Having been in management for a while, I have seen too many bad managers at this point. Unfortunately technical competence does not directly translate into management ability. As a manager, one of the most important skills to have is the ability to understand and predict the needs of the business. A programmer is in a good position to develop that ability because they are constantly being tasked with fulfilling those needs. If the OP has not developed those skills he is either organizationally tone deaf from being eyeballs deep in his code, or he does not care enough to pay attention what is going on around him.

For all we know, he already has that ability in spades. Nothing about the original post mentions it one way or the other, and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Most good programmers are really good at coming up with effective solutions for real world challenges.

It is all about perspective. You will always toil away at something. Whether or not you love it is up to you.

If he has the experience that he says he has, he should already have the business and risk mitigation functions under control. As a programmer, I presumably has spent his career developing programs that the business needs. If he cannot anticipate business needs by now, he probably lacks the intelligence to be in management anyway. The same thing goes for mitigating risk. If he cannot foresee project risks and is still relying on others to tell him what to work on, and what NOT to do, then he is not much more valuable than a mid-level programmer.

Managerial functions on the other hand are a whole new ball game. Unlike programs, people are unpredictable and cannot be debugged or rewritten to function the way we would like them to. I agree with you that those functions are not simple, and that could make the transition rough.

None the less, the OP is on the right track. A good employee should be leading a team and mentoring junior employees. I look at it as the personnel equivalent of systems administration. As an employer, do you want a guy who is still provisioning servers by hand, or do you want the guy who has automated everything and can make a change across ten thousand systems as easily as one? I do not mean to disparage the admin who can fine tune the golden image to the point where it consumes as few resources as possible. But without the talent to extend that skill beyond a single system, they are going to be professionally limited.

Not sure why I bother replying to an AC, but I usually play Conquest so I do PTFO you tool.

K:D is something that everyone, even someone who does not play BF4, can understand.

How about this... when I am playing on a hack free server, I am usually in the top 5 (because I am PTFingO and earning points for my team). If I was all about K:D, I would not spend so much time with a Stinger where I only earn about 50 points for a mobility kill and get 0 player kills.

They ban them, but I think it is a limited time ban. As someone else commented, those hackers are paying customers. They do not want to cut off the revenue stream.

I think that they should let them play on hacker only servers. Let the trolls all roll around in the muck with each other and leave the rest of the community alone.

Very much like HFT.

It really does not require any more skill. If hacking were allowed, it would come down to who has the fastest computer and lowest ping to the server.

Playing the game without hacks requires skill.

I keep hoping and praying that one day someone will come out with a way to effectively deal with this, but the reality is that the problem is here to stay. The way this pans out is that you get a day or two of hack free game play when the publisher updates their anti-cheat code. Then the hackers come out with new binaries that cannot be detected and the game sucks again.

I like FPS games and I really like FPS games on the computer where I can use a keyboard and mouse. Hackers just kill the game though. On a hacker free BF4 server, I will go 3:1 or 4:1 frequently. Yet my overall ratio for the game is down around 0.8:1. That gives some sense of how often the hacks are going undetected.

I do not understand why companies like EA, Valve, etc do not just subscribe to the hacks themselves and update the detection routines as soon as they come out. They have proven that they have technology that will catch the large majority of them. It just seems like they are too lazy to stay on top of it. The cynical side of me thinks that they are have only been aggressive with the BF4 hackers in the last week or two due to Hardline coming out soon.

This right here is what I miss the most about swapping warez.

I haven't pirated software with any regularity since a 56k modem was fast, but even back then, any game that I enjoyed I bought to support the publisher so that they had a chance to stay in business and continue to pump out good products.

A try before you buy model would crush the software industry, but would be a godsend for gamers. Even a model where you get to play the first level, or play for 10 hours would strike the balance between piracy and profits.

I cannot believe that you wasted money buying that garbage either.

Get with the rest of the smart people and wait next time. I did. Oddly enough, I am not kicking myself in the ass for not pre-ordering AC:Unity. Go figure....

That is not say that I do not want to play the game, or that I will not enjoy playing it in two months from now when the public beta period is over, the bugs are worked out, and I purchase the game for a discount.

Given the likelihood of that happening (hint: not at all), the only sane option is to stop buying on the release date.

I saw the trailers for AC:Unity and thought that it looks like a fun game. Then I remembered what a cluster fuck Watch Dogs was and decided to wait.

Surprise, I made the wise choice there.

I might pick up the game in another month or two once the public beta period is over, and Ubisoft has knocked 20%+ off of the price.

I adopted a similar tactic. I have been burned one time too many. After the cluster fuck that was Watch Dogs, I will never buy a pre-release version of another Ubisoft game.

The same goes for EA, after the cluster fuck that was BF4.

It is better to wait a month or two, let everyone else deal with the public beta test period, and then get it at a discount.

They finally figure out how to mitigate aimbots and wall hacks.

Filing jointly worked out well for me. I make nearly five times what my wife makes. Without her I would pay significantly more in taxes.

The DoD has put the most thought into the subject of co-locating equipment, but the entire Federal government is embracing this model as well. The company I work for provides legal technology solutions to the DoJ and the SEC. Over the last year, every single RFP has had at least some question about our willingness to co-locate hardware in their facilities.

The same thing is happening in the private sector, especially the financial industry. People are so paranoid about data breaches that they are unwilling to trust server providers, no matter how secure the application stack might be.