Seriously. The insanity of working late to meet some artificial, wholly-arbitrary deadline has to stop.
Unless people *actually* die if you miss your deadline -- i.e., unless you work for the CIA or maybe work directly with patients in a hospital -- go home. Your wife, kids, dog, and personal mental health will sincerely thank you.
Your boss likely won't do that, and even if he does, he won't compensate you for your extra time. Unless you believe in communism, stop working for free.
Unfortunately, most people possessing a PhD *are* so arrogant as to believe that lacking a PhD means lacking the ability to contribute unique insights to their body of knowledge.
But see, that's the difference between you and most computer geeks -- you have a life! Meeting friends for beers after work? Not something most geeks do, even the relatively-social ones. Exercise? How many geeks are overweight? And showering?
FWIW, I'm with you 100%. I'd never work again either, and I have habits like those you described.:) But I'm also somewhat unusual (read: social, well-adjusted) as computer geeks go.
And it's because of people like you (and me) that we have stories like these, where people are demanded to work not only 40 hours/week -- a number that arose not out of thin-air, but because it is actually a reasonable average for a variety of workloads -- but also unpaid overtime, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
(Disclaimer: I am also a software consultant. I often work long hours of unpaid overtime - and I think the practice ought to be criminalized.)
Very true. But disasters of Vista's sort (and that of so many other software projects) take months or years to create.
Meanwhile, Joe Manager has a quarterly revenue and/or budget target to meet, or an uber-aggressive deadline imposed by the client (if a consulting firm), and so doesn't have time to make things right. He has only time... to create a barely-functional app that is ultimately a disaster.
Short-termist thinking is the biggest problem American business faces today, even bigger than the financial crisis, because it drives nearly every bad behavior (both those that are illegal, and those that are legal and merely idiotic) we so-frequently find in businesses.
Can you give an idea of what labor laws as relating to IT people (particularly developers) are like in Canada (or at least in your province), specifically regarding overtime? e.g. how it works if you're salaried vs. hourly? (Or point me towards good resources? I've googled for hours before, and come up with relatively little.)
My understanding is that there are U.S.-like laws surrounding hourly employment, and enforced via employee reporting at the provincial level. But they are nonetheless stricter: my understanding is that - for hourly employees - anything above 40h/week requires the job falling into a certain classification, and even then, only 48h/week is considered acceptable. Beyond that OT must be paid, up to some maximum level -- and while the employer can have somebody work long hours, the hours worked must average-out to some level per 2 week period (e.g. if you work 12h one day, then you might only work 4h the next day, and then 8h/day for the remaining days).
But IT people are rarely hourly; most of us are salaried (certainly all my jobs have been, anyway). How does OT work for salaried employees in Canada?
It can't be any worse than America, where you can be worked 8 hours/day or 16 hours/day, every day of the week (theoretically) - and expect exactly the same pay no matter how much you work... (Hence why I would be overjoyed if salaried employment were outlawed. But that will never happen here, so my next best option is to move to a sane, reasonable, better-balanced country.)
True, so let me clarify: the rate must be either project (or case, or other unit of work)-based, or based on a rate with no granularity than an hour. The denominator unit must be small enough to capture the time and misery costs of working e.g. 12 hours (or more) per day instead of some lesser amount.
The "per day" point is key, as the human body has daily limits of its performance - everyone needs food, sleep, and (for any more than a short period) love and recreation.
There is NO justification for uncompensated -- i.e. free -- labor. Especially when one is working for a for-profit enterprise.
I support outlawing all non-rate-based employment, including salaried employment. All work should be paid on the basis of a rate: dollars/hour, dollars/project, or some other rate.
A flat 40 hours/week with no OT compensation and no cost to the employer to work the employee longer than that is fucking criminal... and only a communist -- one who believes in the free labor for the benefit of a larger collective (like a corporation?) -- would support it.
Yet, we have quite a few commies running businesses. Funny thing, that...
IT people have for far too long been working too many free hours. And for what? The opportunity to work more? Why? That's the most irrational thing we can do......except we do it, quite rationally, out of individual self-interest because we know that the pressure of competition means if we complain about it or leave, some other poor sucker will take our place (the squeaky wheel gets replaced) -- and our next job will simply be a repeat of the previous one, with similar responsibilities.
The only escape is a non-IT job.
Seriously, it's time we stood-up for *sane*, sensible labor regulations in America. You'd think a leftie like Obama would push this, but no...
I doubt people will be so quick to forget the reasons they moved away from the Republicans the last go around and so I think third parties will really make an emergence in the NEXT election cycle.
What U.S. historical evidence do you have that:
1) 3rd parties "will really make an emergence in the NEXT election cycle"? 2) That if a 3rd party emergence actually occurs, it will be significant enough to result in a 3rd party candidate winning the election? (Because if they do not win, then it doesn't matter that their presence was made - results, i.e. winning, is the only thing that matters.)
The Libertarian Party has never achieved higher than a 1% popular vote (in 1980) for President. I believe the Green Party once garnered 2%. Ross Perot took 19% in 1996 -- the best of any 3rd party in U.S. history, AFAIK -- but Clinton of course still won (around 45% popular vote, IIRC). Eugene Debs in 1916 took 16% of the popular vote, but he too, lost (and was later imprisoned for holding socialist political views).
That's my knowledge of 3rd party performance in U.S. Presidential elections; those facts suggest the odds for 3rd parties in 2012 are grim - as they always have been.
So in the space of just 50 years we've gone from "The buck stops here" to "I can't possibly be expected to know about EVERYTHING that my appointee's are up to"
Is this such a bad thing, long-term? "The buck stops here" is a confident-sounding statement of authority. It's also been demonstrated as too confident -- typical of people making confident statements that are difficult to disprove.
By contrast, it is far more realistic to expect that there are too many things to keep track of in a bureaucracy of 1.5 million (or more) people, like the U.S. Federal Government. It's true: that is *far* too much information for 1 man to process. That is a fact, and no confident-sounding 20th-century bullshit like "the buck stops here" will change that.
The more people realize this, the more hope will be lost in the notion that a large, socialist bureaucracy like our current national government can be competently and knowledgeably managed. For all the flaws demonstrated by the financial crisis, decentralization is the only serious answer to the problem of accountably coordinating action.
Mistake in the overview...
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
The Waterfall Model stressed rigid functional and design specification of the program(s) to be constructed in advance of any code development. While the this methodology and other early formal tools for Software Engineering were infinitely preferable to the chaos and ad-hoc programming-without-design practices of early systems,
The author of this/. post erroneously completed that last sentence. Appended above should be "it was replaced by a return to those same engineering failures of chaos and ad-hoc programming-without-design practices wrought under the name of Agile".
Pig, meet lipstick. In practice, Agile = cowboy coding; I've never seen it done any other way, even though yes, in theory it *shouldn't* be that way...
That said, as another poster noted, IT's culture and business environment is a free market, compared to other professions that raise artificial barriers to entry via licensure (medicine, law, plumbing, etc.).
Very well said; I agree with much of this. In short, the low-hanging fruit of IT has been picked. We're all still waiting for Google-like improvements to our lives from artificial intelligence, but aside from Google, nobody at this point is holding their breath any longer...
IT has shifted from an innovative industry to a maturing one, and as it does so, the mental void resulting from a lack of excitement is increasingly filled by the fact that IT is ultimately an expense.
Nobody needs another damn WCMS, or accounting application, or spreadsheet...
I do disagree with you strongly though on the point about bidding wars. Have you seen the business side of IT contracting this year? Love it or hate it, the economic theory of competition holds very sound - and the competition is quite fierce; there is plenty of under-bidding, and the process of such bidding wars is a race-to-the-bottom, by definition. ("Bottom" needn't be "zero" - it just has to be low enough that only 1 vendor is willing to provide the product at that lowest-of-all price level.)
Also, many people are taking pay cuts to keep their jobs; where they are not, salary freezes are usually in place -- meanwhile, inflation eats-away at workers' real income, which is essentially a pay cut.
The assumption you're making is that any laborer can be "indispensable"; that any sysadmin or programmer, if they are really good, could be irreplaceable.
In very tiny, niche roles, that remains true.
But the fact of the matter is global competition; we're not talking about the town blacksmith making you a fine gun to hunt dinner with anymore. If you're irreplaceable, boo fucking hoo - in any major city, another smart guy can be hired for similar premium pay; there's enough of a labor base to support the selection. And if not a smart guy, well, it could be a guy with the social skills to smooth-talk his way into the job. Either way, if you're willing to look more-broadly, you can get cheaper help, e.g. from Russia or India.
The moral of the story: nobody is indispensable - there are far too many other people on this planet willing to do a given job for that special property to arise in practice. Even CxOs replace themselves every few years or so, jumping from one corporate board to the next.
Every one of us, from the janitor to the CEO, is a replaceable cog in our chosen corporate machine. Don't like it? Too bad - remember, in a consumption-driven disposal economy like ours, the squeaky wheel gets replaced, not oiled.
But even in the rare case that somebody is relatively-irreplaceable, will management understand that? That depends on their competence and willingness to think objectively (which rarely happens). I have seen even top-flight developers, people whose knowledge and skill is expensive to replace, from the country's best schools get laid-off because management wants to save a few bucks by working other developers longer hours and not paying for premium talent. Technical quality is irrelevant anymore...
The notion of "IT hero" put on a pedestal was one that died in 2001 with the end of the dot-com boom; only in consulting, where half the job is self-puffery and propagation of mass-delusion for consulting-firm contract sales, does this myth still exist. Today, we are all just "resources" (not even "people"; that we live and breathe rather than running on electricity like a printer or file server goes unrecognized in our project language) in some project manager's work-breakdown structure...
Very well said; the distinction is a good one. IT is a relatively free-market culture because the bulk of its members want it that way, and so we have resisted things like unionization, and have supported things like exemptions from overtime pay.
Well, not we, the laborers of IT -- the managers of IT (actually, I have something of a foot in both camps, professionally, though still largely more in the former). But we the laborers have typically agreed with management on those libertarian policies -- in much the same way that poor white Republicans often oppose government healthcare, even though they would stand as among the greatest beneficiaries of it -- and we are poorer for it. For all our claims towards a rational-actor model, in practice, even the more-rational among us do not always behave in a rationally-self-interested way...
My ideal society is probably anarcho-capitalism. But that has a dependency (among many others) on an assumption of labor-side behavior with a strong will and Hank Rearden-like assertiveness and principle. Unfortunately, that assumption is a very poor one...
Yep... I'm not yet 30; I was born during the Reagan era. But from looking at the different generations of people in IT -- the greybeards who hacked on mainframes, the gen-Xers before me, my gen-Y colleagues, and the hyperactive early-20s kids now -- I see *exactly* these sorts of cultural rings in the IT tree.
I actually mostly agree with you here. I *would* be a zero-government anarcho-capitalist -- if I believed that the labor side of the labor-vs-management battle would fight effectively enough. In that case, pro-union laws (among others) would be unnecessary and freer competition could prevail.
If only that theoretical equilibrium actually existed.
An 8%-and-dropping unionization rate in the U.S., combined with increasingly-long work weeks (for those of us still employed; yes, I know the "official" number, at about 33h/week currently, continues to decline as more people become unemployed) suggests otherwise.
Simple: there are too many in IT who actually believe in the philosophy of "Atlas Shrugged" - a race-to-the-bottom, out-compete-each-other-for-the-good-of-mankind philosophy.
Ayn Rand and the army of philosophical libertarians in the U.S. whose intellect (required to understand the philosophy and economics behind it) naturally puts them in positions of influence and power via which these ideas are implemented (example: Alan Greenspan, a deep fan of Rand), along with the army of free-market economists who use their own work as faux-empirical justification for libertarian economic policies, NEVER talk about the humanitarian downsides of a hyper-competitive feedback loop/death-spiral... except to mock them in "Atlas Shrugged" (America's second most-influential book after the Bible, according to one survey conducted in the early 1990s).
I say this as a slowly-recovering right-libertarian (and developer) myself, turned moderate left-libertarian.
We in IT have cut our own personal income profit margins and raised our hours in an attempt to out-compete each other; we've raised the bar year after year on ourselves. We have, in short, cut our own throats. We now, and increasingly-moreso, live in the cutthroat environment we (and admittedly, I) have so often advocated.
FOSS is done primarily by male geeks in their early 20s; guys who all too often will graduate college as frustrated virgins.
What makes anybody think they would be opposed to the inclusion of *more* women into their lives? Perhaps in large part for self-serving reasons, but so what? The same is true of any other area of society.
I, for one, would have loved to have more girls in my CS courses (2 of which had no girls at all), for the chance to meet them...
What if you're a hard-core developer? Somebody who writes back-end code -- complex SQL, libraries, etc.? Those don't have much relevance to advertising -- or anywhere outside of a purely-technology role.
Web 2.0 development is inextricably intertwined with UI development, often publicly-facing. Hence, your switch was an organic one: you moved from one role dealing tangentially with advertising, to a role dealing more-directly with it.
The Internet web 2 cloud computing buzzword age is ridden with little substance and lots of marketing doublespeak and the sickening thing is people are buying into it. Our world COULD be amazing in 20 years but I bet it's more restricted and more frustrating than ever.
AMEN brother! I'm becoming increasingly-worried that the future of our economy rests not on producing goods or services of any actual value, but on producing hype and making people *believe* that falsehoods are true; that people are preferring sizzle rather than steak.
I'm worried, in short, that the nature of business will increasingly come to resemble organized religion: a massive, self-perpetuating propaganda machine that produces no output other than propaganda, and takes-in as input money from believers-in-a-better-tomorrow (example: how Rita, the hooker co-star in Idiocracy, managed to string-along a young Latino for several days while getting him to pre-pay for services she would likely never provide).
i.e., that businesses which currently produce real output (like Google, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree, Apple, as well as car companies, professional services firms, etc.) will cease or at least greatly slow production of these things in favor of producing marketing bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. The insanity of working late to meet some artificial, wholly-arbitrary deadline has to stop.
Unless people *actually* die if you miss your deadline -- i.e., unless you work for the CIA or maybe work directly with patients in a hospital -- go home. Your wife, kids, dog, and personal mental health will sincerely thank you.
Your boss likely won't do that, and even if he does, he won't compensate you for your extra time. Unless you believe in communism, stop working for free.
And yes, I am completely serious...
Wrong; cultural distinctions exist. The "V sign" is a common symbol of "peace" in the U.S., and formerly of "victory" during the World Wars. But in Australia? It's offensive, as George Bush Sr. found the hard way in 1992.
Unfortunately, most people possessing a PhD *are* so arrogant as to believe that lacking a PhD means lacking the ability to contribute unique insights to their body of knowledge.
But see, that's the difference between you and most computer geeks -- you have a life! Meeting friends for beers after work? Not something most geeks do, even the relatively-social ones. Exercise? How many geeks are overweight? And showering?
FWIW, I'm with you 100%. I'd never work again either, and I have habits like those you described. :) But I'm also somewhat unusual (read: social, well-adjusted) as computer geeks go.
And it's because of people like you (and me) that we have stories like these, where people are demanded to work not only 40 hours/week -- a number that arose not out of thin-air, but because it is actually a reasonable average for a variety of workloads -- but also unpaid overtime, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
(Disclaimer: I am also a software consultant. I often work long hours of unpaid overtime - and I think the practice ought to be criminalized.)
Is the lack of testing the reason you see those boxes coming back to you 2 weeks later?
Very true. But disasters of Vista's sort (and that of so many other software projects) take months or years to create.
Meanwhile, Joe Manager has a quarterly revenue and/or budget target to meet, or an uber-aggressive deadline imposed by the client (if a consulting firm), and so doesn't have time to make things right. He has only time... to create a barely-functional app that is ultimately a disaster.
Short-termist thinking is the biggest problem American business faces today, even bigger than the financial crisis, because it drives nearly every bad behavior (both those that are illegal, and those that are legal and merely idiotic) we so-frequently find in businesses.
Can you give an idea of what labor laws as relating to IT people (particularly developers) are like in Canada (or at least in your province), specifically regarding overtime? e.g. how it works if you're salaried vs. hourly? (Or point me towards good resources? I've googled for hours before, and come up with relatively little.)
My understanding is that there are U.S.-like laws surrounding hourly employment, and enforced via employee reporting at the provincial level. But they are nonetheless stricter: my understanding is that - for hourly employees - anything above 40h/week requires the job falling into a certain classification, and even then, only 48h/week is considered acceptable. Beyond that OT must be paid, up to some maximum level -- and while the employer can have somebody work long hours, the hours worked must average-out to some level per 2 week period (e.g. if you work 12h one day, then you might only work 4h the next day, and then 8h/day for the remaining days).
But IT people are rarely hourly; most of us are salaried (certainly all my jobs have been, anyway). How does OT work for salaried employees in Canada?
It can't be any worse than America, where you can be worked 8 hours/day or 16 hours/day, every day of the week (theoretically) - and expect exactly the same pay no matter how much you work... (Hence why I would be overjoyed if salaried employment were outlawed. But that will never happen here, so my next best option is to move to a sane, reasonable, better-balanced country.)
True, so let me clarify: the rate must be either project (or case, or other unit of work)-based, or based on a rate with no granularity than an hour. The denominator unit must be small enough to capture the time and misery costs of working e.g. 12 hours (or more) per day instead of some lesser amount.
The "per day" point is key, as the human body has daily limits of its performance - everyone needs food, sleep, and (for any more than a short period) love and recreation.
There is NO justification for uncompensated -- i.e. free -- labor. Especially when one is working for a for-profit enterprise.
I support outlawing all non-rate-based employment, including salaried employment. All work should be paid on the basis of a rate: dollars/hour, dollars/project, or some other rate.
A flat 40 hours/week with no OT compensation and no cost to the employer to work the employee longer than that is fucking criminal... and only a communist -- one who believes in the free labor for the benefit of a larger collective (like a corporation?) -- would support it.
Yet, we have quite a few commies running businesses. Funny thing, that...
IT people have for far too long been working too many free hours. And for what? The opportunity to work more? Why? That's the most irrational thing we can do... ...except we do it, quite rationally, out of individual self-interest because we know that the pressure of competition means if we complain about it or leave, some other poor sucker will take our place (the squeaky wheel gets replaced) -- and our next job will simply be a repeat of the previous one, with similar responsibilities.
The only escape is a non-IT job.
Seriously, it's time we stood-up for *sane*, sensible labor regulations in America. You'd think a leftie like Obama would push this, but no...
What U.S. historical evidence do you have that:
1) 3rd parties "will really make an emergence in the NEXT election cycle"?
2) That if a 3rd party emergence actually occurs, it will be significant enough to result in a 3rd party candidate winning the election? (Because if they do not win, then it doesn't matter that their presence was made - results, i.e. winning, is the only thing that matters.)
The Libertarian Party has never achieved higher than a 1% popular vote (in 1980) for President. I believe the Green Party once garnered 2%. Ross Perot took 19% in 1996 -- the best of any 3rd party in U.S. history, AFAIK -- but Clinton of course still won (around 45% popular vote, IIRC). Eugene Debs in 1916 took 16% of the popular vote, but he too, lost (and was later imprisoned for holding socialist political views).
That's my knowledge of 3rd party performance in U.S. Presidential elections; those facts suggest the odds for 3rd parties in 2012 are grim - as they always have been.
Is this such a bad thing, long-term? "The buck stops here" is a confident-sounding statement of authority. It's also been demonstrated as too confident -- typical of people making confident statements that are difficult to disprove.
By contrast, it is far more realistic to expect that there are too many things to keep track of in a bureaucracy of 1.5 million (or more) people, like the U.S. Federal Government. It's true: that is *far* too much information for 1 man to process. That is a fact, and no confident-sounding 20th-century bullshit like "the buck stops here" will change that.
The more people realize this, the more hope will be lost in the notion that a large, socialist bureaucracy like our current national government can be competently and knowledgeably managed. For all the flaws demonstrated by the financial crisis, decentralization is the only serious answer to the problem of accountably coordinating action.
The author of this /. post erroneously completed that last sentence. Appended above should be "it was replaced by a return to those same engineering failures of chaos and ad-hoc programming-without-design practices wrought under the name of Agile".
Pig, meet lipstick. In practice, Agile = cowboy coding; I've never seen it done any other way, even though yes, in theory it *shouldn't* be that way...
Running. Lead pipe. Both ways. :-)
Longer than that, really. But you're right.
That said, as another poster noted, IT's culture and business environment is a free market, compared to other professions that raise artificial barriers to entry via licensure (medicine, law, plumbing, etc.).
Very well said; I agree with much of this. In short, the low-hanging fruit of IT has been picked. We're all still waiting for Google-like improvements to our lives from artificial intelligence, but aside from Google, nobody at this point is holding their breath any longer...
IT has shifted from an innovative industry to a maturing one, and as it does so, the mental void resulting from a lack of excitement is increasingly filled by the fact that IT is ultimately an expense.
Nobody needs another damn WCMS, or accounting application, or spreadsheet...
I do disagree with you strongly though on the point about bidding wars. Have you seen the business side of IT contracting this year? Love it or hate it, the economic theory of competition holds very sound - and the competition is quite fierce; there is plenty of under-bidding, and the process of such bidding wars is a race-to-the-bottom, by definition. ("Bottom" needn't be "zero" - it just has to be low enough that only 1 vendor is willing to provide the product at that lowest-of-all price level.)
Also, many people are taking pay cuts to keep their jobs; where they are not, salary freezes are usually in place -- meanwhile, inflation eats-away at workers' real income, which is essentially a pay cut.
The assumption you're making is that any laborer can be "indispensable"; that any sysadmin or programmer, if they are really good, could be irreplaceable.
In very tiny, niche roles, that remains true.
But the fact of the matter is global competition; we're not talking about the town blacksmith making you a fine gun to hunt dinner with anymore. If you're irreplaceable, boo fucking hoo - in any major city, another smart guy can be hired for similar premium pay; there's enough of a labor base to support the selection. And if not a smart guy, well, it could be a guy with the social skills to smooth-talk his way into the job. Either way, if you're willing to look more-broadly, you can get cheaper help, e.g. from Russia or India.
The moral of the story: nobody is indispensable - there are far too many other people on this planet willing to do a given job for that special property to arise in practice. Even CxOs replace themselves every few years or so, jumping from one corporate board to the next.
Every one of us, from the janitor to the CEO, is a replaceable cog in our chosen corporate machine. Don't like it? Too bad - remember, in a consumption-driven disposal economy like ours, the squeaky wheel gets replaced, not oiled.
But even in the rare case that somebody is relatively-irreplaceable, will management understand that? That depends on their competence and willingness to think objectively (which rarely happens). I have seen even top-flight developers, people whose knowledge and skill is expensive to replace, from the country's best schools get laid-off because management wants to save a few bucks by working other developers longer hours and not paying for premium talent. Technical quality is irrelevant anymore...
The notion of "IT hero" put on a pedestal was one that died in 2001 with the end of the dot-com boom; only in consulting, where half the job is self-puffery and propagation of mass-delusion for consulting-firm contract sales, does this myth still exist. Today, we are all just "resources" (not even "people"; that we live and breathe rather than running on electricity like a printer or file server goes unrecognized in our project language) in some project manager's work-breakdown structure...
Very well said; the distinction is a good one. IT is a relatively free-market culture because the bulk of its members want it that way, and so we have resisted things like unionization, and have supported things like exemptions from overtime pay.
Well, not we, the laborers of IT -- the managers of IT (actually, I have something of a foot in both camps, professionally, though still largely more in the former). But we the laborers have typically agreed with management on those libertarian policies -- in much the same way that poor white Republicans often oppose government healthcare, even though they would stand as among the greatest beneficiaries of it -- and we are poorer for it. For all our claims towards a rational-actor model, in practice, even the more-rational among us do not always behave in a rationally-self-interested way...
My ideal society is probably anarcho-capitalism. But that has a dependency (among many others) on an assumption of labor-side behavior with a strong will and Hank Rearden-like assertiveness and principle. Unfortunately, that assumption is a very poor one...
Yep... I'm not yet 30; I was born during the Reagan era. But from looking at the different generations of people in IT -- the greybeards who hacked on mainframes, the gen-Xers before me, my gen-Y colleagues, and the hyperactive early-20s kids now -- I see *exactly* these sorts of cultural rings in the IT tree.
I actually mostly agree with you here. I *would* be a zero-government anarcho-capitalist -- if I believed that the labor side of the labor-vs-management battle would fight effectively enough. In that case, pro-union laws (among others) would be unnecessary and freer competition could prevail.
If only that theoretical equilibrium actually existed.
An 8%-and-dropping unionization rate in the U.S., combined with increasingly-long work weeks (for those of us still employed; yes, I know the "official" number, at about 33h/week currently, continues to decline as more people become unemployed) suggests otherwise.
Simple: there are too many in IT who actually believe in the philosophy of "Atlas Shrugged" - a race-to-the-bottom, out-compete-each-other-for-the-good-of-mankind philosophy.
Ayn Rand and the army of philosophical libertarians in the U.S. whose intellect (required to understand the philosophy and economics behind it) naturally puts them in positions of influence and power via which these ideas are implemented (example: Alan Greenspan, a deep fan of Rand), along with the army of free-market economists who use their own work as faux-empirical justification for libertarian economic policies, NEVER talk about the humanitarian downsides of a hyper-competitive feedback loop/death-spiral... except to mock them in "Atlas Shrugged" (America's second most-influential book after the Bible, according to one survey conducted in the early 1990s).
I say this as a slowly-recovering right-libertarian (and developer) myself, turned moderate left-libertarian.
We in IT have cut our own personal income profit margins and raised our hours in an attempt to out-compete each other; we've raised the bar year after year on ourselves. We have, in short, cut our own throats. We now, and increasingly-moreso, live in the cutthroat environment we (and admittedly, I) have so often advocated.
FOSS is done primarily by male geeks in their early 20s; guys who all too often will graduate college as frustrated virgins.
What makes anybody think they would be opposed to the inclusion of *more* women into their lives? Perhaps in large part for self-serving reasons, but so what? The same is true of any other area of society.
I, for one, would have loved to have more girls in my CS courses (2 of which had no girls at all), for the chance to meet them...
What if you're a hard-core developer? Somebody who writes back-end code -- complex SQL, libraries, etc.? Those don't have much relevance to advertising -- or anywhere outside of a purely-technology role.
Web 2.0 development is inextricably intertwined with UI development, often publicly-facing. Hence, your switch was an organic one: you moved from one role dealing tangentially with advertising, to a role dealing more-directly with it.
Not everybody can do that.
AMEN brother! I'm becoming increasingly-worried that the future of our economy rests not on producing goods or services of any actual value, but on producing hype and making people *believe* that falsehoods are true; that people are preferring sizzle rather than steak.
I'm worried, in short, that the nature of business will increasingly come to resemble organized religion: a massive, self-perpetuating propaganda machine that produces no output other than propaganda, and takes-in as input money from believers-in-a-better-tomorrow (example: how Rita, the hooker co-star in Idiocracy, managed to string-along a young Latino for several days while getting him to pre-pay for services she would likely never provide).
i.e., that businesses which currently produce real output (like Google, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree, Apple, as well as car companies, professional services firms, etc.) will cease or at least greatly slow production of these things in favor of producing marketing bullshit.
I'd like to see the data to back that up.