Not to fed the trolls but, we are largely an atheist society. Why would someone care about the next world when science and economics is all that is true to them?
I'm rather surprised if anyone took the religious comment very seriously. It was meant as a joke, although the reasoning that led to it wasn't:
Abrahamic and many other populist religions (most surviving popular ones, as you said) try to cater to the poor (Buddhism warns against focusing on money, but certainly does not prohibit wealth, and many Buddhists are quite wealthy). But historically there have been plenty of others--created by a slightly different demographic--that allowed taking wealth into the next world. Look at the ancient Egyptians!
We know that fossil fuels have already caused enormous damage/illness/death and are going to cause vastly more. Anyone who values science knows this, and yet there are execs who, given the unavoidable choice between accruing huge personal fortunes and a clean, healthy, sustainable, safe world, choose the former. Given this emphasis on money over life, and I draw the obvious conclusion--the only alternative I see is that they don't believe in science (hence the joke). Perhaps William McDonough (?) explained it most concisely when he said "Republicans are afraid of dying poor."
And no, we in the USA are not anywhere close to being an atheist society. The details depend on how you ask the questions, but well over half of USians really believe that the world is less than 6000 years old, 75% go to churches regularly and believe in some kind of Christian Jesus (ie. the magical zombie, not the historical figure who said some wise things and may or may not have existed), perhaps half believe weird doctrine like "homosexuality is a sin"...
Thanks, but I don't want my species go extinct, even if it does make Shell execs richer (and the world a better place). But wait--can you really carry your wealth into the next world with you when you die? This changes everything...
Mods: mod this guy "young"! He's schmort. He must be a mere child. He may of course also be a girl... in which case he's probably wearing pigtails or something...
re: Planning, the claim here and perpetuated by the article is that there are OMG RIGHT THIS INSTANT problems in programming. There aren't, unless you're a small programming shop that doesn't follow relatively basic practices like version control and QA'd releases.
If your QA team is perfect, then OMG problems are constrained to things like "our biggest customer needs this prototyped by yesterday". Stupid, but it does happen. Or do you advocate firing any client who makes such patently idiotic and shortsighted requests?:)
re: Managers, I would advocate firing anyone who hired a Josh.
Sounds like your experience is not with companies that could have put him to good use. I believe that that makes you lucky. I'd hate to deal with him, for sure. And a company with a Josh but without a manager who can keep him from doing damage is indeed screwed.
It's been a while so I don't have a reference at hand, but I thought that pair programming had been pretty rigorously shown to improve code output (by some measure that eludes me, but involving quality and production rate) under a wide range of circumstances? Perhaps not "always", but "more often than not". I know people complain about it, and I know what you mean about the concentration bubble, but the numbers don't lie. If, that is, I'm remembering them correctly, the experiments were well-controlled, the pairs were typical, etc...?
It amazes me how many people will drop $1k+ without bothering to do some basic research on what they're buying. Ignorance is bliss I guess
Crikey, yes. Look at all the people who drop $40+k on an SUV "for safety", even though they're not only far more dangerous for everyone else on the road, but also for their occupants! It's amazing how few people do any reading before spending that kind of money. And then they read consumerreports to help them choose bottled water.
6 megapixels is fine for almost everything I do. But of course 24 megapixels is sort of like 6 mp with a 2x zoom--you can crop without losing resolution. Of course, you lose on noise...
But a 24mp image downsampled to 6mp is apparently going to be cleaner than a 6mp image... there's a good article about this hiding somewhere on http://www.dxomark.com/
What resolution you need depends on what you do, but making larger prints does not mean you need higher resolution--it just means you look at it from 5' away rather than 1'. A well-composed photo usually looks best when it takes up a fixed amount of your visual field!
Software development is 40% technical and 60% people. [citation needed]
There, fixed that for you. How do you even measure those things quantitatively? That's nothing more than a way of saying "people skills matter too" and yet you're parroting it like it's a law of physics.
Even assuming those numbers are correct in general (to two significant figures, even), do you think that there's no variation? Do you think that you can measure an average and then insist that the real world must match the average in every case? Precisely enough that you can do that sort of math?
however to balance him you will need to hire someone who is like 10% technical and 90% people skills just to support him.
What does this mean?? It's not even wrong. Firstly, 10% technical and 90% people sounds like a manager or enabler, you need those anyway, and one of them can support a lot more than one 90/10 like a Josh. Secondly, are you suggesting that the company as a whole needs to add up the raw ability scores of all of its employees and make sure that the average is upheld? Methinks you've been playing too much D&D!
And you're still ignoring the first law of hiring: figure out what the person is worth to you and offer him that. If he wants more, then you can fire him. Again, another inexact science, but not so bad...
They should be recognized as douchebags and fired on the spot.
Sounds like you want him fired because you don't get along with him. Perhaps you're jealous of his ability, such as it is? You needn't be--a good coder who can work with people is generally far more useful than a great one who can't.
Proper management and planning means you don't need a Josh on your team.
Proper planning means you'll anticipate every eventuality and be ready for it, which is of course impossible given that outside factors are basically random.
The guy should have been fired before he was ever allowed to become so integral to their solutions that getting rid of him would mean pain for the group.
You're confusing two issues here. He should clearly not have been allowed to become so integral to a sustainable solution, since he fucked up any hope of that. Firing him is one way to keep him from becoming integral to long-term solutions.
You might just as well advocate firing any manager who lets a Josh become involved in long-term projects. That would be just as correct. Clearly there are things Josh shouldn't be doing. A good manager will see that.
Actually, I like the idea of keeping Josh around just in order to test new managers. If they can't figure out how to use him effectively, fire them. He could be a truly invaluable resource to the company even if not a single piece of his code ever gets executed.
Because there are a lot of good people who can do the work and better and be a company player too.
Um no.
The article was about someone who can do an incredible amount of coding in a very short time. Indeed, more coding in less time than most anyone else.
It isn't that they weren't smart. In every case, these "great" developers were the most talented in the group. Their intellectual abilities and problem solving capabilities were unparalleled.
Obviously, if there are a lot of people who are equally fast and one can't work with teammates, then fire the asshole. But that wasn't the question. The question was how to deal with one asshole who can churn out more code faster than everyone else. You can tell me you're as good as anyone else until you're blue in the face--in which case your employer is lucky to have you--but that's not what the article was about. It was about someone who was much better than you (for a certain very circumscribed--but potentially useful--definition of "better").
Sure, if you spent sufficient time and money, you could find someone better than Josh. And ideally you do. There's always someone better on the market, out there, somewhere--especially in this economy. But if you have a limited budget for finding and hiring the best of the best, then an acceptable compromise is learning how to use the people you have. Understand what he is, and isn't, good for, and offer him what he's worth to the company. And learn to use him wisely.
I know that it's cool to say 'hey, Linux is making headway' but it's also true to say that someone else is losing out.
Well, yes, obviously. But the people losing out are service providers who are providing an obsolete service. Here is a situation in which you can truly get something for nothing (Linux exists; if you use it (and if it doesn't suck admins) nobody loses. It's the ideal of communism, in which I take your cow but you still have your cow). And you're bellyaching about someone who was making money by creating artificial scarcity (you can only use an OS if you pay us) not being able to do so anymore.
This sounds like the argument "Wait--if we stop polluting our streams and rivers, people will just be able to drink from them FOR FREE! All the purveyors of expensive bottled spring water lose out!" How is that scary?
People like Josh, on the other hand, should be fired on the spot.
I don't think so. They can just be recognised for what they are, and treated accordingly. Think of him as a fire extinguisher--a pain in the ass to clean up after, but from time to time invaluable. Sometimes you need a solution NOW, and you will have time to clean it up (or re-implement it more carefully) later. Perhaps your expectations for him were too high. Understand your resources and learn to use them appropriately.
I doubt 131 (or more now) is a record. If you say something controversial, good conversation might ensue (or, of course, it can get you fired...). I didn't understand "troll" either.
Apparently one reason why sociology research is usually done so poorly is that many people can't consider the questions without becoming upset.
You might like this?
A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it, can be warped to serve harmful ends. We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
--Steven Pinker
Most people don't handle issues involving conflict well.
So a real warning to people who naively surrender their privacy, about how that information can be misused and twisted out of shape to present in what ever light people can use to their advantage. So face book, myspace et al, a really bad idea unless you simply want to put up a completely non personal digital illusion of yourself and present yourself in the best possible light.
You are right. Of course, the problem is that if you never tell anyone about yourself, you will have no friends, and the Internet is remarkably useful for communication. Written media like facebook are a problem, but so are letters, diaries, anything that goes beyond the spoken word. Does facebook help more than it hurts? Every piece of technology can be used for good and for ill, and there is no easy way to foresee whether it will work out well in any case.
The American Indians invented the Internet and lawyers 1000 years ago, decided that it caused more problems than it solved, and wisely decided that an oral-only tradition was really the way to go, after all.
(1) Yes, if success means being able to kill people.
(2) Have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel? You might like it. It goes a long way towards answering your question. To wit: there were a bunch of factors, and more than a few had to do with coincidences of geography.
I'd go a step further. Crime should be likely to hurt you: (what you stand to gain) * (your chance of getting away with it) should be significantly less than (what you stand to lose if you get caught) * (your probability of getting caught). If you just paid back what you gained, you'd be a fool not to commit crimes.
If "due process" becomes the same sort of joke internationally that it is in the USA (and elsewhere) (border laptop confiscations, random car searches and paper checks, warrantless wiretapping, surveillance face recognition,...), then it seems reasonable that people will (1) legitimately stop paying taxes to a government that has broken its end of the contract (eg. the Constitution in the USA), and (2) look for large and powerful entities that will actually respect their contracts. If banks have their own fair and reasonable judicial system, it's no less sad that governments don't, but at least someone powerful does. At least for now...
Yes, I've just painted a scenario in which the police go to the bank and demand a client's records, the bank says "let's see your evidence", and the bank decides whether or not there is enough evidence to warrant allowing an investigation. I realise that that is not what is going on in this case. But it's interesting to think about.
War, security, health care, clean water, etc., are all being privatised. Why not justice?
Does this happen with all shows? Or just scifi? Is it a little too conspiracy-theory to think that a network with as many politically conservative and backwards execs as Fox is purposefully fucking with any show that might make people think and re-evaluate ideas? That's not the exclusive domain of scifi, but there's a strong correlation there...
I think your agreement is up now. If they change the terms of the contract, it's a new contract. The old one is void. They don't like it and will try to persuade you that it's not true, but check on the legality of getting someone to sign one contract and then substituting another one in its place.
I used a contract change (additional 37 cent service charge or some bullshit like that) to get out of my Verizon contract a few years ago. They called me a few times to try to persuade me to pay an early termination fee, but eventually I explained it to them on terms they could understand, and they sent me my prorated refund.
Why worry? Sure, a sedentary lifestyle (games, books, criminal-masterminding, etc) will get you dead, but if you choose your game wisely and play well, you'll have plenty of extra lives.
Actually, I've recently decided to promote responsible and healthy transportation options by pushing the "wouldn't it be wonderful if a third of those other cars weren't [on the road | taking up parking | spewing smog]?" By the same token, I rather like the fact that while there are way too many people in the world, many of them really truly don't contribute much to overcrowding.
Faugh! Stomping out terrorism and crime is important and all, but get your priorities straight! The Economy is our god, it demands constant sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Now, if we can't actually get rich off it, then we're against, like, y'know, crime and death and shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to fed the trolls but, we are largely an atheist society. Why would someone care about the next world when science and economics is all that is true to them?
I'm rather surprised if anyone took the religious comment very seriously. It was meant as a joke, although the reasoning that led to it wasn't:
Abrahamic and many other populist religions (most surviving popular ones, as you said) try to cater to the poor (Buddhism warns against focusing on money, but certainly does not prohibit wealth, and many Buddhists are quite wealthy). But historically there have been plenty of others--created by a slightly different demographic--that allowed taking wealth into the next world. Look at the ancient Egyptians!
We know that fossil fuels have already caused enormous damage/illness/death and are going to cause vastly more. Anyone who values science knows this, and yet there are execs who, given the unavoidable choice between accruing huge personal fortunes and a clean, healthy, sustainable, safe world, choose the former. Given this emphasis on money over life, and I draw the obvious conclusion--the only alternative I see is that they don't believe in science (hence the joke). Perhaps William McDonough (?) explained it most concisely when he said "Republicans are afraid of dying poor."
And no, we in the USA are not anywhere close to being an atheist society. The details depend on how you ask the questions, but well over half of USians really believe that the world is less than 6000 years old, 75% go to churches regularly and believe in some kind of Christian Jesus (ie. the magical zombie, not the historical figure who said some wise things and may or may not have existed), perhaps half believe weird doctrine like "homosexuality is a sin"...
Thanks, but I don't want my species go extinct, even if it does make Shell execs richer (and the world a better place). But wait--can you really carry your wealth into the next world with you when you die? This changes everything...
Yes, fine them! For TREASON!! That's, um, what, $100 minimum?
I have to figure out how it works and so I'm constantly aware it has superhuman abilities and I find that very distracting from the realism.
What do you mean "the realism"? This is just good training for battle with: aliens, vampires, terminators, the FBI...
Mods: mod this guy "young"! He's schmort. He must be a mere child. He may of course also be a girl... in which case he's probably wearing pigtails or something...
re: Planning, the claim here and perpetuated by the article is that there are OMG RIGHT THIS INSTANT problems in programming. There aren't, unless you're a small programming shop that doesn't follow relatively basic practices like version control and QA'd releases.
If your QA team is perfect, then OMG problems are constrained to things like "our biggest customer needs this prototyped by yesterday". Stupid, but it does happen. Or do you advocate firing any client who makes such patently idiotic and shortsighted requests? :)
re: Managers, I would advocate firing anyone who hired a Josh.
Sounds like your experience is not with companies that could have put him to good use. I believe that that makes you lucky. I'd hate to deal with him, for sure. And a company with a Josh but without a manager who can keep him from doing damage is indeed screwed.
It's been a while so I don't have a reference at hand, but I thought that pair programming had been pretty rigorously shown to improve code output (by some measure that eludes me, but involving quality and production rate) under a wide range of circumstances? Perhaps not "always", but "more often than not". I know people complain about it, and I know what you mean about the concentration bubble, but the numbers don't lie. If, that is, I'm remembering them correctly, the experiments were well-controlled, the pairs were typical, etc...?
It amazes me how many people will drop $1k+ without bothering to do some basic research on what they're buying. Ignorance is bliss I guess
Crikey, yes. Look at all the people who drop $40+k on an SUV "for safety", even though they're not only far more dangerous for everyone else on the road, but also for their occupants! It's amazing how few people do any reading before spending that kind of money. And then they read consumerreports to help them choose bottled water.
6 megapixels is fine for almost everything I do. But of course 24 megapixels is sort of like 6 mp with a 2x zoom--you can crop without losing resolution. Of course, you lose on noise...
But a 24mp image downsampled to 6mp is apparently going to be cleaner than a 6mp image... there's a good article about this hiding somewhere on http://www.dxomark.com/
What resolution you need depends on what you do, but making larger prints does not mean you need higher resolution--it just means you look at it from 5' away rather than 1'. A well-composed photo usually looks best when it takes up a fixed amount of your visual field!
If the guy produces a lot of unmaintainable code then he's costing almost as much as he's making for the company.
Maybe. Depends on how they use him. Read my post again.
Software development is 40% technical and 60% people. [citation needed]
There, fixed that for you. How do you even measure those things quantitatively? That's nothing more than a way of saying "people skills matter too" and yet you're parroting it like it's a law of physics.
Even assuming those numbers are correct in general (to two significant figures, even), do you think that there's no variation? Do you think that you can measure an average and then insist that the real world must match the average in every case? Precisely enough that you can do that sort of math?
however to balance him you will need to hire someone who is like 10% technical and 90% people skills just to support him.
What does this mean?? It's not even wrong. Firstly, 10% technical and 90% people sounds like a manager or enabler, you need those anyway, and one of them can support a lot more than one 90/10 like a Josh. Secondly, are you suggesting that the company as a whole needs to add up the raw ability scores of all of its employees and make sure that the average is upheld? Methinks you've been playing too much D&D!
And you're still ignoring the first law of hiring: figure out what the person is worth to you and offer him that. If he wants more, then you can fire him. Again, another inexact science, but not so bad...
They should be recognized as douchebags and fired on the spot.
Sounds like you want him fired because you don't get along with him. Perhaps you're jealous of his ability, such as it is? You needn't be--a good coder who can work with people is generally far more useful than a great one who can't.
Proper management and planning means you don't need a Josh on your team.
Proper planning means you'll anticipate every eventuality and be ready for it, which is of course impossible given that outside factors are basically random.
The guy should have been fired before he was ever allowed to become so integral to their solutions that getting rid of him would mean pain for the group.
You're confusing two issues here. He should clearly not have been allowed to become so integral to a sustainable solution, since he fucked up any hope of that. Firing him is one way to keep him from becoming integral to long-term solutions.
You might just as well advocate firing any manager who lets a Josh become involved in long-term projects. That would be just as correct. Clearly there are things Josh shouldn't be doing. A good manager will see that.
Actually, I like the idea of keeping Josh around just in order to test new managers. If they can't figure out how to use him effectively, fire them. He could be a truly invaluable resource to the company even if not a single piece of his code ever gets executed.
Because there are a lot of good people who can do the work and better and be a company player too.
Um no.
The article was about someone who can do an incredible amount of coding in a very short time. Indeed, more coding in less time than most anyone else.
It isn't that they weren't smart. In every case, these "great" developers were the most talented in the group. Their intellectual abilities and problem solving capabilities were unparalleled.
Obviously, if there are a lot of people who are equally fast and one can't work with teammates, then fire the asshole. But that wasn't the question. The question was how to deal with one asshole who can churn out more code faster than everyone else. You can tell me you're as good as anyone else until you're blue in the face--in which case your employer is lucky to have you--but that's not what the article was about. It was about someone who was much better than you (for a certain very circumscribed--but potentially useful--definition of "better").
Sure, if you spent sufficient time and money, you could find someone better than Josh. And ideally you do. There's always someone better on the market, out there, somewhere--especially in this economy. But if you have a limited budget for finding and hiring the best of the best, then an acceptable compromise is learning how to use the people you have. Understand what he is, and isn't, good for, and offer him what he's worth to the company. And learn to use him wisely.
I know that it's cool to say 'hey, Linux is making headway' but it's also true to say that someone else is losing out.
Well, yes, obviously. But the people losing out are service providers who are providing an obsolete service. Here is a situation in which you can truly get something for nothing (Linux exists; if you use it (and if it doesn't suck admins) nobody loses. It's the ideal of communism, in which I take your cow but you still have your cow). And you're bellyaching about someone who was making money by creating artificial scarcity (you can only use an OS if you pay us) not being able to do so anymore.
This sounds like the argument "Wait--if we stop polluting our streams and rivers, people will just be able to drink from them FOR FREE! All the purveyors of expensive bottled spring water lose out!" How is that scary?
Does society lose?
People like Josh, on the other hand, should be fired on the spot.
I don't think so. They can just be recognised for what they are, and treated accordingly. Think of him as a fire extinguisher--a pain in the ass to clean up after, but from time to time invaluable. Sometimes you need a solution NOW, and you will have time to clean it up (or re-implement it more carefully) later. Perhaps your expectations for him were too high. Understand your resources and learn to use them appropriately.
This might be of interest to readers of the current thread: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7943906.stm
I doubt 131 (or more now) is a record. If you say something controversial, good conversation might ensue (or, of course, it can get you fired...). I didn't understand "troll" either.
Apparently one reason why sociology research is usually done so poorly is that many people can't consider the questions without becoming upset.
You might like this?
A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it, can be warped to serve harmful ends. We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
--Steven Pinker
Most people don't handle issues involving conflict well.
The devil take thee, self-righteous cad!
So a real warning to people who naively surrender their privacy, about how that information can be misused and twisted out of shape to present in what ever light people can use to their advantage. So face book, myspace et al, a really bad idea unless you simply want to put up a completely non personal digital illusion of yourself and present yourself in the best possible light.
You are right. Of course, the problem is that if you never tell anyone about yourself, you will have no friends, and the Internet is remarkably useful for communication. Written media like facebook are a problem, but so are letters, diaries, anything that goes beyond the spoken word. Does facebook help more than it hurts? Every piece of technology can be used for good and for ill, and there is no easy way to foresee whether it will work out well in any case.
The American Indians invented the Internet and lawyers 1000 years ago, decided that it caused more problems than it solved, and wisely decided that an oral-only tradition was really the way to go, after all.
(1) Yes, if success means being able to kill people. (2) Have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel? You might like it. It goes a long way towards answering your question. To wit: there were a bunch of factors, and more than a few had to do with coincidences of geography.
Well put.
I'd go a step further. Crime should be likely to hurt you: (what you stand to gain) * (your chance of getting away with it) should be significantly less than (what you stand to lose if you get caught) * (your probability of getting caught). If you just paid back what you gained, you'd be a fool not to commit crimes.
If "due process" becomes the same sort of joke internationally that it is in the USA (and elsewhere) (border laptop confiscations, random car searches and paper checks, warrantless wiretapping, surveillance face recognition, ...), then it seems reasonable that people will (1) legitimately stop paying taxes to a government that has broken its end of the contract (eg. the Constitution in the USA), and (2) look for large and powerful entities that will actually respect their contracts. If banks have their own fair and reasonable judicial system, it's no less sad that governments don't, but at least someone powerful does. At least for now...
Yes, I've just painted a scenario in which the police go to the bank and demand a client's records, the bank says "let's see your evidence", and the bank decides whether or not there is enough evidence to warrant allowing an investigation. I realise that that is not what is going on in this case. But it's interesting to think about.
War, security, health care, clean water, etc., are all being privatised. Why not justice?
Does this happen with all shows? Or just scifi? Is it a little too conspiracy-theory to think that a network with as many politically conservative and backwards execs as Fox is purposefully fucking with any show that might make people think and re-evaluate ideas? That's not the exclusive domain of scifi, but there's a strong correlation there...
I think your agreement is up now. If they change the terms of the contract, it's a new contract. The old one is void. They don't like it and will try to persuade you that it's not true, but check on the legality of getting someone to sign one contract and then substituting another one in its place.
I used a contract change (additional 37 cent service charge or some bullshit like that) to get out of my Verizon contract a few years ago. They called me a few times to try to persuade me to pay an early termination fee, but eventually I explained it to them on terms they could understand, and they sent me my prorated refund.
Why worry? Sure, a sedentary lifestyle (games, books, criminal-masterminding, etc) will get you dead, but if you choose your game wisely and play well, you'll have plenty of extra lives.
Actually, I've recently decided to promote responsible and healthy transportation options by pushing the "wouldn't it be wonderful if a third of those other cars weren't [on the road | taking up parking | spewing smog]?" By the same token, I rather like the fact that while there are way too many people in the world, many of them really truly don't contribute much to overcrowding.
Faugh! Stomping out terrorism and crime is important and all, but get your priorities straight! The Economy is our god, it demands constant sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Now, if we can't actually get rich off it, then we're against, like, y'know, crime and death and shit.
Interesting. Is that what Wall Street economists do as well?
Speaking of, if you're buying cocaine, please, for the sake of our economy, buy US-made stuff. Doing Mexican cocaine is unpatriotic.
"Unless you're Mexican, you insensitive clod"?