Unless, of course, the user in question is the CEO, or COO, or some other bigwig that can fire you on the spot when you tell them their latest gadget isn't supported. CEOs consider themselves immune to IT policy in most organizations. This includes things like data on laptops, ignoring backup policy, ignoring password policy (to the point where you have to have two policies), iOS devices / Blackberries from outside vendors / Android phones from outside vendors....
If you've found the ONE Fortune 500 company where this isn't the case, please tell us so that we can apply for jobs there. Until then, IT policy is just a suggestion to most executives.
Hmm. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Nuclear power plants haven't been operating for 20,000 years. I think the odds of an accident are a little better than you think, and those are just the two biggies that have happened within recent memory.
Here's the bottom line: When there's a profit motive, corners will be cut, and accidents will happen. Period. The difference is, when an accident happens at a nuclear power plant, it contaminates the environment for hundreds of square miles. When an accident happens in a solar panel farm, a panel falls down and breaks.
Nuclear power has proven itself neither safe nor practical (we still don't know what the fuck to do with the waste, burying it for 10,000 years doesn't do it for me.) Alternatives to coal, oil and nuclear must be found. Actually, they already have, it's just that Big Oil / Coal / insert big multinational conglomerate here lobby them to death.
I was wondering how long it would take for an anti-union douche to show up in this discussion. Unionization makes teaching more attractive by preventing a teacher from being fired for taking risks and innovating. There's always going to be some wingnut parent that disagrees with something the teacher is discussing in class, be it evolution, women's rights, religion, even education. Allowing teachers to be fired basically on a parent's whim makes it that much harder to attract good teachers, and it's pretty damn hard already. Do unions have their downsides? Sure. But they don't have a monopoly on corruption. Management is just as corrupt, if not more so.
And that's exactly the problem - there's such a low barrier to entry for these scumbags that anyone can rent some office space and call themselves a recruiting company. All you have to be able to do is lie like a rug and not know anything about IT (apparently that's a job requirement.) I'd like to see some regulation in this industry - at the very least some standardized forms to indicate things like salary, benefits, job description, etc, that have to be signed off on by the prospective employer. That way, the recruiter couldn't get away with blatantly lying about the position, it'd all be there in black and white. And if the recruiter fudges things, they're on the hook for fraud / breach of contract / severe beatings.
Your advice about cold calls and fly by night recruiters is good, but there are good recruiting companies out there.
[citation needed]
Every recruiter I've worked with, I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE, has been nothing but opportunistic lying used-car-salesman English-major-with-a-2.0-GPA scum. You should see some of the boiler rooms these twerps work in.
One recruiter oversold me on a company by lying about the compensation structure, to the tune of $20k/year.
I got my current job by my employer picking my resume off of Monster. No recruiter involved. I got to talk to my prospective first manager directly, they didn't have to pay five figures to some sleazebag for the privilege of hiring me. Everybody won, and I've been here for four years so far. THIS IS THE WAY IT SHOULD WORK .
Yes, because poor performance at a chronically understaffed and unresourced part of the organization is indicative of the organization's capabilities as a whole.
I can be in and out of my RMV in less than an hour. It's pretty much a model of efficiency considering what it has to work with.
For mission critical documents like that, yes, I would probably go with FedEx. (Should be noted, however, that FedEx loses stuff too, despite your faith in them.) However, that's not the market I'm talking about. I'm talking about typical bills, letters, small packages, and so forth, that right now are cheap to send via USPS. Right now you can send letters for 44 cents. If FedEx, UPS, and the like were to take over that segment of the market, you can bet your last dollar it won't stay that cheap (at least not for long.) Before you know it, you'll be paying $2 for a first class - level delivery, because the company MUST continually show increasing profits lest they be sued by their stockholders.
Your assumption that "government bureaucracy" can't get anything done is a poor one. They get things done every day, and usually with a high level of quality, just like private industry. In fact, in some segments of the economy, the government is beating the stuffing out of private industry in terms of efficiency. (See Medicare.) Do those programs have problems (fraud, for example)? Sure. Do private industry programs in the same markets have the same issues (like recission, denial of care, poor/slow reimbursement rates, etc.)? You betcha. The difference is that less money goes into overhead with the government program, because it doesn't have to show a profit.
You sound like some of these Tea Party yahoos who were cheering at the concept of a government shutdown. What you're advocating here would be a catastrophic event. I know that my employer would go out of business were they not able to have their customers mail letters to us for a nominal fee; UPS and the like would charge too much.
Yes, let's introduce a profit motive into the postal system. I'm sure that won't lead to cutting corners (and lost mail as a result) or anything like that.
The postal service is way way WAY too critical to leave in the hands of a company that cares nothing about quality and everything about profits. (The fact that higher quality will lead to greater profits is too long-term a concept for Corporate America, as it usually takes more than a quarter to realize the profits.)
You know, because we don't have a hard enough time recruiting teachers. Let's make them all at-will employees, subject to termination because they wore the wrong color shirt that day. I'm sure people will be flocking to teaching like it's going out of style, instead of making a lot more money working somewhere else.
Teachers teach because 1) they want to educate, 2) because it's a relatively secure job. You need both. Take one or the other away, and you've suddenly got no teachers.
Some oil/legacy energy company will quietly buy the kid's patent with the stated intention of paying for his college education.. and then quietly bury the idea, which if practical/efficient/it does at it claims, will threaten their business model. $500k is a drop in the bucket for these companies.
How can we enforce policies to keep business data under control and segmented from personal data?
By saying "No", a lot of the time.
Obligatory car-related analogy: "But waiting at the crosswalk for the light to change is boring, and it takes too long, I want to use this vaulting pole!" where waiting for the light to change is securing your communications, and the pole is your iGadget device.
Management needs to be forced to understand that you can have neat gadgets/convenience, or you can have security. Not both. One or the other. If your management refuses to understand this, either 1) get a different job or 2) get it IN WRITING, not just in an email, that you've been asked to override a security policy so that the Vice President of Things That Start With H can have an iPad to play Angry Birds on.
Then again one has to wonder, why do you strive to become upper management?
Because they get paid more. Period. Plus, generally they don't work as hard. It does require a significant amount of political acumen, to be sure, but you make more money to make up for that.
Basically, money is all that matters, in the end. You can't eat job satisfaction.
You'd have to overcome the viewpoint that poor people don't deserve health care, because they're poor. If they just stopped being poor, then they could afford health insurance. They'd also have to stop being unemployed/underemployed, which in this economy is much easier said than done.
So they end up in ERs, where the taxpayer pays for their care anyway. The USA is largely a logic-free zone when it comes to health care.
"As such, insurance companies need to come up with methods to better manage those they are covering to buffer against those who will abuse the system."
Or, you know, they could stop screwing over their customers to the point where having insurance is actually affordable, and people would buy it before they got sick.
"They already have been forgiven the responsibility of paying for their health care"
I don't know about you, but I'm sure paying for my health care. To the tune of $1200/month.
"Why should someone pay for your healthcare if your not an active participant in improving your own health"
Maybe because some people actually give a shit about people other than themselves?
However, we frequently give corporations the same rights as individual citizens. It would only be fair to give them the same responsibilities as well (in other words, paying taxes on income.)
if you want trillions of dollars to be spent on changing the country's energy economy.
It'll need to happen sooner or later. Even if you don't believe in AGW at all (and you're an idiot IMHO if you don't) we're going to run out of fossil fuels eventually. We can spend trillions now or face total disaster. I say spend the damn money.
99% of users are as you described (need educating) and why they won't abandon the Windows system they are used to. And in some cases, won't even move from Win XP to Win 7.
And 99% of everyone are complete shitheads, what's your point? The fact that we're catering to the stupid instead of educating them will be the downfall of our civilization. If they're that stupid, fire them and hire someone who's willing to be trained. A motivated person can learn how to write a document, send an email, and view a web page in an hour on a Linux system.
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Unless, of course, the user in question is the CEO, or COO, or some other bigwig that can fire you on the spot when you tell them their latest gadget isn't supported. CEOs consider themselves immune to IT policy in most organizations. This includes things like data on laptops, ignoring backup policy, ignoring password policy (to the point where you have to have two policies), iOS devices / Blackberries from outside vendors / Android phones from outside vendors....
If you've found the ONE Fortune 500 company where this isn't the case, please tell us so that we can apply for jobs there. Until then, IT policy is just a suggestion to most executives.
Outside of the US, sure. I live in the US. And we've got waste in concrete lined bunkers that has to survive the next Ice Age.
Hmm. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Nuclear power plants haven't been operating for 20,000 years. I think the odds of an accident are a little better than you think, and those are just the two biggies that have happened within recent memory.
Here's the bottom line: When there's a profit motive, corners will be cut, and accidents will happen. Period. The difference is, when an accident happens at a nuclear power plant, it contaminates the environment for hundreds of square miles. When an accident happens in a solar panel farm, a panel falls down and breaks.
Nuclear power has proven itself neither safe nor practical (we still don't know what the fuck to do with the waste, burying it for 10,000 years doesn't do it for me.) Alternatives to coal, oil and nuclear must be found. Actually, they already have, it's just that Big Oil / Coal / insert big multinational conglomerate here lobby them to death.
I was wondering how long it would take for an anti-union douche to show up in this discussion. Unionization makes teaching more attractive by preventing a teacher from being fired for taking risks and innovating. There's always going to be some wingnut parent that disagrees with something the teacher is discussing in class, be it evolution, women's rights, religion, even education. Allowing teachers to be fired basically on a parent's whim makes it that much harder to attract good teachers, and it's pretty damn hard already. Do unions have their downsides? Sure. But they don't have a monopoly on corruption. Management is just as corrupt, if not more so.
They should.
And that's exactly the problem - there's such a low barrier to entry for these scumbags that anyone can rent some office space and call themselves a recruiting company. All you have to be able to do is lie like a rug and not know anything about IT (apparently that's a job requirement.) I'd like to see some regulation in this industry - at the very least some standardized forms to indicate things like salary, benefits, job description, etc, that have to be signed off on by the prospective employer. That way, the recruiter couldn't get away with blatantly lying about the position, it'd all be there in black and white. And if the recruiter fudges things, they're on the hook for fraud / breach of contract / severe beatings.
[citation needed]
Every recruiter I've worked with, I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE , has been nothing but opportunistic lying used-car-salesman English-major-with-a-2.0-GPA scum. You should see some of the boiler rooms these twerps work in.
One recruiter oversold me on a company by lying about the compensation structure, to the tune of $20k/year.
I got my current job by my employer picking my resume off of Monster. No recruiter involved. I got to talk to my prospective first manager directly, they didn't have to pay five figures to some sleazebag for the privilege of hiring me. Everybody won, and I've been here for four years so far. THIS IS THE WAY IT SHOULD WORK .
Yes, because poor performance at a chronically understaffed and unresourced part of the organization is indicative of the organization's capabilities as a whole.
I can be in and out of my RMV in less than an hour. It's pretty much a model of efficiency considering what it has to work with.
For mission critical documents like that, yes, I would probably go with FedEx. (Should be noted, however, that FedEx loses stuff too, despite your faith in them.) However, that's not the market I'm talking about. I'm talking about typical bills, letters, small packages, and so forth, that right now are cheap to send via USPS. Right now you can send letters for 44 cents. If FedEx, UPS, and the like were to take over that segment of the market, you can bet your last dollar it won't stay that cheap (at least not for long.) Before you know it, you'll be paying $2 for a first class - level delivery, because the company MUST continually show increasing profits lest they be sued by their stockholders.
Your assumption that "government bureaucracy" can't get anything done is a poor one. They get things done every day, and usually with a high level of quality, just like private industry. In fact, in some segments of the economy, the government is beating the stuffing out of private industry in terms of efficiency. (See Medicare.) Do those programs have problems (fraud, for example)? Sure. Do private industry programs in the same markets have the same issues (like recission, denial of care, poor/slow reimbursement rates, etc.)? You betcha. The difference is that less money goes into overhead with the government program, because it doesn't have to show a profit.
You sound like some of these Tea Party yahoos who were cheering at the concept of a government shutdown. What you're advocating here would be a catastrophic event. I know that my employer would go out of business were they not able to have their customers mail letters to us for a nominal fee; UPS and the like would charge too much.
Yes, let's introduce a profit motive into the postal system. I'm sure that won't lead to cutting corners (and lost mail as a result) or anything like that.
The postal service is way way WAY too critical to leave in the hands of a company that cares nothing about quality and everything about profits. (The fact that higher quality will lead to greater profits is too long-term a concept for Corporate America, as it usually takes more than a quarter to realize the profits.)
[citation needed]
You know, because we don't have a hard enough time recruiting teachers. Let's make them all at-will employees, subject to termination because they wore the wrong color shirt that day. I'm sure people will be flocking to teaching like it's going out of style, instead of making a lot more money working somewhere else.
Teachers teach because 1) they want to educate, 2) because it's a relatively secure job. You need both. Take one or the other away, and you've suddenly got no teachers.
What about all the people that used to be employed building houses? Should they just go off and starve to death?
Some oil/legacy energy company will quietly buy the kid's patent with the stated intention of paying for his college education.. and then quietly bury the idea, which if practical/efficient/it does at it claims, will threaten their business model. $500k is a drop in the bucket for these companies.
By saying "No", a lot of the time.
Obligatory car-related analogy: "But waiting at the crosswalk for the light to change is boring, and it takes too long, I want to use this vaulting pole!" where waiting for the light to change is securing your communications, and the pole is your iGadget device.
Management needs to be forced to understand that you can have neat gadgets/convenience, or you can have security. Not both. One or the other. If your management refuses to understand this, either 1) get a different job or 2) get it IN WRITING, not just in an email, that you've been asked to override a security policy so that the Vice President of Things That Start With H can have an iPad to play Angry Birds on.
Wow, the tinfoil hat brigade is out in force on this one.
Then again one has to wonder, why do you strive to become upper management?
Because they get paid more. Period. Plus, generally they don't work as hard. It does require a significant amount of political acumen, to be sure, but you make more money to make up for that.
Basically, money is all that matters, in the end. You can't eat job satisfaction.
Health insurance. Contractors don't get it.
You'd have to overcome the viewpoint that poor people don't deserve health care, because they're poor. If they just stopped being poor, then they could afford health insurance. They'd also have to stop being unemployed/underemployed, which in this economy is much easier said than done.
So they end up in ERs, where the taxpayer pays for their care anyway. The USA is largely a logic-free zone when it comes to health care.
"As such, insurance companies need to come up with methods to better manage those they are covering to buffer against those who will abuse the system."
Or, you know, they could stop screwing over their customers to the point where having insurance is actually affordable, and people would buy it before they got sick.
"They already have been forgiven the responsibility of paying for their health care"
I don't know about you, but I'm sure paying for my health care. To the tune of $1200/month.
"Why should someone pay for your healthcare if your not an active participant in improving your own health"
Maybe because some people actually give a shit about people other than themselves?
However, we frequently give corporations the same rights as individual citizens. It would only be fair to give them the same responsibilities as well (in other words, paying taxes on income.)
Someone's been watching Glenn Beck, apparently.
It specifically wasn't presented as an objective statement, that's what "IMHO" means.
It'll need to happen sooner or later. Even if you don't believe in AGW at all (and you're an idiot IMHO if you don't) we're going to run out of fossil fuels eventually. We can spend trillions now or face total disaster. I say spend the damn money.
And 99% of everyone are complete shitheads, what's your point? The fact that we're catering to the stupid instead of educating them will be the downfall of our civilization. If they're that stupid, fire them and hire someone who's willing to be trained. A motivated person can learn how to write a document, send an email, and view a web page in an hour on a Linux system.