Yep, you're absolutely right. I was speaking more in extremes -- pros aren't usually cropping a shot down to 25% of it's original area, but consumers certainly do. Cropping to a standard print usually still leaves 90-95% of the real estate still in frame.
What makes outsourcing possible is the strength of the US dollar compared to the currency of those countries we outsource to. My Indian counterparts live as comfortable an existence as I do.
It's a much more complex economic dillema than "they're willing to work for less." If the US companies continue to deprive the population of white collar work, the strength of the consumer base will be destabilized. With no strong consumer base, revenue drops like a stone, companies have shareholder problems, more jobs are outsourced. Soon you have an extremely weak economy with no middle class to support the very companies that are trying to save money by outsourcing jobs.
My suspician is that this trend will continue until American tech workers get off of their collective asses and mid-cap, privately owned tech companies begin to proliferate. Private ownership will be the last bastion of American tech work in the future -- employment without the expectation of relentless growth from greedy shareholders.
Outsourcing is a necessary trend in the western world because of unrealistic shareholder and fund manager expectations.
Yah, I would dearly love to get a WRX STi, but the wife thinks they all look like rice burners:-(.
I think the Porsche/BMW types have their place, but they're certainly not SUVs, as you imply. I got an Infiniti FX45 as a rental while the Landies were in the shop recently, and it was a sweet ride, but again more like a powerful station wagon than an offroad vehicle.
The Audi S4 Avante is a superlative wagon, btw. Puts sports coupes at twice the price to shame in road tests.
BTW -- if you hadn't heard, Porsche's taking the Cayenne powerplant and introducing a new 928, so that car wasn't a complete waste.;-)
It's not good at anything, not community, nor grocery getting, off roading, cruising, or for ferrying around children
Um, I do all the above with my LR Discovery and Defender 90. The Discovery, despite having some of the highest ground clearance around, is not at all tippy compared to some of the poorly built American equivalents I've driven. It's great for highway driving. It doesn't rust. Plenty of room in the back for trips to hardware store or the soccer field. My 5'1" wife has no problems climbing in with no running boards, as do the possy of 8 year old soccer players that usually are following her.
I have it offroad at least twice a month; I wouldn't want to be 2 days from a paved road in any other vehicle (short of a Land Cruiser, possibly a better made off roader than any Landie). The things simply go in any type of weather, any kind of road. I can't at all understand your statement 'it's not good at anything' particularly offroading, which the things were built for. Even the questionable 'Merican versions are truck frames, and built for abuse. I know plenty of people that have their Cherokees and Explorers off road. Now, the little unibody suv-like vehicles are a different story, but let's face it, they're not really SUVs.
And I've driven minivans. Even if most of them weren't pretty poorly made, I just don't find them comfortable. The ones I've driven do piss poor in the winter. They're akin to driving big plastic tubs around. Maybe Chrysler's resurgence of the muscle station wagon will inspire some interesting changes, but minvans are simply no joy to drive.
I do feel guilty about the 15mpg I get, and I do wish LR would export the diesels. But I'm not just the grocery-getter SUV driver, and you shouldn't assume everyone is. But I guess I'm just a dumbshit for thinking so.;-)
Yeah, because that's what every consumer does. Everyone with an old elph or kodak point-and-click had longer lenses and teleconverters with with which they could get nice zoomed in shots.
No, no. They had badly composed, squinty looking shots where the subject of their photographs took up 5% of the frame. Now, ma and pa can take their pictures of the world's biggest rubber band ball (the first 20 of which they deleted because they fucked them up) that they shot with their $300 5 MP camera, and crop out 70% of the shot, and still get good enough resolution to print a 4x6.
The interchangeable lenses, filters, and 'correct shots' will always be in the domain of the prosumer and professional. They'll need the 5, 10, 20 MP cams to print their enlargements, which will always be accurately composed and framed (ie, need no cropping). The beauty of digital is that it frees the consumer from the cost of mistakes (bracket 100 shots on a 1/2 gig card!) and allows them to fix their mistakes in photoshop heaven after the experience. Plenty of normal, non-photog people of perfects sound mind mind work like this.
Sooooo, we should wait until we feed and house everyone in the world before we do anything to advance our knowledge in any other field of interest? I guess you should sell that computer you're enjoying at the moment, take a vow of poverty, and enjoy the rest of your life as a monk. I know the missionaries of charity are always looking for people in bangalore...
There were lots of good ideas and discussions in this thread, until I came upon yours.
No one calls people of French/English/Scottish/Irish extraction 'North American'. They call them 'European' or more specifically 'of Western European descent'. 'North America' defines geography, often the US and Canada combined. Nothing more. If you think 'North America' implies the four white ethnic groups (if you could even call them that) that you named, you need to go back to 3rd grade history class. We haven't been here long enough to establish any homogenized ethnicity, and what mixing has occured, has certainly occured among more than the four groups you mention.
And none of your cute, smiley face suggestions make any sense. None of them uniquely identify a person as being from the USA. There are other countries of states, other unions, other federal governments. And we haven't been thirteen colonies for some number of years. Fool.
I am totally on your side that the acceptance of the copying of CDs/software/movies and sharing them is completely and totally wrong. Most of the people who post here are not practicing some sort of civil disobedience as they would have you believe, most just want an excuse not to pay.
BUT -- I just don't agree with you that it's stealing. It's a poorly placed word that is meant to assign a certain moral responsibility; they problem I have is with the severity of this responsibility.
If I physically steal a CD, I've deprived someone of a tangible good. Someone's going to pay, whether it be the distributor, the store owner, or an insurance company. I've displaced an item from one person's possession to my own.
In the case of copying a CD and giving it to my friend, no possession has been displaced. The originator can still copy the CD as many times as he likes, I've done nothing to cost him money.
Now, have I reduced his potential revenue? Maybe. I can create a CD of static, sell it to some fool for $1, and he can copy it 1 million times and send it to 1 million people. He's broken the law, but I've not lost any money. No one else would've paid the dollar.
Have I broken the law by violating copyright protections? Yes. But that's the distinction -- I am committing a *copyright violation*, not a theft. It is not just semantic BS, there are real world differences between the two. While I agree it is totally wrong, it is not stealing. Logic would say that if it's stealing, it's also stealing for me to burn my paid-for CD to my ipod, or copy the CD to have a copy in my car and my home stereo. It's not -- copyright law gives me that right.
Or do you really believe that this is also stealing, that I should have to buy multiple copies of something for personal use across geographic locations? If it's stealing, it's always stealing. Otherwise, it must be something more complex, like what it is, a copyright issue.
Until the language is used correctly, the greater public will never gain true understanding of this issue, and it will never be fairly treated for both consumer and content provider.
Every big CAD package currently imports/exports to VRML, IGES, STL, Parasolid, etc. I'm sure the same will go with this if customers demand it. As poorly as PTC is doing right now, I'm certain that they'd all stand on their heads and recite the pledge if a customer as big as Intel asked them to.
your compsci degree is obsolete right after you get your diploma
This is so popular to say, but I totally disagree. Calculus doesn't change. Data Structures doesn't change. Formal Languages doesn't change. The fundamentals of good software design do not change.
There's nothing you learn in Computer Science that you can't teach yourself.
Oh, I agree with that -- same with nuclear engineering, accounting, writing, and musical performance. So what? Many people go to school because it gives them a head start in their chosen career. Many employers will throw out your resume without a degree. Most people want to be an 'employee' for a while before they become an 'employer'. Ergo, get a degree. The smartest, though, go to school so they can saturate themselves in an environment of their choice, to study with the brightest people in their field. You can't get that by locking yourself in your bedroom with 'MySQL for Dummies'. An architect or artist gets critiqued a thousand times for their work before they're paid to design their first building or play their first concert. Why should a software project or IT infrastructure be any different?
he was telling me that most of the people running such businesses don't have degrees
Yep, I too know a lot of uneducated IT people making big money doing mediocre work. If that makes you happy, by all means -- but I'm glad to see that you're not giving up college. There's more there than you're giving it credit for, or you're going to the wrong uni.
This "you can't call things from the USA American" crap gets so old. You might be one of those people that *has* to point this out, but it's quite incorrect.
Point One: The USA is the only *country* in the world with the name America in it, so far as google and I know,
Point Two: The people of a country always have a descriptive name related to the name of said country. For example: Russian, French, Italian, Canadian, etc.
Final Point: Would you really have us called 'YouEssAyyans'? 'Staters'? 'United People'? What -- seriously, can you think of a more descript name for the citizens of the US of America?
"America" does indeed describe to continents, and yes, most, ahem, Americans know it. If there was country called 'The United Factions of Europe', you can damn well guarantee they'd call them Europeans, and everyone would know what they meant. As a matter of fact, I have a friend who's South African. No one questions the legitimacy of this description of his homeland, even though there are certainly other countries that could be called South African (the continent). Everyone, everywhere in the world knows what someone means when you say 'American' (and yes, it's usually conjures negative connotation).
Anyway, descriptors of continents often connote ethnic background, which isn't applicable here at all. 'South American' suggests a clear ethnic origin, as does 'European', 'Asian', and 'African'. But what does 'North American' suggest? The only valid use of 'North American' is for discussions of geography, in which the word 'continent' would usually be applied anyway. I can *absolutely* say that if you're in Mexico and guarantee something with American money, they won't be expecting pesos.
There's a big difference between owning 10% of radio stations, and owning 10% of total listenership. I suspect that a vast majority of the number of radio stations cover a small percentage of the total listeners, while ClearChannels 10% of the stations covers a lion's share of the listeners.
Uh, if a browser or outlook exploit is used to run a piece of rogue software on your machine in the context of your account, it doesn't matter how well your ACLs are setup.
I would hazard a guess that very few Linux 'zealots' chmod 600 their files, unless they're very paranoid.
Mercy! No, those are exact reasons why so many projects fail
I have to laugh at this. I work on a multi-hundred man application team. 20+ million lines of code. We've never missed a release date. Our revenue is in the 9 figures. Our product is used to produce airplanes and cars; it works well. It has to work well. I've worked for 2 other similar companies in the manufacturing software industry, and one with no discernable process or estimation system. The latter was the one that went under, the first two thrive.
I never said that people never fail when they use they spend time in design, you can certainly still have a bad design at the end.
And as to your implication that, say, indians are better off doing old-fashioned waterfall requirements-heave processes, and thus overtake "our" jobs
Nope. I wasn't implying that. I was implying that US employers say that if you bring no discernable or, more importantly, quantifiable process to your development, there is no reason *not* to ship jobs overseas. If the Indians don't use process or estimation either, what's the difference at a third the price?
Again and again I see 'traditional' and new SE processes succeed. Where I see them fail is when they are applied by people that have neither the skill nor the drive to use them. PSP works. TSP works. XP works in the right situation. American IT people need to learn that they're not magicians, and if they don't want to be engineers, they're just going to be nothing more than unemployment collectors.
Absolutely, all excellent points. I can relate to the last point; I have several friends who write platform games. I have no idea how they get things done; one 80+ man team I know of *just* adopted source control. (!)
Honest answer: they're only helpful if you already have experience or are in the process of gaining experience on a large project. Yes, they're excellent books, and I have read them, but they aren't a silver bullet for managing a large software project.
This is true of all disciplines, though. I can point out a dozen *excellent* books on automotive design, but not one would give you enough to design a usable production powertrain. There ain't no substitute for the real world. There are trade skills even in the engineering disciplines.
(I have access to several online book services through work, btw. I'd probably never pay $50 for a book of this type, unless I was truly green and desperate for knowledge)
I would be interested in hearing any links to resources that you have found really, honestly valuable
I would recommend:
"Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules" by Steve McConnell
"A Discipline for Software Engineering" by Humphrey
Just to name a couple. Otherwise, like in most cases in the engineering field of academia vs. The Real World, go find someone who's good at it. Find a team that gets their product out on time every time. Learn from whoever leads it.
I don't really understand your statement saying that in software you don't understand how the system works until at least the end of the design phase. I don't know of any project in any engineering discipline where this isn't true. As for not understanding until implementation, well, that certainly happens. It's still an immature field, to be sure. The idea of managing a large software project has only been around for what, 30-40 year? But there are people out there doing it, and doing it well.
Can you expand? Sounds interesting -- I'd like to hear how you got started and some more detail about what you do. Fix websites? Fix networks? Fix legacy apps?
I hope you format your code better than your slashdot posts;-).
I somewhat disagree with your analogy. Although I do see some IT shops that view programming talent with the 'factory' mindset, I think a majority of large software products want you to apply what you're studying: Software Engineering.
I know, I know, there are 10k/. readers out there who just rolled their eyes ("Software development is not like bridge design!" "Programmers are not engineers!") but there are engineering practices that are applicable to software development: proper QA/QC, documenting everything, spending 70% of the SDLC in requirements and design, carefully designing dependencies before implementation, etc. These are not by themselves fun or 'crafty' activities, but in the bigger picture of developing a large and mature software project, can be very fulfilling.
That is not to say you can ROM the time for a software project like a bridge; there are things unique to each and every large project that cannot be accounted for. But, if care is given during the software lifecycle, a project team can deliver a mature, maintainable, usable project, still allow the company to make money, and still allow the developers to practice some 'craft'. I do believe that the difference between the best packages and the average ones lie in the company's investment in that last activity.
*BUT*, craft by itself, in anything but small to medium-small IT projects, is asking for disaster in terms of budget and schedule. The SEI level 1 nickname isn't 'folklore' for nothing. In fact, I would postulate that that's why so many jobs are going away from the Western companies: Western developers' insistence that software development is some kind of magic that cannot even be remotely predicted or estimated. Nonsense!
It'll be interesting to see if it widely enters the vernacular, and if it does, it'll be interesting to see if Tivo defends its copyright. 'Kleenex', 'Elevator', 'Cornflakes', and 'Aspirin' certainly lost their battles.
I hope they've become better than Sprint with the voice recognition dialer. At least with a cell, people understand why I have to shout the same name 5 times in a row with different inflections.
It'd look a little odd to see someone walking down the road, repeatedly tapping their chest, saying "Robert! *smack* Ro-bert! *smack* Robbberrrtt! *smack* "
I know many European Socialist countries where the poorest enjoy better life than the poorest in the USA.
This started as you saying that India's worst wasn't that much worse than America's. This is tripe -- India's a third-world country. The middle class there accounts for far less than 10% of its population. There is still poverty there the likes of which people in the Western world just can't comprehend. Have you been? I've volunteered there, visited friends there, seen it for what it is.
Yes, there is a disproportionate amount of random violence in poorer parts of the US. In the news, if it bleeds, it leads. But most white/blue collar workers never see anything worse than a car broken into.
I think it's you who needs to uncover your eyes. Minimalizing the problems that still exist in the developing third world (do you want to discuss slavery in India for starters, the largest legalized slave trade left in the world?) does a disservice to the good people that are fighting to make the world aware and combat the problem. Europeans tend to forget that the world outside of the West can be an ugly, ugly place. Shit happens in the US, but not very many people bloody well starve to death.
I'm an American, and not nationalistic/racist enough to think that there's something inherit to this country that makes it better, and there are certainly huge problems here with foreign and domestic policy, but the fact is, the living standards are vastly better/safer/healthier here and in Europe than any third world country.
There's a lucrative living to be made in business-to-business advertising. Billions of dollars are spent every year on telemarketing, direct mail, and trade shows to sell products that aren't directly consumer-advertised products.
Generic brands fit into this, too. Generic-brand companies compete for corporate agreements with supermarkets to sell their own 'no name' cereals, cookies, baking goods, etc. *Many* dollars are spent send reps to the four corners of the earth with samples, literature, anything they can do to market directly to the store in question.
Don't think for a second that advertising costs are any lower, or margins are any higher, just because it's generic. Usually the only thing different is that the production cost of the item is lower; it's just unnecessary to market a name to the consumer, because the ones buying generic are just looking for the lowest cost item that isn't completely indigestable.
Don't kid yourself; *every* consumer product is advertised/marketed in some form.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you're absolutely right. I was speaking more in extremes -- pros aren't usually cropping a shot down to 25% of it's original area, but consumers certainly do. Cropping to a standard print usually still leaves 90-95% of the real estate still in frame.
What makes outsourcing possible is the strength of the US dollar compared to the currency of those countries we outsource to. My Indian counterparts live as comfortable an existence as I do.
It's a much more complex economic dillema than "they're willing to work for less." If the US companies continue to deprive the population of white collar work, the strength of the consumer base will be destabilized. With no strong consumer base, revenue drops like a stone, companies have shareholder problems, more jobs are outsourced. Soon you have an extremely weak economy with no middle class to support the very companies that are trying to save money by outsourcing jobs.
My suspician is that this trend will continue until American tech workers get off of their collective asses and mid-cap, privately owned tech companies begin to proliferate. Private ownership will be the last bastion of American tech work in the future -- employment without the expectation of relentless growth from greedy shareholders.
Outsourcing is a necessary trend in the western world because of unrealistic shareholder and fund manager expectations.
I think the Porsche/BMW types have their place, but they're certainly not SUVs, as you imply. I got an Infiniti FX45 as a rental while the Landies were in the shop recently, and it was a sweet ride, but again more like a powerful station wagon than an offroad vehicle.
The Audi S4 Avante is a superlative wagon, btw. Puts sports coupes at twice the price to shame in road tests.
BTW -- if you hadn't heard, Porsche's taking the Cayenne powerplant and introducing a new 928, so that car wasn't a complete waste. ;-)
Um, I do all the above with my LR Discovery and Defender 90. The Discovery, despite having some of the highest ground clearance around, is not at all tippy compared to some of the poorly built American equivalents I've driven. It's great for highway driving. It doesn't rust. Plenty of room in the back for trips to hardware store or the soccer field. My 5'1" wife has no problems climbing in with no running boards, as do the possy of 8 year old soccer players that usually are following her.
I have it offroad at least twice a month; I wouldn't want to be 2 days from a paved road in any other vehicle (short of a Land Cruiser, possibly a better made off roader than any Landie). The things simply go in any type of weather, any kind of road. I can't at all understand your statement 'it's not good at anything' particularly offroading, which the things were built for. Even the questionable 'Merican versions are truck frames, and built for abuse. I know plenty of people that have their Cherokees and Explorers off road. Now, the little unibody suv-like vehicles are a different story, but let's face it, they're not really SUVs.
And I've driven minivans. Even if most of them weren't pretty poorly made, I just don't find them comfortable. The ones I've driven do piss poor in the winter. They're akin to driving big plastic tubs around. Maybe Chrysler's resurgence of the muscle station wagon will inspire some interesting changes, but minvans are simply no joy to drive.
I do feel guilty about the 15mpg I get, and I do wish LR would export the diesels. But I'm not just the grocery-getter SUV driver, and you shouldn't assume everyone is. But I guess I'm just a dumbshit for thinking so. ;-)
No, no. They had badly composed, squinty looking shots where the subject of their photographs took up 5% of the frame. Now, ma and pa can take their pictures of the world's biggest rubber band ball (the first 20 of which they deleted because they fucked them up) that they shot with their $300 5 MP camera, and crop out 70% of the shot, and still get good enough resolution to print a 4x6.
The interchangeable lenses, filters, and 'correct shots' will always be in the domain of the prosumer and professional. They'll need the 5, 10, 20 MP cams to print their enlargements, which will always be accurately composed and framed (ie, need no cropping). The beauty of digital is that it frees the consumer from the cost of mistakes (bracket 100 shots on a 1/2 gig card!) and allows them to fix their mistakes in photoshop heaven after the experience. Plenty of normal, non-photog people of perfects sound mind mind work like this.
Sooooo, we should wait until we feed and house everyone in the world before we do anything to advance our knowledge in any other field of interest? I guess you should sell that computer you're enjoying at the moment, take a vow of poverty, and enjoy the rest of your life as a monk. I know the missionaries of charity are always looking for people in bangalore...
No one calls people of French/English/Scottish/Irish extraction 'North American'. They call them 'European' or more specifically 'of Western European descent'. 'North America' defines geography, often the US and Canada combined. Nothing more. If you think 'North America' implies the four white ethnic groups (if you could even call them that) that you named, you need to go back to 3rd grade history class. We haven't been here long enough to establish any homogenized ethnicity, and what mixing has occured, has certainly occured among more than the four groups you mention.
And none of your cute, smiley face suggestions make any sense. None of them uniquely identify a person as being from the USA. There are other countries of states, other unions, other federal governments. And we haven't been thirteen colonies for some number of years. Fool.
BUT -- I just don't agree with you that it's stealing. It's a poorly placed word that is meant to assign a certain moral responsibility; they problem I have is with the severity of this responsibility.
If I physically steal a CD, I've deprived someone of a tangible good. Someone's going to pay, whether it be the distributor, the store owner, or an insurance company. I've displaced an item from one person's possession to my own.
In the case of copying a CD and giving it to my friend, no possession has been displaced. The originator can still copy the CD as many times as he likes, I've done nothing to cost him money.
Now, have I reduced his potential revenue? Maybe. I can create a CD of static, sell it to some fool for $1, and he can copy it 1 million times and send it to 1 million people. He's broken the law, but I've not lost any money. No one else would've paid the dollar.
Have I broken the law by violating copyright protections? Yes. But that's the distinction -- I am committing a *copyright violation*, not a theft. It is not just semantic BS, there are real world differences between the two. While I agree it is totally wrong, it is not stealing. Logic would say that if it's stealing, it's also stealing for me to burn my paid-for CD to my ipod, or copy the CD to have a copy in my car and my home stereo. It's not -- copyright law gives me that right.
Or do you really believe that this is also stealing, that I should have to buy multiple copies of something for personal use across geographic locations? If it's stealing, it's always stealing. Otherwise, it must be something more complex, like what it is, a copyright issue.
Until the language is used correctly, the greater public will never gain true understanding of this issue, and it will never be fairly treated for both consumer and content provider.
Every big CAD package currently imports/exports to VRML, IGES, STL, Parasolid, etc. I'm sure the same will go with this if customers demand it. As poorly as PTC is doing right now, I'm certain that they'd all stand on their heads and recite the pledge if a customer as big as Intel asked them to.
This is so popular to say, but I totally disagree. Calculus doesn't change. Data Structures doesn't change. Formal Languages doesn't change. The fundamentals of good software design do not change.
There's nothing you learn in Computer Science that you can't teach yourself.
Oh, I agree with that -- same with nuclear engineering, accounting, writing, and musical performance. So what? Many people go to school because it gives them a head start in their chosen career. Many employers will throw out your resume without a degree. Most people want to be an 'employee' for a while before they become an 'employer'. Ergo, get a degree. The smartest, though, go to school so they can saturate themselves in an environment of their choice, to study with the brightest people in their field. You can't get that by locking yourself in your bedroom with 'MySQL for Dummies'. An architect or artist gets critiqued a thousand times for their work before they're paid to design their first building or play their first concert. Why should a software project or IT infrastructure be any different?
he was telling me that most of the people running such businesses don't have degrees
Yep, I too know a lot of uneducated IT people making big money doing mediocre work. If that makes you happy, by all means -- but I'm glad to see that you're not giving up college. There's more there than you're giving it credit for, or you're going to the wrong uni.
Point One: The USA is the only *country* in the world with the name America in it, so far as google and I know,
Point Two: The people of a country always have a descriptive name related to the name of said country. For example: Russian, French, Italian, Canadian, etc.
Final Point: Would you really have us called 'YouEssAyyans'? 'Staters'? 'United People'? What -- seriously, can you think of a more descript name for the citizens of the US of America?
"America" does indeed describe to continents, and yes, most, ahem, Americans know it. If there was country called 'The United Factions of Europe', you can damn well guarantee they'd call them Europeans, and everyone would know what they meant. As a matter of fact, I have a friend who's South African. No one questions the legitimacy of this description of his homeland, even though there are certainly other countries that could be called South African (the continent). Everyone, everywhere in the world knows what someone means when you say 'American' (and yes, it's usually conjures negative connotation).
Anyway, descriptors of continents often connote ethnic background, which isn't applicable here at all. 'South American' suggests a clear ethnic origin, as does 'European', 'Asian', and 'African'. But what does 'North American' suggest? The only valid use of 'North American' is for discussions of geography, in which the word 'continent' would usually be applied anyway. I can *absolutely* say that if you're in Mexico and guarantee something with American money, they won't be expecting pesos.
There's a big difference between owning 10% of radio stations, and owning 10% of total listenership. I suspect that a vast majority of the number of radio stations cover a small percentage of the total listeners, while ClearChannels 10% of the stations covers a lion's share of the listeners.
Sounds kinda wrathful. Remember, you don't marry just her, you marry the whole family!
I would hazard a guess that very few Linux 'zealots' chmod 600 their files, unless they're very paranoid.
I have to laugh at this. I work on a multi-hundred man application team. 20+ million lines of code. We've never missed a release date. Our revenue is in the 9 figures. Our product is used to produce airplanes and cars; it works well. It has to work well. I've worked for 2 other similar companies in the manufacturing software industry, and one with no discernable process or estimation system. The latter was the one that went under, the first two thrive.
I never said that people never fail when they use they spend time in design, you can certainly still have a bad design at the end.
And as to your implication that, say, indians are better off doing old-fashioned waterfall requirements-heave processes, and thus overtake "our" jobs
Nope. I wasn't implying that. I was implying that US employers say that if you bring no discernable or, more importantly, quantifiable process to your development, there is no reason *not* to ship jobs overseas. If the Indians don't use process or estimation either, what's the difference at a third the price?
Again and again I see 'traditional' and new SE processes succeed. Where I see them fail is when they are applied by people that have neither the skill nor the drive to use them. PSP works. TSP works. XP works in the right situation. American IT people need to learn that they're not magicians, and if they don't want to be engineers, they're just going to be nothing more than unemployment collectors.
Absolutely, all excellent points. I can relate to the last point; I have several friends who write platform games. I have no idea how they get things done; one 80+ man team I know of *just* adopted source control. (!)
This is true of all disciplines, though. I can point out a dozen *excellent* books on automotive design, but not one would give you enough to design a usable production powertrain. There ain't no substitute for the real world. There are trade skills even in the engineering disciplines.
(I have access to several online book services through work, btw. I'd probably never pay $50 for a book of this type, unless I was truly green and desperate for knowledge)
I would recommend:
"Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules" by Steve McConnell
"A Discipline for Software Engineering" by Humphrey
Just to name a couple. Otherwise, like in most cases in the engineering field of academia vs. The Real World, go find someone who's good at it. Find a team that gets their product out on time every time. Learn from whoever leads it.
I don't really understand your statement saying that in software you don't understand how the system works until at least the end of the design phase. I don't know of any project in any engineering discipline where this isn't true. As for not understanding until implementation, well, that certainly happens. It's still an immature field, to be sure. The idea of managing a large software project has only been around for what, 30-40 year? But there are people out there doing it, and doing it well.
Can you expand? Sounds interesting -- I'd like to hear how you got started and some more detail about what you do. Fix websites? Fix networks? Fix legacy apps?
I somewhat disagree with your analogy. Although I do see some IT shops that view programming talent with the 'factory' mindset, I think a majority of large software products want you to apply what you're studying: Software Engineering.
I know, I know, there are 10k /. readers out there who just rolled their eyes ("Software development is not like bridge design!" "Programmers are not engineers!") but there are engineering practices that are applicable to software development: proper QA/QC, documenting everything, spending 70% of the SDLC in requirements and design, carefully designing dependencies before implementation, etc. These are not by themselves fun or 'crafty' activities, but in the bigger picture of developing a large and mature software project, can be very fulfilling.
That is not to say you can ROM the time for a software project like a bridge; there are things unique to each and every large project that cannot be accounted for. But, if care is given during the software lifecycle, a project team can deliver a mature, maintainable, usable project, still allow the company to make money, and still allow the developers to practice some 'craft'. I do believe that the difference between the best packages and the average ones lie in the company's investment in that last activity.
*BUT*, craft by itself, in anything but small to medium-small IT projects, is asking for disaster in terms of budget and schedule. The SEI level 1 nickname isn't 'folklore' for nothing. In fact, I would postulate that that's why so many jobs are going away from the Western companies: Western developers' insistence that software development is some kind of magic that cannot even be remotely predicted or estimated. Nonsense!
It'll be interesting to see if it widely enters the vernacular, and if it does, it'll be interesting to see if Tivo defends its copyright. 'Kleenex', 'Elevator', 'Cornflakes', and 'Aspirin' certainly lost their battles.
Here, you won't have to sell your sole to read it
I hate having selling my fish to read the news.
It'd look a little odd to see someone walking down the road, repeatedly tapping their chest, saying "Robert! *smack* Ro-bert! *smack* Robbberrrtt! *smack* "
I know many European Socialist countries where the poorest enjoy better life than the poorest in the USA.
This started as you saying that India's worst wasn't that much worse than America's. This is tripe -- India's a third-world country. The middle class there accounts for far less than 10% of its population. There is still poverty there the likes of which people in the Western world just can't comprehend. Have you been? I've volunteered there, visited friends there, seen it for what it is.
Yes, there is a disproportionate amount of random violence in poorer parts of the US. In the news, if it bleeds, it leads. But most white/blue collar workers never see anything worse than a car broken into.
I think it's you who needs to uncover your eyes. Minimalizing the problems that still exist in the developing third world (do you want to discuss slavery in India for starters, the largest legalized slave trade left in the world?) does a disservice to the good people that are fighting to make the world aware and combat the problem. Europeans tend to forget that the world outside of the West can be an ugly, ugly place. Shit happens in the US, but not very many people bloody well starve to death.
I'm an American, and not nationalistic/racist enough to think that there's something inherit to this country that makes it better, and there are certainly huge problems here with foreign and domestic policy, but the fact is, the living standards are vastly better/safer/healthier here and in Europe than any third world country.
There's a lucrative living to be made in business-to-business advertising. Billions of dollars are spent every year on telemarketing, direct mail, and trade shows to sell products that aren't directly consumer-advertised products.
Generic brands fit into this, too. Generic-brand companies compete for corporate agreements with supermarkets to sell their own 'no name' cereals, cookies, baking goods, etc. *Many* dollars are spent send reps to the four corners of the earth with samples, literature, anything they can do to market directly to the store in question.
Don't think for a second that advertising costs are any lower, or margins are any higher, just because it's generic. Usually the only thing different is that the production cost of the item is lower; it's just unnecessary to market a name to the consumer, because the ones buying generic are just looking for the lowest cost item that isn't completely indigestable.
Don't kid yourself; *every* consumer product is advertised/marketed in some form.