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In a comment on my post about Bad Project Management [1] Don Marti [2] says “the more money you charge, the less of your time people waste, and the more seriously they take you” and “you can affect the client more, whether you’re peddling idiocy or wisdom“.
That’s a nice theory, however I don’t recall seeing an example of it anywhere that I have worked. There are two broad categories of employers, large and small. Large companies have HR departments etc who decide on rough pay scales. Once the budget is approved (by senior management and HR) for someone’s contract fees or salary the amount of money seems to be of little concern to the line manager. They have a group of N people reporting to them who are all paid by money that comes from some mysterious place (with no direct connection to the quality or quantity of work done) and therefore the amount of money paid is not very relevant. Often team-leaders don’t even know how much the people who report to them are being paid! Note that this applies to people who have a similar job title, if I am paid twice as much as another sys-admin in a corporate environment I don’t expect to get more attention, but someone who has a more senior job title (or in the case of the UK has been to a more prestigious school or has a better accent) may get more attention.
Small companies are rarely in a position to be silly in this way. This doesn’t mean that the most highly paid person gets the most attention, it’s more a matter of making a logical case. Most of the small companies I have worked for have been run in a sensible manner, and my ideas have often received more attention than those of others because I have had a better technical background than my colleagues. However in some cases my suggestions have received less attention because I was receiving a higher pay rate. The reason is that I was being paid a rate that the company could not afford in the long-term and therefore the people who would work there in future years would have to maintain the systems in question which meant that their ability to do such maintenance was often considered to be more important than my ideas about the best way to design the system.
I have worked for a small company that had no financial pressure to do sensible things (they had some sweet deals going with major corporations which essentially gave them money for nothing). They had chaotic management which they could get away with because there were no immediate consequences for doing silly things (such as not forcing their clients to have a method of backing up servers that they installed).
I can’t claim that Don’s advice in this regard never applies, but my observations of situations where it didn’t apply lead me to believe that it’s applicable to some situations in limited areas and is not a general rule.
Don also refers to “a high number that you would quote to a client you didn’t want in order to get them to go away“. This is an issue that causes a lot of disagreement. One consultant I respect advises people to never make such quotes, if you don’t want a job then say that you are not available – one reason is that if a position is so bad that you want the potential client to go away then you don’t want to be tempted to reconsider if they agree to pay you a silly amount of money, another is that it may be considered ethically wrong to make an offer is not genuine. Another consultant I respect claims that his greatest career success was when he turned up to an interview in casual clothes, explained to the potential client that he would never wear a suit and demanded an excessive amount of money. The client agreed to such terms and he then went on to charge other clients similar amounts of money and continued to refuse to wear a suit.
I won’t claim that it’s wrong to demand excessive amounts of money to make an unwanted potential client go away and I will not rule out the possibility of doing so at some future time. But I think it should be noted that the practice is controversial and not referred to as something that anyone might do. It is something that I don’t recall doing at any previous time in my career (so I haven’t done it in a formal manner at least – I may have done so at the informal discussion phase and forgotten).
Please note that I encourage you to read my previous post with Don’s comment in it’s original context to avoid any risk of misinterpretation. The purpose of this post is not to disagree with Don (I agree with him almost all of the time) but to disagree with some very commonly held beliefs which Don represented in his comment.
The current method of carrying young children (less than 4-6 years old) in cars is to have a special car seat fitted in the back seat. This has several significant problems:
- It takes significant space in the back seat. The child seat is going to add at least 10cm to the length required in the back seat and often drives the purchase of larger cars (including SUV and 4WD vehicles that are known for being unsafe – especially for children). Having child passengers in a car is a great distraction for the driver, driving a large vehicle increases the difficulty in avoiding accidents – especially when parking.
- The seat belts of the rear seats are used as part of the mechanism of attaching the child seat to the car. Seat belts are designed to stretch in a crash. It’s recommended that after a crash all seat belts that were used to secure people or objects be replaced as they will have stretched. Seat-belts that don’t stretch will cause more serious injuries. It seems likely to me that a seat belt used to tightly secure a child seat for a long period of time will stretch without a collision. Therefore if an older child is seated where they (or another child) used to have a child-seat then they may be at greater risk in the case of a collision.
- Child seats should be fitted by specially trained experts if they are to be safe. The majority of seats are not correctly fitted and put children at needless risk (the cost of getting an expert to do the installation is small).
Some car companies are offering child “booster seats” that are an optional attachment to the rear seat (I first noticed this when reviewing the specs of the latest version of the car I drive – the VW Passat [1]). This is a good idea, but it doesn’t go far enough.
The best thing to do would be to provide a selection of back-seat assemblies as factory fitted options which have built-in baby and child seats. The combinations that would be most desired are:
- Standard car back-seat for three adults (or two adults for a small car).
- A regular seat (for an adult) at the road side of the car combined with a baby (backward facing) seat at the kerb side.
- A regular seat (for an adult) at the road side with a young child (forward facing) seat at the kerb side.
- A baby seat at the road side with a young child seat at the kerb side.
- Two young child seats.
It would be quite possible to have all five of these options available from the factory. Of course there are corner cases that this doesn’t cover such as twins or parents who have two children so close together that they need two baby seats. For those cases option 2 combined with one of the current off-the-shelf baby seats would do. The number of different supported options would need to be kept reasonably small to reduce manufacture cost and to allow a reasonable market for second-hand seats.
One thing to note is that it’s recommended that the first forward-facing seat a child uses is smaller than the later one. Having options for three different built-in baby/child seats (rear-facing and two sizes of forward-facing) would significantly expand the number of combinations (and thus the expense). I suspect that the safety benefits of having an ideal method of securing a forward-facing child seat would compensate for the disadvantage of having it be too large for the child when they are first placed in it.
Another possibility would be to replace the rear seat with a more solid bench with bolt holes for baby and child seats. Securing a child or baby seat to a hard surface with bolts would be a much less technically demanding task than using a seat belt (and thus could be done correctly without expert assistance). Child and baby seats would have to be redesigned for this (I suspect that the safety of them relies on being attached to a soft surface), but after that I expect that safety would improve. For this option the rear seat could bold on to a hard surface that’s suitable for attaching child/baby seats so it would simply be a matter of removing the rear seat and installing the child/baby seat(s). The most common car design in Australia includes a 60/40 split rear seat (meaning that if you have a large item to store in the boot/trunk then you can fold down 40% or 60% of the back of the rear seat to allow the luggage to extend into the passenger compartment). This split could be extended to allow removing the base of the rear seat for 60% or 40% to bolt on child/baby seats.
Once a car model had been designed for replacing the rear seat there would be other options available. For example replacing the rear seat with luggage storage space. While almost all cars allow folding down the backs of the rear seats to store extra luggage the option of removing seats that you don’t need to give even more space is not common at all (I’ve only seen it advertised as a feature in vehicles with 6 or more seats).
I expect that if this idea was implemented it would allow a small car such as a Toyota Corolla to give an equal or greater amount of usable space for children in the rear as a larger vehicle such as a Toyota Camry. While better options for luggage storage would allow people who don’t have children to use a small car while still being able to carry the luggage that they desire. This would allow considerable savings on car purchase prices and fuel use. I expect that a reduction in fuel use world-wide could be achieved by removing the pressure on parents to buy large cars!
The poor support for child seats in cars is really surprising. One of the features that could be introduced is both top and bottom mounts for such seats. There is apparently a standard for this, some (not all) cars support it, but most baby seats apparently don’t. So baby and child seats are secured at the top (to a hook that’s bolted securely to the car frame and which was designed specifically for the purpose) and at the bottom to the seat-belt which was never designed for such things.
It’s a pity that some of the money spent on supposedly protecting children from drugs couldn’t be spent on making cars safer for them. The government is in the best position to force car manufacturers to improve their safety features while parents are in the best position to teach children about the dangers of drugs.
In a comment on my post about apprentices [1] Don Marti pointed me to a blog post of his from 6 months ago where he mentioned a need for an apprentice [2]. I had read the post in question before but didn’t think about it when writing my previous post.
When I was about 17 I had my first article published in a computer magazine, it was a small magazine for a computer club and the article was merely a long email on the club BBS which someone decided to publish. The option of trying to make a career out of journalism occurred to me then as I had been published once without trying, and the quality of the magazines at the time indicated that anyone who wanted to write technical articles would face little competition. :-#
If someone as skillful as Don had been offering apprenticeships during school holidays when I was at that age I would have been very interested, but at the time there was too much cultural pressure (and too much pain invested) to make quitting school entirely an option.
I encourage other people who have the ability to take on an apprentice to blog about it. Please make sure to mention your approximate location and whether school-holidays work is OK.
I have just read a rant by Sean Middleditch about bad project management [1]. He describes his post as “personal, rather angsty, and especially whiny” but I think it’s useful and informative. He makes some interesting technical points about PHP programming (I wasn’t aware that there were so many ways of easily getting things wrong and having difficulty to get them right). But of course this isn’t all limited to PHP, the web site WorseThanFailure.com has anecdotes about mistakes of similar calibre being implemented in every language imaginable.
Sean is apparently considering leaving the computer industry after having numerous bad experiences of having highly paid people mess up projects while he gets paid a lot less to try and fix the worst of the bugs and get the systems working in production. I understand what it’s like, I have occasionally idly contemplated leaving the industry after bad projects. However the fun of working on free software combined with the amounts of money that I can earn in the computer industry made me quickly abandon such ideas.
His stories in some ways resemble my experiences in working as a contractor, most of my contracts have been profoundly weird for various reasons (I’ll use the WTF [2] category of this blog to document some of them). I had two theories as to why I ended up in so many strange contracts, one was that I was in some sort of Twilight Zone and the other was that taking contracts based on the amount of money offered puts you at high risk of being employed by people who have no financial pressure to do things in a sensible manner.
My advice to anyone in such a situation is to try and find a contract position paying an unreasonable amount of money. Getting more than $80 an hour (the rate Sean cites as being paid to the idiots who cause problems) is going to be difficult, but getting $50 or $60 an hour is much easier to achieve and should be enough to alleviate the pain of working on doomed projects.
A recent news article has Doris Lessing (a Nobel prize winner for literature) claiming that the net has “created a world where people know nothing” [1].
However the Internet is a great tool for learning for people who choose to use it in that way, for example I have learned many interesting things from reading Wikipedia and following the links which I probably wouldn’t have learned in any other way. Criticising the Net for the lack of reading by the population makes just as much sense as criticising newspapers. She gives an example of a North London school where the library was under-utilised and compares it to schools in Africa where students beg for books and claims that the Net is at fault. But you could just as easily blame newspapers as Britain has some of the worst examples of tabloid journalism in the English language – of course Britain also has some really high quality papers and anyone can choose which ones to read. I think that when children don’t have much interest in reading it’s more sensible to criticise the education system.
The article is not that great either, one significant flaw is referring to Elton John as “another creative type“. No, Elton is a formerly creative type who’s afraid that the pension he expected from his back catalogue is threatened. Ex-artists who complain about the Net merely demonstrate that for them it’s not about the music. The Wikipedia article about Elton John [2] documents his career and you can see that since the late 80’s it’s been steadily going downhill.
To create literature you must read it – which doesn’t mean being close to old-fashioned libraries (as Doris claims). Currently I am trying to write science fiction, largely inspired by Cory Doctorow [3] and www.365tomorrows.com/. One good thing about the Internet is that there is a reasonably level playing field that everyone can compete on. Bloggers compete for readers using all forms of writing – including literature.
The speech has more information about Zimbabwe [4] and the difficulties faced by people there who want to learn. One thing that has the potential to improve the situation there is the One Laptop Per Child [5] project. Such a laptop costs about the same amount as 20 novels (based on US prices) or 5 text books but can be used to store many more books.
Christmas is billed as a family occasion and a huge amount of advertising money is spent convincing people that they need to have big expensive family events. This is good for the advertisers but not good for people who have no family to meet up with (orphans, people who live in different countries to their families, and people who don’t get along with their relatives).
If any of your friends don’t have an event planned for Christmas day then it’s a good idea to invite them to your family party if possible. When I was younger there were two occasions when friends who didn’t have a possibility of attending a party with their own family attended a Christmas party with my family. Unfortunately I’m not in a position to make such an offer this year, but I encourage everyone who knows of someone with no plans to consider the possibility of inviting them to a party.
Another possibility is that Linux people who have no option of a family party could arrange a Linux community Christmas party.
David writes about the concept of having a central resource for arranging meetings of Debian Developers [1] (or other targetted special interest groups).
It seems that the best way to implement this is via a Wiki. The main page would have links to one page per country, and then the residents of that country could create pages for each state/province/city/whatever. Each page would then have information on mailing lists, web pages of local organisations, etc.
To get this started all we need is someone with a public wiki to create a top level page and invite submissions from others. Is anyone interested in doing this?
When I worked for Red Hat I joined AISA [1] (the Australian Information Security Association – formerly known as ISIG). Red Hat marketting paid for my membership so it was a good deal, I went to meetings (which often had free drinks), said good things about Red Hat security, and it cost me nothing.
I was recently asked why I chose not to renew my membership, I didn’t have time to give a full answer so I’ll blog it now.
AISA offers discounts on some conferences, books, and training related to computer security, if you plan to purchase such things then they do offer good deals. However I have little time to attend conferences at the moment, not enough time to read all the free Internet resources related to computer security, and feel no need to pay for such training. If at any time I plan to attend a conference where the discount for AISA members is equal or greater than the AISA membership fee then I can easily re-join.
AISA membership seems largely to consist of managers and consultants not technical people or people doing R&D type work. This isn’t a bad thing if you are a manager or consultant, but when attending AISA meetings I don’t meet the type of people I meet at events such as SecureCon [2], Linux Conf Au [3], RuxCon [4], and the SE Linux Symposium [5] (which I think is not going to be held again for a while). Meetings of my local LUG [6] typically have more people doing serious technical work related to computer security than the AISA meetings I’ve attended.
The AISA code of Ethics has as it’s second criteria “I will comply with all relevant laws“. Some laws can not be obeyed by decent people (study some German or Russian history or what is happening in China right now for examples). Many other laws should not be obeyed. Many countries (including Australia) have enacted many laws which should not be obeyed in the name of the “war on terror“.
A final thing that irked me about AISA is their professional membership system (click on this link and download the AISA_Professional_Membership_Requirements_Nov_2006 document for details). It seems that I don’t qualify because I don’t have one of the listed certifications, and a public credit on the NSA web site [7] doesn’t count (yes, I asked about this). I’m not overly worried about this, I figure that any clique that won’t accept me also won’t accept a significant portion of the people that I want to associate with – so we can hang out elsewhere. I don’t recall there being any great benefit to professional membership apart from the possibility of adding it to your business card if you are so inclined (I don’t recall ever putting B.Sc [8] on a business card and don’t plan on adding anything less).
There are some real benefits to AISA membership, but not for me.
A common feature in blog software is a Blogroll, this is a list of links to blogs which are associated in some way with the blog in question – most commonly it’s a list of blogs run by friends of the blogger in question.
Now in the case of friends with very similar interests (IE same religious and political beliefs, sexual preferences, hobbies, etc) this wouldn’t cause a problem. In the case of commercial blogs it also will work well (EG Google runs a large number of blogs which contain links to all the rest – they may not interest all readers but should be expected not to offend any).
In the case of personal blogs where people don’t always have the same interests there is scope for problems. A link to the main page of a blog is an unconditional recommendation for the blog. There are not many of my friends who I share that much in common with that I would be prepared to give such a recommendation for a frank personal blog, and for those few I am unwilling to do so as it generates social pressure to include others. Some of my friends who didn’t get listed in my blogroll would probably get offended, even though it’s only the occasional post that I strongly disagree with which would make me refrain from such a listing.
I appreciate it when people add me to their blogroll, but don’t have any expectation that the listing will remain (I’m not going to get offended if someone changes their criteria for listing and removes my entry). But I consider it an equal compliment when someone cites one of my blog posts as a reference and recommends that other people read it. Citing an individual post has the advantage (for the person citing the post) they are specifically not recommending my entire blog. For example if you recommend one of my posts about Linux and one of your readers goes further into my site and is offended by my posts about politics then it’s not your issue. Tim Berners-Lee made an interesting point [1] “so readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don’t just hit the back button once, they hit it twice“. I know that some people who would be interested in the technical Linux issues I write about don’t read my blog because they are offended by my political beliefs, I am not concerned about this – but I don’t expect that everyone who chooses to link to me will necessarily want to make the same trade-off.
When citing individual posts it’s possible to strongly agree with one post and strongly disagree with another by the same author.
Probably the best way of acknowledging your friends via blogging (if you choose to do so) would be to make an occasional links post which contains short positive recommendations to the best posts your friends wrote. If every month or two someone writes a links post (post which has little content, merely recommendations for other posts) which references your posts then you know that they like you (and you get a Technorati.com boost), so a blogroll entry hardly seems necessary. An additional benefit for giving such direct credit is that the person receiving the links will know what you consider to be their best work which will help them in their future writing.
I believe that adding this feature to common blogging software was a mistake. The small number of people who actually need this (such as Google) can create it via a HTML widget (IE writing raw HTML for the page – it’s really easy to do) and the rest of the population would be better off without it.
The site http://maxfeed.ath.cx/ is copying the entire Planet Debian feed for the purpose of splogging. I’ve sent one DMCA take-down notice for one of my pages (hopefully they will go through and remove all pages that were illegally copied from my feed). Other people who have non-commercial use licenses for their blog feeds may want to do the same.
Would it be possible to have the entire Debian feed licensed in such a way such that one person could request that the Planet Debian feed not be used for such things?
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