Reminds me of a Simpsons episode Homer- "bring in the elephant and monkey to fight for my amusement" Burns"God like worship... even the monkey and elephant had some merit, but treating employee's fairly?" Or something like that
oh come on, how is this flamebait? if I had said M$ sucks and is for the ignorant masses that would be flamebait but a simple statement of fact does not constitute flamebait. Frontpage simply does not produce code as well as Dreamweaver and is very lacking in features. It is great for a starter and when notepad is not available but show me stats that have frontpage out preforming Dreamweaver and I will concede.
Which is the point, Google comes out with some phenomenal products and yes I am a Google fan boy but Google is a long way away from replacing my Office 2007 addiction. Toys are nice and useful, there are some great stitch programs and the auto fill-in is a neat concept, but it just doesn't compete with the CS studio, you can do a couple things well but the CS studio is a complete robust solution for doing professional work not just a toy, which is why Adobe feels they can charge their exorbitant prices and people will pay them.
Sorry but I don't buy it, This will be a competition for Adobe the way Frontpage is competition for Dreamweaver....people just know better and if you don't well I pity the company that you work for.
Actually since I (COMON$) created the universe mere seconds before either of you and granted you the memories you have of creating the universe for my own amusement I revoke your infallibility and shall use your lives as humorous toys for my own purposes for being arrogant;).
since you are on topic and this is a rather interesting post and I don't think I will fear the usual drivel coming out here I will break my promise and post a reply. I say you and I are along the same reasoning I am a creationist myself, however I do not rule out the idea that I may be wrong (eternity is a long time to be wrong).
Therefore, I am very interested in the lineage of hominids, fact is fact except when it isn't, but that is where faith comes in (Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see Heb. 11:1). Without the use of one hell of a mirror and a couple wormholes we will never know exactly what happened in the beginning but we can come up with some great theories none of which can possibly preclude a creator be it an omnipotent deity or a clever scientific mind. I would like to think in another life I was an anthropologist.
I do however think it is interesting to see two lines co-existing and really look forward to the research that will come out of this exceptional find. I will have to read more, but what allows this kind of thing to occur, did one migrate away and follow a different evolutionary track and eventually come back? When they did come back did they mingle with the race they found, or did they war with them? Did they have children? Things like this are exciting in that they grant us more evidence to what the truth is. As long as people keep their minds open we will find the truth of our history, even if it is not what we hope for.
And to complete my prophecy in the last post therefore nullifying anything I say here I shall say one horrific statement to all "The Great Spaghetti monster was Hitler".
Everyone huh, just because you seem like someone fun to piss off because of your generalizations I will post to let you know that I do not like utorrent better, there just crushed all your hopes and dreams of your generalization working;)
which every time a good article comes out about human origins we degrade to creationism bashing rather than discussing the actual article. But nonetheless we cannot rule out all forms of creationism simply because a person is an atheist or some other hater of religion. There still is are very likely possibilities that could have occurred that these new finds may support regarding evolution. Such as this planet being terraformed or being used as a planting ground for a new species by an older race. Just because it has been part of a sci-fi novel doesn't mean that it cannot be true or be taken seriously. Yes it can be proved, eg the creators come down and correct us and show well documented code:).
But I shall not post on this article anymore because inevitably the conversation will degrade into drivel of God fearing individuals vs people angry at God, pissing on each other then there will be a couple references to the great spaghetti monster and a few obscure misinterpretations of the Koran and Bible then some fear mongering and finally Godwin's Law takes effect...
Well said, as long as COBOL is being used in the production environment it will not be a toy language especially when you can earn those nice salaries that come with being a cobol geek. PHP has had a problem with being treated as a toy language, I simply tinker with it because it is easy to understand but with PHP4 finally being kicked out the door and PHP5 enforcing stricter rules it is becoming a more serious language. It is still a big contender with.net in many shops but I think eventually what we know as PHP of the last 10 years will be like cobol by 2015 unless it picks up the pace (which it shows it is doing). But then again I know little about PHP compared to C++ and perl.
I like smaller companies exactly for the reason that you are mentioning, much more personable people. A real "do what you can to get the company going" mentality. I came from gov't work and the freedom of not working in a corporate environment is great, I make 15% more get to wear shorts and sandals to work, a benefits package to die for, and I work with highly trained professionals rather than glorified secretaries.
Private health insurance is exhorbitantly expensive.
Amen to that, I did the math of being a consultant and private health care for my family was the number 1 reason not to do it. Although I have found that in my job search, smaller companies have better perks than corporations a lot of the time, at least here in the midwest. With the exception of Conagra, who have sweet benefits.
As for COBOL, yes it has been a powerful language as many have been and many will be. However in today's market the syntax and the algorithms used in COBOL just dont translate to current languages. A java programmer can leap to C++ or.NET easily and vice versa because the language is current and similar styles. COBOL is so different from pretty much everything and (here is a matter of religious debate) IMHO not nearly as powerful/Useful as the object orientated languages of today. Thus the great migration that you will probably be a part of and retire with your millions, because those 20K compilers have nothing on the multi million dollar migration costs.
2 weeks will never replace the difference in 50K of salary. If it does the 50K more a year person is a fraud. The difference comes in the quality of development that comes out of the individual. If it only takes 2 weeks to train someone up to your level I would strongly suggest that you may be overpaid or your job is much simpler than a programmer worth 50K more would ever even think of applying for. I am no where near the top of the chain of what I did at my last job and it took me 2 weeks alone to just give a brief overview and 120 page document for my sucessor and in no way was the documentation complete.
As for your 20something workhorses you as a manager need to learn that there is a difference between a workhorse putting in hours and a workhorse that can get a weeks worth of 20 something work done in a day. I know a couple programmers who can for a fraction of the price punch out what the 20 somethings in half the time and a product that you will not recode when you learn the crap mistakes the 20 somethings are learning on your buck.
Case and point, think of when you first started coding, go back and look at the code, how much better are you now than then?
first you said: It is all in COBOL with a little other stuff thrown in when COBOL won't work.
Then you said: you can do anything with a modern COBOL compiler that you can do with any number of other languages. couldn't help but notice the discrepencies....unless you are either admitting that A: You don't know that much about COBOL and are just regurgitating what some old COBOL programmer told you or B: You understand that certain things can be done much better in certain languages.
And this is the point that shows if you are really a good coder. It is easy to pick up a language and start typing it. But to really understand what it is doing and the architecture that it uses is when you really become good at it. So you can see the difference between an expert/guru by how they use their current language and what they can tell you about it. A good programmer can code and keep you out of trouble but a great programmer uses a language like a wrench, sounds a bit kung fu ish but that is the way it goes and it is the essential reason programming architecture classes are taught to BSCS students so that they are platform independent coders. A CS student uses the language to serve a purpose and will then pick what they need to best fit the need. Where as traditional programmers learned one language and make it fit the project. Of course I am biased to CS students but they just make damn good developers once they get their feet wet. I would hire a CS student with 3 years experience over a dev with 7 any day.
There is a reason that most of the backend code for banks and insurance companies are written in COBOL. Yes I remember reading about it in history classes:) It was an elegant solution for a more civilized age. But as languages evolved so did the arcitectures that evolved from them. You dont use BASIC for much anymore but it served as a hell of a platform not too long ago. But then again any middle schooler can pick up BASIC. it is a great entry level language.
As for your comment that you can do anything with a modern COBOL compiler you can do the same thing with assembler, but there are better ways now. The reason the banks are sticking with COBOL is mainly the cost to migrate. If I were in your shoes with a ton of COBOL experience, I would do research on what COBOL is being migrated to with companies that have made the switch and i would become as familliar as possible with those and you will be a highly desirable person very very soon.
welcome to the working world. The specialized knowledge you seek doesnt come from your first job. It comes from taking a thousand crap jobs and compiling information as you go. If you seek to be specialized in mainframe development then you have a long path in front of you, as there are many more experienced mainframe developers with a good 15 years of experience ahead of you.
However if you are one of the aforementioned mainframe experts then you need to take a crap job or some side jobs as a web developer, starting off working for free for non-profits and the like, then as your skills progress you can start charging then work your way up from there. Then you can start looking for the mainframe web devs that you are aiming for. However if you are like most people you become a specialist because that is where the job field led you. You may see that there is a good paycheck in the area or it may interest you but that is exactly why those jobs pay well, because they are a rare person and unless a trade school offers a program you are SOL.
The purpose of the article is to explain that a good dev can make up for some serious problems as a beginner programmer, or if your company is big enough you can hire the underlings to do the crap coding while the expert does all the engineering, planning and actual Development. Those entry level people pay their dues coding and recoding the same scripts over and over for the guru and after a while they move up, taking that knowledge with them. However if a company cannot afford a whole host of devs, they had better hire the good ones rather than the entry level employees.
COBOL is not really a programming language, thus the reason it is dying. I know I am being a snob, but the quality that makes COBOL great (eg anyone can write and become an expert), is also the quality that makes the devs go back to college to learn the complexities of PHP or another object orientated language. I learned C++ initially and ended up moving to Java and Perl and indeed it was a simple switch. Of course now I have discarded all and become a SysAdmin:)
Sorry that is not the way the world works, at least not the commerce society. You get paid a general permium about what they mentioned, the real premium is beign so good at your job that you have no fear anymore. Getting fired is a perk meaning you get signing bonuses for your next job. Choosing your office to working is a perk as well, while at the lower end you spend your time just trying to be employed.
Uber programers do exist, and yes they are paid very well, but it would be an HR nightmare to prove that Johnny X does the work of 10 people so he should be paid what 10 people are, thus the reason it is not done.
While I am not a dev, Sysadmin here, this is probably the best article I have read on the subject in a long time. This idea of lets get someone in and train them up is assinine. Of course not every company can afford 120K a year but what about the lower end, midwest people get hit up with 45K a year jobs all the time, if the company would jump to 60-70K they would get 2X the dev and also get a much better product. I am currently with a company that made the mistake of hiring a below par employee to dev a site. Now they lucked out and got someone for the same price who doesnt care about salary but it a hell of a PHP developer, probably the best I have ever worked with. He spends 90% of his time fixing mistakes of the last dev and does things in minutes that took his predecessor days.
Same concept goes with my job field, I spend a considerable amount of time consulting, fixing poorly configured networks and servers. You cant just grab a joe off the street and expect him to be a professional or put out professional work without having learned his/her lessons, they will make mistakes learning, do you want it to be on your buck and your network?
Computer Science is no more about Computers than Astronomy is about Telescopes - Dijkstra
I am a System Administrator with a CS degree, and while I dont think you need a CS degree to be a hell of a SysAdmin I do think it helps you come to the conclusion that you made above much quicker and helps you understand the true purpose of your job. I picked SysAdmin over being an Academic or Engineer because it allowed me to compile multiple technologies and entertain information flow solutions. As a CS individual I see flow of data rather than platforms such as MS, BSD, OSX, Cisco, HP or whatever. i would say an IT person (depending on what they do) is more of a Contractor to a house than a janitor, Janitors are the interns and Level 1 & 2 techs. Once you move into a creative mind you become something a bit more, although you are still support staff and will always remain so.
I say we just give any and all female hires shiny new Sig sidearms with a license to shoot anyone (especially upper management) that harasses them.
Even though you jest here are you suggesting that we give women special privileges in the IT Business world? I certainly hope not, having tutored both males and females in the CS field for a couple of years I found that the females were particularly gifted compared to males in the same class.
I think a more important study here isn't looking at numbers but looking at how many females go into IT then drop out due to an uncomfortable atmosphere.
This argument has been debated way too much, I don't think there is an issue in IT any more than there is an issue in the military, autobody shops, Department Stores, Support staff members (secretaries), Janitors, or any other profession that is tilted one way or another. I think what pisses off the feminists here is that IT is a well paid field and people want a bite of the pie and if the only way to do that is to get special privelages then go for it.
Personally I loved talking to my female friends in college who started off in Engineering so they could get all the scholarships while they worked on there general courses. Or my american buddy who just happens to have a korean heritage, but raised by white americans from birth, in a white suburb, in middle class. Yet gets thousands of dollars to go to college as a minority.
The solution here is not to grant special privelages to individuals the solution is the education of people already in the field to accept the minorities.
It is just a peeve of my to hear about solutions to force people into fields rather than just letting things roll out the way they do, each gender has things they are better at, fact of life we will never be equal and thank goodness because if we were the world would crash. Each life is worth the same but all have different gifts. If you wish to debate this then go find a Nature vs Nuture forum.
And yes I am referencing the book and not the movie. Remember the book made this point if you have the stories fresh in your memory. How the computers had most likely already taken into account the revolutions that would occur due to humanity discovering its submissive state.
I thought the point was that the 3 laws worked perfectly, humans just didn't want to accept the conclusion. For discussion purposes it brings up a great philosophy debate.
What is the Price of Happiness? What would be acceptable to achieve it? If we were no longer in control but utterly happy and blissful for the rest of our lives would this be a good thing?
Humans have proved throughout time that they love control, freedom is always portrayed as the ultimate good, happiness falls far short.
In the end the three laws weren't stupid or incomplete, the conclusion of I Robot is that humanity cannot live in a state of submission no matter the consequence because we need power.
I would like to see some stats to back that up. As a dead soldier has to have a replacement trained and sent out, not to mention the price of paying the family and military funerals and all that jazz.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a Simpsons episode Homer- "bring in the elephant and monkey to fight for my amusement" Burns"God like worship... even the monkey and elephant had some merit, but treating employee's fairly?" Or something like that
oh come on, how is this flamebait? if I had said M$ sucks and is for the ignorant masses that would be flamebait but a simple statement of fact does not constitute flamebait. Frontpage simply does not produce code as well as Dreamweaver and is very lacking in features. It is great for a starter and when notepad is not available but show me stats that have frontpage out preforming Dreamweaver and I will concede.
Which is the point, Google comes out with some phenomenal products and yes I am a Google fan boy but Google is a long way away from replacing my Office 2007 addiction. Toys are nice and useful, there are some great stitch programs and the auto fill-in is a neat concept, but it just doesn't compete with the CS studio, you can do a couple things well but the CS studio is a complete robust solution for doing professional work not just a toy, which is why Adobe feels they can charge their exorbitant prices and people will pay them.
Well said my good sir, well said.
Sorry but I don't buy it, This will be a competition for Adobe the way Frontpage is competition for Dreamweaver....people just know better and if you don't well I pity the company that you work for.
Actually since I (COMON$) created the universe mere seconds before either of you and granted you the memories you have of creating the universe for my own amusement I revoke your infallibility and shall use your lives as humorous toys for my own purposes for being arrogant ;).
Therefore, I am very interested in the lineage of hominids, fact is fact except when it isn't, but that is where faith comes in (Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see Heb. 11:1). Without the use of one hell of a mirror and a couple wormholes we will never know exactly what happened in the beginning but we can come up with some great theories none of which can possibly preclude a creator be it an omnipotent deity or a clever scientific mind. I would like to think in another life I was an anthropologist.
I do however think it is interesting to see two lines co-existing and really look forward to the research that will come out of this exceptional find. I will have to read more, but what allows this kind of thing to occur, did one migrate away and follow a different evolutionary track and eventually come back? When they did come back did they mingle with the race they found, or did they war with them? Did they have children? Things like this are exciting in that they grant us more evidence to what the truth is. As long as people keep their minds open we will find the truth of our history, even if it is not what we hope for.
And to complete my prophecy in the last post therefore nullifying anything I say here I shall say one horrific statement to all "The Great Spaghetti monster was Hitler".
Everyone huh, just because you seem like someone fun to piss off because of your generalizations I will post to let you know that I do not like utorrent better, there just crushed all your hopes and dreams of your generalization working ;)
But I shall not post on this article anymore because inevitably the conversation will degrade into drivel of God fearing individuals vs people angry at God, pissing on each other then there will be a couple references to the great spaghetti monster and a few obscure misinterpretations of the Koran and Bible then some fear mongering and finally Godwin's Law takes effect...
I like smaller companies exactly for the reason that you are mentioning, much more personable people. A real "do what you can to get the company going" mentality. I came from gov't work and the freedom of not working in a corporate environment is great, I make 15% more get to wear shorts and sandals to work, a benefits package to die for, and I work with highly trained professionals rather than glorified secretaries.
Amen to that, I did the math of being a consultant and private health care for my family was the number 1 reason not to do it. Although I have found that in my job search, smaller companies have better perks than corporations a lot of the time, at least here in the midwest. With the exception of Conagra, who have sweet benefits.
As for COBOL, yes it has been a powerful language as many have been and many will be. However in today's market the syntax and the algorithms used in COBOL just dont translate to current languages. A java programmer can leap to C++ or .NET easily and vice versa because the language is current and similar styles. COBOL is so different from pretty much everything and (here is a matter of religious debate) IMHO not nearly as powerful/Useful as the object orientated languages of today. Thus the great migration that you will probably be a part of and retire with your millions, because those 20K compilers have nothing on the multi million dollar migration costs.
As for your 20something workhorses you as a manager need to learn that there is a difference between a workhorse putting in hours and a workhorse that can get a weeks worth of 20 something work done in a day. I know a couple programmers who can for a fraction of the price punch out what the 20 somethings in half the time and a product that you will not recode when you learn the crap mistakes the 20 somethings are learning on your buck.
Case and point, think of when you first started coding, go back and look at the code, how much better are you now than then?
Then you said: you can do anything with a modern COBOL compiler that you can do with any number of other languages. couldn't help but notice the discrepencies....unless you are either admitting that A: You don't know that much about COBOL and are just regurgitating what some old COBOL programmer told you or B: You understand that certain things can be done much better in certain languages.
And this is the point that shows if you are really a good coder. It is easy to pick up a language and start typing it. But to really understand what it is doing and the architecture that it uses is when you really become good at it. So you can see the difference between an expert/guru by how they use their current language and what they can tell you about it. A good programmer can code and keep you out of trouble but a great programmer uses a language like a wrench, sounds a bit kung fu ish but that is the way it goes and it is the essential reason programming architecture classes are taught to BSCS students so that they are platform independent coders. A CS student uses the language to serve a purpose and will then pick what they need to best fit the need. Where as traditional programmers learned one language and make it fit the project. Of course I am biased to CS students but they just make damn good developers once they get their feet wet. I would hire a CS student with 3 years experience over a dev with 7 any day.
As for your comment that you can do anything with a modern COBOL compiler you can do the same thing with assembler, but there are better ways now. The reason the banks are sticking with COBOL is mainly the cost to migrate. If I were in your shoes with a ton of COBOL experience, I would do research on what COBOL is being migrated to with companies that have made the switch and i would become as familliar as possible with those and you will be a highly desirable person very very soon.
you would be suprised what people go back to college to learn....I saw some people drop a couple grand to learn perl just the other day :)
However if you are one of the aforementioned mainframe experts then you need to take a crap job or some side jobs as a web developer, starting off working for free for non-profits and the like, then as your skills progress you can start charging then work your way up from there. Then you can start looking for the mainframe web devs that you are aiming for. However if you are like most people you become a specialist because that is where the job field led you. You may see that there is a good paycheck in the area or it may interest you but that is exactly why those jobs pay well, because they are a rare person and unless a trade school offers a program you are SOL.
The purpose of the article is to explain that a good dev can make up for some serious problems as a beginner programmer, or if your company is big enough you can hire the underlings to do the crap coding while the expert does all the engineering, planning and actual Development. Those entry level people pay their dues coding and recoding the same scripts over and over for the guru and after a while they move up, taking that knowledge with them. However if a company cannot afford a whole host of devs, they had better hire the good ones rather than the entry level employees.
COBOL is not really a programming language, thus the reason it is dying. I know I am being a snob, but the quality that makes COBOL great (eg anyone can write and become an expert), is also the quality that makes the devs go back to college to learn the complexities of PHP or another object orientated language. I learned C++ initially and ended up moving to Java and Perl and indeed it was a simple switch. Of course now I have discarded all and become a SysAdmin :)
Uber programers do exist, and yes they are paid very well, but it would be an HR nightmare to prove that Johnny X does the work of 10 people so he should be paid what 10 people are, thus the reason it is not done.
Same concept goes with my job field, I spend a considerable amount of time consulting, fixing poorly configured networks and servers. You cant just grab a joe off the street and expect him to be a professional or put out professional work without having learned his/her lessons, they will make mistakes learning, do you want it to be on your buck and your network?
Computer Science is no more about Computers than Astronomy is about Telescopes - Dijkstra
I am a System Administrator with a CS degree, and while I dont think you need a CS degree to be a hell of a SysAdmin I do think it helps you come to the conclusion that you made above much quicker and helps you understand the true purpose of your job. I picked SysAdmin over being an Academic or Engineer because it allowed me to compile multiple technologies and entertain information flow solutions. As a CS individual I see flow of data rather than platforms such as MS, BSD, OSX, Cisco, HP or whatever. i would say an IT person (depending on what they do) is more of a Contractor to a house than a janitor, Janitors are the interns and Level 1 & 2 techs. Once you move into a creative mind you become something a bit more, although you are still support staff and will always remain so.
Even though you jest here are you suggesting that we give women special privileges in the IT Business world? I certainly hope not, having tutored both males and females in the CS field for a couple of years I found that the females were particularly gifted compared to males in the same class.
I think a more important study here isn't looking at numbers but looking at how many females go into IT then drop out due to an uncomfortable atmosphere.
This argument has been debated way too much, I don't think there is an issue in IT any more than there is an issue in the military, autobody shops, Department Stores, Support staff members (secretaries), Janitors, or any other profession that is tilted one way or another. I think what pisses off the feminists here is that IT is a well paid field and people want a bite of the pie and if the only way to do that is to get special privelages then go for it.
Personally I loved talking to my female friends in college who started off in Engineering so they could get all the scholarships while they worked on there general courses. Or my american buddy who just happens to have a korean heritage, but raised by white americans from birth, in a white suburb, in middle class. Yet gets thousands of dollars to go to college as a minority.
The solution here is not to grant special privelages to individuals the solution is the education of people already in the field to accept the minorities.
It is just a peeve of my to hear about solutions to force people into fields rather than just letting things roll out the way they do, each gender has things they are better at, fact of life we will never be equal and thank goodness because if we were the world would crash. Each life is worth the same but all have different gifts. If you wish to debate this then go find a Nature vs Nuture forum.
And yes I am referencing the book and not the movie. Remember the book made this point if you have the stories fresh in your memory. How the computers had most likely already taken into account the revolutions that would occur due to humanity discovering its submissive state.
What is the Price of Happiness? What would be acceptable to achieve it? If we were no longer in control but utterly happy and blissful for the rest of our lives would this be a good thing?
Humans have proved throughout time that they love control, freedom is always portrayed as the ultimate good, happiness falls far short.
In the end the three laws weren't stupid or incomplete, the conclusion of I Robot is that humanity cannot live in a state of submission no matter the consequence because we need power.
I would like to see some stats to back that up. As a dead soldier has to have a replacement trained and sent out, not to mention the price of paying the family and military funerals and all that jazz.