Oh good, let's bring the Bible into this. It's just what this conversation needs. All we need now are some 9/11 conspiracies, and we've got the full spectrum of right wing crazy town.
Someone has to know how to decrypt this information. The way of doing that is sent over the Internet, which can easily be MitMed.
Yes the "way of doing that" *is* sent over the internet encrypted specifically to prevent a mitm attack. The whole fucking point of encryption is to prevent a mitm attack. So if you've got some new information showing that mitm attacks are actually easy (e.g. you solved the RSA problem, etc), then lets hear it.
There are 2 crimes being committed as part of the plan. 1 crime is meant to be discovered, and the other is not.
You don't seem to be able to understand that when I wrote "A crucial part of the plan is not getting caught ", it was in the context of the crime referred to by the comment I was responding to (i.e. violating RICO laws), and not to both crimes.
I thought it was pretty clear: "not getting caught" means nobody gets the reward.
It should be pretty clear that I was not suggesting that nobody gets caught for anything, especially since this was the crux of the plan I described.
Identifying yourself to the police as someone who committed a crime is different than identifying yourself to the police as someone who witnessed a crime and wants to collect a reward.
The fall guy is supposed to get caught for point a laser at a plane. The person collecting the reward not supposed to get caught for fraud.
I expect there are many laws that someone who was caught implementing this plan could be convicted under. A crucial part of the plan was not getting caught.
1) Find someone who doesn't mind going to jail that much (e.g. a homeless guy, someone with a terminal illness, etc).
2) Offer to pay him $8K for pointing a laser pointer at a plane and going to jail.
3) Profit!
You could probably find a more erratic person willing to take less than $8K of the 10K, but I would imagine you'd want to deal with a fairly rational person who doesn't feel resentment towards you (i.e. for getting ripped off). The goal of this plan is to rip off the government and the tax payer, not the fall guy.
What the government should do, is offer $20K for turning in the orchestrator of a laser pointer arrest reward scheme.
Anyhow, my point was only that "fast" and "right" are orthogonal axes
As I said before, I don't consider "fast and wrong" to be fast at all. If we only count right/correct work to be finished, then speed is a perfectly reasonable evaluation of the skill of a programmer.
I consider someone who finishes work fast and wrong to actually be tied for worst/slowest developer along with everyone else who takes an infinite amount of time to complete a task properly.
Under your characterization, I honestly don't even know that many people who fall into the "fast and wrong" category. I know lots of people in the "slow and wrong" category, and lots of people in the "fast and right" category, and a few people in the "slow and right category".
Are you working on some very long release cycle where 3 months is an interesting time frame?
No it was just an example. Every contract we get is split into tasks which can be split into subtasks. Some take years, some take months, some take days, some take hours. If someone is constantly finishing his work ahead of schedule, they are able to take on more tasks to get the overall job done. There are so many tasks for a 2 year contract, some of which can be done simultaneously and some of which must be done sequentially, that it is impractical to predict exactly when everything will be finished. We start with a plan and adapt as certain people finish their tasks earlier or later than expected.
Individual developers don't technically need to know anything about the schedule. They just need to know what their current task is. Often developers will be informed whether the team is ahead or behind schedule to get them to work a little faster or allow them to relax a little
.
Someone who works really fast (i.e. genuinely fast without needing his work to be redone) is actually accomplishing many more tasks than someone who works really slow. Even if "we" meet our deadline, it doesn't change the fact that someone who accomplished 10x as much work toward meeting that deadline in the same time frame is more valuable.
No we are not making shoes, but I don't see how writing software is all that much different than making shoes other than it being a little more unpredictable.
I don't doubt that there isn't some aspect of luck to all of this, whether it be luck in getting published by a big journal, or something else. I question whether the right conclusion was reached from the data. The logic seems a bit circular, in that it seems to suggest is that the more successful scientists are more successful.
Certainly scientists who publish many top tier papers are great, but not all great scientists publish many top tier papers. For the number to correlate so strongly with academic success is a bit sad.
If it didn't correlate with success, then we would see some other different scientists becoming successful, and then they would start getting published in big science journals, and then it would correlate again. Wouldn't we expect these numbers to correlate highly regardless of how fair the process was?
We're not making shoes here. It's quite rare that "productivity per dollar of salary" really matters, at least not by a factor of 2. Predictably delivering high quality code on schedule as a team is what matters to me.
The "on schedule" part seems to imply a threshold for satisfactory speed of work.
Not to me. The guy who checks in after 2 days and says "ship it, I'm done", and we're still finding bugs in production 3 months later is a disaster
Thinking you're done when you are not, is a different problem. Programmers, fast and slow can suffer from this. In my experience it's the slow pokes that suffer from this more often. Their general lack of talent makes them both slow and clueless about potential problems with their approach.
At least with someone who finishes in 2 days and says "ship it" prematurely you still have 88 days to fix the situation. The guy who spends 3 months doesn't give you a lot of room to fix problems.
Yes correctness matters. On schedule matters too. Ahead of schedule means you have more time to do testing.
My post got cut off... but basically he doesn't understand a section of code that revolves around the concept of scaledValue(a double) = rawValue(an integer) * scaleFactor + offset. It's not like were talking about a complicated algorithm or anything.
But, if someone is competent at those boring jobs, I agree that if that's the best and highest use of the person, it makes no sense wasting a more broadly or deeply skilled person on the job.
Almost anyone would be competent at these boring jobs. I don't think you'd even need a high school education to do them. All you need is the diligence, and motivation to show up everyday, the maturity to act and dress like a professional especially in front of customers. The only reason a 14 year old kid couldn't do this job is because they can't be trusted not to stay up until 5 am playing call of duty and blowing off their responsibilities.
However, if someone is competent at their job, I don't hear them being referred to as "idiots" often.
Certainly not in a professional setting, but I certainly refer to them idiots to my colleagues/friends/family in private.
Unfortunately, if these people incorrectly think they are qualified for a "better" job, they seem to often have attitude problems.
Unfortunately it is the case that we can't officially designate these people as idiots, so whenever they get a new manager or switch groups, inevitably, there is a period of time when they are presumed to know things that they don't. And the person I am thinking of right now, actually does get bored with busy work, and asks for more interesting work that he shouldn't be trusted with. Even if he is never awarded such work, it takes a psychological toll on his manager to constantly shoot him down.
I, for example, would be completely incompetent at the job of conductor of the symphony. If I somehow got such a job, I would quickly be declared an "idiot" by patrons and employees alike.
And you would be one in the context of that job.
Our team idiot is probably not an idiot in every aspect of his life. He speaks Chinese (i.e. he is bilingual) which is an area in which I am certainly deficient. He is however by far the worst software engineer in our group. He has been asking me questions about how a certain piece of code works periodically for the past 7 years. If you can't figure out how a piece of code (
For tennis players who aspire to be successful (e.g. get lots of endorsements, etc), the secret is to win lots of tennis tournaments and preferably grand slams. That career advice may seem obvious, but this time it's backed up by a new analysis of tournament data.
So now the question becomes whether the tennis players became successful because they employed the strategy of winning lots of tournaments, or whether some 3rd factor (like raw talent and/or work ethic) somehow caused both the winning of tournaments *and* the success. Looking at tournament data is not going to tell you this.
In order to get to the bottom of this, you need to do something like simple random sampling. You might randomly select players to win tennis tournaments, independently of their skill. Lets say we declare the winner of Wimbledon based on a lottery for a few years rather than by having a skill based tournament, and see how many tennis endorsements the winners get, compared with the winners of other grand slams that are based on skill.
If the winners of the Wimbledon lottery get just as many tennis endorsements as the US/French/Australian open winners, then we might conclude that winning tournaments is what causes a players success.
No one gets it right 100% of the time. Everyone has a percentage of the time that they get it wrong. Some people have a higher percentage than others.
Being a really slow worker is a really bad thing. If you take 2 people that are right the same percentage of the time. One works twice as fast as the other. You have to be paying the slower worker half the salary of the fast worker to make the slow worker's employment as valuable as the fast worker.
Workers who work "fast" but but have a high error rate, are not really fast at all if you count the time it takes to fix their mistakes. If we refer to people who are genuinely fast, this would include people who appear slow, but never need their work fixed. If we refer to genuinely slow people, this would include people who appear fast but never do things correctly the first time (or ever). In this model the wrong people *are* the slow people, and the "right" slow people are no better.
It doesn't matter to me if someone finishes a project in 2 days and it takes them 3 months to work out all the bugs, or if it just takes them 3 months to finish, if the end result is the same. A person who can finish a project properly in 1 month is 3x as valuable as a person who takes 3 months regardless of how many times they got it wrong before they got it right after 3 months.
It's not like everyone needs to be compensated equally. You can keep incompetent people if they can still be a net benefit to the company (i.e. their salary does not exceed their skill level). We have tons of idiots at our company, and they are just given boring jobs no one else wants to do (i.e. the kind of jobs that would make me quit if I were stuck doing them). They aren't even paid *that* much less. Wasting a really talented person on a mundane, but necessary job, is what you inevitably end up doing if you have *only* hired people that are equally amazing.
Most people are not tempted confuse an opinion piece (regardless of the medium) as fact. Maybe you should work on this skill if you are having trouble.
The idiot is always the problem. You're story describing how you were once "the idiot" but actually the smartest person at the company, while the "real idiots" fucked everything up, is just more evidence of this.
Tell a story about how the result of a project is completely independent of how competent the people the people on a team are, and that is a story about how it's not the idiots fault when things go wrong.
It turns out the CEO is really bad at cleaning toilets and the janitor is really bad at deciding corporate strategy. Everybody is equally valuable and everyone's skill sets complement each other perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh good, let's bring the Bible into this. It's just what this conversation needs. All we need now are some 9/11 conspiracies, and we've got the full spectrum of right wing crazy town.
Well the worst case scenario is that 9/11 was an inside job and Obama is a secret Muslim. Now how do we proceed?
Someone has to know how to decrypt this information. The way of doing that is sent over the Internet, which can easily be MitMed.
Yes the "way of doing that" *is* sent over the internet encrypted specifically to prevent a mitm attack. The whole fucking point of encryption is to prevent a mitm attack. So if you've got some new information showing that mitm attacks are actually easy (e.g. you solved the RSA problem, etc), then lets hear it.
Is that you John Galt?
There are 2 crimes being committed as part of the plan. 1 crime is meant to be discovered, and the other is not.
You don't seem to be able to understand that when I wrote "A crucial part of the plan is not getting caught ", it was in the context of the crime referred to by the comment I was responding to (i.e. violating RICO laws), and not to both crimes.
I thought it was pretty clear: "not getting caught" means nobody gets the reward.
It should be pretty clear that I was not suggesting that nobody gets caught for anything, especially since this was the crux of the plan I described.
Fraud is a deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
The fraud is pretending to catch a criminal in order to secure a reward from the government.
I started writing a comment to explain it to you in a way I thought you could understand it. Fuck it. If you can't understand it, you are on your own.
Identifying yourself to the police as someone who committed a crime is different than identifying yourself to the police as someone who witnessed a crime and wants to collect a reward.
The fall guy is supposed to get caught for point a laser at a plane. The person collecting the reward not supposed to get caught for fraud.
I expect there are many laws that someone who was caught implementing this plan could be convicted under. A crucial part of the plan was not getting caught.
2) Offer to pay him $8K for pointing a laser pointer at a plane and going to jail.
3) Profit!
You could probably find a more erratic person willing to take less than $8K of the 10K, but I would imagine you'd want to deal with a fairly rational person who doesn't feel resentment towards you (i.e. for getting ripped off). The goal of this plan is to rip off the government and the tax payer, not the fall guy.
What the government should do, is offer $20K for turning in the orchestrator of a laser pointer arrest reward scheme.
Anyhow, my point was only that "fast" and "right" are orthogonal axes
As I said before, I don't consider "fast and wrong" to be fast at all. If we only count right/correct work to be finished, then speed is a perfectly reasonable evaluation of the skill of a programmer.
I consider someone who finishes work fast and wrong to actually be tied for worst/slowest developer along with everyone else who takes an infinite amount of time to complete a task properly.
Under your characterization, I honestly don't even know that many people who fall into the "fast and wrong" category. I know lots of people in the "slow and wrong" category, and lots of people in the "fast and right" category, and a few people in the "slow and right category".
Are you working on some very long release cycle where 3 months is an interesting time frame?
No it was just an example. Every contract we get is split into tasks which can be split into subtasks. Some take years, some take months, some take days, some take hours. If someone is constantly finishing his work ahead of schedule, they are able to take on more tasks to get the overall job done. There are so many tasks for a 2 year contract, some of which can be done simultaneously and some of which must be done sequentially, that it is impractical to predict exactly when everything will be finished. We start with a plan and adapt as certain people finish their tasks earlier or later than expected.
Individual developers don't technically need to know anything about the schedule. They just need to know what their current task is. Often developers will be informed whether the team is ahead or behind schedule to get them to work a little faster or allow them to relax a little
.
Someone who works really fast (i.e. genuinely fast without needing his work to be redone) is actually accomplishing many more tasks than someone who works really slow. Even if "we" meet our deadline, it doesn't change the fact that someone who accomplished 10x as much work toward meeting that deadline in the same time frame is more valuable.
No we are not making shoes, but I don't see how writing software is all that much different than making shoes other than it being a little more unpredictable.
Yeah, I wonder when that's going to be fixed.
I don't doubt that there isn't some aspect of luck to all of this, whether it be luck in getting published by a big journal, or something else. I question whether the right conclusion was reached from the data. The logic seems a bit circular, in that it seems to suggest is that the more successful scientists are more successful.
Certainly scientists who publish many top tier papers are great, but not all great scientists publish many top tier papers. For the number to correlate so strongly with academic success is a bit sad.
If it didn't correlate with success, then we would see some other different scientists becoming successful, and then they would start getting published in big science journals, and then it would correlate again. Wouldn't we expect these numbers to correlate highly regardless of how fair the process was?
We're not making shoes here. It's quite rare that "productivity per dollar of salary" really matters, at least not by a factor of 2. Predictably delivering high quality code on schedule as a team is what matters to me.
The "on schedule" part seems to imply a threshold for satisfactory speed of work.
Not to me. The guy who checks in after 2 days and says "ship it, I'm done", and we're still finding bugs in production 3 months later is a disaster
Thinking you're done when you are not, is a different problem. Programmers, fast and slow can suffer from this. In my experience it's the slow pokes that suffer from this more often. Their general lack of talent makes them both slow and clueless about potential problems with their approach.
At least with someone who finishes in 2 days and says "ship it" prematurely you still have 88 days to fix the situation. The guy who spends 3 months doesn't give you a lot of room to fix problems.
Yes correctness matters. On schedule matters too. Ahead of schedule means you have more time to do testing.
My post got cut off... but basically he doesn't understand a section of code that revolves around the concept of scaledValue(a double) = rawValue(an integer) * scaleFactor + offset. It's not like were talking about a complicated algorithm or anything.
But, if someone is competent at those boring jobs, I agree that if that's the best and highest use of the person, it makes no sense wasting a more broadly or deeply skilled person on the job.
Almost anyone would be competent at these boring jobs. I don't think you'd even need a high school education to do them. All you need is the diligence, and motivation to show up everyday, the maturity to act and dress like a professional especially in front of customers. The only reason a 14 year old kid couldn't do this job is because they can't be trusted not to stay up until 5 am playing call of duty and blowing off their responsibilities.
However, if someone is competent at their job, I don't hear them being referred to as "idiots" often.
Certainly not in a professional setting, but I certainly refer to them idiots to my colleagues/friends/family in private.
Unfortunately, if these people incorrectly think they are qualified for a "better" job, they seem to often have attitude problems.
Unfortunately it is the case that we can't officially designate these people as idiots, so whenever they get a new manager or switch groups, inevitably, there is a period of time when they are presumed to know things that they don't. And the person I am thinking of right now, actually does get bored with busy work, and asks for more interesting work that he shouldn't be trusted with. Even if he is never awarded such work, it takes a psychological toll on his manager to constantly shoot him down.
I, for example, would be completely incompetent at the job of conductor of the symphony. If I somehow got such a job, I would quickly be declared an "idiot" by patrons and employees alike.
And you would be one in the context of that job.
Our team idiot is probably not an idiot in every aspect of his life. He speaks Chinese (i.e. he is bilingual) which is an area in which I am certainly deficient. He is however by far the worst software engineer in our group. He has been asking me questions about how a certain piece of code works periodically for the past 7 years. If you can't figure out how a piece of code (
For tennis players who aspire to be successful (e.g. get lots of endorsements, etc), the secret is to win lots of tennis tournaments and preferably grand slams. That career advice may seem obvious, but this time it's backed up by a new analysis of tournament data.
So now the question becomes whether the tennis players became successful because they employed the strategy of winning lots of tournaments, or whether some 3rd factor (like raw talent and/or work ethic) somehow caused both the winning of tournaments *and* the success. Looking at tournament data is not going to tell you this.
In order to get to the bottom of this, you need to do something like simple random sampling. You might randomly select players to win tennis tournaments, independently of their skill. Lets say we declare the winner of Wimbledon based on a lottery for a few years rather than by having a skill based tournament, and see how many tennis endorsements the winners get, compared with the winners of other grand slams that are based on skill.
If the winners of the Wimbledon lottery get just as many tennis endorsements as the US/French/Australian open winners, then we might conclude that winning tournaments is what causes a players success.
No one gets it right 100% of the time. Everyone has a percentage of the time that they get it wrong. Some people have a higher percentage than others.
Being a really slow worker is a really bad thing. If you take 2 people that are right the same percentage of the time. One works twice as fast as the other. You have to be paying the slower worker half the salary of the fast worker to make the slow worker's employment as valuable as the fast worker.
Workers who work "fast" but but have a high error rate, are not really fast at all if you count the time it takes to fix their mistakes. If we refer to people who are genuinely fast, this would include people who appear slow, but never need their work fixed. If we refer to genuinely slow people, this would include people who appear fast but never do things correctly the first time (or ever). In this model the wrong people *are* the slow people, and the "right" slow people are no better.
It doesn't matter to me if someone finishes a project in 2 days and it takes them 3 months to work out all the bugs, or if it just takes them 3 months to finish, if the end result is the same. A person who can finish a project properly in 1 month is 3x as valuable as a person who takes 3 months regardless of how many times they got it wrong before they got it right after 3 months.
It's not like everyone needs to be compensated equally. You can keep incompetent people if they can still be a net benefit to the company (i.e. their salary does not exceed their skill level). We have tons of idiots at our company, and they are just given boring jobs no one else wants to do (i.e. the kind of jobs that would make me quit if I were stuck doing them). They aren't even paid *that* much less. Wasting a really talented person on a mundane, but necessary job, is what you inevitably end up doing if you have *only* hired people that are equally amazing.
Do you really think everybody has equal intellect? Or do you think people should just pretend that everyone has equal intellect?
Most people are not tempted confuse an opinion piece (regardless of the medium) as fact. Maybe you should work on this skill if you are having trouble.
The idiot is always the problem. You're story describing how you were once "the idiot" but actually the smartest person at the company, while the "real idiots" fucked everything up, is just more evidence of this.
Tell a story about how the result of a project is completely independent of how competent the people the people on a team are, and that is a story about how it's not the idiots fault when things go wrong.
It turns out the CEO is really bad at cleaning toilets and the janitor is really bad at deciding corporate strategy. Everybody is equally valuable and everyone's skill sets complement each other perfectly.
Regardless of how you choose to value your employees, somebody is going to end up being the least valuable (even if everyone is really valuable).