I agree with parent post. I'm asked this all the time because I'm a lead developer at the company I work for. If I can't provide an estimate on the spot, I tell them I will have to get back to them about an estimate. I try to buffer for time for bugs and QA. Bugs are things you just can't account for. You may have none, you might haave tons. You have that one bug that takes forever to diagnose, or you might have 20 bugs that you can knock out each in minutes.
Just try to be fair in your estimate; fair for you and fair for the business unit. If your estimate is something that the business side can't understand why it may take so long, tell them in detail what goes into it. The Business side is the one who wants the product and the estimate, so you have to communicate to them clearly why the time is what it is.
One time our CEO was in a meeting with clients, and she had to tell them the password so they could access a page on our website. She told me she embarassed having to tell them the password was "nachomama".
She was lucky she didn't use the other password "sofakingwetodddid".
That's how you ensure your passwords don't get around.
Based on your question, you threw out things with a heavy web portion in there, so I will assume to some degree you want to learn things for the web, or at least, lean towards that to begin with.
The way I learned was starting with HTML. I learned the basics until I became moderately proficient. I later learned Javascript, which is a good started language to get you going with basic programming concepts. I next learned Perl, where I found Javascript and the Perl for Dummies book were a great way for me to learn. Nowadays I would recommend starting with PHP since it's a quicker language to pick up from Perl, though, not too different from Perl and C. The main advantage of a scripting language is that there is less to learn. This will give you time to get more proficient in general programming and help to establish the ground work if you wish to learn another language, and get into more low level coding like C/C++.
I then picked up XML, XSLT and SQL. When CSS was starting to emerge, I learned that as well. I did not get onto the Java bandwagon because all of the environments I worked in, except one, didn't use it. I would recommend though, to learn Java at some level, or even Python because they have a better Object Oriented Model than some other languages, without the extra work you will need to do like in C/C++. You may want to go straight to C or C++, it comes down to your background, aptitude and willingness to learn.
I can at least tell you I picked up HTML, Javascript and Perl within 1 year of playing with them. You won't be a maestro, but you will have the fundamentals.
I would also recommend getting some of the cookbooks out there, they offer a number of good points when programming. Also writing programs that mimic that which you want to do will help as well.
If you provide more information as to where you want to go, I'm sure others will be able to provide better guidance.
They are not all of Americans. They are those Americans who read their paper. Come on seriously now. 63% is a high number of people who would agree to this. I see this number being more representative of higher-middle class conservative individuals.
A friend of mine has the razr, and he has Star Wars Battlefront on it. I'm thinking nice, but... what exactly am I going to play on a phone for a game like that.
It was worse than I imagined. You used your arrow keys to move the crosshair to shot enemies that popped up like a cheesy carnival game. Absolutely horrible.
I remember the days when a cellphone was just a cellphone.
...poor planning or a crappy idea of creating demand.
How poorly do you make an expectation to sell over 2.5 million units in the first three weeks, to then only have sold 600,000 units in the first 3 months. Talk about setting a terrible expectation. If by April they are still having problems, they might as well hold off till next christmas.
I'm wondering though, could this also be a result of beta testing?
Now you do mention virtual sysadmin, but I will guess you don't mean someoone who is completely remote, they might be a need for them to come in and do some manual stuff like setting up the physical network, printer stuff, etc. I previously worked at a company of 20 employees where we do outsource our tech support. The person would come in 2 times a week for an hour or two, and we would schedule work for them. Fix a computer, install software drivers, update the OS, that kind of work mainly. The problem we faced was the quality of the workers, and the response times. We used one company who had a pool of tech support, and some of the guys they sent us were a hit or miss. Those who sucked we never saw again. As for timeframe, we had one incident where we had to wait a few weeks to get a laptop problem resolved. The good thing was we were provided with a temp laptop in the meantime. Some of delays are to be expected since it is a virtual staff. Arrival times, and scheduling them between work hours or at least when a company employee is present is difficult at times.
"and if you buy your dial-up service through me, then I can get you a sweet deal."
Wow, what a crock of crap that advice was. True, the slowness might prevent someone from grabbing your data IF your computer was fully open to the internet, but if you left on your connection all night, then they can still get it. Overall, the dial-up argument is absolutely terrible. Just install the right software (anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware) and practice good habits (don't run suspicious attachments, even from friends, or install questionable software, and patch often).
I've lived and worked in NYC for many years, specifically in the IT field for 7 years in NYC. While working there, when it came to programming positions, I found the majority of the developers were caucasian. Many places I went to were like this. In addition to that, we would have the various number of people from overseas, such as the Russians, Chineses, and Indians, but very few from established minority groups from the US, specifically Blacks and Latinos. Now this wasn't necessarily tied to racism, but more of an economic situation; the infamous digital divide.
I now work in South Florida, and the work environment looks much better; we have a decent mixing of backgrounds. But for this situation to improvement around the US, there needs to be a better education system setup for those in the low income areas. Companies and foundations need to make the effort to improve the quality of life for those, who may not get the opportunity.
Mod parent up. To further show by example, let's look at games developed for the Atari 2600, that took 1-2 developers and less than 3 months, in some cases just a few weeks. Nowadays, it takes 3 to 24 months, sometimes even longer, with the number of people involved starting at 5 to 50 people. There are more pieces in the games, more lines of code, more things you can do. Overall, it's all more. One shouldn't be surprised that we have to deal with patches. But I will say one thing, they should have either spent more time or patched ET for the Atari.
With the broadband market now including a minimum of 25% of home users, and up to maybe 40%, though I haven't looked at those numbers in some time, would be a contributing factor to the fact that yes, web pages are getting bigger.
I took a quick sampling of the NYTimes homepage, and noticed that the number has increased by a few kilobytes per year, from 56K in 2001, to 67K in 2003, to 83K in 2005. That's not even counting images. They've added more ad banners since the old days. If you google search, I'm sure you will find stuff.
Ad banners have increased in size, and complexity over time. Streaming content, is another addition, as well as more services running over the network.
You probably have a number of contributing factors happening to your bandwidth, in addition to web pages. - Unless you have an internal instant messenging environment, you may have many ppl chatting away on services having to use your bandwidth. - Email for personal use. Jokes, funny attachments, and worms clogging up things.
Here are a couple of suggestions to try and improve traffic: - block services that shouldn't be run at the office like streaming music content. - block websites that you see can have an impact on traffic, that you believe users should not be visiting. ie: quicktime movies. - block your daytrading slacker coworkers. - block ad servers entirely! this should drastically improve your situation, and be the easiest to implement. - switch to an internal instant messenging service, if you haven't done so already. - disable unnecessary services. - ensure that you have an internet policy that prohibits the users from using their work companies for personal use. - cache often used content.
The employer is protecting their assets. Think of it as if you were the employer, and someone told you they were leaving, whether you expected it or not. You will probably not know the reasons for the resignation in full, you only know what they tell you. If the person continues to work for you, is there a chance they can leave with things you may not want them to leave it? Maybe it's a tactic on their part to force you to raise their salary. If it's a critical one-person role, who will replace them? Is it a position easy to replace. Yada, yada, yada... Hopefully you get the picture.
If that's what the employer did, and you got paid for the 2 weeks, then it's still a professional outcome. They chose to exercise security in this case, and you didn't get screwed out of your money. All seems fair.
If a tank can get destoryed by a spearman, then something is absolutely wrong. I hear Civ 4 has corrected that issue. Sheesh, would I hate to be the player to have to experience that.
In this turn-based game, you will create brothels, build slaveships, create drug cartels, research ways to refine cocaine, harvest opium fields, and assasinate political leaders, and it'll have a story line. =)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with parent post. I'm asked this all the time because I'm a lead developer at the company I work for. If I can't provide an estimate on the spot, I tell them I will have to get back to them about an estimate. I try to buffer for time for bugs and QA. Bugs are things you just can't account for. You may have none, you might haave tons. You have that one bug that takes forever to diagnose, or you might have 20 bugs that you can knock out each in minutes.
Just try to be fair in your estimate; fair for you and fair for the business unit. If your estimate is something that the business side can't understand why it may take so long, tell them in detail what goes into it. The Business side is the one who wants the product and the estimate, so you have to communicate to them clearly why the time is what it is.
Oh, this is about software, nevermind.
I was under the impression that they jumped version numbers from 5.0 to 9.0 when they did their huge marketing blitz.
One time our CEO was in a meeting with clients, and she had to tell them the password so they could access a page on our website. She told me she embarassed having to tell them the password was "nachomama".
She was lucky she didn't use the other password "sofakingwetodddid".
That's how you ensure your passwords don't get around.
It's like when AOL jumped to version 9.0 As if the version number is measure of comparison between different products.
Based on your question, you threw out things with a heavy web portion in there, so I will assume to some degree you want to learn things for the web, or at least, lean towards that to begin with.
The way I learned was starting with HTML. I learned the basics until I became moderately proficient. I later learned Javascript, which is a good started language to get you going with basic programming concepts. I next learned Perl, where I found Javascript and the Perl for Dummies book were a great way for me to learn. Nowadays I would recommend starting with PHP since it's a quicker language to pick up from Perl, though, not too different from Perl and C. The main advantage of a scripting language is that there is less to learn. This will give you time to get more proficient in general programming and help to establish the ground work if you wish to learn another language, and get into more low level coding like C/C++.
I then picked up XML, XSLT and SQL. When CSS was starting to emerge, I learned that as well. I did not get onto the Java bandwagon because all of the environments I worked in, except one, didn't use it. I would recommend though, to learn Java at some level, or even Python because they have a better Object Oriented Model than some other languages, without the extra work you will need to do like in C/C++. You may want to go straight to C or C++, it comes down to your background, aptitude and willingness to learn.
I can at least tell you I picked up HTML, Javascript and Perl within 1 year of playing with them. You won't be a maestro, but you will have the fundamentals.
I would also recommend getting some of the cookbooks out there, they offer a number of good points when programming. Also writing programs that mimic that which you want to do will help as well.
If you provide more information as to where you want to go, I'm sure others will be able to provide better guidance.
They are not all of Americans. They are those Americans who read their paper. Come on seriously now. 63% is a high number of people who would agree to this. I see this number being more representative of higher-middle class conservative individuals.
A friend of mine has the razr, and he has Star Wars Battlefront on it. I'm thinking nice, but... what exactly am I going to play on a phone for a game like that.
It was worse than I imagined. You used your arrow keys to move the crosshair to shot enemies that popped up like a cheesy carnival game. Absolutely horrible.
I remember the days when a cellphone was just a cellphone.
Now, the new and improved Wii2, aka WiiWii.
Or how about the new smaller version called the little Wii.
Or the Wii you hold in your hands.
No, the message was "Do you hear me NOW?"
I hope you realize this is a joke comment, not to be taken seriously by you overly analytical geeks.
At least someone understands.
or only feed it further.
Since when does the slashdot community care about Bradiffer?
...poor planning or a crappy idea of creating demand.
How poorly do you make an expectation to sell over 2.5 million units in the first three weeks, to then only have sold 600,000 units in the first 3 months. Talk about setting a terrible expectation. If by April they are still having problems, they might as well hold off till next christmas.
I'm wondering though, could this also be a result of beta testing?
Now you do mention virtual sysadmin, but I will guess you don't mean someoone who is completely remote, they might be a need for them to come in and do some manual stuff like setting up the physical network, printer stuff, etc. I previously worked at a company of 20 employees where we do outsource our tech support. The person would come in 2 times a week for an hour or two, and we would schedule work for them. Fix a computer, install software drivers, update the OS, that kind of work mainly. The problem we faced was the quality of the workers, and the response times. We used one company who had a pool of tech support, and some of the guys they sent us were a hit or miss. Those who sucked we never saw again. As for timeframe, we had one incident where we had to wait a few weeks to get a laptop problem resolved. The good thing was we were provided with a temp laptop in the meantime. Some of delays are to be expected since it is a virtual staff. Arrival times, and scheduling them between work hours or at least when a company employee is present is difficult at times.
"and if you buy your dial-up service through me, then I can get you a sweet deal."
Wow, what a crock of crap that advice was. True, the slowness might prevent someone from grabbing your data IF your computer was fully open to the internet, but if you left on your connection all night, then they can still get it. Overall, the dial-up argument is absolutely terrible. Just install the right software (anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware) and practice good habits (don't run suspicious attachments, even from friends, or install questionable software, and patch often).
I've lived and worked in NYC for many years, specifically in the IT field for 7 years in NYC. While working there, when it came to programming positions, I found the majority of the developers were caucasian. Many places I went to were like this. In addition to that, we would have the various number of people from overseas, such as the Russians, Chineses, and Indians, but very few from established minority groups from the US, specifically Blacks and Latinos. Now this wasn't necessarily tied to racism, but more of an economic situation; the infamous digital divide.
I now work in South Florida, and the work environment looks much better; we have a decent mixing of backgrounds. But for this situation to improvement around the US, there needs to be a better education system setup for those in the low income areas. Companies and foundations need to make the effort to improve the quality of life for those, who may not get the opportunity.
Mod parent up. To further show by example, let's look at games developed for the Atari 2600, that took 1-2 developers and less than 3 months, in some cases just a few weeks. Nowadays, it takes 3 to 24 months, sometimes even longer, with the number of people involved starting at 5 to 50 people. There are more pieces in the games, more lines of code, more things you can do. Overall, it's all more. One shouldn't be surprised that we have to deal with patches. But I will say one thing, they should have either spent more time or patched ET for the Atari.
making fun of us.
"Those silly humans, they treat global warming by fighting fire with fire"
"Duh! Here's more content"
With the broadband market now including a minimum of 25% of home users, and up to maybe 40%, though I haven't looked at those numbers in some time, would be a contributing factor to the fact that yes, web pages are getting bigger.
One way to see proof of this is using the wayback machine.
http://www.waybackmachine.org/
I took a quick sampling of the NYTimes homepage, and noticed that the number has increased by a few kilobytes per year, from 56K in 2001, to 67K in 2003, to 83K in 2005. That's not even counting images. They've added more ad banners since the old days. If you google search, I'm sure you will find stuff.
Ad banners have increased in size, and complexity over time. Streaming content, is another addition, as well as more services running over the network.
You probably have a number of contributing factors happening to your bandwidth, in addition to web pages.
- Unless you have an internal instant messenging environment, you may have many ppl chatting away on services having to use your bandwidth.
- Email for personal use. Jokes, funny attachments, and worms clogging up things.
Here are a couple of suggestions to try and improve traffic:
- block services that shouldn't be run at the office like streaming music content.
- block websites that you see can have an impact on traffic, that you believe users should not be visiting. ie: quicktime movies.
- block your daytrading slacker coworkers.
- block ad servers entirely! this should drastically improve your situation, and be the easiest to implement.
- switch to an internal instant messenging service, if you haven't done so already.
- disable unnecessary services.
- ensure that you have an internet policy that prohibits the users from using their work companies for personal use.
- cache often used content.
The employer is protecting their assets. Think of it as if you were the employer, and someone told you they were leaving, whether you expected it or not. You will probably not know the reasons for the resignation in full, you only know what they tell you. If the person continues to work for you, is there a chance they can leave with things you may not want them to leave it? Maybe it's a tactic on their part to force you to raise their salary. If it's a critical one-person role, who will replace them? Is it a position easy to replace. Yada, yada, yada... Hopefully you get the picture.
If that's what the employer did, and you got paid for the 2 weeks, then it's still a professional outcome. They chose to exercise security in this case, and you didn't get screwed out of your money. All seems fair.
Don't forget to pay for said magazine that you have destoryed in the process of the experiment, or you will be going to jail for science.
If a tank can get destoryed by a spearman, then something is absolutely wrong. I hear Civ 4 has corrected that issue. Sheesh, would I hate to be the player to have to experience that.
In this turn-based game, you will create brothels, build slaveships, create drug cartels, research ways to refine cocaine, harvest opium fields, and assasinate political leaders, and it'll have a story line.
=)