ropz
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
50
Submissions
35
Member since
Jan 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
My father is a retired South Wales steelworker - he worked in the Hot Mill, which is where you put slabs of steel in, and take huge coils of hot rolled steel out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_%28metalworking%29). The building is half a mile long, and the thickness of the steel slab is gradually reduced as it passes through dozens of rolling stations - pairs of rollers (or rolls as they're called).
To get the best product quality, it's important to monitor the shape of the rolling surface of each roll. If they distort out of tolerance, they have to be taken offline and machined to a new finish - something that would stop production for hours.
My father told me of the time when they bought an expensive new computerised lathe to reduce the time it takes to fix up the rolls - this was in the 1980s when a PC on a production line was still a thing of wonder. For a while, everything worked as planned. Then, for some reason, the quality of the reconditioned rolls dropped drastically. Despite the fact that the PC dump showed that the rolls had perfect surfaces and profiles, production defects skyrocketed and it was discovered that the reconditioned rolls were to blame.
To cut an even longer story short - they eventually discovered that the lathe operator had taught himself how to edit the PC logs (in hex!) to make the results look good, without having to get down and actually do the work.
Comment · 12 years ago
Is this some kind of RHEL marketing thing? Help me out here, I'm rather lost.
Comment · 12 years ago
Nope, I don't work there.
Suggest you ask them :)
Comment · 12 years ago
These people:
produce a compiler, tools etc that run the language of SAS.
(disclaimer: I interviewed there last year)
Comment · 12 years ago
"Censorship is the mother of metaphor" - Borges
Comment · 12 years ago
I think that it's terrific but does a disservice to Illustrator. It's terrific because you've built it - and what's there, works, wonderfully - but does a disservice to Illustrator because the devil is in the million details that Illustrator has already implemented. But I know you want help to make and iron out those details, so really well done!
Comment · 12 years ago
What a bunch of spoiled, whining brats! Sure, you can only code for 4-6 hours a day, but why not honor your contract by spending that other 2 hours mentoring less senior people, trying to understand your employer's business goals, and generally trying to do your best to move your company ahead. Sheesh. By the way, the sheer arrogance of the question "How do you tell managers that having good developers is a privilege?" beggars belief. I believe that as a programmer, it's your duty to spend some time doing stuff your manager didn't know he needed to ask you to do, rather than running personal errands.
Comment · 13 years ago
Yeah, you're right, but I'm stubborn. I won't move to where the work is - I have a family. I'm much much more productive if I'm actually interested in what the client is doing (... and that's hard to figure out) and I'm not particularly bothered about making top dollar - mid-dollar is OK by me.YMMV.
Comment · 13 years ago
There is a market in the UK for good technical writers. It's not as sexy as development (whoever heard of a technical writer making the cut as a YC founder?) but it pays the bills. My own problem is that around 10 years ago, I veered off into business development and sales, and have been struggling to get back into the technical side of things ever since. I was OK at bizdev and sales, but I worked for fantasists unfortunately and it's left me with a bad taste.
Where do I get contracts from? The usual suspects - jobserve, networking, and various other places. I think it's probably worth pointing out that having had a well-completed LinkedIn profile for over 10 years, it's never brought me anything.
Edit: drop me a line - happy to help, heck, this might be the beginning of a technical writing dynasty! ropley at gmail dot com.
Comment · 13 years ago
In the UK, my lowest rate is equivalent to $75 an hour. I can read and write code, but most of my work is documentation related. I, too, like to tinker around with my own projects, but tend to do that between gigs. I'd be delighted if I could work for 30 hours a week and spend the rest on my own projects.
Comment · 13 years ago
"Tapjoy is a mobile advertising and monetization platform whose unique Mobile Value Exchange model allows users to select personalized advertisements with which to engage for virtual rewards ... blah blah blah."
Sounds like shit.
Comment · 13 years ago
Marketing, it seems, is all about spamming HN with ads for a book about marketing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersfield,_Hampshire.
Never met him, but I think he's on record as describing those roles as ... <Googles> ... "Fairytale rubbish".