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Comment And the stupidest thing about it? (Score 4, Interesting) 710

If everything I've read about it is true(and I mentioned this in another article here on /.) you literally can't get more than 40 hours of work out of people anyway. Oh sure, the first couple of weeks they do more work but then they get tired and slow and make mistakes. After a few weeks of that they're working more than 40 hours but aren't producing any more work. Go ahead, read stuff like Peopleware where they point this out. (That working overtime makes no sense, you don't get anything but pissed off employees.) Before anybody asks, no I don't work more than 40 hours a week. (And yes one of the big reasons is I'm old enough to recognize I don't get any more work done if I do. Plus the fact you do it and your manager quickly abuses it.)

Comment Re:You are the only one. (Score 1) 370

Wait, you've seen them actually clean it up? I guess I have bad luck then because what happens in my experience is the company just keeps building up tech debt and think they'll never have to pay it down. (You know, like an idiot maxing out his credit card because he figures he only has to pay part of it off at the end of the month. It's practically forever before the whole bill is due:) ) Guess I'm gun shy since my experience is managers abuse it. (IE do the half ass version and then don't get time to clean it up until it collapses on a customer which is of course dev's fault.)

Comment Re:You are the only one. (Score 1) 370

Just to be clear I've seen what you say work if it's along the lines of keep out features that aren't needed and we kept track that those features aren't there.(As you say tech debt or in this case reduced feature set.) What I haven't seen work is "We want all the features, we'll just do a half assed version of it and not keep track of the tech debt." turn out well. (I bring it up a lot but I always have this story of a communications protocol where my company tried to take the toy "proof of concept" version that made no attempt to implement large necessary portions of the protocol. Pretty much that was written under the directive of "Get a proof on concept in a day for a protocol that should have taken a week or 2 to implement." Basically the entire "handshake" portion was written with the idea that it would always work since there was no time to actually implement it. Not true in reality.) They spent weeks after that trying to get it to work and it still has serious issues. (It would have been quicker to just do it right in the first place. Of course now it gets dumped on me so I'm annoyed.)

Comment Actually we had a clued in manager before (Score 1) 370

Of course that was until they hired the manager that sucked at leadership/management but was awesome at company politics. End result was they laid the good manager off. (Since he thought it was stupid to use software engineers as tech support and actually tried to protect us from that shit, make sure our computers were up to date so we weren't frustrated, ETC. The rest of the company hated that since they absolutely love using us as their tech support. As best we could figure out the lousy manager considered the good one a threat so the crap one climbed the corporate ladder until they were above him and then used the layoff excuse to get rid of him.)

Comment Re:You are the only one. (Score 3, Insightful) 370

Those fresh out of uni have yet to see the executive suite cut back on (or eliminate) quality assurance because it's "too costly" and it "slows down development".

Amazing how many managers think you can save time by cutting quality isn't it? (Because what I see happen pretty much every time is it would have been quicker just to do it right the first time. You end up having to repeatedly fix the half-ass version until you get a working version.)

Comment Which is of course made worse (Score 4, Insightful) 370

So this is made worse by the fact that any time anybody has actually checked they've found that long term overtime does not actually work. (IE you don't actually get any more work out of people by having them work more than 40 hours a week for long periods of time.) Us older workers (30+) already know this and don't play this game because it's pointless.(And apparently has been known for about a century so it's not a new concept.) However managers still want you to do that, mostly because far too many managers are completely stupid. (Something I feel justified in saying because I've seen way too many mind bogglingly stupid decisions from managers.)

Comment Hell I don't (Score 1) 538

When you think of people who teach at a college, you probably imagine moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars.

You must be thinking of a different institute than I do. Professors don't teach, they're too busy doing their real job of research. The teaching is done by adjuncts and grad students.

Comment Re:Programming language in 2 hours ? Yeah, right. (Score 1) 466

Hell I'm one of the guys that harps on how quickly you can learn a language and even I agree with this. I mean I know I say that since I know C++ I was able to learn C# very quickly since the syntax is largely the same. But I'd still say it was at least a couple of weeks before I was pretty comfortable in C#. (No, I don't think it'd take any decent C++ guy months or years to get as good in C# but still it's not nothing either.) Mod the parent up. (I know I know, the mods can't because they're too busy modding down pointlessly, they have no points left.)

Comment I never even considered that (Score 3, Insightful) 23

But since they're doing education with it, damn med students could use this to look at a virtual cadaver if they wanted to put in a little extra studying. (Since I bet seeing it in VR is a lot better than Grey's anatomy. Not as good as the real thing but they'll still be doing that.)

Comment I could point out (Score 0) 132

There's been less than 300 cases of this disease ever so this is a super rare disease.(I wouldn't be surprised if you're more likely to die from being crushed by a vending machine than ever knowing someone who died of VCJD) Or I could point out that it's actually extremely rare in US cattle not because of testing but because letting the cows graze is so cheap farmers in the US never really got into feeding their animals ground up animal parts. (Hey, doesn't the feds let these rangers graze their animals on federal land for a really cheap price? That's probably done more to keep this disease in check than anything else. I could have sworn some jack-ass was in the news a month or 2 ago because he didn't want to pay his grazing fees.)

Comment Oh this is hilarious (Score 1) 325

Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, 'adjunct' professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads.

This is from the Modern Language Association? Hell when I was an undergrad 20+ years ago they didn't have professors teach language courses. That was done by wet behind the ears grad students in charge of classes of 15-20 students.(Oh and it didn't seem like it was a new thing.) I know, I know. The language professors couldn't do it because they were too busy with research. You know, if you're a Spanish prof well you have to do that research of eating Serrano ham in Spain or maybe you're a French prof. Damn it, you can't teach, you've got to drink your coffee by the Seine river, oops I mean do research.

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