IMHO this is where MS would like to go. Having a hosted web service model gives a dependable revenue stream that makes the Wall Street analysts salivate. Knowing that you have X numbers of users paying Y amount/month is a reliable predictor of future revenue.
This also allows MS not to worry about license revenue and allows them to control the spitgot. If you can turn a service off or on then you put a serious clamp on the pirating of your software.
The company I work for is in the final stages of turning off the licensed customers. The code line is deadended and will be eliminated in the future years. The only way to get our service will be to pay a user fee for out hosted web service.
This is great for the company because we now control updates, releases, etc. and don't need the customers permission. We turn on access for new users and when the users get to a certain number we add a few more machines to the server farm. We use the same open source applications to provide the web servers and leverage the databases to handle many clients on the single license.
Over time we have seen the 'cost per transaction' reduce and the 'cost per deployment' reduce but we still charge the same amount. This increases the margins and thereby increases our profitability.
I read your nomen nudum all the time on this site and you rarily have much insight to what you say. It's obvious that you spend most of your time 'trolling'. When this incident happened I did go to 2 other programmers I respect and gave them the algorithm just to see if I was off-base on my assumption that it was 'efficient and succinct'. It took less than 5 minutes in both cases to for either to understand what the algorithm did. If it would take you a half-hour to dicipher my 'asshats succinct code' then I'm not surprised you spend so much time sharing your insightful observations for us here at slashdot.org. I'm guessing that this is your only form of enjoyment because of your lack of coding skills. I'll continue to work on my 'retarded skill set'. As long as I'm competing against the likes of you.
while(*s++ = *t++);
is great code and not the hard to understand if you have even a little bit of programming talent.
I love to write code like that because it is efficient and succinct. I had a experience about 1 1/2 years ago where I spent about 2 days working on a loop that would determine how to manage automated file transfer using different protocols. My tech lead couldn't understand it and rewrote it with a bunch of if - ifelse conditions. What was about 15 lines of code turned into 3 pages of code.
His reason for doing this was that it was 'easier to understand and maintain'. Good argument but I always have trouble seeing how 3 pages of code is 'easier to maintain' then 15 lines. Also the initial premise that my 15 lines of code needed to be maintained was wrong. It work as stated and could do all of the necessary setup work for transferring of files.
I no longer work for that tech lead and I hope I never work for you. Sometimes you need to have faith that code does as it should even if you don't understand it.
Your 'talking-to' should be more about good documentation and not about coding to the lowest-common denominator of your programmers.
Writing code is a hobby for me. It began in the early 80's when I was working as a firefighter putting out house fires and fixing hurt and sick people.
I went to one of those 'elite' CompSci schools that doesn't teach programming they teach CompSci theory. Lots of time spent on discrete math and computational math. Areas I could only manage B's in . But a 44 I graduated with my CompSci degree. I took a $4,000 cut in pay from what they paid me to be a fireman. Now 14 years later I make triple what I got paid as a fireman and can't believe they pay me so much to write code. Office politics suck but programming is always a delight.
I have computers at home that run both MS's OS and Linux. Some are wireless and some are cabled. Some hold MP3's and some hold video files. I constantly work on improving my skill set. I still have time for outside activities. I don't spend my time drinking beer and watching sports on TV.
I don't worry about my job going to India, China or anywhere else on this planet.
The advice about having good writing skills is dead on. The advice about a strong drive to improve your programming skills is also dead on. The advice to always put out your best effort even if you don't want to is dead on.
My own observations...
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Being on the leading edge of the boomer generation I grew up in the 50's. My early childhood was spent hanging with the kids in the nieghborhood. I can remember when the first TV showed up. It was this huge cabinet and a small round screen. There was only one TV station at the time. Through most of my childhood we had only 3 stations and by my teenage years there were a handful more.
Fast forward to the 70's I was taking advantage of the GI bill (thanks to being drafted) and getting a master degree in clinical psychology. I used to wonder why I could drive a car, remember the roads I was on, overlay that with the topography of the city I was in and use that to find alternate routes. This is a practice I still use today. In retrospect I would infer that from the article that I had the ability to multitask.
Fast forward again to the late 80's. I was a firefighter who in the early 80's got interested in computers as a hobby. I ended up at one of the top ten CompSci schools and got my degree at the age of 44.
Being a firefighter I learned not to be stressed because not only is your life on the line but the lives and welfare of your co-workers and the victims of the current crisis depends on you making the right choices. I found this to come fairly easy for me.
Now my present job as a senior programmer I find that doing multiple tasks is not that big of a deal. I've got time for this post because I'm compiling the application I work on and it takes about 20 minutes to run the ant scripts on my machine.
The observation that I'm trying to make is that some people just have a knack at doing many things at once and I'm fortunate to be one of those people. Based on my 58 laps around the sun I would say that most people do not have this ability. I think that this is what the article is trying to get at.
I really don't spend much time on TV but when I'm ready for sleep I sometimes surf the cable offerings. I've noticed because of my ability to multitask that some cable channels have about 7 minutes between commercials.
That is why I hate TV. If you took the commercials out of commercial TV it would be a big improvement to even the worst shows.
I live only 17 miles from Redmond and I can't get DSL or cable to my house that is in the middle of the woods on a hillside overlooking the Snoqualimie River valley. I could care less about TV over the phone lines. What I would like is wireless internet connectivity that doesn't need to use Terabeam-like 'line of sight' technology. I've got satellite internet connectivity but I can't use VPN access to work. My cell phone works fine so why doesn't the phone company spend the money to keep me connected wirelessly. Now that I would appreciate.
Just remember the following logic: More options = good Less options = bad
For me options are not as important as:
Less bugs = good More bugs = bad
and of course:
Less vulnerability = good More vulnerability = bad
These are the reasons I moved to Firefox.
Re:WE have done nothing to protect ourselves.
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
If you are really talented then start going to the local user group meetings for whatever interests you. There are language user groups like java and.NET. There are database user groups like Oracle and SQL Server. There are OS user groups like Linux. This is called networking. Get to know the people who go there. If you're really good then someone will recognize your talent. If no one does then maybe you need to upgrade your skill set. If you upgrade your skill set and still no one recognize it then maybe you're not as talented as you think. A union isn't going to get you a job. You want a union then become a plumber or an electrian. A programmer who needs a union to protect their job is as doomed as the steelworker's union.
Re:offshoring vs. obsoleting
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
I lived the dot com bomb and outsourcing is just the latest manifestation of it. I worked with programmers who in my opinion were marginally at best in their skill sets. These people were the first to be laid off. In the last 4 years or so I have talked to countless 'former programmers' who were unable to find another programming job. It only takes me a few minutes to know that these are the ones who were marginal but they don't realize it. However, everyone of the programmers I would consider to be talented have had no trouble finding work. Even at the company I'm at now we have openings for senior level programmers. A senior level programmer is not based on years of experience. It is based on the skills you have and how well you know them. If you have the skills and an ability to learn new skills then you're a senior level developer. I code in java right now but here is a partial list of what else I know.
Open source tools:
Maven , Ant, Log4j, Struts, Turbine, Velocity, Torque, picocontainers and more.
Databases (both administration of and engineering of):
Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL
Application servers:
Tomcat and WebLogic
Misc:
javascript, VBScript, HTML, TCP/IP, HTTP and HTTPS, FTP and SFTP
On top of that I understand architectural issues and now to apply design patterns. I can take current code and refactory it to make it easier to maintain.
And the number asset I have is I love to program and still find it incredible that I get paid the big bucks to do what I consider a hobby.
Re:Stay specialized and ahead of the curve
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
You have hit upon the main way to stay employed. 10 years ago you had to compete against other programmers in Silicon Valley, Silicon Forest and the high tech corridor around MIT. Now you need to compete with programmers in India, Czech, China and anywhere else they may pop up. I've worked in many different programming languages and now I'm doing java programming. But that is only one small part of it. Programming is just loops and conditional where all problems are solved by either indirection or another data structure. Programming is just the syntax you're writing in. However, I know much more than java syntax. I know many open source tools that are needed to write java programs like the application server it runs on and the database it talks to. I can manage both of these. On top of that I know how to write build scripts, write the presentation layer and SQL queries. I understand database administration and database engineering concepts. I work with frameworks and templating languages. I know how to setup a linux box. I know how to connect to the network and setup up the network protocols. I have excellent debugging skills and I don't write code that is full of bugs but my code does have some bugs. I never try to be the best but I strive to be better than most. The last four jobs I've had I never had to interview for. I've been doing this for 15 years now and I didn't even get my CompSci degree until I was 44 years old. If you want to programmer than you have to compete globally. If you're not willing to do that then get a job pushing hamburgers through a window (which I have done). In the company I work at now there are programmers from the US, Britain, Canada, China and India. Most of the testing is done by Indians while I'm asleep. Some of the bug fixing is also done by Indians. About a year ago the company did try and outsource a major project but had to bring much of it back in house. If you want to earn the American bucks then realize you have to become more than just a code cutter.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO this is where MS would like to go. Having a hosted web service model gives a dependable revenue stream that makes the Wall Street analysts salivate. Knowing that you have X numbers of users paying Y amount/month is a reliable predictor of future revenue.
This also allows MS not to worry about license revenue and allows them to control the spitgot. If you can turn a service off or on then you put a serious clamp on the pirating of your software.
The company I work for is in the final stages of turning off the licensed customers. The code line is deadended and will be eliminated in the future years. The only way to get our service will be to pay a user fee for out hosted web service.
This is great for the company because we now control updates, releases, etc. and don't need the customers permission. We turn on access for new users and when the users get to a certain number we add a few more machines to the server farm. We use the same open source applications to provide the web servers and leverage the databases to handle many clients on the single license.
Over time we have seen the 'cost per transaction' reduce and the 'cost per deployment' reduce but we still charge the same amount. This increases the margins and thereby increases our profitability.
MS would love to get to the same place.
I read your nomen nudum all the time on this site and you rarily have much insight to what you say. It's obvious that you spend most of your time 'trolling'. When this incident happened I did go to 2 other programmers I respect and gave them the algorithm just to see if I was off-base on my assumption that it was 'efficient and succinct'. It took less than 5 minutes in both cases to for either to understand what the algorithm did. If it would take you a half-hour to dicipher my 'asshats succinct code' then I'm not surprised you spend so much time sharing your insightful observations for us here at slashdot.org. I'm guessing that this is your only form of enjoyment because of your lack of coding skills. I'll continue to work on my 'retarded skill set'. As long as I'm competing against the likes of you.
while(*s++ = *t++); is great code and not the hard to understand if you have even a little bit of programming talent. I love to write code like that because it is efficient and succinct. I had a experience about 1 1/2 years ago where I spent about 2 days working on a loop that would determine how to manage automated file transfer using different protocols. My tech lead couldn't understand it and rewrote it with a bunch of if - ifelse conditions. What was about 15 lines of code turned into 3 pages of code. His reason for doing this was that it was 'easier to understand and maintain'. Good argument but I always have trouble seeing how 3 pages of code is 'easier to maintain' then 15 lines. Also the initial premise that my 15 lines of code needed to be maintained was wrong. It work as stated and could do all of the necessary setup work for transferring of files. I no longer work for that tech lead and I hope I never work for you. Sometimes you need to have faith that code does as it should even if you don't understand it. Your 'talking-to' should be more about good documentation and not about coding to the lowest-common denominator of your programmers.
Writing code is a hobby for me. It began in the early 80's when I was working as a firefighter putting out house fires and fixing hurt and sick people.
I went to one of those 'elite' CompSci schools that doesn't teach programming they teach CompSci theory. Lots of time spent on discrete math and computational math. Areas I could only manage B's in . But a 44 I graduated with my CompSci degree. I took a $4,000 cut in pay from what they paid me to be a fireman. Now 14 years later I make triple what I got paid as a fireman and can't believe they pay me so much to write code. Office politics suck but programming is always a delight.
I have computers at home that run both MS's OS and Linux. Some are wireless and some are cabled. Some hold MP3's and some hold video files. I constantly work on improving my skill set. I still have time for outside activities. I don't spend my time drinking beer and watching sports on TV.
I don't worry about my job going to India, China or anywhere else on this planet.
The advice about having good writing skills is dead on. The advice about a strong drive to improve your programming skills is also dead on. The advice to always put out your best effort even if you don't want to is dead on.
Being on the leading edge of the boomer generation I grew up in the 50's. My early childhood was spent hanging with the kids in the nieghborhood. I can remember when the first TV showed up. It was this huge cabinet and a small round screen. There was only one TV station at the time. Through most of my childhood we had only 3 stations and by my teenage years there were a handful more.
Fast forward to the 70's I was taking advantage of the GI bill (thanks to being drafted) and getting a master degree in clinical psychology. I used to wonder why I could drive a car, remember the roads I was on, overlay that with the topography of the city I was in and use that to find alternate routes. This is a practice I still use today. In retrospect I would infer that from the article that I had the ability to multitask.
Fast forward again to the late 80's. I was a firefighter who in the early 80's got interested in computers as a hobby. I ended up at one of the top ten CompSci schools and got my degree at the age of 44.
Being a firefighter I learned not to be stressed because not only is your life on the line but the lives and welfare of your co-workers and the victims of the current crisis depends on you making the right choices. I found this to come fairly easy for me.
Now my present job as a senior programmer I find that doing multiple tasks is not that big of a deal. I've got time for this post because I'm compiling the application I work on and it takes about 20 minutes to run the ant scripts on my machine.
The observation that I'm trying to make is that some people just have a knack at doing many things at once and I'm fortunate to be one of those people. Based on my 58 laps around the sun I would say that most people do not have this ability. I think that this is what the article is trying to get at.
I really don't spend much time on TV but when I'm ready for sleep I sometimes surf the cable offerings. I've noticed because of my ability to multitask that some cable channels have about 7 minutes between commercials.
That is why I hate TV. If you took the commercials out of commercial TV it would be a big improvement to even the worst shows.
I live only 17 miles from Redmond and I can't get DSL or cable to my house that is in the middle of the woods on a hillside overlooking the Snoqualimie River valley. I could care less about TV over the phone lines. What I would like is wireless internet connectivity that doesn't need to use Terabeam-like 'line of sight' technology. I've got satellite internet connectivity but I can't use VPN access to work. My cell phone works fine so why doesn't the phone company spend the money to keep me connected wirelessly. Now that I would appreciate.
Just remember the following logic:
More options = good
Less options = bad
For me options are not as important as:
Less bugs = good
More bugs = bad
and of course:
Less vulnerability = good
More vulnerability = bad
These are the reasons I moved to Firefox.
If you are really talented then start going to the local user group meetings for whatever interests you. There are language user groups like java and .NET. There are database user groups like Oracle and SQL Server. There are OS user groups like Linux. This is called networking. Get to know the people who go there. If you're really good then someone will recognize your talent. If no one does then maybe you need to upgrade your skill set. If you upgrade your skill set and still no one recognize it then maybe you're not as talented as you think. A union isn't going to get you a job. You want a union then become a plumber or an electrian. A programmer who needs a union to protect their job is as doomed as the steelworker's union.
I lived the dot com bomb and outsourcing is just the latest manifestation of it. I worked with programmers who in my opinion were marginally at best in their skill sets. These people were the first to be laid off. In the last 4 years or so I have talked to countless 'former programmers' who were unable to find another programming job. It only takes me a few minutes to know that these are the ones who were marginal but they don't realize it. However, everyone of the programmers I would consider to be talented have had no trouble finding work. Even at the company I'm at now we have openings for senior level programmers. A senior level programmer is not based on years of experience. It is based on the skills you have and how well you know them. If you have the skills and an ability to learn new skills then you're a senior level developer. I code in java right now but here is a partial list of what else I know. Open source tools: Maven , Ant, Log4j, Struts, Turbine, Velocity, Torque, picocontainers and more. Databases (both administration of and engineering of): Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL Application servers: Tomcat and WebLogic Misc: javascript, VBScript, HTML, TCP/IP, HTTP and HTTPS, FTP and SFTP On top of that I understand architectural issues and now to apply design patterns. I can take current code and refactory it to make it easier to maintain. And the number asset I have is I love to program and still find it incredible that I get paid the big bucks to do what I consider a hobby.
You have hit upon the main way to stay employed. 10 years ago you had to compete against other programmers in Silicon Valley, Silicon Forest and the high tech corridor around MIT. Now you need to compete with programmers in India, Czech, China and anywhere else they may pop up. I've worked in many different programming languages and now I'm doing java programming. But that is only one small part of it. Programming is just loops and conditional where all problems are solved by either indirection or another data structure. Programming is just the syntax you're writing in. However, I know much more than java syntax. I know many open source tools that are needed to write java programs like the application server it runs on and the database it talks to. I can manage both of these. On top of that I know how to write build scripts, write the presentation layer and SQL queries. I understand database administration and database engineering concepts. I work with frameworks and templating languages. I know how to setup a linux box. I know how to connect to the network and setup up the network protocols. I have excellent debugging skills and I don't write code that is full of bugs but my code does have some bugs. I never try to be the best but I strive to be better than most. The last four jobs I've had I never had to interview for. I've been doing this for 15 years now and I didn't even get my CompSci degree until I was 44 years old. If you want to programmer than you have to compete globally. If you're not willing to do that then get a job pushing hamburgers through a window (which I have done). In the company I work at now there are programmers from the US, Britain, Canada, China and India. Most of the testing is done by Indians while I'm asleep. Some of the bug fixing is also done by Indians. About a year ago the company did try and outsource a major project but had to bring much of it back in house. If you want to earn the American bucks then realize you have to become more than just a code cutter.