I have a background in software development, and am disgusted by the situation engineers have to face in most companies today. I have tried to move into management specifically to create the type of company where managers serve engineers, free them from the bullshit and allow the engineers to create cool products that delight the customers. Apart from that I believe managers should mostly get out of the way.
One day, should I ever discover a company that doesn't try to destroy the souls of its engineers, I hope to move back into a technical role and actually create cool products that delight customers again.
But I don't expect to ever see that day. I will die a manager, but at least one that tried to make a difference.
I think it is terrible that managers get paid more than engineers. It is mostly because their ass is on the line when things go wrong I think.
I would much rather see situations where the people that actually create the product get paid the most, and those in a supporting role, like managers get paid less.
The only problem is, this would mean that the engineers would have to take on the responsibility, make the hard decisions, and accept the consequences when things go wrong.
Or maybe that isn't a problem. Maybe that is how it should be.
I am not so sure I agree with this 100%. I see what you mean, and agree that engineers might make good "technical project managers" or team leaders. But I have seen engineers in senior management roles destroy companies by thinking like engineers. It required people with a good understanding of things like finance, the market, and the customer to come in and save the situation.
Including engineers. But I think they are right. The people that actually create the value are the most important. Ideally they could do this without managers, but most companies are a long way from that. Managers are less important, and probably should be seen more as servants than bosses of the engineers, but they are still required, at least for the meantime in most companies.
I am really excited by some radical companies that are experimenting with not having managers. It does require especially good engineers willing and able to take on some of the management responsibilities though.
I agree. There are movements around to try and change things. There have been since the 60s. Managers resist them for fear of losing power.
Engineers laugh at them, don't understand them, or don't care. They see them as some new management fad, ignore it, and go on suffering under the current bullshit system.
If engineers don't care, nothing will change, and they only have themselves to blame.
I always thought this 2 track thing was typical. Most consulting companies have 2 tracks like you mentioned. Sometimes I see 3 tracks. The technical as you mentioned, and the management role split into 2 tracks. Those with an external focus who do sales and marketing, company strategy and product design who know the business domain, the customer, the market and the products really well (I guess a project manager track), and those with a more internal focus that look after the company and employees and understand team work, motivation, pricing, training, employment law, contracts, internal culture etc, (the line management track I guess).
All very different skills, and very different focus areas. Often requiring quite different personalities too.
Well that is ok. Good engineers probably shouldn't try switching to a management career. A lot of people are under the assumption that engineering manager is a promotion, and builds on the skills of, engineers. Not true. It is or should be a very different job.
You don't want managers with a strong technical background in most cases, or they end up neglecting their management duties and start poking their nose in and micromanaging the engineers.
Managers should probably rather have a background in something else like psychology, or the business domain, or finance or statistics or something.
Heh I agreed with the first bit. But I thought the second bit was going somewhere else.
The best engineers are self managing, communicative, get on well with others, have a customer focus, understand the market and the domain and have an understanding of how knowledge work flows through a product development system. They understand risks and can make decisions. They don't get bogged down in the details of the latest tech toy, and are able to deliver, constantly what the customer wants with high quality.
Good engineers can still fall short in one or two areas, that is why we need managers.
Managers don't need to know the details of what the engineers are doing, we have engineers for that. Especially for managers that are closer to the market or the customer, or other parts of the business.
It is fairly legitimate that those who can't "do" in the sense of the actual engineering work, are found in management roles. That is ok though. You could spin it around and say that those who can't manage end up "doing", which is fine too. Both types of role are required to successfully generate market value.
Anyway, it isn't usually engineers who are promoted to management roles, but product people such as business analysts in the software world, or experts in the actual domain like bankers or insurance experts. If we consider a company that makes say medical devices, it is more likely that doctors or people with a medical background will become the managers rather than the engineers who work on the products.
That would probably be "leadership", which is slightly different from management, and possibly a potential replacement for what we recognise today as management.
Also good engineering managers won't often be, or need to be, good engineers themselves. Just because someone knows about electronics or programming, doesn't mean they know about things like risk management, team motivation, pricing of knowledge work, what the market wants, etc. And they are unlikely to be interested in much of the paperwork aspects, or the politics and the continual selling and marketing of ideas that needs to take place.
A good engineering manager is unlikely to (need to) be a good engineer. Fairly different personalities are required as well as skill sets.
Science is explicitly NOT a moral pursuit. Science is objective, morality is subjective. There would be no need for morality if things could be scientifically proven good or bad in the way that things can be proven true or false, or arguments valid or invalid.
Science does seek truth, morality does not. The best it can seek is consensus.Science is indeed impartial, morality is about picking a side. "Collective well being" may be one end goal of scientific thinking, but never at the expense of truth, and as soon as one engages in science specifically for such a goal one is no longer impartial.
Also date-rate is a poor topic for such an experiment as it is easy for most people to conclude that it is wrong based on universally shared principles (note: nothing to do with science). In fact it sounds like the researchers didn't even think twice about forming such a moral position in advance and merely compared to which degree the participants chose a moral position that agreed with theirs. Far better would be the trickier issues like political positions, abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, vegetarianism etc.
Even if the experiment was sound, the interpretation is ridiculous. The observed correlation could still be interesting, but we would need to conduct more, better, experiments and interpret the results better.
My hypothesis would be : Assuming science enthusiasts go on less dates as young singles than the general population they have less exposure to situations where tricky situations arrive, i.e. getting drunk and having sex. Many of the less-scientifically minded have probably had situations where a mistake was made, or judgement was poorly executed, and are less likely to make blanket judgements condemning certain behaviours outright. A science enthusiast that hasn't been in that situation is likely to consider himself, should he find himself in that situation, as being capable of exemplary behaviour, he may not consider himself as likely to make mistakes, have less tolerance for mistake making in general, and more prepared to take a harder moral position against the very human behaviour of making mistakes.
You need a full service, deep Kanban implementation to evolve your process into a flow based one. You can have separate classes of service, with separate prices, for new development, and support and operations tickets with different urgencies. Once upstream stakeholders are clear on team capacity, they can negotiate amongst themselves about which items should be done next, which can be done later, and which are probably not going to be done at all. I think with a good system design, concrete measurements of throughput and lead time, paying attention to the way work flows through the system and full transparency you can at least make upstream stakeholders aware that they cannot have it all.
I am a software developer, with a CS degree and I only spend about 20-40% of the day writing code. The rest is sitting around in front of the white-board with the team actually developing the software, talking with customers about requirements, a few meetings, attending conferences, giving and attending presentations, preparing reports, researching.
I did have one employer once who thought that software developers just sat at the computer typing in code all day. I didn't stay there very long.
A software developer spends about as much time typing into a pc as the typical office worker, and about as much time with people as your typical office worker too.
Cropping and pan and scan are the same thing. The other (better) way to do the conversion is via letterboxing. 16:9 material is actually stored in the disk as anamorphic, which does change the aspect ratio of the pictures (and restores them an playback.)
Don't forget the audio, it looks like uncompressed PCM is fast becoming the standard high quality audio stream (due to many players not being able to even bitstream some of the advanced audio codecs). And that really chews up space. Sounds damn good though!
Dr. Who is only recorded in SD. They have no plans to start recording in HD as they say the amount of special effects they have in the show would be too expensive to do in HD. But it should still be widescreen.
Whether 4:3 stuff is pillarboxed or pan scanned when broadcast digitally should be up to the settings on the tv itself. The station should only have to make the decision with analog broadcasts, (and in my opinion should always pillarbox and never pan scan. And never ever stretch it) Trimming shit off the left and right might have (sort of) worked for playing movies on 4:3 tvs, but it just doesnt work to trim the top and bottom off a 4:3 picture to play on 16:9 tvs.
Hi, I am a kiwi, who has been living overseas for 6 and a half years, and I used to vote libertarian. Anyway, I am coming back soon, because I find Europe to be too socialist for my tastes, and will be looking into starting a new political movement based on Freedom. It will be partially based on the Libertarianz, and partially based on the "Pirate Parties".
The issues I have with the Libertarianz are: I dislike the fact they specifically include "intellectual property" as deserving of the same sort of protection as physical property, fair enough, but this is specifically listed in their constitution as an non negotiable policy of theirs, whereas I see the extent that "intellectual property" is to be protected as an issue to be dealt with normally as legislation dealt with in Parliamentm (and personally dont see the point in intellectual property laws at all, although I wont enforce my personal beliefs upon the party I would be interested in helping to create).
I find their over the top America-worshipping symbolism (statue of liberty etc) distasteful and frankly bizarre as a I dont actually percieve the current America to be particularly more free than the current NZ. Its a huge turn off to most especially young Kiwis who recognize the USA as being rather far from an ideal role model for NZ.
Their press releases, website, policies etc are worded in an over the top inflammatory way which reduces their credibility.
They intend to totally reform the NZ political system by introducing a constitution, which is too ambitious for a nation like NZ, whereas I would prefer to work within the current MMP framework, either as part of the opposition, or a coalition partner, at least initially. Lets face it, the Labour Party and Helen Clark havent done that terrible a job, NZ in general is better suited towards slow gradual improvements rather then anything too radical and revolutionary, and many people are in fact happy with the current level of socialist meddling in private lives. However I believe just as many people are interested in opposing such meddling, and thus would like to see a party in Parliament address those peoples needs.
They base their politics rigidly on the philosophy of objectivism which I dont believe is especially productive. Most political issues are after all fairly subjective, and the truely objective issues are mostly self evident and fairly common sense and represented by values that are upheld by most parties anyway.
Anyone who wants to be a part of this please get in touch.
"Exactly which law makes torrent files illegal?" is as stupid a question as "Exactly which law makes operating a finger on a trigger illegal?". Well nobody condems the act of pulling the trigger on a gun; if somebody gets killed as a consequence, though, I think you won't find it absurd that the police is involved.
Great analogy, bad interpretation. Operating a finger on a trigger is not illegal, and neither should be, or a lot of soldiers, hunters and farmers would be in a lot of trouble. Murdering someone is however, and should be, illegal. In the same way, operating a web sites that shares torrent files containing no copyright material at all is not illegal and neither should it be, but distributing actual copyright material, that, well actually that shouldnt be illegal either, but it is, so at least the police would have reason to investigate people doing that, but taking down a torrent site just has no legal justification whatsoever.
Well I dunno about IT. I mean instaling software and plugging in network cables and adding users to a server doesnt really require much in the way of the latest academic research.
But as a software developer I have often needed to look up academic journals. Sometimes scientific, sometimes engineering. Depends on the projects though. Just as often I have to look up tax and finance law as well, for the financial software.
haha your a dick: infer Audio pronunciation of "inferred" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-fûr) v. inferred, inferring, infers v. tr.
1. To conclude from evidence or premises.
2. To reason from circumstance; surmise: We can infer that his motive in publishing the diary was less than honorable.
3. To lead to as a consequence or conclusion: "Socrates argued that a statue inferred the existence of a sculptor" (Academy).
4. To hint; imply.
I actually looked up both words, as I do to every single word I ever type in a word forum (after all web forums are the epitome of literary prestige) and concluded that infact imply was the inferior choice.
Yeah I think it works with mirroring(raid 1), but wont work with striping (raid 0), wont work with RAID 5 or 10 (Heck most software raids can only do 0 or 1 anyway)
Sorry, I just inferred that the typical home user will be using his large data drives for audio and video files. Very broad generalization I know... And I didnt mean these drives have fixed rates but the files themselves, a 128kbps mp3 is only going to require so much performance from a drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a background in software development, and am disgusted by the situation engineers have to face in most companies today. I have tried to move into management specifically to create the type of company where managers serve engineers, free them from the bullshit and allow the engineers to create cool products that delight the customers. Apart from that I believe managers should mostly get out of the way.
One day, should I ever discover a company that doesn't try to destroy the souls of its engineers, I hope to move back into a technical role and actually create cool products that delight customers again.
But I don't expect to ever see that day. I will die a manager, but at least one that tried to make a difference.
I think it is terrible that managers get paid more than engineers. It is mostly because their ass is on the line when things go wrong I think.
I would much rather see situations where the people that actually create the product get paid the most, and those in a supporting role, like managers get paid less.
The only problem is, this would mean that the engineers would have to take on the responsibility, make the hard decisions, and accept the consequences when things go wrong.
Or maybe that isn't a problem. Maybe that is how it should be.
I am not so sure I agree with this 100%. I see what you mean, and agree that engineers might make good "technical project managers" or team leaders. But I have seen engineers in senior management roles destroy companies by thinking like engineers. It required people with a good understanding of things like finance, the market, and the customer to come in and save the situation.
Including engineers. But I think they are right. The people that actually create the value are the most important. Ideally they could do this without managers, but most companies are a long way from that. Managers are less important, and probably should be seen more as servants than bosses of the engineers, but they are still required, at least for the meantime in most companies.
I am really excited by some radical companies that are experimenting with not having managers. It does require especially good engineers willing and able to take on some of the management responsibilities though.
I agree. There are movements around to try and change things. There have been since the 60s. Managers resist them for fear of losing power.
Engineers laugh at them, don't understand them, or don't care. They see them as some new management fad, ignore it, and go on suffering under the current bullshit system.
If engineers don't care, nothing will change, and they only have themselves to blame.
I always thought this 2 track thing was typical. Most consulting companies have 2 tracks like you mentioned. Sometimes I see 3 tracks. The technical as you mentioned, and the management role split into 2 tracks. Those with an external focus who do sales and marketing, company strategy and product design who know the business domain, the customer, the market and the products really well (I guess a project manager track), and those with a more internal focus that look after the company and employees and understand team work, motivation, pricing, training, employment law, contracts, internal culture etc, (the line management track I guess).
All very different skills, and very different focus areas. Often requiring quite different personalities too.
Well that is ok. Good engineers probably shouldn't try switching to a management career. A lot of people are under the assumption that engineering manager is a promotion, and builds on the skills of, engineers. Not true. It is or should be a very different job.
You don't want managers with a strong technical background in most cases, or they end up neglecting their management duties and start poking their nose in and micromanaging the engineers.
Managers should probably rather have a background in something else like psychology, or the business domain, or finance or statistics or something.
Heh I agreed with the first bit. But I thought the second bit was going somewhere else.
The best engineers are self managing, communicative, get on well with others, have a customer focus, understand the market and the domain and have an understanding of how knowledge work flows through a product development system. They understand risks and can make decisions. They don't get bogged down in the details of the latest tech toy, and are able to deliver, constantly what the customer wants with high quality.
Good engineers can still fall short in one or two areas, that is why we need managers.
Managers don't need to know the details of what the engineers are doing, we have engineers for that. Especially for managers that are closer to the market or the customer, or other parts of the business.
It is fairly legitimate that those who can't "do" in the sense of the actual engineering work, are found in management roles. That is ok though. You could spin it around and say that those who can't manage end up "doing", which is fine too. Both types of role are required to successfully generate market value.
Anyway, it isn't usually engineers who are promoted to management roles, but product people such as business analysts in the software world, or experts in the actual domain like bankers or insurance experts. If we consider a company that makes say medical devices, it is more likely that doctors or people with a medical background will become the managers rather than the engineers who work on the products.
That would probably be "leadership", which is slightly different from management, and possibly a potential replacement for what we recognise today as management.
Also good engineering managers won't often be, or need to be, good engineers themselves. Just because someone knows about electronics or programming, doesn't mean they know about things like risk management, team motivation, pricing of knowledge work, what the market wants, etc. And they are unlikely to be interested in much of the paperwork aspects, or the politics and the continual selling and marketing of ideas that needs to take place.
A good engineering manager is unlikely to (need to) be a good engineer. Fairly different personalities are required as well as skill sets.
The 400 Euro mini-job is probably the equivalent.
Science is explicitly NOT a moral pursuit. Science is objective, morality is subjective. There would be no need for morality if things could be scientifically proven good or bad in the way that things can be proven true or false, or arguments valid or invalid.
Science does seek truth, morality does not. The best it can seek is consensus.Science is indeed impartial, morality is about picking a side. "Collective well being" may be one end goal of scientific thinking, but never at the expense of truth, and as soon as one engages in science specifically for such a goal one is no longer impartial.
Also date-rate is a poor topic for such an experiment as it is easy for most people to conclude that it is wrong based on universally shared principles (note: nothing to do with science). In fact it sounds like the researchers didn't even think twice about forming such a moral position in advance and merely compared to which degree the participants chose a moral position that agreed with theirs. Far better would be the trickier issues like political positions, abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, vegetarianism etc.
Even if the experiment was sound, the interpretation is ridiculous. The observed correlation could still be interesting, but we would need to conduct more, better, experiments and interpret the results better.
My hypothesis would be : Assuming science enthusiasts go on less dates as young singles than the general population they have less exposure to situations where tricky situations arrive, i.e. getting drunk and having sex. Many of the less-scientifically minded have probably had situations where a mistake was made, or judgement was poorly executed, and are less likely to make blanket judgements condemning certain behaviours outright. A science enthusiast that hasn't been in that situation is likely to consider himself, should he find himself in that situation, as being capable of exemplary behaviour, he may not consider himself as likely to make mistakes, have less tolerance for mistake making in general, and more prepared to take a harder moral position against the very human behaviour of making mistakes.
And what the hell is "belief in science"?
I have seen more intellectual rigour on /r/Atheism
You need a full service, deep Kanban implementation to evolve your process into a flow based one. You can have separate classes of service, with separate prices, for new development, and support and operations tickets with different urgencies. Once upstream stakeholders are clear on team capacity, they can negotiate amongst themselves about which items should be done next, which can be done later, and which are probably not going to be done at all. I think with a good system design, concrete measurements of throughput and lead time, paying attention to the way work flows through the system and full transparency you can at least make upstream stakeholders aware that they cannot have it all.
I am a software developer, with a CS degree and I only spend about 20-40% of the day writing code. The rest is sitting around in front of the white-board with the team actually developing the software, talking with customers about requirements, a few meetings, attending conferences, giving and attending presentations, preparing reports, researching.
I did have one employer once who thought that software developers just sat at the computer typing in code all day. I didn't stay there very long.
A software developer spends about as much time typing into a pc as the typical office worker, and about as much time with people as your typical office worker too.
Cropping and pan and scan are the same thing.
The other (better) way to do the conversion is via letterboxing. 16:9 material is actually stored in the disk as anamorphic, which does change the aspect ratio of the pictures (and restores them an playback.)
Don't forget the audio, it looks like uncompressed PCM is fast becoming the standard high quality audio stream (due to many players not being able to even bitstream some of the advanced audio codecs). And that really chews up space. Sounds damn good though!
There is no broadcast standard for 1080p anyway, its always either 720p or 1080i isnt it?
Yeah but pal is pal, and ntsc is ntsc and compression was never really relevant.
Dr. Who is only recorded in SD. They have no plans to start recording in HD as they say the amount of special effects they have in the show would be too expensive to do in HD. But it should still be widescreen.
Whether 4:3 stuff is pillarboxed or pan scanned when broadcast digitally should be up to the settings on the tv itself. The station should only have to make the decision with analog broadcasts, (and in my opinion should always pillarbox and never pan scan. And never ever stretch it) Trimming shit off the left and right might have (sort of) worked for playing movies on 4:3 tvs, but it just doesnt work to trim the top and bottom off a 4:3 picture to play on 16:9 tvs.
Hi,
I am a kiwi, who has been living overseas for 6 and a half years, and I used to vote libertarian. Anyway, I am coming back soon, because I find Europe to be too socialist for my tastes, and will be looking into starting a new political movement based on Freedom. It will be partially based on the Libertarianz, and partially based on the "Pirate Parties".
The issues I have with the Libertarianz are:
I dislike the fact they specifically include "intellectual property" as deserving of the same sort of protection as physical property, fair enough, but this is specifically listed in their constitution as an non negotiable policy of theirs, whereas I see the extent that "intellectual property" is to be protected as an issue to be dealt with normally as legislation dealt with in Parliamentm (and personally dont see the point in intellectual property laws at all, although I wont enforce my personal beliefs upon the party I would be interested in helping to create).
I find their over the top America-worshipping symbolism (statue of liberty etc) distasteful and frankly bizarre as a I dont actually percieve the current America to be particularly more free than the current NZ. Its a huge turn off to most especially young Kiwis who recognize the USA as being rather far from an ideal role model for NZ.
Their press releases, website, policies etc are worded in an over the top inflammatory way which reduces their credibility.
They intend to totally reform the NZ political system by introducing a constitution, which is too ambitious for a nation like NZ, whereas I would prefer to work within the current MMP framework, either as part of the opposition, or a coalition partner, at least initially. Lets face it, the Labour Party and Helen Clark havent done that terrible a job, NZ in general is better suited towards slow gradual improvements rather then anything too radical and revolutionary, and many people are in fact happy with the current level of socialist meddling in private lives. However I believe just as many people are interested in opposing such meddling, and thus would like to see a party in Parliament address those peoples needs.
They base their politics rigidly on the philosophy of objectivism which I dont believe is especially productive. Most political issues are after all fairly subjective, and the truely objective issues are mostly self evident and fairly common sense and represented by values that are upheld by most parties anyway.
Anyone who wants to be a part of this please get in touch.
Great analogy, bad interpretation. Operating a finger on a trigger is not illegal, and neither should be, or a lot of soldiers, hunters and farmers would be in a lot of trouble. Murdering someone is however, and should be, illegal. In the same way, operating a web sites that shares torrent files containing no copyright material at all is not illegal and neither should it be, but distributing actual copyright material, that, well actually that shouldnt be illegal either, but it is, so at least the police would have reason to investigate people doing that, but taking down a torrent site just has no legal justification whatsoever.
Well I dunno about IT. I mean instaling software and plugging in network cables and adding users to a server doesnt really require much in the way of the latest academic research.
But as a software developer I have often needed to look up academic journals. Sometimes scientific, sometimes engineering. Depends on the projects though. Just as often I have to look up tax and finance law as well, for the financial software.
haha your a dick:
infer Audio pronunciation of "inferred" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-fûr)
v. inferred, inferring, infers
v. tr.
1. To conclude from evidence or premises.
2. To reason from circumstance; surmise: We can infer that his motive in publishing the diary was less than honorable.
3. To lead to as a consequence or conclusion: "Socrates argued that a statue inferred the existence of a sculptor" (Academy).
4. To hint; imply.
I actually looked up both words, as I do to every single word I ever type in a word forum (after all web forums are the epitome of literary prestige) and concluded that infact imply was the inferior choice.
Yeah I think it works with mirroring(raid 1), but wont work with striping (raid 0), wont work with RAID 5 or 10 (Heck most software raids can only do 0 or 1 anyway)
Sorry, I just inferred that the typical home user will be using his large data drives for audio and video files. Very broad generalization I know... And I didnt mean these drives have fixed rates but the files themselves, a 128kbps mp3 is only going to require so much performance from a drive.