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Comment Re:Families come first (Score 1) 370

Greenbird I am truly sorry I did not intend for this to be a TIRADE personally directed at YOU at all.

You do realize this is both the internet and /. so apologies are considered uncouth (and yes that's sarcasm). And unnecessary.

For the record - the guys that work for me get paid TOP DOLLAR and I give raises to the one's who perform. Because I spent most of my career as a developer when I went into management I was extremely determined NOT to become the clueless boss I always had, a.k.a. PHB, okay?

And that's a good thing. More managers like that and maybe the industry will stop turning out nothing but crap. Your response seemed to come across that way though probably through the lack of context you provided here. I'm just constantly amazed by management who seem to somehow expect something for nothing in the tech industry.

A while back I got tired of programming and worked as a headhunter for 2 months. I would get guys from one country - you guess - I would ask "So what are you looking for" and they would answer "X$ more"... I'd be like "There's more to work that just money, what kind of projects would interest you?" and they would say "X$ more". When the first question a prospective hire asks is the rate, they fail the interview.

I would agree that the types that focus exclusively on money aren't usually the best type to work with and often end up being the blowhards you referenced in your earlier post.

And yes, there is nothing worse than the project built entirely by junior guys. Even worse is the client who believed the vendor who told him to fire all the good developers because he could get guys in some third world hell hole for $4/hour. And of course these "developers" took a 3 week programming class...

Worse if you're trying to manage the project but I make a good part of my living cleaning up after crap like that. And it is definitely much more enjoyable if you can do it right from scratch rather than trying to fix something that's already all screwed up.

Comment Re:Families come first (Score 1) 370

There are now xvalues, glvalues and prvalues

Out of C and C++ to long I guess. It's been a good 10 years since I did any serious work with either. But to make my original point it only took a quick read to grasp those new concepts. When the schooling runs from Nand gates and K-maps on up grasping new things is much easier.

Comment Re:Families come first (Score 1) 370

As a tech hiring manager I can state with absolute experience and clarity that believe it or not, this is not the best answer. The guy (or gal) who is wooed away by a high salary will disappear just as fast when the next employer comes along and offers $1/Hour more. This approach will also increase outsourcing, as it reinforces the incorrect yet often quoted in management circles foolishness that programmers are like ditch diggers - interchangeable, easily swapped out, etc.

My guess is you are unhappy with your salary and think you should make more. Maybe you should, but if money is all that motivates you, you made a very poor career choice and should consider going into sales.

Wow. You latch on to one statement I made, completely alter the context and then go on a tirade about me being whiny and unhappy. I can only guess you're projecting?

Nothing I said was about me. It was about what I've seen and experienced in my 20+ year career. Personally I choose where I work on more than just the basis of money (although admittedly it's one factor). And the vast majority of people at my level think the same way. A good working environment with good people is worth a goodly chunk of pay. That being said though the long and short of it is you get what you pay for. You pay cheap you're going to get crap. And no, highly skilled individuals aren't going to work for junior pay no matter how much you want to whine about it. It's a pretty simple concept and is applicable to pretty much every field. Higher skill and experience equals higher pay. Why do people expect it to be different in tech?

Comment Re:Families come first (Score 4, Insightful) 370

Poppycock! It only takes years because the colleges are failing at producing the quality employee and the company ends up having to re-teach what the grad was supposed to learn in school. Worse, they now may have to unlearn bad habits that the student was taught in that rotten school.

Bullshit. No school of any kind is going to teach you how things work in industry. First off in almost every case the instructors have little if any industry experience. Teaching and working in industry are 2 completely different skill sets. Second a college's job should be teaching fundamentals: language theory, programming theory (e.g. L-Values vs R-Values), data structures, algorithms and the like. Those are the types of things that can be taught in a structured graded environment. Because thirdly there is no way possible for any school to set up a program that would represent what you are going to face once you start working in industry: Working on a team of 10 individuals where the work has to get done no matter that 3 of them are incompetent idiots, requirements changing on a daily bases without changes to resources or schedule, balancing supportability vs reliability vs speed of completion, being to do risk assessments on the fly as conditions change radically throughout a project. Because these types of things are radically different for each project you work on these are things that can't be taught in a classroom environment and are only learned through experience.

As someone said further up these are also intangible skills that are almost always overlooked by HR types and managers who haven't worked in the trenches. And as GP said these are the types of skills that when missing cause software projects to fail or to turn out the kind of crap we typically see when they do manage to "succeed".

The bigger the employer, the more scrutiny they come under. Again, you need some metric to weed out the chaff in a way that won't get you sued in any of a thousand different ways. Some metrics work, some don't.

There is no "metric". As has been discovered using "metrics" like these ends in tossing out the good candidates while hiring the idiots.

Again, it is trying to work within the hiring laws that skew the tables with things like affirmative action How many times has /. had stories about the gender gap or other minority in tech? I see at least a story a week including this story. All these lead to a perception that those groups need to be given preference even over better qualified applicants solely to meet the numbers.

Again bullshit. Did you see the recent diversity numbers put out by the big name tech companies? These "metrics" you claim are supposed to be saving them from diversity issues has resulted in an overwhelmingly white/Asian male majority.

Yet when government does that you get upset??? Throwing money at a problem isn't only foolish it is a quick way to the poor house. What you are calling for is cronyism or nepotism where the only way to get a job is to be in that one person's contact list. That's no way to hire someone and you really don't know why that person may be in that contact list.

You sound like HR or a clueless hiring manager. Throwing money at the highly skilled personnel who will get the job done is exactly how to get the job done and make money. Paying a lot for three highly experience highly skilled people will payoff far more than hiring 10 much cheaper inexperienced college grads who don't have a clue about risk evaluation, supportability, performance, etc... And the people are on the contact list because they are the types that have a history of getting things done and bailed out projects that started with those college grads working on them who cocked them all up.

Way to put your head in the sand and ignore the fact that the universities and colleges are failing in their task of producing qualified students. Or that the current hiring laws are skewed to favor less qualified people simply because they fit a diversity metric. Way to put the failure of the job seekers to manage their expectations on the employer with them wanting to be paid the same as the CEO on their first day.

Again that's just plain wrong. Good schools are doing a fantastic job at teaching what they are supposed to. My school gave me a fantastic basis for developing industry development skills. I could look at a piece of code and evaluate the consequences from the lowest level to the highest level. But then I was placed with a team of people that were all more experienced than I was. Some barely more some at the level I'm at now. They mentored me and guided me in learning the skills that aren't teachable in a classroom environment but are essential to developing good industry software.

Comment Re:Does it really matter? (Score 1) 99

I don't know about you but news makes my life considerably worse than it would be without it, as news is not so much "news" as it is "bads"

Yeah, things like weather, traffic, political information, pricing information for goods and services, job information, all that does nothing but make people miserable.

You just have no idea how much access to information enriches your life. I dare you to live a year without any access to any news or information source.

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 1) 387

[citation needed]

WTF are you demanding a citation about?

Nobody has yet seen a graviton. Our understanding of gravity is so far utterly theoretical. For example, we have never succeeded in making it in the lab, as we can with magnetism.

Our understanding of pretty much everything is utterly theoretical. For all we know this whole thing is just an illusion and we're in the matrix. We can experimentally in a controlled environment show cause and effect of gravity to a very small margin of error. We can't experimentally show the effect of releasing certain amounts of carbon into the atmosphere on global climate. There is no way to isolate any effects of the carbon verses a million other interactions.

But we do have both contemporary and historical case studies where we can observe the impact (both local and global) of human activity on climate.

Bullshit. Such a study would have to somehow isolate the human effects from all other interaction and effects and we don't even know and/or understand what the vast majority of the interactions are. Otherwise all the study is showing is correlation not causation.

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 1) 387

And yet, science is also based on assumptions.

Yes it is. And the level of trust in those assumptions should be based on how well our theories explain those assumptions.

Every scientific paper doesn't start by explaining gravity, even if it's a factor in whatever it's going to go on and try to prove.

No but what I have a problem with (and didn't express very well in my post) is people claiming the current theories on climate science are as well understood as the theory of gravity. And our understanding of gravity isn't particularly solid either. Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 1) 387

Yes, that's true. But often those breakthroughs target one particular assumption in a core theory, often one that has been causing problems for some time (e.g., the discrepancies regarding the aether theory in 19th-century experiments which led to Einstein's breakthrough in relativity). They don't generally question the entire nature of the underlying scientific paradigm.

Not 99% of science. Most scientists who are working every day in a lab are not actively questioning the foundations of accepted scientific theories. If they did, they'd be wasting their time... and holding back scientific progress.

I don't disagree with most of what you say. For the most part you're saying what saying what I was trying to elucidate but in a much more loquacious and elegant manner. When I wrote my reply I was focus more on climate science specifically although I didn't express that very well. I chalk it up to not having finished my morning caffeine yet. From my knowledge most scientific advance aren't from someone saying "That's wrong. I'm setting out to prove it's wrong." As you stated it's usually more a result of discrepancies in a related experiment or observed phenomenon that don't fit the assumed theory and can't be explained by problems with the method.

That being said here's the part where we differ.

For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.

Given the complexity of the system, the scale of the system and our extremely limited knowledge of system's interactions there is no way any theory of how the climate of this entire planet works should in any way be considered settled or part of a "hard core". The problem being that even though they may be right to at least some degree regarding AGW they are most likely largely wrong about the details of how and why and subsequently the consequences and causes of any consequences. These are important because they dictate what mitigating actions may be taken. History shows mitigating actions taken without sufficient understanding of a system usually results in less then desirable if not outright negative result. This has happened over and over in mankind's intervention in nature. We often take a bad situation and make it worse trying to fix it.

Now I'm not saying no action should be taken to try to limit man's contribution to carbon production. I am saying what actions we do take need to based on more solid ground rather than alarmist theories based on insufficient knowledge.

Comment Re:I get enough flying priuses already. (Score 1) 186

Now I agree whole heartily with everything you said except:

Although every drivers manual reads we should slow down if someone wants to merge into our lane

This is wrong and it drives me nuts. People don't know how to merge. You're are supposed to drive at a consistent speed if someone is trying to merge into your lane. The merger is supposed to adjust their speed. Their supposed to decide whether to slow down or speed up to merge in front or in back of you. If both start slowing down and speeding up it becomes a confusing guessing game. Now if you mean by slowing down providing enough of an opening for the merger to fit that's another issue. Unless you're driving at a very slow speed if you're following so close that a car can't fit in front of you you're following too close. Tailgating is probably the second most leading cause of serious collisions (whether directly or as a result of reducing wiggle room).

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 2) 387

It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.

The biggest problem with this argument is that our level of understanding of the "climate" system on this planet is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the system. This discovery is just another example. The other problem is that anything that challenges the theory of global warming seems to be either twisted to fit the current theory or ignored. The theory is supposed to be changed to fit the evidence.

That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.

You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected. That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 3, Interesting) 387

Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.

The level of ignorance is astounding. "questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about. Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions. And this gets modded up. It's no wonder the current climate debate is so off kilter.

Comment Re:Queue the deniers (Score 1) 387

AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree.

See. An example of GP's point. Science doesn't agree on things. Science posits theories then performs experiments and looks for evidence that both support and oppose those theories. The problem with the current climate in the climate debate is that any evidence that might oppose current theories tends to get either twisted to fit the current theories or shouted down. It's supposed to work the other way around. The theories are supposed to be twisted to fit the evidence.

could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity?

Wow. You could not have presented a more perfect example.

Comment Re:Ellsberg got a fair trial (Score 4, Insightful) 519

Well first you need a grand jury to indict them before they go on trial. I'm sure there's a lot of evidence to go over before that happens.

If you really believe there is any chance of that you're seriously delusional. Clapper openly admitted he lied to congress.

Justice rushed is not justice.

Strange you claim this in defending the government officials who admittedly broke the law but have already declared Snowden guilty of a crime he should never even have been charged with.

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