Ahh another person to see tham the CMM scale ought to have a level below 1 =:-[
CMM level 0:The manic self-destructive level
0)Self-destructive. There are informally defined but keenly and thorougherly enforced processes in place that ensures that project succes never happens, no matter the talent and energy employed by a group or an individual.
In the definition for CMM Level 1 it is said that "... and success depends on individual effort and heroics." At CMM level 0 succes is an impossibility even for a lone struggling hero. It is really sad to vitness the social mechanisms at work in such an organisation.
At the worst such organisation I have experienced myself, there were two main problems. Severe political problems with the rest of the company and the major customers, and the department management procedures.
There were 2-3 levels of management within a 15-20 people software architecture and design department with the CTO at the top. The CTO was a bright former ace programmer with a CS masters degree. Due to his intelligence and experience he could make fast technical decisions that were correct 70% of the time and relied on making such decisions to cut down on the time he spent on project related decisions in order to free up time for political battles with the rest of the company and just to show off of course.
The lower level managers imitiated him. Not his intelligence, knowledge and experience of course, rather they imitiated him by making decisions just as fast as he did and with as little effort spent studying the matter at hand before making the decisions. They also imitiated the CTO's tendency to fiercly stand by his decisions when they were proven wrong.
It did not help that two out of three of the non managers in the department had a strong tendency towards not planning further ahead than to the bottom of the editor window, and considered themself so well qualified that they did not have to read books or othervise learn how to make software properly. Most of them had either EE engineering or CS masters degrees and 10+ years software industry experience BTW.
Open source works by putting the user in a position to fix his/her problems with the software no matter if "the user" is a ten thousand people coorporation a 20 people company or a single individual.
The downside is that problems that only bother a small part of the userbase are not being fixed.
It seems that the user experience for people using Linux as a desktop office or entertainment system is such a problem that has in the past bothered too few end users.
Progress towards a better end user experience for desktop office and home use for Linux will come from a sufficiently large number of such endusers starting to work on improving Linux towards a better user experience. Companies or government organisations with thousands of desktop computers in their offices are the end users most likely to be willing and able to make a difference here, but of course the little guy - end individual home user or small business user can make contributuins as well.
Are there anything keeping companies with an interest in replacing macs and windozz machines with Linux in their offices from contributing to a better user experience for such users?
Do we as programmers/engineers only need such certificates because the bulk of our managers are unable to tell a good programmer/engineer apart form a bad one given less than one year to study their behaviour and the outcome of their work?
If this is the case, why are there no great push for certificates for managers?
It should at least certify that they can spot the difference between a fresh out of three year programming school idiot who thinks his education has enabled him to pass absolute judgement on any topic related to computer science/software engineering, and a competent and experienced guy.
It should also certify that the certified manager has understood the content of "The Mythical Man Year" and are aware of ways to stear clear of the pitfalls it describes.
and the list goes on.
Patterns conferences - pattern languages - pattern
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A lot has happened within the field of patterns since 1995.
Each year there is seven patterns conferences held around the world. At each of them 15-50 patterns or pattern languages are workshopped and published in book form. Got to http://www.hillside.net/ and click on "conferences" to learn more of the conferences.
The form has evolved a lot since the Gang of Four book was published. Pick up the proceedings for a recent patterns conference to see for your self.
The largest repository of patterns are the proceedings for all these conferences. Unfortunately they can be very hard to get hold of unless you attended the conference at which the pattern you are interested in were workshopped or can borrow the proceedings from someone who attended.
There is a set of four books published by Addison Wesley and easily obtainable, that are a collection of the best patterns from the first four years of these conferences.
In one of the posts above someone asked if the "Design Patterns" book was obsolete by now, because it is seven years old. Patterns are solutions to problems that arises again and again, and for which there is a solution that has been succesfully used in several independent cases. So patterns are in starch contrast to the API of the month phenomenon.
If the company or university you work for have a decent hosting aggrement for their own site good bandwith to the office then ask if you can host with them for free.
If you approach the powers thay be the right way they will see this as a cheap way of keeping you in the company.
When negotiating such a deal, remember that it's expensive to have good hosting and connectivity but it's cheap to share the excess bandwith of such a connection.
The largest scale example of this is Philip Greenspun who not only uses what equals a T1 of MIT bandwith but received a large HP9000 server for free to run the site.
During the last 3-5 years most of the bright programemrs and all the ambitious business people in the software business has been transfering from PC based applications to server based services with webbrowsers and the like as clients.
Last week I and my client scetched the phase one server setup for their new service. Estimated price for the hardware alone is $200K in SUN and Nokia hardware. This setup is going to run redundant Java application servers, databases and ssl+apache boxes.
Had this contract come in by 1996 we would probably have delivered a bloated GUI application instead, that could very well have lead to the customer upgrading their desktop machines. Now they just keep their Netscape or IE current.
Your hardware killer app. is Java application servers. Development boxes (usually PC's with Linux) have at least 384 MB of RAM and uses top of the line PIII or Athlon CPU's and they still are awfully slow.
For my latest project I got my team of five programmers a SUN server worth $20k to use as a shared development machine in order to get restart times of the application server down to only 40 seconds. For the next project I hope to get approval for another SUN box four times as quick.
Give people a small home dir on a server that's available both from university machines and from outside campus.
You can use disk quota to limit the amount of disk space people can use to say 10 MB so you don't have to get funding for enourmous amounts of disks.
Access from outside campus can be limited to ftp and/or http so people can read and write their files from anywhere in the World.
This is the file sharing solution with the lowest demand on sysadm resources both with regard to maintenance and security.
Do those who stear the company and make the importent decisions have expierence with software development projects?
Have they themself taken part of succesfull software development projects in the past in a non-manegerial role?
Have they read and understood books such as The Mythical Man Month?
The answer to all three questions schould be a firm yes or the project/company is in deep trouble.
I have seen so-called project leaders tell programmers to skip the design and specification phases of a development project to save time!!!!!
Of course as the delivery date grew near, those projects were no where close to having a finished product, and the jokers leading them called in expensive consultants to throw at the problem.
Actually it might be possible to build a very profitable consultancy carear on saving such projects.
Re:reasons to be an isolate
on
Disconnected
·
· Score: 1
I liked your posting so much that I have printed it and pinned it to the wall near my table at work.
Your posting, bullets and all, emits just the cold emotionless worldview that your words describes.
During the last 50 years the majority of the middle class jobs have been in fields like enginering, teaching, medicine, sales etc. where you were best served by staying within the same field during your whole working life.
Internet and the end of the cold war probably means that the next 50 years will be more dynamic, with lines of business rising and falling, and markets and ways of doing business changing a bit all the time. The 90'ties was only a fore-warning of what's to come in dynamic markets.
To succed under such circumstances you will need the ability to adapt to changing job content, and it's quite likely that you will have to switch fields a couple of times during your working life.
Being adaptable requires a broad and at the same time deep understanding of a lot more than a line of business, and it requires the ability to learn more by yourself.
Unfortunately there's a current trend at universities to switch into a more job focused curriculum, ie. they are creating the perfect curriculum for ~1950-1985.
I left university (was heading for a MS EE/CS) to pursue programming for this very reason.
A lot of the curriculum was hands on programming or electronics design.
My job as a senior programmer requires a lot of technical knowledge of course, but it requires at least as much social skill, understanding of business, ability to manouvre in the political enviroment of the workplace and a lot more, none of which was part of the university curriculum.
10 years from now my job will be very different from my present job, but I don't know how it will differ.
Therefore I prepare myself by aquiring some understanding of different lines of business, of cultural issues and what's going on in the world.
Will people please keep in mind that the size of fonts on screen is in no way proportional to the size of the individual dots on the screen.
Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined representation of the character.
If you cannot understand this, then just memorize this little example.
In the old days (more than 5 years ago) laser printers printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi), now a cheap one prints at 600 dpi and good ones at 1200 dpi.
Text printed on a 600 dpi printer isn't half the size of text printed on a 300 dpi printer;-)
BTW. 1600x1200 on a monitor with 18" viewable area gives around 120 dpi. 1024x768 on a monitor with 14" viewable area gives around 75 dpi.
Ken Thompson managed to get an early Unix that came with source code to allow logins to anyone supplying a certain password without leaving any traces in the source code ! Read all the scary details in his ACM Turing Award speech Reflections on Trusting Trust.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh another person to see tham the CMM scale ought to have a level below 1 =:-[
CMM level 0: The manic self-destructive level
In the definition for CMM Level 1 it is said that "... and success depends on individual effort and heroics." At CMM level 0 succes is an impossibility even for a lone struggling hero. It is really sad to vitness the social mechanisms at work in such an organisation.
At the worst such organisation I have experienced myself, there were two main problems. Severe political problems with the rest of the company and the major customers, and the department management procedures.
There were 2-3 levels of management within a 15-20 people software architecture and design department with the CTO at the top. The CTO was a bright former ace programmer with a CS masters degree. Due to his intelligence and experience he could make fast technical decisions that were correct 70% of the time and relied on making such decisions to cut down on the time he spent on project related decisions in order to free up time for political battles with the rest of the company and just to show off of course.
The lower level managers imitiated him. Not his intelligence, knowledge and experience of course, rather they imitiated him by making decisions just as fast as he did and with as little effort spent studying the matter at hand before making the decisions. They also imitiated the CTO's tendency to fiercly stand by his decisions when they were proven wrong.
It did not help that two out of three of the non managers in the department had a strong tendency towards not planning further ahead than to the bottom of the editor window, and considered themself so well qualified that they did not have to read books or othervise learn how to make software properly. Most of them had either EE engineering or CS masters degrees and 10+ years software industry experience BTW.
Open source works by putting the user in a position to fix his/her problems with the software no matter if "the user" is a ten thousand people coorporation a 20 people company or a single individual.
The downside is that problems that only bother a small part of the userbase are not being fixed.
It seems that the user experience for people using Linux as a desktop office or entertainment system is such a problem that has in the past bothered too few end users.
Progress towards a better end user experience for desktop office and home use for Linux will come from a sufficiently large number of such endusers starting to work on improving Linux towards a better user experience. Companies or government organisations with thousands of desktop computers in their offices are the end users most likely to be willing and able to make a difference here, but of course the little guy - end individual home user or small business user can make contributuins as well.
Are there anything keeping companies with an interest in replacing macs and windozz machines with Linux in their offices from contributing to a better user experience for such users?
Do we as programmers/engineers only need such certificates because the bulk of our managers are unable to tell a good programmer/engineer apart form a bad one given less than one year to study their behaviour and the outcome of their work?
If this is the case, why are there no great push for certificates for managers?
It should at least certify that they can spot the difference between a fresh out of three year programming school idiot who thinks his education has enabled him to pass absolute judgement on any topic related to computer science/software engineering, and a competent and experienced guy.
It should also certify that the certified manager has understood the content of "The Mythical Man Year" and are aware of ways to stear clear of the pitfalls it describes.
and the list goes on.
A lot has happened within the field of patterns since 1995.
9 6, 0201607344,00.htmld emic/product/1,4096, 0201895277,00.htmld emic/product/1,4096, 0201310112,00.html
Each year there is seven patterns conferences held around the world. At each of them 15-50 patterns or pattern languages are workshopped and published in book form. Got to http://www.hillside.net/ and click on "conferences" to learn more of the conferences.
The form has evolved a lot since the Gang of Four book was published. Pick up the proceedings for a recent patterns conference to see for your self.
The largest repository of patterns are the proceedings for all these conferences. Unfortunately they can be very hard to get hold of unless you attended the conference at which the pattern you are interested in were workshopped or can borrow the proceedings from someone who attended.
There is a set of four books published by Addison Wesley and easily obtainable, that are a collection of the best patterns from the first four years of these conferences.
http://www.aw.com/catalog/academic/product/1,40
http://www.aw.com/catalog/aca
http://www.aw.com/catalog/aca
In one of the posts above someone asked if the "Design Patterns" book was obsolete by now, because it is seven years old. Patterns are solutions to problems that arises again and again, and for which there is a solution that has been succesfully used in several independent cases. So patterns are in starch contrast to the API of the month phenomenon.
If you approach the powers thay be the right way they will see this as a cheap way of keeping you in the company.
When negotiating such a deal, remember that it's expensive to have good hosting and connectivity but it's cheap to share the excess bandwith of such a connection.
The largest scale example of this is Philip Greenspun who not only uses what equals a T1 of MIT bandwith but received a large HP9000 server for free to run the site.
Last week I and my client scetched the phase one server setup for their new service. Estimated price for the hardware alone is $200K in SUN and Nokia hardware.
This setup is going to run redundant Java application servers, databases and ssl+apache boxes.
Had this contract come in by 1996 we would probably have delivered a bloated GUI application instead, that could very well have lead to the customer upgrading their desktop machines. Now they just keep their Netscape or IE current.
Your hardware killer app. is Java application servers. Development boxes (usually PC's with Linux) have at least 384 MB of RAM and uses top of the line PIII or Athlon CPU's and they still are awfully slow.
For my latest project I got my team of five programmers a SUN server worth $20k to use as a shared development machine in order to get restart times of the application server down to only 40 seconds. For the next project I hope to get approval for another SUN box four times as quick.
You can use disk quota to limit the amount of disk space people can use to say 10 MB so you don't have to get funding for enourmous amounts of disks.
Access from outside campus can be limited to ftp and/or http so people can read and write their files from anywhere in the World.
This is the file sharing solution with the lowest demand on sysadm resources both with regard to maintenance and security.
The answer to all three questions schould be a firm yes or the project/company is in deep trouble.
I have seen so-called project leaders tell programmers to skip the design and specification phases of a development project to save time!!!!!
Of course as the delivery date grew near, those projects were no where close to having a finished product, and the jokers leading them called in expensive consultants to throw at the problem.
Actually it might be possible to build a very profitable consultancy carear on saving such projects.
Your posting, bullets and all, emits just the cold emotionless worldview that your words describes.
Internet and the end of the cold war probably means that the next 50 years will be more dynamic, with lines of business rising and falling, and markets and ways of doing business changing a bit all the time. The 90'ties was only a fore-warning of what's to come in dynamic markets.
To succed under such circumstances you will need the ability to adapt to changing job content, and it's quite likely that you will have to switch fields a couple of times during your working life.
Being adaptable requires a broad and at the same time deep understanding of a lot more than a line of business, and it requires the ability to learn more by yourself.
Unfortunately there's a current trend at universities to switch into a more job focused curriculum, ie. they are creating the perfect curriculum for ~1950-1985.
I left university (was heading for a MS EE/CS) to pursue programming for this very reason.
A lot of the curriculum was hands on programming or electronics design.
My job as a senior programmer requires a lot of technical knowledge of course, but it requires at least as much social skill, understanding of business, ability to manouvre in the political enviroment of the workplace and a lot more, none of which was part of the university curriculum.
10 years from now my job will be very different from my present job, but I don't know how it will differ.
Therefore I prepare myself by aquiring some understanding of different lines of business, of cultural issues and what's going on in the world.
Will people please keep in mind that the size of fonts on screen is in no way proportional to the size of the individual dots on the screen.
Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined representation of the character.
If you cannot understand this, then just memorize this little example. ;-)
In the old days (more than 5 years ago) laser printers printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi), now a cheap one prints at 600 dpi and good ones at 1200 dpi.
Text printed on a 600 dpi printer isn't half the size of text printed on a 300 dpi printer
BTW. 1600x1200 on a monitor with 18" viewable area gives around 120 dpi. 1024x768 on a monitor with 14" viewable area gives around 75 dpi.
Ken Thompson managed to get an early Unix that came with source code to allow logins to anyone supplying a certain password without leaving any traces in the source code !
Read all the scary details in his ACM Turing Award speech Reflections on Trusting Trust.