There's too much of it. They can't do all the work, and they have to let the crappy programmers learn. Trial by fire.
I know a really excellent Indian programmer that's a project coordinator now over several projects. He works like a madman trying to correct and teach people, but the results are still pretty crappy because he's just one guy. Eventually, he'll burn out.
I'd hire that single guy in a heartbeat. There might also be another one in the dozen or so on the project that doesn't do more harm than good.
However, they produce so many document artifacts it looks much more professional to management. Even if some of the documents are verging on criminal negligence. Who in the world thinks a flow chart built by omitting structural constructs (like all the conditional statements, say) makes valid documentation? Someone who thinks nobody will check it, that's who. The docs look awesome, but everyone's worse off having them.
Actually, my favorite is how the turrets say "I forgive you" before shutting down when you knock them over.
Whoever did the writing on that did an AWESOME job.
My problem was trying to show my 4 year old portal mechanics and accidentally running into a turret. "No, I spilled some red paint." I don't think he bought it. It needs a "no blood" game option.
There's also no evidence you're not the most prolific and successfully unnoticed serial killer in history. That doesn't mean I believe you are. Although... it would be my right to believe you were if I chose, right?
If you consider all the crazy things religions say in their respective texts that can be shown to be false, that should go somewhat far towards actually being evidence that at least the specific Gods in those religions are not correct. This article is saying that some smart now-ex fundamentalist christians decided something in their book was not literally true. That is either evidence their specific religion is at least partially incorrect, or they need to re-evaluate their book as containing some or all "life-lesson stories" instead of it being entirely literal truths.
Oh, and generally it's software geeks (like us?) that define the platform to start with. Executives come in much later, when they smell money. They're just overpaid car salesmen trying to sell what they've got.
The reasons behind the HTML5/JS platform are mostly mundane software developer religious fanboy-ism reasons. Some high level Palm guy did a proof of concept, and everybody got the fever. (Just guessing)
The execs get involved and if they want to lock you in it's because they think they might be able to pull an Apple. They're not thinking much further than that. It's a pretty stupid idea, really.
My app requirements are fairly simple. Looking and acting like a PC application while not ideal is perfectly good enough for what I'm doing currently on the TouchPad.
I haven't tried to match any webOS look and feel, or even really make that many buttons/dropdowns fat finger friendly. I don't bother to rotate the screen orientation, etc.
If you want to match look and feel and behave like a really slick tablet app, then that would probably be a lot of work.
The last three apps I ported to the Touchpad just worked. I think I added "w.showFullScreen();" in main.cpp, two lines to declaring my platform plugin, and a little.pro file editing to link in my plugin. That was pretty much all that was required. For the one client that doesn't need static, it was even easier (only showFullScreen).
Of course, I was keeping the code fairly clean platform-wise. My clients usually need the apps on Windows and I prefer to work on Linux.
I'm not doing OpenGL, though.. that'd take a little more on the platform plugin side. Check Palm's open source releases, they've got some OpenGL plugin stuff in the qt package diffs there I haven't got around to looking at that closely.
Hmm... I'm not sure about pyQt. I haven't used that one. It's probably easy, though.
Qt itself ports extremely cleanly. In fact, the sum total of my changes to the Qt source tree are two short changes in the QCoreApplication class file to force the display plugin to my own. (WebOS 2.x+ adds a QWS_DISPLAY environment variable that overrides my plugin with theirs, which doesn't work in the general case)
In my opinion, it's easier to compile than the Windows one. (Although that's assuming the cross compiler is set up)
I have worked a bit on my webOS platform plugin, though (webOS QScreen, etc implementations). That's LGPL'd and available for use... but... I haven't updated that in a little bit. That's basically just writing an SDL wrapper, though. Pretty simple.
Oh yeah, "unwitting pawn"... that's one of the pretty common ones too. How come free-thinking conspiracists always end up with the same language?:)
Sorry about being a bit of a jerk... it's not nearly as much about you as it is the people I work with at a couple clients.
Look, HP as primarily a personal computer company has no reasonable incentive that I can see to want all apps to go into the cloud. You'd go even further from a bunch of PCs running apps to a relatively lower number of highly virtualized datacenter hosts running the apps. The extra servers aren't going to cover the loss in PC sales when people in that environment get cheap web terminal PCs.
Do you see HP massively into software at all? No. I'm 99.99999999% sure they don't want what you say they want.
I can tell you that the people at the top of any particularly large or successful corporation are in my experience generally self-centered, and usually at least a little sociopathic. They're not terribly cooperative. They're mega-competitive. They don't trust much. They're constantly trying to get ahead by any means necessary. Conspiracies take a lot of cooperation and whole lot more trust.
Just from the nature of the people I've met and the behavior of companies in the news, etc... I'd think a conspiracy of any scale would be extremely unlikely and very rare.
Frankly, I'd think it more plausible that an alien body-snatcher race had taken control of our political and business leaders than I'd think our top execs and politicians collude at the degree my conspiracy friends say they do.
I'm totally willing to be wrong, and I am sure I occasionally am. I suppose the world needs a -few- conspiracy nuts to smoke out the particularly gnarly real conspiracies. I just think we don't need NEARLY as many conspiracy nuts as we have.
It's INTENDED as a way to pull developers from the web into their mobile platform. There's no smoky-room-with-old-white-billionaires-playing-poker here.
People need to stop looking for conspiracies everywhere. I understand that humanity is hard-wired to look for a presence behind any random thing in the universe (the fundamental basis of religion)... but get a little perspective.... can it potentially LEAD to that? Sure, I suppose it's possible. A lot of stuff is possible. If that's your point of view, you'd help your cause out a lot more if you skipped the little gestures like avoiding webOS and simply skipped using the entire WEB.
If you want to get yourself all worked up over and over again over a 1 in 10,000 chance there's a real conspiracy, the only person you're hurting it yourself. Scratch that, you're hurting anyone who listens to you too. I know way too many people personally who see conspiracies everywhere and say "Dude, I'm NOBODY's tool! You're acting like a sheep!" Is that actually rewarding? It turns people paranoid and suspicious. At what point is the remote risk of being fooled by some schemer simply not worth the effort of burning yourself into a bitter old cynical asshat?
While critical thinking is sorely lacking in general... just to evaluate things yourself on their merits should go plenty far enough towards avoiding sheep-like behavior. Don't give in to the temptation to search for conspiracies everywhere.
I like webOS because it's extremely developer friendly. Personally, I put Qt apps on it for my use and my clients use... no HTML5/JS required. I'm not particularly happy with HTML5/JS as an upcoming platform in general.
(I suppose since I'm an advocate I must be part of this web conspiracy?... or just a tool?)
oops. That'll teach me to keep typing after hitting preview.
I meant to say I don't think this story makes any sense. As in, banning the sale of pets is dumb. Maybe you can regulate it a bit more if you want to ensure animal welfare. Otherwise we might as well just go put all domesticated animals to sleep so they'll never suffer again.
Actually, saltwater fish are sometimes sourced in absolutely horrible ways.
Think dumping cyanide on coral reefs to stun fish to make them easier to catch. This results in massive coral bleaching and you kill many more fish than you catch. Those you do catch are sick and plenty of those die in transit.
Unfortunately, it tends to happen in tropical countries (imagine that) that we have no real control over.
There is a significant movement to certify your fish don't come from this evil bullshit, though. A fair number of aquarium people are on board.... not that I think this s makes any sense.
The most promising ways IMHO to getting kids interested in math and science are through educational robotics competitions like FIRST and electronics projects tinkering with stuff like Arduinos. There's enough hardware there to get people started.... it's almost a mini renaissance in that stuff right now.
The MAIN PROBLEM is simply to get kids interested and teach the very basics of logic.
Programmers tend to take for granted the simple process of how to take what you want to do and deconstruct that into logical steps that you apply through some sort of program.
This is absolutely fundamental, and I believe it's where most kids get lost and quit.
Grants are institutions giving money to companies to develop ideas that otherwise would very likely not be developed. If you limit grants to basically academics, non-profits, and volunteers you're not going to get nearly as much done. Many non-profits work for a bit and shut down when the key people get tired of it and want to pursue something else. Academics are going for a paper and drop the project immediately after reaching a diminishing returns point on it's ability to produce more papers.
Grants are also highly unpredictable and in my experience they're usually for short incremental tasks on something that requires massive ongoing development.
If you want to do something long term, you need long term money. Grants are not long term. It's the difference between "I could quit my job and do this 3 year grant, then hope I can find another job" and "I could quit my job for this 3 year grant, and then it should be able to sustain itself and my salary". Can you see why the latter would attract a lot more people?
Open source is really awesome when there's enough real interest to create a sustainable project. "That's cool... somebody should do that" isn't enough, you have to do it.
I don't think this is true. It's also about presentation.
When I was 7, my uncle convinced my parents to get me a TI 99/4A. He supposedly stayed up until 2am programming it to play "we wish you a merry christmas" in a loop. When I saw that and realized "You can make it do stuff?!?" I instantly started to try to program it.
I had an Atari 2600 at the time and I loved playing games on that. If my parents had just stuck a game cartridge in the TI, I would have just played games on it for who knows how long. I'm not sure I would have (a) figured out you could make it do stuff (program it) AND (b) thought it was something a pre-teen could accomplish totally on their own... it could have been 5-7 years longer before I started programming with that simple change in presentation.
Outsourcing companies do NOT have your interests in mind. They will push as much work as possible for themselves to the degree that they think you can bear it, and increase that amount as they feel you become dependent on them. The big ones will, anyway.
If you can, never outsource the management of a project. The workers themselves aren't going to screw you too badly and can easily be a good thing. The outsourcing managers will absolutely rape you if they can.
I'm about 3X more expensive than most outsourcing team members, but they tend to bill 10x the number of hours and produce a much crappier product. The larger outsourcing firms can't fill that many chairs with talented people, and they hardly try. The good people get promoted to coordinator roles and so you're pretty much guaranteed by design to never get senior level people on a project for any length of time.
Most of an outsourcing firm's skill lies in making presentations to non-software upper management.
Actually, compilers are NOT nearly as good at optimizing things as people seem to think. They have a whole lot of individually very clever optimizations, but it is pretty easy to beat them. You can restructure and refactor code freely, compilers must be reasonably true to the code you wrote.
The real problem is that perhaps even a majority of programmers are nearly incompetent, and most of the remainder aren't all that good at it.
Funny, it's my wife that enables me to be the workaholic I really want to be. She gets annoyed if I'm sitting on the couch... so I'm always working.
I started off in software. I then jumped to firmware, FPGAs, electronics, and PCB design... now I'm slowly adding mechanical and manufacturing processes.
I've watched a lot of EE-only or software-only people design horribly sub-optimal designs basically because they only used what they know. By at least being exposed to other fields, you can do much better design work and apply the strengths of each discipline to what your trying to do. If you're actually good at a couple disciplines, then amazing things happen.
Dysfunctional design happens even in companies where you supposedly have a team of these different disciplines. Individually, the workers don't know what they don't know... so unless a design element happens to come up in a meeting, you don't get the full benefit of a team of experts.
I'm a long time contractor... believe me it doesn't have to be that way. You need to keep looking... ideally you find some other established contractor you identify as pretty good and talk to them a little bit. Sooner than you know you have a little local network of cool people who refer work to you when they don't have time, etc. (without taking a slice)
Even if you never quite find that, you should be able to find places that actually appreciate hard work.
No.. a company spends a whole lot on benefits, extra taxes you don't have to pay, legal risk if they need to fire you, etc. I've heard an employee typically costs a company twice his salary.
Strangely, that's about the average multiplier that contractors make over employees. Coincidence?
I sometimes try to talk the occasional employee (unrelated to whatever my current position is there) through the benefits of being contract. I think many of the good employees deserve better. However, I just pity the bitter ones and avoid them. It's a prison entirely of their own making, and that kind of attitude practically guarantees they're going to become and stay miserable.
Contractors typically make 1.5-3x what employees do. You can buy a LOT of benefits for that. It's a great justification for companies to give employees... but it's simply not good math.
The best thing is to have 2 or 3 part time clients if you can swing it. Then you have a much stronger position when negotiating situations like that.
In a single client situation, it's a game of chicken. The problem is by the time the company realizes you won't blink, it's too late to take back some of the ultimatums they made... or the threats lose a lot of credibility with the next guy. With multiple clients, they know it won't work and so they never really go there. (They may whine a bit, but they'll get over it)
On the off chance they actually do get rid of you... well... so what, you've got another gig.:)
I've been a contractor for 12+ years now, and I've given a long-term but fairly screwed up part time client 7 months notice to figure out how to get someone up to speed to replace me with the least pain.
In that time, I've been working 70-110 hour weeks trying to do both that job and the project I selected to do instead. It's been very difficult to manage everything, and I'm very happy that I've got a bit less than a month to go now.
At the high end of software development, the vast majority of the best guys I know are contractors. The rest are some excellent employees who frankly don't know what they're worth.
Sure, there are a lot of incredibly crappy consulting firms out there (many of the large ones, actually)... but there are good guys and gals out there too. In any one industry they usually know eachother at least locally or regionally... so find one and you can find a lot of good help. (kind of a 2 or 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing)
Well, when I was in college I really wasn't mature enough to get enough value out of it. My study habits were almost nonexistent... I dropped out. That worked out wonderfully, actually.. I came out during the run up of the first tech bubble instead of right after it burst.
These days, I am self-learning and absorbing information at least twice as fast as my standard college workload was feeding it to me.
College didn't help much on the attitude side. Jumping into the real world and realizing what my actual skills were did the trick. Even initially, all the really useful skills were self-taught.
In college, I felt like just another fish in the sea... Why would anyone hire me over someone else? I had NO idea how I was going to make a living (even with a selected major and career path).
Once I saw the real world, it became "Seriously? That's the best they can do?"
Contractors almost always make a lot more extra money than benefits are worth.
The delta also partially includes the additional RISK you generally take as a contractor in having consistent work. (Or perceived risk, really... it's generally greatly overstated)
In fact, once you get into the professional world (vs. unskilled labor) risk is a very major factor in influencing how much people get paid. Risks borne by participants has value.
You were paid a premium as a contractor to compensate for the minor risks you took not having the security of a full time job. The startup employees will eventually be paid in equity for the huge risk they took in an all-or-nothing bid for a part in a company they hoped had a future.
Obviously, if the company is doing as well as you say... most of that startup risk is gone, so the opportunity to invest in it is likewise mostly gone.
I'm also a contractor, and one client of mine is also a startup moving into the "doing pretty good" category. I'm not about to whine about it... they paid in risk and now they will likely reap the benefits of that investment. I'm HAPPY for them.
It's almost exactly the same as "I sure wish I hadn't sold stock X, look how high it is now!"
Slashdot Mirror
There's too much of it. They can't do all the work, and they have to let the crappy programmers learn. Trial by fire.
I know a really excellent Indian programmer that's a project coordinator now over several projects. He works like a madman trying to correct and teach people, but the results are still pretty crappy because he's just one guy. Eventually, he'll burn out.
I'd hire that single guy in a heartbeat. There might also be another one in the dozen or so on the project that doesn't do more harm than good.
However, they produce so many document artifacts it looks much more professional to management. Even if some of the documents are verging on criminal negligence. Who in the world thinks a flow chart built by omitting structural constructs (like all the conditional statements, say) makes valid documentation? Someone who thinks nobody will check it, that's who. The docs look awesome, but everyone's worse off having them.
Actually, my favorite is how the turrets say "I forgive you" before shutting down when you knock them over.
Whoever did the writing on that did an AWESOME job.
My problem was trying to show my 4 year old portal mechanics and accidentally running into a turret. "No, I spilled some red paint." I don't think he bought it. It needs a "no blood" game option.
There's also no evidence you're not the most prolific and successfully unnoticed serial killer in history. That doesn't mean I believe you are. Although... it would be my right to believe you were if I chose, right?
If you consider all the crazy things religions say in their respective texts that can be shown to be false, that should go somewhat far towards actually being evidence that at least the specific Gods in those religions are not correct. This article is saying that some smart now-ex fundamentalist christians decided something in their book was not literally true. That is either evidence their specific religion is at least partially incorrect, or they need to re-evaluate their book as containing some or all "life-lesson stories" instead of it being entirely literal truths.
Oh, and generally it's software geeks (like us?) that define the platform to start with. Executives come in much later, when they smell money. They're just overpaid car salesmen trying to sell what they've got.
The reasons behind the HTML5/JS platform are mostly mundane software developer religious fanboy-ism reasons. Some high level Palm guy did a proof of concept, and everybody got the fever. (Just guessing)
The execs get involved and if they want to lock you in it's because they think they might be able to pull an Apple. They're not thinking much further than that. It's a pretty stupid idea, really.
Also also,
My app requirements are fairly simple. Looking and acting like a PC application while not ideal is perfectly good enough for what I'm doing currently on the TouchPad.
I haven't tried to match any webOS look and feel, or even really make that many buttons/dropdowns fat finger friendly. I don't bother to rotate the screen orientation, etc.
If you want to match look and feel and behave like a really slick tablet app, then that would probably be a lot of work.
Oh, I forgot to menton the app port itself.
The last three apps I ported to the Touchpad just worked. I think I added "w.showFullScreen();" in main.cpp, two lines to declaring my platform plugin, and a little .pro file editing to link in my plugin. That was pretty much all that was required. For the one client that doesn't need static, it was even easier (only showFullScreen).
Of course, I was keeping the code fairly clean platform-wise. My clients usually need the apps on Windows and I prefer to work on Linux.
I'm not doing OpenGL, though.. that'd take a little more on the platform plugin side. Check Palm's open source releases, they've got some OpenGL plugin stuff in the qt package diffs there I haven't got around to looking at that closely.
Hmm... I'm not sure about pyQt. I haven't used that one. It's probably easy, though.
Qt itself ports extremely cleanly. In fact, the sum total of my changes to the Qt source tree are two short changes in the QCoreApplication class file to force the display plugin to my own. (WebOS 2.x+ adds a QWS_DISPLAY environment variable that overrides my plugin with theirs, which doesn't work in the general case)
In my opinion, it's easier to compile than the Windows one. (Although that's assuming the cross compiler is set up)
I have worked a bit on my webOS platform plugin, though (webOS QScreen, etc implementations). That's LGPL'd and available for use... but... I haven't updated that in a little bit. That's basically just writing an SDL wrapper, though. Pretty simple.
Oh yeah, "unwitting pawn"... that's one of the pretty common ones too. How come free-thinking conspiracists always end up with the same language? :)
Sorry about being a bit of a jerk... it's not nearly as much about you as it is the people I work with at a couple clients.
Look, HP as primarily a personal computer company has no reasonable incentive that I can see to want all apps to go into the cloud. You'd go even further from a bunch of PCs running apps to a relatively lower number of highly virtualized datacenter hosts running the apps. The extra servers aren't going to cover the loss in PC sales when people in that environment get cheap web terminal PCs.
Do you see HP massively into software at all? No. I'm 99.99999999% sure they don't want what you say they want.
I can tell you that the people at the top of any particularly large or successful corporation are in my experience generally self-centered, and usually at least a little sociopathic. They're not terribly cooperative. They're mega-competitive. They don't trust much. They're constantly trying to get ahead by any means necessary. Conspiracies take a lot of cooperation and whole lot more trust.
Just from the nature of the people I've met and the behavior of companies in the news, etc... I'd think a conspiracy of any scale would be extremely unlikely and very rare.
Frankly, I'd think it more plausible that an alien body-snatcher race had taken control of our political and business leaders than I'd think our top execs and politicians collude at the degree my conspiracy friends say they do.
I'm totally willing to be wrong, and I am sure I occasionally am. I suppose the world needs a -few- conspiracy nuts to smoke out the particularly gnarly real conspiracies. I just think we don't need NEARLY as many conspiracy nuts as we have.
It's INTENDED as a way to pull developers from the web into their mobile platform. There's no smoky-room-with-old-white-billionaires-playing-poker here.
People need to stop looking for conspiracies everywhere. I understand that humanity is hard-wired to look for a presence behind any random thing in the universe (the fundamental basis of religion)... but get a little perspective. ... can it potentially LEAD to that? Sure, I suppose it's possible. A lot of stuff is possible. If that's your point of view, you'd help your cause out a lot more if you skipped the little gestures like avoiding webOS and simply skipped using the entire WEB.
If you want to get yourself all worked up over and over again over a 1 in 10,000 chance there's a real conspiracy, the only person you're hurting it yourself. Scratch that, you're hurting anyone who listens to you too. I know way too many people personally who see conspiracies everywhere and say "Dude, I'm NOBODY's tool! You're acting like a sheep!" Is that actually rewarding? It turns people paranoid and suspicious. At what point is the remote risk of being fooled by some schemer simply not worth the effort of burning yourself into a bitter old cynical asshat?
While critical thinking is sorely lacking in general... just to evaluate things yourself on their merits should go plenty far enough towards avoiding sheep-like behavior. Don't give in to the temptation to search for conspiracies everywhere.
I like webOS because it's extremely developer friendly. Personally, I put Qt apps on it for my use and my clients use... no HTML5/JS required. I'm not particularly happy with HTML5/JS as an upcoming platform in general.
(I suppose since I'm an advocate I must be part of this web conspiracy? ... or just a tool?)
oops. That'll teach me to keep typing after hitting preview.
I meant to say I don't think this story makes any sense. As in, banning the sale of pets is dumb. Maybe you can regulate it a bit more if you want to ensure animal welfare. Otherwise we might as well just go put all domesticated animals to sleep so they'll never suffer again.
Actually, saltwater fish are sometimes sourced in absolutely horrible ways.
Think dumping cyanide on coral reefs to stun fish to make them easier to catch. This results in massive coral bleaching and you kill many more fish than you catch. Those you do catch are sick and plenty of those die in transit.
Unfortunately, it tends to happen in tropical countries (imagine that) that we have no real control over.
There is a significant movement to certify your fish don't come from this evil bullshit, though. A fair number of aquarium people are on board. ... not that I think this s makes any sense.
The most promising ways IMHO to getting kids interested in math and science are through educational robotics competitions like FIRST and electronics projects tinkering with stuff like Arduinos. There's enough hardware there to get people started.... it's almost a mini renaissance in that stuff right now.
These are kids.
The MAIN PROBLEM is simply to get kids interested and teach the very basics of logic.
Programmers tend to take for granted the simple process of how to take what you want to do and deconstruct that into logical steps that you apply through some sort of program.
This is absolutely fundamental, and I believe it's where most kids get lost and quit.
It's not ridiculous at all.
Grants are institutions giving money to companies to develop ideas that otherwise would very likely not be developed. If you limit grants to basically academics, non-profits, and volunteers you're not going to get nearly as much done. Many non-profits work for a bit and shut down when the key people get tired of it and want to pursue something else. Academics are going for a paper and drop the project immediately after reaching a diminishing returns point on it's ability to produce more papers.
Grants are also highly unpredictable and in my experience they're usually for short incremental tasks on something that requires massive ongoing development.
If you want to do something long term, you need long term money. Grants are not long term. It's the difference between "I could quit my job and do this 3 year grant, then hope I can find another job" and "I could quit my job for this 3 year grant, and then it should be able to sustain itself and my salary". Can you see why the latter would attract a lot more people?
Open source is really awesome when there's enough real interest to create a sustainable project. "That's cool... somebody should do that" isn't enough, you have to do it.
I don't think this is true. It's also about presentation.
When I was 7, my uncle convinced my parents to get me a TI 99/4A. He supposedly stayed up until 2am programming it to play "we wish you a merry christmas" in a loop. When I saw that and realized "You can make it do stuff?!?" I instantly started to try to program it.
I had an Atari 2600 at the time and I loved playing games on that. If my parents had just stuck a game cartridge in the TI, I would have just played games on it for who knows how long. I'm not sure I would have (a) figured out you could make it do stuff (program it) AND (b) thought it was something a pre-teen could accomplish totally on their own... it could have been 5-7 years longer before I started programming with that simple change in presentation.
Yup.
Outsourcing companies do NOT have your interests in mind. They will push as much work as possible for themselves to the degree that they think you can bear it, and increase that amount as they feel you become dependent on them. The big ones will, anyway.
If you can, never outsource the management of a project. The workers themselves aren't going to screw you too badly and can easily be a good thing. The outsourcing managers will absolutely rape you if they can.
I'm about 3X more expensive than most outsourcing team members, but they tend to bill 10x the number of hours and produce a much crappier product. The larger outsourcing firms can't fill that many chairs with talented people, and they hardly try. The good people get promoted to coordinator roles and so you're pretty much guaranteed by design to never get senior level people on a project for any length of time.
Most of an outsourcing firm's skill lies in making presentations to non-software upper management.
Actually, compilers are NOT nearly as good at optimizing things as people seem to think. They have a whole lot of individually very clever optimizations, but it is pretty easy to beat them. You can restructure and refactor code freely, compilers must be reasonably true to the code you wrote.
The real problem is that perhaps even a majority of programmers are nearly incompetent, and most of the remainder aren't all that good at it.
Funny, it's my wife that enables me to be the workaholic I really want to be. She gets annoyed if I'm sitting on the couch... so I'm always working.
I started off in software. I then jumped to firmware, FPGAs, electronics, and PCB design... now I'm slowly adding mechanical and manufacturing processes.
I've watched a lot of EE-only or software-only people design horribly sub-optimal designs basically because they only used what they know. By at least being exposed to other fields, you can do much better design work and apply the strengths of each discipline to what your trying to do. If you're actually good at a couple disciplines, then amazing things happen.
Dysfunctional design happens even in companies where you supposedly have a team of these different disciplines. Individually, the workers don't know what they don't know... so unless a design element happens to come up in a meeting, you don't get the full benefit of a team of experts.
Wow, I feel sorry for you. Is that what you want?
I'm a long time contractor... believe me it doesn't have to be that way. You need to keep looking... ideally you find some other established contractor you identify as pretty good and talk to them a little bit. Sooner than you know you have a little local network of cool people who refer work to you when they don't have time, etc. (without taking a slice)
Even if you never quite find that, you should be able to find places that actually appreciate hard work.
Bitter, are we?
No.. a company spends a whole lot on benefits, extra taxes you don't have to pay, legal risk if they need to fire you, etc. I've heard an employee typically costs a company twice his salary.
Strangely, that's about the average multiplier that contractors make over employees. Coincidence?
I sometimes try to talk the occasional employee (unrelated to whatever my current position is there) through the benefits of being contract. I think many of the good employees deserve better. However, I just pity the bitter ones and avoid them. It's a prison entirely of their own making, and that kind of attitude practically guarantees they're going to become and stay miserable.
Contractors typically make 1.5-3x what employees do. You can buy a LOT of benefits for that. It's a great justification for companies to give employees... but it's simply not good math.
Yeah, this happens all the time.
The best thing is to have 2 or 3 part time clients if you can swing it. Then you have a much stronger position when negotiating situations like that.
In a single client situation, it's a game of chicken. The problem is by the time the company realizes you won't blink, it's too late to take back some of the ultimatums they made... or the threats lose a lot of credibility with the next guy. With multiple clients, they know it won't work and so they never really go there. (They may whine a bit, but they'll get over it)
On the off chance they actually do get rid of you... well... so what, you've got another gig. :)
Uh, yeah wrong dude.
I've been a contractor for 12+ years now, and I've given a long-term but fairly screwed up part time client 7 months notice to figure out how to get someone up to speed to replace me with the least pain.
In that time, I've been working 70-110 hour weeks trying to do both that job and the project I selected to do instead. It's been very difficult to manage everything, and I'm very happy that I've got a bit less than a month to go now.
At the high end of software development, the vast majority of the best guys I know are contractors. The rest are some excellent employees who frankly don't know what they're worth.
Sure, there are a lot of incredibly crappy consulting firms out there (many of the large ones, actually)... but there are good guys and gals out there too. In any one industry they usually know eachother at least locally or regionally... so find one and you can find a lot of good help. (kind of a 2 or 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing)
Well, when I was in college I really wasn't mature enough to get enough value out of it. My study habits were almost nonexistent... I dropped out. That worked out wonderfully, actually.. I came out during the run up of the first tech bubble instead of right after it burst.
These days, I am self-learning and absorbing information at least twice as fast as my standard college workload was feeding it to me.
College didn't help much on the attitude side. Jumping into the real world and realizing what my actual skills were did the trick. Even initially, all the really useful skills were self-taught.
In college, I felt like just another fish in the sea... Why would anyone hire me over someone else? I had NO idea how I was going to make a living (even with a selected major and career path).
Once I saw the real world, it became "Seriously? That's the best they can do?"
There need to be more internships.
Contractors almost always make a lot more extra money than benefits are worth.
The delta also partially includes the additional RISK you generally take as a contractor in having consistent work. (Or perceived risk, really... it's generally greatly overstated)
In fact, once you get into the professional world (vs. unskilled labor) risk is a very major factor in influencing how much people get paid. Risks borne by participants has value.
You were paid a premium as a contractor to compensate for the minor risks you took not having the security of a full time job. The startup employees will eventually be paid in equity for the huge risk they took in an all-or-nothing bid for a part in a company they hoped had a future.
Obviously, if the company is doing as well as you say... most of that startup risk is gone, so the opportunity to invest in it is likewise mostly gone.
I'm also a contractor, and one client of mine is also a startup moving into the "doing pretty good" category. I'm not about to whine about it... they paid in risk and now they will likely reap the benefits of that investment. I'm HAPPY for them.
It's almost exactly the same as "I sure wish I hadn't sold stock X, look how high it is now!"