Which means the company made out really well. Assuming the burdened cost per employee was about $70,000 per year (which is low) HP made $45,000 per employee laid off this year, and $70,000 next year. Assuming a 15% discount rate and a 4 year save, the end result is a corporate savings of about $1,200,000,000. Not a whole lot of money, but not bad either. Would you be willing to pay 150 million to get something worth 1.2 billion? I would.
Layoffs suck. I've been there, I've been unemployed in this crappy market. Let's face the facts. For the most part, IT people are overpaid and underperform. Nobody cares about having cool IT, they want to run their business. HP is a rare example of a merger workin as planned. I only hope the recent Bank One and JP Morgan merger (I work for Bank One) will go as smoothly. Even there they are projecting 10,000 job cuts. Layoffs sometimes make sense like those done by General Dynamics in the '80s. Their CEO wrote the book on getting a huge bonus for laying people off. In the long term, it was a good move. Most people found jobs and a company that was headed for bankruptcy was saved.
So the summary version: Layoffs suck, but keeping people that aren't necessary for business just acts as a drag on the company causing productive people to suffer a similar fate.
This is not particularly accurate. Stock options are a derivative investment. Their value depends upon the value and variability of the underlying asset (the stock)
As far as valuing them, there is no need to guess, simply use the Black Scholes formula. You can find it at http://home.online.no/~espehaug/SayBlackScholes.ht ml in a number of programming languages.
(Who says business people aren't good for anything!)
I agree with most of this, but I would disagree with "Cost Center". A cost center is a division within the enterprise that is measured based upon eliminating cost. IT is usually treated as a cost center because it does not directly generate profits or revenue (And is therefore not a profit or revenue center) and does not manage investments. Whether you think the company should be broken down this way or not is up to you, but the term is a real, established term.
In the past, I have created scripts that populate data. You can do several levels of refresh, refresh just the data, or delete all objects and re-create them as well. This is a bit of a pain to set up, but it works well in simple cases.
Using ant, I just had a task to take a snapshot of the data in the database and save it to cvs. I then had a data refresh as a general part of the setup.
Every once in a while, we would rebuild all objects by dropping all tables and recreating them. This was nice in development, but a pain in production (reloading a 4million row table takes a while, not to mention keeping the data in CVS)
For production usage, we created alter table scripts that got added with the correct TAG. When we installed a build, all alter scripts were run before any code was pushed.
What about a web server using signal based on IO and a single process model handling quite a few connections? That can easily have thousands of signals per second. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It is extremely important to compile your/bin shells staticly. That way you can recover in case you screw up/lib or ld.so --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
The two front speakers meet that price range. Or you could buy the amplifier and the center channel. Or the Sub and the rears. Unfortunately, you probably can't get all of them for that.
You can, however, get a setup that includes 5 infinity speakers, a sub and an amp for about 1500. You just can't the one I have. (Or maybe prices have dropped enough in the last 2 years where you can get it) Infinity is not that expensive, and they sound great! --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I absolutely love my Onkyo amplifiers. I have 3 of them, including the monster that drives my home theater. It has 6 channel output for room a, and 4 channel output for room b. It will allow me to listen to music in one room while watching TV in another, all driven on the one amplifier. Combine this with Dolby Digital decoding and 3 digital inputs and you have a killer amplifier.
As far as speakers go, I much prefer my infiniti system. I have infiniti overtures in the front, quadpoles in the back and a really nice center channel. If you can only afford to buy one really good speaker, make it your center channel. You won't regret it.
As for subs, I like the velodyne 16" subwoofer. MMMMM, bass. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
In my opinion, OO does nothing for reuse. Proper design of code/interfaces does everything for reuse. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Of course. I thought the article was poorly written and flat out biased. OO is not a solution to every problem, however it can help encourage reuse. I did not mean to imply that OO was the perfect answer, only that code reuse through OO can have immediate returns under the right conditions. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
My statement about properly implemented OO gives you code reuse can be applied to paradigms other than OO, but I haven't done it will.
About half of the good OO code I have written in my life has been done in C. That does not include polymorphism or any other pure OO construct, however the design of the components themselves are modeled as objects.
A better word to explain my vision of OO is component based design. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It has been a long time since I last posted to Slashdot. I can normally restrain myself, but this is just pure and absolute BS.
Properly implemented, code re-use can pay off immediately. I have worked in shops where every time we added a client, we needed a new copy of the code. Even though most of the processing was the same for the new client, we had to start out with a copy of the code. Code re-use would have bought us hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly. (This did not ocurr at my current employer)
Properly implemented abstraction and OO along with iterative design can save a large amount of money very quickly. The key is to prototype your interfaces for the application you have in mind. Once you have done that, think of a completely unrelated use of the interface and test that. If you can handle 2 or 3 different uses, you have a good interface to start with. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your system.
People may question you immediately, however the minute somebody decides to change the system message transport from http to JMS, you should be able to convince them of the value of proper abstraction and code reuse, just change the transport class and you are done. I did this in a system where we did all of the work necessary to change the transport in less than 30 minutes. The consultant that had been working on the same problem for 3 months was absolutely amazed at quickly I made the change.
OOP is not a cure all, however its use along with proper abstraction can lead to large savings from code-reuse in a short time.
Mike --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
He may come across that way, but after reading some of his in depth technical posts, he is also an incredibly bright person. If you read the LKML often, you will see that there are quite a few people that come across as being jerks. Once you get to know how they talk though, you can see that they really aren't that bad.
Never confuse how a person says something with what they say. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Why can't you just compile C down to the bytecode that this assembler compiles to? The question is why should I use this language instead of a more normal language, not why should I use this bytecode/VM combo --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Not a bit less. I am paid fair money for what I do, and I expect to be paid more in the future. I am simply saying that being on call is part of the jobs, and we are already being paid to do the job. Maybe I sounded brainwashed and enamored by the prospect, however I understand this is a job, it just happens to be a job I enjoy. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I love responses like this. I am young. I am 22 years old and married. I have a life and I enjoy that life very much. The software that I support is enourmous. I haven't even written 1 percent of it. It is also mission critical for quite a few large name clients (such as kmarts BlueLight.com and Dicks Sporting Goods)
Your last line summarized it, though. I love competition. I want to be the best. I want to propve to people that I can do anything, because I find that fun. Supporting a large piece of mission critical software can be a blast, it is a competition like any other to see how fast you can find the problem and fix it. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It depends on how you feel about your job. I work for a relative startup (just more than one year old). I am on call 24/7 every third week. I get called about 4 times a week when on call, normally during the middle of the night.
How much do I get paid for this? 0 dollars. I make no extra money when I get paged. I do it because I want the system to work and I want our customers to get their packages as soon as possible.
It amazes me that it is rare to hear people complain about getting paged, even when they get paged 3 times a night (2:00am, 4:00 am and 6:00 am) 6 days during their on call rotation. The company is neat and we like what we do.
In short, if you are dedicated to the company and agree with the job that you are doing, you may not need to be paid extra to carry the pager.
If you are interested in seeing what we do, check out our website --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Why can't you sync the disks? All you need to do is to kill the redhat daemon and you get all of your file descriptors back, then just run like normal. The kernel will clean up after the application when it exits. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Correct,but if other yahoo pages linked to these, and those pages weren't indexed, their rank would be lower. Remember that google looks at how many people link to a page when determining rank. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
First of all, has anyone contacted Google about this before complaining?
Second, isn't it possible that Google is only now starting to index pages inside Yahoo that link to their directory? Previously they could have been excluded due to a robots.txt file. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I agree with this, however I would imagine it would be rare to see the printf in any program that was written with security in mind. The printf problem should be obvious to anyone who has programmed, the creating of a locale database is quite a bit more removed from the programmer however. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
This is not an accidental thing. It takes a lot of work to get a root prompt. Essentially, you can make the daemon run code (such as/bin/sh) as the user it is currently running under. --
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Slashdot Mirror
Which means the company made out really well. Assuming the burdened cost per employee was about $70,000 per year (which is low) HP made $45,000 per employee laid off this year, and $70,000 next year. Assuming a 15% discount rate and a 4 year save, the end result is a corporate savings of about $1,200,000,000. Not a whole lot of money, but not bad either. Would you be willing to pay 150 million to get something worth 1.2 billion? I would.
Layoffs suck. I've been there, I've been unemployed in this crappy market. Let's face the facts. For the most part, IT people are overpaid and underperform. Nobody cares about having cool IT, they want to run their business. HP is a rare example of a merger workin as planned. I only hope the recent Bank One and JP Morgan merger (I work for Bank One) will go as smoothly. Even there they are projecting 10,000 job cuts. Layoffs sometimes make sense like those done by General Dynamics in the '80s. Their CEO wrote the book on getting a huge bonus for laying people off. In the long term, it was a good move. Most people found jobs and a company that was headed for bankruptcy was saved.
So the summary version: Layoffs suck, but keeping people that aren't necessary for business just acts as a drag on the company causing productive people to suffer a similar fate.
All numbers in thousands, that is 3b dollars
This is not particularly accurate. Stock options are a derivative investment. Their value depends upon the value and variability of the underlying asset (the stock)
t ml in a number of programming languages.
As far as valuing them, there is no need to guess, simply use the Black Scholes formula. You can find it at http://home.online.no/~espehaug/SayBlackScholes.h
(Who says business people aren't good for anything!)
I agree with most of this, but I would disagree with "Cost Center". A cost center is a division within the enterprise that is measured based upon eliminating cost. IT is usually treated as a cost center because it does not directly generate profits or revenue (And is therefore not a profit or revenue center) and does not manage investments. Whether you think the company should be broken down this way or not is up to you, but the term is a real, established term.
In the past, I have created scripts that populate data. You can do several levels of refresh, refresh just the data, or delete all objects and re-create them as well. This is a bit of a pain to set up, but it works well in simple cases.
Using ant, I just had a task to take a snapshot of the data in the database and save it to cvs. I then had a data refresh as a general part of the setup.
Every once in a while, we would rebuild all objects by dropping all tables and recreating them. This was nice in development, but a pain in production (reloading a 4million row table takes a while, not to mention keeping the data in CVS)
For production usage, we created alter table scripts that got added with the correct TAG. When we installed a build, all alter scripts were run before any code was pushed.
What about a web server using signal based on IO and a single process model handling quite a few connections? That can easily have thousands of signals per second.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It is extremely important to compile your /bin shells staticly. That way you can recover in case you screw up /lib or ld.so
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
This is the reason given that one of the first sounds on the macintosh system that was played on startup is called ....
sosumi
so-sue-me
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
The two front speakers meet that price range. Or you could buy the amplifier and the center channel. Or the Sub and the rears. Unfortunately, you probably can't get all of them for that.
You can, however, get a setup that includes 5 infinity speakers, a sub and an amp for about 1500. You just can't the one I have. (Or maybe prices have dropped enough in the last 2 years where you can get it) Infinity is not that expensive, and they sound great!
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I absolutely love my Onkyo amplifiers. I have 3 of them, including the monster that drives my home theater. It has 6 channel output for room a, and 4 channel output for room b. It will allow me to listen to music in one room while watching TV in another, all driven on the one amplifier. Combine this with Dolby Digital decoding and 3 digital inputs and you have a killer amplifier.
As far as speakers go, I much prefer my infiniti system. I have infiniti overtures in the front, quadpoles in the back and a really nice center channel. If you can only afford to buy one really good speaker, make it your center channel. You won't regret it.
As for subs, I like the velodyne 16" subwoofer. MMMMM, bass.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
In my opinion, OO does nothing for reuse. Proper design of code/interfaces does everything for reuse.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Of course. I thought the article was poorly written and flat out biased. OO is not a solution to every problem, however it can help encourage reuse. I did not mean to imply that OO was the perfect answer, only that code reuse through OO can have immediate returns under the right conditions.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
My statement about properly implemented OO gives you code reuse can be applied to paradigms other than OO, but I haven't done it will.
About half of the good OO code I have written in my life has been done in C. That does not include polymorphism or any other pure OO construct, however the design of the components themselves are modeled as objects.
A better word to explain my vision of OO is component based design.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It has been a long time since I last posted to Slashdot. I can normally restrain myself, but this is just pure and absolute BS.
Properly implemented, code re-use can pay off immediately. I have worked in shops where every time we added a client, we needed a new copy of the code. Even though most of the processing was the same for the new client, we had to start out with a copy of the code. Code re-use would have bought us hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly. (This did not ocurr at my current employer)
Properly implemented abstraction and OO along with iterative design can save a large amount of money very quickly. The key is to prototype your interfaces for the application you have in mind. Once you have done that, think of a completely unrelated use of the interface and test that. If you can handle 2 or 3 different uses, you have a good interface to start with. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your system.
People may question you immediately, however the minute somebody decides to change the system message transport from http to JMS, you should be able to convince them of the value of proper abstraction and code reuse, just change the transport class and you are done. I did this in a system where we did all of the work necessary to change the transport in less than 30 minutes. The consultant that had been working on the same problem for 3 months was absolutely amazed at quickly I made the change.
OOP is not a cure all, however its use along with proper abstraction can lead to large savings from code-reuse in a short time.
Mike
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
He may come across that way, but after reading some of his in depth technical posts, he is also an incredibly bright person. If you read the LKML often, you will see that there are quite a few people that come across as being jerks. Once you get to know how they talk though, you can see that they really aren't that bad.
Never confuse how a person says something with what they say.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Why can't you just compile C down to the bytecode that this assembler compiles to? The question is why should I use this language instead of a more normal language, not why should I use this bytecode/VM combo
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Not a bit less. I am paid fair money for what I do, and I expect to be paid more in the future. I am simply saying that being on call is part of the jobs, and we are already being paid to do the job. Maybe I sounded brainwashed and enamored by the prospect, however I understand this is a job, it just happens to be a job I enjoy.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
We have 600+ people, 3 warehouses and 2 call centers. This one is going to make it big.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I love responses like this. I am young. I am 22 years old and married. I have a life and I enjoy that life very much. The software that I support is enourmous. I haven't even written 1 percent of it. It is also mission critical for quite a few large name clients (such as kmarts BlueLight.com and Dicks Sporting Goods)
Your last line summarized it, though. I love competition. I want to be the best. I want to propve to people that I can do anything, because I find that fun. Supporting a large piece of mission critical software can be a blast, it is a competition like any other to see how fast you can find the problem and fix it.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
It depends on how you feel about your job. I work for a relative startup (just more than one year old). I am on call 24/7 every third week. I get called about 4 times a week when on call, normally during the middle of the night.
How much do I get paid for this? 0 dollars. I make no extra money when I get paged. I do it because I want the system to work and I want our customers to get their packages as soon as possible.
It amazes me that it is rare to hear people complain about getting paged, even when they get paged 3 times a night (2:00am, 4:00 am and 6:00 am) 6 days during their on call rotation. The company is neat and we like what we do.
In short, if you are dedicated to the company and agree with the job that you are doing, you may not need to be paid extra to carry the pager.
If you are interested in seeing what we do, check out our website
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Why can't you sync the disks? All you need to do is to kill the redhat daemon and you get all of your file descriptors back, then just run like normal. The kernel will clean up after the application when it exits.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Correct,but if other yahoo pages linked to these, and those pages weren't indexed, their rank would be lower. Remember that google looks at how many people link to a page when determining rank.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
First of all, has anyone contacted Google about this before complaining?
Second, isn't it possible that Google is only now starting to index pages inside Yahoo that link to their directory? Previously they could have been excluded due to a robots.txt file.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
I agree with this, however I would imagine it would be rare to see the printf in any program that was written with security in mind. The printf problem should be obvious to anyone who has programmed, the creating of a locale database is quite a bit more removed from the programmer however.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
This is not an accidental thing. It takes a lot of work to get a root prompt. Essentially, you can make the daemon run code (such as /bin/sh) as the user it is currently running under.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com