Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, offer him a fishing certification and he'll open up a consultancy without ever having seen a fish.
— Dan Lyke (@danlyke) July 29, 2013
Software Estimation Options
With software estimation you've only realistically got a choice of 5 mins, 1 hour, 1-2 days, about a week, and then all bets are off.
— Rob Bowley (@robbowley) September 18, 2011
Pictures of Food
Years ago, if you wanted to show your friends a picture of your food, you’d have to break out the palette and the easel and paint one. Time-consuming!
Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it’s just point and click!
Another way life gets better and better thanks to computers . . .
Profiling
The office park where my a friend of mine works was burglarized over the weekend. Surveillance cameras captured the whole operation.
“They were Mexicans,” he said. “They look like professionals. They were wearing hats and jackets so you couldn’t see their build or anything.”
“So how are you identifying them as Mexicans if you couldn’t see them?” I asked. “Because they were stealing stuff?”
Another Saturday Night
“Have a great rest of your night,” the waiter says. “And a great Sunday.”
What about Monday? What about the rest of my life? Pretty limited success you’re wishing me here . . .
Aside
Chaconne
On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
Minimizing Retention
From an actual job description for a Software Development Manager:
- Worth with management and directs to put together a solid SW Development career development plan in alignment with Organization Solutions all-up to grow hi-potential employees and minimize retention.
If you’re writing job descriptions and learning English at the same time, there’s no shame in having a native speaker review your work.
The job description goes on like that for 10 or 12 more bullet points. I singled that one out because I like the phrase “minimize retention.” I can recommend a couple of people for that.
I assume it’s a language problem in this case — that the author meant to say “maximize retention” or “minimize turnover” — but it might be a kick to have a job where your actual charter is to minimize retention.
You would not be an easy person to work for. You would take all the credit. Your subordinates would get all of the blame.
Picture having the names of all staff members written on a whiteboard in your office and removing them one by one with a triumphant swipe of your eraser at the end of their (hopefully brief) tenure.
Maybe your boss would stop by every now and again to tap on a name and ask, “Why is that guy still here?”
Of course, if some clinging vine is screwing up your retention rate by refusing to quit (maybe he really needs the job?), you can just call him in and fire him. Or her.
Good times! If only all job objectives were this easy to meet.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Do People Recognize Beauty in Everyday Life?
This is a few years old now, but I just saw it today. (Please read Gene Weingarten‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning story from the Washington Post for the full details.)
[youtube https://youtu.be/hnOPu0_YWhw]
The premise is that Joshua Bell, international virtuoso, one of the best violinists in the world — maybe the best violinist in the world — dresses in jeans, T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap, and for 45 minutes plays several renowned classical pieces (on a good fiddle — the Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius of 1713, purchased by Bell in 2003 for $4 million) in a Washington, D.C., metro station, during a Friday morning rush hour, with a violin case open in front of him for donations.
Do people recognize beauty in everyday life?
[SPOILER ALERT]
No. They don’t. Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, is the only person out of 1,000 or so passers-by who recognizes Bell.
“It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Furukawa says. “Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters!”
(Some people gave less than that, including pennies. Bell’s total take was $32.17.)
Furukawa enters the video around 1:35, stops 10 feet in front of Bell and listens smiling to the rest of the performance while everyone else in the place goes on about their business. It’s heartbreaking to watch . . . because of the one person who stopped or the thousand others who didn’t, I’m not sure which.
Amateur Design
The worst scenario I can imagine is when we allow real customers, users, and our own salespeople to dictate “functions and features” to the developers, carefully disguised as “customer requirements.” Maybe conveyed by our Product Owners. If you go slightly below the surface, of these false “requirements” (“means,” not “ends”), you will immediately find that they are not really requirements. They are really bad amateur design, for the “real” requirements — implied but not well defined.
Dog Eat Dog
Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away
Agile, ALM, and Agile 2.0 — Putting the Cart Before the Horse?
Speaking of selling chickens still in shells, an august panel of industry giants laid out their recent improvements and plans for ALM products (Application Lifecycle Management, for those not in the know). These guys dazzled the audience with how they’ve moved far beyond simple source code repositories and testing tools to a complete integration of all modern software practices. Quite a coup, indeed, since most real live software developers I’m seeing out there today still aren’t using the practices automated by the ALM tools. . . .
In other words, many software developers aren’t using practices such as test driven development or source version control. Yet here are HP, Microsoft, and IBM announcing new ALM tools that automate more advanced practice in areas not even in use in the first place. Unbelievable.
Aside
If Grateful Dead fans are Deadheads, what are fans of Philip K. Dick?
Doing What He Loved
From a corporate alumni group on Facebook:
We lost another good guy last night. [Name redacted] fell off his boat crabbing in the Chesapeake. He died doing what he loved.
He loved falling off boats? That’s unusual. It’s too bad he didn’t love swimming. Or wearing life vests.
I Wuz Homeshooled
Via LinkedIn:
You’re Gonna Like the Way You Look
I know George Zimmerman has had a lot on his plate lately, but when is he going to get back to doing those Mens Wearhouse commercials?
You Don’t Understand How Phones Work
East coast woman on conference call is yelling into the phone. Why? To be heard at a distance? HEY HONEY THE PHONE WORKS ELECTRONICALLY YOU DONT HAVE TO YELL!
Do You Want to Take the Human Race to the Next Plateau?
In 1986, Steve Jobs famously challenged John Sculley, asking him if he wanted to keep on making sugar water or help Apple change the world. While that did not quite work out the way either of them intended, the challenge itself still holds. Do you want to spend your next decade developing more digital distractions to amuse people while they stand in line at Starbuck’s, or do you want to take the human race to the next plateau?
Aside
I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart. — Vincent van Gogh