The Software Industry

Downsizing R & D, and telling brilliant people that they must always be on notice to "prove" that they Contribute to the sacred Bottom Line, NEVER WORKS. Why?

Here's one for you: Supposing I combine my preternatural programming skills with my well known talents as a practitioner of Voodoo Economics to come up with a software tool that can take chicken heads and source code trees as input and, as output, tells you exactly how much each line of code contributes to the company's bottom line.
Would you use it?

Getting insinuated into the process of a new workplace is always interesting. Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it just doesn't happen, and you remain a little island in your cube throughout your tenure. Nice one, Milton. Here's your stapler back.

Donna L. Davis reports from the 2006 VSLive conference in Orlando, Florida, US.

Turner wowed the audience by resizing a form, demonstrating that all the form elements (buttons, listboxes, etc.) dynamically resized and maintained their relative positions (without code).

"Every employee rates their boss, their boss' boss, and any three other company managers they choose, on 18 questions using a 1-5 scale. Such 360-degree evaluations are not uncommon, but at HCL all results are posted online for every employee to see."

In our attempts to build systems that do just about everything, we lost the rote reliability inherent in machinery. It was supposed to be a 0 or 1, wasn’t it? Not .5. Certainly not mysterious blue.

Microsoft set out with a "business" vision alone, to own the software running the desktop. It didn't define an "operating system" as a resource manager. From a marketing standpoint, this would have been an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how fast the computer, resources are limited.

I have long noticed a split in computer magazines between hortatory pieces which urge the manager to flog the troops to implement best practices, while failing to describe what on earth they might be, and pieces that actually describe those practices.

I won't pretend that I'm an expert at running an advertising-funded print magazine with a circulation in the tens of thousands, but it has always seemed to me that the challenge of SD Magazine was the paradox that the readers most interested in technical content are not necessarily the ones who have decision-making power regarding (or even interest in) expensive testing, configuration management, and "lifecycle management" tools.

Dr. Naur was instrumental in establishing software engineering as a discipline. He made pioneering contributions to methodologies for writing correct programs through his work on assertions that enable programmers to state their assumptions, and on structured programming.

The basic gist of the suit is that NTP (actually just one guy) filed a patent some years ago for the concept of "wireless email." Did they create a wireless email device or any software to run it? No, they did not. They simply patented the concept before anyone else did. This is the basis of their suit.

Business fulfills needs of customers. Business "uses" people as well as process. But business is only an exchange arangement of work for money. We work because we are made to work. And we like it.

I would not want my team of software developers to be composed of only the "best programmers." We would never get our products to market and would soon be out of business. Each person can be an asset to the software team--but only a particular aspect of it...

I expect that it’s not so much that software development has a lot in common with comedy, but that many diverse professions share similar frustrations in the arduous journey from concept to deliverable product.