Agile works, as long as everyone involved has the balls to stand up for their own part of the process. If the client requests a feature that requires a big chunk of code to be rewritten / refactored, you just have to make sure you're upfront about it, and make it clear of how much effort and time will be required in the process.

The basic thing to keep in mind if that your boss, or the client don't trust your effort / time estimations, agile won't work.

And as a final note: the way to make sure you can trust someone is to hire the right people - have a good screening process when you hire.

When an mp3 is sold, it is not being transferred from the provider's server to the buyer's computer...it is being copied.

It goes both way... it isn't stealing either then, as the media corps would like to make us believe.

The best job I've ever had was in a small company (of around 100 people) in which the hiring process took around two months to complete. It was a position as a remote developer for iOS.

After the initial interview with the HR people, they instructed me to code a small app in my free time for no monetary reward at all. The software was just a few screens with data and some relatively easy logic. The problem for me was that since I work during the day, and study at night, it took me quite some time to complete.

After presenting the code (it was my first obj-c project), the iOS architect interviewed me. He criticized some of the code, praised some other parts, and asked technical questions. The interview was probably the hardest part of it all.

After getting the job I can tell you it's pretty clear to me that while the whole process was a real PITA, the end result was amazing. The average level of knowledge and expertise I was able to find there, is something I hadn't seen before in other jobs. In retrospective, I can see how the software project they asked was a very good way to see people's willingness to get the job, and their ability to commit and deliver.

If you repeat the question to yourself again, you'll see that the question is about why you are applying to that *particular* company, not why you need a job. Are you truly interested in what the company does and what practice area it is involved in, or as you say, are you applying only because "you need the fucking job". This helps the company determine if you are just going to be a pencil pusher clocking your time and going to be a sourpuss about it, or if you are going to kick some ass in your job.

You're relating not caring about a particular company with being a bad worker, which is a fallacy. Some people simply don't care about the company, as long as the job and the career are good. It doesn't mean they won't do their best, and it doesn't mean they will be pencil pushers clocking their time.

I would imagine that just about *any* company would be interested in you want to do with your career and how the position will fit not just your current needs (bring food on the table as per your statement) but also your future needs as a person AND as a professional. Are you seriously tell me that you are an automaton - you just want to clock in your 8 hrs at work so you get your paycheck and aspire absolutely nothing else from your career?? Why would you react so strongly to an interviewer who is trying to understand your career aspirations? Its not like they are asking you how you lead your life or how you floss your teeth, the question is only about your career goals. Sooner or later, you will end up discussing this with your manager anyway.

You are still assuming he's an automaton just because he doesn't care for that particular company. Respect and responsability are what the employment relationship needs, not some unfounded love and loyalty. It is a two way road, which takes time to build.

Each and every time I've worked at a company, I have done my best. But still I totally disagree with your reasoning that this is related directly with how much I care about the company having a particular name.

...I would rather that someone have the strength of conviction to make and stick with the choice that they believe is right, rather than flip back and forth to fit the prevailing opinion...

In this particular case, I do agree that GoDaddy has no merit in their change of mind - because they are acting consistently bad with their customers, and don't really seem to have changed their mind at all.

But it seems to me as if in our society we preferred that people stick to their decisions, rather than change their mind if there's overwhelming evidence that they've been wrong. Does it make sense?

Recognizing mistakes and dealing properly with them is IMHO a very rare and positive trait, which should always be encouraged. Think of how much better things would be if this was more widely encouraged.

Its sort of unrelated. But my brother was doing some independent audio work for some VIP wedding in Italy, when he realized the electrical hardware & connections were a mess (meaning they were actually dangerous to use). He first talked with the management for the event and let them know about the situation. They ignored him. He quit the job, and was highly criticized for it.

As he was disconnecting all of his hardware with his team, a short circuit caused a fire, which fortunately was controlled easily.

The event's management immediately contacted him to offer him a formal apology and pay for the damages to his hardware. They also offered to hire him back, double the salary. The last part was kind of luck, but had the fire not been controlled as easily as it was, my brother would have shared the responsibility.

Long story short: sometimes you have to know when to step down.

Nope it's not. That was the whole point of my post. :)

You are partially right, but let me rephrase what I meant.

When some client asks you to get a project done by a certain date, and you tell them explicitly that it's impossible to do so, and maintain quality at the same time... yet they decide to go on, or go to another company to get what they want: don't you think they are partially responsible for what they get?

In any case I totally agree with you in that outsourcing companies have a huge part of the responsibility... but most of the times it's all about unrealistic goals from the client's side in the first place.

Having been involved in many outsourced projects, from the other side, this is what I can tell you: 1 - Cost & time over quality: doesn't need much explanation. When a client asks you for a product and puts cost & time above anything else, they shouldn't be surprise when the final product sucks.

2 - Requirements: most of the times, the problem is not that offsourced programmers need more instructions, but that you simply can't talk to them as you would talk to someone who is physically sitting right besides you. You are talking to someone who will spend the next coding day without any other chances to ask for clarification. A simple interpretation mistake can make them have to trash a full working day.

3 - Trust: you need to get people involved from the very beginning - let them know you trust them (otherwise why did you hire them in the first place). This is related to point #2 as well. You need to give people a chance to participate, sometimes make decisions, let them know you trust them, if you want them to care at all for what they do. If you treat people like mindless morons, that's what you will get - and this is something you see plenty of when working for remote customers.

4 - Selection process: get involved in the selection process. Talk to your programmers. Get to know them. Don't let the outsourcing company of choice screen you out on this. Because most often it is NOT the programmers that lie to you, but the very companies that hired them. They will hire just about anyone without any programming skills at all, if you let them do it.

Regards.

I work at a company that does outsourced programming for for US and EU companies. I have been working at this for the last 5 years aproximately (always in programming & analysis roles).

I am really amazed at how much our clients undermine their own goals. I understand that cost is what drives programming jobs to my country - but I still have to see a really successful product come out of this. It would be difficult to find a single cause for this, but all of the following are at least partially responsible:

1 - Low wages.

2 - Lack of good programmers getting involved: some of the programmers you can get for the lower wages are great, some suck. I've seen companies taking just anyone interested to fill programmer positions for such jobs (you can train them, right?). Getting involved in the selection process may help prevent this.

3 - Lack of trust in the the outsourced team: you can't think of the outsourced team as a bunch of mindless morons and expect them to care about your product. In those cases in which the outsourced team was a very good team, it didn't make the slightest difference because people was told what to do, and not to think - which makes hiring inexperienced people a pretty attractive alternative.

4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.

5 - Communication: communication is harder when people is spread all over the world. IMHO you need to compensate this difficulty by having some tool to help you keep in touch. In my current company, we use skype, and we keep in touch at all times with the client, which really helped solve this particular problem.

6 - Planning: planning is much more difficult when delivering work to someone who is not right at your side.

5 - Etc, etc.

No, it's not a fake vulnerability. You should read the report (RTFR?).

The vulnerability is about how apple events can be used to bypass the sandboxing of an application, and in this particular case to gain unrestrained network access even though the app is tagged as "no-network". According to the report it can be used to bypass other restrictions too.

For a single moment forget about everything you know. Forget about laws... forget about your religion... about your studies... forget everything. Now, with a fresh and clean mind go watch the video and tell me: does it look right to you? I sometimes wonder at how we let ourselves be fooled by our own rules, and end up confused to such an extent as to allow and consider appropiate something like this kind of physical punishment on a kid due to "copyright infringement"... whatever the fuck that is supposed to really mean.

The scientific method also dictates that hypotheses must be testable through experiments and results should be measurable.

In fact the scientific method does not claim to be able to prove something is true, but rather to prove that it is NOT wrong, and to do so it is a basic requirement for the hypotheses to be testable someway.

To say it in other words: intelligent design may or may not be true, but it certainly is outside of the scope of science and cannot be considered to have any relation with it.

Never pedantic if it clears out misconceptions. Thanks for the correction, I found it insightful. :)

There's nothing wrong with teaching ID from a phylosophical point of view. The problem is when people want's to teach it as if it was science. As I mentioned in another post: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong). This is enough to filter ID and Creationism out as scientific theories. They can still be taught as other kind of theories though and that would be fine.