One great non-hierarchical way to run a conference is known as Open Space. I went to a 1000-person conferenc that organized about half the sessions this way and it was fantastic.
The way it works is that everybody who's interested turns up in a big room. A facilitator explains the deal, and then anybody who has an idea for a session they want (whether they want to talk or just listen) writes it on a big sheet of paper, announces it to the audience, and sticks it on the wall. Next they pick a time and room slot from a big list of post-its and stick that on their session title sheet. People who are interested in attending write their names on the sheets.
And basically, aside from some simple rules, that's it. At each session, whomever turns up turns up. Somebody generally volunteers to take notes and put them on a Wiki.
This sounds like it could be lame, but it was fantastic. There was minimal vendor waffle, lots of interactions, and very little bullshit. For me, the most valuable bits of a conference always came outside the sessions, at meals and in the hallways. This organized and distilled those encounters. It was great!
It has been proven that gaining social skills often comes at the expense of your problem solving and other intellectual abilities.
Do you have any cites for that? I've never heard anything like that.
Is it so hard to understand that some people work better all by themselves? That some people are loners, and thats the way they are wired?
I think everybody has strengths and weaknesses. But people can either choose behaviors that reinforce or mitigate those weaknesses.
I did tech support in college, and I never had a problem with people who were bad at computers. The ones that made me crazy were the ones who considered their poor aptitude an excuse not to learn.
Why should the ones who are socially inept and deficient try and be socially pleasant and accomodating to others?
For the same reason clumsy people like me generally try hard not to break things.
Now if the smarter ones were to demand that those who were socially better off learn to be more smart and learn to solve more problems, lets see how the world takes that. Lets see the world taking to people saying that your IQ skills are bad, you need to develop them else you will not be accepted into the community.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this happens all the time. The geeks make fun of the jocks for being stupid; the jocks make fun of the geeks for being weak and clumsy. Musicians cringe when the tuneless sing; language mavens mock the ungrammatical; the well-coiffured laugh at the scruffy. In general, people overestimate the importance of the things they are good at and minimize the importance of the things they are bad at.
They will cry wolf. Then why should the socially inept have to learn social skills?
Because unless the inept own their own land and live as subsistence farmers far from neighbors, they'll have to deal with others. Our economy is tightly interlinked and, thanks to everlowering communication costs, getting more so.
It's like asking, "Why should the technically fearful have to learn about computers?" but more so. Refusing to deal with something so fundamental puts people at a huge disadvantage. Adults are welcome to make that choice, of course, but kids like the OP describes should be given every opportunity and every encouragement to learn enough that they aren't handicapped later in life.
The way I started to get stuff like this was to make use of my intellectual and analytic strengths to get a theoretical understanding of what was going on, and then to approach it like a naturalist studying a foreign species. Then as I figured things out, I practiced, praticed, and practiced some more.
A book I found helpful on the theoretical side were Chimpanzee Politics, a detailed study of political struggle in a colony of chimps. Once I got how this stuff worked in our nearest relatives, a lot of previously mysterious human behavior made more sense to me. Another fantastic one is Impro, a book about improvisational theater which contains some great material on exactly how humans express some of the monkey stuff, how to become more aware of it, and how to do it on stage.
Also helpful are books on body language and flirting (e.g., this one, but there are a ton of them). All of this reading should be combined with observation. TV and movies are a great place to start; the signals are obvious, and you can rewind and slow-mo to help get it. But there's nothing like the real world: classrooms, cafes, and bars are a big help, too.
But there's nothing like practice. It's best to start practicing stuff in a safe environment, possibly by role-playing with friends, teachers, or counsellors. If he easily gets flustered or frustrated when trying this in real life, it's worth talking to a psychiatrist to see if they can help; problems like social anxiety, attention defecit disorder, and depression can interfere in both learning and performing.
Another way to make use of the geeky side is to have him come up with procedures and rituals for things other people do naturally. E.g., have him write up the checklist for the rituals he must perform (brushing his teeth, coming his hair) before he goes into the monkey cage (i.e. classroom). He might also be excited by using high-tech tools (like using the computer to record and catalog of himself and others doing normal social things).
One tip: Somebody who spends all their time on geeky pursuits will be used to learning things quickly. They must be prepared that in this, progress will come very slowly. It's a whole different kind of intelligence. A good popular read on the science behind it is Emotional Intelligence.
The fact that this is tolerated and actually modded insightful is stunning. Substitute any other group of people and people would condemn statements like that.
You mean like lawyers, politicians, salespeople, telemarketers, and spammers?
Amazing how you and many others assume that most MBA's are idiots and just out for money and will do anything illegal to get there.
As far as I can tell, that's like saying that the people on Slashdot are dorky. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but it's true often enough that it's not an unreasonable stereotype.
I know a number of people with MBAs, both personally and professionally. Many of them are smart and honorable. But a substantial minority of the ones I have met, especially the ones fresh out of business school, are arrogant pricks with a gloss of book-learning and an desperate desire to cover up their ignorance with a lot of glib waffle.
This is a lot like the stereotypical fresh-out-of-college cowboy coder. Except that cowboy coders mainly cause trouble for themselves, whereas an MBA can wreak havoc on a much larger scale. Also, in my experience, hubristic cowboy coders are mainly annoying on geeky topics, whereas the annoying fresh-minted MBAs think they know everything about everything.
I don't entirely blame the MBAs, either; some top-tier MBA programs seem to actively train people to be arrogant and glib, presumably because clear thought and honest self-appraisal are mainly handicaps when playing the primate dominance games that upper managers seem to spend most of their time on.
So we should become Code Cowboys and never write any documentation lest we be supplanted by the Indians?
Extreme Programming and cowboy coding are complete opposites. XP is the most disciplined process I've ever worked under. The fact that it doesn't produce documents unless the product manager explicitly asks for them is part of that discipline; an XP team doesn't waste time on things that nobody wants. Instead, they focus on what matter. E.g., producing a beautifully clean and readable code base, rather than a crappy code base with a lot of documentation.
The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the US 30 years ago.
True, but misleading. It's up substantially in the last decade, during which our exports and imports have both more than doubled. Further, a much larger proportion of the workforce is employed; it's reasonable to assume that those people were less employable, and so brought down average wages. It also just counts people who get paychecks; entrepreneurship is up substantially, partly thanks to technology's power to make the little guys more viable.
And most importantly, the standard CPI number hides some important differences. The computer you could buy in 1970 is not the one you could buy today, but the inflation stats don't account well for increases in quality or new categories of goods.
You are equivocating me buying a car with a boss buying someone's labor time.
Actually, I'm equating them. The problem with that is the value of a commodity is constant, while the value of labor-time can vary.
Values of commodities vary all the time. Most importantly, value differs from buyer to buyer, even if the price may not.
Value is created by the worker during labor time. A commodity sitting idly does not create value.
True, but irrelevant. Commodities have value, and are used to create value.
What bosses want to buy is surplus value, not value. They want the 3 hours (or 4 hours, or 5 hours...) of time where you are creating wealth, but the wealth is not coming back to you as wages, but is rather going into the pockets of the boss as profit. After all, why else would he hire you as a wage worker? You're "giving your boss the best value he can get" by working hours of surplus that go to him as profits, instead of to you in wages.
This is plain wrong.
I take a job because they have a good environment for me to create value. A boss hires me because I can use their environment to create value. We then share in the value created in rough proportion to how much we contribute.
If my boss is giving me too small a share of the value created, then some other employer can hire me away by giving me a better cut.
If you're worried about your job being outsourced, put your energies into making sure you're giving your boss the best value he can get, and make sure he knows it.
I've seen countless workers work themselves to death only to lose their jobs.
From the studies I've seen, programmers who work themselves to death don't contribute much in the way of value. Tired people make mistakes, and in code bases, mistakes always come back to haunt you. If you want to give good value, try going home on time.
And before I hear how impossible this is, it works for me. I just convinced a new boss that if he wants maximum speed and maximum efficiency over the long haul, then we should work at a sustainable pace. When I work at the right pace (and with the right practices), my bug rates are well under one per month. The hours that others spend debugging, I spend having fun.
Even if you are twice as good as they are, they are 10 times cheaper. Remember that.
Salaries for people with equivalent experience might be 10 times cheaper, but I've never seen real numbers to back that, especially for people with 8+ years of experience.
But programmer salaries are a small portion of the total cost of most projects. One company I consulted at tried outsourcing and found that they saved maybe a third of the software development cost. However, their development processes were pretty screwed up; they could have gotten much better cost savings just by sorting out all the bullshit in their organization.
Ultimately free trade works out well. As far as I know we have yet to see how free trade really works out. We've seen it's short term results, that's all.
Global trade volume has been increasing for centuries. So has wealth and employment, both globally and in the US. If trade is bad for us, it's taking an awfully long time to show it.
Trade, whether international or domestic, is made up of lots of little trades. And in every trade, the person on both sides makes the trade because they think they'll be better off. When you buy a computer, you'd rather have the computer than the money; the seller would rather have the money and lose the computer. On average, both sides win. Otherwise we'd stop trading.
Of course, although we win on average, not everybody in specific wins. Government tax revenues on the increased wealth should be used to help support and retrain those whose jobs are lost to trade.
But what jobs are Americans better at when the definition of doing a job well is increasingly based solely on the cost of labor?
Smart consumers and smart bosses never by on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost. American workers may cost more, but they're also very productive compared to many countries.
If you're worried about your job being outsourced, put your energies into making sure you're giving your boss the best value he can get, and make sure he knows it. Continuing professional education is one good way, and I'm sure people here can suggest others.
We should also make full use of a big advantage: proximity. Old-style development methods that rely on requirements documents are vulnerable to outsourcing; you can just ship that requirements document to Elbonia. But Agile methods like Extreme Programming make better use of proximity. XP, for example, requires that instead of writing documents, the product manager must sit in the same room as the developers. This increases software quality and productivity in ways that an outsourcer, be they in Buffalo or Bangalore, will have a hard time matching.
what i want to say is, that with XP, or actually with outsourcing in general, you need to have a detailed plan without a detailed plan you are going to loose control over the things
That's not my experience of XP.
What you need to have is the ability not just to plan, but to re-plan, over and over. I forget exactly how Barry Boehm phrased it, but his pithy summary was that traditional methods (like the waterfall) were plan-driven, whereas agile methods like XP are planning-driven.
I've done a couple of substantial XP projects that basically started with just an idea. By sketching on whiteboards or in HTML, we produced mock-ups as a way to discuss what we were up to. As soon as we identified something that we were pretty sure we wanted to build, we spent that week building it.
Because we were good guessers, generally what we built was the right thing. But sometimes when we saw it in action, we'd realize that we guessed wrong and go back to the drawing board. That might seem wasteful, but there were a number of features that we killed after a week's work that non-Agile teams would have built out to completion.
It's sort of like driving somewhere. Nobody sane plans out every twist of the wheel and touch of the pedals in advance. At most, you'd get some directions to give you an idea how to get there, and often people just get a rough idea where something is and hop in the car. To make that work, you have to steer continously, keeping your eye on the road and keeping your goal in mind.
Espeically for long trips over unknown territory, your initial plan is almost guaranteed to be wrong; to get where you want to go, you have to be prepared to adapt.
They recommended just listing the years because most people reading the resume were only looking at the highlights anyway.
It could be that we're talking about two different sorts of resumes here. I'm interviewing people for programming jobs in the San Francisco Bay area. Between the boom and the bust, turnover has been rapid.
Now I imagine that for non-tech jobs in other parts of the country, "leave off the months" is good advice, as that leaves you with a list like this:
1987-1993
1993-1997
1997-present
In which case, sure, who cares about the months?
But I'm seeing resumes with dates like this:
1996-1998
1998-1999
2000-2001
2002
2002-2003
Now this could be a perfectly respectable resume for somebody who likes startups, or it could be a problem employee who got sucked up in the boom at one company, and then hasn't been able to keep a job for more than a couple of months since. Without listing the months, it's impossible to tell.
Your "logic" has massive holes in it. For starters, a gap in employment tells you nothing at all about the person, the circumstances of their leaving the position, their suitability to work where you work...
I will be excited to see you tell me where I said that.
you sound exactly like the sorts of HR weenies that are making a mess of companies large and small
Bzzzzt! Wrong. But thanks for playing.
I'm a programmer, hiring other programmers. Like most, I have gaps in my resume; some are vacations, some aren't. When I see gaps, I may ask people about them. I'm hiring in an area that was strongly affected by the boom, so it's no black mark to say, "Yeah, my startup went bust and it's been ugly out there."
What I object to is people trying to hide things from me, either in an interview or a resume. I've certainly interview people with the year-only resumes, but I've quizzed them much more closely on both dates and on the rest of their stuff. I like it better when they're honest up front, both on gaps and on everything else.
If you give a brutally honest assessment of your weaknesses, the job is going to go the the bullshitter that didn't... remember, when they ask if you're a god, tell 'em you're a god!
If you want to work for fools, this is probably good advice. Otherwise, read on.
Since I'm hiring programmers this very week, the topic's on my mind. The people I was most likely to interview
followed instructions: they sent the required details in the right format to the right address;
addressed the requirements in the cover letter: some just gave a few paragraphs, and some replied inline to each item in the posting;
were honest: when somebody told me what they did and didn't know, their honesty was a big plus.
And then in the interviews, important factors have been
asking good questions, both about our business and about the technical side;
listening well, and demonstrating that they get what we're talking about;
communicating clearly about what they've done and what they know;
being willing to challenge us on some things: we don't want to hire yes men, but neither do we want people who argue for the sake of it;
not telling us any of their previous employers' secrets: if they'll break somebody else's NDA, I'm sure they'll break ours;
really knowing anything they put on their resume as knowing, and
being able to walk the walk: the second round of interviews is sitting down and pair programming.
If I find out somebody is bullshitting me, they've just stepped on the fast slidewalk out of the office.
Everybody has gaps in their technical knowledge, and I'm glad to work with that. It's impossible to put together a team where everybody knows everything, but if I know individual weaknesses I can make sure that at least one person is stellar in each important area. In my experience, if people lie to me about one thing, they'll lie to me about quite a lot of things.
1998-2001 [...]2001-Present [...] Everyone who interviews me simply assumes I've had continuous employment
I've interviewed circa a dozen people in the last couple of weeks, and I see this style much more than I used to. When I see only years in a resume, I assume it's because they're hiding something. I much prefer to see a month-based approach that's honest about gaps.
Automation can save significant amounts of time and money if the project [...] Has a large enough number of regressions to make the expense of automating less than the cost of all of the regressions.
On my last few projects, I did both automated unit tests and automated end-to-end tests, right from the beginning of the project. Developers are the ones in control of the unit tests, but I like the product managers and/or QA to be in control of the end-to-end tests.
In my experience, having test suites like this makes development go much faster than it otherwise would, even with very high-quality developers. And the payoff is ongoing; fully automated QA tests mean that you can change the system with complete confidence, releasing daily if you like.
My experience matches what Martin Fowler talks about in his blog entry on very low defect projects, meaning less than one bug per month.
This is likely to conflict with the best interests of the customers; they may be getting a sub-obtimal product, and at any rate will usually be charged more than the break-even cost.
As compared to what? As a general rule, market-based solutions get you better goods for the same money (or lower prices for the same goods) than other solutions.
Of course, if you wanted to start a not-for-profit registrar and bid against Verisign, I'm sure that ICANN would be glad to take your bid.
This still wouldn't be such a major issue for me if the Internet didn't play such a central role in modern day society.
However, they have taken unilateral and harmful action before, and now, despite global criticism, they are going to do the exact same thing.
They took that action and ICANN whacked them. Now they're saying that they'll try again. Hopefully ICANN will whack them again. Ideally, ICANN, a non-profit corporation, will give the contract to somebody else.
A profit purpose appeals to the basest of motivational factors - greed. It is likely that the greedier a person is, the more power they will wind up with in a corporation. And if greed is their primary driver, there is more chance of them (and hence the corporation) doing something sleazy, unethical, destructive or even illegal, than if their primary motive were, for example, altruism.
This is true in the short term, but if that were the only important factor, then most companies would be doing sleazy, unethical, destructive, and illegal things most of the time.
But it turns out that they don't. Why? Because it's in the long-term interest of any company to behave in a way that keeps their customers coming back. Verisign here feels like they can trick and manipulate their customer, ICANN. They got beaten down on it once, and hopefully ICANN will smack 'em again if needed.
But if Verisign gets away with it and keeps getting contract renewals, then it's not really Verisign who deserves the blame, it's ICANN, the outfit that is picking them. And note that ICANN is a non-profit corporation that's responsible to the US Government. So if we rule out for-profit corporations, non-profits, and governments, it's not clear to me who y'all are proposing should run the registry.
I don't trust corporations. Sitefinder just proves me right. I don't just want Sitefinder to go away, I want VeriSign to go away. Down with corporate control! The Internet to the People!
I don't know if you've been inside one, but it turns out corporations are made up of people. And it's a crazy thing, but so are governments. Everywhere you look, it's people, people, people. And as far as I can tell, none of 'em are perfect.
The problem isn't corporations as such; it's ICANN giving control of the big TLDs without sufficient oversight. Outsourcing the operation makes sense, but allowing Verisign to do whatever they please doesn't. ICANN should be making sure that none of their vendors are doing stuff that harms the internet, outrages the people who make it go, or inconveniences the zillions of people who rely on it.
Whether it's a coroporation or a government department doing the work, you still need oversight, and that seems lacking here.
Why do all virus writers suddenly have to be spammers?
Maybe because if you don't give a fuck about other people, the future of the internet, or risking a little jail time, then it seems like a way to make money?
What would be nice is some sort of in game system that could filter servers by skill level. Maybe just a ladder would be enough. Set it up so if one player dominates, he gets booted to another server with a higher rating, and the weakest players get booted to a lower level server. Throw in some load balancing for good measure and you might have something accessible for newbies.
Bravo! This is a great solution to the problem. It is also what happens in real sports.
Another option is the sporting notion of a handicap. If somebody is really good, then the server makes it harder on them. If the server makes the handicap public, then they still get to be known as a bad-ass, while everybody still gets to have fun.
No, but if you get your wife to use an on-line menstrual calendar, you can have the Orb match it. It'd be your own personal color-coded terror alert level system.
Slashdot Mirror
Defining a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes is no more or less "real" than defining it as 1,000,000,000 bytes.
When marketroids deliberately shift the meaning of words to trick people into buying stuff, that makes it a lot less "real" in my book.
One great non-hierarchical way to run a conference is known as Open Space. I went to a 1000-person conferenc that organized about half the sessions this way and it was fantastic.
The way it works is that everybody who's interested turns up in a big room. A facilitator explains the deal, and then anybody who has an idea for a session they want (whether they want to talk or just listen) writes it on a big sheet of paper, announces it to the audience, and sticks it on the wall. Next they pick a time and room slot from a big list of post-its and stick that on their session title sheet. People who are interested in attending write their names on the sheets.
And basically, aside from some simple rules, that's it. At each session, whomever turns up turns up. Somebody generally volunteers to take notes and put them on a Wiki.
This sounds like it could be lame, but it was fantastic. There was minimal vendor waffle, lots of interactions, and very little bullshit. For me, the most valuable bits of a conference always came outside the sessions, at meals and in the hallways. This organized and distilled those encounters. It was great!
It has been proven that gaining social skills often comes at the expense of your problem solving and other intellectual abilities.
Do you have any cites for that? I've never heard anything like that.
Is it so hard to understand that some people work better all by themselves? That some people are loners, and thats the way they are wired?
I think everybody has strengths and weaknesses. But people can either choose behaviors that reinforce or mitigate those weaknesses.
I did tech support in college, and I never had a problem with people who were bad at computers. The ones that made me crazy were the ones who considered their poor aptitude an excuse not to learn.
Why should the ones who are socially inept and deficient try and be socially pleasant and accomodating to others?
For the same reason clumsy people like me generally try hard not to break things.
Now if the smarter ones were to demand that those who were socially better off learn to be more smart and learn to solve more problems, lets see how the world takes that. Lets see the world taking to people saying that your IQ skills are bad, you need to develop them else you will not be accepted into the community.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this happens all the time. The geeks make fun of the jocks for being stupid; the jocks make fun of the geeks for being weak and clumsy. Musicians cringe when the tuneless sing; language mavens mock the ungrammatical; the well-coiffured laugh at the scruffy. In general, people overestimate the importance of the things they are good at and minimize the importance of the things they are bad at.
They will cry wolf. Then why should the socially inept have to learn social skills?
Because unless the inept own their own land and live as subsistence farmers far from neighbors, they'll have to deal with others. Our economy is tightly interlinked and, thanks to everlowering communication costs, getting more so.
It's like asking, "Why should the technically fearful have to learn about computers?" but more so. Refusing to deal with something so fundamental puts people at a huge disadvantage. Adults are welcome to make that choice, of course, but kids like the OP describes should be given every opportunity and every encouragement to learn enough that they aren't handicapped later in life.
The way I started to get stuff like this was to make use of my intellectual and analytic strengths to get a theoretical understanding of what was going on, and then to approach it like a naturalist studying a foreign species. Then as I figured things out, I practiced, praticed, and practiced some more.
A book I found helpful on the theoretical side were Chimpanzee Politics, a detailed study of political struggle in a colony of chimps. Once I got how this stuff worked in our nearest relatives, a lot of previously mysterious human behavior made more sense to me. Another fantastic one is Impro, a book about improvisational theater which contains some great material on exactly how humans express some of the monkey stuff, how to become more aware of it, and how to do it on stage.
Also helpful are books on body language and flirting (e.g., this one, but there are a ton of them). All of this reading should be combined with observation. TV and movies are a great place to start; the signals are obvious, and you can rewind and slow-mo to help get it. But there's nothing like the real world: classrooms, cafes, and bars are a big help, too.
But there's nothing like practice. It's best to start practicing stuff in a safe environment, possibly by role-playing with friends, teachers, or counsellors. If he easily gets flustered or frustrated when trying this in real life, it's worth talking to a psychiatrist to see if they can help; problems like social anxiety, attention defecit disorder, and depression can interfere in both learning and performing.
Another way to make use of the geeky side is to have him come up with procedures and rituals for things other people do naturally. E.g., have him write up the checklist for the rituals he must perform (brushing his teeth, coming his hair) before he goes into the monkey cage (i.e. classroom). He might also be excited by using high-tech tools (like using the computer to record and catalog of himself and others doing normal social things).
One tip: Somebody who spends all their time on geeky pursuits will be used to learning things quickly. They must be prepared that in this, progress will come very slowly. It's a whole different kind of intelligence. A good popular read on the science behind it is Emotional Intelligence.
Good luck!
The fact that this is tolerated and actually modded insightful is stunning. Substitute any other group of people and people would condemn statements like that.
You mean like lawyers, politicians, salespeople, telemarketers, and spammers?
Amazing how you and many others assume that most MBA's are idiots and just out for money and will do anything illegal to get there.
As far as I can tell, that's like saying that the people on Slashdot are dorky. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but it's true often enough that it's not an unreasonable stereotype.
I know a number of people with MBAs, both personally and professionally. Many of them are smart and honorable. But a substantial minority of the ones I have met, especially the ones fresh out of business school, are arrogant pricks with a gloss of book-learning and an desperate desire to cover up their ignorance with a lot of glib waffle.
This is a lot like the stereotypical fresh-out-of-college cowboy coder. Except that cowboy coders mainly cause trouble for themselves, whereas an MBA can wreak havoc on a much larger scale. Also, in my experience, hubristic cowboy coders are mainly annoying on geeky topics, whereas the annoying fresh-minted MBAs think they know everything about everything.
I don't entirely blame the MBAs, either; some top-tier MBA programs seem to actively train people to be arrogant and glib, presumably because clear thought and honest self-appraisal are mainly handicaps when playing the primate dominance games that upper managers seem to spend most of their time on.
So we should become Code Cowboys and never write any documentation lest we be supplanted by the Indians?
Extreme Programming and cowboy coding are complete opposites. XP is the most disciplined process I've ever worked under. The fact that it doesn't produce documents unless the product manager explicitly asks for them is part of that discipline; an XP team doesn't waste time on things that nobody wants. Instead, they focus on what matter. E.g., producing a beautifully clean and readable code base, rather than a crappy code base with a lot of documentation.
The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the US 30 years ago.
True, but misleading. It's up substantially in the last decade, during which our exports and imports have both more than doubled. Further, a much larger proportion of the workforce is employed; it's reasonable to assume that those people were less employable, and so brought down average wages. It also just counts people who get paychecks; entrepreneurship is up substantially, partly thanks to technology's power to make the little guys more viable.
And most importantly, the standard CPI number hides some important differences. The computer you could buy in 1970 is not the one you could buy today, but the inflation stats don't account well for increases in quality or new categories of goods.
You are equivocating me buying a car with a boss buying someone's labor time.
Actually, I'm equating them.
The problem with that is the value of a commodity is constant, while the value of labor-time can vary.
Values of commodities vary all the time. Most importantly, value differs from buyer to buyer, even if the price may not.
Value is created by the worker during labor time. A commodity sitting idly does not create value.
True, but irrelevant. Commodities have value, and are used to create value.
What bosses want to buy is surplus value, not value. They want the 3 hours (or 4 hours, or 5 hours...) of time where you are creating wealth, but the wealth is not coming back to you as wages, but is rather going into the pockets of the boss as profit. After all, why else would he hire you as a wage worker? You're "giving your boss the best value he can get" by working hours of surplus that go to him as profits, instead of to you in wages.
This is plain wrong.
I take a job because they have a good environment for me to create value. A boss hires me because I can use their environment to create value. We then share in the value created in rough proportion to how much we contribute.
If my boss is giving me too small a share of the value created, then some other employer can hire me away by giving me a better cut.
From the studies I've seen, programmers who work themselves to death don't contribute much in the way of value. Tired people make mistakes, and in code bases, mistakes always come back to haunt you. If you want to give good value, try going home on time.
And before I hear how impossible this is, it works for me. I just convinced a new boss that if he wants maximum speed and maximum efficiency over the long haul, then we should work at a sustainable pace. When I work at the right pace (and with the right practices), my bug rates are well under one per month. The hours that others spend debugging, I spend having fun.
Even if you are twice as good as they are, they are 10 times cheaper. Remember that.
Salaries for people with equivalent experience might be 10 times cheaper, but I've never seen real numbers to back that, especially for people with 8+ years of experience.
But programmer salaries are a small portion of the total cost of most projects. One company I consulted at tried outsourcing and found that they saved maybe a third of the software development cost. However, their development processes were pretty screwed up; they could have gotten much better cost savings just by sorting out all the bullshit in their organization.
Ultimately free trade works out well. As far as I know we have yet to see how free trade really works out. We've seen it's short term results, that's all.
Global trade volume has been increasing for centuries. So has wealth and employment, both globally and in the US. If trade is bad for us, it's taking an awfully long time to show it.
Trade, whether international or domestic, is made up of lots of little trades. And in every trade, the person on both sides makes the trade because they think they'll be better off. When you buy a computer, you'd rather have the computer than the money; the seller would rather have the money and lose the computer. On average, both sides win. Otherwise we'd stop trading.
Of course, although we win on average, not everybody in specific wins. Government tax revenues on the increased wealth should be used to help support and retrain those whose jobs are lost to trade.
But what jobs are Americans better at when the definition of doing a job well is increasingly based solely on the cost of labor?
Smart consumers and smart bosses never by on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost. American workers may cost more, but they're also very productive compared to many countries.
If you're worried about your job being outsourced, put your energies into making sure you're giving your boss the best value he can get, and make sure he knows it. Continuing professional education is one good way, and I'm sure people here can suggest others.
We should also make full use of a big advantage: proximity. Old-style development methods that rely on requirements documents are vulnerable to outsourcing; you can just ship that requirements document to Elbonia. But Agile methods like Extreme Programming make better use of proximity. XP, for example, requires that instead of writing documents, the product manager must sit in the same room as the developers. This increases software quality and productivity in ways that an outsourcer, be they in Buffalo or Bangalore, will have a hard time matching.
what i want to say is, that with XP, or actually with outsourcing in general, you need to have a detailed plan
without a detailed plan you are going to loose control over the things
That's not my experience of XP.
What you need to have is the ability not just to plan, but to re-plan, over and over. I forget exactly how Barry Boehm phrased it, but his pithy summary was that traditional methods (like the waterfall) were plan-driven, whereas agile methods like XP are planning-driven.
I've done a couple of substantial XP projects that basically started with just an idea. By sketching on whiteboards or in HTML, we produced mock-ups as a way to discuss what we were up to. As soon as we identified something that we were pretty sure we wanted to build, we spent that week building it.
Because we were good guessers, generally what we built was the right thing. But sometimes when we saw it in action, we'd realize that we guessed wrong and go back to the drawing board. That might seem wasteful, but there were a number of features that we killed after a week's work that non-Agile teams would have built out to completion.
It's sort of like driving somewhere. Nobody sane plans out every twist of the wheel and touch of the pedals in advance. At most, you'd get some directions to give you an idea how to get there, and often people just get a rough idea where something is and hop in the car. To make that work, you have to steer continously, keeping your eye on the road and keeping your goal in mind.
Espeically for long trips over unknown territory, your initial plan is almost guaranteed to be wrong; to get where you want to go, you have to be prepared to adapt.
It could be that we're talking about two different sorts of resumes here. I'm interviewing people for programming jobs in the San Francisco Bay area. Between the boom and the bust, turnover has been rapid.
Now I imagine that for non-tech jobs in other parts of the country, "leave off the months" is good advice, as that leaves you with a list like this:
- 1987-1993
- 1993-1997
- 1997-present
In which case, sure, who cares about the months?But I'm seeing resumes with dates like this:
- 1996-1998
- 1998-1999
- 2000-2001
- 2002
- 2002-2003
Now this could be a perfectly respectable resume for somebody who likes startups, or it could be a problem employee who got sucked up in the boom at one company, and then hasn't been able to keep a job for more than a couple of months since. Without listing the months, it's impossible to tell.Your "logic" has massive holes in it. For starters, a gap in employment tells you nothing at all about the person, the circumstances of their leaving the position, their suitability to work where you work...
I will be excited to see you tell me where I said that.
you sound exactly like the sorts of HR weenies that are making a mess of companies large and small
Bzzzzt! Wrong. But thanks for playing.
I'm a programmer, hiring other programmers. Like most, I have gaps in my resume; some are vacations, some aren't. When I see gaps, I may ask people about them. I'm hiring in an area that was strongly affected by the boom, so it's no black mark to say, "Yeah, my startup went bust and it's been ugly out there."
What I object to is people trying to hide things from me, either in an interview or a resume. I've certainly interview people with the year-only resumes, but I've quizzed them much more closely on both dates and on the rest of their stuff. I like it better when they're honest up front, both on gaps and on everything else.
That's nice, but what about the other five billion people in the world, who consider gaps in a resume to be immediate grounds for File 13?
If somebody has unreasonable expectations while hiring, why would it be any different once you start?
If you want to work for fools, this is probably good advice. Otherwise, read on.
Since I'm hiring programmers this very week, the topic's on my mind. The people I was most likely to interview
- followed instructions: they sent the required details in the right format to the right address;
- addressed the requirements in the cover letter: some just gave a few paragraphs, and some replied inline to each item in the posting;
- were honest: when somebody told me what they did and didn't know, their honesty was a big plus.
And then in the interviews, important factors have been- asking good questions, both about our business and about the technical side;
- listening well, and demonstrating that they get what we're talking about;
- communicating clearly about what they've done and what they know;
- being willing to challenge us on some things: we don't want to hire yes men, but neither do we want people who argue for the sake of it;
- not telling us any of their previous employers' secrets: if they'll break somebody else's NDA, I'm sure they'll break ours;
- really knowing anything they put on their resume as knowing, and
- being able to walk the walk: the second round of interviews is sitting down and pair programming.
If I find out somebody is bullshitting me, they've just stepped on the fast slidewalk out of the office.Everybody has gaps in their technical knowledge, and I'm glad to work with that. It's impossible to put together a team where everybody knows everything, but if I know individual weaknesses I can make sure that at least one person is stellar in each important area. In my experience, if people lie to me about one thing, they'll lie to me about quite a lot of things.
1998-2001 [...]2001-Present [...] Everyone who interviews me simply assumes I've had continuous employment
I've interviewed circa a dozen people in the last couple of weeks, and I see this style much more than I used to. When I see only years in a resume, I assume it's because they're hiding something. I much prefer to see a month-based approach that's honest about gaps.
Automation can save significant amounts of time and money if the project [...] Has a large enough number of regressions to make the expense of automating less than the cost of all of the regressions.
On my last few projects, I did both automated unit tests and automated end-to-end tests, right from the beginning of the project. Developers are the ones in control of the unit tests, but I like the product managers and/or QA to be in control of the end-to-end tests.
In my experience, having test suites like this makes development go much faster than it otherwise would, even with very high-quality developers. And the payoff is ongoing; fully automated QA tests mean that you can change the system with complete confidence, releasing daily if you like.
My experience matches what Martin Fowler talks about in his blog entry on very low defect projects, meaning less than one bug per month.
This is likely to conflict with the best interests of the customers; they may be getting a sub-obtimal product, and at any rate will usually be charged more than the break-even cost.
As compared to what? As a general rule, market-based solutions get you better goods for the same money (or lower prices for the same goods) than other solutions.
Of course, if you wanted to start a not-for-profit registrar and bid against Verisign, I'm sure that ICANN would be glad to take your bid.
This still wouldn't be such a major issue for me if the Internet didn't play such a central role in modern day society.
However, they have taken unilateral and harmful action before, and now, despite global criticism, they are going to do the exact same thing.
They took that action and ICANN whacked them. Now they're saying that they'll try again. Hopefully ICANN will whack them again. Ideally, ICANN, a non-profit corporation, will give the contract to somebody else.
A profit purpose appeals to the basest of motivational factors - greed. It is likely that the greedier a person is, the more power they will wind up with in a corporation. And if greed is their primary driver, there is more chance of them (and hence the corporation) doing something sleazy, unethical, destructive or even illegal, than if their primary motive were, for example, altruism.
This is true in the short term, but if that were the only important factor, then most companies would be doing sleazy, unethical, destructive, and illegal things most of the time.
But it turns out that they don't. Why? Because it's in the long-term interest of any company to behave in a way that keeps their customers coming back. Verisign here feels like they can trick and manipulate their customer, ICANN. They got beaten down on it once, and hopefully ICANN will smack 'em again if needed.
But if Verisign gets away with it and keeps getting contract renewals, then it's not really Verisign who deserves the blame, it's ICANN, the outfit that is picking them. And note that ICANN is a non-profit corporation that's responsible to the US Government. So if we rule out for-profit corporations, non-profits, and governments, it's not clear to me who y'all are proposing should run the registry.
I don't trust corporations. Sitefinder just proves me right. I don't just want Sitefinder to go away, I want VeriSign to go away. Down with corporate control! The Internet to the People!
I don't know if you've been inside one, but it turns out corporations are made up of people. And it's a crazy thing, but so are governments. Everywhere you look, it's people, people, people. And as far as I can tell, none of 'em are perfect.
The problem isn't corporations as such; it's ICANN giving control of the big TLDs without sufficient oversight. Outsourcing the operation makes sense, but allowing Verisign to do whatever they please doesn't. ICANN should be making sure that none of their vendors are doing stuff that harms the internet, outrages the people who make it go, or inconveniences the zillions of people who rely on it.
Whether it's a coroporation or a government department doing the work, you still need oversight, and that seems lacking here.
Why do all virus writers suddenly have to be spammers?
Maybe because if you don't give a fuck about other people, the future of the internet, or risking a little jail time, then it seems like a way to make money?
What would be nice is some sort of in game system that could filter servers by skill level. Maybe just a ladder would be enough. Set it up so if one player dominates, he gets booted to another server with a higher rating, and the weakest players get booted to a lower level server. Throw in some load balancing for good measure and you might have something accessible for newbies.
Bravo! This is a great solution to the problem. It is also what happens in real sports.
Another option is the sporting notion of a handicap. If somebody is really good, then the server makes it harder on them. If the server makes the handicap public, then they still get to be known as a bad-ass, while everybody still gets to have fun.
Wow! I was sure you were just making that up. Folks, that really is in the TOS.
No, but if you get your wife to use an on-line menstrual calendar, you can have the Orb match it. It'd be your own personal color-coded terror alert level system.