This is a well-researched topic with hard data available. And it's pretty unambiguously and consistently the case that the hard data show that working extra hours results, not just in lower productivity per hour, but lower productivity overall. Which is why people who start pushing for extra hours can't seem to catch up -- they're making it worse rather than better.
Your managers are trying to find out just how much gasoline they have to pour on this fire to put it out, and I don't think you can reasonably expect them to get smarter.
I think you may have rather misunderstood my post, given that my entire point was that neither group is uniform, and you seem to think that I think that the "scientists" all support my views. Except I didn't say particularly which side of any of these issues I was on...
I occasionally interact with people who are convinced that "evilution" is taught out of a desire to attack religion and make people into amoral monsters. And they will go on, at length, about their beliefs about the "motives" of scientists. And somehow, none of the motives they invent actually fit very well with anything I see when I talk to scientists. I mean, yes, I occasionally encounter people who really do seem to have those motives, but in general they're not particularly regarded well by the scientific community.
And I occasionally interact with people who have all sorts of really strange beliefs about the "motives" of religion, and similarly, what they say has very little to do with what I mostly encounter among religious people. Although I do occasionally encounter people who appear to have those motives, but they are not regarded well by the religious community.
It seems interesting to me how well these groups parallel each other, and how well each of them plays into the other's narrative of persecution or abuse. And how much both of them rely on the assumption that you can't ask people what they think, or why they think it. Slashdot tends to have more of the people who have a very naive view of what religious faith is, or why people have it, but I've hung around on other sites that tended towards the very naive view of science, and it was just as funny there.
So far as I can tell, in the real world, the majority of religious people have beliefs that are a lot more complicated, and a lot more coherent, than the strawmen that I mostly see attacked on Slashdot. But since they don't usually go around trying to get on TV news and insist that they are the only representatives of their faith, people are less aware of them. In general, most of the time if you know someone's religious beliefs, it's because they're jerks; the non-jerks won't generally get pushy about it and tell you all about it unless you actually ask what they think. And, of course, if you've made up your mind that they're all idiots and you don't want to know, then you're the jerk whose opinions they will take as representative of people who hold your beliefs. (This goes both ways.)
Admit that the reasons are not "perfectly legitimate", but have no basis in reality. Real names don't make people civil. Communities that are willing to kick out people who are abusive make people civil -- or, at least, omit the people who aren't.
Except that "automatically connect" is a primary requirement for a sync cable. And sure, in theory that doesn't mean automatically executing, but software has bugs.
The current behavior of phones is probably right for 99% of their users. Makes more sense to solve the special case specially and get the default case right, I think.
On what screen? You don't have access to a screen. You could refuse to provide power if you don't see data pins, but you can't control how that gets displayed. And I suspect anyone who gets one of these will pretty much be suspicious of suddenly finding a charger which needs that.
Note that there's at least one sort-of-similar example: The iPhone won't charge from a USB hub if there's no computer. It'll charge from a plain charger, or from a computer, but not from a hub. In this case, it's that there's data pins but not quite enough data on them.
Cheap ($225 if you're making more than $20k, $60 for personal or small-scale commercial use), excellent quality, friendly upgrading. The sum total of the "copy protection" is that if you aren't registered, it will remind you that they are asking money for it. It does not restrict or limit itself in any way. Extremely flexible and powerful.
The world has changed, and overall I think it's for the better.
No, it will separate out one category of skill from another. Performance and composition are both skills. Not everyone is good at both of them. The world would be a dreary place without the performers who can't compose having music written for them, and the composers who can't perform finding people (or machines) to play their music.
"Delusion" is about what your basis for a belief is, not whether it's true or not.
If you believe that the NSA is spying on American citizens because of large volumes of media coverage, leaked documents, and so on, that's not-delusional. If you believe that the NSA is spying on American citizens because you were flipping channels and you heard "watching" from one channel and "you" from the next channel, and then the same thing happened again four days later, and you are pretty sure that can't be a coincidence, you are delusional.
There are a lot of people who believed that the government was spying on them prior to the recent leaks, who had no valid basis for this belief, meaning that they were delusional even if they were right.
Basically, it's about methodology. If your methodology is not one we think is generally likely to produce true beliefs more often than false beliefs, then it's not valid, and holding a belief strongly based on an invalid methodology is "delusional" -- meaning, we have a pretty good bet that you will hold other beliefs on a similar basis, and that will be wrong pretty often.
But "I learned this from my parents when I was a kid" is a pretty good way to learn things; sure, it has errors, but it produces way better than 90% true beliefs in most people, and there's no good alternatives, so "learned it from parents" isn't delusional even if your parents are wrong sometimes.
Well, they don't need to work well with others, but if they can't, and you try to make them, you will end up creating an unhealthy and toxic environment where people are not primarily focused on getting things done. And by and large, there are few enough genuinely solo projects out there that "can't work with others" means "can't work on any of the important projects". At which point, well, what do we want them for, exactly?
Note: I work pretty well with others, by most accounts. Also, I'm autistic (yes, actual clinical diagnosis), and I don't have the "same thought patterns" as other people, or any of that. But I'm also capable of realizing that there's a reason there's more than one employee, and adapting my behavior appropriately. You don't need boring or mediocre people to get good people who can do innovative things. Just people who have realized that cooperation is a skill which can be useful in producing usable results.
You're conflating two unrelated things: Competence and attitude. You might find The No Asshole Rule an interesting source. People who can't cooperate with other people are not a necessity, no matter how amazing they are.
But... When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The thing that makes exceptional developers exceptional isn't their very specialized ability to solve weird problems no one really needs to solve. It's their ability to spot an opportunity to replace a hard problem with an easy one, or to massively improve performance by solving a slightly harder problem. And that really is that useful, even if you don't directly see the benefits. You can do nearly everythign with plodding, methodical, mediocre work. Doesn't mean you won't be happier with the results if you have someone better available.
Oddly, this ties closely to the main barrier for me with Steam games: Steam's DRM, while very open in a large number of ways, is more restrictive than any other DRM system I've ever seen in one key way, which is that all Steam games on an account are subject to the same simultaneous usage requirement. Many of the games I play are turn-based games which I might well leave up and running for hours at a time, returning to them occasionally. Some are little fidgets I might play for brief windows. And with Steam's system, although I can have games installed on two machines, I can't play games on two machines at once.
Yes, I am aware of the "offline mode" option. I have asked Valve, and they have stated that it is specifically forbidden to use offline mode to run games from the same library on two machines at once, no matter what. So if I have two adjacent computers, and I want to play Game A on one machine, and Game B on another, I can't do that if I got them through Steam. This is sort of weird to me, because even the most restrictive of other DRM systems I'm aware of allow you to install one game on one machine, and a different game on another machine, and run them at the same time.
They're useful, though, because the way people retcon their own beliefs from their behaviors (yes, really) means that people "forced" to apologize are noticably more likely than others to avoid those behaviors in the future, and change their perception of the things at issue.
As I recall, nicotine patches are actively bad for quitting, compared with not using anything. What they perform better than is "placebo" patches which, of course, actually contain small amounts of nicotine. On the grounds that if they didn't you could smell the difference and they wouldn't be a proper placebo. The exact amount of nicotine is not disclosed, last I heard, but the interesting thing is that nicotine addiction appears to be highly responsive to even small amounts of nicotine getting in your system; it's only completely cutting it out that seems to actually help people shake the addiction. (That, and stuff like buproprion, which can short-circuit the addiction mechanism.)
Thanks to modern hardware, we can do the test. No one has yet demonstrated the ability to tell whether an audio sample they're hearing has been downsampled from 96kHz/48-bit to 44.1kHz/16-bit. If you have a converter box inline, and switch it back and forth, they can't tell even whether or not you are switching it between the two modes.
Anonymous isn't the same thing as pseudonymous. I have a lot more invested in "seebs" than I do in the name on my driver's license.
Even ignoring that, though... Your point is still ill-considered. The "lawsuits" and "termination" are just where it starts; the world is full of people who are going to be threatened with all sorts of things if they identify themselves. And, of course, you can provide for that, but if the way you provide for it involves people having to prove to someone else that their reason is good enough, that can also effectively "out" them.
So far, if I compare all the things I've ever read from people who insist that anyone not identified by a "real name" isn't serious or real, and all the things I've ever read under arbitrary pseudonyms, the latter have been a much, much, more valuable resource.
I have never known a creative type who didn't get frustrated with projects when people were getting up in their face about what they were working on. So I guess I don't feel much reason to complain here. Yeah, he sort of caused it, but lots of people make that mistake a few times before getting the hang of it.
I might do different work if I had Infinite Money, but there are things I work on for $DAYJOB now that I would likely continue to work on if I had free time and no other obligations.
MMO devs often take a fairly hands-off attitude about their community, don't do anything about harassment and griefing... then are confused that their community is dominated by toxic people.
Yes, it's a great thing to be thick-skinned, but it's not a moral virtue, it's just really useful. The people who are trying to offend other users and mock them for being sensitive are not really good for your community, and if you keep tacitly endorsing them, you end up with a community of people who have learned that abuse works, because the people it worked on mostly left. Then they do it to you too, and suddenly it's a problem...
You know, "something that decent people just know" is a really big red flag. Lots of decent people happen not to know some things. Generally, better to explain things explicitly, especially when dealing with people who haven't had exactly the same experiences you have.
No, it's a good thing. I could, indeed, keep someone else prepped to handle my stuff all the time. Doing so would take at least 20% of my time. Forever. Is it really a good bet? It's not. The fact is, I'm not hit by trucks very often. It's just not cost-effective to try to keep everything in that state. So we accept the risk that things will be expensively bad in the very rare cases where people are suddenly incapacitated, and we expect people to keep them from being expensively bad when there's no need for a departure to be sudden.
Yes, it "makes companies lazy", but only in the sense that laziness is one of the great virtues of programmers. There is no meaningful way for companies to "get their shit together" that would reduce the social benefit of giving reasonable notice, which would not cost much more than it saved.
Even if no one ever gave notice, the current practices would still be pretty much the best choice. Just think about it: Average length of employment is way over a week. A constant time sink during your entire employment is way more expensive than one large hit when you leave.
Giving notice is a way to give people time to wrap things up -- make sure your stuff is handed off to someone else if needed, start looking for a replacement, or whatever. It's done to be courteous, and to make things less troublesome for other people. I was in a small department where someone just suddenly left one day; out of the blue, email telling us he got a job he likes better and is gone now. Which sort of sucked, because we suddenly didn't have enough people for the workload, and we'd had things like vacations and whatnot planned, and everyone had to scuttle around madly making up for things with no notice, and any recovery plan (like finding a new guy) had to happen on top of suddenly dealing with this. Which sucked. If he'd given us two weeks' notice, we could have done stuff like ask him to update/annotate work in progress so we knew what was happening, and started looking for people, and had time to discuss who was rescheduling what to make up the hours.
So it's a nice thing to do, and if you don't do it, people might be mad at you. Sometimes that might be okay. Sometimes you know they'll be mad at you regardless. Sometimes you just can't deal with someone or something a day longer. In which case, well. You leave.
Think of it like any other courtesy. It's there to make things more pleasant for other people. Usually, things like that are a good strategy because they make other people like you better, which makes them more likely to help you if an opportunity to do so arises. If I run into a job that I know a bunch of my former coworkers could do, and I know a lot of people are looking for work, I might try to put some of them in touch with the prospective employer, right? Well, not the guy who ditched out without warning, obviously.
As with all social niceties, it's somewhat cultural, and somewhat role-dependent. The importance of giving notice is wildly different between, say, the sole sysadmin at a company, and one of a team of thirty junior sysadmins, none of whom ever "own" any project, but who are just going through a series of small assigned tasks which are always done or handed off by the end of the day.
But... I went to look for a book which has been out for a few years. I could buy a paperback for $8 if I wanted to drive somewhere. Or... I could buy an ebook for $12.
I do that. Only I'm told by a shrink that what I have isn't "really" empathy, because I am thinking about other people's feelings, not experiencing them immediately without consciousness of them.
It's useful. Empathy is a really good first approximation of a way to make people be nice, but it also makes people do really shitty things because they are Trying To Help and can't stop to consciously think through their actions and their effects. Since I conveniently happen to care whether people are happy or unhappy, for reasons other than empathy, I am more effective at making things better than people who are constrained by the limits of an unconsidered intuition.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a well-researched topic with hard data available. And it's pretty unambiguously and consistently the case that the hard data show that working extra hours results, not just in lower productivity per hour, but lower productivity overall. Which is why people who start pushing for extra hours can't seem to catch up -- they're making it worse rather than better.
Your managers are trying to find out just how much gasoline they have to pour on this fire to put it out, and I don't think you can reasonably expect them to get smarter.
I think you may have rather misunderstood my post, given that my entire point was that neither group is uniform, and you seem to think that I think that the "scientists" all support my views. Except I didn't say particularly which side of any of these issues I was on...
I occasionally interact with people who are convinced that "evilution" is taught out of a desire to attack religion and make people into amoral monsters. And they will go on, at length, about their beliefs about the "motives" of scientists. And somehow, none of the motives they invent actually fit very well with anything I see when I talk to scientists. I mean, yes, I occasionally encounter people who really do seem to have those motives, but in general they're not particularly regarded well by the scientific community.
And I occasionally interact with people who have all sorts of really strange beliefs about the "motives" of religion, and similarly, what they say has very little to do with what I mostly encounter among religious people. Although I do occasionally encounter people who appear to have those motives, but they are not regarded well by the religious community.
It seems interesting to me how well these groups parallel each other, and how well each of them plays into the other's narrative of persecution or abuse. And how much both of them rely on the assumption that you can't ask people what they think, or why they think it. Slashdot tends to have more of the people who have a very naive view of what religious faith is, or why people have it, but I've hung around on other sites that tended towards the very naive view of science, and it was just as funny there.
So far as I can tell, in the real world, the majority of religious people have beliefs that are a lot more complicated, and a lot more coherent, than the strawmen that I mostly see attacked on Slashdot. But since they don't usually go around trying to get on TV news and insist that they are the only representatives of their faith, people are less aware of them. In general, most of the time if you know someone's religious beliefs, it's because they're jerks; the non-jerks won't generally get pushy about it and tell you all about it unless you actually ask what they think. And, of course, if you've made up your mind that they're all idiots and you don't want to know, then you're the jerk whose opinions they will take as representative of people who hold your beliefs. (This goes both ways.)
Hulu's options:
1. I watch shows which have ads.
2. I pay them money, and they still show me ads.
I am really not seeing the attraction of option #2.
Admit that the reasons are not "perfectly legitimate", but have no basis in reality. Real names don't make people civil. Communities that are willing to kick out people who are abusive make people civil -- or, at least, omit the people who aren't.
Except that "automatically connect" is a primary requirement for a sync cable. And sure, in theory that doesn't mean automatically executing, but software has bugs.
The current behavior of phones is probably right for 99% of their users. Makes more sense to solve the special case specially and get the default case right, I think.
On what screen? You don't have access to a screen. You could refuse to provide power if you don't see data pins, but you can't control how that gets displayed. And I suspect anyone who gets one of these will pretty much be suspicious of suddenly finding a charger which needs that.
Note that there's at least one sort-of-similar example: The iPhone won't charge from a USB hub if there's no computer. It'll charge from a plain charger, or from a computer, but not from a hub. In this case, it's that there's data pins but not quite enough data on them.
Or, if you don't wanna pirate stuff, get Reaper: http://www.cockos.com/reaper/
Cheap ($225 if you're making more than $20k, $60 for personal or small-scale commercial use), excellent quality, friendly upgrading. The sum total of the "copy protection" is that if you aren't registered, it will remind you that they are asking money for it. It does not restrict or limit itself in any way. Extremely flexible and powerful.
The world has changed, and overall I think it's for the better.
No, it will separate out one category of skill from another. Performance and composition are both skills. Not everyone is good at both of them. The world would be a dreary place without the performers who can't compose having music written for them, and the composers who can't perform finding people (or machines) to play their music.
"Delusion" is about what your basis for a belief is, not whether it's true or not.
If you believe that the NSA is spying on American citizens because of large volumes of media coverage, leaked documents, and so on, that's not-delusional. If you believe that the NSA is spying on American citizens because you were flipping channels and you heard "watching" from one channel and "you" from the next channel, and then the same thing happened again four days later, and you are pretty sure that can't be a coincidence, you are delusional.
There are a lot of people who believed that the government was spying on them prior to the recent leaks, who had no valid basis for this belief, meaning that they were delusional even if they were right.
Basically, it's about methodology. If your methodology is not one we think is generally likely to produce true beliefs more often than false beliefs, then it's not valid, and holding a belief strongly based on an invalid methodology is "delusional" -- meaning, we have a pretty good bet that you will hold other beliefs on a similar basis, and that will be wrong pretty often.
But "I learned this from my parents when I was a kid" is a pretty good way to learn things; sure, it has errors, but it produces way better than 90% true beliefs in most people, and there's no good alternatives, so "learned it from parents" isn't delusional even if your parents are wrong sometimes.
Well, they don't need to work well with others, but if they can't, and you try to make them, you will end up creating an unhealthy and toxic environment where people are not primarily focused on getting things done. And by and large, there are few enough genuinely solo projects out there that "can't work with others" means "can't work on any of the important projects". At which point, well, what do we want them for, exactly?
Note: I work pretty well with others, by most accounts. Also, I'm autistic (yes, actual clinical diagnosis), and I don't have the "same thought patterns" as other people, or any of that. But I'm also capable of realizing that there's a reason there's more than one employee, and adapting my behavior appropriately. You don't need boring or mediocre people to get good people who can do innovative things. Just people who have realized that cooperation is a skill which can be useful in producing usable results.
You're conflating two unrelated things: Competence and attitude. You might find The No Asshole Rule an interesting source. People who can't cooperate with other people are not a necessity, no matter how amazing they are.
But... When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The thing that makes exceptional developers exceptional isn't their very specialized ability to solve weird problems no one really needs to solve. It's their ability to spot an opportunity to replace a hard problem with an easy one, or to massively improve performance by solving a slightly harder problem. And that really is that useful, even if you don't directly see the benefits. You can do nearly everythign with plodding, methodical, mediocre work. Doesn't mean you won't be happier with the results if you have someone better available.
This is sorta cool.
Oddly, this ties closely to the main barrier for me with Steam games: Steam's DRM, while very open in a large number of ways, is more restrictive than any other DRM system I've ever seen in one key way, which is that all Steam games on an account are subject to the same simultaneous usage requirement. Many of the games I play are turn-based games which I might well leave up and running for hours at a time, returning to them occasionally. Some are little fidgets I might play for brief windows. And with Steam's system, although I can have games installed on two machines, I can't play games on two machines at once.
Yes, I am aware of the "offline mode" option. I have asked Valve, and they have stated that it is specifically forbidden to use offline mode to run games from the same library on two machines at once, no matter what. So if I have two adjacent computers, and I want to play Game A on one machine, and Game B on another, I can't do that if I got them through Steam. This is sort of weird to me, because even the most restrictive of other DRM systems I'm aware of allow you to install one game on one machine, and a different game on another machine, and run them at the same time.
They're useful, though, because the way people retcon their own beliefs from their behaviors (yes, really) means that people "forced" to apologize are noticably more likely than others to avoid those behaviors in the future, and change their perception of the things at issue.
As I recall, nicotine patches are actively bad for quitting, compared with not using anything. What they perform better than is "placebo" patches which, of course, actually contain small amounts of nicotine. On the grounds that if they didn't you could smell the difference and they wouldn't be a proper placebo. The exact amount of nicotine is not disclosed, last I heard, but the interesting thing is that nicotine addiction appears to be highly responsive to even small amounts of nicotine getting in your system; it's only completely cutting it out that seems to actually help people shake the addiction. (That, and stuff like buproprion, which can short-circuit the addiction mechanism.)
Long story short: No, they don't.
Thanks to modern hardware, we can do the test. No one has yet demonstrated the ability to tell whether an audio sample they're hearing has been downsampled from 96kHz/48-bit to 44.1kHz/16-bit. If you have a converter box inline, and switch it back and forth, they can't tell even whether or not you are switching it between the two modes.
Anonymous isn't the same thing as pseudonymous. I have a lot more invested in "seebs" than I do in the name on my driver's license.
Even ignoring that, though... Your point is still ill-considered. The "lawsuits" and "termination" are just where it starts; the world is full of people who are going to be threatened with all sorts of things if they identify themselves. And, of course, you can provide for that, but if the way you provide for it involves people having to prove to someone else that their reason is good enough, that can also effectively "out" them.
So far, if I compare all the things I've ever read from people who insist that anyone not identified by a "real name" isn't serious or real, and all the things I've ever read under arbitrary pseudonyms, the latter have been a much, much, more valuable resource.
I have never known a creative type who didn't get frustrated with projects when people were getting up in their face about what they were working on. So I guess I don't feel much reason to complain here. Yeah, he sort of caused it, but lots of people make that mistake a few times before getting the hang of it.
I might do different work if I had Infinite Money, but there are things I work on for $DAYJOB now that I would likely continue to work on if I had free time and no other obligations.
MMO devs often take a fairly hands-off attitude about their community, don't do anything about harassment and griefing... then are confused that their community is dominated by toxic people.
Yes, it's a great thing to be thick-skinned, but it's not a moral virtue, it's just really useful. The people who are trying to offend other users and mock them for being sensitive are not really good for your community, and if you keep tacitly endorsing them, you end up with a community of people who have learned that abuse works, because the people it worked on mostly left. Then they do it to you too, and suddenly it's a problem...
You know, "something that decent people just know" is a really big red flag. Lots of decent people happen not to know some things. Generally, better to explain things explicitly, especially when dealing with people who haven't had exactly the same experiences you have.
No, it's a good thing. I could, indeed, keep someone else prepped to handle my stuff all the time. Doing so would take at least 20% of my time. Forever. Is it really a good bet? It's not. The fact is, I'm not hit by trucks very often. It's just not cost-effective to try to keep everything in that state. So we accept the risk that things will be expensively bad in the very rare cases where people are suddenly incapacitated, and we expect people to keep them from being expensively bad when there's no need for a departure to be sudden.
Yes, it "makes companies lazy", but only in the sense that laziness is one of the great virtues of programmers. There is no meaningful way for companies to "get their shit together" that would reduce the social benefit of giving reasonable notice, which would not cost much more than it saved.
Even if no one ever gave notice, the current practices would still be pretty much the best choice. Just think about it: Average length of employment is way over a week. A constant time sink during your entire employment is way more expensive than one large hit when you leave.
Giving notice is a way to give people time to wrap things up -- make sure your stuff is handed off to someone else if needed, start looking for a replacement, or whatever. It's done to be courteous, and to make things less troublesome for other people. I was in a small department where someone just suddenly left one day; out of the blue, email telling us he got a job he likes better and is gone now. Which sort of sucked, because we suddenly didn't have enough people for the workload, and we'd had things like vacations and whatnot planned, and everyone had to scuttle around madly making up for things with no notice, and any recovery plan (like finding a new guy) had to happen on top of suddenly dealing with this. Which sucked. If he'd given us two weeks' notice, we could have done stuff like ask him to update/annotate work in progress so we knew what was happening, and started looking for people, and had time to discuss who was rescheduling what to make up the hours.
So it's a nice thing to do, and if you don't do it, people might be mad at you. Sometimes that might be okay. Sometimes you know they'll be mad at you regardless. Sometimes you just can't deal with someone or something a day longer. In which case, well. You leave.
Think of it like any other courtesy. It's there to make things more pleasant for other people. Usually, things like that are a good strategy because they make other people like you better, which makes them more likely to help you if an opportunity to do so arises. If I run into a job that I know a bunch of my former coworkers could do, and I know a lot of people are looking for work, I might try to put some of them in touch with the prospective employer, right? Well, not the guy who ditched out without warning, obviously.
As with all social niceties, it's somewhat cultural, and somewhat role-dependent. The importance of giving notice is wildly different between, say, the sole sysadmin at a company, and one of a team of thirty junior sysadmins, none of whom ever "own" any project, but who are just going through a series of small assigned tasks which are always done or handed off by the end of the day.
I have certainly bought ebooks.
But... I went to look for a book which has been out for a few years. I could buy a paperback for $8 if I wanted to drive somewhere. Or... I could buy an ebook for $12.
That's gonna cut back on sales a fair bit.
I do that. Only I'm told by a shrink that what I have isn't "really" empathy, because I am thinking about other people's feelings, not experiencing them immediately without consciousness of them.
It's useful. Empathy is a really good first approximation of a way to make people be nice, but it also makes people do really shitty things because they are Trying To Help and can't stop to consciously think through their actions and their effects. Since I conveniently happen to care whether people are happy or unhappy, for reasons other than empathy, I am more effective at making things better than people who are constrained by the limits of an unconsidered intuition.