Failing the background check essentially means you lied in the interview. You said you had a PhD but the background check says you only have a GED. If they get you confused with someone else then point this out.
There are a LOT of companies that do this now. Criminal background checks too.
There are the cool jobs that everyone wants but hardly anyone gets. Then there are the uncool jobs (anything not at Google) that no one wants because they're still trying to get the cool jobs. Plus if the skill sets you want don't match the current fads then it's hard for the recruiters to find people. The economy is still pretty crappy right now and a lot of smart people still want to stay put where it's safe and stable.
Sometimes the recruiters just aren't good at finding the right people.
Right so what do you do instead? A background check takes a long time. Do you delay the interview for a couple weeks, or delay the start of work for a couple weeks? Very often candidates want a week or two before starting anyway (but the workaholics won't). For my last job the results didn't arrive until after I had already been working there. I have run across a couple of cases where an employee was terminated within the first month when problems showed up with the background checks. I've seen it happen with CEOs too (ie, they didn't have the college degree that they claimed to have).
Background checks can be expensive, so I suspect those get done last. I had my results arrive after my first day on the job. I remember back in the day that for jobs requiring security clearances that the employee would be hired and paid but have no actual job assignments for a few months until the FBI background checks were completed.
So you have one open req, you interview one person on Monday and another person is scheduled to be interviewed in Friday. Do you hire the adequate person on Monday evening or do you wait in case the Friday candidate is better?
I don't necessarily think the pool is adequate. Even if we're desparate for an employee to fill a long vacant position, we're not going to hire the first warm body that submits a resume. No employee is sometimes better than an inadequate one that wastes everyone else's time. Of course where I am there really are fewer qualified people with relevant experience and skills; though in a high volume popular job type with high turnover (IT grunt) the time it takes to get hired is probably faster (show your Microsoft papers at desk A, get them stamped at desk B, pick up badge at desk C).
The faster way to get a job is to get a referral; the resume gets handed to HR directly from the hiring manager, bypassing a lot of screening. Then it may still take a couple of weeks to arrange interviews and run background checks.. Coming in from the outside always takes longer.
That said, I've had the whole process coming in cold without a referral take only a couple of weeks once.
We're hiring engineers, not fast food workers who only need to be warm bodies. It takes time to evaluate someone. If you hire the wrong person you waste far more money than if you actually verify if the candidate is a good fit.
Your emphasis on "every single time they change jobs" is a bit bizarre. It would be a good thing if we slowed down the revolving door, get employees who stick around longer. If you want employers to stop treating you like an interchangeable cog, then you need to stop treating your employer like an interchangeable paycheck provider. I can tell you that when we see resumes with lots of short term non-contract jobs that it sends a very negative signal.
This is how it works on wikipedia. One moment you're looking up how kalman filters work and then 8 hours later you're still browsing but looking at the history of bamboo plantations.
True, but the situation was changing. The north was getting tired of the stalemate. Abolitionists were getting a bit more power, not strong but strong enough to have an influence. The Whig party (which Lincoln was a member of for a long time) was mostly gone, and those who just wanted to continue compromising over the slavery and slave state issues were losing political power.
I suspect that the war could have been delayed another decade, but it would have come to a head sooner or later. Even if the break up had been done peacefully I think the fugutive slave issue had a good chance of causing military conflict.
Why it happened? Because they lost their long held grasp over the government and were worried that they'd have to give up slavery. They saw the writing on the wall and did not want to become a dwindling minority with no power. To them, "state's rights" meant the right to maintain the institution of slavery and to *expand* the institution to new states entering the union. Fort Sumter was attacked because they knew they were going to secede and they didn't want enemy troops in their midst.
The union had been in a bit of stalemate for a long time, slave versus free states, few were really happy overall with the situation. But the expansion into the west brought about troubles with the power balance, as well as growing clout amongst abolitionists. The institution of slavery was a horrible black mark on the constitution and the peaceful situation was not going to last much longer regardless of who had been elected president or who controlled the forts.
Fact: the civil war was about slavery, pure and simple. The leaders of the new confederacy said so themselves. They required any state joining the confederacy to make pledges to maintain the institution of slavery. If there had been no slavery then there would have not been a civil war.
The confederate battle flag is being used today as a symbol of racism. The idea that it is about southern heritage is revisionist bullshit, unless they mean the southern heritage of holding slaves and denying post war blacks their civil rights. The confederate battle flag lasted for such a short period of time in history that it is absurd to treat it as a lasting symbol of anything beyond the civil war period. The flag is used precisely because it brings to the forefront the emotions of people who think they should not have lost the war that they started and instigated. The use of the flag after the war was relatively rare and spotty until it became more popular during the civil rights era (probably as a symbol of resistance against what they saw as more northern interference into their segregationist way of life).
But ultimately what it comes down to is this. Most people see the confederate battle flag as a racist symbol. Whether that is true or not, everyone flying that flag knows this. They KNOW that most people seeing the flag will find it offense and they fly it anyway.
The southern states were the ones most often holding the legislature hostage over slavery issues. It was the southern states that pushed for and managed to get the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) enacted, with pro-southern supreme court justices defending it. The southern states were in no possible way being ignored. It took time for anti-slavery movements to gain enough political power to win Lincoln the election; a major political party dwindled and split over the slavery issue so that few remember the Whigs anymore. All the infighting up north and in the west meant that the southern Democrats had lots of political power.
The pip-boy edition seems a bit iffy to me. There's a chance there will be some left over, but if not then that saves me $60 on a flimsy piece of plastic. The exclusive bobble heads from FO3 pre-order are available in the Bethesda store now I think (maybe not the lunchbox).
I think the phone+pipboy won't work so well in practice. Ie, the phone turns off after being idle, you want to check your inventory so you have to power it on again, enter your PIN to unlock it (many companies require this if you use your phone to read work email), etc. The touch screen on a tiny phone is just a wierd way of controlling this stuff, so a tablet would seem a better choice just for accuracy in where you tap.
Much of the time this is not under the control of the game developer. Instead there's usually a game publisher pushing on the studio to release on time or else. The devs want to create a great game, the executives however want things released on time so that they can lay off the staff and move on. This is why EA competes with Comcast to be the most hated company.
I have never done this. I have a friend though who can damage a DVD in seconds... I've got 20 year old games I still play. GOG is good for the times when modern drives get grumpy trying to deal with copy protection. If the game is DRM-required like Steam, then the DVD is just a more convenient way to install if you've got slow internet, and there's zero point in making a backup unless you are brave enough deal with the world of game cracks. With bigger and cheaper USB drives it's getting pretty easy to make archival backups now.
It depends on the game I think. If there's DRM, then there's no point, if the game maker discontinues the game then you're out of luck. But I have lots of older CDs and DVDs from companies long out of business and I can still install and replay them. A lot of gamers don't care about this, especially younger ones, since they don't understand about playing games when they're no longer fashionable.
Also, physical games are cheaper much of the time! It seems illogical, but game publishers are loathe to reduce prices even when there is a 0% cost to distribution. However retailers have big incentives to reduce prices on games to get them out of inventory and make room for something else. Just wait 6 months after a release and the physical copies will already start to drop in price while the digital versions will not have budged a penny. When a physical game goes on sale it almost always stays on sale, but digital sales on Steam are temporary. Even at an expensive retailer like Amazon you can find good prices compared to digital copies.
It's generally a poor idea to pre-order because you have no idea what the game will really be like. Even a fan of a series of games should wait to learn more details first. It locks you into one vendor for example, or locks you into a higher price than may exist later, and so forth. I'm annoyed that I have one game from Steam that I could have gotten cheaper and easier to use from GOG, because I didn't realize it would be available elsewhere.
It seems very strange when most games are supplied digitally only that someone wants to pre-order. The game won't run out. It's not like the old days where a store would only stock a limited number of copies. The publishers are basically taking advantage of hype.
Before STL was widely adopted I had used RogueWave (commercial) class libraries that operated using inheritance. These were honestly a lot easier to use in my opinion. You dealt with pointers to objects. Then the iterators didn't have to check against the "end" of a collection because it returned 0 at the end, as in "while (x=next())". This felt a lot more like classic OO languages like Smalltalk.
With the STL you're constantly doing copy constructors because you're passing around objects instead of object references, etc. I have written some templates around an STL container of void* pointers, and some other stuff, with the template there to just do the type safe checking for you but it didn't replicate code over and over for each instantiation and it copied pointers instead of objects.
When you get down to it, std::list should be able to share completely the object code for std::list, but in practice the compilers don't do this very well.
Now for this simple example the amount of code growth is not very large at all, but in some large projects this extra code adds up to something very noticeable. You'd think that on a PC it should not matter, but it does become noticeable and important a lot of times. Bigger code means you're not using your cache as efficiently. PC games for example often take code size and speed very seriously. If you need to respond quickly to millions of queries then increasing speed even slightly can result in big improvements in responsiveness.
Templates I think were a mistake to add to C++. It has removed a lot of object orientation from C++ programs, and it has bloated things up tremendously because of popular styles of using them and due to STL. Templates are essentially smart macros. You end up with duplicated code for each instantiation, and with some styles even the functions themselves are inlined. This only works because this style is big on the PC where there is massive amounts of RAM and cache space to soak up the inefficiencies. The current compiler/linker technology is not capable of effectively turning template heavy code into efficient code by recognizing when there is duplicated code that could be combined into shared object code. Often what is normally a library of object code in other languages turn into a library of header files in a template-heavy C++ style.
Now templates as a concept aren't all bad. A small template that provides type safety while sitting on top of a small tight library is great. Programmers need to learn their tools, learn how to use them well, and learn when to not use them. But most programmers don't do this, instead they learn to follow what other people do blindly until it becomes a habit.
Because you can use C++ as a better-C-than-C with no overhead. Better type checking, more consistent rules, use simple classes or namespaces for organization, avoid the bloat stuff like big templates or exceptions or RTTI.
Start with C first. Then move to C++ is things are complex enough that you need better organizational tools. Then move to Java if performance and efficiency aren't all that important and you can get away with it. The move to a scripting language to do the stuff that can be really slow or you've got a big whopping PC.
Doing it the other way around just seems bizarre to me. Sure, algorithms are important, but if you've got array sizes of 1000, then your dumbass O(n^2) bubblesort in C will be amazingly faster than an optimized mergesort of quicksort in a scripting language. But most of the high level languages rely on underlying libraries written in C to do the stuff that needs to be fast anyway.
C++ is in the middle, depending upon the type of the programmer and style of programming. You can get some C++ programs where the programmer wasn't paying attention and ends up with a result that's slowering the interpreted scripting languages (the mantra is to never prematurely optimize, and instead wait for faster PCs with more memory).
I program raw TCP, but that's because I have to fix bugs in the IP stack. Most people though can just use their OS to do TCP for them. Very few people actually compose the raw IP/TCP headers themselves or use raw sockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Failing the background check essentially means you lied in the interview. You said you had a PhD but the background check says you only have a GED. If they get you confused with someone else then point this out.
There are a LOT of companies that do this now. Criminal background checks too.
There are the cool jobs that everyone wants but hardly anyone gets. Then there are the uncool jobs (anything not at Google) that no one wants because they're still trying to get the cool jobs. Plus if the skill sets you want don't match the current fads then it's hard for the recruiters to find people. The economy is still pretty crappy right now and a lot of smart people still want to stay put where it's safe and stable.
Sometimes the recruiters just aren't good at finding the right people.
Right so what do you do instead? A background check takes a long time. Do you delay the interview for a couple weeks, or delay the start of work for a couple weeks? Very often candidates want a week or two before starting anyway (but the workaholics won't). For my last job the results didn't arrive until after I had already been working there. I have run across a couple of cases where an employee was terminated within the first month when problems showed up with the background checks. I've seen it happen with CEOs too (ie, they didn't have the college degree that they claimed to have).
Background checks can be expensive, so I suspect those get done last. I had my results arrive after my first day on the job. I remember back in the day that for jobs requiring security clearances that the employee would be hired and paid but have no actual job assignments for a few months until the FBI background checks were completed.
It's not experience though. You should say on the resume that you've had a class in it, but not that you have lots of experience with it.
So you have one open req, you interview one person on Monday and another person is scheduled to be interviewed in Friday. Do you hire the adequate person on Monday evening or do you wait in case the Friday candidate is better?
I don't necessarily think the pool is adequate. Even if we're desparate for an employee to fill a long vacant position, we're not going to hire the first warm body that submits a resume. No employee is sometimes better than an inadequate one that wastes everyone else's time. Of course where I am there really are fewer qualified people with relevant experience and skills; though in a high volume popular job type with high turnover (IT grunt) the time it takes to get hired is probably faster (show your Microsoft papers at desk A, get them stamped at desk B, pick up badge at desk C).
The faster way to get a job is to get a referral; the resume gets handed to HR directly from the hiring manager, bypassing a lot of screening. Then it may still take a couple of weeks to arrange interviews and run background checks.. Coming in from the outside always takes longer.
That said, I've had the whole process coming in cold without a referral take only a couple of weeks once.
We're hiring engineers, not fast food workers who only need to be warm bodies. It takes time to evaluate someone. If you hire the wrong person you waste far more money than if you actually verify if the candidate is a good fit.
Your emphasis on "every single time they change jobs" is a bit bizarre. It would be a good thing if we slowed down the revolving door, get employees who stick around longer. If you want employers to stop treating you like an interchangeable cog, then you need to stop treating your employer like an interchangeable paycheck provider. I can tell you that when we see resumes with lots of short term non-contract jobs that it sends a very negative signal.
This is how it works on wikipedia. One moment you're looking up how kalman filters work and then 8 hours later you're still browsing but looking at the history of bamboo plantations.
Slavery was also mentioned by the Confederate leaders as the reasons for the necessity to secede. It was not a side issue.
Yes, but I don't see many in Egypt today who are clamoring to restore their slave owning "heritage".
True, but the situation was changing. The north was getting tired of the stalemate. Abolitionists were getting a bit more power, not strong but strong enough to have an influence. The Whig party (which Lincoln was a member of for a long time) was mostly gone, and those who just wanted to continue compromising over the slavery and slave state issues were losing political power.
I suspect that the war could have been delayed another decade, but it would have come to a head sooner or later. Even if the break up had been done peacefully I think the fugutive slave issue had a good chance of causing military conflict.
Why it happened? Because they lost their long held grasp over the government and were worried that they'd have to give up slavery. They saw the writing on the wall and did not want to become a dwindling minority with no power. To them, "state's rights" meant the right to maintain the institution of slavery and to *expand* the institution to new states entering the union. Fort Sumter was attacked because they knew they were going to secede and they didn't want enemy troops in their midst.
The union had been in a bit of stalemate for a long time, slave versus free states, few were really happy overall with the situation. But the expansion into the west brought about troubles with the power balance, as well as growing clout amongst abolitionists. The institution of slavery was a horrible black mark on the constitution and the peaceful situation was not going to last much longer regardless of who had been elected president or who controlled the forts.
Fact: the civil war was about slavery, pure and simple. The leaders of the new confederacy said so themselves. They required any state joining the confederacy to make pledges to maintain the institution of slavery. If there had been no slavery then there would have not been a civil war.
The confederate battle flag is being used today as a symbol of racism. The idea that it is about southern heritage is revisionist bullshit, unless they mean the southern heritage of holding slaves and denying post war blacks their civil rights. The confederate battle flag lasted for such a short period of time in history that it is absurd to treat it as a lasting symbol of anything beyond the civil war period. The flag is used precisely because it brings to the forefront the emotions of people who think they should not have lost the war that they started and instigated. The use of the flag after the war was relatively rare and spotty until it became more popular during the civil rights era (probably as a symbol of resistance against what they saw as more northern interference into their segregationist way of life).
But ultimately what it comes down to is this. Most people see the confederate battle flag as a racist symbol. Whether that is true or not, everyone flying that flag knows this. They KNOW that most people seeing the flag will find it offense and they fly it anyway.
The southern states were the ones most often holding the legislature hostage over slavery issues. It was the southern states that pushed for and managed to get the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) enacted, with pro-southern supreme court justices defending it. The southern states were in no possible way being ignored. It took time for anti-slavery movements to gain enough political power to win Lincoln the election; a major political party dwindled and split over the slavery issue so that few remember the Whigs anymore. All the infighting up north and in the west meant that the southern Democrats had lots of political power.
The pip-boy edition seems a bit iffy to me. There's a chance there will be some left over, but if not then that saves me $60 on a flimsy piece of plastic. The exclusive bobble heads from FO3 pre-order are available in the Bethesda store now I think (maybe not the lunchbox).
I think the phone+pipboy won't work so well in practice. Ie, the phone turns off after being idle, you want to check your inventory so you have to power it on again, enter your PIN to unlock it (many companies require this if you use your phone to read work email), etc. The touch screen on a tiny phone is just a wierd way of controlling this stuff, so a tablet would seem a better choice just for accuracy in where you tap.
Much of the time this is not under the control of the game developer. Instead there's usually a game publisher pushing on the studio to release on time or else. The devs want to create a great game, the executives however want things released on time so that they can lay off the staff and move on. This is why EA competes with Comcast to be the most hated company.
I have never done this. I have a friend though who can damage a DVD in seconds... I've got 20 year old games I still play. GOG is good for the times when modern drives get grumpy trying to deal with copy protection. If the game is DRM-required like Steam, then the DVD is just a more convenient way to install if you've got slow internet, and there's zero point in making a backup unless you are brave enough deal with the world of game cracks. With bigger and cheaper USB drives it's getting pretty easy to make archival backups now.
It depends on the game I think. If there's DRM, then there's no point, if the game maker discontinues the game then you're out of luck. But I have lots of older CDs and DVDs from companies long out of business and I can still install and replay them. A lot of gamers don't care about this, especially younger ones, since they don't understand about playing games when they're no longer fashionable.
Also, physical games are cheaper much of the time! It seems illogical, but game publishers are loathe to reduce prices even when there is a 0% cost to distribution. However retailers have big incentives to reduce prices on games to get them out of inventory and make room for something else. Just wait 6 months after a release and the physical copies will already start to drop in price while the digital versions will not have budged a penny. When a physical game goes on sale it almost always stays on sale, but digital sales on Steam are temporary. Even at an expensive retailer like Amazon you can find good prices compared to digital copies.
It's generally a poor idea to pre-order because you have no idea what the game will really be like. Even a fan of a series of games should wait to learn more details first. It locks you into one vendor for example, or locks you into a higher price than may exist later, and so forth. I'm annoyed that I have one game from Steam that I could have gotten cheaper and easier to use from GOG, because I didn't realize it would be available elsewhere.
It seems very strange when most games are supplied digitally only that someone wants to pre-order. The game won't run out. It's not like the old days where a store would only stock a limited number of copies. The publishers are basically taking advantage of hype.
Before STL was widely adopted I had used RogueWave (commercial) class libraries that operated using inheritance. These were honestly a lot easier to use in my opinion. You dealt with pointers to objects. Then the iterators didn't have to check against the "end" of a collection because it returned 0 at the end, as in "while (x=next())". This felt a lot more like classic OO languages like Smalltalk.
With the STL you're constantly doing copy constructors because you're passing around objects instead of object references, etc. I have written some templates around an STL container of void* pointers, and some other stuff, with the template there to just do the type safe checking for you but it didn't replicate code over and over for each instantiation and it copied pointers instead of objects.
When you get down to it, std::list should be able to share completely the object code for std::list, but in practice the compilers don't do this very well.
Now for this simple example the amount of code growth is not very large at all, but in some large projects this extra code adds up to something very noticeable. You'd think that on a PC it should not matter, but it does become noticeable and important a lot of times. Bigger code means you're not using your cache as efficiently. PC games for example often take code size and speed very seriously. If you need to respond quickly to millions of queries then increasing speed even slightly can result in big improvements in responsiveness.
Templates I think were a mistake to add to C++. It has removed a lot of object orientation from C++ programs, and it has bloated things up tremendously because of popular styles of using them and due to STL. Templates are essentially smart macros. You end up with duplicated code for each instantiation, and with some styles even the functions themselves are inlined. This only works because this style is big on the PC where there is massive amounts of RAM and cache space to soak up the inefficiencies. The current compiler/linker technology is not capable of effectively turning template heavy code into efficient code by recognizing when there is duplicated code that could be combined into shared object code. Often what is normally a library of object code in other languages turn into a library of header files in a template-heavy C++ style.
Now templates as a concept aren't all bad. A small template that provides type safety while sitting on top of a small tight library is great. Programmers need to learn their tools, learn how to use them well, and learn when to not use them. But most programmers don't do this, instead they learn to follow what other people do blindly until it becomes a habit.
Because you can use C++ as a better-C-than-C with no overhead. Better type checking, more consistent rules, use simple classes or namespaces for organization, avoid the bloat stuff like big templates or exceptions or RTTI.
Start with C first. Then move to C++ is things are complex enough that you need better organizational tools. Then move to Java if performance and efficiency aren't all that important and you can get away with it. The move to a scripting language to do the stuff that can be really slow or you've got a big whopping PC.
Doing it the other way around just seems bizarre to me. Sure, algorithms are important, but if you've got array sizes of 1000, then your dumbass O(n^2) bubblesort in C will be amazingly faster than an optimized mergesort of quicksort in a scripting language. But most of the high level languages rely on underlying libraries written in C to do the stuff that needs to be fast anyway.
C++ is in the middle, depending upon the type of the programmer and style of programming. You can get some C++ programs where the programmer wasn't paying attention and ends up with a result that's slowering the interpreted scripting languages (the mantra is to never prematurely optimize, and instead wait for faster PCs with more memory).
I program raw TCP, but that's because I have to fix bugs in the IP stack. Most people though can just use their OS to do TCP for them. Very few people actually compose the raw IP/TCP headers themselves or use raw sockets.