Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 1
If you're hiring people off one enlisted tour, yeah, you're hiring kids with a pittance of trade-school training, maybe an AA, and very narrowly-focused experience. The attitude problems, sure, there are blowhards galore with military backgrounds, but I can't say the frequency is much different from the number of jack-booted jerks I've encountered who came straight out of Harvard and have never worn a uniform in their lives.
Seriously. Every time ANYTHING comes up about ANY kind of regulation, the drones come out and start blathering "let the market sort it out!" as if no one else has heard about this alien concept. Well, some things the market DOESN'T sort out, or in doing so, the market suffers great harm, possibly involving a lot of people ending up hurt or killed.
This is certainly a case where many people would have to be defrauded over a great period of time before enough information would enter the market to shutdown the fraudster. That's why we have laws against fraud that shut them down _before_ the market is damaged enough to respond. Further regulation may not be necessary, but this incessant bullshit about the free market panacea is just insipid.
I suppose we should just allow everything to reach Enron proportions and just sit there waiting for that invisible hand to come around and slap you in the ass....lovely, my captcha was "audited."
Sociological and Economic research happens to be my academic field, sport. As I mentioned in my original post, all one has to do to get a NON-anecdotal P.O.V. on the subject is to look at the BLS statistics for the last fifteen years. Apparently, you haven't even attempted that. So, before you attack someone for "not having the relevant degree," do make sure you exhibit the accoutrement of one who does, certainly when addressing someone who does, ass.
I stated VERY VERY clearly that those things DID exist. What I said was that those cases were OUTLIERS. That is, for those woefully and insistently ignorant of statistics, that THEY ARE NOT GENERALIZABLE ACROSS THE POPULATION.
I remember the boom-bust cycle. I remember most of the industry looked upon these sketchy-ass venture-capital awash paper tigers as bullshit. I remember the rank and file making damned good -- but not exhorbitant -- money looking at those who jumped ship for the big, shiny carrots as, basically, the money-grubbing day-trading traitors that they were -- and wouldn't hire them back if you paid THEM.
The whole period of time in question was itself an outlier and those who profited from it were very, very rare. THAT was the point.
"The days of high-paying technology-based jobs right out of highschool are over."
Those days never existed and for christ's sake I wish IT-types would stop perpetuating the myth. Yeah, sure, there were excesses during the dot-com boom-bust cycle, but rarely, VERY rarely were those excesses bestowed upon 17 year-olds. It was bad enough when people were insinuating that every CompSci graduate in 1997 was getting a 135K/year job with a free Mercedes. Stupid shit like that happened, but the psychology is akin to one Amway triple-diamond sales manager pulling up in his new Maserati, causing the 300 people in his "downline" running around telling all their friends that they're getting Maseratis too. Then, when the whole thing falls apart, they don't have the Maserati, and everyone gets into a big schadenfreude orgy watching the giant fall...from a height he never attained.
The other aspect of this that is maddening is the implication that utterly normal salaries for middle-of-the-road positions are "high." Take a garden variety IT job that pays about $65-70k today. Well, in 1995 dollars that's $49-52K -- and that WASN'T a great deal of money in 1995 for a skilled occupation. Constantly screaming out this mantra of "high IT salaries" communicates to people that they are unjustified. Go to the BLS and pull up similarly skilled occupations. You'll find that by and large, IT salaries are--and have been for some time--totally in line with, say, being an electrician or a telco engineer... or a PLUMBER for christ's sake.
The bubble was a five-year abberation that has been over for five years. Get over it and please stop perpetuating and exacerbating what is largely urban myth based on what are at best statistical outliers. In short, shut-the-fuck-up already.
On my current project I brought up HIPAA compliance issues, primarily data encryption between remote facilities. Color me horrified when I was informed of the gaping loophole that exempted us completely from HIPAA.
"I think we're dangerously close to having a law that is essentially meaningless."
I just ran Speakeasy's test on my Comcast cable line. In the same city (Washington, DC), sure enough, it returned 3Mb/s. Connecting to Atlanta, it predictably dropped a bit to 2.7Mb/s and connecting to Los Angeles, 1.6Mb/s. Upload speed was consistent at all three at around 350kb/s (it's supposed to be 384kb/s).
Damnit, it would seem that they're delivering the product they've advertised. Somehow, I still want them to be doused in boiling oil and flayed alive because they're evil, incompetent bastards.
This IPO had so many glaring red flags I can't imagine why anyone would jump on it. Principals with fraudulent backgrounds--and that's just the stuff they HAD to disclose--a questionable split and sweatheart options executions just prior to the IPO, a massive debt and burn rate, horrible dire predictions about competitiveness and on and on and on. If they had gotten the full estimated value of the IPO, they would be in the black for less than a month.
Well, "large" in the sense of "lots of lines of code" is one thing. 250,000 or 2.5M lines servicing 10 people is a much different thing than 25,000 lines of code serving 10,000 people. Maintaining the former in any language is easier than maintaining the latter in any language.
The main strength of VB is it's relative accessibility. It is suited for small projects and by small I mean small distribution, not small in terms of the size of your codebase. The main problem you should be addressing is your development methodology. If you have 47 branches of the same product that you're trying to maintain simultaneously, it doesn't matter what language it's written in and it would seem the temptation is there far more often with VB projects than with other languages precisely because it is so "accessible." Ergo, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
Other languages, almost entirely because they are somewhat inaccessible to the layman, frankly make it harder to fuck up the development cycle and that is more of a problem than the choice of language.
You have FAR, FAR more access to all those old cultural tidbits than at any time in the history of the industry. What are you, 19? 20? CDs now cost LESS than they did when I was in college -- and if I need to explain the economics of that, you need to go back to class. Movies that used to take YEARS to come out on video are now on the racks before they've left the 2nd-run theaters. All those old T.V. shows you claim are being held hostage and thrown into incinerators are now being pumped out like crazy on DVD when just fifteen years ago, no one would even THINK about putting them out -- and they come out on DVD practically instantaneously after season end and an entire season on eight DVDs costs HALF what a single VHS used to -- NOT adjusted for inflation.
It's so indicative of a spoilt rotten pubescent culture when they get more for less and scream that something's been taken from them, so they want it all for free. Fark that. I know people whose lives depend on their paychecks from the movie and music industries. If you want to make them casualties in your petty little war, then grow up and fuck you.
Tapes cost less because they are of lesser quality and no one would purchase them if they cost more than CDs--they'd simply buy the CD and MAKE A TAPE.
You can call this a war or whatever and say that boycotts don't work, but talk of circumlocution, what the hell is defiantly ripping your music/movies/porn whatever without paying for it but a boycott?
You talk about "what are the retiring old folks supposed to do?" Well, christ, what about the old folks who WORK IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY? Not the mega-gabillionaires at top (be they "artist" or "suit"), but the armies of workaday S.O.B.s who will be first to feel the pinch come cost-cutting time?
The rest of your screed is simply "why the world sucks in general in the 21st century." Well, that's just dandy, but if your fucking CDs and DVDs are at the top of that list, I humbly suggest you have a MAJOR priority problem--quite akin to the aforementioned 4yo having a tantrum in a toy store.
instead they'll just see a festival of crime that needs to be dealt with facing little or no reprecussion.
I get really tired of people gleefully circumlocuting around this issue. Yes, the technology exists to make this sort of thing easy to get away with under laws meant for less complicated times. No, copyright infringement should not be a _crime_ -- it is (or should be returned to) a tort. But, the bottom line is, if you want the product and want more of it to be produced, this sort of activity, barring some other form of payment, is not economically sustainable.
All these asinine "adapt or die" arguments don't really help, unless you want everything to have more gratuitous product placement than an Austin Powers movie and, frankly, what the hell is with such a shiatty attitude toward the companies that produce the products people just can't seem to live without? If I felt that hostile towards, say, my car manufacturer, I wouldn't go around stealing their cars or making knock-off copies, I'd simply take my business elsewhere and wash my hands of them completely. It all smacks of 4yo's toy store tantrum after they've been told they can't have some stupid, useless, overpriced trinket they'll be bored with in five minutes anyway.
Have a big bag of tricks to solve problems, but specialize in the problems you solve. You can have all the language skills on the planet, but if you don't have a specialized field in which you apply those skills, you will not have an edge against the armies of similar Jacks-Of-All-Trades out there whose resumes also read like a bowl of Alpha-Bits.
The "Semantic Web" is basically the intersection of RDF+OWL, that is to say, it is entirely about taxonomy. The whole idea is that you have a certain nomenclature that you assert against known values, someone else has a different nomenclature that they assert against the same values. You can now cross-reference with a high degree of confidence. For example, using the Dublin Core.
I get people all the time dismissing the whole idea because "man, you'd have to agree on definitions" or "how does 'it' know?" Right. "It" doesn't unless it is explicitly told. If what you call a "House" is in a well-known schema, you simply add an equivalency in your schema et voila, une maison est une 'House.' So, someone else comes along and they want to assert that "'ein Haus ist ein 'maison'," so they assert against the previous schema, and now implicitly ein Haus=une maison=a House. No one had to make the last assertion as it was implicitly true from the previous assertions. So now, in your schema, you make all sorts of categorical assertions about other things relating to houses. Your French and German counterparts now have them for free, as do you theirs. Yes, it takes work, no it isn't completely automatic, yes it is limited to strict taxonomies, but it is still very, very powerful.
"I have met such people. It almost seems as though some people can learn to shoe a horse without ever learning the basics about how to ride one."
I've never met a farrier who could dream of being a jockey...and I've never met a jockey who would ever even remotely want to be a farrier. Two very different jobs for two very different people.
Everything you described was management-track and the primary skill in effectively delegating is understanding that distinction.
Use of computers and telecom _in general_ increased exponentially under his watch, so it's a little disingenuous to blame him for the government following right with the rest of the world. But, I find it puzzling that simultaneously people slam Clinton for doing nothing to cover for indadequacies and then slam him for doing too much to cover for excesses. Which is it? How could he have done nothing and too much of the same thing? Hmm?
There's a bigger deal made about this now because the Cold War is over and terrorism, while dangerous, is a FAR less ominous threat, for the most part practically insignificant--even including the possibility of using nuclear weapons--than something where one guy just doing his job could wipe out the entire human race with the push of a button. Oddly enough, the anniversary of when that one man's hestiation literally saved the world was yesterday.
THAT is what ECHELON was built to intercept. The reason this is getting so much heat is that the honeymoon of the 90's is over and people are starting to question the repurposing of these program because they realize the proportionality is way, way out of whack compared to the threat they were originally intended to counter.
I just have it forward my voicemail to GMail. No slow download problems there. I used to also have it simultaneously ring my cellphone and send a copy of the voicemail notification as a text message.
My *BIG* problem with Vonage is that after looking at their absolutely dismal financials, I'm left wondering, IPO or not, whether they're going to be around much longer.
...as in many similar cases...it is the best for the most, as opposed to the best for the least. The latter is certainly far, far better, but for far, far fewer...and I say that having worked in various aspects of U.S. national public health programs since the 70's, both on the private service and public administration sides of that equation--and I can assure you, that the "universal healthcare" side is a much, much better deal by a LONG shot.
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If you're hiring people off one enlisted tour, yeah, you're hiring kids with a pittance of trade-school training, maybe an AA, and very narrowly-focused experience. The attitude problems, sure, there are blowhards galore with military backgrounds, but I can't say the frequency is much different from the number of jack-booted jerks I've encountered who came straight out of Harvard and have never worn a uniform in their lives.
Seriously. Every time ANYTHING comes up about ANY kind of regulation, the drones come out and start blathering "let the market sort it out!" as if no one else has heard about this alien concept. Well, some things the market DOESN'T sort out, or in doing so, the market suffers great harm, possibly involving a lot of people ending up hurt or killed.
...lovely, my captcha was "audited."
This is certainly a case where many people would have to be defrauded over a great period of time before enough information would enter the market to shutdown the fraudster. That's why we have laws against fraud that shut them down _before_ the market is damaged enough to respond. Further regulation may not be necessary, but this incessant bullshit about the free market panacea is just insipid.
I suppose we should just allow everything to reach Enron proportions and just sit there waiting for that invisible hand to come around and slap you in the ass.
That would be like the highway patrol handing out tickets to the state troopers, if you get my drift.
Sociological and Economic research happens to be my academic field, sport. As I mentioned in my original post, all one has to do to get a NON-anecdotal P.O.V. on the subject is to look at the BLS statistics for the last fifteen years. Apparently, you haven't even attempted that. So, before you attack someone for "not having the relevant degree," do make sure you exhibit the accoutrement of one who does, certainly when addressing someone who does, ass.
I stated VERY VERY clearly that those things DID exist. What I said was that those cases were OUTLIERS. That is, for those woefully and insistently ignorant of statistics, that THEY ARE NOT GENERALIZABLE ACROSS THE POPULATION.
I remember the boom-bust cycle. I remember most of the industry looked upon these sketchy-ass venture-capital awash paper tigers as bullshit. I remember the rank and file making damned good -- but not exhorbitant -- money looking at those who jumped ship for the big, shiny carrots as, basically, the money-grubbing day-trading traitors that they were -- and wouldn't hire them back if you paid THEM.
The whole period of time in question was itself an outlier and those who profited from it were very, very rare. THAT was the point.
"The days of high-paying technology-based jobs right out of highschool are over."
Those days never existed and for christ's sake I wish IT-types would stop perpetuating the myth. Yeah, sure, there were excesses during the dot-com boom-bust cycle, but rarely, VERY rarely were those excesses bestowed upon 17 year-olds. It was bad enough when people were insinuating that every CompSci graduate in 1997 was getting a 135K/year job with a free Mercedes. Stupid shit like that happened, but the psychology is akin to one Amway triple-diamond sales manager pulling up in his new Maserati, causing the 300 people in his "downline" running around telling all their friends that they're getting Maseratis too. Then, when the whole thing falls apart, they don't have the Maserati, and everyone gets into a big schadenfreude orgy watching the giant fall...from a height he never attained.
The other aspect of this that is maddening is the implication that utterly normal salaries for middle-of-the-road positions are "high." Take a garden variety IT job that pays about $65-70k today. Well, in 1995 dollars that's $49-52K -- and that WASN'T a great deal of money in 1995 for a skilled occupation. Constantly screaming out this mantra of "high IT salaries" communicates to people that they are unjustified. Go to the BLS and pull up similarly skilled occupations. You'll find that by and large, IT salaries are--and have been for some time--totally in line with, say, being an electrician or a telco engineer... or a PLUMBER for christ's sake.
The bubble was a five-year abberation that has been over for five years. Get over it and please stop perpetuating and exacerbating what is largely urban myth based on what are at best statistical outliers. In short, shut-the-fuck-up already.
On my current project I brought up HIPAA compliance issues, primarily data encryption between remote facilities. Color me horrified when I was informed of the gaping loophole that exempted us completely from HIPAA.
"I think we're dangerously close to having a law that is essentially meaningless."
Certainly is for me.
I just ran Speakeasy's test on my Comcast cable line. In the same city (Washington, DC), sure enough, it returned 3Mb/s. Connecting to Atlanta, it predictably dropped a bit to 2.7Mb/s and connecting to Los Angeles, 1.6Mb/s. Upload speed was consistent at all three at around 350kb/s (it's supposed to be 384kb/s).
Damnit, it would seem that they're delivering the product they've advertised. Somehow, I still want them to be doused in boiling oil and flayed alive because they're evil, incompetent bastards.
The article had an air of truthiness about it...
This IPO had so many glaring red flags I can't imagine why anyone would jump on it. Principals with fraudulent backgrounds--and that's just the stuff they HAD to disclose--a questionable split and sweatheart options executions just prior to the IPO, a massive debt and burn rate, horrible dire predictions about competitiveness and on and on and on. If they had gotten the full estimated value of the IPO, they would be in the black for less than a month.
This was more an attempted robbery than an IPO.
Well, "large" in the sense of "lots of lines of code" is one thing. 250,000 or 2.5M lines servicing 10 people is a much different thing than 25,000 lines of code serving 10,000 people. Maintaining the former in any language is easier than maintaining the latter in any language.
The main strength of VB is it's relative accessibility. It is suited for small projects and by small I mean small distribution, not small in terms of the size of your codebase. The main problem you should be addressing is your development methodology. If you have 47 branches of the same product that you're trying to maintain simultaneously, it doesn't matter what language it's written in and it would seem the temptation is there far more often with VB projects than with other languages precisely because it is so "accessible." Ergo, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
Other languages, almost entirely because they are somewhat inaccessible to the layman, frankly make it harder to fuck up the development cycle and that is more of a problem than the choice of language.
You have FAR, FAR more access to all those old cultural tidbits than at any time in the history of the industry. What are you, 19? 20? CDs now cost LESS than they did when I was in college -- and if I need to explain the economics of that, you need to go back to class. Movies that used to take YEARS to come out on video are now on the racks before they've left the 2nd-run theaters. All those old T.V. shows you claim are being held hostage and thrown into incinerators are now being pumped out like crazy on DVD when just fifteen years ago, no one would even THINK about putting them out -- and they come out on DVD practically instantaneously after season end and an entire season on eight DVDs costs HALF what a single VHS used to -- NOT adjusted for inflation.
It's so indicative of a spoilt rotten pubescent culture when they get more for less and scream that something's been taken from them, so they want it all for free. Fark that. I know people whose lives depend on their paychecks from the movie and music industries. If you want to make them casualties in your petty little war, then grow up and fuck you.
Tapes cost less because they are of lesser quality and no one would purchase them if they cost more than CDs--they'd simply buy the CD and MAKE A TAPE.
You can call this a war or whatever and say that boycotts don't work, but talk of circumlocution, what the hell is defiantly ripping your music/movies/porn whatever without paying for it but a boycott?
You talk about "what are the retiring old folks supposed to do?" Well, christ, what about the old folks who WORK IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY? Not the mega-gabillionaires at top (be they "artist" or "suit"), but the armies of workaday S.O.B.s who will be first to feel the pinch come cost-cutting time?
The rest of your screed is simply "why the world sucks in general in the 21st century." Well, that's just dandy, but if your fucking CDs and DVDs are at the top of that list, I humbly suggest you have a MAJOR priority problem--quite akin to the aforementioned 4yo having a tantrum in a toy store.
instead they'll just see a festival of crime that needs to be dealt with facing little or no reprecussion.
I get really tired of people gleefully circumlocuting around this issue. Yes, the technology exists to make this sort of thing easy to get away with under laws meant for less complicated times. No, copyright infringement should not be a _crime_ -- it is (or should be returned to) a tort. But, the bottom line is, if you want the product and want more of it to be produced, this sort of activity, barring some other form of payment, is not economically sustainable.
All these asinine "adapt or die" arguments don't really help, unless you want everything to have more gratuitous product placement than an Austin Powers movie and, frankly, what the hell is with such a shiatty attitude toward the companies that produce the products people just can't seem to live without? If I felt that hostile towards, say, my car manufacturer, I wouldn't go around stealing their cars or making knock-off copies, I'd simply take my business elsewhere and wash my hands of them completely. It all smacks of 4yo's toy store tantrum after they've been told they can't have some stupid, useless, overpriced trinket they'll be bored with in five minutes anyway.
It is for all intents the exact same design, which of course was the biggest biatch about the constraints in the first place.
You need to be a specialist AND a generalist.
Have a big bag of tricks to solve problems, but specialize in the problems you solve. You can have all the language skills on the planet, but if you don't have a specialized field in which you apply those skills, you will not have an edge against the armies of similar Jacks-Of-All-Trades out there whose resumes also read like a bowl of Alpha-Bits.
GameTap.
"Ohh look! It can download games over the internet!"
Uh... just like any other desktop.
The "Semantic Web" is basically the intersection of RDF+OWL, that is to say, it is entirely about taxonomy. The whole idea is that you have a certain nomenclature that you assert against known values, someone else has a different nomenclature that they assert against the same values. You can now cross-reference with a high degree of confidence. For example, using the Dublin Core.
I get people all the time dismissing the whole idea because "man, you'd have to agree on definitions" or "how does 'it' know?" Right. "It" doesn't unless it is explicitly told. If what you call a "House" is in a well-known schema, you simply add an equivalency in your schema et voila, une maison est une 'House.' So, someone else comes along and they want to assert that "'ein Haus ist ein 'maison'," so they assert against the previous schema, and now implicitly ein Haus=une maison=a House. No one had to make the last assertion as it was implicitly true from the previous assertions. So now, in your schema, you make all sorts of categorical assertions about other things relating to houses. Your French and German counterparts now have them for free, as do you theirs. Yes, it takes work, no it isn't completely automatic, yes it is limited to strict taxonomies, but it is still very, very powerful.
"I have met such people. It almost seems as though some people can learn to shoe a horse without ever learning the basics about how to ride one."
I've never met a farrier who could dream of being a jockey...and I've never met a jockey who would ever even remotely want to be a farrier. Two very different jobs for two very different people.
Everything you described was management-track and the primary skill in effectively delegating is understanding that distinction.
It saves like, uhm, two keystrokes or something...
That's a quantum leap in efficiency...uhm...
What does http://www.google.mobi/ get you?
Why, it's a redirect to:
http://www.google.com/mobile/
BRILLIANT!
Meh.
Use of computers and telecom _in general_ increased exponentially under his watch, so it's a little disingenuous to blame him for the government following right with the rest of the world. But, I find it puzzling that simultaneously people slam Clinton for doing nothing to cover for indadequacies and then slam him for doing too much to cover for excesses. Which is it? How could he have done nothing and too much of the same thing? Hmm?
There's a bigger deal made about this now because the Cold War is over and terrorism, while dangerous, is a FAR less ominous threat, for the most part practically insignificant--even including the possibility of using nuclear weapons--than something where one guy just doing his job could wipe out the entire human race with the push of a button. Oddly enough, the anniversary of when that one man's hestiation literally saved the world was yesterday.
THAT is what ECHELON was built to intercept. The reason this is getting so much heat is that the honeymoon of the 90's is over and people are starting to question the repurposing of these program because they realize the proportionality is way, way out of whack compared to the threat they were originally intended to counter.
Carnivore? Okay, that's reltaviely recent--and very limited in scope, it's site-specific--but Echelon has existed for a very, very long time.
I just have it forward my voicemail to GMail. No slow download problems there. I used to also have it simultaneously ring my cellphone and send a copy of the voicemail notification as a text message.
My *BIG* problem with Vonage is that after looking at their absolutely dismal financials, I'm left wondering, IPO or not, whether they're going to be around much longer.
...as in many similar cases...it is the best for the most, as opposed to the best for the least. The latter is certainly far, far better, but for far, far fewer...and I say that having worked in various aspects of U.S. national public health programs since the 70's, both on the private service and public administration sides of that equation--and I can assure you, that the "universal healthcare" side is a much, much better deal by a LONG shot.