"There were plenty of cases of Germans attacking the Third Reich, more obviously there were several attempts by Germans to assassinate Hitler. That didn't make WWII a civil war. Just an international war with some within the country opposed to it."
This is absolutely true but the problem is that had those Germans assassinated people in their own country it would not have been an act of war but would've been murder.
This is the fundamental distinction at play here, unless it's a civil war you cannot be a member of a country and kill your country men and it be an act of war, it by definition has to be murder. You may see other charges thrown in like "aiding the enemy" but it still can't be defined as an act of war and I believe that's the GP's point.
"Software developers that insist that it cannot be done are simply (i) inexperienced, or (ii) do not know what they are doing and need to not be doing software."
Oh do fuck off. Software developers that insist it can be done are simply inexperienced and unaware of the bugs that actually do exist in their software. See how that works? It's called the no true scotsman fallacy.
Yes I agree more experience means better estimation, but it's still estimation, and therein lies the problem - estimation is not a guarantee of correctness, it's by definition, just an estimate.
The only way software developers manage to hit time targets is simply by giving themselves plenty of leeway by overestimating, and sure you can get a rough idea over time of roughly how long things may take, if you have a number of estimates to stick together it may be that you overestimate some and underestimate others but on average hit a happy balance and that's great, providing those tasks do not change, but therein lies the problem. You estimated 2 weeks for translation support, but guess what? they found an ambiguity in the spec that allows them to gouge out of you full blown internationalisation. Suddenly your estimate is meaningless.
Your blabber about contract is still completely ignorant of the way the real world works. It's pretty clear from your comments that you've always just worked as a developer and never actually acted in a client facing capacity - guess what, I have and I've delivered and delivered with happy clients and a healthy profit margin, that's why I know for certain that I've managed to figure out what degree of leeway to give and not give, but also why constant contract negotiation and haggling is not the solution unless you want to piss the customer off because it's utterly inefficient for both parties.
"And, FYI, the Defense Industry operates on this very principle. The US Government puts out an RFP; contractors respond with their proposals; one of them wins, and then immediately renegotiates the proposal before any work is actually done. They seem to be doing very well."
You couldn't have picked a worse example, public sector, and the military in particular in both the UK and US (and probably much of the world in fact) are notorious for suffering project overruns, poor budgeting and poor planning. They only seem to be doing very well if you completely and utterly ignore the massive cost overruns that the world's militaries are absolutely famous for.
"And ultimately, if they don't want to do it - then they're not worth having as a customer either as it will impose undue risk on you and your own business."
This is one thing I somewhat agree on, as I said in a different post you have two options - you either have a client that you have a trustworthy relationship with where they'll gladly accept to pay for some changes when it's their fault as long as you fix bugs where it's your fault without dicking around with contract negotiation, or you work on a time and materials model where you charge them for fixed blocks of work for example by using Scrum and charging them per spring giving them a rough estimate of initial sprints, giving them visibility of the backlog and letting them increase/decrease the number of sprints as they see fit to get the required number of features they want and also giving them visibility of the impact on the backlog of changes as and when they make them. If you have neither of these then yes, walk away because it means you're dealing with a customer that wants more out of you than they're willing to pay for.
Software just isn't as fixed as you're making out, specs aren't as fixed as your making out, it's a far more fluid process than you're implying and the impact of the fluidity is larger the longer the project runs. If it's a two year project the clients business needs may even have changed somewhat such that it by definition has to be fluid to be of any use to the client in the first place. You have to plan for that one way or another and it's the
They weren't killing for the sake of the love of the slaughter, they were killing for the same reason any other gangbanger kills - for "respect".
These are people with nothing in their lives, bought up in violent neighbourhoods surrounded by knife and gun crime and frequent stabbings and sought fame in the only way these sorts of people know - more violence.
The government and media has given them exactly what they wanted, they've published the mobile phone footage of them chatting before the police turned up, the government has made it a "terrorist" incident adding unjustified validity to their claim that they were sending a message. Now there will be extremists who will praise them for "joining their cause" and giving them respect for it.
The fact they didn't kill others despite having had ample opportunity to do so demonstrates further why it wasn't terrorism. If it was terrorism they'd have killed innocent people too to, you know, spread terror. The fact they stood there talking to some woman shows that they just wanted to make the news, if it was about maximising terror, they'd have beheaded her too.
Right, and Dale Cregan shot one female police officer as she knocked on a door, and shot the other in the back as she ran away and then threw a grenade between the two of them whilst they were still alive and desperately trying to crawl away.
You'll have to excuse me if I still don't exactly see the difference even when the level of barbarism is taken into account. Even Raul Moat walking up to a police officer whose sat pulled up in his car, sticking a shotgun in his face and pulling the trigger doesn't strike me as particularly free from barbarism.
I agree none of these are ordinary murders, they're particularly extreme murders, but neither case is any more terrorism than the other. There was extreme barbarism in each case, and there was a message in each case.
I agree this wasn't terrorism but it wasn't war either. These people have no association with Iraq or Afghanistan, it seems they were most probably British.
That means it was not war. It was simple cold blooded violent murder and little else.
I'm anti Iraq/Afghanistan war too, but let's not pretend these guys were fighting for some cause, they were just killers looking for an excuse to kill.
Dale Cregan shot and threw grenades at killing two police officers last year.
Raul Moat before that hunted for and shot a police officer in the face after having just shot two other people and said he was starting a war with the police.
Both of these were making political statements by attempting to instil fear, neither was classed as a terrorist incident.
The only difference this time is that the perpetrators identified as muslim. The fact they were talking to and not harming everyone else that was around afterwards means they were arguably less effective at instilling fear than people like Dale Cregan was, so if this was terrorism why were other such incidents not?
More realistically these seemed like a pair of London gangbangers desperate for a cause which they could use as an excuse to commit murder. They were not your usual middle eastern jihadis, they even quoted from the Christian bible which shows how poor their association with the jihadi ideology actually was.
We'd be better off dealing with London's gang problem once and for all (the one that triggered the riots) than we would pratting around treating this as a terrorist incident and investing in the security service's ability to snoop - hint: they knew about these guys anyway using existing ability and still couldn't/didn't stop them.
"I see that you get what you pay for. So your past benefits such as education have no financial value? Then how did you get that nice job? And you've already demonstrated that you're willing to spend money for the society thing which means you've given that some sort of financial value as well."
I don't really understand what you're on about any more. You seem to be trying to make an argument where there isn't one which has ultimately resulted in your nonsensical blabbering. Of course my past education have financial value, that's precisely why I said I used to be a net financial beneficiary - I was paying in less (nothing) than I was getting out of the system directly, the fact I'm not using any public services like that now is also why I'm now paying in more than I'm getting out of the system directly. This doesn't mean I don't have indirect benefits that are impossible to quantify financially (like peace of mind over not having to worry about how I'll pay medical bills if I get ill) which are the non-financial indirect benefits of paying a civilised level of taxation in a civilised society that I referred to.
But anyway, your nonsensical ramblings are about to fall off my recent comments list on my userpage, so have fun continuing to try and get your head round the idea of someone being happy with paying the taxes they pay. Perhaps you can pursue me and continue to make no sense in another thread in response to another article or something another day.
My final comment was simply a question as to whether you're really happy having a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude when it's in large part what makes everyone else hate Americans like you. I mean, is it really that much fun being horribly selfish and hated was the question.
" I've read some of the posts in this thread and many of you are comparing building contractors to software developer contractors and I honestly think you're comparing apples to oranges."
This is because there are two types of people engaging in this discussion - developers and analysts with real world experience of involvement in the full software project lifecycle, and everyone else.
Everyone else would be the people you describe, these are the students on Slashdot, the IT support folks, and a handful of end users. None of these have the first clue about the topic but you'll get their (incorrect) opinion regardless.
See the person who responded to you completely unable to grasp why software with it's combinatorial explosion of branches that can do markedly different things in markedly different ways, many of which have never been done before making it a complete unknown is not quite the same as doing building work which has been done literally millions of times before by millions of people in the exact same way and is so very much a known.
People who don't know anything about software, don't know anything about software. News at 10.
But that wouldn't be classed as a bug in software because as the contractor intentionally implemented that solution then it would be classed as outright incompetence and would be grounds to recoup money back from the contractor through the courts if necessary. This would be akin to accidently breaking some code, and then rather than fix it, implementing some additional code that masks it but works on a timer and breaks half the program after a while - a contractor doing this wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
"I must laugh when people say there are fewer bugs in different professions."
If you believe this then you don't understand why software is different to building a house, and if you don't understand that you don't know enough to even be engaging in this discussion.
Software is difference because you're always doing something new (if you're not you should reuse existing code/libraries) and so it's always an unknown as to exactly how long it will take and what the bugs might be. This isn't true with building a house, you know how long it takes to dig the holes, lay the bricks, plaster the walls, do the plumbing and so forth - you know because it's a set of tasks that have been repeated a thousand times before. The people you hire also know what can go wrong, they know what to look out for, and how to do it to minimise issues. You may not know exactly but you know enough for a ballpark figure for each task, that, on average, will balance out across the whole build.
But here's news for you, a bug in the sense of building a house, the sort that will make it through to UAT would be as simple as an ever so slight dent in the wall, some corner not quite being a perfect 90 degrees, the wiring being a bit tacky, sealant not being put on quite tidily enough. Guess what? You wont get any of these things fixed for free either.
"1) If you want bugs to be their problem, agree on a fixed project/product price beforehand."
The problem is that this is fantasy. The only contractors you'll find that will sign up to this are the not very good ones who are completely naive as to what it means until it burns them and if you end up with them you'll be lucky to even deliver full stop.
Talented and experienced contractors know that this means the risk is being put onto them, and know to go look elsewhere. Given that there isn't a shortage of contract work in the world right now due to the fact companies have no idea what's going to happen with the economy from one minute to the next and haven't for a few years means you'd be hard pressed to try and find anyone desperate enough to take this risk.
"The rest of your post is boasting about how much you got from government which is in contradiction to your assertion that you got less from government than you put in."
I clarified that so I'm not sure why you're still confused about the point. My original comment that I'm not a net beneficiary was that I'm not directly financially a net beneficiary - I don't use the services enough directly to be worth it right now, I don't get any benefits like child tax credits, unemployment, disability or anything like that.
But that doesn't mean I don't benefit indirectly, it doesn't mean I haven't benefited in the past, and it doesn't mean I wont benefit in the future.
Yes right now I'm certainly not benefitting directly but that doesn't mean I'm getting screwed. When I was born, when I was going through school someone was subsidising me, and it's quite possible when I'm old and need end of life care that someone may well be subsidising me depending on what happens in the future. The simple fact is we cannot be self-supporting for every minute of our existence, it's not possible, we're all dependent at some point.
"But you said you live in the UK. One merely needs to look at their public surveillance system or their laws on slander and libel to see that they're kind of retarded."
As opposed to a nation with warrantless wiretapping, that bans kinder eggs deeming them more dangerous than guns and that is full of cities with absurd ordinances such as determining how much grass you must have in your garden? Yeah, so much for the land of the free, home of the brave.
What's it like being barely more liked than China? -
Yes it is, there are two types of project in the world - those where the time for production is a fairly well known and those where it's not. When you've built a few houses you know roughly how many bricks your bricklayers can lay in a day, you know how long it takes to install the plumbing, these are tasks that you do many times and within a certain degree of tolerance are highly predictable in terms of time required.
You can't do that with software, because everything you write is new (and if it isn't, you're doing it wrong, why aren't you taking advantage of reusable components?) so you simply cannot predict ahead of time how long something will take with any reasonable degree of guarantee. The same is true for many research projects, the same is true for a lot of engineering projects. Projects in industries like these aren't like production lines where you have masses of historical data on identical or near identical tasks to go on - you know your factory can churn out 10,000 chocolate bars in a day on average, but you don't know that your team of software developers can definitely solve problem x in a day.
"When requirements change, you change the contract through a renegotiation. If they don't want to change the contract, you don't change what you provide. That's standard practice for contracting."
This shows a complete lack of experience on your behalf on dealing with clients. If you act like this you'll a) often be wasting more of your time and their time renegotiating contracts than you will just doing the changes because the changes rarely come in one big bulk lump, but normally come in at a trickle, and b) Your customers wont be your customers because forcing them to waste time with a contract renegotiation over say, roughly a days work is the quickest way to piss them off and show how inflexible you are. They'll go elsewhere.
There's also the fact that it's impossible to write down a perfectly solid spec, if they want something different and you try to demand they pay for a change request or you demand contract renegotiation they're just as likely to find a hole in the spec (and there will be holes, writing a hole-proof spec is more difficult and time consuming than writing 100% bug-free software) and use that to make your life difficult. You may not even have a leg to stand on to even claim it's a change request or a contract renegotiation.
You have to allow at least some flexibility whilst also catering for that fact. You can't apply programmer binary logic of "It's a change, therefore contract renegotiation is required" in the real world - real clients wont go for that, there are shades of grey in between that you absolutely have to cater to if you want to stay in business, especially if you want repeat business and to grow your business.
No I'm saying they're both for the benefit of the respective countries.
You seem to assume that because I'm not a net beneficiary right now that it's not for the benefit of the country and the citizens - just because I'm not a net beneficiary doesn't mean it's not for my benefit, the problem is with your "I got mine, fuck you!" attitude you wont be able to comprehend why.
Still, I'll explain briefly anyway, simply put, what happens if one day I get cancer and my employer goes Enron and we're all made redundant? Guess what, I don't just get left to die, I don't get made homeless.
Even if that doesn't happen, I still benefit indirectly by not having my countrymen forced into crime because they hit on hard times, and because people are happier, healthier, and more literate and numerate.
I know it'll be impossible for you to comprehend, but some of us like living in a country where we're not all out for ourselves and where people get looked after no matter how unlucky, even if that is something that actually costs me. This is in part because I haven't always done well, I had to work hard to get here, and I still remember how difficult it was when I was just starting out and how helpful my state funded education and so forth was - it was instrumental in getting me where I am so I could pay back all that and then some. I suppose in that respect you could even say I was wrong, I am a net beneficiary, the benefit I get is living in a non-retarded society where everyone isn't politically ignorant and out for themselves so perhaps to clarify, I'm not financially a net beneficiary.
It depends in part how it's done, it could be that they retain some shares in the spin-off (and presumably they would) but fundamentally say they spin it off and retain over 50% of shares so that they maintain control it means they can command a higher share price for the remaining 49% or whatever than they can for Sony shares alone.
Effectively this means that they'll get a big windfall which they can use to try and turn around their main units that are currently struggling (i.e. they could massively invest in smartphones and we know how much success there has been pulling in Samsung) whilst retaining a majority control of what happens at the spun-off entertainment business.
Also, in the near term that division will likely be loss making due to the production and marketing costs of the PS4, so it would act to lessen the blow on the main company. They probably feel it looks better if Sony makes a $1bn loss and The Playstation Company or whatever makes a $1bn loss that they can attribute to the cost of being spun off and temporary than if Sony in general makes a $2bn loss.
Alternatively it's even possible that they feel the main electronics business has more scope for profitability in general even without their entertainment division and that it simply needs a lot of income to turn things round and so they sell it off altogether and don't even retain a share in it. They may feel with a few billion $ in pocket to invest internally they can turn themselves into a Samsung, which is massively profitable even without an entertainment division but that's a bigger gamble.
There's lots of ways that selling off the entertainment division could be beneficial to them.
"In other words, you're saying that a major country defecting from the high tax policies common to the developed world would cripple the power of budding government oligarchies globally? Ok, let's do it then. I don't mind fighting so-called "trade wars" which will end in my favor."
No, they wouldn't. The irony of your comment is that you seem oblivious to the fact that said tax arrangements are the way they are in large part because nations like the US were instrumental in getting them developed that way both for the benefit of the US and for the benefit of it's citizens like you. It'll never end in your favour because you, as an American citizen, will never accept the same level of suffering and poverty that someone in India, China, or Bangladesh will accept. If you want a race to the bottom, you have far more to lose than their citizens do.
"Sentiments such as you echo remind me of why I support tax competition among governments. You are in a situation where due to the bribes that your government pays you, you have to support the growth of their power in order to continue to receive those bribes."
What do you mean "bribes"? I've never received any bribe from government, if you're talking about benefits then as a male with no kids in the higher tax bracket working as a lead developer in the financial services industry the UK I'm far and away a net contributor. I support them on things like this because I'm not a bat-shit crazy libertaritard who doesn't have the slightest grasp of global politics and the global economy and what problems it would cause if we went down your path.
"All I can say here is that if your so-called "western lifestyle" can only be funded by a lot of Other Peoples' Money, then it's not worthwhile. You have become merely a parasite and my view on parasites is that purging them is better, even if it comes at great cost to the host. Or maybe co-opting them so that they are somehow symbiotes."
Oh I see, so you are assuming I'm a net beneficiary of the current tax system. Sucks for you to be wrong I guess, don't cry too hard about it though.
"I think a lower tax rate would help in the latter strategy since you'd have to actually provide something of value in order to survive than merely take it."
Then you finish off with a complete fail of a comment. I think the fact your whole argument is based on an assumption that turns out to be completely and utterly incorrect, and completely opposite of the truth shows how flawed your argument is.
By making such a massive assumption that was false you've merely obliterated what little worth there may have been in anything you otherwise had to say. The real travesty is that were we in the same country I've no doubt that my taxes would likely be subsidising politically ignorant little turds like you rather than vice versa, which wouldn't be a problem, if said taxes I produce were at very least being used to give you some basic education in the way the world works and pulling you out your stupor, though I suspect that may be an impossible task given the level of assumption you jump to and the extreme ignorance you apparently suffer from.
The problem is that I can't see how the OP is hiring to do a fixed amount of work given that he says they just walk away when it comes to bug fixing time which he expects to be done for free.
If he was working with contracts that contract a full piece of work rather than by the hour or whatever then they wouldn't just be able to walk away and take work elsewhere when it comes to bug fixing - he'd be able to hold them to the contract.
The fact he can't do that and by the sounds of it they walk away without a fight suggests most likely he is just paying them by the hour or day and then expects them to work free when it comes to bug fixing.
See the latter part of my post here about spec writing:
I agree, specs are dangerous things to live by, it's impossible to write a perfect spec that covers every case no matter how good you are and even if you feel you nailed it down tightly enough that it's almost perfect the response of the client will likely be "I'm not signing that because I'm concerned it doesn't leave enough leeway for necessary minor changes that are inevitable in any software development".
But we're not talking about a house which is normally something you can quantify as taking x amount of time to a pretty reasonable degree if you've done it before, we're talking about software.
I think just about every software contractor has clued into the fact that software requirements change much more rapidly and if I was on the hiring side of the equation I'd be loathe to take on a contractor that didn't want to be paid by the hour, day, or week, and instead wanted to be paid for the full job, as it would say to me that they didn't have the necessary experience to understand the way software is built and what can go wrong because both I and they would be exposed to far too much risk to be healthy.
True, but I can't honestly say that any old hardware I have will last forever. I have plenty of old systems where I can no longer use the software regardless because the hardware has gone and the components required to fix are no longer available.
He is. Because he has this problem. If it was factored in and the developers had signed a contract taking on the risk then they wouldn't simply be going elsewhere when he asks them to fix bugs for free would they? They'd be contractually obliged to do exactly that.
"This sort of risk/reward management is totally par for the course with any sort of contract management, and there are several solutions that are all fair and equitable (subject to negotiation and the informed consent of both parties), so there's no need to go ragging on someone who chooses a different model from your chosen one."
Right, so why does he have a problem? Why is he here asking for solutions?
"A contractor is a supplier, not an employee, and should therefore be working to provide something to a contract."
Yes, a fixed amount of work for a defined period of time, this is why you pay them by the day or hour. If you want more than that then pay more than that. You don't get to pay a contractor for a days work then expect him to do a day and half's work.
If you feel the contractor's work wasn't of sufficient quality then either withhold payment and dispute it legally with them or just don't ever hire them again.
The whole point in using contractors is that you can get rid of them in an instant with no questions asked, no redundancy payment, no justification required. Maybe this is in part a cultural difference because I understand some US states even allow the firing of permanent employees at will, but certainly here in the UK the benefit of contractors is the flexibility they allow you in staffing up or down as required above all else - if you don't like the work they're doing then kick them out the door immediately.
No it's not, and his predicament is proof of the fact.
He refuses to pay for bugs, which is an extreme way of attempting to encourage his developers to reduce bugs in their software. The fact he does this and still ends up with bugs shows that you simply can't avoid bugs, they're an inevitable consequence of any kind of complex work which software development is.
What he in fact needs to do is accept that bug fixing is an inevitable element of software development and he needs to pay for that so that the contractors will stick around and do it. He needs to factor it into his products and pricing, if he can't do that and remain profitable then his business plan isn't viable and he either needs to change it or go out of business and let someone who can do proper software development in a suitably profitable manner take his place in the market.
"I'm sick of buying buggy software and being told it's "good enough" when it doesn't do what it promises."
If it doesn't do what it promises then it's not fit for purpose and if you live in any country with sane consumer protection laws you can take it back for a refund. For what it's worth though I have, over the thousands of pieces of software I've bought had only once something that was buggy to the extent it didn't work as intended (it was a game that didn't even load) so I took it straight back to the shop and got my money back. I don't know where therefore you're managing to find so many dodgy pieces of software, certainly it can't be anything mainstream so I can only assume you're paying cowboys for bespoke software development so here's a hint if that is indeed the case- if it's that bad then they're cowboys, and if they're cowboys not providing you with what you've paid for, then you're legally entitled to withhold payment. Stop paying cowboys, you're part of the problem you supposedly have such a distaste for.
On a final note it's no use using the "to spec" argument because guess what? specs always have loopholes, always, without fail, in fact, you could almost say they're a bit like software bugs. It doesn't matter how much you write, there will always be the opportunity to say "Well we want a massive pink elephant on the splash screen" because you didn't explicitly exclude it and so forth. This is where having a good client relationship comes in, you and the client need to both understand that software changes, that the spec will be 95% correct but that there may be some leeway one way or the other on some issues, if you trust the client then it wont be a problem, if you don't trust the client then you need to either:
a) Change your business model and use an agile, or hybrid agile approach where you develop in phases and charge them based on time, rather than on a finished product, such that you can always escape at the end of say a 2 week spring they may have paid for if they're a nightmare customer. This way the customer gets exactly what they pay for but might take some convincing.
b) If they wont go for the agile approach and you can't trust them to not try and squeeze more work out of you through exploiting loopholes in the spec then you don't want them as a customer anyway because this inevitably means they're going to do everything to squeeze more money's worth of work out of you than they paid meaning the project will ultimately have to run at a loss.
"The advantage of not having static types, though, is that it is a heck of a lot faster to program, as well as much easier to extend. You just have to be able to keep the design in your head."
This is a myth, even if it were faster to type code you end up having to spend more time debugging because you're having to manually track down more awkward bugs. It's not faster to type code though because what you save in not declaring types, you lose in having to explicitly deal with conversion. For every int you don't type you have 10 more === you need to remember to type instead of == and so on.
Beyond that more bugs inevitably slip through, because things a compiler would've caught in a statically typed language only appear in edge cases at run time with dynamically typed languages.
It all gets worse the larger the project is too, the larger the project the more these sorts of issues arise and the greater the cost such that on large projects the gap between static vs. dynamic typing is massive and using a dynamically typed language will cost you dear.
I worked on such a 2 year project about a year back using PHP, it wasn't mine from the outset but I took it over about 18 months in and I had 5 very talented, very experienced contractors working on the project. We completed it on time and with a healthy profit margin but it could've been done so much sooner with such a larger profit margin if we'd been doing it using C# or Java - I wont pretend it's all because of dynamic typing, much of it was because PHP is shit and you have to implement hacks to work around it's lack of decent threading support and such but it was certainly a factor. I have absolutely no doubt that that project could've been done in 15 to 18 months using C# or Java and would've been of much higher quality. I'd argue that the higher levels of testing and longer we had to spend debugging cost us at least 1 month of that over using a statically typed language. Our 56% profit margin could've easily been a 70%+ profit margin.
Dynamically typed languages are okay for toy projects, or for internal quickly hacked together pieces of code for automation and so forth, and can also be good for scripting inside part of a larger application and that sort of thing but for full system development their worth rapidly diminishes for anything that's going to take more than a month or two to build.
Slashdot Mirror
"There were plenty of cases of Germans attacking the Third Reich, more obviously there were several attempts by Germans to assassinate Hitler. That didn't make WWII a civil war. Just an international war with some within the country opposed to it."
This is absolutely true but the problem is that had those Germans assassinated people in their own country it would not have been an act of war but would've been murder.
This is the fundamental distinction at play here, unless it's a civil war you cannot be a member of a country and kill your country men and it be an act of war, it by definition has to be murder. You may see other charges thrown in like "aiding the enemy" but it still can't be defined as an act of war and I believe that's the GP's point.
"Software developers that insist that it cannot be done are simply (i) inexperienced, or (ii) do not know what they are doing and need to not be doing software."
Oh do fuck off. Software developers that insist it can be done are simply inexperienced and unaware of the bugs that actually do exist in their software. See how that works? It's called the no true scotsman fallacy.
Yes I agree more experience means better estimation, but it's still estimation, and therein lies the problem - estimation is not a guarantee of correctness, it's by definition, just an estimate.
The only way software developers manage to hit time targets is simply by giving themselves plenty of leeway by overestimating, and sure you can get a rough idea over time of roughly how long things may take, if you have a number of estimates to stick together it may be that you overestimate some and underestimate others but on average hit a happy balance and that's great, providing those tasks do not change, but therein lies the problem. You estimated 2 weeks for translation support, but guess what? they found an ambiguity in the spec that allows them to gouge out of you full blown internationalisation. Suddenly your estimate is meaningless.
Your blabber about contract is still completely ignorant of the way the real world works. It's pretty clear from your comments that you've always just worked as a developer and never actually acted in a client facing capacity - guess what, I have and I've delivered and delivered with happy clients and a healthy profit margin, that's why I know for certain that I've managed to figure out what degree of leeway to give and not give, but also why constant contract negotiation and haggling is not the solution unless you want to piss the customer off because it's utterly inefficient for both parties.
"And, FYI, the Defense Industry operates on this very principle. The US Government puts out an RFP; contractors respond with their proposals; one of them wins, and then immediately renegotiates the proposal before any work is actually done. They seem to be doing very well."
You couldn't have picked a worse example, public sector, and the military in particular in both the UK and US (and probably much of the world in fact) are notorious for suffering project overruns, poor budgeting and poor planning. They only seem to be doing very well if you completely and utterly ignore the massive cost overruns that the world's militaries are absolutely famous for.
"And ultimately, if they don't want to do it - then they're not worth having as a customer either as it will impose undue risk on you and your own business."
This is one thing I somewhat agree on, as I said in a different post you have two options - you either have a client that you have a trustworthy relationship with where they'll gladly accept to pay for some changes when it's their fault as long as you fix bugs where it's your fault without dicking around with contract negotiation, or you work on a time and materials model where you charge them for fixed blocks of work for example by using Scrum and charging them per spring giving them a rough estimate of initial sprints, giving them visibility of the backlog and letting them increase/decrease the number of sprints as they see fit to get the required number of features they want and also giving them visibility of the impact on the backlog of changes as and when they make them. If you have neither of these then yes, walk away because it means you're dealing with a customer that wants more out of you than they're willing to pay for.
Software just isn't as fixed as you're making out, specs aren't as fixed as your making out, it's a far more fluid process than you're implying and the impact of the fluidity is larger the longer the project runs. If it's a two year project the clients business needs may even have changed somewhat such that it by definition has to be fluid to be of any use to the client in the first place. You have to plan for that one way or another and it's the
They weren't killing for the sake of the love of the slaughter, they were killing for the same reason any other gangbanger kills - for "respect".
These are people with nothing in their lives, bought up in violent neighbourhoods surrounded by knife and gun crime and frequent stabbings and sought fame in the only way these sorts of people know - more violence.
The government and media has given them exactly what they wanted, they've published the mobile phone footage of them chatting before the police turned up, the government has made it a "terrorist" incident adding unjustified validity to their claim that they were sending a message. Now there will be extremists who will praise them for "joining their cause" and giving them respect for it.
The fact they didn't kill others despite having had ample opportunity to do so demonstrates further why it wasn't terrorism. If it was terrorism they'd have killed innocent people too to, you know, spread terror. The fact they stood there talking to some woman shows that they just wanted to make the news, if it was about maximising terror, they'd have beheaded her too.
Right, and Dale Cregan shot one female police officer as she knocked on a door, and shot the other in the back as she ran away and then threw a grenade between the two of them whilst they were still alive and desperately trying to crawl away.
You'll have to excuse me if I still don't exactly see the difference even when the level of barbarism is taken into account. Even Raul Moat walking up to a police officer whose sat pulled up in his car, sticking a shotgun in his face and pulling the trigger doesn't strike me as particularly free from barbarism.
I agree none of these are ordinary murders, they're particularly extreme murders, but neither case is any more terrorism than the other. There was extreme barbarism in each case, and there was a message in each case.
I agree this wasn't terrorism but it wasn't war either. These people have no association with Iraq or Afghanistan, it seems they were most probably British.
That means it was not war. It was simple cold blooded violent murder and little else.
I'm anti Iraq/Afghanistan war too, but let's not pretend these guys were fighting for some cause, they were just killers looking for an excuse to kill.
Dale Cregan shot and threw grenades at killing two police officers last year.
Raul Moat before that hunted for and shot a police officer in the face after having just shot two other people and said he was starting a war with the police.
Both of these were making political statements by attempting to instil fear, neither was classed as a terrorist incident.
The only difference this time is that the perpetrators identified as muslim. The fact they were talking to and not harming everyone else that was around afterwards means they were arguably less effective at instilling fear than people like Dale Cregan was, so if this was terrorism why were other such incidents not?
More realistically these seemed like a pair of London gangbangers desperate for a cause which they could use as an excuse to commit murder. They were not your usual middle eastern jihadis, they even quoted from the Christian bible which shows how poor their association with the jihadi ideology actually was.
We'd be better off dealing with London's gang problem once and for all (the one that triggered the riots) than we would pratting around treating this as a terrorist incident and investing in the security service's ability to snoop - hint: they knew about these guys anyway using existing ability and still couldn't/didn't stop them.
"I see that you get what you pay for. So your past benefits such as education have no financial value? Then how did you get that nice job? And you've already demonstrated that you're willing to spend money for the society thing which means you've given that some sort of financial value as well."
I don't really understand what you're on about any more. You seem to be trying to make an argument where there isn't one which has ultimately resulted in your nonsensical blabbering. Of course my past education have financial value, that's precisely why I said I used to be a net financial beneficiary - I was paying in less (nothing) than I was getting out of the system directly, the fact I'm not using any public services like that now is also why I'm now paying in more than I'm getting out of the system directly. This doesn't mean I don't have indirect benefits that are impossible to quantify financially (like peace of mind over not having to worry about how I'll pay medical bills if I get ill) which are the non-financial indirect benefits of paying a civilised level of taxation in a civilised society that I referred to.
But anyway, your nonsensical ramblings are about to fall off my recent comments list on my userpage, so have fun continuing to try and get your head round the idea of someone being happy with paying the taxes they pay. Perhaps you can pursue me and continue to make no sense in another thread in response to another article or something another day.
My final comment was simply a question as to whether you're really happy having a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude when it's in large part what makes everyone else hate Americans like you. I mean, is it really that much fun being horribly selfish and hated was the question.
" I've read some of the posts in this thread and many of you are comparing building contractors to software developer contractors and I honestly think you're comparing apples to oranges."
This is because there are two types of people engaging in this discussion - developers and analysts with real world experience of involvement in the full software project lifecycle, and everyone else.
Everyone else would be the people you describe, these are the students on Slashdot, the IT support folks, and a handful of end users. None of these have the first clue about the topic but you'll get their (incorrect) opinion regardless.
See the person who responded to you completely unable to grasp why software with it's combinatorial explosion of branches that can do markedly different things in markedly different ways, many of which have never been done before making it a complete unknown is not quite the same as doing building work which has been done literally millions of times before by millions of people in the exact same way and is so very much a known.
People who don't know anything about software, don't know anything about software. News at 10.
But that wouldn't be classed as a bug in software because as the contractor intentionally implemented that solution then it would be classed as outright incompetence and would be grounds to recoup money back from the contractor through the courts if necessary. This would be akin to accidently breaking some code, and then rather than fix it, implementing some additional code that masks it but works on a timer and breaks half the program after a while - a contractor doing this wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
"I must laugh when people say there are fewer bugs in different professions."
If you believe this then you don't understand why software is different to building a house, and if you don't understand that you don't know enough to even be engaging in this discussion.
Software is difference because you're always doing something new (if you're not you should reuse existing code/libraries) and so it's always an unknown as to exactly how long it will take and what the bugs might be. This isn't true with building a house, you know how long it takes to dig the holes, lay the bricks, plaster the walls, do the plumbing and so forth - you know because it's a set of tasks that have been repeated a thousand times before. The people you hire also know what can go wrong, they know what to look out for, and how to do it to minimise issues. You may not know exactly but you know enough for a ballpark figure for each task, that, on average, will balance out across the whole build.
But here's news for you, a bug in the sense of building a house, the sort that will make it through to UAT would be as simple as an ever so slight dent in the wall, some corner not quite being a perfect 90 degrees, the wiring being a bit tacky, sealant not being put on quite tidily enough. Guess what? You wont get any of these things fixed for free either.
"1) If you want bugs to be their problem, agree on a fixed project/product price beforehand."
The problem is that this is fantasy. The only contractors you'll find that will sign up to this are the not very good ones who are completely naive as to what it means until it burns them and if you end up with them you'll be lucky to even deliver full stop.
Talented and experienced contractors know that this means the risk is being put onto them, and know to go look elsewhere. Given that there isn't a shortage of contract work in the world right now due to the fact companies have no idea what's going to happen with the economy from one minute to the next and haven't for a few years means you'd be hard pressed to try and find anyone desperate enough to take this risk.
"The rest of your post is boasting about how much you got from government which is in contradiction to your assertion that you got less from government than you put in."
I clarified that so I'm not sure why you're still confused about the point. My original comment that I'm not a net beneficiary was that I'm not directly financially a net beneficiary - I don't use the services enough directly to be worth it right now, I don't get any benefits like child tax credits, unemployment, disability or anything like that.
But that doesn't mean I don't benefit indirectly, it doesn't mean I haven't benefited in the past, and it doesn't mean I wont benefit in the future.
Yes right now I'm certainly not benefitting directly but that doesn't mean I'm getting screwed. When I was born, when I was going through school someone was subsidising me, and it's quite possible when I'm old and need end of life care that someone may well be subsidising me depending on what happens in the future. The simple fact is we cannot be self-supporting for every minute of our existence, it's not possible, we're all dependent at some point.
"But you said you live in the UK. One merely needs to look at their public surveillance system or their laws on slander and libel to see that they're kind of retarded."
As opposed to a nation with warrantless wiretapping, that bans kinder eggs deeming them more dangerous than guns and that is full of cities with absurd ordinances such as determining how much grass you must have in your garden? Yeah, so much for the land of the free, home of the brave.
What's it like being barely more liked than China? -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22624104
"It's no different for the software industry."
Yes it is, there are two types of project in the world - those where the time for production is a fairly well known and those where it's not. When you've built a few houses you know roughly how many bricks your bricklayers can lay in a day, you know how long it takes to install the plumbing, these are tasks that you do many times and within a certain degree of tolerance are highly predictable in terms of time required.
You can't do that with software, because everything you write is new (and if it isn't, you're doing it wrong, why aren't you taking advantage of reusable components?) so you simply cannot predict ahead of time how long something will take with any reasonable degree of guarantee. The same is true for many research projects, the same is true for a lot of engineering projects. Projects in industries like these aren't like production lines where you have masses of historical data on identical or near identical tasks to go on - you know your factory can churn out 10,000 chocolate bars in a day on average, but you don't know that your team of software developers can definitely solve problem x in a day.
"When requirements change, you change the contract through a renegotiation. If they don't want to change the contract, you don't change what you provide. That's standard practice for contracting."
This shows a complete lack of experience on your behalf on dealing with clients. If you act like this you'll a) often be wasting more of your time and their time renegotiating contracts than you will just doing the changes because the changes rarely come in one big bulk lump, but normally come in at a trickle, and b) Your customers wont be your customers because forcing them to waste time with a contract renegotiation over say, roughly a days work is the quickest way to piss them off and show how inflexible you are. They'll go elsewhere.
There's also the fact that it's impossible to write down a perfectly solid spec, if they want something different and you try to demand they pay for a change request or you demand contract renegotiation they're just as likely to find a hole in the spec (and there will be holes, writing a hole-proof spec is more difficult and time consuming than writing 100% bug-free software) and use that to make your life difficult. You may not even have a leg to stand on to even claim it's a change request or a contract renegotiation.
You have to allow at least some flexibility whilst also catering for that fact. You can't apply programmer binary logic of "It's a change, therefore contract renegotiation is required" in the real world - real clients wont go for that, there are shades of grey in between that you absolutely have to cater to if you want to stay in business, especially if you want repeat business and to grow your business.
That old man was always vulnerable, it's not my fault for mugging him. If I didn't, someone would.
No I'm saying they're both for the benefit of the respective countries.
You seem to assume that because I'm not a net beneficiary right now that it's not for the benefit of the country and the citizens - just because I'm not a net beneficiary doesn't mean it's not for my benefit, the problem is with your "I got mine, fuck you!" attitude you wont be able to comprehend why.
Still, I'll explain briefly anyway, simply put, what happens if one day I get cancer and my employer goes Enron and we're all made redundant? Guess what, I don't just get left to die, I don't get made homeless.
Even if that doesn't happen, I still benefit indirectly by not having my countrymen forced into crime because they hit on hard times, and because people are happier, healthier, and more literate and numerate.
I know it'll be impossible for you to comprehend, but some of us like living in a country where we're not all out for ourselves and where people get looked after no matter how unlucky, even if that is something that actually costs me. This is in part because I haven't always done well, I had to work hard to get here, and I still remember how difficult it was when I was just starting out and how helpful my state funded education and so forth was - it was instrumental in getting me where I am so I could pay back all that and then some. I suppose in that respect you could even say I was wrong, I am a net beneficiary, the benefit I get is living in a non-retarded society where everyone isn't politically ignorant and out for themselves so perhaps to clarify, I'm not financially a net beneficiary.
It depends in part how it's done, it could be that they retain some shares in the spin-off (and presumably they would) but fundamentally say they spin it off and retain over 50% of shares so that they maintain control it means they can command a higher share price for the remaining 49% or whatever than they can for Sony shares alone.
Effectively this means that they'll get a big windfall which they can use to try and turn around their main units that are currently struggling (i.e. they could massively invest in smartphones and we know how much success there has been pulling in Samsung) whilst retaining a majority control of what happens at the spun-off entertainment business.
Also, in the near term that division will likely be loss making due to the production and marketing costs of the PS4, so it would act to lessen the blow on the main company. They probably feel it looks better if Sony makes a $1bn loss and The Playstation Company or whatever makes a $1bn loss that they can attribute to the cost of being spun off and temporary than if Sony in general makes a $2bn loss.
Alternatively it's even possible that they feel the main electronics business has more scope for profitability in general even without their entertainment division and that it simply needs a lot of income to turn things round and so they sell it off altogether and don't even retain a share in it. They may feel with a few billion $ in pocket to invest internally they can turn themselves into a Samsung, which is massively profitable even without an entertainment division but that's a bigger gamble.
There's lots of ways that selling off the entertainment division could be beneficial to them.
"Which is why after the announcement, Sony stock is up and Microsoft stock is down slightly."
That doesn't make much sense given that Sony's announcement was even more vague again (they didn't even have a physical console to show).
Besides, someone else pointed out already Sony's stock is up because they've suggested they might spin off their entertainment unit.
Is there a citation for this? I'd be intrigued to see the justification as to why Kinect is necessary for the system to function.
"In other words, you're saying that a major country defecting from the high tax policies common to the developed world would cripple the power of budding government oligarchies globally? Ok, let's do it then. I don't mind fighting so-called "trade wars" which will end in my favor."
No, they wouldn't. The irony of your comment is that you seem oblivious to the fact that said tax arrangements are the way they are in large part because nations like the US were instrumental in getting them developed that way both for the benefit of the US and for the benefit of it's citizens like you. It'll never end in your favour because you, as an American citizen, will never accept the same level of suffering and poverty that someone in India, China, or Bangladesh will accept. If you want a race to the bottom, you have far more to lose than their citizens do.
"Sentiments such as you echo remind me of why I support tax competition among governments. You are in a situation where due to the bribes that your government pays you, you have to support the growth of their power in order to continue to receive those bribes."
What do you mean "bribes"? I've never received any bribe from government, if you're talking about benefits then as a male with no kids in the higher tax bracket working as a lead developer in the financial services industry the UK I'm far and away a net contributor. I support them on things like this because I'm not a bat-shit crazy libertaritard who doesn't have the slightest grasp of global politics and the global economy and what problems it would cause if we went down your path.
"All I can say here is that if your so-called "western lifestyle" can only be funded by a lot of Other Peoples' Money, then it's not worthwhile. You have become merely a parasite and my view on parasites is that purging them is better, even if it comes at great cost to the host. Or maybe co-opting them so that they are somehow symbiotes."
Oh I see, so you are assuming I'm a net beneficiary of the current tax system. Sucks for you to be wrong I guess, don't cry too hard about it though.
"I think a lower tax rate would help in the latter strategy since you'd have to actually provide something of value in order to survive than merely take it."
Then you finish off with a complete fail of a comment. I think the fact your whole argument is based on an assumption that turns out to be completely and utterly incorrect, and completely opposite of the truth shows how flawed your argument is.
By making such a massive assumption that was false you've merely obliterated what little worth there may have been in anything you otherwise had to say. The real travesty is that were we in the same country I've no doubt that my taxes would likely be subsidising politically ignorant little turds like you rather than vice versa, which wouldn't be a problem, if said taxes I produce were at very least being used to give you some basic education in the way the world works and pulling you out your stupor, though I suspect that may be an impossible task given the level of assumption you jump to and the extreme ignorance you apparently suffer from.
The problem is that I can't see how the OP is hiring to do a fixed amount of work given that he says they just walk away when it comes to bug fixing time which he expects to be done for free.
If he was working with contracts that contract a full piece of work rather than by the hour or whatever then they wouldn't just be able to walk away and take work elsewhere when it comes to bug fixing - he'd be able to hold them to the contract.
The fact he can't do that and by the sounds of it they walk away without a fight suggests most likely he is just paying them by the hour or day and then expects them to work free when it comes to bug fixing.
See the latter part of my post here about spec writing:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3772351&cid=43792107
I agree, specs are dangerous things to live by, it's impossible to write a perfect spec that covers every case no matter how good you are and even if you feel you nailed it down tightly enough that it's almost perfect the response of the client will likely be "I'm not signing that because I'm concerned it doesn't leave enough leeway for necessary minor changes that are inevitable in any software development".
But we're not talking about a house which is normally something you can quantify as taking x amount of time to a pretty reasonable degree if you've done it before, we're talking about software.
I think just about every software contractor has clued into the fact that software requirements change much more rapidly and if I was on the hiring side of the equation I'd be loathe to take on a contractor that didn't want to be paid by the hour, day, or week, and instead wanted to be paid for the full job, as it would say to me that they didn't have the necessary experience to understand the way software is built and what can go wrong because both I and they would be exposed to far too much risk to be healthy.
True, but I can't honestly say that any old hardware I have will last forever. I have plenty of old systems where I can no longer use the software regardless because the hardware has gone and the components required to fix are no longer available.
"Who says he isn't factoring that into pricing?"
He is. Because he has this problem. If it was factored in and the developers had signed a contract taking on the risk then they wouldn't simply be going elsewhere when he asks them to fix bugs for free would they? They'd be contractually obliged to do exactly that.
"This sort of risk/reward management is totally par for the course with any sort of contract management, and there are several solutions that are all fair and equitable (subject to negotiation and the informed consent of both parties), so there's no need to go ragging on someone who chooses a different model from your chosen one."
Right, so why does he have a problem? Why is he here asking for solutions?
"A contractor is a supplier, not an employee, and should therefore be working to provide something to a contract."
Yes, a fixed amount of work for a defined period of time, this is why you pay them by the day or hour. If you want more than that then pay more than that. You don't get to pay a contractor for a days work then expect him to do a day and half's work.
If you feel the contractor's work wasn't of sufficient quality then either withhold payment and dispute it legally with them or just don't ever hire them again.
The whole point in using contractors is that you can get rid of them in an instant with no questions asked, no redundancy payment, no justification required. Maybe this is in part a cultural difference because I understand some US states even allow the firing of permanent employees at will, but certainly here in the UK the benefit of contractors is the flexibility they allow you in staffing up or down as required above all else - if you don't like the work they're doing then kick them out the door immediately.
"This man's view of bugs is the right one"
No it's not, and his predicament is proof of the fact.
He refuses to pay for bugs, which is an extreme way of attempting to encourage his developers to reduce bugs in their software. The fact he does this and still ends up with bugs shows that you simply can't avoid bugs, they're an inevitable consequence of any kind of complex work which software development is.
What he in fact needs to do is accept that bug fixing is an inevitable element of software development and he needs to pay for that so that the contractors will stick around and do it. He needs to factor it into his products and pricing, if he can't do that and remain profitable then his business plan isn't viable and he either needs to change it or go out of business and let someone who can do proper software development in a suitably profitable manner take his place in the market.
"I'm sick of buying buggy software and being told it's "good enough" when it doesn't do what it promises."
If it doesn't do what it promises then it's not fit for purpose and if you live in any country with sane consumer protection laws you can take it back for a refund. For what it's worth though I have, over the thousands of pieces of software I've bought had only once something that was buggy to the extent it didn't work as intended (it was a game that didn't even load) so I took it straight back to the shop and got my money back. I don't know where therefore you're managing to find so many dodgy pieces of software, certainly it can't be anything mainstream so I can only assume you're paying cowboys for bespoke software development so here's a hint if that is indeed the case- if it's that bad then they're cowboys, and if they're cowboys not providing you with what you've paid for, then you're legally entitled to withhold payment. Stop paying cowboys, you're part of the problem you supposedly have such a distaste for.
On a final note it's no use using the "to spec" argument because guess what? specs always have loopholes, always, without fail, in fact, you could almost say they're a bit like software bugs. It doesn't matter how much you write, there will always be the opportunity to say "Well we want a massive pink elephant on the splash screen" because you didn't explicitly exclude it and so forth. This is where having a good client relationship comes in, you and the client need to both understand that software changes, that the spec will be 95% correct but that there may be some leeway one way or the other on some issues, if you trust the client then it wont be a problem, if you don't trust the client then you need to either:
a) Change your business model and use an agile, or hybrid agile approach where you develop in phases and charge them based on time, rather than on a finished product, such that you can always escape at the end of say a 2 week spring they may have paid for if they're a nightmare customer. This way the customer gets exactly what they pay for but might take some convincing.
b) If they wont go for the agile approach and you can't trust them to not try and squeeze more work out of you through exploiting loopholes in the spec then you don't want them as a customer anyway because this inevitably means they're going to do everything to squeeze more money's worth of work out of you than they paid meaning the project will ultimately have to run at a loss.
"The advantage of not having static types, though, is that it is a heck of a lot faster to program, as well as much easier to extend. You just have to be able to keep the design in your head."
This is a myth, even if it were faster to type code you end up having to spend more time debugging because you're having to manually track down more awkward bugs. It's not faster to type code though because what you save in not declaring types, you lose in having to explicitly deal with conversion. For every int you don't type you have 10 more === you need to remember to type instead of == and so on.
Beyond that more bugs inevitably slip through, because things a compiler would've caught in a statically typed language only appear in edge cases at run time with dynamically typed languages.
It all gets worse the larger the project is too, the larger the project the more these sorts of issues arise and the greater the cost such that on large projects the gap between static vs. dynamic typing is massive and using a dynamically typed language will cost you dear.
I worked on such a 2 year project about a year back using PHP, it wasn't mine from the outset but I took it over about 18 months in and I had 5 very talented, very experienced contractors working on the project. We completed it on time and with a healthy profit margin but it could've been done so much sooner with such a larger profit margin if we'd been doing it using C# or Java - I wont pretend it's all because of dynamic typing, much of it was because PHP is shit and you have to implement hacks to work around it's lack of decent threading support and such but it was certainly a factor. I have absolutely no doubt that that project could've been done in 15 to 18 months using C# or Java and would've been of much higher quality. I'd argue that the higher levels of testing and longer we had to spend debugging cost us at least 1 month of that over using a statically typed language. Our 56% profit margin could've easily been a 70%+ profit margin.
Dynamically typed languages are okay for toy projects, or for internal quickly hacked together pieces of code for automation and so forth, and can also be good for scripting inside part of a larger application and that sort of thing but for full system development their worth rapidly diminishes for anything that's going to take more than a month or two to build.