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What's the Worst Job Posting You've Seen?
Kickstart70 asks: "Recently myself and a number of friends of mine who work or worked in IT jobs have been remarking on absolutely horrible job postings for low-level IT jobs paying small change. It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages (in the job listing linked, the wage is in Canadian dollars). Is this common everywhere? What's the worst job posting you have seen?"
> WINNT is nice to have.
Don't do it! The organization is clearly run by crazies.
My favorite part:
Software List: Some or all would be preferred.
I mean, damn, $17-$19 is pretty good for Help Desk, even if it is bilingual, but anyone who is familiar with all of the items on that list should make more than God himself. Of course, the poster of this probably works for Kelly Services anyway.
The worst I've seen?
The job posting to find the person who will replace me.
Poopsmith
I count 163 things (well, wc -l counted it) on that list of things they want prospects to know. Obviously that job involves too much work and would interfere with reading
Anyone that applies is obviously beyond geekdom and is to be pitied.
Trolling is a art,
The worst ones I've seen are ones that require you to have gone back in time in order to have enough experience with the software they want you to use:
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Fuck that job
e suthibut.a sp
http://fuckthatjob.com/index.php
E-mails of the suthibut family (doesn't seem to be updated)
http://blog.postapocalypse.com/dave/dav
In 1997!
I'm being nitpicky about your commment I know. But you're lack of understanding into the space time continium and the 4th dimension requires it.
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Ok if one wanted 5 years of experience with win2k, they would need to go forward in time, to say 2005. Not backwards, because win2k was not created yet.
Again my apologies for being a nitpick.
at Fuck That Job dot com ..but you know, there are so many of these postings that it's really not that funny anymore. It just reaffirms our belief that management really is trying to squeeze everything they can out of the pee-on workers.
Gotta do something to give that CEO his bonus (studies show that executive compensation has gone up over 17% in the past year. Bah.)
Seriously, it was like right after C# had come out and I started seeing all kinds of jobs requiring 3-5 years of C# experience. When you get an idiot to write up the reqs, and interview the people...you get idiots.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Hummm....
"Self Starter" and "Team Player" are favorites of mine.
But, aren't they mutually exclusive?
No - you would quite obviously take a copy of windows 2000 back in time with you to 1998 in order to have 5 years experience by 2003.
Of course, if you can convince your boss of that youprobably don't want to work for him anyways...
The job pays 17.00 to 19.00 Canadian dollars per hour.
That's 13.05 to 14.58 US dollars per hour.
(No this is not a cheap anti-Canada joke. Currency conversion is taken from here, the first Google lsiting for currency conversion.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
This job sounds pretty dangerous.
The Canadian dollar is up around 77 cents US these days.
Oh shit, that does suck.
That's less than US$29K. While one of the job requirements may be unique, it would be amusing to see how long a heterosexual male would last working there.
There are some good ones here
When I was looking I actually told recruiter this. "It's impossible to have that much J2EE experience." Supposedly the companies do this so they can say they could not fill the position and off-shore it.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
Not to nitpick your comments.... but yeah, Windows 2000 was created 5 years ago. I used it in beta stages in 98 and then the final was released in 99 for retail.
:)
I know, I'm being dumb and offtopic, but you started it
Actually, going backwards works out too. He just gets to repeat 2-3 years which will accumulate to 5+ years experience.
You can find an army of people willing to do all that work for 5$/hr over in India.
Which is exactly what they will do, some subcontractor will contact them and bid it out.
Heck I'm sure 5 such offers bounce off my spam filters every day.
That's why there are no jobs in the US anymore.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
...that as much as you hate your lousy IT job, there are 10 other people who would fill it given the chance. On top of that, I'd rather have a job in IT than working in, say, a meat processing plant. I'm grateful to have a job in IT, even if it sucks.
An actual posting about 6 months ago.
Required:
- BS degree in relevant field
- 4 years minimum QA experience
- 2 years testing web applications using Oracle and/or DB2 database
- 2 years testing web applications using WebLogic and/or WebSphere application server
[*previous experience with coding in a rice paddy.]
Pay rate: $10-$15/hr
OK, the rice paddy part wasn't actually in the ad.
Check out craigslist - jobs like the following are *quite* common these days.
--
Programmer intern to set up simple Acrobat online document system!
Reply to: contact@blissinteractive.com
Date: 2003-11-04, 11:56AM
Bliss Interactive (www.blissinteractive.com) is currently seeking an unpaid intern to accomplish the following task:
Take our workflow process online, utilizing/integrating documents currently created with Acrobat Professional 6.0.
Specifically, we need you to:
1. Allow for a username and password to be set for each project.
2. Have a pre-set catalog of documents which currently exist in Adobe Acrobat 6.0 viewable online for each project after the user logs in. The docs may be accessed from a simple left nav UI.
3. Allow anyone who logs on to add to/change the alterable text fields already embedded in the Acrobat documents and save the changes online.
There are approximately 40 documents total.
Benefits: why would you want to do this for us as an unpaid intern?
In short, you have the time and you are interested in expanding your network. We have the need for qualified programmers for projects of all kinds. If we develop a good working relationship with you, we will pass programming work along to you in the future!
Please respond with a short email explaining past experience with projects like this as well as your CV in the body of your email.
Telecommuting is ok.
This is a part-time job.
This is a contract job.
This is an internship job.
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
Reposting this message elsewhere is NOT OK.
this is in or around Union Square
18786888
Let's face it. IT salaries got way ahead of themselves in during the boom. Now the pendulum swings the other way
Have you looked at what a teacher makes or any other number of degree-requiring professions? CAD$40k might sound sucky to you, but I'm betting there's a lot of unemployed IT ppl out there right now who'd take it in a snap.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...$0.37 American these days, right? You can do better than that making shoes in Thailand.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Its fairly simple - they actually want to employ a dishonest person.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Requirements: Creative, smart individual who finds delight in working with others and around others. Candidate should have an understanding of computational theory and application and be able to grasp new ideas quickly. Prospective employee should have skills in a couple programming languages as well as the ability to learn a new language or environment quickly. If you are right for this job you will be able to apply your knowledge, logic and intuition to the problems at hand. You enjoy solving problems and discovering new ways to do things. An engineering degree is preferred but not necessary. If you don't have an engineering degree you will be expected to demonstrate competency in math, logic and computer science theory. You will be paid accordingly to your abilities in the above listed requirements.
Instead we see:
Must have 10 years of programming in language A that has been around for 4 years. Most know X,Y,Z. We don't care if you can learn X,Y,Z or understand the theory behind X,Y,Z, you must know it because it is a nice buzz-word right now. Be prepared to unlearn X,Y,Z and learn G,H,J when they become the new buzzwords. We don't want you to think, we want you code!! code!! code!!
But I digress.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Santa Cruz Operation, Orem UT
Chief Financial Officer
Looking for someone willing to completely ignore the Sarbanes-Oxley Securities Act( total ignorance of this legislation a plus! )and sign off on dubious financial reports. Experience with Enron, WorldCom, or Tyco preferred.
Education Requirements: 1.0 GPA or lower in Corporate Ethics
In the Seattle Times summer 2002;
Use your UNIX administration and Secretarial skills in our modern, fast-paced office.
Our law office needs a part-time secretary and unix administrator. Excellent Benefits and a generous $10 per hour! Don't miss this one!
Really, I swear! The ad ran for 5 weeks before they either gave up or got a clue.
I saw a posting for mail room personnel at CNet that said "must have 2 years previous corporate mail room experience". And it wasn't for managing the thing, it was just a nomal clerk position.
Would you want to hire someone who was either a) so uncapable that working the mail room is the peak of their abilities or b) so ambition-free that they had multiple years of mailroom experience without advancing?
Just like others have noted, job postings where they ask for 4-5 years experience with C# or .NET Framework. These are sooo common these days, I guess hiring managers don't really know what technology they're actually hiring for. I'm sure they just take their experience from other job postings (5+ experience C++ programming) and apply it to whatever the management tell him they need (a C# programmer).
Ofcourse jobs that ask one to know everything under the sun are completely off base, but I think there are people who give the managers the impression that a person can know all the software they put on the list. I'm sure this is just exposure to individuals to never say they can't handle something dealing with technology.
I feel I've always been someone like that. Someone that never says "No, I can't do that" and always says "Sure, I'll figure it out in a few minutes.". I've worked at plenty of jobs doing tech work and programming where I've had to learn something over night or at work that day to use in my job.
Ofcourse like I said earlier... these ridiculous job postings are just made by hiring personel that have no idea of the technology they're actually hiring for.
-- D3X
The ONE, the Only, the First truly FREE Adult entertainment site... [ I'm serious ]
Anything matching my qualifications and located in Hyderabad or Bombay. [I wince when I see these on Dice. I don't even think they hire Americans. They're probably just hiring back some of the Indians who came here on H1 visas.]
this job posting is, think about it from Kelly's viewpoint. They are competing with foreign workers for help desk support; their tech outsourcing is under siege. If someone's willing to fill this position, even for a month, they've made some money. Kelly is a transactional business; not a brain-farm (like BearingPoint or Accenture).
Tech workers are whining about what hard labor workers had to endure with NAFTA. Remember Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" -- well now, thanks to the Internet and armagedden in the telco market, you now have that sucking sound from Asia.
Want better tech jobs? Create them! You've got to build something more than yet another XML Web Service for B2B leveraging of core compentencies in the new millenium...if you know what I mean.
Welcome to the low wage economy. What people forget is that they are competing with people from India and other very low wage countries.
I am from the UK and work as a freelance writer, I did a piece not too long ago about how employers want more and more yet are in real terms offering less they were 10 years ago. I interviewed the owner of a large telesales outsorcing company, he had this to say
"People always complain about low wages, instead they should be giving me a medal. If costs become too high using staff from the UK I can just move the operation to India and save 40%. Not only that everyone of those Indian workers will be very highly educated and very grateful for the opportunity to work for me."
windows development timeline
Windows 2000: 42 months - a little less than four years
...I don't care about getting a degree any longer. I'm tired of spending money just so that I can lie about myself to maybe have a slight possibility of trying for a chance at a job.
Fuck that shit, I'm gonna be a gravedigger (isn't my dad proud now). At least then I'll have a crooked ass union to back me up.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
"worked in IT jobs have been remarking on absolutely horrible job postings for low-level IT jobs paying small change"
? except for the rediculous amount of qualifications needed for that poisition, it seems like any other job posting ive seen for helpdesk. also 19 bucks an hour is alot of money to most entry level people i know (including myself). it should be noted that the rent in edmonton for a small apartment is usually around 500 CAN/mth and with this job working 40 hours a week would make like 3k.
how is 3k a month bad? have you tried looking for work lately? im tryign to find a job doing similar things in vancouver and would be more than happy with 12 or 13 dollars an hour. that would cover rent and internet and all that.
wtf is the poster on? does he expect everyone to be making 50k+ a year?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
It was real posting to a real job list, which I thought was very funny, but the poster got banned from the list for their sense of humor.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
required-
5 years linux experiance
thorough knowlege of perl, c, php, shell scripting
ability to travel
BA in CS
was some kind of admin job for a new company
they offered us $8 an hour.
...I didn't say they were competent
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
To see posts l like that. The pay range for the job linked to in the original post is about $12/hr US, btw.
4 816.html
I've seen worse, but I ran across this one recently:
http://www.craigslist.org/eby/tch/1911
FWIW, In N Out Burger pays $11.70/hr locally.
I work at a dot-com company. One you've heard of, trust me. Anyway, we survived the Internet bubble bursting, and most of us kept our jobs, but things were still tough around here for a couple of years.
After finding out that the raises one year would be much smaller than expected, a coworker of mine complained about it. I looked at him in bafflement, and told him he should be thankful to be getting a raise at all. He should be happy to have a job at all.
For that matter, I later reflected, he should be happy simply that he makes enough money to have food to eat, to provide for himself and his loved ones, and not to have to go to bed wondering where his next meal will be coming from. All of us that can say that should be thankful for it.
Yes, the job the submitter pointed to isn't spectacular pay, but it's enough to feed and clothe yourself in comfort. That's more than most people in the world can say. Try to keep a sense of perspective while you're busy complaining about things.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
I once saw one that said "No Mullets, please."
when come back bring pie
Looking at that job posting, you could almost play a game of Bullshit Bingo with it...
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
if you see any truly unbelievably low pay rates, you can bet they're placing the ad just to fulfill a legal requirement before hiring a foreign worker for peanuts.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
CA-AB-Downtown Edmonton-Help Desk Tier 1 & 2 - Bilingual French<br>
Description:<br>
5 Tier 1 & 2 Helpdesk candidates required for our downtown, Fortune 500 client. Must be Bilingual French. Must know Windows XP, MS Office Professional, Office 2000, Lotus Notes, and Novell. WINNT is nice to have. 2-4 years experience in technical PC support and/or Helpline operations in a client/server environment. Experience supporting Intel based operating system. Good soft skills required (positive attitude, team player/self starter, communication skills, excellent listening skills, flexible, strong personal time management, task oriented, must be eager and willing to learn.) Fluency in the English language, articulate, and flexible with duties. Diploma or degree preferred- Microcomputer Specialist (GMCC), Computer Systems Technologist (NAIT), Computing Science (UofA), etc. Must be available for varying shifts in this 24/7 environment. All applicants must be bilingual French, or you need not apply.<br>
Requirements:<br>
Diploma or degree from a recognized institution, preferrably in relevant field, or equivalent working experience.<br>
Software List: Some or all would be preferred.<br>
Integral ? Benefits<br>
Integral - Payroll<br>
SAP and SAP Client<br>
AOD (Access On Demand DB)<br>
AIP ? Aspect integrator Platform<br>
ASCC - Advanced Supply Chain Collaboration<br>
AutoCAD<br>
AutoCa d Lite<br>
AutoVIEW<br>
BAAN System ( Canada )<br>
BOL ? Business OnLine<br>
CADKEY<br>
CAWP Helpdesk<br>
CCRP process owner for Canada.<br>
Chameleon (Xwindows)<br>
CIT ? application<br>
CIT - Cash In Time Notes Database (server issues)<br>
Coach - Time keeping software<br>
Columbus Citrix;<br>
CompSCOT, MQ Queries, MQ Series,<br>
Cosmos<br>
CRS<br>
C RS - Customer Reporting System<br>
CSP (Commerce Solutions Project)<br>
CSP and OMCT, If it is determined to be a database problem<br>
CTI Admin Support; BOL - Business OnLine; Commerce Engine;<br>
CTI Applic. Support<br>
EDMS<br>
EDS - Electrical design software<br>
eSMART<br>
eTB complaint/problem; eTB (Easy To Buy)<br>
FAS US-PCS-Norwalk<br>
FDTN - All Others<br>
FDTN - Installation<br>
FDTN - New User<br>
FDTN - ODBC Error<br>
FDTN - SPIN Website<br>
First View<br>
FTP Site - Canada<br>
GAD Server issues<br>
Global License Server Triad-Flex/LM, Pro-E<br>
Global Notes Database<br>
GP Time Entry - Electronic Timesheet System (ETS) - password resets<br>
Greco CNC Software<br>
Group Processes Project Information database<br>
Hummingbird ExCeed<br>
Hyperion Retrieve - WINFORM<br>
IS Supportline US-Notes Support-Americas Database<br>
JMIP Notes Database<br>
MACPAC ViewNow<br>
MANMAN (VIMS)<br>
Masterfile - server issues<br>
Masterfile ( same as above)<br>
MAXIMO server<br>
Microstation CAD<br>
Minitab<br>
MDS - Mechanical design software<br>
ME10 - 2D Cad system - Canda<br>
MQ Queries, MQ Series,<br>
Netscape Communicator<br>
Netting -Notes A Zurich supported Notes accounting database<br>
New CA network accounts<br>
New GIA/SRA account requests, Defective token returns<br>
Norton Anti Virus 4.5 Corp edition to 2003<br>
Notes file restore requests for Canada, Columbus, Raleigh and Windsor<br>
Nuclio (also known as '7-space' to monitor our network)<br>
NuTCracker - Runs Unix apps in NT<br>
OMCT - Open Content Merging Technologies ( same is CSP )<br>
Open Connect (Java VT Terminal Emulation) (Warminster)<br>
Oracle, Remedy database,<
About 5 years I saw a job posting looking for someone with 7 years experience in JAVA programming...JAVA had only announced to the public in 1995...how could you have 7 years experience with a langauge that was only available for 3 years?!?!?!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
When I was in school, there was a job posting looking for motion sickness study candidates. For $25/session, they'd spin you around until you puked. Makes all the whining about crappy IT positions seem petty.
"It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages"
They have to at least pretend to be looking locally before they start outsourcing to India.
As soon as I see 'Administer Outlook/Exchange' and 'on-call 24/7', I don't care how much it pays.
Besides, I don't have 5 years experience with 2K/XP. I don't know if they do that to weed out liars or what, but it's a big red flag to me that the employer is reality-challenged.
In 1995, I saw an ad in the local paper for a Java programmer. Had an interesting by-line:
5 years Java experience required.
Um..
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Mirrored copy:
Kevin Fox
That's true, but I'm so used to heaping shit on the Canadian currency after *years* of it tanking that it's like a reflex now. ;)
US is still up a bit over the last 10 years tho.
Only thing about a weak dollar is it makes good German beer more expensive. Fucking Greenspan.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
...for an IT to add
* A math degree
* A statistics degree
* An economics degree
* A programming certification
* An engineering certification
Assuming of course you already have a _degree_ as an IT, getting a 2nd or 3rd degree is much quicker. If your job is going down the crapper, ask your company to pay for more education. They'd gladly pay double for school what they'd refuse to give you in a raise.
I'll be an intern for the next six months. I'll earn a bit over $20/hr USD, although I still have more than two years left of school. Engineering is the bomb if you can take it.
But they don't specify which version! I've got experience in Intel 95, 98 and 2000, but I haven't logged onto an Intel XP machine yet. I've heard it really sucks, though.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Why do so many ads ask for self-motivated team players? What possible good could including this in an ad do? I mean, if the ad states that you must have experience in PL/Forgol++, then you can at least honestly ask yourself if you have experience in PL/Forgol++, and if you do you can then offer evidence to the hirer that this is so. But how many people are going to say "well, I'm not a self-motivated team player, so I'd better not respond to the ad"? This is something you ask the references, not the hiree.
if anyone is intrested:
We have call centers in Salt Lake city, Utauh and Tampa, Florida.
Anyway, just call 1800-827-6364.
1-1-2 should get you to a live person.
Have fun talking to ididots.
-Forest Grump
AOL hiring manager.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
It was bad enough that they wanted MSCE certification in addition, but wanting fifteen years experience with Linux?! ROFL!
I live in Washington State and was laid off a year ago.
While browsing through the job listings at the local Worksource. I noticed several innocuous seeming jobs at the local military base. Things like 'Trumpet Player' and 'Kitchen Manager' Well to my suprise, the only requirement was that you ENLIST IN THE MILITARY I can just see some poor horn player getting shipped out to IRAQ for a year!!!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
In 1999 I was looking for a job in Hampton Roads Virginia. Chesapeake schools advertised for a Systems Admin with a 4 year Degree in CS or IS, MCSE & Solaris Certifications minimum. Salary: $10 - $24k depending on experience!
Kirk:Scotty! The lettuce has wilted!
Scotty:Ah know, Captain, the main refrigeration unit is offline and we canna reroute the plasma relays!
Kirk:Dammit Scotty, I need freon, and I need it now!
Scotty:Captain, I'm givin ya all she's got!
Kirk:There must be... some... method... we could use to preserve our produce?
Scotty:I suppose I could use the ice chest--but it's risky. The relative humidity could be too high!
Kirk:Do it, mister, and no more questions.
Scotty:Aye, Sir.
plastics
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Ah, the year was 1993 with the country still trying to exit the recession. This was an internal company posting (I don't know if was ever posted this way outside).
There were two openings for UNIX systems programmers. They wanted degrees, and lots of experience. They asked for 15 and 20 years of experience working with internal UNIX code. Note that 1993 - 20 is starting to do UNIX systems programming in 1973 and not too many people would have that kind of experience. I showed this to my coworkers and we agreed they either didn't know what they were asking for or they thought they could get Kernigan or Ritchie for the job.
I often see ads for L1&2 Help Desk positions that reqired 7 or more years experience. Would you trust a personality that could not move their career along faster than that? Nothing wrong with help desk (I'm a desk helper myself), but dang, who stays in Help Desk for 7 years or more. I would have to paint the walls with my brains.
you still need 6~7 months more
Apparently, you are not.
HAND.
I'm not even entirely sure whether they had a version of VS .NET which would compile(as in the program not stuff it created) in the spring of 1998. Ahh well, such is lunacy.
It's for Kelly. I don't know if you are aware of this, but Kelly is a temp agency. They don't really have a lot of people who are tech support, so I think the conversation went like this:
Kelly: "Okay, tech support, got it. What software?"
Company: "I don't know. All of them."
Kelly: *shrug* "Okay, I'll check all the boxes, since we get $6/hr off the top no matter what."
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The fair market price for a programmer is $20,000. Time to face it.
If you went forward in time to 2005, you'd still have to travel backwards in time get a postmark on your resume by the deadline...
A recruiter mentioned to me a job that I wasn't qualified for, but I asked for some details to get an idea of why she was having problems filling the order. Seems a major clothing retailer was looking for someone who was a DBA (probably Oracle) and had an MBA (of course they wanted a top-5 school). The pay? $90,000. Then I understood why they couldn't get anyone. The going rate for a DBA was about $120K and a newly minted MBA from a lower-tier school was looking at $100K. To match the request the candidate would expect $130 minimum. I explained to her the database programmer I previously worked with (who had almost finished a doctorate, but didn't have MBA skills) was near $200K. Of course the reality of The Bust finally set in and the person who took that job for $90K probably got laid off so it really didn't matter.
It's the sport of the future! (and always will be)
I was told a long time ago that it was customary to ask the world, see what you actually got, and choose from there. The real problem I've seen (from both ends) is first-level resume screening that is done by non-technical people who only count buzzwords. I've gotten burnt on this, and seen others get burnt on it too.
...laura
Do english majors have any reason to read /.? /. period.
I would be afraid of an english major who visited
-Grump.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
The example given was for a staffing company looking to place a candidate somewhere. Such companies typically don't know what any of the skills they are asking for really are. They simply toss out a bunch of acronyms and hope that their lame buzzword-mining software will give them a "hit."
Employers and potential employees alike are best off avoiding such staffing companies, I think. It is a sad state of affairs when people actually think those charlatans will accomplish anything good.
...they spell it SEQUEL instead of SQL. And you know the hiring authority didn't review the job posting.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Can I complain about bad interviews to? I submitted a story about bad interviews but its been pending in the que for *6 weeks* (what does that mean?). I had an interview for qualcomm for a 1 month temp position, and the interviewer asked a bunch of jack-ass quesitons, but this one sent me over the edge "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". To this I replied, "Not working at qualcom for 4 years and 11 months!"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm not sure about the worst job out there... but this is one of the best I've seen for good money. I guess not all IT sectors are hurting. This consulting company seems to be doing pretty well.
The worst I have seen is a senior dba position for MS Access with some programming/development work involved for $8 CDN an hour.
Internet Retail spaces are wonderful. Get over it!
This is pretty good, at current exchange rates this is $12-14 /hr US.
Flex hours, 2 year contract.
Looks like a decent opportunity for someone paying their way through school or something.
On a big billboard outside of McDonalds:
Now hiring losers!!!
but it definately got your attention:
before the days of the internet there was a
massive BBS called "The Well" (hundreds of phone lines), it once ran an ad for a sysadmin that included
"located on the marina in Sausalito, can kayak to work from San Francisco".
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
> Supposedly the companies do this so they can say they could not fill the position and off-shore it.
Mebbe. However, following the principle that one should first look to stupidity before one claims that there is conspiracy, I'd say that requirements like our example arises when a manager tells the job shop, ``I need someone with 6 years of experience with Windows. You know -- NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP." And the recruiter then decides to simplify the requirements by stating that the position requires ``6 years of experience with Windows XP."
And six months later, the recruiter can't understand why he isn't making his quota.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Not really all that different from what I do now.
Doesn't say how many clients you're supporting, if that's around a hundred or so that's similar too.
Keep in mind that salary rates in Canada are a LOT lower, unless you're in Toronto, Vancouver or Ottawa.
Had an interview with GE Hydro (not sure if it's wise to mention their names, but anyways). I'm a mechanical engineer. The job was to inspect work being down on big hydro-electric projects everywhere in the world, a lot of them being in China, and mainly oversee the progress of the work and do some basic QA management.
They were offering 14$ canadian per hour...
So basically they wanted you to say goodbye to your life, work on 3 months stetches in obscure parts of the globe with unstable governments and god-forsaken diseases, and pay me less than I was making doing tech support for an ISP during college.
Someone there made the equation "tough job" + "total isolation" + "14 000$ below average starting engineering job" = PROFIT!
Sad thing is some poor guy (or girl) probably took the job.
i see at least one new miami posting a week on there that might as well read. make a free website for us, and we'll let you live
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I saw "Senior Oracle DBA, Central London, 25K", fell about laughing, and moved on. Still, I suppose if they don't try they'll never know, and management are trying all sorts of bullshit at the moment simply cos they can.
5 years is 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year... or 2000 hours.
;-)
I got SIX months experience the TWO months I screwed around trying to set up a *working* active directory.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000...
Back in the dotcom bubble days we used to list stuff like this intentionally. It was fun catching the liars out.
Me: So, you have ten years experience programming with ASP and JSP?
Idot: Yeah! I've developed a number of sites with both back in the day.
Me: Really? So what were you working on in 1990?
Idot: I was (insert meaningless dotcom business programming phrase) web solutions.
Me: Remarkable! Even more remarkable when you consider that ASP and JSP weren't even around in 1990.
Idot: Uh, excuse me (bolts from room)
If you can not be replaced, you can not be promoted. Whenever I work one of my ongoing quests is to train the guy who I think should replace me. Espeically for the meinal chores.
(And never tell a new employer about your extensive background in network administration. If you do, you will end up the defacto administrator no matter what you are supposed to be doing. And it will be a zero-time-allotted and a 100% competency reqiuired "unoffical" duty to boot. 8-)
Granted, if it is a posting for your job, and you know you have nowhere to go at the company, it is a bad thing. But no so bad as being escorted from the building just after meeting the new guy Jimbo.
It's worse *not* to see the posing that offers the world your job. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I certainly wouldn't take him up on the offer; I'd "keep on walking." But it sounds like he's being honest with you the reader. He'll work you hard, and pay you poorly until you've proven yourself. I guess he has a certain corporate culture he's aiming for, and it doesn't look like it involves buzzwords.
Maybe I should have been a dance instructor instead. Or possibly a TV critic. There's the ideal job.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It's a HELP DESK job for chrissakes!!! What the hell do you expect?? Help desk positions have always been the bottom of the barrel in terms of both pay and job satisfaction, moreso during the boom times of the mid to late 90's than now, but still... If a person wants some real world experience to put on their resume, then by all means go for it, even with the mediocre pay. But I can't honestly believe that they'll find (or expect to find) anyone that has the level of experience that they're asking for in their posting.
is because it can go down.
Because of the outsourced jobs to india and
that there simply are fools here willing to work
at such wagelevels.
this young reader is the way of the free market
and what people are willing to put up with.
Do not struggle against what will always be,
instead use it to your advantage turn to the dark side,
become part of management
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Yeah they want you to know everything.
;)
Just like Wallmart hirring illegal workers to clean the floors and the other dirty work.
(Well actually the managers of each store trying to save a buck so that he can get a bigger bonus)
They don't want to pay union wages for some guy to clean thier floors and bathrooms and take a 30 minute smoke break on every hour and the floors still look like shit.
In every job, economy and country there is always somone who is being exploited.
The Haves have always exploited the Have not's
Same shit different smell.
This country (USA) was built on exploitation.
The Hoover Dam, The railrods, Bridges and Tunnels.
The IT hirring field is no different, unfortunately most HR departments don't know what the hell they are asking for. If you do get a job it's probably cleaning up the mess the last guy left behind. you can justify yourself by saying "Hey this last admin guy was really messed up".
Maybe some IT people are overpaid maybe not. Maybe because they now do the job of 10 Admins.
Maybe everything is so streamlined now that you don't need 10 people to administer a network anymore?
I have an IT job, barely. I thank God I am able to pay my rent and buy Groceries.
Working with Windows makes me feel like I'm aging twice as fast. Does that count?
Those that irked me the most were the ones with explicit version requirements, like:
3 years with Java V1.31a7c
2 years Swing V2.93xL
Must have this experience on a Sun station running Solaris 5.839.
The above is an exaggeration, but only slightly.
As if the Microsoft style interview of asking you to solve endless programming problems on the white board and asking you puzzles over lunch was not enough: companies are now asking for results on standardized tests (e.g., SAT, GRE) along with your resume. These companies seem to believe that this will allow them to choose "really bright people".
As we all know, with all of the unemployed computer science and EE people, employers can be obnoxious and still get people to interview.
Even worse awaits you when you actually go to the interview. The Microsoft style interview has spread. In these interviews they don't ask about what you have done or how you solved problems on past projects.
At an interview with a major graphic chip manufacturer I had this guy come in, sit down, tell me his name and then ask me to solve a programming problem. I had another interview where someone asked a trick question whose answer was an impractical algorithm (the time complexity was exponential, when linear solutions were available with a slightly more complex data structure).
The justification for this interview style seems to be "we want to know if you can program". Actually, it's more like "we want to see if you can program on the white board". I've published a considerable body of C++ and Java source code on my web pages. But everyone I've talked to seems unwilling to looking at my work instead of asking these silly questions.
As we all know, the sad truth is that if you need a job you'll send your twenty year old test scores or what ever else the prospective employer wants. Then at the job interview you'll attempt to put up with what ever obnoxious and demeaning interview style they have. In this job market the company will have so many resumes and so many people coming through that they can find someone with the experience they are looking for who also happens to do well in their demeaning interview.
The guy who answered the phone said what he needed to manage a such a rental facility. I expected management experience, including accounting, hiring, and employee management. He expected a fully 10 years of computer programming experience, including C+, DB IV, plus extensive terminal installation, a college degree, and at least five year experience in software engineering. Uh... for a management job in a Rental Storage Facility? I didn't have near what he asked, but when I asked, "Why would you need that?" he said he only wanted smart managers, not the dumb ones he kept getting. I felt it ironic, thinking $33,000 was bit high for a manager, but now it seemed WAY too low for what he was asking. I told him so, and he got angry, saying I was insulting him. I told him that people who had those skills would probably ask for at least $50,000 a year, plus, they wouldn't look under "retail management" in the paper, nor would they consider running a Rental Storage Facility. He got mad, and told me to hang up. So I did.
I saw that ad for a year afterwards. I wonder if he is still looking?
More silly stories of my own here
CmdrTaco does the worst job posting...
Benefits Package: none, contract basis, terminatable at any time without severance package
Pay: $14 Canadian/hour
Wait a minute... what am I doing? Is anyone looking for a developer (or hardware engineer for that matter)?
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Not IT-related, but a telling inidcator of the job market for those of us who simply cannot afford to go to college.
(1) Janitorial Work - "Must work minimum of 40 hours a week, must be on call 24/7/365 and have a minimum of 3 years of custodial work experience. $6.00 an hour."
(2) Fire Sprinkler Installer Apprentice - "Looking for entry-level beginners. Must be able to lift 80lbs and have absolutely no fear of heights. Minimum of 3 to 5 years of Fire Sprinkler Installation Experience required"
No one wants to train anyone in anything anymore. Even if the position exists to train a new employee (see above) and more and more employers require college degrees - and increasingly 4 year degrees at that for the most basic and entry-level jobs. Of course, even that is usually not good enough. You are now expected to have several years of experience and really good credit. A low FICO score alone is enough to prevent you from even some of the most menial jobs available. Because we all know those that are late on their credit card payments s are fucking theives and there couldn't possibly be any mitigating circumstances to explain the low score.
Well the worst job listing I ever saw was when I quit a company after 2 years, and found out they were looking for 2 people to fill my position, and each were going to get basically around the same salary I was getting. Made me feel like I should have been paid more.
Worst I've ever seen was something like:
...
Linux Kernel Engineer
Please submit resume in MS Word format.
When I was job-searching last year, it wasn't enough to know a language or API. With all the free tools available, most of us can teach ourselves pretty much anything necessary in a matter of weeks. But most of the abusive job ads had specific requirements for years of paid experience.
I recall going through one ad, getting excited because I really did have the experience they wanted (Unix, C++, etc.). But then I came to the deal-killer, in all caps: "APPLICANT MUST HAVE THIS EXPERIENCE WORKING FOR A MEDICAL EQUIPMENT SUPPLIER."
I have over 5 years part-time experience of Windows 2000.
I've used it 20 hours a week from 2000 to 2003, and 20 other hours a week from 2000 to 2003.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
... but I thought it was the funniest. I actually saw a want-ad in the paper that explained that applicants must have experience in all of the following software packages. Then it went on to with a fairly lengthy list of the required packages. But the one that cracked me up was ``After Dark''. I guess they had a lot of employees who were having trouble getting their toasters to fly.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Not so long ago I found this rather amusing requirement in a job ad:
must be familiar with the 6 editor
But I think this was probably just an overzealous secretary.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
A few months ago I saw an ad for a job requiring experience in "Mutexes and Sophomores". Apparently knowledge of critical sections and freshmen was not required.
Applicants must have 10 Years Windows 2000 experience or 10 Years Solaris 9 experience.
I posted this a while back, and some people thought it was too true to be funny. Others saw the humor.
How to decode an Oracle DBA Want-Ad
Oracle and unix guy.
5.50/hr
;)) they shuffle all the desks around. Newsflash: Finance won't let me buy a reel of CAT5, it's a charity, we can't afford it. Don't even get me started on the cost of my wages against getting a working system (which I'd LOVE to do)
For that I do tech support, networking, systems analysis (DFDs etc), systems design (in Access, don't kill me, but currently working on MySQL as a backend) etc etc etc.
They grumble that I don't re-do their network wiring when (like a typical female-run organisation that it is
Worst job posting? Mine, when I accepted it, and mine still!
Yes this is a common dilema of the current IT world. I was pre-screened for an interview for an IT position. I am current on all the requirements, but I have never done PHP web development. They are going to call me back for interviews in about 2 weeks. So what am I doing in the meantime??? I have started to learn PHP. If that is their one reason for not wanting to hire me, I might be able to convince them that I am a quick learner.
The real dilema is pay issues. I am a too honest person sometimes. I expect to be paid and paid well for my work. Their is not alot of demand for my services, but even fewer people qualified to do them in this area. I am hoping this makes me valuable at least in the short term. At this point, anything that does not pay based on sales commission sounds like a dream come true. I am not a salesman.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
As funny as your post is, I can't help but wonder how you mispelled "idiot" three times. Unless you meant something else?
Note this wasn't at my company.......
Applicant" Ok I've been doing deskside here for 4 yrs...
You want me to:
A: Work in an area that has a 5% wage tax
B: Be the only support person for this app (that's buggier than a flop house mattress) 24X7X365
C: Drive two hours to work
D: Manadatory 60hr week with NO Overtime
E: Pay 300 a month just to park my car anywhere near work, no public transportation.
F: And do A-E for no increase in pay!
Boss: Yep!!! Why don't you want it?
Note: this job was a promotion for the three previous applicants in the company before this one. The reason that it wasn't for this applicant was because he had worked support on this app 2 yrs previously for a different company that payed him 2X what he's making now
~corporate tool, but employed~
I remember looking for intern/co-op positions through my school's placement center.
One year, a major computer hardware company came to campus looking ONLY for Ph.D students willing to do 3 month intern positions at minimum wage. Uh.... Turns out their HR department was a bit overzealous.
Another firm was an IT contracting company. They came to campus looking for new grads with a bachelors in computer science or engineering, and 5 years IT experience... After the representative told the several people that they were wasting his time because they didn't have enough experience, he was escorted off campus and told never to return.
I also recall a major financial institution wanted to hire CS students with 3 years of programming experience for the summer to - and I'm not making this up - *STAND INSIDE THE WALLS TO MAKE SURE THE NETWORK CABLES DIDN"T COME LOOSE OR BREAK*. The job was located in New York City, paid $5/hr, no assisted living, and you were *required* to live within 10 miles of the office. Oh yes, and you were also required to wear a suit at all times (though I have no idea how you were supposed to keep it clean standing inside crawlspaces all day long...)
This company, too, was kicked off campus and told never to return.
Did anybody notice that it's located in Alberta. That means that the crappy pay rate is in Canadian Dollars and is probably the equivalent of about 13-15 US Dollars.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I hate those. In 2001 I saw an ad that asked for 5 years + experience with Alias|wavefront maya, which was released in 1998.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
There were a few really funny IT postings in Australia recently. Depending on how you react to them you could also consider them the worst!
Well, i just got myself a job. As a graduate of a 4 year university, costing 23 tho' a year, i was jumping for joy when graduation came around. Started looking for a job..... well 8 months later, i finally found SOMETHING. In all that free time i've had, ive gotten 5 certifications:
Net+, I-net, a+, Linux, Cisco CCNA.
Well thankfully i finally recieved a call for an interview. Well a couple of interviews later i got the job. I'm officially called an "on the road technician." I get paid a pathetic 9 dolars an hour, because thats "as much as i can pay you."
Well all i have to do tho is: Unix and linux administration, T1 instalation and troubleshooting, Linux router development and VPN. And i get paid 9 dolars an hour. Nice, i spend 70 thousand dolars in school expenses, to make less than 18 tho a year. My friend who barely passed High school just found a job driving armoured trucks and makes 800 dolars a week.... So, Where do i get my refund?
How about dogs years?
I love how tech jobs always expect several years of experience using internal applications that are specific to that company. Stupid HR depts are mostly to blame.
And some people out there claim experience as far as from their birhtday.
"Greater worker insecurity" is what Alan Greenspan attributed to significant "wage restraint" on the part of employers, and the reason of the "fairy tale" economic boom of the late 90s in which median income was largely unchanged. Meaning, workers are too afraid to ask for money so they are taken advantage of by their employers.
You can read about here and here. Or get the big picture here.
Quoting Noam Chomsky from the first link:
"The facts of the matter are a little different. The economic boom is indeed unprecedented. It's the worst one in postwar American history, the slowest recovery from the low point of the business cycle in 1989. The growth in the 70s and 80s was far below the 50s and 60s and the current recovery is totally unprecedented in that it has left out the large majority of the population. So roughly 80% of households are working more hours just to try to stay where they were, they haven't yet recovered the level of 1989, the low point of the business cycle, let alone the early 1970s when the new economy was introduced. But it is a fairytale for some, the top 1% of the population are doing magnificently. The top 10% are doing reasonably well. If you look at the next 10%, it turns out that during the fairytale economy their net worth has actually declined. Their debts have increased faster than their assets. If you go below that it, gets worse and worse the farther you go down."
No - this was just making animals into barbeque sized portions - not the afore-mentioned animal porn :p
Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000...
.NET experience.
We're actually seeking candidates with three years of XP experience. We also brought in an instructor with a resume listing five years of
Sometimes the requirements aren't impossible, just extremely improbable. When I applied here for an entry SQA job several years ago, I was told that I need to have a Bachelors degree in Software Quality Assurance. At the time, there was only one college in the US that offered such a degree. Everyplace else was just a techschool certificate. I was told by the HR rep to first get a degree, then get 5 years of experience, then come back and reapply.
Out of 18 SQA personnel, none had these qualifications. If he could have listed a masters or doctorate in Software Quality Assurance, I'm sure he would have.
I went over his head to the manager with the req, and got hired. The HR rep never did talk to me afterwards.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Executives, as a class, know nothing of the fields they command and are overpaid for what they do. Fuck you for telling people who know more than you do that they don't know enough.
Just today (yes, today), I had a major schedule slip that could cost the company millions over that cheap labor.
I hope it cost you and the people that trusted you plenty. You deserve it for giving industry specific trianing offshore for price while advocating that people need more of the same. Fuck you for denying people the thing you advocate.
Business knowledge is still a damn rarity. Business knowledge and the ability to implement it in systems is almost impossible to find.
That would be because companies have not really hired and trained skilled people since the early 80's, no? So you and your fellow "executives" reap what you sow. Just wait till all those people who do know what they are doing and put up with your BS for the last 20 years reach reitrement. Fuck you 20 years of bullshit, that's what your stock portolio is worth.
Oh yeah, most resumes I see from programmers who think they know the business don't know nearly as much as they think. Spend as much time learning the business as your programming skills, and I think you'll be fine.
You only think you can tell. If you really know so much, you would have caught the spec error that you sent to India AND having fucked up, you could fix it yourself. Fuck you for your attitude and get to work, bitch.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It isn't. I've been in electronics now for 28 years. Every time that I have gone hunting for a job, these kinds of things crop up. Lately it seems like most job listings have ridiculous requirements. I do believe that it's because so many human resources people were hired by exactly the same ads that they are floating now (i.e. they got someone stupid, low-paid and incompetent).
I can now scan down the Want Ads and pick out those ads that are just fishing expeditions for headhunter agencies (high salaries with low/reasonable requirements), sweat shops (low salaries with ridiculous requirements) and automated HR departments (resume must be submitted in Word format, resumes not in Word format will not be considered). None of these ads should be replied to. Any that are legitimate will learn their lesson and resubmit the next week OR they found a sucker and, luckily, it wasn't you!
My favorite way of weeding out idiots is to submit my resume in PDF format. If they call back demanding that I send it in any other format, I give up now. If they call complaining that they can't open this in Word, I give up. If they call back and ask what a PDF file is and how can they open it, I at least give the benefit of a doubt; they might actually need me!
Here's my favorite story: I answered an ad in the paper, talked with the owner of the company and actually had an interview. About 1 week later I busted a private eye sitting in front of my house when I came home. 2+2 = ??? I called the owner of the company, told him I wasn't interested in any job he had to offer and, when he asked why, told him that he obviously wasn't capable of hiring competent people. Later that day I got a call from the private eye asking what the hell I'd done to get him fired.
It takes all kinds; I just don't want to work for most of them.
1- I'd rather make half that starting my own business
2- "entrupreneurial" er... they can't spell an ad, they can't be good to work for
3- "hockey stick" growth -- only in Canada...
On top of that, it's programming M$, and requires you to know sysadmin, db admin, front-end and server-side coding. I'm surprised they don't mention graphic design!
If they really were interested in " e-commerce done right" they wouldn't ask one person to do it all.
To all you good coders out there: damned those PHBs; if you have an "entrupreneurial" spirit, team up with people and start your own business.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
More of a Jobs no one would want recovery
I started with nothing and I still have most of it.
$18-$20 / hr + benefits is good for an entry skilled labour, college grad job. I'm not an IT guy, thats good entry pay across the board. Not for a university grad though. Use it too build your resume, nothing more than that. If you sign that 2 year contract, your'e a sucker and deserve to be in that job
Needle Nardle Noo
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... but then I realized that it was "Simba", not "Samba". OTOH, I did see "Lion King".
The worst job I saw was about 3 years ago.. The job required a MCSE in a pure unix shop. I called up and asked how many windows machines were in the environment, and there were none. When asked why does it require an MCSE, the statement was that they were best qualified to operate the servers. Go figure..
And in the IT field, look at the HR section of a taiwanese company - even the CEO has a masters degree!
Back in the late nineties, when Nokia had just released the first WAP-enabled phone, there was a job posting from Nokia on our CS department's bulletin board where the main requirement was "prior experience with WAP".
Very. F*cking. Likely.
The worst ones I've seen are ones that require you to have gone back in time in order to have enough xperience with the software they want you to use:
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Reminds me of the job postings when Unix was young. Hundreds of jobs (at entry-level pay) requiring 5 or more years of unix experience.
I didn't have the heart to call 'em up and tell 'em that Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson were all unlikely to be lured away from Bell Labs for that price. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I would have to say that job postings which declare "employees" are "paid" in stock instead of money are the absolute worst. That bullshit might have worked to some degree in 1998, but I think we've all seen the man behind the curtain by now.
After reading this, i just remembered the following comic strip i saw before:
y ?show,11
http://kmk.dnsalias.com:1234/cgi-bin/show_strip.p
You must be a time traveler also, because the build of Windows 2000, build 2195, that went gold, didn't go gold until December 17th, 1999.
The version available in summer of 99 was build 2151.
Whatever you had, it wasn't what you think.
http://kmk.dnsalias.com:1234/cgi-bin/show_strip.py ?show,11
instead (no space before the question mark)
A little less corruption and more competance in business would be a good thing. I now work for a company with very transpanent accounting, and have a compentent boss. A previous boss failed to supply electricity to a major city for over a month, but I'm sure "Quality" was maintained.
Everybody here is interpreting the job description all wrong. Kelly Services (the name of the company) is a consultant company that hooks people up with jobs. You apply, they hire you. Then, they whore you off to other companies. The long list of requirements is just so that they can whore you off to the maximum number of their clients. You'll probably only ever have to do 2 things on that list.
They really should have made this clearer in the description though
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Actually, you deserve a few more -1, Idiot moderations.
Finding fair, accurate moderation on slashdot would be akin to: (take your pick)
Justice in the US Judicial system.
Truth in politics.
Compassion and decency in christianity.
Genuine (non-spam) email in my/your email box.
At least with kuro5hin, only greater trolls are allowed to run amok, here on slashdot the crapflooders, first-posters, and goatse ijits lord it over us with mob rule. My god, I think I saw a 700,000 userid the other day. I haven't read a truly compelling story here in over a month, and see less than 20 a year (compare that to 20 a week a few years back). Hell, even then, who can read it, with 1-2 million illiterate carpetbagger mouthbreathers all hammering the sites at once?
But, to top it all off, who cares? You can't even see what your karma is anymore, as if you didn't top it off at 50 long ago, Mr. 200k userid. And all this, about a post thats little better than useless... you could have said something clever, or wise, or even trollish. But you paste a URL that the google-literate could have found for themselves, if they really cared to.
was a tech support job for the forest service. The duties were typical hardware/software support, and it had the usual list of of skills - Windows, Novell, Office, virus removal, hardware troubleshooting and repair, ect. Until you got to the last one, which was something like "knowledge and experience with tree husbandry"
Yes, I know it was the forest service, but the duties didn't mention anything tree-related, and one would imagine you could fix the computer of someone in the forest service without forestry skills. I kind of wondered if they had someone in mind they wanted to promote who had worked there, and that was their way of eliminating outsiders.
I have blog like everyone else
This sort of requirement has settled down to MS Word now, but not long ago technical staff that could work out how to use any word processing package in detail with less than five minutes with a manual (or ten without) were not considered unless they listed a particular word processing package on their resume. I had about twelve listed on mine for such situations, from Chiwriter up. All this is irrelevant, however, when you submit the resume as a PDF file and the employement agent doesn't know how to read it.
When they say 5 years, they just mean 5 years for 8 hours per day. If you work for 16 hours per day, you can gain the same experience in 2.5 years. Try using that logic in your next job interview.
Here in Colorado Springs, we have a very Christian organization that claims to project values and morals through their very profitable enterprise. They run ads all the time such as director of information technology ($28,000 / yr) and web designer for even less. They never get anybody to work for them and those that do just use them as a stepping stone. If FotF was really a Christian and moral company, they'd pay moral wages.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
That unemployment rate also doesn't take into account that the formula used to calculate unemployment has been changed many times by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics without retroactively applying the new formula. They can't apply the new formula to previous years because the data collected has also changed over time. Meaning that historical comparisons are not necessarily valid because what is being measured is different and the formula used to calculate the rate is different for given periods.
The truth is that "real unemployment rate" is much higher then politically expedient one that you quote.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
You pay a programmer $20k a year and you are likely to either get really ugly, non-scalable, non-standard, non-portable code, or a really nice piece of code with a big fat back door.
Ask yourself this...do you think that an architect, lawyer, engineer, or doctor should be payed $20k a year and, if so, how good do you think the quality of their services would be?
My grandfather is a doctor and my uncle a lawyer and they are stunned at the amount of information I must consume to stay on top of my profession. I make sure that the businesses I work for run smoothly and add real value to their bottom line. I deserve my salary. Hell, I deserve more.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
So many technically minded people screwed thier employers by jumping ship every 6 months (practically) that, in some sad irony, the situation is reversed. It wasn't one sided, of course, but the inflated environment has caused a pendulum reaction.
You'll never make as much money as you think you're worth. IT is not a profit center, its a cost center. Deal with it. Start you own company, work harder then you are now, and then maybe with a little luck you'll get the job you want. Until then, don't expect anyone to "give" it to you.
The reference came from the print version, however it can also be found online. Indeed there was a whole issue dedicated to CEOs.
Cheers!
...I mean the skills summary is a bit silly, but that is probably an artifact of the database that the listing is in, and that the submitter wanted a wide audience of potential applicants.
What they're looking for is a bilingual windows drone sysadmin to take care of their machines. Speaking from experience looking through resumes, there are a way too many mediocre or sub-mediocre system admins out there looking for a job (and I look thorugh unix resumes -- I've heard the windows ones are worse). Paying them $40k -- even CDN -- is probably being generous.
Most system admins are bad at what they do. I don't know why anyone would think they should all get paid $80k a year...
If you aren't a bad system admin, then you should realize that the $40k job listings are communicating to you that those aren't the jobs for you. If you had the job, in addition to being underpaid, you'd probably be unchallenged and bored.
One or more of the following is going on here:
They already know who they intend to hire, but want to keep up some pretense of "equal opportunity."
They don't intend to hire anyone at all, but are just putting out the ad to see what response they get.
Same as above, except they intend to use this to show that there are no qualified indiginous workers and, on the pretext of a "labor shortage," intend to bring in a tech-boot-camp trained immigrant guest worker who will work for $9 CDN. "Hey, we advertised the position, but there isn't anyone qualified, so gosh, we gots to bring in an H1B."
Same as above, but the perky HR flack intends to call all applicants and tell them the position is filled. "But hey, this other position just came available. It's a GREAT commission sales opportunity with unlimited income potential!" that turns out to be telemarketing. Temp agencies are famous for this.
Congratulations! You're hired. :)
but you must be God in 3 different religions now.
On the flip side of that issue, I am currently looking for a software developer to fill a peer position with me in my shop. I am requesting the following:
Languages:
shell (bash, sh preferably - csh less desireable)
Perl and/or Python + Tk gui development
Java and/or C/C++
Knowledge of SQL and basic Database design and administration.
Experience:
*nix system administration experience.
Preferably 5 years or more development experience.
Desired:
Knowledge of Agile development methods.
Education:
4 year degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
Synopsis:
Candidate will work with customers (our customers are mostly internal customers) to develop software specifications, project managers and possibly vendors to implement said applications. Additional duties include Tier 4 trouble escalation for said applications. (to put it in a nutshell we will be building tools for our NOC, Technical Support, Customer Service Center, System Administrators, Network Engineers, Management, and on a rare basis - outside business customers)
No specific salary amount is listed (a large range from $xx,xxx up to $xxx,xxx - negotiable).
I don't think that list is far outside of the reasonable arena (I have all of those skills and experience and much more than that). Here is the kicker: I can't find anyone qualified to do the job I am currently doing (barely treading water btw - doing two jobs for the price of one). Here are the reasons:
1. We can't hire anyone from outside of the company! I can understand the need to keep our people gainfully employed instead of letting them go...I would certainly want that chance if my current job was on the line.
2. Most of the people who apply for the position aparently don't even read the requirements before posting. This is the worse part. I get glorified clerks, and middle management personel managers who think the job is managing people (no - you actually have to know how to develop an application specification, write the code in the appropriate language for the job, or read a vender's code and understand how he is implementing your design - as well as a host of other things, like fighting with internal and external developers to get them to do incremental releases once a month - instead of a big roll-up every 4 months!).
Along this vein I also get people who only know one narrow discipline. For example, 'Visual Basic IDE and MS Access database experience'. While they might be trainable - they are certainly going to be an albatros around my neck until they are trained up on more than just using their mouse to build applications on a Windows box.
Here is my advice to those of you looking for a real steady job in the computer field:
Stop thinking of yourself as a 'Programmer' or a 'Coder', or a 'DBA' or whatever narrowly defined field you think you are in. From now on you are a 'System Integrator', 'System Developer', 'Computer Guru'. Stand up straight - stick out that chin - be proud of who you are.
Learn as much as you can about iterative/agile development - characterized by rapid prototyping, frequent incremental releases, and a really meaningful feedback loop with your customers and team members that addresses the three key questions: What did we do not so well this iteration? What did we do very well this iteration, and finally, what can we do to improve ourselves for the next iteration?
Avoid the strict waterfall method (where specifications are defined in detail - often taking many weeks or months - before implementation - during which specifications are frozen until final release. At which point the application is 'maintained' and changes have to go through a review process - many months - and vye for IT resources with other projects; I have lived through these - and it is not pretty); build quickly to get something in the hands of the users so they can gi
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I saw an ad where a company was looking for someone with experince in "J2EE (Java to Enterprise Edition)". How reassuring does that sound...
Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
I think the worst part about this job would not be the pay, but the working conditions. Who would want to work for such an asshole? Maybe he's just a straight shooter, but somehow I get the idea that when he dies, nobody will be at the funeral.
Well it sure feels like 5 years...
If Marketing is what you really would like to study, then by all means do it. But if you really like CIS, then continue on with that. You're in college to learn what you WANT to do with your career, not what you think the market dictates you should do.
Good strategy, that.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The worst I saw was from a second-tier aerospace company that expected you to basically have a PhD in databases, on in Computer Science, and a third in the new acronyms that've popped up in the last two years (e.g. 14 years experience in Mod_Perl). After two pages of acronyms and the ability to design and fabricate CPU's in your home as well as write MacOs X in Assembler without taking notes, the position requires up to 75% travel. You should be able to pick your own jobs and own a mansion at that level; but the position won't let you see your mansion for 9 months out of the year! Finally the sentance that nobody on Earth could live up to: "Only those applicants having ALL of the listed qualifications will be considered". I almost emailed the company and asked to meet the successful applicant. -Trogdor the Burninator for President
Comes a time in a man's life when he realizes that there is NO wage that is worth working for, and that the only person worth working for is HIMSELF.
To be an employee is to allow someone else to define your day for you, and your life.
The article affects me directly: after struggling for far too long I'm a year away from finishing my CS, but money has become tight and I'm wondering should I work my a$$ off at two jobs to afford to finish school, or perhaps start looking in another direction? I've had friends who went to tech school to become electricians and plumbers and within a year of starting school they were making $20/hr USD. Now they're making $40+/hr thanks to Unions while I'm barely making $10/hr 3 years into a CS degree with 5x more loan debt, and it doesn't sound like it's going to get much better after I graduate judging.
Do I (and thousands of other IT students) keep pouring money into the IT education money pit, or suck up our losses and head in another direction?
Perhaps Slashdot should be "News for minimum-wage making Nerds" and a new article category should be offered: "stuff you can't afford until it's hopelessly obsolete"
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
We also brought in an instructor with a resume listing five years of .NET experience.
My first assumption would have to be that he is lying--MS didn't even announce an alpha of dotnet until July 2000.
That said, it's possible he's telling the truth--or something close to the truth, anyway, since dotnet has an ancestor named Omniware, which has existed since 1995.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Actually what I've seen is that frequently the HR person who's responsible for the posting has only notes from a meeting with a PHB (Pointy Headed Boss) and neither of them have a clue.
I remember having a discussion with a headhunter about the "requirement" that a candidate for a particular job had to have 5 years experience with Java. Problem was, at that time Java had only been around for 3 years.
He said basically "sorry, but that's what the client wants so we can't accept your resume unless you have 5 years experience" and then suggested I rewrite my resume to match.
Didn't get the job, but if their HR and management were so lame, it was probably for the best.
yeah, I've actually seen one equivilant to that... I also remember a report from M$ alleging that they had a win2k box running for three years last year... that would have been great if it was the same build as customers were getting.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
the only degree you get if you don't pay attention
is a degree of stultification and culture too poor to mention!
mod me up down or sideways, it doesn't really matter;
better get your RSI on, baby, and indulge in mindless chatter!
It's a troll but i'll bite...
Look at my user information for a second.. It's been a little slow this week, but unlike the trolls and FP's you akin me too, I actually care about my comments here on slash. Nearly 1 out of every 2 posts of mine get moderated up.
Now what is my motivation?
I just like the fact that people think along similiar lines that I do. I enjoy the fact that my insight gets rewarded in the form of karma. Some of my posts are 4 line direct and too the point, while others are 2 page tirads based on personal life experience. I carefully craft my comments to appeal to a wide audience, chocked full of insight and sometimes humor.
As far as "google literate" I've had both these sites in my favorites for about 6 months now. It's how I know Dave Suthibut is no longer being maintained (still funny though) and fuck that job has gone from a simple non-interactie page made from MS frontpage, to the PHP please leave your comments glory that it is now.
And I do care when mistakes in moderation are made. You're obviously missing the point about why i'm bringing it up. You yourself are sitting here bitching and moaning about how bad the slashdot moderation system is, how you left it SOOO long ago for kuroshin, yet when I try to remedy my own bad moderation, you crucify me. You're whole post is just stupid.
I did a quick check on you're UID to make sure that you're not a complete idiot. You seem like a nice, smart person. Albiet a bit underemployed at the moment (so am I so don't sweat it) I'm going to read through some of your past comments to get a better idea of who you are before I completely pass judgement on you.
Yes I care.
Even the government puts the official poverty line at $50k!
You're (notice the correct usage) completely correct about my missuse of You're (you are) when it was Your (possesive) and I apologize wholeheartedly.
(BTW try coding and seeing how fast your english turns to turds)
One more thing I just gotta add here... the Coupe De Gra, quoted from your very own journal.
5 9
http://slashdot.org/~NoMoreNicksLeft/journal/46
Got mis-moderated by a troupe of chimpanzees masquerading as slashdot readers. Some idiot accused me of cutting and pasting a list of OS's I claimed to use.
Sort of like the pot calling the kettle black.
Not IT, but probably what convinced me to stay in IT for the moment... Junior Mechanical Engineer at a casket company... What a shiny happy place that must be to work in...
I'm not going to comment about whether or not 1220 is a "good" score, but it is definitely a better score back in the day than it is now.
I have seen a lot of things like that when New York State Posts for a bid in the IT structure. Because the State really wants one company or person to do the job but they have to bid it out. So they make the bid so only that one company or person is qualified. ... ...
The job can be for a consultant who sweeps the floor of the computer room. But because they want one consultant and need to justify paying them $80 an hour. They make a bid for something like.
Computer Consultant. Must have intimate knowlege of the following hardware IBM Mainframes, Sun Fire 12k, PC. with the following Operating Systems, Linux, Windows 3.1-2003, AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD. Must have 5 Years experence in programming in Java 3 Years Programming in C++,
And so forth so when it comes to bid there is only one person who is truely qualified for the job.
I am sure some of these companies already have a person they want but Upper Manangement want to post the job to the public so they adjust the job qualifications so they can higher the person they want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Median income in the US of A is about $30,000 per person, or $35,000 per household. Basic rule of thumb is you double hourly wage and multiply by 1,000 to get annual income. So that's $26,000-29,000. Given that Canada has a lower GDP per capita, their median incomes are probably lower (unless you adjust for PPP). The only thing that seems out of line to me is the huge list of software, which was probably just the result of someone copying and pasting from a list somewhere without thinking about it.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Okay, what are they like?
...yeah, how many people for these 100-ish boxes?
"Great company, very busy, lots of growth."
Do tell. What kind of shop do they have?
"75 to 100 servers."
So they're not quite sure how big they are. You've been talking to a clueless manager, then.
(Pause) "Yeah, he wants you bad."
How bad? How many people are supporting these...
"uh, closer to 100 servers"
"3 on staff right now."
So they either had a cost-cutting purge or the previously overworked staffers walked before they keeled over.
"So then, do you want to talk to them?"
So sometimes it's the postings you *don't* see that you should worry about.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Look for entries with "Job Ad" in my journal.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
(From a snopes.com case)
SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY Cape Girardeau, Missouri 63701
Enclosed is an announcement of a tenure-track position in philosophy at the rank of assistant professor. We hope to fill this position rapidly; the target date for our final decision is June 13. We are more interested in looking at candidates with real teaching experience than in newly minted Ph.D's, who might have unrealistic expectations about the possibilities for academic growth at an institution such as ours. Southeast Missouri State University is a regional university which serves students in the southeast portion of the state including St. Louis. Our students tend to be poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme. We offer a major in philosophy. but do not usually have more than two students officially declared as majors at any given time.
There are a few good students, however, and we are proud to say that our current graduating major, William Knorpp, won the 1985 Analysis competition and will be undertaking graduate study in philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill next year. Mr. Knorpp's upper level work was mainly accomplished through independent tutorials; and prospective candidate must understand that there will be virtually no opportunity to teach upper-division seminars in philosophy. We also offer a religious studies minor; most of the students who declare this minor are shocked to learn that Moses might not have written the Pentateuch and regard higher criticism as secular humanist propaganda. The 12 hrs/semester teaching load is devoted mainly to general education courses at the freshman/sophomore level. In another five years, if the general education curriculum is revised as promised, there may be seminars which are to "capstone" the G.E. program.
The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly non-intellectual -- somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting -- and the candidate cannot expect to attract students by offering courses that assume innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought. Nevertheless. in order to earn promotion and tenure it is necessary to be involved in curriculum development and to sustain an interest in research and publication. It has occurred to me that the best candidate would be someone who has held the Ph.D. for more than two years, has taught at a community college or a rural state institution, and who would like to continue in somewhat the same vein but at a slightly higher level.I will be interviewing at the Central Division Meetings in St. Louis. If you have an questions, you may call me at my office
here
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
questions@craigslist.org, or if it's really bad, send it to abuse@craigslist.org.
Thanks!
Craig
The reason you see job postings that seem to be ridiculously specific and arbitary for simple jobs is that the company already knows who they are going to hire. See, there are rules about hiring foreigners into positions that could be filled by local candidates. So what they do is sit the candidate they want down (maybe a former intern) and ask for every conceivable skill they possess, attempting to create a job position for which there is only one person on earth qualified.
Are you an amazing software developer looking for challenging opportunities? We've got the place for you. Our organization is seeking a mid-level (or junior with fair experience) software engineer, who is energetic and EXTREMELY self-motivated. Our company only hires people who drive themselves for the goal.
m l
You will be working on software for the PalmOS platform as well as software for Windows. You should be flexible with the type of programming you do. Your work may include writing Windows components for integration with Palm.
Compensation is $40k/yr, no benefits initially. You will be working from home initially and will be worked like a dog, so please expect long hours. Please include a full resume and a detailed list of projects you have been involved with.
Compensation: $40k/yr FT
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sof/18823825.ht
These postings requiring super-human qualifications and offering insulting salaries are used to establish that the "position cannot be filled" by a resident. This is a step in justifying bringing an H1B application. The requirements are carefully matched to exactly the qualifications of the H1B applicant, who the company posting the ad has already decided to hire. But first, they must post the position and ensure nobody else gets hired. These postings are carefully designed to exclude qualified applicants, by using the inflated job requirements and slave wage salaries. Don't bother applying, they will find a reason to reject you.
We need a new stupid job posting section in Slashdot to which we can post the lastest find and have a few hundred thousand slashdotters respond to. After sifting through a couple of hundred thousand resumes these geniuses might give up posting job openings period.
Well yeah, I have been developing software for the American Society of Primatologists and the Japan Society of Protozoology for a decade now.
Actually, I've seen a lot of people asking for impossible requirements. I never apply for them because I don't want to be working for anyone so stupid that they don't have a clue about what the technologies are or how long they've been around, and much, much worse, they don't have a clue what they need if they are asking for something impossible.
Karma Clown
I put in my two-weeks notice because I found a decent sysadmin job. I'm leaving behind:
Field Technician:
A+ / Net+ / MCSE / Compaq certified
Good People skills
Salary $350/week after taxes
8 - 12-hour days at locations anywhere in 160-mile range, no overtime pay.
Familiar with banking hardware and software, insurance compliance rules, data security concepts.
Assist Active Directory and Novell teams with desktop issues.
Ability to work with server hardware and software.
it's about $12/hour assuming 8-hour days, but I work about 55 hours/week for the same pay. And this is ion one of the most expensive areas of the country to live.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I have five years experience with Windows 2000, just not with the release version...
Betas were circulating in 1999, alphas quite a bit before then.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
INTERNAL JOB POSTING
.NET, Java, VisualStudio, Clearcase, Lotus Notes, Siebel, Office, and other standard development tools. Will work closely with hardware development teams to create next generation computing platforms. Master's degree required, Ph.D. strongly preferred. Prefer candidates fluent in Hindi, Chinese, Russian, or Czech. Must be willing to travel. Contact ********* or see your HR Generalist.
POSITION: Entry Level Software Engineer
LOCATION: Various
SALARY: $36k-48k, depending upon qualifications
DESCRIPTION: ********* is seeking motivated individuals to fill several key entry level positions in software development. Successful candidates must have 10+ years project experience with at least 5 years in leadership or staff level positions. Candidates must be fluent in C, C++, C#,
====
IMO if the CEO of is basically a vote counter, the company is one step away from Chapter 7. I take it as axiomatic that democracy is inefficient and slow. In a corporation that is death-on-a-stick.
There is one reason why I will probably never be a CEO. That is my inability to get people to do what I want, because they want to do that.
Sure, if you can make someone rich, or threaten them, leadership isn't any big deal. But you have to be able to make them very, very rich, and cut out a few tongues once in awhile, just for fun. Someone that can lead without that is rare and valuable
But 531x(average worker's pay)? Good Lord...
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
I saw a job listing for a Network engineer for SAIC or one of the other big government contractors. Wanted X year experence in networking, yada, yada, yada... arabic and weapons certified. Three guesses where the job opening was located at.
There is no problem offshoring a job, it is only if the programmer is going to come to the US and pay taxes here that there are any restrictions.
Don't worry that much about offshore contracts, they are a fad. The US govt is currently running a 400 billion deficit and thats before the $87 billion for Iraq/hallibuton is spent. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent the deficit will be structural and run to about $300 billion even if we have a return to the Clinton economy.
What I am getting at here is the fact that the exchange rate is not going to hold at its current rate forever with that type of deficit. The only way to fund the deficit is to borrow, that in turn will push up interest rates. In the short term the capital inflow will shore up the dollar (people buying dollars to lend) the rise in the dollar will further hurt the economy, as will the increasing interest rates that the Fed has to offer to get people to buy the debt.
Eventually things that can't go on forever don't. The currency market will get nervous about the ability of the US to repay the debt burden and we will have a good old fashioned currency crisis. At that point the dollar will rapidly plumet in value and the economic incentive to offshore jobs will be gone.
Of course they might not be wanting yout J2EE/Linux skills by that time. The market will probably have moved on
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I have Tons of Positions(TM) open right now... we develop software to perform Radar Cross Section Analysis.
:) It's all just for fun, but still something you can do to keep your skills up and have something to put on your resume if you're between jobs. There are about half a dozen of us right now.. it isn't such a bad gig :)
Now, for those of you who clicked before reading on, the only drawback is that I have no money, so there is no pay
"FTP Site - Canada"?!
"Six Sigma - ABB data collection for manufacturing quality - Canada". Right, now I know that ad was written by a psychotic butt-monkey. Why the frell does a tier 1 helpdesk tech need to know anything about Six Sigma? You write the frelling numbers down, end of story. Let the green belts or black belts waste time with the statistical analysis.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
Here's a novel idea:
If you don't like these low-paying jobs, DON'T APPLY FOR THEM!
This is all about supply and demand. If there are too many techie types available, then there will always be someone willing to do the job for LESS than you.
Get some better job skills, or train yourself in another industry. Don't sit around and whine about how you can't get paid $50 an hour because some H1B programmer from India stole your job.
*mwillems winds up and delivers*
But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
*swings*
Do you mean investors and janitors?
*It's a long drive back-back-back-back-back.... gone!*
(To stretch the baseball analogy to death...)
I agree with your point, mwillems. There's definitely something to be said about the idea that successful companies require teamwork across the board. You can field an all-star team of ball players or engineers, but without skippers, CTOs, ticket punchers, sales, marketing, bobble-head doll resellers, and groupies, you're left with a bankrupted company moving to Sowasdositcalit, Montana, which has just built a new office park with stadium seating and state-of-the-art shower rooms.
(Sorry, the groupies sidetracked me...)
Go team!
-- Will program for bandwidth
I cannot even begin to relate how many times I've seen job postings asking for at least 10 years experience with .NET and longer in Java. They ask for SQL, C++, HTML, or the equivalent. Oh, and having a firm understanding of TCP/IP or ethernet will clearly help any web developer/designer (whatever that is supposed to be).
It's amazing to me that companies can actually make job postings like this then reject qualified individuals (probably when they inform the employee that it's presently impossible to have 10 years in .NET). It's amazing they can even function at all. I mean, who writes the postings? Upper-level employees, no doubt.
This concludes my rant. Silly, isn't it? Nevertheless, do a search for tech jobs on Dice, and this is the kind of nonsense you turn up.
Join Tor today!
Pay based on amount of work? Not in this country. Pay based on importance of work? Not in this country.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Someone is blowing smoke at you!
As a Sysadmin you have full rights to anything on the servers and LAN that you or your employers own. Wiretapping does not come into play unless the government does it, or the government has somone do it as their agent. The only type of recording employers can not do is voice without the notifying their employees that they are subject to monitoring and recording. (However in Penna, you have to have the consent of both parties for a voice recording.)
Email belongs to the boss, all your surfing habits belong to the boss. Hell anything you do on your home machine is subject to whatever your employer wants to do if you connect to their network and use just one piece of software supplied by them.
Tell your source to try looking at the laws on search and siezure before giving you false legal info.
There is no "Title X", Many statutes and laws have titles that exceed X (10 in Roman Numerals) but Title X of what law? what statute?
IANAL, but IAALS (I am a Law Student) and I suggest that you try reading:
ISBN 0-8493-1192-6, Cyber Crime Investigator's Field Guide by Bruce Middleton, Appendix G
or just go to US DOJ Computer Crime
The Search and Seizure manual is here: S&S Manual.pfd
HTML
Short excerpt from page 7 of the pdf:
4. Private Searches
The Fourth Amendment does not apply to searches conducted by private parties who are not acting as agents of the government.
The Fourth Amendment "is wholly inapplicable to a search or seizure, even an unreasonable one, effected by a private individual not acting as an agent of the Government or with the participation or knowledge of any governmental official." United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 113 (1984) (internal quotation omitted). As a result, no violation of the Fourth Amendment occurs when a private individual acting on his own accord conducts a search and makes the results available to law enforcement. See id. For example, in United States v. Hall, 142 F.3d 988 (7th Cir. 1998), the defendant took his computer to a private computer specialist for repairs. In the course of evaluating the defendant's computer, the repairman observed that many files stored on the computer had filenames characteristic of child pornography.
The repairman accessed the files, saw that they did in fact contain child pornography, and then contacted the state police. The tip led to a warrant, the defendant's arrest, and his conviction for child pornography offenses. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit rejected the defendant's claim that the repairman's warrantless search through the computer violated the Fourth Amendment.
Because the repairman's search was conducted on his own, the court held, the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the search or his later description of the evidence to the state police. See id. at 993. See also United States v. Kennedy, 81 F. Supp. 2d 1103, 1112 (D. Kan. 2000)
(concluding that searches of defendant's computer over the Internet by an anonymous caller and employees of a private ISP did not violate Fourth Amendment because there was no evidence that the government was involved in the search).
c) Employer Searches in Private-Sector Workplaces Warrantless workplace searches by private employers rarely violate the Fourth Amendment. So long as the employer is not acting as an instrument or agent of the Government at the time of the search, the search is a private search and the Fourth Amendment does not apply. See Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 614 (1989).
Now, if you or your employer is privy to illegal activity online, you are duty bound to report it, or face the consequences as a conspirator. Whoever is giving you that "title X" line is setting you up for a fall!
Assuming you have 5 years experience with OOP and experience with the mentioned languages you havn't falseified your resume and the client might just accept the resume. (Considering the client is isn't the best informed person anyway). Furthermore, if you do have extensive OOP experience, and some Java experience, you will probably fill the position just fine.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
I'm a tier 1 tech support guy and it only took me three tries to figure out how to answer the phone! cut us some slack!
(This is true, btw. The phones here are completely counter-intuitive on how you answer them in headset mode)
The worst job I have ever come across was Sewage Diver. Basically you put on scuba gear and swim around in fecal matter to work on technologies in sewage tanks.
And then there was E
You might want to check out http://duluth.happypenguin.org/forums/
It's a forum for people that were in Duluth in the 80's & 90's. I did my time at UMD from 1990 to 1995.
And I agree, it's one of the most beautiful cities I know.
Fuck that job
First, a very stupid one to make you lose your faith in humanity... Stupendoes
And now the one to restore your faith
A Dream job for any nerdy geek right after the high school
------------ Internet? Is that thing still around? H.J. Simpson
Eh... it's a 2 way street. Yeah, on one hand, it's a fair comment to say "Hey, if you don't like the deal you're getting working for someone else, start your own business!" But on the other hand, there's the reality that 1. The economy will only support so many businesses at a time, and 2. Many people who started their own businesses had some of the start-up funding pretty much handed to them.
For every successful business that literally began with great product ideas by a couple people working out of a garage, there's at least 10 that began when someone inherited a bunch of cash and needed something to invest some of it in. I don't care what some folks preach about you being guaranteed to be a success if you only work hard and have enough "drive" to succeed.... Reality is, you need things like advertising in the Yellow Pages ($$$'s!), money to keep filling your vehicle with gas when you travel around promoting your product or service, and so on. Many a perfectly good business has failed because the owners simply didn't have the funds put aside to get them through that first year or two of not being profitable yet....
Hey!
:)
I taught a 3 day PHP course up in Moncton earlier this year - were either of you there by any chance? It'd be quite a small world if so.
creation science book
Organization: CASHBACKALLIANCE (cashbackalliance.com)
Position Description:
We are an ICANN accredited domain registrar. We require programmers to help develop software to strip all WhoIs servers through proxy ports over the Internet.
Skills Required:
-C++
-UNIX Proficiency.
-Experience with scripting languages (Perl, CGI, etc).
-Strong data parsing skills.
Prior experience in the domain name industry would be beneficial.
(Their website seemed to indicate that they were running some kind of pyramid scheme-type operation.)
--It's all fun and games, 'till someone loses an eye. Then it's one-eyed fun!--
Real estate is really that expensive in TX? Seems like with all that space, people wouldn't be so crowded. Where I grew up (Johnson City, TN), an 80'x20' house (that's 1600 sq. ft) runs us $500/mo, including water. ($.3125/sq. ft) Of course, that is in a so-called "bad neighborhood" and with an active train track 50 ft from the house. But single-parent households like mine can't really afford to be choosy.
;-)
(There is a positive side to growing up that close to a train track: now that I'm in college dorms, I sleep peacefully every night while my hallmates complain of all the noise. Ahh, blissful sleep
I never called you a troll. I also never denied being a whiny bitch myself. I just flamed you for thinking moderation can work. Maybe I once did, and you remind me of myself which embarrasses me, I dunno.
We're I-bought-cheesy-puffs-on-the-interweb.com, a startup Fortune 23,500,000 company with a fantastic new idea! We're going to sell home-delivered cheese puffs over the interweb!
Project Requirements
We'd need the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well as your first born child and a hand job. All source code must be provided, and you must assign all copyrights to us. We need this project completed within the next three hours. Contractor will be required to provide lifetime support for code base, even if we let the neighbor kid muck about in the source code (Janice says that he's a web developer, so he must be qualified. Besides, he's in the 10th grade now, we're sure he knows what he's doing).
Contractor Requirements
Compensation
We offer a generous compensation package that includes free soda (Wednesdays only) and all the pretzels you can eat! Yay!
We'll also give you a title! Yes, you'll be the Supervisory Director of Internet Architectural Engineering (Junior)! That's the kind if title that you can almost pay a mortgage with! Almost.
Unfortunately, we can't offer compensation in the form of pay or benefits right now. When the interweb cheese puffs delivery service takes off, though, we'll pay you really, really well. Promise!
I will not tell you what was the worst, most shameful, humiliating and slavishly exploiting job posting I have ever seen, since posting it I was young and naive and I don't really want to talk about it.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
However you missed the boat on drugs. Drugs are NOT subsidized in Canada. Nor is dental work, nor are eyeglasses. But, patent life in Canada is shorter. This means there is more competion, and medicine is cheaper. Ah well, you are right Canada does have slow health care. Charging $50.00 to the the morons that show up at the emergency ward with the sniffles (a non emergency) instead of the doctor's office would help Canada afford something better. It happens all the time. This is the one lesson from American health insurance that Canadians could well learn from. It costs about 3 or 4 times the price of a doctor's office visit to go to the emergency room... and that is just to be triaged before treatment!
However... and now a major rant against American health care: You're probably the type who never bothered to notice the clerk at a local store wince because he or she is in pain from a back injury. And you probably don't give a shit that they can't get it fixed becuase they can't afford it on the wage they make, the store they work at doesn't provide health insurance, and they make too much to get medicade. Just as long as you can get your MRI in a day, who gives a fuck about the 70,000,000 who can't get any MRI? But then again, maybe you are also one of those hypocrytical born again Christian assholes who says universal medicare is not for you because the people who can't afford health insurance should stop whining and get a real job like I hear these dickheads say all the time. Like Jesus when healing a lame begger ever stopped to say, "do you have an HMO or a PPO? What, no insurance? Sorry piss off."
It is amazing that a county that outspends by far any other country in the world per capita in health care, doesn't care to make sure everyone is covered. That is the black side of American health care. On the other hand, you may need a long time to get an MRI in Canada, but you will get it whether you are employed or not. And if it is an emergency, you will get it in minutes. Urgent, in hours. Nice to have, you have to wait. I had a shoulder operation after I was hurt... after I was laid off from a company. I wouldn't have been able to afford it here. Canada has also either the first on second healtiest population in the world according the the U.N. That is because everyone has access to basic health care. The mattress store clerk in Ballwin, MO. wouldn't have to live in chronic pain. The U.S. by the way, falls way down the list, below Canada and many of the European Union countries who all have universal health care.
So you want to knock universal health care? And people keep saying Americans are selfish. Can you imagine that? Get a clue.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
A job advertisement could be one where they have the specific candidate in mind, but are required to advertise for it.
I saw this one in a local paper two weeks ago here in Riyadh: construction worker - 600 riyals a month, plus housing (providing housing is typical of many jobs here), a twelve hour work day.
.26666
A riyal is worth USD
RTFM; please, I beg you.
That could be possible. The first RC was released around mid-99, so 5 years as of today isn't as absurd as it sounds. You would have had to have access to the later stages of the beta test, which means you'd likely work for Microsoft and undoubtedly all of your knowledge from the time signed away by contract, but who cares about those things anyway.
I'm hiring some people (in the SF Bay Area) and I can tell you its definately an employer's market for tech right now. There's so many people out there taking what ever pays $1 more than unemployment. I'm seeing lots of resumes with "self-employed private consultant" listed as the recent experience (2 or more years).
What we would payed 3 years ago for a software engineer would now pay for an engineer and a qa engineer and we don't have to worry about them scanning DICE once a month for something better.
I just talked to a guy who had to move to Philadephia from the Bay Area because it was the only offer he had. God, I felt sorry for him
Are things different in other areas?
This is a side note...and perhaps I'm being a bit naive here, and that's possible since I love language and speak several of them... ...but half the shit I buy has both English and French on it (obviously intended to be sold all over North America.) Another 1/3rd of it adds Spanish as well.
Seems to me a particularly innovative individual could put together a book on how to teach yourself French simply by reading boxes of Tide detergent. At the very least, why isn't it that people are looking at the text, and then comparing. Such an easy way to learn new words it seems to me....
For $19.00 an hour on a 2-year contract? I'm there. I got shafted by HP, yes, Hewlett Packard, for $15.00 an hour and got hosed after busting my ass for 5 months. Just one day, "Oh, we love your work, you're great, you work hard, we're downsizing, goodbye." "Can I get my stuff from my desk?" "No, we're boxing it up for you as we speak." Thank you very fucking much. BTW, can we pass a couple more H1-B Visas, I DON'T THINK WE HAVE ENOUGH SWAMIS IN THIS NATION YET. I LIKE GOING TO BED AT NIGHT KNOWING I CAN BE FIRED AT ANY MOMENT AND THAT MY DAUGHTER WILL PROBABLY STARVE IF I CAN'T PROVIDE FOR HER FOOD.
IF WE DON'T UNIONIZE INFO-TECH, NONE OF US WILL BE LEFT TO SPEAK FOR.
UNIONIZE NOW!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
The listing:
The reality:
The company is hiring only on a contractor basis, not as an employee, which means they offer no benefits, no overtime pay, and you have to pay self-employment taxes. But they will still manage you like an employee, meaning they expect you to work for them full-time, do whatever tasks they assign you, and they will monitor everything you do. Plus, even though they claim to offer $10-$15 per hour, they will actually try to negotiate it down to $8-$10. They won't train anybody (even though it's a perfectly trainable job) so they expect you to know how to answer questions about technical support, pricing/features for web hosting plans, and billing policies at the time you come in to interview.
Unfortunately I know this because I work for them. When I applied last year they were asking for a system administrator for $15-$30/hour, but when I went in to the interview they wouldn't offer more than $12-$15. And now they're wondering why they can't find any qualified applicants!
You don't know a gift when you see it.
I would have been running out and then back with a dog and cat under my arms and a bucket of chicken fat. YEEEEHAH!
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Recently, while looking for a new job some of the things i've seen:
1) Everything requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree in *something*. Even if it is a Master's in Technical Support, or a Bachelor's in PC Repair Tech I. Some say "Requires both a Master's degree in X, plus equivalent experience."
2) I saw an ad requesting 10+ years experience in Java programming. Another wanted 7+ in Struts.
3) one of my favourites, a slave to buzzwords: "X number of years experience in an Object Oriented Programming Language, such as perl, python, java, C/C++ or javascript." It apparently doesn't matter which *one*. And by the vast differences of languages listed, it doesn't appear to matter what you will use it for, either.
4) "Applicants must be Bilingual". I speak English and German, but apparently this didn't meet their requirements for "bilingual", so i didn't get the job. Besides, it was an internal UNIX Sysadmin position, which means that you pretty much wouldn't ever talk to anyone anyway.
do() || do_not();
Translation: Our computer system is a complete mess. We don't even know exactly what software we are running. We're lucky if Windows even boots without errors. We need someone to take care of all of our computer needs, and to help the boys in the lumberyard when things get busy. As a bonus, the candidate would be able to communicate better than our high school dropout foreman, who wrote this job ad. Be sure to include salary history so we know who is desperate enough to work for the minimum wage that we would like to offer. And please, apply now. We can't even send out invoices until those nasty DLL conflicts are resolved.
Of course, back then it took super programmmers to cram a complex graphical application into an 8086 running DOS.
I like the idea of some basic coverage for everybody. Makes good sense. However, I think too many people look towards the federal government for the answers. In a nation of nearly 300 million, a national plan, in my opinion, is not feasible. Canada has 30 million people, biggest Western European pop would be 60 millionish. Japan is 120 million and has some socialists aspects to it's health system, but no American is going to settle for the cost of living they have in Japan (even if we had all the pretty Japanese birds) It's best left to the states and states like NY have excellent programs especially for kids and seniors.
" Y'know, I was almost tempted to admire your principled stand -- until I noticed that your journal is filled with bitching about being broke."
Actually to be totally honest I often wondered what would have happened had I kept that job.. then someone who still kept track of the place filled me in: the anti spammers got their main link pulled not long after I left followed by them getting booted from every co-location except rackspace.. They ended up packing up everything and moving the buisness to Moscow..
So I would still have been out of a job.. but probably sooner than I was anyways As that place closed shop before I got layed off from the job I took afterwords.
It's been a few years now since I've interviewed for an IT job. Thank god for that.
My background was tech support. Nothing advanced, just lots of software/hardware tech support.
On several occasions a temp agency/IT firm would have me sit down in front of a computer and take a test designed on the computer.
In one instance, I was taking a basic test on how to function in Word. No problem. You were told to do a particular function, and finish it in a certain amount of steps.
The function could include, for instance, printing a document off in landscape form.
Well, one huge issue was that you couldn't use the shortcut keys. None of the shortcuts in this artificial testing environment were enabled. However, if you tried to use them out of habit, they counted against you. Worse, several functions they tested could have been done multiple ways. However, the testing environment had a correct answer that was one particular way (which I may have been familiar with, but didn't use.)
Needless to say, it was entirely possible to know MS Word well, but do poorly on the artificial test.
Another test was a Q+A on Win95. This test was given to me in 1999. It asked me a series of poorly worded questions with even worse answers.
It also asked several questions that would have been best for a test on debugging XT problems in 1985. It made me furious...and consequently I did poorly on the test, though I had an MC Specialist in Win95.
The tech company had no use for me. I wonder whom I should have complained to.
Fortunately, I'm out of that industry.
The fortune 1000 companies will be caught in a bind when their offshored IT projects slow down their entire business much much more than when the IT work was done in the USA.
It will take one or two significant failures, even to the point of bankrupting a large company or two, to scare the large corporations away from offshore work.
Intellectual property laws are non-existant in those countries.
Made some commercial .NET work 5 years ago.
Definitly possible.
You HAD to be in the official beta program for this, though, so you talk about a hundred or so people plus the folks at MS.
This late in the posting, I'm still willing to risk being moderated off topic.
Has anyone ever though of getting a job where money isn't the best reason to get it? I honestly believe that most people place too much value on there money. I would urge people to take a job where they feel rewarded, and programming a computer for someone who doesn't respect your hard work ain't it.
Someone out there is going to read this and know what I'm talking about. Programming was cool paid well, and was easy for you. Now your realizing that where you have skills is not where you have passion.
My advice, follow your passion, espicially if your stuck in a job like that, get out and do what you've always wanted to do. A few more people living lives instead of just existing in them will change the world!
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
System Administrator
-Windows 2000, with 8 years of experience.
Hmm hello... it's 2003. This product hasn't even existed for that long.
Actually if you read it, it's not even an IT position, it's for a phone tech support position, and that's actually good money for that kind of position.
Don't Vote for Norm Dicks! http://www.nodicks2008.com Another nutless dirtbag that voted for the FISA bill!
graduate network engineer job advertised in the UK job centre at "meets national minimum wage requirements" which was 3.75 per hour at the time
Heh, I remember seeing an ad back in 2000 asking for at least 10 years experience with linux.
for example:
Opening Date: November 06, 2003 Closing Date: December 31, 2003
Position: Information Technology Management Series, GS-2210-9
Salary: 46,175 - 73,657 Annual
Place of Work: Various Organizations in Mannheim, Germany
Position Status: This announcement may be used to fill permanent part-time, permanent full-time, intermittent, temporary full-time and/or temporary part-time positions. Indicate on your resume your availability for any these appointments.
Click on links for more information
Duties: Duties of positions covered under this announcement may include but are not limited to: 1) translating detailed logical steps developed by others into language codes that computers accept with a required understanding of procedures and limitations appropriate to the use of a particular programming language; 2) interviewing subject-matter personnel to get facts regarding work processes in the areas of responsibility (e.g., supply, personnel, chemical process control); 3) scheduling the sequence of programs to be processed by computers where alternatives must be weighed with a view to production efficiency; 4) preparing documentation on cost/benefit studies; 5) analysis of the interrelationships of pertinent components of a system; 6) personal responsiblity for at least a segment of an overall project; 7) knowledge of customary approaches, techniques and requirements appropriate to a computer speciality area in an organization; 8) adaptation of guidelines/precedents to assignment needs.
Or...
Position: Information Technology Specialist , GS-2210-11/12
Salary: $42,976 - $66,961 Annual
Place of Work: VARIOUS, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY with TCS to Bosnia
Position Status: This is a Permanent position. -- Full Time
Click on links for more information
Duties: Analyze functional requirements, design automation systems, design and develop application programs, design and develop client-server applications, design program databases, design system security interfaces, design and program network communications interfaces, test and validate programs and applications, configure operating systems and etc.. Indentify and evaluate automation system requirements. Develop, interpret, and implement automation regulations, policies, and directives. Develop and implement automation plans and architectures. Plan, manage, and implement automation projects and programs. Design and engineer information technology (IT) networks. Operate and maintain ITnetworks. Administer systems, such as network operating systems, messaging systems, database management systems, and worldwide web systems. Research current and new technology in order to develop migration and integration plans. Develop local area network (LAN)/client-server life-cycle management plans.
Be very wary when applying for Govt IT jobs. I applied for one that sounded from the description like a standard network adminstration position (managing windows servers & network equipment etc..) and wound up with a job that is best described as "Powerpoint Bitch"
> The HR rep never did talk to me afterwards.
0 031114
--Reminded me of this:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=2
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Me fail english? that's unpossible!
Imagine, if you will, your fish/crab season is exactly 48 hours long in the worst weather of the year, barely above freezing, in the ever loving sea with 6 foot seas. (That's the height from the peak to the trough of the wave, most boats don't go out in 3 foot seas)
Now picture a sadistic man (the boat captain) screaming a non-stop diatribe of obscenities at you while you work non-stop for that 48 hours without break, where any perceived slowdown (say caused by a mechanical failure of a net winch) is your fault and he is now 3 inches from your face screaming to fix or by god you will be thrown overboard.
Let's presume you survive said trip, make dock and discover some big commercial fishing boat has used an illegal net, and dumped a massive amount of product on the buyers, who instead of paying $3.00 a pound are paying $.15 a pound.
And you tiny little single share that was supposed to be $5000 becomes $250.
I believe these get advertised as "Seasonal Deckhand."
The Bering sea, for those of you nautically challenged, is way north of the pacific ocean between the coast of Alaska and Siberia.
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
Clearly idot is a pun on dotcome and idiot. Probably.
I was told by the HR rep to first get a degree, then get 5 years of experience, then come back and reapply.
This is unusual behaviour. Typically job specs are for an ideal candidate. Virtually nobody has all the required skills, unless youg et about 200 applicants. It's up to HR to find the best match.
Man, you have an amazing imagination!
Wood swells when it gets wet. If you build a woden boat completely tight, then when you put it in the water there's a good chance it will fail from the compression - you'll burst the fastenings. So wooden boats are not built completely tight, and when first put in the water they leak. Even a medium sized wooden ship will leak several tons of water on its first day after launch.
If your claim were true, Europeans would never have got to the Americas (which might be a very good thing).
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
4 years ago sysadmin - knowledge of word 2.0 (!) - excell - Windows for workgroups 3.11 - persons with a physical handicap will be prefered. - knowledge of Dutch. - Troubleshooting. - Passing an test. Due to regulations, authorithies had to post job applications. The profile was a match for some existing person. The first words "sysadmin" tooks my attention. Reading op further, decided even not to apply. Only one would pass the test. Geert
I've been working with many so called "programmers" from India, they hardly know where is the power button in a PC.
Sure. Right now, the state of the industry is in turmoil. There's tons of money flooding to India, and lots of stupid US companies spending money foolishly. There are few rating companies, there hasn't been long to establish reputations, and the body of programmers is still less experienced and skilled as a whole.
But this will change. There are few things that living in the United States grants one (aside from, perhaps, good experience with English) that is a huge benefit in the industry. Picking up PHP doesn't take very long, and the pool of skilled Indian tech workers will rapidly grow. It's cheap to live in India -- IT prices will go up, but still remain lower than in the US.
A formal education is a good start, but nothing compared to what a dedicated and intelligent person can learn on their own -- plus, India places a good deal of emphasis on engineering and hard science.
I expect that increased competition will increase the global standard of living...but reduce the insane wealth that the US currently enjoys.
May we never see th
Not strictly an IT job, but this week Orkney Council advertised posts for a Registrar and a Burial Ground Clerk, paying 357 and 148 pounds sterling a year respectively. (Roughly $650 and $250).
I paraphase, but only because I saw this ad about five years ago.
Frankly, this Jeff guy seems reasonably straightforward. Hard to say whether you'd want to work for him from just this, but:
1) He's honest. He feels that being honest up front is more important than dicking you around because it'll help the company in the short term.
2) He wants you to feel like part of the company, not a component in a machine. Having worked at both small and large companies, I can confidently say that feeling like you're doing something to help the company is generally a much nicer feeling than just being a cog.
3) He's telling you that he's going to run a pretty strict meritocracy. He's not giving you vague promises of "big bonuses" or other crap to string you along that Slashdotters may have seen in the past. You want to get respect and pay, you have to prove yourself.
4) His requirements are pretty damned clear. He doesn't say you need to "produce synergy". He lists tools that you need to know, and that's that.
5) This letter seems a bit like a "fluff cleaner". He's trying to get rid of folks that are trying to get an easy job. You pass this letter and still want to go for the job, he's probably likely in person.
6) He doesn't care about being politically correct. He's happy to reference himself being an asshole. I like environments where people can take and give honest criticism without worrying about not brown-nosing.
7) Unless he's lying (and I doubt it), he's putting a hell of a lot into the company.
8) This is a tight ship. You get on board this company (and assuming they have someone that can actually market), you're unlikely to be riding a sinking ship down.
9) He offers training. Significant amounts, and makes the forumla for the salary that he's willing to go with clear. His offer isn't that out of line with pre-tech-bubble levels.
May we never see th
Just today was my last day (I quit) at a company where the HR department insisted on editing the job requirements for job postings. They didn't change much, but one absolute requirement was that they added to skills such as:
2 years ASP.NET development
Ability to quickly ramp up on new development projects.
Solid Object Oriented skills.
etc.
They insisted on adding:
Excellent typing skills.
Now wait a minute. Someone who is a C# programming goddess...Who knows OOP like the back of their hand and understands programming concepts instinctually...need excellent typing skills? What a joke. If you are a good programmer (correct me if I'm wrong), you can type...guaranteed. And anyway...who programs at 80WPM? That's just not how it works. Dumbasses.
Um...no
If you went back in time, to say 2001, got two years experience, then went back to 2001 and got another two etc.
Thus, to fill a job now that requires impossible years of experience you need to go back in time, simple.
I am NaN
I'm always tickled by the ones that say:
Salary: N/A
I have developed an answer to this, since you have to answer positively to get past the fuckwit HR drones who wrote the job spec.
Yes, I have 10 years of Solaris 9 experience, starting with the early beta program known as Solaris 2.1 in 1993, continuing through each of the updates for the last decade. I even have experience with the pre-release versions of Solaris, known as SunOS 4.1.
Same thing for Win2k or XP. Yes, I have 14 years total experience with XP, starting with the early alpha releases known as Windoze 1.0. Yes, these are all versions of Windoze XP, merely the marketing name changes, but the product is still built on the same code base for 14 years, and I know all of it. I am also a certified micro$loth developer, and thus I am already working on the next version of Windoze, but I am not allowed to tell you the new name unless I am hired as a full time employee and bring this company into the fold under an NDA. By hiring me, you will be two years advanced on your nearest competitors who are still hiring for Win2k laggards.
After that, you end up as a sysadmin doing backups and writing simple perl scripts, but the company thinks you are just barely qualified with your 10 years of experience.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Hell, maybe they wanted you to filter out the email. At some times you might run into loads 'o' porn, of the animal and other varieties...
Did they ask if he wanted to be involved in porn (isn't animal illegal), or if you had a problem. There's a difference...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Not the 5 years IT experience, nor the 3 years programming experience one... I want the job for kicking retarded recruiters out. You have no idea how satisfied I'd come home after knowing I'd given another high-expectation low-return clueless employer a good beating with a cluebat before marching them military-style off the premisis.
A union can say, "If you move those jobs overseas, the rest of us will strike." That means that when the next worm comes along, the network will be hosed. Suddenly there's a profit motive for hiring local workers. We could also get portable heath care and pensions. But no, lets avoid collective bargaining so that we can all be screwed individually.
The following is a general rant, not directly in reply to the parent.
I'm sick of people here trashing the Socialists. I'm not saying that they're perfect, but if it weren't for them, we'd be working 100hr 7-day weeks. That's right, the socialists brought us such terrible things as weekends off, medical benefits, safety regulations, and the 40hr work week. That's what you get when you put people before profit. It can work in a 100% capitalistic society too -- just add human, social, and environmental costs into the profit/loss equations and you'd have a much fairer system.
If we had fair trade laws, there wouldn't be a benefit to moving work to India because it would be balanced by a penalty tariff against India for having poor working conditions. By putting all of the worlds workers of equal footing, we could end this off-shoring trend. We could make all American companies pay the U.S. minimum wage to all of their workers everywhere. That would bring jobs back home real fast.
t'nera semordnilap
Sounds like they are just trying to prove they can't replace the resident alien they have in that position.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
This is from dice.com, about a month ago:
Junior Developer
COMPANY: Pencom Systems Incorporated
SKILLS REQUIRED: (see below)
LOCATION: NEW YORK, NY
RATE: OPEN (Annual)
AREA: 212
LENGTH: Permanent
TERM: FULLTIME
SUMMARY: This financial institution is seeking a junior real-time programmer/analyst to develop C++ real-time Linux applications in a Linux environment. In this role you will interface with traders and trading management to deliver position management and risk anal
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
This has got to be the most insane job description I've ever seen. There is an ongoing discussion thread about the nutball in question and he -- or someone posing as him -- has joined the thread to defend his requirements of things such as 80-100 hour work weeks and 24/7 beck and call.
/.-ing...
For the record he's an affiliate marketer/spammer named Philip Seldon. Methinks he could use a good
Of course, there's the Onion's idea of executive compensation....
If I was an admin of two Win2k boxes for 2.5 years, would that count? (I would have the experience of rebooting twice as much)
I don't know whether or not you've ever worked in or dealt with a corporate mailroom, but my guess is no. People in mailrooms don't stay there because they're "uncapable" [sic], or because they have no ambition. They stay there because they're reliable.
;) have to keep numerous records on paper. That paper is generated at one office, sent to another office to be reviewed and approved, forwarded on to another office for archival, eventually sent to another facility for secure document destruction, etc. ad nauseum.
I've been in the mail business for six years over a ten year period, first in retail (think Mailboxes Etc type of place) and now in - surprise - a corporate mailroom environment. There was a time from '99 to this year when I was out of the mail industry, doing nothing but IT. I went back to mail when freelance programming revenue took a downturn.
I don't know how many employees C|Net has. I don't know how many employees the company I'm contracted to has, either; but I can tell you one thing, they have an absolute ton of interoffice mail. When I say a ton, I'm not joking around. There have been days when I've carted around quite literally 2,000 pounds of mail. And that's just paper - I don't touch boxes, or anything other than loose or bagged envelopes.
Most people overlook the fact that the mailroom and internal mail operations of any large corporation are the core of that corporation. If IBM's mailroom staff went on strike tomorrow, IBM would be hurting in a big way. Similarly, if Microsoft's mailroom staff had a high churn rate, Microsoft would be hurting in a big way.
You'd think that in this day and age, especially at companies which pride themselves in technology, postal mail would be a thing of the past and everything would be handled via email. Not so, not anywhere freaking near so. At a bare minimum, companies working in government-regulated industries (think "air transportation" - hey, I did say I was in the mail business
No company wants stupid or incapable people in its mailroom; what they want are reliable, dedicated employees. When it comes to any large company, there's a steep learning curve involved in mail operations. It takes a great deal of time to learn:
a) The internal mail coding system, whether numeric or name-based; every large corporation has one, and it's independent of physical addresses [the company I deal with uses a combination of airport codes and four-digit numbers]
b) The physical (postal) addresses which correspond to the internal coding system
c) The names of hundreds or even thousands of different people employed in various offices
d) Which of those names belong at which of the a) internal mail codes and b) physical addresses
e) How to spot and reroute mislabeled items, taking a) through d) into consideration
f) How to apply the previous knowledge to thousands or even tens of thousands of individual items every day
This was even a challenge in retail, where among other things, our store rented PMB's to the public. We had a wall of more than 200 private mailboxes. When I first started working there, it took me an hour or more to sort the day's inbound mail into the appropriate boxes. After working there for a year, it took maybe 10 minutes, even though the volume of mail had increased. I'd memorized the names, the PMB numbers, etc. to the point where my brain took over and the process was nearly robotic.
It's very similar in a corporate environment. In a corporate mailroom, you don't want to hire someone who's going to quit after a few months and leave you stuck hiring on someone new. What you do want is to hire someone who's going to come in, learn your system, learn your employees' names and locations, learn how to ensure that they all receive their mail with a minimum of missorts, and keep doing that for as long as possible.
You can't find someone to do this at minimum wage, but I assure you that the companies who value their m
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I have a friend who clears mines with the ICRC in former war zones like Rwanda and Serbia. Depending on who the sub-contractor is, there might be an ambulance and a medical team next to the operation, or there might not. The descriptions of injuries they sustain are pretty gruesome.
Those stories make me appreciate the relatively low risk the IT industry is, but I have been arrested once because of a stupid fuckwit recruiter. The job was for a security cleared individual, with a security rating that matched some acronym on my CV. The fuckwit recruiter scum just assumed because I had the TLA and the word security, that was enough. He never told me the "security clearance" part, or the "Ministry of Defence" part, just that the employer was the national phone company, and they needed a security analyst specialising in big secure networks to work at a client site for a few weeks filling in for a sick Cisco specialist.
I showed up at the unmarked HQ of the ministry of defence in a country which doesn't have a sense of humour. So they kept me for a few days. Non-stop questioning with no food or water, sleep deprivation, bright lights and a painfully loud klaxxon every time my head nodded or I closed my eyes. Meanwhile they checked out my story, and eventually decided I was the victim of a fuckhead agency. Then I was allowed back to my hotel, ordered to return the next day to start work. So for one day I was the star techie in the group, the project manager had tons of technical questions for me, and lots of shooting the breeze. They then expelled me from the country later that friday afternoon. The sleazy headhunter guy was fired before I even got back, the company said he had been an independent, and refused to deal with me. I never got my new 486 laptop back, or paid for my lost week. I had to get a new passport, because they put a big red stamp in it stating "expelled permanently for economic espionage". Quite worrying for a while, since a spying charge there carried the death penalty.
I vet all my contracts very carefully now, and refuse all jobs that ask "can you start tomorrow or next monday".
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
This is OT and will probably be modded as such, but I just wanted to say hi to someone else in Memphis. I can't find an IT job here either. Good to know I'm not alone.
Did you go to the APC show tonight? It was pretty good.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
And I have an IT job here (I'm a Python programmer) for just $400/month. I understand, that this is not the European country or something, but for that amount of money I can't even afford myself a separate apartment. I'm a student and live in dorm. (You have to see dorms here) How can I dream about family or something? Normal 2room apartment in Moscow is around $500/month. So, I have to try really hard to make enough money here.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Right now you have two years of w2k experience. Then you go back to y2k, and when you once again reach 2003 you will have earned three more years. If you go forward in time you gain nothing.
Made the adjustment from daylight savings time yet?
This was a real ad I saw on jobserve.com back in March when it was looking like I might lose my current job. The job was in Manchester, so not as bad as being in London on that salary, but its still crap.
I've been thinking about these very things for months now, and a question keeps popping up: When you don't like a company, their methods, or their products, a free-market way of dealing with this would be to simply buy the products of their competitors. Is something like this not possible with employment as well?
Mind you, I'm not just suggesting "well, don't work there," but something more. From my perspective (underemployed tech worker) there are thousands of people that are talented and either working for peanuts or not working at all. Meanwhile, large corporations lavish on their CEO's and Executive VP's and the like while the people who actually do most of the work sit around and complain that they're not getting paid enough.
Isn't there some free-market potential for mutiny? That is, if you and a thousand techie's get together and believe you can do the same thing as WhateverSoft, what is stopping you from doing it? There are certainly startup costs, but I imagine the hardest part is just gaining the initial momentum to do it. And if word spread that a new company was taking aim at another's market share, only this company didn't hemmorage funding to overpaid execs and actually rewarded its staff by their performance, they'd probably be able to recruit some very talented people.
Just some thoughts.
The real cash cows are the places where management is so hopeless that their IT infrastructure resembles a plate of undocumented and unsupported spaghetti. Save your manager's ass a few times... Be reliable... Be trusted... Be essential... Be EXPENSIVE.
looking for a change?
Design for the Lord!
Time Travel Testing
V.P. Ops Afghanistan
I spent two summers in college temping in the mailroom of a small insurance company. I worked for them one summer, and they actually had the temp agency call me back while I was still at school the next year and ask if they could hire me back. As people had mentioned, the turnover rate was crazy. One of the times, they had me train my replacement. In a week, we went through three people. The first one never showed up after the first day, and the second one worked half a day and then decided she didn't like the job.
So I can see why they would want someone who isn't going to leave after a couple days. Plus, at least where I was, the job did involve making sure important documents got to the right people -stuff like subpoenas, titles, ect.
I have blog like everyone else
It is times like this, when I see the posting talked about (which I had to work like hell to track down), that I give thanks I listened to my wife and got into teaching. The money is not great (but it beats the hell out of $17-$19.00 Canadian) and the benefits are actually there. It is a small district in a small town and there is actually some respect for the teachers from the kids. And I don't have to learn French. IT workers UNITE! Don't buy products from companies which outsource. Remember, there IS an RFC for Carrier Pigeon. http://www.plig.net/things/rfc1149.html
UNIX is truth, the Console is life. Use Evolution to send e-mail and not virii.
anyway, the new job description for the level-one tech position i originally held is below. not only did i not meet these qualifications then, i don't meet them now ... in fact, the manager of tech support, who came up through the ranks, doesn't meet them either! (although, he does have a degree in music ... so, he's got the BA part, anyway.) they want not only BA/BS, but MCSE, too! and then two years tech support experience on top of that. i wouldn't even get an interview for this job, yet, if i may say so, i have turned out to be an excellent investment from the company's point of view.
companies who put these kinds of strict requirements on a position like level-one tech support, put too much emphasis on technical skills and not enough emphasis on ability or desire. that's the real joke here.
it's not about the money, you can always get that. it's about getting the job you want, doing the things you want to do. people who meet these requirements are overqualified for this job and they don't stay. doh! i've been watching it happen ... you'd think management would figure it out.
Required Skills
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
And that idea that somehow managerial IT positions are superior to the engineering jobs (where the real work happens) is where the problem lies... In the boom days, myself and my buddies always assumed that the people who fell into middle management IT positions (often incompetent software engineers) would be the first to be hit when the bubble burst. You know, the actual "doers" would remain long after the "talkers" were gone. The fact is that many programmers and administrators are very much capable of doing the executive level roles that you're talking about. You didn't rise through the ranks, you just followed a different career path to your co-workers.
I am still earning top dollar for some pretty niche skills. But I looked around my team yesterday - 5 managers of varying levels (all local born), 12 system engineers (7 indian, 2 mexican, 1 kenyan, 1 australian, 1 local born - me). I don't resent these guys - they're just doing the best they can to get a better life for their families back home. I'd do the same in their position. Here's the thing that DOES annoy me. The only jobs that aren't filled by low cost overseas workers (apart from mine and the Australian's) are the managerial positions. The original "doers" have all been priced out of the market. Many have started new careers outside of IT (as I myself intend to do at the end of this year). Yet the most ridiculous thing is that all of the managers remain...
In case you're wondering, I'm not bitter. I like that fact that I'm able to explain to people what I do for a living - i.e. what it is that I contribute to the world. Be honest with yourself, if you're an IT manager or IT director (this is a general comment, not necessarily directed at the original poster). You contribute little or nothing to the world. You create nothing. It is likely that you no longer have the capability to create anything yourself (if you ever had that ability in the first place). When your ivory tower falls and cheap labour moves into your job, you will find that the world that isn't interested in a washed up middle manager rejected by an ailing industry... The doers will continue to do. Will you survive?
there is an element to human greed
And what is greed? "An excessive desire for wealth." Well, how much is "excessive"?
A million dollars?
A thousand?
A hundred?
Anything above bare subsistence living?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
It's not all bad. I've had two such jobs, one on staff and another contract and both were quite excellent. The first was system administrator for a high school back in the early '90's. Because of the Y2K initiative to get schools online tons of new equipment would come in, but since it came through county before it came to the individual schools, we got county's hand-me-downs as they got the newest and best. So I got to go through each computer. Long story short, I found out some things about some very high-level people because they didn't wipe their Outlook e-mail or newsgroups... After hinting around a little to some people, my duties seemed to get really light, and the new equipment started to come straight to us. (Well for a while.)
The second was for a city elementary school / junior high who wanted to do a Quicktime VR walkthrough of the school. So, one night me and my crew came and for an absorbantly large amount of money, we made about 70 VR panoramas of the building. (The concept being some crap about yuppie parents being able to walk around the school and seeing it, without actually having to come to the school or be active in their childs education. After all, school is daycare between 7:45 and 3 for these people.) We'll, I started the process of stitching all the images together to make the QT VRs (all automated) and about five days later, it finished them. I contacted their Sys Admin / Web guy and said I had them, but apparetly the school let the PTA know about them and parents got all worried that people would have a virtual walkthrough so they could plan kidnappings of their kids or plant bombs in the building or what not... Paranoid freaks... Still got paid for it though.
Those that give up liberty for freedom, deserve neither. -Benjamin Franklin
AS usual I get here too late and the site has been /.ed out of memory.
"We're sorry. This job has been removed from the site and is no longer available for viewing"
Anyone have links or caches of it for further viewing?
Lessee, in terms of money, most recently, part-time Web designer, one of the towns around KSC, $7/hr.
Then there's the interview I was on yesterday, with the question, "you were making twice what we're offering - how can I be sure that if you get an offer like that in a couple of months, you won't walk?"...when the company's layed off about a third of their staff last year, and offshored to India, and they're looking at my resume...with two couple-week contracts in well over two *years*.
Don't s'pose there's anyone out here in FL looking for an experienced and reliable developer or *Nix sysadmin...?
mark
They might be able to outsource code to Timbuktu, but somebody still has to run cable. Think about it. The highest paid domestic "IT" jobs in the future may be the cable ferrets.
Unless the job is for doing natural language processing, in Sanskrit.
But then, only a few thousand would be fluent in Sanskrit all over the world ....
karma : former act as leading to inevitable results
Imagine at the start of the year, you were told that the cost of health insurance would start being deducted from your check for $150/mo. You feel that the company is small and that this 150 wont hurt you to lose it, so you agree. Next thing you know, they take it out of your check every paycheck. So now, it's more than $300 a month. So, knowing that the company is low on funds, you bit the bullet and agree to it, even though it does put a pinch on your spending habits. And with a family of two kids and a wife, are forced to redo your home budget. A few months later, your kids gets sick. You take her to the doctor, fill out the forms, and within a few minutes, you are denied service unless it comes from your own pocket. YOU HAVE NO INSURANCE. Never did, and probably never will. Yet, where did all of this money go to from your check? Today, I tried to cash my paycheck from two weeks ago. Still bounced. I put in more than enough time at our clients sites, and they have paid thier bills. Where did the money go at the boss's level? I didnt even think to try to ask about yesterdays paycheck. I know it wont cash. Today I was supposed to take my Japanese wife to the only close Japanese bookstore around 200 miles away in Chicago. I had to cancel it. Bills are piling up, and for the first time, I'm actually scared that they wont get paid. Why dont I find another job? I've tried. Dice and Monster.com are only filled with head hunters and no matter how many resumes I send out to those two sites, no phone calls or emails. I think those two sites are just black holes of wasted internet space. So for now, I am forced to stick with my current employer, seemingly without pay, since it is work. Im in the Detroit area, and not looking to relocate. Here is the URL to my resume: http://tbazz.dyndns.org/~tbazzinett/resume.html If anyone knows anybody...please.....
does anybody believe that whatever Darl McBride makes is justified? did he actually write any of the unix code in question? his value is in how much b.s. he can pump to grease the system in his company's favor (insert your favorite ceo's name here)
afa these job postings go, the insane technical and experience requirements are a Trojan Horse, designed to get said applicant hired for less money (oh, you don't have 10+ years programming C apps for nuclear powerplants? well, you're going to be on the low end of the pay scale writing VB scripts for our dogfood distribution website)
the solutions aren't easy--either be happy with less, or start your own business--i did both after living through the dotcom meltdown--try drinking Cafe Bustelo instead of Starbucks 3x a day, and hopefully you'll realize you don't need as much $ as you though you did...;>
Do they call each other "bitch" a lot at the high-powered firm where you doubtlessly work?
Exceptional demand for an outstanding product has resulted in "hockey stick" growth.
Umm... I don't think I want to share "hockey stick" growth with my colleagues. I don't think I could survive too many slapshots to the head.
A single missing word costs you "several million dollars"? Wow. I guess that's a pretty important word! I can only imagine what it was--maybe "inches" in the phrase "300 inches", and so metric was assumed by the ex-British colony in India?
--
$tar -xvf
I tend to agree with the initial poster that most CEO's are decent people. I also agree that there are egregious incidents of CEO exploitation of workers and shareholders. Both are probably true.
The egregious CEO's we hear about are usually Fortune 500/1000 companies where those absurd incentives are possible, where CEO compensation is set by a nod-and-wink executive compensation board, and where there is a serious glass ceiling for many of us to reach that level.
The problem is that there are only 500 (or 1000) such CEO's, and there are many, many more companies. I've worked directly with many CEO's of small companues, and I've met some really decent people, and some not so decent people. I also recognize there are enough companies out there that my sample set is way too small to make any generalizations.
If you don't believe it, check it out here: http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/jobpost.asp
SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY
Cape Girardeau, Missouri 63701
Enclosed is an announcement of a tenure-track position in philosophy at the rank of assistant professor. We hope to fill this position rapidly; the target date for our final decision is June 13. We are more interested in looking at candidates with real teaching experience than in newly minted Ph.D's, who might have unrealistic expectations about the possibilities for academic growth at an institution such as ours. Southeast Missouri State University is a regional university which serves students in the southeast portion of the state including St. Louis. Our students tend to be poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme. We offer a major in philosophy. but do not usually have more than two students officially declared as majors at any given time.
There are a few good students, however, and we are proud to say that our current graduating major, William Knorpp, won the 1985 Analysis competition and will be undertaking graduate study in philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill next year. Mr. Knorpp's upper level work was mainly accomplished through independent tutorials; and prospective candidate must understand that there will be virtually no opportunity to teach upper-division seminars in philosophy. We also offer a religious studies minor; most of the students who declare this minor are shocked to learn that Moses might not have written the Pentateuch and regard higher criticism as secular humanist propaganda. The 12 hrs/semester teaching load is devoted mainly to general education courses at the freshman/sophomore level. In another five years, if the general education curriculum is revised as promised, there may be seminars which are to "capstone" the G.E. program.
The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly non-intellectual -- somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting -- and the candidate cannot expect to attract students by offering courses that assume innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought. Nevertheless. in order to earn promotion and tenure it is necessary to be involved in curriculum development and to sustain an interest in research and publication. It has occurred to me that the best candidate would be someone who has held the Ph.D. for more than two years, has taught at a community college or a rural state institution, and who would like to continue in somewhat the same vein but at a slightly higher level.I will be interviewing at the Central Division Meetings in St. Louis. If you have an questions, you may call me at my office
i once saw, and have a screen shot of, a job ad asking for, and im not making this up "1137 A01" skills, this was for a level 1 support specialist in san diego. i stil wonder if it was a joke or not.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
Early builds of Win2K were certainly available in 1998... so yes, someone could have 5 years experience with it. In fact, I probably have, but just as a user not as a sysadmin.
You should have used "10 years EJB experience" or something as an example.
Oh, Vikings. That changes things a little due to the Viking construction method. Lapstrake planking (the overlapping method they used) did not promote a dry hull. They edge nailed (riveted actually) the strakes (planks) together, and did not fasten them rigidly to an internal framework. They were sealed between each strake before riveting, with rope/hair & pitch. As this was done before the hull was wet, as the planking swelled and changed dimentions, it leaked. They would coat pitch/tar in there to try to control it. The Viking method created a flexible hull, one with no decks possible on an oceangoing hull.
This is unlike a carvel hull, where the planks are fastened to a rigid internal structure (the ribs & decks) and caulk is paved between each plank. As the planks swell when wet, they actually create a tighter hull, and become drier. Though generally not totally dry, and especially not when under way in a rough sea.
Now, a lapstrake (Viking) hull. upon being launched may have been drier than a carvel hull, as the hull was riveted together and sealed that way. After a few days though, as the strakes work and swell, as the boat is loaded, as it moves, it too would begin to leak, possibly a lot.
So, with the Vikings, I can buy a cup of leakage as some tradition. Like putting pennies beneath the mast before it is stepped, to pay Charon the ferryman on your way to the afterlife. Lots of us still do that. I have been into wooden boats for many years, and have read much about their construction and the traditions. I also have experience in maintaining several. But with the Vikings thrown into the mix, I can possibly buy such a tradition in their particular case. After all, these are the guys who would allegedly do a human sacrifice to commemorate a ship launch.
Larry
I've spent the last year trying to break into the IT industry at the bottom level and work my way up..
What really tweaked me out was about 6 months ago I ran across no less than 4 positions for ENTRY LEVEL positions.. paying around 9 bucks an hour... that required *10 Years* experience in 3 to 5 areas each.
Now, I know the job market's been tight and all.. but 10 years experience for an ENTRY LEVEL position? Jeebus.. Have all their "upper level" staff been involved since the invention of computing?
I quit my first job ... (they wanted to do porn and I didn't)...
You gave a job that entailed free access to porn?? w/animals?!!
The power of Christ compiles you!
I think there is a big difference between doing hardware/OS type tech support and doing development. Obviously, if you are developing software, you should have some idea of the industry the software is being developed for. But if you are providing hardware-type support, it seems much less important. Replacing a hard drive is replacing a hard drive, and it doesn't matter if the computer is used to keep track of trees or stocks.
I have blog like everyone else
OK, let's face it... a lot of the people here are either out of work, or are just starting out in life. They feel threatened by outsourcing, and rightly so.
I am just starting out, and I have a degree in comp sci. Here's the question that people here should be asking, but aren't.
How can I become you?
What do I have to learn? How can I best learn it?
Thanks,
NYC had to dumb down the tests, though, to avoid charges of racial discrimination. Now they're pass/fail, and those who pass are selected in sequence. They used to be truly competitive, resulting in overqualified low-level people.
Also in that set was the 1956 test for U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer. "Which of the following phrases best expresses the idea that the United States supports the government with which you are dealing but will not support them militarily".
I may sound conceited or holier-than-thou here, but what if I had to answer no to that question? I imagine if I delved back in my memories for a few hours, I could find something like that situation. But right in the middle of an interview, I really don't think I could come up with something, mostly due to the fact that I have morals.
This question leaves the interviewee in a sticky situation: Come up with an example and you're left trying to defend yourself. Fail to come up with an answer and you look like you're lying. All in all it really isn't too fair of a question.
You ask for one who's sweet, sexy, funny, intelligent, good coversationalist, likes to have sex, knows Linux, but has very little experience, and no baggage.
:)
Those are just criteria of the ideal candidate, you will probably interview and maybe hire somebody with at least 2 out of 3 qualifications, no?
--D
I was told by the HR rep to first get a degree, then get 5 years of experience, then come back and reapply.
This HR rep wasn't named Catbert was he?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
what in the world does this have to do with our government?
and i wasn't blaming anyone for anything. i just stated a pretty well-known fact about those ads which look for high-tech skills for absurdly low wages, by our country's standards.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
In Accountancy Age, a UK weekly for the accountacy profession.
Golden Shot Holdings Ltd
Executive Appointment, Accountant 30-35 per annum + health insurance.
Then it goes on about where it is located, and what they expect you to do for them.
If it was 30 to 35 per hour, I might consider it, but I believe their quoted salary could fall foul of the minumum wage act.
actual job post
The truth doesn't care what I think.
I'm sick of people here trashing the Socialists.
Yeah, well I'm sick of socialists taking credit for the achievements of free men.
I'm not saying that they're perfect, but if it weren't for them, we'd be working 100hr 7-day weeks. That's right, the socialists brought us such terrible things as weekends off, medical benefits, safety regulations, and the 40hr work week.
No, you can thank Henry Ford for most of these improvements. Once he started offering better working conditions, other capitalists had to follow suit, since they had to *compete* for the labor supply.
All of these things were made possible by the increased marginal productivity of labor, which in turn is caused by investment in tools, training, etc. In other words, by capitalists in a (relatively) free market.
Here's an exercise for you, my ignorant, pink friend: Compare working conditions in the west to any of the old soviet-block countries before their people overthrew your kind.
While you're at it, why don't you have a quick study of the Socialist Workers' Paradise in North Korea or Cuba. I'll bet they'd *love* to cut back to 40 hour work weeks, and actually be able to buy unrationed food.
That's what you get when you put people before profit.
It's what you get when you limit government's intrusion into the economy.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What I'm tired of seeing:
.NET.
In 1995 it was 5 years experience in COM/DCOM. In 1997 it was 5 years experience in Java. In 2002 it was 5 years experience in
Why the hell do these companies keep asking for 5 years experience in technologies less than 3 years old?
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
I've come to consider the US healthcare system as a net winner for the world versus Canadian- or European-style socialized (I use the term loosely) medicine.
Because it is an almost entirely private system, there is huge money to be made from those who can afford good health care. This creates competition, as well as R&D. That R&D creates better and better health care, not just for Americans, but also for the rest of the world. Without US research, for example, there wouldn't be any MRI machines. Probably even X-ray machines would be significantly less common.
Thus, the parts of the world that get some Western medical treatment are subsidized by America's insured. Of course, the insured consider the cost worth paying, so I don't think they are getting screwed -- for them it's all the better if, in addition to their money helping themselves, it also helps others.
So despite the fact that the insured are paying, the losers are America's uninsured, who would (in a socialized system) have that money directed to them rather than nebulous advancement of medical knowledge.
Now, I think that more efficient ways must be found to direct money to R&D while avoiding bloated pharamceutical advertising and management budgets. But I also think it would be a net loss for humanity if the USA adopted one of the existing systems.
> Yet some languages, which I haven't used in a long time, I'm no longer that good with. E.g., I'm now good at Java, but I'd need to re-learn Pascal if I wanted to program in it.
--I'm the same way with COBOL - not that I'd ever want to go back to it.
> And you know what's _really_ sad? That in reality most of us coders would actually hold them in much higher regard if they were honest, and _asked_ before making some totally retarded "strategic decision."
--That my friend, is some +1 Insightful irony.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
In a country with unemployment levels so low as in the US only the lazy, ill or stupid do not find work.
Having lived in places where a job is the last of the concerns of people it really irks me the sheepesh middle class conformity of being willing to do anything in order to keep a job.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You have my respect. Not many people would put in weekends to stay up to date with the technology, once they're at a director level. (Or for that matter, some as soon as they're at project leader level.)
However, you probably do realize that most people are more like your boss. Get a 50,000 foot level view, and then decide based on that.
Nothing inherently wrong with that either, as long as they do ask. God knows we need people skilled in management too. Those who do ask when they have a question, got my respect too. Same as I'd respect any other skilled person, regardless of the field, really.
And I don't think many people actually have that belief that a manager should personally micro-manage everyone. If you notice, my objection was precisely more along the lines of "ffs, one doesn't need to pretend to be an all around specialist, one only needs to ask." So, yes, delegating and letting people do their job and use their expertise is good. The world would be a much better place if more managers trusted their subordinates' judgment, instead of pulling uninformed "strategic decisions" themselves. So, yes, you have a whole lot of respect from me in that aspect too.
However, well, we've all run into some boss who tries to look smart by throwing buzzwords around. Sometimes even demands buzzwords. (E.g., true case: asking for lists of which Java patterns were used. But not where or why or if it was even applicable there.) And who (unlike you) doesn't get his knowledge first hand, but thinks that reading some IT-for-dummies magazine once a month makes him _the_ most qualified IT specialist in the whole enterprise.
And then there's those who don't even try to read that magazine either. They just literally take an "I'm paid more than you, so nyah! It means I know it all better than you, including your job" attitude. (True story: I once had to go to a client, where the local PHB averaged more than once an hour of saying, literally, "The golden rule is: whoever has the gold makes the rules, and that's me." I initially thought he was the owner or something. Turned out he was just a hired joker, and they fired him a couple of months later, when he basically drove the whole department into the ground. Including causing all programmers _and_ designers to leave.)
That's all I'm saying. When you see some of us snapping at the first mention of management, well, it's just bad memories of these individuals. I know a few good managers myself, but, well, somehow often the first mental image is of that "golden rule" guy and the like.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So you want to knock universal health care? And people keep saying Americans are selfish. Can you imagine that? Get a clue.
How did this get modded interesting? It looks more like flamebait to me.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
I had one employer tell me that I could work 1/2 days and he didn't care which 12 hours I wanted.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Hehehe - that was actually funny.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
> WTF is "Mebbe"? Is that a new drug you kids are all hooked on?
It's a colloquial variation on "maybe". I've seen it used on Usenet & in email for quite a few years, with the intent to avoid the ironic/sarcastic connotation that typing ``Maybe" as a one-word sentence fragment might convey.
BTW, I chuckled when I saw that you included me in your off-handed catagorization of ``you kids". I'll be 47 next month. And I don't feel as young as I must read.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
You sound like you're busy. With nothing but technical stuff no less.
Here's what I do:
Senior systems administrator for a small ISP, with a heterogenous network of FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS and Win2k. On these servers is DNS, RADIUS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, Frontpage, HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and our accounting database running (ew!) Filemaker. SSH is on everything.
The languages I need to know and use on a daily basis are sh, perl and C. I also need to know how to work with routers, firewalls, (Cisco, 3com, and FreeBSD) and flaky PC hardware (the company is too cheap to run anything more reliable).
There are no benefits, overtime is unpaid (and as such I refuse to do it, even if it would mean that I could get something done in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time). I get paid $13.12 an hour.
But this is the real kicker. I get to do tech support for the end users too - setting up joe sixpack's Outhouse Express, walking geriatric old ladies through setting up a dialup account, and wrestling with the local telco over ADSL trouble tickets[1].
On regular days, my real work (setting things up for customers, or automating setting things up for customers, for instance) is interrupted every 5 or 10 minutes with another phone call from a customer. On busy days, my phone calls are interrupted by more phone calls. My boss says that he doesn't like having tech support people sitting around and doing nothing, so we all have something else to do (besides working hard to do the things the customers ask for when they're talking to us on the phone) when we're not on the phone.
So while it may suck to be working hard for shitty pay, it sure beats working your ass off trying to swim up a fast moving river. In your case, there's at least a warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment instead of the desperate feeling of being swept away to your doom and being completely helpless to do anything about it.
[1] It's bad enough when it takes a friggin' week for them to get around to fixing phone lines for *our* customers. But if you had ever in your life tried to use their trouble ticket database, you would point and laugh at how spectacularly badly written it is, then start to cry when you realized YOU were forced to use it, then scream at the morons who made the decision to use it, then slit your wrists so that you would never have to use it again. As an example, once everything is ready and you're on the page to actually input the data, it takes a whole 4 minutes (I timed it) to fill in a total of 5 fields, with less than 80 bytes of data. For some gawdawful reason that seems to involve exceptionally slow server-side visual basic for error checking and data reformatting (all it does is insert - and () into phone numbers for that one field that requires phone numbers), it pauses no less than 30 seconds to switch between fields. My theory is that it was programmed by a finite number of monkeys. An infinite number of course, would produce much better results.
Is anyone looking for a developer (or hardware engineer for that matter)?
I'd recommend working for the company that's responsible for the massive disaster that is the database I just described, but somehow I get the feeling that they're not interested in making things better.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
does my comment hit too close to home?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I was referring more to the insults and namecalling than the message itself.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
CA-AB-Downtown Edmonton-Help Desk Tier 1 & 2 - Bilingual French Description: 5 Tier 1 & 2 Helpdesk candidates required for our downtown, Fortune 500 client. Must be Bilingual French. Must know Windows XP, MS Office Professional, Office 2000, Lotus Notes, and Novell. WINNT is nice to have. 2-4 years experience in technical PC support and/or Helpline operations in a client/server environment. Experience supporting Intel based operating system. Good soft skills required (positive attitude, team player/self starter, communication skills, excellent listening skills, flexible, strong personal time management, task oriented, must be eager and willing to learn.) Fluency in the English language, articulate, and flexible with duties. Diploma or degree preferred- Microcomputer Specialist (GMCC), Computer Systems Technologist (NAIT), Computing Science (UofA), etc. Must be available for varying shifts in this 24/7 environment. All applicants must be bilingual French, or you need not apply. Requirements: Diploma or degree from a recognized institution, preferrably in relevant field, or equivalent working experience. Software List: Some or all would be preferred. Integral ? Benefits Integral - Payroll SAP and SAP Client AOD (Access On Demand DB) AIP ? Aspect integrator Platform ASCC - Advanced Supply Chain Collaboration AutoCAD AutoCad Lite AutoVIEW BAAN System ( Canada ) BOL ? Business OnLine CADKEY CAWP Helpdesk CCRP process owner for Canada. Chameleon (Xwindows) CIT ? application CIT - Cash In Time Notes Database (server issues) Coach - Time keeping software Columbus Citrix; CompSCOT, MQ Queries, MQ Series, Cosmos CRS CRS - Customer Reporting System CSP (Commerce Solutions Project) CSP and OMCT, If it is determined to be a database problem CTI Admin Support; BOL - Business OnLine; Commerce Engine; CTI Applic. Support EDMS EDS - Electrical design software eSMART eTB complaint/problem; eTB (Easy To Buy) FAS US-PCS-Norwalk FDTN - All Others FDTN - Installation FDTN - New User FDTN - ODBC Error FDTN - SPIN Website First View FTP Site - Canada GAD Server issues Global License Server Triad-Flex/LM, Pro-E Global Notes Database GP Time Entry - Electronic Timesheet System (ETS) - password resets Greco CNC Software Group Processes Project Information database Hummingbird ExCeed Hyperion Retrieve - WINFORM IS Supportline US-Notes Support-Americas Database JMIP Notes Database MACPAC ViewNow MANMAN (VIMS) Masterfile - server issues Masterfile ( same as above) MAXIMO server Microstation CAD Minitab MDS - Mechanical design software ME10 - 2D Cad system - Canda MQ Queries, MQ Series, Netscape Communicator Netting -Notes A Zurich supported Notes accounting database New CA network accounts New GIA/SRA account requests, Defective token returns Norton Anti Virus 4.5 Corp edition to 2003 Notes file restore requests for Canada, Columbus, Raleigh and Windsor Nuclio (also known as '7-space' to monitor our network) NuTCracker - Runs Unix apps in NT OMCT - Open Content Merging Technologies ( same is CSP ) Open Connect (Java VT Terminal Emulation) (Warminster) Oracle, Remedy database, PC Leasing Information, Canada PDM software for Pro/Enginee PeopleSoft Helpdesk Platinum -Norwalk Financial Program US-PCS-Norwalk Powerhelp (app support) Powerhelp (web support) PPHS (Paperless Plant Handling System) PPHS Mailbox PowerOlap client Powerplay ? Cognos Primivera Pro/Engineer/PDM Proxy, Internet access, Fire Wall, Websense blocking Purchasing requests CANADA Purchasing requests Raleigh, Windsor, Norwalk & Stamford ReView IGS Robot Studio ROSS SBase SCOT; Parts OnLine Service Activity Entry (SAE/SR Tools) Shop Track - Data collection software for bar code readers - Canada Showcase Simba SIMON - web server access SIMON - appl
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
"Slashdot duplicate article checker. No ability necessary".
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry, but everyone gets to choose either where they live or what they do, not both. If you've made the choice to live in Moncton, then you are not entitled to the luxary of choosing to work in IT. Either move or retrain -- stop whining without being willing to make sacrifices.
And some Canadian morons slashed all four of the tires on my car just because it had US plates on it! Fuck Canada!
Slashing your tires is one thing, but hanging around to let you know why -- that takes balls!
dishwasher/computer tech
I should have been clearer. I was not talking about communism or the system implemented by any particular government. I never even said that socialism is a good thing. I did write about the specific benefits that we all enjoy because of the actions (and sacrifices) of the American socialists. To deny those benefits is to deny history.
t'nera semordnilap
I did write about the specific benefits that we all enjoy because of the actions (and sacrifices) of the American socialists.
The socialists did a great job of taking credit for the achievements of the american labor movement, but in fact they had about as much to do with winning concessions as they did with toppling the czar.
If anything, the socialist hangers-on impeded the labor movement by making it possible for the kind of people who hired Pinkerton thugs to murder strikers to rationalize their crimes as defense of democracy.
(Especially after Lenin's terrorist putsch in Russia overthew the revolution, and ushered in an era of opression that the czar couldn't have even imagined.)
The American Socialists were nothing but a hindrance to real reformers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was just shocked that someone would make a job offer like this at all, anywhere.
I'm working maybe a little too hard to keep our site as okay as possible.
next: sleazy apartment brokers in Manhattan...
Thanks!
Craig
He was probably being unhelpful so that he could give the job to his cousin from Bangalor....
#include <sig.h>
Like many in my field, I am working outside of my element so I am constantly looking for an IT position
Recently, I was looking in the classifieds in my local paper and saw this posting.
--
(Verbatim)
"-Bar-coding Company needs database and internal network administrator. Canidate should be familiar with windows 95 and SQL.
Technical Requirements:
4 years experience in Dbase design
4 years experience in network administration
Must be familar with windows 95,98,2000,XP.
SQL/PERL/PHP a must.
50 wpm typing skills
Good writing skills (comprehension and spelling)
Responsibilites:
1) Monitor and administer the internal network as well as be responsible for database development for our inventory tracking system using barcode scanners.
2) Custom Database development for end-user clients.
3) Intranet Design.
Send resume to jobs@(CENSORED).com
--
So, looking at this post; I imagined that whoever wrote this is an idiot and has 'head-barely above water' technical knowledge. I apply just for the sake of it.
A few days later, I get a call from this company asking me to go down for an interview. We set it up for 10:00 am the following Tuesday.
I arrive at 9:30 am on the day for an interview and took a seat as instructed. The office was a 1200 Sq Ft shop located in a shared office building. It looked as if someone went on a rage and destroyed everything. Boxes, cables, hardware and coffee cups were everywhere. The reception desk looked as if someone was murdered on it. I looked around for a taped outline of a human being.
After an hour's wait; a very pissed off job seeker was called in. I met the president of the company and walked (I had to step over things) into the little conference room that they had.
He gave me the run down on the job. He spoke much like an inept monkey so I imagined he was the one who wrote the posting.
After all was said and done, we talked about $$$.
He asked me what I was looking for and I gave him a figure. Approx $45,000 USD. I figured with network administration, custom database development matched with my skills; I guessed this was reasonable.
His face almost ripped from his head and ran away. He got all flustered and told me that no one in the industry makes that kind of money for what the job requirements state.
Not wanting to strangle this guy for getting loud with me, I diffused the situation and asked him what he was offering. He told me $28,785 USD per year. It was at this point that I almost fell off my chair.
Seeing that this job wasn't worth it; I laced into him for wasting my time. I told him that I was more qualified to hire people than he was and that if he, in rare circumstance, could find someone to do the job for 28k; it was certainly going to be shitty work.
He asked me to leave ( ROFL ) so on my way out I told him to clean up his office and go back to school and that his job posting is an insult to educated and experienced IT professionals.
In retro-spect, it may not have been such a good idea to lay into him the way I did; however, it was obvious to me that place was a joke, and he was looking to take advantage of an employer's market and a pool of employees that are in need of work.
Damn, did it feel good to tell him to stuff it.
It's not what you know; It's what you can find out.
I've seen Strange Brew. All you do up there is play ice hockey with jedi knights all day long. That's the impression I got at least.
The conversion may not be great but from what I hear hourly wages and salaries in the great ol' US_of_A don't amount to shit.
Don't know how you'd go about evaluating that. For people who actually get up off their ass and work, the quality of life seems pretty good.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
...when webdesigners should know and have at least 25 years of experience in PHP, MySQL, Dreamweaver, Flash, HTML, CSS, XML, XSL, XHTML, Photoshop, Perl, Python, Frontpage, C++, Javascript, VBscript, ASP, .NET, Active Directory, FoxPro and Tetris. You should have five degrees: graphic design, human/computer-interaction, and astrophysics. Oh, that's right, and in Math as well. Even though you need several decades of experience, you should still be young, between 20-35.
Just because the truth is inflammatory doesn't make it flamebait...
Look. Its simple.
:) :) Whats your the name of your company?
:)
:) ). I might also suggest that a further consideration would include NOT DOING BUSINESS with companies that employ gestapo-like tactics, have Unnecessarily short-term vision, fuck over their workers on a regular basis while wiping their managers asses.
:) so find some people in your community who are under-utilized, hungry, and honorable and give them a job :)
:) Fuck the bastards :) And regarding the out-sourcing sir, I can understand the need (given current climes and capitalistic practices), but cannot excuse the short-sightedness/myopia. If you have any power in your company, I would recommend pointing out the simple fact that for every job you outsource as a way of boosting your short-term profits, you are in effect, removing a household of its ability to support you and your business partners. Think about that. It could be you next.
Beat them at their own game, and lock them out in the fucking cold. Target their companies with better, cheaper produced products. WORK with other true geeks (read: PRODUCERS) and fucking cap these motherfuckers.
Sir; no doubt I could run circles around you
So, put your money where your mouth is
Incidentally, I would happen to agree with ur assessment of domain-specific knowledge seperating good engineers from crappy ones; I would however say, that we probably differ on the definition of what business-knowledge actually consists of. I've worked alongside some AMAZING engineers, and covered the ineptitude of a host of crappy ones. However, I have yet to meet a project/mid-level manager who had any serious grasp of what was required for day-to-day work; even those who have risen through the ranks. Particularly since the technologies chosen themselves influence the design patterns (from a code and system point of view), and change monthly.
On a personal note; AMERICAN businesses fucking suck. I DESPISE the way a majority of corporations are structured and run in the US.
I hope, that in the construction of my new company, I will avoid the (many) mistakes I have encountered in US corporations. I should mention, having never worked for a foreign company, I can't really comment on how they're operations are run, past analytical business literature, except to say that there are several other countries which seem to have a much better focus on the producing rather than juggling. As far as I am concerned, there is something fundamentally broken with the US notions of capitalism (versus societal considerations) that need to be rectified by the workers (who are in effect, permitting the system to continue as is, for whatever reasons). Personally, I have no intention of taking it up the rear for middle or upper-management, and will work actively towards slagging as many shitheads as I can
I urge all of you PRODUCERS, of note and quality to START YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESSES. Target these fucked up companies, compete against them. USE your knowledge and remember, SLAG the incompetent workers, keep middle management to a minimum, and pay your workers something equitable in relation to your own salary (ALL WORKERS, not just the engineers
In short, extend your own personal sense of integrity to improve the situation. And don't forget that even the most intelligent, motivated of us needs a break
Anyway, Luck to all of you good people
Sincerely,
Omar Desoky
Entry-Level Software Engineer/Data Analyst with 4-6 years of post-degree experience. A BS Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science is required....Familiarity with Government documentation formats/procedures, as well as with Ballistic Missile Air Defense Systems is desired. Yeah, cause I have one of those...
You must be a consultant, too (posted from cubicle @ 7pm)...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I think it might be a question of institution--one of my masochistic friends did a triple major in CS/Math/Physics, and he thought that Math was hardest, followed by CS, and Physics was a complete joke.
In general, though, I think one's perception of "easy" and "hard" is highly personal and related to one's specific aptitudes.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
No, Americans would jsut buy more stuff made by non-American companies as their products would be a lot cheaper.
Of course you could also put tarrifs on those, then the result would be HUGE inflation and loss of export jobs.