Heh, one of the guys I work with used to work at McDonalds. He tells me their corporate offices had fountain drinks in the hallways instead of drinking fountains. From what he says, it wasn't a bad place to work. Strangely, I know another guy who left his IT job at a cd manufacturer for a better position in Wendy's IT.
I think the number one rule of these situations is don't do anything stupid or tell anyone anything unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of those actions. In my department, two or three people read slashdot. If I were to post something here, even anonymously, others could very likely trace it back to me fairly easily.
If the posting causes an uproar, there could be legal confidentiality issues. More obviously, if you are not already prepared to walk, it could aggravate your situation. The only thing worse than an evil manager is an evil manager that is pissed off at you.
I'm not saying to bend over and take it, just that it is better to stay tight lipped until you have decided on a couple different potential courses of action.
if you work at a big enough company, mention the situiation to your boss's boss or boss's boss's boss (aka Senior of Corporate Management ). They might not be in the loop about what is going on. This may be in violation of company policy. Or they may be smart enough to know the signs of a death march and take steps to stop it before it gets started.
I was on a death march project a few months ago. When the project was over a few people left and torched management in their exit interviews. My particular company is a highly profitable / semi independent sub division of a larger company. We don't always play by the parent company's rules and, in this case, red flags started going up all over the parent company's HR department. Since these folks left, we've all been on a strict 40 hour regimen and management has gone out of its way to show a greater amount of appreciation, so much so that at times it is almost funny. Anyways, had we let them know what was going on earlier we might not have had to put up with it nearly as long as we did. Unfortunately, it was impossible to casually walk over to headquarters and casually mention the situation to important people. We would have had to file a formal complaint and that could have gone in undesirable, unpredictable directions.
Anyways, my last day is 14 workdays from today. Woohoo! So long and thanks for all the fish.
Actually, I once contacted the department of labor on this to see if I was exempt, they referred me to my local columbus whose a ma call it. Long story short, that exemption only affects hourly individuals. If you are salaried, you are exempt from being payed overtime for an entirely different reason, provided you are a professional making more than $250 per week (I think it was 250). I think when that exemption was written, there might have been some debate over whether or not all/which IT workers were professionals, which could be part of the reason behind the exemption.
Getting back on topic, the experience that lead me to contact the DOL was similar to that of the guy in question. My team was tasked with completing a project in an unreasonable timeframe. With months to go, we were told we had to put in 60+ hour weeks. This went on for about 10-12 weeks. There was a stretch where I worked something like 30 days in a row with just one day off. Productivity dropped sharply in those conditions and most everyone was talking about leaving (H1B's and all). After the project was finished, we were treated to strict 40 hour work weeks, and we had the appreciation and respect of most of the people in the company.
However, our graphics designer quit (with no job lined up), our development manager quit as soon as he could find another job, I (developer) just quit after getting another job, and the dust hasn't settled yet. We had a 9 member MIS department that they were planning on growing to 11 this year and now we^H^H they are down to 6, and a few others could still go. It probably would have been a lot worse had 3 of the remaining 6 not been H1Bs.
My advise to the poster would be, if you like your job and your management stick it out. If you don't and you have enough money to go it alone for a while, work a 40 hr week and see if they fire you (if you quit, you can't collect unemployment). If you can't afford to go it alone for a while, buckle down because unless you've got some good connections, you are going to be stuck at your job for a while. One thing I quickly discovered was that it is almost impossible to conduct a good strong job search while working 60-70 hours per week.
If you want to try to reason with your management you might want to try to illustrate to them just how unreasonable those hours are. For example, if you are a rookie making 45,000/yr that boils down to $865/week. Now imagine you are a sophomore intern in college making $12/hr. If you work 60 hours a week, you will make $840/week (12*40 + 18*20). Of course there's benefits and a higher stable paycheck, but it's downright insulting to say that a bachelor's degree and year or two of experience is only worth an extra $25/week.
I don't know anything about the way Nasa contracts work... however... I don't think the guys in the BBC article/6 million dollar contract are actually doing very much. From the article:
As part of the newly established Project Prometheus, the aerospace company Lockheed Martin has been given a $6m (£4m) contract for a design study of the proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo).
You will note they are being payed 6 mil to do a design study of the proposed orbiter. To me, this sounds like some kind of commissioned peer review/audit or maybe a phase one portion of the project. $6 million dollars probably isn't that uncommon for this sort of thing.
Re:Related discrimination
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Ageism in IT?
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I had an interview a few years ago in which I asked about what kind of hours I would be required to work. The hiring manager told me something ungodly, and when I told him I thought that was too much, he said, "what else do you you have to do?" I was only 22 and desperately needed a job but I ended the interview right then and there. On the bright side, got a free lunch out of it.
What really bothers me though, is that there are people out there that tolerate this kind of behavior. It just makes life that much harder for everyone.
Personally, I think the employers with whom you have a non-compete agreement should be the ones paying you unemployment benefits.
I am by no means an authority on this but... in a certain sense they do pay some of it. Employers pay a certain amount of money into an unemployment fund. The amount of money they pay is based on a number of factors including their "experience rating" which I think has something to do with the number of people they've had eligible to collect unemployment. THe more people that leave the company and collect unemployment, the more money the company has to pay into the unemployment fund.
There are some companies out there, that have a policy of initially contesting every unemployment claim in order to keep their experience rating "good" and reduce the amount of money they pay into the unemployment fund.
Anyways, I don't know first hand how true all this is. It's just something I heard over lunch with manager/accountant types. It may only apply to certain levels of businesses or it could be a state of ohio thing too.
As soon as people we met found out that I was a computer guy they asked me to help them and all to often... I didn't have the tools.
Yes I myself have frequently encountered this problem. Walking around, minding my own business, when BAM, someone sees me with a laptop and a copy of some old programming tome. They inevitably ask for help and then my day is just gone right down the drain... if only I had the proper tools at hand to avoid these kinds of situations.
Some suggestions:
-If you must carry a pda, conceal it in something like a hollowed out paperback. Make sure the book is something on a 7th grade reading level. Never carry technical tomes, always use the concealed pda. If someone sees the pda, hold it up to your ear and pretend you are talking to someone on a cell phone.
-If you must carry a laptop, have something hotkeyed that brings up a blue screen of death on command. Start "diagnosing" their problem with your laptop all the while hitting the BSOD key every 15 seconds or so. Swear everytime it pops up. Keep "trying" pretending to be more and more embarassed until they say nevermind.
-In your car, keep a copy of the Idiot's guide to Windows 95. If anyone asks you anything about any kind of OS/Software, attempt to look up the answer in the Idiot's guide (assuming the problem is not with Windows 95). Have them adjust unrelated settings until they realize you are inept.
You have a very good point there. I hadn't thought of it in terms of diminished packaging costs and having those benefits pushed on to the consumer. Still there are costs involved in setting all this stuff up, IT framework and whatnot.
They probably just figure $1 is about what people will pay for a song (I would) and that's what they are going to charge no matter how much it costs them to deliver. While we are losing the physical cd, jewel case, and liner notes, we are gaining convenience. I mean, instead of having to get into my car, drive to [insert record store here], pay $12 for 3 songs I want, and then spend 20 minutes mp3ing the cd, I can just spend $3 and 3 minutes doing that online.
Anyway's a dollar isn't that much. It's just the cost of a pop or a cheap burger. To me, a song has more value than a pop or a cheap burger.
the average CD will still cost $10-$12 to download
One would assume pricing for bulk purchases (aka albums) would be different than pricing for a single purchase as it is with most everything. Besides, to me, already burned mp3s have greater value than a store bought cd.
Alright I realize this is "different" but... come on... how much can we can complain about the secrecy of a 4 digit number. There's only 10,000 different combinations. What pisses me off is my bank uses the pin numbers for your online banking password and they use your frickin social security number as the username. You get 3 tries on every account. So how hard is that to automate a hack?
Make friends online that either do what you like to do, or even better, hire people that do what you like to do.
I have a decent number of technical friends/contacts. None of them/their companies are hiring new grads, heh, actually a bunch of them are unemployed. How do you make contacts that are hiring in your area?
Find the companies you really want to work for.
Sorry, they're not hiring. For example, here at Ohio State, we just had what is arguably the biggest engineering career fair in the state. There were only two local companies there hiring recent Computer Science graduates, Mettler Toledo and James Gregory Associates. JGA might be hiring 1-3 people towards the end of the year. Mettler Toledo mostly hires interns, and they seem to only be interested in new moldable BS graduates. In fact, most of the big employers around Columbus won't hire anyone without at least 2-3 years of experience. Most professional job fairs won't even let you in the door without 2 years experience on your resume and co-ops/internships don't count.
So now that you've given up on job postings...
I agree that job postings generally suck. 4 out of every 5 doesn't even identify the company you'd really be working for. They are all consulting firms like Emerald, KForce, ManPower Professional, ICC, etc. However, some of them are useful, and I have gotten several interviews and a couple job offers as a result of replying to postings. The key to using job postings successfully, as with anything, is to do it efficiently.
Ignore anything that will ask you to fill out their own special resume format. Places like Nationwide, Bank One, NCR, and Lexis Nexis will just take your resume and throw it in some database of 100,000 records long where it will be permanently lost.
Never submit anything in a job site's special resume format (monster, career builder, etc). My manager once told me how much he liked the Monster resumes because he could see all the person's skills at a glance. Well, anyone who's ever filled out one of those things knows that is not true. All it does is make your resume look exactly like the hundred other resumes in the employer's inbox... and of course waste your time. Besides, my manager ended up hiring me.
Don't apply to anything that is not local. A company will not bother to pursue someone more than 100 mi away when they have 100 resumes a day coming in.
And if you're in college, get as many co-ops and internships as you can. They really really help.
Obviously, it is more advantageous to communicate certain things face to face, over the phone, or via some other non computing related mechanism.
However, don't underesimate the importance of computing in the business world. It doesn't just deal with person to person communications. Sure you can use a computer to talk to a person over email, chat, video conferencing, or voice over ip. These methods of interperson communication are often very important and they have their place within a business. But this is by far the least important kind of communication that computing enables.
the business world cannot in general because the sheer amount of bandwidth available in a face-to-face vs. email.
I'm going to side track myself for a second here. to argue an inane point. Email only has a smaller bandwidth than face to face communications for those messages whose content requires complex human forms of expression and interpretation or real time discussion. For example, if you need to discuss a design point with a coworker, email would be horribly inefficient. You would be better served by walking over to the coworker's desk and having a conversation. However if you have prepared a summary design document and need to submit it to 30 people throughout the company, it would be ridiculous to hand deliver it to every person. You could place it in interoffice mail, but then it would most likely take at least a day. If you emailed the message, it would be delivered instantly and you would have a nice audit trail prooving you sent it.
While we are on this subject, what about the design document itself? How did you make it? Without a computer, you would have had to type it up on a type writer or scribe it by hand, then use a photocopier to produce 30 copies. For every piece of feedback you get from those 30 people, you'd either have to retype pages from the document, produce a complex series of ammendments, or creatively edit a photocopy of the original. A computer enables you to do all this a fraction of the time. Furthermore it provides formatting tools, as well as grammar and spelling correction (shud we chose to yuse tham). But, as I said before, I am digressing.
Where computing shines in communication is in managing, storing, and presenting complex business information. Where I work, half of our custom code is written for reporting purposes. Need to know how detailed information about all the orders Chevron/Texacco placed in the last six weeks? Run a report. Need to know every kind of item in inventory whose on hand quantity is less than 5% last month's total quantity sold? Run a different report. Need to know something simple like Susie's new phone number? Use the online phone directory. But this is just the easy stuff.
Imagine you are a manufacturer that relies on 10 different suppliers for sub components. How do you efficiently communicate your current production needs to your suppliers? Keep in mind you also supply several other companies and your suppliers also have supliers and so on. How did you track the status of current shipments? If you have a chain 15 companies long and humans are handling all the order processing there's going to be massive delays and pretty soon someone in the chain is going to run out of inventory. This communication is much faster when it is done automagically using something like EDI (die EDI die!).
They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built.
I think my manager might be a little like that but honestly, myself and my coworkers see ourselves more like the some sort of corporate punching bag. We are the dirt that Customer Service, Sales, Production, Marketting, and all the other departments grind under their heel. Literally no one in the company works longer or harder than we do. No one else even comes close to putting in the hours we do and no one else is expected to be on call in their off hours.
I think this attitude is seen here on slashdot a lot, I see posts by people who feel they are entitled to set policy because they can implement policy at the touch of a few buttons. But that's asinine, policy should be made by people paid to set policy. The IT person's job is to implement policy on a technological level.
Oh god, if only they would. Where I work, policy decisions are constantly being shoved off onto IT. Let me just say, I don't know a bleep bleep thing about accounting. You get sales and customer service in a room, and they're not going to agree on a damn thing except the date the project is due. The CEO won't settle the fights. Inevitably, we have to make a decision because no one else will. Nothing would make me happier than to have someone take all those non IT policy decisions out of our hands. We're not qualified, it's a hell of a lot of work, and we always hear unending grief over every single thing we do.
in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier.
That's not always true. There are many many businesses out there that couldn't exist without IT. The place I work is one such place. Even in a typical large Non IT company, IT has become extremely important. Wild claims that the IT staff does not contribute to the "True Value" of a business is one of the things that motivates me to send my resume out when I get home from work 4 hours later than everyone else.
A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to.
What exactly should it mean? I suppose it boils down to the question of what exactly a grade represents. Is it a relative measure comparing your aptitude to that of other students? Is it an absolute measure of mastery of a given subject? Should it be different in different fields? I don't think it is appropriate to say that all disciplines need to evaluate their students using the same methods.
Personally I never really cared that liberal Arts majors had easier classes than my CS/Math courses. I guess I have trouble understanding why it would even matter. It's no more or less fair than me getting paid 150% the starting salary of a liberal arts major.
Ba. Where I work, firing any number of the "developers" would thoroughly and permanently cripple the company. These guys are just irreplaceable. Use Strict? Option Explicit? Comments? Documentation? Proper English? Any jedi craves not these things.
While on the subject, is anyone looking for a young, highly disciplined software developer? Please? Anyone? Help, the escape key isn't working!
The owner of the machine should still be in control
How? A computer can be in many states where the only real absolute control a system admin has is pulling the plug. And when you pull a plug you need a reason to do it. What if you aren't aware of one?
There are dozens of situations in real life where ignorance of the problem doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it.
But there are an infinite number of situations in real life where ignorance of a problem does prevent you from being held responsible for it. Let's say I'm driving down the freeway and my car's wheels simultaneously fall off due to an unpublished design flaw in a headlight which somehow causes a piston to misfire which somehow causes the rear and front axels to break in half. I crash causing a fifteen car pile up that claims 30 lives. The conditions that lead up to this accident were evident in my car had I possessed the expertise and vigilence to identify them. In a very esoteric sense I am responsible for the accident, but in a practical sense I can not be held responsible.
Practically speaking, what needs to be done before we can hold Aunt Tillie responsible for the security of her PC? We can't afford to train all the Aunt Tille's of the world. Even if we could, the black hats would be ahead of that training anyway. We might be able to hold them responsible after they have been duly informed of the problem, but simply trying to explain these things to Aunt Tillie can be an extraordinarily daunting task. We could attempt to explain it and send her a patch, but if my Aunt Tillie received an email she didn't understand with instructions to run some executible and she actually did run it, I would have to spend the next several days beating her with a baseball bat.
So if I'm looking for the garbage file named after Pink Floyd's Wish You were Here which RIAA has freely chosen to distribute... and I accidentally get the file corresponding to the actual Pink Floyd song, what kind of weird legal footing does that put me on.
If they are in charge of the systems, they are the system administrators, regardless of if it's someone who is responsible for 100 servers or Aunt Tilly with her "email machine".
Aunt Tilly will never be a competent system administrator. You can spend $10,000 a person training everyone in the world about computer security, spend 60 trillion dollars, and Aunt Tilly will still not be a competent system administrator. Why even pursue this line of thought?
Incompetence doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for what your system is doing any more than being a bad driver relieves you of the responsibility for the accident you caused.
Bad analogy. You can be an expert and still be rooted and have your computer used in an attack. The complexity of software is such that one person often can't even understand the complete functionality of a single program. Anyway's in your analogy you are the one driving, when your computer is taken over and used in an attack, you are not the one in control. It's more like if someone steals my car using a flaw in the locking/starting mechanism then runs over a cop. Except that's not a good analogy either because often with a computer you have no obvious evidence that your machine is compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to know, what in blazes were you trying to accomplish? How did all that chain together? I really want to know, or maybe I don't....
Heh, one of the guys I work with used to work at McDonalds. He tells me their corporate offices had fountain drinks in the hallways instead of drinking fountains. From what he says, it wasn't a bad place to work. Strangely, I know another guy who left his IT job at a cd manufacturer for a better position in Wendy's IT.
I think the number one rule of these situations is don't do anything stupid or tell anyone anything unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of those actions. In my department, two or three people read slashdot. If I were to post something here, even anonymously, others could very likely trace it back to me fairly easily.
If the posting causes an uproar, there could be legal confidentiality issues. More obviously, if you are not already prepared to walk, it could aggravate your situation. The only thing worse than an evil manager is an evil manager that is pissed off at you.
I'm not saying to bend over and take it, just that it is better to stay tight lipped until you have decided on a couple different potential courses of action.
if you work at a big enough company, mention the situiation to your boss's boss or boss's boss's boss (aka Senior of Corporate Management ). They might not be in the loop about what is going on. This may be in violation of company policy. Or they may be smart enough to know the signs of a death march and take steps to stop it before it gets started.
I was on a death march project a few months ago. When the project was over a few people left and torched management in their exit interviews. My particular company is a highly profitable / semi independent sub division of a larger company. We don't always play by the parent company's rules and, in this case, red flags started going up all over the parent company's HR department. Since these folks left, we've all been on a strict 40 hour regimen and management has gone out of its way to show a greater amount of appreciation, so much so that at times it is almost funny. Anyways, had we let them know what was going on earlier we might not have had to put up with it nearly as long as we did. Unfortunately, it was impossible to casually walk over to headquarters and casually mention the situation to important people. We would have had to file a formal complaint and that could have gone in undesirable, unpredictable directions.
Anyways, my last day is 14 workdays from today. Woohoo! So long and thanks for all the fish.
I find setting people's desktops to the html page for hampsterdance.com (complete with sound) to be an amusing yet relatively benign past time.
My favorite was that we would inevitably spend 1 or more of those 12 hours plotting and complaining about our boss and the company. That's efficiency.
Actually, I once contacted the department of labor on this to see if I was exempt, they referred me to my local columbus whose a ma call it. Long story short, that exemption only affects hourly individuals. If you are salaried, you are exempt from being payed overtime for an entirely different reason, provided you are a professional making more than $250 per week (I think it was 250). I think when that exemption was written, there might have been some debate over whether or not all/which IT workers were professionals, which could be part of the reason behind the exemption.
Getting back on topic, the experience that lead me to contact the DOL was similar to that of the guy in question. My team was tasked with completing a project in an unreasonable timeframe. With months to go, we were told we had to put in 60+ hour weeks. This went on for about 10-12 weeks. There was a stretch where I worked something like 30 days in a row with just one day off. Productivity dropped sharply in those conditions and most everyone was talking about leaving (H1B's and all). After the project was finished, we were treated to strict 40 hour work weeks, and we had the appreciation and respect of most of the people in the company.
However, our graphics designer quit (with no job lined up), our development manager quit as soon as he could find another job, I (developer) just quit after getting another job, and the dust hasn't settled yet. We had a 9 member MIS department that they were planning on growing to 11 this year and now we^H^H they are down to 6, and a few others could still go. It probably would have been a lot worse had 3 of the remaining 6 not been H1Bs.
My advise to the poster would be, if you like your job and your management stick it out. If you don't and you have enough money to go it alone for a while, work a 40 hr week and see if they fire you (if you quit, you can't collect unemployment). If you can't afford to go it alone for a while, buckle down because unless you've got some good connections, you are going to be stuck at your job for a while. One thing I quickly discovered was that it is almost impossible to conduct a good strong job search while working 60-70 hours per week.
If you want to try to reason with your management you might want to try to illustrate to them just how unreasonable those hours are. For example, if you are a rookie making 45,000/yr that boils down to $865/week. Now imagine you are a sophomore intern in college making $12/hr. If you work 60 hours a week, you will make $840/week (12*40 + 18*20). Of course there's benefits and a higher stable paycheck, but it's downright insulting to say that a bachelor's degree and year or two of experience is only worth an extra $25/week.
I don't know anything about the way Nasa contracts work... however... I don't think the guys in the BBC article/6 million dollar contract are actually doing very much. From the article:
As part of the newly established Project Prometheus, the aerospace company Lockheed Martin has been given a $6m (£4m) contract for a design study of the proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo).
You will note they are being payed 6 mil to do a design study of the proposed orbiter. To me, this sounds like some kind of commissioned peer review/audit or maybe a phase one portion of the project. $6 million dollars probably isn't that uncommon for this sort of thing.
I had an interview a few years ago in which I asked about what kind of hours I would be required to work. The hiring manager told me something ungodly, and when I told him I thought that was too much, he said, "what else do you you have to do?" I was only 22 and desperately needed a job but I ended the interview right then and there. On the bright side, got a free lunch out of it.
What really bothers me though, is that there are people out there that tolerate this kind of behavior. It just makes life that much harder for everyone.
Personally, I think the employers with whom you have a non-compete agreement should be the ones paying you unemployment benefits.
... in a certain sense they do pay some of it. Employers pay a certain amount of money into an unemployment fund. The amount of money they pay is based on a number of factors including their "experience rating" which I think has something to do with the number of people they've had eligible to collect unemployment. THe more people that leave the company and collect unemployment, the more money the company has to pay into the unemployment fund.
I am by no means an authority on this but
There are some companies out there, that have a policy of initially contesting every unemployment claim in order to keep their experience rating "good" and reduce the amount of money they pay into the unemployment fund.
Anyways, I don't know first hand how true all this is. It's just something I heard over lunch with manager/accountant types. It may only apply to certain levels of businesses or it could be a state of ohio thing too.
I bet the vast majority of Indians that you know came here with H1B visa, have by now become citizens.
No, it usually takes several years just to get a green card (2-4). Then it takes a whole lot of years after that to gain citizenship.
Did you read the story about DOOM and Xbox? Even DOOM is doomed!
As soon as people we met found out that I was a computer guy they asked me to help them and all to often ... I didn't have the tools.
Yes I myself have frequently encountered this problem. Walking around, minding my own business, when BAM, someone sees me with a laptop and a copy of some old programming tome. They inevitably ask for help and then my day is just gone right down the drain... if only I had the proper tools at hand to avoid these kinds of situations.
Some suggestions:
-If you must carry a pda, conceal it in something like a hollowed out paperback. Make sure the book is something on a 7th grade reading level. Never carry technical tomes, always use the concealed pda. If someone sees the pda, hold it up to your ear and pretend you are talking to someone on a cell phone.
-If you must carry a laptop, have something hotkeyed that brings up a blue screen of death on command. Start "diagnosing" their problem with your laptop all the while hitting the BSOD key every 15 seconds or so. Swear everytime it pops up. Keep "trying" pretending to be more and more embarassed until they say nevermind.
-In your car, keep a copy of the Idiot's guide to Windows 95. If anyone asks you anything about any kind of OS/Software, attempt to look up the answer in the Idiot's guide (assuming the problem is not with Windows 95). Have them adjust unrelated settings until they realize you are inept.
or just say no.
heh, obviously some strange new definition of the word "works" I was previously unfamiliar with.
You have a very good point there. I hadn't thought of it in terms of diminished packaging costs and having those benefits pushed on to the consumer. Still there are costs involved in setting all this stuff up, IT framework and whatnot.
They probably just figure $1 is about what people will pay for a song (I would) and that's what they are going to charge no matter how much it costs them to deliver. While we are losing the physical cd, jewel case, and liner notes, we are gaining convenience. I mean, instead of having to get into my car, drive to [insert record store here], pay $12 for 3 songs I want, and then spend 20 minutes mp3ing the cd, I can just spend $3 and 3 minutes doing that online.
Anyway's a dollar isn't that much. It's just the cost of a pop or a cheap burger. To me, a song has more value than a pop or a cheap burger.
$.99 a song? Ripoff
I will gladly pay $1 a song.
the average CD will still cost $10-$12 to download
One would assume pricing for bulk purchases (aka albums) would be different than pricing for a single purchase as it is with most everything. Besides, to me, already burned mp3s have greater value than a store bought cd.
Iyou don't get a CD, a jewel case, or liner notes
Yeah, isn't that great? I hate all those things.
Alright I realize this is "different" but ... come on ... how much can we can complain about the secrecy of a 4 digit number. There's only 10,000 different combinations. What pisses me off is my bank uses the pin numbers for your online banking password and they use your frickin social security number as the username. You get 3 tries on every account. So how hard is that to automate a hack?
How many morons we got on this ship?
Make friends online that either do what you like to do, or even better, hire people that do what you like to do.
I have a decent number of technical friends/contacts. None of them/their companies are hiring new grads, heh, actually a bunch of them are unemployed. How do you make contacts that are hiring in your area?
Find the companies you really want to work for.
Sorry, they're not hiring. For example, here at Ohio State, we just had what is arguably the biggest engineering career fair in the state. There were only two local companies there hiring recent Computer Science graduates, Mettler Toledo and James Gregory Associates. JGA might be hiring 1-3 people towards the end of the year. Mettler Toledo mostly hires interns, and they seem to only be interested in new moldable BS graduates. In fact, most of the big employers around Columbus won't hire anyone without at least 2-3 years of experience. Most professional job fairs won't even let you in the door without 2 years experience on your resume and co-ops/internships don't count.
So now that you've given up on job postings...
I agree that job postings generally suck. 4 out of every 5 doesn't even identify the company you'd really be working for. They are all consulting firms like Emerald, KForce, ManPower Professional, ICC, etc. However, some of them are useful, and I have gotten several interviews and a couple job offers as a result of replying to postings. The key to using job postings successfully, as with anything, is to do it efficiently.
Ignore anything that will ask you to fill out their own special resume format. Places like Nationwide, Bank One, NCR, and Lexis Nexis will just take your resume and throw it in some database of 100,000 records long where it will be permanently lost.
Never submit anything in a job site's special resume format (monster, career builder, etc). My manager once told me how much he liked the Monster resumes because he could see all the person's skills at a glance. Well, anyone who's ever filled out one of those things knows that is not true. All it does is make your resume look exactly like the hundred other resumes in the employer's inbox... and of course waste your time. Besides, my manager ended up hiring me.
Don't apply to anything that is not local. A company will not bother to pursue someone more than 100 mi away when they have 100 resumes a day coming in.
And if you're in college, get as many co-ops and internships as you can. They really really help.
Obviously, it is more advantageous to communicate certain things face to face, over the phone, or via some other non computing related mechanism.
However, don't underesimate the importance of computing in the business world. It doesn't just deal with person to person communications. Sure you can use a computer to talk to a person over email, chat, video conferencing, or voice over ip. These methods of interperson communication are often very important and they have their place within a business. But this is by far the least important kind of communication that computing enables.
the business world cannot in general because the sheer amount of bandwidth available in a face-to-face vs. email.
I'm going to side track myself for a second here. to argue an inane point. Email only has a smaller bandwidth than face to face communications for those messages whose content requires complex human forms of expression and interpretation or real time discussion. For example, if you need to discuss a design point with a coworker, email would be horribly inefficient. You would be better served by walking over to the coworker's desk and having a conversation. However if you have prepared a summary design document and need to submit it to 30 people throughout the company, it would be ridiculous to hand deliver it to every person. You could place it in interoffice mail, but then it would most likely take at least a day. If you emailed the message, it would be delivered instantly and you would have a nice audit trail prooving you sent it.
While we are on this subject, what about the design document itself? How did you make it? Without a computer, you would have had to type it up on a type writer or scribe it by hand, then use a photocopier to produce 30 copies. For every piece of feedback you get from those 30 people, you'd either have to retype pages from the document, produce a complex series of ammendments, or creatively edit a photocopy of the original. A computer enables you to do all this a fraction of the time. Furthermore it provides formatting tools, as well as grammar and spelling correction (shud we chose to yuse tham). But, as I said before, I am digressing.
Where computing shines in communication is in managing, storing, and presenting complex business information. Where I work, half of our custom code is written for reporting purposes. Need to know how detailed information about all the orders Chevron/Texacco placed in the last six weeks? Run a report. Need to know every kind of item in inventory whose on hand quantity is less than 5% last month's total quantity sold? Run a different report. Need to know something simple like Susie's new phone number? Use the online phone directory. But this is just the easy stuff.
Imagine you are a manufacturer that relies on 10 different suppliers for sub components. How do you efficiently communicate your current production needs to your suppliers? Keep in mind you also supply several other companies and your suppliers also have supliers and so on. How did you track the status of current shipments? If you have a chain 15 companies long and humans are handling all the order processing there's going to be massive delays and pretty soon someone in the chain is going to run out of inventory. This communication is much faster when it is done automagically using something like EDI (die EDI die!).
I could just go on and on....
They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built.
I think my manager might be a little like that but honestly, myself and my coworkers see ourselves more like the some sort of corporate punching bag. We are the dirt that Customer Service, Sales, Production, Marketting, and all the other departments grind under their heel. Literally no one in the company works longer or harder than we do. No one else even comes close to putting in the hours we do and no one else is expected to be on call in their off hours.
I think this attitude is seen here on slashdot a lot, I see posts by people who feel they are entitled to set policy because they can implement policy at the touch of a few buttons. But that's asinine, policy should be made by people paid to set policy. The IT person's job is to implement policy on a technological level.
Oh god, if only they would. Where I work, policy decisions are constantly being shoved off onto IT. Let me just say, I don't know a bleep bleep thing about accounting. You get sales and customer service in a room, and they're not going to agree on a damn thing except the date the project is due. The CEO won't settle the fights. Inevitably, we have to make a decision because no one else will. Nothing would make me happier than to have someone take all those non IT policy decisions out of our hands. We're not qualified, it's a hell of a lot of work, and we always hear unending grief over every single thing we do.
in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier.
That's not always true. There are many many businesses out there that couldn't exist without IT. The place I work is one such place. Even in a typical large Non IT company, IT has become extremely important. Wild claims that the IT staff does not contribute to the "True Value" of a business is one of the things that motivates me to send my resume out when I get home from work 4 hours later than everyone else.
A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to.
What exactly should it mean? I suppose it boils down to the question of what exactly a grade represents. Is it a relative measure comparing your aptitude to that of other students? Is it an absolute measure of mastery of a given subject? Should it be different in different fields? I don't think it is appropriate to say that all disciplines need to evaluate their students using the same methods.
Personally I never really cared that liberal Arts majors had easier classes than my CS/Math courses. I guess I have trouble understanding why it would even matter. It's no more or less fair than me getting paid 150% the starting salary of a liberal arts major.
Ba. Where I work, firing any number of the "developers" would thoroughly and permanently cripple the company. These guys are just irreplaceable. Use Strict? Option Explicit? Comments? Documentation? Proper English? Any jedi craves not these things.
While on the subject, is anyone looking for a young, highly disciplined software developer? Please? Anyone? Help, the escape key isn't working!
The owner of the machine should still be in control
How? A computer can be in many states where the only real absolute control a system admin has is pulling the plug. And when you pull a plug you need a reason to do it. What if you aren't aware of one?
There are dozens of situations in real life where ignorance of the problem doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it.
But there are an infinite number of situations in real life where ignorance of a problem does prevent you from being held responsible for it. Let's say I'm driving down the freeway and my car's wheels simultaneously fall off due to an unpublished design flaw in a headlight which somehow causes a piston to misfire which somehow causes the rear and front axels to break in half. I crash causing a fifteen car pile up that claims 30 lives. The conditions that lead up to this accident were evident in my car had I possessed the expertise and vigilence to identify them. In a very esoteric sense I am responsible for the accident, but in a practical sense I can not be held responsible.
Practically speaking, what needs to be done before we can hold Aunt Tillie responsible for the security of her PC? We can't afford to train all the Aunt Tille's of the world. Even if we could, the black hats would be ahead of that training anyway. We might be able to hold them responsible after they have been duly informed of the problem, but simply trying to explain these things to Aunt Tillie can be an extraordinarily daunting task. We could attempt to explain it and send her a patch, but if my Aunt Tillie received an email she didn't understand with instructions to run some executible and she actually did run it, I would have to spend the next several days beating her with a baseball bat.
So if I'm looking for the garbage file named after Pink Floyd's Wish You were Here which RIAA has freely chosen to distribute... and I accidentally get the file corresponding to the actual Pink Floyd song, what kind of weird legal footing does that put me on.
If they are in charge of the systems, they are the system administrators, regardless of if it's someone who is responsible for 100 servers or Aunt Tilly with her "email machine".
Aunt Tilly will never be a competent system administrator. You can spend $10,000 a person training everyone in the world about computer security, spend 60 trillion dollars, and Aunt Tilly will still not be a competent system administrator. Why even pursue this line of thought?
Incompetence doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for what your system is doing any more than being a bad driver relieves you of the responsibility for the accident you caused.
Bad analogy. You can be an expert and still be rooted and have your computer used in an attack. The complexity of software is such that one person often can't even understand the complete functionality of a single program. Anyway's in your analogy you are the one driving, when your computer is taken over and used in an attack, you are not the one in control. It's more like if someone steals my car using a flaw in the locking/starting mechanism then runs over a cop. Except that's not a good analogy either because often with a computer you have no obvious evidence that your machine is compromised.