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Even HP has the same policy which I found to my dismay three years back.

Whenever these kinds of useless and idiotic thoughts come to my mind (they often do), I think of the following quote by Steven Weinberg

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

The important part is to understand that this human life is a farce and it does not matter what you do or do not do. So enjoy this farce as long as you can and don't overthink it.

I will reply with the following famous quote -

Your lack of planning is not my emergency

I would reply with the following famous quote-

Your lack of planning is not my emergency

A question to ppl who are currently using this service. Do you tip the drivers, if so, how much?

If there was a case for a thorough investigation of a company affairs then I think it is Nokia. There has to be much more that went behind the scenes that brought Nokia to this state. In many parts of the world Nokia was synonomous with the mobile phone. They could have played a vital part in bringing the emerging economies online. Today that company has been destroyed and MS and its ambassador has played a dubious role in this.

I think one useful feature might be the ability to export existing Jenkins build jobs to the README files. Some ppl might be more comfortable with Jenkins interface rather than writing the README files from scratch.

Reminds me of some companies where the team knows that a particular project is doomed from the start but has to still work on it as no one has guts to tell the boss the truth.

I have been moving in the same direction. Trying to get proficient with both the platforms. I have got background in both Java and C++ so that makes it slightly easier. At this moment, I am trying to explore if there is some kind of "economies of scale" in learning both the platforms.

I was also thinking about the same thing. I think there are similar concerns while developing for both the platforms and if there is one person who is working on both there will be much better reuse of concepts and functionality. From maintenance point of view also it might be better if one person can do both. I am not sure if big companies will prefer to have hybrid developers but smaller companies will definitely appreciate the savings and speed-up such hybrid developers could bring.

I had the same expectation that you had. But when I went there, it was an anti-climax. Maybe something cool is happening behind the closed doors there. But just walking around is nothing special.

Yes, I could do that but I just wanted to check if there is already some service that does this.

I think this could be a nice side project - A daily reminder service to go over a subset of some content.

I would like to see some numbers which tell which places in US are least affected by this kind of external pollution. As pollution from Asia is going to increase, it might make sense to look at these places especially for ppl with breathing issues.

This is a very valid point. Most managers think communicating the immediate work load of the team is their only responsibility. But most of the time the team really needs to know the bigger picture. What is the future direction of the company, product etc. and most of the managers are really stingy with these types of details. This behavior results in lot of duplication of efforts. Managers are happy as they have something to show in their status reports. But in the long run, it reduces the overall product quality as most engineering decisions cannot be prudently taken without having the bigger picture in your head.

One other disadvantage of having too managers is that it leads to a reduction in organization productivity. Each team reporting to a manager eventually becomes a silo. A team only works on the tasks assigned to it by its direct manager only. This results in some teams which are overburdened, while the team sitting next to them doesn't know what to do with their time.

The managers are too busy in their daily meetings to figure out what is happening on the floor. This causes lot of resentment in the teams.

If a project gets assigned to a manager and the best resources to work on this project are on some other team, it is really tough to pull them in to work on this project. This results in reduced overall efficiency as teams have been artificially divided to create a reporting structure for the manager.

I understand that some of you would not have seen this type of manager in your work life. But I am speaking from my own experience and recognize that there are managers which are very good. But I have seen too many of them coasting along, doing little real work while increasing the organizational inefficiencies.

I work for a large software company with about 11,000 employees.

Most of the managers that I have come across are not worth the paper on which their job description is printed. I am talking about the middle level managers here.

There is some adhoc planning going on at this level but most of the time it is dictated by what is being conveyed from the top. This takes care of all the planning, task assignment work. If the manager has capable team members then all that is required is to just tell them that they are now going to work on project X. After that it is the responsibility of those team members to manage the work. All that the so called managers do is check periodically about how it is going.

Recruitment of engineers is again completely left to senior engineers. Once 3 senior engineers say yes to a candidate, the manager just has to complete the formalities. So there is no contribution in building better teams.

There is no technical input from the managers as this takes lot of time and is somehow beneath them.

With agile processes, the team manages their work flow on a day to day basis. So the manager role is reduced even further.

All they work on is performance review once a year. It is more of a give and take as the manager and his manager don't have any realistic idea of an individual's contribution.

I think time has come to cull the managers rank and just have 1 manager for 100 developers with developers organizing themselves in self-managing teams. The managers just get too much credit and money for doing essentially nothing.

AT&T maybe.

http://developer.att.com/developer/apiDetailPage.jsp?passedI...

I posted it on another thread. An app to help you decide on what to wear on a given day. The app will get inputs from weather, day's schedule and the clothes in your wardrobe etc. and will then suggest you what to wear. It can take input regarding clothes in wardrobe using either a scan of the clothing item or using a barcode. It can also suggest which new clothing items to buy based on what is currently in the user's wardrobe and user's lifestyle. This can cover the monetizing aspect of the app.

The #1 point mentioned in the article was my experience as well. For a tight deadline project if we decided to do everything based on the complexity points and team velocity it would take 6 sprints and a total of 3 months. But we just decided to ditch it and sit around a table and finished the whole thing in 2 weeks straight. So my experience is that if you are working with a dedicated team it is better to finish the work based on the best of your ability rather than time boxing into some artificial time limits.

I have got an idea from this discussion. What about an app which suggests what to wear on a given day? You somehow scan all your clothes into it and then it decides based on the weather, what you wore yesterday, your schedule etc. what is the best fit for the day.

I think one of the solutions that these countries can work is to promote high skill immigration to their countries. Something similar to what Australia and Canada are doing. Give the potential immigrants a chance to become full EU nationals in 4-5 years. I am pretty sure lot of skilled ppl from developing nations will be ready to move for that to these countries which offer a great quality of life. It might also help them overcome the problems of aging population in these countries as well. But the only caveat is that immigration process is tightly controlled to allow the most suitable applicants only.

RingCentral, a more established player in this space, has been providing a similar service since last year

http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/ringcentral-new-numbers/

Based on the comments on Steve Yegge's post, hundreds of non Googlers read it and appreciated it, I am not sure why a Google founder did not find it worthwhile to go thru it. On the one hand they mentioned that Google has an open culture and on the other hand they are dismissive of his ideas and seemingly refuse to acknowledge them.

Hi Kevin,

Can you give me the link for the question you asked. I am getting lots of search results when I go to the codereview site.

Looks like a good competitor for AWS. I think as a customer it is always good to have some high quality competition amongst the vendors. This will push AWS to try to replicate or better the features being offered by them and also keep them from raising their prices too much.

The list of customers for the joyent cloud looks quite impressive. So this might already have been tested quite thoroughly by these customers and doesn't look like as if it is launching just now.

I think they should introduce a free tier like AWS's micro instance to allow ppl to test drive this new cloud.

For some reason this news is reminding me of the O Fortuna song.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna

It is passing of an era and things will not be same at Apple or in the tech industry after this.

Actually the first trend of delayed marriage age is now very much evidence in India. Working professionals are marrying at quite a late age - 35 for boys and 30 for girls is now very common. This is very quickly going to turn into the rejection of marriage trend mentioned in the article. So in case of India it is only a question of when not if.

These behind the scenes emails raise a question in my mind. On what other issues these companies are covertly colluding with each other which we don't know. One obvious thing could be some kind of silent agreement on not competing with each other on employee salaries etc. to keep them in check. There could be more like trying not to increase valuations of startups they are trying to acquire.

The ultimate cross platform language for me will be one that runs on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOSX and Linux without any change in code. From the article it doesn't look like haxe is trying to do that. But it will be great to have such a language.

P.S. I think Javascript, HTML and CSS is a good combination but not what most people want.