Agreed that conflicts have far fewer casualties than the WW 2 and even the Vietnam era. There's light years of difference between losing 1,000 men taking over a square mile of battlefield and pushing a button to wipe out your enemy from remote. In fact, the likelihood that we will never need to use the draft again will probably make interventions more palatable in the future, unfortunately. There's a huge difference in public opinion between a volunteer army which most see as a jobs program for the poor and forced conscription that may mean you or your offspring not coming back home.
I also agree that terrorism isn't anything compared to the huge armed conflicts of the past, or even small scale stuff in the grand scheme of things. I wasn't one of the people I mentioned who wanted to prevent another 9/11 no matter what. But, there were plenty of other people who did.
I'm not quite sure I agree with you and many others who feel the government is going to swoop in and become the Stasi or KGB. First, the US population is too fractured as it is -- there would be no way for anyone to agree on one particular platform to rally around. Anti-religion people hate the religious people. Liberals hate conservatives. Budget hawks hate progressives. Gun nuts hate non-gun nuts. Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. Second, the government itself has too many internal issues to make anything like that happen. The only reason there was any cooperation on defense in the past was because there was, as you say, a well-armed and capable adversary that was at least making noises about our destruction. Even then, there was still a huge debate about the policy of containment, especially since Korea and Vietnam were such total wastes of life and money for, arguably, no gain.
I'm not trying to generalize or rip down your view of things, but all the arguments I've seen about this have boiled down to "OMG, the evil government is out to get me personally, lock me up and take away my guns. It's like the Soviet Union all over again!" People give away so much more data to Facebook, Google, Apple, other big retailers and the various payment processing companies -- why aren't they paranoid about that? I'd be a lot more worried about Google and other private companies abusing their power. Not in a "send you off for re-education" sense, but in a forcing you to give them increasing amounts of money for essential services sense. There's a lot of this "defending my homestead" mentality that just makes people sound like they live on a 20-acre compound in the mountains with barbed wire fence and a private security force 24/7 just in case the government decides to try something. It just doesn't make sense in this modern era.
I think a true "geek" would probably enjoy working there. If nothing else, the problems to solve would be a lot more interesting than typical corporate IT/dev positions. The people who actually work for NSA, not for a contractor like Snowden did, are sure not doing it for the money. They're doing it for job security, maybe better benefits, but probably also because they feel like they're doing something important. The contractors will always be hired guns, as they are in any organization, and not as invested in the core mission. Also, NSA isn't just about spying -- any cryptography or communications nerd would probably have an interesting set of tasks to pick from that didn't involve actually collecting and sifting through data.
It's not an exact parallel, but I work for an organization that provides a quasi-public service. We're not quite private, not quite public, owned by our customers, and provide vital services -- kind of a "captive service provider". The stuff I work on is used around the world, and is much more interesting (to me) than building the latest executive dashboard or accounting system for a company. There are trade offs -- the pay is lower than what I could get doing executive dashboard work, and it's not a hot sexy industry we work for. But for the right type of person, it's a good fit. (We have issues retaining people because of this -- the mercenaries can get much better pay working somewhere else and don't have to deal with some of our unique problems. Those who do stay tend to be long-tenured folks who share the same interests I was talking about.)
In my opinion, a lot of the hand-wringing around Snowden and the NSA communications surveillance needs to be put into perspective. We share an immense amount of data about our personal lives online, and then wonder why this open source intelligence is collected and analyzed. I think most reasonable individuals had some inclination that something like this was happening, similar to the Cold War era. Intelligence organizations are a necessary evil to protect a country's interests, and every country spies on every other country. It just came out a couple of days ago that Brazil has an active domestic surveillance program, which would seem strange if you heard Brazil's president railing against the US version.
I think the big problem now is that people feel NSA collects too much data and has a much easier time finding patterns in it than they did with pre-Internet and analog communications channels in the past. After all, you could only have so many analysts sorting through international phone records and listening to the interesting ones. Many of the people complaining don't have the perspective of living with the Soviet Union and the US staring each other down for decades -- I barely remember it myself. But a lot of those same people post-9/11 basically said to their elected officials, "Don't ever let this happen again, no matter what it takes." I'm inclined to believe that a program like this is what it takes. Look how much damage two US residents did in Boston, and that wasn't even a large-scale or particularly well planned attack.
I've been on enough big-bang massive IT projects to know that this is no different from anything we've seen before. - Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing (stuff that even "agile" can't account for): This is always a killer. Even an "agile" project can't have the framework ripped down and rebuilt at the last second...some decisions have to be permanent. - Contractors who just want to collect money : Outsourcing is always more expensive and produces worse results than if you do it in house. The only thing you save is the cost of employees, but you pay more in the long run. - Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends. - Massive time pressure: I don't know why software development and IT are so different from engineering projects, but there is still the persistent myth that you can throw bodies at a late project to make it come in on time. You can't do this with a construction project of any reasonable size...there are still dependencies. Yet, there's always pressure to make arbitrary dates.
Seriously, replace "government healthcare insurance marketplace connecting people with thousands of insurers" with "SAP implementation", and you see the same problems.
I can see why they made this guy resign though -- someone has to be the scapegoat. At one of the companies I worked at, the much-loved founder of the company was thrown out by the board (it had grown into a public company) after a massive operations disaster that forced him to go out and publicly apologize. Some of it might have been willful blindness, but executives tend to say "I'm paying millions of dollars, just make this happen and don't bother me with details." Consulting companies love these kind of executives....
I'm sure HP has been staring this one down forever, saying "We sunk all this money into Itanium, there's no way we can abandon it." In fact, if you look at the documents from HP's lawsuit that Oracle helpfully put up on their website, you can see internal discussions of their intention to port HP-UX to x86 and the fact that they're basically paying Intel to keep developing Itanium processors for them.
Itanium was an interesting idea, and the only way to get 64-bit non-Sun, non-IBM hardware until the Opteron came out. But it's a really good example of a technology hanging on way past the point where it's relevant.
I wonder if they've inadvertently sent OpenVMS to the old folks' home by doing this...unless they're planning to port OpenVMS to x86. I know there's plenty of legacy OpenVMS stuff out there, but who knows if those customers would be willing to finance a port by buying machines from HP?
I also wonder if at least some of the ProLiant line is going to get that awesome RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) that NonStop and the Itanium boxes have. That would be cool.
I have nothing but respect for teachers. Everyone likes to demonize them as lazy government workers who get summers off and can't be fired, but they really have a crap job. Because all of those parents who demonize teachers got together and complained, we got No Child Left Behind and now the Common Core standards. Why? Because standardized tests are the only way to measure student progress, and teachers need to be evaluated based on student performance, right?
I don't know which type of school district would be worse -- the inner city public school doomed to permanent failure because of demographics, or the affluent one filled with Type-A parents who insist on micromanaging everything a teacher does. Either way, I'd hate to be the teacher who lost their job because they got stuck with a class full of idiots, or kids who had such awful home lives that they can't handle school. That's what people who push for the elimination of tenure don't get. I know several teachers, and they concede that there are bad apples in the system, but that teachers who do their jobs are protected by tenure from political machinations, crappy administrators, etc. And, every one of those teachers I know (in a relatively affluent area) has had a conversation with a parent that basically boils down to "You work for me, little public servant. Now do what my child demands." Not fun...
I looked at some of the early common core stuff, and it really does de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. When I was in school a million years ago, we just got a table of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, and were told "Memorize this." This new wordier approach is, IMO, a good way for students (and their parents) who are apprehensive about math to have it presented in a different way.
OK, see my comment below. Intense interest in science and problem solving, bad training in math. What is it that "math people" are taught about the subject that "non-math people" don't get exposed to?
There may be a "math genius" set of genes somewhere in our DNA, and I think that makes sense because some people are better visualizers and problem solvers than others, regardless of education. But one thing that I think gets overlooked is whether the early interest in math gets nurtured by a good teacher or wiped out by a bad one.
My personal experience seems to indicate there might be something to this. I've always been a very good problem solver, and I get to keep my systems engineering job in an increasingly competitive field because my employers regard me as someone who can see problems 1000 miles down the line from the first bad decision and work on correcting them. However, I absolutely, completely, totally suck at math. In school, I was a memorizer for math tests, and it was absolute torture as the content kept getting more and more complex with me not getting the basics. So when I got to college, I started off in a chemical engineering major and realized I just lacked the ability to do the math required, even though I understood the concepts. I ended up getting a chemistry degree instead, and somehow wound up in IT.:-)
The reason why I picked chemistry was because a had a really good high school chemistry teacher, better than any of the science teachers I have had. The material was taught in a way that clicked with me, even if some of it required math that I wasn't perfect at. Whenever I talk about chemistry education with someone, most people say, "Oh, I took one class and it never made any sense to me. I couldn't ever do any real chemistry work."
I think that a lot of math-oriented people have a similar experience early on. And since math builds on the basics, it's very important to get kids interested very early on. "Math people" can see beyond the variables and relations, and understand exactly what a given expression is saying in real terms. The problem starts when people don't get it, and know they have to pass tests, and just memorize procedures without knowing why they work. The 8th/9th grade "polynomial manipulation" exercises are really good examples of this. I still don't know why x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a. If someone had bothered to explain this to me, maybe I would have had a better time with things.
I just got done with our Open Enrollment session here at work last week. Our plans aren't changing much, but there are a couple of new twists like higher deductibles, more expensive out of network choices, etc. I couldn't believe how many basic questions my reasonably educated colleagues had that showed they didn't get how health insurance worked at all. Stuff like "what do you mean I have to pay $600 before I get any coverage?" or "what's a generic medication?" Imagine giving those same choices to less educated people and telling them, "You're on your own, pick your own coverage."
It's nice to say that everyone should get their own choices when it comes to health insurance, but can people actually handle those choices and make rational decisions? My experience seems to show otherwise. Same goes for 401(k)s -- some people can handle choice, others can't. The system should be set up to maximize benefit for everyone, not just for the well-educated. It sounds like I'm saying people are too dumb to make up their own mind, but I guess that's what I'm saying. It sure seems that way in the majority of cases. I'm no super-genius either...
OK, OK, replace "go bankrupt" with "be liquidated." Sorry I forgot the two things were different. I think that if it were liquidated, you'd see the pieces sold off to some private equity firm that would in turn sell them off to Chinese manufacturers or similar. Look at what happened when Ford dumped Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover.
The point still is valid -- loss of the last vestige of domestic manufacturing, and the inability to quickly ramp up production in the event of a national emergency. Let's say a WWII scale war happened today -- how quickly would we be able to start building mass quantities of ships, tanks, rifles, etc.? With no domestic production facilities left, that would be a huge effort if one of our adversaries owned the plants (or had them on their soil!) We would probably be able to build aircraft and some heavy armored vehicles because they're still made here, but think of having to turn out a million Jeeps in a month, or 20 million rifles. I've seen a few WWII era rifles stamped "manufactured by IBM" or similar...that's because they needed to use the manufacturing capacity.
I think it would take a monumental problem to get people to come together again. It would have to be something that neither side could deny or minimize the scope of, like another World War or pandemic or asteroid strike, or something like that.
The Apollo program was from a different era, where we had a thread, real or imagined, that our adversary would wipe us out if they gained any sort of technological advantage. (Turns out both sides were bluffing for 50 years...and people on both sides realized that a nuclear war wouldn't be "winnable.")
Look at how much pushback the bank bailout got, or the emergency rescue of GM and Chrysler. People don't think anymore...I was amazed when I heard people saying they wanted GM to go bankrupt. So, wipe out millions of jobs, and kill the last domestic manufacturing capacity the country has.
World War II instituted nationalization of key industries, rationing of consumer goods, and for whatever reason, people went along with it. You would never in a million years get that kind of support today, no matter what was happening. Part of it might be that there's no longer a need for a draft, and a very good chance that 18-30 year olds of every background would be shipped off to get killed. War is button-pushing and drones now, not thousands of men wiped out in a single battle.
Everyone looking to immediately blame this on government should think about what's involved and what probably happened:
1. The contract went to the lowest bidder and/or the firm that could do the most backroom political deals to win. This is not necessarily the team you want doing the work, nor are they necessarily the most capable. 2. It's a huge, monster systems integration challenge. There are probably thousands of XML data brokers, enterprise service buses, web services libraries, and wrappers of wrappers of wrappers of abstraction layers to get the exchange, the insurance companies, the tax records systems used for eligibility verification, the authentication, etc etc etc talking to each other. This is one of the things I do for work on various big systems projects, and it's hard when you have a competent team. When you're dealing with the "offshore delivery centers" of the firm in Point #1 above, it's an absolute nightmare. 3. Every outsourcing contract, public or private sector suffers from the same problem -- it's always more expensive, and the people involved don't have any incentive beyond a paycheck to see it work. I've seen that happen all the time as an FTE in companies overrun by consultants. The consultants don't care what happens as long as they're billing time. If they deliver garbage, so be it, as long as it can be shown that it does what the contract says it does. 4. Continuing with the "don't care" theme, there's also no incentive for the contractor to get it right the first time. Even contracts with penalties for failure or missed dates aren't a big deal because they can bill way more cleaning up the mess they made. 5. I'm sure the "outsourcing partners" weren't forthcoming when the RFP was put out and they saw red flags. Some outsourcers like to trap the customer and have them think everything's sorted, when there's really a huge problem with design/specs/whatever that will mean a very expensive rewrite later on. 6. Any project with a huge red target date on the calendar that is not flexible is doomed to failure. Problems like this lead to stupid things that PMs do like stuff more people onto a late piece of the project where it clearly doesn't help, and it leads to people taking shortcuts to rush it out the door. 7. There was probably immense cost pressure, not from the gov't itself, but from the outsourcer trying to squeeze every nickel out of the deal, and so it probably runs on half the hardware it needs, and has no DR facilities. 8. It was probably slapped together by hundreds of 24 year old new graduate business analysts, hundreds of 30 year old PMs, and thousands of offshore resources of dubious quality. Look at pretty much any bespoke line of business web application you have to use for your job. Chances are you hate it and it has maddening bugs that make it hard to live with. Now take that same code quality and put it in front of Joe Average, and I'm not surprised people are complaining.
I honestly think they should have done this in-house with supplemental hired gun contractors for the areas they needed it in. Despite the stories, I'm sure working for a government agency has its advantages. I would think that people (myself included) would welcome a more stable employment environment (at the expense of salary,) a stable retirement system, and the ability to work on a critical system that affects people's daily lives. The problem is that people see IT people getting rich at Google/Facebook/Latest Social Media Startup and think that they're going to be the next one to make the big time. Reality is that most people are mediocre coders/IT people and they're never going to get a big payday supporting the current IT employment model we have.
Also, this entire mess would have been avoided by extending Medicare benefits to everyone. Doctors would be happy because they would get paid without questions from insurers, patients would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies -- the only people who wouldn't be happy are insurance companies, which is why we have the system we have now. Seriously, the Medicare system processes payments for doctors with very little difficulty -- because we have the insurance companies involved, we had to build a completely new system.
I think the more likely situation, if there was a conspiracy at all, would be that they would wait for the private insurers to have a crack at this for a few years, then people would see that no one's rates will decrease and that the private companies are just pocketing the difference.
I'm all for single-payer, complete with death panels. NHS in the UK has huge costs too, but at least they know when to give up on treating someone. (See the Quality-Adjusted Life Year -- we need a metric like that in our healthcare system.) We'll see if I get my wish.
I'm sure there's tons of people salivating at the chance to jump all over this topic and say things like "classic government inefficiency at work." But the reality is that these kinds of projects happen every day in private sector companies. You only hear about them when they make the news. I've seen many companies throw out millions in sunk costs because they couldn't get an ERP system massaged enough to fit their business processes. Often, the companies realize too late that they're getting bled dry by outsourcing "partners" and getting nothing in return, then make the hard decision to just dump everything and try again.
Some of it may be leadership incompetence (analogous to CIOs getting swindled by consulting salesmen over copious rounds of golf and strippers) but HHS doesn't have hundreds of web developers on staff, and there would be a monster backlash if they actually did go out and hire them as permanent employees. IN the real world, they're forced to outsource to be "good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar" and end up getting crap. I can't believe that no one over the last 30 years has come to the realization that outsourcing always costs more, and results are not guaranteed no matter how much money gets flushed. What probably happened is that the project got awarded to the lowest bidder of the big consultancy firms, who promptly replaced all the super-geniuses they promised with new grads, and just kept collecting money.
A lot of private firms get fed up and just insource the whole thing, but I don't think the government has that option right now. Given the political climate, I'm sure every paper clip purchased is tracked by certain right-wing groups, and hiring hundreds of Federal employees certainly won't go over well. So, we'll just see the same consultancies who screwed up get rewarded to "fix" the problem. Just like in the private sector...
Wow, I knew the UK was becoming more like the US every year, but I had no idea how much. Maybe this is Margaret Thatcher reaching out from beyond the grave to dismantle the remaining state institutions?
Nobody seems to understand that healthcare (a) has to be treated like a public good (in the economic sense) to be fairly available to everyone, and (b) that requires rationing of care to keep costs reasonable. The ACA we have now does neither of these -- it was a compromise to keep the "free market" insurance companies in on the game while giving them millions more customers.
If I were king, I would just declare Medicare to be the default universal insurance plan for everyone. That's a good compromise, since it doesn't cover everything and the insurance companies could fight over that market. It does cover catastrophic things, which is the primary failing of our system now. No one thinks the insurance companies would ever deny their claims, but they should try getting very sick sometime and see how fast the friendly relationship changes. People's taxes would go up, but they would be getting a valuable benefit for it.
The other thing single-payer care could eliminate is the tying of insurance coverage to employment. I personally know a few people whose families have serious health problems and they're literally trapped at their current employer because of the insurance plan they offer.
I think the ACA will reduce cost by a little bit, but it has flaws: - You're still dealing with for-profit insurance companies who are looking for every reason to not cover a claim -- I doubt customer service will improve. - The uninsured population that qualifies for subsidies isn't necessarily going to know or care about their ability to get cheap or free health insurance. It's not nice to say that people are stupid, but they are... - Same goes for the policies themselves. Even educated people are confused by the language in health insurance policies and it's only gotten more complex with high-deductible plans, MSAs, etc. - People who have insurance through work are just going to grumble about their rates going up and get no immediate benefit. Almost everyone vilifying single-payer healthcare has steady, well paying jobs and has never had to worry about going bankrupt if they land in the hospital. Because they don't understand the target population (low income workers with crappy or no insurance from their low-level service job) they think there's no benefit. - The current political climate in the US labels anything beneficial that the government provides as socialism and therefore evil.
I think we should ditch the whole thing and just go single-payer. Doctors would get paid fee-for-service and not have to deal with insurance companies, individuals would be able to use healthcare without worrying about the cost, and things would be better. There's no reason a country like ours with so much wealth can't provide universal healthcare. People complain about government inefficiency, but what's efficient about tons of for profit insurance companies nickel and diming their policyholders and healthcare providers in order to make a buck? I think government would be very efficient at this task (and the NHS is -- the UK has a higher life expectancy than we do and spends less.)
I have a serious question. Maybe I've been working for dysfunctional organizations too much, but I've noticed a different MBA pattern.
How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice. I've also seen that the MBA gives new grads at least a manager job starting out, often never having worked in the field the company is in. That "MBAs can manage anything" mindset is a killer in technical job roles, and has led to me working on some miserable projects. Of course, there are exceptions, but why does the MBA automatically qualify someone as a manager any more than a paper technical certification conveys proficiency with a product?
If MBAs really aren't taught "bad management skills," what is it that corrupts them and causes the disastrous short term thinking epidemic in companies these days?
Especially if your company's paying, you should do it. If nothing else, it might give you perspective. I have a pretty broad background, but don't have an MBA. I'm not sure if it would help me or not but I'm never against learning something new.
That said, what is your reason for wanting to be in management, or "something more responsible?" I've been repeatedly asked to make this transition, given that I'm getting older, and so far I've been able to avoid it. Not that I mind responsibility -- I have technical authority over a very complex product at work. The reason why I don't want to go there is that I don't want to work with the equivalent of preschoolers and their people problems all day long. I would much rather be solving problems. To top it all off, if you're in a big organization, lower-to-middle management is always the first to get at least one level knocked out of the hierarchy at the first sign of trouble.
Also, consider the fact that management is not a technical job. You will never do anything remotely technical again -- which is one of the reasons I'm avoiding it. Your job will be to delegate tasks to your staff, something I've never been comfortable with, and you have to hope and pray they get it right. You'll spend your entire day in meetings, crafting emails and fighting your way through an organization of people. It is problem solving, but a very different kind. and not everyone is good at it.
In short, know this before you leap out of your technical job. I was offered and accepted a management job a few years ago, found out I sucked at it, and had to quit because the company I worked for refused to demote me back to somewhere I could be useful.
I'm noticing a lot of "waah, little baby can't handle a little teasing" posts. This is/. -- who wasn't mercilessly picked on in junior high/high school??
I'm a new parent of two kids and am not looking forward to helping them navigate the new Facebook bullying world. One of them is a girl too, so I'm sure it's going to be worse for her. I think the bad thing about it is that those of us who really got a lot of abuse in school would be able to go home and tune it out. With cell phones, Facebook and all that stuff, you can't ever escape.
One thing I do see a lot of lately is a backlash against PC and just being nice to people. Not being an ass isn't PC, it's just being a good human. Parents should teach their children this, but unfortunately no one is giving out parenting licenses (yet.) I think that would be a big help in solving the behavior problems of kids -- reining in their idiot parents. (And no, I'm no super genius parent, but watching typical 7 year olds having a screaming match with their parents complete with creative expletives makes me wonder whether I'm doing something right.
Back before the Internet, the various spy agencies listened to phone traffic, radio traffic and the very few digital communications that were going on back then. It was even easier before 1984 because AT&T was the phone company, so you didn't even have to go to a million providers to get customer data. The thing that's different this time is that IP communications are easier to archive, search through and draw patterns from. So why isn't everyone all up in arms about this? - There are quite a number of people who grew up during the Cold War era and lived under the constant background threat that the Soviet Union would have a bad day one morning and finally get around to wiping us out. I think those people understand that spying is a necessary evil in cases like this, and tend to give a pass to the NSA/CIA/??? on most things. - I think a lot of people (myself included) had a notion that something like this was going on. How is it that, immediately after terrorist attacks, law enforcement seems to know exactly who was involved, where to find them, who their parents are, etc.? It's the ultimate open-source intelligence tool. - Also, the standard geek answer -- everyone's just too stupid to understand, and all of us smart people need to rise up and fight the power.
That said, I actually don't get why so many people are making a huge deal out of this. Ironically, many of the same people making the most noise about this are in the Millenial generation -- whose entire lives are sometimes posted online for everyone to see. These same people also happily give all of their personal web search data to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo in exchange for free services. 30 years ago, no one would have thought twice about spy activity, given how important it was to protect nuclear weapons secrets and other vital information. Now, all of a sudden, it's a huge problem just because the data allows people to connect the dots faster.
The Internet is a public network -- always has been. Nothing you want to keep private should be put on it.
One of the things I have noticed about commercial software is this...if you pay enough money, they will make sure things work for you.
I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just relaying my experience. Our company is a big CA and Oracle customer, and we use a lot of their products in production. All of it is absolute crap, and extremely poorly documented. I can't believe how much work it is to get an Oracle instance running and properly secured/tuned compared to something like SQL Server. But, when you call, your problems are solved even if they have to drag the guy who wrote your problem module out of his cave. One CA product I work with uses a completely proprietary message queue interface to pass messages between different chunks of the product code, and it's over 20 years old. Like I mentioned, one phone call and a few logfiles later, and I had a fix for my problem. The software is God-awful and I can't stand working with it, but at least it's fixable. Who knows what dev resource they had to resurrect from the dead to make the change...but it was made.
Beyond the "scared proprietary dev shop" feelings this piece seems to indicate, I think Oracle is trying to make the point that OSS doesn't necessarily offer you the same level of "we'll move heaven and earth to make your product work." This can be a valid argument with executive types who want to minimize risk. Again, I am not saying it's right, and there are plenty of great support resources for Linux out there...look no further than Red Hat, that's what they make their money on. But, there still is the perception that if big support organizations aren't built around a product, it must be a hobbyist toy.
The other thing that I'm not so convinced that OSS is good at is the user experience. Developers don't make good GUI designers. Look at any line-of-business Java monstrosity you've had to use for work...it's just not a top priority. Of course, Microsoft managed to destroy 21 years of the Windows desktop with Win8, so closed source companies can screw up too.
obDisclaimer: I have a left wing bias to say the least. But that's not important for this post since it applies to both sides equally.
You do have to admit that Drudge, the Huffington Post and all the others serve as echo chambers for extreme viewpoints. The conservative side gets bombarded with anti-liberal stories day in and day out, and doesn't have to listen to any other opinion if they don't want to. Same thing happens on the liberal side. You wouldn't have heard Walter Cronkite on CBS news during the Vietnam War talking about "godless baby killers" or something like that, but I could definitely see a more targeted media organization, or let's face it, some dude with a blog, saying something like this. There's no consequences for the blogger dude, and the media outlets will be rewarded for offering this as entertaining fare to their audience.
Personally, I have some very conservative relatives who, while very smart, don't get exposed to differing viewpoints on issues. And when you hear something catchy that you agree with, then repeat it to your friends, then have those same friends amplify your beliefs, you do end up with a very polarized population. Both liberal and conservative talk show hosts know this and use it to their advantage. Suddenly all those people on both sides go out and elect officials that share their polarized opinions of the world, and a sensible debate over healthcare policy turns into a protracted fight that neither side will give ground on. So, talking with people like this for me feels like I'm Rob Reiner ("Meathead") from All in the Family. Yeah, Meathead was a pinko-liberal commie but his character was reasonable compared with Archie...
I don't know, maybe people were more reasonable back in the day when we were fighting a cold war with an adversary who could wipe us out if they were having a bad day.
One of the side effects of the rise of the blogging hordes is the death of traditional journalism. Even if old media is biased one way or another, the decent newspapers of record have some respect for journalistic integrity. Reporting on a government corruption scandal is very different from reporting on the latest iPhone over at Engadget or the endless stream of celebrity garbage "news." Seeking out the real story from actual, verifiable sources rather than a blogger posting their own opinion as fact is the difference. While I'm sure some bloggers are journalists in the traditional sense, not all are, and blogs are even more sensitive to producing content that makes people click than newspapers are.
Some people may cite this as anti-progress, but look at media prior to the Internet, in fact, before cable TV. There were only 3 network news sources, and a few newspapers of record producing content. Now there's tons of media outlets, thousands of random bloggers, and an increasing trend of the medial outlets crowdsourcing content from their readers (CNN iReport, etc. etc.) Having so many choices means that opinions are more diverse, but conversely it also means that it narrows people's viewpoints. Conservatives are Fox News fans, but they're also fans of even more conservative bloggers. It makes liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative, and that leads to situations like we're in today with Congress and the Tea Party faction. You would never have something like this in the 50s/60s simply because the population didn't have enough customized hot-button content to whip them into whatever polarized frenzy they're into.
Traditional journalism does need to return to media, but as the submitter states, you have to pay for it, and integrity doesn't pay the bills like the latest unverified rumor from a friend of a friend of Lindsey Lohan...
- Most CS programs train their graduates in Java. - Java is pretty much the enterprisey middleware language these days. I've seen so many J2EE applications alive inside organizations doing mundane but vital tasks. - Unless you're a web startup, Java is almost universally used for line-of-business application development. That ugly GUI that collects budget numbers from 500 databases and displays an "executive dashboard" was probably slapped together by an Accenture type outfit using offshore new grad coders and sold to companies for millions.
It's just too prevalent now for people to say, "Oracle sucks, we're porting everything to C#." I can definitely see a market for Java talent similar to the COBOL market 30 years down the road. People won't need millions of Java coders anymore, but they'll need older expert types to go untangle messes.
You may get your wish soon -- I remember when VBS was just starting to become available in Windows, and I also remember one of the things holding back its adoption was the fact that you couldn't guarantee that there was a complete "VBS stack" on the system. WMI was an addon, MDAC was an addon, even the XML parser wasn't guaranteed to be the same version until IE 6 came out. Even the scripting engine itself was an add-on! Therefore, you had to write lowest common denominator scripts until you got all the old stuff up to date. We were still using batch files for quite a while, and knew we could do things faster and easier, but we were stuck in a mixed NT/XP environment. (Yes, this was a while back.)
I have the same issue with PowerShell and a mixed Windows 7 and XP environment. In a big enterprise you can't absolutely guarantee that a compatible PowerShell interpreter plus the right version of.NET is available. Microsoft has done an OK job of making sure most of the functionality is backported, so we're starting to move away from VBS.
Honestly, my complaint about PowerShell is its complexity. You get access to vast resources through the.NET Framework, and that's great. But just like any other modern language with a monster prebuilt library, just finding what you need to write and what has been written for you is still a Google operation. One huge improvement is the ability to dispense with thousands of "results parsing" functions. VBS meant you had to do a lot of output reading/interpreting in code, plus access to things like WMI and data services is still kind of a magic incantation thing. Now PowerShell lets you directly work on objects. Example: I wrote a script to edit an XML configuration file for one of our apps the other day, just to make a simple change. It was a huge script in VBS with all the error checking, magic incantations to access the XML DOM and parsing of results. PowerShell lets you directly manipulate the file in memory.
Good idea, but isn't Best Buy and other retailers complaining about the "showroom effect?" How's that going to work when car dealers are just giant test drive outlets?
That said, wow, the ability to drop the stupid haggle dance with your typical slimeball car salesman would be awesome. I'd pay more for the privilege. I can't stand haggling over a few hundred dollars, and actively dislike all salesdroids.
One factor they have to take into account is that car dealerships actually don't make much money on the cars themselves (unless you pay MSRP.) They make money on the sleazy stuff like: - Financing. People who come in and say "I can pay $X/month." OK, here's an 11-year loan at 14% interest... - People with bad credit - Useless options/warranties/accessories they try to push on you at the last second - Leases -- leasing is an awful deal unless you can completely write off the lease payments as a business expense.
So this new system would just have to funnel your order to a random pick of the Glengarry Glen Ross guys at Joey Barbarino Chevrolet, and they would get a flat fee for processing your paperwork. Not as lucrative as all the other stuff they can push on you...
Subsistence agriculture --> Organized agriculture --> Mechanized agriculture --> Industrial revolution --> Assembly-line factories --> Corporate paper pushing jobs --> IT and service jobs --> ?
Fill in the blank. What will the millions of people who are not qualified for the handful of knowledge work jobs left do?
That's where the wheels fall off the Luddite argument. We're just out of higher-level tasks to shift the huge displaced workforce to.
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Agreed that conflicts have far fewer casualties than the WW 2 and even the Vietnam era. There's light years of difference between losing 1,000 men taking over a square mile of battlefield and pushing a button to wipe out your enemy from remote. In fact, the likelihood that we will never need to use the draft again will probably make interventions more palatable in the future, unfortunately. There's a huge difference in public opinion between a volunteer army which most see as a jobs program for the poor and forced conscription that may mean you or your offspring not coming back home.
I also agree that terrorism isn't anything compared to the huge armed conflicts of the past, or even small scale stuff in the grand scheme of things. I wasn't one of the people I mentioned who wanted to prevent another 9/11 no matter what. But, there were plenty of other people who did.
I'm not quite sure I agree with you and many others who feel the government is going to swoop in and become the Stasi or KGB. First, the US population is too fractured as it is -- there would be no way for anyone to agree on one particular platform to rally around. Anti-religion people hate the religious people. Liberals hate conservatives. Budget hawks hate progressives. Gun nuts hate non-gun nuts. Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. Second, the government itself has too many internal issues to make anything like that happen. The only reason there was any cooperation on defense in the past was because there was, as you say, a well-armed and capable adversary that was at least making noises about our destruction. Even then, there was still a huge debate about the policy of containment, especially since Korea and Vietnam were such total wastes of life and money for, arguably, no gain.
I'm not trying to generalize or rip down your view of things, but all the arguments I've seen about this have boiled down to "OMG, the evil government is out to get me personally, lock me up and take away my guns. It's like the Soviet Union all over again!" People give away so much more data to Facebook, Google, Apple, other big retailers and the various payment processing companies -- why aren't they paranoid about that? I'd be a lot more worried about Google and other private companies abusing their power. Not in a "send you off for re-education" sense, but in a forcing you to give them increasing amounts of money for essential services sense. There's a lot of this "defending my homestead" mentality that just makes people sound like they live on a 20-acre compound in the mountains with barbed wire fence and a private security force 24/7 just in case the government decides to try something. It just doesn't make sense in this modern era.
I think a true "geek" would probably enjoy working there. If nothing else, the problems to solve would be a lot more interesting than typical corporate IT/dev positions. The people who actually work for NSA, not for a contractor like Snowden did, are sure not doing it for the money. They're doing it for job security, maybe better benefits, but probably also because they feel like they're doing something important. The contractors will always be hired guns, as they are in any organization, and not as invested in the core mission. Also, NSA isn't just about spying -- any cryptography or communications nerd would probably have an interesting set of tasks to pick from that didn't involve actually collecting and sifting through data.
It's not an exact parallel, but I work for an organization that provides a quasi-public service. We're not quite private, not quite public, owned by our customers, and provide vital services -- kind of a "captive service provider". The stuff I work on is used around the world, and is much more interesting (to me) than building the latest executive dashboard or accounting system for a company. There are trade offs -- the pay is lower than what I could get doing executive dashboard work, and it's not a hot sexy industry we work for. But for the right type of person, it's a good fit. (We have issues retaining people because of this -- the mercenaries can get much better pay working somewhere else and don't have to deal with some of our unique problems. Those who do stay tend to be long-tenured folks who share the same interests I was talking about.)
In my opinion, a lot of the hand-wringing around Snowden and the NSA communications surveillance needs to be put into perspective. We share an immense amount of data about our personal lives online, and then wonder why this open source intelligence is collected and analyzed. I think most reasonable individuals had some inclination that something like this was happening, similar to the Cold War era. Intelligence organizations are a necessary evil to protect a country's interests, and every country spies on every other country. It just came out a couple of days ago that Brazil has an active domestic surveillance program, which would seem strange if you heard Brazil's president railing against the US version.
I think the big problem now is that people feel NSA collects too much data and has a much easier time finding patterns in it than they did with pre-Internet and analog communications channels in the past. After all, you could only have so many analysts sorting through international phone records and listening to the interesting ones. Many of the people complaining don't have the perspective of living with the Soviet Union and the US staring each other down for decades -- I barely remember it myself. But a lot of those same people post-9/11 basically said to their elected officials, "Don't ever let this happen again, no matter what it takes." I'm inclined to believe that a program like this is what it takes. Look how much damage two US residents did in Boston, and that wasn't even a large-scale or particularly well planned attack.
I've been on enough big-bang massive IT projects to know that this is no different from anything we've seen before.
- Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing (stuff that even "agile" can't account for): This is always a killer. Even an "agile" project can't have the framework ripped down and rebuilt at the last second...some decisions have to be permanent.
- Contractors who just want to collect money : Outsourcing is always more expensive and produces worse results than if you do it in house. The only thing you save is the cost of employees, but you pay more in the long run.
- Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends.
- Massive time pressure: I don't know why software development and IT are so different from engineering projects, but there is still the persistent myth that you can throw bodies at a late project to make it come in on time. You can't do this with a construction project of any reasonable size...there are still dependencies. Yet, there's always pressure to make arbitrary dates.
Seriously, replace "government healthcare insurance marketplace connecting people with thousands of insurers" with "SAP implementation", and you see the same problems.
I can see why they made this guy resign though -- someone has to be the scapegoat. At one of the companies I worked at, the much-loved founder of the company was thrown out by the board (it had grown into a public company) after a massive operations disaster that forced him to go out and publicly apologize. Some of it might have been willful blindness, but executives tend to say "I'm paying millions of dollars, just make this happen and don't bother me with details." Consulting companies love these kind of executives....
I'm sure HP has been staring this one down forever, saying "We sunk all this money into Itanium, there's no way we can abandon it." In fact, if you look at the documents from HP's lawsuit that Oracle helpfully put up on their website, you can see internal discussions of their intention to port HP-UX to x86 and the fact that they're basically paying Intel to keep developing Itanium processors for them.
Itanium was an interesting idea, and the only way to get 64-bit non-Sun, non-IBM hardware until the Opteron came out. But it's a really good example of a technology hanging on way past the point where it's relevant.
I wonder if they've inadvertently sent OpenVMS to the old folks' home by doing this...unless they're planning to port OpenVMS to x86. I know there's plenty of legacy OpenVMS stuff out there, but who knows if those customers would be willing to finance a port by buying machines from HP?
I also wonder if at least some of the ProLiant line is going to get that awesome RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) that NonStop and the Itanium boxes have. That would be cool.
I have nothing but respect for teachers. Everyone likes to demonize them as lazy government workers who get summers off and can't be fired, but they really have a crap job. Because all of those parents who demonize teachers got together and complained, we got No Child Left Behind and now the Common Core standards. Why? Because standardized tests are the only way to measure student progress, and teachers need to be evaluated based on student performance, right?
I don't know which type of school district would be worse -- the inner city public school doomed to permanent failure because of demographics, or the affluent one filled with Type-A parents who insist on micromanaging everything a teacher does. Either way, I'd hate to be the teacher who lost their job because they got stuck with a class full of idiots, or kids who had such awful home lives that they can't handle school. That's what people who push for the elimination of tenure don't get. I know several teachers, and they concede that there are bad apples in the system, but that teachers who do their jobs are protected by tenure from political machinations, crappy administrators, etc. And, every one of those teachers I know (in a relatively affluent area) has had a conversation with a parent that basically boils down to "You work for me, little public servant. Now do what my child demands." Not fun...
I looked at some of the early common core stuff, and it really does de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. When I was in school a million years ago, we just got a table of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, and were told "Memorize this." This new wordier approach is, IMO, a good way for students (and their parents) who are apprehensive about math to have it presented in a different way.
OK, see my comment below. Intense interest in science and problem solving, bad training in math. What is it that "math people" are taught about the subject that "non-math people" don't get exposed to?
There may be a "math genius" set of genes somewhere in our DNA, and I think that makes sense because some people are better visualizers and problem solvers than others, regardless of education. But one thing that I think gets overlooked is whether the early interest in math gets nurtured by a good teacher or wiped out by a bad one.
My personal experience seems to indicate there might be something to this. I've always been a very good problem solver, and I get to keep my systems engineering job in an increasingly competitive field because my employers regard me as someone who can see problems 1000 miles down the line from the first bad decision and work on correcting them. However, I absolutely, completely, totally suck at math. In school, I was a memorizer for math tests, and it was absolute torture as the content kept getting more and more complex with me not getting the basics. So when I got to college, I started off in a chemical engineering major and realized I just lacked the ability to do the math required, even though I understood the concepts. I ended up getting a chemistry degree instead, and somehow wound up in IT. :-)
The reason why I picked chemistry was because a had a really good high school chemistry teacher, better than any of the science teachers I have had. The material was taught in a way that clicked with me, even if some of it required math that I wasn't perfect at. Whenever I talk about chemistry education with someone, most people say, "Oh, I took one class and it never made any sense to me. I couldn't ever do any real chemistry work."
I think that a lot of math-oriented people have a similar experience early on. And since math builds on the basics, it's very important to get kids interested very early on. "Math people" can see beyond the variables and relations, and understand exactly what a given expression is saying in real terms. The problem starts when people don't get it, and know they have to pass tests, and just memorize procedures without knowing why they work. The 8th/9th grade "polynomial manipulation" exercises are really good examples of this. I still don't know why x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a. If someone had bothered to explain this to me, maybe I would have had a better time with things.
I just got done with our Open Enrollment session here at work last week. Our plans aren't changing much, but there are a couple of new twists like higher deductibles, more expensive out of network choices, etc. I couldn't believe how many basic questions my reasonably educated colleagues had that showed they didn't get how health insurance worked at all. Stuff like "what do you mean I have to pay $600 before I get any coverage?" or "what's a generic medication?" Imagine giving those same choices to less educated people and telling them, "You're on your own, pick your own coverage."
It's nice to say that everyone should get their own choices when it comes to health insurance, but can people actually handle those choices and make rational decisions? My experience seems to show otherwise. Same goes for 401(k)s -- some people can handle choice, others can't. The system should be set up to maximize benefit for everyone, not just for the well-educated. It sounds like I'm saying people are too dumb to make up their own mind, but I guess that's what I'm saying. It sure seems that way in the majority of cases. I'm no super-genius either...
OK, OK, replace "go bankrupt" with "be liquidated." Sorry I forgot the two things were different. I think that if it were liquidated, you'd see the pieces sold off to some private equity firm that would in turn sell them off to Chinese manufacturers or similar. Look at what happened when Ford dumped Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover.
The point still is valid -- loss of the last vestige of domestic manufacturing, and the inability to quickly ramp up production in the event of a national emergency. Let's say a WWII scale war happened today -- how quickly would we be able to start building mass quantities of ships, tanks, rifles, etc.? With no domestic production facilities left, that would be a huge effort if one of our adversaries owned the plants (or had them on their soil!) We would probably be able to build aircraft and some heavy armored vehicles because they're still made here, but think of having to turn out a million Jeeps in a month, or 20 million rifles. I've seen a few WWII era rifles stamped "manufactured by IBM" or similar...that's because they needed to use the manufacturing capacity.
I think it would take a monumental problem to get people to come together again. It would have to be something that neither side could deny or minimize the scope of, like another World War or pandemic or asteroid strike, or something like that.
The Apollo program was from a different era, where we had a thread, real or imagined, that our adversary would wipe us out if they gained any sort of technological advantage. (Turns out both sides were bluffing for 50 years...and people on both sides realized that a nuclear war wouldn't be "winnable.")
Look at how much pushback the bank bailout got, or the emergency rescue of GM and Chrysler. People don't think anymore...I was amazed when I heard people saying they wanted GM to go bankrupt. So, wipe out millions of jobs, and kill the last domestic manufacturing capacity the country has.
World War II instituted nationalization of key industries, rationing of consumer goods, and for whatever reason, people went along with it. You would never in a million years get that kind of support today, no matter what was happening. Part of it might be that there's no longer a need for a draft, and a very good chance that 18-30 year olds of every background would be shipped off to get killed. War is button-pushing and drones now, not thousands of men wiped out in a single battle.
Everyone looking to immediately blame this on government should think about what's involved and what probably happened:
1. The contract went to the lowest bidder and/or the firm that could do the most backroom political deals to win. This is not necessarily the team you want doing the work, nor are they necessarily the most capable.
2. It's a huge, monster systems integration challenge. There are probably thousands of XML data brokers, enterprise service buses, web services libraries, and wrappers of wrappers of wrappers of abstraction layers to get the exchange, the insurance companies, the tax records systems used for eligibility verification, the authentication, etc etc etc talking to each other. This is one of the things I do for work on various big systems projects, and it's hard when you have a competent team. When you're dealing with the "offshore delivery centers" of the firm in Point #1 above, it's an absolute nightmare.
3. Every outsourcing contract, public or private sector suffers from the same problem -- it's always more expensive, and the people involved don't have any incentive beyond a paycheck to see it work. I've seen that happen all the time as an FTE in companies overrun by consultants. The consultants don't care what happens as long as they're billing time. If they deliver garbage, so be it, as long as it can be shown that it does what the contract says it does.
4. Continuing with the "don't care" theme, there's also no incentive for the contractor to get it right the first time. Even contracts with penalties for failure or missed dates aren't a big deal because they can bill way more cleaning up the mess they made.
5. I'm sure the "outsourcing partners" weren't forthcoming when the RFP was put out and they saw red flags. Some outsourcers like to trap the customer and have them think everything's sorted, when there's really a huge problem with design/specs/whatever that will mean a very expensive rewrite later on.
6. Any project with a huge red target date on the calendar that is not flexible is doomed to failure. Problems like this lead to stupid things that PMs do like stuff more people onto a late piece of the project where it clearly doesn't help, and it leads to people taking shortcuts to rush it out the door.
7. There was probably immense cost pressure, not from the gov't itself, but from the outsourcer trying to squeeze every nickel out of the deal, and so it probably runs on half the hardware it needs, and has no DR facilities.
8. It was probably slapped together by hundreds of 24 year old new graduate business analysts, hundreds of 30 year old PMs, and thousands of offshore resources of dubious quality. Look at pretty much any bespoke line of business web application you have to use for your job. Chances are you hate it and it has maddening bugs that make it hard to live with. Now take that same code quality and put it in front of Joe Average, and I'm not surprised people are complaining.
I honestly think they should have done this in-house with supplemental hired gun contractors for the areas they needed it in. Despite the stories, I'm sure working for a government agency has its advantages. I would think that people (myself included) would welcome a more stable employment environment (at the expense of salary,) a stable retirement system, and the ability to work on a critical system that affects people's daily lives. The problem is that people see IT people getting rich at Google/Facebook/Latest Social Media Startup and think that they're going to be the next one to make the big time. Reality is that most people are mediocre coders/IT people and they're never going to get a big payday supporting the current IT employment model we have.
Also, this entire mess would have been avoided by extending Medicare benefits to everyone. Doctors would be happy because they would get paid without questions from insurers, patients would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies -- the only people who wouldn't be happy are insurance companies, which is why we have the system we have now. Seriously, the Medicare system processes payments for doctors with very little difficulty -- because we have the insurance companies involved, we had to build a completely new system.
I think the more likely situation, if there was a conspiracy at all, would be that they would wait for the private insurers to have a crack at this for a few years, then people would see that no one's rates will decrease and that the private companies are just pocketing the difference.
I'm all for single-payer, complete with death panels. NHS in the UK has huge costs too, but at least they know when to give up on treating someone. (See the Quality-Adjusted Life Year -- we need a metric like that in our healthcare system.) We'll see if I get my wish.
I'm sure there's tons of people salivating at the chance to jump all over this topic and say things like "classic government inefficiency at work." But the reality is that these kinds of projects happen every day in private sector companies. You only hear about them when they make the news. I've seen many companies throw out millions in sunk costs because they couldn't get an ERP system massaged enough to fit their business processes. Often, the companies realize too late that they're getting bled dry by outsourcing "partners" and getting nothing in return, then make the hard decision to just dump everything and try again.
Some of it may be leadership incompetence (analogous to CIOs getting swindled by consulting salesmen over copious rounds of golf and strippers) but HHS doesn't have hundreds of web developers on staff, and there would be a monster backlash if they actually did go out and hire them as permanent employees. IN the real world, they're forced to outsource to be "good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar" and end up getting crap. I can't believe that no one over the last 30 years has come to the realization that outsourcing always costs more, and results are not guaranteed no matter how much money gets flushed. What probably happened is that the project got awarded to the lowest bidder of the big consultancy firms, who promptly replaced all the super-geniuses they promised with new grads, and just kept collecting money.
A lot of private firms get fed up and just insource the whole thing, but I don't think the government has that option right now. Given the political climate, I'm sure every paper clip purchased is tracked by certain right-wing groups, and hiring hundreds of Federal employees certainly won't go over well. So, we'll just see the same consultancies who screwed up get rewarded to "fix" the problem. Just like in the private sector...
Wow, I knew the UK was becoming more like the US every year, but I had no idea how much. Maybe this is Margaret Thatcher reaching out from beyond the grave to dismantle the remaining state institutions?
Nobody seems to understand that healthcare (a) has to be treated like a public good (in the economic sense) to be fairly available to everyone, and (b) that requires rationing of care to keep costs reasonable. The ACA we have now does neither of these -- it was a compromise to keep the "free market" insurance companies in on the game while giving them millions more customers.
If I were king, I would just declare Medicare to be the default universal insurance plan for everyone. That's a good compromise, since it doesn't cover everything and the insurance companies could fight over that market. It does cover catastrophic things, which is the primary failing of our system now. No one thinks the insurance companies would ever deny their claims, but they should try getting very sick sometime and see how fast the friendly relationship changes. People's taxes would go up, but they would be getting a valuable benefit for it.
The other thing single-payer care could eliminate is the tying of insurance coverage to employment. I personally know a few people whose families have serious health problems and they're literally trapped at their current employer because of the insurance plan they offer.
I think the ACA will reduce cost by a little bit, but it has flaws:
- You're still dealing with for-profit insurance companies who are looking for every reason to not cover a claim -- I doubt customer service will improve.
- The uninsured population that qualifies for subsidies isn't necessarily going to know or care about their ability to get cheap or free health insurance. It's not nice to say that people are stupid, but they are...
- Same goes for the policies themselves. Even educated people are confused by the language in health insurance policies and it's only gotten more complex with high-deductible plans, MSAs, etc.
- People who have insurance through work are just going to grumble about their rates going up and get no immediate benefit. Almost everyone vilifying single-payer healthcare has steady, well paying jobs and has never had to worry about going bankrupt if they land in the hospital. Because they don't understand the target population (low income workers with crappy or no insurance from their low-level service job) they think there's no benefit.
- The current political climate in the US labels anything beneficial that the government provides as socialism and therefore evil.
I think we should ditch the whole thing and just go single-payer. Doctors would get paid fee-for-service and not have to deal with insurance companies, individuals would be able to use healthcare without worrying about the cost, and things would be better. There's no reason a country like ours with so much wealth can't provide universal healthcare. People complain about government inefficiency, but what's efficient about tons of for profit insurance companies nickel and diming their policyholders and healthcare providers in order to make a buck? I think government would be very efficient at this task (and the NHS is -- the UK has a higher life expectancy than we do and spends less.)
I have a serious question. Maybe I've been working for dysfunctional organizations too much, but I've noticed a different MBA pattern.
How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers? Usually, these consultants are in their late 20s, got their MBA right after their undergrad years, never worked anything more complex than a retail job, and are immediately hired to dispense advice. I've also seen that the MBA gives new grads at least a manager job starting out, often never having worked in the field the company is in. That "MBAs can manage anything" mindset is a killer in technical job roles, and has led to me working on some miserable projects. Of course, there are exceptions, but why does the MBA automatically qualify someone as a manager any more than a paper technical certification conveys proficiency with a product?
If MBAs really aren't taught "bad management skills," what is it that corrupts them and causes the disastrous short term thinking epidemic in companies these days?
Especially if your company's paying, you should do it. If nothing else, it might give you perspective. I have a pretty broad background, but don't have an MBA. I'm not sure if it would help me or not but I'm never against learning something new.
That said, what is your reason for wanting to be in management, or "something more responsible?" I've been repeatedly asked to make this transition, given that I'm getting older, and so far I've been able to avoid it. Not that I mind responsibility -- I have technical authority over a very complex product at work. The reason why I don't want to go there is that I don't want to work with the equivalent of preschoolers and their people problems all day long. I would much rather be solving problems. To top it all off, if you're in a big organization, lower-to-middle management is always the first to get at least one level knocked out of the hierarchy at the first sign of trouble.
Also, consider the fact that management is not a technical job. You will never do anything remotely technical again -- which is one of the reasons I'm avoiding it. Your job will be to delegate tasks to your staff, something I've never been comfortable with, and you have to hope and pray they get it right. You'll spend your entire day in meetings, crafting emails and fighting your way through an organization of people. It is problem solving, but a very different kind. and not everyone is good at it.
In short, know this before you leap out of your technical job. I was offered and accepted a management job a few years ago, found out I sucked at it, and had to quit because the company I worked for refused to demote me back to somewhere I could be useful.
I'm noticing a lot of "waah, little baby can't handle a little teasing" posts. This is /. -- who wasn't mercilessly picked on in junior high/high school??
I'm a new parent of two kids and am not looking forward to helping them navigate the new Facebook bullying world. One of them is a girl too, so I'm sure it's going to be worse for her. I think the bad thing about it is that those of us who really got a lot of abuse in school would be able to go home and tune it out. With cell phones, Facebook and all that stuff, you can't ever escape.
One thing I do see a lot of lately is a backlash against PC and just being nice to people. Not being an ass isn't PC, it's just being a good human. Parents should teach their children this, but unfortunately no one is giving out parenting licenses (yet.) I think that would be a big help in solving the behavior problems of kids -- reining in their idiot parents. (And no, I'm no super genius parent, but watching typical 7 year olds having a screaming match with their parents complete with creative expletives makes me wonder whether I'm doing something right.
Back before the Internet, the various spy agencies listened to phone traffic, radio traffic and the very few digital communications that were going on back then. It was even easier before 1984 because AT&T was the phone company, so you didn't even have to go to a million providers to get customer data. The thing that's different this time is that IP communications are easier to archive, search through and draw patterns from. So why isn't everyone all up in arms about this?
- There are quite a number of people who grew up during the Cold War era and lived under the constant background threat that the Soviet Union would have a bad day one morning and finally get around to wiping us out. I think those people understand that spying is a necessary evil in cases like this, and tend to give a pass to the NSA/CIA/??? on most things.
- I think a lot of people (myself included) had a notion that something like this was going on. How is it that, immediately after terrorist attacks, law enforcement seems to know exactly who was involved, where to find them, who their parents are, etc.? It's the ultimate open-source intelligence tool.
- Also, the standard geek answer -- everyone's just too stupid to understand, and all of us smart people need to rise up and fight the power.
That said, I actually don't get why so many people are making a huge deal out of this. Ironically, many of the same people making the most noise about this are in the Millenial generation -- whose entire lives are sometimes posted online for everyone to see. These same people also happily give all of their personal web search data to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo in exchange for free services. 30 years ago, no one would have thought twice about spy activity, given how important it was to protect nuclear weapons secrets and other vital information. Now, all of a sudden, it's a huge problem just because the data allows people to connect the dots faster.
The Internet is a public network -- always has been. Nothing you want to keep private should be put on it.
One of the things I have noticed about commercial software is this...if you pay enough money, they will make sure things work for you.
I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just relaying my experience. Our company is a big CA and Oracle customer, and we use a lot of their products in production. All of it is absolute crap, and extremely poorly documented. I can't believe how much work it is to get an Oracle instance running and properly secured/tuned compared to something like SQL Server. But, when you call, your problems are solved even if they have to drag the guy who wrote your problem module out of his cave. One CA product I work with uses a completely proprietary message queue interface to pass messages between different chunks of the product code, and it's over 20 years old. Like I mentioned, one phone call and a few logfiles later, and I had a fix for my problem. The software is God-awful and I can't stand working with it, but at least it's fixable. Who knows what dev resource they had to resurrect from the dead to make the change...but it was made.
Beyond the "scared proprietary dev shop" feelings this piece seems to indicate, I think Oracle is trying to make the point that OSS doesn't necessarily offer you the same level of "we'll move heaven and earth to make your product work." This can be a valid argument with executive types who want to minimize risk. Again, I am not saying it's right, and there are plenty of great support resources for Linux out there...look no further than Red Hat, that's what they make their money on. But, there still is the perception that if big support organizations aren't built around a product, it must be a hobbyist toy.
The other thing that I'm not so convinced that OSS is good at is the user experience. Developers don't make good GUI designers. Look at any line-of-business Java monstrosity you've had to use for work...it's just not a top priority. Of course, Microsoft managed to destroy 21 years of the Windows desktop with Win8, so closed source companies can screw up too.
obDisclaimer: I have a left wing bias to say the least. But that's not important for this post since it applies to both sides equally.
You do have to admit that Drudge, the Huffington Post and all the others serve as echo chambers for extreme viewpoints. The conservative side gets bombarded with anti-liberal stories day in and day out, and doesn't have to listen to any other opinion if they don't want to. Same thing happens on the liberal side. You wouldn't have heard Walter Cronkite on CBS news during the Vietnam War talking about "godless baby killers" or something like that, but I could definitely see a more targeted media organization, or let's face it, some dude with a blog, saying something like this. There's no consequences for the blogger dude, and the media outlets will be rewarded for offering this as entertaining fare to their audience.
Personally, I have some very conservative relatives who, while very smart, don't get exposed to differing viewpoints on issues. And when you hear something catchy that you agree with, then repeat it to your friends, then have those same friends amplify your beliefs, you do end up with a very polarized population. Both liberal and conservative talk show hosts know this and use it to their advantage. Suddenly all those people on both sides go out and elect officials that share their polarized opinions of the world, and a sensible debate over healthcare policy turns into a protracted fight that neither side will give ground on. So, talking with people like this for me feels like I'm Rob Reiner ("Meathead") from All in the Family. Yeah, Meathead was a pinko-liberal commie but his character was reasonable compared with Archie...
I don't know, maybe people were more reasonable back in the day when we were fighting a cold war with an adversary who could wipe us out if they were having a bad day.
One of the side effects of the rise of the blogging hordes is the death of traditional journalism. Even if old media is biased one way or another, the decent newspapers of record have some respect for journalistic integrity. Reporting on a government corruption scandal is very different from reporting on the latest iPhone over at Engadget or the endless stream of celebrity garbage "news." Seeking out the real story from actual, verifiable sources rather than a blogger posting their own opinion as fact is the difference. While I'm sure some bloggers are journalists in the traditional sense, not all are, and blogs are even more sensitive to producing content that makes people click than newspapers are.
Some people may cite this as anti-progress, but look at media prior to the Internet, in fact, before cable TV. There were only 3 network news sources, and a few newspapers of record producing content. Now there's tons of media outlets, thousands of random bloggers, and an increasing trend of the medial outlets crowdsourcing content from their readers (CNN iReport, etc. etc.) Having so many choices means that opinions are more diverse, but conversely it also means that it narrows people's viewpoints. Conservatives are Fox News fans, but they're also fans of even more conservative bloggers. It makes liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative, and that leads to situations like we're in today with Congress and the Tea Party faction. You would never have something like this in the 50s/60s simply because the population didn't have enough customized hot-button content to whip them into whatever polarized frenzy they're into.
Traditional journalism does need to return to media, but as the submitter states, you have to pay for it, and integrity doesn't pay the bills like the latest unverified rumor from a friend of a friend of Lindsey Lohan...
- Most CS programs train their graduates in Java.
- Java is pretty much the enterprisey middleware language these days. I've seen so many J2EE applications alive inside organizations doing mundane but vital tasks.
- Unless you're a web startup, Java is almost universally used for line-of-business application development. That ugly GUI that collects budget numbers from 500 databases and displays an "executive dashboard" was probably slapped together by an Accenture type outfit using offshore new grad coders and sold to companies for millions.
It's just too prevalent now for people to say, "Oracle sucks, we're porting everything to C#." I can definitely see a market for Java talent similar to the COBOL market 30 years down the road. People won't need millions of Java coders anymore, but they'll need older expert types to go untangle messes.
You may get your wish soon -- I remember when VBS was just starting to become available in Windows, and I also remember one of the things holding back its adoption was the fact that you couldn't guarantee that there was a complete "VBS stack" on the system. WMI was an addon, MDAC was an addon, even the XML parser wasn't guaranteed to be the same version until IE 6 came out. Even the scripting engine itself was an add-on! Therefore, you had to write lowest common denominator scripts until you got all the old stuff up to date. We were still using batch files for quite a while, and knew we could do things faster and easier, but we were stuck in a mixed NT/XP environment. (Yes, this was a while back.)
I have the same issue with PowerShell and a mixed Windows 7 and XP environment. In a big enterprise you can't absolutely guarantee that a compatible PowerShell interpreter plus the right version of .NET is available. Microsoft has done an OK job of making sure most of the functionality is backported, so we're starting to move away from VBS.
Honestly, my complaint about PowerShell is its complexity. You get access to vast resources through the .NET Framework, and that's great. But just like any other modern language with a monster prebuilt library, just finding what you need to write and what has been written for you is still a Google operation. One huge improvement is the ability to dispense with thousands of "results parsing" functions. VBS meant you had to do a lot of output reading/interpreting in code, plus access to things like WMI and data services is still kind of a magic incantation thing. Now PowerShell lets you directly work on objects. Example: I wrote a script to edit an XML configuration file for one of our apps the other day, just to make a simple change. It was a huge script in VBS with all the error checking, magic incantations to access the XML DOM and parsing of results. PowerShell lets you directly manipulate the file in memory.
Good idea, but isn't Best Buy and other retailers complaining about the "showroom effect?" How's that going to work when car dealers are just giant test drive outlets?
That said, wow, the ability to drop the stupid haggle dance with your typical slimeball car salesman would be awesome. I'd pay more for the privilege. I can't stand haggling over a few hundred dollars, and actively dislike all salesdroids.
One factor they have to take into account is that car dealerships actually don't make much money on the cars themselves (unless you pay MSRP.) They make money on the sleazy stuff like:
- Financing. People who come in and say "I can pay $X/month." OK, here's an 11-year loan at 14% interest...
- People with bad credit
- Useless options/warranties/accessories they try to push on you at the last second
- Leases -- leasing is an awful deal unless you can completely write off the lease payments as a business expense.
So this new system would just have to funnel your order to a random pick of the Glengarry Glen Ross guys at Joey Barbarino Chevrolet, and they would get a flat fee for processing your paperwork. Not as lucrative as all the other stuff they can push on you...
Serious question --
Subsistence agriculture --> Organized agriculture --> Mechanized agriculture --> Industrial revolution --> Assembly-line factories --> Corporate paper pushing jobs --> IT and service jobs --> ?
Fill in the blank. What will the millions of people who are not qualified for the handful of knowledge work jobs left do?
That's where the wheels fall off the Luddite argument. We're just out of higher-level tasks to shift the huge displaced workforce to.