I have pointed this out to management before. One exchange has went:
Mgr: We don't care how many hours you work, as long as you get the work done. Me: Bullshit. If I got everything done in 40 hours / week, you'd simply assign me more things until I had to work unpaid overtime to complete them.
So far, my strategy has been to work 40 hours a week, and not everything gets done. I've yet to get fired for it... my job's going to India anyway, it's only a matter of time, why bust my butt when at best it might keep me employed for a few months longer?
I unfortunately have the opposite problem; start many things, most I either don't get time to finish (which this book might help), or forget about completely and never come back to (which this book would not help).
Re:Here's a classic: about marriages and divorce
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 1
Annulment means the marriage never happened, so it's not really an 'end' to the marriage.
Re:Here's a classic: about marriages and divorce
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 1
One hundred percent of all marriages end in death or divorce.
Trident, now, has TV commercials purporting to explain the fifth dentist's actions. For example, Dentist #4 smacks a fly with his clipboard, the fly is on Dentist #5's head, so Dentist #5 is kocked out, and his head falls on the "No" button.
As much as I hate the pervasiveness of advertising, it feels good to see entertaining ads.
Some comic or other posed reasoning along those lines: "If the world made sense, elderly people would be the ones out drinking all night, bungee-jumping, etc., and 20-year-olds would be complaining 'Shut the door! You're letting in a draft!'"
You can't do that with software. Any large software project ends up as a boondoggle; if it works at all, it will be buggy and painful. Our government is reaping the fruits of the race to the bottom, that our government's corporate owners have sown.
Broadcom switching-chip-development reference boards have a 4-character LED display on the CPU card (you don't usually see it unless you have the lid off). It gives status for early bootup (before the serial port starts outputting stuff), and, our operational code scrolls a message across it. Great for seeing if a box is hung or sitting on a breakpoint.
This depends on whether the business is thinking long-term or short-term.
In the long term, if (e.g.) fusion power replaces oil power, then oil companies can / will simply get into the fusion power business, and continue to make money.
Short-term thinking could (but does not necessarily) lead an oil company to marginalize / buy-up-and-suppress alternative energy sources, though.
Wealthy and powerful people are not categorically and necessarily greedy and selfish
True. However, get enough of them together and their association (e.g. a corporation) will be categorically and necessarily greedy and selfish. With enough shareholders, the only aim the shareholders will all have in common is to make (ever-increasing amounts of) money, regardless of the consequences, and the corporation's leadership is legally bound to facilitate this.
The only way a business can be ethical is if it is under the control of a small number of ethical people. (Any business that's under the control of one person reflects the ethics of that person, for example).
That's why the economy seems bad... like the Asian poster above pointed out (but I am in the U.S. and know only about the U.S.) corporate profits are up, so the "economy" is growing. However, the growth is going to execs / investors and offshore, rather than trickling down to "real people" in the form of jobs.
I think the major difference between you and me is that you appear to idolize the overachievers who put in 12-16 hour days to "get ahead"
I will go even farther and say: working that much is unlikely to even get you ahead. Typically, in my experience, the cost/benefit analysis for programmers is like this:
Work 40 hours a week: Some hostility with management, probability of termination in 6 months = 10%, P(term(2 years)) = 40%, P(term(10 years)) = 100% (I am based in the U.S.), P(decent raise/promotion) = depends on job market.
Work 60 hours a week: Little hostility with mgmt. P(term(6mo)) = 8%, P(term(2y)) = 35%, P(term(10y)) = 100%, P(raise) = depends on job market, +1% to 2%.
Work 80 hours a week: Management loves you. P(term(6mo)) = 6%, P(term(2y)) = 30%, P(term(10y)) = 100%, P(raise) = depends on job market, +3% to 5%.
Is it really worth spending the time that it would take to work an entire second job for such little potential gain? Do you think your raises would add up to how much you could make working 20-40 hours per week at Wendy's?
I believe that the race to the bottom is going to bring on worldwide economic collapse, and (because the pace of history is ever-increasing) quickly enough that I will have to live through it. I also believe it's impossible to resist, as race-to-the-bottom-style capitalism seems pretty much inevitable (especially amongst the rich) given human nature (i.e. in any large-enough group, there will be enough people who will ruin it for everyone in their quest for personal gain).
It's a difficult belief, one I wish I could get rid of, but I've tried all sorts of research, arguments, even meditation and drugs and can't get rid of it. My life would be so much easier (I'd be able to do things like further my career, plan a budget, or even just enjoy a week without being convinced that this is as good as my life will ever get).
So watch out for those times when your beliefs turn on you!
A (somewhat famous) book called "The Naked Ape" had an alternate explanation - that apes' tendencies to organize themselves into hierarchies with alpha males gives humans a tendency to look for the Ultimate Alpha Male In The Sky.
I'm not sure anything can save software projects from aggressive scheduling.
As long as at least one company is doing it, then pretty much all of them have to, to compete. Customers come to us with 'it needs to do X, in Y weeks, for $Z' already in hand, and we take it or starve. If we told them how much time / money it would actually take, they'd just go to someone else, believing their overpromises.
This may be a simplistic view, but as long as you have US-style corporations (who legally must continually increase their growth rate by any legal means), and easy movement across of corporations across soverign borders, you will end up with wages / living conditions / labor standards going down to the lowest possible levels, and staying there forever.
If any factor (such as increased labor standards) causes the cost of doing business to go up, *whoosh* off the jobs go to somewhere even cheaper, driving wages back down again. If some factor improves conditions across the board (improvements in efficiency, etc.) the advantage to workers will eventually be nullified by the pursuit of ever-increasing growth rates.
Just look at the quality of goods. We've seen in several examples (agriculture, drugs, etc.) that the only realistic way to keep a floor on product quality, in a capitalist system, is through regulation. (I can see the business-apologist crowd now: "If you don't like maggots in your meat, just buy it somewhere else; you've asked for such low-quality meat by only being willing to pay $10/pound for it. Agribusiness is legally required to increase their shareholder value, so they have to make this kind of profit; they'd happily provide safer meat for $50/pound."). Never mind that most people can't afford to voluntarily pay extra for higher quality.
Re:Could be good... could be bad
on
The Media in 2014
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...make as much profit from their inventions/productions/IP with no concern for fairness (ie, there is a point where you've made enough money and you can stop).
This is the difference between small and big business. Here I measure that difference in the number of investors (1 for sole proprietorships, infinitely many for publically-traded companies).
Small business can act ethically, consider fairness, make "enough" money and no more, etc. (Note that this doesn't mean they will have good ethics; the company's ethics will simply reflect those of the controlling people). There are plenty of small businesses that care about delivering a quality product, and have no desire to dominate the world.
Once you get over a certain number of investors, enough of them will be in it just for the money that the business cannot behave ethically (the degenerate case is the pubically-traded corporation, which must grow shareholder value at a continually-increasing rate, forever). This means there will never be "enough" money made by one of these entities, so they will have to turn to "unethical" (i.e. socially-irresponsible) behavior to keep growing (deliver less to the consumer while keeping prices up, treat employees worse, drive down product quality, etc.)
The Right Way to do this is to have your wireless network connect to a subnet that only connects to a firewall, which then allows IPSEC tunnels or some other kind of VPN through to the rest of the network.
If the VPN is secure enough to protect against unauthorized use when connected to the Internet (where the whole world can pound on the door), it's secure enough to protect your wireless network from unauthorized use (where intruders at least have to have some physical proximity).
I use this, with MAC lists and WEP to protect against casual / inadvertent usage / snooping (they cost nothing...)
I also have some protection in the form of having a crappy-range Linksys WAP, so that intruders would pretty much have to be inside my house to use it...
It's not just Walmart (although I do refrain from shopping there for just that reason). It's any corporation.
Capitalism is destroying society; all the forces are pushing everything towards a world where a few mega-corps own and control everything, and everyone else lives in Third-World conditions. Nobody will be able to climb out of that poverty, because *whoosh* if their standards of living go up any, the jobs will just move to somewhere where the standards of living are still low.
(Yes, this will eat into the corps' profits, but they'll no doubt still manage to survive, and they don't / can't think in that long of a time horizon anyway).
I don't know what to do to fight this - I could try to buy from socially-responsible companies (it is possible, in our society, for a small business to have ethics - only big businesses (with several or more investors) must give up their ethics). I could try to lobby for better labor and consumer-protection laws. Any of it would be like standing under Niagra Falls with a golf umbrella trying to stop the water.
It seems all I can do (since I'll never be able to rise to the top of the capitalist heap) is try to prepare for a life of abject poverty.
I would just as soon see the outlawing of all sales of goods with a non-negotiable contract attached.
Real examples:
Cellphones: "You agree to pay for a full month when you terminate service, you can't take the phone to another carrier even if it's compatible, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration."
Credit cards: "You agree that we can raise your interest rate if you're late with a payment on anything you owe, even if with another company, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration."
What's next? To get food at a restaurant: "You agree that the product is not warranted to have any nutritional value and may not conform to the published ingredients list, you agree to hold the restaurant harmless for any food-poisoning incidents, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration"?
I see this moving towards a corporate "utopia" where corps can keep charging consumers, while providing less and less service, until everything becomes a subscription-based service that doesn't actually provide anything to the consumer.
This is especially true with brain chemistry - it's somewhat of a black art, and everyone's is different. This means that, even for something as relatively "simple" as antidepressants, a doctor typically has to fiddle around with drugs and dosages before finding out what works for a particular patient.
My gut feeling is that it would lead to ADD instead, given that the way ADD feels is like having thoughts pinging around the inside of your head, at great speed, all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Mgr: We don't care how many hours you work, as long as you get the work done.
Me: Bullshit. If I got everything done in 40 hours / week, you'd simply assign me more things until I had to work unpaid overtime to complete them.
So far, my strategy has been to work 40 hours a week, and not everything gets done. I've yet to get fired for it... my job's going to India anyway, it's only a matter of time, why bust my butt when at best it might keep me employed for a few months longer?
Actually (in the software industry), returning to a 40-hour work week would carry much of the same benefits.
I unfortunately have the opposite problem; start many things, most I either don't get time to finish (which this book might help), or forget about completely and never come back to (which this book would not help).
Annulment means the marriage never happened, so it's not really an 'end' to the marriage.
One hundred percent of all marriages end in death or divorce.
As much as I hate the pervasiveness of advertising, it feels good to see entertaining ads.
Some comic or other posed reasoning along those lines: "If the world made sense, elderly people would be the ones out drinking all night, bungee-jumping, etc., and 20-year-olds would be complaining 'Shut the door! You're letting in a draft!'"
You can't do that with software. Any large software project ends up as a boondoggle; if it works at all, it will be buggy and painful. Our government is reaping the fruits of the race to the bottom, that our government's corporate owners have sown.
Get enough investors involved, and the company will of necessity turn evil.
The monitoring can also serve to protect the agents from really abusive customers, death threats, etc.
Broadcom switching-chip-development reference boards have a 4-character LED display on the CPU card (you don't usually see it unless you have the lid off). It gives status for early bootup (before the serial port starts outputting stuff), and, our operational code scrolls a message across it. Great for seeing if a box is hung or sitting on a breakpoint.
In the long term, if (e.g.) fusion power replaces oil power, then oil companies can / will simply get into the fusion power business, and continue to make money.
Short-term thinking could (but does not necessarily) lead an oil company to marginalize / buy-up-and-suppress alternative energy sources, though.
The only way a business can be ethical is if it is under the control of a small number of ethical people. (Any business that's under the control of one person reflects the ethics of that person, for example).
That's why the economy seems bad... like the Asian poster above pointed out (but I am in the U.S. and know only about the U.S.) corporate profits are up, so the "economy" is growing. However, the growth is going to execs / investors and offshore, rather than trickling down to "real people" in the form of jobs.
- Work 40 hours a week: Some hostility with management, probability of termination in 6 months = 10%, P(term(2 years)) = 40%, P(term(10 years)) = 100% (I am based in the U.S.), P(decent raise/promotion) = depends on job market.
- Work 60 hours a week: Little hostility with mgmt. P(term(6mo)) = 8%, P(term(2y)) = 35%, P(term(10y)) = 100%, P(raise) = depends on job market, +1% to 2%.
- Work 80 hours a week: Management loves you. P(term(6mo)) = 6%, P(term(2y)) = 30%, P(term(10y)) = 100%, P(raise) = depends on job market, +3% to 5%.
Is it really worth spending the time that it would take to work an entire second job for such little potential gain? Do you think your raises would add up to how much you could make working 20-40 hours per week at Wendy's?It's a difficult belief, one I wish I could get rid of, but I've tried all sorts of research, arguments, even meditation and drugs and can't get rid of it. My life would be so much easier (I'd be able to do things like further my career, plan a budget, or even just enjoy a week without being convinced that this is as good as my life will ever get).
So watch out for those times when your beliefs turn on you!
As long as at least one company is doing it, then pretty much all of them have to, to compete. Customers come to us with 'it needs to do X, in Y weeks, for $Z' already in hand, and we take it or starve. If we told them how much time / money it would actually take, they'd just go to someone else, believing their overpromises.
Have a nice day!
If any factor (such as increased labor standards) causes the cost of doing business to go up, *whoosh* off the jobs go to somewhere even cheaper, driving wages back down again. If some factor improves conditions across the board (improvements in efficiency, etc.) the advantage to workers will eventually be nullified by the pursuit of ever-increasing growth rates.
Just look at the quality of goods. We've seen in several examples (agriculture, drugs, etc.) that the only realistic way to keep a floor on product quality, in a capitalist system, is through regulation. (I can see the business-apologist crowd now: "If you don't like maggots in your meat, just buy it somewhere else; you've asked for such low-quality meat by only being willing to pay $10/pound for it. Agribusiness is legally required to increase their shareholder value, so they have to make this kind of profit; they'd happily provide safer meat for $50/pound."). Never mind that most people can't afford to voluntarily pay extra for higher quality.
Small business can act ethically, consider fairness, make "enough" money and no more, etc. (Note that this doesn't mean they will have good ethics; the company's ethics will simply reflect those of the controlling people). There are plenty of small businesses that care about delivering a quality product, and have no desire to dominate the world.
Once you get over a certain number of investors, enough of them will be in it just for the money that the business cannot behave ethically (the degenerate case is the pubically-traded corporation, which must grow shareholder value at a continually-increasing rate, forever). This means there will never be "enough" money made by one of these entities, so they will have to turn to "unethical" (i.e. socially-irresponsible) behavior to keep growing (deliver less to the consumer while keeping prices up, treat employees worse, drive down product quality, etc.)
If the VPN is secure enough to protect against unauthorized use when connected to the Internet (where the whole world can pound on the door), it's secure enough to protect your wireless network from unauthorized use (where intruders at least have to have some physical proximity).
I use this, with MAC lists and WEP to protect against casual / inadvertent usage / snooping (they cost nothing...)
I also have some protection in the form of having a crappy-range Linksys WAP, so that intruders would pretty much have to be inside my house to use it...
Capitalism is destroying society; all the forces are pushing everything towards a world where a few mega-corps own and control everything, and everyone else lives in Third-World conditions. Nobody will be able to climb out of that poverty, because *whoosh* if their standards of living go up any, the jobs will just move to somewhere where the standards of living are still low.
(Yes, this will eat into the corps' profits, but they'll no doubt still manage to survive, and they don't / can't think in that long of a time horizon anyway).
I don't know what to do to fight this - I could try to buy from socially-responsible companies (it is possible, in our society, for a small business to have ethics - only big businesses (with several or more investors) must give up their ethics). I could try to lobby for better labor and consumer-protection laws. Any of it would be like standing under Niagra Falls with a golf umbrella trying to stop the water.
It seems all I can do (since I'll never be able to rise to the top of the capitalist heap) is try to prepare for a life of abject poverty.
Real examples:
- Cellphones: "You agree to pay for a full month when you terminate service, you can't take the phone to another carrier even if it's compatible, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration."
- Credit cards: "You agree that we can raise your interest rate if you're late with a payment on anything you owe, even if with another company, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration."
What's next? To get food at a restaurant: "You agree that the product is not warranted to have any nutritional value and may not conform to the published ingredients list, you agree to hold the restaurant harmless for any food-poisoning incidents, and you agree to resolve disputes with binding arbitration"?I see this moving towards a corporate "utopia" where corps can keep charging consumers, while providing less and less service, until everything becomes a subscription-based service that doesn't actually provide anything to the consumer.
This is especially true with brain chemistry - it's somewhat of a black art, and everyone's is different. This means that, even for something as relatively "simple" as antidepressants, a doctor typically has to fiddle around with drugs and dosages before finding out what works for a particular patient.
My gut feeling is that it would lead to ADD instead, given that the way ADD feels is like having thoughts pinging around the inside of your head, at great speed, all the time.