jasonwocky

Move? Vote? Write your Congressman?

I don't know about it not being "good law", but one difference between Ford and the modern CEO is that the modern CEO is significantly less likely to out-and-out say, "screw the shareholders...they're not who I'm doing this for" as Ford basically did.

> To support that (sorry) scam, you claim $50k is your "reasonable" salary --- putting you way on the low side of the industry. How convenient.

I don't know. What salary would you take for your honest-to-god dream job?

The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss.

e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that.

In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.

> Indeed he's attempting to apply an existing regulatory framework to new technology, which rarely works well.

I think this sounds more true than it actually is. "Works" is a fairly ambiguous word, but new technology is released into existing regulatory frameworks every day.

> Dave Thomas, the author of Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby (arguably the book that helped Ruby grow pre-Rails), has written a great book titled "Programming Elixir"

I bought this ebook when it was first released. The level of care Dave has given to it is astounding. I believe he's released at least 10 significant updates to it as the language has evolved.

Maybe he said somewhere on the book's marketing page that he was going to be doing that, but if he did, I missed it. Extremely pleasant surprise.

Not to sound snippy, but how do you define projects in your world, and how do you benefit from having 21 of them open at once? How many do you interact with in a typical day?

That setup is so far removed from my day-to-day experience that I'm genuinely seeking understanding here. At most, I typically have 3 or 4 open "projects" at once, and those would be fairly tightly related (like, a server codebase and a couple of clients for it).

Well, for the first time in a long time I agree with something Scalia says...Congress is the body that opens loopholes in the law, and it's their job to close them. Not the court's.

They really should amend Godwin's Law to include mentions of Communism these days.

There's a marked difference between everyone owns the labor and everyone owns their labor. You don't even have to check the history books. There are plenty of examples of functional, profitable, worker-owned cooperatives in the wild today.

So is, "Open-source is becoming the only way to develop (and, especially, maintain) complex software". This is hyperbole. Complex software has been developed and maintained for over half a century, in myriad ways.

> We gave Google and Apple this power because we decided that smooth animations and per process tabs were a fair trade for the future of a global information network not controlled by corporate interests.

Actually, I decided that hellacious startup times weren't worth it.

All of your hyperbole is a spin-master's way of saying that Chome and Safari beat out Mozilla because, for a significant amount of time, Firefox sucked compared to them.

Much of OpenGL is implemented in hardware rather than software, and that benchmark is probably pretty close to pure OpenGL. There wouldn't be much emulation to do.

>> any studies that show that Texas doctors are significantly worse than doctors in other states?

> Texas has some of the best doctors in the world and an innovative healthcare community

This doesn't answer the question.

The TMB taking this responsibility seems workable on face value; in a lot of ways, this correlates with how many European nations handle consumer protection: fewer lawsuits are permitted, but the bureaucracy increases its responsibility and authority. It seems like a pretty straightforward tradeoff with no obvious answer; just a tradeoff curve.

When it fails is when, as grandparent indicates, the bureaucracy (TMB in this case) wasn't given enough additional resources to handle the increased workload.

I can't tell...is this supposed to trigger some sort of a contradictory-to-the-article emotional response? Look, I don't doubt that there are many terrible engineer-CEOs, but I wouldn't use Hoover as an example.

First of all, CEO != POTUS.

Secondly, in the words of Harry Truman, "don't you ever cast any aspersions on Mr. Hoover because he's done some very important things for this country and the world."

e.g.:

Early in 1946, when large parts of both Europe and Asia were threatened with famine, Truman made Hoover honorary chairman of a Famine Emergency Committee, and in that capacity Hoover traveled 35,000 miles to twenty-two countries threatened with famine. As a result of his recommendations, the United States in five months shipped more than 6,000,000 tons of bread grains to the people of hungry nations.

- Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman

Not to mention a lot of successful food relief efforts he drove during and after the First World War. How do you think the guy got elected President in the first place?

Hoover did have leadership skills, it seems in particular the problem-solving kinds that a successful engineer-CEO might bring to the table. His political policies and the times he lived in just didn't intersect well.

Whether something is in the back of your mind or in the front of your mind will affect one's decision-making. But I don't think that buyers will seek out this information as a rule.

> But what I understand is that while simulated annealing is good for many things, it hasn't shown itself to be best for anything

That's kind of the nature of the beast, though. Approaches like Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms are appropriate for situations in which you have no good heuristic for pruning a search tree. They're almost always going to be last resort approaches, but at least in the case of SA they generally approximate quickly enough to provide useful results.

> Really? In my experience managers can be replaced rather easily, or at least more easily than it is to a replace a single engineer.

Possibly true. But think about how most engineering managers attained that role...it was because companies thought they were good engineers, despite little if any evidence that they'd ever make good managers. Throw in a dash of, "we don't really have a training budget" for this new profession (which it is...management is an entirely different profession from engineering), and you have a recipe for disappointing, easily replaceable parts.

I think gp's numbers are off. But for sure, if you need ERP anywhere near the scale of what Oracle offers, it'll definitely cost more in the long- and short-runs to ROYO.

Again, in my case, it didn't need to be amplified by the media. It happened around the corner, to an 8-year old child whose parents wanted to grant him some independence. He was literally kidnapped on the first day they let him walk home from school alone.

I understand that stranger abduction is a rare occurrence. What I don't buy is the approach of divorcing that statistic from the "parental overprotectionism" that so many of you decry. Yes, kidnappings are probably trending down (I don't know for sure...I can't find any statistics other than from 1999) at the same time that parental protectionism is trending up. Isn't that the whole point?

> The biggest risk to your kids being abducted is one you probably don't want to admit -- around 200,000 children/year are abducted by a family member.

I don't mind admitting that at all. I just don't see what it has to do with my argument (which might be admittedly difficult to read now since it doesn't fall in line with the HN hive mind).

> Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment. We're more worried about child abductions than childhood obesity. Statistically speaking, only one of those is a real issue today.

Quit talking nonsense. A young boy got abducted mere blocks from where I live not more than 3 years ago. Those parents would give anything to have an obese kid right now.

Asking parents to make decisions based on the aggregate damage child obesity does to society rather than the acute damage an abduction does to their family is ridiculous.

Well, sure, there was a benefit to the startups' founders and funders.

There may have been no capital-W Waterfall approach, but implying that projects weren't routinely being run in a waterfall-esque, staged-handoff fashion smacks of revisionism.

I was there. I was on those projects. They existed, and unless everything went perfectly according to plan, they were messes.

My step 1 to understanding a new language has always been to build a simple, file-serving HTTP server without using any HTTP-specific libraries.

"What you're essentially stating is more experience is detrimental."

It's not so simple. Not all experience is equal. Some folks have 10 years of experience developing software. Others have one year of experience, repeated 10 times.

> This ludditic reverence for user-hostile text editors is one of the more perplexing and frustrating things about our industry.

I feel the same way about our industry's enslavement to faddishness.

Exactly. Lots of things "work" for small projects. Try to scale some of those strategies, however, and things break down.

> For example how many doctors know how a CAT scan works?

I don't know. Do you? Or are you just assuming that most of them don't?

As the bearer of bad news, so to speak, I think that's often a good approach. On the flip side, I think it's bad as an enforced policy from above. I've worked with some managers who have a "Don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions" rule. I think that's poor management for at least three reasons:

1. This kind of thing leads to bigger problems. If they're small but your employee is having trouble coming up with a solution, and they don't come to you, odds are the problem will get worse and you might not find out about it before it takes the proverbial "pound of cure" to deal with it.

2. If your employee already has a solution in mind, why do they need to come to you at all? Just let them implement it. If you need your employees to run their "solutions" by you, you might be a micromanager. As a manager, I want my employees coming to me with their unsolvable problems, not the stuff they think they can handle. Sure, there's some risk of a mistake from time to time, but I treat those as experiences to learn from and there are other ways of keeping those "lessons" from getting too expensive.

3. It's often hypocritical. Does the average middle manager waste their senior exec's time with stuff they already know the answer to? Most likely not.

All that said, a policy of "Don't come to me with a problem until after you've thought about it a little bit" (i.e. a form of "Don't come to me with data, come to me with analysis") is perfectly reasonable to me.

What alternative do you propose, and what "actual convincing research" shows that your approach is actually beneficial?

In the context of software engineering approaches, "What research exists?" is basically a conversation killer of a question. The scientific method, when applied to medium-number, complex-interaction systems like most business settings, offers very little in the way of predictive power. At best, it may illuminate some dynamics and raise some questions to ask, but rarely predict the future in the way that hard sciences research does. This is why, if you a predisposed to label something like TDD as "cargo cult", you will likely never find any published research to be "convincing".

But that said, a simple search for "published tdd research" turns up quite a few hits, including this one from Microsoft right at the top: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/ese/nagappan_tdd....