Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Well, the Yugoslav wars were fairly horrible. There is however the fact that every country in former Yugoslavia is now more or less democratic. If the West hadn't attacked, at best there might be a Fiji style pseudo-democracy in the Serb-majority territory, and at worst Milosevic and co still in power.
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the chances of randomly assembling such a team are astronomically low
But teams aren't randomly assembled. The company decides that it can import coders from the Philippines or someplace on a temporary work permit and pay them $20k a year - the good ones then realize they're being screwed and jump ship to proper jobs.
I see your point on average vs worst, but there are two factors not included in McConnell's 10x that I was alluding to:
- the bigger the team, the less efficient. If you can size a job to be done by a single developer in the required time, that's optimum. The "better" the developer, the more work they can do as a self-contained unit. Too many cooks, etc.
- managers cost money. Less programmers (especially if they mostly self-manage) means less managers, hence more functionality per $$.What’s hard isn’t finding them, it’s paying for them
In production per dollar of wages, the expensive programmers cost less. Of course, there are many reasons why management (and staff) might not want rock stars on high six figures in the company.
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I can’t really be bothered to engage with some people today, so have an interesting article:
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid -
It is a lot easier to find 10 good programmers than one good manager of programmers. Programmers are churned out from educational programmer factories
It's a lot easier to find 10 programmers, possibly. Are you aware of the research that shows a 10x variation in productivity between programmers? (A corollary to this is that since the best programmers are generally self-managing and productivity declines with team size, two really good programmers can do the job of many more than 20 average ones, and require a lot fewer managers).
There are a lot of mediocrities who can trot out received dogma at interview, and could churn out endless form-filling applications, provided they have a business owner to iterate through exactly where all the fields go, etc. Good programmers are harder to find, and they aren't churned out in EducationalProgrammerFactories, they require individual instantiation*
It's also hard to find good managers, granted, but you don't need many (a lot of functional OSS projects have none). The #1 job of any software manager is to hire good people (which is hard) and the #2 job is not to piss them off too much (which is also hard).
* Bad Java joke
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It’s not about gang colours
That justification came from a teacher, that they wouldn't be able to stop the kids fighting over gang colours if they weren't made to wear a uniform.
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Don’t see why kids need uniforms. Most European countries, they don’t. We didn’t in my sixth form, and the world didn’t fall in because a few kids went to school fully goffed, punked or metalled up.
It’s all about indoctrinating kids into subordination for the sake of it.
(The only reasonable argument I heard is that it suppresses gang colours. Which is a bit of a sad indictment. Also, what if all those angelic looking year 5’s were actually Crips/BP? Riccarton’s blue, right?)
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Actually, I think that "privilege theory" is one of those academic ideas (like Baudrillard's concept of Simulacra and Simulation) that don't really map into the "real" world.
It's keenest exponents are US academics. I'm sorry, but if you are a tenured academic at Berkeley, for instance, then notwithstanding your being African-American, trans-gendered and having a quiver full of "genuine" disabilities like non-coeliac gluten intolerance or whatever, you are still better off than practically all the six billion other people in the world. Even if people are reflexively nasty to you if you're dumb enough to visit (in person or online) the more unpleasant backwoods of the planet, you can still get in your Tesla, drive home to a nice apartment and spend several hours cooking yourself a nutritionally appropriate meal.
Also, it's part of an obsession with language. Let's look at that esteemed liberal institution, the University of California at Berkeley. Use the wrong words to describe non-white people there, and you will be in serious trouble. However, for the last sixty years, tucked away on a mesa in New Mexico, UCB has run a lab developing a range of nuclear and non-nuclear means to kill said non-white people.
Yeah.
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Hard News: The epitome of reason, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
I imagine they believed, as did the equally well paid managers at Solid Energy, and as the similar managers at the banks do, that Chinese growth is unlimited and unstoppable. On that basis, any price slumps are just minor glitches.
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Hard News: The epitome of reason, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It's fairly hard to avoid giving an MP the chop when they're on trial for [REDACTED} with their [REDACTED]. One would think, anyway.
However many suppression orders are in place, you can't hang on to an electorate from inside a jail.
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There’s obviously a lot of members of the Green Party that believe in woo (although their numbers are small compared to all the National supporters who believe in Islamic terrorism, Labour backwoodsmen who deny climate change, and NZ First voters who believe in Islamic terrorism, climate change denial and chemtrails).
That doesn’t make them a faction unless they engage in some form of organisation. And I fail to see how you could organise for a postal ballot in a mass membership organisation without leaving some sort of trace…
(Oh, unless their Hippie Magick actually works and they can organise by telepathy. That must be it).