Otherwise I'd advise to ask the scientist, since their profession is (supposed to be) an implementation of the scientific method.
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
I am not sure I would, generally, agree with scientific method being a philosophical construct before a scientific one, based on the reference.com dictionary definition of "Scientific Method":
"a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested."
The philosopher will sit back and think about things, possibly describing a problem in a form that can be addressed by someone other than another philosopher. But the scientist will define the bounds of the problem as (generally) measurable features, gather data and formulate hypotheses, leading to the empirical testing of those hypotheses. However, where String Theory is concerned, I do agree that what we call "Scientific Method" in relation to the theory is a philosophical exercise, due to the difficulty in actually doing any of the data gathering and empirical testing. The edge case/boundary between the two would be a thought experiment, similar to many that Einstein engaged in when formulating his theories around Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The difference between those and String Theory though, is that we have found other ways to validate those theories by applying them to situations that allow prediction, experiment and measurement for comparison to the models that arose from the thought experiments. I would love to see a similar evolution with String Theory, but until we can measure, test and experiment I cannot see String Theory as anything more than a philosophical exercise.
You have obviously never been to New Jersey or Oregon. Or at least not gone to a gas station in either of those two states.
I went to New Jersey once... it smelled funny. ok, I lied and spread terribly bad geographical stereotypes. Never been to NJ other than as a layover stop at Newark when flying between Europe and San Francisco. If NJ and Oregon are still using Gas Station pump attendants, I suspect that is more about padding employment figures than service levels. Because if an attendant were adding value, they would be common in other states too. Hmm, just heard a whooshing sound. Was that the point of the comment, flying over my head?:P
You mean, like the fact that we now have to fill up our cars by ourselves nowadays at the gas station? Next, we will go to the data center by ourselves to turn the power back on...
To a large extent, yes. Although the example I initially had in mind was the airline industry - flying in the 1950's was a little bit dangerous, but also very glamorous. As it grew and became more of a mass-market thing through the 70's and 80's, competition on price became the norm, while it had previously been competition based on added value services and the prestige of travel. The current state, with low-cost carriers and "cattle class" in every sense of the phrase, is not where we are with data centers yet, but we will get there. In data center terms, that probably would be not much more than off-site hosting, and if you want extras like UPS, power/network/server failover, data backup or on-the-spot warm body technicians with the skill to do more than press a button, you will pay for it. As the service itself becomes less valued, price becomes very important. Price is always important to PHBs and other MBA idiots, but at least with cloud services at the moment the more technically-minded can point to the hype and caché of the cloud as a justification of the cost.
As with a lot of other services (in fact, all other services that I can think of) that reach a certain level of maturity and ubiquity in the market place, one of two things seem to happen. Large-scale consolidation reducing the number of competitors until a small number of actors, or a single monolithic entity, remain; or reduced perceived value of aspects of the service leading to a bare-bones offering because customers decide they are less willing to pay for services they are not going to use very often (but when they need them and they are not there... oh boy, will they scream and harass the provider who told them they were sacrificing redundancy and potential uptime for lower costs).
I am going to be generous to Senator Feinstein, and assume that she has no technical/IT knowledge, so is reliant on staffers and advice from lobbyists about what the benefits and consequences of something like this would be. I could be wrong, and it could be that she is fully aware of the consequences, but a short-term benefit for the surveillance state and a long-term open door for cyber-crime does not seem like a politically shrewd move. However, that in itself presents a problem - if we assume that this one politician has no first-hand working knowledge of the consequences of what she is proposing, then we would also have to assume that many other members of Congress and the Senate, plus many other political and legislation bodies around the world, similarly have little or no understanding of (a) the way computers and the Internet work, and (b) the consequences of weakening encryption in this way. If those assumptions are true, how can those individuals (or even those institutions, if the level of ignorance is at enough of a critical mass to hamper an intelligent debate on the subject) be trusted or expected to craft effective, meaningful and beneficial legislation on the topic? Answer, they cannot. Hence the reason we have expert advisors and so on... who also need to be both independent and also be SEEN to be independent.
Internally within most organisations in my experience, developers write the code their management team tells them to write, which comes from competitive analysis, feedback from sales or pre-sales demo teams, analysis of trends in support calls, and feedback from client relationship managers. Basically, 1. When we go out to show our products to prospective clients, what do they want that we cannot do or cannot do easily? 2. What feedback are our existing customers giving us (through any channel, but mainly their relationship manager or the support team) about what they are finding hard? 3. When we lose a deal to the competition on something other than price, what was the deciding factor? What features were we lacking, or is it just that the competition have better sales staff? 4. What bugs/features exist in our system that are causing problems for our clients, or are preventing us landing new deals? (This one is different from points 1 and 2 - this is a functional issue, 1 and 2 are design issues).
In most development companies where I have worked, the answers to those questions are constantly monitored by a focus group for future development, and they mandate what new features (or fixes for existing bugs) are included in the product roadmap.
It sounds as though that entire process is missing from OP's company, and getting management buy-in to get that setup would be my first suggestion. Once that is up and running, the organisation becomes more focused on profitably delivering what the customer wants, instead of what seems to be the case in OP's office - what the developers want to produce.
Asking clients specifically for feedback about what features they find good and bad about the system, and how the system can better support their workflow is a question for the relationship manager, if there is one. Similarly, if a client decides not to renew a contract or wants to break the contract part way through to move to a competitor's product, asking why the decision to migrate was made would be a good idea - often it will be purely price-driven and features will have no relevance. But sometimes, the lack of a specific feature or generally bad UI programming causing lost productivity for the client can be the cause, and really needs to be addressed.
As others have said, stopping the payment of severance is one avenue, although in my case as in some others there was a clause that if I find another job within the severance period, the remainder of the severance is paid as a lump sum (or I have seen in some cases that a proportion of the severance is paid), with the previous employer reserving the right to claw back/reclaim the money paid through the severance package if the deal is broken - that reclaim can go through civil courts in some cases, incurring additional expense for the job leaver. The attendant loss of a reference from that employer, plus the negative impact on the ex-employee's reputation are more troubling issues though, especially when you work in a relatively specialized role with employers who have significant transference between them - a reputation for not honoring severance contracts as an ex-employee can be worse than a reputation for resigning by shitting on the boss' desk. Not fair, I know - it gives the ex-employer a lot of leverage, and also would devalue their reputation somewhat, but you are the one looking for a new paycheck so you are the one who needs to look awesome.
I had a similar clause in my severance contract at a previous employer (only 6 months, though), and started getting calls frequently because the guy to whom I handed over decided to quit after a row with my old boss. I had covered myself by notifying the new employer of the clause during interviews, but suddenly getting 4 or 5 calls a day that took up 1-2 hours of the working day was a problem and as the new guy on the team, I did not have a huge amount of good-will with my team to be able to "slack off" from the team's projects. The old employer also had a vested interest. Knowing the way my old manager's mind worked, he would have had no problem with making calls to the point where the new employer terminated my contract because of it, so that he could try to rehire me. My new boss got his legal team talking to the old company, and when the possibility of either legal action or invoicing for my time came up, the call volume dropped to near zero - 2 calls in 3 months, if I recall correctly. The project they were calling about was well documented, thanks to me and a detail-oriented intern who had been working with me for a couple of months, but these clauses still leave an ex-employee on the hook for a lot of potential problems if they are vaguely worded.
Simple answer... you cannot. Useful answer, buy from a place that has a "full refund" policy which will not be invalidated by you doing enough with the phone to install the app that will tell you which chip you got. Cannot get a suitable refund guarantee? Then either do not buy the phone or buy one and take pot luck.
Personally, I have no problem with visiting a web site that has ads on it, within reason. That mainly applies to my home internet connection, but my mobile is a work tool and I rarely browse the internet on it anyway. However, pages that load within a second or two, but then sit with a blank window "waiting for Adserve/Adsense/some-other-bullshit-3rd-party-ad-site" for a minute or so; or pages that have a tiny amount of useful content but which have 30-40 trackers on them, meaning that my (admittedly crap) home internet connection slows from a crawl to a coma-inducing slither; or sites that try to fetch ads from a third party which has been infected with malware which then tries to install on my system; ads that lead my technologically illiterate family members to call me in a panic because there is a thing on the screen saying their computer is infected; or ads that are so visually intrusive that I can barely see the information I am interested in; these are the main things that drive me to install ad blockers, script blockers, and privacy tools. They also drive me to restrict access for user accounts to system resources, so if any of those family members want stuff installed, I have to go and install it for them (a pain in the ass and a time sink, but from experience I can say that it is less of a pain in the ass and much less of a time sink than the alternatives I have found).
If I was on a connection where I was paying for every megabyte of data I download, such as the typical mobile contracts, I would be even harder.
Advertisers want to paint this as me "stealing" from them, as if I have taken from them anything more tangible than the POTENTIAL to try and sell me something I do not want. But for me, loading a web page is akin to inviting someone into my house (I generally offer coffee, tea and cake to people I invite in) - I am inviting that information, that company, to make a connection to me. Just because I have invited that ONE connection does not mean that I am going to extend that invitation to their friends, friends of friends, neighbours and some drug-addled homeless psycho that is tagging along with them to come in, drink my coffee, eat my cake, piss all over the dining room and steal the painting on the wall. With allowing ads on my system, sometimes it feels as though that is what I would be doing.
So, umm, no Mr. Advertiser, sorry. I might trust the person or party that I have invited enough to load their web page, but I do not know you or any of your friends, and you are not accepting any liability for bad stuff that happens, so if you happen to cause me problems I have no recourse against you. That means you get left at the front door, and while I will not come out brandishing a shotgun shouting "Get off my lawn!", it is an awfully tempting thing.
Software engineers generally (always, in my experience) do what management tells them to do, and nothing more - with the pressure of hitting a deadline, no engineer wants to miss a deadline and then tell their boss that the reason they missed it was because they were getting creative with the code and requirements. However, I can see a scenario where this might be laid at the feet of a couple of software engineers.
Presumably, the ECM is capable of dynamically switching the engine mode depending on a range of factors - sensor measurements, controls in the cabin, driver actions, and so on. Presumably also, each engine mode is used in a variety of different scenarios.
So if a manager tasks one particular software engineer with, among other "minor changes", detecting when an emissions testing rig is attached and setting a flag in the system (or even when *anything* is attached to the port used by the testing rig), then that engineer is probably not going to see anything untoward in the request - the system might want to log that a test rig has been plugged in on a particular date and time for any number of reasons relating to the servicing, maintenance and operation of the vehicle. Separately, and maybe at quite a significantly later date, a manager might ask another software engineer to tweak the controls on the ECM, so that if a particular flag is set, the engine is put into super-low-emission economy mode.
If the two engineers are feeling un-curious or if the instructions are phrased in a highly innocuous way, then it would just be one of a number of commits to the version control system by those engineers, probably with no record of managerial requests, and as there would also be no record of any management discussions about this - informal "chance" meetings over lunch in the management canteen rarely have detailed minutes of the meeting - it is laid at the door of a couple of hapless engineers.
Personally, I have had more crap managers who were actually brilliant technical people with no management skills than good managers. If a person has good management skills but no technical ability, they will still be a much better manager than a technical person who is promoted to management because the company "wants to reward their loyalty/performance". Sadly, I have also met a lot of managers who were crap managers and who also had no technical knowledge. But in almost all cases, the bad managers were good at something within the company, and were simply promoted beyond their competence.
Customer Experience Improvement Program... for those of us used to wading through the pile of sewage that is Windows in a corporate environment, it is well known and enjoyed about as much as annual performance appraisals.
For the purpose of ensuring consistency, the author (whose concentration within the story is typically on what is coming and where characters and the story arc are going to be) is usually not the best person to ensure that current or recent story updates are consistent with existing material they have already written for that universe. For that task, third party human fact-checkers are best (readers of the existing works who have the attention to detail and the fanatical sense of ownership of the author's creation to have built up a body of lore based on the existing material - effectively, people whose concentration within the story is on where the characters and story have already been.
It makes things harder for the author if they are up against a publisher's deadline, and their fact checker points out that the character who is central to a plot twist in Chapter 13 of book 4 had their head chopped off in chapter 9 of book 2, but it is better for the problem to be raised before going to print.
It doesn't say anywhere that the study is funded by CATO, although there is nothing stopping a bit of friendly back-scratching between golf-course buddies to cross-fund studies so that the interested party gets a piece of paper that supports their argument, without there being any direct financial ties. Which is not to say, of course, that this is an example of such.
In this case, the author of the study, David Bier, is the Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, which is a basically Libertarian think-tank whose major opinion pieces on Climate Change, EPA and ITC oversight, CISA, Defence reform and pretty much everything else read to me as "trust big business, they are not going to screw things up, and then you will not need all those expensive gubmint headcounts that are currently wasted on watching us do what is best".
In other words, just the kind of group whom I would expect to come out with the kind of H1b opinion piece they have done.
"I might actually vote for him because of this policy. Never thought I would say that."
the second half of the comment suggests that OP was about as close to voting for Trump as you are to, say, the moon. "Never thought I would say that" kind of implies that "I find myself having nothing in common with this candidate". However the first part of the comment - "I might actually vote for him because of this policy", when taken in line with the second half of the statement, says "nothing else I have heard from this candidate would make me want to vote for him or even consider the possibility that I might want to vote for him, but this policy does, and would make me seriously consider voting for Trump." In other words, the most perfect example of "single issue voting" - assuming that the OP actually does at some point in the future put an "X" next to Trump - that you will ever see in the real world.
For those of us who went through our teenage years before the internet, the records were mostly out of reach - parents pulling out embarrassing baby/child photos to show a girlfriend/boyfriend, childhood friends with unfortunately good memories recounting stories about embarrassing behaviour, tattoos that we regretted but could generally cover up, and for the more adventurous of us the juvenile criminal records that resulted from pranks or misbehaviour are the kinds of things we deal with. The current generation are going through all of that while also having an almost uncontrollable urge to post every iota of their lives online. Somebody with the ability to step back and think "will I regret this tomorrow/next week/next year/at a job interview" would probably not do a lot of the things that end up being posted, but today's teenagers are no better at consequence analysis than we were when we were that age. The difference is that today the records are more permanent and more visible.
Personally, I do not believe that people should be able to airbrush their past to this degree, even though as adults we all do it up to a point - after all, rewriting a resumé so it is still basically true but puts you in a better light is a common tactic before applying for jobs, and keeping some of your more embarrassing secrets is natural - we all want people to see the good parts, and we want to hide the bad parts. That will be harder for teenagers in the digital world. But rather than allowing children to erase the past and thus escape the consequences of their actions, I would prefer to educate them about those consequences and how long they can go on for. It means they have to grow up a bit more quickly in some ways, but better that than to teach them that you can do bad or embarrassing shit and then rewrite history after the fact.
Some code written in RPG on an AS/400 that was hosting a MAAPICS environment. Some of the code updates were dated to the early 1960's, and there were indications that some of the original code dated back to the 1950's. But yes, technically the oldest technology I have used is either a pencil and paper or the wheels on an old cart - those specific instances of the wheels were not that old, but as instances of the "wheel" object within the OO design schema, the wheel object itself is pretty old.
My perspective is from working as a contractor to banks and other companies in the banking sector in the UK and Europe, and occasionally to companies working in Defence contracting, where there is no issue with foreign nationals providing such services. The ultimate goal is, where possible, to prevent data breaches. However, when budgets are limited and business requirements mandate access to external services, IT security becomes about (0.9) Establishing ownership of the IT security policy and firewall management; (1) making it as hard as possible for the breach to occur; (2) minimizing the data that can be lost during a breach; (3) establishing clear auditing procedures to help recognize and quantify the nature of the breach and the data exposed; and (4) establish reporting and information sharing policies to advise internal and external stake-holders of the breach. There should probably be a (1.1) in there as well, which is to identify the most likely sources of a breach and manage the risks in each case, although as an IT security issue the biggest single source of hacks, electronic break-ins, lost data, and any kind of shenanigans that lead to your company's data being splurged all over the internet, is the stupid fuck-wit sitting at the desk (you and I included, but especially the users outside the IT department). Everyone from the company chairman down to the lowest employee is a softer target than the firewall itself.
If there is a breach (and chances are that there will be one if there has not been one already, so the statement should probably be "if/when you DISCOVER the breach"), the IT team are the ones who will get it in the neck for allowing the breach, even if users are given the ability to control their own firewall settings. If users need access to a website or service that is not currently allowed, they should submit a business case/request to their line manager who then approves it. IT then co-approve and make the relevant changes (and if IT say "no", they need to have a damn good reason). There is a paper trail, and all open ports and firewall rules are there because of business decisions. IT will still get it in the neck, but there will be an audit trail.
Allowing users to open their own ports (whether it is temporary or permanent is totally irrelevant) means that those clients cannot be trusted by the server farms/network resources on the network, so they should be moved into a DMZ with a firewall between them and the rest of the network.
Not quite - the cost of building out infrastructure is a huge barrier to entry, but it is not insurmountable for an individual, organisation or corporation with deep enough pockets - see Google's Fiber initiative as an example. Other obstacles exist too (lack of expertise, reputation, existing customer base to determine asset value, and so on), but as with the cost of infrastructure these can be overcome with sufficient up-front investment. The single biggest thing preventing the launch of a new wholesale carrier to challenge the existing regional monopolies is the fact that many urban areas have either legislative or contractual tie-ins that lock them into an exclusive contract with the existing incumbent, which will result in either the new provider being denied access to poles/underground tunnels or being denied the requisite planning permission to build their own, or they will be allowed to build the infrastructure but not connect the last mile to potential consumers.
If the role is really THAT specialized, then presumably they have agreed some kind of agreement where the new hire can call you during their first 6 months(?) of ramp up time, when they have questions (and that should be something they compensate you for in an appropriate and mutually agreed manner). Aside from that, securing the knowledge base is vital, so your manager (and the manager/owner of the system you are supporting, if that is not your manager) need to request/authorize the retention of your email account beyond the 90 day period. Typically that would involve getting IT to transfer ownership of the mailbox over to the manager/owner, and when the new hire starts granting access to them. As long as they advise you in writing that, as of your last day on the job, you forfeit ownership, control, access and rights to all content of your mailbox and get your signature to agree to that, most HR departments and HR legal specialists will be ok with that afaik. Once the knowledge base is out of your hands, it ceases to be your problem though, so management need to own the process of securing and preserving the knowledge, something they seem to have done a piss poor job of to date.
In Europe and Asia, the average population density in cities is typically much higher than the US, where the cities typically have as large a population, but are more spread out. (Fun fact, the only US city that ranks in the top 50 for population density world-wide is.... Union City, New Jersey!) As such, in the US, car ownership is almost a necessity unless you live in a city like New York with a large area mass transit system. Living in, for example, London or Tokyo, you have to be either borderline suicidal or a regular commuter to areas outside the city, for car ownership to be viable, given the high cost of ownership and maintenance of a car, parking, fuel, and so on. Or you have to be a creature of habit. Seriously, the idea of driving across London at a slower pace than you could walk the same distance actually appeals to some people! In that kind of environment, the most economical option is often to take the train to your chosen destination (it is quicker, less stressful, and you can kick back with a beer, and avoid the airport security theater and molestation by a TSA agent *cough*pervert*cough*). If you really need to drive, hiring a car at your destination is again usually cheaper than taking your own vehicle all the way.
Overturn murder conviction? Murderers belong to a electric chair. Keeping those morons around is total waste of taxpayers money. Before you start your hippy bull shit about "what if he is innocent..." find out, how much it cost to keep one of those scumbags in prison for a year. I bet most of you wish you could spend that much on yourself for the rest of your life:)
Gas/chair/needle all the violent repeat criminals and be done with those morons.
Hmm let's see... assuming the Seattle Times is not just pushing this because they or the report authors are anti-death penalty... Seeking death penalty adds $1M to prosecution cost, study says http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Or according to the Nevada Legislature, "The Legislative Auditor estimated the cost of a murder trial in which the death penalty was sought cost $1.03 to $1.3 million, whereas cases without the death penalty cost $775,000." (All the study links I can find for that one are either pdf or paywalled)
Kansas: "Defending a death penalty case costs about four times as much as defending a case where the death penalty is not sought, according to a new study by the Kansas Judicial Council. Examining 34 potential death-penalty cases from 2004-2011, the study found that defense costs for death penalty trials averaged $395,762 per case, compared to $98,963 per case when the death penalty was not sought. "
Idaho: "A new, but limited, study of the costs of the death penalty in Idaho found that capital cases are more costly and take much more time to resolve than non-capital cases. One measure of death-penalty costs was reflected in the time spent by attorneys handling appeals. The State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal (almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty defendant). Capital cases with trials took 20.5 months to reach a conclusion while non-capital cases with trials took 13.5 months."
California: Assessment of Costs by Judge Arthur Alarcon and Prof. Paula Mitchell (2011, updated 2012) "The authors concluded that the cost of the death penalty in California has totaled over $4 billion since 1978: $1.94 billion--Pre-Trial and Trial Costs $925 million--Automatic Appeals and State Habeas Corpus Petitions $775 million--Federal Habeas Corpus Appeals $1 billion--Costs of Incarceration The authors calculated that, if the Governor commuted the sentences of those remaining on death row to life without parole, it would result in an immediate savings of $170 million per year, with a savings of $5 billion over the next 20 years."
Texas: "Each death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers about $2.3 million. That is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. ("Executions Cost Texas Millions," Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992)." Granted, the Texas study is probably too old for immediate relevance....and so on...
Going purely from memory for this next little item, so I cannot provide any citation for it, I seem to recall that the cost of keeping a prisoner on Death Row is about $90,000 to $100,000 higher than keeping a prisoner in the general population. Sounds to me like the Death Penalty is a ridiculously expensive option, considering that it is primarily there as a deterrent. Given the crime rates in the US, I would have to question whether the deterrent is working. So if it is not working, and it costs a butt-ton of money, why bother with it?
Having just finished a contract in the investment banking arm of a Swedish bank, I can point to a range of frontline support and development roles which are going to be RELATIVELY outsource-proof. Telephony system support; desktop support; trading platform support; algorithm/decision support system development; basically anything that an investment banking trader is going to need in order to process a deal, although the specifics are going to vary by company. Those traders are (a) paid a metric crap-ton of money, and (b) stressed by anything and everything from reflections on the screen to their coffee being too hot. Having to pick up a phone and shout at someone in another country is not going to work - even someone in the SAME BUILDING, but on a different floor does not do it. They want someone in the same room (same room is not a small office, this is typically a trading pit with 250-300 people in it, so pretty big) who they can grab (sometimes literally), point at the problem and yell "fix it", before running off to chug down a couple of valium. If they do not get what they want, they bitch at their managers about how the company is not giving them the tools to do their job (make tons of money for the bank). The typical overhead for one of those traders by the time their Bloomberg and Reuters real-time data licences plus software licences and broker fees is included, is well over $10,000 per month, and that is without accounting for their salaries, bonuses, IT hardware or software licences that are calculated at a corporate level - operating systems, Office package, databases etc. Overall, the "normal" monthly investment that the bank makes in that trader is over $100,000, so for the business, even when it is run by bean-counters or Harvard MBAs, whatever that person needs to increase their productivity, they get. So if the users say that they NEED an IT guy on the spot who can be at the desk within 20 seconds to look at and start working on the problem, that is what they get. If that IT guy is going to cost $80,000 - $100,000 per year instead of $15,000 per year for some guy called "Dave" with an Indian accent working out of Bangalore, tough shit, $65,000 is pin money. Remote access from outside the bank is almost always flat out refused for security reasons, so while off-site support can work, third-party support has to be on-site and in person.
The only exception to the "local first" rule that I have seen, is the Bloomberg helpdesk. Those guys work remotely, and can be reached either by telephone (usually a call center somewhere in the same geographical region as the user) or by pressing F1 twice on your keyboard, which brings up a Messenger-style chat window. You type your question and it gets routed to a team that hopefully knows something about the specifics. Almost invariably though, when a trader gets a Bloomberg problem, it is batted off to the in-room IT guy who goes through the problem with the Bloomberg tech while the trader goes to pop another valium and get a massage to de-stress.
Basically, if you are someone who can turn Excel inside out, write high quality C++ code while being constantly interrupted, and solve whatever random crap problems come up while maintaining a calm demeanour and keeping the world's most stressed people from flying into hypertensive shock, then you have a job for life. A typical day? Printer is out of paper; another printer is jammed, and has a full waste toner bottle; internet connection for user X is down; User Y has just sent a naked picture of client A's wife to client B by mistake; Murex overnight jobs have failed so the D3 trading platform has the wrong start prices and wrong date, so someone needs that escalating to the Murex support team to get it fixed; User Z has just got in and spilled coffee in his Bloomberg keyboard so the biometric login does not work; vendor A upgraded their app without telling anyone last night, so now all the users of that system cannot login; the row of desks 24-48 are completely dead, Christ knows why, although t
Slashdot Mirror
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
I am not sure I would, generally, agree with scientific method being a philosophical construct before a scientific one, based on the reference.com dictionary definition of "Scientific Method":
"a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested."
The philosopher will sit back and think about things, possibly describing a problem in a form that can be addressed by someone other than another philosopher. But the scientist will define the bounds of the problem as (generally) measurable features, gather data and formulate hypotheses, leading to the empirical testing of those hypotheses.
However, where String Theory is concerned, I do agree that what we call "Scientific Method" in relation to the theory is a philosophical exercise, due to the difficulty in actually doing any of the data gathering and empirical testing.
The edge case/boundary between the two would be a thought experiment, similar to many that Einstein engaged in when formulating his theories around Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The difference between those and String Theory though, is that we have found other ways to validate those theories by applying them to situations that allow prediction, experiment and measurement for comparison to the models that arose from the thought experiments.
I would love to see a similar evolution with String Theory, but until we can measure, test and experiment I cannot see String Theory as anything more than a philosophical exercise.
You have obviously never been to New Jersey or Oregon. Or at least not gone to a gas station in either of those two states.
I went to New Jersey once... it smelled funny. ok, I lied and spread terribly bad geographical stereotypes. Never been to NJ other than as a layover stop at Newark when flying between Europe and San Francisco. :P
If NJ and Oregon are still using Gas Station pump attendants, I suspect that is more about padding employment figures than service levels. Because if an attendant were adding value, they would be common in other states too.
Hmm, just heard a whooshing sound. Was that the point of the comment, flying over my head?
You mean, like the fact that we now have to fill up our cars by ourselves nowadays at the gas station? Next, we will go to the data center by ourselves to turn the power back on...
To a large extent, yes. Although the example I initially had in mind was the airline industry - flying in the 1950's was a little bit dangerous, but also very glamorous. As it grew and became more of a mass-market thing through the 70's and 80's, competition on price became the norm, while it had previously been competition based on added value services and the prestige of travel. The current state, with low-cost carriers and "cattle class" in every sense of the phrase, is not where we are with data centers yet, but we will get there. In data center terms, that probably would be not much more than off-site hosting, and if you want extras like UPS, power/network/server failover, data backup or on-the-spot warm body technicians with the skill to do more than press a button, you will pay for it.
As the service itself becomes less valued, price becomes very important. Price is always important to PHBs and other MBA idiots, but at least with cloud services at the moment the more technically-minded can point to the hype and caché of the cloud as a justification of the cost.
As with a lot of other services (in fact, all other services that I can think of) that reach a certain level of maturity and ubiquity in the market place, one of two things seem to happen. Large-scale consolidation reducing the number of competitors until a small number of actors, or a single monolithic entity, remain; or reduced perceived value of aspects of the service leading to a bare-bones offering because customers decide they are less willing to pay for services they are not going to use very often (but when they need them and they are not there... oh boy, will they scream and harass the provider who told them they were sacrificing redundancy and potential uptime for lower costs).
I am going to be generous to Senator Feinstein, and assume that she has no technical/IT knowledge, so is reliant on staffers and advice from lobbyists about what the benefits and consequences of something like this would be. I could be wrong, and it could be that she is fully aware of the consequences, but a short-term benefit for the surveillance state and a long-term open door for cyber-crime does not seem like a politically shrewd move.
However, that in itself presents a problem - if we assume that this one politician has no first-hand working knowledge of the consequences of what she is proposing, then we would also have to assume that many other members of Congress and the Senate, plus many other political and legislation bodies around the world, similarly have little or no understanding of (a) the way computers and the Internet work, and (b) the consequences of weakening encryption in this way. If those assumptions are true, how can those individuals (or even those institutions, if the level of ignorance is at enough of a critical mass to hamper an intelligent debate on the subject) be trusted or expected to craft effective, meaningful and beneficial legislation on the topic?
Answer, they cannot. Hence the reason we have expert advisors and so on... who also need to be both independent and also be SEEN to be independent.
Ahh crap, we're screwed.
Internally within most organisations in my experience, developers write the code their management team tells them to write, which comes from competitive analysis, feedback from sales or pre-sales demo teams, analysis of trends in support calls, and feedback from client relationship managers.
Basically,
1. When we go out to show our products to prospective clients, what do they want that we cannot do or cannot do easily?
2. What feedback are our existing customers giving us (through any channel, but mainly their relationship manager or the support team) about what they are finding hard?
3. When we lose a deal to the competition on something other than price, what was the deciding factor? What features were we lacking, or is it just that the competition have better sales staff?
4. What bugs/features exist in our system that are causing problems for our clients, or are preventing us landing new deals? (This one is different from points 1 and 2 - this is a functional issue, 1 and 2 are design issues).
In most development companies where I have worked, the answers to those questions are constantly monitored by a focus group for future development, and they mandate what new features (or fixes for existing bugs) are included in the product roadmap.
It sounds as though that entire process is missing from OP's company, and getting management buy-in to get that setup would be my first suggestion. Once that is up and running, the organisation becomes more focused on profitably delivering what the customer wants, instead of what seems to be the case in OP's office - what the developers want to produce.
Asking clients specifically for feedback about what features they find good and bad about the system, and how the system can better support their workflow is a question for the relationship manager, if there is one. Similarly, if a client decides not to renew a contract or wants to break the contract part way through to move to a competitor's product, asking why the decision to migrate was made would be a good idea - often it will be purely price-driven and features will have no relevance. But sometimes, the lack of a specific feature or generally bad UI programming causing lost productivity for the client can be the cause, and really needs to be addressed.
As others have said, stopping the payment of severance is one avenue, although in my case as in some others there was a clause that if I find another job within the severance period, the remainder of the severance is paid as a lump sum (or I have seen in some cases that a proportion of the severance is paid), with the previous employer reserving the right to claw back/reclaim the money paid through the severance package if the deal is broken - that reclaim can go through civil courts in some cases, incurring additional expense for the job leaver.
The attendant loss of a reference from that employer, plus the negative impact on the ex-employee's reputation are more troubling issues though, especially when you work in a relatively specialized role with employers who have significant transference between them - a reputation for not honoring severance contracts as an ex-employee can be worse than a reputation for resigning by shitting on the boss' desk.
Not fair, I know - it gives the ex-employer a lot of leverage, and also would devalue their reputation somewhat, but you are the one looking for a new paycheck so you are the one who needs to look awesome.
I had a similar clause in my severance contract at a previous employer (only 6 months, though), and started getting calls frequently because the guy to whom I handed over decided to quit after a row with my old boss.
I had covered myself by notifying the new employer of the clause during interviews, but suddenly getting 4 or 5 calls a day that took up 1-2 hours of the working day was a problem and as the new guy on the team, I did not have a huge amount of good-will with my team to be able to "slack off" from the team's projects.
The old employer also had a vested interest. Knowing the way my old manager's mind worked, he would have had no problem with making calls to the point where the new employer terminated my contract because of it, so that he could try to rehire me.
My new boss got his legal team talking to the old company, and when the possibility of either legal action or invoicing for my time came up, the call volume dropped to near zero - 2 calls in 3 months, if I recall correctly.
The project they were calling about was well documented, thanks to me and a detail-oriented intern who had been working with me for a couple of months, but these clauses still leave an ex-employee on the hook for a lot of potential problems if they are vaguely worded.
Simple answer... you cannot. Useful answer, buy from a place that has a "full refund" policy which will not be invalidated by you doing enough with the phone to install the app that will tell you which chip you got.
Cannot get a suitable refund guarantee? Then either do not buy the phone or buy one and take pot luck.
Personally, I have no problem with visiting a web site that has ads on it, within reason. That mainly applies to my home internet connection, but my mobile is a work tool and I rarely browse the internet on it anyway.
However, pages that load within a second or two, but then sit with a blank window "waiting for Adserve/Adsense/some-other-bullshit-3rd-party-ad-site" for a minute or so; or pages that have a tiny amount of useful content but which have 30-40 trackers on them, meaning that my (admittedly crap) home internet connection slows from a crawl to a coma-inducing slither; or sites that try to fetch ads from a third party which has been infected with malware which then tries to install on my system; ads that lead my technologically illiterate family members to call me in a panic because there is a thing on the screen saying their computer is infected; or ads that are so visually intrusive that I can barely see the information I am interested in; these are the main things that drive me to install ad blockers, script blockers, and privacy tools.
They also drive me to restrict access for user accounts to system resources, so if any of those family members want stuff installed, I have to go and install it for them (a pain in the ass and a time sink, but from experience I can say that it is less of a pain in the ass and much less of a time sink than the alternatives I have found).
If I was on a connection where I was paying for every megabyte of data I download, such as the typical mobile contracts, I would be even harder.
Advertisers want to paint this as me "stealing" from them, as if I have taken from them anything more tangible than the POTENTIAL to try and sell me something I do not want. But for me, loading a web page is akin to inviting someone into my house (I generally offer coffee, tea and cake to people I invite in) - I am inviting that information, that company, to make a connection to me. Just because I have invited that ONE connection does not mean that I am going to extend that invitation to their friends, friends of friends, neighbours and some drug-addled homeless psycho that is tagging along with them to come in, drink my coffee, eat my cake, piss all over the dining room and steal the painting on the wall. With allowing ads on my system, sometimes it feels as though that is what I would be doing.
So, umm, no Mr. Advertiser, sorry. I might trust the person or party that I have invited enough to load their web page, but I do not know you or any of your friends, and you are not accepting any liability for bad stuff that happens, so if you happen to cause me problems I have no recourse against you. That means you get left at the front door, and while I will not come out brandishing a shotgun shouting "Get off my lawn!", it is an awfully tempting thing.
Software engineers generally (always, in my experience) do what management tells them to do, and nothing more - with the pressure of hitting a deadline, no engineer wants to miss a deadline and then tell their boss that the reason they missed it was because they were getting creative with the code and requirements.
However, I can see a scenario where this might be laid at the feet of a couple of software engineers.
Presumably, the ECM is capable of dynamically switching the engine mode depending on a range of factors - sensor measurements, controls in the cabin, driver actions, and so on. Presumably also, each engine mode is used in a variety of different scenarios.
So if a manager tasks one particular software engineer with, among other "minor changes", detecting when an emissions testing rig is attached and setting a flag in the system (or even when *anything* is attached to the port used by the testing rig), then that engineer is probably not going to see anything untoward in the request - the system might want to log that a test rig has been plugged in on a particular date and time for any number of reasons relating to the servicing, maintenance and operation of the vehicle.
Separately, and maybe at quite a significantly later date, a manager might ask another software engineer to tweak the controls on the ECM, so that if a particular flag is set, the engine is put into super-low-emission economy mode.
If the two engineers are feeling un-curious or if the instructions are phrased in a highly innocuous way, then it would just be one of a number of commits to the version control system by those engineers, probably with no record of managerial requests, and as there would also be no record of any management discussions about this - informal "chance" meetings over lunch in the management canteen rarely have detailed minutes of the meeting - it is laid at the door of a couple of hapless engineers.
Personally, I have had more crap managers who were actually brilliant technical people with no management skills than good managers.
If a person has good management skills but no technical ability, they will still be a much better manager than a technical person who is promoted to management because the company "wants to reward their loyalty/performance".
Sadly, I have also met a lot of managers who were crap managers and who also had no technical knowledge. But in almost all cases, the bad managers were good at something within the company, and were simply promoted beyond their competence.
Do you even know what a "theory" means? A theory means a proven hypothesis.
Too many stupid people walking this planet.
Oh the irony... you are thinking of a theorem...
Customer Experience Improvement Program... for those of us used to wading through the pile of sewage that is Windows in a corporate environment, it is well known and enjoyed about as much as annual performance appraisals.
For the purpose of ensuring consistency, the author (whose concentration within the story is typically on what is coming and where characters and the story arc are going to be) is usually not the best person to ensure that current or recent story updates are consistent with existing material they have already written for that universe. For that task, third party human fact-checkers are best (readers of the existing works who have the attention to detail and the fanatical sense of ownership of the author's creation to have built up a body of lore based on the existing material - effectively, people whose concentration within the story is on where the characters and story have already been.
It makes things harder for the author if they are up against a publisher's deadline, and their fact checker points out that the character who is central to a plot twist in Chapter 13 of book 4 had their head chopped off in chapter 9 of book 2, but it is better for the problem to be raised before going to print.
It doesn't say anywhere that the study is funded by CATO, although there is nothing stopping a bit of friendly back-scratching between golf-course buddies to cross-fund studies so that the interested party gets a piece of paper that supports their argument, without there being any direct financial ties. Which is not to say, of course, that this is an example of such.
In this case, the author of the study, David Bier, is the Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, which is a basically Libertarian think-tank whose major opinion pieces on Climate Change, EPA and ITC oversight, CISA, Defence reform and pretty much everything else read to me as "trust big business, they are not going to screw things up, and then you will not need all those expensive gubmint headcounts that are currently wasted on watching us do what is best".
In other words, just the kind of group whom I would expect to come out with the kind of H1b opinion piece they have done.
As the original comment was
"I might actually vote for him because of this policy. Never thought I would say that."
the second half of the comment suggests that OP was about as close to voting for Trump as you are to, say, the moon. "Never thought I would say that" kind of implies that "I find myself having nothing in common with this candidate".
However the first part of the comment - "I might actually vote for him because of this policy", when taken in line with the second half of the statement, says "nothing else I have heard from this candidate would make me want to vote for him or even consider the possibility that I might want to vote for him, but this policy does, and would make me seriously consider voting for Trump."
In other words, the most perfect example of "single issue voting" - assuming that the OP actually does at some point in the future put an "X" next to Trump - that you will ever see in the real world.
For those of us who went through our teenage years before the internet, the records were mostly out of reach - parents pulling out embarrassing baby/child photos to show a girlfriend/boyfriend, childhood friends with unfortunately good memories recounting stories about embarrassing behaviour, tattoos that we regretted but could generally cover up, and for the more adventurous of us the juvenile criminal records that resulted from pranks or misbehaviour are the kinds of things we deal with.
The current generation are going through all of that while also having an almost uncontrollable urge to post every iota of their lives online. Somebody with the ability to step back and think "will I regret this tomorrow/next week/next year/at a job interview" would probably not do a lot of the things that end up being posted, but today's teenagers are no better at consequence analysis than we were when we were that age. The difference is that today the records are more permanent and more visible.
Personally, I do not believe that people should be able to airbrush their past to this degree, even though as adults we all do it up to a point - after all, rewriting a resumé so it is still basically true but puts you in a better light is a common tactic before applying for jobs, and keeping some of your more embarrassing secrets is natural - we all want people to see the good parts, and we want to hide the bad parts. That will be harder for teenagers in the digital world. But rather than allowing children to erase the past and thus escape the consequences of their actions, I would prefer to educate them about those consequences and how long they can go on for. It means they have to grow up a bit more quickly in some ways, but better that than to teach them that you can do bad or embarrassing shit and then rewrite history after the fact.
Some code written in RPG on an AS/400 that was hosting a MAAPICS environment. Some of the code updates were dated to the early 1960's, and there were indications that some of the original code dated back to the 1950's.
But yes, technically the oldest technology I have used is either a pencil and paper or the wheels on an old cart - those specific instances of the wheels were not that old, but as instances of the "wheel" object within the OO design schema, the wheel object itself is pretty old.
My perspective is from working as a contractor to banks and other companies in the banking sector in the UK and Europe, and occasionally to companies working in Defence contracting, where there is no issue with foreign nationals providing such services. The ultimate goal is, where possible, to prevent data breaches. However, when budgets are limited and business requirements mandate access to external services, IT security becomes about (0.9) Establishing ownership of the IT security policy and firewall management; (1) making it as hard as possible for the breach to occur; (2) minimizing the data that can be lost during a breach; (3) establishing clear auditing procedures to help recognize and quantify the nature of the breach and the data exposed; and (4) establish reporting and information sharing policies to advise internal and external stake-holders of the breach.
There should probably be a (1.1) in there as well, which is to identify the most likely sources of a breach and manage the risks in each case, although as an IT security issue the biggest single source of hacks, electronic break-ins, lost data, and any kind of shenanigans that lead to your company's data being splurged all over the internet, is the stupid fuck-wit sitting at the desk (you and I included, but especially the users outside the IT department). Everyone from the company chairman down to the lowest employee is a softer target than the firewall itself.
If there is a breach (and chances are that there will be one if there has not been one already, so the statement should probably be "if/when you DISCOVER the breach"), the IT team are the ones who will get it in the neck for allowing the breach, even if users are given the ability to control their own firewall settings.
If users need access to a website or service that is not currently allowed, they should submit a business case/request to their line manager who then approves it. IT then co-approve and make the relevant changes (and if IT say "no", they need to have a damn good reason). There is a paper trail, and all open ports and firewall rules are there because of business decisions. IT will still get it in the neck, but there will be an audit trail.
Allowing users to open their own ports (whether it is temporary or permanent is totally irrelevant) means that those clients cannot be trusted by the server farms/network resources on the network, so they should be moved into a DMZ with a firewall between them and the rest of the network.
Not quite - the cost of building out infrastructure is a huge barrier to entry, but it is not insurmountable for an individual, organisation or corporation with deep enough pockets - see Google's Fiber initiative as an example. Other obstacles exist too (lack of expertise, reputation, existing customer base to determine asset value, and so on), but as with the cost of infrastructure these can be overcome with sufficient up-front investment.
The single biggest thing preventing the launch of a new wholesale carrier to challenge the existing regional monopolies is the fact that many urban areas have either legislative or contractual tie-ins that lock them into an exclusive contract with the existing incumbent, which will result in either the new provider being denied access to poles/underground tunnels or being denied the requisite planning permission to build their own, or they will be allowed to build the infrastructure but not connect the last mile to potential consumers.
If the role is really THAT specialized, then presumably they have agreed some kind of agreement where the new hire can call you during their first 6 months(?) of ramp up time, when they have questions (and that should be something they compensate you for in an appropriate and mutually agreed manner). Aside from that, securing the knowledge base is vital, so your manager (and the manager/owner of the system you are supporting, if that is not your manager) need to request/authorize the retention of your email account beyond the 90 day period. Typically that would involve getting IT to transfer ownership of the mailbox over to the manager/owner, and when the new hire starts granting access to them.
As long as they advise you in writing that, as of your last day on the job, you forfeit ownership, control, access and rights to all content of your mailbox and get your signature to agree to that, most HR departments and HR legal specialists will be ok with that afaik.
Once the knowledge base is out of your hands, it ceases to be your problem though, so management need to own the process of securing and preserving the knowledge, something they seem to have done a piss poor job of to date.
In Europe and Asia, the average population density in cities is typically much higher than the US, where the cities typically have as large a population, but are more spread out. (Fun fact, the only US city that ranks in the top 50 for population density world-wide is.... Union City, New Jersey!)
As such, in the US, car ownership is almost a necessity unless you live in a city like New York with a large area mass transit system. Living in, for example, London or Tokyo, you have to be either borderline suicidal or a regular commuter to areas outside the city, for car ownership to be viable, given the high cost of ownership and maintenance of a car, parking, fuel, and so on. Or you have to be a creature of habit. Seriously, the idea of driving across London at a slower pace than you could walk the same distance actually appeals to some people!
In that kind of environment, the most economical option is often to take the train to your chosen destination (it is quicker, less stressful, and you can kick back with a beer, and avoid the airport security theater and molestation by a TSA agent *cough*pervert*cough*). If you really need to drive, hiring a car at your destination is again usually cheaper than taking your own vehicle all the way.
Overturn murder conviction? :)
Murderers belong to a electric chair. Keeping those morons around is total waste of taxpayers money.
Before you start your hippy bull shit about "what if he is innocent..." find out, how much it cost to keep one of those scumbags in prison for a year.
I bet most of you wish you could spend that much on yourself for the rest of your life
Gas/chair/needle all the violent repeat criminals and be done with those morons.
Hmm let's see... assuming the Seattle Times is not just pushing this because they or the report authors are anti-death penalty...
Seeking death penalty adds $1M to prosecution cost, study says
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Or according to the Nevada Legislature, "The Legislative Auditor estimated the cost of a murder trial in which the death penalty was sought cost $1.03 to $1.3 million, whereas cases without the death penalty cost $775,000."
(All the study links I can find for that one are either pdf or paywalled)
Kansas: "Defending a death penalty case costs about four times as much as defending a case where the death penalty is not sought, according to a new study by the Kansas Judicial Council. Examining 34 potential death-penalty cases from 2004-2011, the study found that defense costs for death penalty trials averaged $395,762 per case, compared to $98,963 per case when the death penalty was not sought. "
Idaho: "A new, but limited, study of the costs of the death penalty in Idaho found that capital cases are more costly and take much more time to resolve than non-capital cases. One measure of death-penalty costs was reflected in the time spent by attorneys handling appeals. The State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal (almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty defendant). Capital cases with trials took 20.5 months to reach a conclusion while non-capital cases with trials took 13.5 months."
California: Assessment of Costs by Judge Arthur Alarcon and Prof. Paula Mitchell (2011, updated 2012)
"The authors concluded that the cost of the death penalty in California has totaled over $4 billion since 1978:
$1.94 billion--Pre-Trial and Trial Costs
$925 million--Automatic Appeals and State Habeas Corpus Petitions
$775 million--Federal Habeas Corpus Appeals
$1 billion--Costs of Incarceration
The authors calculated that, if the Governor commuted the sentences of those remaining on death row to life without parole, it would result in an immediate savings of $170 million per year, with a savings of $5 billion over the next 20 years."
Texas: "Each death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers about $2.3 million. That is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. ("Executions Cost Texas Millions," Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992)." Granted, the Texas study is probably too old for immediate relevance. ...and so on...
Going purely from memory for this next little item, so I cannot provide any citation for it, I seem to recall that the cost of keeping a prisoner on Death Row is about $90,000 to $100,000 higher than keeping a prisoner in the general population.
Sounds to me like the Death Penalty is a ridiculously expensive option, considering that it is primarily there as a deterrent. Given the crime rates in the US, I would have to question whether the deterrent is working. So if it is not working, and it costs a butt-ton of money, why bother with it?
Having just finished a contract in the investment banking arm of a Swedish bank, I can point to a range of frontline support and development roles which are going to be RELATIVELY outsource-proof. Telephony system support; desktop support; trading platform support; algorithm/decision support system development; basically anything that an investment banking trader is going to need in order to process a deal, although the specifics are going to vary by company.
Those traders are (a) paid a metric crap-ton of money, and (b) stressed by anything and everything from reflections on the screen to their coffee being too hot.
Having to pick up a phone and shout at someone in another country is not going to work - even someone in the SAME BUILDING, but on a different floor does not do it. They want someone in the same room (same room is not a small office, this is typically a trading pit with 250-300 people in it, so pretty big) who they can grab (sometimes literally), point at the problem and yell "fix it", before running off to chug down a couple of valium. If they do not get what they want, they bitch at their managers about how the company is not giving them the tools to do their job (make tons of money for the bank).
The typical overhead for one of those traders by the time their Bloomberg and Reuters real-time data licences plus software licences and broker fees is included, is well over $10,000 per month, and that is without accounting for their salaries, bonuses, IT hardware or software licences that are calculated at a corporate level - operating systems, Office package, databases etc. Overall, the "normal" monthly investment that the bank makes in that trader is over $100,000, so for the business, even when it is run by bean-counters or Harvard MBAs, whatever that person needs to increase their productivity, they get. So if the users say that they NEED an IT guy on the spot who can be at the desk within 20 seconds to look at and start working on the problem, that is what they get. If that IT guy is going to cost $80,000 - $100,000 per year instead of $15,000 per year for some guy called "Dave" with an Indian accent working out of Bangalore, tough shit, $65,000 is pin money.
Remote access from outside the bank is almost always flat out refused for security reasons, so while off-site support can work, third-party support has to be on-site and in person.
The only exception to the "local first" rule that I have seen, is the Bloomberg helpdesk. Those guys work remotely, and can be reached either by telephone (usually a call center somewhere in the same geographical region as the user) or by pressing F1 twice on your keyboard, which brings up a Messenger-style chat window. You type your question and it gets routed to a team that hopefully knows something about the specifics. Almost invariably though, when a trader gets a Bloomberg problem, it is batted off to the in-room IT guy who goes through the problem with the Bloomberg tech while the trader goes to pop another valium and get a massage to de-stress.
Basically, if you are someone who can turn Excel inside out, write high quality C++ code while being constantly interrupted, and solve whatever random crap problems come up while maintaining a calm demeanour and keeping the world's most stressed people from flying into hypertensive shock, then you have a job for life.
A typical day? Printer is out of paper; another printer is jammed, and has a full waste toner bottle; internet connection for user X is down; User Y has just sent a naked picture of client A's wife to client B by mistake; Murex overnight jobs have failed so the D3 trading platform has the wrong start prices and wrong date, so someone needs that escalating to the Murex support team to get it fixed; User Z has just got in and spilled coffee in his Bloomberg keyboard so the biometric login does not work; vendor A upgraded their app without telling anyone last night, so now all the users of that system cannot login; the row of desks 24-48 are completely dead, Christ knows why, although t