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vegas

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Enforcing said appropriate social norms is a big part of the reason there is management in the first place. However it means that 1) Management has to be technically competent enough to understand the things being communicated about. 2) Management has to be motivated to enforce appropriate social norms. These are both pretty difficult to achieve in practice.

all of the above are great for well supported kids to learn about firsthand. resillience and perseverance are great traits to acquire young, especially when coupled with a healthy awareness of your own fallibility.

This essay is pretty accurate in a lot of regards. However, many of the things that he gets on about are things that are massively wrong with the American economy at the moment(not that that doesn't make them any less real). He also completely neglects the fact that given the generally poor quality of technical evaluation skills at most companies, one rarely gets to "just be an engineer", but often has to learn how swim in political waters anyways. There's less bullshit to deal with just working in an office than there is being the quasi-celebrity that one must be as a CEO, but there's still a lot more bullshit than there ought to be. Nobody's out there just building awesome stuff, having people notice that they build awesome stuff and handing them fair amounts of money.

This application needs to be something that runs on an open source ti-86 equivalent piece of hardware with no network connections and a battery life of forever instead of an iphone application, and then it will actually be successful. Until then, anyone smart enough to actually give a shit isn't going to be particularly interested.

People would certainly be more inclined to trust Microsoft, Apple, or Google with this sort of task than Joe Startup, and they haven't yet. Therefore, while this is a valid need, and really a very big market opportunity, I don't buy that anyone will succeed commercially with it unless they just set themselves up as the distributors of commodity open source hardware that does the job.

People do make shitloads of money selling commodities.

[dead] 14 years ago

it was obvious it was bullshit at least :D

Truly the only blog title which could top this would be "Return of the ScrumMaster"

I will not be holding my breath for "Attack of the beanlet containers"

Bringing the elegance, style, and linguistic specificity of C++ to Python. Next article will cover how to introduce friends classes and three different kinds of inheritance, to further simplify your python life.

You can and should charge at least $225/hour if you are a competent software person. There are far less competent software people then there are mediocre lawyers, and mediocre lawyers can charge $225/hour.

Chad Orzel isn't glamourizing his lack of systematic knowledge, merely acknowledging it in a forthright and fairly humble manner. I'd argue that he's trying to avoid coming off as and arrogant physics/math nerd.

In fact, here is direct textual evidence contradicting your caricaturization:

"This is the exact same chippiness I hear from Physics majors who are annoyed at having to take liberal arts classes in order to graduate. The only difference is that Terrance can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy, where the grousing of Physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds."

I give you an F in Reading, and a B in Rhetoric. I concur entirely that the lack of intellectual breadth amongst both technical and non-technical academics is quite obnoxious, and I'd argue that the rather pointlessly competitive nature of academic subfield is a holdover from when academics were basically young courtiers trying to secure themselves a nice sinecure. Sometimes this energy can produce great things, I'd venture that at this point we are just making the remarkable research discoveries that are largely just waiting around for some humble systematic work, further away.