Send IT workers to jail

[sasguru]

What do you care Dodgy? I thought your business model was body shopping immigrants on work permits at a huge margin?

They're all buggering back now that the economy is tanking. Dodgy will have to go upmarket and hire some real pros

[DodgyAgent]

They're all buggering back now that the economy is tanking. Dodgy will have to go upmarket and hire some real pros

I am not sure "upmarket" is the word I would use.

[HairyArsedBloke]

Now that I am a manager I just need to strategise and guide. This leaves some time to share my wisdom with CUK, for free.

Not a lot of opportunity to arbitrage between market price and fair value there.

[sasguru]

Not a lot of opportunity to arbitrage between market price and fair value there.

[HairyArsedBloke]

Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.

[Hemingfield]

If you went back a hundred years and tried to explain to the man on the street what you did you'd be getting tied to a pole in the middle of a bonfire before you could start your second sentance.

(Ironically job-pimps would probably be viewed as flesh peddlers and get let off!)

What IT does is create something from nothing, or take something and re-engineer it to do something else. You wouldn't throw Derren Brown in gaol for being rubbish. You just wouldn't hire him again.

Where does the responsilbilty lie? The gun maker or the person who fires it?

Hem

[HairyArsedBloke]

If you went back a hundred years and tried to explain to the man on the street what you did you'd be getting tied to a pole in the middle of a bonfire before you could start your second sentance.

Utter rubbish. In 1908 (a hundred years ago) the objectives of IT would be understandable even if the technology wasn’t there. Even two hundred or more going right back to the earliest forms of writing. Once there was a form of symbolic representation of knowledge then the concept of an engine that could manipulate those symbols was inevitable and most people would be able to grasp the idea.

However, even today, explaining how it all works would be lost on most people.

[Hemingfield]

I think you are refering to the secular elite of the time who were exhorbitantly few in numbers and had control over how history remembers them. The 'Establishment' didn't just appear over-night.

The man on the street I referred to is the 98% of the rest of the population whose main axis in life were turnips. After a 23 1/2 hour graft at' mill, if you'd stopped them on their trudge through fields back to their hovel and begin info dumping the finer qualities of SAS or the elegance of ANSI-92 SQL constraints then, I am afraid my friend, welcome to charred ember city.

You just don't know, man. You weren't there.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

I think you are refering to the secular elite of the time who were exhorbitantly few in numbers and had control over how history remembers them. The 'Establishment' didn't just appear over-night.

The man on the street I referred to is the 98% of the rest of the population whose main axis in life were turnips. After a 23 1/2 hour graft at' mill, if you'd stopped them on their trudge through fields back to their hovel and begin info dumping the finer qualities of SAS or the elegance of ANSI-92 SQL constraints then, I am afraid my friend, welcome to charred ember city.

You just don't know, man. You weren't there.

I reckon this is true and it's the argument I advanced last time a racist bigot of an American was having a go at me about how "I" had persecuted his ancestors in the potato famine. Whilst the Irish were starving, my English ancestors were indeed illiterate labourers. They didn't have the vote and therefore it's really hard to see how they could have done anything about the potato famine if they'd even known about it which is highly unlikely.

Returning to this point - they would probably have been very suspicious of me if I was able to visit them and show (or try and explain) them my work, although a small number of people around at the time may have been able to understand it.

[tim123]

Yet there is no requirement for safety critical software to be written by a suitably qualified, experienced and certified software engineer.
Aircraft systems, rail signalling systems and hospital equipment have all been produced using least cost rather than best qualified.

Sorry, you are just plain wrong here.

There are requirements that this type of software is developed "properly" by qualified people.

Just because some fly-by-night companies have managed to get away with not doing it properly, doesn't mean that they wouldn't be up before the beak if it had killed someone.

tim