My yard has about a dozen random combos, which is awfully precise. Unfortunately for their business plan, f you want to describe the world in location, you need to have a system adequate to handle muli-floor buildings.
Oh well, cute and worth the 30s I spent clicking around.
Seriously, I am a EE of 15 years and I have given that advice to several shocked STEM wannabe's finishing up high school. It runs so counter to all the cheer leading they get.
The only way to make it is to get specialized in an already niche field. You then become a technical nomad, trekking across the country (or globe) from one dying or mismanaged company to the next for a few more years. The work is damn hard, the pay only OK, and your co-workers are an interesting story (sausage fest, lots of imports with language issues, almost all lacking a full deck of social skills). Expect that other than your basics, that your knowledge's value will have a half life of about 5 years, meaning you have to constantly build up new skills, often without your present company's support. If you thrive on hard technical challenges you can find your reward there, but that is about it.
Yeah, go into business or accounting or some such.
I am a user, not a developer, so I have a little different perspective.
First, what does not work for me is a faceless drop box. Without feedback and a sense that the other end cares, it is hard to motivate to put in a bug request, let alone a good one. Submissions to nameless drop boxes become a rant to vent frustration.
For an external vendor, company A, whose design software I have now been using (suffering through) for 14 years I gave up submitting reports after 3-4 years. I never heard anything back, never saw my requests fulfilled within my attention span. In the last few years I moved to a company that uses the same software, but has managed to get a hold of them by the short and curlies. Now when I submit a request our guys get access to their bug tracker and make sure it gets resolved. I have 1 human point of contact at their end I send my reports to (CC'ing our main guy), he works with me to reproduce the problem and then submit it into the "real" system. The feedback portion is still lacking, but I have gotten dozens of long standing bugs and usability issues fixed.
Our internal software has a simple bug tracking system that is open for all of us to submit to. I almost always follow up with one human point of contact after submitting so he has a chance to see and verify it. Often he adds notes in the software groups own jargon. Later I get email traffic keeping me up to date on the resolution. The human contact plus feedback keeps me engaged and keeps me reminded of how to make a useful submission.
Ipod Touch 1st gen came out in 2007, replaced in 2008 with second gen. So you have a 5-6 year old widget that is no longer supported, big whoop.
The truly shameful thing about Android is that you can still buy brand new Android phones sporting 2.3.7 that were will NEVER be offered an upgrade despite being a malware magnet out of the box. Most iOS devices get several major upgrades, for years after they have been replaced, before being put out to pasture.
I have a mix of iPods, iPads, and an Android phone, and frankly I have to say Apple does a darn good job avoiding fragmentation and avoiding the love'em and leave them feeling you get buying an Android widget. Apple is in real danger of being badly undercut thanks to their gouging for RAM and flash memory that has not budged over the time that prices have plummeted, and expectations of soared. I would like an iPhone, but frankly the level of gouging just goes too far for me to stomach.
I'm going to fail Godwin's law off the bat here, but remember that Hitler was lawfully elected and his SS all worked within the law. The letter of the law can twisted and re-written to make torture "legal", but that does not mean that it is OK since it is legal. The fact that "enhanced interrogation", and now "enhanced observation" is legal and was known to congress should be MUCH scarier than if it came out that the NSA was breaking the law without congressional oversight.
I'll happily trade away the meager incremental improvement all this spying, torturing, and drone killing has brought me to be able to say I am proud of my nation without squirming.
Compare car deaths since 2000 to terrorist deaths, and tell me why we are spending orders of magnitude more on our spying/military/secrecy industrial complex than on car safety improvements.
We are a nation of laws, sure... Secret laws overseen by secret courts who round up people and hold them in secret prisons. Hard to be proud of these laws.
A functioning democracy needs the voters to be sufficiently aware of what their elected officials are doing to be able to be informed voters. Adopting an attitude of only sharing with the country what you have to, instead of only hiding what you have to undermines the whole logical argument supporting the concept of a self governing populace.
I am still wanting to see a viable long term storage solution for the waste, with at least one example of a spent rod finding a final and safe resting place. Otherwise the tail risk of nuclear power is just a myth.
I have opposite problem. I left me cell as an emergency contact on my out of office reply, and now boss man keeps using it instead of either me desk phone, email, or the lab phone. I previously strictly only answeered calls from my wife (who knows only to call me for very important issues during the day), and had previously not read text until the end of the day. I've missed enough impromptu meeting he called via text message that I had to take that off of silent, which is very annoying for all the other texts that come in during the day. Several gentle "cease and desist" conversations have not gotten through. I am tempted to send him a bill to see if that gets through.
A friend of mine got me a really nice copy of Bode's book, which I now treasure. A look into the minds of the pioneers of your field can be fascinating.
Perhaps it is a short sighted negotiating tactic to loot the place while asking the workers to "take one for the team". Destroying good will with the workers can have consequences, and it is rather simplistic to 100% blame the unions for drawing a line after seeing the boss class run up excesses in the middle of harsh and painful negotiations. Hopefully future negotiations will benefit from the fear that employees will not always do ANYTHING to keep their ever downward spiraling jobs.
A three year old isn't trying to make a living using this crap. I'm not THAT old (35) and I am still hating life pretty bad just getting my job done with Office and it's Ribbon interface crap after over a year of being moved to it. Sure a 3-year old could figure that out, but ask them to be efficient and do real work with a real deadline. Windows 8 strikes me as more vomitous spew from whatever bozo thought up the Ribbon crap. Oh well.
Pay is only one piece of a large puzzle. My experience is as follows:
1) HR people can't pick out a good engineer's resume out of a stack to save their life. Worse, is they often can't even post the job in a good location. I was at a company that wanted to hire another copy of me (RF/Microwave Design Engineer, a somewhat rare critter) and I could not find the posting even after the hiring manager told me where to look. If HR is illiterate in your key growth areas you are SOL.
2) Pay is not in my top 3 concerns, and I understand that it is for many other folks. Getting jerked around because my pre-planned vacation (5 months warning) now conflicts with your MS Project fiction should not result in heated words with my manager. Employees need time off, and it should not be a major hassle to take it. If the project is so fragile that a one week absence is so detrimental, you have a staffing or vision problem, not a scheduling problem.
3) My weekends are not fair game except in rare crunches. Sorry, but no. Telling me "You wouldn't do well at a startup." won't get very far in winning me over, especially if you used "need more time with family" as the explanation as to why you left a startup to come work here (a non-startup, FYI).
4) Letting me have beer a day with lunch at my desk won't kill your bottom line, but would be worth 2% salary to me to have a more enjoyable time at work.
5) When I come in on my day off for 4 hours, don't bitch that I changed my timecard to reflect I worked that day. I'm salary, I worked. Telling me to put in 4 hours of PTO will not win you brownie points for the next time you foul up and need me to cancel a date with my wife.
How do we know that all galaxies are made of matter, and that the universe isn't littered with some galaxies made out of antimatter? How would we be able to tell if a galaxy was made of anti-matter due to a different rounding error than occurred in our neck of the woods?
There was great buzz when it first went online, but they actively kept folks from signing up without an invite for a couple months. I tried to check it out, but was rejected, as were many folks I suspect. Google didn't want me, why go back?
Google has done this before too. I just lose interest if they come out with a half finished Beta service, which they have a track record of then not following through with. Apple has this side of things mostly down, zip your lips until you ship. With little Apple generates over-inflated expectations and mostly well executed non-Beta products at launch you have a lot less chance of "Meh" in the marketplace.
Exactly. Pushing your religious beliefs at work is bad enough, but doing it as a manager is something else entirely. Sounds to me like the dude crossed several lines.
I've worked with a few oddballs, like a Young Earth'er who'd fill your ear with great flood stories (the Grand Canyon is proof positive of the great flood!), but they all knew what lines not to cross and I had no problem with them professionally. One is still a good friend. You can talk about this stuff at a peer level, outside of work within reason (i.e. respect folks desire to change the subject when they are clearly getting uncomfortable). You can't create a situation where employees can reasonably be afraid that their review/raise/promotion can affected by agreeing or disagreeing with them on decidedly non-work topics.
Given how the phone is already rolled it, it would be nice if it was broken out as a separate line item. A lot fewer phones would get tossed if you had start paying another ~$20-30/month once you swapped. Folks are fools if they don't upgrade every two years, as they pay for it anyway.
Having phone standards be more open so that it would be easier to switch carriers without buying new phones, and get contracts more Ala Carte would be great. Sadly we all know that We The People don't really matter to the regulators these days.
"be laid off by the time I'm 50 because I'm "too expensive""
Try laid off at 25.
I'm now at my 5th engineering job at 34.
Job 1 paid poorly so I bailed. Job 2 was a nightmare of constant stressful layoffs and exploding work levels so I volunteered for a layoff to end the pain on the 5th round of layoffs (that site eventually hit 85% headcount reduction). Job 3 was a known lame firm, but times were tough. Had an engineering manager standup after a layoff and say "We are ALL temporary employees." I polished my resume up... Job 4 was another abysmal disappointment of disfunction, mis-management, then we got bought by an evil overload (Danaher), so I bailed once it was clear that things were decidedly going to get much worse (they actually reneged on vesting of 401k's and the like). Job 5 finally feels like I found an outfit that is not terrible, but I'd have to move out of state to find equivalent work if they ever ran into a tight spot.
At this rate I'll work about 16-18 different jobs by time I retire, and working at one place till I hit 50 is just a dream.
Wages are low, work is hard, college for these degrees is hard, and job security in general is all but a punchline but especially painful when you are uber specialized. You are smarter to get a more mobile degree like business, as it is also easier and anecdotally it has a much higher wage ceiling than science and engineering.
29 total deaths in either space flights, or training for space flights out of 555 total astronauts is what I did up. With a death rate of ~2% per person in space that is awful by almost any measure.
Slashdot Mirror
My yard has about a dozen random combos, which is awfully precise. Unfortunately for their business plan, f you want to describe the world in location, you need to have a system adequate to handle muli-floor buildings.
Oh well, cute and worth the 30s I spent clicking around.
Seriously, I am a EE of 15 years and I have given that advice to several shocked STEM wannabe's finishing up high school. It runs so counter to all the cheer leading they get.
The only way to make it is to get specialized in an already niche field. You then become a technical nomad, trekking across the country (or globe) from one dying or mismanaged company to the next for a few more years. The work is damn hard, the pay only OK, and your co-workers are an interesting story (sausage fest, lots of imports with language issues, almost all lacking a full deck of social skills). Expect that other than your basics, that your knowledge's value will have a half life of about 5 years, meaning you have to constantly build up new skills, often without your present company's support. If you thrive on hard technical challenges you can find your reward there, but that is about it.
Yeah, go into business or accounting or some such.
I am a user, not a developer, so I have a little different perspective.
First, what does not work for me is a faceless drop box. Without feedback and a sense that the other end cares, it is hard to motivate to put in a bug request, let alone a good one. Submissions to nameless drop boxes become a rant to vent frustration.
For an external vendor, company A, whose design software I have now been using (suffering through) for 14 years I gave up submitting reports after 3-4 years. I never heard anything back, never saw my requests fulfilled within my attention span. In the last few years I moved to a company that uses the same software, but has managed to get a hold of them by the short and curlies. Now when I submit a request our guys get access to their bug tracker and make sure it gets resolved. I have 1 human point of contact at their end I send my reports to (CC'ing our main guy), he works with me to reproduce the problem and then submit it into the "real" system. The feedback portion is still lacking, but I have gotten dozens of long standing bugs and usability issues fixed.
Our internal software has a simple bug tracking system that is open for all of us to submit to. I almost always follow up with one human point of contact after submitting so he has a chance to see and verify it. Often he adds notes in the software groups own jargon. Later I get email traffic keeping me up to date on the resolution. The human contact plus feedback keeps me engaged and keeps me reminded of how to make a useful submission.
Ipod Touch 1st gen came out in 2007, replaced in 2008 with second gen. So you have a 5-6 year old widget that is no longer supported, big whoop.
The truly shameful thing about Android is that you can still buy brand new Android phones sporting 2.3.7 that were will NEVER be offered an upgrade despite being a malware magnet out of the box. Most iOS devices get several major upgrades, for years after they have been replaced, before being put out to pasture.
I have a mix of iPods, iPads, and an Android phone, and frankly I have to say Apple does a darn good job avoiding fragmentation and avoiding the love'em and leave them feeling you get buying an Android widget. Apple is in real danger of being badly undercut thanks to their gouging for RAM and flash memory that has not budged over the time that prices have plummeted, and expectations of soared. I would like an iPhone, but frankly the level of gouging just goes too far for me to stomach.
I'm going to fail Godwin's law off the bat here, but remember that Hitler was lawfully elected and his SS all worked within the law. The letter of the law can twisted and re-written to make torture "legal", but that does not mean that it is OK since it is legal. The fact that "enhanced interrogation", and now "enhanced observation" is legal and was known to congress should be MUCH scarier than if it came out that the NSA was breaking the law without congressional oversight.
I'll happily trade away the meager incremental improvement all this spying, torturing, and drone killing has brought me to be able to say I am proud of my nation without squirming.
Compare car deaths since 2000 to terrorist deaths, and tell me why we are spending orders of magnitude more on our spying/military/secrecy industrial complex than on car safety improvements.
We are a nation of laws, sure... Secret laws overseen by secret courts who round up people and hold them in secret prisons. Hard to be proud of these laws.
A functioning democracy needs the voters to be sufficiently aware of what their elected officials are doing to be able to be informed voters. Adopting an attitude of only sharing with the country what you have to, instead of only hiding what you have to undermines the whole logical argument supporting the concept of a self governing populace.
Oh well.
I am still wanting to see a viable long term storage solution for the waste, with at least one example of a spent rod finding a final and safe resting place. Otherwise the tail risk of nuclear power is just a myth.
Twice a week, ride the bike to work the other days.
I have opposite problem. I left me cell as an emergency contact on my out of office reply, and now boss man keeps using it instead of either me desk phone, email, or the lab phone. I previously strictly only answeered calls from my wife (who knows only to call me for very important issues during the day), and had previously not read text until the end of the day. I've missed enough impromptu meeting he called via text message that I had to take that off of silent, which is very annoying for all the other texts that come in during the day. Several gentle "cease and desist" conversations have not gotten through. I am tempted to send him a bill to see if that gets through.
A friend of mine got me a really nice copy of Bode's book, which I now treasure. A look into the minds of the pioneers of your field can be fascinating.
Game play still is more important than FPS, see: RAGE.
A good game with low FPS is tragic, but a lame game at even the highest FPS still just sucks.
Perhaps it is a short sighted negotiating tactic to loot the place while asking the workers to "take one for the team". Destroying good will with the workers can have consequences, and it is rather simplistic to 100% blame the unions for drawing a line after seeing the boss class run up excesses in the middle of harsh and painful negotiations. Hopefully future negotiations will benefit from the fear that employees will not always do ANYTHING to keep their ever downward spiraling jobs.
A three year old isn't trying to make a living using this crap. I'm not THAT old (35) and I am still hating life pretty bad just getting my job done with Office and it's Ribbon interface crap after over a year of being moved to it. Sure a 3-year old could figure that out, but ask them to be efficient and do real work with a real deadline. Windows 8 strikes me as more vomitous spew from whatever bozo thought up the Ribbon crap. Oh well.
Or Clippy Mobile as a competitor for Siri.
Wish I had mod points.
Pay is only one piece of a large puzzle. My experience is as follows:
1) HR people can't pick out a good engineer's resume out of a stack to save their life. Worse, is they often can't even post the job in a good location. I was at a company that wanted to hire another copy of me (RF/Microwave Design Engineer, a somewhat rare critter) and I could not find the posting even after the hiring manager told me where to look. If HR is illiterate in your key growth areas you are SOL.
2) Pay is not in my top 3 concerns, and I understand that it is for many other folks. Getting jerked around because my pre-planned vacation (5 months warning) now conflicts with your MS Project fiction should not result in heated words with my manager. Employees need time off, and it should not be a major hassle to take it. If the project is so fragile that a one week absence is so detrimental, you have a staffing or vision problem, not a scheduling problem.
3) My weekends are not fair game except in rare crunches. Sorry, but no. Telling me "You wouldn't do well at a startup." won't get very far in winning me over, especially if you used "need more time with family" as the explanation as to why you left a startup to come work here (a non-startup, FYI).
4) Letting me have beer a day with lunch at my desk won't kill your bottom line, but would be worth 2% salary to me to have a more enjoyable time at work.
5) When I come in on my day off for 4 hours, don't bitch that I changed my timecard to reflect I worked that day. I'm salary, I worked. Telling me to put in 4 hours of PTO will not win you brownie points for the next time you foul up and need me to cancel a date with my wife.
Thanks! It is nice to read that I'm not the only nutjob running this thought experiment.
How do we know that all galaxies are made of matter, and that the universe isn't littered with some galaxies made out of antimatter? How would we be able to tell if a galaxy was made of anti-matter due to a different rounding error than occurred in our neck of the woods?
There was great buzz when it first went online, but they actively kept folks from signing up without an invite for a couple months. I tried to check it out, but was rejected, as were many folks I suspect. Google didn't want me, why go back?
Google has done this before too. I just lose interest if they come out with a half finished Beta service, which they have a track record of then not following through with. Apple has this side of things mostly down, zip your lips until you ship. With little Apple generates over-inflated expectations and mostly well executed non-Beta products at launch you have a lot less chance of "Meh" in the marketplace.
Nuff said.
Exactly. Pushing your religious beliefs at work is bad enough, but doing it as a manager is something else entirely. Sounds to me like the dude crossed several lines.
I've worked with a few oddballs, like a Young Earth'er who'd fill your ear with great flood stories (the Grand Canyon is proof positive of the great flood!), but they all knew what lines not to cross and I had no problem with them professionally. One is still a good friend. You can talk about this stuff at a peer level, outside of work within reason (i.e. respect folks desire to change the subject when they are clearly getting uncomfortable). You can't create a situation where employees can reasonably be afraid that their review/raise/promotion can affected by agreeing or disagreeing with them on decidedly non-work topics.
Given how the phone is already rolled it, it would be nice if it was broken out as a separate line item. A lot fewer phones would get tossed if you had start paying another ~$20-30/month once you swapped. Folks are fools if they don't upgrade every two years, as they pay for it anyway.
Having phone standards be more open so that it would be easier to switch carriers without buying new phones, and get contracts more Ala Carte would be great. Sadly we all know that We The People don't really matter to the regulators these days.
"be laid off by the time I'm 50 because I'm "too expensive""
Try laid off at 25.
I'm now at my 5th engineering job at 34.
Job 1 paid poorly so I bailed.
Job 2 was a nightmare of constant stressful layoffs and exploding work levels so I volunteered for a layoff to end the pain on the 5th round of layoffs (that site eventually hit 85% headcount reduction).
Job 3 was a known lame firm, but times were tough. Had an engineering manager standup after a layoff and say "We are ALL temporary employees." I polished my resume up...
Job 4 was another abysmal disappointment of disfunction, mis-management, then we got bought by an evil overload (Danaher), so I bailed once it was clear that things were decidedly going to get much worse (they actually reneged on vesting of 401k's and the like).
Job 5 finally feels like I found an outfit that is not terrible, but I'd have to move out of state to find equivalent work if they ever ran into a tight spot.
At this rate I'll work about 16-18 different jobs by time I retire, and working at one place till I hit 50 is just a dream.
Wages are low, work is hard, college for these degrees is hard, and job security in general is all but a punchline but especially painful when you are uber specialized. You are smarter to get a more mobile degree like business, as it is also easier and anecdotally it has a much higher wage ceiling than science and engineering.
Not that I'm jaded or anything...
29 total deaths in either space flights, or training for space flights out of 555 total astronauts is what I did up. With a death rate of ~2% per person in space that is awful by almost any measure.