PS: we have widespread employment post-industrial-revolution because the majority of humanity literally moved off of their farms, and towards the factories/cities.
Dude, that's like saying Canada is a militaristic society - because your entire gained knowledge of Canada involved hanging around the bridge of a Canadian warship, with the occasional excursion to foreign shores.
TBH, I don't even get why the TFA author's idea was necessary. The US Constitution was built out of a long series of debates, compromises, and not a little effort towards future-proofing (and let's be honest, idiot-proofing). That, and they included mechanisms to modify it as needed.
Sure, the process was arduous and it involved a lot of potential inclusions that would quite frankly scare many folks today. That said, once finalized and ratified, it's in place and should be treated as the original document. If you (or anyone) want it changed, then use the mechanisms included to do just that. We've managed to do so for a couple of centuries now without violating the thing, so why get all creative about it now?
I can see how that happens. It takes a lot of initiative and push on your part to make it happen the way you want it to... you cannot rely on either the Dev teams or Ops to do it for you. On my part, I am fully independent from either side of the house. Because I came into it from the operations side of things, I treat the dev teams as my customers, and the ops/IT teams as my resources. I will happily abuse or appease both as needed to get the job done, but overall, that's usually how I handle it.
Thing is, you bring up a really good point: If you let either team take prominence, they will dominate your schedule, and eventually they will use you to own the other side of the fence. This is scarily common in both startups and huge corps alike, with only the actors changing. I'll explain who.how in a moment...
It goes bad either way: Either you wind up with bleeding-edge eternal-beta product that constantly breaks because the dev teams (and marketing!) demand release über alles!, or you get stuck with a calcified slow-moving product roadmap because Ops (and the bean-counters) really hate change.
In your case, the codemonkeys won the battle (which is, again, *very* common in startups and small companies.) If you worked for a large corp, it would be the opposite - a fight to keep the Ops guys from dominating things.
Anyone who has worked in/as a competent SCM manager is (or at least damned well should be) familiar with how this works; DevOps just takes the SCM role and expands the hell out of it.
DevOps also introduces one thing that the average code/server-monkey has never had to deal with: Inter-departmental politics. It's now up to you to keep The Force in balance, as it were, while at the same time putting in sane frameworks that not only scale up, but makes sure that everybody gets what they wants w/o unnecessary expense.
Not so fast... if you live somewhere that allows you to fly down the road due to 'flow of traffic' laws, prepare to have that speed drop once the majority of cars begin to 'flow' at driverless-governed speeds.
Workday commutes? Fuggit, wake me when we get there.
Weekend drives through the mountains, coastal roads and countryside? I'll take the wheel, thanks.
Road trips? Meh - maybe do it in shifts. I used to love pounding out 18-24 hours straight driving to get somewhere interesting or fun (the open road gives the mind time to play, whilst driving keeps you occupied enough to not be bored), but nowadays I don't mind splitting the load.
Dude, seriously? Nearly every subway, bus and light-rail system in the US already operates under heavy government subsidization, and fares are well below cost.
Put this way: If fares reflected the actual cost of operation (forget profit), they would IMHO just barely compete with Uber. Chuck in a profit margin for future expansion and improvements, and taxicabs could compete.
Actually, it pays hella good money - My salary has almost doubled over the past 4 years. I still get recruiters bugging me at least 1-2 times a week (and I don't mean the bullshit Indian-run far-flung contract ones, I mean local recruiting companies in PDX that I know quite well.) Once a month or so I get emails from the really big name folks wanting to know if I want to move to Seattle, SanFran, etc. It's damn hard to find someone who keeps the title for more than 6 months, and I've been doing this since 2011 or so, back when it was just called "Systems Engineering", and you were at the mercy of numerous external teams.
There is one trick, though, and it may just be my own bias showing, but you have to approach it with a heavy leaning towards operations. You don't want to get in a position where you're writing product code or doing QA, but instead acting more in an SCM/automation role in the dev teams. You do have to know enough about development to work well within the teams, but at the same time, you have to know enough about the IT side to know what you're asking them to do for you (or often to build it yourself), and to keep uptime at maximum.
Here's where company size comes in, though, because company size usually determines what you do.:
I work for a largish (1500-3,000 employee) company, which is, believe it or not, the least stressful way to do it (you have enough resources on either side that all you have to do is help make it all go smoothly.) In the larger companies, you are an advocate for Ops/NOC while you're within the dev teams, but you are an advocate for the teams when you deal with Ops and the NOCs. Meanwhile, you're building the automation (usually viz Puppet and a good ENC like Foreman if you're lucky), and doing your level best to make sure it all runs smooth. I usually find myself as a combination of right-hand-man and devil's advocate to the product owners and PMs, making sure that both of them understand fully what I'm up to, and what they're trying to navigate on their way to release (unless you're lucky enough to have good CI/CD in place, in which case everyone builds towards that). I find myself talking just as much as I am typing.
( One big caveat, though... some companies this size are murder to work under... especially if they're too into using H1-Bs to do the bulk of their dev work. )
In a smaller company (say, 300-400 employees total), it's way different. In this environment, you're a little bit of everything, doing a bit of everything, and sometimes you get dragged in to help debug, help out QA, etc. Other times, you're troubleshooting issues on the load balancers. Other times still, you're helping the DBA hammer out a bad query into a good one. On the plus side, you get a lot more leeway as to what tools get used, what processes you want to have in place, etc. Just be prepared to bust-ass and put in a lot of long hours... I didn't mind working for a company like this, but the one time I did it, the Systems Architect and I didn't get along very well, to put it mildly. I think it was because I wasn't quite hipster/bleeding-edge enough when it came to how I approached production systems...
I once did it all by myself with one dev team, for two small products, in a small company who inherited the project/team from a small acquisition they made. It actually was a lot less work, at least once I put the CI/CD process in place (the dev team and two QA guys didn't care - they just want it out and working). At that size it's just maintenance and scaling for growth ('course, that can go many ways, depending).
Funny you should mention this... I actually got a lot of actual work done in the two-hour monster retrospective I sat through this morning. I just listen for my name and glance at the Kanban board occasionally to see if I come up next.:)
Thank Heaven for wifi and laptops, is all I can say, else I'd never get anything done.
Nah - that one won't get as far - it usually requires that people prove their ability as both a sysadmin *and* as a developer (or at least as a member of a dev team). Most applicants choke hard on one or the other in the interview, and I'm not seeing a credible 'certification' yet that can paper over that deficiency.
I am sorry that you feel left out. Guess what, this is what it means when the science is settled.
Not to be trollish, but why is there a voice in my head that chants "A reading from the Gospel According To Doctor Mann..." whenever I see blind assertion that "the science is settled" - used as if it were some sort of magic wand that waves away the need for fact and proof?
I think the biggest problem with this whole debate (at least insofar as slashdot) is illustrated in your post...
Are you specifying "deniers" as in 'deniers of Anthropogenic Climate Change', or as in 'deniers or climate change' (the latter noticeably minus the human component)?
It's something I find disturbing... I'll explain a bit: Most of the alarmist crowd seem to hide behind that lack of distinction up there when advocating their views. To be fair, sadly, so does the media - especially the mainstream media. I'm not 100% certain if this is because of the overpowering desire for using shorthand terms in lieu of precision, or if it's just a dishonest attempt to discredit those who truly do not believe that humans are affecting global climate to the degree asserted by the alarmist crowd, and/or to bolster the 'because, science! arguments.
It would be helpful to avoid such things. I say this because while yes, I know for fact, based on evidence, that global climate has and always will change. What I do not know for certain (and that no one has yet conclusively proven) is whether recent changes are caused *primarily* by human activity, what the scope of that impact is if or otherwise, and if proven, what that impact will be. Here's the trick - most climate scientists do not know for certain, and cannot (yet) prove one way or the other, IMHO.
Make it conversational as well as informative. You don't have to write a novel or make it into a drama play, but at least do something to help illustrate a bit more than some short and often mis-communicated list of what the options do. In technical speak? No problem: less man page, more info page (speaking of which, an actual info page would be a nice thing to have for a few of the projects out there, eh?)
I'm usually not one to ad hominem by source, but seriously... slate.com? The whole site is a political screed. But, it gets worse...
You go to the article, and of all the links they have, only *two* point to anything that comes even close to scientific -or- academic.
The one academic link points to a summary on UCAR, from 2007(!?), that contains exactly one pretty chart, but *no data* to back it up (or even a link to said data.) If someone finds a link to hard data in any of this mess, please let me know. Meanwhile, it should be noted that one of UCAR's missions is literally "Engaging in effective advocacy."
The one scientific link, to a NASA project site, tells the actual story. the TL;DR is that most of what they saw was routine, but two small areas got their attention... and they didn't measure those areas with anything useful, but instead literally used:
These images were not produced with the lasers, radar, and other instruments flying on the aircraft. (Check out the mission page for content like that.) Rather, IceBridge scientist John Sonntag captured these scenes with a handheld digital camera while looking out the aircraft window.
If you're going to link to something as backup for a story, how about you make it an article that contains some fact, and not an alarmist screed which supports its premise with a series of blind alley links, only one of which eventually leads to something useful... and that useful thing isn't even all that scientific?
Seriously - if you want less skeptics on the subject, it would help if you provided something more than blind assertion by a university-affiliated advocacy group, and what one guy did with his little handycam...
Fortunately atheism is the fastest growing religious belief
...again, you express confusion. Atheism is not a religious belief; it is the very antithesis of such.
Mind you, I actually get the complaints against religion... human-run organizations are highly imperfect by definition, because humans are imperfect creatures. That said, the whole concept of "rights" (however you wish to define them) is religious in origin as well, specifically as a Christian one (that is, the concept of all humans being equal in the eyes of God. Before then, people naturally assumed that some humans were better than others, and sorted themselves accordingly... this is even an assumed condition in Plato's Republic.)
In other words, you'll become more like Canada...
This has its hazards as well; recently there have been a disturbing number of cases where voicing *any* opinions in public contrary to LGBT diktat is considered "hate speech", and is punished by law accordingly. That doesn't quite square with one of the US' greatest treasures --that being freedom of speech -- now does it?
Of course, from your POV this may be considered a wonderful thing, but consider that you're merely imposing the beginnings of totalitarianism.
The New Testament actually covers those specific Hebraic Laws, and goes on to explain *why*.
The TL;DR version (at least one big reason anyway) is that the Hebraic laws were actually getting in the way of the whole point of worship - that is, folks would be more concerned with keeping their kitchen kosher and not working during the Shabat, than with being righteous before God and with loving one's fellow human being.
You use that term, but I sincerely doubt that you know what it means, let alone the context to which (and why) it was applied. Certainly you can reply with 'Muh Crusades', but you apparently don't know *why* said Crusades were called (hint: it involved a response to 400+ years of Muslim conquests-by-sword throughout first Northern Africa, then Europe itself.)
You do realize that if that brush you're using were any broader, you could cover at least the entire Inner Solar System with a single stroke of it... right?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, what they're doing is (well, at least technically) legal, so disbarment is not much of an option. :(
Now a hit man or two on the other hand...
PS: we have widespread employment post-industrial-revolution because the majority of humanity literally moved off of their farms, and towards the factories/cities.
Dude, that's like saying Canada is a militaristic society - because your entire gained knowledge of Canada involved hanging around the bridge of a Canadian warship, with the occasional excursion to foreign shores.
TBH, I don't even get why the TFA author's idea was necessary. The US Constitution was built out of a long series of debates, compromises, and not a little effort towards future-proofing (and let's be honest, idiot-proofing). That, and they included mechanisms to modify it as needed.
Sure, the process was arduous and it involved a lot of potential inclusions that would quite frankly scare many folks today. That said, once finalized and ratified, it's in place and should be treated as the original document. If you (or anyone) want it changed, then use the mechanisms included to do just that. We've managed to do so for a couple of centuries now without violating the thing, so why get all creative about it now?
...could be worse still: Slashdot could be teaching Constitutional Law, which means you'd start with a car analogy.
I can see how that happens. It takes a lot of initiative and push on your part to make it happen the way you want it to... you cannot rely on either the Dev teams or Ops to do it for you. On my part, I am fully independent from either side of the house. Because I came into it from the operations side of things, I treat the dev teams as my customers, and the ops/IT teams as my resources. I will happily abuse or appease both as needed to get the job done, but overall, that's usually how I handle it.
Thing is, you bring up a really good point: If you let either team take prominence, they will dominate your schedule, and eventually they will use you to own the other side of the fence. This is scarily common in both startups and huge corps alike, with only the actors changing. I'll explain who.how in a moment...
It goes bad either way: Either you wind up with bleeding-edge eternal-beta product that constantly breaks because the dev teams (and marketing!) demand release über alles!, or you get stuck with a calcified slow-moving product roadmap because Ops (and the bean-counters) really hate change.
In your case, the codemonkeys won the battle (which is, again, *very* common in startups and small companies.) If you worked for a large corp, it would be the opposite - a fight to keep the Ops guys from dominating things.
Anyone who has worked in/as a competent SCM manager is (or at least damned well should be) familiar with how this works; DevOps just takes the SCM role and expands the hell out of it.
DevOps also introduces one thing that the average code/server-monkey has never had to deal with: Inter-departmental politics. It's now up to you to keep The Force in balance, as it were, while at the same time putting in sane frameworks that not only scale up, but makes sure that everybody gets what they wants w/o unnecessary expense.
Not so fast... if you live somewhere that allows you to fly down the road due to 'flow of traffic' laws, prepare to have that speed drop once the majority of cars begin to 'flow' at driverless-governed speeds.
I'm split on it:
Workday commutes? Fuggit, wake me when we get there.
Weekend drives through the mountains, coastal roads and countryside? I'll take the wheel, thanks.
Road trips? Meh - maybe do it in shifts. I used to love pounding out 18-24 hours straight driving to get somewhere interesting or fun (the open road gives the mind time to play, whilst driving keeps you occupied enough to not be bored), but nowadays I don't mind splitting the load.
Dude, seriously? Nearly every subway, bus and light-rail system in the US already operates under heavy government subsidization, and fares are well below cost.
Put this way: If fares reflected the actual cost of operation (forget profit), they would IMHO just barely compete with Uber. Chuck in a profit margin for future expansion and improvements, and taxicabs could compete.
Actually, it pays hella good money - My salary has almost doubled over the past 4 years. I still get recruiters bugging me at least 1-2 times a week (and I don't mean the bullshit Indian-run far-flung contract ones, I mean local recruiting companies in PDX that I know quite well.) Once a month or so I get emails from the really big name folks wanting to know if I want to move to Seattle, SanFran, etc. It's damn hard to find someone who keeps the title for more than 6 months, and I've been doing this since 2011 or so, back when it was just called "Systems Engineering", and you were at the mercy of numerous external teams.
There is one trick, though, and it may just be my own bias showing, but you have to approach it with a heavy leaning towards operations. You don't want to get in a position where you're writing product code or doing QA, but instead acting more in an SCM/automation role in the dev teams. You do have to know enough about development to work well within the teams, but at the same time, you have to know enough about the IT side to know what you're asking them to do for you (or often to build it yourself), and to keep uptime at maximum.
Here's where company size comes in, though, because company size usually determines what you do.:
I work for a largish (1500-3,000 employee) company, which is, believe it or not, the least stressful way to do it (you have enough resources on either side that all you have to do is help make it all go smoothly.) In the larger companies, you are an advocate for Ops/NOC while you're within the dev teams, but you are an advocate for the teams when you deal with Ops and the NOCs. Meanwhile, you're building the automation (usually viz Puppet and a good ENC like Foreman if you're lucky), and doing your level best to make sure it all runs smooth. I usually find myself as a combination of right-hand-man and devil's advocate to the product owners and PMs, making sure that both of them understand fully what I'm up to, and what they're trying to navigate on their way to release (unless you're lucky enough to have good CI/CD in place, in which case everyone builds towards that). I find myself talking just as much as I am typing.
( One big caveat, though... some companies this size are murder to work under... especially if they're too into using H1-Bs to do the bulk of their dev work. )
In a smaller company (say, 300-400 employees total), it's way different. In this environment, you're a little bit of everything, doing a bit of everything, and sometimes you get dragged in to help debug, help out QA, etc. Other times, you're troubleshooting issues on the load balancers. Other times still, you're helping the DBA hammer out a bad query into a good one. On the plus side, you get a lot more leeway as to what tools get used, what processes you want to have in place, etc. Just be prepared to bust-ass and put in a lot of long hours... I didn't mind working for a company like this, but the one time I did it, the Systems Architect and I didn't get along very well, to put it mildly. I think it was because I wasn't quite hipster/bleeding-edge enough when it came to how I approached production systems...
I once did it all by myself with one dev team, for two small products, in a small company who inherited the project/team from a small acquisition they made. It actually was a lot less work, at least once I put the CI/CD process in place (the dev team and two QA guys didn't care - they just want it out and working). At that size it's just maintenance and scaling for growth ('course, that can go many ways, depending).
Funny you should mention this... I actually got a lot of actual work done in the two-hour monster retrospective I sat through this morning. I just listen for my name and glance at the Kanban board occasionally to see if I come up next. :)
Thank Heaven for wifi and laptops, is all I can say, else I'd never get anything done.
Nah - that one won't get as far - it usually requires that people prove their ability as both a sysadmin *and* as a developer (or at least as a member of a dev team). Most applicants choke hard on one or the other in the interview, and I'm not seeing a credible 'certification' yet that can paper over that deficiency.
Agile is not failing because there is nothing to replace it. Are we going to go back to Waterfall?
PS: ...where did Charles Darwin come from? I didn't know he was a climatologist.
I'm not complaining about "consensus", just the use of it as a debate bludgeon. Please learn the difference. ;)
I am sorry that you feel left out. Guess what, this is what it means when the science is settled.
Not to be trollish, but why is there a voice in my head that chants "A reading from the Gospel According To Doctor Mann..." whenever I see blind assertion that "the science is settled" - used as if it were some sort of magic wand that waves away the need for fact and proof?
I think the biggest problem with this whole debate (at least insofar as slashdot) is illustrated in your post...
Are you specifying "deniers" as in 'deniers of Anthropogenic Climate Change', or as in 'deniers or climate change' (the latter noticeably minus the human component)?
It's something I find disturbing... I'll explain a bit: Most of the alarmist crowd seem to hide behind that lack of distinction up there when advocating their views. To be fair, sadly, so does the media - especially the mainstream media. I'm not 100% certain if this is because of the overpowering desire for using shorthand terms in lieu of precision, or if it's just a dishonest attempt to discredit those who truly do not believe that humans are affecting global climate to the degree asserted by the alarmist crowd, and/or to bolster the 'because, science! arguments.
It would be helpful to avoid such things. I say this because while yes, I know for fact, based on evidence, that global climate has and always will change. What I do not know for certain (and that no one has yet conclusively proven) is whether recent changes are caused *primarily* by human activity, what the scope of that impact is if or otherwise, and if proven, what that impact will be. Here's the trick - most climate scientists do not know for certain, and cannot (yet) prove one way or the other, IMHO.
Make it conversational as well as informative. You don't have to write a novel or make it into a drama play, but at least do something to help illustrate a bit more than some short and often mis-communicated list of what the options do. In technical speak? No problem: less man page, more info page (speaking of which, an actual info page would be a nice thing to have for a few of the projects out there, eh?)
I'm usually not one to ad hominem by source, but seriously... slate.com? The whole site is a political screed. But, it gets worse...
You go to the article, and of all the links they have, only *two* point to anything that comes even close to scientific -or- academic.
The one academic link points to a summary on UCAR, from 2007(!?), that contains exactly one pretty chart, but *no data* to back it up (or even a link to said data.) If someone finds a link to hard data in any of this mess, please let me know. Meanwhile, it should be noted that one of UCAR's missions is literally "Engaging in effective advocacy."
The one scientific link, to a NASA project site, tells the actual story. the TL;DR is that most of what they saw was routine, but two small areas got their attention... and they didn't measure those areas with anything useful, but instead literally used:
If you're going to link to something as backup for a story, how about you make it an article that contains some fact, and not an alarmist screed which supports its premise with a series of blind alley links, only one of which eventually leads to something useful... and that useful thing isn't even all that scientific?
Seriously - if you want less skeptics on the subject, it would help if you provided something more than blind assertion by a university-affiliated advocacy group, and what one guy did with his little handycam...
Fortunately atheism is the fastest growing religious belief
...again, you express confusion. Atheism is not a religious belief; it is the very antithesis of such.
Mind you, I actually get the complaints against religion... human-run organizations are highly imperfect by definition, because humans are imperfect creatures. That said, the whole concept of "rights" (however you wish to define them) is religious in origin as well, specifically as a Christian one (that is, the concept of all humans being equal in the eyes of God. Before then, people naturally assumed that some humans were better than others, and sorted themselves accordingly... this is even an assumed condition in Plato's Republic.)
In other words, you'll become more like Canada...
This has its hazards as well; recently there have been a disturbing number of cases where voicing *any* opinions in public contrary to LGBT diktat is considered "hate speech", and is punished by law accordingly. That doesn't quite square with one of the US' greatest treasures --that being freedom of speech -- now does it?
Of course, from your POV this may be considered a wonderful thing, but consider that you're merely imposing the beginnings of totalitarianism.
The New Testament actually covers those specific Hebraic Laws, and goes on to explain *why*.
The TL;DR version (at least one big reason anyway) is that the Hebraic laws were actually getting in the way of the whole point of worship - that is, folks would be more concerned with keeping their kitchen kosher and not working during the Shabat, than with being righteous before God and with loving one's fellow human being.
Deus Vult.
You use that term, but I sincerely doubt that you know what it means, let alone the context to which (and why) it was applied. Certainly you can reply with 'Muh Crusades', but you apparently don't know *why* said Crusades were called (hint: it involved a response to 400+ years of Muslim conquests-by-sword throughout first Northern Africa, then Europe itself.)
As you were...
The religious...
You do realize that if that brush you're using were any broader, you could cover at least the entire Inner Solar System with a single stroke of it... right?
I hate to interrupt a good smug-a-thon, but it should be noted that the assailants were Muslim.
As you were...
...until you consider that Communism is an ideology that (allegedly) uses reason and logic...
Oh, and No True Scotsmen allowed. ;)