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+ - How do we move from using contract developers to hiring some in house?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I run a small software consulting company who outsources most of it's work to contractors. I market myself as being able to handle any technical project but only really take the fun ones, then shop it around to developers who are interested.

I write excellent product specs, provide bug tracking & source control and in general am a programming project manager with empathy for developers. I don't ask them to work weekends and I provide detailed, reproducible bug reports and I pay on time. The only 'rule' (if you can call it that) is: I do not pay for bugs. Developers can make more work for themselves by causing bugs and with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code.

Developers are always fine with it until we get toward the end of a project and the customer is complaining about bugs. Then all of a sudden I am asking my contractors to work for 'free' and they can make more money elsewhere. Ugh.

Every project ends up being a pissing match, so, I think the solution is to finally hire someone fulltime and pay for everything (bugs or not) and just keep them busy. But how can I make that transition? The guy I'd need to hire would have to know a LOT of languages and be proficient in all of them and I can't afford to pay someone $100K/year right now.

Ideas?"

+ - Least used key on your keyboard?->

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes "Over on Slashdot Japan (between discussions of the price of beef bowl and Linux kernel vulnerabilities) there has been some discussion over which key is least used on a PC keyboard. According to a small survey conducted by Yahoo Japan it is unsurprisingly the Pause/Break key. More interesting are the next three keys in descending order of unpopularity: F3, F6 and F12. No mention of the "multimedia" keys found on many keyboards these days, or Num Lock.

Which key do you use the least? What, if anything, would you replace it with?"
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Comment: Re:Easy (Score 2) 161

by dintech (#43749957) Attached to: How To Talk Like a CIO

If you don't understand the details of the technology, you're highly likely to miss a bunch of nuance in understanding how (and how much) it can solve your business problems.

As a CIO, this is what you have underlings for. You build a relationship of trust with people who DO understand the technology. You'll tend to like these people if they can deeply understand the technology and can describe it in language you are used to. "Is this good, yes or no."

This way you can then repeat that information to other people. If you get burned later because they were economical with the truth, you replace them with someone you can trust. This is is how non-technical people work.

Comment: Re:Whats really amazing. (Score 3, Insightful) 108

Here in the UK the main domain has been blocked by the major ISPs several months ago. Immediately there were no end of proxy alternative domains by which to get access to the same content, no one particular domain really matters at all. I think it's cute that they keep going after the main domain. It keeps them distracted while the main event is going on elsewhere.

+ - Genetically Modified Plants To Produce Natural Lighting ->

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes "A team has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to develop sustainable natural lighting by using a genetically modified version of the flowering plant Arabidopsis. Using the luciferase gene, the enzyme responsible for making fireflies glow, the researchers will design, print, and transform the genes into the target plant. The project, which was recently launched on Kickstarter, has already raised over $100k with over a month left to go."
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+ - HR as a bot: Hiring developers by algorithm->

Submitted by Strudelkugel
Strudelkugel writes "WHEN the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn’t bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough. “The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,” says Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild since late last year. That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way."
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+ - Canada Revenue Agency To Tax BitCoin Transactions->

Submitted by semilemon
semilemon writes "The Canada Revenue Agency has started paying attention to BitCoin transactions, as it says users will have to pay tax on all transactions using the currency. From the article, "The CRA told the CBC there are two separate tax rules that apply to the electronic currency, depending on whether they are used as money to buy things or if they were merely bought and sold for speculative purposes. "Barter transaction rules apply where BitCoins are used to purchase goods or services," Canada Revenue Agency spokesman Philippe Brideau said in an email. In this situation, that means whatever you've received in exchange for your $1 worth of vegetables must be documented as a taxable gain of at least $1 somewhere. When it comes to trading BitCoins for profit, the tax man says there are tax implications there, too. "When BitCoins are bought or sold like a commodity, any resulting gains or losses could be income or capital for the taxpayer depending on the specific facts," ruled the CRA."
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Businesses

Why PC Sales Are Declining 564

Posted by timothy
from the people-pretty-satisfied-mostly-for-the-price dept.
First time accepted submitter Benedick writes "I have a four year old desktop and a three year old notebook. Why haven't I upgraded to a new machine? Because they still work great. PC sales aren't declining because of Windows 8. They are declining because our PCs are so good, they last a lot longer. Will Oremus of Slate explains it better than I can."

Comment: Re:His works will (hopefully) grow in stature in t (Score 1) 150

by dintech (#43347323) Attached to: Iain Banks: Extremely Ill With Cancer
I've read all of his books and have grown quite attached to his writing style. Even the more difficult to follow ones such as The Bridge were still pretty good in their own right. I'm a Scot who doesn't live in Scotland any more, so I take particular joy in his books set in Scotland like The Wasp Factory, Complicity and Stonemouth.

Also, You don't have to look far to find a few Culture references in the Halo games.

APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming; ...and is best for educational purposes. -- A. Perlis

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