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There is an interview with Joel Spolsky on GeekWire which reports that companies should Just shut up and let your devs concentrate:
If you want to attract and keep developers, don't emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.
That's the view of Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow, a popular Q&A site for programmers, who spoke this morning at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.
"Facebook's campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers," Spolsky said in an interview with GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. "But developers don't want to overhear conversations. That's ideal for a trading floor, but developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don't want to work there."
[Continues...]
Spolsky, who in 2011 created project-management software Trello, said the "Joel Test" that he created 16 years ago is still a valid way for developers to evaluate prospective employers. It's a list of 12 yes-no questions, with one point given for every "yes" answer:
- Do you use source control?
- Can you make a build in one step?
- Do you make daily builds?
- Do you have a bug database?
- Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
- Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
- Do you have a spec?
- Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
- Do you use the best tools money can buy?
- Do you have testers?
- Do new candidates write code during their interview?
- Do you do hallway usability testing?
"The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time," Spolsky said when he created the test. He said that remains true today.
How well does your organization support its developers? If new or better equipment would improve your productivity, is it made available to you? How is your work environment? How well does your organization score on the 12-point "Joel Test"? What is the biggest thing blocking your company from improving?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 10 2016, @08:03PM
Let's eliminate physical security by obscurity, wow!. You know I always wondered how that dude Elliot found the time to research the insider details of public utilities in order to hack everything so easily. Now it's so clear. Mr Robot lives in the fantasy world you describe where police departments and prisons and phone companies just open source everything.
I'm gonna go post my backup schedule and the locations of all my backups on my blog now. Surely nobody would want to destroy all copies of my backups at once. So the locations of my backups don't need to be secret.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @11:05PM
What, the floor plans of the building and such that they used to get inside and plant their Pi? Architectural diagrams aren't code, so "open source" doesn't really apply there. Also that information is often public already here in the real world. And even if it wasn't public, thousands of people would still have had access to it. If you consider "they'd have to bribe a janitor" to be good security, you're gonna have some bad surprises coming...
Also not code, so "open source" doesn't really apply. It's not "security through obscurity" to keep your encryption keys secret either. The point isn't that EVERYTHING must be open, the point is that the secrets should be as small as possible. A secret password with a public algorithm almost always works better than a secret password with a secret algorithm, because you're only as secure as the weakest link, so you probably want to choose an algorithm that's been researched for flaws for decades rather than something you just threw together overnight.
And if your backups get destroyed, that really isn't a security issue anyway, that's a data integrity or accessibility issue. It would actually *improve* the security of that data -- we still haven't managed to crack the 'big freakin' bonfire' method of encryption.
So you aren't arguing for security through obscurity, you're arguing for accessibility through obscurity. Which might be a valid tactic actually, although I'm having trouble coming up with any examples that wouldn't be fairly trivial to defeat or cause more harm than good (ie, you can't take out a website by cutting a wire if you don't know which wires to cut...but that seems rather unlikely to begin with compared to maintenance cutting the wrong wires because the damn things aren't labeled clearly!)