...it's what government will do with the information. Private citizens shouldn't have an issue; but we should forbid police from having such technology/information. There's a lot that private citizens can and should be able to do that government should not; the few exception are things like weapons of mass destruction and the judicial system.
So the whole degree vs self-taught is sort of a bogus comparison. Many top programmers are both, degree and self-taught are not mutually exclusive.
Actually... the people who are interested enough to learn on their own are the ones that make great programmers. They have the curiosity and drive to do it.
Yes and no. The interest and curiosity are absolutely necessary but often insufficient. People who are purely self-taught often have holes in their knowledge. Their self-study avoided topics that are uninteresting or seem unimportant. Many need that formal environment which forces them to study such topics a little. The person whose self-study covers the full breadth and depth of a formal university program is quite rare. That breadth/depth helps one to become great and many of those with the interest/curiosity need a little external push to get there.
I'm primarily self-taught and augmented by a BA in CS, and I can honestly say that anyone that is self taught typically does better than anyone holding a CS degree. In my case, I often covered the class topics before I took the class - many times in more depth than the class went into, the one exception was probably my Database and Software Engineering classes - the database class not because I had not done SQL on my own prior (I had) but because we covered the Relational Algebra and Relational Calculus mathematic domains in the class, the Software Engineering because I simply had not done much in formal software engineering (I did have a book on it already, just had not yet read it).
So yes, give me a self-taught programmer over a degree holder any day; if the self-taught programmer also has a degree better yet, but I would not require it as they'll typically know where to go to find stuff they don't know and learn it, or at least ask.
Finally, many companies typically will look at degree holders fresh out of college and say "well, we'll hire them but we have to retrain them" versus the self-taught programmer which will normally have prior experience in one form or another, a portfolio, etc that can be evaluated.
Plus the university provides incredible access to hardware and software one would not have had on one's own. Many professors bemoan the number of students lacking the interest/curiosity, and are happy to assist those with the interest/curiosity. I never had a professor in charge of some equipment deny me access to it, even when what I wanted to do had nothing to do with classwork and was just personal curiosity. Professors perfectly willing to discuss some difficulty I was having even when not in a class of theirs. They genuinely want to assist and encourage those with the interest/curiosity. Also your fellow student with the interest/curiosity are an incredible opportunity, meeting in person, looking over one's shoulder when stuck on something, showing you something new and when offline being able to chat about some problem or something new. A team meeting in person can be more powerful and more educational than one only meeting online. The university environment is a rare region incredibly dense with people with the interest/curiosity.
OTOH, many universities don't grade correctly so self-taught programmers have to be more vigilant about how the TA's score their homework, tests, etc.
Case in point: The professors only taught how to use a For loop for infinite loops in the classes - preferring "for(;;){...}" - highly obfuscated compared to other methods, so when I used a While loop - "while(true) {...}" - to do the same thing the TA (who didn't know any better) took points off, my vigilance restored the points.
If one has the opportunity to go to a university they probably should, it will most likely lead them to achieving a higher skill level than they could have on their own.
I won't disagree that it won't add value - but the value for a self-taught programm
I personally recommend people go law, accounting, or a trade. You cannot offshore...
Actually - an accounting firm in my town off-shores the majority of their accounting work to offices that they set up in India.
Please tell so we know who to avoid...they could potentially be running afoul of export control laws too...
I can see certain legal tasks (drafting legal documents, etc) also going offshore as soon as some senior partner at a law firm figures out that they will save money by doing so.
Again, please tell so we know who to avoid...it's also less likely as legal documents often fall into areas where they are not allowed to be exported for various reasons, and yes - anything going to any offshore (i.e foreign) company is an export and falls under export control laws.
I've heard this claim before. It may have been true in the past, but it isn't now. I work for a fairly big company that is headquartered in Texas. My title ends with "software engineer" just the same as my peers that actually work out of the Texas office. We have a competent legal team, so if there were such a restriction, we would honor it.
It would be nice if they dropped it, and frankly that would align them with everyone else. I was familiar with them regulating back around 2003, and it was very CMU SE oriented - e.g highly useless; so it would be very good if it was removed.
Of course, most got around it by simply using a different job title.
It varies a little from state to state, but in general the PE is only necessary for certain regulated work (e.g. civil engineering, building systems, etc.) and if you plan to offer your services to the general public. If you are building assembly equipment for a factory like I do, you won't find a PE anywhere except the building maintenance guys.
Not simply State-to-State but also Country-to-Country depending on what business you are in. If you are doing international business, then you have to take into account where your customers are too.
I'm a mechanical engineer, and while continuing education is certainly necessary for the sake of both myself and the company that I do work for - I am not regulated in any way. It might be different if we did work with the government, but I have no requirement to be a Professional Engineer. I did sit for the test, but since no one at this entire company is certified there was no way to apprentice. Technically I could now sit for the test again and get the certification based on my work experience, but it is simply not worth my time or effort.
That depends on what you want to do. I've seen PE mechanical engineers and there were certain things that only they were allowed to do where we worked; non-PEs could work under them and do the work but it had to be signed off by the PE before it was allowed to get installed for the customer.
I've done software engineering in the past. It was slow and expensive, parts of it were tedious, and parts -- particularly fallout from the fact that (fairly) rigorous software engineering is rarely done -- involved more hassle than they should have been. Even at that job, most of what I did was more traditional software development than engineering, and all my other software-developing jobs have been far from the level of rigor and care that I would call engineering.
However, when I did software engineering, with clearly defined requirements and interfaces, with an explicit architecture and functional decomposition of the software, with carefully planned and executed verification and validation, the results were definitely higher quality than you would get from less time- and labor-intensive methods. Most of the time, cheaper methods are acceptable and worth the increased chance of defects. Flight systems, healthcare, other safety-critical systems, and financial computing usually, and justifiably, prefer to pay for more rigor and higher quality.
The issue there is that software engineering as presently designed is neither practical, nor cost effective, or workable for all but a very few software projects where money is seemingly unlimited or the consequences are too grave.
So why do aspie men have so much trouble finding them?
I have a theory. These men actually do run into their opposite number, but because they both have lower than average empathy, their meeting turns into a tragedy of errors. Maybe she mistakes his attempt to make conversation as sexual harassment, or maybe he mistakes his sexual harassment as still normal male dating behavior.
" So, might individuals and companies think twice about embracing a programming language whose community's Code of Conduct threatens to ruin reputations and ban people from technical support resources for life? "
Or might individuals and companies embrace a programming language whose community that is polite and professional?
Well, they might at first until they run into problems with people representing them getting banned for stupid things. Once that happens companies will realize how hard it is to keep someone in that they have invested a lot of resources and time into ($$). If that is too hard, then companies will leave.
Maybe it is time for people to understand that being straightforward and direct is not the same as being a rude jerk.
+1
If you read the actual proposal you will see that they have a range of options if someone is out of line. I don't know about most people but I have no problem with a life long ban for someone that threatens to kill or rape someone online. And yes it does happen. In fact it has happened to me on Slashdot. It was an AC and it didn't really threaten me much but had it happened to someone else they may have actually been concerned.
True, there is a place for live-long bans. However, it should always be a last resort with numerous attempts at reconciliation, etc before hand.
Well, I think they managed it with the movie reboot - same problems for the same reasons. They had a good chance in both cases to tell some very good and interesting stories, but decided to go their own with time-travel instead, ultimately rewriting the entire story in the process.
I know how you do public/private in C (declare your functions in an.h file, or in the.c file as static). How do you do protected?
The difference between public and protected is in which headers you provide. It's the same as the difference between having a library with a public interface, an internal library interface, and a file internal interface.
I find templates to be one of the most useful features of c++. Although it may not be it's most obvious usage, through templates, you can get zero overhead versions of object oriented programming minus the ability to dynamic cast (static polymorphism).
Most uses of templates are provided by the STL and there is not much need for them in normal programming. That is not to say there are not instances for their use, but there are often better design patterns to be following.
I like the exception pattern when used locally (i.e. within a function), but I think the overhead of actually excepting makes usage of this mechanism undesirable. Although I think compilers may one day (or may already) be able to optimize out the overhead of exceptions when used in a limited scope.
That Exception pattern may be useful - and in all honest it's the only useful pattern for exceptions; anything else makes developers too lazy in handling errors and therefore leads to program terminations that shouldn't happen.
We watch our government ignore anti-monopoly laws. We watch companies try and buy each other for hundreds of billions, knowing full well the DOJ should certainly shoot down the deal. And then we watch those same companies try and try again until they find that loophole (or greased palm) that allows the deal to go through. And it does eventually go through. Every damn time.
Haven't watched the attempted acquisitions of T-Mobile have you? They have yet to get acquired.
Haven't noticed the fact you speak of multiple attempts from multiple vendors when pointing this out? Watch and learn how loopholes are made and used.
Don't worry. Too Big to Fail will win eventually. Look at history.
It is even possible [a hacker] can alter the color bits in a pointer to match the color of a block theywish to access, and thus avoid any crashes and detection.
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
Or on the flip side, as TFA states, the new guys don't want to learn the old stuff - same issue. You have to understand the old stuff to keep from making the same mistakes when writing the new stuff. But re-writing for re-writing sake doesn't provide any purpose; the new guy will say "it's to use XYZ" but if there is no real benefit to the business/customer...
They would claim to understand C++, but not the appeal, as it seems to them to be far easier to do everything in C. The fact that they don't see the appeal is evidenced that they don't understand that c++ actually makes doing things correctly (i.e. maintainable, scalable, modular, etc) easier, maybe because they don't even see the appeal of those features.
I probably tend more toward C than C++, namely because there's a lot of cap in C++ (like streams) that actually make code harder to follow. I like using Objects - and use Classes and Namespaces a lot - but I have rarely found uses for Templates, Streams, and other big C++ functionality. Polymorphism can be your friend when used right. Exceptions should be avoided at all costs.
That said, everything I do in C++ - even object oriented stuff - i also know how to do in a pure C manner, even private/protected/public APIs of an Object.
So it's not necessarily that they don't understand the language. They may very well understand the actual language. But they may not see any real benefit - and therefore appeal - to what is provided that they are not already doing.
We watch our government ignore anti-monopoly laws. We watch companies try and buy each other for hundreds of billions, knowing full well the DOJ should certainly shoot down the deal. And then we watch those same companies try and try again until they find that loophole (or greased palm) that allows the deal to go through. And it does eventually go through. Every damn time.
Haven't watched the attempted acquisitions of T-Mobile have you? They have yet to get acquired.
Even after the media attention has died out, the awareness of the company has been catapulted forward in irrevocable way. No one knew who they were before, now they are known for their media attention getting pay policy, and now people actually know who they are for the business they do. So long as their service makes business sense, awareness acquired under one strategy is not that unreasonable to retain just by 'doing your job'.
Not saying it's a bad idea or can't help or that it's a good idea and can't hurt, just saying this case is a lost cause for a controlled understanding of the impact of this strategy absent of the media attention no matter how close you look and long you wait.
That still only lasts so long. As the GP said, you have to see how they're doing in 1/2/5 years times when media coverage over this PR stunt isn't a factor and he actually has to pay the full marketing cost to keep the same level of customer inquiries. And in fact, this round of follow up is still a follow on effect of the media coverage.
The other side of it is that you also have to evaluate the quality of the customer inquiries. It doesn't help if he went from 100 inquiries with a 80 becoming customers (80%) to 2000 inquiries with only 100 becoming customers; the additional 20 customers doesn't pay for the time in handling the other 1900.
If he can keep the numbers up so that the company grows, great; but it's not likely.
His costs are not beyond market value, because he reduced his million dollar salary to $70K as well.
That has nothing to do with what the GP said which was paying employees beyond their market value. Now, it'll certainly help to retain those employees as they'll be hard pressed to go elsewhere since they won't be able to make the same amount; but it hurts the bottom line in the end, and if he ever IPOs the company or primary ownership (51% stake) otherwise to another party then there will be a reckoning as those new owners would take it as their responsibility to reconcile the employees with their actual market rates in order to raise profits again out of shareholder duty, etc - which he partner can make similar claim against him, even through him out of the company over.
Note: This is one reason why publicly traded companies are usually producing poor products and run by poorly paid employees; because few C-level execs are willing to stand up to the scrutiny for doing the right thing for the company, employees, and customers, and instead acquiesce to what the shareholders want, which is not necessarily the right thing for the company, employees, or customers since too many shareholders only look at the short term profits.
As long as his clients see the reward of staying with him as higher than the risk of moving to a different vendor, they will stay.
And happy employees are one factor in his favour.
The problem is not in keep customers or employees. It is in keeping the advertising sufficiently high enough to bring in enough new customers to keep the business growing sufficiently to pay for the added costs. Right now he's getting free publicity due to the PR stunt, so he doesn't have to pay for the marketing and the customer inquiries are up because more people have heard about the business as a result. However, as time passes unless he invests enough money into marketing to generate an equivalent number of customer inquiries then the numbers are going to go down and the business will have a hard time growing.
To top it off, he's presently experiencing a national marketing campaign that is likely far beyond anything the company could afford prior to the PR stunt let alone after it. So the likelihood of him being able to invest enough money to keep it up is not that great, at least not without figuring a new PR stunt - and the same one won't pay off the same way. (E.g. if he bumps everyone up to $100k/yr, it won't bring in the same returns as the current one did; it may also be met more with more hostility since it would be seen for what it is - a PR stunt to drive free publicity, so not as likely to get the same kind of positive coverage.)
Customer inquiries are customer-initiated cold-calls. They have nothing to do with how happy your employees are.
Exactly. They're entirely related to how well you advertise. Those numbers will fall over time unless he figures out another method of advertising that can keep the numbers up - not likely.
The point of vouchers is to allow parents to evaluate the schools available to them and allow parents to decide.
That's not the point of vouchers. The point of vouchers is for the government to pay a government contractor to run a school, much in the way they paid Blackwater to fight a war. Everything is more expensive, more cheaply done and less effective. It comes down to which contractor has the best inside track to get awarded the pork.
You already have choice. If you don't like the public school in your area, send your kid to private school. Lower working class people have been doing this for half a century.
The issue is that the public school gets paid for all the kids in the district regardless of whether those kids actually attend the public school. That can be $8k/student. The point of vouchers is to redirect those funds to where students actually attend - be it a different public school (charter or otherwise) or a private school of the parent's choice, helping to alleviate the cost on the lower class people (like my parents were).
Same thing happened in the 1990's for tech workers as part of the DotCom Boom. It works for a short time, but only in a very strong economy. The economy isn't good enough to support it like it did then; it's being promulgated for othe reasons right now.
The school "privatization" movement is one of the biggest scandals of the 21st century. Charter schools fail. They exist to funnel money upward, not to educate kids.
Having been in both public and private K12 schools, the above can be said about ANY school - public or private.
There are quite a few below part private schools out there. One of the private schools (School A) I went to got kids from another private school in the area (School B); the kids from School B were A or A/B students at that school, but were C/D/F students at School A.
The point of vouchers is to allow parents to evaluate the schools available to them and allow parents to decide.
One of my neighbor's sent their kids to public schools, but not the one assigned to them because the other one was better for their kids - IIRC, they had to pay something and vouchers likely would have meant they would not have needed to - public school to public school. My parents, OTOH, were never made much while I was in school; vouchers would certainly have helped pay for the private schools we went to.
Where my wife grew up (western Washington State), the public schools were horrid compared to the private schools.
So in the end, you really do have to evaluate the schools available to you and decide which ones are providing the better education for your kids - regardless of public vs private. Vouchers, in this respect, make sense as it provides more freedom to ensure a good education - even public vs public.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's what government will do with the information. Private citizens shouldn't have an issue; but we should forbid police from having such technology/information. There's a lot that private citizens can and should be able to do that government should not; the few exception are things like weapons of mass destruction and the judicial system.
So the whole degree vs self-taught is sort of a bogus comparison. Many top programmers are both, degree and self-taught are not mutually exclusive.
Actually... the people who are interested enough to learn on their own are the ones that make great programmers. They have the curiosity and drive to do it.
Yes and no. The interest and curiosity are absolutely necessary but often insufficient. People who are purely self-taught often have holes in their knowledge. Their self-study avoided topics that are uninteresting or seem unimportant. Many need that formal environment which forces them to study such topics a little. The person whose self-study covers the full breadth and depth of a formal university program is quite rare. That breadth/depth helps one to become great and many of those with the interest/curiosity need a little external push to get there.
I'm primarily self-taught and augmented by a BA in CS, and I can honestly say that anyone that is self taught typically does better than anyone holding a CS degree. In my case, I often covered the class topics before I took the class - many times in more depth than the class went into, the one exception was probably my Database and Software Engineering classes - the database class not because I had not done SQL on my own prior (I had) but because we covered the Relational Algebra and Relational Calculus mathematic domains in the class, the Software Engineering because I simply had not done much in formal software engineering (I did have a book on it already, just had not yet read it).
So yes, give me a self-taught programmer over a degree holder any day; if the self-taught programmer also has a degree better yet, but I would not require it as they'll typically know where to go to find stuff they don't know and learn it, or at least ask.
Finally, many companies typically will look at degree holders fresh out of college and say "well, we'll hire them but we have to retrain them" versus the self-taught programmer which will normally have prior experience in one form or another, a portfolio, etc that can be evaluated.
Plus the university provides incredible access to hardware and software one would not have had on one's own. Many professors bemoan the number of students lacking the interest/curiosity, and are happy to assist those with the interest/curiosity. I never had a professor in charge of some equipment deny me access to it, even when what I wanted to do had nothing to do with classwork and was just personal curiosity. Professors perfectly willing to discuss some difficulty I was having even when not in a class of theirs. They genuinely want to assist and encourage those with the interest/curiosity. Also your fellow student with the interest/curiosity are an incredible opportunity, meeting in person, looking over one's shoulder when stuck on something, showing you something new and when offline being able to chat about some problem or something new. A team meeting in person can be more powerful and more educational than one only meeting online. The university environment is a rare region incredibly dense with people with the interest/curiosity.
OTOH, many universities don't grade correctly so self-taught programmers have to be more vigilant about how the TA's score their homework, tests, etc. Case in point: The professors only taught how to use a For loop for infinite loops in the classes - preferring "for(;;){...}" - highly obfuscated compared to other methods, so when I used a While loop - "while(true) {...}" - to do the same thing the TA (who didn't know any better) took points off, my vigilance restored the points.
If one has the opportunity to go to a university they probably should, it will most likely lead them to achieving a higher skill level than they could have on their own.
I won't disagree that it won't add value - but the value for a self-taught programm
I personally recommend people go law, accounting, or a trade. You cannot offshore ...
Actually - an accounting firm in my town off-shores the majority of their accounting work to offices that they set up in India.
Please tell so we know who to avoid...they could potentially be running afoul of export control laws too...
I can see certain legal tasks (drafting legal documents, etc) also going offshore as soon as some senior partner at a law firm figures out that they will save money by doing so.
Again, please tell so we know who to avoid...it's also less likely as legal documents often fall into areas where they are not allowed to be exported for various reasons, and yes - anything going to any offshore (i.e foreign) company is an export and falls under export control laws.
I've heard this claim before. It may have been true in the past, but it isn't now. I work for a fairly big company that is headquartered in Texas. My title ends with "software engineer" just the same as my peers that actually work out of the Texas office. We have a competent legal team, so if there were such a restriction, we would honor it.
It would be nice if they dropped it, and frankly that would align them with everyone else. I was familiar with them regulating back around 2003, and it was very CMU SE oriented - e.g highly useless; so it would be very good if it was removed.
Of course, most got around it by simply using a different job title.
It varies a little from state to state, but in general the PE is only necessary for certain regulated work (e.g. civil engineering, building systems, etc.) and if you plan to offer your services to the general public. If you are building assembly equipment for a factory like I do, you won't find a PE anywhere except the building maintenance guys.
Not simply State-to-State but also Country-to-Country depending on what business you are in. If you are doing international business, then you have to take into account where your customers are too.
I'm a mechanical engineer, and while continuing education is certainly necessary for the sake of both myself and the company that I do work for - I am not regulated in any way. It might be different if we did work with the government, but I have no requirement to be a Professional Engineer. I did sit for the test, but since no one at this entire company is certified there was no way to apprentice. Technically I could now sit for the test again and get the certification based on my work experience, but it is simply not worth my time or effort.
That depends on what you want to do. I've seen PE mechanical engineers and there were certain things that only they were allowed to do where we worked; non-PEs could work under them and do the work but it had to be signed off by the PE before it was allowed to get installed for the customer.
Well, if you try to call yourself a Software Engineer in the state of Texas, you'll get yourself in trouble as it's legally a regulated title there.
I've done software engineering in the past. It was slow and expensive, parts of it were tedious, and parts -- particularly fallout from the fact that (fairly) rigorous software engineering is rarely done -- involved more hassle than they should have been. Even at that job, most of what I did was more traditional software development than engineering, and all my other software-developing jobs have been far from the level of rigor and care that I would call engineering.
However, when I did software engineering, with clearly defined requirements and interfaces, with an explicit architecture and functional decomposition of the software, with carefully planned and executed verification and validation, the results were definitely higher quality than you would get from less time- and labor-intensive methods. Most of the time, cheaper methods are acceptable and worth the increased chance of defects. Flight systems, healthcare, other safety-critical systems, and financial computing usually, and justifiably, prefer to pay for more rigor and higher quality.
The issue there is that software engineering as presently designed is neither practical, nor cost effective, or workable for all but a very few software projects where money is seemingly unlimited or the consequences are too grave.
"There are just as many aspie women as men."
So why do aspie men have so much trouble finding them?
I have a theory. These men actually do run into their opposite number, but because they both have lower than average empathy, their meeting turns into a tragedy of errors. Maybe she mistakes his attempt to make conversation as sexual harassment, or maybe he mistakes his sexual harassment as still normal male dating behavior.
Like with Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory...
" So, might individuals and companies think twice about embracing a programming language whose community's Code of Conduct threatens to ruin reputations and ban people from technical support resources for life? "
Or might individuals and companies embrace a programming language whose community that is polite and professional?
Well, they might at first until they run into problems with people representing them getting banned for stupid things. Once that happens companies will realize how hard it is to keep someone in that they have invested a lot of resources and time into ($$). If that is too hard, then companies will leave.
Maybe it is time for people to understand that being straightforward and direct is not the same as being a rude jerk.
+1
If you read the actual proposal you will see that they have a range of options if someone is out of line. I don't know about most people but I have no problem with a life long ban for someone that threatens to kill or rape someone online. And yes it does happen. In fact it has happened to me on Slashdot. It was an AC and it didn't really threaten me much but had it happened to someone else they may have actually been concerned.
True, there is a place for live-long bans. However, it should always be a last resort with numerous attempts at reconciliation, etc before hand.
It can't get any worse than Enterprise.
Well, I think they managed it with the movie reboot - same problems for the same reasons. They had a good chance in both cases to tell some very good and interesting stories, but decided to go their own with time-travel instead, ultimately rewriting the entire story in the process.
I know how you do public/private in C (declare your functions in an .h file, or in the .c file as static). How do you do protected?
The difference between public and protected is in which headers you provide. It's the same as the difference between having a library with a public interface, an internal library interface, and a file internal interface.
I find templates to be one of the most useful features of c++. Although it may not be it's most obvious usage, through templates, you can get zero overhead versions of object oriented programming minus the ability to dynamic cast (static polymorphism).
Most uses of templates are provided by the STL and there is not much need for them in normal programming. That is not to say there are not instances for their use, but there are often better design patterns to be following.
I like the exception pattern when used locally (i.e. within a function), but I think the overhead of actually excepting makes usage of this mechanism undesirable. Although I think compilers may one day (or may already) be able to optimize out the overhead of exceptions when used in a limited scope.
That Exception pattern may be useful - and in all honest it's the only useful pattern for exceptions; anything else makes developers too lazy in handling errors and therefore leads to program terminations that shouldn't happen.
We watch our government ignore anti-monopoly laws. We watch companies try and buy each other for hundreds of billions, knowing full well the DOJ should certainly shoot down the deal. And then we watch those same companies try and try again until they find that loophole (or greased palm) that allows the deal to go through. And it does eventually go through. Every damn time.
Haven't watched the attempted acquisitions of T-Mobile have you? They have yet to get acquired.
Haven't noticed the fact you speak of multiple attempts from multiple vendors when pointing this out? Watch and learn how loopholes are made and used.
Don't worry. Too Big to Fail will win eventually. Look at history.
Too big to fail eventually fails.
It is even possible [a hacker] can alter the color bits in a pointer to match the color of a block they wish to access, and thus avoid any crashes and detection.
Go ahead, mod me down as a troll.
Even better - fully inclusive ;-)
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
Or on the flip side, as TFA states, the new guys don't want to learn the old stuff - same issue. You have to understand the old stuff to keep from making the same mistakes when writing the new stuff. But re-writing for re-writing sake doesn't provide any purpose; the new guy will say "it's to use XYZ" but if there is no real benefit to the business/customer...
They would claim to understand C++, but not the appeal, as it seems to them to be far easier to do everything in C. The fact that they don't see the appeal is evidenced that they don't understand that c++ actually makes doing things correctly (i.e. maintainable, scalable, modular, etc) easier, maybe because they don't even see the appeal of those features.
I probably tend more toward C than C++, namely because there's a lot of cap in C++ (like streams) that actually make code harder to follow. I like using Objects - and use Classes and Namespaces a lot - but I have rarely found uses for Templates, Streams, and other big C++ functionality. Polymorphism can be your friend when used right. Exceptions should be avoided at all costs.
That said, everything I do in C++ - even object oriented stuff - i also know how to do in a pure C manner, even private/protected/public APIs of an Object.
So it's not necessarily that they don't understand the language. They may very well understand the actual language. But they may not see any real benefit - and therefore appeal - to what is provided that they are not already doing.
We watch our government ignore anti-monopoly laws. We watch companies try and buy each other for hundreds of billions, knowing full well the DOJ should certainly shoot down the deal. And then we watch those same companies try and try again until they find that loophole (or greased palm) that allows the deal to go through. And it does eventually go through. Every damn time.
Haven't watched the attempted acquisitions of T-Mobile have you? They have yet to get acquired.
Even after the media attention has died out, the awareness of the company has been catapulted forward in irrevocable way. No one knew who they were before, now they are known for their media attention getting pay policy, and now people actually know who they are for the business they do. So long as their service makes business sense, awareness acquired under one strategy is not that unreasonable to retain just by 'doing your job'.
Not saying it's a bad idea or can't help or that it's a good idea and can't hurt, just saying this case is a lost cause for a controlled understanding of the impact of this strategy absent of the media attention no matter how close you look and long you wait.
That still only lasts so long. As the GP said, you have to see how they're doing in 1/2/5 years times when media coverage over this PR stunt isn't a factor and he actually has to pay the full marketing cost to keep the same level of customer inquiries. And in fact, this round of follow up is still a follow on effect of the media coverage.
The other side of it is that you also have to evaluate the quality of the customer inquiries. It doesn't help if he went from 100 inquiries with a 80 becoming customers (80%) to 2000 inquiries with only 100 becoming customers; the additional 20 customers doesn't pay for the time in handling the other 1900.
If he can keep the numbers up so that the company grows, great; but it's not likely.
His costs are not beyond market value, because he reduced his million dollar salary to $70K as well.
That has nothing to do with what the GP said which was paying employees beyond their market value. Now, it'll certainly help to retain those employees as they'll be hard pressed to go elsewhere since they won't be able to make the same amount; but it hurts the bottom line in the end, and if he ever IPOs the company or primary ownership (51% stake) otherwise to another party then there will be a reckoning as those new owners would take it as their responsibility to reconcile the employees with their actual market rates in order to raise profits again out of shareholder duty, etc - which he partner can make similar claim against him, even through him out of the company over.
Note: This is one reason why publicly traded companies are usually producing poor products and run by poorly paid employees; because few C-level execs are willing to stand up to the scrutiny for doing the right thing for the company, employees, and customers, and instead acquiesce to what the shareholders want, which is not necessarily the right thing for the company, employees, or customers since too many shareholders only look at the short term profits.
It probably won't change much, do to inertia.
As long as his clients see the reward of staying with him as higher than the risk of moving to a different vendor, they will stay.
And happy employees are one factor in his favour.
The problem is not in keep customers or employees. It is in keeping the advertising sufficiently high enough to bring in enough new customers to keep the business growing sufficiently to pay for the added costs. Right now he's getting free publicity due to the PR stunt, so he doesn't have to pay for the marketing and the customer inquiries are up because more people have heard about the business as a result. However, as time passes unless he invests enough money into marketing to generate an equivalent number of customer inquiries then the numbers are going to go down and the business will have a hard time growing.
To top it off, he's presently experiencing a national marketing campaign that is likely far beyond anything the company could afford prior to the PR stunt let alone after it. So the likelihood of him being able to invest enough money to keep it up is not that great, at least not without figuring a new PR stunt - and the same one won't pay off the same way. (E.g. if he bumps everyone up to $100k/yr, it won't bring in the same returns as the current one did; it may also be met more with more hostility since it would be seen for what it is - a PR stunt to drive free publicity, so not as likely to get the same kind of positive coverage.)
Customer inquiries are customer-initiated cold-calls. They have nothing to do with how happy your employees are.
Exactly. They're entirely related to how well you advertise. Those numbers will fall over time unless he figures out another method of advertising that can keep the numbers up - not likely.
That's not the point of vouchers. The point of vouchers is for the government to pay a government contractor to run a school, much in the way they paid Blackwater to fight a war. Everything is more expensive, more cheaply done and less effective. It comes down to which contractor has the best inside track to get awarded the pork.
You already have choice. If you don't like the public school in your area, send your kid to private school. Lower working class people have been doing this for half a century.
The issue is that the public school gets paid for all the kids in the district regardless of whether those kids actually attend the public school. That can be $8k/student. The point of vouchers is to redirect those funds to where students actually attend - be it a different public school (charter or otherwise) or a private school of the parent's choice, helping to alleviate the cost on the lower class people (like my parents were).
Same thing happened in the 1990's for tech workers as part of the DotCom Boom. It works for a short time, but only in a very strong economy. The economy isn't good enough to support it like it did then; it's being promulgated for othe reasons right now.
The school "privatization" movement is one of the biggest scandals of the 21st century. Charter schools fail. They exist to funnel money upward, not to educate kids.
Having been in both public and private K12 schools, the above can be said about ANY school - public or private.
There are quite a few below part private schools out there. One of the private schools (School A) I went to got kids from another private school in the area (School B); the kids from School B were A or A/B students at that school, but were C/D/F students at School A.
The point of vouchers is to allow parents to evaluate the schools available to them and allow parents to decide.
One of my neighbor's sent their kids to public schools, but not the one assigned to them because the other one was better for their kids - IIRC, they had to pay something and vouchers likely would have meant they would not have needed to - public school to public school. My parents, OTOH, were never made much while I was in school; vouchers would certainly have helped pay for the private schools we went to.
Where my wife grew up (western Washington State), the public schools were horrid compared to the private schools.
So in the end, you really do have to evaluate the schools available to you and decide which ones are providing the better education for your kids - regardless of public vs private. Vouchers, in this respect, make sense as it provides more freedom to ensure a good education - even public vs public.