Except he offered it to them, *and they refused it*. So it's still his.
Only if they declined to pay him for the time. Otherwise, it's still technically theirs. There's little chance that they'd enforce that, though, so in practice it probably would never matter.
They were paying him for dooing his job description: copying data entry by hand. Not for his programming.
If he chose to do programming for data-entry wages, then that's his problem, not his employer's. Work he does on their dime is their property, regardless of his nominal job description. They can't force him to do the programming, but once he's done it, he can't unilaterally and retroactively change the terms of his contract. That's a good thing, too, as the same rule protects him from all sorts of employer abuses.
At worst, he should be fired for spending his time doing something else, but he should not have his IP stolen at data-entry wages.
Well, it's true they could have fired him. But they get to keep the IP regardless. It's hardly stealing: you can't give somebody a gift and then holler for the cops if they keep it.
If the production line keeps stalling because product gets bunched up and blocks the chute and instead of wasting time unclogging it, I bring in a pole and poke the ones that are about to get stuck, does the company own my pole?
No. The poster, however, talked about developing a tool on company time. If you bring in a tool, you can take it away again. If you make it on company time, it's the company's tool.
In the case of intellectual property like code, you should be very careful bringing in tools you've made elsewhere. To avoid a dispute, you at least need to be able to prove that you spent no company time or resources on it. And with some employment contracts, even that isn't enough. Be sure to see a lawyer if IP ownership is an issue for you.
Its success is because of its management, its failures because of its management.
This is pretty much base stupidity. It's like saying the success of a car in getting somewhere is because of the steering wheel. There are many important factors in the success of any business, and the failure of any one of them is sufficient to cause failure.
A company is driven from the top.
Some companies are driven from the top. However, many very successful ones aren't. 3M is a good example, and so is Google: both of them are driven by bottom-up innovation. Moreover, a lot of work suggests that command-and-control hierarchies like you (and imperial CEOs) favor are much less appropriate today than they were when they peaked in the 50s. See Artful Making or pretty much any article on the topic in the last few years of The Economist for more info on this.
Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV).
It's not so much hard work that I think is required; it's useful work. Americans seem to care less and less whether they're creating value. The large corporations where I see the most outsourcing are also the ones where I see a ton of waste, and much more effort spent on marketing a crappy product than making a better one.
This seems endemic to me. From Enron and Worldcom and the rise of the MBAs to the long-term reduction in graduating scientists and engineers and the huge reduction in long-term R&D, it seems like we now favor people who get a bigger slice of the pie, rather those who make the pie bigger. Exhibit A is our president: a nominal businessman who, as far as I can tell, never created any business value at all.
Hopefully the deserved ass-kicking we're starting to get from India and China well help us get back to basics. But our car industry never really learned the lesssons they should have from the Japanese ass-kicking that they got, so we'll see.
I've worked my share of 80+ hour weeks, and productivity doesn't go down.
Well, you think your productivity doesn't go down. One of the skills that decays quickly is evaluating how you're doing, and not just for beign tired. Drunk drivers think they can drive just fine, for example, and any hiker knows how insidious hypothermia is. As one back-country guide puts it, "the victim is the LAST to realize s/he's in danger".
My productivity kept on pretty much as normal. No 'cancelling out', no 'negative work', no extra mistakes. Yeah it can get a bit boring and maybe physically tiring, but that's why it's called 'work'.
There's plenty of evidence that, whatever applies for you, that's not true for humans. Here's a good summary: Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work.
I think you people are just lazy: you don't want to do much work,
Wrong! I love my work. But even when I'm obsessed with a new project and could happily work around the clock, I've learned to limit myself to 50 hours a week or so. More than that and I start losing my judgement and my enthusiasm. I can tell this pretty easily, as I write unit tests for all my code. After a couple of weeks of crunch mode I spend a lot more time bumping my head against the unit tests. And after a couple of days off to recover, I'll often realize that particular problems I was brute-forcing my way through could have been solved much more efficiently.
If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me.
Legally, all work you do as an employee is owned by the company. If you give them something more than they expect, well, you've given it to them. Generally that's the case if you're on an hourly contract, too, although it depends on exactly what's in your contract.
If you want the right to own the IP and want to be able to turn a profit on being smart about the way to do the work, arrange a contract that pays you by the piece completed. It's better if the contract is between Dell and El Womble Inc rather than between Dell and Mr. El Womble. I don't think it's legally better; rather it fits people's prejudices.
There are countless games you can play with a $1.00 deck of cards.
Dude, this is Slashdot.
So A, we're only willing to use cards on a computer screen. And so we can all play, we'd need to make it networked and each play from our own computers. And because that would feel kinda lonely, we'd need to add headsets and VOIP so we can mock our fellow players.
And B, if we were to deign to use physical playing cards, we wouldn't actually buy them. Instead, we'd register a SourceForge project to host open-source artwork that we would in theory use to print them ourselves on a printer at work. Except that we'd only finish the number cards and three of the face cards before we ran out of steam and just started hoping somebody would send us a patch for the rest.
I agree that today's government is not perfect. But my point is that things have gotten better, and that it is within our power to make it better still. Which is not only why Michael Moore did make that movie, but also why he could make that movie.
Yes hackers are a pain in the arse, so are spam merchants. Thats life, live with it.
No, no it's not.
Shitty conditions are not an immutable law of nature. Things can get better. Things do get better. Fifty years ago, government corruption was endemic. One hundred years ago, working conditions were horrific, and women weren't allowed to vote. 150 years ago, we practiced slavery, and life expectancy at birth was more than 30 years shorter than now.
The few thousand spammers and hackers are a minor ass-pimple on the vast improvement the Internet has made.
There are a number of shitty conditions that I accept temporarily, as there's only so much one can do at once. But as long as mopes like yourself keep out of the way, there's plenty of room for improvement. And when you get tired of playing Eeyore, let us know: there's plenty of interesting work to do.
The short future is projects managed in US but implemented abroad
Only if we don't take advantage of our one unassailable advantage, proximity.
If you're working with a document-driven process where the product manager spends months writing a giant spec, and then you spend months reading the spec and implementing what you thought he meant, then people in India can do your part almost as well.
Instead, use one of the processes that takes advantage of proximity, like Scrum or Extreme Programming. Put the product manager in the same room with developers and do weekly iterations. You cut out all those months of spec-writing, and because the product manager can make snap decisions and give instant feedback, you'll develop more efficiently and more correctly than somebody far away ever could.
blockquote>Probably not good even then. Both experience and research suggest that crunch mode doesn't work.Ah, but, as cynical as it sounds, that's freakin' beside the point.
If you're at a place where the appearance of effort is more important than good results, you should either change your organization or change your organization.
Both are possible. I've seen companies break their addiction to crunch mode. And I've seen companies fail to change their ways and lose their best people as a result. 80-hour weeks are a thing of the past in most industries; soon it will be that way for our industry, too.
All the hardwork for sorting etc are done already by Oracle inside their DB. [...] Then came JAVA which removed even the need to do memory managment.
The problem isn't those tools; the problem is that some mediocre developers stop thinking except in terms of those tools. You mainly see this in "enterprise" shops. Most of them only think in terms of turning a problem into SQL requests. That's what makes back-to-basics approaches like Prevayler seem heretical in some quarters.
I'm sure Oracle encourages this, as I have personally seen them make millions of dollars because some programmers for a major corporation couldn't deal with any other paradigm.
But if you stay out of the "enterprise" IT market, there's plenty of innovation going on. Find somebody doing games, or consumer apps, or high-end web stuff, or anything where buying one copy of oracle per installation doesn't make sense. You know that Google isn't powered by Oracle, and they're vacuuming up smart people.
Eventually, the enterprise swamp will get sorted out. People who actually can do CS will keep automating the monkey work. The legions of corporate drone programmers will hopefully do interesting stuff, but probably just find another way to suck on the corporate teat.
Another buddy said of the current crop of kids, "bright, cannot program, big egos." Only good if they can put in the 80 hours that I hear kids out of school and without families can do.
Probably not good even then. Both experience and research suggest that crunch mode doesn't work. At best, you get the appearance of success, but under the covers, the code's a mess. The project ends up with a lot of code debt. Likely the code base will be so smelly that v 2.0 will require a complete rewrite.
In my experience, a team of seasoned developers using modern techniques can get bug rates below one per developer-month, which means very low maintenance and operation costs, easy future expansion, and rarely opening the debugger. But a team of novices in crunch mode would be more like one bug per developer-day. Which means they'll spend those extra 40 hours a week mainly stepping through stuff in the debugger, not doing anything productive.
I know some good people swear by it, but the thing that makes me crazy about apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive is that a lot of alleged designers use them as an excuse to remain ignorant of the underlying technology.
When I asked one designer to clean up her voluminous and chaotic markup and to fix the browser-related issues I had noticed, she told me that she was "a web designer, not a web programmer", and that she didn't really understand HTML and CSS so well. I rolled my eyes so hard I had to get an doctor to unstick them for me.
My tip for designer wannabes out there: use the fancy tools like Dreamweaver to speed along things you already know how to do manually. Clothing designers understand fabric and can sew. Print designers understand typography and the arcane details of n-color presses. Web designers do not get special permission to be clueless. Indeed, given how quickly web technologies evolve compared to other media, they have a special obligation to keep on top of the tech.
There's your proof. Dvorak was designed sensibly, reducing finger movement distance and frequency. Typing feels like drumming your fingers, and is incredibly rapid and comfortable.
I guess that doesn't seem much like proof to me, at least of the "type faster, reduce RSI" claims. I could imagine Dvorak helps, but I could also imagine that it doesn't really matter. Indeed, I could imagine that QWERTY, because it requires more variety of movement, is actually better for RSI.
I know some people are happier with it. But some people are just as enthusiastic about Herbalife products. Maybe it's real improvement; maybe it's akin to Hawthorne Effect improvement.
For proof, I'd want to see somebody train QWERTY typists on several alternate layouts and compare productivity and RSI incidence across the alternate layouts. It'd be nice if they could get some life-long Dvorak typists and do the same experiment with them. Until then, what you have is a competing theory, not proof.
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
Dvorak eclipses it in terms of speed by an exponential amount. Don't be so stubborn if you haven't tried it!
Sweet! Since I can type 110 wpm now, that should mean I can type 12,100 wpm with Dvorak, right?
Re:Not unless they fab brainwashing nanomachines..
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Fab
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· Score: 1
(Another couple percent learn to act as if they have no conscience, but that's a social/upbringing issue.)
Would you be OK with it if you had to go to court and your lawyer showed up with all sorts of visible tats and strange body piercings?
How would that be related exactly? I hire a lawyer for an entirely different purpose than a programmer.
Personally, I have no tatoos or piercings, and my taste in clothing is pretty vanilla. But when I'm hiring, I generally don't give a damn what people look like. It would matter if I were hiring marketing or in-person customer service people. But most programmers and sysadmins are kept well away from those front-of-house positions anyhow, so as far as I'm concerned they can look as they please.
But hey, y'all keep your biases against the freaks. Less competition for the talented weirdos means that I get better people for less money, and I get all sorts of gratitude for treating them like human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
Except he offered it to them, *and they refused it*. So it's still his.
Only if they declined to pay him for the time. Otherwise, it's still technically theirs. There's little chance that they'd enforce that, though, so in practice it probably would never matter.
They were paying him for dooing his job description: copying data entry by hand. Not for his programming.
If he chose to do programming for data-entry wages, then that's his problem, not his employer's. Work he does on their dime is their property, regardless of his nominal job description. They can't force him to do the programming, but once he's done it, he can't unilaterally and retroactively change the terms of his contract. That's a good thing, too, as the same rule protects him from all sorts of employer abuses.
At worst, he should be fired for spending his time doing something else, but he should not have his IP stolen at data-entry wages.
Well, it's true they could have fired him. But they get to keep the IP regardless. It's hardly stealing: you can't give somebody a gift and then holler for the cops if they keep it.
If the production line keeps stalling because product gets bunched up and blocks the chute and instead of wasting time unclogging it, I bring in a pole and poke the ones that are about to get stuck, does the company own my pole?
No. The poster, however, talked about developing a tool on company time. If you bring in a tool, you can take it away again. If you make it on company time, it's the company's tool.
In the case of intellectual property like code, you should be very careful bringing in tools you've made elsewhere. To avoid a dispute, you at least need to be able to prove that you spent no company time or resources on it. And with some employment contracts, even that isn't enough. Be sure to see a lawyer if IP ownership is an issue for you.
Its success is because of its management, its failures because of its management.
This is pretty much base stupidity. It's like saying the success of a car in getting somewhere is because of the steering wheel. There are many important factors in the success of any business, and the failure of any one of them is sufficient to cause failure.
A company is driven from the top.
Some companies are driven from the top. However, many very successful ones aren't. 3M is a good example, and so is Google: both of them are driven by bottom-up innovation. Moreover, a lot of work suggests that command-and-control hierarchies like you (and imperial CEOs) favor are much less appropriate today than they were when they peaked in the 50s. See Artful Making or pretty much any article on the topic in the last few years of The Economist for more info on this.
Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV).
It's not so much hard work that I think is required; it's useful work. Americans seem to care less and less whether they're creating value. The large corporations where I see the most outsourcing are also the ones where I see a ton of waste, and much more effort spent on marketing a crappy product than making a better one.
This seems endemic to me. From Enron and Worldcom and the rise of the MBAs to the long-term reduction in graduating scientists and engineers and the huge reduction in long-term R&D, it seems like we now favor people who get a bigger slice of the pie, rather those who make the pie bigger. Exhibit A is our president: a nominal businessman who, as far as I can tell, never created any business value at all.
Hopefully the deserved ass-kicking we're starting to get from India and China well help us get back to basics. But our car industry never really learned the lesssons they should have from the Japanese ass-kicking that they got, so we'll see.
I've worked my share of 80+ hour weeks, and productivity doesn't go down.
Well, you think your productivity doesn't go down. One of the skills that decays quickly is evaluating how you're doing, and not just for beign tired. Drunk drivers think they can drive just fine, for example, and any hiker knows how insidious hypothermia is. As one back-country guide puts it, "the victim is the LAST to realize s/he's in danger".
My productivity kept on pretty much as normal. No 'cancelling out', no 'negative work', no extra mistakes. Yeah it can get a bit boring and maybe physically tiring, but that's why it's called 'work'.
There's plenty of evidence that, whatever applies for you, that's not true for humans. Here's a good summary: Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work.
I think you people are just lazy: you don't want to do much work,
Wrong! I love my work. But even when I'm obsessed with a new project and could happily work around the clock, I've learned to limit myself to 50 hours a week or so. More than that and I start losing my judgement and my enthusiasm. I can tell this pretty easily, as I write unit tests for all my code. After a couple of weeks of crunch mode I spend a lot more time bumping my head against the unit tests. And after a couple of days off to recover, I'll often realize that particular problems I was brute-forcing my way through could have been solved much more efficiently.
If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me.
Legally, all work you do as an employee is owned by the company. If you give them something more than they expect, well, you've given it to them. Generally that's the case if you're on an hourly contract, too, although it depends on exactly what's in your contract.
If you want the right to own the IP and want to be able to turn a profit on being smart about the way to do the work, arrange a contract that pays you by the piece completed. It's better if the contract is between Dell and El Womble Inc rather than between Dell and Mr. El Womble. I don't think it's legally better; rather it fits people's prejudices.
There are countless games you can play with a $1.00 deck of cards.
Dude, this is Slashdot.
So A, we're only willing to use cards on a computer screen. And so we can all play, we'd need to make it networked and each play from our own computers. And because that would feel kinda lonely, we'd need to add headsets and VOIP so we can mock our fellow players.
And B, if we were to deign to use physical playing cards, we wouldn't actually buy them. Instead, we'd register a SourceForge project to host open-source artwork that we would in theory use to print them ourselves on a printer at work. Except that we'd only finish the number cards and three of the face cards before we ran out of steam and just started hoping somebody would send us a patch for the rest.
Other than that, it's a good idea.
Oops! No, sorry, I didn't, just the headline and the rest of the jokes. Which is probably a good geek joke in itself.
You know why programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because OCT 31 = DEC 25.
Want your state to make laws to prevent this? Show up and vote.
Wait! My state has elections, too? That's too much to keep track of.
Watch [Fahrenheit 911] and do you still think corruption went away?
Well, if you want to play duelling media, watch Chinatown or read Boss or The Jungle.
I agree that today's government is not perfect. But my point is that things have gotten better, and that it is within our power to make it better still. Which is not only why Michael Moore did make that movie, but also why he could make that movie.
Yes hackers are a pain in the arse, so are spam merchants. Thats life, live with it.
No, no it's not.
Shitty conditions are not an immutable law of nature. Things can get better. Things do get better. Fifty years ago, government corruption was endemic. One hundred years ago, working conditions were horrific, and women weren't allowed to vote. 150 years ago, we practiced slavery, and life expectancy at birth was more than 30 years shorter than now.
The few thousand spammers and hackers are a minor ass-pimple on the vast improvement the Internet has made.
There are a number of shitty conditions that I accept temporarily, as there's only so much one can do at once. But as long as mopes like yourself keep out of the way, there's plenty of room for improvement. And when you get tired of playing Eeyore, let us know: there's plenty of interesting work to do.
The short future is projects managed in US but implemented abroad
Only if we don't take advantage of our one unassailable advantage, proximity.
If you're working with a document-driven process where the product manager spends months writing a giant spec, and then you spend months reading the spec and implementing what you thought he meant, then people in India can do your part almost as well.
Instead, use one of the processes that takes advantage of proximity, like Scrum or Extreme Programming. Put the product manager in the same room with developers and do weekly iterations. You cut out all those months of spec-writing, and because the product manager can make snap decisions and give instant feedback, you'll develop more efficiently and more correctly than somebody far away ever could.
blockquote>Probably not good even then. Both experience and research suggest that crunch mode doesn't work.Ah, but, as cynical as it sounds, that's freakin' beside the point.
If you're at a place where the appearance of effort is more important than good results, you should either change your organization or change your organization.
Both are possible. I've seen companies break their addiction to crunch mode. And I've seen companies fail to change their ways and lose their best people as a result. 80-hour weeks are a thing of the past in most industries; soon it will be that way for our industry, too.
All the hardwork for sorting etc are done already by Oracle inside their DB. [...] Then came JAVA which removed even the need to do memory managment.
The problem isn't those tools; the problem is that some mediocre developers stop thinking except in terms of those tools. You mainly see this in "enterprise" shops. Most of them only think in terms of turning a problem into SQL requests. That's what makes back-to-basics approaches like Prevayler seem heretical in some quarters.
I'm sure Oracle encourages this, as I have personally seen them make millions of dollars because some programmers for a major corporation couldn't deal with any other paradigm.
But if you stay out of the "enterprise" IT market, there's plenty of innovation going on. Find somebody doing games, or consumer apps, or high-end web stuff, or anything where buying one copy of oracle per installation doesn't make sense. You know that Google isn't powered by Oracle, and they're vacuuming up smart people.
Eventually, the enterprise swamp will get sorted out. People who actually can do CS will keep automating the monkey work. The legions of corporate drone programmers will hopefully do interesting stuff, but probably just find another way to suck on the corporate teat.
Another buddy said of the current crop of kids, "bright, cannot program, big egos." Only good if they can put in the 80 hours that I hear kids out of school and without families can do.
Probably not good even then. Both experience and research suggest that crunch mode doesn't work. At best, you get the appearance of success, but under the covers, the code's a mess. The project ends up with a lot of code debt. Likely the code base will be so smelly that v 2.0 will require a complete rewrite.
In my experience, a team of seasoned developers using modern techniques can get bug rates below one per developer-month, which means very low maintenance and operation costs, easy future expansion, and rarely opening the debugger. But a team of novices in crunch mode would be more like one bug per developer-day. Which means they'll spend those extra 40 hours a week mainly stepping through stuff in the debugger, not doing anything productive.
Bah. I'm a huge fan of Dreamweaver.
I know some good people swear by it, but the thing that makes me crazy about apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive is that a lot of alleged designers use them as an excuse to remain ignorant of the underlying technology.
When I asked one designer to clean up her voluminous and chaotic markup and to fix the browser-related issues I had noticed, she told me that she was "a web designer, not a web programmer", and that she didn't really understand HTML and CSS so well. I rolled my eyes so hard I had to get an doctor to unstick them for me.
My tip for designer wannabes out there: use the fancy tools like Dreamweaver to speed along things you already know how to do manually. Clothing designers understand fabric and can sew. Print designers understand typography and the arcane details of n-color presses. Web designers do not get special permission to be clueless. Indeed, given how quickly web technologies evolve compared to other media, they have a special obligation to keep on top of the tech.
Weakup!
That word deserves to become as much of a classic as cow-orkers.
The bet is part of the Long Bets project, which is run by the Long Now foundation. The permanent URL for the bet is http://www.longbets.org/2.
Why do you assume exponentiation starts at a power of 2?
Because it was funnier that way.
There's your proof. Dvorak was designed sensibly, reducing finger movement distance and frequency. Typing feels like drumming your fingers, and is incredibly rapid and comfortable.
I guess that doesn't seem much like proof to me, at least of the "type faster, reduce RSI" claims. I could imagine Dvorak helps, but I could also imagine that it doesn't really matter. Indeed, I could imagine that QWERTY, because it requires more variety of movement, is actually better for RSI.
I know some people are happier with it. But some people are just as enthusiastic about Herbalife products. Maybe it's real improvement; maybe it's akin to Hawthorne Effect improvement.
For proof, I'd want to see somebody train QWERTY typists on several alternate layouts and compare productivity and RSI incidence across the alternate layouts. It'd be nice if they could get some life-long Dvorak typists and do the same experiment with them. Until then, what you have is a competing theory, not proof.
Dvorak eclipses it in terms of speed by an exponential amount. Don't be so stubborn if you haven't tried it!
Sweet! Since I can type 110 wpm now, that should mean I can type 12,100 wpm with Dvorak, right?
(Another couple percent learn to act as if they have no conscience, but that's a social/upbringing issue.)
And still they leave the business schools open!
Would you be OK with it if you had to go to court and your lawyer showed up with all sorts of visible tats and strange body piercings?
How would that be related exactly? I hire a lawyer for an entirely different purpose than a programmer.
Personally, I have no tatoos or piercings, and my taste in clothing is pretty vanilla. But when I'm hiring, I generally don't give a damn what people look like. It would matter if I were hiring marketing or in-person customer service people. But most programmers and sysadmins are kept well away from those front-of-house positions anyhow, so as far as I'm concerned they can look as they please.
But hey, y'all keep your biases against the freaks. Less competition for the talented weirdos means that I get better people for less money, and I get all sorts of gratitude for treating them like human beings.