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How silly! EVERY company loses favor. Styles change, customs change, companies bet on the wrong horse or stay the course and stagnate.

EVERY company loses favor sooner or later.

Some Japanese hotels like Hoshi have literally been around for ages.

Also, check out Tower Publishing, around since 1772, and JPMorgan Chase, with us since 1799.

Take a quick peek at Wikipedia sometime. Though I can't prove that all of these companies will be around forever, I think that companies that have been around through several generations come close enough for me.

Facebook is not going to be the first immortal company.

I doubt any company can truly be immortal, but the companies on that wiki page are as close at it gets.

This is a no-brainer around here (literally.) First, there are no tech companies in Ohio, so tech jobs are quite scarce.

What in the world and what part of Ohio are you talking about? I'm a software engineer in Columbus, OH and I'm posting this on my lunch break. There are plenty of tech jobs out there, you just have to know where to look. A few right off the top of my head:

• Sophos
• Abbott Labs
• Nationwide Insurance (If you're not picky about a ton of COBOL.)
• JP Morgan Chase (If you're not picky about a ton of Java.)
• Cardinal Health

Admittedly a lot of these aren't what you classify as "tech companies," but they still hire developers like crazy. I think the market is what you make of it, and a lot of getting a job is simply not giving up on the hunt.

As for a B.S. being B.S... I call BS. Most places around here won't give you the time of day unless you have a B.S. Certifications don't mean a thing (unless you have experience to back them up), and an Associate's means the hiring manager will at least glance at it for a fleeting few seconds before deciding to toss it back in the pile.

Hmm...

JP Morgan Chase?
http://www.jpmorganchase.com/

Looks like they use Apache 2.0.55

Bank Of America, HSBC, and my own bank all seem to use Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1

From what I've seen by typing Bank into Google, and Clicking on links... it looks like Sun-ONE is the most popular. I didn't see any IIS....

2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures.

This approach usually defines risk independently (typically as variance around a mean) for each individual item. The items are then observed (or just assumed) to have low enough correlations so that if one item fails, enough others are OK so that the reserves need only cover the probability of a small number of failures.

Hedge fund LTCM took this strategy to the limit by borrowing heavily -- in effect reducing reserves to a large negative number. LTCM essentially made money by noting when the cost differences of various instruments were out of line with their historic risk patterns. But even Nobel Prize Winners can't estimate all potentially significant risks correctly. Once in a great while, everything crashes together and reserves aren't enough, let alone negative reserves. When the Russian debt crisis happened in the fall of 1998, all of the instruments LTCM dealt in suddenly moved in lockstep as investors around the world fled to safer things like TBills. When LTCM died, they almost took the capital markets down with them because large international banks had loaned LTCM their play money based on those risk models.

I used to work in the Risk Management department of the capital markets division of a large international bank as a programmer.

When I started, 4 years ago, the reports generated were basically compilations by a cut-and-paste-monkey staff (despite being highly trained, very conciencious individuals) of reports generated by other departments. I was part of a team that reformed the IT basis for creating risk reporting, and found that while there was a lot of expertise and complex methods available, what was actually implemented was much much smaller for the simple reason that it was tough to get the right reports generated given the inputs the department was given.

The project I worked on parsed the input data from the Excel spreadsheet inputs and loaded it to a database, where it could then be queried intelligently and nice reports generated. These reports were growing very fast in complexity, building towards the best toolsets available for determining the actual risk the bank was taking.

Several points about this job were fascinating:
1. How much many departments are so caught up in the minutae of "getting the report out" that they don't have time to examine the contents of it;
2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures.
3. How much the banking consolidation trend is increasing, due to the repeal of glass-steagal (sp?) allowing multi-state banks to gobble and grow. This makes a consumer's life better because of more resources being available (auto-bill-pay, check images, etc.

It was a fun job. Then I found another one where I get to play with Python!

-- Kevin

You see, the no-talent ass clowns that run my company will probably go right along with any threats or warnings imposed by the RIAA. I'm sure there'll be a copy in my inbox when I get to work.

We can't earn money for shit, but we're happy to help other organizations do it. Legally, or illegally.

At (my company), "spending more time with my family" ALWAYS equates to "forced to step down.

ALWAYS

ALWAYS

I'm sure she was down in the trenches hand-shaping this beast too...

That's usually what managers do.
Of course, ours just take big bonuses, lend money to criminals, and screw their minions.... but that's a different story.

The corporation I work for is still on WindowsNT 4.0 with Novell. Only recently did we upgrade to Notes 5 across the firm, and in the next 4-5 months the migration to Windows2000 is supposed to take place. The larger the firm, the slower they are to adopt new technologies. At least that's been my experience.

Don't worry! My company will surely bail them out.
After all, where there's trouble (Enron, Global Crossing, etc.) there's JPMorgan Chase.

I think my employer already tried this plan. Fucking idiots ...

Good! Maybe those tapes will show where all of my company's money is.