HR not understanding tech is like business executives not understand tech, and the answer is the same: you hire someone to sit in the middle as an adapter and translate. It sounds like you were, in fact, being the "business analyst" guy for HR, but you were translating into the wrong language. You were translating from high-detail tech -> low-detail tech, instead of high-detail tech -> HR speak. If you could have filled in all the HR metadata yourself, you no doubt would have chosen the correct ones. The signature of the problem is HR asking "is C++ hardware?". That tells you they're doing a second translation step.
Only stupid executives think this way. Smart executives -- Jeff Bezos comes quickly to mind -- listen to engineers. Especially ones who suggest your company commoditize all the web service components you need, and then rent them to the world.
And the reason why the government changes it's mind so often is because the leadership changes. In the case of Obamacare, apparently the leadership was reported spread across multiple agencies to lower the attack profile from Republicans, so it was already behind the eight-ball.
When did he NOT have the time to pay attention to the most important legislative agenda of his entire Presidency? Personally, I think historians will be writing books about the answer to that question for decades to come. Here's the problem: either it really is his key agenda item, or it isn't. If it is, then why did he let it go live on October 1st? If you say, "someone else made that decision", then it can't be his key agenda item, can it? Who concedes decision-making power of the most important item on one's list?
It's more than a conundrum, it's a full-blown mystery.
And, do you really think a President who spent 4 years convincing people he's actually American is going to blow off a major website snafu and hope to ride his middling approval rates through it all?
Yes. Look at it politically from his point of view. What was the alternative? Admit failure? Delay for a year -- after just winning the sequester against the hated Republicans who ran on exactly that proposition?
The thought that this is another conspiracy and that you'd equate it to Watergate is ludicrous.
Whatever gave you the idea I said this was a conspiracy? The question about what the President knew does comes from the Watergate era, but that is incidental. It's just a very pertinent question.
"A final 'pre-flight checklist' before the Web site’s Oct. 1 opening, compiled a week before by CMS, shows that 41 of 91 separate functions that CGI was responsible for finishing by the launch were still not working. And a spreadsheet produced by CGI, dated the day of the launch, shows that the company acknowledged about 30 defects on features scheduled to have been working already, including five that it classified as 'critical'".
The question is, what did the President know, and when did he know it? We know the responsible White House staff knew the system would not work because it simply wasn't finished. And that's only for the parts that were to go live on October 1st. As we heard last week from the existing CTO on the project, there is still 30-40% of the backend system that hasn't even been written yet.
I don't think it is reasonable that no one told the President about this. I think the President knew, but decided to push it through anyway. Why? Personally, I think it's because he believed that the glitches would be forgiven, and because the press was behind him, he could always blame the other side, and they would go along as the usually do.
If you read the specifics, you'll find that there is plenty of leeway between what the auditors asked for (things like scanning for empty/default admin passwords, filing security audit reports in a central location, documenting that managers approved admin accounts, etc.) and what the IRS believed it had done to implement them.
If you ask me to implement something, I think I did so, and so I check that off as "completed", that is not lying.
This is more like a failed test case. The auditors are complaining that the IRS' implementation of their recommendations are insufficient.
" OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor."
This has got to be the thousandth time I've read an analysis of debt from a Progressive that fails to account for the fact that government is only a redistributor of income. Any decrease in spending is an increase in the amount that taxpayers can keep for themselves.
The question really comes down to market efficiency. Collecting taxes to direct an economy is obviously less efficient than letting the economy spend its own earnings. The overhead of administration alone makes government spending generally a raw deal, efficiency-wise.
This post assumes that the actions of the federal government are in response to people's fears. That's your problem right there, you've got it backwards. It's the government who is acting in bad faith to begin with, and is then just looking for some cover to excuse it.
You didn't really think it takes $4 Trillion to catch a bunch of terrorists, did you?
Well said. The analysis of the rationale for allowing veterans to vote was especially interesting, thanks.
Actually, I liked both the book and the movie, but for obviously very different reasons. Suffice it to say that the book was mined for characters, names, and context, and then an entirely different story was told. That sometimes happens in movies. An example of that happening in a good way is in Children of Men, which is really a terrific riff on the ideas and characters in the novel of the same name by PD James, but isn't the same story at all.
Why I liked Starship Troopers, the movie, is because the acting is superb. The plot is childish, the Nazism stupid, the splatterfest is stomach-turning, and the gratuitous nudity is sophmoric, but those actors are terrific, across the board. If you want to see the difference between having an A-team ensemble cast vs. a partial A-team, just watch any of the two sequels.
Akin to "Ender's Game depicts a society using children to commit xenocide" and "Orson Scott Card believes in a very traditional definition of marriage"?
Hey, asking citizens to just get out their cameras and document how a king tide affects their properties is fine with me. That's cheap, easy, and makes sense. Sure beats questionable schemes like carbon "taxes".
I love the idea of modular, transportable structures, but do they have to look like a pile of garbage bins with pins sticking out of the top? That's not industrial-cool, or retro-cool, that's just plain ugly. Makeover!
"I'm really the one who's 'work makes the company work' and it is really my work that the company is selling and turning into profit."
You couldn't be more wrong. Try doing your work without someone selling it for you. Try doing your work without someone in the back office making sure that the customers pay for the software sold by sales, so you can get a paycheck on time, like clockwork. Try doing your work without someone orchestrating, adjusting, and aligning your work with everyone else's, so the company actually delivers something the customer is willing to buy. Try doing your work without someone else looking over your work, checking and cross-checking for errors, so customers get delivered a good product that we know will work. Try doing all that without someone making sure you have a table to type on, a chair to sit in, and a functioning bathroom when you need it.
What you need, my friend, is to get out and start a startup company. There you will learn the value of teamwork, I guarantee it.
Every software developer should have their own company, even if it's just a company of one. Nothing teaches you how to be a better employee than being a boss, even of just yourself. You should have your own company in parallel with your day job until you can support yourself fully.
Virtually everything important I've learned about how to deliver working code came first from working on an outside project, which I then perfected by applying those techniques as part of a project at work. Everything important I've learned about what people are really like -- the good, bad, and the ugly -- was formed in the same way: in my outside "company" first, then finished within the context of my employer.
The big takeaway about business I learned is that a good business is a stool with three legs: one leg is sales, the other is operations/development, and the third is administrative/executive. Every one of those legs are equally important, the company is only as strong as the weakest leg, and if any one leg is failing badly, it is only a matter of time before the company will fail.
Great advice. In picking what is both "basic and essential" I simply look at dependencies, using two perspectives: first, gating dependency -- what, if it doesn't work, would prevent other things from working -- then, structural dependency -- what is the thing that other things are built on.
First satisfy yourself that there are several approaches to meeting the gating dependencies, this will actually give you the best all-around sense of what the design of your application will likely become. Then, start from the bottom of the structural dependencies and work you way up. Happily, in most languages you'll find that library support is strongest at the bottom, so your useful level of work will proceed very quickly, and you will be satisfying all the gating dependencies early in the process.
Done like this, it gets increasingly easier to call in extra hands to help with the work, because what remains is more obvious/common.
To a believer, evolution doesn't "undermine" the idea of divine creation, it is just a wrong-headed idea. When you present them with facts and they dispute with you, they aren't being "neurotic" or "irrational", they just don't agree with you. That you describe this as "profound intellectual dishonesty" and their arguments as "obvious defiance of objective reality" shows that you are simply prejudiced.
God's existence cannot be objectively proven one way or another, not because God is lacking, or we are lacking, but because by definition you can't use the intellectual tools of science to operate on a philosophical conclusion. If I say the world was created because God loves us, one cannot apply the scientific method to test the truth or falsity of such a claim. There is no test you can devise, nothing to measure, it is an opinion.
Philosophical opinions are not illegitimate, they are simply not able to be objectively proved. Opinion may be informed by science, for example, to look around at the universe we see, one might understandably conclude that it was made by God, and point to many objective facts in support of that conclusion. But the central opinion itself cannot be disproved by them.
Very close! To correct one line of reasoning, however, it is a mistake to think that evolution "threatens" the doctrine of creation. The Bible can't become "fuzzy", it is the revealed truth, and people who don't believe are simply blinded to it. To rail against God isn't an "existential threat to civilization", it's simply a wrong path being taken. If society becomes less Christianized, it won't cause them to "lose all spiritual direction", it will cause society to lose that direction.
Pretty good advice. There are actually quite a few capital investments that produce a profit for individuals: housing that is appreciating in value (not that hard to come by, there are deals out there), higher education at public universities, and starting your own internet-based business, to name a few. For most people, though, you're absolutely correct that paying down debt should be job #1. Use the snowball method, you'll be amazed at how quickly it works.
This would all be much easier if the NSA would simply set up automatic transfers from our bank accounts to the Treasury so the feds can just take what they need.
I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.
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HR not understanding tech is like business executives not understand tech, and the answer is the same: you hire someone to sit in the middle as an adapter and translate. It sounds like you were, in fact, being the "business analyst" guy for HR, but you were translating into the wrong language. You were translating from high-detail tech -> low-detail tech, instead of high-detail tech -> HR speak. If you could have filled in all the HR metadata yourself, you no doubt would have chosen the correct ones. The signature of the problem is HR asking "is C++ hardware?". That tells you they're doing a second translation step.
Only stupid executives think this way. Smart executives -- Jeff Bezos comes quickly to mind -- listen to engineers. Especially ones who suggest your company commoditize all the web service components you need, and then rent them to the world.
And the reason why the government changes it's mind so often is because the leadership changes. In the case of Obamacare, apparently the leadership was reported spread across multiple agencies to lower the attack profile from Republicans, so it was already behind the eight-ball.
When did he NOT have the time to pay attention to the most important legislative agenda of his entire Presidency? Personally, I think historians will be writing books about the answer to that question for decades to come. Here's the problem: either it really is his key agenda item, or it isn't. If it is, then why did he let it go live on October 1st? If you say, "someone else made that decision", then it can't be his key agenda item, can it? Who concedes decision-making power of the most important item on one's list?
It's more than a conundrum, it's a full-blown mystery.
And, do you really think a President who spent 4 years convincing people he's actually American is going to blow off a major website snafu and hope to ride his middling approval rates through it all?
Yes. Look at it politically from his point of view. What was the alternative? Admit failure? Delay for a year -- after just winning the sequester against the hated Republicans who ran on exactly that proposition?
The thought that this is another conspiracy and that you'd equate it to Watergate is ludicrous.
Whatever gave you the idea I said this was a conspiracy? The question about what the President knew does comes from the Watergate era, but that is incidental. It's just a very pertinent question.
According to the Washington Post:
"A final 'pre-flight checklist' before the Web site’s Oct. 1 opening, compiled a week before by CMS, shows that 41 of 91 separate functions that CGI was responsible for finishing by the launch were still not working. And a spreadsheet produced by CGI, dated the day of the launch, shows that the company acknowledged about 30 defects on features scheduled to have been working already, including five that it classified as 'critical'".
The question is, what did the President know, and when did he know it? We know the responsible White House staff knew the system would not work because it simply wasn't finished. And that's only for the parts that were to go live on October 1st. As we heard last week from the existing CTO on the project, there is still 30-40% of the backend system that hasn't even been written yet.
I don't think it is reasonable that no one told the President about this. I think the President knew, but decided to push it through anyway. Why? Personally, I think it's because he believed that the glitches would be forgiven, and because the press was behind him, he could always blame the other side, and they would go along as the usually do.
Point well taken
If you read the specifics, you'll find that there is plenty of leeway between what the auditors asked for (things like scanning for empty/default admin passwords, filing security audit reports in a central location, documenting that managers approved admin accounts, etc.) and what the IRS believed it had done to implement them.
If you ask me to implement something, I think I did so, and so I check that off as "completed", that is not lying.
This is more like a failed test case. The auditors are complaining that the IRS' implementation of their recommendations are insufficient.
" OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor."
This has got to be the thousandth time I've read an analysis of debt from a Progressive that fails to account for the fact that government is only a redistributor of income. Any decrease in spending is an increase in the amount that taxpayers can keep for themselves.
The question really comes down to market efficiency. Collecting taxes to direct an economy is obviously less efficient than letting the economy spend its own earnings. The overhead of administration alone makes government spending generally a raw deal, efficiency-wise.
This post assumes that the actions of the federal government are in response to people's fears. That's your problem right there, you've got it backwards. It's the government who is acting in bad faith to begin with, and is then just looking for some cover to excuse it.
You didn't really think it takes $4 Trillion to catch a bunch of terrorists, did you?
Capitalism rewards profitable work. Whether that work is easy or hard is immaterial.
Well said. The analysis of the rationale for allowing veterans to vote was especially interesting, thanks.
Actually, I liked both the book and the movie, but for obviously very different reasons. Suffice it to say that the book was mined for characters, names, and context, and then an entirely different story was told. That sometimes happens in movies. An example of that happening in a good way is in Children of Men, which is really a terrific riff on the ideas and characters in the novel of the same name by PD James, but isn't the same story at all.
Why I liked Starship Troopers, the movie, is because the acting is superb. The plot is childish, the Nazism stupid, the splatterfest is stomach-turning, and the gratuitous nudity is sophmoric, but those actors are terrific, across the board. If you want to see the difference between having an A-team ensemble cast vs. a partial A-team, just watch any of the two sequels.
Akin to "Ender's Game depicts a society using children to commit xenocide" and "Orson Scott Card believes in a very traditional definition of marriage"?
Hey, asking citizens to just get out their cameras and document how a king tide affects their properties is fine with me. That's cheap, easy, and makes sense. Sure beats questionable schemes like carbon "taxes".
I love the idea of modular, transportable structures, but do they have to look like a pile of garbage bins with pins sticking out of the top? That's not industrial-cool, or retro-cool, that's just plain ugly. Makeover!
Whatever Snowden did to bottle up his stolen cache of documents, it has apparently kept the entire US security apparatus at bay.
Now, THAT'S a project that would look good on an IT resume, anywhere.
"I'm really the one who's 'work makes the company work' and it is really my work that the company is selling and turning into profit."
You couldn't be more wrong. Try doing your work without someone selling it for you. Try doing your work without someone in the back office making sure that the customers pay for the software sold by sales, so you can get a paycheck on time, like clockwork. Try doing your work without someone orchestrating, adjusting, and aligning your work with everyone else's, so the company actually delivers something the customer is willing to buy. Try doing your work without someone else looking over your work, checking and cross-checking for errors, so customers get delivered a good product that we know will work. Try doing all that without someone making sure you have a table to type on, a chair to sit in, and a functioning bathroom when you need it.
What you need, my friend, is to get out and start a startup company. There you will learn the value of teamwork, I guarantee it.
States rights won't survive gay marriage.
Every software developer should have their own company, even if it's just a company of one. Nothing teaches you how to be a better employee than being a boss, even of just yourself. You should have your own company in parallel with your day job until you can support yourself fully.
Virtually everything important I've learned about how to deliver working code came first from working on an outside project, which I then perfected by applying those techniques as part of a project at work. Everything important I've learned about what people are really like -- the good, bad, and the ugly -- was formed in the same way: in my outside "company" first, then finished within the context of my employer.
The big takeaway about business I learned is that a good business is a stool with three legs: one leg is sales, the other is operations/development, and the third is administrative/executive. Every one of those legs are equally important, the company is only as strong as the weakest leg, and if any one leg is failing badly, it is only a matter of time before the company will fail.
Great advice. In picking what is both "basic and essential" I simply look at dependencies, using two perspectives: first, gating dependency -- what, if it doesn't work, would prevent other things from working -- then, structural dependency -- what is the thing that other things are built on.
First satisfy yourself that there are several approaches to meeting the gating dependencies, this will actually give you the best all-around sense of what the design of your application will likely become. Then, start from the bottom of the structural dependencies and work you way up. Happily, in most languages you'll find that library support is strongest at the bottom, so your useful level of work will proceed very quickly, and you will be satisfying all the gating dependencies early in the process.
Done like this, it gets increasingly easier to call in extra hands to help with the work, because what remains is more obvious/common.
To a believer, evolution doesn't "undermine" the idea of divine creation, it is just a wrong-headed idea. When you present them with facts and they dispute with you, they aren't being "neurotic" or "irrational", they just don't agree with you. That you describe this as "profound intellectual dishonesty" and their arguments as "obvious defiance of objective reality" shows that you are simply prejudiced.
God's existence cannot be objectively proven one way or another, not because God is lacking, or we are lacking, but because by definition you can't use the intellectual tools of science to operate on a philosophical conclusion. If I say the world was created because God loves us, one cannot apply the scientific method to test the truth or falsity of such a claim. There is no test you can devise, nothing to measure, it is an opinion.
Philosophical opinions are not illegitimate, they are simply not able to be objectively proved. Opinion may be informed by science, for example, to look around at the universe we see, one might understandably conclude that it was made by God, and point to many objective facts in support of that conclusion. But the central opinion itself cannot be disproved by them.
Very close! To correct one line of reasoning, however, it is a mistake to think that evolution "threatens" the doctrine of creation. The Bible can't become "fuzzy", it is the revealed truth, and people who don't believe are simply blinded to it. To rail against God isn't an "existential threat to civilization", it's simply a wrong path being taken. If society becomes less Christianized, it won't cause them to "lose all spiritual direction", it will cause society to lose that direction.
Pretty good advice. There are actually quite a few capital investments that produce a profit for individuals: housing that is appreciating in value (not that hard to come by, there are deals out there), higher education at public universities, and starting your own internet-based business, to name a few. For most people, though, you're absolutely correct that paying down debt should be job #1. Use the snowball method, you'll be amazed at how quickly it works.
This would all be much easier if the NSA would simply set up automatic transfers from our bank accounts to the Treasury so the feds can just take what they need.
It's called customer service.
I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.