You can speak to someone and not know their sex. Smartphone apps exist that do nothing but this task.
One could also correspond by snail-mail, too. I doubt that is a reasonable mechanism for interviewing potential candidates unless the whole exercise is done just to prove the point that it can be done. But in that case we are no longer talking about business decisions, and we are entering the realms of the ideological/subreal.
I have probably hired 10-20 people.
None using that method, but I would like to try it one day.
Well, good for you, and let us know when you try said method. But until then, don't pass hypotheticals you haven't even tried as possible solutions or counter-arguments.
This means if they get two similarly qualified candidates they will select a woman if their quota needs one. That means males who apply are being discriminated against.
As a man, I will say this to those "men" who feel discriminated or unfairly treated by that practice: Go to the Cry-Me-A-River Department and send us a violin-shaped postcard when you get there. Srlsly, man the f* up.
A little bit of social adjustment to achieve some fairness that has been conspicuously absent in the history of humankind will inevitably hit someone else. Bohoho, big deal. World is unfair, but it has always been more favorable to us men than to women. It doesn't take a lot of testicular fortitude to accept this fact graciously.
If a man gets passed in favor of an equally qualified woman, and said man cannot find another job in this male-predominant industry, then chances are there is something wrong with him.
It is absolutely pathetic to see men born and raised in one of the most prosperous nations in the history of mankind getting their panties all curled up because a company in a male-predominant, highly-paid industry decides to favor women in their hiring process. It speaks volumes about them, and that wasn't meant as a compliment.
That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.
If it pushes Google to have a bit more of a responsive front end to their customers, then... I'm ok with that.
Though I'd also see Google's side of it if they insisted on a GMail/G+ account to prove they are a valid customer and not MS spam bots!
It is unreasonable unless the there is a paid SLA that mandates such a response. It is also unreasonable because customers have the right to walk away from a provider with bad customer support. I'm not one to believe in 100% unadultered "the-market-will-heal-itself" laissez faire crap, but here, we should really let the market forces decide. We do this all the time when we encounter a vendor, a restaurant or a service or a hardware distributor that give us products or support of a level of crappiness beyond what we wish to tolerate.
If management is so brilliant it can identify dead wood when it is forced to, why couldn't it identify dead wood before hiring them or remove them before intense negative financial pressure requires them to do so?
Because you can only determine the dead wood only after they have actively begin to perform or under perform at the work's premises. It is a process that take months, if not years (for you cannot typically and reasonably fire someone for initial failings that could be naturally attributed to lack of company-specific experience.) That is, you have to wait it out.
By the time you identify an underperformer, you realize that person has already developed some type of company-specific knowledge, with potential to some use somewhere. By that time, you, the company, has made a tremendous investment, and it is simply not appropriate to get rid of an asset if there is a way to recoup your ROI, say, by moving the underperformer to another task where he/she might prove useful.
These are hard-to-break cycles that become built-in in an organization. Very few companies are capable of filtering out underperformers right off the bat.
You should know all of this if you have some time of real-life work experience, and if you have had paid attention beyond the scope of your immediate work requirements.
Might not the/appearance/ of "removing dead wood" be the actual intent with management essentially guessing who can be replaced or not and those who hang around being forced to do more work for the same pay but "morale improves" because they are happy they have a job? And since people temporarily work harder out of fear or relief the appearance of having gotten rid of the dead wood is made more real as the new dead wood gradually and slowly relaxes.
Because if the management demotivated the employees enough to turn them into dead wood before they'll do it again with the new crop.
When management has no idea how to motivate people they lay people off. I suspect it's similar to the Nazi motivational technique of random executions: it keeps people on their toes.
That's beside the point. Nobody who sees you slash and burn your tenured staff is going to have any loyalty to the company.
Depends. I would developed (and I have had developed) loyalty for management willing to slash and burn tenure staff that is innefectual. Normal folks with a modicum of work ethics do not resent slash and burn techniques if they are aimed at the right target. They do resent it when it is used indiscriminately.
This is the kind of shit that breeds every man for himself and short term thinking.
Depends. If the company is plagued by inneffectual people, keeping them around breeds the "every man for himself" ethos you are referring to. It cuts both ways, and it is contextual. Let's not pretend that every boss is a pointy-haired clueless psychopath, and that every worker is a diligent Dilbert, please.
How much something counts is only about how much it appears to count. Jump to the greener pasture on the other side at the first instant. Etc. Etc. It's actually bad for morale and bad for the company.
Depends of who gets cut and why. See above.
Management and staff take an aggressive and hostile view of one another.
Again, depends on the context. See above.
Makes for a shitty place to work and the last place anyone is going to innovate, ever.
Keeping non-performers, letting them accumulate seniority, that also makes up for a shitty place. I know, I've been there, seen it. In those situations, good, objective slash and burn were sorely needed (and sadly, never implemented.) Without naming companies, letting the status quo remain was what ultimately hurted innovation.
True not all long-term employees are worth a damn. I'll counter your argument however that a lot of new people seem to wash out in the first 6 months at my place of work (17k employees). That's a big problem for us because in my field I expect approximately a 1 year ramp up for even the top notch talent, so if they quit or get fired before then we got 0 out of them. I suppose my case might be an outlier, but we have a pretty good reason for paying our proven talent well.
I've seen that happened at many large companies. The net result if that "senior/principal" titles are the most common ones across the orgs... because they are the ones that stay (or cannot leave). Those that stayed because they believed in something in the org, and who know their sh*t, those are extremelly valuable seniors. But those who stayed because they couldn't cut it in the "outside" world, or because the thrived/were the cause of young talent GTFO, those are like barnacles clinging to your ship's hull.
Long story short, unless you have a methodical method for culling down the senior/principal barnacles, expect to be paying high salaries for the senior non-performers clustered among/around your top senior talent.
If revenue is down, but profits are up, I'm betting a bunch of the long-term employees were fired, as they were the most expensive. While this will help Yahoo's short-term outlook, a few years down the road will be really bad for them.
This will be true only if said long-term, expensive employees were actually that valuable. Hint: in many companies, that is not the case.
Its 100x better for this than any of the languages you mention, higher performance, generally, and achieves VERY high rates of internal reusability to boot. I literaly wrote 4.5 million lines of fully debugged functioning FORTH code in 5 years. It certainly isn't a FASHIONABLE tool, but its frighteningly effective.
I like FORTH. However, as interesting a topic may be, I'm not sure how this relates to my question.
The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
Not that I'm a Luddite resisting new tools and ideas, but wouldn't a REPL be good enough for most cases? Most of my professional life I worked with separate editing, compiling and debugging sessions, a necessary PITA for the tools at my disposal. But ever since I started using/playing with languages that come with a REPL (Python, Ruby, Scala), it's been like a productivity blessing where one can break portions of the code into (semi)independent, coherent groups of lines that can be tried out again and again and again.
The side effect of this (when I'm a liberty to use a tool with a REPL) is that my code (already designed for testing in mind) becomes even more testable, and firing a full-blown debugger is something I have to do only for very difficult-to-find bugs. I certainly hate when I have to work with an environment (C and Java, which is what I mostly do) without it (even though that is how I've been working most of my professional life).
So I'm wondering what else can one get with the new approach that is substantially better than a REPL-based development environment.
5) kernel hardening? WTF are you talking about? Look at the 12.04 kernel sources, they are the opposite of hardened. Bonus question: how do you harden those 3rd party binary BLOB drivers?
Hmmm, what does hardening of 3rd party blobs have to do with kernel hardening?
That'd be just fine with UF tax-law Prof. Martin J. McMahon. 'I buy my lunch with after-tax dollars,' said McMahon. 'And I have to pay taxes to support free meals for those Google employees.'"
The other side of the argument is that those google employees, like most highly paid STEM workers create wealth with their work and with their spending (teh the true trickle down economics), wealth that the whole nation, including said Professor benefits from. That wealth more than compensates the complete and absolutely minuscule, if ever detectable and completely relevant "tax burden" unfairly placed on top of the "others".
Seriously, go to the cry-me-a-river department and send me a violin-shaped postcard when you get there.
Those perks provided by Google are a business expense; the items utilized to make those free lunches were already taxed; employees involved in making such things were already taxed, and Googlers, being the highly-paid employees they are, are already taxed in our supposedly progressive federal tax system (not to mention the additional state taxes.)
On very absolute terms that borderline ideological fanatism, yes, maybe we need to tax those free lunches in the name of fairness and bunnies.
On the other hand, there are so many more pressing taxation issues that need our immediate attention that putting even a micro-second of attention to THIS, it is both a function of the spiteful dysfunctionality of the IRS, and entitlement pettiness for those who are actually clamoring for it.
Get your goddamed taxation priorities in place. I'm all for tax reform - tax capital gains and income equally, close loop holes, simplify the tax code so that we either have a flat tax system or a true scheduled tax system, provide incentives for inshoring, etc.
To focus on this is like worrying about a pimple on your head while being terminally ill with brain cancer.
Yup. It's true in the sciences too. I have first-hand experience of it. A big part of the problem is tenure; get rid of it.
You have to love this attitude! Because I don't have something, take it away from someone else. The real race to the bottom.
Grow up. Not everyone gets to work in their field of choice.
You are missing the point. Asking to get rid of tenure is not about wanting to take something away because one doesn't have it. As it exists today, tenure is missused and abused by the lazy or the abominable/deviant. Tenure used to be a means by which to protect intellectuals from the consequences of challenging the academic (and even political) status quo.
Now, it is an anti-Darwinian device, one used by many (not all or the majority, but many) to shield themselves from the pressures of competing. It is a means for protectionism, and just as in economics, protectionism in Academia doesn't work as intended. Shit, you have a tenure, you are pretty much unfireable. You can be a singularity of teaching suckage and retain your job. You'd have to be caught doing something horrid (say sexual molestation) to get fired.
The only solution is to get rid of tenure or to modify it so much (by adding actual performance measurements) that it no longer resemble tenure as it exists today.
That isn't a problem with the BitCoin protocol, but Instawallet's website.
The OP is not faulting the BitCoin protocol. He/she is faulting the BitCoin developers/staff/whatever for their deployment architecture choices. After, choosing Instawallet's is/was an architectural choice. For the type of operations BitCoin is aiming for, we are talking architectural options that must accomodate growth into the realms of mega-scale/mega-resilient, ala AWS, ebay or Google.
Having to halt operations indefinitely until an alternative architectural solution is in place, that is not acceptable. Furthermore, they should have never gone into operations without one. I've worked in small, insular enterprises where having alternate architectures for catastrophe recovery was a starting, non-negotiable requirement.
I'm not saying "me-can-do" nor saying this just out of spite to join the Borg bashing collective. I'm simply stating a matter of fact that is revelant when building and fielding systems of such potential caliber. Hopefully useful lessons will be learned so that it does not happen again.
I don't trust MTGOX, and I have no illusions of trust. However many people trust the government. The real question is, is the illusion of trust better than the reality of not trusting anyone.
Caveat Emptor.
Basic economics and historical data say yes. Trust is a proxy for inherent risks (or lack thereof) in the legal and economic systems of a society.
Trust facilitates the exchange of goods and services. The greater the trust, the greater the exchange and/or lower the costs of carrying out transcations. The Lesser the trust, the smaller the exchange and/or the greater the costs of protecting yourself.
On a more mundate example, I don't trust the government to know how exactly to maintain a free and effective economy. But I do trust that by savings will be FDIC-protected up to a certain ceiling, or that my property rights will be protected in general. Trust, and ergo, risk, are contextual.
I can. Not for the harassment, or the "hacking" of their social network pages. That's an almost inevitable consequence. I feel bad for them because they were doing their job of prosecuting a law that shouldn't exist. Nothing says prosecutors have to agree with the law.
Ever heard of prosecutorial/judicial discretion? It is part of our legal institutions, and it is what differentiate good prosecutors from Javert-wannabes trying to make their mark.
Aaron Swartz Prosecution Team Claims Online Harassment
As you sow, so shall you reap Monsieur Javert.
This particular phrase and verse is most fitting to describe whatever they are going through (that which will forever pale in comparison to what Swartz when through.)
What comes around goes around and shit like that, and you reap what you sow. C'est la fucking vie.
My question: is my background diverse enough that I don't have to worry about finding a job if all the predictions that the 'app bubble' will pop soon come true?
First thing: Don't be a one-trick ponny. Specifically, don't be the mobile-dev Doppelgänger of the many web-app-dev-only cookie cutter programmers and DoD-entrenched-dinosaurs out that exist out there.
Second thing: You are dabbling into Machine Learning, and that is good. Beyond that, your background seems diverse... for mobile systems/app development as it exists now. Do you have a good grasp of web/enterprise development? Systems programming (OS kernel, drivers, network protocols)? You don't have to be an expert in any of these (no one can nor should when coming out of school),but you need to have a firm grasp of the essentials. It is something you get either through school or on your own (or a combination thereof.)
Your background needs to be diverse in the main topics, with sufficient dept in some core areas. If you don't have that, your background is not diverse. The more specific it is, the more vulnerable it makes you when bubbles go pop.
Is there another, similar area of programming that I should look into in order to have some contingencies in place if things go south?
What do you mean similar? The more similar that it is to that which you are referring to, the more that it might be vulnerable to bubble-popalypse aftermath.
Your studies in CS should provide you with some breadth of studies in areas of application and systems development.
My general interests and experience have so far been in mobile app development with Java and C++ (using the NDK), and some web development on both the client and server side. Thank you!"
These two give lots of space to wiggle. If you expand web development into some general knowledge enterprise, end-to-end development and the main technologies and architectures that go in there (.ie. web services, REST, SOA, RIA, RDBMSs, NoSQL), then you will open yourself up for more perennial opportunities.
You should also familiarize yourself well (or at least with the basics) with OS/kernel development. If I were you, and if I had the means to do so, I would postpone my studies an extra year just to do that (or go into a MS program and delve deep into these issues.) If I had a time machine, I would do that for my own career TBO.
One more important thing, and something a lot of CS students miss, is that their junior and senior years are the times to cultivate networks and to aggressively pursue internships at a software development/engineering firm (avoid Banking/Finance institutions, or anything that is not an engineering-oriented firm.)
Aim high and aggressively. Be versatile, adjustable and resilient. These traits will help you survive bubble bursts far more than knowledge of a development stack.
Christians are far worse to me. If I get into an infight about religion, it's mostly with catholics, sometimes it's lutherans
Why do you get into an infight about religion? Why not take the high road and leave? I'm Catholic and sometimes I get disagreement with other people about their faith or lack thereof, but mostly when they come up to me uninvited to tell me they are right or, more often that I'm wrong (or in the case of Atheists, that I'm stupid.)
My response is always he/she doesn't know WTF he/she's talking about (about me or my faith choices), or I don't care about his opinion (since he/she doesn't care about mine), and/or that his/her opinion is not being constructive and it is mostly out of self-validating ego...
... and then I leave. Sometimes I don't even say anything, I simply leave. Why engage in that? Unless there is a significant injustice being committed that warrants a reply, why reply back? Seriously, why engage when it is self-evident that the engaging party is already set-in in his/her opinions of the nature of God (or lack thereof) in a manner so destructive that entices a fight.
Infights are not the same as conversational constructive disagreements. The nuisance is missed to most.
People can have conversational disagreements, or they can have fights. The former are unavoidable and necessary for the human experience. The later, you better have a big and valid moral imperative for the greater good to do so. Otherwise, you are worshipping your own biases while getting a hard-on in the process.
To say Christians (or whatever denomination) are worse, while stating that you get into infights, you might be sitting on an ideologica/theological polar opposite, but you are fundamentally the same as them.
This is hilarious in so many ways. I don't care what boost is doing under the hood, I just want it to do what its interfaces say it does and to a great extent, it does.
That works well and dandy until you get incomprehensible (or hard-to-track) compilation errors. Then you want to know what boost "is doing under the hood". The panacea of interfaces that one can program against w/o zero problems has never existed, it never will.
Just the single boost::shared_ptr was fantastic in its time. Now we have a std implementation. There are many things in boost that are extremely useful.
True as it may be, it is non-sequitor to the original point you are replying to. Plus, shared_ptr is just one example within boost of a small, uncomplicated interface to something that does one single job well. There are other things that we could pick as examples of over-complication. Thus, it is not accurate to say "look, this library has no flaws" by picking up one of its most perfect artifacts.
Don't confuse a generally difficult learning curve for writing good C++ code with C++ being a poor language.
For starters, he didn't mention C++ per say, but C++ metaprogramming, which as powerful and useful as it may be, it is a templating hack. A good thing back then (I though it was the greatest enchilada ever), but now a hack compared to what we know now in terms of language design.
Similarly, a learning curve is part of the factors that that define and differentiate a poor language from a good one. Granted that the terms "poor" and "good" are typically used in a subjective fashion (certainly so in slashdot.) But the issue of its quality remains.
It is a powerful language, and, like any language, in good capable hands, it can be used to create wonders. But significant aspects of it, which at one point were thought of as pluses, have turned out to be crap. People should really stop worshipping sacred cows and accept that some things of them are just shitty.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. I walk about 20 minutes to work (I live close by). But when I don't leave close by, I simply park my car far enough to force me to walk. I use the stairs, I do push ups in my cublice, and I keep a set of resistance bands for a variety of arm/shoulder workouts. I also keep a set of CoC grippers (140lbs and 190lbs) at the office. Two times a week I change clothes and run from the office back home. At all times I carry a bagpack that weights about 15lbs. Sometimes before lunch, I walk down the stairs to the first floor and run through them all the way up to the 6th floor for some fast and short bout of anaerobic training.
All my life I've made time to work out (BJJ/Judo, weight lifting, powerlifting) while working O/T at the office. But that was when I was single. Now that I'm married and with two kids, I don't have much time to do that anymore. As a result, I resort to the "tactics" I mentioned above (plus I've modified my diet to take into account the reduction in physical activity.
Probably like many of you, this code monkey has lead a fairly sedentary life consisting most on fritos, tab, and mountain dew.
No. Many of us aren't like that.
Every time I attempt to incorporate exercise in even the most modest amount it never really seems to work out.
No. It is not that it does not seem to work out. It is that you do not make it work out. Part of being physically active is taking personal responsibility of our life habits.
'Just do it' or joining and going to a gym just doesn't seem to work and with time being my most precious resource at this point, I would like to incorporate exercise in to my daily work process. Our office recently switched to standing desks, which is great, and I would like to possibly bring in a flat treadmill that fits under the standing desk, but my bosses have balked unless the equipment is whisper silent.
Dude, just park far enough to force you to walk 10 minutes. Do push ups in your cublicle. Go take a walk at lunch. At home, how much time does it take to do 100 jumping jacks in the morning and at night????? If you are overweight, alter your diet.
Put simply. KISS.
We are a small business in a traditional office park with no exercise facility.
See above.
Do any other geeks out there have a similar set up
Of course.
and would like to share what they use to stay heart healthy and improve circulation during their work day?
See above.
What other ways do you incorporate exercise in to your geeky or nerdy lifestyle?"
We exercise. 5 minutes here and there, and when you know you have done 20 minutes of exercise in a day. We change our diet. Once a week on an off day, I try to go to the gym. If I can't, no biggie. I simply go when I can and go balls out circuit training.
There are no formulas that people can give you. The only things that count are:
how bad you want it,
how reasonable your expectations are,
and how much discipline do you have
The last part is important. No discipline == lots of excuses for doing nothing.
As TFA says, the MBA types have killed the innovation that laid the golden egg.
This is such a silly statement. I'm sure it sounds cool and awesome and avant-garde to the slashdotter's ears, but what exactly does it mean? How do you measure that? Who are the MBA types? What is a MBA type? What do you mean by killing innovation? Lots of cliched emotions on this statement, but little analyzable substance.
So???? Call me when CompSci requirements across the board are on par (or attempt to be on par) with top-notch universities, like Stanford. We have been seeing a continuously increasing enrollment in CompSci since the dot-com era. And that has gone hand-in-hand with a watering down of CompSci curricula (seriously, how can someone graduate with a CompSci degree without ever knowing what a pointer is, or what an assembly instruction looks like *)
Most of the IT/Enterprise software development work does not require a 4-year CompSci degree. A 2-year AS IT-related degree would do just fine. So the important thing here is to provide the adequate educational choices for people who want to pursue a career in software. But instead we seem content to increase the enrollment in CompSci while watering down the degree into a vocational programming workshop. Sorry, but that is no progress.
* And no, the argument that people don't need to know these things anymore is absolute bullshit. That's like saying a EE major doesn't need to know how a transistor is made because he simply buys one off-the-shell. It's a ludicrous argument.
Slashdot Mirror
You can speak to someone and not know their sex. Smartphone apps exist that do nothing but this task.
One could also correspond by snail-mail, too. I doubt that is a reasonable mechanism for interviewing potential candidates unless the whole exercise is done just to prove the point that it can be done. But in that case we are no longer talking about business decisions, and we are entering the realms of the ideological/subreal.
I have probably hired 10-20 people. None using that method, but I would like to try it one day.
Well, good for you, and let us know when you try said method. But until then, don't pass hypotheticals you haven't even tried as possible solutions or counter-arguments.
Did they not let women apply before?
This means if they get two similarly qualified candidates they will select a woman if their quota needs one. That means males who apply are being discriminated against.
As a man, I will say this to those "men" who feel discriminated or unfairly treated by that practice: Go to the Cry-Me-A-River Department and send us a violin-shaped postcard when you get there. Srlsly, man the f* up.
A little bit of social adjustment to achieve some fairness that has been conspicuously absent in the history of humankind will inevitably hit someone else. Bohoho, big deal. World is unfair, but it has always been more favorable to us men than to women. It doesn't take a lot of testicular fortitude to accept this fact graciously.
If a man gets passed in favor of an equally qualified woman, and said man cannot find another job in this male-predominant industry, then chances are there is something wrong with him.
It is absolutely pathetic to see men born and raised in one of the most prosperous nations in the history of mankind getting their panties all curled up because a company in a male-predominant, highly-paid industry decides to favor women in their hiring process. It speaks volumes about them, and that wasn't meant as a compliment.
That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. If it pushes Google to have a bit more of a responsive front end to their customers, then... I'm ok with that. Though I'd also see Google's side of it if they insisted on a GMail/G+ account to prove they are a valid customer and not MS spam bots!
It is unreasonable unless the there is a paid SLA that mandates such a response. It is also unreasonable because customers have the right to walk away from a provider with bad customer support. I'm not one to believe in 100% unadultered "the-market-will-heal-itself" laissez faire crap, but here, we should really let the market forces decide. We do this all the time when we encounter a vendor, a restaurant or a service or a hardware distributor that give us products or support of a level of crappiness beyond what we wish to tolerate.
If management is so brilliant it can identify dead wood when it is forced to, why couldn't it identify dead wood before hiring them or remove them before intense negative financial pressure requires them to do so?
Because you can only determine the dead wood only after they have actively begin to perform or under perform at the work's premises. It is a process that take months, if not years (for you cannot typically and reasonably fire someone for initial failings that could be naturally attributed to lack of company-specific experience.) That is, you have to wait it out.
By the time you identify an underperformer, you realize that person has already developed some type of company-specific knowledge, with potential to some use somewhere. By that time, you, the company, has made a tremendous investment, and it is simply not appropriate to get rid of an asset if there is a way to recoup your ROI, say, by moving the underperformer to another task where he/she might prove useful.
These are hard-to-break cycles that become built-in in an organization. Very few companies are capable of filtering out underperformers right off the bat.
You should know all of this if you have some time of real-life work experience, and if you have had paid attention beyond the scope of your immediate work requirements.
Might not the /appearance/ of "removing dead wood" be the actual intent with management essentially guessing who can be replaced or not and those who hang around being forced to do more work for the same pay but "morale improves" because they are happy they have a job? And since people temporarily work harder out of fear or relief the appearance of having gotten rid of the dead wood is made more real as the new dead wood gradually and slowly relaxes.
Because if the management demotivated the employees enough to turn them into dead wood before they'll do it again with the new crop.
When management has no idea how to motivate people they lay people off. I suspect it's similar to the Nazi motivational technique of random executions: it keeps people on their toes.
Um, wut?
That's beside the point. Nobody who sees you slash and burn your tenured staff is going to have any loyalty to the company.
Depends. I would developed (and I have had developed) loyalty for management willing to slash and burn tenure staff that is innefectual. Normal folks with a modicum of work ethics do not resent slash and burn techniques if they are aimed at the right target. They do resent it when it is used indiscriminately.
This is the kind of shit that breeds every man for himself and short term thinking.
Depends. If the company is plagued by inneffectual people, keeping them around breeds the "every man for himself" ethos you are referring to. It cuts both ways, and it is contextual. Let's not pretend that every boss is a pointy-haired clueless psychopath, and that every worker is a diligent Dilbert, please.
How much something counts is only about how much it appears to count. Jump to the greener pasture on the other side at the first instant. Etc. Etc. It's actually bad for morale and bad for the company.
Depends of who gets cut and why. See above.
Management and staff take an aggressive and hostile view of one another.
Again, depends on the context. See above.
Makes for a shitty place to work and the last place anyone is going to innovate, ever.
Keeping non-performers, letting them accumulate seniority, that also makes up for a shitty place. I know, I've been there, seen it. In those situations, good, objective slash and burn were sorely needed (and sadly, never implemented.) Without naming companies, letting the status quo remain was what ultimately hurted innovation.
True not all long-term employees are worth a damn. I'll counter your argument however that a lot of new people seem to wash out in the first 6 months at my place of work (17k employees). That's a big problem for us because in my field I expect approximately a 1 year ramp up for even the top notch talent, so if they quit or get fired before then we got 0 out of them. I suppose my case might be an outlier, but we have a pretty good reason for paying our proven talent well.
I've seen that happened at many large companies. The net result if that "senior/principal" titles are the most common ones across the orgs ... because they are the ones that stay (or cannot leave). Those that stayed because they believed in something in the org, and who know their sh*t, those are extremelly valuable seniors. But those who stayed because they couldn't cut it in the "outside" world, or because the thrived/were the cause of young talent GTFO, those are like barnacles clinging to your ship's hull.
Long story short, unless you have a methodical method for culling down the senior/principal barnacles, expect to be paying high salaries for the senior non-performers clustered among/around your top senior talent.
If revenue is down, but profits are up, I'm betting a bunch of the long-term employees were fired, as they were the most expensive. While this will help Yahoo's short-term outlook, a few years down the road will be really bad for them.
This will be true only if said long-term, expensive employees were actually that valuable. Hint: in many companies, that is not the case.
Its 100x better for this than any of the languages you mention, higher performance, generally, and achieves VERY high rates of internal reusability to boot. I literaly wrote 4.5 million lines of fully debugged functioning FORTH code in 5 years. It certainly isn't a FASHIONABLE tool, but its frighteningly effective.
I like FORTH. However, as interesting a topic may be, I'm not sure how this relates to my question.
The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
Not that I'm a Luddite resisting new tools and ideas, but wouldn't a REPL be good enough for most cases? Most of my professional life I worked with separate editing, compiling and debugging sessions, a necessary PITA for the tools at my disposal. But ever since I started using/playing with languages that come with a REPL (Python, Ruby, Scala), it's been like a productivity blessing where one can break portions of the code into (semi)independent, coherent groups of lines that can be tried out again and again and again.
The side effect of this (when I'm a liberty to use a tool with a REPL) is that my code (already designed for testing in mind) becomes even more testable, and firing a full-blown debugger is something I have to do only for very difficult-to-find bugs. I certainly hate when I have to work with an environment (C and Java, which is what I mostly do) without it (even though that is how I've been working most of my professional life).
So I'm wondering what else can one get with the new approach that is substantially better than a REPL-based development environment.
Is it strawmans or strawmen? Strawmopedies?
Neither. It is a typo. Welcome to the r34l world where inconsequential imperfections are the norm.
5) kernel hardening? WTF are you talking about? Look at the 12.04 kernel sources, they are the opposite of hardened. Bonus question: how do you harden those 3rd party binary BLOB drivers?
Hmmm, what does hardening of 3rd party blobs have to do with kernel hardening?
That'd be just fine with UF tax-law Prof. Martin J. McMahon. 'I buy my lunch with after-tax dollars,' said McMahon. 'And I have to pay taxes to support free meals for those Google employees.'"
The other side of the argument is that those google employees, like most highly paid STEM workers create wealth with their work and with their spending (teh the true trickle down economics), wealth that the whole nation, including said Professor benefits from. That wealth more than compensates the complete and absolutely minuscule, if ever detectable and completely relevant "tax burden" unfairly placed on top of the "others".
Seriously, go to the cry-me-a-river department and send me a violin-shaped postcard when you get there.
Those perks provided by Google are a business expense; the items utilized to make those free lunches were already taxed; employees involved in making such things were already taxed, and Googlers, being the highly-paid employees they are, are already taxed in our supposedly progressive federal tax system (not to mention the additional state taxes.)
On very absolute terms that borderline ideological fanatism, yes, maybe we need to tax those free lunches in the name of fairness and bunnies.
On the other hand, there are so many more pressing taxation issues that need our immediate attention that putting even a micro-second of attention to THIS, it is both a function of the spiteful dysfunctionality of the IRS, and entitlement pettiness for those who are actually clamoring for it.
Get your goddamed taxation priorities in place. I'm all for tax reform - tax capital gains and income equally, close loop holes, simplify the tax code so that we either have a flat tax system or a true scheduled tax system, provide incentives for inshoring, etc.
To focus on this is like worrying about a pimple on your head while being terminally ill with brain cancer.
Yup. It's true in the sciences too. I have first-hand experience of it. A big part of the problem is tenure; get rid of it.
You have to love this attitude! Because I don't have something, take it away from someone else. The real race to the bottom.
Grow up. Not everyone gets to work in their field of choice.
You are missing the point. Asking to get rid of tenure is not about wanting to take something away because one doesn't have it. As it exists today, tenure is missused and abused by the lazy or the abominable/deviant. Tenure used to be a means by which to protect intellectuals from the consequences of challenging the academic (and even political) status quo.
Now, it is an anti-Darwinian device, one used by many (not all or the majority, but many) to shield themselves from the pressures of competing. It is a means for protectionism, and just as in economics, protectionism in Academia doesn't work as intended. Shit, you have a tenure, you are pretty much unfireable. You can be a singularity of teaching suckage and retain your job. You'd have to be caught doing something horrid (say sexual molestation) to get fired.
The only solution is to get rid of tenure or to modify it so much (by adding actual performance measurements) that it no longer resemble tenure as it exists today.
That isn't a problem with the BitCoin protocol, but Instawallet's website.
The OP is not faulting the BitCoin protocol. He/she is faulting the BitCoin developers/staff/whatever for their deployment architecture choices. After, choosing Instawallet's is/was an architectural choice. For the type of operations BitCoin is aiming for, we are talking architectural options that must accomodate growth into the realms of mega-scale/mega-resilient, ala AWS, ebay or Google.
Having to halt operations indefinitely until an alternative architectural solution is in place, that is not acceptable. Furthermore, they should have never gone into operations without one. I've worked in small, insular enterprises where having alternate architectures for catastrophe recovery was a starting, non-negotiable requirement.
I'm not saying "me-can-do" nor saying this just out of spite to join the Borg bashing collective. I'm simply stating a matter of fact that is revelant when building and fielding systems of such potential caliber. Hopefully useful lessons will be learned so that it does not happen again.
The people in Cyprus used to sleep well too.
Comparing Cyprus's banking system and economy to the US is a bit of a stretch when it comes to play Chicken Little.
I don't trust MTGOX, and I have no illusions of trust. However many people trust the government. The real question is, is the illusion of trust better than the reality of not trusting anyone.
Caveat Emptor.
Basic economics and historical data say yes. Trust is a proxy for inherent risks (or lack thereof) in the legal and economic systems of a society.
Trust facilitates the exchange of goods and services. The greater the trust, the greater the exchange and/or lower the costs of carrying out transcations. The Lesser the trust, the smaller the exchange and/or the greater the costs of protecting yourself.
On a more mundate example, I don't trust the government to know how exactly to maintain a free and effective economy. But I do trust that by savings will be FDIC-protected up to a certain ceiling, or that my property rights will be protected in general. Trust, and ergo, risk, are contextual.
I can. Not for the harassment, or the "hacking" of their social network pages. That's an almost inevitable consequence. I feel bad for them because they were doing their job of prosecuting a law that shouldn't exist. Nothing says prosecutors have to agree with the law.
Ever heard of prosecutorial/judicial discretion? It is part of our legal institutions, and it is what differentiate good prosecutors from Javert-wannabes trying to make their mark.
Aaron Swartz Prosecution Team Claims Online Harassment
As you sow, so shall you reap Monsieur Javert.
This particular phrase and verse is most fitting to describe whatever they are going through (that which will forever pale in comparison to what Swartz when through.)
What comes around goes around and shit like that, and you reap what you sow. C'est la fucking vie.
My question: is my background diverse enough that I don't have to worry about finding a job if all the predictions that the 'app bubble' will pop soon come true?
First thing: Don't be a one-trick ponny. Specifically, don't be the mobile-dev Doppelgänger of the many web-app-dev-only cookie cutter programmers and DoD-entrenched-dinosaurs out that exist out there.
Second thing: You are dabbling into Machine Learning, and that is good. Beyond that, your background seems diverse ... for mobile systems/app development as it exists now. Do you have a good grasp of web/enterprise development? Systems programming (OS kernel, drivers, network protocols)? You don't have to be an expert in any of these (no one can nor should when coming out of school) ,but you need to have a firm grasp of the essentials. It is something you get either through school or on your own (or a combination thereof.)
Your background needs to be diverse in the main topics, with sufficient dept in some core areas. If you don't have that, your background is not diverse. The more specific it is, the more vulnerable it makes you when bubbles go pop.
Is there another, similar area of programming that I should look into in order to have some contingencies in place if things go south?
What do you mean similar? The more similar that it is to that which you are referring to, the more that it might be vulnerable to bubble-popalypse aftermath.
Your studies in CS should provide you with some breadth of studies in areas of application and systems development.
My general interests and experience have so far been in mobile app development with Java and C++ (using the NDK), and some web development on both the client and server side. Thank you!"
These two give lots of space to wiggle. If you expand web development into some general knowledge enterprise, end-to-end development and the main technologies and architectures that go in there (.ie. web services, REST, SOA, RIA, RDBMSs, NoSQL), then you will open yourself up for more perennial opportunities.
You should also familiarize yourself well (or at least with the basics) with OS/kernel development. If I were you, and if I had the means to do so, I would postpone my studies an extra year just to do that (or go into a MS program and delve deep into these issues.) If I had a time machine, I would do that for my own career TBO. One more important thing, and something a lot of CS students miss, is that their junior and senior years are the times to cultivate networks and to aggressively pursue internships at a software development/engineering firm (avoid Banking/Finance institutions, or anything that is not an engineering-oriented firm.)
Aim high and aggressively. Be versatile, adjustable and resilient. These traits will help you survive bubble bursts far more than knowledge of a development stack.
Christians are far worse to me. If I get into an infight about religion, it's mostly with catholics, sometimes it's lutherans
Why do you get into an infight about religion? Why not take the high road and leave? I'm Catholic and sometimes I get disagreement with other people about their faith or lack thereof, but mostly when they come up to me uninvited to tell me they are right or, more often that I'm wrong (or in the case of Atheists, that I'm stupid.)
My response is always he/she doesn't know WTF he/she's talking about (about me or my faith choices), or I don't care about his opinion (since he/she doesn't care about mine), and/or that his/her opinion is not being constructive and it is mostly out of self-validating ego...
Infights are not the same as conversational constructive disagreements. The nuisance is missed to most.
People can have conversational disagreements, or they can have fights. The former are unavoidable and necessary for the human experience. The later, you better have a big and valid moral imperative for the greater good to do so. Otherwise, you are worshipping your own biases while getting a hard-on in the process.
To say Christians (or whatever denomination) are worse, while stating that you get into infights, you might be sitting on an ideologica/theological polar opposite, but you are fundamentally the same as them.
This is hilarious in so many ways. I don't care what boost is doing under the hood, I just want it to do what its interfaces say it does and to a great extent, it does.
That works well and dandy until you get incomprehensible (or hard-to-track) compilation errors. Then you want to know what boost "is doing under the hood". The panacea of interfaces that one can program against w/o zero problems has never existed, it never will.
Just the single boost::shared_ptr was fantastic in its time. Now we have a std implementation. There are many things in boost that are extremely useful.
True as it may be, it is non-sequitor to the original point you are replying to. Plus, shared_ptr is just one example within boost of a small, uncomplicated interface to something that does one single job well. There are other things that we could pick as examples of over-complication. Thus, it is not accurate to say "look, this library has no flaws" by picking up one of its most perfect artifacts.
Don't confuse a generally difficult learning curve for writing good C++ code with C++ being a poor language.
For starters, he didn't mention C++ per say, but C++ metaprogramming, which as powerful and useful as it may be, it is a templating hack. A good thing back then (I though it was the greatest enchilada ever), but now a hack compared to what we know now in terms of language design.
Similarly, a learning curve is part of the factors that that define and differentiate a poor language from a good one. Granted that the terms "poor" and "good" are typically used in a subjective fashion (certainly so in slashdot.) But the issue of its quality remains.
It is a powerful language, and, like any language, in good capable hands, it can be used to create wonders. But significant aspects of it, which at one point were thought of as pluses, have turned out to be crap. People should really stop worshipping sacred cows and accept that some things of them are just shitty.
What do you do to stay fit?
Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. I walk about 20 minutes to work (I live close by). But when I don't leave close by, I simply park my car far enough to force me to walk. I use the stairs, I do push ups in my cublice, and I keep a set of resistance bands for a variety of arm/shoulder workouts. I also keep a set of CoC grippers (140lbs and 190lbs) at the office. Two times a week I change clothes and run from the office back home. At all times I carry a bagpack that weights about 15lbs. Sometimes before lunch, I walk down the stairs to the first floor and run through them all the way up to the 6th floor for some fast and short bout of anaerobic training.
All my life I've made time to work out (BJJ/Judo, weight lifting, powerlifting) while working O/T at the office. But that was when I was single. Now that I'm married and with two kids, I don't have much time to do that anymore. As a result, I resort to the "tactics" I mentioned above (plus I've modified my diet to take into account the reduction in physical activity.
Probably like many of you, this code monkey has lead a fairly sedentary life consisting most on fritos, tab, and mountain dew.
No. Many of us aren't like that.
Every time I attempt to incorporate exercise in even the most modest amount it never really seems to work out.
No. It is not that it does not seem to work out. It is that you do not make it work out. Part of being physically active is taking personal responsibility of our life habits.
'Just do it' or joining and going to a gym just doesn't seem to work and with time being my most precious resource at this point, I would like to incorporate exercise in to my daily work process. Our office recently switched to standing desks, which is great, and I would like to possibly bring in a flat treadmill that fits under the standing desk, but my bosses have balked unless the equipment is whisper silent.
Dude, just park far enough to force you to walk 10 minutes. Do push ups in your cublicle. Go take a walk at lunch. At home, how much time does it take to do 100 jumping jacks in the morning and at night????? If you are overweight, alter your diet.
Put simply. KISS.
We are a small business in a traditional office park with no exercise facility.
See above.
Do any other geeks out there have a similar set up
Of course.
and would like to share what they use to stay heart healthy and improve circulation during their work day?
See above.
What other ways do you incorporate exercise in to your geeky or nerdy lifestyle?"
We exercise. 5 minutes here and there, and when you know you have done 20 minutes of exercise in a day. We change our diet. Once a week on an off day, I try to go to the gym. If I can't, no biggie. I simply go when I can and go balls out circuit training.
There are no formulas that people can give you. The only things that count are:
The last part is important. No discipline == lots of excuses for doing nothing.
As TFA says, the MBA types have killed the innovation that laid the golden egg.
This is such a silly statement. I'm sure it sounds cool and awesome and avant-garde to the slashdotter's ears, but what exactly does it mean? How do you measure that? Who are the MBA types? What is a MBA type? What do you mean by killing innovation? Lots of cliched emotions on this statement, but little analyzable substance.
US CompSci Enrollment Leaps For 5th Straight Year
So???? Call me when CompSci requirements across the board are on par (or attempt to be on par) with top-notch universities, like Stanford. We have been seeing a continuously increasing enrollment in CompSci since the dot-com era. And that has gone hand-in-hand with a watering down of CompSci curricula (seriously, how can someone graduate with a CompSci degree without ever knowing what a pointer is, or what an assembly instruction looks like *)
Most of the IT/Enterprise software development work does not require a 4-year CompSci degree. A 2-year AS IT-related degree would do just fine. So the important thing here is to provide the adequate educational choices for people who want to pursue a career in software. But instead we seem content to increase the enrollment in CompSci while watering down the degree into a vocational programming workshop. Sorry, but that is no progress.
* And no, the argument that people don't need to know these things anymore is absolute bullshit. That's like saying a EE major doesn't need to know how a transistor is made because he simply buys one off-the-shell. It's a ludicrous argument.