And there's no competition there. The Poppendiecks led several sessions at Agile 2005, the big XP conference in the US. XP is much more about what goes on at the team level, while the Poppeniecks are more interested in broader business and corporate culture issues.
Besides, having coded for companies before, I know that if you don't properly document your code and make sure you have a preponderance for process control in place typically the whole thing goes to shit.
The Agile movement is about the notion that there's another way to keep things from going to shit.
And what is this about the bee's knees!?
A quick Google search gets you three explanations in the first 10 results.
[...] people came out and protested like mad, mostly the older farmers who didn't have kids [...]
People like this send me through the fucking roof. I've actually heard people say that raising children is a choice, and they don't see why they should have to support other people's lifestyle choices.
This not only ignores that not having children means the extinction of our species. It also ignores that every one of the dolts saying this was at one point a child, and entitled to all of the benefits that condition implies. Taking candy from babies would be less selfish than this sort of sour greed.
The intelligent ones will see right through [...] such faggotry.
Yes! Do not leave small bundles of sticks lying around your NOC. Rural types will be comforted to see something familiar, but for ultra-super-intelligent types like the previous poster, they will be a disappointment.
As for learning on the job - you leave uni, your straight into Job Catch 22.
Well, I think that part of the problem is that people change jobs a lot in the industry, and that fresh-out-of-school programmers don't understand that they have a lot left to learn.
To me, somebody with no experience maintaining production code is only slightly less dangerous than a rampaging bull. Actually, they're probably more dangerous: I know when the rampaging bull is destroying things, but in cube farms, you have no idea what the newbies are up to. And school has likely taught them some bad habits. When you turn in an assignment, it's done; you escape the consequences of your mistakes. But production code lives forever, and those small mistakes will add up into big costs.
One reasonable solution is something in the style of an apprenticeship. But that hasn't caught on much: new grads rarely think they need on-the-job training, and companies are unlikely to invest a lot training somebody who has good odds of jumping ship just about the time when they get to be useful.
Newbies should also look for shops that have open workspaces and practice pair programming. That's a much better environment for learning, which reduces the cost of having a relative novice around.
Saying "no no" or giving them punishments for it isn't a logical deterrent, because if you don't give it to them, they'll get it elsewhere.
I agree with some of your points, but that's hardly true. Compare the relative availability and use of two popular, mood-altering white powders: cocaine and sugar. You'll note that the illegal one is a lot harder to get. Prohibition certainly does reduce use, thus reducing some kinds of harm. Unfortunately, it also increases other kinds of harm.
Personally, I think prohibition and full legalization are both untenable. I'm in favor of treating drugs like vehicles or explosives: through licensing users. The relatively safe drugs (sugar, caffeine) are available freely. The somewhat dangerous ones (alcohol, nicotine, marijuana) require relatively easy licensing. And for the dangerous stuff (heroin, crack), you have stringent licensing requirements including lots of regular, mandatory safety training and field tests of your ability to use dangerous substances responsibly.
That way rational people can get access to the drugs they can handle. And people who have lost the ability to make rational judgments about drugs get cut off and given the help they need to get back to being sane.
My point is, and has always been, that we ALL have psychopathic narcissistic, antisocial, sociopthic etc...) traits, but this does not make us psychopaths
That's a very reasonable point.
I certianly wasn't saying that ALL executives or managers are grandiose, manipulative or lacking in affect. But I would say that the majority, and the most succesful are percieved that way by the majority of their employees.
That could be true, but you haven't done much to show that. I went through his evaluation criteria with a bunch of my bosses, clients, and other executives I've met. Only a couple qualify. I think there's a real difference between somebody who's a bit of a jerk and a psychopath, and I think people can learn to tell the difference.
Articles like this one simply put fear into the minds of the people that read them. They have no other purpose.
That's pretty far from accurate. This throws a new light on the recent wave of corporate fraud. That the perpetrators may have a diagnosable mental illness suggests very different solutions than the "few bad apples" theory.
This article didn't make me fearful. Because it opened up an avenue for changing a pernicious problem, it gave me hope.
So please don't everyone go of thinking there boss is a psychopath because they are manipulative, grandiose or don't show any feeling or affect. It's a job, and it is those particular traits that most likely allowed them to get where they are.
Sorry, but that argument doesn't do much for me. I know a number of successful execs who are certainly political players, but they are honest, realistic in their self-assessments, and empathize with other people. Even when taking actions, like layoffs, that hurt people, they feel the pain they're causing.
I think the really interesting question is why some companies structure things to reward people with mental illnesses. I think it's far from universal, but it seems like a common problem in large corporations. My guess is that psychopaths in charge create environments that encourage people to act like psychopaths.
Honestly, I feel that any "good" businessman will tell you that without all of these traits, you cannot succeed in this world we call America.
I know a number of good businesspeople, without the scare quotes, and some of them are fantastically successful. I think they are all charming and good talkers, but none of them come close to qualifying as psychopaths.
I think they people you're talking about are the obnoxious MBAs and the corporate climbers. From what I've seen, those people are generally terrible businessmen who couldn't run a lemonade stand. Without useful people around to bully and manipulate, they can't do much on their own.
It depends on your read of capitalism. The psychopaths the articles describe thrive in large organizations that have a strongly top-down power structure.
To me, capitalism is about empowering individuals and small groups to make their own decisions about what's best for them through free trade and free association. Many large corporations are capitalists only on the outside; on the inside they're feudal monarchies. And externally they strive for the same sort of utter dominance that they have inside.
Corporations like that internally quash and externally seek to subvert the driving engine of capitalism, the open marketplace. I don't see them as real capitalists at all, whatever their PR departments say.
You want a formula? A formula for the optimal flight path to Mars? Here's one:
y = (o*u) / (ar^e + an - (i*(d-i)+(o-t)))
Keep dreaming. It's a complicated thing. You have to factor in [...]
So the guy comes here, says he's interested in the complications, and you just give a handwaving, go-away-kid answer. My suspicion is that you don't actually know any of the details, and you just took the opportunity to be a jerk.
So I say: put up or shut up. If you do actually know how it's done, then you can pretty easily given the formulas and data for the major components of what you mention. Or heck, go to town and put up a Wikipedia article where you explain the whole thing. But my guess is that you won't; I'll just get silence or some bitchy, content-free comeback.
Otherwise, the best way to get really good performance out of a database, after there is a *reasonable* amount of RAM and CPU power there, is to add a good disk controller with a nice battery backed writeback cache.
Oh, agreed. We were talking about a user database, which usually has a really heavy read bias. If you're bottlenecking on writes, then a battery-backed write cache can indeed help, possibly quite a bit.
After that, if it's still slow, add still more RAM.
Seriously, disk access is hideously slow. And disk seeks are much, much slower than that. RAM for the entire user database will be a couple hundred bucks. And if other things on that machine are eating up the RAM, then move the user database to its own machine as a read-only partial clone.
If the OP's queries are such that the database is mostly read-only, I don't think that switching over to Postgresql is going to really show enough improvement to justify the pain of switching to a different rdbms.
If the queries are indeed read-mostly, it might be worth benchmarking it against an LDAP server. LDAP servers are built specifically for serving user data, which is usually greater than 99% read. It's been a while since I did benchmarks, but at the time they could beat the pants of of general-purpose databases.
Seems like there's a larger problem out there that wikipedia needs to address.
That statement falls into the same category as ones starting with, "the government should" or "the open-source movement should". Anybody can be a part of Wikipedia. Don't say, "they" should do something about it. Say "we"! The editing interface is just one click away.
It was the Beeb that put up the fake article about a fake dead pop star.
That appears not to be the case. As mentioned on the Boing Boing follow-up, it seems that somebody else added the initial article, and some BBC employee, who had nothing to do with the production or promotion of the game, added the Boy*d Upp page.
what are the chances of a BBC man putting up an article connected to a fake BBC website coincidentally?
I don't think it was completely coincidental. Working at the BBC certainly increased his odds of hearing about the game, and probably made him more willing to add on to the stuff at Wikipedia. But so far there's no evidence of a conspiracy at the BBC to maim Wikipedia for profit. So I don't think we could really call it intentional, either.
This would be trivial to do with a web based application.
No, not really. And this is exactly the kind of literal-minded, half-assed, thoughtless requirements analysis that makes so much software suck.
I make web applications for a living, and to duplicate what these guys can do with Word is far from trivial. Why? Because using a tool like Word gets them functionality for free that is a lot of work to code. Some examples:
rich text - a word processor has a ton of features for rich text, including bold, italics, and lists like this one
images - a picture's worth a thousand words
change history - knowing who did what is hugely helpful, and a lot of work to code
document transfer - if somebody needs to share a document, give control to somebody else, save a copy for reference, or just show it to somebody, that's easy with a document: you can email it, put it on a floppy, CD, or USB key, or put in on a network drive
printing - any word processor gives you great control over printed output; web sites need to render everything to PDFs for that and making a web interface for controlling all that would be a bitch
widely understood - people learn how to use Word in high school now, not for whatever custom interface you build in a browser
richer UI - web apps are making some progress, but GUI apps can still have a much better user experience
And as I pointed out in another post, modifying the web app requires a real programmer, whereas any secretary can futz with forms in MS Word or change the mail merge.
I love web apps, but using your psychic powers to say that people you've never seen doing work you don't know about can get along fine with a trivial web app is just asinine.
Really, you could automate that much better using web forms.
No, *you* could automate that much better using web forms. You're a programmer. But your average secretary can't.
That's why limited but special-purpose tools like Office are valuable. There are some tasks that suck to do by hand, but aren't worth the time and expense of a trained programmer. Especially in a bureaucratic organization where the programmers are in another building, on another budget, have a two-year backlog, require a two-month requirements analysis process, and in the end will build you something that still isn't quite right.
intern at a pretty large(think largest) financial institute. [...] and my awesome summer internship consisted of waiting around [...] some crippled website [...] the ones afraid to lose their jobs [...] streched it out to 10 weeks.
You may think you wasted your time. But now you have learned the impossible-to-believe truth about large companies, especially ones with very stable revenue sources. You didn't waste a summer; you saved yourself a few years plugging away at a crappy job right after graduation.
unit testing should be taught AS SOON AS POSSIBLE in my opinion
Amen to that! Experience with test-driven development is now my number-one criterion for hiring programmers.
Back in ye olden dayes, unit testing was hard, so nobody learned it. Today, there's no excuse. As a bonus, test-driven development is much more fun, so students are much more likely to enjoy the process.
But wait! More happy students -> more programmers -> more job competition -> lower wages for us. Teach those high schoolers assembler or C or something.
Java is easy to learn, gets programs that do real stuff going rather quickly, and is runable on any platorm, and is enterprise level.
I love Java and program 90% of my stuff in it, but I wouldn't recommend it for a high-school course. Ruby, since it's interpreted, has a much tighter code-to-effect feedback loop, which drastically speeds up learning. It's a very unfussy language, so it's nicer to beginners. And Ruby On Rails is some nice magic, so they can get a web app up and going quickly, which will be more fun.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of similarities to XP.
And there's no competition there. The Poppendiecks led several sessions at Agile 2005, the big XP conference in the US. XP is much more about what goes on at the team level, while the Poppeniecks are more interested in broader business and corporate culture issues.
Besides, having coded for companies before, I know that if you don't properly document your code and make sure you have a preponderance for process control in place typically the whole thing goes to shit.
The Agile movement is about the notion that there's another way to keep things from going to shit.
And what is this about the bee's knees!?
A quick Google search gets you three explanations in the first 10 results.
[...] people came out and protested like mad, mostly the older farmers who didn't have kids [...]
People like this send me through the fucking roof. I've actually heard people say that raising children is a choice, and they don't see why they should have to support other people's lifestyle choices.
This not only ignores that not having children means the extinction of our species. It also ignores that every one of the dolts saying this was at one point a child, and entitled to all of the benefits that condition implies. Taking candy from babies would be less selfish than this sort of sour greed.
*pant, pant* Ok, I'm done now.
The intelligent ones will see right through [...] such faggotry.
Yes! Do not leave small bundles of sticks lying around your NOC. Rural types will be comforted to see something familiar, but for ultra-super-intelligent types like the previous poster, they will be a disappointment.
It would be more impressive if there were people at the desks. :-)
As for learning on the job - you leave uni, your straight into Job Catch 22.
Well, I think that part of the problem is that people change jobs a lot in the industry, and that fresh-out-of-school programmers don't understand that they have a lot left to learn.
To me, somebody with no experience maintaining production code is only slightly less dangerous than a rampaging bull. Actually, they're probably more dangerous: I know when the rampaging bull is destroying things, but in cube farms, you have no idea what the newbies are up to. And school has likely taught them some bad habits. When you turn in an assignment, it's done; you escape the consequences of your mistakes. But production code lives forever, and those small mistakes will add up into big costs.
One reasonable solution is something in the style of an apprenticeship. But that hasn't caught on much: new grads rarely think they need on-the-job training, and companies are unlikely to invest a lot training somebody who has good odds of jumping ship just about the time when they get to be useful.
Newbies should also look for shops that have open workspaces and practice pair programming. That's a much better environment for learning, which reduces the cost of having a relative novice around.
Saying "no no" or giving them punishments for it isn't a logical deterrent, because if you don't give it to them, they'll get it elsewhere.
I agree with some of your points, but that's hardly true. Compare the relative availability and use of two popular, mood-altering white powders: cocaine and sugar. You'll note that the illegal one is a lot harder to get. Prohibition certainly does reduce use, thus reducing some kinds of harm. Unfortunately, it also increases other kinds of harm.
Personally, I think prohibition and full legalization are both untenable. I'm in favor of treating drugs like vehicles or explosives: through licensing users. The relatively safe drugs (sugar, caffeine) are available freely. The somewhat dangerous ones (alcohol, nicotine, marijuana) require relatively easy licensing. And for the dangerous stuff (heroin, crack), you have stringent licensing requirements including lots of regular, mandatory safety training and field tests of your ability to use dangerous substances responsibly.
That way rational people can get access to the drugs they can handle. And people who have lost the ability to make rational judgments about drugs get cut off and given the help they need to get back to being sane.
My point is, and has always been, that we ALL have psychopathic narcissistic, antisocial, sociopthic etc...) traits, but this does not make us psychopaths
That's a very reasonable point.
I certianly wasn't saying that ALL executives or managers are grandiose, manipulative or lacking in affect. But I would say that the majority, and the most succesful are percieved that way by the majority of their employees.
That could be true, but you haven't done much to show that. I went through his evaluation criteria with a bunch of my bosses, clients, and other executives I've met. Only a couple qualify. I think there's a real difference between somebody who's a bit of a jerk and a psychopath, and I think people can learn to tell the difference.
Articles like this one simply put fear into the minds of the people that read them. They have no other purpose.
That's pretty far from accurate. This throws a new light on the recent wave of corporate fraud. That the perpetrators may have a diagnosable mental illness suggests very different solutions than the "few bad apples" theory.
This article didn't make me fearful. Because it opened up an avenue for changing a pernicious problem, it gave me hope.
So please don't everyone go of thinking there boss is a psychopath because they are manipulative, grandiose or don't show any feeling or affect. It's a job, and it is those particular traits that most likely allowed them to get where they are.
Sorry, but that argument doesn't do much for me. I know a number of successful execs who are certainly political players, but they are honest, realistic in their self-assessments, and empathize with other people. Even when taking actions, like layoffs, that hurt people, they feel the pain they're causing.
I think the really interesting question is why some companies structure things to reward people with mental illnesses. I think it's far from universal, but it seems like a common problem in large corporations. My guess is that psychopaths in charge create environments that encourage people to act like psychopaths.
Honestly, I feel that any "good" businessman will tell you that without all of these traits, you cannot succeed in this world we call America.
I know a number of good businesspeople, without the scare quotes, and some of them are fantastically successful. I think they are all charming and good talkers, but none of them come close to qualifying as psychopaths.
I think they people you're talking about are the obnoxious MBAs and the corporate climbers. From what I've seen, those people are generally terrible businessmen who couldn't run a lemonade stand. Without useful people around to bully and manipulate, they can't do much on their own.
Capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior inherently.
It depends on your read of capitalism. The psychopaths the articles describe thrive in large organizations that have a strongly top-down power structure.
To me, capitalism is about empowering individuals and small groups to make their own decisions about what's best for them through free trade and free association. Many large corporations are capitalists only on the outside; on the inside they're feudal monarchies. And externally they strive for the same sort of utter dominance that they have inside.
Corporations like that internally quash and externally seek to subvert the driving engine of capitalism, the open marketplace. I don't see them as real capitalists at all, whatever their PR departments say.
That just gave me an idea for a business, "Psychopaths On Call."
Slogan: "You'd have to be sane to hire us."
What does the ease of the install have to do with the overall feature set of the OS? You only have to install once.
You only have one computer that you'll never be replacing? Who let you on Slashdot?
You want a formula? A formula for the optimal flight path to Mars? Here's one:
y = (o*u) / (ar^e + an - (i*(d-i)+(o-t)))
Keep dreaming. It's a complicated thing. You have to factor in [...]
So the guy comes here, says he's interested in the complications, and you just give a handwaving, go-away-kid answer. My suspicion is that you don't actually know any of the details, and you just took the opportunity to be a jerk.
So I say: put up or shut up. If you do actually know how it's done, then you can pretty easily given the formulas and data for the major components of what you mention. Or heck, go to town and put up a Wikipedia article where you explain the whole thing. But my guess is that you won't; I'll just get silence or some bitchy, content-free comeback.
Otherwise, the best way to get really good performance out of a database, after there is a *reasonable* amount of RAM and CPU power there, is to add a good disk controller with a nice battery backed writeback cache.
Oh, agreed. We were talking about a user database, which usually has a really heavy read bias. If you're bottlenecking on writes, then a battery-backed write cache can indeed help, possibly quite a bit.
And add more RAM.
After that, if it's still slow, add still more RAM.
Seriously, disk access is hideously slow. And disk seeks are much, much slower than that. RAM for the entire user database will be a couple hundred bucks. And if other things on that machine are eating up the RAM, then move the user database to its own machine as a read-only partial clone.
If the OP's queries are such that the database is mostly read-only, I don't think that switching over to Postgresql is going to really show enough improvement to justify the pain of switching to a different rdbms.
If the queries are indeed read-mostly, it might be worth benchmarking it against an LDAP server. LDAP servers are built specifically for serving user data, which is usually greater than 99% read. It's been a while since I did benchmarks, but at the time they could beat the pants of of general-purpose databases.
Seems like there's a larger problem out there that wikipedia needs to address.
That statement falls into the same category as ones starting with, "the government should" or "the open-source movement should". Anybody can be a part of Wikipedia. Don't say, "they" should do something about it. Say "we"! The editing interface is just one click away.
It was the Beeb that put up the fake article about a fake dead pop star.
That appears not to be the case. As mentioned on the Boing Boing follow-up, it seems that somebody else added the initial article, and some BBC employee, who had nothing to do with the production or promotion of the game, added the Boy*d Upp page.
what are the chances of a BBC man putting up an article connected to a fake BBC website coincidentally?
I don't think it was completely coincidental. Working at the BBC certainly increased his odds of hearing about the game, and probably made him more willing to add on to the stuff at Wikipedia. But so far there's no evidence of a conspiracy at the BBC to maim Wikipedia for profit. So I don't think we could really call it intentional, either.
No, not really. And this is exactly the kind of literal-minded, half-assed, thoughtless requirements analysis that makes so much software suck.
I make web applications for a living, and to duplicate what these guys can do with Word is far from trivial. Why? Because using a tool like Word gets them functionality for free that is a lot of work to code. Some examples:
- rich text - a word processor has a ton of features for rich text, including bold, italics, and lists like this one
- images - a picture's worth a thousand words
- change history - knowing who did what is hugely helpful, and a lot of work to code
- document transfer - if somebody needs to share a document, give control to somebody else, save a copy for reference, or just show it to somebody, that's easy with a document: you can email it, put it on a floppy, CD, or USB key, or put in on a network drive
- printing - any word processor gives you great control over printed output; web sites need to render everything to PDFs for that and making a web interface for controlling all that would be a bitch
- widely understood - people learn how to use Word in high school now, not for whatever custom interface you build in a browser
- richer UI - web apps are making some progress, but GUI apps can still have a much better user experience
And as I pointed out in another post, modifying the web app requires a real programmer, whereas any secretary can futz with forms in MS Word or change the mail merge.I love web apps, but using your psychic powers to say that people you've never seen doing work you don't know about can get along fine with a trivial web app is just asinine.
Really, you could automate that much better using web forms.
No, *you* could automate that much better using web forms. You're a programmer. But your average secretary can't.
That's why limited but special-purpose tools like Office are valuable. There are some tasks that suck to do by hand, but aren't worth the time and expense of a trained programmer. Especially in a bureaucratic organization where the programmers are in another building, on another budget, have a two-year backlog, require a two-month requirements analysis process, and in the end will build you something that still isn't quite right.
At least I am not the unscrupulous individual who is taking the time and effort into doing something that is morally wrong.
I went to the store, bought something, and am using it for what I please. My use hurt nobody. Where's the moral wrong, exactly?
intern at a pretty large(think largest) financial institute. [...] and my awesome summer internship consisted of waiting around [...] some crippled website [...] the ones afraid to lose their jobs [...] streched it out to 10 weeks.
You may think you wasted your time. But now you have learned the impossible-to-believe truth about large companies, especially ones with very stable revenue sources. You didn't waste a summer; you saved yourself a few years plugging away at a crappy job right after graduation.
unit testing should be taught AS SOON AS POSSIBLE in my opinion
Amen to that! Experience with test-driven development is now my number-one criterion for hiring programmers.
Back in ye olden dayes, unit testing was hard, so nobody learned it. Today, there's no excuse. As a bonus, test-driven development is much more fun, so students are much more likely to enjoy the process.
But wait! More happy students -> more programmers -> more job competition -> lower wages for us. Teach those high schoolers assembler or C or something.
Java is easy to learn, gets programs that do real stuff going rather quickly, and is runable on any platorm, and is enterprise level.
I love Java and program 90% of my stuff in it, but I wouldn't recommend it for a high-school course. Ruby, since it's interpreted, has a much tighter code-to-effect feedback loop, which drastically speeds up learning. It's a very unfussy language, so it's nicer to beginners. And Ruby On Rails is some nice magic, so they can get a web app up and going quickly, which will be more fun.