Union for Programmers
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No Joke. Perfectly serious At 20 you know all the answers At 40 you know all the questions At 50 you can relate the two Wisdom must be attained - not learned Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
Richard Stringer wrote: No Joke. Perfectly serious Truly sad: if I thought that way, there would have been no way that I could have lead a group of developers, nor delegated authority and/or responisbility if I did not trust 'em. Richard Stringer wrote: Wisdom must be attained - not learned But to believe that all people attain knowledge/wisdom/whatever at the same rate (or at the same point in their lives) is naive... :) Some may have known all of the answers at 17, all of the questions at 26, and almost has all of the peices together at 33! (Not that I am 33 yet...) Peace! -=- James. "Fat people are hard to kidnap." (Try Check Favorites Sometime!)
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No thanks. I rely on the competition between companies to pay me what I'm worth. Software is a pretty volitile industry. Establishing a union will burn the entire industry everytime there is a downturn. Whereas *not* establishing a union will allow the industry to adjust to downturns by (1) giving companies more flexibility in paying employees, and (2) allow for the firing of useless employees. (In fact, one of the main jobs of unions seems to be to prevent companies from firing useless employees, and it hurts everyone else.) Overall, I think unions would hurt software companies and would be the best way to move job overseas. (Have learned anything by watching the US steel industry?) Besides, Bill, you are the *king* of infomercials. As the local CP royalty, aren't you afraid of giving power to the commoners? :)
Brit wrote: No thanks. I rely on the competition between companies to pay me what I'm worth. The one thing that causes that ideal to fail is that not all companies (or people, for that matter) have the necessary acumen to correctly determine what you really are worth. However, there is a good chance that they believe that they do! :| Peace! -=- James. "Fat people are hard to kidnap." (Try Check Favorites Sometime!)
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Of course, it's been shown that new scientific ideas are most likely to come from the youngest group. Older people tend to get stuck in the "status quo" rut and, therefore, fail to discover new and revolutionary ideas.
Elucidate if you are going to make a statement like "its been shown". In physics there is some correlation in that Uncle Albert did the work on realativity when in his late 20's and Newton did some of his best work before thirty. However in many ( most ) fields one will find that the accumalition of knowledge leads to better and more productive work. This is true in many diverse fields such as chemistery, engineering, genetics, medicine, anthropology, etc.. While having an uncluttered mind is beneficial in some respects, it is not so in others. I direct your attention to the habit of many programmers to simply throw code at a problem rather than to carefully plan a solution and then code the solution. This comes from experience and can not be taught. I think those among us who have had the unique challenge of coding on the old 2-4 -8 16 K machines in assembler have a big advantage on those kids who thinks that God invented computers with a minimum or 256 Megs and a 20 gig hard drive along with and advanced language. How namy "programmers" these days can build a state machine, have a working knowledge of fuzzy logic, data structures, alogrithims, know when to use a while loop as opposed to a do while loop, have an idea what decomposition is, can code floating point routines, etc... Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
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Richard Stringer wrote: No Joke. Perfectly serious Truly sad: if I thought that way, there would have been no way that I could have lead a group of developers, nor delegated authority and/or responisbility if I did not trust 'em. Richard Stringer wrote: Wisdom must be attained - not learned But to believe that all people attain knowledge/wisdom/whatever at the same rate (or at the same point in their lives) is naive... :) Some may have known all of the answers at 17, all of the questions at 26, and almost has all of the peices together at 33! (Not that I am 33 yet...) Peace! -=- James. "Fat people are hard to kidnap." (Try Check Favorites Sometime!)
All things are Possible but all things are not Probable. And if you trust them why would you have such things as peer review and code verifcation ? As a business owner I have the unique problem of hiring people that effect MY bottom line. A bad personel decision affects my pocket book directly. It gives one a different perspective. We have programmers from age 20 to 50 and it is my experience that the older ones are more knowleable in general than the younger ones and also have a much better idea of their own strengths and weakness and are better able to communicate abstract ideas and accept direction than the younger. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so. Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
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Elucidate if you are going to make a statement like "its been shown". In physics there is some correlation in that Uncle Albert did the work on realativity when in his late 20's and Newton did some of his best work before thirty. However in many ( most ) fields one will find that the accumalition of knowledge leads to better and more productive work. This is true in many diverse fields such as chemistery, engineering, genetics, medicine, anthropology, etc.. While having an uncluttered mind is beneficial in some respects, it is not so in others. I direct your attention to the habit of many programmers to simply throw code at a problem rather than to carefully plan a solution and then code the solution. This comes from experience and can not be taught. I think those among us who have had the unique challenge of coding on the old 2-4 -8 16 K machines in assembler have a big advantage on those kids who thinks that God invented computers with a minimum or 256 Megs and a 20 gig hard drive along with and advanced language. How namy "programmers" these days can build a state machine, have a working knowledge of fuzzy logic, data structures, alogrithims, know when to use a while loop as opposed to a do while loop, have an idea what decomposition is, can code floating point routines, etc... Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
"Old" vs "Young" of course has a lot to do with what it is that you are trying to accomplish. Some problems do favor experience over new ideas. In other cases, it is reversed. (Which reminds me of a quote I saw on the door of a math professor - it said something to the effect that theoretical mathematicians tend to have great bursts of creativity when they are young, but new ideas come less frequently with age; applied mathematicians, on the other hand, tend to age quite gracefully.)
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All things are Possible but all things are not Probable. And if you trust them why would you have such things as peer review and code verifcation ? As a business owner I have the unique problem of hiring people that effect MY bottom line. A bad personel decision affects my pocket book directly. It gives one a different perspective. We have programmers from age 20 to 50 and it is my experience that the older ones are more knowleable in general than the younger ones and also have a much better idea of their own strengths and weakness and are better able to communicate abstract ideas and accept direction than the younger. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so. Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
All things are Possible but all things are not Probable. Of course! My intent was simply to point out that perhaps "never trust" was a poor choice of words. You response seems to agree with that. And if you trust them why would you have such things as peer review and code verifcation? Because everyone, even those that you trust, makes mistakes sometimes. We have programmers from age 20 to 50 and it is my experience that the older ones are more knowleable in general than the younger ones and also have a much better idea of their own strengths and weakness and are better able to communicate abstract ideas and accept direction than the younger. I have no trouble believing that (I was young once...! :) ), but when you have been in my position, where you may be overseeing older developers, the opposite is true: the younger ones seem to respect me a bit more than the older ones. And just because someome was writing Fortran and Cobol on a PDP-11 when I was still in grade school does not automatically mean that they are making the correct decisions involving today's systems, today's architecture, and today's development languages. We are not writing the same code that was being written 15 years ago. Sometimes, that can be a difficult pill to swallow. It seems we both have had a decent share of good and bad experiences involving different ages... YMMV. :) Peace! -=- James. "Fat people are hard to kidnap." (Try Check Favorites Sometime!)
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Elucidate if you are going to make a statement like "its been shown". In physics there is some correlation in that Uncle Albert did the work on realativity when in his late 20's and Newton did some of his best work before thirty. However in many ( most ) fields one will find that the accumalition of knowledge leads to better and more productive work. This is true in many diverse fields such as chemistery, engineering, genetics, medicine, anthropology, etc.. While having an uncluttered mind is beneficial in some respects, it is not so in others. I direct your attention to the habit of many programmers to simply throw code at a problem rather than to carefully plan a solution and then code the solution. This comes from experience and can not be taught. I think those among us who have had the unique challenge of coding on the old 2-4 -8 16 K machines in assembler have a big advantage on those kids who thinks that God invented computers with a minimum or 256 Megs and a 20 gig hard drive along with and advanced language. How namy "programmers" these days can build a state machine, have a working knowledge of fuzzy logic, data structures, alogrithims, know when to use a while loop as opposed to a do while loop, have an idea what decomposition is, can code floating point routines, etc... Richard Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
Speaking of Uncle Albert, would not say your opinions are biased based on your relative disposition in the matter? I'm sure the fact that you’re older has something to do with it. For what it's worth, I agree with most of your comments, but you have taken the assumption that just because we are younger we do not appreciate or understand the same things you may. This is ludicrous, and it is just as blatantly senseless as me saying to not trust anyone over 40. And just so you know, data processing and parsing isn't has hard as you make it out to be. I've written programs and macros to convert information between Excel, Access, MySQL, and FileMaker that had to interoperate over FTP on Windows, FreeBSD (unix), and Macs. But, you don't see me posting things like "you old people don't know what you're doing because I can data process." And no, I haven't used a 2K machine, but it doesn't mean I don't appreciate the thoughts that accompanied that era. And I have studied fuzzy logic, assembly, do...while (what a joke), etc. But, if you happen to know more about those topics then me, so what. Quit latching on to something to mask the real issue and get over yourself man. Jeremy L. Falcon "You do not know the power of the dumb side." Homepage : Sonork = 100.16311
Maybe my mangling might misguide malicious miscreants momentarily? -
Speaking of Uncle Albert, would not say your opinions are biased based on your relative disposition in the matter? I'm sure the fact that you’re older has something to do with it. For what it's worth, I agree with most of your comments, but you have taken the assumption that just because we are younger we do not appreciate or understand the same things you may. This is ludicrous, and it is just as blatantly senseless as me saying to not trust anyone over 40. And just so you know, data processing and parsing isn't has hard as you make it out to be. I've written programs and macros to convert information between Excel, Access, MySQL, and FileMaker that had to interoperate over FTP on Windows, FreeBSD (unix), and Macs. But, you don't see me posting things like "you old people don't know what you're doing because I can data process." And no, I haven't used a 2K machine, but it doesn't mean I don't appreciate the thoughts that accompanied that era. And I have studied fuzzy logic, assembly, do...while (what a joke), etc. But, if you happen to know more about those topics then me, so what. Quit latching on to something to mask the real issue and get over yourself man. Jeremy L. Falcon "You do not know the power of the dumb side." Homepage : Sonork = 100.16311
Maybe my mangling might misguide malicious miscreants momentarily?OHWEEE.... Are we getting upset :) "speaking of Uncle Albert, would not say your opinions are biased based on your relative disposition in the matter? I'm sure the fact that you’re older has something to do with it." Of course it does. How else would I even have an opinion without having sufficient age and experience to look back on the folly of my youth with a touch of regret. "And just so you know, data processing and parsing isn't has hard as you make it out to be." I know its not. Its really a simple process but one that many "programmers" these days can not do. I spent several hours just a few weeks ago with a person with a degree in CS trying to explain how to use a binary tree data structure to both sort and remove duplicates from a data set that was being read in from a transaction file. Since he had no template or built in function to do this he could not grasp how simple it was to implement. Last year we had a problem with a customer that wanted us to write a program that had to make decisions based on various critera and I spent a lot of time explaining how to make state tables and decision trees to people who had a great deal more education than I did. I leave this argument with a quote "Youth is wasted on the young" BTW: The day I take myself seriously is the day I die Richard :) PS : And I just wonder how many programmers these days could write anything useful using only the API without any of the foundation classes ? PPS: Whats your gripe with a Do--while loop. There are some situations when it is quite useful. Same with Goto There I've said it :) Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
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I would never join a union for the purpose of extorting money from an employer. The employer is the best judge of what my services are worth to him and to the economy in general, that is what I should be paid. The only legitimate reason I can see to form a union is in response to the insane system by which programmers are judged and hired. We need to break the power of the recruiting firms that enjoy so much leverage as to who gets hired and how they are presented. It is *that* system which is the source of the only oppression I am aware of. "There's a slew of slip 'twixt cup and lip"
well said :-) Christian Skovdal Andersen Don't mention the war...
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Programmers are grossly under paid and in general programmers lack the balls to speak up and DEMAND from employers what they are worth. It is time for programmers to join the Teamsters and demand that the teamsters act on their behalf. All programmers should receive a minimum of $100,000 per year! An average rate of pay for a C++ programmer should be $150,000 per year. Stop taking crap from employers--stop pissing in their urine bottles like a bunch of sheep. Any company that requires a drug test is demeaning the employee and no employee should ever take this crap! Let's send aclear message to employers that these nerd programmers will not take crap and demand a minimum of $100,000 per--stand up for yourselves guys and gals!:mad: Bill SerGio, The Infomercial King
LOL! This post is very troll-like. :| -- Dana Holt Xenos Software