I realize it's vastly preferable that they speak English if they work for you, but you're implying there's actually something wrong with Indians who don't speak English, and that's absurd.
No, but if they're being hired by an English speaking company, to produce code that adheres to specs written in English and being directed by people who speak English... well, you can see the many ways in which that could go wrong.
At a previous job, we had partly outsourced the development of some code to India. We frequently found that when you explain to them what you need, you get a "yes", and then when it came back it bore no resemblance whatsoever to what was discussed. So either it was a language issue, or a code quality issue... I wasn't directly involved enough to really know which.
But, obviously my Hindi is non-existent, so if your business is founded on selling services to people in English speaking countries, being able to understand the specs and any deficiencies is kind of important.
One thing we also found was a tendency to take someone with no experience on the actual technology involved, send them on a quick training course, and then set them loose. So, you often ended up with someone who was pretty inexperienced. For a lot of the stuff we worked with there simply wasn't the kind of training that was needed to really bring them up to speed (proprietary stuff).
So, we got junior coders, bad understanding of what was being asked, and inconsistent results... all combined with the fun of someone who worked in a time zone that gave us a small amount of overlapping workdays so we could work with them.
All in all, I got the impression that for the people involved this wasn't really getting much benefit. Of course, it was a management decision, so we had little choice in the matter.
Not true. I have had plenty of access to such information and have always avoided looking at it. It's immoral.
And unprofessional, and in some cases, quite possibly illegal.
In various jobs and roles I've had access to a lot of information... and I make a point to only look at it when I need to, and usually only for troubleshooting.
I'm not truly "surprised" that people do this, but I continue to be amazed at how many IT folks think that the keys to the kingdom is something they can just play with for fun.
The last thing I want it to have any more knowledge about company sensitive data than I absolutely need to do my job. Poking around in that stuff is likely cause grounds for dismissal. And in some cases, will get you into a LOT more trouble than that.
If your sysadmins are abusing that, you really need better ones who understand the line between what they can technically do, and what they're allowed to do.
And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.
I found the huge memory bloat drove me away. For years, I could have 3-4 windows up, with a bunch of tabs in each with a relatively small memory footprint.
Then it started taking up over a gig of RAM. I haven't used it in about a month or so.
telling people what to do with their property (thus treating private property like communal property) is communism.
Well, then, if your garbage is your property, keep it in your house. Or, pay the tipping fees to drop it off at your local landfill and drag it there yourself. You will be responsible for the full life-cycle of your garbage. They'll likely force you to separate stuff, or charge you even more to sift through it for you.
Like it or not, garbage collection is a communal activity, and it's funded by your taxes because there isn't an efficient way for people to handle their own garbage without it being centralized by the municipality.
Under your system, random assholes would just dump off their waste in whatever parking lot, river, or backyard they find convenient. It would take shockingly little time before the water supply was toxic and public health concerns run rampant.
Waah, boo hoo, the people who provide me services are imposing rules by which I can access those services... under your model, that's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? But, you're welcome to a living room full of your own refuse.
Seriously, someone comes to the front of your house, takes away your garbage and disposes of it... and you're going to seriously say that garbage collection is communism? Guess what, roads, municipal water, storm drains, fire, police, and all of that infrastructure that makes modern life possible is "communism".
Oh, wait, somehow "the market" and the "invisible hand" will find a magic, optimal solution whereby waste is efficiently removed and made to disappear. Of course, the more likely alternative is some greedy bastard grinds it up to make food since your model wouldn't include any checks and balances to be sure people don't do that.
You guys going around whining about everything being communism have some fantasy definition of how reality works. De-regulating everything and having no government won't produce "good" outcomes for anyone... it's just create a whole bunch of people looking to get make a profit and fuck over everyone else in the process.
Hey, once they haul it away from my house they can pick through it and recycle whatever they want, but I'm not going to sort out my trash for this that and the other.
Where I live, we've got blue bin recycling (glass, cans, plastic), black bin recycling (paper, cardboard), green bin recycling (compost-able stuff), and garbage. You mostly just sort it as you go.
They have a limit on the number of garbage bags you can put out, and may choose not to collect your garbage if you have too much.
I'm betting you have even less room to store the garbage they refuse to collect because you've got too much at the curb.
Garbage is one of those things people tend to just thing magically gets hauled away and properly dealt with -- but landfill usage and availability in some places is filling up, so like it or not, they're going to force you to do this or they're going to charge you for excess garbage as a deterrent.
I know in some jurisdictions, they're paying to truck their garbage to landfills in other locations, and it can be remarkably expensive to do that.
I'm not disputing that... I am saying that it's a bit of a stretch to say that America has better beer than the Germans.
Like it or not, the beer of America will always be tainted by the mass-market crap perception that American's don't know anything about beer (which is likely unfair, but very real nonetheless).
And, are you incapable of saying anything without saying fuck? Or should I be impressed somehow?
Who the fuck was talking about Budweiser and Miller? Why the fuck would you even bring them up in a discussion about 'real beer'?
Because, by volume, American's are drinking the crap that you don't think should be mentioned in a discussion with real beer.
And, quite frankly, if you look at the top beers of 2011, other than Sam Adams, I'm not recognizing a lot of American breweries... enough to make me refute the assertion that America has better beer than Germany, starting with pointing out Budweiser and Miller as counter examples. And with a Bavarian beer being the best overall.
I'm sure there are some good American beers... I've had some. But overwhelmingly, the rest of the world things of Budweiser out of the gate.
Ah, NeXT... the machine that gave my my first access to a UNIX command-line.
Didn't get to play on the console much, but a friendly Jesuit in the physics department allowed me access to his research machine so I could see UNIX since the comp-sci department didn't have anything at all.
Fond memories of that machine... by the time I had a Linux box I was pretty good to go with bash and a couple of other things.
So far it's primarily a North American thing. I'm fairly certain CIQ in the form implemented by most North American carriers is illegal per European privacy laws.
It's quite likely also illegal under Canadian privacy laws.
This could get Rogers in trouble with the Federal Privacy Commissioner.
The question is, will this have any effect? Will carriers stop shipping this stuff ? Will consumers care?
Will the FCC decide this is a violation of what they're allowed to do?
This to me sounds like it could be bordering on illegal... and, of course, how likely is it that law enforcement is requesting this data and forcing the carriers to keep it secret?
The guy I report to I interact with all the time either in conference calls or emails. If he wanted me on another project, he'd tell me. As things come up that require my input, he does, in fact.
When I'm in town for meetings (or because we have a big push and need everyone in the same place)... I meet and interact with all of the people I usually interact via the phone or email, specifically to make sure we keep a personal connection as well. Coffee or lunch or even dinner go a long way to keeping a good working relationship.
So, as a consultant, there's not a whole lot of room for me to be looking at other projects... and my relationship with the client is more predicated on me doing the actual job well.
I do know what you mean about moving around within an organization in terms of being visible, but I find that in the projects I work on I end up with interacting with people from several different departments on a pretty constant basis. I'd also like to think I do with without pissing off or alienating those people, which hopefully means people are interested in keeping me around.
If telecommuting means you're not interacting with co-workers and being 'seen', then yes, you might become invisible and/or deemed irrelevant. It also might mean you are.
Both my wife and I work from home lately, as the contract I work on is across country and her job went to telecommute-only a couple of years ago. I'm in conference calls, email threads, planning meetings, and all sorts of things all the time. My wife is on the phone a good chunk of the day as well as countless emails and IMs with people.
If you are doing your job in a corner, never interacting with people, and it becomes possible that people forget you exist... well, maybe that's not the fault of telecommuting. I've worked in offices where there are people who nobody really knows what they do, who they report to, or what their role is -- it's possible to be invisible in the office too, and in my experience if nobody knows who you are and what you do then maybe you're just putting in time and waiting until someone realizes they don't know what they pay you for.
Not saying telecommuting is for everyone, or that it fixes everything... but I've been doing it for over a year, and it's not like anybody on the project I'm working on doesn't know who I am. They may have only met me face to face a handful of times... but between email and phone calls, I'm hardly invisible. Quite the opposite, in fact since I was kind of the technical lead.
What kind of job can you even be doing that doesn't call for interaction with your co-workers? If you're regularly doing the kinds of things that normal people do, there's no reason for you to disappear as a teleworker.
I can't speak for anybody else, but for ME email is still the preferred business communication tool.
Agree completely.
I can't stand IM... it's basically a random intrusion into whatever I'm working on that people seem to expect you respond immediately to. I don't use it, and haven't in years.
E-mail leaves me a history I can refer back to and search so that I can actually see what people said so I have it for reference.
IM is at best a half-assed solution with a bunch of random snippets in it... I'll stick with e-mail thanks.
He believes 'amateur' means "one lacking in experience and competence in an art or science." In fact, in this context 'amateur' means "not compensated," "not for hire," or "one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession."
Actually, I think in this case it's more along the lines he's been doing it so long, he's hardly some noob with a new telescope, but he's not a 'professional' either.
If you look here, that man has some pretty serious astro-photography creds.
I don't think the article means to imply he's some hack who got lucky, but that he is, technically, an 'amateur'. There's no snark in calling him an amateur... in fact, the last paragraph of TFA says:
My sincere and hearty congratulations to Rolf Olsen for achieving this (and you should look through his gallery of astrophotographs; they're beautiful and some are astonishing). I think it's a milestone in 'amateur' astronomy, and it goes to show you that sometimes, the sky is not the limit.
Seriously, read the article again... this man is an 'amateur' in only the sense that you describe, and the article isn't saying anything else. He's certainly a competent astronomer (and one with the pleasure of living in an area that affords him some awesome viewing).
He's not an academic, but he is an 'amateur' -- the quotes seem to belittle the word amateur more than the man being discussed. I think you're mistaken to say " the grandeur of Rolf's contribution to science is sullied by other's ignorance"... TFA is holding him in the highest esteem.
Not hardly... I've been the biggest cheerleader of progress my entire life.
I want the really cool sci-fi future... but even the guys TFA is about calls this "far future".
This is kind of like trying to see if flying cars should come with a cigarette lighter or not... it's the goal after the goal, when the first goal might never actually happen.
Well, other than machine reliability, and 24x7x365 buss routs as needed or even on demand busing.
Maybe. But, you still need to pay for fuel, maintenance, and the gadgetry which does that in the first place.. and I'm not convinced the gadgetry wouldn't end up costing more than human labor anyway.
It is a cool idea, but it's hard to see it as anything but a sci-fi pipe-dream which will never actually come to fruition. I'd happily eat crow over my cynicism if this ever comes to pass.
Except, an automated bus is going to be the same riding experience as a current bus... crowded, takes too long to get there, and still full of creepy weird bus people.
To a hypothetical bus rider... what, exactly, does an automated driver bring to the table? Hardly a "personal chauffeur" and no meaningful change to the experience.
So, when we have our city with flying cars, domestic robots and all of the other commensurate sci-fi amenities which will never happen, we will also have a train we board at speed.
I'm sure in some abstract, never-going-to-happen way this is a really cool idea.
But it's so far detached from anything which will ever happen as to basically be a meaningless suggestion. These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Harumph... I must be getting old. Time was I'd think this was something cool. Now it's just another pointless futurist thought experiment.
But sometime before I die, I would like to be able to use the phrase, "my personal submersible" if only for the way it makes my mouth feel to say those words.
Well, you can still say those words... "alas, I will never have my own personal submersible". It just might not be as satisfying.
But, for the record, I would also like to be able to use the phrase "my personal submersible"... "hey baby, want to come down to the marina and see my personal submersible?". It's just so Austin Powers.
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder people are unwilling to use OSS tools when they have such horrible names.
I mean, really, when you pick a word like that normal people are going to stay away from it.
Seriously, that's just nasty.
No, but if they're being hired by an English speaking company, to produce code that adheres to specs written in English and being directed by people who speak English ... well, you can see the many ways in which that could go wrong.
At a previous job, we had partly outsourced the development of some code to India. We frequently found that when you explain to them what you need, you get a "yes", and then when it came back it bore no resemblance whatsoever to what was discussed. So either it was a language issue, or a code quality issue ... I wasn't directly involved enough to really know which.
But, obviously my Hindi is non-existent, so if your business is founded on selling services to people in English speaking countries, being able to understand the specs and any deficiencies is kind of important.
One thing we also found was a tendency to take someone with no experience on the actual technology involved, send them on a quick training course, and then set them loose. So, you often ended up with someone who was pretty inexperienced. For a lot of the stuff we worked with there simply wasn't the kind of training that was needed to really bring them up to speed (proprietary stuff).
So, we got junior coders, bad understanding of what was being asked, and inconsistent results ... all combined with the fun of someone who worked in a time zone that gave us a small amount of overlapping workdays so we could work with them.
All in all, I got the impression that for the people involved this wasn't really getting much benefit. Of course, it was a management decision, so we had little choice in the matter.
And unprofessional, and in some cases, quite possibly illegal.
In various jobs and roles I've had access to a lot of information ... and I make a point to only look at it when I need to, and usually only for troubleshooting.
I'm not truly "surprised" that people do this, but I continue to be amazed at how many IT folks think that the keys to the kingdom is something they can just play with for fun.
The last thing I want it to have any more knowledge about company sensitive data than I absolutely need to do my job. Poking around in that stuff is likely cause grounds for dismissal. And in some cases, will get you into a LOT more trouble than that.
If your sysadmins are abusing that, you really need better ones who understand the line between what they can technically do, and what they're allowed to do.
I found the huge memory bloat drove me away. For years, I could have 3-4 windows up, with a bunch of tabs in each with a relatively small memory footprint.
Then it started taking up over a gig of RAM. I haven't used it in about a month or so.
The link to the PDF in the summary is a borked link ... this one is accurate: http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1135.pdf
Well, then, if your garbage is your property, keep it in your house. Or, pay the tipping fees to drop it off at your local landfill and drag it there yourself. You will be responsible for the full life-cycle of your garbage. They'll likely force you to separate stuff, or charge you even more to sift through it for you.
Like it or not, garbage collection is a communal activity, and it's funded by your taxes because there isn't an efficient way for people to handle their own garbage without it being centralized by the municipality.
Under your system, random assholes would just dump off their waste in whatever parking lot, river, or backyard they find convenient. It would take shockingly little time before the water supply was toxic and public health concerns run rampant.
Waah, boo hoo, the people who provide me services are imposing rules by which I can access those services ... under your model, that's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? But, you're welcome to a living room full of your own refuse.
Seriously, someone comes to the front of your house, takes away your garbage and disposes of it ... and you're going to seriously say that garbage collection is communism? Guess what, roads, municipal water, storm drains, fire, police, and all of that infrastructure that makes modern life possible is "communism".
Oh, wait, somehow "the market" and the "invisible hand" will find a magic, optimal solution whereby waste is efficiently removed and made to disappear. Of course, the more likely alternative is some greedy bastard grinds it up to make food since your model wouldn't include any checks and balances to be sure people don't do that.
You guys going around whining about everything being communism have some fantasy definition of how reality works. De-regulating everything and having no government won't produce "good" outcomes for anyone ... it's just create a whole bunch of people looking to get make a profit and fuck over everyone else in the process.
Where I live, we've got blue bin recycling (glass, cans, plastic), black bin recycling (paper, cardboard), green bin recycling (compost-able stuff), and garbage. You mostly just sort it as you go.
They have a limit on the number of garbage bags you can put out, and may choose not to collect your garbage if you have too much.
I'm betting you have even less room to store the garbage they refuse to collect because you've got too much at the curb.
Garbage is one of those things people tend to just thing magically gets hauled away and properly dealt with -- but landfill usage and availability in some places is filling up, so like it or not, they're going to force you to do this or they're going to charge you for excess garbage as a deterrent.
I know in some jurisdictions, they're paying to truck their garbage to landfills in other locations, and it can be remarkably expensive to do that.
Aww, does someone need a nap? Go fuck yourself.
I'm not disputing that ... I am saying that it's a bit of a stretch to say that America has better beer than the Germans.
Like it or not, the beer of America will always be tainted by the mass-market crap perception that American's don't know anything about beer (which is likely unfair, but very real nonetheless).
And, are you incapable of saying anything without saying fuck? Or should I be impressed somehow?
Because, by volume, American's are drinking the crap that you don't think should be mentioned in a discussion with real beer.
And, quite frankly, if you look at the top beers of 2011, other than Sam Adams, I'm not recognizing a lot of American breweries ... enough to make me refute the assertion that America has better beer than Germany, starting with pointing out Budweiser and Miller as counter examples. And with a Bavarian beer being the best overall.
I'm sure there are some good American beers ... I've had some. But overwhelmingly, the rest of the world things of Budweiser out of the gate.
Ah, NeXT ... the machine that gave my my first access to a UNIX command-line.
Didn't get to play on the console much, but a friendly Jesuit in the physics department allowed me access to his research machine so I could see UNIX since the comp-sci department didn't have anything at all.
Fond memories of that machine ... by the time I had a Linux box I was pretty good to go with bash and a couple of other things.
Maybe some of the smaller breweries ... but Budweiser and Miller aren't "better" beers than ... well, thousands of beers, actually.
They're pretty much the most boring, generic beers you can get.
It's quite likely also illegal under Canadian privacy laws.
This could get Rogers in trouble with the Federal Privacy Commissioner.
Will the FCC decide this is a violation of what they're allowed to do?
This to me sounds like it could be bordering on illegal ... and, of course, how likely is it that law enforcement is requesting this data and forcing the carriers to keep it secret?
Yeah, I took it, and I was hard for ... oh, wait, you mean the other blue pill. ;-)
See, I'm on contract.
The guy I report to I interact with all the time either in conference calls or emails. If he wanted me on another project, he'd tell me. As things come up that require my input, he does, in fact.
When I'm in town for meetings (or because we have a big push and need everyone in the same place) ... I meet and interact with all of the people I usually interact via the phone or email, specifically to make sure we keep a personal connection as well. Coffee or lunch or even dinner go a long way to keeping a good working relationship.
So, as a consultant, there's not a whole lot of room for me to be looking at other projects ... and my relationship with the client is more predicated on me doing the actual job well.
I do know what you mean about moving around within an organization in terms of being visible, but I find that in the projects I work on I end up with interacting with people from several different departments on a pretty constant basis. I'd also like to think I do with without pissing off or alienating those people, which hopefully means people are interested in keeping me around.
If telecommuting means you're not interacting with co-workers and being 'seen', then yes, you might become invisible and/or deemed irrelevant. It also might mean you are.
Both my wife and I work from home lately, as the contract I work on is across country and her job went to telecommute-only a couple of years ago. I'm in conference calls, email threads, planning meetings, and all sorts of things all the time. My wife is on the phone a good chunk of the day as well as countless emails and IMs with people.
If you are doing your job in a corner, never interacting with people, and it becomes possible that people forget you exist ... well, maybe that's not the fault of telecommuting. I've worked in offices where there are people who nobody really knows what they do, who they report to, or what their role is -- it's possible to be invisible in the office too, and in my experience if nobody knows who you are and what you do then maybe you're just putting in time and waiting until someone realizes they don't know what they pay you for.
Not saying telecommuting is for everyone, or that it fixes everything ... but I've been doing it for over a year, and it's not like anybody on the project I'm working on doesn't know who I am. They may have only met me face to face a handful of times ... but between email and phone calls, I'm hardly invisible. Quite the opposite, in fact since I was kind of the technical lead.
What kind of job can you even be doing that doesn't call for interaction with your co-workers? If you're regularly doing the kinds of things that normal people do, there's no reason for you to disappear as a teleworker.
Agree completely.
I can't stand IM ... it's basically a random intrusion into whatever I'm working on that people seem to expect you respond immediately to. I don't use it, and haven't in years.
E-mail leaves me a history I can refer back to and search so that I can actually see what people said so I have it for reference.
IM is at best a half-assed solution with a bunch of random snippets in it ... I'll stick with e-mail thanks.
Actually, I think in this case it's more along the lines he's been doing it so long, he's hardly some noob with a new telescope, but he's not a 'professional' either.
If you look here, that man has some pretty serious astro-photography creds.
I don't think the article means to imply he's some hack who got lucky, but that he is, technically, an 'amateur'. There's no snark in calling him an amateur ... in fact, the last paragraph of TFA says:
Seriously, read the article again ... this man is an 'amateur' in only the sense that you describe, and the article isn't saying anything else. He's certainly a competent astronomer (and one with the pleasure of living in an area that affords him some awesome viewing).
He's not an academic, but he is an 'amateur' -- the quotes seem to belittle the word amateur more than the man being discussed. I think you're mistaken to say " the grandeur of Rolf's contribution to science is sullied by other's ignorance" ... TFA is holding him in the highest esteem.
Not hardly ... I've been the biggest cheerleader of progress my entire life.
I want the really cool sci-fi future ... but even the guys TFA is about calls this "far future".
This is kind of like trying to see if flying cars should come with a cigarette lighter or not ... it's the goal after the goal, when the first goal might never actually happen.
Maybe. But, you still need to pay for fuel, maintenance, and the gadgetry which does that in the first place .. and I'm not convinced the gadgetry wouldn't end up costing more than human labor anyway.
It is a cool idea, but it's hard to see it as anything but a sci-fi pipe-dream which will never actually come to fruition. I'd happily eat crow over my cynicism if this ever comes to pass.
Prove me wrong kids ... prove me wrong. ;-)
Except, an automated bus is going to be the same riding experience as a current bus ... crowded, takes too long to get there, and still full of creepy weird bus people.
To a hypothetical bus rider ... what, exactly, does an automated driver bring to the table? Hardly a "personal chauffeur" and no meaningful change to the experience.
What is the sound of one cheek farting?
If you see the Buddha on the road, say hi for me.
So, when we have our city with flying cars, domestic robots and all of the other commensurate sci-fi amenities which will never happen, we will also have a train we board at speed.
I'm sure in some abstract, never-going-to-happen way this is a really cool idea.
But it's so far detached from anything which will ever happen as to basically be a meaningless suggestion. These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources ... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Harumph ... I must be getting old. Time was I'd think this was something cool. Now it's just another pointless futurist thought experiment.
Well, you can still say those words ... "alas, I will never have my own personal submersible". It just might not be as satisfying.
But, for the record, I would also like to be able to use the phrase "my personal submersible" ... "hey baby, want to come down to the marina and see my personal submersible?". It's just so Austin Powers.