I remember reading an article about the creator of the cubicle - he meant for modular offices to be larger.
Anyway, the reason they're popular is that they amortize as furniture instead of as a building, so the company can write it off in 7 years instead of 30. I don't think management really wants cube farms, so get rid of the tax loophole and you're all set.
As far as convincing them about better chairs, larger monitors, etc., you could pay for it yourself or find a different company to work for...
My first college CS course started with "This is an n-type transistor, and this is a p-type transistor." We learned to make logic gates like AND, OR, NOT, NAND, and NOR. Then we used those to make flip-flops, muxes, etc. Next step: memory and a CPU.
Our first programming assignment in college was a list of 1s and 0s. THEN we moved to assembly. We learned to hand assemble our code (and hand disassemble). Moving on, we covered C and how to hand compile it to assembly. One of our questions on the final was to provide C code for a binary string of machine code.
How was this possible? The professor had developed a very simple processor architecture that allowed us to focus on learning a lot of concepts without having to deal with most real-world issues. e.g. no floating point support in the processor, only 16 registers, minimal set of interrupt routines available, etc.
That was a great semester! It gave me the framework for the rest of my 4-year program. All my other classes felt like they were just flushing out more detail on this or that area. One thing that worked well for me was that I had some programming experience, but not in C. Everything was new to me, but I had a basic understanding of how a computer works, how to write code, etc.
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I remember reading an article about the creator of the cubicle - he meant for modular offices to be larger.
Anyway, the reason they're popular is that they amortize as furniture instead of as a building, so the company can write it off in 7 years instead of 30. I don't think management really wants cube farms, so get rid of the tax loophole and you're all set.
As far as convincing them about better chairs, larger monitors, etc., you could pay for it yourself or find a different company to work for...
Start in machine code? Bah.
My first college CS course started with "This is an n-type transistor, and this is a p-type transistor." We learned to make logic gates like AND, OR, NOT, NAND, and NOR. Then we used those to make flip-flops, muxes, etc. Next step: memory and a CPU.
Our first programming assignment in college was a list of 1s and 0s. THEN we moved to assembly. We learned to hand assemble our code (and hand disassemble). Moving on, we covered C and how to hand compile it to assembly. One of our questions on the final was to provide C code for a binary string of machine code.
Think I'm kidding? Check out the text book.
How was this possible? The professor had developed a very simple processor architecture that allowed us to focus on learning a lot of concepts without having to deal with most real-world issues. e.g. no floating point support in the processor, only 16 registers, minimal set of interrupt routines available, etc.
That was a great semester! It gave me the framework for the rest of my 4-year program. All my other classes felt like they were just flushing out more detail on this or that area. One thing that worked well for me was that I had some programming experience, but not in C. Everything was new to me, but I had a basic understanding of how a computer works, how to write code, etc.