(Comments added for week ending Sun 21 Jul 2002) | View Other Weeks
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 21 Jul 2002) | View Other Weeks |
| Listen.com no Panacea? | Sun 21 Jul | Thomas Sanders |
| >>>You acknowledge that Listen may issue upgraded versions of the Application from time to time, and may automatically electronically upgrade the version of the Application that you are using on your computer. You consent to such automatic upgrading, and agree that this Agreement (as amended from time to time) will govern all such upgraded versions.<<< After reading Joels article on Listen.com, I hopped right ovr and downloaded it. The above caught my eye -- do we really want our applications upgrading themselves without our consent? |
| Sun 21 Jul | anon | My company does this. The main reason is that backwards compat is no longer a problem, and usability is increased. The downside is a shocking security hole. This is incidentally why you should like the GPL. You can inspect the code on your machine, or at least pay a trusted person to do it. |
| Real-world XML DOM? | Sun 21 Jul | KJK::Hyperion |
| Hiya all With much disappointment, Ive found that Microsofts XML DOM library is exceedingly picky, even in HTML mode. It complains about unterminated tags, non-standard attributes and so on But I need to parse HTML files, and you know that nobody has ever paid too much attention to creating pages in standard HTML, or even *valid* HTML for that matter. I dont consider writing my own parser an option (the less I have to handle strings, the better). So I ask to you: do you know of any XML DOM that can be used, lets say, for a real-world browser? FWIW: Im writing a download manager+web spider (kind of like a merge between Getright and Teleport Pro), and for the web spider part I need to download and parse HTML, to find all linked and embedded files |
| Sun 21 Jul | Matthew Lock | There are quite a few nice Perl modules for spidering and parsing HTML. http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=robot Given a URL the robot modules can extract and visit links. For HTML parsing http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=HTML-Parser http://search.cpan.org/doc/GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.26/Parser.pm and also using C/C++ HTML tidy does HTML parsing http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ |
| Sun 21 Jul | KJK::Hyperion | Thanks! I didn't remember Tidy, I hope it's reusable enough (and I knew that there were Perl modules to do it - there's *always* a Perl module to do something - but I need this for C/C++/Delphi) |
| Sun 21 Jul | Vincent Marquez | If your only looking for links, i'd just use a regular expression, otherwise you have alot of work ahead of you. I've just finished something similar to what your talking about, and my next project was going to be an html parser, and let me tell you, its MUCH harder then XML. Definatly not worth the effort unless your going to be parsing through teh content and need to keep stuff grouped by tables, etc. As for an HTML parsing library, I haven't found one either, other then a couple perl modules. |
| wml programing | Sun 21 Jul | mona latifi |
| please send the tutorials of wml programing |
| Sun 21 Jul | Matthew Lock | Don't waste your time WAP is dead. Wait until NTT roll out i-mode world wide in few years and learn that |
| Sun 21 Jul | archon | Why do you think that low capable i-mode can beat with XHTML-Basic which come after WML? i-mode terminal isn't adjust well for english and cHTML restricted to make acceptable quality presentation. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Matthew Lock | The reason is that i-mode is charged by the packet rather than by the minute (so i-mode works out to be almost free), and that it uses regular HTML. So anybody who can build a normal web page can build an i-mode one. I-mode also supports J2ME applets running on the phone, MP3 downloads, colour screens etc. And all these things have been running for 3 years now, not just some promise for the future. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Matthew Lock | Don't just take my word for it, check out these links: NTT imode http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/imode/index.html Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010429.html |
| Sun 21 Jul | Beka Pantone | WAP itself is independent of transport protocol. What killed WAP was, lame business models around it, overhype, sucky terminals, lack of developer support and the fact that it was implemented over GSM circuit switched networks. If you look into i-mode and WAP. WAP is vastly superior technically, what makes i-mode great is that NTT got the business part right, where european operators failed. WML and cHTML are just markups that you can learn in a couple of days, the 'back-end' programming is similar for many of these devices. Besides the WAP2 spec and the future of i-mode will both be based on XHTML, so if you choose any of those markups right now, it will become obsolete in no time. IMO, forget the markup... as long as you UNDERSTAND wireless devices and what markets are they suited for you can write a generic back-end that pumps any markup you like doing server side transforms (for example). I live in a european country where i-mode has been recently deployed country wide. And honestly I really don't see massive adoption. Services are lacking (and no, having my horoscope on my phone doesn't really count as 'exciting service'), terminals are VERY poor (the good ones have yet to come, but at the current rate of adoption I doubt telcos will keep on subsidising terminals) and packet switched networks are rather flaky. |
| Listen.com vs emusic.com | Sat 20 Jul | Gregg Tavares |
| Has anybody tried both? I have tried neither (sorry) but it appears that Listen.com you are actually renting the music but emusic.com you are buying it (licensing it). Emusic.com gives you unprotected MP3s so you can do whatever you want with them. Burn a CD, put them on your iPod etc. The hope is that paying them $9.99 a month is far more convenient than trying to find them on the net for free. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Matt Christensen | I tried emusic.com first. Loved the idea, but had a real hard time finding the music i wanted. Listen.com, on the other hand, has been great. I've spent about three days just following the 'similar bands' links; taken myself on a little lo-fi tour, and so on. It rocks. Yeah, it sucks that they don't give raw mp3s, but I'm ok with it. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Greg | I don't get it. From the looks of it, these places only offer stuff that I could just wander down to my local chain music store and pick up, if I wanted it. Maybe I was mistaken but I was under the impression most people downloaded music as a way to get stuff they *couldn't* just go to the mall and buy. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Mark Bessey | > Maybe I was mistaken but I was under the > impression most people downloaded music > as a way to get stuff they *couldn't* > just go to the mall and buy. No, actually most people download music because they don't want to pay for it. Which is why a site that charges $100/year for music isn't going to make any kind of dent in the online file trading that goes on now. -Mark |
| Sun 21 Jul | anon | Mark, you need some real counterfactual evidence to make that claim. Otherwise, there's a lot of sophisticated arguments pro and con at Slashdot and K5. |
| Learing Lisp | Fri 19 Jul | Matthew Lock |
| I wondered if anyone here could recommend learning Lisp? I read some pretty convincing arguments for trying it at http://paulgraham.com (One of the people who coded Yahoo Store) His argument is that not all languages are equal in power and that the most powerful is Lisp because of its macro features. http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/icad.html |
| Fri 19 Jul | Matthew Lock | This is one of my favourite quotes from Paul Graham: 'A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase 'software engineering' shake their heads disapprovingly. ' http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html |
| Sat 20 Jul | Gareth McCaughan | I can recommend learning Lisp. It's a very powerful language and some things are much less painful in Lisp than they are in almost any other language. And there are some ideas in Lisp that you won't find elsewhere, which means that learning Lisp might expand your brain :-). A couple of random pieces of advice. 1. Be aware that there are several dialects of Lisp. They are quite different. I recommend that you learn Common Lisp. 2. If you're looking for books, Paul Graham's 'ANSI Common Lisp' is a good first one. Peter Norvig's 'Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp' is a wonderful second one: it's one of the best programming books I've read. 3. If all you're used to is C or C++, you will find many things in LIsp *very* strange. Prefix syntax, dynamic typing, a very different object system, interactive use, macros (altogether different from the things C calls 'macros', and closer to C++ 'templates' but still very different), and so on. If this bothers you, you might want to learn Python first: it has some 'Lispy' features and is more approachable for the beginner. But, a warning: You may find Python so nice that you don't proceed to Lisp. That would be a mistake. You should learn both. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Sam Wong | Lisp has many innovative ideas. For example 'conditionals', garbage collection. But it's really a pain in the neck for beginners. My school had used Scheme as CS 101 for freshmen for a couple of years before Java was used. (Thank God!) I believe Lisp can be introduced in a compiler course. Knowing the basic theories of compiler might make the weird syntax less weird. E.g., the prefix syntax makes more sense. OT: Talking about languages, any opinion on Pliant? |
| Sat 20 Jul | Matthew Lock | Thanks for the tips. I have downloaded clisp a Common Lisp interpretter. http://clisp.sourceforge.net/ I'm working through ANSI Common Lisp, by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/acl2.txt |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ori Berger | Another good option for a second book is Graham's own 'On Lisp', which can be dowloaded (as PostScript or PDF) from his website. It's a very well written, concise (?!? yes, even though it's a) several hundred pages book, which illustrates just how powerful Lisp really is. And for anyone else who hasn't yet started learning - I recommend starting with Scheme rather than Common Lisp. If you want to do high-performance commercial work in Lisp, you have to use CL as, apparently, the best native code compilers are for it. If that isn't a requirement, however, scheme is much cleaner, simpler, and more consistent. Just for comparison, the latest Scheme specification is 50 pages long, and that contains exact semantics, syntax, standard library, an example or two, credits, table of contents and index. The latest Ansi CL specification is just over 1300 pages. CL has much more in its standard library, granted - but a large part of the difference has to do with the basics of common lisp being more complex and needing more description (e.g., of historic heritage that led to present state of affairs). If you can afford not to have the greatest native code compiler, and don't have legacy Common (or uncommon) Lisp code to tend to, go with scheme. If you can't afford that, still learn scheme first, and then move to CL - this route will probably be shorter in the long run. A good (the best?) Scheme meta-resource is [ http://www.schemers.org ]; You can find the latest (R5RS) scheme spec over there. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ringo | I'm learning another lisp dialect (what Ori mentioned), and this basic link about the functional calculus was really valuable. http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.07/07.05/LambdaCalculus/ YMMV. For me, it made it feel like I knew where things were going. I have Graham's Ansi CL too, and find it very readable. About using Python... it has lispy features, but they're pretty much hidden. When I learned lisp, my Python style completely changed. |
| Sun 21 Jul | John Palevich | It's always good to learn a new language, but Lisp's been around for more than 30 years now, and it's not a popular language. Either everyone's stupid, or there are better alternatives for real-world problems, or there are problems with Lisp that prevent its widespread adoption. There was a great paper written many years ago by a Lisp guru explaining why Lisp lost the language wars to C -- it made the distinction between the 'New Jersey' school of design and the 'Boston' school of design. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a web reference to the paper. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Gareth McCaughan | When I said Python has some Lispy features, the main ones I had in mind were dynamic typing, automatic memory management, and interactivity. Those certainly aren't hidden. :-) 'On Lisp' is indeed a good book. I would suggest reading it third, after 'ANSI Common Lisp' and 'Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming'. Scheme is certainly a simpler language than Common Lisp. Part of that simplicity is that it lacks some of the important features of CL: the amazing object system, hash tables (associative arrays, maps, whatever), and the full power of CL's macros. (Scheme's macro system is also very cool, but in a different way.) For an introduction to the world of Lisp-like languages, Scheme is an excellent candidate. For a language to do real work in, it's not such a clear choice. |
| Sun 21 Jul | anon | I think the essay you're referring to is this: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html |
| Sun 21 Jul | Sammy | Hi John, Here's backgrounder on that paper: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html If you're interested in a fun discussion about these models, here's a paper by John Backus, of BNF grammars and Fortran: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf You might want to scroll down to p.616 for a quick comparison. (There aren't 600 pages in this pdf, it was just taken from a journal.) |
| Sun 21 Jul | John Palevich | Yes, Worse is Better is it! (Words to live by in today's PC world, I'm afraid!) Thanks to everyone who replied with a citation! I always triy to reread this article whenever I get too wrapped up in writing or using the latest language or framework. ..as for me, I have enjoyed learning many languages over the years. While C/C++ is extrordinarily useful for a wide range of applications, there are certainly domains (such as writing one-time scripts for quick-and-dirty text processing) where other languages (like Perl and C#) are superiour. In the old days Lisp was superior to other languages for quick development of complex projects because it was interactive, it had a powerful built-in data structure (the list), and it had garbage collection. These days, every language compiles quickly, every language has good libraries, and nearly every language besides C/C++ has a garbage collector. Lisp's primary remaining advantage over other programming languages is that Lisp programs are natively expressed using lists, which enables all sorts of clever (and philosophically profound) tricks. The fact that very few other languages have tried to emulate Lisp's ability (to dynamically reason about themselves) may be a hint that this capability is not that useful for day-to-day programming. But it is way cool! |
| Pager duty for developers? | Fri 19 Jul | Someone who prefers to remain anonymous |
| I started working as a developer at a large financial institution with a lot of in-house software 6 weeks ago. So far so good. Then, a couple days ago, my boss announced that our three-person team will start rotating pager duty. Were only responsible for supporting our teams software. My initial feeling is that pager duty is very much a non-standard duty for a developer and that this should have been mentioned during the interview. I know I could have asked during the interview (and from now on I will!) but Id never heard of developers carrying a pager. Also, most of our users are 6 timezones ahead of us, so support calls will come in the middle of the night. So I guess I want to know other peoples opinion on this. Am I right in thinking that pager duty is unusual enough for developers that my boss should have mentioned this during the interview? Is pager duty standard for developers in the financial industry? Advice? Warnings? Thanks. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Humbug | You make it, you fix it. Or would you rather have a clueless administrator come in and 'duuh....it's broken, why don't I hit the reset button.' 'Duuh...it still doesn't work..my mouse works but I can't get to the website..let me try the reset button again.' Pager duty also goes a LONG way in forcing developers to write quality code. This is especially true if you are working in the financial market where 'testers' are considered 'a waste of time'. Remember, most financial market people are sales people. They are driven by deadlines, demos, meetings,etc. This means constantly changing system which means no time to test which mean you better be a damn good defensive programmers. Hint for ya, buy a good logging tool and log a lot. When you make updates to the production server, monitor the log for a few hours after your deployment to make sure you didn't do something stupid. This will save you from the early 6am calls from people on the east coast. |
| Fri 19 Jul | XP Man | Not really ... If it's critical and you created it... then unfortunately, you have to be avialable to support it.... especially if is complex/nontrival. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Igor Krivokon | It's not unusual. A while ago one well-known company licensed our code to include in their OS. We had to wear pagers 24 hours a day, because they recompile the latest sources of the system every night and in case of build errors have to contact 3rd-party developers immediately. Fortunately, they never really called us, AFAIR. I know some other big companies that have the same standard policy - 24x7 3-rd party developer support. It's quite normal. Besides, it's quite possible that your boss didn't know about this pager duty when you were interviewed... |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | They were deceitful not to tell you the job involved 24 hour support. In large organisations, and especially the financial industry, there are usually extra payments for call-outs. |
| Fri 19 Jul | a | I think so too. You can do it, but negotiate. :) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | Support is necessary, and standard in the telco industry (or anywhere else that promises 24-hour reliability, excluding embedded systems) - someone must do it. If I take a new employer, one of my questions will be about what hours I will be expected to work (as well as where). My boss takes most of the pager support on himself. Why should we refuse to do it occasionally? We use cell phones, not pagers. |
| Fri 19 Jul | the cluetrain | Ha! Been there, done that. Its standard duty for 24x7 systems like the one your on. Quite a lot of fun to be called in the middle of the night to find an obscure bug in some 10 year old code, isn't it? Its easy for some of these people to say 'you wrote it, you fix it'. That's easy when your still writing your undergrad programs and spouting off on forums. What they fail to realize is that you probably didn't go in and write a financial system from scratch. When I had to carry a pager, it was never my own code that broke. My code was a tiny fraction of a percent of the total code in the system, so invariably it was someone else's code AND THEY WERE LONG GONE. I don't think you should jump ship. Try to make the situation better first. Every chance you get you should try to make the code more solid and the error messages easier to understand. Have the programs try to tell the operators what may be wrong. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Would I be right to assume you would not be on direct pager duty for the end-users, but on an escalation from the network/sys-admins? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Bella | Is pager duty standard for developers in the financial industry? Advice? Warnings Yes, it is. Pagers are common for developers in Finance. In many financial firms, developers support what they have written. Often, many programmers do little new development, and mostly production support of their previously released apps. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Joe AA. | Back in the old days... ah, before pagers, it was (and in most IT departments probably still is) called... 'Callout'. It's the best thing in the world... for bringing developers up to speed on an application system. 'You broke it, you fix it' is one way to look at it. However, that implies 'finding who to blame' which is not a real productive activity in the middle of the night when you are trying to hit an availability or service level agreement window. I prefer 'It's your job, you fix it'. If you consider your cushy tushy too high of a level to care about the impacts to your user/customer... then I would suggest moving on to your next job where the stress of doing work is more to your liking. But don't whine about 'your interview' and get a clue. Business programming is a constant battle with change and there was never any promise given to you that things would always stay as they were when you were given the priviledge of walking through the door as an employee. Your employer will probably be just as disappointed in not noticing the lack of adaptability during your interview. |
| Fri 19 Jul | A. Coward | Carrying a pager seems to be common to many programming jobs. The better companies will compensate for being on pager service, although the compensation is often minimal -- maybe $75 a week. But that is better than nothing. Comp time for nights you get pages should be a must, with a 4 hour minimum. Sometimes it takes longer than that to get back to sleep. And the night calls also wake up family members. Someone should pay besides me for the hell given when my wife is waken up by the phone at 3 A.M. Be careful of companies that will use the pager service for thier own profit. The last company I worked for had service contracts with the customers, and made a bundle when a customer called after hours for support. The pager carriers were told that our support of the night calls were just part of our jobs, and we would not get a cent. Soon no one could be reached on the pagers or even the home phones! |
| Fri 19 Jul | Joe AA. | Compensation for callout support needs to be handled carefully. Certainly if the callout is for customer support and the company is making money, there should be some compensation to the individual(s) being called out. What you don't want it to become... is a 'bonus program' that rewards incompetent work. It is best to focus it on results (callout causes are eliminated) rather than effort expended (but I worked 4 hours on it!!). AND... I would never pay for callout for the individual directly responsible for the problem. For most corporate IT departments, the philosophy of callout should be focused on 'help me make it through the night' - i.e. get the processing back to running the quickest way possible. This includes bypassing bad input records and the like. Save the application debugging and repair sessions for non-critical times, and fix it once and for all. Eventually callout will become a non-issue as the application stability improves. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | I'm not paid extra for being called out, but if I work at night I don't in the daytime. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Doug Withau | If I get a call about work at 3:00 AM, they will talk to the BofH. http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html |
| Fri 19 Jul | regualar poster that saw the light | Joe AA is a troll |
| Fri 19 Jul | Curious | Just want to make sure. You can telecommute when paged, right? No needing to drive in the middle of the night and probably running over a few children? |
| Sat 20 Jul | name witheld by request | > You can telecommute when paged, right? No needing to drive in the middle of the night and probably running over a few children? - curious Supporting an installation 6 timezones away, I'd bet on telecommuting. Quit meat and drink, live 20 minutes walk from office. Practice being harmless, useful, faithful, polite, happy, hygienic, secure, and free. Live in the shade. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Sarain H. | It's no problem but in all industries, when you are on call, you are also on-pay (though at a reduced rate of course). Some companies legitimately need developers on call and pay a fair rate for the service and that's fine. It's a good way to make some extra money. Of course if there is no compensation for this, look at them and say 'Bite Me'. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Sarain H. | 'What you don't want it to become... is a 'bonus program' that rewards incompetent work.' Joe since you're such a fine programmer that makes no errors and codes in excess of 1000 prefect bug free lines a day, would you come work for us? We are willing to pay you $8,000/year, which is substantially more than you are making now. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Sarain H. | And Joe, Say hello to your husband Angelo for me. |
| Sun 21 Jul | vanguard | I'm a developer and I've always had pager duty. Here's the compensation for my last two companies. Current: (Very large company) 0 calls - $100 per week < 5 hours $250 per week < 15 hours $500 per week 15 or greater $750 per week. Only calls handled outside of work hours are counted. Previous: (1000 employees) $50 per week + $1 per minute of time spent. Before that: (15 employees) No money. Respond or get fired. (I left them after 3 months) Final Note: I know it can be both <5 and <15. I just don't feel like coding in a forum. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Joe AA. | Sarain... do you dispute 'you get what you reward'? Or do you not want to lose the cash cow that funds your incompetence? I don't get the 'husband Angelo' comment. Must be some fantasy of yours. Darn it!! Am I STILL supposed to be pretending that bugs come from some mystical source outside the developer? I promised to do better in another post... I guess I'll have to keep trying. Ok... 'Bugs are always around everywhere in the magical ether that fills the universe. The action of a programmer coding disturbs them and traps them in a vast unseen area that exists between the lines of code.' Hmm... could be the start of yet another Mythodology. |
| Thinking in C++, etc | Thu 18 Jul | Tim the curious undergrad |
| Just wondering if anyone has read the Thinking in ... books, and if so, what your opinions are. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Christopher Wells | There ought to be a FAQ about this. _TIC++_ taught me to read/write the syntax of C++, given that I knew C already. I read _Effective C++_ and _Design Patterns_ after that. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bella | Great books. Really gets into the nuts and bolts of Java, as in the order in which nested constructors are fired in inherited classes. etc. Which order variables are initialized in inherited subclasses, etc....I can't recall, it's been almost 4 years since I read TIJ |
| Thu 18 Jul | Andrew Reid | I found 'Thinking in Java' an excellent book for the C++ programmer wanting to learn Java (whether it's equally good for someone completely new to programming I can't say). It's primarily a book about the _language_, though. API topics like Swing, RMI etc. are covered more briefly. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Mr. Obvious | I don't care much for TiC++ or the followup books TiJ and TiC#. It's a cookie cutter approach to writing books. But it's free on the Web, so check it out. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | > I don't care much for TiC++ or the followup books TiJ and TiC#. It's a cookie cutter approach to writing books. But it's free on the Web, so check it out. So far as I know, TIC++ was the best book for bringing you up to speed on the C++ syntax/mechanics, if you already knew C. I read the first edition; he was going to ammend it to include STL topics, which I learned from Stroustrup's _The C++ Programming Language_ 3rd edition. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Darren Collins | I've read TIC++ and TIJ, both of which are excellent. Nothing beats actually using a language for real-world development to learn it, but if you want a thorough guided tour before you begin, these books are it. They're also great reference works that you'll come back to again and again. Interestingly, I hear he's now working on Thinking In Python. Cool! |
| Measurement and The Talent Myth | Wed 17 Jul | Hardware Guy |
| This weeks New Yorker has an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell called The Talent Myth. Gladwell challenges the hire the brightest people you can and get out of their way business philosophy, offering up Enron and the US WW II Atlantic submarine fleet as bad examples. The article is a nice complement to Joels recent post on measurement. You can find the article at: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020722fa_fact My conclusion: You need good people. You need good organization and methodology. Neither is a substitute for the other. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Tom Vu | You need different types of people. --Those who are smart, independent, think, get things done. They will probably not be around too long. --Those who are smart, have bills or obligations. --Those who are smart who will accept crap work for the money. --Those who will do crap work. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Sammy | Hmm, the author likes to invoke the Evil Enron. Enron did This, so This must be evil. An interesting shadowplay, where occasionally he makes absurd points about the narcissism of talent -- then quickly he dashes back into the safe haven of moderation: Talent needs a good framework. Replace Enron with Juno, and it reminds you of a certain Joelsky... |
| Wed 17 Jul | Sammy | BTW, I don't mean Joel made the same mistake; I meant the opposite. He didn't demonize Juno for hiring good people. Squandering them is the problem. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Hugh Wells | As I've been saying several times - MBA's are not 'top talent' and top management consulting firms sometimes lose the plot. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Crimson | 'It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing. ' Beautiful. The article was an interesting read, but at the same time, I'm not sure if I can believe the examples and parallels the author uses to prove his main point. It's easy to go in and criticize after the fact and it's easy to fit past circumstances into a puzzle that looks like it proves a point. Some of the comparisons he made between Enron and other companies seemed kind of spurious. Proctor & Gamble doesn't trade in energy. Southwest wasn't attempting to set up a data-centric infrastructure. The comparisons would have been much more believable if the author had used examples of other companies doing the same things, only with a different company culture. I'm not saying that Enron is not at fault here. Obviously, they are very much at fault. But who's to say another company doing the same thing, only with a philosophy agreeble to the author's, wouldn't have failed too? Perhaps some things are just out of the companies hands and they are doomed to failure (not to sound too Calvinistic here). It's hard to find a successful energy trader these days after all. I believe the author's main point (smart people don't make a smart company), but I don't believe everything he wrote. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | There's a confusion in the article, and particularly the heading. He's not really talking about smart people, but about the aggressive culture of promoting empty MBA's. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | Smart people are everything. Unfortunately, to get smart people, you need to have smart managers to start with. If you don't, you hire Andersen as auditors and tons of MBA's and think you're fabulous. Until ... |
| Thu 18 Jul | An MBA | It's not just MBAs. The article also uses the Navy as a prime example. I see it a lot too in the programming world. Prima donna programmers that think they are above any sort of a system. But hey, that's what Joel preaches and he's a superstar so he must be right, huh? A's hire A's, B's hire B's.... But yeah, just because you have an MBA doesn't mean you know how to run a company, just because you have a big brain doesn't mean you can ship product, etc... |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | When are you guys going to wise up to the great SILVER BULLET myth? For any endeavor, there are a few paths to success and many paths to failure. Failure has the highest probability. The conclusion reached by Hardware Guy: 'You need good people. You need good organization and methodology. Neither is a substitute for the other.' Is yet another silver bullet. There is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to success. There is no strategy or methodology that is equally effective in all contexts, there is no case in which particulars can be safely ignored. Achieving success is a day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute never-ending effective decision making session - for all decisions no matter what their size and no matter 'who' makes them. Your brain must have its switch turned on. Turn it off with 'faith in mythodology', the latest flavor of the month 'management' strategy, the newest revision of 'THE PLAN', or drifting in daydreams... and your probability of failure increases several orders of magnitude. Simple as that. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | Joe AA, are you talking to McKinsey? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | Actually, I query a lot of the conclusions reached by the McKinsey people in their book. It really does sound like typical MBA crap. The RAF did not grade their fighter pilots into A,B,C during the Battle; live and dead was all they used. The conclusions about centralised structures are also wrong in some places. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | Hugh... Who/what is McKinsey? And what is the book? |
| Thu 18 Jul | w.h. | I still think that Joel has it right with the appellations of 'Smart' and 'Gets Things Done'. Smart is great, but Gets Things Done is equally important. I also don't think that you can apply one model to both engineer and business people. How my product manager displays intelligence and ability to get things done is completely different than my felllow enginners. So by concluding that hiring the brightest MBAs doesn't help says nothing about weather hiring the brightest and most productive engineers helps. I think that gets things done can be taught. After working with a bunch who are good in both the gets things done and intelligence department, I have noticed that I have become better at the gets things done department myself. I mean, they have shown that there is an order-of-magnitude difference in productivity between programmer productivity. I'm not sure if they have show or can show the same difference in productivity between MBAs. |
| Thu 18 Jul | I actually read the article | Hugh - only read the first few sentences, used article to voice unsubstantiated opinions. Joe - didn't even bother to click on the link, used article to voice unsubstantiated opinions. Thread - officially dead to any reasonable discussion, only yelling contests here on out. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | Well 'actually', I did actually read the article. What triggered my thoughts was the mindless practice of giving someone a job just based on their 'want' of it. I assume you believe it to be quite logical not to be concerned about minor things like 'qualifications' to perform the work. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hardware Guy | Joe AA wrote: ----- The conclusion reached by Hardware Guy: 'You need good people. You need good organization and methodology. Neither is a substitute for the other.' Is yet another silver bullet. ----- Nope. No silver bullet here. Both good people and organization/methodology are necessary. That's not to say they're sufficient. ----- There is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to success. There is no strategy or methodology that is equally effective in all contexts, there is no case in which particulars can be safely ignored. ----- Who said there was? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Mr Jack | 'What triggered my thoughts was the mindless practice of giving someone a job just based on their 'want' of it.' People are _much_ better at jobs they want to do. Giving people a job they want to do is important. Not only for the success of that individual, but for the creation of a working company that people want to stay at. If I get work I want to do I will stay at my current company; if I don't I will leave. That's not to say that you should only base recruitment and placement on 'want' but it should count for a lot. |
| Thu 18 Jul | An MBA | Productivity between MBAs? Not really useful, MBAs can be found in all types of jobs (I used to be a financial analyst, now I'm a programmer). Did you mean productivity between corporate leaders? That gets measured all the time - it shows up in your bonus and the quarterly reports. |
| Thu 18 Jul | I actually read the article | sorry. since you asked who mckinsey was you must have forgot the opening lines, here they are: 'Five years ago, several executives at McKinsey & Company, America's largest and most prestigious management-consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent.' |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | Yes Actually... you are correct. I don't keep crap in my short term memory for long, and had no need to memorize the name. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Highly Paid Manager Looking for Talent with a Capital T | 'Those who are smart who will accept crap work for the money.' Notice ------- Are you a brilliant genius who gets things done and is willing to work in a poor, unsupportive environment with outdated tools, impossible deadlines, restrictive contract conditions and no hope for advancement? If so, you're just the person we're looking for!! We're hiring NOW!! We're having a hard time finding all you smart talented people who will work for little so call us today! If you are brilliant and talented and expect fair pay and decent working conditions, don't bother contacting us. You are spoiled and lazy and don't deserve to work you little piss ant. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | To guy who read the article - it's very arrogant of you to state that I didn't read the article. I read it all. The article expresses my own views quite well. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Mr. Jack wrote: 'People are _much_ better at jobs they want to do.' Sure, but 90% of the people want the same 10% of jobs. How do we make sure that we give the 10% to the best of that 90% and make the rest do the 90% of jobs that noone realy wants to do. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Alex Moffat | Wow, there must be some sort of graph you can plot of usefulness of forum vs. number of readers/posters. At the beginning you have too few readers/posters to have a reasonable discussion, as more people join quaility improves, eventually though you reach the point we're getting to here where it all starts to sound like Slashdot. Soon will be having the goat.cx guy and linux vs. bsd arguments. On slashdot you get the linux zealots, here you get the windows ones. Some of the topics, for example the one presented here, could be the basis for an interesting discussion but they seem to degenerate into slanging matches very quickly these days. Some people seem to be very sure that they are smarter than the author of 'The Talent Myth', and keen to pick at the little things that may not be exactly spot on in their argument. What about the bigger issue, is basing a company around 'talent', especially self-selecting 'talent', a good idea? This sort of culture encourages a homogeneity of thought and behavior. The 'talented' people recruit other 'talented' people by looking, basically, for people just like themselves. I don't think this is very sensible, and it causes a spiral towards the louder and pushier 'super-stars' who may not be very productive but certainly act the part. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Sammy | You do have very good points, Alex. Maybe I got envious that everyone is using this as a complaint board and wanted to get in on the fun. ;-) The problem is that most companies fail because of lack of talent, not an abundance of it. If you meet military grunts, they're usually pretty cocky. Climb the ladder into special teams, they're overall smarter but humbler. Quieter. So narcissism affects not only the smarties. I disagree with Joel. Sometimes you can take a little bit of bad if it gives results. If you're hindered, you gotta push it out of the way. These performance sheets might be necessary to the company, but you can draw a middle finger on them. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Joe AA. | Sammy - I don't know... I can't see how something that gives results is bad, nor how something that is bad can give results. Can you give an example? Alex - I have found that people with talent (i.e. real ability) do not form cliques as easily as people without (i.e. the wannabes). The mediocre usually select people like themselves - to insure no one upsets the apple cart. People with talent usually want to improve that talent... not rest on it. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Sammy | > I can't see how something that gives results is bad, nor how > something that is bad can give results. I was thinking of this cute anecdote: 'As for the concern over Six Sigma, Welch retorts: 'I don't give a damn if we get a little bureaucracy as long as we get the results. If it bothers you, yell at it. Kick it. Scream at it. Break it!''' http://www.businessweek.com/1998/23/b3581001.htm I know that Welch might be part myth, but hey... |
| Sun 21 Jul | Joe AA. | Sammy... Of course Jack Welch wasn't advocating bureaucracy, just defusing a complaint. It is difficult to kick people with cushy tushy's off of their comfortable fantasy world centers. |
| Poll w moral: Who wears "Old Navy" brand clothes? | Wed 17 Jul | Bella |
| Hint: This poll is related to one of the recent heated debates we have had on this board. Please chime in with a YES or NO. I will post my point in a week or so. Feel free to guess my point. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Joe S. | ugh. spare us the drama. |
| Wed 17 Jul | /dotter | Cowboy Neal! |
| Wed 17 Jul | Vincent Marquez | one of the best programmers i've ever met shops at old navy. Hes 21. (and a citizen :-) |
| Wed 17 Jul | Greg Kellerman | I don't like to pay to advertise for others. I DON'T like car dealership stickers on MY car either. For people to wantonly do so is dumb. IMO. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Vincent Marquez | you know, they DO make shirts and pants that don't have their logo plastered all over it... |
| Wed 17 Jul | "asset" | They must be in malls. That's why I've never seen 'em. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ignorant foreigner | What are 'Old Navy' brand clothes? |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ali G | Me is wearin' dem all de time. Respeck! |
| Wed 17 Jul | Zwarm Monkey | I own some Old Navy clothes, but none that actually bear the Old Navy logo on them. In fact, I am wearing an Old Navy t-shirt right now. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Winston Kodogo | Is the moral that Bella has way too much time on his/her hands? |
| Wed 17 Jul | xyzzy | Bella, why do you post to this message board? Is it so you can see your name on the internet? Well... Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella Now will you go away for a month or two? |
| Wed 17 Jul | Bella | This poll relates to the USA software offshore outsourcing debates. Please spare me all your commentary, and just answer the poll. |
| Wed 17 Jul | programmer | I'm not sure I understand the question, Bella. When you say, 'who wears Old Navy clothes,' and you ask us to respond with a YES or NO, what exactly are we saying YES or NO to? -- If we have never shopped at Old Navy, but were given some articles of clothing from Old Navy as gifts, it can be said that we 'wear Old Navy clothes.' So, can those people who have never shopped at Old Navy, but nonetheless wear Old Navy clothes, say YES? -- But for some reason I suspect you're asking not whether people WEAR Old Navy clothes, but whether we SHOP at Old Navy. But what counts as 'shopping at Old Navy' is less than clear, to my mind. -- If you are in fact asking whether we SHOP at Old Navy, are you asking whether we REGULARLY shop at Old Navy, or would it count if I happen to have been to Old Navy, say, two times in the last three years, and have bought, a total of five items there? -- Or do you mean something even stronger, like 'Who is a FAN of Old Navy, and loves their clothes'? Please be clearer! |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ali G | Hactually, me is not wearin' dem any more cos Me Julie said them make me look like a batty boy. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Vincent Marquez | Does your point relate to the skill of programmers in relation to their taste in fashion? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Annoyed | The reason that nobody is answering you seriously is that nobody feels like being suckered into such an obviously trick question. The last thing anyone wants is to have you run up, point to their face and rail on them to prove some point. People smell a rat and are staying away or coming with shotguns. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Nick Hebb | I assume that your point is that Americans buy Old Navy because of value. They get value because they are reasonably fashionable and well made (not great, but good enough), yet at a lower than market average cost - at least compared to their parent company's other brands (Gap, Banana Republic, et al.). And, of course, the cost is low because they are made offshore, undoubtedly by workers paid very low wages with awful working conditions. Therefore, I would surmise that your point is that ultimately, Americans will choose the most economic option regardless of the negative impact to American workers and the exploitation of foreign workers. So, as it went for American textile workers, so it will go for American programmers. If so, point taken. But if this is another H-1B argument, then the point is old, moldy, and most of all, moot. It's a bad analogy for too many reasons for me to bother with. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Oh well ... Today I'll be wearing : http://www.oldnavy.com/asp/Product.asp?wdid=200830&wpid=160589 and http://www.oldnavy.com/asp/product.asp?:=l&wdid=200530&wpid=148192 I will be surprised if you manage to surprise us with a non-lame elaboration on this subject. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Matt H. | I may be flamed for this (and everyone else may be smarter to stay away) ... but ... I drive an American Car. So does my wife. (We still don't know what do to about Chrysler, so for the time being we are staying away. :-) I try to buy American Tools. I try to buy clothes that were made in America. The trade deficit scares me. My wife has a BA in Philosophy. The idea is that an idea can only be good if, if everyone did it, it would be good. (That leads to certain conclusions about drunkeness, adultery, etc that just happen to be in line with classic morality. Go figure.) But, honestly, I don't know. The economic argument about normalization and providing employment makes me wonder. (IE: If I bought clothes at old navy, I could employ 5 man-months of people in Asia; if I buy American, the $3.00 profit to the textile maker pays 1 person for 1/2 hour.) So, I guess what I'm saying is that I actually have an open mind. Hmm. If everyone had an open mind, then we could actually listen to each other and make rational judgements. hmm. And that would be ... Good? regards, |
| Thu 18 Jul | Ian Stallings | I would just like to say that I don't think any american would like to take work away from people outside the US. But we are not exactly in a Bull market right now. That being said I would hope that this topic dies the death it deserves. Bella is the type of person who wins an argument through attrition. Everyone will concede to his point just to move on. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bella | Man, it's like dealing with impatient 2nd graders in here. Ok, here goes..... OLD NAVY clothes (at least some) are MADE IN INDIA. Why do Americans love them? Old Navy clothes are a bargain. I wanted to see if any people against H1's & offshoring wear Old Navy. That would be comedy. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | Well... I really don't buy clothes strictly by brand. It first has to fit and then be cheap. Comedy is always funny... except when it happens to me, of course. That's when there ought to be a law against it. (laughing) |
| Thu 18 Jul | a person | Hey Bella, if you don't understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labor, I feel sorry for you. Unfortunately, I don't really want to give you any more of the human attention you seem starved of. |
| Thu 18 Jul | "asset" | Economics don't care whether the labor is skilled or unskilled. The work will go to where the labor is the lowest cost. Imagine when doctors can do most of their work over the net, the HMOs can outsource all that diagnostic and surgical labor. and legal advice labor and archtectural design labor and engineering labor and financial analysis labor and political labor? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Fuck Old Navy. And Menthos. And... | Old Navy. Fuck Old Navy. I don't patronize bad advertising. I will never eat menthos. I will never buy a car from 'Crazy' anyone. I will never go to a monster truck rally unless they say 'We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge!'. And most of all, I will never, ever, ever shop at Old Navy. |
| Thu 18 Jul | vincent marquez | 'Economics don't care whether the labor is skilled or unskilled. The work will go to where the labor is the lowest cost.' Thats a horribly general statement. Do you think that tailored Hugo Boss suites are done by thousands of indian kids? Nope, they're done by little old italain guys who get paid a crapload in the mall across the street. Some people don't care about their close, and some people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for an outfit. The same goes for software. If some marketing start up needs a quick web page, some DB apps, etc. and they come to me i'll tell them to go find someone else, becasue they'd be wasting their money and my skills. I feel there will always be a need for very high end, well written software, maybe not everyone needs a brilliant, 100k a year coder, but some companies will. |
| Thu 18 Jul | "asset" | From the comments on this forum, it's not THOSE people who are complaining. |
| Thu 18 Jul | pb | Yes. |
| Thu 18 Jul | pb | Amazing how not one person followed what are fairly simple instructions. Must be a bunch of techies. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bella | Hey Bella, if you don't understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labor, I feel sorry for you. Don't feel sorry for me. I have other plans than to stay in IT and whine, fight, and split hairs regarding basic economics and reality. Yourdon officially put the writing on the wall a decade ago, if you bothered to open your eyes. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/013191958X/qid=1027046559/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-8166626-6103000 |
| Thu 18 Jul | Vincent Marquez | Bella, I've always liked your posts, and you seem like your a nice, if not overly sarcastic person. But, if you have such a hard time doing well in the programming field, what makes you think you'll be great at something else? I hate to tell you, but in any job you'll go to, there will be tons of 'under-paid' (in their opinion) workers, and a small amount of highly paid, successful people. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Jeff MacDonald | Just because someone wrote a book, that doesn't necessarily mean there's writing on the wall: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1877858676/qid=1027055335/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/002-1630185-0619248 |
| Fri 19 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Haven't read this Yourdon book. Hope its predictions were more on target than http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130952842/qid=1027068062/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/103-1194569-9110227 |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | The IEEE has formally called on Congress to review the dangerous situation in engineering employment. It points out that the crisis may be more than a short term or cyclical downturn, and that it may harm America. 'IEEE-USA is asking Congress to investigate the impacts of increased hiring of non-U.S. guest workers, the greater use of temporary workers and the outsourcing of engineering work overseas as causes of the unemployment problem, in addition to the economic downturn,' the press release says. http://www.ieeeusa.org/releases/2002/071202pr.html By the way, you're allowed to have views on this issue even if it doesn't affect you personally. Let's look after our colleagues, people, especially when the problems are being deliberately created by greedy morons. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | 'Let's look after our colleagues, people, especially when the problems are being deliberately created by greedy morons. ' No offence Hugo, but you mean your 'American' collegues, right? Or did you include the Bangalore branch teams also? As for 'greedy morons', do you mean companies that try to maximize shareholder value by reducing operational expences through outsourcing and right-sizing? What is the better option for the company in a free market? Should they suddenly all become welfare intitutions for the poor disadvanteged american programmer? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | You have a valid point: are we going to look after all the world, which would be good, or our own part of it. Personally, I would be all in favor of looking after all of the world right now, but if we're going to do that, everyone should contribute. At the moment, the situation is that programming and engineering are being globalised while most other professions are not. Why is this? It is so that senior management can be richer. Nothing more. So my call is that engineers and programmers should not be disadvanted compared with their fellow citizens in the economy. Let us not forget that this is not an abstract game. Good people in mid-career suddenly find themselves without a job. Without money to buy things for their children. This is a terrible situation we should care about. As to shareholder value, all that is a negotiated thing. Shareholders benefit from operations in the economy. All participants in that economy are entitled to negotiate their role in that economy. Why is something that's good for shareholders better than something that's good for workers? Answer: it's not. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | > Feel free to guess my point. You're 'talking to Americans'. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | > Yes. Amazing how not one person followed what are fairly simple instructions. Must be a bunch of techies. - pb No - most people in the world buy nothing in the U.S. except food, lodging, and gas - no-one outside the U.S. has ever heard of 'Old Navy'. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Bella | > Bella, I've always liked your posts, and you seem like your a nice, if not overly sarcastic person. But, if you have such a hard time doing well in the programming field, what makes you think you'll be great at something else? I hate to tell you, but in any job you'll go to, there will be tons of 'under-paid' (in their opinion) workers, and a small amount of highly paid, successful people. Vin, 'Hard time doing well programming??' Actually, it's the opposite. If you've read my posts, I am leaving tech b/c of quality of life issues. If anything, I have had TOO MUCH contract work, and have made myself TOO valuable to my clients. I am tired of doing nothing but work work work, and now want a more balanced life. Money is of no concern to me anymore. ========= Ed the Millwright: 'It sounds like you're saying that as a consultant you are able to bill for about 60 hours a week? Are you then able to bill for every working hour? I personally don't work 60 hours a week anymore. The money is not that important to me anymore. But yes, I do I know some consultants who have been capped at a per diem rate. Previously, they would bill 80 hours if that's what they worked. $30k a month was commonplace....I know handfuls of people in their 20's whose houses are paid off as a direct result of the consulting BONANZA. Sounds like you missed the boat entirely. Be glad you have a nice safe dayjob, b/c it sounds like you have absolutley no business instinct. Bella Thursday, July 04, 2002 I must admit, I am quite taken aback when I see programmers who a) claim to be talented and b) complain about pay rates. I dont know what planet some of these people have been on, but we've just experienced as big a boom as ANY profession ever has. Yes, the market has slowed, but how on earth were these people not making money hand over fist for the past 5 years, IF that was their goal? Any decent programmer with a couple years experience had contract offers being thrown at him daily. There was 10x more money to be made than hours in the day. And if you subcontracted work and took a reasonable cut, like the body shops do, you could have cleared 7 figures the last few years, IF that's your style. Bella Friday, June 28, 2002 ========== |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | > That was a 100% content-free post: nothing but quotes. Get some sleep. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ed the Millwright | I do not wear Old Navy clothes but not for any particular reason. I have seen Old Navy ads and thought they were targetting the clothes for teens and below. I prefer to shop at Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack. There I buy Italian and American shoes which last me 10 years and cost about $60-80/pair. They are a better value than Malaysian and Chinese made sneakers that cost $150 and last less than 1 year before the soles fall out. My shirts all seem to be made in the middle-east - Bahrain, United Arab Emirates. Very nicely made with doubl-stitching and thick cotton and fit well. I have tried on Indian made shirts in the past but they tend to be cut too small and do not have the longer shirttails I favor. But they are usually made OK. Regarding Indian software, I do not have a single piece of Indian built software on my computer. All of it is made in the US, Canada, Germany and a couple shareware programs from Italy. I have never in my life seen a single piece of software made in India and so I could not possibly tell whether its any good or not. However, because I have never seen it, I am skeptical when I hear that H1B visitors have 'more experience' in the latest technologies, which is the story given by companies importing them. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Fuck Old Navy. And Menthos. And... | Ed: How do you know? If an American or Canadian company outsources their development, they don't often proudly announce 'portions of this product are made in India!' So maybe you have nothing but Indian software on your computer. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Mr. Obvious | A new poll: Was this the stupidest topic ever? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | Actually, I was talking to people in all the Western economies. Organised campaigns alleging 'skills shortages' and resulting flooding of the market with cheaper guest workers have been occurring in all the Western economies. These have generally been run by the local equivalents of the ITAA, with identifiable similarities in campaign tactics. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Bella | Ed the Millwright, You may be the biggest IDIOT in this forum. You have never run software written in India? Have you ever heard of Microsoft Windows? Here ya go, a cluetrain just for you: http://www.microsoft.com/india/indiadev/ http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=microsoft+windows+india+developed |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ed the Millwright | Perhaps you missed my post on the 'Mac fanatic' thread? Ho hum. So Bella you still using that piece-a-feces unstable operating system? I guess you can't afford a real man's operating system or perhaps unix is just too hard for you to understand? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | Ed, >All of it is made in the US, Canada, Germany and a couple >shareware programs from Italy. Not Finland eh? ... but then again that OS is not UNIX ;-) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ed | Is some from Finland? It's possible. Finns tend to be pretty smart people, like the Dutch. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ed | Oh I just realized you meant Linux. No I haven't had the chance to try out Linux but I've heard great things about it. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Fuck Old Navy. And Menthos. And... | Ed, http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2002/nf2002036_9682.htm (quote) Now, Apple has quietly made its next move. It has signed up a number of software developers in India to write business applications for OS X and port over (that's geek talk for 'convert') existing Unix or Windows programs. Apple has kept quiet about this plan. News of the deal broke in the Financial Express, one of India's leading English-language business dailies. B Mahendran, Apple's country manager for India, told the paper that the company plans 'to break into the serious business applications segment.' (unquote) So if not now, perhaps soon. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ed | Thanks! That's good news -- I look forward to finally being able to see some Indian software in action. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Bella | So, Apple will spent years replicating existing app functionality of today's OS's. What a great reason to convert! These tech firms are run by monkeys. Reminds me of the Corel/Java/Office suite DEBACLE. Just think, in 3 years, Mac will do just what Win/Linux do today! (I dont even mean to put Linux in the same sentence as Win. Linux on the *desktop* was always an overhyped unrealistic joke. I'm glad all that rubish hype dies off with the stock price of RHAT) Actually, that same Mac/Win game of catch-up, applies to Linux/Win in the desktop 3 years ago. We all saw how that worked out. Same will happen for this Mac porting project. Can it now, save yourself the $12,000 in coding fees. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ed | Bella, I'll be looking fgorward to when you can afford your first own computer. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Bella | Douchebag, you want to compare bank accounts? I put away more money in the last 10 years than you will in your entire life. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ed | We're not talking about Monopoly Money little boy. Come and play when you're a real man and you don't have to use your mommy's computer. |
| Sat 20 Jul | Sammy | My monitor's bigger than both your monitors!!! |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ed | It's not the size of the monitor but what you do with it. I've got the AppleCinemaDisplay 23'. You working with that 24' monster Sammy? Those things are great! |
| Sun 21 Jul | Daniel Shchyokin | Bella Proves a lot of my views about H1B's yes old navy makes clothes in Sweatshops in India, but are we going to argue that they should bring the sweat shops here too? There is a way to fight this, by the way! |
| Sun 21 Jul | Bella | Not sure what that last post meant, but to clear any confusion, I am not an H1. However, I support the idea that corporations are allowed to act in their best interests and cut costs where they can. Anyone who doesn't think so is a flat out hyporcite only looking out for himself. People like that never get far anyways. Ed, again, you want to talk money, then post your email. I My liquid net worth will DWARF yours. You picked the wrong topic to fight me on, pauper. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Hugh Wells | This is quite interesting. I've never seen people duel it out based on net worth before. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Ed | Bella, The issue of money is absurd. When have I attempted to bring that up? It is clear that there is no way to 'prove' cash in the bank without opening myself up to your script kiddie attacks against my banks. I doubt you'd get through but you can never be too careful here. Your motivations here are obvious and transparent. Just as an aside, I would not be surprised if your mommy did have more cash in her bank accounts than I do. What do money market accounts pay these days? Or perhaps she has it in CDs or interest checking? The fact is that anyone who talks about how much cash they have in their bank account is either not very wealthy or has no clue regarding finance management. This much is also obvious to all who have the misfortune to read your puerile diatribes. Even if we did want to compare wallet size (ho hum), any money your mommy has is not relevant here. The issue is how old you are and whether or not you are actually a developer or just play one on the internet. I think the answer to both of these questions is obvious for all to see. As far as email addresses, I think there are far more people here interested in seeing yours than mine and I have better things to do than sort through megabytes of spam sent by you and your little friends. I will say this though, as a small child your actions are understandable. If you are indeed an adult then that is very sad and I feel quite sorry for you. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Ringo | Bella, could you explain why companies are the only entities allowed to be rational, looking out for their best interests? For the record, I'm for outsoucing but find H1B as implemented terrible. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Joe AA. | I don't think Bella is limiting rational self interest to companies. I think he is talking about the irrational self interest that expect companies to 'provide a life' to their employees (high pay, no stress, no expectations, < 40 hours/week, private office, etc, etc, etc). |
| Sun 21 Jul | Bella | Ed, You're kidding, right? Not only are you dumb, you're senile as well. When you did attempt to bring up the issue of money, you ask? How about your use of the word 'afford' and 'money' in your posts below? 'I'll be looking fgorward to when you can afford your first own computer. ' 'We're not talking about Monopoly Money little boy.' |
| Sun 21 Jul | Bella | Bella, could you explain why companies are the only entities allowed to be rational, looking out for their best interests? Thanks for clarifying A.A. My only point is this thread was to expose people who don't see that cost cutting is an integral part of business. I'd like to see my detractors this thread start their own company, and start to pay people with THEIR OWN MONEY, and see if they don't start paying attention to salaries, and consider doing some comparison shopping. To close this thread, I do buy Old Navy. The clothes are a bargin, and suit my needs. As far as quality, I don't need to wear Brooks Brothers when going to the gym. Make decisions based on your needs. One last lesson to the economically illiterate who don't understand when cheaper labor has its place. Though it's technically superior, you don't buy a Ferarri to drive to church. And one a few have stated, programming today is easier than ever. The levels of abstraction have made lots of corporate programming child's play. Don't hire a PhD to do a job that an intern can do. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Required | New poll: Anybody else get kind of freaked out when Bella talks to himself via the 'Joe AA' handle? |
| Sun 21 Jul | Daniel Shchyokin | At first I thought Bella might be somewhat serious, but now I realize 'it' is a troll! |
| Sun 21 Jul | Daniel Shchyokin | Allright bella, you made your point now crawl back under your bridge |
| Mac fanatics | Wed 17 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) |
| Anyone want to guess the size of Joels Inbox by tomorrow morning? Why mess with these people, Joel? Slow week at Fog Creek? |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ed the Millwright (a Mac enthusiast actually) | What? Huh? A PC/Mac flame war? I hope I didn't arrive too late!! I followed his link to: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/zd/20020717/tc_zd/944359&e=1 Where I found this gem: 'Everybody is going to jump on the MPEG-4 bandwagon, except Microsoft,' Jobs said. Here's some other 'secret sayings' of Jobs which I am privy to: 'Everybody is going to start eating uranium, except humans.' Jobs said. 'Everybody is going to start commuting using hot air balloons, except people who use cars or public transportation, bicycles, or walk.' Jobs said. 'Everybody is going to become psychic, except people will less than three arms.' Jobs said. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Greg Kellerman | 'What? Huh? A PC/Mac flame war? I hope I didn't arrive too late!!' Their market share is too small to give a damn. Even this is more work than I'd normally consider. |
| Wed 17 Jul | anon zealot | Free software zealots are probably worse. They can send you 1000 identical emails in the time a Mac zealot can send you one. |
| Wed 17 Jul | "asset" | Hey...if 'love' their computing experience more than the wintel crowd, more power to 'em. If it's delusion, that's even better. I think I'll buy one. |
| Thu 18 Jul | sherlock_yoda | I think more thought should be given to 'mac fanatics', rather than just dismissing them as sad or stupid. After all, if we accept that in functional terms Macs are less superior to PCs running Windows then what's going on? Clearly, Mac users are getting something else that PCs aren't offering them. I would suggest that some of these things are: Perceived ease of use Perceived style and individuality Perceived friendliness A perception that Macs are more 'fun' oriented than work oriented (PCs) A 'product' orientation - Macs are sold as 'products' rather than technology 'Designed' products over 'engineered' PCs Rather than having the same old religious war, why not try and incorporate the two. I think it is high time the PC world sincerely tries to adopt some of the design values of Apple. Indeed this is already happening - look at the all the new styling for PCs with different colours, shapes, styles and look at Windows XP an attempt at style and character for the Windows O/S. Apple shows how an inferior product (functional and 'power' terms) can compete through a design orientation and usability. It also shows how these values can maintain loyalty against competing evidence. We should thinkbefore we get too smug. Sherlock |
| Thu 18 Jul | the roger | I feel sorry for intelligent Mac users. Macs can do really interesting things, but when you try talking about them religion is everywhere. Here's the advantages of Windows vs. OS X: * apps * hardware competition, and its advantages * upfront price I would never get an OSX box as my only home machine. But if I had a conventional business, I would use OSX for the large majority of my machines, connected by PC Unix servers. The TCO is likely lower; the productivity is higher. Just buy real optical wheel mice for those who want interface speed. Of course, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Specialized apps and more technical users often require other choices. And the caveat is that I'm a programmer rather than an admin; I don't know how simple it is to script the installation of software or upgrades across 100 OSX systems. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bob Crosley | 'I think it is high time the PC world sincerely tries to adopt some of the design values of Apple.' Amen. The iPod came out in November and is so compelling to many that not a single manufacturer duplicated it on the Windows side. So much so that when analysts started estimating that Apple could take 20% of the MP3 player market with Windows support, Apple has to do it themselves. iPod for Windows comes out next month. Apple designs their machines with a real love and passion. It shows. When most of the PC manufacturers try, they get it wrong with a splash of color here or an ugly shape there. I'd love to buy a PC laptop that had the same design sense as a Titanium PowerBook or an ice white iBook. But they don't exist. But the sad truth of the Mac side is that the religion has obscured the truth. I bought a Mac recently and ended up selling it. They're slow, underpowered and the legendary 'integration' isn't really there unless you stick to only Apple applications. But I love Apple. They push the entire industry forward. That's a good thing. Bob |
| Thu 18 Jul | Andrew Simmons | I have to admit that I have a Macintosh at home, it being the only type of computer that my wife is prepared to use. I thought the article made some good points, and there is no doubt that the Mac does tend to crash more than any flavour of Windows - at least for versions of the OS before X, which I haven't tried. This seems to be due to the fact that the OS provides no protection against poorly written applications. Having said that, and not wishing to sound like a fanatic, I think that the Mac is still a good deal easier for a non-technical person to use - my wife, for instance, learnt to use it very quickly, but still finds Windows quite baffling, and for some reason finds the concept of file extensions highly amusing. Maybe the relative shortage of applications is an issue for some people, but the Mac runs all we need - Office, Eudora for email, Netscape or Exploder for browsing, Pagemaker, Photoshop, and Virtual PC for those occasions when one has to turn to the dark side. My son occasionally complains about the shortage of games, but I'm glad of an excuse not to buy any new ones. One great benefit of the Mac's relative lack of popularity is the lack of viruses for it - the last time we had one was over 10 years ago. |
| Thu 18 Jul | pb | I must admit that I actually like the fact that the maker of my computer is interesting. Life would be pretty boring if everything was 'just a tool'. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bob Crosley | 'Life would be pretty boring if everything was 'just a tool'.' Absolutely. I look forward to Apple getting past their processor problems with Motorola and producing some hardware that can really keep up. Between that and OSX's Unix stability, I look forward to trying a Mac again. They are a joy to use in a lot of cases and they absolutely are easier to learn. Bob |
| Fri 19 Jul | anon | OS X is a fine machine... but for most people it is still an early-adopter phase. Apple's track record is pretty scary: dumping free email after users got locked in, enforcing 'digital rights' on DVDs you bought, hardware performance, etc. Still, every client-side developer should definitely take a look at OS X. Many times they implement features the Right Way. |
| Fri 19 Jul | X. J. Scott | Here's something interesting for whatever it's worth: > A recent Nielsen/NetRatings report shows Mac users are more educated, live in higher income households and are more Web savvy than their PC-compatible counterparts: > http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1403581 That of course doesn't mean Macs are better -- Jaguars are also favoured by this group and are temperamental, inefficient and hard to find parts or mechanics for. I guess that's why OS X 10.2 is being called Jaguar. In one of the Mac critical articles it mentioned that high end Pcs have faster system busses than high end Macs. While true, it neglected to mention that the Mac has a 64 bit bus. PCs faster and more stable? Depends on the application, the particular PC hardware, and the usage pattern. For music work such as digital recording, real-time digital effects, soft-synthesis, where floating point performance is critically important, the Mac currently wins over the PC architecture. But I won't make this claim for any other applications. Seeing NextStep resurrected as OSX is a great thing but Apple has a long ways to go before they get their act together on OSX. Musicians are staying with OS9 where at least their software works and they can get sound in and out of the machine. Steve Jobs hatred of the floppy drive is what did in NeXT and now that he has eliminated floppies from the Mac he is following that same stubborn path. Sure floppies are outdated but potential buyers of Macs have a problem with the no floppy included routine - not everyone enjoys cluttering up their desk with a lot of add on things and cables. Also it's time for him to give it up and start including a two-button mouse with a wheel. The one button mouse is totally lame. These two issues reduce the Mac's usability seriously. But he won't do either of these sensible things since he think s that he is the only person in the world who knows anything about computers and he can't learn anything from any one else. That pomposity may be his undoing. |
| Fri 19 Jul | anon | Think of the mouse issue as an 'interesting' design tradeoff. One thing people don't realize is that it's extremely ergonomic. It's also all you really need for the Mac. It should come standard with all Macs, and the consumer should consciously buy a different mouse or pen for trickier maneuvering. At least that is the Apple perspective, which to my mind isn't flawed. Just different. I work with many foreign people. Windows requires me to install a different OS if I want German. With OS X, a couple clicks is enough to make new menus speak German, Japanese, Spanish, whatever. If an app isn't locailzed, you can specify what language is next most desirable. That means you're not running into Joel's Hebrew Windows problems. The only real problem I have with Mac is lack of freedom. If Windows is rough sodomy, Macs are those sad codependent relationships. Just make sure you don't get locked in, and you should be OK. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Jeff MacDonald | 'If Windows is rough sodomy, Macs are those sad codependent relationships.' Definitely the quote of the day. |
| Sun 21 Jul | John Palevich | Here's a couple of less positive reasons why Mac owners might be richer and more educated than PC users: 1) PC users have to be 'average' simply because so many people are PC users. Only minority groups can deviate from the average. 2) Since Macs cost more, both initially, and in terms of the socal costs of not owning the dominant platform, you have to be richer in order to afford the luxury of owning one. 3) A very large portion of the Mac user base is people who are locked into the Mac from the 80's and the 90's. These people are naturaly richer and better educated than the general public, simply because they're older. (Disclaimer: I was a big Mac user from '84 to '94, but since then I've been a PC user.) |
| Fixing bugs rather than taking time | Tue 16 Jul | Tom Haviland |
| Did anyone else notice this quote: The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. umm...if you put in lots of bugs and fix them all, and it takes less time than doing it without bugs in the first place, wouldnt it be better to put in the bugs and fix them? In both cases, according to the quote you end up the same place... Not that I think this would really happen - its quicker to do it right in the first place, but I thought the wording could have been better... |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | A lot of people like to believe it takes 'extra time to get it right in the first place'. I agree it is quicker to 'do it right' the first time and I have not found it true that it takes extra time to do it right. Sometimes, I get the impression that 'doing it wrong', or putting in the bugs... is a form of intentional rebellion that tries to prove extra time is necessary to do it right by getting it wrong. |
| Tue 16 Jul | anonymous for obvious reasons | Believe me this does happen. I know a case where a manager insisted on measuring progress by the percentage of bugs fixed per week. Since the team was already working as hard as it could, the rate was achieved by simply introducing bugs and then fixing them until the rate was high enough. The manager was later sacked for incompetence. |
| Tue 16 Jul | not that difficult | I work in a place that rewards you for the amount of code you write and the amount of bugs you fix, and we can still seperate the troublemakers from the truly good coders. I guess that's what you get when your manager used to be a programmer, though it may have something to do with not getting credit for fixing your own bugs. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | 'may have something to do with not getting credit for fixing your own bugs.' OH!! I have to agree with this! 'Your bug, you fix it!!' is a powerful feedback mechanism towards quality code. One of the absolute worst places, with the lowest quality and bug ridden code, that I have ever worked on... NEVER traced back the bugs to their original source - each was merely entered into the 'work management system' (i.e. bug tracking) as a 'new defect'. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Malachi Brown | I think the 'extra time to get it right in the first place' comment might be best viewed in the context of a shop that doesn't include QA and bug fixing as part of scheduled development time. You could 'release' to QA on time with a whole bunch of bugs that you can fix without impacting the original schedule, or you can release late, but have fewer bugs to fix. The total time to develop and release a fairly bug free product would probably be shorter for the 'get it right' group, but if the incentive is to release to QA on time... Sorry, I'm a little off today. I hope that made sense. |
| Tue 16 Jul | James Montebello | Some of this is a matter of interpretation and semantics. One viable development methodology is to get to 'working' code as rapidly as possible, then iterate over the working model until it works 'well enough'. The actual definitions of 'working' and 'well enough' are, of course, flexible and depend on the project in question. One can view this as 'not taking the time to do it right the first time', since the iteration invariably involves fixing bugs. However, I view it as figuring out what 'the right way' is by using an actual working model. As for measuring by number of bugs fixed, my credo for a long time has been: 'Either you're making bugs, or fixing bugs. Often, you're doing both.' |
| Wed 17 Jul | Erik van Linstee | So what is that fixing bugs about? Is that fixing bugs in the code? Or the design? Or the concept? Getting to working code quickly is oke if you have first plotted a course. Too often the first bit of working code is just a wild stab in the dark. After that, there is no way of getting from the office buidling that you created, to the country house that you should have... |
| Wed 17 Jul | James Montebello | I think that was my point. The very idea that 'fixing bugs' should be a measurable goal is insufficient, since the very idea of 'fixing bugs' is itself too vague. All too often, a task will be roughly defined, only to have major parameters change after the work has started. These changes are either driven by outside forces (the marketeers didn't understand the problem), or inside forces (the engineers didn't understand the problem). Frequently, no one realizes the disconnect until after something is working and everyone can see it. Essentially, the problem is deciding what's 'right' when you want to take the time to 'do it right'. If you spend a lot of time designing and building an excellent solution that ultimately doesn't meet the needs of the market, the product fails. Since no one has yet invented the perfect communication mechanism, yet, one proven way to get past that is prototyping, testing, and iteration. So, yes, make a reasonably guided blind stab in the dark and go with it. Iterate until all goals are met. This may not be the ideal way, but it's a proven, effective way. To me, any way that results in a working solution is the 'right' way. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Andrew Reid | Fixing bugs is the wrong thing to measure. What you should be measuring is remaining bugs. In other words: you don't care how many bugs have been fixed, you care how many are left. Of course, this presupposes you've got someone (QA, Customers) actively finding and logging bugs. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Erik van Linstee | James Montebello wrote: 'So, yes, make a reasonably guided blind stab in the dark and go with it. Iterate until all goals are met. This may not be the ideal way, but it's a proven, effective way. To me, any way that results in a working solution is the 'right' way.' So I respond: But then your point is also that it is not a blind stab in the dark, but but a reasonably guided 'something else' :-) And there are reliable ways to get to reasonably guided, so that you can avoid stabbing. And yes, building something (like a prototype) is is one of them, but not the first, because you have to have some sense of where you're going first. Studying the subject and subjects (users, machinery, or whatever else is involved), asking stakeholders (users, service people, sponsors,...), drawing storyboards, are all much cheaper than and easier to accomplish under most circumstances than is having programmers program. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Erik van Linstee | Andrew Reid wrote: 'Fixing bugs is the wrong thing to measure. What you should be measuring is remaining bugs.' Remaining bugs, I say? Are those the ones you found, or the ones you didn't find but are still there regardless? So what does remaining bugs tell you then? That once remaining bugs drop, your skill at finding them is going? Or that there are less to find? At least bugs fixed tells you something about the rate at which your fixing bugs so you can decide to add people who can fix bugs. But remaining bugs by itself does not tell me anything. Should I add more people when the remaining bugs count goes down? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Tom Haviland | I think rather than measuring how fast bugs are being fixed, or how many are remaining, a better thing to measure (if you have to measure something) is the percent of test cases passed. This does several things: - it forces you to write test cases up front. - It gives you an easy way to measure your projects progress (i.e. velocity) - You can tell when you're done (all the test cases pass) I think Boeing used this technique for the 777 control software. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Andrew Reid | >>Remaining bugs, I say? Are those >>the ones you found, or the ones you >>didn't find but are still there regardless? Well, by definition, you can't measure unfound bugs :) >>So what does remaining bugs tell you then? How close you are to a shippable product. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Joe AA. | What about just having the developers count the bugs as they code them? Ooops!!! Are we still pretending they come from some mystical source outside our control??? I'm sorry... I'll do better to keep in sync... |
| Stuck in high-tech hell? There's a way out! | Tue 16 Jul | Bella |
| http://msn.com.com/2102-1106-940287.html |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ryan | Good stuff. |
| Tue 16 Jul | mackinac | Garbage. Worse than useless, could be harmful. So we work in a stressful unsupportive environment and his solution is to take a nap or maybe a day off once in a while? This reminds me of the little anecdote in Peopleware where the executive was proudly telling the author how his company had surveyed employees and was implementing a plan to resolve the #2 problem. So what about the #1 problem? Oh, they couldn't do anything about that. This sounds like the kind of book that CEOs would like because it gives them an excuse to avoid the #1 problems. What does this guy know about software development anyway? |
| Tue 16 Jul | Jutta Jordans | Well, Mackinac, if you can offer the world the solution for problem #1, write a book about it and get rich :-) As long as you don't, I prefer to take a break from time to time, change the things I can change, leave the things I cannot change and try to make my personal life as happy as possible. I will take a break in August and travel through British Columbia with some friends for four weeks. And man, I am really looking forward to this. I love my job, and I kind of like that many people depend on my work here, but at the moment it is my greatest pleasure to laugh everyone in the face and tell them that I will not be able to do task x or y because I will be river rafting, feeding bears or whatever. Have fun, |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ian Stallings | Sometimes the problem is out of your control. We sometimes deal with clients that don't want to give an inch but have no problem taking a mile and expecting a smile. Sometimes our managers become the enemy instead of our trusted protector, searching for ways to boost hourly billing at the cost of our sanity. I think his point was this - all the success you gain and problems you solve will mean nothing if they come at the expense of your life. You'll be wishing you had spent more time with your family or went on that vacation you've been putting off when you realize that there is no end of the road. No silver bullet solution that will lead to development bliss. The problems continue, the stress continues, the work goes on. So take a little time for yourself, it's not gonna kill anyone. But working yourself into the ground will - you'll be on the receiving end of a heart problem. Now don't get me wrong, I don't go along with society's obsession with self happiness at the expense of everyone else. I think that sometimes work just sucks and you have to just deal with it. But I also keep work in perspective now. It's merely one piece of my life. I take time off from work to spend with my daughter and enjoy it. And because of that I remain a happy and productive worker. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | There are basically two kinds of people in this world. The ones that are responsible for themselves and the other kind generally known as whiners. The whiners should be lined up against a wall and shot. Only problem with that approach is that there ain't that many walls. |
| Tue 16 Jul | mackinac | >>>Well, Mackinac, if you can offer the world the solution for problem #1, write a book about it and get rich :-)<<< DeMarco and Lister wrote a book 15 years ago. They have been mostly ignored, at least by people who might be in a position to implement any of their solutions. The reason I dislike books like the one that started this thread is that they offer junk solutions that might displace real solutions. The hard problem is getting employers to implement the known solutions. As a developer the only thing I can do is find a company that has implemented those solutions. I am finding this to be an amazingly difficult problem, but I am working on it. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Alex Givant | Dalay Lama says: 'Measure your success not by what you've reached, but what you give away during the road to success'. |
| Tue 16 Jul | David Clayworth | Excellent stuff. I think it's generally well known that Winston Churchill used to take an hour nap after lunch, even at the height of WWII. He was so much more productive that one of his top Generals started following his example (one at HQ, not one actually on the battlefield). However he slept sitting up, because he didn't think it was fitting for him to be seen to be asleep. It comes to the measurement thing Joel talks about. If you could have a nap, and not loose productivity (and I believe you can), and more importantly show that, then most managers would be OK with this (I think). Until then, managers have to guess how productive you are from how many hours you work or something. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Sarah Tonin | General Ulysses S. Grant was rumoured to over-indulge in alcohol. During the height of the Civil War, a congressman complained to President Lincoln that Grant was a drunkard. Lincoln, who was impressed with Grant's abilities on the battlefield, allegedly replied, 'Find out what kind of whiskey he drinks and send a barrel of it to all my other generals.' |
| Wed 17 Jul | "asset" | Any employer that doesn't 'allow' you to have the time you need for yourself is not a qualified employment services vendor. Remove them from the short list. In the interim, TAKE the time you need and want for yourself. Make it priority #1. Your employment services vendor will survive until you hire a new one. Repeat until life=null if doYourOwnThing.complete work |
| Wed 17 Jul | Bella | Clearly, 'asset' naive idealism reflects his lack of children, a mortgage, and/or elderly parents to support. Your time will come. |
| Wed 17 Jul | "asset" | I only lack the children Bella. At 40-something, I'm past my reality phase. And I choose to work in high-tech because I love it, just like I did 15 years ago. If everyone put their 'job' on the line every day, unemployment would be lower. |
| Thu 18 Jul | a | Employment services vendor? LOL |
| Thu 18 Jul | jag | i think boredom or 'life sucks' is necessary to let one get totally pissed and do something about it...change it for the better..which becomes eventually boring....begining the cycle all over again. the key is to have new experiences. i was cycling yesterday along a less known path and found a plum tree. stopped by to have a few plums. they were raw but i enjoyed the experience of plucking as many as i want, eat a little, chuck some to the birds and squirrels. hmm nice. hope that made sense ;) |
| Thu 18 Jul | apw | jag- exactly!! people spend too much time worrying about the 9 to 5, when they should be paying more attention to the 5 to 9. |
| Thu 18 Jul | mackinac | >>>people spend too much time worrying about the 9 to 5, when they should be paying more attention to the 5 to 9. <<< Maybe it is just an effect of getting older, but I am finding that it is getting harder and harder to enjoy much of the 5 to 9 while the 9 to 5 seems to be going down the tubes with no potential for improvement in sight. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | I would encourage anyone who wants to do something different during the day - a nap, read a book, walk, whatever - to go tell their manager and just do it. The trap people get into it is being defensive about it, which then lets a Dumb Manager turn them down. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bella | Yea, sounds smart in a recession. Go tell your manager that you're going for a bike ride after lunch. LOL. Sounds even smarter if you have children. (Disclaimer: I have no children, but have nothing but awe for those who handle this monumental task) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | Stuff the recession. |
| Fri 19 Jul | "asset" | If you are your own manager, you can answer 'yes' to such resonable requests. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Sarain H. | Hugh, You've got it together. You're absolutely right this is the way to handle it. if a manager who would have a problem with it, I'd consider myself warned that it's time to move on. But I've not yet had a boss that would have a problem with it. Last year, I was reading that productivity and well-being was higher in developers with a window view. I came in on the weekend, moved my stuff into an unoccupied office with a window, set it up and walked into it on Monday. Later I overheard my boss's boss ask him about the move and he said 'I decided to give him an office with a window because he deserves it and needs the privacy.' Later that week I told the department secretary that I needed a drafting table, a drafting chair and a decent bookcase. Didn't ask anyone for permission, though she did clear it with my boss first. They were ordered and desivered promptly and now I am working better than ever before. My boss knows that it pays big dividends to have team members who are not unnecessarily hobbled in their efforts. Imagine that! If you expect respect, you'll often get it. And if you don't get respect, you've acquired some extremely valuable information. I will say that I would not expect these acts of being a self-starter to work if one is not competant in their profession. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | Sarain, that is just beautiful! Good work. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Joe AA. | Beg for forgiveness, never ask permission. Well, almost. It may not be your 'boss' that would have the problem - if you are doing something physical outside of your normal job description... such as moving yourself or even furniture from one desk/office to another... there is the possibility you could be violating a company/union agreement and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble, regardless of your competency. Just be aware of other possibilities when you decide to knock your own chip off your shoulder. You may not be as smug as you want to believe. |
| Sun 21 Jul | Hugh Wells | No-one's talking about doing things that are selfish, foolish or irresponsible. That's not what it's about. So I agree with your point Joe AA. |
| Ogilvy on Advertising | Fri 12 Jul | Matthew Lock |
| Just read Ogilvy on Advertising, which I can thoroughly recommend to as an introduction to advertising. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D039472903X/103-9381745-5149401 Id like to hear if anyone has tried to put Ogilvys principles into advertising software. |
| Mon 15 Jul | William Frantz | There's some kind of irony in that the book is about effective advertising yet, I've only heard about it by word of mouth. |
| Tue 16 Jul | J. D. Trollinger | Conventional marketing (including advertising) is over-rated. Word-of-mouth is much more powerful than an ad executive would lead you to believe. This is probably most easily demonstrated at the movies. No mega-million advertising blitz can save a movie if the movie's a stinker. A good book on this subject is, _Marketing Without Advertising_, by Michael Phillips and Salli Rasberry: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0873376080/ |
| Sun 21 Jul | Hugh Wells | When reading anything by an advertising guy, you have to remember their job is *advertising*, i.e. making things look better than they are. |
| ASP | Fri 19 Jul | PC |
| I recently learned ASP, having avoided Windows until now. Do I have to learn ASP.NET right away, or is plain old-fashioned ASP ok to get started? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Vincent Marquez | depeneds what you want to do. Asp is great for making dynamicly driven sites. if you want to make some decent money doing web sites, this is a great way to go. Unfortunatly, asp isn't very scalable. If you want to add in some complex stuff, you'll have to buy someone's add on, or code a com object in C++ (although some would argue, i don't think thats fun). Asp.net uses VB.net and/or C#, instead of vbscript, both of which are much more powerful. If you want to expand into areas other then web programming, go with C# and ASP.NET. If your happy with being a web master or web programmer, stick with asp for now. I still use it all the time for small time sites. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Matthew Lock | Once you have learned ASP give PHP a go. It's an easy transition to PHP from ASP. PHP lets you do some cool stuff like Flash, GIF/JPEG, and PDF creation on the server. http://php.net |
| Fri 19 Jul | PC | I already know PHP, Java, JSP, mod_perl and Perl CGI. I have experience with Unix and Linux, but so far not much experience with Windows. This was requested by a customer, so I had to learn it. I don't expect to get deeply involved with Windows web sites, although you never know. I'm glad to have a chance to learn ASP but don't think I have time right now to learn C#, although I've heard it's similar to Java which I already know. The problem is I have to get this project done pretty fast. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Matthew Lock | If you already know Perl or PHP stick with them. They are both infinitely better than VBScript, the language that ASP uses by default. |
| Sat 20 Jul | PC | I know. I'm using PerlScript instead of VBScript. |
| .NET Language Choices | Fri 19 Jul | SMJ |
| Anyone have any views on the language of choice for a major .NET development ? Ive been using VB since VB1, but I wonder if VB.NET is too hacked, i.e. too much baggage from previous versions. Im tempted to bin VB and go with C# for a nice clean start. Anyone got any opinions? |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ori Berger | If you want something clean, go with Python. If you wish to avoid a language war, don't post such questions :) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Eiffel Convert | We're using Eiffel.NET from ISE: http://www.eiffel.com/ Our last two products were built from VB6/COM and Java/J2EE, respectively. Eiffel seems to stand heads and shoulders above both of them for the kinds of work we are doing. We're also using ASP.NET for a web-gui, but I'm not involved with it, so I don't know the details. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Vincent Marquez | ASP.NET isn't a language, its just some classes :-). Go with C#, without a doubt, its one of the most well thought out and capable langauges out. Anyone arguing otherwise hasn't programmed with it, either out of loyalty for their legacy langauge or the in-ability to learn. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Eiffel Convert | Thanks for the clarification. They are using whatever language is commonly used with ASP.NET :) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ian Stallings | I'm not knocking those other languages but I chose c# because it was clean and MS seems to be putting it's weight behind it. VB.Net seems like a kludge. I could be biased, as all developers are towards languages, but oh well. I know VB pretty well but it's usually my last choice. |
| Sat 20 Jul | prj | Both VB.Net and C# have a common basis in the CLR and .Net FCL, both are object-oriented. It's the programming paradigm that matters. This is what you need to learn. Whether you write 'Dim yourVar as Int' or 'Int32 yourVar;' is, IMHO, irrelevant. Although it could be said, if you come from a VB background, switching to C# means you drop all the baggage from VB that might interfere with your learning OOP. VB and VB.Net might look the same, but they are most definitely not the same way to program. |
| Is .NET the way to go? | Thu 18 Jul | confused soul |
| Hey fellas: I am wondering how to stay competitive and survive in this economic slump. Is learning .NET something recommended or/and experience with that would be an asset down the line? Thanks. confused soul |
| Thu 18 Jul | Sarah Tonin | It's pretty much impossible to give a meaningful reply to this question unless the original poster provides a lot more information about his/her long-term career goals, work experience, education, etc. |
| Thu 18 Jul | confused soul | Here's my background: 12+ years of software/web development (mainly microsoft technologies - VB, VC++, ASP, SQL, IIS, etc.). BSc in CS MCSE |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bill Carlson | Down the line? I can't see how you'd go wrong. My company has been dabbling in .NET for a while. It's very good and Microsoft has bet all their chips on it. For those that haven't given it a close look, .NET really isn't the usual Microsoft 'API of the week'. It's quite complete and very well thought out. DOS was awful, Win16 was awful, Win32 was painful, MFC was a hack. They all made it big. .NET/C# are consistent, elegant and have a $100M marketing budget behind them. You wouldn't be wasting your time, IMO. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Ori Berger | Get some non-MS experience (Unix, Python, Perl, Lisp, AWK). It will improve your offering a lot. Do get some .NET experience if it feels ok. Diversity is always good. .NET will provide you the same kind of job that VB or Java provided you in the past; And in 5 years time, it will be outdated and slowly replaced by something else (This is the way of all hype-driven technologies; Even if its good, it will have to give way to something else or there will be no source of revenue / no way to steer the market). When you have diverse experience, you can jump into any 'new' technology within days. mostly because there is little new under the sun. XML? was, for all practical purposes, available circa 1962. Virtual Machines? Around the same time. JIT compilers (better than any offered for Java or .NET at this time) circa 1984. Patterns? as old as time. Aspects Oriented Programming? 60s. Object Oriented Programming? Late 60s. It's not that things haven't improved in the mean time - they have. But not substantially, and some degraded. Get firm, diverse experience, and you're set for the next twenty years. And don't believe hype. It's hazardous to your health. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bill Carlson | I agree with Ori's 'There's nothing new under the sun' arguments (especially concerning XML). I think the original poster was asking 'I'm already a good engineer, how to I become more employable', not 'How do I become a better engineer'. Becoming more employable is a matter of manipulating the supply/demand equation. IMO, the demand for .NET will steadily increase and may carry a salary/rate premium in a couple years. It is a foundational platform, not a band-aid, so it lifespan will likely be long enough to warrant learning it. Along the same lines, reading and dabbling in XML isn't a bad idea. It's horribly overhyped, slow, and usually used as a bloated CSV file. Still, people want to see that you 'know' it or can at least talk the walk. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Nick | My company's very conservative and hasn't adopted the .NET platform yet, and probably won't for at least a year. Been burned too many times by all the problems associated with OS and Office suite upgrades, so the converstaive philosphy has extended to all things software, I guess. So, I'm curious whether many others are also seeing a conservative approach to adoption of .NET? I would assume that most practice organizations are using it for new development, but maintaining old code in VB6, VC++6, etc. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Larry From Queens | Nick, having worked with .NET C++ and C# now for about 6 months, your firm isn't really missing anything. .NET is very incremental technolgy and to a large extent with regards to many of its 'bennies', development organizations already have alternatives for. Unfortunately Microsoft's insistence on promoting a 'REDMOND' centric view the net, is something most organizations will find completely unpaletable. Organizations want OPEN, Microsoft desires CLOSED. The Web is for better or worse open for all to play. >> I would assume that most practice organizations are using it for new development, but maintaining old code in VB6, VC++6, etc. << |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bill Carlson | Nick's conservative approach is often the correct one. Why rewrite stable code in .NET? Good question. .NET isn't really about doing things that were impossible before. It's about dumbing down the stuff we spend 90% of our coding time on and having advanced functionality for the other 10%. I don't like spending my time maintaining C++ header files or converting between string types or writing marshalling code for objects or dealing with COM or ATL or maintaining .rc and resource.h files or doing try/catch to free memory or 100 other things that I don't have to do with .NET. Does this make me lazy? You bet. But until expectations catch up to the productivity, my team can go home at 5pm. If you're starting a project, .NET makes perfect sense. Remember, .NET _ISN'T_ all about web services, despite what Microsoft says. It's also about better languages, libraries, and runtimes. |
| Thu 18 Jul | pb | Dabble in Python, Perl, Lisp, AWK if you don't wish to be marketable. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Short term: Yes, .NET is a good option. There will be demand for this expertise, and a lott of the stuff that is developed on a day to day basis is going to be developed a lott faster in .NET. Long term: look for something else besides coding. Clinb that ladder or get into client relations etc. . Coding as a good way to make a living is dead. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Peter Ibbotson | Simple answer is yes. Now is also a good time, pick a simple project, write it well and use it as a calling card. It's basically going to be the future of windows programming. It certainly isn't about webservices, although it makes all of that stuff a lot easier, in that same way that writing a com object is easy in VB6 (Although there are gotchas) If you want to write desktop apps it's the way forward. Personally I suspect that in three years time if you don't have a .NET based app, you'll like someone selling a 16 bit app today. Oh and if you do write an app. Bother to a) Write an installer for it and check it installs on win98 & Win2K. b) Write some help. (Even if the text is somewhat lame) c) Write some documentation using the /// stuff for self documenting. d) Have a look at the disability / screen reader stuff At interview it would impress me, even if the application itself was very simple (e.g. an address book) |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | Unix is more important. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | Not to start a religious war but, >DOS was awful, Win16 was awful, Win32 was painful, >MFC was a hack. They all made it big. .NET/C# are >consistent, elegant and have a $100M marketing budget >behind them. C# is the brainchild of Anders Hjelsberg, chief architect of Microsoft. He created Turbo Pascal way back when, and was with Borland until Delphi 3. Delphi 3 happened back in like -97, but noone seemed to notice back then, because Delphi was just 'Pascal', Nikolaus Wirth style. There was no 'elegance' back then simply because people did not bother to look. What it all boils down to is to choose the right tool for the given task. A thing that is not often done in the industry. I see .NET being applied to all the wrong things, simply because its all the rage this week. Much like HTML or Flash is missused because someone said its the 'way to go'. In two years, there will be C$ or D# or whatever, that will be the new bandwagon for people to jump onto. There will always be 'Bandwagon Blindness'. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | Chrstopher, Maybe we will see .UNIX sometime soon eh? ;-) |
| Sat 20 Jul | Ed the Millwright | Chris, Amen to that! And when MS .Unix-- _does_ comes out in 2010 they'll be claiming they invented it. And when MS adds 'Watson' -- full text indexing of the junk on your hard drive, they'll claim it was their idea all along. Seriously, you can't go wrong with unix. The writing is on the wall for MS. It's a great platform if you're selling fixit services to people who like to buy cheap junk but it's not a real OS. Everytime I see the blue screen of death on a kiosk I just laugh! |
| Functional Spec Debate | Fri 19 Jul | Sarah Lester |
| Our User Interface Team is in the process of reviewing how we write functional specs. Currently we use an excel spreadsheet to define constants, scenarios and error messaging. Newer people in our group would prefer we use Word docs. Becuase our spec is used to write test cases for new development and to check that the existing functionality is still functioning we have to maintain all of the functionality in one file. The spread sheet we use now is almost 300 pages. A Word doc would be considerably longer. Is there a better option? Were considering building a database. What have others done. |
| Fri 19 Jul | posterboy | We put as much of this kind of stuff into databases as we can so that we can easily set up relationships, do filtering, add additional information easily, and all the other good things that databases provide. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Big B | For what it's worth... I use a Word document for a plain-English specification, then use that to create a detailed task list spreadsheet. The spec is the 'big picture' document that everyone can understand and discuss. The task list is full of technical implementation details and could possibly be used to create test cases, although I mostly use it to estimate, keep track of progress and proritize. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | >The spread sheet we use now is almost 300 pages. >We're considering building a database. I think this constitutes the worst Excel abuse I have seen :) You have answered the question of a better alternative yourself. Databases may not look like Excel or whathaveyou but you can extract the relevant parts and make Word docs or Excel sheets. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | Just to clarify my 'relevant parts'-statement... What is relevant for programmers and management differs, and not only differs in the area of expertice, but the requirements will vary over time as well. So a database to store the entire thing is needed, and then extract whats relevant to different people at different times. Im a programmer, and if I was handed a 300 page Excel sheet I would have a nervous breakdown :) |
| What's the best computer related job | Fri 19 Jul | Ryan |
| Programmer, DBA, Management, Helpdesk... What do you think is the best and why. Relate working conditions, salary, benifits, whatever. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Gerald | The one you enjoy doing, life is too short to work a job you hate doing. I always liked the advice if you love what you do the money will follow. |
| Fri 19 Jul | anon | Company. Not position. Google's chef has a more fun job than many programmers I know. A great company's hell desk can be better than another's DB admin position. |
| Fri 19 Jul | apw | 'hell desk' funny :) |
| Fri 19 Jul | "asset" | entrepreneur |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | >Programmer, DBA, Management, Helpdesk... Ive been a programmer for almost 8 years now professionally, and I have to agree that it all has to do with what company you are working for. I can work for much less salary and benefits, given I feel that the work environment and colleauges are good and talented. If the stuff I am working on, and the environment motivates me, thats enough (within limits ofcourse, I still have my cost of living, mortgage etc...). But now Im working mostly for a good pay check, doing Oracle stuff. Not very challenging, but it pays the bills. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Patrik | So I guess you can say Im now practicing the oldest job there is ;-) |
| re: Listen.com.. | Thu 18 Jul | Marty Eichelman |
| I still dont agree with the rent-a-song concept. The Entertainment Industry is trying every possible method to convince people that theyre only allowed to enjoy music/video/etc. for as long as the Entertainment Industry allows you to. When I purchase a written work, whether it be in PDF/eBook format or hardcopy, I expect that a year (or ten years) from now I will be able to go back to that work and read it again if I so choose.. withOUT paying for it again. Unfortunately, it seems the Entertainment Industry is trying to move away from this model. I know there are still CDs and DVDs, but I just dont understand these type of services (Listen.com). |
| Thu 18 Jul | Bill Carlson | I think the recording industry's business models are limited by technology. They might be willing to sell you an .MP3 file for $1/song, but it's a little too easy to give it to your friends. Streaming audio is difficult to capture into a file and gives them some protection. As long as 90% of people can't figure out how to pirate the tunes, they probably feel safe. Obviously, the $20 per CD music model has got to go and its days are numbered. I can't really blame the music industry, though, for holding onto this for as long as possible. You don't kill the golden goose, after all... |
| Thu 18 Jul | Igor Krivokon | Marty, what about movies? One can rent movies OR buy video/DVD. Both models coexist happily. If renting movies is OK, why renting music is bad? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Anonymous Coward | There must be ways to capture the data that's streamed from Listen.com. If so, what's the quality of the resulting music file? As good as if you ripped it from a regular CD? |
| Thu 18 Jul | th | I've been subscribed for a couple of months. It does offer a nice selection, though there are still plenty of songs missing (even though they have a lot of artists, for some artists they might only have one or two CDs). The music streams are 128-Kbps. That's good enough for my ears. You can get something like TotalRecorder at http://www.highcriteria.com if you really want to save them permanently.. For the most part I listen to music at the computer so 'renting' isn't too bad. However, there's always the possibility of rights to songs expiring and being suddenly removed. And I got this nice friendly message at 9 last night: 'We're sorry, Rhapsody is currently down for scheduled maintenance and upgrades. This maintenance period will be over at approximately 12:00am, Thursday July 18 PDT We apologize for any inconvenience. Please check back in a few hours.' Also, I really wish they'd create a web service interface to their catalog so I could write my own client. I can't stand the user interfaces to most of the music services. Rhapsody is tolerable but it's partially browser-based and hence slow to navigate. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Anonymous Coward | 'This maintenance period will be over at approximately 12:00am, Thursday July 18 PDT' Is 12:00 AM noon or midnight? And if it's midnight, is it assigned to the day that's ending or the day that's just beginning? Stuff like this drives me crazy. I hate ambiguity. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Gertjan de Back | Hah, there is no way to tell as 12.00 AM and 12.00 PM (or 0.00 AM and 0.00 PM) do not exist. As AM means 'before noon' and PM 'after noon', noon is neither before or after. It's either Noon or Midnight. Just one more reason to use a 24 hours clock. Don't take my word for it: http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/general/misc.htm http://greenwichmeantime.com/info/noon.htm |
| Fri 19 Jul | tapiwa | to be honest, with a lot of the music the record companies are putting out there, it makes more sense to rent. A lot of it is shite that you will not want to listen to again in six month's time. Very few cd's/dvd's are worth buying ... read watch more than once! |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ian Stallings | [Streaming audio is difficult to capture into a file and gives them some protection] Anyone can rip a stream and it's not hard. I can setup winamp/shoutcast with a ripper easily. The tools are out there. BUT some companies try to protect their investment with proprietary encoding that can only be played through their application. Everything can be reverse engineered but that makes it harder. The latest scheme coming out of redmond plans to build Digital Rights Management (DRM) into the hardware all the way down to the CPU so you can only play 'authorized' media and use 'authorized' applications. Kind of a hard pill to swallow, giving an outside authority the right to determine what I can and cannot do on my machine. I wonder what ever happened to trusting the consumer. Call me crazy but I like the idea of ownership and all the restrictions they want to place on consumers simply so they can milk another nickle is getting old. If coporations had their way we will all rent our lives from them. It's bad enough that we have to finance everything, but now we can't even own anything. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Bill Carlson | My guess is that the record companies are not afraid of Ian Stallings (previous poster) and his audio capture software. Their afraid of 12 year old girls E-Mailing the latest n'Sync single back and forth. They're taking a risk, but it's a measured risk, like credit card lenders. Some people are going to rip them off, but the odds are in their favor. All they have to do is make it a pain to download music. I'll admit, I used Napster for a while. When they closed, it wasn't point-click-download anymore and I quit downloading music. Yes, the record companies are pond scum, but this isn't a moral issue at all. They are going to hand on to the $20/CD model until it's completely run into the ground. And from a business angle, they should. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Joe AA. | Maybe it's a personal problem or even an age thing, but I can't work and listen to music at the same time. When my head is bopping along to the tunes I find it really difficult to concentrate on something else. I think that means I would not use a service like listen.com... and when I do listen to music (which is quite a lot actually) it will be on my stereo for the higher quality. I don't know where you guys are buying your CD's... but I have never paid $20 for a single CD... double or triple or sets maybe, but not a single CD!! |
| Fri 19 Jul | Marty Eichelman | Igor, you have a very good point. I suppose what makes renting a movie more palatable is the 1-2 hours of enjoyment you expect from the rental. The typical song is 3-4 minutes, and no matter how good it is I won't be playing it for 1-2 hours straight. Then again, very rarely have I gone back to rent a movie that I've seen in the past, but I still play my old Stones albums every so often. Ian, I'm with you. Pretty soon Dell will come out with metered PCs.. 2 hour max and if you don't fill it up with change (quarters only, of course) before it expires, you lose all of your work. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ian Stallings | Yeah I guess I should qualify what I said a little more - I have no problem paying for a one time view/listen/whatever. Especially if it's for a cheap one time price , like at the movie theatre. But when they want to charge me ownership prices I expect ownership, not rental. Listen.com sounds like a middle of the road alternative and I think they should keep moving in the direction. But i would like to be able to download and own specific songs from every artist. I hope one day we can get there. Joe A.A. - i also get distracted by music but only if it has words. I find that certain types of music played over some headphones actually helps me focus on my coding. Especially classical and electronica, which tend to have very few words. One of my old coworkers said that music without words has been proven to help you think faster and focus better. Here's one quick link I dug up on music and the brain: http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n15/mente/musica.html I don't know, but it sounds like a great excuse to put on the headphones. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Joe AA. | Ian... I think I can understand that... at least for the general public, your point about words in music.
However |
| Fri 19 Jul | Ian Stallings | |
| Fri 19 Jul | Standardization Commitee Chairman | 12pm is noon. 12am is midnight. |
| Fri 19 Jul | X. J. Scott | Joe, $20 is normal for most of the chains excetp for new releases. Almost every single CD is either $17.99 or $18.99. Add tax and you're over $20 on average. New releases of big name artists are $13.99 or $14.99. I buy considerable fewer Cds than I used to because they don't have this set at the right price point. That is quite foolish from a business standpoint actually. If Cds were $8.99 they would sell over three times as many easily. Marketing studies have been done that show this but they are not interested since riding the cash cow is what it's all about. The fact that all the music they promote on radio stations is so lame I defenestrated my radio years ago is another issue. It's quite hard to find decent music. Surfing the web is one way to do it and when I find something good I do buy the album since I have golden ears and mp3s sound like garbage can lids beingdragged back and forth. |
| Knowledge work this! | Wed 17 Jul | Tim Boucher |
| So Id like to get the opinion of people here about the whole idea of knowledge workers, whether they think thats bunk or really important and relevant (which is what i happen to think). And also, if you know any good articles or links about it, I would love to see them, because I think 98% of people who are using this buzzword dont really know what the mean by it yet. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | Tim, just give us a hint of what you mean by it. |
| Thu 18 Jul | tim | Hm. I guess I'm trying to clarify what, if anything, this idea of knowledge workers means to anyone else out there. I guess the way I'm thinking about it is anyone who has to deal with, in any sense, a body information at their job, especially of a technical nature and especially those who are interacting with it through the use of computers. Like I'm interested in talking about the cognitive/cultural shifts that computers are causing. Hows that? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | It's a very general term - knowledge worker. You don't need to use that term to talk about what you want to do. It sounds great. Talk about it. |
| Thu 18 Jul | tim | haha. i mean, im interested in hearing you guys talk about it too. i just found a sort of neat book about it called 'growing up digital'. its neat cause it talks about how like education and other stuff are being forced to change as a result of a whole generation has grown up using computers their whole lives (like me, 22 yrs old). I agree that knowledge worker is totally a wussy word that is completely vague and generalized and doesnt mean much at this point, but i think its interesting because it acknowledges that there is a shift happening, that words need to be invented for it. |
| Thu 18 Jul | w.h. | My co-worker used to use the term Knowledge Worker with a perverted bent... as in it's kinda like being a.. *cough* worker. Now we just replaced the term with Hex Worker. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Joe AA. | Knowledge worker... do you mean the people that spend their day pointing and clicking away at some GUI to perform a business function that would have been completely automated in the old days? |
| Thu 18 Jul | Matt H. | heh. Knowledge Worker = Getting Paid to think. 'Work for Hire' of intellectual property. As opposed to labor. Did you guys know I usedta work for a fortune 500 intellectual property company? That wasn't AOL-Time Warner? :-) regards, |
| Thu 18 Jul | Sarain H. | 'Knowledge Worker' got hijacked. It is now xeing used as a code word for 'Technical Support person with no experience maxing minimum wage and following a mindless script.! It allows those saddled with these jobs to feel good about themselves when explaining their crummy job to others. The term no longer refers safely to a developer. Time to move on. Soon they will be calling themselves 'systems architects' after everyone catches on to what KW really means. |
| Thu 18 Jul | "asset" | Where can I find a job that requires no knowledge? That would be cool. It must be a matter of degree (quantity and quality of knowledge - not a peice of paper to frame). That bar started high and is moving lower. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Christopher Wells | A knowledge worker is anyone who works in an office, but perhaps excluding dealing with people (customer service, sales), and excluding anyone whose job can be automated e.g. clerks sorting tax returns or who use the telephone, also including lab researchers. My cousin is starting a job maintaining and callibrating hospital equipment - he has a university degree in radiology so though he's a lab technician he's a 'knowledge worker' too. White collar workers. The job needn't be sedentary, e.g. medical doctors qualify. |
| Fri 19 Jul | Hugh Wells | Tim, it's an interesting point. What do you think is the biggest change in how things are taught and 'stuff'. What do you think is the biggest change that HASN'T occurred but needs to. I suppose everyone knows the Air Force changed its recruiting test procedures for pilots to accommodate the fact that games have given them much better familiarity with simulators and better co-ordination skills than in previous generations. |
| Another way to reduce the cost of tech support | Tue 16 Jul | J. D. Trollinger |
| I think that companies deliberately make it so painful for customers to call tech support that customers simply stop calling after a while. Case in point. I was one of the first people in my area to get a cable modem connection (Time Warners Road Runner). As you might imagine, the early adaptors tended to be computer geeks. And yet, whenever I called the Road Runner Help Desk, the technician automatically assumed that I was a total idiot. I could present twenty different pieces of evidence to show that a problem was originating with Road Runners news server, or one of their routers, or whatever -- and the technician would still INSIST that the problem was on my end, and that I simply needed to re-install the TCP/IP stack on my Windows machine. Eventually, I just became totally frustrated, and I stopped reporting network problems. I think that this was their intent all along. |
| Tue 16 Jul | KDEr | Usually technical support at frontline (ie. customer support line) have little/or no expenience on their support area. I was once reporting a GPRS network problem to my telecom company. It was okay to ask me if my end configuration is okay at the first time. However repeatedly go through the configuration on each call is not a thrill thing to do (I already told them I ran by this couple times from another support people already, and they keep inconsist my end configuration has gotten some problems. And yes, they thought I am a idoit). From that case all of the support people can enable to do one 'code segment' - 'check the configuration on user end, if not work, then try to refresh the GPRS status on my account in their database'. I called them over 10 times and finally they escalated the problem to 'engineer', which in the end the problem was really a network error. I am not sure if it can reduce the their cost of technical support, but I am sure I am frustrated. |
| Wed 17 Jul | James Ladd | Most of the Help Desk people are reading a script. Therefore, they treat you as an idiot because they are following a script. I have had the guy tell me that I had to re-install windows and the dial-up software because that was the process he had to follow. He agreed that because I got the message 'Server Dropped Connection' that in all likelyhood the problem was at their end, but the script says X and he can not raise the issue any higher until I did X. I hung up. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ged Byrne | I worked on a help desk for nearly 3 years, and they have a tough time. A help deskers life is completely measured, and it doesn't pay to think. If you do a lousy job, but follow the scripts and procdures (and cut off people when the lines get to busy) then you can get good stats and appraisals. Try to do your job properly (ie. actually helping people) and you'll barely scrape by. I never did very well as a help desk. My poor performance stats where only tolerated because of a steady flow of very pleased customers praising my work. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ged Byrne | On, another point. Since 99% of people who call help desks are idiots, its safe to assume that the perso on the other end is a idiot. Everybody knows that smart people would have posted to a web discussion board for a worthwhile answer. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | There's this amazing series running on BBC 2 for the moment called 'The Secret Life of the Office' that gives you an inside look at the helpdesk (among many other things). Prepare yourselves for discovering incredible new depts of incompetence. |
| Wed 17 Jul | J. D. Trollinger | Ged Byrne wrote: 'Since 99% of people who call help desks are idiots...' In general, this might be true. However, the percentage varies according to the type of technology. For early-adaptors of broadband connections (my example), the percentage is much lower. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Anon when dumb | I used to work doing tech support, and no matter what kind of technology they were using, almost every user calling for support is a consumate idiot. Companies do an excellent work selling high tech products to housekeepers, nannies, moms, grandfathers, and to the village idiots. They're the bulk of their sales, and there is no such thing as 'early adopters', except if you are cooperating doing beta testing. The small percent of people who actually knew what they're doing, usually were very responsive once they figured they were talking with a 'good' tech. I was part of a special team -spec ops :-)- who only attend difficult cases. That team was later disbanded (too expensive), but luckily I was longer out of there. |
| Wed 17 Jul | apw | Are the callers actually stupid or are the products they are talking about designed in such a way (read: poorly) that it takes a rocket scientist or computer geek to use them? It would seem to me that if there is a majority of 'idiot users' out there then the companies should listen to them and make better designed more useable products... |
| Wed 17 Jul | J. D. Trollinger | 'there is no such thing as 'early adopters' ' Early adaptors are the people who embrace new technologies as soon as those technologies become available on the market. In terms of stupidity, early adopters follow a normal distribution (just like almost any other human characteristic). The normal distribution is definitely shifted toward the intelligent end, though. Tech support would be much better if the technician could make a judgement as to whether or not you (the caller) were an idiot. If you're not an idiot, you would be referred to the next level instead of having your time wasted ('Did you check to see if your computer is turned on? Is it plugged into the wall socket?' etc.) Maybe your customer profile could contain a rating -- say from 1 to 5 -- that describes your level of technical sophistication. Wasn't customer relationship management (CRM) software supposed to solve these types of problems? What happened? |
| Wed 17 Jul | Greg Kellerman | 'Maybe your customer profile could contain a rating -- say from 1 to 5 -- that describes your level of technical sophistication. Wasn't customer relationship management (CRM) software supposed to solve these types of problems? What happened? ' I think it called...um what's that word again? Oh yeah, Management! |
| Wed 17 Jul | Joe AA. | Anyone that counts on software to solve people problems is a fool. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Anon when dumb | 'Early adaptors are the people who embrace new technologies as soon as those technologies become available on the market.' Agree with that (adaptor like in adaptation, or adopter like in adoption?), but when a company actually have a tech support dept, its because they want their product to be mainstream. Usually, they've already spent mountains of money doing marketing and the such, so, that's why I don't believe in these things early adopters exists at all. (hope anybody be able to understand what I've said, because I don't) |
| Wed 17 Jul | Troy King | Anon you said: '...almost every user calling for support is a consumate idiot. Companies do an excellent work selling high tech products to housekeepers, nannies, moms, grandfathers, and to the village idiots. ' Nice to know you consider housekeepers, nannies, moms, and grandfathers idiots. Please tell me what company you work for so I can add them to my list of companies I prefer not to give my money. Maybe if your company had designed a product that the users could figure out more easily, you'd have been out of a job. I can't stand being around people like you that think anyone in a different line of work is an idiot. Let me clue you in. . . lots of computer professionals laugh at the tech support people behind their back, because while the support reps they think they're experts, they're really beginners working in an entry-level position; they're at the same level of expertise as the average CompUSA floor rep. They think they're experts because they know so little that they don't even know what else exists besides their narrow experience. Believe it or not, just because someone has trouble with your product, that doesn't make him an idiot. |
| Thu 18 Jul | OzzieGT | My friend has the same problem with RR. He keeps losing his connection to various parts of the network (gateway, news server, etc.) but when he calls in they tell him that it's his computer and to reinstall the TCP/IP stack. Then, after a few days, everything just magically clears up. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Ged Byrne | My second point was said with tounge in cheek, but there is a point.
Regarding Early Adopters, I've encountered 2 types.
The first type are the hobbyist enthusiasts who are generally interested in the product and stick out like a sore thumb. If the support operator knows their stuff (which is tragically rare) then they will spot this type.
Unfortunately, the majority of early adopters who phone support are of the second type - those who do it for status. The want the latest gee whiz gizmo that they read about in their lifestyle magazine so they can bore people at parties.
Theses idiots are also vain, which means they will willingly lie to avoid revealling their ignorance.
It is a popular sport among cynical tech supporters to ask these people made up questions to these type for sheer entertainment value.
'You've checked the flux capacitor, it needs 88mph to work'
'Yes, obviously |
| Thu 18 Jul | I wish the Coyote would eat Road Runner | ====Begin quote==== No one appreciates being treated like an idiot. I was forwarded to the 'National Help Desk.' The person who took my call had no recognizable knowledge of the Road Runner network, networks in general, computers, or networking. I described the problem as plainly as I could: I had connectivity. My modem was on, connected to Road Runner, and working. My computer was plugged in, on, and connected to the modem. I could connect to Road Runner. I could retrieve e-mail. I could ping rr.com successfully. I could NOT reach any site beyond the rr.com servers via HTTP, FTP, or ping. Stating all that, it would be apparent to anyone with some modicum of networking knowledge that the problem was on the network, not in my computer. Why then, do you suppose, did this person insist that she could not help me unless we first ran down her checklist that began with resetting my modem? That question is rhetorical; I know the answer. The answer is that the customer is assumed to be an imbecile who knows nothing about what they are calling for, and the 'help desk' personnel are trained chimps who have been taught to read a script, and given no autonomy in dealing with customers that have an IQ that is actually measurable. Topping the cake is the customer service response e-mail I received while the problem still existed. It was on an unreachable server. 2 hours later, the service returned, and the local Time Warner / Road Runner support people had confirmed what I told them 2 hours ago. How much time would have been saved if I had been able to speak to someone who actually understood what I was saying and was able to act on the information I had provided? I know for a fact that it does not take 2 hours to track down a server / router that needs to be rebooted / replaced. I know it's not practical to hire technically savvy people to man your first tier of support, but if reading from a checklist is all they are able to do, why not simply mail a copy of the list to each of your customers and do away with them altogether? I would appreciate hearing from someone who can actually answer some of these questions. 'Based on your recent experience with technical support, how likely are you to use Road Runner telephone support again?' Utterly preposterous. What other options have you given? Service goes down, can't use Web-based support... am I supposed to mail you a letter? Hah. DSL is now available in this area, and Sprint has been courting those of us who could benefit from it. TW / RR is not the only broadband solution in town anymore. Perhaps they should act as if they had a customer base to protect. Thank you for your time. Hopefully someone will actually read this, rather than simply shipping it off to the bit bucket in an effort to protect someone else's feelings. ====End quote==== http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/daily/20011219.html |
| Fri 19 Jul | Chris Woodard | I agree, but support issues aren't limited to RoadRunner. In my area Verizon DSL buys addresses from Genuity (yes, the Black Rocket (tm) people) to provision them out to their business class customers (of which I am one). When I contracted for my static IP addresses, I was told that I couldn't run my own DNS server. When I asked them why, I was told 'because those addresses aren't reverse-DNS compatible'. On further digging, I was told that the real reason was that nobody would be able to reach my DNS server if my DSL connection went down. After I pointed out to them that if my DSL connection went down my web server wouldn't be reachable and that the unreachability of my local DNS box would be a non-issue, they finally admitted it was because they didn't want to support customers running their own DNS servers. After about three months, Genuity 'lost' my addresses. Verizon Business-Class support (with a level 3 tech) was prompt, courteous, and knowledgeable. Apparently, Genuity told the Verizon tech that 'sometimes routers just lose addresses' and then told me that Genuity used older 'RedBack' routers and had to replace them relatively frequently and that what he thought had really happened was that some 90-day-wonder had just forgotten to put my addresses back in. Total downtime for my site: one week, including reprovisioning time and DNS propagation time. Anybody had a similar experience? |
| Meeting Time | Tue 16 Jul | Matt Watson |
| Ok, I have a question.... How many hours out of your week do you spend in meetings? I am just shocked at how many meetings I am invited to (and must go to). On a good week, I have at a minimum 5 hours of meetings. That is 1/8th of my week. On a bad week though (like this one) I think my meetings will come in at about 12-15 hours. That is almost a third of my week in meetings. I have been with this company since I graduated from college so this is all that I know. Everyone outside is shocked at the amount of meetings we have here. Oh and if there is some sort of major issue they require daily meetings. We have a theory around here.... promotions and salary increases are directy proportional to the amount of daily meetings you have. Granted I am the tech lead on my procjet and I know I should be attending some meetings, but doesnt that seem ridiculous? Does anyone have any advice? Thanks Matt |
| Tue 16 Jul | Scott B | Sounds to me like you think these meetings are a waste of time. Have you talked separately to the meeting chairperson(s) about this? Try suggesting something like you attend every second meeting, and send an email update to the chairperson for the meetings you skip. The amount of time spent in meetings would obviously relate to the amount of projects you are working on. Speak to your manager. Your productivity could be being harmed, which would affect your annual review. :-) |
| Tue 16 Jul | Jutta Jordans | > How many hours out of your week do you spend in meetings? At the moment it is an average of about 4 hrs/week for me. It used to be less than this, but at the moment we are having some major changes to our software as well as to our development process and I took over some QA responsibilities, too. (Normally I am just a programming grunt) I would say that this meeting time is dearly needed and most of the time very effieciently used. But how many meetings you need depends on the size of the company/department/team you work with and on the overall communication culture you maintain. I do not mind meetings as long as I have the feeling that they are neccessary and the information gathered there is indeed connected to my work and helps me when programming. I get impatient when I feel that I do not learn anything useful at a meeting and my input is not needed or wanted either. Fortunately this does not happen often. Have fun, |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | Unfortunately there are some places... well, maybe quite a few... where meetings are held as a pretense of doing work. Or, in other terms, the purpose of the meeting is to establish, maintain, keep or enforce the 'social pecking order' of the participants. The best recommendation is to stop going to any meeting, required or otherwise, in those cases where it serves no productive use of your time. If it is considered 'socially unacceptable' to turn down a meeting then you can always have a good time picturing everyone as a chicken. Their behavior is very close to what happens in a hen farmyard. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Meeting Misser | One technique that I use to control meeting time is to insist that the meeting have a formal agenda and firm objectives. This makes it a little more costly for folks that like to call meetings to do it (since they have to actually think about the objectives and agenda). It also is useful in preventing certain individuals from taking over the meeting to satisfy their need for constant debate. This, in turn, prevents you having to call another meeting to get done what you wanted to get done in the first one. This approach also seems to yield better results, in my experience. Another tactic is to demand (or assign) prework. This succeeds for the same reasons as above. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Sean Conner | Why not remove all the chairs from the conference room and don't allow anyone to sit at meetings? That would keep them short. Or (as I heard from a movie): If a meeting can start without me, it's not worth attending. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Alyosha` | Maybe you're thinking of Groucho Marx: 'I refuse to be a part of any meeting that would invite me as an attendee?' |
| Tue 16 Jul | Dan Sickles | In addtion to a strict agenda, limit all meetings to 4 attendees. Less is better. No exceptions. If you still have more than 4, start crossing off agenda items until you get there. Then schedule another meeting for the other items. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Alyosha` | I agree with Dan. Limit the number of attendees to four and you should have no problems with the meeting getting off topic and wasting other people's time. Oh, and eliminate status meetings entirely. Collect status from your reports via email. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Sammy | So, people call meetings for your input but don't want to hear what you really desire to say? Amazing! Two options come to mind. One is, during those meetings, commit to time Schedules that mean you 'can't make it to many meetings.' Depending on how things go, you will be seen as having made a valiant effort. Maybe email a friend who goes to those meetings to drop your name. ('Bob is today ensuring the GUI subsystem has Six Sigma quality, boy are those GUIs monsters!') Then when you make a meeting, sound focussed but satisfied at having slain dragons. Make the next few meetings, say interesting things. Rinse, lather... The other option is if being 'lead programmer' means being some sort of manager. Then you implement the Umbrella management design pattern, running interference so your other programmers don't have to waste their time. Make sure during those meetings you get great developers, so they don't need your regular input. Take time outside of meetings to make sure your skills are sharp, so you don't slowly morph into an unhireable management bozo. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | Yeh, fill up your day with specific tasks, so you can apologise and explain that's when you're coding the update algorithm, or whatever. Where management is dumb, they presume programmers are always available; they interpret the lack of interaction with another person as not being busy. |
| Measurement | Mon 15 Jul | Michiel de Mare |
| Cool article! I never thought about the similarities between incentive pay for developers and top management in this way. I guess some schooling in game theory would have prevented a lot of suffering at a couple of major company. I think the measurement problem also affects software estimates. A developer will naturally try to give a realistic estimate. However, when he knows that he will be held accountable (shouted at and spit on by the boss, forced to work until after midnight for many moons) when his estimate later turns out to be too optimistic, he will react by putting his self-interest first by both inflating his estimate a bit (left-shifting it more likely) and working slower in order not to beat his estimate by too much. Solution for management: ensure that estimates made by developers do not affect them personally (affect, not effect, and ensure, not insure, sorry, just had to say that) and win their trust so that they realize that its safe to tell management how long this word count feature REALLY takes. If your programmers are always, like Microsoft, just beating their estimates, its probably time for a little soul-searching... |
| Mon 15 Jul | Adam | Wow. People focus on what gets the to the rewards. I believe this is known as a blinding flash of the obvious. Not faulting Joel for saying it, though, as one of the problems with leadership is ignoring the obvious. The problem with leading large organizations is that people forget that they can handle leading a MAXIMUM of 7, and most effectively 4 other people. If you try to lead all 200 Customer Service Reps, you will fail. Your brain is not wired to do it., You do not have a sufficient set of eyes. Lets look at Uncle Sam's layout in the Army: A unit is almost always subdivided into 3 Main subunits and a Headquarters element. A Commander/Leader has to Command and Control about 5 maneuver elements, as that HQ usually has 2 maneuver elements. He Has one-two people supporting him directly and Executive officer and a Senior Non-commisioned officer. But he has to lead these two people as well. So now he is a little more tapped out. Course, most smart COs put the HQ section directly under the XO reducing the burden a little bit. The success or failure of this system comes from the Leader non-micromanaging. There is a positive and negative aspect to this. The easier part is to only give orders to the person heading up the subordinate unit, and to task organize so that one of these people is always incharge of a supporting element. This give the subordinate consitancy of command. That is the easy part. The hard part is to then give those subordinates the leeway to do the task their own way, and grade them solely on performance. This is the hardest part for a commander to do, becasue he remembers being a platoon leader, and hass that experienmce at his beck and call. He can solve the problems of a subordinate unit fairly easily. Good Commandders realize that they cannot do this or they remove their subordinates ability to lead. Does this setup transition over to the civilian world? Well, the 7 person max part does. What it means is that no division within a company should be larger than 6 people + 1 manager. If it is the type of division that routinely has outside interaction, it needs to be smaller. Probably 4 is the target size, as that allows you room to add one or two as necessary, and if you lose one or two, you haven't massively killed the balance (1 leader / 1 lead). So those massive call centers with 45 people on a shift need to be subdivided. 6 people per team * 6 teams will get you 36. Perhaps three main groups, with two levles underneath. This gives you a manageable group size and a promotion heirarchy. Just remember, those people up at the top of the ladder are going to spend more and more of their time supervising. You may not want to 'Waste' money on this aditional overhead, but you'll end up with those phantom hangups. |
| Mon 15 Jul | James Montebello | This topic has been discussed quite a few times before in this forum. Organizational hierarchies are one thing, but performance measurement is something else entirely. The military does do performance assessments (once upon a time, they were 'fitness reports'), although they just go 'up' (i.e., the individual doesn't review themselves, or their peers). These are (or were) subjective and not anonymous, and made a huge difference to one's career. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | I have to disagree with the span of control that an individual can lead is optimum when limited to the short term memory limitation of 'seven plus or minus two'. The most obvious part of this fallacy is the implication that what is most important for a leader to keep in mind is the 'persons' of the team or of those above them. An effective leader keeps his goals in mind, not the bodies, names, roles, titles or 'feelings' of people. The success or failure of any 'system' comes from the leader non-micromanaging. The micromanager, who is such because he keeps his team members shortcomings in mind, will be most capable of micromanaging with a staff span of 'seven plus or minus two'. This low level of control span will only increase the number of hierarchy levels... increasing all of the bad things about hierarchies along with... such as communication compression. Most low control span organizations are mediocre... and that is on their good days. |
| Tue 16 Jul | A. Coward | I second Joe AA's disagreement with Adam on seven subordinates being the optimal number. I work in a group of about 20 people with only one boss. Most of the workers are quite senior, and need little if any management. Tell us what needs to be done, then quickly get out of the way. More management would only slow us down. |
| Wed 17 Jul | James Montebello | You have more management, you're just not aware of it. All of those senior people are informally 'managing' you. If that one boss is smart, he's regularly getting information from the senior people about the junior people, operating through informal channels. The senior people are being relied on to help keep the junior people from drifting into the weeds. There are also a (very limited) number of exceptional people who really can keep the enough short-term data in their heads at once to manage 20+ people. The rule-of-7 is there so a 'normal' person can effectively manage. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Hugh Wells | Would it be useful here to consider that military management requirements are much more rigorous than for business? The military system has to remain valid while everyone is flat on the ground with bullets thrashing through the foliage. |
| why PDF is soo complex | Mon 15 Jul | Seemore |
| Hello, In trying to produce end-user reports in my Deplhi app I found out ( and convinced every day more ) that it is much more easier to cretate files for MS Office , natively, MS Word (RTF file creation) and Excel (BIFF 8) without even to require Word/Excel at client PC. For viewing purposes they can use any RTF /BIFF 8 viewe, but than again all of them have MS Office/OpenOffice installed. With all this bashing at MSFT for keeping the closed format of their Office documents, it is just unbeliavably easy to do it (download documentation from MSFT site and do it or get a free/shareware component to do this for you) On the other hand, I am not aware of any free/cheap shareware component that allows you to directly create PDF files without eiher carrying DLLs around or some limitations on what you want to generate, or having to comply with Printer object programming paradigm I just do not get it... |
| Mon 15 Jul | Sebastian | Hi! PDF is not that complex, but as it was derived from PostScript, it's very low-level. If you don't have a high-level library which does it for you, you have to code all the layout code yourself. (I did this once - in PHP). At least for Java there are some higher-level libraries available which can make PDF creation easy. Sebastian |
| Mon 15 Jul | Patrik | [On the other hand, I am not aware of any free/cheap shareware component that allows you to directly create PDF files] ppdf.zip (550,424 bytes) PasPDF - Native PDF Creation for Delphi txt2pdf - Text-To-PDF Converter .. source code included for Delphi 1-4 and TP7/BP7 .. freeware for 'non-commercial use' .. 'commercial use' : USD19 (up to v1.4xx) USD39 (up to v1.5xx-v1.9xx) (ver. 0.943, added 1/3/99, updated 1/30/99, Initial release of v1.0 will supporting Text Processing only in 16.jan.99-28.feb.99. available at http://ftp.sunet.se/delphi This is a Delphi Super Page Mirror, so you will find it on any DSP-mirror. Maybe this is what you want? |
| Mon 15 Jul | Chris Winters | << On the other hand, I am not aware of any free/cheap shareware component that allows you to directly create PDF files without eiher carrying DLLs around or some limitations on what you want to generate, or having to comply with Printer object programming paradigm >> IIRC, the gold standard for this is PDFLib, found at http://www.pdflib.com/ |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matthew Lock | There are plenty of free Perl modules for creating and manipulating PDF. http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=pdf |
| Mon 15 Jul | delphi bro | Also check out waler (waler.com) and report builder by digital metaphors. Why not simplify your life. I don't work for them. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Tim Sullivan | wPDF from http://www.wptools.de is quite good, especially if you're already using WPTools. The aforementioned Waler add-on for ReportBuilder is also excellent. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Ori Berger | Not exactly what you're looking for, but might come in handy - Htmldoc, which you can find at [ http://htmldoc.org ] reads HTML input and produces astonishingly beautiful PDF and PS output. It comes with source so you can tweak it to your heart's desire (but it's in C, not Delphi, so you'll have to sort out linkage issues if you insist on linking it). Oh, and it's cross platform, just in case you wondered. HTMLDOC + SDF (Simple Document Formatter) have long replaced Word in my book - I write a simple file in a text editor with very light WYMIWYG markup (What you MEAN is what you get), and pass it over to SDF (which, in turn passes it to HTMLDOC) to get wonderful results. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Alex Russell | um, if you're really that PostScript challenged, you can easily kick your stuff out to LaTeX or DocBook and then convert away to your heart's content. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matthew | The w3c method for replacing paged content is XSL:FO. It's an XML file with overzealous style='' definitions. You can process the XSL:FO file into PDF using Apache FOP. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Bella | http://www.pdfzone.com |
| Thu 18 Jul | Szasz Attila | www.est.hi-ho.ne.jp/takeshi_kanno/powerpdf Superb. |
| Age old Comp. Sci. laws and corrolaries | Sat 13 Jul | Bella |
| Ok, in an attempt to get back on track with computer science discussions, Id like to hear peoples favorite technology laws. I especially request any relating to project management. I will start: Metcalfes Law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. http://www.mgt.smsu.edu/mgt487/mgtissue/newstrat/metcalfe.htm |
| Mon 15 Jul | Link Fairy | I offer three chunks of information, two which could be laws, one which is little more than a quote: `Worse is Better' -- Richard Gabriel http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html `Fast, cheap, good: choose two.' Sometime appears as `Fast, cheap, correct: choose two.' I have no idea where this first appeared. The last is little more than a bit of good advice, from Forth creator Chuck Forth. `You can do three things with a computer. You can try to make money and that is unlikely. You can try to become famous and that never happens. And you can have fun and that always works.' http://www.ultratechnology.com/color4th.html |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matt H. | For XProgramming.Com: *My Paraphrase* 1) Early Estimates will be inaccurate ... 2) There are four things management can control on a project: - Time - Money (Resources, People) - Scope/Feature - Quality There are ONLY four things. If the project is running late, mgt can extend the project's delivery date, hire more staff (which may violate moore's law, but there are ways around that), decrease the scope or featureset, or decrease the quality. Most of the time, mgt will simply insist that that project be delivered on time, under budget, feature complete. As a result, the project is a _little_ late, cuts a _few_ features, runs a _bit_ over budget, and has incredibly poor quality, because that's the hardest to measure and easiest to skip. but that's just me. :-) |
| Mon 15 Jul | Dan Sickles | Your software can be: on time cheap high quality Pick two. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Dan Sickles | Next time I'll read ALL the other posts first. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matt H. | heh. Earlier, when I mentioned Moore's Law, I ment Brook's (As in Fred Brooks, as in Mythical Man Month, as in 'Adding people to a late project will invariably make it later.') |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matt H. | Hey Dan, any relation to the Civil War General that lost his arm at Gettysburg? |
| Mon 15 Jul | Nat Ersoz | The laws: 1. F=ma 2. E=IR 3. You can't push on a rope. 4. No magnetic monopoles. The principle (there is only one): Keep It Simple Stupid. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Joe AA. | 'Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.' |
| Mon 15 Jul | David Clayworth | 'Deliver your software a month late, and your customers will hate you for a month. Deliver bad software on time and your customers will hate you for a year.' Or whatever your release period is. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Ian Stallings | ['Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.' ] Oh man, this has to be true because I am surrounded by fools on the beltway everyday. Even worse, according to this law I am one of them. But I'm not Not disagreeing. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Ian Stallings | I am also not disagreeing. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Dan Sickles | Larry Wall says of Perl, 'easy things are easy, and hard things are possible.' This is often quoted for applications also. |
| Mon 15 Jul | William Frantz | 'If you want it bad, you'll get it bad and the worse you want it, the worse you'll get it.' 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.' 'Doubling the size of code will quadruple its complexity.' 'Hard work pays off in the long run, but procrastination pays off right now.' 'Software will always bear the blame for poor hardware.' 'If the wheel had 32-bit API's, we'd re-invent that too.' 'You can't 'test in' quality.' 'Finding bugs in the code means you have bugs in your process.' (i.e. design review failed) |
| Mon 15 Jul | Nat Ersoz | >> 'Finding bugs in the code means you have bugs in your process.' (i.e. design review failed) TRUE! And worse than just a design review faling it may mean more fundamental things like: . Your developers don't care about finding/fixing bugs. . Your developers' unit tests need improvement. . Your testers aren't catching bugs (if they didn't catch it). . Someone doesn't understand the system its deployed in. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Contrary Mary | 'You can't polish a turd.' - Unknown 'Never send a monster to do the work of an evil scientist.' - Water, Water Every Hare |
| Mon 15 Jul | Nat Ersoz | Rule 1: DOW=7500 Rule 2: NASDAQ=700 Principle: Your stock options are worthless. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Alyosha` | 'If you rush miracles, sonny, you get rotten miracles.' |
| Mon 15 Jul | Adam | I believe the quote is, 'Don't rush a miracleman, son. You get rotton miracles.' Does anyone else refer to non computer savvy people as Muggles? |
| Tue 16 Jul | fubar | The ''Everything should be made as simple as possible...' quote was Einstein IIRC |
| Tue 16 Jul | Jutta Jordans | >I believe the quote is, 'Don't rush a miracleman, son. You get rotton miracles.' Princess Bride? |
| Tue 16 Jul | Steve Wheeler | Dan Sickles quoted Larry Wall as saying, 'easy things are easy, and hard things are possible.' I believe that Alan Kay used this earlier as a description of what should be possible with a system. It might have developed from the old military boast, 'The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.' My two favorite project management sayings are: 'If the minimum weren't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum.' and 'If you can't get your work done in a 24-hour day, work nights.' |
| Wed 17 Jul | Jutta Jordans | Over my desk there is a sign spelling: 'It wasn't me and I won't do it again.' |
| Wed 17 Jul | Alyosha` | I used to have the following Despair.com poster prominently displayed in my office: 'MEDIOCRITY: It Takes a Lot Less Time and Most People Won't Notice the Difference Until It's Too Late.' |
| Wed 17 Jul | Jacco | One I have (to go back to the original topic) is: Design should be complete and minimal. The first thing is hard enough, but a lot of problems I have come across in my career were caused by overdesign rather than underdesign. |
| Thu 18 Jul | Steve Wheeler | 'Design should be complete and minimal. The first thing is hard enough, but a lot of problems I have come across in my career were caused by overdesign rather than underdesign.' Very true. I have the following quote from C.A.R. Hoare's Turing Award lecture hanging in my office: 'I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.' |
| YAH1BT | Wed 10 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) |
| If our long term goal is to keep programmer wages at an acceptable level, we need to maximize the inflow of H1B workers. This will bring the foreign programmer talent into a higher cost living environment. H1Bs will need to raise the hourly rate they accept in order to sustain in this environment. Furthermore this leaves their country of origin with less programmers driving up the wages over there in turn. |
| Thu 18 Jul | a | That's why I do documentation. They may be able to code: but can they write English well? :) |
| Those were the days ... | Wed 17 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) |
| Came across this gem today while looking for something completely different: Remember the days when a Sun workstation came with an Intel bus and a Microsoft operating system? http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=anews.Aucbvax.2296&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain |
| Wed 17 Jul | Patrik | Heh, thats a while before my Sun-days, makes me feel young again :-) I first saw Suns back in like -92 or so, when 68030 based Sun 3/80 workstations and Sun 4/110s and the likes of them was all the rage. |
| Anybody use the Wyde Active Modeller | Tue 16 Jul | Ted Pater |
| Anybody heard of e-WAM and the other products from Wyde? www.wyde.com ? Im wondering what peoples impressions are. Does it speed up the development cycle as claimed? If not, does it at least not slow down development? If not, does it at least make development fun? Thanks |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ged Byrne | I'm wondering if their are now people whose job it is to post on popular groups. Every so often you get 'Blatant Plug' post for a product, or H1B campaign or some such. In 'Trigger' ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006483836/qid=1026918043/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3_3/202-8400619-1054230 ) Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell describe people who are employed by political parties, and it always interests me to see something in reality that I read about a few years ago in Sci Fi. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ted Pater | Hi Ged, Thanks for being so cynical and hypocritical. How is my post a blatant plug? I am just trying to find out more information about Wyde's products. I would appreciate useful comments and not postings with referal links to the amazon. (Unless those links actually had SOMETHING to do with modelling tools). Wyde claims their products increase developer productivity. I want to know if anyone has experience and if their experiences were postive, negative, or neutral. |
| Wed 17 Jul | Joe AA. | I think you can always assume that any company/product with a website is good. And a website with a flash intro always cinches it for me! Happy silver bullet hunting! |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ged Byrne | I'm curious about what makes me hypocritical, is the link to Amazon a blatant plug? As for cynical, JoeAA seems to have outdone me on that one :( Sorry, Ted, if your curiosity struck me as being ingeniune, but the link to www.wyde.com revealed nothing but window dressing (Customer comments still under construction.) A search for Wyde Active Modeller on Google yeilds no results,and a search for e-Wam produces just one relevant link to www.wyde.com, so its hardly a product thats setting the web alight. Perhaps you are evaluating platforms for your own use, so you are asking if anybody else has tried it. But why only evaluate a single vendor's product? So the post puzzles me, and then I remember reading the book a couple of years back and I wonder... Sorry for getting it wrong. |
| What's the alternative to performance reviews? | Mon 15 Jul | Crimson |
| While I agree that many of the incentive pay programs in companies are silly, I dont know what the alternative is. Clearly everyone doesnt contribute at the same level (well not in most places), so it doesnt make sense to give everyone the same increase during performance reviews. At the same time, as Joel mentions in one of his articles, whats written in performance reviews is generally ignored anyway and increases are doled out to fit some sort of bell curve. Also management is often in a horrible position to give an accurate review anyway. Anyone have a solution to such conflicting results or are we doomed to be damned if we do and damned if we dont? |
| Mon 15 Jul | Matthew Lock | I like Joel's idea of a professional ladder http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html You get paid a set amount at each stage of the ladder. Better workers can then be rewarded by having a higher level, and pay. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Mark | How about if salary changes were determined by your peers, my wouldn't we all be nicer to each other. This would also reflect our real standings in the group. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Patrik | >How about if salary changes were determined by your peers, my wouldn't we all be nicer to each other. In theory, yes. But this is flawed. IMHO, if you are secure with your work-role, you can handle working with better, or same-level guys as yourself and be happy about learning new stuff every day. As time passes, you will probably be on par with the best guys you are working with. Everybody happy. Problem, many people are insecure in their work-roles and see other solutions and people as a threat to their current position. There goes being nice. >This would also reflect our real standings in the group. Yes. Until some office-politics dude came along and decided he wanted me out of the group. You would have the environment of 'reality-tv-shows' which possibly makes for good entertainment, but not a good work environment. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Erik van Linstee | A good start is to not tie salary increase to performance reviews. Performance reviews in them selves are not a bad idea, only not for the purposes they are (ab)used for. You can increase everyone's salary yearly based on inflation rates, which is only fair. And you can reward people for exceptional performance when it occurs (by which ever means that fits you and the one being rewarded, which is not necessarily money). But don't use performance reviews for (personal) goal setting, or salary increases. There are better means for those. And start by not calling it a performance review, because it isn't or shouldn't be. Once you realise that, you may also save your company most of the costs that go with a performance review system. |
| Tue 16 Jul | moo | I've never been a big fan of formal processes like performance reviews or code reviews, mostly because they don't really work (i.e. people learn to work the system) and much prefer more informal ways of doing things. If you're leading a team, just because you don't sit down with each person once every 12 months to talk about how they've been going doesn't mean that you're not monitoring their performance. I keep an eye on all the team members and their work and give feedback on an on-going basis (and ask them to do the same for me). As far as salary raises go, I've never been involved in that side of things but if I were, I would perhaps start with a flat increase for everybody (depending on the company's performance over the past year, perhaps?) and then increase or decrease it for each person as I saw fit. Pretty arbitrary, I s'pose, but unless you have some specific way of measuring performance e.g. sales revenue it's always going to be like that. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ryan | The company needs to listen to the employee much more than the employee to the company. As the old saying goes, 'What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.' A company has one primary method of motivation: hiring. It hires an employee because of what he has or is or can do for the company, not for the 'hidden potential' it sees in him/her (with very few exceptions). A company only has one real disciplinary measure: firing. Everything else is only smoke. Pay raises should be connected primarily to group or team performance (after all, you want everyone to work well together, not for people to backstab). Invite those that aren't satisfied with payment to talk to you about it by having an open climate. If they really weren't satisfied with money, they wouldn't have taken the job. But no one is satisfied with stagnation either. People need to have the feeling that things improve in their lives. For this reason, most are happy with simple cost-of-living increases every year. If they are not, and you are giving raises in proportion to the true value of the group to the team, then, sorry, find something else. Talk is cheap. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ged Byrne | I think the main problem is the reductionist view of people, mostly to do with the market economics. The idea is that an individual finds work a disutility. An unenjoyable necessity. In order to get people to work it is therefore necessary to offer a utitlity - money. The financial reward is given to compensate the work for the unpleasant task of working. This means that the person does not want to work. Given the choice he will just sit their all day doing nothing (like Wally in the Dilbert cartoosn). The holes in this reasoning are obvious. If programmers hate to work, then what drives Open Source? Individuals are motivated by a number of factors, and it varies strongly from person to person. The best alternative to performance reviews is to know the workers, to understand what drives them, and to then make sure that they are well motivated. Therefore, a manager must know his workers. As pointed out in another post, this makes the maximum size of a team 7. I think XPs Pair Programming approach also pays dividend in this regard. Also, they must have the authority to reward his workers. In too many companies the manager is more of a spy than manager. They are there to keep an eye on the filthy slaves, cracking the whip when necessary. They don't have any authority to do anything else. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Alyosha` | The way I see it, it's a manager's job to pay attention to the group dynamics and to know who is productive and who is not. The performance review is just a ceremony. It's a ritual designed to replace the skill of making difficult, subjective decisions with a mindless, objective process. A competent manager has no need of a process, and an incompetent manager cannot possibly benefit from one. So why bother? The only way performance reviews could possibly be useful is if you are starting a paper trail in preparation for terminating a problem employee. But there are better ways to handle this -- for instance, documenting problems as they arise. This gives the employee immediate feedback, not a sudden suprise at the end of the year. It also avoid the embarassing situation of giving an employee four years of laudatory reviews, and then suddenly terminating them on the basis of performance -- as happened recently with a friend of mine. If I were a manager, I would give two raises: a modest cost-of-living adjustment once a year, and a performance raise to selected group members after successfully meeting major deadlines (such as product shipping, for example). I'd select employees whose achievements are be held in high regard by their peers and whose performance is not in line with their current salary (for example, if they make 50K and they do the same work as someone else who makes 60K, I would try to bring them up to the other's level). And they would be bona fide raises; not bonuses -- since employees have a way of amortizing bonuses across the overtime they put in, which turns out often to be an insultingly small hourly rate. Raises are more forward-looking. That's Alyosha`s management philosophy in a nutshell. Someone wanna hire me as their manager? =-) |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ryan | Oh, by the way, the alternative is The One Minute Manager. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Sarain H. | Huh. Well it's all very good and well to talk about what you're gonna do to the workers and if they don't like it tough. Glad I don't work for any of you. I expect and receive a favorable performance review and a nice raise each and every year. This lets me know me efforts are appreciated and I'm not wasting my time squandering my talenst for a bunch of losers who don't know a goodthing when they got it. It's sort of a 'heartbeat' of employment like the daily build is the heartbeat of the project. So sure, if you don'th mind loosing all your best people, eliminate performance reviews and merit based pay. And good luck on your project. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Joe AA. | I have no problem with merit based pay... since by definition it is based on merit - what you did and what you produced. But no one is entitled to automatic cost-of-living raises or annual raises just because their butt warmed a chair for a year. This is the area where only the whiners abound. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Bill Carlson | Good thread. There is always the question of how to deal with overachievers. IMO, there is the need in any compensation system for the concept of a 'market adjustment'. If someone comes in at a low salary and performs at a high level, what do you do? They may not be satisfied with a metric of COLA + Bonus Pool / Team Size. I like Joel's 'ladder system', although in small companies it may be difficult to put into place. On the flip side, our industry as a whole might be served by the concept of 'supply and demand' based salary reductions. If you payed a premium to hire people with skill X and two years later, skill X is dead, should you still have to pay the premium? Cold, but isn't it better than having to turn over your staff to reduce costs? If the real IT market problem (according to some folks) is that developers don't keep their skills up, maybe there's some merit to this. I've known a couple highly paid UNIX guys that got layed off and went 'oh, crap' when they saw what they we're able to make 'on the outside'. A system like that would never fly, but it's interesting to contemplate. Thoughts? |
| Wed 17 Jul | Sammy | Teams who do complete their goals can get a nice bonus or something-cooler-than-a-bonus. Liking occassional candy doesn't turn you into a Pavlovian dog. |
| Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. | Thu 11 Jul | Christopher Wells |
| Yep. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Nat Ersoz | What constitutes an application vs. utility? Hmmm? |
| Tue 16 Jul | Just me (Sir to you) | A utility is an application that fails to come up with a decent GUI after 10 years ;-). |
| Wed 17 Jul | Jeff MacDonald | Utilities are designed (generally) to perform one task in order to solve a problem, whereas applications perform many tasks (sometimes using multiple utilities) to solve many problems. I think developing WinZip or WSFTP would be much less complicated than MS Excel or Photoshop... More complexity = more features = more opportunity for something to be missed. |
| Mozilla might be committing suicide. | Sat 29 Jun | Ramón |
| Mozilla does not support Internet Explorer javascript extensions such as document.all, window.event and some others. The result is that many pages do not work with Mozilla. At present, Internet Explorer accounts for about 91 % of web access. Therefore, most web developers test their pages with Internet Explorer only. Therefore, the web pages they develop often contain Javascript code that does not work with Mozilla. My experience in Spain is painful. Mozilla is locked out almost all commercial web servers. For instance, www.abbyss-computer.com blocks mozilla by the usage of document.all; www.ebankinter.com (one of largest banks in Spain) uses a regular expression not supported by Mozilla; www.auto-res.net requires HTMLElement.outerHTML ; www.iberia.com (the leading Spanish airlines) requires either document.all or Netscape 4.x document.layers I wrote a patch that partially fixes those problems, and allows me to work with the sites that I need. I also posted a request for enhancement through the Mozilla bug tracking system ( http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154589 ) Unfortunately, it has very few chances of being accepted. Some opposition is well founded (some pages check for the existence of document.all for using more extensions, and therefore my patch is not enough. However, this problem can be solved. Most of the opposition is purely religous. Bob Clary, manager of the Tech Evangelism (whose job is to evangelize web developers to make pages that work with Mozilla) thinks that implementing these extensions would do harm the web at large (see comment #30 in the link above). It seems that they cannot accept that they have no influence on what is used on the web. What do you think? Note: if you want to add a comment in the bug tracking page http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154589 you need to be registered in the bugzilla tracking system, at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/createaccount.cgi |
| Wed 17 Jul | Ramón | First of all, I reject that I have given any misinformation. I have exposed all the facts, and therefore I have been honest. I exposed both legitimate drawbacks on implementing document.all '(some pages check for the existence of document.all for using more extensions)'. I also exposed clearly what the Tech Evangelism is: '(whose job is to evangelize web developers to make pages that work with Mozilla) '. I hope this is clarified. Next, the relevant matter. You use three arguments: 1) It is difficult to build an exact emulation. This is true, but it is not enough. More on later. 2) MSIE is a moving target. I disagree. More on later. 3) The job of Tech Evangelism is easy. I disagree. 1) You still have the dynamic of the market working: 95 % people use Internet Explorer => webmasters check their logs => they test their pages for Internet Explorer => many pages do not work with Mozilla => users refuse to use Mozilla. First of all, we must **acknowledge** this dynamic. If we cannot solve it, that is no excuse, because the dynamic is still there. I think that most scripts use fixed patterns of use. Therefore a 80% emulation is enough. It will not work with all pages, only most of them. My experience seems to agree, but I acknowledge, (and I did so state in my comments) that extensive testing must be done to ensure that the emulation is really useful. But let us suppose that I am wrong, that you need 99 % emulation including bug emulation to fix most pages designed with Internet Explorer in mind. Again, there is no excuse to ignore the dynamic of the market. We must either implement 99 % emulation or, if we do not have the resources, be honest with AOL and suggest them to spend their money for something different than Mozilla. So I do not want to believe that 99% emulation is needed. 2) There is a misunderstanding of the dynamic of the market. Even if Microsoft releases a new version with new extensions, webmasters will refuse to use them, because that would break uses who did not update. One evidence: how many Window applications do require something higher that Windows 95? Very few vendors would self-restrict their market in that silly way. You say that trying to emulate Microsoft products is not a good strategy. Show me one example where *not* emulating Microsoft products has been a good strategy. For example, AmigaOS, BeOS, Apple, Linux on the desktop side, ... 3) Contrary to what you might believe, I have a lot of respect for the Tech Evangelism people. I think that it would be great to get all the web pages to be converted to standards. Why wouldn't webmasters accept free consulting help? For internal political and practical reasons, very few developers of impotant sites would listen them. In a commercial site, any change, even if it is a small one, requires extensive testing before approved. Why would one invest any resources in a browser that takes only 1 % of share? And what interest has a developer in acknowledging that he has not done a good job first? The fact that you attempt to convince someone of doing something does not mean that you will succeed. People have their own motivations, economical, ideological, ... There is no silver bullet that can turn all the webmasters into supporters of web standards. They may prefer to get the job done sooner. Let me emphasize that I tried to 'evangelize' all the sites that I need. I finally succeded with http://www.ebankinter.com, which is very unusual because they have full time programmers rather than rely on consutories. Even so, the update took about two weeks. Finally, scalability is against the Tech Evangelism. The size of their job grows with the number of sites in the Internet which is very large. By contrast, modifying Mozilla source is a task that one must only do once. I hope that I have clarified my opinion. |
| Whatever happened to Win32 Programming? | Sat 13 Jul | Nick Hebb |
| I was trying to locate a copy of Charles Petzolds Programming Windows, and I had to look at 4 bookstores before finally finding a copy. And that copy was used - at Powells Technical Books, a good sized bookstore with ~50% of its inventory IT related. Apparently, one of the definitive Windows texts is selling so little that no ones keeping it in stock. Has good old-fashioned Windows programming really fallen by the wayside? |
| Mon 15 Jul | Nick Hebb | I didn't expect Win 32 to be at the top of the charts near .NET, Flash, Java, etc. In fact, I didn't expect it to be even in the middle of the charts. My surprise was that it had seemed to drop of the charts completely. Even if it's a well understood technology, there will always be new programmers learning to program C/C++ for Windows, so I would have expected more to be interested in what's going on under the hood. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Scott Gamon | As Harvey Pengwyn says, bookstore shelf space is a good metric of 'something.' It's just not clear what that is. In the case of Flash, my bet is that the Flash developer community is dominated by designers who are still in love with print. They eagerly trade their expertise with the tool into an opportunity to be published. Also, they probably all buy each other's books to check out the designs. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Troy King | Nick, you said: . . . I would have expected more to be interested in what's going on under the hood. Since when? Think of the programmers you've worked with, and how many of them care about 'under the hood.' If they're like the majority of programmers I've known, they're happy to just to get a clean compile, or find a good copy/paste source for the latest MS library. |
| Mon 15 Jul | Vincent Marquez | not to start a war or anything, but I can see very few circumstances when it would be better to do Win32 programming vs. using C# + dotnet. Unless your writting some low-level stuff, I'd assume that dotnet is a perfect fit for most windows applications. If i'm mistaken, please let me know. I'm interested in knowing what 'Win32 programmers' are up to. ;-) |
| Mon 15 Jul | Troy King | Vincent, you said: . . . I can see very few circumstances when it would be better to do Win32 programming vs. using C# + dotnet. I want my application to have as few dependencies, as little memory use, as small an install, and make as few system changes as possible. If I code Win32, this is far easier to accomplish. In my opinion, it's (almost) as quick and easy as doing it some other way, and then you get all the little bonuses I shoot for above. I think Joel refers to people like me as 'neat freaks.' |
| Mon 15 Jul | Adam | It is on the bookshelf right next to the XLib books. Sometimes I think we put so many layers upon layers, that we forgot what we were originally trying to simplify. Oh well. |
| Tue 16 Jul | John | Win32 programming isn't new and interesting so few people will buy a book just to see what it's like. Most people who do win32 programming already have all the books they need. C#/.NET is new and interesting so a lot of people will buy a book just to see what it's like. Nobody who needs to do C#/.NET programming has a book so everyone will buy one. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Daren Thomas | I bought Petzold just the other day - and am enjoying it thouroughly! Why Win32? I want to learn C. After reading K&R (several times) and loads of source code, I want to actually know how to write something usefull in C, something that will run on my PC. That's why. |
| What's the best text editor? | Thu 11 Jul | Ryan |
| I couldnt take another H1B tirade, so I thought Id start a religious war instead |
| Mon 15 Jul | Ian Stallings | Textpad is the first small editor I have paid for (its only $25). I like to open it up when I need to do basic hacking. Sometimes the power of and ide is not needed. There are quite a few of my own projects I have created using textpad and ant/make/nant/etc. I'm not religous about it but I like it. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ged Byrne | $329 for a text editor! http://www.slickedit.com/purchase/pu_pricing.php Considering how many great freewares there are out their, what do they offer for the money? |
| Tue 16 Jul | Jan Derk | And while we are trashing the Slickedit site, did anyone notice that the four small screenshot thumbnails at the bottom of the Overview page add a measly 1.1MB to the total page download size. They could have created higher quality thumbnails using 20KB. http://www.slickedit.com/products/pr_products.php Broadband Internet is getting more popular these days, but I sincerely hope that their editor is less generous on resources. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Ed the Millwright | Jan!! You rock at finding that example. 318kb jpg screen images that should have been gif'd and color reduced PLUS illegible 8 pt font throughout the entire page. Surely this is a perfect example of much that is wrong with web design today. After all that's not a fancy art site, but a site selling a plain old text editor. No text editor site needs 318kb images. I firmly believe that all commercial web site developers should be required as a matter of professional competance to use 1 14.4 modem. Also, many (non-game) shrinkwrap developers should be testing their software on 66 and 100Mhz machines. Can do development on a faster machine if one must but definitely need to regularly test on the slowest machine possible. |
| Question for Joel regarding e-commerce | Tue 09 Jul | Woodrow Stool |
| Some time ago you mentioned that you had dumped Digital River (or DigiBuy, dont remember which) as your ESD provider and started processing your own credit card orders via a secure form with your own merchant account. My question is - how has this impacted your fraud rate? When you sign up with Digital River, one of the things you are supposed to be buying is their extensive experience with fraud screening. Im wondering how your experience has been so far handling this yourself. Id like to hear from anyone else who has dumped an ESD (electronic software delivery) provider and started processing the orders with your own merchant account - how are you handling the fraud screening? Many thanks for sharing any experiences, good or bad. |
| Tue 16 Jul | pb | Or you can just use PayPal. |
| Books | Wed 14 Nov | Joel Spolsky |
| Its about time that I updated my crufty old list of recommended books at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html . What books should I have up there? Ground rules: to keep this conversation on track, everybody gets to vote for ONE book, and one book only. I really want to hear what people think is the SINGLE best book on painless software management. |
| Tue 16 Jul | Andrew Gilmartin | So many new books. New books that don't really detail the art of programming but rather suggest that programing is an art. I have many of the books mentioned but my eyes focus on two older books that are reprints of columns. 'Programming Pearls' by Jon Bentley is still a wonderful read; for those that have forgotten or have not been told software is about meta programming when you get good. Bentley's columns on little languages speaks to this. The other is 'OMT Insights' (ISBN: 0138469652) by James Rumbaugh. Who cares what notation you use good OO design is hard and fun and this series of columns shows a master designer working it out. |
| oh well.....a few weeks wait, ended by an ad | Mon 15 Jul | life is like that |
| So the topic was potentially interesting.....but I dont really enjoy being sold to ;( |
| Mon 15 Jul | A Big Boy now. | Welcome to big boy land. Here, we realize that Joel writes whatever the hell he wants, and doesn't cater to your needs and desires. Additionally, Joel often writes reviews about books that he thinks are notable. If you don't like it, change the channel. |
| Mon 15 Jul | life is like that | 'Welcome to big boy land. '
|
| From Applications to "Loosely Coupled Systems" | Thu 11 Jul | John |
| Im doing some research for a whitepaper Im writing about the challenges in moving from enterprise applications to web service based distributed systems. One of the areas of interest to me is the change in how programmers/architects have to think/work. Programmers at platform companies like MS or Apple have been desiging and shipping SDKs/APIs for years. Their user is another developer, and they have to build software to support applications they have not conceived themselves. Corporate developers have not done as much of this historically, and yet now we are asking them to become brilliant designers of objects/services which will be utilized by other departments, partners, etc. In the same way that Apples early toolbox ( full of exposed data structures, not accessors) was a massive albatross when Apple tried to modernize the OS (Copland, etc.) are we heading for the same type of thing in corporate IT? If you accept this premise that IT staffers are not well trained for SDK-esque development tasks, the next interesting question to me is how to proceed with a web service re-architecture project if you want to account for this learing, and not end up with a modern legacy mess in a few years. Im interested in anyones thoughts on either of these questions. Or, if youre working on a web services project, how are you aproachng API design? Cheers, Josh |
| Mon 15 Jul | Simon Lucy | In the recent project I was involved in designing I purposely made the middle ware very dumb and created a very simple command language. The client connected to the middleware using the command language, apart from converting the syntax into stored procedure calls and some simple validation, the middleware just sent on the request. The database stored procedure then returned whatever it returned in XML. This wasn't just the data but the status and bookkeeping as well. Not only that but if I needed the middleware to pass on information to the client itself, such as use _this_ ip address not me for the next call cos I'm too busy, then the middleware passed that onto the stored procedure which then returned it neatly wrapped in XML. The back end database was SQL Server, but to get it to return the XML in a clean uncluttered way (not the way MS do it by default) took a deal of effort on behalf of the database designer. So the answer is yes, you can get XML returns back from the database. |
| Quick Translator | Thu 11 Jul | apw |
| try out www.itools.com Language Tools section: Enter a website such as http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html (Joels Painless Functional Specs-Part1) and translate it to your favorite language! (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese). Not being multilingual, I not sure as to the accuracy of the site but it probably would help out in the current translation endeavor. |
| Mon 15 Jul | micje | Cool game! Let's go! (yeah, bored at work...) I only used the silly translations, so this is not representive. Of the Sun the Ascents also. The Mill in the Silk. Sad House. As I Put To Die. High increase the carpenters of the beam of the roof. Wow, it took me a long time to find a couple of funny examples. Machine translation has improved a lot! For truly funny results we'll need to switch to full sentences: 'It is a recognized truth universal that a single man in the possession of a good fortune must inside be wishes of a wife.' 'It was low low, level, in the morning, being stopped four feet ten in a sock. It was Lola in comforts. It was car in the school. It was Dolores in the punteada line. But in my arms it was always Lolita.' 'You rejoice will hear that no disaster has accompanied the beginning by a company that you have watched with such forebodings evil.' 'We beat ignition so, the boats against the present one, taken behind incessantly in the past.' 'If you really wish to hear speak he, the first thing that you will probably wish to know is where I was born, and like which lousy was my childhood, and how they occupied to my parents and all before they had to me, and all that class of David Copperfield of crap, but I it does not feel like entering he, if you wish to know the truth.' For extra bonus points, which intermediary language did I use? |
| Hey, US developers, stop wining! | Tue 09 Jul | Russian Developer |
| Does anybody here really understands what oursourcing is? If you producing a code that is so dumb that it can be easily outsourced, then I wonder what are you doing in this forum. It is rather hard to just outsource the development to India or Russia. I am a leader of such a team in Russia. And Im desperate need several smart developers (maybe you better call them analysts or architects) from US side. There is a huge communication gap, so there is a good opportunity for people who can eliminate it. My point is - if you wanted to be a code slave for the rest of your life - forget it. There going to be a lot of cheap code slaves. Times are changing. Now use your opportunity - you are closer to customers, than India (otherwise India would outsource you). You can now do more interesting work than dumb coding. Are you sad because China produces most of goods for your country for cheap? I dont think so, because your people have more time to think and to create a job for Chineese. (And I dont mean that Russian or Indian developers are dumb, I mean that all markets are in US and Europe, and they still need you). |
| Mon 15 Jul | Ilya Ryzhenkov | Well, in my opinion, people talking about communication gap, about misunderstanding and such just pay not enough attention to understand the other side. Several quite simple techniques and hints can help a lot. One should just have desire to understand and not just get a contract, build software and farewell. From the perspective of successful outsourcing, both parties should - be eager to cooperate, not just do what is requried - understand the reason for which software is written - verify mutual understanding at critical points 3 times from different point of views - plan together, not independently - be open to change (aware of any software product that was successfuly created as was planned initially? Tell me!) These are just few things to note, but there are more. Just don't be stuck with public opinion. Two smart people always can come to the point. PS: I'm leader of outsourcing software development company, if you mind. |
| Why open-source usability stinks | Fri 05 Jul | Jason McCullough |
| I give you: the only Slashdot thread youll ever need on this subject. I love the implicit assumptions. http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/02/07/04/2341202.shtml?tid=126 Is There Such a Thing as Too User Friendly? Why do todays software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it? I feel that a large majority of the time it is mostly the users fault, and I speek from personal experience. My father often asks me to help him use his computer. He called me down once saying he installed new software and he think it broke his computer because an error showed up he had never seen before after he restarted, I go down and read it... it says something to the effect of Thank you for installing with the one button Ok. He didnt even bother to read it, he instantly assumed things were more complicated than they should be. And my favorite: Seriously though, I cant say I blame you...we are too lazy to read a manual...or possibly just to prideful. At the same time, I remember a Slashdot article a few weeks ago about manuals in other countries and how users there actually read them... |
| Mon 15 Jul | Steven Ehrbar | 'An accountant, for example, who is trained in the general principles of accounting, shouldn't have to be computer literate to use a computer in her accounting practice. Her domain knowledge should be enough to see her through.' It 'should' be that way? It's never been that way in the entire history of new tools; why should it be different because this one is a computer? For example, there are literally millions of people who have a strong grasp of the Chinese language, using it day in and day out for all communications in their life -- but who cannot use books, or paper and pen, or otherwise use tools that are entirely supplemental to the use of language. And it takes people literally years to become competent in using those tools. But isn't communicating communicating? Knowledge of traffic laws and twenty years' driving a horse-drawn wagon isn't enough to be able to drive a car. But isn't driving driving? Just try to use traditional woodcrafting skills with power tools. I dare you. Have the hospital phone number ready, though. I wonder how well Christopher Columbus would fare with a supertanker. I mean, a sextant's a sextant, the stars are still stars, and currents are currents, so he should be able to use his domain knowledge, right? Someone who can compose and recite epic poetry from memory is going to feel stupid learning to read. Someboy who's driven a horse-and-buggy is going to get frustrated learning to drive a car. A master woodcarver is going to make mistakes with power tools. A expert sailor isn't going to be able to walk onto a diesel-engined ship and pilot it. And an expert accountant isn't going to be able to sit down with a computer and use it without learning the tool either, whatever 'should' be. |