When I was a teenager I ended up having my tonsils removed. The doctor thought they looked "funny" and sent off to pathology. Pathology came back and said "lymphoma". So we got to go visit the pediatric oncologist who started doing blood tests, bone marrow samples, and scans looking for cancer.
They were going to crack my chest open to put a center line and start chemo. But the oncologist thought things weren't adding up. I wasn't sick enough. So he ordered a DNA test for the ebstein bar virus (mono). That test came back positive when three other of the regular mono tests came back negative. Apparently mono can look identical to lymphoma under a microscope.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.
OMG! How horrible that we have strict training requirements for doctors! We should just let anyone with a 4 year degree practice medicine, do surgery, and prescribe drugs to babies. That whole apprenticeship and practice thing is a waste of time! Learn by doing!
I have a friend that got all the way into his residency and then while doing an ER stint that involved lemons in an awkward place, decided to change careers to nuclear engineering. He realized he didn't really want to ever deal with something like that again and he didn't want to be a doctor that badly. There is a reason the bar is high.
Why do you need anything more? Reject the change. Say why you rejected it and what can be done to make acceptable. End of story. Now we may have actually taught someone something.
The point everyone is trying to make is that he could have criticized the code without the "incompetent and out to lunch" comment. If he had said "The above code is illegible, inefficient, unsafe, and unacceptable", it would not have been an attack on the coder, but the code itself and served the same point of making sure everyone knew that kind of code is bad and should never be repeated. You can reject the code without attacking the coder.
The additional commentary he adds further attacking the coder is unnecessary and hostile. It creates a hostile environment full of vitriol and fear which many talented individuals do not want to participate in. It creates an environment where one mistake gets you publicly humiliated and lets face it, everyone has a bad idea every now and then. It also creates an environment where no one can question Linus or suggest new ideas. If you have an idea and Linus disagrees you get ripped apart. End of story. In this environment, Linus is infallible and he better like your initial suggestion or else. There is no back and forth. There is no "here's an idea", "that's not going to work", "what if we do it this way...". There is only "Here's an idea", "Your idea sucks and you are a god damn moron, get the fuck out of here."
Large red type and all caps has been shown to discourage people from contributing to discussions. What do you think swearing and personal attacks will do?
I grew up in the US and was raised to not swear, does that mean that I do not belong in the american coding culture? What does that say about our culture? Are you then going to complain about the lack of respect today's youth shows towards authority as well?
If you are willing to acknowledge that different cultures have different methods of dealing with conflict, then why do we settle on an obviously hostile culture and then say "adapt! It's my culture!" when challenged on it? Are you telling me that someone from that other country would not be welcome where you work?
Are you telling me there is no difference between "Please pass the salt" and "Give me the fucking salt, dumb-ass!"? In the end, I'm just asking for salt. It's just words and words don't matter...
Why are we at war? What are we destroying? Bad code? Why is the elimination of bad code so violent?
There is a difference between attacking a person and critiquing their work. There is an art to constructive criticism. As soon as you start swearing you turn it from a critique into an attack. By making personal attacks, you make it personal. I frequently tell my coding minions that their code is bad and they need to rewrite it, but I don't call them names or swear at them. Instead I tell them "this is unacceptable and why." Either they defend themselves (sometimes they have a reason) or they fix it, but we don't get emotional. I don't call them stupid. I don't swear. I don't take them out back and beat them.
"Professional" does not mean we sit around a campfire singing songs and telling each other how much we love each other. It means we treat each other with respect. Everyone has bad ideas and everyone writes bad code. We don't need to get emotional about it and attack each other.
The whole argument that it is acceptable for Linus to convey his anger and shame seems to boil down to developers should "suck it up" and detach emotionally from their code. If that is true, should not Linus also detach emotionally? Or is he the only one who gets emotions?
Can I talk to my kids the way Linus talks to developers? Can your kids talk to you that way? If you don't want your kids talking that way, why is it ok for you or Linus? Anytime you find a situation where there are different standards for different groups, you should ask yourself why. Sometimes the double standard is appropriate. Sometimes it's not. We should still take a moment to ask ourselves which standard is right and is the difference valid.
Several hundred years ago a bunch of men nailed together a bunch of dead trees, left their warm beds, and set sail across a barren, desolate, hostile ocean. They left behind real, tangible, and local problems in the hope of adventure, gold, glory, and a better life.
Today we celebrate their bravery (bravado, whatever) and glorify their achievements. We named an entire continent after one of them.
Exploration is not about immediate returns. We do these things not because they are easy, but because we can. I few weeks ago I launched a weather balloon for a group of elementary and preschool kids. We zip tied a toy to an ice chest, sent it to 80,000 ft, and then gave it and the pictures back to the kids. They loved it. They went home and tied helium balloons to random things round their houses trying to get stuff to fly away.
I don't know how to make the entire world a better place all at once, but I do know a bunch of kids who had one hell of day because some space nutters decided to tie a toy to a balloon for them and I do know that we can make our parts of the world better. Perhaps what we learn will be useful. Perhaps what we will kill ourselves. Perhaps we will fuck up our experiment and discover penicillin.
Kids pick up on (and latch onto) stranger things. My daughter (age 5) was playing Life the other day. She was the doctor with the yellow ($100,000) salary. My husbanded swapped salaries with her to give her something like the $30,000 salary and she was bouncing up and down with joy... The new salary card was green. Each profession card has two people on it (a boy and a girl) and two colored bars to tell you which salary cards are valid. On the doctor card the yellow bar was underneath the male doctor and the green bar was underneath the female doctor. She apparently believed that the colored salaries represented which of the doctors she was and that the male doctor thus had a higher salary than the female doctor as a matter of course so if she wanted to be the girl (which she did) she had to take the lower salary.
That is a sign of unsupervised children. It really doesn't take much effort to put a child lock on the sink so that if they are old enough to open it they are old enough to know not to put random things in their mouth. Also... it doesn't taste good. A five year old is not going to eat enough soap to get sick. An infant or toddle who is capable of opening up the kitchen cabinet, finding the soap and eating enough to die raises a lot of other questions. Like why didn't they try the bleach? My brother got a visit to the ER for trying to drink a bottle of ammonia. It's not about 'looking like candy'. It's about not taking responsibility for your kids.
So... more people died today on US highways than died in that plane crash. Clearly we should ban cars because we can't trust people with that kind of responsibility... Yes it is tragic. Was it preventable? Possibly. But hindsight is 20/20. Lots of people go through rough patches and never kill anyone. People also go through rough patches and murder their infant children, their spouse, etc. How do you differentiate?
Shrinks have an obligation to report if they feel their patients are a danger to themselves or others, but seeing a shrink should not automatically result in your job loss. We don't have pre-crime and we need to be very careful how we handle people who *may* hurt themselves. You should be damn sure, have evidence to back it up, and the threat should be eminent. And you aren't going to catch them all.
So what if you have one of these jobs and are going through a rough patch? Your wife just left you and took the kids, your mom died of cancer...
If admitting to having problems causes you to loose the one thing you love to do, what do you do? Mental health is not an easy problem to solve. We need to make it socially ok to admit that we need help and that everything isn't ok. When someone asks "how are you today?", we should be able to give something other than the canned "I'm good! How are you?"
The reality is that if you want to commit mass murder, it is not hard. Drive a SUV down a crowded street at a fair. Chain some doors shut and light a match.
My bank lets me send money to anyone I want... You give me your account and routing number (which are printed on your checks) and I fill out a form on my bank's website to tell them to send you the money. Your bank account number isn't a secret. And no, my bank doesn't charge me fees for this service. If yours does, you have a shitty bank.
$140K a year for a defense contractor in the DC area (even 14 years ago) is quite reasonable. Down in DC defense salaries are highly inflated. Once you get your tickets (bonus if you are ex-military cause the govies love ex-military on the proposals) you can just jump houses whenever you think you aren't getting paid enough. One of my managers was down there interviewing a guy making > $140k who had done literally nothing but change jobs every couple of years and thought he deserved a pay boost.
Or how about we get rid of all the stupid tax credits in exchange for a lower base rate... You are probably going to give your $1000 to the red cross anyways. If you pay a tax rate of 20% and you get a $1000 deduction, then the govt gives you back $200. You are still out $800.
Now you say that because the government won't give you $200 back, you will only donate $800. However, if the lower base rate gives you the extra $200 as disposable income without having to file the paperwork, then why wouldn't you give it to the Red Cross like you wanted to do before? If the answer is you are going to take the extra $200 and spend it on hookers and blow, then that's on you, not the government.
Personally I like the Fair Tax proposal. Consider this... do we really need to have an entire industry devoted solely to reducing people's tax burdens?
Probably because he only bothered to put 3 digits on the display. And he's 17.
A new hire I'm working with that is a college grad asked me why I was making him validate the system input... Apparently there are some things that you don't learn until it bites you in the ass. I then let him do some XML parsing using string searches a couple months ago and now he is busy rewriting all his code to use the XML parser now that he has discovered how diverse legal XML truly is. I figured a good life lesson was worth it. He has spend the past few days muttering about how he was told the XML messages would never change...
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a teenager I ended up having my tonsils removed. The doctor thought they looked "funny" and sent off to pathology. Pathology came back and said "lymphoma". So we got to go visit the pediatric oncologist who started doing blood tests, bone marrow samples, and scans looking for cancer.
They were going to crack my chest open to put a center line and start chemo. But the oncologist thought things weren't adding up. I wasn't sick enough. So he ordered a DNA test for the ebstein bar virus (mono). That test came back positive when three other of the regular mono tests came back negative. Apparently mono can look identical to lymphoma under a microscope.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.
OMG! How horrible that we have strict training requirements for doctors! We should just let anyone with a 4 year degree practice medicine, do surgery, and prescribe drugs to babies. That whole apprenticeship and practice thing is a waste of time! Learn by doing!
I have a friend that got all the way into his residency and then while doing an ER stint that involved lemons in an awkward place, decided to change careers to nuclear engineering. He realized he didn't really want to ever deal with something like that again and he didn't want to be a doctor that badly. There is a reason the bar is high.
Cause if I'm smuggling cigarettes and booze to my buddy in prison I care that it's a felony...
the above code is unacceptable.
Why do you need anything more? Reject the change. Say why you rejected it and what can be done to make acceptable. End of story. Now we may have actually taught someone something.
You sound like a reasonable person who would probably recognize that a team member was uncomfortable and take steps to correct the situation.
I still don't buy "Linus only hits people when he loves them."
The point everyone is trying to make is that he could have criticized the code without the "incompetent and out to lunch" comment. If he had said "The above code is illegible, inefficient, unsafe, and unacceptable", it would not have been an attack on the coder, but the code itself and served the same point of making sure everyone knew that kind of code is bad and should never be repeated. You can reject the code without attacking the coder.
The additional commentary he adds further attacking the coder is unnecessary and hostile. It creates a hostile environment full of vitriol and fear which many talented individuals do not want to participate in. It creates an environment where one mistake gets you publicly humiliated and lets face it, everyone has a bad idea every now and then. It also creates an environment where no one can question Linus or suggest new ideas. If you have an idea and Linus disagrees you get ripped apart. End of story. In this environment, Linus is infallible and he better like your initial suggestion or else. There is no back and forth. There is no "here's an idea", "that's not going to work", "what if we do it this way...". There is only "Here's an idea", "Your idea sucks and you are a god damn moron, get the fuck out of here."
Large red type and all caps has been shown to discourage people from contributing to discussions. What do you think swearing and personal attacks will do?
I grew up in the US and was raised to not swear, does that mean that I do not belong in the american coding culture? What does that say about our culture? Are you then going to complain about the lack of respect today's youth shows towards authority as well?
If you are willing to acknowledge that different cultures have different methods of dealing with conflict, then why do we settle on an obviously hostile culture and then say "adapt! It's my culture!" when challenged on it? Are you telling me that someone from that other country would not be welcome where you work?
Are you telling me there is no difference between "Please pass the salt" and "Give me the fucking salt, dumb-ass!"? In the end, I'm just asking for salt. It's just words and words don't matter...
Why are we at war? What are we destroying? Bad code? Why is the elimination of bad code so violent?
There is a difference between attacking a person and critiquing their work. There is an art to constructive criticism. As soon as you start swearing you turn it from a critique into an attack. By making personal attacks, you make it personal. I frequently tell my coding minions that their code is bad and they need to rewrite it, but I don't call them names or swear at them. Instead I tell them "this is unacceptable and why." Either they defend themselves (sometimes they have a reason) or they fix it, but we don't get emotional. I don't call them stupid. I don't swear. I don't take them out back and beat them.
"Professional" does not mean we sit around a campfire singing songs and telling each other how much we love each other. It means we treat each other with respect. Everyone has bad ideas and everyone writes bad code. We don't need to get emotional about it and attack each other.
The whole argument that it is acceptable for Linus to convey his anger and shame seems to boil down to developers should "suck it up" and detach emotionally from their code. If that is true, should not Linus also detach emotionally? Or is he the only one who gets emotions?
Can I talk to my kids the way Linus talks to developers? Can your kids talk to you that way? If you don't want your kids talking that way, why is it ok for you or Linus? Anytime you find a situation where there are different standards for different groups, you should ask yourself why. Sometimes the double standard is appropriate. Sometimes it's not. We should still take a moment to ask ourselves which standard is right and is the difference valid.
Um... you still owe the state the sales tax even if you buy it out of state. Look up Use Tax.
Several hundred years ago a bunch of men nailed together a bunch of dead trees, left their warm beds, and set sail across a barren, desolate, hostile ocean. They left behind real, tangible, and local problems in the hope of adventure, gold, glory, and a better life.
Today we celebrate their bravery (bravado, whatever) and glorify their achievements. We named an entire continent after one of them.
Exploration is not about immediate returns. We do these things not because they are easy, but because we can. I few weeks ago I launched a weather balloon for a group of elementary and preschool kids. We zip tied a toy to an ice chest, sent it to 80,000 ft, and then gave it and the pictures back to the kids. They loved it. They went home and tied helium balloons to random things round their houses trying to get stuff to fly away.
I don't know how to make the entire world a better place all at once, but I do know a bunch of kids who had one hell of day because some space nutters decided to tie a toy to a balloon for them and I do know that we can make our parts of the world better. Perhaps what we learn will be useful. Perhaps what we will kill ourselves. Perhaps we will fuck up our experiment and discover penicillin.
Kids pick up on (and latch onto) stranger things. My daughter (age 5) was playing Life the other day. She was the doctor with the yellow ($100,000) salary. My husbanded swapped salaries with her to give her something like the $30,000 salary and she was bouncing up and down with joy... The new salary card was green. Each profession card has two people on it (a boy and a girl) and two colored bars to tell you which salary cards are valid. On the doctor card the yellow bar was underneath the male doctor and the green bar was underneath the female doctor. She apparently believed that the colored salaries represented which of the doctors she was and that the male doctor thus had a higher salary than the female doctor as a matter of course so if she wanted to be the girl (which she did) she had to take the lower salary.
Is that a bad thing? Life moves on... when your industry becomes obsolete, you have to move on too.
Ooo! There was a movie about this! You get a drill ship thing and drive a nuclear bomb into the core!
I think cab drivers don't need a computer to tell them this...
That is a sign of unsupervised children. It really doesn't take much effort to put a child lock on the sink so that if they are old enough to open it they are old enough to know not to put random things in their mouth. Also... it doesn't taste good. A five year old is not going to eat enough soap to get sick. An infant or toddle who is capable of opening up the kitchen cabinet, finding the soap and eating enough to die raises a lot of other questions. Like why didn't they try the bleach? My brother got a visit to the ER for trying to drink a bottle of ammonia. It's not about 'looking like candy'. It's about not taking responsibility for your kids.
I was once asked to come up with one (single) metric that my company can use to track how much money they save by code reuse.
Our entire culture is obsessed with metrics and lacks the stats background to understand them.
So... more people died today on US highways than died in that plane crash. Clearly we should ban cars because we can't trust people with that kind of responsibility... Yes it is tragic. Was it preventable? Possibly. But hindsight is 20/20. Lots of people go through rough patches and never kill anyone. People also go through rough patches and murder their infant children, their spouse, etc. How do you differentiate?
Shrinks have an obligation to report if they feel their patients are a danger to themselves or others, but seeing a shrink should not automatically result in your job loss. We don't have pre-crime and we need to be very careful how we handle people who *may* hurt themselves. You should be damn sure, have evidence to back it up, and the threat should be eminent. And you aren't going to catch them all.
So what if you have one of these jobs and are going through a rough patch? Your wife just left you and took the kids, your mom died of cancer...
If admitting to having problems causes you to loose the one thing you love to do, what do you do? Mental health is not an easy problem to solve. We need to make it socially ok to admit that we need help and that everything isn't ok. When someone asks "how are you today?", we should be able to give something other than the canned "I'm good! How are you?"
The reality is that if you want to commit mass murder, it is not hard. Drive a SUV down a crowded street at a fair. Chain some doors shut and light a match.
My bank lets me send money to anyone I want... You give me your account and routing number (which are printed on your checks) and I fill out a form on my bank's website to tell them to send you the money. Your bank account number isn't a secret. And no, my bank doesn't charge me fees for this service. If yours does, you have a shitty bank.
$140K a year for a defense contractor in the DC area (even 14 years ago) is quite reasonable. Down in DC defense salaries are highly inflated. Once you get your tickets (bonus if you are ex-military cause the govies love ex-military on the proposals) you can just jump houses whenever you think you aren't getting paid enough. One of my managers was down there interviewing a guy making > $140k who had done literally nothing but change jobs every couple of years and thought he deserved a pay boost.
No one said terrorists are smart people... Probably cause smart people have better things to do with their time.
Or how about we get rid of all the stupid tax credits in exchange for a lower base rate... You are probably going to give your $1000 to the red cross anyways. If you pay a tax rate of 20% and you get a $1000 deduction, then the govt gives you back $200. You are still out $800.
Now you say that because the government won't give you $200 back, you will only donate $800. However, if the lower base rate gives you the extra $200 as disposable income without having to file the paperwork, then why wouldn't you give it to the Red Cross like you wanted to do before? If the answer is you are going to take the extra $200 and spend it on hookers and blow, then that's on you, not the government.
Personally I like the Fair Tax proposal. Consider this... do we really need to have an entire industry devoted solely to reducing people's tax burdens?
Probably because he only bothered to put 3 digits on the display. And he's 17.
A new hire I'm working with that is a college grad asked me why I was making him validate the system input... Apparently there are some things that you don't learn until it bites you in the ass. I then let him do some XML parsing using string searches a couple months ago and now he is busy rewriting all his code to use the XML parser now that he has discovered how diverse legal XML truly is. I figured a good life lesson was worth it. He has spend the past few days muttering about how he was told the XML messages would never change...