Interesting viewpoint, I see some validity to it, there is a partner infrastructure supporting MS products that employs many more people than MS does, and they have been much more suseptible to the ups and downs of the industry as well. This "external" service infrastructure is a big difference between IBM and MS.
But I don't think they are "unwilling". And it is not so different than the Linux story as well.
In fact you could say that IBM has decided that they are going to live off the Linux dev community and save themselves a lot of money (and confusion, how many OS's did IBM develop and support (and then drop)?).
12 billion profit with only 60,000 people? That is like 200,000 dollars per head profit. How many other firms with over 10,000 people can do that? Considering the average salery is bound to be like 100k or less, they are doing great on that front. Whatever those guys are doing, from the aspect of profit they are doing it right.
I think IBM makes like 8 billion with 200,000+ people (or like 40k profit per head). That is nearer the industry average.
I don't think MSFT has far too many people, though any firm in the world that is as old as MSFT is bound to have some fat.
I loved studying math, have never regretted it, and having done so is a huge advantage to me even today (20 years later). But I have never gottem paid purely on my ability to do math, and all the jobs I know that do that (like teaching) did not appeal to me.
Programming makes it far easier to use math but you need a third thing to be really valuable.
Finance and economics are your best bet as they are so universally in demand, but any carefully chosen engineering disipline will also do.
Be careful about getting a doctorate though. If you do, do it fast and don't tell anyone (much). Doctorates have an ever worsening reputation as being hopelessly theoretical and inflexible.
The business of america has always been business. Engineers and Scientists have always been second best, and are most admired if they sucessful businessmen too, like Thomas Edison.
And I am sure that the NASA engineers would do a much better job if they thought that their own lives and families depended on them doing the best job they could. It is just that we are all so rich and bloated now. That is the price of sucess.
I often wonder how Rome pulled off being top dog for so long. I don't think America's dominance will last anything like that long.
I think thhe "too many people" argument is simply wrong. As technology advances, the world can easily support more and more people. The environment is far better off than it was when I was a child, although it has close to twice as many people, and is still improving. The problem in the future will be a lack of population, as our societies all strongly discourages children by putting those who have them at a tremendous economic disadvantage.
I would guess that with careful use of new technologies (like genetic engineering) and moving some of industries off planet, earth could support something like 20 billion people. In fact it is unlikely to even see 9, and no one is sure where the population will level off once it starts shrinking.
In fact as all of our economic systems have evolved to cope with growing and not falling populations, it is not clear that we can cope with decling populations at all. Look at the political paralysis about funding retirement shemes in Japan, Germany and the USA. We might see a very long worldwide depression once the big two pops (India and China) start to decline as well, but as most of the readers here will most likely be dead, I guess it doesn't matter much.
You will find what you look for
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Subject says it all. There are good people everywhere, and even the most corrupt workplaces have pockets of good. Outside the military you have much more control over your own fate. You can almost always immediately change your job and location, and fairly rapidly change your profession as well.
Looks like you are going to have to get used to that. Don't fall into the trap of blaming your environment for your own lack of drive and initative.
My kids play a lot of Sims, but they play even more Neopets. It has a more complex economy, I think it is better on the whole.
The girls play dolls too, but not as much as Neopets/Sims.
I am sure it is good for them. Most everybody I know who has a good job spends a large portion of it wrestling with uncooperative software suites. Sims and Neopets do a good job of preparing you for that. And dealing with money (somewhat). And unstructured problem solving. And much more.
There are lots of good coding jobs out there. Bad ones too I know, sounds like you have one of the latter.
I know a many coders, working as I do for a large software company. They really only get a lot of pressure when there projects have gone south, or they are near to their shipping deadline. Maybe 10-15 percent of their time they have to work late or on weekends. That is a lot compared to other jobs, but acceptable in my opinion. Coding is fun if you can do it well, and very prestigous, at least in geek circles.
So the whole point of Open Source is that money is going obsolete because "Geeks value other things"?
I would respectfully submit that the purpose of money is to help decide on the allocation of scarce resources (whatever they are), guide production decisions, make the organization of ring-trades unnecessary, and do this all in a decentralized (democratic if you will) fashion.
Food and material goods could well become free goods, and peoples behavior and happiness would probably change little. Most people I know don't want stuff per-se, they want the status that goes with having certain stuff.
I think a Geek Society will also have the same issues (allocating scarse status?), and money will turn out to be the best way to deal with it.
Of course I think a good, economically sound argument can be made against Microsoft and against the creation of billionairs. In fact I thing Bill Gates has these frequently and might even enjoy them. I think he is on-track on his announced goal to give away almost all his money before he dies.
MS has practically killed Borland, Novell, and Sun, who were all wolves in their days. And I think they have picked their opponents well, Sony is struggling, and can't write software anyway. IBM's eyes are off the ball as they go after "Business Consulting", and anyway their HW/SW portfolio is hopelessly obsolete, confused, and incompatible with itself.
Google will be hard to beat of course, but they might beat themselves considering the hype they have to live up to.
Your main point agree with, but I know many socially functional people (men of course, with wifes, kids, girlfriends, and sometimes all three) who still search for p0rn.
In fact the only guys I know who don't search for p0rn are those who are afraid of their wifes and don't know how to cover their tracks.
Just part of being a guy I guess. Always interested in sex, whether or not you really need it.
I got one. Put it in my pocket and flew home. Then I showed it to my wife, it was less than 24 hours old. Her first reaction was, "it looks second-hand. Why is so scratched?" I checked my pocket for sand, but there was nothing special.
Still, I think it is way cool and I use it all the time when I travel. Wish it was built into my phone.
Remember, let the buyer beware. If I had waited another week I would have known to buy some sort of protective cover. Sueing is definitly not for protecting trivial amounts discretionary spending.
I got all 6 MCSE certs in a month in 1996 (or was it 7). Although I didn't really learn anything (I knew the stuff already), it gave me instant crediblity on the corparate meat market, and launched me on a sucessful consulting career.
But MCSE were fairly rare back then. "Supply and Demand" rules everywhere. Now it is not worth nearly as much.
For example I think the new MS Solution Architect cert will be worth something for awhile, once it goes live.
Hmmm. You must be pretty good. Like a lot better than the other few thousand people have tried this before. In particular you must think you are better than Larry and Serge.
Or do you think that Google is hiring TOO MANY programmers and should have stopped with 10?
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Interesting viewpoint, I see some validity to it, there is a partner infrastructure supporting MS products that employs many more people than MS does, and they have been much more suseptible to the ups and downs of the industry as well. This "external" service infrastructure is a big difference between IBM and MS.
But I don't think they are "unwilling". And it is not so different than the Linux story as well.
In fact you could say that IBM has decided that they are going to live off the Linux dev community and save themselves a lot of money (and confusion, how many OS's did IBM develop and support (and then drop)?).
12 billion profit with only 60,000 people? That is like 200,000 dollars per head profit. How many other firms with over 10,000 people can do that? Considering the average salery is bound to be like 100k or less, they are doing great on that front. Whatever those guys are doing, from the aspect of profit they are doing it right.
I think IBM makes like 8 billion with 200,000+ people (or like 40k profit per head). That is nearer the industry average.
I don't think MSFT has far too many people, though any firm in the world that is as old as MSFT is bound to have some fat.
I loved studying math, have never regretted it, and having done so is a huge advantage to me even today (20 years later). But I have never gottem paid purely on my ability to do math, and all the jobs I know that do that (like teaching) did not appeal to me.
Programming makes it far easier to use math but you need a third thing to be really valuable.
Finance and economics are your best bet as they are so universally in demand, but any carefully chosen engineering disipline will also do.
Be careful about getting a doctorate though. If you do, do it fast and don't tell anyone (much). Doctorates have an ever worsening reputation as being hopelessly theoretical and inflexible.
The business of america has always been business. Engineers and Scientists have always been second best, and are most admired if they sucessful businessmen too, like Thomas Edison.
And I am sure that the NASA engineers would do a much better job if they thought that their own lives and families depended on them doing the best job they could. It is just that we are all so rich and bloated now. That is the price of sucess.
I often wonder how Rome pulled off being top dog for so long. I don't think America's dominance will last anything like that long.
I think thhe "too many people" argument is simply wrong. As technology advances, the world can easily support more and more people. The environment is far better off than it was when I was a child, although it has close to twice as many people, and is still improving. The problem in the future will be a lack of population, as our societies all strongly discourages children by putting those who have them at a tremendous economic disadvantage.
I would guess that with careful use of new technologies (like genetic engineering) and moving some of industries off planet, earth could support something like 20 billion people. In fact it is unlikely to even see 9, and no one is sure where the population will level off once it starts shrinking.
In fact as all of our economic systems have evolved to cope with growing and not falling populations, it is not clear that we can cope with decling populations at all. Look at the political paralysis about funding retirement shemes in Japan, Germany and the USA. We might see a very long worldwide depression once the big two pops (India and China) start to decline as well, but as most of the readers here will most likely be dead, I guess it doesn't matter much.
Subject says it all. There are good people everywhere, and even the most corrupt workplaces have pockets of good. Outside the military you have much more control over your own fate. You can almost always immediately change your job and location, and fairly rapidly change your profession as well.
Looks like you are going to have to get used to that. Don't fall into the trap of blaming your environment for your own lack of drive and initative.
Good luck.
I taught my son how to program when he was about 10.
We did the first 10 or so little programs with just an editor and the javac. It was much easier to see how things worked that way.
Then we moved to eclipse.
It worked well. I think it is the way to go.
My kids play a lot of Sims, but they play even more Neopets. It has a more complex economy, I think it is better on the whole.
The girls play dolls too, but not as much as Neopets/Sims.
I am sure it is good for them. Most everybody I know who has a good job spends a large portion of it wrestling with uncooperative software suites. Sims and Neopets do a good job of preparing you for that. And dealing with money (somewhat). And unstructured problem solving. And much more.
Just my 0.02 Euros.
There are lots of good coding jobs out there. Bad ones too I know, sounds like you have one of the latter.
I know a many coders, working as I do for a large software company. They really only get a lot of pressure when there projects have gone south, or they are near to their shipping deadline. Maybe 10-15 percent of their time they have to work late or on weekends. That is a lot compared to other jobs, but acceptable in my opinion. Coding is fun if you can do it well, and very prestigous, at least in geek circles.
I think you should look for a new job.
So the whole point of Open Source is that money is going obsolete because "Geeks value other things"?
I would respectfully submit that the purpose of money is to help decide on the allocation of scarce resources (whatever they are), guide production decisions, make the organization of ring-trades unnecessary, and do this all in a decentralized (democratic if you will) fashion.
Food and material goods could well become free goods, and peoples behavior and happiness would probably change little. Most people I know don't want stuff per-se, they want the status that goes with having certain stuff.
I think a Geek Society will also have the same issues (allocating scarse status?), and money will turn out to be the best way to deal with it.
Of course I think a good, economically sound argument can be made against Microsoft and against the creation of billionairs. In fact I thing Bill Gates has these frequently and might even enjoy them. I think he is on-track on his announced goal to give away almost all his money before he dies.
You might be right, things change. But I remember someone saying that you never get rich betting against Bill Gates.
OTOH, Bill doesn't seem much interested in Microsoft these days.
MS has practically killed Borland, Novell, and Sun, who were all wolves in their days. And I think they have picked their opponents well, Sony is struggling, and can't write software anyway. IBM's eyes are off the ball as they go after "Business Consulting", and anyway their HW/SW portfolio is hopelessly obsolete, confused, and incompatible with itself.
Google will be hard to beat of course, but they might beat themselves considering the hype they have to live up to.
Your main point agree with, but I know many socially functional people (men of course, with wifes, kids, girlfriends, and sometimes all three) who still search for p0rn.
In fact the only guys I know who don't search for p0rn are those who are afraid of their wifes and don't know how to cover their tracks.
Just part of being a guy I guess. Always interested in sex, whether or not you really need it.
How is speaking badly about the US President illegal communication? Short of calling for his assasination.
I can't think of a time in my life when it hasn't happened in *every* newspaper I read.
To say nothing of Jay Leno. He will sometimes do two or three presidents in a night...
But then my wife says the same about me...
Not true. Especially with the collapsing birth rates everywhere.
I got one. Put it in my pocket and flew home. Then I showed it to my wife, it was less than 24 hours old. Her first reaction was, "it looks second-hand. Why is so scratched?" I checked my pocket for sand, but there was nothing special.
Still, I think it is way cool and I use it all the time when I travel. Wish it was built into my phone.
Remember, let the buyer beware. If I had waited another week I would have known to buy some sort of protective cover. Sueing is definitly not for protecting trivial amounts discretionary spending.
That should do the trick.
Or some last drastic variation that just kills the connections.
to whoever published it. It might even discredit what might be a good idea (I sure can't tell).
Don't they all take like 5 to 10 years of English in their school just for things like this?
If you can invest a few billion and get much cheap access, then doing anything else is obviously irrational.
OTOH, I seriouly doubt the ability of the US goverment to do anything cheaply. That is the real problem.
Rocket powered spaceflight should be much cheaper than it is today as well, and that sorry fact is what makes the SE look so attactive.
I got all 6 MCSE certs in a month in 1996 (or was it 7). Although I didn't really learn anything (I knew the stuff already), it gave me instant crediblity on the corparate meat market, and launched me on a sucessful consulting career.
But MCSE were fairly rare back then. "Supply and Demand" rules everywhere. Now it is not worth nearly as much.
For example I think the new MS Solution Architect cert will be worth something for awhile, once it goes live.
Funny. I wanted to post exactly that.
I bet it is just a phase.
If your attention span is getting shorter, try concentrating, i.e. a bit of self dicipline.
Don't blame "the Internet".
When I was a teenager I blamed girls. Now it is women. There is always something.
Judging by their relentless increase in revenue from quarter to quarter, nobody is making much progress against MS.
OTOH, it has to stop sometime, like when we all work for them...
Hmmm. You must be pretty good. Like a lot better than the other few thousand people have tried this before. In particular you must think you are better than Larry and Serge.
Or do you think that Google is hiring TOO MANY programmers and should have stopped with 10?