pj

But I see your point.

Many information systems can be implemented in a week. You could set up email, an e-commerce site, a CRM, SCM, or even substantial portions, if not an entire ERP system depending on the size of the company.

A week is a long time if you know what you are doing.

What are some examples of the governments that are simpler and better?

If no one wants to give up their power, what is going to happen? Revolution? Civil war? Domination by another power somewhere else?

Appeal denied.

I think it doesn't matter if it is consistent for all the candidates. A company can't change to suit every employee. Working for a startup like Youtube is high pressure. You have to be very self-aware and able to work under extreme circumstances. When your app crashes and millions of people are angry, you have to fix it! You can't create a special case scenario for your employees because they need to work in a stress free environment.

Of course that is a simple case, but high stress engagements occur at some point in almost every environment and how the candidate reacts to the high stress is very important, perhaps the most important.

IMO, it is more important for the employee to adapt to the environment than for the environment to adapt to the employee. Every candidate is going to want questions asked a different way. Every candidate is going to want their cube to be a different color -- that's why they are all gray or beige.

My point is, if you want A players on your team, you will be well served to waste as little time as possible on candidates that want you to ask them interview questions the way the candidate wants them asked and focus your attention on candidates that correctly answer the questions how the interviewer wants to ask them.

I think it's really a symptom of a much deeper problem with American government and that is that the "system" is getting so big that no one really knows how to fix it. I see this kind of thing happen with software too. Your IT department buys software or adopts a new platform and builds all these great interconnected applications with messaging busses and information silos and then one day everyone who knows anything about the system is gone and what to do now?

Well, you start building systems on the platforms that are easier to understand and try to work around problems and in the meantime, the people who don't know what to do are trying to keep their jobs by doing something at all which is just making the whole package even worse!

At some point, a company has to make a very tough decision to "rip and replace." It's costly. It takes time. And while you are ripping and replacing you have to try to do the best with what you have working now. But the consequences of not ripping and replacing are just going to continue crippling you and eventually, you are going to be leap frogged by an agile startup who doesn't have the legacy deficit you've run up by not doing things right in the first place!

A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube."

The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?"

Maybe what you think you are doing when you are working is actually causing more problems and moving the company backwards because they are going to have to undo all the crappy code you wrote. I'm not meaning to attack you, I'm just trying to illustrate a point. Know what I mean?

Maybe such an engagement could work out where, "If we hire you, we pay you for the week. If we fire you, we keep the money and you are out."

This reduces the risk for the employer while also giving the employee a chance to examine the company and be paid if the work is satisfactory.

So if I am going to spend my time developing something, I want it to never go away. Facebook will go away. The iPhone will go away. These are fads.

What people who think like I do often fail to understand, is that most of the world doesn't think like we do. They want money. They want popularity. Even if it is fleeting.

My question is: Where is the balance? Think about investing. If you have a 20 year vision and invest in those companies, you have to have 20 years of patience. Plus, how do you know your vision of 20 years out is the correct one? How do you know how much vision you have? If you consistently think 5 years ahead of the masses, then buy companies that the masses will think are awesome in 5 years.

If you are 3 months ahead or one year ahead, then buy those kinds of companies.

It's the same with building applications. You are building applications ahead of time for a market that will want them by the time you are finished building it. For example, if you build a facebook app and that app is going to take 5 years to complete, well... facebook may be gone by then and you are wasting your time.

So what you are stuck with then, is building applications that don't take very long or are targetted toward a massive population with lots of investment and horsepower behind the app that can be built very quickly. Of course companies that can execute like this can make money building apps for one platform after another making money off the network effects within that platform. It's not just facebook, it's salesforce, quickbase, microsoft, java, oracle, php, the list really is endless...

So, to summarize, how do we determine how much vision we have? How do we determine how long it will take to build an app? How do we determine when the platform on which we build our apps will cease to exist -- if ever?

I find anyone who immediately blames the environment for their lack of ability to answer the questions correctly to be suspect. These types of complainers are externally motivated and will never accept fault for their lack of capabilities. "You should have asked me in a different way." or "I need to be taught differently" or "There's too much pressure"... look, you can come up with whatever excuses you want, but the fact is, you can't solve the problem and what we are looking for is someone who can solve problems.

Case closed.

It works both ways. You are selling your time. They are selling their environment.

The problem is that the employer is accepting a lot more risk than the employee. Do you like paying for something you can't return and you can't get your money back for if it is crap? This is the situation a lot of companies are in. They hire someone, they pay them to write the code or build the project and it turns out it's all a lot of garbage and the company is out the money.

This problem is really tainting our industry. I think a lot of people who call themselves programmers are really just some kids off the street who grabbed an open source package and started hacking away. They can build a website with some graphics and stuff, but they have no vision, no experience with large systems that are actually going to be used for any significant period of time.

It is quite depressing actually.

They use tools a lot. They can be trained to operate vending machines to get food out by exchanging them for coins they find on the street: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihdP3b6LXw

They use cars to crack nuts and traffic lights to know when it is safe to go get the meat out of the nut: http://www.autoblog.com/2006/09/09/video-crow-uses-oncoming-...

I think that a good portion of the population in cities around the world wants to cull the crows is a sad metaphor for the state of humanity. For a species that wants to find intelligence somewhere in the world, that wants to relate to and communicate with others to avoid loneliness to want to erradicate one of the few examples of great intelligence outside our own species is a metaphor for the erradication of intelligence within our own species as well. In times of war, philosophers are the first to be killed. Science is losing in our American class rooms. Teachers are paid a pittance while athletes are paid millions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1337698/Plan-to-cull-...

This thread is interesting because these people want to cull the crows because they interfere with song birds: http://www.birding.bc.ca/community/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2... Another metaphor for our society more interested in pursuing entertainment in the form of sports or music or hollywood at the expense of engineering, science and math.

And others want to kill them because they wake them up! http://www.canada.com/northshorenews/news/story.html?id=7d72...

How poetic: ignorance is bliss.

YMMV, but I will never be a BCBS customer again.

Gotta love it.

I'm not saying this DOS or DDOS is related to the Iran issue, but I am saying that twitter has become a weapon of sorts, a communication enabler that benefits one side of a conflict more than another, so an attack like this is inevitable, even if this particular one isn't coming from the Iranian incumbents.

What he meant was that we can look at something and quickly reverse engineer the logic to construct it, but coming up with the idea originally is often much more difficult than the simple patented solution would indicate. That's what we do right? We take difficult concepts and distill them into solutions.

Realize, this algorithm was developed in 1918. Try rewinding your mind to what the world knew back then and this algorithm may have been ground breaking!

A lot of us hackers think these problems are easy to solve when really, we never even realized before we saw the solution that it was a problem at all! Another issue is that we often, through modesty, humility, or a lack of self-awareness really under-appreciate how smart we really are -- relative to the population as a whole. We judge ourselves compared to other hackers and the other brilliant people we work with over the years. We isolate ourselves from the masses to a large degree and so we think we aren't as smart as we are or our ideas and solutions and our inventions really aren't as unique and innovative as they are. Most of the things we take for granted are really far beyond what the vast majority of the world even remotely considers or ever will consider for the entirety of their lives.

I think really what you have here Paul is an illustration of why javascript is the future, more than flash, more than silverlight. As browsers get faster and engines get faster, the web will move more toward js than anything else. It's a standard technology.

Very nice work.

He's making assumptions on the answer to that question based on his circumstances, which are totally different than a sweat shop worker in another country. Sweat shop working might be "better" than the alternative for that person.

My wife says, "You just have to do everything with love."

I think the answer is: People don't want to work. People are lazy. The very field of computer science was developed to help people do less work and still accomplish more.

The internet does this as well.

There's a scene in Waking Life that asks what the most essential human characteristic is: Fear or Laziness.

I think it's Laziness.

That person may become a slave by choice, but only at the loss of freedom. Because the negative ramifications of slavery are not presented to the potential slave, they are making a choice with limited information.