My first job out of college was in a support centre, supporting voice recognition software: an early ancestor of Siri if you like! One weekend without our knowledge, the parent company stuck a prior version of the software onto a free bundle cd that came with a PC magazine in the UK... a great marketing move sure, but the amount of calls we got as a result of that free software was incredible. People can get irate when voice recognition software doesn't work as well as they expect (for a variety of reasons, generally either hardware or accent related!), but with this free version, people really lost the run of themselves altogether... some of the calls we took that week were from some very angry people indeed!
The writer of this article summed up this confusing paradox quite well by offering a refund... for this free item... which was a gift!
The recommendation to 'dismember' the project is particularly harsh! Killer line towards the end though: "we will be moving to an innovative new system."
Nice piece. Something my female friends always do on FB, and that I half-expected the article to mention, is the 'perfect day' status update.. ie one along the lines of 'walk in the park, dinner at Mario's, curled up on the couch with <insert partner name here> and a glass of wine, perfect!' ... the scenarios described might be different, but the common factors are the veneer of amazingness, and the fact that they always end with a declaration: 'lovely', or 'great', or 'perfect'.
I'm formerly a COBOL developer, now working with Java. Did anyone else think that his main argument for learning Java could also work for learning COBOL? (substitute COBOL for Java in the quote below)
<quote>
It's not going to go away any time soon. There's too much momentum. There's no need to worry. Ever since the launch of Java I've heard that it's going to be gone or unusable tomorrow. History shows that just doesn't happen to popular programming languages.
If you learn Java now, you may still be using it 20 years from now. Or 30.
</quote>
Think this is also true for anyone who works in an open plan office. Any number of halfalogues can be going on at any one time, tough to tune them all out without an mp3 player of some kind.
I work on enterprise software in a financial company, and IMO, this quote from Zawinski would lead to a dangerous short-term view in that context: "unit tests are not critical. If there’s no unit test the customer isn’t going to complain about that."
When you work in enterprise software, this approach might work on the first project, maybe the second, but eventually a point will arrive where a requirement will take longer to deliver for the simple reason that there are no unit tests. Without unit tests, bugs will be found later in the project life-cycle, possibly even after delivery. If customers have delivered software that is unusable, the fact of delivery becomes a negative pretty quickly..
On the positive side though, the tension between what's essential for the customer, and what developers need to learn to keep their careers alive is an interesting idea, and is something we've been looking recently at where I work. Is it a good idea to introduce a technology just because a programmer feels s/he should learn it? I'm not so sure.
Great article, enforced corporate 'fun' is always horrific, couldn't agree more.
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but recently enough where I work, there was an attempt at measuring the happiness of the workforce. Everyone was encouraged to register how happy they were, once per day, by clicking on a survey link. The choices were: 0% happy, 25% happy, 50%, 75% or, yes, 100% happy.
The results were aggregated (a basic average I believe) and emailed to management, who then supposedly knew how happy >everyone< was.
Putting aside the obvious problems with this approach, it kicked off some funny quasi-philosophical debates each day (e.g. am I 50% or 75% happy?, Do I register how happy I am with work, or in general?). Bizarre stuff, it didn't last very long.
My first name is Patrick, but I go by Paddy, which is a common enough name in Ireland. When I initially signed up for a hotmail account (around 1997/98) I got a message telling me my name was a racially offensive term (or words to that effect). I found it quite funny at the time, so in the end I just registered as 'Patrick' and didn't use paddy in my email address. (No such problems with gmail, which I use now)
Liar's Poker was great, and I'm enjoying reading 'The Big Short' at the moment.
Although I'm not sure that the guys making money from Credit Default Swap agreements on CDOs are on morally safe ground, I disagree with Yves that Steve Eisman, Mike Burry et al were "the moving force behind otherwise inexplicable, superheated demand for the very worst sort of mortgages." Ultimately, irresponsible mortgage lending was the root cause of the crisis: it was a superheated supply scenario.
It was only when the rate of defaults on home loans dramatically increased that the CDOs dropped in value, and the Credit Default Swaps could be redeemed.
For example, in addition to the high number of defaults that occurred after an initial two year, fixed-interest period, (when the interest rate jumped in some cases from 6% to 12%) some of the loans even defaulted on their very first payment. Lewis makes the point in the book that the question is not "who defaults on their first loan repayment?", but rather "who lends to someone who can't even make a single repayment?"
As for Magnetar being undocumented, Chicago Public Radio did a great podcast about it a couple weeks ago, which was where I got the recommendation for 'The Big Short'. It's well worth a listen:
http://www.propublica.org/ion/podcast/item/bernstein-and-eis...
Without meaning to be controversial, this is just for anyone else like me, who was a little uncertain what Christian Science (not that there's anything wrong with that) is :
Kudos to Volkswagen for enforcing the blackberry 'opening hours'. (And here's hoping more companies start to ban internal email!)