You know there may not be a clear answer to this question, but here are a few thoughts.
If I'm someone from a third world country who can not afford to consume as many calories to develop my muscle tone like people in first world nations, then do they have an 'unfair advantage' over me?
How about if my genetic disposition to putting on muscle tone is greater than the next person's.. can we not call this an 'unfair advange'?
Since his prosthetics' efficiency is compared to an average (vs population or athletes), it would just be an issue of tuning them down to the best runner's efficiency. Then it could be thought of as 'fair', couldn't it?
The line gets blurrier the more information you take into consideration. Some might say that the whole idea of human beings competing against each other is the problem, but the counter-argument that everyone benefits from competition is valid based on results. The #2, #3 etc.. place runners drive themselves harder to try to win which benefits them by achieving better results, developing themselves further, etc..
I guess my comment only raises more questions, but where to draw the line on 'unfair advantages' is fuzzy at best.
1. The person who told me about the hiring of someone from outside of the company to replace me still works there. You can be sure that person won't want to make the statement publicly for fear of losing their job. So in my books it's all the employees that knew what had happened that let me down, not the other way around. I'm known to be a fighter, but some fights you know you're not going to win on your own. 2. How do you retain a lawyer for a wrongful dismissal suit when the income you would have required to pay the attorney is no longer coming in? When I was 'laid off' I had 4 months left on my annual rental agreement (4 x $750 = $3,000), so do I hire the lawyer and gamble my rent money on it without any other employee's legal testimony?
Despite having had previous technical + operational help desk experience (apx 2 years), having published public domain open source code which was used by http://cheshire.berkeley.edu/ the Cheshire 2 project in 2001, specifically the Object Oriented Programming extension to Tcl/Tk used in http://zoom.z3950.org/bind/tcl/cheshire/ the ZOOM Tcl module, having coded a web site using Perl and win32::odbc for a client, having worked on a web crawler by contract for a company based out of North Carolina and other related successful experience in the I.T. field which was listed on my resume, I DID NOT FIND EMPLOYMENT FOR 2 YEARS AFTER THIS INCIDENT AT THAT COMPANY and even then it was at first level at an ISP's help desk.
The problem with your comment is it assumes the circumstances in my life are the same as yours. I never did get my RRSPs which meant the company didn't match my contributions because of the incident and the money I had saved up to make that contribution got reallocated to rent. I did pay the rest of the rent though since I don't believe in skipping out on my legal agreements.
I've worked in software production as a full time employee twice since having started to learn how to program in 1987. Both times an acquaintance who knew about my programming skills recommended me to their respective employers who in turn put me through full interview processes. Despite my merits I can't seem to find employment as an entry level help desk technician let alone in software production and it all falls back to the hole in my resume which I couldn't fight.
Don't talk as though you would have contributed to justice by lending me the money for my legal bills pal.
Dog, your loyalty to corporate 'values' befit you.
I've got a permanent scar on my right major finger as a reminder of the grunt work I did as a rite of passage and here I present it to you.
I got it while working at gas stations cleaning the shit in toilets, facing product, cleaning pumps, shovelling snow and salting ice, mopping slush when I eventually became assitant manager, doing the paperwork, preparing bank deposits (you can imagine the cash totals I'm sure) and earning trust. In my spare time I learned C, then C++ and a few years after learning it on my own I took courses as 'confirmations' of my efforts. I received 'A' as a final grade in both of those languages from a University with a reputation for it's computer science department.
Then I worked as a help desk agent for a national corporation where we had to know the corporate procedures manual (several hundred pages) for operational assistance and also had to have technical skills for fixing computer related problems for the point of sales systems. I did this for a couple of years then went on to University full time.
I left University studies for employment as a software developer and maintainer at a multi-million dollar company where I had the chance to be a member of a small team that produced the kiosk software system for a government program under contract to allow the public free internet access from locations across the country. The company wanted it programmed in VisualBASIC for maintainability quick-hatched college students, so I made wrapper libraries around RAS32 so that dial-out was strictly controlled by the software such that the user could not modify the call out number etc... (Windows 2000 allowed the user to modify values if the session did not connect on the first try). Seperately at that position I also maintained databases in Microsoft Access with employees' (tens of thousands of) private information and as another example a database of the banking information for all retail sites across the country.
The deadline for RRSP signup was looming and I had tried to contact the employee who was responsible for the signup unsuccessfully so I asked my manager who their manager was so I would know who to look for if I could not find the employee in person. He accused me of going to start trouble for our group and I responded that I wasn't going off to start any trouble. He sent me home for talking back to him then promptly laid me off on the next business day because he expected me to apologize despite his lack of apology for having accused me of wanting to get the other employee in trouble (which I swear to God I did not intend to do). The 'lay off' was commented as a 'corporate restructuring' on my official government forms despite the fact that I got word from employees I still knew that they hired another programmer to do the exact workload I was doing.
Now these things I've told you are examples of someone performing those rites of passage but despite the trustworthiness exemplified and the crappy jobs I went through to get that first programming job at the age of 26 after originally learning how to program in BASIC at the age of 11 or 12, I'm now impoverished because I would not accept some corporate dog slandering me in from of my peers.
If you think it's those people who refuse to serve a system that serves the elite who don't care about the people that do the work that make it possible for them to even be in the positions they're in, I'm here to tell my story and set the record straight. They'll use you, abuse you and cover it all up neatly while collecting money from your hard work.
Now go be on and be a loyal dog to your corporate masters and give 'em a good rim job.
Way to let 'em have it.
I've worked very hard to make projects work and delivered on schedule and within the ORIGINAL budget.
Time and again some power mongering middle manager decides to take swipes at me until I dig my heels in and stand up for myself. Then I'm promptly put out the door (they like the term 'corporate restructuring') despite having achieved the goals set out for me.
I don't play WoW and I do think of myself as ambitious but I'm in severe shock and VERY poor today. My ambition and drive never paid off (made under $15,000 CDN per year for 4 years running), so let them know they aren't fooling you into believing that it's your fault. I know how to program multi-threaded applications in Java, C++ and VisualBASIC and I'm subjected to this kind of professional neglect.
Business used to be strongly tied to peoples' needs but today it caters more to want/desire because of abundant wealth and a small controlling group pushing corporate 'values'. These conditions CAUSE the boom and bust effect so you can bet your bottom dollar we haven't seen the last of the market slides until they finally return business to it's pure form where market capital, not investment capital is the primary driving force in the market.
While reading your comment it struck me that what you had been told had a political slant to it.
People who tend toward socialist ideals are generally the ones who push the higher education = freedom lingo. At the other end, capitalists tend to preach survival of the fittest, do what you must to succeed.
I'm a centrist myself, tending toward both if either of these approaches. However unrealistic expectations can be made from any side if taken as the 'sure way to succeed'.
However your point is a good one. Expectations are set in impressionable youth by those who they respect, sometimes quite irresponsibly. And I won't argue with these youngsters, try to get what you can while you can.
If I may add a few thoughts as well;
Back in the 90s we had investors buying the rosie portrait of the market being painted by the bulk of the economic forecasters. We also had generation X filling the employment seats, who after attending College and University were being paid unreasonably high salaries because of these market conditions. The investment capital was being used like disposable income by corporate entities and generation X having grown up while the baby boomers were still fighting their way up the corporate ladders were not privvy to an excessively comfortable living as kids. I believe it's the retirement of the silent generation (generation before boomers) that caused this boom in the 90s.
Today the market is in fair shape but the investors are once bit and twice shy. So the days of offers including air fair, immediate accomodations and a vehicle of the employee's choice are long gone. The millenials have grown up in conditions where their parents have had more disposable income and are wise to what they are walking into. Namely harsher market conditions than generation X and they seem to know enough to try to sap any money they can get.
I get the feeling the Millenials will end up being quite conservative/capitalistic in a few more years (age 35 esp).
My last employment was terminated in April of 2007 where I earned $35,000 cdn/year.
I was hired in December of 2006 to follow a software development plan to implement a visualization suite which allowed building developers to visualize housing before construction to show potential buyers, city planners, etc..
The software development was in Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 using OpenSceneGraph, XML based configuration and skinning, used OpenThreads and had TCP based network sessions for live or pre-recorded guided tours.
When I was hired, I replaced an intermediate software developer that could no longer get along with the director (immediate supervisor). There was a senior programmer above me but he left by mid-January of 2007, but before he did I was told the development team was going to be expanded to 3 full time developers. We had a graphics artist who used tools like 3D Studio Max to visualize the buildings from architectural blue-prints (or floor plans if you prefer).
Just after the senior programmer left, I started going through all of the modules to get an idea of what would need to be done to prepare the rendering engine for the development plan which had been presented to me. I found that whenever a HUD button was being pressed a new thread was being launched. In fact if you pressed the 'move forward' button twice quickly, the camera would jump back and forth between two positions because two threads were being launched without mutexes or any other safe-guard. I also noticed that nearly all class data members were public and being affected from other classes. And finally that the event processor had code that depended on the event be associated to a HUD button.
So I made recommendations to decouple the modules, fix the event model & processor as well as eliminate the excessive threading which was not making things faster as the unexperienced multi-threading programmer who implemented them had obviously assumed.
When I presented these recommendations to the director he laughed in my face and began yelling at me when I tried to explain why these changes would be necessary. So I backed off after the president of the company heard us out and decided to back the director who had been there longer than I.
At the beginning of April I was falling behind the schedule because of problems directly associated to the event model where the software development plan called for events to be generated by the camera walking through tagged plains. As mentioned, the event processor contained code which read fields from a HUD button which had to be present, so I was trying to emulate a button's state but the events would run in a continuous loop. While struggling with emulating the button states properly there was construction crew in our new office building during the day and my director was having (business?) friends in the office in the evening to drink wine and chat within earshot of my cubicle.
In my last few days of my employment, in early April of 2007 I started going into the office in the late afternoon to ensure at least 4 hours of my 8 hour shift had no distractions since my employers who told me when I was hired that my hours of work were flexible as long as they amounted to 8 hours a day. They decided to fire me without telling me why, though I expect it had to do with my decision to go in during the evening to avoid the distractions during the day. Up until that point I had never handed in any work late. Get this, they still had not hired any other developer, so I was the only programmer left when they terminated my employment.
I have been unemployed since April 2007 (we're now in January of 2008) despite looking for work at junior and intermediate levels, software development, testing, maintenance, help desk support, etc, etc..
In my years of IT work I've found management to be incompetant, not at technical skills but soft skills. It sounds as though the new generation of IT workers have been informed of what kind of crap happens in thes
I have a 70 Gb software RAID in my basement on a headless Pentium 133 or 166 powered by Slackware 11.0 serving over Samba. If a hard drive goes, I replace it and no harm is done.
And I digress, there are algorithms to correct corrupted data streams though there are limits to the level of corruption they can correct.
If the corrupted data file was the firing sequence data then I would have to say that this type of programming is best left to proper software engineers considering the danger to human lives. And if a software engineer didn't at least run a CRC check on the input file, I would suggest job displacement or at the very least some serious retraining.
Engineering isn't for fly-by-wire hackers. Innovation is great and all but there are certain times when a profession's tried and true practices should be strictly adhered to.
Slashdot Mirror
You know there may not be a clear answer to this question, but here are a few thoughts.
If I'm someone from a third world country who can not afford to consume as many calories to develop my muscle tone like people in first world nations, then do they have an 'unfair advantage' over me?
How about if my genetic disposition to putting on muscle tone is greater than the next person's.. can we not call this an 'unfair advange'?
Since his prosthetics' efficiency is compared to an average (vs population or athletes), it would just be an issue of tuning them down to the best runner's efficiency. Then it could be thought of as 'fair', couldn't it?
The line gets blurrier the more information you take into consideration. Some might say that the whole idea of human beings competing against each other is the problem, but the counter-argument that everyone benefits from competition is valid based on results. The #2, #3 etc.. place runners drive themselves harder to try to win which benefits them by achieving better results, developing themselves further, etc..
I guess my comment only raises more questions, but where to draw the line on 'unfair advantages' is fuzzy at best.
1. The person who told me about the hiring of someone from outside of the company to replace me still works there. You can be sure that person won't want to make the statement publicly for fear of losing their job. So in my books it's all the employees that knew what had happened that let me down, not the other way around. I'm known to be a fighter, but some fights you know you're not going to win on your own.
2. How do you retain a lawyer for a wrongful dismissal suit when the income you would have required to pay the attorney is no longer coming in? When I was 'laid off' I had 4 months left on my annual rental agreement (4 x $750 = $3,000), so do I hire the lawyer and gamble my rent money on it without any other employee's legal testimony?
Despite having had previous technical + operational help desk experience (apx 2 years), having published public domain open source code which was used by http://cheshire.berkeley.edu/ the Cheshire 2 project in 2001, specifically the Object Oriented Programming extension to Tcl/Tk used in http://zoom.z3950.org/bind/tcl/cheshire/ the ZOOM Tcl module, having coded a web site using Perl and win32::odbc for a client, having worked on a web crawler by contract for a company based out of North Carolina and other related successful experience in the I.T. field which was listed on my resume, I DID NOT FIND EMPLOYMENT FOR 2 YEARS AFTER THIS INCIDENT AT THAT COMPANY and even then it was at first level at an ISP's help desk.
The problem with your comment is it assumes the circumstances in my life are the same as yours. I never did get my RRSPs which meant the company didn't match my contributions because of the incident and the money I had saved up to make that contribution got reallocated to rent. I did pay the rest of the rent though since I don't believe in skipping out on my legal agreements.
I've worked in software production as a full time employee twice since having started to learn how to program in 1987. Both times an acquaintance who knew about my programming skills recommended me to their respective employers who in turn put me through full interview processes. Despite my merits I can't seem to find employment as an entry level help desk technician let alone in software production and it all falls back to the hole in my resume which I couldn't fight.
Don't talk as though you would have contributed to justice by lending me the money for my legal bills pal.
A disillusioned Canadian.
Dog, your loyalty to corporate 'values' befit you.
I've got a permanent scar on my right major finger as a reminder of the grunt work I did as a rite of passage and here I present it to you.
I got it while working at gas stations cleaning the shit in toilets, facing product, cleaning pumps, shovelling snow and salting ice, mopping slush when I eventually became assitant manager, doing the paperwork, preparing bank deposits (you can imagine the cash totals I'm sure) and earning trust. In my spare time I learned C, then C++ and a few years after learning it on my own I took courses as 'confirmations' of my efforts. I received 'A' as a final grade in both of those languages from a University with a reputation for it's computer science department.
Then I worked as a help desk agent for a national corporation where we had to know the corporate procedures manual (several hundred pages) for operational assistance and also had to have technical skills for fixing computer related problems for the point of sales systems. I did this for a couple of years then went on to University full time.
I left University studies for employment as a software developer and maintainer at a multi-million dollar company where I had the chance to be a member of a small team that produced the kiosk software system for a government program under contract to allow the public free internet access from locations across the country. The company wanted it programmed in VisualBASIC for maintainability quick-hatched college students, so I made wrapper libraries around RAS32 so that dial-out was strictly controlled by the software such that the user could not modify the call out number etc... (Windows 2000 allowed the user to modify values if the session did not connect on the first try). Seperately at that position I also maintained databases in Microsoft Access with employees' (tens of thousands of) private information and as another example a database of the banking information for all retail sites across the country.
The deadline for RRSP signup was looming and I had tried to contact the employee who was responsible for the signup unsuccessfully so I asked my manager who their manager was so I would know who to look for if I could not find the employee in person. He accused me of going to start trouble for our group and I responded that I wasn't going off to start any trouble. He sent me home for talking back to him then promptly laid me off on the next business day because he expected me to apologize despite his lack of apology for having accused me of wanting to get the other employee in trouble (which I swear to God I did not intend to do). The 'lay off' was commented as a 'corporate restructuring' on my official government forms despite the fact that I got word from employees I still knew that they hired another programmer to do the exact workload I was doing.
Now these things I've told you are examples of someone performing those rites of passage but despite the trustworthiness exemplified and the crappy jobs I went through to get that first programming job at the age of 26 after originally learning how to program in BASIC at the age of 11 or 12, I'm now impoverished because I would not accept some corporate dog slandering me in from of my peers.
If you think it's those people who refuse to serve a system that serves the elite who don't care about the people that do the work that make it possible for them to even be in the positions they're in, I'm here to tell my story and set the record straight. They'll use you, abuse you and cover it all up neatly while collecting money from your hard work.
Now go be on and be a loyal dog to your corporate masters and give 'em a good rim job.
Way to let 'em have it. I've worked very hard to make projects work and delivered on schedule and within the ORIGINAL budget. Time and again some power mongering middle manager decides to take swipes at me until I dig my heels in and stand up for myself. Then I'm promptly put out the door (they like the term 'corporate restructuring') despite having achieved the goals set out for me. I don't play WoW and I do think of myself as ambitious but I'm in severe shock and VERY poor today. My ambition and drive never paid off (made under $15,000 CDN per year for 4 years running), so let them know they aren't fooling you into believing that it's your fault. I know how to program multi-threaded applications in Java, C++ and VisualBASIC and I'm subjected to this kind of professional neglect. Business used to be strongly tied to peoples' needs but today it caters more to want/desire because of abundant wealth and a small controlling group pushing corporate 'values'. These conditions CAUSE the boom and bust effect so you can bet your bottom dollar we haven't seen the last of the market slides until they finally return business to it's pure form where market capital, not investment capital is the primary driving force in the market.
While reading your comment it struck me that what you had been told had a political slant to it.
People who tend toward socialist ideals are generally the ones who push the higher education = freedom lingo.
At the other end, capitalists tend to preach survival of the fittest, do what you must to succeed.
I'm a centrist myself, tending toward both if either of these approaches. However unrealistic expectations can be made from any side if taken as the 'sure way to succeed'.
However your point is a good one. Expectations are set in impressionable youth by those who they respect, sometimes quite irresponsibly. And I won't argue with these youngsters, try to get what you can while you can.
If I may add a few thoughts as well;
Back in the 90s we had investors buying the rosie portrait of the market being painted by the bulk of the economic forecasters. We also had generation X filling the employment seats, who after attending College and University were being paid unreasonably high salaries because of these market conditions. The investment capital was being used like disposable income by corporate entities and generation X having grown up while the baby boomers were still fighting their way up the corporate ladders were not privvy to an excessively comfortable living as kids. I believe it's the retirement of the silent generation (generation before boomers) that caused this boom in the 90s.
Today the market is in fair shape but the investors are once bit and twice shy. So the days of offers including air fair, immediate accomodations and a vehicle of the employee's choice are long gone. The millenials have grown up in conditions where their parents have had more disposable income and are wise to what they are walking into. Namely harsher market conditions than generation X and they seem to know enough to try to sap any money they can get.
I get the feeling the Millenials will end up being quite conservative/capitalistic in a few more years (age 35 esp).
-- A drowning voice of gen X
My last employment was terminated in April of 2007 where I earned $35,000 cdn/year.
I was hired in December of 2006 to follow a software development plan to implement a visualization suite which allowed building developers to visualize housing before construction to show potential buyers, city planners, etc..
The software development was in Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 using OpenSceneGraph, XML based configuration and skinning, used OpenThreads and had TCP based network sessions for live or pre-recorded guided tours.
When I was hired, I replaced an intermediate software developer that could no longer get along with the director (immediate supervisor). There was a senior programmer above me but he left by mid-January of 2007, but before he did I was told the development team was going to be expanded to 3 full time developers. We had a graphics artist who used tools like 3D Studio Max to visualize the buildings from architectural blue-prints (or floor plans if you prefer).
Just after the senior programmer left, I started going through all of the modules to get an idea of what would need to be done to prepare the rendering engine for the development plan which had been presented to me. I found that whenever a HUD button was being pressed a new thread was being launched. In fact if you pressed the 'move forward' button twice quickly, the camera would jump back and forth between two positions because two threads were being launched without mutexes or any other safe-guard. I also noticed that nearly all class data members were public and being affected from other classes. And finally that the event processor had code that depended on the event be associated to a HUD button.
So I made recommendations to decouple the modules, fix the event model & processor as well as eliminate the excessive threading which was not making things faster as the unexperienced multi-threading programmer who implemented them had obviously assumed.
When I presented these recommendations to the director he laughed in my face and began yelling at me when I tried to explain why these changes would be necessary. So I backed off after the president of the company heard us out and decided to back the director who had been there longer than I.
At the beginning of April I was falling behind the schedule because of problems directly associated to the event model where the software development plan called for events to be generated by the camera walking through tagged plains. As mentioned, the event processor contained code which read fields from a HUD button which had to be present, so I was trying to emulate a button's state but the events would run in a continuous loop. While struggling with emulating the button states properly there was construction crew in our new office building during the day and my director was having (business?) friends in the office in the evening to drink wine and chat within earshot of my cubicle.
In my last few days of my employment, in early April of 2007 I started going into the office in the late afternoon to ensure at least 4 hours of my 8 hour shift had no distractions since my employers who told me when I was hired that my hours of work were flexible as long as they amounted to 8 hours a day. They decided to fire me without telling me why, though I expect it had to do with my decision to go in during the evening to avoid the distractions during the day. Up until that point I had never handed in any work late. Get this, they still had not hired any other developer, so I was the only programmer left when they terminated my employment.
I have been unemployed since April 2007 (we're now in January of 2008) despite looking for work at junior and intermediate levels, software development, testing, maintenance, help desk support, etc, etc..
In my years of IT work I've found management to be incompetant, not at technical skills but soft skills. It sounds as though the new generation of IT workers have been informed of what kind of crap happens in thes
I have a 70 Gb software RAID in my basement on a headless Pentium 133 or 166 powered by Slackware 11.0 serving over Samba. If a hard drive goes, I replace it and no harm is done.
And I digress, there are algorithms to correct corrupted data streams though there are limits to the level of corruption they can correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction
If the corrupted data file was the firing sequence data then I would have to say that this type of programming is best left to proper software engineers considering the danger to human lives. And if a software engineer didn't at least run a CRC check on the input file, I would suggest job displacement or at the very least some serious retraining.
Engineering isn't for fly-by-wire hackers. Innovation is great and all but there are certain times when a profession's tried and true practices should be strictly adhered to.
An unemployed man