It's kind of hard to call something "vaporware" when it's open source and you can download betas. Even if the project died right there, it wouldn't be vapor.
I agree with you to an extent, but I think the grandparent post had a good sense of "don't be a a crybaby" that I agree with. Here's what you have to keep in mind: yes, you're there to learn, but everyone else there is trying to get things done. As the intern, you're pretty unimportant and you're low man on the totem, so be prepared to put up with some kind of crap work. It's not an insult if people expect you to show up on time and work. Be friendly, sociable, eager to work, adaptable. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Don't be an entitled brat.
But aside from that, yes, get a clear idea of what your responsibilities are, and if people are treating you unreasonably, talk to your supervisor about it. And I also particularly like your thing about "don't worry too much about asking dumb questions." You aren't supposed to know everything yet. If you don't know something and you ask, you'll get an answer and then you'll know. Not-asking just means you'll keep not-knowing.
And that advice isn't just good for internships. I've seen it happen, even with fairly senior workers, where a good and obvious solution gets ignored because everyone is too afraid to suggest it or ask about it. They assume that, if the obvious solution would work, someone else would have suggested it.
Well yes, you know Google harvests data and you have a choice not to use them. On the other hand, I don't think that would excuse them if they were misusing your private information. If, for example, I found out that someone at Google was reading everything sent to my gmail account, or if I found out that Google was providing free access to my mail to marketers, I would be pretty angry.
I think the whole thing really hinges on whether what they're doing is reasonable. We may disagree about whether it's reasonable, but if it isn't reasonable then "you could choose something else," doesn't really excuse their behavior. Like if Burger King put razor blades in their burgers, then the fact that you could choose to eat somewhere else doesn't make the whole thing acceptable.
Yeah, I don't know about the particular quote, but I do think there's a very real distinction between the idea that "only wrongdoers have anything to fear from loss of privacy," and the idea that "if you're extremely troubled by the idea of people finding out what you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it."
The latter idea is... well... it's kind of true. I think that's kind of a decent rule of thumb: Pretend for a second that all the information surrounding what you're about to do because public knowledge. Imagine your parents and spouse and children will all find out about it. Does that worry you a lot? If so, you should at least consider not doing it.
Now, that's not an argument that privacy isn't a good idea. Even if you try to use the rule of thumb I'm advocating, you might consider "not doing it" and decide "no, I'm going to do it." And it's possible that it'll still be a good decision, but just not one you'd want everyone to know about. Or even if you'd theoretically be fine with the idea of all the information being public, it might still be that some of the information, taken out of context, would be embarrassing. People should be allowed to keep some of that information to themselves.
Well there are a couple things to consider. First, as others have mentioned, the fact that it's not yet at 1.0 has less importance in many free software projects. There are definitely projects that haven't reached 1.0 yet are still production ready.
Also, you seem to throw "free" in there like it's a bad thing (or maybe I'm misreading?), but the fact that people are using an open-source project may indicate that they're very concerned about future maintenance of the software they're using. Being open source prevents the possibility of it simply being dropped, leaving the users no recourse. Free software can be passed into others' hands or forked, and in the worst case scenario a business can theoretically pay a programmer to fix problems.
So in that sense, at least, free software is pretty good for future-proofing. And even if the whole setup is not yet at 1.0, many of the components are quite robust and mature. Both FreeBSD and Debian are very good, as are Samba, ProFTP, and the other services.
I've people use it in speech and writing and others generally know what it means, then it's a word. I think even the people who work on the OED have said that dictionaries are descriptive, no prescriptive. The intention is to maintain a catalog of words that are commonly accepted and in use, not to tell you which words are acceptable. Oxford is not the Academie Francaise.
All words are made-up words. There are words that I don't like and words that I think are stupid, and plenty of new words that I hope don't continue to be used. Unfortunately, they're still words.
Yeah, I'm afraid that you're probably right, that the best way to keep yourself out of trouble these days is to avoid drawing law enforcement's attention to yourself. There are enough laws that, if they decide to, they can probably go after you for something. Even if they don't find any proof, they can make your life inconvenient while they're looking.
So imagine this guy calls the police and says he accidentally downloaded kiddie porn. Of course at some point the police are going to ask what he thought he was downloading and from where, and it's pretty safe to assume that it's not a legit site. So now this guy has to explain that he was using P2P to look for "College Girls Gone Wild", which means pornographic movies which are probably under someone's copyright. If you're downloading porn and violating copyright, are you eager to call the police and tell them?
Now I'd like to think that, if the police received a call like that, they'd try to be discrete about it. They'd keep the guy's porn-viewing habits as secret as they could and ignore any copyright violations, since otherwise they'd be discouraging others to come forward. But if I were in that situation, would I take that risk? Probably not. I'd probably erase the offending material and hope the FBI would find it on their own.
"If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear," doesn't work.
And sorry, but just to complete the thought, there's a very good reason why Google would want to do this even if they don't get any data mining or ad revenue in any direct way: Think about all the other services (OpenDNS or ISPs) that redirect failed searches to their own search page. Every time that happens, that's a search that doesn't go through Google. As far as Google is concerned, you getting a proper response of "This page doesn't exist" is good for them, because they know your next stop will be Google.com.
It's dead simple - they want to know what people are looking at so that they can better target people with advertising thereby increasing the value of their service.
Well it's slightly more complicated than that. They already know what you're looking at and can target advertising. Sometimes they're just working on improving your experience of the Internet so you'll use it more and use it for more things.
For as long as Google owns the search engine market, increased activity and reliance on the Internet is good for them. They don't need to do excessive data mining on each service in order for the service to be worthwhile for them. They just need a reason to believe that it will somehow drive more traffic to one of their services that include ads, even if it's achieved in a roundabout way.
It might also be applied to people who spend every hour of every night for years building their own hot rod or ships in bottles or whatever.
You might even argue that it applies to people who work their whole lives to achieve fame and fortune. It's not uncommon for those people to neglect some of their personal relationships or have other parts of their lives suffer. Often enough, they end up losing their fortune to some degree or failing in other pursuits. Eventually, sooner or later, those people will die anyway, and it's not clear that they're better off in death than any of us. It's all pointless from a certain perspective.
So cheer up, all you WoW players. Your WoW-filled lives aren't any worse than a guy who has millions of dollars and bangs supermodels!
To be clear - I feel you've made the right choice, but I feel that placing the responsibility on the game itself undermines the millions of people who have not lost their lives to it.
I see your point, but couldn't you say the same about anything that's addictive? "Placing responsibility on the heroin undermines the millions of people who have tried heroin and have not lost their lives to it." Sure, that's true, but clearly heroin plays a role.
No, I'm not saying WoW is comparable to heroin. I only mean to point out that nothing is all that addictive all by itself. Different people fall prey to different addictions, but certainly some things carry more danger of addiction than other things.
It's not "Windows Vista SE" in that people had a bad impression of Vista and Microsoft needed rebranding. They had to name it something else-- anything else-- before people would even look at it.
Yeah, statistics are kind of interesting, but you have to try to keep a clear idea of what they're really saying. I guess these are measurements of the share of web traffic each OS has according to some measurement of web traffic. Is it done with unique IPs, in which case NAT could caused skewed statistics? Is it doing it by cookies? Which sites, exactly, are being monitored? Is it being treated like a random sample and used to extrapolate data? Is there an attempt to account for people who might not visit those sites, or even people who don't really use the Internet?
I don't know the answer to that stuff, but even if all that were settled, there's another problem: depending on what your purposes are, market share might not be the thing you really want to look at. What about the total number of sales for the year? What about the rate of growth of sales? Are the sales with new computers, OEM copies, or retail copies? What about profit over a given period? Do you want to look at total profit or profit margin?
People tend to cite numbers like these as though they depict some absolute reality. "Windows 7 is a success," or "Windows 7 is a failure," depending on what they want to prove. It's all a bit more complicated than that.
The difficulty with including oncall pay in the base salary of the position is that oncall time and difficulty can vary greatly depending on circumstances, and there's no way to reflect that in one's salary in a timely manner.
Well what I mean to suggest is that it's generally something you should discuss at hiring time. This is exactly the sort of thing that job interviews are for. Ask what their expectations are of you, and what you should anticipate. The answer probably won't have a lot of precision, but it should give you an idea of whether you'll be expected to come in immediately whenever there's an emergency, as well as whether those kind of emergencies are common.
At the end of an interview, you should have gotten a pretty good idea whether they're expecting you to be able to go home at the end of the day and be completely done, or if you'll be expected to work long hours, be constantly on-call, and come in at 2am on a regular basis. If you don't, then you just did a very bad job at interviewing your prospective employer. If the employer accidentally mislead you, then you have grounds to renegotiate. If the employer intentionally mislead you, then you should consider whether you really want that job.
It, as usual, comes down to the simple fact that when you negotiate a salary you need to base your acceptance upon the possibilities not just what's down on the job description because those job descriptions are rarely written by people who know what they're talking about (sadly.)
Well I wouldn't disregard the job description. It's not as simple as "what's in the job posting" or whatever, but I assume you went into an interview before you were hired, right? Didn't you talk about the job at that point? Did the interviewer say anything about working outside normal business hours? Did the idea of being on call every come up, implicitly or explicitly?
If it's not a job that obviously requires being on call and at no point in the interview did they indicate that possibility, then I think it's fair to say that being on call "wasn't in the job description". It just wasn't part of the deal you signed up for. That fine, but when an employer asks you to do something that wasn't part of the deal you signed up for, they've essentially reopened negotiation. Negotiate a deal that you find acceptable.
However, it doesn't really much matter exactly how that extra money is delivered. It could be that "The job description of 'Job A' includes being on call, which is why people who do it earn a hefty salary" or it could be "'Job B' is 9 to 5; and time on call is X dollars/hour outside of that". That seems to be the point of confusion.
Exactly. The first question here should be, are we talking about a salaried position or an hourly wage? If it's a salaried position, then the salary should just be higher for taking on a job with the increased responsibility of being on call. "Being on call" should be part of the job description, and part of the negotiation for salary at hiring. If it wasn't and they ask you to be on call, then I think it's generally reasonable to say, "That wasn't part of my job description. If you want me to be on call, then I want a pay bump to go along with it."
If it's an hourly wage, then again it needs to be negotiated. If it were me, I'd probably want a certain rate for working the normal 40 hour week, a different rate for being on call, and a third (relatively high) rate for work done outside of normal hours, while on call. If you want me to make an effort to ensure that I can be reached 24/7, I expect some kind of compensation. If you expect me to actually come in at 2am and work, then I expect to get paid more for that time than I get paid during the normal weekday.
Of course, negotiating terms of employment can always be tricky. If you really like your job and don't mind being on call for the amount you're paid, then you might not want to push it. If you play hardball, it's possible they'll just let you go.
You seem to be arguing "No one, in good conscience, should deliver a distributed wide-area architecture without some degree of resilient connectivity."
No, that's not really what I'm arguing.
Either what they did was ethical because they were living up to their agreement and had warned VA about the problems as much as they were ethically bound to, or it wasn't ethical and they didn't do a good job as a technical vendor. I'm arguing that, if the latter, then "what they did is technically legal and they're only ethically bound to do whatever is profitable for their own company," isn't a good excuse.
Now if you want to talk about whether it's ethical to deliver an underperforming solution, then I'm inclined to say that it depends on the exact context. Generally, if a vendor knows pretty well that the service they're selling will not perform the way their client/customer is expecting, then I do believe they have some responsibility for warning their customer. The bidding process in this case may essentially absolve Northrop of the responsibility, but in that case the excuse is in the bidding process, not in "hey, businesses are only bound by profit, and not ethics."
Yeah, like I said, I don't know about this situation. Like if the bidding process is explicitly set up to request bids for documented requirements and doesn't allow for businesses to provide their own proposal, then I'd say it's VA's fault for providing crappy requirements and using a process without enough flexibility.
I'm not faulting Northrop's business, but just the sentiment expressed in the previous post that we shouldn't have a problem with a company who acts to the detriment to their own customers, simply because, "hey, businesses are supposed to hurt their customers if it's profitable in the short term."
I just think that stuff is part of a whole perverse world view that leads to (among other nasty things) economic ruin.
C'mon, do you actually expect a for-profit to do something for nothing?
Not for nothing. They're getting paid. The fact that you're calling it "something for nothing" is in my mind a further indication of the attitude I'm objecting to. There's an expectation that businesses are entitled to screw everyone over while not really providing good service, as though customers' payments are something that they have a right to, not something contingent on them providing satisfactory service.
Like, "Oh, you actually expected them to provide the service we're selling? And you expected us to do a good job?! Ha ha, that's naive." Well, no, I've grown accustomed to the idea of you selling me a service and then not really providing it. My being accustomed to it doesn't make it right.
They're not in business to keep the state government afloat, their only purpose is to make money.
I hate when this is offered as an excuse for shoddy work. "It's not their job to do good work. It's their job to make money." Yeah? So what. It strikes me a little like saying, "Hey, can't blame a con man for stealing your money. That's what con men do!"
I don't know this particular situation well enough to say who is at fault and to what degree, but it's part of their business to service their customers well. It's part of every company's business to provide service to their customers in an ethical manner.
But such is what happens when you let one company monopolize a market.
I also blame the attitude people have toward the Internet. Most people I know talk about the Internet like it's an entertainment service. It's their source of porn and Netflix and MP3s, so they think it's roughly analogous (and no more important than) cable TV or Blockbuster video.
Of course, even these people use the Internet to send business-critical emails, engage in commerce, voice their political views, and pay their taxes. The Internet is a very important part of our infrastructure. It's not just for porn.
Also, it's not clear to me that the economics don't support a single provider and are unable to attract a single entrant. The failure to attract an entrant in some of the underserved areas has to be the phone company itself.
If I were going to invest in a small business which was building out fiber infrastructure in smaller towns, I suspect one of my largest worries would be Verizon. Even if I could afford to lay the fiber and support service, I would have to face the fact that Verizon could pretty much come in and roll over me whenever they wanted. They have the money to undercut me, even if it means functioning at a loss, and they have the money to pay for legislation to be passed that favors them and puts me out of business.
That's the problem with monopolistic situations. The monopoly power can sit around and speculate that their control must be due to their doing a good job, or that the situation just doesn't allow for competition. There may be some truth to those ideas, but it dismisses the role that the monopolist plays in the situation, not allowing for competition.
And maybe it's true that the economics of Internet infrastructure will ultimately only allow for a single set of cable to be run to each location. To me, that would be the foundation for a very good argument that Internet infrastructure needs to be controlled and regulated by the government, and made open and available for everyone to use.
I live in NYC and the phone company won't even provide broadband. I can get Internet from the cable company, but Verizon says neither FIOS or DSL are available in my area.
That's in the country's largest city. The idea that internet sucks because our population density is too low is absolute hogwash.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of hard to call something "vaporware" when it's open source and you can download betas. Even if the project died right there, it wouldn't be vapor.
I agree with you to an extent, but I think the grandparent post had a good sense of "don't be a a crybaby" that I agree with. Here's what you have to keep in mind: yes, you're there to learn, but everyone else there is trying to get things done. As the intern, you're pretty unimportant and you're low man on the totem, so be prepared to put up with some kind of crap work. It's not an insult if people expect you to show up on time and work. Be friendly, sociable, eager to work, adaptable. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Don't be an entitled brat.
But aside from that, yes, get a clear idea of what your responsibilities are, and if people are treating you unreasonably, talk to your supervisor about it. And I also particularly like your thing about "don't worry too much about asking dumb questions." You aren't supposed to know everything yet. If you don't know something and you ask, you'll get an answer and then you'll know. Not-asking just means you'll keep not-knowing.
And that advice isn't just good for internships. I've seen it happen, even with fairly senior workers, where a good and obvious solution gets ignored because everyone is too afraid to suggest it or ask about it. They assume that, if the obvious solution would work, someone else would have suggested it.
Well yes, you know Google harvests data and you have a choice not to use them. On the other hand, I don't think that would excuse them if they were misusing your private information. If, for example, I found out that someone at Google was reading everything sent to my gmail account, or if I found out that Google was providing free access to my mail to marketers, I would be pretty angry.
I think the whole thing really hinges on whether what they're doing is reasonable. We may disagree about whether it's reasonable, but if it isn't reasonable then "you could choose something else," doesn't really excuse their behavior. Like if Burger King put razor blades in their burgers, then the fact that you could choose to eat somewhere else doesn't make the whole thing acceptable.
Yeah, I don't know about the particular quote, but I do think there's a very real distinction between the idea that "only wrongdoers have anything to fear from loss of privacy," and the idea that "if you're extremely troubled by the idea of people finding out what you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it."
The latter idea is... well... it's kind of true. I think that's kind of a decent rule of thumb: Pretend for a second that all the information surrounding what you're about to do because public knowledge. Imagine your parents and spouse and children will all find out about it. Does that worry you a lot? If so, you should at least consider not doing it.
Now, that's not an argument that privacy isn't a good idea. Even if you try to use the rule of thumb I'm advocating, you might consider "not doing it" and decide "no, I'm going to do it." And it's possible that it'll still be a good decision, but just not one you'd want everyone to know about. Or even if you'd theoretically be fine with the idea of all the information being public, it might still be that some of the information, taken out of context, would be embarrassing. People should be allowed to keep some of that information to themselves.
What's more, I don't want to know.
Well there are a couple things to consider. First, as others have mentioned, the fact that it's not yet at 1.0 has less importance in many free software projects. There are definitely projects that haven't reached 1.0 yet are still production ready.
Also, you seem to throw "free" in there like it's a bad thing (or maybe I'm misreading?), but the fact that people are using an open-source project may indicate that they're very concerned about future maintenance of the software they're using. Being open source prevents the possibility of it simply being dropped, leaving the users no recourse. Free software can be passed into others' hands or forked, and in the worst case scenario a business can theoretically pay a programmer to fix problems.
So in that sense, at least, free software is pretty good for future-proofing. And even if the whole setup is not yet at 1.0, many of the components are quite robust and mature. Both FreeBSD and Debian are very good, as are Samba, ProFTP, and the other services.
I've people use it in speech and writing and others generally know what it means, then it's a word. I think even the people who work on the OED have said that dictionaries are descriptive, no prescriptive. The intention is to maintain a catalog of words that are commonly accepted and in use, not to tell you which words are acceptable. Oxford is not the Academie Francaise.
All words are made-up words. There are words that I don't like and words that I think are stupid, and plenty of new words that I hope don't continue to be used. Unfortunately, they're still words.
Yeah, I'm afraid that you're probably right, that the best way to keep yourself out of trouble these days is to avoid drawing law enforcement's attention to yourself. There are enough laws that, if they decide to, they can probably go after you for something. Even if they don't find any proof, they can make your life inconvenient while they're looking.
So imagine this guy calls the police and says he accidentally downloaded kiddie porn. Of course at some point the police are going to ask what he thought he was downloading and from where, and it's pretty safe to assume that it's not a legit site. So now this guy has to explain that he was using P2P to look for "College Girls Gone Wild", which means pornographic movies which are probably under someone's copyright. If you're downloading porn and violating copyright, are you eager to call the police and tell them?
Now I'd like to think that, if the police received a call like that, they'd try to be discrete about it. They'd keep the guy's porn-viewing habits as secret as they could and ignore any copyright violations, since otherwise they'd be discouraging others to come forward. But if I were in that situation, would I take that risk? Probably not. I'd probably erase the offending material and hope the FBI would find it on their own.
"If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear," doesn't work.
And sorry, but just to complete the thought, there's a very good reason why Google would want to do this even if they don't get any data mining or ad revenue in any direct way: Think about all the other services (OpenDNS or ISPs) that redirect failed searches to their own search page. Every time that happens, that's a search that doesn't go through Google. As far as Google is concerned, you getting a proper response of "This page doesn't exist" is good for them, because they know your next stop will be Google.com.
It's dead simple - they want to know what people are looking at so that they can better target people with advertising thereby increasing the value of their service.
Well it's slightly more complicated than that. They already know what you're looking at and can target advertising. Sometimes they're just working on improving your experience of the Internet so you'll use it more and use it for more things.
For as long as Google owns the search engine market, increased activity and reliance on the Internet is good for them. They don't need to do excessive data mining on each service in order for the service to be worthwhile for them. They just need a reason to believe that it will somehow drive more traffic to one of their services that include ads, even if it's achieved in a roundabout way.
It might also be applied to people who spend every hour of every night for years building their own hot rod or ships in bottles or whatever.
You might even argue that it applies to people who work their whole lives to achieve fame and fortune. It's not uncommon for those people to neglect some of their personal relationships or have other parts of their lives suffer. Often enough, they end up losing their fortune to some degree or failing in other pursuits. Eventually, sooner or later, those people will die anyway, and it's not clear that they're better off in death than any of us. It's all pointless from a certain perspective.
So cheer up, all you WoW players. Your WoW-filled lives aren't any worse than a guy who has millions of dollars and bangs supermodels!
To be clear - I feel you've made the right choice, but I feel that placing the responsibility on the game itself undermines the millions of people who have not lost their lives to it.
I see your point, but couldn't you say the same about anything that's addictive? "Placing responsibility on the heroin undermines the millions of people who have tried heroin and have not lost their lives to it." Sure, that's true, but clearly heroin plays a role.
No, I'm not saying WoW is comparable to heroin. I only mean to point out that nothing is all that addictive all by itself. Different people fall prey to different addictions, but certainly some things carry more danger of addiction than other things.
Me too. (by "real life", you mean posting on Slashdot, right?)
In what way is this not Vista 1.1?
It's not "Windows Vista SE" in that people had a bad impression of Vista and Microsoft needed rebranding. They had to name it something else-- anything else-- before people would even look at it.
Yeah, statistics are kind of interesting, but you have to try to keep a clear idea of what they're really saying. I guess these are measurements of the share of web traffic each OS has according to some measurement of web traffic. Is it done with unique IPs, in which case NAT could caused skewed statistics? Is it doing it by cookies? Which sites, exactly, are being monitored? Is it being treated like a random sample and used to extrapolate data? Is there an attempt to account for people who might not visit those sites, or even people who don't really use the Internet?
I don't know the answer to that stuff, but even if all that were settled, there's another problem: depending on what your purposes are, market share might not be the thing you really want to look at. What about the total number of sales for the year? What about the rate of growth of sales? Are the sales with new computers, OEM copies, or retail copies? What about profit over a given period? Do you want to look at total profit or profit margin?
People tend to cite numbers like these as though they depict some absolute reality. "Windows 7 is a success," or "Windows 7 is a failure," depending on what they want to prove. It's all a bit more complicated than that.
The difficulty with including oncall pay in the base salary of the position is that oncall time and difficulty can vary greatly depending on circumstances, and there's no way to reflect that in one's salary in a timely manner.
Well what I mean to suggest is that it's generally something you should discuss at hiring time. This is exactly the sort of thing that job interviews are for. Ask what their expectations are of you, and what you should anticipate. The answer probably won't have a lot of precision, but it should give you an idea of whether you'll be expected to come in immediately whenever there's an emergency, as well as whether those kind of emergencies are common.
At the end of an interview, you should have gotten a pretty good idea whether they're expecting you to be able to go home at the end of the day and be completely done, or if you'll be expected to work long hours, be constantly on-call, and come in at 2am on a regular basis. If you don't, then you just did a very bad job at interviewing your prospective employer. If the employer accidentally mislead you, then you have grounds to renegotiate. If the employer intentionally mislead you, then you should consider whether you really want that job.
It, as usual, comes down to the simple fact that when you negotiate a salary you need to base your acceptance upon the possibilities not just what's down on the job description because those job descriptions are rarely written by people who know what they're talking about (sadly.)
Well I wouldn't disregard the job description. It's not as simple as "what's in the job posting" or whatever, but I assume you went into an interview before you were hired, right? Didn't you talk about the job at that point? Did the interviewer say anything about working outside normal business hours? Did the idea of being on call every come up, implicitly or explicitly?
If it's not a job that obviously requires being on call and at no point in the interview did they indicate that possibility, then I think it's fair to say that being on call "wasn't in the job description". It just wasn't part of the deal you signed up for. That fine, but when an employer asks you to do something that wasn't part of the deal you signed up for, they've essentially reopened negotiation. Negotiate a deal that you find acceptable.
However, it doesn't really much matter exactly how that extra money is delivered. It could be that "The job description of 'Job A' includes being on call, which is why people who do it earn a hefty salary" or it could be "'Job B' is 9 to 5; and time on call is X dollars/hour outside of that". That seems to be the point of confusion.
Exactly. The first question here should be, are we talking about a salaried position or an hourly wage? If it's a salaried position, then the salary should just be higher for taking on a job with the increased responsibility of being on call. "Being on call" should be part of the job description, and part of the negotiation for salary at hiring. If it wasn't and they ask you to be on call, then I think it's generally reasonable to say, "That wasn't part of my job description. If you want me to be on call, then I want a pay bump to go along with it."
If it's an hourly wage, then again it needs to be negotiated. If it were me, I'd probably want a certain rate for working the normal 40 hour week, a different rate for being on call, and a third (relatively high) rate for work done outside of normal hours, while on call. If you want me to make an effort to ensure that I can be reached 24/7, I expect some kind of compensation. If you expect me to actually come in at 2am and work, then I expect to get paid more for that time than I get paid during the normal weekday.
Of course, negotiating terms of employment can always be tricky. If you really like your job and don't mind being on call for the amount you're paid, then you might not want to push it. If you play hardball, it's possible they'll just let you go.
You seem to be arguing "No one, in good conscience, should deliver a distributed wide-area architecture without some degree of resilient connectivity."
No, that's not really what I'm arguing.
Either what they did was ethical because they were living up to their agreement and had warned VA about the problems as much as they were ethically bound to, or it wasn't ethical and they didn't do a good job as a technical vendor. I'm arguing that, if the latter, then "what they did is technically legal and they're only ethically bound to do whatever is profitable for their own company," isn't a good excuse.
Now if you want to talk about whether it's ethical to deliver an underperforming solution, then I'm inclined to say that it depends on the exact context. Generally, if a vendor knows pretty well that the service they're selling will not perform the way their client/customer is expecting, then I do believe they have some responsibility for warning their customer. The bidding process in this case may essentially absolve Northrop of the responsibility, but in that case the excuse is in the bidding process, not in "hey, businesses are only bound by profit, and not ethics."
Yeah, like I said, I don't know about this situation. Like if the bidding process is explicitly set up to request bids for documented requirements and doesn't allow for businesses to provide their own proposal, then I'd say it's VA's fault for providing crappy requirements and using a process without enough flexibility.
I'm not faulting Northrop's business, but just the sentiment expressed in the previous post that we shouldn't have a problem with a company who acts to the detriment to their own customers, simply because, "hey, businesses are supposed to hurt their customers if it's profitable in the short term."
I just think that stuff is part of a whole perverse world view that leads to (among other nasty things) economic ruin.
C'mon, do you actually expect a for-profit to do something for nothing?
Not for nothing. They're getting paid. The fact that you're calling it "something for nothing" is in my mind a further indication of the attitude I'm objecting to. There's an expectation that businesses are entitled to screw everyone over while not really providing good service, as though customers' payments are something that they have a right to, not something contingent on them providing satisfactory service.
Like, "Oh, you actually expected them to provide the service we're selling? And you expected us to do a good job?! Ha ha, that's naive." Well, no, I've grown accustomed to the idea of you selling me a service and then not really providing it. My being accustomed to it doesn't make it right.
They're not in business to keep the state government afloat, their only purpose is to make money.
I hate when this is offered as an excuse for shoddy work. "It's not their job to do good work. It's their job to make money." Yeah? So what. It strikes me a little like saying, "Hey, can't blame a con man for stealing your money. That's what con men do!"
I don't know this particular situation well enough to say who is at fault and to what degree, but it's part of their business to service their customers well. It's part of every company's business to provide service to their customers in an ethical manner.
But such is what happens when you let one company monopolize a market.
I also blame the attitude people have toward the Internet. Most people I know talk about the Internet like it's an entertainment service. It's their source of porn and Netflix and MP3s, so they think it's roughly analogous (and no more important than) cable TV or Blockbuster video.
Of course, even these people use the Internet to send business-critical emails, engage in commerce, voice their political views, and pay their taxes. The Internet is a very important part of our infrastructure. It's not just for porn.
Also, it's not clear to me that the economics don't support a single provider and are unable to attract a single entrant. The failure to attract an entrant in some of the underserved areas has to be the phone company itself.
If I were going to invest in a small business which was building out fiber infrastructure in smaller towns, I suspect one of my largest worries would be Verizon. Even if I could afford to lay the fiber and support service, I would have to face the fact that Verizon could pretty much come in and roll over me whenever they wanted. They have the money to undercut me, even if it means functioning at a loss, and they have the money to pay for legislation to be passed that favors them and puts me out of business.
That's the problem with monopolistic situations. The monopoly power can sit around and speculate that their control must be due to their doing a good job, or that the situation just doesn't allow for competition. There may be some truth to those ideas, but it dismisses the role that the monopolist plays in the situation, not allowing for competition.
And maybe it's true that the economics of Internet infrastructure will ultimately only allow for a single set of cable to be run to each location. To me, that would be the foundation for a very good argument that Internet infrastructure needs to be controlled and regulated by the government, and made open and available for everyone to use.
I live in NYC and the phone company won't even provide broadband. I can get Internet from the cable company, but Verizon says neither FIOS or DSL are available in my area.
That's in the country's largest city. The idea that internet sucks because our population density is too low is absolute hogwash.
Free money, no mandates.
Well, it is good work if you can get it.