Millenials also think that they can solve any problem by looking it up on StackOverflow and books are something that old people used to learn things back in the dark ages. Kids are stupid, hit them with a ruler.
There is very little you can do to force your co-workers into stealth mode without it blowing back on you.
That's more or less the standard conclusion most of us come to. What's frustrating about it is, I know I'm not giving my employer my best when 75% of my concentration is focused on drowning out distractions. There's a reason people take exams in silence. I'm working in a dystopian open-office where people are always walking by, talking on the phone, having hallway conversations, or talking on the phone. Nobody has complained about my work - as far as I can tell, they're happy with what I'm producing, but there was a time, before the open-office cancer infested corporate America, when I could really plug in and focus and I was producing so much more.
Since I've been in wide-open offices now for the past 15 years or so, I've (had no choice but to) observe my co-workers. I know which ones "collaborate" all the time - the ones who are always paired up two to a computer pointing at the screen and chatting with one another. They're always the ones that are least trusted with complex tasks. Always. But the open office is cheap, and it offers the illusion of control, so it's here to stay.
Ironically, when I can't focus on anything because I'm surrounded by constant distractions, I default to doing something that doesn't require much concentration, like complaining about open offices on Slashdot. They can see that I'm typing, but they don't know into what...
In addition to which, we're programmers, and that biometric device is a device, after all. I'll be super productive the first week they attach it to me figuring out how to signal it to make sure it's red all the time.
Do we really want CDNs and proxies and mirrors to dictate what the public can and cannot see?
If we're millennial liberals, then yes, we do, and we specifically want them to dictate that the public can only see praise for glorious, wonderful socialism.
Really? How so? I've never noticed anything missing, but maybe you're using options I haven't had a chance to explore. I'm reading through the book "Unix Power Tools" right now, and pretty much everything they cover there is support on OS/X.
As a long-time Unix nerd, I love that OS/X has bash and all of the standard command-line tools that I've grown used to, and that they're actually supported and built in to the system. I could always sort of fake it with Cygwin on Windows, but that always felt like a square peg in a round hole. For decades, I'd buy a PC, pay for Windows (which I didn't want), and install Linux just so I'd have the tools I needed, but the downside was that nothing was supported on Linux - and sometimes you really _do_ need to read a word document or open an Excel spreadsheet.
The other thing is that I honestly do trust Apple as a manufacturer. I know their shit is more expensive than any of the PC manufacturers, but I've been screwed over so many times by Sony, Dell, Acer, Toshiba and HP that I'm more than happy to pay more because I know the machine will actually behave as it's speced.
And, of course, once you have a Mac, you might as well just bite the bullet and get an iPad, and iPhone, an iPod, an apple watch....
all the employees of these outsourcing companies have valid credentials?
That's one place I always felt like I was at a disadvantage relative to H1B's - I did my undergrad at a relatively no-name college here in the US (it was cheap and close to home). Now, whenever somebody reads my resume and doesn't see MIT, Stanford, or Harvard on it, they figure, "never heard of it, probably a degree from a diploma mill". On the other hand, who the hell, in America, knows the difference between the University of Hyderabad and the University of Mumbai?
And they want you to do it in a wide-open bullpen office with no walls, listening to your coworkers shout on the phone, burp and talk about their dogs right next to you.
That's really my greatest fear right there, as I'm coming into my mid-40's. I've been a developer/individual contributor my whole life (since I was a teenager, actually). It's been made abundantly clear to me that there's no room for me in management in any capacity; whenever I've so much as dipped my toe into a management track, I've been violently pulled back into technical roles - although I must admit I've always been more than happy to go because I hate managing and love programming. But man, I have a lot of years left before I'll have enough saved up to retire, and two kids that still have to go to college...
Actually, as far as I can tell, they don't - even though banks and insurance companies are risking actually going out of business if they can't find people to maintain (or port) their ancient mainframe COBOL applications, they're still not offering more than about $50K/year for these jobs.
So... education is important for everything _except_ programming, which can (apparently) only be learned through doing rather than a combination of doing and learning (like everything else)?
projects where requirements were laid out in advance (via requirements documents)
Of course, the process of laying out the requirements in advance via requirements documents took twice as long as the actual project itself, and THAT process was chaotic and unpredictable and nobody knew in advance how long that was going to take, but the actually coding part was predictable so in somebody's mind, that was a "win".
I think there's slashdot-induced brain disease where people gradually begin to lose the ability to distinguish between the way things actually are and the way they think things ought to be.
Well, maybe a little, but I think it has more to do with every request for an estimate being something along the lines of, "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." When we're young, this freaks us out, and we try to talk them back from the brink of insanity and get them to see that this is definitely more complicated than two weeks, but they beg, bully and cajole until you break down and agree, certain that you're going to be fired (from your first job!) after just two piddling weeks. So you put together what you can, it doesn't work, two weeks pass, you keep working, nobody fires you, nobody even notices that you slipped the estimate. You keep working on it, the boss keeps asking "is it done yet", you get really good at apologizing and explaining that the network didn't work the way you thought and the new version of the database is different than the old version in undocumented ways, and a few more weeks pass and you get something working, and they say it's shit, and you go back and make a bunch of modifications and they keep asking is it done yet and you keep apologizing, and three months later you actually have a decent working product, and nobody fired you, and the company didn't go out of business because you blew your estimate by a factor of 6 and everybody actually seems reasonably happy.
And then they come you and say "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." And you start to protest, but then you remember last time, so you say, "yeah, sure, two weeks, whatever dude," knowing that it doesn't matter and gradually coming to the realization that you're just playing a game whose rules aren't written down anywhere, pretending that you can deliver anything in two weeks, knowing that they know you can't, but both of you are playing a game of chicken at the end of which nothing happens.
And then after lather-rinse-repeat for 30 years, you go on to slashdot and you tell the young kids, "just give them the number they want to hear, nobody takes estimates seriously anyway" and some loudmouth PHB who figured out how to turn on his computer replies back "they're going to offshore all of you if you don't start producing accurate estimates because there are real-world consequences for missing dates" and you shrug your shoulders and go back to work because you know that the offshore people can't estimate any better than you can and the only people who insist that software estimation is realistic are the people who wish it was realistic, not the ones actually expected to produce it.
Slashdot Mirror
Millenials love this setup.
Millenials also think that they can solve any problem by looking it up on StackOverflow and books are something that old people used to learn things back in the dark ages. Kids are stupid, hit them with a ruler.
There is very little you can do to force your co-workers into stealth mode without it blowing back on you.
That's more or less the standard conclusion most of us come to. What's frustrating about it is, I know I'm not giving my employer my best when 75% of my concentration is focused on drowning out distractions. There's a reason people take exams in silence. I'm working in a dystopian open-office where people are always walking by, talking on the phone, having hallway conversations, or talking on the phone. Nobody has complained about my work - as far as I can tell, they're happy with what I'm producing, but there was a time, before the open-office cancer infested corporate America, when I could really plug in and focus and I was producing so much more.
Since I've been in wide-open offices now for the past 15 years or so, I've (had no choice but to) observe my co-workers. I know which ones "collaborate" all the time - the ones who are always paired up two to a computer pointing at the screen and chatting with one another. They're always the ones that are least trusted with complex tasks. Always. But the open office is cheap, and it offers the illusion of control, so it's here to stay.
Ironically, when I can't focus on anything because I'm surrounded by constant distractions, I default to doing something that doesn't require much concentration, like complaining about open offices on Slashdot. They can see that I'm typing, but they don't know into what...
I suggest start looking for another job.
Should be good advice, but I've been through 10 of them in about 25 years - let me tell you, they're all the same.
to monitor my biometrics
In addition to which, we're programmers, and that biometric device is a device, after all. I'll be super productive the first week they attach it to me figuring out how to signal it to make sure it's red all the time.
Do we really want CDNs and proxies and mirrors to dictate what the public can and cannot see?
If we're millennial liberals, then yes, we do, and we specifically want them to dictate that the public can only see praise for glorious, wonderful socialism.
Calling anything that isn't extreme left-wing propaganda "hate" is also contributing to the proliferation of "hate" on the internet.
My uncle Fred in Tuscaloosa does.
They'd rather have a B- student from Harvard than an A+ student from state
Or literally any random person on an H1B visa, almost regardless of educational background.
Really? How so? I've never noticed anything missing, but maybe you're using options I haven't had a chance to explore. I'm reading through the book "Unix Power Tools" right now, and pretty much everything they cover there is support on OS/X.
As a long-time Unix nerd, I love that OS/X has bash and all of the standard command-line tools that I've grown used to, and that they're actually supported and built in to the system. I could always sort of fake it with Cygwin on Windows, but that always felt like a square peg in a round hole. For decades, I'd buy a PC, pay for Windows (which I didn't want), and install Linux just so I'd have the tools I needed, but the downside was that nothing was supported on Linux - and sometimes you really _do_ need to read a word document or open an Excel spreadsheet. The other thing is that I honestly do trust Apple as a manufacturer. I know their shit is more expensive than any of the PC manufacturers, but I've been screwed over so many times by Sony, Dell, Acer, Toshiba and HP that I'm more than happy to pay more because I know the machine will actually behave as it's speced. And, of course, once you have a Mac, you might as well just bite the bullet and get an iPad, and iPhone, an iPod, an apple watch....
all the employees of these outsourcing companies have valid credentials?
That's one place I always felt like I was at a disadvantage relative to H1B's - I did my undergrad at a relatively no-name college here in the US (it was cheap and close to home). Now, whenever somebody reads my resume and doesn't see MIT, Stanford, or Harvard on it, they figure, "never heard of it, probably a degree from a diploma mill". On the other hand, who the hell, in America, knows the difference between the University of Hyderabad and the University of Mumbai?
And they want you to do it in a wide-open bullpen office with no walls, listening to your coworkers shout on the phone, burp and talk about their dogs right next to you.
You would think, but they've been saying this exact same thing for 30 years and I'm still waiting for the payday...
That's really my greatest fear right there, as I'm coming into my mid-40's. I've been a developer/individual contributor my whole life (since I was a teenager, actually). It's been made abundantly clear to me that there's no room for me in management in any capacity; whenever I've so much as dipped my toe into a management track, I've been violently pulled back into technical roles - although I must admit I've always been more than happy to go because I hate managing and love programming. But man, I have a lot of years left before I'll have enough saved up to retire, and two kids that still have to go to college...
He should be fired for being too stupid to not get caught working on side projects during working hours.
Talking that way - I could never do anything like that.
You're arguing with a paid Tata consulting shill (and maybe a bot).
who hate each other
Woohoo, I'm 83 years ahead of schedule!
pay very well.
Actually, as far as I can tell, they don't - even though banks and insurance companies are risking actually going out of business if they can't find people to maintain (or port) their ancient mainframe COBOL applications, they're still not offering more than about $50K/year for these jobs.
Yeah, but he did it in Japanese. Have you ever typed in Kanji with front-panel switches?
So... education is important for everything _except_ programming, which can (apparently) only be learned through doing rather than a combination of doing and learning (like everything else)?
screw around and look busy
I already know I'm going to be doing that ahead of time, so I start out that way.
projects where requirements were laid out in advance (via requirements documents)
Of course, the process of laying out the requirements in advance via requirements documents took twice as long as the actual project itself, and THAT process was chaotic and unpredictable and nobody knew in advance how long that was going to take, but the actually coding part was predictable so in somebody's mind, that was a "win".
I think there's slashdot-induced brain disease where people gradually begin to lose the ability to distinguish between the way things actually are and the way they think things ought to be.
partly explained by a sort of optimism.
Well, maybe a little, but I think it has more to do with every request for an estimate being something along the lines of, "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." When we're young, this freaks us out, and we try to talk them back from the brink of insanity and get them to see that this is definitely more complicated than two weeks, but they beg, bully and cajole until you break down and agree, certain that you're going to be fired (from your first job!) after just two piddling weeks. So you put together what you can, it doesn't work, two weeks pass, you keep working, nobody fires you, nobody even notices that you slipped the estimate. You keep working on it, the boss keeps asking "is it done yet", you get really good at apologizing and explaining that the network didn't work the way you thought and the new version of the database is different than the old version in undocumented ways, and a few more weeks pass and you get something working, and they say it's shit, and you go back and make a bunch of modifications and they keep asking is it done yet and you keep apologizing, and three months later you actually have a decent working product, and nobody fired you, and the company didn't go out of business because you blew your estimate by a factor of 6 and everybody actually seems reasonably happy.
And then they come you and say "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." And you start to protest, but then you remember last time, so you say, "yeah, sure, two weeks, whatever dude," knowing that it doesn't matter and gradually coming to the realization that you're just playing a game whose rules aren't written down anywhere, pretending that you can deliver anything in two weeks, knowing that they know you can't, but both of you are playing a game of chicken at the end of which nothing happens.
And then after lather-rinse-repeat for 30 years, you go on to slashdot and you tell the young kids, "just give them the number they want to hear, nobody takes estimates seriously anyway" and some loudmouth PHB who figured out how to turn on his computer replies back "they're going to offshore all of you if you don't start producing accurate estimates because there are real-world consequences for missing dates" and you shrug your shoulders and go back to work because you know that the offshore people can't estimate any better than you can and the only people who insist that software estimation is realistic are the people who wish it was realistic, not the ones actually expected to produce it.