Can you cite the paper? What was the sample trained to use?
There is a good discussion of optimal formatting in Code Complete, which is a pretty well respected book, even on/. I believe the sample was either Pascal programmers or C programmers. The advantage of dropping the braces is that you can get a lot more code onto a screen at once.
Well that's basically my point. Stop programming in 25x80 text mode and this will cease to be a problem.
I don't actually program in Python but a few months ago I was interested enough to read a tutorial. I have to admit that when I found out about the wierd formatting rules, I gave up on ever using the language. I was bemused by the fact that a large portion of the tutorial was spent teaching you to avoid hard to spot mistakes (e.g. be very careful when typing variable names because if you misspell a variable, the compiler will just create a new one for you.)
This is wonderful! With this precidence set, I'll be able to sue the state for the highway I was on if I have an accident, and the power company for supplying the electricity that started a house fire.
Believe it or not, you can sue the city for negligence (e.g. if your car gets a flat tire from a pothole) or the power company for negligence (e.g. if a power line breaks and sets your house on fire).
You can hold a business accountable for negligence, even if you are not their customer. Banks can have their assets seized if they don't take steps to prevent money laundering. On a smaller scale, pawnbrokers are held responsible for selling stolen goods.
Generally, when an industry creates a technology that facilitates an illegal or dangerous act, that industry is held responsible for part of the cost of monitoring and preventing that action.
No but it does show as a developer you can get paid to work on open source software.
Hey, Pets.com showed you can get paid to sell dogfood on the Internet, at least for a few months. You can make money playing the lottery too, but it doesn't mean it's a good business model. For some reason, OSS-advocates like you always try to use a qualitative argument where a quantitative argument was called for. No one doubts that it is possible to make money with open source. That is silly. The question is, how much money, with how much risk, and how many developers' salaries can it support.
RedHat is one of the few OSS companies that is actually making money above the line (however, they are still losing money below the line and they have never even had a single profitable quarter). RedHat employs a mere 600 people (only a handful of which are coders), whereas Microsoft employs tens of thousands. Which of these is more likely to pay you to code? I would even venture a guess that Microsoft has funded more OSS projects (indirectly, via employees contributing in their spare time) than RedHat has even dreamed of. Redhat has a good buisness model,
You know, I'm a fan of counter-intuitive ideas. They are somewhat of a hobby of mine. But I believe that ideas that go against the grain require extraordinary evidence to back them up, and you have *zero* evidence to back up that last statement. Here's a hint: successful counter-intuitive ideas are not founded on the principle of "wishing will make it so." Congratulations, RedHat. If you succeed, you will have taken a $40 billion industry and reduced it to a $100 million industry.
my quote came from "Occupational Outlook Handbook" (1994 edition, your library should have a newer copy). Look under "Computer Programmer". 2nd from last paragraph (soft cover edition of my 1994 copy) where they talk about job break down.
I'm not about to go to the library to look this up, but there are several versions available on the web. None of them give any specific figures, such as the 80% one that you cite. They merely state that there are more systems programmers than application programmers. They also say that developing shrink wrapped programs is the fastest growing segment of the industry. They don't clarify exactly what computer languages fall under the realm of "programming"
Both C# and Java have several defects compared to languages like occam or python. First off what is it with the semi-colons and braces? Lets get rid of them, the only reason they were ever needed was people misapplying Chomsky to develop parsers.
You had me until here. The fact is, research into the way programmers read code has shown that the statement:
if (x) {
y(); }
is far more readable and tends to contain fewer errors than:
if (x)
y();
or:
if (x) {
y();
}
or x && y();
Maybe you have an editor that marks different levels of indentation with different text colours or something. I dunno. Research also shows that whitespace makes code more readable. Python seems to be designed for compactness of notation instead. Maybe a lot of users still program in 25x80 VGA text mode or something like Linux does.
Python seems to be easier to learn and debug as a scripting language than bash or perl, but you seem to ignore the fact that semantic inconveniences, such as semicolons, variable declarations and type checking, are all there to catch programming bugs before you reach the debugging phase.
According to the article, the idea was "80%" complete. I don't really know what that means, but whether or not you write something down, an idea that is 80% complete is pretty mature. Furthermore, the idea obviously was relevant to Alcatel et. al, since he was trying to sell it to them. If you are paid to be a researcher, then oftentimes, ideas are your product.
You don't have to have the cash. MIT is need-blind admissions.
I dunno. I know MIT will give you financial aid, but you have to prove you absolutely need it. They may require you to explore other options (e.g. your parents selling their house). I had a friend who was accepted at MIT but he didn't go because he couldn't get financial aid.
Not to trivialize this or anything (I'm against buying diamonds too), but this makes me laugh. It seems like whenever Slashdotters don't want to pay for something (e.g. CDs), they find some kind of ethical reason why they shouldn't.
Okay, the discussion has got to the point where you are mostly hurling insults at me, calling me a troll, and whining about being misquoted, which probably means it's about time to end it.
I could try to explain why I don't think I misquoted you (or follow up with similar insults and allegations), but I find that pointless. As a general commment, I would posit that one of the main differences between our claims is that you seem to believe that if X hasn't happened yet then X will never happen. This is backed up by your earlier statement that "Programming is a high paying job, always has been, always will be." I, on the other hand, like to look at the situation and anticipate people's responses using common sense and game theory. This technique has served me well in the past (always has, always will). The fact that a certain prediction doesn't always happen exactly on schedule or exactly as predicted does not necessarily refute the theory. The underlying dynamics that govern a societal game tend to be predictable, even though additional factors may influence the result.
If you work for a stable Fortune 1000 company, they rarely do layoffs if they are not in the tech sector
Oh really. So GM never closes down whole factories and moves them to Mexico? Coke just laid off some people last week. And I bet Enron never lays people off either... Oh wait, you said "stable company". I wonder if there's a connection there. Maybe stable companies rarely lay people off and it has nothing to do with them being in the tech sector. Hmm...
Of course I have no idea whether GM or Enron ever lays off anybody from their IT department. The layoff announcements rarely mention those details. So basically your strategy for remaining employed is to do something that gets tangible results for your division but which is an insignificant part of the company's budget. That's a great theory, but strangely enough it also fits my job description as well. Too bad a lot of companies use across the board cuts. When the budget of every single department is reduced by 20% they've got to fire someone.
"Wishing to be laid off because you feel unappreciated is a silly attitude." Uhm, when the hell did I say that. Stay on topic here.
You said "Go ahead and lay me off, I know I'm worth more to the company here than not here." Let's say that Bob feels unappreciated at his job. Your solution is for him to say "fuck it... I don't care if I get laid off because they'll never find anyone better than me." That may be true, but it doesn't solve the problem at hand. In the meantime, Bob is laid off and someone less qualified than him has a job.
"I sense that your are a person who values finality." Wrong, nothing is final.
Well, you've only said things like "end of story" or "always has been, always will be" or "period" about 50 times during this thread:-) However, if you get laid off, you were not worth your salary to the company. I didn't say why, now did I?
Sorry, but that is just a stupid generalization. It's like saying "a jury found him guilty, therefore he is guilty". An insurance policy is the stupidest idea I have heard, in all honesty.
Really... the stupidest idea ever? Lloyds of London once insured a man's beard against fire and theft. If someone burgles your home, who pays for it? Do you sue the police, or the company that sold you the burglar alarm? Or do you phone your insurance company (who gave you a discount because you have a burglar alarm)? There is a very fine distinction between warranties and insurance, as anyone who has ever bought electronics will tell you. What is so unbelievable about an insurance company insuring an open source database against hacking? You seem to have some issues thinking every good engineer deserves a good job.
Well, the transition away from a manufacturing economy was theoretically supposed to improve the quality of life for all of us. Instead of toiling away in a factory for 8 cents an hour, we would have jobs that required knowledge and imagination while machines do most of the manual labour. I, for one, see that as a good thing. Maybe you don't. Your whole argument seems to be summed up with, "We're going to get paid less because open source software is free and businesses will use that instead of developing it in house." That is bunk. You have to have developers to even install and maintain open source software.
Yes, that's most of it. I also stated that the job quality would be reduced because a lot of the remaining work would be in configuring and maintaining OSS.
Before the open source revolution, you still had two sets of developers. You had people producing shrink wrapped software (or customized versions of that software on contract), and the customer had its own developers who would write scripts to interface with the shrink wrapped code or even help us with the development of a custom interface. We had experience dealing with these types of customers. We usually thought their in house developers were useless, but your experience may vary:-)
The point is, you have proposed that the elimination of one of these two categories of programmers won't hurt the industry, and that's just BS. There are simply going to be fewer jobs to go around. Fewer jobs means more competition and more competition means reduced salaries.
I'm familiar with information theory, as I work with it all the time. I also tried left/right-wing libertarian without the quotes and that got about the same ration of left to right. I decided not to use those results because there were too many "comparison" pages that talk about "left-wing vs. right-wing, authoritarian vs. libertarian".
Did you actually do the search? If you look at the results, you will see that the majority hits are people saying "I am a left-wing libertarian" or "she was a moderate left-wing libertarian." In the other case, yes I do notice a bias towards people talking about right-wing libertarian groups (and also, several "right-wing" libertarian groups). My conclusion is that "right-wing libertarian" is what you call people you don't like, whereas "left-wing libertarian" is what you yourself profess to be. Anyway, I don't think libertarian really fits into either of the traditional left or right viewpoints.
Hardly left wing. They are libertarian elitists, which is about as far-right as you can get without bumping into Birchers.
I've always thought of libertarians as mostly left wing. I find it weird calling people right-wing when they have absolutely no economic sense. FWIW, according to Google:
"right-wing libertarian" = 641 hits "left-wing libertarian" = 231 hits Businesses since the '90's have been telling us we are as useful as the current project.
I am convinced that the current crop of corporate scandals is derived directly from the dot come bubble. When the stock market sets unreasonable expectations, businesses are under pressure to produce unreasonable results.
That might be nice. It would be interesting to have a lobby group that expressed just the opinion of IT workers (i.e. not including students, university professors, users). Still, I wonder if their attitude would really be any different. The majority of developers I meet have very libertarian, pro-open source attitudes. But then again, I meet a lot of researchers at conferences.
How about theoretical math? That's a very demanding intellectual task, but you don't see number theorists becoming millionaires overnight like in the IT field.
This argument always bugs me... I have heard a million variants. E.g. when cars were invented, the blacksmiths lobby complained that the car would put them out of business, but that's not a valid reason to ban cars.
The fact is, theoretical math is very demanding, but it's also not very practical. When you go into pure math, you know that you are getting into an academic field. The sad thing here is that software is a skill that is still very much in demand, but a group of developers decided to devalue the whole industry.
Anyway, I used to work for a company that did cutting edge development in networking. Of course we didn't write everything ourselves, but plenty of companies sell libraries for various purposes and everyone prospers. The added cost didn't matter because all your competitors faced the same decision.
It used to be you could create a niche market either selling those libraries or providing some kind of value added component. Nowadays, everything is free and we have to use the free stuff in order to stay competitive. Of course the free stuff is always buggy and poorly documented. You can't sell libraries and any value added feature you include immediately becomes GPL'ed. The only market left is integrating and debugging open source components.
You're pretty much right there until you mentioned open source. Open source outside of a few programs (namely apache) has had very little impact in the corporate world.
The way I see it, that's the scary thing. In terms of job losses, the worst is yet to come!!! No, the main reason the industry is collapsing is consolidation and fat trimming. In bad times, redundant companies with poor business plans tend to fail.
No kidding. But if you look at the poor business plans that failed, most of them were a) selling crap online that you can buy in a supermarket, b) providing free content online in exchange for advertising, and c) developing open source software. Oh, and of course d) selling bandwith/hardware to a, b & c. companies that actually offer something useful and unique (NVidia, Akamai, etc) do well
Well, NVidia is doing well, but they are a hardware company. I'm sure they hire some programmers, but that's not their focus. Akamai looks like a good company, but they aren't making money ($59M loss last quarter on $37M revenues). I'm not sure how this fits in with your larger point, though. Your claim was that open source hasn't affected software sales, but neither of these companies sells software. When there's less work, salaries sometimes do go up actually, as companies are looking for fewer, more skilled workers as opposed to C++ or Java code monkeys.
So C++ & Java coders aren't skilled? So much for my qualifications. They're looking for people with significant experience in the areas they'll be working in, which most people just don't have.
I have plenty of experience in my field. I believe my code is superior to the open source equivalent, but I'm still worried about my job. Why should my employer pay me to develop something that others will give away for free? So, basically, you're right, but we'll see smaller salaries and more work as proprietary programmers will generally be better at what they do and will have to compete with eachother. Open source really isn't a factor here.
I just don't understand this leap of faith. Why won't open source penetrate business? IBM certainly seems to think it's a selling point. And why did HP hire Bruce Perens?
What the past few years (and likely the next few) is going to do, is sort out who is worth what, and to whom. There _are_ several good uses for the net, it just so happens that selling pet food, giving stuff away for free, and printing your own stock certificates don't represent any of them.
We are still giving stuff away for free, and that is why the tech industry will be slow to rebound.
That's a rather silly attitude. I believe it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face. Uhm, no, it's called job security. It's not asking for a higher price than what it would cost to replace you with someone cheaper
Wishing to be laid off because you feel unappreciated is a silly attitude. Maybe 2 years from now they will recognize your genius and wish they had paid you more, but in the meantime you are laid off. The transition is not finished yet. Barring the company going out of business, if you were selected for a layoff, you were paid too much for that position. End of story.
I sense that your are a person who values finality. Anyway, your conclusion is silly and extreme. X and Y does not imply X => Y. I know about exclusive knowledge -- good programmers were, and still are, hard to come by. People can write good code, but don't know how to engineer, that's the difference. I'm not a coder, I solve problems.
I know how to engineer too. Unfortunately, the genius of my design is not recognized right away and I feel unappreciated until 2 years later, by which point the guy who got quick results with his shitty prototype has already been promoted twice. Accountability means shit in a courtroom. You get a backend CC providor on an Oracle database experience an Oracle bug that causes them to lose a days worth of transactions that they have to pay for, and you see who gets sued. Remember, you can sue anybody for anything.
You can sue anybody for anything, but you don't always win. You can also get slapped with a fine for filing a nuisance suit. I don't know of anyone who successfully sued Oracle for data loss. Anyway, instead of spending $1M on Oracle software, why not use the free stuff and spend $500k on a whopping huge insurance policy for the data. Then they should get a different job. Do the work till they find a job that is more suited for their tastes.
These people don't seem all that unsatisfied with their new role as far as I can tell (many of them are free software advocates). All I can say is that I had the equivalent job I would almost certainly quit. Jobs are hard to come by, but they are still there. If all they are doing is writing glue code, they could probably go somewhere else and end up making more money, and having more fun.
That is very nice to say, but I just finished explaining how open source will make "good" jobs much scarcer. If it's more cost effective to grab a free library off the web than to write your own, what are most companies going to do? Then you have to patch it up a bit (half the time it won't even compile), and then spend time monitoring some newsgroup to keep abreast of any security holes. It's just not my idea of fun. You could say the same thing to the guy working behind the counter at Wendy's but he'll tell you that all the fun fast food jobs are already taken.
The way to really do it (which is why I have a job) is find someone very versed in open source software, specifically very familiar with the projects you need/want and hire them. Even if you don't get one of the main developers (I'm not) as long as they know the inner workings of the software packages you are interested in, if the developer stops working on it you can still get it stable internally and have the features you need put in.
What percentage of customers need customized code anyway? I worked in product development at a small company, and there was always the nebulous threat of the customer special, usually from a large potential customer with lots of clout. Customer specials are annoying because they distract you from core development. Typically, the customer is unwilling to pay the full cost of development so you have to recoup the money somehow. Possibly the feature will be sufficiently useful that it will improve the overall saleability of your product or (more likely) the customer is dangling a carrot in front of you, such as the promise to buy 1000 widgets if you deliver features X, Y, and Z. (Of course they are promising the same thing to 3 other companies, but your CEO is young and gullible.
The point is, it's very difficult to make money from a customer special, fundamentally because the customer doesn't want to pay the full cost of development. So this begs the question why, in general, they would hire a core open source developer to customize an open source project for their own use. You say you have a job, so clearly this sometimes happens, but it doesn't sound cost-effective. Remember that just because something is stupid, it doesn't mean that people won't do it. However, most people are not masochistic, and they will give up when it doesn't work. What I see as plausible is that industry consortiums will fund new features. This is a sustainable model, under which open source development can thrive. However, it is also one in which there are fewer available jobs, and at a lower salary than you see today.
Go ahead and lay me off, I know I'm worth more to the company here than not here.
That's a rather silly attitude. I believe it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face. They'd just have to hire someone else in for a couple bucks less an hour who has no clue about the thousands and thousands of lines of code. I'm worth what they pay, end of story.
That's a rather over-simplistic attitude. Worth can't be quantified in one variable, even if attempts to do so are often the source of political extremism.
You are worth:
a) The value of the work you do to your employer. b) The cost to your employer to replace you. Same thing with everyone else that still has jobs for the most part. If you don't have a job, you weren't worth what they paid for you.
I am a highly skilled programmer and I still have a job. I know skilled people who got layed off and I know inept people who still have jobs. Sorry, it is. Just a fact of life. Always has been, always will be. It's up there with being a doctor.
The medical profession wasn't always a highly-skilled and highly-paid profession. Doctors used to be real quacks. What makes them a highly-paid profession is the fact that they require a license to operate. That, and their monumentally expensive education, high insurance costs, and penalties against immigration. Programming is not a licensed profession, therefore the same rules do not apply. Even before the boom people were making well over $55K a year.
Before the boom, there wasn't a computer in every household and kids didn't learn to use them in school. Back then, programmers were geeks with some very exclusive knowledge. Sorry, but for critical database apps Oracle is the way to go? Why? Simple: Accountability. You don't store $1M a day in transactions in Postgres.
I fail to see the logic. Don't/. readers complain daily that software providers aren't accountable for bugs? They certainly seemed very vocal about Oracle's misleading "can't break in, can't break it" ad campaign.
I guess because open documentation isn't particularly glamorous work. Which is why I'll always be paid well, and employed. I don't mind.
You know what... I do mind. I *care* if all the glamourous work becomes free and I can only get paid to do the crufty bits. We had a good thing going and then we went and ruined it. I am lucky in that my job quality was largely unaffected by our shift to open source, but I look at the shitty work some of my co-workers now have to do and it totally depresses me. It is demeaning for a highly skilled programmer to be stuck writing glue code to glue two poorly written, heterogenous open source apps together.
Thank you for a very insightful comment. Your web page is a good reference. You are right that "super genius" programmers think economics doesn't affect them. I have often wondered why this is so. Doctors and lawyers often do pro bono work, but they typically do so with discretion. The medical and legal professions have also traditionally been "closed societies", employing technical jargon to ward off laymen. What is it that makes programmers so much more left wing and idealistic than other professionals? I am not a big fan of labour unions, but I fear that if the trend continues they will be necessary.
Because they will get laid off otherwise? Because unemployed IT guys are willing to work for less? I'm in a secured position, for the most part. The only way I can go is up. In 5 years, you better expect me to want a lot more money. The IT field is a high paying field. End of story.
Wishing *will* make it so. Wishing *will* make it so. Since the creation of the Ford automobile, there has been 15,000 failed automobile manufacturers. You think when it was a boom people were getting paid a lot to design cars? Yeah, they were. Then, it started to decline and no automobile designers are again making very good salaries and most of them have been in the business for a very long time.
I have no knowledge of the car industry with which to dispute your comment. However, you haven't really made any attempt to explain why the industry goes up and down, just that salaries track the market. And saying that open source software is going to compete with developers is just utter I've-never-worked-in-a-large-company-bull-shit.
I work for a large company. In the company I work at, 90% of the server software (Excluding Oracle and WebLogic) we use is open source.
And I work on product that is 90% open source and developed using 100% open source tools. Most open source software is not ready to be used in an enterprise environment.
I disagree. We're not gullible enough to spend $50 per seat (or $1000s in developer-hours) on an improved product when we can get the stock version for free. However, with a few code modifications, and some clever front end GUI applications, they become very usable.
I make some productivity tools and a few people use them, but if it was the kind of thing everyone wanted, it would already be in the free version. Some people want a CLI, others a GUI, others a TUI. You can't please everyone. I'll never worry about being put out of a job because of open source software. Purely because you need to have a coder in house to understand it.
I guess because open documentation isn't particularly glamorous work.
Smart companies will find good people and pay whatever it takes to keep them.
There's a limit to that. As we have seen, some companies are willing to pay their CEO $500 million dollars, but that's one guy. For a select few senior positions, salaries are quite flexible. But for most positions, it seems they really aren't. Now, I agree that the average salary has gone down, however that's more just from there being a reasonable pool of people to choose from rather than 1% unemployment.
I do agree with that. However, I think there is an additional factor, which is that the average IT job today requires less skill than it used to.
These things go in cycles. If there's enough public disinterest caused by the "tech bust" that university enrollments go down past a certain point, it's only a matter of time before demand once again exceeds supply.
Theoretically true, but I doubt that argument applies in this case. The industry crashed by such an order of magnitude that there will be ex-tech workers ready to jump on the bandwagon for years. And there are so many more kids growing up with computers these days that it is very unlikely that university enrollment in related fields will wane. Remember, certain kinds of tech jobs are difficult, and there's many a person who can't stand being a knowledge worker behind a desk all day, thinking about problems and solving them. If the pay goes too low, interest will be lost disportionately fast, because many kinds of IT jobs simply aren't very fun.
Oh, I have no doubt that there will be some high-paying sysadmin jobs available in the future, but I don't see many high-paying developer jobs opening up. Much of the most demanding, coolest development will be on free software projects. Adapting an existing app to a specific situation is way less fun (and takes less skill and fewer man-hours) than writing something completely new. Hence, there will be fewer high paying development jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you cite the paper? What was the sample trained to use?
There is a good discussion of optimal formatting in Code Complete, which is a pretty well respected book, even on
The advantage of dropping the braces is that you can get a lot more code onto a screen at once.
Well that's basically my point. Stop programming in 25x80 text mode and this will cease to be a problem.
I don't actually program in Python but a few months ago I was interested enough to read a tutorial. I have to admit that when I found out about the wierd formatting rules, I gave up on ever using the language. I was bemused by the fact that a large portion of the tutorial was spent teaching you to avoid hard to spot mistakes (e.g. be very careful when typing variable names because if you misspell a variable, the compiler will just create a new one for you.)
-a
This is wonderful! With this precidence set, I'll be able to sue the state for the highway I was on if I have an accident, and the power company for supplying the electricity that started a house fire.
Believe it or not, you can sue the city for negligence (e.g. if your car gets a flat tire from a pothole) or the power company for negligence (e.g. if a power line breaks and sets your house on fire).
You can hold a business accountable for negligence, even if you are not their customer. Banks can have their assets seized if they don't take steps to prevent money laundering. On a smaller scale, pawnbrokers are held responsible for selling stolen goods.
Generally, when an industry creates a technology that facilitates an illegal or dangerous act, that industry is held responsible for part of the cost of monitoring and preventing that action.
-a
No but it does show as a developer you can get paid to work on open source software.
Hey, Pets.com showed you can get paid to sell dogfood on the Internet, at least for a few months. You can make money playing the lottery too, but it doesn't mean it's a good business model. For some reason, OSS-advocates like you always try to use a qualitative argument where a quantitative argument was called for. No one doubts that it is possible to make money with open source. That is silly. The question is, how much money, with how much risk, and how many developers' salaries can it support.
RedHat is one of the few OSS companies that is actually making money above the line (however, they are still losing money below the line and they have never even had a single profitable quarter). RedHat employs a mere 600 people (only a handful of which are coders), whereas Microsoft employs tens of thousands. Which of these is more likely to pay you to code? I would even venture a guess that Microsoft has funded more OSS projects (indirectly, via employees contributing in their spare time) than RedHat has even dreamed of.
Redhat has a good buisness model,
You know, I'm a fan of counter-intuitive ideas. They are somewhat of a hobby of mine. But I believe that ideas that go against the grain require extraordinary evidence to back them up, and you have *zero* evidence to back up that last statement. Here's a hint: successful counter-intuitive ideas are not founded on the principle of "wishing will make it so." Congratulations, RedHat. If you succeed, you will have taken a $40 billion industry and reduced it to a $100 million industry.
-a
my quote came from "Occupational Outlook Handbook" (1994 edition, your library should have a newer copy). Look under "Computer Programmer". 2nd from last paragraph (soft cover edition of my 1994 copy) where they talk about job break down.
I'm not about to go to the library to look this up, but there are several versions available on the web. None of them give any specific figures, such as the 80% one that you cite. They merely state that there are more systems programmers than application programmers. They also say that developing shrink wrapped programs is the fastest growing segment of the industry. They don't clarify exactly what computer languages fall under the realm of "programming"
-a
Both C# and Java have several defects compared to languages like occam or python. First off what is it with the semi-colons and braces? Lets get rid of them, the only reason they were ever needed was people misapplying Chomsky to develop parsers.
You had me until here. The fact is, research into the way programmers read code has shown that the statement:
if (x)
{
y();
}
is far more readable and tends to contain fewer errors than:
if (x)
y();
or:
if (x) {
y();
}
or
x && y();
Maybe you have an editor that marks different levels of indentation with different text colours or something. I dunno. Research also shows that whitespace makes code more readable. Python seems to be designed for compactness of notation instead. Maybe a lot of users still program in 25x80 VGA text mode or something like Linux does.
Python seems to be easier to learn and debug as a scripting language than bash or perl, but you seem to ignore the fact that semantic inconveniences, such as semicolons, variable declarations and type checking, are all there to catch programming bugs before you reach the debugging phase.
-a
According to the article, the idea was "80%" complete. I don't really know what that means, but whether or not you write something down, an idea that is 80% complete is pretty mature. Furthermore, the idea obviously was relevant to Alcatel et. al, since he was trying to sell it to them. If you are paid to be a researcher, then oftentimes, ideas are your product.
-a
You don't have to have the cash. MIT is need-blind admissions.
I dunno. I know MIT will give you financial aid, but you have to prove you absolutely need it. They may require you to explore other options (e.g. your parents selling their house). I had a friend who was accepted at MIT but he didn't go because he couldn't get financial aid.
-a
Not to trivialize this or anything (I'm against buying diamonds too), but this makes me laugh. It seems like whenever Slashdotters don't want to pay for something (e.g. CDs), they find some kind of ethical reason why they shouldn't.
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Okay, the discussion has got to the point where you are mostly hurling insults at me, calling me a troll, and whining about being misquoted, which probably means it's about time to end it.
I could try to explain why I don't think I misquoted you (or follow up with similar insults and allegations), but I find that pointless. As a general commment, I would posit that one of the main differences between our claims is that you seem to believe that if X hasn't happened yet then X will never happen. This is backed up by your earlier statement that "Programming is a high paying job, always has been, always will be." I, on the other hand, like to look at the situation and anticipate people's responses using common sense and game theory. This technique has served me well in the past (always has, always will). The fact that a certain prediction doesn't always happen exactly on schedule or exactly as predicted does not necessarily refute the theory. The underlying dynamics that govern a societal game tend to be predictable, even though additional factors may influence the result.
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If you work for a stable Fortune 1000 company, they rarely do layoffs if they are not in the tech sector
Oh really. So GM never closes down whole factories and moves them to Mexico? Coke just laid off some people last week. And I bet Enron never lays people off either... Oh wait, you said "stable company". I wonder if there's a connection there. Maybe stable companies rarely lay people off and it has nothing to do with them being in the tech sector. Hmm...
Of course I have no idea whether GM or Enron ever lays off anybody from their IT department. The layoff announcements rarely mention those details. So basically your strategy for remaining employed is to do something that gets tangible results for your division but which is an insignificant part of the company's budget. That's a great theory, but strangely enough it also fits my job description as well. Too bad a lot of companies use across the board cuts. When the budget of every single department is reduced by 20% they've got to fire someone.
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"Wishing to be laid off because you feel unappreciated is a silly attitude."
:-)
:-)
Uhm, when the hell did I say that. Stay on topic here.
You said "Go ahead and lay me off, I know I'm worth more to the company here than not here." Let's say that Bob feels unappreciated at his job. Your solution is for him to say "fuck it... I don't care if I get laid off because they'll never find anyone better than me." That may be true, but it doesn't solve the problem at hand. In the meantime, Bob is laid off and someone less qualified than him has a job.
"I sense that your are a person who values finality."
Wrong, nothing is final.
Well, you've only said things like "end of story" or "always has been, always will be" or "period" about 50 times during this thread
However, if you get laid off, you were not worth your salary to the company. I didn't say why, now did I?
Sorry, but that is just a stupid generalization. It's like saying "a jury found him guilty, therefore he is guilty".
An insurance policy is the stupidest idea I have heard, in all honesty.
Really... the stupidest idea ever? Lloyds of London once insured a man's beard against fire and theft. If someone burgles your home, who pays for it? Do you sue the police, or the company that sold you the burglar alarm? Or do you phone your insurance company (who gave you a discount because you have a burglar alarm)? There is a very fine distinction between warranties and insurance, as anyone who has ever bought electronics will tell you. What is so unbelievable about an insurance company insuring an open source database against hacking?
You seem to have some issues thinking every good engineer deserves a good job.
Well, the transition away from a manufacturing economy was theoretically supposed to improve the quality of life for all of us. Instead of toiling away in a factory for 8 cents an hour, we would have jobs that required knowledge and imagination while machines do most of the manual labour. I, for one, see that as a good thing. Maybe you don't.
Your whole argument seems to be summed up with, "We're going to get paid less because open source software is free and businesses will use that instead of developing it in house." That is bunk. You have to have developers to even install and maintain open source software.
Yes, that's most of it. I also stated that the job quality would be reduced because a lot of the remaining work would be in configuring and maintaining OSS.
Before the open source revolution, you still had two sets of developers. You had people producing shrink wrapped software (or customized versions of that software on contract), and the customer had its own developers who would write scripts to interface with the shrink wrapped code or even help us with the development of a custom interface. We had experience dealing with these types of customers. We usually thought their in house developers were useless, but your experience may vary
The point is, you have proposed that the elimination of one of these two categories of programmers won't hurt the industry, and that's just BS. There are simply going to be fewer jobs to go around. Fewer jobs means more competition and more competition means reduced salaries.
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I'm familiar with information theory, as I work with it all the time. I also tried left/right-wing libertarian without the quotes and that got about the same ration of left to right. I decided not to use those results because there were too many "comparison" pages that talk about "left-wing vs. right-wing, authoritarian vs. libertarian".
Did you actually do the search? If you look at the results, you will see that the majority hits are people saying "I am a left-wing libertarian" or "she was a moderate left-wing libertarian." In the other case, yes I do notice a bias towards people talking about right-wing libertarian groups (and also, several "right-wing" libertarian groups). My conclusion is that "right-wing libertarian" is what you call people you don't like, whereas "left-wing libertarian" is what you yourself profess to be. Anyway, I don't think libertarian really fits into either of the traditional left or right viewpoints.
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Hardly left wing. They are libertarian elitists, which is about as far-right as you can get without bumping into Birchers.
I've always thought of libertarians as mostly left wing. I find it weird calling people right-wing when they have absolutely no economic sense. FWIW, according to Google:
"right-wing libertarian" = 641 hits
"left-wing libertarian" = 231 hits
Businesses since the '90's have been telling us we are as useful as the current project.
I am convinced that the current crop of corporate scandals is derived directly from the dot come bubble. When the stock market sets unreasonable expectations, businesses are under pressure to produce unreasonable results.
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That might be nice. It would be interesting to have a lobby group that expressed just the opinion of IT workers (i.e. not including students, university professors, users). Still, I wonder if their attitude would really be any different. The majority of developers I meet have very libertarian, pro-open source attitudes. But then again, I meet a lot of researchers at conferences.
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How about theoretical math? That's a very demanding intellectual task, but you don't see number theorists becoming millionaires overnight like in the IT field.
This argument always bugs me... I have heard a million variants. E.g. when cars were invented, the blacksmiths lobby complained that the car would put them out of business, but that's not a valid reason to ban cars.
The fact is, theoretical math is very demanding, but it's also not very practical. When you go into pure math, you know that you are getting into an academic field. The sad thing here is that software is a skill that is still very much in demand, but a group of developers decided to devalue the whole industry.
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Is reinventing the wheel your idea of fun?
Isn't that what Linux is doing?
Anyway, I used to work for a company that did cutting edge development in networking. Of course we didn't write everything ourselves, but plenty of companies sell libraries for various purposes and everyone prospers. The added cost didn't matter because all your competitors faced the same decision.
It used to be you could create a niche market either selling those libraries or providing some kind of value added component. Nowadays, everything is free and we have to use the free stuff in order to stay competitive. Of course the free stuff is always buggy and poorly documented. You can't sell libraries and any value added feature you include immediately becomes GPL'ed. The only market left is integrating and debugging open source components.
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You're pretty much right there until you mentioned open source. Open source outside of a few programs (namely apache) has had very little impact in the corporate world.
The way I see it, that's the scary thing. In terms of job losses, the worst is yet to come!!!
No, the main reason the industry is collapsing is consolidation and fat trimming. In bad times, redundant companies with poor business plans tend to fail.
No kidding. But if you look at the poor business plans that failed, most of them were a) selling crap online that you can buy in a supermarket, b) providing free content online in exchange for advertising, and c) developing open source software. Oh, and of course d) selling bandwith/hardware to a, b & c.
companies that actually offer something useful and unique (NVidia, Akamai, etc) do well
Well, NVidia is doing well, but they are a hardware company. I'm sure they hire some programmers, but that's not their focus. Akamai looks like a good company, but they aren't making money ($59M loss last quarter on $37M revenues). I'm not sure how this fits in with your larger point, though. Your claim was that open source hasn't affected software sales, but neither of these companies sells software.
When there's less work, salaries sometimes do go up actually, as companies are looking for fewer, more skilled workers as opposed to C++ or Java code monkeys.
So C++ & Java coders aren't skilled? So much for my qualifications.
They're looking for people with significant experience in the areas they'll be working in, which most people just don't have.
I have plenty of experience in my field. I believe my code is superior to the open source equivalent, but I'm still worried about my job. Why should my employer pay me to develop something that others will give away for free?
So, basically, you're right, but we'll see smaller salaries and more work as proprietary programmers will generally be better at what they do and will have to compete with eachother. Open source really isn't a factor here.
I just don't understand this leap of faith. Why won't open source penetrate business? IBM certainly seems to think it's a selling point. And why did HP hire Bruce Perens?
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What the past few years (and likely the next few) is going to do, is sort out who is worth what, and to whom. There _are_ several good uses for the net, it just so happens that selling pet food, giving stuff away for free, and printing your own stock certificates don't represent any of them.
We are still giving stuff away for free, and that is why the tech industry will be slow to rebound.
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That's a rather silly attitude. I believe it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Uhm, no, it's called job security. It's not asking for a higher price than what it would cost to replace you with someone cheaper
Wishing to be laid off because you feel unappreciated is a silly attitude. Maybe 2 years from now they will recognize your genius and wish they had paid you more, but in the meantime you are laid off.
The transition is not finished yet. Barring the company going out of business, if you were selected for a layoff, you were paid too much for that position. End of story.
I sense that your are a person who values finality. Anyway, your conclusion is silly and extreme. X and Y does not imply X => Y.
I know about exclusive knowledge -- good programmers were, and still are, hard to come by. People can write good code, but don't know how to engineer, that's the difference. I'm not a coder, I solve problems.
I know how to engineer too. Unfortunately, the genius of my design is not recognized right away and I feel unappreciated until 2 years later, by which point the guy who got quick results with his shitty prototype has already been promoted twice.
Accountability means shit in a courtroom. You get a backend CC providor on an Oracle database experience an Oracle bug that causes them to lose a days worth of transactions that they have to pay for, and you see who gets sued. Remember, you can sue anybody for anything.
You can sue anybody for anything, but you don't always win. You can also get slapped with a fine for filing a nuisance suit. I don't know of anyone who successfully sued Oracle for data loss. Anyway, instead of spending $1M on Oracle software, why not use the free stuff and spend $500k on a whopping huge insurance policy for the data.
Then they should get a different job. Do the work till they find a job that is more suited for their tastes.
These people don't seem all that unsatisfied with their new role as far as I can tell (many of them are free software advocates). All I can say is that I had the equivalent job I would almost certainly quit.
Jobs are hard to come by, but they are still there. If all they are doing is writing glue code, they could probably go somewhere else and end up making more money, and having more fun.
That is very nice to say, but I just finished explaining how open source will make "good" jobs much scarcer. If it's more cost effective to grab a free library off the web than to write your own, what are most companies going to do? Then you have to patch it up a bit (half the time it won't even compile), and then spend time monitoring some newsgroup to keep abreast of any security holes. It's just not my idea of fun. You could say the same thing to the guy working behind the counter at Wendy's but he'll tell you that all the fun fast food jobs are already taken.
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The way to really do it (which is why I have a job) is find someone very versed in open source software, specifically very familiar with the projects you need/want and hire them. Even if you don't get one of the main developers (I'm not) as long as they know the inner workings of the software packages you are interested in, if the developer stops working on it you can still get it stable internally and have the features you need put in.
What percentage of customers need customized code anyway? I worked in product development at a small company, and there was always the nebulous threat of the customer special, usually from a large potential customer with lots of clout. Customer specials are annoying because they distract you from core development. Typically, the customer is unwilling to pay the full cost of development so you have to recoup the money somehow. Possibly the feature will be sufficiently useful that it will improve the overall saleability of your product or (more likely) the customer is dangling a carrot in front of you, such as the promise to buy 1000 widgets if you deliver features X, Y, and Z. (Of course they are promising the same thing to 3 other companies, but your CEO is young and gullible.
The point is, it's very difficult to make money from a customer special, fundamentally because the customer doesn't want to pay the full cost of development. So this begs the question why, in general, they would hire a core open source developer to customize an open source project for their own use. You say you have a job, so clearly this sometimes happens, but it doesn't sound cost-effective. Remember that just because something is stupid, it doesn't mean that people won't do it. However, most people are not masochistic, and they will give up when it doesn't work. What I see as plausible is that industry consortiums will fund new features. This is a sustainable model, under which open source development can thrive. However, it is also one in which there are fewer available jobs, and at a lower salary than you see today.
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Go ahead and lay me off, I know I'm worth more to the company here than not here.
That's a rather silly attitude. I believe it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
They'd just have to hire someone else in for a couple bucks less an hour who has no clue about the thousands and thousands of lines of code. I'm worth what they pay, end of story.
That's a rather over-simplistic attitude. Worth can't be quantified in one variable, even if attempts to do so are often the source of political extremism.
You are worth:
a) The value of the work you do to your employer.
b) The cost to your employer to replace you.
Same thing with everyone else that still has jobs for the most part. If you don't have a job, you weren't worth what they paid for you.
I am a highly skilled programmer and I still have a job. I know skilled people who got layed off and I know inept people who still have jobs.
Sorry, it is. Just a fact of life. Always has been, always will be. It's up there with being a doctor.
The medical profession wasn't always a highly-skilled and highly-paid profession. Doctors used to be real quacks. What makes them a highly-paid profession is the fact that they require a license to operate. That, and their monumentally expensive education, high insurance costs, and penalties against immigration. Programming is not a licensed profession, therefore the same rules do not apply.
Even before the boom people were making well over $55K a year.
Before the boom, there wasn't a computer in every household and kids didn't learn to use them in school. Back then, programmers were geeks with some very exclusive knowledge.
Sorry, but for critical database apps Oracle is the way to go? Why? Simple: Accountability. You don't store $1M a day in transactions in Postgres.
I fail to see the logic. Don't
I guess because open documentation isn't particularly glamorous work.
Which is why I'll always be paid well, and employed. I don't mind.
You know what... I do mind. I *care* if all the glamourous work becomes free and I can only get paid to do the crufty bits. We had a good thing going and then we went and ruined it. I am lucky in that my job quality was largely unaffected by our shift to open source, but I look at the shitty work some of my co-workers now have to do and it totally depresses me. It is demeaning for a highly skilled programmer to be stuck writing glue code to glue two poorly written, heterogenous open source apps together.
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Thank you for a very insightful comment. Your web page is a good reference. You are right that "super genius" programmers think economics doesn't affect them. I have often wondered why this is so. Doctors and lawyers often do pro bono work, but they typically do so with discretion. The medical and legal professions have also traditionally been "closed societies", employing technical jargon to ward off laymen. What is it that makes programmers so much more left wing and idealistic than other professionals? I am not a big fan of labour unions, but I fear that if the trend continues they will be necessary.
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Why would people take more pay cuts?
Because they will get laid off otherwise? Because unemployed IT guys are willing to work for less?
I'm in a secured position, for the most part. The only way I can go is up. In 5 years, you better expect me to want a lot more money. The IT field is a high paying field. End of story.
Wishing *will* make it so. Wishing *will* make it so.
Since the creation of the Ford automobile, there has been 15,000 failed automobile manufacturers. You think when it was a boom people were getting paid a lot to design cars? Yeah, they were. Then, it started to decline and no automobile designers are again making very good salaries and most of them have been in the business for a very long time.
I have no knowledge of the car industry with which to dispute your comment. However, you haven't really made any attempt to explain why the industry goes up and down, just that salaries track the market.
And saying that open source software is going to compete with developers is just utter I've-never-worked-in-a-large-company-bull-shit.
I work for a large company.
In the company I work at, 90% of the server software (Excluding Oracle and WebLogic) we use is open source.
And I work on product that is 90% open source and developed using 100% open source tools.
Most open source software is not ready to be used in an enterprise environment.
I disagree. We're not gullible enough to spend $50 per seat (or $1000s in developer-hours) on an improved product when we can get the stock version for free.
However, with a few code modifications, and some clever front end GUI applications, they become very usable.
I make some productivity tools and a few people use them, but if it was the kind of thing everyone wanted, it would already be in the free version. Some people want a CLI, others a GUI, others a TUI. You can't please everyone.
I'll never worry about being put out of a job because of open source software. Purely because you need to have a coder in house to understand it.
I guess because open documentation isn't particularly glamorous work.
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Smart companies will find good people and pay whatever it takes to keep them.
There's a limit to that. As we have seen, some companies are willing to pay their CEO $500 million dollars, but that's one guy. For a select few senior positions, salaries are quite flexible. But for most positions, it seems they really aren't.
Now, I agree that the average salary has gone down, however that's more just from there being a reasonable pool of people to choose from rather than 1% unemployment.
I do agree with that. However, I think there is an additional factor, which is that the average IT job today requires less skill than it used to.
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These things go in cycles. If there's enough public disinterest caused by the "tech bust" that university enrollments go down past a certain point, it's only a matter of time before demand once again exceeds supply.
Theoretically true, but I doubt that argument applies in this case. The industry crashed by such an order of magnitude that there will be ex-tech workers ready to jump on the bandwagon for years. And there are so many more kids growing up with computers these days that it is very unlikely that university enrollment in related fields will wane.
Remember, certain kinds of tech jobs are difficult, and there's many a person who can't stand being a knowledge worker behind a desk all day, thinking about problems and solving them. If the pay goes too low, interest will be lost disportionately fast, because many kinds of IT jobs simply aren't very fun.
Oh, I have no doubt that there will be some high-paying sysadmin jobs available in the future, but I don't see many high-paying developer jobs opening up. Much of the most demanding, coolest development will be on free software projects. Adapting an existing app to a specific situation is way less fun (and takes less skill and fewer man-hours) than writing something completely new. Hence, there will be fewer high paying development jobs.
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