In my area, the skill level of the youngsters is so high that the number of casual players and players over 30 has drastically declined because the rules were not changed to protect them. We had "recreational" leagues where 3 sectional players would get on each team and basically spend the entire season playing 3 on 3.
Had the same huge argument repeatedly-- casual player is *completely* and *totally* wide open in the end zone. And the "uber" player throws it into triple coverage to another uber player. The uber swears no one was open while the casual was jumping up and down, waving their arms, screaming their head off. You also got into situations where people were literally not even covered because the other team knew they wouldn't be thrown to.
Then we had the email "where have all the casual players gone" - but the league has been taken over by sectional players so they discount every kind of handicapping or suggestion of limiting sectional players being in the casual league. The leagues dropped from about 200 people down to 40 people. Instead they rely these days on a constant stream of new players from the high school program.
Back when I started ultimate the spirit of the game was that everyone played and everyone got the disk. The spirit of the game is mostly gone now. No one self calls any more- hell they argue when someone else calls them. It's automatic, "foul - contest" about 90% of the time.
We have an old school pickup game this weekend that I'm looking forward to. I still like the game that was- I just don't like the game that is.
At what point will people wake up and start attacking these devices?
There is a light bulb within 50' of the ground.
There is a camera within 20' of the ground.
If they are going to have a policeman sitting there 24/7 to protect the device it takes away the profit and purpose of the devices.
I'm for stopping red light running- and it has been *repeatedly* shown that raising the yellow light duration by 1 seconds stops 99% of red light running. In cities with cameras they have been *repeatedly* caught lowering the yellow light duration to force more violations.
But just getting older I can feel myself slipping away. A little less snap. A little slower reactions. The memory is also not that great (wasn't to start with).
It ruins some of my hobbies like Ultimate and Boardgaming because there are no age/skill brackets for those activities like there are for softball.
Ultimate is particularly bad because there has been a big push to get ultimate down to 13 year olds. So now you have people with 18 year old bodies and 5 years experience coming out to play "pickup". This leads to long periods of watching them run around like gazelles tossing the disk back and forth to each other. The only thing they can't do is fake well.
Boardgaming- perhaps because of BSW or perhaps because of boardgamegeek has gone the other way- along the brain axis. Where boardgamers used to be a mix of average folks, increasingly you have certifiable genius's. Likewise, the games have gone away from dice to pure logic/player interaction over the past 8 years and these brainiacs can see almost to the end of the game from the first turn. And the bad part is that 10 minutes in, I can see if I've lost and now i have to sit through another 45 minutes until the actual loss. No handicapping, no dividing into different play classes.
I find the lack of handicapping to be an expression of our "winner take all" society. I guess I need to either start a group with handicapping or move on to other activities.
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Other things you lose are sense of smell, sense of touch, and sense of taste.
So don't give up your life from 18 to 30 so you can "have a good life" because you are giving up your best years. Definitely have some fun along the way.
Nah, these are decent people with 5 to 10 years with the company. But they are business people with no clue about programmers or the programs they have been put over.
Then there are the innumerable plants and grasses that *require* a major fire in order to reproduce.
--
So, no. It's more like saying ".1% survived some kind of interaction with the laser system long enough to reproduce". Those descendants almost all have that factor and may now tune it with each generation to be stronger. It could be they were at the fringe of the laser, or extreme range, or as others pointed out they fool the targeting system.
I thought I was being clear that you can't develop resistance if you have 100% fatality. But I'm certain that some of the survivors of hiroshima that reproduced survived because they were slightly more resistant to radiation-- just like the Voles above.
And then the smart programmer, who programs because he loves the orgasmic rush when the code works, still sits on his ass for 8 weeks doing nothing.
The point is smart programmers want to program. It's like sex. It's like breathing. They don't want to sit doing nothing for 8 weeks.
When I was in my coding hey day, I would code 10 hours a day without extra compensation. The entire world went away and nothing was more fun, absorbing, or gave more meaning to existence. I could turn 60,000 lines of "hot developer" crap in to 28,000 lines of tight refactored well documented highly reusable gleaming elegance.
To deny a real programmer the freedom to code and insist they write 40 pages Word documents detailing what changes they made (and those documents are filed and never *ever* looked at again) is a crime. It's like buying a racing horse and riding it 1 day a month while leaving it in the stables the other 29 days.
Dogs will turn vicious when you don't give them the exercise they need.
Yet my political sense and knowledge of the internet keeps me from giving that hint. B)
However it is similar at *many* larger corporations. I can say this. We have had programmers from Exxon say that Exxon's controls, procedures, and buereaucracy are much worse than ours- tho we are gaining on them.
Size of project Complexity of project Value of Project
Turn this in to a "swag" which everyone understands is a swag for comparison to other projects. Getting the programmer to give a good estimation for size and complexity usually takes about 15 minutes per item. Value of the project comes from working at the same place 9 years and having a good feel of how much heat the managers are placing on the project combined with likely reduction of support or improved code base.
Once I get a swag from a programmer, I apply an ongoing fudge factor which I develop for each programmer over time. It has values of.75 to 2.0.
Once the project starts, I use an iterative approach with monthly build/checkpoints. High risk elements are addressed first- easy "crank it out" coding is left for last. If the project starts to fall behind schedule, I help address the reasons why, get more resources, and/or file a notice to management that the project will be at a new date with reasons why. I track all my reports vacations and holidays and confirm they do not over-allocate themselves.
Once the project is 50% complete, I start looking for new work/projects for them to work on. I prefer to have programmers 60%/30%/10% allocated instead of 100% allocated to reduce downtime.
For project workers, the main concern is meeting the deadline.
I absolutely *hate* the waterfall method of programming. I think it is a terrible methodology prone to errors, missing requirements, is based on the fantasy that you can get a complete spec before you start coding, and produces architecture lockin way too early.
To mirror your experience... My experience so far, is:
- People have a reasonable gut feeling but are afraid of being crucified. Managers have no clue they are being unrealistic until things start failing. They are in fact TAUGHT that the only way to know people are fully loaded is to keep adding things until failure. So it is important to fail gracefully earlier rather than spectacularly later. - People prefer to ask for early commitment on deadlines even before they have an idea of what they have to do. (complete agreement) - After committing to a deadline, reasonable reasons for changing it will be listened to a few times, after that your ass is on the line- so save your bullets and fire them at the appropriate times. - managers HATE dealing with under-confident people. They don't want to micro manage, they want you to say "it's handled' and free them to move on to the next bit. They love competent subordinates who come across confidently. Under-confident subordinates keep managers awake at night worrying. As such, they are total suckers for confident idiots.
Being a brilliant programmer is like being putting you with a team of people assigned to move 1,800 pounds of weights.
Management requires that you only move one 5 pound weight per trip to reduce risk of injury.
Your idea to use a dolly is turned down because of the 5 pound limit and lack of funding for a dolly (even tho one is sitting in the corner, it's allocated to moving the water bottles).
Management estimates that a 5 minutes per weight, it will take 1,800 minutes (30 hours) to finish the job.
If you finish the job in 30 minutes, you'll only sit around doing nothing and possibly be reprimanded for doing the job in a non-approved way.
Now to make sure you do it in the standard way, they assign a two people two observe pickup and delivery of each 5 pound weight. They assign an incident number to moving the particular weight. When the system finishes assigning the incident number, they record it in a pad that you initial and give you a sticky receipt that you attach to the weight.
At the delivery end, the other person certifies that you have delivered the weight correctly, hands it to a tester who certifies the weight is 5 pounds and creates an incident related certification notice which is attached to the incident. The tester passes the weight to a stacker who takes the weight and places it on the stack, removes the sticky receipt and puts it in a stack log.
The average incident time is recorded and any weight moving incidents which take significantly longer or shorter than the standard time are recorded and you meet with your supervisor to explain the anomalies.
Incidents that take *shorter* than the standard time are treated much more seriously because you must be taking some kind of risk or violating procedure if you are moving the weights too quickly.
Any missing sticky incident receipts are also taken extremely seriously because those are "control" documents recommended by your auditors and failure to track them means your gym could be fined or closed down.
---
Now, you, the 6'3" lifter of 300 pounds* are going to remain completely calm in the face of this. No irritation. No feeling "this just isn't right".
Every step i outlined is an analogue to the development and SOX in place at my company. We have about 3 brilliant programmers left. The rest are decent but disengaged (but we have regular session on how to "engage" our employees so they will do quality work.)
--- * btw, 300 pounds is pretty buff. I am 6'5" and do 160 pounds. When I try to do more, I usually develop joint problems of some kind. B(
I could see it being taken as a joke- but I'm serious.
Anything with a high breeding rate will suffer 99.9% losses- the remaining.1% will be partially resistant to the problem and replace itself in a single breeding season. Even within days for bacteria.
The wealthy took 350 times as much pie as they took previously.
The total amount of pie for 95% of the people in the country declined (and has declined both in wealth and income since 1978).
One person used to be able to support 3 to 4 people in a household. Now two people barely keep a household going.
Executives used to make 10 to 20 times as much as line workers. Now executives take 400 times as much, lay of 6,000 people, and suppress raises to the rest of the company for two decades.
At this point, the wealthy now control so much of the pie, that there is no place they can safely invest their wealth to get the last 5% of the pie from the other 95% of the population.
And the wealthy overplayed their hand (as they have throughout history and have become such a tiny minority of the population that once again, the majority of the population is going to bone them severely. I'm thinking 70% taxes on the wealthy within 20 years- probably higher. Some pretty studly property taxes coming too. And probably no limitations on mortgage deductions that stops us from subsidizing the wealthy to the tune of $28,000 to $40,000 dollars on their purchase of a three million dollar mansion. A fairer system will be a fixed rate- like $1500 a year max mortgage deduction. But to be honest, on my *reasonably* priced house, I've never gotten over $900.
I've worked with many brilliant programmers over the course of 25 years.
Good coding *is* difficult.
Managers want to think that programmers are a generic goo. Our 2nd to last reorg 3 years ago took everyone away from their areas of competence because some management company said it would be a more efficient allocation of our resources. After suffering with it 3 years (I think because they didn't want to embarrass the executive that backed the plan), we have a brilliant new organizational plan-- we put people in their areas of competence.
A good programmer can do quality work and quality documentation in 1/10th the time, with less architectural/design issues than a pleasant competent programmer. A brilliant programmer MUST write quality code- sub-standard code and design pisses them off and drives them crazy. You don't want *two* brilliant programmers in the same area. You need a brilliant programmer and 3 to 4 solid pleasant programmers and 1 to 2 eager novices.
You don't need an asshat like Josh, but you may find your brilliant programmer does his ( I've met some brilliant female programmers recently but the vast majority are male ) best work from 1pm to 1am so you have to focus on project deadlines, not arrival times.
The SALESPERSON tells a senior executive way above the IT president that an 8 week project can be done in 4 weeks.
This gives a psychotic set of options.
Either the project is done with our SOX controls and takes 16 weeks and the programmers sit around doing nothing for 4 to 8 weeks OR we hire consultants to lead the project- our SOX controls don't apply to them- and they deliver in 4 weeks. But they install directly to production with admin rights and very skimpy documentation- plus they actually get to code 40 hours a week so they do obscure unclear things to people who are getting to code about 4 weeks out of 16 (10 hours a week average).
If it comes from below, it is subject to SOX controls and a requirement that it meet the scheduled date 100% of the time and is enormously slow. If it comes from outside the company, all bets are off.
The fun jobs for real programmers appear to be with consulting companies. However, I am not willing to work 60 hours for 40 hours of pay any longer.
We raised the issue all the way to senior management and they say our controls are in line with other companies our size.
1 week... maybe for an emergency change.
Any scheduled change has 4 weeks for the testing department, in the scheduled window (which add another 4 weeks if you miss the window), 2 weeks for the change control and scheduling meetings, 1 week for the actual installation process (so what 7 weeks == 42 days, yup) and then 1 day for coding, 1 day for testing (since you have to create a fairly substantial test packet with screenshots, scripts, etc. for the testing department), and 1 day I can't remember what it was for. Oh yea, the 1 week installation can slide if they have a competing installation.
I'm not kidding, I'm not engaging in hyperboly.
Any emergency changes are aggressively monitored because they screw up the scheduled changes.
Here's a recent one.
Change the password expiration period for one of our systems.
We are on our *FOURTH MONTH* for what is a configuration change. Because of the paperwork overhead, it is now a full blown project of it's own. Testing documents, requirements packets, technical documentation, there will be a testing certification, there have been multiple meetings about when it will go live (since it is "high" priority).
At ANY small company this would have taken 5 minutes.
We are no longer allowed to change our own text configuration files due to SOX. This means another department has to edit the files- which means since they do not understand the risk, that they want full testing for any change before they will make it. And then, we have to schedule a window of their time to make the text change.
So we wrote a file editor INTO the application to avoid this control- but we didn't include the password duration (no time- we were just sneaking in the file editor on the back of another project- took us 7 months to get it into production-- this was after it took 8 weeks to get "yes" changed to "no" in a text file to turn on some error logging back in 2003).
For this particular change, the other department has decided they do not want to edit the file ("too risky, we could make a typo") so we are delivering them a copy of the edited text file that has passed through unit testing and quality testing.
The pay is very good, but the work is soul-draining.
* Definitely 2 to 9 weeks. Over 9 weeks 5% of the time- file a project change with reason at week 7. * Definitely 16 weeks. Over 16 weeks 5% of the time- file a project change with reason at week 14.
Managers choose 16 weeks.
And if they do have a 2 to 9 week person, they'll tend to let that person sit around doing nothing for 7 weeks (actually vetoing projects because they don't want to "spend money" for a person that will instead sit at their desk doing nothing, worrying about their job. i.e. the money is already frakking spent).
You have to let go or it will drive you crazy. You just deliver on the deadlines- with all of your paperwork correct (7 documents these days) and the appropriate status reports and weekly meetings attended.
Any truly brilliant developer will be driven insane by this. The only option in my opinion is for them to go to consultant firms or small companies. When I worked at a small company, I was free to change code, put it into production-- on the SAME day. When I worked at a small company, I was free to tell my manager, "Hey I'm not busy right now so I'm going to improve the code". We didn't have to schedule a series of meetings. When I was a consultant, at least I could say, "I'm done- bye" instead of being tied to a desk with no work. And as a consultant, the paperwork was SOOOOO much lower.
The two levels above me have no clue (they were reorganized over our department but really don't know who anyone is or what anyone is doing or what is important and what is trivial).
I was always a leader type (lead sports team, lead online guilds, organized groups) so being a low level manager is fun. I was a solid intuitive maintenance programmer. I was not a brilliant developer but after loading the code, I could figure out problems in a non-logical fashion.
I'm solid at building morale, coaching programmers how to game the system better so they get promotions and raises, and running programmers and projects so they arrive on time without the programmers having to work overtime.
And I have carpal tunnel so I can't do head's down coding any more.
I'm good at where i am- but if I were moved another level up, I'd be another clueless manager.
The problem is that smart people get very irritated working with fools.
Our corporation has now cut our productivity by 75% in the last 5 years due to SOX related procedural changes. It takes 45 days to put a 1 line code change into practice.
The smarter developers got irritated, then angry, then acted out, then most of them left. The few who remained were mostly burdened with debt and couldn't afford to take the risk. So they take anger management courses and let the corporation destroy them as people.
There are appropriate places for smart developers-- in projects where they save millions of dollars.
There are fewer and fewer jobs for smart developers. Corporations prefer predictable pleasant programmers over brilliant good programmers. They would prefer that a project *definately* take 16 weeks instead of taking 2 to 9 weeks.
Even tho I was smart enough to move out of programming and into management, the culture slowly driving me insane as well. As far as I can see after a few promotions is that it is is turtles all the way up and the problem is coming from somewhere above 5 levels of management above me.
I'm "responsible" for keeping two major projects which do about 8 billion dollars each in business. The company has cut support funding by 20% a year for the last 4 years. Things are failing all over the place and they want me to fix them... for insanely low amounts of money. It's not like these are not producing huge profits that could be used to pay for ongoing maintenance-- no, it's all being looted for pretty spinny things elsewhere in the company.
That is literally driving my crazy to some extent- it was a good job until they started doing this crap.
"We want blah", "okay that's going to cost about $440,000", "that can't be right- we can do it for $20,000", "uh. no you can't", "why???", "well the hardware alone costs $320,000", "why?", "You took away every resource we had so we will have to use contractors- and that's really going to be more than an additional $120,000", "why?", "why????"
Likewise the democrats and the republicans decided when Reagan was elected that they could have it all-- BOTH guns AND butter. And absolutely ruin the nation doing so.
There is nothing you or I can do to stop it.
Hell- we don't even get to vote for real candidates any more-- all of them are preselected for us. Unless the corporations like you, the corporate owned news media will ridicule, mock, dig up, and if need be fabricate reasons why the masses shouldn't vote for you. And enough of them do, that independents and anyone else with a brain can't overcome the weight of idiocy.
I need a vacation. I need to chill and just let the disaster happen since I can't stop it anyway.
But it sets me off when some 1/2 brain cell republican says it's all Obama's fault. Like Bush2, Bush1, and Reagan didn't happen. Clinton was actually effective and cut down the deficit. Obama looks like he is going to suck. Was hoping for better from him. There was no way I could vote for Sara Palin's finger on the nuclear trigger-- and that McCain could select someone that unseasoned and naive to be VP / Pres meant i couldn't vote for him (tho he really lost me in 2005 when he gave up his balls and became Bush3 so the powers that be would let him be president).
Slashdot Mirror
No... come back for the wrestling.
because wrestling is so... syfy.
Required insurance should be government provided and enforced.
The cost should be based on actual losses over a rolling average of years.
Payouts should have fixed criteria.
Insurance companies have ridiculous rates and go to extreme lengths to avoid paying out.
Having the government require that we buy their product makes this happen.
In my area, the skill level of the youngsters is so high that the number of casual players and players over 30 has drastically declined because the rules were not changed to protect them. We had "recreational" leagues where 3 sectional players would get on each team and basically spend the entire season playing 3 on 3.
Had the same huge argument repeatedly-- casual player is *completely* and *totally* wide open in the end zone. And the "uber" player throws it into triple coverage to another uber player. The uber swears no one was open while the casual was jumping up and down, waving their arms, screaming their head off. You also got into situations where people were literally not even covered because the other team knew they wouldn't be thrown to.
Then we had the email "where have all the casual players gone" - but the league has been taken over by sectional players so they discount every kind of handicapping or suggestion of limiting sectional players being in the casual league. The leagues dropped from about 200 people down to 40 people. Instead they rely these days on a constant stream of new players from the high school program.
Back when I started ultimate the spirit of the game was that everyone played and everyone got the disk. The spirit of the game is mostly gone now. No one self calls any more- hell they argue when someone else calls them. It's automatic, "foul - contest" about 90% of the time.
We have an old school pickup game this weekend that I'm looking forward to. I still like the game that was- I just don't like the game that is.
At what point will people wake up and start attacking these devices?
There is a light bulb within 50' of the ground.
There is a camera within 20' of the ground.
If they are going to have a policeman sitting there 24/7 to protect the device it takes away the profit and purpose of the devices.
I'm for stopping red light running- and it has been *repeatedly* shown that raising the yellow light duration by 1 seconds stops 99% of red light running. In cities with cameras they have been *repeatedly* caught lowering the yellow light duration to force more violations.
Chemo did a number on me too.
But just getting older I can feel myself slipping away. A little less snap. A little slower reactions. The memory is also not that great (wasn't to start with).
It ruins some of my hobbies like Ultimate and Boardgaming because there are no age/skill brackets for those activities like there are for softball.
Ultimate is particularly bad because there has been a big push to get ultimate down to 13 year olds. So now you have people with 18 year old bodies and 5 years experience coming out to play "pickup". This leads to long periods of watching them run around like gazelles tossing the disk back and forth to each other. The only thing they can't do is fake well.
Boardgaming- perhaps because of BSW or perhaps because of boardgamegeek has gone the other way- along the brain axis. Where boardgamers used to be a mix of average folks, increasingly you have certifiable genius's. Likewise, the games have gone away from dice to pure logic/player interaction over the past 8 years and these brainiacs can see almost to the end of the game from the first turn. And the bad part is that 10 minutes in, I can see if I've lost and now i have to sit through another 45 minutes until the actual loss. No handicapping, no dividing into different play classes.
I find the lack of handicapping to be an expression of our "winner take all" society. I guess I need to either start a group with handicapping or move on to other activities.
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Other things you lose are sense of smell, sense of touch, and sense of taste.
So don't give up your life from 18 to 30 so you can "have a good life" because you are giving up your best years.
Definitely have some fun along the way.
I was standing on the shoulders of giants. I only added one word.
Nah, these are decent people with 5 to 10 years with the company. But they are business people with no clue about programmers or the programs they have been put over.
Only one survivor would need to survive and procreate to pass the beneficial genes into the pool.
On a geologic scale, humans can breed fast given no competition.
In 50,000 years we've gone from almost nothing, to enough to cause a massive deer like die off from over breeding.
Parent post poses probably perfect Peter Principle patrondom. :-)
Well, by 1996, chernobyl Voles who have only an annual breeding rate were showing adaption to radiation and proliferating in large numbers.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D61439F934A35756C0A960958260
And then there is the fungus that uses radiation like plants use sunlight.
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070422222547data_trunc_sys.shtml
Then there are the innumerable plants and grasses that *require* a major fire in order to reproduce.
--
So, no. It's more like saying ".1% survived some kind of interaction with the laser system long enough to reproduce". Those descendants almost all have that factor and may now tune it with each generation to be stronger. It could be they were at the fringe of the laser, or extreme range, or as others pointed out they fool the targeting system.
I thought I was being clear that you can't develop resistance if you have 100% fatality. But I'm certain that some of the survivors of hiroshima that reproduced survived because they were slightly more resistant to radiation-- just like the Voles above.
And then the smart programmer, who programs because he loves the orgasmic rush when the code works, still sits on his ass for 8 weeks doing nothing.
The point is smart programmers want to program. It's like sex. It's like breathing. They don't want to sit doing nothing for 8 weeks.
When I was in my coding hey day, I would code 10 hours a day without extra compensation. The entire world went away and nothing was more fun, absorbing, or gave more meaning to existence. I could turn 60,000 lines of "hot developer" crap in to 28,000 lines of tight refactored well documented highly reusable gleaming elegance.
To deny a real programmer the freedom to code and insist they write 40 pages Word documents detailing what changes they made (and those documents are filed and never *ever* looked at again) is a crime. It's like buying a racing horse and riding it 1 day a month while leaving it in the stables the other 29 days.
Dogs will turn vicious when you don't give them the exercise they need.
Yet my political sense and knowledge of the internet keeps me from giving that hint. B)
However it is similar at *many* larger corporations. I can say this. We have had programmers from Exxon say that Exxon's controls, procedures, and buereaucracy are much worse than ours- tho we are gaining on them.
My methodology is this
Rate from 1-5,
Size of project
Complexity of project
Value of Project
Turn this in to a "swag" which everyone understands is a swag for comparison to other projects.
Getting the programmer to give a good estimation for size and complexity usually takes about 15 minutes per item.
Value of the project comes from working at the same place 9 years and having a good feel of how much heat the managers are placing on the project combined with likely reduction of support or improved code base.
Once I get a swag from a programmer, I apply an ongoing fudge factor which I develop for each programmer over time. It has values of .75 to 2.0.
Once the project starts, I use an iterative approach with monthly build/checkpoints. High risk elements are addressed first- easy "crank it out" coding is left for last. If the project starts to fall behind schedule, I help address the reasons why, get more resources, and/or file a notice to management that the project will be at a new date with reasons why. I track all my reports vacations and holidays and confirm they do not over-allocate themselves.
Once the project is 50% complete, I start looking for new work/projects for them to work on. I prefer to have programmers 60%/30%/10% allocated instead of 100% allocated to reduce downtime.
For project workers, the main concern is meeting the deadline.
I absolutely *hate* the waterfall method of programming. I think it is a terrible methodology prone to errors, missing requirements, is based on the fantasy that you can get a complete spec before you start coding, and produces architecture lockin way too early.
To mirror your experience...
My experience so far, is:
- People have a reasonable gut feeling but are afraid of being crucified. Managers have no clue they are being unrealistic until things start failing. They are in fact TAUGHT that the only way to know people are fully loaded is to keep adding things until failure. So it is important to fail gracefully earlier rather than spectacularly later.
- People prefer to ask for early commitment on deadlines even before they have an idea of what they have to do. (complete agreement)
- After committing to a deadline, reasonable reasons for changing it will be listened to a few times, after that your ass is on the line- so save your bullets and fire them at the appropriate times.
- managers HATE dealing with under-confident people. They don't want to micro manage, they want you to say "it's handled' and free them to move on to the next bit. They love competent subordinates who come across confidently. Under-confident subordinates keep managers awake at night worrying. As such, they are total suckers for confident idiots.
Good post and good points, AC.
Being a brilliant programmer is like being putting you with a team of people assigned to move 1,800 pounds of weights.
Management requires that you only move one 5 pound weight per trip to reduce risk of injury.
Your idea to use a dolly is turned down because of the 5 pound limit and lack of funding for a dolly (even tho one is sitting in the corner, it's allocated to moving the water bottles).
Management estimates that a 5 minutes per weight, it will take 1,800 minutes (30 hours) to finish the job.
If you finish the job in 30 minutes, you'll only sit around doing nothing and possibly be reprimanded for doing the job in a non-approved way.
Now to make sure you do it in the standard way, they assign a two people two observe pickup and delivery of each 5 pound weight. They assign an incident number to moving the particular weight. When the system finishes assigning the incident number, they record it in a pad that you initial and give you a sticky receipt that you attach to the weight.
At the delivery end, the other person certifies that you have delivered the weight correctly, hands it to a tester who certifies the weight is 5 pounds and creates an incident related certification notice which is attached to the incident. The tester passes the weight to a stacker who takes the weight and places it on the stack, removes the sticky receipt and puts it in a stack log.
The average incident time is recorded and any weight moving incidents which take significantly longer or shorter than the standard time are recorded and you meet with your supervisor to explain the anomalies.
Incidents that take *shorter* than the standard time are treated much more seriously because you must be taking some kind of risk or violating procedure if you are moving the weights too quickly.
Any missing sticky incident receipts are also taken extremely seriously because those are "control" documents recommended by your auditors and failure to track them means your gym could be fined or closed down.
---
Now, you, the 6'3" lifter of 300 pounds* are going to remain completely calm in the face of this. No irritation. No feeling "this just isn't right".
Every step i outlined is an analogue to the development and SOX in place at my company. We have about 3 brilliant programmers left. The rest are decent but disengaged (but we have regular session on how to "engage" our employees so they will do quality work.)
---
* btw, 300 pounds is pretty buff. I am 6'5" and do 160 pounds. When I try to do more, I usually develop joint problems of some kind. B(
I could see it being taken as a joke- but I'm serious.
Anything with a high breeding rate will suffer 99.9% losses- the remaining .1% will be partially resistant to the problem and replace itself in a single breeding season. Even within days for bacteria.
If you cant' get 100%, it's better to pass.
Except that is a complete myth.
The pie increased in size by 5 or 6 times.
The wealthy took 350 times as much pie as they took previously.
The total amount of pie for 95% of the people in the country declined (and has declined both in wealth and income since 1978).
One person used to be able to support 3 to 4 people in a household. Now two people barely keep a household going.
Executives used to make 10 to 20 times as much as line workers. Now executives take 400 times as much, lay of 6,000 people, and suppress raises to the rest of the company for two decades.
At this point, the wealthy now control so much of the pie, that there is no place they can safely invest their wealth to get the last 5% of the pie from the other 95% of the population.
And the wealthy overplayed their hand (as they have throughout history and have become such a tiny minority of the population that once again, the majority of the population is going to bone them severely. I'm thinking 70% taxes on the wealthy within 20 years- probably higher. Some pretty studly property taxes coming too. And probably no limitations on mortgage deductions that stops us from subsidizing the wealthy to the tune of $28,000 to $40,000 dollars on their purchase of a three million dollar mansion. A fairer system will be a fixed rate- like $1500 a year max mortgage deduction. But to be honest, on my *reasonably* priced house, I've never gotten over $900.
Given their high breeding rate, anything short of 100% extermination will mean mosquitoes that are immune to lasers within 10-20 years.
I've worked with many brilliant programmers over the course of 25 years.
Good coding *is* difficult.
Managers want to think that programmers are a generic goo. Our 2nd to last reorg 3 years ago took everyone away from their areas of competence because some management company said it would be a more efficient allocation of our resources. After suffering with it 3 years (I think because they didn't want to embarrass the executive that backed the plan), we have a brilliant new organizational plan-- we put people in their areas of competence.
A good programmer can do quality work and quality documentation in 1/10th the time, with less architectural/design issues than a pleasant competent programmer. A brilliant programmer MUST write quality code- sub-standard code and design pisses them off and drives them crazy. You don't want *two* brilliant programmers in the same area. You need a brilliant programmer and 3 to 4 solid pleasant programmers and 1 to 2 eager novices.
You don't need an asshat like Josh, but you may find your brilliant programmer does his ( I've met some brilliant female programmers recently but the vast majority are male ) best work from 1pm to 1am so you have to focus on project deadlines, not arrival times.
We actually have a variant on that.
The SALESPERSON tells a senior executive way above the IT president that an 8 week project can be done in 4 weeks.
This gives a psychotic set of options.
Either the project is done with our SOX controls and takes 16 weeks and the programmers sit around doing nothing for 4 to 8 weeks OR
we hire consultants to lead the project- our SOX controls don't apply to them- and they deliver in 4 weeks. But they install directly to production with admin rights and very skimpy documentation- plus they actually get to code 40 hours a week so they do obscure unclear things to people who are getting to code about 4 weeks out of 16 (10 hours a week average).
If it comes from below, it is subject to SOX controls and a requirement that it meet the scheduled date 100% of the time and is enormously slow.
If it comes from outside the company, all bets are off.
The fun jobs for real programmers appear to be with consulting companies. However, I am not willing to work 60 hours for 40 hours of pay any longer.
We raised the issue all the way to senior management and they say our controls are in line with other companies our size.
1 week... maybe for an emergency change.
Any scheduled change has 4 weeks for the testing department, in the scheduled window (which add another 4 weeks if you miss the window), 2 weeks for the change control and scheduling meetings, 1 week for the actual installation process (so what 7 weeks == 42 days, yup) and then 1 day for coding, 1 day for testing (since you have to create a fairly substantial test packet with screenshots, scripts, etc. for the testing department), and 1 day I can't remember what it was for. Oh yea, the 1 week installation can slide if they have a competing installation.
I'm not kidding, I'm not engaging in hyperboly.
Any emergency changes are aggressively monitored because they screw up the scheduled changes.
Here's a recent one.
Change the password expiration period for one of our systems.
We are on our *FOURTH MONTH* for what is a configuration change. Because of the paperwork overhead, it is now a full blown project of it's own. Testing documents, requirements packets, technical documentation, there will be a testing certification, there have been multiple meetings about when it will go live (since it is "high" priority).
At ANY small company this would have taken 5 minutes.
We are no longer allowed to change our own text configuration files due to SOX. This means another department has to edit the files- which means since they do not understand the risk, that they want full testing for any change before they will make it. And then, we have to schedule a window of their time to make the text change.
So we wrote a file editor INTO the application to avoid this control- but we didn't include the password duration (no time- we were just sneaking in the file editor on the back of another project- took us 7 months to get it into production-- this was after it took 8 weeks to get "yes" changed to "no" in a text file to turn on some error logging back in 2003).
For this particular change, the other department has decided they do not want to edit the file ("too risky, we could make a typo") so we are delivering them a copy of the edited text file that has passed through unit testing and quality testing.
The pay is very good, but the work is soul-draining.
Close.. but not what I'm saying.
Given a choice of:
* Definitely 2 to 9 weeks. Over 9 weeks 5% of the time- file a project change with reason at week 7.
* Definitely 16 weeks. Over 16 weeks 5% of the time- file a project change with reason at week 14.
Managers choose 16 weeks.
And if they do have a 2 to 9 week person, they'll tend to let that person sit around doing nothing for 7 weeks (actually vetoing projects because they don't want to "spend money" for a person that will instead sit at their desk doing nothing, worrying about their job. i.e. the money is already frakking spent).
You have to let go or it will drive you crazy. You just deliver on the deadlines- with all of your paperwork correct (7 documents these days) and the appropriate status reports and weekly meetings attended.
Any truly brilliant developer will be driven insane by this. The only option in my opinion is for them to go to consultant firms or small companies.
When I worked at a small company, I was free to change code, put it into production-- on the SAME day. When I worked at a small company, I was free to tell my manager, "Hey I'm not busy right now so I'm going to improve the code". We didn't have to schedule a series of meetings. When I was a consultant, at least I could say, "I'm done- bye" instead of being tied to a desk with no work. And as a consultant, the paperwork was SOOOOO much lower.
I will be if I get promoted one more time.
The two levels above me have no clue (they were reorganized over our department but really don't know who anyone is or what anyone is doing or what is important and what is trivial).
I was always a leader type (lead sports team, lead online guilds, organized groups) so being a low level manager is fun. I was a solid intuitive maintenance programmer. I was not a brilliant developer but after loading the code, I could figure out problems in a non-logical fashion.
I'm solid at building morale, coaching programmers how to game the system better so they get promotions and raises, and running programmers and projects so they arrive on time without the programmers having to work overtime.
And I have carpal tunnel so I can't do head's down coding any more.
I'm good at where i am- but if I were moved another level up, I'd be another clueless manager.
I find cuddy to be infinitely hotter than 13 or Cameron.
She's just so pneumatic.
Pistons of a Ferrari, indeed.
The problem is that smart people get very irritated working with fools.
Our corporation has now cut our productivity by 75% in the last 5 years due to SOX related procedural changes. It takes 45 days to put a 1 line code change into practice.
The smarter developers got irritated, then angry, then acted out, then most of them left. The few who remained were mostly burdened with debt and couldn't afford to take the risk. So they take anger management courses and let the corporation destroy them as people.
There are appropriate places for smart developers-- in projects where they save millions of dollars.
There are fewer and fewer jobs for smart developers. Corporations prefer predictable pleasant programmers over brilliant good programmers. They would prefer that a project *definately* take 16 weeks instead of taking 2 to 9 weeks.
Even tho I was smart enough to move out of programming and into management, the culture slowly driving me insane as well. As far as I can see after a few promotions is that it is is turtles all the way up and the problem is coming from somewhere above 5 levels of management above me.
Responsible
That's like my job.
I'm "responsible" for keeping two major projects which do about 8 billion dollars each in business. The company has cut support funding by 20% a year for the last 4 years. Things are failing all over the place and they want me to fix them... for insanely low amounts of money. It's not like these are not producing huge profits that could be used to pay for ongoing maintenance-- no, it's all being looted for pretty spinny things elsewhere in the company.
That is literally driving my crazy to some extent- it was a good job until they started doing this crap.
"We want blah", "okay that's going to cost about $440,000", "that can't be right- we can do it for $20,000", "uh. no you can't", "why???", "well the hardware alone costs $320,000", "why?", "You took away every resource we had so we will have to use contractors- and that's really going to be more than an additional $120,000", "why?", "why????"
Likewise the democrats and the republicans decided when Reagan was elected that they could have it all-- BOTH guns AND butter. And absolutely ruin the nation doing so.
There is nothing you or I can do to stop it.
Hell- we don't even get to vote for real candidates any more-- all of them are preselected for us. Unless the corporations like you, the corporate owned news media will ridicule, mock, dig up, and if need be fabricate reasons why the masses shouldn't vote for you. And enough of them do, that independents and anyone else with a brain can't overcome the weight of idiocy.
I need a vacation. I need to chill and just let the disaster happen since I can't stop it anyway.
But it sets me off when some 1/2 brain cell republican says it's all Obama's fault. Like Bush2, Bush1, and Reagan didn't happen. Clinton was actually effective and cut down the deficit. Obama looks like he is going to suck. Was hoping for better from him. There was no way I could vote for Sara Palin's finger on the nuclear trigger-- and that McCain could select someone that unseasoned and naive to be VP / Pres meant i couldn't vote for him (tho he really lost me in 2005 when he gave up his balls and became Bush3 so the powers that be would let him be president).
bleah.