I work for Alion Science and Technology ( http://www.alionscience.com ), they're a defense contractor that hires mostly retired military but they hire geeks too. It's an employee owned company that's growing like crazy.
Good for you. There is another employee-owned DoD contractor (the largest), and I can guarantee that management in that company has no resemblance to the management in your company.
Also, corporate revenues would be much higher without paying 50% or more to tax, so they could afford to higher more people etc...
Many of the wealthiest corportations pay no tax except for the matching Social Security contribution for U.S. employees. When they outsource those jobs, they pay nothing. So cutting taxes for corporations is a meaningless excercise -- half of zero is still zero. Some companies now appear to have negative tax rates, i.e., corporate welfare.
Any geek gamers out there willing to boycott EA's products until they change their ways?
I'm already boycotting EA games, but it's not because of their sweatshop employment practices. It's because they think they can charge full price for unfinished junk like MOH Frontline. They used the popularity of the franchise to make big bucks off of a second-rate effort.
Good managers recognize the employees under them as their "customers" and as such do everything they can to make sure they can do their job. They also make sure YOU have a job.
You apparently have far more experience with "good" management than I do. In my experience, it's the managers who walk the working employees to the door when the budget gets cut. It's interesting that the managers all keep their jobs even when there are fewer people to _manage_.
I say for their punishment the judge should make them work 80+ hours 7 days a week for 3 months and let them see how they like it...
That's not much of a punishment since what they do isn't really "work". What they do is _supervise_, attend communal back-patting meetings with other managers, and make more work for the people who know how.
Note for those who left their humor detectors at home like the AC: The parent refers to a long thread yesterday, where a poster claimed that Americans would tend to do exactly the opposite of whatever the Europeans wanted in the election.
This is America, you are free to build your own company and loot it too. You'll start it and honestly go into it with the intention of not screwing anyone, but hey, when the chips are down, and you can just grab that pile of money, legally, and run with it, I guarantee you'll do the same exact thing.
Don't tell me what I would do. I've had opportunities to take advantage of situations in the past and not done so. I still have to live with myself - apparently you don't care who you live with. You also missed the point that company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company, which does not include looting it or robbing the shareholders. These aren't even people who have anything to do with starting the companies. They're just corporate raiders.
We can argue whether greed is wrong or not, but let's not quibble over a moral issue. . . . Many of them make a couple million dollars a year, but a lot of that is in stock options.
The average CEO makes 300 times the salary of an average worker. This one burned the company's original stockholders, leaving them with nothing, and walks away with $100 million because he's being replaced. And his options were vested as a reward. Let's not forget the $1.5 million bonus. And he gets to stay on the board of directors where he gets to set the compensation for the next CEO. It's not a quibble over a moral issue, it's a financial obscenity. It's called looting a company.
Google's a corporation, corporations are neither good nor bad IMO, they're all alike, all about profit.
There are real differences between companies, and you can tell by working for them. In some companies, it's all about cash flow, and if you need to cut corners or bill some stuff early to make the numbers come out right, that's accepted. There are still (a few) companies that, in enlightened self-interest, deal straight with customers and suppliers. Unfortunately, it takes only one greedy executive at the top to turn an honest company into a bad one.
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.
Since copyright now extends longer than the life of an average person and well beyond the death of the author, the term "limited time" has little meaning anymore. It certainly doesn't serve the original purpose of getting the works into the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.
Not only do these people require extra seats on planes, slow down the lines for roller coasters, and other idiotic things, they also cost this country millions in health care costs that could have been avioded if the ate a bit less and actually got up from in front of the tv once in a while.
Sorry, but my logic detector went off. Since fat people die younger, don't they actually save us money by not being a burden on Social Security and pension plans? Since health care costs are constantly rising, doesn't it save us money to have them die now rather than later when health care costs more? Do thin people always die suddenly while visiting the funeral home to make *arrangements* and therefore have no health care costs? It seems to me that the real consequence fat people have is the increasing cost of food. Have you seen the prices at Mickey-D's lately ?!!
Claiming you can't find source code is one of the most rediculous things I've ever heard.
That would depend on the age of the source code. We have a large application and, uh, lost all the code and documentation for versions prior to six years ago. It was all stored on an older machine that was taken out of service and surplused. When I eventually found out, I asked to have it restored to another machine from backups, but it was too late. Tapes are expensive, and they get reused after a while. It's not really a big deal, and there are no conspiracy theories about the loss.
While I don't play console games, I know that the console mags are often unable or unprepared to give realistic reviews on the hyped new title.
I guess that depends on the magazine. There are two major magazines covering the Playstation, PSM and OPM, and neither is afraid give a game a bad rating. There have been several hyped games I have not purchased because of bad reviews. The one I was really waiting for was the last Tomb Raider. After both magazines gave it a thumbs-down, I never did buy it. In contrast, they gave high ratings to Ico, a great game that didn't get a lot of hype.
MS Office is the only tool that can correctly render *ALL* Microsoft Word.doc documents.
That's news to me. I remember when the department's secretaries switched to Word 2000 when everyone else was using Word 97. Tables in documents from either version could not be rendered correctly by the other. The upshot was that everyone was forced to upgrade to remain compatible, and many project documents had to be redone.
MS has always positioned itself as a growth company. That's changing, and they know it.
That's the problem with a monopoly. Once you've reached market saturation, the only thing you can do to increase revenue is raise prices in one way or another. That leads ever more customers to look for alternatives. When you're on top of the world, the only remaining direction is down.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Geez. Let's try something easier than a whole site. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm The 2000 election in Florida was a real-world situation. It's pretty hard to get 16,000 negative votes with paper ballots. Diebold did it.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
During all these discussions, you've never made it to http://blackboxvoting.org/? I consider machines that let real votes disappear to be pretty insecure.
It is up to those companies to convince the public that they need and want new voting machines.
While I agree with most of your comment, the companies don't need to convince the public. Congress mandated the change when they wanted to be seen *doing something* after the 2000 election, and they provided $4 billion to make it happen. Diebold and friends are in hog heaven.
Honestly, the important searchability is author/title, not so much full text searching. I'd bet on PDF files.
I guess that depends on what you're looking for. I'd like to be able to search on quotes or keywords and authors at the same time. If I already know the exact source of the information I'm looking for, I can probably find it using other resources.
Interesting concept, though. It's okay if I go to the Library and look it, but not if I look at it online? Why? ( I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time. Online, everyone on Earth can see it at the same time.
Really, it's only a matter of degree. There are thousands of libraries all serving up the same books to many users. Web servers can only serve so many connections at once. The real difference is the ability to copy the digital content and redistribute it. However, the vast majority of books in the LOC should be past the copyright period anyway. Perhaps they could make the majority of people happy by placing the works that are out of copyright online.
A librarian's job is the care of books. They can digitise them without destroying them. They've done it for Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think they can manage. Basically, if a book can be read it can be scanned (maybe not on your handy home USB scanner though).
While true, this wouldn't be done by the robotic scanners proposed in the article, which makes the $260 million less realistic. Searchability is another factor not mentioned. What format for the documents? PDFs, while probably best, don't lend themselves to easy searching and indexing.
5. Process is a must but it should be pretty lightweight. Make it enforcable and do not waiver in ensuring the necessary pieces occur.
6. Insulate your engineers from most of the stuff above. Not all, just most of it. Usually controlling the flow will suffice (often this involves rumor squashing).
Agreed, that would be good management. Too bad most managers don't see it that way. They generally go out of their way to find more work for engineers instead of facilitating the work required.
What ever the case, good management will know when to get involved and when not to.
I guess that depends on the company. In our SW department, it's generally those who *can't* that apply for and get promoted to line management. We have one project lead right now who has applied for the assistant dept. manager position, and the programmers who work for him are urging him on (and out of their way).
We have another project lead who is building a little empire and wasting a lot of resources in busy-work. His project produces reams of documentation for every minor release. The only problem is that it's mostly garbage. If the real situation and code changes, the documents don't change to match the reality. Management is cluelessly happy and constantly giving awards to the project.
In my experience, software line management is completely out of touch with what is going on because the people who would be best in that position won't take that position - they know how to build software, and that's what they want to do.
Do H1-B visa holders help reduce salary costs? Of course. The law of supply and demand has not been repealed. But that doesn't make it an evil program.
No,the program is not evil. The companies that flaunt the program's regulations are. The H1-B program was not supposed to do away with demand or increase supply so that IT workers go unemployed. One of the requirements for employing an H1-B is that the company cannot find an American resident (not necessarily a citizen) to fill the job.
There has been no enforcement of the program's regulations since the Clinton administration refused funding (although the Republicans aren't any better with it), and companies here know it.
In '98, when I was looking for a job, a well known company in Denver (a user and abuser of H1-Bs) had a job posting with a laundry list of requirements including 10 years experience with Java (if that number doesn't bother you, do some research). I didn't qualify, but they must have found some H1-Bs that did. Go figure.
Anyone who believes anything put out by Harris Miller and his ITAA is a fool.
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I work for Alion Science and Technology ( http://www.alionscience.com ), they're a defense contractor that hires mostly retired military but they hire geeks too. It's an employee owned company that's growing like crazy.
Good for you. There is another employee-owned DoD contractor (the largest), and I can guarantee that management in that company has no resemblance to the management in your company.
Also, corporate revenues would be much higher without paying 50% or more to tax, so they could afford to higher more people etc...
Many of the wealthiest corportations pay no tax except for the matching Social Security contribution for U.S. employees. When they outsource those jobs, they pay nothing. So cutting taxes for corporations is a meaningless excercise -- half of zero is still zero. Some companies now appear to have negative tax rates, i.e., corporate welfare.
Any geek gamers out there willing to boycott EA's products until they change their ways?
I'm already boycotting EA games, but it's not because of their sweatshop employment practices. It's because they think they can charge full price for unfinished junk like MOH Frontline. They used the popularity of the franchise to make big bucks off of a second-rate effort.
Good managers recognize the employees under them as their "customers" and as such do everything they can to make sure they can do their job. They also make sure YOU have a job.
You apparently have far more experience with "good" management than I do. In my experience, it's the managers who walk the working employees to the door when the budget gets cut. It's interesting that the managers all keep their jobs even when there are fewer people to _manage_.
I say for their punishment the judge should make them work 80+ hours 7 days a week for 3 months and let them see how they like it...
That's not much of a punishment since what they do isn't really "work". What they do is _supervise_, attend communal back-patting meetings with other managers, and make more work for the people who know how.
Note for those who left their humor detectors at home like the AC: The parent refers to a long thread yesterday, where a poster claimed that Americans would tend to do exactly the opposite of whatever the Europeans wanted in the election.
This is America, you are free to build your own company and loot it too. You'll start it and honestly go into it with the intention of not screwing anyone, but hey, when the chips are down, and you can just grab that pile of money, legally, and run with it, I guarantee you'll do the same exact thing.
Don't tell me what I would do. I've had opportunities to take advantage of situations in the past and not done so. I still have to live with myself - apparently you don't care who you live with. You also missed the point that company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company, which does not include looting it or robbing the shareholders. These aren't even people who have anything to do with starting the companies. They're just corporate raiders.
We can argue whether greed is wrong or not, but let's not quibble over a moral issue. . . . Many of them make a couple million dollars a year, but a lot of that is in stock options.
The average CEO makes 300 times the salary of an average worker. This one burned the company's original stockholders, leaving them with nothing, and walks away with $100 million because he's being replaced. And his options were vested as a reward. Let's not forget the $1.5 million bonus. And he gets to stay on the board of directors where he gets to set the compensation for the next CEO. It's not a quibble over a moral issue, it's a financial obscenity. It's called looting a company.
Google's a corporation, corporations are neither good nor bad IMO, they're all alike, all about profit.
There are real differences between companies, and you can tell by working for them. In some companies, it's all about cash flow, and if you need to cut corners or bill some stuff early to make the numbers come out right, that's accepted. There are still (a few) companies that, in enlightened self-interest, deal straight with customers and suppliers. Unfortunately, it takes only one greedy executive at the top to turn an honest company into a bad one.
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.
Since copyright now extends longer than the life of an average person and well beyond the death of the author, the term "limited time" has little meaning anymore. It certainly doesn't serve the original purpose of getting the works into the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.
Not only do these people require extra seats on planes, slow down the lines for roller coasters, and other idiotic things, they also cost this country millions in health care costs that could have been avioded if the ate a bit less and actually got up from in front of the tv once in a while.
Sorry, but my logic detector went off. Since fat people die younger, don't they actually save us money by not being a burden on Social Security and pension plans? Since health care costs are constantly rising, doesn't it save us money to have them die now rather than later when health care costs more? Do thin people always die suddenly while visiting the funeral home to make *arrangements* and therefore have no health care costs? It seems to me that the real consequence fat people have is the increasing cost of food. Have you seen the prices at Mickey-D's lately ?!!
Claiming you can't find source code is one of the most rediculous things I've ever heard.
That would depend on the age of the source code. We have a large application and, uh, lost all the code and documentation for versions prior to six years ago. It was all stored on an older machine that was taken out of service and surplused. When I eventually found out, I asked to have it restored to another machine from backups, but it was too late. Tapes are expensive, and they get reused after a while. It's not really a big deal, and there are no conspiracy theories about the loss.
While I don't play console games, I know that the console mags are often unable or unprepared to give realistic reviews on the hyped new title.
I guess that depends on the magazine. There are two major magazines covering the Playstation, PSM and OPM, and neither is afraid give a game a bad rating. There have been several hyped games I have not purchased because of bad reviews. The one I was really waiting for was the last Tomb Raider. After both magazines gave it a thumbs-down, I never did buy it. In contrast, they gave high ratings to Ico, a great game that didn't get a lot of hype.
MS Office is the only tool that can correctly render *ALL* Microsoft Word .doc documents.
That's news to me. I remember when the department's secretaries switched to Word 2000 when everyone else was using Word 97. Tables in documents from either version could not be rendered correctly by the other. The upshot was that everyone was forced to upgrade to remain compatible, and many project documents had to be redone.
MS has always positioned itself as a growth company. That's changing, and they know it.
That's the problem with a monopoly. Once you've reached market saturation, the only thing you can do to increase revenue is raise prices in one way or another. That leads ever more customers to look for alternatives. When you're on top of the world, the only remaining direction is down.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Geez. Let's try something easier than a whole site. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211 .htm The 2000 election in Florida was a real-world situation. It's pretty hard to get 16,000 negative votes with paper ballots. Diebold did it.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
During all these discussions, you've never made it to http://blackboxvoting.org/? I consider machines that let real votes disappear to be pretty insecure.
It is up to those companies to convince the public that they need and want new voting machines.
While I agree with most of your comment, the companies don't need to convince the public. Congress mandated the change when they wanted to be seen *doing something* after the 2000 election, and they provided $4 billion to make it happen. Diebold and friends are in hog heaven.
MSFT is scared to death of angering the DOJ and would never be so brazen as to arbitrarily share content in an IE-only format.
Yes, Microsoft was terrified by the hand-slapping they received from the big, bad DoJ.
Honestly, the important searchability is author/title, not so much full text searching. I'd bet on PDF files.
I guess that depends on what you're looking for. I'd like to be able to search on quotes or keywords and authors at the same time. If I already know the exact source of the information I'm looking for, I can probably find it using other resources.
Interesting concept, though. It's okay if I go to the Library and look it, but not if I look at it online? Why? ( I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time. Online, everyone on Earth can see it at the same time.
Really, it's only a matter of degree. There are thousands of libraries all serving up the same books to many users. Web servers can only serve so many connections at once. The real difference is the ability to copy the digital content and redistribute it. However, the vast majority of books in the LOC should be past the copyright period anyway. Perhaps they could make the majority of people happy by placing the works that are out of copyright online.
A librarian's job is the care of books. They can digitise them without destroying them. They've done it for Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think they can manage. Basically, if a book can be read it can be scanned (maybe not on your handy home USB scanner though).
While true, this wouldn't be done by the robotic scanners proposed in the article, which makes the $260 million less realistic. Searchability is another factor not mentioned. What format for the documents? PDFs, while probably best, don't lend themselves to easy searching and indexing.
5. Process is a must but it should be pretty lightweight. Make it enforcable and do not waiver in ensuring the necessary pieces occur.
6. Insulate your engineers from most of the stuff above. Not all, just most of it. Usually controlling the flow will suffice (often this involves rumor squashing).
Agreed, that would be good management. Too bad most managers don't see it that way. They generally go out of their way to find more work for engineers instead of facilitating the work required.
What ever the case, good management will know when to get involved and when not to.
I guess that depends on the company. In our SW department, it's generally those who *can't* that apply for and get promoted to line management. We have one project lead right now who has applied for the assistant dept. manager position, and the programmers who work for him are urging him on (and out of their way).
We have another project lead who is building a little empire and wasting a lot of resources in busy-work. His project produces reams of documentation for every minor release. The only problem is that it's mostly garbage. If the real situation and code changes, the documents don't change to match the reality. Management is cluelessly happy and constantly giving awards to the project.
In my experience, software line management is completely out of touch with what is going on because the people who would be best in that position won't take that position - they know how to build software, and that's what they want to do.
No,the program is not evil. The companies that flaunt the program's regulations are. The H1-B program was not supposed to do away with demand or increase supply so that IT workers go unemployed. One of the requirements for employing an H1-B is that the company cannot find an American resident (not necessarily a citizen) to fill the job.
There has been no enforcement of the program's regulations since the Clinton administration refused funding (although the Republicans aren't any better with it), and companies here know it.
In '98, when I was looking for a job, a well known company in Denver (a user and abuser of H1-Bs) had a job posting with a laundry list of requirements including 10 years experience with Java (if that number doesn't bother you, do some research). I didn't qualify, but they must have found some H1-Bs that did. Go figure.
Anyone who believes anything put out by Harris Miller and his ITAA is a fool.