Not the manager, but perhaps the environment or the office culture. I've had times where I wasn't getting much done working from home, and I have had great runs of banging out code at the office (sometimes in a cube farm no less). Some people can't stand distracting noises but I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with interruptions. As the articles states: a programmer needs 15 minutes to resume work after an interruption, which is true in my case. On top of that, after a day full of interruptions I am exhausted, both physically and mentally. But: getting up for a coffee is not an interruption. "Are you coming to Lisa's barbeque later?" is not an interruption. An interruption is when you have to engage your brain on another task: a phone call, someone asking a technical question, your manager asking for some document, etc.
A good manager understands this, and is able to create a work environment for differing work styles, or work out reasonable compromises (keeping in mind the consequences). Such a manager will also make sure to create a culture where these work styles can thrive. It's ok to ignore your email for most of the day, as long as you make that clear in an out of office reply. Don't disturb coworkers with headsets on, or those working in isolation pods. Do disturb others in case of emergencies, as long as you understand what those are. Seat the more chatty people together. It works, but it isn't always easy to create such an environment, and it does cost money.
I've had a rare few managers who understood this, and who created a work environment suitable both for solitary coding as well as collaboration. And in my experience, in such an environment the coders are just as productive as they are at home, but the collaborative parts like design meetings, brainstorming sessions or daily standups were vastly more productive compared to conference calls. In contrast I've worked in toxic environments where productivity was low. But it wasn't a case of toxic management, just poor management. And they might do as poorly when managing their teams remotely.
To be fair, they weren't the only ones predicting this. I've seen Windows in action on phones and it looked pretty good. Coupled with cross-platform technology like Xamarin that lets you produce a Windows version of your app almost for free, I too believed that Windows would gain market share in the mobile market. It was too little too late though, Xamarin wasn't mature at the time and is still not widely used, and by the time some major apps started appearing on Windows, they had already become largely irrelevant.
Just doing what you know is not enough. Most innovation I have been involved in didn't focus on generating ideas, though that was certainly part of it; the focus was on selecting and evaluating them. Not "is this a good idea", but "will this work for us, and how?". For example: we set up a corporate Wiki when such things were virtually unheard of. The challenge there was not the idea, nor doing what we know (setting up the servers and software, doing a bit of training, etc). The challenge was in changing the culture: selling the idea to decision makers, getting everyone to make effective use of the new tool, and continuously evaluate the outcomes. As Linus says: "Process problems are a pain in the ass. You never, ever want to have process problems". But the truth is that changing culture and process is a large part of innovation.
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
Fingerprint ID on current iPhones is entirely optional. And you still need to set a password in case the scanner fails to recognise you 5 times (or after a reboot)
And hopefully Apple will get it right. My android phone has two "soft" buttons next to a physical home button, and I hate those little fuckers. It's entirely too easy to accidentally press them. Since the screen on the iPhone is pressure sensitive, they better make the buttons react to a forceful push rather than a touch, but they probably will; they usually pay a lot of attention to this stuff.
Good one. IT security already seems to be a fairly in-demand skill, combined with the worries over IoT you'll be set for the foreseeable future.
But what is IoT? Home automation? Smart appliances? Industrial sensor networks? Inercommunicating cars? What? For now I'll think of IoT as "Any networked stuff, other than servers, workstations or network equipment"
Depends. If someone can execute 10 tasks in 8 hours, and I can perform the exact same tasks in 4 hours, then what are you going to do?
- Send me home early?
- Assign me additional tasks?
- Assign me additional task and give me a pay rise?
- Ask me how I manage to work so quickly, and if my methods could help other employees improve their throughput?
- Promote me?
- Request a "random" drug test?
The Amiga actually had a function for that: it suspended the OS so you could have the entire machine to yourself, and revive the OS once you were done. A lot of games ran in this mode.
Ah yes, the lovely 68000. They came in a gigantic DIL package the size of a candy bar, I always was somewhat afraid to snap it in half when seating it in its socket.
We really take our faster computers for granted, and our code is far from the level of optimization we were once required to achieve.
And that's a good thing too; now we can focus on more important things. It also makes our code better in terms of readability and maintainability. I once had to optimize the crap out of a routing algorithm to bring the execution time within acceptable limits. I made it work within the time allowed, but the resulting code was extraordinarily hard to understand and maintain. On better hardware we got away with a straight-up, clean implementation in C.
But knowing weird ways to optimize code still comes in handy from time to time. I know programmers who manage to squeeze a couple of ms from a routine and turn a sluggish bit of UI into something that performs smoothly. And I see others who give up thinking "this is as good as it'll get".
Depending on how the phone or that corporate laptop is set up, they will also gain access to (parts of) the corporate network. Do border cops have the authority to search that as well? I'm all for protecting my privacy and the privacy of my clients by applying good security practises, but protecting your privacy is not at all the same as protecting your right to privacy. You can bring a blank laptop through customs and work through VPN, but you shouldn't have to. How about waking up your government to the fact that today's mobile devices constitute a hell of a lot more than the electronic equivalent of physical work-related papers and books, and contain acutely privacy-sensitive material that cops have no business poking their noses into? (Good luck with that...)
And what if they come across an encrypted file or a password vault, do they also have the right to ask for access to those? Because if they do, then you're also going to have to change the passwords on perhaps hundreds of accounts. If a cop copies the keys to my front door, you bet I'll be changing the locks, and that goes double for digital keys; I have very little faith in their cyber-security.
In other words, "think of the children". A poor excuse for this sort of thing if there ever was one... because if it is an excuse, why stop at border checks? Why not have cops bust down people's doors on a regular basis to go through their porn pile? Do random stop-and-searches?
There may be valid reasons for allowing searches at the border that are not allowed elsewhere, but finding kiddie porn isn't one of them.
the one thing is though that you get guaranteed tax revenue as well.
And that's another important issue of basic income: not the cost per se, but the fact that in many countries the bulk of tax revenue comes from income taxes. That will have to change if people are going to be working less, regardless of whether they do so by choice or they are replaced by robots. Taxing consumption more heavily will reduce consumption and at some point necessitate an increase of the basic income. Taxing production is an obvious solution; during the replacement of human labour with robots we could levy an "income tax" on robots, but that would only work on a level playing field or in an autarky; in our own globalized world, production would simply flee to the country with the lowest tax on production as it does now.
It's more like the Uber's and Lyft's of the world are going to get the money I would have otherwise spent on a car.
In a world of self driving cars, Uber and Lyft do little more than provide a fancy app and capital. What people management and logistics is left to take care of is more akin to a car rental company than a taxi firm. Why wouldn't Budget and Avis trounce Uber and Lyft at that game? At the very least there will be some healthy competition, and with Uber and Lyft not being the only game in town, they will not be able to fleece the public.
That's why Uber is investing in self-driving tech as well.
There are a lot of dreamers. They dream that a self driving car will be just as cheap as a manual car is today.
When mass produced, it is unlikely that self driving cars will be much more expensive.
They dream that a self driving car will get them places as quickly as if they drive themselves.
Why wouldn't it? And with ultrafast lanes for self driving cars, not having to stop at intersections (or even red lights) when they are clear, and other benefits too dangerous to let human drivers have, they may get there faster.
They dream that, if they hail a self driving car it will be like having their own and cheaper and more convenient than a taxi.
It will certainly be cheaper to rent a self driving car than owning a second car that only sees occasional use, in a lot of cases. It's like renting a car without the suckiest part of car rental: picking up and returning the vehicle. They are about as convenient as taxies and will most likely be cheaper too, with the advantage that it doesn't come with an expensive, tired, cranky, smelly driver.
You remind them that they will have to fit into the economy somehow, and that car companies expect to be paid for this technology more than for a manual car and they just get angry at being woken.
Car companies will be paid for this, initially by car rental companies, who will be happy to pay since their vehicles can now serve a multitude of paying customers every day instead of just one. More kilometers per day = more €. Some people dream, get inspired, and turn those dreams into reality. And some people just sit around complaining, muttering about pipe dreams and the impracticality of it all, while others get shit done.
That makes sense. But the fact that Putin might extradite Snowden to cosy up to Trump is hardly something you can blame Trump for directly, much less his voters.
Would Snowden have fared any better with the Obama administration? Obama was somewhat more sympathetic towards Snowden, at least in public, but he weaseled out of granting him a pardon (saying he "can't") while he did commute Manning's sentence.
Is that really the case? Not sure about Germany, but here in the Netherlands workers at any particular plant can join any union they like or none at all. In some cases, the unions jointly (depending how active they are in a given industry sector) negotiate with industry groups about wages, in other cases they negotiate with individual companies, assist Works Councils, organize strikes, etc. But we have no such thing as "unionizing" or "union shops". It seems like some US unions (the UAW in particular) are a lot more powerful than any of our unions or even all of them combined, in terms of influence they wield over workers and management.
The fact that your home isn't built as a hotel and lacks the usual consumer protections is precisely why the city won't allow you to treat it as one.
However I agree that the NYC law seems overly strict. Over here, cities implement such laws to prevent disturbances caused by short term rental, but in most cases this amounts to a rule that properties cannot be rented out short-stay for over 30 or 60 days a year; anything below that is fine. The idea is that people should be free to rent out their own home for short periods (even when they are away themselves), while preventing landlords from turning entire tenement buildings into year-round AirBnB short term rentals. Because that does amount to running a hotel.
You can do what you want with your own damn home... up to a point. Running a hotel isn't one of them; not only can it be a cause of unreasonable disturbance to your neighbours, it is also unfair to those who run actual hotels and take care of fire proofing and escape routes, proper hygiene, insurance, and compliance with other regulations, at great expense.
Hank got off light, by the way. Some landlord in Amsterdam was running what amounts to an illegal hotel through AirBnB; now he and the property management company involved in the setup get to split a fine of almost €300,000. That may sound high, but if you have an efficient operation you can make a ton of money this way (at the expense of your neighbours, while endangering the tenants), and the fine has to reflect that.
That makes sense if you consider pay and benefits to be the only rewards for work. But for many people recognition is part of those "other methods" of compensation. It's not something you're entitled to, but it can be a valuable reward which comes more or less at no cost to the employer. Hiring someone as director purely on the strength of their celebrity status can be as detrimental to morale and motivation as promoting some dimwit to management purely because he is a cousin of the founder.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the manager, but perhaps the environment or the office culture. I've had times where I wasn't getting much done working from home, and I have had great runs of banging out code at the office (sometimes in a cube farm no less). Some people can't stand distracting noises but I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with interruptions. As the articles states: a programmer needs 15 minutes to resume work after an interruption, which is true in my case. On top of that, after a day full of interruptions I am exhausted, both physically and mentally. But: getting up for a coffee is not an interruption. "Are you coming to Lisa's barbeque later?" is not an interruption. An interruption is when you have to engage your brain on another task: a phone call, someone asking a technical question, your manager asking for some document, etc.
A good manager understands this, and is able to create a work environment for differing work styles, or work out reasonable compromises (keeping in mind the consequences). Such a manager will also make sure to create a culture where these work styles can thrive. It's ok to ignore your email for most of the day, as long as you make that clear in an out of office reply. Don't disturb coworkers with headsets on, or those working in isolation pods. Do disturb others in case of emergencies, as long as you understand what those are. Seat the more chatty people together. It works, but it isn't always easy to create such an environment, and it does cost money.
I've had a rare few managers who understood this, and who created a work environment suitable both for solitary coding as well as collaboration. And in my experience, in such an environment the coders are just as productive as they are at home, but the collaborative parts like design meetings, brainstorming sessions or daily standups were vastly more productive compared to conference calls. In contrast I've worked in toxic environments where productivity was low. But it wasn't a case of toxic management, just poor management. And they might do as poorly when managing their teams remotely.
To be fair, they weren't the only ones predicting this. I've seen Windows in action on phones and it looked pretty good. Coupled with cross-platform technology like Xamarin that lets you produce a Windows version of your app almost for free, I too believed that Windows would gain market share in the mobile market. It was too little too late though, Xamarin wasn't mature at the time and is still not widely used, and by the time some major apps started appearing on Windows, they had already become largely irrelevant.
Just doing what you know is not enough. Most innovation I have been involved in didn't focus on generating ideas, though that was certainly part of it; the focus was on selecting and evaluating them. Not "is this a good idea", but "will this work for us, and how?". For example: we set up a corporate Wiki when such things were virtually unheard of. The challenge there was not the idea, nor doing what we know (setting up the servers and software, doing a bit of training, etc). The challenge was in changing the culture: selling the idea to decision makers, getting everyone to make effective use of the new tool, and continuously evaluate the outcomes. As Linus says: "Process problems are a pain in the ass. You never, ever want to have process problems". But the truth is that changing culture and process is a large part of innovation.
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
Fingerprint ID on current iPhones is entirely optional. And you still need to set a password in case the scanner fails to recognise you 5 times (or after a reboot)
And hopefully Apple will get it right. My android phone has two "soft" buttons next to a physical home button, and I hate those little fuckers. It's entirely too easy to accidentally press them. Since the screen on the iPhone is pressure sensitive, they better make the buttons react to a forceful push rather than a touch, but they probably will; they usually pay a lot of attention to this stuff.
Good one. IT security already seems to be a fairly in-demand skill, combined with the worries over IoT you'll be set for the foreseeable future.
But what is IoT? Home automation? Smart appliances? Industrial sensor networks? Inercommunicating cars? What? For now I'll think of IoT as "Any networked stuff, other than servers, workstations or network equipment"
But a lot harder to autorotate if the motors crap out...
Depends. If someone can execute 10 tasks in 8 hours, and I can perform the exact same tasks in 4 hours, then what are you going to do?
- Send me home early?
- Assign me additional tasks?
- Assign me additional task and give me a pay rise?
- Ask me how I manage to work so quickly, and if my methods could help other employees improve their throughput?
- Promote me?
- Request a "random" drug test?
In fact plants crave it.
The Amiga actually had a function for that: it suspended the OS so you could have the entire machine to yourself, and revive the OS once you were done. A lot of games ran in this mode.
Ah yes, the lovely 68000. They came in a gigantic DIL package the size of a candy bar, I always was somewhat afraid to snap it in half when seating it in its socket.
We really take our faster computers for granted, and our code is far from the level of optimization we were once required to achieve.
And that's a good thing too; now we can focus on more important things. It also makes our code better in terms of readability and maintainability. I once had to optimize the crap out of a routing algorithm to bring the execution time within acceptable limits. I made it work within the time allowed, but the resulting code was extraordinarily hard to understand and maintain. On better hardware we got away with a straight-up, clean implementation in C.
But knowing weird ways to optimize code still comes in handy from time to time. I know programmers who manage to squeeze a couple of ms from a routine and turn a sluggish bit of UI into something that performs smoothly. And I see others who give up thinking "this is as good as it'll get".
Depending on how the phone or that corporate laptop is set up, they will also gain access to (parts of) the corporate network. Do border cops have the authority to search that as well? I'm all for protecting my privacy and the privacy of my clients by applying good security practises, but protecting your privacy is not at all the same as protecting your right to privacy. You can bring a blank laptop through customs and work through VPN, but you shouldn't have to. How about waking up your government to the fact that today's mobile devices constitute a hell of a lot more than the electronic equivalent of physical work-related papers and books, and contain acutely privacy-sensitive material that cops have no business poking their noses into? (Good luck with that...)
And what if they come across an encrypted file or a password vault, do they also have the right to ask for access to those? Because if they do, then you're also going to have to change the passwords on perhaps hundreds of accounts. If a cop copies the keys to my front door, you bet I'll be changing the locks, and that goes double for digital keys; I have very little faith in their cyber-security.
In other words, "think of the children". A poor excuse for this sort of thing if there ever was one... because if it is an excuse, why stop at border checks? Why not have cops bust down people's doors on a regular basis to go through their porn pile? Do random stop-and-searches?
There may be valid reasons for allowing searches at the border that are not allowed elsewhere, but finding kiddie porn isn't one of them.
the one thing is though that you get guaranteed tax revenue as well.
And that's another important issue of basic income: not the cost per se, but the fact that in many countries the bulk of tax revenue comes from income taxes. That will have to change if people are going to be working less, regardless of whether they do so by choice or they are replaced by robots. Taxing consumption more heavily will reduce consumption and at some point necessitate an increase of the basic income. Taxing production is an obvious solution; during the replacement of human labour with robots we could levy an "income tax" on robots, but that would only work on a level playing field or in an autarky; in our own globalized world, production would simply flee to the country with the lowest tax on production as it does now.
Yeah, everyone said it was daft to build a castle in a swamp...
It's more like the Uber's and Lyft's of the world are going to get the money I would have otherwise spent on a car.
In a world of self driving cars, Uber and Lyft do little more than provide a fancy app and capital. What people management and logistics is left to take care of is more akin to a car rental company than a taxi firm. Why wouldn't Budget and Avis trounce Uber and Lyft at that game? At the very least there will be some healthy competition, and with Uber and Lyft not being the only game in town, they will not be able to fleece the public.
That's why Uber is investing in self-driving tech as well.
There are a lot of dreamers. They dream that a self driving car will be just as cheap as a manual car is today.
When mass produced, it is unlikely that self driving cars will be much more expensive.
They dream that a self driving car will get them places as quickly as if they drive themselves.
Why wouldn't it? And with ultrafast lanes for self driving cars, not having to stop at intersections (or even red lights) when they are clear, and other benefits too dangerous to let human drivers have, they may get there faster.
They dream that, if they hail a self driving car it will be like having their own and cheaper and more convenient than a taxi.
It will certainly be cheaper to rent a self driving car than owning a second car that only sees occasional use, in a lot of cases. It's like renting a car without the suckiest part of car rental: picking up and returning the vehicle. They are about as convenient as taxies and will most likely be cheaper too, with the advantage that it doesn't come with an expensive, tired, cranky, smelly driver.
You remind them that they will have to fit into the economy somehow, and that car companies expect to be paid for this technology more than for a manual car and they just get angry at being woken.
Car companies will be paid for this, initially by car rental companies, who will be happy to pay since their vehicles can now serve a multitude of paying customers every day instead of just one. More kilometers per day = more €. Some people dream, get inspired, and turn those dreams into reality. And some people just sit around complaining, muttering about pipe dreams and the impracticality of it all, while others get shit done.
That makes sense. But the fact that Putin might extradite Snowden to cosy up to Trump is hardly something you can blame Trump for directly, much less his voters.
Would Snowden have fared any better with the Obama administration? Obama was somewhat more sympathetic towards Snowden, at least in public, but he weaseled out of granting him a pardon (saying he "can't") while he did commute Manning's sentence.
Is that really the case? Not sure about Germany, but here in the Netherlands workers at any particular plant can join any union they like or none at all. In some cases, the unions jointly (depending how active they are in a given industry sector) negotiate with industry groups about wages, in other cases they negotiate with individual companies, assist Works Councils, organize strikes, etc. But we have no such thing as "unionizing" or "union shops". It seems like some US unions (the UAW in particular) are a lot more powerful than any of our unions or even all of them combined, in terms of influence they wield over workers and management.
The fact that your home isn't built as a hotel and lacks the usual consumer protections is precisely why the city won't allow you to treat it as one.
However I agree that the NYC law seems overly strict. Over here, cities implement such laws to prevent disturbances caused by short term rental, but in most cases this amounts to a rule that properties cannot be rented out short-stay for over 30 or 60 days a year; anything below that is fine. The idea is that people should be free to rent out their own home for short periods (even when they are away themselves), while preventing landlords from turning entire tenement buildings into year-round AirBnB short term rentals. Because that does amount to running a hotel.
You can do what you want with your own damn home... up to a point. Running a hotel isn't one of them; not only can it be a cause of unreasonable disturbance to your neighbours, it is also unfair to those who run actual hotels and take care of fire proofing and escape routes, proper hygiene, insurance, and compliance with other regulations, at great expense.
Hank got off light, by the way. Some landlord in Amsterdam was running what amounts to an illegal hotel through AirBnB; now he and the property management company involved in the setup get to split a fine of almost €300,000. That may sound high, but if you have an efficient operation you can make a ton of money this way (at the expense of your neighbours, while endangering the tenants), and the fine has to reflect that.
That makes sense if you consider pay and benefits to be the only rewards for work. But for many people recognition is part of those "other methods" of compensation. It's not something you're entitled to, but it can be a valuable reward which comes more or less at no cost to the employer. Hiring someone as director purely on the strength of their celebrity status can be as detrimental to morale and motivation as promoting some dimwit to management purely because he is a cousin of the founder.