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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 23 2017, @11:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-know-what-you-make dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

This week the British papers revelled in news about how much the BBC's on-air stars get paid, though the salaries of their counterparts in commercial TV remain under wraps. In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid - and it rarely causes problems.

In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact.

"It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG.

"At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40669239


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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:34AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:34AM (#543541)

    Government work. If you haven't done it, you don't know what you're missing.

    Bureaucratic rules lawyers passing the buck indefinitely? Disconnection between performance and pay removing any motivation to do quality work? Chronic backstabbers trying to get everyone fired as soon as contractually possible?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday July 24 2017, @02:37AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Monday July 24 2017, @02:37AM (#543560)

    Pretty much. When I came onto the project I guessed 6 months start to finish. We spent a year just doing paperwork. No code, just pseudocode. They actually sent a room full of people from Alexandria to San Diego for a week to review our docs. There was not a single technical comment. It was all "section 3.1.7.2 should start section 3.1.8". Keep in mind we had a team of 6, all 6 of us were in that room with I think 8 of them for a week.

    They sent a whole team of people to San Diego for what was essentially a week's vacation.

    Best part? I talk to hardware. I was designing for a Code Warrior DSP card. A card I was allowed to see in a file cabinet, but not in a live system. This is important, I'd learned 10 years earlier hardware vendors lied through their teeth to sell stuff.

    Sky Warrior had this thing called "chaining", which let you build a list of DSP things to do without any CPU intervention. Without it there was no way we could meet out timing requirements.

    So, after a year of pseudocode and other bullshit, never writing a single line of code, I quit. Soon after management realized "uh, we need to write some code". Had lunch with the woman who took over my job after I quit (she was quite accomplished in DSP work, I was a dude without a secret clearance following orders with no clue about DSP). Turned out chaining didn't work. She asked the vendor, vendor said "nobody else used it, they never implemented it".

    I would have found out chaining didn't work within 2 months of starting the job. Company didn't find out for over a year.

    She figured it out. Wish I could remember her name just to give a shout out, but I have no clue. I would not have been able to meet the requirements without chaining.

    But it gets better. My company couldn't decide on a naming format, be it Thisway, thisWay, ThisWay, this_way, This_way, you get the idea. This was 1990, era of the IDE as the solution to all your software ills. Cadre I think it was called. Sales dude said "You'll master this in 30 minutes". Yep, he was right, we all mastered it in 30 minutes. Because it sucked as an editor. The list of things it could do would fit on a toothpick. The only thing it was good for was generating the paper trail government contracts required.

    Anyway, first time they changed the coding standard du jour it took 6 of us a week to update our files, mainly because we couldn't run sed scripts over files held in the CASE tool. Second time they changed the coding standard I'd been halfway to figuring out how to pull files out of CASE cuz I wanted to use vi, not their brain dead editor. Third time I knew how to both pull files out, and put them back in. And run sed commands between. So third time management decided our camel case sucked I could suck the files out of CASE, run a sed script, and shove them back in. In less than 30 minutes. By this time management had gotten accustomed to changing camel case would take a week. So we would update our scripts, fuck off for a week, then check all our files back in.

    The dessert? About a year after I left they did an audit on our code. Turned out every time I pulled a file out of the CASE tool I essentially deleted it, and when I put it back in I made a new file. In other words, file revision history? Yeah, about that.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.