I disagree - that sounds like the old "I'm irreplaceable" strategy. Trust me, I found out the hard way -- when the layoffs come, style and personality and uniqueness of character have nothing to do with it, your headcount WILL be minimized. The plan WILL go forward without you, except in amazingly rare circumstances where you truly are unique (such as being the inventor/founder of your own technology).
You have not experienced what this means until you've been in a meeting with executives debating over who would get credit for exactly how many "synergies" were "maximized" that week (translation - how many jobs were cut/outsourced).
I was the last to go from my team. I spent the last 3 months sitting around waiting for people from Chicago (I'm in Boston) to decide what to ask me, and documenting everything I knew. It's called a transition team, and is hardly new. Just because the jobs are being transitioned to another country instead of another state doesn't make it anything special.
Don't get pissed when you're asked to train your replacement. Worry when you *arent* asked, because it means management doesnt think you know anything valuable.
Two simple questions - when did you know that your life was going to revolve around computers? And, what career decisions did you make to that end?
I remember the answer to the first vividly - I was 10 years old and it was the last day of 4th grade, they told us that we would be getting a computer the next year. For the remaining years of school I was in my element. It was just always a given that I would end up doing something that involved coding. From there I got to go to a good CS school (Worcester Polytech), and have gotten programming jobs ever since that I've enjoyed greatly.
Now, had something gone wrong and I'd ended up in admin or help desk, I could see where I'd be unhappy. Or if I'd waited until college to pick a path, said "Hmmmm, IT sounds good..." and then later "Wow, this really isn't for me."
Don't think I don't count myself incredibly lucky. I've always said that you should evaluate your job on three factors - am I any good at it, can I make a living at it, and do I love it. I'm very lucky to be able to say yes to all of the above.
If I were the interviewee, and my prospective boss couldn't explain himself any better than that, then I'd give some serious thought to alternatives such as bagging groceries, hanging drywall, or pushing a mop.
And if you honestly think that I spend as much time typing responses into a Slashdot thread as I do speaking with potential employees, you realllllly need to get a life.
You can store a primitive in a collections object in Java 1.5; haven't you read JSR 201?
Of course I have. And every now and then a candidate references this as well -- but rarely. If they don't, I ask. If they do, we discuss whether this makes the language any more efficient or if it is just syntactic sugar to make the programmer's life easier.
My original point was to give an example of a pretty simple problem -- really only one step removed from "How do you tell if a number is even or odd" or "How can you simulate a 'round' method using only 'floor'?" -- to illustrate that some people can't even do THAT. If you're going to complain that it is a bad question, but you can't complete it, then your opinion really has no standing with me. Complete it and tell me it's a stupid question, fine. I've had people do that, and we move on. But I've also had candidates for whom I've had to ask, "Now...how do you tell if a number is even or odd?" and had one guy write "int x ; if (x/2 == whole number)..."
I don't know the answer to your question about Java collection objects without looking it up,
Basically I set up a situation where I want to create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table, and ask people to write me the structure to do it. Some just try to stick an int into a Hashmap and do a put(key, get(key)++) which shows a horrible lack of understanding of java objects. The better answer is when they know they have to store an Integer, get the intValue(), increment that, then create a new Integer object and store that.
The *better* answer is creating your own MyInt wrapper that stores a mutable int and enables you to easily increment it.
It's never about getting a perfect answer. What I love are the ones who swear up and down how easy it is, and then do it wrong.
I am the first line interviewer at my company. I ask Java programming questions that I consider easy (like tricking people into trying to store a primitive in a collections object, or knowing how to determine if a bit is set). Sad to say most people fail. Some fail spectacularly.
For the record I do NOT ask those boring certification style questions that you'd only know the answer to by memorizing the spec. All the questions we ask start with "here's a problem, now solve it with real Java code, please." If I've learned one thing, it's if somebody groans and complains that writing code is so trivial you shouldn't even ask it, then sit there and force them to write code because chances are they can't.
I'm not talking about memorizing a formula. I'm talking about figuring out your own formula. Sure, you'll likely end up reinventing the wheel, but is your goal the mental challenge, or to compete professionally? It's like that old Rubik's Cube -- you could read the book and memorize the answer, but was that fun?
Similar story - once, after a trip to a casino, I got it into my head that red/black roulette betting could be won all the time using the simple strategy of "Always bet the same color, and when you lose, double your bet." Mathematically it works. I even heard Artie Lang (sp?) quote it on the Howard Stern show talking about the pass line in craps.
The problem is that this is a known, flawed, strategy. First, it implies that you might need a huge stake of cash up front if you hit a losing streak (kinda like the old "doubling a grain of rice on the chessboard" story). Second, you only ever win 1. Think about it -- you bet 1, you lose, you bet 2, you lose, you bet 4, you win 4 - but you've already lost 3, so you're up 1. So technically it does work, but it is not realistic to build up any real winnings.
I hope the "we should be able to use any cartridge in any printer" people do win the battle. And then when printer prices skyrocket back up to 10x what they are now we'll wonder what happened.
Off topic if you like, but it did remind me of something...
Eons ago when I had a compuserve account and the world was text over a 300baud modem I would dial in to play a networked hack-like game that I wanna say was called Island of Kesmai. There were actually a bunch of similar games over the years and I'm not sure if that is the one I'm thinking of.
Anyway, you start out in this village and wander around looking at the different text characters roam about with you. This dog, represented by a . or something like that, starts bugging me. I'm bored, unable to figure out what the point of the game is, so I shoot the dog.
Suddenly the sheriff kills me dead with a single arrow.
But wait...the game doesn't stop. I stare in fascination as a symbol comes over to my body. "Holy cow," I think, "They're going to rob my corpse." Then my symbol starts moving across the screen with this other one.
The two symbols walk across town into what I'm told is a church, and presto, I'm alive again, the other player having paid to get me resurrected.
"Yeah," he says, "Don't shoot the dog. The sheriff hates that."
It's just occurred to me on the way back from the men's room that we're talking about two different things.
Multitasking would be doing several things at once, such as listening to an audio book while jogging. This is pretty common, and anybody who has a busy job knows what it's like. A coworker follows you into the men's room to chat at the urinal. You print something out before getting up to go get coffee so that you can use the time while you wait for the printout to finish. And so on. Hardly a new idea.
Timeshifting would be manipulating one of those tasks that you might not have been able to in the past. Besides Tivo and ReplayRadio, I'd suggest that the whole RSS aggregator phenomenon fits into that category. You used to spend X minutes visiting Y sites every day. Now you spend 1/10th that time by putting them all under your nose simultaneously. It's not like you're doing 10 things at once, you're not visiting 10 sites at the same time -- you're cramming more valuable info into your web browsing time.
Or how about those elevators that have a CNN newsfeed in them? Sure, technically it's multitasking, giving you something to do with otherwise down time (or I suppose up time depending on which floor you're going to:)). But it's also time manipulation in that you used to be limited to "Watch news in the morning before going to work." Now you get to take it with you up to the office. Of course I could make the opposite argument that you're not manipulating it, as anybody that's seen this setup knows. It asks a trivia question, then you have to wait 30 seconds, and you end up on your floor before you see the answer and you get all cranky.
I like that "audio books while getting dressed" thing. I used to try listening to my audio books while coding, but my brain kept trying to split itself down the middle. Quite painful, really.
So now I just listen to them in the car, which gives me almost 2 hours a day. Not bad.
Does make me wish that the ipod had some more interactive features, though. Like, say, a wireless sync. That way I could just keep sending it new info (such as a text-to-speech version of an RSS feed) all day. Unlike an audio book, I wouldn't mind so much if the news turned into a background drone and I missed some of it.
The idea of taking off my ipod headphones when I set down at the desktop and putting a different set on (and then swapping everytime I want to get up from the machine) is not a good one. I dont even like putting it in the cradle because it's yet another thing I have to do before getting up and walking away.
A good Tivo timeshift trick somebody pointed out to me is to record the early news on a channel where they do one of those crawlers across the bottom of the screen. Then, watch on fast forward.
It's been my experience that when we're talking about promotion rather than hiring, that those chosen for team lead have grown into the role anyway. Ask yourself:
Do you have a pretty fair understanding of your system as a whole, even if you're not contributing code to every single aspect? (Could you, if you had to?)
Do so many people come to you with questions that you've begun delegating them to other team resources?
When a junior person has a question do you get up and go back to their cube and help them figure it out rather than just sighing and saying "I'll take it.."?
When management is making a decision about what can and can't be done to the product, do they seek out your opinion?
No. Seriously. I'm sitting here bitching to my coworker that this has to be the most ridiculous question I think I've ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying something.
Do you still play with your GI Joes? Do you still ask mommy if you can ride your bike down to the store to buy some YuGiOh (or however the christ you spell it) trading cards?
Do you really need Slashdot to confirm for you that your interests change when you grow up and get a life? That one day you realize there are better places to spend your money, and your time?
Jesus H, next thing we're gonna be hearing from 13yr old geeks who find hair sprouting in funny places and want to know if that's normal.
Listen. You losing interest in video games at 28 is a *good* thing. The other 28yr olds at the next party you attend want to talk about the new house they bought, or how their job is going, or the plans for the wedding. Not how awesome it was when you shot the guy that was on your team because he picked up the sniper rifle when everybody knows that you kick ass with it.
The only fun part about writing this response is seeing whether I'm insightful or a troll.:)
I was very surprised to learn that the bank that bought us had a position on open source for the OS, but not for apps. Probably because there was a way to centralize control of the "approved" OS (via the most senior admin department), but there was no similar group in charge of applications.
The first argument that I heard was "We will have to develop our own distribution" rather than rely on Redhat or SuSe or something like that. This is particularly true of financial institutions who must be very concerned with their ability to audit exactly what is on their machines at all times.
With open source comes the question from developers, "Will we be able to contribute changes back to the community?" The answer is almost always "No" in the big companies because they feel that it makes them responsible/liable for those changes. Worse, this sometimes develops into the black hole of "Get it off the net, integrate it into our stuff, then never say another word about it. Don't even get new versions [we don't want to be dependent on them], just treat it like it's been ours all along."
Lastly, in order to use open source app X, be able to show that a vendor exists who will sell you support for that app. I heard that almost verbatim from a boss once -- Why Tomcat over JBoss? Beacuse he knew where he could buy Tomcat support, but not JBoss. (Whether or not you actually can buy JBoss support is not the question -- the fact is that a manager's world is limited to what he has read in Business Week or who he has talked to at the latest trade show).
Oh, one more thing. Keep religion and philosophy out of it. If your company really does want to go open source, they are most definitely not doing it beacuse they want to contribute back to the community, or because they believe that it is the new way, or anything new agey. They are doing it to save money. Therefore, sell it like that. Don't push your luck.
When this comes out on audio book if somebody could go ahead and rip it for me then blog an announcement someplace so I can go pull it down onto my iPod, then I'll care. I tried reading a dead tree while driving to work one morning, damn near killed myself. Spilled my coffee in my lap and everything, had to tell my wife I'd call her back.
You are completely wrong. An Open Source policy is not just some pie-in-the-sky ideal -- it's a valid business decision based on value and control.
Sure, it's a valid business strategy. But you have to know when your strategy is not going well, and change it. Before you even get to the IT section of the business plan, you know you need certain internal systems. The business can run without OSS. It cannot run without accounting software, or whatever it is that the original post (which is not in front of me) said. So I suppose you *could* say "It's more important for everything to be OSS, I guess we will just live without a [blank] system", but I'm not sure that's a valid business decision anymore.
Buying into proprietory, closed systems is a significant risk and can result in not only large financial outlays now, but again later, eg; When the product is discontinued and the tax laws change. Software with only a Windows client is almost as bad as no software at all.
It's also the model that's been working for something like 30 years now. While I prefer open source as much as the next guy, you can't just dismiss something as "almost as bad as no software at all" when the world has been running that way just fine. Make open source win by showing it to be of a higher quality than closed -- not by trying to debate why closed source doesnt work. The evidence is against you.
While you're waiting for your Slashdot answer, start the egg timer and multiply it times the amount of money you're burning waiting for the ideal answer. If no reasonable OSS alternative exists, then cut your losses, salvage what parts of your OSS policy that you can, make a decision and get moving. I've been in places where the developers have two workstations - a Unix and a Windows - exactly for the situation you describe. Or relegate Linux to the servers but put Xwindow on the developers Windows machines. That's a day one decision, not one to labor over and try to get perfect otherwise everything falls to pieces.
Your internal IT should never ever never be a gating item for letting your business department do what it needs to do. If the chairman of the board likes MS Word and just doesn't "get" Open Office, then the amount of his and your time that you burn trying to show him the light will forever outweigh the cost you would have paid to get him a Crossover license and a copy of Word and keep him happy and concentrating on what he is supposed to be doing.
Putting a book online for free is a great way for any would-be author to get his stuff read massively. It's just not a good way to get paid.
Hang out over at boingboing.net (Cory's blog) for a little while. I don't see him going hungry. If it failed for him the first time there would be no second time.
Ok, I see two titles I've recently read -- Darwin's Children, and Ilium. Didn't like either of them, both for different reasons. But now what? Maybe there truly are some gems on the list that I should read -- but if I randomly go get one and it's as all over the place as Ilium was I won't be happy. Especially if I'm buying hardcovers.
The online version you link to does not include Eliza, SeaWar, or Wumpus? How many versions of that book existed?
Trivia -- I remember it well, the first few lines of SeaWar asked for the user name, and if the named typed in was "chris" it would jump to the end and say "Game over." What was up wit dat??
Slashdot Mirror
You have not experienced what this means until you've been in a meeting with executives debating over who would get credit for exactly how many "synergies" were "maximized" that week (translation - how many jobs were cut/outsourced).
Don't get pissed when you're asked to train your replacement. Worry when you *arent* asked, because it means management doesnt think you know anything valuable.
I remember the answer to the first vividly - I was 10 years old and it was the last day of 4th grade, they told us that we would be getting a computer the next year. For the remaining years of school I was in my element. It was just always a given that I would end up doing something that involved coding. From there I got to go to a good CS school (Worcester Polytech), and have gotten programming jobs ever since that I've enjoyed greatly.
Now, had something gone wrong and I'd ended up in admin or help desk, I could see where I'd be unhappy. Or if I'd waited until college to pick a path, said "Hmmmm, IT sounds good..." and then later "Wow, this really isn't for me."
Don't think I don't count myself incredibly lucky. I've always said that you should evaluate your job on three factors - am I any good at it, can I make a living at it, and do I love it. I'm very lucky to be able to say yes to all of the above.
And if you honestly think that I spend as much time typing responses into a Slashdot thread as I do speaking with potential employees, you realllllly need to get a life.
Of course I have. And every now and then a candidate references this as well -- but rarely. If they don't, I ask. If they do, we discuss whether this makes the language any more efficient or if it is just syntactic sugar to make the programmer's life easier.
My original point was to give an example of a pretty simple problem -- really only one step removed from "How do you tell if a number is even or odd" or "How can you simulate a 'round' method using only 'floor'?" -- to illustrate that some people can't even do THAT. If you're going to complain that it is a bad question, but you can't complete it, then your opinion really has no standing with me. Complete it and tell me it's a stupid question, fine. I've had people do that, and we move on. But I've also had candidates for whom I've had to ask, "Now...how do you tell if a number is even or odd?" and had one guy write "int x ; if (x/2 == whole number)..."
Basically I set up a situation where I want to create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table, and ask people to write me the structure to do it. Some just try to stick an int into a Hashmap and do a put(key, get(key)++) which shows a horrible lack of understanding of java objects. The better answer is when they know they have to store an Integer, get the intValue(), increment that, then create a new Integer object and store that.
The *better* answer is creating your own MyInt wrapper that stores a mutable int and enables you to easily increment it.
It's never about getting a perfect answer. What I love are the ones who swear up and down how easy it is, and then do it wrong.
For the record I do NOT ask those boring certification style questions that you'd only know the answer to by memorizing the spec. All the questions we ask start with "here's a problem, now solve it with real Java code, please." If I've learned one thing, it's if somebody groans and complains that writing code is so trivial you shouldn't even ask it, then sit there and force them to write code because chances are they can't.
Did you NOT read the whole post? Did my entire last paragraph get cut off or something?
Similar story - once, after a trip to a casino, I got it into my head that red/black roulette betting could be won all the time using the simple strategy of "Always bet the same color, and when you lose, double your bet." Mathematically it works. I even heard Artie Lang (sp?) quote it on the Howard Stern show talking about the pass line in craps.
The problem is that this is a known, flawed, strategy. First, it implies that you might need a huge stake of cash up front if you hit a losing streak (kinda like the old "doubling a grain of rice on the chessboard" story). Second, you only ever win 1. Think about it -- you bet 1, you lose, you bet 2, you lose, you bet 4, you win 4 - but you've already lost 3, so you're up 1. So technically it does work, but it is not realistic to build up any real winnings.
I hope the "we should be able to use any cartridge in any printer" people do win the battle. And then when printer prices skyrocket back up to 10x what they are now we'll wonder what happened.
Eons ago when I had a compuserve account and the world was text over a 300baud modem I would dial in to play a networked hack-like game that I wanna say was called Island of Kesmai. There were actually a bunch of similar games over the years and I'm not sure if that is the one I'm thinking of.
Anyway, you start out in this village and wander around looking at the different text characters roam about with you. This dog, represented by a . or something like that, starts bugging me. I'm bored, unable to figure out what the point of the game is, so I shoot the dog. Suddenly the sheriff kills me dead with a single arrow.
But wait...the game doesn't stop. I stare in fascination as a symbol comes over to my body. "Holy cow," I think, "They're going to rob my corpse." Then my symbol starts moving across the screen with this other one.
The two symbols walk across town into what I'm told is a church, and presto, I'm alive again, the other player having paid to get me resurrected.
"Yeah," he says, "Don't shoot the dog. The sheriff hates that."
Don't you mean Guildenstern? Wasn't he the one that lost all the money?
Actually I'm assuming that they're not. Joke, ya see. See "facetious", as in "being". :)
Multitasking would be doing several things at once, such as listening to an audio book while jogging. This is pretty common, and anybody who has a busy job knows what it's like. A coworker follows you into the men's room to chat at the urinal. You print something out before getting up to go get coffee so that you can use the time while you wait for the printout to finish. And so on. Hardly a new idea.
Timeshifting would be manipulating one of those tasks that you might not have been able to in the past. Besides Tivo and ReplayRadio, I'd suggest that the whole RSS aggregator phenomenon fits into that category. You used to spend X minutes visiting Y sites every day. Now you spend 1/10th that time by putting them all under your nose simultaneously. It's not like you're doing 10 things at once, you're not visiting 10 sites at the same time -- you're cramming more valuable info into your web browsing time.
Or how about those elevators that have a CNN newsfeed in them? Sure, technically it's multitasking, giving you something to do with otherwise down time (or I suppose up time depending on which floor you're going to :)). But it's also time manipulation in that you used to be limited to "Watch news in the morning before going to work." Now you get to take it with you up to the office. Of course I could make the opposite argument that you're not manipulating it, as anybody that's seen this setup knows. It asks a trivia question, then you have to wait 30 seconds, and you end up on your floor before you see the answer and you get all cranky.
Depends what you're listening to. Right now I've got Hary Potter 5 on there, and I could care less if I miss some subtle symbolism.
Does make me wish that the ipod had some more interactive features, though. Like, say, a wireless sync. That way I could just keep sending it new info (such as a text-to-speech version of an RSS feed) all day. Unlike an audio book, I wouldn't mind so much if the news turned into a background drone and I missed some of it.
The idea of taking off my ipod headphones when I set down at the desktop and putting a different set on (and then swapping everytime I want to get up from the machine) is not a good one. I dont even like putting it in the cradle because it's yet another thing I have to do before getting up and walking away.
A good Tivo timeshift trick somebody pointed out to me is to record the early news on a channel where they do one of those crawlers across the bottom of the screen. Then, watch on fast forward.
- Do you have a pretty fair understanding of your system as a whole, even if you're not contributing code to every single aspect? (Could you, if you had to?)
- Do so many people come to you with questions that you've begun delegating them to other team resources?
- When a junior person has a question do you get up and go back to their cube and help them figure it out rather than just sighing and saying "I'll take it.."?
- When management is making a decision about what can and can't be done to the product, do they seek out your opinion?
You already are tech lead.Do you still play with your GI Joes? Do you still ask mommy if you can ride your bike down to the store to buy some YuGiOh (or however the christ you spell it) trading cards?
Do you really need Slashdot to confirm for you that your interests change when you grow up and get a life? That one day you realize there are better places to spend your money, and your time?
Jesus H, next thing we're gonna be hearing from 13yr old geeks who find hair sprouting in funny places and want to know if that's normal.
Listen. You losing interest in video games at 28 is a *good* thing. The other 28yr olds at the next party you attend want to talk about the new house they bought, or how their job is going, or the plans for the wedding. Not how awesome it was when you shot the guy that was on your team because he picked up the sniper rifle when everybody knows that you kick ass with it.
The only fun part about writing this response is seeing whether I'm insightful or a troll. :)
The first argument that I heard was "We will have to develop our own distribution" rather than rely on Redhat or SuSe or something like that. This is particularly true of financial institutions who must be very concerned with their ability to audit exactly what is on their machines at all times.
With open source comes the question from developers, "Will we be able to contribute changes back to the community?" The answer is almost always "No" in the big companies because they feel that it makes them responsible/liable for those changes. Worse, this sometimes develops into the black hole of "Get it off the net, integrate it into our stuff, then never say another word about it. Don't even get new versions [we don't want to be dependent on them], just treat it like it's been ours all along."
Lastly, in order to use open source app X, be able to show that a vendor exists who will sell you support for that app. I heard that almost verbatim from a boss once -- Why Tomcat over JBoss? Beacuse he knew where he could buy Tomcat support, but not JBoss. (Whether or not you actually can buy JBoss support is not the question -- the fact is that a manager's world is limited to what he has read in Business Week or who he has talked to at the latest trade show).
Oh, one more thing. Keep religion and philosophy out of it. If your company really does want to go open source, they are most definitely not doing it beacuse they want to contribute back to the community, or because they believe that it is the new way, or anything new agey. They are doing it to save money. Therefore, sell it like that. Don't push your luck.
When this comes out on audio book if somebody could go ahead and rip it for me then blog an announcement someplace so I can go pull it down onto my iPod, then I'll care. I tried reading a dead tree while driving to work one morning, damn near killed myself. Spilled my coffee in my lap and everything, had to tell my wife I'd call her back.
Sure, it's a valid business strategy. But you have to know when your strategy is not going well, and change it. Before you even get to the IT section of the business plan, you know you need certain internal systems. The business can run without OSS. It cannot run without accounting software, or whatever it is that the original post (which is not in front of me) said. So I suppose you *could* say "It's more important for everything to be OSS, I guess we will just live without a [blank] system", but I'm not sure that's a valid business decision anymore.
Buying into proprietory, closed systems is a significant risk and can result in not only large financial outlays now, but again later, eg; When the product is discontinued and the tax laws change. Software with only a Windows client is almost as bad as no software at all.
It's also the model that's been working for something like 30 years now. While I prefer open source as much as the next guy, you can't just dismiss something as "almost as bad as no software at all" when the world has been running that way just fine. Make open source win by showing it to be of a higher quality than closed -- not by trying to debate why closed source doesnt work. The evidence is against you.
Your internal IT should never ever never be a gating item for letting your business department do what it needs to do. If the chairman of the board likes MS Word and just doesn't "get" Open Office, then the amount of his and your time that you burn trying to show him the light will forever outweigh the cost you would have paid to get him a Crossover license and a copy of Word and keep him happy and concentrating on what he is supposed to be doing.
Hang out over at boingboing.net (Cory's blog) for a little while. I don't see him going hungry. If it failed for him the first time there would be no second time.
Ok, I see two titles I've recently read -- Darwin's Children, and Ilium. Didn't like either of them, both for different reasons. But now what? Maybe there truly are some gems on the list that I should read -- but if I randomly go get one and it's as all over the place as Ilium was I won't be happy. Especially if I'm buying hardcovers.
Trivia -- I remember it well, the first few lines of SeaWar asked for the user name, and if the named typed in was "chris" it would jump to the end and say "Game over." What was up wit dat??