Except that 'cloud' at Lockheed is entirely 'in house' and not accessible from the outside world at all. Its certainly not available on the Internet.
I seriously doubt that, as do many Chinese/Russian hackers. Even if the fileserver itself isn't on the internet, you can bet that client machines which connect to it are. I bet they allow VPN access to their internal network too, since they have more than one location.
China and Russia already have the F-35 plans.
As a former engineer at a defense contractor, I can say this: you cannot VPN to internal networks vetted for cleared work (aka "secured labs". In fact, you cannot even connected to secured labs from within an internal network. You have to physically walk in into a secured lab from where to connect to a secured network (where you have to sign in, sign out, and leave all electronic gadgets behind.) You cannot VPN nor work from home when you work on classified stuff. You need to be on-site on a partitioned network infrastructure.
And once there, that secured network has only access to resources specific to designated projects on a 'need-to-know' basis, and only for work at or below a given security level.
Meaning, a secret-level lab cannot access resources from a top-secret project, and/or top-secret lab A designated to work on project X cannot access resources allocated on secret lab B designated for project Y if projects A and Y are unrelated or firewalled even though lab A has greater clearance than lab B.
You cannot even print in many of these labs. Any information that must be transmitted from one lab to another is permitted only by a IA officer that is not assigned to any project and whose only work is to enforce the firewalls. And when that information is permitted is via encrypted devices carried by hand (sometimes we refer to those as sneaker nets.) These labs are physically separated down to the wire (and sometimes backup power generators.)
Nothing of the above can 100% prevent leakage due to stupidity or ulterior motives. But to assume that clients machine simply connect to a fileserver on a sec lab, that is just nonsense. It can happen due to malice or stupidity (I mean, anything not forbidden by physics or mathematics is possible). But that is not the general case, and as a result, you cannot simply presume it as a matter of fact.
I expect there to be outrage here on slashdot. But think about it. How is this really different from, lets say, Lockheed Martin designing the F-35 and storing all the design data associated with it. Sure, they're not a "private cloud vendor", but they're probably running a bunch of servers for this purpose. So "top secret cloud" is already happening.
Bingo. Amazon has been hiring people with sec. clearance for quite some time. These DoD clouds are not stuff deployed on typical heroku or AWS, but cloud infrastructure deployed on secured facilities.
I blame the term "the cloud", too amorphous of a term to mean just about anything.
Exactly. Secrets need to be kept in house, and even then they're not totally secure.
Give it to a contractor and even the most idiot person in the world will understand that there is a 99% chance you'll find that info spilled on the internet. I guess nothing stands in the way of cost reductions to zero eh ? Stupidity all around.
That is stupid. The same can be said for disgruntled employees. When we are talking contractors in a DoD setting, we are not talking about Infosys handing over work to someone overseas, but:
a bunch of US Citizens of different technical backgrounds already with sufficient clearance,
that works for a defense contractor,
for a very specific project
under non-negotiable guidelines of security
AT facilities physically vetted for the necessary clearance
Nothing on that list will prevent someone from leaking stuff out to the interweeds, but to presume that under those conditions there is a 99% change of that (as you said), that is just nonsense.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed.
I did not include the link in an attempt to provide statistics.
Please, try again.
No, I won't. This shit is clear as daylight. I have lived in the flesh. People "see it" or they "don't see it."
If it were "clear", you would've had no problems substantiating it with links to evidence..
We could extend that statement to say if the statement "Jim Crow laws are bad" weren't clear in the past, we wouldn't have needed a whole goddamned Civil Right Movement to make the case for it.
For something like this, with so much evidence that had been published in so many years, "clear" is firmly in the eye of the beholder.
You see it or you don't. I am not going to debate you, and if that gives *you* the impression of winning the point, go ahead and do your victory dance.
If you're black. White people can bring semi auto rifles into Walmart and the police don't give a fuck.
It's not about race, it's about attitude. If you are friendly and polite people assume you are there to help them. If you are dour and moody, people assume you are there to hurt them.
No. It is about race, in a significant number of cases. Just look at the statistics of people open carrying (or people getting shot at). Hell, just look at the statistics of how people are treated by "the law" per race where some groups *get harsher* penalties for the same goddamned crime.
And since we are on John Crawford's case (RIP), let's look at the Walmart video just released:
In the specific case of John Crawford (RIP), the poor guy that got shot down while carrying a toy gun to the cash register, he didn't do anything of the above in bold. Nothing in his fucking attitude indicated he was a treat.
The, OTH, you have white militia pointing rifles at federal agents at the Cliven Bundy stand-off on April 2014, with photographs clearly identifying those threatening federal agents with deadly force, and have you seen any one of them arrested?
Crawford might or might not have been shot at the way was due to his race, but there is a clear distinction in attitude and partial/subjective enforcement of the law that still crosses racial lines (Militia at the Bundy's ranch for example.)
Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization.
Seriously, what the hell? A major setback from what? From superstition? Did we have anything better before Aristotelian science? That many of Aristotle's predictions turned out to be false (heavier objects fall faster) is not an indictment on his work or body of knowledge. Without Aristotle and the likes of him during their time, we wouldn't have science as we know today.
Seriously, the author might have a point, but that point is purely accidental. He has no clue what he is talking about.
Astrobiologists have long known that these events are capable of causing mass extinctions by stripping a planet of its ozone layer and exposing the surface to lethal levels of radiation. The likelihood of being hit depends on the density of stars, which is why the center of galaxies are thought to be inhospitable to life.
Like many here, I'm sure, I first considered the possibility that the galactic core was inhospitable to life when I read Larry Niven's 1968 short story "At the Core" (collected with his other "Beowulf Shaeffer" stories in Crashlander). In his science-fiction tale, Niven had an astronaut visiting the core and witnessing the wash of radiation from so many supernovas placed so close together.
Niven's story, however, ended with the astronaut coming back and warning that this massive wave of radiation would be moving towards Earth at the speed of light. If that were true, and even the edges of galaxies were not safe in the end, then every galaxy would be ultimately hostile to life, not just in their cores. Is this the case, or did Niven get it wrong?
I would find it very hard to believe radiation of such magnitude could be generated from a core and sterilize the galaxy on its way out. But then again, I'm not an Astrophysicist:)
You would also like to read Niven's "Protector" if you haven't, and how sentient life actually evolved in a radiated home world near the core.
You are lucky to be able to cope with 5 hours sleep a night. Or you lose a significant amount of the weekend to catching up on sleep.
IMO work should stay in the office (maybe checking emails on the train to/from work) unless there's an outage that needs dealing with. Maybe once or twice a month it's okay if needs require it.
Ideally it is, and there are jobs like that. But other times, there are not. You might have to work on a product whose schedule reacts to external events (new merger, new competitor). And I'm referring to very large projects with development plans in terms of years. So, things occur. Eventually things stabilize, or we jump ship to another job. Rinse and repeat.
Doing 55 hours a week regularly is nothing to be proud of - unless maybe you have significant shares in your employer (as a founder, for example).
Never said I was proud. It's just a matter of fact.
Where do you get the time in all that to do your own hobbies (for a decent amount of time)?
We change hobbies. I used to dance salsa with my wife. No more. So we change hobbies. Indoor hobbies, hobbies with our kids (the things we must do with them.) And so on. Once you have kids, there is no time for hobbies compared to when we were single. And yet, when I was single, I could pursue my hobbies while still working long hours.
As a single person, you can do whatever you want with very little spare time. Which is why I said to the OP not to make his work his passion.
See, 45-50 hours is the norm in software for grunt work. And if its 50-55 when you are trying to climb the tech lead ladder. I could just stick to a true 9-5, but that pretty much guarantees I (or anyone for that matter) will be the Milton guy from Office Space.
In the end, we have priorities and goals and we adjust our hobbies, work hours and passions accordingly. And in a field where continuous technical and professional growth requires going beyond the 9-5, you cannot make work your passion (if you want to maintain your sanity.)
I wanted to get your opinion on who should pay the costs associated with attending conferences. In the past, I've covered costs associated with attending some local (in town) conferences, but despite claims to be willing to cover some costs associated with conferences, training, and certifications, my requests have been denied.
Conferences =/= training. At least in general, they are more opportunities to socialize and listen to some speakers. That's it.
So you need to consider very carefully why you want to go to conferences, and why your employer should pay for it.
Very few, bleeding edge companies pay for conferences. Engineering companies OTH, tend to pay for graduate education, and some of them actually pay some type of work-related certifications. But in the end, save up and budget for your own certifications.
If you can't manage to save up for certifications - while working in one of the best paid professional fields of our times - you have much bigger problems to tackle before thinking about certifications. Seriously, save $100 a month and you have $1200 of disposable income a year for your own training. And if you truly cannot save that, then deal with the issues that prevent you saving a meager $100 a month (again, in one of the professions that pay some of the best salaries.)
There used to be a time when companies would pay for their developer's training. 17years ago, my first employer forked over $7K for me to get trained in new software tools. That doesn't happen anymore, and I don't expect we will ever go back to those times.
Those times are gone!
Plan to adapt, save and pay for your own training. There is no other choice nowadays.
I forgot to mention. Get a hobby, do shit outside of work and be passionate about it. Be passionate about life, not work! I look back into my early years how "passionate" I was about work (not knowing the difference between career and work.) That wasn't passion, that was energy inefficiency combined with not knowing WTF I was doing (or how to do it better, faster and more economically.)
Sources - 18 years of experience doing all kind of stuff, Java, C, C++, DevOps, Enterprisey stuff, Embedded, for commercial and defense sectors. 45 years old, married, two little kids and going back to grad school a third time.
Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home.
Family does that. Specially kids. I need to be home early to be with them, read to them, help them eat, clean themselves, let them see me (and feel and understand I actually give a shit). When I was single I would work at any hour. Not anymore. That does not mean, however, that my work is strictly 9-5. I wake up at 5AM to get myself ready, log in, do some work, then get ready (and help my wife get my kids ready). Then I log back to work via VPN from 9 to 10, sometimes going to bed till midnight... with just 5 hours to go sleep to start again.
I easily make 55a week just like that. More if I do work on weekends. But 9-5 is the strict window I use to be in the office.
A lot of 9-5'ers are like that, and in addition to all that, we see the same shit repeating itself again and again, from one employer to the next. So what you call "lack of passion" might actually be work-related pragmatism combined with some physical exhaustion and simply the necessary notgiveashitis gene kicking off to save your brain from dying after witnessing the same inane shit rendering itself at work for the millionth time.
The passion is there, is just that we move it out of work and into other things, like family and career (which is distinct from work.)
They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way.
Life. Life will happen and will change your perspective and priorities. YOU. WILL. SEE.
This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.
But that is the thing. You are projecting. How do you know that other people are not made some kind of difference? They are likely making a difference *somewhere else*.
Also, as we get older we become more efficient with our time. I can do a lot more know with less time than what I could do when I had 10 years of experience (and certainly much more when I started my career.) We burn a lot of hours thinking it is necessary, we do not know how to prioritize or say no to crazy demands. We freak out, and we go into a professional-related frenzy, willing to burn the midnight oil to compensate for a lot of things.
We have a lot of energy when we start. But energy is not necessarily passion. And not all forms of professional passions are constructive. As we get older, family or not, we learn to pick our battles and seek out the lowest hanging fruits, the 20% that make up the 80%. It is then when we begin to be true engineers, not just berserker hackers.
Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job,
Unless you are developing the ultimate shit, or have a wonderful work experience with your managers, or are developing your own business, never, ever, be passionate about your job. Be passionate about your career, but not your job. Your job is the conduct by which you make money using your career. Display work ethics, and be willing to go the extra mile when needed. But don't confuse that with passion. That's just work ethics, which we should all display.
I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the la
"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
After living in Eastern Europe for so many centuries as a minority, with continuous gene flows, no, I would expect them to have a significant amount of Northwestern Eurasian genes in them. I mean, just look at them (and I don't mean it in a derogatory manner) and compare them with some other ancient-yet-living Middle Eastern populations (Assyrians, Chaldean, Samaritans, Yemenite Jews, Arabs, and pretty much any other Semitic group that has not migrated out of the Levant, Mesopotamia and/or the Arabic Peninsula.)
OTH, I (we) have to acknowledge that outward, superficial looks do not equate pure genetic profiles.
"The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand."
This is a complete falsehood that people need to stop parroting. Research work is VERY difficult to come by. Microsoft was one of the few places actually employing researchers.
So what will they do now? There are absolutely no jobs left in academia, so forget that. They could in theory become programmers, but that field is overcrowded too as people on slashdot regularly point out.
The fact is, if we want to maintain our jobs and standard of living in the USA, we're going to have to band together and force politicians to stop letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs. It really doesn't help matters when certain propagandists keep lying about how "plentiful" high-tech jobs are and how desperately we need more STEM graduates.
If you replace this sentence:
letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs
with:
letting incompetent immigrants into the country to take our jobs, but letting competent immigrants take the jobs of less competent people, citizens or otherwise, and we force our programmers to become more competent (because the quality of work we do here is pretty crappy)
Then I'm on board. I'm not in favor of protectionism to protect the incompetent. And if we were more competent, we wouldn't be so worry about immigrants competing with us.
To be honest, I would like to see our government throttle immigration of engineers into our country as a function of unemployment and other economic indicators (make rate of immigration in field X inversely proportional to unemployment in said field) coupled with actual examinations (classified by years of experience) of migrating professionals, to truly ensure we only get the best junior, mid and senior professionals that we can get. Also, we should do for all regions (LATAM, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, etc) and not just for China and South Asia.
That I would like to see.
Open-ended migration, or closing immigration just to protect us from competition? No. I don't want to see that. Screw that. Bring the best, from as many parts of the world as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Let the competent rise regardless of origin. And let the incompetent adapt or sink, regardless of origin.
SpaceX has promise, but Boeing has shown it can deliver.
...eventually, and only after the requisite pork has been spread across a multitude of states and subcontractors to keep the requisite congress-critters happy.:(
Not to knock Boeing's technical prowess, but damn - they do know how to play the game (which explains why they're getting a piece of the contract most likely...)
As a very apt comparison, go back to the days when the F-16 first came out: relatively cheap, by some upstart company (General Dynamics), a revolutionary design, the first 9-G capable fighter, and was an all-around workhorse that could do (within reason) damned near anything you demanded of it. It's still in production today (albeit as a division of Lockheed-Martin), with a design that stands to be around for decades to come. Compare and contrast this with, oh, the F-35/6/whatever that's been nothing but a massive money-sink to date.
Did you just called GD an "upstart" (relative to the time the F-16 was built)? #youarenuts
GD is a century old tech mega-ass conglomerate (think GE of defense) that builds from armored vehicles to fighters to satellites to naval warships to communication systems to artillery, you name it, with branches all over the world.
If GD was an upstart at the time the F16 was being build, I'm batman!
Boeing - Giant Company - $4.2B for a space vehicle that is still in design.
SpaceX - Space Startup - $2.6B for a space vehicle that works and has been flying missions for two years.
Spend your money more wisely.
We are talking about NASA and space exploration, not implementing and deploying ER software systems. Re-using existing designs is a very acceptable approach, but for the type of R&D and work that this involves, NASA (and we) need to also explore new designs. The time to do is now.
I think *our* money is well spent by funding both proposals and to put them into competition. The point is not just to have someone deliver something, but to do R&D and extend our body of engineering knowledge. Our money *would not* have been spent well if only one player had been picked to the exclusion of the other.
Boeing on the other hand is proposing a craft that's clean-sheet new and has no other customers.
That is better because?
He didn't say anything about one being better than the other (#fileitundereadingcomprehension.)
With that said, from a fault-tolerant point of view, this makes absolute sense. It would be extremely hard and un-probable that any major flaws in one system will be present in the other system. This has been a typical way to create redundant, fault-tolerant solutions, expensive, but totally appropriate when critical systems are concerned.
Re-using an existing design has the advantage of leveraging known factors, specially if the design is already proven.
That hast its limits when it comes to innovation, however. Here is where a from-scratch approach can push innovation forward (at greater risks obviously.) Reuse when you can, but don't be afraid to break new ground with from-scratch systems if the potential ROI warrants it. That is the nature of engineering complex shit.
...but people are still dying of starvation and lack of water on THIS planet. =\
I know space exploration is very important, but shit, let's get real here. I feel guilty driving a newer model Honda Civic knowing that if I bought something cheaper I could maybe feed someone less fortunate.
Your post has little to do with compassion, and a lot to do with a base need to show to the world that you *care* and drop a tear for it. #dramaqueen
The official news (not WSJ speculation) will be revealed on a live feed today at 4PM EDT. Lots of info in the link below.
Link: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...
Bingo. OTH (and to add more fuel to the speculation pyre), WP is reporting that the news will announce contracts will be awarded to both Boeing and SpaceX. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Slashdot Mirror
Except that 'cloud' at Lockheed is entirely 'in house' and not accessible from the outside world at all. Its certainly not available on the Internet.
I seriously doubt that, as do many Chinese/Russian hackers. Even if the fileserver itself isn't on the internet, you can bet that client machines which connect to it are. I bet they allow VPN access to their internal network too, since they have more than one location.
China and Russia already have the F-35 plans.
As a former engineer at a defense contractor, I can say this: you cannot VPN to internal networks vetted for cleared work (aka "secured labs". In fact, you cannot even connected to secured labs from within an internal network. You have to physically walk in into a secured lab from where to connect to a secured network (where you have to sign in, sign out, and leave all electronic gadgets behind.) You cannot VPN nor work from home when you work on classified stuff. You need to be on-site on a partitioned network infrastructure.
And once there, that secured network has only access to resources specific to designated projects on a 'need-to-know' basis, and only for work at or below a given security level.
Meaning, a secret-level lab cannot access resources from a top-secret project, and/or top-secret lab A designated to work on project X cannot access resources allocated on secret lab B designated for project Y if projects A and Y are unrelated or firewalled even though lab A has greater clearance than lab B.
You cannot even print in many of these labs. Any information that must be transmitted from one lab to another is permitted only by a IA officer that is not assigned to any project and whose only work is to enforce the firewalls. And when that information is permitted is via encrypted devices carried by hand (sometimes we refer to those as sneaker nets.) These labs are physically separated down to the wire (and sometimes backup power generators.)
Nothing of the above can 100% prevent leakage due to stupidity or ulterior motives. But to assume that clients machine simply connect to a fileserver on a sec lab, that is just nonsense. It can happen due to malice or stupidity (I mean, anything not forbidden by physics or mathematics is possible). But that is not the general case, and as a result, you cannot simply presume it as a matter of fact.
I expect there to be outrage here on slashdot. But think about it. How is this really different from, lets say, Lockheed Martin designing the F-35 and storing all the design data associated with it. Sure, they're not a "private cloud vendor", but they're probably running a bunch of servers for this purpose. So "top secret cloud" is already happening.
Bingo. Amazon has been hiring people with sec. clearance for quite some time. These DoD clouds are not stuff deployed on typical heroku or AWS, but cloud infrastructure deployed on secured facilities.
I blame the term "the cloud", too amorphous of a term to mean just about anything.
Nothing like setting oneself up for failure.
Exactly. Secrets need to be kept in house, and even then they're not totally secure. Give it to a contractor and even the most idiot person in the world will understand that there is a 99% chance you'll find that info spilled on the internet. I guess nothing stands in the way of cost reductions to zero eh ? Stupidity all around.
That is stupid. The same can be said for disgruntled employees. When we are talking contractors in a DoD setting, we are not talking about Infosys handing over work to someone overseas, but:
Nothing on that list will prevent someone from leaking stuff out to the interweeds, but to presume that under those conditions there is a 99% change of that (as you said), that is just nonsense.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed.
I did not include the link in an attempt to provide statistics.
Please, try again.
No, I won't. This shit is clear as daylight. I have lived in the flesh. People "see it" or they "don't see it."
If it were "clear", you would've had no problems substantiating it with links to evidence..
We could extend that statement to say if the statement "Jim Crow laws are bad" weren't clear in the past, we wouldn't have needed a whole goddamned Civil Right Movement to make the case for it.
For something like this, with so much evidence that had been published in so many years, "clear" is firmly in the eye of the beholder.
You see it or you don't. I am not going to debate you, and if that gives *you* the impression of winning the point, go ahead and do your victory dance.
If you're black. White people can bring semi auto rifles into Walmart and the police don't give a fuck.
It's not about race, it's about attitude. If you are friendly and polite people assume you are there to help them. If you are dour and moody, people assume you are there to hurt them.
No. It is about race, in a significant number of cases. Just look at the statistics of people open carrying (or people getting shot at). Hell, just look at the statistics of how people are treated by "the law" per race where some groups *get harsher* penalties for the same goddamned crime.
And since we are on John Crawford's case (RIP), let's look at the Walmart video just released:
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/breaking-video-finally-released-cops-shooting-man-toy-gun-wal-mart/
In the specific case of John Crawford (RIP), the poor guy that got shot down while carrying a toy gun to the cash register, he didn't do anything of the above in bold. Nothing in his fucking attitude indicated he was a treat.
The, OTH, you have white militia pointing rifles at federal agents at the Cliven Bundy stand-off on April 2014, with photographs clearly identifying those threatening federal agents with deadly force, and have you seen any one of them arrested?
Crawford might or might not have been shot at the way was due to his race, but there is a clear distinction in attitude and partial/subjective enforcement of the law that still crosses racial lines (Militia at the Bundy's ranch for example.)
Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization.
Seriously, what the hell? A major setback from what? From superstition? Did we have anything better before Aristotelian science? That many of Aristotle's predictions turned out to be false (heavier objects fall faster) is not an indictment on his work or body of knowledge. Without Aristotle and the likes of him during their time, we wouldn't have science as we know today.
Seriously, the author might have a point, but that point is purely accidental. He has no clue what he is talking about.
Like many here, I'm sure, I first considered the possibility that the galactic core was inhospitable to life when I read Larry Niven's 1968 short story "At the Core" (collected with his other "Beowulf Shaeffer" stories in Crashlander ). In his science-fiction tale, Niven had an astronaut visiting the core and witnessing the wash of radiation from so many supernovas placed so close together.
Niven's story, however, ended with the astronaut coming back and warning that this massive wave of radiation would be moving towards Earth at the speed of light. If that were true, and even the edges of galaxies were not safe in the end, then every galaxy would be ultimately hostile to life, not just in their cores. Is this the case, or did Niven get it wrong?
I would find it very hard to believe radiation of such magnitude could be generated from a core and sterilize the galaxy on its way out. But then again, I'm not an Astrophysicist :)
You would also like to read Niven's "Protector" if you haven't, and how sentient life actually evolved in a radiated home world near the core.
That is the only work I think about when I think of Yelp
You are lucky to be able to cope with 5 hours sleep a night. Or you lose a significant amount of the weekend to catching up on sleep.
IMO work should stay in the office (maybe checking emails on the train to/from work) unless there's an outage that needs dealing with. Maybe once or twice a month it's okay if needs require it.
Ideally it is, and there are jobs like that. But other times, there are not. You might have to work on a product whose schedule reacts to external events (new merger, new competitor). And I'm referring to very large projects with development plans in terms of years. So, things occur. Eventually things stabilize, or we jump ship to another job. Rinse and repeat.
Doing 55 hours a week regularly is nothing to be proud of - unless maybe you have significant shares in your employer (as a founder, for example).
Never said I was proud. It's just a matter of fact.
Where do you get the time in all that to do your own hobbies (for a decent amount of time)?
We change hobbies. I used to dance salsa with my wife. No more. So we change hobbies. Indoor hobbies, hobbies with our kids (the things we must do with them.) And so on. Once you have kids, there is no time for hobbies compared to when we were single. And yet, when I was single, I could pursue my hobbies while still working long hours.
As a single person, you can do whatever you want with very little spare time. Which is why I said to the OP not to make his work his passion.
See, 45-50 hours is the norm in software for grunt work. And if its 50-55 when you are trying to climb the tech lead ladder. I could just stick to a true 9-5, but that pretty much guarantees I (or anyone for that matter) will be the Milton guy from Office Space.
In the end, we have priorities and goals and we adjust our hobbies, work hours and passions accordingly. And in a field where continuous technical and professional growth requires going beyond the 9-5, you cannot make work your passion (if you want to maintain your sanity.)
I wanted to get your opinion on who should pay the costs associated with attending conferences. In the past, I've covered costs associated with attending some local (in town) conferences, but despite claims to be willing to cover some costs associated with conferences, training, and certifications, my requests have been denied.
Conferences =/= training. At least in general, they are more opportunities to socialize and listen to some speakers. That's it.
So you need to consider very carefully why you want to go to conferences, and why your employer should pay for it.
Very few, bleeding edge companies pay for conferences. Engineering companies OTH, tend to pay for graduate education, and some of them actually pay some type of work-related certifications. But in the end, save up and budget for your own certifications.
If you can't manage to save up for certifications - while working in one of the best paid professional fields of our times - you have much bigger problems to tackle before thinking about certifications. Seriously, save $100 a month and you have $1200 of disposable income a year for your own training. And if you truly cannot save that, then deal with the issues that prevent you saving a meager $100 a month (again, in one of the professions that pay some of the best salaries.)
There used to be a time when companies would pay for their developer's training. 17years ago, my first employer forked over $7K for me to get trained in new software tools. That doesn't happen anymore, and I don't expect we will ever go back to those times.
Those times are gone!
Plan to adapt, save and pay for your own training. There is no other choice nowadays.
I forgot to mention. Get a hobby, do shit outside of work and be passionate about it. Be passionate about life, not work! I look back into my early years how "passionate" I was about work (not knowing the difference between career and work.) That wasn't passion, that was energy inefficiency combined with not knowing WTF I was doing (or how to do it better, faster and more economically.)
Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home.
Family does that. Specially kids. I need to be home early to be with them, read to them, help them eat, clean themselves, let them see me (and feel and understand I actually give a shit). When I was single I would work at any hour. Not anymore. That does not mean, however, that my work is strictly 9-5. I wake up at 5AM to get myself ready, log in, do some work, then get ready (and help my wife get my kids ready). Then I log back to work via VPN from 9 to 10, sometimes going to bed till midnight... with just 5 hours to go sleep to start again.
I easily make 55a week just like that. More if I do work on weekends. But 9-5 is the strict window I use to be in the office.
A lot of 9-5'ers are like that, and in addition to all that, we see the same shit repeating itself again and again, from one employer to the next. So what you call "lack of passion" might actually be work-related pragmatism combined with some physical exhaustion and simply the necessary notgiveashitis gene kicking off to save your brain from dying after witnessing the same inane shit rendering itself at work for the millionth time.
The passion is there, is just that we move it out of work and into other things, like family and career (which is distinct from work.)
They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way.
Life. Life will happen and will change your perspective and priorities. YOU. WILL. SEE.
This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.
But that is the thing. You are projecting. How do you know that other people are not made some kind of difference? They are likely making a difference *somewhere else*.
Also, as we get older we become more efficient with our time. I can do a lot more know with less time than what I could do when I had 10 years of experience (and certainly much more when I started my career.) We burn a lot of hours thinking it is necessary, we do not know how to prioritize or say no to crazy demands. We freak out, and we go into a professional-related frenzy, willing to burn the midnight oil to compensate for a lot of things.
We have a lot of energy when we start. But energy is not necessarily passion. And not all forms of professional passions are constructive. As we get older, family or not, we learn to pick our battles and seek out the lowest hanging fruits, the 20% that make up the 80%. It is then when we begin to be true engineers, not just berserker hackers.
Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job,
Unless you are developing the ultimate shit, or have a wonderful work experience with your managers, or are developing your own business, never, ever, be passionate about your job. Be passionate about your career, but not your job. Your job is the conduct by which you make money using your career. Display work ethics, and be willing to go the extra mile when needed. But don't confuse that with passion. That's just work ethics, which we should all display.
I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the la
They have state run health care. They're sheeple. Baaaah.
No, they are civilized.
"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
After living in Eastern Europe for so many centuries as a minority, with continuous gene flows, no, I would expect them to have a significant amount of Northwestern Eurasian genes in them. I mean, just look at them (and I don't mean it in a derogatory manner) and compare them with some other ancient-yet-living Middle Eastern populations (Assyrians, Chaldean, Samaritans, Yemenite Jews, Arabs, and pretty much any other Semitic group that has not migrated out of the Levant, Mesopotamia and/or the Arabic Peninsula.)
OTH, I (we) have to acknowledge that outward, superficial looks do not equate pure genetic profiles.
"The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand."
This is a complete falsehood that people need to stop parroting. Research work is VERY difficult to come by. Microsoft was one of the few places actually employing researchers.
So what will they do now? There are absolutely no jobs left in academia, so forget that. They could in theory become programmers, but that field is overcrowded too as people on slashdot regularly point out.
The fact is, if we want to maintain our jobs and standard of living in the USA, we're going to have to band together and force politicians to stop letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs. It really doesn't help matters when certain propagandists keep lying about how "plentiful" high-tech jobs are and how desperately we need more STEM graduates.
If you replace this sentence:
letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs
with:
letting incompetent immigrants into the country to take our jobs, but letting competent immigrants take the jobs of less competent people, citizens or otherwise, and we force our programmers to become more competent (because the quality of work we do here is pretty crappy)
Then I'm on board. I'm not in favor of protectionism to protect the incompetent. And if we were more competent, we wouldn't be so worry about immigrants competing with us.
To be honest, I would like to see our government throttle immigration of engineers into our country as a function of unemployment and other economic indicators (make rate of immigration in field X inversely proportional to unemployment in said field) coupled with actual examinations (classified by years of experience) of migrating professionals, to truly ensure we only get the best junior, mid and senior professionals that we can get. Also, we should do for all regions (LATAM, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, etc) and not just for China and South Asia.
That I would like to see.
Open-ended migration, or closing immigration just to protect us from competition? No. I don't want to see that. Screw that. Bring the best, from as many parts of the world as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Let the competent rise regardless of origin. And let the incompetent adapt or sink, regardless of origin.
#onlybaldmoronsputtheirlinkedinprofilesonslashdot
#onlymoronsrelyonnonsequitursinlieuofintelligentcounterarguments
And your point would be?
He had no point, so he had to rely in the good old ad hominem fallacy.
The only people who say that are people who would never vote for a Libertarian or a Republican. As in NEVER.
I voted Republican most of my life, and I say that. So your statement is false. Proof by fucking contradiction bitches.
SpaceX has promise, but Boeing has shown it can deliver.
...eventually, and only after the requisite pork has been spread across a multitude of states and subcontractors to keep the requisite congress-critters happy. :(
Not to knock Boeing's technical prowess, but damn - they do know how to play the game (which explains why they're getting a piece of the contract most likely...)
As a very apt comparison, go back to the days when the F-16 first came out: relatively cheap, by some upstart company (General Dynamics), a revolutionary design, the first 9-G capable fighter, and was an all-around workhorse that could do (within reason) damned near anything you demanded of it. It's still in production today (albeit as a division of Lockheed-Martin), with a design that stands to be around for decades to come. Compare and contrast this with, oh, the F-35/6/whatever that's been nothing but a massive money-sink to date.
Did you just called GD an "upstart" (relative to the time the F-16 was built)? #youarenuts
GD is a century old tech mega-ass conglomerate (think GE of defense) that builds from armored vehicles to fighters to satellites to naval warships to communication systems to artillery, you name it, with branches all over the world.
If GD was an upstart at the time the F16 was being build, I'm batman!
Boeing - Giant Company - $4.2B for a space vehicle that is still in design. SpaceX - Space Startup - $2.6B for a space vehicle that works and has been flying missions for two years.
Spend your money more wisely.
We are talking about NASA and space exploration, not implementing and deploying ER software systems. Re-using existing designs is a very acceptable approach, but for the type of R&D and work that this involves, NASA (and we) need to also explore new designs. The time to do is now.
I think *our* money is well spent by funding both proposals and to put them into competition. The point is not just to have someone deliver something, but to do R&D and extend our body of engineering knowledge. Our money *would not* have been spent well if only one player had been picked to the exclusion of the other.
Boeing on the other hand is proposing a craft that's clean-sheet new and has no other customers.
That is better because?
He didn't say anything about one being better than the other (#fileitundereadingcomprehension.)
With that said, from a fault-tolerant point of view, this makes absolute sense. It would be extremely hard and un-probable that any major flaws in one system will be present in the other system. This has been a typical way to create redundant, fault-tolerant solutions, expensive, but totally appropriate when critical systems are concerned.
Re-using an existing design has the advantage of leveraging known factors, specially if the design is already proven.
That hast its limits when it comes to innovation, however. Here is where a from-scratch approach can push innovation forward (at greater risks obviously.) Reuse when you can, but don't be afraid to break new ground with from-scratch systems if the potential ROI warrants it. That is the nature of engineering complex shit.
...but people are still dying of starvation and lack of water on THIS planet. =\
I know space exploration is very important, but shit, let's get real here. I feel guilty driving a newer model Honda Civic knowing that if I bought something cheaper I could maybe feed someone less fortunate.
Your post has little to do with compassion, and a lot to do with a base need to show to the world that you *care* and drop a tear for it. #dramaqueen
The official news (not WSJ speculation) will be revealed on a live feed today at 4PM EDT. Lots of info in the link below. Link: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...
Bingo. OTH (and to add more fuel to the speculation pyre), WP is reporting that the news will announce contracts will be awarded to both Boeing and SpaceX. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Ask "average Joe on the street" what he thinks about evolution.
Exactly. Relying on average Joe to determine a piece of knowledge on very complex shit (or wisdom) is pretty stupid no matter how we cut it.
So... let's say he's a sociopath.
That means the problem would be one of mental health.
There, fixed that for you (since we are starting from a hypothetical.)