Oooh! I got aggregated. Thanks for the nice discussion
So you did!
Why you need a home lab to keep your job
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Why you need a home lab to keep your job
#42"Today, the lab costs £870 a month thanks to the presence of a pair of Dell EqualLogic arrays."
To paraphrase that fount of wisdom, the hippy from The Simpsons: Sounds like you're working for your lab. Simplify, man!
Re: Why you need a home lab to keep your job
#43The main problem with my rack is the noise - I live in a flat and there's nowhere but the living room to put it. I've seen a few noise cancelling designs around, but they're all too expensive. I wonder if I could build a simple noise cancellation system with an FX-LMS algorithm?
Does your experimentation require you work on blades and not on virtualized environment?
They're 1U and 2U servers on which I've installed ESXi. I love it - I can run a VM locally then transfer it across, then if I'm travelling I can chuck it onto VMWare Fusion on my laptop.
Re: Why you need a home lab to keep your job
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The comment to which I was replying stated: "At the 'rockstar' level, all learning is self directed." " In context , that quote sounds more nuanced. "Obviously neither statement is (completely) true. At the "rockstar" level, all learning is self directed. And rockstar employers expect and rely on that. But for everyone else I think it's reasonable that there be some level of support for education from employers, and…
> But then if we are to descend to that level of hairsplitting, your quote about other industries training programs doesn't really prove the point that something similar would work in software/programming, and is equally 'neither here nor there'. It's not hair splitting, it's the fundamental question of whether self-directed learning is necessary to achieve rockstar-level programming skills. This seems to be commonly…
plinkplonk already pointed it out, but I'll say it again: this fact is commonly assumed in the programming world because it is empirically true. If that's "brain damage" then you have a strange definition for that term. We observe facts ("at the rockstar level, all learning is self directed") and make hypotheses to support a theory ("self-directed learning is necessary to achieve rockstar-level programming skills"). If you want to assert a theory counter to that, then I'm sorry but it is you that needs to provide some evidence to support it.
And seriously: there is none. There are no "trained" rock stars out there that I've seen. Can you find just one? Someone who through diligent classwork or apprenticeship reached a top-tier position in their field? I've never seen it.
Re: Why you need a home lab to keep your job
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But then if we are to descend to that level of hairsplitting, your quote about other industries training programs doesn't really prove the point that something similar would work in software/programming, and is equally 'neither here nor there'. It's not hair splitting, it's the fundamental question of whether self-directed learning is necessary to achieve rockstar-level programming skills. This seems to be commonly…
plinkplonk already pointed it out, but I'll say it again: this fact is commonly assumed in the programming world because it is empirically true . If that's "brain damage" then you have a strange definition for that term. We observe facts ("at the rockstar level, all learning is self directed") and make hypotheses to support a theory ("self-directed learning is necessary to achieve rockstar-level programming skills").…
First, even if it's empirically true that there are no trained rockstars in the programming field (which is a point I'm not going to concede), that doesn't mean that "at the rockstar level all learning is self-directed." There is an obvious difference between "all the rockstars I can see are self-directed learners" and "self-directed learning is necessary to become a rockstar." Asserting otherwise is a basic failure of logical reasoning.
My theory is that programming isn't any different in this regard from other intellectually demanding fields except culturally. I think the assertion that it is different is the one that requires proof, or at least an explanation for the mechanism by which it might be different.
As for self-directed learning, I'll point to Dennis Ritchie as an example. He's arguably somewhere in the middle between self-taught and trained. On one hand he started at Bell Labs concurrent with/immediately after Harvard. On the other hand, UNIX was something of a side project. Compare him to his father, who was a scientist at Bell Labs working on switching theory, and received his training in the AT&T engineering machine. What's different about the two men? Why is Dennis's field not trainable but Alistair's field trainable? My assertion is that there is no difference except the fact that there was an established framework for training engineers but not really one for training programmers.
Re: Why you need a home lab to keep your job
#46Unless I've misunderstood this article, I think this is a bad idea. When working for a company your work should ideally stay at work. Come 5pm, if you're privliged enough to work a 9-5, your day should be done. This growing push for work to be extended into the family home really erodes the necessary work life distinction that allows for a happy life. Thats not to say you shouldn't have a lab at home to train yoursel…
For my personal situation, this is a good idea. My current job involves me writing code for robots. This sounded interesting to me, until I realized that I am working with some ancient software here - I'm talking .Net 1.1 on Windows 2000! Not to mention that writing software for robots isn't really all that challenging. If it weren't for my after-hours exploration of open-source technologies, my skill-set would be se…
I too write code for robots, and I wish I was dealing with code only 13 years old. Our entire codebase is ancient shell and Tcl.