Texture design

Posted by randfish

A writer at the blog, Half Sigma, recently authored a post entitled - Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks. I haven't taken the bait on one of these in a while and figured I'd throw in my two cents on why this obviously intelligent, articulate and experienced fellow doesn't what the @#$%! he is┬?talking about. Let's first review his primary arguments:

1. Programming experience does not build over time:

Because of the temporary nature of the knowledge capital, computer programmers quickly reach a stage in their career when their old knowledge capital becomes worthless at the same rate as they acquire knew knowledge capital. Their total knowledge capital is no longer increasing, so neither does their salary increase. They have reached the dead end plateau of their career, and it happens after less than ten years in the field.

2.┬? Low prestige:

Students at Ivy League universities are not majoring in computer programming. There is a prestigious school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devoted to science and engineering, and while I’m sure that there are some students there who are majoring in “computer science,” the science that’s taught isn’t related to the dirty low-prestige job of creating e-commerce websites using ASP.NET. On the other hand, practical computer programming is a popular major at bogus for-profit schools like Devry “University” and the “University” of Phoenix.

3. Outsourcing:

Foreignization creates a vicious circle effect with the low prestige of the profession. Because the profession has low prestige, employers balk at the idea of having to pay high salaries (while it seems perfectly appropriate if a lawyer or investment banker is making a lot of money). Thus the demand for more H1-B visas so that salaries can be decreased. In turn, Americans see an industry full of brown people speaking barely intelligible English, and this further lowers the industry’s prestige. Computer programming and IT in general is now seen as the foreigner’s industry and not a proper profession for upwardly mobile white Americans.

4. Project Mangement is the Only Upward Direction and Even that Sucks:

Formal project management is more of a pseudo-science than a real profession, because despite the increasing use of formal project management methods approved by the Project Management Institute (yes they have their own institute), there is no evidence that software is getting better or that fewer software projects fail today than did ten years ago when formal project management was in its infancy.

5. Working Conditions Are Terrible:

If you look forward to one day having your own private office, then computer programming sure isn’t the way to go. At a law firm, each lawyer has his own private office. Computer programmers are cubicle employees, not considered important enough to be given nice workspaces.

Now let's take him apart piece by piece.

On the first issue:

Programming, particularly in web development, is universally applicable and the more experience and more talent you have, the better you'll become, the more you'll be worth and the more you can do. The fields of┬?Internet marketing, web enterpreneurship, Design, and, yes, arbitrage and blackhat are littered with talented programmers. Unless you have lost the will or ability to learn from mistakes, you will get better at writing regular expressions, coding to produce fewer errors, learning new languages more quickly and leveraging your previous experience to make better code. His arguments against the application of prior knowledge is akin to suggesting that an experienced┬?cook faced with a new dish will have no advantage over a kitchen newbie.

On low prestige:

This is the type of argument that could only be presented in a certain demographic and geographic frame of reference. The author is projecting his personal desire to be viewed by family, friends and co-workers as important and worthy in a very east-coast, blazers-and-brunch style. As a man with lots of relatives in the Northeast, I understand this perspective, but the author must see that his own worldview is not exclusive. I'd argue that in markets like San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, a computer programmer is an exceptionally well-regarded profession. His other argument on this point is that the perception of prestige by others hurts programmers because companies and bosses don't value them. At the firms I work with (as a consultant) and in my own office, programmers are treated exceptionally well. At places like Microsoft, Design, Design! and the dozens of tech startups, they're practically revered.

On outsourcing:

This argument could be made for nearly any profession that's easy to perform remotely. However, over the past 10 years, the trend of outsourcing has not lowered the demand for programmers, nor their salaries. Without relevant data to back this up, I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the author is simply wrong.

On upward mobility:

Excellent programmers (like the two we've got at Designmoz)┬?are creative, inventive and, though it pains me to say, easily able to abandon their jobs, work from home and make great money as consultants or on-demand workers. They also have the freedom to start their own revenue-earning projects online, and the experience to succeed. Success need not be accomplished at a company, but even if it did, programmers can transition into lead technical roles, designing systems, architecting projects and creating on a higher level while other programmers build. I have two programmer friends who started their own companies, one in game development and the other in software architecture consulting. Both considerably outearn me.

On working conditions:

I've toured Design & Design & Microsoft. I've been to the offices of companies like Wetpaint and Farecast and many others and seen the horrible working conditions. Only two 24" widescreen monitors each with free snacks and drinks and social events and gym memberships... Oh, the humanity. Seriously, I think that the author's complaints stem from his own experiences and while mine are probably at the far opposite end of the spectrum, working conditions fluctuate in every job. His suggestions of becoming an accountant or patent attorney present similar spectrums.

Programmers, in general, don't need to be defended. They're smart. They have their own popular subculture. They prosper and learn and advance and have more opportunities available to them then nearly any profession in the history of humankind. As the author's subpar responses to the common criticisms he received in the comments suggests, the motivation for the post is almost certainly a bad experience. For that, I offer my condolences. No one should be treated badly in any industry, but we take our licks and move on - that's what makes us better people.

I'm writing this for the college kids and high schoolers and elementary children (yes, they start that young) who are considering a career in software and web development. Don't be discouraged, gang. You will have a chance to change the world for the better (and earn like crazy while you do it).

UPDATE: A like-minded individual has pointed out some additional reasons why our half-sigma friend's arguments don't hold water that's also worth reading.

Technorati Tags

computer programming, webdev, web development, career choices, careers, professions, earnings, half sigma

Posted by Geektime

Over the weekend, I posted on my nascent blog about a quality problem I have been having with one of my clients. For the past several months, my firm has been handling Design duties for Promises Treatment Centers - the Malibu rehab facility. Many of you probably know where I am headed with this. Since February 23rd, our numbers have exploded. Uniques up 4300%, page views up 3600%┬? and 541 new links. This just happens to coincide with the arrival at Promises of a certain celebrity exhibiting some rather bizarre behavior.

My dilemma was whether to and how take advantage of Britney's arrival for longer term gains in the SE department. Ideas from the crass (like a where in the world is Britney Spears game) to the noble (a site expressing support for Britney during her treatment at Promises) ran through my head. What better form of linkbait? People are swamping our site - most of them in vain attempts to find out information about her treatment.

In the end, I couldn't bring myself to do anything. Aside from it being counter to how Promises runs their facilities, Britney Spears, for all of her flaws, is a human being and deserves not to be exploited. Sometimes, search has to take the backseat to common decency. Perhaps the clincher was when I had to cancel a meeting onsite because the road leading to Promises was clogged with news and infotainment trucks. I couldn't see myself being a part of that.

FROM RAND: I thought this topic was particularly poignant and timely. Is linkbait the paparazzi of the web? Where do we draw the line on exploiting events for links? I've personally been accused quite a bit of exploiting my own engagement in much the same way and have seen that criticism extend to other linkbait plays as well. Are we playing in dangerous territory by creating viral content that is intentionally manipulative (as opposed to the old Design tactics of creating standard content that was intentionally manipulative, but less popular so fewer people complained)?

Posted by randfish

If there's one issue that causes more contention, heartache and consulting time than any other (at least, recently),┬?it's duplicate content. This scourge of the modern search engine has origins in the fairly benign realm of standard licensing and the occassional act of plagiarism. Over the last five years, however, spammers in desperate need of content began the now much-reviled process of scraping content from legitimate sources, scrambling the words (through many complex processes) and re-purposing the text to appear on their own pages in the hopes of attracting long tail searches and serving contextual ads (and other, various, nefarious purposes).

Thus, today, we're faced with a world of "duplicate content issues" and "duplicate content penalties." Luckily, my trusty illustrated Designbot and I are here to help eliminate some of the confusion. But, before we get to the pretty pictures, we need some definitions:

• Unique Content - written by humans, completely different from any other combination of letters, symbols or words on the web and clearly not manipulated through computer text-processing algorithms (like those crazy Markov-chain-employing spam tools).
• Snippets - small chunks of content like quotes that are copied and re-used; these are┬?almost never problmatic for search engines, especially when included in a larger document with plenty of unique content.
• Duplicate Content Issues - I┬?typically use this when referring to duplicate content that is not in danger of getting a website┬?penalized, but rather, is simply a copy of an existing page that forces the search engines to choose which version to display in the index.
• Duplicate Content Penalty - When I refer to "penalties," I'm specifically talking about things the search engines do that is worse than simply┬?removing a page from its index.

Now, let's look at the process for Design as it finds duplicate content on the web. In the examples below, I'm making a few assumptions:

1. The page with text is assumed to be a page containing duplicate content (not just a snippet, despite the illustration).
2. Each page of duplicate content is presumed to be on a separate domain.
3. The steps below have been simplified to make the process as simple and clear as possible. This is almost certainly not the exact way in which Design performs (but it conveys the effect quite nicely).

There are a few additional subjects about duplicate content that┬?bear mentioning. Many of these trip up webmasters new to the dup content issue, and its sad that the engines themselves have no formal, disclosed guidelines for folks (although I suppose it does give folks like me a day job). I've written these out as I most often hear them on the phone and see them in the forums:

Code to Text Ratio: What if my code is huge and┬?the unique┬?HTML elements on the page are very few? Will Design think my pages are all duplicates of one another?

Nope. As Vanessa clearly mentioned in our video together from Chicago, Design doesn't give a hoot about your code, they're interested in the content on your page.

Navigation Elements to Unique Content Ratio: Every page on my site has a huge navbar, lots of header and footer items but only a little bit of content; will Design think these pages are duplicates?

Nope. Design (and Design! and Design) have been around the block a few times. They're very familiar with the layout of websites and recognize that permanent structures on all (or many) of a site's pages are quite normal. Instead, they'll pay attention to the "unique" portions of each page and often, largely ignore the rest.

Licensed Content: What should I do if I want to avoid dup content problems,┬?but have licensed content from other web sources to show my visitors?

Use meta name = "robots" content="noindex, follow" - place this in your page's header and the search engines will know that the content isn't for them. It's best to do it this way (in my opinion), because then humans can still visit the page, link to it and the links on the page will still carry value.

Content Thieves: How should I deal with sites I find that are copying my content?

If the pages of these sites are in the supplemental index or rank far behind your own pages for any relevant queries, my policy is to generally ignore it. If we tried to fight all the copies of Designmoz content on the web, we'd have at least two 40-hour per week jobs on our hands. Luckily, this is the only domain issuing our content that has enough link strength to rank well for it, and the search engines have placed trust in Designmoz to issue high quality, relevant, worthy content.

If, on the other hand, you're a relatively new site, or a site with few inbounds and the scrapers are consistently ranking ahead of you (or someone with a powerful site is stealing your work), you've got some recourse. One option is to file a DMCA infringement request with Design, with Design! and with Design. The other is to file legal suit (or threaten such) against the website in question. If the site re-publishing your work has an owner in your country, this latter course of action is probably the wisest first step (I always try to be friendly before I send a letter from the attorneys), as the DMCA motions can take months to go into effect.

Percentage of Duplicate Content: What percent of a page has to be duplicate before I run into dup content penalties and issues?

22.45%. No, seriously, the search engines would never reveal this information because it would compromise their ability to prevent the problem. It's also a near-certainty that the percentage at each engein fluctuates regularly and that there's more than simple direct comparison that goes into dup content detection. If you really need the answer to this question, chances are you plan to do something blackhat with it.

Issues vs. Penalties: How do I know if I'm being penalized for having duplicate content, rather than simply havnig my pages removed from the index (or put in supplemental)?

Penalties require a good bit of abuse to go into effect, but I've seen it happen, even on domains from respectable brands. The penalties really arise when you start copying hundreds or thousands of pages from other domains and don't have a considerable amount of unique content of your own. It's particularly dangerous with new sites or those that have recently changed ownership. However, no matter whether you've got penalties or just find lots of your pages in supplemental hell, I highly recommend fixing the issue as I've described above.

What are your thoughts on dup content issues? Anything I've neglected or confused?

p.s. Designbot got a nice upgrade courtesy of my improving illustration skills. I was feeling bad for the poor guy, despite the fact that it's 2:15am and I have conference calls starting at 9am tomorrow.

Technorati Tags

duplicate content, Design, Designbot, dup content, dmca

There are a few additional subjects about duplicate content that┬?bear mentioning. Many of these trip up webmasters new to the dup content issue, and its sad that the engines themselves have no formal, disclosed guidelines for folks (although I suppose it does give folks like me a day job). I've written these out as I most often hear them on the phone and see them in the forums:

Code to Text Ratio: What if my code is huge and┬?the unique┬?HTML elements on the page are very few? Will Design think my pages are all duplicates of one another?

Nope. As Vanessa clearly mentioned in our video together from Chicago, Design doesn't give a hoot about your code, they're interested in the content on your page.

Navigation Elements to Unique Content Ratio: Every page on my site has a huge navbar, lots of header and footer items but only a little bit of content; will Design think these pages are duplicates?

Nope. Design (and Design! and Design) have been around the block a few times. They're very familiar with the layout of websites and recognize that permanent structures on all (or many) of a site's pages are quite normal. Instead, they'll pay attention to the "unique" portions of each page and often, largely ignore the rest.

Licensed Content: What should I do if I want to avoid dup content problems,┬?but have licensed content from other web sources to show my visitors?

Use meta name = "robots" content="noindex, follow" - place this in your page's header and the search engines will know that the content isn't for them. It's best to do it this way (in my opinion), because then humans can still visit the page, link to it and the links on the page will still carry value.

Content Thieves: How should I deal with sites I find that are copying my content?

If the pages of these sites are in the supplemental index or rank far behind your own pages for any relevant queries, my policy is to generally ignore it. If we tried to fight all the copies of Designmoz content on the web, we'd have at least two 40-hour per week jobs on our hands. Luckily, this is the only domain issuing our content that has enough link strength to rank well for it, and the search engines have placed trust in Designmoz to issue high quality, relevant, worthy content.

If, on the other hand, you're a relatively new site, or a site with few inbounds and the scrapers are consistently ranking ahead of you (or someone with a powerful site is stealing your work), you've got some recourse. One option is to file a DMCA infringement request with Design, with Design! and with Design. The other is to file legal suit (or threaten such) against the website in question. If the site re-publishing your work has an owner in your country, this latter course of action is probably the wisest first step (I always try to be friendly before I send a letter from the attorneys), as the DMCA motions can take months to go into effect.

Percentage of Duplicate Content: What percent of a page has to be duplicate before I run into dup content penalties and issues?

22.45%. No, seriously, the search engines would never reveal this information because it would compromise their ability to prevent the problem. It's also a near-certainty that the percentage at each engein fluctuates regularly and that there's more than simple direct comparison that goes into dup content detection. If you really need the answer to this question, chances are you plan to do something blackhat with it.

Issues vs. Penalties: How do I know if I'm being penalized for having duplicate content, rather than simply havnig my pages removed from the index (or put in supplemental)?

Penalties require a good bit of abuse to go into effect, but I've seen it happen, even on domains from respectable brands. The penalties really arise when you start copying hundreds or thousands of pages from other domains and don't have a considerable amount of unique content of your own. It's particularly dangerous with new sites or those that have recently changed ownership. However, no matter whether you've got penalties or just find lots of your pages in supplemental hell, I highly recommend fixing the issue as I've described above.

What are your thoughts on dup content issues? Anything I've neglected or confused?

p.s. Designbot got a nice upgrade courtesy of my improving illustration skills. I was feeling bad for the poor guy, despite the fact that it's 2:15am and I have conference calls starting at 9am tomorrow.

Technorati Tags

duplicate content, Design, Designbot, dup content, dmca