The morons are people, who bought houses they had no way of affording without reading the fine print. It is impossible for any democrat (and I don't mean the political party here, but anybody associating with the Demos rather than Optimates) to blame the "ordinary people", so they blame the bankers and mortgage brokers to help unqualified people get mortgages.
It's entirely possible. The mistake the bank-blamers make is the same one you're making: that if something bad happens, there must be one mistake, one sort of person who gets all the blame. But there were many compounding errors here, not just one.
Yes, people who got bad mortgages screwed up, and deserve to pay a price. But this does not excuse the people who tried their best to manipulate people into getting bad mortgages. Nor the ones who approved them, sold them, rated them, or bought them. All of those people screwed up, and if punishment is due, it is due all of them. And due as well to the regulators and politicians who were asleep at the wheel.
If you are looking for "morons", they aren't on Wall Street. Some of those people may be arrogant assholes, but "morons" they aren't.
Hah. That's hilarious.
Having worked for financial trading companies, I think "morons" is not a bad word for the people who got us into this, although I think the more precise one is "fools". Quite a lot of smart people saw the mortgage securities problem coming, and stayed well away from it.
My friends who are still in the industry are livid about the bailout. They recognize that it's necessary to prevent systemic failure, but they have taken lower profits for years, knowing that an array of fools and charlatans were going to get their comeuppance. But instead, you and I and my friends will be paying thousands each for somebody else's greed and idiocy.
Remember, being smart isn't enough to keep you from qualifying as a fool (or a moron). You have to be able to think things all the way through, and then behave in a way consistent with your thinking.
One reason you might see a crazy ad like that is hiring or immigration rules.
For example, a lot of countries have a rule that you can't hire an immigrant if anybody in the country can take the job. You have to advertise and then show why none of the applicants were good enough. If you've already got somebody you like and that you know will be good at it, then it's to your advantage to write the ad in such a way that only the person you've already got could possibly qualify.
It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems.
I agree with your general point, and think employers can indeed be too picky. However, this is a pretty bad example; doing embedded systems work is grossly different than the kind of development most people do.
I'd also add that from the employer perspective, given the speed at which people tend to change jobs, there's little point in training somebody. If it takes you two months to get up to speed and the average turnover is 18 months, then you're 11% more expensive than somebody who can jump right in.
Don't waste time applying for jobs unless your resume is a perfect match.
I think a much better way to get jobs is through personal connections. I'd agree that developers should be continually retraining, employed or not. But if I've got two roughly equivalent candidates and one has a recommendation from somebody I know, or somebody they know, then they'll get the job every time, as that's much harder to fool than an interview on its own. So I encourage everybody to go to events, join user groups, work on open source projects, and generally make friends with peers.
I'm just writing this to show why I'm going to be lazy, at least according to your definition (working 40hrs a week). Like hell I'm going to work myself to death simply to enrich my employers.
Just to be clear, I fully support your decision. There's nothing wrong with choosing a life you want, and then having just enough job to support it.
However, there are other alternatives to making somebody else rich. Especially in the US, starting a business is within almost anybody's reach if they take it seriously and put their mind to it.
That in turn makes it easier to lead a healthy life. If you're working for yourself, you're much more likely to enjoy your work. And you get to decide how your employees, yourself included, get treated.
furthermore, where are we supposed to go? wtf? is there a "destination" planned? cuz i didn't get the memo. [...] i hate looking for a new job. [...] It's only in Western Capitalism that the idea of financial insecurity and instability pushing people into staying with there jobs
If you have gotten to the point where you are blaming your personal discontent on the essential nature of capitalism, then you should pause a moment.
Whether or not capitalism is actually the problem, if you find working a 40-hour week the limit of your energies, then you might as well get used to your situation. Revolutionaries don't work an 8-hour day, and most of them end in ignominy. If you focusing on doing what you can with what you have, you'll end up being a lot happier.
How many do not have the financial means to get training to get that jobs? have you seen those cisco training courses? bat crazy money
I understand the other poster pissed you off, but this just makes it sound like you're making excuses.
There is no reason a dedicated person can't learn pretty much any computer skill they want. Hardware is cheap, the Internet is flooded with useful information, and software is free, cheap, or easily stolen. Most courses are priced and structured for large-company drones. If you want a better or different job, just devote the time to learning the stuff yourself.
Cisco gear is one of the hardest things to learn about, true. But even there, I know people who are giving away old stuff or selling it on eBay cheap. That won't let you learn everything, but you sure can get a lot that way, more than enough to get a job. Were I to interview somebody who had built their own home router lab, I'd hire them on the spot.
And if they're not going to refinance then how is it my fault.
The sheer idiocy of this statement amazes me.
When you took out your loan, you ASKED FOR a floating interest rate. That means that it could change. If you didn't know that, then it's your fault for not paying attention. And if you did know it, it's your fault for not considering what that means.
When you took out your mortgage, you bet that future interest rates would be ones that you liked. You lost that bet. I'm sorry for you, because that has to suck, but it's not like fixed-rate mortgages were some sort of secret that they only told you about if your last name was Rockefeller.
The housing bubble, which is undoubtedly the cause of the economic downturn, came about because democrats on capital hill thought every American should be able to live the "American dream," and buy houses which they couldn't afford. [...] but get the facts. Be enlightened.
You'd like some facts? Allow me.
The housing bubble collapse triggered the current problem (which is a financial crisis, and not yet an economic downturn), but they are not the sole cause, or even a major one. Other culprits are securitized mortgage debt, underregulation of derivatives, ludicrously lax regulation of investment banking, absurd expansions of Fannie and Freddie, and a failure of federal regulators to keep up with the times. You can find explanations of all of this in The Economist, which has been warning about a number of these problems for years.
The Democrats may have been complicit in it, but for the last 8 years, the Republicans have been calling the tunes. And most of the failures leading up to this crisis aren't legislative failures; they're executive branch failures.
As far as I can tell, the real problem here is giving control of government to people who are contemptuous of it. Republicans didn't used to be like that, and I hope they get over it.
Why not just keep the regulation the whole effing time?
A lot of people seem to think knowing the right level of regulation is easy. In fact, there are only two levels: too little and too much. And you don't know which you've got until years later.
The problem with excess regulation is that it's a quiet problem. Things cost more. People start fewer businesses. Business owners spend more time on paperwork. Competitors who are less regulated beat you like a drum. Overall, you get less economic growth.
That's not to excuse the free-market fundamentalists, the crony capitalists, or the ideologues. They aren't arguing against regulation because they're worried about the greater good. But finding the right level of regulation can be tricky.
I'm entirely in favor of that. The only thing I'd add, at least in the current crisis, is confiscation of up to 80% of the endowments of major business schools.
At least the shopping answer was a nudge to Americans to go on about their lives and keep the economy going.
That's certainly valuable. I'm not complaining that he started there. But I think it was a mistake to stop there.
What could the average American do after 9/11?
I'm sure others have considered this at length. But off the top of my head:
Recognize that the goal of terrorists is to cause fear, and remain calm.
Recognize that the goal of Osama Bin Laden was to cause conflict and polarization between the West and Islam. Be more aware of the international situation, understand where we are unintentionally causing friction, and work to reduce it.
Get to know people overseas. Get a pen pal. Travel. When your church goes overseas to volunteer, go with them. Join the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. Or just learn about the world from the comfort of your couch.
Pressure your elected representatives to work on solving international sources of tension like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Understand that although it was a terrible tragedy, it was not the only terrible tragedy, and that as others have suffered, survived, and moved on, so can we.
Instead, our energies were directed into an unrelated war, billions of dollars of security theater, weakening the rule of law, and a lot of hatred and fear. Oh, and shopping.
You didn't ask a simple question. You used loaded words and hostile assumptions, presumably to be a dick. Don't act all shocked that your hostility begets hostile replies.
I don't need people to tell me what to do, or what's a good idea. But it's helpful to have leaders tell us all how best to go about it, especially in novel situations. That would be part of leading. And I'd like them to remind everybody, especially during times of crisis, that public service is valuable and welcome.
This statement puzzles me, I've never understood the masochistic need of certain people post 9/11. Will it assuage your survivor's guilt if I told you to sit at home and beat your self bloody with chains? Or could you not volunteer some of your time or money to a cause unless the POTUS tells you to?
Point one: blow me.
Point two: I already make substantial charitable contributions and volunteer with a couple of local non-profits. So again, blow me.
Point three: I'm not guilty. I'm just community-oriented. When there are troubles, I like to help. Most people do. If you don't, that's fine; being an asshole is its own reward.
It depends on whether you define a lie as a) a deliberately false set of words or b) a communication intended to deceive or give a wrong impression.
Both definitions are in the dictionary. Those who like to deceive favor the first definition, as they can deceive without getting called out for it. Those who have a commitment to clear understanding favor the second.
Using that second definition, which is the one I favor, spinning is just a fancy form of lying, in that deception and manipulation are still the goals.
The algorithm does seem to consist primarily of a bunch of intuitions that David Skillicorn has had about what textual attributes correlate with spin.
And I'll note here that Skillicorn is a computer scientist, not a cognitive scientist. If we're just talking about his intuitions, then I'm not seeing why I should trust his over anybody else's.
He seems to hang a lot on Obama's use of "we" instead of "I". It seems to me that heavy use of "we" is exactly how community organizers would talk. Not because they're spinning, but because they're trained to generate collective action.
And heck, that's what I like about him. After 9/11, a great national tragedy, I wanted to serve, to help, but George Bush told me to go shopping. It was a bit of a letdown. This election, I'm really excited that both McCain and Obama truly believe in public service. But I think Obama's much better at getting people to actually do it.
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
I spend a good chunk of my time negotiating contracts with clients and vendors. Contract negotiation is a fantastic time sink, and only trained lawyers with years of commercial experience are fully competent to read and interpret contracts. I pay mine $250 an hour, and he's worth every penny. Can you imagine going through that effort for every pack of gum, movie ticket, or car repair?
To avoid that, we have a number of mechanisms to make it so that people don't really have to understand the deals for common activities. They just trust that thinks work reasonably and in the usual fashion. Those mechanisms include the Uniform Commercial Code, a host of regulators, a variety of case law, and a bunch of rules imposed by wholesalers, retailers, credit card processors, and other middlemen.
That AT&T has set things up so that reasonable behaviors yield unreasonable results is a mistake on their part. Whether or not a regulator can or will beat them up in this case, I dunno, but they'd be fools not to clean this problem up pronto. If people get scared to use new services because of stories like this, it costs them a lot more than $20k; it can cost millions.
My bet is that AT&T will waive most or all of the charges, and in the long term look at implementing better notifications and limits.
...because we here at Slashdot never fall for bogus news articles, inflated claims by hardware manufacturers, or the promise of yet another best programming language ever.
I said, more, not all. And you'll note a characteristic of those scams is novelty, while some of the classic scams like fortune-tellers and three-card monte are centuries old. We're definitely a harder audience to scam.
I'd have the time, money, and skills to try to get the cops involved.
There is something seriously wrong in what you just said.
That's true, but maybe not in the way you think. I can afford to hire a lawyer to help me sort out the best way to go after them. And maybe even an investigator to collect more details.
I can't blame people quite as much for not understanding how to do proper research on something, or knowing signs of a scam.
Further, we here at Slashdot, who are probably biased heavily to the educated, analytical, and practical, will always see through more of the scams. A scam artist in it for the money only has incentive to improve things to the point where it fools enough of the population to get money.
Not only do they have no need to make their scam better, but there's probably a disincentive. If I got scammed on something, I'd be livid, and I'd have the time, money, and skills to try to get the cops involved. Going after the bottom quartile is not only easier, but probably safer.
True, but an entry-level Java programmer won't have many accomplishments, will he?
I would hope they do.
If somebody has minimal work experience, I want to see a portfolio of things they've built on their own. They don't have to be particularly mighty, but they should at least work for them. They get bonus points if other people are using them. E.g., via the web or via an open source project.
I'm not interested in hiring somebody who only builds things when a boss tells them to. I want people who are so excited about programming that they'll be doing it whether or not somebody pays them for it.
Just to be clear, unit tests are how programmers verify that code conforms to programmer expectations. You seem to be talking about something else: verifying that the code conforms to business, customer, or product management expectations. So I think he should regardless learn unit testing.
I find doing a more rigorous requirements gathering process then writing the spec
For many projects, this is effectively impossible Competitors launch new products. Governments issues new regulations. Customers get new expectations. Vendors change their products. The behavior of users changes once they start to use your product. A community develops around your creations, leading to entirely new uses and interaction patterns. And once people see what they ask for, they realize they wanted something else.
Some of that change might possibly be predictable. Some of it isn't even in theory, as your competitors are actively hiding information from you. Much of it is just in practice too expensive to predict accurately.
Of course, you may work in a field where things actually are predictable. In which case, good for you. Setting that aside:
writing the spec and a code generation engine that consumes the spec is a process more conductive to maintaining long term focus and vision than your typical extreme/test-driven development style
I look forward to seeing examples of the approach you're thinking of.
From the way you describe it, this is generally what agilists call "acceptance tests", which are written in some fashion that a business person can understand them and hopefully write them. There is a lot of innovation in this area, including Fit & Fitnesse, browser-focused tools like Selenium, the behavior-driven design movement, and the domain-specific language movement.
Some of those things can use a code generator; many don't. But it's a commonplace in the agile world that automated tests are just specs that a computer can verify.
I'm going to risk being upsetting here and say that, if you have any real experience with SQL, avoid things like Hibernate. They try and force you to do things the way the Hibernate developers think, and this is not good because they just regard the database as a persistence layer, adding a lot of complexity for the sake of things you may never want to use.
The way that the Hibernate developers think is called "object oriented".
I agree that not all problems are well matched to an OO approach in all business environments. But if this guy is going to learn to work in the world's most popular object-oriented language, he should learn how to design object-oriented programs.
If he then ends up in a situation where he needs to use the database as a processing engine, he can always go back to the way it was done in ye olden dayes.
Slashdot Mirror
The morons are people, who bought houses they had no way of affording without reading the fine print. It is impossible for any democrat (and I don't mean the political party here, but anybody associating with the Demos rather than Optimates) to blame the "ordinary people", so they blame the bankers and mortgage brokers to help unqualified people get mortgages.
It's entirely possible. The mistake the bank-blamers make is the same one you're making: that if something bad happens, there must be one mistake, one sort of person who gets all the blame. But there were many compounding errors here, not just one.
Yes, people who got bad mortgages screwed up, and deserve to pay a price. But this does not excuse the people who tried their best to manipulate people into getting bad mortgages. Nor the ones who approved them, sold them, rated them, or bought them. All of those people screwed up, and if punishment is due, it is due all of them. And due as well to the regulators and politicians who were asleep at the wheel.
If you are looking for "morons", they aren't on Wall Street. Some of those people may be arrogant assholes, but "morons" they aren't.
Hah. That's hilarious.
Having worked for financial trading companies, I think "morons" is not a bad word for the people who got us into this, although I think the more precise one is "fools". Quite a lot of smart people saw the mortgage securities problem coming, and stayed well away from it.
My friends who are still in the industry are livid about the bailout. They recognize that it's necessary to prevent systemic failure, but they have taken lower profits for years, knowing that an array of fools and charlatans were going to get their comeuppance. But instead, you and I and my friends will be paying thousands each for somebody else's greed and idiocy.
Remember, being smart isn't enough to keep you from qualifying as a fool (or a moron). You have to be able to think things all the way through, and then behave in a way consistent with your thinking.
One reason you might see a crazy ad like that is hiring or immigration rules.
For example, a lot of countries have a rule that you can't hire an immigrant if anybody in the country can take the job. You have to advertise and then show why none of the applicants were good enough. If you've already got somebody you like and that you know will be good at it, then it's to your advantage to write the ad in such a way that only the person you've already got could possibly qualify.
It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems.
I agree with your general point, and think employers can indeed be too picky. However, this is a pretty bad example; doing embedded systems work is grossly different than the kind of development most people do.
I'd also add that from the employer perspective, given the speed at which people tend to change jobs, there's little point in training somebody. If it takes you two months to get up to speed and the average turnover is 18 months, then you're 11% more expensive than somebody who can jump right in.
Don't waste time applying for jobs unless your resume is a perfect match.
I think a much better way to get jobs is through personal connections. I'd agree that developers should be continually retraining, employed or not. But if I've got two roughly equivalent candidates and one has a recommendation from somebody I know, or somebody they know, then they'll get the job every time, as that's much harder to fool than an interview on its own. So I encourage everybody to go to events, join user groups, work on open source projects, and generally make friends with peers.
I'm just writing this to show why I'm going to be lazy, at least according to your definition (working 40hrs a week). Like hell I'm going to work myself to death simply to enrich my employers.
Just to be clear, I fully support your decision. There's nothing wrong with choosing a life you want, and then having just enough job to support it.
However, there are other alternatives to making somebody else rich. Especially in the US, starting a business is within almost anybody's reach if they take it seriously and put their mind to it.
That in turn makes it easier to lead a healthy life. If you're working for yourself, you're much more likely to enjoy your work. And you get to decide how your employees, yourself included, get treated.
furthermore, where are we supposed to go? wtf? is there a "destination" planned? cuz i didn't get the memo. [...] i hate looking for a new job. [...] It's only in Western Capitalism that the idea of financial insecurity and instability pushing people into staying with there jobs
If you have gotten to the point where you are blaming your personal discontent on the essential nature of capitalism, then you should pause a moment.
Whether or not capitalism is actually the problem, if you find working a 40-hour week the limit of your energies, then you might as well get used to your situation. Revolutionaries don't work an 8-hour day, and most of them end in ignominy. If you focusing on doing what you can with what you have, you'll end up being a lot happier.
How many do not have the financial means to get training to get that jobs? have you seen those cisco training courses? bat crazy money
I understand the other poster pissed you off, but this just makes it sound like you're making excuses.
There is no reason a dedicated person can't learn pretty much any computer skill they want. Hardware is cheap, the Internet is flooded with useful information, and software is free, cheap, or easily stolen. Most courses are priced and structured for large-company drones. If you want a better or different job, just devote the time to learning the stuff yourself.
Cisco gear is one of the hardest things to learn about, true. But even there, I know people who are giving away old stuff or selling it on eBay cheap. That won't let you learn everything, but you sure can get a lot that way, more than enough to get a job. Were I to interview somebody who had built their own home router lab, I'd hire them on the spot.
And if they're not going to refinance then how is it my fault.
The sheer idiocy of this statement amazes me.
When you took out your loan, you ASKED FOR a floating interest rate. That means that it could change. If you didn't know that, then it's your fault for not paying attention. And if you did know it, it's your fault for not considering what that means.
When you took out your mortgage, you bet that future interest rates would be ones that you liked. You lost that bet. I'm sorry for you, because that has to suck, but it's not like fixed-rate mortgages were some sort of secret that they only told you about if your last name was Rockefeller.
The housing bubble, which is undoubtedly the cause of the economic downturn, came about because democrats on capital hill thought every American should be able to live the "American dream," and buy houses which they couldn't afford. [...] but get the facts. Be enlightened.
You'd like some facts? Allow me.
The housing bubble collapse triggered the current problem (which is a financial crisis, and not yet an economic downturn), but they are not the sole cause, or even a major one. Other culprits are securitized mortgage debt, underregulation of derivatives, ludicrously lax regulation of investment banking, absurd expansions of Fannie and Freddie, and a failure of federal regulators to keep up with the times. You can find explanations of all of this in The Economist, which has been warning about a number of these problems for years.
The Democrats may have been complicit in it, but for the last 8 years, the Republicans have been calling the tunes. And most of the failures leading up to this crisis aren't legislative failures; they're executive branch failures.
As far as I can tell, the real problem here is giving control of government to people who are contemptuous of it. Republicans didn't used to be like that, and I hope they get over it.
Why not just keep the regulation the whole effing time?
A lot of people seem to think knowing the right level of regulation is easy. In fact, there are only two levels: too little and too much. And you don't know which you've got until years later.
The problem with excess regulation is that it's a quiet problem. Things cost more. People start fewer businesses. Business owners spend more time on paperwork. Competitors who are less regulated beat you like a drum. Overall, you get less economic growth.
That's not to excuse the free-market fundamentalists, the crony capitalists, or the ideologues. They aren't arguing against regulation because they're worried about the greater good. But finding the right level of regulation can be tricky.
I'm entirely in favor of that. The only thing I'd add, at least in the current crisis, is confiscation of up to 80% of the endowments of major business schools.
At least the shopping answer was a nudge to Americans to go on about their lives and keep the economy going.
That's certainly valuable. I'm not complaining that he started there. But I think it was a mistake to stop there.
What could the average American do after 9/11?
I'm sure others have considered this at length. But off the top of my head:
Instead, our energies were directed into an unrelated war, billions of dollars of security theater, weakening the rule of law, and a lot of hatred and fear. Oh, and shopping.
You didn't ask a simple question. You used loaded words and hostile assumptions, presumably to be a dick. Don't act all shocked that your hostility begets hostile replies.
I don't need people to tell me what to do, or what's a good idea. But it's helpful to have leaders tell us all how best to go about it, especially in novel situations. That would be part of leading. And I'd like them to remind everybody, especially during times of crisis, that public service is valuable and welcome.
This statement puzzles me, I've never understood the masochistic need of certain people post 9/11. Will it assuage your survivor's guilt if I told you to sit at home and beat your self bloody with chains? Or could you not volunteer some of your time or money to a cause unless the POTUS tells you to?
Point one: blow me.
Point two: I already make substantial charitable contributions and volunteer with a couple of local non-profits. So again, blow me.
Point three: I'm not guilty. I'm just community-oriented. When there are troubles, I like to help. Most people do. If you don't, that's fine; being an asshole is its own reward.
It depends on whether you define a lie as a) a deliberately false set of words or b) a communication intended to deceive or give a wrong impression.
Both definitions are in the dictionary. Those who like to deceive favor the first definition, as they can deceive without getting called out for it. Those who have a commitment to clear understanding favor the second.
Using that second definition, which is the one I favor, spinning is just a fancy form of lying, in that deception and manipulation are still the goals.
The algorithm does seem to consist primarily of a bunch of intuitions that David Skillicorn has had about what textual attributes correlate with spin.
And I'll note here that Skillicorn is a computer scientist, not a cognitive scientist. If we're just talking about his intuitions, then I'm not seeing why I should trust his over anybody else's.
He seems to hang a lot on Obama's use of "we" instead of "I". It seems to me that heavy use of "we" is exactly how community organizers would talk. Not because they're spinning, but because they're trained to generate collective action.
And heck, that's what I like about him. After 9/11, a great national tragedy, I wanted to serve, to help, but George Bush told me to go shopping. It was a bit of a letdown. This election, I'm really excited that both McCain and Obama truly believe in public service. But I think Obama's much better at getting people to actually do it.
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
I spend a good chunk of my time negotiating contracts with clients and vendors. Contract negotiation is a fantastic time sink, and only trained lawyers with years of commercial experience are fully competent to read and interpret contracts. I pay mine $250 an hour, and he's worth every penny. Can you imagine going through that effort for every pack of gum, movie ticket, or car repair?
To avoid that, we have a number of mechanisms to make it so that people don't really have to understand the deals for common activities. They just trust that thinks work reasonably and in the usual fashion. Those mechanisms include the Uniform Commercial Code, a host of regulators, a variety of case law, and a bunch of rules imposed by wholesalers, retailers, credit card processors, and other middlemen.
That AT&T has set things up so that reasonable behaviors yield unreasonable results is a mistake on their part. Whether or not a regulator can or will beat them up in this case, I dunno, but they'd be fools not to clean this problem up pronto. If people get scared to use new services because of stories like this, it costs them a lot more than $20k; it can cost millions.
My bet is that AT&T will waive most or all of the charges, and in the long term look at implementing better notifications and limits.
...because we here at Slashdot never fall for bogus news articles, inflated claims by hardware manufacturers, or the promise of yet another best programming language ever.
I said, more, not all. And you'll note a characteristic of those scams is novelty, while some of the classic scams like fortune-tellers and three-card monte are centuries old. We're definitely a harder audience to scam.
I'd have the time, money, and skills to try to get the cops involved.
There is something seriously wrong in what you just said.
That's true, but maybe not in the way you think. I can afford to hire a lawyer to help me sort out the best way to go after them. And maybe even an investigator to collect more details.
I can't blame people quite as much for not understanding how to do proper research on something, or knowing signs of a scam.
Further, we here at Slashdot, who are probably biased heavily to the educated, analytical, and practical, will always see through more of the scams. A scam artist in it for the money only has incentive to improve things to the point where it fools enough of the population to get money.
Not only do they have no need to make their scam better, but there's probably a disincentive. If I got scammed on something, I'd be livid, and I'd have the time, money, and skills to try to get the cops involved. Going after the bottom quartile is not only easier, but probably safer.
Hah! That's awesome.
True, but an entry-level Java programmer won't have many accomplishments, will he?
I would hope they do.
If somebody has minimal work experience, I want to see a portfolio of things they've built on their own. They don't have to be particularly mighty, but they should at least work for them. They get bonus points if other people are using them. E.g., via the web or via an open source project.
I'm not interested in hiring somebody who only builds things when a boss tells them to. I want people who are so excited about programming that they'll be doing it whether or not somebody pays them for it.
Just to be clear, unit tests are how programmers verify that code conforms to programmer expectations. You seem to be talking about something else: verifying that the code conforms to business, customer, or product management expectations. So I think he should regardless learn unit testing.
I find doing a more rigorous requirements gathering process then writing the spec
For many projects, this is effectively impossible Competitors launch new products. Governments issues new regulations. Customers get new expectations. Vendors change their products. The behavior of users changes once they start to use your product. A community develops around your creations, leading to entirely new uses and interaction patterns. And once people see what they ask for, they realize they wanted something else.
Some of that change might possibly be predictable. Some of it isn't even in theory, as your competitors are actively hiding information from you. Much of it is just in practice too expensive to predict accurately.
Of course, you may work in a field where things actually are predictable. In which case, good for you. Setting that aside:
writing the spec and a code generation engine that consumes the spec is a process more conductive to maintaining long term focus and vision than your typical extreme/test-driven development style
I look forward to seeing examples of the approach you're thinking of.
From the way you describe it, this is generally what agilists call "acceptance tests", which are written in some fashion that a business person can understand them and hopefully write them. There is a lot of innovation in this area, including Fit & Fitnesse, browser-focused tools like Selenium, the behavior-driven design movement, and the domain-specific language movement.
Some of those things can use a code generator; many don't. But it's a commonplace in the agile world that automated tests are just specs that a computer can verify.
You can make some awfully shiny turds that way. Not that it can't work, but it's not a silver bullet...
True. So?
I'm going to risk being upsetting here and say that, if you have any real experience with SQL, avoid things like Hibernate. They try and force you to do things the way the Hibernate developers think, and this is not good because they just regard the database as a persistence layer, adding a lot of complexity for the sake of things you may never want to use.
The way that the Hibernate developers think is called "object oriented".
I agree that not all problems are well matched to an OO approach in all business environments. But if this guy is going to learn to work in the world's most popular object-oriented language, he should learn how to design object-oriented programs.
If he then ends up in a situation where he needs to use the database as a processing engine, he can always go back to the way it was done in ye olden dayes.