In related news, humans still can't seem to bridges with any reliable schedule or budget. Despite the fact that bridges have been built probably since the dawn of man, and we've been building suspension bridges for at least 500 years.
Smart, but not *too* smart. Too smart people have ideas and go and start their own companies.
This statement could not be further from the truth. One of my fellow co-workers is brilliant and he ran his own hosted content management company for years before joining Google. The three people who started a company that eventually became Google Talk are still working here in Kirkland, Washington. One of my friends here at the Kirkland office just moved to San Mateo, California, to work with the engineers at YouTube and learn from their entrepreneurial experiences. And just yesterday we had the founder of JotSpot, which Google acquired a few months back, come to help us with our latest product strategy. The people here are extremely smart, they have run their own companies in the past, and Google's very happy to have them. (And as far as I can tell, they're happy to be here:).)
I personally would not fill out a survey like that. While I'm fortunate to have a nice background of experience, so I can walk out of such an interview without feeling bad about it, there's other reasons for not filling out a questionnaire like that. For example, do you want to work at a company with so much process that hiring requires applicants not to show their ability to communicate clearly about relevant experience, but to fill out 100 question surveys? If they expect you to do them when they're not paying you anything, what kind of bullshit processes will they have once they are? And what kind of co-workers would you work with who put up with the same shit? Are these the types of people who will be revolutionaries and inspire you to be a better worker? Seems to me they're more likely to obey process... and the company will end up going nowhere.
Reading back over my post, I'd like to revisit saying that Google doesn't care about past experience. I meant that it doesn't especially matter what technologies you worked with (e.g..Net vs. J2EE vs. Lisp). But it's certainly a good thing for you to contribute to open source projects, run your own web sites and web applications, and participate in research projects. It's also great if you know languages outside the norm, like functional languages, Ruby, Python, etc. Just doing your studying or your job is perfectly acceptable, but showing a history of going above and beyond, knowing more than you have to, and doing projects for the fun of it will get you noticed in interviews and when you get here.
I've been working at Google for four months, and of all the companies I interviewed at, Google seemed to care the least about my past projects, experience, or my GPA. Google's interviewing process is all about finding very smart computer people. You simply must know the core computer science principles, but it does not matter if you were able to regurgitate them on your college exams. It matters that you can explain them in an interview and use them towards solving a problem. Once I got here, I can understand the reasoning behind the hiring process: Lots of Google infrastructure and technology is unique to Google. Look at the published articles on Bigtable and MapReduce to get a glimpse of the unique systems used every day here. For people to learn these systems and begin being productive quickly, Google doesn't care if you have an MSCE or know the syntax of Apache's httpd.conf. Google just needs you to be smart.
note: These are my opinions and not necessarily those of Google's. And I try not to post on Google articles nowadays, but this doesn't pertain to our business strategy so I'm comfortable sharing it. BTW we had an awesome free lunch today here in Kirkland, Washington.:)
Security is not absolute, and there's lots of ways to get a cookie besides having root somewhere along a person's network uplinks. Security IS about making things harder for people, and I controversially (though pretty firmly) believe that locking a cookie down to an IP address is a great idea. It may not work as well for people behind a large corporate network, or a rooted machine behind the same NAT as a victim user, but sending a request out from a specific IP address is usually a big step to overcome besides merely having someone's cookie.
Consider that almost half (47%)of the IT outsourcing contracts are cancelled due to non-performance. All that manager knows is that [Westerners] cost too much.
These two sentences are pretty contradictory. If 47% of IT outsourcing contracts are cancelled with no salvagable progress, outsourcing contracts should be 53% cheaper than doing the work in-house. Given a project with 10 engineers, let's assume an in-house cost of $10 million for ten developers. (Not exactly Silicon Valley salaries, but conceivable in many US locations.) If we're outsourcing, a competitive contract would pay $5.3 million given the 47% chance of failure. Considering the overhead of consultants, we can see the engineers at the consultant getting a 50% of the income, which is typical in the US. So we have 10 engineers in India getting $27k/year each, which is basically the going rate there right now. VOILA, the equation is balanced!!
However, projects people are doing are designed to make profits. Not executing on opportunities translates into rather large opportunity costs. Now considering the 47% failure rate, engineers in India aren't so attractive anymore. You'd rather have engineers in the US get the job done right the first time.
Therefore, if you're the type of engineer that is GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES, and gets the job done right the first time, YOU WILL NOT BE OUTSOURCED. You might be at the wrong company at the wrong time, but if you're good, you can always find a great job in the US. Google is hiring thousands of engineers a year in the US. Microsoft is hiring about the same. And smaller companies are doing great too. Outsourcing is not killing tech jobs in the US -- they're doing quite fine.
The only way this blog campaign is going to be successful is if Verizon realizes they're creating a public relations problem. Therefore I recommend people email Verizon, referencing the customer's blog and name (George Vaccaro), and explain why his bill should be 72 cents instead of 72 dollars. Here's a link to Verizon's email page:
I really like the bananas explanation: Convert.002 cents to.002 bananas. Multiply by 3600 and you get 72 bananas. Now since we switched cents to bananas, replace bananas with cents and you get 72 cents. Which is $0.72. I don't believe explaining the difference without a switch in units has been effective in either the phone calls or the emails.
Maybe the format sucks, but why complain about people adding additional functionality to OpenOffice? Especially if it enables better collaboration with Microsoft Office users. By your logic, OpenOffice shouldn't even support Microsoft.doc because.doc is a bloated format.
Apart from GNAA ASCII art and first posts, if you can not comprehend what other commenters have written, you should not be writing your own comments. It's as simple as that. With the font size technology and translation software in modern browsers, if you, presumably a fully functioning adult human being, can not understand what a post says, not only are you a nuisance, you are at risk of looking like a buffoon.
If you must write replies, in the interests of sanity I recommend you wear glasses following the recommendations of your ophthalmologist for your current reading conditions.
Have you considered arranging for dictator? If you feel that you can not comprehend the contributions of other Slashdot readers, there are public and private services available in most areas to help you meet your reading needs. A good place to get started would be a local nursing home or retirement housing complex.
My initial reaction was the same as yours. But now that I've reflected on the news, and the fact that the "fork" is really just some plug-ins to support OpenXML, I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. What's wrong with having OpenOffice support one more format, especially if it provides better interoperability with the Windows world? It would make it EASIER to use Linux. It would be EASIER to switch to OpenOffice. Where's the evil in that? Would you feel the same way if an open source team of developers worked on the same OpenXML functionality for OpenOffice, similar to how open source people are working on Mono?
I'm actually surprised that I can't find the evil considering Microsoft's been behind a lot of Novell's announcements lately. But this announcement seems more like something Novell's SUSE team has been working on.
I guess Microsoft's "ignore the competitor" strategy has failed, and they're switching to "embrace, extend, extinguish" as Microsoft's claimed to have called their strategy against Java and Netscape. It's interesting that lately Microsoft's been using puppet companies (SCO, Novell) to do their dirty work, rather than adding crappy support for open standards in their own products. I wonder what the legal agreements between Microsoft and Novell/SCO look like?
Maybe you also want to convince San Ling and Chaoping Xing, authors of Coding Theory: A First Course that "codes" must be Turing complete.
Or maybe you aught to realize that words can be used in different ways, and the term "HTML code" is actually matches pretty well with the traditional usage of the word. At least it matches a lot better than your Turing completeness requirement.
Microsoft dogfoods most everything, including Exchange Server (for @microsoft.com and @hotmail.com), SQL Server (for *.live.com), and internal Office betas (with pushes out to everyone, including admins). But for source control, their own products just don't scale up to 60,000 employees. I've heard there's dogfood initiatives for VSS, but developers in Windows Client and Office vehemently oppose them. I'm not sure if VSS is used in other areas of the company, like perhaps the Live.com groups and Xbox/Zune. And I'm not sure if there's efforts to expand VSS's capabilities to support Microsoft's own requirements, since there's very few companies that need that kind of scalability and most are Microsoft competitors.
With good administrators, Perforce is comfortably scalable up to 500 to 1,000 developers. You just start running into lag problems once you get above that. Certain operations like branch integrates can lock up a depot for minutes, which doesn't sound bad until you realize that no developers on that depot can check-out files or make other Perforce client changes that whole time. Technically you'd run into the same problems with just 2 developers, but it gets really noticable when there's 3,000 developers and they can all do integrates and anyone's integration will lock the other 3,000 users. Microsoft's definitely running into this problem, plus they're running into sandbox issues. You can probably think of other companies with the same problem.
I'm not sure how you decided Perforce is a "barely mid-level player" in the SCM market. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft all use Perforce as their primary source code management solution. (Though Microsoft has highly modified it and calls it something else internally... but my contacts there tell me it's still Perforce underneath.) Perforce does have its problems with scalability, but in terms of merging, collaborating, viewing history, keeping branches, etc, etc, etc, it's pretty awesome.
Quitting may be one option, but it's a pretty extreme one, don't you think? The submitter appears to have some feelings for his co-workers (he doesn't want to leave the project early), so it seems like he's happy with his work place. I like the first poster's idea of telling the boss about the morals the submitter has and requesting a new project. But there's many different ways to approach it -- it can be something immediate, something after the project is done, or perhaps even a request through HR (depending on the size of the company). But quitting without exploring other options at the company seems a little immature.
The employment market for software developers is very tilted towards employees right now. This is especially true for Flash developers, who both have the online advertising boom and the advent of rich-client applications fueling demand for new workers. The article submitter in all likelyhood is not a "beggar", and likely has many opportunities available to him. So don't go on a tirade about H-1B workers, because software developers who know what they're doing are having no problems getting quality jobs.
Wow, reading the third word incorrectly really changes the entire context of the article:
Reaching for protection is a funny thing. By aiming for a high mark of quality, you ensure that your end product is as good as you can possibly make it. The reality is, of course, that perfection is unattainable. Every work of art, be it book, painting, movie, or videogame, is going to be flawed in some way; this is the reality of being human, after all.
I've always respected Slashdot's uncanny ability to overanalyze, but about putting on a condom?? Oh, and too funny that it's on a gaming article.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, humans still can't seem to bridges with any reliable schedule or budget. Despite the fact that bridges have been built probably since the dawn of man, and we've been building suspension bridges for at least 500 years.
Mail me your contact information. We have a nice recruiting staff in London that I can try to get you connected with. Thanks!
Smart, but not *too* smart. Too smart people have ideas and go and start their own companies.
:).)
This statement could not be further from the truth. One of my fellow co-workers is brilliant and he ran his own hosted content management company for years before joining Google. The three people who started a company that eventually became Google Talk are still working here in Kirkland, Washington. One of my friends here at the Kirkland office just moved to San Mateo, California, to work with the engineers at YouTube and learn from their entrepreneurial experiences. And just yesterday we had the founder of JotSpot, which Google acquired a few months back, come to help us with our latest product strategy. The people here are extremely smart, they have run their own companies in the past, and Google's very happy to have them. (And as far as I can tell, they're happy to be here
I personally would not fill out a survey like that. While I'm fortunate to have a nice background of experience, so I can walk out of such an interview without feeling bad about it, there's other reasons for not filling out a questionnaire like that. For example, do you want to work at a company with so much process that hiring requires applicants not to show their ability to communicate clearly about relevant experience, but to fill out 100 question surveys? If they expect you to do them when they're not paying you anything, what kind of bullshit processes will they have once they are? And what kind of co-workers would you work with who put up with the same shit? Are these the types of people who will be revolutionaries and inspire you to be a better worker? Seems to me they're more likely to obey process ... and the company will end up going nowhere.
Reading back over my post, I'd like to revisit saying that Google doesn't care about past experience. I meant that it doesn't especially matter what technologies you worked with (e.g. .Net vs. J2EE vs. Lisp). But it's certainly a good thing for you to contribute to open source projects, run your own web sites and web applications, and participate in research projects. It's also great if you know languages outside the norm, like functional languages, Ruby, Python, etc. Just doing your studying or your job is perfectly acceptable, but showing a history of going above and beyond, knowing more than you have to, and doing projects for the fun of it will get you noticed in interviews and when you get here.
I'm feeling lucky.
I've been working at Google for four months, and of all the companies I interviewed at, Google seemed to care the least about my past projects, experience, or my GPA. Google's interviewing process is all about finding very smart computer people. You simply must know the core computer science principles, but it does not matter if you were able to regurgitate them on your college exams. It matters that you can explain them in an interview and use them towards solving a problem. Once I got here, I can understand the reasoning behind the hiring process: Lots of Google infrastructure and technology is unique to Google. Look at the published articles on Bigtable and MapReduce to get a glimpse of the unique systems used every day here. For people to learn these systems and begin being productive quickly, Google doesn't care if you have an MSCE or know the syntax of Apache's httpd.conf. Google just needs you to be smart.
:)
note: These are my opinions and not necessarily those of Google's. And I try not to post on Google articles nowadays, but this doesn't pertain to our business strategy so I'm comfortable sharing it. BTW we had an awesome free lunch today here in Kirkland, Washington.
Security is not absolute, and there's lots of ways to get a cookie besides having root somewhere along a person's network uplinks. Security IS about making things harder for people, and I controversially (though pretty firmly) believe that locking a cookie down to an IP address is a great idea. It may not work as well for people behind a large corporate network, or a rooted machine behind the same NAT as a victim user, but sending a request out from a specific IP address is usually a big step to overcome besides merely having someone's cookie.
Heating > A/C > Lights/Fridge/Cook/ Clothes > gadgets.
A-HAH! So YOU'RE the person behind this picture. Personally, my clothes don't require any power.
Consider that almost half (47%)of the IT outsourcing contracts are cancelled due to non-performance. All that manager knows is that [Westerners] cost too much.
These two sentences are pretty contradictory. If 47% of IT outsourcing contracts are cancelled with no salvagable progress, outsourcing contracts should be 53% cheaper than doing the work in-house. Given a project with 10 engineers, let's assume an in-house cost of $10 million for ten developers. (Not exactly Silicon Valley salaries, but conceivable in many US locations.) If we're outsourcing, a competitive contract would pay $5.3 million given the 47% chance of failure. Considering the overhead of consultants, we can see the engineers at the consultant getting a 50% of the income, which is typical in the US. So we have 10 engineers in India getting $27k/year each, which is basically the going rate there right now. VOILA, the equation is balanced!!
However, projects people are doing are designed to make profits. Not executing on opportunities translates into rather large opportunity costs. Now considering the 47% failure rate, engineers in India aren't so attractive anymore. You'd rather have engineers in the US get the job done right the first time.
Therefore, if you're the type of engineer that is GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES, and gets the job done right the first time, YOU WILL NOT BE OUTSOURCED. You might be at the wrong company at the wrong time, but if you're good, you can always find a great job in the US. Google is hiring thousands of engineers a year in the US. Microsoft is hiring about the same. And smaller companies are doing great too. Outsourcing is not killing tech jobs in the US -- they're doing quite fine.
Wow, this venture sounds both as exciting and successful as MusicNet. (Remember when the major music labels tried to do this?)
The only way this blog campaign is going to be successful is if Verizon realizes they're creating a public relations problem. Therefore I recommend people email Verizon, referencing the customer's blog and name (George Vaccaro), and explain why his bill should be 72 cents instead of 72 dollars. Here's a link to Verizon's email page:
. jsp
.002 cents to .002 bananas. Multiply by 3600 and you get 72 bananas. Now since we switched cents to bananas, replace bananas with cents and you get 72 cents. Which is $0.72. I don't believe explaining the difference without a switch in units has been effective in either the phone calls or the emails.
:)
https://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/contact/email
I really like the bananas explanation: Convert
Good luck everyone!
Let me guess, you wanted to call it "No College Student Left Behind"?
Maybe the format sucks, but why complain about people adding additional functionality to OpenOffice? Especially if it enables better collaboration with Microsoft Office users. By your logic, OpenOffice shouldn't even support Microsoft .doc because .doc is a bloated format.
Apart from GNAA ASCII art and first posts, if you can not comprehend what other commenters have written, you should not be writing your own comments. It's as simple as that. With the font size technology and translation software in modern browsers, if you, presumably a fully functioning adult human being, can not understand what a post says, not only are you a nuisance, you are at risk of looking like a buffoon.
If you must write replies, in the interests of sanity I recommend you wear glasses following the recommendations of your ophthalmologist for your current reading conditions.
Have you considered arranging for dictator? If you feel that you can not comprehend the contributions of other Slashdot readers, there are public and private services available in most areas to help you meet your reading needs. A good place to get started would be a local nursing home or retirement housing complex.
The exceptions are not the rule.
My initial reaction was the same as yours. But now that I've reflected on the news, and the fact that the "fork" is really just some plug-ins to support OpenXML, I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. What's wrong with having OpenOffice support one more format, especially if it provides better interoperability with the Windows world? It would make it EASIER to use Linux. It would be EASIER to switch to OpenOffice. Where's the evil in that? Would you feel the same way if an open source team of developers worked on the same OpenXML functionality for OpenOffice, similar to how open source people are working on Mono?
I'm actually surprised that I can't find the evil considering Microsoft's been behind a lot of Novell's announcements lately. But this announcement seems more like something Novell's SUSE team has been working on.
I guess Microsoft's "ignore the competitor" strategy has failed, and they're switching to "embrace, extend, extinguish" as Microsoft's claimed to have called their strategy against Java and Netscape. It's interesting that lately Microsoft's been using puppet companies (SCO, Novell) to do their dirty work, rather than adding crappy support for open standards in their own products. I wonder what the legal agreements between Microsoft and Novell/SCO look like?
What about Morse code? Is that not code either?
Maybe you also want to convince San Ling and Chaoping Xing, authors of Coding Theory: A First Course that "codes" must be Turing complete.
Or maybe you aught to realize that words can be used in different ways, and the term "HTML code" is actually matches pretty well with the traditional usage of the word. At least it matches a lot better than your Turing completeness requirement.
Microsoft dogfoods most everything, including Exchange Server (for @microsoft.com and @hotmail.com), SQL Server (for *.live.com), and internal Office betas (with pushes out to everyone, including admins). But for source control, their own products just don't scale up to 60,000 employees. I've heard there's dogfood initiatives for VSS, but developers in Windows Client and Office vehemently oppose them. I'm not sure if VSS is used in other areas of the company, like perhaps the Live.com groups and Xbox/Zune. And I'm not sure if there's efforts to expand VSS's capabilities to support Microsoft's own requirements, since there's very few companies that need that kind of scalability and most are Microsoft competitors.
I nominate Gimp. It's represented a crappy image editor with nonsensical UI for too long. It'd be awesome if it was something cool, like Web 2.0 Pong.
With good administrators, Perforce is comfortably scalable up to 500 to 1,000 developers. You just start running into lag problems once you get above that. Certain operations like branch integrates can lock up a depot for minutes, which doesn't sound bad until you realize that no developers on that depot can check-out files or make other Perforce client changes that whole time. Technically you'd run into the same problems with just 2 developers, but it gets really noticable when there's 3,000 developers and they can all do integrates and anyone's integration will lock the other 3,000 users. Microsoft's definitely running into this problem, plus they're running into sandbox issues. You can probably think of other companies with the same problem.
I'm not sure how you decided Perforce is a "barely mid-level player" in the SCM market. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft all use Perforce as their primary source code management solution. (Though Microsoft has highly modified it and calls it something else internally... but my contacts there tell me it's still Perforce underneath.) Perforce does have its problems with scalability, but in terms of merging, collaborating, viewing history, keeping branches, etc, etc, etc, it's pretty awesome.
Quitting may be one option, but it's a pretty extreme one, don't you think? The submitter appears to have some feelings for his co-workers (he doesn't want to leave the project early), so it seems like he's happy with his work place. I like the first poster's idea of telling the boss about the morals the submitter has and requesting a new project. But there's many different ways to approach it -- it can be something immediate, something after the project is done, or perhaps even a request through HR (depending on the size of the company). But quitting without exploring other options at the company seems a little immature.
The employment market for software developers is very tilted towards employees right now. This is especially true for Flash developers, who both have the online advertising boom and the advent of rich-client applications fueling demand for new workers. The article submitter in all likelyhood is not a "beggar", and likely has many opportunities available to him. So don't go on a tirade about H-1B workers, because software developers who know what they're doing are having no problems getting quality jobs.
I've always respected Slashdot's uncanny ability to overanalyze, but about putting on a condom?? Oh, and too funny that it's on a gaming article.