This is unfortunately true. What I said was a simplification, that would have included the scenarios you describe.
I noticed how you didn't say anything about the for-profit insurers, though, who would rather not do business with someone than spend 85 cents on the dollar on actual healthcare.
Second, you're a short-sighted jerk who wants to treat his workers like interchangeable cogs in your machine.
If an employer isn't willing to "put up with" retooling and retraining, then that employer is missing out on a huge amount of talent. Not to mention that devs as a group are a reasonably bright bunch, and it will be apparent to them once they start working for you that you don't give a flying shit about their professional development or treating them like human beings. I'm guessing your churn rate is enormous and you spend a good portion of your departmental budget on outsourced recruiting. (I tend to hang up on those guys, because if your company is too cheap to pay for a domestic recruiter, then they're probably too cheap in other areas as well.)
And w/r/t your comment about "prima donnas": The market for software developers is tight. The market for GOOD software developers is psychotic. Again, software devs are a reasonably bright bunch, and they realize they have a skill set that is highly in demand. Basic economics: When demand is high and supply is finite, prices go up. "Prices", in this case, does not refer solely to salary, but also in the less tangible aspects of a employer/employee relationship. The economy has sucked for a while now, and in most cases employers are used to candidates kissing their ass and basically agreeing to give up any semblance of work-life balance for a job that pays them about 70% of what they're worth. Devs don't have to do that; they can demand 1) premium salaries and 2) to be treated like human beings with a need for a life outside of work and for opportunities for professional development, because supply is so tight.
If you're worried about your investment in your new people not paying off (because once they realize what a flaming asshole you are, they quit) then you need to 1) change your attitude about your people; treat them like assets and not walking cost centers, and 2) keep them happy in their jobs by making their workloads sane, giving them opportunities to do cool shit that also benefits the company, and compensating them well enough to keep them from jumping ship. The problems you describe with re-tooling and delays in productivity are actually failures of management; see 1) and 2). Managing devs is hard, and it sounds like you're either too lazy or too incompetent to do the job. You come across as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and people don't want to work for people like that if they have the choice (and they do.)
Uh, reading is fundamental. OP isn't suggesting anything, it's cowardly management that puts covering their own asses over providing a quality product.
This. Get a new job and leave skidmarks on the floor running out of there. GTFO. I don't know where you're located, but if it's within driving distance of any city of consequence, you can have a new job in a month if not sooner if you've got IT expertise.
I just quit a job like what you describe (in my case, developer on paper, but doing a thousand other things because they wouldn't get done if I left it up to clueless management). Solo developer, no sysadmin, no DBA, no QA, no administrative support, no specs, no clue. The only thing I did wrong was let it go on for as long as it did.
Caveat: Outside looking in, have not technically worked in an Agile environment (although I have a new gig that is supposedly going to implement it Real Soon Now).
It seems to me that the main benefit to the business concerns in Agile is the ability to see something rudimentary right away, and be able to give better-informed feedback to the developers with regards to the features that are yet to be implemented. The trade-off is that the new features have costs associated with them, so the benefit to the developers is that that forces the business concerns to curb their scope accordingly, and hopefully provide better specs. However, what I can see happening is costs being invisible (or non-existent) to the business concerns, giving them a blank check to creep the scope and demand features that were never discussed in the planning stages (because the developers selfishly insisted on having adequate time to implement the features in a sane environment, thus committing the cardinal sin of pushing up a deadline).
Without those costs as a check against business concern ignorance, Agile IMHO seems doomed to failure. At my last job (and this is one of the reasons I no longer work there) we had a big client. A really big client. A client that was big enough to bully their way into creeping the scope and providing inadequate (and by inadequate, I mean non-existent) specifications. A client that would not allow us to bill them for additional time when they changed their requirements and demanded new features. Without that check (increased costs) the development process went way beyond initial estimates to the point where we ate most of the development costs and burned out our resources. Had we tried to implement Agile, I would have either quit sooner or had a psychotic break. So, to bring us back on topic, they now have zero developers on staff instead of one because of poor management.
If my child is killed in a car accident because they were doing something stupid, then they didn't learn anything, now did they?
Children (especially teenagers) do stupid things. I certainly did my share. Doing stupid shit is part of growing up, and, unfortunately, sometimes the stupid shit prevents your growing up.
Since teenagers tend to think they have it all figured out, they don't like to listen, it isn't nearly as much fun as goofing off and doing whatever they want.
That's a failure of parenting. Parenting is hard, which is why so many have adopted zero-privacy zero-tolerance attitudes towards their children. At some point you have to trust that your kids have been raised well enough to know right from wrong, to know the colossally stupid from the merely irresponsible. Cracking down on them when they've done nothing to warrant it only undermines your authority as a parent and as an example to be followed. Sure, set rules, and enforce punishments when the rules are broken (and *be consistent*, IMHO that's the key), but don't assume that your kid is going to misbehave without any evidence.
But they must also respect authority, which in this case, is me. I have rules, I expect them to be followed.
No, they really don't *have* to. You have to earn their respect, and that starts slightly after they're walking. If they don't respect you, they won't listen to you, and you can't watch them 24/7.
but they also are minors until they are 18 and they live under my roof, thus there are rules to be followed.
Has any teenager ever listened to that? If they have, has it made any impact on their behavior? It just re-enforces the arbitrary authoritarianism that you appear to espouse. The more you tighten your grip, the more they'll find ways to wiggle out of it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposing strict rules for teenagers to try to help keep them out of trouble. I'm actually pretty strict with my kids (granted, they're not teenagers yet, but learning that there are consequences for breaking rules early on makes your life easier when they start thinking for themselves and questioning your wisdom, which even the most well-behaved teenager does) but I try hard not to be arbitrary. I try to emphasize the reasoning behind the punishment as much as I can ("Do you know why you're in time out? No? Here's why. Do you understand?") If you're afraid that your kid will die in a car accident, do your best to make sure they have the right tools and skills to keep them out of a bad situation. For example, paying for driver's education if it's available, getting the safest car you can afford for them to drive, emphasize driving defensively, etc. If you're afraid of your kid getting pregnant/getting someone else pregnant, do your level best to present the risks and consequences in a non-condescending way, and offer them all the free birth control they want.
In a perfect world, none of this would be necessary and teenagers would always listen to their parents. We're not in one of those, and IMHO we probably shouldn't be.
- but there's no *compelling business case* to do so
FTFY. Let's say engineering wanted to include this feature. They'd go to the business and say "We can offer our customers additional peace of mind and also protect ourselves from harm in the event of a data breach if we store all this information encrypted." The business would answer with "Does that translate to additional sales?" Unfortunately, given the general technical cluelessness of the average consumer, they aren't likely to buy on something they can't see or understand.
So, engineering isn't authorized to commit the resources to securing the data. Nothing to see here, move along.
And you can thank Blue Cross for that. The ACA didn't cancel your plan, your carrier cancelled your plan because it was no longer profitable under the ACA's rules. Your insurer had the option of improving their efficiency and lowering their costs so that they could meet the 85% rule the ACA requires, but they decided that that was too hard. The ACA's wrong move there was assuming that for-profit insurance companies 1) should continue to exist and 2) would exchange the mountains of new business they're getting for not acting like complete money-grubbing parasitic sociopathic asshats.
tl;dr: Your plan got cancelled because your insurer made a marketing decision.
... by a company acting just as badly or worse. It's the 'car salesman' business model. Everyone hates car salesmen (with good reason) but so long as every salesman in every dealership acts just as cravenly, then there's no incentive to change the model.
It's been well established that a very large percentage of those who come here illegally because "they only want a better life" end up in prison for things like robbery, rape, murder, drugs, etc.
Well established in your mind, maybe. The rest of us would like you to cite your (objective) source. Blaze, Fox News, World Net Daily are not sources, they're parodies.
Instead of amnesty we need to start talking about rounding them up, shipping them to Antarctica, and let them walk back.
How would you like to pay for that? I'm sure you'd rather rip your legs off than pay more in taxes.
If they had no respect for our laws when they came here why would they respect our laws after the fact?
Because they don't want to attract attention to themselves? Getting arrested is a really good way to get deported if you're here illegally.
They have no interest in the American way of life.
Work hard, get ahead, leave something better for your kids. Sounds pretty American to me. All the immigrants I know work pretty fucking hard at shitty jobs so they can send money back "home".
There's 12 million of them (that we know of). I'd consider that a significant part of the population (4% or so). The "culture" part of your comment pretty much gives away your 'white power' attitude.
A reason in two parts, actually. One is job security; if you have so much institutional knowledge and your employer is too cheap to have redundancy for that knowledge (by hiring more people or spending man-hours sharing the knowledge with another employee), and that knowledge is mission-critical, you can get away with being all kinds of lazy/incompetent and you won't get fired. The CTO at our company has had his job for the last 15 years or so purely because he's the only one who knows how some of our stuff works; he's an incompetent micromanaging asshole who drives good employees to quit, and would be fired in a cold minute at most companies. The other part is that that job security gives you leverage with the clueless management that asks you to do something completely stupid; you can stand up to them and say "No, I'm not doing that, it's retarded" and you stand a lesser chance of being fired. If that sounds arrogant, think of how arrogant it is for the business to make technical decisions without engineering input. If worse comes to worst, you can say "Fire me if you have to, but either way, that's not getting done."
In my opinion, anything that gives the people who do actual work leverage over people who are exploiting them for personal gain is a good thing. Downside is that when you're job hunting, frequently the positions you're looking at are tasked with cleaning up someone else's mess because either they (stupidly) fired the employee with the knowledge that was critical to the business processes, or the employee got sick of putting up with management's bullshit and quit. If either of those happen, it's a failure of leadership (who either decided that redundancy of knowledge isn't important enough to put in the time, or that the employee wasn't bending over far enough for them). I find that that failure takes the form of hiring someone for their knowledge and/or skills, then dismissing their input as inconvenient or deciding they know better how to do that job than the guy with the actual skills.
GM dealers aren't required to participate in the web-based test, and company officials say they have had some dealers turn it down.
Their business model relies on being able to screw over the customer on the price, and if the customer is walking through the door with a price that's guaranteed, then they can't screw them over (as hard, I'm sure they'll find a way).
The whole dealership paradigm needs to die. Open "service centers" instead of dealerships for the maintenance and sell over the web. Put all those scumbag salespeople/managers right where they belong: either in jail for fraud, or unemployed because they have no useful skills.
1. No response to poor test results. They noticed poor performance but didn't take any action to investigate or resolve it.
But it was cheaper, that's all that matters.
2. No competent code review (especially for algorithm related code).
Then they'd have to pay someone else to look at it. People can check their own code for mistakes, no sense in paying another person.
Management very rarely want "good", they're more focused on "cheap" and "fast". Cheap and fast are easy to put numbers on, good is harder to quantify without actually listening to the people working in IT (and believing/trusting them). Never listen to cost centers when they tell you you need to spend money on a problem, they're just lazy nerds who want to sandbag you.
My (admittedly fairly unscientific) testing seems to indicate that if you have your passcode lock set to lock immediately, you can see what apps are running, but you cannot open any of them. If you set your passcode lock to lock after 5 minutes, you can access the applications... but you could just swipe from the "lock" screen to do the same thing.
As far as I can tell, this "bug" is bullshit. The worst that happens is that someone sees what apps you were running, the screens are greyed out if you "exploit" this successfully.
No, that's the true American Dream, not that drivel they fed you in school. The true American Dream is not "work hard, play by the rules, you'll leave something better for your children," it's "Con other people into working hard and generating revenue, then keep the revenue for yourself."
Hard work only gets you ahead if what you work hard at is screwing over people who do actual work.
No, you need to know enough to migrate to something that isn't three decades old.
These 'rules' that you speak of, what makes you think the engineers/developers have any input on those? The only leverage you have on some of this stuff is to quit if what they're asking you to do is stupid enough. (Actually, first, you get a new job offer, then you tell management "I'm not doing that." When they threaten your job, you tell them "That's fine, either way, it's not getting done." But, they WILL call your bluff, so make sure it isn't a bluff. Case in point: My company asked me to remove all the data validation on user input in a web application because "customers won't be able to place orders". Seriously. That's when I started looking for a new job, because they 1) don't believe that data validation is worthwhile, and 2) don't listen to me when I try to explain to them why it's not optional. (My current analogy for that is that you can drive a car on the highway without wearing your seatbelt, but it's a really bad idea. True, 999 times out of 1000 you won't wreck and get ejected from the car, but it only hasn't happened until it does.)
And telling Management that they're idiots, even when they are, will get you fired, period. Doesn't matter if you're right or not, you're the company's bitch, and there's 150 people who will do your job for less than they're paying you.
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This is unfortunately true. What I said was a simplification, that would have included the scenarios you describe.
I noticed how you didn't say anything about the for-profit insurers, though, who would rather not do business with someone than spend 85 cents on the dollar on actual healthcare.
Agreed. Outlawing for-profit insurers/providers isn't a magic bullet but it's a good step, it would save something like 25 cents on the dollar.
First, you're a jerk.
Second, you're a short-sighted jerk who wants to treat his workers like interchangeable cogs in your machine.
If an employer isn't willing to "put up with" retooling and retraining, then that employer is missing out on a huge amount of talent. Not to mention that devs as a group are a reasonably bright bunch, and it will be apparent to them once they start working for you that you don't give a flying shit about their professional development or treating them like human beings. I'm guessing your churn rate is enormous and you spend a good portion of your departmental budget on outsourced recruiting. (I tend to hang up on those guys, because if your company is too cheap to pay for a domestic recruiter, then they're probably too cheap in other areas as well.)
And w/r/t your comment about "prima donnas": The market for software developers is tight. The market for GOOD software developers is psychotic. Again, software devs are a reasonably bright bunch, and they realize they have a skill set that is highly in demand. Basic economics: When demand is high and supply is finite, prices go up. "Prices", in this case, does not refer solely to salary, but also in the less tangible aspects of a employer/employee relationship. The economy has sucked for a while now, and in most cases employers are used to candidates kissing their ass and basically agreeing to give up any semblance of work-life balance for a job that pays them about 70% of what they're worth. Devs don't have to do that; they can demand 1) premium salaries and 2) to be treated like human beings with a need for a life outside of work and for opportunities for professional development, because supply is so tight.
If you're worried about your investment in your new people not paying off (because once they realize what a flaming asshole you are, they quit) then you need to 1) change your attitude about your people; treat them like assets and not walking cost centers, and 2) keep them happy in their jobs by making their workloads sane, giving them opportunities to do cool shit that also benefits the company, and compensating them well enough to keep them from jumping ship. The problems you describe with re-tooling and delays in productivity are actually failures of management; see 1) and 2). Managing devs is hard, and it sounds like you're either too lazy or too incompetent to do the job. You come across as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and people don't want to work for people like that if they have the choice (and they do.)
Uh, reading is fundamental. OP isn't suggesting anything, it's cowardly management that puts covering their own asses over providing a quality product.
This. Get a new job and leave skidmarks on the floor running out of there. GTFO. I don't know where you're located, but if it's within driving distance of any city of consequence, you can have a new job in a month if not sooner if you've got IT expertise.
I just quit a job like what you describe (in my case, developer on paper, but doing a thousand other things because they wouldn't get done if I left it up to clueless management). Solo developer, no sysadmin, no DBA, no QA, no administrative support, no specs, no clue. The only thing I did wrong was let it go on for as long as it did.
Caveat: Outside looking in, have not technically worked in an Agile environment (although I have a new gig that is supposedly going to implement it Real Soon Now).
It seems to me that the main benefit to the business concerns in Agile is the ability to see something rudimentary right away, and be able to give better-informed feedback to the developers with regards to the features that are yet to be implemented. The trade-off is that the new features have costs associated with them, so the benefit to the developers is that that forces the business concerns to curb their scope accordingly, and hopefully provide better specs. However, what I can see happening is costs being invisible (or non-existent) to the business concerns, giving them a blank check to creep the scope and demand features that were never discussed in the planning stages (because the developers selfishly insisted on having adequate time to implement the features in a sane environment, thus committing the cardinal sin of pushing up a deadline).
Without those costs as a check against business concern ignorance, Agile IMHO seems doomed to failure. At my last job (and this is one of the reasons I no longer work there) we had a big client. A really big client. A client that was big enough to bully their way into creeping the scope and providing inadequate (and by inadequate, I mean non-existent) specifications. A client that would not allow us to bill them for additional time when they changed their requirements and demanded new features. Without that check (increased costs) the development process went way beyond initial estimates to the point where we ate most of the development costs and burned out our resources. Had we tried to implement Agile, I would have either quit sooner or had a psychotic break. So, to bring us back on topic, they now have zero developers on staff instead of one because of poor management.
Children (especially teenagers) do stupid things. I certainly did my share. Doing stupid shit is part of growing up, and, unfortunately, sometimes the stupid shit prevents your growing up.
That's a failure of parenting. Parenting is hard, which is why so many have adopted zero-privacy zero-tolerance attitudes towards their children. At some point you have to trust that your kids have been raised well enough to know right from wrong, to know the colossally stupid from the merely irresponsible. Cracking down on them when they've done nothing to warrant it only undermines your authority as a parent and as an example to be followed. Sure, set rules, and enforce punishments when the rules are broken (and *be consistent*, IMHO that's the key), but don't assume that your kid is going to misbehave without any evidence.
No, they really don't *have* to. You have to earn their respect, and that starts slightly after they're walking. If they don't respect you, they won't listen to you, and you can't watch them 24/7.
Has any teenager ever listened to that? If they have, has it made any impact on their behavior? It just re-enforces the arbitrary authoritarianism that you appear to espouse. The more you tighten your grip, the more they'll find ways to wiggle out of it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposing strict rules for teenagers to try to help keep them out of trouble. I'm actually pretty strict with my kids (granted, they're not teenagers yet, but learning that there are consequences for breaking rules early on makes your life easier when they start thinking for themselves and questioning your wisdom, which even the most well-behaved teenager does) but I try hard not to be arbitrary. I try to emphasize the reasoning behind the punishment as much as I can ("Do you know why you're in time out? No? Here's why. Do you understand?") If you're afraid that your kid will die in a car accident, do your best to make sure they have the right tools and skills to keep them out of a bad situation. For example, paying for driver's education if it's available, getting the safest car you can afford for them to drive, emphasize driving defensively, etc. If you're afraid of your kid getting pregnant/getting someone else pregnant, do your level best to present the risks and consequences in a non-condescending way, and offer them all the free birth control they want.
In a perfect world, none of this would be necessary and teenagers would always listen to their parents. We're not in one of those, and IMHO we probably shouldn't be.
FTFY. Let's say engineering wanted to include this feature. They'd go to the business and say "We can offer our customers additional peace of mind and also protect ourselves from harm in the event of a data breach if we store all this information encrypted." The business would answer with "Does that translate to additional sales?" Unfortunately, given the general technical cluelessness of the average consumer, they aren't likely to buy on something they can't see or understand.
So, engineering isn't authorized to commit the resources to securing the data. Nothing to see here, move along.
And you can thank Blue Cross for that. The ACA didn't cancel your plan, your carrier cancelled your plan because it was no longer profitable under the ACA's rules. Your insurer had the option of improving their efficiency and lowering their costs so that they could meet the 85% rule the ACA requires, but they decided that that was too hard. The ACA's wrong move there was assuming that for-profit insurance companies 1) should continue to exist and 2) would exchange the mountains of new business they're getting for not acting like complete money-grubbing parasitic sociopathic asshats.
tl;dr: Your plan got cancelled because your insurer made a marketing decision.
... by a company acting just as badly or worse. It's the 'car salesman' business model. Everyone hates car salesmen (with good reason) but so long as every salesman in every dealership acts just as cravenly, then there's no incentive to change the model.
Well established in your mind, maybe. The rest of us would like you to cite your (objective) source. Blaze, Fox News, World Net Daily are not sources, they're parodies.
How would you like to pay for that? I'm sure you'd rather rip your legs off than pay more in taxes.
Because they don't want to attract attention to themselves? Getting arrested is a really good way to get deported if you're here illegally.
Work hard, get ahead, leave something better for your kids. Sounds pretty American to me. All the immigrants I know work pretty fucking hard at shitty jobs so they can send money back "home".
There's 12 million of them (that we know of). I'd consider that a significant part of the population (4% or so). The "culture" part of your comment pretty much gives away your 'white power' attitude.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Todays "Occam's Razor" prize goes to ebno-10db!
A reason in two parts, actually. One is job security; if you have so much institutional knowledge and your employer is too cheap to have redundancy for that knowledge (by hiring more people or spending man-hours sharing the knowledge with another employee), and that knowledge is mission-critical, you can get away with being all kinds of lazy/incompetent and you won't get fired. The CTO at our company has had his job for the last 15 years or so purely because he's the only one who knows how some of our stuff works; he's an incompetent micromanaging asshole who drives good employees to quit, and would be fired in a cold minute at most companies. The other part is that that job security gives you leverage with the clueless management that asks you to do something completely stupid; you can stand up to them and say "No, I'm not doing that, it's retarded" and you stand a lesser chance of being fired. If that sounds arrogant, think of how arrogant it is for the business to make technical decisions without engineering input. If worse comes to worst, you can say "Fire me if you have to, but either way, that's not getting done."
In my opinion, anything that gives the people who do actual work leverage over people who are exploiting them for personal gain is a good thing. Downside is that when you're job hunting, frequently the positions you're looking at are tasked with cleaning up someone else's mess because either they (stupidly) fired the employee with the knowledge that was critical to the business processes, or the employee got sick of putting up with management's bullshit and quit. If either of those happen, it's a failure of leadership (who either decided that redundancy of knowledge isn't important enough to put in the time, or that the employee wasn't bending over far enough for them). I find that that failure takes the form of hiring someone for their knowledge and/or skills, then dismissing their input as inconvenient or deciding they know better how to do that job than the guy with the actual skills.
Their business model relies on being able to screw over the customer on the price, and if the customer is walking through the door with a price that's guaranteed, then they can't screw them over (as hard, I'm sure they'll find a way).
The whole dealership paradigm needs to die. Open "service centers" instead of dealerships for the maintenance and sell over the web. Put all those scumbag salespeople/managers right where they belong: either in jail for fraud, or unemployed because they have no useful skills.
But they want more money to do it. The bean counters don't understand their jobs, so they assume they're just being greedy.
But it was cheaper, that's all that matters.
Then they'd have to pay someone else to look at it. People can check their own code for mistakes, no sense in paying another person.
Management very rarely want "good", they're more focused on "cheap" and "fast". Cheap and fast are easy to put numbers on, good is harder to quantify without actually listening to the people working in IT (and believing/trusting them). Never listen to cost centers when they tell you you need to spend money on a problem, they're just lazy nerds who want to sandbag you.
Cheaper workers, which is all they care about.
I'll pay you back. Where would you like me to send my 1.5 cents?
My (admittedly fairly unscientific) testing seems to indicate that if you have your passcode lock set to lock immediately, you can see what apps are running, but you cannot open any of them. If you set your passcode lock to lock after 5 minutes, you can access the applications... but you could just swipe from the "lock" screen to do the same thing.
As far as I can tell, this "bug" is bullshit. The worst that happens is that someone sees what apps you were running, the screens are greyed out if you "exploit" this successfully.
Try again, Apple haters.
People keep saying that they exist, but I have no evidence to support that assertion other than anecdote.
Oh really.
Yeah, that's why there's a waiting list months long for the Model S, and it outsells its conventionally-fueled competitors. Idiot.
No, that's the true American Dream, not that drivel they fed you in school. The true American Dream is not "work hard, play by the rules, you'll leave something better for your children," it's "Con other people into working hard and generating revenue, then keep the revenue for yourself."
Hard work only gets you ahead if what you work hard at is screwing over people who do actual work.
No, you need to know enough to migrate to something that isn't three decades old.
These 'rules' that you speak of, what makes you think the engineers/developers have any input on those? The only leverage you have on some of this stuff is to quit if what they're asking you to do is stupid enough. (Actually, first, you get a new job offer, then you tell management "I'm not doing that." When they threaten your job, you tell them "That's fine, either way, it's not getting done." But, they WILL call your bluff, so make sure it isn't a bluff. Case in point: My company asked me to remove all the data validation on user input in a web application because "customers won't be able to place orders". Seriously. That's when I started looking for a new job, because they 1) don't believe that data validation is worthwhile, and 2) don't listen to me when I try to explain to them why it's not optional. (My current analogy for that is that you can drive a car on the highway without wearing your seatbelt, but it's a really bad idea. True, 999 times out of 1000 you won't wreck and get ejected from the car, but it only hasn't happened until it does.)
And telling Management that they're idiots, even when they are, will get you fired, period. Doesn't matter if you're right or not, you're the company's bitch, and there's 150 people who will do your job for less than they're paying you.