as if i was the janitor. which didn't offend me. what did offend me was she thought i could be a janitor too stupid to find the garbage can
She does sound like a jerk. Here's some ideas on how to reduce how often this happens, though.
Consider shaving and neatly grooming yourself, and wearing more professional clothes that have been recently laundered correctly. Make a conscious effort to hone some social skills: exude confidence as you approach the customer, look alert, and engage them warmly and announce what you are there to do.
Look the part, play the part, and people's reactions will follow.
Given power to shut down the internet at will, the excuses for doing so will only continue to grow.
Exactly. It's like Patriot Act all over again. It saddens and terrifies me how we let legislators pass such things. Reminds me of something discussed recently on Sons of Anarchy: People mostly just want the freedom to be comfortable, but because freedom is not comfortable, they end up sacrificing their freedom.
I have kids, and think he's being over the top about it. Spending time with the fam is important. But if you want to be the best developer you can be, you're going to need to spend at least some time contemplating things outside of the normal grind of work. Perhaps he does that during work hours, or perhaps the normal grind of his work does and always will encompass staying on top of his game. Or perhaps his attitude will eventually get the best of him, and he'll become obsolete more quickly than an enthusiastic person would.
The problem I have is how hard line he's being about it. I mean, it'd be much better if he said something like, "Well, I took a couple days to see if Python was worth using instead of Perl back in 98" or something. But he's just so over-the-top strident about never ever messing with computers outside of work hours.
Anyway people have all kinds of things they use to discriminate on hiring, like only wanting social drinkers, only wanting people that play golf, or sail, or whatever. Not hiring people that don't do at least some professional development on their own time makes a lot of sense in comparison.
But not coding in your free time also shows balance.
Perhaps, but never coding in your free time, not ever, and saying that you've never enjoyed writing code to explore or learn something: that shows a distinct lack of balance.
Article summary: Smug douchebag knows it all, or gets to learn it all on the job.
Good for him. But for normal people who are, say, coding ASP or Visual Basic 6 at work-- if they would like to have some professional development, I hope they're doing some coding on the side to reinvent themselves. People that don't generally end up doing something like working on COBOL systems principally written in the 60's and 70's. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying: most people need to do some personal development off the the side of their job, or else they're stagnating. Plenty of people will disagree with me on this point, and have in the past on Slashdot. But generally speaking, those people have quit growing, and will of course deny it.
You should listen to your customers, but do so understanding most requests aren't for what they're asking for, it's for a more fundamental desire...
That's fine. But the Innovator's Dilemma is a wholly unrelated to that form of customers not knowing what they want. Here is an excellent introduction to the Innovator's Delemma. The article talks about the rapid changes in the hard drive industry over.
This article isn't about customers not knowing what they want. It's about how over time, who your customers are can radically change as brand new markets emerge. For example, hard disk business with mainframes was all about cost per megabyte. But in the new desktop computer market, the criteria by which things are judged is totally different than just cost per megabyte. Overall cost for the unit is more important, and physical size. A mainframe customer wouldn't be interested in a drive that costs more per megabyte but is smaller and has an overall lower price per unit-- but a desktop customer would be interested. The topic of the article is that if you exclusively listen to your customers without contemplating how the world is changing, you can sink yourself. Same situation with the newspaper industry: over-focus on existing markets and existing business lines can cause you to not see the opportunity in emerging markets, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.
Nobody really cares about what other people do, generally. Unless your answer to the question "What do you do" is something like one of the following:
Regarding computer programming, though, you're right: it's transformed from something rare to something more common over the last 20 years. 20 years ago, when I told people I was a computer programmer, most of them couldn't even really envision what that might mean, other than just sitting in front of a boring computer with blinking lights all day long.
Here's a great rule of thumb I use. Let's say you're writing a function to do some bit of functionality. Typically you're going to write that code, and then put together some code to check it out real quick before you proceed with the rest of your application. Usually, the cheesy little try-it-out code gets thrown away. Whenever you catch yourself starting to write a little piece of outside code to just check sanity check your method, instead write a unit test for it, and stick that unit test into the comments. I love to use doctest for this in Python, and I imagine there is some analog to it in Ruby.
A lot of people go through the trouble of writing simple little testy code to make sure stuff works, without going through the trouble of saving that code. It takes a little effort to set yourself up so that code can be saved for posterity. But if you do it early, it really doesn't add much to the effort at all. And it makes it much easier to make changes later to the code and to do so with confidence.
... shit... fucking... slashdot... fucking... fucking... high horse... complaint...
Goodness! Someone's got a case of the Mondays! The problem here is that iTunes blows. There's some nice things about it, but there are some highly annoying corporate overlord types of things to not like, too. Reasonable people can probably agree that it does some nice things, but it also is invasive and bloated.
Those were fantastic links on Sed. Really liked the sed one-liners explained, especially. I was impressed, but couldn't help but think that if I needed to remove double spacing and do something special whenever a regex appeared or something, that this would be a pretty hacky way to do it. I immediately thought of the old saw about regular expressions: "Thinking of using a regex? Now you've got two problems!". And the same principle may apply to sed. Maybe even more so.
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
