I disagree. Age doesn't count for anything. The fact that my mom is older than I am doesn't mean I should be listening to her technology suggestions. I'm certainly not going to be adding pictures of kittens to the background of all my e-mails just because she is older and wiser.
Experience, on the other hand, is *worth* a lot. It doesn't *count* for a lot, though. You see, my dad has a lot of experience with lawnmowers, because he has been mowing his own lawn for 30-some years. If I were to get into some kind of argument with him about how I should mow my lawn, then I might listen to what he has to say, but in the end, he still has to provide me with a good reason why he thinks what he thinks. Experience itself doesn't count for anything unless that experience has led to good reasoning and such reasoning can be transferred to the other person. Your experiences in life will never transfer to anyone else unless you learn how to teach.
There *is* a market for it, but there is no legislative body to administer the ratings yet. There needs to be a standard.
Imagine how confusing it would be to have movies rated by individual companies all competing. The ratings would be all over the board, with some companies giving "Beerfest" a PG-13 rating since they don't think boobs are that bad and others giving it an R rating since they subjectively think the boob content of that movie was a little too much. Movie ratings are for parents and no one else. The parents need to know -- without having to do a ton of research -- what kind of a movie their 11 year old is asking to see. All the parents are asking for right now is a way to determine which ISPs are going to make the internet as safe for their kids as G rated movies are. All we need is a standard. That's what the government is suggesting they do here. Create a standard. The private companies are still the ones that have to do the regulation (if they wish to).
You can argue that it won't work (and it won't, since it can't keep up with all the content on the internet), but I don't see how a free market would work here. That argument doesn't make sense to me.
You are talking about "massive" tables and a "reporting" application. Of course Oracle and DB/2 are the right choices for this. Has anyone ever thought differently?
I've always used MySQL and it has always been extremely fast for me. But I've always known that it isn't meant for data analysis on massive amounts of data. The only time I've ever heard anyone compare MySQL to Oracle and say that MySQL was just as good as Oracle is when using small tables on a web app, which is exactly what MySQL is used for 99% of the time.
Managers that are managing other managers don't need to know the technical side. For instance, the CEO at my company has a vague understanding of the technical side of our products. He doesn't need to know how it all really works; he only cares that it DOES work.
It is the middle managers that really have the tough job of having to balance technical know-how with people skills. I work in a very small company, and the IT Manager is positioned between the programmers and the CEO. The IT Manager needs not only to know how to manage people, but also manage the technical processes and be able to make technical decisions. Sure, he can get advice from his IT team, since they probably actually know more about it than he does, but he needs to be able to understand that advice. If the IT Manager has the same "I don't care how it gets done as long as it gets done" attitude that the CEO has, then the IT Manager is almost worthless. That is when IT Managers become supervisors ("babysitters") rather than managers. That role can be filled by almost anybody.
Having a supervisor rather than a good IT manager is a poor choice, not only because it is less efficient, but also because a lot of bad decisions can be get made that way. Also, tension will start to build if the people being managed feel that their boss doesn't understand what they do. Nobody likes feeling like their abilities are being taken for granted. If I do a bunch of extra difficult work, I expect to get acknowledged for it. A non-technical manager won't be able to recognize when I go out of my way on a particular task. Therefore, I'm less likely to go out of my way in the future if I don't have to.
I've been trying to use Thunderbird for a couple weeks and if I switch back its because thunderbird doesn't have a calendar. I still have to open outlook and leave it open if I want to be reminded about meetings and appointments.
I've been running FreeBSD 4.x on my web and database servers for a while. I'm about ready to buy some new hardware, and I'd love to put 5.x on it, but after looking at the release notes for 5, it appears that they are urging me not to do this. So I guess I'll go with 4.10 on my new machines.
Does anyone know when the 5 branch will be ready? Is 5.3 final going to be it? If so, how many more months before it arrives?
This warranty wouldn't have helped you with your data loss.
But it may have helped me with the fact that every 75GXP that I got as a replacement eventually crapped out as well. If they had 5 year warranty on those, I would have ended up with at least 4 different replacements for my original drive.
I don't really understand why manufacturers haven't moved to 5 year warranties sooner. Usually if a hard drive craps out after a year it is because the drive sucks. If the drive lasts for 3 years, it will almost always last for 5. Seagate probably did a study on this and found that to be the case. I assume thats why they did this.
A friend of mine mentioned to me the other day that some phone companies (like sprint) are being very cautious about offering bluetooth support in their phones because bluetooth makes it so easy to share the internet connection on the phones. A lot of the phone companies (like sprint) are offering unlimited internet plans, and bluetooth phones would lead to a lot of abuse with people using the connections for their laptops instead of their cellphones.
Anyway, it is one of the reasons that bluetooth adoption isn't taking off as fast as it should.
In my opinion, Bluetooth has been much more plagued by lack of adoption than speed and power consumption. USB was immensily popular before it became fast. It's popularity is what spurred it to become faster.
I would love to get a bluetooth phone or PDA, or wireless keyboard or wireless mouse to connect with the internal bluetooth in my powerbook, but options are limited, which is driving costs way up. We need more options, and we need costs to be driven down. Thats not going to happen until more manufacturers adopt it.
Data redundancy is possible with most forms of RAID, but the "Redundant" part of the acronym is referring to the fact that there are multiple disks of the same size. Redundant array of (usually) inexpensive disks.
I actually did. I guess I'm too new to slashdot and didn't notice that it expects HTML formatting by default. I didn't switch it to plain text like I should have. Sorry everyone!
I actually agree with you. I don't like the "people don't matter" theme to my software engineering course, but that doesn't mean I don't like the course. I'm seeing a lot of things that are definitely necessary for large projects with lots of people.
I'm actually learning most of this from real life. The class is just teaching me the terms and the details of how to produce x type of chart. But I'm definitely seeing a problem in real life where, with large projects especially, there NEEDS to be a lot of documentation and lot of planning (with graphs and charts that everyone can understand). This class is pretty good for that kind of stuff.
I'd also like to add that the craft approach doesn't work with everyone, because not everyone can be a good craftsman. The best sword maker in the world will make great swords, but if you have a company that needs to make a lot of swords, you can't let everybody do it their own way, because most of the swordmakers are actually quite terrible. Thats really why factories and assembly lines were invented in the first place.
At any rate, the most important thing for having happy programers (even in large companies) is to give them at least a little bit of freedom and let them show what they can do with it, and reward them if they do a good job. If you continually give them no freedom or ways for self motivation, they won't be happy.
I'm happy with my job because I get to see results, which in turn motivates me even more each time around. Nobody needs to be a whip cracker to get me to work hard.
Nevertheless, I do better work than most, because I actually care about the quality of what I do.
If they want me to push out the same code over and over, then I simply don't want to be a programmer. I won't like it. And that was my point in relation to the article.
IT Professionals are really a wide range of jobs in my opinion. One guy replies saying he likes doing all the cabling work that he does. Another responds that he doesn't like programmer. Those are very different jobs in my opinion and the research in the article seems to lump them together.
But anyway, I have a pretty good idea of why programmers are unhappy. For one thing, businesses treat programmers like crap. I got into programming about 4 years ago. I'm in a small office where I mostly work on projects myself. I like my job because it is kind of an artistic release at times. I get to put my own quality standards into the project and when I'm done I can look at my work and be very happy with it. Thats a "Craft" view of programming. But businesses hate that. I even find myself fighting with my employers on an ongoing basis because they want speed and effeciency, not quality. They also want things to be predictable. They don't like that I often spend a good portion of time at the beginning of all my projects researching "Whats new" and trying to implement new things into my work. They want reliable time constraints for my work.
I'm also finishing up my degree in IT, and I'm taking a senior level course right now called Software Engineering. This course has 100% confirmed by belief that the industry wants nothing to do with craft programming. They want what they call "ego-less" programmers that don't care about their own work as much as the group as a whole's work. They want guys that follow the same processes every time and do reliable, predictable work every time. They want (and have probably succeeded in the corporate world) to turn programmers and software developers into factory workers. They want us sitting on the assembly line, pushing out code as if we are machines.
What they don't realize is the human aspect of programming. People don't WANT to work that way. It is boring. Look at open source projects as an example. We use a lot of open source applications at our office, and my bosses are completely dumbfounded as to why anyone would put out work for free. I try to tell them that it is because they actually enjoy doing what they do. They enjoy getting credit for their efforts. Business people just don't understand this.
If you treat programming like a craft, you'll get better results, and your employees will be more happy. That is what I'm going to live and die by in this industry, because I refuse to ever become a cubicle code monkey. I'll become a hair dresser before I let myself become a code monkey.
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You misunderstood him.
Neither term works. You are confusing integrity with being hard-headed and you are completely misunderstanding the meaning of hypocrisy.
"Age and experience counts for a lot."
I disagree. Age doesn't count for anything. The fact that my mom is older than I am doesn't mean I should be listening to her technology suggestions. I'm certainly not going to be adding pictures of kittens to the background of all my e-mails just because she is older and wiser.
Experience, on the other hand, is *worth* a lot. It doesn't *count* for a lot, though. You see, my dad has a lot of experience with lawnmowers, because he has been mowing his own lawn for 30-some years. If I were to get into some kind of argument with him about how I should mow my lawn, then I might listen to what he has to say, but in the end, he still has to provide me with a good reason why he thinks what he thinks. Experience itself doesn't count for anything unless that experience has led to good reasoning and such reasoning can be transferred to the other person. Your experiences in life will never transfer to anyone else unless you learn how to teach.
There *is* a market for it, but there is no legislative body to administer the ratings yet. There needs to be a standard.
Imagine how confusing it would be to have movies rated by individual companies all competing. The ratings would be all over the board, with some companies giving "Beerfest" a PG-13 rating since they don't think boobs are that bad and others giving it an R rating since they subjectively think the boob content of that movie was a little too much. Movie ratings are for parents and no one else. The parents need to know -- without having to do a ton of research -- what kind of a movie their 11 year old is asking to see. All the parents are asking for right now is a way to determine which ISPs are going to make the internet as safe for their kids as G rated movies are. All we need is a standard. That's what the government is suggesting they do here. Create a standard. The private companies are still the ones that have to do the regulation (if they wish to).
You can argue that it won't work (and it won't, since it can't keep up with all the content on the internet), but I don't see how a free market would work here. That argument doesn't make sense to me.
You are talking about "massive" tables and a "reporting" application. Of course Oracle and DB/2 are the right choices for this. Has anyone ever thought differently?
I've always used MySQL and it has always been extremely fast for me. But I've always known that it isn't meant for data analysis on massive amounts of data. The only time I've ever heard anyone compare MySQL to Oracle and say that MySQL was just as good as Oracle is when using small tables on a web app, which is exactly what MySQL is used for 99% of the time.
Managers that are managing other managers don't need to know the technical side. For instance, the CEO at my company has a vague understanding of the technical side of our products. He doesn't need to know how it all really works; he only cares that it DOES work.
It is the middle managers that really have the tough job of having to balance technical know-how with people skills. I work in a very small company, and the IT Manager is positioned between the programmers and the CEO. The IT Manager needs not only to know how to manage people, but also manage the technical processes and be able to make technical decisions. Sure, he can get advice from his IT team, since they probably actually know more about it than he does, but he needs to be able to understand that advice. If the IT Manager has the same "I don't care how it gets done as long as it gets done" attitude that the CEO has, then the IT Manager is almost worthless. That is when IT Managers become supervisors ("babysitters") rather than managers. That role can be filled by almost anybody.
Having a supervisor rather than a good IT manager is a poor choice, not only because it is less efficient, but also because a lot of bad decisions can be get made that way. Also, tension will start to build if the people being managed feel that their boss doesn't understand what they do. Nobody likes feeling like their abilities are being taken for granted. If I do a bunch of extra difficult work, I expect to get acknowledged for it. A non-technical manager won't be able to recognize when I go out of my way on a particular task. Therefore, I'm less likely to go out of my way in the future if I don't have to.
I've been trying to use Thunderbird for a couple weeks and if I switch back its because thunderbird doesn't have a calendar. I still have to open outlook and leave it open if I want to be reminded about meetings and appointments.
I've been running FreeBSD 4.x on my web and database servers for a while. I'm about ready to buy some new hardware, and I'd love to put 5.x on it, but after looking at the release notes for 5, it appears that they are urging me not to do this. So I guess I'll go with 4.10 on my new machines. Does anyone know when the 5 branch will be ready? Is 5.3 final going to be it? If so, how many more months before it arrives?
This warranty wouldn't have helped you with your data loss.
But it may have helped me with the fact that every 75GXP that I got as a replacement eventually crapped out as well. If they had 5 year warranty on those, I would have ended up with at least 4 different replacements for my original drive.
I don't really understand why manufacturers haven't moved to 5 year warranties sooner. Usually if a hard drive craps out after a year it is because the drive sucks. If the drive lasts for 3 years, it will almost always last for 5. Seagate probably did a study on this and found that to be the case. I assume thats why they did this.
A friend of mine mentioned to me the other day that some phone companies (like sprint) are being very cautious about offering bluetooth support in their phones because bluetooth makes it so easy to share the internet connection on the phones. A lot of the phone companies (like sprint) are offering unlimited internet plans, and bluetooth phones would lead to a lot of abuse with people using the connections for their laptops instead of their cellphones. Anyway, it is one of the reasons that bluetooth adoption isn't taking off as fast as it should.
In my opinion, Bluetooth has been much more plagued by lack of adoption than speed and power consumption. USB was immensily popular before it became fast. It's popularity is what spurred it to become faster. I would love to get a bluetooth phone or PDA, or wireless keyboard or wireless mouse to connect with the internal bluetooth in my powerbook, but options are limited, which is driving costs way up. We need more options, and we need costs to be driven down. Thats not going to happen until more manufacturers adopt it.
Data redundancy is possible with most forms of RAID, but the "Redundant" part of the acronym is referring to the fact that there are multiple disks of the same size. Redundant array of (usually) inexpensive disks.
What difference does the order make?
I actually did. I guess I'm too new to slashdot and didn't notice that it expects HTML formatting by default. I didn't switch it to plain text like I should have. Sorry everyone!
I actually agree with you. I don't like the "people don't matter" theme to my software engineering course, but that doesn't mean I don't like the course. I'm seeing a lot of things that are definitely necessary for large projects with lots of people.
I'm actually learning most of this from real life. The class is just teaching me the terms and the details of how to produce x type of chart. But I'm definitely seeing a problem in real life where, with large projects especially, there NEEDS to be a lot of documentation and lot of planning (with graphs and charts that everyone can understand). This class is pretty good for that kind of stuff.
I'd also like to add that the craft approach doesn't work with everyone, because not everyone can be a good craftsman. The best sword maker in the world will make great swords, but if you have a company that needs to make a lot of swords, you can't let everybody do it their own way, because most of the swordmakers are actually quite terrible. Thats really why factories and assembly lines were invented in the first place.
At any rate, the most important thing for having happy programers (even in large companies) is to give them at least a little bit of freedom and let them show what they can do with it, and reward them if they do a good job. If you continually give them no freedom or ways for self motivation, they won't be happy.
I'm happy with my job because I get to see results, which in turn motivates me even more each time around. Nobody needs to be a whip cracker to get me to work hard.
I get paid 30k a year, but your point is taken.
Nevertheless, I do better work than most, because I actually care about the quality of what I do.
If they want me to push out the same code over and over, then I simply don't want to be a programmer. I won't like it. And that was my point in relation to the article.
IT Professionals are really a wide range of jobs in my opinion. One guy replies saying he likes doing all the cabling work that he does. Another responds that he doesn't like programmer. Those are very different jobs in my opinion and the research in the article seems to lump them together. But anyway, I have a pretty good idea of why programmers are unhappy. For one thing, businesses treat programmers like crap. I got into programming about 4 years ago. I'm in a small office where I mostly work on projects myself. I like my job because it is kind of an artistic release at times. I get to put my own quality standards into the project and when I'm done I can look at my work and be very happy with it. Thats a "Craft" view of programming. But businesses hate that. I even find myself fighting with my employers on an ongoing basis because they want speed and effeciency, not quality. They also want things to be predictable. They don't like that I often spend a good portion of time at the beginning of all my projects researching "Whats new" and trying to implement new things into my work. They want reliable time constraints for my work. I'm also finishing up my degree in IT, and I'm taking a senior level course right now called Software Engineering. This course has 100% confirmed by belief that the industry wants nothing to do with craft programming. They want what they call "ego-less" programmers that don't care about their own work as much as the group as a whole's work. They want guys that follow the same processes every time and do reliable, predictable work every time. They want (and have probably succeeded in the corporate world) to turn programmers and software developers into factory workers. They want us sitting on the assembly line, pushing out code as if we are machines. What they don't realize is the human aspect of programming. People don't WANT to work that way. It is boring. Look at open source projects as an example. We use a lot of open source applications at our office, and my bosses are completely dumbfounded as to why anyone would put out work for free. I try to tell them that it is because they actually enjoy doing what they do. They enjoy getting credit for their efforts. Business people just don't understand this. If you treat programming like a craft, you'll get better results, and your employees will be more happy. That is what I'm going to live and die by in this industry, because I refuse to ever become a cubicle code monkey. I'll become a hair dresser before I let myself become a code monkey.