I started my own small software tools company ("do what you know") when I was in my late 30's and am still at it 20 years later and expect to continue until I retire. For those that run into ageist hiring practices but still love programming, this is a great way to go. I still design and write code, which I enjoy, and I also like having to interact with customers, run the business, decide on product development priorities, etc. It's more interesting, varied, and fun, although perhaps also more challenging, than being a cog in some company with onerous software design standards and long meetings. You do need a decent viable idea that will work at the scale of one or a few programmers working on it, but in the end hard work and persistence over many years is what matters, not the original brilliance of the idea; no matter what you do it'll evolve considerably over time. The rewards once you build momentum include flexible work schedule, ability to focus on real work, blissful lack of office politics and meetings, and ability to live anywhere and travel the world as you work.
1) Bridges, roads, etc are public and shared because it makes sense to build infrastructure together and not privately. Most of the most successful open source projects are similar shared infrastructure.
2) People that build bridges, roads, etc, even though they are owned publically afterwards, tend to get paid. They work for pay and build open/shared things because that's what (usually) makes the most sense.
3) Sky scrapers, mines, etc are usually private because that's what makes sense. Similarly, some software is not open but proprietary.
This is not rocket science and hardly something to get all religious about. I wish people would just get over this open source vs. non open source thing already.
I'd like to know how long it took them to write this and how much of a headache it was. I mean, how fast is it really going to happen that this huge complex awful hack known as the web can replace decent traditional GUI toolkits? Or does ajax hide all the crap from the programmers?
Yeah, except this isn't a garden-variety flu bug -- it's incredibly lethal. If this bug mutates to easily spread from person-to-person, you're not talking about revolving ill -- many of these people won't be "revolving" back to the workplace, they'll be dead.
My father is a retired virologist and used to work w/ avian flu, tracking its spread along bird migratory patterns among other things. He says when flu viruses mutate to spread more easily they almost always also become less deadly, usually significantly so. Every 100 to 150 years you have an exception like the 1919 pandemic, but in between you have thousands of mutations that didn't cause a terrible pandemic.
H5N1 could be the exception but it is much more likely to become a relatively minor flu as part of the mutation process.
Of course you never heard that on the news... god forbid people lose their sense of terror or get bored and read a book instead...
I'm not clear on why he's hiring programmers generically and not hiring people whose itch *is* the software he wants. They may not be super hotshot programmers but they've got the right motivations. In other words, enable people that would produce the software already if they could just afford to do it -- so many people have dreams but can't afford to follow them because their day job keeps them too busy. Particularly if you're working in Python the barriers to entry for less skilled programmers are much lower.
That old "fact" that you're 31 times more likely to shoot a friend or family member is complete garbage. It included intentional homicide and suicide (which drastically increased the numbers). Nor is it really even a meaningful comparison, since most of the time guns are used for self-defense, they aren't even fired. The threat alone works wonders.
That is all correct -- people usually shoot friends and family on purpose, and they do it something like 30X more often than shooting strangers on purpose.
The fact still remains that the guns are around making this all possible.
I wonder where you live. Is it someone else's responsibility to protect you there?
Boston, across the street from a housing project. There are guns around and so far I've only heard of them being used offensively.
It's kind of like the airbags in my car. Hopefully I'll never need them, but if I ever do, I'll be very glad I had them.
Yes, but I'm fairly sure the statisics on air bags are somewhat more encouraging than for guns...
Someone busts into my house, my wife takes out my gun, and the fucking thing doesn't work for her, because the gun is "mine".
I hate this wacked rationale for gun ownership.
Home invasions are extremely rare. Shooting your family members by mistake is far more common.
* A gun I cannot loan to a friend on the range
That does sound like a tragedy.
* A gun that criminals WILL NOT USE. They will bypass the security of stolen guns
So will they use them or not?
Basically, the idea of a smart gun is ludicrous but then again so is the idea that 99.9% of the population actually need a gun. It's a hollywood fantasy people die for every day.
CNN won't release the #1 innovation until Sunday, January 18 at 8pm EST (Monday, Jan 19 @ 1AM GMT)
Let's see, January 18 is on Tuesday this year, so I guess this means we have to wait until 2009 to find out that #1 is the World Wide Web?
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
I've mentioned this before: the interview process that Google uses selects only those people who can solve puzzles in real-time.
This appears to be true now, but it seems puzzle solving was initially more a viral marketing thing to get lots of attention to their hiring process, and only secondarily a filter for some initial screening.
They do seem to be using puzzles deeper into the process than I thought they would when this was first announced. Don't know if that's intentional or just over-application of the initial idea.
I'd agree it's to their detriment to filter out slow thinkers. I've known a number of brilliant people that don't amount to much in real time, and there really isn't anything wrong with saying "let me think about it and I'll get back to you" in most jobs.
Re:What a complex world we live in! Is it worth it
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for this post. You're clearly smarter than most of the puzzle solving machines Google is going to end up hiring.
Re:What a complex world we live in! Is it worth it
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
I didn't read past your first paragraph, sorry.
Duh... intellectualism, huh, but you can't read past the first paragraph of something that actually breaks the foolish paradigm we're all stuck in?
Wherever I got this photo (many years ago; alas, I've lost the source) it was claimed that it shows the movement of the fault line during this earthquake -- the fence in the picture got separated by a gap of 8 feet and had to be mended!
Don't know if it's a hoax, but I thought it pretty interesting.
I'm in the Boston area and there's a definate increase in local jobs in the past 3-6 months. Not a huge difference but the deathly silence has ended. I've even got recruiters calling and emailing me and had offers of $500 referral bonus and stuff like that.
This is from the perspective of random stuff coming across my desk. I'm not personally in the market for a job and haven't been since 1999.
Call me a cynic but this is just another way to build ideas for the powers-that-be to ignore. Election politics and party image do not equal what is actually done later. You can feed the rhetoric in new ways but don't look to open source ideas to effect real change 'cause you won't be working on the actual "code" (law) but just the "spec" (which in politics is ignored even more than in software development).
I hate this focus on terrorism. We are so playing into their hands like a big bunch of whiney fearful wooseys. We send our kids overseas to fight the senseless war(s), while over here we're cowering in the corners or acting like bullies and playing with red, orange, and yellow light bulbs instead of doing anything that might actually combat terrorism, fuel the economy, or do anything of value in general. As a recovering patriot, let me just add: Shame on the USA!
Now to the subject of this message: The real issue is the spending deficit, which is huge, and the economy, which is a freaking disaster. The last props of the latter being unsustainable tax cuts and foreign investment, we could see some serious shit hit the fan in the coming years, esp. as the baby boomers start to retire (tax revenues lost, gov't expenses go up) and (possibly) Europe and Asia start looking like better places to invest than the good old USA.
So let's see -- the dollar drops sharply, interest rates to go up, house prices go down, the stock market crashes, and in short we'll all be trapped in the US at the mercy of a fundamentalist religious wacko regime, freezing our asses off because we can't afford foreign oil or a ticket to get the heck outta here. (Oh, and no sex because you won't be able to get birth control or an abortion, not that this affects this crowds that much.)
Meanwhile, we're pissing not just our manufacturing and software jobs but also our basic know-how and innovation overseas. Witness the last 50 years of technological history: We are losing our edge as technological leaders.
Folks, this is not a good formula. The one thing that might save us is a cheap dollar, which could reduce our trade deficit but if we don't have anything of value to sell we're screwed. At best we can hope a cheap dollar will re-attract foreign investment mainly based on our track record last century or some glimmer of hope we'll stabilize above mediocrity (which I'm not seeing at the moment, but then I'm not a foreign investor nor, lately, an optimist).
What I'd like to see is some real thinking about where the heck we're going as far as our legendary American Ingenuity, source of all our current wealth and power. But in Washington I'm not seeing leadership, just fear-mongering and plundering.
it always concerns me that paleontologists and anthropologists are always so excited over finding *one* specimen. and usually just a partial one at that.
Not just one. From the article on NPR:
"The remains of at least two to three individuals were recovered from the excavation in 2003, and this number has expanded to five to seven with the results of the 2004 field season."
C'mon already -- most of the software I've worked on probably has about the number of inter-related working parts as a 747 jet.
So somehow this stuff is going to start writing itself? I don't think so.
The software components idea is like building a machine out of stock parts rather than designing every little bit yourself. That's great but it still doesn't make up for the vastly increasing complexity of software. If you count parts and inter-relationships, you've still got more complexity that needs to be engineered.
OK, so yes, some narrow classes of software like certain office apps can be designed and built in more and more automated ways, but this also doesn't make up for the explosion of what computers and software can do.
Just because people don't readily see code, they seem to think it can be magically woven in ways that engineered physical objects like ships and planes and cars obviously cannot. They also think that code is code is code, which is like saying a machine that designs and builds toasters automatically can also design and build ships.
Sorry, code is like matter and components are like parts and you still need engineers to put the crap together.
Slashdot Mirror
I started my own small software tools company ("do what you know") when I was in my late 30's and am still at it 20 years later and expect to continue until I retire. For those that run into ageist hiring practices but still love programming, this is a great way to go. I still design and write code, which I enjoy, and I also like having to interact with customers, run the business, decide on product development priorities, etc. It's more interesting, varied, and fun, although perhaps also more challenging, than being a cog in some company with onerous software design standards and long meetings. You do need a decent viable idea that will work at the scale of one or a few programmers working on it, but in the end hard work and persistence over many years is what matters, not the original brilliance of the idea; no matter what you do it'll evolve considerably over time. The rewards once you build momentum include flexible work schedule, ability to focus on real work, blissful lack of office politics and meetings, and ability to live anywhere and travel the world as you work.
I took it to mean thee poster think CNN and MS-NBC are biased and not reporting real truth...
> What lost mind share??? This laptop isn't stealing "mind share" away from other ideas.
It's taking mindshare away from Windows / Vista. That's the real problem here.
1) Bridges, roads, etc are public and shared because it makes sense to build infrastructure together and not privately. Most of the most successful open source projects are similar shared infrastructure.
2) People that build bridges, roads, etc, even though they are owned publically afterwards, tend to get paid. They work for pay and build open/shared things because that's what (usually) makes the most sense.
3) Sky scrapers, mines, etc are usually private because that's what makes sense. Similarly, some software is not open but proprietary.
This is not rocket science and hardly something to get all religious about. I wish people would just get over this open source vs. non open source thing already.
And the sequel:
Sold stock, chartered yacht, oops hurricane!
It's a trilogy, actually, though the last book never sold well:
Will read, wife profits, the end.
No, but it would put commercial software companies out of business.
I'd like to know how long it took them to write this and how much of a headache it was. I mean, how fast is it really going to happen that this huge complex awful hack known as the web can replace decent traditional GUI toolkits? Or does ajax hide all the crap from the programmers?
My father is a retired virologist and used to work w/ avian flu, tracking its spread along bird migratory patterns among other things. He says when flu viruses mutate to spread more easily they almost always also become less deadly, usually significantly so. Every 100 to 150 years you have an exception like the 1919 pandemic, but in between you have thousands of mutations that didn't cause a terrible pandemic.
H5N1 could be the exception but it is much more likely to become a relatively minor flu as part of the mutation process.
Of course you never heard that on the news... god forbid people lose their sense of terror or get bored and read a book instead...
Ha! You obviously don't have any children!
I'm not clear on why he's hiring programmers generically and not hiring people whose itch *is* the software he wants. They may not be super hotshot programmers but they've got the right motivations. In other words, enable people that would produce the software already if they could just afford to do it -- so many people have dreams but can't afford to follow them because their day job keeps them too busy. Particularly if you're working in Python the barriers to entry for less skilled programmers are much lower.
That is all correct -- people usually shoot friends and family on purpose, and they do it something like 30X more often than shooting strangers on purpose.
The fact still remains that the guns are around making this all possible.
I wonder where you live. Is it someone else's responsibility to protect you there?
Boston, across the street from a housing project. There are guns around and so far I've only heard of them being used offensively.
It's kind of like the airbags in my car. Hopefully I'll never need them, but if I ever do, I'll be very glad I had them.
Yes, but I'm fairly sure the statisics on air bags are somewhat more encouraging than for guns...
I hate this wacked rationale for gun ownership. Home invasions are extremely rare. Shooting your family members by mistake is far more common.
* A gun I cannot loan to a friend on the range
That does sound like a tragedy.
* A gun that criminals WILL NOT USE. They will bypass the security of stolen guns
So will they use them or not?
Basically, the idea of a smart gun is ludicrous but then again so is the idea that 99.9% of the population actually need a gun. It's a hollywood fantasy people die for every day.
Let's see, January 18 is on Tuesday this year, so I guess this means we have to wait until 2009 to find out that #1 is the World Wide Web?
This appears to be true now, but it seems puzzle solving was initially more a viral marketing thing to get lots of attention to their hiring process, and only secondarily a filter for some initial screening.
They do seem to be using puzzles deeper into the process than I thought they would when this was first announced. Don't know if that's intentional or just over-application of the initial idea.
I'd agree it's to their detriment to filter out slow thinkers. I've known a number of brilliant people that don't amount to much in real time, and there really isn't anything wrong with saying "let me think about it and I'll get back to you" in most jobs.
Thanks for this post. You're clearly smarter than most of the puzzle solving machines Google is going to end up hiring.
Duh... intellectualism, huh, but you can't read past the first paragraph of something that actually breaks the foolish paradigm we're all stuck in?
Sure, that's Microsoft's business model, isn't it? Trap users, screw them, charge them to get into the next trap. Is this a big surprise?
Don't know if it's a hoax, but I thought it pretty interesting.
I'm in the Boston area and there's a definate increase in local jobs in the past 3-6 months. Not a huge difference but the deathly silence has ended. I've even got recruiters calling and emailing me and had offers of $500 referral bonus and stuff like that.
This is from the perspective of random stuff coming across my desk. I'm not personally in the market for a job and haven't been since 1999.
Call me a cynic but this is just another way to build ideas for the powers-that-be to ignore. Election politics and party image do not equal what is actually done later. You can feed the rhetoric in new ways but don't look to open source ideas to effect real change 'cause you won't be working on the actual "code" (law) but just the "spec" (which in politics is ignored even more than in software development).
Now to the subject of this message: The real issue is the spending deficit, which is huge, and the economy, which is a freaking disaster. The last props of the latter being unsustainable tax cuts and foreign investment, we could see some serious shit hit the fan in the coming years, esp. as the baby boomers start to retire (tax revenues lost, gov't expenses go up) and (possibly) Europe and Asia start looking like better places to invest than the good old USA.
So let's see -- the dollar drops sharply, interest rates to go up, house prices go down, the stock market crashes, and in short we'll all be trapped in the US at the mercy of a fundamentalist religious wacko regime, freezing our asses off because we can't afford foreign oil or a ticket to get the heck outta here. (Oh, and no sex because you won't be able to get birth control or an abortion, not that this affects this crowds that much.)
Meanwhile, we're pissing not just our manufacturing and software jobs but also our basic know-how and innovation overseas. Witness the last 50 years of technological history: We are losing our edge as technological leaders.
Folks, this is not a good formula. The one thing that might save us is a cheap dollar, which could reduce our trade deficit but if we don't have anything of value to sell we're screwed. At best we can hope a cheap dollar will re-attract foreign investment mainly based on our track record last century or some glimmer of hope we'll stabilize above mediocrity (which I'm not seeing at the moment, but then I'm not a foreign investor nor, lately, an optimist).
What I'd like to see is some real thinking about where the heck we're going as far as our legendary American Ingenuity, source of all our current wealth and power. But in Washington I'm not seeing leadership, just fear-mongering and plundering.
Not just one. From the article on NPR:
"The remains of at least two to three individuals were recovered from the excavation in 2003, and this number has expanded to five to seven with the results of the 2004 field season."
More here
So somehow this stuff is going to start writing itself? I don't think so.
The software components idea is like building a machine out of stock parts rather than designing every little bit yourself. That's great but it still doesn't make up for the vastly increasing complexity of software. If you count parts and inter-relationships, you've still got more complexity that needs to be engineered.
OK, so yes, some narrow classes of software like certain office apps can be designed and built in more and more automated ways, but this also doesn't make up for the explosion of what computers and software can do.
Just because people don't readily see code, they seem to think it can be magically woven in ways that engineered physical objects like ships and planes and cars obviously cannot. They also think that code is code is code, which is like saying a machine that designs and builds toasters automatically can also design and build ships.
Sorry, code is like matter and components are like parts and you still need engineers to put the crap together.
Need I say more?
There would be no comments here, if we all R'd TFA.
When ya can't read the freakin' article because their website is slashdotted, commenting is all that we've got left to do.