skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technically, the employee would not be fired right away.

He or she, however, would be red flagged for close observation by being put on a Performance Plan.

Basically, a PP is required to legally fire you. For example, if you had a bad record of coming in at a consistent time, they could put you on a PP. In this PP (which you would have to sign as a condition of further employment), there would be a contract for coming in between 9 and 9:15 for the next thirty days, with a small margin of forgiveness. PP are used to document that you have behaved poorly or acted wrongly in the corporate context. Once you are put on a PP, it is a prelude to a firing. You can successfully get out of a PP, but it is stressful.

For the hypothetical Ruby programmer in the Java shop, the PP would probably involve something insidious like LOC.
Think back to the now-wealthy Googler who wrote the code that 97% of $BILLIONS in revenue passes through. Do you think that person introduces him/herself as "C++ programmer with 10+ years of industry experience"?

You'll get better work on better terms if you focus on results rather than tools, even if your technical skillset is fundamentally the same as another dev with a poorer sales pitch. You're finding the best mutually beneficial business arrangements out there rather than just pursuing a predefined career track.

Edit: Mastery is its own reward. If you want to become an expert at a particular corner of technology, go ahead. Just remember to explain your work to others in terms that aren't unnecessarily limiting.
"You're better situated to judge my worth to your company than I am. What do you think I should be paid?" Counter with better offer.

My other stock answer: "As a matter of professional courtesy, I decline to comment on specific policies of previous employers. You should appreciate this, after all, someday someone will be asking about yours."
I'm not going to make any claims as to whether or not this is a scam, but your logic is completely wrong. Most people would probably need investors to finance any mass production. To get investors, you (normally) have to prove that it works...
Don't Confuse Signifiers and Substance
Allow me to rephrase:

Aside from being a guy who played fast and loose with facts and was awarded a medal by a president who couldn't be bothered with facts, what solid contribution did this Drucker guy make to the art and science of programming?
Reprising a comment of mine from earlier: the actual work performed by most lawyers is letter-writing at $X00 an hour. No lawyer describes themselves as a "professional letter-writer" or "professional letter-writer specializing in Mostly Empty Threats."

When "programmer" starts showing up with lawyer and doctor on "high status occupations used as the canonical examples of professional jobs since you were three years old" then programmers should definitely start describing themselves as programmers to anyone who will listen.
I'll just say that based only on reading his post, I'm 100% sure that Patrick wouldn't agree with your career advice.
Coding ability (the 99% not the 1% of elite coders) is a commodity.

"The question used to be: Does it run? That was enough, because software that worked was scarce...

So if it’s not about avoiding fatal bugs, what’s the business of software?

At its heart, you need to imagine (and then execute) a business that just happens to involve a piece of software, because it’s become clear that software alone isn’t the point. There isn’t a supply issue--it’s about demand. The business of software is now marketing (which includes design)."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/10/the-business...
Is this article's claim about Google -- that the programmers closest to Adwords revenue have highest status (edit: and/or pay) -- true? It contradicts what I've heard.
Actually, no, beneath the JS layer is the browser, which is a massive wall of architecture-independent C++ with its own graphics abstractions and high-level constructs. You'd need to drop another level or three to reach the C layer.

I dare you to actually try SDL sometime; it is far less pain than doing browser work in JS.
Back in the day, John Carmack would micro-blog on the finger protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol). finger johnc@idsoftware.com got you Carmack's .plan file, a well-written and, for a time, frequently-updated journal of whatever programming challenges he happened to be facing at the time. finger @idsoftware.com got you the id corporate directory, a simple list of about 20 names and titles. The only titles were CEO, designer, and programmer. In a tech world awash, even then, with countless software engineers, senior software engineers, senior members of technical staff, architects, chief architects, CTOs, rock stars, and ninjas, it was always refreshing for me to see Carmack's humble programmer listing.

All of my heroes in the field are programmers.
Not sure about him, but I see klout, just raised 30 million on top of a previous 10 million. And there was that social phone app that also raised 40 million... ;-)
Not to be pedantic, but it actually says "more conservative", not "conservative". They're not necessarily the same.
They published the report in http://www.nyteknik.se/incoming/article3303693.ece/BINARY/Re...
Maybe 'cause the company with the money was all "we are only interested if it can output one megawatt" and the guy making it was all "huh, looks like I can get one of these units to put out about 1/43 of a megawatt apiece"? The shrinking number would jibe with him having a few improvements over the process of developing the thing and scaling it up.
It's great except for 2 annoyances: (1) the d-pad just doesn't feel natural to me still, (2) the constant crashing of the app and google TV when connections don't establish correctly. That being said, I use both the iPhone and android tablet versions all the time.
Fully agree. But in our lawyer run and lawyer trained society, most people don't see things this way anymore.
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I agree about the design it is very clean. I also think you might have something there with the reddit integration.
You find it strange that this is upvoted on 'Hacker News'? Hackers like tinkering and understanding why things work. I understand the principles behind these flaws and am not interested in the article because I'm hoping it will teach me how to avoid SQL injection. The article is actually not about that; instead it's illustrates how a skilled attacker may specific features of MySQL to exploit flawed code in a stealthy way.

As a sysadmin, this is interesting. I help out people who run WordPress sites, for instance. While I do my best, on a practical level not all of the code can be audited or rewritten.

As an SQL coder, this is interesting as he's cleverly crafting code in a language I've spent a fair amount of time playing with, and about which I would like to know more. It's interesting to see how someone might do SQL injection in the same way you might wonder how people pick padlocks, despite having no need to pick padlocks yourself.
Once you are on TiVo or something like it you don't know when something is on or even what channel it is on.
http://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-archaeology-an... is a great example of this.
Restrained, professional confidence will work as well or better as "pompous douche", and it won't compromise your principles.

Picture a heart surgeon. Given an opening like "Wow, you save people's lives all by yourself" he doesn't say "Oh, it's nothing", he says something like "My team saves people lives. It is a privilege to work with them."
And it is not unlikely that there is somebody else looking for an opportunity to put Ruby experience on her resume, and will gladly take on the maintenance. In that case you have created value for your co-workers, too.
We real hardware people don't take too kindly to FPGA types declaring themselves to be hardware people. They're really only initializing a stinkin' big pile of look-up tables anyway.

You get to be hardware when you use a soldering iron :P
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To be honest I cringe whenever I hear programmers refer to themselves as "engineers". Maybe it's because here in canada engineering is regulated and you are not allowed to call yourself an engineer by law unless you posses an an engineering degree.
Great idea. I made a contribution and also tweeted. I'm monitoring the spreadsheet to see if there are any problems I can help to solve.

The more people that get involved, the more value this kind of effort has, so fill out your form, ask for help, and give help to someone else!
When reddit first launched publicly, there was a new Steve Pavlina article every week on the #1 spot -- polyphasic sleep, passive sources of income, etc. I can't be the only one who remembers this.
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Apparently, the secret of Erlang garbage collection is that it's done per-thread, and the whole Erlang model is based on spawning many threads. As a result, each thread only has a few K of RAM to collect, as opposed to a bigger pool per thread for Java.

http://prog21.dadgum.com/16.html
Professional athletics? It seems to be as close to a pure meritocracy as I can think of.
Saying that the truth of X and the desire that X be true/false are orthogonal is rather like saying that "things just are the way they are".

While this is the case in scientific matters, it's definitely not the case in social matters. There are plenty of things that I and others can do to bring about a business climate that fixes some of the shittiness that the author lays out.
I suspect because they're trying to align to some type of grid.

(Even spacing between icons would require 39px of separation, and the odd numbering probably throws something off.)
I did appreciate the section about programmer skill and not to underestimate yourself too much, simply because it was a feel-good paragraph. By regularly reading a variety of tech blogs and trying to keep up with software goings-on, I've put myself on a drip feed that constantly reinforces: "Holy crap... every programmer out there is developing mind blowing software in languages you've never heard of in the course of a weekend. Meanwhile, you're dribbling out a few dozen lines of C in a day."

Who knows where the truth lies, but for the next few minutes I'll just enjoy the slight buzz from the article.
The use of sharing in traffic generation
Don't take this the wrong way, but ... really? I find that hard to believe. Pretty much all programming is in the short term unemployment producing, since pretty much all programming is automation. Automating a job means that no one does it anymore, hence one fewer job.

In the long run those people are usually repurposed into productive work, and there are occasional moments where a programmer will create a massive number of jobs (see: whoever implemented adwords, creating an entire industry of professionals to optimize purchasing them). But that's the exception, not the rule.
Please note, he got to do this working for a boss who "never even asked what produced the deliverable".

This sounds like a very dysfunctional company in the first place.
I don't think he said they had the highest status...I think he said they were the best paid. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's a very different claim.

(I too have heard differently)
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Pardon my ignorance, was Jobs obsessed with symmetry?
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Cool man. Great design. But as I'm sure you know, you are entering a very tough market. You'll need more than superior aesthetics and good marketing. I might suggest targeting a particular social niche rather than the general population as a whole. Best of luck to you.
Whether you are satisfying the terms and conditions of your contract is secondary. A contract is there to codify the most basic rights and obligations and generally says nothing about excellence, growth and value. If a competitor really wants a piece of your cake - which I assume several actually want since it seems lucrative - they could establish the perception that you are not creating enough value/growth for the licensor.
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Thanks :) And Xbox Connect is about to get a lot more awesome. The thing is though, I don't want to make it too geeky. The Reddit Connect/Xbox Connect features or benefits if you will, will only be prominently displayed if in fact you are connected; I don't want to be showing a bunch of Reddit or Xbox related stuff to people who don't give a crap about either; but I want to make it even more awesome for those who do.
> Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).

It also jumped out at me that the zero case is not handled (it occurs on the rand(100), if not the die).

He's got a great point about learning negotiation skills, too, but I've read a lot of things and feel that what I lack most is actual live practice. I think this is similar to the point about meeting people and shaking their hand and how different that is from meeting some person online.
I heard "This is Guy Steele standing in for Alan Kay", and I thought it was an obscure joke. I felt exceedingly nerdy for getting the joke. Then I realized it wasn't a joke at all.

I still feel exceedingly nerdy.
So here's another reason not to call yourself a programmer: it suggests that you are a peon who needs micromanagement. At Japanese megacorps, which are not historically known for huge degrees of flexibility, it is assumed that Software Engineers should be able to tie their own shoelaces without needing to be told what kind of knot to use.

The boss asked for me to produce comprehensible and comprehensive documentation of 100,000 lines of Perl and gave me a two month deadline. I produced what he asked for in two weeks. The production of this involved a Ruby script.

Contra many sibling comments, delivering a higher quality product earlier than the deadline does not typically result in one getting fired, particularly when one makes a habit of making your boss look like an effing genius for managing you so well.
The opposite of "modest" is not, in fact, "pompous douche". There are alternative ways of showing confidence, many of which actually incorporate substantial amounts of humility.

There are better role models, or better coaches. Keep looking. I realize it is hard, because there are a lot of complete poseurs cluttering the landscape, but keep looking.
In this case I think we need to view the sedan as the natural realization of that mass production (or next step)
Thank you so much; Really, it means the world to me and gives me more motivation than ever (and it's hard as hell to motivate me at times) when I get any type of user feedback what so ever. I don't have any real-world contacts that do what I do (code/internet related work in general) that I can get feedback from, So needless to say I rarely get it for any of my projects.

Yes it's a very tough market; But I see nothing wrong with that, it just goes to show (in my eyes) that it's a good market to get into if it's that popular, but you have to make people love it & make it stand out otherwise you'll be another failed startup collecting e-dust.
Users can disable SB, but then they wouldn't be able to boot Windows 8.
> "One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do."

A connection just went off in my head; this sentiment is echoed in Sirlin's 'Playing to Win' series of posts.

"I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves."

It's good advice. I mean, enjoy solving difficult problems, but it is important to recognize that it can be... self-indulgent sometimes. There certainly exist hard problems that are also good problems, but they are not measured with the same units.
That's disturbing, to say the least.
I have a degree in engineering, but when people ask me what I do, I say I'm a computer programmer because that's what I am and I'm proud of that.
Dayum, your signup sequence kicks ass. I especially like being immediately logged out after a password change (it needed doing) so I can type the new one in and say "yes" when the browser offers to remember it.
See Moneyball. Traditionally, people can't measure merit. They measure things which they think are proxies, but some popular proxies are hilariously inaccurate. Like, "Lines of code is a proxy for programming skill" hilariously inaccurate.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I got a similar impression - lots of words, little pay-off.
I got in on that promotion also. I joined the IRC channel but have been too busy to start doing anything with it. Pretty interesting. Especially with the motion/sound sensing and audio out built in.
Most Technical Interviews Suck
I imagine that some of it is also the almost entirely strictly functional design of the language. Some of the ways it makes you write things should make certain tasks like that easier for the compiler. It should be almost always known at compile time when it'll be able to reap things.
It's important to personally know how you'll take care of your kids, but it's inappropriate for an interviewer to ask questions about a person's personal life outside of work, especially about legally protected topics like family status. It's just not relevant, and these topics are specially protected because there's a long history of discrimination based on them (such as employers avoiding hiring married women because they assume the women will not be productive employees since they have to take care of children).

See http://www.microsoft.com/business/en-us/resources/management... and http://www.focus.com/fyi/30-interview-questions-you-cant-ask... for some lists of questions that help illustrate this. Instead of asking a very personal question like "Do you have or plan to have children?" and extrapolating random stuff from the answer, you ask the directly useful question you really meant to ask: "Are you available to work overtime on occasion? Can you travel?"
Um, yeah, I don't think we're going from broadcast/cable we have now to something like the web sites with RSS feeds. If by standardization, you mean open standard, that's not happening.
It's a proof of the power of javascript. In another 10 years it'll be even faster due to faster compilers and faster processors.

Perhaps by then it'll be completely routine for video to be encoded and decoded using Javascript on a mobile device.
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Maybe "one-off" means something different where you're from, but I read it as meaning this wasn't an issue.
Actually if you see pro players play, they jump around in a very similar fashion. That pattern similarity was one of the most impressive things about this.
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From the article: "Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store."

all you need to do is make awesome apps.

Oh, is that all? </sarcasm>

The fact is that it's hard to make awesome apps or awesome anything that also makes people enough money to go entirely independent. Especially if you have a family that you need to support.

And even if you do decide to be an independent mobile app developer, parts of this article still apply to you. Your job isn't to make apps.

For example: "Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things."

Your job is to save people time/money, entertain them, or make their lives easier by making apps.
I beg to differ.

We don't have a Bill of Rights or a Congress.

Regardless, I'm not sure how you got the impression that I think federalism is unconstitutional or an imposition... I generally feel that multiple conflicting state-based laws is an inefficient way to run a country, and note that the constitution gives the states the ability to cede legislative power to the commonwealth (as it should).

Just stating the facts ma'am.
I do have to give him one thing. When I was younger and more naive his polyphasic sleep experiment seemed pretty neat and his motivational articles really got me going.

However once he started in with the nonsense I bailed out and started looking to other intellectuals for inspiration.

People who are new to SP don't need to be warned. They will get what they want out of it and eventually come to their own conclusions ;)

(I forgot to mention that in 2005 I'm pretty sure he claimed to have 1 single degree in CS)
Show HN: Google invented 15 new technologies for Instant Search? Ya right.
Here is the video demo:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SullivanSoftware#p/u/3/KGq9AKqp_Kw<p>In some ways, what I did is more powerful than Google's Instant Search. Let me know if you agree. My point is not that I am a great programmer. I'm not. Fill in the rest :)
This also doesn't have to be an either-or sort of scenario. It's pretty easy to mix C++ and Java using the Java Native Interface. It's not going to win a beauty pageant, but it's not rocket science either.

My company's web services are exactly that: we do all of the heavy graph traversal stuff down in the C++ layer and do the web services and XML parsing and all of that stuff in Java. The Java types that correspond to our graph elements basically just are a reference to our persistent graph store (basically a bunch of mmaped disk structures) which means that to do graph traversal on the Java side we never have to actually load the graph into the JVM. And the glue code between the JVM and our C++ still weighs in at under 1k LOC.
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There's not a whole lot you can do about it if you're stuck working 70 hours a week for $35k a year for a boss (or series of bosses) who would very much like to send your job to India. Patrick's guide is just about how to be successful in the culture that exists now. If you manage to completely transform the tech industry, more power to you. But even if you do, that will not be tomorrow, or the day after, or even 10 years after that. Until then, Patrick's guide will continue to be useful.
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