If the management operate like that, then they're obviously idiots, because the folks putting in the 16-hour days are the bugs, as well as the bug generators.
Naturally, most startups operate this way because "that's how it's done" even though the vast majority of the time it leads to a far higher bug rate, very poor code quality, high turnover, lengthens the time to delivery, and increases development costs in the long term.
Well, both. Of course, as long as american'ts are foolish enough to vote for repugnicans and dummycraps, we'll never have a congress that's worth as much as a pile of cat poop.
If the IRS had any integrity, it would be putting its efforts into forcing companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple (at al) to pay the taxes that they owe due to their loophole abuse.
So you're saying that because our politicians are uneducated idiots beyond redemption that we should just throw up our hands and accept our demise at the hands of their stupidity?
You deserve credit for one of the best posts so far. Most of the deniers clearly ignore reality in their assumption that all points around the world will warm equally, even though the world today has very widely varying climates.
The situation with the thawing tundra is looking to be quite a bit worse than a surge of CO2. It's turning out to be a large amount of methane, which although it doesn't persist for as long as CO2, also has a stronger insulating effect than CO2, which in the short term exacerbates warming significantly.
Add to that the rise in sea level, which so far even though only due to thermal expansion is already forcing people to abandon land due in some cases to becoming submerged and in others contamination from salt water in their aquifers, and this is before we see the effects of large volumes of land-based ice melting... into the oceans.
And never mind the fact that warm water feeds cyclones... and that another side effect of global warming is to melt out glaciers, without which places like the Seattle metropolitan area wouldn't have enough water to last a summer...
In reality, the worst offenders in the pollution race include the US and China. Both are in the top ten most disgusting nations on earth... but as if that weren't bad enough, our consumerism is driving a lot of the consumption in developing nations, and we still burn more hydrocarbons per person than any other nation.
It sounds like we're on the same page, so to... type. You're right, colleges these days generally don't teach programming, they teach programming languages. For that reason alone I think that the class that I took on expert systems was the most useful of the CS classes that I took, because the prof, being a professional who happened to be teaching, took a software engineering approach to how to develop expert systems. Hence we went through the process of analyzing the problem and designing a solution before coding it, and it's lead me to endless frustration in my professional life because all of the engineering is missing from almost every development team I've been on. Most of them think that requirements = design. And most recruiters care more about what languages you've used than about how good you are at understanding and solving actual problems.
The point is that spending some time working through some non-trivial use cases of git or svn or spending some structured time actually being taught to debug, what to actually do with a dump file, or to use git/svn/etc to fork and merge in a structured teaching environment is useful.
There's nothing in there that justifies making a class of it. If it's not part of a foundation class on developing software, there's a bigger problem that needs solving.
The goal is not to teach them to use the tool feature by feature but what the tools are capable of and that's valuable.
That I agree with.
Make it 1 credit. Like you said they don't need to spend a LOT of time on it, but spending SOME time on it, in a structured teaching environment is invaluable.
No, make it part of a class on building software. The best way to learn something is by doing it, and it's a complete waste of time to make a class on it because it's part of development. Making it a separate class is the height of idiocy... it justifies the pure idiocy of HR filtering out people who've done lots and lots of programming and software engineering, yet haven't shelled out their own bux for Visual Studio because they were using open source tools instead.
Nobody can learn to use a debugger or source control system effectively from never having seen one before to competent in 15-20 minutes.
They might learn enough to get a programming assignment done, but they won't touch the surface of what it can do.
I'd argue that showing someone how to use a debugger is best done when teaching them how to program. If you're showing someone how to use a debugger in a class that isn't a programming class, you're wasting their time, because at that point all you're doing is showing them the features of the debugger and creating extra busy work in the form of pointless homework assignments.
While that's standard operating practice in most colleges because they want to beat the idea of work/life balance out of students' heads so that they'll be good little mindless drones after they graduate, it's a symptom of systemic idiocy that should be rooted out and destroyed.
Rather than fixing the symptoms of a crappy education system with extra stupidity, fix the systemic problem: revamp the programming curriculum so that it's geared toward having students work through the process of analyzing requirements, designing solutions, and implementing them as part of a team with version control, profiles, and debuggers, and get them trained to deal with real life. A class on "here's how you use an IDE" will never accomplish anything of value beyond an asinine resume pad. Work the tools into the programming classes where they belong.
You have 5 courses that I would consider "electives". English I and English II being examples of such.
Far too many comp sci grads think basic language skills is an elective. It's not.
Agreed.
Also dump the "programming tools" class. They can pick that up in their programming classes.
Meaning they will learn the bare minimums to get their programming assignments done. No, these are worthy of their own classes.
No, they're not, unless you're intentionally trying to cram classes in there that any idiot can get a good grade in, a class on things like IDEs is a waste of time outside of a remedial course. If it takes more than 15-20 minutes to get someone up to speed on using the tools, then either you have a duffer on your hands and they're not going to make it, or you picked the wrong tools. Either way, it's not a good use of class time.
I think a basic databases course / intro to sql / data normalization / data modelling / CRUD / serialization / persistence would be a better fit.
Also dump the "programming tools" class. They can pick that up in their programming classes.
True that. A class on programming tools is a waste of time. It's just a way to kowtow to idiot recruiters who think that experience with Visual Studio is necessary to be a.NET developer, when in fact the IDE is the one thing that you don't need any programming or software engineering skills in order to work with it.
... in the first place. Calling it applied science is just a petty way of attempting to legitimize it as a highly technical skills, which it isn't.
Programming... yes, pretty much anyone can do that. Look at the mountain of poop that is amazon's codebase, and there's your proof.
Engineering on the other hand, is another beast entirely... but even a software engineer rarely has any need for scientific or mathematical skills. I found the "math" requirements for even graduate level computer science classes to be pretty lightweight, but then I'd been studying quantum and astrophysics alongside my computer science classes.
NASA has contributed more to our society far more than most (e.g. plastics, ceramics, things that we rely on for our daily lives, that sort of thing), and we spend FAR less on space exploration than our cluterfucked government GAVE to the financial industry as "punishment" for fucking over the entire nation.
This is the clusterfucks in charger realizing that they found yet another way to steal money from the people, and people being fucking stupid enough to elect these asswipes in the first fucking place. It's bad for everyone in the long run though... like most things that politicians do.
My first interview with a google dude went terribly, also -- it made me not want work with them. After he described the solution that he wanted me to code OVER THE PHONE I started by describing a utility function that I knew I'd need then started describing the algorithm... and he derailed me complete when I basically "just swap these two" and he said you can't do that! My first thought was, "Yes idiot, I can, since I anticipated this obvious need and planned for it." After that I just couldn't motivate myself to bother.
More significantly, I suspect that the definition of "top talent" still in reality just means people who put in the most hours. That's the standard for corporate america, after all.
Oh, because the politicians are "the state"? We shouldn't question our elites? Nice servitude attitude you got going on there.
Don't forget, someone VOTED for the same idiots who are now denying climate change, even while their own state is experiencing first hand the effects of the rising seas, yet they're so incredibly stupid that they refuse to account for the rising seas even when planning new development.
No one would accept such a source for anything else today, but for some reason the Bible is accepted as fact.
This is due to the fact that the idiocracy is in power. They're in power because people with wealth bought power, then passed on to their spoiled offspring.
What would make sense is shutting down the pentagram, reforming the government contracting process (for example, stop giving contracts to companies that consistently fail to deliver), cutting the pay of the monkeys in the senate, congress, and the white house (etc), and put an end to subsidies for large, well-established corporations that have no need for subsidies (e.g. oil), and start taxing corporations like microsloth, giggle, crapple, and so on.
Modern society is incontrovertible proof that we weren't designed by an intelligent being. If we were, we wouldn't be constantly trying to poison ourselves for short term profit.
The cold, hard truth about faith is that man created god to control the weak minded.
I think IPOs kill innovation. When a company is new they are still searching for the best market and best product to meet that market. As soon as they take on a bunch of investor money it becomes lets get something out the door so we can start milking it. Doesn't have to be great it just has to meet the quarterly street estimate.
Profit kills innovation. I agree with you, but even private companies tend to become increasingly risk averse and therefore innovation resistant when their profits grow.
The most obviously visible example of the death of innovation as a direct result of profit is hollywood.
Encourage employees to use the 20% time to Innovate within the existing projects;
for example, by finding ways to make them better or lower their costs.
It won't happen. Ever.
First off, the engineers work for managers, which is why all engineering shops turn into stagnant messes sooner or later. The managers are leaches by definition - they're working on overhead, which means that the engineers' work is paying them, yet the managers are the ones making the decisions. Hence the decisions will shift toward what gets the manager promoted, and that leads to a conflict of interest, because what's best for the product usually isn't sexy enough for the manager to get promoted.
Second, it will lead to engineers who want to do good, innovative work to move on to other projects and/or companies that are worth their time, and you'll end up turning into another expedia or amazon, where 90% of the work work available is maintaining the code other people wrote, and if you want to do anything cool you need to put in overtime.
If you lose the sugarcoating, you'll realize that the actual productivity metric has nothing to do with whether or not a given employee is doing what their job describes. It's simply based on how many hours they're on the clock.
The management has yet another incentive for having staff under them working overtime consistently: it gives the management an excuse to recruit more people for their team, which leads to their getting promoted, so they can leach off of even more people.
Google is yet more evidence that profit kills innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
If the management operate like that, then they're obviously idiots, because the folks putting in the 16-hour days are the bugs, as well as the bug generators.
Naturally, most startups operate this way because "that's how it's done" even though the vast majority of the time it leads to a far higher bug rate, very poor code quality, high turnover, lengthens the time to delivery, and increases development costs in the long term.
Actually, you're right. It's only slavery when it's not voluntary. When it's voluntary, it's idiocy.
Well, both. Of course, as long as american'ts are foolish enough to vote for repugnicans and dummycraps, we'll never have a congress that's worth as much as a pile of cat poop.
If the IRS had any integrity, it would be putting its efforts into forcing companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple (at al) to pay the taxes that they owe due to their loophole abuse.
So you're saying that because our politicians are uneducated idiots beyond redemption that we should just throw up our hands and accept our demise at the hands of their stupidity?
You deserve credit for one of the best posts so far. Most of the deniers clearly ignore reality in their assumption that all points around the world will warm equally, even though the world today has very widely varying climates.
The situation with the thawing tundra is looking to be quite a bit worse than a surge of CO2. It's turning out to be a large amount of methane, which although it doesn't persist for as long as CO2, also has a stronger insulating effect than CO2, which in the short term exacerbates warming significantly.
Add to that the rise in sea level, which so far even though only due to thermal expansion is already forcing people to abandon land due in some cases to becoming submerged and in others contamination from salt water in their aquifers, and this is before we see the effects of large volumes of land-based ice melting... into the oceans.
And never mind the fact that warm water feeds cyclones... and that another side effect of global warming is to melt out glaciers, without which places like the Seattle metropolitan area wouldn't have enough water to last a summer...
In reality, the worst offenders in the pollution race include the US and China. Both are in the top ten most disgusting nations on earth... but as if that weren't bad enough, our consumerism is driving a lot of the consumption in developing nations, and we still burn more hydrocarbons per person than any other nation.
This is an example of the states attempting to violate FTC regulations, making the states federal criminals.
It sounds like we're on the same page, so to... type. You're right, colleges these days generally don't teach programming, they teach programming languages. For that reason alone I think that the class that I took on expert systems was the most useful of the CS classes that I took, because the prof, being a professional who happened to be teaching, took a software engineering approach to how to develop expert systems. Hence we went through the process of analyzing the problem and designing a solution before coding it, and it's lead me to endless frustration in my professional life because all of the engineering is missing from almost every development team I've been on. Most of them think that requirements = design. And most recruiters care more about what languages you've used than about how good you are at understanding and solving actual problems.
The point is that spending some time working through some non-trivial use cases of git or svn or spending some structured time actually being taught to debug, what to actually do with a dump file, or to use git/svn/etc to fork and merge in a structured teaching environment is useful.
There's nothing in there that justifies making a class of it. If it's not part of a foundation class on developing software, there's a bigger problem that needs solving.
The goal is not to teach them to use the tool feature by feature but what the tools are capable of and that's valuable.
That I agree with.
Make it 1 credit. Like you said they don't need to spend a LOT of time on it, but spending SOME time on it, in a structured teaching environment is invaluable.
No, make it part of a class on building software. The best way to learn something is by doing it, and it's a complete waste of time to make a class on it because it's part of development. Making it a separate class is the height of idiocy... it justifies the pure idiocy of HR filtering out people who've done lots and lots of programming and software engineering, yet haven't shelled out their own bux for Visual Studio because they were using open source tools instead.
Nobody can learn to use a debugger or source control system effectively from never having seen one before to competent in 15-20 minutes.
They might learn enough to get a programming assignment done, but they won't touch the surface of what it can do.
I'd argue that showing someone how to use a debugger is best done when teaching them how to program. If you're showing someone how to use a debugger in a class that isn't a programming class, you're wasting their time, because at that point all you're doing is showing them the features of the debugger and creating extra busy work in the form of pointless homework assignments.
While that's standard operating practice in most colleges because they want to beat the idea of work/life balance out of students' heads so that they'll be good little mindless drones after they graduate, it's a symptom of systemic idiocy that should be rooted out and destroyed.
Rather than fixing the symptoms of a crappy education system with extra stupidity, fix the systemic problem: revamp the programming curriculum so that it's geared toward having students work through the process of analyzing requirements, designing solutions, and implementing them as part of a team with version control, profiles, and debuggers, and get them trained to deal with real life. A class on "here's how you use an IDE" will never accomplish anything of value beyond an asinine resume pad. Work the tools into the programming classes where they belong.
You have 5 courses that I would consider "electives". English I and English II being examples of such.
Far too many comp sci grads think basic language skills is an elective. It's not.
Agreed.
Also dump the "programming tools" class. They can pick that up in their programming classes.
Meaning they will learn the bare minimums to get their programming assignments done. No, these are worthy of their own classes.
No, they're not, unless you're intentionally trying to cram classes in there that any idiot can get a good grade in, a class on things like IDEs is a waste of time outside of a remedial course. If it takes more than 15-20 minutes to get someone up to speed on using the tools, then either you have a duffer on your hands and they're not going to make it, or you picked the wrong tools. Either way, it's not a good use of class time.
I think a basic databases course / intro to sql / data normalization / data modelling / CRUD / serialization / persistence would be a better fit.
A much better fit, yes.
Also dump the "programming tools" class. They can pick that up in their programming classes.
True that. A class on programming tools is a waste of time. It's just a way to kowtow to idiot recruiters who think that experience with Visual Studio is necessary to be a .NET developer, when in fact the IDE is the one thing that you don't need any programming or software engineering skills in order to work with it.
... in the first place. Calling it applied science is just a petty way of attempting to legitimize it as a highly technical skills, which it isn't.
Programming... yes, pretty much anyone can do that. Look at the mountain of poop that is amazon's codebase, and there's your proof.
Engineering on the other hand, is another beast entirely... but even a software engineer rarely has any need for scientific or mathematical skills. I found the "math" requirements for even graduate level computer science classes to be pretty lightweight, but then I'd been studying quantum and astrophysics alongside my computer science classes.
NASA has contributed more to our society far more than most (e.g. plastics, ceramics, things that we rely on for our daily lives, that sort of thing), and we spend FAR less on space exploration than our cluterfucked government GAVE to the financial industry as "punishment" for fucking over the entire nation.
That is, sadly true.
Why else do so many americans believe that we ever had a democracy even though our government wasn't set up as such?
This is the clusterfucks in charger realizing that they found yet another way to steal money from the people, and people being fucking stupid enough to elect these asswipes in the first fucking place. It's bad for everyone in the long run though... like most things that politicians do.
My first interview with a google dude went terribly, also -- it made me not want work with them. After he described the solution that he wanted me to code OVER THE PHONE I started by describing a utility function that I knew I'd need then started describing the algorithm... and he derailed me complete when I basically "just swap these two" and he said you can't do that! My first thought was, "Yes idiot, I can, since I anticipated this obvious need and planned for it." After that I just couldn't motivate myself to bother.
More significantly, I suspect that the definition of "top talent" still in reality just means people who put in the most hours. That's the standard for corporate america, after all.
Oh, because the politicians are "the state"? We shouldn't question our elites? Nice servitude attitude you got going on there.
Don't forget, someone VOTED for the same idiots who are now denying climate change, even while their own state is experiencing first hand the effects of the rising seas, yet they're so incredibly stupid that they refuse to account for the rising seas even when planning new development.
No one would accept such a source for anything else today, but for some reason the Bible is accepted as fact.
This is due to the fact that the idiocracy is in power. They're in power because people with wealth bought power, then passed on to their spoiled offspring.
What would make sense is shutting down the pentagram, reforming the government contracting process (for example, stop giving contracts to companies that consistently fail to deliver), cutting the pay of the monkeys in the senate, congress, and the white house (etc), and put an end to subsidies for large, well-established corporations that have no need for subsidies (e.g. oil), and start taxing corporations like microsloth, giggle, crapple, and so on.
Modern society is incontrovertible proof that we weren't designed by an intelligent being. If we were, we wouldn't be constantly trying to poison ourselves for short term profit.
The cold, hard truth about faith is that man created god to control the weak minded.
I think IPOs kill innovation. When a company is new they are still searching for the best market and best product to meet that market. As soon as they take on a bunch of investor money it becomes lets get something out the door so we can start milking it. Doesn't have to be great it just has to meet the quarterly street estimate.
Profit kills innovation. I agree with you, but even private companies tend to become increasingly risk averse and therefore innovation resistant when their profits grow.
The most obviously visible example of the death of innovation as a direct result of profit is hollywood.
Encourage employees to use the 20% time to Innovate within the existing projects; for example, by finding ways to make them better or lower their costs.
It won't happen. Ever.
First off, the engineers work for managers, which is why all engineering shops turn into stagnant messes sooner or later. The managers are leaches by definition - they're working on overhead, which means that the engineers' work is paying them, yet the managers are the ones making the decisions. Hence the decisions will shift toward what gets the manager promoted, and that leads to a conflict of interest, because what's best for the product usually isn't sexy enough for the manager to get promoted.
Second, it will lead to engineers who want to do good, innovative work to move on to other projects and/or companies that are worth their time, and you'll end up turning into another expedia or amazon, where 90% of the work work available is maintaining the code other people wrote, and if you want to do anything cool you need to put in overtime.
If you lose the sugarcoating, you'll realize that the actual productivity metric has nothing to do with whether or not a given employee is doing what their job describes. It's simply based on how many hours they're on the clock.
The management has yet another incentive for having staff under them working overtime consistently: it gives the management an excuse to recruit more people for their team, which leads to their getting promoted, so they can leach off of even more people.
Google is yet more evidence that profit kills innovation.