mikemainguy

While this statement is in alignment with conventional wisdom, I think things are changing (or should). Corporations are legal entities and can/should have a voice just like any other person. When folks start watering down the corporate voice to "only be positive" or "not admit fault", they are aggravating the problem that this blog post is illustrating. There are enough faceless corporations with thousands of powerless minions doing the work of "corporate".

I'm not sure why this isn't a more popular approach. I've often wanted a JVM (or Ruby VM) that ran without an OS, but it's a little "off the grid" right now. Good idea.

I see this with clients all the time. Pitch a "stupid" idea and 10 weeks later the client comes back with a "brilliant" one (that is identical).

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." — Warren Buffet CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

My Buffet said it best IMHO... I've worked with some competent, hardworking, and passionate with no integrity who have really caused a lot of problems.

But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.

I listened to the 2004 intro to Psych lectures by professor Wolfe at MIT. I thought it interesting that he pointed out that depressives have a more accurate portrayal of reality and how thing really are than "normal" people.

I agree... personally I think you should not be allowed to code unless you can type somewhere around 60-70 wpm. It is only with extreme mental effort that I can watch someone hunt-and-peck out 5 lines of code fiddling with their mouse and looking for the "n" key or the ";".

There should be a minimal period of time between when the code appears in your head and you see it expressed on a screen. If you can't type that fast, write it down, if you can't write it down, use a voice recorder.

I'm serious, if you only type 20 wpm, you are like an soccer player who can't run. Sure, running isn't the objective of soccer, but it sure as hell is an important skill to be proficient.

I disagree, part of the value of time tracking is that you can illustrate the many distractions you have during a day and consciously block off time to get into flow. Obviously this doesn't apply if you set your own priorities and objectives, but often (in organizations bigger than 1) your priorities are set or impacted by someone else's contribution.

Spoken like a young creative (at a startup? in the valley?) who is only responsible to himself. Once you need to work as part of a team, time management becomes important because you have to manage the interruptions + coordination with other people who depend on each other to be productive.

Yes, however, time management and team coordination do add overhead. Teams, however are much more scaleable that individuals. In addition, they are also fault tolerant.

Put in hacker terms... a great programmer is an superfast solid state drive, whereas a team is a raid 6 array with a bunch of disks that are slower and of varying speeds.

Overall, the solid state disk might individually perform better (and possibly be cheaper), but generally most people tend to agree the RAID array is a better way to go if you can afford it.