Whether or not it is important to leave a job on good terms is a personal issue for you to answer, not a question for the community. It might make a difference in your future career but it is much more a question of personality, and whether you would regret the bad blood.
If you decide you do want to leave on good terms, best approach IMO is to talk to the nut directly, don't go behind his back or get anyone else to intervene on your behalf. Try to be the hurt pal, let him know how you want to be remembered as a good worker, that you were there a long time, that it bothers you he could think you were causing trouble, and so on. It might not work right away, or at all, but if so you'll know for sure there was nothing more you could do. You may have every right to be angry (we can't know for sure, but it seems you do) but acting angry does no good if what you want to accomplish is to calm down the paranoid.
And if it doesn't work, *then* calmly make sure you've covered all your bases: dot your i's and cross your t's, keep proof of everything, and don't say anything stupid.
In my own experience I've felt sometimes it was worth going the extra mile to make someone happy, and sometimes it wasn't.
If you've ever played Illuminati, you may have already seen this truth about futurists: all Fanatics are opposite. (They are also usually not wealthy.) It is easy to get great ideas from them, but not easy to get them to organize, or agree, or even figure out how to agree. They can't always express their predictions in terms of logical argument, because the reasons are partially religious.
The idea of the singularity should bring up a mix of alarm and hope in all of us who can see its inevitability. You don't know whether you will reach utopia or dystopia, or a mix, because it depends on who controls it.
Mostly I am posting with a bit of advice: organize yourself. This is way too deep and long-winded to be lost this far into a/. discussion tree, and a bit rambling too. Maybe it is better suited for a blog, or a futurist forum?
So you know, Adobe Photoshop is a 2D image processing program. So you can paint with it, but most of its neato features are in compositing images with layers, and applying filters. You can use the Gimp for most of what it has for free, but Photoshop is still the most professional program of its type.
Of the tests that were performed I would wager that you should be most interested in Photoshop. You probably wouldn't use it directly except in cooking up the graphics for a web page, but what it does is number-crunching (both integer and floating point) on large files. It uses a lot of memory, and really does most of its work in optimized loops over large blocks of data, rather than lots of GUI mess.
That sounds a lot more like the BLAST jobs and SQL queries that you (and I) deal with than Word or Quake benchmarks.
That said, I would not make any hardware purchasing decisions for bioinformatics based on these benchmarks. You want more detailed, more balanced information, and possibly some big iron with UNIX numbers too.
That would be nice, and it would be quite helpful too for information retrieval researchers who need to get under the hood.
But hosting a good search engine for the web requires an absurd amount of nice hardware. Plus you really need that hardware as you develop, or else you won't be sure your code will scale well.
Add to that the fact that Google is quite good at what it does, and is free... it makes it quite difficult to launch the project you describe. Anyone have ideas on how to support a project like that?
If that isn't what drives U.S. foreign policy that is at least the way it appears to the world.
But don't forget the converse: "Countries do not have enemies, only interests."
Don't all large public and private organizations tend to act in their own interests first and foremost? Isn't it hard for a group of people to really be considered to have friendships and emotion?
That's a real question, BTW. It seems like sometimes groups show anger and love and remorse just like individuals do, but they apparently need to be hit pretty hard to act outside of self-interest.
That is absolutely correct. He could get away with the same parodies without permission but preferred to ask first.
In at least one case ("Like a Surgeon") the song was actually suggested by the original artist. Madonna wanted him to do that parody.
But in one case there was a mix-up, where he was told that the artist (Coolio) had granted permission for the song ("Amish Paradise") but in fact had not. He regretted the mistake, which was actually not his personally, and apologized. He still performs it of course, and there was no legal action.
In this case Penny Arcade had the legal high ground, but why bother? The comic is now mirrored everywhere, new people have been exposed to PA, American Greetings looks silly, and they have new things to make fun of. Win-win!
This sort of thing bugs me a lot. I have a mixed background both in game development, and in science, so it kind of hits close to home.
This group - The Lion & Lamb Project - isn't trying to find toys that are dangerous to play with in a physical sense. They assume that violence in video games and such causes violence in children, and if they were right about that, we couldn't really argue against their recommendations.
They have a link to "Research". I read one of the papers and it is pretty weak - basically it rants about Columbine for a while, draws a statistical correlation between violent people and the desire to play violent video games, and ASSUMES from there that the games cause violent behavior.
So basically they are saying: young violent men enjoy violent games, and we would be "very surprised" if the games weren't causing real-life violence. But of course, nobody has done that research.
That's not even really research, there's no case at all for causation. If there was, I'd have to (very reluctantly) agree with them, but fortunately they are wrong.
Even this article separates into 9 HTML pages what could have comfortably fit on a few. The idea being, if someone wants to read an article, they must load more banner ads.
If we end up paying per page view, that sort of thing might run rampant, so one would need to visit 20 or more bogus pages to get to the one they know they want.
Worse, I know many people, myself included, wouldn't bother browsing much, for the same reason nobody likes per-hour connect charges if they can avoid it. I don't want to feel like I need to savor every URL, and I don't want to wonder whether a site is going to be worth anything before viewing it.
I'd rather see
* sites that have free areas, and premium subscriptions if you use them often
* banding together of several sites that charge a joint membership, or charge ISPs for access. So you decide whether you want a standard or executive internet connection when you sign up for service.
The first is actually starting to pop up, and it seems to make sense.
Popular vote is simple, and isn't vulnerable to the trouble we have now. Each person of a group of N has a 1/N fraction of the total power. Simple.
ANY deviation from that at all implies that some people get greater than 1/N and some get less. The article suggests that this means that (assuming the electoral boundaries are chosen along the boundaries of groups with different views) minorities won't be trampled on. Basically it implies that some people ought to have more say than others. This means some people are empowered at the expense of others, and which bin you are in depends on electoral boundaries.
Well if you really want to be representative, allow the 3% of people that constitute some minority to have 3% of the seats in Congress, rather than zero. Popular vote clearly is the only fair way to run a winner take all system. Winner take all systems are themselves a good bit unfair - and if you want to address that issue, address it with a real fix, not the electoral college.
From the first article (the chart on Palm Beach was nice, this is weak.)
Real elections are almost never that closely contested.
OK, maybe it's rare, but that doesn't seem to help us at all. We have this situation NOW, and this is the ONLY time that the popular vs. electoral college decisions will differ.
In a fair election, he saw, each voter's power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person's vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands.
Wait a minute! But what is the probability that you are that voter that gets to swing the election? Is there any reason why a Floridian vote should really be worth more per person than one from Oregon? It is not possible for everyone to have more say than anyone else. That premise seems flawed to me. Can anyone justify it?
(for the record: I'm an independent, I care about the math and not this year's particular result.)
Advance disclaimer: I am biased in favor of Linux.
This white paper makes me feel somewhat better about Mindcraft's position, at least enough to believe that there are ways in which Linux needs to play catch-up.
I think it is funny that this paper mentions four times that Mindcraft is unbiased.
THE PROBLEM IS that all this says is that the test results are valid, but the test itself (as we know from previous discussions) is suspect. These graphs (which are a bit sketchy themselves... fitting a curve to one data point is only so informative) are measuring obscenely high access rates for static web pages, which is a rather contrived benchmark.
I do appreciate that there are one processor benchmarks added here, and not surprisingly we see that some of the NT/Linux disparity is in SMP scalability (and ultimately TCP/IP multithreading.) But we don't need to wait for the multithreaded TCP/IP stack in Linux to find tasks that Linux is perfect for.
I cannot say with any certainty whether Mindcraft deliberately chose conditions to favor NT. It certainly seems possible, but on the other hand they have perhaps received more criticism than is warranted already, so I am reluctant to rant about it. I am curious why we don't see open benchmarks on a wider variety of tasks, and including the *BSDs as well. Even knowing that benchmarks are inherently weak, I would personally like to see how everything would fare.
The simple fact that the software would be easy to port to the PC goes the other way too... just about any PC game would be easy to port to this console. So it could develop a steady stream of titles from day one.
That means the plethora of PC game development teams would have a lower barrier to enter the console market, which has a history of making money (unlike PC games).
Personally, I prefer the standard PC, and I'm willing to fork over the extra money to have one. I'm also more excited about PSX2 in theory. But in practice, the PSX2 development boxes are still nowhere to be found. Your hair doesn't even need to be very pointy before you start to look seriously at this rumor.
The echelon jamming lines that privacy advocates like to use are probably not all that effective. If it was your job to run the search engines at echelon, all you would have to do is search for text that contains a few keywords, rather than all relevant keywords. Furthermore, you would be interested in text that mentions a few words repeatedly over a long stream, rather than all at once (since you would want text that was on a topic exclusively, rather than mentioning something in passing).
The moral of the story depends on who you are: * if you are a privacy advocate, scatter your echelon words about with a better algorithm, and probably avoid "echelon" entirely. * if you are a terrorist, don't talk about or email your plans without encryption. * if you are an echelon employee, be smart with your database queries.
BTW, the phrase "golf ball factory" is rumored to be what (some?) NSA employees are supposed to use when asked where they work. After all, who is interested in the work of a golf ball factory employee?
Celera is brute forcing DNA sequences, not structures. IIRC from my days as a biochemist, getting a sequence for a gene is the easy step. Determining what the gene does is the hard step, and getting the structure of its protein product is even harder.
What could become A Big Mess (TM) is what a gene patent actually means. It is not difficult to devise a DNA sequence that is different from the wild type that generates the exact same protein, or a slight variant with the same biological function. A bit farther in the future we will have more ways of generating proteins through protein engineering.
But wait, there's more. You can mass-produce the product of a gene without knowing or caring about its sequence or structure. Does the gene patent cover the product of a gene? I realize our patent system in the US is horribly broken but it is my understanding that patents are for specific processes, not for any process that serves a specific goal.
This issue reminds me of the need we have for formalizing defensive patents. A lot of companies issue patents simply to prevent others from doing so, and plan not to profit from them. Celera claims to be doing this, essentially. If there was only a way to guarantee that this were true, and prevent future management from reneging on the promise... then our lives might become a lot easier!
In any case, abusers of this system will eventually be frustrated with the progress of technology, as they are in other areas.
Agreed, working on games is quite similar to working on movies. I have only had the luxury of working on computer games (about 3 years now), but sometimes it feels like a weird little pocket of Hollywood.
I know I have been somewhat exploited these past few years. I'm not 19, I'm 27, but the concept is the same. I could make a lot more out in the so-called real world, and in some ways it would be more rewarding. There is probably a much greater temptation for game programmers to jump ship than their Hollywood counterparts, simply because our talents are in such demand in other places. Yet I find I am happy where I am, and that these issues in my own life have become better, not worse.
Yes, game development is sloppier than business development, simply because the competition is fierce and profits are so low. The best games these days come from well-funded companies that have the luxury of elbow room. However, like movies, just having a large budget guarantees nothing. And on the lower budget end, it is like movies too, for every Blair Witch winner you have a thousand losers, some deserved and some undeserved.
Open source game development is a neat idea, but is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is much easier to get engineers for such projects than artists. We may still see some winners in this area.
Alternative publishing sources are a neat idea too. You can check up on how the g.o.d. (gathering of developers) is doing, that may prove fruitful as well.
I do not fault you for the decision to leave, and sympathize with the reasons. If finding a good game development job is a matter of luck, then I am among the lucky, although it took a few years to get to that position. And a few years of software development with published titles and associated experience is an investment in myself, and one that I do not regret, even when there are lucrative alternatives. But I recommend that you do not discourage those who want "in" completely, because even though it is difficult to manage, getting a rewarding game job is much easier than winning a lottery.
Best of luck
Sam Kalat (happy at Red Storm, which does not necessarily agree with anything I post, but probably would today)
Resumes themselves will be obsolete
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 2
Why scan a resume for buzzwords when you can provide a web-based form with drop-down boxes that contain the terms you are interested in?
In the long run applying for a job should be a process of filling out an online questionnaire, chock full of check boxes and radio buttons summarizing your experience. The HR department on the other end can then compare resumes in the same format without resorting to OCR.
Of course there will be brand new annoyances with this procedure. For instance messages like "Your application is not complete. Please press the back button on your browser and complete the following items: Current Salary"
A good use of this technique would sort through candidates efficiently and notify them automatically that their applications had been received. Hopefully there would also be a few areas to actually type something about yourself that a person might actually read, but the added convenience of technology makes everything convenient, including screwing things up.
Crackers don't make money, Hackers need new name
on
"Hackers" are Dumb
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· Score: 2
Beyond the obvious cracker/hacker error is the declaration that cracking is on the rise because of e-commerce. Certainly virus authors do not make money. Typically cracking is for fun and not profit.
What has happened to "hacker" is the same thing that happened to "negative feedback". A good engineer knows that negative feedback acts to preserve the current state, but your typical suit thinks of negative feedback as something that discourages what someone is already doing.
It is noble to try to clear up the confusion surrounding the misuse of terms, but the problem is the confusion is too strong. "Hacker" now means both enthusiast and criminal, just as negative feedback has two contradictory meanings.
I don't have a good suggestion for a replacement, however, and after all these years there isn't a replacement for negative feedback either. A good name would have to be immediately recognizable. If anyone has a suggestion I'd like to hear it.
It looks like most of/. agrees that lines of code is a useless method of evaluating programmer productivity. One could write many lines and be either a good or bad programmer; one could write few lines (or mostly remove line) and be either a good or bad programmer.
I think most readers here would ALSO agree that articles such as this are a dangerous thing when they wind up in the hands of managers. The quote that bothers me the most:
"Garrin said he plans to step up the measurement of IT costs and staff productivity "to light a fire under people and show them where they stand."
While I would love to be paid by number of bugs fixed, or number of lines written, it would quickly bring about ruin for my company.
What IS interesting is the question of why there exists a discrepancy between LOC/programmer in the study. We know that this is not necessarily a reflection of quality, and if it is, whose programmers come out ahead.
I would like to know how the "16,000 information technology professionals in 28 nations" were chosen. Given that Howard Rubin issues no disclaimers about using LOC as a benchmark, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the foreign companies were of a different character than the U.S. counterparts, perhaps ones that have more international visibility. These Connecticut-based researchers should have an easier time finding small firms to poll locally. Maybe the U.S. companies participated in different kinds of software development than the others, for instance a larger proportion of products like games (my territory) that do not often have the luxury of code reuse. What we are probably seeing is an antecedent variable, something that IMHO is the single biggest reason why statistics are most often just lies.
Judge software by how useful it is to you; by that measure the U.S. produces many programs that are good and many that are not.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not it is important to leave a job on good terms is a personal issue for you to answer, not a question for the community. It might make a difference in your future career but it is much more a question of personality, and whether you would regret the bad blood.
If you decide you do want to leave on good terms, best approach IMO is to talk to the nut directly, don't go behind his back or get anyone else to intervene on your behalf. Try to be the hurt pal, let him know how you want to be remembered as a good worker, that you were there a long time, that it bothers you he could think you were causing trouble, and so on. It might not work right away, or at all, but if so you'll know for sure there was nothing more you could do. You may have every right to be angry (we can't know for sure, but it seems you do) but acting angry does no good if what you want to accomplish is to calm down the paranoid.
And if it doesn't work, *then* calmly make sure you've covered all your bases: dot your i's and cross your t's, keep proof of everything, and don't say anything stupid.
In my own experience I've felt sometimes it was worth going the extra mile to make someone happy, and sometimes it wasn't.
If you've ever played Illuminati, you may have already seen this truth about futurists: all Fanatics are opposite. (They are also usually not wealthy.) It is easy to get great ideas from them, but not easy to get them to organize, or agree, or even figure out how to agree. They can't always express their predictions in terms of logical argument, because the reasons are partially religious.
/. discussion tree, and a bit rambling too. Maybe it is better suited for a blog, or a futurist forum?
The idea of the singularity should bring up a mix of alarm and hope in all of us who can see its inevitability. You don't know whether you will reach utopia or dystopia, or a mix, because it depends on who controls it.
Mostly I am posting with a bit of advice: organize yourself. This is way too deep and long-winded to be lost this far into a
A nice case mod show-off site that I Googled into when looking for information on hobbyist usage of acrylic and other plastics for robot parts:
http://www.pimprig.com/
Some of these folks are pretty professional about it, they have some useful tips, and lots of photos.
Of the tests that were performed I would wager that you should be most interested in Photoshop. You probably wouldn't use it directly except in cooking up the graphics for a web page, but what it does is number-crunching (both integer and floating point) on large files. It uses a lot of memory, and really does most of its work in optimized loops over large blocks of data, rather than lots of GUI mess.
That sounds a lot more like the BLAST jobs and SQL queries that you (and I) deal with than Word or Quake benchmarks.
That said, I would not make any hardware purchasing decisions for bioinformatics based on these benchmarks. You want more detailed, more balanced information, and possibly some big iron with UNIX numbers too.
That would be nice, and it would be quite helpful too for information retrieval researchers who need to get under the hood.
But hosting a good search engine for the web requires an absurd amount of nice hardware. Plus you really need that hardware as you develop, or else you won't be sure your code will scale well.
Add to that the fact that Google is quite good at what it does, and is free... it makes it quite difficult to launch the project you describe. Anyone have ideas on how to support a project like that?
If that isn't what drives U.S. foreign policy that is at least the way it appears to the world.
But don't forget the converse:
"Countries do not have enemies, only interests."
Don't all large public and private organizations tend to act in their own interests first and foremost? Isn't it hard for a group of people to really be considered to have friendships and emotion?
That's a real question, BTW. It seems like sometimes groups show anger and love and remorse just like individuals do, but they apparently need to be hit pretty hard to act outside of self-interest.
Everyone knows that this is just a ploy by those OPEN SOURCE FREAKS trying to get bought out by SCO!
They have no intention of taking it to court!
That is absolutely correct. He could get away with the same parodies without permission but preferred to ask first.
In at least one case ("Like a Surgeon") the song was actually suggested by the original artist. Madonna wanted him to do that parody.
But in one case there was a mix-up, where he was told that the artist (Coolio) had granted permission for the song ("Amish Paradise") but in fact had not. He regretted the mistake, which was actually not his personally, and apologized. He still performs it of course, and there was no legal action.
In this case Penny Arcade had the legal high ground, but why bother? The comic is now mirrored everywhere, new people have been exposed to PA, American Greetings looks silly, and they have new things to make fun of. Win-win!
This sort of thing bugs me a lot. I have a mixed background both in game development, and in science, so it kind of hits close to home.
This group - The Lion & Lamb Project - isn't trying to find toys that are dangerous to play with in a physical sense. They assume that violence in video games and such causes violence in children, and if they were right about that, we couldn't really argue against their recommendations.
They have a link to "Research". I read one of the papers and it is pretty weak - basically it rants about Columbine for a while, draws a statistical correlation between violent people and the desire to play violent video games, and ASSUMES from there that the games cause violent behavior.
So basically they are saying: young violent men enjoy violent games, and we would be "very surprised" if the games weren't causing real-life violence. But of course, nobody has done that research.
That's not even really research, there's no case at all for causation. If there was, I'd have to (very reluctantly) agree with them, but fortunately they are wrong.
Even this article separates into 9 HTML pages what could have comfortably fit on a few. The idea being, if someone wants to read an article, they must load more banner ads.
If we end up paying per page view, that sort of thing might run rampant, so one would need to visit 20 or more bogus pages to get to the one they know they want.
Worse, I know many people, myself included, wouldn't bother browsing much, for the same reason nobody likes per-hour connect charges if they can avoid it. I don't want to feel like I need to savor every URL, and I don't want to wonder whether a site is going to be worth anything before viewing it.
I'd rather see
* sites that have free areas, and premium subscriptions if you use them often
* banding together of several sites that charge a joint membership, or charge ISPs for access. So you decide whether you want a standard or executive internet connection when you sign up for service.
The first is actually starting to pop up, and it seems to make sense.
ANY deviation from that at all implies that some people get greater than 1/N and some get less. The article suggests that this means that (assuming the electoral boundaries are chosen along the boundaries of groups with different views) minorities won't be trampled on. Basically it implies that some people ought to have more say than others. This means some people are empowered at the expense of others, and which bin you are in depends on electoral boundaries.
Well if you really want to be representative, allow the 3% of people that constitute some minority to have 3% of the seats in Congress, rather than zero. Popular vote clearly is the only fair way to run a winner take all system. Winner take all systems are themselves a good bit unfair - and if you want to address that issue, address it with a real fix, not the electoral college.
Real elections are almost never that closely contested.
OK, maybe it's rare, but that doesn't seem to help us at all. We have this situation NOW, and this is the ONLY time that the popular vs. electoral college decisions will differ.
In a fair election, he saw, each voter's power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person's vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands.
Wait a minute! But what is the probability that you are that voter that gets to swing the election? Is there any reason why a Floridian vote should really be worth more per person than one from Oregon? It is not possible for everyone to have more say than anyone else. That premise seems flawed to me. Can anyone justify it?
(for the record: I'm an independent, I care about the math and not this year's particular result.)
After a marathon of Tetris-playing, my friends would go outside and lay brick walls. I fear some of them went into construction for a living.
After playing Sim City I had an uncontrollable compulsion to run for mayor, or at least to lay pipes for the sewer authority.
I saw some people play too much Populous. They became Gods.
You don't want to know what happened to the guy that played Leisure Suit Larry.
This white paper makes me feel somewhat better about Mindcraft's position, at least enough to believe that there are ways in which Linux needs to play catch-up.
I think it is funny that this paper mentions four times that Mindcraft is unbiased.
THE PROBLEM IS that all this says is that the test results are valid, but the test itself (as we know from previous discussions) is suspect. These graphs (which are a bit sketchy themselves... fitting a curve to one data point is only so informative) are measuring obscenely high access rates for static web pages, which is a rather contrived benchmark.
I do appreciate that there are one processor benchmarks added here, and not surprisingly we see that some of the NT/Linux disparity is in SMP scalability (and ultimately TCP/IP multithreading.) But we don't need to wait for the multithreaded TCP/IP stack in Linux to find tasks that Linux is perfect for.
I cannot say with any certainty whether Mindcraft deliberately chose conditions to favor NT. It certainly seems possible, but on the other hand they have perhaps received more criticism than is warranted already, so I am reluctant to rant about it. I am curious why we don't see open benchmarks on a wider variety of tasks, and including the *BSDs as well. Even knowing that benchmarks are inherently weak, I would personally like to see how everything would fare.
That means the plethora of PC game development teams would have a lower barrier to enter the console market, which has a history of making money (unlike PC games).
Personally, I prefer the standard PC, and I'm willing to fork over the extra money to have one. I'm also more excited about PSX2 in theory. But in practice, the PSX2 development boxes are still nowhere to be found. Your hair doesn't even need to be very pointy before you start to look seriously at this rumor.
The moral of the story depends on who you are:
* if you are a privacy advocate, scatter your echelon words about with a better algorithm, and probably avoid "echelon" entirely.
* if you are a terrorist, don't talk about or email your plans without encryption.
* if you are an echelon employee, be smart with your database queries.
BTW, the phrase "golf ball factory" is rumored to be what (some?) NSA employees are supposed to use when asked where they work. After all, who is interested in the work of a golf ball factory employee?
What could become A Big Mess (TM) is what a gene patent actually means. It is not difficult to devise a DNA sequence that is different from the wild type that generates the exact same protein, or a slight variant with the same biological function. A bit farther in the future we will have more ways of generating proteins through protein engineering.
But wait, there's more. You can mass-produce the product of a gene without knowing or caring about its sequence or structure. Does the gene patent cover the product of a gene? I realize our patent system in the US is horribly broken but it is my understanding that patents are for specific processes, not for any process that serves a specific goal.
This issue reminds me of the need we have for formalizing defensive patents. A lot of companies issue patents simply to prevent others from doing so, and plan not to profit from them. Celera claims to be doing this, essentially. If there was only a way to guarantee that this were true, and prevent future management from reneging on the promise... then our lives might become a lot easier!
In any case, abusers of this system will eventually be frustrated with the progress of technology, as they are in other areas.
I know I have been somewhat exploited these past few years. I'm not 19, I'm 27, but the concept is the same. I could make a lot more out in the so-called real world, and in some ways it would be more rewarding. There is probably a much greater temptation for game programmers to jump ship than their Hollywood counterparts, simply because our talents are in such demand in other places. Yet I find I am happy where I am, and that these issues in my own life have become better, not worse.
Yes, game development is sloppier than business development, simply because the competition is fierce and profits are so low. The best games these days come from well-funded companies that have the luxury of elbow room. However, like movies, just having a large budget guarantees nothing. And on the lower budget end, it is like movies too, for every Blair Witch winner you have a thousand losers, some deserved and some undeserved.
Open source game development is a neat idea, but is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is much easier to get engineers for such projects than artists. We may still see some winners in this area.
Alternative publishing sources are a neat idea too. You can check up on how the g.o.d. (gathering of developers) is doing, that may prove fruitful as well.
I do not fault you for the decision to leave, and sympathize with the reasons. If finding a good game development job is a matter of luck, then I am among the lucky, although it took a few years to get to that position. And a few years of software development with published titles and associated experience is an investment in myself, and one that I do not regret, even when there are lucrative alternatives. But I recommend that you do not discourage those who want "in" completely, because even though it is difficult to manage, getting a rewarding game job is much easier than winning a lottery.
Best of luck
Sam Kalat (happy at Red Storm, which does not necessarily agree with anything I post, but probably would today)
In the long run applying for a job should be a process of filling out an online questionnaire, chock full of check boxes and radio buttons summarizing your experience. The HR department on the other end can then compare resumes in the same format without resorting to OCR.
Of course there will be brand new annoyances with this procedure. For instance messages like "Your application is not complete. Please press the back button on your browser and complete the following items: Current Salary"
A good use of this technique would sort through candidates efficiently and notify them automatically that their applications had been received. Hopefully there would also be a few areas to actually type something about yourself that a person might actually read, but the added convenience of technology makes everything convenient, including screwing things up.
What has happened to "hacker" is the same thing that happened to "negative feedback". A good engineer knows that negative feedback acts to preserve the current state, but your typical suit thinks of negative feedback as something that discourages what someone is already doing.
It is noble to try to clear up the confusion surrounding the misuse of terms, but the problem is the confusion is too strong. "Hacker" now means both enthusiast and criminal, just as negative feedback has two contradictory meanings.
I don't have a good suggestion for a replacement, however, and after all these years there isn't a replacement for negative feedback either. A good name would have to be immediately recognizable. If anyone has a suggestion I'd like to hear it.
I think most readers here would ALSO agree that articles such as this are a dangerous thing when they wind up in the hands of managers. The quote that bothers me the most:
"Garrin said he plans to step up the measurement of IT costs and staff productivity "to light a fire under people and show them where they stand."
While I would love to be paid by number of bugs fixed, or number of lines written, it would quickly bring about ruin for my company.
What IS interesting is the question of why there exists a discrepancy between LOC/programmer in the study. We know that this is not necessarily a reflection of quality, and if it is, whose programmers come out ahead.
I would like to know how the "16,000 information technology professionals in 28 nations" were chosen. Given that Howard Rubin issues no disclaimers about using LOC as a benchmark, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the foreign companies were of a different character than the U.S. counterparts, perhaps ones that have more international visibility. These Connecticut-based researchers should have an easier time finding small firms to poll locally. Maybe the U.S. companies participated in different kinds of software development than the others, for instance a larger proportion of products like games (my territory) that do not often have the luxury of code reuse. What we are probably seeing is an antecedent variable, something that IMHO is the single biggest reason why statistics are most often just lies.
Judge software by how useful it is to you; by that measure the U.S. produces many programs that are good and many that are not.