I realize that the article was specifically about costs and return on investment but... Can somebody else join me in challenging the idea that money is why we should educate ourselves?
The slashdot summary is incorrect. Emotiv is made by a rival company, not by (formerly) Jedi mind. Also, Emotiv seems to recognize facial expressions, not read brain signals. So, there's some confusion here.
Sorry, but going way back, pencils actually were lead. In, say, revolutionary times, sticks of lead served as pencils. They were easy to make and sharpen because of lead's low melting point and softness.
I've written with modern replicas of them, and it's neat how much their writing resembles that of modern pencils.
Big companies fear open source because it's a threat to their intellectual property. If a company uses an open source product, and that product (accidentally and unknowingly of course) infringes on one of their patents, then that company loses the ability to enforce their own patent in the future.
Patents are the "mustard gas" of big companies. Everybody has them, and nobody uses them. But you better have them stockpiled, or somebody might use theirs against you. Some open source licenses rob companies of this line of defense. The hoops one has to jump through at a big company just to use Log4J are maddening.
I'm stunned by the venom in the responses to the OP. I think this is a reflection of some serious naivete on the part of some responders.
Maybe titles don't matter to most IT folks, but they certainly do matter to everyone else. Specifically, they matter to the folks who pay you and who decide when to stop paying you. The idea that if you just do your job well, then that will be enough, is very foolish. It assumes that promotions and firings are in some way related to competence. They are not. In today's competitive environment, we would all do well to hone our political skills too.
Not to be pedantic, but...
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
Royce was actually arguing against waterfall, but a poorly worded caption led to much misunderstanding. Waterfall is almost certainly the most expensive meme in history.
AC, you actually seem to consider keeping your head in the sand a virtue. Would you want an auto mechanic that stopped learning ten years ago? Or a doctor? There's a big difference between fifteen years of experience and one year of experience fifteen times in a row.
By the way, there's absolutely no consensus in our field that what you call the best common sense methodology is a good way to go. You are preferring contract negotiation over customer collaboration. In fact, that's the exact opposite of what many talented thinkers in our field espouse.
It could be worse than losing your best coders. Our scrummasters are the managers of the scrum team. Yes, that's right. The scrummaster's direct reports are on the same team. So... candor pretty much goes out the window.
One specific consequence that I didn't see coming... Upper management recently messed with the sprint and pulled people off. Yes, I know we're not supposed to let them do that, but the big bosses didn't seem to agree. Naturally, we only completed about half our stories. So in the demo, the scrummaster manager reported that we completed all our stories so that it wouldn't look bad. He just deleted the incomplete ones from our list.
In other words, upper management didn't learn that their behavior was bad, so I'm sure it will be repeated.
"The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."
People, couldn't we just be happy that we better understand something about the universe without trying to contrive some kind of relevance? Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Science doesn't need an immediate application to be important.
I don't think i was the transparency of the material that made it desirable. Scotty needed something thin and transportable that still had the strength to hold back all that water. Remember the 20th century engineer would have needed much thicker material.
Projects almost never fail for technical reasons. Pretty much everyone knows this, so I wouldn't worry too much about programmers being stigmatized from working on a failed project.
However, you should worry about the effects on yourself. Toxic environments can warp your perspective, your work ethic, and your love for the craft. Engineers need to be optimists, and cynicism will creep into you if you work for a messed-up company.
Your future employer won't really believe that you are competent in language X anyway, until you have programmed in it professionally for about a year. So, don't worry about being seen as a newbie when you are fresh out of school -- you are.
I haven't seen anyone comment yet on how frequently the code under review will change. If you are writing a library or something that's going to be pretty stable, then the cost of a formal review is easier to justify.
But if the code is unstable, and going to be modified over and over, then the benefit of a formal review depreciates very rapidly. For some industries and products, this doesn't matter. But for others, the cost of the formal review can be too high.
Sorry, but you are mis-characterizing religion. You obviously know a lot about science, but perhaps not quite as much about religion. In reality, science informs religion. Now, there certainly are religious people that cover their ears when, say, evolution comes up. But you can't blame all of religion for the illogical ideas of some people. (I'm speaking of Hellenized religions here, where reason is important. Not all religions in the world have been heavily influenced by, say, Aristotle, but I'm afraid I know little about those that haven't.)
Speaking of Lost in Space, didn't the Robinson Family use Silicon Graphics computers (in the remake)? Next, somebody will have to reboot Pan Am, so that the 2001 Space Odyssey timeline can come true, too.
Uh, hold on. Your implied equivalence between the struggles and character of Dr. King and those of the Pirate Bay defendants makes you look ridiculous. Appealing to offensive hyperbole actually robs your argument of any real credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
A religion takes a fixed viewpoint and defends it.
Religion, by definition, has a set of unchanging doctrines.
You are completely and embarassingly wrong here. Religion, like science, is a search for the truth.
I realize that the article was specifically about costs and return on investment but... Can somebody else join me in challenging the idea that money is why we should educate ourselves?
And yet, whenever I listen to BBC radio in the U.S., I always hear announcers say "thousand million" instead of "billion".
This makes for an entertaining impedance mismatch when U.S. politicians are interviewed about the budget or deficit.
+1 for using the phrase "begging the question" correctly.
The slashdot summary is incorrect. Emotiv is made by a rival company, not by (formerly) Jedi mind. Also, Emotiv seems to recognize facial expressions, not read brain signals. So, there's some confusion here.
Sorry, but going way back, pencils actually were lead. In, say, revolutionary times, sticks of lead served as pencils. They were easy to make and sharpen because of lead's low melting point and softness.
I've written with modern replicas of them, and it's neat how much their writing resembles that of modern pencils.
No, it is not a tragedy. She brought it on herself.
Actually, that precisely is the definition of tragedy. :-)
http://xkcd.com/732/
The human eye is more sensitive to violet than to blue? If that is so, then why is the sky blue?
Big companies fear open source because it's a threat to their intellectual property. If a company uses an open source product, and that product (accidentally and unknowingly of course) infringes on one of their patents, then that company loses the ability to enforce their own patent in the future.
Patents are the "mustard gas" of big companies. Everybody has them, and nobody uses them. But you better have them stockpiled, or somebody might use theirs against you. Some open source licenses rob companies of this line of defense. The hoops one has to jump through at a big company just to use Log4J are maddening.
unintentional irony
-1 for redundancy
I'm stunned by the venom in the responses to the OP. I think this is a reflection of some serious naivete on the part of some responders.
Maybe titles don't matter to most IT folks, but they certainly do matter to everyone else. Specifically, they matter to the folks who pay you and who decide when to stop paying you. The idea that if you just do your job well, then that will be enough, is very foolish. It assumes that promotions and firings are in some way related to competence. They are not. In today's competitive environment, we would all do well to hone our political skills too.
Royce was actually arguing against waterfall, but a poorly worded caption led to much misunderstanding. Waterfall is almost certainly the most expensive meme in history.
AC, you actually seem to consider keeping your head in the sand a virtue. Would you want an auto mechanic that stopped learning ten years ago? Or a doctor? There's a big difference between fifteen years of experience and one year of experience fifteen times in a row.
By the way, there's absolutely no consensus in our field that what you call the best common sense methodology is a good way to go. You are preferring contract negotiation over customer collaboration. In fact, that's the exact opposite of what many talented thinkers in our field espouse.
http://agilemanifesto.org/
It could be worse than losing your best coders. Our scrummasters are the managers of the scrum team. Yes, that's right. The scrummaster's direct reports are on the same team. So... candor pretty much goes out the window.
One specific consequence that I didn't see coming... Upper management recently messed with the sprint and pulled people off. Yes, I know we're not supposed to let them do that, but the big bosses didn't seem to agree. Naturally, we only completed about half our stories. So in the demo, the scrummaster manager reported that we completed all our stories so that it wouldn't look bad. He just deleted the incomplete ones from our list.
In other words, upper management didn't learn that their behavior was bad, so I'm sure it will be repeated.
"The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."
People, couldn't we just be happy that we better understand something about the universe without trying to contrive some kind of relevance? Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Science doesn't need an immediate application to be important.
I don't think i was the transparency of the material that made it desirable. Scotty needed something thin and transportable that still had the strength to hold back all that water. Remember the 20th century engineer would have needed much thicker material.
It would be called Moonbase Alpha.
Life always imitates art. Consider the name of the first space shuttle.
Projects almost never fail for technical reasons. Pretty much everyone knows this, so I wouldn't worry too much about programmers being stigmatized from working on a failed project.
However, you should worry about the effects on yourself. Toxic environments can warp your perspective, your work ethic, and your love for the craft. Engineers need to be optimists, and cynicism will creep into you if you work for a messed-up company.
Your future employer won't really believe that you are competent in language X anyway, until you have programmed in it professionally for about a year. So, don't worry about being seen as a newbie when you are fresh out of school -- you are.
I haven't seen anyone comment yet on how frequently the code under review will change. If you are writing a library or something that's going to be pretty stable, then the cost of a formal review is easier to justify.
But if the code is unstable, and going to be modified over and over, then the benefit of a formal review depreciates very rapidly. For some industries and products, this doesn't matter. But for others, the cost of the formal review can be too high.
If TDD is taking you 200% longer, then frankly you were just skipping the testing.
Sorry, but you are mis-characterizing religion. You obviously know a lot about science, but perhaps not quite as much about religion. In reality, science informs religion. Now, there certainly are religious people that cover their ears when, say, evolution comes up. But you can't blame all of religion for the illogical ideas of some people. (I'm speaking of Hellenized religions here, where reason is important. Not all religions in the world have been heavily influenced by, say, Aristotle, but I'm afraid I know little about those that haven't.)
Speaking of Lost in Space, didn't the Robinson Family use Silicon Graphics computers (in the remake)? Next, somebody will have to reboot Pan Am, so that the 2001 Space Odyssey timeline can come true, too.
Uh, hold on. Your implied equivalence between the struggles and character of Dr. King and those of the Pirate Bay defendants makes you look ridiculous. Appealing to offensive hyperbole actually robs your argument of any real credibility.