Dan, I've had some lengthy arguments with my manager about that.
Due to a combination of poor planning and an inability to say no to our customer, my team frequently finds itself in the position where we want to ask QA to verify a patch or release in a day (when QA says it takes them three).
QA always says yes to this request, but complains about how engineering never gives them enough time to properly test. And they're right; when a bug comes in from the customer's testers at 8am, gets to engineering at 10, is fixed and released to QA at 4, and then released to our customers at 7, QA hasn't had enough time to do its job properly.
I think we should stop asking; QA can't do its job because we aren't letting it and they, for whatever reason, don't feel like they can say no to us.
My manager thinks that if QA doesn't say no, they must be fine with it.
the tone is "we like it when Abi finds bugs, because then our customers don't."
From a business perspective that's the only tone which makes sense. Far better to find bugs in testing than in the field.
Bruce, my official title is "Lead Software Engineer", but I call myself a programmer, because I'm not really convinced that what I do is actually engineering; most of the time it's more like emergency fly-by-my-pants firefighting. I'm at best a professional tinkerer and hacker.
I've been pretty much insulated from most of the trends you describe - only working at two companies and so therefore having the corporate cultures loom larger in some ways than the global culture - but one thing rings true: the job of computer programming does seem to me to be much lower status today than it did in 1995. I've always assumed that my perception was wrong in 1995, and that as my social circle grew and I was exposed to something outside the Santa Cruz bubble, I became more able to see the way things really are(tm); but your comment is making me wonder if maybe that's less true than I imagine.
Serge, very much so.
When I worked for a medium-sized (and famous among geeks) development company, while there were a fair number of women in QA and in tech support and tech pubs, there were basically none (eventually, one, but that took a long time) in development. For years.
At the company where I work now, women are maybe 1/15th of the engineers; on the other hand, most of our QA engineers are women.
(It's also true that 2/3 of our developers are first generation Chinese or Indian immigrants, and as far as I can tell everyone other than me is straight ... for all that Silicon Valley claims to value diversity, it's not clear that those claims translate into practice.)
For what it's worth, testing is an important part of software development that's rarely ever given the respect it's deserved.
Absolutely. In my mind, a good tester is far more valuable than a good programmer - because most business software can be produced by mediocre programmers, but few can withstand mediocre testers.
I'm pretty skeptical that the state constitution has really required gay marriage for all the years it has existed, but nobody noticed before.
I don't think this is actually what is being claimed.
The basic equal protection claim is that the state may not discriminate between its citizens using improper criteria. Everyone agrees that race is an improper criterion; everyone pretty much agrees that gender is an improper criterion. But it's totally unclear what else is an improper criterion: at the federal level, the list includes national origin, alienage status, and bastardy.
What these cases are saying is that sexual orientation is also an improper criterion. Nobody is claiming that the authors of the state constitution would have believed it to be an improper criterion; but that doesn't matter ... because the rule "you shall not discriminate among your citizens using improper classifications" is not limited to what the framers would have thought was improper.
Every time a state legitimizes gay marriage, it brings tears of joy to my eyes.
And each passing victory brings me more confidence that we Californians can repeal our albatross next year.
Pat Greene: I fear you are right.
But it *will* be removed. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year ... but there's an entire generation of gay people who will not rest until it is removed.
Redshift: there's a difference, however, between being ok legally and being ok politically. Which is to say: in some parts of the country, even if it's legally OK for a non-citizen to help a campaign, doing so may actually inflict a political price on the campaign.
It's far better, IMO, to err on the side of cautio on this one.
Alex Wilson: as a practical matter, certainly, McCain will be treated as though he were eligible; and under current law, if he were born today, he would be.
But, oddly, people born in the Canal Zone were not automatically citizens at the time that McCain was born, even if they were born on the US military base to US parents. The law was changed after McCain was born to retroactively confer citizenship on children born in the Canal Zone to American parents.
This situation makes McCain somewhat different than Goldwater was; Goldwater had been born in the Arizona Territory, but was a citizen at birth.
Yikes. I was on a bicycle at the time, but I've had that injury, through a very similar poor choice of using my hand to break a fall. I'm cringing inside, now.
The tech Gods of the site should be aware: http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ takes you through a strange sort of time warp.
(This is clearly a lingering side effect of last month's tech crisis, of much lower importance than the other side effects; but it should be on The List. :))
Dave, at #8: the Republicans will spin it that all of the country's problems are due to the Democrats running Congress.
This is ridiculous, but it has just enough of a kernel of truth that they may be able to persuade some people.
In the not-yet-working-category: the electrolite link still raises a page from the past.
Apparently the address is now using a form autoresponder, too. I sent a brief response to the "we're sorry but we're out of copies" message, indicating that i'd understood that to be a risk, and thanking you for giving away copies at all ... only to get the same message back. :)
It's a reasonable thing to do, but I still find it amusing whenever I find myself (inadvertantly) trying to talk to a machine.
Anyhow ... thank you for offering the ARCs. :)
Apropos of Patrick's comment #18 about the major media: they waited
a week so that they could cover the death of the last French
infantryman from WW1, but the Economist devoted their weekly obituary to Clarke.
Apropos of nothing, the vote I cast for Leon Panetta in 1992, when I'd just moved into his Congressional district, is one of the few votes I've ever cast for someone (as opposed to voting against someone's opponent).
Scott, at 61: the electoral college doesn't assemble in DC to vote; it votes in the states, and then the results are dispatched to DC and opened and read on the floor of the House. This is how, in 1877, there could be a dispute over *which set of dispatched votes* to accept from certain states which had submitted multiples.
Larry, at #45: while it's true that precinct size is variable, there's now a federal law which sets a maximum of 1000 voters per precinct in federal elections. (In effect, this controls precinct size in no-federal leection,s cause who's going to have different sets of precincts for one than for the other?)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 8 |
| 2008 | 14 |
| 2007 | 24 |
| 2006 | 34 |
| 2005 | 16 |
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2003 | 7 |
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