I live in an area with a regional airport. It's not something you'd be likely to miss. Yet I recall a news story (from about 20 years ago) where someone moved into the neighborhood and THEN decided that the airport should be limited (no flights after 9pm or whatever) or shut down. It always astonishes me when folks do that.
Oh absolutely, yes: Quite a few have become very good, and regularly correct me. This is how I learned, too. Just as a great programmer knows that the code isn't done when it works -- that's when you start -- writing doesn't end with the first draft.
Verbal advice is ephemeral. It's easy to not-notice something said in passing. And while there have been situations in which I learned at a master's feet in person -- particularly when he didn't realize he was teaching -- the grunt work of getting better at my job is a processing of making small improvements. So the opportunity to see, on the page, how someone changed the text, and why... that lets me compare before-and-after at my own pace, without anyone standing over me.
Needless to say I'm still close with those who mentored me and with those whom I've mentored. But "how to mentor" is, perhaps, a different discussion.
> The whole idea is a pretty radical change from the established order. Better tools need to be built. Better protocols need to be in place more consistently. Better practices need to be thought up and deployed, because the state of it now is objectively bad at the corporate level.
I'm interested in what changes you feel need to be made to improve the process, particularly if I left them out of the white paper (to which the article linked). As you may imagine, the topic is one that interests me greatly.
That's _their_ viewpoints. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I agree with them. But it's the perception, and you don't change someone's mind simply by saying, "You're wrong."
I agree that both types of learning are important. And that we need to learn to work outside our comfort zones, whatever they are, simply because in "real life" we're going to need to work in all sorts of environments.
I agree, too, when you say, "Group projects and collaborative work are, at best, tools that should be used in only limited roles in the classroom." We're talking about learning situations. That includes socialization, but it also touches on the best way for any given individual to soak up the factual knowledge necessary to get along in life, whether that's understanding Calculus, learning grammar, or writing a term paper. If the environment becomes a barrier to grokking the knowledge, then it adds to the difficulty of learning the subject. That is: If the only way that American History is presented to me is in a big group where I'm supposed to discuss it, and I find it difficult to be around people, I'm apt to end up less interested in American History.
Of course, the notion of using different types of teaching/learning applies more widely than introversion and extroversion. My husband (the extreme introvert) reads a book and applies the knowledge. I learn best when I have someone hovering over my shoulder, giving me slight corrections as I go. Other people like listening to a teacher at the front of the room. Shouldn't education include all of those, so that each of us can get what we need?
I started in mainframe days when SO MANY PROGRAMMERS I KNEW TYPED IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT WAS THE ONLY THING THE COMPILER UNDERSTOOD.
And then those people tried to use email, and thought that it was perfectly fine to write all non-programming correspondence that way. Including my brother-in-law... and you can't tell your BiL he's an idiot. Not if you want your sister to keep talking to you.
I have had lots of projects fail. Some were my fault. Some were management. Some were external. Plenty of reasons.
My point is that the existence of the team being ever-so-awesome does not necessarily have a correlation with its success. Just as actors can tell you about working on a movie with other actors where everyone felt creative and warm-and-fuzzy towards each other, and it has no influence on whether the movie is a commercial success.
You wouldn't have read the article if I had called it, A Measure of Your Team’s Health: How You Treat Your Less-Productive-But-Still-Well-Meaning Members. Also, we all do say, or at least mutter, "Elliot is such an idiot!" particularly in headdesk moments.
There's a big difference from someone being semi-competent or having a "dial-it-in" attitude and someone who's just not up to the rest of the people around him. With the former, team members resent the individual: "Why am I working so hard when you can't be bothered? I just have to pick up the slack" -- and that creates dissension and a management nightmare.
With Elliot (and the many team members I've known like him), it's obvious to everyone that he's doing the best he can; he's just dumb (relative to the others around him). He can be frustrating, but it's not because he has a bad attitude; quite to the contrary. HE WANTS TO HELP. In a healthy team, everybody does his best to find a way for him to do so.
Beer-wise: I am more of an ale fan than lagers, with particular fondness for IPAs and porters. But my attention is on good craft brews rather than a specific type. Or good craft anything; I appreciate good made-by-hand workmanship in any endeavor.
Robert Plant wasn't that pretty to start with. Fortunately, he made good music, instead of trying to have a career as a model.
"When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not." --Yoda
My self-worth is not bound to my looks. Nor should it be (even though I was kinda cute when I was young). I judge my value by my skill in my chosen field (whatever that is at the time, whether it's optimizing compilers, explaining how OS/2 system internals work, or sharing advice on using Twitter), in whether I treat others with kindness, and, of course, by how much chocolate I get to eat. So if you were trying to put me down, it didn't work.
Oh how sad. With all the wonders that the Internet brings to you, the first and only thing you consider is how someone looks?! Young padawan, the joy, the utter joy of living online, in IP packets, is that we connect to one another based on who we are and not what we are. My gender doesn't matter. My color is irrelevant. What matters is that we can find people who share our interests -- science fiction, programming, baseball, whatever -- and we can be honest with each other (because we don't have to edit ourselves, saying "I have to live with these people" when a family member utters a deplorable statement such as "I like the Dodgers.").
Thus we get to learn from each other, and our bodies matter least of all the things we bring to the conversation. Thus I could be friends with someone online for years before learning he was in a wheelchair, when in-person it would have been the first -- but least important -- thing I learned about him.
And you think first about how attractive I am? I'm so sorry. You're missing so much of what online communities can bring.
There are companies/"brands" I follow because I find their info cool or useful or they make me say, "How 'bout that!" Sometimes that's the case even when I have no interest in their product... in the same way that I can admire the Budweiser Clydesdales even if I'd never drink their beer. (I am a beer snob.) And there are companies whose stuff I like even though their Twitter feeds are lame. For example, I'm thinking of one quilting fabric company whose Twitter feed is nothing but dumb self-serving ads, and comparing it in my head to another quilting fabric company that regularly shares groovy quilt designs (made with their fabric of course), and asks Facebook fans which fabric they ought to feature in a print magazine ad, and so on.
But if you discover that what they say/publish is not-so-cleverly-concealed propaganda, nothing says you have to follow them.
Actually, the book tells people to have human conversations. Not to create the kind of awful "branded" Twitter streams we both abhor. I advise people to do the same thing I do on slashdot: Tell other people about things they'll find useful and cool.
Which does not make me a marketing expert. It makes me a communication expert.
I don't think so much about what interests me. I consider what might interest you.
I looked through a few of your submissions. With a few, you have the germ of something that might work. But you just blurt out the "fact" of the link, like "CNN says bigfoot was found," and that fits into my "weather report" description. Oh, yeah? How nice for them. Instead, tell me what you found and why it matters to me. Why should I care? Why is this amusing or relevant or useful to know?
Slashdot Mirror
No, green!
I'm lucky enough to have hugged roblimo in person.
We didn't always agree. But we always cared about what each other said. ...and isn't that the best any of us can ask for in a relationship?
I live in an area with a regional airport. It's not something you'd be likely to miss. Yet I recall a news story (from about 20 years ago) where someone moved into the neighborhood and THEN decided that the airport should be limited (no flights after 9pm or whatever) or shut down. It always astonishes me when folks do that.
Oh absolutely, yes: Quite a few have become very good, and regularly correct me. This is how I learned, too. Just as a great programmer knows that the code isn't done when it works -- that's when you start -- writing doesn't end with the first draft.
Verbal advice is ephemeral. It's easy to not-notice something said in passing. And while there have been situations in which I learned at a master's feet in person -- particularly when he didn't realize he was teaching -- the grunt work of getting better at my job is a processing of making small improvements. So the opportunity to see, on the page, how someone changed the text, and why... that lets me compare before-and-after at my own pace, without anyone standing over me.
Needless to say I'm still close with those who mentored me and with those whom I've mentored. But "how to mentor" is, perhaps, a different discussion.
> The whole idea is a pretty radical change from the established order. Better tools need to be built. Better protocols need to be in place more consistently. Better practices need to be thought up and deployed, because the state of it now is objectively bad at the corporate level.
I'm interested in what changes you feel need to be made to improve the process, particularly if I left them out of the white paper (to which the article linked). As you may imagine, the topic is one that interests me greatly.
I've mentored dozens of people by email and by commenting on their articles. Voice isn't necessary. Sometimes it actually gets in the way.
But yeah I also write very long emails.
That's _their_ viewpoints. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I agree with them. But it's the perception, and you don't change someone's mind simply by saying, "You're wrong."
I agree that both types of learning are important. And that we need to learn to work outside our comfort zones, whatever they are, simply because in "real life" we're going to need to work in all sorts of environments.
I agree, too, when you say, "Group projects and collaborative work are, at best, tools that should be used in only limited roles in the classroom." We're talking about learning situations. That includes socialization, but it also touches on the best way for any given individual to soak up the factual knowledge necessary to get along in life, whether that's understanding Calculus, learning grammar, or writing a term paper. If the environment becomes a barrier to grokking the knowledge, then it adds to the difficulty of learning the subject. That is: If the only way that American History is presented to me is in a big group where I'm supposed to discuss it, and I find it difficult to be around people, I'm apt to end up less interested in American History.
Of course, the notion of using different types of teaching/learning applies more widely than introversion and extroversion. My husband (the extreme introvert) reads a book and applies the knowledge. I learn best when I have someone hovering over my shoulder, giving me slight corrections as I go. Other people like listening to a teacher at the front of the room. Shouldn't education include all of those, so that each of us can get what we need?
I don't mind there being a caps lock key. But does it have to be bigger than most other keys? And in the way of other more-used ones?
Ha!
I started in mainframe days when SO MANY PROGRAMMERS I KNEW TYPED IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT WAS THE ONLY THING THE COMPILER UNDERSTOOD.
And then those people tried to use email, and thought that it was perfectly fine to write all non-programming correspondence that way. Including my brother-in-law... and you can't tell your BiL he's an idiot. Not if you want your sister to keep talking to you.
That's pretty weird, I agree.
You're right. But sometimes... itch itch itch MUST RESPOND NOW.
Ha ha ha ha.
Sorry. Just looking at my track record as a journalist, and comparing it to your comment. It made me snicker.
Um, no.
I have had lots of projects fail. Some were my fault. Some were management. Some were external. Plenty of reasons.
My point is that the existence of the team being ever-so-awesome does not necessarily have a correlation with its success. Just as actors can tell you about working on a movie with other actors where everyone felt creative and warm-and-fuzzy towards each other, and it has no influence on whether the movie is a commercial success.
You wouldn't have read the article if I had called it, A Measure of Your Team’s Health: How You Treat Your Less-Productive-But-Still-Well-Meaning Members. Also, we all do say, or at least mutter, "Elliot is such an idiot!" particularly in headdesk moments.
Is that really what you thought this was about?
There's a big difference from someone being semi-competent or having a "dial-it-in" attitude and someone who's just not up to the rest of the people around him. With the former, team members resent the individual: "Why am I working so hard when you can't be bothered? I just have to pick up the slack" -- and that creates dissension and a management nightmare.
With Elliot (and the many team members I've known like him), it's obvious to everyone that he's doing the best he can; he's just dumb (relative to the others around him). He can be frustrating, but it's not because he has a bad attitude; quite to the contrary. HE WANTS TO HELP. In a healthy team, everybody does his best to find a way for him to do so.
>>It would be nice to have an article about retired coders, what they did and their opinions of the dev world now.
Really? Cuz I could arrange that.
How kind of you to say so!
Beer-wise: I am more of an ale fan than lagers, with particular fondness for IPAs and porters. But my attention is on good craft brews rather than a specific type. Or good craft anything; I appreciate good made-by-hand workmanship in any endeavor.
I have several responses to this comment.
Thus we get to learn from each other, and our bodies matter least of all the things we bring to the conversation. Thus I could be friends with someone online for years before learning he was in a wheelchair, when in-person it would have been the first -- but least important -- thing I learned about him.
And you think first about how attractive I am? I'm so sorry. You're missing so much of what online communities can bring.
I'm happy to help. :-)
Filter it out? Just don't follow them...?
There are companies/"brands" I follow because I find their info cool or useful or they make me say, "How 'bout that!" Sometimes that's the case even when I have no interest in their product... in the same way that I can admire the Budweiser Clydesdales even if I'd never drink their beer. (I am a beer snob.) And there are companies whose stuff I like even though their Twitter feeds are lame. For example, I'm thinking of one quilting fabric company whose Twitter feed is nothing but dumb self-serving ads, and comparing it in my head to another quilting fabric company that regularly shares groovy quilt designs (made with their fabric of course), and asks Facebook fans which fabric they ought to feature in a print magazine ad, and so on.
But if you discover that what they say/publish is not-so-cleverly-concealed propaganda, nothing says you have to follow them.
Actually, the book tells people to have human conversations. Not to create the kind of awful "branded" Twitter streams we both abhor. I advise people to do the same thing I do on slashdot: Tell other people about things they'll find useful and cool.
Which does not make me a marketing expert. It makes me a communication expert.
I'm always friendly. Someone might have chocolate to share with me.
I don't think so much about what interests me. I consider what might interest you.
I looked through a few of your submissions. With a few, you have the germ of something that might work. But you just blurt out the "fact" of the link, like "CNN says bigfoot was found," and that fits into my "weather report" description. Oh, yeah? How nice for them. Instead, tell me what you found and why it matters to me. Why should I care? Why is this amusing or relevant or useful to know?
::glowing smile:: You're welcome.