The couple of "hero" coders like this I've seen in the past are, to a large degree, sucking productivity directly from other coders. Their complete lack of documentation, zero time spent naming variables/functions with whatever gobbledygook ran through their head momentarily, etc., winds up bringing other coders' work to a complete screeching halt. Intentionally or unintentionally, they arrange it so they're the only person who can manipulate the codebase. So the whole "hero worth millions" idea is really just a facade.
Example from this month's Game Developer Magazine: Near the end of a production cycle, one game is way over memory budget. Entire staff (engineers, artists) spend weeks cutting stuff out: reducing polygons on models, downgrading textures, etc. Everyone sweats it out and comes up 1.5 MB short. On the last day a senior coder goes in to where he'd hidden a 2MB string allocation at project start (completely unused), snips out the one line, and is hailed by everyone as having "saved" the project at the last minute. That's the kind of bullshit going on with these sociopath coders.
That's why as part of the interview team you need to set up some programming tests that constitute basic pass or fail. Like: do basic CRUD in a pseudo language of your choice. Reverse a string of characters in a pseudo code.
Personal anecdote: Make sure the guy doing the interview can understand the solution. I was at a job interview and asked to convert an ASCII digit string to its decimal equivalent integer. So I said "easy" and just threw down the standard solution from my numerical analysis textbook (basically: int total; for i = 0 to strlen(s) {total = total*10 + s[i]-'0';}, which is the most efficient way to do it, as is done in java.lang.Integer or any other standard library). Guy says "no, that's wrong, you have to start from the back", and (amazed) I have to start stepping him through the more efficient, standard solution.
I did not get the job, bugged the hell out of me ever since -- to this day I don't think he actually understood the solution.
Does it bother anyone this is the same type of gadget analysis that got us into the current economic situation? Your most valuable employees aren't always the most communicative... We have one developer who shuns any type of contact, doesn't have a phone on his desk, rarely sends an email longer than two sentences. Yet he's the most heads-down, dogged and prolific programmer I've ever worked with...
The main problem I see with this metric is that it was created by the HR people. That is, the people who see themselves as touchy-feely, interpersonal, emotional, really just yack all day and don't really produce product. To them, obviously the best metric for measuring employees is via how much they talk to other people (because that's what the HR people experience as work), and of course the only sub-metric for that that's actually accessible is number of messages sent through the email server.
Let doctors evaluate doctors, lawyers pass judgement on other lawyers, engineers judge engineers, teachers evaluate teachers, etc. If only HR people are allowed to measure employee value at your company, then someday only HR people will be employed at your company.
Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense... It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun.
That is a false choice. Other options include (a) more rigorous standards, (b) more willingness for teachers to fail students and fight grade-inflation, (c) lessening students' consumerist expectations that they are paying for grades, etc. I believe that I'm consistently the highest-rated teacher where I teach. Yet I would not want merit pay to be implemented.
Here's what the Urban Institute found in a statistical study:
A study by the Urban Institute found some positive short-lived effects of merit pay, but concluded that most merit pay plans "did not succeed at implementing lasting, effective... plans that had a demonstrated ability to improve student learning." Problems included low teacher morale because of increased competition between teachers, as well as wasted time and money in the administration of the merit pay plans. The same study found "little evidence from other research...that incentive programs (particularly pay-for-performance) had led to improved teacher performance and student achievements.
Here's what the Libertarian Cato Institute says:
Marie Gryphon, an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, makes some practical objections: - The system can't simply reward high scores. If it did, it would favor teachers in wealthy neighborhoods whose students came to school with excellent skills. Nor can the system reward only improvement. If it did, it would unfairly penalize teachers whose students were already scoring too well to post large gains. - Moreover, any money for test results scheme will worsen the problem of teachers cheating on standardized tests to avoid the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers willing to erase wrong answers on exams to avoid having their school labeled "needing improvement" will also be tempted by the thought of a personal raise.
You would think thorough statistics would solve this problem...
Here's my experience with statistics in a corporate environment.
YOU: Sir, our team has completed our month-long analysis of the economic data. We've done preliminary data analysis, removed outliers, run a Pearson error test, t-interval hypothesis tests, and a Chi-square analysis. The confidence interval is (95%: 45.1 to 52.8) and you can see that in contradiction to your earlier theory, our findings are very strongly correlated, with P-value 0.0026.
Look, read the summary. (a) No one claimed they had found causative factors. They are very careful to state that they found a correlative link. What were they supposed to do, not publish the findings because it's only correlation? (b) This is not a situation where it will not ever be feasible to do a study showing actual causation. You simply can't do a designed experiment where you take a control and experimental group of babies, lock them in two differently designed households for 5 years, and then see which group develops asthma more frequently.
Any way you look at it, "correlationisnotcausation" is not a relevant response to any part of this article. This is how research is done, and these are what the results are like. The unthinking "correlationisnotcausation" comments are just a microscopic step removed from people yelling "evolution is just a theory, it's never been proven!", any time that comes up.
And for the record, your figures are complete bunk. 91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.
No, it's not. Those are perfectly-documented, reported-in-the-media deaths.
Statistical study in the Lancet (British medical journal) in 2006 came up with a more likely number of over 600,000 violent Iraqi deaths since the invasion. ORB (British polling agency) in 2007 came up with a number more than 1,000,000.
These "causationisnotcorrelation" tags are flat-out the dumbest part of Slashdot these days.
Take this particular news story: There are no specific claims of any sort that I can see in any of the article links on either side. There aren't any specific correlations being asserted or presented between anything and anything else that I can tell, just a bunch of bitching on both sides. The "correlationisnotcausation" whine-fest is completely beside the point, like a mass hallucination.
For future reference, first you must have (a) Specific characteristics being discussed. Then (b) Claims of correlations between them. Then (c) Specifically referenced research that backs up those correlation claims. Only then is it any use to start arguing about "correlationisnotcausation" (and usually not even then).
The "correlationisnotcausation" tagging is just plain vandalism. I don't think the taggers involved even read the summaries anymore, they just tag everything in sight "correlationisnotcausation", like they're autistic graffiti artists.
I'll bet that when the final history of TV is written, people will point to the time of the switchover from analog to digital TV as a watershed moment. In one fell swoop it'll kick off a whole bunch of mostly-older folks who don't have the interest/capacity in getting the digital converter setup. (A year or two ago I assumed that would be me, until my TV died early and my girlfriend & I discovered we preferred watching shows on the computer anyway as a stopgap.)
Not that it's causative. There are in fact all these other forces pressing on TV, encouraging a switchover to internet viewing. But it will be seen as significant that all this stuff just happened to occur around the same time as the DTV switchover. Someday some analyst will be kicking DTV as the idea that caused the death of TV.
No, the theater industry will implant a life-long RFID tracking device in your neck, like in "Escape From New York." When you enter the theater, all your movements will be tracked, and you are ok.
This literally sent a shiver down my spine, because at this point I don't see any limits on our surveillance society, and this seems all-too-likely to be real some day. (Minus, perhaps, the "kill switch" for people's heads. Car analogy works differently here, though.)
Well it makes some assumptions about rates of emotional development, it's true.
No, it's purely unthinking bullshit.
Re:Watchmen non-fan
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Watchmen is like Star Wars. You must experience it at age 18 or younger to appreciate it. Youre just too old. To adults, the characters are unrealistic, the plot is uninteresting, the love story silly, the ending illogical, and the tough guy machismo boring. To kids and teens its nectar of the gods. Its firmly in the realm of nostalgic stuff.
This is all bullshit. - I liked Star Wars around 12, yes. - I disliked the new and revisionist-history Star Wars around 30, yes. - I also loved Lord of the Rings around 35 (without reading the books), it felt like original Star Wars to me. Saw it multiple times. Said, "Now George Lucas should go clean shit at the zoo." - I didn't really "get" Watchmen until I re-read it for the fourth time at around age 37. Final analysis: It's really a horror story, merely in the guise of a superhero comic.
To summarize: "Watchmen is like Star Wars. You must experience it at age 18 or younger to appreciate it," is all bullshit.
Well, it's one thing if a car dealership who is not Toyota starts buying "Toyota" as a keyword. Arguably this is similar to buying Toyota.com and could be misleading to customers.
Totally disagree. If someone gets a consumer reports article that says "Better than a Toyota!", they should be able to promote that information with a keyword ad (among a host of other examples). As long as you're not tricking buyers into thinking some product is a Toyota when it's not, it should be fair game and free speech.
Even more important that the limitations of a model are the assumtions taken in developing the model and/or feeding the data into the model, these should always be made clear to whomever the user of the model is, and it is then up to the user to decide if those assumtions are reasonable for their use of it.
The problem with this is most people's "just give me what I need to get the job done today" attitude. I've taught statistics in community college for a number of years, and I grapple with this a lot. Difficult enough to get people to perform the calculations for z-interval/test. Almost impossible to get them to consider the meta-analysis on whether the test is legitimate (simple random sample, assessment of normal population if sample size small, known standard deviation, etc.)
If most days they can get away with ignoring the model's assumptions, then folks wind up doing so, and then that knowledge degenerates. Ultimately the exceptional day that they need that skill, they don't have it. People function very, very poorly in relation to very infrequent (once a generation?), catastrophic events.
With that kind of data out there, these industry giants are forgetting the #1 tactic of product placement - give it away free, later a client they will be. That's Biz-101.
Admittedly, that's also a pretty good summary of the ~2000AD dot-com bust.
Only one open question remains: how many people are going to suffer in one way or another before it is generally understood that this can't possibly work?
Yet almost 50% of their elected representatives, and probably media outlets, supported it. How do we account for this?
Hypothesis: Representation is a trailing indicator (that is, people's opinions flip-flop more often than they elect new leaders). The majority of people may have actually supported censoring when they first heard of it, around the time of the last election.
Consider US opinion on invading Iraq, and how long after that opinion changed it took for US leadership to follow suit.
The only people unions help are ones who on their own can't keep a job.
Spoken like a true PHB who knows nothing that he's talking about, and not addressing the parent point in any way. Congratulations on swallowing the company line so fully.
Depends on what you mean by "implied". If it's in any way been directly stated, I would recommend addressing this directly with HR. Ask for a written letter analyzing your performance right now. If they're unwilling to do that, consider upping the leverage to "If you can't make that commitment to not screw me, then I'll just be leaving today".
Honestly I'm not sure written recommendations make that much difference. I don't think I've used one in any of my technical jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your solution but I wouldn't want someone to write something like that in production code because it would be hard to maintain.
Again, this is the industry-standard solution in every standard library package. Go check one out.
The couple of "hero" coders like this I've seen in the past are, to a large degree, sucking productivity directly from other coders. Their complete lack of documentation, zero time spent naming variables/functions with whatever gobbledygook ran through their head momentarily, etc., winds up bringing other coders' work to a complete screeching halt. Intentionally or unintentionally, they arrange it so they're the only person who can manipulate the codebase. So the whole "hero worth millions" idea is really just a facade.
Example from this month's Game Developer Magazine: Near the end of a production cycle, one game is way over memory budget. Entire staff (engineers, artists) spend weeks cutting stuff out: reducing polygons on models, downgrading textures, etc. Everyone sweats it out and comes up 1.5 MB short. On the last day a senior coder goes in to where he'd hidden a 2MB string allocation at project start (completely unused), snips out the one line, and is hailed by everyone as having "saved" the project at the last minute. That's the kind of bullshit going on with these sociopath coders.
That's why as part of the interview team you need to set up some programming tests that constitute basic pass or fail. Like: do basic CRUD in a pseudo language of your choice. Reverse a string of characters in a pseudo code.
Personal anecdote: Make sure the guy doing the interview can understand the solution. I was at a job interview and asked to convert an ASCII digit string to its decimal equivalent integer. So I said "easy" and just threw down the standard solution from my numerical analysis textbook (basically: int total; for i = 0 to strlen(s) {total = total*10 + s[i]-'0';}, which is the most efficient way to do it, as is done in java.lang.Integer or any other standard library). Guy says "no, that's wrong, you have to start from the back", and (amazed) I have to start stepping him through the more efficient, standard solution.
I did not get the job, bugged the hell out of me ever since -- to this day I don't think he actually understood the solution.
Does it bother anyone this is the same type of gadget analysis that got us into the current economic situation? Your most valuable employees aren't always the most communicative... We have one developer who shuns any type of contact, doesn't have a phone on his desk, rarely sends an email longer than two sentences. Yet he's the most heads-down, dogged and prolific programmer I've ever worked with...
The main problem I see with this metric is that it was created by the HR people. That is, the people who see themselves as touchy-feely, interpersonal, emotional, really just yack all day and don't really produce product. To them, obviously the best metric for measuring employees is via how much they talk to other people (because that's what the HR people experience as work), and of course the only sub-metric for that that's actually accessible is number of messages sent through the email server.
Let doctors evaluate doctors, lawyers pass judgement on other lawyers, engineers judge engineers, teachers evaluate teachers, etc. If only HR people are allowed to measure employee value at your company, then someday only HR people will be employed at your company.
Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense... It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun.
That is a false choice. Other options include (a) more rigorous standards, (b) more willingness for teachers to fail students and fight grade-inflation, (c) lessening students' consumerist expectations that they are paying for grades, etc. I believe that I'm consistently the highest-rated teacher where I teach. Yet I would not want merit pay to be implemented.
Here's what the Urban Institute found in a statistical study:
A study by the Urban Institute found some positive short-lived effects of merit pay, but concluded that most merit pay plans "did not succeed at implementing lasting, effective ... plans that had a demonstrated ability to improve student learning." Problems included low teacher morale because of increased competition between teachers, as well as wasted time and money in the administration of the merit pay plans. The same study found "little evidence from other research...that incentive programs (particularly pay-for-performance) had led to improved teacher performance and student achievements.
Here's what the Libertarian Cato Institute says:
Marie Gryphon, an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, makes some practical objections:
- The system can't simply reward high scores. If it did, it would favor teachers in wealthy neighborhoods whose students came to school with excellent skills. Nor can the system reward only improvement. If it did, it would unfairly penalize teachers whose students were already scoring too well to post large gains.
- Moreover, any money for test results scheme will worsen the problem of teachers cheating on standardized tests to avoid the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers willing to erase wrong answers on exams to avoid having their school labeled "needing improvement" will also be tempted by the thought of a personal raise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_pay#Other_opposition
Nobody gives away stuff to be a nice guy.
Bullshit. Sometimes I really wonder what circles you people travel in.
You would think thorough statistics would solve this problem ...
Here's my experience with statistics in a corporate environment.
YOU: Sir, our team has completed our month-long analysis of the economic data. We've done preliminary data analysis, removed outliers, run a Pearson error test, t-interval hypothesis tests, and a Chi-square analysis. The confidence interval is (95%: 45.1 to 52.8) and you can see that in contradiction to your earlier theory, our findings are very strongly correlated, with P-value 0.0026.
EXECUTIVE: Yeah, fuck off.
Look, read the summary. (a) No one claimed they had found causative factors. They are very careful to state that they found a correlative link. What were they supposed to do, not publish the findings because it's only correlation? (b) This is not a situation where it will not ever be feasible to do a study showing actual causation. You simply can't do a designed experiment where you take a control and experimental group of babies, lock them in two differently designed households for 5 years, and then see which group develops asthma more frequently.
Any way you look at it, "correlationisnotcausation" is not a relevant response to any part of this article. This is how research is done, and these are what the results are like. The unthinking "correlationisnotcausation" comments are just a microscopic step removed from people yelling "evolution is just a theory, it's never been proven!", any time that comes up.
And for the record, your figures are complete bunk. 91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.
No, it's not. Those are perfectly-documented, reported-in-the-media deaths.
Statistical study in the Lancet (British medical journal) in 2006 came up with a more likely number of over 600,000 violent Iraqi deaths since the invasion. ORB (British polling agency) in 2007 came up with a number more than 1,000,000.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
These "causationisnotcorrelation" tags are flat-out the dumbest part of Slashdot these days.
Take this particular news story: There are no specific claims of any sort that I can see in any of the article links on either side. There aren't any specific correlations being asserted or presented between anything and anything else that I can tell, just a bunch of bitching on both sides. The "correlationisnotcausation" whine-fest is completely beside the point, like a mass hallucination.
For future reference, first you must have (a) Specific characteristics being discussed. Then (b) Claims of correlations between them. Then (c) Specifically referenced research that backs up those correlation claims. Only then is it any use to start arguing about "correlationisnotcausation" (and usually not even then).
The "correlationisnotcausation" tagging is just plain vandalism. I don't think the taggers involved even read the summaries anymore, they just tag everything in sight "correlationisnotcausation", like they're autistic graffiti artists.
I'll bet that when the final history of TV is written, people will point to the time of the switchover from analog to digital TV as a watershed moment. In one fell swoop it'll kick off a whole bunch of mostly-older folks who don't have the interest/capacity in getting the digital converter setup. (A year or two ago I assumed that would be me, until my TV died early and my girlfriend & I discovered we preferred watching shows on the computer anyway as a stopgap.)
Not that it's causative. There are in fact all these other forces pressing on TV, encouraging a switchover to internet viewing. But it will be seen as significant that all this stuff just happened to occur around the same time as the DTV switchover. Someday some analyst will be kicking DTV as the idea that caused the death of TV.
No, the theater industry will implant a life-long RFID tracking device in your neck, like in "Escape From New York." When you enter the theater, all your movements will be tracked, and you are ok.
This literally sent a shiver down my spine, because at this point I don't see any limits on our surveillance society, and this seems all-too-likely to be real some day. (Minus, perhaps, the "kill switch" for people's heads. Car analogy works differently here, though.)
Well it makes some assumptions about rates of emotional development, it's true.
No, it's purely unthinking bullshit.
Watchmen is like Star Wars. You must experience it at age 18 or younger to appreciate it. Youre just too old. To adults, the characters are unrealistic, the plot is uninteresting, the love story silly, the ending illogical, and the tough guy machismo boring. To kids and teens its nectar of the gods. Its firmly in the realm of nostalgic stuff.
This is all bullshit.
- I liked Star Wars around 12, yes.
- I disliked the new and revisionist-history Star Wars around 30, yes.
- I also loved Lord of the Rings around 35 (without reading the books), it felt like original Star Wars to me. Saw it multiple times. Said, "Now George Lucas should go clean shit at the zoo."
- I didn't really "get" Watchmen until I re-read it for the fourth time at around age 37. Final analysis: It's really a horror story, merely in the guise of a superhero comic.
To summarize: "Watchmen is like Star Wars. You must experience it at age 18 or younger to appreciate it," is all bullshit.
Well, it's one thing if a car dealership who is not Toyota starts buying "Toyota" as a keyword. Arguably this is similar to buying Toyota.com and could be misleading to customers.
Totally disagree. If someone gets a consumer reports article that says "Better than a Toyota!", they should be able to promote that information with a keyword ad (among a host of other examples). As long as you're not tricking buyers into thinking some product is a Toyota when it's not, it should be fair game and free speech.
Even more important that the limitations of a model are the assumtions taken in developing the model and/or feeding the data into the model, these should always be made clear to whomever the user of the model is, and it is then up to the user to decide if those assumtions are reasonable for their use of it.
The problem with this is most people's "just give me what I need to get the job done today" attitude. I've taught statistics in community college for a number of years, and I grapple with this a lot. Difficult enough to get people to perform the calculations for z-interval/test. Almost impossible to get them to consider the meta-analysis on whether the test is legitimate (simple random sample, assessment of normal population if sample size small, known standard deviation, etc.)
If most days they can get away with ignoring the model's assumptions, then folks wind up doing so, and then that knowledge degenerates. Ultimately the exceptional day that they need that skill, they don't have it. People function very, very poorly in relation to very infrequent (once a generation?), catastrophic events.
Just because you don't give any weight to anonymous statements doesn't mean the rest of the world ignores them.
You've missed the sarcasm.
Grandparent does not actually give zero weight to AC. It is great-grandparent who says he gives zero weight to AC, while posting AC. Hence the humor.
Now the true contest begins. SCO = Darth Vader. MS = The Emperor.
With that kind of data out there, these industry giants are forgetting the #1 tactic of product placement - give it away free, later a client they will be. That's Biz-101.
Admittedly, that's also a pretty good summary of the ~2000AD dot-com bust.
Most tickets are in the $5 to $20 range.
No, parking fines in Manhattan range from $65 to $115. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/nyregion/02parking.html (multimedia sidebar popup).
Only one open question remains: how many people are going to suffer in one way or another before it is generally understood that this can't possibly work?
Ask the same question about pot.
Yet almost 50% of their elected representatives, and probably media outlets, supported it. How do we account for this?
Hypothesis: Representation is a trailing indicator (that is, people's opinions flip-flop more often than they elect new leaders). The majority of people may have actually supported censoring when they first heard of it, around the time of the last election.
Consider US opinion on invading Iraq, and how long after that opinion changed it took for US leadership to follow suit.
The only people unions help are ones who on their own can't keep a job.
Spoken like a true PHB who knows nothing that he's talking about, and not addressing the parent point in any way. Congratulations on swallowing the company line so fully.
Depends on what you mean by "implied". If it's in any way been directly stated, I would recommend addressing this directly with HR. Ask for a written letter analyzing your performance right now. If they're unwilling to do that, consider upping the leverage to "If you can't make that commitment to not screw me, then I'll just be leaving today".
Honestly I'm not sure written recommendations make that much difference. I don't think I've used one in any of my technical jobs.
Seriously, I don't see any crime mentioned here whatsoever.