Actually before I was in a PhD program I thought the research and academia was a good idea. Then actually being there I realized it just wasn't for me, so I quit without the degree. I'm just not cut out to be my own boss, and spending 3/4s of my time writing funding proposals felt infinitely worse than than anything in the corporate world. But then I had to start all over again in the job world, with a crappy job that seriously underpaid me, and then work my way to a job I like.
However if I actually had gotten the PhD the job opportunities would have opened up a lot more I think. But I do have lots of friends with PhDs and they do get jobs outside of academia, in the corporate world doing development and engineering, just like other humans do.
Any place that shuns someone with a masters degree is pretty sucky, I feel sorry for you. There are many companies that value people with education. Do you really think at the CTO and architect level that they prefer BA to BS, and BS to MS, and MS to PhD? Granted, fresh graduates don't get those jobs but people do work up to them. Not everyone is in the trenches forever doing coding that other people tell them to do, eventually there's someone in the company that has to actually know something, if the company is worth anything.
I don't think this is necessarily true. This might be true for a basic grunt developer job or IT support. But many companies hire PhDs, and having that degree is a major help in securing a senior level positions. The trick though is in finding those jobs that want education rather than just basic knowledge. It's also not necessary to put yourself out of the running merely because you have a PhD if you don't want to do PhD work, just don't emphasize it.
Consider that it's probably more likely to get a development or engineering job at Google with a PhD than without one. Though they will expect that you do PhD work (patents, proposing new products, etc).
Online resume submittals is nearly pointless from the start. You won't stick out from the crowd that way very often, unless the job listing is very detailed and you match. A better bet is networking; have friends and friends of friends give you references. Then you bypass the HR and recruiting department, who are filtering based on keywords. But this is hard to do without experience or with people you know in the industries you care about (ie, if everyone you know is a webhead doing javascript, you're not likely to have them help you find a job in network optimization or embedded systems). Get referrals from professors maybe
4 months is not that long to be honest. The job market sucks, do not believe the people who say the economy is booming and that anyone who wants a job can get one.
One snag I found after leaving the PhD program was that I was competing with entry level people for entry level jobs. Any past work experience I had was not considered at all because it was not current. A lot of companies actually felt baffled about someone who did not recently come from a previous job or who had not just graduated with some sort of degree, and they did not consider working in a PhD program as as work or experience (probably classified me as "unemployed").
I did indeed have one VP who finally hired me but also was biased against me by assuming I would only want to do research and not actually do the job I was being paid for. I do not think this was most people though, I think this guy was an exception.
I'm personally tired of the google+ bashing. Everyone feels like google+ is being forced on them as the one and only undesirable google service. Look at it from the other side, google+ users are sick and tired of having google forced on them, or getting automatic youtube accounts, or having it linked to our android phones. We just want a nice social media site that is maintained and improved and that is not facebook.
I joined G+ because it was not Facebook. You can decide exactly who you share with, and you can follow other people without them also following you (ie, no pretending that the b-list celebrity is your friend).
I don't necessarily think Google is proud of Google+ or care about the numbers, Google treats G+ like a stray dog at the door, same as Google treats all its services.
I don't understand the "core" users part. What does Google have other than G+ that people want, besides Youtube, which was acquired after G+ I thought. Do people really use picasa, which was the only thing G+ was trying to make me use.
It's annoying to be reminded each month to set this up. I do not want to use my phone for this. I will never answer it from an unknown caller, and texting is blocked, so it's useless for this purpose. If someone steals my G+ account, nothing much terrible will happen. It's not something that needs high security, I don't keep anything of value there (it's not a bank, not a cloud service, it's just some social media).
I've only been to one conference in thirty years, and it was free and I drove there. I went to a trade show when unemployed also to get some job leads, but that was it. No one has ever offered to send me to a conference, and to be honest my coworkers rarely have gone to them (except for marketing types). But I'm a developer and engineer, we're expected to learn everything on our own. But I see many IT people going to these, which makes me think there's just a lot of vendor-sponsored indoctrination going around.
Really, one week off of work, lots of lounging around, some key note speakers that are boring, and hotel and conference expenses. Is the outcome really worth the cost? Can't one read the proceedings afterwords instead of going to the party in person? I do not think "networking" is important for the employer as networking is just a means to job hop more easily.
Now some sorts of conferences are indeed useful (they never happen in Las Vegas though). Things like attending the industry consortium meetings, hashing out standards, and so forth. Things like DEFCON maybe if one is a security expert. But these things tend to involve very few people from each company, often only one.
I've always distrusted them. First, there has never been incentive for reasonable reviews online by amateurs. They're either extremely positive or extremely negative, with a writing style that seems like a wannabe critic. I am baffled by the people who will not even go into a restaurant without first reading what Yelp have to say. What's the worst possible thing that could happen without reading Yelp first? Just try something new and unknown for a change.
Everyone knows they lie and extort, it has been this way for years. The only ones who don't know this are social media junkies who believe anything online.
Adults don't talk that way all the time. Honest. If someone is saying fuck all the time at work, then HR needs to get involved. This is the work place, act like professionals. We get emails currently saying "we have customers in the building this week, please be careful what you say", and it's not only about giving away product secrets but to make sure that we don't appear to be some startup run by twenty somethings. Sure, maybe the CEO swears a bit, but that CEO stops swearing when the customers come around (even Jobs and Ballmer), but if there's a department that just can't stop swearing like they're watching HBO then they do get a bad reputation from the rest of the company.
There's the phrase "swearing like a sailor", but in my experience when military people are around civilians at home, they are highly respectful and keep the language civilized.
I'd say that 95% of the people I hear saying fuck all the time in public or using fucking as a universal adjective are kids (teens or twenty somethings, usually without a job).
Most of these sites don't know what ads they are serving. They just sign up with some ad suppliers and wait for the pennies to start trickling in with no work or effort on their part. Can you even imagine if television shows did the same thing, allowing anyone and everyone to show an advertisement with no oversight, with viagra being advertised during children's shows and Cheeze Whiz advertised on the Food Channel.
That's like saying because we can't fight the government we may as well stop our protests and start loving the government instead. If we can't stop war with a protest we should learn to love the bomb. Do you fail to see the raw anger that these anti-social and irresponsible advertisers are generating? If all of the sites vanish then maybe that will be a good thing.
I won't reconsider. When that happens I will not view the content and go elsewhere. Or are you suggesting that there actually is content on the internet that is mandatory viewing?
That's fine with me. I'll watch their ads if they agree to pay to fix up things if I get hit by malware or identity theft, and agree to actively prevent tracking of visitors.
Sites would not have to charge subscriptions if everyone did this, it is just one potential option. They could just kill off all the "me too" self promotion sites and no one would miss them ("hey, I just started a blog and don't know how to write coherently, but please look at my ads to pay for the drivel!").
Even if they make money with advertisements, they can do so in a socially responsible way that shows respect for the customers! Instead most of them use third party ad servers, they don't even bother screening the ads themselves to see if they're something appropriate to the customer base. That's why people just give up and use doubleclick.net and serve up the malware.
The ads slow down the internet! Web pages show up so much faster if you shut down all that crap. Especially if you've got a relative on a dial up modem, adding ad-block greatly speeds things up, far more than any dubious internet accelerator. Why should these EVIL ad content creators by allowed a free ride paid for with MY money? I don't use the word 'evil' lightly, these are freeloaders of the first order. Even the postal service advertisements are paid for by the advertiser, yet the internet advertisers get a free ride paid for by the recipient. Why should more than half of my bandwidth go to serving up content I don't want? I don't care if some web sites die because I refuse the ads, it is not my requirement to subsidize web sites.
It is becoming more common, however it still does seem rare for a useful site to do this. Generally when I have to unblock more than a couple third party sites before the main site is usable, it's not worth the effort to unblock more because I was only marginally interested in seeing whatever cat pictures that site had.
Actually, I didn't even think Canadians could officially get Netflix. Though after a search it turns out there is a Netflix Canada, but a lot of Canadians use workarounds to get the American Netflix so that they can get more content.
There's not even American culture per se. Do you think people in Iowa watch shows from LA and NY and think "wow, that's American culture I can relate to!" What next, make sure you have shows produced in Vancouver get the same amount of air time as shows from Toronto and Montreal, so that Canadian culture isn't dominated by eastern cities?
Remember, McCain has clearly stated that he knows how to recognize a moderate Syrian rebel from a terrorist, even though he can't distinguish a crazy person from a reasonable vice presidential choice.
The workplace is the important factor here. The reason that companies and professions have rules against harassment is to avoid the workplace problems that occur. When soemone gets repeatedly hit on at work is cause the worker to want to stay home, avoid the coworker, or just quit the job and go elsewhere. Bad for morale and the bottom line. Yes it's difficult to completely eliminate this in society as a whole, there will always be the catcalls and wolf whistles while walking down the street, but there's no reason to tolerate it in a workplace where everyone is supposed to be acting professionally.
Basically the workplace is not supposed to be a dating pool. Sure it may happen, but it's not the purpose of the job and most the vast majority of employees they did not join the company in an attempt to find a partner.
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Actually before I was in a PhD program I thought the research and academia was a good idea. Then actually being there I realized it just wasn't for me, so I quit without the degree. I'm just not cut out to be my own boss, and spending 3/4s of my time writing funding proposals felt infinitely worse than than anything in the corporate world. But then I had to start all over again in the job world, with a crappy job that seriously underpaid me, and then work my way to a job I like.
However if I actually had gotten the PhD the job opportunities would have opened up a lot more I think. But I do have lots of friends with PhDs and they do get jobs outside of academia, in the corporate world doing development and engineering, just like other humans do.
Any place that shuns someone with a masters degree is pretty sucky, I feel sorry for you. There are many companies that value people with education. Do you really think at the CTO and architect level that they prefer BA to BS, and BS to MS, and MS to PhD? Granted, fresh graduates don't get those jobs but people do work up to them. Not everyone is in the trenches forever doing coding that other people tell them to do, eventually there's someone in the company that has to actually know something, if the company is worth anything.
I don't think this is necessarily true. This might be true for a basic grunt developer job or IT support. But many companies hire PhDs, and having that degree is a major help in securing a senior level positions. The trick though is in finding those jobs that want education rather than just basic knowledge. It's also not necessary to put yourself out of the running merely because you have a PhD if you don't want to do PhD work, just don't emphasize it.
Consider that it's probably more likely to get a development or engineering job at Google with a PhD than without one. Though they will expect that you do PhD work (patents, proposing new products, etc).
Online resume submittals is nearly pointless from the start. You won't stick out from the crowd that way very often, unless the job listing is very detailed and you match. A better bet is networking; have friends and friends of friends give you references. Then you bypass the HR and recruiting department, who are filtering based on keywords. But this is hard to do without experience or with people you know in the industries you care about (ie, if everyone you know is a webhead doing javascript, you're not likely to have them help you find a job in network optimization or embedded systems). Get referrals from professors maybe
4 months is not that long to be honest. The job market sucks, do not believe the people who say the economy is booming and that anyone who wants a job can get one.
One snag I found after leaving the PhD program was that I was competing with entry level people for entry level jobs. Any past work experience I had was not considered at all because it was not current. A lot of companies actually felt baffled about someone who did not recently come from a previous job or who had not just graduated with some sort of degree, and they did not consider working in a PhD program as as work or experience (probably classified me as "unemployed").
I did indeed have one VP who finally hired me but also was biased against me by assuming I would only want to do research and not actually do the job I was being paid for. I do not think this was most people though, I think this guy was an exception.
I'm personally tired of the google+ bashing. Everyone feels like google+ is being forced on them as the one and only undesirable google service. Look at it from the other side, google+ users are sick and tired of having google forced on them, or getting automatic youtube accounts, or having it linked to our android phones. We just want a nice social media site that is maintained and improved and that is not facebook.
I joined G+ because it was not Facebook. You can decide exactly who you share with, and you can follow other people without them also following you (ie, no pretending that the b-list celebrity is your friend).
I don't necessarily think Google is proud of Google+ or care about the numbers, Google treats G+ like a stray dog at the door, same as Google treats all its services.
I don't understand the "core" users part. What does Google have other than G+ that people want, besides Youtube, which was acquired after G+ I thought. Do people really use picasa, which was the only thing G+ was trying to make me use.
It's annoying to be reminded each month to set this up. I do not want to use my phone for this. I will never answer it from an unknown caller, and texting is blocked, so it's useless for this purpose. If someone steals my G+ account, nothing much terrible will happen. It's not something that needs high security, I don't keep anything of value there (it's not a bank, not a cloud service, it's just some social media).
But if you're sending the entire team to a conference merely to get trained, can't you save money by having trainers come to the company for a week?
I've only been to one conference in thirty years, and it was free and I drove there. I went to a trade show when unemployed also to get some job leads, but that was it. No one has ever offered to send me to a conference, and to be honest my coworkers rarely have gone to them (except for marketing types). But I'm a developer and engineer, we're expected to learn everything on our own. But I see many IT people going to these, which makes me think there's just a lot of vendor-sponsored indoctrination going around.
Really, one week off of work, lots of lounging around, some key note speakers that are boring, and hotel and conference expenses. Is the outcome really worth the cost? Can't one read the proceedings afterwords instead of going to the party in person? I do not think "networking" is important for the employer as networking is just a means to job hop more easily.
Now some sorts of conferences are indeed useful (they never happen in Las Vegas though). Things like attending the industry consortium meetings, hashing out standards, and so forth. Things like DEFCON maybe if one is a security expert. But these things tend to involve very few people from each company, often only one.
It also read to me a bit like "Statistics appear to show things that are contrary to my political views, and I don't think that's very scientific."
Did they pay for good reviews, or just pay for advertising (or preferred placement higher on the list)?
I've always distrusted them. First, there has never been incentive for reasonable reviews online by amateurs. They're either extremely positive or extremely negative, with a writing style that seems like a wannabe critic. I am baffled by the people who will not even go into a restaurant without first reading what Yelp have to say. What's the worst possible thing that could happen without reading Yelp first? Just try something new and unknown for a change.
Everyone knows they lie and extort, it has been this way for years. The only ones who don't know this are social media junkies who believe anything online.
Adults don't talk that way all the time. Honest. If someone is saying fuck all the time at work, then HR needs to get involved. This is the work place, act like professionals. We get emails currently saying "we have customers in the building this week, please be careful what you say", and it's not only about giving away product secrets but to make sure that we don't appear to be some startup run by twenty somethings. Sure, maybe the CEO swears a bit, but that CEO stops swearing when the customers come around (even Jobs and Ballmer), but if there's a department that just can't stop swearing like they're watching HBO then they do get a bad reputation from the rest of the company.
There's the phrase "swearing like a sailor", but in my experience when military people are around civilians at home, they are highly respectful and keep the language civilized.
I'd say that 95% of the people I hear saying fuck all the time in public or using fucking as a universal adjective are kids (teens or twenty somethings, usually without a job).
Most of these sites don't know what ads they are serving. They just sign up with some ad suppliers and wait for the pennies to start trickling in with no work or effort on their part. Can you even imagine if television shows did the same thing, allowing anyone and everyone to show an advertisement with no oversight, with viagra being advertised during children's shows and Cheeze Whiz advertised on the Food Channel.
That's like saying because we can't fight the government we may as well stop our protests and start loving the government instead. If we can't stop war with a protest we should learn to love the bomb. Do you fail to see the raw anger that these anti-social and irresponsible advertisers are generating? If all of the sites vanish then maybe that will be a good thing.
I won't reconsider. When that happens I will not view the content and go elsewhere. Or are you suggesting that there actually is content on the internet that is mandatory viewing?
That's fine with me. I'll watch their ads if they agree to pay to fix up things if I get hit by malware or identity theft, and agree to actively prevent tracking of visitors.
Sites would not have to charge subscriptions if everyone did this, it is just one potential option. They could just kill off all the "me too" self promotion sites and no one would miss them ("hey, I just started a blog and don't know how to write coherently, but please look at my ads to pay for the drivel!").
Even if they make money with advertisements, they can do so in a socially responsible way that shows respect for the customers! Instead most of them use third party ad servers, they don't even bother screening the ads themselves to see if they're something appropriate to the customer base. That's why people just give up and use doubleclick.net and serve up the malware.
The ads slow down the internet! Web pages show up so much faster if you shut down all that crap. Especially if you've got a relative on a dial up modem, adding ad-block greatly speeds things up, far more than any dubious internet accelerator. Why should these EVIL ad content creators by allowed a free ride paid for with MY money? I don't use the word 'evil' lightly, these are freeloaders of the first order. Even the postal service advertisements are paid for by the advertiser, yet the internet advertisers get a free ride paid for by the recipient. Why should more than half of my bandwidth go to serving up content I don't want? I don't care if some web sites die because I refuse the ads, it is not my requirement to subsidize web sites.
It is becoming more common, however it still does seem rare for a useful site to do this. Generally when I have to unblock more than a couple third party sites before the main site is usable, it's not worth the effort to unblock more because I was only marginally interested in seeing whatever cat pictures that site had.
Actually, I didn't even think Canadians could officially get Netflix. Though after a search it turns out there is a Netflix Canada, but a lot of Canadians use workarounds to get the American Netflix so that they can get more content.
It's ok, I think we know a way to get the tattoos off.
There's not even American culture per se. Do you think people in Iowa watch shows from LA and NY and think "wow, that's American culture I can relate to!" What next, make sure you have shows produced in Vancouver get the same amount of air time as shows from Toronto and Montreal, so that Canadian culture isn't dominated by eastern cities?
Remember, McCain has clearly stated that he knows how to recognize a moderate Syrian rebel from a terrorist, even though he can't distinguish a crazy person from a reasonable vice presidential choice.
Never saw a lot of vendors, given that no one at the conferences had money to spend...
But the attractive guys who continue to hit on someone even after being told no do get reported. Stop blaming the women here.
The workplace is the important factor here. The reason that companies and professions have rules against harassment is to avoid the workplace problems that occur. When soemone gets repeatedly hit on at work is cause the worker to want to stay home, avoid the coworker, or just quit the job and go elsewhere. Bad for morale and the bottom line. Yes it's difficult to completely eliminate this in society as a whole, there will always be the catcalls and wolf whistles while walking down the street, but there's no reason to tolerate it in a workplace where everyone is supposed to be acting professionally.
Basically the workplace is not supposed to be a dating pool. Sure it may happen, but it's not the purpose of the job and most the vast majority of employees they did not join the company in an attempt to find a partner.