Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home.
Family does that. Specially kids. I need to be home early to be with them, read to them, help them eat, clean themselves, let them see me (and feel and understand I actually give a shit). When I was single I would work at any hour. Not anymore. That does not mean, however, that my work is strictly 9-5. I wake up at 5AM to get myself ready, log in, do some work, then get ready (and help my wife get my kids ready). Then I log back to work via VPN from 9 to 10, sometimes going to bed till midnight... with just 5 hours to go sleep to start again.
I easily make 55a week just like that. More if I do work on weekends. But 9-5 is the strict window I use to be in the office.
A lot of 9-5'ers are like that, and in addition to all that, we see the same shit repeating itself again and again, from one employer to the next. So what you call "lack of passion" might actually be work-related pragmatism combined with some physical exhaustion and simply the necessary notgiveashitis gene kicking off to save your brain from dying after witnessing the same inane shit rendering itself at work for the millionth time.
The passion is there, is just that we move it out of work and into other things, like family and career (which is distinct from work.)
They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way.
Life. Life will happen and will change your perspective and priorities. YOU. WILL. SEE.
This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.
But that is the thing. You are projecting. How do you know that other people are not made some kind of difference? They are likely making a difference *somewhere else*.
Also, as we get older we become more efficient with our time. I can do a lot more know with less time than what I could do when I had 10 years of experience (and certainly much more when I started my career.) We burn a lot of hours thinking it is necessary, we do not know how to prioritize or say no to crazy demands. We freak out, and we go into a professional-related frenzy, willing to burn the midnight oil to compensate for a lot of things.
We have a lot of energy when we start. But energy is not necessarily passion. And not all forms of professional passions are constructive. As we get older, family or not, we learn to pick our battles and seek out the lowest hanging fruits, the 20% that make up the 80%. It is then when we begin to be true engineers, not just berserker hackers.
Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job,
Unless you are developing the ultimate shit, or have a wonderful work experience with your managers, or are developing your own business, never, ever, be passionate about your job. Be passionate about your career, but not your job. Your job is the conduct by which you make money using your career. Display work ethics, and be willing to go the extra mile when needed. But don't confuse that with passion. That's just work ethics, which we should all display.
I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge.
Life. I told ya.
I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent.
That is not being complacent. That is becoming burned out. That is your mind and body telling you the situation is not conductive to your mental, emotional and professional development.
What is your advice?
GTFO. Get another job that you like. Rinse and repeat as needed. Learn to be effective with your
They have state run health care. They're sheeple. Baaaah.
No, they are civilized.
"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
After living in Eastern Europe for so many centuries as a minority, with continuous gene flows, no, I would expect them to have a significant amount of Northwestern Eurasian genes in them. I mean, just look at them (and I don't mean it in a derogatory manner) and compare them with some other ancient-yet-living Middle Eastern populations (Assyrians, Chaldean, Samaritans, Yemenite Jews, Arabs, and pretty much any other Semitic group that has not migrated out of the Levant, Mesopotamia and/or the Arabic Peninsula.)
OTH, I (we) have to acknowledge that outward, superficial looks do not equate pure genetic profiles.
"The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand."
This is a complete falsehood that people need to stop parroting. Research work is VERY difficult to come by. Microsoft was one of the few places actually employing researchers.
So what will they do now? There are absolutely no jobs left in academia, so forget that. They could in theory become programmers, but that field is overcrowded too as people on slashdot regularly point out.
The fact is, if we want to maintain our jobs and standard of living in the USA, we're going to have to band together and force politicians to stop letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs. It really doesn't help matters when certain propagandists keep lying about how "plentiful" high-tech jobs are and how desperately we need more STEM graduates.
If you replace this sentence:
letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs
with:
letting incompetent immigrants into the country to take our jobs, but letting competent immigrants take the jobs of less competent people, citizens or otherwise, and we force our programmers to become more competent (because the quality of work we do here is pretty crappy)
Then I'm on board. I'm not in favor of protectionism to protect the incompetent. And if we were more competent, we wouldn't be so worry about immigrants competing with us.
To be honest, I would like to see our government throttle immigration of engineers into our country as a function of unemployment and other economic indicators (make rate of immigration in field X inversely proportional to unemployment in said field) coupled with actual examinations (classified by years of experience) of migrating professionals, to truly ensure we only get the best junior, mid and senior professionals that we can get. Also, we should do for all regions (LATAM, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, etc) and not just for China and South Asia.
That I would like to see.
Open-ended migration, or closing immigration just to protect us from competition? No. I don't want to see that. Screw that. Bring the best, from as many parts of the world as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Let the competent rise regardless of origin. And let the incompetent adapt or sink, regardless of origin.
#onlybaldmoronsputtheirlinkedinprofilesonslashdot
#onlymoronsrelyonnonsequitursinlieuofintelligentcounterarguments
And your point would be?
He had no point, so he had to rely in the good old ad hominem fallacy.
The only people who say that are people who would never vote for a Libertarian or a Republican. As in NEVER.
I voted Republican most of my life, and I say that. So your statement is false. Proof by fucking contradiction bitches.
SpaceX has promise, but Boeing has shown it can deliver.
...eventually, and only after the requisite pork has been spread across a multitude of states and subcontractors to keep the requisite congress-critters happy.
Not to knock Boeing's technical prowess, but damn - they do know how to play the game (which explains why they're getting a piece of the contract most likely...)
As a very apt comparison, go back to the days when the F-16 first came out: relatively cheap, by some upstart company (General Dynamics), a revolutionary design, the first 9-G capable fighter, and was an all-around workhorse that could do (within reason) damned near anything you demanded of it. It's still in production today (albeit as a division of Lockheed-Martin), with a design that stands to be around for decades to come. Compare and contrast this with, oh, the F-35/6/whatever that's been nothing but a massive money-sink to date.
Did you just called GD an "upstart" (relative to the time the F-16 was built)? #youarenuts
GD is a century old tech mega-ass conglomerate (think GE of defense) that builds from armored vehicles to fighters to satellites to naval warships to communication systems to artillery, you name it, with branches all over the world.
If GD was an upstart at the time the F16 was being build, I'm batman!
Boeing - Giant Company - $4.2B for a space vehicle that is still in design. SpaceX - Space Startup - $2.6B for a space vehicle that works and has been flying missions for two years.
Spend your money more wisely.
We are talking about NASA and space exploration, not implementing and deploying ER software systems. Re-using existing designs is a very acceptable approach, but for the type of R&D and work that this involves, NASA (and we) need to also explore new designs. The time to do is now.
I think *our* money is well spent by funding both proposals and to put them into competition. The point is not just to have someone deliver something, but to do R&D and extend our body of engineering knowledge. Our money *would not* have been spent well if only one player had been picked to the exclusion of the other.
Boeing on the other hand is proposing a craft that's clean-sheet new and has no other customers.
That is better because?
He didn't say anything about one being better than the other (#fileitundereadingcomprehension.)
With that said, from a fault-tolerant point of view, this makes absolute sense. It would be extremely hard and un-probable that any major flaws in one system will be present in the other system. This has been a typical way to create redundant, fault-tolerant solutions, expensive, but totally appropriate when critical systems are concerned.
Re-using an existing design has the advantage of leveraging known factors, specially if the design is already proven.
That hast its limits when it comes to innovation, however. Here is where a from-scratch approach can push innovation forward (at greater risks obviously.) Reuse when you can, but don't be afraid to break new ground with from-scratch systems if the potential ROI warrants it. That is the nature of engineering complex shit.
...but people are still dying of starvation and lack of water on THIS planet. =\
I know space exploration is very important, but shit, let's get real here. I feel guilty driving a newer model Honda Civic knowing that if I bought something cheaper I could maybe feed someone less fortunate.
Your post has little to do with compassion, and a lot to do with a base need to show to the world that you *care* and drop a tear for it. #dramaqueen
The official news (not WSJ speculation) will be revealed on a live feed today at 4PM EDT. Lots of info in the link below. Link: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...
Bingo. OTH (and to add more fuel to the speculation pyre), WP is reporting that the news will announce contracts will be awarded to both Boeing and SpaceX. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Ask "average Joe on the street" what he thinks about evolution.
Exactly. Relying on average Joe to determine a piece of knowledge on very complex shit (or wisdom) is pretty stupid no matter how we cut it.
So... let's say he's a sociopath.
That means the problem would be one of mental health.
There, fixed that for you (since we are starting from a hypothetical.)
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
