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Admin
Sorry for my digression into economics, it was aimed at this post
Admin
What a joke. The US is demonstrably one of the most open markets in the world. Why don't you do some research before shooting your mouth off. Oh wait, you may not be able to do any from behind the Chinese censorship firewall.
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Yes, but they only paid 1/3 for that zero. That means they can afford TWO MORE zeros.
(glass half full kind of guy)
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Umm... did I ever say I was Chinese? Nice try, now how 'bout some facts before you start shooting your mouth off about what race I am.
I'll happily take an economics discussion/debate to another forum (without random personal insults, if you can handle it) with references to economists and their work but let's get back to the topics at hand here - questionable code! Think the next wtf is up.
Admin
Perhaps, but nothing in there worked to make sure the code was of good quality. (maybe if you believed there could be repeat business) I don't know how to solve that problem. Though if you hire good programmers it wouldn't be a problem, but how would you know?
Admin
Fucking overseas programmers. We all know that only US citizens make good programmers (but only those without the pointless CS degree). U-S-A! U-S-A!
(sarcasm)
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Oh actually there was, I can't go into everything in the space alloted here. But there was a reason for signoff on specification.
Of course functionality does not equal good code, but we did hope for the news to come down about modifications to past products and actually got those contracts too. Due to a good experiance prior, we were always considered when future development was needed. The good code comes from the fact that these later modifications were easily implemented within the exiting architecture. If the change was something more fundemental it was much easier to recognize that and estimate the change to the underlying structure.
Our attitude was along the lines of this:
Good code is and always should be written first. Speggetti code comes from the natural progression of software aging; as software matures and functionality is added by later programmers it is inevitable that the code will eventually suffer. Our goal was to minimize the rate of code decay during our changes as much as possible, while still maintaining profitability.
Luckily, we had a management and sales team that actually understood the software lifecycle. That made our jobs much easier. This doesn't mean that there was not the occasional "Oh crap deadline is looming" moments, but it did reduce them a lot.
Admin
Not long ago, I was a contractor at a very large company that swallowed an almost-as-large company. After the deed, as the details were working themselves out, some bean-counter noticed that "our" company had 20% FTE's and 80% contractors, whereas the assimilated company had an 80:20 ratio. The obvious implication? "Our" company had too many contractors - we should be able to work just as effectively at an 80:20 ratio.
This information came down on Monday, and the bulk of the contractors were to be released on Friday. It was 3:00 on Friday before someone straightened this out ... too bad, it would have been fun to witness the train wreck this would have been.
"Sure, I'd be happy to come back ... at double my original rate ..."
Admin
I never said you were. Does being in China make you Chinese? Where's the random insult in anything I've said?
Perhaps you could address the substance of what I said. Take a peak at any ranking of countries by free/open trade policies. You will find the US invariably in the top 10 or 20. You won't ever find China there. Even the WTO (no bastion of US nationalism) rates US top 10. China, way down on the list. You brought the economics up and now you want to run away and pretend it has to do with insults and your focus on the topic of this site. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find anything of substance to back your position up.
The first hurdle you would have to get over is the fact that the US imports/exports more than any other country. Yet, you would call them one of the "most closed" markets in the world. A contradiction on it's face if I ever saw one.
Admin
I heard that a large part (~20%?) of the US economy works for the not-so-open defence sector, mostly protected from foreign competition...
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The thing is, I never mentioned anything about China in my first post.
Maybe we're talking at different points here. I was trying to make the point that from your post, to me, it sounded like these trade agreements are a favour the US is doing (and I could be way off - you never can quite tell tone through text) and China should be left off.
The US does do a lot of importing/exporting. I won't dispute that. It's the world's largest economy.
But (as an example) if we take a look at the Uruguay round of trade talks, the outcomes disproportionately benefits the developed countries - much more than it benefits the devloping countries (and I'm not talking about China specifically).
I'm not talking sheer volume, I'm talking of actual benefits. The US does a great amount of trade. It's also a heavily protectionist country. It keeps its quotas on goods that developing countries can be competitive on (eg textiles, sugar) whilst demanding that other countries open their markets to it.
Don't get me wrong either, there's plenty of problems all countries have. I'm not a 'China is wonderful' person either. I'm just looking at international relations in general. And, I doubt I'm that censored over here in London either.
Oh, and I was talking about pulling this off the forum because it's off topic and probably (especially now I've added this to it) boring the crap out of everyone else.
I come here to check out some pretty random code and I have worked with some pretty random bits too. I just happen to like economics/international development (so I guess that makes me an even bigger nerd [;)])
Admin
Maybe my point was not so well made. I was trying to be sarcastic and at the same time overgeneralising just to show what the person I quoted was doing.
I cannot, on the other hand, keep this to myself: Don't argue with U.S. people cause they're all thick headed and all think the U.S. is the best country in the world. It's the only generalisation I'll make without any sarcasm. It's just to warn you that this discussion you're about to start will either end up with you agreeing to him just for the sake of letting it go, or will continue forever and ever. You have been warned.
Admin
RobIII and Pam L. Perhaps you should review the thread. I guess in your eagerness to bash the US you failed to actually distinguish between my posts and those of others you are assuming are from US citizens.
Pam L. You jumped in on my China comment and then proceeded to label the US "one of the most closed markets in the world" which is demonstrably false by almost anyone's standards. Perhaps you should review my original post:
"I have no problem with fair competition. But when it comes to China, we in the West are being complete idiots. Why we allow "free" trade with a brutal communist dictatorship that manipulates its currency price to put its trade partners out of business is one of the true mysteries to me."
To my mind, you haven't refuted a single element of that comment.
RobIII. I don't which, if any, of my comments you are referring to. I challenge you to show me a single post of my on this thread in which I claim the US is the best country in the world or any other such comment.
China manipulates the value of their currency to promote exports. That's indisputable. Aside from that comment, where have I maligned any country in any of my posts?
Admin
fine - they speak English in New Zealand. But we all know they speak Australian in Austalia, right?
p.s. Does tha CAPTCHA pull words from the thread? mine's "china"...
Admin
What I've posted demonstrates that the US doesn't provide 'free' trade. They're there because they get many benefits out of trading with China - not just the other way around. It's not doing any favours it doesn't expect something back from. And my posts demonstrate that the US does not offer 'fair' competition (as you put it) either (check out Uruguay trade negotiations amongst others). That's what my previous posts were getting at.
As for it's 'brutal' communist regime, I have as many issues with China as anyone else but there are human rights issues in many countries at varying levels to be dealth with, the US included. No country is by any means perfect.
As for currency, most countries' governments have a hand in their foreign exchange markets, so China is not on its own - should you no longer trade with anyone?
I'm a developer, not an economics expert by any means, if you can prove I'm wrong (all my posts), by all means go for it, I'm always happy to learn something new (and I'll actually do some research to check it).
Admin
Oh Sorry, one more thing, I think I have demonstrated that the US is effectively a closed market, not in sheer volume, but in it's bias.
Like I've said, it demands other markets freely open to its services but won't open it's markets where some of the developing countries actually have a competitive advantage (my post on trade negotiations).
And as for your other comments, I don't think you can construe these statements as US bashing - I'm raising points that have been raised by economists. I'm not randomly saying US sucks. Like I've already said, every country has issues. Trade is all I'm discussing here.
Admin
Better upfront requirements... that sounds like something. Can't quite put my finger on it. Wait, what's that sound of falling water? Is it a running tap? No, sounds like more water.
GASP.
It's a waterfall.
From my reading outsourcing has lead to companies trying to produce large, concrete, watertight requirements to send down the waterfall to the design an implementation stage. And this is guaranteed to work becasue we all know that requirements never, ever change while a system is being built.
Admin
Yes what we had was simular to waterfall, I'd like to say it was a modified waterfall. The thing is, when consulting from the outside, you have to know up front what you are building so you can estimate cost and time. Keep in mind we did allow for changes but those changes had to be reviewed and always added money and/or time. The client was free to change as much as they liked but the cost and time estimate would consistantly rise.
Pay attention to this, a client with cosistantly changing requirements is actually detrimental to any development, yet a rigorously unmoving specification is also detrimental. With our modified waterfall approach, we got a specification nailed down, with cost and time estimates, the client has a change in requirements and the cost and time changed with it. As long as the client continued to ask for changes this cost continued to grow. It was a way for us to keep the client in check and also for the client to get what they asked for in a reasonable time, while still allowing for modifications to process.
Without this process the client could have never settled on a common specification and development would never have ended favorably. We also would have never reached goals and perhaps never gotten paid. I will never claim that a strict waterfall approach is a good idea, but neither is letting the client make any change whenver they want. We found a balance and it worked well. The proof for us was that the clients actually got a stable system that they liked and when they wanted changes they came to us first so we got repeat business.
Admin
I've said it
Admin
*insert standard forum software WTF comment*
I've said it here http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/59171/ShowPost.aspx
and I'll say it again:
The big embarassment of the software developer profession is not the prevalence of the waterfall process, it's the prevalence of having no formal development process and no formal requirements documents AT ALL! Any process, including the waterfall, is a huge improvement over that, and sozin's claim was that THAT was the improvement forced on many companies by outsourcing.
Admin
I think I've worked for that client before. :)
He came to our company after firing another one. He wanted to build this huge system that would probably take about 3 years to build. He thought it should take about 6 months. He'd always make comments like "My daughter could do that in a weekend". I was once asked for an estimate on some tasks and I was told that my estimate was way too high, so I said "Just make something up, then, because you obviously don't want to hear the truth." (I was labeled as having a bad attitude, of course). He brought in two bozo consultants who implemented a month-long hack fest before achieving utter failure. Who knows how many times that projects was restarted because of him hitting the panic button all the time. I think he eventually was fired.
The saddest thing is that there are probably a large number of people here who could tell this exact story.
Admin
I may have an idea of what he encountered...
When debugging you want to know where an error occured. The easiest way is to use reflection's System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().Name to get the executing function's name. This would work if you did a debug or release build. Now, if you were to throw in .NET Obfusicator with the code here, every function name would be "a" or somthing like that when using reflection. No way of determining where the error occured. So his solution was to hardcode the function name into everyone so he could know where it occured. (Though should use const string METHOD_NAME for each) Given these circumstances, there is no other way of doing it. Its a lot of work to do this, but a big payoff in the end if you can know what class, function, and or line number an error occured in a production system.
Admin
What is sad is that the US is one of the most open markets despite all the closed parts. I cannot defend the US for all the closed parts of our market - they are wrong (and I'm just one vote trying to change things). However most countries are even more closed. So if you are no from the US, quit looking at me - the US is a bad example, so just straighten out your own mess and become the example setter.
Though I would note that you cannot compare openness easily. If two countries have different restrictions, how do you decide one's restrictions are worth more/less than the others?
Admin
I think I'll leave this stream after this, it was never supposed to turn into a whole thread of economics [;)]
I agree, every country has it's own mess to sort out including where I was born, where I've grown up and all the places I've lived and I'm just as interested in them cleaning up their acts. I'm not from the US and it's not aimed at you as one person. There'll always people fighting for many different agendas in every country. Like you're one vote - so am I in countries where I can vote and I'll happily take different views on board especially if their backed up with some kind of reason.
The world will naturally look at the US, it makes itself a huge presence on the international arena and has the ability to (i'm not necessarily saying it will) cripple other (i'm mostly talking developing) nations.
Developing countries can't afford to be the examples. The really good ones are just battling to improve the most basic of necessities. As for your question of how do we decide about the worth of restrictions? I have my priorities and I know that other people have theirs, like you and everyone else who's vaguely interested. There'll always be disagreements [:)]. I like discussions that present new ideas reasonably. It's how I (and I'm sure others) learn.
hmmm - end rant - sorry
Admin
Pity Mr Toaster not to learn at least one more language than English. Do not overestimate the "being local" thing, it is only required to make first impression. The rest is 90% of hard work and 10% of luck. If you can't deliver - being a guy across the street will not be any help in the court.
Me eat banana,
bzz
Admin
Translation: "I want the last word on the argument and am too unsure of my opinion to stick around and defend it."
Of course, since you're just an Anonymous user, perhaps I'll log out and post replies with your faux-username. Yes, that sounds like a good plan.
sincerely,
Richard Nixon
Admin
'Openness' has at least two dimesions: economic and social. Indisputably the US and Europe lead in the area of social liberalism, rights of speech, etc. (and getting into whether that will be true for long is yet another threadjack).
Economic liberalism is a different story. Since the 1980's, 'communist' China has embraced free trade and there are some signs that social openness may follow. The US, despite our myth of the self made man, provides massive industry subsidies to many industries. From the point of view of some Chinese, their tariffs are a fair response to the economic power of the US (see for example this article on US steel tariffs imposed on China: http://www.china.org.cn/english/31888.htm). In any case, whether trade restrictions, currency policies, etc. are 'fair' is a political issue generally defined by counties with the most economic power. The Travels of A Tshirt in the Global Economy is one objective look at these issues in the US, Africa and China.
Whether China manipulates currency is disputed, although it might be dogma among many circles in Congress:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3893672
Admin
The comment I was responding to
Admin
Is this intended to mean that Saddam Hussein is the "one asshole who started it all"? That seems pretty much completely divorced from reality.
This thread is fascinating, but pretty wide-ranging, so let me just make a bunch of separate points as a series of non sequiturs:
The reason so many programmers from both outside and inside the US are bad is an application of Sturgeon's Law. (Someone asked SF writer Ted Sturgeon why 90% of science fiction is shit, and he said that 90% of science fiction is shit because 90% of everything is shit. Quote almost always cleaned up to "crap" or "crud" by mealy-mouthed people who prefer their words minced.)
The problem with outsourcing/offshoring is not US persons vs. the rest of the world, but when companies think they can do something on the cheap which may also mean skimping on properly managing the project, vetting the people who will be doing it wherever they may be located, etc.
I've recently been involved in interviewing a number of candidates for a J2EE position, and I noticed something in the admittedly small sample of people we talked to. Among the Indian programmers we interviewed, only the female ones came across as having a personality. The guys gave technically correct but very matter-of-fact answers, and could not be drawn out on anything. Also, although I've known and worked with plenty of Indian programmers, male and female, who spoke English well, I can say that the only ones I've ever known who were nearly or totally incomprehensible were males.
The most interesting resume I saw was from a 'Merkin who found himself out of work due to both the dot-com and Enron implosions, and stated that he was writing a Lisp interpreter in Java to keep his skills fresh. We had already decided to hire another candidate, though, before we ever got to interview this guy, which is too bad. I would have loved to have asked him about it.
Now for a bit of fun....
The statement that English is not entirely unknown to Kiwis is an example of litotes, the use of understatement for emphasis. Google "define:litotes".
They do not speak English in Australia, they speak 'Strine as in "Let stalk Strine!" As for the Kiwis, New Zealand sux! ... Austrahlia seven.
Did you hear about that new Kiwi comedy movie? "There's Something about Maori".
What do you call a Kiwi with an IQ over 90? The Prime Minister!
What do you call someone in Wellington with an IQ over 100? A tourist!
The US has the most open markets in the world ... because we say we do! We have the best health care system in the world ... because we say we do! We have 100 literacy and the best education system in the world ... because we say we do! Oh, and yes, we're crazy. And yes, we have a lot of nukes. Sleep tight, world.
Admin
Actually, pretty much all serious sources agree that "crud" is in fact the word Sturgeon himself used:
http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/faq.html#slaw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SturgeonsLaw.html
Admin
He fixes her cable?