If your idea of fun is goof off all day and fight each other with nerf guns or foosball then I doubt you will find it.
If instead your idea of fun is the job that forces you to think out of the box and push you to think of new ways of solving old problems with new technology, then these are all over the place. You just have to keep looking.
Also keep in mind many screwed up places use the foosball tables,nerf guns and free soft drinks as a way to attract younger/single/unattached employees that are easier to exploit than married/with-children employees (no wife or girlfriend to bitch if you work 60-hr weeks or longer).
You just can't help yourself. You finally managed to write something completely neutral and you got excited and let your signature anti-Microsoft remark slip by.
Now wait for the backslash from all the users that think they have a God-given right to run a server off their broadband connection. As for myself I run webservers (yes, Microsoft webservers, bite me) but I got a firewall and I block everything, so these are for my own consumption.
I read that article thru a link at the bottom of C-net's news.com a few days ago. Why bother/. it? Are you implying/. is the only place we look for news?
My company has been doing telecommuting for years. We have people from the lowest ranks all the way to the CTO telecommute for a very long time (we are in the DC Metro area and our former CTO used to fly from Rhode Island twice a month, the rest of his business was done over the phone and thru email and instant messengers).
My own team has a special flex time arrangement. Option one is you telecommute full time and are not entitled to your own office, and we will provide you with a laptop loaded with all the software you need, cover your telecommunication costs and you will only have to show up around the office once or twice a month.
Option two is the real flex time: you do whatever the hell you want as long as we see you around the office 3 times a week. As long as your project manager is happy I am happy. We will usually pay for your ISP and in some specific cases we will even pay for broadband (like in my own personal case).
Flex time rocks because sometimes the muse hits you at 11:00 PM and you prefer to pull an all-nighter than wait til the morning only to find the muse is gone. If you like to work these weird hours the only thing you do is send your boss, the front desk and any project managers an email saying that you worked til 5AM and that you are going to sleep until the afternoon. That's all and nobody will bother you.
BTW, flex time workers are not entitled to a laptop, they get a workstation and an office (no cubes here, the cubes are for telecommuters that are visiting) and you are not entitled to have company software installed at your home pc.
Why is this cheap?
Our branch is in Bethesda, Maryland. This is a very hostile place to find parking, so one of the perks is to pay for our garage space. Stay home and you pay your own parking. The company saves $70 on each employee that stays home. Office space is very expensive. Keeping you at home means more people can have an office and we don't have to tear down the walls to make cubicle islands. There are many savings like that that will add up to significant savings over the year.
The employee saves too. Less gas spent. Since Starbucks is now 2 miles away instead of across the street you cut down from $7/day in Cappuccinos to $3.50 every other day. Better bandwidth (my cable is always faster than the fractional t1 at the office) and PEACE.
Yes, PEACE. Nobody kocking on your office door every 10 minutes to show you something you don't really care. No b.s. meetings (if the meeting is important you will teleconference to it). You also save time in the commute (I save between one and three hours a day just by staying home).
Still, it has a downside. A programmer that works at home works longer hours because of the lack of distractions. Some people are not compatible with telecommuting because of lack of discipline. And some just crave the human contact.
You also have to be on alert for abusive project managers that take advantage that you are working from home, especially if you are single. You have to learn to turn off the instant messengers after a certain hour or you risk project managers continuously pushing you to work 12-hour days and weekends.
Right now I manage 8 programmers. One lives over 2 hours away and I see her probably every other week. Another one shows up probably once a month. They are both senior developers and the only thing they need me for is to approve their timesheets. The other guys are not as independent, so I make them show up at the office 3 times a week until I can see that they are mature enough to stay home.
This is a very old argument. My @home terms of service of over a year ago already prohibit me from hosting any kind of service from my @home connection. This is really annoying to us developers because it forces us to host ouside of our home offices if we want to show running web code to a client.
Funny thing is that the only thing they filter is web traffic. I can ftp to any of my machines just fine. P2P software used to work but that is in question. pcAhywhere and terminal services work fine too.
We always ask for what computer games the guy plays. Real time strategy and 3D shooters are our top picks.
We actually use that question to put the applicant at ease. I also ask them if they play softball (recruiting for the team never stops, hehe) and what would they pick between IE and Netscape. The browser question has no right answer, we just want to know the reasoning behind it.
I don't like to play 20 questions, I prefer instead to test them for problem solving skills. I also want to make sure the guy doesn't turn into a total asshole or a heap of nerves every time a red light blinks.
This movie rocked. Theather packed wall-to-wall, nobody talking in the middle of the movie, nobody even left!
And yeah, Dirk Diggler was boring as hell but still did not screw up the movie. The apes were brilliant, downright scary. And the movie was good entertainment, well worth the $8.50 I had to pay for it (not like A.I., which I walked out at the end feeling cheated).
There is no way a new movie can measure up to the standards of the classic, but that doesn't mean we have to be unfair. Planet of the Apes was the first movie I have seen in months that I would not hesitate to pay to see it in the theater at least two more times, and then I'll buy the DVD too.
I am a the senior programmer for my company and the manager of the programming team. The main problem I see in recruiting is that nobody wants an entry level job. People decide to switch careers because of the promises of riches in the programming sector. They read the dummies book and think that entitles them to a senior developer job.
Our own cost structure is an issue. If out of a team of 7 programmers I have 3 that are at the top level and one that I will either have to promote in 6 months or he will get a better paying job somewhere else, then my other 3 programmers have to be juniors just so I don't break my budget.
The other reason for keeping these juniors is that every programming job does not require a rocket scientist, and project managers will start bitching when they have to use a $150/hr programmer for something simple enough for a $15/hr intern.
Hell, we even considered using a coding sweat shop in India! We had three different organizations in India trying to sell us into using one of their virtual programming teams. We could take advantage of the strength of the dollar to get top notch programming at a great saving. Cooler still, we could use the 12-hr time difference to our advantage. I could assign them work at 5 PM EST knowing that when I came back to the office the next day at 7 AM they would have spent 12 hrs dealing with it.
I absolutely love my @home cable modem, even more since my employers are willing to pay for it because I telecommute up to 50%.
Still, I am completely TERRORIZED every time the modem loses lock, because first tier support sucks.
The one thing I have to give them is that over the last year the uptime of my connection has been outstanding. My only complain so far is that I am so addicted to the freaking thing that even 5 minutes without the modem locking up already drives me crazy!
The other thing I like is that the system here is not biased towards any specific OS. I got two machines running Windows 2000 and an old machine as a free BSD testbed and all 3 run fine. I have tested it with Mandrake, RedHat, SuSe, Win98 and WinME and in every instance it works fine.
DRMO = Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office.
DoD pretty much mounts everything on industry standard racks. That means you have a fair shot at finding an old one at a DRMO sale close to where you live. When I was stationed in Germany they even had special sales open to German nationals, so you don't have to be a DoD employee to take advantage of this.
Worst case scenario you will have to repaint it and probably add power cords and fans.
As for size, we had many different models, the only requirement was that they had to fit 19-in wide components (the racks themselves always were exactly 2-feet wide). WE had some models small enough to sit on a desk, so I bet you can find something for what you have in mind.
My company issued me both a Palm IIIxe and an iPaq. I love both. I like the Palm if I just need to carry contacts and appointments around. I like the iPaq when I don't feel like carrying a laptop around.
If I had to use my own money I would get a IIIxe without even blinking (I will probably have to hit eBay since there are very few of these still around). If I could afford it then I would get the iPaq, but I would be completely happy with just the IIIxe.
1."Show Stopper." The client absolutely refuses to sign-off on the project until this issue is solved.
2. "Mickey Mouse." Very minor error that can usually take a minute or two to fix, but wastes more of your time in the error reporting, documentation, and follow-ups.
3. "Ghost." Only the client sees it but can't replicate it or give you instructions so you can do that. The error is real (the client will send you a screen capture), but they can't helo you in recreating it.
That's one thing that is really irritating about pvcs: it works too well.
And every pvcs known to man had at least one of them early birds. They either show up at 6:00 AM and lock a file til 4:00 PM or worse: They lock all their files before they leave for a long weekend and nobody else is trusted with admin access to the pvcs tree!
VSS was cool but it was annoying as hell to figure out how to send the checked out files to a test webserver. That way if you make one change you can run it live. Once that was out of the door we only had to handle with the damn early birds.
This would not be a big deal if you are a marketing major, but if you major on ANYTHING that has the potential of putting a human life at risk then you are playing a very dangerous game whenever you cheat at school.
If you are a mechanical engineering major one day you may get stuck dsigning high pressure vessels. One of these things blows up and people get killed. Then you are liable. Imagine screwing up the design for the brakes of a school bus.
You are a programmer: You are working for a DoD contractor building a fire control system. It goes nuts and the missile hits a friendly target. People died because you cheated instead of learning the material properly.
You are a mechanical engineer and cheated while taking your mechanics statics/dynamics. One of your buildings collapses. You will be a prime candidate for a monstrous lawsuit. WHenI was in engineering school we were told that when you design things like that you have to keep in mind that if anything happens to in in the next 10 yrs you will be blamed for it.
Have you seen the licensing for MS SQL Server 2000 lately?
US $20,000/processor for enterprise edition. Maybe you meant Access by itself.
As for why? This is very simple. We are risking the integrity of the data that keeps a company alive. We have to be very conservative when putting all that data to risk. Personally I will only recommend Oracle 8+ or SQL Server 7+. I started playing with Informix Redbrick warehouses about 6 months ago and true, it's expensive as hell but (1) it's bulletproof and (2) our client had it already, so it did not impact the bottom line of the contract.
I will consider posgres as long as I have trained personnel available to deal with the server (we are a Microsoft-only shop for now). I will not consider mySQL until I get solid proof that it passes ACID and it beats posgres.
To be honest, I won't even recommend Oracle anymore. If the client has a license for Oracle already paid for and gathering dust we'll use it to our advantage. If they have to buy licenses we'll recommend SQL server every time.
I refuse to do any database work on Access, I prefer SQL server and Oracle depending on the client's preferences. Still, I have to give MS Access credit for being so damn easy to slap together a quick and dirty interface to a database.
The only problems is that I have are:
1. Some people at the office are still living in 1995, and see Access as a solid solution for building a whole system.
2. Access is not free. You will have to pay for every user (if I write the front end in ASP/Perl/JSP/etc then the user only needs a browser).
The encryption acts as a black box. The software does not know anything about how the commands are transmitted. It sends out stuff but by the time it is broadcasted it is garbled.
The only thing the cracker will learn is what the telemetry matrix looks like. Which would top the list of pretty damn boring exploits to achieve. THe last telemetry matrix I got to see was a 4-in thick stack of printouts! All commercial systems use something like that so you will have the thrill of finding if the solid state power amplifier in channel X is running 1.02% hotter than usual.
If the satellite is military then it has [...description of the encryption deleted, the security clearance had a hell of a NDA, sorry...] encryption for the command uplink/downlink. You just don't hack a military satellite because you have the source code.
I was a payload controller for 4 years. The components that do the encryption are bulky and cumbersome, and the software takes a month of classroom training only to qualify to sit by an experienced controller for OJT. Gimme a break.
I forgot to add that for last summer we had a few interns. A bunch of college kids and one kid still in high school (not even a senior!).
So what happened?
Some of the college kids got lucky enough to learn Macromedia Flash, so we put them to work on a project. The lazy ones were sent to do quality assurance on a project and the bored one ended up being sort of a stage hand at our media studio.
What about the high school kid?
We took him to our web development team, and paired him with a mid-level programmer hoping he could keep him busy and out of trouble. A week later the kid had mastered Pathware and LearningSpace (nobody else had a clue). Two weeks later he was functioning as a staff programmer, and he was training OUR guy on Pathware and Learningspace!
When summer was over nobody wanted him to leave and we almost issued him a laptop and cell phone so he could do contract work for us. Only reason we did not do it was because we did not want to make a wreck out of his senior year in HS. He stays in touch and if I am lucky he will come to work for me this summer before he is gone for college.
Slashdot Mirror
If your idea of fun is goof off all day and fight each other with nerf guns or foosball then I doubt you will find it.
If instead your idea of fun is the job that forces you to think out of the box and push you to think of new ways of solving old problems with new technology, then these are all over the place. You just have to keep looking.
Also keep in mind many screwed up places use the foosball tables,nerf guns and free soft drinks as a way to attract younger/single/unattached employees that are easier to exploit than married/with-children employees (no wife or girlfriend to bitch if you work 60-hr weeks or longer).
You just can't help yourself. You finally managed to write something completely neutral and you got excited and let your signature anti-Microsoft remark slip by.
Now wait for the backslash from all the users that think they have a God-given right to run a server off their broadband connection. As for myself I run webservers (yes, Microsoft webservers, bite me) but I got a firewall and I block everything, so these are for my own consumption.
Is it really that hard to check the facts first before slashdotting something?
I know you are going to bash Microsoft no matter what, but it would be nice if every now and then you actually try to check the story first.
I read that article thru a link at the bottom of C-net's news.com a few days ago. Why bother /. it? Are you implying /. is the only place we look for news?
Gee...
My company has been doing telecommuting for years. We have people from the lowest ranks all the way to the CTO telecommute for a very long time (we are in the DC Metro area and our former CTO used to fly from Rhode Island twice a month, the rest of his business was done over the phone and thru email and instant messengers).
My own team has a special flex time arrangement. Option one is you telecommute full time and are not entitled to your own office, and we will provide you with a laptop loaded with all the software you need, cover your telecommunication costs and you will only have to show up around the office once or twice a month.
Option two is the real flex time: you do whatever the hell you want as long as we see you around the office 3 times a week. As long as your project manager is happy I am happy. We will usually pay for your ISP and in some specific cases we will even pay for broadband (like in my own personal case).
Flex time rocks because sometimes the muse hits you at 11:00 PM and you prefer to pull an all-nighter than wait til the morning only to find the muse is gone. If you like to work these weird hours the only thing you do is send your boss, the front desk and any project managers an email saying that you worked til 5AM and that you are going to sleep until the afternoon. That's all and nobody will bother you.
BTW, flex time workers are not entitled to a laptop, they get a workstation and an office (no cubes here, the cubes are for telecommuters that are visiting) and you are not entitled to have company software installed at your home pc.
Why is this cheap?
Our branch is in Bethesda, Maryland. This is a very hostile place to find parking, so one of the perks is to pay for our garage space. Stay home and you pay your own parking. The company saves $70 on each employee that stays home. Office space is very expensive. Keeping you at home means more people can have an office and we don't have to tear down the walls to make cubicle islands. There are many savings like that that will add up to significant savings over the year.
The employee saves too. Less gas spent. Since Starbucks is now 2 miles away instead of across the street you cut down from $7/day in Cappuccinos to $3.50 every other day. Better bandwidth (my cable is always faster than the fractional t1 at the office) and PEACE.
Yes, PEACE. Nobody kocking on your office door every 10 minutes to show you something you don't really care. No b.s. meetings (if the meeting is important you will teleconference to it). You also save time in the commute (I save between one and three hours a day just by staying home).
Still, it has a downside. A programmer that works at home works longer hours because of the lack of distractions. Some people are not compatible with telecommuting because of lack of discipline. And some just crave the human contact.
You also have to be on alert for abusive project managers that take advantage that you are working from home, especially if you are single. You have to learn to turn off the instant messengers after a certain hour or you risk project managers continuously pushing you to work 12-hour days and weekends.
Right now I manage 8 programmers. One lives over 2 hours away and I see her probably every other week. Another one shows up probably once a month. They are both senior developers and the only thing they need me for is to approve their timesheets. The other guys are not as independent, so I make them show up at the office 3 times a week until I can see that they are mature enough to stay home.
I thought the same a few years ago and then Half Life came out. And UT. And Kingpin :-)
That is not innovation. That is eye candy.
Who the hell has time to stop and look at the pretty lights and the neat fog effects with all the shooting going on? Pleeeze!
The only advantage you get out of a fast graphics card is that the game runs much smoother. The rest is eye candy.
This is a very old argument. My @home terms of service of over a year ago already prohibit me from hosting any kind of service from my @home connection. This is really annoying to us developers because it forces us to host ouside of our home offices if we want to show running web code to a client.
Funny thing is that the only thing they filter is web traffic. I can ftp to any of my machines just fine. P2P software used to work but that is in question. pcAhywhere and terminal services work fine too.
Volrath50,
Thanks for posting the Emulators, inc. link. It's a great article and I had lost the bookmark.
I get Comcast Digital Cable, around 400+ channels and I can't get FX? WTF? For $70+/month!
We always ask for what computer games the guy plays. Real time strategy and 3D shooters are our top picks.
We actually use that question to put the applicant at ease. I also ask them if they play softball (recruiting for the team never stops, hehe) and what would they pick between IE and Netscape. The browser question has no right answer, we just want to know the reasoning behind it.
I don't like to play 20 questions, I prefer instead to test them for problem solving skills. I also want to make sure the guy doesn't turn into a total asshole or a heap of nerves every time a red light blinks.
And yeah, Dirk Diggler was boring as hell but still did not screw up the movie. The apes were brilliant, downright scary. And the movie was good entertainment, well worth the $8.50 I had to pay for it (not like A.I., which I walked out at the end feeling cheated).
There is no way a new movie can measure up to the standards of the classic, but that doesn't mean we have to be unfair. Planet of the Apes was the first movie I have seen in months that I would not hesitate to pay to see it in the theater at least two more times, and then I'll buy the DVD too.
Pedro
Our own cost structure is an issue. If out of a team of 7 programmers I have 3 that are at the top level and one that I will either have to promote in 6 months or he will get a better paying job somewhere else, then my other 3 programmers have to be juniors just so I don't break my budget.
The other reason for keeping these juniors is that every programming job does not require a rocket scientist, and project managers will start bitching when they have to use a $150/hr programmer for something simple enough for a $15/hr intern.
Hell, we even considered using a coding sweat shop in India! We had three different organizations in India trying to sell us into using one of their virtual programming teams. We could take advantage of the strength of the dollar to get top notch programming at a great saving. Cooler still, we could use the 12-hr time difference to our advantage. I could assign them work at 5 PM EST knowing that when I came back to the office the next day at 7 AM they would have spent 12 hrs dealing with it.
Pedro
I absolutely love my @home cable modem, even more since my employers are willing to pay for it because I telecommute up to 50%.
Still, I am completely TERRORIZED every time the modem loses lock, because first tier support sucks.
The one thing I have to give them is that over the last year the uptime of my connection has been outstanding. My only complain so far is that I am so addicted to the freaking thing that even 5 minutes without the modem locking up already drives me crazy!
The other thing I like is that the system here is not biased towards any specific OS. I got two machines running Windows 2000 and an old machine as a free BSD testbed and all 3 run fine. I have tested it with Mandrake, RedHat, SuSe, Win98 and WinME and in every instance it works fine.
Pedro
DoD pretty much mounts everything on industry standard racks. That means you have a fair shot at finding an old one at a DRMO sale close to where you live. When I was stationed in Germany they even had special sales open to German nationals, so you don't have to be a DoD employee to take advantage of this.
Worst case scenario you will have to repaint it and probably add power cords and fans.
As for size, we had many different models, the only requirement was that they had to fit 19-in wide components (the racks themselves always were exactly 2-feet wide). WE had some models small enough to sit on a desk, so I bet you can find something for what you have in mind.
Pedro
If I had to use my own money I would get a IIIxe without even blinking (I will probably have to hit eBay since there are very few of these still around). If I could afford it then I would get the iPaq, but I would be completely happy with just the IIIxe.
Pedro
1."Show Stopper." The client absolutely refuses to sign-off on the project until this issue is solved.
2. "Mickey Mouse." Very minor error that can usually take a minute or two to fix, but wastes more of your time in the error reporting, documentation, and follow-ups.
3. "Ghost." Only the client sees it but can't replicate it or give you instructions so you can do that. The error is real (the client will send you a screen capture), but they can't helo you in recreating it.
Pedro
And every pvcs known to man had at least one of them early birds. They either show up at 6:00 AM and lock a file til 4:00 PM or worse: They lock all their files before they leave for a long weekend and nobody else is trusted with admin access to the pvcs tree!
VSS was cool but it was annoying as hell to figure out how to send the checked out files to a test webserver. That way if you make one change you can run it live. Once that was out of the door we only had to handle with the damn early birds.
Pedro
This would not be a big deal if you are a marketing major, but if you major on ANYTHING that has the potential of putting a human life at risk then you are playing a very dangerous game whenever you cheat at school.
If you are a mechanical engineering major one day you may get stuck dsigning high pressure vessels. One of these things blows up and people get killed. Then you are liable. Imagine screwing up the design for the brakes of a school bus.
You are a programmer: You are working for a DoD contractor building a fire control system. It goes nuts and the missile hits a friendly target. People died because you cheated instead of learning the material properly.
You are a mechanical engineer and cheated while taking your mechanics statics/dynamics. One of your buildings collapses. You will be a prime candidate for a monstrous lawsuit. WHenI was in engineering school we were told that when you design things like that you have to keep in mind that if anything happens to in in the next 10 yrs you will be blamed for it.
Pedro
US $20,000/processor for enterprise edition. Maybe you meant Access by itself.
As for why? This is very simple. We are risking the integrity of the data that keeps a company alive. We have to be very conservative when putting all that data to risk. Personally I will only recommend Oracle 8+ or SQL Server 7+. I started playing with Informix Redbrick warehouses about 6 months ago and true, it's expensive as hell but (1) it's bulletproof and (2) our client had it already, so it did not impact the bottom line of the contract.
I will consider posgres as long as I have trained personnel available to deal with the server (we are a Microsoft-only shop for now). I will not consider mySQL until I get solid proof that it passes ACID and it beats posgres.
To be honest, I won't even recommend Oracle anymore. If the client has a license for Oracle already paid for and gathering dust we'll use it to our advantage. If they have to buy licenses we'll recommend SQL server every time.
Pedro
The only problems is that I have are:
1. Some people at the office are still living in 1995, and see Access as a solid solution for building a whole system.
2. Access is not free. You will have to pay for every user (if I write the front end in ASP/Perl/JSP/etc then the user only needs a browser).
Pedro
Pedro
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/FGCS/info/sans_SA/docs/
Pedro
I was a payload controller for 4 years. The components that do the encryption are bulky and cumbersome, and the software takes a month of classroom training only to qualify to sit by an experienced controller for OJT. Gimme a break.
Pedro
So what happened?
Some of the college kids got lucky enough to learn Macromedia Flash, so we put them to work on a project. The lazy ones were sent to do quality assurance on a project and the bored one ended up being sort of a stage hand at our media studio.
What about the high school kid?
We took him to our web development team, and paired him with a mid-level programmer hoping he could keep him busy and out of trouble. A week later the kid had mastered Pathware and LearningSpace (nobody else had a clue). Two weeks later he was functioning as a staff programmer, and he was training OUR guy on Pathware and Learningspace!
When summer was over nobody wanted him to leave and we almost issued him a laptop and cell phone so he could do contract work for us. Only reason we did not do it was because we did not want to make a wreck out of his senior year in HS. He stays in touch and if I am lucky he will come to work for me this summer before he is gone for college.
Pedro