A jury of our peers has one of three possible outcomes today.
1. Shield from a judge's political agenda.
2. Hanging from an unreasonable outraged mob (common when accused of a crime against a child)
3. In highly rare cases of jury rebellion, jury nullification.
I don't think any of this is new. The difference is that technology makes it a lot easier to notice. Any outside information on a trial not presented in court will influence the jury in some way, some more extreme than others. I think the only real way to combat this is to impose stiff fines on jurors who cause a mistrial by blatantly ignoring the court order to no access this information during the trial.
And 20 minutes later some other jackass will edit it to read "Shakrai did not commit this crime. He did however murder and molest (in that order) 20 children."
Just my meaningless 2 cents
4-8, fair enough
8-12, kids start talking about it. They should have the talk before they and their friends hit puberty or you will find your words mostly redundant by the time they get it.
12-16, like it or not, if they want it enough then they'll get it, and they'll find a way to keep you from finding out about it most of the time. Though it's fair to say that they should at least be trying to keep it a secret. I was browsing Usenet by 13 and IRC by 14, and there's a lot more options today.
16, forget it. If they want it, they'll have it, and if they aren't dumb, you probably won't know about it.
That's what Software Engineering is. It's akin to System's Engineering. It requires a diverse set of technical and managerial skills and it's not easy to do well.
If you can show that management truly never told them that documentation was part of their job, then sure, give them a second chance. However, employment is nothing like school. You are being paid to do a job, not being forced by law to learn. If management has told you that documentation is part of your job and you are giving snarky replies about your failure to do so, then you should be fired. This isn't school. This is the real world.
I believe it would be more accurate to say that this topic deals with really good coders who have a God complex and refuse to document their code. There are plenty of great programmers out there that can write good documentation. There is a lot more available in climbing the ladder than business management. You think organizing a large scale project, be it an application with millions of lines of code or an IC with millions of transistors, is a sad middle management task best left to mediocre programmers? That kind of work takes hardcore systems engineering from someone who is very experienced and understands a broad range of technical skills AND is capable of organizing engineers and programmers of various disciplines to make it happen. I don't think any good systems designer would want someone on their team that could compromise the entire project by their leaving.
That's not what it means to be irreplaceable. Irreplaceable means that if you left tomorrow, the company would suffer immense losses because there would be no one around who could pick up where you left off in any reasonable amount of time. Lack of documentation of what you are doing is the most effective way to make yourself irreplaceable. If you become too entrenched in the critical functions of a company, your incapacitation could cripple the company. That's just bad policy for everyone.
And those people are fools. If you're getting fired at the end of the day, that means one of two things. Your talent and skill has not been significantly honed with experience, and therefore, you are not moving into positions that simply can not be filled by a fresh recruit with little experience OR your management team sucks and doesn't get it. Writing documents and manuals is training the new guy who will take your place when you move up, quit, or die. If your company's management simply can't see how valuable that makes you, then you might want to start searching for a new job where the management isn't cancer. Fortunately for me, I work in a regulated industry, where failure to document will inevitably result in being ordered to shut down. Good documentation is highly valued here.
I think it's fair to say that the Board of Directors at Apple should have long ago foreseen that they needed a protege for Steve Jobs. Whenever Steve Jobs left Apple in the past, they stumbled badly. He has been both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to Apple. A good CEO is a hard thing to do without for even a short period of time. Apple should make Steve Jobs replaceable and then keep him. If he refuses to become replaceable, which doesn't seem to be the case, then yes they should get rid of him as soon as they reasonably can.
As I noticed is one of my previous comments, this story is really about mismanagement than misbehavior of employees.
That's about as fair of criticism as can be had. As the summary suggests, stop enabling these people. Only management can enable these type of anti-team employees. Give them the ultimatum, document your crap or get out. Don't let them entrench themselves for years with this behavior.
I used to believe this. Then I found myself in a dead-end job because I was irreplaceable. I couldn't move up because the company couldn't afford to let me. So I found a new job. Unless you are content to be in one position for the rest of your life, being irreplaceable is bad for everyone involved. Now I contend that a wise employee starts training their replacement from day one.
There are many excellent geniuses out there in the tech field that do what they're supposed to do. They document their work so that others can understand it. If they die or quit tomorrow, their company won't have to spend 2 years trying to figure out what they did. Getting a cheap geek to document these people holds its own high risk. What if the geek doesn't understand what they did? If this "genius" can't be bothered to document his own work, what makes you think they can be bothered to review someone else's documentation of their work? Mitigate your risk by paying more to hire a genius who won't put your company at risk of internal collapse.
Things I was never taught in school that would have been useful and relatively trivial to teach:
* IEEE/ISO standards on system requirements specifications
* How to write functional specifications
* Quality Control Systems overview
* IEEE standards on SRSs
* IEEE standards on SDDs
* IEEE standards on Software Quality Plans
There are many more and feel free to add to the list. This is why it takes a year for a college grad to become independently useful in industry. If college grads didn't have to learn these things from a trial by fire, I think they could settle in a lot faster. But as someone mentioned before, universities are usually not equipped or prepared to teach practical skill sets.
if the author has such a problem with this guy, maybe he needs to be skilled enough to replace him
That's part of the problem. Having irreplaceable people on your staff is bad for business long term. If someone is laughing at you for asking for non-existent documentation that they should have written, they should be fired immediately. The cost to business if this guy were to leave will only get worse with time and probably already outweighs the savings of keeping him on.
Lesson, you are replaceable. If you are not replaceable, then you are too dangerous to have.
Not to mention that I regularly use satellite imagery to augment maps when I am going somewhere unfamiliar and want to get a better idea of what it will look like when I get there. There are plenty of good uses for clear satellite imagery of buildings and all.
It's clear that the living situation in the UK is very different from the US (and this is a great example of why I hate when other citizens from the US have grand ideas of exporting our governmental system). But as a point about our experience with socialized housing, I grew up in an area with a lot of socialized housing. The people that lived there rarely tried to work and often trashed their socialized housing, and this I know from the time I spent as a volunteer EMT in the area. This might just be a failure of the system to allow people into social housing until they are so down on life that you're only catching mostly the leeches on society.
You must have missed where the parent said "Um, that is the law in the UK. He could technically have insisted on it under the Disability Discrimination Act but I doubt he even thought of it." As I stated, it's great that the employer voluntarily offers this, but the fact that they do is a far cry from the government forcing them to. Though apparently in the UK, the government could force them to offer it if the employee made a request for it.
It's hard to say. There may have been a lot of inter-office controversy and rumors surrounding the employee's termination and the company felt that for the sake of preventing drama, they needed to set the story straight. Or it may have just been a rash unethical decision by an HR rep. But either way, I don't see why it would be considered libel. I hope that Staples appeals the case.
Well, I was unaware that this was in the UK, and the citizens of the UK are welcome to govern themselves as they please. From my perspective in the US though, how does spending an extra 30 minutes a week filing yourself out of the building in any way impede your access to work? You can still work, and are not being discriminated against in that regard. I see that as arguing that anyone who lives 5 minutes further from work than the average of everyone else should be able to leave 5 minutes early. This is of course absurd, whether you live further away by choice or by economic necessity.
A man where I work is allowed to leave five minutes early each day because he's in a wheelchair. If he didn't the three p.m. rush (early starts suck, early finishes ftw though!) would mean he'd be five minutes later leaving than everybody else which is thirty minutes a week. He didn't even ask for it, one of the bosses just noticed he was always last out and realised it was because it's impossible for him to navigate the corridors when they're full of people.
There's an impassibly huge gap between this example of voluntarily giving an employee special treatment and the government legislating that you MUST give an employee special treatment. Just because you are in a wheelchair doesn't mean that you have a right to not be inconvenienced. It's great that the employer allowed this man to have that five minute head start and probably gives them good PR for minimal cost, but that doesn't mean that they legally should be required to do this. The issue is not about allowing some people to have special treatment, it's about the government forcing you at the end of a gun to give special treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
A jury of our peers has one of three possible outcomes today.
1. Shield from a judge's political agenda. 2. Hanging from an unreasonable outraged mob (common when accused of a crime against a child)
3. In highly rare cases of jury rebellion, jury nullification.
I don't think any of this is new. The difference is that technology makes it a lot easier to notice. Any outside information on a trial not presented in court will influence the jury in some way, some more extreme than others. I think the only real way to combat this is to impose stiff fines on jurors who cause a mistrial by blatantly ignoring the court order to no access this information during the trial.
And 20 minutes later some other jackass will edit it to read "Shakrai did not commit this crime. He did however murder and molest (in that order) 20 children."
Just my meaningless 2 cents
4-8, fair enough
8-12, kids start talking about it. They should have the talk before they and their friends hit puberty or you will find your words mostly redundant by the time they get it.
12-16, like it or not, if they want it enough then they'll get it, and they'll find a way to keep you from finding out about it most of the time. Though it's fair to say that they should at least be trying to keep it a secret. I was browsing Usenet by 13 and IRC by 14, and there's a lot more options today.
16, forget it. If they want it, they'll have it, and if they aren't dumb, you probably won't know about it.
That's what Software Engineering is. It's akin to System's Engineering. It requires a diverse set of technical and managerial skills and it's not easy to do well.
If you can show that management truly never told them that documentation was part of their job, then sure, give them a second chance. However, employment is nothing like school. You are being paid to do a job, not being forced by law to learn. If management has told you that documentation is part of your job and you are giving snarky replies about your failure to do so, then you should be fired. This isn't school. This is the real world.
I believe it would be more accurate to say that this topic deals with really good coders who have a God complex and refuse to document their code. There are plenty of great programmers out there that can write good documentation. There is a lot more available in climbing the ladder than business management. You think organizing a large scale project, be it an application with millions of lines of code or an IC with millions of transistors, is a sad middle management task best left to mediocre programmers? That kind of work takes hardcore systems engineering from someone who is very experienced and understands a broad range of technical skills AND is capable of organizing engineers and programmers of various disciplines to make it happen. I don't think any good systems designer would want someone on their team that could compromise the entire project by their leaving.
The SciFi Channel hasn't put anything on worth watching in a long time with all of the "SciFi Original Movie" garbage they have been airing.
That's not what it means to be irreplaceable. Irreplaceable means that if you left tomorrow, the company would suffer immense losses because there would be no one around who could pick up where you left off in any reasonable amount of time. Lack of documentation of what you are doing is the most effective way to make yourself irreplaceable. If you become too entrenched in the critical functions of a company, your incapacitation could cripple the company. That's just bad policy for everyone.
And those people are fools. If you're getting fired at the end of the day, that means one of two things. Your talent and skill has not been significantly honed with experience, and therefore, you are not moving into positions that simply can not be filled by a fresh recruit with little experience OR your management team sucks and doesn't get it. Writing documents and manuals is training the new guy who will take your place when you move up, quit, or die. If your company's management simply can't see how valuable that makes you, then you might want to start searching for a new job where the management isn't cancer. Fortunately for me, I work in a regulated industry, where failure to document will inevitably result in being ordered to shut down. Good documentation is highly valued here.
I think it's fair to say that the Board of Directors at Apple should have long ago foreseen that they needed a protege for Steve Jobs. Whenever Steve Jobs left Apple in the past, they stumbled badly. He has been both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to Apple. A good CEO is a hard thing to do without for even a short period of time. Apple should make Steve Jobs replaceable and then keep him. If he refuses to become replaceable, which doesn't seem to be the case, then yes they should get rid of him as soon as they reasonably can.
As I noticed is one of my previous comments, this story is really about mismanagement than misbehavior of employees.
That's about as fair of criticism as can be had. As the summary suggests, stop enabling these people. Only management can enable these type of anti-team employees. Give them the ultimatum, document your crap or get out. Don't let them entrench themselves for years with this behavior.
I used to believe this. Then I found myself in a dead-end job because I was irreplaceable. I couldn't move up because the company couldn't afford to let me. So I found a new job. Unless you are content to be in one position for the rest of your life, being irreplaceable is bad for everyone involved. Now I contend that a wise employee starts training their replacement from day one.
There are many excellent geniuses out there in the tech field that do what they're supposed to do. They document their work so that others can understand it. If they die or quit tomorrow, their company won't have to spend 2 years trying to figure out what they did. Getting a cheap geek to document these people holds its own high risk. What if the geek doesn't understand what they did? If this "genius" can't be bothered to document his own work, what makes you think they can be bothered to review someone else's documentation of their work? Mitigate your risk by paying more to hire a genius who won't put your company at risk of internal collapse.
Things I was never taught in school that would have been useful and relatively trivial to teach:
* IEEE/ISO standards on system requirements specifications
* How to write functional specifications
* Quality Control Systems overview
* IEEE standards on SRSs
* IEEE standards on SDDs
* IEEE standards on Software Quality Plans
There are many more and feel free to add to the list. This is why it takes a year for a college grad to become independently useful in industry. If college grads didn't have to learn these things from a trial by fire, I think they could settle in a lot faster. But as someone mentioned before, universities are usually not equipped or prepared to teach practical skill sets.
if the author has such a problem with this guy, maybe he needs to be skilled enough to replace him
That's part of the problem. Having irreplaceable people on your staff is bad for business long term. If someone is laughing at you for asking for non-existent documentation that they should have written, they should be fired immediately. The cost to business if this guy were to leave will only get worse with time and probably already outweighs the savings of keeping him on.
Lesson, you are replaceable. If you are not replaceable, then you are too dangerous to have.
Not to mention that I regularly use satellite imagery to augment maps when I am going somewhere unfamiliar and want to get a better idea of what it will look like when I get there. There are plenty of good uses for clear satellite imagery of buildings and all.
That's the spirit!
It's clear that the living situation in the UK is very different from the US (and this is a great example of why I hate when other citizens from the US have grand ideas of exporting our governmental system). But as a point about our experience with socialized housing, I grew up in an area with a lot of socialized housing. The people that lived there rarely tried to work and often trashed their socialized housing, and this I know from the time I spent as a volunteer EMT in the area. This might just be a failure of the system to allow people into social housing until they are so down on life that you're only catching mostly the leeches on society.
You must have missed where the parent said "Um, that is the law in the UK. He could technically have insisted on it under the Disability Discrimination Act but I doubt he even thought of it." As I stated, it's great that the employer voluntarily offers this, but the fact that they do is a far cry from the government forcing them to. Though apparently in the UK, the government could force them to offer it if the employee made a request for it.
It's hard to say. There may have been a lot of inter-office controversy and rumors surrounding the employee's termination and the company felt that for the sake of preventing drama, they needed to set the story straight. Or it may have just been a rash unethical decision by an HR rep. But either way, I don't see why it would be considered libel. I hope that Staples appeals the case.
Well, I was unaware that this was in the UK, and the citizens of the UK are welcome to govern themselves as they please. From my perspective in the US though, how does spending an extra 30 minutes a week filing yourself out of the building in any way impede your access to work? You can still work, and are not being discriminated against in that regard. I see that as arguing that anyone who lives 5 minutes further from work than the average of everyone else should be able to leave 5 minutes early. This is of course absurd, whether you live further away by choice or by economic necessity.
When you have a wolf crying wolf, what's a farmer to do?
A man where I work is allowed to leave five minutes early each day because he's in a wheelchair. If he didn't the three p.m. rush (early starts suck, early finishes ftw though!) would mean he'd be five minutes later leaving than everybody else which is thirty minutes a week. He didn't even ask for it, one of the bosses just noticed he was always last out and realised it was because it's impossible for him to navigate the corridors when they're full of people.
There's an impassibly huge gap between this example of voluntarily giving an employee special treatment and the government legislating that you MUST give an employee special treatment. Just because you are in a wheelchair doesn't mean that you have a right to not be inconvenienced. It's great that the employer allowed this man to have that five minute head start and probably gives them good PR for minimal cost, but that doesn't mean that they legally should be required to do this. The issue is not about allowing some people to have special treatment, it's about the government forcing you at the end of a gun to give special treatment.
Yes because we all know how much integrity the Right has had over the last eight years. What fools we would be to not take them at their word.