Gambling, pretty much by definition, has to work with people who don't know what they are doing.
That statement is patently ridiculous.
Some people--myself included--enjoy gambling. The camaraderie at the craps table. The excitement at the poker table. The time with friends, the free drinks, the cocktail waitresses.
When I go gambling, I bring with me no more money than I would spend on an ordinary night out on the town, attending a professional sporting event, etc. Sometimes I lose the money I brought--sometimes I bring home a little more money than I brought (and everywhere in between)--but I always have a good time, win or lose.
Perhaps you know what I'm doing better than I do, as you assert. Personally, I think you are simply wrong on this point.
What is your suggestion for people who don't know how to back up their own data?
Learn to do it yourself or hire someone who does know how.
How would I know--before it's too late--that I hired someone capable of safeguarding my data? I ask, because I imagine there are an awful lot of Sidekick owners who thought they DID "hire someone who does know how".
In hindsight, they were wrong. But the Microsoft name connotes expertise to a lot of people (although not a lot of people around here--for good reason).
"The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange)."
- Assuming you set those up...
My usual yardstick by which I measure whether or not an average user might set something up is my estimation on whether or not my technologically-disinclined, AARP-card-carrying mother would set it up.
My mother syncs her Palm Pre contacts and calendar with google, so I am forced to conclude that the average user would do this.
"It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers."
- We now know to trust the vendor's servers as far as we can throw them. History is no guide.
I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. I don't give one tenth of one hoot if Palm's servers crash because my data is safely on my device and safely on google and safely on my personal server and safely backed up as part of my offsite backup procedure.
"All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers."
Uh, 'on the device' is not a backup. That's the 'data'. Make that 2 places, more if you use multiple online services/Exchange.
I'm not sure your point, because I never claimed that the on-device data was the backup. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of Palm Pre users will have their data replicated to three different locations, and managed by 2+ different vendors. A data loss for your average user is extremely unlikely.
"(As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis)."
I save my POP mail to Google and Yahoo! daily or more often. Contacts ditto. I actually have 4 email accounts with copies of 3 spread around. I also export from my Outlook client at home, andthen distribute the CD ISOs around to three different places, all encrypted with the name of the file as the hint. I copy my SMS into Gmail, and from there it goes to 2 other servers, and is part of the Outlook export.
I have email so old I cannot really read it in anything but a text editor. Elm barfs on some of the old MBox stuff, which is probably just corrupted, and the old Eudora stuff is pretty much done for I think. I lost some AOL mail, but that was mostly noise and spam anyways.
Oh, and up to 2005 I saved spam. I have a great collection. Stuff you would have to pay for nowadays:)
I'm glad that you have all that data, but do you find it useful?
I converted all of my old email to Maildir format, and my IMAP server maintains a fulltext index so I can actually find something when I need it.
The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange). It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers. All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers. (As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis).
All this makes is extremely unlikely that a Palm Pre user will ever suffer an unintentional data loss.
Hope your sister gets her data back, but if she doesn't, she should upgrade to a Pre.:)
There is no excuse for dishonesty. If you had represented yourself honestly from the beginning, none of this would have happened. Yes, I am assigning the blame to you. You should have fired this headhunter after this first (extremely serious) offense
The only unilateral modifications that a headhunter should be doing to your resume is removing your contact information and standardizing the format. Any other modification should first be cleared with you. A good headhunter will help you improve your resume, but ultimately it is your resume.
You should not be rude to Zeke, but you must discontinue working with him.
No, I have not dealt with such a situation, because what Zeke did was a truly exceptional display of unprofessionalism. You're done working with him. Be cordial, but be finished
ACID only ensures that when multiple users hit "save" at the exact same time, that their updates are applied serially to the data and that reads don't pick up halfway-updated data. ACID does not guarantee anything beyond that.
In particular, it does not guarantee that the application is preventing multiple users from inadvertently modifying the same data concurrently and clobbering each other's updates.
If you rely only on ACID for data consistency, whomever is lucky enough to hit "save" last wins, and that person will never even know the damage he just caused.
Your original point was that ACID will protect you. My continued contention is that you are simply wrong.
The biggest problem is that once a lock is acquired, how long do you wait before you realize that the lock will never be released?
For 99% of web applications, Optimistic Locking is a better choice, because for 99% of applications, the normal usage pattern is for users not to be stepping on each other's toes. Two users editing the same data would be a relatively rare occurrence.
If your app's usage pattern has a lot of contention to edit the same data, then you're forced to use pessimistic locking so you don't drive your users bonkers with "The record has changed since you started editing it--please resolve the conflicts" messages.
This is a stateless web-based application, we we're talking long-running transactions. You're not going to hold a db transaction open while the user goes and eats lunch, has a few water-cooler discussions, and updates his fantasy football lineup (or simply abandons the transaction entirely!). Such a solution does not scale well, because you'll have to hold a db connection and a db transaction open for each user of your application who is modifying data until you can guarantee that he is no longer modifying data. Your database will grind to a screeching halt past a few thousand users.
Since you can't scale an app under that model, ACID is not going to protect you. Consider the following scenario: 1. User A reads record 1 and starts making modifications in his browser 2. User B reads record 1 and starts making modifications in her browser 3. User B finishes first and writes record 1 back to the database 4. User A writes record 1 back to the database, obliterating User B's modifications
Note: ACID was not violated here, and the database is still in a consistent state. Unfortunately, the record probably contains incorrect data, because user A didn't know about user B's modifications, and neither user even knows there was a ever a conflict!
The correct answer in 99% of applications is to use some form of Optimistic Locking. In the remaining 1%, where usage patterns simply cause too much contention for the same data, a pessimistic locking approach would be required.
The officers violated procedure by playing a suspect's video game console during a narcotics raid. If they violated procedure there, how can we believe that they conducted the raid in accordance with departmental procedure?
Maybe they planted the drugs? Maybe they violated the judge's warrant in other ways aside from the video game incident?
It is when they head up a tool selection process. Management's job is not to select tools for developers, but to set goals and standards and enable their reports to meet them.
Whether or not my managers were managing effectively is not in dispute. I will happily agree with you that my managers were not meeting their responsibilities. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is that while the world is imperfect, and managers don't always do their jobs well (or at all), it is still each employee's responsibility to conduct themselves in a professional manner.
We can't control the actions of others, but we are always in control of our own actions. To blame my temper tantrum on the actions of others is just making excuses. They weren't paying me more than the average salary for a family of 4 to be a peevish little snot.
Thankfully, I took that lesson to heart, and I have not since repeated that performance, despite facing my fair share of challenging workplace situations. Now, I relish being the lone voice of reason in a room full of unreasonable people.
Well, there are all kinds of managers in the world, so no rule will apply in every last case. If you have a sociopath for a boss, all bets are off.
Most rational managers like to look good, and if they have a direct report whose ideas always seem to make them look good, they tend to listen (and give credit where credit is due, etc.)
Having a good manager who is well-respected in your company is crucial to your career development. You need someone who can and will advocate for you.
I'll give you an example of this. At my first job out of college, I got put on a death march of a project. The VP in charge of that project was well-respected in the firm, and the project lead was well-respected by the VP.
Typically promotions at that firm happened after 2-3 years for new grads, but the nature of the project gave me the opportunity to take on duties beyond my job title, so I spoke with the project lead about whether or not he felt it would be appropriate for me to seek an early promotion. He felt that I was definitely ready, but that it would be a tough sell given my short tenure with the firm.
At the team dinner recognizing the project's delivery, the VP thanked everyone for going above and beyond, and said if there was anything he could do for any one of us to let him know. The next morning, I emailed him to request his support for my promotion. Sure, he confirmed with the project lead first that I wasn't off my rocker, but once I had him in my corner, it was a done deal. I got that promotion.
I survived about 4 or 5 rounds of layoffs too, before I left to found my own company. Having well-respected people like you is important, and the best way to get them to like you is to make them look good.
"If the client had been there (not that I would have ever done this in front of the client, but how could management know this?), my firm would have lost millions of dollars."
And it would have served them damn well right.
That's not really an acceptable answer. An employee's job is not to select tools--his or her job is to provide value to the company. An unprofessional employee that costs the company into the 7 figures is not providing positive value to the company.
I understand your point, and I appreciate you coming to my defense, but I still maintain that my behavior, while understandable given the circumstances I was placed in, was still improper and unprofessional.
The correct response would have been to say something along the lines of, "I, too, share your valid concerns about the gap between our project requirements and the tool's capabilities--so much so that I have written a gap-analysis which I will ensure you receive at the conclusion of this demonstration. In the meantime, why don't you give me an opportunity to run through the rest of the demonstration of what the tool is currently capable of, and we should set up a followup meeting to detail what's missing and approach the vendor with our concerns. I recommend we get those concerns addressed before we start getting this type of question from the client."
Do you see the difference, and why my suggested reaction is more professional than what my actual reaction was? Flying off the handle is rarely the correct response to a business scenario (and is rarely a correct response to just about anything life hands you).
Incidentally, I did arrange to switch projects about 6 months after that incident because the pressure-cooker atmosphere just never dissipated. I wasn't enjoying the work, and I missed my family.
But I do notice a bit of an attitude-shift on the part of kids fresh out of college these days. Helicopter parenting has resulted in young people who grew up insulated from the reality that life isn't always fair. If they got a bad grade, mommy and daddy would fix it. If they didn't get the teacher they wanted, or make the team they wanted, or get the part they wanted, mommy and daddy would go to bat for them. I get calls from parents of college grads about personnel decisions. College grads! That never would have happened 20 or even 10 years ago.
Anyhow, your "fuck 'em" comment hit a bit of that nerve for me because life doesn't get handed to you in a neat little package with a bow on top. You don't get paid the big bucks to do easy, well-defined work--you get paid the big bucks to handle challenging situations.
With a few more years' experience under my belt, I could have easily diffused the situation and turned a huge negative position into a positive outcome. But back then, I didn't have the experience I needed, so I threw a tantrum. Not very professional.
I could see those reasons for firing someone. If you don't get along with your boss then you are likely to get fired.
My question is why do good developers, that are talented get laid off?
Because many good developers don't understand that there is a difference between "promoting their ideas" and "insubordination".
If you've got this great idea and you step on a lot of toes promoting it (going over people heads, ignoring others' valid objections (sure, your idea may be better, but if we use it, we'll never make our deadlines and we'll all look bad), or doing other things that make you difficult to work with), you probably are going to find yourself getting fired a lot.
In short, good developers don't get fired for being good developers--they get fired for acting unprofessionally.
The point of the article is that geeks tend to bury their heads in the code and don't notice the writing on the walls.
In US companies of any decent size, if the employee isn't doing anything illegal, he's going to be put on a Performance Improvement Plan, where he will specifically be told what his deficiencies are, what specifically he needs to accomplish to get off of PIP, and by when. If the goals of the PIP aren't met by the deadline set in the PIP, he will be terminated for cause.
Geeks tend to have an overinflated sense of self and don't think they will ever actually be fired, PIP or not. Then they find out they are wrong and bitch about it.
The essential implication seems to be that your longevity in employment has absolutely nothing to do with your actual work. Rather, it has everything to do with someone else's perception of you, and said perception doesn't necessarily need to have any honest or factual relationship with your work output whatsoever.
Why is this so surprising? If the person signing your paychecks doesn't appreciate the value you are providing him, then that person is right to wonder why he's continuing to pay you. Part of your job is to ensure that your (busy) employer understands the value that you provide. "Bragging" was a bad choice of words. Really, providing a weekly status report (what you worked on, milestones you reached, what you plan to work on next week, and roadblocks that you face) to your manager is more than sufficient.
If your boss's boss asks your boss, "Hey what does petrus4 do around here, anyway?", you want you boss to have a good answer right on the tip of his tongue. Something along the lines of, "Well, he's been working on X, and he's just completed Y, etc." If your boss's answer is, "Gee, I'm really not sure. Let me go ask him," that isn't good for your career.
Don't make your boss hunt you down for what you're working on. That's how I read that "bragging" recommendation.
I'd be interested to hear your manager's side of the story. I've never seen anybody get fired for pointing out a security vulnerability. In fact, I used to point them out all the time.
One thing you might want to keep in mind is that what's important isn't always what you say, but the way you say it (and the forum in which it's said). I once nearly got fired for saying something that desperately need to be said--just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a nutshell, I headed up a tool-selection process, selected a tool, wrote up a report, only to have our choice overruled because the vendor was supposedly about to go out of business (they didn't, and this was about 10 years ago). Despite my protestations to my immediate management layer, I was asked to cobble together a demo of the inferior tool, in what turned out to be a dry-run for a client-facing demo (but nobody bothered to tell me that higher purpose).
During the demo, higher-ups were grilling me on why the tool couldn't do what it needed to do, and finally I got sick and tired of defending the inferior tool and I just lost it. I finally had everyone's attention, and I emitted a painfully detailed explanation, replete with 4-letter-words, of why their chosen solution was inferior and would never meet the project requirements. Toes were stepped on, egos were bruised, and I spared no one. If the client had been there (not that I would have ever done this in front of the client, but how could management know this?), my firm would have lost millions of dollars.
It's a miracle I wasn't fired for that little stunt. I was spared only because they had nobody who could replace me on their tight timelines. Those managers never trusted me again after that.
So my point is it's not that you need to know when to duck. It's that you need to know how to state your case, when to state your case, and to whom to state your case. Furthermore, you need to understand when rank is being pulled on you, and when your helpfullness crosses the line into insubordination.
If you look at your situation impartially, can you objectively claim that you followed the above rules about stating your case? Or did you conduct yourself unprofessionally as I did during that demo?
OK, sure. We all know how many minutes there are in a day... But how many gigabytes are in a month?
5GB/month is a reasonable amount of data per month for most people given the current bandwidth of the device. Assuming you got half (ha!) the bandwidth a 3G network is supposed to provide (2Mbit/s, so half would be 1Mbit/s or possibly as much as 500kbyte/s, you'd be talking about a half an hour per day of solid usage (like downloading).
Anecdotally, I can say that many people in the forums use their Palm Pres to listen to a LOT of Pandora radio, and they have not once been harassed by Sprint, despite going way over their 5GB "limit". Obviously Sprint would be within their TOS to put the kibosh on that, but so far, nobody has heard a peep out of Sprint.
Personally, I use my Palm Pre for tethering and my wife watches Hulu streams over the EvDO connection. This usage runs completely contrary to the TOS that I agreed to (the tethering bit), but again, I have not heard a word from Sprint about this blatantly unauthorized usage.
The working definition of "unlimited" that I've always used in this context is, "as long as you are using the service in remotely the way you agreed you would use it, the service provider won't give you any flak." If, on the other hand, I decided to saturate my connection 24/7 with bittorrent swarms, I would expect to have my service terminated.
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Gambling, pretty much by definition, has to work with people who don't know what they are doing.
That statement is patently ridiculous.
Some people--myself included--enjoy gambling. The camaraderie at the craps table. The excitement at the poker table. The time with friends, the free drinks, the cocktail waitresses.
When I go gambling, I bring with me no more money than I would spend on an ordinary night out on the town, attending a professional sporting event, etc. Sometimes I lose the money I brought--sometimes I bring home a little more money than I brought (and everywhere in between)--but I always have a good time, win or lose.
Perhaps you know what I'm doing better than I do, as you assert. Personally, I think you are simply wrong on this point.
What if the poke was initiated before the restraining order was issued, but the pokee didn't receive the poke until after said order was issued?
You don't need to be friends with someone to poke them.
Amen, brother.
What is your suggestion for people who don't know how to back up their own data?
Learn to do it yourself or hire someone who does know how.
How would I know--before it's too late--that I hired someone capable of safeguarding my data? I ask, because I imagine there are an awful lot of Sidekick owners who thought they DID "hire someone who does know how".
In hindsight, they were wrong. But the Microsoft name connotes expertise to a lot of people (although not a lot of people around here--for good reason).
"The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange)."
- Assuming you set those up...
My usual yardstick by which I measure whether or not an average user might set something up is my estimation on whether or not my technologically-disinclined, AARP-card-carrying mother would set it up.
My mother syncs her Palm Pre contacts and calendar with google, so I am forced to conclude that the average user would do this.
"It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers."
- We now know to trust the vendor's servers as far as we can throw them. History is no guide.
I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. I don't give one tenth of one hoot if Palm's servers crash because my data is safely on my device and safely on google and safely on my personal server and safely backed up as part of my offsite backup procedure.
"All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers."
Uh, 'on the device' is not a backup. That's the 'data'. Make that 2 places, more if you use multiple online services/Exchange.
I'm not sure your point, because I never claimed that the on-device data was the backup. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of Palm Pre users will have their data replicated to three different locations, and managed by 2+ different vendors. A data loss for your average user is extremely unlikely.
"(As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis)."
I save my POP mail to Google and Yahoo! daily or more often. Contacts ditto. I actually have 4 email accounts with copies of 3 spread around. I also export from my Outlook client at home, andthen distribute the CD ISOs around to three different places, all encrypted with the name of the file as the hint. I copy my SMS into Gmail, and from there it goes to 2 other servers, and is part of the Outlook export.
I have email so old I cannot really read it in anything but a text editor. Elm barfs on some of the old MBox stuff, which is probably just corrupted, and the old Eudora stuff is pretty much done for I think. I lost some AOL mail, but that was mostly noise and spam anyways.
Oh, and up to 2005 I saved spam. I have a great collection. Stuff you would have to pay for nowadays :)
I'm glad that you have all that data, but do you find it useful?
I converted all of my old email to Maildir format, and my IMAP server maintains a fulltext index so I can actually find something when I need it.
And your sister should still get a Palm Pre. ;)
as the guy said in the article, it should kick you from a session at expired certs, not allow click through options
if the cert is expired/ unverifiable, the browser should simply kick the session, end of story
Would you actually use a browser that misbehaved in this fashion?
I certainly would not.
In general Java devs know ZIP about anything out side of a JAR file.
Or a WAR file or an EAR file or a...
The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange). It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers. All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers. (As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis).
All this makes is extremely unlikely that a Palm Pre user will ever suffer an unintentional data loss.
Hope your sister gets her data back, but if she doesn't, she should upgrade to a Pre. :)
If your data is important to you - you must back it up, and you must test your backups.
What is your suggestion for people who don't know how to back up their own data?
Look at it on the bright side. At least you're not stuck waiting for it to come out on iPhone.
Did you read the example I posted?
ACID only ensures that when multiple users hit "save" at the exact same time, that their updates are applied serially to the data and that reads don't pick up halfway-updated data. ACID does not guarantee anything beyond that.
In particular, it does not guarantee that the application is preventing multiple users from inadvertently modifying the same data concurrently and clobbering each other's updates.
If you rely only on ACID for data consistency, whomever is lucky enough to hit "save" last wins, and that person will never even know the damage he just caused.
Your original point was that ACID will protect you. My continued contention is that you are simply wrong.
The biggest problem is that once a lock is acquired, how long do you wait before you realize that the lock will never be released?
For 99% of web applications, Optimistic Locking is a better choice, because for 99% of applications, the normal usage pattern is for users not to be stepping on each other's toes. Two users editing the same data would be a relatively rare occurrence.
If your app's usage pattern has a lot of contention to edit the same data, then you're forced to use pessimistic locking so you don't drive your users bonkers with "The record has changed since you started editing it--please resolve the conflicts" messages.
Time to move your application to a Lotus Notes DB.
OP specifically said it was a web app. Deploying Notes to each client machine is not in the spec.
The keyword you are looking for is "Optimistic Locking". Google it and educate yourself.
This is a stateless web-based application, we we're talking long-running transactions. You're not going to hold a db transaction open while the user goes and eats lunch, has a few water-cooler discussions, and updates his fantasy football lineup (or simply abandons the transaction entirely!). Such a solution does not scale well, because you'll have to hold a db connection and a db transaction open for each user of your application who is modifying data until you can guarantee that he is no longer modifying data. Your database will grind to a screeching halt past a few thousand users.
Since you can't scale an app under that model, ACID is not going to protect you. Consider the following scenario:
1. User A reads record 1 and starts making modifications in his browser
2. User B reads record 1 and starts making modifications in her browser
3. User B finishes first and writes record 1 back to the database
4. User A writes record 1 back to the database, obliterating User B's modifications
Note: ACID was not violated here, and the database is still in a consistent state. Unfortunately, the record probably contains incorrect data, because user A didn't know about user B's modifications, and neither user even knows there was a ever a conflict!
The correct answer in 99% of applications is to use some form of Optimistic Locking. In the remaining 1%, where usage patterns simply cause too much contention for the same data, a pessimistic locking approach would be required.
The officers violated procedure by playing a suspect's video game console during a narcotics raid. If they violated procedure there, how can we believe that they conducted the raid in accordance with departmental procedure?
Maybe they planted the drugs? Maybe they violated the judge's warrant in other ways aside from the video game incident?
It is when they head up a tool selection process. Management's job is not to select tools for developers, but to set goals and standards and enable their reports to meet them.
Whether or not my managers were managing effectively is not in dispute. I will happily agree with you that my managers were not meeting their responsibilities. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is that while the world is imperfect, and managers don't always do their jobs well (or at all), it is still each employee's responsibility to conduct themselves in a professional manner.
We can't control the actions of others, but we are always in control of our own actions. To blame my temper tantrum on the actions of others is just making excuses. They weren't paying me more than the average salary for a family of 4 to be a peevish little snot.
Thankfully, I took that lesson to heart, and I have not since repeated that performance, despite facing my fair share of challenging workplace situations. Now, I relish being the lone voice of reason in a room full of unreasonable people.
Well, there are all kinds of managers in the world, so no rule will apply in every last case. If you have a sociopath for a boss, all bets are off.
Most rational managers like to look good, and if they have a direct report whose ideas always seem to make them look good, they tend to listen (and give credit where credit is due, etc.)
Having a good manager who is well-respected in your company is crucial to your career development. You need someone who can and will advocate for you.
I'll give you an example of this. At my first job out of college, I got put on a death march of a project. The VP in charge of that project was well-respected in the firm, and the project lead was well-respected by the VP.
Typically promotions at that firm happened after 2-3 years for new grads, but the nature of the project gave me the opportunity to take on duties beyond my job title, so I spoke with the project lead about whether or not he felt it would be appropriate for me to seek an early promotion. He felt that I was definitely ready, but that it would be a tough sell given my short tenure with the firm.
At the team dinner recognizing the project's delivery, the VP thanked everyone for going above and beyond, and said if there was anything he could do for any one of us to let him know. The next morning, I emailed him to request his support for my promotion. Sure, he confirmed with the project lead first that I wasn't off my rocker, but once I had him in my corner, it was a done deal. I got that promotion.
I survived about 4 or 5 rounds of layoffs too, before I left to found my own company. Having well-respected people like you is important, and the best way to get them to like you is to make them look good.
"If the client had been there (not that I would have ever done this in front of the client, but how could management know this?), my firm would have lost millions of dollars."
And it would have served them damn well right.
That's not really an acceptable answer. An employee's job is not to select tools--his or her job is to provide value to the company. An unprofessional employee that costs the company into the 7 figures is not providing positive value to the company.
I understand your point, and I appreciate you coming to my defense, but I still maintain that my behavior, while understandable given the circumstances I was placed in, was still improper and unprofessional.
The correct response would have been to say something along the lines of, "I, too, share your valid concerns about the gap between our project requirements and the tool's capabilities--so much so that I have written a gap-analysis which I will ensure you receive at the conclusion of this demonstration. In the meantime, why don't you give me an opportunity to run through the rest of the demonstration of what the tool is currently capable of, and we should set up a followup meeting to detail what's missing and approach the vendor with our concerns. I recommend we get those concerns addressed before we start getting this type of question from the client."
Do you see the difference, and why my suggested reaction is more professional than what my actual reaction was? Flying off the handle is rarely the correct response to a business scenario (and is rarely a correct response to just about anything life hands you).
Incidentally, I did arrange to switch projects about 6 months after that incident because the pressure-cooker atmosphere just never dissipated. I wasn't enjoying the work, and I missed my family.
But I do notice a bit of an attitude-shift on the part of kids fresh out of college these days. Helicopter parenting has resulted in young people who grew up insulated from the reality that life isn't always fair. If they got a bad grade, mommy and daddy would fix it. If they didn't get the teacher they wanted, or make the team they wanted, or get the part they wanted, mommy and daddy would go to bat for them. I get calls from parents of college grads about personnel decisions. College grads! That never would have happened 20 or even 10 years ago.
Anyhow, your "fuck 'em" comment hit a bit of that nerve for me because life doesn't get handed to you in a neat little package with a bow on top. You don't get paid the big bucks to do easy, well-defined work--you get paid the big bucks to handle challenging situations.
With a few more years' experience under my belt, I could have easily diffused the situation and turned a huge negative position into a positive outcome. But back then, I didn't have the experience I needed, so I threw a tantrum. Not very professional.
I could see those reasons for firing someone. If you don't get along with your boss then you are likely to get fired.
My question is why do good developers, that are talented get laid off?
Because many good developers don't understand that there is a difference between "promoting their ideas" and "insubordination".
If you've got this great idea and you step on a lot of toes promoting it (going over people heads, ignoring others' valid objections (sure, your idea may be better, but if we use it, we'll never make our deadlines and we'll all look bad), or doing other things that make you difficult to work with), you probably are going to find yourself getting fired a lot.
In short, good developers don't get fired for being good developers--they get fired for acting unprofessionally.
The point of the article is that geeks tend to bury their heads in the code and don't notice the writing on the walls.
In US companies of any decent size, if the employee isn't doing anything illegal, he's going to be put on a Performance Improvement Plan, where he will specifically be told what his deficiencies are, what specifically he needs to accomplish to get off of PIP, and by when. If the goals of the PIP aren't met by the deadline set in the PIP, he will be terminated for cause.
Geeks tend to have an overinflated sense of self and don't think they will ever actually be fired, PIP or not. Then they find out they are wrong and bitch about it.
The essential implication seems to be that your longevity in employment has absolutely nothing to do with your actual work. Rather, it has everything to do with someone else's perception of you, and said perception doesn't necessarily need to have any honest or factual relationship with your work output whatsoever.
Why is this so surprising? If the person signing your paychecks doesn't appreciate the value you are providing him, then that person is right to wonder why he's continuing to pay you. Part of your job is to ensure that your (busy) employer understands the value that you provide. "Bragging" was a bad choice of words. Really, providing a weekly status report (what you worked on, milestones you reached, what you plan to work on next week, and roadblocks that you face) to your manager is more than sufficient.
If your boss's boss asks your boss, "Hey what does petrus4 do around here, anyway?", you want you boss to have a good answer right on the tip of his tongue. Something along the lines of, "Well, he's been working on X, and he's just completed Y, etc." If your boss's answer is, "Gee, I'm really not sure. Let me go ask him," that isn't good for your career.
Don't make your boss hunt you down for what you're working on. That's how I read that "bragging" recommendation.
I'd be interested to hear your manager's side of the story. I've never seen anybody get fired for pointing out a security vulnerability. In fact, I used to point them out all the time.
One thing you might want to keep in mind is that what's important isn't always what you say, but the way you say it (and the forum in which it's said). I once nearly got fired for saying something that desperately need to be said--just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a nutshell, I headed up a tool-selection process, selected a tool, wrote up a report, only to have our choice overruled because the vendor was supposedly about to go out of business (they didn't, and this was about 10 years ago). Despite my protestations to my immediate management layer, I was asked to cobble together a demo of the inferior tool, in what turned out to be a dry-run for a client-facing demo (but nobody bothered to tell me that higher purpose).
During the demo, higher-ups were grilling me on why the tool couldn't do what it needed to do, and finally I got sick and tired of defending the inferior tool and I just lost it. I finally had everyone's attention, and I emitted a painfully detailed explanation, replete with 4-letter-words, of why their chosen solution was inferior and would never meet the project requirements. Toes were stepped on, egos were bruised, and I spared no one. If the client had been there (not that I would have ever done this in front of the client, but how could management know this?), my firm would have lost millions of dollars.
It's a miracle I wasn't fired for that little stunt. I was spared only because they had nobody who could replace me on their tight timelines. Those managers never trusted me again after that.
So my point is it's not that you need to know when to duck. It's that you need to know how to state your case, when to state your case, and to whom to state your case. Furthermore, you need to understand when rank is being pulled on you, and when your helpfullness crosses the line into insubordination.
If you look at your situation impartially, can you objectively claim that you followed the above rules about stating your case? Or did you conduct yourself unprofessionally as I did during that demo?
OK, sure. We all know how many minutes there are in a day... But how many gigabytes are in a month?
5GB/month is a reasonable amount of data per month for most people given the current bandwidth of the device. Assuming you got half (ha!) the bandwidth a 3G network is supposed to provide (2Mbit/s, so half would be 1Mbit/s or possibly as much as 500kbyte/s, you'd be talking about a half an hour per day of solid usage (like downloading).
Anecdotally, I can say that many people in the forums use their Palm Pres to listen to a LOT of Pandora radio, and they have not once been harassed by Sprint, despite going way over their 5GB "limit". Obviously Sprint would be within their TOS to put the kibosh on that, but so far, nobody has heard a peep out of Sprint.
Personally, I use my Palm Pre for tethering and my wife watches Hulu streams over the EvDO connection. This usage runs completely contrary to the TOS that I agreed to (the tethering bit), but again, I have not heard a word from Sprint about this blatantly unauthorized usage.
The working definition of "unlimited" that I've always used in this context is, "as long as you are using the service in remotely the way you agreed you would use it, the service provider won't give you any flak." If, on the other hand, I decided to saturate my connection 24/7 with bittorrent swarms, I would expect to have my service terminated.
Root access is allowed on the Pre, too. Palm has conveniently published instructions on their website for how to obtain a root prompt.