Category: rePosts

The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobsWhen I write about linchpins and people on a mission, I often hear from bosses who ask a variant of, “Any idea how I can find people like that for my business?”It’s unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from someone who isn’t trusted to create it.It’s unreasonable to find someone truly talented to switch to your organization when your organization is optimized to hire and keep people who merely want the next job.It’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll develop amazing people when you don’t give them room to change, grow and fail.And most of all, it’s unreasonable to think you’ll find great people if you’re spending the minimum amount of time (and money) necessary to find people who are merely good enough.Building an extraordinary organization takes guts. The guts to trust the team, to treat them with respect and to go to ridiculous lengths to find, keep and nurture people who care enough to make a difference.

Source: Seth’s Blog: The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs
 
You want awesome developers but give them an over manged crappy work environment? This is the Philippine Programming Context. Programmers need to say enough of this shit.

Before the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, most politicians kept their faith to themselves. In 1945, for example, President Harry Truman wrote: “I’m not very much impressed with men who publicly parade their religious beliefs.” After his election in 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower joined a Presbyterian church, but when he heard the minister was publicly boasting about his new member the general commanded, “You go and tell that goddam minister that if he gives out one more story about my religious faith I will not join his goddam church!” John F. Kennedy discussed his Catholicism only when forced to do so by critics during the 1960 presidential campaign. In a 1964 interview with the Baptist Standard, President Lyndon Johnson explained, “I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution.” Richard Nixon was famously a Quaker, but what he practiced can best be described as religious expediency—whatever worked politically. Gerald Ford called his religiosity “very personal” and wrote, “I am most reluctant to speak or write about it publicly.” Even the openly evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter prioritized his piety below that of most political issues.

Source: Religion Is Disappearing. That’s Great for Politics. – Michael Shermer – POLITICO Magazine

I couldn’t agree more.

It’s time for most of “Agile” and especially Scrum to die. These aren’t just bad ideas. They’re more dangerous than that, because there’s a generation of software engineers who are absorbing them without knowing any better. There are far too many young programmers being doomed to mediocrity by the idea that business-driven engineering and “user stories” are how things have always been done. This ought to be prevented; the future integrity of our industry may rely on it. “Agile” is a bucket of nonsense that

Source: Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible | Michael O. Church

How do we compare with other countries? In 1995 Thailand and India were “cleaner” than us, and China and Indonesia (the lowest scorer) were more corrupt. In 2000 we got overtaken by China, but at least we scored the same as India. Thailand was still higher than us. Only Indonesia was below us. In 2005 we barely kept pace. Vietnam came into the picture, and it was less corrupt than we were. Indonesia was still lower than us. By 2010, however, all these countrieswere considered cleaner than us. That was our nadir.But look what has happened in the past four years: Aside from being higher in rank than half of the countries on the list, we are at par with Thailand (never since 1995) and India, and are better off than China, Indonesia and Vietnam. I don’t know about you, but that gives me great comfort. It feels good to be in the upper half for once. The daang matuwid has taken root.There will be gnashing of teeth among the opposition, of course. But what can one do?And of course, let us not forget that our CPI is still only 38. We still have a lot of cleaning up to do.   But it is good to know that the combined efforts of government and civil society (who are monitoring and who are yelling when things go wrong) are finally gelling.

Source: Cause for celebration | Inquirer Opinion

There’s some really good news that gives us cause for celebration, and there’s also some bad news that gives us cause for concern. First, the good news: We have made some solid strides in our fight against corruption. While preparing for a talk at the Asian Development Bank, I looked at Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from when it first started doing this index in 1995, and traced it through to 2014, for the Philippines, and for comparator countries. Here’s what I found:Our Corruption Perception Index(Various Years)Year(1)     CPI Value(2)   Country Rank(3)     Percentile(4)1995        2.8          36th of 41        122000        2.8          69th of 90        232005        2.5          117th of 159            262010        2.4          134th of 178            252011        2.6          129th of 182            292012        34           105th of 174            402013        36           94th of 175             462014        38          85th of 175             51

Source: Cause for celebration | Inquirer Opinion

Unfortunately, this type of miscarriage of justice isn’t an isolated one-off case.According to researcher estimates, about 4.1% of death penalty convictions are erroneous. In other words, for every 100 people on death row, at least four people shouldn’t be there. And that’s not even looking at those wrongly convicted of smaller crimes with lesser penalties.Sadly, the people it usually happens to are those who can’t afford the most highly qualified defense attorneys and who can’t keep paying legal fees to appeal. And they’re mostly people of color. The National Exonerations Registry shows that as of 2015, 60% of exonerations after a wrongful conviction were for non-white defendants.

Source: 30 years on death row but you’re innocent. When you’re freed, the prosecutor comes to apologize.

To repeat: more than 62 per game. Perhaps players in every match could each wear 62 black armbands. Then again, that would probably contravene Fifa’s strict rules on what constitutes official kit, infringements of which it punishes ferociously. On infringements such as mass slave death, however, the evidence suggests it is more relaxed.

Source: How many slave deaths for the Qatar World Cup can Fifa put up with? | Football | The Guardian

In mathematics, a predicate is commonly understood to be a Boolean-valued function P: X? {true, false}, called the predicate on X. Informally, a predicate is a statement that may be true or false depending on the values of its variables. It can be thought of as an operator or function that returns a value that is either true or false. In java 8, Predicate a functional interface and can therefore be used as the assignment target for a lambda expression or method reference. So, where you think, you can use these true/false returning functions in day to day programming? I will say you can use them anywhere where you need to evaluate a condition on group/collection of similar objects such that evaluation can result either in true or false e.g. 1) Find all children borned after a particular date 2) Pizzas ordered a specific time 3) Employees greater than certain age and so on.. So Predicate seems to be interesting thing. Let’s go deeper. As I said, Predicate is functional interface. It mean we can pass lambda expressions wherever predicate is expected. For example one such method is filter() method from Stream interface.

Source: How to use Predicate in java 8 – HowToDoInJava