We actually utilize them... and they still send us many candidates who don't pass our technical screening. Possibly because these companies are in the business of getting people hired, and in the long run they probably meet most of their clients' standards. We're a little pickier though.
At what point did I "argue for anti-worker actions"? I don't want any government involvement in this issue. I just wish our pool of candidates today had as many good candidates (percentage-wise) as our pool of candidates before the tech boom.
You need to calm down and respond to what people actually say.
No, the OP was probably suggesting that you remove personal and sensitive data from your devices and keep it at home. Why travel with a computer that's loaded with your bank account info? Use a separate laptop for travel, or else keep the sensitive stuff on removable partitions (SSDs, USB keys, etc) which never leave the house.
Better yet: if all you need the laptop for is reading eBooks and occasionally checking your FB/Gmail/whatever account, leave the thing at home and make do with internet cafes, hotel computers, and the like.
Don't care how you do it, the free market will solve the problem.
Actually, the Free Market has already solved the problem. People that don't meet our standards don't get hired, and we always manage to find people who do meet our standards -- either because they're good, or because they've shown the potential to learn.
But God, we have to wade through a lot of haystack to find those needles. I just want there to be more needles and less hay. Hopefully some of the hay will find something they're better at than programming, and stop sending us their resumes.
Not every company has a CEO who earns tens of millions while the employees scrape by on a meager existence. Many small IT consulting firms have CEOs who are also developers -- they're just developers who went independent and then had the ability to grow their business and bring on some help. They get bonuses, sure, but we're not talking Wall Street scale compensation.
Agreed, and I far prefer training junior-level developers to be good senior-level developers. But when a business finds itself in a period of sudden growth, it may have to bring people on board in a hurry, and sometimes that means bringing on additional senior-level staff as well who can be given a problem and hit the ground running, because the existing staff is already dedicated to demanding projects.
No, there is simply a large ratio of bad-to-good developers and a limited amount of time and resources to find good ones when it's time to ramp up for a new project.
When new project work comes along, we have to fill vacancies in about one month. We post a position, and get hundreds of applicants. So we look at the resumes. Most, as it turns out, are a tissue of lies: people simply claim to have skills they don't, but we have to start somewhere. So we have the most promising candidates do web tests, and we phone-screen. That cuts the number down to dozens, but it's still not good enough, because we have to do in-person interviews with at least two senior techies in attendance. That takes time and we're already on tight deadlines.
The problem isn't that we lose good candidates because we didn't offer enough (although that does happen from time to time). The problem is the avalanche of candidates we have to wade through when a position is announced. If just fifty percent of those candidates met my standards I'd have no problem.
Ironically, since I love mentoring, I'm far more like to approve a junior-level candidate and train them up, than I am to approve a senior-level candidate who has demonstrated by their lack of ability that they probably won't improve.
Suppose we quadruple developers pay. All that money has to come from somewhere. Shall we raise our rates to our customers four-fold? How about just two-fold? In that case, our competitors will easily beat us on price. Which is also how market economies work.
We don't have useless managers or middle-managers here. Most of our staff are boots-on-the-ground techies -- including me. But business competition is fierce, and we can't keep positions unfilled for more than a month while we search for good people at reasonable rates.
There simply are a lot of awful developers out there, and it's difficult to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of promising resumes in a few weeks, winnowing them down to a manageable number of phone-screens, then web tests, then in-person interviews until we find a few candidates who actually know what they're doing.
I have been interviewing IT candidates for years. We don't have a shortage of applicants. We do have a shortage of good applicants. I am increasingly dismayed by the number of individuals who profess ten or even twenty years of IT experience on their resumes, yet who cannot solve the most basic design problem or answer questions about the fundamentals of the language they use daily.
This goes for both native-born U.S. workers and those from outside, by the way.
I suspect that many people become software developers because they believe it to be a lucrative -- or, at least, employable -- field. But being a developer is like being a novelist or an athlete or a professional chess player: it requires a certain amount of discipline, above and beyond just showing up and doing the work assigned to you. Where I work we can't afford to have bad coders, so it's very hard to make the cut.
The telomere-shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and animal studies suggest that this is responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans. Telomeres protect a cell's chromosomes from fusing with each other or rearranging—abnormalities that can lead to cancer—and so cells are destroyed when their telomeres are consumed. Most cancers are the result of "immortal" cells that have ways of evading this programmed destruction
I believe we're basically in agreement here. (And by the way, as I understand it, the term "gender identity disorder" was retired in favor of "gender dysphoria" for the DSM-V, exactly for the reasons you point out: it's no longer considered a disorder.)
But we haven't really classified a personality trait as a medical disorder. Ordinary narcissism is still narcissism. Extreme narcissism is still narcissism. But extreme narcissism which with the following symptoms becomes highly problematic for the individual and those around them, and thus is distinguished as "Narcissistic Personality Disorder":
- Expects to be recognized as superior and special, without superior accomplishments - Expects constant attention, admiration and positive reinforcement from others - Envies others and believes others envy him/her - Is preoccupied with thoughts and fantasies of great success, enormous attractiveness, power, intelligence - Lacks the ability to empathize with the feelings or desires of others - Is arrogant in attitudes and behavior - Has expectations of special treatment that are unrealistic
I mean, we could call this "Delusional Disorder #521", but since the nature of the disorder is a super-magnified version of the narcissistic personality trait, "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" is a better mnemonic.
And I do still blame people if they're being arrogant pricks, whether they fall into this class or not. The only difference to me is that if they've been diagnosed with NPD, they go from being "arrogant pricks who need to grow up" to "arrogant pricks who should be in therapy or on meds".
Gender reassignment surgery helps someone "be who they are", and works very well.
If it helps, you can think of gender reassignment in the same way as a prosthetic for people born with missing legs or arms. Those people could "live in the real world" with their disability, or we can give them a way to achieve what they desire.
As for your "black/white" example: most people with dark skin *like* who they are, *like* their skin color, and don't see themselves as "suffering" directly because of it. Rather, their suffering is because some racist whites are *making* them suffer needlessly. It's a different thing entirely.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is narcissism taken to unhealthy extremes; it describes only about 1 percent of the population. One might argue that "being an asshole" affects a far, far larger percentage.
The issue was supposedly raised during the trial itself, but for all we know (s)he has felt this way for years (as said in the article) and just kept it VERY tightly under wraps because of the demands of a military career. Now that motivation is somewhat moot.
Self-identifying as a woman is not a sign of insanity. There are quite a number of transgendered people in the world today, from young to old, pre-op or post-op, leading perfectly normal lives.
While we used to refer to the condition as Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM-IV, it was replaced with Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-V because we now don't think of it as a disorder. In fact, the general "treatment" is not to make the mind match the body, but to make the body match the mind. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder .
I suspect that -- other than wiring up GUI elements to events -- there aren't a lot of interesting things you can do with a GUI-based code builder that you can't do more efficiently by writing actual code.
I gather that the idea is to lower the bar for "Hello World"-type apps, but once that's done, I have to wonder: are any serious app developers using this as a development bed for complex apps?
Yes, and Manhattan Island belonged to the Lenape tribe long before Europeans came to America. That doesn't give the tribe's surviving members the undisputed right to barricade the Holland Tunnel.* Times change.
"Bing is another powerful tool Microsoft can juice. Despite “continuing to rack up operating losses,” Bing is “inching up the search ladder,” according to Caris, growing revenues 13% to $784 million. Microsoft is sitting on a massive $512.7 billion war chest with which it supports acquisitions and businesses like Bing, which are strategic in tapping into Google and Yahoo’s all-important search revenues. According to comScore, Bing’s market share is now up to 15.1% (as of December), compared to 14.5% for Yahoo and 66% for Google."
Oh, I agree... Microsoft doesn't have its act together. My point was that given its war chest and the demands of its current user base, it should. There's simply no excuse.
I think that's why some of us on/. come down harder on Microsoft then on smaller companies. Sure, all software shops produce buggy code from time to time. And many vendors ship products that they hope will be game changers but that, ultimately, people aren't interested in. But most of these companies don't have a zillion dollars to spend on usability studies, development, and testing.
Some folks argue that the stories (or, rather, the presentation and discussion of them) are unfairly slanted against Microsoft. For me, it comes down to this:
When a company has a warchest in excess of 500 billion US dollars, as well as immense market penetration in a variety of domains -- desktop operating systems, web browser, word processing software, spreadsheet software, etc. -- it is expected to have its act together.
Slashdot Mirror
We actually utilize them... and they still send us many candidates who don't pass our technical screening. Possibly because these companies are in the business of getting people hired, and in the long run they probably meet most of their clients' standards. We're a little pickier though.
At what point did I "argue for anti-worker actions"? I don't want any government involvement in this issue. I just wish our pool of candidates today had as many good candidates (percentage-wise) as our pool of candidates before the tech boom.
You need to calm down and respond to what people actually say.
No, the OP was probably suggesting that you remove personal and sensitive data from your devices and keep it at home. Why travel with a computer that's loaded with your bank account info? Use a separate laptop for travel, or else keep the sensitive stuff on removable partitions (SSDs, USB keys, etc) which never leave the house.
Better yet: if all you need the laptop for is reading eBooks and occasionally checking your FB/Gmail/whatever account, leave the thing at home and make do with internet cafes, hotel computers, and the like.
Don't care how you do it, the free market will solve the problem.
Actually, the Free Market has already solved the problem. People that don't meet our standards don't get hired, and we always manage to find people who do meet our standards -- either because they're good, or because they've shown the potential to learn.
But God, we have to wade through a lot of haystack to find those needles. I just want there to be more needles and less hay. Hopefully some of the hay will find something they're better at than programming, and stop sending us their resumes.
Not every company has a CEO who earns tens of millions while the employees scrape by on a meager existence. Many small IT consulting firms have CEOs who are also developers -- they're just developers who went independent and then had the ability to grow their business and bring on some help. They get bonuses, sure, but we're not talking Wall Street scale compensation.
Agreed, and I far prefer training junior-level developers to be good senior-level developers. But when a business finds itself in a period of sudden growth, it may have to bring people on board in a hurry, and sometimes that means bringing on additional senior-level staff as well who can be given a problem and hit the ground running, because the existing staff is already dedicated to demanding projects.
No, there is simply a large ratio of bad-to-good developers and a limited amount of time and resources to find good ones when it's time to ramp up for a new project.
When new project work comes along, we have to fill vacancies in about one month. We post a position, and get hundreds of applicants. So we look at the resumes. Most, as it turns out, are a tissue of lies: people simply claim to have skills they don't, but we have to start somewhere. So we have the most promising candidates do web tests, and we phone-screen. That cuts the number down to dozens, but it's still not good enough, because we have to do in-person interviews with at least two senior techies in attendance. That takes time and we're already on tight deadlines.
The problem isn't that we lose good candidates because we didn't offer enough (although that does happen from time to time). The problem is the avalanche of candidates we have to wade through when a position is announced. If just fifty percent of those candidates met my standards I'd have no problem.
Ironically, since I love mentoring, I'm far more like to approve a junior-level candidate and train them up, than I am to approve a senior-level candidate who has demonstrated by their lack of ability that they probably won't improve.
Suppose we quadruple developers pay. All that money has to come from somewhere. Shall we raise our rates to our customers four-fold? How about just two-fold? In that case, our competitors will easily beat us on price. Which is also how market economies work.
We don't have useless managers or middle-managers here. Most of our staff are boots-on-the-ground techies -- including me. But business competition is fierce, and we can't keep positions unfilled for more than a month while we search for good people at reasonable rates.
There simply are a lot of awful developers out there, and it's difficult to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of promising resumes in a few weeks, winnowing them down to a manageable number of phone-screens, then web tests, then in-person interviews until we find a few candidates who actually know what they're doing.
I have been interviewing IT candidates for years. We don't have a shortage of applicants. We do have a shortage of good applicants. I am increasingly dismayed by the number of individuals who profess ten or even twenty years of IT experience on their resumes, yet who cannot solve the most basic design problem or answer questions about the fundamentals of the language they use daily.
This goes for both native-born U.S. workers and those from outside, by the way.
I suspect that many people become software developers because they believe it to be a lucrative -- or, at least, employable -- field. But being a developer is like being a novelist or an athlete or a professional chess player: it requires a certain amount of discipline, above and beyond just showing up and doing the work assigned to you. Where I work we can't afford to have bad coders, so it's very hard to make the cut.
Telomeres function as a kind of clock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
...and my first thought was: Wow! How many zeros in a brazillion?
I believe we're basically in agreement here. (And by the way, as I understand it, the term "gender identity disorder" was retired in favor of "gender dysphoria" for the DSM-V, exactly for the reasons you point out: it's no longer considered a disorder.)
But we haven't really classified a personality trait as a medical disorder. Ordinary narcissism is still narcissism. Extreme narcissism is still narcissism. But extreme narcissism which with the following symptoms becomes highly problematic for the individual and those around them, and thus is distinguished as "Narcissistic Personality Disorder":
- Expects to be recognized as superior and special, without superior accomplishments
- Expects constant attention, admiration and positive reinforcement from others
- Envies others and believes others envy him/her
- Is preoccupied with thoughts and fantasies of great success, enormous attractiveness, power, intelligence
- Lacks the ability to empathize with the feelings or desires of others
- Is arrogant in attitudes and behavior
- Has expectations of special treatment that are unrealistic
I mean, we could call this "Delusional Disorder #521", but since the nature of the disorder is a super-magnified version of the narcissistic personality trait, "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" is a better mnemonic.
And I do still blame people if they're being arrogant pricks, whether they fall into this class or not. The only difference to me is that if they've been diagnosed with NPD, they go from being "arrogant pricks who need to grow up" to "arrogant pricks who should be in therapy or on meds".
Gender reassignment surgery helps someone "be who they are", and works very well.
If it helps, you can think of gender reassignment in the same way as a prosthetic for people born with missing legs or arms. Those people could "live in the real world" with their disability, or we can give them a way to achieve what they desire.
As for your "black/white" example: most people with dark skin *like* who they are, *like* their skin color, and don't see themselves as "suffering" directly because of it. Rather, their suffering is because some racist whites are *making* them suffer needlessly. It's a different thing entirely.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is narcissism taken to unhealthy extremes; it describes only about 1 percent of the population. One might argue that "being an asshole" affects a far, far larger percentage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
The issue was supposedly raised during the trial itself, but for all we know (s)he has felt this way for years (as said in the article) and just kept it VERY tightly under wraps because of the demands of a military career. Now that motivation is somewhat moot.
Self-identifying as a woman is not a sign of insanity. There are quite a number of transgendered people in the world today, from young to old, pre-op or post-op, leading perfectly normal lives.
While we used to refer to the condition as Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM-IV, it was replaced with Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-V because we now don't think of it as a disorder. In fact, the general "treatment" is not to make the mind match the body, but to make the body match the mind. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder .
I suspect that -- other than wiring up GUI elements to events -- there aren't a lot of interesting things you can do with a GUI-based code builder that you can't do more efficiently by writing actual code.
I gather that the idea is to lower the bar for "Hello World"-type apps, but once that's done, I have to wonder: are any serious app developers using this as a development bed for complex apps?
I did too, and never looked back.
I believe Clementine is a fork of Amarok 1.4, which was the last version I really liked. My experiences with 2.x were not good.
Jimmy James beautifully sums up the virtues of advertising in this NewsRadio clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JGKTgfpeUs
They should have just gone to Discworld and talked to this guy:
http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Death_of_Rats
Yes, and Manhattan Island belonged to the Lenape tribe long before Europeans came to America. That doesn't give the tribe's surviving members the undisputed right to barricade the Holland Tunnel.* Times change.
* Although that would be kind of cool.
This isn't "The Atlantic" reporting; it's an article by Bruce Schneier. This guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier
Feel free to dismiss his concerns if you like, but don't dismiss them just because you don't like the mag they happen to be printed in.
My bad: the Forbes article I grabbed it from is a year old:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/01/20/dont-underestimate-microsoft-but-watch-out-for-margin-compression/
"Bing is another powerful tool Microsoft can juice. Despite “continuing to rack up operating losses,” Bing is “inching up the search ladder,” according to Caris, growing revenues 13% to $784 million. Microsoft is sitting on a massive $512.7 billion war chest with which it supports acquisitions and businesses like Bing, which are strategic in tapping into Google and Yahoo’s all-important search revenues. According to comScore, Bing’s market share is now up to 15.1% (as of December), compared to 14.5% for Yahoo and 66% for Google."
Oh, I agree ... Microsoft doesn't have its act together. My point was that given its war chest and the demands of its current user base, it should. There's simply no excuse.
I think that's why some of us on /. come down harder on Microsoft then on smaller companies. Sure, all software shops produce buggy code from time to time. And many vendors ship products that they hope will be game changers but that, ultimately, people aren't interested in. But most of these companies don't have a zillion dollars to spend on usability studies, development, and testing.
Some folks argue that the stories (or, rather, the presentation and discussion of them) are unfairly slanted against Microsoft. For me, it comes down to this:
When a company has a warchest in excess of 500 billion US dollars, as well as immense market penetration in a variety of domains -- desktop operating systems, web browser, word processing software, spreadsheet software, etc. -- it is expected to have its act together.