It matters a lot where these internship students are going to learn the practical issues of their work. There are companies with good working methods, and companies where adhocism, office politics, mismanagement, shadowy financial interests, stupidity, and lack of skills have created a negative counterproductive culture forcing everyone involved (sometimes even middle managers themselves) to leave their brains at the gate. In this kind of companies, engineering, especially software engineering (but unfortunately, also civil engineering, and this sometimes mean death for the users of the finished projects) is done in a fashion that defies any law of logic, intelligence, and organisation. Imagine a bunch of sloppy brainless underpaid engineers, surrounded by a dozen of incompetent managers interrupting them with 'urgent tasks' often requiring new hires to perform their tasks in a certain way, 'because that is how it was always done here', even when there are better alternatives.
An intern going to a sloppy company of this kind will only learn to shut off their brain during 9-to-5.
It would be a much more enjoyable and productive learning experience for interns to work on 'free culture' projects, like open-source, open-content, and open-hardware (nowadays we have processing cores under the GPL). No office politics (there are, of course, some other kind of personality politics in open-source but that's a wholla lot different than the traditional office), no annoying managers, no exploitation.
What India may need is private universities offering degrees of UK universities through franchising. Note that the educational method should be 'franchised' too, not only the degree, and UK professors should be handling the examinations.
And, by the way, I study towards an MSc in Management and what we learn at graduate business school is that the most important asset of a business is its people.
Keep the workers motivated and happy, and they will do anything possible to help you succeed. It isn't difficult: On top of a base salary with excellent health insurance, add:
on-the-spot bonuses ("finish the documentation tomorrow and you'll get $100 immediately")
profit-sharing ("in addition to your guaranteed salary you get 0.5% of the company's profits whenever we make a profit")
teleworking (telecommuting) arrangements ("you can work from home or anywhere else") while still providing a good working environment for those who need it ("if you have noisy kids at home, you may like to know that the company can hire you your own office room near your home and help you decorate it and build an ergonomic environment where you will enjoy working without distractions")
asynchronous working ("you can work at any time you want, night or day, just make sure you commit your code by the deadline")
an MBO (Management by Objectives) culture ("to get paid you need to finish this specific task. You can work as much or as little as you want, in any way you want, as long as you finish this task on time and within the agreed quality levels")
and frequent feedback (lack of feedback builds a culture of constant fear, while what companies should say is "John, I didn't like your past month's performance, and your code sometimes doesn't meet our quality guidelines, can you please tell me what your difficulties are and under what circumstances you could work a bit harder?" or "Hillary, the company is proud to work with you and we would like to let you know that if you keep producing so good art you will get a raise within 6 months" or "Juan, unfortunately we won't be able to keep you on the payroll next year if you don't improve your performance within 3 months by doing X, Y, and Z. Please tell us how we could help you in achieving your targets or whether you feel you were hired in the wrong position, and what your ideal working situation would be").
Focus on motivating people. Treat them as humans and respect them, and they will become your friends.
What many businesses currently do is suicidal and results in demotivated employees who hate going to work (which is, by definition, illogical: I sincerely believe that most humans, not everyone certainly but it must be most of them, enjoy working and having activities in life. Some like to work even without monetary gain, like in volunteering and free software development, and most people feel good when they do something useful for society and get recognition from peers and friends).
The employer-employee relationship could be more human-to-human relation and not like the master-slave mentality that still exists in many companies today (as a direct, albeit somewhat modernised and relaxed, descendant of slavery and serfdom).
In fact, today the average employee is a slave, with slavery often extending beyond their working hours (just think of the last unreasonable employment contract you had to decline or were forced to sign out of real need), and many business owners believing that employees are something like furniture and can be owned. In reality, although in theory we live in enlightened capitalist societies were every talented person can succeed and live in harmony with others in a free market, companies are behaving internally as if they were communist states with the owner and the managers as members of an evil communist party. True capitalism and free market doesn't exist yet, just like true freedom is lightyears away from our present societies.
Instead of spending millions on hi-res video and Hollywood-like productions, hire a good games hacker and motivate them to write the next Tetris or Chess game. Good games are simple, without rich graphics (so that your imagination can work), but with lots of gameplay. You may spend $1000 in developing the next Tetris and earn millions as people start downloading it on their smartphones to play something during rush hour traffic.
I am a member of IET and just now I got their magazine, and here's what the cover article says: "For working meetings, you need good audio and the ability for everyone to see the same working documents. You don't have to look at each other." - Tony Gasson, Vice President for EMEA, Interwire. You need to quit the video meeting = face meeting mentality! In fact, in a videoconference, your brain may lose much more energy and time in processing your colleagues's behaviour, body language, and faces than focusing on what really matters to all of you: Your work. Focus on the f***cking document and the laptop with the software code, not on that nice woman's face!
Your reply is insightful. You are right that investing in gold, silver, oil, and other commodities is sane only when the investor expects the people to get poorer. Your fundamental logic is correct. But you also made a fundamental factual mistake: People get poorer all the time, and the world economy constantly crashes. The governments print obscene amounts of paper money to pay their war debts, and every few decades the control over the economy is lost and another crash follows.
A Chinese satellite failed. I assure you it's only a matter of time until the Communist Party of China and its atrocities against freedom and human rights suffer a complete failure, too. No state can torture and censor forever. Just look here and tell me whether I'm wrong: The Chinese GDP rose only after the first privatisations and market-based (read: capitalist) reforms were made. The CPC did that because otherwise they would have been overthrown by either a US invasion or a revolution. Now we only need a Chinese Gorbachev to bury the CPC forever. I only hope this can be done before mad CPC generals launch WW3 (which is unlikely, given their 400 nuclear warheads against a US arsenal of 10000, but I am afraid we can't count on the reason of communists since they have none).
I remember that I had to use scissors to get my AMD Athlon XP CPU from its stupid packaging. Thank FSM, they later changed the packaging for their Athlon 64 CPUs. Nowadays when I want to buy a USB hub or another product and I can choose between one in paper packaging and another in plastic packaging, I always prefer the product in packaging that can be opened with hands. I think that if a package needs scissors or another tool to open, then it is the responsibility of the retailer to open it for me before I get it to my home or office. In fact whenever I have to buy a product in plastic packaging, after I pay for it by credit card, I ask a shop employee to open it for me: "Can you please open the packaging for me, because I have no scissors at my office and I need to use it immediately?". Many times they do it. The ones who don't lose me as a customer. As for the manufacturers, if I notice that a company uses stupid packaging across its whole product range, then I tend to prefer its competitors. Vote with your Euros or dollars, folks.
Come on. Win2k is still used in the workplace. Just imagining cost-averse businesses thinking about Vista is like telling us a story from La-La Land. Seriously, companies seek to minimise cost, and many of them even forget the meaning of investment (like, buying 19" TFTs to employees instead of refurbished 17" CRTs can make them mor productive). Don't talk about Vista in the workplace until 2010, please.
i also have this problem and I hate high fees. But there are other markets too apart from the stock market, like the commodity and metal markets. it makes sense to invest not only on papers, but also on tangible goods where the fees are much lower if you choose the right provider. i do distrust investment schemes like mutual funds, though, where someone takes your money to 'invest it' and you effectively pay for their salary.
Commodity markets, especially metals as silver and gold, have great potential. The stock market is, after all, just a game of beliefs: You believe that a share will go well and you invest based on that belief. No wonder it's so volatile. Metals have inherent value, and even if people stop liking gold, it will still have its value as it has practical and industrial uses as well.
Why do you seek to invest in mutual funds? I am also an investor, but I never invest in mutual funds. Choose index shares wisely and you won't be disappointed. Why pay for analysts's salaries when we all know that the economy is more or less a chaotic system that no one can predict its behaviour? What is your time horizon? If you can wait for many years, then use the method of the Sage of Omaha, as described in Buffettology: Buy shares of undervalued companies in markets with good economics, and keep them for years (be reluctant to sell, as in buy and hold). This may not work if your time horizon is short, however, so you might like to pay some attention to seasonality and perhaps sell in May and go away.
As a member of IEEE, I have read about plasma and LCD in a recent article appeared on Spectrum (I read it on the print edition, but I think the online version is similar if not the same). The article confirmed what we all know: Plasma is impractical; Long live LCD! The winning technology must be cheap, reliable, with a long lifespan. LCD has all of these characteristics, but Plasma has none of them.
I oppose Novell's agreement with Microsoft and I will abandon the SUSE sphere soon. I am about to join the Ubuntu cosmos (without this meaning that I enjoyed their recent binary driver announcement, but that's another story). Note to Debian developers : I would install exclusively Debian on all of my machines and servers if it was officially 64bit and had more updated software.
I study for an MSc in Management, and my Management books say it clearly: Telecommuting and teleworking increase employee productivity at least by 20% without exception, if implemented right. This is what we learn at a government-funded university. Therefore, productivity, at least in business, has not peaked, as most businesses are still requiring to lose 3 hours in commuting to your cubicle farm, where you sit all day in front of a computer similar to the one(s) you have at home, often doing exactly the same things (programming and Slashdot), only at a different place. It's crazy.
what the probability for life arising on a planet is given that our own seemed to be in a very unique situation on many different counts
The probability of life appearing on a planet may be high, and our planet's situation may not be as unique as you think. I study Planetary Science at the Open University (UK) and the fact that they decided to couple lessons about the search for life in the, primarily geology-themed, planetology course has to say a lot about what scientists think of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
It is, however, natural that some people think that Earth is unique, as it is the only living planet we know of. Sure, your first lemonade was unique, your first PC was unique, and your first GNU/Linux distro was also unique.
I think wouldn't want to die without playing a week-long multiplayer FreeCiv session!
However, if I was in your shoes, I would spend my money buying ergonomic equipment and paying doctors, and my time learning about my condition and trying to find a way to live without being dependent on a job.
You are right that combining technical knowledge with business awareness is a quality appropriate for entrepreneurs. Managers are slaves just like anyone else: They know the business side of things but can't build a product themselves. Programmers, likewise, can make products but often have difficulty marketing them. A programmer who knows about business and has an urge to self-start things can become a great entrepreneur.
A Technical Manager, such as a project manager, must know a lot about technology and use it actively in practice, otherwise they are just wasting the programmers's time by asking stupid questions and giving bad directions. A General Manager in an IT business need not have much grasp of technical matters except excellent appreciation of the concepts involved (e.g. they ought to know about information systems), but I would still recommend some weekend coding even to a general manager, especially if they participate in hiring decisions.
I personally am a holder of a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and I am now studying towards an MSc in Management, while I work as an Analyst Programmer on European Union projects and contribute to open-source. It's not all bad: Techies can certainly become good managers if they try, but I guess it all depends on why one decided to go to business school.
Yes, there are undisciplined people who enjoy goofing all day. There people need to be pushed by a supervisor in order to finish their work, so they may see an office environment as supporting them to concentrate on work. Teleworking is for self-motivated people who really want to work. My problem is that management seems to think that everyone is undisciplined and lazy.
About better chairs, larger monitors, etc... I am willing to pay for them myself, but at a company they said they could not allow employees to bring their own chairs even if we pay for them. Go figure!
I know companies that randomly assign employees to a desk in an open-plan office, and the result is that your team members may be far away from you scaterred in all directions, and your immediate neighbours are unrelated to your work or even to your profession. So even if open-plan offices have some benefits, some companies seem to use them for purely economical reasons (they are cheaper than private offices).
We should also focus on open-source projects where lots of people all over the planet cooperate through the Internet, and their creations are better than teams working for a company. With the Internet we have the communication benefits of a single large room (if these benefits exist at all), combined with the productivity-enabling environment of a private office (or your home, or your car, or your nearest lakes and mountains if you are a mobile warrior and have broadband Internet connectivity on your laptops). Personally I enjoy programming near the sea on a sunny day, and whenever I do this I write more code and of higher quality than what I write in a noisy office in double the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It matters a lot where these internship students are going to learn the practical issues of their work. There are companies with good working methods, and companies where adhocism, office politics, mismanagement, shadowy financial interests, stupidity, and lack of skills have created a negative counterproductive culture forcing everyone involved (sometimes even middle managers themselves) to leave their brains at the gate. In this kind of companies, engineering, especially software engineering (but unfortunately, also civil engineering, and this sometimes mean death for the users of the finished projects) is done in a fashion that defies any law of logic, intelligence, and organisation. Imagine a bunch of sloppy brainless underpaid engineers, surrounded by a dozen of incompetent managers interrupting them with 'urgent tasks' often requiring new hires to perform their tasks in a certain way, 'because that is how it was always done here', even when there are better alternatives.
An intern going to a sloppy company of this kind will only learn to shut off their brain during 9-to-5.
It would be a much more enjoyable and productive learning experience for interns to work on 'free culture' projects, like open-source, open-content, and open-hardware (nowadays we have processing cores under the GPL). No office politics (there are, of course, some other kind of personality politics in open-source but that's a wholla lot different than the traditional office), no annoying managers, no exploitation.
Google's SoC is a step to the right direction.
What India may need is private universities offering degrees of UK universities through franchising. Note that the educational method should be 'franchised' too, not only the degree, and UK professors should be handling the examinations.
And, by the way, I study towards an MSc in Management and what we learn at graduate business school is that the most important asset of a business is its people.
Keep the workers motivated and happy, and they will do anything possible to help you succeed. It isn't difficult: On top of a base salary with excellent health insurance, add:
Focus on motivating people. Treat them as humans and respect them, and they will become your friends.
What many businesses currently do is suicidal and results in demotivated employees who hate going to work (which is, by definition, illogical: I sincerely believe that most humans, not everyone certainly but it must be most of them, enjoy working and having activities in life. Some like to work even without monetary gain, like in volunteering and free software development, and most people feel good when they do something useful for society and get recognition from peers and friends).
The employer-employee relationship could be more human-to-human relation and not like the master-slave mentality that still exists in many companies today (as a direct, albeit somewhat modernised and relaxed, descendant of slavery and serfdom).
In fact, today the average employee is a slave, with slavery often extending beyond their working hours (just think of the last unreasonable employment contract you had to decline or were forced to sign out of real need), and many business owners believing that employees are something like furniture and can be owned. In reality, although in theory we live in enlightened capitalist societies were every talented person can succeed and live in harmony with others in a free market, companies are behaving internally as if they were communist states with the owner and the managers as members of an evil communist party. True capitalism and free market doesn't exist yet, just like true freedom is lightyears away from our present societies.
Instead of spending millions on hi-res video and Hollywood-like productions, hire a good games hacker and motivate them to write the next Tetris or Chess game. Good games are simple, without rich graphics (so that your imagination can work), but with lots of gameplay. You may spend $1000 in developing the next Tetris and earn millions as people start downloading it on their smartphones to play something during rush hour traffic.
I am a member of IET and just now I got their magazine, and here's what the cover article says: "For working meetings, you need good audio and the ability for everyone to see the same working documents. You don't have to look at each other." - Tony Gasson, Vice President for EMEA, Interwire. You need to quit the video meeting = face meeting mentality! In fact, in a videoconference, your brain may lose much more energy and time in processing your colleagues's behaviour, body language, and faces than focusing on what really matters to all of you: Your work. Focus on the f***cking document and the laptop with the software code, not on that nice woman's face!
Your reply is insightful. You are right that investing in gold, silver, oil, and other commodities is sane only when the investor expects the people to get poorer. Your fundamental logic is correct. But you also made a fundamental factual mistake: People get poorer all the time, and the world economy constantly crashes. The governments print obscene amounts of paper money to pay their war debts, and every few decades the control over the economy is lost and another crash follows.
A Chinese satellite failed. I assure you it's only a matter of time until the Communist Party of China and its atrocities against freedom and human rights suffer a complete failure, too. No state can torture and censor forever. Just look here and tell me whether I'm wrong: The Chinese GDP rose only after the first privatisations and market-based (read: capitalist) reforms were made. The CPC did that because otherwise they would have been overthrown by either a US invasion or a revolution. Now we only need a Chinese Gorbachev to bury the CPC forever. I only hope this can be done before mad CPC generals launch WW3 (which is unlikely, given their 400 nuclear warheads against a US arsenal of 10000, but I am afraid we can't count on the reason of communists since they have none).
Remember me... the meteors are Chinese satellites that suffered complete failure!
Go ask a solicitor. If you can't pay for one, then put a disclaimer "I assume all your contributed code is legal blah-blah".
I remember that I had to use scissors to get my AMD Athlon XP CPU from its stupid packaging. Thank FSM, they later changed the packaging for their Athlon 64 CPUs. Nowadays when I want to buy a USB hub or another product and I can choose between one in paper packaging and another in plastic packaging, I always prefer the product in packaging that can be opened with hands. I think that if a package needs scissors or another tool to open, then it is the responsibility of the retailer to open it for me before I get it to my home or office. In fact whenever I have to buy a product in plastic packaging, after I pay for it by credit card, I ask a shop employee to open it for me: "Can you please open the packaging for me, because I have no scissors at my office and I need to use it immediately?". Many times they do it. The ones who don't lose me as a customer. As for the manufacturers, if I notice that a company uses stupid packaging across its whole product range, then I tend to prefer its competitors. Vote with your Euros or dollars, folks.
Come on. Win2k is still used in the workplace. Just imagining cost-averse businesses thinking about Vista is like telling us a story from La-La Land. Seriously, companies seek to minimise cost, and many of them even forget the meaning of investment (like, buying 19" TFTs to employees instead of refurbished 17" CRTs can make them mor productive). Don't talk about Vista in the workplace until 2010, please.
i also have this problem and I hate high fees. But there are other markets too apart from the stock market, like the commodity and metal markets. it makes sense to invest not only on papers, but also on tangible goods where the fees are much lower if you choose the right provider. i do distrust investment schemes like mutual funds, though, where someone takes your money to 'invest it' and you effectively pay for their salary.
Commodity markets, especially metals as silver and gold, have great potential. The stock market is, after all, just a game of beliefs: You believe that a share will go well and you invest based on that belief. No wonder it's so volatile. Metals have inherent value, and even if people stop liking gold, it will still have its value as it has practical and industrial uses as well.
Why do you seek to invest in mutual funds? I am also an investor, but I never invest in mutual funds. Choose index shares wisely and you won't be disappointed. Why pay for analysts's salaries when we all know that the economy is more or less a chaotic system that no one can predict its behaviour? What is your time horizon? If you can wait for many years, then use the method of the Sage of Omaha, as described in Buffettology: Buy shares of undervalued companies in markets with good economics, and keep them for years (be reluctant to sell, as in buy and hold). This may not work if your time horizon is short, however, so you might like to pay some attention to seasonality and perhaps sell in May and go away.
I would really want to end up like RMS.
As a member of IEEE, I have read about plasma and LCD in a recent article appeared on Spectrum (I read it on the print edition, but I think the online version is similar if not the same). The article confirmed what we all know: Plasma is impractical; Long live LCD! The winning technology must be cheap, reliable, with a long lifespan. LCD has all of these characteristics, but Plasma has none of them.
I oppose Novell's agreement with Microsoft and I will abandon the SUSE sphere soon. I am about to join the Ubuntu cosmos (without this meaning that I enjoyed their recent binary driver announcement, but that's another story). Note to Debian developers : I would install exclusively Debian on all of my machines and servers if it was officially 64bit and had more updated software.
I study for an MSc in Management, and my Management books say it clearly: Telecommuting and teleworking increase employee productivity at least by 20% without exception, if implemented right. This is what we learn at a government-funded university. Therefore, productivity, at least in business, has not peaked, as most businesses are still requiring to lose 3 hours in commuting to your cubicle farm, where you sit all day in front of a computer similar to the one(s) you have at home, often doing exactly the same things (programming and Slashdot), only at a different place. It's crazy.
The probability of life appearing on a planet may be high, and our planet's situation may not be as unique as you think. I study Planetary Science at the Open University (UK) and the fact that they decided to couple lessons about the search for life in the, primarily geology-themed, planetology course has to say a lot about what scientists think of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
It is, however, natural that some people think that Earth is unique, as it is the only living planet we know of. Sure, your first lemonade was unique, your first PC was unique, and your first GNU/Linux distro was also unique.
I think wouldn't want to die without playing a week-long multiplayer FreeCiv session! However, if I was in your shoes, I would spend my money buying ergonomic equipment and paying doctors, and my time learning about my condition and trying to find a way to live without being dependent on a job.
You are right that combining technical knowledge with business awareness is a quality appropriate for entrepreneurs. Managers are slaves just like anyone else: They know the business side of things but can't build a product themselves. Programmers, likewise, can make products but often have difficulty marketing them. A programmer who knows about business and has an urge to self-start things can become a great entrepreneur.
A Technical Manager, such as a project manager, must know a lot about technology and use it actively in practice, otherwise they are just wasting the programmers's time by asking stupid questions and giving bad directions. A General Manager in an IT business need not have much grasp of technical matters except excellent appreciation of the concepts involved (e.g. they ought to know about information systems), but I would still recommend some weekend coding even to a general manager, especially if they participate in hiring decisions.
I personally am a holder of a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and I am now studying towards an MSc in Management, while I work as an Analyst Programmer on European Union projects and contribute to open-source. It's not all bad: Techies can certainly become good managers if they try, but I guess it all depends on why one decided to go to business school.
Yes, there are undisciplined people who enjoy goofing all day. There people need to be pushed by a supervisor in order to finish their work, so they may see an office environment as supporting them to concentrate on work. Teleworking is for self-motivated people who really want to work. My problem is that management seems to think that everyone is undisciplined and lazy.
About better chairs, larger monitors, etc... I am willing to pay for them myself, but at a company they said they could not allow employees to bring their own chairs even if we pay for them. Go figure!
I know companies that randomly assign employees to a desk in an open-plan office, and the result is that your team members may be far away from you scaterred in all directions, and your immediate neighbours are unrelated to your work or even to your profession. So even if open-plan offices have some benefits, some companies seem to use them for purely economical reasons (they are cheaper than private offices).
We should also focus on open-source projects where lots of people all over the planet cooperate through the Internet, and their creations are better than teams working for a company. With the Internet we have the communication benefits of a single large room (if these benefits exist at all), combined with the productivity-enabling environment of a private office (or your home, or your car, or your nearest lakes and mountains if you are a mobile warrior and have broadband Internet connectivity on your laptops). Personally I enjoy programming near the sea on a sunny day, and whenever I do this I write more code and of higher quality than what I write in a noisy office in double the time.