Sunday, August 10, 2008

Top 10 Signs You've Become Indispensable (and Are Therefore About to Be Fired)

A wise man once told me that when someone becomes indispensable the very best thing you can do is get rid of them as soon as possible. I've always thought that was sage advice. I've tried to keep that in mind. So I'm always keeping an eye out for habits that "indispensable" coders have. These are the guys I want eliminated, even if one of those guys is me.

What it comes down to is whether or not one guy on the team can hold an entire project hostage. No company can reasonably afford to be in that position. I certainly wouldn't want to put a company in that position. It's about risk, and managing that risk, and doing so proactively.

So, without further adieu, the Top 10 Signs You've Become Indispensable (and Are Therefore About to Be Fired):

  1. You're the only one who can work on the particular tasks assigned to you, because you're the only one who understands them.
  2. You believe in or practice job security through code obscurity.
  3. You don't communicate, and hoard valuable information that other members of the team need to get their jobs done.
  4. You make technology decisions, implement them, and expect everyone to follow suit, whether they understand them or not.
  5. You frequently make vast, sweeping changes to the underlying architecture of the system, without first discussing those changes or their impact with others on the team.
  6. You don't really understand object oriented analysis and design, but you act like you do.
  7. You resist any suggestions for better, proven ways to implement solutions, simply because someone tried it that way before and it left a bad taste in your mouth.
  8. You use source code control like a backup device, rather than a version control system.
  9. When designing a system, your first thought is the code or data model and not the problem domain.
  10. You have no interest in being a member of the team, and would rather do it your way all the time.

(This is, of course, completely unscientific and totally subjective. Take it or leave it.)

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Why Censor the Internet (Language Warning)

A poster on Digg offered this eloquent response to the article, Internet Censorship is On it's Way. The i-Patriot Act:

WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY CONCERNED ABOUT THE FUCKING INTERNET?!?!

I mean seriously there are much bigger issues in the whole fucking world then the internet. We cannot be in our on privacy doing our own thing without the people watching over us. I mean come on its such bullshit. Soon it will be like the movie Demolition Man and we will get fined when we fucking curse at home! We are slowly creeping into a government who has complete control over everything we do.

Censor the internet... Give me a fucking break.

My apologies for the language, but this impassioned question deserves an equally impassioned answer. Why, indeed?

In a fascist state, the last thing you want is for people to be able to express themselves and speak out against the government. It's all about control. And people who can speak freely can't be controlled. Neither can those who listen to those who speak freely.

Anyone who's been raptly paying attention to what's been going on in our country (particularly over the last 8 years or so) knows that we've been becoming a fascist state. But it's by our own choosing. We elected these people to power, either by choice or by sheer apathy. We refused to entertain the notion of deviating from a two party system, and we allowed them to strip us of our rights and freedoms. We did not cry out in protest when the Patriot Act was put into place; rather, many of us celebrated it, embracing it as a necessary evil in order to hunt down the vile terrorists who had dared to attack us on our own soil.

Thus, we surrendered our rights, our freedoms, our liberties in order to gain a false sense of security and chase after demons that never really existed. And from that day forward our government, whom we put into power and have kept in power, have continued to play upon our fears in order to further strip us of any vestige of the Constitutional rights we had before. They can do what they want, when they want, to whomever they want, and there is little that any of us can do about it.

But we chose this path. We elected it. Sixty percent of the population failed to vote in the last presidential election. It was far more important to watch reality television than it was to secure a meaningful future for our nation, and we allowed the same criminals to maintain their stranglehold on what was once a powerful, respectable democracy. But those same people maintain that their government fails them, that they have no rights, that the economy is in the toilet, that we're sending our troops to senseless deaths overseas in a war we should never have been involved in, and a myriad of other complaints. When asked, though, they'll tell you that they didn't vote because their vote didn't count. Of course it didn't. No uncast vote counts.

But we've learned nothing. Even now we entertain the absurd notion of effecting change by maintaining the status quo. We're going to elect either Obama or McCain. Yet another pawn from a two-party system. Neither will be able to revolutionize the country and restore what it was. Neither will break the back of the military industrial complex. Neither will do what must be done to fix what must be fixed.

That responsibility rests with you and me. Right here. Right now. Every day. But it means getting off our asses, turning off our televisions, and getting involved. We must DEMAND change, DEMAND our rights, and DEMAND the restoration of the Constitution.

You see? A fascist would never want words like these uttered on any medium. And the Internet makes it all too easy to make such statements in a forum where hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can read it.