Most professions with "engineer" in the title require state certification and licensing to practice their trade. I figure that's a reasonable benchmark for whether someone should put "engineer" in their title. Some engineers get in a snit about this, and I can sort of see their point.
IMHO, the mere usage of the term engineering in the software industry is a good thing. The more developers who think of themselves as engineers, and try to elevate their professional practices to a level worthy of the term, the better the industry will be. It may take some time for software engineering practices to become as mature as civil engineering, but I believe the developers who consider themselves software engineers are the ones who will do it.
I personally am fine considering myself a software engineer. I find the connotations the term carries apply well to how I try to separate my capabilities from less structured programmers.
And as for engineers being rubbed the wrong way, I have yet to meet a "true" engineer who I admire who felt there was anything profound about being called an engineer. To paraphrase one college friend / mechanical engineer: "There are a lot of incompetent certified engineers out there."
You: Finally, I have to disagree that a US flag is somehow like making a political statement about immigration.
Me: You are more than likely bright enough to realize the students were making a political statement with those t-shirts. They even freely admit it.
You: So what? Are other students allowed, at other times, to make political statements?
I am not even sure what your argument is anymore as you change it each post. And BTW, I never said students making a political statement is a bad thing, I was simply refuting your statement that these students weren't making one.
A "hostile learning environment" is irrelevant: any political speech of any kind is going to offend someone
It's not the school's job to select which political opinions are OK and which aren't.
Once again, it has nothing to do with just being offended. It is about being hostile to other students. The extent in which schools should help enforce an inclusive learning experience is simply where people like you and me are going to disagree. I am happy in this case most school districts are closer to my side of the argument, but I don't pretend I approve of every decision schools make.
And who decides what are those cases where the right should be limited?
I assume you mean this as a rhetorical question, but the same people who protect the rights we are given are the ones who decide the scope of those rights. How else could it work?
though I do think that it's extremely biased on your behalf to treat the mere presentation of flag as "deport anchor babies
Among people upset enough about immigration to visibly protest it on school grounds, a disdain for anchor babies is quite common. A sizable number of anti-immigration individuals would like to deport anchor babies along with their parents. There are even Congress representatives who have pushed bills to this effect. This is not some extreme opinion. Well it is extreme, just not extreme for the anti-immigration crowd.
put it in another light
should a jewish baker be forced to cater a nazi rally?
should a black photographer be forced to film a pro klan calender???
IANAL, but almost the only reason this law is a problem is because sexual orientation is not a protected class in Indiana. People are generally allowed to refuse business on any grounds, such as being anti-Nazi or anti-KKK, but not when they are refusing someone because of them being part of a protected class.
At this moment in history, LGBT rights are at the forefront of the civil rights movement (a movement that apparently never ends). In an alternative world where religion isn't being used as a smokescreen for homophobia, this law would be very uncontroversial. But that is not a world we live in.
the American flag was little different than a slogan saying "deport anchor babies."
So are you suggesting that t-shirts bearing that slogan should be censored by the government? I find that offensive.
I find those t-shirts, in the same context, would be similar to yelling fire in a crowded theater, swatting someone, or committing slander. All three of these similar instances could be defended by citing freedom of expression or free speech. All three are expressions I would like our laws to limit. The wearing of t-shirts is far less extreme than any of these three examples, but the reasoning on why freedom of expression should be limited in all four cases is the same.
Teenagers should enjoy the same free-speech protections that the rest of us enjoy, even if it offends some people.
While adults are not prevented from using hate speech (or any other symbols that promote hate), there are places where they are not allowed. You will probably be asked to leave a courthouse if you start spouting hate speech during a trial, or even when standing in line at the DMV. I am also okay with this, even though both are government buildings.
Then they could just forbid all clothing with slogans or flags of any kind.
I see no reason to go to this extreme. Schools generally use the guideline of preventing a hostile learning environment when determining what to allow on campus. I believe having a cohesive learning environment is more important than students giving up a few liberties while at school. I also believe children's property rights should be respected, but would give teachers the ability to confiscate calculators during math tests if necessary.
Finally, I have to disagree that a US flag is somehow like making a political statement about immigration. It's the flag of this nation; if wearing it is offensive to someone, regardless of the day, that seems rather ridiculous.
You are more than likely bright enough to realize the students were making a political statement with those t-shirts. They even freely admit it. And this case in particular has nothing to do with the action being offensive. Being offensive is okay. Creating a hostile learning environment is the heart of the matter, not offensive speech.
Now I have even more despair that someone would mark my comment as trolling. That is more of a lack of reading comprehension though, since I gave no interpretation on what DarkOx said. He openly said it is okay to discriminate since people could just do business elsewhere. I merely stated I am upset people actually think like that.
While I may disagree with punishing those high school students, it is a very poor comparison with the discriminatory law being questioned in this forum.
You may disagree with it, but most people understand free expression should be limited in some cases. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is one example. Not allowing US flags to be worn simply to incite anger on a school campus is another. No one was being offended by the US flag, they were being offended by the context in which they were worn.
A flag is just a symbol. It can be a rallying cry for national pride but it can also be a rallying cry for xenophobia. In the context that these shirts were worn in this case, the American flag was little different than a slogan saying "deport anchor babies."
Civil rights laws that try and force a private business to serve all customers should be considered unconstitutional.
I don't think its right to deny someone based on race,color,creed, sexual orientation etc, but as strongly as I feel that is wrong, so do I feel about forcing someone to act against their will or conviction.
Our economy is large enough that minority groups who face discrimination probably can find another employer or another shop who will treat them fairly.
When people are proponents of laws like these I just hope they simply haven't thought about their opinion thoroughly enough. But here is someone who fully knows the ramifications of this opinion and is actually proud of it. I don't meet people like this often, and it is very chilling.
I simply couldn't imagine someone walking into a store with a "Whites Only" sign on the door and hear him say "Good for them for sticking up for their convictions." But it is clear that DarkOx is such a person. I guess I just have to take solace in the hope that most people don't think like him/her. I'm an upper middle class white male living in a wealthy liberal area, so it is quite likely I am in a bubble where I simply don't see how dark parts of this country still are.
"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
Fair Market Value is whatever an employer can spend to get an equivalent amount of work done anywhere. Everyone needs to ensure they are valuable enough to be worth more than a third-world developer. Most of that extra worth will come from soft skills, not technical skills. Your salary will get capped real quick if you are mostly relying on your technical skills as your value to the company.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Computers aren't the only reason companies are more efficient today. One area (among many others) of improvement has been in knowledge management. 50 years ago companies were often far more reliant on the tacit knowledge of their employees. This could include your lead engineers' knowledge of your product, your senior salesmen's insight into your customers' needs, and so forth. Companies today spend far more effort in disseminating that information and codifying the knowledge so it is saved when an employee moves on or moves into another role. A well run company should be able to weather the loss of any employee with minimal disruption.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
When did s.petry say he is still working at a cushy job with a company still living in the past? For all you know he moves companies every 3-5 years as new opportunities present themselves. People who mismanage their careers usually find it impossible to even understand what a well-managed career looks like. I have worked at a failed start-up and a large company which was and still is losing market share because of mismanagement. Neither of these companies sunk my career; in fact both were used as springboards. I learned a lot, gathered contacts, and moved on.
I dare say that a flight attendant (mostly women) is not going to stop a (co)pilot (mostly men) with a plan for murderous suicide.
Thanks for showing your misogyny nature. Poor helpless woman would not be able to stop big mean man.
My wife and I are almost as progressive as they come, but that doesn't mean my wife is stupid enough to think we are equals when it comes to physical strength. And we are pretty average for our genders when it comes to physical strength. Even with a knife or baseball bat she would not have much of a chance without a lucky hit early in the fight. She could surely injure me severely (with a weapon that is), but not stop me if I intended to pacify her.
There is plenty of actual misogyny in our culture, there is no need to invent some while making yourself sound stupid.
People need to stop losing their minds every time we have a tragedy. People are going to die in plane crashes from time to time. Sometimes it will be an accident, sometimes it will be negligence, and sometimes it will be terrorism. No one lives forever. Deal with it.
Put things into perspective There were 3.4 trillion passenger miles flown worldwide in 2012, and 475 aviation deaths. There were 3.0 trillion passenger miles driven in the US in 2012, and 33,561 traffic deaths.
Maybe it makes sense to add another pilot to flights, but lets not let the amount of press coverage a single incident gets determine policy changes.
I agree that if we want more people to train for STEM jobs, we need to focus on jobs in that sector not in education. We already have an education system qualified enough to produce STEM graduates. We just don't have enough quality jobs for those graduates, so many of our best and brightest go into law, medicine, finance, etc. instead of STEM fields.
Take that $240 million, plus another $240 billion, and put it into research. Go to Mars, invent better batteries, create DNA specific medical treatments... the sky really is the limit. By doing this we won't care about just creating new jobs because we will be creating new industries.
People smart enough to work in STEM are usually smart enough to go where the money is as well.
Everyone keeps forgetting that the government does not force unions in the work place - it is a voluntary agreement between two parties.
Government absolutely force unions in the work place. There are plenty of laws which protect union membership. I'm not arguing that those laws are a good or bad thing, just that to ignore the government's role in supporting unions is ridiculous.
Powerful unions are essentially monopolies that the government won't protect society from. If Ford cars become too expensive I can just buy a car from another company. If Ford was the only option, their only incentive to lower prices would be so people don't keep used cars for too long. That is obviously a horrible situation and the government would step in. If the UAW asks for too much money, however, Ford can't turn to another automotive union with more reasonable rates. And going with non-union workers in an industry dominated by a powerful union also has its problems.
strong correlation between dismantling of unions and stagnant wages ?
There is also a strong correlation between the time where a significant portion of the population became college educated and stagnant wages. Wages grew substantially when the average worker was becoming far more valuable economically then generations past. This was low hanging fruit solved by increased government funding of higher education and a shift in middle class mindsets that college was necessary for a middle class life. Once a tipping point of the number of college educated employees in the workforce, average wage growth started to stagnate again.
Workers get approximately 6 to 9 times as much work done as they did 40 years ago, but make less money. awesome.
Productivity gains which occurred 40-50 years ago were largely because of a more highly educated work force. Productivity gains today are largely because of increased use of capital. Computer systems, robotics, operational improvements, etc. are responsible for that increased productivity over the past few decades. And just like the 50's and 60's saw the rise of the middle class because of college participation, the 80's through today saw the rise of the upper middle class.
The upper middle class is now responsible for the productivity gains we see today so they are the ones who are reaping the benefits (along with the capital holders of course). When a middle class worker becomes more productive today, it is probably because of a CRM system or robotics assembly created by someone in the upper middle class. And the upper middle class wages have not been stagnant by a long shot over the past 20-30 years. The upper middle class hardly even existed before the 80's.
why do we have unions? because there is no balance of power in the workplace without them, and workers will be impoverished without that balance
Labor unions aren't solely responsible for workers rights. The government is our primary tool for enabling worker's rights. The government enacted the 40 day work week, overtime laws, etc (with help from unions), and governments are the ones who enforce these laws today. Unions were a tool which was necessary because in the early 1900's the government simply did not take on the responsibility. That is not the case today.
There are plenty of times where drastic actions are necessary because the government is not doing its job well enough. The US Civil War is such an example. We needed a war to prevent secession, but we don't need perpetual war to stop it from occurring regularly. Just like we needed unions to set reasonable work standards after the industrial revolution, but we don't need them perpetually.
Long standing unions almost always become as big of a problem as the robber baron monopolies they were created to fight against. They drive up consumer costs of any service they have a hand in providing; that is if the industries they taint can't just move overseas. They are especially dangerous when they mix with public services, because tax payers are stuck with bills promised by politicians decades ago who knew they would be out of office long before the bills came due.
Your statement, "she took the job" in no way refutes what Jason Levine just said.
The first guy said to give the parents a break because parenting is hard. The second guy said "she took the job", obviously implying you shouldn't have kids unless you are prepared to do a good job at that very hard job. Sounds like he was refuting exactly what the first poster said. Be careful about calling people stupid when you can't understand a very simple argument (regardless of whether or not you agree with it).
There are plenty of very tough jobs in this world. My job is a lot more difficult than raising my daughter is (although not a more important job than being a dad). But I can't just shrug and say my job is tough if I fail at work. I took a job where I knew the responsibilities and challenges were significant, both at home and work, so now it is my duty to do well at both.
That said, even the best of kids can make horrible mistakes, so you would need to know quite a bit about the home dynamic before immediately blaming the parents. From personal experience I would say these kids' parents are more than likely bad parents, but it would be idiotic for me to just assume they are. Even good kids can be convinced to do bad things through peer pressure, for instance.
Why are you buying a Mac if you want to run Windows 7 in the first place?
1. You feel Mac hardware fits your needs at your price point better than other options. 2. Your employer bought you a Macbook but you want to use Windows (I was in this situation until a couple months ago). 3. If you are buying a Macbook / Surface / etc. you probably don't care about the extra cost of an OS. If you do care, you probably should be buying cheaper hardware anyway.
Computers can certainly be granted superior perception to a human but the optimization algorithms may not always win in a 1-on-1. Humans have the potential to be just as good at signal processing if the context is something we have already evolved or been conditioned to handle.
The benefit of an AI is generally its superior memory and consistency when compared to a human. Those are things humans cannot be evolved or conditioned to match. We could possibly be improved to match the memory through the use of bionics, but the consistency may never be matched.
The good thing about the memory and consistency is they can both be utilized by humans in hybrid decision systems. That is why the best chess players are humans using computers, and why business intelligence tools are almost always better when they merge computer generated data with human intuition.
Who is going to carry the risks and the costs of genemodding and carry the consequences of trial and error?
I tell you who will: In first world countries it will the society, the taxpayers. So they get to vote on if this is done or not. End of story.
Oh that is so cute. You think if taxpayers could be adversely affected by something that they will have a significant voice in the matter. It's just so adorable.
You realize that almost always the reason there's only one cable company is because of regulation, don't you?
That is not even close to true. Regulation is partly responsible for why there are so few companies laying wires, but lack of regulation is what is holding back more companies from selling services which use those wires.
The United States is almost the only country in the OECD which does not require the owners of broadband physical infrastructure to sell access to independent providers on a regulated wholesale market. This is almost the only reason our broadband speeds are so much worse and our costs are so much higher than other OECD countries. If we treated our broadband line like we do our telephone, electric, and gas lines, there would be plenty of competition. And using dozens of European countries as an example, the quality of our physical infrastructure would not suffer if this changed.
Local governments do enact regulations and fees which make building our physical infrastructure more expensive, but that would be even worse if the local governments didn't exist. Having to deal with hundreds of individual property owners per neighborhood instead of one local government per township would make it near impossible to build our infrastructure. We can at least try to reign in corrupt government.
the current US system WILL NOT ALLOW FOR 3RD PARTY CANDIDATES
It may not allow for 3rd party presidential candidates, but the presedency isn't the only elected office in our government. Getting third party candidates into Congress is still incredibly difficult, but I believe is within the realm of possibility. Just think how much of a difference having just 10% of our congressmen as independents would make. No party would likely ever get over 50% majority, and it would also be unlikely that any minority party could block legislation. Good legislation (those that independents would vote for) from both sides could pass.
(the truth) All this might be wonderful, but very expensive. I'm not here to tell you how you should do your job, or how other developers should do theirs. but I'm just saying that in my experience, where you have unhappy developers, you might have some unhappy code, and that means the agility of the project to be able to move forwards with new features is in question, as I'd predict new features taking exponentially more time to implement, as it's likely the code if suffering from a lack of separation of concerns.
The warning it there from the developer, but the stakeholders are happy. Case closed, move on... until that change request comes in, and the new developer says it's going to take 10x longer than the estimate! Hence, the "just get it working" approach - which further kicks the can down the road called "technical debt". Sooner or later the company pays for it, and often it's with a complete re-write in a few years!
Well said.
This is indeed a worst case scenario, which unfortunately play out too often. It is most often caused by not having enough developers on the "His side" of the argument. I for instance am a senior level developer who is very involved in the business side of my employer's decisions. This probably comes from my time as a contractor where I have also seen these his side, her side, and the truth arguments play out time and again. A company that does not have enough developer minded people in CTO, VP of Software Development, Director of Application Architecture, etc. positions is going to find themselves in your worst case scenario quite often. Most well run companies I have worked for and contracted for have CS/EE majors with MBAs (or equivalently minded people) in the positions I listed above, so "His Side" in these companies have many of the best arguments from "Her Side" already included.
Technical debt is a necessity in any product. Being aware of this debt and estimating its impact going forward is very much a part of any quality change management process. Martin Fowler has a great blog post describing the relationship between prudent, reckless, deliberate, and inadvertent technical debt that is worth a read. I particularly like his reasoning behind the inadvertent / prudent quadrant.
If you don't take proper care of your technical debt, it will ruin any software product. But properly managing your technical debt is not the same thing as just taking "Her Side" every time she complains about technical debt.
You only say that due to the limited scope of your vision. You think "it" is "the final product"; I never stated or implied any such thing. Each feature. Each bug fix. Each of these is "it". The bug won't be fixed by Thursday, it will be fixed as quickly as possible while still conforming to security standards and following established process. If that is Thursday, awesome! In fact we hope it will be Wednesday, but if it isn't right until Saturday then it won't be done until Saturday; period.
There is rarely just one possible solution for any single bug. Change management processes are still involved even at this level of granularity. One solution may be to disable the feature causing the bug. One may be to provide a work around. One may be to put a quick "band-aid" on the code in question, and one may be to find and fix the root cause. If a bug needs to be fixed by Thursday, there are still options even if your developers can't figure out the root causes by then. Once again you weigh the risk of providing a quick fix now with the risk of providing a better fix after the deadline has past.
Slashdot Mirror
Most professions with "engineer" in the title require state certification and licensing to practice their trade. I figure that's a reasonable benchmark for whether someone should put "engineer" in their title. Some engineers get in a snit about this, and I can sort of see their point.
IMHO, the mere usage of the term engineering in the software industry is a good thing. The more developers who think of themselves as engineers, and try to elevate their professional practices to a level worthy of the term, the better the industry will be. It may take some time for software engineering practices to become as mature as civil engineering, but I believe the developers who consider themselves software engineers are the ones who will do it.
I personally am fine considering myself a software engineer. I find the connotations the term carries apply well to how I try to separate my capabilities from less structured programmers.
And as for engineers being rubbed the wrong way, I have yet to meet a "true" engineer who I admire who felt there was anything profound about being called an engineer. To paraphrase one college friend / mechanical engineer: "There are a lot of incompetent certified engineers out there."
You: Finally, I have to disagree that a US flag is somehow like making a political statement about immigration.
Me: You are more than likely bright enough to realize the students were making a political statement with those t-shirts. They even freely admit it.
You: So what? Are other students allowed, at other times, to make political statements?
I am not even sure what your argument is anymore as you change it each post. And BTW, I never said students making a political statement is a bad thing, I was simply refuting your statement that these students weren't making one.
A "hostile learning environment" is irrelevant: any political speech of any kind is going to offend someone
It's not the school's job to select which political opinions are OK and which aren't.
Once again, it has nothing to do with just being offended. It is about being hostile to other students. The extent in which schools should help enforce an inclusive learning experience is simply where people like you and me are going to disagree. I am happy in this case most school districts are closer to my side of the argument, but I don't pretend I approve of every decision schools make.
And who decides what are those cases where the right should be limited?
I assume you mean this as a rhetorical question, but the same people who protect the rights we are given are the ones who decide the scope of those rights. How else could it work?
though I do think that it's extremely biased on your behalf to treat the mere presentation of flag as "deport anchor babies
Among people upset enough about immigration to visibly protest it on school grounds, a disdain for anchor babies is quite common. A sizable number of anti-immigration individuals would like to deport anchor babies along with their parents. There are even Congress representatives who have pushed bills to this effect. This is not some extreme opinion. Well it is extreme, just not extreme for the anti-immigration crowd.
put it in another light
should a jewish baker be forced to cater a nazi rally?
should a black photographer be forced to film a pro klan calender???
IANAL, but almost the only reason this law is a problem is because sexual orientation is not a protected class in Indiana. People are generally allowed to refuse business on any grounds, such as being anti-Nazi or anti-KKK, but not when they are refusing someone because of them being part of a protected class.
At this moment in history, LGBT rights are at the forefront of the civil rights movement (a movement that apparently never ends). In an alternative world where religion isn't being used as a smokescreen for homophobia, this law would be very uncontroversial. But that is not a world we live in.
the American flag was little different than a slogan saying "deport anchor babies."
So are you suggesting that t-shirts bearing that slogan should be censored by the government? I find that offensive.
I find those t-shirts, in the same context, would be similar to yelling fire in a crowded theater, swatting someone, or committing slander. All three of these similar instances could be defended by citing freedom of expression or free speech. All three are expressions I would like our laws to limit. The wearing of t-shirts is far less extreme than any of these three examples, but the reasoning on why freedom of expression should be limited in all four cases is the same.
Teenagers should enjoy the same free-speech protections that the rest of us enjoy, even if it offends some people.
While adults are not prevented from using hate speech (or any other symbols that promote hate), there are places where they are not allowed. You will probably be asked to leave a courthouse if you start spouting hate speech during a trial, or even when standing in line at the DMV. I am also okay with this, even though both are government buildings.
Then they could just forbid all clothing with slogans or flags of any kind.
I see no reason to go to this extreme. Schools generally use the guideline of preventing a hostile learning environment when determining what to allow on campus. I believe having a cohesive learning environment is more important than students giving up a few liberties while at school. I also believe children's property rights should be respected, but would give teachers the ability to confiscate calculators during math tests if necessary.
Finally, I have to disagree that a US flag is somehow like making a political statement about immigration. It's the flag of this nation; if wearing it is offensive to someone, regardless of the day, that seems rather ridiculous.
You are more than likely bright enough to realize the students were making a political statement with those t-shirts. They even freely admit it. And this case in particular has nothing to do with the action being offensive. Being offensive is okay. Creating a hostile learning environment is the heart of the matter, not offensive speech.
Now I have even more despair that someone would mark my comment as trolling. That is more of a lack of reading comprehension though, since I gave no interpretation on what DarkOx said. He openly said it is okay to discriminate since people could just do business elsewhere. I merely stated I am upset people actually think like that.
While I may disagree with punishing those high school students, it is a very poor comparison with the discriminatory law being questioned in this forum.
You may disagree with it, but most people understand free expression should be limited in some cases. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is one example. Not allowing US flags to be worn simply to incite anger on a school campus is another. No one was being offended by the US flag, they were being offended by the context in which they were worn.
A flag is just a symbol. It can be a rallying cry for national pride but it can also be a rallying cry for xenophobia. In the context that these shirts were worn in this case, the American flag was little different than a slogan saying "deport anchor babies."
Civil rights laws that try and force a private business to serve all customers should be considered unconstitutional.
I don't think its right to deny someone based on race,color,creed, sexual orientation etc, but as strongly as I feel that is wrong, so do I feel about forcing someone to act against their will or conviction.
Our economy is large enough that minority groups who face discrimination probably can find another employer or another shop who will treat them fairly.
When people are proponents of laws like these I just hope they simply haven't thought about their opinion thoroughly enough. But here is someone who fully knows the ramifications of this opinion and is actually proud of it. I don't meet people like this often, and it is very chilling.
I simply couldn't imagine someone walking into a store with a "Whites Only" sign on the door and hear him say "Good for them for sticking up for their convictions." But it is clear that DarkOx is such a person. I guess I just have to take solace in the hope that most people don't think like him/her. I'm an upper middle class white male living in a wealthy liberal area, so it is quite likely I am in a bubble where I simply don't see how dark parts of this country still are.
"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
Fair Market Value is whatever an employer can spend to get an equivalent amount of work done anywhere. Everyone needs to ensure they are valuable enough to be worth more than a third-world developer. Most of that extra worth will come from soft skills, not technical skills. Your salary will get capped real quick if you are mostly relying on your technical skills as your value to the company.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Computers aren't the only reason companies are more efficient today. One area (among many others) of improvement has been in knowledge management. 50 years ago companies were often far more reliant on the tacit knowledge of their employees. This could include your lead engineers' knowledge of your product, your senior salesmen's insight into your customers' needs, and so forth. Companies today spend far more effort in disseminating that information and codifying the knowledge so it is saved when an employee moves on or moves into another role. A well run company should be able to weather the loss of any employee with minimal disruption.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
When did s.petry say he is still working at a cushy job with a company still living in the past? For all you know he moves companies every 3-5 years as new opportunities present themselves. People who mismanage their careers usually find it impossible to even understand what a well-managed career looks like. I have worked at a failed start-up and a large company which was and still is losing market share because of mismanagement. Neither of these companies sunk my career; in fact both were used as springboards. I learned a lot, gathered contacts, and moved on.
I dare say that a flight attendant (mostly women) is not going to stop a (co)pilot (mostly men) with a plan for murderous suicide.
Thanks for showing your misogyny nature.
Poor helpless woman would not be able to stop big mean man.
My wife and I are almost as progressive as they come, but that doesn't mean my wife is stupid enough to think we are equals when it comes to physical strength. And we are pretty average for our genders when it comes to physical strength. Even with a knife or baseball bat she would not have much of a chance without a lucky hit early in the fight. She could surely injure me severely (with a weapon that is), but not stop me if I intended to pacify her.
There is plenty of actual misogyny in our culture, there is no need to invent some while making yourself sound stupid.
People need to stop losing their minds every time we have a tragedy. People are going to die in plane crashes from time to time. Sometimes it will be an accident, sometimes it will be negligence, and sometimes it will be terrorism. No one lives forever. Deal with it.
Put things into perspective
There were 3.4 trillion passenger miles flown worldwide in 2012, and 475 aviation deaths.
There were 3.0 trillion passenger miles driven in the US in 2012, and 33,561 traffic deaths.
Maybe it makes sense to add another pilot to flights, but lets not let the amount of press coverage a single incident gets determine policy changes.
I agree that if we want more people to train for STEM jobs, we need to focus on jobs in that sector not in education. We already have an education system qualified enough to produce STEM graduates. We just don't have enough quality jobs for those graduates, so many of our best and brightest go into law, medicine, finance, etc. instead of STEM fields.
Take that $240 million, plus another $240 billion, and put it into research. Go to Mars, invent better batteries, create DNA specific medical treatments ... the sky really is the limit. By doing this we won't care about just creating new jobs because we will be creating new industries.
People smart enough to work in STEM are usually smart enough to go where the money is as well.
Everyone keeps forgetting that the government does not force unions in the work place - it is a voluntary agreement between two parties.
Government absolutely force unions in the work place. There are plenty of laws which protect union membership. I'm not arguing that those laws are a good or bad thing, just that to ignore the government's role in supporting unions is ridiculous.
Powerful unions are essentially monopolies that the government won't protect society from. If Ford cars become too expensive I can just buy a car from another company. If Ford was the only option, their only incentive to lower prices would be so people don't keep used cars for too long. That is obviously a horrible situation and the government would step in. If the UAW asks for too much money, however, Ford can't turn to another automotive union with more reasonable rates. And going with non-union workers in an industry dominated by a powerful union also has its problems.
strong correlation between dismantling of unions and stagnant wages ?
There is also a strong correlation between the time where a significant portion of the population became college educated and stagnant wages. Wages grew substantially when the average worker was becoming far more valuable economically then generations past. This was low hanging fruit solved by increased government funding of higher education and a shift in middle class mindsets that college was necessary for a middle class life. Once a tipping point of the number of college educated employees in the workforce, average wage growth started to stagnate again.
Workers get approximately 6 to 9 times as much work done as they did 40 years ago, but make less money. awesome.
Productivity gains which occurred 40-50 years ago were largely because of a more highly educated work force. Productivity gains today are largely because of increased use of capital. Computer systems, robotics, operational improvements, etc. are responsible for that increased productivity over the past few decades. And just like the 50's and 60's saw the rise of the middle class because of college participation, the 80's through today saw the rise of the upper middle class.
The upper middle class is now responsible for the productivity gains we see today so they are the ones who are reaping the benefits (along with the capital holders of course). When a middle class worker becomes more productive today, it is probably because of a CRM system or robotics assembly created by someone in the upper middle class. And the upper middle class wages have not been stagnant by a long shot over the past 20-30 years. The upper middle class hardly even existed before the 80's.
why do we have unions?
because there is no balance of power in the workplace without them, and workers will be impoverished without that balance
Labor unions aren't solely responsible for workers rights. The government is our primary tool for enabling worker's rights. The government enacted the 40 day work week, overtime laws, etc (with help from unions), and governments are the ones who enforce these laws today. Unions were a tool which was necessary because in the early 1900's the government simply did not take on the responsibility. That is not the case today.
There are plenty of times where drastic actions are necessary because the government is not doing its job well enough. The US Civil War is such an example. We needed a war to prevent secession, but we don't need perpetual war to stop it from occurring regularly. Just like we needed unions to set reasonable work standards after the industrial revolution, but we don't need them perpetually.
Long standing unions almost always become as big of a problem as the robber baron monopolies they were created to fight against. They drive up consumer costs of any service they have a hand in providing; that is if the industries they taint can't just move overseas. They are especially dangerous when they mix with public services, because tax payers are stuck with bills promised by politicians decades ago who knew they would be out of office long before the bills came due.
Your statement, "she took the job" in no way refutes what Jason Levine just said.
The first guy said to give the parents a break because parenting is hard. The second guy said "she took the job", obviously implying you shouldn't have kids unless you are prepared to do a good job at that very hard job. Sounds like he was refuting exactly what the first poster said. Be careful about calling people stupid when you can't understand a very simple argument (regardless of whether or not you agree with it).
There are plenty of very tough jobs in this world. My job is a lot more difficult than raising my daughter is (although not a more important job than being a dad). But I can't just shrug and say my job is tough if I fail at work. I took a job where I knew the responsibilities and challenges were significant, both at home and work, so now it is my duty to do well at both.
That said, even the best of kids can make horrible mistakes, so you would need to know quite a bit about the home dynamic before immediately blaming the parents. From personal experience I would say these kids' parents are more than likely bad parents, but it would be idiotic for me to just assume they are. Even good kids can be convinced to do bad things through peer pressure, for instance.
Why are you buying a Mac if you want to run Windows 7 in the first place?
1. You feel Mac hardware fits your needs at your price point better than other options.
2. Your employer bought you a Macbook but you want to use Windows (I was in this situation until a couple months ago).
3. If you are buying a Macbook / Surface / etc. you probably don't care about the extra cost of an OS. If you do care, you probably should be buying cheaper hardware anyway.
Computers can certainly be granted superior perception to a human but the optimization algorithms may not always win in a 1-on-1. Humans have the potential to be just as good at signal processing if the context is something we have already evolved or been conditioned to handle.
The benefit of an AI is generally its superior memory and consistency when compared to a human. Those are things humans cannot be evolved or conditioned to match. We could possibly be improved to match the memory through the use of bionics, but the consistency may never be matched.
The good thing about the memory and consistency is they can both be utilized by humans in hybrid decision systems. That is why the best chess players are humans using computers, and why business intelligence tools are almost always better when they merge computer generated data with human intuition.
Who is going to carry the risks and the costs of genemodding and carry the consequences of trial and error?
I tell you who will: In first world countries it will the society, the taxpayers. So they get to vote on if this is done or not. End of story.
Oh that is so cute. You think if taxpayers could be adversely affected by something that they will have a significant voice in the matter. It's just so adorable.
You realize that almost always the reason there's only one cable company is because of regulation, don't you?
That is not even close to true. Regulation is partly responsible for why there are so few companies laying wires, but lack of regulation is what is holding back more companies from selling services which use those wires.
The United States is almost the only country in the OECD which does not require the owners of broadband physical infrastructure to sell access to independent providers on a regulated wholesale market. This is almost the only reason our broadband speeds are so much worse and our costs are so much higher than other OECD countries. If we treated our broadband line like we do our telephone, electric, and gas lines, there would be plenty of competition. And using dozens of European countries as an example, the quality of our physical infrastructure would not suffer if this changed.
Local governments do enact regulations and fees which make building our physical infrastructure more expensive, but that would be even worse if the local governments didn't exist. Having to deal with hundreds of individual property owners per neighborhood instead of one local government per township would make it near impossible to build our infrastructure. We can at least try to reign in corrupt government.
the current US system WILL NOT ALLOW FOR 3RD PARTY CANDIDATES
It may not allow for 3rd party presidential candidates, but the presedency isn't the only elected office in our government. Getting third party candidates into Congress is still incredibly difficult, but I believe is within the realm of possibility. Just think how much of a difference having just 10% of our congressmen as independents would make. No party would likely ever get over 50% majority, and it would also be unlikely that any minority party could block legislation. Good legislation (those that independents would vote for) from both sides could pass.
Well said
Management should understand that a feature with bugs is an incomplete delivery.
So there is no such thing as a complete delivery then?
(the truth)
All this might be wonderful, but very expensive. I'm not here to tell you how you should do your job, or how other developers should do theirs. but I'm just saying that in my experience, where you have unhappy developers, you might have some unhappy code, and that means the agility of the project to be able to move forwards with new features is in question, as I'd predict new features taking exponentially more time to implement, as it's likely the code if suffering from a lack of separation of concerns.
The warning it there from the developer, but the stakeholders are happy. Case closed, move on... until that change request comes in, and the new developer says it's going to take 10x longer than the estimate! Hence, the "just get it working" approach - which further kicks the can down the road called "technical debt". Sooner or later the company pays for it, and often it's with a complete re-write in a few years!
Well said.
This is indeed a worst case scenario, which unfortunately play out too often. It is most often caused by not having enough developers on the "His side" of the argument. I for instance am a senior level developer who is very involved in the business side of my employer's decisions. This probably comes from my time as a contractor where I have also seen these his side, her side, and the truth arguments play out time and again. A company that does not have enough developer minded people in CTO, VP of Software Development, Director of Application Architecture, etc. positions is going to find themselves in your worst case scenario quite often. Most well run companies I have worked for and contracted for have CS/EE majors with MBAs (or equivalently minded people) in the positions I listed above, so "His Side" in these companies have many of the best arguments from "Her Side" already included.
Technical debt is a necessity in any product. Being aware of this debt and estimating its impact going forward is very much a part of any quality change management process. Martin Fowler has a great blog post describing the relationship between prudent, reckless, deliberate, and inadvertent technical debt that is worth a read. I particularly like his reasoning behind the inadvertent / prudent quadrant.
If you don't take proper care of your technical debt, it will ruin any software product. But properly managing your technical debt is not the same thing as just taking "Her Side" every time she complains about technical debt.
You only say that due to the limited scope of your vision. You think "it" is "the final product"; I never stated or implied any such thing. Each feature. Each bug fix. Each of these is "it". The bug won't be fixed by Thursday, it will be fixed as quickly as possible while still conforming to security standards and following established process. If that is Thursday, awesome! In fact we hope it will be Wednesday, but if it isn't right until Saturday then it won't be done until Saturday; period.
There is rarely just one possible solution for any single bug. Change management processes are still involved even at this level of granularity. One solution may be to disable the feature causing the bug. One may be to provide a work around. One may be to put a quick "band-aid" on the code in question, and one may be to find and fix the root cause. If a bug needs to be fixed by Thursday, there are still options even if your developers can't figure out the root causes by then. Once again you weigh the risk of providing a quick fix now with the risk of providing a better fix after the deadline has past.