To whoever modded me down, how about not using the troll mod to express disagreement, but giving me a rational counterargument instead. The fact is, the environmentalist lobby has done much to limit or prevent progress in this area. You cannot generate the terawatts of power required by our civilization without some consequences. Expecting that to happen without risk is not even remotely reasonable.
I find in unconscionable that we are doing this with a deficit as large as ours. Exploring such things when you're in the black is one thing; there will be no return on these funds.
Are you trolling? Basic research should always continue. We won't be able to solve our problems until we learn how, and the way to do that is... research. One cannot reasonably expect all lines of research to pay off: most don't. But the ones that do produce great rewards, and history has demonstrated, very clearly, that in the long run we've always been better off making an investment in knowledge. To not do so is shooting ourselves squarely in the foot, and selling ourselves short into the bargain.
And then eco-terror groups will demand endless environmental impact studies and keep the permits held up in court for a decade. The "Green" movement isn't about saving the planet. It's about blocking the progress of mankind in response to some twisted belief that they've somehow sinned against Gaia. It's where all of the disenchanted misanthropic do-nothings ran to after the fall of their beloved USSR.
I read a story years ago (don't remember who wrote it) about a future society where the government had set up a fake enemy for all the fruitcakes to protest against. At the end, the main character comments that the government was now able to build power plants, roads, and do all the things necessary to maintain civilization, since the natural born protesters were being successfully distracted.
Any private company doing this will get railroaded by the "environmentalists." And by that in quotes I mean those people who are against progress at all costs, BANANA, and not necessarily for the environment. You know, the people that caused Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore to leave the organization.
The reality of this is, no matter what you do to generate electric power, someone will be against it and will take you to court over it. These people don't have any ability to help, so all they can do is hinder. I think that many so-called "environmentalists" won't be happy until they've brought down civilization and reduced us to living in caves again.
Probably because, in practice, communism has invariably been equated with totalitarianism. Show me one major world government that is a true communist state. China isn't. Russia isn't. Never have been and never will be.
So if China and Russia don't count as communist, where does the association with totalitarianism come from? Small-time dictatorships? Those exist as both left- and right-wing variations. Or propaganda? Could this association with totalitarianism be because it made a convenient excuse to protect American corporations foreign interests? You know, stop those eeevil commie bastards from nationalizing their own resources for the benefit of their people, rather than exporting them dirt cheap to the US?
The association comes because they keep calling themselves Communist. That has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is that the average American thinks about them... they created that association themselves, quite deliberately.
How does the old saw go? "Any government that has the word Republic in the name usually isn't."
The number of developers halves every 6 to 7 years. This could be due to being promoted out of the developer pool in to managment or architecture.
This is pretty much what I've always felt was happening. And explains away a lot in the ageism debate.
The question is this: why do software people believe that they're any exception to that? Engineers of all kinds have been finding their way into management since invented engineering.
Too bad you won't find it working for the big, policy-burdened companies, either. Might as well go for that which is more interesting to work at, given that job stability was being called a myth at least 10 years ago and has only gotten worse.
You want to know the real answer to that? Find a job where the bulk of your critical company-specific knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with programming! If the company has to spend, say, a year to bring you to the point where you can work effectively, the odds are they're not going to consider you so disposable.
Most numbers I've seen put the difference between average and good at about a factor of 100. Paying 2.5 times as much to get 100 times better sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Even if it's only a factor of 10 (which is what the more conservative estimates say), then that's still a four times greater ROI for the expensive programmer.
The problem for so many companies is this: you can hire that 10x or 100x developer, but if you don't provide him with a work environment where he can shine you just wasted your money. Very, very few companies have the slightest idea how to effectively administer a high-powered software team, they know this, and that's why they don't throw money at top-flight engineers. Because if they did, they'd probably have to replace a lot of middle managers to make that investment pay off, and that can be very hard to do for a lot of reasons (whereas the people who actually create products, oddly, are often considered expendable.) Good engineers require the proper support in order to perform at their best. How many programmers in this forum, right now, can honestly say they have that?
And there is value in young blood as well, but you really need a mixture of people out of university with new ideas...
Assumes only young people have "new ideas". Such an assumption, while all too common, is patently and demonstrably false, which pretty much explains the prevalence of "agism".
True enough. Besides, what is needed in the vast majority of programming positions isn't "new ideas" or "creativity", but simple competence. And in that, the older programmer is almost invariably going to give you better results than the newbie.
Nevertheless, good programming is hard, and it should be treated as such by those who profess to learn it. People to go into programming because they're looking for job security, or a decent salary, or anything else than the love of programming are in the wrong business.
As good as you may be, you are probably too expensive from the perspective of people making the hiring decisions.
That, ultimately, is the problem. People in charge of hiring look at the financial aspect only, because it is the only criterion with which they can objectively measure a prospective employee, other than their performance during an interview. They aren't qualified to judge an applicant's engineering or technical skills, so they don't try. However, I've often found it very difficult to get past the HR drones to gain a audience with someone who can offer a proper evaluation and a chance at the position.
That's if you're applying to a company that is large enough to have a Human Resources department. The outfit I work for now does not: the person that interviewed me was my original manager (himself a software engineer with a background similar to mine) and after that first interview I was hired, for more money that I had asked for. The point is, getting hired is more a matter of talking to the right people than it is your age, salary requirements, education or experience. If you can get an interview with the person for whom you will be working, your odds of getting a job are much greater if you are a good fit. If he or she thinks you're going to be of benefit to their organization, they'll go to bat for you. It can be tough to do that in today's economy: so many people are applying for so few jobs that they depend upon HR to weed out the obvious cruft.
Also, I've worked at very profitable companies with low quality code bases. The quality of the code is less important to many businesses than the attitude of the employees towards the clients.
That depends upon whether your engineering staff ever has much contact with customers. If you are designing a mass-marketed software product, say, odds are your developers will never speak directly to a customer (although, in many cases, they probably should.) On the other hand, if you deal with vertical-market, custom or heavily-customized products... what you say is perfectly true. I spend most of my time as a developer, but also have a lot of interaction with our customer base. That's been of tremendous value to me, as well as beneficial to our software, since their needs are diverse and I can't think of everything.
That pretty much describes me. Except my resume gets me interviews - with people younger than my daughter and I never hear from them. I hate to say it. Our mistake was not moving to management.
I dunno... I know an ex-coder who went into management (we worked at the same company in 1986) about fifteen years ago. He's now stuck in a dead-end job running a bunch of Indian and Chinese engineers, who are only there long enough to get enough experience to jump ship and take what they've learned to a high-paying job. If engineering is truly your thing, think carefully about any move to management. Creative people who make career changes based strictly upon financial motivations are often very unhappy in the end.
Now, having said that, I can certainly understand financial pressure. I have a mortgage and the other usual fixed expenses, and my salary hasn't kept pace with inflation. I earn more now than I did ten years ago, sure, but I have fewer dollars remaining out of each paycheck. I have the feeling a lot of us here can say that.
Indeed. I can do a decent job of reading the control flow of a Z-80 program by looking at a hex dump after hand-assembling so much of it. And I will never forget that the CLS routine was at 01C9.
The older programmers, although I prefer the term "more experienced", have had a longer time to make idiotic mistakes and face the harsh reality that we really don't know everything. Of course the younger programmers have not had enough to time to even realize they don't know everything. Of course some of them who o get caught doing something stupid believe they are victims of some evil MS conspiracy. Of course I am prejudiced since I started my programming using BASIC (and not the Visual Basic either). Writing programs with only 640K memory or a whopping 1024K if you could make tap the extended memory really separated the men from the boys.
Try 16K on an Apple ][ Standard, plus a lot of embedded work I did after that with a couple k of EPROM and 256 bytes of RAM. If I was lucky. The truth is, in the desktop world today, from the programmer's perspective he has effectively infinite resources. Sure, he could spend a week optimizing his code to take less memory, say, but why bother? The target machine has a couple of gigs in it... what's another ten megs of array space? What the hell, it works and the boss wants it shipped yesterday.
You might have to define "dead". I'm pretty certain that half or more of our elected officials are already braindead. A good number of them are probably clinically dead, as well. How many fail to vote on important issues? As I recall, Obama looked pretty dead from his voting record while in the senate. And, Ted Kennedy - that lowlife looked dead for at least a decade, before the medical people agreed that he really was dead!
Some people refused to believe, to accept, that a loved one has passed away until they view the dead body. Personally, I think that our elected officials should be required to look in the mirror at least once a day. More of them might then come to the realization that they, too, are dead.
To be fair, the rabid fanatical commy hunters actually caught some commies. And, the terror warriors have actually bagged some terrorists. But, the cost? Just not worth it . ..
A communist is someone who believes that the means of production should be owned by the society. A terrorist is someone who kills people to scare the rest to get his way. Why do you group these two together?
Probably because, in practice, communism has invariably been equated with totalitarianism. Show me one major world government that is a true communist state. China isn't. Russia isn't. Never have been and never will be.
Can we please throw away the broken patent system, and just force company heads to duel at high noon when two companies have an argument?
Nah, wouldn't last long enough to be entertaining. Take an empty industrial complex somewhere (we have plenty of those), fill it full of hi-def cameras, and turn these guys loose in there. No guns: they'll have to make do with whatever they find handy. Whoever wins gets the patents (and the broadcast rights.)
My guess is there'd be a lot fewer patent lawsuits.
Think of Apple as the rebel Borg and Steve Jobs as Hugh.
Nah, Apple hasn't been a "rebel" in any sense of the word, not for a long, long time. They're no better than the IBM of old, which would do anything to suppress competition and squeeze more revenue out of its customers. On the Evil scale, Apple is pretty close to the bottom.
Personally, I think of Apple as being the Borg Collective, with Jobs being (ahem!) the Borg Queen.
No, the present system actually discourages that. More ideas are simply locked up for as long as possible.
True, but as I point out, the present system is not what the Founders wanted, or is it the system under which we rose to economic pre-eminence. It was changed, and very recently.
Slashdot Mirror
To whoever modded me down, how about not using the troll mod to express disagreement, but giving me a rational counterargument instead. The fact is, the environmentalist lobby has done much to limit or prevent progress in this area. You cannot generate the terawatts of power required by our civilization without some consequences. Expecting that to happen without risk is not even remotely reasonable.
I find in unconscionable that we are doing this with a deficit as large as ours. Exploring such things when you're in the black is one thing; there will be no return on these funds.
Are you trolling? Basic research should always continue. We won't be able to solve our problems until we learn how, and the way to do that is ... research. One cannot reasonably expect all lines of research to pay off: most don't. But the ones that do produce great rewards, and history has demonstrated, very clearly, that in the long run we've always been better off making an investment in knowledge. To not do so is shooting ourselves squarely in the foot, and selling ourselves short into the bargain.
And then eco-terror groups will demand endless environmental impact studies and keep the permits held up in court for a decade. The "Green" movement isn't about saving the planet. It's about blocking the progress of mankind in response to some twisted belief that they've somehow sinned against Gaia. It's where all of the disenchanted misanthropic do-nothings ran to after the fall of their beloved USSR.
I read a story years ago (don't remember who wrote it) about a future society where the government had set up a fake enemy for all the fruitcakes to protest against. At the end, the main character comments that the government was now able to build power plants, roads, and do all the things necessary to maintain civilization, since the natural born protesters were being successfully distracted.
Oh Gawd...Shut the FUCK UP!
Obviously the microwave towers have scrambled you brains.
They stopped using the towers years ago because we were on to them. Now they use satellites. Much harder to detect.
Any private company doing this will get railroaded by the "environmentalists." And by that in quotes I mean those people who are against progress at all costs, BANANA, and not necessarily for the environment. You know, the people that caused Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore to leave the organization.
The reality of this is, no matter what you do to generate electric power, someone will be against it and will take you to court over it. These people don't have any ability to help, so all they can do is hinder. I think that many so-called "environmentalists" won't be happy until they've brought down civilization and reduced us to living in caves again.
So if China and Russia don't count as communist, where does the association with totalitarianism come from? Small-time dictatorships? Those exist as both left- and right-wing variations. Or propaganda? Could this association with totalitarianism be because it made a convenient excuse to protect American corporations foreign interests? You know, stop those eeevil commie bastards from nationalizing their own resources for the benefit of their people, rather than exporting them dirt cheap to the US?
The association comes because they keep calling themselves Communist. That has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is that the average American thinks about them ... they created that association themselves, quite deliberately.
How does the old saw go? "Any government that has the word Republic in the name usually isn't."
The number of developers halves every 6 to 7 years. This could be due to being promoted out of the developer pool in to managment or architecture.
This is pretty much what I've always felt was happening. And explains away a lot in the ageism debate.
The question is this: why do software people believe that they're any exception to that? Engineers of all kinds have been finding their way into management since invented engineering.
As I'm sure your former girl friends will attest, that doesn't always help. :-)
In other words, 25 goes into 50 more times than 50 goes into 25.
Too bad you won't find it working for the big, policy-burdened companies, either. Might as well go for that which is more interesting to work at, given that job stability was being called a myth at least 10 years ago and has only gotten worse.
You want to know the real answer to that? Find a job where the bulk of your critical company-specific knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with programming! If the company has to spend, say, a year to bring you to the point where you can work effectively, the odds are they're not going to consider you so disposable.
If he's a great programmer, then no, it doesn't matter.
True, but if he's just an ordinary competent programmer, then it probably does, so far as immediate productivity is concerned.
Most numbers I've seen put the difference between average and good at about a factor of 100. Paying 2.5 times as much to get 100 times better sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Even if it's only a factor of 10 (which is what the more conservative estimates say), then that's still a four times greater ROI for the expensive programmer.
The problem for so many companies is this: you can hire that 10x or 100x developer, but if you don't provide him with a work environment where he can shine you just wasted your money. Very, very few companies have the slightest idea how to effectively administer a high-powered software team, they know this, and that's why they don't throw money at top-flight engineers. Because if they did, they'd probably have to replace a lot of middle managers to make that investment pay off, and that can be very hard to do for a lot of reasons (whereas the people who actually create products, oddly, are often considered expendable.) Good engineers require the proper support in order to perform at their best. How many programmers in this forum, right now, can honestly say they have that?
And there is value in young blood as well, but you really need a mixture of people out of university with new ideas...
Assumes only young people have "new ideas". Such an assumption, while all too common, is patently and demonstrably false, which pretty much explains the prevalence of "agism".
True enough. Besides, what is needed in the vast majority of programming positions isn't "new ideas" or "creativity", but simple competence. And in that, the older programmer is almost invariably going to give you better results than the newbie.
Nevertheless, good programming is hard, and it should be treated as such by those who profess to learn it. People to go into programming because they're looking for job security, or a decent salary, or anything else than the love of programming are in the wrong business.
More experienced guys consider it and factor it in, but are thinking more towards how they'll have to change it in the future.
Yes, because the more experienced guys have been burned by unmaintainable code more than once.
As good as you may be, you are probably too expensive from the perspective of people making the hiring decisions.
That, ultimately, is the problem. People in charge of hiring look at the financial aspect only, because it is the only criterion with which they can objectively measure a prospective employee, other than their performance during an interview. They aren't qualified to judge an applicant's engineering or technical skills, so they don't try. However, I've often found it very difficult to get past the HR drones to gain a audience with someone who can offer a proper evaluation and a chance at the position.
That's if you're applying to a company that is large enough to have a Human Resources department. The outfit I work for now does not: the person that interviewed me was my original manager (himself a software engineer with a background similar to mine) and after that first interview I was hired, for more money that I had asked for. The point is, getting hired is more a matter of talking to the right people than it is your age, salary requirements, education or experience. If you can get an interview with the person for whom you will be working, your odds of getting a job are much greater if you are a good fit. If he or she thinks you're going to be of benefit to their organization, they'll go to bat for you. It can be tough to do that in today's economy: so many people are applying for so few jobs that they depend upon HR to weed out the obvious cruft.
I second the mobile phone thing. I have job offers up to my ears in northeast Florida. Android is hot here!
Move that far south and you'll be hot as well.
Also, I've worked at very profitable companies with low quality code bases. The quality of the code is less important to many businesses than the attitude of the employees towards the clients.
That depends upon whether your engineering staff ever has much contact with customers. If you are designing a mass-marketed software product, say, odds are your developers will never speak directly to a customer (although, in many cases, they probably should.) On the other hand, if you deal with vertical-market, custom or heavily-customized products ... what you say is perfectly true. I spend most of my time as a developer, but also have a lot of interaction with our customer base. That's been of tremendous value to me, as well as beneficial to our software, since their needs are diverse and I can't think of everything.
That pretty much describes me. Except my resume gets me interviews - with people younger than my daughter and I never hear from them. I hate to say it. Our mistake was not moving to management.
I dunno ... I know an ex-coder who went into management (we worked at the same company in 1986) about fifteen years ago. He's now stuck in a dead-end job running a bunch of Indian and Chinese engineers, who are only there long enough to get enough experience to jump ship and take what they've learned to a high-paying job. If engineering is truly your thing, think carefully about any move to management. Creative people who make career changes based strictly upon financial motivations are often very unhappy in the end.
Now, having said that, I can certainly understand financial pressure. I have a mortgage and the other usual fixed expenses, and my salary hasn't kept pace with inflation. I earn more now than I did ten years ago, sure, but I have fewer dollars remaining out of each paycheck. I have the feeling a lot of us here can say that.
Indeed. I can do a decent job of reading the control flow of a Z-80 program by looking at a hex dump after hand-assembling so much of it. And I will never forget that the CLS routine was at 01C9.
Call -151
The older programmers, although I prefer the term "more experienced", have had a longer time to make idiotic mistakes and face the harsh reality that we really don't know everything. Of course the younger programmers have not had enough to time to even realize they don't know everything. Of course some of them who o get caught doing something stupid believe they are victims of some evil MS conspiracy. Of course I am prejudiced since I started my programming using BASIC (and not the Visual Basic either). Writing programs with only 640K memory or a whopping 1024K if you could make tap the extended memory really separated the men from the boys.
Try 16K on an Apple ][ Standard, plus a lot of embedded work I did after that with a couple k of EPROM and 256 bytes of RAM. If I was lucky. The truth is, in the desktop world today, from the programmer's perspective he has effectively infinite resources. Sure, he could spend a week optimizing his code to take less memory, say, but why bother? The target machine has a couple of gigs in it ... what's another ten megs of array space? What the hell, it works and the boss wants it shipped yesterday.
You might have to define "dead". I'm pretty certain that half or more of our elected officials are already braindead. A good number of them are probably clinically dead, as well. How many fail to vote on important issues? As I recall, Obama looked pretty dead from his voting record while in the senate. And, Ted Kennedy - that lowlife looked dead for at least a decade, before the medical people agreed that he really was dead!
Some people refused to believe, to accept, that a loved one has passed away until they view the dead body. Personally, I think that our elected officials should be required to look in the mirror at least once a day. More of them might then come to the realization that they, too, are dead.
A communist is someone who believes that the means of production should be owned by the society. A terrorist is someone who kills people to scare the rest to get his way. Why do you group these two together?
Probably because, in practice, communism has invariably been equated with totalitarianism. Show me one major world government that is a true communist state. China isn't. Russia isn't. Never have been and never will be.
I hear they use Microsoft Works
It does?
Can we please throw away the broken patent system, and just force company heads to duel at high noon when two companies have an argument?
Nah, wouldn't last long enough to be entertaining. Take an empty industrial complex somewhere (we have plenty of those), fill it full of hi-def cameras, and turn these guys loose in there. No guns: they'll have to make do with whatever they find handy. Whoever wins gets the patents (and the broadcast rights.)
My guess is there'd be a lot fewer patent lawsuits.
Think of Apple as the rebel Borg and Steve Jobs as Hugh.
Nah, Apple hasn't been a "rebel" in any sense of the word, not for a long, long time. They're no better than the IBM of old, which would do anything to suppress competition and squeeze more revenue out of its customers. On the Evil scale, Apple is pretty close to the bottom.
Personally, I think of Apple as being the Borg Collective, with Jobs being (ahem!) the Borg Queen.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
No, the present system actually discourages that. More ideas are simply locked up for as long as possible.
True, but as I point out, the present system is not what the Founders wanted, or is it the system under which we rose to economic pre-eminence. It was changed, and very recently.