They announced layoffs where I work in a memo that had at least 38 buzzwords in it, some more than once. The more buzzwords in the memo, the worse the news. I swear some of these C-suite people have translators just to convert ordinary English into buzzword bullshit.
So, basically, you're cheap and only wanting to hire young kids with no experience. You get what you pay for.
You aren't willing to pay experts, but you are willing to pay a bunch of noobs with "new" "hip" "modern" language skilz to recode your entire platform. So you are not only cheap, but penny wise, pound foolish.
The real headscratcher to me is the number of programmers who assume that because a language isn't adding features every couple years it is dead.
This. I hate working with "new" "elite" languages that every new version that comes out breaks existing code in weird ways. (Python, I'm looking at you.)
I've done maintenance on perl code written by people in love with their own intelligence. It's painful. I've tried it on similar stuff in python (see my breaking with new versions comment above.) It's impossible. I rewrite it in something stable and universal - shell or perl.
Agreed, which is why I get really annoyed with Python bigots. My main exposures to python have been trash piles like Anaconda and cowboy crap that is seven layers of libraries to implement and process check that has such poor syntax that it can't even fail, no matter how screwed the process.
I've seen incomprehensible junk written in tcl, bash, java, javascript, c, c++, visual basic, fortran, cobol, basic and assembler, most often written by "experienced" coders who think comments and structure are anathema and risky to their job security.
Give me "unsophisticated" and/or heavily commented code, thank you.
All self-checkout systems I have used have horrible user interfaces. That's why they get taken out -- the customers hate them.
This.
The voice and the 'dialog' on the ones at Safeway and Lowes drives me insane. It is both irritating in tone, and infuriatingly condescending. I don't need a machine to talk loudly at me like I was a five year old in a snotty teacher voice like it was talking to a barely sentient animal. Plus, the work flow assumes that you scan, pile up, then bag your purchases in store provided bags. If you are in a municipality that requires that you bring your own bags, it breaks the workflow and the ****ing thing nags at you loudly until you do everything its way, regardless of how inconvenient or inefficient it is. I don't like being essentially yelled at like a bad puppy by a machine.
I can't even delete the base Facebook app from my phone. I just don't log in to it, and don't update it. I'd have to root my phone to get rid of it. Grrr.
This. I had one twit looking for a sysadmin who wanted me to put his entire business "in the Cloud". I asked him what his product was. He couldn't tell me. But he wanted all of his infrastructure "in the Cloud" - intranet, development, production, Everything!! I pleaded ignorance and got off the phone.
No serious CIO or sysadmin puts all their critical services and ultra sensitive data on someone else's hardware, trusting their entire future to Company Z's business plan. Hell, I didn't hear about *any* security in "the cloud" until 2 years after the cloud hype began.
I'm not saying that cloud computing (really hosted virtualized computing) has no place. It is great for backups, development testing/QA/staging, overflow processing, production scaling, and a lot of stuff that is easily reproducible and/or redeployable. But live, working copies of confidential data and intellectual property repositories? No, and anyone worth their salt knows it. Encrypted backups are one thing, but not your live copies.
When people call me up and want a "Cloud Sysadmin" I want to puke. Yeah, I can use someone else's hosted servers and upload web panel, same as I can use $company's internal panel and/or shell. The only thing is that I have to call outside if it breaks. It's not even a new concept, for crying out loud.
Ah, but it turns out that people who serve papers in person (process servers) only have to present them to an adult living at the address they are paid to serve to. The adult doesn't even need to accept them. (How do I know? Someone tried to serve me shit for a roomie, I declined to accept, the mangy asshole dropped them outside my door and filed it as having been served.)
Service by Fed-X is even easier, since they now don't actually require signatures for "home" deliveries.
So papers for someone can be served by Fed-X to their old address, without forwarding, to no one at home, and it counts as valid service. When you get notice at your new address of the default judgment (because they'll always find the right address when they have a judgment in hand), and say "what suit?", they'll smugly say "We served you, you didn't respond, pay up." You then have no recourse, you've been fucked over.
It is very easy for a corporation, like RIAA, MPAA, or any collection agency, to use the civil courts to financially fuck you so hard that you have jizz coming out of your nose for months.
I have this vision of an arabic looking guy charging out of an airplane toilet, pants nowhere to be seen, yelling "Allah Akbar!" as he attempts to light a fuse sticking out of his ass...
So how do you protect your corporate crown jewels from staff that can so easily be bribed to steal them and hand them over to a competitor?
1) Hire trustworthy, ethical people with a personal interest in IT as a career, not just a job. 2) Pay them well, they hold the keys to your company as much as the sales, marketing, or executives do. 3) Treat them well, including being honest with them and not samdbagging them with conflicting or ridiculous requirements. 4) Don't hire IT as contractors or temps, bring them on board and give them benefits. Then they won't need bribe money to pay medical bills. 5) Don't outsource their jobs and then expect them to train their replacements.
The short form: don't screw IT professionals, and they won't screw you.
"Here, let me introduce you to the team that will be working on your project..."
You are assuming that the environment is always a consulting "coder for hire" gig. You assume wrong.
Places I've worked tend to make products that they sell to several entities, not just one feature creeper.
The sales and marketing droids deal initially with customers, then it's the support folks, mostly by phone and email. If they bring in engineering on a problem, they expect the engineer to dress like a geek - otherwise they look like just another sales droid, and aren't credible. I get corroberation on this from friends on the client side of such equations as well.
I like the place I'm working now, BTW. The marketing people are actually technical, and are comfortable doing very technical presentations and taking questions. Our partners and customers don't want to meet the SDEs. They want to talk to project managers and VPs, as well as marketing....your job isn't as important as you seem to think it is...
Oh, that gives me a chuckle! I'm not just talking about my job, but the way entire companies work. In Silly Valley, the ones who dress the most business-y are either low level clerical or sales people. Engineers are almost expected to dress geek casual, or maybe business casual (geek dressy).
The only reason I don't wear ratty t-shirt and blue jeans every day is that I work in downtown Palo Alto, and the homeless tend to dress that way. I still wear sandals, and my hair is purple. One of our managers shaves his head and wears an earing. The CEO dresses like a college professor.
This is actually very common in the valley, sort of the hallmark of a serious tech company versus a "hype" company.
Since when does a developer's alleged mode of dress influence the decisions of those who never meet him? It's yet another excuse: "Oh, those open source guys are hippy dippy slobs with pony tails and sandals! Let's buy from MicroSoft who makes their (sales) people dress up nice!!"
It's bullshit.
Besides, microsofties wear west coast developer attire too, just they don't let them make sales calls. Also, I know damn well what the Apple geeks wear, and it isn't suit and tie. I see them whenever I drive down the DeAnza Blvd in Cupertino. They are definitely ponytail compliant - although some of them their *only* hair is their ponytail, with nothing on top!
This is why I don't have a gmail account, and why my Yahoo account is just a spam trap. I also delete spam, especially stuff that is of questionable legality, unopened.
Even so, I know that some day some fundie jerk may rule, and even my most innocent mail will become "evidence" in the show trial for "immorality" and "liberal subversion".
You are an idiot. "Social Engineering" is a term for gaining illegal entrance into systems by "conning" the gatekeepers. Do your homework before you spout stupidity.
"People are becoming the weakest link. A fluid work force with diminished loyalty to organisations is being exacerbated by the fact that people do not always realise the value of information that they deal with,"
The "fluid workforce" and its disloyalty is the fault of the organizations themselves. When employees are viewed as interchangeable commodities, and swapped out willy-nilly for an overseas "body" that is a few thousand cheaper, there just isn't going to be any loyalty to the organisation. When a company shows no loyalty to you, there is less and less reason to be "loyal" to it, especially when, for a while there, the only way to get a raise was to change jobs.
So yes, people are the weakest link to security. This is nothing new - ask Mitnick about social engineering.
The fact that senior management is still a bit sparse on ethics (cf Global Crossing, WorldCon, Enron) also doesn't inspire ethical and/or careful behavior with company data by the rank and file.
How to reverse the trend? I don't know if it's even possible. Even high profile prosecutions don't seem to slow it down.
But if you want in on a new technology, you have to realize your experience isn't worth crap, and your ability to adapt to new ideas real-time is the most important.
The first part is horseshit. Experience tells you how to take ideas from dreaming and handwaving to real, working versions.
Any developer worth his/her salt can "adapt to new ideas", and "real-time" is a piece of noveau fluff. Experience lets you dodge the chronic reinvent the wheel syndrome that companies with all of their dev staff under 30 have. A square wheel isn't a "disruptive" new idea, it's just stupid.
BTW, if my experience isn't worth crap, how come I keep getting hired by smaller companies, rather than big dinosaurs? Maybe they understand that RCG kids aren't the be all and end all of development. Also, why are some of the brightest, most creative developers I know in their 40s? Most of the younger ones just want to play multiplayer online games that just suck money and time out of their lives, not create something worthwhile.
This all sounds so much like the lame dot com shills from the late 90s that it isn't even funny. It was stupid then, it's stupid now. "Under 30, and on the Cutting Edge" is just a code for age discrimination, lower salaries, and the fake IT shortage that it spawned.
This tripe from Business Week is just another paean to the cult of youth, a slap in the face of those who've actually been around a while.
People forget that the "under 30" crowd was responsible for some of the stupidest, lamest, and most ridiculous excesses of the dot bomb. The recipe for dot com success was to only hire "young" (under 30, RCG) developers, because you "can't teach an old dog new tricks". It didn't work then, and it's still stupid now.
The best development environment is a mix of young, middle aged, and older developers. The elder developers season the brashness of youth with experience (and pointing out why web businesses to just sell 50# bags of dog food are stupid), and the younger ones inspire creativity where the elders had become complacent.
Would you trust a 25 year old bank president? Would you want to drive a car designed totally by a 22 year old recent college grad without the benefit of verification by a senior engineer? I wouldn't. So why in the hell should our software and computer hardware be only the product of young minds?
Business Week should know better than to shill for the "young is best" nonsense. We've seen where that crap leads - I read lots of articles just like it in 1998 and 1999. For shame.
BTW, I'm 44, and I said it was stupid the last time this "concept" got touted too - seven years ago...
Slashdot Mirror
They are also ~20% cheaper, overall.
They announced layoffs where I work in a memo that had at least 38 buzzwords in it, some more than once. The more buzzwords in the memo, the worse the news. I swear some of these C-suite people have translators just to convert ordinary English into buzzword bullshit.
So, basically, you're cheap and only wanting to hire young kids with no experience. You get what you pay for.
You aren't willing to pay experts, but you are willing to pay a bunch of noobs with "new" "hip" "modern" language skilz to recode your entire platform. So you are not only cheap, but penny wise, pound foolish.
Ugh. I still have TCL nightmares. Space delimited crap;, clunky as hell. Ugh.
No. Take a look at Anaconda, and then try to tell me Python is readable.
Try hiring people who are over 30.
The real headscratcher to me is the number of programmers who assume that because a language isn't adding features every couple years it is dead.
This. I hate working with "new" "elite" languages that every new version that comes out breaks existing code in weird ways. (Python, I'm looking at you.)
I've done maintenance on perl code written by people in love with their own intelligence. It's painful. I've tried it on similar stuff in python (see my breaking with new versions comment above.) It's impossible. I rewrite it in something stable and universal - shell or perl.
Agreed, which is why I get really annoyed with Python bigots. My main exposures to python have been trash piles like Anaconda and cowboy crap that is seven layers of libraries to implement and process check that has such poor syntax that it can't even fail, no matter how screwed the process.
I've seen incomprehensible junk written in tcl, bash, java, javascript, c, c++, visual basic, fortran, cobol, basic and assembler, most often written by "experienced" coders who think comments and structure are anathema and risky to their job security.
Give me "unsophisticated" and/or heavily commented code, thank you.
All self-checkout systems I have used have horrible user interfaces. That's why they get taken out -- the customers hate them.
This.
The voice and the 'dialog' on the ones at Safeway and Lowes drives me insane. It is both irritating in tone, and infuriatingly condescending. I don't need a machine to talk loudly at me like I was a five year old in a snotty teacher voice like it was talking to a barely sentient animal. Plus, the work flow assumes that you scan, pile up, then bag your purchases in store provided bags. If you are in a municipality that requires that you bring your own bags, it breaks the workflow and the ****ing thing nags at you loudly until you do everything its way, regardless of how inconvenient or inefficient it is. I don't like being essentially yelled at like a bad puppy by a machine.
I can't even delete the base Facebook app from my phone. I just don't log in to it, and don't update it. I'd have to root my phone to get rid of it. Grrr.
You have developed the "private corporate cloud infrastructure"! Is that buzzwordy enough?
This. I had one twit looking for a sysadmin who wanted me to put his entire business "in the Cloud". I asked him what his product was. He couldn't tell me. But he wanted all of his infrastructure "in the Cloud" - intranet, development, production, Everything!! I pleaded ignorance and got off the phone.
No serious CIO or sysadmin puts all their critical services and ultra sensitive data on someone else's hardware, trusting their entire future to Company Z's business plan. Hell, I didn't hear about *any* security in "the cloud" until 2 years after the cloud hype began.
I'm not saying that cloud computing (really hosted virtualized computing) has no place. It is great for backups, development testing/QA/staging, overflow processing, production scaling, and a lot of stuff that is easily reproducible and/or redeployable. But live, working copies of confidential data and intellectual property repositories? No, and anyone worth their salt knows it. Encrypted backups are one thing, but not your live copies.
When people call me up and want a "Cloud Sysadmin" I want to puke. Yeah, I can use someone else's hosted servers and upload web panel, same as I can use $company's internal panel and/or shell. The only thing is that I have to call outside if it breaks. It's not even a new concept, for crying out loud.
It's just another slot on my Buzzword Bingo card.
Ah, but it turns out that people who serve papers in person (process servers) only have to present them to an adult living at the address they are paid to serve to. The adult doesn't even need to accept them. (How do I know? Someone tried to serve me shit for a roomie, I declined to accept, the mangy asshole dropped them outside my door and filed it as having been served.)
Service by Fed-X is even easier, since they now don't actually require signatures for "home" deliveries.
So papers for someone can be served by Fed-X to their old address, without forwarding, to no one at home, and it counts as valid service. When you get notice at your new address of the default judgment (because they'll always find the right address when they have a judgment in hand), and say "what suit?", they'll smugly say "We served you, you didn't respond, pay up." You then have no recourse, you've been fucked over.
It is very easy for a corporation, like RIAA, MPAA, or any collection agency, to use the civil courts to financially fuck you so hard that you have jizz coming out of your nose for months.
IANAL, of course.
I have this vision of an arabic looking guy charging out of an airplane toilet, pants nowhere to be seen, yelling "Allah Akbar!" as he attempts to light a fuse sticking out of his ass...
So how do you protect your corporate crown jewels from staff that can so easily be bribed to steal them and hand them over to a competitor?
1) Hire trustworthy, ethical people with a personal interest in IT as a career, not just a job.
2) Pay them well, they hold the keys to your company as much as the sales, marketing, or executives do.
3) Treat them well, including being honest with them and not samdbagging them with conflicting or ridiculous requirements.
4) Don't hire IT as contractors or temps, bring them on board and give them benefits. Then they won't need bribe money to pay medical bills.
5) Don't outsource their jobs and then expect them to train their replacements.
The short form: don't screw IT professionals, and they won't screw you.
"Here, let me introduce you to the team that will be working on your project..."
...your job isn't as important as you seem to think it is...
You are assuming that the environment is always a consulting "coder for hire" gig. You assume wrong.
Places I've worked tend to make products that they sell to several entities, not just one feature creeper.
The sales and marketing droids deal initially with customers, then it's the support folks, mostly by phone and email. If they bring in engineering on a problem, they expect the engineer to dress like a geek - otherwise they look like just another sales droid, and aren't credible. I get corroberation on this from friends on the client side of such equations as well.
I like the place I'm working now, BTW. The marketing people are actually technical, and are comfortable doing very technical presentations and taking questions. Our partners and customers don't want to meet the SDEs. They want to talk to project managers and VPs, as well as marketing.
Oh, that gives me a chuckle! I'm not just talking about my job, but the way entire companies work. In Silly Valley, the ones who dress the most business-y are either low level clerical or sales people. Engineers are almost expected to dress geek casual, or maybe business casual (geek dressy).
The only reason I don't wear ratty t-shirt and blue jeans every day is that I work in downtown Palo Alto, and the homeless tend to dress that way. I still wear sandals, and my hair is purple. One of our managers shaves his head and wears an earing. The CEO dresses like a college professor.
This is actually very common in the valley, sort of the hallmark of a serious tech company versus a "hype" company.
YMMV east of the Mississippi river.
Since when does a developer's alleged mode of dress influence the decisions of those who never meet him? It's yet another excuse: "Oh, those open source guys are hippy dippy slobs with pony tails and sandals! Let's buy from MicroSoft who makes their (sales) people dress up nice!!"
It's bullshit.
Besides, microsofties wear west coast developer attire too, just they don't let them make sales calls. Also, I know damn well what the Apple geeks wear, and it isn't suit and tie. I see them whenever I drive down the DeAnza Blvd in Cupertino. They are definitely ponytail compliant - although some of them their *only* hair is their ponytail, with nothing on top!
This is why I don't have a gmail account, and why my Yahoo account is just a spam trap. I also delete spam, especially stuff that is of questionable legality, unopened.
Even so, I know that some day some fundie jerk may rule, and even my most innocent mail will become "evidence" in the show trial for "immorality" and "liberal subversion".
This just makes it "routine".
Here's your clue re social engineering: Social Engineering Fundamentals, Part I: Hacker Tactics
You are an idiot. "Social Engineering" is a term for gaining illegal entrance into systems by "conning" the gatekeepers. Do your homework before you spout stupidity.
"People are becoming the weakest link. A fluid work force with diminished loyalty to organisations is being exacerbated by the fact that people do not always realise the value of information that they deal with,"
The "fluid workforce" and its disloyalty is the fault of the organizations themselves. When employees are viewed as interchangeable commodities, and swapped out willy-nilly for an overseas "body" that is a few thousand cheaper, there just isn't going to be any loyalty to the organisation. When a company shows no loyalty to you, there is less and less reason to be "loyal" to it, especially when, for a while there, the only way to get a raise was to change jobs.
So yes, people are the weakest link to security. This is nothing new - ask Mitnick about social engineering.
The fact that senior management is still a bit sparse on ethics (cf Global Crossing, WorldCon, Enron) also doesn't inspire ethical and/or careful behavior with company data by the rank and file.
How to reverse the trend? I don't know if it's even possible. Even high profile prosecutions don't seem to slow it down.
::me whacks you with her cane... ;-)
But if you want in on a new technology, you have to realize your experience isn't worth crap, and your ability to adapt to new ideas real-time is the most important.
The first part is horseshit. Experience tells you how to take ideas from dreaming and handwaving to real, working versions.
Any developer worth his/her salt can "adapt to new ideas", and "real-time" is a piece of noveau fluff. Experience lets you dodge the chronic reinvent the wheel syndrome that companies with all of their dev staff under 30 have. A square wheel isn't a "disruptive" new idea, it's just stupid.
BTW, if my experience isn't worth crap, how come I keep getting hired by smaller companies, rather than big dinosaurs? Maybe they understand that RCG kids aren't the be all and end all of development. Also, why are some of the brightest, most creative developers I know in their 40s? Most of the younger ones just want to play multiplayer online games that just suck money and time out of their lives, not create something worthwhile.
This all sounds so much like the lame dot com shills from the late 90s that it isn't even funny. It was stupid then, it's stupid now. "Under 30, and on the Cutting Edge" is just a code for age discrimination, lower salaries, and the fake IT shortage that it spawned.
This tripe from Business Week is just another paean to the cult of youth, a slap in the face of those who've actually been around a while.
People forget that the "under 30" crowd was responsible for some of the stupidest, lamest, and most ridiculous excesses of the dot bomb. The recipe for dot com success was to only hire "young" (under 30, RCG) developers, because you "can't teach an old dog new tricks". It didn't work then, and it's still stupid now.
The best development environment is a mix of young, middle aged, and older developers. The elder developers season the brashness of youth with experience (and pointing out why web businesses to just sell 50# bags of dog food are stupid), and the younger ones inspire creativity where the elders had become complacent.
Would you trust a 25 year old bank president? Would you want to drive a car designed totally by a 22 year old recent college grad without the benefit of verification by a senior engineer? I wouldn't. So why in the hell should our software and computer hardware be only the product of young minds?
Business Week should know better than to shill for the "young is best" nonsense. We've seen where that crap leads - I read lots of articles just like it in 1998 and 1999. For shame.
BTW, I'm 44, and I said it was stupid the last time this "concept" got touted too - seven years ago...
Patenting a button is just as silly. Hardware or software, those have been around a while too.