Actually wasn't Erlang written for and successfully used by Ericsson in telco control and/or billing software with some insanely low amount of system down-time? Never figured out why the more business-minded innovative leaders in software didn't pick up on that and find some programmers willing to drop their prima-donna loves for mainstream languages to give writing some other software in it to see if the results for uptime could be duplicated.
Heh... just workin' in telco systems tech support for a little over 15 years... and installed/maintained a whole lot of mountain-top RF gear in my hobby-time... I've seen stuff break that blew my mind...
My favorite this year was watching a forest fire via video from the TV News chopper, blow past one of the Amateur Radio repeater sites I help maintain (that also contains all the city bus dispatch radio gear for the city of Boulder, CO as well as a ton of the Sheriff's Department's gear, and a couple of low-power TV and FM broadcast stations.
Was fully-expecting everything to drop off-line, but the generator at the site did its job, and the grass was kept cut and the "defensible space" with trees cut down around the tower site was done correctly, so the crowning/roaring fire pretty much just roared on by... and the Sheriff's guys made sure the generator had gas for the next week or so until the power was back on.
Pretty wild to watch your stuff sitting in the middle of a forest fire. Murphy was kind to us that day.
Yup... lots of tunnels have better cell-network engineering than the out-of-doors, a few feet outside of the tunnel.:-) Lots of places also have XM/Sirius base stations in tunnels and areas where Satellite coverage is piss-poor too, but only newer XM/Sirius receivers can use that signal effectively. My stock XM (pre-merger) receiver in my truck, doesn't.
I'm just sayin' some Engineers work a lot harder for the title than others. Let me know when there's a PE certification for software.;-) Software seems to be one of the areas where prima-donnas really like the title, and then bloviate endlessly online about how it's not a science-only, or a tech-only position, but it requires "Art". In the Civil Engineer world, the "Art" is handled by the Architect. The Engineer makes sure the damn thing doesn't fall on anyone's family. And there are TV shows about when they screw up... called "Disasters". I've seen some true software disasters in my time in Tech Support roles, and never once seen a TV show about them... because they happen consistently and every day, the world over. Thus my observation that "Software Engineering, isn't." At least, not yet. Not even close.:-)
Sorry my advice was assuming a lot of things. Sounds like you've really been through the wringer, man. I wish you and your family well. It'll get better. (I've been there... a year without work... it wasn't fun, but there is life on the other side.)
Your math forgot that Murphy requires at least two of those sick days fall on a weekend when you wanted to do something fun and out of the ordinary.:-)
Yep. As a person who rarely gets sick I really appreciate working for a place that does it all as just one big PTO blob. I budget to leave a few days in the kitty into the end of the year in case of actual illness. Some people would carry it over for years until they put a cap on it.
Forbes (granted possibly biased) had a list of the top 10 cities to find a job in recently on their website. It may be time for a move if it's taken four years to find work. Lots and lots of folks won't though. They also had an article on ten places offering free land... Similar to homesteading days. Sadly, the lists didn't cross. Welcome to Urbanization.
Then they wasted a lot of money, which is common in young adults. It's not a generational gap, it's an overall complete loss of the concept of what things really cost. Did they buy any of those items on credit cards? At what interest rate? Do they rail now against "the man" on Wall Street who made them those loans and want the rich who did it, taxed heavily, hoping politicians will "make them pay" for offering them those DVDs, big flat screens, and crap they couldn't afford... That distracted them from purchasing assets that would make them rich in their old age?
Dead on. But more and more falling on deaf ears in our consumer debt driven economy. Americans are so stupid about what's an asset (worth buying) and what's a massive liability (not) that as long as you promised them no money down, 90 days before payments begin, and "low monthly payments!" that last the rest of their lives, they'd buy an elephant for the back yard. Sell the elephants at a fancy elephant mall out in the suburbs with a Starbucks drive-thru and everyone will want one.
The one that amazes me is the fucking Sleep Number Bed. You know what, if you work hard all day for your pay, and you get enough exercise, and you actually get TIRED, the floor and a blanket seem pretty comfy. Ask any soldier or sailor to list the places they've slept. Only $699 for the "barely better than a $20 air mattress" model, low monthly payments, come on in! No it shouldn't worry you that we can afford hundreds of hours of ads on TV, radio, and a giant store in the mall only moving two units a day...
Crazy shopping-addicted freaks we are. Well many are anyway.
Bell Helicopter perhaps? Famous ladies these days. Lots of work digging through all that raw data back then. Part of a chapter about it in the new book about the V-22 Osprey "The Dream Machine".
Those TV stations used to hire these people called "meteorologists" who could get a local forecast right greater than 80% of the time by looking outside the window and knowing what time of the year it was. Now they hire hookers and tell them to read NOAA text.
Real engineers have to pay for personal liability insurance for when the bridge falls down and the public sues them in Civil court, so that pay scale isn't as grand as you might think.
Holy ****. You still get manuals?! Must be nice. I've been doing tech support for over 15 years, and nowadays all I get are Quick Start guides that suck, Admin Guides of totally disorganized unrelated trivia no one needs, and Release Notes with a hundred bugs listed as fixed that I already know about because I turned in the trouble tickets on them and lived through that pain already. And maybe a stolen Sales slide show or two as a road-map for where we're going so when the customer says "when will this stupid crap be fixed?" I can make up a date, pad it heavily, and then say "maybe" by then. What are these "manuals" of which you speak? I have them for my airplane, but not any software in the last ten years.
No, coders are not required to sign the final plans, nor typically able to be held personally liable for negligence when their product falls down and ruins someone's life. Seen anyone in jail for the "Flash Crash" yet? Any Building Codes or government code safety inspectors? Get real. Software "engineers" can crank out mediocre crap their entire careers and get to keep their "engineer" title. If Civil Engineers did as badly or allowed people to occupy their half-finished work -- would you like to be a beta-tester of houses built with completely new and radical components made by 20-somethings every year or two? -- they'd be in jail or bankrupt from the successful gross negligence lawsuits.
Look for the professor who used to code in ADA for a living and left to teach. Best course I ever took. Including the comment, "If you can't find an error in a printout of your code with a red pen without running it or help from the compiler's syntax checker -- you really don't know how to code yet.". In a Beginning Java course in 1994 or 1995. I forget. That and, "Ask yourself -- Does this really need to be in a database? Most of the time, the answer is no."
Really slowly. Let us know when software "engineering" has the equivalent of Building Codes and the head Enginner signs the document that makes them personally and legally liable for any wrongdoing at each code release/something new built. Coders have always wanted the "engineering" title without the engineering discipline.
Terrible, those near-monopoly telcos like Telstra with technical standards books a mile high, and real engineers. Wouldn't want to have to actually regulate them properly like other Utilities, ya know. Judge Greene says so.
Slashdot Mirror
... would be a solution to the desire to pay for less real-estate.
(Not to mention alleviating a whole lot of cars on the roads. But we get tax breaks for the Coal-Fired Chevy Volt instead?)
Add videoconferencing for the "need to see/be seen".
It's way cheaper than building rent.
(Disclaimer: My employer sells such gear. And it works.)
... the Myth that being popular, makes you talented? ;-)
Actually wasn't Erlang written for and successfully used by Ericsson in telco control and/or billing software with some insanely low amount of system down-time? Never figured out why the more business-minded innovative leaders in software didn't pick up on that and find some programmers willing to drop their prima-donna loves for mainstream languages to give writing some other software in it to see if the results for uptime could be duplicated.
Heh... just workin' in telco systems tech support for a little over 15 years... and installed/maintained a whole lot of mountain-top RF gear in my hobby-time... I've seen stuff break that blew my mind...
My favorite this year was watching a forest fire via video from the TV News chopper, blow past one of the Amateur Radio repeater sites I help maintain (that also contains all the city bus dispatch radio gear for the city of Boulder, CO as well as a ton of the Sheriff's Department's gear, and a couple of low-power TV and FM broadcast stations.
Was fully-expecting everything to drop off-line, but the generator at the site did its job, and the grass was kept cut and the "defensible space" with trees cut down around the tower site was done correctly, so the crowning/roaring fire pretty much just roared on by... and the Sheriff's guys made sure the generator had gas for the next week or so until the power was back on.
Pretty wild to watch your stuff sitting in the middle of a forest fire. Murphy was kind to us that day.
Yup... lots of tunnels have better cell-network engineering than the out-of-doors, a few feet outside of the tunnel. :-) Lots of places also have XM/Sirius base stations in tunnels and areas where Satellite coverage is piss-poor too, but only newer XM/Sirius receivers can use that signal effectively. My stock XM (pre-merger) receiver in my truck, doesn't.
I'm just sayin' some Engineers work a lot harder for the title than others. Let me know when there's a PE certification for software. ;-) Software seems to be one of the areas where prima-donnas really like the title, and then bloviate endlessly online about how it's not a science-only, or a tech-only position, but it requires "Art". In the Civil Engineer world, the "Art" is handled by the Architect. The Engineer makes sure the damn thing doesn't fall on anyone's family. And there are TV shows about when they screw up... called "Disasters". I've seen some true software disasters in my time in Tech Support roles, and never once seen a TV show about them... because they happen consistently and every day, the world over. Thus my observation that "Software Engineering, isn't." At least, not yet. Not even close. :-)
Sorry my advice was assuming a lot of things. Sounds like you've really been through the wringer, man. I wish you and your family well. It'll get better. (I've been there... a year without work... it wasn't fun, but there is life on the other side.)
Your math forgot that Murphy requires at least two of those sick days fall on a weekend when you wanted to do something fun and out of the ordinary. :-)
Yep. As a person who rarely gets sick I really appreciate working for a place that does it all as just one big PTO blob. I budget to leave a few days in the kitty into the end of the year in case of actual illness. Some people would carry it over for years until they put a cap on it.
And that sociopath is likely still a manager, just with a new crew somewhere. What's your point? It failed and he lost his job, or...?
Forbes (granted possibly biased) had a list of the top 10 cities to find a job in recently on their website. It may be time for a move if it's taken four years to find work. Lots and lots of folks won't though. They also had an article on ten places offering free land... Similar to homesteading days. Sadly, the lists didn't cross. Welcome to Urbanization.
Actually norms are just lots and lots of anecdotal evidence. :-)
Then they wasted a lot of money, which is common in young adults. It's not a generational gap, it's an overall complete loss of the concept of what things really cost. Did they buy any of those items on credit cards? At what interest rate? Do they rail now against "the man" on Wall Street who made them those loans and want the rich who did it, taxed heavily, hoping politicians will "make them pay" for offering them those DVDs, big flat screens, and crap they couldn't afford... That distracted them from purchasing assets that would make them rich in their old age?
P.S. Shame on you for not confronting them about it and if they refuse to reason, turning them in.
I truly hope they go to jail. Shame on them.
Dead on. But more and more falling on deaf ears in our consumer debt driven economy. Americans are so stupid about what's an asset (worth buying) and what's a massive liability (not) that as long as you promised them no money down, 90 days before payments begin, and "low monthly payments!" that last the rest of their lives, they'd buy an elephant for the back yard. Sell the elephants at a fancy elephant mall out in the suburbs with a Starbucks drive-thru and everyone will want one.
The one that amazes me is the fucking Sleep Number Bed. You know what, if you work hard all day for your pay, and you get enough exercise, and you actually get TIRED, the floor and a blanket seem pretty comfy. Ask any soldier or sailor to list the places they've slept. Only $699 for the "barely better than a $20 air mattress" model, low monthly payments, come on in! No it shouldn't worry you that we can afford hundreds of hours of ads on TV, radio, and a giant store in the mall only moving two units a day...
Crazy shopping-addicted freaks we are. Well many are anyway.
Bell Helicopter perhaps? Famous ladies these days. Lots of work digging through all that raw data back then. Part of a chapter about it in the new book about the V-22 Osprey "The Dream Machine".
Those TV stations used to hire these people called "meteorologists" who could get a local forecast right greater than 80% of the time by looking outside the window and knowing what time of the year it was. Now they hire hookers and tell them to read NOAA text.
Real engineers have to pay for personal liability insurance for when the bridge falls down and the public sues them in Civil court, so that pay scale isn't as grand as you might think.
Holy ****. You still get manuals?! Must be nice. I've been doing tech support for over 15 years, and nowadays all I get are Quick Start guides that suck, Admin Guides of totally disorganized unrelated trivia no one needs, and Release Notes with a hundred bugs listed as fixed that I already know about because I turned in the trouble tickets on them and lived through that pain already. And maybe a stolen Sales slide show or two as a road-map for where we're going so when the customer says "when will this stupid crap be fixed?" I can make up a date, pad it heavily, and then say "maybe" by then. What are these "manuals" of which you speak? I have them for my airplane, but not any software in the last ten years.
No, coders are not required to sign the final plans, nor typically able to be held personally liable for negligence when their product falls down and ruins someone's life. Seen anyone in jail for the "Flash Crash" yet? Any Building Codes or government code safety inspectors? Get real. Software "engineers" can crank out mediocre crap their entire careers and get to keep their "engineer" title. If Civil Engineers did as badly or allowed people to occupy their half-finished work -- would you like to be a beta-tester of houses built with completely new and radical components made by 20-somethings every year or two? -- they'd be in jail or bankrupt from the successful gross negligence lawsuits.
Look for the professor who used to code in ADA for a living and left to teach. Best course I ever took. Including the comment, "If you can't find an error in a printout of your code with a red pen without running it or help from the compiler's syntax checker -- you really don't know how to code yet.". In a Beginning Java course in 1994 or 1995. I forget. That and, "Ask yourself -- Does this really need to be in a database? Most of the time, the answer is no."
Really slowly. Let us know when software "engineering" has the equivalent of Building Codes and the head Enginner signs the document that makes them personally and legally liable for any wrongdoing at each code release/something new built. Coders have always wanted the "engineering" title without the engineering discipline.
Terrible, those near-monopoly telcos like Telstra with technical standards books a mile high, and real engineers. Wouldn't want to have to actually regulate them properly like other Utilities, ya know. Judge Greene says so.
Correction: They paid Jobs and Apple shareholders. Apple stock has been a great way to fund an iPhone habit at AT&T's expense.