this is a horrible, horrible elitist and unrealistic concept. Instead, find someone with passion and man up as a leader to help mold them to be great. Why is this person even working alone at all? Pair them up and help them learn to be a part of your unique group! Follow the apprentice/journeyman/master model.... I'd rather get a n00b who wants to be great than someone who hacked out a project on his own without ever being an active partner.
Prince hasn't been selling his music that way for well over a decade. He sells much smaller runs of CDs with the exact music he wants (self-produced) through his fan club. Apparently, he's actually making way more money now than he ever did in the million-selling-record days.
I broke the screen on my iPhone over a year ago. It looks hideous, with spider-web cracks all up and down it now.
It still works. Hasn't failed at all. I have the required repair kit to fix it, just been too lazy to do so ($79 to buy the kit myself, by the way -- Apple wanted $200, and most online fixers are about $100). At this point, it's almost a badge of pride, because no one who sees the phone believes it still works.
However, I can certify that putting an LG NV3 through the washing machine and dryer will break it.
You need to give up caring. Seriously, if they, as the owner(s), want to be idiots... well, so be it. Realize that (as with many business owners) they aren't really all that sharp, don't commit to this company any further than the short term, and keep your resume up to date for the time when they finally screw up really bad.
I've seen it all at this point. The small business owners that are smart, honest, and have reasonable common sense are few and far between. Your complaints don't surprise me at all; while I admire your dedication and desire to do the right thing, I think this is an exercise in frustration. Let them make their own mistakes, and maybe they'll wise up eventually. If they don't, don't let it be your problem.
> "There are so many development houses where this is not allowed that you just have to deal with it unless you are going to spend your entire life at one company under one boss (not realistic). I suppose you could always ask the question at the end of an interview but that might come across as a little bit petty."
Or, you know, honest.
I would never work in an environment where I couldn't at least occasionally be putting on the headphones and getting into the zone. I know it works for me, I know I produce kickass results that way, and I know some days absolutely nothing else is going to work. It's not my sole means of work; I do plenty of interactions and sometimes me leaving the headphones off and kibitzing when I hear someone get stuck over the cube walls helps others get into the zone. However, any boss that was going to ban my headphones... well, he honestly wouldn't be my boss for long. That's not arrogance speaking, it's confidence that he's simply wrong in his assumptions and I'd be glad to show him entire subsystems of our architecture written to the Essential Mix broadcast. If he still doesn't like it, then I'm going to just be the arrogant dickhead creative type that leaves his employ -- I'd see that as a sign of deeper issues that are inevitably going to manifest as bigger problems. That sort of boss doesn't "get it" in a way that is conducive to managing creative people efficiently. In fact, the OP suggests a boss desperate to assign some blame, and grasping at straws -- hardly someone you want in charge of your work.
So, it sounds petty, but I think it matters a lot. Your work environment and the attitudes you deal with are absolutely going to influence the results of your work. I'm going to argue that the bottom line for the company really does want me to wear my headphones, and if you can't at least ponder the possibility that I might be right... you're not really understanding your technical business.
Sorry, dude, but you look like a total weed hookup even to my suburban white-boy self. The hair says "this dude probably has some weed". Do you carry a hemp bag? I see a lot of vegans with hemp bags.
Just saying... maybe you should carry some bags of oregano with you and make some money from those seeking your assistance.
Yes, I've been reading about all that. Unfortunately, it's a hard lesson in the real world where logic and reason fail utterly. I've contributed to the DNA Lounge fund, hope they can squeak out a win over the bastards.
Well, yes. No doubt that JWZ is a wizard programmer. I mean, the guy earned his bones writing LISP, he knows the theory and the basis for what he is doing. He also knows when to throw elegance out the window and just get the job done as best you can in pressing circumstances. The ability to choose the right course and not get bogged down at either end between cruft and elegance is what makes for a good "duct tape" programmer. You can only throw out the bits you already understand well; otherwise you are operating out of ignorance.
Do fewer unit tests. Stick to the absolute minimum, well-known, easy to test scenarios. Write a bunch of comments noting all the stuff I'm not testing, and why I didn't have time to test it (something like "cannot test this functionality, the logic is too deeply embedded in private code"). I'd at least do something so I have a tiny bit of reassurances that I didn't miss obvious stuff (asserts inside the code can do this too, if you don't want to write dedicated, separate tests) and so I have a basic structure to add better tests in later.
At this point, I wouldn't ever skip some sort of testing in my code. I've just seen too many things caught early enough in the release cycle for me not to believe it's a reasonable investment. I'm leery of getting overly navel-gazing and searching for some perfect testing Nirvana where no production bugs ever occur, but double-checking yourself and making some effort to test early just makes sense in terms of risk reduction.
I hope this professor wasn't any sort of philosophy professor, because that is a classic example of (actually) begging the question. You can win any argument when you choose the definitions and basic assumptions.
Yes, thank you, I don't know why people can't get that. All he needs to do is make an honest effort to be a reasonably good president, and his legacy is assured.
People I know recall fun and funny moments of DND combat from nearly 20 years ago, not plot points.
Wow. My experience over the last 20 years has been the exact opposite. Totally.
Oh, we recall some memorable times when a completely crazy move or lucky roll made the difference, sure. But we usually remember more how we got into that fight in the first place ("He's doing what? He's just supposed to tail the evil wizard/rogue/possible demon, not start a fight with him! Oh shit, let me double-check that list of scrolls I've been saving for a rainy day, maybe I have a Get Out of Death Free card...")
Anyway, combat is fun until it becomes tediously long. Then I fall asleep. Even the big battles better be dynamic and active, my patience for grinding through minutiae of combat is pretty low. We'll Call Our Attacks when we're simulating the best parts of "Enter the Dragon", but otherwise let's keep it simple.
My beef with 3.5e is that combat became this tedious war-gaming exercise that, rather than encouraging interesting ways to achieve victory, slanted towards doing the same stuff over and over again. It showed it's ambitions to be a miniatures-selling, video-game-adaptable system. Yuck. If I want video-games, I have them and I like them for what they are. RPGs with my friends should enhance things I can only do with my friends -- like role-play.
The best times I've had with RPGs have been things like Call of Cthulhu games where I never even knew what combat skills my character had, because a real conflict that had to be gamed out never happened (I was either going to prevail in a trivial situation where five of us jumped the single cultist goon, or die horribly when an actual monster emerged). Don't get me wrong -- I love having a character who can kick ass; I just like it if he can also chew bubblegum.
I concur. I bought the $299 Everex model (whatever that was), the one that had Vista on it rather than Linux. I wanted the slightly better hardware specs of that model, and calculated that I would have spent about $75 and at least $25 of my time to upgrade the $199 Linux model to similar specs.
Off went Vista, on went Ubuntu... everything worked just dandy fine. End of story, life went on. That machine is still my home server, sits in the living room and no one even notices it's there. My XBox 360 makes more noise and draws more power. I got my $299 worth out of it for sure, it draws less power than my previous "green" home server and was less of a hassle. The form factor is slightly bigger, but I dealt with that once I found a convenient spot to hide it while still giving it plenty of passive cooling.
Yeah, yeah, we know. Corporations suck. Whatever, I'm just describing the facts of the matter -- value judgments on the results they lead to are something else entirely. This is why unrestrained capitalism is probably a bad thing -- the invisible hand does need a slap on the wrist every so often to keep it in line.
I don't think this set of remarks on its own is going to get anyone in trouble, but it's naive to not be aware that someone at a VP level has a required standard of conduct very different from just any old techie dude. If you want to be able to shoot your mouth off (and most of us in the technical field do like to do that, it's part of who were are), it's better to stay out of the boardroom, because that's a freedom that you might be giving up along with those lovely stock options.
I remember when Marc and some other bigwigs demoed their initial vision for Netscape 4.0 to a firm I was with in 1996 (maybe they just called it "Communicator", I don't remember the exact package we were being sold on). It looked like a complete desktop environment, the browser went full-screen and suddenly widgets were flying all over and we were pretty much being shown a WebOS.
I have never seen an audience so under-whelmed and outright scared. They just could not deal with the notion that Netscape was proposing that the OS was irrelevant. "But... but... where's my Windows desktop?".
They left essentially being told "no, please don't work on this -- we wouldn't want it". I had the strange feeling they heard that a lot, and whatever this concept was it died pretty stillborn. The version of Communicator they finally came out with was far far less ambitious than the demo I saw that day.
You cannot be a corporate officer of a publicly held company and do that. That will get you sued by investors. You don't need to be a corporate drone to understand that you have to be circumspect and held to a higher standard once you're a VP. If you can't learn when to STFU, don't take a job that is going to involve that.
Where does my slot fit? Do I tie it around my waist, or sling it on my back? I must have missed this wondrous medieval carrying device, the "slot".
Ugh. Even using words like those conjures up MMPORG stuff, and if I wanted that, I'd play that (and sometimes I do want that, and I do play in at least one MMPORG game regularly). D&D isn't a fucking video game, it's not (solely) a board game or miniatures game (sure, you can do that, and it's fun -- but I get bored of it rather quickly).
I just can't see roleplaying a "slot". When game mechanics so overshadow the ability to think of these games as a big version of "let's pretend", I feel like a part of my youth is being stomped by the boots of WotC.
Ah well. I've played homebrew rules before. I can do it again. I sure as heck won't pay them for the privilege of throwing out most of their rules, though.
Oh please. I think Parenti is not someone I give a flying fuck about. I'm more than willing to be reactionary and dismiss him based on this:
"Parenti is known, particularly in his capacity as a prominent member and head of the United States chapter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, as a defender of the Serb position in the Yugoslav wars. He derided what he termed the "tireless demonization of democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic".[1] According to Parenti, these wars were caused by a deliberate US and Western policy aiming at dismembering Yugoslavia in order to impose liberal capitalism there. In this capacity he called for Slobodan's release and defended both Milosevic and Serbs against allegations of atrocities"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti)
He can feel free to suck my dick... show me someone a little less of a scumfuck and maybe I'll listen to him about the Tibetan situation. Seriously, that's about the worst source I can think of, the man is obviously a complete twat. That doesn't mean he might not be right about some things, but his POV is so incredibly skewed from what I consider rational that I don't think it's worth my time to try to figure it out. I have better things to do, like... pick my nose.
I concur. The sheer relentless hammering of those points in every single "late" novel of his just eventually made me swear off of any Heinlein after "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". At a certain point, it just became boring.
When you make promiscuous sex with incredibly beautiful people boring, then you're doing something wrong. Heinlein is boring, and I can pretty much only read his short stories and juvenile novels now.
On the contrary, Tony Stark has been portrayed as a recovering alcoholic in the comics for decades now. If anything, RDJ wins extra points for knowing how to get in touch with the character;-)
Congratulations, grasshopper. You are on the path to enlightenment.
You have to immediately forget whatever you were told about specifications. The real world doesn't work that way, where you get elegant descriptions of exact useful functionality. You're either going to get 100 page documents with way too much detail and a laundry list of features that won't really get used, or what you have right now -- which is, basically, nada.
The key to fixing this is iterative development. You have to give people something to react to -- then you'll draw out their real needs. Start small, be prepared to throw a few false starts away entirely, and you can build up from there. You don't need the full eXtreme Programming bit of having a full-time customer advocate and specific two-week/three-week/whatever iterations, but those concepts are good ones to model your process on.
Try reading the Creating Passionate Users blog for suggestions on how to get people actually interested in your project. Once you do that, you'll get the feedback you need, and as you deliver on those suggestions, you'll build confidence from them that will give you the carte blanche you need to start dictating the evolution of this project on your own. Once you're "the goto guy" on "The Project", you're in the sweet spot and basically can't lose.
This sounds like some sort of sex line to me... when I think of delectable English, I imagine Liz Hurley on the other end of the line telling me what color and type of underwear she has on.
Of course, the absolute irony of the original blogger complaining about anyone's diction and grammar is almost as delicious, I suppose.;-)
| Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
My PC prefers to be lovingly wooed, not fucked like a cheap two-dollar whore. That, to me, is the difference between Microsoft and Linux. It's like the sleazy CEO from Seattle who just wants an H&D versus the sophisticated Finnish fellow who loves jazz music and art films.
Slashdot Mirror
this is a horrible, horrible elitist and unrealistic concept. Instead, find someone with passion and man up as a leader to help mold them to be great. Why is this person even working alone at all? Pair them up and help them learn to be a part of your unique group! Follow the apprentice/journeyman/master model....
I'd rather get a n00b who wants to be great than someone who hacked out a project on his own without ever being an active partner.
Prince hasn't been selling his music that way for well over a decade. He sells much smaller runs of CDs with the exact music he wants (self-produced) through his fan club. Apparently, he's actually making way more money now than he ever did in the million-selling-record days.
I broke the screen on my iPhone over a year ago. It looks hideous, with spider-web cracks all up and down it now.
It still works. Hasn't failed at all. I have the required repair kit to fix it, just been too lazy to do so ($79 to buy the kit myself, by the way -- Apple wanted $200, and most online fixers are about $100). At this point, it's almost a badge of pride, because no one who sees the phone believes it still works.
However, I can certify that putting an LG NV3 through the washing machine and dryer will break it.
You need to give up caring. Seriously, if they, as the owner(s), want to be idiots... well, so be it. Realize that (as with many business owners) they aren't really all that sharp, don't commit to this company any further than the short term, and keep your resume up to date for the time when they finally screw up really bad.
I've seen it all at this point. The small business owners that are smart, honest, and have reasonable common sense are few and far between. Your complaints don't surprise me at all; while I admire your dedication and desire to do the right thing, I think this is an exercise in frustration. Let them make their own mistakes, and maybe they'll wise up eventually. If they don't, don't let it be your problem.
> "There are so many development houses where this is not allowed that you just have to deal with it unless you are going to spend your entire life at one company under one boss (not realistic). I suppose you could always ask the question at the end of an interview but that might come across as a little bit petty."
Or, you know, honest.
I would never work in an environment where I couldn't at least occasionally be putting on the headphones and getting into the zone. I know it works for me, I know I produce kickass results that way, and I know some days absolutely nothing else is going to work. It's not my sole means of work; I do plenty of interactions and sometimes me leaving the headphones off and kibitzing when I hear someone get stuck over the cube walls helps others get into the zone. However, any boss that was going to ban my headphones... well, he honestly wouldn't be my boss for long. That's not arrogance speaking, it's confidence that he's simply wrong in his assumptions and I'd be glad to show him entire subsystems of our architecture written to the Essential Mix broadcast. If he still doesn't like it, then I'm going to just be the arrogant dickhead creative type that leaves his employ -- I'd see that as a sign of deeper issues that are inevitably going to manifest as bigger problems. That sort of boss doesn't "get it" in a way that is conducive to managing creative people efficiently. In fact, the OP suggests a boss desperate to assign some blame, and grasping at straws -- hardly someone you want in charge of your work.
So, it sounds petty, but I think it matters a lot. Your work environment and the attitudes you deal with are absolutely going to influence the results of your work. I'm going to argue that the bottom line for the company really does want me to wear my headphones, and if you can't at least ponder the possibility that I might be right... you're not really understanding your technical business.
Sorry, dude, but you look like a total weed hookup even to my suburban white-boy self. The hair says "this dude probably has some weed". Do you carry a hemp bag? I see a lot of vegans with hemp bags.
Just saying... maybe you should carry some bags of oregano with you and make some money from those seeking your assistance.
Yes, I've been reading about all that. Unfortunately, it's a hard lesson in the real world where logic and reason fail utterly. I've contributed to the DNA Lounge fund, hope they can squeak out a win over the bastards.
Well, yes. No doubt that JWZ is a wizard programmer. I mean, the guy earned his bones writing LISP, he knows the theory and the basis for what he is doing. He also knows when to throw elegance out the window and just get the job done as best you can in pressing circumstances. The ability to choose the right course and not get bogged down at either end between cruft and elegance is what makes for a good "duct tape" programmer. You can only throw out the bits you already understand well; otherwise you are operating out of ignorance.
Do fewer unit tests. Stick to the absolute minimum, well-known, easy to test scenarios. Write a bunch of comments noting all the stuff I'm not testing, and why I didn't have time to test it (something like "cannot test this functionality, the logic is too deeply embedded in private code"). I'd at least do something so I have a tiny bit of reassurances that I didn't miss obvious stuff (asserts inside the code can do this too, if you don't want to write dedicated, separate tests) and so I have a basic structure to add better tests in later.
At this point, I wouldn't ever skip some sort of testing in my code. I've just seen too many things caught early enough in the release cycle for me not to believe it's a reasonable investment. I'm leery of getting overly navel-gazing and searching for some perfect testing Nirvana where no production bugs ever occur, but double-checking yourself and making some effort to test early just makes sense in terms of risk reduction.
I hope this professor wasn't any sort of philosophy professor, because that is a classic example of (actually) begging the question. You can win any argument when you choose the definitions and basic assumptions.
Yes, thank you, I don't know why people can't get that. All he needs to do is make an honest effort to be a reasonably good president, and his legacy is assured.
People I know recall fun and funny moments of DND combat from nearly 20 years ago, not plot points.
Wow. My experience over the last 20 years has been the exact opposite. Totally.
Oh, we recall some memorable times when a completely crazy move or lucky roll made the difference, sure. But we usually remember more how we got into that fight in the first place ("He's doing what? He's just supposed to tail the evil wizard/rogue/possible demon, not start a fight with him! Oh shit, let me double-check that list of scrolls I've been saving for a rainy day, maybe I have a Get Out of Death Free card...")
Anyway, combat is fun until it becomes tediously long. Then I fall asleep. Even the big battles better be dynamic and active, my patience for grinding through minutiae of combat is pretty low. We'll Call Our Attacks when we're simulating the best parts of "Enter the Dragon", but otherwise let's keep it simple.
My beef with 3.5e is that combat became this tedious war-gaming exercise that, rather than encouraging interesting ways to achieve victory, slanted towards doing the same stuff over and over again. It showed it's ambitions to be a miniatures-selling, video-game-adaptable system. Yuck. If I want video-games, I have them and I like them for what they are. RPGs with my friends should enhance things I can only do with my friends -- like role-play.
The best times I've had with RPGs have been things like Call of Cthulhu games where I never even knew what combat skills my character had, because a real conflict that had to be gamed out never happened (I was either going to prevail in a trivial situation where five of us jumped the single cultist goon, or die horribly when an actual monster emerged). Don't get me wrong -- I love having a character who can kick ass; I just like it if he can also chew bubblegum.
I concur. I bought the $299 Everex model (whatever that was), the one that had Vista on it rather than Linux. I wanted the slightly better hardware specs of that model, and calculated that I would have spent about $75 and at least $25 of my time to upgrade the $199 Linux model to similar specs.
Off went Vista, on went Ubuntu... everything worked just dandy fine. End of story, life went on. That machine is still my home server, sits in the living room and no one even notices it's there. My XBox 360 makes more noise and draws more power. I got my $299 worth out of it for sure, it draws less power than my previous "green" home server and was less of a hassle. The form factor is slightly bigger, but I dealt with that once I found a convenient spot to hide it while still giving it plenty of passive cooling.
Yeah, yeah, we know. Corporations suck. Whatever, I'm just describing the facts of the matter -- value judgments on the results they lead to are something else entirely. This is why unrestrained capitalism is probably a bad thing -- the invisible hand does need a slap on the wrist every so often to keep it in line.
I don't think this set of remarks on its own is going to get anyone in trouble, but it's naive to not be aware that someone at a VP level has a required standard of conduct very different from just any old techie dude. If you want to be able to shoot your mouth off (and most of us in the technical field do like to do that, it's part of who were are), it's better to stay out of the boardroom, because that's a freedom that you might be giving up along with those lovely stock options.
I remember when Marc and some other bigwigs demoed their initial vision for Netscape 4.0 to a firm I was with in 1996 (maybe they just called it "Communicator", I don't remember the exact package we were being sold on). It looked like a complete desktop environment, the browser went full-screen and suddenly widgets were flying all over and we were pretty much being shown a WebOS.
I have never seen an audience so under-whelmed and outright scared. They just could not deal with the notion that Netscape was proposing that the OS was irrelevant. "But... but... where's my Windows desktop?".
They left essentially being told "no, please don't work on this -- we wouldn't want it". I had the strange feeling they heard that a lot, and whatever this concept was it died pretty stillborn. The version of Communicator they finally came out with was far far less ambitious than the demo I saw that day.
You cannot be a corporate officer of a publicly held company and do that. That will get you sued by investors. You don't need to be a corporate drone to understand that you have to be circumspect and held to a higher standard once you're a VP. If you can't learn when to STFU, don't take a job that is going to involve that.
"slots"?
slots????
Where does my slot fit? Do I tie it around my waist, or sling it on my back? I must have missed this wondrous medieval carrying device, the "slot".
Ugh. Even using words like those conjures up MMPORG stuff, and if I wanted that, I'd play that (and sometimes I do want that, and I do play in at least one
MMPORG game regularly). D&D isn't a fucking video game, it's not (solely) a board game or miniatures game (sure, you can do that, and it's fun -- but I get bored of it rather quickly).
I just can't see roleplaying a "slot". When game mechanics so overshadow the ability to think of these games as a big version of "let's pretend", I feel like a part of my youth is being stomped by the boots of WotC.
Ah well. I've played homebrew rules before. I can do it again. I sure as heck won't pay them for the privilege of throwing out most of their rules, though.
Oh please. I think Parenti is not someone I give a flying fuck about. I'm more than willing to be reactionary and dismiss him based on this:
"Parenti is known, particularly in his capacity as a prominent member and head of the United States chapter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, as a defender of the Serb position in the Yugoslav wars. He derided what he termed the "tireless demonization of democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic".[1] According to Parenti, these wars were caused by a deliberate US and Western policy aiming at dismembering Yugoslavia in order to impose liberal capitalism there. In this capacity he called for Slobodan's release and defended both Milosevic and Serbs against allegations of atrocities"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti)
He can feel free to suck my dick... show me someone a little less of a scumfuck and maybe I'll listen to him about the Tibetan situation. Seriously, that's about the worst source I can think of, the man is obviously a complete twat. That doesn't mean he might not be right about some things, but his POV is so incredibly skewed from what I consider rational that I don't think it's worth my time to try to figure it out. I have better things to do, like... pick my nose.
I concur. The sheer relentless hammering of those points in every single "late" novel of his just eventually made me swear off of any Heinlein after "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". At a certain point, it just became boring.
When you make promiscuous sex with incredibly beautiful people boring, then you're doing something wrong. Heinlein is boring, and I can pretty much only read his short stories and juvenile novels now.
I wouldn't bother reading Transmetropolitan then
On the contrary, Tony Stark has been portrayed as a recovering alcoholic in the comics for decades now. If anything, RDJ wins extra points for knowing how to get in touch with the character ;-)
Congratulations, grasshopper. You are on the path to enlightenment.
You have to immediately forget whatever you were told about specifications. The real world doesn't work that way, where you get elegant descriptions of exact useful functionality. You're either going to get 100 page documents with way too much detail and a laundry list of features that won't really get used, or what you have right now -- which is, basically, nada.
The key to fixing this is iterative development. You have to give people something to react to -- then you'll draw out their real needs. Start small, be prepared to throw a few false starts away entirely, and you can build up from there. You don't need the full eXtreme Programming bit of having a full-time customer advocate and specific two-week/three-week/whatever iterations, but those concepts are good ones to model your process on.
Try reading the Creating Passionate Users blog for suggestions on how to get people actually interested in your project. Once you do that, you'll get the feedback you need, and as you deliver on those suggestions, you'll build confidence from them that will give you the carte blanche you need to start dictating the evolution of this project on your own. Once you're "the goto guy" on "The Project", you're in the sweet spot and basically can't lose.
> "speaking a delectable version of English"
;-)
This sounds like some sort of sex line to me... when I think of delectable English, I imagine Liz Hurley on the other end of the line telling me what color and type of underwear she has on.
Of course, the absolute irony of the original blogger complaining about anyone's diction and grammar is almost as delicious, I suppose.
| Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
My PC prefers to be lovingly wooed, not fucked like a cheap two-dollar whore. That, to me, is the difference between Microsoft and Linux. It's like the sleazy CEO from Seattle who just wants an H&D versus the sophisticated Finnish fellow who loves jazz music and art films.
My PC needs more than a one-night stand, dammit!