I am a girlfriend (well, wife), and I think swords are cool beyond belief. Took fencing lessons in college. Have female friends who are serious fencers. And, no, none of us have trouble finding nookie.
I'm a knowledge worker. I've been playing with computers since I was 10. I'm also 40.
One of the commoner cliches in articles like this is "Hire the young geeks, they've been using computers all their lives, and they really understand what's going on." Guess what? That's also true of many old geeks. Granted, it used to be a lot harder to get computer access -- which means that anybody who spent time geeking was extremely motivated.
I don't buy that software is like languages, learning it young changes your brain. I'm the daughter of a computer-science professor, and I was exposed to computers very young. When I went to college, my doors were blown off by some people who'd first encountered computers at college; they did datasuck faster than I did. What matters is speed of knowledge acquisition, not the age at which it was acquired.
I'm not advocating that young geeks are any less valuable than old geeks; just pointing out that we have different virtues to offer. The old geeks can say "Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; the young geeks can say "Let's try it this way in 2001, and see if we can do it now."
And, yes, old dogs can learn new tricks. I do it every day.
There's a solar lawnmower in my neighborhood; I think the owner works for a company that's testing it before rollout. Quite cool -- it buzzes happily around the lawn, doing its duty without cutting kids or dogs off at the ankles. For Halloween, the owners draped it in a sheet and put a lighted plastic pumpkin on top.
The one that boggles my mind is the number of people who can't read BNF. Or even recognize it...
This isn't about shibboleths, or proving that I'm bright and you're not. The point is, a working software engineer should recognize basic computer-science concepts. If you don't know what BNF is, or why an O(N^3) algorithm is bad news at the heart of your application, then you're going to be constantly reinventing the wheel, and a bumpy wheel at that.
Software is both an instinctive and an intellectual pursuit. Working engineers should be able to switch between modes as appropriate.
Re:diamond age = interactive fiction? and PANTS!
on
Ask Bruce Sterling
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· Score: 1
Neal Stephenson wrote THE DIAMOND AGE.
Bruce Sterling wrote HEAVY WEATHER and THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, and co-wrote THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE.
I deeply love the Dead Media Page, http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html However, I've never received any mail after signing up for the Dead Media Mailing List. Is this a problem with my mailer, or is the list currently dormant?
It pays to see a specialist; I see an orthopedist myself. General practictioners often don't know much about typing injuries. The first GP I saw heard "it hurts when I type" and immediately diagnosed carpal tunnel and prescribed wrist braces. The only problem was, the pain kept getting worse.
When I saw an orthopedist, he said "You don't have carpal tunnel, but you will if you keep wearing those braces." I had either extensor tendinitis (1992 diagnosis) or radial tunnel syndrome (1999). In either case, the pain is in the upper forearm, not the wrist, and treating the wrist does no good at all; in fact, it was inducing a different typing injury!
So make sure you get a diagnosis for your pain, and that the treatment is making the pain better, not worse.
If you're specifically having mouse problems, you might consider the Dr. Mouse (formerly Anir Mouse). I tried and discarded a couple of alternate pointing devices before I settled on this.
As long as we're talking about research, bear in mind that repeated clinical double-blind tests have proved that sugar has no effect one way or the other on hyper children. Don't shoot down one myth only to replace it with another.
Based on the Salon story, by the way, both of those kids were suicidal. Seems like a good indication for antidepressants to me...
is Fortune's look at what money has done to SV culture, and what SV residents do with their money. Fortune's conclusion is that people are more afraid than happy, and that money has become the only way of keeping score.
I doubt that; the survivors of General Magic are still regarded with respect, even though they didn't make a dime. Nonetheless, the article seems mostly accurate to me.
I'd love to move to SV, but I dread getting trapped there by an underwater mortgage. I've lived through the collapse of a housing bubble (Rte 128 in Boston after the minicomputer collapse in the late 80s). It's no fun making payments on a mortgage that's 120% of the house's value. And you can forget about refinancing, even when the rates drop...
When Company A buys a service from Company B, this is a private transaction. Company B isn't going to announce the transaction unless Company A gives them permission. You don't say "FrogData spent $100,000 on our software product" in a press release unless FrogData says it's cool. Quite frequently, FrogData turns you down, because they don't want to give information to their competition, because they don't feel like publicly endorsing your product, or because the marketing director had a bad weekend.
Endorsements are a favor one company does another; they aren't a guaranteed part of doing business. Amazon is trying to make it look as if Oracle, Microsoft, and so on, are endorsing Amazon's services. They aren't. They're using Amazon's services, which is a different matter entirely.
Nobody would do business with a headhunter if they ran ads in the trade press saying "FredCO hired 57 MUMPS / OS/360 experts from us; why don't you do the same?" Amazon's telling the world which books a company's employees buy falls into the same basket. We don't have to invoke rights when we can invoke the power of the marketplace.
My employer's sysadmins spent at least 3 days ealing with Melissa and its aftereffects. That's three days that they didn't spend working on their normal tasks. Multiply that by all the companies that were infected by Melissa, and, yes, you're talking serious money.
It is no longer "free" for external E-mail to be down. Down E-mail = unhappy customers and (potentially) lost sales. I suspect the customers who received Melissa from us are very unhappy indeed.
Yeah, Outlook sucks, and we should have been using open software. Tell that to the PHBs who like scheduling meetings, filing their nails, and slicing french fries with their mailer. Meanwhile, my company lost time and money because of Melissa, and I very much doubt we're the only ones.
Read a little medieval history, friend. The workplace and the home weren't separate through much of history. People worked out of their homes, and everybody old enough to lend a hand, did. That included wives, kids, and apprentices. When the husband died, the widow frequently took over the business, including the guild membership. And that's only the urbanized people; the peasants worked side by side in the fields.
You may not have met any real female hackers, but I have. Generally, there's about one per company; they may be rare, but they aren't nonexistent.
>Stay current and you will be even more >marketable at 40 then you are now.
It's easy to believe that when you're 25. This isn't my problem, it's those stupid old farts who never bothered to learn C++, Java, Perl....
Then you turn 40, and you notice that even though your resume is full of bleeding-edge skills, you get half as many phone calls as you did when you were 37. Hmmm... maybe those old farts had a point, eh?
You can turn off Word autocorrect (generally my first task when I edit on somebody else's box) with the
Tools | Options | Spelling and Grammar tab
Uncheck "Check spelling as you type" and "Always suggest corrections".
The annoying (p) correction (and many of its siblings) can be yanked by removing its entry from AutoCorrect.
Insert | AutoText | Autotext | AutoCorrect tab
Re:The problem is that it's not bloated enough!
on
All Hail Bloatware
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· Score: 1
>So in closing, which customer asked for dancing paperclips, and can somebody please hurt him/her???
Naah. First in line is the bozo who keeps demanding that the Master Document feature intermittently corrupt all included documents beyond recovery, because it's had that bug since Release 4 and his organization depends on backward compatibility.
When I find him, I'm buying him a season pass to Good Burger at the local $1.50 house.
Sonny, I'm 40, and I'd bet I was using computers before you were weaned. I learned about computers from my father, who saw his first compiler in 1959 or so, and thought it was for wimps, because REAL programmers wrote in assembler. We had an Altair (IMSAI?) 8080.
Let me offer you a hint: How old do you think Engelbart is now? Wozniak? Vint Cerf? Dennis Ritchie?
Explosive growth in computing began more than 20 years ago. Many of the people telling war stories here are over 30, over 40, and, yes, over 50. We may not be a majority of our generations, but we damned well exist.
Random Old Fart question: There's a content-free Microsoft-underwritten travelling "history of video games" exhibition, currently at the Charlotte Discover Place museum. My husband and I wandered down memory lane, checking out the Osbornes, Apples, and Ataris. The Altair 8080 brought me up short because the toggle switches on the front were metal. I remember my father's 8080 having red and blue plastic switches -- the owner got to choose whether to assemble them in octal or hexadecimal groups. Am I misremembering, or did we have an Altair 8080 Mark II or something like that? (Long gone, alas.)
Human networks, not computer networks
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
Yes, the entrenched gatekeepers do a lousy job. So don't use the gate. If you'll walk around the corner, you'll see that there's a rope hanging over the wall.
Now that I've gotten that metaphor out of my system...
Ask anybody who's ever done any hiring, or who's been in the industry more than 5 years. The worst resumes are the ones that go through the agencies. The best resumes are the ones that are hand-carried in by your existing team members.
The reason is simple. Every time a team member recommends somebody to you, s/he's putting reputation on the line. Nobody wants to be the person who got the team stuck with a bozo. If you recommend unqualified people who are your friends, word gets around fast. Contrariwise, if you are known to have a good network, it reflects well on you. If all of Joe's friends are fast and smart, what does that say about Joe?
More than once, I've seen people get form rejection letters and job offers from the same company, within the week. The reason? One resume was walked in by a friend, the other was sent to the box number in a job ad. The anonymous resume got eaten by the gatekeeper; the personal resume reached the people with the authority to make a hiring decision.
So screw www.clueless.com. Let your friends know you're available. If you don't have any friends elsewhere, let the search engines (I'm talking Google, not Goodjobs) hunt up actual companies desperate for your skills.
Out of my last four jobs, I got two through recommendations from former co-workers. The other two came from searching for "object-oriented" and "writer", then mailing my resume to motivated first-party employers who could recognize what I had to offer. None of the leads I got through agencies were worth pursuing.
"Okay, but isn't it possible that Lucas (and Homer, and all the rest) meant for us to aspire to be like their heroes. Of course, we will fall short of their greatness,..."
To be precise, we can't aspire to their greatness, because we're too old and have too low a midichlorian count.
Brin is looking at the subtext of some of Lucas's messages, and he's right, some of it is pretty creepy. I don't like the idea of inborn Destiny, I don't like the idea that a nine-year-old is too old to train, and I don't like the idea that righteous anger always leads to evil.
When somebody tells you he's handing out a Myth, you're entitled to examine his theology. That's all Brin is doing.
"In both cases the user had to voluntarily *choose* to run the virus with their own permissions. For goodness sake, the email says, "take a look at these zip files" but the attachment is an exe! Only a clod would fall for such as obvious imposture."
Allow me to quote Alan Cooper's About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, p. 444.
"Confirmation boxes only work if they are unexpected. When users are performing new tasks, their senses will be alert to danger, so the only time they need unexpected confirmation boxes is when they are doing routine tasks. Deterministic algorithms can't do that."
Or, to put it another way, if you ask me 20 times a day "Are you SURE you want to do that?", the 21st time, I'll click YES before I've even read the message. Even if this was the one case in which I was making a mistake.
I work for a software shop. Cow-orkers, including my sysadmin, send me executables all the time. Furthermore, since we switched to Outlook, on every major holiday the secretarial staff send out.exes that put pretty twinkling lights on the screen. (Bleah.) This means that I, like many other Outlook users, have had the opportunity to form the habit of ignoring the "Are you SURE you want to run this executable?" dialog. (As it happens, I don't ignore it. But I can certainly understand why a novice would.)
Outlook is trying to have it both ways. It's trying to claim to be the all-powerful tool that lets you do anything, including sending messages with powerful payloads, yet it is also claiming to be the perfect tool for the computer-naive user who only wants to send everybody baby pictures and invitations to her yard sale.
Fine. But when something goes wrong, don't say "Well, it's the naive user's fault for not KNOWING that the trojan horse must have been there because the file's extension didn't match its icon."
Outlook is supposed to be a mailer for clods. Perhaps Microsoft ought to rethink its security model so that clods aren't constantly shooting themselves in the foot.
I strongly recommend DeathMarch by Edward Yourdon. The full title is 'The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects".
Yourdon has a lot to say about projects with impossible schedules, impossible deadlines, no budget, conflicting goals, and constant overtime.
Constant 80-hour weeks aren't a sign of dedication; they're a sign of project managers who aren't doing their job.
Re:Make sure project authority matches pecking ord
on
How to Manage Geeks?
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· Score: 1
Hey, I'm a writer, so clearly the writer is the most qualified.
Seriously, the lead on a multi-disciplinary team should know what he's an expert on, and what he isn't, and should refrain from laying down the law outside his expertise. He may occasionally say "We're making this decision so that we can move on, and it may not be the perfect decision", but he won't say "I'm right, because I'm the lead."
It all has to do with respect. If the lead respects the team members, they may well return the favor. If the lead is insistent on her authority, rather than using her influence and experience to persuade, she will find that she has less and less real clout.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a girlfriend (well, wife), and I think swords are cool beyond belief. Took fencing lessons in college. Have female friends who are serious fencers. And, no, none of us have trouble finding nookie.
One of the commoner cliches in articles like this is "Hire the young geeks, they've been using computers all their lives, and they really understand what's going on." Guess what? That's also true of many old geeks. Granted, it used to be a lot harder to get computer access -- which means that anybody who spent time geeking was extremely motivated.
I don't buy that software is like languages, learning it young changes your brain. I'm the daughter of a computer-science professor, and I was exposed to computers very young. When I went to college, my doors were blown off by some people who'd first encountered computers at college; they did datasuck faster than I did. What matters is speed of knowledge acquisition, not the age at which it was acquired.
I'm not advocating that young geeks are any less valuable than old geeks; just pointing out that we have different virtues to offer. The old geeks can say "Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; the young geeks can say "Let's try it this way in 2001, and see if we can do it now."
And, yes, old dogs can learn new tricks. I do it every day.
There's a solar lawnmower in my neighborhood; I think the owner works for a company that's testing it before rollout. Quite cool -- it buzzes happily around the lawn, doing its duty without cutting kids or dogs off at the ankles. For Halloween, the owners draped it in a sheet and put a lighted plastic pumpkin on top.
I love living in the future.
My God! And here I've been happily married to a geek for 18 years, and all along I really wanted a cool ex-jock. What was I thinking?
This isn't about shibboleths, or proving that I'm bright and you're not. The point is, a working software engineer should recognize basic computer-science concepts. If you don't know what BNF is, or why an O(N^3) algorithm is bad news at the heart of your application, then you're going to be constantly reinventing the wheel, and a bumpy wheel at that.
Software is both an instinctive and an intellectual pursuit. Working engineers should be able to switch between modes as appropriate.
Neal Stephenson wrote THE DIAMOND AGE.
Bruce Sterling wrote HEAVY WEATHER and THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, and co-wrote THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE.
I deeply love the Dead Media Page, http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html However, I've never received any mail after signing up for the Dead Media Mailing List. Is this a problem with my mailer, or is the list currently dormant?
http://news.bbc .co.uk/olmedia/460000/video/_461668_ghosh1300_vi.r am Damn, I hate to slashdot the BBC... Anyway, the report says that the explosion blew a hole in the roof, and gives an aerial closeup of a blurry something that may or may not be a hole in the roof.
When I saw an orthopedist, he said "You don't have carpal tunnel, but you will if you keep wearing those braces." I had either extensor tendinitis (1992 diagnosis) or radial tunnel syndrome (1999). In either case, the pain is in the upper forearm, not the wrist, and treating the wrist does no good at all; in fact, it was inducing a different typing injury!
So make sure you get a diagnosis for your pain, and that the treatment is making the pain better, not worse.
If you're specifically having mouse problems, you might consider the Dr. Mouse (formerly Anir Mouse). I tried and discarded a couple of alternate pointing devices before I settled on this.
See the Typing Injury FAQ for further pointers.
Our marketing department wanted to name our version P/Nix.
Tech Docs mocked up a P/Nix manual. Some sample chapter headings:
Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed.
Based on the Salon story, by the way, both of those kids were suicidal. Seems like a good indication for antidepressants to me...
is Fortune's look at what money has done to SV culture, and what SV residents do with their money. Fortune's conclusion is that people are more afraid than happy, and that money has become the only way of keeping score.
I doubt that; the survivors of General Magic are still regarded with respect, even though they didn't make a dime. Nonetheless, the article seems mostly accurate to me.
I'd love to move to SV, but I dread getting trapped there by an underwater mortgage. I've lived through the collapse of a housing bubble (Rte 128 in Boston after the minicomputer collapse in the late 80s). It's no fun making payments on a mortgage that's 120% of the house's value. And you can forget about refinancing, even when the rates drop...
Or maybe the midi-chlorians did it.
When Company A buys a service from Company B, this is a private transaction. Company B isn't going to announce the transaction unless Company A gives them permission. You don't say "FrogData spent $100,000 on our software product" in a press release unless FrogData says it's cool. Quite frequently, FrogData turns you down, because they don't want to give information to their competition, because they don't feel like publicly endorsing your product, or because the marketing director had a bad weekend.
Endorsements are a favor one company does another; they aren't a guaranteed part of doing business. Amazon is trying to make it look as if Oracle, Microsoft, and so on, are endorsing Amazon's services. They aren't. They're using Amazon's services, which is a different matter entirely.
Nobody would do business with a headhunter if they ran ads in the trade press saying "FredCO hired 57 MUMPS / OS/360 experts from us; why don't you do the same?" Amazon's telling the world which books a company's employees buy falls into the same basket. We don't have to invoke rights when we can invoke the power of the marketplace.
It is no longer "free" for external E-mail to be down. Down E-mail = unhappy customers and (potentially) lost sales. I suspect the customers who received Melissa from us are very unhappy indeed.
Yeah, Outlook sucks, and we should have been using open software. Tell that to the PHBs who like scheduling meetings, filing their nails, and slicing french fries with their mailer. Meanwhile, my company lost time and money because of Melissa, and I very much doubt we're the only ones.
You may not have met any real female hackers, but I have. Generally, there's about one per company; they may be rare, but they aren't nonexistent.
>Stay current and you will be even more >marketable at 40 then you are now.
It's easy to believe that when you're 25. This isn't my problem, it's those stupid old farts who never bothered to learn C++, Java, Perl....
Then you turn 40, and you notice that even though your resume is full of bleeding-edge skills, you get half as many phone calls as you did when you were 37. Hmmm... maybe those old farts had a point, eh?
with the
Tools | Options | Spelling and Grammar tab
Uncheck "Check spelling as you type" and "Always suggest corrections".
The annoying (p) correction (and many of its siblings) can be yanked by removing its entry from AutoCorrect.
Insert | AutoText | Autotext | AutoCorrect tab
Naah. First in line is the bozo who keeps demanding that the Master Document feature intermittently corrupt all included documents beyond recovery, because it's had that bug since Release 4 and his organization depends on backward compatibility.
When I find him, I'm buying him a season pass to Good Burger at the local $1.50 house.
Let me offer you a hint: How old do you think Engelbart is now? Wozniak? Vint Cerf? Dennis Ritchie?
Explosive growth in computing began more than 20 years ago. Many of the people telling war stories here are over 30, over 40, and, yes, over 50. We may not be a majority of our generations, but we damned well exist.
Random Old Fart question: There's a content-free Microsoft-underwritten travelling "history of video games" exhibition, currently at the Charlotte Discover Place museum. My husband and I wandered down memory lane, checking out the Osbornes, Apples, and Ataris. The Altair 8080 brought me up short because the toggle switches on the front were metal. I remember my father's 8080 having red and blue plastic switches -- the owner got to choose whether to assemble them in octal or hexadecimal groups. Am I misremembering, or did we have an Altair 8080 Mark II or something like that? (Long gone, alas.)
Now that I've gotten that metaphor out of my system...
Ask anybody who's ever done any hiring, or who's been in the industry more than 5 years. The worst resumes are the ones that go through the agencies. The best resumes are the ones that are hand-carried in by your existing team members.
The reason is simple. Every time a team member recommends somebody to you, s/he's putting reputation on the line. Nobody wants to be the person who got the team stuck with a bozo. If you recommend unqualified people who are your friends, word gets around fast. Contrariwise, if you are known to have a good network, it reflects well on you. If all of Joe's friends are fast and smart, what does that say about Joe?
More than once, I've seen people get form rejection letters and job offers from the same company, within the week. The reason? One resume was walked in by a friend, the other was sent to the box number in a job ad. The anonymous resume got eaten by the gatekeeper; the personal resume reached the people with the authority to make a hiring decision.
So screw www.clueless.com. Let your friends know you're available. If you don't have any friends elsewhere, let the search engines (I'm talking Google, not Goodjobs) hunt up actual companies desperate for your skills.
Out of my last four jobs, I got two through recommendations from former co-workers. The other two came from searching for "object-oriented" and "writer", then mailing my resume to motivated first-party employers who could recognize what I had to offer. None of the leads I got through agencies were worth pursuing.
To be precise, we can't aspire to their greatness, because we're too old and have too low a midichlorian count.
Brin is looking at the subtext of some of Lucas's messages, and he's right, some of it is pretty creepy. I don't like the idea of inborn Destiny, I don't like the idea that a nine-year-old is too old to train, and I don't like the idea that righteous anger always leads to evil.
When somebody tells you he's handing out a Myth, you're entitled to examine his theology. That's all Brin is doing.
Allow me to quote Alan Cooper's About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, p. 444.
"Confirmation boxes only work if they are unexpected. When users are performing new tasks, their senses will be alert to danger, so the only time they need unexpected confirmation boxes is when they are doing routine tasks. Deterministic algorithms can't do that."
Or, to put it another way, if you ask me 20 times a day "Are you SURE you want to do that?", the 21st time, I'll click YES before I've even read the message. Even if this was the one case in which I was making a mistake.
I work for a software shop. Cow-orkers, including my sysadmin, send me executables all the time. Furthermore, since we switched to Outlook, on every major holiday the secretarial staff send out .exes that put pretty twinkling lights on the screen. (Bleah.) This means that I, like many other Outlook users, have had the opportunity to form the habit of ignoring the "Are you SURE you want to run this executable?" dialog. (As it happens, I don't ignore it. But I can certainly understand why a novice would.)
Outlook is trying to have it both ways. It's trying to claim to be the all-powerful tool that lets you do anything, including sending messages with powerful payloads, yet it is also claiming to be the perfect tool for the computer-naive user who only wants to send everybody baby pictures and invitations to her yard sale.
Fine. But when something goes wrong, don't say "Well, it's the naive user's fault for not KNOWING that the trojan horse must have been there because the file's extension didn't match its icon."
Outlook is supposed to be a mailer for clods. Perhaps Microsoft ought to rethink its security model so that clods aren't constantly shooting themselves in the foot.
I strongly recommend DeathMarch by Edward Yourdon. The full title is 'The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects".
Yourdon has a lot to say about projects with impossible schedules, impossible
deadlines, no budget, conflicting goals, and constant overtime.
Constant 80-hour weeks aren't a sign of dedication; they're a sign of project managers who aren't doing their job.
Hey, I'm a writer, so clearly the writer is the most qualified.
Seriously, the lead on a multi-disciplinary team should know what he's an expert on, and what he isn't, and should refrain from laying down the law outside his expertise. He may occasionally say "We're making this decision so that we can move on, and it may not be the perfect decision", but he won't say "I'm right, because I'm the lead."
It all has to do with respect. If the lead respects the team members, they may well return the favor. If the lead is insistent on her authority, rather than using her influence and experience to persuade, she will find that she has less and less real clout.