Whether this is a good idea or not, I have no idea. I is an interesting social experiment and it will be interesting to see the results.
But, does anyone else see a Criminal Minds episode in this? Lonely road; quiet, dark house; dank alley; victims are found one after another, the only thing tying them all together is their organ donor status on their facebook page. The villain turns out be the husband of someone who died waiting for a kidney, lung, or heart transplant.
I think one of the best things employers can do to show that they respect their employees is to invert the decision making and control structure in the organization. Similarly to what Agile/XP did for the software development sector. Instead of having managers and CxOs make all the decisions, allow the people closest to the situation, with all the facts, make the decision and be responsible for that decision. Create small teams that are self organizing and imbue those teams with the power to truly own and produce the solution to the problems that they face and are trying to solve.
I personally feel that the main problem with organizations and employee happiness and retention is the current system of command and control where all employees are assumed to be idiots that need to be micro-managed. How is anyone suppose to be happy in that kind of environment? Work should not be an extension of school where we store and manage people in order to keep them out of trouble until they are old enough to retire. No, work should be a place where people want to go because they know that they own a little bit of that business and are really responsible for its success and/or failure.
Toronto, ON, Canada - QA Lead, Software Testers - Full Time
Nulogy.com (http://www.nulogy.com), is revolutionizing the co-packing world by developing SaaS applications for our packaged world. We are looking for professional software testers who are passionate about delivering quality software that helps meet, and exceed, our customers needs.
Nulogy.com is a Ruby on Rails software development shop. We have embraced Agile software methodologies and believe in the idea of being a little better tomorrow than we are today. And we are looking for people who are passionate about quality to help us build up our QA team. We are looking for a QA Lead and for software testers.
We are looking for smart, passionate people dedicated to delivering quality software and who are willing to leave their ego at the door. We love differing ideas and debates, but we are a team and we succeed or fail based on the strength of that team.
If this sounds like ideal environment for you, sends us an email and your resume to [email protected].
I find that in tech culture--startups, coders, hackers alike--there is an attitude that if you don't live, breath, sleep your profession that you will fail. And I wonder if this idea that for a startup to succeed you have to give 24/7 comes from that attitude.
One ruby conference, there were two talks by startup founders, the one presenter stated that the only way to succeed was to work 24/7 while the other presenter stated that success only came through working smart and taking time off to recharge and do other things. Both were successful. Personally, I have other things that I want to do and the sooner we can abolish this startup myth the better.
I always find it interesting that Babe Ruth was, at the same time, the home run leader and the strike out leader. If you swing for the fences, chances are, you will fail more than you win. Hitting singles, consistently, is actually far more beneficial for both you and the team that you work with.
I agree with only one point in the article; the ability to delete tests. Tests of all kinds should be living, breathing code, just like the code in the rest of your application. As such, tests, like production code, can become outdated and obsolete and need to be updated, changed, and sometimes deleted.
However, I do not agree with the idea that tests are evil. If your tests are failing, or breaking regularly, or are hard to write, then your tests are trying to tell you something. Tests are a direct mirror of the state of your code. If your tests are brittle and hard to manage, don't delete the tests, fix your code. If you need to instantiate a tonne of objects in order to make your tests work, fix your methods dependencies and learn to test your methods in isolation of its dependencies.
Any production code needs tests, this is non-negotiable in today's development eco-system. But I get tired of people who do not understand the purpose of tests complaining that tests are evil. If there is a problem with your tests, then your tests are telling you there is a problem with your code. Clean up your code in order to clean up your tests. However, remember that as code changes, your tests will need to change as well. It is okay to edit, delete, change tests to reflect the current state of the application. Just change the tests first to express how you want to interact with a specific bit of code and then change the code, not the other way around.
So voluntary blackouts in protest of SOPA are to be stopped because they are dangerous gimmicks, but a bill that will allow the government to blackout websites isn't?
How exactly are these people so blind to this kind of obvious contradiction? It completely baffles me that any intelligent human can see this bill as a good thing.
It also scares me that politicians and lobby groups are using the idea of protecting "American" jobs as one of the main selling points for getting this bill past. It is far to obvious that American hasn't realized that to survive in this world one must join the global community and not either separate oneself from it nor try to rule it.
As others have stated, how well someone codes is less important than how good a cultural and personal fit they are for the company. I want to know how passionate someone is, how well they do when pair programming, how well they communicate, etc in addition to knowing how well they can code. I can teach someone, who is willing, how to be a great coder, but I cannot teach someone how to fit well into the company culture or with my team.
In addition, I know too many developers who I would hire in a heartbeat that do not have repos on Github and far too many developers that I never want to work with that do have repos.
I also find it curious that on http://githire.com/order, when I refresh the page and see people like 37Signals and Omni show up. Not sure they are looking for new gigs.
To me, Open Internet is the same as an open city. SOPA is like going into a city and shutting down a street corner because someone was heard quoting passages from a book or giving away pirated movies. It's ridiculous. Instead of closing down the website (the street corner) close down the people behind the site.
The US, instead of enacting laws that restrict movement, needs to put into place laws that make copyright infringement illegal. Oh wait, they already have them.
In short, go after the people not the domain. I want to be able to walk around the internet the same way I can walk around a city. If there are seedy places online then it is my choice to avoid them and not the governments right to simply declare them quarantined or off limits.
I am sure it's a great presentation, but I always have trouble believing these when the photo of the presenter has him wearing a suit. I want to see presentations by developers and developers do not wear suits. Those are for sales people.
I am actually Canadian complaining of how cold Melbourne was when I lived there. And I was there during the record breaking 47C day and the Victoria fires.
The problem with Melbourne is a combination of no humidity to retain the heat a wind chill from Antarctica. The combination of these means that 27C, on a sunny afternoon, requires a light jacket and the evenings/nights are never warm. I am used to 80-90% humidity and going out at 3am in shorts and a t-shirt in the summer. Melbourne rarely has this.
Granted, there are two months were the weather is very nice (january, february), but that is about it. Yes, it never gets to -40C, so cold is very relative here, but for a city that you would expect to be comparable to Sydney, Perth or Miami, it is cold.
If MS continues with their ideas for Windows 8, then Windows 7 will be the last OS I own from them. I really do not understand the rational for wanting to make desktop PCs look and act like tablets. I really don't want full screen apps on my 24" monitor. And that start screen looks like it was written for 5 year olds.
The real problem today is that the majority of people view children as accessories. They put them in front of the TV and let other people raise them, i.e., teachers, sitcoms, and the internet. They don't really care about the kids.
However, those kids are viewed as an extension of themselves and so any attack on the kids is an attack on them. if you say that the kid has behavioral problems, what the parent hears is that they are a bad parent/person. They don't care about the kid, they care about how it reflects on them. This is the same reason that you have parents beating up and murdering hockey coaches and referees when they pull their kid. In the mind of the parent, the call is against them.
We have moved from a society were the entire village raised the kids and parents had the support, training, and coaching they needed. They were raised in an environment in which kids were actually cared for and that was passed onto new parents. Today, we move away from home, most of us don't have contact with parents, grandparents, siblings, etc and we raise kids because they either make us look good or it is simply the expected thing to do. Unfortunately, they don't actually have any understanding of how to raise kids and they are too busy to do a proper job anyway.
I am a firm believer that we are getting very close to the day when we will have to issue licences before people are allowed to have kids. Not that we should police who has them, but to ensure that people have the needed support systems and knowledge in place before trying to be parents.
Excellent comment. Far to many developers concentrate on becoming a better programmer to the complete exclusion of becoming a better software developer. Software development is all about how well you can deliver business value and the ability to program, although an important skill, is not the most important. It is simply one of many, many skills that are needed.
Like the comment above, my advice is learn how to deliver software instead of just program. Learn how to interact with customers and become an expert in your business' domain. In addition, learn how to solve real problems without using technology or programming.
Being a great programmer will get you in the door for an interview, but it is all the other soft skills that will get you the job (and the money that you want).
Interesting article; however, I would suggest that the Universities themselves are to blame. There were very few courses that I took where the professor encouraged us to talk to one another about problems and assignments. Usually it was the reverse. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to talk to anyone else, nor were we to work with other students in the class. Any collaboration was considered cheating and plagiarism.
Obviously, this did not apply to things like study groups, but once you have had it drilled in to your head that collaboration was bad, it is very difficult to then create the network necessary for a study group.
Universities need to change the way they teach and mark such that collaboration is not only suggested, but required. In addition, I think universities, if they really care about these differences, need to create some form of mentoring program for incoming students.
The idea of the site is interesting and the pictures are great, but I strongly object to any website that hijacks the standard method of navigating websites in order to move the user through images. When I press Command-left arrow, I should move backwards through my browser's history. I should be shown the previous photo in a series.
As others have said, I checked the site and couldn't find the meaning anywhere I looked. Granted, I did not check the entire site word for word, but you would think they would make it obviously clear somewhere what the letters stood for.
If you are going to name your company a bunch of letters, shouldn't you put somewhere on your site what those letters stand for? So what the hell does BCIC mean?
But, does anyone else see a Criminal Minds episode in this? Lonely road; quiet, dark house; dank alley; victims are found one after another, the only thing tying them all together is their organ donor status on their facebook page. The villain turns out be the husband of someone who died waiting for a kidney, lung, or heart transplant.