I like this. At work, we get so much "leadership" that is nothing more than stupid quotes from the latest management fad book. I really don't want people to be confused. After all, I know that I count on slashdot.sigs for all my self-help advice.;-)
However, just getting out of the way would certainly unique but probably not make you beautiful.
See, I was reading slashdot and watching le Tour de France at the same time. I kept seeing people's.sigs quoting Fightclub, which is one of my favorite movies. So, I look down at the laptop and see, "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." then look up and see Armstrong. Apparently I'm not intelligent to hold those two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time. It's surprising the number of people who think that stinking quote is the core message of Fightclub.
Anyway, after getting so many emails insisting the the past tense of "to lead" is "lead" you've convinced me to drop it.
Wait. This guy has reduced crime because he kept the murder rate has increased to 6% above the expected rate? In don't understand this meaning of the word "reduced"
I have to agree with Oli. Here's the core required courses for UW:
*CSE 142 Computer Programming I (4) -- NOPE *CSE 143 Computer Programming II (5) -- NOPE CSE 321 Discrete Structures (4) -- MAYBE CSE 322 Intro to Formal Models (3) -- MAYBE CSE 326 Data Structures (4) -- NOPE CSE 341 Programming Languages (4) -- NOPE CSE 370 Intro to Digital Design (4) -- NOPE CSE 378 Machine Org & Assembly Lang. (4) -- NOPE
Now, if you've been doing it for 30 years, which of these courses is going to be interesting?
Data structures? Nope. Please -- probably implemented modified versions of everything the instructor's going to teach.
Programming languages? Nope. -- Probably knows lisp, haskell, scheme, etc. on top of all the production languages.
Digital Design? Nope. Probably fiddled enough to have a leg up.
Assembly Language? Nope. With 30 years of experience probably done *A LOT* of production assembly.
Notice there's no required algorithms course. That's CSE 373 Data Structures And Algorithms.
So, if you look at this the required curriculum it is 20% interesting. That sucks. Would I want to go spend 4/5s of my time being bored? No way. That's why I chose to go back in math -- at least that way I can feel challenged every day.
Now, I grant you the University of Washington is not MIT but it's a respected school.
I wouldn't call Oli a liar. I might call him a brick shy of a load for choosing to do a CS degree after 30 years in industry. There are other options (AMATH springs to mind). BTW, in the interest of full disclosure I have about 16 years in the industryw without a degree.
Actually, just to back you up a bit, I remember someone I know who works out there saying that they have almost a 1:1 Dev to QA ratio. The industry standard is somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1 Dev to QA. So they have a lot of QA.
So, my theory is that they've made the OS so huge by integrating everything in that a little change in one place means that a good deal of the product needs to be retested.
I'm Joe Six-Pack. Apparently. I've always wanted to be able to say "I'm Batman". Apparently this is as close as I'll get.
Joe six-pack is shooting squirrels with his 12-gauge
Squirrels are good eatin'. I don't understand why that's Joe-Sixpackish.
while he spits chewing-tobacco into a coffee can
Yep, I have done that.
which is overflowing onto his shoes, staining them the color of this god-awful Slashdot section.
Letting it overflow is nasty. Don't do it. And certainly don't let a cat lick it up. However, according to some of the folks I've known, putting the cat in a trashback, drizzling in the juice, then shaking it up to get a nice even coating is, well, just plain good clean fun.
I don't think he has had much luck soldering hacked chips into any consumer electronics lately
I generally don't do that. However, I like to do hugely over-engineered solutions to every day problems. My previous project was a 8051 microcontroller based bonsai tree light that similated the track of the sun at a settable longitude and latitude.
My current is an automated offset smoker using a bunch of different thermistors a couple of thermocouples and a servo motor. It's all being controlled by labview.
I Haven't tried smoking squirrel, yet. But once I finish the big BBQ this week-end (for about 40 people that's why I have 4 channels of meat probes) I may try it.
and he surely isn't worried about the DCMA.
I am but most of my friends are not. Most don't understand that the impact of laws doesn't have to be immediate for them to be detrimental. They have the "I have nothing to hide." mentality. They're wrong of course, but what's more fun, drinking beer and watching the women walk by or talking law/politics? These guy say, "I have nothing to... Hey! check out the cans on that one."
In the dim, dark past, intel machines didn't have an FPU on die. You could buy an exernal floating point processor, which was most commonly installed by the store that sold the machine.
Well, Compaq made a system where the the main processor along with all the other chips were mounted so that the letter was right-side up when standing at the front of the machine.
However, the coprocessor socket was rotated 90 degrees. If you installed it so the lettering was the same as everything else, one of the pins melted off when power was applied. Don't ask me how I know.
It's not hard to understand. You set the bar at "gold medalists only" and thereby disqualify every silver medalist in the process. Seems simple enough.
I admit the bar is high but look at this from the hiring manager's point of view. Education level is not strongly correlated with performance. What is strongly correlated with is experience. When times were better we took more chances but we've always tried to hire the best that we can. Currently, we don't have to take as many chances. This is pretty much like it was in the late-80s. However, 2002-2003 was like I'd never seen it before. It was bad.
It should. The sales pitch was (and I quote) "go to school, get and education and get a good job." I did my part.
If you were told this, you were at best misinformed at worst; at worst you were lied to. Back in 1989 when I was doing tech support to get in the door, there was another guy there who was a fresh CS grad who got on by offering to work for free for a while (BTW, a company can't legally take you up on the offer but it shows intent). So, despite what some people say, it's always been hard, with the exception of the dotcom boom.
But I'm WAY past bitter. I was bitter after the second major financial disaster and fourth round of layoffs. Now I'm just amused. I'm amused that I am expected to get married and sign a mortgage based on a job I could lose at any moment for reasons (or non-reasons) that are totally out of my control.
The problem is that bitter doesn't help. I know it's *REALLY* hard not to be there and I'm guilty myself. I spent 6 month out of work in 2002. I got bitter. When I look back at it, I can say getting bitter hurt my performance in interviews over that time period.
BTW, nobody outside of your family and friends gives a rat's ass about whether you get married (that is unless you're gay) nor do they care whether you have a family or buy a house. Politicians and social scientists will tell you that they care but they usually don't.
What I have earned I don't get to keep.
No, what you have promised to pay for, you lose, if you miss the payments.
Of course, I couldn't rent a job any more. I became unemployable rather soon after the entire job market became an economy of layoffs. Oh sure, I know eight programming languages and have a great deal of experience in a number of different types of businesses, but that doesn't matter at all.
It's all about the hiring manager's estimation of whether you are the best choice he or she has. In other words, can you help ship product. Number of languages doesn't really matter. I've hired people who have never worked in the language that we're using.
Then again, of what value is a job that can become a layoff at literally any moment? It is valueless. It is only as valuable as the next paycheck, which is usually a below average wage for above average ability and work hours.
I would encourage you to think really hard about whether this is true or not. The value of the job is the future earning discounted by probability of earning them and the time value of money minus that value of the effort.
BTW, there are still good jobs out there. I make a good living (I shouldn't say how much). I used to manage sizable development groups but decided to stop doing that because I realized that I was primarily an instrument for extracting as many hours out of the people that worked for me as possible. Now, I come in and really focus on getting work done for the eight hours I'm there then I get out. I get the most done and I don't have to kill myself to do it, so my employer is happy and I get to have a life.
Shouldn't have to. Should be able to say "here are my EDUCATION, skills and experience, which you will find perfectly qualify me for this job" and start work. Shouldn't have to wheedle, bullshit and argue my way into a career.
The problem is that many people with a CS degree come out
Folks who haven't shipped a commercial product are unproven in the context of shipping commercial product. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand. There's a vast difference between school work/projects and real products. Don't be bitter that all the hard work in school doesn't automatically get you a job. The school work will pay off in the end.
My advice would be to do what I did. Find a small software house and get in any way you can. Then work your ass off while all the while letting them know that you really want to work on the product.
I pestered a small development house into taking me on as tech support -- I literally called them every week for 6 months. About a year later I was working on the product. Lots of late nights, lots of hard work -- but that's how you break into most businesses. This was in 1989 and now I'm the "old guy", have shipped a lot of products, and get to help make hiring decisions.
Experience is just an employer-invented bullshit reason to disqualify people.
At least in the software industry, there's a huge difference between working with folks who have shipped a few solid commercial products and those who haven't.
When I'm involved in hiring, the experience on the rez gets you in the door -- I count education as experience but at a discounted rate. If we have some person from the past in common (it's shocking how often this happens) then with a positive call and a good interview I'm excited about having you join the teams.
Blow any one of these points and it just lessens your chances.
Actually, I am. It's hard to do it while working a little over 40 hours / week. Mostly from the lack of time (and sleep).
As the other poster mention, being a math major is hard. That's why I chose to do that.
I used to manage development teams and that sort of stuff until I realized that most of the people that I worked for couldn't care less about the quality of the lives of the individual developers and I was just an instrument for extracting more work and longer hours.
So, I stopped doing it. I work as an individual developer now and steadfastly refuse to be exploited. At the same time, because I have a lot of experience, I get paid well enough to put my wife through law school while I go part time.
In a year, when she's done, we're going to swap. I'll go to school full time and she'll bring home the bacon. However, I really love to cook, so I'll be the one frying it up in a pan, thank you very much (and thank you, Alton).
So, I was in the "gifted" program going through schools and it was all pretty easy for me as well. My big regret is that I didn't work harder at academics to begin with. I ended up getting a job instead. Although I've learned a lot and accomplished a lot, I've always wondered exactly what I missed by staying in school and working really hard. I look back on all the money and career success and I frankly hold it pretty cheap.
So my advice, is find the hardest major in which you're interested and go work your ass off. Then, when you get to be my age and look back on it, you won't have to wonder because you went all out and did something really hard.
Nope, don't think I understand it. I'm taking a lot of math courses but I figure I have about another year before I have the background to understand this thing.
By that time, the money will be paid or the proof will be on the scrapheap.
I can't tell you how often I wish people had a basic grounding in economics. See, economics isn't really about money, it's about the effects of people making choices to get the best outcomes for themselves -- money is just a medium for doing that -- there are others.
See, what your boss is telling you is that you are only worth what they are paying you because they can shove extra work down your throat. He's also saying that Paul is worth what they're paying with his current work output.
Think about that a second. Which would you rather be?
Second, Paul is saying that getting paid what he's getting paid only is only worth the amount of time he's putting in (otherwise he'd probably take a job elsewhere). He's also probably aware of your bitching and it doesn't change his behavior, so it doesn't mean much to him.
So, I'd be asking myself why Paul is getting paid for less work. Is it that he's more experienced, more productive, less gullable?? In other words, don't hate the player.
You know, I think I had AST wrong. I'd seen the thread where he bashes Linus for not doing a microkernel design and thought that maybe it was sour grapes.
His exchanges on this subject have changed my opinion on that. He's been nothing but kind toward Linus, generous with his time, and well-spoken.
If anything good come out of this whole mess, maybe it's that AST really got to show us what he's really like instead of all of us just assuming that he was bitter about the MINIX/Linux history.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like the A&E Hornblower series. Master and Command paled in comparison. Think about that:
Big Hollywood Film: Ok.
Crappy little A&E miniseries: Really Good.
Oh well.
Please stop using heading to get a particular typeface/size. Use CSS instead.
Oh, and what the other guy said. Get a doctype.
I like this. At work, we get so much "leadership" that is nothing more than stupid quotes from the latest management fad book. I really don't want people to be confused. After all, I know that I count on slashdot .sigs for all my self-help advice. ;-)
.sigs quoting Fightclub, which is one of my favorite movies. So, I look down at the laptop and see, "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." then look up and see Armstrong. Apparently I'm not intelligent to hold those two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time. It's surprising the number of people who think that stinking quote is the core message of Fightclub.
However, just getting out of the way would certainly unique but probably not make you beautiful.
See, I was reading slashdot and watching le Tour de France at the same time. I kept seeing people's
Anyway, after getting so many emails insisting the the past tense of "to lead" is "lead" you've convinced me to drop it.
Sorry, I guess I missed where he said that there was a dip in murders then a huge spike.
Actually, reading it again, I still can't find it. Crying foul over the interpretation of the stats when his own interpretation is much more suspect.
Over the years of Sherrif Joe's tenure the per-capita murder rate has risen.
I hope that you can agree with that statement.
I read this as being about an undergrad. That's why I said:
I wouldn't call Oli a liar. I might call him a brick shy of a load for choosing to do a CS degree after 30 years in industry.
Wait. This guy has reduced crime because he kept the murder rate has increased to 6% above the expected rate? In don't understand this meaning of the word "reduced"
I have to agree with Oli. Here's the core required courses for UW:
*CSE 142 Computer Programming I (4) -- NOPE
*CSE 143 Computer Programming II (5) -- NOPE
CSE 321 Discrete Structures (4) -- MAYBE
CSE 322 Intro to Formal Models (3) -- MAYBE
CSE 326 Data Structures (4) -- NOPE
CSE 341 Programming Languages (4) -- NOPE
CSE 370 Intro to Digital Design (4) -- NOPE
CSE 378 Machine Org & Assembly Lang. (4) -- NOPE
Now, if you've been doing it for 30 years, which of these courses is going to be interesting?
Data structures? Nope. Please -- probably implemented modified versions of everything the instructor's going to teach.
Programming languages? Nope. -- Probably knows lisp, haskell, scheme, etc. on top of all the production languages.
Digital Design? Nope. Probably fiddled enough to have a leg up.
Assembly Language? Nope. With 30 years of experience probably done *A LOT* of production assembly.
Notice there's no required algorithms course. That's CSE 373 Data Structures And Algorithms.
So, if you look at this the required curriculum it is 20% interesting. That sucks. Would I want to go spend 4/5s of my time being bored? No way. That's why I chose to go back in math -- at least that way I can feel challenged every day.
Now, I grant you the University of Washington is not MIT but it's a respected school.
I wouldn't call Oli a liar. I might call him a brick shy of a load for choosing to do a CS degree after 30 years in industry. There are other options (AMATH springs to mind). BTW, in the interest of full disclosure I have about 16 years in the industryw without a degree.
Actually, just to back you up a bit, I remember someone I know who works out there saying that they have almost a 1:1 Dev to QA ratio. The industry standard is somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1 Dev to QA. So they have a lot of QA.
So, my theory is that they've made the OS so huge by integrating everything in that a little change in one place means that a good deal of the product needs to be retested.
You have a strange idea of who "Joe Six-Pack" is.
... Hey! check out the cans on that one."
I'm Joe Six-Pack. Apparently. I've always wanted to be able to say "I'm Batman". Apparently this is as close as I'll get.
Joe six-pack is shooting squirrels with his 12-gauge
Squirrels are good eatin'. I don't understand why that's Joe-Sixpackish.
while he spits chewing-tobacco into a coffee can
Yep, I have done that.
which is overflowing onto his shoes, staining them the color of this god-awful Slashdot section.
Letting it overflow is nasty. Don't do it. And certainly don't let a cat lick it up. However, according to some of the folks I've known, putting the cat in a trashback, drizzling in the juice, then shaking it up to get a nice even coating is, well, just plain good clean fun.
I don't think he has had much luck soldering hacked chips into any consumer electronics lately
I generally don't do that. However, I like to do hugely over-engineered solutions to every day problems. My previous project was a 8051 microcontroller based bonsai tree light that similated the track of the sun at a settable longitude and latitude.
My current is an automated offset smoker using a bunch of different thermistors a couple of thermocouples and a servo motor. It's all being controlled by labview.
I Haven't tried smoking squirrel, yet. But once I finish the big BBQ this week-end (for about 40 people that's why I have 4 channels of meat probes) I may try it.
and he surely isn't worried about the DCMA.
I am but most of my friends are not. Most don't understand that the impact of laws doesn't have to be immediate for them to be detrimental. They have the "I have nothing to hide." mentality. They're wrong of course, but what's more fun, drinking beer and watching the women walk by or talking law/politics? These guy say, "I have nothing to
In the dim, dark past, intel machines didn't have an FPU on die. You could buy an exernal floating point processor, which was most commonly installed by the store that sold the machine.
Well, Compaq made a system where the the main processor along with all the other chips were mounted so that the letter was right-side up when standing at the front of the machine.
However, the coprocessor socket was rotated 90 degrees. If you installed it so the lettering was the same as everything else, one of the pins melted off when power was applied. Don't ask me how I know.
great design.
And the alarms were for lower priority tasks -- like updating displays. So, they dropped a few frames during descent. ;-)
I seem to remember that, in the recent past, we were running budget surplusses.
I feel dirty for posting a link to a geocities site on slashdot.
It's not hard to understand. You set the bar at "gold medalists only" and thereby disqualify every silver medalist in the process. Seems simple enough.
I admit the bar is high but look at this from the hiring manager's point of view. Education level is not strongly correlated with performance. What is strongly correlated with is experience. When times were better we took more chances but we've always tried to hire the best that we can. Currently, we don't have to take as many chances. This is pretty much like it was in the late-80s. However, 2002-2003 was like I'd never seen it before. It was bad.
It should. The sales pitch was (and I quote) "go to school, get and education and get a good job." I did my part.
If you were told this, you were at best misinformed at worst; at worst you were lied to. Back in 1989 when I was doing tech support to get in the door, there was another guy there who was a fresh CS grad who got on by offering to work for free for a while (BTW, a company can't legally take you up on the offer but it shows intent). So, despite what some people say, it's always been hard, with the exception of the dotcom boom.
But I'm WAY past bitter. I was bitter after the second major financial disaster and fourth round of layoffs. Now I'm just amused. I'm amused that I am expected to get married and sign a mortgage based on a job I could lose at any moment for reasons (or non-reasons) that are totally out of my control.
The problem is that bitter doesn't help. I know it's *REALLY* hard not to be there and I'm guilty myself. I spent 6 month out of work in 2002. I got bitter. When I look back at it, I can say getting bitter hurt my performance in interviews over that time period.
BTW, nobody outside of your family and friends gives a rat's ass about whether you get married (that is unless you're gay) nor do they care whether you have a family or buy a house. Politicians and social scientists will tell you that they care but they usually don't.
What I have earned I don't get to keep.
No, what you have promised to pay for, you lose, if you miss the payments.
Of course, I couldn't rent a job any more. I became unemployable rather soon after the entire job market became an economy of layoffs. Oh sure, I know eight programming languages and have a great deal of experience in a number of different types of businesses, but that doesn't matter at all.
It's all about the hiring manager's estimation of whether you are the best choice he or she has. In other words, can you help ship product. Number of languages doesn't really matter. I've hired people who have never worked in the language that we're using.
Then again, of what value is a job that can become a layoff at literally any moment? It is valueless. It is only as valuable as the next paycheck, which is usually a below average wage for above average ability and work hours.
I would encourage you to think really hard about whether this is true or not. The value of the job is the future earning discounted by probability of earning them and the time value of money minus that value of the effort.
BTW, there are still good jobs out there. I make a good living (I shouldn't say how much). I used to manage sizable development groups but decided to stop doing that because I realized that I was primarily an instrument for extracting as many hours out of the people that worked for me as possible. Now, I come in and really focus on getting work done for the eight hours I'm there then I get out. I get the most done and I don't have to kill myself to do it, so my employer is happy and I get to have a life.
Shouldn't have to. Should be able to say "here are my EDUCATION, skills and experience, which you will find perfectly qualify me for this job" and start work. Shouldn't have to wheedle, bullshit and argue my way into a career.
The problem is that many people with a CS degree come out
Folks who haven't shipped a commercial product are unproven in the context of shipping commercial product. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand. There's a vast difference between school work/projects and real products. Don't be bitter that all the hard work in school doesn't automatically get you a job. The school work will pay off in the end.
My advice would be to do what I did. Find a small software house and get in any way you can. Then work your ass off while all the while letting them know that you really want to work on the product.
I pestered a small development house into taking me on as tech support -- I literally called them every week for 6 months. About a year later I was working on the product. Lots of late nights, lots of hard work -- but that's how you break into most businesses. This was in 1989 and now I'm the "old guy", have shipped a lot of products, and get to help make hiring decisions.
Experience is just an employer-invented bullshit reason to disqualify people.
At least in the software industry, there's a huge difference between working with folks who have shipped a few solid commercial products and those who haven't.
When I'm involved in hiring, the experience on the rez gets you in the door -- I count education as experience but at a discounted rate. If we have some person from the past in common (it's shocking how often this happens) then with a positive call and a good interview I'm excited about having you join the teams.
Blow any one of these points and it just lessens your chances.
Women by a lot of SUVs:
This is just about the first link off a google search.
So, penis extension isn't quite the right phrase.
Are we searching around for a project to start? The best stuff comes when you're scratching your own itch.
Heh. I remember installing RLL drive controller cards with MFM drives so we could get 1.5x the disk space. We got another 10 meg for free!!!!
Actually, I am. It's hard to do it while working a little over 40 hours / week. Mostly from the lack of time (and sleep).
As the other poster mention, being a math major is hard. That's why I chose to do that.
I used to manage development teams and that sort of stuff until I realized that most of the people that I worked for couldn't care less about the quality of the lives of the individual developers and I was just an instrument for extracting more work and longer hours.
So, I stopped doing it. I work as an individual developer now and steadfastly refuse to be exploited. At the same time, because I have a lot of experience, I get paid well enough to put my wife through law school while I go part time.
In a year, when she's done, we're going to swap. I'll go to school full time and she'll bring home the bacon. However, I really love to cook, so I'll be the one frying it up in a pan, thank you very much (and thank you, Alton).
So, I was in the "gifted" program going through schools and it was all pretty easy for me as well. My big regret is that I didn't work harder at academics to begin with. I ended up getting a job instead. Although I've learned a lot and accomplished a lot, I've always wondered exactly what I missed by staying in school and working really hard. I look back on all the money and career success and I frankly hold it pretty cheap.
So my advice, is find the hardest major in which you're interested and go work your ass off. Then, when you get to be my age and look back on it, you won't have to wonder because you went all out and did something really hard.
Nope, don't think I understand it. I'm taking a lot of math courses but I figure I have about another year before I have the background to understand this thing.
By that time, the money will be paid or the proof will be on the scrapheap.
There's the occasional post that deserves to be modded to "+10 -- Best Damn Thing I've Read On Slashdot This Year".
Thanks!
I can't tell you how often I wish people had a basic grounding in economics. See, economics isn't really about money, it's about the effects of people making choices to get the best outcomes for themselves -- money is just a medium for doing that -- there are others.
See, what your boss is telling you is that you are only worth what they are paying you because they can shove extra work down your throat. He's also saying that Paul is worth what they're paying with his current work output.
Think about that a second. Which would you rather be?
Second, Paul is saying that getting paid what he's getting paid only is only worth the amount of time he's putting in (otherwise he'd probably take a job elsewhere). He's also probably aware of your bitching and it doesn't change his behavior, so it doesn't mean much to him.
So, I'd be asking myself why Paul is getting paid for less work. Is it that he's more experienced, more productive, less gullable?? In other words, don't hate the player.
Because he didn't get nailed for the act of spamming but some other related offense that means that others may not be a deterred.
You know, I think I had AST wrong. I'd seen the thread where he bashes Linus for not doing a microkernel design and thought that maybe it was sour grapes.
His exchanges on this subject have changed my opinion on that. He's been nothing but kind toward Linus, generous with his time, and well-spoken.
If anything good come out of this whole mess, maybe it's that AST really got to show us what he's really like instead of all of us just assuming that he was bitter about the MINIX/Linux history.