| last updated:06 Aug 2003 14:47 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 13 Apr 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Unemployed how long? | Sun 13 Apr | John Evans |
| I have finally found a position after 7 months of unemployment, that too abroad.Anybody out there unemployed for more than 6 months?What do you do when EI checks dry out? |
| Sun 13 Apr | Mike Swieton | If you don't have the money to pay the bills, either reduce the bills or get a job. Even if you're flipping burgers, you'll be able to eat. I know families where both kids are in high school and working full time to support the family because one or both parents won't get a job. If you can afford to be picky in what job you take, fine: wait for the opportunity. But when it gets down to the line and you need money, take what you can get, or go to where the gettin's better. If you're in desperate straits and need a job, you have no excuse for not finding one within a month. Maybe this is different where you're at, but in moderately sized cities in the U.S., I've never seen anyone have a problem finding a job who wanted one. Don't get be wrong: I understand where you're coming from: you are a developer and want a dev position. But if that's not there and you can't pay your rent, go do merchandising on the 3rd shift at Toys 'r Us, or be the fry-boy at the local McDonald's. Within those 7 months, if you had really needed it, you should have gotten a job. That's what you do when the unemployment stops coming. |
| No Telepones | Sun 13 Apr | Nat Ersoz |
| From the Google article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/technology/13GOOG.html?pagewanted=all&position=top Recently, Mr. Page, a 30-year-old software designer, sought to declare the companys newest office building off-limits to telephones, under the belief that it would improve programmer productivity. I love the idea. I enjoy (contrary to many here on JoS) working in Cube-space and XP like open environments. But one thing I hate is people talking on phones. I can ignore everything else, but not a phone conversation. It also seems to me that most phone conversations are not work related. Software development environments. No phones. Would it work? |
| Sun 13 Apr | Nat Ersoz | One note: I (try to) take personal call on my cell phone, so I can walk outside and talk as loud and obnoxiously as I want without annoying the hell out of everyone else (in the office). |
| Sun 13 Apr | Geoff Bennett | A place I worked at a few years ago had a policy where developers weren't allowed near phones. We had our own shared (between 2/3 devs) offices, and they actually had phones in them, but we weren't allowed to answer them, and no customers could talk directly to a developer unless the developer initiated the contact. They had a decent support team and sales team, and they figured there were enough people there to handle it. It actually felt pretty good. Nothing to interrupt you when you hit the zone. |
| "80/20" Rule | Sun 13 Apr | Chi Lambda |
| In an article[1] at the New York Times (that was mentioned at Slashdot) it was written that Yahoo! is trying to regain its stature lost to Google. Among other things, theyre going to cut down on the graphical advertising and focus on returning search results more in tune with their web services. As you are probably aware, Google is very spartan; almost no graphics, their ads are text-based and their search results are consistently rated the most relevant. That, along with a number of beta technologies from their labs make them a strong presense indeed. In fact, Joel once said[2]: A lot of software developers are seduced by the old 80/20 rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, its never the same 20%. Heres the thing: I believe Google figured out the 20%! My God, can you think of anyone else who acheived this? This is the Holy Grail of programming; its no wonder Google is #1. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/technology/07YAHO.html?ex=1050292800&en=821ae8a3ad2b7af3&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE [2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html [3] This was originally posted at my site but I wanted to see what you guys think. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Andres | Actually, I think Google figured out the 100%, people go to search engines to search for something, not to look at ads. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Wei | that's a pretty thing to figure out... just do a survey of just about anybody who uses search engines. i wonder how much advertising revenue they do get though. =) |
| Sun 13 Apr | Jeff MacDonald | I once did some research for a client on 'preferred placement'. Costs are either $5,000 or $10,000 per month for Premium Sponsorship and/or AdWords. http://www.google.com/ads/overview.html Jeff |
| Sun 13 Apr | Stephen Jones | They offer 'five times the industry standard for click through rates'. Five times almost zero isn't a great deal. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Nat Ersoz | I think Google has figured out something simple: 'people don't like being bullshitted'. It truly is as simple as that. When I search google, I get: 1. The most unbiased search engine available. 2. I get very useful results. 3. I don't get flashing banners, annoying popups, etc. 4. I can view power point, PDF, Word, etc. as HTML if I don't feel like incurring the app startup time to preview the link. The other search engines would be (almost) as attractive as Google if they merely cut out the BS. Software has a huge 'Bullshit Attractor Factor'. Layer upon layer of thick oozing excrement from a Bull with scurvy. The disturbed state of search pages (outside of Google) are the residue of an industry awash in the unholy cowpie. The fact that they haven't figured out that no one wants to be within 10 miles of their barn is only remarkable. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Prakash S | Teoma is pretty good too, the 7 odd times I used it. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Kyralessa | Stephen, Before you say that, you should read the NYTimes article referenced in the 'No telepones' [sic] thread. Apparently the conventional wisdom, that nobody ever clicks on those things, is wrong. |
| Leaving open communication standards behind | Sat 12 Apr | Emmet Jackson |
| I am faced with an application server project where the request rate will measure in the thousands per second. In house, we own the implementations of both the client and the server. This leaves us free to choose a custom proprietary set up if we so choose. I see the throughput and lack of latency requirements leading towards a communications stack with: 1. Persistent, open socket connections that get re-used. 2. A fast protocol 3. A fast binary message body encoding scheme. We have the engineering talent in house to do this. No doubts there. Still, however, I am getting questions from IT and higher up the chain that cant believe we cannot build another J2EE app to do this. I dont see HTTP, JMS, EJB, XML parsing etc meeting our requirements. I see these technolgies as well suited for interoperability but I own both ends of this pipe. If interoperability with outside organizations becomes a new requirement then we will build simple servlets to encode the app server responses in XML. Has anyone else out there experienced this evolution away from some of the open communication standards as a business and application evolves over time? At some point I see that a successful technology based company will have enough engineering talent in house and the funding to make some customization cost effective. |
| Sat 12 Apr | valraven | Do you plan on meeting the requirements with one server or many? If many and a load balancing approach you probably can meet your requirements and use more off the shelf. Another thing is to look at the requirements honestly and see what they really are. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Eric Kidd | Also note that modern servers are extremely fast, and you can often get away with insane request rates using inefficient protocols. I benchmarked the parser/serializer in xmlrpc-c (a C library for processing XML-RPC messages) at well over 1,000 calls/second on a 233MHz server. A good Java implementation on a modern server could probably do even better. In many applications, the biggest bottleneck is round-trip latency; this can reach 0.5 seconds over the Internet backbone. If you design to minimize round trips, you're doing pretty well. Once you've fixed any latency problems, and bought a big enough server, XML often becomes the next bottleneck (especially if you have enormous numbers of clients and limited bandwidth). XML eats bandwidth, and takes some extra work to parse. You can reduce bandwith and parsing time with a dense, easy-to-parse text format (take a look at Scheme's s-expressions; these are pretty flexible and stupidly easy to parse). Don't go to binary formats unless you've (a) got a good library to implement or (b) every other possibility fails. Try hacking together some spike solutions using your regular J2EE tools, and measuring the performance. You might discover that you don't need to do anything special. If you do discover bottlenecks, you've got evidence to take to management. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | At a job I worked at, we did financial transactions using XML, and handled a whole hell of a lot of them per second. +1 for the biggest bottleneck likely being the pipe, not the XML parser (especially if you use a fast, forward-only parser). |
| Sun 13 Apr | Mike Swieton | It doesn't matter. Just make sure you can change it. Isolate the transmition level on both sides and gather data BEFORE writing custom, bandwidth-/speed-tuned code. You can get great speed custom-writing and tuning every message, but why bother if alphabet soup will get the job done? Hell, go write it in asm... I'd suggest doing the least work you can to make it function. It shouldn't take long to change well-factored code if it proves too slow. See what the priority is: it *functions* now, or *functions perfectly* in a month (or whatever). That may make your decision for you. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Jim Lyon | Large TPC-C benchmarks routinely turn in hundreds of thousands of TPM-C (transactions per minute), using HTTP with HTML output. By the time you strip away the benchmark fog, this often comes out at 10,000 transactions per second or more. So, it *can* be done with standard protocol and tools. Before deciding that your situation is differnet, I would build a performance prototype: a driver that sends nonsensical requests of about the complexity that you envisage, and a server that does about the right amount of application work, then sends a nonsensical reply of the right complexity. Only try nonstandard protocols if the above won't perform satisfactorily. Understanding which parts of the above don't perform will be key in deciding where to depart from standards. |
| Non Stop Coding - How Many Hours ? | Sat 12 Apr | Tarek demiati@ureach.com |
| How many hours (days?) can sit behind a desk programming. With the usual toilets/eating breaks ;-) As far as I am concerned right now I stick to 8-10 hours a day. But Im usually burned out after 16 hours. Ive just heard stories/rumors when a few people can manage to cut high quality code for 48 hours in a row. - As a teenager I was able to stick 48 hours in a row behind my Commdore 64 hacking in assembler 6502 but it was by no means production code. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Stephen | I'm burned out after arouned 6 non-stop hours |
| Sat 12 Apr | Eric Kidd | I can do 5 6-hour days/week for an extended period of time without burning out (the other 10+ hours are for talking to users, the boss, etc). This is at top productivity. I can work more hours, but my total number of features completed goes down slightly if I do it for too long. When I'm really going full speed, and I'm working on a fascinating problem, I've been able to write good code for 23+ hours straight, but them I'm useless for the next several days. But it's great way to solve some really hairy problems; there's no need to 'save' complex mental state. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Tarek demiati@ureach.com | There is a nice book called 'Programmers at Work' from Susan Lammers. Where some of the hot shot developers of the 80's, just to name a few : Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Gary Kildalll, Butler Lamspon ... Tell a bit about their programming philosophy and habits. I would have love to see similar book but where the interviews are conducted in much more deptht, maybe Susan was not a programmer that's why she did not go into the details, also I'm not too sure if there's a market for such a book ... |
| Hiring Friends or Family. | Sat 12 Apr | Prakash S |
| A few people that own or run a business, I spoke to as a rule never hire friends/ family. OTOH: I have seen quite a few companies started by brothers/ family members. Is this even an issue - or just go ahead and hire the best person for the job. Would you guys hire or not hire friends or family for a.) the company you work for/ b.) your own business whenever u start one? |
| Sat 12 Apr | IVR | Well, my father's company has mostly family members in the executive level. He did have a lot of problems when he first started, and fired many of them, including brothers. But now it is pretty much stabilized and runs smoothly. I personally think family companies are great when the proper care is taken. When I go visit them I always feel a nice warmth. And although I've seen some discussions here and there (mostly due to misunderstandings), it always gets resolved pretty well. Even the coworkers that aren't family feel like they are. Everyone loves working there. It's a great place indeed. Then again, I've seen some family companies being rip apart by greed, envy, lack of vision, etc. In my company, my partner is my cousin, and we're doing great so far. I would definitely like to hire family, specially for key positions, because when you know them enough, they're the best people you can trust on, IMHO. Dysfunctional families are other issue... In my most personal thinking, I believe a family business can do much better than a 'normal' one. |
| Sat 12 Apr | aa | I strongly feel that you shouldn't hire friends of family. It's just an emotional minefield. While in biz I've partnered with one friend and hired three, and it's only worked out one time. Then again, I might be hard to work for/with, but I don't think that's it. I think it's just a whole lot of extra problems that you don't need. It's also harder for other employees, who may or may not feel there's favouratism going on. There may not be, but why have to worry over it... If you do go ahead, make sure EVERYTHING is spelled out in advance and on paper. What if you leave? What if they leave? What are their expectations? Responsibilities? Etc. One thing I can assure you - your friendship will probably never be the same. It's sorta like a relationship with a friend. You have to be willing to give up the friendship, and you probably will. |
| Sat 12 Apr | | It's fine unless you want to let the company grow beyond the family - in which case, the newcomers will be resentful, guaranteed. But if you want to stay small, go for it, and more power to you - more companies should realise that the 'right size' is where they are - and if that is small, so be it. |
| Sat 12 Apr | HeWhoMustBeConfused | DON'T DO IT!! Never hire relatives. Never hire friends. Never hire relatives of friends. I've done all three, had nothing but problems as a result, and will NEVER do it again. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Prakash S | Never hire relatives of friends, I missed that one - equally important. thanks. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Angus Glashier | My brother and I haved worked together for nearly three years now and it's turned out fine. Of course, we had to come up with a special working arrangement: I work in Sydney and he works in London. Always have at least one planet between you and your manager. |
| Outrageous Suggestion | Sat 12 Apr | Dennis Atkins |
| To create a wildly successful company out of nothing, one should hire brilliant, passionate people, and pay them extremely well. This is how Apple, HP and Microsoft all became successful. There is another method that is frequently proposed - to hire whoever will accept low salaries and poor working conditions. these companies do not become successful, although this method has been used to stabilize many companies that were plagued by excess success. A corallary to this is that any companies paying below the 75% percentile on salaries is not a company where there is either opportunity or bright coworkers. |
| Sat 12 Apr | www.marktaw.com | Unless that company is hiring outside of it's core competencies... Some of the largest companies in the world hire mediocre *somebodies* for some jobs. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Prakash S | Dennis, what is your source in saying this? |
| Sat 12 Apr | Matthew Lock | If you accept a more liberal definition of 'pay' to include stock options in lew of salary then I think the original statement is correct. That's what MS did for quite a while. |
| Sat 12 Apr | John McQuilling | I thought Apple, HP and Microsoft were founded by brilliant passionate people who worked very hard at first but did not have a lot of money. It was after they took off that they could pay more to keep the companies growing. I don't know about HP but both Apple and Microsoft owe a lot of their success to outside events. Visicalc made the Apple II a useful tool for accounting which brought in large sales to the accounting firms. Microsoft was a modest success selling Basic until IBM asked them to build the OS for the PC. The Dot Com's tried the idea of big salaries and bright people and it did not work too well. |
| Sat 12 Apr | . | Dot coms were actually a good example of the OP's point. Dot coms were generally attempts by non-developers to cash in on capabilities of technology, and those non-developers made heaps more than the developers in just about every case. It's trendy to snipe at Microsoft now, but you don't change the world by being dunces. They hired the best and understood software engineering and development. On a personal level, I've seen the cheap-staff effect at work in several companies I'm familiar with. One lost $6 million, one went bankrupt and the other is on the way. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | 'I thought Apple, HP and Microsoft were founded by brilliant passionate people who worked very hard at first but did not have a lot of money.' They were started by a few extremely brilliant hardworking poeple, but would not have reached multibillion dollar size without consistently hiring above-average developers. Still, nontechnical companies can manage to survive with crappy IT departments. There are Fortune 500 companies with software managers who don't know what version control is and programmers who don't know what recursion is. They'll still waste millions due to their reluctance to pay for good developers, but the sheer bulk of the rest of their core business still enables them to make money. It still amazes me that most corporations cannot wake up to the fact that they could actually save money by paying 80% above average to attract a developer who can do the work of 5-10 average developers. |
| Sat 12 Apr | A Software Build Guy | Any successful company has got a leader with a Passion for a vision, drive to get their goal, understanding of how to get to their goal and the ablity to see and take advantage of an oppertuity. Bill Gates realized when IBM asked him for compilers for IBM's new PC he had a great oppertuity. Then when Digital Research seem to refuse tosell IBM CP/M 8086 Bill found an bought a company that made a CP/M rip off (QDOS) renamed it and MSDOS and the rest is history. It was his drive and vision that made MS what it is today, for better or worst. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Pseudo Nym | Microsoft's pay scale is actually designed to pay at the 65th percentile for salaries. In fact, until a couple of years ago they paid at the 50th percentile. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Stephen Jones | Microsoft work on the principle of giving equity. Also there is the value of the kudos. A large number of MS programmers are in agency placements who receive no health care or benefits. This caused considerable ill-feeling. Paying the best and brightest well started well before the dotcom boom. Think, HP, Xerox, Intel to just name three. The whole of the boom in computer hardware was based on the fact that it was the engineers who got control of the company. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Dennis Atkins | Right, -> Cheap staff is no bargain if you are intending to create a great company with great products that is to become profitable. -> Dotcoms did not hire passionate competant people, which should be oxbvious from looking at the low quality of dotcom products (nonexistant product=low quality) and thorough mismanagement and squandering of funds on idiotic superbowl ads, lear jets and snazzy office buildings. Their purpose was not to create a successful profitable company with desirable products, but to get rich off an IPO and then cash out. -> MS pay is low now and they are no longer a high growth company. This emminently proves my point. I am talking about creating a great company. Once a company becomes an elephant, it is hard to kill no matter how it is managed. As it is, MS DOES pay well for critical products where they are trying to take over the market, like with the xbox group, showing they understand this principle only too well. The low pay employees at MS are teh ones who are working on unimportant products. (unimportant = Ms already owns 75% or more this market segment and there is no room left for growth). |
| Sat 12 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | The dot-com phenomenon was not necessarily as tidy as you think it was. In most of the dot-coms I knew of, including the one I was involved in, the people trying to get in, get rich, and get out were the investors (typically VCs), and not necessarily the engineers and mid-management, who as often as not got screwed when the VCs came in with their money. High growth, too, was an off-shoot of VC demands, and it was inevitable that you'd hire bad people when you have to fill 50 seats in 6 months. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Dennis Atkins | Brad, My recollection was that the engineers and management were just as caught up in the get rich *hysteria* as the VCs. I got phone calls from everyone I knew at one time or another either bragging about their good fortune or begging me to go work for their place because it was a sure thing everyone was going to be a billionaire. Admist all the hysteria what was lacking is any common sense about developing products or services anyone really wanted, or designing them in any fashion other than throwing junk together as quickly as possible in time for a superbowl ad or a comdex convention. Maybe there were good developers working for some of those companies but with few exceptions, they failed to use their alleged talents to create anything worthwhile. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | There's a lot that happens when an organization goes from 5 developers to 50. It's not simply a matter of some great engineer telling everyone to screw off while (s)he does all the work. It just doesn't happen. The good engineers at our company were buried in process and mentoring. When you have to deliver an enterprise level software package in 9 months starting with nothing and nobody, you might as well just go home. I don't think a lot of people realized this until they went through it the first time. I know I'll never do it again. |
| Sat 12 Apr | aa | Why does pay have so much to do with it? What about startups that are great places to work, but don't pay oodles of money? The impression I get from this forum is that money talks, and little else. What about a peopleware workplace that doesn't pay so much? If I had to try to explain why everyone seems so money-driven, it'd be that money is a measure of whether or not you're valued, respected and treated right. Is that the case? Or perhaps it's, 'if this industry sucks and you're gonna treat me like shit, you better pay me a lot to put up with it.' In any case, I believe companies can be built without paying big bucks. It doesn't mean you don't care about people, it might mean you just don't have a lot of money. In general, one reason people don't like taking low-paying jobs is that they think the owner is taking home all the money and taking advantage of them. Solution: Open books. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | You can build a successful company by having yourself and your partners taking little or no salary until things get off the ground. But when it comes to hiring people, 99.9% of the time the employees aren't going to get any benefit from such a sacrifice. If it succeeds, they don't own enough of a slice of the company to pay back for the lost time and foregone income. And if it fails, which it usually will if you are so starved for cash, they have nothing. To even consider joining at that salary, the original poster should be getting at least a 10% ownership in the company. If they aren't willing to offer that, they are just looking for suckers to exploit. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | Oops, wrong thread ... I thought I was responding to the $1000/month salary thread. Still, most of what I said holds true - there has to be an offer of ownership in the company to compensate for the subpar wages. Not as high as 10% ownership if the salary is only slightly below average, but enough stock so the employee can really share in the company's future success (if it happens). |
| Sun 13 Apr | Bored Bystander | T. Norman - excellent points. But to that I would add: it's entirely possible to build a profitable company by hiring those occasional prodigies who are very very good, yet are too young and/or inexperienced to know that they are being exploited, and then manipulate them into working like dogs for a 'cause'. It requires lack of decency and ethics, but it can be done. So I think it's a mistake to assume that a supranaturally low pay rate indicates no expectation of talent. In THIS industry, it's entirely likely that the $1000/mo startup is looking for an undiscovered Bjarne Stroustroup who doesn't have the self esteem to move out of his parent's basement. I think the $12K/yr startup owners are betting on exactly that dynamic. If anon turns down the offer, they will hold out for the super cheap, super naive, superb, and super docile developer. And there are, surprisingly, a LOT more of them around than one would think.... not tons, but a perhaps 1/2 dozen per city in most 1 million pop. and up metro areas in the US. |
| XHTML, CSS and valid web pages | Fri 11 Apr | Charles Reich |
| Not to start a religious debate... But I understood that the reason to use xhtml and css was to insure that your websites would be compatible for future versions of compliant browsers. do most people agree with this, or do they think xhtml is more of a waste of time. |
| Fri 11 Apr | flamebait sr. | XHTML's big advantage is that it's completely regular form of HTML that you can feed into an XML parser. In theory, they might make an XHTML-only browser, but I suspect that as long as you stick to the HTML standard, you will be fine. I've been moving over to XHTML because I've moved my static web content generation to XML+XSLT. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Matthew Lock | I don't worry too much about valid HTML. No company would dare make a web browser which will not reneder older style HTML correctly, it would break too many pages. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | You can have strict interpretation of HTML without requiring that it be turned into XML. The SOLE purpose for making XHTML is so it can be consumed by an XML parser. This doesn't do jack for browsers or end users, because browsers have to support HTML as tag soup. So emitting XHTML is a rather pointless task. Now, observing HTML 4.01 Strict, the HTML DOM, and CSS... those are very good ideas. Nailing down the interpretation is a very sizeable leap forward in browser independent presentation and code. It's even doubly valuable to remove layout from data, no only for maintenance, but also because it opens up whole classes of non-traditional browsers that old style HTML was mostly terrible with (mobile devices, aural browsers for blind people, etc.). |
| Fri 11 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | Oh, and XSL-T transforms can output traditional HTML. They don't have to emit XHTML. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Chris | I second Brad's remarks. See also http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml , which discusses the issue at some length. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Chris Nahr | FWIW, Ian Hickson is wrong when he says that the syntax would produce an extra > in HTML. I use it regularly (for XML compatibility), and the W3C validation service (*) says it's perfectly valid HTML 4.01 Transitional, as per my document declaration. I've also never seen a browser produce that extra '>' character claimed by Hickson. I seem to recall that the empty tag syntax was made legal in the HTML 4 or 4.01 standard, so as to allow valid XML content. Really old browsers might have a problem with it. Otherwise I agree with Hickson, browsers that understand correctly declared XHTML are too rare to bother with this format right now. Just use XML to create content, and XSLTs to create HTML 4.01 from that. Then it's easy to make the switch when XHTML does become common. (*) http://validator.w3.org/ |
| Sun 13 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | Just because the browsers render it as you expect, doesn't mean it's legal. He does even make the point that it's exploiting a bug in the browsers wherein their shouldn't render it. Besides, it's showing that browsers can't handle real XML, wherein [br/] would be legal, but browsers are only buggy enough to accept [br /]. You can see it's obviously exploiting a common parsing bug. |
| Professionals .... bah | Fri 11 Apr | tapiwa |
| Having just paid close to 100k in legal fees, I say shoot the lawyers. My problem with the legal profession is almost that it exists to ensure that the legal profession exists. The law, by definition should be simple (ignorance of the law is no defence). Similarly, it should not be exclusive (anyone should be able to decide what level of legal representation they want even if it is my Uncle Guber). The law however, says that to have your day in court, you need a lawyer.... GUARANTEED DEMAND. In certain courts, you need certain types of lawyers (who cost even more). The only folk that determine who can become a lawyer (read how many qualify) are other lawyers... LIMITED SUPPLY. Most politicians are lawyers, so the folk writing the laws have a vested interest to ensure the need for legal professionals. The exact same scenario with accountants. The law says that every company needs to have its books signed off by a Chartered Accountant... again DEMAND GUARANTEED by LEGAL STATUTE. The folk who determine who qualifies as an accountant are existing accountants.... Before you talk about the level of professionalism in either industry, I just want to make a couple of points. 1. If the value in the services was self evident, they would not need protection through legal statutes. eg. As an investor, I might not invest in a company that did not have its books audited by a big five firm. MY decision!! If a business thought there was value to be derived from association with a Chartered Accounting firm, they would do so without prodding from the law. 2. Enron anyone?? There was an article in the FT not too long ago about one of the big international legal firms padding their billing to clients. These are the big ones that the press pick up on... A lot of small firms and small folk getting shafted daily. 3. I am not convinced that accreditation by these bodies is all that. What would you rather have freshly minted MSCE or someone with 3 years on the job. Read Next: The future just happened, by Michael Lewis http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393323528/qid=1050059977/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/103-0280361-3040607 and I quote ... Markus, a bored adolescent stuck in a dusty desert town and too young to even drive, becomes the most-requested legal expert on Askme.com, doling out advice on everything from how to plead to murder charges to how much an Illinois resident can profit from illegal gains before being charged with fraud Given my issues with all these closed shops (ahem industry bodies), and protectionist cries how can I then condone certain sentiments expressed on this forum like do not export our jobs to India ..... we are so much better than Indian coders ... we need to form a Developers Union ? True professionals do not need the law to coerce people to use their services or products. The value of their service is self evident to those who use it. Some food for thought.... ON why they exist It has become fashionable in some quarters to argue that women ought to be able to make such [breast implant] decisions on their own. If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions about the entire range of products for which the FDA has responsibility, however, then the whole rationale for the agency would cease to exist. -- FDA head David Kessler, New England Journal of Medicine, quoted in the Wall Street Journal 6/24/92 ON govt thinking for us But Lisa, thats why we have government officials, so we dont have to think. -- Homer Simpson |
| Fri 11 Apr | | Yeah, having no standard accounting practices would do wonders for the market. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Mike Gamerland | Wow, it must have been one bad day in court. IANAL, and you have some valid points. Enron did show the system can fail. However in the absence of making certain they do not, what alternative would we have. You said, 'an investor, I might not invest in a company that did not have its books audited by a big five firm. ' What is my recourse if they just 'say' they did? On David Kessler's comments, his point is slightly out of context. We are empowered to make decisions, however we need someone with near unlimited resources to ensure we get the proper information to make them. If you owned a Pinto, or a Ford Explorer and legal options were not available what incentive would exist for a company to correct the issue? While it might be 'they may not sell more cars' who is to say? It may be they pay the 200 people killed and require a non-disclosure. What about those of us who own them and still haven't been killed? The issue you touch on is merely a symptom of our problem past. Many of these were put in place to protect us from people who did real damage. Some were put in for really dumb reasons, no doubt. Which side of the line depends on your point of view on the issue. |
| Fri 11 Apr | tapiwa | The lack of standard accounting practices should not in itself be a reason for Govt to mandate them. Industry bodies would establish their own. Do you recall the ISO9000 craze a little while back?? Hotel rating?? (5 stars anyone?) Michelin rating for restuarants?? All I am saying is that I do not want anyone dictating what I can or cannot do, even if it is supposedly for my own good. Recommend something. Highlight the dangers inherent in others, but do not make it illegal for me to disagree with you. If someone says their books are audited by the big five, and they are lying, then that is fraud aka theft. Then you have legal recourse. But to force everyone to use the same standard is silly. It almost says that this is as good as it gets, and that any other competing standard is sub-standard. :) Consumers vote with their $$ when not compelled to use one product by the law. People talk of the technical merits of Betamax..... Should the govt have mandated that as the standard instead of VHS, which (for reasons I will not go into here) was a commercial success. Would we have been happier then? Extend this argument to the EU directives on banana's (what curveture and size can be imported into the EU) on the one extreme, accounting standards on the other. The govt does know better than Tapiwa, what is good for Tapiwa. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Joel Spolsky | The worst thing about lawyers is that they create spiraling demand for other lawyers (because the poor shmucks they sue need to hire lawyers, too). |
| Fri 11 Apr | GiorgioG | Maybe the Indian gov't should open a U.S. law school in Bangalore ;-) |
| Fri 11 Apr | | Tapiwa, the point is that - at the serious study and work level - everyone is protected except software developers. If we're going to have global competition, let's do it for everyone, including the people who get extra bonuses by sacking their software developers. Let's remove all borders so that Mr CEO has to sit in traffic jams for three hours and knows his house could be raided by armed gangs. That's equality. |
| Fri 11 Apr | David Clayworth | The reason there are mandated standards for these things is make life easier for the non experts. If every company could audit their figures any way they wanted, everyone would. Maybe a 'de facto' standard would emerge, but maybe it wouldn't. And without any legal backing anybody could say they followed the standards when they didn't. Or maybe they say they follow their own standards, which are just as good as the industry ones. But to check that that is really true you would need an accountant, and how to you know that the accountant is any good? The big difference this would make to us is that no small investor would ever invest in a company, because the risk would be too high. Doctors is another good example. Do you really want a situation where anybody can set themselves up as a doctor, and the only way you can find out if they know anything is by doing extensive research into their background. On another topic, where are you required to have a lawyer to get your day in court? In Canada and the UK I believe everybody has the right to defend themselves if they want (and I have a personal example of someone doing just that against a serious charge) |
| Fri 11 Apr | Stephen Jones | 100k legal fiees are quite common in civil cases in the UK. There are numerous cases of a houseowner taking a nuisance case out against the neighbour and one or both parties losing their house at the end of the process to pay the lawyers fees. This doesn't happen anywhere else in Europe, but the ant-Europe lobby, to which tapiwa so clearly belongs, consider this, like unsafe convictions and deaths in custody to be one of the defining glories of the Anglo-Saxon legal system. An acquaintance of mine had a court case in Barcelona he had inherited, and asked me to translatate to his lawyer over the phone. He was amazed to find that the lawyers fees for taking the appeal to the Supreme Court (in Spain almost all cases go to appeal as a matter of course) was around one thousand pounds sterling all inclusive! The main reasons that civil legislation in the UK is a mnefield are firstly the fact that you are normally obliged to pay the loser's costs, so that even if you can afford to handle the case yourself, and most cases can be taken as far as the Lords by a reasonably intelligent layman (look at the McLibel case for example), you are still facing financial ruin if you lose. The second fact is the stupidity of Anglo-Saxon Common Law which gives the most importance in any decision to judicial precedence. That means you can have a clearly won case but if the other side can come up with a decision based on a case from an entirely diferent field of law two hundred years ago, then you had better be able to answer it or the rest of your case won't be taken into account. This is why junior lawyers at big firms in the States spend 12 hour days looking up case law in the libraries for the big corporate clients. You won't get anywhere by mixing up the issues of legal malfeasance (overcharging clients is standard among all country and market-town solicitors) and having regulations in the first place. Definitions are particularly important where they effect the distribution of public money (in the case of bananas there is a special EU regime intnended to protect Carribean smallholders against competition by exploitative giants such as United Fruit), but are needed everywhere (if you work in drawing up software contracts you should know this). And do bear in mind that all European governments, including the French, Spanish and German, attempt to pass the blame for their own decisions on to Brussels or Strasbourg. |
| Fri 11 Apr | next question please.... | 'Industry bodies would establish their own' They have. The govt let's them establish what is acceptable. Google FASB, GAAP, et al. |
| Fri 11 Apr | choppy | 'Tapiwa, the point is that - at the serious study and work level - everyone is protected except software developers.' Any other form of engineering, any science, mathematics, and any humanities graduate has probably LESS job security than a software developer. And, there already IS global competition for executives. Yes, law is a self-policing profession...BUT unless you go to the right law school and make the right connections to get into the right law firm, and then bill 4000 hours a year to get a fat bonus, your salary is going to be LESS than that of a decent software developer. Medicine also is self policing, but again, unless you go to right school and become head of neurology, you are not going to be making astronomical sums. In fact, the best paid doctors are probably elective surgeons (plastic surgery) and dermatologists...and at that point, you are more of a businessman than a doctor anyway. The number of whiners in this industry is sometimes amusing, and sometimes annoying. You are basically being paid to goof off. And, this is one of the only industries where you can essentially make money out of thin air...the redistribution cost of software has become $0. Write a $30 game or shareware program and sell 2000 copies of it a year and you have an annual salary greater than 99% of the world's population. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Stephen Jones | Actually, lawyers and accountants (and to a lesser extent architects) are very vulnerable to losing much of their bread and butter work to the web. For example in the UK a solicitor normally pays the rent through conveyancing work, which he charges for at solicitor's rates but has done by lowly paid clerks. You can download packs from the web to do this; the same goes for tax returns and other basic accounting stuff. Now maybe I ought to bulid that house in Sri Lanka and then advertise my services over the web. $25 an hour for fillng in forms on the laptop by the swimming pool doesn't seem so bad! |
| Fri 11 Apr | Herbert Sitz | Lots of messages in this thread seem to assume that professional certification or accreditation is meant to protect the profession itself. This is wrong. Actually, the accreditation is intended to protect the consumers! I do say 'intended' because I'm not sure that it always works out that way. But in may cases I think it does. A few random thoughts: 1. Someone suggested accreditation in itself wasn't worth much: 'Would you rather hire an MCSE with no experience or someone without an MCSE with 3 years experience?' On that question I'm not so sure. But I'm pretty sure I'd hire an MCSE with 3 years experience over either of them. And it doesn't take a genius to know that you're better off hiring a lawyer with experience than a lawyer fresh out of law school. 2. Someone suggested that lawyers create a 'spiralling' need for other lawyers, because when one lawyer is hired the other side needs to hire a lawyer, too. I fail to see how this creates a true 'spiral', which would require a never-ending succession of legal-employements, one after another after another, all related to the initial hiring. Sure, the employment of one lawyer will often prompt an opposing party to hire one of their own (and there may even be lots of opposing parties who get dragged in), but there is no such thing as an unending spiral. All this is just related to the fact that law disputes are adversarial. Of course lawyers will often need to be employed in pairs, with representation for each side. 3. I don't believe there is any court in the U.S. where you are required to be represented by a lawyer. You can always represent yourself, and this goes for corporations as well as individuals. What you aren't allowed to do is to HIRE someone other than yourself (or an employee of your corporation) to represent you. If you are a corporation, though, you can hire a person as a permanent employee, and this person can provide legal services without being accredited (unless the person needs to appear in court, which is often not required for corporate counsel). Would anybody care to guess how many people hired for corporate in-house counsel are nonaccredited or haven't attended law school, even though corporations can hire anyone they want? 4. I don't have any numbers on this, but my guess is that among major professions law is near the top for professions where individuals who have received a degree and accreditation are no longer working within that profession. Lots of lawyers practice just a handful of years and leave for other jobs to run business, be teachers, program (I'm one of those), etc. If law were the boondoggle lots of you assume it to be, don't you think people would want to stay with it once they worked themselves into that privileged position? I could go on. All of this isn't to say there aren't problems with the legal profession. But I do think that many of the criticisms of it are misguided. |
| Fri 11 Apr | tapiwa | They have. The govt let's them establish what is acceptable. Google FASB, GAAP, et al. Herbet, next-question-please and others... My biggest criticism with these professions is not that they are closed shops.... anyone can and should do as they please, including the freedom to associate. What I have a problem with is govt regulation compelling me to use the services of XYZ in an matter especially a legal one. Accreditation is fine. There are a lot of competing computer qualifications. Still, there is no law stating that 'if you are running a server facing the public you should employ an MCSE'. That alone is my biggest gripe with the law. If someone hits me with a nuisance lawsuit, I want to be able to get Uncle Gruber, who is a retired comedian, spends his days in courtrooms listening to cases, and is probably more competent to argue my case than some £300 per hour QC. Unfortunately the law, in all its infinite wisdom, deems that this would be a BAD thing. |
| Fri 11 Apr | next question please.... | Sounds like your uncle should go to law school, or you should be looking to hire a better caliber of lawyer... |
| Fri 11 Apr | Stephen Jones | to the best of my knowlledge a solicitor can appear in all cases where a barrister was previously required. You still can't have a barrister without going through a soliicotor first though. One of the reasons for insisting on accreditation is to avoid too much of the court's time being wasted. Though it doesn't always work that way. My favourite time in court was when the employer took us all to the labour court to get the union elections overturned and his in-house 'lawyer' (who had just got his degree after 25 years of studying and had not yet joined the college and thus couldn't wear the toga) said to the judge who was tearing his case to pieces with some tactful prompting from myself and our lawyer, 'It isn't as easy as it seems, your worship'. 'No case is as easy as it seems,' the judge shot back. 'Next time get yourself an lawyer.' |
| Fri 11 Apr | T. Norman | 'If someone hits me with a nuisance lawsuit, I want to be able to get Uncle Gruber, who is a retired comedian, spends his days in courtrooms listening to cases, and is probably more competent to argue my case than some £300 per hour QC.' It's not that the law is stopping YOU from getting Uncle Gruber to represent you, but the prohibition is against Uncle Gruber offering legal services (although that essentially brings the same result). Without that regulation, there would be thousands of 'Uncle Grubers' around the place offering legal services to people and landing them in jail or bankrupt from lost lawsuits, after which they would move on to their next money-making scheme. Anyway, you could still represent yourself and have Uncle Gruber sit in court watching you, giving you advice between sessions (as long as he isn't getting paid to do it). |
| Fri 11 Apr | Frank Fellowes, III | That reminds me of 'General Contractors'. You know, the guys that build houses. These guys aren't regulated in my area, and all sorts of con men abound. To get a good one, you have to KNOW the references that they provide. If you're good, you can get a lot of business by word of mouth. If your a client though and you don't know anybody, it's a crap-shoot. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Herbert Sitz | tapiwa said, 'What I have a problem with is govt regulation compelling me to use the services of XYZ in an matter especially a legal one.' tapiwa -- Nobody's compelling you to use anybody's services. You can act as your own lawyer, or you can hire any accredited lawyer you want. If you have no money at all, in most U.S. cities you can find nonprofit organizations offering legal services for free. Because of the requirement of legal accreditation, you and everyone else can approach someone who holds themselves out as a lawyer and be confident that their service will meet at least some minimum standard of quality. That standard may not be terribly high. But it's far better than having no standard at all. At least that's the argument, and nothing you've said has anything to do with whether that argument is valid or not. You don't like the idea of requiring accreditation. That's fine, but unless you have evidence that consumers would be protected as well without it, then your feelings aren't worth much. Also, the need for accreditation has nothing to do with quality of legal services being 'self evident'. Actually, it's the exact opposite. Absent accreditation, it would not be self-evident to consumers what lawyers were capable of satisfying certain minimum standards of representation. With accreditation, it does become self-evident, i.e., all lawyers are certified as satisfying the minimal standard. By the way, there are lots of lawyers around. Why did you hire one who charged so much? I can virtually guarantee that if you shopped around you could have found one for less than half the cost. Would that have been a wise hire? Would eliminating the requirement of accreditation lower the hourly fees of the good lawyers? |
| Fri 11 Apr | T. Norman | 'Would eliminating the requirement of accreditation lower the hourly fees of the good lawyers?' I think it would decrease the fees of lawyers in general, but increase the fees of those who are good and known for being good ... because they would be overstocked with clients, while unknown lawyers (even if they are good) would have hell trying to attract clients at even $15/hour. |
| Fri 11 Apr | | May I suggest, tapiwa should consider visiting Iraq this spring - I hear the lawlessness is quite invigorating. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Hardware Guy | The Enron debacle is an argument for *less* regulation? Is today Upside-Down Day? |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | |
| Fri 11 Apr | choppy | ' If programmers as a group had any street smarts, H1B and offshoring vogue would not be the factors that they are today.' Well, the individual programmers with street smarts tend to make bank even when the market trend is against them, and let the herds of wanna-be teamsters whine about protectionism and professionalism. Joel seems to be moving in to new manhattan office space, doesn't he? |
| Fri 11 Apr | Herbert Sitz | With respect to reasons for professional accreditation, I don't see programming as very different from engineering, which is a controlled profession where certification is required. But I don't think salaries for engineers are much different from those for programmers. (Programming has a wider range of pay, though, I think: in general, I would say that low end programming jobs pay less than most low-end engineering jobs and high-end programming jobs pay more than most high-end engineering jobs.) The engineering career cycle seems very similar to that of programming: (1) initial salary out of school is decent, higher than almost any other bachelor's degree; (2) pay goes up fairly quickly but also reaches a ceiling fairly quickly; (3) people with more than a few years experience end up going into management to make more money. If professional accreditation requirements haven't given engineers the same salaries as doctors and lawyers, why would anyone think they would do that for programmers? I think requiring accreditation for programmers would protect consumers of programming services because it would guarantee a minimum competence level. And to some extent it would protect people with accreditation against losing out on jobs to people without accreditation who would otherwise be able to bamboozle employers or clients. But I'm not confident it would make a big difference in average salaries. |
| Fri 11 Apr | | Accreditation is actually something different from the protection that other professional groups have acquired for themselves. It's part of it, but not the whole picture. Engineering comprises several groups. Civil engineering does indeed require that people who build bridges know what they're doing, and for this reason that discipline forms into partnerships like law and accounting, and the partners do reasonably well. Another factor is that a lot of civil engineering jobs are in government, and this holds pay down a bit. Electrical engineers are actually suffering much the same downward pressures as software developers. Re representing people in court, which I mentioned in connection with the restrictions on practising law, I was referring to representing other people, not yourself. Compare software development with the law. In software, someone often with inadequate expertise briefs the developers and also tells them how long to take and everything else. The developers often suffer stress because of this and do a job they know is poor. In law, the lawyer tells you how long it will take and how much and makes sure you pay it. In software, a manager who doesn't like the salary or fees demanded by good people simply hires much cheaper people, generally with very little regard for expertise. Then when things go wrong, they slam software development. Here's an article about accountants writing software: http://www.cioinsight.com/print_article/0,3668,a=38859,00.asp |
| Sat 12 Apr | | Nothing will change until those who use software development services are legally required to meet certain minimum standards. This means banks and others will be legally required to use knowledgeable people to develop and protect their web systems and databases, and so on. At the moment, they can cause all sorts of damage, and then just throw their hands in the air. Note the important distinction - the legal requirements must be on those who USE the software development services, not those who provide them. The first will create the latter but without the first, good software developers will always be undercut by incompetents. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Dennis Atkins | How much innovation would you say there is in these regulated and certified industries like accounting and bridge building where things are sufficiently standardized to be able to test in the ways proposed? |
| Sat 12 Apr | Daniel Shchyokin | Hmmm... free people from all government restrictions, just listened to the french news, it seems to be working just fine in Iraq right now. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Taffy | Accreditation in law and medicine is just an excuse for a closed shop. A closed shop means high wages. In the UK the print industry was a closed shop until a few years ago. Only the very lucky and relatives of existing print workers got print jobs. Their wages even during recessions were at least 3 times the national average. Thatcher smashed that closed shop. Many of us wanted her to do the same to the doctors and lawyers but they were too powerful. Can you imagine what the wages of computer programmers would be if they decided how many new people each year could become computer programmers? |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | >'Accreditation in law and medicine is just an excuse for a closed shop.' Actually, it's the *lack* of accreditation in software that has now caused it to become a closed shop. A new college graduate probably has an easier time getting into medical school than being hired as a programmer. Think about it this way ... suppose they remove all the standards and restrictions for being a doctor, so anybody can call themselves a doctor and do surgery and diagnose people. The market floods with self-called doctors who read things like 'Teach Yourself Knee Surgery in 24 Hours'. For some number of years, patients have horrible experiences all over the place. Eventually, most patients refuse to go to a doctor unless they're vomiting blood. Hospitals lay off doctors and decide to hire only those who have at least 5 years experience and numerous references. Others only hire those who have experience in all of brain surgery, heart surgery, eye surgery, orthopedics, and dermatology. After all that has happened, a bright 22 year old arrives on the scene and wants to be a doctor. Do you think he/she will stand much of a chance of getting hired by a hospital or running a practice that attracts enough patients to earn a living? In such a scenario, the lack of accreditation causes the medical field to become MORE difficult for newcomers to enter. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | As I just explained, all high-paying professions eventually become closed shops with or without regulation by government or an industry body. The problem with the software industry is that it has become a closed shop with power on the side of the employers, as opposed to the regulated professions where the balance of power is somewhat in favor of the practitioners. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Johnny Simmson | Well done Bored Bystander! |
| Sat 12 Apr | | I disagree that all high-paying professions become closed shops of their own accord. Most efforts to regulate minimum standards come from existing professionals, and one strong reason is to stop competition from those who haven't invested the same time and effort in achieving certain capabilities. Society generally considers this OK. We do a deal with doctors. They do seven years study. We agree that, in return for being sure of having good doctors, we let them exclude untrained competition ( via legal statutes.) In the case of lawyers and accountants, the deal has swung too far in their favour, without return to society. Teachers and journalists have strong unions in most countries, and they represent another social contract. In software, there is no deal and so other people - businesses - profit from our years of expertise and work, and actually farm us, in a sense. That's what recruiting is. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | 'I disagree that all high-paying professions become closed shops of their own accord. ' They all ultimately become closed shops, but not always of their own accord. It could be society at large (without government intervention) that closes the doors to newcomers -- such as the doctors scenario described above in which people refuse to be treated by new doctors. Software has now become a closed shop, with the employers being the ones who slam the doors to keep newcomers out, instead of developers controlling the gates. Since there is going to be a closed shop anyway, we would be better off if developers were the ones controlling the door instead of mindless corporations and HR drones. |
| Sat 12 Apr | | If there were no restrictions on who practised medicine, this is what would have happened by now: 1. Non-medical businessmen would set up heavily marketed medical centres and hire cheap 1 and 2-year trained staff at bargain rates. If they occasionally needed a real doctor, they would be able to hire one cheaply. 2. Pharmaceutical companies would provide 10-week courses specific to their products, and heavily promote the worth of the resulting certification to hospitals and the managers of the medical centres. Completion of the courses would be denoted by heavily marketed 4-letter acronyms. 3. Large recruitment businesses would arise to find cheap staff for the medical centres. These recruitment businesses would market the pharmaceutical company courses to young people, and then place them in jobs afterwards. 4. Job ads for doctors would call for experience operating certain types of stethoscope and administering certain brands of anti-biotic. 5. Hospital financial officers would sack medical officers who questioned hospital medical policy, and business magazines would carry stories about uppity doctors. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Stephen Jones | British Medical Schools generally limit the number of doctors to many less than necessary. That is why the UK is always importing doctors from other countries, though it is also why British Medical Schools have a very high reputation. The basic problem with the law in Britain is that the system is intended to make it so outrageously expensive that as few people as possible go to court. It is actually quite easy in the UK to become a barrister or a solicitor - you do not need a law degree. Incidentally, I think you will find that the median computer science graduates salary is higher than that of the average law graduate in the US or Europe. It's simply that people only think of the high flyers. |
| Sat 12 Apr | | And, oh, I forgot: 6. Lots more people would become more sick or die because of lower quality health care and the inability to rely on the skills of their doctors. |
| Sat 12 Apr | T. Norman | And: 7. People would become very, very afraid to go to the doctor, which would drag down the number of employment opportunities for doctors, probably to even less than the limited opportunities that exist with official standards in place. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Taffy | The claim by Stephen Jones that anyone in the UK can become a solicitor or barrister is not quite true. To become a solicitor or barrister, regardless of what qualifications you have gained, you need to be taken on as a kind of apprentice by an existing solicitor or barrister. This is how our lawyers maintain their closed shop and restrict the number of people entering the legal profession. Doctors, Lawyers and Chartered Accountants all restrict the number of people entering their professions in order to keep their fees or wages high. I do not object to accreditation I object to the way it is being abused. In the UK there are only a few medical schools. Far more people would like to become doctors than there are places in these medical schools. All that is needed is to stop the BMA, the trade union of the British doctors, determining how many people should train as doctors. This could be done by opening private medical schools and allowing the number of doctors to be determined by the market. In the UK IT world accreditation is not very important. Many of the best IT consultants I have worked with had failed at university. They got work by showing what they could do rather than telling someone what they knew. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Al | I think there's a big difference between vendor certification and independent certification. Sort of like the difference between being a 'licensed professional civil engineer' vs. being certified in 'canam steel joist construction'. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Stephen Jones | Dear Taffu, I have never met anybody who wanted to become a barrister or solicirtor but was prevented from doing so by not finding a 'sponsor'. The problem with taking the bar exams is that they are incredibly difficult; you really need to have money saved up to pay for a year to eighteen months off in order to study for them. And the barristers who live off legal aid work are hardly better paid than code monkeys. Many solicitors are badly paid. The small firms are in general dependent on conveyancing and other property related work, and in the medium to large firms it all depends on your position in the hierarchy. A salaried solicitor will probably earn considerably less than a salaried programmer, whilst the senior partner can take skiing holidays in Switzerland and drive a Rolls, particularly if like one famous Bury solicitor he can persuade all the old dears whose wills he's executor for to leave him a nice juicy legacy. The situation with doctors is strange, since the consumer does not directly pay for health care. Certainly there are excellent reasons for increasing the number of medical places, though that would require Central Government funding, and the government may decide it is cheaper to plunder the products of Third World Medical Schools than train more native doctors, who may go off to the States anyway. Dentists is another thing, and a total scandal. Dental care is actually cheaper, and much more convenient, in countries where it is completely private than in the UK where it is nominally under the NHS. And let's not start with opticians! |
| Sun 13 Apr | | This is departing from the topic a bit, but as I mentioned, 'accreditation' is only a minor part of the way established professions protect themselves. However if we're going to mention it, then it's important to realise that accreditation would not necessarily be synonymous with university degrees, and in fact shouldn't be in software development. Other professions use this approach, but software is quite different. A useful accreditation scheme would probably be based on deep peer assessment, like the awarding of Ph D's. (Even though they're degrees, the process for obtaining and assessing them is different.) |
| Sun 13 Apr | David | Sounds to me like Tapiwa (and some others on this thread) has NO idea what it takes to become a lawyer and then practice law. They charge a lot of money because it's damn hard work to a) become a lawyer and b) to practice law. You think all law should be simple? Have you any idea what that means? Do you mean tort law? What about criminal law? Shipping law? Environmental law? Have you considered that each law is probably fairly simple, but there are thousands (millions?) of them, and each has a huge volume of case history shading its interpretation. I have an idea, go to your local university and buy yourself a 1200 page legal textbook on, say Corporations. Read that whole book and memorize it. Great! Now, you done some of the work of exactly 1 class in 1 semester of 1 year of law school. You're about 1/30 of the way there. Oh, and after that, you'll need to learn more to get that cheap accreditization you blather on about. ps. No, I'm not a lawyer, but I do sleep with one. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Bella | Tapiwa, I agree, the law seems to exist just to prepetuate itself. What a great racket. |
| Sun 13 Apr | T. Norman | Rather than being a 'closed shop' I think law is different in that it seeks to artificially expand the viable supply of lawyers. Of course, the difficulty and expense of law school and the bar exam has the effect of driving away many from the profession, but if anybody could call themselves a lawyer, people would rarely use lawyers. Lawyers love ambiguous and controversial laws like the DMCA, and will actively participate in helping to get them created. They are especially happy with the Patent Office's attitude of 'rubber stamp everything and let the courts sort it out.' And of course, many of the politicians who passed those laws were or still are lawyers. |
| Are Microsoft SQL's stored procedures standard? | Fri 11 Apr | Mike Grace |
| I am writing an app that I feel would be easier if I used stored procedures. My ideal SQL Server for this is MySql. However, it currently will not support stored procedures until version 5. If I develop the app using microsoft Sql stored procedures will I be able to use the code in mysql when it eventually has them or has most of T-SQL been modified to be microsoft only? Or, Is there another sql server product I can use which has standard stored procedures? Regards |
| Fri 11 Apr | Craig | I have only used a half dozen or so different databases, but none them seem to have the same SQL stored procedure language. Some are similar, some are miles apart. If you want to support multiple databases you should build some kind of persistence layer that allows you to change databases easily. But you will have to maintain slightly different DB schemas for each. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Matt H. | If you keep your stored procedures simple (pretty much standard IBM sql with parameters), you could just write a perl script to translate when you switch DB's. good luck! |
| Fri 11 Apr | na | 'My ideal SQL Server for this is MySql' or 'My ideal SQL server for this is MySql' ?? |
| Fri 11 Apr | Just me (Sir to you) | Probably: 'My ideal: SQL Server, for this is MySQL.' ;-) |
| Fri 11 Apr | | ... or ... The DBMS I would like to use is mySQL. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Roel Schroeven | If I understand it correctly, you want to use stored procedures in MySQL, but that can't be done yet. Therefore you want to use MS SQL Server in the meantime, in a way that you can transfer the stored procedures easily back to MySQL afterwards. Have you thought about using PostgreSQL or one of the other OS-databases that support stored procedures _now_? It might just circumvent your problem. |
| Fri 11 Apr | DJ | I believe there is no standard stored procedure langange. Each RDBMS has a different implentation of stored procedures and they have different capabilities. The SQL code for your Selects and Inserts should be the same but the procedural control langauge would have to be rewritten for each vendor. |
| Fri 11 Apr | ashben | Something a little off-topic, but with the next version (Yukon) of SQL Server having .NET CLR integrated, developers will be able to write stored procedures in 23 languages in addition to Microsoft's T-SQL. How cool (or cold) is that?!?! BTW, does MySQL 3.x or 4.x support stored procedures? I thought stored procedures in MySQL were being implemented in version 5.0 development tree. And that effort is based on SQL-99, which has a basic syntax similar (but not identical) to Oracle PL/SQL. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Nick | 'How cool (or cold) is that?!?!' Not very. Why create a system that moves away from a standard? |
| Fri 11 Apr | And the horse you rode in on | Vendor lock in |
| Fri 11 Apr | ashben | Nick: 'Why create a system that moves away from a standard?' Probably, because MS has this thing about creating their own standards (for the rest to follow). |
| Fri 11 Apr | Brad (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com) | Ask Oracle about embedding Java. Everybody tries to maneuver to lock into their products, not just Microsoft. |
| Fri 11 Apr | choppy | you can already use java in Oracle, and TCL and some other stuff within Postgres. both suck, however. The stored procedure language you will really use will be PL/SQL, pg/plsql, or T-SQL, depending on the database. All of these languages suck. There are various religions surrounding the use of stored procedures. Some people argue that you should use them as much as possible: let the database do as much of the work as you can, you'll get performance gains this way, if you don't do it this way you aren't doing enough db design up front. Other people argue that stored procedures suck, they are written in weird non-standard languages that are no fun to write in, and that are hard to debug. I've been in both situations and for the most part, i try to avoid stored procedures, because debugging them really fucking sucks. However, if you have a really crazy data model, you might need to use them, to keep sane. But what i've noticed is that you don't really need to use stored procedures until your database gets complicated enough to warrant having a separate 'database team' of DBAs and database programmers ONLY doing database stuff. |
| Fri 11 Apr | apw | Choppy: Isn't the complexity of the DB evident from the get go? It sounds like you are talking about a product that adds tables in a adhoc manner, thus the need to hack your way around using stored procs....oh and by the way, thats the exact scenario that exists where i work! Don't get into the situation, in a development environment, where you have a dedicated 'database team'. This will cause much heart-ache and head-ache. I would stand clear of such organizations that have such. |
| Fri 11 Apr | choppy | 'Isn't the complexity of the DB evident from the get go? ' Not necessarily. Obviously if you are setting out to write an inventory management system for chrysler, you realize you are going to be dealing with something complex. However, most DB projects I work on are much smaller scale (10-30 tables) and thus complexity doesn't start spiraling out of control until years later when people want to add more functions to the system. ' Don't get into the situation, in a development environment, where you have a dedicated 'database team'. This will cause much heart-ache and head-ache. I would stand clear of such organizations that have such. ' Well, if you get heart-ache from programming, you need to learn how to separate your emotional life from your professional life. And much head-ache seems to accompany any sort of development task. One of my contracts is at a hospital, that has a huge database server farm, and the databases have thousands of tables, and you can't fuck up the data, or else you will not only be fired, you are liable for being sued due to HIPAA regulations. I'm certainly glad there is a dedicated 'database team' there, because I already have two jobs, and don't need another four! |
| Fri 11 Apr | Sergent Sausage | Nick: Why create a system that moves away from a standard? Actually, MS is moving *toward* a standard here. The MS 'stored procedure language' (T-SQL (Transact Structured Query Language)) is currently a proprietary, bastardized 'embrace and extend' hack to the SQL-92 'standard' SQL. By moving to CLR support by the query engine, they are moving from a proprietary hack *to* something that's already an ECMA standard, and what will soon be an ISO standard. They're actually moving in the right direction with this and I'm really jazzed these days about development in C# -- and since I spend 90% of my time hacking out T-SQL I'm anxiously awaitning the inclusion of the CLR in the query processing engine. I think it's overall a good move for MS. REF: http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/ for further details. |
| Sat 12 Apr | Greg Gaughan | Stored procedures have been part of the ISO SQL Standard since the 1990s. There is an excellent standard syntax specified in the PSM package (Persistent Stored Modules). The ThinkSQL RDBMS complies with the standard: http://www.thinksql.co.uk |
| Sun 13 Apr | drazen | Maybe you would like to check FireBird RDBMS - open source form of Borlands Interbase. Have 3 SQL dialects, available on various platforms. Have a look at www.ibphoenix.com |
| Sun 13 Apr | Albert D. Kallal | I have to agree with Sergent comments. The real problem here is why learn another procedural language? I have been saying for years that sql server should have also allowed VBA in addition to t-sql as a programming language. MS missed a huge opportunity here. So many companies started down the road of 3 tiered applications because t-sql sucked for complex procedures, and placing all the business code in the front end also did not make sense (developers need a half decent IDE, and t-sql does not give that). Anyone who has worked on databases with a nice programming language integrated into the database system will understand this. IBM’s UniVerse line, and pick were such database systems with a nice programming language. Even the older dbase programming languages were considered much better then t-sql, but dbase died since the design was never migrated to a “server” based version of dbase. It would be a different world if dbase had really thought about this. At least Microsoft did think about client server, and created DAO, and then ADO data objects. I seen a lot of companies with developers that have both sql skills, and good VB skills. They then bring in another developers with t-sql skills. This should NOT have to be the case. If the new version of sql server supports all the net languages, then Microsoft has indeed scored another brilliant design decision. What a fabulous idea! Once again, they are going to kick butt here. I will actually admit, that a good portion of my work actually involves using ms-office to provide solutions. The reason why office is so much better then something like open “star office” is that I can use my VB skills, and simply develop applications around ms-office. VBA is a “super glue” that holds all of those appcltions together. I even go so far as to say that one of the most useful technologies that MS came out with was the inclusion of VBA into office. I have written medical billing systems in ms-word that interface to propriety database systems. Knowing VB (well, ok VBA) was the ticket here. Anyone who has hit alt-f11 while using ms-word will understand what I mean (every copy of word has the VB6 ide built in. If you never hit alt-f11 while using word…you should!!). I have never meet ONE business that cannot use some form of VBA to automate and integrate office into their existing work flow. Using all these rich applications together as programmable objects is a dream come true for me. Having a completely programmable sql server, or word processor, or Excel all makes sense. It also all makes sense that every time a new system comes out, I don’t have to learn a new language. While much of what I am talking about is really the fact of COM objects, having a common language sure is nice. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada Kallal@msn.com |
| Desktop Metaphor | Fri 11 Apr | R K |
| Hi, Ive been reading a lot about UI related discussions here and also in other sites. There have been a lot of ink on changing what is known as desktop metaphor. The argument is as the pda and hand held gadgets get prominence, the desktop metaphor cannot hold on. In my opinion I feel that the desktop metaphor will eventualy be absorbed or replaced by something more intuitive and more easy to use. I feel more aspect should be on the work at hand then going through the process of clicking, window arrangement etc etc. The change may not be soon maybe it may start with PDAs and then migrate to pcs.(if they exist as a standalone in future) What do you guys feel in this regard? What kind of metaphors do you guys envision our grand/great grand childrens maybe using? |
| Fri 11 Apr | Robert Moir | I'm sitting at a desk with a laptop on it, a pad of paper, some paperwork i need to read *groan*, a pencil pen and ruler. The deskop metaphor is therefore one i still understand and use every day for performing my work. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how well current OSes implement 'the desktop', I'd consider that the metaphor doesn't have to change until the way we work in general changes. Have you seen the UI research project at http://research.microsoft.com - in particular have you seen their video demonstration of a new interface idea? |
| Fri 11 Apr | R K | I understand how one relates to desktop metaphor. I'll tell an incident on change. In a company with SEI5 process control there were lots of forms to be filled. When the system was introduced the forms were in Word, like the forms you get printed. All they did was transformed paper based office to paperless office but kept everything same layout for filling in. So in each form everbody had to fill in details like name, project etc etc which was repeatative and time consuming. Now someone observed these and started doing some workflow analysis. Later all these forms were replaced with a single window or HTML page with little text boxes in the place where only the details regarding the process were to be filled. Rest was all automated. So due to avalabilty of tools the paper like concept was eliminated and a more work friendly concept was adopted. Even though people were adapted to paper based form filling they really liked it. My point is, similar kind of research may change the desktop metaphor altogether. I am saying not now maybe in 7-10 years or more. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Benji Smith | At this point, making any major changes to the user interface of a desktop computer would be like deciding to switch the drivers seat (in US cars) from the left side to the right. It would be utterly pointless and would result in lots of confusion for everyone. Even if some researcher in some lab determined that we could all be 30% safer behind the wheel of a car just by switching the driver to the other side of the car, no one would accept the change. Especially because, during the transition period, safety would probably temporarily (but drastically) decline. Likewise, if there was some fundamentally different user interface developed for desktop computers, it would destroy everyone's productivity for at least three to six months. Why, exactly would that be good? I agree that there will be a paradigm shift in computer user interfaces, but not until computers move away from the desktop. Voice activated wearable computers will obviously need different UI's. Car computers would probably benefit from different UI's as well. But these things are waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the future. The desktop UI will probably never have any significant changes made to it. |
| Fri 11 Apr | JP | There is a difference there, though. Theproblem in that case study was that people hadn't separated the goal of an operation from the methods of achieving the goal. Consequently they had simply duplicated the method they had used electronically, and only later analysed what their actual goals were and how they might achieve them more efficiently. However, the desktop metaphor for GUIs isn't there because designers think people need an electronic desktop. It's there to provide a frame of reference, to make it easier to recognise where things are and what things do. Now, as computer literacy grows and users acquire a knowledge of what the metaphors actually refer to, it's possible that they might outgrow the metaphor. Or alternatively it's possible that a new realm of human experience might end up providing a better metaphor. But I think it's unlikely. If only because the metaphor will and in fact has become conflated with the underlying mechanisms. |
| Fri 11 Apr | MAX2000EXTREMEOHYEAH | Maybe the metaphor for a PDA should be the little leather binder with a pad on one side and a folder on the other, maybe one with a calendar in it too. Isn't that what a PDA is trying to be? |
| Fri 11 Apr | www.marktaw.com | I don't get it. a) what would we replace the desktop metaphor with? b) how aware is any given user that the desktop is the metaphor being used? c) how strong is the desktop metaphor today anyway? A magnifying glass with folder has replaced what used to be a filing cabinet. d) I have a desk with a computer on it with a desktop with a computer icon on it... This is all getting very (the name of that artist who painted the picture inside the picture). I mean, if we re-named the Desktop something else, how aware would any of us be that it is supposed to be a desktop? The file/folder metaphor works fine and will continue to work fine until the world comes up with a more complex ui (think creo six degrees). |
| Fri 11 Apr | apw | The thing bad about the computer desktop, is that mine is as messy as my physical desktop. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Chris Tavares | The PDA UI is predicated around small, low resolution screens. I rather doubt that a Palm calendar page would work well on my 17' 1280x1024 desktop screen. |
| Fri 11 Apr | X. J. Scott | I'll take this opportunity to lobby for the UI I'd like to have. One problem is finding files. Where are they? What are they named? Why can't the computer be a secretary and automatically file things for me with an algorithm like the one that google uses to categorize news? Seeing things spatially arranged is helpful -- I can remember that I put it in a green folder somewhere in the lower right side of some window. OK, that's OK and better than a lineal list from 'ls -l', but still not good enough. I want to see my files in filing cabinets and cubbyholes inside of rooms. Stuff that is really old can get moved to the attic or basement. On the main level, I can walk into the 'library' room to find bookshelves with great works of literature automatically arranged sensibly, and into the 'office' room I can go to look for my customer records, and in the 'art studio' all of my graphic design, gardening articles out in the greenhouse, etc etc etc. All this in a 3D interface which I walk around 3D shooter style. That's the file finder -- there will also be desktopS (plural)/or 'work surfaces' to go to that are saveable and task related, like collections of open window settings and toolbar placements and choices that some programs now have. Keyboards are fine but if the mouse is used on the right, the numerical keypad should be on the left so the keyboard will be in the center. Actually, I want two mouses, a left hand and a right hand, each with several buttons and at least one wheel. The OS should support two mouse cursors so now I can select an object with one hand and perform and action to it with the other like I do in real life. Modifier keys like control, shift, option and command should come as footpedals as well as being on the keyboard in the standard computer. There's plenty more but that's enough to get started. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Party animal | Here's the problem with UI. X J Scott's ideal interface would have me destroying the PC with a meat cleaver. I don't want anyone to arrange things for me. Leave it where I put it! Let me decide what things are called. Shove your 'My Documents' concepts where the sun don't shine. Stop opening Windows Explorer with all that pre-selected Windows crap expanded! I don't let Windows decide where anything goes, 'cos nothing is more certain than that after the next upgrade I will never find any of it again. As for 3D ... barf! |
| Fri 11 Apr | Jim Rankin | '(the name of that artist who painted the picture inside the picture)' Escher |
| Fri 11 Apr | Matthew Lock | Check out this project http://www.sqldesktop.com/ it's supposed to be more like a filing cabinet environment. |
| Fri 11 Apr | X. J. Scott | Party Animal, You'd still have the old interfaces as an alternative way of doing things. The automatic filing 'secretary' function would not force you to use it -- all files in this system can have an unlimited number of references -- you can still store your stuff wherever you like, but the secretary places references and cross references to all data in various locations automatically (just like google does not actually delete or change the location of the original news stories that it automatically categorizes). Not having this as an option is like advocating an internet in which search engines and links are not allowed - each document can only be accessed by typing in its URL to the URL bar and pressing GO. Imagine web navigation in which you are only allowed to start at ip addresses and access directories from the top level. No hyperlinks. No search engines. That is the state of desktop technology - very primative. There's tons of room for improvement. |
| Fri 11 Apr | www.marktaw.com | 'Escher' Of course, I immediately thought of escher, but weren't people doing this before Escher? |
| Fri 11 Apr | www.marktaw.com | Which has me thinking... If M C Escher had designed the Windows GUI... |
| Sat 12 Apr | Stephen Jones | ---'If M C Escher had designed the Windows GUI... '--- He would no doubt have written it in LISP |
| Sun 13 Apr | Angus Glashier | Every now and then some self-proclaimed user interface 'guru' comes along, complains loudly about the current state of computer usability, and makes some vague statements about a 'new paradigm'. Then they disappear from whence they came, their manifesto confined to the dusty corners of the Web. The problem is that we don't really want a single user interface. Different tasks require different interactions. Each application should be permitted, even encouraged, to adopt a user interface most suitable to the needs of its users. Obviously, there are a bunch of common tasks that many programs will have in common: buttons, opening files, printing, etc. but the central purpose of an application will be different from any other application. If this were not so, why would we need that application? Applications are the reason we use computers. The job of the operating system is to get out of the way and let the user get their work done with the tools of their choice. Look at Quake. It's technically feasible to create a file management system that works like Quake, running around deleting files with your rocket launcher, but why would you want to? Sure, its a neat hack, but would you actually use it on a day-to-day basis? The right tool for the right job. |
| Sun 13 Apr | HeyMacarana | 'Look at Quake. It's technically feasible to create a file management system that works like Quake, running around deleting files with your rocket launcher, but why would you want to?' I think companies would pay for a program that does something like that. It would allow employees a venue to vent and save on the bills paid to retain a psychologist on call for those employees who are on the edge of going postal. Just kidding :) |
| startup company offering 1000$ a month | Thu 10 Apr | anon |
| A startup company is offering 1000$ a month to work full-time, is it possible to survive off this amount? Is this kind of thing also going on in other places? |
| Thu 10 Apr | Jannis Joplin | Freedom Indiana. You can live there on $1,000/month. |
| Thu 10 Apr | GiorgioG | Who in their right mind would work for $12,000/year in the USA developing software - startup or not? |
| Thu 10 Apr | Daniel Shchyokin | If it was 1000/mo and I liked the idea, and I had a percentage (i.e. not x shares but x percent of the shares), and I was unemployed, I would consider it. |
| Thu 10 Apr | Vincent Marquez | 1000 a month? Thats what a 1 bedroom studio apt. costs in the city I live in. Do you get a company car and an expense account with this salary? :-) |
| Thu 10 Apr | flamebait sr. | Work it out. Can you get rent a place you'd want to live in for 1/3 of what they pay you? Will you be able to pay for utilities and taxes after this? Is there any real big reasons for taking this job, like stock offerings, etc? How will you pay for benefits? |
| Thu 10 Apr | Stephen | I think people are taking advantage of the ongoing recession |
| Thu 10 Apr | www.marktaw.com | That's not much less than what I'm making on unemployment. At least at the startup I'm working... and then I can always go back on unemployment if it doesn't work out. |
| Thu 10 Apr | | I used to be able to survive on that amount. Probably still could if forced, but I don't have a clue as to how... I agree that I would want a percentage of the company for that price... |
| Thu 10 Apr | www.marktaw.com | I always thought that a company could be founded by people working in their spare time who only got 'a piece of the pie' without getting paid an hourly wage. I'd seen something like it a few years ago called the Beeehive Collective, but they only did mac software. People would contribute ideas, and the ones that were popular got people who would branch off and make it. Then the collective would market it & profits would be split. |
| Thu 10 Apr | HeyMacarana | I would not really consider it unless I was really really desperate and had been unemployed for ages. The company will never get anywhere. If they can't get funding or figure out how to get funding then they will always have problems making the payroll in the future especially when turbulent times hit. |
| Thu 10 Apr | Bella | > Who in their right mind would work for $12,000/year in the USA developing software - startup or not? Umm, someone who makes less than $12,000/year. Any other questions? |
| Thu 10 Apr | Bella | > The company will never get anywhere. Says You. |
| Thu 10 Apr | GiorgioG | >> Who in their right mind would work for $12,000/year in the USA developing software - startup or not? >Umm, someone who makes less than $12,000/year. Any other questions? This person can go work at a call center, assuming he's even semi-competant and make $9-10/hr sitting around reading from a script. You do the math. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | Isn't there a recent phenomenon in the Bay Area of unemployed techies and others taking jobs for options only and no pay, and even competing for the chance? Measured by that metric, $12,000 is 'competitive' for the right person and the right opportunity. Now, my rant, based on simple deductive logic. If the venture has no money backing it to pay even 1/2 a market rate salary, then the chances of any payoff are nebulous to say the least. Why? It's basically implying that there's no business plan in existence that justifies an investment of cash. Sweat equity co-ops generally have a poor dynamic because most people require a reasonable above-poverty income in order to allocate time to such a venture. It's far more likely that an unfunded voluntary effort will fracture because most people simply can't afford to live on a s*** income level of $12K/yr. My experience with startups has been uniformly negative. Not only is the pay scab level but if you're not in the core group of 'inner party members' (AKA founders) you have no vote, so you can expect to spend your time doing things that make no sense and which are wastes of your talent. Screw that. Someone else's clueless unfinanced dreams of being 'the next Netscape' are pie in the sky crap. Instead, work pro bono for charities on visible projects. Toot your own horn, on projects that create goodwill for your own talents, rather than contributing to someone else's selfishly shortsighted commercial gimmick. Build your own equity rather than flushing it down some other SOB's bottomless rathole. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | PS: Bella: >> > The company will never get anywhere. >> Says You. You say you've been around. This isn't meant as a flame, but I really thought you were wiser and more experienced than to say something like that, unless you simply mean to be contrarian for contrarity's sake. Most small businesses fail. And most small businesses fail due to lack of capital. $12K/yr salary says 'almost no capital'. Surely, from years in industry, you know these things. Or do you? Or do you feel that there's some special sauce that justifies pitching in on such an effort? |
| Fri 11 Apr | Prakash S | Like HeyMacarana says, if u have are really desperate and have been unemployed for ages you should take up the job. This is considering that you do not have any other job options. Can you live on $1000 a month? Assuming you are single, you live in a not so great area and have 3 flatmates, and that you are very frugal about expenses, I am sure you can pull it off. All the best, |
| Fri 11 Apr | smm | I think the first thing you should do before accepting this job offer (and really any job offer) is to look at a company and its products. The company can have little money not because of bad idea or bad business plan, but because of many other reasons. Not least of them is a current climate in tech biz. Most venture investment companies don't like to fund from the day 1, they prefer to give money to companies with some history (even relatively short). Don't forget that first version of google was made with money from maxed out credit cards. So my advice is - if you really need a job, go to the company and look around. May be you will find a great project or very good climate. |
| Fri 11 Apr | | Bored - any company which can hire s/w developers (that is what we are talking about, right? this isn't a Burger startup or something like that?) at 12k/year has a better than average chance of surviving. Whether such cheapskates would make good employers or not is another question. They probably charge to use the toilet as well. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Vincent Marquez | i'm going to say that someone in the US offering 12k a year isn't doing something right. Assuming that there is a good chance of future success, why doesn't the business owner go get himself a loan so he can hire someone decent. If he really believes in the idea enough, he (they) should do that. Now, if they said they were looking for senior people and willing to pay 35 or 40k with ownership, i'd understand, but for 12k, they have to have known they wouldn't attract anything but the most useless developers. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Ged Byrne | Giorgio, Given the choice between going back to the call centre and working as a developer for less money, I'd choose the developer option. Sure, the call centre is easier, but is also boring and GOING NOWHERE. If a company has a good product, and the type of business smarts needed to exploit unempoloyed developers, then it can be a good learning experience. If nothing else, your keeping yourself in the field and dveloping your skills. I still remember in my early 20s being made redundant. I was the king of Wordperfect, Lotus123 and the dos prompt. 3 Years later I'm back on the job and looking preety clueless trying to use Excel and Microsoft Word. I took me 3 months of cramming to get back up to speed. |
| Fri 11 Apr | | Run, don't walk away from this. If they need extra an developer so badly that they must have him, yet can't afford even basic pay, then they do not have a clue. This would not be a development job at all. You would find yourself being blamed for not completing the product in the generous time they gave you ( 2 weeks? ) and then for having bugs etc etc. They they would blame you for them missing out on the financing they were after. If they had any hope, or any business expertise, they would either have the money to pay you, or would be able to achieve their goals without you. Help a charity. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Matt H. | >no business plan in existence that justifies >an investment of cash That's what I'd look for: 'How are we gonna make money?' Specifically: 'How am _I_ gonna make boatloads of cash?' Think about this: Assuming you could relocate and make 50K, you are intesting 38K/year in this job. Because of the risk involved, it should return about 25% interest. When is the company going to become wildly successful? If it's in six months, I'd try and figure out what kind of massive salary bump i'd get after 6 months. If it's > 6 months, I'd start talking about equity and profit sharing. If the hiring manager gets wierd when you bring these things up - saying things like 'we'll take care of you' 'hmm, equity, that would be nice - I'll talk to the CEO about that' (then he tries to hire you on the spot BEFORE talking to the CEO) walk away. If it sounds like a used-car-pitch ... Seriously. I joined a start-up a few years ago that was a spin off of a traditional business. The salary was what I asked for, so I didn't let the vague promises of equity bother me - I thought of it as a possible bonus, no big deal if I didn't get it. (Hey, it was the late 1990's, waddaya want?) A year later, the company was sold and shut down by the new owners - after all, they also owned competing websites. Our owner realized millions in cash. I was put out on the street with my earned vacation, and that's all. At the very least, a lesson learned ... regards, |
| Fri 11 Apr | Stephen Jones | ----' At least at the startup I'm working... '---- As opposed to having all the day to do what you want? Is it only developers who have been so profoundly brainwashed as to think those preferences normal? |
| Fri 11 Apr | GiorgioG | Ged wrote: >Sure, the call centre is easier, but is also boring and GOING NOWHERE. Ged, I worked at a call center up until my junior year in college. In that time, I met alot of people (even a few intelligent ones.) Some of these people went on to work in the operations dept, dev dept and those contacts gave me opportunities to jump to the operations dept, babysitting HP-UX servers, etc. Not too long after that, another contact from the call center hooked me up with my current employer doing software development. Not bad for a kid with zero dev experience and (then) without a college degree (this is Buffalo, NY - grads have trouble finding jobs in good economic times.) I've done the same thing for other people as well who worked at the call center. My point is it really isn't a dead end job unless you treat it as such. And all the while I made $11/hr for a job with very little responsibility. Sure, it's not for everyone - it can be stressful - but the contacts I made and good times (working with other young people) made it worthwhile. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Ged Byrne | Giorigio, I'm afraid the nature of call centres has changed dramitically during the 90s. They are now nothing more than factories, with similar conditions and hopes. Most positions are now on a temporary contract basis. Since most companies are now seeking to move their call centre operations to the pacific rim, it is most definately a career to avoid. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Benji Smith | You'd have to be nuts to take this $1000/month gig. If you're a halfway decent developer, and have any connections in the industry _at_all_, you should be able to do a little bit of networking and land yourself a few contract gigs that will let you earn twice this amount (easily). And YOU will be making the big decisions, YOU'LL be impressing clients. YOU will be learning how to manage projects. That type of experience is very valuable. If the BEST offer you've currently got is a job that pays $5.76 an hour, you owe it to yourself to do some freelance work. You should have no trouble beating that rate by doing freelance projects, even if you bill yourself out at one tenth of industry-standard billing rates. At least you'll get some good experience. And at least you'll be the boss. And at least you can pick your own projects. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Benji Smith | By the way... $12,000 per year / (40 hours per week * 52 weeks in the year) = $5.76 per hour |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | Matt H. - that's exactly what I meant. Generally, when an employer makes a dirt cheap offer to a candidate, they are generally trolling for that candidate who is decent AND desperate AND who doesn't have the financial insight to assign a value to the 'salary forgone'. Believe it or not, many programmers and other techies with above average work ethics share this combination. It's not exactly stupidity, it's the trained naivete that this industry expects technical implementors to share. We're supposed to respect the process and honor the bigger picture like they're a damned religion, even if our own needs are disrespected. Typically there's some manager or owner sitting on us preaching at us to 'BE PROFESSIONAL' as they line their own pockets. A value must be assigned to the salary that is forgone, and the probability of the success of the operation relative to one's own defined stake in equity must be be assigned as well. Otherwise, it's random chance weighted extremely favorably toward the 'house's' interests. And almost nobody in our field seems to get any of these things, at least not in a well verbalized way, which is why underfunded pipe dreams can always seem to find someone slightly down on their luck to work for almost nothing. |
| Fri 11 Apr | anon | Bored Bystander has recently finished his 'option pricing' MBA course? ;) |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | >> Bored Bystander has recently finished his 'option pricing' MBA course? ;) Ha hah. It might have come off as slightly technical or pompous sounding but it's basic common sense in negotiation: if someone doesn't want to put much of anything on the table, then why should you either? That's the bottom line. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Kyralessa | I once rented the upstairs of a rabbi's widow's home for $100 a month. If you can find a deal like this, it's possible to live on $1000 a month. Would you want to? Well, if you're thinking of pursuing monasticism, I'd say $1000 a month is a good place to start. $1000/month, $12,000/year, works out to about $5.77 an hour...assuming you're working 40 hours a week, not 60 or 80. McDonald's pays better. And remember, a dollar in the hand is worth 1000 shares in the bush. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Bored Bystander | I can think of exactly *ONE* set of conditions under which a deal like this would be OK for the right person. The employer would have tightly specified and conservatively defined deliverables in hand and would pay your salary as long as you made your goals, no matter what. Also, the location where the work is performed and the number of hours would be entirely irrelevant, and, you would not be precluded from doing work on the side as your primary job permitted. Fat chance. The sad reality is that pay rate usually implies the level of respect you're likely to receive. When you're cheap, you're usually assumed to be quite clueless, therefore you will probably lack any voice in decision making. Also, startups I've been around are run like cargo cults, so lots of luck asserting your right to flexible conditions in exchange for low pay. The M.O. of most startups is to sweat a lot with no-process heroics and to assume that anyone on salary at a low rate is supposed to be worked to death. Better option: deliver pizzas for real income, and work on an open source project in the evenings that you can lay claim to bragging rights on. PS: I don't attribute any particular immorality to the notion of paying someone intentionally low. However, there has been a consistently positive correlation in my life between abusive employers and low pay. |
| Fri 11 Apr | Ged Byrne | Bored, Your making in sense. |
| Fri 11 Apr | X. J. Scott | I disagree with the advices given to take the job. $12k is $6/hr, which is loss than minimum wage in some parts of the country. It has been suggested that you do it yfor partial ownnership if that is offered. I disagree. If you believe their idea makes sense and could be profitable, you should steal it. Get a part time job loading newspapers into trucks for $12/hr and you will have the same income AND lots of free time. Use that free time to implement the undeveloped idea they had yourself since you are obviously capable of doing so or you would not be considering doing this in the first place. Then' take it public yourself. You will be 100% owner, not 5% owner or whatever. By the way, regarding ownership, if you are planning such a deal, you need to hire a competant lawyer to negotiate the terms on your behalf and make sure all the agreements are in order. Getting this done right will cost you $10,000-$50,000, which is unlikely to be worth it for a $6/hr job. |
| Fri 11 Apr | optimistic coder | Don't do it. The low pay offer is the thin end of the wedge - next you'll be working 18 hour days for a big fat zero extra. You'll get bollocked for such heinous timewasting as checking the news web sites each morning (bearing in mind this was sept 2001). And you'll be sniffed at for wantonly leaving the office for a walk during your lunch break. And for what? The boss man's ego, basically. Believe me, it's happened to me and it's horrible. Never again. I wouldn't wish it on anyone else, either. Hence the posting, I guess. PS. Bored Bystander and Stephen Jones - you truly are the kings of this board. |
| Fri 11 Apr | T. Norman | My local supermarket is paying $7/hr for people to stock the shelves. That's about $1200/month. Do something like that in the evenings and weekends, and use the daytime to update your skills by helping your local public library build a web-based searchable catalog or a develop a web site for a charity to enable them to accept online credit card donations. |
| Fri 11 Apr | T. Norman | And speaking of minimum wage, not only may that salary be less than your state's minimum wage, but it is almost definitely too low for it to qualify as an 'exempt' position (i.e. exempt from paying overtime). If so, it would be illegal for them to pay you $1000/month for working 60+ hour weeks without overtime pay. If they would break the law so openly like that, they're quite likely to be unscrupulous in other ways. (Please let's not go over the minimum wage debate again. For the time period of this job's existence, it is an unavoidable reality.) |
| Sat 12 Apr | bot123 | anon, have you asked them for more money? |
| Sat 12 Apr | anon | bot123, no that's the max they can afford |
| Sun 13 Apr | bot123 | Are they offering other incentives (profit-share, stock)? From the above comments it looks like they are offering around 80% of supermarket pay. This sounds like they are trying to take advantage of the current economy. I find it hard to believe that they couldn't even find the extra 20% (of not much) to even meet supermarket pay. If you are out of work and considering this, I would not accept it without first pushing hard for more money. A company as cheap is not going to be generous with pay rises. If they won't move on money, consider negotiating on working hours/terms. Agree on a maximum number of hours per week, and then overtime pay. If you are productive, it will better for them to pay you the overtime, instead of hiring another budget programmer. Maybe offer to work 3/4 days a week for the same money; if you find you are struggling on the $1000, you have the spare time to for additional work. Maybe offer to work from home, and flexible hours. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Bella | > $12K/yr salary says 'almost no capital'. 12k/yr salary says to me, 'Take advantage of curent market circumstances, and preserve capital.' Who is to say they don't have 16 mil in the bank? (Yes, I'm playing devil's advocate) I would accept this job if you are unemployed. (and continue loooking for a 'real' job.) You will gain experience, and will not be unemployed. Remember, lenghty unemp. can stigmatize you, and create a vicious cycle of further unemployement. Sadly, if you have been laid off too long something 'must' be wrong with you. It's the same reason guys can't get laid during a drought, and have girls swarming to them when they are taken. 'Forbidden Fruit' |
| Sun 13 Apr | T. Norman | 'I would accept this job if you are unemployed. (and continue loooking for a 'real' job.) You will gain experience, and will not be unemployed.' Chances are 99% that the company will not last very long if its capital is so limited. More money can be made by working in the supermarket or McDonalds, and experience can be gained by working on open source or doing a volunteer project for a library, school, or charity. |
| Sun 13 Apr | Bored Bystander | Bella, I think what most of us here are expressing concern about is the fact that a job like this will tend to displace this guy from looking for a job paying a decent salary. It's clearly an opportunity cost. On 'stigma': Lengthy periods of unemployment can stigmatize you, but so can accepting a level of pay so low that it doesn't sound possible. Yeah, right, employers want to know if you've been busy but they also want to know that the candidate is good enough that he or she has *some* personal standards. Instead of 'Ok, you were laid off for 8 months' it would be 'OK, you worked below minimum wage... at a SOFTWARE JOB!?' I worked with a guy once who had almost no self esteem. A C whiz. He developed the core of his company's software product line. He started at $5/hr in 1982 with no BS degree. He also stayed with the same employer for 20 years. And he lived in his parent's house until he socked away a couple of hundred $K. Yeah, he eventually progressed to a market level salary but that didn't happen until the mid 1990s. And this company was WILDLY successful in the interim, building on his work. Bottom line: sounds like a long shot to me in terms of personal advantage, no matter if the company makes it or not, because I've seen exactly how that kind of progression starts out. I'm hoping for anon's sake that there's an as yet untold story behind this offer. |
| Pattern(s) for Calculating Variable Costs | Tue 08 Apr | Walter Rumsby |
| Hello, Im doing some preliminary work for a system that will calculate costs based on a number of formula that contain fixed and variable elements. The tricky part is that these formula are not fixed, i.e. the system Im working on will have to work out which formula to apply, when to apply it and how to combine it with other formula. Furthermore the formula are configurable by end users. Im wondering if any JOSers have worked on such a system and have any suggestion about appropriate design patterns. Any comments appreciated. |
| Tue 08 Apr | Nice | I have done a similiar thing (scoring configurable by an ini file) in a hobby project. I ended up chucking in a full expression evaluator. You can likely pick up code for your choosen language of the web. |
| Tue 08 Apr | big bob | 'Command' pattern for the different functions, and 'State' pattern for the switching. |
| Tue 08 Apr | Dino | Interpreter pattern & friends |
| Tue 08 Apr | Ged Byrne | Walter, Since I've nearly finished that excellent book you recommended, I'd say this is a definate candidate for the Abstract Factory pattern, and possibly the bridge pattern. We have a similar system (point of sale) here that is an excellent demonstration of how not to do it (The hundreds of case statements pattern). |
| Tue 08 Apr | JJ | Maybe a simple recursive decent expression evaluator would suffice? |
| Tue 08 Apr | Philippe Back | http://www.singularsys.com/jep/ |
| Tue 08 Apr | jess user | Take a look at using a rule-based approach. If you are programming in Java, JESS is a good solution for this: http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/ |
| Tue 08 Apr | Chris Tavares | If the end users can edit the formula, the Interpreter pattern (or just embedding an interpreter) is a good way to manage the actual calculations. Deciding which formula to use is often done via a Factory - you pass the factory the criteria, it returns the appropriate formula object. |
| Tue 08 Apr | Eric Lippert | JScript, JScript .NET and VBScript all have methods which take in strings containing expressions and evaluate those expressions. You might consider using the Script Control or VSA to cheaply host the engines. These languages also have the important feature that they are sandboxable. I would strongly recommend a thorough design review from a security perspective of any system which allows users to customize formulas, _particularly_ if they can call third-party libraries via those formulas. Evaluating '10 + DeleteMyHardDisk()' can ruin y |