If it works on the hardware in question, what's wrong with that? Sometimes being newer isn't better, it's just newer.
I don't see this as a huge problem for embedded systems.... Unless it's something like a firewall or a router that lives on the internet, then it *might* be worth looking at. If it's something like a media player or printer on your private network, who cares? (unless you are member of the tin foil hat society).
If your manager isn't telling you, you might try asking them the following question:
"What can I do to get an excellent review next year?"
Think about the answer to that question and set out to do what they ask. If you don't get an answer you think is reasonable and within your control, start looking for another job.
I used to hate performance reviews, then about 13 years ago I got a manager who taught me how to properly do them. Now I always get the highest ratings.
basically, it's become a glitch I can manipulate to get the maximum raise each year.
Good for you... My first manager, when I worked for the government, introduced me to the "performance review" concept too. It was great and if you know the system and can work with your manager, good reviews are a given. If you cannot work with the manager or he's not communicating with you, it's a crap shoot and I have had to roll the dice a number of times and lost.
But we are not talking about the performance review, but the horrible HR developed software tools that have Rube Goldberg like user interfaces that make no sense and because you only have to use them 3 times a year you never remember how to do everything and have to try and remember the necessary username and password then figure out how the blasted thing works. Huge waste of time.
Real jobs don't come from HR. They come from business contacts.
Actually, this is NOT true all the time.
But I'll go back to the old saw (because it is true): "The best job openings are never advertised." Which means the best job openings don't "go through" HR. The best companies use HR as a convenient way to get paperwork done, not as a gatekeeper for hiring.
I'm not debating with most of what you said. I'm saying that there are some of us who managed to get though the HR process without the benefit of having inside help. It *sometimes* happens. Now, the question about if folks could do better than the HR managed door is another matter. In my experience, what you describe has not been that common. I've certainly not ventured far from the corporate monoliths with strong HR departments, save once when I worked for a small start up that turned out totally dysfunctional and got me sued in the end. (Something I don't wish to repeat). However, what you describe does happen for some, I'm just not ready to say it's the only way. Other ways work too.
I suppose that I could have done better with a bit more aggressive approach to job hunting that used more networking and less luck, it just doesn't serve my personality very well. I'm glad it works for you.
I guess it deepens on who you know. I've only been hired by an insider at small companies where HR didn't exist myself. With my personality, I don't tend to stand out in the crowd, nor do I tend to network all that well, being a scary tall guy who doesn't smile much. It's a skill I should have worked on a lot more when I was younger, could have paid off, but I'm trying to teach myself some new tricks in the closing years here....
Good advice. I've been whittling it down to the point where much of my employment history before 2000 is limited to position, company, and dates while moving all relevant "what I have experience with" to a master list of keywords. It's proven effective this way. Still, it's hard to fit everything on two pages after 20+ years. Where I'm pretty sure knowing "VULCAN" and "ATLAS" isn't going to help me today, being able to do C and shell programming might.... What to do.
When I have the time, I generally like to tailor my resume for the position I'm applying for. For that reason I have about 3 basic resumes, one slanted more towards firmware/hardware, one for system integration and one that's pure software engineering and start from there.
I won't argue that having an insider isn't invaluable, I'm just saying that having an insider is not the only way to get a job. Some of us can get though the HR wickets, though the interviews and actually get a job without needing inside help, and I'm living proof. Out of the 9 jobs I've had since college, only 2 ever involved an insider. Maybe that says something about me, but that's another topic...
3. Because programmers usually make horrible GUI designers and nobody is thinking "work flow" for the perspective employee.
Just consider it your initial indoctrination into the inane filling out of forms, diversity training and yearly "performance review" processes designed by the legal staff in HR department.
Bad advice. If you are really looking for a job, getting your name and specs searchable and in front of as many hiring managers as you can is only going to be a help.
Now, I can tell you that companies that do this may not be the kind of place you want to work, but if the goal is to get a job, you need to get your name out there. Do be warned though, filling out the online searchable stuff on "job boards" (who shall remain nameless) should be done carefully to avoid ID theft and they are going to generate a lot of garbage contacts from head hunters.
Real jobs don't come from HR. They come from business contacts.
Actually, this is NOT true all the time. In fact, a any job you get from a corporation of any kind of size, you are going though HR and the only thing your contact can buy you is priority treatment (getting put top on the stack) and possibly having an advocate with the hiring manager. My last 3 jobs which cover the last 15 years of my life all came via HR and not direct contacts. In fact, most of my jobs came though the HR process and didn't involve an insider at all.
That"s not to say that jobs don"t come from referrals and business contacts, for small companies, they often do. It's just a function of what kind of company we are talking about. The bigger they are, the more likely HR is going to be in firm control of the initial vetting of possible candidates and having an inside contact is much less valuable. But in the small company, where they don't have an HR department., contacts are the only route to get in. So it just depends on what kind of company you are looking for.
I further hate it when they insist on "plain text" for the resume too. For crying out loud, I spent hours trying to cram my 20+ years onto two pages and when I dump it to plain text it turns into like 5 pages of disjointed text. I get the problem with MS Office macros being dangerous, but plain text?
My advice to these sites is.... At least accept PDF or XPS versions of any document that's formatted like a Resume.
There's nothing really new for programmers because, if you're doing it right, everything is really new for programmers all the time. Once anything becomes routine, we turn around and automate it, so the work is always this set of tasks we haven't figured out how to automate set.
If you look at the effects of automation tools, you discover that they really don't didn't fix anything, they just change the specifics of the problem. You are still going to need a programmer to learn the new tool and make your desired program work. That is the point of Chapter 16 and 17 in "The Mythical Man Month" I told you to read....
Here we go again with another silver bullet?. It seems that every generation of noobs comes to this same conclusion and are just as wrong as we where when we said the same thing. It's almost a rite of passage, just like the rebellious teenager or terrible twos kids go though.
Yes, programming has changed some since I started doing it. However, in the long run, nothing has really changed. Programming is Programming, the same skills I used to need when doing assembly, are useful when I dabble in Java. What HAS changed is the programming model and the languages we use. Yea, we can automatically generate a boat load of code and come up with stuff that would have taking years to do in assembly in a few hours, but nothing is really new. When we went from Assembly to C, we could do things in C so much faster than in assembly, but programs only got bigger and slower. C to C++ bumped that up again, but not that much. Java bumped that up, adding mufti-platform capacity, slowing the programs down and making them take more memory. That's how this goes, new tools, bigger programs that run slower, but still requires a programmer to make useful things using those tools.
Truly there is nothing really new for programmers, the job still requires the same kinds of skills and still requires that you know the programming model. Yea, we can pull ready built stuff off the shelf more easily, but like before, new advances really only make programs bigger and slower and still require programmers who know how to design and implement. We keep trying, but this will not change.
So, nice try there syndeq, I think you are wrong. My generation of programmers thought we had achieved the same things you are claiming when we where noobs. We where wrong too. There may be new tools, but you still need a skilled craftsman to use those tools or you get garbage for a program.
I strongly recommend you go get and read "The Mythical Man Month" by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.. In my day his experience and insights where eye opening for us, and it will be for you too. You don"t have to make the same mistakes we did. I've met some of you guys/gals you can do better, just take my advice.
Then my point stands. Automakers are not going to worry with this kind of hacking because there is really no new risk here. They will naturally provide more secure keys and locks, but not because folks are gnashing their teeth, but because the "state of the art" moves forward. After all, we've moved from zero security on the Model A Ford to actually having keys with electronics embedded in them to immobilize cars without having all us techies up in their grills over cars getting hacked and stolen.
Not going to happen, you needn't worry. Folks that say you need to care are just fear mongering.
Where your scenario is *theoretically* possible, the chances of it happening are less than you winning the lottery or getting hit by a Mir space station part. It's just not going to happen. A cost risk analysis says it's not worth the cost to harden such systems beyond where they are now and unless you are a high value target, hacking your car as you suggest is not worth the cost and effort over just cutting the break line.
Someone put your brakes in maintenance mode and caused a crash...
Oh, you mean they "hacked" your car by connecting directly up to the CAN buss which requires physical access to the car and disabled the breaks? This is so much tripe.
Tell me this... IF somebody cuts your break line, are you going to have a cause to sue the manufacturer? Short answer is: NO. What you suggest is not different as it requires PHYSICAL access to your car too.
For what? Somebody broke into your Bluetooth connection and loaded a bunch of MP3's you didn't like? Or that they managed to unlock the doors or steal the car using some hacking? Are you going to sue the car maker because your car got stolen? Maybe, but I don't think you will win.
Personally, IMHO there just isn't that much the car makers need to do. The cars they now produce are NOT insecure in practice, only in theory. Car companies are not going to spend money on *theories* without some kind of pay off for them.. You don't fix a non-existent problem.
HOWEVER, What might happen is bad PR might cause car makers to "do something" about security, if only paying lip service in their marketing, or making minor changes to things you'd never notice
You fail to bring into account that said corporation is owned by PEOPLE who did loose money when the fines where paid and damages made whole. You also fail to mention that willful breaking of laws by an employee of a company puts his butt in jail, even if it's the CEO.
The guilty get punished, even if you don't want to admit it.
Which is why, apart from voting, you also have the right of petition.
This country need a whole lot less complaining and a whole lot more exercise of personal rights, like voting and petition. I'd go so far as to say if you are complaining and you HAVEN'T voted or tried the petition route, I'm not very motivated to listen to your complaints..
Exactly! We should govern by polling EVERYONE in the country. Maybe every day someone should post all the foreign relations issues and potential solutions, and we can all Facebook like the ones we like and the ones we don't. Hmmm. That might be hard to manage with a population of several hundred million. Perhaps we could break up the population into smaller groups and have some sort of arrangement where there are representatives chosen from the groups of people who give input into how they're governed. But what would one call such a system of representatives governing? Hmmm.
On your other topic, what point are you making regarding Putin? Are you arguing he doesn't have imperial ambitions? Would it be imperial ambitions if he rolled into a few more countries, or will you just see that as gettin' the old band back together?
Love the history lesson.. Well played and exactly correct.
In case the antecedent of the pronoun "we" wasn't clear, I was referring to the population of the United States under which authority the Government acts.
BTW, your suggestion that we govern ourselves using a PURE democracy is a really BAD idea. We proved that with the Mayflower Compact in Jamestown nearly 350 years ago. I prefer we stick to the representative republic model which works a lot better.
I don't know why anyone is surprised that Putin and company act like dictatorial thugs. Their nation is imploding and they need to bring out the rod to keep control.
Russia is going through the tyranny playbook chapter by chapter. Demonization and scapegoating of minorities, directly state controlled media spewing nationalistic propaganda, massive corruption and crony control of all major industries, suppression and murderer of political opponents. The list goes on. You name it, they do it. Anything not on the list will happen soon. Things will get worse before they get better.
This is now getting to be an old story in Russia. Something makes me wonder if their culture yearns to be under the boot of monsters and tyrants, because it's been that way for the past few hundred years.
And for the tired, trite "America does it too" blowhards that are already typing up their scathing reply:
Except for that last rant and one small detail, I agree with you. This was my impression of what Putin is doing. He's prepping for conflict, internal and external and following the well worn paths of world history in general and Russian history in particular. We are going to all look back on the Olympic opening "show" of Putin's and see the story line play out yet again.
The small detail has to do with how long this has been going on. I think we can safely say it's been thousands of years that the same broken record has played and replayed about every 100-200 years. Ending every time in a bloody rebellion where the innocent pay.
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, while those who do, are doomed to helplessly watch while those who don't repeat it.
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If it works on the hardware in question, what's wrong with that? Sometimes being newer isn't better, it's just newer.
I don't see this as a huge problem for embedded systems.... Unless it's something like a firewall or a router that lives on the internet, then it *might* be worth looking at. If it's something like a media player or printer on your private network, who cares? (unless you are member of the tin foil hat society).
What's the secret?
If your manager isn't telling you, you might try asking them the following question:
"What can I do to get an excellent review next year?"
Think about the answer to that question and set out to do what they ask. If you don't get an answer you think is reasonable and within your control, start looking for another job.
I used to hate performance reviews, then about 13 years ago I got a manager who taught me how to properly do them. Now I always get the highest ratings. basically, it's become a glitch I can manipulate to get the maximum raise each year.
Good for you... My first manager, when I worked for the government, introduced me to the "performance review" concept too. It was great and if you know the system and can work with your manager, good reviews are a given. If you cannot work with the manager or he's not communicating with you, it's a crap shoot and I have had to roll the dice a number of times and lost.
But we are not talking about the performance review, but the horrible HR developed software tools that have Rube Goldberg like user interfaces that make no sense and because you only have to use them 3 times a year you never remember how to do everything and have to try and remember the necessary username and password then figure out how the blasted thing works. Huge waste of time.
Real jobs don't come from HR. They come from business contacts.
Actually, this is NOT true all the time.
But I'll go back to the old saw (because it is true): "The best job openings are never advertised." Which means the best job openings don't "go through" HR. The best companies use HR as a convenient way to get paperwork done, not as a gatekeeper for hiring.
I'm not debating with most of what you said. I'm saying that there are some of us who managed to get though the HR process without the benefit of having inside help. It *sometimes* happens. Now, the question about if folks could do better than the HR managed door is another matter. In my experience, what you describe has not been that common. I've certainly not ventured far from the corporate monoliths with strong HR departments, save once when I worked for a small start up that turned out totally dysfunctional and got me sued in the end. (Something I don't wish to repeat). However, what you describe does happen for some, I'm just not ready to say it's the only way. Other ways work too.
I suppose that I could have done better with a bit more aggressive approach to job hunting that used more networking and less luck, it just doesn't serve my personality very well. I'm glad it works for you.
I guess it deepens on who you know. I've only been hired by an insider at small companies where HR didn't exist myself. With my personality, I don't tend to stand out in the crowd, nor do I tend to network all that well, being a scary tall guy who doesn't smile much. It's a skill I should have worked on a lot more when I was younger, could have paid off, but I'm trying to teach myself some new tricks in the closing years here....
Good advice. I've been whittling it down to the point where much of my employment history before 2000 is limited to position, company, and dates while moving all relevant "what I have experience with" to a master list of keywords. It's proven effective this way. Still, it's hard to fit everything on two pages after 20+ years. Where I'm pretty sure knowing "VULCAN" and "ATLAS" isn't going to help me today, being able to do C and shell programming might.... What to do.
When I have the time, I generally like to tailor my resume for the position I'm applying for. For that reason I have about 3 basic resumes, one slanted more towards firmware/hardware, one for system integration and one that's pure software engineering and start from there.
I won't argue that having an insider isn't invaluable, I'm just saying that having an insider is not the only way to get a job. Some of us can get though the HR wickets, though the interviews and actually get a job without needing inside help, and I'm living proof. Out of the 9 jobs I've had since college, only 2 ever involved an insider. Maybe that says something about me, but that's another topic...
There is that.... I guess I need a plain text resume that has every keyword I can conceivably claim, which is a lot of them...
Problem with that is, I've been on more than one interview where the interviewer had the plain text resume and nothing else.... What to do..
3. Because programmers usually make horrible GUI designers and nobody is thinking "work flow" for the perspective employee.
Just consider it your initial indoctrination into the inane filling out of forms, diversity training and yearly "performance review" processes designed by the legal staff in HR department.
Bad advice. If you are really looking for a job, getting your name and specs searchable and in front of as many hiring managers as you can is only going to be a help.
Now, I can tell you that companies that do this may not be the kind of place you want to work, but if the goal is to get a job, you need to get your name out there. Do be warned though, filling out the online searchable stuff on "job boards" (who shall remain nameless) should be done carefully to avoid ID theft and they are going to generate a lot of garbage contacts from head hunters.
Real jobs don't come from HR. They come from business contacts.
Actually, this is NOT true all the time. In fact, a any job you get from a corporation of any kind of size, you are going though HR and the only thing your contact can buy you is priority treatment (getting put top on the stack) and possibly having an advocate with the hiring manager. My last 3 jobs which cover the last 15 years of my life all came via HR and not direct contacts. In fact, most of my jobs came though the HR process and didn't involve an insider at all.
That"s not to say that jobs don"t come from referrals and business contacts, for small companies, they often do. It's just a function of what kind of company we are talking about. The bigger they are, the more likely HR is going to be in firm control of the initial vetting of possible candidates and having an inside contact is much less valuable. But in the small company, where they don't have an HR department., contacts are the only route to get in. So it just depends on what kind of company you are looking for.
I further hate it when they insist on "plain text" for the resume too. For crying out loud, I spent hours trying to cram my 20+ years onto two pages and when I dump it to plain text it turns into like 5 pages of disjointed text. I get the problem with MS Office macros being dangerous, but plain text?
My advice to these sites is.... At least accept PDF or XPS versions of any document that's formatted like a Resume.
One can only shake your head.
You can just shake your head but don't forget this lightened your wallet too.
There's nothing really new for programmers because, if you're doing it right, everything is really new for programmers all the time. Once anything becomes routine, we turn around and automate it, so the work is always this set of tasks we haven't figured out how to automate set.
If you look at the effects of automation tools, you discover that they really don't didn't fix anything, they just change the specifics of the problem. You are still going to need a programmer to learn the new tool and make your desired program work. That is the point of Chapter 16 and 17 in "The Mythical Man Month" I told you to read....
doesn't that mean my entire face would be 1 pixel large?
Maybe two if you have a big mouth..... (Shush up Dave!)
Here we go again with another silver bullet?. It seems that every generation of noobs comes to this same conclusion and are just as wrong as we where when we said the same thing. It's almost a rite of passage, just like the rebellious teenager or terrible twos kids go though.
Yes, programming has changed some since I started doing it. However, in the long run, nothing has really changed. Programming is Programming, the same skills I used to need when doing assembly, are useful when I dabble in Java. What HAS changed is the programming model and the languages we use. Yea, we can automatically generate a boat load of code and come up with stuff that would have taking years to do in assembly in a few hours, but nothing is really new. When we went from Assembly to C, we could do things in C so much faster than in assembly, but programs only got bigger and slower. C to C++ bumped that up again, but not that much. Java bumped that up, adding mufti-platform capacity, slowing the programs down and making them take more memory. That's how this goes, new tools, bigger programs that run slower, but still requires a programmer to make useful things using those tools.
Truly there is nothing really new for programmers, the job still requires the same kinds of skills and still requires that you know the programming model. Yea, we can pull ready built stuff off the shelf more easily, but like before, new advances really only make programs bigger and slower and still require programmers who know how to design and implement. We keep trying, but this will not change.
So, nice try there syndeq, I think you are wrong. My generation of programmers thought we had achieved the same things you are claiming when we where noobs. We where wrong too. There may be new tools, but you still need a skilled craftsman to use those tools or you get garbage for a program.
I strongly recommend you go get and read "The Mythical Man Month" by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.. In my day his experience and insights where eye opening for us, and it will be for you too. You don"t have to make the same mistakes we did. I've met some of you guys/gals you can do better, just take my advice.
Then my point stands. Automakers are not going to worry with this kind of hacking because there is really no new risk here. They will naturally provide more secure keys and locks, but not because folks are gnashing their teeth, but because the "state of the art" moves forward. After all, we've moved from zero security on the Model A Ford to actually having keys with electronics embedded in them to immobilize cars without having all us techies up in their grills over cars getting hacked and stolen.
Not going to happen, you needn't worry. Folks that say you need to care are just fear mongering.
Where your scenario is *theoretically* possible, the chances of it happening are less than you winning the lottery or getting hit by a Mir space station part. It's just not going to happen. A cost risk analysis says it's not worth the cost to harden such systems beyond where they are now and unless you are a high value target, hacking your car as you suggest is not worth the cost and effort over just cutting the break line.
Someone put your brakes in maintenance mode and caused a crash...
Oh, you mean they "hacked" your car by connecting directly up to the CAN buss which requires physical access to the car and disabled the breaks? This is so much tripe.
Tell me this... IF somebody cuts your break line, are you going to have a cause to sue the manufacturer? Short answer is: NO. What you suggest is not different as it requires PHYSICAL access to your car too.
Nothing is going to happen until they get sued.
For what? Somebody broke into your Bluetooth connection and loaded a bunch of MP3's you didn't like? Or that they managed to unlock the doors or steal the car using some hacking? Are you going to sue the car maker because your car got stolen? Maybe, but I don't think you will win.
Personally, IMHO there just isn't that much the car makers need to do. The cars they now produce are NOT insecure in practice, only in theory. Car companies are not going to spend money on *theories* without some kind of pay off for them.. You don't fix a non-existent problem.
HOWEVER, What might happen is bad PR might cause car makers to "do something" about security, if only paying lip service in their marketing, or making minor changes to things you'd never notice
.
You fail to bring into account that said corporation is owned by PEOPLE who did loose money when the fines where paid and damages made whole. You also fail to mention that willful breaking of laws by an employee of a company puts his butt in jail, even if it's the CEO.
The guilty get punished, even if you don't want to admit it.
Which is why, apart from voting, you also have the right of petition.
This country need a whole lot less complaining and a whole lot more exercise of personal rights, like voting and petition. I'd go so far as to say if you are complaining and you HAVEN'T voted or tried the petition route, I'm not very motivated to listen to your complaints..
Exactly! We should govern by polling EVERYONE in the country. Maybe every day someone should post all the foreign relations issues and potential solutions, and we can all Facebook like the ones we like and the ones we don't. Hmmm. That might be hard to manage with a population of several hundred million. Perhaps we could break up the population into smaller groups and have some sort of arrangement where there are representatives chosen from the groups of people who give input into how they're governed. But what would one call such a system of representatives governing? Hmmm.
On your other topic, what point are you making regarding Putin? Are you arguing he doesn't have imperial ambitions? Would it be imperial ambitions if he rolled into a few more countries, or will you just see that as gettin' the old band back together?
Love the history lesson.. Well played and exactly correct.
who's this 'we' of which you speak?
In case the antecedent of the pronoun "we" wasn't clear, I was referring to the population of the United States under which authority the Government acts.
BTW, your suggestion that we govern ourselves using a PURE democracy is a really BAD idea. We proved that with the Mayflower Compact in Jamestown nearly 350 years ago. I prefer we stick to the representative republic model which works a lot better.
I don't know why anyone is surprised that Putin and company act like dictatorial thugs. Their nation is imploding and they need to bring out the rod to keep control. Russia is going through the tyranny playbook chapter by chapter. Demonization and scapegoating of minorities, directly state controlled media spewing nationalistic propaganda, massive corruption and crony control of all major industries, suppression and murderer of political opponents. The list goes on. You name it, they do it. Anything not on the list will happen soon. Things will get worse before they get better.
This is now getting to be an old story in Russia. Something makes me wonder if their culture yearns to be under the boot of monsters and tyrants, because it's been that way for the past few hundred years.
And for the tired, trite "America does it too" blowhards that are already typing up their scathing reply:
Except for that last rant and one small detail, I agree with you. This was my impression of what Putin is doing. He's prepping for conflict, internal and external and following the well worn paths of world history in general and Russian history in particular. We are going to all look back on the Olympic opening "show" of Putin's and see the story line play out yet again.
The small detail has to do with how long this has been going on. I think we can safely say it's been thousands of years that the same broken record has played and replayed about every 100-200 years. Ending every time in a bloody rebellion where the innocent pay.
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, while those who do, are doomed to helplessly watch while those who don't repeat it.