I haven't bought anything made by EA or Ubisoft or Bethesda in quite a while. Life's good. (Bethesda, you ask? Yes, because of the Mojang lawsuit. That was Not Okay.)
So, you're saying, the guy who solves the hardest problems that no one else could reasonably attempt is the worst employee? Because that guy's going to take more time to solve things, is gonna have more things that need to be reworked, and so on.
Think it through! If you have a simple task that any reasonably competent engineer could do, an average programmer should be able to do it quickly and reliably, right? So then you have stuff that's basically new research and trying to solve problems that no one's yet sure how to solve, and...
1. We won't have any way to make reasonable estimates, so estimated dates will be missed sometimes. 2. Amount of output will be small. 3. Likelihood of rework is high.
Look, seriously, if it were that easy, people would already be doing it widely enough that there wouldn't be a need to invent metrics, we'd have working ones. We don't.
Because "employees" are a monolithic group who all have the same opinions, right?
I work remotely. I would switch jobs rather than go to an office regularly. I can't function well in an office; I mean, yeah, well enough to hold down most jobs in my general area, but not even close to as well as I can work when I don't have to deal with people all the time. "Face time" is not merely not a requirement for me, it's an active detriment. But IRC's great, so I'm happy with that.
Thing is, I'm sure there's some people, especially people not in our group, who note that I'm on at sporadic hours and conclude that I "haven't been working". And since a lot of the people I work with are also remote, if all the remote workers went away at once, you might find a majority view was that it was an improvement...
I don't dispute that there may have been lots of people at Yahoo who weren't actually working, but the existence of a majority who think a particular set of requirements is just fine is unpersuasive to me. There's often a majority who don't care about impact on some smaller group of people who aren't them.
Funny you should mention that, there was recently some effort by management where I work to establish times of day during which it is strictly forbidden to go interrupt people because being found and asked things all the time was preventing them from getting stuff done...
It'd take a long time to untangle all the bad assumptions here, but long story short, the correlation between the chromosomes and the genitalia is not 100%, and the correlation between either and self-identity is also not 100%. And the thing is... Neither the chromosomes, nor the genitalia, care. The brain does. So the one that has the ability to express a preference wins.
Biology is full of things which are a little approximate around the edges, and sometimes strange things happen. The consequences to everyone else of accepting someone's claim of being male or female despite some amount of evidence to the contrary are basically nil. The consequences of rejecting those claims are catastrophic. I'm inclined to care more about the severe consequences to a few people than a few other people being briefly uncomfortable or weirded out and then getting over it.
Not really. You just need people to breed, you could have all the kids raised by gay couples.
But this is really a non-starter argument to begin with. It is impossible for a civilization to function if absolutely everyone is a programmer, because we have no one to produce food. BAN PROGRAMMING!
Except that he doesn't believe that. I know, he says he does. But until he's explicitly stating that polygamy is A-OK, taking women by force in war is also OK, and the "family unit" is extended families including Uncle Bill and his very very good friend Uncle Pete who are "confirmed bachelors", he's not supporting anything more "traditional" than the 1950s.
The historical tradition of marriage in the various cultures represented in the US is much larger and more varied than the modern propagandists like to pretend.
There was a time when marriage was a serious commitment that created family bonds binding not only on the direct participants, but also on their families. Card is among the leading advocates of rejecting that ideal entirely in favor of viewing marriage as an animal husbandry permit.
If he were also not getting paid for it, that might count. If he gets paid for it, he tithes from that money to the Mormon church and uses the rest to support his hobbies like running anti-marriage organizations and pushing anti-gay propaganda.
While most humans are male or female, not all are, and demanding that everyone be categorized as one, or asserting that your determination as to category is better than theirs, seems pretty arrogant.
Life is full of rough edges where theories don't quite work.
Card is attacked for organizing millions of dollars of funding for propaganda campaigns about how some of my friends are horrible people who are destroying our country. This has nothing to do with McCarthyism, which had nothing to do with what people actually did or said.
It's a pretty safe bet. I've met... Hmm. I think I've met one person I could point to who does not support legal recognition of gay marriages, but that I don't think is visibly bigoted against gays.
And the thing is, your proposed test, that "As long as he doesn't stop anyone from doing anything that they are legally permitted to do, you shouldn't care what he says.", makes no sense whatsoever. Part of liberty is advocating for freedoms which we ought to have but don't yet. In the 1960s, people like Card were advocating against legalizing interracial marriage. Does your test work there? Why, yes, it does. It produces the obvious result, that as long as people are only marching on Washington with signs reading "stop the race-mixing march of the antichrist", there is no reason for interracial couples to object to what those people are doing, as it's not actually preventing them from doing something currently legally allowed, it's just trying to prevent something they want very much to do from becoming legally allowed...
Imagine that someone has an absolute commitment to a policy where, no matter where he gets money or how much he gets, 10% of it goes to an organization that has launched massive propaganda campaigns telling everyone that some group of people are a menace to society.
Can you imagine someone being unwilling to give him money, even if the specific task they'd be paying him for does not also endanger them?
But it's precisely his "contributions" for which he's being attacked -- he's drawn immense amounts of development effort into fragmentation, bloatware, and attempts to be nearly-compatible with something Microsoft is going to abandon and wreck as soon as they think the compatibility shims are good enough to be a threat.
In theory, the language merely strongly suggests a full name, and you should be able to pick a different name and file an appeal showing that it's your intended name. Obviously, they don't actually do that.
I'm not at all convinced that you can in general separate artists from art. Further, even if you could, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I mean, you could also decide you don't care whether a particular company uses slave labor to obtain products more cheaply, and just enjoy the savings...
Wait, so, the guy who basically pushed 90% of the bloat, incompatibility, and other such madness I've ever seen in Linux is leaving because of the bloat and incompatibility?
And "prove" is not defined. There is no documented standard of proof, and whatever it is, I apparently don't qualify. I am not sure there is an actual standard short of "famous enough to get significant news coverage".
Take some time to go read what Yonatan Zunger has written about names. He appears to have a pretty good idea of how important it is to people to have their chosen names recognized. He talks about things like how the appeals process should "start a dialogue", and so on.
What actually happens:
I've appealed a couple of times. There is no process in any part of the appeal to permit me to submit even a single sentance of explanation for why I feel a given thing is or is not my name. All I can submit is scanned documents or web pages. Could those be things I wrote? We don't know, but if they've ever checked the one I tried submitting, I have no knowledge of it.
When your appeal is denied, there is no explanation. There is not a single sentence in the boilerplate letter that goes out which says in what way their determination was reached, or what they thought of the evidence, or even whether they looked at the evidence. The appeal comes from a no-replies-accepted address. There is no identification of who it was who sent the message, there is nothing given to permit followups. Your sole option is to retry the appeal.
If you appeal a second time, the appeal can be ignored for months. Not denied, not approved, just ignored completely. I eventually went and posted on one of their help forums asking for information. I was told by someone I think was claiming to be a Google employee that there was an absolute requirement that all names must have a first and last name. This is, of course, not actually true -- there are counterexamples. The policy says that names will usually be a first and last name, but stops short of requiring them. Except, of course, if you're just some random guy, in which case, it's a requirement.
I go by "seebs". That is the name I am commonly known by in daily life. It is the name used to address me and to refer to me, by my coworkers, by my friends, by my spouse, by my lawyer. My mom doesn't use "seebs" all the time, but she does sometimes. If I'm in a mall, and I hear someone yelling the name on my driver's license, I'm unlikely to look, because usually that means someone else.
The underlying issue is that they have some evidence that some people feel "uncomfortable" when they enter a social community and some people have handles which are not "real names". The Google policy, they claim, is not to require that the name be a real name, only that it look like a real name, because that makes some people less nervous. However, it is not at all obvious to me that this justifies the insulting, arrogant, and dismissive way that Google has handled the appeals process.
The gap between what they actually do and what Mr. Zunger describes is disturbing, because he's nominally in charge. I don't know what's up. Are his blog posts not actually what he thinks? Are the employees unaware of the stated intent of policy? Does no one at Google have the technical know-how to allow an employee evaluating an appeal to send an email to the person whose name is under discussion? It seems like a simple email or two saying "I looked at this, and here's why I don't think this looks like good evidence that this is the name you're commonly known by" could go a fair way towards solving this.
Of course, so could just accepting that the name I want to be known by is probably the only name you can use without being arrogant and insulting.
The whole process makes it very clear that Google's employees are much more valuable than the prospective users of their social network. The overall impression I get is that they would much rather all the weird people just stayed off their network, so they could save valuable engineering and support time, and just not have to deal with us. I have in the past observed that the impression I get is that they would be happier if all the people with weird names, or who are unwilling to use their legal names (say, trans people who haven't done their name change yet), would just go away. Or die. Whatever, so long as the problem that a minority of p
I used to sue junk faxers as a hobby, we never had any trouble at all getting costs awarded. Fees are harder, and fees and costs are not the same thing. But we got fees awarded at least once. So, it can happen.
I've been programming professionally at some level for, oh, 20ish years now. I know people who've been doing it longer. And so far, I've never once seen anyone do that "just paste things together" thing who had been programming for more than a couple of years.
It's not just that what you say isn't what I've seen, it's that it's precisely inverted from anything I've seen. Maybe there's some huge pool of commercial programmers who suck, but I'm not encountering them. People who don't like to develop abstractions and invent stuff don't typically enjoy programming very much.
You seem to have completely omitted the part where you make your case in any way, by showing an actual causal relationship between age and the abilities you hypothesize.
And if anything, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Young programmers copy and paste boilerplate. Old programmers think of good abstractions.
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I haven't bought anything made by EA or Ubisoft or Bethesda in quite a while. Life's good. (Bethesda, you ask? Yes, because of the Mojang lawsuit. That was Not Okay.)
So, you're saying, the guy who solves the hardest problems that no one else could reasonably attempt is the worst employee? Because that guy's going to take more time to solve things, is gonna have more things that need to be reworked, and so on.
Think it through! If you have a simple task that any reasonably competent engineer could do, an average programmer should be able to do it quickly and reliably, right? So then you have stuff that's basically new research and trying to solve problems that no one's yet sure how to solve, and...
1. We won't have any way to make reasonable estimates, so estimated dates will be missed sometimes.
2. Amount of output will be small.
3. Likelihood of rework is high.
Look, seriously, if it were that easy, people would already be doing it widely enough that there wouldn't be a need to invent metrics, we'd have working ones. We don't.
Because "employees" are a monolithic group who all have the same opinions, right?
I work remotely. I would switch jobs rather than go to an office regularly. I can't function well in an office; I mean, yeah, well enough to hold down most jobs in my general area, but not even close to as well as I can work when I don't have to deal with people all the time. "Face time" is not merely not a requirement for me, it's an active detriment. But IRC's great, so I'm happy with that.
Thing is, I'm sure there's some people, especially people not in our group, who note that I'm on at sporadic hours and conclude that I "haven't been working". And since a lot of the people I work with are also remote, if all the remote workers went away at once, you might find a majority view was that it was an improvement...
I don't dispute that there may have been lots of people at Yahoo who weren't actually working, but the existence of a majority who think a particular set of requirements is just fine is unpersuasive to me. There's often a majority who don't care about impact on some smaller group of people who aren't them.
Funny you should mention that, there was recently some effort by management where I work to establish times of day during which it is strictly forbidden to go interrupt people because being found and asked things all the time was preventing them from getting stuff done...
It'd take a long time to untangle all the bad assumptions here, but long story short, the correlation between the chromosomes and the genitalia is not 100%, and the correlation between either and self-identity is also not 100%. And the thing is... Neither the chromosomes, nor the genitalia, care. The brain does. So the one that has the ability to express a preference wins.
Biology is full of things which are a little approximate around the edges, and sometimes strange things happen. The consequences to everyone else of accepting someone's claim of being male or female despite some amount of evidence to the contrary are basically nil. The consequences of rejecting those claims are catastrophic. I'm inclined to care more about the severe consequences to a few people than a few other people being briefly uncomfortable or weirded out and then getting over it.
Yeah, but this goes beyond merely "really bad customer support" to "they have stated intentions which no one is even remotely trying to act on".
Not really. You just need people to breed, you could have all the kids raised by gay couples.
But this is really a non-starter argument to begin with. It is impossible for a civilization to function if absolutely everyone is a programmer, because we have no one to produce food. BAN PROGRAMMING!
Except that he doesn't believe that. I know, he says he does. But until he's explicitly stating that polygamy is A-OK, taking women by force in war is also OK, and the "family unit" is extended families including Uncle Bill and his very very good friend Uncle Pete who are "confirmed bachelors", he's not supporting anything more "traditional" than the 1950s.
The historical tradition of marriage in the various cultures represented in the US is much larger and more varied than the modern propagandists like to pretend.
There was a time when marriage was a serious commitment that created family bonds binding not only on the direct participants, but also on their families. Card is among the leading advocates of rejecting that ideal entirely in favor of viewing marriage as an animal husbandry permit.
If he were also not getting paid for it, that might count. If he gets paid for it, he tithes from that money to the Mormon church and uses the rest to support his hobbies like running anti-marriage organizations and pushing anti-gay propaganda.
You mean like we used to have the legal right to marry someone of our own race? Loving v. Virginia dealt with that one 40+ years ago.
While most humans are male or female, not all are, and demanding that everyone be categorized as one, or asserting that your determination as to category is better than theirs, seems pretty arrogant.
Life is full of rough edges where theories don't quite work.
Card is attacked for organizing millions of dollars of funding for propaganda campaigns about how some of my friends are horrible people who are destroying our country. This has nothing to do with McCarthyism, which had nothing to do with what people actually did or said.
It's a pretty safe bet. I've met... Hmm. I think I've met one person I could point to who does not support legal recognition of gay marriages, but that I don't think is visibly bigoted against gays.
Proposition 8 was a change to California's law.
And the thing is, your proposed test, that "As long as he doesn't stop anyone from doing anything that they are legally permitted to do, you shouldn't care what he says.", makes no sense whatsoever. Part of liberty is advocating for freedoms which we ought to have but don't yet. In the 1960s, people like Card were advocating against legalizing interracial marriage. Does your test work there? Why, yes, it does. It produces the obvious result, that as long as people are only marching on Washington with signs reading "stop the race-mixing march of the antichrist", there is no reason for interracial couples to object to what those people are doing, as it's not actually preventing them from doing something currently legally allowed, it's just trying to prevent something they want very much to do from becoming legally allowed...
Imagine that someone has an absolute commitment to a policy where, no matter where he gets money or how much he gets, 10% of it goes to an organization that has launched massive propaganda campaigns telling everyone that some group of people are a menace to society.
Can you imagine someone being unwilling to give him money, even if the specific task they'd be paying him for does not also endanger them?
But it's precisely his "contributions" for which he's being attacked -- he's drawn immense amounts of development effort into fragmentation, bloatware, and attempts to be nearly-compatible with something Microsoft is going to abandon and wreck as soon as they think the compatibility shims are good enough to be a threat.
In theory, the language merely strongly suggests a full name, and you should be able to pick a different name and file an appeal showing that it's your intended name. Obviously, they don't actually do that.
I'm not at all convinced that you can in general separate artists from art. Further, even if you could, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I mean, you could also decide you don't care whether a particular company uses slave labor to obtain products more cheaply, and just enjoy the savings...
Wait, so, the guy who basically pushed 90% of the bloat, incompatibility, and other such madness I've ever seen in Linux is leaving because of the bloat and incompatibility?
Dude, not cool. You made that bed, now lie in it.
And "prove" is not defined. There is no documented standard of proof, and whatever it is, I apparently don't qualify. I am not sure there is an actual standard short of "famous enough to get significant news coverage".
Take some time to go read what Yonatan Zunger has written about names. He appears to have a pretty good idea of how important it is to people to have their chosen names recognized. He talks about things like how the appeals process should "start a dialogue", and so on.
What actually happens:
I've appealed a couple of times. There is no process in any part of the appeal to permit me to submit even a single sentance of explanation for why I feel a given thing is or is not my name. All I can submit is scanned documents or web pages. Could those be things I wrote? We don't know, but if they've ever checked the one I tried submitting, I have no knowledge of it.
When your appeal is denied, there is no explanation. There is not a single sentence in the boilerplate letter that goes out which says in what way their determination was reached, or what they thought of the evidence, or even whether they looked at the evidence. The appeal comes from a no-replies-accepted address. There is no identification of who it was who sent the message, there is nothing given to permit followups. Your sole option is to retry the appeal.
If you appeal a second time, the appeal can be ignored for months. Not denied, not approved, just ignored completely. I eventually went and posted on one of their help forums asking for information. I was told by someone I think was claiming to be a Google employee that there was an absolute requirement that all names must have a first and last name. This is, of course, not actually true -- there are counterexamples. The policy says that names will usually be a first and last name, but stops short of requiring them. Except, of course, if you're just some random guy, in which case, it's a requirement.
I go by "seebs". That is the name I am commonly known by in daily life. It is the name used to address me and to refer to me, by my coworkers, by my friends, by my spouse, by my lawyer. My mom doesn't use "seebs" all the time, but she does sometimes. If I'm in a mall, and I hear someone yelling the name on my driver's license, I'm unlikely to look, because usually that means someone else.
The underlying issue is that they have some evidence that some people feel "uncomfortable" when they enter a social community and some people have handles which are not "real names". The Google policy, they claim, is not to require that the name be a real name, only that it look like a real name, because that makes some people less nervous. However, it is not at all obvious to me that this justifies the insulting, arrogant, and dismissive way that Google has handled the appeals process.
The gap between what they actually do and what Mr. Zunger describes is disturbing, because he's nominally in charge. I don't know what's up. Are his blog posts not actually what he thinks? Are the employees unaware of the stated intent of policy? Does no one at Google have the technical know-how to allow an employee evaluating an appeal to send an email to the person whose name is under discussion? It seems like a simple email or two saying "I looked at this, and here's why I don't think this looks like good evidence that this is the name you're commonly known by" could go a fair way towards solving this.
Of course, so could just accepting that the name I want to be known by is probably the only name you can use without being arrogant and insulting.
The whole process makes it very clear that Google's employees are much more valuable than the prospective users of their social network. The overall impression I get is that they would much rather all the weird people just stayed off their network, so they could save valuable engineering and support time, and just not have to deal with us. I have in the past observed that the impression I get is that they would be happier if all the people with weird names, or who are unwilling to use their legal names (say, trans people who haven't done their name change yet), would just go away. Or die. Whatever, so long as the problem that a minority of p
I used to sue junk faxers as a hobby, we never had any trouble at all getting costs awarded. Fees are harder, and fees and costs are not the same thing. But we got fees awarded at least once. So, it can happen.
Yeah, still not seeing any evidence for this.
I've been programming professionally at some level for, oh, 20ish years now. I know people who've been doing it longer. And so far, I've never once seen anyone do that "just paste things together" thing who had been programming for more than a couple of years.
It's not just that what you say isn't what I've seen, it's that it's precisely inverted from anything I've seen. Maybe there's some huge pool of commercial programmers who suck, but I'm not encountering them. People who don't like to develop abstractions and invent stuff don't typically enjoy programming very much.
I've never seen a programmer who had to be encouraged to program. Mostly, I'm interested in the people you can't get to stop programming.
You seem to have completely omitted the part where you make your case in any way, by showing an actual causal relationship between age and the abilities you hypothesize.
And if anything, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Young programmers copy and paste boilerplate. Old programmers think of good abstractions.