Companies want employees that do everything they are told
No, they don't! Companies -- and by that I mean the real decision makers, not just your boss -- want employees who make them richer. Pretty much all employees do what they're told; the ones that don't are an insignificant number and generally end up fired or marginalized. You can't distinguish yourself by showing up and just doing what you're told.
You're right: he needs to "get over being clever," but also to decide if he wants to excel at something (in this case a job/career) and figure out how to apply his intelligence properly to that task.
Hint: it usually involves going way beyond doing just what you're told. It requires that you figure out the next step and do it, or suggesting an improvement that fits the company's business model, not just something that makes you look like you're trying to be smart.
Problem is that most geeky types -- yours truly included:-( -- take a long time to learn that no one cares if they're smart. People care what you can do for them and that you can do it well without making them feel stupid. That's a hell of a lot more important to your success than just being clever.
You still ignore the point at the bottom of my post. namely that while these inconveniences can be worked around, they occur often enough to severely impact the usefulness of a car like this. Enough so that getting one of these instead of a used "normal" one for the same price offers little tangible benefit. I've done the bus/train commute thing and had all of these problems (except the kid: I was single back then) and found solutions. But in my case at least, the ultimate solution was to buy a used vehicle because I was making too many compromises living with a bicycle and public transportation. And I was living in an area with pretty good public transit. Good enough that even owning a car, I still took the train to work because it got me there faster than driving.
Bicycles are cheap enough that you can live with their shortcomings; a car like this would have a far worse cost/benefit ratio.
I don't think anyone seriously believes that a car like this meets everyone's needs; rather the problem is that it meets *very few* needs that aren't already met with a normal sized car.
See, that's your problem right there. This is/., you're not supposed to enjoy anything other than recompiling your Linux kernel through a remote X session for the 50th time because you forgot the '--IHateBillG' option last time. You are especially not supposed to enjoy cars. The mere mention of horsepower > 5 on a four-wheel vehicle should instill shudders of fear or indignant remarks of "why can't you just ride a bicycle?"
But that "reality" falls apart very quickly. Let's see.
I have to pick up kid from daycare at the last minute cause wife is getting home late (and she has the "real" car).
On way home, I get the urge for roast chicken. Need to stop off at grocery for whole chicken and large bag of charcoal since we're out. How does that fit in this car?
Pet store just called, my new 100gal aquarium is in, I have to pick it up at lunch time since they're closed by the time I get off work.
Most of those cars you see during your commute may in fact only have one person, but you can't predict that commuting back and forth is all that car is going to be used for. While all the scenarios I posit can be worked around, that is the problem: it introduces another level of difficulty into the day and diminishes the convenience of having a car in the first place.
one least-common-denominator vehicle for all of these purposes (e.g. the Suburban Assault Vehicle), is a poor use of resources
That may very well be, but most people aren't concerned with optimizing automotive resource use; they just want a convenient vehicle that they like. And this is a key point that most pro "no car/tiny car"/.ers ignore.
I have a wife and a child. I have an SUV that on a good day gets *maybe* 65% the mileage of my wife's new, fuel efficient car, though it still does OK for such a heavy vehicle. Which do we take on long trips? You got it: the gas guzzler. Why? It's more convenient: easier to stuff things into, take the dog along, etc, it feels roomier and she usually doesn't feel like driving and I'd rather drive the vehicle I'm used to. Non-optimal use of resources, especially when gas costs what it does? Sure. But as long as we can afford those resources, the behavior probably won't change. And *THAT*'s the key. People won't change without good reason and telling them that their vehicles are inefficient is usually not a good enough reason.
Once you're well above the subsistence level for any resource, optimal use of that resource ceases to be a priority. When I was a student, you bet your ass I made the best use of every dollar and carefully considered every purchase. I had to: I was working for minimum wage. Now I'm a fairly well paid developer, the difference between 20 mpg and 35 mpg isn't enough to prevent me buying a car I really like. Yes, I will consider the impact on my environment, but having a car is just one of many choices we make that have environmental impact. I don't see anyone applauding me because I don't fertilize my lawn due to concern about runoff into local lakes.
I'm a pretty good cook and we typically have plenty of raw food on hand to make a variety of meals, yet why do we eat out at least twice a week? Same reason: convenience. There's that non-optimal behavior again!
I think you to lightly gloss over the downsides and costs of the automobile so I looked some facts up:
And you ignore the main reason for having a car in the US: mobility. Sure I can (and have, when I lived in NYC and didn't own one) rent a car, but having my own vehicle lets me do things like:
1. Decide at 9:00 pm at the start of a major snowstorm in Minnesota to go visit a friend who lives 220 miles away at the edge of the North woods just cause I felt like it and she wanted to see me (as a plus, I like driving in weather). 2. Take my family whereever we want to on a weekend without being limited by public transportation or having to plan ahead, or having to return a vehicle by a certain time, etc... 3. In general go where I want, when I want to, without worrying about weather, distance or schedule. In short: convenience and mobility. If we didn't need either we'd all still be riding mules.
I lived in New York city from my teenage years until after college graduation and stayed in the NY metro area for years after. I know what good public transportation is like. I have enjoyed my 20 mile commute to work, reading books on Metro North train at 70 mph when I-95 was a parking lot. I also know that for most things other than a daily commute, it simply doesn't beat wide open roads (I did say I lived in MN) and your own vehicle. Bicycles do have their place (which for me means off road on a mtn bike), but so do cars. Use the right tool for the job.
Modern cars are very, very complicated
As far as the complexity of cars, well I just sold a vehicle I've had for 14 years and the only times it was ever in the shop was for major engine work (once) and transmission work (once) that I didn't have time (engine) or experience (xmission) to handle. All other repairs, upgrades and modifications (and she was turned into a nice off-roadin' truck:-) in that 14 year period as well as all the work on my 4 year-old vehicle I did myself with no training. If you're worried about repair costs, you can get an old car and learn to fix it yourself. Lots of people do this; car repair isn't brain surgery. Oil changes? By law repair shops must take used engine oil. Tires? I'd just store them in the garage, but maybe we have more room than you do.
it very rarely comes up with any real problems in the code
Do you mean that it can't find problems in the code because it's useless, or that there are no problems in the code for it to find? There's a substantial difference between the two. As someone who codes for devices where patient safety is critical, I find tools like this very interesting.
Oh, she had experience all right, but that's not the point. Inexperienced people were constantly being hired at her job and trained. The point I was making was that at the time IT hiring was down, but other fields were booming and having trouble finding employees.
From reading/. it appears to me that too many unemployed IT workers never consider looking outside their specialty. Perhaps it comes from being used to having a very narrow focus, I don't know, but stories about people who either entered a completely different field, or found new applications for their IT experience are all too rare here.
None of those jobs listed involve a lot of "innovation" or re-education to move up to a higher level on the job scale.
Depends on what you consider a "higher level." Some plumbers make more money than most computer programmers if you're talking financially. And the fact that a job doesn't require re-education is a good thing: it means that laid-off software developer can move into the field easily.
Two years ago when/. was all a-whine about no jobs for programmers, my wife, still working on her Bachelor's, was inundated with job offers from financial firms. She settled on one that paid upwards of $50k. In the Midwest, with only a HS diploma! On the strength of an old resume on monster.com, she was still getting calls 6 months after starting her new job.
There are always jobs to be found, some people just look in the wrong places.
Perhaps the mistake so many make is to not prepare for job loss when the writing is so obviously on the wall. Are you employed as a software engineer/coder/programmer? If so have you considered what you'd do if you job went overseas and you couldn't find work programming? What's your contingency plan?
since without a "push" to learn English they never do become bilingual.
Well since we're trading anecdotes here, let me inject one. The cleaning crew for a building I work in is all Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants. I learned that most (if not all) of them are illegals. I speak passable Spanish and was surprised to learn that their supervisor spoke fluent English. Where did he learn it? Here in America. Why? Because, in his own words, "you have to if you're going to get anywhere." Most people that make the life-changing trip here (and I speak as one of them) want to improve their lives and will work hard toward that goal. Most of those who are given the opportunity to learn English will, because they realize its importance.
The problem with the bilingual imperatives is that it makes life easier for the few who can't be bothered to learn English or simply have too much trouble learning for it to be worthwhile and does nothing to help the rest of the population at large. However, encouraging learning foreign languages for the existing native population is a good thing. Speaking multiple languages does encourage diversity -- there's a big planet beyond our borders and even English speaking immigrants like it when you converse with them in their native language -- and you'd be hard pressed to get me to believe that's a bad thing.
I think both sides of this are missing something important: people are saying "who cares if he was gay" because it truly doesn't matter and normally shouldn't be made an issue. But there was a time when this would have been all that mattered. The majority would be trying to pretend that he wasn't, because "gays can't make that kind of contribution." The fact that this discussion/argument is happening at all is a glimpse into how far we have come as a society to realize the irrelevance of sexual orientation.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that after I read another few posts, I'll be reminded of how many lightyears we have still to travel {sigh}...
No, I'm an engineer. What you said did cross my mind before I posted, but even then I couldn't see it working except for research students where depth might have been more important than breadth.
the point of lectures is to obtain a set of notes good enough to work completely on their own in most cases
That's surprising. I can't think of many courses I took where there was remotely enough information given in class to learn the material thoroughly. Especially not physics. There was simply too much information for a 1 hour class period. Class was basically where you went to understand the trickier aspects of the text or to learn what the professor thought was important. I'd have to assume that your profs either spit out a huge amount of info without stopping to answer questions, or your class times were longer.
Did anyone also recognized that old advertisements have long and informative texts.
Back in the late 80's/early 90's I was working for a small computer company that also advertised in Byte and our ads (some done in part by yours truly) were just like that. The reason was that at the time most such companies were selling to engineers and other technical people who wanted *specs* above all. Pictures were nice, but they wanted technical details. If we skimped on detail and tried to insert product photos instead, we were deluged with customer support calls asking if we could fax over spec sheets to interested readers.
This was at the very beginning of PC desktop publishing. The memory in our Canon laser printer cost more than the printer itself. I would write ad copy in XyWrite, the owner took product photographs then the bunch of us would sit around a big table with a hot wax roller and X-Acto knives and paste up the ad. Then downstairs to the big Agfa stat camera to produce the final incarnation which was then mailed off to the magazines. I sure learned a lot of odd stuff at that job for a 23 y-o electrical engineer:-)
When the company was sold (to a group of morons headed by the canonical PHB), we were told that our ads were too dense and hard to read, so they brought in all these marketing consultants who prepared jazzy colorful ads at 2x the cost (we paid $20,000 for a 2page B&W ad in Byte and it easily paid for itself every month, the ads they produced cost over $50,000.. for a company doing only $1M in sales that bites!) Needless to say, the new ads sucked in terms of response. The PHB would not accept that the ugly ads designed by engineers for engineers were actually resulting in more sales than his expensive ones and refused to go back. Sales plummetted, company lost tons of money, went tits up. Been there, done that, got my T-shirt ripped off! We actually had one ad (we even had a copy under glass!) that cost $80,000 in marketing and placement fees and resulted in exactly ZERO product inquiries. The only thing they did right was to track ad responses!
OK, done with that particular rant for the moment:-)
And then there are the games. Back in the '8088 days I was a huge Robotron fan. Last time I tried it was back on a '486. Absolutely insane speed, way too fast for me to play it.
why US companies have developed the mentality that it is ok to give developers less time than they need to complete development
Oh, I think that one's easy: it has no obvious financial impact on the company. So your developers have to work 80 hour weeks to do the job half-right. You don't have to pay them more, and even if you do give overtime to a few, it's not a big deal.
This behavior will not change until a lot more businesses get sued for poor software performance. When there is an obvious correlation between software defects and money, companies will begin to improve their processes.
When you're working with physical stuff, process counts. Even if your time is cheap, if your design has to be reworked multiple times before it works, that rework costs money. If a carpenter who's overworked and sleep deprived drops your $900 kitchen cabinet on the floor and smashes it, it comes out of his pocket, not yours. But there is no obvious cost to the company for having its developers work longer hours as long as the project is completed in the number of calendar days allocated. No one changes without good reason and for a corporation, usually the only good reason is financial.
Perhaps I can offer an example of why requirements are useful. We build medical instruments and not surprisingly, we have a pretty tight development process. A few days ago a tester files a defect report and it gets assigned to me to fix. As I'm investigating, I wonder why the tester thinks the behavior (which I think is correct) is wrong. Because the test case explicitly states which requirement it is testing, I can track the requirement back to its source, and in this case, discover that it conflicts with another requirement (that's why I thought the behavior was OK).
Now since we know where these two conflicting requirements are from, we can figure out what the intents were, and either decide ourselves which one is wrong, or at least who to escalate the problem to (in this case, a different department "owns" that requirement) for a final decision.
Without a set of requirements, it would have rapidly devolved into a "he said, she said" battle to determine which behavior was right.
As far as your professor's statement that you can't know how much space it can take/how fast it will be, I assume he's never done any embedded development. When you're building custom hardware, you'd better have a good idea up front how much space/CPU speed your application will need, because by the time it's half done, the hardware design's probably set in stone!
work for a smaller business, learn the entire business and move up from there.
Yes!!! Small companies are where real learning can start simply because you have to wear so many hats. Larger companies are better for getting depth in a particular skill, but smaller ones force you to learn enough about a lot of things -- Jack of all trades, master of many.
My first job was with a tiny engineering company (can you tell:-) and I was thrown in head first and forced to sink or swim. I had a blast for the first 2 years, then our "reward" for high profitability was to be bought out by a bunch of clueless idiots...
But before that I learned the entire industry and business processes from product design through inventory management, through manufacturing and on to marketing and sales. Only drawback was the miniscule salary, but that experience parlays itself into much higher pay once you leave.
Most people don't argue that everyone is better off than they were X years ago - it's the relative proportions of "better offedness" that they find offensive.
OK, I'll bite: why? Why does it matter that Bill Gates (e.g.) is a few orders of magnitude wealthier that I'll ever be? I still have a nice house, nice car and acceptable lifestyle. I'm happy, why begrudge him what he worked for any more than you'd begrudge me what I worked for?
As far as the whole cost of living thing. Well, the US (yeah, I know you're Australian) is pretty big. I moved away from the coast because it got too expensive, now I live in a nicer place with less stress and can get by on less.
While I have known truly poor people (being raised by a single mother with no education does that to ya!), my experience has been that most people have enough to live comfortably; but they define as "necessities" things that are really luxuries. Dining out? Fast food? I can buy a 25lb bag of rice for less than $10, about $8 for a 25lb bag of flour. I can make my own damn bread and cake, cookies, etc. I don't need to spend $5 a loaf at au bon pain when the materials cost me about 50 cents and 10 minutes of effort. $400k house? Mine cost half that and I could have spent much less and still had a big enough house (2 adults one child) within reasonable distance from work, but we spent extra for a pretty location. Most Americans above the poverty level simply want to spend too much. Great for the economy, but they shouldn't whine that they can't afford what their $$$boss drives. I have gotten into arguments with well paid engineers (and in the sake of disclosure, I am a well paid engineer) who argue that they have to keep their stressful, overworked job to maintain their lifestyle. They run out of steam when I point out that their lifestyle is pretty much self inflicted and they could live quite well consuming less. I'm not anti-consumer, just anti-whiner.
On one hand I agree with you. On the gripping hand, it's like saying that VBA is so powerful and easy to use you don't need to be a programmer for a lot of tasks. True on the surface, but for anything other than simple applications, the untrained user runs into trouble fast.
In my first job as a design engineer I also did customer support. I've seen how all the small issues an engineer unconsciously takes into account can cause real trouble for an inexperienced customer-turned-"engineer."
The problem with TV is when people get bad viewing habits
And that's exactly the reason these turn off TV things don't work: the people who just use it to veg out won't turn it off, and the people who don't mind turning it off, well... don't care that much about it anyway.
On an average night (unless Penn&Teller's "Bullshit" is on, or we're watching a movie) we actually pay real attention to the TV for only about an hour. Could I go a whole week without ever turning it on? Yes, but what would be the point? And I think a lot of people feel pretty much the same way.
As far as the impact of TV on my 3 y.o. son: unless I'm really tired and need to rest, he's lucky if he watches more than 1/2 hour of kids shows a day. I'd rather have him drawing or playing than zombified in front of a TV. We've already decided he's not getting his own TV until he's old enough to get a job and buy one himself!
Slashdot Mirror
No, they don't!
Companies -- and by that I mean the real decision makers, not just your boss -- want employees who make them richer. Pretty much all employees do what they're told; the ones that don't are an insignificant number and generally end up fired or marginalized. You can't distinguish yourself by showing up and just doing what you're told.
You're right: he needs to "get over being clever," but also to decide if he wants to excel at something (in this case a job/career) and figure out how to apply his intelligence properly to that task.
Hint: it usually involves going way beyond doing just what you're told. It requires that you figure out the next step and do it, or suggesting an improvement that fits the company's business model, not just something that makes you look like you're trying to be smart.
Problem is that most geeky types -- yours truly included
Because you're not subject to someone else's idea of "buildings worth looking at?"
You still ignore the point at the bottom of my post. namely that while these inconveniences can be worked around, they occur often enough to severely impact the usefulness of a car like this. Enough so that getting one of these instead of a used "normal" one for the same price offers little tangible benefit. I've done the bus/train commute thing and had all of these problems (except the kid: I was single back then) and found solutions. But in my case at least, the ultimate solution was to buy a used vehicle because I was making too many compromises living with a bicycle and public transportation. And I was living in an area with pretty good public transit. Good enough that even owning a car, I still took the train to work because it got me there faster than driving.
Bicycles are cheap enough that you can live with their shortcomings; a car like this would have a far worse cost/benefit ratio.
I don't think anyone seriously believes that a car like this meets everyone's needs; rather the problem is that it meets *very few* needs that aren't already met with a normal sized car.
See, that's your problem right there. This is
You are especially not supposed to enjoy cars. The mere mention of horsepower > 5 on a four-wheel vehicle should instill shudders of fear or indignant remarks of "why can't you just ride a bicycle?"
OK, that proves it. I need more caffeine!
But that "reality" falls apart very quickly. Let's see.
I have to pick up kid from daycare at the last minute cause wife is getting home late (and she has the "real" car).
On way home, I get the urge for roast chicken. Need to stop off at grocery for whole chicken and large bag of charcoal since we're out. How does that fit in this car?
Pet store just called, my new 100gal aquarium is in, I have to pick it up at lunch time since they're closed by the time I get off work.
Most of those cars you see during your commute may in fact only have one person, but you can't predict that commuting back and forth is all that car is going to be used for. While all the scenarios I posit can be worked around, that is the problem: it introduces another level of difficulty into the day and diminishes the convenience of having a car in the first place.
That may very well be, but most people aren't concerned with optimizing automotive resource use; they just want a convenient vehicle that they like. And this is a key point that most pro "no car/tiny car"
I have a wife and a child. I have an SUV that on a good day gets *maybe* 65% the mileage of my wife's new, fuel efficient car, though it still does OK for such a heavy vehicle. Which do we take on long trips? You got it: the gas guzzler. Why? It's more convenient: easier to stuff things into, take the dog along, etc, it feels roomier and she usually doesn't feel like driving and I'd rather drive the vehicle I'm used to. Non-optimal use of resources, especially when gas costs what it does? Sure. But as long as we can afford those resources, the behavior probably won't change. And *THAT*'s the key. People won't change without good reason and telling them that their vehicles are inefficient is usually not a good enough reason.
Once you're well above the subsistence level for any resource, optimal use of that resource ceases to be a priority. When I was a student, you bet your ass I made the best use of every dollar and carefully considered every purchase. I had to: I was working for minimum wage. Now I'm a fairly well paid developer, the difference between 20 mpg and 35 mpg isn't enough to prevent me buying a car I really like. Yes, I will consider the impact on my environment, but having a car is just one of many choices we make that have environmental impact. I don't see anyone applauding me because I don't fertilize my lawn due to concern about runoff into local lakes.
I'm a pretty good cook and we typically have plenty of raw food on hand to make a variety of meals, yet why do we eat out at least twice a week? Same reason: convenience. There's that non-optimal behavior again!
And you ignore the main reason for having a car in the US: mobility. Sure I can (and have, when I lived in NYC and didn't own one) rent a car, but having my own vehicle lets me do things like:
1. Decide at 9:00 pm at the start of a major snowstorm in Minnesota to go visit a friend who lives 220 miles away at the edge of the North woods just cause I felt like it and she wanted to see me (as a plus, I like driving in weather).
2. Take my family whereever we want to on a weekend without being limited by public transportation or having to plan ahead, or having to return a vehicle by a certain time, etc...
3. In general go where I want, when I want to, without worrying about weather, distance or schedule. In short: convenience and mobility. If we didn't need either we'd all still be riding mules.
I lived in New York city from my teenage years until after college graduation and stayed in the NY metro area for years after. I know what good public transportation is like. I have enjoyed my 20 mile commute to work, reading books on Metro North train at 70 mph when I-95 was a parking lot. I also know that for most things other than a daily commute, it simply doesn't beat wide open roads (I did say I lived in MN) and your own vehicle. Bicycles do have their place (which for me means off road on a mtn bike), but so do cars. Use the right tool for the job.
As far as the complexity of cars, well I just sold a vehicle I've had for 14 years and the only times it was ever in the shop was for major engine work (once) and transmission work (once) that I didn't have time (engine) or experience (xmission) to handle. All other repairs, upgrades and modifications (and she was turned into a nice off-roadin' truck
Do you mean that it can't find problems in the code because it's useless, or that there are no problems in the code for it to find? There's a substantial difference between the two. As someone who codes for devices where patient safety is critical, I find tools like this very interesting.
Oh, she had experience all right, but that's not the point. Inexperienced people were constantly being hired at her job and trained. The point I was making was that at the time IT hiring was down, but other fields were booming and having trouble finding employees.
/. it appears to me that too many unemployed IT workers never consider looking outside their specialty. Perhaps it comes from being used to having a very narrow focus, I don't know, but stories about people who either entered a completely different field, or found new applications for their IT experience are all too rare here.
From reading
Depends on what you consider a "higher level." Some plumbers make more money than most computer programmers if you're talking financially. And the fact that a job doesn't require re-education is a good thing: it means that laid-off software developer can move into the field easily.
Two years ago when
There are always jobs to be found, some people just look in the wrong places.
Perhaps the mistake so many make is to not prepare for job loss when the writing is so obviously on the wall. Are you employed as a software engineer/coder/programmer? If so have you considered what you'd do if you job went overseas and you couldn't find work programming? What's your contingency plan?
Well since we're trading anecdotes here, let me inject one. The cleaning crew for a building I work in is all Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants. I learned that most (if not all) of them are illegals. I speak passable Spanish and was surprised to learn that their supervisor spoke fluent English. Where did he learn it? Here in America. Why? Because, in his own words, "you have to if you're going to get anywhere." Most people that make the life-changing trip here (and I speak as one of them) want to improve their lives and will work hard toward that goal. Most of those who are given the opportunity to learn English will, because they realize its importance.
The problem with the bilingual imperatives is that it makes life easier for the few who can't be bothered to learn English or simply have too much trouble learning for it to be worthwhile and does nothing to help the rest of the population at large.
However, encouraging learning foreign languages for the existing native population is a good thing. Speaking multiple languages does encourage diversity -- there's a big planet beyond our borders and even English speaking immigrants like it when you converse with them in their native language -- and you'd be hard pressed to get me to believe that's a bad thing.
I think both sides of this are missing something important: people are saying "who cares if he was gay" because it truly doesn't matter and normally shouldn't be made an issue.
But there was a time when this would have been all that mattered. The majority would be trying to pretend that he wasn't, because "gays can't make that kind of contribution."
The fact that this discussion/argument is happening at all is a glimpse into how far we have come as a society to realize the irrelevance of sexual orientation.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that after I read another few posts, I'll be reminded of how many lightyears we have still to travel {sigh}...
No, I'm an engineer. What you said did cross my mind before I posted, but even then I couldn't see it working except for research students where depth might have been more important than breadth.
That's surprising. I can't think of many courses I took where there was remotely enough information given in class to learn the material thoroughly. Especially not physics. There was simply too much information for a 1 hour class period. Class was basically where you went to understand the trickier aspects of the text or to learn what the professor thought was important.
I'd have to assume that your profs either spit out a huge amount of info without stopping to answer questions, or your class times were longer.
Back in the late 80's/early 90's I was working for a small computer company that also advertised in Byte and our ads (some done in part by yours truly) were just like that. The reason was that at the time most such companies were selling to engineers and other technical people who wanted *specs* above all. Pictures were nice, but they wanted technical details. If we skimped on detail and tried to insert product photos instead, we were deluged with customer support calls asking if we could fax over spec sheets to interested readers.
This was at the very beginning of PC desktop publishing. The memory in our Canon laser printer cost more than the printer itself. I would write ad copy in XyWrite, the owner took product photographs then the bunch of us would sit around a big table with a hot wax roller and X-Acto knives and paste up the ad. Then downstairs to the big Agfa stat camera to produce the final incarnation which was then mailed off to the magazines. I sure learned a lot of odd stuff at that job for a 23 y-o electrical engineer
When the company was sold (to a group of morons headed by the canonical PHB), we were told that our ads were too dense and hard to read, so they brought in all these marketing consultants who prepared jazzy colorful ads at 2x the cost (we paid $20,000 for a 2page B&W ad in Byte and it easily paid for itself every month, the ads they produced cost over $50,000
Needless to say, the new ads sucked in terms of response. The PHB would not accept that the ugly ads designed by engineers for engineers were actually resulting in more sales than his expensive ones and refused to go back. Sales plummetted, company lost tons of money, went tits up. Been there, done that, got my T-shirt ripped off!
We actually had one ad (we even had a copy under glass!) that cost $80,000 in marketing and placement fees and resulted in exactly ZERO product inquiries. The only thing they did right was to track ad responses!
OK, done with that particular rant for the moment
And then there are the games. Back in the '8088 days I was a huge Robotron fan. Last time I tried it was back on a '486. Absolutely insane speed, way too fast for me to play it.
Oh, the joy of coding timing loops in software!
Oh, I think that one's easy: it has no obvious financial impact on the company. So your developers have to work 80 hour weeks to do the job half-right. You don't have to pay them more, and even if you do give overtime to a few, it's not a big deal.
This behavior will not change until a lot more businesses get sued for poor software performance. When there is an obvious correlation between software defects and money, companies will begin to improve their processes.
When you're working with physical stuff, process counts. Even if your time is cheap, if your design has to be reworked multiple times before it works, that rework costs money. If a carpenter who's overworked and sleep deprived drops your $900 kitchen cabinet on the floor and smashes it, it comes out of his pocket, not yours. But there is no obvious cost to the company for having its developers work longer hours as long as the project is completed in the number of calendar days allocated. No one changes without good reason and for a corporation, usually the only good reason is financial.
Perhaps I can offer an example of why requirements are useful. We build medical instruments and not surprisingly, we have a pretty tight development process. A few days ago a tester files a defect report and it gets assigned to me to fix. As I'm investigating, I wonder why the tester thinks the behavior (which I think is correct) is wrong. Because the test case explicitly states which requirement it is testing, I can track the requirement back to its source, and in this case, discover that it conflicts with another requirement (that's why I thought the behavior was OK).
Now since we know where these two conflicting requirements are from, we can figure out what the intents were, and either decide ourselves which one is wrong, or at least who to escalate the problem to (in this case, a different department "owns" that requirement) for a final decision.
Without a set of requirements, it would have rapidly devolved into a "he said, she said" battle to determine which behavior was right.
As far as your professor's statement that you can't know how much space it can take/how fast it will be, I assume he's never done any embedded development. When you're building custom hardware, you'd better have a good idea up front how much space/CPU speed your application will need, because by the time it's half done, the hardware design's probably set in stone!
So you mean the hermit crabs in my aquarium are robots? Cool!
Yes!!! Small companies are where real learning can start simply because you have to wear so many hats. Larger companies are better for getting depth in a particular skill, but smaller ones force you to learn enough about a lot of things -- Jack of all trades, master of many.
My first job was with a tiny engineering company (can you tell
But before that I learned the entire industry and business processes from product design through inventory management, through manufacturing and on to marketing and sales. Only drawback was the miniscule salary, but that experience parlays itself into much higher pay once you leave.
OK, I'll bite: why?
Why does it matter that Bill Gates (e.g.) is a few orders of magnitude wealthier that I'll ever be? I still have a nice house, nice car and acceptable lifestyle. I'm happy, why begrudge him what he worked for any more than you'd begrudge me what I worked for?
As far as the whole cost of living thing. Well, the US (yeah, I know you're Australian) is pretty big. I moved away from the coast because it got too expensive, now I live in a nicer place with less stress and can get by on less.
While I have known truly poor people (being raised by a single mother with no education does that to ya!), my experience has been that most people have enough to live comfortably; but they define as "necessities" things that are really luxuries. Dining out? Fast food? I can buy a 25lb bag of rice for less than $10, about $8 for a 25lb bag of flour. I can make my own damn bread and cake, cookies, etc. I don't need to spend $5 a loaf at au bon pain when the materials cost me about 50 cents and 10 minutes of effort. $400k house? Mine cost half that and I could have spent much less and still had a big enough house (2 adults one child) within reasonable distance from work, but we spent extra for a pretty location. Most Americans above the poverty level simply want to spend too much. Great for the economy, but they shouldn't whine that they can't afford what their $$$boss drives.
I have gotten into arguments with well paid engineers (and in the sake of disclosure, I am a well paid engineer) who argue that they have to keep their stressful, overworked job to maintain their lifestyle. They run out of steam when I point out that their lifestyle is pretty much self inflicted and they could live quite well consuming less.
I'm not anti-consumer, just anti-whiner.
On one hand I agree with you. On the gripping hand, it's like saying that VBA is so powerful and easy to use you don't need to be a programmer for a lot of tasks. True on the surface, but for anything other than simple applications, the untrained user runs into trouble fast.
In my first job as a design engineer I also did customer support. I've seen how all the small issues an engineer unconsciously takes into account can cause real trouble for an inexperienced customer-turned-"engineer."
And that's exactly the reason these turn off TV things don't work: the people who just use it to veg out won't turn it off, and the people who don't mind turning it off, well... don't care that much about it anyway.
On an average night (unless Penn&Teller's "Bullshit" is on, or we're watching a movie) we actually pay real attention to the TV for only about an hour. Could I go a whole week without ever turning it on? Yes, but what would be the point? And I think a lot of people feel pretty much the same way.
As far as the impact of TV on my 3 y.o. son: unless I'm really tired and need to rest, he's lucky if he watches more than 1/2 hour of kids shows a day. I'd rather have him drawing or playing than zombified in front of a TV. We've already decided he's not getting his own TV until he's old enough to get a job and buy one himself!
Your mileage obviously varies. I consider learning how to get laid when I was a lonely, unhappy geek to have been substantially more important.
Yeah, I'm pretty bored just about now...