Discharge

I'm a civilian now. Not even a reservist. Most of the trouble was getting rid of my cellphone - they wanted me to schedule an appointment to return the damn thing next week, when I had to do it today to get discharged. Eventually they agreed to accept it back but not in Tel-Aviv because there are lines. ::rollseyes::

Other than that it was very painless and rather efficient, considering the inefficiency of conscripted labor in a government-run organization.

Time to send those c.v.s. I haven't written yet.

Grey's Anatomy

So, I'm watching the first season of Grey's Anatomy because there's no House till end of September. It's like E.R. mixed with more Bridget Jones' Diary (or maybe Ally McBeal). I don't think surgical interns are actually that promiscuous, but then again, I didn't think people where fucking during programming course either… My discharge date is September 6th.

update

After convincing my superiors that I am completely fed up with my work (turns out not being productive and spending 21 days (actually 18) in the brig does the trick) I now have three colonels' signatures on my discharge papers. I think I need two more colonels. I was told it can take a week and then I'll have a discharge date which should be this month, maybe even immediately after all signatures are present. A small personal victory, though getting transferred to a decent place a year ago would've been much better.

Long Time No Update

I did not forget R.J., but I keep forgetting to visit.

My WD400, bought in May 2001, finally died. Didn't lose much data as it has been dying for a while now and I had backups. Removed it and the Maxtor from March 2000 (that died a couple of months ago) and bought a Seagate 320GB 7200.10. It's quieter, but I think it runs warmer. I don't see a performance difference, though I know there must be, despite the same interface and rotation speed, what with the platers being at least ten times denser now. Cost me 120 USD, 50% more than the listed price on newegg.com. KSP, where I bought the Barracuda and the Caviar, have very no-nonsense but efficient service. I think I was in and out in under 60 seconds, and it's a five minute walk from Azrieli Towers.

Weather is weird: very hot and raining a bit.

Again sitting in one room with M. Is loud, looking for ways to cope.

Boss says I might be able to get an early discharge. Will see.

Tech - Women in Industry

I have written about this before, and about my personal experience of working with females. Today I've read this post by female BSD admin/advocate/instructor Dru Lavigne (make sure you read this comment as well, possibly even instead of the blog post as it's shorter) and I agree — after a woman proves her worth, she gets treated with respect; trying to survive on "cute" or attempting to be all macho only alienates colleagues. The environment is very macho, lots of dick measuring contests and posturing. The first reaction to a female is always like the title of the section under the photo at Erinn Clark's about page (LOL by the way) — here's a recent example from my own blog.

Where I work there is the added difficulty of not only IT being male-dominant but the "outside" organization being the cliché male-dominant society. Dev leads are commissioned officers and are expected to act like it, which leads to lots of silliness and quite a bit of angst.

My hot female teammate is scheduled for officer's training in a couple of months. I have disagreed with all my bosses about her prospects as a future team lead, but I really do wish her the best. I believe I might be overcompensating in her case, but I have observed the debilitating effect on myself and others too many times not to be wary. You see, I find smart women attractive. But sadly, the link works both ways, and I perceive women I find attractive as being smarter. I'm not the only one. I am absolutely sure E.G. had a crush on her when he praised her, and since he praised her technical abilities (which leave much to be desired), he probably overestimated her leadership abilities as well. I know her supervisor accurately estimated her skill as a developer, but he too vehemently defended her potential as a good officer, though he did blurt something like "yeah, a guy with her skills would be pretty useless, but if she can properly work her feminine wiles she would get the job done". So I manage not to notice how good looking she is, and I try to be objective, and I don't see any special leadership skills beyond not being socially inept. And she would need to earn the respect of a technically competent geek for her team to produce anything worthwhile. I think it would be very educational for me to watch her do it.

Update

• The weather is hellish.
• Strangely, I'm excited about my current assignment. I wonder how long that will last.
• Was ordered to give a presentation on a system I've participated in building to rest of dpt. Was horrible, because I didn't return to the big picture after each chapter so people who lost me midway had no way to reorient themselves.
• Appears to have found a bug in IBM C/C++ compiler for zOS, systems people promised to check whether it's documented.
• Female team member appears to be afraid of me. I didn't do anything, it's just that none of us are all ok in the head.
• New team member is the most painfully extroverted person I've met, with no tact whatsoever, zero experience in behaving at a workplace, programming, working in teams, quasi-military reality, etc.
• Immediate boss is control freak, not talented at management at all.
• Services we must rely on provided by other departments don't work so it looks like our stuff doesn't work and we look like idiots to our clients.
• Buddy got left in the sun for more than ten hours because security officer freaked and decided that state of alert equals war and he can disregard the regs. His CO couldn't do anything about it.
• Got detention for a week for being late. Spending it in an air conditioned room with a fridge, microware oven, cold/hot water thingy, phone with civilian line and an unmonitored broadband internet connection reminded me once again that I'm not really in the army. Was kind of a vacation!
• I work in the public sector, so it all sucks, and I can't quit because I'm under contract. Because I can't quit, they can treat me like shit, and sometimes they do. Of course they know they get shitty work from an unsatisfied, undermotivated, undertrained, unwilling, often even downright depressed and rebellious workforce, but because it's the public sector (no competition, budget is decided with no correlation to actual work being done, promotions are decided with no correlation to accomplishments) nobody cares. Does that sound cynical enough? I'm a real patriot of my country, BTW, and I believe in doing what I can to improve what I can, but really, the system fights you every step of the way.
• Boss' boss said a number of PHB lines so bad I had to force myself not to literally ROFL on the spot. Unrelated buzzword spewage is not funny when you have to actually work with the man.
• AM2 and Conroe both look good. Of course Conroe is designed in Israel, so I'd buy that, but if AM2 still beats Intel at price/performance with moderate overclocking, I'll probably vote for the underdog.
• FFDB goes nowhere, but I haven't given up yet, it's just that carving time is hard when you're depressed and no one shows interest anyway.
• The latest fandom wank sounds all exciting, but I haven't read it yet. [Ed - I've meant the mssrcibe story by bad_penny]

Take care.

Me/Work - Damn

Last week I was transferred to another development team in the department, as part of an effort to create task-oriented teams and because my boss couldn't handle me. My new boss is better, though not as good as my old-old boss and nowhere near as great as my old-old-old boss. I moved into the team's rooms, two doors down. The room now sits me, a new college grad my age (though with no experience at all and no passion for programming), and our sole remaining female developer. Who is drop dead gorgeous. Usually, in day-to-day uniformed professional environment, I am able to ignore it, mostly. Yesterday there was a Sting concert and I've seen her leave the office ready for an outing with her hair down, perfumed, etc. I had to concentrate not to drool and my mind kept returning to it hours later. Potentially very embarrassing.

In other news I was asked to recommend technology and architecture for a project without being told what the app does. Also I've rewritten in PL/SQL a view that our production server refused to perform reasonably, but because my new boss can't read PL/SQL the code-review will be… interesting. It does work though. On my way home an old lady asked me to pull her shopping cart to her home because it was too heavy for her, and then thanked my profusely after I've put it down near her second floor flat's door. We've been cautioned in basic training that old people react strangely to uniform, and they were right - it happens every few weeks.

Sundiver and Startide Rising were a breeze, though for a multiple awards winning novel, Startide Rising wasn't that great. I don't wish to read the third book in the trilogy. Is the second trilogy better? Good Omens doesn't go that fast though. The Pratchett jokes are amusing, but I don't know that Gaiman brings to the table.

Work - Phone

All officers (commissioned, non-commissioned and academic) in my unit have been issued a cellular slavery device, carrying and answering which is mandatory. Stood half the day in the sun on god forsaken base waiting in line. Turns out their records indicate I'm not an NCO. Flashed shiny new NCO card I got especially for this occasion — no go. Faxed(!) a hard copy (!!) of my record over - all ok (!!!). World class authentication, that is. Seems our systems don't integrate too well with the civilian cell service provider's. At least free calls with colleagues should cut my phone bill in half.

Geek/Work - Women in Industry

I just wanted to say that unlike poor Alice here(alt), my boss has never asked my help with his pr0n, but then I thought about the broader problem of women in programming (or the IT industry, or science & technology in general).

For one thing, over launch a few weeks back, I have tried and failed to explain to a novice (a very wet behind the ears, non-geek, Comp.Sci. grad) what is meant by:

The saddest example of the overly homogeneous work group is the all-male team. Women are obvious victims of the sports analogy: The same male establishment that excluded them systematically from team sports for so long now compounds the felony by insinuating that they're probably bad team players. Of course women function as well on teams as men. Any man who has worked on mixed teams would find it hard to imagine ever again working in the all-male environment. That was our fathers' sad lot.

Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware 2nd ed, p. 156

For another, today, one of our big design whiteboards showed evidence of immature and inexperienced adolescent males who lack artistic talent discussing breast size preferences. In the room sits a female developer. A very good looking one (shush mom, she's taken). This is not an uncommon occurrence. Oftentimes, the office sounds like a thread on Slashdot, just not as sophisticated (due to the participants' smaller total erudition).

And then we ask why so few females major in computer science.

And the ones who do, turn out to be like Scott Adams' Alice. The joke goes like this: female programmers are like guinea pigs. Why? Well, guinea pigs are neither from Guinea, nor are they pigs.

It's very sad, and I see no way to end this. I'm not alone.

Edit: If anyone cries "sexual harassment", I'd like to say this: Yes, and no. The situation is suboptimal, but we're in the army. It's a thinly veiled patriarchal system populated by teens who are led by people in their early to mid twenties. If the letter of the law was strictly enforced, we'd probably all be in jail. So we don't point fingers, we try not to stare, and mostly the situation does not get out of hand. Did I ever feel uncomfortable for the females present, because of something that was said? Many, many times.
To the Neanderthals who would call me "gay" for thinking like this: date rapists get caught.

EDIT: Added Google Images alternate link to Dilbert comic.

Tech - Be gentle with your laptop

Righteous techie anger is amusing when the spit is not in your face.

Before my project was moved to the IT division, it existed in the main (or rather, first) client's IT department. When main development goals were reached and we have entered the maintenance stage, the client decided our premium treatment was unwarranted and cut our budget, our ability to filter personnel and finally our offices (That's how I found myself in our barrack).
The IT department still uses our cool brand, but since the advent of centralized IT they have no directory, mail, file or database servers of their own — they just manage their own users. Anyway, since we were buddies we've heard their war stories, and I can tell you non-combat officers and company executives are the same, and they ruin laptops just as frequently, just their replacements don't lower their shares' value, they cost the taxpayer money.

Life - Three years of my life

Three years ago I was conscripted into service, for a period of three years. Today I was supposed to be discharged. But of course, since I became a code monkey, I have signed a contract obligating me to work for the government for a period of up to two and a half years more. Starting from tomorrow, I'm an NCO. Nothing at all has changed, but now I'll be getting paid (about minimum wage, I've been told).

It should have been a happy day, but it has been completely ruined by the most horrid display of bureaucracy I have seen in my life. I'll be on leave tomorrow to try and salvage what's left of this unique opportunity to celebrate. The clerks cut their day short because of their commander's absence, so I was unable to finish some paperwork, and I was threatened with a court marshal if I don't come to work tomorrow to finish it. I said that if that's the best use of my time the system can imagine, I'll oblige, when I'm back on the day after tomorrow.

I was a very patriotic young man three years ago. Very eager to serve. I was discouraged by the drafting and sorting process, but still believed in the system to volunteer for the training and extra service. Three years of service have led me to the conclusion that the public sector sucks, and every non-combat position in the armed forces should be cut back and privatized. Men and women in service should be paid volunteers, who can be replaced.

Life - Work

This week, this happened. It wasn't that bad. Three hours on buses for a one minute interview and a signature on a piece of paper. But I've seen girls from Shevah-Mofet* on the bus trip back, which mitigates the enormous waste of time, at least a little bit. I figure in a few years, such a statement would label me a pedophile, but I like to watch highschoolers and see if there's any hope of some of them becoming decent adults. By the time I meet them on guard duty, it appears it's usually too late for them to change.

At work, I'm simultaneously being treated like a misbehaving child (I don't like military discipline for the sake of military discipline, and my new project lead takes offence) and pushed into a position of responsibility without too much support. This whole "we can't treat you any differently than any other soldier, but we can demand ten times the output because we've seen you perform" is making me crazy. I've donated three years of my life, now I'm expected to take on more work for the privilege of minimum wage, while the people I'm supposed to train and delegate work to (with no authority whatsoever) are basically laughing at me for being a pushover.

In other new, I've finished "Paladin of Souls". Bujold is very good, but I just don't like romance novels. 4/5

* - supposedly a good high school in Tel Aviv, formed by immigrant Soviet prep school teachers, frustrated of Israeli public education and unable to penetrate the elite to get access to private schools. In Russia, Jews were pressured to excel because of surrounding anti-Semitism, and the state-enforced ethnic quotas on admittance to good higher education. In Israel, where there is no pressure, the liberal/populist "let the kids be" crap has won and education is as bad as in the US.

Life - Updates

• Our new guy is a CS major from TAU. He has graduated together with two of my buddies from school. He's also dated a girl from my class in school.
• A guy who has enlisted (got drafted, whatever) on the same day with me and has been with me through half the training and then flunked and served one floor below as a tech got quietly discharged more than a full month before his due date. I barely had the time to say goodbye. Lucky SOB.
• Found out I was being ripped off by the national telco and ISP for a year. Phoned them and got six times more bandwidth for half the price. My advice: follow the price changes, and demand to be on the better programs, since they obviously won't upgrade you by themselves.
• I've noticed how my work as a coder is slowly spoiling my love for hacking. Doing it under time pressure, with arbitrary constraints, in a room with people I don't like, with a tight-ass PHB running around and sputtering nonsense really takes the fun out of this thing I enjoy doing. So much so, that I've found I haven't been inclined to pursue this at home for a while. Makes me really pity adult movie actors. T.S. has recommended to just say "screw with this" and hack for fun to get the feeling back. I have vowed to never work in an outfit that will give me this feeling — the army is one thing, but on the free market, I'm willing to sacrifice some pay so I won't have to dread mornings/Sundays.
• My department was moved out of our nice offices and into a shack. We've pained it and we've got new furniture for it and a new gigabit switch and they keep saying it'll be fine, but it won't be the same. I need some posters for decoration.
• Stupid, criminally incompetent, should've been shot, lazy-ass @#$%&^*!s in [censored] have [censored] our [censored] [censored] right during [censored] and of course the [censored] is not [censored] so our [censored] are [censored]. I'm glad I'm not the one there right now [censored] it, but I can't help with feeling useless because I can't do anything about it. But that's probably like "secret" or something…
• I'm seriously considering buying a computer, because my mom wants my old one. It would be a 3000+ (Venice) on AN8 Ultra (NF4U) with 1G Geil PC3200 CL2.5 and a 6600 (or I might shell out for a 6600GT). It's cheap and sounds great, but the cooling must be seriously considered.

Work - New Year's

For the third time in my department, the smart, dependable, funny, pretty girl is too good for us and leaves for officer's training. It is very sad to lose E.C, and I hope she'll get a decent assignment.

I got First Sergeant two weeks early, for the Jewish new year. Considering the 16 hours long work days and working on the weekend, it really is the least they could've done.

Hurt my finger on the Uzi's magazine holding thingy. Still scored 100% day/night and 12 dead (simulated) Arabshostiles. Yeah, in the IDF, even the software developers are tough! ;-)

Work/Life - Down again

It's true that it's the little things that affect one's mood.

During my night shift I've left a poor impression on an interesting female colleague. I feel like I have no influence on my room. My boss and I disagree about schedules and the exact nature of my job. A friend whom I've met in training is getting discharged because his outfit can't afford him and for the next two years he'll be earning roughly three times more than I'll be earning comes December.

Is aimlessly reading about Prosody a waste of my time?

Work - @#$%^&!

I don't want to name names, but yesterday I've had a surreal experience that exemplifies how badly IT projects are run and why I think it's a disgrace and a waste of money and why a project my outfit working on is going to fail. Again.

As part of my training I've interviewed a development team from a neighboring project. The team lead was a female coder promoted to officer to hide the fact she's a bad developer. Naturally, she became an even worse team lead. The team members themselves are all very inexperienced and have very naive notions about how stuff works in real life, especially concerning QA (especially unit, integration, system and acceptance testing), SCM, performance benchmarking, verifying scalability, deployment, user training, support, debugging in a production environment, maintenance, etc (basically everything other than churning out bad code). They all live in this dream where they release a version 1 in December, when what they had to show me looks nowhere near anything I'd show a client as "ready for release". To find out how bad it really is, I've turned to the systems people: I've managed to interview G.B., who is a team lead of a dedicated group of DBAs who support the project. We've shared war stories like one DBA to another, and man, she has revived my faith in females in IT. The place is full of great people, if only the fucked up institution could inspire them all to work!

Every time I think I'm too much of a "Rosh Gadol" for my job description and how big the gap between what I'm supposed to be responsible for and what I feel responsible for, I get the feeling I was wrong to decline officer training and yet I still believe I'm not the right person to be a great officer (INTJs are simply not leaders. I'd want to strangle people who are slacking, and that's not allowed). Problem is, it might've been better for me and my outfit if I were one. I'll see, maybe I'll change, maybe the environment will change.

God, how I hate "Rosh Katan" people who don't care about their craft!

On a completely unrelated note: E.P. has invited me to his birthday, day after tomorrow. I can't believe how excited I am! Don't have a clue about a present, though.

Work - More ranting

So, free training. Two years after initial training all coders get an upgrade where they learn about architecture. Actually, the idea is to try and make the coders think outside their projects, technologies and environments and learn broadly about modern IT. Among other activities there are introductory lectures on topics like n-tier, UML, interpersonal communication, database tuning, datawarehousing, design patterns, networks, QA, SOA, dotNET vs. Java, ERP, storage with backup & recovery, security and lots of others. Three weeks total, by the best consultants available. A bloody dream come true for anyone wishing to get any sort of clue about the industry.

The first lecture was given by Eyal Rubin (I think that's the name; anyway, he's a big boss there or something) from 2Train4. Right at the start he got so many blank stares the level very quickly dropped to kindergarten. He had to review OOP, TCP/IP, RDBMS… very, very basic stuff. Someone asked what's a proxy. People didn't know about the existence of stored procedures. He used euphemisms for HTTP, XML, SOAP, SOA to avoid using the terminology after he had to explain "port 80". It took him a while to explain "application server" and how come scalability is not always linear. I was so ashamed I took off my pin.

I know about the five different worlds, and I realize that hadn't I been a huge computer geek, I wouldn't have known about EJB's either, but some of that stuff was covered in the initial training! A bloody TCP socket, for crying out loud, and SELECT statements! Gah.

Work - Need to vent

Our new resource turned out to be a big fat "no hire" with no skill set, a big head and an attitude problem. The guy has never seen any OOD in his life, has no respect for coding standards, no experience in team work, no understanding of PC hardware, doesn't know what "K&R" or "Stroustrup" are. Basically, he lacks all skills the company paid for.

But my main problem is that his motivation for getting the job was completely different from the rest of us: You see, he is fit for combat duty. So, nearing the end of his senior year of high school (when he was already a full year older than his peers, for reason unknown), he had several choices:

1. Enlist, serve three years in infantry, armor or artillery.
2. Go to college, get a degree, serve six years as an engineer (three years paid).
3. Stay in school for an extra year, get an associate degree, serve four to five years (a year or two paid).

He probably decided real military service is for suckers and college is hard, so what kind of associate degree to get? Mechanics, electronics, software. "Computers" sounds like "money", so a year later here he is.

Now, his goal successfully met, he has no motivation to work hard or learn anything.

And his fucking Israeli attitude! @#$%^&*!

Life - A weekend on base

Last Thursday, fifteen minutes before end of the work week, a guy who is in charge of arranging the duty shifts / rotation calls and says I must stay for the weekend because they really need me and they're very sorry It's on such a short notice and they'll compensate me later. The notice was indeed short — I was already "late for duty" by hours and needed many more to get home and take things for the weekend and get back. So they decided the need was grave and I won't go home. Instead my parents can bring me items I might need¹.

Ridiculous, but an order is an order and thus, I've spent the weekend with some old and new friends. Everything but the weather was great - the guys (people brought laptops and guitars!), the CO ("I don't like to do the paperwork, can we pretend I didn't catch you asleep and you'll stay awake for two more hours?"), the girls (I took guesses at their data, will check Monday how I did), even the notorious cooking (compensated by local take-out joints being open 24/7). We eventually got so tired from the heat and humidity I beat a guy at chess who in usual circumstances would wipe the board with me.

A girl, all of one month in the service behind her (one day out of bootcamp), didn't handle third watch too well (Why go to sleep while there are friends around to talk to? Because you don't share a watch with those friends meaning your sleep cycles aren't in sync, but of course you have to stop being a teenager for a moment to get this) and whined to the CO about being too sleepy on the third night. He took pity and so I got to fill in for her.

She realized she has done something not nice and to appease her conscience (her own words) brought me vending machine coffee and snack bars at around 4AM, claiming insomnia. We end up sitting there talking until dawn and the end of the shift. What's interesting is that instead of the oversized dirty field uniform she wore short, tight, black somethings with more lacy under-somethings in sight. Also she was playing with her hair and rocking back and forth, showing decent amount of cleavage.

I kept my distance, playing the perfect listener and gentleman, letting her tell me a condensed account of her life ages ten to eighteen, and pretending not to notice anything, thinking she didn't need me to be a guy, but two hours later, with first light, the magic gone and we departing in different directions, I realized that maybe she was hitting on me and I was a giant prat for not even taking a phone number², especially since I had the perfect legit reason — to read her her own file off the computer at the office³.

1 - Z.L. has immediately lent me two books he had with him. Book review posts to follow.

2 - or ICQ UIN? What is it that I'm supposed to ask for these days?

3 - For reasons unknown (Well… I can guess, but that would be a really long digression), the military don't tell people how well they tested, and thus everyone feels obligated to get this otherwise completely uninteresting information through black market channels and longish chains of friends-of-friends).

Life - Updates

I've found out (thanks to T.S.) that the military has accepted a plea we (mostly D.Z. and N.K.) filed two years ago about our signing for extra six months of enlisted service being illegal (though they never bothered to tell us). It means I'll be discharged in January '08 instead of July '08, and more importantly I'll get my first real paycheck in January '06. It will be minimum wage I think, but that's ten times more than what I get now!

I got tired of my trusty old Nokia 5120 and replaced it with a Motorola C650. I like Nokia better, but this one had a camera. I'm still learning to use it. It's so bloody children-oriented and the interface is so flashy. It looks unprofessional!
I don't believe I'm typing this, what am I, forty?

I've downloaded episodes of West Wing. It's not bad at all.

My boss' boss' boss and her boss were replaced today/tomorrow (scheduled, not sudden). We'll see how we like the new people.

Today, very suddenly, a new guy was added to my team. He's fresh out of training and we don't know yet how good is he or whether he likes computers/software.