Agreed. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for a well-known investment management firm was amazed when their traders were doing business with Lehman the day after it filed for bankruptcy.
When he asked them what the hell they were doing trading with a bankrupt, they told him "but the prices on the screen are amazing!"
He had to explain to them that the prices were amazing because they were unlikely to see the transaction completed by their counterparty. "Have you not been reading the papers?" he asked, exasperated. But all they could do was stare at the trading screen.
They just didn't get it. That's the thing about these so-called Masters of the Universe - they're not the best and the brightest despite what they think.
My friend then had to spend the next 36 hours working non-stop to close the positions his traders had taken as best he could. The really astonishing thing was that his boss reprimanded him for not explicitly telling the traders earlier not to trade with Lehman.
It's a good point - but have you ever tried to take a project away from a vendor some way into the development life cycle?
Outsourced IT consultancies are essentially organized labor. They have collective bargaining powers that can totally fsck you up if you look as if you may start causing them problems.
Basically, you're the victim of a kind of intellectual lock-in. How motivated do you think the outgoing vendor is when transferring all its knowledge to you if they know their contract is not being renewed? They'll give the minimum amount of co-operation they're contractually obliged to. I know. I've been there:-(
The best way of managing an IT project is to keep it all (or at least mostly) in-house. But this flies in the face of all those economic fundamentalists that were bleating outsourcing dogma in the early 2000s. The situation is slowly changing, but not fast enough.
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money? Sure, it's tax-payers' money but aren't we constantly told by various private sector financed think tanks that this public work is best outsourced to the private sector? Well, this is what happens, folks.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land. It's just that they are less liable to scrutiny. When corruption happens in private organizations, it gets brushed under the carpet. Why? Because it looks not only bad for the culprit (obviously) but also the guy who employed him - no matter that he had nothing to do with the scam. Everybody stay silent and nobody gets hurt, right?
I've seen this soooo many times in the private sector - outsourced procurement agencies that charge $1000 for a $500 desktop, outsourced projects that were awarded to a consultancy that was (by shocking coincidence) run by the brother of the guy on the committee overseeing the outsourcing etc etc. In all these cases, it's hard to prove that actual fraud took place (eg, "well, we really did think this was the best offer when you consider all the factors").
And nobody in a private organization is ever, ever going to be prosecuted for these scams. Why would they? Who wants to pursue such cases? The shareholders don't care about such small corruption even if they got to hear of it. The media are not interested (a private company can spend its money as it sees fit). And an employee is only going to ruin his career.
The death sentence for "economic espionage" [from TFA]?
That seems a bit harsh....
As I understand it, the guy was working for Boeing - which is not the same thing as working for the government. Sure, it was on an outsourced government project. But if the information really were that essential to national security, why the f--- would you outsource it?
(Or am I being somewhat naive about the "military industrial complex" bogeyman, where Boeing and the US Government become synonymous...?)
It's a nice idea but a friend who was a quant at Lehmans told me that the rating agencies were giving away the algorithms they used to price the instruments (at least, to their best clients).
But as a result, these clients then structured their instruments to give them the highest ratings.
It seems like the problem isn't whether the algorithm is known or not but peoples' faith that the algorithms somehow contains an objective reality. The truth is (less interestingly) that they are only a rough approximation of reality.
Your duty is to the shareholders not the bosses
on
Music While Programming?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You don't have a duty to your boss, you have a duty to the company's shareholders. They are the people paying your wages, not the bosses.
If the boss makes idiotic decisions that destroy productivity, I think it is reasonable to be insubordinate.
[Without wishing to start a flame war, I've noticed that this blind allegiance to one's boss is very common in America. I have no idea why a people that so value their independence is so supine in the work place.]
As for music while coding, I've found dance music (or anything without lyrics - jazz or classical, but especially high energy dance) helps me concentrate.
Name a well-known (outside of engineering) engineer. I'll wait...
Neil Armstrong? Alexander Graham Bell? Even Bill Gates, dammit.
Or my favourite, Isambard Kingdom Brunel? He might not be very well known in America but he was voted #2 Greatest Britain in a BBC poll. A lot of his work still exists (he died in 1859) and is pretty damned impressive. The guy was a genius hacker and a great self-publicist.
Or like giving medals to everybody onboard the ship that blew a passenger jet out of the sky killing all 290 people.
Oh, wait! That's our guys! So, I guess it's OK then.
It's time Americans started to realize that the reason (some) Iranians hate America is that the US (and Britain) toppled their democratically elected president, Mohammed Mosaddeq, to get their hands on their oil. And then installed a brutal dictator that abused his power for 26 years.
Don't believe me? Then Google "Operation Ajax" and get educated.
"... And I have no doubt that North Korea traded with Iran for the designs and other essential technology."
Evidence? Citation? Logic?
WTF - how did this get modded as Insightful? I despair of the readership of Slashdot some days when a guy comes out with a statement like this - to the complete friggin' surprise of the World's intelligence community - and gets voted "Insightful"!
I don't know about the others, but the compact disc was invented by Philips (Dutch) and Sony (Japanese).
Anyway, this whole debate is as childish as "my dad's bigger than your dad" arguments in the playground. I've lived in Europe and the US and although I actually prefer where I am (England), I totally appreciate it's a matter of taste. If you don't like where you are, then move.
"...since science can't predict and describe the circumstances and targets of murder ahead of time, that murder might not exist."
Then science would be the wrong tool for the job.
Remember: science is supposed to be predictive and repeatable. If it can't make predictions and it can't be repeated under controlled circumstances, then it's not science.
That's not to say it is invalid. History is a respected discipline to which many clever people devote their lives. It's just not science. That in no why undermines it, but it's not science.
Similarly, evolution is akin to archaelogy. A respected discipline but it doesn't make predictions, it can't be tested and we can't replicate it. (We can play with genetics, but that's a different field.).
And again, I believe in mainstream history, archaeology and evolution. But I don't believe they're sciences.
But while stereotypes persist that programmers have no people skills, you forget that many business people don't either.
Just ask yourself: how many effective, people-oriented bosses have I ever had? If your answer is "not many", you're not alone.
I've been software engineering for over a decade. These are a few observations I'd like to share with managers:
Hire good people. If you don't, you're hosed before you start. If you can't tell the good people from the bad, you're in the wrong business.
Software engineering often fails because software engineers are ignored. In a badly run company, nobody even asks developers which is the best approach. Imagine if civil engineering were like this...
"Software is too expensive to do cheaply". Sure, you can get 20 engineers with 2 years experience apiece. But it's more effective to get 4 engineers with 10 years experience.
Let the team (largely) manage themselves. Open source projects work just fine without management - or, at least they do no worse than managed software...
Don't do things to keep morale high; instead, cease doing things that keep morale low. We engineers just want to do good work in a nice environment. It goes back to hiring good people and then leaving them well alone.
Give the team a hand in decision making. The team will be more incentivised to hit targets they set than the ones you set. Afterall, the only incentive they have for hitting your impossible deadlines is furthering your career.
Automated regression tests! There are still managers who don't know what these are/how important they are. Along with all other good processes, automated regression tests reduce stress.
"But I frankly don't see any reversal of the outsourcing trend"
I do. I'm having my most profitable year ever. It seems as if a lot of work has come back to the UK.
Hiring outsiders from half way around the World just doesn't work. If it does, why are companies not boasting about the latest successful product that cost 75% less to make than in previous years? Why are the PR spin machines strangely silent?
All we hear is that some company decided to offshore and hopes to make tens of millions of dollars in savings. Then it all goes eerily quiet. Then I get a call from an agent asking whether I am in the market for some maintenance work at a large blue chip.
The mistake these companies keep making is that it's the same PHBs running the shop (yes, they're not being offshored...). Not a single mother's-son of 'em ever thinks of asking a software engineer how to do, er, software engineering...
I'm currently working with a large European Telecommunication company who have shipped in two plane-loads of Indians. Man, you should see these white boys strut around the office. It's the last days of the British Raj all over again! I almost expect them to walk in with a pith-helmet some mornings. Now, as a result, they won't listen to the advice of their brown-skinned subordinates (though, to be fair, these young boys fresh from college need a lot of guidance too...).
"The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent"
Agreed. I had a helluva job integrating with a team in Sweden. I learned the hard way that Swedish business culture is very different to the Anglo-Saxon model, despite the fact that their English was as good as (better?) than mine. They were great coders but you just can't say to a Swede: "Dude, this code's a bit crufty. Can we refactor it please?" - something you could say to any UK programmer that you quoff beers with. Cultural faux-pas like that (yes, I know, I was a compleat tit) resulted in a large loss of productivity.
It is a project paid for by the government but not a government project.
From TFA:
"Accenture proved the big winner... Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) was awarded Northwest with West Midlands; BT beat out IBM to get London; and a Fujitsu-led alliance won the Southern region. BT was also given the contract to build both the N3 network and the National Spine, while yet another vendor, Paris-based I.T. services provider Atos Origin (formerly SchlumbergerSema), was commissioned to provide Choose and Book."
If anything, this is an argument for bringing these projects in-house (a true government project). There is no way it can be said that outsourcing saves money and they couldn't afford to do this in-house - $24 billion buys you a lot of good staff.
Am I the only person who is bored of hearing people whine about the failures of government when it was actually private companies that destroyed the project? We're told by much of the press that governments are wasteful but when a trillion dollars is lost in the dot-com bubble of the private sector, this demonstrates the efficiency of free markets...
I saw this movie last week at a showing in London's South Bank Center.
The film-maker said we were all free to download it. He'd covered his costs thanks to RTE and the BBC and just wanted people to see it now.
Great movie. And what happened was truly frightening. Not least because (as mentioned in the discussion afterwards) most of the Western press largely ignored it.
The movie vaguely hints that Washington may have been involved. It shows the plotters going to the White House the month before the coup. It shows George Tenet hilariously complaining that Chavez did not have American interests as his number one priority. But the film-maker was keen on people making up their own minds.
The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency.
The Constitution means jack. People interpret it as they want. From Wikipedia:
'...in Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), where the U.S. Supreme court held that a black "whose ancestors were... sold as slaves" was not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court, and that blacks were "beings of an inferior order" not included in the phrase "all men" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence nor afforded any rights by the United States Constitution."'
It makes me laugh when my American friends tell me how great their Constitution is whereas I am not a citizen of the UK but a subject of Her Majesty. It's no coincidence that these same Americans are all white. The Constitution did not help black people for many years.
In more recent events, habeas corpus (a human right that dates back hundreds of years in England) appears to be routinely suspended in the US despite it being part of the Constitution (see the Jose Padilla case).
The UK has been free from slavery and apartheid for centuries and, to be honest, I think the average Brit is far more willing to debate any potential infringement on his rights than the average American.
Am I the only Westerner who thinks that Iran getting nuclear weapons is no bad thing?
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is what prevented the Cold War from warming up. It might take the current crisis in the Middle East off the boil as well.
Consider this:
They've already had the West topple their democratically elected government before. This was pure and simple an attempt by us to get our greedy mitts on their oil (google for Operation Ajax).
The Iranians (perhaps rightly) fear unprovoked aggression from America. It's now clear that the claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction used in the current Iraq campaign were just propaganda to allow the invasion of an oil-rich nation. Why should Iran not think we want to do the same thing again?
The US was sabre rattling against Iran by calling it part of the comically titled "Axis of Evil" even when the moderate Mohammad Khatami was president (and, yes, Iran is. at least nominally, a democracy...)
All the horror expressed in the America media about oil-rich Iran's claimed civilian programme sounds somewhat hollow when their so-called fellow Axis-of-Evil partner North Korea has happily admitted to a military nuclear programme (total oil reserves of North Korea in millions of barrels: 0).
Israel already has them (google for Mordechai Vanunu who served 18 years in an Israeli prison for leaking information about their nuclear programme to the British Press. Awfully long sentence if the programme didn't exist, don't you think...?).
For this last reason, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's beligerent stance towards Israel is largely regarded as rhetoric. Afterall, Mutually Assured Destruction is, well, mutual.
I for one think Iran having nuclear weapons will make us stop taking ill-advised decisions when it comes to meddling in the affairs of small, oil-rich countries.
It wasn't Joseph Wilson, who's wife was outed by the Bush administration as a CIA operative was it?
:-P
People did have their livelihoods ruined. For some bizarre reason, The Dixie Chicks had a campaign launched against them for having the temerity to question the president.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for a well-known investment management firm was amazed when their traders were doing business with Lehman the day after it filed for bankruptcy.
When he asked them what the hell they were doing trading with a bankrupt, they told him "but the prices on the screen are amazing!"
He had to explain to them that the prices were amazing because they were unlikely to see the transaction completed by their counterparty. "Have you not been reading the papers?" he asked, exasperated. But all they could do was stare at the trading screen.
They just didn't get it. That's the thing about these so-called Masters of the Universe - they're not the best and the brightest despite what they think.
My friend then had to spend the next 36 hours working non-stop to close the positions his traders had taken as best he could. The really astonishing thing was that his boss reprimanded him for not explicitly telling the traders earlier not to trade with Lehman.
It's a good point - but have you ever tried to take a project away from a vendor some way into the development life cycle?
Outsourced IT consultancies are essentially organized labor. They have collective bargaining powers that can totally fsck you up if you look as if you may start causing them problems.
Basically, you're the victim of a kind of intellectual lock-in. How motivated do you think the outgoing vendor is when transferring all its knowledge to you if they know their contract is not being renewed? They'll give the minimum amount of co-operation they're contractually obliged to. I know. I've been there :-(
The best way of managing an IT project is to keep it all (or at least mostly) in-house. But this flies in the face of all those economic fundamentalists that were bleating outsourcing dogma in the early 2000s. The situation is slowly changing, but not fast enough.
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money? Sure, it's tax-payers' money but aren't we constantly told by various private sector financed think tanks that this public work is best outsourced to the private sector? Well, this is what happens, folks.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land. It's just that they are less liable to scrutiny. When corruption happens in private organizations, it gets brushed under the carpet. Why? Because it looks not only bad for the culprit (obviously) but also the guy who employed him - no matter that he had nothing to do with the scam. Everybody stay silent and nobody gets hurt, right?
I've seen this soooo many times in the private sector - outsourced procurement agencies that charge $1000 for a $500 desktop, outsourced projects that were awarded to a consultancy that was (by shocking coincidence) run by the brother of the guy on the committee overseeing the outsourcing etc etc. In all these cases, it's hard to prove that actual fraud took place (eg, "well, we really did think this was the best offer when you consider all the factors").
And nobody in a private organization is ever, ever going to be prosecuted for these scams. Why would they? Who wants to pursue such cases? The shareholders don't care about such small corruption even if they got to hear of it. The media are not interested (a private company can spend its money as it sees fit). And an employee is only going to ruin his career.
That seems a bit harsh....
As I understand it, the guy was working for Boeing - which is not the same thing as working for the government. Sure, it was on an outsourced government project. But if the information really were that essential to national security, why the f--- would you outsource it?
(Or am I being somewhat naive about the "military industrial complex" bogeyman, where Boeing and the US Government become synonymous...?)
But as a result, these clients then structured their instruments to give them the highest ratings.
It seems like the problem isn't whether the algorithm is known or not but peoples' faith that the algorithms somehow contains an objective reality. The truth is (less interestingly) that they are only a rough approximation of reality.
If the boss makes idiotic decisions that destroy productivity, I think it is reasonable to be insubordinate.
[Without wishing to start a flame war, I've noticed that this blind allegiance to one's boss is very common in America. I have no idea why a people that so value their independence is so supine in the work place.]
As for music while coding, I've found dance music (or anything without lyrics - jazz or classical, but especially high energy dance) helps me concentrate.
"The USA was founded on the premise that human beings have some inalienable rights endowed by their creator."
Unless you were one of the million or so Africans who were shipped over to live and die as a slave.
Some perspective, please...
Name a well-known (outside of engineering) engineer. I'll wait ...
Neil Armstrong? Alexander Graham Bell? Even Bill Gates, dammit.
Or my favourite, Isambard Kingdom Brunel? He might not be very well known in America but he was voted #2 Greatest Britain in a BBC poll. A lot of his work still exists (he died in 1859) and is pretty damned impressive. The guy was a genius hacker and a great self-publicist.
Oh, wait! That's our guys! So, I guess it's OK then.
It's time Americans started to realize that the reason (some) Iranians hate America is that the US (and Britain) toppled their democratically elected president, Mohammed Mosaddeq, to get their hands on their oil. And then installed a brutal dictator that abused his power for 26 years.
Don't believe me? Then Google "Operation Ajax" and get educated.
Evidence? Citation? Logic?
WTF - how did this get modded as Insightful? I despair of the readership of Slashdot some days when a guy comes out with a statement like this - to the complete friggin' surprise of the World's intelligence community - and gets voted "Insightful"!
Anyway, this whole debate is as childish as "my dad's bigger than your dad" arguments in the playground. I've lived in Europe and the US and although I actually prefer where I am (England), I totally appreciate it's a matter of taste. If you don't like where you are, then move.
So, why aren't you employing the 10% who are both American and qualified?
Then science would be the wrong tool for the job.
Remember: science is supposed to be predictive and repeatable. If it can't make predictions and it can't be repeated under controlled circumstances, then it's not science.
That's not to say it is invalid. History is a respected discipline to which many clever people devote their lives. It's just not science. That in no why undermines it, but it's not science.
Similarly, evolution is akin to archaelogy. A respected discipline but it doesn't make predictions, it can't be tested and we can't replicate it. (We can play with genetics, but that's a different field.).
And again, I believe in mainstream history, archaeology and evolution. But I don't believe they're sciences.
How do you test evolution? Can you predict how species will evolve? Does evolution predict where to dig and what you'll find there?
Don't get me wrong, I believe in evolution. But I recoginise that it is a belief.
"but the pair do a good job of spicing up the commercials with a bit of dry British humor and sexy good looks"
I'm sorry but I'm British and although we've always got a joke to hand, we're simply not the best looking people in the World...
But while stereotypes persist that programmers have no people skills, you forget that many business people don't either.
Just ask yourself: how many effective, people-oriented bosses have I ever had? If your answer is "not many", you're not alone.
I've been software engineering for over a decade. These are a few observations I'd like to share with managers:
I do. I'm having my most profitable year ever. It seems as if a lot of work has come back to the UK.
Hiring outsiders from half way around the World just doesn't work. If it does, why are companies not boasting about the latest successful product that cost 75% less to make than in previous years? Why are the PR spin machines strangely silent?
All we hear is that some company decided to offshore and hopes to make tens of millions of dollars in savings. Then it all goes eerily quiet. Then I get a call from an agent asking whether I am in the market for some maintenance work at a large blue chip.
The mistake these companies keep making is that it's the same PHBs running the shop (yes, they're not being offshored...). Not a single mother's-son of 'em ever thinks of asking a software engineer how to do, er, software engineering...
I'm currently working with a large European Telecommunication company who have shipped in two plane-loads of Indians. Man, you should see these white boys strut around the office. It's the last days of the British Raj all over again! I almost expect them to walk in with a pith-helmet some mornings. Now, as a result, they won't listen to the advice of their brown-skinned subordinates (though, to be fair, these young boys fresh from college need a lot of guidance too...).
"The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent"
Agreed. I had a helluva job integrating with a team in Sweden. I learned the hard way that Swedish business culture is very different to the Anglo-Saxon model, despite the fact that their English was as good as (better?) than mine. They were great coders but you just can't say to a Swede: "Dude, this code's a bit crufty. Can we refactor it please?" - something you could say to any UK programmer that you quoff beers with. Cultural faux-pas like that (yes, I know, I was a compleat tit) resulted in a large loss of productivity.
And people say the European Commission is corrupt...
It is a project paid for by the government but not a government project.
From TFA:
"Accenture proved the big winner ... Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) was awarded Northwest with West Midlands; BT beat out IBM to get London; and a Fujitsu-led alliance won the Southern region. BT was also given the contract to build both the N3 network and the National Spine, while yet another vendor, Paris-based I.T. services provider Atos Origin (formerly SchlumbergerSema), was commissioned to provide Choose and Book."
If anything, this is an argument for bringing these projects in-house (a true government project). There is no way it can be said that outsourcing saves money and they couldn't afford to do this in-house - $24 billion buys you a lot of good staff.
Am I the only person who is bored of hearing people whine about the failures of government when it was actually private companies that destroyed the project? We're told by much of the press that governments are wasteful but when a trillion dollars is lost in the dot-com bubble of the private sector, this demonstrates the efficiency of free markets...
Because they could.
The best engineer I know left the profession during the last downturn. He was a doctor, so he returned to medicine.
I think a lot of other smart people changed profession.
It's the law of unintended consequences again.
The film-maker said we were all free to download it. He'd covered his costs thanks to RTE and the BBC and just wanted people to see it now.
Great movie. And what happened was truly frightening. Not least because (as mentioned in the discussion afterwards) most of the Western press largely ignored it.
The movie vaguely hints that Washington may have been involved. It shows the plotters going to the White House the month before the coup. It shows George Tenet hilariously complaining that Chavez did not have American interests as his number one priority. But the film-maker was keen on people making up their own minds.
The Constitution means jack. People interpret it as they want. From Wikipedia:
'...in Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), where the U.S. Supreme court held that a black "whose ancestors were ... sold as slaves" was not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court, and that blacks were "beings of an inferior order" not included in the phrase "all men" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence nor afforded any rights by the United States Constitution."'
It makes me laugh when my American friends tell me how great their Constitution is whereas I am not a citizen of the UK but a subject of Her Majesty. It's no coincidence that these same Americans are all white. The Constitution did not help black people for many years.
In more recent events, habeas corpus (a human right that dates back hundreds of years in England) appears to be routinely suspended in the US despite it being part of the Constitution (see the Jose Padilla case).
The UK has been free from slavery and apartheid for centuries and, to be honest, I think the average Brit is far more willing to debate any potential infringement on his rights than the average American.
And we don't have a formal constitution.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is what prevented the Cold War from warming up. It might take the current crisis in the Middle East off the boil as well.
Consider this:
For this last reason, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's beligerent stance towards Israel is largely regarded as rhetoric. Afterall, Mutually Assured Destruction is, well, mutual.
I for one think Iran having nuclear weapons will make us stop taking ill-advised decisions when it comes to meddling in the affairs of small, oil-rich countries.
That includes Canada which is the second largest country in the World (after Russia) and only has 32 million people.
That's gonna skew the stats...
People did have their livelihoods ruined. For some bizarre reason, The Dixie Chicks had a campaign launched against them for having the temerity to question the president.
Sigh.