The Whiteboard

user41796

3:17 AM

Someone and their one-trick pony has annoyed me...

user41796

@AndyzSmith - let it go. Honestly, just let your rant against the GPL go. OP specifically said BSD which is a very permissive license, even with the copyright attribution requirements. The question wasn't about GPL or the copyleft, and you made your point about being careful with the GPL. Beyond declaring "public domain" and the WTFPL, all licenses have some degree of restriction by their very nature. And there are potential legal issues with those two cases anyway. We get it, you don't like the GPL. Now please let the issue go. — GlenH7 3 mins ago

user55340

4:17 AM

Canadian getters defined

user55340

88

A: Do people in non-English-speaking countries code in English?

I'm from Canada, but live in the States now. It took me a while to get used to writing boolean variables with an "Is" prefix, instead of the "Eh" suffix that Canadians use when programming. For example: MyObj.IsVisible MyObj.VisibleEh

gnat

6:27 AM

@MichaelT not to mention that meta posts don't go to collider, it is simply designed for a different purpose than you likely want. It aims at short attention span, day or two there and post goes away (time decay element in the formula was designed to do just that). Your Open Letter looks worthy of more long-term, Reddit like type attention (as an example, I am getting upvotes every week since one of my posts has been reddited more than a year ago, go figure)...

...Last time I spoke to our local reddit expert :) though, my impression was that meta posts have low chances at reddit. Anyway, let's re-check this, why not... @Yannis what do you think would be chances of this post at Reddit?

64

Q: Open letter to students with homework problems

It is September once again (today is the 7316th day of September), and once again students are asking their homework problems on Stack Overflow and Programmers.SE. We start seeing questions like: A car dealer has 10 salespersons. Each salesperson keeps track of the number of cars sold each m...

meanwhile, don't miss the funniest status-* EVAR

upvoted not because I agree with your reasoning (I agree but this doesn't matter here) but for making a fantastic case of a feature request having both status-completed and status-declined — gnat 8 hours ago

122

Q: Get rid of the question ban on Meta; suspend actively harmful users manually

This user appears to have been question banned because of two unpopular Meta suggestions. (He says so in Chat) Look at the two contributions that appear to have gotten him banned. Like those of many others, they may not be of perfect quality, but they are not actively harmful to the site, either...

feature-request status-completed status-declined meta post-ban

Jubbat

11:28 AM

Hi, this page (programming-motherfucker.com) doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Are they saying that any methodology is pointless?. Can someone help me understand it?

Thomas Owens

11:45 AM

@Jubbat It's a joke. Meant to be funny. That's it.

Jubbat

Ok, so just a fancy page to market some books. It was linked as part of an answer suggesting it as an actual methodology but probably I didn't get the joke there either. programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/211843/…

user41796

1:03 PM

@Jubbat I added a tooltip to the link within that answer to indicate that it was a parody site and had strong language.

user55340

2:23 PM

@Jubbat Its not so much 'to market some books' - its more 'a reaction to people claiming methodology XYZ is the next best thing and will improve your productivity." As a programmer, I don't care about agile, or billable hours, or stringing along clients and I despise filling out Microsoft Project. I want to program.

user55340

Many times those who are showing improved performance from a new methodology are instead seeing the Hawthrone effect.

user55340

Hawthorne effect

The Hawthorne effect (commonly referred to as the observer effect) is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior, which is being experimentally measured, in response to the fact that they know that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation. History The term was coined in 1950 by Henry A. Landsberger when analysing older experiments from 1924–1932 at the Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside Chicago). Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if its workers would become more productive i...

user55340

The books (mostly links to free ones) are more a "you came here for some reason, lets give you something to help you anyways." The T-shirts are more important, and they're a form of the humor found in our profession (but I'd never get one - its red, it would bleed into my occasional non-black tshirt)

Jubbat

3:29 PM

Thanks for the explanation. I didn't want to sound as harsh as the way I word the sentence you quoted suggests. I simply didn't get the parody tone. On that topic, I do agree there is a lot of cargo cult mentality going on, but that doesn't mean that methodologies are utterly pointless.

user55340

"Ha Ha Only Serious" is a core part to programmer humor - catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

user55340

Compare agilemanifesto.org to the halfarsedagilemanifesto.org (note, programing-mf also makes fun of agile)

user55340

in programing-mf, note the 'Our Values' section and compare it to the agile manifesto.

user55340

I've heard it in all seriousness said by consultants that agile was designed by consultants to help clients come to terms with 'the eternal project" - so they could eternally bill them. (Waterfall, as flawed as it is has an end - you deliver and its done, agile has endless phases... well, from the consultant view).

Jimmy Hoffa

4:12 PM

@MichaelT You can't blame them; the alternative is they are constantly threatened back and forth, and occasionally get tossed off a project only to be brought back a week later. Most projects in companies living off consultants are eternal projects because the company doesn't have the expertise to create or maintain it properly which is why they have consultants to begin with

If they can get the company to come to terms with the fact that it needs the consultants, all the better for the company which just shoots itself in the foot everytime it decides "Ok! We're done!", close the project and two weeks later the system crashes and they have to get consultants back

user55340

I don't blame them at all (I'm one of them now). Its that sometimes the companies that do have the experience go "hey, lets do this agile thing, it seems to work for the consultants we hire... they like it, and we're paying them 3x more than we pay you so they must know what they're doing"

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT haha yeah I love it when businesses base trust on how much they pay someone, which is so utterly opposite of the way they should understand that relationship it's absolutely ridiculous

user55340

The answer isn't agile, or waterfall or whatever... its letting the programmers actually work rather than go to meetings and fill out paper work for change controls.

Jimmy Hoffa

"You negotiated way more money than your worth from us, clearly you must be someone we can trust more than the people asking only for their value!"

user55340

When I was at netapp, I had ~8h of standing meetings a week.

user55340

4:18 PM

At my previous employer, I had to fill out a time sheet with % of time spent in support, maintenance, project, development, and 'admin' (filling out time sheets) every day.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Yeah, been there. Working on FDA regulated software at ISO9001 company I would often go weeks without doing any work because I was waiting on a required review for signoffs which I couldn't get any sooner because everyone was in constant meetings (reviewing and signing off on things) so they couldn't be scheduled sooner than 2 weeks away

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT Any process that prevents people from carrying out their primary function is broken. In some places, though, there is a need for heavy documentation and paperwork that someone needs to do. The problem is making sure that the person doing that gets it.

I think that's a big problem in places - either spreading out the paperwork so everyone's doing their own pieces or making sure that one person is doing it and realizing that most (if not all) of their time will be spent in data and reports and documentation.

user55340

Thus, I completely sympathize with the inspiration between programing-mf. It may be a bit over the top, but thats not uncommon humor in our industry. Sometimes you need to go to extremes to get the point across.

user55340

You hired programmers - not time sheet filler outers and meeting sitters.

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