Consulting covers a pretty large area. I currently work for a Consulting firm that specializes in custom built enterprise software development (perhaps I should have said this instead of "Consulting"). 50% of my job is designing and building solutions, 30% is managing other technical people and 20% is sales. I love it. I get to use my engineering skills to solve problems, my people skills, and build my rudimentary sales skills. This is after spending 12 years in industry as a heads down developer and 6 years in a pure management role and finding myself stuck. Consulting was the best move I ever made.

I agree. Unfortunately it's much easier to measure the revenue generated by a sales person or a consultant than it is to measure the contribution made by a good engineer. It's also not obvious to a non engineer (the folks that generally decide how valuable someone is) what a good engineer looks like.

I agree completely. Once more, unfortunately it's easy to measure the value of a sales person by the amount of revenue they bring in and much harder to measure the worth of an engineer. Most executives like things that are easy to measure.

At the end of the day, reality is reality. You can either work to change it, change yourself to work with it, or sit around and bitch...

Paranoid much? Get over yourself. Nobody fears you.

However, if you are running around actively trying to make other people look stupid, they might think you're an asshole and not be all that motivated to help you advance.

  I and most of the people I've worked with and for love it when the people that work for us are smarter than us. I keep the idiots at bay, let them do their jobs and we both prosper.

There are bad managers that are threatened by other talented people and work to keep them down, but in my experience they only make it so far before they find themselves all alone with no support.

^THIS^

I can't stress this enough, emotional IQ is as important if not more important to success as technical intelligence. The best built software in the world is useless if nobody can sell it. It's really time for technical folks to stop bitching about how unfair this is and start trying to teach themselves interpersonal skills and sales skills. Get a job in consulting where both are highly valued. A good technical person that can also schmooze, sell and build relationships is worth their weight in gold.

They suck.

1. The simulators are buggy, slow, and prone to crashing.
2. Their documentation is either non-existant or full of errors.
3. Their APIs are woefully under featured.

I've been building a Mobile development team for the past 2 years (iOS, BB, Android) and I am constantly amazed at how much more productive my iOS developers are even through most everyone on my team has a Java background and RIM's OS and environment are based around J2ME and Eclipse. Until they fix their issues, they will not be able to attract enough quality developers to fill their market place with quality apps.

As a general case, I say that no, developers should not be given access to production. While giving us access to production might seriously speed up the resolution of an issue, in my experience, it always eventually introduces more problems than it fixes. It also tends to create an environment where testing is devalued because it creates the perception that any issues can be quickly resolved in production. This encourages management to compress timelines and causes the dev team to waste a lot of time fighting fires.

The best environments I've worked in have a fully replicated "break fix" mirror of production that can be used to test and rapidly deploy emergency production fixes outside of a normal test cycle if absolutely necessary.

If put in the context of how to work with "talent" found on sites like elance.com, guru.com, etc. it's actually pretty good advice. In short, build a solid requirements doc, break it down into simple milestones, (since you are already scraping the bottom of the barrel of commoditized software development "talent") pick three providers and see which one actually delivers something for your first milestone.

When you're working with dirt cheap developers that are most likely off shore, all of this sounds like pretty good advice to me.

I've gone through the process a few times unsuccessfully on the apple store website and it goes fine until it hits the point where you submit your info to check your AT&T contract status to see if you are eligible for an upgrade. This is most certainly calling a web service hosted by AT&T or a third party that is not Apple. I'm very surprised (not) that at this point AT&T still can't get their shit together for a major (pre)launch.

Really Mods?! Who was he trolling? morons? To top it off, he actually has a valid point.

Man up and learn Objective C

I was thinking the same thing this morning!

This unpredictability can also disrupt the grid. In the Texas market, you'll often see prices in the the zones that are wind heavy dip into negative territory because the wind farms are dropping too much power onto the grid, causing congestion. The negative price is an incentive to back down some of the units because they are basically being charged for putting power into the grid. In short, wind power is useless if you don't have the grid infrastructure capable of handing its peak output.

Is the grid in the areas that Google is operating capable of taking on new wind output?

I'll bet that they knew exactly what they were doing when they registered the domain and the government / domain authority played right into their hands.

After all, here we are discussing it on Slashdot.

-T