If there is no means for enforcement, then I guess the labor offices of the civil rights sections of the Federal & state departments of justice must sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs and the various cases in the past and that are pending against companies that violated or even suspected of violating these rules must be fiction. Just because there isn't a panel within a company that takes 2-3 weeks in order to fire someone, doesn't mean that the rules aren't enforced.
Also if a company is the size that this sort of ranking scale is used, it also probably has compiled an employee handbook of some sort detailing the various policies concerning termination, discipline, or evaluation and have the employees sign that they've read and understand them. If anything this is for when some govt officials start poking around. The same goes for publishing the various raise scales, employee grades, bonus formulas, reporting violations to internal auditors, etc. Throw into the mix the sexual harassment, diversity, violence, or any other type of CYA training that should bore most people to death.
I find it somewhat odd that a manager would not communicate with his subordinates what is expected of them and how they are to be graded. If they don't, they should be fired for incompetence because if they don't, how does the employee know what they should be doing on a day-to-day basis? Wait until once a year? That's silly. In many of these types of reviews nowdays, the employee has to fill out a self evaluation form at the beginning of the process. This not only insures that they know what they are going to be graded, but it provides communication back to management on how the employee feels they did and examples backing it up. Personally, I'm the type of guy that finds this sort of need of HR communication a pain - just tell me what I need to work on when I'm finished with other tasks, let me work on it, and judge the output when it's done. I wouldn't want any additional bullshit imposed by politicans. IMHO, we have more than enough as it is.
Unless you ask them directly, people that like their jobs aren't going to go into all the HR paperwork behind the scenes. They will tell you about what they do. People that don't, will complain how their treated unfairly, how they were fired or weren't hired for no reason, etc. Misery loves company. So take these tales with a grain of salt.
There are some code generators or sql table generators for dia, but since it was originally made to be a diagramming tool, I'm not sure how good these add-ons are.
So does PeopleSoft and lots of other 'Enterprise' systems. I seem to recall an article in one of those 'IT newspapers' a year or so back that said that 75% of the business logic in programs world wide is written in Cobol. Cobol programmers aren't going anywhere.
I wonder if it's the case where many slashdotters are getting out of college and are working at their first job in the real world, or if they are former.com employees trying to adjust to a regular business environment, especially a large corporate one.
If you look at it from the business' viewpoint, the reason why they do the point rankings or some other standardized performance ranking is to simplify things and to provide a documented process that includes a lengthy paper trail for when they get sued or get brought up on civil rights abuses by the govt for running a 'good ole boys network'. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter. This will happen to any company of significant size because there will always be at least one person that will scream that they were discriminated against even though they were terminated for poor performance. They need to demonstrate that there was a uniform, impartial process in place to counter this. Start-ups probably don't care about any of this because they want to reward their achievers who are fueling the growth. This behavior continues until they become big and/or until they fire the wrong person.
So you're saying that companies should keep unproductive people onboard until the company is unprofitable and eventually is run into the ground and everyone is out of a job? That's insane. Around here, sexual harassment will get you fired in a heartbeat, so I'm not sure what your point is about that unless you're the one doing the harassment. People also sue their former employers because of perceived injustices of various forms. I'm not sure where you got your idea of work in the US, but it doesn't seem jive with reality. Unless a person is a slacker, socialism isn't going to help you very much, if at all.
We've had printers go bad because of 'dirty power'. None of the support calls would make sense. The printer worked fine for a while, and then went to hell and nothing on the server changed. Send out a new printer, it would be ok for a while and then stop working. Fly a tech in to investigate. After another dead printer, he determines that the outlet the printer is plugged into is not delivering adequate voltage. A call to an electrician fixed the problem.
I think Archos already makes portable devices that can store and play audio and video. By MSFT's definition, an iPod killer is already here, but apparently not doing it's job.
Hollywood apparently has run out of good ideas and/or writers. It seems that they either put out absolute garbage or take a great old movie and put out a weak remake at best.
Somewhere in 1997 I downloaded and configured the linuxrouter.org projects mini-distro (called LRP). It was based on Debian 'some vegtable'
2.0.36 kernel. It was put on a Zenith Z-select Workstation with a 486 DX
with 12 Megs of Ram and two identical 3Com 3c509 ISA parallel taking cards
10Mbit only. From the time it went to production til its retirement it
served solid. It has only one failure, the floppy drive. I can say it
NEVER failed because of OS. It did act squirrely during the last big worm
we had because a bunch of workstations tried to ping 'SCO' and it kept
running out of NAT ports, BUT it did not fail. Its longest uptime was 530
days, It would have been longer but people kicking power plugs out and
other external events. On march 4, 2004 at 7:45am 'shutdown -h now' was
performed and the box went to sleep.
The box serviced some 450 people on 25 different subnets.
It was fed directly from the Internet on a T1.
It put up with streaming video, audio and many, many windows update
sessions.
Better yet, once you've explained to them how important having a cell phone is, if they still balk at having employee owned equipment in the office, tell them you'll gladly carry one that they buy for that purpose.
That way you won't have to pay for a service that they should be in order to do your job. Also, when you go on vacation or are out sick, the company owned cell phone can be given to the person taking over in your absence. This could even be something that could be rotated on a weekly or monthly basis.
If there is one on the market, I know I would like to get one. Being lost in the middle of nowhere and finding out that the batteries in the GPS are dead, sucks.
Connections get you grant money, and with out that, well, you just as well be a lab TA. Hell, this is even the case within Federal science facilities. This is just a case of a leftist political action group not liking the appointments and trying to hide behind science.
They would be doing those activities anyway because of the dependence on GPS and communications sats. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that if we don't create these types of weapons, then no-one else will either is dangerous.
Places like LensCrafters exist for one main reason: people get their new glasses the same day. This technology would allow them to crank them out even faster. You would spend more time picking out the frames than you would for the lenses being made. Since the process would be cheaper and faster, you will have more people buying glasses to accessorize like they do shoes.
I thought they are supposed to be free to do research that challeges the accepted scientific view, not just goes along with it.
Politicians appointing committee members that share their views is as old as politics itself. Anyone who thinks that these scientists are free of political or ideology concerns is living in a dream world. Who you know is probably more important that what you know, because the former is how you get grants. All of it is very political.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is no means for enforcement, then I guess the labor offices of the civil rights sections of the Federal & state departments of justice must sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs and the various cases in the past and that are pending against companies that violated or even suspected of violating these rules must be fiction. Just because there isn't a panel within a company that takes 2-3 weeks in order to fire someone, doesn't mean that the rules aren't enforced.
Also if a company is the size that this sort of ranking scale is used, it also probably has compiled an employee handbook of some sort detailing the various policies concerning termination, discipline, or evaluation and have the employees sign that they've read and understand them. If anything this is for when some govt officials start poking around. The same goes for publishing the various raise scales, employee grades, bonus formulas, reporting violations to internal auditors, etc. Throw into the mix the sexual harassment, diversity, violence, or any other type of CYA training that should bore most people to death.
I find it somewhat odd that a manager would not communicate with his subordinates what is expected of them and how they are to be graded. If they don't, they should be fired for incompetence because if they don't, how does the employee know what they should be doing on a day-to-day basis? Wait until once a year? That's silly. In many of these types of reviews nowdays, the employee has to fill out a self evaluation form at the beginning of the process. This not only insures that they know what they are going to be graded, but it provides communication back to management on how the employee feels they did and examples backing it up. Personally, I'm the type of guy that finds this sort of need of HR communication a pain - just tell me what I need to work on when I'm finished with other tasks, let me work on it, and judge the output when it's done. I wouldn't want any additional bullshit imposed by politicans. IMHO, we have more than enough as it is.
Unless you ask them directly, people that like their jobs aren't going to go into all the HR paperwork behind the scenes. They will tell you about what they do. People that don't, will complain how their treated unfairly, how they were fired or weren't hired for no reason, etc. Misery loves company. So take these tales with a grain of salt.
There are some code generators or sql table generators for dia, but since it was originally made to be a diagramming tool, I'm not sure how good these add-ons are.
So does PeopleSoft and lots of other 'Enterprise' systems. I seem to recall an article in one of those 'IT newspapers' a year or so back that said that 75% of the business logic in programs world wide is written in Cobol. Cobol programmers aren't going anywhere.
I wonder if it's the case where many slashdotters are getting out of college and are working at their first job in the real world, or if they are former .com employees trying to adjust to a regular business environment, especially a large corporate one.
If you look at it from the business' viewpoint, the reason why they do the point rankings or some other standardized performance ranking is to simplify things and to provide a documented process that includes a lengthy paper trail for when they get sued or get brought up on civil rights abuses by the govt for running a 'good ole boys network'. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter. This will happen to any company of significant size because there will always be at least one person that will scream that they were discriminated against even though they were terminated for poor performance. They need to demonstrate that there was a uniform, impartial process in place to counter this. Start-ups probably don't care about any of this because they want to reward their achievers who are fueling the growth. This behavior continues until they become big and/or until they fire the wrong person.
So you're saying that companies should keep unproductive people onboard until the company is unprofitable and eventually is run into the ground and everyone is out of a job? That's insane. Around here, sexual harassment will get you fired in a heartbeat, so I'm not sure what your point is about that unless you're the one doing the harassment. People also sue their former employers because of perceived injustices of various forms. I'm not sure where you got your idea of work in the US, but it doesn't seem jive with reality. Unless a person is a slacker, socialism isn't going to help you very much, if at all.
We've had printers go bad because of 'dirty power'. None of the support calls would make sense. The printer worked fine for a while, and then went to hell and nothing on the server changed. Send out a new printer, it would be ok for a while and then stop working. Fly a tech in to investigate. After another dead printer, he determines that the outlet the printer is plugged into is not delivering adequate voltage. A call to an electrician fixed the problem.
Bentonville seems to be a nice town, but for many /.ers, it's still in BFE.
In other words, do the damn job at the best of your abilities, day in, day out and don't give a shit about the ranking system.
The bass player for Splitlip Rayfield made his own instrument out of a gas tank, some strings, and a piece of wood.
she included her mail address though.
Wal-Mart's HQ is in what many here will consider a rural area. They have a sizeable IT staff.
I think Archos already makes portable devices that can store and play audio and video. By MSFT's definition, an iPod killer is already here, but apparently not doing it's job.
Hollywood apparently has run out of good ideas and/or writers. It seems that they either put out absolute garbage or take a great old movie and put out a weak remake at best.
hmmm...this guy didn't have a problem:
Somewhere in 1997 I downloaded and configured the linuxrouter.org projects mini-distro (called LRP). It was based on Debian 'some vegtable' 2.0.36 kernel. It was put on a Zenith Z-select Workstation with a 486 DX with 12 Megs of Ram and two identical 3Com 3c509 ISA parallel taking cards 10Mbit only. From the time it went to production til its retirement it served solid. It has only one failure, the floppy drive. I can say it NEVER failed because of OS. It did act squirrely during the last big worm we had because a bunch of workstations tried to ping 'SCO' and it kept running out of NAT ports, BUT it did not fail. Its longest uptime was 530 days, It would have been longer but people kicking power plugs out and other external events. On march 4, 2004 at 7:45am 'shutdown -h now' was performed and the box went to sleep.
The box serviced some 450 people on 25 different subnets. It was fed directly from the Internet on a T1. It put up with streaming video, audio and many, many windows update sessions.
I have at least two, maybe three slot-1 motherboards from different manufacturers that allow you to change the FSB via the bios. they were around.
Better yet, once you've explained to them how important having a cell phone is, if they still balk at having employee owned equipment in the office, tell them you'll gladly carry one that they buy for that purpose.
That way you won't have to pay for a service that they should be in order to do your job. Also, when you go on vacation or are out sick, the company owned cell phone can be given to the person taking over in your absence. This could even be something that could be rotated on a weekly or monthly basis.
If there is one on the market, I know I would like to get one. Being lost in the middle of nowhere and finding out that the batteries in the GPS are dead, sucks.
Connections get you grant money, and with out that, well, you just as well be a lab TA. Hell, this is even the case within Federal science facilities. This is just a case of a leftist political action group not liking the appointments and trying to hide behind science.
They would be doing those activities anyway because of the dependence on GPS and communications sats. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that if we don't create these types of weapons, then no-one else will either is dangerous.
Places like LensCrafters exist for one main reason: people get their new glasses the same day. This technology would allow them to crank them out even faster. You would spend more time picking out the frames than you would for the lenses being made. Since the process would be cheaper and faster, you will have more people buying glasses to accessorize like they do shoes.
A minority of the electorate put Clinton in office both times too. The SC just froze the state of vote manipulation in FL.
Cheney's following the cancelled checks to the families of suicide bombers.
I thought they are supposed to be free to do research that challeges the accepted scientific view, not just goes along with it.
Politicians appointing committee members that share their views is as old as politics itself. Anyone who thinks that these scientists are free of political or ideology concerns is living in a dream world. Who you know is probably more important that what you know, because the former is how you get grants. All of it is very political.
It does sound a bit like the eMate, except for the description of being able to fold the keyboard around.
Well, if I was British, I'd be looking into private hospitals just like I do in the US.