Unfortunately, you don't have an equivalent to the amendment that is the most important, and that is the 2nd one. How are you going to fight for those rights you listed if you suddenly get a dictator in power up there? I bet no German thought it could happen in Germany, either. A list of rights don't mean a hill of beans if you have a dictator in power and no muscle to knock him/her out of power.
You may be right. I do know that we got kicked off the human rights commission. I also know that China raised some kind of half-witted argument to the U.N. that we may be violating human rights in the U.S. since we are one of the few nations that recognizes gun ownership as a right. How ridiculous, especially considering where it's coming from. Yes, China, defender of individual liberty. I seem to remember something called Tieneman Square. Anyway, guns are the very reason that we can be guaranteed any future liberty. Free speech is great, but it means nothing if some entity wants to take all your rights (or life) away.
Anyway, us getting kicked off the commission drove home to a lot of folks that were paying attention that the UN is irrelevant. The aftermath of 9-11 then drove home to the average schmoe that the U.N. is way too often a podium for every tea-pot dictator with an axe to grind with the U.S. It also demonstrated that the U.N. is next to useless as far as anything that might be important besides bashing the U.S. The fact that Bush had to plead his case to them says a lot. I say we pull out of the U.N. now. There is no value-add for us.
This is basically a "me-too" post. I just wanted to add one point. I totally agree with your point about letting the ignorant racists having all kinds of access to the media, and one major outlet right now is Jerry Springer. Dumbass hillbilly KKK members get on there and show just what ignorant trash they are. It's delightful...I just hope it lasts. I'm not a regular watcher by any means (hey, I work, or at least I did before I got laid off last week), but when I see this it just makes me laugh. I've never heard so much stupidity. So if some young impressionable kid is thinking of joining the Klan or some other racist group, they will at least see what idiots they are, and how the average Joe sees these people (members of the audience usually express their outrage quite clearly). To make these people martyrs by repressing their right to free speech would make them very, very dangerous, because of these things happening in the public eye where they could be easily refuted, they will be driven underground, where no rational thinking people will be around to refute their nonsense.
What?? The only people you can make fun of now are white Christian heterosexual non-handicapped American males. That's it. Everyone else is a a victim now. And I haven't heard a Pollock(sp?) joke in YEARS. I never did understand those jokes anyway, because all the Polish folks I ever knew very well at all were very, very smart people. Wasn't Mandelbrot Polish, too?
And besides, some Jew comedians/entertainers are self-deprecating enough that they already covered that ground pretty well. Woody Allen, Jon Stewart, uh, well Woody Allen did quite a lot on his own, I doubt I really need too many more examples...and don't radical black "leaders" (in quotes because no one elected them) CONSTANTLY blame the Jews (and Koreans) for their problems at every turn? I think even Jesse Jackson still does that, doesn't he? I guess certain groups get a free pass on racism all the time, so it's easy to see how this was overlooked.
Well, apparently you haven't heard of so-called "hate speech", and "hate crimes". Being something essentially just made up by liberals, they have the luxury of defining just what these things are. Apparently, at least for now, they are usually something that only whites or heterosexuals can commit.
A crime is a crime is a crime. It doesn't matter what frame of mind or what reason the criminal had when he committed the act. But try telling that to a liberal. If a gay man is killed by a heterosexual, it must be a hate crime. It doesn't matter that hate always accompanies murder (well, unless the murderer is a nutter). Apparently, my murder would be a less serious crime than say, a black man killed by a white guy, huh? I doubt liberals really think through their positions too much, or they would have realized that this would have been the outcome. Or maybe that's what they wanted?
I guess Orwell knew what he was talking about when he coined the term "thoughtcrime". It's here and now, ladies and gentlemen.
Once again, liberals are demonstrating that they are the modern-day Nazis...only they do it under a the guise of "for the children", and other feel-good nonsense. Free speech is free speech. It comes with the danger that it may be offensive. It's no big deal to defend speech that isn't. Liberals are all for "diversity", but apparently that only applies to diversity of skin, diversity of lifestyles, etc. It apparently doesn't apply to diversity of opinions.
What's next, a book-burning? Ooops, I forgot, liberals are already doing that on campuses. Well, newspapers that dared to print something that liberals didn't agree with, anyway. See: Brown University and the PAID advertisement of an individual who was refuting the absolute nonsense of paying reparations for slavery. That justified a good ol' fashioned newspaper burnin'. If you think that reparations should be paid, that's fine, discuss it in an open forum, logically and rationally. Burning newspapers is about as anti-American as it gets. But this new breed of liberal is hardly pro-American anyway...
Oh BTW, the UN has been targetting our rights (ie, Second Amendment) for years. They are irrelevant anyway: they kicked US off the human rights commission??!!! We (the U.S.) are the only reason there is any decency in the world at all, and don't ever forget that!! Sudan was nominated as one of our replacements on the human rights commission (and I think got the position). What a farce. Sudan has been ACTIVELY practicing slavery until at least the 80's. They may be doing it even now. Why the UN gives voice to absolute criminals like this is beyond understanding.
...we, the relatively innocent masses...
NO, please don't mince words. We are not "relatively innocent". We are innocent, innocent of any wrongdoing that would justify any loss of life without any political discourse of any kind, without a declaration of war, etc...
...use said techniques in an effort to prevent more heinous acts like these from happening to our citizens...
Nope, the best prevention right now involves striking so hard and in such a heinous way that we break the will of these people. Tactical nukes may come into play if this anthrax business continues/escalates. These people are made braver every time we do little or nothing in response to their actions. We've had SEVERAL attacks from the fingered groups, and we did next to nothing about it. The solution, IMHO, certainly doesn't involve us giving up freedom to keep our freedom.
All the B.S. directed at people flying should not even be happening. If terrorism on flights is to be truly eliminated/minimized, the solution(s) are pretty simple, IMHO:
1. Crew is trained, and then issued, guns. The guns will be loaded with bullets that cannot penetrate the skin of the plane, but CAN kill wanna-be terrorists. Due some of the pantywaists in this country that view the Second Amendment as outdated, and somehow dangerous, this will be a hard thing to enact, politically. But in these times of moral clarity, gun purchases have been WAY up, so maybe not so tough as before. Also, I believe some aviation union was/is going to DEMAND that pilots be issued guns, or they will strike. Hmmm, seems I'm not the only one who feels this way. The ones closest to this do as well.
2. "Impenetrable" doors to the cockpit. Makes sense, costs money. Now is the time to do it, though, while the country is up in arms. Not wait around for it to happen again.
3. Take aggressive and decisive action against those that harbor, aid, etc. terrorists. Seems we are on the path to doing this. We need to get Saddam next. Maybe Libya, Syria, too.
4. Long term, and much more difficult: wean ourselves from any dependency (oil) on these people. That way, when things like this happen, we won't
need the approval of so-called "allies" like Saudi Arabia. We'll do what we want/need in order to retaliate and put down any more aggressors, and won't have to pussyfoot around about it. Switching to something else other than oil is something that is a big, big problem....but a determined and entrepeneurial country such as ours should be able to handle it, given the push....
Mmmm, maybe they won't say that about an A+ cert, but I've heard it about the CPD (Certified PowerBuilder Developer) a few years back. My placement firm set me up with an interview at a potential client. During the interview, I talked to two team leads, then the PM. The PM said that "well, we don't normally hire folks that don't have a CPD". At that point, I had approximately 4.5 solid years experience doing PowerBuilder.
If you don't know what PowerBuilder is, it has many similarities to VB. The major differences are it's edge on doing client/server apps (better db stuff) and it implements OO slightly better. But it's very, very simple compared to something like C or C++...almost any old poseur can at least look productive with it. So I was quite amazed at this arrogance and stupidity on the client's part. Other than that, I know the client was a reasonably good place to work. So you can never tell when someone might be looking for those things.
Eh? I'm the same age group as you, and there definitely WERE trends in the 80s (let's see - Pac-Man, Rubik's Cube, leg-warmers, Atari, Commodore 64, breakdancing, New Wave bands, MTV, yada yada yada)...yeah, people were a little more selective than the previous generations, but I'd say Gen Y is even MORE selective (some would say cynical, just like GenX) than Gen X'ers. I'd say that maybe mainstream outlets like eMpyTV *have* become more homogeneous, but that's hardly the whole picture...look at Mtv2, and all those channels of music that digital tv networks carry. It's not ALL Britney or faggotty boy bands. Or look on the Web: ShoutCast or what have you. Or even in regular ol' radio waves, you have college radio. I guess I haven't seen much of different subcultures that were so prevalent in the 80's (like goths, metal-heads, punks, rivet heads, pop fans, ravers), but I guess the new culture still has ravers (much larger population now than back then), and has added rap-metal fan subculture, etc.
I guess I could sum up my comments by saying that you are sounding like an old man (which I esp. don't like because you are same age as me) casting aspersions on the next generation. They are really that much different from us AT ALL, in my eyes. The only thing is BBSes are now the Internet, and it went mainstream, that's all. What's that different? We had parachute pants, they have baggy oversized jeans. Bell bottoms made a come back for their generation; we wore those as hand-me downs from older kids when we were really little. Raves got bigger for them, it was no longer underground. Marilyn rehashed NIN and Skinny Puppy for them. We had that stupid mullet, they have the close cut hair with the love patch.
Easily the best show on TV, period. Not always sci-fi, but most of the movies they watch are sci-fi. You'd never get to see most of those movies on TV if they weren't put into this context.
The funniest part about this show, is that I have a hunch the idea was hatched by stoners sitting around making comments about bad movies...because they say a lot of the same type of stuff my friends and I would say when watching bad movies.
Unfortunately, even with having Tivo set to Season Pass on Doctor Who results in rather sporadic viewing of Doctor Who where I'm at(Denver Metro area). Some weeks, they show 2 parts (out of the usual 4), and
then other weeks they don't show any at all, or REPEAT the same 2 parts from the week before. Weird. Where I grew up at (Central PA), it was like clockwork during my high school years. Always the same time, same day, and they showed all four parts together...unless they were doing a fund raising marathon, in which case they would split the show in two, and beg in between for about a half an hour.
I can't wait for season 4 of Lexx where they encounter Earth of our time
??? Aren't they running that right now on Sci-fi channel? Or are you talking about the DVD release?
I didn't USE to watch cable (much)...until I got a Tivo. Now I can use Tivo to glean all the good stuff, even if I'd never be awake or home during a show...and skip the crap (commercials).
My advice: get another job as soon as is humanly possible. That project is DOOMED. You don't want to be involed with any code like that. It will make your brain hurt looking at some of the terrible code.
Project/specwise: trying to communicate across time zones and whatnot is hard enough w/o the cultural differences. This has nothing to do with racism. This has to do with other factors besides that. Any white programmers working for $10 hour would be churning out a real cluster-fuck, as well....and there is simply no way that won't happen in your case. I guarantee it. I've seen it, and in the case I saw, the client made all kinds of efforts to head off these kinds of problems, and THEY STILL HAPPENED. And it was a relatively small project. And those programmers were getting $20 an hour...I can't imagine what will happen for $10. It was the biggest chunk of shite code I've ever seen, even though initial design was really good (done by people at company, not offshore). Guess what happened? The client hired me and another contractor to work on fixing it while they got rid of offshore team, and hired perms that were competent AND PAID WELL.
In the end, it was not at all impressive from a business standpoint. If you are still there in a year, I think you will probably agree with me. It was an idiotic business decision, and I know for a fact that the client regretted ever doing it in the first place. It probably cost them tons of $$$ to turn it around, and probably even much more immeasurable $$$ because time-to-market was thrown way off track.
Thanks, I HAVE been on both the hiring and managing side of the coin, if only very briefly, and only for a work-study programming job. That being said, I can still judge anyone, regardless of whether I've been in their shoes or not. I did fill those shoes long enough to know that I want to put off being forced into mgmt for as long as possible.
Re: your 22 years of coding, and still coding while managing, you are not the norm for a manager, you must agree. Most people I've had "manage" me have AT MOST maybe 2-3 years of coding and an MIS degree, from what I've seen. Many have never written a line of code in their life, and I've been at many sites (contractor for the past five years). And even the ones who do/did code don't really understand good design or OO, and so try to skip it or condemn those that want to do it.
Re: the difficulty of mgmt, let me say this: it's easier for a bad manager to just get by than it is for a bad programmer to get by...because in addition to the managers watching for weak programmers, there are the programmers co-workers, which will often complain of a weak developer. Who do you complain to about a bad manager, without risking getting fired? I've seen MANY a weak coder let go, and I've rarely seen a weak manager given the boot, even though they sorely deserved it.
Erm. And that is exactly my point. We SHOULD allow as many QUALIFIED people become citizens, and let the market decide. Because they will have more leverage (and would be more likely to spend more here, since they know they can stay), I would imagine the situation would be better overall. Not necessarily for the companies in the SHORT run, but overall, I would think everyone would benefit. Foreign workers would certainly not be getting raped financially. And companies would be less likely to ask ridiculous hours and weekends from its employees, because no one has a stay in the country that is hinging on staying the company's good favor.
My point about the doctors and lawyers was that someone was arbitrarily saying that programmers are overpaid. I can select any profession and say that I think they are overpaid. That doesn't necessarily mean there should be a gov't program to artificially depress those salaries.
I strongly disagree with your disagreement. I am still relatively young, but I think a lot of older programmers are simply cut out of the picture for ageism, and for no other reason. If you want to pay younger programmers higher wages while rejecting resumes from older programmers, that's your choice, but don't pretend it's based on any facts. It's just your prejudice...but don't feel bad, you're not alone in your ageism, apparently.
I also think that someone who is good at problem-solving in general, and has had experience overall in programming (many different languages) can pick up any new acronym the industry is currently hyping. Really. Think about it - HR won't pass a resume on because someone knows Java/C/Pascal, but oops, they don't have XML on there. Wow, that's hard stuff there. Or, oops, they have Java but not EJB on there. Oooh, rocket science. You can't tell me that, beyond OO, things have changed THAT much. And even OO is not too difficult to grasp the basic concepts, if one is given half the chance.
Oh, then there's Yourdon who cites some studies about programmers and the productivity they have: the ONLY correlation between productivity and anything they could measure was the number of languages a programmer knew: the more, the better.
An older programmer is likely to have used more languages over the course of his career, no?
All I can say to this is: "yep".
It's been tried. And it would have been similar to auto industry if it worked. But it has not.
I was at a client that tried to outsource nearly the entire project to Pakistan. What a complete and utter trainwreck...yeah, the rates are cheap, but when you end up with a product that doesn't do what you want, and doesn't even do what you don't want right, what's the point?
That's where I came in. I was a local contractor. Myself and others got the project back on track in the short term by doing what the project was supposed to do. Initially, I was only supposed to be there for a 2-3 months, but it ended up being six. In the meantime, they hired all-American team (though some were foreign-born, they had green card or citizenship) and started down the right path. Just ask them how well it went. And don't think they didn't try to do the things to head off problems.
Every time H1-B cap-raising comes up, this spectre is always raised by companies or those representing companies. It's bullshit, don't believe it for a second...if they could do this, they already would have.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Things may be worse in SV, I can't speak for that, but I live in Denver, and things ain't so pretty here, either. TONS of layoffs. One headhunter a friend talked to is obviously feeling a bit high and mighty: she said, "A year ago, I posted a Java position, I got almost no responses, so I had to throw money at people, 120K was not uncommon. Now, I post a job position, and get 500 resumes!" So, people that had to do a little dance before are now able to pick and choose...and being assholes about it, too...if I lose my current job, and end up at one of these places, when the market takes an upturn, I'd turn the tables on them as soon as possible, and nearly anyone else would, too. I imagine some come-uppances will be in order a few months/years down the road....
Same with the East Coast (PA, NJ, D.C. area), from what I hear. Almost no one is willing to pay relo fees right now, because they can find local talent almost anywhere they are. A friend of mine who wanted to relocate to the northeast (Maine/Vermont, etc) said one headhunter told him that "if you're not from this area, there is no reason to even send your resume."
I've also noticed that an awful lot of local postings specifically say they WILL NOT accept H1-B's at this time. Which is a good thing, IMHO. At least local workers aren't totally screwed at finding a job if they lose their current one. If we didn't have so many glutting the market in the first place, it might not be so hard finding a job right now, though.
Yes, I've had both types of managers, but what you are largely talking about is people skills.
But most of this stuff you should have learned in kindergarten.:) Say please and thank you, wait your turn to speak, etc.. For managers who are short on the clue factor, a read (or re-read) of Peopleware should be mandatory.
I guess that's why I said mostly unskilled. Are there certifications in "asking the right questions", or "making decisions quickly"? Nope. I rest my case. There is a lot more work in keeping a programmer's skills current and relevant than a manager's skillset....once a manager has mastered the soft issues, he's pretty much done...besides maybe keeping abreast of a few buzzwords, and their meanings. Managers rarely have to have a "deep" understanding of any one topic.
Oh, and as for good vs. bad managers, THEIR managers might have a completely different idea of who they are. Sometimes the most incompetent managers I've worked for received the most praise from their bosses, and vice versa.
Besides all the above, I completely agree that their IS a world of difference between what programmers perceive as a bad manager vs. a good one...and some of the good ones maybe had to work hard at getting to that point. But there are so many bad ones getting so many kudos as to *almost* completely offset the notion that management is a skilled job, at least in the programming world.
In the "hard" engineering world, it's my understanding that most direct managers have to have real experience, and they are in many cases able to do their staff's work if they had to...in the software world, I get the feeling that many of the bosses I've had never coded in their life, and couldn't do my job if their lives depended on it...I'm not talking outdated skills, I'm talking about no real problem-solving skills at all. It's hard to respect those types of managers, and IMHO, they don't deserve it, anyway. Just because you have an MBA or an MIS degree doesn't NECESSARILY qualify you to manage programmers. Most of the MIS majors I knew in college were droputs from CS major.
Yeah, maybe doctors and lawyers should be willing to work for less, too. They get paid too much, IMHO. What a ridiculous notion...it's law of supply and demand. If programmers are in short supply, then they should be paid accordingly. The H1-B system is completely artificial and skewed in the company's favor. If there was a true shortage, then companies should lobby for giving out citizenship to those that are needed - not some short-term indentured servitude.
I would subscribe that in the end, it costs just as much time and money to keep your skills on the bleeding edge over a long career of programming as it does for doctors and lawyers. Okay, maybe not as much, but even so, who's to say that some industry's standard rate is too high?
And these don't exist in the U.S.? Where have you been? It's called the HOV lane, and yes, there are cities that have roads for buses only. The greenie-weenies are already getting a foothold here, don't you fret.
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Unfortunately, you don't have an equivalent to the amendment that is the most important, and that is the 2nd one. How are you going to fight for those rights you listed if you suddenly get a dictator in power up there? I bet no German thought it could happen in Germany, either. A list of rights don't mean a hill of beans if you have a dictator in power and no muscle to knock him/her out of power.
You may be right. I do know that we got kicked off the human rights commission. I also know that China raised some kind of half-witted argument to the U.N. that we may be violating human rights in the U.S. since we are one of the few nations that recognizes gun ownership as a right. How ridiculous, especially considering where it's coming from. Yes, China, defender of individual liberty. I seem to remember something called Tieneman Square. Anyway, guns are the very reason that we can be guaranteed any future liberty. Free speech is great, but it means nothing if some entity wants to take all your rights (or life) away.
Anyway, us getting kicked off the commission drove home to a lot of folks that were paying attention that the UN is irrelevant. The aftermath of 9-11 then drove home to the average schmoe that the U.N. is way too often a podium for every tea-pot dictator with an axe to grind with the U.S. It also demonstrated that the U.N. is next to useless as far as anything that might be important besides bashing the U.S. The fact that Bush had to plead his case to them says a lot. I say we pull out of the U.N. now. There is no value-add for us.
This is basically a "me-too" post. I just wanted to add one point. I totally agree with your point about letting the ignorant racists having all kinds of access to the media, and one major outlet right now is Jerry Springer. Dumbass hillbilly KKK members get on there and show just what ignorant trash they are. It's delightful...I just hope it lasts. I'm not a regular watcher by any means (hey, I work, or at least I did before I got laid off last week), but when I see this it just makes me laugh. I've never heard so much stupidity. So if some young impressionable kid is thinking of joining the Klan or some other racist group, they will at least see what idiots they are, and how the average Joe sees these people (members of the audience usually express their outrage quite clearly). To make these people martyrs by repressing their right to free speech would make them very, very dangerous, because of these things happening in the public eye where they could be easily refuted, they will be driven underground, where no rational thinking people will be around to refute their nonsense.
What?? The only people you can make fun of now are white Christian heterosexual non-handicapped American males. That's it. Everyone else is a a victim now. And I haven't heard a Pollock(sp?) joke in YEARS. I never did understand those jokes anyway, because all the Polish folks I ever knew very well at all were very, very smart people. Wasn't Mandelbrot Polish, too?
And besides, some Jew comedians/entertainers are self-deprecating enough that they already covered that ground pretty well. Woody Allen, Jon Stewart, uh, well Woody Allen did quite a lot on his own, I doubt I really need too many more examples...and don't radical black "leaders" (in quotes because no one elected them) CONSTANTLY blame the Jews (and Koreans) for their problems at every turn? I think even Jesse Jackson still does that, doesn't he? I guess certain groups get a free pass on racism all the time, so it's easy to see how this was overlooked.
Well, apparently you haven't heard of so-called "hate speech", and "hate crimes". Being something essentially just made up by liberals, they have the luxury of defining just what these things are. Apparently, at least for now, they are usually something that only whites or heterosexuals can commit.
A crime is a crime is a crime. It doesn't matter what frame of mind or what reason the criminal had when he committed the act. But try telling that to a liberal. If a gay man is killed by a heterosexual, it must be a hate crime. It doesn't matter that hate always accompanies murder (well, unless the murderer is a nutter). Apparently, my murder would be a less serious crime than say, a black man killed by a white guy, huh? I doubt liberals really think through their positions too much, or they would have realized that this would have been the outcome. Or maybe that's what they wanted?
I guess Orwell knew what he was talking about when he coined the term "thoughtcrime". It's here and now, ladies and gentlemen.
Once again, liberals are demonstrating that they are the modern-day Nazis...only they do it under a the guise of "for the children", and other feel-good nonsense. Free speech is free speech. It comes with the danger that it may be offensive. It's no big deal to defend speech that isn't. Liberals are all for "diversity", but apparently that only applies to diversity of skin, diversity of lifestyles, etc. It apparently doesn't apply to diversity of opinions.
What's next, a book-burning? Ooops, I forgot, liberals are already doing that on campuses. Well, newspapers that dared to print something that liberals didn't agree with, anyway. See: Brown University and the PAID advertisement of an individual who was refuting the absolute nonsense of paying reparations for slavery. That justified a good ol' fashioned newspaper burnin'. If you think that reparations should be paid, that's fine, discuss it in an open forum, logically and rationally. Burning newspapers is about as anti-American as it gets. But this new breed of liberal is hardly pro-American anyway...
Oh BTW, the UN has been targetting our rights (ie, Second Amendment) for years. They are irrelevant anyway: they kicked US off the human rights commission??!!! We (the U.S.) are the only reason there is any decency in the world at all, and don't ever forget that!! Sudan was nominated as one of our replacements on the human rights commission (and I think got the position). What a farce. Sudan has been ACTIVELY practicing slavery until at least the 80's. They may be doing it even now. Why the UN gives voice to absolute criminals like this is beyond understanding.
I have well over that in MP3s. It's not hard if you are a fan of lots of different types of music, believe me.
...we, the relatively innocent masses...
...use said techniques in an effort to prevent more heinous acts like these from happening to our citizens...
NO, please don't mince words. We are not "relatively innocent". We are innocent, innocent of any wrongdoing that would justify any loss of life without any political discourse of any kind, without a declaration of war, etc...
Nope, the best prevention right now involves striking so hard and in such a heinous way that we break the will of these people. Tactical nukes may come into play if this anthrax business continues/escalates. These people are made braver every time we do little or nothing in response to their actions. We've had SEVERAL attacks from the fingered groups, and we did next to nothing about it. The solution, IMHO, certainly doesn't involve us giving up freedom to keep our freedom.
All the B.S. directed at people flying should not even be happening. If terrorism on flights is to be truly eliminated/minimized, the solution(s) are pretty simple, IMHO:
1. Crew is trained, and then issued, guns. The guns will be loaded with bullets that cannot penetrate the skin of the plane, but CAN kill wanna-be terrorists. Due some of the pantywaists in this country that view the Second Amendment as outdated, and somehow dangerous, this will be a hard thing to enact, politically. But in these times of moral clarity, gun purchases have been WAY up, so maybe not so tough as before. Also, I believe some aviation union was/is going to DEMAND that pilots be issued guns, or they will strike. Hmmm, seems I'm not the only one who feels this way. The ones closest to this do as well.
2. "Impenetrable" doors to the cockpit. Makes sense, costs money. Now is the time to do it, though, while the country is up in arms. Not wait around for it to happen again.
3. Take aggressive and decisive action against those that harbor, aid, etc. terrorists. Seems we are on the path to doing this. We need to get Saddam next. Maybe Libya, Syria, too.
4. Long term, and much more difficult: wean ourselves from any dependency (oil) on these people. That way, when things like this happen, we won't
need the approval of so-called "allies" like Saudi Arabia. We'll do what we want/need in order to retaliate and put down any more aggressors, and won't have to pussyfoot around about it. Switching to something else other than oil is something that is a big, big problem....but a determined and entrepeneurial country such as ours should be able to handle it, given the push....
Mmmm, maybe they won't say that about an A+ cert, but I've heard it about the CPD (Certified PowerBuilder Developer) a few years back. My placement firm set me up with an interview at a potential client. During the interview, I talked to two team leads, then the PM. The PM said that "well, we don't normally hire folks that don't have a CPD". At that point, I had approximately 4.5 solid years experience doing PowerBuilder.
If you don't know what PowerBuilder is, it has many similarities to VB. The major differences are it's edge on doing client/server apps (better db stuff) and it implements OO slightly better. But it's very, very simple compared to something like C or C++...almost any old poseur can at least look productive with it. So I was quite amazed at this arrogance and stupidity on the client's part. Other than that, I know the client was a reasonably good place to work. So you can never tell when someone might be looking for those things.
Eh? I'm the same age group as you, and there definitely WERE trends in the 80s (let's see - Pac-Man, Rubik's Cube, leg-warmers, Atari, Commodore 64, breakdancing, New Wave bands, MTV, yada yada yada)...yeah, people were a little more selective than the previous generations, but I'd say Gen Y is even MORE selective (some would say cynical, just like GenX) than Gen X'ers. I'd say that maybe mainstream outlets like eMpyTV *have* become more homogeneous, but that's hardly the whole picture...look at Mtv2, and all those channels of music that digital tv networks carry. It's not ALL Britney or faggotty boy bands. Or look on the Web: ShoutCast or what have you. Or even in regular ol' radio waves, you have college radio. I guess I haven't seen much of different subcultures that were so prevalent in the 80's (like goths, metal-heads, punks, rivet heads, pop fans, ravers), but I guess the new culture still has ravers (much larger population now than back then), and has added rap-metal fan subculture, etc.
I guess I could sum up my comments by saying that you are sounding like an old man (which I esp. don't like because you are same age as me) casting aspersions on the next generation. They are really that much different from us AT ALL, in my eyes. The only thing is BBSes are now the Internet, and it went mainstream, that's all. What's that different? We had parachute pants, they have baggy oversized jeans. Bell bottoms made a come back for their generation; we wore those as hand-me downs from older kids when we were really little. Raves got bigger for them, it was no longer underground. Marilyn rehashed NIN and Skinny Puppy for them. We had that stupid mullet, they have the close cut hair with the love patch.
Easily the best show on TV, period. Not always sci-fi, but most of the movies they watch are sci-fi. You'd never get to see most of those movies on TV if they weren't put into this context.
The funniest part about this show, is that I have a hunch the idea was hatched by stoners sitting around making comments about bad movies...because they say a lot of the same type of stuff my friends and I would say when watching bad movies.
Unfortunately, even with having Tivo set to Season Pass on Doctor Who results in rather sporadic viewing of Doctor Who where I'm at(Denver Metro area). Some weeks, they show 2 parts (out of the usual 4), and then other weeks they don't show any at all, or REPEAT the same 2 parts from the week before. Weird. Where I grew up at (Central PA), it was like clockwork during my high school years. Always the same time, same day, and they showed all four parts together...unless they were doing a fund raising marathon, in which case they would split the show in two, and beg in between for about a half an hour.
I can't wait for season 4 of Lexx where they encounter Earth of our time
??? Aren't they running that right now on Sci-fi channel? Or are you talking about the DVD release?
I didn't USE to watch cable (much)...until I got a Tivo. Now I can use Tivo to glean all the good stuff, even if I'd never be awake or home during a show...and skip the crap (commercials).
My advice: get another job as soon as is humanly possible. That project is DOOMED. You don't want to be involed with any code like that. It will make your brain hurt looking at some of the terrible code.
Project/specwise: trying to communicate across time zones and whatnot is hard enough w/o the cultural differences. This has nothing to do with racism. This has to do with other factors besides that. Any white programmers working for $10 hour would be churning out a real cluster-fuck, as well....and there is simply no way that won't happen in your case. I guarantee it. I've seen it, and in the case I saw, the client made all kinds of efforts to head off these kinds of problems, and THEY STILL HAPPENED. And it was a relatively small project. And those programmers were getting $20 an hour...I can't imagine what will happen for $10. It was the biggest chunk of shite code I've ever seen, even though initial design was really good (done by people at company, not offshore). Guess what happened? The client hired me and another contractor to work on fixing it while they got rid of offshore team, and hired perms that were competent AND PAID WELL.
In the end, it was not at all impressive from a business standpoint. If you are still there in a year, I think you will probably agree with me. It was an idiotic business decision, and I know for a fact that the client regretted ever doing it in the first place. It probably cost them tons of $$$ to turn it around, and probably even much more immeasurable $$$ because time-to-market was thrown way off track.
Thanks, I HAVE been on both the hiring and managing side of the coin, if only very briefly, and only for a work-study programming job. That being said, I can still judge anyone, regardless of whether I've been in their shoes or not. I did fill those shoes long enough to know that I want to put off being forced into mgmt for as long as possible.
Re: your 22 years of coding, and still coding while managing, you are not the norm for a manager, you must agree. Most people I've had "manage" me have AT MOST maybe 2-3 years of coding and an MIS degree, from what I've seen. Many have never written a line of code in their life, and I've been at many sites (contractor for the past five years). And even the ones who do/did code don't really understand good design or OO, and so try to skip it or condemn those that want to do it.
Re: the difficulty of mgmt, let me say this: it's easier for a bad manager to just get by than it is for a bad programmer to get by...because in addition to the managers watching for weak programmers, there are the programmers co-workers, which will often complain of a weak developer. Who do you complain to about a bad manager, without risking getting fired? I've seen MANY a weak coder let go, and I've rarely seen a weak manager given the boot, even though they sorely deserved it.
Geez. Couldn't said it better myself. This is just a "me too" post saying that I couldn't agree more. Mod this mother up!!!!
Erm. And that is exactly my point. We SHOULD allow as many QUALIFIED people become citizens, and let the market decide. Because they will have more leverage (and would be more likely to spend more here, since they know they can stay), I would imagine the situation would be better overall. Not necessarily for the companies in the SHORT run, but overall, I would think everyone would benefit. Foreign workers would certainly not be getting raped financially. And companies would be less likely to ask ridiculous hours and weekends from its employees, because no one has a stay in the country that is hinging on staying the company's good favor.
My point about the doctors and lawyers was that someone was arbitrarily saying that programmers are overpaid. I can select any profession and say that I think they are overpaid. That doesn't necessarily mean there should be a gov't program to artificially depress those salaries.
I strongly disagree with your disagreement. I am still relatively young, but I think a lot of older programmers are simply cut out of the picture for ageism, and for no other reason. If you want to pay younger programmers higher wages while rejecting resumes from older programmers, that's your choice, but don't pretend it's based on any facts. It's just your prejudice...but don't feel bad, you're not alone in your ageism, apparently.
I also think that someone who is good at problem-solving in general, and has had experience overall in programming (many different languages) can pick up any new acronym the industry is currently hyping. Really. Think about it - HR won't pass a resume on because someone knows Java/C/Pascal, but oops, they don't have XML on there. Wow, that's hard stuff there. Or, oops, they have Java but not EJB on there. Oooh, rocket science. You can't tell me that, beyond OO, things have changed THAT much. And even OO is not too difficult to grasp the basic concepts, if one is given half the chance.
Oh, then there's Yourdon who cites some studies about programmers and the productivity they have: the ONLY correlation between productivity and anything they could measure was the number of languages a programmer knew: the more, the better.
An older programmer is likely to have used more languages over the course of his career, no?
All I can say to this is: "yep". It's been tried. And it would have been similar to auto industry if it worked. But it has not. I was at a client that tried to outsource nearly the entire project to Pakistan. What a complete and utter trainwreck...yeah, the rates are cheap, but when you end up with a product that doesn't do what you want, and doesn't even do what you don't want right, what's the point? That's where I came in. I was a local contractor. Myself and others got the project back on track in the short term by doing what the project was supposed to do. Initially, I was only supposed to be there for a 2-3 months, but it ended up being six. In the meantime, they hired all-American team (though some were foreign-born, they had green card or citizenship) and started down the right path. Just ask them how well it went. And don't think they didn't try to do the things to head off problems. Every time H1-B cap-raising comes up, this spectre is always raised by companies or those representing companies. It's bullshit, don't believe it for a second...if they could do this, they already would have.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Things may be worse in SV, I can't speak for that, but I live in Denver, and things ain't so pretty here, either. TONS of layoffs. One headhunter a friend talked to is obviously feeling a bit high and mighty: she said, "A year ago, I posted a Java position, I got almost no responses, so I had to throw money at people, 120K was not uncommon. Now, I post a job position, and get 500 resumes!" So, people that had to do a little dance before are now able to pick and choose...and being assholes about it, too...if I lose my current job, and end up at one of these places, when the market takes an upturn, I'd turn the tables on them as soon as possible, and nearly anyone else would, too. I imagine some come-uppances will be in order a few months/years down the road....
Same with the East Coast (PA, NJ, D.C. area), from what I hear. Almost no one is willing to pay relo fees right now, because they can find local talent almost anywhere they are. A friend of mine who wanted to relocate to the northeast (Maine/Vermont, etc) said one headhunter told him that "if you're not from this area, there is no reason to even send your resume."
I've also noticed that an awful lot of local postings specifically say they WILL NOT accept H1-B's at this time. Which is a good thing, IMHO. At least local workers aren't totally screwed at finding a job if they lose their current one. If we didn't have so many glutting the market in the first place, it might not be so hard finding a job right now, though.
Yes, I've had both types of managers, but what you are largely talking about is people skills.
:) Say please and thank you, wait your turn to speak, etc.. For managers who are short on the clue factor, a read (or re-read) of Peopleware should be mandatory.
But most of this stuff you should have learned in kindergarten.
I guess that's why I said mostly unskilled. Are there certifications in "asking the right questions", or "making decisions quickly"? Nope. I rest my case. There is a lot more work in keeping a programmer's skills current and relevant than a manager's skillset....once a manager has mastered the soft issues, he's pretty much done...besides maybe keeping abreast of a few buzzwords, and their meanings. Managers rarely have to have a "deep" understanding of any one topic.
Oh, and as for good vs. bad managers, THEIR managers might have a completely different idea of who they are. Sometimes the most incompetent managers I've worked for received the most praise from their bosses, and vice versa.
Besides all the above, I completely agree that their IS a world of difference between what programmers perceive as a bad manager vs. a good one...and some of the good ones maybe had to work hard at getting to that point. But there are so many bad ones getting so many kudos as to *almost* completely offset the notion that management is a skilled job, at least in the programming world.
In the "hard" engineering world, it's my understanding that most direct managers have to have real experience, and they are in many cases able to do their staff's work if they had to...in the software world, I get the feeling that many of the bosses I've had never coded in their life, and couldn't do my job if their lives depended on it...I'm not talking outdated skills, I'm talking about no real problem-solving skills at all. It's hard to respect those types of managers, and IMHO, they don't deserve it, anyway. Just because you have an MBA or an MIS degree doesn't NECESSARILY qualify you to manage programmers. Most of the MIS majors I knew in college were droputs from CS major.
Yeah, maybe doctors and lawyers should be willing to work for less, too. They get paid too much, IMHO. What a ridiculous notion...it's law of supply and demand. If programmers are in short supply, then they should be paid accordingly. The H1-B system is completely artificial and skewed in the company's favor. If there was a true shortage, then companies should lobby for giving out citizenship to those that are needed - not some short-term indentured servitude.
I would subscribe that in the end, it costs just as much time and money to keep your skills on the bleeding edge over a long career of programming as it does for doctors and lawyers. Okay, maybe not as much, but even so, who's to say that some industry's standard rate is too high?
And these don't exist in the U.S.? Where have you been? It's called the HOV lane, and yes, there are cities that have roads for buses only. The greenie-weenies are already getting a foothold here, don't you fret.