From Isaacson's excellent biography of Jobs, the one thing I gathered is that he had taste (turtlenecks and baggy jeans notwithstanding... ok, haven't seen the yacht either). He bullied a whole company into satisfying his exquisite taste, and the results are still outstanding. I'll take them even at a small price premium.
That does not justify any boss being a jerk, but if you have the taste and the power to bully a lot of people to satisfy that taste, you'll likely produce something tasty.
Because millions of others have a much more desperate need for some love and some feeling of self worth. Even a surrogate one. There's no insulin for that...
Of course, I assume nobody wants Ms. Ortiz to spin into deep guilt-driven depression for doing what she believed was right. This kind of emotional blackmail is probably not helping anyone or anything, at least not this soon after the events when emotions are still looming high and, more importantly, nobody actually understands the exact circumstances of a person's... well... personal predicament that lead to certain actions....
> these kinds of post (and we seem to get a lot) usually strike me as "a list of good things about me" or "why everyone should be like me".
Yep... That's why the mysteriously named skill, "spiritual" may actually be quite important and why the OP should work on it a bit more. Beginners' minds don't go around dispensing advice. I think that touches lightly on the "social" as well...
This is 'backward' until you meet a bunch of doctors who claim to cure cancer using cucumber juice and find that they all have PhDs and MDs from the University of Tantric Study and Life Exploration, Middlesex Town Massahoma. People in trouble DO fall for this bs.
I find it very hard to believe anyone can possibly be confused here.
Coursera is not a university, doesn't look or pretend to be a university. It doesn't grant PhDs, MDs, or indeed anything beyond a simple certificate that isn't even valid as college credit. They go to some length on every single course page to explain this. Some courses don't even give you a certificate. The website doesn't talk about certification it talks about "Advance your knowledge and career". There is a big tab that says "Universities" so I can't see how you could think Coursera was a university.
That's optimistic. There are plenty of quacks out there who claim to cure cancer using things like "black salve," which regularly causes permanent disfigurement and sometimes death. (Googlers beware.)
But people who are desperate and gullible don't check references. The scammer can just as easily claim to have an MD they never earned from a legitimate school, or an MD from a school that doesn't exist, or one that has never received approval to teach in any particular state.
School accreditation really isn't an effective solution to the problem you pose.
How much would you care to bet that the University of Tantric Study and Life Exploration, Middlesex Town Massahoma, would have all of the approvals necessary?
Yeah, not a big waterfall (or agile, or any other pyramid scheme) fan myself, but this kind of bullshit did get a man on the Moon and then a mixture of them got some kit on Mars, and generally they are doing OK.
Some of them can actually scan you or your friend's internal organs to see if they're alright too - that's not going to be php on a lamp stack. I'm guessing they are probably not moving fast and breaking things either. They may be taking it easy with your friends internal organs, just so they don't get sued by the growing legal community on HN.
There's also all that bizarre software that somehow delivers you to the airport of your choice. I wonder how that happens - do they have their Agile/Waterfall/Kanban/Nonsense boards on their office walls in order to get you there?
> Yeah, not a big waterfall (or agile, or any other pyramid scheme) fan myself, but this kind of bullshit did get a man on the Moon...
Agreed on the pyramid scheme. But the challenges listed strike me as mostly hardware, physics, and non-software science/engineering related. A Waterfall-like process is probably a good fit here since failure is far more costly than project budget/time overruns. Also, didn't the Apollo guidance computer suffer several failures? ;)
To me, software looks like the least-difficult part of the space program. Doesn't mean it's easy. But let's not overstate its importance.
Also, most developers aren't working on mission-critical stuff. I think it's fair to apply the 80/20 rule here.
> Some of them can actually scan you or your friend's internal organs to see if they're alright too - that's not going to be php on a lamp stack. I'm guessing they are probably not moving fast and breaking things either.
Funny you should bring up medical equipment. Recently, a laser caught fire inside a friend-of-a-friend during a bronchoscopy. Had to put him in an induced coma (Happy ending: he pulled through).
Just out of curiosity, does anyone here think there's anything inherit to either mainstream process (Agile, Waterfall) that puts direct controls in place to prevent complexity? Both talk about "Managing complexity" but very little on mitigating complexity. To me and prevention and elimination complexity is something our profession still struggles with.
That does not justify any boss being a jerk, but if you have the taste and the power to bully a lot of people to satisfy that taste, you'll likely produce something tasty.