unites states is now dominated in feminist politics, which is fear politics. oh, and the fear must be directed made out of something innocuous in that you dont have to DO anything about it... other than maybe propose a new law. things they should properly be afraid of would make them look at the politicians more than where they may decide not to vacation any more.
stairs are not scary enough compared to sharks.
what happened in England has to be made scarier here.. (but you dont take OUR politicos to task)
and the princess and the pea syndrome (i am coining it here first), means that we are so insulated that aruba vacation kidnapping is scary, for only what happens to women is scary enough (again.. not politicos)
for instance yesterday a building collapsed, several people injured and it made it on the cover, with the main thing being a woman and a baby and ignoring the men that were hurt...
fine.
however on page 20 is an article where china is going to take taiwan back by force (new law in march), and if the US blocks them or stops them or even moves ships into the area, china will use nuclear weapons on them! so says a general of theirs...
which is really scarier, which is more important, and which might make us really think about our politicians policies and even whom we elect?
what MS is doing is not needed. there is no law making them do this at all.
so they are voluntarily stripping your rights and such at the behest of other companies rather than their consumers.. tell me if that is not collusion and the reason why monopolies are not good?
tell you the truth.. i dont care anymore..
the masses are being pinched.. and DVD is a MASS media.. the more that can buy the more you make. except the only peoples incomes that have increased (in real terms) in the past 20 years are the top 10%.. with offshoring and with nafta, and cafta people cant afford it.. its why DVD sales are slumping...
the issue here is that if MS continues to ignore that now there are other operating systems and such, and that doing things against your clients only works when you are a monopoly...
even if these things wont work at all in linux, its still better..
i am getting to the point that i am trying to teach my freinds to go out, lets take pics, lets see a free show in the park, go skating , read under the trees..
the entertainment industry forgets that they ALSO compete with those things too.. and when their price performance is too high given your ROI in satisfaction, you shift to other things that do that. the sad part is that with such shitty movies, and so many crappy remakes, the population may just 'discover' that those things are actually a lot more fun than the movies are now...
the other thing is that this is a money maker in other ways. that DVM will not be robust, despite what it seems like. why? because, when someone cracks it, and beats it, then they will change it and we all will have to buy new monitors and TVs as they are not software upgradable, nor do they want to be! in fact nothing stops them from 'improving' it anyway and doing this every ccouple of years. i have a 21 inch autocad workstation with hige res and color correction on a cathode flat screen. better color and such for the graphics and what not. i spend more than 3000 when that was new in 1999.. it still runs sweet, has no burn in (i have been a sofware engineer for more than 20 years and other things). i am NOT going to bother with this...
you know what i will do instead. say fuck it.. wait three months and watch it with my normal cable!!!!!!!
if they think that a blurry version is ok for us to watch they just proved that yuo dont care as much about HD as they stress!!!
screw it.. i will wait.. and if i dont have that i will watch something else. if it really is that good and i want it.. i will pay the 2.99-3.99 pay per view fee..
bottom line is that only really good films are worth $4!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or less... (and the medium of storage is not worth the other $12-$26!) the drivel they make is not worth more, and certainly not worth 500 a year (amortizing the monitors) extra to see!!!
but to be FAIR, though i dont know why.. MS is probably making the decision based on the recording and movie industry. if MS does not comply then windows boxes will not be able to play ANY movies and such, becasue the code was a work for hire of the recording industry and movie industry.
MS is making the decision that people wont by the new operating system without this, or fewer will. however DVDs are not the major reason i buy a computer...
basically the recording industry is playing a dangerous game. they are saying "either you comply with us, or you dont get ANY entertainment"
if we take the threat, we lose... there will always be wealthier people that dont care, so we are already sold out.
screw em though...
I have never thought of buying a street DVD, but may start in purpose. in fact the ONLY dvd i have ever bought was the first lord of the rings movie... but when they decided to screw me i didnt by the rest. how did they screw me, easy, they then came out with richer better editions, and i realized that if i buy the others soon and not wait 5 years i will get less for my money.. and so
what you said was what i was trying to say but i guess i did not do as well..
the law firm sends tapes in every few months and stuff.. it gives them also a record of how long the repair had been sitting there after the city was notified...
all this was in a daily news article a few years back.. i culdnt locate the article.
there is an automatic and presumptive claim that every creation is automatically copywrited. that is the law now - a long time ago this was not the case - the implicit (C) had to be used correctly and such.. this hasnt been the case for a long long time... proving copyright under these circumstances is where ths issue was shifted.
i like your analysis.. except if you want to draw that each hop from location to location consitutes the same thing as "in the way"... and expresses that you are on the outside (which is the inside of the net), and not inside THEIR network. if there were no hops then you would be IN their network/store, and no longer on the street (the inside of the net).
as far as it not being a second use of space, well you can define that it is. that the primary use is when you log in and enter through someones locked "door". now the whole of the net is just like the store model your positing. the jumps are the streets.. the view is whats public... the entery is after a log in.. (so if you grant a spyder entry to crawl, you in effect are granting permission for it to do its job. you are aware of its job when you let thim through, and so are acquiesing to the results of which you already know)
oh... and in france the billboard example would have other outcomes. in france the owner of an edifice controls the image of that edifice, so technically you cant take a picture of the eiffle tower and use it in a post card without paying royalty.
i say this so that whatever philosophical center we find isnt defined by the laws. it should be defined first, THEN see how the laws apply.. which is what i was trying to do...
the tapes in order to be valid are made with street names recorded and such... so the report would have to include the location.. so your assumption that its not reasonable to search them all (outside of normal maintenance), is correct
Hows this for fresh...
rather than looking at each site as its own thing look at the internet as a whole. then you are no longer copying to you, you are just moving a digital book to a digital table to read.
if thats the case then they havent done anything wrong as they are also part of that large book, the whole net.
who owns the net? its community property, supported by private participation. the owners of the large book (all of us) have free right to work with the pages in the book and read them.
for another poor analogy.. that this is a like a compendium of poetry published ongoing. there are such things as implied contracts. and where the actual physical book needs a physical contract that states that the publisher of said book has the right to work with your work with no compensation. it might also be argued that a public document can take submissions for inclusion wherby the person gives up limited rights in contect to that "document" (the whole web). now in this case the publisher has the right to move and repage, and such..
now each entity of the web is now an editor for the large singular entity, and each editor can reform pages and move them around WITHIN that context since they were submitted to the public entity.
under this model i could read what i want.. since the book is offered for free... yes some chapters are not free... some are easier to read than others, but all in all the book itself, the whole thing is free.
if i printed a page, i would not be in violation nor would i be in violation for my cache or mirrors as they dont reproduce the whole net (even the archive doesnt reproduce the whole thing)... so now the one site is the akin to copying a chapter or a page not a whole entity.
the rights of the publisher cant be revoked and so one must make considerations when one submits to this publisher.
so the analogies are more like radio and TV... i can tape shows on TV because i have already seen them and as such have pervue to see them again. the viewing was paid for by the advertising, and continues to be paid for each time i see the film (with the advertisers not paying for such ads! this is exactly the net model - content is broadcast publicly and paid for by ads or donations. the ads on the pages that are archived continue to "earn") their quality is not the same but lesser (as with the archive in that many pages will not work without the databases and programing and such behind them)...
now me recording a song or show off the TV is fine, and so should be with this archive.
i dont have the time to really formulate this and it was off the cuff, but this is the angle that might work.
there is a famous photographer that makes his "art" by taking pictures of other photographers pictures...
he gets away with it because he is not reproducing the actual picture, but a picture of a picture which is his own picture.. (he does not crop it to only the image).
There are several law firms in the NY city area that pay to have every sidewalk and store front and such filmed on video...
they then send that video into the state....
now when a person trips on a bad sidewalk they can get the case to court!
i know.. you say WTF.. but its pretty simple. say there is a big upheaval in the sidewalk.. you trip, and try to sue the city for not maintaining its property, etc... (i am making this simple, there are all kinds of better examples but this is simpler).
the city though will tell you and so will the courts that the city is not responsible. why? because you cant prove negligence. negligence is willfull, and not knowing there is a crack is not negligence. and here is the rub.
being told that you have a problem and then ignoring it till something happens IS negligence.
so in the past the lawyer would have to sepeona the cities records to see if someone reported the issue, if so, then great for the client, if not, their plum out of luck.
so when the legal firm sends in the tapes, they are reporting the state of every block in that area... the city not looking at the tape that would define all the bad areas is negligence since now they DO have a method of seeing the problems and are ignoring them.. and voila, you now win cases that you couldnt before...
so given that there is precident on such (and that store windows, especially in manhatten, are copyrightable, given that they are artistic displays!)
my friend say i should have been a lawyer.:)
its easier to create hidden variables in your form and then vary the same code that you would use for buttons to change the image while changing the value in the hidden fields.
making it reverse compatible would be to put regular checks in a hidden div...
so if there is javascript div is emptied..
if there is no javascript the contents of the div shows and the javascript doesnt run...
cascading styles are optional...
ah... there are many things that can make one incapable... like being fired for wasting my time making little cartoons... actual words from one person... if you cant get them on board with how valauable it is and any kind of process, you aint going to do it anyway...
if you told me you werent able to walk i wouldnt think that you were crippled...
as for suck it up and quit whining... well, this was only commentary to a forums. i like programming a whole lot so its not the job. the number of quality positions has greatly diminished and you have to take work where you can work. i am 40 and so have found it hard in the past few years to get steady work. small firms are by nature unstable, and large firms are looking for younger (ie cheaper) people (even if you tell them thats ok the money is fine, that is not acceptable to them).
things arent what they used to be.. nor are the salaries.. and i see it getting a lot worse in the next 15 years... but hey, when your my age there are no scholarships..
i will have to say that the programmers that you have today or rather after the 80's are pretty bad as a lot. as i mentioned elsewhere, they dumbed the position down in attempt to keep salaries manageable. in the 80's thie became especially true for no one could figure out how much value they were getting from their investment in IT. it may sound silly but its true. i was trained in all kind of things that you dont see today at all, the economics just isnt there. one thing that i had was business area analysis. this wasnt in the colledge this was afterwards in industry. it is how to sit there and listen and learn the business processes and make a system that either helped it or changed it. that sounds bad though then you actually had someome trained in how to do this and in other parts of the firm and such. also you had someone who at their core was a computer science guy. the schools had just started cranking out those interested in something they can do. businesses also bent over backward for good expertise and they cared more about results that worked. i watched the whole thing evolve or devolve. it was like watching rust.
The idea with, for example, GNU/Linux, is that tasks might be difficult, but they make sense.
the reason they make sense is that GNU/linux was written, at its core, by a programmer... with no marketing department... no management... and no salesmen to tell you to do that because one client out of all of them wants something.
your love of this is the same love many people have for some of the early net programs and such.. in a way you are making the case for us!!!!
the sad part is all the concepts that people are relating it to in building dont surfice... take your light switch.. in a real house a light switch is something that can stand alone and exist without the house. but programing features are more like waves. they exist only in that they are part of the programs medium. taken out they cant exist on their own... and in fact.. in such a house, every light switch would be that way.. totally custom for each one!!!!
ho ho, ha ha... you are sooooo funny... i havent been ABLE to do a flow chart or warnier orr diagram in more than 15 years... and when i started this career 25 years ago, you werent allowed to proceed until you had one done and it was reviewed by antoher SKILLED person.
if managemetn doesnt value such charts managment will castigate you for wasting time. the charts were a better way to go.. managment today cant see how they help.. they never ask two programmers of relatively equal ability to execute the same project two different ways and compare which one costed more and was done better. its NEVER done. so they remove charting and such (methods developed long ago to get a handle on the intractableness of programming), and never listen to how much damage it does!!!!
Time passes, and when asked about progress, the answer is usually something like, "well, the server crashed, so we put that problem on the back burner". Or, "we're still working on it". [During the interim, someone has sketched the solution on a paper napkin, got it approved by someone who knows WTF he is talking about and the thing gets built in the field anyway].
I love this answer... the reason we programmers say this is that most of the time we work with and for people that dont have the ability to actually understand the problem. whats more, they also dont have the time for a dessertation to bring them up to speed as to why.
the salesmans problem is the classic example. tons of programming things will fall under this. the boss, or whatever will not want to hear that the problem cant or courldnt be handled. that after working it you discivered it fit into the class of P/NP problems and such. you learn very fast that saying the servef was down, is easier and more believable thatn quoting kurt godels theorems to a person that requires you to write all memos in 8th grade english (thats why word has a tool to help you do that! and has had that since very early days).
often times in programming you are put in a postioin of having to teach a pig to sing or lose your job... at least if you try to teach the pig to sing you might succeed, or if you can convine the pig they are singing... the other option is not vialble in the real world.
Because engineers in other industries and professions spend orders of magnitude more time estimating than they do actually building.
Then perhaps it's time for software engineers (not programmers or coders) to start treating their job with the professionalism it deserves.
we used to have that time. but management pushed us into a clerical model that we dont fit in. we dont get to negotiate from a point of being able to turn down or dictate terms. we are not equals with any abilithy to change outcomes, we are supplicants that get to execute what others want.
Now you have got to be kidding me. Satellite design and road construction are more complex than software design? Do you have any idea how many people it involves, how much planning take places, and how much impact constructing a major interchange or bridge requires?
I worked construction as a teen. programming is infinitely more complext than building a major interchange. just a quick point, all your workers on the programming team have to have colledge degrees... that is not true of your highway example... perhaps there is a reason? and perhaps you are not giving that reason credit. the workers on a programming team have to also integrate with each other a lot more. unlike the house or the road they are working on things that are folded into things that are folded into things that call things that are folded into things that they call... you can see and invision a major interchange, you cant see or visualize the scope of a large program. major interchange is measured in decade man years...some programmign projects are measured in MILLION man years estimate. concrete hasnt changed drastically in a few hundred years (yes there are new formulations, but you just pour it into a hole still), programming languages dont even last 20... imagine every 10 years everyone on your highway crew has to learn a new language and only talk in that.. now imagine that your boss comes in and says today we all talk tagalog and the deadlines are the same!!!
you are proving us engineers point... we ARE saying that you cant estimate programming that way because its the nature of programming (even the govt has been trying for 30 years do develope such metrics, imagine how much money could be made if you could).
and i quote "Don't tell me that an engineer has to guess anymore than a salesperson or marketer has to".
actually we do.. and we also have to fill in details that you dont want to go over.
"likes to blame sales/marketing/management for all of the times a developer can't deliver what he committed to."
contracts under duress are not contracts, and thats what happens when three departments gang up across the table from a couple of programmers. the programmers WANT to do the work, they dont want the company to miss out.
sales/marketing/management are all broadstroke clerical type areas... none of them are doing R&D on demand, which by definition is what your programmers ARE doing.
sales/marketing/management can all pipe together that we are going to build a space shuttle. only programming has any concept of what that once sentence entails, and just like you, sales/marketing/management is saying "Don't tell me..." and "no is not an option", AND "I dont have the time to discuss all the details with you". those three groups can state a sentence that when expanded out, like "lets build a shuttle", can lead to decades of work and billions of dollars of effort.
you are petulent like most bosses in thinking your will can change the beast. the best you can do is pinch a programmer between the beast and your wrath...
try a simple exercise in programming. list out a script in natural english that you can follow to get up and travel to work in the morning. first estimate how long it will take you to make that script. you will be writing in small units of action, so "get out of bed" is not code, its a subroutine that would be made up of "detect alarm? no alarm: reman sleeping, yes alarm, open eyes, start seeing, get orientation, turn head to alarm, view time, is it time to wake up? yes start wake up routine, no start sleep five minutes routine"
i will say that after your done i will be able to quickly point out that your subject is dead. why? because you forgot to throw interupts into your program to handle housekeeping tasks to support the rest of the system. things like breathing, balance, swallowig correctly, blinking...
a salesperson doesnt have to get that low into the mechanics of his work to do his work, a programmer does.
the features arent the problem, its being able to think of all these other little things that have to come together to make it all work.. so a feature in your wakeup and go to work may be the express mode that allows you to skip breakfast.. well.. after you get that first test program of how to wake up and go to work, now try to change it minimally to give you the express mode. go ahead try it... your not used to breaking things down into small parts.
to give you another feel for it..
a typical programming language has only 30 to about 150 statements... the larger only being bloated with statements that accomplish things that can be done in combinations of smaller statements.
thats right! all you see on the screen and such is the combination of about 30 statements or less put togetehr in combinations to make it all work.
break down any set of paper work you do into operations this small and you can see you are asking them to estimate how many grains of sand it will take to make a mountain (When you havent defined the mountain yet). or how many jelly beans are in the jar... what they have to do is think of how many statements and how fast they can write them. this is baring any weirdness in information (lke the salesmans probglen or the tyranny of numbers).
yhou do not realize that when you say we will display how many days between two dates and what day of the week they fall on, you have to figure out how to do that!!!!
i can tell that you are not a person that has any concept of writing code!!!
writing programs is incredibly complex. the kinds of problems that we solve often seem frightingly simple. lets take this simple one as an example, its a programming classic.
everybody says they can get together and make money if they make a traveling salesmans program. you all agree that there is a market for a program for companies to be able to save money by having their salesmen take the shortest routes to various customers. now any old programmer would laugh and tell you not to bother. would you allow your programming department to veto all the others? i doubt it, and so the project goes forward. the programers to their best, but they cant get the program to work in a reasonable amount of time.
here is where your ignorance comes in as to simple things being simple to do. does it sound like a simple thing to take in a list of all the locations a salesman has to visit and come up with the shortest route? well, in case you didnt know, the problem is intractable. there are a whole bunch of classes of problem that come up and are not hard to check but are pretty much impossible to compute (special cases not included). to solve this problem for only 100 locations would take you DECADES on a desktop computer!!!
if you were writing a program to filter out offensive language in resume postings would you filter out this list? F*ck, Cum, Sh*T, C*nt".
well then you would also be filtering out all those that graduated suma CUM laude! while you were thinking in a dirty context did your brain pull up the exception? but the exception in this case would mean either letting resumes potentially with dirty words, or get no applications from the best candidates!!! (i know because a friend of mine didnt understand why she wasnt getting responses. i told her to take that part out, and viola, she gets responses. turns out that few have caught that!).
such an issue is exaclty why a programmer cant estimate like a marketer or a salesperson. a salesperson asks their clients would you buy this if we made that? cut and dried... with 100 clients you have 100 opinions to promote.. thats a lot easier than programming.. even a simple program runs into more than 1000 lines of code! each has to be in the right place to work! in programing there is no tolerances... they arent loose, or tight, they are exact... totally infinitely exact. it wont work if anything is out of place and you go down that path!
the reason they SEEM to skate.. is that what they do is a guestimate and what you do is an estimate!
you KNOW that if you get (A) you then can make (B).
what you are asking of them, has never been done before! if it had, then you would be buying it, not asking them to make it so you can exploit the niche that is not being filled. you neglect to think of why is that niche empty for you to exploit? the word processer spread sheet niches were dominated long ago. your nichs is open because as the big niches are taken we try to squeeze out profit from smaller and smaller margins. your niche is also open because others dont have the resources to survive that niche, NOT as a company selfabsorbidly thinks, that no one else had the idea.
marketing and sales are clerical positions.. you dont need an IQ of 130 to be a good marketer... you dont even need an IQ of 100 to be a salesman. your jobs are not mathematical constructions..
if i asked you to build a house... could you tell me how many boards, windows, nails, floring, tiles, wire, etc you will need? yes you can... can you tell me on the fly in a meeting when everyone turns to you after reading a list of features? to implement a feature you have to implement everything around it. there are dependencies, interdependencies, and such. just as you cant tell me the number of boards you will need to make a bathroom until you know how many walls it shares with other features, neither can the programmer. whats worse is that we all have an idea of what ma
thats bradlys bromide i believe... and i was programming when that was new... its not from unix, or any language... its from a teacher of computer science.
there were lots of clever things like this in programming.. the way the web had clever things in its early days..
the value of a program is inversely proportional to the size of the print out
some day my prints will come
in every large program there are smaller programs just dying to get out.
your generally not allowed to ask that question... they dont think you understand "business", or your not even in that meeting that happened weeks before they are telling you how to do it. if you dont do what they want, you get a nasty review and your not a team player..
my new definition of a team player is the guy that puts nitrous in the truck that they are going to drive off a cliff!
you forgot why there is no buget and things are harder...
the managers ride first class... so there is only enough budget for one first class seat, not two business class seats.
the managers believe that programming is clerical and so they can ask the right questions for you, in passing, as they accomplish the other work. like setting the schedule for the creation of something they dont know the resources for or anything else.
and if you got to get work done by bypassing management, then management can be pared down! dont need to send dicky to the islands over that issue, we can send joey... etc...
oh.. and my favorite is that they dont know what can be done or cant be done or even what it entails to get something done!!!!
as a developer i have been banging my head on this issue for the last 15 of my 25 year career!!
the groups you mentioned do not take programming seriously. they think its easy, or at least easy for someone that knows how. like their jobs! marketing is an easy job (most just regurgitate the 'rules'they learned in school), and sales can be even worse as they are using their lack of knowledge to close deals.
whats worse is that they often think that when you say you cant do something, you are just being lazy. for in sales and marketing, there is no such thing as impossible. and they believe it to a ridiculous point, to the point to use it to define the engineer they think is being obstinate as not being a team player, etc...
by consistenly dumbing down the job AND by consistenly rewarding bad work over good work, we get what we want but didnt actually ask for.
too many megalomaniacs in business now that think that they have the werewithal to be it all and control it all and every aspect of it, because thats what they were told an entrepreneur gets as a reward. sure!
today i just bang out stuff that barely works... there is no time to do better, and no one cares. i am used to do hack stuff, and 25 years of experience is just sitting being underutilized, while i now make a third of what i used to 10 years ago. businesses have lost site of how to motivate. they forgot that what a business is, is a group of motivated people... the more motivated the better and cheaper it is to run it. crazy acoounting, or what i call advocate accounting, has torn up any real measure of the costs and expenditures
it took them a long time to work those things that they cant easily control into the ether, a financial sweeping under the rug. however what went with it was ALL control, and the creation of a model that barely works compared to what a healthy company used to be like. if there are no financial metrics for the costs and damage such practices reap, then there is no measure of them to even see that they exist when its floated upstairs. and so it gets worse and they try to do other things that are ineffective at controlling the real issues (like outsourcing or offshoring, etc)
it all sucks...
i would tell everyone now not to get into IT, its a total dead end now! too much eductation to do too much dumb work for people that make you do bad work and then dont appreciate it when you do good work. not to mention there isnt enough money in it, nor security... while re-education costs you, you are forbidden by federal law (from the time programmers made more and it hasnt been changed!) from getting overtime!!! the same can be said of pretty much all the other engineering disciplines... become an EE? why? they are suffernig the same things... even software companies dont appreciate the people that make their product!!!!!
i am looking for a new career... preferably something i can do overseas... obviously american business doesnt need what we have to offer....
by crackey....
in the old days we had all those things... reams of them... and companies saved lots of money by following them... but then the clock became king over everything else... a task completed poorly but on time got you a raise when tasks completed well but were 1 day late got you nothing 9and i am being VERY literal on the 1 day thing).
mainframe programming had and has all these things and its why you dont hear as much from that area as to the problems. they pay a lot for their machines, they pay for upkeep, they even pay for each instruction cycle(!), and so they get viceral returns in all categories...
the simple smaller company manager only has his scheduler to blame. not willing to accept the REAL cost of what they need, or accept that what they need costs too much to be practical, they make do with almost solutions.
when they scream we want cheaper employees do they get better work done with them? when a person who you have hired for a lot of money tells you not to do something becuase its well known that the problems become intractable... do they look up the workd intractable? no they just say "we are better than that, we will not make those mistakes".
i have worked this field for about 25 years now and started in the mainframe world when all programmers were computer scientists.. and i have watched the cry for cheapness erode more and more each day the quality of the tools that business needs. and those tools are people. wanting cheap tools and not computing the costs for not using good tools makes a situation in which the proglems and thier sources are to be ignored, for that wich is not tracked doesnt exist. we are no longer willing to make any investment in our most important tools and in their care... the outcome is inevitable...
generally if you think your subs are unreliable and a company thinks they arent, then there is a liklyhood that you have unreal expectations when it comes to having software done. in general someone will say three weeks, and then they will cut that down to something that is acceptable. the person doing the cutting doesnt know where this 'extra resource' will come from. well... it will come from all those areas that arent specific to the actual ruler (the code). so testing gets cut, features get cut, cheap implementation is done over correct implementation. why? because the person with the wallet is demanding cuts and the one area that could be cut and not effect the project, is the profit that keeps you afloat. you cant do the job for free, and so the client stiffs themselves.
think of it this way. i will hand you a sheet with long division problems on them. what happens when you compress the time i have to do them? you get more errors... errors that have to be corrected in a time frame in which you already cut every bit of ballast already out! sop the second round of fixing the errors is under more pressure, and so on... eventually you try to get problems passed when they arent correct, or all manner of other things because what will work is not acceptable!
managers like to think the job is a clerical one. it is not. they fail to realize that the job is to create custom solutions, and they think custom solutions is like the selection of colors you get when ordering a car. its not. its custom from the ground up. how much would it take for you to have a few men build you a car from scratch? not customize a mass produced one, but actually start from scratch. thats what writing code is like, though the managers view is like "crysler makes a million a year, so making one shouldnt be that hard a problem".
bottom line is that a manager is not willing to pay for the work that they want to have done and they force good workers to create poor solutions because otherwise they would have no work and no money to live on. the concept that people want to get up in the morning and waste their day creating bad work and pissing people off is not an accurate one, but is what people think is happening.
now with the trend to cut salaries for programmers more and more you will get even worse work. offshoring and outsourcing will not solve that problem. you are all trying to get top level professional work done for less than the cost of unskilled laborers without degrees. our college costed us a lot of money, a waste when you think that there are many non skilled jobs that make more than i do now.
you will all get what you pay for... AND will not find the ability in the near future for any price as those that would come up the ranks are deciding that its not worth getting a professional level degree that takes the same time as a lawyer and such only to make as much as a broom sweep. businesses are starving the two biggest areas of their growth and ability.. the engineers and the programmers... and with them goes efficiencies and innovations...
given that you too make a living divining what people want i willleave you with this programmers maxim.. also on my desk...
Its exaclty what i asked for
though it isnt what i need
oh... and there is a cary grant movie that reads exactly like your post... in it they attempt to build a house, and they make all kinds of minor changes that cause all kinds of problems that inflate the cost and makes the house unlivable..
i recommend it to EVERY computer scientist.. though programmers would like it too!
bosses say thought takes too much time... thought doesnt look like your working... better to be busy hitting keys so boss is not unhappy... boss gives you money, where he gets it is his problem...
bosses also love development processes, then they hate them because they actually take time and need what they think of as "extra work". besides if i get them to bypass the development process, to get the job done in the time i said we would do it in, i can always fire those that cant pull it off!!!!! so what you see is very good programmers, forced to write very bad programs, usually in languages picked by someone who doesnt program, that read that the language will solve their problems, all while they were on a plane in between making pitches.
either that or you got a program written by a cheap foreigner that didnt understand enough of the issues to be able to make what they were assigned to make, all the while they keep nodding yes and smiling...
Slashdot Mirror
unites states is now dominated in feminist politics, which is fear politics. oh, and the fear must be directed made out of something innocuous in that you dont have to DO anything about it... other than maybe propose a new law. things they should properly be afraid of would make them look at the politicians more than where they may decide not to vacation any more.
stairs are not scary enough compared to sharks.
what happened in England has to be made scarier here.. (but you dont take OUR politicos to task)
and the princess and the pea syndrome (i am coining it here first), means that we are so insulated that aruba vacation kidnapping is scary, for only what happens to women is scary enough (again.. not politicos)
for instance yesterday a building collapsed, several people injured and it made it on the cover, with the main thing being a woman and a baby and ignoring the men that were hurt...
fine.
however on page 20 is an article where china is going to take taiwan back by force (new law in march), and if the US blocks them or stops them or even moves ships into the area, china will use nuclear weapons on them! so says a general of theirs...
which is really scarier, which is more important, and which might make us really think about our politicians policies and even whom we elect?
what MS is doing is not needed.
there is no law making them do this at all.
so they are voluntarily stripping your rights and such at the behest of other companies rather than their consumers.. tell me if that is not collusion and the reason why monopolies are not good?
tell you the truth.. i dont care anymore..
the masses are being pinched.. and DVD is a MASS media.. the more that can buy the more you make. except the only peoples incomes that have increased (in real terms) in the past 20 years are the top 10%.. with offshoring and with nafta, and cafta people cant afford it.. its why DVD sales are slumping...
the issue here is that if MS continues to ignore that now there are other operating systems and such, and that doing things against your clients only works when you are a monopoly...
even if these things wont work at all in linux, its still better..
i am getting to the point that i am trying to teach my freinds to go out, lets take pics, lets see a free show in the park, go skating , read under the trees..
the entertainment industry forgets that they ALSO compete with those things too.. and when their price performance is too high given your ROI in satisfaction, you shift to other things that do that. the sad part is that with such shitty movies, and so many crappy remakes, the population may just 'discover' that those things are actually a lot more fun than the movies are now...
the other thing is that this is a money maker in other ways. that DVM will not be robust, despite what it seems like. why? because, when someone cracks it, and beats it, then they will change it and we all will have to buy new monitors and TVs as they are not software upgradable, nor do they want to be! in fact nothing stops them from 'improving' it anyway and doing this every ccouple of years.
i have a 21 inch autocad workstation with hige res and color correction on a cathode flat screen. better color and such for the graphics and what not. i spend more than 3000 when that was new in 1999.. it still runs sweet, has no burn in (i have been a sofware engineer for more than 20 years and other things). i am NOT going to bother with this...
you know what i will do instead.
say fuck it.. wait three months and watch it with my normal cable!!!!!!!
if they think that a blurry version is ok for us to watch they just proved that yuo dont care as much about HD as they stress!!!
screw it.. i will wait.. and if i dont have that i will watch something else. if it really is that good and i want it.. i will pay the 2.99-3.99 pay per view fee..
bottom line is that only really good films are worth $4!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or less... (and the medium of storage is not worth the other $12-$26!)
the drivel they make is not worth more, and certainly not worth 500 a year (amortizing the monitors) extra to see!!!
but to be FAIR, though i dont know why..
MS is probably making the decision based on the recording and movie industry.
if MS does not comply then windows boxes will not be able to play ANY movies and such, becasue the code was a work for hire of the recording industry and movie industry.
MS is making the decision that people wont by the new operating system without this, or fewer will. however DVDs are not the major reason i buy a computer...
basically the recording industry is playing a dangerous game. they are saying "either you comply with us, or you dont get ANY entertainment"
if we take the threat, we lose...
there will always be wealthier people that dont care, so we are already sold out.
screw em though...
I have never thought of buying a street DVD, but may start in purpose. in fact the ONLY dvd i have ever bought was the first lord of the rings movie... but when they decided to screw me i didnt by the rest. how did they screw me, easy, they then came out with richer better editions, and i realized that if i buy the others soon and not wait 5 years i will get less for my money.. and so
what you said was what i was trying to say but i guess i did not do as well.. the law firm sends tapes in every few months and stuff.. it gives them also a record of how long the repair had been sitting there after the city was notified... all this was in a daily news article a few years back.. i culdnt locate the article.
there is an automatic and presumptive claim that every creation is automatically copywrited. that is the law now - a long time ago this was not the case - the implicit (C) had to be used correctly and such.. this hasnt been the case for a long long time... proving copyright under these circumstances is where ths issue was shifted. i like your analysis.. except if you want to draw that each hop from location to location consitutes the same thing as "in the way"... and expresses that you are on the outside (which is the inside of the net), and not inside THEIR network. if there were no hops then you would be IN their network/store, and no longer on the street (the inside of the net). as far as it not being a second use of space, well you can define that it is. that the primary use is when you log in and enter through someones locked "door". now the whole of the net is just like the store model your positing. the jumps are the streets.. the view is whats public... the entery is after a log in.. (so if you grant a spyder entry to crawl, you in effect are granting permission for it to do its job. you are aware of its job when you let thim through, and so are acquiesing to the results of which you already know) oh... and in france the billboard example would have other outcomes. in france the owner of an edifice controls the image of that edifice, so technically you cant take a picture of the eiffle tower and use it in a post card without paying royalty. i say this so that whatever philosophical center we find isnt defined by the laws. it should be defined first, THEN see how the laws apply.. which is what i was trying to do...
the tapes in order to be valid are made with street names recorded and such... so the report would have to include the location.. so your assumption that its not reasonable to search them all (outside of normal maintenance), is correct
Hows this for fresh... rather than looking at each site as its own thing look at the internet as a whole. then you are no longer copying to you, you are just moving a digital book to a digital table to read. if thats the case then they havent done anything wrong as they are also part of that large book, the whole net. who owns the net? its community property, supported by private participation. the owners of the large book (all of us) have free right to work with the pages in the book and read them. for another poor analogy.. that this is a like a compendium of poetry published ongoing. there are such things as implied contracts. and where the actual physical book needs a physical contract that states that the publisher of said book has the right to work with your work with no compensation. it might also be argued that a public document can take submissions for inclusion wherby the person gives up limited rights in contect to that "document" (the whole web). now in this case the publisher has the right to move and repage, and such.. now each entity of the web is now an editor for the large singular entity, and each editor can reform pages and move them around WITHIN that context since they were submitted to the public entity. under this model i could read what i want.. since the book is offered for free... yes some chapters are not free... some are easier to read than others, but all in all the book itself, the whole thing is free. if i printed a page, i would not be in violation nor would i be in violation for my cache or mirrors as they dont reproduce the whole net (even the archive doesnt reproduce the whole thing)... so now the one site is the akin to copying a chapter or a page not a whole entity. the rights of the publisher cant be revoked and so one must make considerations when one submits to this publisher. so the analogies are more like radio and TV... i can tape shows on TV because i have already seen them and as such have pervue to see them again. the viewing was paid for by the advertising, and continues to be paid for each time i see the film (with the advertisers not paying for such ads! this is exactly the net model - content is broadcast publicly and paid for by ads or donations. the ads on the pages that are archived continue to "earn") their quality is not the same but lesser (as with the archive in that many pages will not work without the databases and programing and such behind them)... now me recording a song or show off the TV is fine, and so should be with this archive. i dont have the time to really formulate this and it was off the cuff, but this is the angle that might work.
there is a famous photographer that makes his "art" by taking pictures of other photographers pictures... he gets away with it because he is not reproducing the actual picture, but a picture of a picture which is his own picture.. (he does not crop it to only the image).
There are several law firms in the NY city area that pay to have every sidewalk and store front and such filmed on video... they then send that video into the state.... now when a person trips on a bad sidewalk they can get the case to court! i know.. you say WTF.. but its pretty simple. say there is a big upheaval in the sidewalk.. you trip, and try to sue the city for not maintaining its property, etc... (i am making this simple, there are all kinds of better examples but this is simpler). the city though will tell you and so will the courts that the city is not responsible. why? because you cant prove negligence. negligence is willfull, and not knowing there is a crack is not negligence. and here is the rub. being told that you have a problem and then ignoring it till something happens IS negligence. so in the past the lawyer would have to sepeona the cities records to see if someone reported the issue, if so, then great for the client, if not, their plum out of luck. so when the legal firm sends in the tapes, they are reporting the state of every block in that area... the city not looking at the tape that would define all the bad areas is negligence since now they DO have a method of seeing the problems and are ignoring them.. and voila, you now win cases that you couldnt before... so given that there is precident on such (and that store windows, especially in manhatten, are copyrightable, given that they are artistic displays!) my friend say i should have been a lawyer. :)
its easier to create hidden variables in your form and then vary the same code that you would use for buttons to change the image while changing the value in the hidden fields. making it reverse compatible would be to put regular checks in a hidden div... so if there is javascript div is emptied.. if there is no javascript the contents of the div shows and the javascript doesnt run... cascading styles are optional...
ah... there are many things that can make one incapable... like being fired for wasting my time making little cartoons... actual words from one person... if you cant get them on board with how valauable it is and any kind of process, you aint going to do it anyway...
if you told me you werent able to walk i wouldnt think that you were crippled...
as for suck it up and quit whining... well, this was only commentary to a forums. i like programming a whole lot so its not the job. the number of quality positions has greatly diminished and you have to take work where you can work. i am 40 and so have found it hard in the past few years to get steady work. small firms are by nature unstable, and large firms are looking for younger (ie cheaper) people (even if you tell them thats ok the money is fine, that is not acceptable to them).
things arent what they used to be.. nor are the salaries.. and i see it getting a lot worse in the next 15 years... but hey, when your my age there are no scholarships..
i will have to say that the programmers that you have today or rather after the 80's are pretty bad as a lot. as i mentioned elsewhere, they dumbed the position down in attempt to keep salaries manageable. in the 80's thie became especially true for no one could figure out how much value they were getting from their investment in IT. it may sound silly but its true. i was trained in all kind of things that you dont see today at all, the economics just isnt there. one thing that i had was business area analysis. this wasnt in the colledge this was afterwards in industry. it is how to sit there and listen and learn the business processes and make a system that either helped it or changed it. that sounds bad though then you actually had someome trained in how to do this and in other parts of the firm and such. also you had someone who at their core was a computer science guy. the schools had just started cranking out those interested in something they can do. businesses also bent over backward for good expertise and they cared more about results that worked. i watched the whole thing evolve or devolve. it was like watching rust.
The idea with, for example, GNU/Linux, is that tasks might be difficult, but they make sense.
the reason they make sense is that GNU/linux was written, at its core, by a programmer... with no marketing department... no management... and no salesmen to tell you to do that because one client out of all of them wants something.
your love of this is the same love many people have for some of the early net programs and such.. in a way you are making the case for us!!!!
the sad part is all the concepts that people are relating it to in building dont surfice... take your light switch.. in a real house a light switch is something that can stand alone and exist without the house. but programing features are more like waves. they exist only in that they are part of the programs medium. taken out they cant exist on their own... and in fact.. in such a house, every light switch would be that way.. totally custom for each one!!!!
ho ho, ha ha... you are sooooo funny... i havent been ABLE to do a flow chart or warnier orr diagram in more than 15 years... and when i started this career 25 years ago, you werent allowed to proceed until you had one done and it was reviewed by antoher SKILLED person.
if managemetn doesnt value such charts managment will castigate you for wasting time. the charts were a better way to go.. managment today cant see how they help.. they never ask two programmers of relatively equal ability to execute the same project two different ways and compare which one costed more and was done better. its NEVER done. so they remove charting and such (methods developed long ago to get a handle on the intractableness of programming), and never listen to how much damage it does!!!!
Time passes, and when asked about progress, the answer is usually something like, "well, the server crashed, so we put that problem on the back burner". Or, "we're still working on it". [During the interim, someone has sketched the solution on a paper napkin, got it approved by someone who knows WTF he is talking about and the thing gets built in the field anyway].
I love this answer... the reason we programmers say this is that most of the time we work with and for people that dont have the ability to actually understand the problem. whats more, they also dont have the time for a dessertation to bring them up to speed as to why.
the salesmans problem is the classic example. tons of programming things will fall under this. the boss, or whatever will not want to hear that the problem cant or courldnt be handled. that after working it you discivered it fit into the class of P/NP problems and such. you learn very fast that saying the servef was down, is easier and more believable thatn quoting kurt godels theorems to a person that requires you to write all memos in 8th grade english (thats why word has a tool to help you do that! and has had that since very early days).
often times in programming you are put in a postioin of having to teach a pig to sing or lose your job... at least if you try to teach the pig to sing you might succeed, or if you can convine the pig they are singing... the other option is not vialble in the real world.
Because engineers in other industries and professions spend orders of magnitude more time estimating than they do actually building. Then perhaps it's time for software engineers (not programmers or coders) to start treating their job with the professionalism it deserves.
.some programmign projects are measured in MILLION man years estimate. concrete hasnt changed drastically in a few hundred years (yes there are new formulations, but you just pour it into a hole still), programming languages dont even last 20... imagine every 10 years everyone on your highway crew has to learn a new language and only talk in that.. now imagine that your boss comes in and says today we all talk tagalog and the deadlines are the same!!!
we used to have that time. but management pushed us into a clerical model that we dont fit in. we dont get to negotiate from a point of being able to turn down or dictate terms. we are not equals with any abilithy to change outcomes, we are supplicants that get to execute what others want.
Now you have got to be kidding me. Satellite design and road construction are more complex than software design? Do you have any idea how many people it involves, how much planning take places, and how much impact constructing a major interchange or bridge requires?
I worked construction as a teen. programming is infinitely more complext than building a major interchange. just a quick point, all your workers on the programming team have to have colledge degrees... that is not true of your highway example... perhaps there is a reason? and perhaps you are not giving that reason credit. the workers on a programming team have to also integrate with each other a lot more. unlike the house or the road they are working on things that are folded into things that are folded into things that call things that are folded into things that they call... you can see and invision a major interchange, you cant see or visualize the scope of a large program. major interchange is measured in decade man years..
you are proving us engineers point... we ARE saying that you cant estimate programming that way because its the nature of programming (even the govt has been trying for 30 years do develope such metrics, imagine how much money could be made if you could).
and i quote "Don't tell me that an engineer has to guess anymore than a salesperson or marketer has to".
actually we do.. and we also have to fill in details that you dont want to go over.
"likes to blame sales/marketing/management for all of the times a developer can't deliver what he committed to." contracts under duress are not contracts, and thats what happens when three departments gang up across the table from a couple of programmers. the programmers WANT to do the work, they dont want the company to miss out.
sales/marketing/management are all broadstroke clerical type areas... none of them are doing R&D on demand, which by definition is what your programmers ARE doing. sales/marketing/management can all pipe together that we are going to build a space shuttle. only programming has any concept of what that once sentence entails, and just like you, sales/marketing/management is saying "Don't tell me..." and "no is not an option", AND "I dont have the time to discuss all the details with you". those three groups can state a sentence that when expanded out, like "lets build a shuttle", can lead to decades of work and billions of dollars of effort.
you are petulent like most bosses in thinking your will can change the beast. the best you can do is pinch a programmer between the beast and your wrath...
try a simple exercise in programming. list out a script in natural english that you can follow to get up and travel to work in the morning. first estimate how long it will take you to make that script. you will be writing in small units of action, so "get out of bed" is not code, its a subroutine that would be made up of "detect alarm? no alarm: reman sleeping, yes alarm, open eyes, start seeing, get orientation, turn head to alarm, view time, is it time to wake up? yes start wake up routine, no start sleep five minutes routine"
i will say that after your done i will be able to quickly point out that your subject is dead. why? because you forgot to throw interupts into your program to handle housekeeping tasks to support the rest of the system. things like breathing, balance, swallowig correctly, blinking...
a salesperson doesnt have to get that low into the mechanics of his work to do his work, a programmer does.
the features arent the problem, its being able to think of all these other little things that have to come together to make it all work.. so a feature in your wakeup and go to work may be the express mode that allows you to skip breakfast.. well.. after you get that first test program of how to wake up and go to work, now try to change it minimally to give you the express mode. go ahead try it... your not used to breaking things down into small parts.
to give you another feel for it.. a typical programming language has only 30 to about 150 statements... the larger only being bloated with statements that accomplish things that can be done in combinations of smaller statements.
thats right! all you see on the screen and such is the combination of about 30 statements or less put togetehr in combinations to make it all work. break down any set of paper work you do into operations this small and you can see you are asking them to estimate how many grains of sand it will take to make a mountain (When you havent defined the mountain yet). or how many jelly beans are in the jar... what they have to do is think of how many statements and how fast they can write them. this is baring any weirdness in information (lke the salesmans probglen or the tyranny of numbers).
yhou do not realize that when you say we will display how many days between two dates and what day of the week they fall on, you have to figure out how to do that!!!!
i can tell that you are not a person that has any concept of writing code!!!
writing programs is incredibly complex. the kinds of problems that we solve often seem frightingly simple. lets take this simple one as an example, its a programming classic.
everybody says they can get together and make money if they make a traveling salesmans program. you all agree that there is a market for a program for companies to be able to save money by having their salesmen take the shortest routes to various customers. now any old programmer would laugh and tell you not to bother. would you allow your programming department to veto all the others? i doubt it, and so the project goes forward. the programers to their best, but they cant get the program to work in a reasonable amount of time.
here is where your ignorance comes in as to simple things being simple to do. does it sound like a simple thing to take in a list of all the locations a salesman has to visit and come up with the shortest route? well, in case you didnt know, the problem is intractable. there are a whole bunch of classes of problem that come up and are not hard to check but are pretty much impossible to compute (special cases not included). to solve this problem for only 100 locations would take you DECADES on a desktop computer!!!
if you were writing a program to filter out offensive language in resume postings would you filter out this list? F*ck, Cum, Sh*T, C*nt". well then you would also be filtering out all those that graduated suma CUM laude! while you were thinking in a dirty context did your brain pull up the exception? but the exception in this case would mean either letting resumes potentially with dirty words, or get no applications from the best candidates!!! (i know because a friend of mine didnt understand why she wasnt getting responses. i told her to take that part out, and viola, she gets responses. turns out that few have caught that!).
such an issue is exaclty why a programmer cant estimate like a marketer or a salesperson. a salesperson asks their clients would you buy this if we made that? cut and dried... with 100 clients you have 100 opinions to promote.. thats a lot easier than programming.. even a simple program runs into more than 1000 lines of code! each has to be in the right place to work! in programing there is no tolerances... they arent loose, or tight, they are exact... totally infinitely exact. it wont work if anything is out of place and you go down that path!
the reason they SEEM to skate.. is that what they do is a guestimate and what you do is an estimate!
you KNOW that if you get (A) you then can make (B).
what you are asking of them, has never been done before! if it had, then you would be buying it, not asking them to make it so you can exploit the niche that is not being filled. you neglect to think of why is that niche empty for you to exploit? the word processer spread sheet niches were dominated long ago. your nichs is open because as the big niches are taken we try to squeeze out profit from smaller and smaller margins. your niche is also open because others dont have the resources to survive that niche, NOT as a company selfabsorbidly thinks, that no one else had the idea.
marketing and sales are clerical positions.. you dont need an IQ of 130 to be a good marketer... you dont even need an IQ of 100 to be a salesman. your jobs are not mathematical constructions..
if i asked you to build a house... could you tell me how many boards, windows, nails, floring, tiles, wire, etc you will need? yes you can... can you tell me on the fly in a meeting when everyone turns to you after reading a list of features? to implement a feature you have to implement everything around it. there are dependencies, interdependencies, and such. just as you cant tell me the number of boards you will need to make a bathroom until you know how many walls it shares with other features, neither can the programmer. whats worse is that we all have an idea of what ma
thats bradlys bromide i believe... and i was programming when that was new... its not from unix, or any language... its from a teacher of computer science.
there were lots of clever things like this in programming.. the way the web had clever things in its early days..
the value of a program is inversely proportional to the size of the print out
some day my prints will come
in every large program there are smaller programs just dying to get out.
i have a million of em!
your generally not allowed to ask that question... they dont think you understand "business", or your not even in that meeting that happened weeks before they are telling you how to do it. if you dont do what they want, you get a nasty review and your not a team player..
my new definition of a team player is the guy that puts nitrous in the truck that they are going to drive off a cliff!
you forgot why there is no buget and things are harder...
the managers ride first class... so there is only enough budget for one first class seat, not two business class seats.
the managers believe that programming is clerical and so they can ask the right questions for you, in passing, as they accomplish the other work. like setting the schedule for the creation of something they dont know the resources for or anything else.
and if you got to get work done by bypassing management, then management can be pared down! dont need to send dicky to the islands over that issue, we can send joey... etc...
oh.. and my favorite is that they dont know what can be done or cant be done or even what it entails to get something done!!!!
you get the nail on the head award!!!!
as a developer i have been banging my head on this issue for the last 15 of my 25 year career!!
the groups you mentioned do not take programming seriously. they think its easy, or at least easy for someone that knows how. like their jobs! marketing is an easy job (most just regurgitate the 'rules'they learned in school), and sales can be even worse as they are using their lack of knowledge to close deals.
whats worse is that they often think that when you say you cant do something, you are just being lazy. for in sales and marketing, there is no such thing as impossible. and they believe it to a ridiculous point, to the point to use it to define the engineer they think is being obstinate as not being a team player, etc...
by consistenly dumbing down the job AND by consistenly rewarding bad work over good work, we get what we want but didnt actually ask for.
too many megalomaniacs in business now that think that they have the werewithal to be it all and control it all and every aspect of it, because thats what they were told an entrepreneur gets as a reward. sure!
today i just bang out stuff that barely works... there is no time to do better, and no one cares. i am used to do hack stuff, and 25 years of experience is just sitting being underutilized, while i now make a third of what i used to 10 years ago. businesses have lost site of how to motivate. they forgot that what a business is, is a group of motivated people... the more motivated the better and cheaper it is to run it. crazy acoounting, or what i call advocate accounting, has torn up any real measure of the costs and expenditures
it took them a long time to work those things that they cant easily control into the ether, a financial sweeping under the rug. however what went with it was ALL control, and the creation of a model that barely works compared to what a healthy company used to be like. if there are no financial metrics for the costs and damage such practices reap, then there is no measure of them to even see that they exist when its floated upstairs. and so it gets worse and they try to do other things that are ineffective at controlling the real issues (like outsourcing or offshoring, etc)
it all sucks...
i would tell everyone now not to get into IT, its a total dead end now! too much eductation to do too much dumb work for people that make you do bad work and then dont appreciate it when you do good work. not to mention there isnt enough money in it, nor security... while re-education costs you, you are forbidden by federal law (from the time programmers made more and it hasnt been changed!) from getting overtime!!! the same can be said of pretty much all the other engineering disciplines... become an EE? why? they are suffernig the same things... even software companies dont appreciate the people that make their product!!!!!
i am looking for a new career... preferably something i can do overseas... obviously american business doesnt need what we have to offer....
by crackey....
in the old days we had all those things... reams of them... and companies saved lots of money by following them... but then the clock became king over everything else... a task completed poorly but on time got you a raise when tasks completed well but were 1 day late got you nothing 9and i am being VERY literal on the 1 day thing).
mainframe programming had and has all these things and its why you dont hear as much from that area as to the problems. they pay a lot for their machines, they pay for upkeep, they even pay for each instruction cycle(!), and so they get viceral returns in all categories...
the simple smaller company manager only has his scheduler to blame. not willing to accept the REAL cost of what they need, or accept that what they need costs too much to be practical, they make do with almost solutions.
when they scream we want cheaper employees do they get better work done with them? when a person who you have hired for a lot of money tells you not to do something becuase its well known that the problems become intractable... do they look up the workd intractable? no they just say "we are better than that, we will not make those mistakes".
i have worked this field for about 25 years now and started in the mainframe world when all programmers were computer scientists.. and i have watched the cry for cheapness erode more and more each day the quality of the tools that business needs. and those tools are people. wanting cheap tools and not computing the costs for not using good tools makes a situation in which the proglems and thier sources are to be ignored, for that wich is not tracked doesnt exist. we are no longer willing to make any investment in our most important tools and in their care... the outcome is inevitable...
generally if you think your subs are unreliable and a company thinks they arent, then there is a liklyhood that you have unreal expectations when it comes to having software done. in general someone will say three weeks, and then they will cut that down to something that is acceptable. the person doing the cutting doesnt know where this 'extra resource' will come from. well... it will come from all those areas that arent specific to the actual ruler (the code). so testing gets cut, features get cut, cheap implementation is done over correct implementation. why? because the person with the wallet is demanding cuts and the one area that could be cut and not effect the project, is the profit that keeps you afloat. you cant do the job for free, and so the client stiffs themselves.
think of it this way. i will hand you a sheet with long division problems on them. what happens when you compress the time i have to do them? you get more errors... errors that have to be corrected in a time frame in which you already cut every bit of ballast already out! sop the second round of fixing the errors is under more pressure, and so on... eventually you try to get problems passed when they arent correct, or all manner of other things because what will work is not acceptable!
managers like to think the job is a clerical one. it is not. they fail to realize that the job is to create custom solutions, and they think custom solutions is like the selection of colors you get when ordering a car. its not. its custom from the ground up. how much would it take for you to have a few men build you a car from scratch? not customize a mass produced one, but actually start from scratch. thats what writing code is like, though the managers view is like "crysler makes a million a year, so making one shouldnt be that hard a problem".
bottom line is that a manager is not willing to pay for the work that they want to have done and they force good workers to create poor solutions because otherwise they would have no work and no money to live on. the concept that people want to get up in the morning and waste their day creating bad work and pissing people off is not an accurate one, but is what people think is happening.
now with the trend to cut salaries for programmers more and more you will get even worse work. offshoring and outsourcing will not solve that problem. you are all trying to get top level professional work done for less than the cost of unskilled laborers without degrees. our college costed us a lot of money, a waste when you think that there are many non skilled jobs that make more than i do now.
you will all get what you pay for... AND will not find the ability in the near future for any price as those that would come up the ranks are deciding that its not worth getting a professional level degree that takes the same time as a lawyer and such only to make as much as a broom sweep. businesses are starving the two biggest areas of their growth and ability.. the engineers and the programmers... and with them goes efficiencies and innovations...
given that you too make a living divining what people want i willleave you with this programmers maxim.. also on my desk...
Its exaclty what i asked for though it isnt what i need
oh... and there is a cary grant movie that reads exactly like your post... in it they attempt to build a house, and they make all kinds of minor changes that cause all kinds of problems that inflate the cost and makes the house unlivable.. i recommend it to EVERY computer scientist.. though programmers would like it too!
bosses say thought takes too much time... thought doesnt look like your working... better to be busy hitting keys so boss is not unhappy... boss gives you money, where he gets it is his problem...
bosses also love development processes, then they hate them because they actually take time and need what they think of as "extra work". besides if i get them to bypass the development process, to get the job done in the time i said we would do it in, i can always fire those that cant pull it off!!!!!
so what you see is very good programmers, forced to write very bad programs, usually in languages picked by someone who doesnt program, that read that the language will solve their problems, all while they were on a plane in between making pitches.
either that or you got a program written by a cheap foreigner that didnt understand enough of the issues to be able to make what they were assigned to make, all the while they keep nodding yes and smiling...
oh i have seen it all!