The goal isn't to actually do any work or help people. The goal is to make sure you close the tasks in your queue before the end of the sprint so that the productivity reports are stellar.
Well hello, you appear to be agreeing with my sentiments. Agile is allegedly supposed to sweep away all the "bureacracy" that interferes with brilliant programmers writing beautiful, functional code. Nice in theory. Once you actually bake it into an actual organization of any size, it effectively becomes a codified work avoidance process. Fuck quality, we're SPRINTING baby.
Honestly, it's the people like your boss and the worker bees that buy into their thinking that I'm railing against. How many points in your sprint planning gets allocated to QA? Support documentation? Who knows? I will fully admit I'm not studied on what Agile's formal methodologies suggest, but from what I can tell in the implementations I've witnessed, things like QA and docs are just two more undefined activities that can be easily ignored if they look like they'll sully the productivity reports.
We know bad requirements when we see them
I agree with your overall suggestion that poorly defined requirements lead to poorly executed projects, but this statement is some serious overreach on your part. So all devs have an innate understanding of all business needs? Devs have an innate understanding of the expectations of the user base? If such things were true, there would be no need to "push back." Trust me, people on the revenue side of the house do NOT want to go through the exhausting process of trying to communicate their needs. They would love it if you could read their minds and give them what they want.
Given free reign however, developers will tend to give the users what the devs want to make, not what the users want to use. I wonder how you would feel if [warning: gratuitous car analogy] the auto industry decided that seatbelts and airbags are wasteful because only incompetent people need them? Yet this is how many devs think when faced with the tedious, onerous business of building something to satisfy the needs of others.
It really fascinates me how this attitude continues to survive in geek culture. In most other creative professions, the creative types are obsessed with winning the adoration of their audience. This frequently leads to less talented people being branded as "hacks" or "panderers" who choose the easy path and are focused solely on pleasing an audience without demonstrating any true artfulness. Somehow many software devs continue to live in this bizarro world were they do what they feel like and pity the poor mortals that don't appreciate their genius.
Those of us who fix problems, rather than create them, are not amused. I'd rather work with a pandering hack than an arrogant prima donna any day of the week. My recommendation for your specific gripe is to make a point of reaching out to the project managers and the business analysts in your organization and offer to put resources from your team into the lion's den during the requirements definition phase of the project. Then you don't have to push back against decisions that were made without your input. You were there when the decisions were made. Good luck with that though. Apparently requirements definition is a fancy name for those "boring meetings" modded 5-insightful at the top of the post.
Users like yourself
Sorry AC, not a user. I work on the support/administration end, where 90% of my life is cleaning up turds left behind by cowboy devs who think that "practices" interfere with their "creativity," and the "users" (aka THE PEOPLE YOUR JOB EXISTS TO SERVE) are somehow beneath notice. But thank you, I really appreciate your dropping by and proving my point for me.
Q: Why would any enterprise allow/sanction/encourage the use of mobile devices in their workspace? Why would they add a Blackberry Enterprise Server or an ActiveSync connection and allow their staff to pull down corporate messaging onto their personal devices? Don't they understand about the security risks and the administrative/support overhead of bridging the gap betwen company equipment and personal equipment?
A: Silly rabbit. These technologies push the executive mindset of being permanently at work down the management chain and into the front line staff. Employees "steal" 5 minutes away from work to check their bank balance etc. only to lose 10 back responding to "urgent" emails or chasing arbitrary deadlines that can only be met by working after hours. Extending the enterprise into employee's mobile devices is effectively a rollback of decades of labor law that today's workers accept willingly. Remember kids: Stay in "non-exempt" job positions as long as possible!
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor. But every once in a while it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. We have to use the indefinite article, "a dildo", never "your dildo."
My electric razor was in fact responsible for delaying the takeoff of a plane once. Thankfully this was prior to 9/11. Aside from the delay, the only adverse impact was having to dissapoint the two bored baggage handlers who knew the Fight Club reference and were desperately hoping that I would produce something embarassing. Today, I'd expect that the bag would be destroyed and I would be held for questioning. I love to fly but airlines, airports, and the TSA have all convinced me to opt for the road trip for anything inside a 600 mile radius.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
So Gordon is wrong, but about the right things.
I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this
Simple solution James. Release the source. Most of the knee-jerks will ignore it, but I would be surprised if you didn't get at least a couple useful optimizations passed back up to you. It's amazing too how many knee-jerk whiners crawl back into the woodwork when they are confronted with a little empowerment.
Great. I was wondering what it would take for the Slashdot crowd to pervert this dipshit into a hero.
"Dude, check it out! He destroyed all his data before he did this! That way, them dirty screws in law enforcement won't ever know a thing about him, won't understand what happened, and won't have any way to prevent it from happening again! Yeah! That's so awesome! Power to the privacy! Privacy rights for all! Woo!"
Attempting to smash up his PC and HDD and leaving the wreckage in his place is about the most n00bish form of data destruction you can imagine, and has probably only been partially successful at best. I'll leave it to the numerous other comments already posted to detail this sick kid's failure to cover his tracks adequately. If you're going to irresponsibly portray privacy and security advocates as paranoid deviants who cheer mass murder, you're going to need to try harder.
'A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.'"
Okay poindexter, what exactly was the issue? Some non-technical middle manager didn't understand the overarching brilliance of your recommended filesystem? Afraid the key length is too short? Too much Linux? Not enough Linux? Welcome to the real world, where your temper tantrum effects no change for anyone else but you. Hope your issue wasn't genuinely important, you'll have a hard time making your case from prison.
There is nothing about the current FB process that contains any true accountability. This is a marketing exercise designed to give the noisiest contingent of FB users something they can do to create the illusion that they have a voice. Consider:
1. The current voting process has a minimum participation requirement for decisions to be binding. This participation threshold has never been met.
2. One of the changes being voted for is doing away with the voting system.
This is how it's going to play out: Facebook is going to work harder and harder to monetize the details of your personal life until somebody powerful and/or well-loved by the public is burned by their behavior, a la Gen. Petraues. Then there will be legislation to curb the powers of private entities like Facebook as a knee-jerk reaction. That is what a real "messy democracy" looks like.
Friction is a drag.
