her and her organization wanted "responsible" broadcasting, and how she was carefull to monitor everything her two boys and one little girl watched on TV and limited the number of hours they could spend in front of the nasty box. The puch-line was the picture of this happy family.
The 15-year old was wearing a Comcast High Speed Internet T-shirt and had a huge smile on his face.
I could not stop laughing. Way to go Mom. All the big bad influences of FCC enforced content with $500,000.00 fines for showing a nipple and your oldest boy already knows how to route around your dammaged sense of so-called morality. If she had any clue what was in the browser cache of that 15 year old...
We all know the solution is simple. As a number of those (although perhaps in the minority on Slashdot) are happy to point out here how proud they are NOT to own a TV, if you don't want your kids watching TV, don't buy one. Don't pay for Cable or Satalite. Or, use the parental lock-out codes (wich DishNetwork runs _PSA SPOTS FOR_) so that you are the only one who can see dammaging things (like the nightly news).
In short, step-up, shut-up, and be a parent. You took the responsibility to raise your kids when you decided to have them. Not me, not your neighbors, or your government. The world isn't responsible for bending to your parental will any more than my childfree will, and we both have to live in it together.
Building software (web or otherwise) is important, but it has become near worthless on it's own in the face of offshore/outsourcing. Unless you can work with stakeholders to understand the goals behind requirements (and all too often fix them), you'll be stuck being a "web application programmer" and you will limit you advancement opportunities with every year you rack up under that title. That is, untill you're pushed out of that job and then out of the job market.
Smart businesses that have core business value captured in software(while still being relatively slow and stupid), are starting to figure out that they're dead in the water without people who know how to build software AND work with, develop, and prioritize business needs. The sad truth is that in today's market, there's a lot of people out there accessible on the 'Net who are just a little bit faster, sharper, on more on the ball for technology XYZ than you. Your primary advantage has to be that they don't know your companies business. Your secondary advantage then becomes that your goals align with your company (you think some offshore shop will tell your company they're about to waste thousands of dollars? I don't think so...). If you get to know the business, understand it, and start to improve it through the software you help both define and build, you won't be seen as a stock "service" that can be budget trimmed.
While you're at it, make sure you're in the right environment. If you have to keep asking yourself why the company is trying to re-invent a wheel it can buy off the shelf as a part of it's core business model, you've got two choices: 1.) find a way to build in something of value or 2.) get the hell out. If you've noticed there's no unique business value and room for product or service expansion, you can bet to hell people higher up the food chain are thinking the same thing. If there's some competition in the market, your competitors are thinking it too.
I saw the Lean Software development presentation given by Mary last week. The best part was when she referenced the interviews done for the book "The Polaris System Development" by Harvey M. Sapolsky (Harvard University press, 1972) citing that the PERT charts were found to be useless in actual project managment and were just hacked up to keep congress happy so that the teams could get things done.
I shudder to think of the job I worked 5 years ago. They bought huge HP plotters to print out the MS Project charts, updated on a daily basis. In the most degenerate case, one documentation manager with two direct reports spent most of his day revising, planning, and in meetings so that he could show how far behind his team was slipping. The irony was that he had a background in documentation at that company, with those tools, on those products. He could have pitched in and helped make the deadline. However, his resource was not allocated for that project in that capacity so...
Some people like to use the level of Dilbert cartoons to spot bad software development environments, but the existence of MS Project printouts is a dead giveaway:)
The Agile environment pays for itself many times over when you work in a world where each check-in kicks off compile, package, db create/destroy, 3k+ unit tests, appserver deploy and launch, and 2k+ functional/acceptance tests that culminate in auto deployment to stage on success. It pays again when at the end of each 1 week itteration you do a load test and deploy consistently to live. You feel great. "Of course we deployed to live. It's Wednesday."
The strange part, is that when you've worked like this for a year, you wonder how the hell you though you were getting anything done before.
Hardware cost had to be pretty low before each developer could compile and run all the project tests every few minutes of development. I also don't remember Brooks talking about weekly iterations.
Good points. In terms of practices you're quite right, and there's a lot about the how things get done today that couldn't be done 30 years ago. The values and the emphasis on people as a fundamental point of building software still remains. I'm of the opinion that Brook's "surgical team" can be realized in part through the XP team (but then again, I'm XP biased:)
shouldn't be telling a dev team the time of day let alone what path to follow to build "Hello World". There's nothing fundamental in Lean, XP, or Scrum that Brooks didn't manage to say 30 years ago(yes. 30. 3-0. Thirty. Near 1/3 of a decade. check the copyright). It's not that things are changing too fast, it's a matter of ajusting your process and your understanding of building software. One great example of this is comparing the origional XP book to the 2nd edition. Kent corrected himself and altered the details after learning a lot in 4 years, but the core is still there.
At the borg HQ even. Lean basicly packages agile concepts into a business-tasty format. There's nothing in Lean that contradicts with XP or Scrum (in fact, it tends to amplify it). The fact that these practices come from proven manufacturing and distribution practices give the concepts more credit . If you're having trouble "selling" either XP or Scrum, take a look at this. It should sell itself.
Good programmers ALWAYS WRITE UNIT TESTS so that they don't wast time weeding and pruning comments. Comments fall out of sync with code. Tests can't. If you can't figure out what between good test coverage and the code itself, it's time to rip it out and start over.
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Parent comment is dead on. The fact that Bill Gates is giving away money and doing all these wonderful things does not negate his unethical business practices that got him rich in the 1st place.
Most customers are business people. Most business people are idiots. Therefore: most customers are idiots. Given that fact, the only thing that can save you from spending months cranking out a specification/contract that will never be fully read, or pounding out garbage that's a nightmare to maintain is to go Agile. I favor XP, but anything where the process includes delivering the most important features using Test Driven Development, small iterations, acceptance tests, etc. will work. Besides, by the time you get something working in front of them, they'll "reprioritize" to the newest Shiny-Thing and you'll be glad not to have produced the 1/2 ream of dead tree UML (that was out of date on day two of "coding"), or the rat's nest in your source tree (mostly written by the guy who quit two monts ago after his wife divorced him for never being home).
Hmmm... a company that cooks the books so they can lie to shareholders. What other unethical/illegal/standard business practices are they up to?
Thats what some of the full time blue badges at one point liked to call any of the vendors/contractors (they get e-mail addresses that start with a "x-" before the username and the different letters stood for differnt contracting & temp agencies. A friend of mine used to work there (went from Orange to Blue badge) said that there were a number of full timers who completely looked down on the contactors. They would ignore thier e-mails, not co-operate with them and brush it off since the temps were just "dash trash". If this is still happens and full time employees still get away with it, they could use a support forum or two...
Aparently you've missed the recent headlines about the ex-Qwest executive's wire fraud charges and the current state of the Enron fraud case. U.S. companies are dishonest slime, just like companies everywhere else. There's a reason why the term "business ethics" gets used as a classic oxymoron - they have none!
In fact, it seems like competition makes companies less honest. Competition seems to get the credit quite often for IBM covertly outsourcing jobs to India and Nikie paying pennies a day for child slave labor in Indonesia. Competition is an excuse to behave like sliime, not a force to keep companies "honest".
In all seriousness, make sure you take some accounting and/or business classes and learn to understand and talk to the people that will hold all the power and make your life in the real world a living hell. The coolest code in the world doesn't mean crap to someone who only sees a balance sheet or P&L numbers. Learn to deal with these weasels now before it gets harder to as you get older:)
that this sort of right-wing christian fundie crap required the ruling of a federal judge to stop. Worse thing is, I'm sure it's still not over in that we haven't had to put up with the last of this yet.
I don't know who the quote is accredited to, but it is very true. Everything else has to be learned (even some babies need help w/ the nipple). Now the real question is, what GUI is most 'intuitable' given some users background. That's a tough one. But, bring that into play (and account for people's backgrounds) and you might be able to find more interesting things about your statistics you piled up.
Seriously folks, this is good news. The more toolmakers who drop plug-in support for Microsoft's windows only junk in favor of cross-platform targeted tools, the better. It seeds a nice message about the future legitimacy (or lack thereof) of locking into Windows...
Yes, I know the text itself is public domain and can be D/L'd from project Gutenburg. But the real value here are the extensive historical end-notes that put things in context and explain things you would miss otherwise. It's a good view into the thoughts and training of those who seek power so that you know what you're up against.
From TFA:
"I want to be like him. I am a huge admirer," said 24-year old Naveen Rao, a development engineer with the outsourcing company Aditi Technologies.
Well, for starters, you need to drop out of an elite college just before you would have been thrown out for skipping classes. If you've already earned a college degree, forget everything you've learned. Get the point here? Next, since you're mom is rich and has big business connections through charity work, use those connections to steal someone elses product (a crappy OS simular to CPM) and pass it off as yours to a big dumb company with deep pockets.
Are you getting the point now? After a few years of screwing the company you sold the product to, cut a deal with them to make a better product. Screw them over again by stealing yet another product by hijacking a product team working nearby that's been cancled (perhaps its a GUI on top of VMS by a guy named Cavid Duttler). Use this stolen product team to plow the compnay that gave you the big start (don't worry, your mom's friend moved on long ago).
Is it starting to sink in yet? From there, you just keep going with whatever makes you money and screws hard working programmers over. Hijack a web browser from some poor startup (make sure they rhyme with "eyeglass").
Through all of this, if you want to go after something, just throw money at it and duplicate features other companies have done the hard work for. By version 3 you'll figure it out more or less. If not, you can just spend them out of the market.
Truth is, if you want to be like Bill Gates, all you don't need any technical tallent. And, if you admire Bill Gates, you have a serious lack of ethics.
It doesn't take long to get sick of hear over 20 min. every hour of ads on the air in any market where almost all the stations are owned by the same bunch of morons (Hi there Clear Channel, you bastards!). If you're not hearing the same add when you skip stations on the dial, you're hearing the same "crossed over" music on the today's mix station that you hear on the so-called hard rock station (one more round of Photograph by Nickleback and I'm going to say 'Goodbye' and move right to Satellite. Big stupid companies have been killing "Free FM" for years. It's sad, but it's just gone to hell and that's the way the people who are about to lose all thier money choose to run it.
A couple months ago, there was a great article in the Seattle PI about some conservative (read Republican) house frau wanting the government to go after all the nasty things on TV. Oblivious to the irony that this expands the role and spending of the federal government, she was going on about how her and her organization wanted "responsible" broadcasting, and how she was carefull to monitor everything her two boys and one little girl watched on TV and limited the number of hours they could spend in front of the nasty box. The puch-line was the picture of this happy family.
The 15-year old was wearing a Comcast High Speed Internet T-shirt and had a huge smile on his face.
I could not stop laughing. Way to go Mom. All the big bad influences of FCC enforced content with $500,000.00 fines for showing a nipple and your oldest boy already knows how to route around your dammaged sense of so-called morality. If she had any clue what was in the browser cache of that 15 year old...
We all know the solution is simple. As a number of those (although perhaps in the minority on Slashdot) are happy to point out here how proud they are NOT to own a TV, if you don't want your kids watching TV, don't buy one. Don't pay for Cable or Satalite. Or, use the parental lock-out codes (wich DishNetwork runs _PSA SPOTS FOR_) so that you are the only one who can see dammaging things (like the nightly news).
In short, step-up, shut-up, and be a parent. You took the responsibility to raise your kids when you decided to have them. Not me, not your neighbors, or your government. The world isn't responsible for bending to your parental will any more than my childfree will, and we both have to live in it together.
Wow. It must be time to start job hopping again to get raises. How absolutely stupid.
To kick and take candy from respectivly. Of course, given the track record so far, I'd believe it the other way around just as well.
Don't let your Java get run out on a Rail just yet
My opinion hasn't changed much since.
"I'm from the United States. Sorry about our government."
It worked well as an introduction.
Building software (web or otherwise) is important, but it has become near worthless on it's own in the face of offshore/outsourcing. Unless you can work with stakeholders to understand the goals behind requirements (and all too often fix them), you'll be stuck being a "web application programmer" and you will limit you advancement opportunities with every year you rack up under that title. That is, untill you're pushed out of that job and then out of the job market.
Smart businesses that have core business value captured in software(while still being relatively slow and stupid), are starting to figure out that they're dead in the water without people who know how to build software AND work with, develop, and prioritize business needs. The sad truth is that in today's market, there's a lot of people out there accessible on the 'Net who are just a little bit faster, sharper, on more on the ball for technology XYZ than you. Your primary advantage has to be that they don't know your companies business. Your secondary advantage then becomes that your goals align with your company (you think some offshore shop will tell your company they're about to waste thousands of dollars? I don't think so...). If you get to know the business, understand it, and start to improve it through the software you help both define and build, you won't be seen as a stock "service" that can be budget trimmed.
While you're at it, make sure you're in the right environment. If you have to keep asking yourself why the company is trying to re-invent a wheel it can buy off the shelf as a part of it's core business model, you've got two choices: 1.) find a way to build in something of value or 2.) get the hell out. If you've noticed there's no unique business value and room for product or service expansion, you can bet to hell people higher up the food chain are thinking the same thing. If there's some competition in the market, your competitors are thinking it too.
I saw the Lean Software development presentation given by Mary last week. The best part was when she referenced the interviews done for the book "The Polaris System Development" by Harvey M. Sapolsky (Harvard University press, 1972) citing that the PERT charts were found to be useless in actual project managment and were just hacked up to keep congress happy so that the teams could get things done.
I shudder to think of the job I worked 5 years ago. They bought huge HP plotters to print out the MS Project charts, updated on a daily basis. In the most degenerate case, one documentation manager with two direct reports spent most of his day revising, planning, and in meetings so that he could show how far behind his team was slipping. The irony was that he had a background in documentation at that company, with those tools, on those products. He could have pitched in and helped make the deadline. However, his resource was not allocated for that project in that capacity so...
Some people like to use the level of Dilbert cartoons to spot bad software development environments, but the existence of MS Project printouts is a dead giveaway:)
The Agile environment pays for itself many times over when you work in a world where each check-in kicks off compile, package, db create/destroy, 3k+ unit tests, appserver deploy and launch, and 2k+ functional/acceptance tests that culminate in auto deployment to stage on success. It pays again when at the end of each 1 week itteration you do a load test and deploy consistently to live. You feel great. "Of course we deployed to live. It's Wednesday."
The strange part, is that when you've worked like this for a year, you wonder how the hell you though you were getting anything done before.
Good points. In terms of practices you're quite right, and there's a lot about the how things get done today that couldn't be done 30 years ago. The values and the emphasis on people as a fundamental point of building software still remains. I'm of the opinion that Brook's "surgical team" can be realized in part through the XP team (but then again, I'm XP biased:)
shouldn't be telling a dev team the time of day let alone what path to follow to build "Hello World". There's nothing fundamental in Lean, XP, or Scrum that Brooks didn't manage to say 30 years ago(yes. 30. 3-0. Thirty. Near 1/3 of a decade. check the copyright). It's not that things are changing too fast, it's a matter of ajusting your process and your understanding of building software. One great example of this is comparing the origional XP book to the 2nd edition. Kent corrected himself and altered the details after learning a lot in 4 years, but the core is still there.
At the borg HQ even. Lean basicly packages agile concepts into a business-tasty format. There's nothing in Lean that contradicts with XP or Scrum (in fact, it tends to amplify it). The fact that these practices come from proven manufacturing and distribution practices give the concepts more credit . If you're having trouble "selling" either XP or Scrum, take a look at this. It should sell itself.
Life imitates art. Or at least Outsourcing.
Good programmers ALWAYS WRITE UNIT TESTS so that they don't wast time weeding and pruning comments. Comments fall out of sync with code. Tests can't. If you can't figure out what between good test coverage and the code itself, it's time to rip it out and start over.