I have bi-weekly one-on-one meetings. There's no structure or format. Often it's just a status update. Sometimes there's mentoring or helping out with a tough problem, but sometimes I am asked for feedback ("am I don't a good job?" was actually asked) but I am able to offer up feedback instead of waiting until the end of the year or trying to corner the person in the cube.
Maybe you're going into it with the wrong attitude. As a manager, I don't want an employee to fail, it means that I have failed and now I have extra work to do.
What it sounds like is a lack of communication. I know some younger people with the same problem. You don't do X, Y, and Z without first seeing if it's OK to do X, Y, and Z. Sure, some of that communication does need to come from the manager, but it must be a two way street. Ask for feedback, ask if you're doing the job correctly, ask before you take on the side projects, find out what other team members are working on, etc. You have to talk!
For instance, there may be a deadline involved. The release is coming out at the end of the month, and yet I had one new person who decided that the code needed a lot of rewriting and proceeded to do so without telling anyone. I'd ask "how are things going?" and hear back "fine". Then there was the mad mad rush to get the real work done at the end. The code review that I had to do was a nightmare since he touched about every other line along the way, but it was too late to revert everything.
And yes, keep notes on what you did during the year. It's really helpful with the performance review, and really helpful with the resume.
Ha, I have one guy that goes too fast, sort of. I give him a couple tasks, and end of the day he says he's done and is going to back to work on the old project I don't want him to work on. An hour later after looking at his code l see that he rushed it, didn't understand the requirements, or made it really complicated (I think he does it for job security). So even though he's constantly saying how he's done he never really ends up being done. There is some hope, he's starting to ask more questions before starting...
I did that. Reduced an 12+ hour build to 45 minutes. The miracle worker status lasted awhile, but I probably coasted on it longer than I should have. At some point it turns into "what miracles have you done lately?"
It is true that most of my feedback is negative. However there are a lot of negative things that need pointing out. Though a lot of this comes from code reviews as I'm still doing those. I'm giving some positive feedback though maybe it's not as obvious ("keep it up").
There is the yearly performance evaluation where you're essentially required to give feedback, and when I've done this I make a point to include positive feedback, and the negative feedback is given constructively. There are people who don't like even constructive criticism, so maybe those people have trained some managers to give no feedback at all (though why is the manager working with someone like that?).
Note on the other hand - you CAN give feedback to managers. If you want feedback, ask for it.
Changing passwords frequently will cause less security as the owners are much more likely to write down the passwords somewhere. I see some lab laptops (shared amongst a few workers) that have post-it notes on them with the bi-monthly password.
I don't mind if Windows succeeds. However I strongly want the Windows store to FAIL. Along with all walled gardens, they should be optional and not oriented towards vendor lock-in. Microsoft has a trust problem at the moment, the customer base distrusts them, from home users to the enterprise, and they need to fix this first before assuming that they can force people into an unwanted store.
Filling positions can be hard. If you're doing generic work that almost everyone does then it's not bad as the talent pool is huge. For the less common jobs it's painful. Ie, C programmer with X+ years, experience in embedded systems and low level programming, experience in a team (too many self taught EE people that fail this), domain knowledge, and we actually will ask you some basic programming questions. Not suprisingly there isn't a line of people passing the filters.
Oh yes, problem children. Ugh, had those. Form those who just don't want to listen, who have to be personally reminded before each and every regularly scheduled meeting, those with 20 years experience still making novice coding mistakes, etc.
We have remote Australian workers. The language gap is pretty tricky at times, but they do good work.
Outsourcing is different. First, they're not real workers, you can terminate the contract at any time if it's not working out. Second there's the "5 for the price of 1" deal, so that the CEO forces you to accept them even if you don't want to. Third, the outsourcing firm should be doing the management for you.
The important thing for remote work is to let the boss know that work is being done. It's not remoteness that makes managers uncomfortable, instead the invisibility is the problem. Some people just don't like to communicate what they're working on even to their own boss. At the very least there should be a good status once a week, listing what is accomplished so far, what are the sticking points, and what the plan is for the next week. Even better, report something daily because the boss is being asked about the projects every day. Worst thing that can happen is that the boss is asked about Project X and the only reply that can be given is "I don't know, we have a guy in a cabin who I think may be working on it."
The worry is not so much that the worker is goofing off (though that absolutely does happen), but that if problems come up they may take longer to correct, or that the worker is setting the wrong priorities because of being out of the loop, is the worker acting as part of a team instead of being a lone wolf, things like that.
The hard part is getting the trust in the first place so the boss has some piece of mind. Of course remote workers can do a great job, but they can also be terrible, and how is the boss supposed to know for someone who's new? It's riskier than with a person who's local. The local person screws up and needs redirecting then you lose a day of work, if the remote worker screws up you may be a week behind before you hear about it and correct things.
BSD wasn't much different than other Unix systems for installation. The BSD license was pretty open, excepting the kernel parts not written originally by BSD, but that cleared up after a bit.
GNU first got big because it had tools. It said it wanted an OS but it had tools first. And those tools were better in many ways and with very quick improvements compared to the competition. Unix systems at the time were already very much open source oriented in a lot of ways, it wasn't a confusing issue like today where you see people very wary of anything that's free ("who will support it?" is the cry, despite MS not providing support).
GNU never did replace the OS. It got into a mode of having to be perfect, and thus never really getting too far off the ground. Linux showed up as Unix was starting its decline, and GNU made that possible by having the tools ready and available. It was mostly marketing I think, free versions of BSD were appearing at the same time but didn't generate excitement for a variety of reasons. The big deal about Linux was getting more out of a normal PC to make it work like much more expensive workstations (dos/windows at the time was utter crap).
Today, MS may be on the decline too. That doesn't mean people want a replacement like people wanted a Unix-workalike back in the 90s. The biggest die hards in Windows are in the enterprise, and that's a hard nut to crack, the enterprises that used Unix did not switch to Linux. The hobbiest already has Linux, the gamers are going to consoles it seems, and the generic home user is happy with phones, tablets, and netbooks.
Well, I heard the reason Melania doesn't sleep in the white house with Donald is because Putin snores. So there are better and wittier ways of making the same point.
I'm not even a libertarian but I have to agree. Criminalize the dealers not the users, at the very least make this a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The article doesn't say it, but I suspect the "unlawful possession of a handgun" comes from possession of a handgun while also having the heroin, because having a hidden handgun in a vehicle is allowed in Colorado. Ie, it's a tacked on charge that makes the jury more receptive to the prosecutor's argument that this is a bad guy, and a tougher penalty which helps with re-election of the prosecutor.
Yes, sadly. Prosecutors are very often political, and their job demands on keeping the tough-on-crime voters happy, which means having a high conviction rate. A prosecutor admitting to a mistake is a rare occurence. I've seen past prosecutors object strongly when a prisoner is released based upon strong new evidence, so even when they're no longer in the job they refuse to admit to mistakes.
Go back a very short 100 years. When you wrote scientific papers it was common to use German, amongst others. Today it's almost 100% English. What matters is not the number of people who speak the language natively, but how often it is used internationally as a means to communicate across cultures. for hundreds of years, Latin was the primary language for communicating across boundaries, even though it had zero native speakers. English can very easily lose it's position here.
Spanish has more native speakers than native English speakers. English has more total speakers because of the number who learn it as a second language, and that is to communicate with others for the purpose of business, science, culture, etc. When the need to learn English as a second language starts to fade then English will lose its place on the world stage. Spanish speaking countries other than Spain tend to be of lower economic importance, which is one reason why it isn't more dominant than English. However Mandarin speaking countries have extremely high economic important, and it is likely going to replace the US as the 800lb gorilla someday.
As for the EU, since the UK is leaving and there will remain only one EU member state with English as one of its official languages, this means that English is indeed losing its importance to the EU as Junker says.
That's because French used to jave a major world importance, which then faded and was replaced by English. When English loses world importance you will be seeing Brits and Americans becoming chauvinistic about the language as well. It's already pretty true, just witness the American tourists who seem angry that they can't be understood in some places.
I liked the attitude in Finland, which was "why the hell do you want to learn Finnish?"
But how do you get TV then, legally? Netflix drops things, usually because the license is pulled and not because Netflix wants a smaller library, but it's still got more I want to see than I'll ever be able to get to. Adn $10/mo is a better deal than any other possible legal option.
I had to pay for mine so I disabled it. Later I found out I could get unlimited text, but they never notified me, I only learned when I went to change some other aspect of the account. Now I don't know where to get the plan you speak of without changing vendors, but I hear some people change often.
This appears targetted to low end (ie, students). But Macbook Air is not intended to be a low end laptop, and Macbook Pro is definitely professional grade. So their whole stance here is confusing; is this the cheap student laptop or a laptop to compete with the top of the line? If it's Windows 10 "S" then it's useless for professional purposes.
If the claims turn out to be valid (actually competing with Macbook but at a cheaper price, smaller, better battery life), then this would be awesome to put Linux on. But I think there's a whole lotta marketing going on here which means treat everything as hypothetical until a real person gets ahold of one.
Because these aren't sports. If we try to understand by using the dictionary and encyclopedias it still doesn't make sense.
Video game clubs makes sense, but they NOT sports. If they want to have different schools with video game clubs competing against each other (and tuition fees don't pay for it) then that's fine also, but that's still not the same as sports. The video game players may be just as rude as real sports jocks and shove the lesser nerds heads in the toilet, but that still doesn't mean it's a sport.
You can't just change words like that and expect everyone to fall in line, just like you can't demand that everyone call your cat a dinosaur.
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I have bi-weekly one-on-one meetings. There's no structure or format. Often it's just a status update. Sometimes there's mentoring or helping out with a tough problem, but sometimes I am asked for feedback ("am I don't a good job?" was actually asked) but I am able to offer up feedback instead of waiting until the end of the year or trying to corner the person in the cube.
Maybe you're going into it with the wrong attitude. As a manager, I don't want an employee to fail, it means that I have failed and now I have extra work to do.
What it sounds like is a lack of communication. I know some younger people with the same problem. You don't do X, Y, and Z without first seeing if it's OK to do X, Y, and Z. Sure, some of that communication does need to come from the manager, but it must be a two way street. Ask for feedback, ask if you're doing the job correctly, ask before you take on the side projects, find out what other team members are working on, etc. You have to talk!
For instance, there may be a deadline involved. The release is coming out at the end of the month, and yet I had one new person who decided that the code needed a lot of rewriting and proceeded to do so without telling anyone. I'd ask "how are things going?" and hear back "fine". Then there was the mad mad rush to get the real work done at the end. The code review that I had to do was a nightmare since he touched about every other line along the way, but it was too late to revert everything.
And yes, keep notes on what you did during the year. It's really helpful with the performance review, and really helpful with the resume.
Ha, I have one guy that goes too fast, sort of. I give him a couple tasks, and end of the day he says he's done and is going to back to work on the old project I don't want him to work on. An hour later after looking at his code l see that he rushed it, didn't understand the requirements, or made it really complicated (I think he does it for job security). So even though he's constantly saying how he's done he never really ends up being done. There is some hope, he's starting to ask more questions before starting...
I did that. Reduced an 12+ hour build to 45 minutes. The miracle worker status lasted awhile, but I probably coasted on it longer than I should have. At some point it turns into "what miracles have you done lately?"
It is true that most of my feedback is negative. However there are a lot of negative things that need pointing out. Though a lot of this comes from code reviews as I'm still doing those. I'm giving some positive feedback though maybe it's not as obvious ("keep it up").
There is the yearly performance evaluation where you're essentially required to give feedback, and when I've done this I make a point to include positive feedback, and the negative feedback is given constructively. There are people who don't like even constructive criticism, so maybe those people have trained some managers to give no feedback at all (though why is the manager working with someone like that?).
Note on the other hand - you CAN give feedback to managers. If you want feedback, ask for it.
Changing passwords frequently will cause less security as the owners are much more likely to write down the passwords somewhere. I see some lab laptops (shared amongst a few workers) that have post-it notes on them with the bi-monthly password.
I don't mind if Windows succeeds. However I strongly want the Windows store to FAIL. Along with all walled gardens, they should be optional and not oriented towards vendor lock-in. Microsoft has a trust problem at the moment, the customer base distrusts them, from home users to the enterprise, and they need to fix this first before assuming that they can force people into an unwanted store.
Filling positions can be hard. If you're doing generic work that almost everyone does then it's not bad as the talent pool is huge. For the less common jobs it's painful. Ie, C programmer with X+ years, experience in embedded systems and low level programming, experience in a team (too many self taught EE people that fail this), domain knowledge, and we actually will ask you some basic programming questions. Not suprisingly there isn't a line of people passing the filters.
Oh yes, problem children. Ugh, had those. Form those who just don't want to listen, who have to be personally reminded before each and every regularly scheduled meeting, those with 20 years experience still making novice coding mistakes, etc.
We have remote Australian workers. The language gap is pretty tricky at times, but they do good work.
Outsourcing is different. First, they're not real workers, you can terminate the contract at any time if it's not working out. Second there's the "5 for the price of 1" deal, so that the CEO forces you to accept them even if you don't want to. Third, the outsourcing firm should be doing the management for you.
The important thing for remote work is to let the boss know that work is being done. It's not remoteness that makes managers uncomfortable, instead the invisibility is the problem. Some people just don't like to communicate what they're working on even to their own boss. At the very least there should be a good status once a week, listing what is accomplished so far, what are the sticking points, and what the plan is for the next week. Even better, report something daily because the boss is being asked about the projects every day. Worst thing that can happen is that the boss is asked about Project X and the only reply that can be given is "I don't know, we have a guy in a cabin who I think may be working on it."
The worry is not so much that the worker is goofing off (though that absolutely does happen), but that if problems come up they may take longer to correct, or that the worker is setting the wrong priorities because of being out of the loop, is the worker acting as part of a team instead of being a lone wolf, things like that.
The hard part is getting the trust in the first place so the boss has some piece of mind. Of course remote workers can do a great job, but they can also be terrible, and how is the boss supposed to know for someone who's new? It's riskier than with a person who's local. The local person screws up and needs redirecting then you lose a day of work, if the remote worker screws up you may be a week behind before you hear about it and correct things.
BSD wasn't much different than other Unix systems for installation. The BSD license was pretty open, excepting the kernel parts not written originally by BSD, but that cleared up after a bit.
I meant open source oriented, in that most people went and used free software on them.
GNU first got big because it had tools. It said it wanted an OS but it had tools first. And those tools were better in many ways and with very quick improvements compared to the competition. Unix systems at the time were already very much open source oriented in a lot of ways, it wasn't a confusing issue like today where you see people very wary of anything that's free ("who will support it?" is the cry, despite MS not providing support).
GNU never did replace the OS. It got into a mode of having to be perfect, and thus never really getting too far off the ground. Linux showed up as Unix was starting its decline, and GNU made that possible by having the tools ready and available. It was mostly marketing I think, free versions of BSD were appearing at the same time but didn't generate excitement for a variety of reasons. The big deal about Linux was getting more out of a normal PC to make it work like much more expensive workstations (dos/windows at the time was utter crap).
Today, MS may be on the decline too. That doesn't mean people want a replacement like people wanted a Unix-workalike back in the 90s. The biggest die hards in Windows are in the enterprise, and that's a hard nut to crack, the enterprises that used Unix did not switch to Linux. The hobbiest already has Linux, the gamers are going to consoles it seems, and the generic home user is happy with phones, tablets, and netbooks.
We're not allowed to make homophonic jokes here.
Well, I heard the reason Melania doesn't sleep in the white house with Donald is because Putin snores.
So there are better and wittier ways of making the same point.
Every day? Wow, that's a lot of action.
I'm not even a libertarian but I have to agree. Criminalize the dealers not the users, at the very least make this a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The article doesn't say it, but I suspect the "unlawful possession of a handgun" comes from possession of a handgun while also having the heroin, because having a hidden handgun in a vehicle is allowed in Colorado. Ie, it's a tacked on charge that makes the jury more receptive to the prosecutor's argument that this is a bad guy, and a tougher penalty which helps with re-election of the prosecutor.
Yes, sadly. Prosecutors are very often political, and their job demands on keeping the tough-on-crime voters happy, which means having a high conviction rate. A prosecutor admitting to a mistake is a rare occurence. I've seen past prosecutors object strongly when a prisoner is released based upon strong new evidence, so even when they're no longer in the job they refuse to admit to mistakes.
Go back a very short 100 years. When you wrote scientific papers it was common to use German, amongst others. Today it's almost 100% English. What matters is not the number of people who speak the language natively, but how often it is used internationally as a means to communicate across cultures. for hundreds of years, Latin was the primary language for communicating across boundaries, even though it had zero native speakers. English can very easily lose it's position here.
Spanish has more native speakers than native English speakers. English has more total speakers because of the number who learn it as a second language, and that is to communicate with others for the purpose of business, science, culture, etc. When the need to learn English as a second language starts to fade then English will lose its place on the world stage. Spanish speaking countries other than Spain tend to be of lower economic importance, which is one reason why it isn't more dominant than English. However Mandarin speaking countries have extremely high economic important, and it is likely going to replace the US as the 800lb gorilla someday.
As for the EU, since the UK is leaving and there will remain only one EU member state with English as one of its official languages, this means that English is indeed losing its importance to the EU as Junker says.
That's because French used to jave a major world importance, which then faded and was replaced by English. When English loses world importance you will be seeing Brits and Americans becoming chauvinistic about the language as well. It's already pretty true, just witness the American tourists who seem angry that they can't be understood in some places.
I liked the attitude in Finland, which was "why the hell do you want to learn Finnish?"
But how do you get TV then, legally? Netflix drops things, usually because the license is pulled and not because Netflix wants a smaller library, but it's still got more I want to see than I'll ever be able to get to. Adn $10/mo is a better deal than any other possible legal option.
I had to pay for mine so I disabled it. Later I found out I could get unlimited text, but they never notified me, I only learned when I went to change some other aspect of the account. Now I don't know where to get the plan you speak of without changing vendors, but I hear some people change often.
After a few of thse, I'm wondering if Slashdot has turned into a "please ask your own questions" type of forum...
This appears targetted to low end (ie, students). But Macbook Air is not intended to be a low end laptop, and Macbook Pro is definitely professional grade. So their whole stance here is confusing; is this the cheap student laptop or a laptop to compete with the top of the line? If it's Windows 10 "S" then it's useless for professional purposes.
If the claims turn out to be valid (actually competing with Macbook but at a cheaper price, smaller, better battery life), then this would be awesome to put Linux on. But I think there's a whole lotta marketing going on here which means treat everything as hypothetical until a real person gets ahold of one.
Because these aren't sports. If we try to understand by using the dictionary and encyclopedias it still doesn't make sense.
Video game clubs makes sense, but they NOT sports. If they want to have different schools with video game clubs competing against each other (and tuition fees don't pay for it) then that's fine also, but that's still not the same as sports. The video game players may be just as rude as real sports jocks and shove the lesser nerds heads in the toilet, but that still doesn't mean it's a sport.
You can't just change words like that and expect everyone to fall in line, just like you can't demand that everyone call your cat a dinosaur.