Except that the first pass into HR doesn't even involve people any more. A ton of companies have put their hiring process at the mercy of automatic matching systems. Check this:
I dunno about you, but just the idea of going to work for a company that uses "person model functionality" to "ensure compliance and increase operational efficiency" in hiring sucks a little bit of my soul into my stomach and makes me throw up into my mouth.
It's a situation that never goes away really, and certain industry segments seem particularly prone to laughable wishlists of skills and tasks paired with grossly low compensation. I personally saw a department that came up with a page of things they wanted done, each of them a small project in itself, and had budget for 1 junior programmer for 1 year to do it all. I don't know what happened to them, but they were ripe for a fleecing from a promise-everything/deliver-nothing flyby contractor.
Yes, it does happen. I think Java was one of the most common offenders in during the dot-com era. From what I hear, it happens because the hiring manager asks for a middle or senior-level person who "knows Java" or whatever. To HR drones, the definition of junior/middle/senior pretty much boils down to # of years experience with the skillset requested, they don't follow the tech enough to know.
The sad thing is, companies with good HR people that work with the hiring manager are relatively few. At most companies HR exists as a gatekeeper to the hiring process, and good hiring managers learn to work around them. Of course, once HR realizes people are bypassing them, they find ways to expand to the rules to block it, which of course makes it even harder for hiring managers to find people.
In the end, companies with clueless, controlling, and inflexible HR departments get exactly the kind of workforce they deserve.
What's interesting though, is that important (noisy senior management) people still get their stuff fixed quickly, because the outsource group soon figures out who butters their bread and makes sure to focus on those people and systems. It's all the rest of the schmoes in the client company who see a big spike in response times, lost tickets, crappy service, etc. True story example: Two days to get a password reset.
"people can be ALLOWED to relocate from one group / project..."
Agreed, which is why root cause is important. Because the initiative seems to be coming from the top down, I'd want to know management's motivation. It's the old track about asking 'why?' five times. Why do they want to standardize? So people can be relocated faster. Why do they want people to be able to relocate faster? etc...
On the other hand, if the effort were coming from the development teams, then we could discuss whether or not the desire to move between projects is a motivation, and if so, why? Are there projects that really suck that people hope to get off of? Why is that? etc...
There is definitely value in having the members of the development team agree to a set of tools around which they can share common experiences and exchange solutions for problems that come up. That's fine. What scares me about your question is that it is driven from above,
The main rationale is that people can be relocated from one group / project to another faster, because they don't need to learn a new environment when they switch.
Developers are not plug-compatible interchangeable parts that can be slotted in and out of various projects according to shifting needs. It doesn't matter if they all know exactly the same toolset or not, dropping Jane from the accounting project who has been around for a couple of years in to replace James in the supply-chain project who left because he got married and his wife is taking an internship at a distant hospital and expecting equivalent results demonstrates a vast ignorance of how developers become productive.
Nearly every company's management wants to imagine it can standardize developers for a lot of bad reasons -- because they believe that gives them leverage over someone who has deep domain knowledge and can't easily be replaced with a junior programmer for example. Or they imagine they can save money by buying bulk licenses for a product from a vendor. Beware of management playing golf with software tool vendors, you'll get stuck with some POS for sure.
Perhaps going to management and suggesting that the developers collaborate to nominate a selection of acceptable toolsets from which management can select would work, but that kind of suggestion never seems to be taken very well by the suits.
Up until now, it was a super-corporation focusing on sales with Bill Gates as the face. Now it'll become like Computer Associates, SAP, CISCO, Computer Sciences, Solectron, IBM or any number of similar bastions of blandness.
Windows operating systems are inherently buggy and exploitable, or include technologies that are. Until security is locked down tight, IMHO, we should not be moving to a place where the Windows operating system does more.
Richard Hofstadter's book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was originally written in 1963. As such it discusses McCarthyism and "eggheads" like Adlai Stevenson, but the arguments are as current now as they were then.
Entertainment Weekly will never find a science book that reaches its audience because no book that could legitimately be called science would ever fall far enough down the intellectual spectrum to be approachable by that magazine's readers.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1, Troll
If the book hits on unions as hard as the reviewer seems to indicate, it appears the authors of want to go back to that time when they and their social circles were the only passengers.
If this makes the life of a programmer too goddamn difficult, it won't get off the ground. Hahahaha.
Hahaha.
OK, now, I...hahahahaha..
You've never programmed for a living I take it?
There are many many technologies out there that make life for programmers too goddamned difficult, but that doesn't prevent the PHBs and the marketecture-driven corporations from buying them and telling the line programmers to make it work. And there are programmers, sofware companies, and consultancies with misaligned ethical compasses more than willing to throw droves of bodies at a problem while picking clean the pockets of any business willful or uninformed enough to insist on trying to make the unworkable work. As a matter of fact, some might argue that the entire business model of DRM-related technology is built around selling snake oil that can never really accomplish the desired goal.
It might never work, but as long as someone keeps buying the promise, it will make money.
I saw that also. If it's not a trick of the light, then it would most likely be a part of the backshell, having drifted a little downrange while the lander was diving more or less straight down on the retros.
Many of the work well, as can be seen from all the endorsements in other comments.
There is one thing to watch for though -- companies selling you software or consulting around the issues their tool highlights.
A few companies will practically give you a tool that they claim finds lots of critical bugs, either through static or runtime analysis, and by the way, for a more considerable sum, offer you "fixes" for these "bugs". This is something that companies sell to a PHBs desire to use the tool to generate metrics and measure progress by how many problems the tool spits out get fixed.
Of course there are companies that offer genuine value in finding and fixing software problems, but every red flag in the room should fly if the company proposes to offer you a free or almost-free "no obligation" assessment. Once the sales dogs are in the door, watch out!
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, I forgot about outsourcing and labor-law violating weasels.
Except that the first pass into HR doesn't even involve people any more. A ton of companies have put their hiring process at the mercy of automatic matching systems. Check this:
By leveraging SmartHire, organizations can deploy job or location-specific hiring templates across the enterprise, allowing rapid, flexible hiring from non-traditional locations while helping to reduce administrative costs and eliminate the need for customization. Additionally, with enhancements to the person model functionality customers may more effectively manage the non-traditional workforce, while an embedded online I-9 processing tool will help to ensure compliance and increase operational efficiency.
I dunno about you, but just the idea of going to work for a company that uses "person model functionality" to "ensure compliance and increase operational efficiency" in hiring sucks a little bit of my soul into my stomach and makes me throw up into my mouth.
It's a situation that never goes away really, and certain industry segments seem particularly prone to laughable wishlists of skills and tasks paired with grossly low compensation. I personally saw a department that came up with a page of things they wanted done, each of them a small project in itself, and had budget for 1 junior programmer for 1 year to do it all. I don't know what happened to them, but they were ripe for a fleecing from a promise-everything/deliver-nothing flyby contractor.
Yes, it does happen. I think Java was one of the most common offenders in during the dot-com era. From what I hear, it happens because the hiring manager asks for a middle or senior-level person who "knows Java" or whatever. To HR drones, the definition of junior/middle/senior pretty much boils down to # of years experience with the skillset requested, they don't follow the tech enough to know.
The sad thing is, companies with good HR people that work with the hiring manager are relatively few. At most companies HR exists as a gatekeeper to the hiring process, and good hiring managers learn to work around them. Of course, once HR realizes people are bypassing them, they find ways to expand to the rules to block it, which of course makes it even harder for hiring managers to find people.
In the end, companies with clueless, controlling, and inflexible HR departments get exactly the kind of workforce they deserve.
MOD PARENT UP
5 4 3 2 1 POST!
I know what he means! I've put this job offer through our HR folks literally WEEKS ago and have not seen a SINGLE candidate's resume!
Wanted to hire, Jr. Web Developer.
Required Skills, minimum 10 years experience in the following:
Silverlight .NET
Microsoft(tm) AJAX(tm)
C-pound
SQL Server 2005
MySQL 5.0
ColdFusion
ATOM
IBM(tm) SOA
MS-Groovy
PRISM
Compensation: $14K/yr
I haven't heard of milfs. How does it compare to jfs or reiserfs?
What's interesting though, is that important (noisy senior management) people still get their stuff fixed quickly, because the outsource group soon figures out who butters their bread and makes sure to focus on those people and systems. It's all the rest of the schmoes in the client company who see a big spike in response times, lost tickets, crappy service, etc. True story example: Two days to get a password reset.
To put it another way, "Although they offer us concessions, change will not come from above."
"people can be ALLOWED to relocate from one group / project..."
Agreed, which is why root cause is important. Because the initiative seems to be coming from the top down, I'd want to know management's motivation. It's the old track about asking 'why?' five times. Why do they want to standardize? So people can be relocated faster. Why do they want people to be able to relocate faster? etc...
On the other hand, if the effort were coming from the development teams, then we could discuss whether or not the desire to move between projects is a motivation, and if so, why? Are there projects that really suck that people hope to get off of? Why is that? etc...
There is definitely value in having the members of the development team agree to a set of tools around which they can share common experiences and exchange solutions for problems that come up. That's fine. What scares me about your question is that it is driven from above,
The main rationale is that people can be relocated from one group / project to another faster, because they don't need to learn a new environment when they switch.
Developers are not plug-compatible interchangeable parts that can be slotted in and out of various projects according to shifting needs. It doesn't matter if they all know exactly the same toolset or not, dropping Jane from the accounting project who has been around for a couple of years in to replace James in the supply-chain project who left because he got married and his wife is taking an internship at a distant hospital and expecting equivalent results demonstrates a vast ignorance of how developers become productive.
Nearly every company's management wants to imagine it can standardize developers for a lot of bad reasons -- because they believe that gives them leverage over someone who has deep domain knowledge and can't easily be replaced with a junior programmer for example. Or they imagine they can save money by buying bulk licenses for a product from a vendor. Beware of management playing golf with software tool vendors, you'll get stuck with some POS for sure.
Perhaps going to management and suggesting that the developers collaborate to nominate a selection of acceptable toolsets from which management can select would work, but that kind of suggestion never seems to be taken very well by the suits.
Up until now, it was a super-corporation focusing on sales with Bill Gates as the face. Now it'll become like Computer Associates, SAP, CISCO, Computer Sciences, Solectron, IBM or any number of similar bastions of blandness.
TOO SHORT
Why only 2-character codes? Host names can be long.
Here's what happens when you go with that kind of naming scheme.
LOCIPDD1
LOCIPDQ1
LOCIPDP1
LOCIPDP2
LOCDDQD1
LOCDDAP1
LOCAPCP1
LOCAPDP1
It goes on and on. Now try saying PDD and PDP over the phone and see how well that works.
.. same as the old boss.
'We never imagined that the same candidate would show up for both parties.'
What? The Demopublicans and the Republicrats are all the same? That unpossible!
Windows operating systems are inherently buggy and exploitable, or include technologies that are. Until security is locked down tight, IMHO, we should not be moving to a place where the Windows operating system does more.
Fixed.
Richard Hofstadter's book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was originally written in 1963. As such it discusses McCarthyism and "eggheads" like Adlai Stevenson, but the arguments are as current now as they were then.
Entertainment Weekly will never find a science book that reaches its audience because no book that could legitimately be called science would ever fall far enough down the intellectual spectrum to be approachable by that magazine's readers.
If the book hits on unions as hard as the reviewer seems to indicate, it appears the authors of want to go back to that time when they and their social circles were the only passengers.
+1 mod parent up
Hahaha.
OK, now, I...hahahahaha..
You've never programmed for a living I take it?
There are many many technologies out there that make life for programmers too goddamned difficult, but that doesn't prevent the PHBs and the marketecture-driven corporations from buying them and telling the line programmers to make it work. And there are programmers, sofware companies, and consultancies with misaligned ethical compasses more than willing to throw droves of bodies at a problem while picking clean the pockets of any business willful or uninformed enough to insist on trying to make the unworkable work. As a matter of fact, some might argue that the entire business model of DRM-related technology is built around selling snake oil that can never really accomplish the desired goal.
It might never work, but as long as someone keeps buying the promise, it will make money.
Set controls for the heart of the sun.
+1 grammerhumor
I saw that also. If it's not a trick of the light, then it would most likely be a part of the backshell, having drifted a little downrange while the lander was diving more or less straight down on the retros.
Many of the work well, as can be seen from all the endorsements in other comments.
There is one thing to watch for though -- companies selling you software or consulting around the issues their tool highlights.
A few companies will practically give you a tool that they claim finds lots of critical bugs, either through static or runtime analysis, and by the way, for a more considerable sum, offer you "fixes" for these "bugs". This is something that companies sell to a PHBs desire to use the tool to generate metrics and measure progress by how many problems the tool spits out get fixed.
Of course there are companies that offer genuine value in finding and fixing software problems, but every red flag in the room should fly if the company proposes to offer you a free or almost-free "no obligation" assessment. Once the sales dogs are in the door, watch out!
Never ask a geek, "Why?", just nod your head and back away slowly...
Obligatory xkcd sudo reference.