wildgift

True, techs are often nerds, but not always. Look at someone like Larry Ellison, or a lot of startup founders, etc. Also, look at how FOSS was created - by nerds. So, nerds can organize socially.

There are unions for cinematographers and editors in the media. Those are two terribly "nerdy" jobs, and the people who do them are, honestly, huge nerds.

Musicians have a union, and a pension system, and generally do pickup work rather than working for companies. And the musicians in that union are quite a mix of people ranging from "alternative" people (aka, cool nerds) and classical musicians.

Dressing is not important. Business casual is good enough unless you're working in an orchestra. You can be professional in jeans and short sleeved shirts. Most physicians in the ER dress casual.

Capitalism hates competition. I think Adam Smith said that.

So was Rockefeller.

What's the situation like for women in tech in Bulgaria?

As people age, they don't always "keep up" on all the social changes. McCarthy clearly didn't. I've met a lot of old folks say things that would be gaffes, outdated, or otherwise out of step with the current social norms.

I'm middle aged, and have started to notice myself falling into these patterns, particularly regarding transgender people and some LGBT issues. I've never been in a situation where these issues were so prevalent that I "just know" the right thing to do. I used to be educated on the issues, so I could be conscious about them. Now, I'm in need of more education. I ask more questions.

I'm also a sexist. I don't mean a raging sexist or "bro", but as things have gotten better for women, I don't know if I'm as free of sexism as younger men.

It's an uphill battle for everyone, to shed old habits and develop new ones.

Another word for empowerment is "autonomy" or "slack". If the regular job is easy, let the employee do other things during the slack time, whether it's helping the company or not. If it helps - that's great, and the person should be paid.

Overqualified people are cool if you don't have to manage them - the lack of oversight saves everyone time and money.

Likewise, being overqualified is cool. The work is easy and steady. Probably even more importantly, people who are overqualified for some jobs take the jobs because they're "fun" jobs. My job is basically "fun" except for some of the coworkers (most are very awesome, but you never get 100%). I undertake odd side projects. The pay isn't great, but the benefits are decent, and the hours are pretty good.

I'm looking to make a lateral move that's probably to a differently "fun" job, but one with less autonomy and slack time, and more pay.

Here's the code in either C or C#:

return ( (price > 100) ? 10 : 5);

Computer languages are for people. It should really be more like this:

    #
    # Description of what this does.
    #
    PRICE-THRESHOLD = 100
    LOWER-PRICE = 5
    UPPER-PRICE = 10

    IF PRICE > PRICE-THRESHOLD RETURN UPPER-PRICE
    ELSE RETURN LOWER-PRICE

Alternatively, use Excel:

    =IF( (price > 100), 10, 5 )

Excel is cryptic, but a lot of finance people understand it.

There's that saying, you can have it done right, fast, and cheap... pick any two. Generally the construction unions go for right and fast, not cheap. Often, they won't even do fast, mainly because speed and safety are often at odds with each other.

Of course, the meaning of cheap here is different. Cheap in the general market is $10 an hour, and union is $15. Qualified is around $20 to $30 an hour for the more common things, and a lot more for exotic skills like building bridges.

The logic is simple, though. Because construction unions aren't involved in producing product, they aren't interested in increasing speed and productivity. What they can increase is skills and quality and safety. So construction unions own training centers - gigantic warehouses and lots with classrooms and vocational education facilities. They force their members to get training.

In industrial unions in factories, the dynamic is different. Everything is based on the assembly line, so it's a different situation, and the unions have different strategies centered around that.

Likewise, trucker unions and other unions in the supply chain are increasingly strategizing around the supply chain.

I think you mischaracterize the waterfall shops. What waterfall did wasn't create union-like conditions. Waterfall rationalized the software production process, and created a kind of "factory" for software. The union-like behavior you notice is really factory behavior; when people in a factory resist management, even individually, it'll end up looking like a factory union's resistance.

When a union in a factory decides to do a "slow down" or "work to rule", it's resisting by putting pressure on the factory's workflow.

Unions operating in other sectors have different strategies. In the service sector, they use public campaigns to gain sympathy in the community. Teacher unions tend to use the political process (being a public sector that is popular with the electorate).

Agile's strategy was to improve quality, and give the programmer more autonomy. A side effect of autonomy (and TDD) is to allow the programmers to leverage productivity gains of new libraries and even new languages.

We don't associate what agile did with unionization, but that's largely because the craft-guild style union is moribund. It hasn't really revived and adapted for the age of data and software. That said, there are things like FOSS, GNU/FSF, Creative Commons and other organizations that operate in the space. The PC revolution, and then desktop publishing, and the internet, and now 3d printing and open hardware have all created a kind of "labor movement" of individual workers. It just lacks a political voice and a labor strategy.

Regarding point 3, I should have worded it differently. What I mean is that Agile is inherently adversarial to what are generally considered the tactics of management, which include being able to replace workers, to move production to different locations, to increase the pace of work, and generally have flexibility. I didn't mean that the programmers and management are going to fight or feel at odds with each other.

They will have a conflict if management decides to use those tactics, but there are other ways to increase productivity.

If workers and managers can generally find alignment with, and achieve, the goals of the company, the conflicts are avoided.

It's K-12. They don't name anything quite right.

Having some programming background is a good thing. In fact, I think it would be better if the courses were more broad than deep, and looked at things like programming graphics, programming robots, programming microcontrollers in appliances, the internet protocols, wireless networking, encryption, sequential circuits, logic gates, etc.

If that extra pay for recruiting girls more heavily works, that's ok.

If, absent that reward, there weren't many or any girls in the class, isn't that some kind of problem right off the bat?

Not all unions are for factory workers. We all have to get beyond that stereotype. There are unions for journalists, social workers, teacher, police officers, college instructors, and nurses. What the union represents in these fields is generally resistance to becoming "factory workers", or more specifically easily replaced workers.

Early factory unions also tried to retain special skills, but automation prevailed... so the union instead went along with the automation, but demanded a greater fraction of the gains from productivity increases.

Agile is adopted because it's a system that works better for some situations. The "deal" is that to get the Agile product, you have to hire Agile programmers, who have a belief that they must work a certain way. Refusing to allow management to control the process is adversarial to management, even if management is happy to go along with it to get the end result.

And speaking of adversarial... what could happen is that UCD will end up being even less adversarial with management than the programmers. After all, they are going to be iterating designs to find the balance between "works for the business" and "works for the user". The programmers will be implementing after all the iteration, and be considered a cost center that can be squeezed for more output for less money.

The article says that Agile was a way to get what amounts to a contract of work rules, without the labor unions.

It's warning that UCD is going in that direction - and that management is going to use UCD to marginalize programmers. It doesn't have to be that way, though, if Agile is willing to get in and work with UCD to develop disciplines that work for both designers and programmers.

I think one place this might happen is the issue of speed. All new programs are pretty slow, but they get sped up with "optimization" (LOL - more like caching and clever laziness tricks.) Evaluating speed needs during the design process brings programming into the design process a lot sooner, opening channels of communication that can reach to the user.

Loomio's comment gets the gist of it. The software creation process has been moving to Agile, which beats waterfall, but there's an emerging practice of UCD. If programmers cannot find some way to work with and within UCD, a division of labor between designing the product with the end user, and writing the code to implement it will develop. This will lead to declines in programmer autonomy, and will demand changes to Agile. The seed for this change is already planted within Agile by people advocating for Taylorism.

That's not my thinking - just my interpretation of the text.

How does the cost of ASIC mining compare to the cost of fiat currency? What about compared to the quantitative easing?

Isn't that still very expensive?

The Sherpa are an ethnic group, not a job.

Good luck. I found myself in a similar situation with pretty good estimates, but unable to bid low. I'd be bidding double or triple the competition. One time, I was bidding at triple, and the previous dev had failed totally. They went with another dev who bid nearly the same price. He failed, too. By that time, I was like, I'm not even going to bother - they don't want to pay what it takes, and buy failure over and over.

I used to estimate small websites (<70k lines of PHP), and generally got to around 30% of the final time required. My method was to fully describe the product, then break it down into tables, queries and pages. Estimates were based on the previous project's stats and final times required. (My constant used to be 3, but technology changes altered the numbers.)

The big unknown - and the highest risk - was managing integration between external systems, or doing complex integration between internal systems. Anything that might benefit from aspect-oriented programming, like access control lists, or a more elaborate front-controller, or universal exports in json format, or a new paradigm like AJAX, would be difficult to estimate.

That fits your breakdown of projects into linear parts, and exponential parts.

Anyway, my estimates were good, but my business management was not - I was always in learning mode because I never studied business and had no experience. So I went W-2 and went into a different field because an opportunity to learn politics emerged. What's interesting is that successful political campaigns are entirely about estimating and budgeting, in real time more or less - you spend money and see results day by day, or after a couple weeks. It's driven by statistics (and messaging). I just watch from the sidelines, and don't do politics, but I think we could learn something from it. It's more like agile XP than waterfall.

The Obama campaign was XP, by necessity. The Healthcare.gov website thought it was waterfall... again by necessity.

It would be better for everyone if writers could get paid for views of their lyrics. It would set a precedent for paying the artist. Even if it's just a few ten-thousandths of a penny per view.

lyrics without errors. what a concept.

It's not maximalist to say that a website cannot make a copy of something for someone who owns the item in another form. That right to copy belongs to the copyright owner, not the person who owns a copy.

Maybe they should sue over the price.

I don't think it's realistic to expect to get the lyrics for free.

For other readers, here's a comparison of these plans. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-insurance/articl...

money * low information voters * paranoid messages = tea party

Also, around 80% of people are in private insurance plans through a plan at work. Some fraction of these people are happy with their HMO or PPO. These are the middle class and upper middle class or rich. They are also politically resistant.

The support for national health care or even single payer would come from the uninsured and people who have lower-end insurance (high deductible plans) and are forced into a kind of expensive PPO (insurance that makes you pay most of the costs of doctor visits).

Hilary Clinton's single payer plan was demolished by the insurance industry. So this time around, they kept insurance companies in the reforms. That negated some of the resistance from the well-insured.

Or allow one state to operate another state's exchange.

The states were given federal money to build their state ACA programs... so the government already owns it.

Now, imagine if they had been forced to open source this stuff, at least between the contractors.

I don't know how it would be done, but I can only see two scenarios. One is to charge the insured the full, unsubsidized premium, and give the tax credit in 2015. The other is to pay the subsidy to the insurance company throughout the year.

In the former situation, some people just cannot afford it.

In the latter situation, you can have some fraud (by the insurance companies).

I guess they could offer both options, and if you choose the latter, you need to apply through the government, so they can verify that you exist, etc.

And video editors.... except that video editors spend a lot of money to buy controllers for video editing, because video editing is about frames. It's about maintaining some illusion of continuity by messing with video by the frame. They need to controllers because they sit in a dim or dark room all day. And they won't want to touch the screen and get it dirty.

Depends on how close the page is to your face, and how well you see. The type's size also matters. 7pt type at 300 dpi is not that attractive due to pixelation. However, to even see that, I need my face at 10 inches from the page.