Good software engineers will make things work be it with XP or Waterfall. Bad software engineers will fail regardless of methodologies.
This. A thousand times this.
I often feel like writing a watershed paper called "Software Methodology Considered Harmful". In the end, the people involved on the software team and how well they work together are the most important determining factor as to the success and/or failure of a software project. Process in organizations often exists as a way of trying to paper over the problems of not wanting to pay for decent practitioners or making a corporate culture that's so awful that no one decent actually wants to work for them. If you like methodologies, you generally like looking at people as functional units rather than people - and that's a problem in itself.
There was a study done at NCSU by Laurie Williams. It showed that pair programming decreased errors, but took more overall effort to achieve similar functionality. Did the additional effort due to pairing work better than, say, additional effort put into code reviews? Who knows. It's very hard to compare these things. And that's the best study out there on the topic of pairing.
In reality, you're right - it's all pretty much snake oil. In the end, it's not process that saves your ass - it's the people on the team. Hire good people that work together well and it doesn't matter what process you use - you can pretty much throw them together in a room and they'll figure out how to give you what you want based on what they figure out about their own strengths and weaknesses.
Most process work is needed by companies who (a) don't want to do the hard work of hiring and compensating good people but (b) have to get software cranked out nonetheless. For those organizations, I'd just recommend picking something and then letting the local teams adapt - it's not going to make more than a 5% difference either way. Chances are, your issues are not at the engineering level anyway, but in places like HR, how much you want to pay people, or sales or product managers over-committing. In the final analysis, no amount of engineering process work is going to fix that stuff.
Agile can work very well in architecture - it simply has to be private, small-scale architecture, on the scale of a house or on a neighborhood layout level. Check out the work of Christopher Alexander (who invented the concept of the pattern language, from which software patterns were derived). His early work emphasized organic growth of architecture over large-scale planning, use of local materials, and energy-efficient designs.
Machine learning these days is all about multi-variate calculus. Anything statistical is going to require the use of calculus to understand it properly. If you do any engineering other than CS, you'll need calculus. If you happen to go into any application programming domain that needs calculus (see sciences and/or engineering), you'll need calculus. If you do scheduling work, you'll at least need to understand convolution (which requires calculus to understand) to get error bars on estimates of serialized tasks. Christ, are college kids this lazy these days? Now GTF off my lawn.
Places like Thunder Bay, Ontario, have to pay new doctors 2x or more than the old ones who retire, because new doctors all want to live in the big cities. That is the Canadian health crisis.
That's been a serious problem in the American system for at least the past thirty years, in case you really are as clueless as this comment makes you seem. In fact, it was starting all the way back in the late fifties. That was when my dad started practicing in a small town. The only reason he moved there was that he grew up on a farm and wanted one of those, too. The town had a vacancy for about four years prior to his starting because they couldn't find anyone who wanted to come out there.
Huge amounts of water go to this, which results in our lake levels getting low, which puts us into water restrictions where we can't water the lawn.
I think I see your problem. Expecting to be able to use potable water to get non-native landscaping to grow in locations not suited to the local environment might be the real issue here. You're in Texas - Google xeriscaping or, if that word's too big for you, "native plant".
In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem.
I'm sure that the Tea Party Republicans here in the US would deny that it would "destroy all life" and make sure it wouldn't get funded unless the mission were paid for with corresponding cuts in social programs.
I don't know. Maybe if there were some languages that broke new ground in terms of data abstractions, control flow, basic concepts of how to program, etc., there might be some reason to adopt them.
The last twenty years of language design has simply been a rehash of the twenty years before that. There hasn't been anything interesting out of the programming language world since CLOS and its multi-methods and MOP back in the early eighties. Maybe Erlang's process model from the mid-eighties. And the academic programming language community hasn't done much either, burrowing ever deeper into its own type-theoretic navel rather than exploring pragmatics.
Someone show me a language that beats APL in array processing, C in procedural programming, or Smalltalk or CLOS in OO programming - that could impress me and maybe make me want to learn a new language. Otherwise, I'll go ahead and learn the syntax and libraries, because that's about all that's different about your latest brain fart.
... the casual buyer, the casual seller, and the market maker all come out ahead!
That cannot be true. The money for the market maker has to come from somewhere and that means either the buyer or the seller is paying more/receiving less than they could have. So the market may be slightly less inefficient than it could have been, but your saying that all three come out ahead is disingenuous at best and absolutely false, if you compare against a perfect market.
As a corollary, you might want to consider that current market makers might actually be moving away from a perfect market rather than towards one - reducing inefficiency via one mechanism (better price discovery) only by adding inefficiency via another mechanism (increased risk due to volatility).
We're paying a lot as a society for those few possibilities, aren't we?
I don' t know. I sort of like having the opportunity to buy a house that has been confirmed by an independent inspector* to have a minimal standard of construction that it meets without having to rip down to the studs to see if the owner was lying to me.
Having grown up in a town of 750 people in downstate Illinois, I understand completely. I was lucky enough to avoid most "real work", except for helping to buck bails of hay in the summer in my early teens and help my dad castrate hogs. Instead, I was lucky enough, once I got my driver's license, to work at the local nursing home the next town over, wiping people's asses and changing pissed on sheets. Oh, and I helped a local contractor build a house one summer when I was back home from college. As soon as I became qualified for anything that (a) didn't involve dirt or waste product and (b) was done in a cool, indoor environment, I jumped at it. It may have only been data entry, but it was cool and clean.
I don't think you did the right thing, assuming it was just a boilerplate document saying that you read and understood it.
It goes to knowing where to pick your battles and not having a chip on your shoulder. Both are generally expected of people who need to work with others to accomplish goals.
On the other hand, your statement that your fellow employees (or as you put it, "sheep") were "caving in" says a lot. I'm sorry you find your life such a struggle against the powers that be.
Somehow, some way, it always has to be blamed on a conservative, doesn't it? Half the Americans around today can't even remember Ronald Reagan, much less be taken in by something he said.
The inheritors of the meme started by Ronnie have continued to spread it. These, of course, are members of the Republican Party and their conservative fellow travelers. Do you really think that the majority of anti-government rhetoric is not spouted by these people? So shut up with the false equivalency crap that "everyone hates government and thinks that private enterprise runs better".
Better yet, educate yourself about why you may have to stand in line at the DMV (or anyplace else governmental). It probably has to do with the facts (a) that they have to serve *everybody* and have procedures in place to make sure that all are treated consistently and fairly and (b) that they've been severely underfunded for the number of people they've had to serve (usually by conservative pressures on tax revenues and smaller state budgets).
Finally, not all of us hate government or think that private enterprise works more efficiently. I for one, having worked in the private sector for over thirty years and knowing several governmental workers (and, no, before you ask, the firms I've worked for have never received a large percentage of their incomes via contracts from governmental agencies), know that the private sector can be even more wasteful than government and that many governmental workers are quite diligent and do more with their limited budgets than most of us could. Your protestations are ludicrous and I'm sorry you've drunk the right-wing Kool-aid.
whom we hate because 99%1%GINI COEFFICIENT PROFIT-MOTIVE WHARRGARBL
Nice way to dismiss the real problem of heinously inequitable wealth distribution in our country. But I guess it's OK because the magical free market will sort it all out, right? And because the wealthy can do no wrong, as long as they hand out their meager crumbs.
And was your friend's name Jing? I knew a Jing and, wow, could she sing! She once sold me a ring. But Idon't know if she knows how to ping. But I know how to get hold of her, so I don't have to bing.
So one of the things I think is THE main failure of Android is the phones have crappy battery and the OS doesn't seem to be optimized for really running conservatively on the battery.
Amen to that. I've noticed that. And it's one of the reasons why my next phone will have an "i" at the beginning of its name. And what another poster says about GPS is dead on - this feature sucks power like there's no tomorrow on Android. I keep GPS off unless I'm actively using the navigation function of the phone - otherwise my battery's dead in a couple hours.
Exactly right! Which is why as soon as benefits elections come around for 2014 at my job. I plan on canceling my plan. I think the tax is likely to cost me more like 3K but my plan now costs almost 5 so its no brainier.
As in "I have no brains?"
That's a viable strategy as long as you're lucky enough not to have a catastrophic accident. Because, if you did have one, you would probably end up bankrupted by the experience, once the hospital and their collection agencies got through with you.
That being said, I think you're just one of the laughable "Fox News talking point"-spewing idiots on this site and actually have no intention of doing this - most of you are nothing but bluster and faux bravado, anyway. Besides, if you did this, eventually you'd be an economic self-cancelling problem anyway.
If only "just signing the guestbook" was as simple as it sounds. Go look up the actual process and you'll find out really quick why some people avoid the legal route: It's loaded with bureaucratic red tape & bullshit...
And that's different from any other country's immigration system how? Last time I checked, it wasn't really simple for someone to immigrate to the Commonwealth countries, EU countries, etc. and nigh on impossible to get into India or China without a lot of "bureaucratic red tape & bullshit". I guess you might be able to sneak into Somalia or somesuch without triggering a "papers please" mentality, but even there, I figure that eventually someone's going to want to know if you are supposed to be there or not.
Look no farther than the dearth of actual, fucking, take once and done *CURES*. Oh, but plenty of life-long maintenance drugs for profit lock-in, yessiree bob.
Maybe, just maybe, that's because drugs that cure a disease are several orders of magnitude more difficult to develop than drugs that manage the symptoms of a disease. Do you really think that a cure for schizophrenia would be easier to find than a drug that manages psychosis? Do you really think that a drug that cures high blood pressure forever would be easier to develop than one that simply lowers blood pressure for a given period? They're not, you know.
We are at the stage where we can push on the body chemically and cause an effect (lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, make penises erect, etc.), but in many of the underlying diseases, knowledge of the underlying mechanisms are still incomplete and we don't have good handles yet to even push against. People who think that If we can develop a drug that lowers blood pressure for eight hours, surely we can make one that lowers blood pressure for the rest of a person's life, don't really understand the problem and the complexity of the mechanism we're working on at all.
And, no, I don't work in the pharmaceutical industry - I've just read about the chemistry and development processes involved. It's actually fucking impressive, if you examine it rather than just bitching about the drug companies from the uninformed sidelines. The people who run drug companies are not saints, but they accomplish a lot of good, providing drugs that make a lot of people's lives better. They've provided drugs that literally saved my life. So go ahead and bitch about them - it's a free country. But I hope you (and others like you) don't bitch so hard that the drug companies go away - because they do a lot more good than harm.
Red states are In rural areas you have land and you are more self reliant.
I call bovine manure.
Red states suck more money from the federal government than they put in. The largest transfer payments are to elderly and disabled people in red states because the overhead in providing medical services to them is so much more than providing these benefits to the elderly in larger population centers (plus - interesting factoid - a smaller number of them continue to work after retirement age than in urban areas). In addition, rural people tend to get farm subsidies, take more money to get roads to them, and get subsidized benefits like grazing on federal land. These idiots endlessly suck at federal and state government's teats while all the while bitching about government being too large and costing too much.
It's like my conservative brother who was just elected to be a circuit judge - for years he was bitching about government employees. Now that he works for the government, suddenly, they're not that bad. Red state conservatives are the most hypocritical fools I've ever met.
How could a person who sees the idiosyncrasies of society laid-bare (to some significant degree) tolerate not to act otherwise than those idiosyncrasies dictate?
Most of us simply descend into lives of desperation and depression. Eventually we die, relieved that it's over. At least, that's what I think happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Good software engineers will make things work be it with XP or Waterfall. Bad software engineers will fail regardless of methodologies.
This. A thousand times this.
I often feel like writing a watershed paper called "Software Methodology Considered Harmful". In the end, the people involved on the software team and how well they work together are the most important determining factor as to the success and/or failure of a software project. Process in organizations often exists as a way of trying to paper over the problems of not wanting to pay for decent practitioners or making a corporate culture that's so awful that no one decent actually wants to work for them. If you like methodologies, you generally like looking at people as functional units rather than people - and that's a problem in itself.
There was a study done at NCSU by Laurie Williams. It showed that pair programming decreased errors, but took more overall effort to achieve similar functionality. Did the additional effort due to pairing work better than, say, additional effort put into code reviews? Who knows. It's very hard to compare these things. And that's the best study out there on the topic of pairing.
In reality, you're right - it's all pretty much snake oil. In the end, it's not process that saves your ass - it's the people on the team. Hire good people that work together well and it doesn't matter what process you use - you can pretty much throw them together in a room and they'll figure out how to give you what you want based on what they figure out about their own strengths and weaknesses.
Most process work is needed by companies who (a) don't want to do the hard work of hiring and compensating good people but (b) have to get software cranked out nonetheless. For those organizations, I'd just recommend picking something and then letting the local teams adapt - it's not going to make more than a 5% difference either way. Chances are, your issues are not at the engineering level anyway, but in places like HR, how much you want to pay people, or sales or product managers over-committing. In the final analysis, no amount of engineering process work is going to fix that stuff.
Agile can work very well in architecture - it simply has to be private, small-scale architecture, on the scale of a house or on a neighborhood layout level. Check out the work of Christopher Alexander (who invented the concept of the pattern language, from which software patterns were derived). His early work emphasized organic growth of architecture over large-scale planning, use of local materials, and energy-efficient designs.
Machine learning these days is all about multi-variate calculus. Anything statistical is going to require the use of calculus to understand it properly. If you do any engineering other than CS, you'll need calculus. If you happen to go into any application programming domain that needs calculus (see sciences and/or engineering), you'll need calculus. If you do scheduling work, you'll at least need to understand convolution (which requires calculus to understand) to get error bars on estimates of serialized tasks. Christ, are college kids this lazy these days? Now GTF off my lawn.
Places like Thunder Bay, Ontario, have to pay new doctors 2x or more than the old ones who retire, because new doctors all want to live in the big cities. That is the Canadian health crisis.
That's been a serious problem in the American system for at least the past thirty years, in case you really are as clueless as this comment makes you seem. In fact, it was starting all the way back in the late fifties. That was when my dad started practicing in a small town. The only reason he moved there was that he grew up on a farm and wanted one of those, too. The town had a vacancy for about four years prior to his starting because they couldn't find anyone who wanted to come out there.
Huge amounts of water go to this, which results in our lake levels getting low, which puts us into water restrictions where we can't water the lawn.
I think I see your problem. Expecting to be able to use potable water to get non-native landscaping to grow in locations not suited to the local environment might be the real issue here. You're in Texas - Google xeriscaping or, if that word's too big for you, "native plant".
In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem.
I'm sure that the Tea Party Republicans here in the US would deny that it would "destroy all life" and make sure it wouldn't get funded unless the mission were paid for with corresponding cuts in social programs.
Run, children, run from the Pacific NorthWest. Do not come here, the sun does not shine.
No! Do not listen to the infidel! That's just the shadow from the mighty Balmer's lifted chair, ready to be flung at a moment's notice!
I don't know. Maybe if there were some languages that broke new ground in terms of data abstractions, control flow, basic concepts of how to program, etc., there might be some reason to adopt them.
The last twenty years of language design has simply been a rehash of the twenty years before that. There hasn't been anything interesting out of the programming language world since CLOS and its multi-methods and MOP back in the early eighties. Maybe Erlang's process model from the mid-eighties. And the academic programming language community hasn't done much either, burrowing ever deeper into its own type-theoretic navel rather than exploring pragmatics.
Someone show me a language that beats APL in array processing, C in procedural programming, or Smalltalk or CLOS in OO programming - that could impress me and maybe make me want to learn a new language. Otherwise, I'll go ahead and learn the syntax and libraries, because that's about all that's different about your latest brain fart.
... the casual buyer, the casual seller, and the market maker all come out ahead!
That cannot be true. The money for the market maker has to come from somewhere and that means either the buyer or the seller is paying more/receiving less than they could have. So the market may be slightly less inefficient than it could have been, but your saying that all three come out ahead is disingenuous at best and absolutely false, if you compare against a perfect market.
As a corollary, you might want to consider that current market makers might actually be moving away from a perfect market rather than towards one - reducing inefficiency via one mechanism (better price discovery) only by adding inefficiency via another mechanism (increased risk due to volatility).
We're paying a lot as a society for those few possibilities, aren't we?
I don' t know. I sort of like having the opportunity to buy a house that has been confirmed by an independent inspector* to have a minimal standard of construction that it meets without having to rip down to the studs to see if the owner was lying to me.
*Standard caveats re corruption apply.
You are a true prince among the writing peons.
Having grown up in a town of 750 people in downstate Illinois, I understand completely. I was lucky enough to avoid most "real work", except for helping to buck bails of hay in the summer in my early teens and help my dad castrate hogs. Instead, I was lucky enough, once I got my driver's license, to work at the local nursing home the next town over, wiping people's asses and changing pissed on sheets. Oh, and I helped a local contractor build a house one summer when I was back home from college. As soon as I became qualified for anything that (a) didn't involve dirt or waste product and (b) was done in a cool, indoor environment, I jumped at it. It may have only been data entry, but it was cool and clean.
I don't think you did the right thing, assuming it was just a boilerplate document saying that you read and understood it.
It goes to knowing where to pick your battles and not having a chip on your shoulder. Both are generally expected of people who need to work with others to accomplish goals.
On the other hand, your statement that your fellow employees (or as you put it, "sheep") were "caving in" says a lot. I'm sorry you find your life such a struggle against the powers that be.
Somehow, some way, it always has to be blamed on a conservative, doesn't it? Half the Americans around today can't even remember Ronald Reagan, much less be taken in by something he said.
The inheritors of the meme started by Ronnie have continued to spread it. These, of course, are members of the Republican Party and their conservative fellow travelers. Do you really think that the majority of anti-government rhetoric is not spouted by these people? So shut up with the false equivalency crap that "everyone hates government and thinks that private enterprise runs better".
Better yet, educate yourself about why you may have to stand in line at the DMV (or anyplace else governmental). It probably has to do with the facts (a) that they have to serve *everybody* and have procedures in place to make sure that all are treated consistently and fairly and (b) that they've been severely underfunded for the number of people they've had to serve (usually by conservative pressures on tax revenues and smaller state budgets).
Finally, not all of us hate government or think that private enterprise works more efficiently. I for one, having worked in the private sector for over thirty years and knowing several governmental workers (and, no, before you ask, the firms I've worked for have never received a large percentage of their incomes via contracts from governmental agencies), know that the private sector can be even more wasteful than government and that many governmental workers are quite diligent and do more with their limited budgets than most of us could. Your protestations are ludicrous and I'm sorry you've drunk the right-wing Kool-aid.
whom we hate because 99%1%GINI COEFFICIENT PROFIT-MOTIVE WHARRGARBL
Nice way to dismiss the real problem of heinously inequitable wealth distribution in our country. But I guess it's OK because the magical free market will sort it all out, right? And because the wealthy can do no wrong, as long as they hand out their meager crumbs.
And was your friend's name Jing? I knew a Jing and, wow, could she sing! She once sold me a ring. But Idon't know if she knows how to ping. But I know how to get hold of her, so I don't have to bing.
So one of the things I think is THE main failure of Android is the phones have crappy battery and the OS doesn't seem to be optimized for really running conservatively on the battery.
Amen to that. I've noticed that. And it's one of the reasons why my next phone will have an "i" at the beginning of its name. And what another poster says about GPS is dead on - this feature sucks power like there's no tomorrow on Android. I keep GPS off unless I'm actively using the navigation function of the phone - otherwise my battery's dead in a couple hours.
Exactly right! Which is why as soon as benefits elections come around for 2014 at my job. I plan on canceling my plan. I think the tax is likely to cost me more like 3K but my plan now costs almost 5 so its no brainier.
As in "I have no brains?"
That's a viable strategy as long as you're lucky enough not to have a catastrophic accident. Because, if you did have one, you would probably end up bankrupted by the experience, once the hospital and their collection agencies got through with you.
That being said, I think you're just one of the laughable "Fox News talking point"-spewing idiots on this site and actually have no intention of doing this - most of you are nothing but bluster and faux bravado, anyway. Besides, if you did this, eventually you'd be an economic self-cancelling problem anyway.
Well, fuck, I might as well start shooting every government member...
Well, have fun with that. I doubt you'll get very far before someone stops you permanently, though.
If only "just signing the guestbook" was as simple as it sounds. Go look up the actual process and you'll find out really quick why some people avoid the legal route: It's loaded with bureaucratic red tape & bullshit...
And that's different from any other country's immigration system how? Last time I checked, it wasn't really simple for someone to immigrate to the Commonwealth countries, EU countries, etc. and nigh on impossible to get into India or China without a lot of "bureaucratic red tape & bullshit". I guess you might be able to sneak into Somalia or somesuch without triggering a "papers please" mentality, but even there, I figure that eventually someone's going to want to know if you are supposed to be there or not.
But now SteveB has cool marks, too!
Look no farther than the dearth of actual, fucking, take once and done *CURES*. Oh, but plenty of life-long maintenance drugs for profit lock-in, yessiree bob.
Maybe, just maybe, that's because drugs that cure a disease are several orders of magnitude more difficult to develop than drugs that manage the symptoms of a disease. Do you really think that a cure for schizophrenia would be easier to find than a drug that manages psychosis? Do you really think that a drug that cures high blood pressure forever would be easier to develop than one that simply lowers blood pressure for a given period? They're not, you know.
We are at the stage where we can push on the body chemically and cause an effect (lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, make penises erect, etc.), but in many of the underlying diseases, knowledge of the underlying mechanisms are still incomplete and we don't have good handles yet to even push against. People who think that If we can develop a drug that lowers blood pressure for eight hours, surely we can make one that lowers blood pressure for the rest of a person's life, don't really understand the problem and the complexity of the mechanism we're working on at all.
And, no, I don't work in the pharmaceutical industry - I've just read about the chemistry and development processes involved. It's actually fucking impressive, if you examine it rather than just bitching about the drug companies from the uninformed sidelines. The people who run drug companies are not saints, but they accomplish a lot of good, providing drugs that make a lot of people's lives better. They've provided drugs that literally saved my life. So go ahead and bitch about them - it's a free country. But I hope you (and others like you) don't bitch so hard that the drug companies go away - because they do a lot more good than harm.
Red states are In rural areas you have land and you are more self reliant.
I call bovine manure.
Red states suck more money from the federal government than they put in. The largest transfer payments are to elderly and disabled people in red states because the overhead in providing medical services to them is so much more than providing these benefits to the elderly in larger population centers (plus - interesting factoid - a smaller number of them continue to work after retirement age than in urban areas). In addition, rural people tend to get farm subsidies, take more money to get roads to them, and get subsidized benefits like grazing on federal land. These idiots endlessly suck at federal and state government's teats while all the while bitching about government being too large and costing too much.
It's like my conservative brother who was just elected to be a circuit judge - for years he was bitching about government employees. Now that he works for the government, suddenly, they're not that bad. Red state conservatives are the most hypocritical fools I've ever met.
How could a person who sees the idiosyncrasies of society laid-bare (to some significant degree) tolerate not to act otherwise than those idiosyncrasies dictate?
Most of us simply descend into lives of desperation and depression. Eventually we die, relieved that it's over. At least, that's what I think happens.
Smoochies...
Jean-Paul Sartre
I would guess 18, since you probably have a post to start.
No, it's 18 because you need one to end.