Work up your courage and do an anonymous 360; you'll be surprised. I'm assuming the team you're managing is of a meaningful size (eg. 15-20) the diversity of comments you get back is amazing and educational. People tend to have diverse needs from their superiors but face to face you usually get mostly smiley faces.

Gave me some new insights, so I bought Venkatesh Rao a coffee (link at the bottom of the article.)

Interesting how easy it is to classify (former) colleagues as sociopath, clueless or loser, yet how this gets harder to do on ourselves.

Am I the only person to think that the woman is obviously and grotesquely altered and therefore find it far more comical than offensive? Looks like she's standing in front of a carnival mirror.

I find it hard to believe that the intent of the creator was to depict an actual, attractive female.

If I actually met such a person, the first thought through my mind would be "serious thyroid problem." And do my best to make sure they didn't tip over.

Seriously.

Actually in some countries there's a good financial reason for getting a Prius; eg. in NL there is a 40% tax (called BPM, it's in addition to about 20% VAT) for every car sold. This tax is waived on the Prius and, needless to say, makes a huge difference in price.

Now if only we could convince goverments that optimal aerodynamics "save the planet", we'd be getting somewhere....

Jeremi writes:
"No sir. What it proves is the existence of the sole."

No, what it proves is that while you can tune an fMRI, you can't tuna fish.

That admittedly is pretty cool - but IBM has (last time I checked) 320,000 employees; so would you agree the point I'm trying to make still holds?

Parent is absolutely right, and this is true of many large companies today. Within IBM, there is too much focus on saving a dollar and doing things on the cheap, while missing the bigger picture and becoming ever distant to one's customers through intertwined cogs and wheels of process bureaucracy. There is a very strong innovative drive by doing your development in regions that have strong universities, a culture for innovation and local use and appreciation of the end product. Where that is depends on what you're doing. For cars, southern germany, for the web, california, for finance NYC and London.

However, by outsourcing everything to China and India, you loose that innovative drive, which erodes your longer term growth.

This is fine in only two cases I think, A) you don't care about the innovation of what you're developing (it's not your core business), or B) the type of work you're doing is extremely expensive *and* specialized (eg. chip design & manufacturing,) making it hard for an upstart to compete with you, even if your work is sloppy.

IBM rarely innovates anymore aside from some of its hardware, I'm not aware of any genuine software innovations from IBM in, say, the last 10 years.

The way large companies seem to be doing it now is by acquiring their way into innovation. I'm happy they do, because it makes startups that more valuable to do. Perhaps if large companies are changing their game, we engineers should wake up and adapt ours.. do more startups?

I must be amazingly stupid because I rather like Apple products.

Proprietary extensions are done for (arguably) the same reason by Microsoft; the goal should instead be to work on better iterations of language standards (C/C++) and not on introducing arbitrary language extensions that are not portable across compilers - especially not really extremely awkward ones like 'anonymous function pointers.' There's a similar argument to be made for 'encouraging' developers to use C# and Objective C.

The problem with multi-threading isn't in laborious API's, it's also not in language support for nifty features. The problem with multi-threading is that some problems are damn hard to multi-thread, either due to algorithms, or more commonly due to the way the internal structures are linked together. This will only make overconfident developers shoot themselves in the foot more quickly (and provide some vendor lock-in for apple as things get increasingly less portable.)

Been saying this for twenty years, ever since it was required at my high school. Best -- and possibly only useful -- thing I learned in high school, too.

Then again I learned on an Olympia SG-1. These kids have it easy. =)

Slur writes:
"A hundred thousand years of human technology, and we're supposed to be impressed at the latest version of the club. Wake me up when the human race does something impressive."

Reminds me of the scene in 2001 when the flying bone-club segues to the orbital view.

Seriously.

Knitting is pretty easy to pick up, and kind of fascinating for a geek: knitting basically boils down to creating an enormous, intricate, single knot in such a way that kind of falls together into a garment of some kind. I found it right up a nerd's alley.

Now, the problem with knitting is that 99% (if not 6-nines or better) of knitters are women[1], so all the patterns are for women's clothes and such. Thus it's not something that's realistically a long-term hobby for a guy, but if you as a man walk into a yarn store with actual knowledge, I guarantee you will find all the female attention you want. The first time it happened I seriously was weirded out, because all I really wanted was some reasonably durable, 100% cotton, worsted weight yarn and a set of double-ended needles for some socks I wanted to make.

So, it's something that will get you attention. It's probably a hobby that'll only last you a year or two, but at least you'll get some socks out of it.

[1] - I have never met a fellow straight male knitter in person, and I am aware of exactly 3 online. So I'm not stereotyping, it's the God's Honest.

Soulskill writes:
"...it is the first serious "water world" candidate,' continued Udry."

Excellent.

WindBourne writes:
"If you do not, then cracks will appear and bits will start to drip from it. Soon, that drip will become bigger and you will have bytes dropping out. Cheaper to replace them now, then to lose all those bytes."

Well, if the leak is small enough, investing in a bit bucket might be a viable option.

thesandtiger writes:
"And suddenly LOGO turns out to be the programming language we need to encode the formula for everything."

Oh crap. So it's turtles all the way down??!