A good project manager will convince the customer about the unrealistic time frames, he will estimate cost and timeframe based on resources available, he will allocate reserves based on the risks taken with the project so it is always finished in time and on budget
... after which he will get replaced by somebody who will tell them what they want to hear.
And what's really frustrating is the number of people who will read your (painfully accurate and correct) comments and translate them in their head to "Mwahaha - I do no design! Mwhahaha - I code without thought! Mwahaha - I know how to do formal software design, and I know that if I did it, it would result in a perfect, bug-free implementation on time and under budget but I choose not to because I enjoy being difficult! Mwahahaha! Mwahaha!"
What usually shuts them up is to ask what design documents they produce. If they do answer they say... "Um... UML. Yeah, UML." If you press for more detail, or a few exmaples, they suddenly remember they have somewhere to be.
In addition to which, CMM level x promises not just accuracy and completeness, but it promises accuracy and completeness within a specified time frame. (As I understand the "formal" software engineering practice, the designers/architects get to set the time frame, which is ridiculously unrealistic in and of itself anyway, but set that aside for a moment). I have yet to even hear of a project which went through any formal design process, came up with a timeline, and then was able to implement within that timeline.
It's possible that this is an achievable goal... when I first heard a description of the problem of securing communications on an unsecured network without prior contact between participants, I concluded that the problem must be unsolvable. However, when I subsequently read a description of public-key cryptography, it was obvious that it would, in fact, solve that problem. However, my experience with "solutions" to the problem of delivering bug-free, complete software, with a schedule in hand before a line of coding starts have been the same as yours. I'll still keep looking, but I'm not holding my breath.
Did you know that there are formal methods for software design
So... I assume you know these methods and are skilled at applying them, then? So... you can commit to delivering any arbitrary software project to a deadline (even a deadline of your choosing)? Didn't think so. Spoken like somebody who's never written a program bigger than "Hello, World."
I think that's exactly the problem with software expectations. They always assume that building software is like building a house, or a bridge, or a toaster. In other words, they always assume that building software is done by experienced people who've built nearly identical software systems before. And, no matter how many times we stress and repeat this, we can't get it through their thick skulls - if it's been implemented in software even one time in the past, it doesn't need to be implemented again. By definition, every single software project ever undertaken is a brand new set of problems to figure out. The more experienced we are, the better we know what to avoid, in general, but if there are no unknown problems, the program doesn't need to be written. This is true by definition. Designing and implementing software is more like proving/solving a mathematical theorem than it is like building a house - I doubt mathemeticians often get paid to figure out how to prove the pythagorean theorem.
Re:If you think the book requires too much coding
on
Firefox Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly - I was looking through the sample pages, and I didn't think any of it looked hacker-friendly enough. I'd like to read more about Firefox's internals (sort of like the book "How Tomcat Works", but written by somebody who can write) and extrapolate my own hacks from there. I'm sure this book has a target audience, but it's not hackers - a hacker would want some kind of a rough outline for fixing bugs and adding features to Firefox, but based on the pages on the O'Reilly site, this book is geared toward power users. Still a useful book, I'm sure, but has nothing to do with hacking or hackers.
You're far better off writing games in your spare time for fun.
I'm curious... do you do this yourself? What do you use? Do you just have gcc and the X libraries and go from there? Or do you use a commercial game development kit or something in between? I wouldn't mind kicking around some "for fun" game development, but I always get bogged down with the graphics primitives; as much fun as it's been learning X programming, I'll be at this for another decade before I actually get a playable game working "from scratch".
You mispelled Hobbit, but yes, people who have a Hobbit of making computers generally find that their computers are very orderly, expecting to find everything in it's place, surrounded by a well ordered and well farmed countryside - stout, good-mooded and enjoying their pipes.
The VIC-20 was powered by the Motorola 6502 chip, which didn't have a "gaseous material" instruction, just a "rock" instruction. Intel-based chips have been packaged with the "gaseous material" instruction since the 386, and newer MMX-based chips also include the "liquid metallic hydrogen" instruction as well, so Jupter Lander 2000 provides a much better simulation experience.
You know, I read the post and thought "Who did he get on the right side of/who did he have to have naked pictures of to land this position?" I've had lots of s-sucking assignments which I had to complete in such exotic places as Oklahoma city, Champaign Illinois, and Cincinatti, Ohio. When I was in college for my undergraduate (10 years ago now), I took courses in Japanese because I dreamed of a job involving overseas travel. I knew such jobs existed, and I even spent a year studying in a Japanese university learning to speak the language fluently. After graduation (majored in Computer Science, flame away), I've worked for several companies with international presence, with lots of opportunities for travel (including to Japan), all of which I've applied for... and all of which I've been turned down for. Yet, every day I run into somebody who spent years over there on their employers dime - who never even bothered to learn the language in the first place! I guess I've just been unknowingly somehow pissing off each and every human being with whom I come into contact at work in spite of my best efforts to get along with my coworkers, 'cause this doesn't make any sense at all. Sigh... must be true what they say - "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
Wow... I didn't realize how jealous and angry and sad and bitter I was about that until I started responding. Hey, parent poster, have a fun trip - Japan is an awesome place to live for a Gaijin. I'll be over here seething with jealousy, but don't take that personally - that's just the way I am.
store credit card numbers in *any* database without a REALLY good reason.
... which don't exist. Another (bad) justification for storing credit cards that I've come across (I'm surprised nobody's brought it up) is so that customer service reps can pull up transactaions keyed off of credit card number (since first & last name is a bad search key due to a high number of collisions and address is a bad search key since it's hard to match on). Although this is a legitimate, useful feature for customer service reps (and never underestimate what those people have to go through just to get their jobs done), a better way to implement this functionality is to SHA or MD5 the CC #, store that in a database, and then re-hash it to retrieve the transaction when the customer calls in.
There is no good reason to store a customer's credit card number in any database, ever, for any reason.
You know, about a month or so ago, "Conan the Barbarian" was on the SciFi channel, and I was watching it with my almost two-year-old son in the room. I didn't really give his presence much thought (he was off in the corner making some toy play the same song over and over again, as he tends to do), but at one point I looked over at him and he was watching, terrified! I realized that although they had censored out the harmful-to-minors boobies, they had left in the wholesome beheadings and limb-hackings. So... this is sanitized television? The absurdity of the whole concept struck me - they're never going to be able to sanitize Conan (or much else even remotely interesting) to the point where it's appropriate or acceptable for a young child; and if the viewer is old enough to appreciate the "sanitized" version (say teenaged), the sight of boobies probably isn't going to paralyze his fragile young psyche.
Of course, I've always felt this way, but seeing the look on my son's face when the "Parent Teacher Council" approved version of Conan was playing really drove the point home. Censorship is so ridiculous and so obviously a cover for another hidden agenda that the people pushing it can't possibly beleive what they're saying.
It appears to me that Ramanujan's name was left out purposely to help understanding and spark interest
You know, the thing about that is... it did spark my interest, and I'd like to learn more (I've never heard of the guy), so I clicked through the links, but there wasn't much meat there. So I clicked back and decided to look through the comments to see if there were any good links on Ramanujan's theorem's suggested by/. readers. Now, here I am, three-fourths of the way down the page, having scrolled through nothing but "you're a racist". "No I'm not". "Yes you are". "Are not". "Are so". Sigh... guess I'll have to bite the bullet and do my own research.
You forgot the follow-on meeting to "brainstorm options for meeting the deadline/determine why development is taking so long". This meeting is scheduled for 6 PM because "everybody's calendar is booked solid during normal working hours". All options that will actually work go into the "long-term solution bucket", and short term solutions such as working on the weekends/holidays/evenings are solicited.
Remember... business students grow up to be the managers who say things like "Give me the 'executive summary' of the work involved in this project... I know you've spent the last two months just understanding the requirements, but I'm in management and therefore, by definition, am infinitely smarter than you programmer worms, so I can absorb it in just a few minutes".
Although I admire everybody's suggestions to try to make them into decent human beings, I think you're probably fighting a losing battle here - no matter what this guy does, they'll be in management, therefore superior. Meanwhile, everybody who can actually accomplish something is busy doing instead of "managing".
Your "technical skills", although they were the ONLY thing we looked at when we reviewed your resume and the ONLY thing we talked about in your job interview and the ONLY thing we discuss in annual reviews, are completely meaningless; we could replace you with a poorly-trained monkey because it's your "people skills" that matter. In other words, you have to be able to do my job for me AND an engineer's job. I, luckily, only have to be able to do my job. And you'll be doing that for me anyway. Plus, you'll still be the one on the unemployment line, and the years you spent doing my job will stagnate your "technical skills" so that nobody else will even look at your resume.
Why do you think that? I agree that CS isn't the same as an EE (or even a CE), but it's an awfully tough degree to complete. I do know that differential equations is not a degree requirement for most CS programs, but otherwise, we're required to take two to three semesters of calculus, at least two semesters of a hard science (I chose physics and ended up doing four full semesters of it), statistics and, of course, a boatload of computer classes, including a few EE courses (and, of course, the requisite english/history/time-wasting stuff, too). Other than the core curiculum (and the added requirement of diffie-q), EE always looked pretty similar to CS to me. You're right - it's not an engineering degree... CS is closer to a math degree. It's still pretty hard to get, though. I don't see why you should be insulted, unless you've done a CS program and found it to be trivial compared to your engineering studies.
Do you just suspect this, or have you actually found it to be true? I ask because my experience has been the opposite. I speak two extra languages (Japanese and Spanish) and even spent a year at a Japanese university... although it increases my circle of friends to be able to converse with people in their native languages, I haven't found this to be even remotely useful in my (programming) career. Both have been on my resume for the last 12 years and have never once even come up throughout lots of job interviews.
Had I known my CS degree would be this useless I would have never even gone to college
Actually, it's worse than useless... now that you fully understand the theory behind good coding/software engineering/algorithmic principles, you have to deal with people who say, "we don't have time to do it 'right', so let's just get it done as fast as we can and do it 'right' in phase II." The word right is always spoken in quotes (and sometimes even accompanied with air quotes) and always a codeword for "wasting time". And then, of course, you'll also deal with people (they seem to congregate on slashdot sometimes) who assume that they can learn in 21 days what you spent four years studying. "Sure, he might be able to optimize a few more CPU cycles out of it, but with CPUs being as fast as they are, what does optimization matter"? Sigh... your (and my) CS degree were actually an inverted waste of time.
Huh? Are you implying that allowing a programmer to write LastName and lastname and lastName and lAsTnAmE and mean the same thing is not inviting trouble? Using the same identifier in different places and capitalizing it differently is inviting trouble in general... case-sensitive languages just punish you for this up-front, with a compile error, rather than six months from now, with a missed reference during refactoring.
Slashdot Mirror
... after which he will get replaced by somebody who will tell them what they want to hear.
And what's really frustrating is the number of people who will read your (painfully accurate and correct) comments and translate them in their head to "Mwahaha - I do no design! Mwhahaha - I code without thought! Mwahaha - I know how to do formal software design, and I know that if I did it, it would result in a perfect, bug-free implementation on time and under budget but I choose not to because I enjoy being difficult! Mwahahaha! Mwahaha!"
What usually shuts them up is to ask what design documents they produce. If they do answer they say ... "Um... UML. Yeah, UML." If you press for more detail, or a few exmaples, they suddenly remember they have somewhere to be.
In addition to which, CMM level x promises not just accuracy and completeness, but it promises accuracy and completeness within a specified time frame. (As I understand the "formal" software engineering practice, the designers/architects get to set the time frame, which is ridiculously unrealistic in and of itself anyway, but set that aside for a moment). I have yet to even hear of a project which went through any formal design process, came up with a timeline, and then was able to implement within that timeline.
It's possible that this is an achievable goal... when I first heard a description of the problem of securing communications on an unsecured network without prior contact between participants, I concluded that the problem must be unsolvable. However, when I subsequently read a description of public-key cryptography, it was obvious that it would, in fact, solve that problem. However, my experience with "solutions" to the problem of delivering bug-free, complete software, with a schedule in hand before a line of coding starts have been the same as yours. I'll still keep looking, but I'm not holding my breath.
So... I assume you know these methods and are skilled at applying them, then? So... you can commit to delivering any arbitrary software project to a deadline (even a deadline of your choosing)? Didn't think so. Spoken like somebody who's never written a program bigger than "Hello, World."
... that don't work ...
I think that's exactly the problem with software expectations. They always assume that building software is like building a house, or a bridge, or a toaster. In other words, they always assume that building software is done by experienced people who've built nearly identical software systems before. And, no matter how many times we stress and repeat this, we can't get it through their thick skulls - if it's been implemented in software even one time in the past, it doesn't need to be implemented again. By definition, every single software project ever undertaken is a brand new set of problems to figure out. The more experienced we are, the better we know what to avoid, in general, but if there are no unknown problems, the program doesn't need to be written. This is true by definition. Designing and implementing software is more like proving/solving a mathematical theorem than it is like building a house - I doubt mathemeticians often get paid to figure out how to prove the pythagorean theorem.
Honestly - I was looking through the sample pages, and I didn't think any of it looked hacker-friendly enough. I'd like to read more about Firefox's internals (sort of like the book "How Tomcat Works", but written by somebody who can write) and extrapolate my own hacks from there. I'm sure this book has a target audience, but it's not hackers - a hacker would want some kind of a rough outline for fixing bugs and adding features to Firefox, but based on the pages on the O'Reilly site, this book is geared toward power users. Still a useful book, I'm sure, but has nothing to do with hacking or hackers.
I'm curious... do you do this yourself? What do you use? Do you just have gcc and the X libraries and go from there? Or do you use a commercial game development kit or something in between? I wouldn't mind kicking around some "for fun" game development, but I always get bogged down with the graphics primitives; as much fun as it's been learning X programming, I'll be at this for another decade before I actually get a playable game working "from scratch".
You mispelled Hobbit, but yes, people who have a Hobbit of making computers generally find that their computers are very orderly, expecting to find everything in it's place, surrounded by a well ordered and well farmed countryside - stout, good-mooded and enjoying their pipes.
The VIC-20 was powered by the Motorola 6502 chip, which didn't have a "gaseous material" instruction, just a "rock" instruction. Intel-based chips have been packaged with the "gaseous material" instruction since the 386, and newer MMX-based chips also include the "liquid metallic hydrogen" instruction as well, so Jupter Lander 2000 provides a much better simulation experience.
Er, I sure hope she doesn't know your /. userid... or maybe she needs admin priviledges to read this post?
You know, I read the post and thought "Who did he get on the right side of/who did he have to have naked pictures of to land this position?" I've had lots of s-sucking assignments which I had to complete in such exotic places as Oklahoma city, Champaign Illinois, and Cincinatti, Ohio. When I was in college for my undergraduate (10 years ago now), I took courses in Japanese because I dreamed of a job involving overseas travel. I knew such jobs existed, and I even spent a year studying in a Japanese university learning to speak the language fluently. After graduation (majored in Computer Science, flame away), I've worked for several companies with international presence, with lots of opportunities for travel (including to Japan), all of which I've applied for... and all of which I've been turned down for. Yet, every day I run into somebody who spent years over there on their employers dime - who never even bothered to learn the language in the first place! I guess I've just been unknowingly somehow pissing off each and every human being with whom I come into contact at work in spite of my best efforts to get along with my coworkers, 'cause this doesn't make any sense at all. Sigh... must be true what they say - "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
Wow... I didn't realize how jealous and angry and sad and bitter I was about that until I started responding. Hey, parent poster, have a fun trip - Japan is an awesome place to live for a Gaijin. I'll be over here seething with jealousy, but don't take that personally - that's just the way I am.
... which don't exist. Another (bad) justification for storing credit cards that I've come across (I'm surprised nobody's brought it up) is so that customer service reps can pull up transactaions keyed off of credit card number (since first & last name is a bad search key due to a high number of collisions and address is a bad search key since it's hard to match on). Although this is a legitimate, useful feature for customer service reps (and never underestimate what those people have to go through just to get their jobs done), a better way to implement this functionality is to SHA or MD5 the CC #, store that in a database, and then re-hash it to retrieve the transaction when the customer calls in.
There is no good reason to store a customer's credit card number in any database, ever, for any reason.
You know, about a month or so ago, "Conan the Barbarian" was on the SciFi channel, and I was watching it with my almost two-year-old son in the room. I didn't really give his presence much thought (he was off in the corner making some toy play the same song over and over again, as he tends to do), but at one point I looked over at him and he was watching, terrified! I realized that although they had censored out the harmful-to-minors boobies, they had left in the wholesome beheadings and limb-hackings. So... this is sanitized television? The absurdity of the whole concept struck me - they're never going to be able to sanitize Conan (or much else even remotely interesting) to the point where it's appropriate or acceptable for a young child; and if the viewer is old enough to appreciate the "sanitized" version (say teenaged), the sight of boobies probably isn't going to paralyze his fragile young psyche.
Of course, I've always felt this way, but seeing the look on my son's face when the "Parent Teacher Council" approved version of Conan was playing really drove the point home. Censorship is so ridiculous and so obviously a cover for another hidden agenda that the people pushing it can't possibly beleive what they're saying.
Hmmm... how so?
You know, the thing about that is... it did spark my interest, and I'd like to learn more (I've never heard of the guy), so I clicked through the links, but there wasn't much meat there. So I clicked back and decided to look through the comments to see if there were any good links on Ramanujan's theorem's suggested by /. readers. Now, here I am, three-fourths of the way down the page, having scrolled through nothing but "you're a racist". "No I'm not". "Yes you are". "Are not". "Are so". Sigh... guess I'll have to bite the bullet and do my own research.
'tis a kick in the nuts, ain't it? Maybe the trick is to write poorly?
You forgot the follow-on meeting to "brainstorm options for meeting the deadline/determine why development is taking so long". This meeting is scheduled for 6 PM because "everybody's calendar is booked solid during normal working hours". All options that will actually work go into the "long-term solution bucket", and short term solutions such as working on the weekends/holidays/evenings are solicited.
Remember... business students grow up to be the managers who say things like "Give me the 'executive summary' of the work involved in this project... I know you've spent the last two months just understanding the requirements, but I'm in management and therefore, by definition, am infinitely smarter than you programmer worms, so I can absorb it in just a few minutes".
Although I admire everybody's suggestions to try to make them into decent human beings, I think you're probably fighting a losing battle here - no matter what this guy does, they'll be in management, therefore superior. Meanwhile, everybody who can actually accomplish something is busy doing instead of "managing".
You forgot to mention:
LAMP = Linux Apache MySql PHP. LZMP = Linux ??? MySql PHP?
Why do you think that? I agree that CS isn't the same as an EE (or even a CE), but it's an awfully tough degree to complete. I do know that differential equations is not a degree requirement for most CS programs, but otherwise, we're required to take two to three semesters of calculus, at least two semesters of a hard science (I chose physics and ended up doing four full semesters of it), statistics and, of course, a boatload of computer classes, including a few EE courses (and, of course, the requisite english/history/time-wasting stuff, too). Other than the core curiculum (and the added requirement of diffie-q), EE always looked pretty similar to CS to me. You're right - it's not an engineering degree... CS is closer to a math degree. It's still pretty hard to get, though. I don't see why you should be insulted, unless you've done a CS program and found it to be trivial compared to your engineering studies.
Do you just suspect this, or have you actually found it to be true? I ask because my experience has been the opposite. I speak two extra languages (Japanese and Spanish) and even spent a year at a Japanese university... although it increases my circle of friends to be able to converse with people in their native languages, I haven't found this to be even remotely useful in my (programming) career. Both have been on my resume for the last 12 years and have never once even come up throughout lots of job interviews.
Actually, it's worse than useless... now that you fully understand the theory behind good coding/software engineering/algorithmic principles, you have to deal with people who say, "we don't have time to do it 'right', so let's just get it done as fast as we can and do it 'right' in phase II." The word right is always spoken in quotes (and sometimes even accompanied with air quotes) and always a codeword for "wasting time". And then, of course, you'll also deal with people (they seem to congregate on slashdot sometimes) who assume that they can learn in 21 days what you spent four years studying. "Sure, he might be able to optimize a few more CPU cycles out of it, but with CPUs being as fast as they are, what does optimization matter"? Sigh... your (and my) CS degree were actually an inverted waste of time.
Huh? Are you implying that allowing a programmer to write LastName and lastname and lastName and lAsTnAmE and mean the same thing is not inviting trouble? Using the same identifier in different places and capitalizing it differently is inviting trouble in general... case-sensitive languages just punish you for this up-front, with a compile error, rather than six months from now, with a missed reference during refactoring.