November 30, 2016 at 9:53 pm
How quickly we forget how The Media participated in torpedoing John Kerry (SWIFT Boat anyone).
The Media is in it for the lulz. Granted, a different set of lulz than Breitbart, et al, but not all that different. They want the eyeballs and clicks in the end.
Like doing IT for lawyers. Lawyers don't care, or even perhaps want you to not be so good at your work, because it may reduce their billables because you showed the client that you could do the proposed work in 1 hr of googling vs 14 hrs of paralegal book searching.
December 1, 2016 at 4:58 am
jasona.work (11/30/2016)
...Professional programmers need an organizational body...
There are plenty of bodies but none are mandatory so none can have the powers like the bodies for the legal, medical or financial professions.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
December 1, 2016 at 6:01 am
Gary Varga (12/1/2016)
jasona.work (11/30/2016)
...Professional programmers need an organizational body...There are plenty of bodies but none are mandatory so none can have the powers like the bodies for the legal, medical or financial professions.
But, at least in todays' world, you're not going to find many self-taught lawyers, doctors, or accountants. Programmers (in fact most generalized IT jobs) can be self-taught. Maybe not well, but certainly well enough in many cases to get a foot in the door (heck, you want to get a foot in the door with Jeff Moden, just remember the ways to get the current date / time in SQL.)
Originally I was also thinking of pointing out that in two of those professions, you also hold someones' life in your hands, but on reflection, in many cases programmers do as well (as Steve pointed out (or maybe the original article,) Toyotas' unintended acceleration problem, air traffic control systems, medical equipment software, etc) so maybe it is time to look at getting an actual professional organization rolling.
But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization? The "image" of having a "board certified" programmer? Would that be worth the price premium over some self-taught 23 year old? Make it mandatory that companies hire people with the certification? That might work in some industries (anything having to do with government,) but programmers don't need to live where they work, so why not hire the guy in Japan or China or India or Canada or Lithuania instead, let them telework and pay them less than a certified person?
At least with a non-mandatory, nationally recognized organization, people would be more likely to keep such hiring "in country" if you will.
December 1, 2016 at 6:57 am
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...heck, you want to get a foot in the door with Jeff Moden, just remember the ways to get the current date / time in SQL...
:laugh:
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
December 1, 2016 at 7:01 am
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization?...
Until a body is mandatory in a region and has powers then there is no point hiring someone with a "piece of paper". Once you have a nationally recognised body then you get ratification of standards equivalences between these national bodies. Much like in the medical profession. It isn't perfect but it is worth it.
There is no point when it is optional.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
December 1, 2016 at 8:20 am
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization? The "image" of having a "board certified" programmer? Would that be worth the price premium over some self-taught 23 year old? Make it mandatory that companies hire people with the certification? That might work in some industries (anything having to do with government,) but programmers don't need to live where they work, so why not hire the guy in Japan or China or India or Canada or Lithuania instead, let them telework and pay them less than a certified person?
...
I beg to differ with you. As someone who works for the government I can say with confidence that department I work for will never allow anyone to work remotely. Therefore, you must live where you work for at least be able to get there by a very long daily commute. There are no exceptions.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
December 1, 2016 at 8:42 am
Rod at work (12/1/2016)
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization? The "image" of having a "board certified" programmer? Would that be worth the price premium over some self-taught 23 year old? Make it mandatory that companies hire people with the certification? That might work in some industries (anything having to do with government,) but programmers don't need to live where they work, so why not hire the guy in Japan or China or India or Canada or Lithuania instead, let them telework and pay them less than a certified person?
...
I beg to differ with you. As someone who works for the government I can say with confidence that department I work for will never allow anyone to work remotely. Therefore, you must live where you work for at least be able to get there by a very long daily commute. There are no exceptions.
Actually, you slightly misunderstood me. I did indicate that Gov jobs could make it mandatory to hire people from an organization, it'd be private industry that could say "yeah, we'll hire this guy in {wherever} and let them work remotely."
I too work in Gov, and while we can telework, it's only one day a week, the rest of the time you have to be in the office...
I think I probably could've worded that paragraph a bit (lot) better...
December 1, 2016 at 11:49 am
Gary Varga (12/1/2016)
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization?...Until a body is mandatory in a region and has powers then there is no point hiring someone with a "piece of paper". Once you have a nationally recognised body then you get ratification of standards equivalences between these national bodies. Much like in the medical profession. It isn't perfect but it is worth it.
There is no point when it is optional.
In certain lines of work, appropriate qualifications are mandatory. This tends to apply in some countries to engineers and technicians working in roles where both (a) serious errors are just plain unacceptable because the consequences can be catastrophic and (b) the legislation was passed before enough large companies bought enough legislators to block it because they realised that they would be hit very hard indeed if they caused disasters by continuing to employ the cheapest available labour whether qualified or not in roles where qualification was required. I don't know about the USA, but I'm pretty sure that in Europe formal engineering qualifications are required to work some things. For example in the UK installation of gas mains and connection of domestic or industrial premises and equipment to gas mains nust be carried out by qualified technicians and some parts of that work must be supervised by qualified engineers.
There's no reason to exclude certain lines of computing work from such regulation - maybe software for pressuirised water fusion reactors would be a good area to require properly qualified programmers? Or air traffic control systems?
Tom
December 1, 2016 at 12:17 pm
Other than something like pushing a deployment outside the formal change control process or granting someone elevated permissions, has anyone here ever been asked to compromise their ethics while on the job?
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 1, 2016 at 12:50 pm
Eric M Russell (12/1/2016)
Other than something like pushing a deployment outside the formal change control process or granting someone elevated permissions, has anyone here ever been asked to compromise their ethics while on the job?
Define ethics, I've worked at jobs that have knowingly had terrible and abusive customer management policies that I was in charge of supporting.
December 1, 2016 at 1:31 pm
ZZartin (12/1/2016)
Eric M Russell (12/1/2016)
Other than something like pushing a deployment outside the formal change control process or granting someone elevated permissions, has anyone here ever been asked to compromise their ethics while on the job?Define ethics, I've worked at jobs that have knowingly had terrible and abusive customer management policies that I was in charge of supporting.
If having a (mostly unintentional) reckless disregard for the feelings of others, especially others outside the IT group, is unethical, then I'll admit that as a demographic, it's something we in the IT industry can work on. However, there were some corporate scheme to extort money from client accounts or fake earnings reports, then IT would be kept out of the loop as much as possible. I'd say that IT professionals are more ethical than average when it comes to premeditated victim based crime.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 1, 2016 at 8:04 pm
Eric M Russell (12/1/2016)
Other than something like pushing a deployment outside the formal change control process or granting someone elevated permissions, has anyone here ever been asked to compromise their ethics while on the job?
Not sure whether the correct answer for me is yes or no, because it depends whether you are jusk asking if anyone has ever suggested it or asking whether my employer ever asked me to do it.
Anyway, no, I've never had an employer who asked me to do that.
But yes, I've had colleagues who indicated very clearly that they expected me to do that.
1) I was recruited by a small company by someone who was concerned that maybe people had been lying to senior management in order to conceal lies they had told to people dealing with customers, and wanted someone he could trust to look at it. He was right: some people didn't want to have to do the things they had told management and customers that they had done but hadn't even considered doing and wanted me to join in the pretence.
I told the CEO (and the guy who had recruited me) what was going on, and the things affecting customers (firm contractual obligations were being ignored while customers were told they were fulfilled) and/or affecting conformance to Data Protection regulations were very rapidly fixed the way I thought they should be fixed.
So I can see that sometimes senior management is ethical and the company is trying to be ethical, but some of the employees aren't.
2) I had a similar situation with software licensing. There are a lot of things one can redistribute freely provided one obtains a license, which costs nothing more than the effort of filling in the form and sending it off. there are also things that should be paid for but are not buried behind a pay-wall because The development group told the company they had the licences. Senior management didn't trust them (it was the same company as above) so asked me to ensure that we were properly covered. We weren't, and the developers were really pissed off when I pointed that out - they thought it was ethical to use stuff without conforming to the conditions for using it.
There was one licence where we should have been paying money, and where legally we now had to pay penalties as well as the licence fees to cover the period when we hadn't paid, so I sent them a note with my calculation of what we owed them including penalties and asked them to confirm the amount; their reply was that as we had offered to pay the penalty they didn't want it, they weren't interested in penalising people who had made an honest mistake and admitted it before they called them out, so we only owed the back fees, no penalties. If we'd carried on not paying until they spotted us, it would have cost us a bomb in penalties. There was another one where I wasn't sure whether we should be paying or not, so I contacted that company and explained wht we were doing and why I found it hard to work out whether we should be paying or not. After some discusion, they said that (a) thedocumenation had been intended to mean that people doing what we were should pay, but they recognised that the documentation was not clear so (b) we were granted a free license to carry on doing what we were doing and (c) they were looking at changing the documentation to make things clearer but it would be without retrospective effect so that we and other people in our position would not be affected and (d) the revision might actually make it clear that what we were doing was free would continue to be (they hadn't yet decided).
So it seems to me that being ethicalsometimes has its rewards.
3) Oddly enough, I found one company I couldn't reach an acceptable licence agreement with - Apple. While I found Apple's legal department helpful and clearly willing to find a sensible agreement I got the impression that Apple senior management didn't give a toss for ethics, they just wanted to be able to impose whatever conditions they liked - and I wasn't going to give them freedom to reverse engineer our code and do what they liked with what they found unless they gave me the same rights on their code; it was clear that the legal people at Apple thought that the right solution was that neither party should have such rights, but the Apple management they reported to thought their capital value endowed them with such a right, which the other party clearly couldn't possible have. That strikes me as executive management displaying grossly less ethical value than lawyers, which given the reputation of lawyers is somewhat remarkable.
Tom
December 2, 2016 at 8:31 am
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
Rod at work (12/1/2016)
jasona.work (12/1/2016)
...But, you still have to consider, WHY would an employer hire someone from such an organization? The "image" of having a "board certified" programmer? Would that be worth the price premium over some self-taught 23 year old? Make it mandatory that companies hire people with the certification? That might work in some industries (anything having to do with government,) but programmers don't need to live where they work, so why not hire the guy in Japan or China or India or Canada or Lithuania instead, let them telework and pay them less than a certified person?
...
I beg to differ with you. As someone who works for the government I can say with confidence that department I work for will never allow anyone to work remotely. Therefore, you must live where you work for at least be able to get there by a very long daily commute. There are no exceptions.
Actually, you slightly misunderstood me. I did indicate that Gov jobs could make it mandatory to hire people from an organization, it'd be private industry that could say "yeah, we'll hire this guy in {wherever} and let them work remotely."
I too work in Gov, and while we can telework, it's only one day a week, the rest of the time you have to be in the office...
I think I probably could've worded that paragraph a bit (lot) better...
I do apologize for having misinterpreted what you said. Thank you for clarifying. 🙂
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
December 2, 2016 at 2:42 pm
Eric M Russell (12/1/2016)
Other than something like pushing a deployment outside the formal change control process or granting someone elevated permissions, has anyone here ever been asked to compromise their ethics while on the job?
Does being pressured into not requesting that certain billing issues be fixed count? What if the directive came AFTER you ascertain that the billing error consistent favors the organization?
Or - letting some requirements go because it is cheaper to incur the fine after you get caught than to do what the law tells you to do?
How about being handed the source code from a commercial application and being asked to rip out the licensing code that is in it?
All three scenarios have happened in some form or another in my past.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
December 2, 2016 at 9:07 pm
Hmm... like rebuilding an accidentally dropped table or managing to recover horked data in prod while using elevated permissions there and not telling anyone I screwed it up in the first place? Oh, no. I haven't done that. No siree...
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