You are expected to be a people person because you're being interviewed by people people. In many companies, they are looking for someone who has the capabilities (bare minimum vs vast experience is rarely a differentiating point) and is a "good fit" for the team. This means someone who has the social skills to get along with everyone.
I've been criticized for being an unusually harsh interviewer. I don't feel in the slightest bit upset about this or compelled to act differently. I have the people skills of a rabid hyena, but I also know how to fake it well enough to get along with most people. In interviews, I ask detailed questions from the start and feel out the limits of a person's capabilities. I make people write code on the spot. People who can't handle this kind of pressure aren't going to be able to function in the event that we actually have to do some real work. As a result of this process, we ended up hiring a couple of techies who may not have made it past the management interviews if management didn't already have a thumbs up from the rest of the team. It's frustrating that non-technical people have any say over the hiring of the technical people, but managers control the budget, so they control the hiring.
If you don't like the way the current system works, sabotage it. When you do have a job where you're important, be sure to get included in the interviewing process. It's not fun, but the pain won't last as long as letting management do all the hiring on their own.
I often see people being accused of being arrogant for defending positions that can be demonstrated to be true. Often times, this comes off as arrogant to people who don't understand that their own position is irrational. It's hard to explain this to people who think that knowing what to do is the same thing as understanding why to do things a certain way. While there may be lots of asshole points to give out, don't forget that no matter how they come off, these people are also spending their time trying to help others.
Of course, experts have topics they're not experts on, and many of them don't know how to see the line that divides genius from stupid. Scott Adams is right - we're all idiots, just at different times with different things.
You're right. That's a PITA. I'm a Unix sysadmin, so I've done that little chore a few times myself.
The reason it's so painful is that nobody wants to make it simple. The idea is that networking computers puts you at greater risk. Most people wouldn't understand the implications of making all of their filesystems publicly available via NFS. By being painful, it helps keep people from hurting themselves until they go through the same pain we went through to learn.
That idea is a bunch of bunk. If we want to get people to use the OS we uber-geeks use, we need to accept that some people are going to want to shoot themselves in the foot. By now, we should have a plethora of shiny guns being offerred to the user.
I'm not being facetious here. I think the protect-the-user-from-himself philosophy needs to be seriously reconsidered.
Only techies seem to be interested in things like awareness or battling the status quo.
Most people want the lowest common denominator. The average person has unprecidented access to information and low priced technology. They don't care that the reason this is true because there were people who wanted more than the mediocrity they saw around them. These people are sheep. We call them sheeple.
Businesses are built by stepping on sheeple and taking their money. If you want to be successful in business, you just have to lose your conscience. Geeks seem to have a hard time grasping that most of the world doesn't care about technology.
From the geek perspective, there is technology that is 10 times better than the stuff MS puts out. The average person has never seen the alternatives and never will. As far as they're concerned, MS is the most amazing thing ever.
There is something that we can do, but it's scary. It involves going outside and interacting with people.
I don't have cable, I get about 3 channels (5 if you count the mostly static ones) and I like this arrangement. I don't believe in paying for TV. Back in my day, commercials were the punishment we had to suffer for getting free broadcast TV. Now we still have all the commercials (well, actually we have more now, but that's a different point) and we're supposed to pay for this? No thanks.
If OTA broadcasts go off the air, I'll kick the TV habit. I know I'm not the only one who is tired of low quality crap being put out for the most part. The good stuff I buy on DVD when it comes out.
For some reason, people seem to like paying too much. They think they're getting a good deal by getting the cheapest thing they can buy, but they don't think about how often they replace things that used to last a lifetime. The quest for the lowest prices has lead to even lower expectations of quality from products and services. Unfortunately, these people will not experience the joy of products living up to expectations without being able to make the first step by buying better products and services.
I know you're just making a snide comment, but it is a race to the bottom. The only question is where are you going to be in that race? Those who do not know what they're going to do will have it chosen for them.
There is a large amount of people taking the savings to line their own pockets. Is that really surprising? People aren't all warm and fluffy. Most people are selfish, greedy bastards. If you want to do something to change that unpleasant fact of life, you better expect to kill billions of people. Of course, taking that approach would put you in the first group. There's always a catch.
Costs to businesses are not constant over time. Look at the industries that are being recommended for more government regulation as an example. Regulation and compliance cost companies a lot of money and do nothing to increase profit. When a company gets stuck with needing to spend millions on complying with some new law, do you expect them to raise their prices? That is just one example, but it is a significant contributor to the need to cut costs elsewhere throughout the business.
There's another side to that coin. The companies paid those people before they made money off the product. Anyone with a good idea can be their own company and reap all the rewards or suffer the losses. While the IT people who helped generate that revenue only get a small piece of the money, they didn't have any of the risk if the product didn't sell. Most products are failures. Most work people do doesn't generate any money for the company. If each IT worker who generated disproportionately more income got more of it, there would be nothing left for the dead weight.
Once you've done something that made a lot of money for the company, if you expect to rest on your laurels, you'll be doing it unemployed. If you don't continue to demonstrate the value you bring to the company, don't expect them to care about you.
Unions don't solve any problems, they just change the kinds of problems you have. Unless everyone is in the union, there are plenty of people to fill the jobs, making the union a liability. Unions always increase employee costs. Employers given the chance will avoid the union employees. Those not given a chance will hire in countries without unions.
IT workers deserve exactly the paycheck they agree to. Nothing more. If you are valuable to the company, they will pay. However, you have to negotiate for the pay. Nobody will give you a big raise for doing a really good job. You have to play the same game as everyone else. The company will always pay you as little as they can get away with.
Each and every one of us is an expendable resource. If we can be replaced at a lower cost, we will be. That's the way the world works. If you want to earn more, you have to demonstrate value to those who have the money and convince them that you deserve a larger share. Those who have the money didn't get in that position by being nice and treating everyone fairly. If you want the rewards, you have to be willing to take risks to get them.
I don't know about you youngins with your new math, but back in my day when you didn't put anything between the numbers, it suggested they were part of the same number. In this case, that number would be one thousand, three hundred, thirty seven.
I think a major part of the problem is that software companies want to sell software as a product and a service, in the contexts that are most objectionable by the consumer.
In the product sense, you buy software off the shelf at some store. Software is the only product you can buy off the shelf that the manufacturer argues has a value that goes down to $0 the instant you buy it. If it doesn't fit your needs, you can't return it or sell it to someone else. In this context, piracy is promoted in the try-before-you-buy sense.
If it were a service, in which case the idea of not owning something you can resell makes sense, why is there no liability for bugs? Any other contract where one party fails to provide what they claim to offer creates a liability for the provider.
They want to sell software as a service, so you can't redistribute your copy, and have all the benefits of selling an as-is product.
Pricing is a significant factor in promoting piracy. Individuals who want to use a piece of software for personal use don't want to pay several hundred dollars for something they will use infrequently. In this context, a personal or education license at a reduced price is a good approach. I had an educational version of Mathematica that cost $125 when I was in college. That was a lot of money at the time, but it was worth it for me. The $1000 it would cost for the regular version was simply not going to happen. I didn't have a *need* for it, so I could have gotten by without it. However, in this situation I see a lot of people rationalizing their pirating the commercial version. Those people are never going to pay full price for the product, so no money is actually being lost.
Piracy is about as morally objectionable as friends who come over uninvited and eat your food. It's nothing more than a nuisance to most people.
Customer service representatives need to have access to customer accounts in order to help customers. The problem comes from customer service being treated as an undesirable expense and offloaded on people who care the least about the customers. It doesn't matter if the call centers are in the US, UK, or India. The people handling this data are low paid employees. It doesn't matter what the wages are specifically, because these people are on the bottom of the totem pole in terms of social and economic status.
If you ask for account information and put $10,000 in cash in front of a $8/hr employee, you're likely to get cooperation. If you do that to someone making over $100,000/yr, you're likely to be held for the police. There is a disconnect between the value of the information and the vulnerability of the people handling it. The result shouldn't be much of a surprise.
There are people who are making minimum wage and others making 6 figures both have the same traits. Some of them believe they are worth more than the company pays them and that is the justification they need to steal from the company. This problem is compounded by companies who will fire people who are caught stealing, but don't press criminal charges. These people just go off to another company with their attitude and experience stealing from employers.
I have a life outside of work. In fact, I enjoy being a contractor because if my employer wants me to work more, they have to pay me more. That's an arrangement that keeps my boss concerned that I have enough not-at-work-time in my life.
One advantage of doing more than I am required to is that when I'm enjoying my outside life, I have more than the bare minimum amount of money to enjoy it with. Though, the down side of this arrangement is that I have to pay more in taxes than many people make who are only doing what is required.
There are people with different personality types and different feelings about their work. Google is hoping that the kind of people they attract are the kind who will do something interesting that might help the company. AT&T strikes me as the kind of place where that policy would have an almost exactly 20% drop in productivity. A lot of large companies have a lot of people who will do the bare minimum to not get fired.
Google is betting on having a significant number of the other type of person. If they're wrong, they still have a bunch of employees who are given more freedom to pursue their own interests than most employees.
Every business wants to make lots of money. There's nothing wrong with making money providing services people want. The factor that makes people like google is that they do still provide services people want, not just find new ways to scam people out of more money.
Some companies do exactly this. It creates a slight delay since someone has to actually generate hashes of potential credit card numbers and compare those against the database. Computers are good at going through a large list of possible values and trying them until it finds ones that work. It might take as long as a week to get the credit card numbers for the whole database if all you have is a desktop computer. It's a nuisance, but it doesn't protect the data. Keeping the data out of the hands of people who would go through all that work is the real trick. If you do a good job at that, hashes keep the honest people who legitimately have access from getting any bad ideas.
The reason the personal information isn't yours is because you are not recognized by the law. The owner of the information (in a legal sense) is the one who collects the information. You don't exist in that context either, you're just a collection of data that can be sold to other companies. These companies are handling collections of bits that can be copied for free and sold to others.
It would be nice if they thought of us as actual people, like them, but that's not the way it works in the real world. As a result, the damage done to people doesn't even factor into how this information is handled. The more I see the system from the inside, the more I agree with the wisdom of living in a cabin in Montana with no outside contact.
Have you tried asking people who know you from your volunteer experience? Personal references are the life blood of small businesses. My first job came from a recommendation from the programming teacher at my high school. An employer asked for students who could program and my name was on the top of the list. Do you have any teachers who may be able to recommend you? A lot of small companies find people by word of mouth, not official job postings. I was a dorky kid with no social skills, but people knew I could do stuff with computers. For technical jobs, results are the only thing that most people will care about.
If you are competing against people with 5+ years of experience, what do you do to differentiate yourself? When I was last looking for a job(2003), every job posted online got hundreds of resumes. I don't expect things are much better now. You have to do something that stands out if you want to get an interview with those odds. Also, consider jobs that aren't being taken by people with much more experience. You can always move around later once people get to know you.
I meant to refer specifically to the politics aspect of technical jobs. I'm not recommending these people go into sales or any other people-intensive jobs. Clearly, these people should stick with jobs that are primarily focused on their strengths, such as programming. However, programmers who don't emphasize their value to the company are plentiful and often no longer employed as programmers. Learning how to fake it when it comes to office politics is enough to get by, but only for those people who have a strong ability that others already recognize and value.
Businesses want to make money. As a programmer, you have to do something that helps with that goal. Being an analyst and understanding the bigger picture are a significant part of of the professional growth needed to be successful.
Coding to specs is a commodity job that can be done by the lowest bidder. Developing those specs is still a job that needs to be done by someone who understands what the customer/employer needs and understands the technology well enough to write or contribute to clear specs. The actual nose down coding jobs may be largely migrating offshore, but there seem to be plenty of higher paying jobs locally for those who can do the more complex work.
That's funny, it seems to me that middle management adds the least value to the revenue stream. We seem to have these cycles where more middle management jobs are created, then they're all removed. I hope we're going to see another contraction of management levels soon.
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You are expected to be a people person because you're being interviewed by people people. In many companies, they are looking for someone who has the capabilities (bare minimum vs vast experience is rarely a differentiating point) and is a "good fit" for the team. This means someone who has the social skills to get along with everyone.
I've been criticized for being an unusually harsh interviewer. I don't feel in the slightest bit upset about this or compelled to act differently. I have the people skills of a rabid hyena, but I also know how to fake it well enough to get along with most people. In interviews, I ask detailed questions from the start and feel out the limits of a person's capabilities. I make people write code on the spot. People who can't handle this kind of pressure aren't going to be able to function in the event that we actually have to do some real work. As a result of this process, we ended up hiring a couple of techies who may not have made it past the management interviews if management didn't already have a thumbs up from the rest of the team. It's frustrating that non-technical people have any say over the hiring of the technical people, but managers control the budget, so they control the hiring.
If you don't like the way the current system works, sabotage it. When you do have a job where you're important, be sure to get included in the interviewing process. It's not fun, but the pain won't last as long as letting management do all the hiring on their own.
I often see people being accused of being arrogant for defending positions that can be demonstrated to be true. Often times, this comes off as arrogant to people who don't understand that their own position is irrational. It's hard to explain this to people who think that knowing what to do is the same thing as understanding why to do things a certain way. While there may be lots of asshole points to give out, don't forget that no matter how they come off, these people are also spending their time trying to help others.
Of course, experts have topics they're not experts on, and many of them don't know how to see the line that divides genius from stupid. Scott Adams is right - we're all idiots, just at different times with different things.
You're right. That's a PITA. I'm a Unix sysadmin, so I've done that little chore a few times myself.
The reason it's so painful is that nobody wants to make it simple. The idea is that networking computers puts you at greater risk. Most people wouldn't understand the implications of making all of their filesystems publicly available via NFS. By being painful, it helps keep people from hurting themselves until they go through the same pain we went through to learn.
That idea is a bunch of bunk. If we want to get people to use the OS we uber-geeks use, we need to accept that some people are going to want to shoot themselves in the foot. By now, we should have a plethora of shiny guns being offerred to the user.
I'm not being facetious here. I think the protect-the-user-from-himself philosophy needs to be seriously reconsidered.
Only techies seem to be interested in things like awareness or battling the status quo.
Most people want the lowest common denominator. The average person has unprecidented access to information and low priced technology. They don't care that the reason this is true because there were people who wanted more than the mediocrity they saw around them. These people are sheep. We call them sheeple.
Businesses are built by stepping on sheeple and taking their money. If you want to be successful in business, you just have to lose your conscience. Geeks seem to have a hard time grasping that most of the world doesn't care about technology.
From the geek perspective, there is technology that is 10 times better than the stuff MS puts out. The average person has never seen the alternatives and never will. As far as they're concerned, MS is the most amazing thing ever.
There is something that we can do, but it's scary. It involves going outside and interacting with people.
I read the same thing. I thought maybe they had a new global strategy to pirate all of their competitors out of business.
I don't have cable, I get about 3 channels (5 if you count the mostly static ones) and I like this arrangement. I don't believe in paying for TV. Back in my day, commercials were the punishment we had to suffer for getting free broadcast TV. Now we still have all the commercials (well, actually we have more now, but that's a different point) and we're supposed to pay for this? No thanks.
If OTA broadcasts go off the air, I'll kick the TV habit. I know I'm not the only one who is tired of low quality crap being put out for the most part. The good stuff I buy on DVD when it comes out.
For some reason, people seem to like paying too much. They think they're getting a good deal by getting the cheapest thing they can buy, but they don't think about how often they replace things that used to last a lifetime. The quest for the lowest prices has lead to even lower expectations of quality from products and services. Unfortunately, these people will not experience the joy of products living up to expectations without being able to make the first step by buying better products and services.
Thank you.
Every company does some things wrong. You just have to decide if that company does so much wrong that you can't live with it.
I know you're just making a snide comment, but it is a race to the bottom. The only question is where are you going to be in that race? Those who do not know what they're going to do will have it chosen for them.
There is a large amount of people taking the savings to line their own pockets. Is that really surprising? People aren't all warm and fluffy. Most people are selfish, greedy bastards. If you want to do something to change that unpleasant fact of life, you better expect to kill billions of people. Of course, taking that approach would put you in the first group. There's always a catch.
Costs to businesses are not constant over time. Look at the industries that are being recommended for more government regulation as an example. Regulation and compliance cost companies a lot of money and do nothing to increase profit. When a company gets stuck with needing to spend millions on complying with some new law, do you expect them to raise their prices? That is just one example, but it is a significant contributor to the need to cut costs elsewhere throughout the business.
There's another side to that coin. The companies paid those people before they made money off the product. Anyone with a good idea can be their own company and reap all the rewards or suffer the losses. While the IT people who helped generate that revenue only get a small piece of the money, they didn't have any of the risk if the product didn't sell. Most products are failures. Most work people do doesn't generate any money for the company. If each IT worker who generated disproportionately more income got more of it, there would be nothing left for the dead weight.
Once you've done something that made a lot of money for the company, if you expect to rest on your laurels, you'll be doing it unemployed. If you don't continue to demonstrate the value you bring to the company, don't expect them to care about you.
Unions don't solve any problems, they just change the kinds of problems you have. Unless everyone is in the union, there are plenty of people to fill the jobs, making the union a liability. Unions always increase employee costs. Employers given the chance will avoid the union employees. Those not given a chance will hire in countries without unions.
IT workers deserve exactly the paycheck they agree to. Nothing more. If you are valuable to the company, they will pay. However, you have to negotiate for the pay. Nobody will give you a big raise for doing a really good job. You have to play the same game as everyone else. The company will always pay you as little as they can get away with.
Each and every one of us is an expendable resource. If we can be replaced at a lower cost, we will be. That's the way the world works. If you want to earn more, you have to demonstrate value to those who have the money and convince them that you deserve a larger share. Those who have the money didn't get in that position by being nice and treating everyone fairly. If you want the rewards, you have to be willing to take risks to get them.
This dates the joke. Back in the old days, there were programming jobs that paid well and were in countries with Porsche dealers.
I don't know about you youngins with your new math, but back in my day when you didn't put anything between the numbers, it suggested they were part of the same number. In this case, that number would be one thousand, three hundred, thirty seven.
I think a major part of the problem is that software companies want to sell software as a product and a service, in the contexts that are most objectionable by the consumer.
In the product sense, you buy software off the shelf at some store. Software is the only product you can buy off the shelf that the manufacturer argues has a value that goes down to $0 the instant you buy it. If it doesn't fit your needs, you can't return it or sell it to someone else. In this context, piracy is promoted in the try-before-you-buy sense.
If it were a service, in which case the idea of not owning something you can resell makes sense, why is there no liability for bugs? Any other contract where one party fails to provide what they claim to offer creates a liability for the provider.
They want to sell software as a service, so you can't redistribute your copy, and have all the benefits of selling an as-is product.
Pricing is a significant factor in promoting piracy. Individuals who want to use a piece of software for personal use don't want to pay several hundred dollars for something they will use infrequently. In this context, a personal or education license at a reduced price is a good approach. I had an educational version of Mathematica that cost $125 when I was in college. That was a lot of money at the time, but it was worth it for me. The $1000 it would cost for the regular version was simply not going to happen. I didn't have a *need* for it, so I could have gotten by without it. However, in this situation I see a lot of people rationalizing their pirating the commercial version. Those people are never going to pay full price for the product, so no money is actually being lost.
Piracy is about as morally objectionable as friends who come over uninvited and eat your food. It's nothing more than a nuisance to most people.
Customer service representatives need to have access to customer accounts in order to help customers. The problem comes from customer service being treated as an undesirable expense and offloaded on people who care the least about the customers. It doesn't matter if the call centers are in the US, UK, or India. The people handling this data are low paid employees. It doesn't matter what the wages are specifically, because these people are on the bottom of the totem pole in terms of social and economic status.
If you ask for account information and put $10,000 in cash in front of a $8/hr employee, you're likely to get cooperation. If you do that to someone making over $100,000/yr, you're likely to be held for the police. There is a disconnect between the value of the information and the vulnerability of the people handling it. The result shouldn't be much of a surprise.
I don't think the pay rate really matters.
There are people who are making minimum wage and others making 6 figures both have the same traits. Some of them believe they are worth more than the company pays them and that is the justification they need to steal from the company. This problem is compounded by companies who will fire people who are caught stealing, but don't press criminal charges. These people just go off to another company with their attitude and experience stealing from employers.
I have a life outside of work. In fact, I enjoy being a contractor because if my employer wants me to work more, they have to pay me more. That's an arrangement that keeps my boss concerned that I have enough not-at-work-time in my life.
One advantage of doing more than I am required to is that when I'm enjoying my outside life, I have more than the bare minimum amount of money to enjoy it with. Though, the down side of this arrangement is that I have to pay more in taxes than many people make who are only doing what is required.
There are people with different personality types and different feelings about their work. Google is hoping that the kind of people they attract are the kind who will do something interesting that might help the company. AT&T strikes me as the kind of place where that policy would have an almost exactly 20% drop in productivity. A lot of large companies have a lot of people who will do the bare minimum to not get fired.
Google is betting on having a significant number of the other type of person. If they're wrong, they still have a bunch of employees who are given more freedom to pursue their own interests than most employees.
Every business wants to make lots of money. There's nothing wrong with making money providing services people want. The factor that makes people like google is that they do still provide services people want, not just find new ways to scam people out of more money.
Some companies do exactly this. It creates a slight delay since someone has to actually generate hashes of potential credit card numbers and compare those against the database. Computers are good at going through a large list of possible values and trying them until it finds ones that work. It might take as long as a week to get the credit card numbers for the whole database if all you have is a desktop computer. It's a nuisance, but it doesn't protect the data. Keeping the data out of the hands of people who would go through all that work is the real trick. If you do a good job at that, hashes keep the honest people who legitimately have access from getting any bad ideas.
The reason the personal information isn't yours is because you are not recognized by the law. The owner of the information (in a legal sense) is the one who collects the information. You don't exist in that context either, you're just a collection of data that can be sold to other companies. These companies are handling collections of bits that can be copied for free and sold to others.
It would be nice if they thought of us as actual people, like them, but that's not the way it works in the real world. As a result, the damage done to people doesn't even factor into how this information is handled. The more I see the system from the inside, the more I agree with the wisdom of living in a cabin in Montana with no outside contact.
Have you tried asking people who know you from your volunteer experience? Personal references are the life blood of small businesses. My first job came from a recommendation from the programming teacher at my high school. An employer asked for students who could program and my name was on the top of the list. Do you have any teachers who may be able to recommend you? A lot of small companies find people by word of mouth, not official job postings. I was a dorky kid with no social skills, but people knew I could do stuff with computers. For technical jobs, results are the only thing that most people will care about.
If you are competing against people with 5+ years of experience, what do you do to differentiate yourself? When I was last looking for a job(2003), every job posted online got hundreds of resumes. I don't expect things are much better now. You have to do something that stands out if you want to get an interview with those odds. Also, consider jobs that aren't being taken by people with much more experience. You can always move around later once people get to know you.
I meant to refer specifically to the politics aspect of technical jobs. I'm not recommending these people go into sales or any other people-intensive jobs. Clearly, these people should stick with jobs that are primarily focused on their strengths, such as programming. However, programmers who don't emphasize their value to the company are plentiful and often no longer employed as programmers. Learning how to fake it when it comes to office politics is enough to get by, but only for those people who have a strong ability that others already recognize and value.
Businesses want to make money. As a programmer, you have to do something that helps with that goal. Being an analyst and understanding the bigger picture are a significant part of of the professional growth needed to be successful.
Coding to specs is a commodity job that can be done by the lowest bidder. Developing those specs is still a job that needs to be done by someone who understands what the customer/employer needs and understands the technology well enough to write or contribute to clear specs. The actual nose down coding jobs may be largely migrating offshore, but there seem to be plenty of higher paying jobs locally for those who can do the more complex work.
That's funny, it seems to me that middle management adds the least value to the revenue stream. We seem to have these cycles where more middle management jobs are created, then they're all removed. I hope we're going to see another contraction of management levels soon.