David Cantrell wrote: > > Does he have a friend > > who had real trouble setting Samba up for some reason and now he's wary > > of it? > > If he values the advice of a random friend over the advice of the person > he pays good money to to know about these things, then he's an idiot.
No, actually I disagree, and it's an important point. I didn't say it was a random friend. My friends are less random than my employees. I employ people based on the best of a bunch of C.V.s that I manage to get within a short time period, minus those ruled out by salary restrictions, minus those that don't want the position in the end, and filtered according to one or maybe two hour long interviews and if I'm lucky some examples of past work. My friends on the other hand may be people I've worked with closely for years, selected out of all the many people I've ever worked with. Or people whose opinions I've read on mailing lists for years. Like many of us I tend to change jobs every 1-2 years, so I'd never know my employees longer than that, while I've known some of my technically minded friends for 5 years or more. <true> I have two employees who work for me. They are both good(ish) Java programmers but have limited knowledge of other areas of computing. One of them tells me he wants to use some commercial bug tracking tool that he used in his last job. It's expensive and proprietary (PVCS tracker) but he really wants it. My friends tell me they've got by fine with cheap and chearful bits of web based freeware, or maybe bugzilla when things get hairy. I overule him and tell him we'll use some PHP based thing I installed in my lunch break (called Mantis, it's on sourceforge somewhere). Why should I do this? He's the developer who has to use it, right? I should just give him what he recommends, after all he says it's good and I've never even used it. Well, my job as manager is not to do whatever my programmers say. I have to think about budget, I have awareness of our future staffing requirements, which make the license fee look a lot worse down the line. In fact, I had a political aim too - I recognised this employee was rather over fond of commercial software, and I wanted to show him that sometimes free stuff can do the job - and it's much better to show than to tell. Plus, it wouldn't kill him to learn a bit of PHP, if nothing else so he can compare it to Java. Plus, if I'm wrong, it's not really a big deal to fix down the line, it's a good chance for me to try something out. In fact, I was also quite interested to see how he would react to being overuled by me. The point is, I did not evaluate this based purely on "What is the best (value for money) bug tracker around". I had lots of other things on the agenda. And I had a lot of faith in friends who assured me that for my size projects you really don't need super duper feature rich wizzo bug tracking tools. </true> Business people place a huge amount of store in the opinions of their friends and contacts. Unless they have a good relationship with their employees, they may place considerably less store in their opinions. If you want your boss to listen to you, be nice to him. Yes, that's politics, but it's a feature of human nature so we have to deal with it. > > I've met a lot of resistance to Perl based on 'bad past experiences'. We > > all know these were usually caused by bad programmers and stupid > > timescales. But your bad experience counts for a lot more than someone > > else's good experience, which is why the 'Perl success stories' are not > > alway so convincing. > > That's OK then. Soon *everyone* will have been burnt by Java and come > flocking back :-) Actually I think that's true. Already Java is becoming the new VB. Want a job in computing? Can't do anything? Read a book on Java and tell them you are a programmer. As the quantity Matt Wright style Java and JSP increases (and I've seen plenty already) it will lose much of its appeal. I think Java will soon become what C is now. Neither good nor bad, still widely used, but somehow a bit old and tired, OK for some big old J2EE project left over from 2002 but not really the best thing to be doing a new project in. > One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't > -- Marge Simpson Everyone has better sigs than me. -- Jonathan Peterson Technical Manager, Unified Ltd, +44 (0)20 7383 6092 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
