Salaries and contract rates are down in the Midwest, too. I can't recall how times I've been contacted by recruiters hawking contracts that are paying rates that would have been nice in the early '90s but are a joke with today's cost of living. Even contracts for periods for very short term (2-3 months) stints are paying crap rates. To be fair, the recruiters know that the compensation being offered by many employers today is a joke but also know that submitting someone at a higher salary/rate won't even get that candidate a phone screen. And that doesn't even take into account the abuse of contract-to-hire where the employer has no intention of ever converting a contractor into an FTE.
I've been waiting for this big "ho hum" of an announcement since that ridiculous "competition" began---(i.e., politicians debasing themselves to win the temporary favor of a megacorporation). This whole circus was akin to competing to host the Olympics. A lot of cities dodged a bullet.
The news this morning was reporting an average $104K for the new employees. That average is likely pretty heavily skewed to that level by the executives' salaries who'll be working in the new locations---no word on what the Average Joe is going to be paid and how they'll be able to afford the cost of living in NYC and Crystal City.
I guess they went with this name after deciding that calling thier new site "PC World", "Creative Computing", or "IBM Technical Journal" would have caused some confusion on the Internet.
A good college program will include some non-tech classes where writing is the focus. When the papers come back all marked up in red, you learn to proofread. Even though you might be studying to enter a technical field, you'll be expected to be able to write. One can't help but wonder if the execrable state of technical documentation nowadays (printed as well as online) is due to a lack of these classes in the technical majors. I worked for a guy who encouraged us to do a lot of writing about our work and I knew engineers at NASA who were expected to write a technical memo/precis/whatever on a weekly basis. It's good for you and your career.
Sadly, I suspect that most don't care about the quality of their writing so long as there aren't any red squigglies on the screen when they click on "Submit".
Is the information in the textbooks being used outdated because it's incorrect? Or it is just too old for your tastes? "OMG! This calculus textbook is 9 years old! Why am I learning something that's clearly outdated?" Or is it outdated because it doesn't emphasize the latest technology du jour?
I seem to recall that the information in most textbooks--at least the printed ones--was something like 4-5 years old when it got into the classrooms due to the writing/editing/printing/distribution process. In some fast-developing fields this is an eternity. I'm one of those who believes that a college curriculum should be teaching concepts and not products (I.e., college != vocational school). Particularly at the undergraduate level. Concepts don't go out of style nearly as quickly as products. The graduate students got more involved in the cutting edge topics and those classes depended somewhat less on textbooks and more on current journal articles. (That will likely depend on the school so YMMV.)
``much closer to loose dirt or discarded pencil shavings''
That's why you never let a non-coffee drinker to buy the coffee for the department coffee maker. We made that mistake many years ago and the phrase "pencil shavings" was exactly how we described what we had to suffer through until enough of us chipped in for something that was drinkable.
... the drinkers of actual coffee? Or those that buy that dreck that Starbucks sells that's only barely palatable after being larded up with all sorts of high-calorie additives?
"The decision to stop disclosing unit sales is because that figure is 'not representative of underlying strength of our business,'"
Really? It seems to be a major part of the yearly (or so) Apple product rollouts... all the people lined up around the block waiting for days for the newest iStatus product. Come to think of it... I haven't noticed those spots on the nightly news for a while. Maybe the lines aren't that impressive any more. Has it gotten harder to find enough suckers to stand in line to fork over a grand or more to get the latest
shiny bauble that's only marginally shinier than the old one?
As a human being using a browser, I, too, disable Javascript for performance reasons.
Just keep adding more and more reasons for users to leave you. Eventually your user base will decline. You're already my second choice for a search engine and it's not difficult to transfer bookmarks to another browser.
... that I can join a class action suit, I throw it away. Why get my hopes up that I might, some day, receive a check for something on the order of $0.17?
... or switch to Slackware. Call me Old School but if snaps are the solution to your application installation problems, maybe you should stick to using your smartphone for your computing needs and just use the application store.
It's certainly unsurpassed in the efficient manner in which it eats all available IT funding. What licensing scheme are they using to rip off their customers this year? By CPU cores? By clock speed? Both?
Amazon could, obviously, have done a better job of testing before flipping the switch on a migration this big. It's not like the company is hurting for the money that could have been used to put together an appropriate environment to prevent a snafu like this.
That bunch never seems to learn. It wouldn't surprise me if Windows also pushes back when you try to make Firefox, Chrome, Opera, et al, the default browser.
``it has a creative way of verifying that people still work where they claim to work''
Really? I have a couple of connections that I worked with for ten years so I know of at least one of their former employers. I receive notices about job openings at other places they've worked stating that "John Smith works there" that pre-date our time together. Note: these say they work there, not worked. Even if it's a goofy grammatical error, the odds of them knowing people that are a.) still there and would be usable contacts and b.) whether the work environment would be remotely recognizable after all these years are slim to nil.
Remember when there were job postings that were exclusive to LinkedIn? They're gone. Have been for some time now.
Want to have your news feed set to only the recent news? Forget it. It defaults to "Top" (i.e., the "Popular") posts by default. In fact, you can't change that default. You have to view the Top posts before you can change it to Recent. This tells me that LI has decided that it wants to cater to Facebook users more interested in what's popular today. That's not why I joined years ago.
What's up with the news feed only showing you 10-20 posts before prompting you to show more, and then when you click on "Show more" you can see more but you're sent back to the top of your feed so you have to scroll through the original set of posts before you get to the new ones. Similarly, what's the point of indicating that there are a small number, say, four replies to an article, only showing three, and making the user click on show more to see the fourth?
Want to see who visited your profile? Sorry. 99% of the people who visit it are people who don't want to be known to you. So please stop the damned come-ons to "upgrade" to a Premium membership so I can see who those visitors were. Because I did that once and, guess what... I still couldn't see who those visitors were. The histogram telling me that 21 of the 25 visitors were recruiters, and that the other 4 were members with the job title "[fill-in-the-blank]" and that I'm not allowed to know who they were is oh so helpful to people who might be trying to tend to their career by using LI. Oh wait... no it's not.
Please, please drop the damned posts about what's "trending in my geographic area". The vast majority of the time, it's not something that would likely be of interest in my geographic area.
Fix whatever "algorithm" decides that the content of my profile detailing several decades of UNIX experience is going to make me the least bit interested in seeing an ad for an elementary course in shell scripting.
Seriously... who designs this crap? LI was once known as "Facebook with a tie". Now it's just a Facebook wannabe.
Finally...
I doubt that any of these types are reading this article and its responses but I don't "live" in LI. I come in, I look around, and I exit. (I'm betting that I'm far from being the only one who uses LI this way.) If you want to send me private messages about job postings via LI's InMail feature, you'll more than likely miss me. My profile has my email address. Use it if you want to get in touch with me. Sending me an InMail tells me you didn't look at all of my profile. I'm not going to have a browser window/tab devoted exclusively to LI all day and visible on all my virtual desktops on the off chance that someone might send me a message. Yes, LI usually sends a regular email to let you know you have an InMail but this mainly ticks off the person who now has to go back onto LI to reply. Frankly, InMail is one of the dumbest features of LI. (Same goes for the private messaging feature on FB.)
... the inevitable foul-ups in getting the call set up. Skype isn't working on the organizer's laptop. The speaker phone in the conference room doesn't work worth a damn. People's headsets cause interference. External conversations from the open-office setting bleed into the call. The conference room where the manager is sitting has lousy acoustics and participants cannot understand what's being said. If the damned call gets to the first agenda item--assuming that there actually is an agenda--within the first 15 minutes of the scheduled time, everyone sees it as a miracle. You can't solve these problems ahead of time because the conference room where the people who aren't working remotely will be participating is booked solid for the entire day.
Has anyone at Google bothered to propose an RFC so that this can be discussed? Or are they just going to make these pronouncements and push this into practice through their size?
... but will make a lot of users without tiny hands have to lug around larger external keyboards. I cannot work on a late model Mac without my typos keeping the spell checker working overtime or the shell giving me countless FNF errors. (Damned muscle memory.)
Slashdot Mirror
Salaries and contract rates are down in the Midwest, too. I can't recall how times I've been contacted by recruiters hawking contracts that are paying rates that would have been nice in the early '90s but are a joke with today's cost of living. Even contracts for periods for very short term (2-3 months) stints are paying crap rates. To be fair, the recruiters know that the compensation being offered by many employers today is a joke but also know that submitting someone at a higher salary/rate won't even get that candidate a phone screen. And that doesn't even take into account the abuse of contract-to-hire where the employer has no intention of ever converting a contractor into an FTE.
I've been waiting for this big "ho hum" of an announcement since that ridiculous "competition" began---(i.e., politicians debasing themselves to win the temporary favor of a megacorporation). This whole circus was akin to competing to host the Olympics. A lot of cities dodged a bullet.
The news this morning was reporting an average $104K for the new employees. That average is likely pretty heavily skewed to that level by the executives' salaries who'll be working in the new locations---no word on what the Average Joe is going to be paid and how they'll be able to afford the cost of living in NYC and Crystal City.
I guess they went with this name after deciding that calling thier new site "PC World", "Creative Computing", or "IBM Technical Journal" would have caused some confusion on the Internet.
A good college program will include some non-tech classes where writing is the focus. When the papers come back all marked up in red, you learn to proofread. Even though you might be studying to enter a technical field, you'll be expected to be able to write. One can't help but wonder if the execrable state of technical documentation nowadays (printed as well as online) is due to a lack of these classes in the technical majors. I worked for a guy who encouraged us to do a lot of writing about our work and I knew engineers at NASA who were expected to write a technical memo/precis/whatever on a weekly basis. It's good for you and your career.
Sadly, I suspect that most don't care about the quality of their writing so long as there aren't any red squigglies on the screen when they click on "Submit".
Is the information in the textbooks being used outdated because it's incorrect? Or it is just too old for your tastes? "OMG! This calculus textbook is 9 years old! Why am I learning something that's clearly outdated?" Or is it outdated because it doesn't emphasize the latest technology du jour?
I seem to recall that the information in most textbooks--at least the printed ones--was something like 4-5 years old when it got into the classrooms due to the writing/editing/printing/distribution process. In some fast-developing fields this is an eternity. I'm one of those who believes that a college curriculum should be teaching concepts and not products (I.e., college != vocational school). Particularly at the undergraduate level. Concepts don't go out of style nearly as quickly as products. The graduate students got more involved in the cutting edge topics and those classes depended somewhat less on textbooks and more on current journal articles. (That will likely depend on the school so YMMV.)
Who wrote this "Touring Test"? AAA?
Everyday psychopaths beware: There are days when I've been known to drink the whole pot (black, of course).
Argh... s/let/send/
That's why you never let a non-coffee drinker to buy the coffee for the department coffee maker. We made that mistake many years ago and the phrase "pencil shavings" was exactly how we described what we had to suffer through until enough of us chipped in for something that was drinkable.
... the drinkers of actual coffee? Or those that buy that dreck that Starbucks sells that's only barely palatable after being larded up with all sorts of high-calorie additives?
Really? It seems to be a major part of the yearly (or so) Apple product rollouts... all the people lined up around the block waiting for days for the newest iStatus product. Come to think of it... I haven't noticed those spots on the nightly news for a while. Maybe the lines aren't that impressive any more. Has it gotten harder to find enough suckers to stand in line to fork over a grand or more to get the latest shiny bauble that's only marginally shinier than the old one?
As a human being using a browser, I, too, disable Javascript for performance reasons.
Just keep adding more and more reasons for users to leave you. Eventually your user base will decline. You're already my second choice for a search engine and it's not difficult to transfer bookmarks to another browser.
... that I can join a class action suit, I throw it away. Why get my hopes up that I might, some day, receive a check for something on the order of $0.17?
... or switch to Slackware. Call me Old School but if snaps are the solution to your application installation problems, maybe you should stick to using your smartphone for your computing needs and just use the application store.
Google might know when I play solitaire or convert meters/second to furlongs/fortnight!
It's certainly unsurpassed in the efficient manner in which it eats all available IT funding. What licensing scheme are they using to rip off their customers this year? By CPU cores? By clock speed? Both?
Amazon could, obviously, have done a better job of testing before flipping the switch on a migration this big. It's not like the company is hurting for the money that could have been used to put together an appropriate environment to prevent a snafu like this.
... will now have to be extended to perpetuity. Right?
Oh yes there will. ;^)
... back in the '90s, doesn't it?
That bunch never seems to learn. It wouldn't surprise me if Windows also pushes back when you try to make Firefox, Chrome, Opera, et al, the default browser.
Really? I have a couple of connections that I worked with for ten years so I know of at least one of their former employers. I receive notices about job openings at other places they've worked stating that "John Smith works there" that pre-date our time together. Note: these say they work there, not worked. Even if it's a goofy grammatical error, the odds of them knowing people that are a.) still there and would be usable contacts and b.) whether the work environment would be remotely recognizable after all these years are slim to nil.
Remember when there were job postings that were exclusive to LinkedIn? They're gone. Have been for some time now.
Want to have your news feed set to only the recent news? Forget it. It defaults to "Top" (i.e., the "Popular") posts by default. In fact, you can't change that default. You have to view the Top posts before you can change it to Recent. This tells me that LI has decided that it wants to cater to Facebook users more interested in what's popular today. That's not why I joined years ago.
What's up with the news feed only showing you 10-20 posts before prompting you to show more, and then when you click on "Show more" you can see more but you're sent back to the top of your feed so you have to scroll through the original set of posts before you get to the new ones. Similarly, what's the point of indicating that there are a small number, say, four replies to an article, only showing three, and making the user click on show more to see the fourth?
Want to see who visited your profile? Sorry. 99% of the people who visit it are people who don't want to be known to you. So please stop the damned come-ons to "upgrade" to a Premium membership so I can see who those visitors were. Because I did that once and, guess what... I still couldn't see who those visitors were. The histogram telling me that 21 of the 25 visitors were recruiters, and that the other 4 were members with the job title "[fill-in-the-blank]" and that I'm not allowed to know who they were is oh so helpful to people who might be trying to tend to their career by using LI. Oh wait... no it's not.
Please, please drop the damned posts about what's "trending in my geographic area". The vast majority of the time, it's not something that would likely be of interest in my geographic area.
Fix whatever "algorithm" decides that the content of my profile detailing several decades of UNIX experience is going to make me the least bit interested in seeing an ad for an elementary course in shell scripting.
Seriously... who designs this crap? LI was once known as "Facebook with a tie". Now it's just a Facebook wannabe.
Finally...
I doubt that any of these types are reading this article and its responses but I don't "live" in LI. I come in, I look around, and I exit. (I'm betting that I'm far from being the only one who uses LI this way.) If you want to send me private messages about job postings via LI's InMail feature, you'll more than likely miss me. My profile has my email address. Use it if you want to get in touch with me. Sending me an InMail tells me you didn't look at all of my profile. I'm not going to have a browser window/tab devoted exclusively to LI all day and visible on all my virtual desktops on the off chance that someone might send me a message. Yes, LI usually sends a regular email to let you know you have an InMail but this mainly ticks off the person who now has to go back onto LI to reply. Frankly, InMail is one of the dumbest features of LI. (Same goes for the private messaging feature on FB.)
... functionality workin' out for ya now? I'm sure the beancounters were all for it but how's productivity today?
... the inevitable foul-ups in getting the call set up. Skype isn't working on the organizer's laptop. The speaker phone in the conference room doesn't work worth a damn. People's headsets cause interference. External conversations from the open-office setting bleed into the call. The conference room where the manager is sitting has lousy acoustics and participants cannot understand what's being said. If the damned call gets to the first agenda item--assuming that there actually is an agenda--within the first 15 minutes of the scheduled time, everyone sees it as a miracle. You can't solve these problems ahead of time because the conference room where the people who aren't working remotely will be participating is booked solid for the entire day.
... in charge of the Internet?
Has anyone at Google bothered to propose an RFC so that this can be discussed? Or are they just going to make these pronouncements and push this into practice through their size?
... but will make a lot of users without tiny hands have to lug around larger external keyboards. I cannot work on a late model Mac without my typos keeping the spell checker working overtime or the shell giving me countless FNF errors. (Damned muscle memory.)