IMO the most imporant factor for rating a companies "greeness" is the prominace of the pharse "enviornmental stewardship" in its corporate mission statement.
Agreed, because when the company's mission statement conflicts with profitability, the mission statement always trumps the cash.
Oh wait, no it doesn't.
If someone can give an example of a mission statement that's actually affected the way a big corporation is run in such a way that it reduces profits (for example, choosing to be more environmentally friendly, which costs money), I would be very interested to see a citation or a source.
I think you might be a little too quick (IMHO) to associate stem cell research with theraputic cloning. That, and I think you underestimate the average (American) woman's ability to guard her eggs. I have serious doubts that the "millions of embryos" scenario you paint would ever occur. I agree it's a frightening future and should be avoided, but I think we disagree on how likely it is.
However, we can agree that TFA describes a solution to all of our collective concerns.
And I certainly don't believe that scientists want to destroy embryos. If stem cell research can be performed without the destruction of embryos, and it does not lead to farming embryos, then I'm just as excited as anyone else.
"Farming" embryos? Have you seen something that makes you think this is likely to happen? When a couple chooses to pursue in vitro fertilization, literally dozens of embryos are created. Not all of them are used in the process. The surplus embryos are either discarded or cryogenically stored. Believe me, there's no shortage of embryos to work with, even without "farming" them.
This leads to a secondary concern - that this situation creates pressure if the "stock" runs low. I don't have numbers, but I don't think we have a very large supply of frozen human embryos on the path to destruction. Sure, there's a bunch, but if there's not enough to satisfy the research then there'll be pressure to create more.
Even in the abscence of the gigantic shit storm that would ensue, should researchers attempt to create embryos purely for the purposes of research, do you really think that scientists are creating embryos soley for the purpose of stem cell research? And if so, (I could be way off base here) do you have a reference on that?
The reason I'm asking is that it's a controversial enough subject without adding the "Dr. Frankenstein" aspect of scientists deliberately creating (arguably) human beings for the sole purpose of "sacrificing them" for research. AFAIK this doesn't happen; the research is conducted on donated or discarded embryos.
Another question I have for the readers in general, not the parent: Which is better, for these embryos to go in the trash, or to be used in research that could help thousands of people? Either way, the embryos are destroyed.
The difference is that employees actually have rights in the UK. More specifically, there are rules about employer/employee relations that are actually ENFORCED in the UK. Over on this side of the pond employees are generally treated no better than disposable diapers - shit all over 'em, throw them away when you're done. It's the norm here for an employee to be terminated with no stated reason, because 1) the employer is not obligated to provide a reason and 2) if they do, they might have to answer for the fact that the reason is complete bullshit.
This attitude is carried over to IP in a lot of cases. More than once, a company has laid claim to an invention that an employee has developed on their own time, using no company resources, even in the absence of an "all your IP are belong to us" clause in their job description. (Not that job descriptions are enforceable by the employee here anyway; they almost always include "other tasks as assigned by management", which means that even if you're hired as a Java developer, your employer can require you to clean toilets. Then if you leave "voluntarily", you're ineligible for any unemployment insurance benefits, since you walked off the job. Theoretically you can appeal by asserting that the job was not as represented, but the burden of proof is on you.) The employee almost always cannot afford to defend themselves against this predatory action; tort law over here doesn't have that clause in it that the loser pays the winner's legal fees, which means that the employee will quickly bankrupt themselves defending the case.
In the meantime, though, I wouldn't go near such a contract without a lawyer.
Is it worth it to pay a lawyer $5000 to tell you "yeah, you don't have any rights here, you can either agree to this or not get the job"? I don't know many people who are looking for work who have that kind of cash.
My example was a bit simplistic in that it assumed that everyone who's in a given business providing a given service does so over the same known port. Clearly that isn't the case for a good part of the services in question.
I guess the way they'd do it is to look up all the IP blocks registered to a given company like Skype etc. and create QoS rules based on those IPs rather than the ports they use. That information IIRC is freely available. The injured party might have an easier time proving QoS shenanigans (at least for the purposes of a lawsuit) in that case; they could put a machine with an IP that isn't known to belong to them on their network, and run throughput diagnostics to determine if there's a difference between how traffic from that IP is delivered, and how traffic from their "known" IPs is delivered.
Just another case of someone trying to confuse people into agreeing with their agenda by muddling one issue with another. Gee, sounds like the White House... (eg 9/11 and Iraq. These two things have nothing to do with one another, and W had to admit as much over 3 years ago on the record. Despite this, a large percentage of Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Lovely propaganda machine, that.)
The thing is, the two can effectively become the same. For instance, blocking the Skype protocol would be just as effective, if not more effective, than blocking Skype.com
I disagree, and I'll tell you why: If an ISP wants to block traffic to its customers on a specific port, it's lousy, and deceptive, and their customers shouldn't stand for it, but it isn't anti-competitive so long as it's applied globally. For example, if, let's say, Verizon decided to block all VoIP traffic because it bit into their POTS profits, that would be one thing. However, the anti-competitive aspect would come into play if they decided to roll out a VoIP product of their own and block everyone else's but theirs. Another example would be if Comcast signed a deal with Barnes and Noble and blocked Amazon.
A complicating factor is the relative lack of sophistication of the consumer regarding Internet service. The consumer will most likely never know that their service has been degraded deliberately. The big telecoms have made a status quo of occasionally unreliable service, so when your Skype doesn't work, the consumer either 1) thinks Skype doesn't work in general or 2) that it's not working for some other technical issue. Either way the consumer is less likely to use Skype, and Skype's revenue is hurt. Arguably if Skype can document this behavior on the part of the telecom provider they could file suit, but the telecom's lawyers would chew their clothes off, and Skype would go bankrupt long before they could prove their case.
It is because of this lack of sophistication that the telecom providers are able to get away with saying "but Google and Amazon are getting a free ride and making money off our bandwidth!" without the public screaming at them "they ARE paying you for the bandwidth they use, assholes!" If it's such a free ride, I'd like to see their reaction to Google, Amazon, YouTube, et al not paying their bandwith bills, which frequently run into seven figures on a monthly basis, if not more.
The free market should be able to correct this issue. However, the market isn't free due to consumer ignorance and telecom propaganda, and therefore something else needs to correct the problem. In the absence of a sane choice, government enforcement of a free market is the least psychotic way to go.
Hmm. This sounds eerily familiar to the ears of someone working in the USA. Huge working poor population growing every day despite growing GDP and long hours: check. Lower-income population relatively worse off than 20 years ago: check. Forced overtime without pay, despite laws to the contrary: check. Workers forced to illegally underreport working hours under implicit (or explicit) threat of termination: check. Obscene housing costs forcing workers into virtual slavery to avoid being homeless: check. Retirement age being extended: check. (I don't know if Japan has an equivalent to Social Security, or if companies over there actually don't resent pension programs to the point of using them for slush funds at their whim.)
Things aren't so different on either side of the Pacific, apparently.
How do you know that's the reason the position was eliminated? Was it in the memo? "Big Biz" has to be stupid, right? It couldn't be that they decided they actually didn't need the position, could it?
As I said, this was a close friend of mine, and I've left lots of stuff out that could potentially be identifying. You'll just have to take my word for it. Suffice it to say the work that had been assigned to the eliminated role didn't go anywhere, it just got dumped on people who had too much work already without doing the supervisor's job too.
The anti-business bias in these comments is disturbing. At my current position (IT consultant basically), not only do our trainings include technical matters (Oracle ERP, Vulnerability Assessments), they also include the business aspect behind them which, in my opinion, helps to understand the bigger picture.
I can't speak for the other posters, but my "anti-business bias" is a result of personal experience and not just negativity for its own sake. Included in that experience is the fact that you have to be very careful around someone who writes (and presumably speaks) the way that you do; frequently the presence of these people foreshadows another "reorganization" or "paradigm" or some other bullshit euphemism for "we're going to make fewer people do more work for the same pay."
The opinion here seems to be that technical skills are all that matter; "business skills" ("lying," "back-stabbing", etc) are worthless, and that any company who looks for these "qualities" is dumb and will get dumber. As someone with an MIS degree, I think what most posters are calling business skills (lying, schmoozing, etc) is actually a demonstration of poor business skills (or lack thereof).
Technical skills are what generates actual work and acheivement. Business skills (good or bad) are what makes the work and acheivement profitable. If a company's choice is between "good business skills" and unprofitability, or "bad business skills" (read: "screwing the bejeezus out of the people who do actual work because we're better than them") and profitability, what do you think happens nearly all of the time? (Especially in publicly traded companies, who must show the maximum profit possible at the expense of everything else, lest they get sued into oblivion?)
Business skills, as I've seen at school and work, include project management, leadership, and perhaps most importantly, negotiation. The colleagues whom I see as most successful excel in all these areas, honestly and creatively.
The top echelon of business professionals have all of those qualities. Unfortunately, most of us here in the real world work with the other 99%, whose primary skill set seems to be exploitation, intimidation, lying, backstabbing, and kissing up to the higherups.
In my experience, in order for IT to be successful, both technical and business skills are needed.
99% of the time you get one or the other, and never the twain shall meet. The business people don't understand what the technical people do (therefore it can't be difficult or significant), and the technical people see the business people for what they are: mouth breathing parasites in cheap suits. (There are exceptions. Some can breathe through their noses.)
And a good example is the article posted here (in another thread) about the shuttle programming group. The article attributes the quality of the software to the competency of the programmers (technical skill), the rigorous process followed in creating the software (project management), and the friendly rivalry culture of the work environment (leadership skills). Heck, the article even mentions a programmer who left for another organization and returned because of the poor business skills.
In short, I'm respected by the people I work for. I'm sure there are a lot of hellish working environments in large companies, probably even within my own, given how culture can vary accross one large company. Just don't assume that a large comany will automatically be a terrible place to work.
I'm speaking from my own experience, as well as the experiences people I know have shared with me. Of course there are always going to be exceptions, and it sounds like you've found one. (Congratulations. Just don't assume you have to stop looking out for #1; lots of jobs are one miserable "son of someone's frat brother" manager away from becoming hell on earth. Ironically, a company that's as flexible as yours sounds can actually be *more* susceptible to "terrible boss" syndrome.. the lack of a more formal structure allows a monster boss more freedom to make his people miserable. For example: Unless your "personal schedule" policy is written into the rules, it's available at the whim of whoever you report to. If Mr. I'm-a-miserable-bastard-so-you-all-need-to-be-more -miserable decides that you need to be at work from 9 until 6 each day without exception, on pain of "unsatisfactory" performance reviews or outright termination, you're not going to have much recourse.)
One other thing: Unless your company has a monopoly on a particular business model, or provides a product or service that's vastly superior to the competition, it's vulnerable to a company that works its people to death and pays them a pittance. Those companies are more "competitive" because they have more money to pull dirty tricks with.
The issue I think most people have is that they don't know how to tailor their resume to a particular opening/market.
That's a very good point. Having multiple resumes makes it less likely that you'll get bounced for being "overqualified" (read: "expensive"). Anything you can do to make yourself look cheap will get you in the door. After you're in and they decide you're the guy, screw 'em. They'd do the same to you.
You've heard the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none?" Granted, there are people out there who are able to work across disciplines as you suggest, but they don't get hired. Why? A few reasons:
1) You're less likely to have Engineering Skills 1, 2, and 3 if you have skills in other disciplines. Granted, there are exceptions, but in general, that's the case. And since everyone does hiring by search engine these days, your resume will never see the light of day if it doesn't have all the right keywords. 2) In the case that you DO have all the skills, it's presumed (correctly or not) that you're going to want a salary commensurate with your skill set and your geographic location. Here you run into the "if we pay our people as little as we can possibly get away with, we'll be more competitive" mentality and you're out of the picture even before the second interview. The fact that you're exactly what they're looking for is irrelevant; if the choice is between someone good and someone cheap... 3) You've found a company where they actually DO value your skills and contributions and you're not in the market:)
I was going to reply to that message with something very similar, but you beat me to the punch.
The only thing I would add to that is that it isn't really that someone's not as smart or someone isn't "better" than someone else, it's that the people who work hard get passed over while the people who take credit for other people's hard work get promoted. It encourages people to not work hard, because 1) nobody cares if you work hard, you certainly aren't going to be recognized or rewarded for it, 2) all hard work gets you is more hard work, and 3) someone else is just going to take the credit for your hard work anyway. It's the "Office Space" cliche: you only work hard enough not to get fired, because there's no reward in going above and beyond that.
Oh please. It's a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes, not a description of a real situation.
Tell me that *sort* of thing doesn't happen. Maybe not that thing specifically, but that *sort* of thing. Which is why I ended that sentence with "$randomOldBoyNetworkFactor".
My point is, it's still not what you know, it's who you know, and a moron with an influential frat brother is still more employable than someone qualified for the position who has no connection like that.
Yes, I've worked for a fortune 100 company. It got nothing but worse and this survey shows that the trend continues. Notice how the smaller companies valued skill more than propaganda?
I've worked for more than one Fortune 500 company (I'm honestly not sure if they're 100 or not) where it was very clear that there was *no chance whatsoever* that you would ever advance beyond your current job description. It seems to be SOP these days for Big Biz to cultivate the environment in such a way that it's very clear to everyone involved that if you want a raise (past the pittance that you get each year that doesn't even keep up with the cost of living) or a promotion, you must leave the company.
The attitude seems to be that you must leave a company with no more skills than you walked in with, EVER. Frequently employees who get training on their own are seen as being "disloyal" by trying to improve their skill set. Why? Because if you're making yourself more marketable, clearly it means you're not interested in staying in the position you have that doesn't require those skills, and are dissatisfied with the opportunities that you've been granted at your current company. (The fact that those opportunities are frequently described as "no fucking way" never enters into the thought process.)
Why Big Biz seems to be so incredibly phobic of encouraging the professional growth of its employees is a mystery to me. It's so incredibly pervasive that many companies have stopped hiring IT staff *altogether*. Instead they hire "contractors" (read: "temps" or "slaves" or "disposable humans") to do the jobs that need to be done for the continued functioning of the company. The contractor gathers experience about the computing environment over the months (or, more likely, years) that they're there, which is rendered completely useless to both the contractor and the company when one of the following happens: 1) Some beancounter arbitrarily decides that payroll is too high and forces someone to lay off contractors regardless of the importance of their role, 2) the contractor is fired (oh, excuse me, "has their contract terminated") because of some incredibly minor infraction of the rules, their failure to take abuse from a permanent employee, or just because, or 3) the contractor realizes there is no place to go from where they are, and decides to leave. The company has to go hire and train another "contractor", during which time the (usually critical) work the contractor was doing goes undone, to the detriment of the entire organization.
This isn't restricted to IT by a long shot. A close friend of mine had been in the same job for 4 years. Her supervisor left to take another job, leaving the position open. This friend of mine had more seniority and experience than others in her group (not to mention being the only one in the group that actually did any work, the rest spent most of their time talking about Pro Wrestling and NASCAR.) Her supervisor wrote a letter recommending her for the position once she had left. A golden opportunity to reward a valued employee for hard work.
Rather than promote her (even in title, maybe not with a raise), they decided to eliminate the position. That's how much they didn't want to promote her (or anyone else). Big Biz has raised the concept of "penny wise, pound foolish" to an art form.
Or whoever is their nephew, or the chick they're currently banging's brother in law, or $randomOldBoyNetworkFactor.
Once you get to the C*O level you are incapable of rational thought. Hiring someone based on their qualifications is akin to actual work, and therefore no C*O is capable of doing it.
The money issue is another thing, but they won't not accept you because they thing you are unable to pay for it. They'll accept you as a student, it's up to you to figure out the financials.
The two issues are inextricably linked, however. If you get accepted to Ivy League X school based on your grades etc. but can't afford to pay for whatever reason, it's the same as not having been accepted. These students count on financial aid from the institution (and to a lesser degree, other scholarships) to be able to actually make use of the privilege they've earned.
When I applied to college (about 15 years ago now, sheesh) I was accepted at several schools that I could not afford to attend. I was ineligible for financial aid because somehow my parents' income was too high to qualify, but too low to be able to pay outright. Sure, I could have taken out student loans, but unlike the common perception, not everyone can get those. I attended an in-state public university (but even that was close to $10k/year back then, when you figured in room and board. On a related note, our illustrious Republican governor likes to tout his "full tuition" scholarship program for students who score highly on our state standardized testing. What he fails to mention is that out of the ~$15k or so in-state students will pay at one of our state universities, about 3k is tuition, the rest is "fees". The fees are retained by the university, while the tuition is given to the state which then decides how much (if any) they're going to get back in the budget.)
Even with the cultural advantages I've been lucky enough to enjoy (white, middle-class, male, went to a high school without metal detectors, etc) people look down on my degree because it came from "that safety school." (Which, I might add, just recently went to "open enrollment", which is a polite way of saying "if you have a pulse and a high school diploma you're accepted." Thanks guys. I suppose I can use my diploma to patch my drywall now.) Take away those advantages and it's another obstacle to someone looking to pull themselves out of poverty, and we all pay the price for people being unable to lift themselves out of poverty (public assistance, uncompensated medical care, other social problems).
However, this being the United Corporate States of America, any politician who suggests that we use substantial (as opposed to "lip service" level) public money to help the financially challenged (read: minorities, the poor, immigrants, etc) go to college, quickly finds him/herself voted out of office. Helping bright students acheive will have benefits in the long run, but nobody cares about the long run, they care that their taxes don't go up half a percentage point. Public funding of higher education is a loser in this country, and nobody wants to be associated with a loser.
Since when is it bigotry to disagree with someone? Granted, I see what you're saying, but do we really want to compare a political position or philosopy with making someone sit at the back of the bus?
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
Pity nobody does that. In a sane world, a valued employee would be able to leave a job if they don't feel like they're being treated fairly, and get a job with a company that treats its employees like human beings. However, the companies that do so are few and far between, and thus competition for those jobs is fierce. They assure themselves of getting the best and brightest by bucking the trend.
Hey, wait a sec.... Nahh, that's too much work.
Seriously though, most companies don't care about the quality of what they produce, only the quantity and the profitability. If you can treat your people like dogshit and still produce a product that makes money (regardless of whether or not the product is any good; on the contrary, crappy products are cheaper to produce) then there's no motivation to change the status quo. And since that dogshitesque treatment generally includes lousy wages, you make even more money.
In other words:
1. Treat your employees like crap. 2.... 3. Profit!
What you're forgetting is that Halliburton will act the same way whether you invest in them or not. The amounts of money we're discussing here (I'm guessing low five figures) are insignificant to them and will not change their strategy one bit.
Within the scope of investment that we're discussing here, your investment will not affect whatever company you're investing in at all. And the reality is, all companies profit off human misery in one way or another. Whether it's tobacco companies essentially selling cancer at huge profit, or pharmaceutical companies profiting off cancer patients, you can't name a single publicly traded company that doesn't increase its profits at the expense of humanitarian concerns (even if all they do is pay their workers as little as possible, or choose an inferior but less expensive health plan.)
So, bearing in mind that the companies that profit from "human misery" the most are also the most profitable (tobacco, oil, alcohol, etc) you have to decide if some meaningless sense of morality is worth a smaller return. Bear in mind, also, that a sense of smug self-satisfaction won't pay the rent.
Way OT, but dunno if anyone would find this useful. We keep bread items (rolls, raisin bread, bagels etc) in our closed microwave when we're not using it. It keeps the bread fresher and it saves space.
Sure, you can find a car for less than $6k here (less so in the northeast) but you're going to pay more one way or another on it; either it'll die on you unexpectedly, or require major repairs, or (usually) both. Also, the cheaper the used cars get, the sleazier the people you'll have to deal with (ask someone who bought a "gently used" car that actually was totalled in the Katrina flooding.)
Remember that people drive a lot more here in the States. It's not unusual for someone to put 20,000 miles (about 32,000 km) on their cars in 12 months. It's not the years, it's the mileage.
I bought a used Golf with 58k on it about a year ago for $9,000 and it was a fucking steal at that price. I'm still planning on having to do the clutch and the water pump/timing belt (known trouble spot on the 1.8t) sometime within 24 to 36 months.
Check Edmunds.com if you don't believe me about the pricing.
What "baddies"? I am talking about an official CD that came from your ISP, not a free AOL frisbey from the junk mail, or some guy in a back alley. What spammer is going to start handing out CDs on the side of the road, and who would actually take them, much less take the time to run them, if they did?
#1, don't give the spammers any ideas, and
#2 you'd be surprised how stupid some people are. Remember the "web accellerator" scam a few years ago? I bet if you put "Makes your computer 500% faster!!!!!!1" on a CD, people would run it.
The old saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
Updated, it'd be "You can lead a user to clue, but you can't make him think."
As it applies here, the average user isn't going to understand (or want to understand) what benefit these free items will give him/her. They've never heard of a firewall or a rootkit. All they really care about is how much it costs.
Now if a service could show better profits through these steps (from reduced expenses, including bandwidth, support, etc) then we might be getting somewhere. But you're never going to get anywhere trying to educate the user.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, no it doesn't.
If someone can give an example of a mission statement that's actually affected the way a big corporation is run in such a way that it reduces profits (for example, choosing to be more environmentally friendly, which costs money), I would be very interested to see a citation or a source.
I think you might be a little too quick (IMHO) to associate stem cell research with theraputic cloning. That, and I think you underestimate the average (American) woman's ability to guard her eggs. I have serious doubts that the "millions of embryos" scenario you paint would ever occur. I agree it's a frightening future and should be avoided, but I think we disagree on how likely it is.
However, we can agree that TFA describes a solution to all of our collective concerns.
Even in the abscence of the gigantic shit storm that would ensue, should researchers attempt to create embryos purely for the purposes of research, do you really think that scientists are creating embryos soley for the purpose of stem cell research? And if so, (I could be way off base here) do you have a reference on that?
The reason I'm asking is that it's a controversial enough subject without adding the "Dr. Frankenstein" aspect of scientists deliberately creating (arguably) human beings for the sole purpose of "sacrificing them" for research. AFAIK this doesn't happen; the research is conducted on donated or discarded embryos.
Another question I have for the readers in general, not the parent: Which is better, for these embryos to go in the trash, or to be used in research that could help thousands of people? Either way, the embryos are destroyed.
This attitude is carried over to IP in a lot of cases. More than once, a company has laid claim to an invention that an employee has developed on their own time, using no company resources, even in the absence of an "all your IP are belong to us" clause in their job description. (Not that job descriptions are enforceable by the employee here anyway; they almost always include "other tasks as assigned by management", which means that even if you're hired as a Java developer, your employer can require you to clean toilets. Then if you leave "voluntarily", you're ineligible for any unemployment insurance benefits, since you walked off the job. Theoretically you can appeal by asserting that the job was not as represented, but the burden of proof is on you.) The employee almost always cannot afford to defend themselves against this predatory action; tort law over here doesn't have that clause in it that the loser pays the winner's legal fees, which means that the employee will quickly bankrupt themselves defending the case.
Is it worth it to pay a lawyer $5000 to tell you "yeah, you don't have any rights here, you can either agree to this or not get the job"? I don't know many people who are looking for work who have that kind of cash.
My example was a bit simplistic in that it assumed that everyone who's in a given business providing a given service does so over the same known port. Clearly that isn't the case for a good part of the services in question.
I guess the way they'd do it is to look up all the IP blocks registered to a given company like Skype etc. and create QoS rules based on those IPs rather than the ports they use. That information IIRC is freely available. The injured party might have an easier time proving QoS shenanigans (at least for the purposes of a lawsuit) in that case; they could put a machine with an IP that isn't known to belong to them on their network, and run throughput diagnostics to determine if there's a difference between how traffic from that IP is delivered, and how traffic from their "known" IPs is delivered.
Just another case of someone trying to confuse people into agreeing with their agenda by muddling one issue with another. Gee, sounds like the White House... (eg 9/11 and Iraq. These two things have nothing to do with one another, and W had to admit as much over 3 years ago on the record. Despite this, a large percentage of Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Lovely propaganda machine, that.)
*anticipates flames*
A complicating factor is the relative lack of sophistication of the consumer regarding Internet service. The consumer will most likely never know that their service has been degraded deliberately. The big telecoms have made a status quo of occasionally unreliable service, so when your Skype doesn't work, the consumer either 1) thinks Skype doesn't work in general or 2) that it's not working for some other technical issue. Either way the consumer is less likely to use Skype, and Skype's revenue is hurt. Arguably if Skype can document this behavior on the part of the telecom provider they could file suit, but the telecom's lawyers would chew their clothes off, and Skype would go bankrupt long before they could prove their case.
It is because of this lack of sophistication that the telecom providers are able to get away with saying "but Google and Amazon are getting a free ride and making money off our bandwidth!" without the public screaming at them "they ARE paying you for the bandwidth they use, assholes!" If it's such a free ride, I'd like to see their reaction to Google, Amazon, YouTube, et al not paying their bandwith bills, which frequently run into seven figures on a monthly basis, if not more.
The free market should be able to correct this issue. However, the market isn't free due to consumer ignorance and telecom propaganda, and therefore something else needs to correct the problem. In the absence of a sane choice, government enforcement of a free market is the least psychotic way to go.
Hmm. This sounds eerily familiar to the ears of someone working in the USA. Huge working poor population growing every day despite growing GDP and long hours: check. Lower-income population relatively worse off than 20 years ago: check. Forced overtime without pay, despite laws to the contrary: check. Workers forced to illegally underreport working hours under implicit (or explicit) threat of termination: check. Obscene housing costs forcing workers into virtual slavery to avoid being homeless: check. Retirement age being extended: check. (I don't know if Japan has an equivalent to Social Security, or if companies over there actually don't resent pension programs to the point of using them for slush funds at their whim.)
Things aren't so different on either side of the Pacific, apparently.
As I said, this was a close friend of mine, and I've left lots of stuff out that could potentially be identifying. You'll just have to take my word for it. Suffice it to say the work that had been assigned to the eliminated role didn't go anywhere, it just got dumped on people who had too much work already without doing the supervisor's job too.
I can't speak for the other posters, but my "anti-business bias" is a result of personal experience and not just negativity for its own sake. Included in that experience is the fact that you have to be very careful around someone who writes (and presumably speaks) the way that you do; frequently the presence of these people foreshadows another "reorganization" or "paradigm" or some other bullshit euphemism for "we're going to make fewer people do more work for the same pay."
Technical skills are what generates actual work and acheivement. Business skills (good or bad) are what makes the work and acheivement profitable. If a company's choice is between "good business skills" and unprofitability, or "bad business skills" (read: "screwing the bejeezus out of the people who do actual work because we're better than them") and profitability, what do you think happens nearly all of the time? (Especially in publicly traded companies, who must show the maximum profit possible at the expense of everything else, lest they get sued into oblivion?)
The top echelon of business professionals have all of those qualities. Unfortunately, most of us here in the real world work with the other 99%, whose primary skill set seems to be exploitation, intimidation, lying, backstabbing, and kissing up to the higherups.
99% of the time you get one or the other, and never the twain shall meet. The business people don't understand what the technical people do (therefore it can't be difficult or significant), and the technical people see the business people for what they are: mouth breathing parasites in cheap suits. (There are exceptions. Some can breathe through their noses.)
In your attempt to demonstrat
One other thing: Unless your company has a monopoly on a particular business model, or provides a product or service that's vastly superior to the competition, it's vulnerable to a company that works its people to death and pays them a pittance. Those companies are more "competitive" because they have more money to pull dirty tricks with.
You've heard the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none?" Granted, there are people out there who are able to work across disciplines as you suggest, but they don't get hired. Why? A few reasons:
:)
1) You're less likely to have Engineering Skills 1, 2, and 3 if you have skills in other disciplines. Granted, there are exceptions, but in general, that's the case. And since everyone does hiring by search engine these days, your resume will never see the light of day if it doesn't have all the right keywords.
2) In the case that you DO have all the skills, it's presumed (correctly or not) that you're going to want a salary commensurate with your skill set and your geographic location. Here you run into the "if we pay our people as little as we can possibly get away with, we'll be more competitive" mentality and you're out of the picture even before the second interview. The fact that you're exactly what they're looking for is irrelevant; if the choice is between someone good and someone cheap...
3) You've found a company where they actually DO value your skills and contributions and you're not in the market
I was going to reply to that message with something very similar, but you beat me to the punch.
The only thing I would add to that is that it isn't really that someone's not as smart or someone isn't "better" than someone else, it's that the people who work hard get passed over while the people who take credit for other people's hard work get promoted. It encourages people to not work hard, because 1) nobody cares if you work hard, you certainly aren't going to be recognized or rewarded for it, 2) all hard work gets you is more hard work, and 3) someone else is just going to take the credit for your hard work anyway. It's the "Office Space" cliche: you only work hard enough not to get fired, because there's no reward in going above and beyond that.
Oh please. It's a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes, not a description of a real situation.
Tell me that *sort* of thing doesn't happen. Maybe not that thing specifically, but that *sort* of thing. Which is why I ended that sentence with "$randomOldBoyNetworkFactor".
My point is, it's still not what you know, it's who you know, and a moron with an influential frat brother is still more employable than someone qualified for the position who has no connection like that.
The attitude seems to be that you must leave a company with no more skills than you walked in with, EVER. Frequently employees who get training on their own are seen as being "disloyal" by trying to improve their skill set. Why? Because if you're making yourself more marketable, clearly it means you're not interested in staying in the position you have that doesn't require those skills, and are dissatisfied with the opportunities that you've been granted at your current company. (The fact that those opportunities are frequently described as "no fucking way" never enters into the thought process.)
Why Big Biz seems to be so incredibly phobic of encouraging the professional growth of its employees is a mystery to me. It's so incredibly pervasive that many companies have stopped hiring IT staff *altogether*. Instead they hire "contractors" (read: "temps" or "slaves" or "disposable humans") to do the jobs that need to be done for the continued functioning of the company. The contractor gathers experience about the computing environment over the months (or, more likely, years) that they're there, which is rendered completely useless to both the contractor and the company when one of the following happens: 1) Some beancounter arbitrarily decides that payroll is too high and forces someone to lay off contractors regardless of the importance of their role, 2) the contractor is fired (oh, excuse me, "has their contract terminated") because of some incredibly minor infraction of the rules, their failure to take abuse from a permanent employee, or just because, or 3) the contractor realizes there is no place to go from where they are, and decides to leave. The company has to go hire and train another "contractor", during which time the (usually critical) work the contractor was doing goes undone, to the detriment of the entire organization.
This isn't restricted to IT by a long shot. A close friend of mine had been in the same job for 4 years. Her supervisor left to take another job, leaving the position open. This friend of mine had more seniority and experience than others in her group (not to mention being the only one in the group that actually did any work, the rest spent most of their time talking about Pro Wrestling and NASCAR.) Her supervisor wrote a letter recommending her for the position once she had left. A golden opportunity to reward a valued employee for hard work.
Rather than promote her (even in title, maybe not with a raise), they decided to eliminate the position. That's how much they didn't want to promote her (or anyone else). Big Biz has raised the concept of "penny wise, pound foolish" to an art form.
Or whoever is their nephew, or the chick they're currently banging's brother in law, or $randomOldBoyNetworkFactor.
Once you get to the C*O level you are incapable of rational thought. Hiring someone based on their qualifications is akin to actual work, and therefore no C*O is capable of doing it.
The money issue is another thing, but they won't not accept you because they thing you are unable to pay for it. They'll accept you as a student, it's up to you to figure out the financials.
The two issues are inextricably linked, however. If you get accepted to Ivy League X school based on your grades etc. but can't afford to pay for whatever reason, it's the same as not having been accepted. These students count on financial aid from the institution (and to a lesser degree, other scholarships) to be able to actually make use of the privilege they've earned.
When I applied to college (about 15 years ago now, sheesh) I was accepted at several schools that I could not afford to attend. I was ineligible for financial aid because somehow my parents' income was too high to qualify, but too low to be able to pay outright. Sure, I could have taken out student loans, but unlike the common perception, not everyone can get those. I attended an in-state public university (but even that was close to $10k/year back then, when you figured in room and board. On a related note, our illustrious Republican governor likes to tout his "full tuition" scholarship program for students who score highly on our state standardized testing. What he fails to mention is that out of the ~$15k or so in-state students will pay at one of our state universities, about 3k is tuition, the rest is "fees". The fees are retained by the university, while the tuition is given to the state which then decides how much (if any) they're going to get back in the budget.)
Even with the cultural advantages I've been lucky enough to enjoy (white, middle-class, male, went to a high school without metal detectors, etc) people look down on my degree because it came from "that safety school." (Which, I might add, just recently went to "open enrollment", which is a polite way of saying "if you have a pulse and a high school diploma you're accepted." Thanks guys. I suppose I can use my diploma to patch my drywall now.) Take away those advantages and it's another obstacle to someone looking to pull themselves out of poverty, and we all pay the price for people being unable to lift themselves out of poverty (public assistance, uncompensated medical care, other social problems).
However, this being the United Corporate States of America, any politician who suggests that we use substantial (as opposed to "lip service" level) public money to help the financially challenged (read: minorities, the poor, immigrants, etc) go to college, quickly finds him/herself voted out of office. Helping bright students acheive will have benefits in the long run, but nobody cares about the long run, they care that their taxes don't go up half a percentage point. Public funding of higher education is a loser in this country, and nobody wants to be associated with a loser.
Since when is it bigotry to disagree with someone? Granted, I see what you're saying, but do we really want to compare a political position or philosopy with making someone sit at the back of the bus?
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
...
Pity nobody does that. In a sane world, a valued employee would be able to leave a job if they don't feel like they're being treated fairly, and get a job with a company that treats its employees like human beings. However, the companies that do so are few and far between, and thus competition for those jobs is fierce. They assure themselves of getting the best and brightest by bucking the trend.
Hey, wait a sec.... Nahh, that's too much work.
Seriously though, most companies don't care about the quality of what they produce, only the quantity and the profitability. If you can treat your people like dogshit and still produce a product that makes money (regardless of whether or not the product is any good; on the contrary, crappy products are cheaper to produce) then there's no motivation to change the status quo. And since that dogshitesque treatment generally includes lousy wages, you make even more money.
In other words:
1. Treat your employees like crap.
2.
3. Profit!
What you're forgetting is that Halliburton will act the same way whether you invest in them or not. The amounts of money we're discussing here (I'm guessing low five figures) are insignificant to them and will not change their strategy one bit.
Within the scope of investment that we're discussing here, your investment will not affect whatever company you're investing in at all. And the reality is, all companies profit off human misery in one way or another. Whether it's tobacco companies essentially selling cancer at huge profit, or pharmaceutical companies profiting off cancer patients, you can't name a single publicly traded company that doesn't increase its profits at the expense of humanitarian concerns (even if all they do is pay their workers as little as possible, or choose an inferior but less expensive health plan.)
So, bearing in mind that the companies that profit from "human misery" the most are also the most profitable (tobacco, oil, alcohol, etc) you have to decide if some meaningless sense of morality is worth a smaller return. Bear in mind, also, that a sense of smug self-satisfaction won't pay the rent.
NOW you're starting to get it.
Dear $deity, this is what it sounds like in Martha Stewart's head.
*goes off to drink self into a coma*
Way OT, but dunno if anyone would find this useful. We keep bread items (rolls, raisin bread, bagels etc) in our closed microwave when we're not using it. It keeps the bread fresher and it saves space.
Just a suggestion.
Sure, you can find a car for less than $6k here (less so in the northeast) but you're going to pay more one way or another on it; either it'll die on you unexpectedly, or require major repairs, or (usually) both. Also, the cheaper the used cars get, the sleazier the people you'll have to deal with (ask someone who bought a "gently used" car that actually was totalled in the Katrina flooding.)
Remember that people drive a lot more here in the States. It's not unusual for someone to put 20,000 miles (about 32,000 km) on their cars in 12 months. It's not the years, it's the mileage.
I bought a used Golf with 58k on it about a year ago for $9,000 and it was a fucking steal at that price. I'm still planning on having to do the clutch and the water pump/timing belt (known trouble spot on the 1.8t) sometime within 24 to 36 months.
Check Edmunds.com if you don't believe me about the pricing.
#1, don't give the spammers any ideas, and
#2 you'd be surprised how stupid some people are. Remember the "web accellerator" scam a few years ago? I bet if you put "Makes your computer 500% faster!!!!!!1" on a CD, people would run it.
The old saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
Updated, it'd be "You can lead a user to clue, but you can't make him think."
As it applies here, the average user isn't going to understand (or want to understand) what benefit these free items will give him/her. They've never heard of a firewall or a rootkit. All they really care about is how much it costs.
Now if a service could show better profits through these steps (from reduced expenses, including bandwidth, support, etc) then we might be getting somewhere. But you're never going to get anywhere trying to educate the user.