You're confusing 'nice' with 'meek'. One can be courteous, friendly, ethical, and also politically astute and assertive. I won't comment on what that does for getting the chicks, but it's served me well in 25 + years of business. Having the balls to stand up to a dickhead doesn't need to affect how you behave to others who aren't out of line.
Clouds are just changing the location of the gear. It still requires someone who knows what to do with it. There is still an application to be developed, administered, and maintained. There are still connections to be managed, and there are still users who just don't 'get' data.
I'm not worried about my job. I'll have to keep on learning, but guess what? That's what I like to do.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides
1) the stock market makes it possible to invest in companies at fractional rates, allowing capital to flow from small pools (you and me) to companies who seek investment capital. Without the stock market, only large investors could invest in companies, which would make it more difficult for enterpreneurs to raise funds.
2) The stock market provides liquidity for those investors who have new information about companies, and therefore want to get rid of their investment. The market makes it possible to sell. Again, this makes people more willing to provide investment funds, because of the existance of an exit strategy/mechanism.
This does not change the fact that most of the participants are lying thieving bastards, and that regulation is needed. That said, though, stock markets are an essential mechanism for the distribution of saved wealth to productive uses for that wealth, and are close to as important as money itself for allowing the economies of the world to function.
Yeah, that's kind of my point, however poorly I made it. SQL Server is much more affordable than Oracle, and in my experience, is a lot easier to administer.
Have you ever actually used SQL Server? It's solid, easy to administer, performs, and costs 20% of what Oracle does.
Nobody buys SQL Server because they have Office. SQL Server sells well because it's a good solution at a competitive price, and MSFT as a company is less sleazy than Oracle. I know, it's a low threshold to exceed.
You say Once one market starts to fall, they all are going to start to fall. I wouldn't hold your breath.
I work in downtown Bellevue, just down the street from Redmond. Across the street are three high rise buildings under construction, all of which are preleased to MSFT. Each one is something like 25 floors. There are construction cranes all over the Redmond campus, and MSFT has just leased buildings in Eastgate Bellevue.
You have the complete right to prohibit all people from entering your property. When you start to allow people to come onto your property to sell them something, society starts to intrude. Whether your like it or not, them's the rules.
That's a condition of contract, and pretty reasonable. No court is going to argue with a business that makes it's money from selling food prohibiting people from bringing their own lower cost food in.
Citation, please. 15 million would be about a 5% incidence rate in the population, and I don't find that credible. I find it hard to believe that 5% of adults find prepubescent children sexually appealing.
If you modify your statement so that it means that many adults find many physically mature teenagers sexually appealling, then I won't disagree.
You second point is very valid, though. There is a world of difference between thinking about sex, and acting on the notion.
When 84% of Palestinians polled [nytimes.com] support the cold-blooded murder of unarmed Jewish students,
While I don't defend this opinion or behavior, I wonder what a comparable survey of Israelis would reveal.
From my vantage point, there seems to be a lot of hotheadedness and vitriol all around the region. I don't think there are a lot of clean hands to be found.
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy.
I think this is right on. I'm in favor of letting jobs move around the world, but in order for this to work and be fair, the countries around the world need to operate at a common level of protection for workers, environment, etc. I think in equilibrium, this means that the US and Europe need to back off some, and Asia/Mexico/etc need to step up.
I'd like to see the first world countries motivate this through a differential level of tariffs that equalize costs for businesses between the countries.
This is not a quick or easy solution. You have to have it, though, or we'll get a race to the bottom as production flees to countries with the lowest regulatory costs.
In the US, they're already down to what is essentially a trivial amount, which doesn't seem to be energizing the market yet. Further, capital gains tax rates only matter when you're making capital gains, which is not really the problem in today's market place.
Like a lot of economists, I think having differing rates for capital gains from other income is a mistake. It causes distortive behavior, and among other things encourages speculative in capital markets over investment in income producing enterprises, which might form a mort stable base to our economy. If you are a dollar richer because your stock went up, why should that be taxed differently than if you are a dollar richer because you earned salary?
I think the past reductions in the cap gains rate encouraged many people, myself included to prefer stocks over bonds, flipping real estate to owning rentals, which contributed to the respective speculative bubbles.
I'd like to see the tax code reworked, simplified, and modified so that income is generally treated as income, and taxed similarly. A kajillion special exceptions, of which the cap gains tax is one, increases compliance costs, and causes folks to think about how to manage their tax bill, rather than how to grow their business. The latter act is better for our nation.
If your performance problem is in an Oracle or SQL Server database, throwing more hardware at the problem probably has a license fee attached to it, and that can easily be measured in multiple developer salaries. This also causes people to scale using bigger boxes, rather than more boxes, and that gets you out of the range of commodity hardware and into the land of $$$$$.
Which is why I don't care to deliver on Oracle, but my employer hasn't figured out that Postgres and MySQL will work for a lot of problems, and is still fellating the Oracle and IBM reps.
Well, you're a mystery to me. I have a relatively highend desktop. I built it myself, for ~$800 (not counting monitor and peripherals, of course). I don't get paying $2500+ for a PC these days. But it's a free country.
Fortunately, a copy of XP will set you back less than $100
Not any more. I'm searching for one currently, and $130-150 seems to be the cheapest, and those are from sketchy sources. Love to know if you have a cheaper line.
A more fundamental difference between ATM's and voting machines is that in financial transactions, there is always a counterparty who cares about detecting and rectifying the mistake. If the ATM shorts you money, you know immediately, and are going to throw a fit with your bank. If the ATM gives you too much money, the totals aren't going to match and the bank is going to throw a fit tracking down the error.
The issue with secret ballots is that it's difficult to perform this sort of reconciliation to detect software errors or manipulation. I don't think it's impossible, but it's certainly a more difficult problem than the bank account case. As others have noted, if we gave up the requirement for complete secrecy of voting, this problem becomes easier to manage.
yeah, better at cobol. An important skill, but c'mon.
Well, if I'm as at least close to as good at linux/web/Java/etc as you, and also can talk to the mainframe with TSO/ISPF/JCL/COBOL, who do you think is going to get paid more in a fortune 500 environment?
I keep getting calls from headhunters looking for web architects. When I tell them what I make, they don't call back.
An efficient statusing process is necessary. You can do it with meetings, you can do it by talking to people, or you can do it with email/spreadsheets. If you have people write a concise summary of where they are on a weekly basis, they can do it when it's convenient for them. The alternative is the manager interrupting them and taking more of their developer's time than it would to update the current task list with .
If you have a team of three, yeah, this may be overkill. If you have a dev team of 8 or more developers, walking around to figure out where everyone is at is tedious and inefficient for all concerned.
That said, if the status report takes more than 10 minutes a week to prepare, something is probably broken.
will resist things like status reports and hard work schedules.
I disagree. I don't mind status reports and hard work. In fact, I immensely prefer a rational status reporting approach to an hour(s) long meeting of listening to everyone recite where -they- are with the project. JoelOnSoftware has some good thoughts on how to do this crisply. I would much rather take 10 minutes to summarize my status in a weekly email, and in fact have tried to force this discipline into my current team, against the resistance of my boss.
I think what experienced folks resent is stupidity and make-work. Working hard because you've got a challenging project is one thing. Being asked to work over the weekend because someone promised a demo on monday without checking with the team whether this was feasible is another.
To take care of experienced folks:
1) treat them as equals with different roles than yours. This means asking their opinion on approaches to be taken, acting on those opinions when they make sense, and offering rational responses when you disagree.
2) work with to communicate objectives in terms of -what- needs to be done, rather than telling them -how- to do it. The odds are good that they know how to do it.
3) shield them from the company bureaucracy as much as you can, while making sure you don't patronize them.
4) as much as you can, let them participate in the determination of the objectives and approaches for what your team is doing.
5) manage the meeting load, and run efficient meetings.
I don't think I'm any different as an employee at 50 than I was at 25, except I recognize idiocy and incompetence more quickly now. Your team will be the same. Geezer coders are still coders. We're just likely better at it.
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You're confusing 'nice' with 'meek'. One can be courteous, friendly, ethical, and also politically astute and assertive. I won't comment on what that does for getting the chicks, but it's served me well in 25 + years of business. Having the balls to stand up to a dickhead doesn't need to affect how you behave to others who aren't out of line.
Ow, you make my head hurt...
Clouds are just changing the location of the gear. It still requires someone who knows what to do with it. There is still an application to be developed, administered, and maintained. There are still connections to be managed, and there are still users who just don't 'get' data.
I'm not worried about my job. I'll have to keep on learning, but guess what? That's what I like to do.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides
1) the stock market makes it possible to invest in companies at fractional rates, allowing capital to flow from small pools (you and me) to companies who seek investment capital. Without the stock market, only large investors could invest in companies, which would make it more difficult for enterpreneurs to raise funds.
2) The stock market provides liquidity for those investors who have new information about companies, and therefore want to get rid of their investment. The market makes it possible to sell. Again, this makes people more willing to provide investment funds, because of the existance of an exit strategy/mechanism.
This does not change the fact that most of the participants are lying thieving bastards, and that regulation is needed. That said, though, stock markets are an essential mechanism for the distribution of saved wealth to productive uses for that wealth, and are close to as important as money itself for allowing the economies of the world to function.
Yeah, that's kind of my point, however poorly I made it. SQL Server is much more affordable than Oracle, and in my experience, is a lot easier to administer.
Have you ever actually used SQL Server? It's solid, easy to administer, performs, and costs 20% of what Oracle does.
Nobody buys SQL Server because they have Office. SQL Server sells well because it's a good solution at a competitive price, and MSFT as a company is less sleazy than Oracle. I know, it's a low threshold to exceed.
You say Once one market starts to fall, they all are going to start to fall. I wouldn't hold your breath.
I work in downtown Bellevue, just down the street from Redmond. Across the street are three high rise buildings under construction, all of which are preleased to MSFT. Each one is something like 25 floors. There are construction cranes all over the Redmond campus, and MSFT has just leased buildings in Eastgate Bellevue.
I wouldn't place any bets on layoffs.
otherwise, how's it even my property
You have the complete right to prohibit all people from entering your property. When you start to allow people to come onto your property to sell them something, society starts to intrude. Whether your like it or not, them's the rules.
That's a condition of contract, and pretty reasonable. No court is going to argue with a business that makes it's money from selling food prohibiting people from bringing their own lower cost food in.
shirt and shoes in restaurants is a health department regulation.
I worship you. Great post!
Karl, nice to hear from you, I thought you were dead all this time.
Wired is only as secure as the door on the phone equipment room, which in my building is shared by several businesses, and is often open as I walk by.
Citation, please. 15 million would be about a 5% incidence rate in the population, and I don't find that credible. I find it hard to believe that 5% of adults find prepubescent children sexually appealing.
If you modify your statement so that it means that many adults find many physically mature teenagers sexually appealling, then I won't disagree.
You second point is very valid, though. There is a world of difference between thinking about sex, and acting on the notion.
When 84% of Palestinians polled [nytimes.com] support the cold-blooded murder of unarmed Jewish students,
While I don't defend this opinion or behavior, I wonder what a comparable survey of Israelis would reveal.
From my vantage point, there seems to be a lot of hotheadedness and vitriol all around the region. I don't think there are a lot of clean hands to be found.
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy.
I think this is right on. I'm in favor of letting jobs move around the world, but in order for this to work and be fair, the countries around the world need to operate at a common level of protection for workers, environment, etc. I think in equilibrium, this means that the US and Europe need to back off some, and Asia/Mexico/etc need to step up.
I'd like to see the first world countries motivate this through a differential level of tariffs that equalize costs for businesses between the countries.
This is not a quick or easy solution. You have to have it, though, or we'll get a race to the bottom as production flees to countries with the lowest regulatory costs.
Eliminate capital gains taxes.
In the US, they're already down to what is essentially a trivial amount, which doesn't seem to be energizing the market yet. Further, capital gains tax rates only matter when you're making capital gains, which is not really the problem in today's market place.
Like a lot of economists, I think having differing rates for capital gains from other income is a mistake. It causes distortive behavior, and among other things encourages speculative in capital markets over investment in income producing enterprises, which might form a mort stable base to our economy. If you are a dollar richer because your stock went up, why should that be taxed differently than if you are a dollar richer because you earned salary?
I think the past reductions in the cap gains rate encouraged many people, myself included to prefer stocks over bonds, flipping real estate to owning rentals, which contributed to the respective speculative bubbles.
I'd like to see the tax code reworked, simplified, and modified so that income is generally treated as income, and taxed similarly. A kajillion special exceptions, of which the cap gains tax is one, increases compliance costs, and causes folks to think about how to manage their tax bill, rather than how to grow their business. The latter act is better for our nation.
If your performance problem is in an Oracle or SQL Server database, throwing more hardware at the problem probably has a license fee attached to it, and that can easily be measured in multiple developer salaries. This also causes people to scale using bigger boxes, rather than more boxes, and that gets you out of the range of commodity hardware and into the land of $$$$$.
Which is why I don't care to deliver on Oracle, but my employer hasn't figured out that Postgres and MySQL will work for a lot of problems, and is still fellating the Oracle and IBM reps.
Well, you're a mystery to me. I have a relatively highend desktop. I built it myself, for ~$800 (not counting monitor and peripherals, of course). I don't get paying $2500+ for a PC these days. But it's a free country.
Fortunately, a copy of XP will set you back less than $100
Not any more. I'm searching for one currently, and $130-150 seems to be the cheapest, and those are from sketchy sources. Love to know if you have a cheaper line.
Just one step closer to OS X completely displacing Linux on the high-end geek desktop.
Not gonna happen until OS X is the same price as Fedora/Ubuntu/Gentoo. Ever.
A more fundamental difference between ATM's and voting machines is that in financial transactions, there is always a counterparty who cares about detecting and rectifying the mistake. If the ATM shorts you money, you know immediately, and are going to throw a fit with your bank. If the ATM gives you too much money, the totals aren't going to match and the bank is going to throw a fit tracking down the error.
The issue with secret ballots is that it's difficult to perform this sort of reconciliation to detect software errors or manipulation. I don't think it's impossible, but it's certainly a more difficult problem than the bank account case. As others have noted, if we gave up the requirement for complete secrecy of voting, this problem becomes easier to manage.
yeah, better at cobol. An important skill, but c'mon.
Well, if I'm as at least close to as good at linux/web/Java/etc as you, and also can talk to the mainframe with TSO/ISPF/JCL/COBOL, who do you think is going to get paid more in a fortune 500 environment?
I keep getting calls from headhunters looking for web architects. When I tell them what I make, they don't call back.
Status reports are a bunch of non-sense.
An efficient statusing process is necessary. You can do it with meetings, you can do it by talking to people, or you can do it with email/spreadsheets. If you have people write a concise summary of where they are on a weekly basis, they can do it when it's convenient for them. The alternative is the manager interrupting them and taking more of their developer's time than it would to update the current task list with .
If you have a team of three, yeah, this may be overkill. If you have a dev team of 8 or more developers, walking around to figure out where everyone is at is tedious and inefficient for all concerned.
That said, if the status report takes more than 10 minutes a week to prepare, something is probably broken.
will resist things like status reports and hard work schedules.
I disagree. I don't mind status reports and hard work. In fact, I immensely prefer a rational status reporting approach to an hour(s) long meeting of listening to everyone recite where -they- are with the project. JoelOnSoftware has some good thoughts on how to do this crisply. I would much rather take 10 minutes to summarize my status in a weekly email, and in fact have tried to force this discipline into my current team, against the resistance of my boss.
I think what experienced folks resent is stupidity and make-work. Working hard because you've got a challenging project is one thing. Being asked to work over the weekend because someone promised a demo on monday without checking with the team whether this was feasible is another.
To take care of experienced folks:
1) treat them as equals with different roles than yours. This means asking their opinion on approaches to be taken, acting on those opinions when they make sense, and offering rational responses when you disagree.
2) work with to communicate objectives in terms of -what- needs to be done, rather than telling them -how- to do it. The odds are good that they know how to do it.
3) shield them from the company bureaucracy as much as you can, while making sure you don't patronize them.
4) as much as you can, let them participate in the determination of the objectives and approaches for what your team is doing.
5) manage the meeting load, and run efficient meetings.
I don't think I'm any different as an employee at 50 than I was at 25, except I recognize idiocy and incompetence more quickly now. Your team will be the same. Geezer coders are still coders. We're just likely better at it.