I fired half an HR department almost 16 years ago who was doing that: the half that was doing the tech hiring.
The problem I then encountered was, I needed tech savvy people to do HR. I even asked my existing staff to take time off to moonlight as interviewers and gatewayers. Good luck with that - all the tech people were hired out of the market and all there was to hire were the ten thousand rank newbs who sent in resumes.
On a side note, that means employers aren't seeing a dearth of employees - they're seeing a dearth of qualified people willing to do the job they want. In my case, it was a lack of experienced network admins, programmers and such, that would be willing to be hired on or do 4 hours a day once in a while as part time hiring managers.
A combination of hiring rank newbs and (forcibly) drafting 1 or 2 employees over to be HR people for the day, plugged the holes; now they're more comfortable with rotating. We have a full time HR staff that has nothing to do with hiring techies, but they manage the HR stuff and they interview/gateway financial reps applicants (which is more their forte).
You need to find a company who's willing to take a flier on someone whom they've got no reason to believe is capable of doing the job they need done. Part of that is demonstrating that you can, in fact, hold down a job and get done what you're assigned to do. Whether or not it's experience in the specific technology you're interested in less important than whether you can get people to serve as good references for you when you decide to move on.
That mentality is why fresh pools of uber programmers are now so hard to find.
New programmers can't easily find companies willing to "take a flier on someone whom they've got no reason to believe is capable of doing the job they need done" (translation: someone with years and years of experience). New programmers thus don't get the job experience that shapes them into tres uber programmers. And this is why you have to put up with BSOD in Windows.
Of course they could hire Linux programmers who are known for better quality software, but why pay them much? I mean they do it now for free.
No, really, they should be paid a king's ransom, but a corporation looks at a Linux coder and says "You have no paid experience and you've been doing this for free. Why should we pay you much more than minimum wage yet we have 2500 other resumes here from other experienced free coders who will take the scraps we throw at them?"
That's my point. I don't call him a loon. There's an old saying, "A prophet is hated in his own country." Given how on the mark Stallman has been, repeatedly, about the future of our digital rights, I would say he's as close to a prophet as they come. Wall Streeters whose record is as solid as his, make billions.
If Stallman could "relate" to those of us with families, he might not have the perspective that he has, and he might not have the wisdom that he has. It's his role to be where he is; Stallman lives and walks his talk, not like the rest of us who piss and moan about the corporate state and yet are FAR more brainwashed than he is.
When being a revolutionary doesn't seem realistic, then something is wrong with the system, and something is wrong with our way of coping. You and I are hypocrites: we eat out of the hand that we bite and even curse. Stallman lives a revolutionary life you can't live, Stallman lives a revolutionary life that I cannot live, but somehow you think of him as a loon and I think of him as a visionary that walks his talk. I respect him in spite not being able to live like him. I could never be a Richard Stallman, but I definitely see the validity in how he lives.
I think what you mean by him not relating to you is, you see he's freed himself from the corporate state more than you or I have, and frankly, it induces a sense of either guilt, or an inability to understand where he is coming from. No offense intended, but he is very much worthy of respect. Without him you'd be using a proprietary set of Unix tools for Linux. Do you use GNU/Linux?
So now we get to his personality faults. Which, being a mortal man, he is bound to have. He yells at folks for no good reason. Yup, that's a fault. He's a man and thus he's not going to be Jesus... though Jesus once threw over some merchant tables at a temple. I feel that his flaws are outshined by his achievements and vision.
We need more people of vision in this world, and fewer greedy strategists finding new ways to feed us all to the corporate state that Stallman is up against. How they live - as long as they're not hypocrites - does not take away from their respectability, in my book.
Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that he has "always lived cheaply... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."
Calling him a loon because he doesn't live the way you do, or the way you want him to, is... well... they stuff NERDS in lockers because of the same mentality.
chooses something based on what they can and cannot afford.
And for those of you who willfully go into debt to get an engineering degree, knowing the current BPO trends, only to find that your line of work has finished going overseas - remember, you asked for it.
Try going online to ask about how to fix your broken X11 settings.
What a horrible mess. I was on #linuxhelp on freenode.net and those guys just ignored this noob who waited and asked twice about this in several minutes, he had all kinds of details on what was going wrong. I told him to use the "system-config-display" command and voila, problem solved. Everyone else sent him on a wild goose chase.
I've not seen that kind of incompetence or snobbery in a local LUG.
If Nazi Germany used slave Jewish labor to build cheap lamps and cars, would you still buy from them? I can show documentation that shows that you could change Nazi Germany for China and Jews for women, and find China to be far worse in every possible way.
The living conditions of China's people is of no consequence to me, any more than the living conditions of Americans are of any consequence to China or the globalists who are enriching China at our expense. As far as China is concerned, and as far as the globalists are concerned, they wouldn't mind if the West was sucked dry.
Where I come from, we care about our family/nation first before we care about someone else. Or would you let your kids go hungry and tell them "think of the starving Chinese, we need to feed them first!"
Yes, I know, it's protectionism, it's nationalism. But until you're willing to declare that we should all be a one world Government, protecting your own country and its people from being sucked dry economically, is a virtue. And if you believe we should be a one world Government, you're asking for much bigger horrors than protectionism and nationalism.
or Americans, for that matter, be forced to bring down our livelihood to help others?
Free trade with places like China amounts to absolutely nothing else but the total undermining of our Western democracies and our respect for human rights. Trade with China says one and only one thing: Western Democracies and Values are not profitable, and the way to be competitive is to be a hell hole like China.
As an American, I say we quarantine the sweatshop block - all nations that are undemocratic and which routinely allow sweatshops, pollution, and worker abuse - and end all trade with them now. Destroy all trade barriers with Western nations NOW. Establish a Western trade block where we renew and strengthen our pledge to cut pollution, enforce human rights, and preserve our Western democracies from being overwhelmed by a handful of wealthy corporate interests.
If necessary, America can build the cameras and ship 'em to Europe, Europe can make the steel and ship it to us.
Yes, this will cost more money for the consumer, but the end result is we will not continue to thoroughly discredit our way of life and reduce the Western world to the horrible nations that we currently are exporting jobs and debt to.
BTW there is nothing in what I said that says Chinese people are bad - those who want to come to the West and participate in Western values, come on over. But by all means leave the "baby girls are a burden - kill them" attitude behind. Is it racist to want to leave the baby killing behind? Fine. It's racist. Bite me. I don't ever, as long as I live, apologize for not ever wanting to buy a single thing from a country whose citizens murder their daughters en masse.
Only an idiot thinks his copper connections aren't radiating his data on RF frequencies that can be picked up outside his building with the right gear. This tech is decades old.
I never said it was 100% secure.
Heck, wired communications aren't 100% secure, either
before you get caught up in a security breach scandal and the orders they gave you to implement wireless networking get sealed up in one of Dubya's supersecret war on terror files.
Maybe some lower security data centers might enable wireless, but I doubt it. Being that we're a financial institution (a small one, mind you), there's no way in the h to the e to the double hockey sticks that I'd ever enable any kind of wireless anything in our data center.
I'd rather deal with a network cable gone sentient and whipping around like a snake and attacking people, than go wireless at the data center.
Only an idiot thinks there's a wireless transmission that's invulnerable to being intercepted. Heck, wired communications aren't 100% secure, either, but my boss's business is about minimizing risk, and wireless networks even inside a data center is not minimizing risk.
Hard drives induce piracy. They're also able to be encrypted. That makes them also a potential weapon of mass destruction. I'd make sure all hard drives require special permits and stuff. I'd pass the INDUCE Act the way they passed the USAPATRIOT Act: behind closed doors.
Failing that, the next time a plane crashes I'd play my trump card - plant a hard drive at the crash site and say it was used to bring it down.
No, really. Ever seen a hard drive fired out at high speed? It can do some serious damage!
I would lobby for 40gbps connections for everyone, and wifi based internet to reach even the remotest parts of the sticks. There would never be another CD, DVD or HD DVD put to press, EVER. You'd come to me for access rights to all music and all movies, and I'd charge by the minute.
I thought SDHC cards didn't work in legacy SD systems (though I understand SD cards do work in SDHC enabled systems).
If SDHC cards work for the Treo then why in heck did I even think about looking at the iPhone? (Sorry, Palm, I thought about looking at it, but did not actually look at it! Honest!)
(I am a manager) The network Admins deal with the Sev1's, unless it costs serious dinero, like a cluster going BOOM, and then I get paged. We've had that happen only in practice drills.
I check for escalations to management, which I haven't seen in months, but still, they can come at the most inconvenient times. At my level, it means it's a systemic problem about to land us in trouble with the state DOI, federal SEC, etc., so I'd better get involved. (I feel sorry for you publicly traded entities in that regard - the Government really SOX it to ya, lol!) Management knows up front that while I'm not micro managing them, I'm keeping an eye on things to make sure issues don't get out of control. Again, haven't seen that happen since tax time. Stuff always goes to hell when we get nailed by a cost basis rush. That's usually solved by hiring more outsourced Okies (midwest reps, usually from Oklahoma).
Then, before I hit Slashdot, I walk the floor to make sure people aren't dicking around. Especially team leads and floor managers. Once in a while I'll sit down for 2 hours and take calls. I do it for the PR points - when they see the man on top putting up with the crap assed customers we deal with, it's a morale boost. I know what they're dealing with. And they have no excuse for slacking off. And I VNC right to my office to make sure that I can respond the instant something big requires my attention. I could sit on the phones all day if nothing is going on, because it's so easy for me to be where I need to be at the drop of a hat. Actually, given how much it inspires my workers, I like hitting the phones.
Then there's the proprietary stuff I can't talk about - the meetings with human resources and marketing staff, occasional briefings from our legal department, and coordination of community activities. Plus the odd call from the company's owner from his friggin yacht.
Comcast had boosted us up to 28mbps download speeds according to Speedtest.net. I routinely confirmed it with download speeds of around 2.9 megabytes per second of total incoming download bandwidth during quieter times of the day (midday, night time). I should have been getting 3.5 megs per second, but I attribute the difference to a shiteload of 24/7 Youtube-like traffic.
They said they were doing some kind of trial in my area, and that it would end.
Well, it did end, and I went back down to a max performance of 18mbps on speedtest and a real world cap of 2 megs per second.
I was crushed. So crushed. Whatever was I going to do with 2 megabytes of download speed per second and 100 K/sec of upload speed? LOL.
Oh and I'd had a total of 45 minutes of internet downtime since I signed up for them in 2004.
I'd have kissed Comcast's Comcastic feet if I didn't know they were a corporation and that corporations are given to turn on their customers like a rabid dog at a moment's notice. Especially one like Comcast which has no competitors anywhere near their class (SBC DSL tops out at 3mbps in this area and God knows what DirectTV can provide for internet service).
Thank you, Comcast, for all the great service you've provided me since the day I signed up... but don't think I didn't keep a suspicious eye on my bills, my net performance, and your policy enforcement.
I'd go back to Comcast given my experience, but I've actually graduated to a DS-class line. Good for business, good for writeoffs.
Slashdot Mirror
to "The Gestapo have Landed".
Are we ready to impeach yet?
I fired half an HR department almost 16 years ago who was doing that: the half that was doing the tech hiring.
The problem I then encountered was, I needed tech savvy people to do HR. I even asked my existing staff to take time off to moonlight as interviewers and gatewayers. Good luck with that - all the tech people were hired out of the market and all there was to hire were the ten thousand rank newbs who sent in resumes.
On a side note, that means employers aren't seeing a dearth of employees - they're seeing a dearth of qualified people willing to do the job they want. In my case, it was a lack of experienced network admins, programmers and such, that would be willing to be hired on or do 4 hours a day once in a while as part time hiring managers.
A combination of hiring rank newbs and (forcibly) drafting 1 or 2 employees over to be HR people for the day, plugged the holes; now they're more comfortable with rotating. We have a full time HR staff that has nothing to do with hiring techies, but they manage the HR stuff and they interview/gateway financial reps applicants (which is more their forte).
That mentality is why fresh pools of uber programmers are now so hard to find.
New programmers can't easily find companies willing to "take a flier on someone whom they've got no reason to believe is capable of doing the job they need done" (translation: someone with years and years of experience). New programmers thus don't get the job experience that shapes them into tres uber programmers. And this is why you have to put up with BSOD in Windows.
Of course they could hire Linux programmers who are known for better quality software, but why pay them much? I mean they do it now for free.
No, really, they should be paid a king's ransom, but a corporation looks at a Linux coder and says "You have no paid experience and you've been doing this for free. Why should we pay you much more than minimum wage yet we have 2500 other resumes here from other experienced free coders who will take the scraps we throw at them?"
Awesome.
Absolutely friggin awesome.
That's my point. I don't call him a loon. There's an old saying, "A prophet is hated in his own country." Given how on the mark Stallman has been, repeatedly, about the future of our digital rights, I would say he's as close to a prophet as they come. Wall Streeters whose record is as solid as his, make billions.
If Stallman could "relate" to those of us with families, he might not have the perspective that he has, and he might not have the wisdom that he has. It's his role to be where he is; Stallman lives and walks his talk, not like the rest of us who piss and moan about the corporate state and yet are FAR more brainwashed than he is.
When being a revolutionary doesn't seem realistic, then something is wrong with the system, and something is wrong with our way of coping. You and I are hypocrites: we eat out of the hand that we bite and even curse. Stallman lives a revolutionary life you can't live, Stallman lives a revolutionary life that I cannot live, but somehow you think of him as a loon and I think of him as a visionary that walks his talk. I respect him in spite not being able to live like him. I could never be a Richard Stallman, but I definitely see the validity in how he lives.
I think what you mean by him not relating to you is, you see he's freed himself from the corporate state more than you or I have, and frankly, it induces a sense of either guilt, or an inability to understand where he is coming from. No offense intended, but he is very much worthy of respect. Without him you'd be using a proprietary set of Unix tools for Linux. Do you use GNU/Linux?
So now we get to his personality faults. Which, being a mortal man, he is bound to have. He yells at folks for no good reason. Yup, that's a fault. He's a man and thus he's not going to be Jesus... though Jesus once threw over some merchant tables at a temple. I feel that his flaws are outshined by his achievements and vision.
We need more people of vision in this world, and fewer greedy strategists finding new ways to feed us all to the corporate state that Stallman is up against. How they live - as long as they're not hypocrites - does not take away from their respectability, in my book.
in slashdot history.
Mod up, please.
I don't care if he squats on the MIT campus. And he has a MORAL reason.
Calling him a loon because he doesn't live the way you do, or the way you want him to, is... well... they stuff NERDS in lockers because of the same mentality.
We're going to see an Eloi caste in a fraction of the time it took to appear in his book.
chooses something based on what they can and cannot afford.
And for those of you who willfully go into debt to get an engineering degree, knowing the current BPO trends, only to find that your line of work has finished going overseas - remember, you asked for it.
I've had ENOUGH of these $%#@%! enemies in my @#@%!! game!!!
when you can get a top-end phone on the cheap in other countries.
Try going online to ask about how to fix your broken X11 settings.
What a horrible mess. I was on #linuxhelp on freenode.net and those guys just ignored this noob who waited and asked twice about this in several minutes, he had all kinds of details on what was going wrong. I told him to use the "system-config-display" command and voila, problem solved. Everyone else sent him on a wild goose chase.
I've not seen that kind of incompetence or snobbery in a local LUG.
This world is about more than just money.
If Nazi Germany used slave Jewish labor to build cheap lamps and cars, would you still buy from them? I can show documentation that shows that you could change Nazi Germany for China and Jews for women, and find China to be far worse in every possible way.
The living conditions of China's people is of no consequence to me, any more than the living conditions of Americans are of any consequence to China or the globalists who are enriching China at our expense. As far as China is concerned, and as far as the globalists are concerned, they wouldn't mind if the West was sucked dry.
Where I come from, we care about our family/nation first before we care about someone else. Or would you let your kids go hungry and tell them "think of the starving Chinese, we need to feed them first!"
Yes, I know, it's protectionism, it's nationalism. But until you're willing to declare that we should all be a one world Government, protecting your own country and its people from being sucked dry economically, is a virtue. And if you believe we should be a one world Government, you're asking for much bigger horrors than protectionism and nationalism.
or Americans, for that matter, be forced to bring down our livelihood to help others?
Free trade with places like China amounts to absolutely nothing else but the total undermining of our Western democracies and our respect for human rights. Trade with China says one and only one thing: Western Democracies and Values are not profitable, and the way to be competitive is to be a hell hole like China.
As an American, I say we quarantine the sweatshop block - all nations that are undemocratic and which routinely allow sweatshops, pollution, and worker abuse - and end all trade with them now. Destroy all trade barriers with Western nations NOW. Establish a Western trade block where we renew and strengthen our pledge to cut pollution, enforce human rights, and preserve our Western democracies from being overwhelmed by a handful of wealthy corporate interests.
If necessary, America can build the cameras and ship 'em to Europe, Europe can make the steel and ship it to us.
Yes, this will cost more money for the consumer, but the end result is we will not continue to thoroughly discredit our way of life and reduce the Western world to the horrible nations that we currently are exporting jobs and debt to.
BTW there is nothing in what I said that says Chinese people are bad - those who want to come to the West and participate in Western values, come on over. But by all means leave the "baby girls are a burden - kill them" attitude behind. Is it racist to want to leave the baby killing behind? Fine. It's racist. Bite me. I don't ever, as long as I live, apologize for not ever wanting to buy a single thing from a country whose citizens murder their daughters en masse.
I never said it was 100% secure.
You did read this, right?
before you get caught up in a security breach scandal and the orders they gave you to implement wireless networking get sealed up in one of Dubya's supersecret war on terror files.
Polish up your resume and quit now.
Really, I'm not kidding.
Maybe some lower security data centers might enable wireless, but I doubt it. Being that we're a financial institution (a small one, mind you), there's no way in the h to the e to the double hockey sticks that I'd ever enable any kind of wireless anything in our data center.
I'd rather deal with a network cable gone sentient and whipping around like a snake and attacking people, than go wireless at the data center.
Only an idiot thinks there's a wireless transmission that's invulnerable to being intercepted. Heck, wired communications aren't 100% secure, either, but my boss's business is about minimizing risk, and wireless networks even inside a data center is not minimizing risk.
Hard drives induce piracy. They're also able to be encrypted. That makes them also a potential weapon of mass destruction. I'd make sure all hard drives require special permits and stuff. I'd pass the INDUCE Act the way they passed the USAPATRIOT Act: behind closed doors.
Failing that, the next time a plane crashes I'd play my trump card - plant a hard drive at the crash site and say it was used to bring it down.
No, really. Ever seen a hard drive fired out at high speed? It can do some serious damage!
(facetiousness mode off)
Can I hear an "Oh h to the e to the double hockey sticks YEAH BOY!" from the RPGers out there?
I would lobby for 40gbps connections for everyone, and wifi based internet to reach even the remotest parts of the sticks. There would never be another CD, DVD or HD DVD put to press, EVER. You'd come to me for access rights to all music and all movies, and I'd charge by the minute.
I'd be CEO of Planet Earth in 5 years.
We did find out that Reagan was helping to bring in drugs to the US.
BTW your great right wing masters formulated that Clinton story. Are you saying your masters are wrong, megaditto?
I thought SDHC cards didn't work in legacy SD systems (though I understand SD cards do work in SDHC enabled systems).
If SDHC cards work for the Treo then why in heck did I even think about looking at the iPhone? (Sorry, Palm, I thought about looking at it, but did not actually look at it! Honest!)
They ought to put stuff like this up as a perfect reason for Slashdot's existence. You deserve greater than +4 mods for this post. Epic. Truly epic.
(I am a manager)
The network Admins deal with the Sev1's, unless it costs serious dinero, like a cluster going BOOM, and then I get paged. We've had that happen only in practice drills.
I check for escalations to management, which I haven't seen in months, but still, they can come at the most inconvenient times. At my level, it means it's a systemic problem about to land us in trouble with the state DOI, federal SEC, etc., so I'd better get involved. (I feel sorry for you publicly traded entities in that regard - the Government really SOX it to ya, lol!) Management knows up front that while I'm not micro managing them, I'm keeping an eye on things to make sure issues don't get out of control. Again, haven't seen that happen since tax time. Stuff always goes to hell when we get nailed by a cost basis rush. That's usually solved by hiring more outsourced Okies (midwest reps, usually from Oklahoma).
Then, before I hit Slashdot, I walk the floor to make sure people aren't dicking around. Especially team leads and floor managers. Once in a while I'll sit down for 2 hours and take calls. I do it for the PR points - when they see the man on top putting up with the crap assed customers we deal with, it's a morale boost. I know what they're dealing with. And they have no excuse for slacking off. And I VNC right to my office to make sure that I can respond the instant something big requires my attention. I could sit on the phones all day if nothing is going on, because it's so easy for me to be where I need to be at the drop of a hat. Actually, given how much it inspires my workers, I like hitting the phones.
Then there's the proprietary stuff I can't talk about - the meetings with human resources and marketing staff, occasional briefings from our legal department, and coordination of community activities. Plus the odd call from the company's owner from his friggin yacht.
Comcast had boosted us up to 28mbps download speeds according to Speedtest.net. I routinely confirmed it with download speeds of around 2.9 megabytes per second of total incoming download bandwidth during quieter times of the day (midday, night time). I should have been getting 3.5 megs per second, but I attribute the difference to a shiteload of 24/7 Youtube-like traffic.
They said they were doing some kind of trial in my area, and that it would end.
Well, it did end, and I went back down to a max performance of 18mbps on speedtest and a real world cap of 2 megs per second.
I was crushed. So crushed. Whatever was I going to do with 2 megabytes of download speed per second and 100 K/sec of upload speed? LOL.
Oh and I'd had a total of 45 minutes of internet downtime since I signed up for them in 2004.
I'd have kissed Comcast's Comcastic feet if I didn't know they were a corporation and that corporations are given to turn on their customers like a rabid dog at a moment's notice. Especially one like Comcast which has no competitors anywhere near their class (SBC DSL tops out at 3mbps in this area and God knows what DirectTV can provide for internet service).
Thank you, Comcast, for all the great service you've provided me since the day I signed up... but don't think I didn't keep a suspicious eye on my bills, my net performance, and your policy enforcement.
I'd go back to Comcast given my experience, but I've actually graduated to a DS-class line. Good for business, good for writeoffs.