I've worked for a couple of small companies. I think it requires different skill sets/strengths to get a company off the ground, known, and making money in the first place than it does to keep it running after you've gone public, have a bunch of employees, etc. Frequently it's not the same person who has both of these skill sets. A small company with very few employees, a few customers who know they are dealing with a small company, and no stock holders to keep happy can more easily make decisions on their feet and survive fairly well by making decisions that just get them through until tomorrow. As they grow, that agility is lost and I think a lot of managers and CEOs are not able to adapt their thinking and planning to the slower pace of movement and amount of resources it now takes to get things done.
Interesting. Now I wish I had some of my old contracts around. I'm sure I've been employed at least one place (and I think several) where discussion of pay was, at least on paper, something you could be fired for. It was unenforced and people talked about their pay and no one was ever fired for it, but I'm certain that on paper it said you're not allowed to. I don't really care that much as it was unenforced, I'm mostly just curious as to if I'm remembering right or not.
There are a couple of common problems I see that are related to this.
1) A lot of people are lazy. Once they find out that math/science/cs/whatever is not just blowing stuff up and playing video games, but actually takes thinking, they get bored. I've known a lot of people who had this happen.
2) In my own experience the attributes that commonly lead to someone being good in these sorts of fields lead to being bored out of your mind in school and frequently not learning the way school is frequently taught. Most good engineers, cs guys, scientists, etc that I have met like a challenge, like exploring and figuring things out, and like hands on work ("hands on" includes working out math problems or the like). Sitting around in lectures memorizing trivia and hoping you remember it leads to boredom or even frustration if you just don't learn well that way.
The last line of the summary is right in line with point #2 there, although it seems to just focus on teaching STEM stuff in that way, and not making the other subjects more interesting as well.
Ugh. Robert Half. I won't even talk to those assholes anymore. Last time I went in there they made me take tests on Perl. The examples did not use strict and whoever wrote the questions didn't know the difference between "$var" and '$var' and there was something where some sort of brackets was used incorrectly on one question as well.
My most recent interview, which was just a couple months ago and I got the job, I was pretty happy with. I e-mailed some short code samples in a few different languages a few days before my interview. In the interview we just talked more high level design and architecture and then I walked them through some of the code I had written, explaining what I had done and why.
That's not really a comment. It tells the shell which program to execute and I believe is not ever seen or processed by the perl interpreter which is why bash scripts start with #!/bin/bash, etc. Although I would guess that if you execute the script with "perl myperlscript", then Perl probably does see that and treat it as a comment.
If executing with "perl myscript" you also don't have to have the hashbang line there at all.
Yeah, I think we mostly agree. I agree that it's not the best option anymore except for the super short stuff, although I'd keep using it for nearly everything if I could. I just don't feel it's terrible for the big stuff and definitely not as terrible as its reputation would suggest. Some would argue that even enabling such hard to maintain code to be written in the first place is is just as bad, but I see it as flexibility with a tradeoff. You can write harder to read/maintain, really short scripts to do something quickly or slightly more verbose code, but still way shorter than Java or C++, which is maintainable and viable for use in a larger system.
Part of why I've moved on to Python (as opposed to Ruby, the other big contender as a Perl replacement) is that it feels somewhat like a more modern Perl (and Perl's object model is actually based on Python's, I believe). Some day I may do some side by side comparisons of Python vs Perl code length (although I bet someone else already has) using properly written, maintainable Perl. I don't expect there to be a huge difference in number of lines.
Perl can be as easy to read and maintain as the developer can be bothered to make it. Sloppy Perl is written by sloppy developers. It has proper variable scoping, namespacing, packages, object inheritance, etc. You also don't have to squeeze as much functionality into one line using as many special characters as possible.
Sure, there's plenty of ugly Perl out there. I suspect much of that is stuff that started as a small, quickly hacked together script which grew into something larger. Perl also used to hold PHP's place as THE language to use for web back end stuff, so it had a lot of amateur devs doing stupid crap. I can find you awful code in any language you want, though. I've got some crazy Python in front of me right now.
I'm not saying it's the best language to use anymore, but it's not even 1/4 as bad as people like to make it out to be around here. Plus many of its libraries are still easier to use and have more functionality than the equivalent libraries in other more popular languages (opinions on that may vary, of course). LWP is still my favorite web client library.
I'm with you there. At my previous job we even had a "Director of IT" title who was primarily a developer. I've never really understood the whole cs/programming is not IT train of thought. I work with/create/develop technology for managing/distributing/analyzing/displaying/storing information. Sounds like it fits under the umbrella label of IT to me.
Nope, I'm the same. I don't care about seeing most movies "right now". I'll watch them when they're available. Until then, I'll watch something else or do something else entirely. For the last 1-2 years I've honestly mostly been watching old to old-ish, TV series' that I always liked when I did see the shows, but never watched consistently due to not being home when they were on. Now I can watch them when it's convenient for me.
I fully agree that Google has abandoned "Do No Evil", but I do still think they have a motto somewhere along the lines of "Do Slightly Less Evil", "Occasionally do something good", or maybe "Be the least likely to do evil".
Yep, that sounds about right and I agree completely as someone who has played since launch.
The other problem for me is that they've put too much focus on end game and especially raiding. I like playing with a small group of people. I don't like playing with 10, 20, 40, etc. people because there's too much waiting around, people wasting my time, people being assholes, etc. With small groups I can find a couple of small groups of people that I really like and enjoy playing with and be happy.
It used to take forever to level and for some of the quests you needed a group or at least 1 or 2 more people. Then you got to the 5 man instances and it took time to get through them, get the gear you wanted, etc. Now you can easily run a charater up to max level completely solo in anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks depending on how little life outside of WoW you have and run the 5 man instances enough to get all the gear and be completely bored of every single one of them within a couple more weeks, then you're left with raiding or starting over to do it all again far too soon for my taste.
Hm, I see. Well, I'll definitely keep an eye on it. I do like the general concept of these sorts of things. There's a lot of good uses for them and I've used freebase for a project or two in the past.
No idea. The biggest thing I used it for was pulling data on video game and game console release dates for a demo website. That was more due to the amount of data and convenience than anything else and pretty simple.
Things like this are why I still have a landline and don't want to see them go away. Even if my cell tower is up, what happens when the battery on my cell phone dies and the power is out (yeah, yeah, plug it into the car)? With a proper landline I can grab the old school, fully cabled up phone which doesn't need a separate power supply that I keep around and plug it in and, probably, still make phone calls.
Obviously the landline "could" be out as well, but my understanding is that they had much more go into designing them to stay up and working as much as possible and my experience is definitely that my landline is more reliable than any other service I pay for. I can assure you my internet connection (which also needs power) doesn't have that and I have my doubts about my cell service (which again needs power anyway).
Then of course there's the cost. I can talk to local friends and family on my landline for hours and hours every day if I really want to (not that I do, but we have had times where we needed to) for a whole lot cheaper than I can do the same on my cell phone.
His spelling and grammar are terrible, but his point (I think what his point is, anyway) is correct, imo and right in line with what I frequently whine about. I can really only speak for the CS/programming and networking/IT stuff, but in those cases, what employers really need and what the four year colleges and universities provide and employers think they need is different.
Four year schools provide a "well rounded" individual who was forced to take a bunch of filler classes that have little to no impact on their ability to write code. Employers want someone with that four year (or more) degree, but they want to treat it like trade school or an applied associate of the arts/science degree from a two year school - something that trains you to write code and that nearly anyone should have the time and money to get.
And honestly, my personal experience suggests that 90% of the people who come out of either two or four year programs able to design an application or write code that works and isn't completely retarded or configure servers or plan a network were going to be able to based on self study and possibly some mentoring from a more senior developer or admin where they work.
Additionally, most dev teams for your average business software seem to need one or two guys that can design an overall sane architecture, one or two guys who really understand what is going on and can troubleshoot the code well and optimize problem areas, and a few guys who can write average, useable, readable, not-terrible but not necessarily super amazing code based on basic design docs/interfaces they were given.
I haven't been in that position, but I'd have to say it would really depend on the certifications, what I'm hiring them to do, and if I feel that those certifications mean anything other than that they're good at memorizing trivia out of a book after talking to them. I might pick the person with the certs or I might decide those certs rarely mean much anyway and go with the person who's attitude and personality seem like they're going to be a better fit.
If we're going with the "everything else is equal and I mean everything" comparison, then obviously the guy with the certs, but in real life that's just never going to be the case.
That makes me applaud this move even more. While it's great to ask people to change what they are doing and do the right thing when there's no backlash against you, only demanding change when it's easy on us and just going with the flow when it's not is part of why things are slowly going to hell. That he's willing to take a stand when it risks negatively effecting him also shows that he's really trying to make a change for the better rather than just picking an easy battle to make himself look good, with little care for seeing any real improvement.
That's what certifications are supposed to be anyway. They aren't for learning a subject or product, they're for showing that you already know a subject. Even the super simple stuff like A+ is to show a competency equal to 6 months experience doing pc repair (or that's what it was way back in the day when I got it).
The book cost is one of my biggest complaints of my current college experience (an experienced 31 year old developer who has returned to get a degree). I can pick up an O'Reilly book of far higher quality than any of the programming or networking books I have had to buy for classes at a significant fraction of the cost of those books the school requires.
I can't remember the last time I spent more than $40 on a quality book on a technical subject that I chose to purchase. I have spent around $100 on a school-required book that claimed that PHP, JavaScript, and one other language (Perl?) have very little data manipulation capability and do most of their work by calling system binaries to get the output from them.
Since phone support is a revolving door anyway, maybe they could try to hire people are very entry level but are technical and possibly pursuing a technical career, who are trying to move up the chain, work part time while in college, etc. Whether the employees leave because they know what they're doing and found something better or because they're burnt out and don't care anyway, they still left and you have to find some new help.
Sure, not all the employees are going to fit that, it would be impossible. Not everyone was someone after a technical career when I was doing that work, either. In my experience, the non-technical people were more likely to try to learn and in the very least pass calls over to the more knowledgeable people when needed if there were more knowledgeable people around.
I'm not expecting them to be able to configure a router, but they're providing technical support for an ISP, they should at least have enough knowledge of computers and networks to understand that there appears to be a problem and maybe they need to pass it up to the next level of support if they can't resolve or quite understand it. I've been there, I did that work for a few years, I'm not asking for anything unreasonable.
Have you ever called them? While you're correct that they can't just start making changes because the customer said so, if they understood how a network or the internet works they could understand what he's saying and start going through the proper channels to have things looked into. I've done my time in phone support roles, both public facing and internal, for multiple companies and that was true at all of them. When you call these guys it's pretty clear that they don't know how any of this stuff works or what any of it means and they just want to go through their scripted "troubleshooting" which they don't actually understand and get you off of the phone. One time when I tried to provide an example the support person had to go ask their supervisor what FTP is. Seriously.
I've since given up. I just wait for the issue to get caught and corrected at the higher levels. Calling support doesn't get it fixed any faster but it sure does waste more of my time.
People have a problem with this method of collecting data because people did not (at least knowingly) agree to have Tom Tom store data on where they traveled and when and how fast and then sell it. I believe they are right to expect that the company not do that. Sure, it's probably buried in some ToS or the like somewhere, but I'm firmly on the "shit buried 20 pages deep in fine print legalese is not a fair warning or agreement" side of the fence.
As to the speed traps themselves, an argument could be (and has been) made that they are not terribly helpful and are just the city/county/state trying to collect money off of a relatively easy target rather than preventing real crime or making the roads noticeably safer. For the most part, I agree with that as well. Want to make my roads safer? Put a cop where lanes come to an end and pull over those assholes who rush past everyone in the lane ending and cut someone off at the last minute. That will make my trip safer than pulling over someone driving 75 or even 85 or 95 mph in a 65 or 70mph zone, staying in their own lane. Hell, pull people over who are going too slow and causing traffic to slow down unexpectedly and build up. I've seen more dangerous situations caused by them than by people going too fast.
A bit late on my comment, but I had similar issues with math in highschool. I just barely passed algebra II and intro to trig (I think it was). It was all memorize this, memorize when to use that, this equals that just because. I couldn't remember a damned thing. I also took physics in highschool, in fact I skipped ahead in science classes and took physics a year early. It was the exact same math, but with some real life application and explanation applied to it and I was getting A's without even trying.
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I've worked for a couple of small companies. I think it requires different skill sets/strengths to get a company off the ground, known, and making money in the first place than it does to keep it running after you've gone public, have a bunch of employees, etc. Frequently it's not the same person who has both of these skill sets. A small company with very few employees, a few customers who know they are dealing with a small company, and no stock holders to keep happy can more easily make decisions on their feet and survive fairly well by making decisions that just get them through until tomorrow. As they grow, that agility is lost and I think a lot of managers and CEOs are not able to adapt their thinking and planning to the slower pace of movement and amount of resources it now takes to get things done.
Interesting. Now I wish I had some of my old contracts around. I'm sure I've been employed at least one place (and I think several) where discussion of pay was, at least on paper, something you could be fired for. It was unenforced and people talked about their pay and no one was ever fired for it, but I'm certain that on paper it said you're not allowed to. I don't really care that much as it was unenforced, I'm mostly just curious as to if I'm remembering right or not.
There are a couple of common problems I see that are related to this.
1) A lot of people are lazy. Once they find out that math/science/cs/whatever is not just blowing stuff up and playing video games, but actually takes thinking, they get bored. I've known a lot of people who had this happen.
2) In my own experience the attributes that commonly lead to someone being good in these sorts of fields lead to being bored out of your mind in school and frequently not learning the way school is frequently taught. Most good engineers, cs guys, scientists, etc that I have met like a challenge, like exploring and figuring things out, and like hands on work ("hands on" includes working out math problems or the like). Sitting around in lectures memorizing trivia and hoping you remember it leads to boredom or even frustration if you just don't learn well that way.
The last line of the summary is right in line with point #2 there, although it seems to just focus on teaching STEM stuff in that way, and not making the other subjects more interesting as well.
Ugh. Robert Half. I won't even talk to those assholes anymore. Last time I went in there they made me take tests on Perl. The examples did not use strict and whoever wrote the questions didn't know the difference between "$var" and '$var' and there was something where some sort of brackets was used incorrectly on one question as well.
My most recent interview, which was just a couple months ago and I got the job, I was pretty happy with. I e-mailed some short code samples in a few different languages a few days before my interview. In the interview we just talked more high level design and architecture and then I walked them through some of the code I had written, explaining what I had done and why.
That's not really a comment. It tells the shell which program to execute and I believe is not ever seen or processed by the perl interpreter which is why bash scripts start with #!/bin/bash, etc. Although I would guess that if you execute the script with "perl myperlscript", then Perl probably does see that and treat it as a comment.
If executing with "perl myscript" you also don't have to have the hashbang line there at all.
Yeah, I think we mostly agree. I agree that it's not the best option anymore except for the super short stuff, although I'd keep using it for nearly everything if I could. I just don't feel it's terrible for the big stuff and definitely not as terrible as its reputation would suggest. Some would argue that even enabling such hard to maintain code to be written in the first place is is just as bad, but I see it as flexibility with a tradeoff. You can write harder to read/maintain, really short scripts to do something quickly or slightly more verbose code, but still way shorter than Java or C++, which is maintainable and viable for use in a larger system.
Part of why I've moved on to Python (as opposed to Ruby, the other big contender as a Perl replacement) is that it feels somewhat like a more modern Perl (and Perl's object model is actually based on Python's, I believe). Some day I may do some side by side comparisons of Python vs Perl code length (although I bet someone else already has) using properly written, maintainable Perl. I don't expect there to be a huge difference in number of lines.
Perl can be as easy to read and maintain as the developer can be bothered to make it. Sloppy Perl is written by sloppy developers. It has proper variable scoping, namespacing, packages, object inheritance, etc. You also don't have to squeeze as much functionality into one line using as many special characters as possible.
Sure, there's plenty of ugly Perl out there. I suspect much of that is stuff that started as a small, quickly hacked together script which grew into something larger. Perl also used to hold PHP's place as THE language to use for web back end stuff, so it had a lot of amateur devs doing stupid crap. I can find you awful code in any language you want, though. I've got some crazy Python in front of me right now.
I'm not saying it's the best language to use anymore, but it's not even 1/4 as bad as people like to make it out to be around here. Plus many of its libraries are still easier to use and have more functionality than the equivalent libraries in other more popular languages (opinions on that may vary, of course). LWP is still my favorite web client library.
I'm with you there. At my previous job we even had a "Director of IT" title who was primarily a developer. I've never really understood the whole cs/programming is not IT train of thought. I work with/create/develop technology for managing/distributing/analyzing/displaying/storing information. Sounds like it fits under the umbrella label of IT to me.
Nope, I'm the same. I don't care about seeing most movies "right now". I'll watch them when they're available. Until then, I'll watch something else or do something else entirely. For the last 1-2 years I've honestly mostly been watching old to old-ish, TV series' that I always liked when I did see the shows, but never watched consistently due to not being home when they were on. Now I can watch them when it's convenient for me.
I fully agree that Google has abandoned "Do No Evil", but I do still think they have a motto somewhere along the lines of "Do Slightly Less Evil", "Occasionally do something good", or maybe "Be the least likely to do evil".
Yep, that sounds about right and I agree completely as someone who has played since launch.
The other problem for me is that they've put too much focus on end game and especially raiding. I like playing with a small group of people. I don't like playing with 10, 20, 40, etc. people because there's too much waiting around, people wasting my time, people being assholes, etc. With small groups I can find a couple of small groups of people that I really like and enjoy playing with and be happy.
It used to take forever to level and for some of the quests you needed a group or at least 1 or 2 more people. Then you got to the 5 man instances and it took time to get through them, get the gear you wanted, etc. Now you can easily run a charater up to max level completely solo in anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks depending on how little life outside of WoW you have and run the 5 man instances enough to get all the gear and be completely bored of every single one of them within a couple more weeks, then you're left with raiding or starting over to do it all again far too soon for my taste.
Hm, I see. Well, I'll definitely keep an eye on it. I do like the general concept of these sorts of things. There's a lot of good uses for them and I've used freebase for a project or two in the past.
No idea. The biggest thing I used it for was pulling data on video game and game console release dates for a demo website. That was more due to the amount of data and convenience than anything else and pretty simple.
It sounds like Freebase to me, which has been around for years.
Things like this are why I still have a landline and don't want to see them go away. Even if my cell tower is up, what happens when the battery on my cell phone dies and the power is out (yeah, yeah, plug it into the car)? With a proper landline I can grab the old school, fully cabled up phone which doesn't need a separate power supply that I keep around and plug it in and, probably, still make phone calls.
Obviously the landline "could" be out as well, but my understanding is that they had much more go into designing them to stay up and working as much as possible and my experience is definitely that my landline is more reliable than any other service I pay for. I can assure you my internet connection (which also needs power) doesn't have that and I have my doubts about my cell service (which again needs power anyway).
Then of course there's the cost. I can talk to local friends and family on my landline for hours and hours every day if I really want to (not that I do, but we have had times where we needed to) for a whole lot cheaper than I can do the same on my cell phone.
His spelling and grammar are terrible, but his point (I think what his point is, anyway) is correct, imo and right in line with what I frequently whine about. I can really only speak for the CS/programming and networking/IT stuff, but in those cases, what employers really need and what the four year colleges and universities provide and employers think they need is different.
Four year schools provide a "well rounded" individual who was forced to take a bunch of filler classes that have little to no impact on their ability to write code. Employers want someone with that four year (or more) degree, but they want to treat it like trade school or an applied associate of the arts/science degree from a two year school - something that trains you to write code and that nearly anyone should have the time and money to get.
And honestly, my personal experience suggests that 90% of the people who come out of either two or four year programs able to design an application or write code that works and isn't completely retarded or configure servers or plan a network were going to be able to based on self study and possibly some mentoring from a more senior developer or admin where they work.
Additionally, most dev teams for your average business software seem to need one or two guys that can design an overall sane architecture, one or two guys who really understand what is going on and can troubleshoot the code well and optimize problem areas, and a few guys who can write average, useable, readable, not-terrible but not necessarily super amazing code based on basic design docs/interfaces they were given.
I haven't been in that position, but I'd have to say it would really depend on the certifications, what I'm hiring them to do, and if I feel that those certifications mean anything other than that they're good at memorizing trivia out of a book after talking to them. I might pick the person with the certs or I might decide those certs rarely mean much anyway and go with the person who's attitude and personality seem like they're going to be a better fit.
If we're going with the "everything else is equal and I mean everything" comparison, then obviously the guy with the certs, but in real life that's just never going to be the case.
That makes me applaud this move even more. While it's great to ask people to change what they are doing and do the right thing when there's no backlash against you, only demanding change when it's easy on us and just going with the flow when it's not is part of why things are slowly going to hell. That he's willing to take a stand when it risks negatively effecting him also shows that he's really trying to make a change for the better rather than just picking an easy battle to make himself look good, with little care for seeing any real improvement.
That's what certifications are supposed to be anyway. They aren't for learning a subject or product, they're for showing that you already know a subject. Even the super simple stuff like A+ is to show a competency equal to 6 months experience doing pc repair (or that's what it was way back in the day when I got it).
The book cost is one of my biggest complaints of my current college experience (an experienced 31 year old developer who has returned to get a degree). I can pick up an O'Reilly book of far higher quality than any of the programming or networking books I have had to buy for classes at a significant fraction of the cost of those books the school requires.
I can't remember the last time I spent more than $40 on a quality book on a technical subject that I chose to purchase. I have spent around $100 on a school-required book that claimed that PHP, JavaScript, and one other language (Perl?) have very little data manipulation capability and do most of their work by calling system binaries to get the output from them.
Since phone support is a revolving door anyway, maybe they could try to hire people are very entry level but are technical and possibly pursuing a technical career, who are trying to move up the chain, work part time while in college, etc. Whether the employees leave because they know what they're doing and found something better or because they're burnt out and don't care anyway, they still left and you have to find some new help.
Sure, not all the employees are going to fit that, it would be impossible. Not everyone was someone after a technical career when I was doing that work, either. In my experience, the non-technical people were more likely to try to learn and in the very least pass calls over to the more knowledgeable people when needed if there were more knowledgeable people around.
I'm not expecting them to be able to configure a router, but they're providing technical support for an ISP, they should at least have enough knowledge of computers and networks to understand that there appears to be a problem and maybe they need to pass it up to the next level of support if they can't resolve or quite understand it. I've been there, I did that work for a few years, I'm not asking for anything unreasonable.
Have you ever called them? While you're correct that they can't just start making changes because the customer said so, if they understood how a network or the internet works they could understand what he's saying and start going through the proper channels to have things looked into. I've done my time in phone support roles, both public facing and internal, for multiple companies and that was true at all of them. When you call these guys it's pretty clear that they don't know how any of this stuff works or what any of it means and they just want to go through their scripted "troubleshooting" which they don't actually understand and get you off of the phone. One time when I tried to provide an example the support person had to go ask their supervisor what FTP is. Seriously.
I've since given up. I just wait for the issue to get caught and corrected at the higher levels. Calling support doesn't get it fixed any faster but it sure does waste more of my time.
People have a problem with this method of collecting data because people did not (at least knowingly) agree to have Tom Tom store data on where they traveled and when and how fast and then sell it. I believe they are right to expect that the company not do that. Sure, it's probably buried in some ToS or the like somewhere, but I'm firmly on the "shit buried 20 pages deep in fine print legalese is not a fair warning or agreement" side of the fence.
As to the speed traps themselves, an argument could be (and has been) made that they are not terribly helpful and are just the city/county/state trying to collect money off of a relatively easy target rather than preventing real crime or making the roads noticeably safer. For the most part, I agree with that as well. Want to make my roads safer? Put a cop where lanes come to an end and pull over those assholes who rush past everyone in the lane ending and cut someone off at the last minute. That will make my trip safer than pulling over someone driving 75 or even 85 or 95 mph in a 65 or 70mph zone, staying in their own lane. Hell, pull people over who are going too slow and causing traffic to slow down unexpectedly and build up. I've seen more dangerous situations caused by them than by people going too fast.
A bit late on my comment, but I had similar issues with math in highschool. I just barely passed algebra II and intro to trig (I think it was). It was all memorize this, memorize when to use that, this equals that just because. I couldn't remember a damned thing. I also took physics in highschool, in fact I skipped ahead in science classes and took physics a year early. It was the exact same math, but with some real life application and explanation applied to it and I was getting A's without even trying.
Same here. Hell, I'm deploying 7 Debian servers into our live environment tonight to replace some old RHEL4 servers at work.