Clueful management won't save you. They're constrained by the market into setting up projects that are just possible if nothing goes wrong and everyone puts in heroic effort.
Even if your management knows how to make realistic deadlines and budgets (and, of course, not all do), they won't be able to use them, because all of your company's business would then be lost to a competitor who is over-promising.
For some reason, the managers at my company look at this as an interesting challenge (really! even when not trying to motivate "resources"), whereas I look at it and see endless hopelessness. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
This is what "race to the bottom" is all about; all semblance of quality is squeezed out until you are cranking out the cheapest product possible, at razor-thin margins.
"What to Expect When You're Expecting" has some info on this kind of dilemma; they are addressing the question of "why bother with these tests for birth defects, if abortion is not an option?"
They give several reasons; the one that sticks out in my mind is that a positive test can tell you to start making the (emotional, financial, etc.) preparations for raising a "special needs" child.
True, though there are some advantages to getting a refund:
If there's some uncertainty about how much tax you might owe, you don't want to be caught too short. For one, there can be problems coming up with the money. For another, if you owe Uncle Sam too much ($1500 IIRC) then you pay a penalty for not having enough withheld.
It's a forced savings program, which works better for some people than trying to save it manually, because it's out of sight, out of mind. (Of course, you can also arrange for money to be diverted from your paycheck to a savings account...)
If you might be fluctuating in tax brackets because of job-security concerns (as we probably all will some day), good to have some extra withheld whilst in the 25% bracket, because unemployment compensation will only withhold at 10% (but be taxed at your overall year's rate).
The long-term best option is to be able to adjust your withholdings so that you owe a small amount at the end of the year. However, that's not possible for everyone to do.
I did my taxes by "hand" this year (actually, using the fill-out PDF forms from irs.gov and ncgov.com), mailing in the paper. I had been using e-file for the last 6-7 years. However, Intuit has gotten too overtly evil for my taste (both with activations, and dropping QIF), and TaxCut doesn't really do much for you except the math and e-filing.
I was surprised to get my refund in about 3 weeks (IIRC I filed in the second week of Feb, & I had both refunds by the end of Feb). This not that much longer, and I saved the annoyance of having to send in for all those rebates.
If the IRS were to write the software their interest would be to increase the burden in order to benefit their agency and the federal government.
Not necessarily true. The IRS gave me $0.44 more refund this year than I asked for (details follow):
When you look up your tax liability in the table in the instructions, it's always a whole dollar amount. I had to add on 5% of dividends (Bush's dividend tax cut saved me $4!) which made my tax liability $BIGNUM.44. You are allowed to round down for cents < 50, or up for cents >=50, on tax returns. I didn't bother, but the IRS apparently did that for me, reducing my tax liability by $0.44.
This is not to belittle your bad experience, but an attempt to forestall the no-doubt enormous thread that will develop about various brands of automobile:
Every single car company in existence has made both lemons and good cars.
Rather than rate by company, you've pretty much got to rate by car model.
The problem with this is the "industry standards problem" (any practice evil enough becomes industry standard).
Because large companies can undercut smaller ones (due to economies of scale), and large companies have to sell to a broad market (to get large), and because most people do shop based on price, the tactics necessary to lower prices will win out every time, and get adopted everywhere. It's just another facet of the race to the bottom.
For example: I'd be glad to pay more for my stuff to shop at a store with well-paid, well-treated, unionized employees, and neither the employees nor customers were treated like criminals. Unfortunately, the number of people like-minded as me in this area are not enough to support a large chain store that did this. Therefore, the best I can do are things like eschewing Wal-Mart in favor of Target, which, in trying to slow the race to the bottom, is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Once, my wife picked up a Circuit City application, and the app made a big deal about the employees having to agree to binding arbitration (including such gems as "you can cancel your application within 3 days if you don't want to agree to binding arbitration). That squicked me enough that I stopped shopping there. Nowadays, however, pretty much every employer (and consumer product that can get away with it) makes their employees / customers agree to binding arbitration, so it's impossible to fight unless I could get together enough cash to rent a few lawmakers.
I actually RTFA, and didn't really see any practical considerations. It's written by a boardroom type, and so all it has is the usual management drivel we all get every day:
If you get laid off, it must have been your own fault for not keeping up with management's desires.
Make sure to change to whatever job management wants you to do, without complaint.
Don't be threatened by outsourcing; learn to manage the contractors. (Because, of course, every engineers secretly longs to be a project-manager, and there will be plenty of PM jobs to soak up all the unemployed engineers...)
The CEO's job depends on your doing your job well. (Curiously failing to mention that, if the CEO loses his job, a golden parachute kicks in, he cashes out a buttload of stock options, then finds a new job without much trouble - none of which is available to us).
It never ceases to amaze me how companies try to hire people smart enough to develop good products, and then expect them to fall for such transparently self-serving bullshit.
Maybe instead of the article's suggestion of "don't take change personally" (really!), I should learn to not take insults of my intelligence personally. If only I could mod the article "-1, Troll"...
I've been waiting for a WOM to store my to-do list on. Currently I have to work around this by putting the to-do's into a Palm Pilot, and never reading them nor setting alarms.
Re:I hope you have more security than CID..
on
Build Your Own PBX
·
· Score: 1
Anyone with a trunk connection can announce whatever they want as the CID..
True, but the only thing spoofing one of our cell numbers would buy you, with my dialplan, is the ability to ring through, and the ability to check voicemail without a password. Since not many people know the cell numbers, I consider it as good as a password:-) (I don't have inbound calls from the Internet, except via IAX from a few family members who have been issued IAX softphones, and ID's/passwords, for the purpose.
I definitely wouldn't put DISA (the ability to get an outside line) or anything like that on just CID authentication.
I bought the card to capture a POTS line (my BellSouth line is hooked to it) new from Digium, for IIRC $50ish. It's discontinued now I think; they combined it with the other card.
The other card is the one to drive POTS lines (so the Asterisk box is what rings my house phones). The current version can be found here. That's the one that requires PCI 2.2. One port in each direction will cost $195 new.
What I did was to get a new box, move all of the usual services (homedir, Samba PDC, etc.) to it, added Asterisk and a second mythbackend. Being a P4/2.4 with 1GB RAM, it handles all this stuff without breaking a sweat:-)
Asterisk has good WAF...
on
Build Your Own PBX
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
(Wife Acceptance Factor)
Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.
Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.
We went a similar route in the last couple of months. Looking to save on the electricity bill. We already have CF bulbs where appropriate, keep lights off, programmable thermostat, etc.
Noting that the two big energy "hogs" are the hot water heater and the dryer, decided to try drying clothes on a rack. Now, some fraction of the laundry gets laid out to dry (with a quick air-tumble afterwards to shake out stiffness).
(An outside clothesline would be impractial because:
Property is covered with trees, bringing sap drippings, animal droppings, etc. into consideration.
We're both allergics - having "clean" clothes covered in pollen might be suboptimal.
)
Not sure yet how much this is saving; it's been frelling cold here (relative to the usual winters) so electric bills are high depite keeping the temperature lower.
Cue the cartoon where people are taking the elevator down from the office, driving to the gym, taking the elevator up there, only to get on the Stairmaster.
Most modern monitors / video cards should support DPMS.
When in the DPMS off state, monitors consume less than 5 watts, which is pretty much negligible.
So have your power-saving screensaver turn off the monitor using DPMS (not too often if it's a CRT - you stress the hardware that way - maybe after an hour or so of inactivity). That way you needn't remember to power the monitor off; just power it off when you're going to be not using it for a day or two.
This is a severe societal problem that I see coming down the road towards us.
Especially in the technical realm, it's very difficult (practically impossible) to get a job if you haven't had a number of years of experience doing the exact same job.
Spent 5 years debugging networking drivers on embedded i386? Not good enough, we are debugging networking drivers on embedded PPC. Ask my wife, who despite a few years of PC and laptop repair experience, got turned down for a job because they used Dells and her previous jobs were not with Dells.
As to the inevitable "who would want to work for such a company" responses, what to do when everyone does this? Temp agencies are especially bad; they are entire companies consisting only of nontechnical HR people.
... it doesn't matter whether you stick with that job or not anyway.
Commercial software development is so subject to the "race to the bottom" that you'll never find a good job. Any that are left now will get squeezed away as the race continues. Current offshoring trends indicate there's no future for this career in the U.S., and I don't see any factors that will push in the other direction.
If only I had the guts to quit here for an electrician's-helper job (after 4 years full-time, I'd be able to test for my electrician's license - a job that will always be local unless/until the economy completely collapses, at which point no career will do you any good).
This time off will give you time to change careers without being limited by what you can do on the side of your development job. It will also allow you to "break in" to a new field, ahead of the millions of unemployed geeks that will be hitting the job market in the next few years, trying to break in to those same fields.
And, of course, the nice thing about F/OSS is that, as long as it exists, and you can afford a computer and an internet connection, nobody can stop you from being a programmer!
I disagree. It is always easier to get a job if you are working. Employers just feel better about hiring you if you are working.
This is where lying comes in handy. Put "MM/YYYY - Present" on your most-recent job on your resume. If challenged, say you did the resume while still working there. As long as it hasn't been too many months, this should work (most companies' hiring cycles are measured in months, so, for all they know, you sent in the resume while actually still working...)
Everyone wants a pill to fix their problems....
So you are depressed? Go to the analyst. Read some books....
Actually, the preferred way to treat depression is to start out with medicine to "lift the cloud" as a temporary measure, then try to address the root causes with therapy (e.g. "Why are you depressed about the future, just because your livelihood is being stomped to death by greedy offshoring-driven corporations? Just get another livelihood!). If you get the root causes addressed, you then come down off the medicine.
This is needed because (from experience) once you get down into the depths of depression, you can shoot down pretty much any idea. ("Why bother trying to improve myself? We'll all be standing in soup-kitchen lines together in a couple of years..." "Why bother trying to fight the concentration of wealth / corporate power? They can just buy as many congressmen as they want...") In fact, that's what took me so long to start getting help - on good days it didn't seem like I needed it, and on bad days I found no reason to bother.
BTW, antidepressants don't make you artificially happy (if they did, they'd be abused, but there's no street market for them, despite easy availability).
Andrew Solomon, a respected author about depression, wrote a handful of tips in a book called "The Bush Survival Guide" (it has many short chapters, by different authors, with usually-positive tips on how to deal with the current government). One was "Recent research has shown that depressives tend to have a more accurate worldview than non-depressives. However, the same research shows that a more accurate worldview is not an advantage." That's research I'd love to read.
I think this is a market failure, and so clueful management can't help you. From what I've seen, the market will simply not bear the cost of software done right.
Nobody will pay extra for quality software (I'm talking about business customers; individuals don't have any kind of realistic influence on software development). If you (as a developer) tell a customer they'll have to pay $X and wait Y months for the software they want, they'll just buy it from someone else who promises it at $0.5X and 0.6Y months. Therefore, as long as any one company is cranking out crap, all must.
(Perhaps it's software buyers (typically PHB's, after all), who exhibit the kind of inability to learn from experience that we programmers typically attribute to those making the schedules and budgets).
This forces for-profit software development firms to live on the edge, cranking out crap as fast as they can, trying to stay afloat. (And, of course, don't forget that in the U.S., for-profit companies must make ever-increasing profits, so you have to cut something as time goes by. Can't raise prices, oh no, so you gotta cut costs).
Open Source software is immune to these market forces, so it's possible for OSS to not suck.
In an intranet you can do what we did - create a corporate CA, sign the intranet server's cert(s) with the corporate CA, then get everyone to import the corporate CA's cert into their browsers to get rid of the warnings.
Public CAs, where you have to pay money to get your identity verified, are useful for services being accessed by the general public, to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. (I did this for the extranet site I put together). But for any service where a limited number of known users are going to access it, either go self-signed and users live with the warnings, or make your own CA that those users choose to "trust" to authenticate sites.
How can you draw a sharp and brutal line on something that isn't clearly defined?
Because for laws to be fair, what is legal and illegal has to be clearly defined. (Not all laws live up to this standard, of course). Therefore, you draw the line based on age - it's easily verifiable and objective, as opposed to (examples I've heard) arguing that "this particular 15-year-old girl is emotionally and psychologically ready to be having sex with middle-aged men".
The problem with the "corps will give up on certain behavior when it alienates enough customers" ignores the Industry Standards Factor. Basically, practices that are evil/profitable enough will become industry standards, and so comsumers really won't have anywhere else to go.
For example, I'd even be willing to pay extra for a credit card that didn't raise your rate when you were late on some other card's payment, or a cellphone whose service contract did not require you to pay for an entire month even if you cancel service at the month's beginning. Obviously there's a hole in the free market here, so some company will step in and give people a more consumer-friendly experience, right?
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Are there other reasons as well? Who knows?
Even if your management knows how to make realistic deadlines and budgets (and, of course, not all do), they won't be able to use them, because all of your company's business would then be lost to a competitor who is over-promising.
For some reason, the managers at my company look at this as an interesting challenge (really! even when not trying to motivate "resources"), whereas I look at it and see endless hopelessness. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
This is what "race to the bottom" is all about; all semblance of quality is squeezed out until you are cranking out the cheapest product possible, at razor-thin margins.
They give several reasons; the one that sticks out in my mind is that a positive test can tell you to start making the (emotional, financial, etc.) preparations for raising a "special needs" child.
- If there's some uncertainty about how much tax you might owe, you don't want to be caught too short. For one, there can be problems coming up with the money. For another, if you owe Uncle Sam too much ($1500 IIRC) then you pay a penalty for not having enough withheld.
- It's a forced savings program, which works better for some people than trying to save it manually, because it's out of sight, out of mind. (Of course, you can also arrange for money to be diverted from your paycheck to a savings account...)
- If you might be fluctuating in tax brackets because of job-security concerns (as we probably all will some day), good to have some extra withheld whilst in the 25% bracket, because unemployment compensation will only withhold at 10% (but be taxed at your overall year's rate).
The long-term best option is to be able to adjust your withholdings so that you owe a small amount at the end of the year. However, that's not possible for everyone to do.I was surprised to get my refund in about 3 weeks (IIRC I filed in the second week of Feb, & I had both refunds by the end of Feb). This not that much longer, and I saved the annoyance of having to send in for all those rebates.
When you look up your tax liability in the table in the instructions, it's always a whole dollar amount. I had to add on 5% of dividends (Bush's dividend tax cut saved me $4!) which made my tax liability $BIGNUM.44. You are allowed to round down for cents < 50, or up for cents >=50, on tax returns. I didn't bother, but the IRS apparently did that for me, reducing my tax liability by $0.44.
Every single car company in existence has made both lemons and good cars.
Rather than rate by company, you've pretty much got to rate by car model.
Because large companies can undercut smaller ones (due to economies of scale), and large companies have to sell to a broad market (to get large), and because most people do shop based on price, the tactics necessary to lower prices will win out every time, and get adopted everywhere. It's just another facet of the race to the bottom.
For example: I'd be glad to pay more for my stuff to shop at a store with well-paid, well-treated, unionized employees, and neither the employees nor customers were treated like criminals. Unfortunately, the number of people like-minded as me in this area are not enough to support a large chain store that did this. Therefore, the best I can do are things like eschewing Wal-Mart in favor of Target, which, in trying to slow the race to the bottom, is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Once, my wife picked up a Circuit City application, and the app made a big deal about the employees having to agree to binding arbitration (including such gems as "you can cancel your application within 3 days if you don't want to agree to binding arbitration). That squicked me enough that I stopped shopping there. Nowadays, however, pretty much every employer (and consumer product that can get away with it) makes their employees / customers agree to binding arbitration, so it's impossible to fight unless I could get together enough cash to rent a few lawmakers.
- If you get laid off, it must have been your own fault for not keeping up with management's desires.
- Make sure to change to whatever job management wants you to do, without complaint.
- Don't be threatened by outsourcing; learn to manage the contractors. (Because, of course, every engineers secretly longs to be a project-manager, and there will be plenty of PM jobs to soak up all the unemployed engineers...)
- The CEO's job depends on your doing your job well. (Curiously failing to mention that, if the CEO loses his job, a golden parachute kicks in, he cashes out a buttload of stock options, then finds a new job without much trouble - none of which is available to us).
It never ceases to amaze me how companies try to hire people smart enough to develop good products, and then expect them to fall for such transparently self-serving bullshit.Maybe instead of the article's suggestion of "don't take change personally" (really!), I should learn to not take insults of my intelligence personally. If only I could mod the article "-1, Troll"...
I've been waiting for a WOM to store my to-do list on. Currently I have to work around this by putting the to-do's into a Palm Pilot, and never reading them nor setting alarms.
I definitely wouldn't put DISA (the ability to get an outside line) or anything like that on just CID authentication.
The other card is the one to drive POTS lines (so the Asterisk box is what rings my house phones). The current version can be found here. That's the one that requires PCI 2.2. One port in each direction will cost $195 new.
What I did was to get a new box, move all of the usual services (homedir, Samba PDC, etc.) to it, added Asterisk and a second mythbackend. Being a P4/2.4 with 1GB RAM, it handles all this stuff without breaking a sweat :-)
Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.
Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.
You'll pry it out of my wife's cold dead hands...
Worldwide economic collapse is probably going to solve many energy-capacity / environmental problems.
No need to worry about global warming once we're all living like medieval peasants.
Noting that the two big energy "hogs" are the hot water heater and the dryer, decided to try drying clothes on a rack. Now, some fraction of the laundry gets laid out to dry (with a quick air-tumble afterwards to shake out stiffness).
(An outside clothesline would be impractial because:
- Property is covered with trees, bringing sap drippings, animal droppings, etc. into consideration.
- We're both allergics - having "clean" clothes covered in pollen might be suboptimal.
)
Not sure yet how much this is saving; it's been frelling cold here (relative to the usual winters) so electric bills are high depite keeping the temperature lower.Cue the cartoon where people are taking the elevator down from the office, driving to the gym, taking the elevator up there, only to get on the Stairmaster.
When in the DPMS off state, monitors consume less than 5 watts, which is pretty much negligible.
So have your power-saving screensaver turn off the monitor using DPMS (not too often if it's a CRT - you stress the hardware that way - maybe after an hour or so of inactivity). That way you needn't remember to power the monitor off; just power it off when you're going to be not using it for a day or two.
Especially in the technical realm, it's very difficult (practically impossible) to get a job if you haven't had a number of years of experience doing the exact same job.
Spent 5 years debugging networking drivers on embedded i386? Not good enough, we are debugging networking drivers on embedded PPC. Ask my wife, who despite a few years of PC and laptop repair experience, got turned down for a job because they used Dells and her previous jobs were not with Dells.
As to the inevitable "who would want to work for such a company" responses, what to do when everyone does this? Temp agencies are especially bad; they are entire companies consisting only of nontechnical HR people.
Commercial software development is so subject to the "race to the bottom" that you'll never find a good job. Any that are left now will get squeezed away as the race continues. Current offshoring trends indicate there's no future for this career in the U.S., and I don't see any factors that will push in the other direction.
If only I had the guts to quit here for an electrician's-helper job (after 4 years full-time, I'd be able to test for my electrician's license - a job that will always be local unless/until the economy completely collapses, at which point no career will do you any good).
This time off will give you time to change careers without being limited by what you can do on the side of your development job. It will also allow you to "break in" to a new field, ahead of the millions of unemployed geeks that will be hitting the job market in the next few years, trying to break in to those same fields.
And, of course, the nice thing about F/OSS is that, as long as it exists, and you can afford a computer and an internet connection, nobody can stop you from being a programmer!
This is needed because (from experience) once you get down into the depths of depression, you can shoot down pretty much any idea. ("Why bother trying to improve myself? We'll all be standing in soup-kitchen lines together in a couple of years..." "Why bother trying to fight the concentration of wealth / corporate power? They can just buy as many congressmen as they want...") In fact, that's what took me so long to start getting help - on good days it didn't seem like I needed it, and on bad days I found no reason to bother.
BTW, antidepressants don't make you artificially happy (if they did, they'd be abused, but there's no street market for them, despite easy availability).
Andrew Solomon, a respected author about depression, wrote a handful of tips in a book called "The Bush Survival Guide" (it has many short chapters, by different authors, with usually-positive tips on how to deal with the current government). One was "Recent research has shown that depressives tend to have a more accurate worldview than non-depressives. However, the same research shows that a more accurate worldview is not an advantage." That's research I'd love to read.
Nobody will pay extra for quality software (I'm talking about business customers; individuals don't have any kind of realistic influence on software development). If you (as a developer) tell a customer they'll have to pay $X and wait Y months for the software they want, they'll just buy it from someone else who promises it at $0.5X and 0.6Y months. Therefore, as long as any one company is cranking out crap, all must.
(Perhaps it's software buyers (typically PHB's, after all), who exhibit the kind of inability to learn from experience that we programmers typically attribute to those making the schedules and budgets).
This forces for-profit software development firms to live on the edge, cranking out crap as fast as they can, trying to stay afloat. (And, of course, don't forget that in the U.S., for-profit companies must make ever-increasing profits, so you have to cut something as time goes by. Can't raise prices, oh no, so you gotta cut costs).
Open Source software is immune to these market forces, so it's possible for OSS to not suck.
Public CAs, where you have to pay money to get your identity verified, are useful for services being accessed by the general public, to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. (I did this for the extranet site I put together). But for any service where a limited number of known users are going to access it, either go self-signed and users live with the warnings, or make your own CA that those users choose to "trust" to authenticate sites.
For example, I'd even be willing to pay extra for a credit card that didn't raise your rate when you were late on some other card's payment, or a cellphone whose service contract did not require you to pay for an entire month even if you cancel service at the month's beginning. Obviously there's a hole in the free market here, so some company will step in and give people a more consumer-friendly experience, right?
Right?
[crickets chirping]