Yeah, emigration would be really, really tempting (though not to Iceland, for me - personal taste) but EU countries (or any first-world countries that I know of) are not welcoming Americans these days. Even getting permanent residence in Canada is an uphill battle on a really, really steep hill.
"When you program, you don't do it in a pressure filled environment. You take your time, you gather requirements, you design and implement within the time available and you do the best job."
Precisely. As an interviewee, you're in a very high-pressure, stressful situation, and many people, myself included, do not perform well on technical tasks in those circumstances. I have never *once* in my long development/mgmt career had to produce architectures or designs or code under anything remotely resembling interview-stress conditions. Dev jobs entail stress, surely, but it's an entirely different variety from that endured in an interview. The result: the sorts of interviews described here weed out, among other things, capable, perhaps excellent people who will excel under real-world conditions.
I like the approach of having candidates submit solutions to small but fun problems along with an application/CV. As a candidate, I'll enjoy wrangling with the problem and creating a solution that I think will impress you, the interviewer(s). In an interview, if there is one, we can discuss my approach and how it led to my solution, we can address any weaknesses you find, we can compare my solution with other possible solutions. We can then change the requirements (I've heard this happens in dev environments...) and talk about how the solution might also change.
This approach puts the candidate in something resembling a "real world" problem-solving environment and allows them to display both the hard and soft skills needed for success in most tech companies. I've been an interviewer many times (100% very small or start-up companies), have hired smart, successful development people, and have never wasted my, or my interviewees' time, with puzzles and on-the-spot coding challenges. There are a number of prominent characteristics of successful, if not great, developers. In almost all circumstances, the ability to code up a sorting algorithm in language X, from memory, in 15 minutes while I stare at them neither is, nor contributes to, having any of those characteristics.
Go to NL, just like that? When will my work visa be ready for me? Let me know and I'll get my plans together.
Really, my brief research into the idea of working in the EU resulted in the conclusion that the odds were not good. Even for the UK pretty much all the job listings I saw indicated that I had to already be legally entitled to work there before they'd consider my application.
I didn't know about her and the Socialist/drug angle. It's been a while but I don't think these things come up in any overt way in the book. It's not like The Jungle by any stretch of the imagination. Now that I think of it, I'm almost sure she's written at least one article for the Freedom From Religion Foundation's monthly newsletter. And I believe it was about patriarchy and the oppression of women in the various flavors of Christianity. That would make her a feminist, atheist, pro-drug socialist. Not to mention an uppity woman.
Alexie's book, written for teenagers, yet quite satisfying reading for adults, has a few references to jacking off as I recall. Any parent of teenagers who thinks this would be foreign territory to their spawn is delusional. But Nickel and Dimed?? Are the uber-capitalists now descending on libraries to challenge the sort of books that illustrate that the economic status-quo is not exactly peachy for everyone?
I was just going to post something about that (contracts). Did he have to get a note from his parents?
It could be that someone over 18, the parents perhaps, were the C-level execs and he was just the majority shareholder.
It WAS wasteful -> they could have walked down any street in the U.S. and found bodies massive enough to use in this experiment. And given the relative compactness of the bodies they could have immersed them in honey for far less than the cost of doing so with a planet.
And so have bottle-makers. It's long puzzled me why we (Americans) have fully accepted buying, specifically, soft drinks in liter or half-liter bottles, yet little else. You don't go to the store and pick up a liter of milk. Or get a liter of beer down at the pub. But soda? "I'll take a couple of two-liter bottles of Carb 'o Matic soda." There may be other examples of widespread "consumer acceptance" of the metric system, but this one is the most apparent and most inexplicable to me. Explication?
Get back to us when you aren't an AC *and* you've heard of, oh, companies like LinkedIn, EDFT, Twitter, Novell, the Guardian, Xebia, Xerox, FourSquare, Sony, Siemens, Thatcham, OPower, GridGain, AppJet, Reaktor [cut&paste from scala-lang.org] and my dev group. There are some good articles on the net about some of these companies and their Scala experiences, and if you can't read, some videos too. But don't get back to us before you can count beyond five.
} Python? Py doesn't use curlies for begin/end.
I adore Python and its whitespace goodness, but Scala is really growing on me too. It seems to just intuit the "ends". The dreaded curlies get used about 50% less often than with Java.
I'm equally comfortable with Eclipse and Netbeans. I just discovered that IntelliJ has a free "community edition" now. I've played around with it some and it appears to be pretty decent. It NB starts to suck ass, there are plenty of options. With the Play! web framework (Java, Scala) an IDE is a convenience but far from necessary, as there are no (visible) compilation steps, no builds to be done, just edit, save, reload.
Quite right. It's astonishing how when tens of thousands (hundreds perhaps, I don't have authoritative numbers) of Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been killed by the U.S. as part of these wars we started, citizens here (U.S.) just brush the fact off as if we were talking about insects. As if these innocent civilians have no children, no families, no hopes, no dreams. They just happen to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, sucks to be them. And our government (and its sycophants) goes around slinging the "xxx has blood on his hands" epithet. It's clear what institution in this turmoil truly has blood on its hands. As far as I can tell it's because, to us, it's only Americans who matter. Their lives are worth 10x what those brown people so far away are worth.
It's Room 101 for me I'm afraid.
to me. Just get the leakers to leak to the honeypot site. Honeypottiers dribble out a few semi-juicy tidbits here and there but keep the good stuff locked down. No publicity. No "releases" without good strong infosec condoms. This would be just what the gubbmint and big corporations would want out there rather than media-blitzing, uncontrollable WL. The only question is, is this a U.S. effort or is it run by the International One-World-Government Conspiracy?
You beat me to it, I was just going to suggest that tourists make the trip to the Maryhill site instead. More are belong to England pix here:
http://www.maryhillmuseum.org/stonehenge.html
A small fraction, EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Straight from the offense budget. From TFA:
"China is reportedly spending $500-billion over 20 years to construct a massive high-speed rail network."
So $25B/yr. Divided by the $685B/yr (Wikipedia) offense budget (2010), and that's 3.6% a year if we were to do the same. A Small Fraction.
Using your numbers, this Small Fraction would buy us 25 train-lines PER YEAR. I'd say that in 20 years we could have us quite a nice network of them.
Also I note from Wiki: "By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars".
We have annual military spending greater than all of the other nations of the world combined, We just wasted a $1T+ on overseas wars, and those costs continue to mount. That would have bought a hell of a rail system, maybe a couple of them. Yet according to you, a proper train system is a "pipe dream". It's not a pipe dream at all if we get our priorities right and spend money to improve our country rather than demolishing overseas ones.
As an aside, this line of reasoning applies to the renewable energy issue as well. "It can't be done, it's not realistic, it's just a hippie pipe dream". Let's see how much of a pipe dream it is if we put the kind of resources into green energy R&D as we do into weapons-related R&D and related ongoing weapon-system costs.
The government's job is to build things and provide services that citizens need but that are not profitable. The military isn't profitable (though defense contracting is very much so). Putting in roads is unprofitable.. and would probably be impossible for private industry alone to do because they'd need the power of eminent domain, like the government has, to get the land to do it on. Sewer systems and treatment plants are unprofitable. Basic research is often unprofitable. What private entity is going to pay to send space probes to Jupiter, or do weather/climate research? The answer is none.
The very fact that something is unprofitable, and that no private party has stepped up to do it for that reason, does not mean the thing is not worth doing and worth having the government do it.
Speaking of the military, just a small fraction of that $500B-$600B (more?) annual offense budget, currently being in great part wasted on failing attempts at nation-building, would buy us this rail service and a whole lotta other stuff besides, without adding to the deficit. The military is just a few (well, a hell of a lot) of people getting massive slush funds for their states that everyone else is expected to pay for.
I'm with you on telecommuting though. It's idiotic for most people to transport a sack of meat - themselves- in a one to two ton container just to sit at a desk and in all likelihood be no more, if not less, productive than they'd be at home. And then transport the same meat/steel back at the end of the day.
That sounds like a good explanation to me.
I wonder if B&W photos made today are the result of some sort of quantum entanglement neutrinoid plasma time dialation effect? A wormhole of sorts, like the one Hollywood used in order to make Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, emigration would be really, really tempting (though not to Iceland, for me - personal taste) but EU countries (or any first-world countries that I know of) are not welcoming Americans these days. Even getting permanent residence in Canada is an uphill battle on a really, really steep hill.
"When you program, you don't do it in a pressure filled environment. You take your time, you gather requirements, you design and implement within the time available and you do the best job."
Precisely. As an interviewee, you're in a very high-pressure, stressful situation, and many people, myself included, do not perform well on technical tasks in those circumstances. I have never *once* in my long development/mgmt career had to produce architectures or designs or code under anything remotely resembling interview-stress conditions. Dev jobs entail stress, surely, but it's an entirely different variety from that endured in an interview. The result: the sorts of interviews described here weed out, among other things, capable, perhaps excellent people who will excel under real-world conditions.
I like the approach of having candidates submit solutions to small but fun problems along with an application/CV. As a candidate, I'll enjoy wrangling with the problem and creating a solution that I think will impress you, the interviewer(s). In an interview, if there is one, we can discuss my approach and how it led to my solution, we can address any weaknesses you find, we can compare my solution with other possible solutions. We can then change the requirements (I've heard this happens in dev environments ...) and talk about how the solution might also change.
This approach puts the candidate in something resembling a "real world" problem-solving environment and allows them to display both the hard and soft skills needed for success in most tech companies. I've been an interviewer many times (100% very small or start-up companies), have hired smart, successful development people, and have never wasted my, or my interviewees' time, with puzzles and on-the-spot coding challenges. There are a number of prominent characteristics of successful, if not great, developers. In almost all circumstances, the ability to code up a sorting algorithm in language X, from memory, in 15 minutes while I stare at them neither is, nor contributes to, having any of those characteristics.
Go to NL, just like that? When will my work visa be ready for me? Let me know and I'll get my plans together. Really, my brief research into the idea of working in the EU resulted in the conclusion that the odds were not good. Even for the UK pretty much all the job listings I saw indicated that I had to already be legally entitled to work there before they'd consider my application.
I didn't know about her and the Socialist/drug angle. It's been a while but I don't think these things come up in any overt way in the book. It's not like The Jungle by any stretch of the imagination. Now that I think of it, I'm almost sure she's written at least one article for the Freedom From Religion Foundation's monthly newsletter. And I believe it was about patriarchy and the oppression of women in the various flavors of Christianity. That would make her a feminist, atheist, pro-drug socialist. Not to mention an uppity woman.
Alexie's book, written for teenagers, yet quite satisfying reading for adults, has a few references to jacking off as I recall. Any parent of teenagers who thinks this would be foreign territory to their spawn is delusional. But Nickel and Dimed?? Are the uber-capitalists now descending on libraries to challenge the sort of books that illustrate that the economic status-quo is not exactly peachy for everyone?
I was just going to post something about that (contracts). Did he have to get a note from his parents? It could be that someone over 18, the parents perhaps, were the C-level execs and he was just the majority shareholder.
It WAS wasteful -> they could have walked down any street in the U.S. and found bodies massive enough to use in this experiment. And given the relative compactness of the bodies they could have immersed them in honey for far less than the cost of doing so with a planet.
And so have bottle-makers. It's long puzzled me why we (Americans) have fully accepted buying, specifically, soft drinks in liter or half-liter bottles, yet little else. You don't go to the store and pick up a liter of milk. Or get a liter of beer down at the pub. But soda? "I'll take a couple of two-liter bottles of Carb 'o Matic soda." There may be other examples of widespread "consumer acceptance" of the metric system, but this one is the most apparent and most inexplicable to me. Explication?
Get back to us when you aren't an AC *and* you've heard of, oh, companies like LinkedIn, EDFT, Twitter, Novell, the Guardian, Xebia, Xerox, FourSquare, Sony, Siemens, Thatcham, OPower, GridGain, AppJet, Reaktor [cut&paste from scala-lang.org] and my dev group. There are some good articles on the net about some of these companies and their Scala experiences, and if you can't read, some videos too. But don't get back to us before you can count beyond five.
Get back to us when you're no longer an AC.
To hell with this, where's my built-in Scala 2.8.x and SBT support? Instead I get PHP and "Guided installation to JDBC driver". Nice. Thanks.
Damn cool, I didn't know this, thanks. It's not enough to compel me to give up spamgourmet or e4ward.com but it's something new to add to the arsenal.
} Python? Py doesn't use curlies for begin/end. I adore Python and its whitespace goodness, but Scala is really growing on me too. It seems to just intuit the "ends". The dreaded curlies get used about 50% less often than with Java.
d$
:w
Hot damn, I've already got me an IDE!
I'm equally comfortable with Eclipse and Netbeans. I just discovered that IntelliJ has a free "community edition" now. I've played around with it some and it appears to be pretty decent. It NB starts to suck ass, there are plenty of options. With the Play! web framework (Java, Scala) an IDE is a convenience but far from necessary, as there are no (visible) compilation steps, no builds to be done, just edit, save, reload.
Quite right. It's astonishing how when tens of thousands (hundreds perhaps, I don't have authoritative numbers) of Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been killed by the U.S. as part of these wars we started, citizens here (U.S.) just brush the fact off as if we were talking about insects. As if these innocent civilians have no children, no families, no hopes, no dreams. They just happen to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, sucks to be them. And our government (and its sycophants) goes around slinging the "xxx has blood on his hands" epithet. It's clear what institution in this turmoil truly has blood on its hands. As far as I can tell it's because, to us, it's only Americans who matter. Their lives are worth 10x what those brown people so far away are worth. It's Room 101 for me I'm afraid.
to me. Just get the leakers to leak to the honeypot site. Honeypottiers dribble out a few semi-juicy tidbits here and there but keep the good stuff locked down. No publicity. No "releases" without good strong infosec condoms. This would be just what the gubbmint and big corporations would want out there rather than media-blitzing, uncontrollable WL. The only question is, is this a U.S. effort or is it run by the International One-World-Government Conspiracy?
Commended? He should be promoted.
You beat me to it, I was just going to suggest that tourists make the trip to the Maryhill site instead. More are belong to England pix here: http://www.maryhillmuseum.org/stonehenge.html
Nope that's the _very first_ thing I thought of too. But you caught me sleeping here at Stately Wayne Mansion. Bunch of Jokers.
Bzzzt. Godwin's Law violation. Core dumped.
A small fraction, EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Straight from the offense budget. From TFA: "China is reportedly spending $500-billion over 20 years to construct a massive high-speed rail network."
So $25B/yr. Divided by the $685B/yr (Wikipedia) offense budget (2010), and that's 3.6% a year if we were to do the same. A Small Fraction.
Using your numbers, this Small Fraction would buy us 25 train-lines PER YEAR. I'd say that in 20 years we could have us quite a nice network of them.
Also I note from Wiki: "By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars".
We have annual military spending greater than all of the other nations of the world combined, We just wasted a $1T+ on overseas wars, and those costs continue to mount. That would have bought a hell of a rail system, maybe a couple of them. Yet according to you, a proper train system is a "pipe dream". It's not a pipe dream at all if we get our priorities right and spend money to improve our country rather than demolishing overseas ones.
As an aside, this line of reasoning applies to the renewable energy issue as well. "It can't be done, it's not realistic, it's just a hippie pipe dream". Let's see how much of a pipe dream it is if we put the kind of resources into green energy R&D as we do into weapons-related R&D and related ongoing weapon-system costs.
The very fact that something is unprofitable, and that no private party has stepped up to do it for that reason, does not mean the thing is not worth doing and worth having the government do it.
Speaking of the military, just a small fraction of that $500B-$600B (more?) annual offense budget, currently being in great part wasted on failing attempts at nation-building, would buy us this rail service and a whole lotta other stuff besides, without adding to the deficit. The military is just a few (well, a hell of a lot) of people getting massive slush funds for their states that everyone else is expected to pay for.
I'm with you on telecommuting though. It's idiotic for most people to transport a sack of meat - themselves- in a one to two ton container just to sit at a desk and in all likelihood be no more, if not less, productive than they'd be at home. And then transport the same meat/steel back at the end of the day.
That sir, was a work of art.
That sounds like a good explanation to me. I wonder if B&W photos made today are the result of some sort of quantum entanglement neutrinoid plasma time dialation effect? A wormhole of sorts, like the one Hollywood used in order to make Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.