I think you're missing the more important point - the employees can choose to move to another job. They are in no sense "stuck" or forced to stay.
They have mobility, and the "everybody's doing it" notion does not apply to every programming job out there.
Even more importantly - they agreed up front to work for $XXK a year as exempt employees. If they think they are being taken advantage of, they can complain. If they don't see action, they can quit.
You see, people are agreeing to these conditions with their eyes wide open when they had many options open to them. They know their salary, they know they don't get paid hourly, they know if they work past 40 hours they don't get extra money. If they feel they're being asked to work too many hours, they can quit and find other jobs.
These are people that eat well, probably have an SUV. 2 or 3 television sets. Lord knows how many computers. Probably thousands of dollars on their credit cards. They're likely 21, 22 and they make more than many people will ever hope to make. For people who do make more, most of them will reach a $60K mark after decades of experience - and for these people this is the entry level salary.
In short, for their experience level they are extraordinarily well compensated compared to most Americans - urban centers or not. A note to the "standard of living" people: most people in NYC, where I live, do not make $60K a year.
If these people think all programming jobs are unfair, they can give up their SUVs and their monstrous credit card debt and their flat screen TVs and live on the edge of bankruptcy like many people in urban population centers do. Or, if they have a lick of sense, they can almost certainly leverage their experience and get a job outside of the games industry but still in programming which will pay them as well or better.
The real point is that these are people who are well off and who have a multitude of choices. The hours are certainly too long, but it's their choice to work them. If they like it, or accept it, or are too stupid to realize they have choices, that's their problem. I don't weep for individuals who accept a choice and get paid better than the vast majority while doing it.
They make a minimum of $60K a year _out of school_ and _choose_ to work there. Oh the humanity of it all! These poor "slaves" are making far more than the national medium right of school.
Here's a novel notion: if you don't like it, quit and find another job. If 60K is so pathetically low they should have no trouble finding other work at higher rates, yes?
Rather than strike or unionize, why they dont't they find a job that fits them? Whatever happend to choice and personal responsibility? These aren't coal miners caught in a company town.
OK, done. See my latest web log entry. Individual employees have admitted their guilt in e-mail, and the bulk of this entry is airing that e-mail.
-Mike Spille
For the record, I e-mailed several JBossers on this, and two e-mailed me back. One admitted he'd done it outright and apologized (thank you for that). He claimed he was a lone wolf acting without corporate knowledge; I'm rather suspicious about _that_. The other also admitted he'd did it - and then went on and lambasted me with several pages of abuse, vitriol, and cursing. He danced around the policy issue.
By "did it" I mean posting under fake-but-real-seeming names to promote their product, and to simultaneously attack competitors and critics of JBoss alike.
The others have not responded.
-Mike Spille
Oh, sorry, I'm too deep into the community and forgot that what's obvious to me may not be obvious to the world at large.
The CDN folks are some of the leads for the Geronimo project. This is an Apache-licensed J2EE application server.
In other words, it's a new free Java application server which is in direct competition to JBoss. Since it's Apache, anybody can use it (and particularly modify and distribute it) with far fewer restrictions than with JBoss. They are a direct competitor to JBoss - a direct open source competitor.
The JBoss fake posters publically called the technical skills of the CDN/Geronimo folks into question. They did exactly the same to the other major open source Java server, the Jonas people.
The purpose is simple: generate interest and market share for JBoss, get the residual interest that pays their training/services/support bills. Do it by boosting your own stuff, and trying to do verbal hatchet jobs on your competitors and detractors. Make regular people who happen to disagree with you or compete with you look like the bad guys, make you look like poor besieged victims and underdogs.
As for the rest - you'd be surprised what a fake grass roots campaign like this can do. In combination with other legit marketing techniques, it's powerful and persuasive. It gets them just enough attention to get articles written, to get research firms like Gartner and Forrester to take notice - and to get enough attention to get VC funding.
I can understand your puzzlement given the examples and if you're not in the community. But imagine the sample of posts in the referenced blogs - and now imagine 500, 600, 700 of them over years. It has an effect, a very measurable effect. Smearing the names of people who disagree with you just serves to magnify that effect, particularly when it _seems_ to come from uninterested parties.
You have to realize first that this really did go on for years, and involves hundreds of posts. The motivations seemed to be three fold. 1) Show JBoss in a good light. 2) Disparage competing products. 3) Gain control of discussion threads, and discredit people who wrote negative posts regarding JBoss.
A big key of this is hijacking threads. If a thread started going "bad" from a JBoss perspective, both employees with their real names and fake names would sweep in simultaneously posting positive things about JBoss and refuting negative parts. They literally turned some threads from being anti-JBoss to looking positive.
Along the way, they made people who posted any negative JBoss posts look like they were the bad guys. "Oh poor us, look, these mean people are persecuting us!". This is a prime JBoss tactic - do something underhanded and slimy, and if there's a whiff of being caught make the people doing the catching look like the bad guys - and make yourself look like a poor victim.
Keep in mind that, having literally done it for years, they're pretty good at it. No blatant cheerleading. Sometimes they would put a mild negative comment in to make the post look more realistic "gee, CMP really sucked, but I hear it's better in 3.2", or "yeah their JMS wasn't that good, but they say they're making it better - anyone know anymore about that?".
To judge it, you have to look at the volume of threads and volume of posts over time. The blogs referenced have touched upon only maybe 5-10% of the total! We had neither the time or energy to exhaustively post everything the fake users did. If you happen to have the time, check out some of the threads on TheServerSide. Watch for their entry into them, and watch them turn the tide of opinion on a thread, and discredit naysayers along the way. In an odd way you have to respect it - they've raised these fake posts to an art form, they've honed their craft over many years.
Sorry, not even close. I'm not an employee of CDN, have never been, am not affiliated with them in any way. Neither are the other bloggers referenced. The only person referenced with any affiliation with JBoss is Rickard, who used to be a major committer on JBoss.
The reason I blogged about this is really simple: truth. Yeah, I know, that sounds trite and stupid, but that really is the main motivation. JBoss people have been posing with very convincing names like "Chip Tyler" and "Joe Murray" for quite some time now, talking up their own product, dissing people like the CDN folks, and directly going after people like me. Some of it got quite nasty as well - and all under the cover of fake names. NOT anonymous ones - no Anonymous Coward. One of them - someone claiming to be Arun Patel but really a senior JBoss executive - went so far as to say online that he worked for WIPRO in Bangalore, India, and to attempt to prove that I was a shill. And he did this when the guy actually has e-mailed me and knew exactly who I really am. The icing on the cake is that the individual _setup the fake Arun Patel account using his real corporate e-mail address_.
This isn't about a vendetta, or revenge, or personalities clashing. It's about exposing a company that uses deceitful tactics to gain market share and simultaneosuly attack individuals and companies. I personally don't care if it's common or not - no matter how prevalent it may, it's still wrong and it should be rooted out and exposed when it's discovered.
Keep in mind also that this was a coordinated corporate policy, and it involved the "big names" at JBoss, and sometimes the weight of faker posts would actually overwhelm entire threads.
It was coordinated, it was nasty, and had high volumes over a span of well over a year.
You're right, you can't rollback - it took me awhile puttering about to find it on that damnable wiki. After reading in depth, it would appear that they don't support transactions at _all_.
Actually, the technology isn't even that good. What you have is a bunch of objects in memory, the ability to rollback "transactions", and in-memory changes are checkpointed to disk every once in awhile.
This has "amateur" written all over it.
Are all two man teams truly of equal skill? If so, you're luckier than I've been. If not - do you trust them to really be able to change any code in the system? Unit tests aren't the check and balance here - because Unit tests are usually too low-level to help diagnose global code changes.
How do you warn people not to refactor code that may be ugly but has been performance tuned (or tuned to meet a requirement that can't be easily reflected in a unit test)? Think about the atomicity and performance issues of creating a transaction log. Your unit tests aren't going to test the key characteristics of this code (as fast as possible and uncorruptable in the face of failures). So your culture allows anyone to twiddle with this? This goes in hand with my previous question, really. Are all teams and all code created equal, as XP seems to claim? In my experience, no.
Any anecdotes out there on refactoring wars within development teams?
On making things explicit: it sounds like Fowler is arguing that static behavior is geneally better than dynamic behavior (see his Dictionary vs. hard coded class example). Is it just me or does his comments completely ignore the fact that the Dictionary example has far more flexibility than a hard-coded class?
In all I like alot of XP's characteristics - but they're always taken to Extremes! I'm serious here - many of the ideas are great (and well-known), but to reap the XP benefit it seems you always have to do it in the most extreme way possible. Despite the use of the phrase "common sense" often by XP supporters, the entire practice seems to disallow it. In fact, many web pages on XP tell you to ignore your instincts and blindly follow XP for a sizable chunk of time before judging it. This is common sense?
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I think you're missing the more important point - the employees can choose to move to another job. They are in no sense "stuck" or forced to stay.
They have mobility, and the "everybody's doing it" notion does not apply to every programming job out there.
Even more importantly - they agreed up front to work for $XXK a year as exempt employees. If they think they are being taken advantage of, they can complain. If they don't see action, they can quit.
You see, people are agreeing to these conditions with their eyes wide open when they had many options open to them. They know their salary, they know they don't get paid hourly, they know if they work past 40 hours they don't get extra money. If they feel they're being asked to work too many hours, they can quit and find other jobs.
These are people that eat well, probably have an SUV. 2 or 3 television sets. Lord knows how many computers. Probably thousands of dollars on their credit cards. They're likely 21, 22 and they make more than many people will ever hope to make. For people who do make more, most of them will reach a $60K mark after decades of experience - and for these people this is the entry level salary.
In short, for their experience level they are extraordinarily well compensated compared to most Americans - urban centers or not. A note to the "standard of living" people: most people in NYC, where I live, do not make $60K a year.
If these people think all programming jobs are unfair, they can give up their SUVs and their monstrous credit card debt and their flat screen TVs and live on the edge of bankruptcy like many people in urban population centers do. Or, if they have a lick of sense, they can almost certainly leverage their experience and get a job outside of the games industry but still in programming which will pay them as well or better.
The real point is that these are people who are well off and who have a multitude of choices. The hours are certainly too long, but it's their choice to work them. If they like it, or accept it, or are too stupid to realize they have choices, that's their problem. I don't weep for individuals who accept a choice and get paid better than the vast majority while doing it.
They make a minimum of $60K a year _out of school_ and _choose_ to work there. Oh the humanity of it all! These poor "slaves" are making far more than the national medium right of school.
Here's a novel notion: if you don't like it, quit and find another job. If 60K is so pathetically low they should have no trouble finding other work at higher rates, yes?
Rather than strike or unionize, why they dont't they find a job that fits them? Whatever happend to choice and personal responsibility? These aren't coal miners caught in a company town.
OK, done. See my latest web log entry. Individual employees have admitted their guilt in e-mail, and the bulk of this entry is airing that e-mail. -Mike Spille
For the record, I e-mailed several JBossers on this, and two e-mailed me back. One admitted he'd done it outright and apologized (thank you for that). He claimed he was a lone wolf acting without corporate knowledge; I'm rather suspicious about _that_. The other also admitted he'd did it - and then went on and lambasted me with several pages of abuse, vitriol, and cursing. He danced around the policy issue. By "did it" I mean posting under fake-but-real-seeming names to promote their product, and to simultaneously attack competitors and critics of JBoss alike. The others have not responded. -Mike Spille
Oh, sorry, I'm too deep into the community and forgot that what's obvious to me may not be obvious to the world at large.
The CDN folks are some of the leads for the Geronimo project. This is an Apache-licensed J2EE application server.
In other words, it's a new free Java application server which is in direct competition to JBoss. Since it's Apache, anybody can use it (and particularly modify and distribute it) with far fewer restrictions than with JBoss. They are a direct competitor to JBoss - a direct open source competitor.
The JBoss fake posters publically called the technical skills of the CDN/Geronimo folks into question. They did exactly the same to the other major open source Java server, the Jonas people.
The purpose is simple: generate interest and market share for JBoss, get the residual interest that pays their training/services/support bills. Do it by boosting your own stuff, and trying to do verbal hatchet jobs on your competitors and detractors. Make regular people who happen to disagree with you or compete with you look like the bad guys, make you look like poor besieged victims and underdogs.
As for the rest - you'd be surprised what a fake grass roots campaign like this can do. In combination with other legit marketing techniques, it's powerful and persuasive. It gets them just enough attention to get articles written, to get research firms like Gartner and Forrester to take notice - and to get enough attention to get VC funding.
I can understand your puzzlement given the examples and if you're not in the community. But imagine the sample of posts in the referenced blogs - and now imagine 500, 600, 700 of them over years. It has an effect, a very measurable effect. Smearing the names of people who disagree with you just serves to magnify that effect, particularly when it _seems_ to come from uninterested parties.
You have to realize first that this really did go on for years, and involves hundreds of posts. The motivations seemed to be three fold. 1) Show JBoss in a good light. 2) Disparage competing products. 3) Gain control of discussion threads, and discredit people who wrote negative posts regarding JBoss.
A big key of this is hijacking threads. If a thread started going "bad" from a JBoss perspective, both employees with their real names and fake names would sweep in simultaneously posting positive things about JBoss and refuting negative parts. They literally turned some threads from being anti-JBoss to looking positive.
Along the way, they made people who posted any negative JBoss posts look like they were the bad guys. "Oh poor us, look, these mean people are persecuting us!". This is a prime JBoss tactic - do something underhanded and slimy, and if there's a whiff of being caught make the people doing the catching look like the bad guys - and make yourself look like a poor victim.
Keep in mind that, having literally done it for years, they're pretty good at it. No blatant cheerleading. Sometimes they would put a mild negative comment in to make the post look more realistic "gee, CMP really sucked, but I hear it's better in 3.2", or "yeah their JMS wasn't that good, but they say they're making it better - anyone know anymore about that?".
To judge it, you have to look at the volume of threads and volume of posts over time. The blogs referenced have touched upon only maybe 5-10% of the total! We had neither the time or energy to exhaustively post everything the fake users did. If you happen to have the time, check out some of the threads on TheServerSide. Watch for their entry into them, and watch them turn the tide of opinion on a thread, and discredit naysayers along the way. In an odd way you have to respect it - they've raised these fake posts to an art form, they've honed their craft over many years.
Sorry, not even close. I'm not an employee of CDN, have never been, am not affiliated with them in any way. Neither are the other bloggers referenced. The only person referenced with any affiliation with JBoss is Rickard, who used to be a major committer on JBoss.
The reason I blogged about this is really simple: truth. Yeah, I know, that sounds trite and stupid, but that really is the main motivation. JBoss people have been posing with very convincing names like "Chip Tyler" and "Joe Murray" for quite some time now, talking up their own product, dissing people like the CDN folks, and directly going after people like me. Some of it got quite nasty as well - and all under the cover of fake names. NOT anonymous ones - no Anonymous Coward. One of them - someone claiming to be Arun Patel but really a senior JBoss executive - went so far as to say online that he worked for WIPRO in Bangalore, India, and to attempt to prove that I was a shill. And he did this when the guy actually has e-mailed me and knew exactly who I really am. The icing on the cake is that the individual _setup the fake Arun Patel account using his real corporate e-mail address_.
This isn't about a vendetta, or revenge, or personalities clashing. It's about exposing a company that uses deceitful tactics to gain market share and simultaneosuly attack individuals and companies. I personally don't care if it's common or not - no matter how prevalent it may, it's still wrong and it should be rooted out and exposed when it's discovered.
Keep in mind also that this was a coordinated corporate policy, and it involved the "big names" at JBoss, and sometimes the weight of faker posts would actually overwhelm entire threads.
It was coordinated, it was nasty, and had high volumes over a span of well over a year.
-Mike Spille
You're right, you can't rollback - it took me awhile puttering about to find it on that damnable wiki. After reading in depth, it would appear that they don't support transactions at _all_.
Actually, the technology isn't even that good. What you have is a bunch of objects in memory, the ability to rollback "transactions", and in-memory changes are checkpointed to disk every once in awhile. This has "amateur" written all over it.
Are all two man teams truly of equal skill? If so, you're luckier than I've been. If not - do you trust them to really be able to change any code in the system? Unit tests aren't the check and balance here - because Unit tests are usually too low-level to help diagnose global code changes.
How do you warn people not to refactor code that may be ugly but has been performance tuned (or tuned to meet a requirement that can't be easily reflected in a unit test)? Think about the atomicity and performance issues of creating a transaction log. Your unit tests aren't going to test the key characteristics of this code (as fast as possible and uncorruptable in the face of failures). So your culture allows anyone to twiddle with this? This goes in hand with my previous question, really. Are all teams and all code created equal, as XP seems to claim? In my experience, no.
Any anecdotes out there on refactoring wars within development teams?
On making things explicit: it sounds like Fowler is arguing that static behavior is geneally better than dynamic behavior (see his Dictionary vs. hard coded class example). Is it just me or does his comments completely ignore the fact that the Dictionary example has far more flexibility than a hard-coded class?
In all I like alot of XP's characteristics - but they're always taken to Extremes! I'm serious here - many of the ideas are great (and well-known), but to reap the XP benefit it seems you always have to do it in the most extreme way possible. Despite the use of the phrase "common sense" often by XP supporters, the entire practice seems to disallow it. In fact, many web pages on XP tell you to ignore your instincts and blindly follow XP for a sizable chunk of time before judging it. This is common sense?