Never in my life have I had 2 or more job offers at the same time
That can be a huge factor modifying your choices. It's certainly understandable that you'd be more forgiving if you have had fewer options in the past. I would not hold that against you if that's the case.
I've had my own work summarily dismissed as not even worth looking at solely because it wasn't done for a customer/employer/profit. Much code is illegal to put up because it is owned by former employers, not me.
They were TOTALLY missing the point of samples. Asking you to violate your employer contracts--breaking the law--by giving them your employer's code is unbelievable. Only a very questionable company would make hard demands for that. The point of code samples is to prove you know the language you say you know and to prove you make relatively sane coding decisions--not to get a peek at competitor's code.
I happen to be in the interviewing process and I've not come across that problem. No one has rejected code samples developed outside work nor demanded my employer's code. No matter how much they demand, I will not give that to them. I'll just move on to the next interview.
So the decision was made by HR, with no input solicited from the team.
Unbelievable. I'm speechless. Your recruiter has no idea what he/she is doing.
we didn't expect the act of reaching up and touching the screen would be as slow as the two-step process for the new hires.
Okay, this is gonna come out from left field, but that's exactly why vi (preferably vim) works so well even though there are "superior" graphical editors available. All commands can be invoked without having to move your hands to control a mouse. Typing:e my-file.txt is faster than grabbing the mouse, clicking a menu, popping a file dialogue, and then selecting the file, and finally clicking the Open button. This is true because most coders can easily type 60 wpm or more so typing 10-15 characters:e my-file.txt only takes a few seconds. Using the built in [TAB] completion makes it even faster.
Also, in vi you're not required to re-orient yourself to changing visual reference points common to GUI apps, because typing a command doesn't frequently cause your screen to change in drastic ways.
Your F1 key is essentially a hot key, comparable to Ctrl-o in Word or:e in vi for loading a file. Your version of the mouse is clicking the on-screen button or a rubber button off to the side, which seems to represent a greater time/energy cost for the user because there's a greater path of movement for the arm. Hot keys are popular among Windows power users because you can avoid the time/energy cost required by moving the mouse. Plus, they generally work everywhere in the app, regardless of what's on the screen, so you're not forced to reset the app back to a "home" state before invoking the command. (More steps.)
I think the lesson to this story is that user input and work-flow are common problems to every industry, so it's not surprising for some situations keyboard input on cash register may be faster than touch screen input.
As for my opinion, I think point of sale machines should focus on minimizing the distance between the arms in rest state, versus work state (such as running items over the scanner), and arms in keyboard input state. Eyes move faster than fingers, fingers move faster than hands, hands move faster than arms, arms move faster than legs. The most frequent actions ought to be optimized to use the fastest of those, the least frequent to use the slowest.
I don't have much faith in that. This presumes that the employer can figure out who the better people are.
I've decided that organizations which cannot distinguish are not worth working for. It's apparent that your employer severely lacks interviewing prowess. If they can't or won't interview properly, then imagine all the sorts of idiots you'll be working with. I suppose you don't need to imagine, since you experienced the situation personally. Working with monkeys is not a job I want. It also demonstrates an unwillingness to be competitive and accumulate the best development team possible.
There are ways to interview candidates the right way, such as asking them to solve coding problems on the spot, as opposed to asking a series of standard questions from interviewing books, which beget standard fluff answers.
Of course, you cannot shift all the responsibility upon the employer. You as an interview candidate must make it easier for them. There are ways to stand out from the rest. For example, building a personal portal for yourself and putting up code samples, blog commentary, and tips & hints. That sort of thing projects a self-starting attitude. You're showing them--not telling them--that you're a contender not a paycheck collector; you're someone who knows wtf they're doing. Showing is light years better than telling.
At one job, they had a choice between me and another fellow. They picked the other guy, and didn't even interview me.
How would you know that if you hadn't interviewed with them? I have to presume they told you during the phone screen. The entire story smacks of unprofessionalism and incompetence on the employer's part.
It's something I generally don't worry too much about because I know I'm very good at what I do, and I can easily prove it, and I tend to interview quite well. There are quite a number of mediocre performers in the IT profession who do not belong there but for some reason they got sent erroneously along that career track. I'd guesstimate for every rock star developer there are 3 piss poor ones, and 6 mediocre ones. 1 in 10 worthy of hire. So, as long as you out-shine them, you'll get work.
When I do worry is during severe recession, such as the one in 2002-2003 because every industry sector is affected, and you get situations where 10 rock star developers are fighting over 1 job--as opposed to 1 fighting with 9 lesser candidates. We may be straddling the recessionary fence, but it's no where near as bad 5 years ago.
As for whether he was being dodgy, well, did they have him working under a contract? If not then its their word against his, and he was under no legal obligation not to use the ideas any way he wished.
Verbal contracts are legal. Apparently they have emails documenting this, so there's strong evidence there was a contract. It was pretty clear they contracted him to do the work.
Let's say this was about a secret recipe for a new type of sauce. I give you the recipe and pay you to manufacture it for me. You do nothing but delay me for 3 months and lie about producing it, but in reality you were manufacturing it for your own profit, you can be sure there's going to be a law suit on the grounds of fraud, infringing on my product, and maliciously disrupting my ability to develop my business.
If it was a matter where they approached him with contract work, he declined and went off to implement his own website based on the idea, then there's no problem with that. They failed to get him to sign a non-compete, but that's not how it went down. It was very clear he accepted a contract for work deal with them.
Never under-estimate the value of a trade. Some tradesman make quite a bit more than average IT staffers.
Changing careers is a good thing because you'll add another skill to your toolset, but only if you can afford to weather the transition. Most people in that situation can't and are forced to hold onto a crummy job or a low paying one.
Also, I'm sad to say you may be having problems due to your age. Age discrimination is rampant in the IT industry. At some point we all have to face it if we've not migrated to management positions or are unable to continue looking like a 32 yo, even with botox and laser treatments.
No, we are going to fix the added levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I anticipated your response. Read the article.
There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change - and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, so it should have a positive impact on the marine environment.'
Kruger says: 'There are many such places - for example, Australia's Nullarbor Plain would be a prime location for this process, as it has 10 000km3 of limestone and soaks up roughly 20MJ/m2 of solar irradiation every day.'
We're going to fix a weather problem, which may be cyclical, that we don't understand that may not be a problem because there may be solar interactions we don't fully understand as well as Earth core changes we don't fully understand by dumping lime into the ocean?
I bet if you had an eye scanning mouse which permitted you to trigger game movements within 1 tenth of a second would change your mind. Eyes move faster than fingers, just as fingers move faster than arms.
Why in the world would a touch screen speed things up? A button is a button is a button. Pressing it requires the same procedure whether it's on screen or as a push key.
If you really wanted to speed things up, you'd try to eliminate the longest part of the key press: searching for the key (hunt 'n peck), using voice recognition maybe.
You know... it never made sense why a computer (the terminator) would require a HUD to display binary data in ASCII form. Bad programming is reading data directly from RAM to render it as a font on an eye screen, which would be OCR'ed by the terminator's main brain CPU, then processed using AI routines, when it could have run the raw data straight to the AI routines in the first place.
Time and time again they've always proved just how talented and resourceful they can be.
Nitpick.
I believe it's easier to crack software than it is to prevent cracking of that software, so I don't believe crackers are more talented and resourceful than the developers building the software. My reasoning is: cracking a known quantity (piece of software) presents a far smaller problem domain than does locking crackers out. There are fewer variables and fewer unknowns. They have the luxury of having a clear task (cracking XYZ software) with concrete inputs (binary image).
Given the preceding I don't perceive crackers to be on the same level as many of our God-like idol programmers such as Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Cox, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, etc, so you'll never see me make comments of praise for them such as the one you've made. They may be smart, but then so are most programmers possessing experience. They are simply nothing to get excited about.
I can totally see myself making light of something terrible like that. It's a coping strategy. It doesn't mean that I don't feel remorse, but what the hell? Am I supposed to sit around for the rest of my life feeling sorry?
You are a selfish person and I'll tell you why.
You're rewriting the story as if the perpetrator is the victim. Had you been Joshua Lipton, how would you have been injured in this case? How are you the victim when your willful voluntary actions caused the accident? Why would you need time to cope if you're not the victim? You don't. Plain and simple. In this case, you are a criminal and the law cannot let you off the hook simply because you're having a hard time coping with the fact you did something bad and you're now fearful of experiencing a criminal sentencing.
Any lawyer worth his or her fee, would've pointed out this evidenced change in behaviour as a sign that the subject no longer drank, and therefore should have a reduced sentence.
I believe being caught and arrested for drunk driving is a far stronger indicator of one's drinking as opposed to a photo of him drinking Red Bull being an indicator he no longer drinks, particularly if you consider the arrest came after the photo.
MIT and Caltech have extremely high numbers of Asian students compared to Caucasian students. Far above the Asian population percentage. Why is no one fighting for quotas for Caucasians to compete with Asians?
Why is there not so strong a push to get more male nurses and primary school teachers? Or even publishing?
Is it because these are seen as female professions and therefore less worthy?
It's because of the assumption that men already have the advantage--an edge over women when getting hired, so surrendering those handful of jobs women excel at in order to give them to privileged men would be considered several steps back.
A couple of weeks ago, a middle-class Slashdot poster wrote something along the lines of "Public transportation is cheap, but I prefer to drive so I don't have to be around poor people." I couldn't imagine someone here in Helsinki saying that. Everyone rides the metro, buses or trams.
It's bad. Real bad. In fact, it can sometimes be downright dangerous. When I was attending college waiting for the bus, it was not unusual to see some schizophrenic homeless person going nuts throwing bottles around, cursing at everyone, and causing a huge ruckus. One time I had someone go through my bag. Other times they called me names. Sometimes they'd beg you for money, and if you didn't give them something, they'd start pushing you around. I've been physically grabbed after giving a homeless man $3. It was all that I had, yet it wasn't enough.
My route to college went through the poor part of the city, so some of the problems were the result of the route taken. Look, let's be honest. If you're white riding the bus through a poor black neighborhood, you're going to be picked on, singled out, and accosted, which happened to me frequently. I was white, and they saw me as privileged--the great whitey keeping them down. I was not because I was rather poor. They shifted their anger about their situation upon me. When they weren't angry, they were hitting me up for money. After all, I was a "rich" white kid. I must be loaded. Surely I could spare a few dollars. None of that was true. I had nothing. On many days, I had maybe $5-6 to get me through the day and I had 4 buses to ride costing about $4 total, so ending with maybe $1-2 for lunch. When they hit me up for those couple bucks, they were quite literally bullying me for my lunch money.
Now, remember. This was all before the gangsta lifestyle was popularized and idolized. I imagine it cannot be any better today.
I will never ride those buses again and I'm sure many other commuters feel the same. I finished college a long time ago. I have a career now, and I have a car, which I will happily use to commute to my job, because public transportation in USA is simply lousy. There's no other way to describe it, and I will never forget just how shitty those public buses were.
Now, with these problems it's usually the bus that's the worst. When light rail is available, it's better. The experience is somewhere in between the bus and a commuter flight. It also depends greatly on the route, time of day, and size of the city. I would ride light rail, but no such thing exists in the city I currently live in. Most American cities don't have light rail, so all you're left with is the bus.
Slashdot Mirror
No more soaked keyboards.
Don't forget the spherical shield and "deh......deh....deh..deh" audio.
That can be a huge factor modifying your choices. It's certainly understandable that you'd be more forgiving if you have had fewer options in the past. I would not hold that against you if that's the case.
They were TOTALLY missing the point of samples. Asking you to violate your employer contracts--breaking the law--by giving them your employer's code is unbelievable. Only a very questionable company would make hard demands for that. The point of code samples is to prove you know the language you say you know and to prove you make relatively sane coding decisions--not to get a peek at competitor's code.
I happen to be in the interviewing process and I've not come across that problem. No one has rejected code samples developed outside work nor demanded my employer's code. No matter how much they demand, I will not give that to them. I'll just move on to the next interview.
Unbelievable. I'm speechless. Your recruiter has no idea what he/she is doing.
Okay, this is gonna come out from left field, but that's exactly why vi (preferably vim) works so well even though there are "superior" graphical editors available. All commands can be invoked without having to move your hands to control a mouse. Typing :e my-file.txt is faster than grabbing the mouse, clicking a menu, popping a file dialogue, and then selecting the file, and finally clicking the Open button. This is true because most coders can easily type 60 wpm or more so typing 10-15 characters :e my-file.txt only takes a few seconds. Using the built in [TAB] completion makes it even faster.
:e in vi for loading a file. Your version of the mouse is clicking the on-screen button or a rubber button off to the side, which seems to represent a greater time/energy cost for the user because there's a greater path of movement for the arm. Hot keys are popular among Windows power users because you can avoid the time/energy cost required by moving the mouse. Plus, they generally work everywhere in the app, regardless of what's on the screen, so you're not forced to reset the app back to a "home" state before invoking the command. (More steps.)
Also, in vi you're not required to re-orient yourself to changing visual reference points common to GUI apps, because typing a command doesn't frequently cause your screen to change in drastic ways.
Your F1 key is essentially a hot key, comparable to Ctrl-o in Word or
I think the lesson to this story is that user input and work-flow are common problems to every industry, so it's not surprising for some situations keyboard input on cash register may be faster than touch screen input.
As for my opinion, I think point of sale machines should focus on minimizing the distance between the arms in rest state, versus work state (such as running items over the scanner), and arms in keyboard input state. Eyes move faster than fingers, fingers move faster than hands, hands move faster than arms, arms move faster than legs. The most frequent actions ought to be optimized to use the fastest of those, the least frequent to use the slowest.
I've decided that organizations which cannot distinguish are not worth working for. It's apparent that your employer severely lacks interviewing prowess. If they can't or won't interview properly, then imagine all the sorts of idiots you'll be working with. I suppose you don't need to imagine, since you experienced the situation personally. Working with monkeys is not a job I want. It also demonstrates an unwillingness to be competitive and accumulate the best development team possible.
There are ways to interview candidates the right way, such as asking them to solve coding problems on the spot, as opposed to asking a series of standard questions from interviewing books, which beget standard fluff answers.
Of course, you cannot shift all the responsibility upon the employer. You as an interview candidate must make it easier for them. There are ways to stand out from the rest. For example, building a personal portal for yourself and putting up code samples, blog commentary, and tips & hints. That sort of thing projects a self-starting attitude. You're showing them--not telling them--that you're a contender not a paycheck collector; you're someone who knows wtf they're doing. Showing is light years better than telling.
How would you know that if you hadn't interviewed with them? I have to presume they told you during the phone screen. The entire story smacks of unprofessionalism and incompetence on the employer's part.
It's something I generally don't worry too much about because I know I'm very good at what I do, and I can easily prove it, and I tend to interview quite well. There are quite a number of mediocre performers in the IT profession who do not belong there but for some reason they got sent erroneously along that career track. I'd guesstimate for every rock star developer there are 3 piss poor ones, and 6 mediocre ones. 1 in 10 worthy of hire. So, as long as you out-shine them, you'll get work.
When I do worry is during severe recession, such as the one in 2002-2003 because every industry sector is affected, and you get situations where 10 rock star developers are fighting over 1 job--as opposed to 1 fighting with 9 lesser candidates. We may be straddling the recessionary fence, but it's no where near as bad 5 years ago.
Verbal contracts are legal. Apparently they have emails documenting this, so there's strong evidence there was a contract. It was pretty clear they contracted him to do the work.
Let's say this was about a secret recipe for a new type of sauce. I give you the recipe and pay you to manufacture it for me. You do nothing but delay me for 3 months and lie about producing it, but in reality you were manufacturing it for your own profit, you can be sure there's going to be a law suit on the grounds of fraud, infringing on my product, and maliciously disrupting my ability to develop my business.
If it was a matter where they approached him with contract work, he declined and went off to implement his own website based on the idea, then there's no problem with that. They failed to get him to sign a non-compete, but that's not how it went down. It was very clear he accepted a contract for work deal with them.
Never under-estimate the value of a trade. Some tradesman make quite a bit more than average IT staffers.
Changing careers is a good thing because you'll add another skill to your toolset, but only if you can afford to weather the transition. Most people in that situation can't and are forced to hold onto a crummy job or a low paying one.
Also, I'm sad to say you may be having problems due to your age. Age discrimination is rampant in the IT industry. At some point we all have to face it if we've not migrated to management positions or are unable to continue looking like a 32 yo, even with botox and laser treatments.
Sarcasm goes right over your head... doesn't it? Unlike others, I will not use <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags.
People get it. They're just not buying 100% into the blame it on autos, factories, democracy, and USA excuse.
I anticipated your response. Read the article.
We're going to fix a weather problem, which may be cyclical, that we don't understand that may not be a problem because there may be solar interactions we don't fully understand as well as Earth core changes we don't fully understand by dumping lime into the ocean?
Surfing internet porn again? I see.
Which.. you cannot do on a touch screen.
We're talking about a game. No one (in real life) will die in a game.
I bet if you had an eye scanning mouse which permitted you to trigger game movements within 1 tenth of a second would change your mind. Eyes move faster than fingers, just as fingers move faster than arms.
Why in the world would a touch screen speed things up? A button is a button is a button. Pressing it requires the same procedure whether it's on screen or as a push key.
If you really wanted to speed things up, you'd try to eliminate the longest part of the key press: searching for the key (hunt 'n peck), using voice recognition maybe.
Terminators build terminators and therefore do not require inferior human style debug logging, noob's noob.
You know... it never made sense why a computer (the terminator) would require a HUD to display binary data in ASCII form. Bad programming is reading data directly from RAM to render it as a font on an eye screen, which would be OCR'ed by the terminator's main brain CPU, then processed using AI routines, when it could have run the raw data straight to the AI routines in the first place.
Nitpick.
I believe it's easier to crack software than it is to prevent cracking of that software, so I don't believe crackers are more talented and resourceful than the developers building the software. My reasoning is: cracking a known quantity (piece of software) presents a far smaller problem domain than does locking crackers out. There are fewer variables and fewer unknowns. They have the luxury of having a clear task (cracking XYZ software) with concrete inputs (binary image).
Given the preceding I don't perceive crackers to be on the same level as many of our God-like idol programmers such as Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Cox, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, etc, so you'll never see me make comments of praise for them such as the one you've made. They may be smart, but then so are most programmers possessing experience. They are simply nothing to get excited about.
You are a selfish person and I'll tell you why.
You're rewriting the story as if the perpetrator is the victim. Had you been Joshua Lipton, how would you have been injured in this case? How are you the victim when your willful voluntary actions caused the accident? Why would you need time to cope if you're not the victim? You don't. Plain and simple. In this case, you are a criminal and the law cannot let you off the hook simply because you're having a hard time coping with the fact you did something bad and you're now fearful of experiencing a criminal sentencing.
I believe being caught and arrested for drunk driving is a far stronger indicator of one's drinking as opposed to a photo of him drinking Red Bull being an indicator he no longer drinks, particularly if you consider the arrest came after the photo.
MIT and Caltech have extremely high numbers of Asian students compared to Caucasian students. Far above the Asian population percentage. Why is no one fighting for quotas for Caucasians to compete with Asians?
Oh right. Because, quotas are a dumb idea. n/m.
It's because of the assumption that men already have the advantage--an edge over women when getting hired, so surrendering those handful of jobs women excel at in order to give them to privileged men would be considered several steps back.
It's all politics anyway.
It's bad. Real bad. In fact, it can sometimes be downright dangerous. When I was attending college waiting for the bus, it was not unusual to see some schizophrenic homeless person going nuts throwing bottles around, cursing at everyone, and causing a huge ruckus. One time I had someone go through my bag. Other times they called me names. Sometimes they'd beg you for money, and if you didn't give them something, they'd start pushing you around. I've been physically grabbed after giving a homeless man $3. It was all that I had, yet it wasn't enough.
My route to college went through the poor part of the city, so some of the problems were the result of the route taken. Look, let's be honest. If you're white riding the bus through a poor black neighborhood, you're going to be picked on, singled out, and accosted, which happened to me frequently. I was white, and they saw me as privileged--the great whitey keeping them down. I was not because I was rather poor. They shifted their anger about their situation upon me. When they weren't angry, they were hitting me up for money. After all, I was a "rich" white kid. I must be loaded. Surely I could spare a few dollars. None of that was true. I had nothing. On many days, I had maybe $5-6 to get me through the day and I had 4 buses to ride costing about $4 total, so ending with maybe $1-2 for lunch. When they hit me up for those couple bucks, they were quite literally bullying me for my lunch money.
Now, remember. This was all before the gangsta lifestyle was popularized and idolized. I imagine it cannot be any better today.
I will never ride those buses again and I'm sure many other commuters feel the same. I finished college a long time ago. I have a career now, and I have a car, which I will happily use to commute to my job, because public transportation in USA is simply lousy. There's no other way to describe it, and I will never forget just how shitty those public buses were.
Now, with these problems it's usually the bus that's the worst. When light rail is available, it's better. The experience is somewhere in between the bus and a commuter flight. It also depends greatly on the route, time of day, and size of the city. I would ride light rail, but no such thing exists in the city I currently live in. Most American cities don't have light rail, so all you're left with is the bus.
It's sad that you have to explain that for people. Ignorance is sad.
However, it's necessary.
(Good post btw)