Don't think there are backdoors in Asian chips and boards?
Don't think there are other vulnerabilities put into software outsourced to India, China or Eastern Europe?
If so, you're an idiot, or just possibly a naive, uninformed, incompetent military/security timeserver more concerned with saving money and getting a good review than with actual national security.
Or maybe you're just stupid enough to trust our silicon valley overlords who do the actual outsourcing. I'm sure they give a shit about national security over profit.
Yeah, we want to hire someone in their 20s, who has "full stack" experience (i.e. can do any damn thing you throw at them with any technology), who will work 60+ hours a week for under $20 an hour.
Of course, there's no shortage of people who will *claim* all of this on their resume.
Job descriptions like this are what happens when a company is either owned or run by non-technical MBAs, or the company has become infested with young MBAs. In either case, they're headed down the slow chute to insolvency. The MBAs, of course, will personally profit, at everyone else's expense.
3) Newly hired 21 year old MBA decides that "those old people" make too much money.
4) Firing is done by salary and no other significant criteria, selectively cutting anybody who's been a consistently good performer.
5) What's left is... what's left. When the *real* mess finally comes home to roost, 21-year old MBA has already been promoted or moved to another job. No consequences.
The age laws, are of course, toothless. Companies can always gin up numbers to prove anything they want. Our "business friendly" government does what it does best for us. Nothing.
The timeframe of the newly minted idiot, I mean "MBA" is the next quarter. Everything in their world is defined by numbers on a spreadsheet. Nobody is going to get into risky, costly things like training developers. Spreadsheets can (but usually don't) contain employee loyalty, corporate knowledge, customer goodwill, marketplace reputation or dozens of other not easily quantifiable factors that determine markeplace success.
MBAs like it easy. Really easy. Besides, they know that in a year, they'll be gone and someone else will get blamed and have to clean up the mess.
And the most buggy software is always C, C++, Objective C or anything else that encourages a human to manipulate pointers and/or memory.
Most buggy framework? WPF, by far. I haven't had to test UWP yet, but it looks like an even bigger, overly elaborate clusterfuck.
Sometimes newer is not better. I despised MFC, loved Winforms, which is inflexible and dull as dishwater, but simple, obvious and easily testable (everything Microsoft appears to hate). It's all been downhill after that.
And don't get me started on ASP. I'm pretty sure the rise of the recent spate of rather nicely designed javascript frameworks happened because the ASP collection ranges from mediocre to Godawful.
I've been hired and have had to do the hiring. I know the drill. So, you want good candidates? Do the following:
1) Get HR out of the loop. HR, as you know, isn't where the brain trust of the company lives. They also tend to be lazy. Result? They're using keywords to exclude resumes. If you don't say, "Agile" on your resume, you sink out of sight, even if you've been working in an Agile environment for years. Keyword based systems are an utter, abysmal, total fail.
2) Don't throw every skill you can think of into your ad. Otherwise good candidates who may not have ever used say, Jira (which takes all of about 15 minutes to learn), are excluded. Pick a few of the core ones. You want someone who can teach themselves. That's as or more important than experience in any specific technology.
3) Understand that you'll have to train and that this will take time. Nobody's going to have everything. If they lie enough to claim they do, well... good luck.
4) If you have a thoughtlessly hacked together toolset that includes, VB6, F#, Erhang, Perl, a collection of proprietary, obscure TLAs and BrainFuck 2, you'll probably have to hire two or three people, instead of the 1 you could have hired to maintain a standard LAMP or Windows stack.
5) What you really want is a 20 year old kid with 30 years of experience who'll work 60 hours a week for 40,000 a year. Guess what? You won't find that person. If you do, don't expect him to stick around. If your manager(s) don't/won't understand that, your company is doomed. Polish up your resume and start looking.
6) Fix your application software. If you get a resume, do not make anybody fill in all that redundant information again, get disgusted and stop. Don't ask the address, web site, and supervisor phone number of the company that died in the dot com crash of 2001. It wastes everyone's time and make you look like idiots.
Don't pop up "helpful" suggestions like a retarded version of Clippy.
Don't *ever* ask me to log into *anything* with my facebook account.
Don't ask if I really want to install your insecure, buggy, virus laden app to improve my "user experience." You're tracking me for marketing purposes, OK? I wasn't born yesterday. Go suck an egg.
Don't *ever* shift my focus to where *you* think it should be.
Mouse "Gestures". Ye Gods. Really?! Don't turn on "mouse gestures" by default. In fact, take all mouse gestures out and shoot them. Then shoot the marketing moron who thought they might be a good idea. If you can't get rid of them, turn them all *off* by default. I'm sure that both of the people in the world who like and use them will figure out how to turn them on.
Not a software issue, but laptop clickpads consisting of only one bug button. WTF were you people *thinking?*
Annnnnd the worst one of all. Software that responds to a click or keystroke with..... NOTHING. It sits there and thinks a minute. This is just slightly less infuriating than software that doesn't disappear on close. Get it out of my face. Clean up after yourself on your own time. Not mine.
By which I mean, this isn't a collaborative process, or more precisely, it's not improved by collaboration, as so many things *aren't.*
Then, use any database that makes sense. Preferably one hosted on your local server so it's not deathly slow and/or intermittent. Tack on any UI with a minimum of interface fluff. Add keywords. Using keywords, scan periodically for duplicates. This needs to be ONE person's job, preferably done for the first hour of each day. Never, ever fire that person.
It's a human language problem. AI isn't good enough. You still need a person familiar with your code and package to review it.
It's expensive. This is software. You have to pay to play.
This is your fault. To avoid another incident, you will bring in the operations IT managers, who are quite frankly, much smarter than you. Then sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to the solutions that these managers already know about, and which will easily fix the problem.
It would be best if all fools, MBAs, accountants and other technical illiterates were excluded from that meeting. A lawyer or too, on the other hand, may be quite helpful.
Hint. The solutions cost money. Guess why they were never implemented. Bonus question! Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
The folks in silicon valley are smart, organized and wealthy. They've purchased the requisite members of congress who have shown quite plainly that their interests diverge significantly from those of the White House and its current, er... "administration."
There will be no change at all, or at best, cosmetic changes.
Of course, the best course of action would be to give any foreign national who moves here for more than five years a green card, a handshake and expedited citizenship if they start a business that employs Americans in a technical capacity at standard wages for their position of expertise for more than five years.
That's a 10 year commitment. Their kids will have grown up here. Nobody is moving back to China or India at that point. We get a new generation of smart, entrepreneurial Americans.
Being a rational course of action that takes advantage of foreign expertise and money for the USA's benefit, it will never happen.
In facility architecture, there are architects, building programmers, estimators, schedulers, carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians and general laborers.
In large scale software, there are architects, developers, testers, tool builders, UI specialists, configuration management engineers and so on.
You don't expect the carpenter to do what the plumber or the head architect does. Neither should you expect the tool builder or UI architect to do what the system architect or feature lead does.
Workers in every field have varying levels of skill. Don't expect the scripting guy to suddenly embrace the wonders of the factory pattern. It's not his job and he's not interested.
What a dev lead who's worth a shit should be thinking about is getting the best labor at the cheapest price to get the job done, and stop trying to hire a system architect when a scripting guy will do.
Software is business, not art. Do that on your own time.
Familiarity with specific fields of mathematics semantics is not the same thing as programming skill.
A good programmer can solve problems algorithmically, whether or not they know common mathematical symbol semantics. I know quite a few excellent programmers whose mathematics skills were limited not by intelligence, but by school systems that had gym teachers teaching high school algebra classes in rural communities to make extra money. Negative bonus points for those programming nerds who were bad in gym class.
Slashdot Mirror
We noticed already. But thanks for pointing that out.
Don't think there are backdoors in Asian chips and boards?
Don't think there are other vulnerabilities put into software outsourced to India, China or Eastern Europe?
If so, you're an idiot, or just possibly a naive, uninformed, incompetent military/security timeserver more concerned with saving money and getting a good review than with actual national security.
Or maybe you're just stupid enough to trust our silicon valley overlords who do the actual outsourcing. I'm sure they give a shit about national security over profit.
Just a thought.
Agreed. Let's not discuss that.
Cough. Firefly. Cough, cough.
The shhoter was a whack job, but had YouTube not "demonetized" her content, she would have probably lived out her life in well deserved obscurity.
I know that Russia or China getting weapons grade AI would be a disaster, and they're *not* going to be constrained by moral hand-wringing.
Yeah, we want to hire someone in their 20s, who has "full stack" experience (i.e. can do any damn thing you throw at them with any technology), who will work 60+ hours a week for under $20 an hour.
Of course, there's no shortage of people who will *claim* all of this on their resume.
Job descriptions like this are what happens when a company is either owned or run by non-technical MBAs, or the company has become infested with young MBAs. In either case, they're headed down the slow chute to insolvency. The MBAs, of course, will personally profit, at everyone else's expense.
We're next. The velvet gloves of governments are off. Democracy is out. Fascism is in. The vote in congress was essentially bipartisan.
1) Do a really good job year after year.
2) Get good reviews and good raises and bonuses.
3) Newly hired 21 year old MBA decides that "those old people" make too much money.
4) Firing is done by salary and no other significant criteria, selectively cutting anybody who's been a consistently good performer.
5) What's left is... what's left. When the *real* mess finally comes home to roost, 21-year old MBA has already been promoted or moved to another job. No consequences.
The age laws, are of course, toothless. Companies can always gin up numbers to prove anything they want. Our "business friendly" government does what it does best for us. Nothing.
And someday, it will be you. Much, much sooner than you think.
...all the time has already failed.
The timeframe of the newly minted idiot, I mean "MBA" is the next quarter. Everything in their world is defined by numbers on a spreadsheet. Nobody is going to get into risky, costly things like training developers. Spreadsheets can (but usually don't) contain employee loyalty, corporate knowledge, customer goodwill, marketplace reputation or dozens of other not easily quantifiable factors that determine markeplace success.
MBAs like it easy. Really easy. Besides, they know that in a year, they'll be gone and someone else will get blamed and have to clean up the mess.
Works for me. Sounds a lot like college.
And the most buggy software is always C, C++, Objective C or anything else that encourages a human to manipulate pointers and/or memory.
Most buggy framework? WPF, by far. I haven't had to test UWP yet, but it looks like an even bigger, overly elaborate clusterfuck.
Sometimes newer is not better. I despised MFC, loved Winforms, which is inflexible and dull as dishwater, but simple, obvious and easily testable (everything Microsoft appears to hate). It's all been downhill after that.
And don't get me started on ASP. I'm pretty sure the rise of the recent spate of rather nicely designed javascript frameworks happened because the ASP collection ranges from mediocre to Godawful.
Enforce draconian laws regarding land use, water use, building materials, power use and so on.
It'll be like a HOA from hell, with computers.
or they don't want to move where the job is located.
Or the idiot hiring manager lives in the quaint, archaic, magical land where Skype and email don't exist and coding must be done on-site.... because.
Fixed that for you.
Of course, then the answer becomes offshore teams, who never come into the office. See a problem here?
Dear Hiring Managers Everywhere,
I've been hired and have had to do the hiring. I know the drill. So, you want good candidates? Do the following:
1) Get HR out of the loop. HR, as you know, isn't where the brain trust of the company lives. They also tend to be lazy. Result? They're using keywords to exclude resumes. If you don't say, "Agile" on your resume, you sink out of sight, even if you've been working in an Agile environment for years. Keyword based systems are an utter, abysmal, total fail.
2) Don't throw every skill you can think of into your ad. Otherwise good candidates who may not have ever used say, Jira (which takes all of about 15 minutes to learn), are excluded. Pick a few of the core ones. You want someone who can teach themselves. That's as or more important than experience in any specific technology.
3) Understand that you'll have to train and that this will take time. Nobody's going to have everything. If they lie enough to claim they do, well... good luck.
4) If you have a thoughtlessly hacked together toolset that includes, VB6, F#, Erhang, Perl, a collection of proprietary, obscure TLAs and BrainFuck 2, you'll probably have to hire two or three people, instead of the 1 you could have hired to maintain a standard LAMP or Windows stack.
5) What you really want is a 20 year old kid with 30 years of experience who'll work 60 hours a week for 40,000 a year. Guess what? You won't find that person. If you do, don't expect him to stick around. If your manager(s) don't/won't understand that, your company is doomed. Polish up your resume and start looking.
6) Fix your application software. If you get a resume, do not make anybody fill in all that redundant information again, get disgusted and stop. Don't ask the address, web site, and supervisor phone number of the company that died in the dot com crash of 2001. It wastes everyone's time and make you look like idiots.
Pretty soon, you'll need a damned protocol AI just to translate for the farmers.
Don't autocomplete.
Don't pop up "helpful" suggestions like a retarded version of Clippy.
Don't *ever* ask me to log into *anything* with my facebook account.
Don't ask if I really want to install your insecure, buggy, virus laden app to improve my "user experience." You're tracking me for marketing purposes, OK? I wasn't born yesterday. Go suck an egg.
Don't *ever* shift my focus to where *you* think it should be.
Mouse "Gestures". Ye Gods. Really?!
Don't turn on "mouse gestures" by default. In fact, take all mouse gestures out and shoot them. Then shoot the marketing moron who thought they might be a good idea. If you can't get rid of them, turn them all *off* by default. I'm sure that both of the people in the world who like and use them will figure out how to turn them on.
Not a software issue, but laptop clickpads consisting of only one bug button. WTF were you people *thinking?*
Annnnnd the worst one of all. Software that responds to a click or keystroke with ..... NOTHING. It sits there and thinks a minute. This is just slightly less infuriating than software that doesn't disappear on close. Get it out of my face. Clean up after yourself on your own time. Not mine.
By which I mean, this isn't a collaborative process, or more precisely, it's not improved by collaboration, as so many things *aren't.*
Then, use any database that makes sense. Preferably one hosted on your local server so it's not deathly slow and/or intermittent. Tack on any UI with a minimum of interface fluff. Add keywords. Using keywords, scan periodically for duplicates. This needs to be ONE person's job, preferably done for the first hour of each day. Never, ever fire that person.
It's a human language problem. AI isn't good enough. You still need a person familiar with your code and package to review it.
It's expensive. This is software. You have to pay to play.
Dear British Airways Upper Management,
This is your fault. To avoid another incident, you will bring in the operations IT managers, who are quite frankly, much smarter than you. Then sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to the solutions that these managers already know about, and which will easily fix the problem.
It would be best if all fools, MBAs, accountants and other technical illiterates were excluded from that meeting. A lawyer or too, on the other hand, may be quite helpful.
Hint. The solutions cost money. Guess why they were never implemented. Bonus question! Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
Cheers!
The folks in silicon valley are smart, organized and wealthy. They've purchased the requisite members of congress who have shown quite plainly that their interests diverge significantly from those of the White House and its current, er... "administration."
There will be no change at all, or at best, cosmetic changes.
Of course, the best course of action would be to give any foreign national who moves here for more than five years a green card, a handshake and expedited citizenship if they start a business that employs Americans in a technical capacity at standard wages for their position of expertise for more than five years.
That's a 10 year commitment. Their kids will have grown up here. Nobody is moving back to China or India at that point. We get a new generation of smart, entrepreneurial Americans.
Being a rational course of action that takes advantage of foreign expertise and money for the USA's benefit, it will never happen.
In facility architecture, there are architects, building programmers, estimators, schedulers, carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians and general laborers.
In large scale software, there are architects, developers, testers, tool builders, UI specialists, configuration management engineers and so on.
You don't expect the carpenter to do what the plumber or the head architect does. Neither should you expect the tool builder or UI architect to do what the system architect or feature lead does.
Workers in every field have varying levels of skill. Don't expect the scripting guy to suddenly embrace the wonders of the factory pattern. It's not his job and he's not interested.
What a dev lead who's worth a shit should be thinking about is getting the best labor at the cheapest price to get the job done, and stop trying to hire a system architect when a scripting guy will do.
Software is business, not art. Do that on your own time.
Familiarity with specific fields of mathematics semantics is not the same thing as programming skill.
A good programmer can solve problems algorithmically, whether or not they know common mathematical symbol semantics. I know quite a few excellent programmers whose mathematics skills were limited not by intelligence, but by school systems that had gym teachers teaching high school algebra classes in rural communities to make extra money. Negative bonus points for those programming nerds who were bad in gym class.
Meanwhile Trump distracts the press with nonsense and everyone falls for that distraction.