What in the world are you doing bringing customers in front of developers?
Believe it or not, some clients actually like to tour the place where they are getting ready to spend [thousands|tens of thousands|millions] of dollars. Yes, that means the development area too.
Uhhh, that wasn't a "gee I've no idea why you'd put customers into a developer's area, please explain it to me" kind of question. That was a "what kind of crack is that company smoking" kind of question. In other words, I understand that some clients like to tour the facilities when they are going to spend millions, but you don't let the customer walk all over you to the point of detriment. You don't mention the developers area, and if they are aware of it anyway, you say no. And if they insist, then fuck it, they see developers in jeans & t-shirts. A business that is willing to make its developers uncomfortable for the sake of a 30-second walkthrough is not a good company, and if you think it is, well, you should at least realize that people on/. are going to disagree.
Avoid exaggeration now -- it's a small world (two candidates applied for one of the job openings I had, both got interviews, both were from the same company, and both claimed to be the lead developer -- we found out which one was telling the truth, and dropped the other without a word. An even better one was the three guys -- two applicants and one of their references -- who each claimed to be the manager of the other two).
And I'll bet you amuse yourself constantly with the knowledge that you bested them, right? Maybe they just wanted to have a job, you know?
And I'll bet this comes as a surprise to you, but anyone who tries to lie their way into a job is going to be disappointed a LOT. Because most hiring managers view deceptive people as bad people. I won't hire bad people, and I have no problem admitting to that.
Well, look who they talked to....
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The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"I'm vaguely looking for another job," Muldoon said. "I'll get a burst of energy and send out a bunch of resumes, and I won't hear anything. It validates the bad perception I had, and I get discouraged again."
Well. No wonder the article is full of stories of people out of work for a year. Hell, if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Now, that's not to say that it's wonderful out there. As an employer, I've been used to begging for resumes for the last 3 years. When I had an opening 3 months ago, I was seriously inundated with resumes. The job market is swarming with candidates. Of course, quite a good number of the candidates I saw shouldn't have been in the industry in the first place. It was obvious from the few hundred resumes I went through that the layoffs throughout Silicon Valley have been mostly about letting go of dead weight. But even that is bad news for qualified people. Think about it: even if you're a genius, your resume is buried in a pile of 400 other lackluster resumes. If you want to succeed, you'll need to be aggressive.
Go into the interview knowing about the company
learn about the specific industry that company is in
Shake hands firmly, get business cards, and send thank you cards (or even email)
Avoid exaggeration now -- it's a small world (two candidates applied for one of the job openings I had, both got interviews, both were from the same company, and both claimed to be the lead developer -- we found out which one was telling the truth, and dropped the other without a word. An even better one was the three guys -- two applicants and one of their references -- who each claimed to be the manager of the other two).
Hmmm. Well, rlowe69 mostly rebutted your comment, but let me agree & disagree with some things you said. My perspective is as a developer for 5 years, and a manager for 2. I'm 30, standard middle-management fare.
In general, if a developer is getting his/her work done, and isn't bothering other developers, then in my opinion, I'm fine with it. I read/. on my lunch break, and one of my employees reads it before going home for the day. Fine. My team is allowed to come into work whatever time they want, as long as they're getting in full 8 hour days. This doesn't bother others, because if there is a meeting at a normal-for-everyone-else time, those developers get in for it. They miss very little. Their job is not to interact with customers or even other employees so much as it is to build things, so let them build.
Lets not forget a dress code. Yeah, lets not enforce that, you don't need to look good to program, man. Until that one programmer wearing the 2 sizes too small phantom menace t-shirt with the body odor turns off a potential client.
What in the world are you doing bringing customers in front of developers? If you mean to suggest that a developer doing demos at customer sites needs a suit, then yes. But at the office? Do you really think uncomfortable programmers are productive programmers? That's rhetorical. I know the answer: no, if developers are in an uncomfortable environment, uncomfortable clothes, uncomfortable programming language, or uncomfortable political situation, they are not productive. That hurts the bottom line. That's not a good business decision.
Lets have a nerf gun fight! Woopie! Two guys want to fuck around, so the entire floor can't get anything done because two guys are running around screaming.
Agreed. That's a holdover of the dot com era better left dead. That and listening to music out loud. Put some headphones on. I can't program to rap, country, jazz, or easy listening music. I have on occassion thrown headphones onto the desks of people who Just Didn't Get It. Their bosses were less understanding than I was -- hurt others productivity, and you cost the company too much to keep around.
I've read a lot of responses, and I agree with some of the things I've read. Here are few things I currently do as a manager:
I ask developers to put in 8.5 hours a day, just to be sure it's a good, full day. But when they start is up to them. If a developer wants to code from 1-10 p.m. that's fine.
I insist projects are well-planned, and I say no to people who try to sneak in extra features or tasks.
Having said that, here are some things that don't work out in favor of the developer. They're mostly out of my hands.
Some developers say "that's not technically possible" when what they mean is "I don't want to do it." Three times in the past year I have taken projects away from a developer and coded it myself to prove it could be done. If your boss has to do this, your requests for management to trust your technical input are doomed.
Although I insist that projects be well-defined with a finalized feature-set before coding starts, my boss has on occasion overruled me. In one case, he basically said, "do whatever they want, even if they ask for 100 core changes in 100 days." THIS SUCKED.
If you want your manager to filter requests -- perhaps firewalling you off from Marketing, as someone else put it -- then when those same people come directly to you because they know your boss will say no, send them to your boss. I have an employee who takes all kinds of tasks on without telling me. But he misses assigned deadlines and complains that I don't shield him enough. Managers can't shield you from feature-creep and junk tasks if you take those things on privately.
I think that last point is one of the most difficult for developers. Sometimes a small, interesting project comes along and you really want to do it. But you know it does nothing for the company, and your boss will say no. So you sneak it in. Unfortunately, that sets precedent, and others will come to you as the "get it done guy." Which is great until you realize you want your boss to filter the jobs, as long as they're lame. But your boss has a different agenda -- he or she is taking on jobs that further the company. The developer wants jobs that are really interesting. You have to decide: if your boss is a firewall, you have to respect it even if you get a boring task once in a while. If you undermine that a few times, the firewall has holes and everything will get through.
Since when does the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution apply to croporations?
Corporations are given legal status as persons in the USA. Any corporation brought to trial is afforded the same protections as a citizen. This also has negative impact -- in some cases, the executives of a company cannot be sued, even if you really want to. For instance, the Enron execs will not have their personal bank accounts seized (unless they were involved in extortion or something) and their life savings drained away. The only "person" that can be sued is the Enron entity, which has its own bank accounts.
I would build on your post, and add one more problem with BSA's methods. That is, the company I work for was threatened with an audit, and, although we had licenses and came out unscathed, management was freaked out enough that they had to move two employees off their current tasks and onto documenting & proving our innocence. Aside from the fact that we had to spend money to prove we were good, there is the fundamental constitutional issue. In a US court of law, the burden is on the accuser to prove our guilt. I hate that the BSA's strong-arm tactics have cowed not just companies, but the US citizens working at those companies, who apparently don't understand their own rights. The burden of proof should be on the accuser.
...something so Microsoft-ian. Much fear & trembling here. But I have to defend Miguel's right to program whatever he wants to program. If he wants to embrace & extend a Microsoft product/API/whatever, then he should do exactly that. I do not at all believe in RPC based standards, so I will never, never use Miguel's product. But it's his code and he can do stupid things with it if he wants.
One of the reasons why I soooo hate Microsoft is their use of scare tactics and implied audits to squeeze cash out of companies, and basically interfere uninvited and without proof. I came to Open Source to be free of these self-appointed watchdogs, yet here we are, handling RMS with kid-gloves. But I just don't feel that extending him more grace is justified. I don't believe he is good for the community.
We're building a huge intranet tool, and that tool has some very cool org charts it can generate. At one brainstorming session, a person was throwing out ideas and then capped his suggestions with "of course, this is all my own IP, so I retain rights to all of it." Since we're thinking that this might someday become Open Source, asserting his IP was unacceptable.
Our solution? We immediately asked him to leave the meeting, took him off the invitations to future brainstorming sessions, and contacted our lawyers. I am VERY glad we kicked him out of the process within minutes of him spouting off about his IP. If he had stayed, we may have had to rebuild or drop basically anything he talked about. Now we can at least say that we're clean-rooming it.
what if the manuals really ARE an indicator?
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Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Everyone here seems to be suggesting that the manuals indicate nothing. "Apple has weak docs!" seems to be the summary. But can we entertain the notion that perhaps while 1 page is too short, 230 pages is far too long? If so, is this because the people who wrote the manual are not professional authors, and got too wordy? Or is it because Linux just isn't usable enough?
And whatever you think, isn't it reasonable to suggest that making Linux more intuitive and the manuals more succinct might help rid us of idiot lusers who won't RTFM? They won't really go away, but if we actually take usability seriously, perhaps developers can get half those people to solve their own problems. Wouldn't this be a good thing? I guess that's a rhetorical question -- I am sure it is a good thing. I spend my entire workday building apps for people, and one usability tweak can mean the difference between 20 nagging people a day and 2. My team even has blacklisted a couple people in the company, whose projects are always time-sinks to build and time-sinks to maintain. Why? Because those people are control freaks who won't let us fix usability errors, and my team ends up spending their days on support. If you can build something intuitive and usable, both the users and the developers will be much happier.
Authority comes from trust, not competence
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Linus Does Not Scale
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...although I concede that trust comes from competence. But what does this have to do with anything?
If you're going to overhaul (or in this case, overthrow) an established system, you need to do it with much fear & trembling. Look, I see this all the time as a manager. A new project is given to a manager. That manager hires someone competent and works with that person to build something from nothing. If the project takes off, you can end up hiring a lot of people to help support that project. It is possible for all those new hires to be more competent than the original, lead developer. But that original, lead developer now has management's trust. That lead developer, who got the damn thing off the ground in the first place, has an opinion that -- like it or not -- counts for more than the other developers. You can call that unfair, but certain people are just better rounded than others -- they have social skills, they can explain things well, they understand the market pressures, or whatever. Not to mention that it's their baby and you don't fuck around with stuff like that. As a manager, if I stomp all over the lead developer's project, that lead developer may not want to lead the next project! Sure, I can call on one of the other people brought in to help, but those other people may not be leaders.
I'm not saying that such an effort is doomed. But I am suggesting that, if you want to propose that Linus relinquish some authority, you damn well better have a value proposition for him. Shouting "this needs to be a democracy" is what you want, not what Linus wants. He's looking at that as a management nightmare, a removal of a power structure that is in place because, whatever it's faults, it was the structure that worked. If it doesn't work well anymore, you either have to convince Linus, or you have to convince everyone else to stop trusting the person in authority. That is a massive undertaking.
...how does a reader/fan of Slashdot configure it so that Katz's stuff doesn't show up on the home page? I've heard that it's possible, but I don't see anything in the preferences on my page.
Agreed, but if you're willing to run Wine, it's now getting pretty decent, even without Transgaming's DirectX extensions. What's nice about Wine is that it doesn't actually require any installation of Windows. So you install Linux, install Wine, and you can get away with never spending the cash on a Windows OS. Some of the great sites that are soooo helpful for this include:
But the best, by far, is this nice, nice Codeweavers Wine Application Database (my link goes right to the games section). Right now I'm going over their tips for getting Diablo II to run on Linux. They have a total of 175 Windows games in their database so far. If you have tips, please contribute.
Re:I'd say you burned some, you old troll.
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2
Well I thought about whether to respond for a while. I decided I should, even though the thread is probably dead now.
Erris, I'm sorry. You obviously feel like I just poured a heap of abuse on you, and to some degree I think it's fair for you to be pissed. I hung a lot of hats on your comments, so to speak -- and some of it was baggage from other posts that I never responded to. So, sorry for that.
At the same time, I think the moderators might be giving you a hint that I am not trolling. Your ability to locate years-old posts of mine at BSD sites is both deliberate on my part -- I always post with the same name so that people can find my history -- and is also an indication that I've been trying in earnest to influence the community (sometimes successfully!) for quite some time. What you see as my fatal flaw, I see as my credentials, my proof that I've been here a while and might have my hands in it enough to know a little bit. Don't forget, back when I made those comments about Linux insecurity, Red Hat 5.2 & 6.2 installed with services on by default. Ports wide open. People haven't had to worry about that problem for a long time, so of course, "Linux insecurity" has less punch nowadays. In fact, in light of WinXP's recent foibles, I'd say Linux is a great alternative for security & privacy reasons. But look, how did Linux improve? It improved because the people using the product raised the issue, and the people working on the codebase listened. I just wish we could have more of that, that's all.
Good post, but there's a fundemental difference between the Linux community and the Mac community -- The Mac people actually like the idea that their platform is used by millions of iMac-buying lusers. Fundementally, the Linux people are trying to get away from that culture and associate the OS with a certain level of l33tness.
OK. Let me ask you this: are Linux people also happy to have Eazel out of business and VA teetering on the edge? Do we want video card manufacturers to refuse to give us drivers? Are we trying to discourage Dell's Linux efforts? Are Linux people happy to see Loki closing their doors? From the posts here, it appears they range from indifference to disapointment. I don't see many people celebrating it. My point was not that we need to cater to "lusers" who have nothing to contribute. But we just witnessed, 4 posts above ours, a highly qualified insider at Hyperion give us good information that was almost immediately discounted with commments like "My friends don't act that way, you must be full of it." Is the Linux community so hell-bent on being 133t that we're going to flip off people who are more qualified than we are? These are not lusers! We are just stupid if we persist in being this self-destructive.
What we got from Linux users were not sales, but tons of email demanding that we put up the binary executeables on an ftp site for free so they could download them and use them with their Windows version of the game. For some reason they just couldn't grasp that it cost us money to both license and port the software, and that we didn't see a red cent for the Windows version they bought. It didn't matter, all they wanted was free beer.
I'm also having trouble imagining the demanding weenies you describe. The Baton Rouge LUG is small, but most of the people there were NOT like this.
Awww... hell. I'm at the cap, let's burn a little.
I am really exhausted by people who just say "I don't (see|believe) it" when someone describes an issue they're having. Let me help my fellow Linvocates.
Saying "I know lots of people, and I've never seen them act as you describe" doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, it (usually) means you don't have enough experience in the area to know what you're talking about.
Saying "I've done it lots of times and I never make that mistake" doesn't mean other people avoided the mistake too, it (usually) means you have no life and other people do.
Saying "Your real problem is blah" doesn't actually solve the issue for the person, it usually just makes them give up on getting the help they needed.
Why do I bring this up now? Because Loki is closing and another Linux developer here is telling us what a real issue is -- our "collective image" to some software companies apparently boils down to greedy "w@r3z d00d." You can say the people you know don't act like that, but it doesn't change the fact that people you don't know apparently are acting like that. And until we, as a collective group, can agree to change that collective mindset, we're going to collectively find our butts on the curb while companies pass us by.
Part of the reason why I'm "exhausted" by these kinds of responses is that everywhere I see it happen, things get fucked up. Mac apologists are notorious for telling people who point out problems with Apple to leave. "You don't like it? We don't need ya, get the hell out." The problem is that they do leave. And you end up with Quicken leaving the Apple market for a while. Anyone remember that? The workarounds sucked. We've got boatloads of Windows refugees out on Linux newsgroups saying "I didn't understand this" or "this part is too hard." It's a usability goldmine out on Usenet, but Linux users (and developers!) are basically just giving them the finger with comments like "I don't have that problem" or "well, you're just too stupid for this OS, I guess" or any other number of witty retorts that solve nothing. And as this happens, we see Linux lose momentum. Look, you want Linux to succeed, to be more than a source-code ghost-town 10 years from now? Then drag everyone along for the ride, and if they tell you they're uncomfortable, then make them more comfortable. Build momentum, acknowledge people's problems.
Who cares how bad the economy is, good developers can get a job anywhere.
That's simply not true. I've recently found myself in a situation where I was forced to either accept a promotion at my present job or hit the street. I don't consider myself middle-management material, and I don't particularly want that job, but my efforts to find another job have gone nowhere.
I've seen Alan's code; Alan is an exceptional and prolific programmer. You, sir, are no Alan Cox.
Way to go, Alan. Rather than be unsure of Red Hat's future, you'd swiftly move on to another company where you could be more effective. You'd rather leave than be associated with the company. You'd help contribute to Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, or even Slackware SUCCEEDING under Linux rather than waste time with a lost cause.
Standing up for your ideals is the main thing, and by leaving, you're tossing aside distractions and concentrating on the betterment of Linux for all of us.
Some people would much rather suck up their pride and tell people that they were employed by AOL, but that's why they aren't in the position of power that you are.
It was good for Mozilla and Netscape 6.x when jwz left. It was under him that the project scope kept changing, the notion of scheduled milestone releases went out the window, and most of the good longtime coders left.
That's not only a troll, that's rewriting history. Badly. JWZ left because the project scope kept changing and because they were not hitting milestones. He was pissed and unable to change things. And he was right -- it's now years later and we're still waiting for Mozilla 1.0.
Alan Cox--who unlike jwz is a really sharp coder and a good project leader--is showing himself to be just as much a child, spoiled and twisted by too much time spent in academic computing, shooting his mouth off before he's got a real situation to evaluate.
Who are you? Do you work with Alan? Are you contributing patches? Is this first-hand experience or just spouting off? And while I'm at it, where were you while JWZ was coding up a browser that revolutionized the world? I remember reading his online journal years ago, I remember his descriptions of staying up for days on end to code up huge chunks of the browser. What revolutionary things have you done that allows you to throw daggers at their backs?
I wish the best of luck to any company, school or organization that wants these guys on its payroll.
There's nothing wrong with a "lowest common denominator" version of Linux. Why should Linux be just for geeks? This will just be another distro, and there can be as many Linux distros as are needed. The geeks will just use a different one (Slackware, Debian, etc.)
Even the people who are presently using RedHat wouldn't be hurt much by this.
Well, everyone else appears to share your sentiment, but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat? Red Hat is trying to reach corporate America, not Joe Consumer. That's Mandrake. Mandrake could use help from a bigger company -- maybe some support and funding would stabilize their distro, and their end-user tools really compliment AOL's markets. But Red Hat -- they'll need to focus on a consumer desktop, which just isn't their market, and they'll probably be pushed in directions that won't serve their enterprise customers. And all the while, Mandrake will be standing to the side shouting, "we don't have to shift focus, we're already focused on Joe Consumer!"
I just think that there are more appropriate companies to buy. Oh well, as long as they leave my SuSE distribution alone, I guess I'm okay.
Well, since you bring it up, let me vent here: I think they both suck, but with just a few improvements, they could be excellent. That's totally frustrating.
Knode visually looks better, although that's mostly a function of KDE's widgets. But things like the Knode frames are great -- I can resize the left frame easily in Knode. In addition, it squishes the newsgroup names sensibly: comp.os.linux becomes c.o.linux when squished. Pan just cuts off the name, so you end up with 10 groups all starting with "comp.os.lin" and no idea what differentiates them. But anyway, what sucks about Knode is the crashing. First it crashes if I pull down too much -- say, 30,000 posts in a single newsgroup. Second, it will sometimes lockup when pulling down headers for a group, and if you try to switch to other groups, it can corrupt the groups list somehow. Last time I did this, the last 4 or 5 groups I subscribe to became permanently inaccessible. Not to mention the slowness, which is just a problem of how it's coded up -- it appears to grab a lot of info when it gets new article counts for each group. With XNews on Windows, this is nearly instantaneous. Oh, and did I mention it can't handle multipart binaries? Try hand-assembling an entire.iso on a newsgroup. Ugh.
Pan is a little faster, although it still seems programmed to do things like grab all the headers when I just want a count of new posts, but also, Pan doesn't seem to lock up ever. And Pan can handle multipart binaries. But the widget you have to click to resize frames is not intuitive, and I hate how the subject line is always a button, even if the subject all fit on the screen. But Pan has some really basic problems. I delete a line of text, think better of it, and try to undo. Whoops. No undo. Okay. I retype some lines, and add/remove some comments. The text won't reflow! Suddenly I've got a 95-character-wide line because I added some words. Manual reflowing -- I haven't had to do that in years. And buttons -- the subject line is a useless button mostly, but useful buttons, such as "followup to newsgroup", don't exist. So I'm memorizing key combos, which is okay, but making the high-traffic commands into buttons would sure be a user-friendly feature.
As you might note, I've been frustrated with these apps lately. I'm tempted to grab Agent or Xnews and run it in Wine, but I'd rather these Linux native apps get some TLC. Here's to hoping the developers are reading this stuff.
For instance those antialiased foreign fonts in the first shot. That's a big big deal, but it's not fruity colors so you overlook it.
Hmmm. Well, if we're going for the little things, I will say that the new scrollbars are waaaaayyy better. I'd like to see if they got the new scrollbars onto popup lists and such too. But the scrollbars still could use some tweaking: for example, in MacOS and KDE, you can have both scroll arrows at the bottom or top of the scroll bar. In other words, at the bottom scroll bar, I have buttons to scroll down and up. I love love love that, and even if the Gnome developers don't, it'd be a nice 2.0 option for me to toggle. It'd also be nice if I could select how big/wide scroll bars get -- on a 120 dpi monitor, the scroll bar is fairly narrow. In Windows, I can go into the config and make 40-pixel-wide scrollbars if I need to.
I haven't seen all the screenshots, but I hope that checkboxes and radio buttons will be more visually obvious, too. Sometimes in Gnome I cannot tell at all what the heck is checked and what is not checked. Here's hoping that Gnome 2.0 is the result of some serious rethinking of the widgets.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh, that wasn't a "gee I've no idea why you'd put customers into a developer's area, please explain it to me" kind of question. That was a "what kind of crack is that company smoking" kind of question. In other words, I understand that some clients like to tour the facilities when they are going to spend millions, but you don't let the customer walk all over you to the point of detriment. You don't mention the developers area, and if they are aware of it anyway, you say no. And if they insist, then fuck it, they see developers in jeans & t-shirts. A business that is willing to make its developers uncomfortable for the sake of a 30-second walkthrough is not a good company, and if you think it is, well, you should at least realize that people on /. are going to disagree.
At no point did I say or even suggest that employers should or do presume candidates are liars!
And I'll bet this comes as a surprise to you, but anyone who tries to lie their way into a job is going to be disappointed a LOT. Because most hiring managers view deceptive people as bad people. I won't hire bad people, and I have no problem admitting to that.
Well. No wonder the article is full of stories of people out of work for a year. Hell, if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Now, that's not to say that it's wonderful out there. As an employer, I've been used to begging for resumes for the last 3 years. When I had an opening 3 months ago, I was seriously inundated with resumes. The job market is swarming with candidates. Of course, quite a good number of the candidates I saw shouldn't have been in the industry in the first place. It was obvious from the few hundred resumes I went through that the layoffs throughout Silicon Valley have been mostly about letting go of dead weight. But even that is bad news for qualified people. Think about it: even if you're a genius, your resume is buried in a pile of 400 other lackluster resumes. If you want to succeed, you'll need to be aggressive.Hmmm. Well, rlowe69 mostly rebutted your comment, but let me agree & disagree with some things you said. My perspective is as a developer for 5 years, and a manager for 2. I'm 30, standard middle-management fare.
In general, if a developer is getting his/her work done, and isn't bothering other developers, then in my opinion, I'm fine with it. I read /. on my lunch break, and one of my employees reads it before going home for the day. Fine. My team is allowed to come into work whatever time they want, as long as they're getting in full 8 hour days. This doesn't bother others, because if there is a meeting at a normal-for-everyone-else time, those developers get in for it. They miss very little. Their job is not to interact with customers or even other employees so much as it is to build things, so let them build.
What in the world are you doing bringing customers in front of developers? If you mean to suggest that a developer doing demos at customer sites needs a suit, then yes. But at the office? Do you really think uncomfortable programmers are productive programmers? That's rhetorical. I know the answer: no, if developers are in an uncomfortable environment, uncomfortable clothes, uncomfortable programming language, or uncomfortable political situation, they are not productive. That hurts the bottom line. That's not a good business decision.
Agreed. That's a holdover of the dot com era better left dead. That and listening to music out loud. Put some headphones on. I can't program to rap, country, jazz, or easy listening music. I have on occassion thrown headphones onto the desks of people who Just Didn't Get It. Their bosses were less understanding than I was -- hurt others productivity, and you cost the company too much to keep around.
I've read a lot of responses, and I agree with some of the things I've read. Here are few things I currently do as a manager:
Having said that, here are some things that don't work out in favor of the developer. They're mostly out of my hands.
I think that last point is one of the most difficult for developers. Sometimes a small, interesting project comes along and you really want to do it. But you know it does nothing for the company, and your boss will say no. So you sneak it in. Unfortunately, that sets precedent, and others will come to you as the "get it done guy." Which is great until you realize you want your boss to filter the jobs, as long as they're lame. But your boss has a different agenda -- he or she is taking on jobs that further the company. The developer wants jobs that are really interesting. You have to decide: if your boss is a firewall, you have to respect it even if you get a boring task once in a while. If you undermine that a few times, the firewall has holes and everything will get through.
Corporations are given legal status as persons in the USA. Any corporation brought to trial is afforded the same protections as a citizen. This also has negative impact -- in some cases, the executives of a company cannot be sued, even if you really want to. For instance, the Enron execs will not have their personal bank accounts seized (unless they were involved in extortion or something) and their life savings drained away. The only "person" that can be sued is the Enron entity, which has its own bank accounts.
I would build on your post, and add one more problem with BSA's methods. That is, the company I work for was threatened with an audit, and, although we had licenses and came out unscathed, management was freaked out enough that they had to move two employees off their current tasks and onto documenting & proving our innocence. Aside from the fact that we had to spend money to prove we were good, there is the fundamental constitutional issue. In a US court of law, the burden is on the accuser to prove our guilt. I hate that the BSA's strong-arm tactics have cowed not just companies, but the US citizens working at those companies, who apparently don't understand their own rights. The burden of proof should be on the accuser.
Yes. Sun isn't perfect, so let's replace them with, um... Microsoft. Yeah. They're much more trustworthy.
...something so Microsoft-ian. Much fear & trembling here. But I have to defend Miguel's right to program whatever he wants to program. If he wants to embrace & extend a Microsoft product/API/whatever, then he should do exactly that. I do not at all believe in RPC based standards, so I will never, never use Miguel's product. But it's his code and he can do stupid things with it if he wants.
One of the reasons why I soooo hate Microsoft is their use of scare tactics and implied audits to squeeze cash out of companies, and basically interfere uninvited and without proof. I came to Open Source to be free of these self-appointed watchdogs, yet here we are, handling RMS with kid-gloves. But I just don't feel that extending him more grace is justified. I don't believe he is good for the community.
We're building a huge intranet tool, and that tool has some very cool org charts it can generate. At one brainstorming session, a person was throwing out ideas and then capped his suggestions with "of course, this is all my own IP, so I retain rights to all of it." Since we're thinking that this might someday become Open Source, asserting his IP was unacceptable.
Our solution? We immediately asked him to leave the meeting, took him off the invitations to future brainstorming sessions, and contacted our lawyers. I am VERY glad we kicked him out of the process within minutes of him spouting off about his IP. If he had stayed, we may have had to rebuild or drop basically anything he talked about. Now we can at least say that we're clean-rooming it.
Everyone here seems to be suggesting that the manuals indicate nothing. "Apple has weak docs!" seems to be the summary. But can we entertain the notion that perhaps while 1 page is too short, 230 pages is far too long? If so, is this because the people who wrote the manual are not professional authors, and got too wordy? Or is it because Linux just isn't usable enough?
And whatever you think, isn't it reasonable to suggest that making Linux more intuitive and the manuals more succinct might help rid us of idiot lusers who won't RTFM? They won't really go away, but if we actually take usability seriously, perhaps developers can get half those people to solve their own problems. Wouldn't this be a good thing? I guess that's a rhetorical question -- I am sure it is a good thing. I spend my entire workday building apps for people, and one usability tweak can mean the difference between 20 nagging people a day and 2. My team even has blacklisted a couple people in the company, whose projects are always time-sinks to build and time-sinks to maintain. Why? Because those people are control freaks who won't let us fix usability errors, and my team ends up spending their days on support. If you can build something intuitive and usable, both the users and the developers will be much happier.
...although I concede that trust comes from competence. But what does this have to do with anything?
If you're going to overhaul (or in this case, overthrow) an established system, you need to do it with much fear & trembling. Look, I see this all the time as a manager. A new project is given to a manager. That manager hires someone competent and works with that person to build something from nothing. If the project takes off, you can end up hiring a lot of people to help support that project. It is possible for all those new hires to be more competent than the original, lead developer. But that original, lead developer now has management's trust. That lead developer, who got the damn thing off the ground in the first place, has an opinion that -- like it or not -- counts for more than the other developers. You can call that unfair, but certain people are just better rounded than others -- they have social skills, they can explain things well, they understand the market pressures, or whatever. Not to mention that it's their baby and you don't fuck around with stuff like that. As a manager, if I stomp all over the lead developer's project, that lead developer may not want to lead the next project! Sure, I can call on one of the other people brought in to help, but those other people may not be leaders.
I'm not saying that such an effort is doomed. But I am suggesting that, if you want to propose that Linus relinquish some authority, you damn well better have a value proposition for him. Shouting "this needs to be a democracy" is what you want, not what Linus wants. He's looking at that as a management nightmare, a removal of a power structure that is in place because, whatever it's faults, it was the structure that worked. If it doesn't work well anymore, you either have to convince Linus, or you have to convince everyone else to stop trusting the person in authority. That is a massive undertaking.
...how does a reader/fan of Slashdot configure it so that Katz's stuff doesn't show up on the home page? I've heard that it's possible, but I don't see anything in the preferences on my page.
Agreed, but if you're willing to run Wine, it's now getting pretty decent, even without Transgaming's DirectX extensions. What's nice about Wine is that it doesn't actually require any installation of Windows. So you install Linux, install Wine, and you can get away with never spending the cash on a Windows OS. Some of the great sites that are soooo helpful for this include:
Well I thought about whether to respond for a while. I decided I should, even though the thread is probably dead now.
Erris, I'm sorry. You obviously feel like I just poured a heap of abuse on you, and to some degree I think it's fair for you to be pissed. I hung a lot of hats on your comments, so to speak -- and some of it was baggage from other posts that I never responded to. So, sorry for that.
At the same time, I think the moderators might be giving you a hint that I am not trolling. Your ability to locate years-old posts of mine at BSD sites is both deliberate on my part -- I always post with the same name so that people can find my history -- and is also an indication that I've been trying in earnest to influence the community (sometimes successfully!) for quite some time. What you see as my fatal flaw, I see as my credentials, my proof that I've been here a while and might have my hands in it enough to know a little bit. Don't forget, back when I made those comments about Linux insecurity, Red Hat 5.2 & 6.2 installed with services on by default. Ports wide open. People haven't had to worry about that problem for a long time, so of course, "Linux insecurity" has less punch nowadays. In fact, in light of WinXP's recent foibles, I'd say Linux is a great alternative for security & privacy reasons. But look, how did Linux improve? It improved because the people using the product raised the issue, and the people working on the codebase listened. I just wish we could have more of that, that's all.
OK. Let me ask you this: are Linux people also happy to have Eazel out of business and VA teetering on the edge? Do we want video card manufacturers to refuse to give us drivers? Are we trying to discourage Dell's Linux efforts? Are Linux people happy to see Loki closing their doors? From the posts here, it appears they range from indifference to disapointment. I don't see many people celebrating it. My point was not that we need to cater to "lusers" who have nothing to contribute. But we just witnessed, 4 posts above ours, a highly qualified insider at Hyperion give us good information that was almost immediately discounted with commments like "My friends don't act that way, you must be full of it." Is the Linux community so hell-bent on being 133t that we're going to flip off people who are more qualified than we are? These are not lusers! We are just stupid if we persist in being this self-destructive.
Awww... hell. I'm at the cap, let's burn a little.
I am really exhausted by people who just say "I don't (see|believe) it" when someone describes an issue they're having. Let me help my fellow Linvocates.
Why do I bring this up now? Because Loki is closing and another Linux developer here is telling us what a real issue is -- our "collective image" to some software companies apparently boils down to greedy "w@r3z d00d." You can say the people you know don't act like that, but it doesn't change the fact that people you don't know apparently are acting like that. And until we, as a collective group, can agree to change that collective mindset, we're going to collectively find our butts on the curb while companies pass us by.
Part of the reason why I'm "exhausted" by these kinds of responses is that everywhere I see it happen, things get fucked up. Mac apologists are notorious for telling people who point out problems with Apple to leave. "You don't like it? We don't need ya, get the hell out." The problem is that they do leave. And you end up with Quicken leaving the Apple market for a while. Anyone remember that? The workarounds sucked. We've got boatloads of Windows refugees out on Linux newsgroups saying "I didn't understand this" or "this part is too hard." It's a usability goldmine out on Usenet, but Linux users (and developers!) are basically just giving them the finger with comments like "I don't have that problem" or "well, you're just too stupid for this OS, I guess" or any other number of witty retorts that solve nothing. And as this happens, we see Linux lose momentum. Look, you want Linux to succeed, to be more than a source-code ghost-town 10 years from now? Then drag everyone along for the ride, and if they tell you they're uncomfortable, then make them more comfortable. Build momentum, acknowledge people's problems.
I've seen Alan's code; Alan is an exceptional and prolific programmer. You, sir, are no Alan Cox.
Way to go, Alan. Rather than be unsure of Red Hat's future, you'd swiftly move on to another company where you could be more effective. You'd rather leave than be associated with the company. You'd help contribute to Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, or even Slackware SUCCEEDING under Linux rather than waste time with a lost cause.
Standing up for your ideals is the main thing, and by leaving, you're tossing aside distractions and concentrating on the betterment of Linux for all of us.
Some people would much rather suck up their pride and tell people that they were employed by AOL, but that's why they aren't in the position of power that you are.
That's not only a troll, that's rewriting history. Badly. JWZ left because the project scope kept changing and because they were not hitting milestones. He was pissed and unable to change things. And he was right -- it's now years later and we're still waiting for Mozilla 1.0.
Who are you? Do you work with Alan? Are you contributing patches? Is this first-hand experience or just spouting off? And while I'm at it, where were you while JWZ was coding up a browser that revolutionized the world? I remember reading his online journal years ago, I remember his descriptions of staying up for days on end to code up huge chunks of the browser. What revolutionary things have you done that allows you to throw daggers at their backs?
I don't think you have much credibility left.
Well, everyone else appears to share your sentiment, but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat? Red Hat is trying to reach corporate America, not Joe Consumer. That's Mandrake. Mandrake could use help from a bigger company -- maybe some support and funding would stabilize their distro, and their end-user tools really compliment AOL's markets. But Red Hat -- they'll need to focus on a consumer desktop, which just isn't their market, and they'll probably be pushed in directions that won't serve their enterprise customers. And all the while, Mandrake will be standing to the side shouting, "we don't have to shift focus, we're already focused on Joe Consumer!"
I just think that there are more appropriate companies to buy. Oh well, as long as they leave my SuSE distribution alone, I guess I'm okay.
Well, since you bring it up, let me vent here: I think they both suck, but with just a few improvements, they could be excellent. That's totally frustrating.
Knode visually looks better, although that's mostly a function of KDE's widgets. But things like the Knode frames are great -- I can resize the left frame easily in Knode. In addition, it squishes the newsgroup names sensibly: comp.os.linux becomes c.o.linux when squished. Pan just cuts off the name, so you end up with 10 groups all starting with "comp.os.lin" and no idea what differentiates them. But anyway, what sucks about Knode is the crashing. First it crashes if I pull down too much -- say, 30,000 posts in a single newsgroup. Second, it will sometimes lockup when pulling down headers for a group, and if you try to switch to other groups, it can corrupt the groups list somehow. Last time I did this, the last 4 or 5 groups I subscribe to became permanently inaccessible. Not to mention the slowness, which is just a problem of how it's coded up -- it appears to grab a lot of info when it gets new article counts for each group. With XNews on Windows, this is nearly instantaneous. Oh, and did I mention it can't handle multipart binaries? Try hand-assembling an entire .iso on a newsgroup. Ugh.
Pan is a little faster, although it still seems programmed to do things like grab all the headers when I just want a count of new posts, but also, Pan doesn't seem to lock up ever. And Pan can handle multipart binaries. But the widget you have to click to resize frames is not intuitive, and I hate how the subject line is always a button, even if the subject all fit on the screen. But Pan has some really basic problems. I delete a line of text, think better of it, and try to undo. Whoops. No undo. Okay. I retype some lines, and add/remove some comments. The text won't reflow! Suddenly I've got a 95-character-wide line because I added some words. Manual reflowing -- I haven't had to do that in years. And buttons -- the subject line is a useless button mostly, but useful buttons, such as "followup to newsgroup", don't exist. So I'm memorizing key combos, which is okay, but making the high-traffic commands into buttons would sure be a user-friendly feature.
As you might note, I've been frustrated with these apps lately. I'm tempted to grab Agent or Xnews and run it in Wine, but I'd rather these Linux native apps get some TLC. Here's to hoping the developers are reading this stuff.
Hmmm. Well, if we're going for the little things, I will say that the new scrollbars are waaaaayyy better. I'd like to see if they got the new scrollbars onto popup lists and such too. But the scrollbars still could use some tweaking: for example, in MacOS and KDE, you can have both scroll arrows at the bottom or top of the scroll bar. In other words, at the bottom scroll bar, I have buttons to scroll down and up. I love love love that, and even if the Gnome developers don't, it'd be a nice 2.0 option for me to toggle. It'd also be nice if I could select how big/wide scroll bars get -- on a 120 dpi monitor, the scroll bar is fairly narrow. In Windows, I can go into the config and make 40-pixel-wide scrollbars if I need to.
I haven't seen all the screenshots, but I hope that checkboxes and radio buttons will be more visually obvious, too. Sometimes in Gnome I cannot tell at all what the heck is checked and what is not checked. Here's hoping that Gnome 2.0 is the result of some serious rethinking of the widgets.
Dear God. Is that Outlook running on Linux?