I'd say enraging more than terrifying. I would not afraid if someone in the local school board was watching my son at home: I'd just want some nice retribution, all the way up the chain to the person who approved that madness.
New college grads have it way harder than someone with 2-3 years of experience, but you might be surprised at how hard getting hired can get when you have 30 years worth. It's easy to be labeled as overqualified.
The group that has it easier depends on the business cycle. In the late 90s, it was great to be experienced. In the early 2000s, a CS degree got a good job to pretty much anyone. Today, neither of both ends is especially appealing.
But the American EE competes directly with the Asian: And he makes a whole lot more. The reason outsourcing started is that the wage differentials were so massive that moving entire divisions overseas made sense: Just see how much R&D many big companies have moved to China, India, Russia and even Brazil.
If you want engineers to have the top status, you can't just wish for doctor or executive salaries: In the US, those professions are extremely overpaid when compared to the rest of the world. It's their status that needs to go down to a reasonable level, precisely by seeing enough youngsters moving into those fields to bring the market back down. Late 90s salaries are not coming back, because they were an aberration. The salaries one can get today as an engineer in the midwest are still way higher than what people of similar positions make in Europe.
Instead of protectionism, look for ways to make your country more competitive. It's the only thing that works in the long run.
Come on, put some thinking into this: If you tax consumption, you get a different flavor of inequality: Saving money to spend it overseas is suddenly a tax break. A single man ends up paying less taxes if he doesn't marry or have children, because he has less expenses. Saving money becomes a tax break, which makes consumption drop like a rock, making the country dependent on exports.
Blanket consumption taxes are probably the worst idea out there. Thankfully, they'll never pass, because if something like that ever comes close to legislation, it'll be really easy to show most people that, under that scenario, the large majority of the population would end up paying more, while those that end up paying less are the top half percent of earners, and immigrants who send their money home.
Even a flat tax on income would be less regressive.
Except Ferrari and Mercedes of course: Neither of them is short of money, and aren't all that interested in passing their tech to the competition.
They could get an updated KERS without talking to the F1 teams themselves though: Magneti Marelli developed KERS systems for at least 3 teams last year.
It depends on what you are doing with it: ROR makes some things extremely easy, and others extremely hard. If your website is mostly about doing the easy stuff, it's great. If your requirements are all about what ROR isn't any good at, ROR is worse than a dozen other frameworks, where you pay a larger upfront cost for more flexibility.
If anything, it's the 360 that has crap for local multiplayer: How often do multiplayer games require a second console, and a second copy of the $60 game to run? And how many of the few games that support local coop do it through a badly implemented split screen?
The best selling games on the Wii are mainly multiplayer games, look it up.
There's other ways to make health care cheaper without having to rely on government, but people are extremely unwilling to head that way: For example, we could take steps to make sure that the US has a number of doctors per capita that is closer to that of the rest of the western world. We could make sure that the training required to become a doctor was a whole lot cheaper. Triple the number of doctors, simplify the certifications for medical equipment, and shorten patents, and prices would go down. But as it is, we have pretty strong interest groups making sure that we need a doctor for almost any medication, and that becoming a doctor becomes a very expensive proposition that relatively few achieve.
The problem is that the value lies in some of the articles, and not in the aggregation of news, as it was 20 years ago. Investigative journalism has some value.The op-ed sectionhas value, but it only has value because a lot of people get to read it: Most of the columnists would make more money on their own ad-funded sites than behind a paywall for the whole thing. Most of the rest doesn't really have that much value, since the difference in quality of their reporting over what you can find in any other news source is pretty minimal.
A paywall if you read more than X articles shouldn't give them much revenue: If anything, it'll make sure some of us avoid visit their site for anything outside of the two areas I just mentioned, precisely because it's those clicks that would be expensive: We'd rather just see the best stuff for free, and get the rest from other sources that are just as good.
The main difference IIRC is that you actually have to enable postmaster to take connections, instead of being locked down by default. I'm glad it's locked by default myself, but there's people that don't want to read any documentation.
Postgres is a freaking enterprise database. Its documentation is so good, it makes every other framework in my development stack look bad. But people complain because they'd rather have the easy things be trivial, without caring about the difficulty of the not so easy things.
We also run MySQL at work, and we have a whole lot more problems with it. The developers, who were the ones that chose MySQL in the first place, are considering a switch to Postgres, based on how fewer headaches we get with our Postgres installations.
You will find a few that require specific instruction sets: For example, the remake of Secret of Monkey Island will not work on an Athlon XP, because the geniuses that made the game compiled it in such a way that it doesn't work on processors that don't support SSE2.
No, but in International affairs, If Bush said jump, Aznar would ask how high. So Aznar's behavior stuck for a bit. The party that took over had awful relations with Bush, which didn't help matters.
And frankly, the anti-americanism started with the Iraq invasion. The majority of Spaniards never bought into Bush's argument. You can find pictures of million man demonstrations that occurred after Aznar, Blair and Bush met at the Azores to discuss the invasion.
But, if I decided to mark you as a person of interest today, I could not obtain a recording of everything you've ever done in public for the last 10 years. What you do in public in a bar in Mexico 8 years ago is not something easily available to everyone you meet.
It's not the fact that someone can get the information, it is the recording and aggregation that makes the rules of the game different.
Java has had pretty good forms development for quite a few years, but it was third party, and then it required some custom work to make it easy to truly separate M,V and C. I've been running them in a production environment for 5 years, on top of my own infrastructure that makes the controller code look more like a web framework than what most people end up doing with Swing. Add a layer of Groovy on top and 20 lines of code and a generic library do the work that 400 lines of Swing used to do.
Someone that doesn't look at what everyone else is doing for at least some inspiration is either alone, or too self centered to be all he can be.
Re:How to turn your skilled employees into cogs
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If anything, Agile requires high quality developers to be very successful: Since the design process is diluted, you can't get away with having one or two people that run the show technically and a bunch of drones: Bad developers that can't shape up throw a wrench into the system, and send quality down to the toilet.
An agile system where the developers are actually talented raises their skill levels as they go along, and it can be very rewarding to everyone involved. Eventually management can just set them loose on a project, knowing not just that the end result will be good, but that most issues with requirements will be dealt with before they become a serious problem.
If anything, the problems I've had getting Agile implemented is getting management to accept the budget issues that come from leaving behind a model of two very good developers/architects and a bunch of bums paid a pittance.
Re:PyPy - crashing and burning with "agile".
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
Designing is much harder than writing, but figuring out what to design is harder still. The difference between what a user wants, what they need, and what they need that can be built under budget can be very large. Few things in development are so disheartening than developing a system as demanded by the customer, and then see it go unused because the requirements that were written down had little to do with real life needs.
Hard methodologies are definitely the way to go in some environments, to solve some kinds of problems. I've been in those situations, and been glad that the structure was there. However, there's situations where agile-like project organizations will do the job better. The trick is realizing that no size fits all, and that each development model fits different organizations, and sometimes even projects within organizations, much differently.
There's also the people issue. Each model has different requirements on the technical and management skill of their people. Some organizations are set up to work around highly competent management, but will get good results even if the developers are just drones. In that case, bad leadership would sink the project to the ground, regardless of development skill. Other times, the weak point is what typically is the hardest part of the job: requirements gathering. With an agile system, the problem is backwards: It tolerates shoddy management better, but a half dozen of bad developers can do a lot of damage. Maybe the grandparent is in one of those organizations where PMI is being handled by someone who can't really run it.
In the end, there's no such thing as an abstract methodology that is equally applied everywhere and has any weight: Implementation details make all the difference, and without explaining how our organizations actually work, it's very difficult to debate methodological pros and cons. There's a right answer for your project, and your people, and it might be what you are using, but I bet that the solution for a system made to order for an external customer, built by 400 developers in 4 countries is not going to be the best solution for an in house project built by 3 people. An industrial mower is a great option for a 3 acre field, but it's not really a good solution for a 0.2 acre front yard.
You could also get stuck with crap like the Apache web server that nobody uses, instead of the extremely popular and much loved and bug free IIS, built by our good friends in Redmond.
For pay can be better than free, but it doesn't have to be.
So you think there's no shady lawyers and accountants that will break every rule in the book? There's plenty of breaking codes of conduct in those professions. It might be less likely than in IT, but the amounts of money involved in corporate piracy tends to be smaller than when a corporation deceives or outright lies in their quarterly reports.
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I'd say enraging more than terrifying. I would not afraid if someone in the local school board was watching my son at home: I'd just want some nice retribution, all the way up the chain to the person who approved that madness.
New college grads have it way harder than someone with 2-3 years of experience, but you might be surprised at how hard getting hired can get when you have 30 years worth. It's easy to be labeled as overqualified.
The group that has it easier depends on the business cycle. In the late 90s, it was great to be experienced. In the early 2000s, a CS degree got a good job to pretty much anyone. Today, neither of both ends is especially appealing.
But the American EE competes directly with the Asian: And he makes a whole lot more. The reason outsourcing started is that the wage differentials were so massive that moving entire divisions overseas made sense: Just see how much R&D many big companies have moved to China, India, Russia and even Brazil.
If you want engineers to have the top status, you can't just wish for doctor or executive salaries: In the US, those professions are extremely overpaid when compared to the rest of the world. It's their status that needs to go down to a reasonable level, precisely by seeing enough youngsters moving into those fields to bring the market back down. Late 90s salaries are not coming back, because they were an aberration. The salaries one can get today as an engineer in the midwest are still way higher than what people of similar positions make in Europe.
Instead of protectionism, look for ways to make your country more competitive. It's the only thing that works in the long run.
Come on, put some thinking into this: If you tax consumption, you get a different flavor of inequality: Saving money to spend it overseas is suddenly a tax break. A single man ends up paying less taxes if he doesn't marry or have children, because he has less expenses. Saving money becomes a tax break, which makes consumption drop like a rock, making the country dependent on exports.
Blanket consumption taxes are probably the worst idea out there. Thankfully, they'll never pass, because if something like that ever comes close to legislation, it'll be really easy to show most people that, under that scenario, the large majority of the population would end up paying more, while those that end up paying less are the top half percent of earners, and immigrants who send their money home.
Even a flat tax on income would be less regressive.
Except Ferrari and Mercedes of course: Neither of them is short of money, and aren't all that interested in passing their tech to the competition.
They could get an updated KERS without talking to the F1 teams themselves though: Magneti Marelli developed KERS systems for at least 3 teams last year.
Most of our houses don't get flooded every two years.
If anything, the launch PS3s are more capable, having extra chips under the hood to also be able to play PS2 games.
It depends on what you are doing with it: ROR makes some things extremely easy, and others extremely hard. If your website is mostly about doing the easy stuff, it's great. If your requirements are all about what ROR isn't any good at, ROR is worse than a dozen other frameworks, where you pay a larger upfront cost for more flexibility.
If anything, it's the 360 that has crap for local multiplayer: How often do multiplayer games require a second console, and a second copy of the $60 game to run? And how many of the few games that support local coop do it through a badly implemented split screen?
The best selling games on the Wii are mainly multiplayer games, look it up.
There's other ways to make health care cheaper without having to rely on government, but people are extremely unwilling to head that way: For example, we could take steps to make sure that the US has a number of doctors per capita that is closer to that of the rest of the western world. We could make sure that the training required to become a doctor was a whole lot cheaper. Triple the number of doctors, simplify the certifications for medical equipment, and shorten patents, and prices would go down. But as it is, we have pretty strong interest groups making sure that we need a doctor for almost any medication, and that becoming a doctor becomes a very expensive proposition that relatively few achieve.
This happens if you have the steam's friend system turned on by default. Turn it off, and it stops complaining.
I don't use commas, like a stupid person.
The problem is that the value lies in some of the articles, and not in the aggregation of news, as it was 20 years ago. Investigative journalism has some value.The op-ed sectionhas value, but it only has value because a lot of people get to read it: Most of the columnists would make more money on their own ad-funded sites than behind a paywall for the whole thing. Most of the rest doesn't really have that much value, since the difference in quality of their reporting over what you can find in any other news source is pretty minimal.
A paywall if you read more than X articles shouldn't give them much revenue: If anything, it'll make sure some of us avoid visit their site for anything outside of the two areas I just mentioned, precisely because it's those clicks that would be expensive: We'd rather just see the best stuff for free, and get the rest from other sources that are just as good.
The main difference IIRC is that you actually have to enable postmaster to take connections, instead of being locked down by default. I'm glad it's locked by default myself, but there's people that don't want to read any documentation.
Postgres is a freaking enterprise database. Its documentation is so good, it makes every other framework in my development stack look bad. But people complain because they'd rather have the easy things be trivial, without caring about the difficulty of the not so easy things.
We also run MySQL at work, and we have a whole lot more problems with it. The developers, who were the ones that chose MySQL in the first place, are considering a switch to Postgres, based on how fewer headaches we get with our Postgres installations.
You will find a few that require specific instruction sets: For example, the remake of Secret of Monkey Island will not work on an Athlon XP, because the geniuses that made the game compiled it in such a way that it doesn't work on processors that don't support SSE2.
No, but in International affairs, If Bush said jump, Aznar would ask how high. So Aznar's behavior stuck for a bit. The party that took over had awful relations with Bush, which didn't help matters.
And frankly, the anti-americanism started with the Iraq invasion. The majority of Spaniards never bought into Bush's argument. You can find pictures of million man demonstrations that occurred after Aznar, Blair and Bush met at the Azores to discuss the invasion.
But, if I decided to mark you as a person of interest today, I could not obtain a recording of everything you've ever done in public for the last 10 years. What you do in public in a bar in Mexico 8 years ago is not something easily available to everyone you meet.
It's not the fact that someone can get the information, it is the recording and aggregation that makes the rules of the game different.
When it comes to marketing cliches, when it rains, it pours.
Java has had pretty good forms development for quite a few years, but it was third party, and then it required some custom work to make it easy to truly separate M,V and C. I've been running them in a production environment for 5 years, on top of my own infrastructure that makes the controller code look more like a web framework than what most people end up doing with Swing. Add a layer of Groovy on top and 20 lines of code and a generic library do the work that 400 lines of Swing used to do.
Someone that doesn't look at what everyone else is doing for at least some inspiration is either alone, or too self centered to be all he can be.
If anything, Agile requires high quality developers to be very successful: Since the design process is diluted, you can't get away with having one or two people that run the show technically and a bunch of drones: Bad developers that can't shape up throw a wrench into the system, and send quality down to the toilet.
An agile system where the developers are actually talented raises their skill levels as they go along, and it can be very rewarding to everyone involved. Eventually management can just set them loose on a project, knowing not just that the end result will be good, but that most issues with requirements will be dealt with before they become a serious problem.
If anything, the problems I've had getting Agile implemented is getting management to accept the budget issues that come from leaving behind a model of two very good developers/architects and a bunch of bums paid a pittance.
Designing is much harder than writing, but figuring out what to design is harder still. The difference between what a user wants, what they need, and what they need that can be built under budget can be very large. Few things in development are so disheartening than developing a system as demanded by the customer, and then see it go unused because the requirements that were written down had little to do with real life needs.
Hard methodologies are definitely the way to go in some environments, to solve some kinds of problems. I've been in those situations, and been glad that the structure was there. However, there's situations where agile-like project organizations will do the job better. The trick is realizing that no size fits all, and that each development model fits different organizations, and sometimes even projects within organizations, much differently.
There's also the people issue. Each model has different requirements on the technical and management skill of their people. Some organizations are set up to work around highly competent management, but will get good results even if the developers are just drones. In that case, bad leadership would sink the project to the ground, regardless of development skill. Other times, the weak point is what typically is the hardest part of the job: requirements gathering. With an agile system, the problem is backwards: It tolerates shoddy management better, but a half dozen of bad developers can do a lot of damage. Maybe the grandparent is in one of those organizations where PMI is being handled by someone who can't really run it.
In the end, there's no such thing as an abstract methodology that is equally applied everywhere and has any weight: Implementation details make all the difference, and without explaining how our organizations actually work, it's very difficult to debate methodological pros and cons. There's a right answer for your project, and your people, and it might be what you are using, but I bet that the solution for a system made to order for an external customer, built by 400 developers in 4 countries is not going to be the best solution for an in house project built by 3 people. An industrial mower is a great option for a 3 acre field, but it's not really a good solution for a 0.2 acre front yard.
You could also get stuck with crap like the Apache web server that nobody uses, instead of the extremely popular and much loved and bug free IIS, built by our good friends in Redmond.
For pay can be better than free, but it doesn't have to be.
So you think there's no shady lawyers and accountants that will break every rule in the book? There's plenty of breaking codes of conduct in those professions. It might be less likely than in IT, but the amounts of money involved in corporate piracy tends to be smaller than when a corporation deceives or outright lies in their quarterly reports.