Bugs make their way into production code. No amount of processes will ever change that. The more incompetent programmers you have, the more likely these bugs will slip through the cracks in your processes.
I have worked with and studied under software engineers that worked with the FDA on better methods for validating that medical devices are safe. It is by no means a perfect science. There simply isn't enough time and money to test all medical devices to the degree you seem to think is possible. The FDA relies heavily on just their experience and their ability to identify bad "smells" in the documentation provided by companies. I am amazed that our medical devices are as safe as they are.
Yeah, there is no such thing as a competent spokesperson who also knows how to write code.
Oh really? Care to name some examples?
First off, I don't know many career paths where you can point to individual spokespersons who encourage people to go into that profession. From my time in high school and college I don't remember large campaigns getting people into the fields of law or medicine or journalism or theater. So if you looking for some kind of evangelical spokesperson for software development or any other profession you probably will not find one.
But as far as examples of coders who have strong communication skills, there are likely tens of thousands of them out there. Many software consultants are competent salesmen whose primary competence happens to be software. If you go to seminars run by large software companies you will find many developers with strong public speaking skills.
There probably is a slightly lower percentage of developers with good communication skills than there is in other professional industries, but software developers are by no means socially inept as a rule.
Also, teachers don't just work 180 days. They are actively teaching for 180 days, but teachers often work weekends when grading assignments, which could mean they're working up to 250 days. Add to that the mandatory continuing education, having to do work for part of the summer to update tests and assignments as the curriculum changes (and to discourage people from just copying off their older siblings), and the notion of a "huge amount of vacation days" becomes downright silly.
First off, professional full time employees tend to work about 45 hours per week. Taking a standard school day of 8-3, and a teacher working 15 minutes before and after that time with a half hour lunch break, leaves a 35 hour work week. That leaves about 10 hours of out of school grading and preparation per week to equal a standard job. From the teachers I know that is either pretty standard or a bit high. There are certainly teachers who do a great deal more than this, such as those running after school groups, and I agree with paying them more than other teachers. Although they tend not to be paid significantly more (popular wisdom is that this is because of unions, but I can't comment on this from experience).
Most careers require out of work time keeping up in their industries. There are numerous certifications and organizations that have a certain number of units of continuing education every year, every 5 years, etc. Teachers are not unique in needing to do this, they are just unique in being given an extra 10 weeks off to help complete the requirements. And teaching Continuing Education Units are the easiest of any serious professional organization I am aware of. My next door neighbor just takes exams online because the tests are so easy he doesn't have to sit though the online lectures to pass. Any teacher that finds keeping up with their CEUs to be difficult is probably not worthy of being a teacher.
I could go on and on obviously. There is no one cause and no silver bullet solution. Technology can be part of the solution, but in the hands of morons it quickly becomes part of the problem.
Technology may not be a silver bullet but in my opinion it has the potential to be the most cost effective solution, and by a wide margin. Technology has been a failure so far because there has been no accompanying process improvement in education. MOOCs are starting to show that lectures can be scaled out further than one teacher per twenty students. Think of all the time saved if there were merely a hundred lectures about numerators and denominators, varied by skill level and learning types, that every student in the country could watch in class. A smart student could watch one of them once and demonstrate to their teacher that they know the material, while another student could watch a dozen of them. Teachers could spend their time individually motivating and helping students. I assume lecturing takes up close to two thirds of teacher time now, so students could get three times the individual instruction for the same cost (minus the minuscule overhead of creating the lectures and improving them).
This is just one example of how technology could help if we start modifying how teaching is done instead of just adding technology. I didn't even go into how the lecture quality would go up as well since only the best of the best would be creating these lectures. And they would get significant feedback on how to correct them since millions of students would watch each lecture. A combination of teacher comments and testing would give a very good measure of how well students are doing with each lecture, and experiments would be easy to run (just give 10 almost identical lectures to 10,000 students each and see which helps comprehension more).
And all of this could be possible with very little spending (proportionally to the amount we already spend) and requires no social engineering of society.
Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.
You are correct that teachers are very well paid in the US. This is especially true when you look at the quality of applicants we get to apply for our teaching colleges (very poor, literally among the worst of any major). One major problem is how we pay our teachers. We pay them with huge benefits packages that no one ever realizes the value of. People are drawn to high salaries, and teachers don't get that. What they get is a huge amount of vacation days and a huge pension. If more people understood how valuable the pension is then many more people would have been going into the profession, and the quality of teachers would go way up.
Since humans are unlikely to start becoming more future focused in their decision making, the better solution is to raise teacher salaries by 30-40% and get rid of the pensions (which would be a budget neutral solution). We should also enact more summer school programs since we are already paying teachers as much as similar private employees who work around 230 days instead of 180.
Even with a longer work year, I think we would get much better teachers if average salaries were closer to $60k instead of $45k even if the pension went away. Very few people factor in the pension when deciding what career to enter at the age of 18 anyway.
American workers are more productive, yet thanks to conservative economic policies have been losing income (measured in constant dollars) since the Reagan era.
The difference between now and the 50s/60s is why workers are becoming more productive. In the past it was because they were becoming more educated so they were more valuable. Now they are more productive because business owners are investing in better technology and process management. This does not make the workers more valuable even though productivity is rising. In fact it often does the opposite.
It isn't some conspiracy theory. If you frame the problem by stating workers deserve more money because they are being more productive you will be ignored because your argument does not hold water. The real reason workers deserve more money is because we want to live in a society that treats its human capital as being valuable just because they are human. Or perhaps we don't, it is our duty to decide that at the voting booths. I personally see us shifting to a three tiered work force of a large lower class that lives a comfortable but resource scarce lifestyle, a similar sized middle class that lives a lifestyle closer to the upper middle class today, and a very small elite that is about the same size as it is today.
Once again, passion is cool, but I'd still prefer someone with commitment to finish the job. Because on most jobs, in the last 10% it will get tough, and not fun; passions will be extinguished, and those who are driven by passion will go home (I've seen people quit jobs because of that). You need to have something more to help you through the not fun parts.
I see your point, but those passionate developers are usually the ones who know enough to make the application scale properly, make it maintainable, extensible, etc. which makes the last 10% not quite as tough. That is obviously an overstatement because even "rock-star" developers make mistakes and cut corners, but at least they understand they are cutting corners (instead of just not knowing any better). I guess this only applies to developers who are passionate about software development, not just playing the the newest toys.
Passion isn't just helpful when the going gets tough, it is helpful in stopping the going from getting tough in the first place.
The difference between $100,000 a year and $200,000 a year isn't really that much, particuarly when you consider how much disappears in tax.
To quote another poster, that is SO not true. But not because of keeping up with the Joneses, or greed, but because there is a very apparent difference between $100k and $200k.
It is the difference between being able to have an upper middle class lifestyle with a single breadwinner, or needing two earners. It is the difference between good schools, and the great schools where half of your kid's friends are going to Ivy league schools. It is the difference between still making sacrifices in your budget, and simply having everything that a middle class person would want (two weeks of traveling per year, a new car every five years, a 3500+ sq ft house, saving $100k per kid for college, etc). Someone with a $100k salary can still get any of the things I mentioned, but someone with $200k can get it without sacrificing any of the others.
As someone with a family income in between these two figures, I can tell you that every extra $10k per year makes a pretty big difference in our budget.
Perhaps but a good company like the one where I work at will let me spend that 4 hours per week on company time.
Well, a good company can handle work/life balance in different ways.
My current employer was very up front that my salary was paying for about 50 hours per week, but it is understood that around 5 of those hours will be spent on my own time working on my own pet projects and/or learning new technologies. Considering it was about a 30% pay raise from my last job, and I spend more than that already on my pet projects, it worked out just fine.
My employer knows how hard it is to find good talent, so they pay well above market rates to get those people who will put in the extra effort so they can be on top of the latest advances but still be billable for at least 40 hours each week. They would have to refuse jobs if our best employees were only billable 30-35 hours per week because we couldn't staff them with people competent enough too keep up our reputation.
That said, about half of our staff is made up of more average employees who do spend time on the job learning skills when new projects need them. They are not paid as well, and their work is more closely monitored.
Apparently, to some developers, this means I don't take my job seriously and I shouldn't be in the industry because I'm not spending every moment living and breathing code
Similar to how arguing on the extremes in politics is rarely productive, neither is arguing on the extremes in work / life balance. My opinion is that the type of developers who deserve top salaries and positions are the ones who on average spend at least 200 hours per year of their free time on learning new skills. I have never known a developer who was able to stay current in their skills with only on the job training. I have known some who found niches they worked in for a couple decades that required no outside training, but they are the ones in their 50s wondering why they can't find work.
But that said, 200 hours per year is not a great level of devotion. It is 4 hours per week. That leaves plenty of time for other hobbies and spending time with family. Anyone claiming that you need to spend 20 hours per week doing software development outside of work is at an extreme that is easy to argue against, but there is a nugget of truth in the belief that having some desire to learn outside of work is necessary. There are plenty of professions where the industry does not change very fast, but IT is not one of them.
Because none of those others who has to get a degree to become a professional have to deal with children. In addition I haven't heard of any CEO having his mother come to the board meeting and complaining that her boy isn't getting the job done because the board isn't helping him after work enough, while ignoring that little Steve Balmer has missed 10 days of work this quarter, and it still isn't his fault that people don't like Windows 8 UI designs.
Yeah, and other professional deals with office politics, or customers who say they want one thing in focus groups but say something else with their pocket books, or incompetent co-workers and bosses who screw up their hard work and try to steal the credit for their successes, etc.
The politics of dealing with irate parents is not fundamentally different with the politics that many professionals have to deal with. If you think a parent is bad just try dealing with a VP whose $300k/yr job is on the line if your go-live date is a failure (and those guys don't have golden parachutes). I assure you they care far more than Johnny's mom does about a bad math test score, and they sure as hell are not going to admit that anything is their fault either. But we still have to deal with their problems if we give a damn about the product of our labor. When a client gives me crappy specs it clearly makes my job harder, but part of my job is being able to identify crappy specs. I don't just get a free pass on my work just because there were obstacles. When future clients check my references they aren't going to care about excuses, just performance.
Should there be some form of performance metric? Sure. It needs to be very carefully set up though, and the child's own performance needs to be a part of it as well as the parents. NO teacher is going to be able teach calculus to a kid who skips 2 days a week to babysit for his siblings because his parent(s) can't afford childcare. It also needs to be politics resistant, I don't want my kids teacher worried about their job because some new guy won an election. I want them worried about how to best teach the next chapter, and that is it.
I agree that we need to be very careful about these metrics. We also have to be careful not to give test scores and other easy but unreliable metrics too much control over performance reviews. We also have to be honest that more time needs to be spent getting better quality teachers in the first place rather than worrying to much about rating the ones we already have. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore teacher performance.
Plenty of good teachers are going to be unfairly punished, just like plenty of other professionals. Politics will get teachers fired. That is life. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good, because we need significant progress in our educational system on many different fronts including this one.
And the tenure process is rigorous and as full of hard work as any other promotion process at any company or organization. They don't just hand tenure out to anyone - most teachers already have to work for years to even qualify, and then they have to submit a huge portfolio and be approved by the county or university. All it does in reality is negate the "right-to-work" state laws which allow anyone to be arbitrarily fired for any reason.
While I only have anecdotal evidence that comes from three teachers I know in the Chicago-land area, from what I have heard the tenure process was the easiest process for advancement in any profession I know of. But as of the last 5 years or so, the process has become much more difficult. It does seem that today you have to be either in the right place at the right time, or be a very good teacher to get tenure in the good school districts. The rest either become day care teachers or move out to the sticks to find a job (and that includes a lot of potentially good teachers that never got a break).
The problem isn't really our current practices (which are getting better), it is all of the teachers who started their career before the mid-2000s. The private sector has mostly shed its dead weight during the last recession, but the private sector and other unionized professions still have significant excess baggage.
Except professors don't teach at high schools, which is what this seems to be about.
I think it is safe to say that the ones fighting for and against this case understand that it has implications far grander than just California professors.
And probably more to the point, the bigger problem is no one can agree on what a bad teacher is to be measured by beyond anecdotes. But I strongly suspect its "shouldn't have given my child a bad grade!"
No one can agree on what makes a good software developer, CEO, plumber, or salesman either. Plenty of factors external to the individual's accomplishments and failures weigh in on the final result of their work. Why is it that teachers are the only ones asking us to ignore performance just because it is hard to measure?
How much ambiguity was there in the situation and the contract such that a lawyer was necessary? If it's an unambiguously-worded agreement - are laywers necessary?
It isn't about ambiguity. People often assume that anything written in a contract is binding, but that simply is not true. In this case a lawyer would have known that a licensed physician needed to be involved in the sperm donation process. You can have a clearly written unambiguous contract, but if it breaks the law or if the terms of the agreement are followed illegally, it will likely be thrown out of court.
Lawyers aren't that expensive for simple things; a few hundred dollars for a lawyer would have saved everyone a lot of money here.
The donor didn't bring the child into the world - he donated a substance - everything else was a side-effect of the parents' actions.
Now you are just being pedantic. The donor donated the sperm with a specific goal in mind. You might as well say that all fathers are just donating a substance, and everything else is a side-effect of the mother's egg's actions.
A handshake should be sufficient contract for something like this. This is yet another example of why society is completely in the crapper these days. People arguing for even more red tape are the reason this keeps getting worse.
You really believe that a handshake would be sufficient? What if there is a dispute? What if the semen donor tries to exert parental rights? What if the parents try to get child support payments? (similar to this case)
Like I said in another post, no reasonable person would think that creating a baby is so trivial that a legal agreement is not necessary. Even the people in this story understood that, they just wanted to save money by not getting proper legal counsel. It worked out just about as well as you would expect.
It is silly that anyone used their prosecutorial discretion to even attempt this case, but the defendant brought this upon himself by being careless. Ignorance is not a defense. If the parents had came after him for child support it would probably be a clear case and he would be paying up for the next two decades.
Yes, because every agreement between groups of people must be taxed by lawyers. I call BS on this.
This case is exactly why consulting a lawyer isn't just some tax, it is the smart way to deal with important and potentially volatile situations. No reasonable person would believe that bringing a human into the world is so trivial that you can just scribble something on a napkin (metaphorically speaking) and be legally covered. I wouldn't buy a house without a lawyer making sure that the deed transfer was legal, and a house is far less valuable than a baby (well, most houses anyway).
It is quite sad that the very people who need the most help from our legal system are the ones who are short changed because they don't have the resources to know how the courts actually work.
Sadly, even crossing your Is and dotting your Ts is less important then when you have officials looking to score points by hurting you
Signing a contract like this without competent legal counsel is not crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. Hopefully the defendant can appeal this ridiculous ruling, but this wouldn't be necessary if he hadn't been so careless with a very important legal matter.
That is simple enough to say, but there aren't that many people willing to adopt adolescent children. The government (taxpayers) will still be paying for the children as you have just shifted the funding to the foster care system.
While that is true, customers have the choice to not work with companies that have shown poor security practices. No one can stop paying taxes if they feel the government isn't protecting the information in their tax returns. If the government wants to be trusted with information we wouldn't give to a private company, then they bear a much higher responsibility to keep it secure.
It is similar to how we require police to log every firing of their weapon, while we don't require the same of private gun owners. The fact that we trust the police with power we don't give to normal citizens means they have to be held to a higher level of scrutiny.
There is no ethical dilemma. The ban is on organ sales is killing people. The example from Iran clearly shows that selling organs will increase the supply and may also reduce net cost since the long term costs of dialysis exceed the transplant cost (not to mention the lost productivity of someone on dialysis or dead.)
The paper's mention of Iran's market for organs does not provide a comparison with this practice and with simply making our organ donor program opt-out instead of opt-in. I believe that our entire shortage of organs would be wiped away immediately if we just make everyone a donor unless they take action an opt-out of the program. Considering how lazy people are, we are missing out a large number of donors because of how poorly we run the system.
Oh boy, you don't have to take Calculus I-III since you got a 5 on the calc bc. You still need 4 math courses. They just start out at a higher level. Oh, by the way, you only need Calc I-III and difeq for this degree. Retake Calc I-III for an easy 3 classes.
If you don't have a desire to learn then I guess AP classes are a waste. But I was very happy every time I could test out of a basic class even though I received no credit just because it let me take a higher level class. I never considered it bad that I was still "forced" to take a database class that taught about B-trees and query optimization because I tested out of the one that taught what a SELECT clause is. I always considered that a pretty good deal.
Why is it alarming? People are different, genders are different. What's alarming is that every single job has to be 50-50% by law it seems. Oh except low-paying grunt jobs then it's OK that only men apply there.
It is alarming whenever a significant portion of the population is not contributing to any field. But it is important to look at each field and determine how important it is to take action. If we determine that women are under-represented in the logging or fishing industries, that isn't a big deal. It is unlikely that we are missing out on great advances or productivity increases in those industries because women very rarely perform these jobs. We should still react to overt discrimination in these fields, but it is not worth our time to address any cultural biases.
But STEM fields are the primary contributor to the success of our nation (or species if you aren't interested in nationalism). They don't just create new jobs, over time they create new industries. The success of our STEM fields is literally the most important thing our society should be focusing on. So when we identify that half of our population is having trouble entering these industries it is crucial that we investigate the issue in great depth.
That doesn't mean we need to reach 50-50 parity, or even that we should necessarily strive for that. But we should investigate every possible road block that we identify. There are clearly social factors at play regardless of any genetic differences that may also be contributing. Every woman who is not living to her full potential because of these social factors is limiting the advancement of the fields she may have contributed to. And in the cases of STEM fields this is particularly tragic.
It is exploitative if someone is selling an organ to survive--I think nobody wants to see that.
So I guess we consider this more exploitative to sell organs than forcing people to work at fast food restaurants or clean my car during a Chicago winter or cleaning my home because I am too lazy. Many of these services are only possible at affordable prices because these workers have no other options.
I wonder what mortality rate is acceptable for any paid activity. Is it more risky to donate a kidney or work as a logger or deep sea fisherman? I am not sure, but the ethical dilemma is the same in both situations (risking health for a payment).
Wait, what? Oh, they're trying to draw a parallel based on efficacy, as opposed to such piffling concerns as morality.
The analogy has nothing to do with efficacy. It is a great analogy because the moral concerns are very similar. The moral issue with selling organs is that the disadvantaged would be sacrificing their future health because of a financial payout. The poor would likely be involved in a dis-proportionally high portion of all organ sales. The same goes for a paid military. If you are paying people well for a very dangerous thing then only those with few options will generally sign up. That is overwhelmingly true for the military, and it would be true of paid organ donors as well.
Whether or not either of these situations is moral is a different topic, but they are very similar.
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Bugs make their way into production code. No amount of processes will ever change that. The more incompetent programmers you have, the more likely these bugs will slip through the cracks in your processes.
I have worked with and studied under software engineers that worked with the FDA on better methods for validating that medical devices are safe. It is by no means a perfect science. There simply isn't enough time and money to test all medical devices to the degree you seem to think is possible. The FDA relies heavily on just their experience and their ability to identify bad "smells" in the documentation provided by companies. I am amazed that our medical devices are as safe as they are.
Yeah, there is no such thing as a competent spokesperson who also knows how to write code.
Oh really? Care to name some examples?
First off, I don't know many career paths where you can point to individual spokespersons who encourage people to go into that profession. From my time in high school and college I don't remember large campaigns getting people into the fields of law or medicine or journalism or theater. So if you looking for some kind of evangelical spokesperson for software development or any other profession you probably will not find one.
But as far as examples of coders who have strong communication skills, there are likely tens of thousands of them out there. Many software consultants are competent salesmen whose primary competence happens to be software. If you go to seminars run by large software companies you will find many developers with strong public speaking skills.
There probably is a slightly lower percentage of developers with good communication skills than there is in other professional industries, but software developers are by no means socially inept as a rule.
Also, teachers don't just work 180 days. They are actively teaching for 180 days, but teachers often work weekends when grading assignments, which could mean they're working up to 250 days. Add to that the mandatory continuing education, having to do work for part of the summer to update tests and assignments as the curriculum changes (and to discourage people from just copying off their older siblings), and the notion of a "huge amount of vacation days" becomes downright silly.
First off, professional full time employees tend to work about 45 hours per week. Taking a standard school day of 8-3, and a teacher working 15 minutes before and after that time with a half hour lunch break, leaves a 35 hour work week. That leaves about 10 hours of out of school grading and preparation per week to equal a standard job. From the teachers I know that is either pretty standard or a bit high. There are certainly teachers who do a great deal more than this, such as those running after school groups, and I agree with paying them more than other teachers. Although they tend not to be paid significantly more (popular wisdom is that this is because of unions, but I can't comment on this from experience).
Most careers require out of work time keeping up in their industries. There are numerous certifications and organizations that have a certain number of units of continuing education every year, every 5 years, etc. Teachers are not unique in needing to do this, they are just unique in being given an extra 10 weeks off to help complete the requirements. And teaching Continuing Education Units are the easiest of any serious professional organization I am aware of. My next door neighbor just takes exams online because the tests are so easy he doesn't have to sit though the online lectures to pass. Any teacher that finds keeping up with their CEUs to be difficult is probably not worthy of being a teacher.
I could go on and on obviously. There is no one cause and no silver bullet solution. Technology can be part of the solution, but in the hands of morons it quickly becomes part of the problem.
Technology may not be a silver bullet but in my opinion it has the potential to be the most cost effective solution, and by a wide margin. Technology has been a failure so far because there has been no accompanying process improvement in education. MOOCs are starting to show that lectures can be scaled out further than one teacher per twenty students. Think of all the time saved if there were merely a hundred lectures about numerators and denominators, varied by skill level and learning types, that every student in the country could watch in class. A smart student could watch one of them once and demonstrate to their teacher that they know the material, while another student could watch a dozen of them. Teachers could spend their time individually motivating and helping students. I assume lecturing takes up close to two thirds of teacher time now, so students could get three times the individual instruction for the same cost (minus the minuscule overhead of creating the lectures and improving them).
This is just one example of how technology could help if we start modifying how teaching is done instead of just adding technology. I didn't even go into how the lecture quality would go up as well since only the best of the best would be creating these lectures. And they would get significant feedback on how to correct them since millions of students would watch each lecture. A combination of teacher comments and testing would give a very good measure of how well students are doing with each lecture, and experiments would be easy to run (just give 10 almost identical lectures to 10,000 students each and see which helps comprehension more).
And all of this could be possible with very little spending (proportionally to the amount we already spend) and requires no social engineering of society.
Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.
You are correct that teachers are very well paid in the US. This is especially true when you look at the quality of applicants we get to apply for our teaching colleges (very poor, literally among the worst of any major). One major problem is how we pay our teachers. We pay them with huge benefits packages that no one ever realizes the value of. People are drawn to high salaries, and teachers don't get that. What they get is a huge amount of vacation days and a huge pension. If more people understood how valuable the pension is then many more people would have been going into the profession, and the quality of teachers would go way up.
Since humans are unlikely to start becoming more future focused in their decision making, the better solution is to raise teacher salaries by 30-40% and get rid of the pensions (which would be a budget neutral solution). We should also enact more summer school programs since we are already paying teachers as much as similar private employees who work around 230 days instead of 180.
Even with a longer work year, I think we would get much better teachers if average salaries were closer to $60k instead of $45k even if the pension went away. Very few people factor in the pension when deciding what career to enter at the age of 18 anyway.
American workers are more productive, yet thanks to conservative economic policies have been losing income (measured in constant dollars) since the Reagan era.
The difference between now and the 50s/60s is why workers are becoming more productive. In the past it was because they were becoming more educated so they were more valuable. Now they are more productive because business owners are investing in better technology and process management. This does not make the workers more valuable even though productivity is rising. In fact it often does the opposite.
It isn't some conspiracy theory. If you frame the problem by stating workers deserve more money because they are being more productive you will be ignored because your argument does not hold water. The real reason workers deserve more money is because we want to live in a society that treats its human capital as being valuable just because they are human. Or perhaps we don't, it is our duty to decide that at the voting booths. I personally see us shifting to a three tiered work force of a large lower class that lives a comfortable but resource scarce lifestyle, a similar sized middle class that lives a lifestyle closer to the upper middle class today, and a very small elite that is about the same size as it is today.
Once again, passion is cool, but I'd still prefer someone with commitment to finish the job. Because on most jobs, in the last 10% it will get tough, and not fun; passions will be extinguished, and those who are driven by passion will go home (I've seen people quit jobs because of that). You need to have something more to help you through the not fun parts.
I see your point, but those passionate developers are usually the ones who know enough to make the application scale properly, make it maintainable, extensible, etc. which makes the last 10% not quite as tough. That is obviously an overstatement because even "rock-star" developers make mistakes and cut corners, but at least they understand they are cutting corners (instead of just not knowing any better). I guess this only applies to developers who are passionate about software development, not just playing the the newest toys.
Passion isn't just helpful when the going gets tough, it is helpful in stopping the going from getting tough in the first place.
The difference between $100,000 a year and $200,000 a year isn't really that much, particuarly when you consider how much disappears in tax.
To quote another poster, that is SO not true. But not because of keeping up with the Joneses, or greed, but because there is a very apparent difference between $100k and $200k.
It is the difference between being able to have an upper middle class lifestyle with a single breadwinner, or needing two earners. It is the difference between good schools, and the great schools where half of your kid's friends are going to Ivy league schools. It is the difference between still making sacrifices in your budget, and simply having everything that a middle class person would want (two weeks of traveling per year, a new car every five years, a 3500+ sq ft house, saving $100k per kid for college, etc). Someone with a $100k salary can still get any of the things I mentioned, but someone with $200k can get it without sacrificing any of the others.
As someone with a family income in between these two figures, I can tell you that every extra $10k per year makes a pretty big difference in our budget.
Perhaps but a good company like the one where I work at will let me spend that 4 hours per week on company time .
Well, a good company can handle work/life balance in different ways.
My current employer was very up front that my salary was paying for about 50 hours per week, but it is understood that around 5 of those hours will be spent on my own time working on my own pet projects and/or learning new technologies. Considering it was about a 30% pay raise from my last job, and I spend more than that already on my pet projects, it worked out just fine.
My employer knows how hard it is to find good talent, so they pay well above market rates to get those people who will put in the extra effort so they can be on top of the latest advances but still be billable for at least 40 hours each week. They would have to refuse jobs if our best employees were only billable 30-35 hours per week because we couldn't staff them with people competent enough too keep up our reputation.
That said, about half of our staff is made up of more average employees who do spend time on the job learning skills when new projects need them. They are not paid as well, and their work is more closely monitored.
Apparently, to some developers, this means I don't take my job seriously and I shouldn't be in the industry because I'm not spending every moment living and breathing code
Similar to how arguing on the extremes in politics is rarely productive, neither is arguing on the extremes in work / life balance. My opinion is that the type of developers who deserve top salaries and positions are the ones who on average spend at least 200 hours per year of their free time on learning new skills. I have never known a developer who was able to stay current in their skills with only on the job training. I have known some who found niches they worked in for a couple decades that required no outside training, but they are the ones in their 50s wondering why they can't find work.
But that said, 200 hours per year is not a great level of devotion. It is 4 hours per week. That leaves plenty of time for other hobbies and spending time with family. Anyone claiming that you need to spend 20 hours per week doing software development outside of work is at an extreme that is easy to argue against, but there is a nugget of truth in the belief that having some desire to learn outside of work is necessary. There are plenty of professions where the industry does not change very fast, but IT is not one of them.
Because none of those others who has to get a degree to become a professional have to deal with children. In addition I haven't heard of any CEO having his mother come to the board meeting and complaining that her boy isn't getting the job done because the board isn't helping him after work enough, while ignoring that little Steve Balmer has missed 10 days of work this quarter, and it still isn't his fault that people don't like Windows 8 UI designs.
Yeah, and other professional deals with office politics, or customers who say they want one thing in focus groups but say something else with their pocket books, or incompetent co-workers and bosses who screw up their hard work and try to steal the credit for their successes, etc.
The politics of dealing with irate parents is not fundamentally different with the politics that many professionals have to deal with. If you think a parent is bad just try dealing with a VP whose $300k/yr job is on the line if your go-live date is a failure (and those guys don't have golden parachutes). I assure you they care far more than Johnny's mom does about a bad math test score, and they sure as hell are not going to admit that anything is their fault either. But we still have to deal with their problems if we give a damn about the product of our labor. When a client gives me crappy specs it clearly makes my job harder, but part of my job is being able to identify crappy specs. I don't just get a free pass on my work just because there were obstacles. When future clients check my references they aren't going to care about excuses, just performance.
Should there be some form of performance metric? Sure. It needs to be very carefully set up though, and the child's own performance needs to be a part of it as well as the parents. NO teacher is going to be able teach calculus to a kid who skips 2 days a week to babysit for his siblings because his parent(s) can't afford childcare. It also needs to be politics resistant, I don't want my kids teacher worried about their job because some new guy won an election. I want them worried about how to best teach the next chapter, and that is it.
I agree that we need to be very careful about these metrics. We also have to be careful not to give test scores and other easy but unreliable metrics too much control over performance reviews. We also have to be honest that more time needs to be spent getting better quality teachers in the first place rather than worrying to much about rating the ones we already have. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore teacher performance.
Plenty of good teachers are going to be unfairly punished, just like plenty of other professionals. Politics will get teachers fired. That is life. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good, because we need significant progress in our educational system on many different fronts including this one.
And the tenure process is rigorous and as full of hard work as any other promotion process at any company or organization. They don't just hand tenure out to anyone - most teachers already have to work for years to even qualify, and then they have to submit a huge portfolio and be approved by the county or university. All it does in reality is negate the "right-to-work" state laws which allow anyone to be arbitrarily fired for any reason.
While I only have anecdotal evidence that comes from three teachers I know in the Chicago-land area, from what I have heard the tenure process was the easiest process for advancement in any profession I know of. But as of the last 5 years or so, the process has become much more difficult. It does seem that today you have to be either in the right place at the right time, or be a very good teacher to get tenure in the good school districts. The rest either become day care teachers or move out to the sticks to find a job (and that includes a lot of potentially good teachers that never got a break).
The problem isn't really our current practices (which are getting better), it is all of the teachers who started their career before the mid-2000s. The private sector has mostly shed its dead weight during the last recession, but the private sector and other unionized professions still have significant excess baggage.
Except professors don't teach at high schools, which is what this seems to be about.
I think it is safe to say that the ones fighting for and against this case understand that it has implications far grander than just California professors.
And probably more to the point, the bigger problem is no one can agree on what a bad teacher is to be measured by beyond anecdotes. But I strongly suspect its "shouldn't have given my child a bad grade!"
No one can agree on what makes a good software developer, CEO, plumber, or salesman either. Plenty of factors external to the individual's accomplishments and failures weigh in on the final result of their work. Why is it that teachers are the only ones asking us to ignore performance just because it is hard to measure?
How much ambiguity was there in the situation and the contract such that a lawyer was necessary? If it's an unambiguously-worded agreement - are laywers necessary?
It isn't about ambiguity. People often assume that anything written in a contract is binding, but that simply is not true. In this case a lawyer would have known that a licensed physician needed to be involved in the sperm donation process. You can have a clearly written unambiguous contract, but if it breaks the law or if the terms of the agreement are followed illegally, it will likely be thrown out of court.
Lawyers aren't that expensive for simple things; a few hundred dollars for a lawyer would have saved everyone a lot of money here.
The donor didn't bring the child into the world - he donated a substance - everything else was a side-effect of the parents' actions.
Now you are just being pedantic. The donor donated the sperm with a specific goal in mind. You might as well say that all fathers are just donating a substance, and everything else is a side-effect of the mother's egg's actions.
A handshake should be sufficient contract for something like this. This is yet another example of why society is completely in the crapper these days. People arguing for even more red tape are the reason this keeps getting worse.
You really believe that a handshake would be sufficient? What if there is a dispute? What if the semen donor tries to exert parental rights? What if the parents try to get child support payments? (similar to this case)
Like I said in another post, no reasonable person would think that creating a baby is so trivial that a legal agreement is not necessary. Even the people in this story understood that, they just wanted to save money by not getting proper legal counsel. It worked out just about as well as you would expect.
It is silly that anyone used their prosecutorial discretion to even attempt this case, but the defendant brought this upon himself by being careless. Ignorance is not a defense. If the parents had came after him for child support it would probably be a clear case and he would be paying up for the next two decades.
Yes, because every agreement between groups of people must be taxed by lawyers. I call BS on this.
This case is exactly why consulting a lawyer isn't just some tax, it is the smart way to deal with important and potentially volatile situations. No reasonable person would believe that bringing a human into the world is so trivial that you can just scribble something on a napkin (metaphorically speaking) and be legally covered. I wouldn't buy a house without a lawyer making sure that the deed transfer was legal, and a house is far less valuable than a baby (well, most houses anyway).
It is quite sad that the very people who need the most help from our legal system are the ones who are short changed because they don't have the resources to know how the courts actually work.
Sadly, even crossing your Is and dotting your Ts is less important then when you have officials looking to score points by hurting you
Signing a contract like this without competent legal counsel is not crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. Hopefully the defendant can appeal this ridiculous ruling, but this wouldn't be necessary if he hadn't been so careless with a very important legal matter.
That is simple enough to say, but there aren't that many people willing to adopt adolescent children. The government (taxpayers) will still be paying for the children as you have just shifted the funding to the foster care system.
While that is true, customers have the choice to not work with companies that have shown poor security practices. No one can stop paying taxes if they feel the government isn't protecting the information in their tax returns. If the government wants to be trusted with information we wouldn't give to a private company, then they bear a much higher responsibility to keep it secure.
It is similar to how we require police to log every firing of their weapon, while we don't require the same of private gun owners. The fact that we trust the police with power we don't give to normal citizens means they have to be held to a higher level of scrutiny.
There is no ethical dilemma. The ban is on organ sales is killing people. The example from Iran clearly shows that selling organs will increase the supply and may also reduce net cost since the long term costs of dialysis exceed the transplant cost (not to mention the lost productivity of someone on dialysis or dead.)
The paper's mention of Iran's market for organs does not provide a comparison with this practice and with simply making our organ donor program opt-out instead of opt-in. I believe that our entire shortage of organs would be wiped away immediately if we just make everyone a donor unless they take action an opt-out of the program. Considering how lazy people are, we are missing out a large number of donors because of how poorly we run the system.
Oh boy, you don't have to take Calculus I-III since you got a 5 on the calc bc. You still need 4 math courses. They just start out at a higher level. Oh, by the way, you only need Calc I-III and difeq for this degree. Retake Calc I-III for an easy 3 classes.
If you don't have a desire to learn then I guess AP classes are a waste. But I was very happy every time I could test out of a basic class even though I received no credit just because it let me take a higher level class. I never considered it bad that I was still "forced" to take a database class that taught about B-trees and query optimization because I tested out of the one that taught what a SELECT clause is. I always considered that a pretty good deal.
Why is it alarming? People are different, genders are different. What's alarming is that every single job has to be 50-50% by law it seems. Oh except low-paying grunt jobs then it's OK that only men apply there.
It is alarming whenever a significant portion of the population is not contributing to any field. But it is important to look at each field and determine how important it is to take action. If we determine that women are under-represented in the logging or fishing industries, that isn't a big deal. It is unlikely that we are missing out on great advances or productivity increases in those industries because women very rarely perform these jobs. We should still react to overt discrimination in these fields, but it is not worth our time to address any cultural biases.
But STEM fields are the primary contributor to the success of our nation (or species if you aren't interested in nationalism). They don't just create new jobs, over time they create new industries. The success of our STEM fields is literally the most important thing our society should be focusing on. So when we identify that half of our population is having trouble entering these industries it is crucial that we investigate the issue in great depth.
That doesn't mean we need to reach 50-50 parity, or even that we should necessarily strive for that. But we should investigate every possible road block that we identify. There are clearly social factors at play regardless of any genetic differences that may also be contributing. Every woman who is not living to her full potential because of these social factors is limiting the advancement of the fields she may have contributed to. And in the cases of STEM fields this is particularly tragic.
It is exploitative if someone is selling an organ to survive--I think nobody wants to see that.
So I guess we consider this more exploitative to sell organs than forcing people to work at fast food restaurants or clean my car during a Chicago winter or cleaning my home because I am too lazy. Many of these services are only possible at affordable prices because these workers have no other options.
I wonder what mortality rate is acceptable for any paid activity. Is it more risky to donate a kidney or work as a logger or deep sea fisherman? I am not sure, but the ethical dilemma is the same in both situations (risking health for a payment).
Wait, what? Oh, they're trying to draw a parallel based on efficacy, as opposed to such piffling concerns as morality.
The analogy has nothing to do with efficacy. It is a great analogy because the moral concerns are very similar. The moral issue with selling organs is that the disadvantaged would be sacrificing their future health because of a financial payout. The poor would likely be involved in a dis-proportionally high portion of all organ sales. The same goes for a paid military. If you are paying people well for a very dangerous thing then only those with few options will generally sign up. That is overwhelmingly true for the military, and it would be true of paid organ donors as well.
Whether or not either of these situations is moral is a different topic, but they are very similar.