If I saw a resume such as what you describe, I would think something like this : "Hopefully has the wisdom and maturity to pick up the technologies we use [ provided he has some relevant experience that he can use as a foundation ]. His age hopefully means that he can provide some leadership and direction for the younger guys. I'd expect him to be the kind of guy that I can ask to write a functional spec, or draw up a project schedule, etc.." In other words, even if you started by doing only 20% code and 80% more management type things, I could still get a benefit out of you. If you're asking whether you can get a job doing 80% coding right from day one, I wouldn't be able to help you I'm afraid. But if you were willing to go the other way for a little while (primarily be more management) you could improve your tech skills during that time.
(Kindly note that when I say management i don't necessarily mean with direct reports on the org chart dealing with budget. I mean a senior person who I can give some respnonsibility and resources to, who knows what to do with both of them).
I agree completely that young engineers can hack code with the best of them. But do they often have the political skills to know when to talk and when to shut up? Just because a problem can be answered by the application of 300 hours of programming does NOT mean that I should listen to the person who offers this as a solution, or that he should pout when I tell him no. Know what I mean? Does the guy asking the question know how to take into consideration things like vacation time, customer impact, quality assurance, all that sort of stuff? Even simple questions often have far reaching results. Recently I was in a meeting to argue with 6 people whether to change the standard prefix for our html directory from "/t" to "/html" (names changed to protect the innocent). The/t was an artifact of a decision made 3 years ago that was no longer relevant, and confused the heck out of new people. But I was argued down, and/t stays, because "It would take 4 weeks of time to change all the existing content, and we don't have that much time." The option at this point is not to yell and scream and throw technology solutions at it ("I can dump all the content to the file system, run sed on it, then ftp it back into the repository!"), it's to learn to work with that sort of obstacle so that the next time you know how to present the problem.
Some things to remember when you think that you're being unfairly shot down:
You do not get to decide what is an adequate use of your time. That's what your boss is for. Are you acutely aware of the fact that the client has already given the boss a budget, and that when you say it'll take you an extra week, that puts extra $$ into the budget that might not be there?
Rarely does your time NOT affect other people, so consider what dependencies you are creating. If it'll take you an extra week to do it "the right way", can the people who are waiting for your code before starting theirs wait that long?
Who needs to be trained in order for your solution to work? CAN those people be trained? I don't use JSP at work because I don't expect to train my HTML people in that syntax.
Not everybody needs to know everything. When you're showing a demo to the boss's boss, do NOT say stuff like "This came out lousy, we could do it better if we had more [time,money]."
One of my favorite pieces of advice for headstrong young engineers who don't understand why sometimes the answer is "no". Imagine you have a brick, and you tie a piece of string to that brick. You want to get the brick moved a few feet to the left. If you yank on the string real hard, the brick won't move, and the string will break. But if you exert a smaller, but constant, force on the string, then the brick will move. Sure you won't get it there fast, but you'll get it there.
The QB microphone was a little silly, since all I heard was "ORANGE! 88! ORANGE 88!! ORANGE 88!!" but I thought it interesting that after every penalty you'd hear someone say "My fault, that was me." And I liked the coach who kept trying to decide whether to "send in the jumbos", since I have no idea what the hell that means. I don't know what to think of the halftime cameras in the lockerroom, because although i saw it I wasn't paying attention, I had people over.
When the announcers remembered that this isn't the WWF crowd (JR, please stop saying slobberknocker), there were some good comments (though not from Brian Bosworth). I liked Jesse once -- "What's that? They're gonna show us how dominant their running game is when they're behind 19 nothing?"
Stop talking to the crowd. Get Stephanie McMahon and Coachman out of there. I would say get Lawler and Ross out of there too, but I think Ross is entertaining to listen to. Tell UPN and TNN to stop hyping the game like it's NASCAR. Seriously, I heard a promo on TNN last night where a bunch of yahoos said "These guys are playing to put food on the table!" and I thought "Oh, great, so now we're gonna condone cheating because they have to feed their kids."
Personally I liked the football, too. More long passes, a few cool dives. The variety of plays was interesting to watch. Sure, it's no way near as extreme as they led us to believe (even in the FAQ it now says that XFL does NOT stand for "eXtreme football league"), but I liked it, what can I say.
Perhaps somebody on this thread can answer my question, since it seems relevant. Most of the time people speak of Oracle they use expressions like "unlimited price" in the same sentence. But the few people I've talked to that are users (and therefore evangelists) of Oracle have all said $25k. That's not really *that* bad, especially for a company that knows its database needs when they make the budget. My question is, is that really the price? What exactly does one get for that price? If not, what's the more accurate price for Oracle in the wild?
HappyPenguin often lists new announcements for games that are little more than an idea. You could jump in on one of those. Or find a game that's already up and running that you like to play, and start hacking.
You do NOT need to spend months reviewing the code before you can contribute. If you know anything about debugging, you could at the very least post some bug fixes. If your logic were true, then the only people that could contribute to Emacs would be original coworkers of Stallman.
Are you sure it's not more a case that you want the credit of having your name attached to the project as originator? You wouldn't be the first one to fall victim to that desire.
Please, for the sake of the community, at least try helping out on some existing projects first. You'll get more quick wins that way, you contribution more broadly to the software base, and you can stop at any time. If you create a project from scratch and decide that you don't like it after all, we're all stuck with another dead project on freshmeat.
We have to decide which battle to fight. It's no good having the perfect platform with perfect apps if no one uses it. The masses won't use it until a critical mass of applications is available, and those apps won't be available until the masses can shell out the $$. The thing that Wine does is gets more people running Linux by providing those Windows apps that don't exist as Linux apps yet. Once they're on Linux, if our OS is really as good as we think it is, they should learn really quickly that native Linux apps are better than emulated ones, and want to switch over. But first we need that critical mass of audience, not of native apps. IMHO.
I agree, but where do you draw the line. By facilitating the use of diverse languages, you allow laziness to creep in, and before you know it, nobody's using a language because it's the right one for the job, they're using it because they're too lazy to implement another one. At least by trying to keep your system relatively homogeneous people aren't as likely to say "Well, there's no reason why I *cant* write my piece in Eiffel, so I will."
Seen on SolarisCentral:
"In essense, while Microsoft advocates the ability
to run diverse code on their platform, Sun advocates writing standard code for all platforms."
The question seems to be how important is that whole "diverse code" thing? I mean, do I want a team of a dozen Java programmers? Or do I want 2 Prolog guys, 4 C++ guys, an APL geek... How do I crosstrain them? When people say "the best language for the task at hand" do they consider the factor of having people crosstrained in that language? Great. You know Smalltalk inside and out. You can make it run 100x faster than C++. So I implement my UI in Smalltalk. Now you go on vacation, and it crashes. I'm screwed. I can't train every programmer in every language.
The speedreading books sometimes contain information on speed notetaking. No, it's not Gregg shorthand, but it's a way to get down the important thoughts on paper, which is usually more useful than a verbatim account (especially when studying said notes later).
Of course I'll go see it, as will many geeks. But would a trailer like that capture the hearts of the audience at large? For a minute there in the opening it looks like it might ask you to feed the kid for just 57 cents a day or something. I fear that the masses need a chase scene or a murder or something (see Antitrust, or even E.T.) to spark their interest.
The music was neat, very Pink Floydish. And I liked the way they did the title at the end.
Maybe if we're lucky, crowds will see the Spielberg name and think "Oh, A.I.? That must be like E.T.! Let's go see it!" And the sad thing is I'm not trying to be funny.
I don't know about the rationale of umbrellas being small...I've walked through the financial district and seen a few people carrying beach umbrellas, I swear. They could cover a taxicab with these things, honestly.:)
I warred with my high school computer teacher. I was one of the few kids coming into high school that had a machine (TRS-80, baby!) and knew how to code it, and already had a reputation as king geek. There was nothing this guy could teach me! I knew EVERYTHING!
Hardly. I learned alot from this guy, even though I didn't know I was doing it. Recursion, data structures, modular programming, all the foundations for what real coding is like. Sure, the stuff that he put into the curriculum to talk about for 4 days I picked up in 4 minutes (like any good geek would), but the fact is that I did learn things. He even knew when and where to strike the balance -- we (there were about 3 of us) only had to go to his class when he was starting a new subject. Other times we got to hang out in the lab. And he would great our assignments differently, to put more challenge in them. "Make a program that draws a birthday cake", for example, was intended to just be a bunch of println("****")s together (come on, this was 1985). I made one out of block graphics (remember what happened when you went after char(x) where x>127?) and made the lights animate. Or the time we had to write Conway's Life, so I made a 3d version. And a favorite, when a test question said "Write a sort routine, any sort routine" I wrote a recursive bubble sort:).
Some favorite moments from class:
"Mr. Morin, perhaps if Miss Baldasini turned around and listened to me for a change she would understand what's going on."
"She just told me she's not learning shit from you, that's why I'm explaining it."
"Mr. Morin, you are not my friend. You are not invited to my wedding." "Can I come to your funeral when you die?"
"Get out, Mr. Morin. Get out, get out, GET OUT!" (That'd be when I pulled a knife on another student as a joke, and Mr. Kendall didn't find it very funny.)
Yup, I was a shit. I've often thought of going back to visit him and telling him how much he is to blame for what I am today (be it for good or bad:))!
I think the goal of the contest was to demonstrate that you can still have a game in minimal resources, i.e. you have to concentrate on gameplay rather than on graphics or sound or whatever (things that take up lots of space). Since this guy couldn't imagine a game that didn't start by going after high memory, he was missing the point of a minimalist contest.
You know I once knew a girl who was dating a telemarketer guy. When I told him "Oh, I don't like to hang up on people, that's rude. I very patiently wait until the guy takes a breath and asks me a question, and then I say no thank you." Guy then gets pissed and says "I hate you people! That's such a waste of my time!" I was like, sorry guy, you call me during dinner, you're on my clock now.
I know the feeling. Know what happens here, though? Version 1.0 goes out and the customers say "Wow, that's pretty slow." Then version 2.0 adds new features and the customers say "That's even slower." Then the bosses come to you and say "How do we make it faster?" and suddenly performance is the priority. If you're lucky, they want performance so badly that you even get to be creative, rather than just doing the usual things to speed it up.
I once said to a boss "Exactly how fast do you want it? I mean, I'll go lock myself in my office and put my optimizing hat on and I'll give you lightning. It'll be hard to follow the code and probably pretty unstable, but that sucker'll fly." That helps set boundaries on the expectations.:)
How can you NOT want to see this?
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 2
The way I've been describing it to my fellow geeks (no spoilers that the trailer wouldn't show you):
"Bill Gates tries to tempt free software programmers to come work for him. When they refuse, he kills them."
That's a gross exaggeration, but it puts it into the category of "Ok, that's so silly I have to see it."
Besides, don't geeks always go see movies like this just to count geek references? I know I do. How long before the Antitrust FAQ shows up to tell us exactly what code they were looking at in all those shots?
Ooo! OOO! There was a game contest on rec.games.programmer once to write a game in 256 bytes. I remember, like, within the first day somebody had written "You losers, that's impossible, it'll take me 220 bytes just to pull the A20 line high and get into virtual memory." (Or something very close to that, it's been a long time). Talk about missing the point.
Remember this challenge? Sort of the defining moment for a code optimization metric. I spent a long, long time following in the footsteps of that series of articles. (In short, the challenge was pretty much "make Conway's Life go as fast as possible"). There's a moment in code optimization where you get to experience the true epiphany of hacking - version 1 takes 15 seconds, version 2 takes 13 seconds, version 3 takes 12 seconds....and then suddenly, as if in a dream it comes to you....and version 4 makes that leap to something like 2 seconds and you revel in it.
I have no idea if I explained that like I wanted to. But I know what I meant.
Ok, people want something that is big like a piece of paper, but portable like a PDA. Freestyle to doodle on, but with a keyboard for typing. Color, but with high contrast for reading. Networked, all the time, wireless.
Did I get it all? Ok, I'll just be getting to work, now...:) Seriously, is there anything in there that seems to be mutually exclusive? The keyboard is often a big one, because it's so hard to make a good portable one that doesn't take up much space and is yet still useful for people that type quickly. Other than that, I'd think that something like foldable smart paper would do it. Combined with some sort of docking station that had the keyboard? That was flexible enough to fold and put into a pocket, but when extended was stiff enough (like a clipboard) that you could hold it and write on it? Would the wireless connection need to be in the device itself, or could it be in the docking station, ala a Palm sync?
Coincidentally I just rearranged the office because my wife has been saying that the room needs a recliner! But I didn't see a price on this thing anywhere. Anybody got a clue?
For christmas, on a whim, I suggested to my wife that a Rocket eBook would be cool (she'd said the previous day "I didn't get you many toys"). So I shortly found Baen. While it's true that sitting behind the computer all day is tough on the eyes, having a Rocket with you on the subway with a full novel or two is excellent. The device is even shaped like a folded back paperback (ambidextrous), with scroll buttons under the thumb so I can read it with one hand while holding onto the pole with the other. I haven't bought any books for the thing yet because I'm reading free stuff like Baen has to offer (and rocket-library.com has some good stuff, too). I mean, come on, Baen has James Hogan, how can ya beat that. I'm just confused by what is actually free right away, what you have to subscribe to, and what I can get in eBook format that I need to pay for.
Only two downsides to the Rocket device are the slow bootup time (close to 10 seconds) and the extra weight. It's just a little too heavy to hold for a long time.
I've already complained to Amazon that they only support the Microsoft reader, of course. There's even a bit in their FAQ where they say they don't support handhelds yet. Oh, joy.
Slashdot Mirror
(Kindly note that when I say management i don't necessarily mean with direct reports on the org chart dealing with budget. I mean a senior person who I can give some respnonsibility and resources to, who knows what to do with both of them).
It's a content repository with a proprietary API and caching mechanism for getting at it. Thanks, though. :)
Some things to remember when you think that you're being unfairly shot down:
- You do not get to decide what is an adequate use of your time. That's what your boss is for. Are you acutely aware of the fact that the client has already given the boss a budget, and that when you say it'll take you an extra week, that puts extra $$ into the budget that might not be there?
- Rarely does your time NOT affect other people, so consider what dependencies you are creating. If it'll take you an extra week to do it "the right way", can the people who are waiting for your code before starting theirs wait that long?
- Who needs to be trained in order for your solution to work? CAN those people be trained? I don't use JSP at work because I don't expect to train my HTML people in that syntax.
- Not everybody needs to know everything. When you're showing a demo to the boss's boss, do NOT say stuff like "This came out lousy, we could do it better if we had more [time,money]."
One of my favorite pieces of advice for headstrong young engineers who don't understand why sometimes the answer is "no". Imagine you have a brick, and you tie a piece of string to that brick. You want to get the brick moved a few feet to the left. If you yank on the string real hard, the brick won't move, and the string will break. But if you exert a smaller, but constant, force on the string, then the brick will move. Sure you won't get it there fast, but you'll get it there.When the announcers remembered that this isn't the WWF crowd (JR, please stop saying slobberknocker), there were some good comments (though not from Brian Bosworth). I liked Jesse once -- "What's that? They're gonna show us how dominant their running game is when they're behind 19 nothing?"
Stop talking to the crowd. Get Stephanie McMahon and Coachman out of there. I would say get Lawler and Ross out of there too, but I think Ross is entertaining to listen to. Tell UPN and TNN to stop hyping the game like it's NASCAR. Seriously, I heard a promo on TNN last night where a bunch of yahoos said "These guys are playing to put food on the table!" and I thought "Oh, great, so now we're gonna condone cheating because they have to feed their kids."
Personally I liked the football, too. More long passes, a few cool dives. The variety of plays was interesting to watch. Sure, it's no way near as extreme as they led us to believe (even in the FAQ it now says that XFL does NOT stand for "eXtreme football league"), but I liked it, what can I say.
Perhaps somebody on this thread can answer my question, since it seems relevant. Most of the time people speak of Oracle they use expressions like "unlimited price" in the same sentence. But the few people I've talked to that are users (and therefore evangelists) of Oracle have all said $25k. That's not really *that* bad, especially for a company that knows its database needs when they make the budget. My question is, is that really the price? What exactly does one get for that price? If not, what's the more accurate price for Oracle in the wild?
You do NOT need to spend months reviewing the code before you can contribute. If you know anything about debugging, you could at the very least post some bug fixes. If your logic were true, then the only people that could contribute to Emacs would be original coworkers of Stallman.
Are you sure it's not more a case that you want the credit of having your name attached to the project as originator? You wouldn't be the first one to fall victim to that desire.
Please, for the sake of the community, at least try helping out on some existing projects first. You'll get more quick wins that way, you contribution more broadly to the software base, and you can stop at any time. If you create a project from scratch and decide that you don't like it after all, we're all stuck with another dead project on freshmeat.
We have to decide which battle to fight. It's no good having the perfect platform with perfect apps if no one uses it. The masses won't use it until a critical mass of applications is available, and those apps won't be available until the masses can shell out the $$. The thing that Wine does is gets more people running Linux by providing those Windows apps that don't exist as Linux apps yet. Once they're on Linux, if our OS is really as good as we think it is, they should learn really quickly that native Linux apps are better than emulated ones, and want to switch over. But first we need that critical mass of audience, not of native apps. IMHO.
I agree, but where do you draw the line. By facilitating the use of diverse languages, you allow laziness to creep in, and before you know it, nobody's using a language because it's the right one for the job, they're using it because they're too lazy to implement another one. At least by trying to keep your system relatively homogeneous people aren't as likely to say "Well, there's no reason why I *cant* write my piece in Eiffel, so I will."
"In essense, while Microsoft advocates the ability to run diverse code on their platform, Sun advocates writing standard code for all platforms."
The question seems to be how important is that whole "diverse code" thing? I mean, do I want a team of a dozen Java programmers? Or do I want 2 Prolog guys, 4 C++ guys, an APL geek... How do I crosstrain them? When people say "the best language for the task at hand" do they consider the factor of having people crosstrained in that language? Great. You know Smalltalk inside and out. You can make it run 100x faster than C++. So I implement my UI in Smalltalk. Now you go on vacation, and it crashes. I'm screwed. I can't train every programmer in every language.
The speedreading books sometimes contain information on speed notetaking. No, it's not Gregg shorthand, but it's a way to get down the important thoughts on paper, which is usually more useful than a verbatim account (especially when studying said notes later).
The music was neat, very Pink Floydish. And I liked the way they did the title at the end.
Maybe if we're lucky, crowds will see the Spielberg name and think "Oh, A.I.? That must be like E.T.! Let's go see it!" And the sad thing is I'm not trying to be funny.
I don't know about the rationale of umbrellas being small...I've walked through the financial district and seen a few people carrying beach umbrellas, I swear. They could cover a taxicab with these things, honestly. :)
Hardly. I learned alot from this guy, even though I didn't know I was doing it. Recursion, data structures, modular programming, all the foundations for what real coding is like. Sure, the stuff that he put into the curriculum to talk about for 4 days I picked up in 4 minutes (like any good geek would), but the fact is that I did learn things. He even knew when and where to strike the balance -- we (there were about 3 of us) only had to go to his class when he was starting a new subject. Other times we got to hang out in the lab. And he would great our assignments differently, to put more challenge in them. "Make a program that draws a birthday cake", for example, was intended to just be a bunch of println("****")s together (come on, this was 1985). I made one out of block graphics (remember what happened when you went after char(x) where x>127?) and made the lights animate. Or the time we had to write Conway's Life, so I made a 3d version. And a favorite, when a test question said "Write a sort routine, any sort routine" I wrote a recursive bubble sort :).
Some favorite moments from class:
- "Mr. Morin, perhaps if Miss Baldasini turned around and listened to me for a change she would understand what's going on."
- "Mr. Morin, you are not my friend. You are not invited to my wedding."
- "Get out, Mr. Morin. Get out, get out, GET OUT!" (That'd be when I pulled a knife on another student as a joke, and Mr. Kendall didn't find it very funny.)
Yup, I was a shit. I've often thought of going back to visit him and telling him how much he is to blame for what I am today (be it for good or bad"She just told me she's not learning shit from you, that's why I'm explaining it."
"Can I come to your funeral when you die?"
I think the goal of the contest was to demonstrate that you can still have a game in minimal resources, i.e. you have to concentrate on gameplay rather than on graphics or sound or whatever (things that take up lots of space). Since this guy couldn't imagine a game that didn't start by going after high memory, he was missing the point of a minimalist contest.
FLAMEBAIT? Oh, you suck! Hmmmm, geeks find it funny when Microsoft gets bashed. Yeah, that's intended to incite flames. Dickhead.
You know I once knew a girl who was dating a telemarketer guy. When I told him "Oh, I don't like to hang up on people, that's rude. I very patiently wait until the guy takes a breath and asks me a question, and then I say no thank you." Guy then gets pissed and says "I hate you people! That's such a waste of my time!" I was like, sorry guy, you call me during dinner, you're on my clock now.
I once said to a boss "Exactly how fast do you want it? I mean, I'll go lock myself in my office and put my optimizing hat on and I'll give you lightning. It'll be hard to follow the code and probably pretty unstable, but that sucker'll fly." That helps set boundaries on the expectations. :)
"Bill Gates tries to tempt free software programmers to come work for him. When they refuse, he kills them."
That's a gross exaggeration, but it puts it into the category of "Ok, that's so silly I have to see it."
Besides, don't geeks always go see movies like this just to count geek references? I know I do. How long before the Antitrust FAQ shows up to tell us exactly what code they were looking at in all those shots?
I also appreciated the cameo by a Rocket eBook.
And the fact that even the handhelds everybody uses aren't Microsoft devices.
d
"What's with the Mission Impossible 3 bullshit, Milo? You're a geek!"
Ooo! OOO! There was a game contest on rec.games.programmer once to write a game in 256 bytes. I remember, like, within the first day somebody had written "You losers, that's impossible, it'll take me 220 bytes just to pull the A20 line high and get into virtual memory." (Or something very close to that, it's been a long time). Talk about missing the point.
I have no idea if I explained that like I wanted to. But I know what I meant.
Did I get it all? Ok, I'll just be getting to work, now...:) Seriously, is there anything in there that seems to be mutually exclusive? The keyboard is often a big one, because it's so hard to make a good portable one that doesn't take up much space and is yet still useful for people that type quickly. Other than that, I'd think that something like foldable smart paper would do it. Combined with some sort of docking station that had the keyboard? That was flexible enough to fold and put into a pocket, but when extended was stiff enough (like a clipboard) that you could hold it and write on it? Would the wireless connection need to be in the device itself, or could it be in the docking station, ala a Palm sync?
$ which ximian-update
ximian-update: Command not found
Ok, NOW what? :)
d
Only two downsides to the Rocket device are the slow bootup time (close to 10 seconds) and the extra weight. It's just a little too heavy to hold for a long time.
I've already complained to Amazon that they only support the Microsoft reader, of course. There's even a bit in their FAQ where they say they don't support handhelds yet. Oh, joy.
Duane