My brother was diagnosed as bipolar, schizo, and a handful of other things, each to justify "trying" a particular drug treatment, none of which worked.
99% certainty that today his diagnosis would be ASD. He reached a level of functionality (around age 35) where he doesn't need help from drugs, counselling, etc. anymore. I'm willing to bet he would have gotten there (independent functioning) sooner without all the drug and therapy detours.
In my opinion, this is creating a disability for the child - disability to function without a constant stream of medication, it will be a lifelong burden in expense, compliance taking the pills, etc. If it's the only workable solution, then it's clearly the best one, but if there were another solution that didn't create a drug dependency - you need to weigh the cost of lifelong dependency vs the difficulty of making the extra effort during childhood. And, if the extra effort fails, the drugs will still be an option.
I agree.
You know the main reason there is over-medication of the poor is probably the rate that poor clinics see people. 5-10 minutes with a doctor results in the easiest solution.
Pills are wickedly efficient, other forms of treatment take time and effort on the part of a caregiver. If you have no money, they'll take what little you have to give you pills, but you can't even hope to get access to significant amounts of other people's time and effort - plus you're probably spending all of your own just trying to get enough money to keep a roof over your head.
maybe the poor kids are getting over-medicated by a government/drug company/new world order rich person conspiracy.
It's not usually a conspiracy, it's usually an emergent property of a system of mostly self-serving, uncaring actors. That's why these things are studied and the lawmakers occasionally decide to change the rules to re-orient the self-serving actors to another course of action that will ultimately be better for society as a whole...
One of the best moments of my programming career was when my boss came over and said he hated to see me with my feet up and hands interlaced behind my head (the classic 'kicking back' pose). My manager interjected with "right now he is earning the money you pay him".
So rare to get a manager that understands the process.
Yep, research also supports the view that morose, depressed people are actually smarter than when they are happy - but nobody likes to see an office full of gloom... so let's all just be happy and stupid instead. (Very few people understand this principle yet...)
Be thankful you don't have tinnitus on her frequency, I had a temporary case once and there was one woman in the office who set it off - very socially awkward having to cringe or cover your ear every time a particular person is speaking...
I never had any problems regarding this issue. What might be a solution is to use earplugs. A colleague of mine uses earplugs when he is doing "serious" work (as he says) and he seems to do just fine. It's just a little bit funny that you have to ask him everything twice, as he won't hear it the first time and first has to remove the earplugs -- ad you don't know beforehand if he is currently wearing his earplugs as you can't see them (at least not from two meters away).
The earplugs have the psychological advantage of making other people disrupt you less often: It takes some time till you remove the earplugs and they have to ask their question twice, so they think twice if the effort of this is worth the answer -- Dummy-questions good-bye!
When I finally rose to a level where my only boss was the owner, and he was a reasonable man, I took the step of staying home to do my work when needed - being in the office, particularly at a level of higher responsibility, reduced my programming productivity by about 80%. So, I could stay home for a week and get a major project done, or stay in the office for 5 weeks working on it and fielding the constant barrage of questions from coworkers, customers, etc. I think the slower produced code would also be more error prone. I was also valuable in the question answering / collaboration mode, but sometimes we just needed to get a piece of code done.
During this current downturn we interviewed about 25 developers for an open position and found 2 acceptable candidates.
There's a sad inevitability to this... I have been laid off twice (in 20 years, both times due to the company simply running out of money), and each time I was re-hired at the first "real" interview I went to, not interviews for the sake of fulfilling a requirement to interview candidates or something like that (and there were plenty of those in 2003...), but the bozos of the world are going to interview many many times before they get taken in somewhere - and even if the world is only 10% bozos, the worse they are, the longer they will rattle around the job search arena, possibly becoming expert in the art of resume' and cover letter writing to get those interviews.
People seem to forget that without workers, the value of a company is nothing. Trying to hand-wave away problems on the premise stated above forgets that the most socially valuable part of a business isn't the product, nor is it the employer or shareholders, but the employees, the value they bring to society and the fair reward they get for their labor....
You seem to be forgetting that many upper management types worship at the altar of Rush Limbaugh, and they are all the more smug and confident in their opinions because they can, at a whim, toss your liberal candy ass out in the street and replace it with another one just like you, probably for less money.
...you can get deep into the flow with music that is familiar...
or not familiar - I had no idea how deeply I was grooving to a new track on Pandora the other day until I accidentally shut the browser window, the interruption in the music was so jarring that it also interrupted my flow of programming thought for a minute or two.
...I think I can make my own decisions about what will distract me and what won't, and be responsible for the quality of my work...
There you go, thinking... this is all about the boss' insecurity about looking like he's letting his employees have a good time at work, and nothing about actual quality of product. This is one good example of why you are not in upper management.
I would think the future, at least the future of computer programming, relies much more on communication skills than rigorous attention to detail. As languages become higher level and more extensible, it is much more important to write code and doc that others can read and understand.
Yes... and no.
The code and doc that others can read and understand, yes, that is tremendously important, and will always be neglected in Dilbert's (and our) world of rushed deadlines, short staffing, and lazy coworkers. If it works, ship it yesterday, oh, and after it's shipped, why isn't the next thing finished yet?
Accurate code and doc requires tremendous attention to detail, if you're talking about API level, you need docs that say what the functions and their parameters do, and functions that properly implement that. Rigorous attention to detail is just the beginning - extensive testing, documentation of big picture connections to related parts of the API, and keeping up with the "cutting edge" of efficiency, feature completeness, etc.
Most of my coworkers don't have the attention span to complete anything significant at this level of rigor, and the ones who do are pushed by management to "be more productive" rather than make something that actually works 100% correctly.
Did you read the part about eating 6 meals a day and still not thriving? These "supermen" will have a super intensive logistical support network, not just to feed them but also to take care of their other medical quirks.
Unfortunately in the world of reality, the difference between Idle and Used CPU is at the very least money. My computer idles at ~180W use. When it's at 100% CPU, it's closer to 450W use.
If that CPU time is being used, it has to be paid for.
Well unless its summer time (when schools are closed) and the school is far enough north you could just think of these PCs running SETI@home as electric heaters. 100% of the energy they use is being turned to heat, so some/all (depending on the schools regular heating system) of the cost of running SETI@home can be subtracted from the heating costs.
Unfortunately, waste heat comes at 1:1 efficiency, while most buildings are heated with 4:1 or better heat-pumps, so, while the waste heat is offsetting some of the heating costs, that only forgives about 25% of the cost.
If you're paying to cool the building, then the waste heat makes things much worse...
The point is that when the computer revolution happened, I was there. I lived in it and I loved it, but I was largely self-taught.
When I was in high-school (early 1980s), the chemistry teacher knew a little bit about computers, and was gracious enough to admit that about a dozen students knew far more than he did, so we took independent study computer science (play on the equipment for an hour a day doing whatever we felt like, BASICally) while he muddled through teaching the regular computer course. That was then, he wasn't losing any face by admitting this, then. Today I doubt any such thing is done due to issues of pride: "what do you mean you don't have a competent computer teacher," I'm sure the disparity still exists, but since everyone expects the school to have competence in teaching, the coursework is dumbed down to the level of whatever talent they can hire on $28K/yr.
On certain afternoons, we learned more in independent study computer science than the lecture based kids would learn in a month, and we screwed around and did nothing productive a lot too, but on average, the unstructured group made far more progress than the kids getting it read to them from a book.
I am in my early 40s. I have been in "high tech" since 1990. I have a MS in Computer Engineering....
Smart people who know what they are doing are passed over for frat boys.
Yeah, I just relived the "dying startup company" movie from the inside for the second time, and I was replaced by a fresh-out frat boy. Thing is, there's a certain cold logic to the value of the frat boy. As a "get things done" guy with experience, I built the product and got it through the approval process. If I had been in a contract position, I would have expected to leave at that point, the annoying lie was that I was "permanent", which means almost nothing with an employment at will clause. But, here comes the value of the frat boy - no, he can't program, he can't even test without being re-trained every 3 hours, but, he can talk football. And, now the the company is starting sales, they need someone who can sell, and support, and talk football with the customers, oh, and it doesn't hurt that he's probably making less than 1/3 my salary. If he's fortunate, he'll slide into some kind of commission based position and should be making more than me within a few years - if the company pulls out of this pit it's in.
Last time I lived this movie I was the "Senior Scientist" and, so, was permitted to "go down with the ship," I was in the core group of about six who were all let go at the end. The engineers who built the product were kicked to the curb about 6 months earlier as "un-necessary expense," and they didn't do it as gracefully that time, as "Senior Scientist," I had a form of sales value, both in talking to prospective customers and in the appearance that the company still had its "core talent" intact. Engineers (and programmers) are viewed by the world as commodity items, and in a well run organization, they are - you don't want a programmer to be irreplaceable. The old company still cycled various forms of sales guys through until the end, because they are the only hope of keeping the company afloat - so, in that phase of the life cycle, frat boy skills become much more valuable.
Some big investor once said that CEOs are all essentially spoiled frat-boys who aren't particularly smart, but they do know enough to protect their position by not keeping anybody smarter than them on the next rung below them, and that most of the underlings also follow this model, so you end up with most of top management being not particularly bright - but they all know how to have a good time and entertain one another. If you want to move among the CEO levels of America, these are the people you have to know how to work with to get deals done. Frat boys have far greater value than any technical competence in that arena.
I taught senior level digital design, these people were graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering within 6 months, and I actually had more than one student who didn't know what a directory tree was or have the foggiest idea of how to use it. Their first argument was "that's not what this class is about, I shouldn't have to know that to do well here." Maybe that argument flies in law school, but if you don't have basic skills, it's no reason for the higher level courses to spoon feed you around your ignorance.
Of course, at the same time I knew self-taught kids in middle school who could create sub-directories with the best of 'em. Attitude is 90% of ability.
Yeah, I've not gotten a lot of jobs that way, "something" didn't work out.
Interesting thing is, the more layers of the onion you peel back, the less that "something" has to do with you, often they end up not hiring anybody for the position.
it is almost a waste of time to spend 16 weeks learning them.
Almost... for most people, it would be helpful to have done a cubic spline interpolation in school if your boss ever asked you to do a least squares fit of a fifth order polynomial to a dataset (yes, he asked, yes, I did it (two straight days of algebra), no, it wasn't really useful), and similarly, if you have had academic experience doing other optimized stream processing algorithms, then adapting the published running median algorithm to your particular application's needs won't be quite so daunting....
Or, you could do what I did and blow these things off in school and just figure them out when the need arises... but as a hiring manager, I'd much rather hire the kid who at least did something similar in school or a previous job, all too often I've had to do "the hard stuff" for my charges, which can lead to some pretty messy ego problems when they think they are the smartest guy in town.
Yeah, I know them well, and a Ph.D employee of mine just couldn't seem to make his histogram code run fast enough, so we dissected it and found he had an un-necessary loop in it (an extra +1 on his O), he never could understand how it worked without that loop....
Slashdot Mirror
My brother was diagnosed as bipolar, schizo, and a handful of other things, each to justify "trying" a particular drug treatment, none of which worked.
99% certainty that today his diagnosis would be ASD. He reached a level of functionality (around age 35) where he doesn't need help from drugs, counselling, etc. anymore. I'm willing to bet he would have gotten there (independent functioning) sooner without all the drug and therapy detours.
still medicated. It'll probably be for life
In my opinion, this is creating a disability for the child - disability to function without a constant stream of medication, it will be a lifelong burden in expense, compliance taking the pills, etc. If it's the only workable solution, then it's clearly the best one, but if there were another solution that didn't create a drug dependency - you need to weigh the cost of lifelong dependency vs the difficulty of making the extra effort during childhood. And, if the extra effort fails, the drugs will still be an option.
Yeah, the fallout from Chernobyl isn't nearly as dangerous as the fallout from coal burning in the USA. (No sarcasm there)
I agree. You know the main reason there is over-medication of the poor is probably the rate that poor clinics see people. 5-10 minutes with a doctor results in the easiest solution.
Pills are wickedly efficient, other forms of treatment take time and effort on the part of a caregiver. If you have no money, they'll take what little you have to give you pills, but you can't even hope to get access to significant amounts of other people's time and effort - plus you're probably spending all of your own just trying to get enough money to keep a roof over your head.
maybe the poor kids are getting over-medicated by a government/drug company/new world order rich person conspiracy.
It's not usually a conspiracy, it's usually an emergent property of a system of mostly self-serving, uncaring actors. That's why these things are studied and the lawmakers occasionally decide to change the rules to re-orient the self-serving actors to another course of action that will ultimately be better for society as a whole...
Yeah, that happens sometimes.
One of the best moments of my programming career was when my boss came over and said he hated to see me with my feet up and hands interlaced behind my head (the classic 'kicking back' pose). My manager interjected with "right now he is earning the money you pay him".
So rare to get a manager that understands the process.
Yep, research also supports the view that morose, depressed people are actually smarter than when they are happy - but nobody likes to see an office full of gloom... so let's all just be happy and stupid instead. (Very few people understand this principle yet...)
So what you're saying is that the OP should get the boss to add free-roaming tigers to the cubicle landscape to provide the 10% distraction?
I saw a video years back with a NFL lineman employed as an in-office "motivator." Seems like it might work very well. (He would tackle slackers.)
monster.com, dude.
Be thankful you don't have tinnitus on her frequency, I had a temporary case once and there was one woman in the office who set it off - very socially awkward having to cringe or cover your ear every time a particular person is speaking...
I never had any problems regarding this issue. What might be a solution is to use earplugs. A colleague of mine uses earplugs when he is doing "serious" work (as he says) and he seems to do just fine. It's just a little bit funny that you have to ask him everything twice, as he won't hear it the first time and first has to remove the earplugs -- ad you don't know beforehand if he is currently wearing his earplugs as you can't see them (at least not from two meters away). The earplugs have the psychological advantage of making other people disrupt you less often: It takes some time till you remove the earplugs and they have to ask their question twice, so they think twice if the effort of this is worth the answer -- Dummy-questions good-bye!
When I finally rose to a level where my only boss was the owner, and he was a reasonable man, I took the step of staying home to do my work when needed - being in the office, particularly at a level of higher responsibility, reduced my programming productivity by about 80%. So, I could stay home for a week and get a major project done, or stay in the office for 5 weeks working on it and fielding the constant barrage of questions from coworkers, customers, etc. I think the slower produced code would also be more error prone. I was also valuable in the question answering / collaboration mode, but sometimes we just needed to get a piece of code done.
During this current downturn we interviewed about 25 developers for an open position and found 2 acceptable candidates.
There's a sad inevitability to this... I have been laid off twice (in 20 years, both times due to the company simply running out of money), and each time I was re-hired at the first "real" interview I went to, not interviews for the sake of fulfilling a requirement to interview candidates or something like that (and there were plenty of those in 2003...), but the bozos of the world are going to interview many many times before they get taken in somewhere - and even if the world is only 10% bozos, the worse they are, the longer they will rattle around the job search arena, possibly becoming expert in the art of resume' and cover letter writing to get those interviews.
This attitude sucks...
Granted.
People seem to forget that without workers, the value of a company is nothing. Trying to hand-wave away problems on the premise stated above forgets that the most socially valuable part of a business isn't the product, nor is it the employer or shareholders, but the employees, the value they bring to society and the fair reward they get for their labor....
You seem to be forgetting that many upper management types worship at the altar of Rush Limbaugh, and they are all the more smug and confident in their opinions because they can, at a whim, toss your liberal candy ass out in the street and replace it with another one just like you, probably for less money.
...you can get deep into the flow with music that is familiar...
or not familiar - I had no idea how deeply I was grooving to a new track on Pandora the other day until I accidentally shut the browser window, the interruption in the music was so jarring that it also interrupted my flow of programming thought for a minute or two.
...I think I can make my own decisions about what will distract me and what won't, and be responsible for the quality of my work...
There you go, thinking... this is all about the boss' insecurity about looking like he's letting his employees have a good time at work, and nothing about actual quality of product. This is one good example of why you are not in upper management.
I would think the future, at least the future of computer programming, relies much more on communication skills than rigorous attention to detail. As languages become higher level and more extensible, it is much more important to write code and doc that others can read and understand.
Yes... and no.
The code and doc that others can read and understand, yes, that is tremendously important, and will always be neglected in Dilbert's (and our) world of rushed deadlines, short staffing, and lazy coworkers. If it works, ship it yesterday, oh, and after it's shipped, why isn't the next thing finished yet?
Accurate code and doc requires tremendous attention to detail, if you're talking about API level, you need docs that say what the functions and their parameters do, and functions that properly implement that. Rigorous attention to detail is just the beginning - extensive testing, documentation of big picture connections to related parts of the API, and keeping up with the "cutting edge" of efficiency, feature completeness, etc.
Most of my coworkers don't have the attention span to complete anything significant at this level of rigor, and the ones who do are pushed by management to "be more productive" rather than make something that actually works 100% correctly.
Did you read the part about eating 6 meals a day and still not thriving? These "supermen" will have a super intensive logistical support network, not just to feed them but also to take care of their other medical quirks.
Pay the fucking teachers.
Obligatory
do you really think you're going to be using a 10.5 year old computer? In this day and age it's possible but highly unlikely.
This is a school system we're talking about, they might be purchasing 10 year old computers to start with.
Unfortunately in the world of reality, the difference between Idle and Used CPU is at the very least money. My computer idles at ~180W use. When it's at 100% CPU, it's closer to 450W use.
If that CPU time is being used, it has to be paid for.
Well unless its summer time (when schools are closed) and the school is far enough north you could just think of these PCs running SETI@home as electric heaters. 100% of the energy they use is being turned to heat, so some/all (depending on the schools regular heating system) of the cost of running SETI@home can be subtracted from the heating costs.
Unfortunately, waste heat comes at 1:1 efficiency, while most buildings are heated with 4:1 or better heat-pumps, so, while the waste heat is offsetting some of the heating costs, that only forgives about 25% of the cost.
If you're paying to cool the building, then the waste heat makes things much worse...
The point is that when the computer revolution happened, I was there. I lived in it and I loved it, but I was largely self-taught.
When I was in high-school (early 1980s), the chemistry teacher knew a little bit about computers, and was gracious enough to admit that about a dozen students knew far more than he did, so we took independent study computer science (play on the equipment for an hour a day doing whatever we felt like, BASICally) while he muddled through teaching the regular computer course. That was then, he wasn't losing any face by admitting this, then. Today I doubt any such thing is done due to issues of pride: "what do you mean you don't have a competent computer teacher," I'm sure the disparity still exists, but since everyone expects the school to have competence in teaching, the coursework is dumbed down to the level of whatever talent they can hire on $28K/yr.
On certain afternoons, we learned more in independent study computer science than the lecture based kids would learn in a month, and we screwed around and did nothing productive a lot too, but on average, the unstructured group made far more progress than the kids getting it read to them from a book.
Smart people who know what they are doing are passed over for frat boys.
Yeah, I just relived the "dying startup company" movie from the inside for the second time, and I was replaced by a fresh-out frat boy. Thing is, there's a certain cold logic to the value of the frat boy. As a "get things done" guy with experience, I built the product and got it through the approval process. If I had been in a contract position, I would have expected to leave at that point, the annoying lie was that I was "permanent", which means almost nothing with an employment at will clause. But, here comes the value of the frat boy - no, he can't program, he can't even test without being re-trained every 3 hours, but, he can talk football. And, now the the company is starting sales, they need someone who can sell, and support, and talk football with the customers, oh, and it doesn't hurt that he's probably making less than 1/3 my salary. If he's fortunate, he'll slide into some kind of commission based position and should be making more than me within a few years - if the company pulls out of this pit it's in.
Last time I lived this movie I was the "Senior Scientist" and, so, was permitted to "go down with the ship," I was in the core group of about six who were all let go at the end. The engineers who built the product were kicked to the curb about 6 months earlier as "un-necessary expense," and they didn't do it as gracefully that time, as "Senior Scientist," I had a form of sales value, both in talking to prospective customers and in the appearance that the company still had its "core talent" intact. Engineers (and programmers) are viewed by the world as commodity items, and in a well run organization, they are - you don't want a programmer to be irreplaceable. The old company still cycled various forms of sales guys through until the end, because they are the only hope of keeping the company afloat - so, in that phase of the life cycle, frat boy skills become much more valuable.
Some big investor once said that CEOs are all essentially spoiled frat-boys who aren't particularly smart, but they do know enough to protect their position by not keeping anybody smarter than them on the next rung below them, and that most of the underlings also follow this model, so you end up with most of top management being not particularly bright - but they all know how to have a good time and entertain one another. If you want to move among the CEO levels of America, these are the people you have to know how to work with to get deals done. Frat boys have far greater value than any technical competence in that arena.
I taught senior level digital design, these people were graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering within 6 months, and I actually had more than one student who didn't know what a directory tree was or have the foggiest idea of how to use it. Their first argument was "that's not what this class is about, I shouldn't have to know that to do well here." Maybe that argument flies in law school, but if you don't have basic skills, it's no reason for the higher level courses to spoon feed you around your ignorance.
Of course, at the same time I knew self-taught kids in middle school who could create sub-directories with the best of 'em. Attitude is 90% of ability.
Yes, but it's a cathartic release... If you haven't ranted about this lately, it feels good to let it out again.
Yeah, I've not gotten a lot of jobs that way, "something" didn't work out. Interesting thing is, the more layers of the onion you peel back, the less that "something" has to do with you, often they end up not hiring anybody for the position.
it is almost a waste of time to spend 16 weeks learning them.
Almost... for most people, it would be helpful to have done a cubic spline interpolation in school if your boss ever asked you to do a least squares fit of a fifth order polynomial to a dataset (yes, he asked, yes, I did it (two straight days of algebra), no, it wasn't really useful), and similarly, if you have had academic experience doing other optimized stream processing algorithms, then adapting the published running median algorithm to your particular application's needs won't be quite so daunting....
Or, you could do what I did and blow these things off in school and just figure them out when the need arises... but as a hiring manager, I'd much rather hire the kid who at least did something similar in school or a previous job, all too often I've had to do "the hard stuff" for my charges, which can lead to some pretty messy ego problems when they think they are the smartest guy in town.
Oh and you know all those big O notations...
Yeah, I know them well, and a Ph.D employee of mine just couldn't seem to make his histogram code run fast enough, so we dissected it and found he had an un-necessary loop in it (an extra +1 on his O), he never could understand how it worked without that loop....