There are arrogant programmers to be sure, but my observation is that programmers either don't believe they can do the other jobs or don't care about them. I find the "skilled" workers (programmers and designers) usually don't step on other people's toes. Programmers usually feel that they can't or certainly wouldn't want to talk to customers. When they argue over features, it usually is the situation in the article (the request is too vague to translated to code) or one where the programmer is worried about unintended consequences.
Now there is actual research to prove that the bosses are arrogant. When I've talked to managers kind of jokingly, "You should be a programmer and I'll talk to the client for you." What I realized is they really thought they can do my job. When I mentioned that you need to know a lot to do what I do, it was clear that she honestly didn't believe it.
My experience is that the tech vs. non-tech feud boils down to the non-techs thinking that knowing the system is an unfair trick and thinking that the techies are lying when they disagree. The non-managers are jealous of the techie pay, and the managers just plain think they are better than the techies. I often think the problem is techies being low key and NOT showing off their knowledge to others.
At least by the modern definition they were. They committed sabotage against a private corporation to protest something. These days sabotage (and cyber crime) are generally treated as terrorism. Two reasons:
The wealthy and powerful consider destruction of property to be worse than actual violence against humans.
We have made a very convenient category of crime called "terrorism" which exempts us from needing to engage in due process and allows us to slide into Stanford Prison Experiment/Lord of the Flies behavior. Hand and hand with that, we are allowed to dehumanize terrorists. So it is very convenient for us to use this category on anyone, when we want to stop thinking and start smacking down.
The military uses a lot of different technologies and in this complex world a lot of things can be connected to defense. And I do agree with your point that we would have less war with more alternative energy. But then you could also say that the Department of State has a lot to do with defense as well, because diplomacy keeps us safe.
However, I don't believe that solar cells are central to military technology or execution of war. And that was just an example. My main point is that DoD should do any research that helps the US and the rest of the world. If you want to say "X is important to defense because..." That is fine and you can say it about any large issue X. But I think we should drop the need to make that statement and just say the DoD is going to do whatever research America needs.
I think one of Obama's best ideas was to have DoD do research on solar energy. Like many of his talking points, it was not implemented.
What does solar energy have to do with defense? Well, nothing. But you know what? We have a giant defense infrastructure and do you really think we can take it apart easily? No, we should just re-purpose it.
The US economy is based on Military Keynesianism. (Which is an economic policy based on the acknowledgement that the New Deal works, but Americans hate all that mushy helping people bullshit. The drawback of implementing Keynesianism through military spending is that it generally does not produce anything of value, so it is a policy based on the broken window fallacy. ) If they take apart military spending overnight, the whole world's economy will collapse, so they just need to shift it.
Last I checked if an OEM doesn't want to update, they just don't. They don't need to throw any bones. You're reading way too much into this.
They need to throw bones to keep their customers happy. If they lock the phone and disallow updates, tech enthusiasts are infuriated. If you update the phones and there are problems everyone is mad.
If you let them unlock their phones, tech enthusiasts are thrilled AND HTC has saved themselves a lot of trouble.
So people that want to use their devices with their own software are "whiners" now?
I think you are a whiner.
Normal people don't care about updates or unlocked boot loaders.
Now you are just arguing against yourself. HTC doesn't have to do updates so much anymore, that's the point.
Developing more technology than your enemies is a fool's errand. At best you should just try to develop just a little bit more than them. If you make breakthroughs, your enemies will steal your technology and be a bigger threat than ever.
It is for this reason that China is not yet spending so much on military technology. They will allow the US to bankrupt itself on military spending before they waste their energy taking the lead. From there their worst case is they just have to focus their energy developing the concepts that the US has already proved. But in most cases they will simply steal the US's technology.
Our efforts to try to keep Israel ahead of are similarly foolish. At this point we are trying to keep the large industrial nation of Iran from developing a nuclear weapon even though their main enemy has them. Stuxnet will work for now. But if nuclear weapons where made in the 1940's so I don't think computer viruses will stop them forever?
This case of Israeli spyware going to Iran is just one more example of the fact that all the technology you develop will find its way to enemy hands. Information wants to be free, for better or worse. Iran will have nukes and whatever else Israel develops. It's just a matter of time.
I think the big question will be, how do you make apps for Boot 2 Gecko? Will they be similar to Android apps? Also, I don't mean this as a joke, but would Boot 2 Gecko mean that Richard Stallman could own a cellphone?
P.S. I recently experimented with Chrome and Opera. But I am back to Firefox because it is just better. Chrome eats memory like crazy without being so fast. Frankly Chrome is also buggier. And the incognito mode is leaky.
I live in the US. The land of the free, the home of the brave (is becoming more and more irrelevant). What country are you in? Do they have a liberal immigration policy?
Think about it. To get a job you have to sign an "at-will" contract waiving your employment rights. So now you will have to waive rights to sue and waive consumer protections when you buy products. I suppose you will eventually have to make a similar agreement when you buy food to agree to waive FDA regulations.
No more rights. We shall live in a libertarian paradise in which artificial entities will have unlimited freedom to take liberties with you and you will have an unlimited liberty to eat their shit.
"Unfortunately for all parties involved, software engineering and management are two completely separate skills"
So the correlation between being a good manager and a good software engineer is 0? I would guess that they are both correlated to general intelligence. Likewise I would guess managing software engineers has some correlation to understanding what they do, what your company's code-base looks like, and what your company does. (Likewise I would put a medical professional in charge of a hospital. Surgeons rarely even want to be administrators, but many hospitals give those jobs to nurses and are happy with the results..)
So based on that, I would think the good software engineers of your company is a good pool to try to select good managers from. (Just as best sales people, best accounts are good pools to look at) Now, that doesn't always mean make the best engineer the manager. You should look at other things, such as ability to handle many things at once, ability to work with others, etc.
You say a great managers ignore the politics. But a great careerist most certainly does not ignore those things. I have observed that a great engineer is more likely to look past the politics and focus on goals and rational resource deployment. And a great salesperson is more likely simply sell themselves, meaning that they will focus politics.
Scientists take what you've said as a given. The reason animals evolve to put limits on their musculature is too reduce the amount of food they need and too make them more nimble. However, as the article states, a great motivation for switching off this gene is to help people with muscular degenerative diseases.
(This is my second comment to criticize this article. But I can't help it, because this article sucks.)
Okay, so he's saying that if IT doesn't you to do something they are bad "High Priest of IT", you should complain to the CIO.
His advice represents a horrible deficit of office political savvy. For example, hasn't it occurred to the author that policies are usually set by the CIO himself? So if the CIO is an asshole, he'll just agree with you that the person you are complaining about is bad and do nothing for you (since you already assigned blame elsewhere, he doesn't need to do anything for you). If he is decent, then he'll feel a need to defend his employee, so he is still less likely to do anything for you.
So wouldn't it be better to explain to the CIO what you want to do and why you want it, instead of complaining about an employee? This is more likely to get you what you want. And even if the CIO can't give you what you want he or she is more likely to find half-measure to appease you. This also means that IT will be more agreeable with you in future, because you aren't a whiny asshole.
The article starts by saying there are good IT people who help you and bad IT people who make things difficult. From there he just whines and whines about nothing. His only advice about "thwarting the high priests of IT" is to complain to the CIO. Of course everyone complains to the CIO about the tech staff, but he or she will apparently be dazzled by your insight that some IT workers are good and some are bad.
The only non-obvious thought in this article is referring to bad IT workers at the "High Priests of IT." However, it is only non-obvious because it is really stupid. And if you actually go around saying "the High Priests of IT" then you are a bigger dickhead than almost any IT guy ever met.
Of course someone is working on something better and cheaper than Raspberry Pi. And of course there will eventually be something better and cheaper than Raspberry Pi. And in ten years, everyone is going to have PC hooked up to their tv. And most people will have one that costs less than $100.
This isn't a reason to not get a Raspberry Pi, but exciting nonetheless.
I think it is because IT doesn't have teeth, has no political leverage, and they have real skills which make people jealous. They are going to fire someone and expect everyone else to work harder.
Google gives money to fight slavery. And everyone is like "Google is teh Slaver!11" They compare Google making it's engineers work a lot to slavery. They criticize everything Google has ever done, etc. It looks like Google is the new Microsoft; they are always in wrong in Slashdot group-think, even when they donate money to the anti-slavery cause.
Don't get me wrong. I agree that Google does plenty of bad things and they scare me. I think they are a greedy corporation and they don't take the "Don't be evil" thing seriously. I think they are just doing this for good press. But really, is it so important to criticize everything they do, even when they legitimately do something good?
First of all, you think the need for drinking water is not a real and pressing problem!? Your ignorance is astounding. Don't you know how much water is used in the production of electricity, food, and other industrial processes? Do you realize that your morning shower is just a tiny percent of your daily water consumption? Development of technology that made clean drinking water ubiquitous would be possibly the greatest accomplishment man has ever made.
Second of all, Haiti has problems because we keep interfering with their governance with our military power. We should have left Aristede in place and because of his "socialism" he would have actually enforced building codes. The idea that we can't rebuild Haiti with trillions of dollars is nonsense. If the money was horribly abused and misplaced, we could still build every Haitian a house for that money.
If you argued that it would simply be a poor application of money, you'd have a better point. However, the Iraq war is a much worse application. There have indeed been hundreds of billions misapplied and stolen from corporations like Haliburton. Furthermore, what did we really accomplish in these places? Life in the war zone is worse that life under Sadaam Hussein.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
If you missed the all the talk of the Nuremberg principles, once again, they say that if you participate in a war of aggression, you are guilty. Maybe you should look up the Nuremberg principles.
Furthermore, you changing the terms of the debate. We are talking about a man who is making a moral choice to participate. Not someone who was drafted by the Nazis. Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
The asker of the question is saying he wants to participate in a war of aggression, not that someone is forcing him to.
I already said I don't think he will have to face a court of law. But it is clear that the reason they weren't held liable was pragmatics. As you said they engaged in clear-cut aggression. So they were guilty under the Nuremberg principles which explicitly denies that they get a "following orders" exemption.
But on the other hand, do you really think that at the end of the war they were going to imprison every soldier who fought for the Axis powers? That would clearly be impossible.
Give them a checklist of information you want. When they give you a bad bug report tell them exactly information you want. You want them be specific, so be specific about what you want.
Your link ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles) says waging a participation in a war of aggression is a war crime. And it does not exempt you based on superior orders, as your link states.
The "Canadian ruling" was a ruling in 2006 made by a Canadian court on whether Canada was going to accept a US war resister as a refugee. That ruling just applies in Canada, the Nuremberg principles do not give the Canadian federal court jurisdiction to interpret them. I think it is clear that Canada had a biased position on this issue because of it's close relationship with the US.
When was the last time your government engaged in an operation on this scale to help people? Did the US drop trillions on Haiti after US installed governments didn't want to make strong building codes? Do they spend trillions on developing clean drinking water solutions? No. They do these things when they want explicit control of an area. So they use military force.
Likewise, you can apply your talents to many projects that help people and involve zero killing.
Slashdot Mirror
There are arrogant programmers to be sure, but my observation is that programmers either don't believe they can do the other jobs or don't care about them. I find the "skilled" workers (programmers and designers) usually don't step on other people's toes. Programmers usually feel that they can't or certainly wouldn't want to talk to customers. When they argue over features, it usually is the situation in the article (the request is too vague to translated to code) or one where the programmer is worried about unintended consequences.
Now there is actual research to prove that the bosses are arrogant. When I've talked to managers kind of jokingly, "You should be a programmer and I'll talk to the client for you." What I realized is they really thought they can do my job. When I mentioned that you need to know a lot to do what I do, it was clear that she honestly didn't believe it.
My experience is that the tech vs. non-tech feud boils down to the non-techs thinking that knowing the system is an unfair trick and thinking that the techies are lying when they disagree. The non-managers are jealous of the techie pay, and the managers just plain think they are better than the techies. I often think the problem is techies being low key and NOT showing off their knowledge to others.
At least by the modern definition they were. They committed sabotage against a private corporation to protest something. These days sabotage (and cyber crime) are generally treated as terrorism. Two reasons:
The wealthy and powerful consider destruction of property to be worse than actual violence against humans.
We have made a very convenient category of crime called "terrorism" which exempts us from needing to engage in due process and allows us to slide into Stanford Prison Experiment/Lord of the Flies behavior. Hand and hand with that, we are allowed to dehumanize terrorists. So it is very convenient for us to use this category on anyone, when we want to stop thinking and start smacking down.
The military uses a lot of different technologies and in this complex world a lot of things can be connected to defense. And I do agree with your point that we would have less war with more alternative energy. But then you could also say that the Department of State has a lot to do with defense as well, because diplomacy keeps us safe.
However, I don't believe that solar cells are central to military technology or execution of war. And that was just an example. My main point is that DoD should do any research that helps the US and the rest of the world. If you want to say "X is important to defense because..." That is fine and you can say it about any large issue X. But I think we should drop the need to make that statement and just say the DoD is going to do whatever research America needs.
I think one of Obama's best ideas was to have DoD do research on solar energy. Like many of his talking points, it was not implemented.
What does solar energy have to do with defense? Well, nothing. But you know what? We have a giant defense infrastructure and do you really think we can take it apart easily? No, we should just re-purpose it.
The US economy is based on Military Keynesianism. (Which is an economic policy based on the acknowledgement that the New Deal works, but Americans hate all that mushy helping people bullshit. The drawback of implementing Keynesianism through military spending is that it generally does not produce anything of value, so it is a policy based on the broken window fallacy. ) If they take apart military spending overnight, the whole world's economy will collapse, so they just need to shift it.
Last I checked if an OEM doesn't want to update, they just don't. They don't need to throw any bones. You're reading way too much into this.
They need to throw bones to keep their customers happy. If they lock the phone and disallow updates, tech enthusiasts are infuriated. If you update the phones and there are problems everyone is mad.
If you let them unlock their phones, tech enthusiasts are thrilled AND HTC has saved themselves a lot of trouble.
So people that want to use their devices with their own software are "whiners" now?
I think you are a whiner.
Normal people don't care about updates or unlocked boot loaders.
Now you are just arguing against yourself. HTC doesn't have to do updates so much anymore, that's the point.
Did MS make them pay triple? Yup! MS could have actually gained some geek-cred paying Mozilla, in addition to getting searches.
I hope they spend most of this money making Web to Gecko a great OS!
Developing more technology than your enemies is a fool's errand. At best you should just try to develop just a little bit more than them. If you make breakthroughs, your enemies will steal your technology and be a bigger threat than ever.
It is for this reason that China is not yet spending so much on military technology. They will allow the US to bankrupt itself on military spending before they waste their energy taking the lead. From there their worst case is they just have to focus their energy developing the concepts that the US has already proved. But in most cases they will simply steal the US's technology.
Our efforts to try to keep Israel ahead of are similarly foolish. At this point we are trying to keep the large industrial nation of Iran from developing a nuclear weapon even though their main enemy has them. Stuxnet will work for now. But if nuclear weapons where made in the 1940's so I don't think computer viruses will stop them forever?
This case of Israeli spyware going to Iran is just one more example of the fact that all the technology you develop will find its way to enemy hands. Information wants to be free, for better or worse. Iran will have nukes and whatever else Israel develops. It's just a matter of time.
I think the big question will be, how do you make apps for Boot 2 Gecko? Will they be similar to Android apps? Also, I don't mean this as a joke, but would Boot 2 Gecko mean that Richard Stallman could own a cellphone?
P.S. I recently experimented with Chrome and Opera. But I am back to Firefox because it is just better. Chrome eats memory like crazy without being so fast. Frankly Chrome is also buggier. And the incognito mode is leaky.
I live in the US. The land of the free, the home of the brave (is becoming more and more irrelevant). What country are you in? Do they have a liberal immigration policy?
Think about it. To get a job you have to sign an "at-will" contract waiving your employment rights. So now you will have to waive rights to sue and waive consumer protections when you buy products. I suppose you will eventually have to make a similar agreement when you buy food to agree to waive FDA regulations.
No more rights. We shall live in a libertarian paradise in which artificial entities will have unlimited freedom to take liberties with you and you will have an unlimited liberty to eat their shit.
"Unfortunately for all parties involved, software engineering and management are two completely separate skills"
So the correlation between being a good manager and a good software engineer is 0? I would guess that they are both correlated to general intelligence. Likewise I would guess managing software engineers has some correlation to understanding what they do, what your company's code-base looks like, and what your company does. (Likewise I would put a medical professional in charge of a hospital. Surgeons rarely even want to be administrators, but many hospitals give those jobs to nurses and are happy with the results..)
So based on that, I would think the good software engineers of your company is a good pool to try to select good managers from. (Just as best sales people, best accounts are good pools to look at) Now, that doesn't always mean make the best engineer the manager. You should look at other things, such as ability to handle many things at once, ability to work with others, etc.
You say a great managers ignore the politics. But a great careerist most certainly does not ignore those things. I have observed that a great engineer is more likely to look past the politics and focus on goals and rational resource deployment. And a great salesperson is more likely simply sell themselves, meaning that they will focus politics.
Scientists take what you've said as a given. The reason animals evolve to put limits on their musculature is too reduce the amount of food they need and too make them more nimble. However, as the article states, a great motivation for switching off this gene is to help people with muscular degenerative diseases.
(This is my second comment to criticize this article. But I can't help it, because this article sucks.)
Okay, so he's saying that if IT doesn't you to do something they are bad "High Priest of IT", you should complain to the CIO.
His advice represents a horrible deficit of office political savvy. For example, hasn't it occurred to the author that policies are usually set by the CIO himself? So if the CIO is an asshole, he'll just agree with you that the person you are complaining about is bad and do nothing for you (since you already assigned blame elsewhere, he doesn't need to do anything for you). If he is decent, then he'll feel a need to defend his employee, so he is still less likely to do anything for you.
So wouldn't it be better to explain to the CIO what you want to do and why you want it, instead of complaining about an employee? This is more likely to get you what you want. And even if the CIO can't give you what you want he or she is more likely to find half-measure to appease you. This also means that IT will be more agreeable with you in future, because you aren't a whiny asshole.
The article starts by saying there are good IT people who help you and bad IT people who make things difficult. From there he just whines and whines about nothing. His only advice about "thwarting the high priests of IT" is to complain to the CIO. Of course everyone complains to the CIO about the tech staff, but he or she will apparently be dazzled by your insight that some IT workers are good and some are bad.
The only non-obvious thought in this article is referring to bad IT workers at the "High Priests of IT." However, it is only non-obvious because it is really stupid. And if you actually go around saying "the High Priests of IT" then you are a bigger dickhead than almost any IT guy ever met.
Of course someone is working on something better and cheaper than Raspberry Pi. And of course there will eventually be something better and cheaper than Raspberry Pi. And in ten years, everyone is going to have PC hooked up to their tv. And most people will have one that costs less than $100.
This isn't a reason to not get a Raspberry Pi, but exciting nonetheless.
I think it is because IT doesn't have teeth, has no political leverage, and they have real skills which make people jealous. They are going to fire someone and expect everyone else to work harder.
Google gives money to fight slavery. And everyone is like "Google is teh Slaver!11" They compare Google making it's engineers work a lot to slavery. They criticize everything Google has ever done, etc. It looks like Google is the new Microsoft; they are always in wrong in Slashdot group-think, even when they donate money to the anti-slavery cause.
Don't get me wrong. I agree that Google does plenty of bad things and they scare me. I think they are a greedy corporation and they don't take the "Don't be evil" thing seriously. I think they are just doing this for good press. But really, is it so important to criticize everything they do, even when they legitimately do something good?
First of all, you think the need for drinking water is not a real and pressing problem!? Your ignorance is astounding. Don't you know how much water is used in the production of electricity, food, and other industrial processes? Do you realize that your morning shower is just a tiny percent of your daily water consumption? Development of technology that made clean drinking water ubiquitous would be possibly the greatest accomplishment man has ever made.
Second of all, Haiti has problems because we keep interfering with their governance with our military power. We should have left Aristede in place and because of his "socialism" he would have actually enforced building codes. The idea that we can't rebuild Haiti with trillions of dollars is nonsense. If the money was horribly abused and misplaced, we could still build every Haitian a house for that money.
If you argued that it would simply be a poor application of money, you'd have a better point. However, the Iraq war is a much worse application. There have indeed been hundreds of billions misapplied and stolen from corporations like Haliburton. Furthermore, what did we really accomplish in these places? Life in the war zone is worse that life under Sadaam Hussein.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
If you missed the all the talk of the Nuremberg principles, once again, they say that if you participate in a war of aggression, you are guilty. Maybe you should look up the Nuremberg principles.
Furthermore, you changing the terms of the debate. We are talking about a man who is making a moral choice to participate. Not someone who was drafted by the Nazis. Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
The asker of the question is saying he wants to participate in a war of aggression, not that someone is forcing him to.
I already said I don't think he will have to face a court of law. But it is clear that the reason they weren't held liable was pragmatics. As you said they engaged in clear-cut aggression. So they were guilty under the Nuremberg principles which explicitly denies that they get a "following orders" exemption.
But on the other hand, do you really think that at the end of the war they were going to imprison every soldier who fought for the Axis powers? That would clearly be impossible.
Give them a checklist of information you want. When they give you a bad bug report tell them exactly information you want. You want them be specific, so be specific about what you want.
Your link ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles) says waging a participation in a war of aggression is a war crime. And it does not exempt you based on superior orders, as your link states.
The "Canadian ruling" was a ruling in 2006 made by a Canadian court on whether Canada was going to accept a US war resister as a refugee. That ruling just applies in Canada, the Nuremberg principles do not give the Canadian federal court jurisdiction to interpret them. I think it is clear that Canada had a biased position on this issue because of it's close relationship with the US.
Simple and to the point. Great advice.
When was the last time your government engaged in an operation on this scale to help people? Did the US drop trillions on Haiti after US installed governments didn't want to make strong building codes? Do they spend trillions on developing clean drinking water solutions? No. They do these things when they want explicit control of an area. So they use military force.
Likewise, you can apply your talents to many projects that help people and involve zero killing.