Golden Rule... "He who has the gold, makes the rules."
Re:I'll have to disagree ('Circle takes the square
on
Geeks in Management?
·
· Score: 1
Number One rule for the managing programmers : Interpreting Time Estimates.
Multiply your newbie developer time quotes by somewhere in the 8x to 24x range. If he says three hours, it will take somewhere between 3 days and two weeks. If he says he can do it in a week, don't expect it to be done (working, through analysis, development, test, client acceptance, documented, and working in production) for two months.
Junior Developers : multiply time estimates 5x. Senior Developers : multiply time estimates 2x-3x. The computer gods : multiple time estimates 0.75x - 2x.
The reason why? Newbies don't know to account for anything. They quote you exactly how long it will take to bang out enough lines of code to do what you are describing. They forget that professional code gets designed, documented, tested, and deployed - and that each of those aspects take time. They also forget that for every two hours of coding they spend an hour farking off doing email, talking with others, finding out where the standard libaries are, and helping some end user fix his printer. Finally, they are under the horrible misconception that when they need someone else to do part of it, that other person will give it their #1 priority and do it right away.
Junior developers know they have to account for all of the above, but they haven't figured out how long each one is going to take so they wayyy underestimate each one. Senior developers have a pretty good grasp of how long each one takes (minimum, maximum, average) but tend to assume best case scenarios for each aspect. The computer gods account for all of the above and when something isn't going according to plan they know how to work the system and make it happen, or do it themselves if they are in a serious bind.
Smartest thing I have read all day. The job of the manager truly is to serve his employees, structured along the lines of 'what do you need in order to accomplish these goals that I have outlined and expect you to finish?'
I only want to add that in a well structured business a manager has goals that are generally driven by the business needs - and the manager's job is to see to that those business goals are met. Even a manager of 'techie geeks.'
What business goals are: Reliable email services Reliable network file and print services Business processes that facilitate working with some business client (ie, process claims or payroll, or put a space shuttle into orbit.)
A business goal isn't: More RAM in a server or in your developer's desktop A new laptop or LCD for the developer Run Linux
My boss comes to my team with business goals and asks us what we need to accomplish them, and keeps the lines of communications between the tech and business teams. Also keeps the business folks from hassling us (aka administrative overhead or politics.) She wouldn't dream of telling me how to write an SQL statement or which language to write the application in - we have driving standards for most of that and the rest... best fit according to the developer.
Want to be a good manager? Define what you need to get done. Someone above you has probably already done this for you. Get your people together and explain what the business goals are for this time period. Explain that they are going to do the work. Come up with a working phrase book that accurately defines the difference between 'I want' and 'I need' Ask them what they need in order to succeed. Get them what they need in order to succeed. Ask them what they want. Get as much of what they want as you can. If a 20" LCD really is that big a deal, fiscally ($600 delivered), consider a 17" LCD at less than $250 delivered. Hell, give them the option for two 17" LCDs that they can put side by side or a single 20" LCD. To a developer spending 2500 hours a year in front of it - it is one step away from saying 'this company loves you.' That's about five cents an hour, if it lasts five years. Stay out of their way. Hold weekly one-on-ones so you don't get surprised. Praise in public / bitchslap in private. Work on their behalf. Accomodate their needs both personally and professionally. If the work isn't getting done, ask why. Don't accuse or blame, just ask what is it going to take to get this done?
I had several colleagues and former bosses contact me to speak with me about positions I might be interested [in]
Bingo, we have a winner. Quite honestly, in the best of times this was the best way to get a job. Now, in questionably the worst times (in a decade or two) it is the only way jobs are landed 90% of the time. Without a personal recommendation from someone on the inside, generally, you aren't getting hired.
This is how I got hired, five of the last... five times. Damn, come to think of it, every job in my life.
Yours too, I'm guessing.
Dig out the rolodex, start contacting all of the professional contacts you made while you were in the job you had during the.COM era, and all the contacts you have from before then. If your rolodex is empty and your business card collection is empty, you are effectively fuxored. Hard reality, but pretty close to as true as they come.
At what point do you consider they may have just ripped you off?"
As soon as you decided to outsource it to Gooks'lvania.
and how do you know when to file complaints and withhold payment?"
Withhold payment? Hehe - you already paid that one and they have already cashed that check.
You not only got fucked, but you asked for it and even paid for it in full. And you agreed to give up control of the source, just handed it over. Maybe next time give them all your databases too, let them data-mine all your data for other ways to exploit all your customers and employees.
Let this be a lesson to you. Outsourcing is bad, Bad, BAD.
I'm starting to think I've just been taken advantage of. Ya THINK?
Too bad for them; two years later that ad is still running at least once a month.
And that is about the stupidest part of the hiring process. I went through about the same thing with a company a few years ago - they wanted two years of embedded code experience in some obscure language (which of course I didn't have.)
Two years later they still haven't filled the position - for fux sake, if they had hired me back then I would have two years in their exact application by now. If a company leaves a position open for a year because they want a year's experience in something - they could have brought in a guy with a broad background and brought him up to speed in the year, and trained him to think the way they wanted.
I was upset that I didn't get asked that. My answer, of course...
I would simply update the documentation saying it had been moved. For 99.5% of our users that would be enough. For the remaining 0.5%, anybody that physically went to the new site and didn't find Mt Fuji (and called tech support to complain) I would just send them the original documentation.
Actually I am just coming down off a week long high doing GigE benchmarking using ramdrives (details in my Journal.) I have been able to peg GigE (116MB/s sustained throughput) in bogus benchmark tests but never in real applications.
I have seen an increase from 10MB/s to 33MB/s (3x) on real applications, however, which is important when moving.iso's around, and more importantly when moving VM's around (details in older Journal entries, virtual machines = about 4-6GB apiece.) Neither of which, however, will I be doing on the MiniMac - so you are pretty much right in that 100Mbps ought to be plenty for whatever I am going to use it for.
I will get one, no doubt, if for no other reason than to see what all versions of Linux I can get running on it (praying that SuSE 9.x has a PPC version, or that YellowDog cooperates) and because I want to play with OSX.
More importantly look at all the little white hooks sticking up in parallel - presumably to grab hold of the top of the case and keep it on. Gonna be a mothafarker to get that thing apart without a specialized Mac'cracker.
Lack of GigE was the first thing that brought me back to reality - it doesn't mean I still won't buy one (or more) but I put my Visa back in the wallet for now.
I am going to get seriously busy with tchuladdiass's recommendation, but I wanted to point out that you are describing a RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers - my term) and as you hoped, when doing common jobs like rendering something, decrypting DVDs, creating iso's... etc, it is faster IF your task load is easily shared.
Ripping one DVD and compressing it to an.avi or VCD? Not easily shared. Ripping six DVDs and compressing them to.avi or VCDs? Your RAIC scales linerarly in performance (ie. add a box, go twice as fast. add three boxes, finish in 1/4th the time.)
Get a 4-way KVM switch with audio port (the one with built in cables would be slick if it used USB connectors on the ends of the cables) and one real nice keyboard, mouse, and display.
It won't get you higher frames per second in a single job (game or DVD rip or whatever) but for serious multi-tasking it makes a big difference. In effect you have to handle the task assignments but once that is done you are all set.
I do this at home with four Wintel boxes (talked about it in my Journal a few months ago) and it works well enough to keep them set up.
It is a built in widget in the Gnome shell in Linux. Right click on the task bar at the bottom and select 'add widget' and find the weather widget. You can add more than one. I love it, wish it was available in KDE.
How about ASCII characters AE and AF? That's like a double LT and double GT character, not something the end user is likely to fat-finger during data entry.
Well for the record I use (and like) GMAIL. And there are plenty of apps where I work that use XML as the interprocess communications vector and several of those applications are more than happy to die in a most glorious fashion when coming across bad XML.
I haven't seen it broken in the fashion we are seeing here with GMAIL, but I have seen plenty of instances of a GT or LT character used in user data entry fields (hosing the XML in the process.) That's what I was talking about. Not too often that characters use one of the high-bit ASCII characters in their data entry - why not use one of those instead?
Same reason you are posting as QMO and not as your real name. Just because you feel like it, and because you can say whatever you want within reason here without fearing easy repercussion.
I'm not saying your true identity can't be determined - I'm just saying it isn't a no-brainer. People talk smack in semi-anonymous forums that they might not have talked if everybody immediately knew who it was.
Jesus - am I the only one to recognize this bug? This is just the most publicly seen instance but broken XML does this every single day.
Use the greater than and less than signs as data delimiters in the 'next generation' of data encoding (XML)? WTF were they thinking?
I'm not 100% they are using true XML but from the looks of it if they aren't they are using a home-built XML wanna-be and - well it looks like I was right a few years ago when I (unsuccessfully) campaigned against doing it that way. Not that I campaigned very loud, as I am basically a nobody.
For the same reason I'm considering getting one : you want to futz around with OSX and all the software available in that environment, see if you like it or not, see how the other half lives, and most importantly see if you can get Linux running on it.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things:-)
We already have half a dozen Dell Wintel boxes at home, one more isn't going to give you anything you don't already have - but a new machine architecture, new operating system, new... well new everything - it's like watching two women kiss. You know you want it (as do I) but until now you haven't been able to justify the cost. You had no delusions of getting practical work done on it (ditto watching two women get it on) but damn it's just something you want check out.
While that works, and simply hijacking a neighbor's signal for free works just as well I want to remind everybody that 'insecure network' works both ways. While you can browse their weak insecure network and look for open shares (printers, file shares) your machine is also on their network and any open shares you have on your box are widely available to anybody on their network.
That's the problem - trusted computing implies that you trust the computer and all of a sudden it is making those decisions for you (and screwing you in the process, it appears.)
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Golden Rule... "He who has the gold, makes the rules."
Number One rule for the managing programmers : Interpreting Time Estimates.
Multiply your newbie developer time quotes by somewhere in the 8x to 24x range. If he says three hours, it will take somewhere between 3 days and two weeks. If he says he can do it in a week, don't expect it to be done (working, through analysis, development, test, client acceptance, documented, and working in production) for two months.
Junior Developers : multiply time estimates 5x.
Senior Developers : multiply time estimates 2x-3x.
The computer gods : multiple time estimates 0.75x - 2x.
The reason why?
Newbies don't know to account for anything. They quote you exactly how long it will take to bang out enough lines of code to do what you are describing. They forget that professional code gets designed, documented, tested, and deployed - and that each of those aspects take time. They also forget that for every two hours of coding they spend an hour farking off doing email, talking with others, finding out where the standard libaries are, and helping some end user fix his printer. Finally, they are under the horrible misconception that when they need someone else to do part of it, that other person will give it their #1 priority and do it right away.
Junior developers know they have to account for all of the above, but they haven't figured out how long each one is going to take so they wayyy underestimate each one.
Senior developers have a pretty good grasp of how long each one takes (minimum, maximum, average) but tend to assume best case scenarios for each aspect.
The computer gods account for all of the above and when something isn't going according to plan they know how to work the system and make it happen, or do it themselves if they are in a serious bind.
Smartest thing I have read all day.
:
:
... best fit according to the developer.
The job of the manager truly is to serve his employees, structured along the lines of 'what do you need in order to accomplish these goals that I have outlined and expect you to finish?'
I only want to add that in a well structured business a manager has goals that are generally driven by the business needs - and the manager's job is to see to that those business goals are met. Even a manager of 'techie geeks.'
What business goals are
Reliable email services
Reliable network file and print services
Business processes that facilitate working with some business client (ie, process claims or payroll, or put a space shuttle into orbit.)
A business goal isn't
More RAM in a server or in your developer's desktop
A new laptop or LCD for the developer
Run Linux
My boss comes to my team with business goals and asks us what we need to accomplish them, and keeps the lines of communications between the tech and business teams. Also keeps the business folks from hassling us (aka administrative overhead or politics.) She wouldn't dream of telling me how to write an SQL statement or which language to write the application in - we have driving standards for most of that and the rest
Want to be a good manager?
Define what you need to get done. Someone above you has probably already done this for you.
Get your people together and explain what the business goals are for this time period.
Explain that they are going to do the work.
Come up with a working phrase book that accurately defines the difference between 'I want' and 'I need'
Ask them what they need in order to succeed.
Get them what they need in order to succeed.
Ask them what they want.
Get as much of what they want as you can. If a 20" LCD really is that big a deal, fiscally ($600 delivered), consider a 17" LCD at less than $250 delivered. Hell, give them the option for two 17" LCDs that they can put side by side or a single 20" LCD. To a developer spending 2500 hours a year in front of it - it is one step away from saying 'this company loves you.' That's about five cents an hour, if it lasts five years.
Stay out of their way.
Hold weekly one-on-ones so you don't get surprised.
Praise in public / bitchslap in private.
Work on their behalf. Accomodate their needs both personally and professionally.
If the work isn't getting done, ask why. Don't accuse or blame, just ask what is it going to take to get this done?
I have a boss that does this, and I love my job.
I had several colleagues and former bosses contact me to speak with me about positions I might be interested [in]
... five times. Damn, come to think of it, every job in my life.
.COM era, and all the contacts you have from before then. If your rolodex is empty and your business card collection is empty, you are effectively fuxored. Hard reality, but pretty close to as true as they come.
Bingo, we have a winner.
Quite honestly, in the best of times this was the best way to get a job. Now, in questionably the worst times (in a decade or two) it is the only way jobs are landed 90% of the time. Without a personal recommendation from someone on the inside, generally, you aren't getting hired.
This is how I got hired, five of the last
Yours too, I'm guessing.
Dig out the rolodex, start contacting all of the professional contacts you made while you were in the job you had during the
I bet the cartridges cost an arm and a leg.
No, I checked with the TBS hotline ... we got a 'marginally funny' on that one.
Actually it is just about ingenius - you only have to have a few spammers beheaded, tortured, etc before it has a serious impact on spam.
Now if he could only figure out a way to apply this to oursourcing companies in India.
At what point do you consider they may have just ripped you off?"
As soon as you decided to outsource it to Gooks'lvania.
and how do you know when to file complaints and withhold payment?"
Withhold payment? Hehe - you already paid that one and they have already cashed that check.
You not only got fucked, but you asked for it and even paid for it in full. And you agreed to give up control of the source, just handed it over. Maybe next time give them all your databases too, let them data-mine all your data for other ways to exploit all your customers and employees.
Let this be a lesson to you.
Outsourcing is bad, Bad, BAD.
I'm starting to think I've just been taken advantage of.
Ya THINK?
Too bad for them; two years later that ad is still running at least once a month.
And that is about the stupidest part of the hiring process. I went through about the same thing with a company a few years ago - they wanted two years of embedded code experience in some obscure language (which of course I didn't have.)
Two years later they still haven't filled the position - for fux sake, if they had hired me back then I would have two years in their exact application by now. If a company leaves a position open for a year because they want a year's experience in something - they could have brought in a guy with a broad background and brought him up to speed in the year, and trained him to think the way they wanted.
I was upset that I didn't get asked that. My answer, of course ...
I would simply update the documentation saying it had been moved. For 99.5% of our users that would be enough. For the remaining 0.5%, anybody that physically went to the new site and didn't find Mt Fuji (and called tech support to complain) I would just send them the original documentation.
Dammit. Visa comes out of hiding again.
.iso's around, and more importantly when moving VM's around (details in older Journal entries, virtual machines = about 4-6GB apiece.) Neither of which, however, will I be doing on the MiniMac - so you are pretty much right in that 100Mbps ought to be plenty for whatever I am going to use it for.
Actually I am just coming down off a week long high doing GigE benchmarking using ramdrives (details in my Journal.) I have been able to peg GigE (116MB/s sustained throughput) in bogus benchmark tests but never in real applications.
I have seen an increase from 10MB/s to 33MB/s (3x) on real applications, however, which is important when moving
I will get one, no doubt, if for no other reason than to see what all versions of Linux I can get running on it (praying that SuSE 9.x has a PPC version, or that YellowDog cooperates) and because I want to play with OSX.
More importantly look at all the little white hooks sticking up in parallel - presumably to grab hold of the top of the case and keep it on. Gonna be a mothafarker to get that thing apart without a specialized Mac'cracker.
But yes, it looks like a regular SDRAM.
Lack of GigE was the first thing that brought me back to reality - it doesn't mean I still won't buy one (or more) but I put my Visa back in the wallet for now.
I am going to get seriously busy with tchuladdiass's recommendation, but I wanted to point out that you are describing a RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers - my term) and as you hoped, when doing common jobs like rendering something, decrypting DVDs, creating iso's ... etc, it is faster IF your task load is easily shared.
.avi or VCD? Not easily shared. .avi or VCDs? Your RAIC scales linerarly in performance (ie. add a box, go twice as fast. add three boxes, finish in 1/4th the time.)
Ripping one DVD and compressing it to an
Ripping six DVDs and compressing them to
Get a 4-way KVM switch with audio port (the one with built in cables would be slick if it used USB connectors on the ends of the cables) and one real nice keyboard, mouse, and display.
It won't get you higher frames per second in a single job (game or DVD rip or whatever) but for serious multi-tasking it makes a big difference. In effect you have to handle the task assignments but once that is done you are all set.
I do this at home with four Wintel boxes (talked about it in my Journal a few months ago) and it works well enough to keep them set up.
Selling drugs is the most profitable profession on the planet and the US Government somehow manages to lose money doing it.
I'm just saying.
And like a real loser, I took my laptop
/.
Ouch.
Yea, I'm on vacation.
Reading
On the laptop I brought with me.
Guess I will be turning this thing off and going to do some vacation type things now.
It is a built in widget in the Gnome shell in Linux. Right click on the task bar at the bottom and select 'add widget' and find the weather widget. You can add more than one. I love it, wish it was available in KDE.
How about ASCII characters AE and AF?
That's like a double LT and double GT character, not something the end user is likely to fat-finger during data entry.
Well for the record I use (and like) GMAIL.
And there are plenty of apps where I work that use XML as the interprocess communications vector and several of those applications are more than happy to die in a most glorious fashion when coming across bad XML.
I haven't seen it broken in the fashion we are seeing here with GMAIL, but I have seen plenty of instances of a GT or LT character used in user data entry fields (hosing the XML in the process.) That's what I was talking about. Not too often that characters use one of the high-bit ASCII characters in their data entry - why not use one of those instead?
Same reason you are posting as QMO and not as your real name. Just because you feel like it, and because you can say whatever you want within reason here without fearing easy repercussion.
I'm not saying your true identity can't be determined - I'm just saying it isn't a no-brainer. People talk smack in semi-anonymous forums that they might not have talked if everybody immediately knew who it was.
Love,
Carly F.
Jesus - am I the only one to recognize this bug?
This is just the most publicly seen instance but broken XML does this every single day.
Use the greater than and less than signs as data delimiters in the 'next generation' of data encoding (XML)? WTF were they thinking?
I'm not 100% they are using true XML but from the looks of it if they aren't they are using a home-built XML wanna-be and - well it looks like I was right a few years ago when I (unsuccessfully) campaigned against doing it that way. Not that I campaigned very loud, as I am basically a nobody.
A breech is a breach of Goatse proportions.
For the same reason I'm considering getting one : you want to futz around with OSX and all the software available in that environment, see if you like it or not, see how the other half lives, and most importantly see if you can get Linux running on it.
:-)
... well new everything - it's like watching two women kiss. You know you want it (as do I) but until now you haven't been able to justify the cost. You had no delusions of getting practical work done on it (ditto watching two women get it on) but damn it's just something you want check out.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things
We already have half a dozen Dell Wintel boxes at home, one more isn't going to give you anything you don't already have - but a new machine architecture, new operating system, new
While that works, and simply hijacking a neighbor's signal for free works just as well I want to remind everybody that 'insecure network' works both ways. While you can browse their weak insecure network and look for open shares (printers, file shares) your machine is also on their network and any open shares you have on your box are widely available to anybody on their network.
That's the problem - trusted computing implies that you trust the computer and all of a sudden it is making those decisions for you (and screwing you in the process, it appears.)
Shit I played EverQuest.
Get back to me when you have 10,000 hours 'invested' in a single character in a single game.