All those statements in 14 words and yet he said nothing of any value on any of them...
Maybe I did read too much into it. Maybe I didn't. I find very short quips can often make more of a point than longer postings. When I make short quips, I find that most of the time the secondary layer of information goes right over other people's heads. I'll give you half a point.
I agree that it was funny, but "Texter gets what he deserves" is just a stupid statement no matter how you feel about people being rude.
"Stupid, but funny." Ok... I guess this belongs with the first paragraph instead of your second? I don't really agree that it's a "stupid" statement. Perhaps funny? Perhaps outrageously cruel and heartless? I think there are other words on either spectrum that could be used.
The movie hadn't started.
Yes, I know. The title of the summary is wrong and the guy responded to that. Does that change anything? Not really.
And police brutality wasn't an issue: the guy was retired. He was not acting as a cop.
If you retire as a cop, you've been working as a cop a long time. That means you'll always "be" a cop and supposedly keep that mentality. I know a number of cops -- both currently on the force and retired -- and they will always be cops. I know military people after their military career -- and they will always have a strong streak of soldier in them.
You're quibbling over details and technicalities that don't really matter and with maybe the exception of your first sentence, have nothing to do with anything else I wrote. It sounds like you've had a long day. Take a deep breath, then go out for a pint.
Texter gets what he deserves vs. more cop brutality. My brain can't handle it.
Really? He deserves to be shot to death for texting his 3-year old during the previews? The PREVIEWS! His child has no father now because the stupid old man couldn't let it go. I've watched the previews before while someone ahead of me is texting - you look UP to see the movie, DOWN to see the phone in the row ahead of you. I can't believe how many posts are applauding this - a man is dead.
You got a +5 insightful for your concern as have a few others. You're horrified that someone can make fun of something like this. Unfortunately, no one has responded to your concern and rebutted with a legitimate response. I will.
GP never condoned what happened. He was spot on with a good joke. Actually, GP was sheer genius because he did more than crack a joke in 14 words. He made several comments about our society if you look deeper: people being rude to one another (in this case, texting at the movies), a person mentally unable to have a gun has a gun, an ex-cop who can't handle a gun properly, police brutality in today's society, and maybe the inability of people (in this case the cop) who need mental help that aren't getting the help they need because of health care issues or societal stigmas. I applaud GP.
There's a time and place for dark-humor jokes. Slashdot is an ok spot as it is unlikely that the victims of this atrocity will come to the comments section of this particular article... even if they read Slashdot. Our unwritten Slashdot rules are concerning dark humor is jokes don't make them too gruesome. I like to crack jokes about people who really died and I laugh at them. It's the only way I can make it through life without going crazy... and I mean literally crazy. Do you know who the worst offenders are about dark humor? Police officers. Firemen. Paramedics. Military. The people who see the most gruesome that life has to offer. I picked up my sense of humor from my father who saw lots of dead bodies in his profession. They aren't the only ones who laugh at stuff like this, though. Lots of people love to laugh at those who are honored with the Darwin Awards. How many people on Slashdot crack jokes about stupid users in tech support? It's the same thing. We have to. It's the only way most of us can survive the perpetual onslaught that life gives us.
Is it morally wrong to make fun of this kind of situation? No, generally it is not. Did something horrible happen? Absolutely. Should the guy have been shot? Absolutely not. Not even if he were texting during the movie. There are some situations where it is morally wrong to crack dark-humor jokes. True story example: Motorcycle accident occurred at high rate of speed, guy flipped over and became road pizza. (He died.) One cop cracks a joke about what happened in front of the family because he didn't know said family member was standing next to him. Was the cop wrong for making jokes in front of the family? Absolutely. Should the cop be disciplined? Absolutely. Was the cop wrong for making a joke about the situation? No. He should be allowed to make jokes even about awful real-life situations. He just needs to be absolutely sure of his surroundings.
Most of my family and friends were affected by Katrina. Why shouldn't I and they be able to make light of what happened there? Why shouldn't the rest of the country?
It's never too late to start doing the right thing.
If the new SimCity adds an offline mode, and you're a SimCity gamer, you should support it, and shun other games that are needlessly connected.
Disagree for two reasons. 1) Once I despise a company so much that I boycott them, then I'm boycotting them until they proved to me they have made real changes to their management structure and their attitude. How many times have companies suddenly "wised up" only to do something worse on their next game? EA is among the worst of those offenders. Even if they did a 180 tomorrow, I'll be watching for years before I buy anything from EA. I know there will always be people who think like you so most companies with this crap attitude do have the chance to redeem themselves. Even if EA went under, I wouldn't feel bad for the management at all. I'm not even sure I'd feel bad for the programmers and artists... which brings me to point 2.
2) EA has treated their employees so bad, a wife got online and wrote a very shaming letter back in 2004. They aren't the only guilty company either. Has it gotten better? I haven't heard anything saying how things have improved. In fact, I generally keep reading how bad it is to work in the AAA gaming industry. I even know someone personally who works in the AAA gaming industry and he recently mentioned something about mold issues in the office where he was expected to work and it caused him to get very sick. (It wasn't EA.)
You're entitled to your opinion, but I think you should not support SimCity until EA cleans up its act. If the company goes under, let it be a message to the other companies to clean up their acts. If they all go under, then that gives the little companies an opportunity to thrive -- something which I think is badly needed.
I understand and you're right about the rabid nutcases. When I joke, I try to make my jokes so absurd that it is clear that I'm cracking one. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, a lot of my jokes on the Internet just don't seem funny because there are people on the Internet who are so crazy that they make my jokes look tame. (This one was still a bad joke.) Oh well... all well that ends well.
Guess I wasn't apparent enough. I was just giving you grief so we could laugh. I admit... my joke wasn't the best. If anything, I was poking fun at the male gender... of which I'm a part of.
In all seriousness: if you live in Hamburg, Germany, I'll buy you that beer.
My wife works with engineers a lot. Her profession required technical training and she's good at what she does. She's brought home stories about how some engineers tried to explain things to her along the lines of "If you put a chicken in the oven..." She politely nods her head at the time and eye rolls at that kind of stuff when she gets home. We both fully agree with you: hire the right person for the right job regardless of gender.
You and I just learned something new. I was speaking about American cars. I happened to have moved to Europe recently but rely on the rails and buses, so I'll definitely check into the steering wheel thing here. Very interesting!
Minor point of correction. I'm ignoring government conspiracy stuff and just speaking from a general driving safety stand point.
Stuck accelerator? Put 'er in neutral.
Or turn off the ignition.
Turning off the ignition locks the steering wheel. If the accelerator gets stuck for any reason while the car is in motion, the correct answer is to put the engine into neutral and coast to a stop then turn off the engine. There should be governors in place to prevent the engine from blowing and even if there aren't, a blown engine is preferred to a locked steering wheel while in motion.
If understand correctly: 52 projects in 52 languages in 52 weeks? A high school junior? You're nuts for even trying this.
I like that.:) Good luck, have fun, and I hope you learn a lot. We each have our ways of learning programming and this seems like an interesting way to do it.
Jack of all trades is not the way to find a job. Companies are looking to fill a specific position. Craft a resume high lighting each of your specialities.
You're right. Jack of all trades is not how I advertise myself on the surface. I always start out with "application and database developer". I try to let my history speak for itself. Unfortunately, companies also don't know what they're looking for a lot of times. I read so many job openings with requirements that just reek because they are a list of disjointed abilities that no single person can have (without training) -- even if they are already a jack of all trades. HR and managers typically have a poor understanding of the job requirements that they need and this is a huge block to a person like me.
I've tried to craft resumes that highlight my four specialties (C#, Java, Oracle, and PostgreSQL), but a lot of accomplishments fall into broad spectrum categories. For instance, I think it's pretty cool that I wrote a multi-threaded Java program that interacted with dozens of hardware controllers via socket programming. I even topped it with not-so-shoddy Swing GUI to link it all together. (This was a number of years ago when swing was about the only option in Java.) Not everyone has had that privilege. I know most companies can't use that "specific thing" that I did, but it says something about what I can do in the future. I'd never done socket programming nor multi-threaded in such depth before. (I took a lot of care, study, and research to get the multi-threading right because I know it's easy to slip up.) Putting that on a resume is a challenge especially when most HR and managers wouldn't understand a socket from a variable. So I leave those kinds of words out because it just clutters my resume.
My current idea is to try to go face to face. Unfortunately, I'm in a new city, don't know very many people, and I can hardly speak the language in this country. Networking has always been a difficult thing for me. This just makes it doubly so. Not to mention, even under ideal circumstances, it's hard to figure out who is a good person to chat with, not put them off when you mention you're looking for a job, and have them know what C#, Java, and SQL is.
I've been waiting for a comment like this. I'll rebut this point by point because this AC is the kind of person I keep bumping into.
This leads me to see the following problems that make you unfit for hiring in a high-unemployment market where employers can pick-and-choose:
I am quite fit for employment. All of my previous employers have been very, very happy with my work. What I am not an expert at is selling myself. Part of that stems from an inability to lie or stretch the truth as well as many others.
1. You seem uninterested in jobs that might require you to stretch and learn other skills
Bzzz. Wrong.
I knew nothing about web development before I did it. I knew nothing about databases before I did it. I knew nothing about teaching people before I did it. I knew nothing about GUIs before I did it. I knew nothing about multi-threading before I did it. I excelled at every single one of these things. Better than others who do these specific things all day long? No. Better than most of the rest of my team? Yes. Am I superior to my teammates? No. We each had our strengths and weaknesses. As I said, being a jack of all trades is a strength and weakness at the same time.
2. You see some jobs as "beneath you", which is not a mindset employers want when they seek problem solvers
If it doesn't involve programming, then you are correct: I'm not interested. I can do other things, but it is a waste of my talent and a step in the wrong direction for me career wise if I do those other things full time. Sometimes, I do many other things besides programming. It sometimes takes a person who understands something about networking and operating systems to get a program to work properly.
3. You seem too dumb to remove the Java stuff (which you claim is a problem) from your resume
Too dumb? Now you're insulting me. Go back and look at Java. A lot of it has nothing to do with web development. I've done a lot of java programming over the years and none of it required me to stick a ".jsp" on the end of a file name.
4. You exhibit a truly annoying "poke my eye out with a blunt stick" (that would be a "downer" on any team) attitude when you hit a minor obstacle of your own making which you could easliy alleviate
Humor. Try it some time. A lot of people at multiple jobs were very sorry to hear me announce that I was moving on because I kept them laughing throughout the day.
Need I go on? You need to SERIUOSLY re-think things if you ever want things to look up
And the final rebut: I do think and re-think about things a lot -- whether it is programming or job hunting or the way I exercise. Why do you think I posted something here at Slashdot? I was looking for people to chime in and offer advice. I don't claim to be the most intelligent creature on the planet so maybe someone has an idea that I hadn't thought of.
Thanks for the "upbeat" advice you gave. I'll do what I've always done with such advice. Complain about it for a few minutes then ignore it and move on. People like you are a huge problem when it comes to job hunting. Stay the hell out of my way. I'm looking to make a positive impact on the world and I don't need you to slow me down.
I'd pay good money in not-so-sporty cars (like the ones I buy) to have an electronic feature that angles all of my mirrors to reflect the headlights of the guy behind me right into his eyes. If I can't see in my mirrors anyway, I might as well make use of the mirrors. I see no problem with this since I've had my entire inside of my car illuminated brightly while at a stop light complements of the SUV sitting behind me. It destroys my night vision.
I'm hunting for a job and there are days I feel like poking a blunt stick in my eye because it would be less painful. I blame HR and head hunters because of my experience in the past with them. (They are almost all totally incompetent.)
My current resume says I'm an application and database programmer. (In short: Oracle, PostgreSQL, C#, and Java is my current forte.) My blessing and curse is that I'm a jack-of-all-trades so I work in just about any language and I have. On the job boards, companies see the word "Java" on my resume (because I worked on Java apps recently) and that I worked on web apps 7+ years ago and they immediately assume I'm a current Java EE programmer. Phone interviews last all of about 3 minutes before they realize that I'm not who they are looking for. I don't get calls for anything else. I try to bury the Intranet stuff I did so it doesn't stand out and I try to highlight the ability for jack-of-all-trades. Doesn't quite work and I'm sure as hell not going to put "Not a web developer" on my resume. (Apparently, it's a mortal sin to list anything "negative" so I can't put the word "not" on my resume or cover letter.)
So, here I am. Stuck. Unable to properly convey on job boards what I can do and getting the wrong kinds of calls. I think I'm going to go find a blunt stick.
This is my biggest problem with GMOs. That and any testing done is extremely questionable until the real financial backers are ferreted out. (That goes for both sides of the GMO argument.) When it comes to GMOs, the truth is very obscured. Based on history, when it is hard to find out the truth, it usually means something bad is buried and hard to find. (Again, that goes for both sides of the GMO argument.)
I'm not talking about whether a question is answered or not. It's about how the question is answered. As a programmer, I often want to know more than a single specific answer. Sometimes, specific answers are useless to me. How do I know if the answer is poor answer or a great one if I am ignorant of the whole topic? The noise ratio on the Internet is very high and Google isn't as good as it used to be. Sometimes I need a variety of answers to pick from so I can grow. Example: Without an experienced hand to help guide them, a noob to multithreaded programming is going to take a lot longer to learn proper multithreading (if they ever can figure it out).
Never used it, but this is the holy grail of command line operations -- a proper merging of command line and GUI. I can't remember jack and have to look up a lot of stuff. (Curse of being a jack-of-all-trades.) This kind of stuff being standard would help me tremendously... and I seriously doubt I'm the only one.
You're right as I've been very sad about seeing Slashdot so watered down over the past several years. I'd also like to see a place where experts can help answer questions for noobs that is similar to the Slashdot forum. Asking a specific question and getting a specific answer is nice (as other websites address), but it would also be nice to toss something like what this guy has out there and watch the experts guide him or her in a better direction instead of stomping all over their face. I think the Internet is missing a good place like that.
I've been around the block and I'm half way decent at what I do, but I'll think twice before submitting a question to Ask Slashdot because nay-sayers come out the woodwork. I've been called an expert by a lot of people, but I know better. I've seen the real experts in action and I'm thankful every time I have an opportunity to interact with them and learn from them.
I fully agree some people just do not want to learn. I will also say that I never let school get in the way of my education. These are two separate thoughts you are expressing (unless you start getting into that schools are so crappy they turn off a lot of students who could have been really good).
Well spoken, but one minor correction: Agnosticism is actually the belief that God (or gods) cannot be proven or disproven. I am an agnostic who believes in God. I also have a friend who is agnostic, but he does not believe in God.
No, a select few are random. One of my coworkers from a decade ago randomly copied portions of if-then statements trying to get them to work. "This branch works so I'll copy it, paste it, and fiddle with the conditions until something else happens." Never mind those two branches required completely different decisions. Looking at one part of his program, a third of his if-then branches could never be run because they would always evaluate to false. I pointed that out to him and he couldn't offer a shred of logic behind what he was doing. After I got home, I bleached my brain with a stiff drink and then I hoped I'd never see code so bad again.
Ahh... the good old days of being fresh from college. I've since seen much worse code since, but at least it wasn't as random as this guy's methodology.
Slashdot Mirror
All those statements in 14 words and yet he said nothing of any value on any of them...
Maybe I did read too much into it. Maybe I didn't. I find very short quips can often make more of a point than longer postings. When I make short quips, I find that most of the time the secondary layer of information goes right over other people's heads. I'll give you half a point.
I agree that it was funny, but "Texter gets what he deserves" is just a stupid statement no matter how you feel about people being rude.
"Stupid, but funny." Ok... I guess this belongs with the first paragraph instead of your second? I don't really agree that it's a "stupid" statement. Perhaps funny? Perhaps outrageously cruel and heartless? I think there are other words on either spectrum that could be used.
The movie hadn't started.
Yes, I know. The title of the summary is wrong and the guy responded to that. Does that change anything? Not really.
And police brutality wasn't an issue: the guy was retired. He was not acting as a cop.
If you retire as a cop, you've been working as a cop a long time. That means you'll always "be" a cop and supposedly keep that mentality. I know a number of cops -- both currently on the force and retired -- and they will always be cops. I know military people after their military career -- and they will always have a strong streak of soldier in them.
You're quibbling over details and technicalities that don't really matter and with maybe the exception of your first sentence, have nothing to do with anything else I wrote. It sounds like you've had a long day. Take a deep breath, then go out for a pint.
Texter gets what he deserves vs. more cop brutality. My brain can't handle it.
Really? He deserves to be shot to death for texting his 3-year old during the previews? The PREVIEWS! His child has no father now because the stupid old man couldn't let it go. I've watched the previews before while someone ahead of me is texting - you look UP to see the movie, DOWN to see the phone in the row ahead of you. I can't believe how many posts are applauding this - a man is dead.
You got a +5 insightful for your concern as have a few others. You're horrified that someone can make fun of something like this. Unfortunately, no one has responded to your concern and rebutted with a legitimate response. I will.
GP never condoned what happened. He was spot on with a good joke. Actually, GP was sheer genius because he did more than crack a joke in 14 words. He made several comments about our society if you look deeper: people being rude to one another (in this case, texting at the movies), a person mentally unable to have a gun has a gun, an ex-cop who can't handle a gun properly, police brutality in today's society, and maybe the inability of people (in this case the cop) who need mental help that aren't getting the help they need because of health care issues or societal stigmas. I applaud GP.
There's a time and place for dark-humor jokes. Slashdot is an ok spot as it is unlikely that the victims of this atrocity will come to the comments section of this particular article... even if they read Slashdot. Our unwritten Slashdot rules are concerning dark humor is jokes don't make them too gruesome. I like to crack jokes about people who really died and I laugh at them. It's the only way I can make it through life without going crazy... and I mean literally crazy. Do you know who the worst offenders are about dark humor? Police officers. Firemen. Paramedics. Military. The people who see the most gruesome that life has to offer. I picked up my sense of humor from my father who saw lots of dead bodies in his profession. They aren't the only ones who laugh at stuff like this, though. Lots of people love to laugh at those who are honored with the Darwin Awards. How many people on Slashdot crack jokes about stupid users in tech support? It's the same thing. We have to. It's the only way most of us can survive the perpetual onslaught that life gives us.
Is it morally wrong to make fun of this kind of situation? No, generally it is not. Did something horrible happen? Absolutely. Should the guy have been shot? Absolutely not. Not even if he were texting during the movie. There are some situations where it is morally wrong to crack dark-humor jokes. True story example: Motorcycle accident occurred at high rate of speed, guy flipped over and became road pizza. (He died.) One cop cracks a joke about what happened in front of the family because he didn't know said family member was standing next to him. Was the cop wrong for making jokes in front of the family? Absolutely. Should the cop be disciplined? Absolutely. Was the cop wrong for making a joke about the situation? No. He should be allowed to make jokes even about awful real-life situations. He just needs to be absolutely sure of his surroundings.
Most of my family and friends were affected by Katrina. Why shouldn't I and they be able to make light of what happened there? Why shouldn't the rest of the country?
It's never too late to start doing the right thing.
If the new SimCity adds an offline mode, and you're a SimCity gamer, you should support it, and shun other games that are needlessly connected.
Disagree for two reasons. 1) Once I despise a company so much that I boycott them, then I'm boycotting them until they proved to me they have made real changes to their management structure and their attitude. How many times have companies suddenly "wised up" only to do something worse on their next game? EA is among the worst of those offenders. Even if they did a 180 tomorrow, I'll be watching for years before I buy anything from EA. I know there will always be people who think like you so most companies with this crap attitude do have the chance to redeem themselves. Even if EA went under, I wouldn't feel bad for the management at all. I'm not even sure I'd feel bad for the programmers and artists... which brings me to point 2.
2) EA has treated their employees so bad, a wife got online and wrote a very shaming letter back in 2004. They aren't the only guilty company either. Has it gotten better? I haven't heard anything saying how things have improved. In fact, I generally keep reading how bad it is to work in the AAA gaming industry. I even know someone personally who works in the AAA gaming industry and he recently mentioned something about mold issues in the office where he was expected to work and it caused him to get very sick. (It wasn't EA.)
You're entitled to your opinion, but I think you should not support SimCity until EA cleans up its act. If the company goes under, let it be a message to the other companies to clean up their acts. If they all go under, then that gives the little companies an opportunity to thrive -- something which I think is badly needed.
I understand and you're right about the rabid nutcases. When I joke, I try to make my jokes so absurd that it is clear that I'm cracking one. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, a lot of my jokes on the Internet just don't seem funny because there are people on the Internet who are so crazy that they make my jokes look tame. (This one was still a bad joke.) Oh well... all well that ends well.
Guess I wasn't apparent enough. I was just giving you grief so we could laugh. I admit... my joke wasn't the best. If anything, I was poking fun at the male gender... of which I'm a part of.
In all seriousness: if you live in Hamburg, Germany, I'll buy you that beer.
My wife works with engineers a lot. Her profession required technical training and she's good at what she does. She's brought home stories about how some engineers tried to explain things to her along the lines of "If you put a chicken in the oven..." She politely nods her head at the time and eye rolls at that kind of stuff when she gets home. We both fully agree with you: hire the right person for the right job regardless of gender.
You and I just learned something new. I was speaking about American cars. I happened to have moved to Europe recently but rely on the rails and buses, so I'll definitely check into the steering wheel thing here. Very interesting!
What is more, why are we so hyper obessessed about the gender gap in these [technical] fields?
Good grief, man! Are you serious? How else can fifty-five year old men that live in Mom's basement go out and meet women?
Minor point of correction. I'm ignoring government conspiracy stuff and just speaking from a general driving safety stand point.
Stuck accelerator? Put 'er in neutral.
Or turn off the ignition.
Turning off the ignition locks the steering wheel. If the accelerator gets stuck for any reason while the car is in motion, the correct answer is to put the engine into neutral and coast to a stop then turn off the engine. There should be governors in place to prevent the engine from blowing and even if there aren't, a blown engine is preferred to a locked steering wheel while in motion.
The red / blue map could have been worse.
If understand correctly: 52 projects in 52 languages in 52 weeks? A high school junior? You're nuts for even trying this.
I like that. :) Good luck, have fun, and I hope you learn a lot. We each have our ways of learning programming and this seems like an interesting way to do it.
Computer: "What did you do the last time you logged on?"
Me: "Surfed for porn and posted snotty comments on Slashdot."
Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky.
Jack of all trades is not the way to find a job. Companies are looking to fill a specific position. Craft a resume high lighting each of your specialities.
You're right. Jack of all trades is not how I advertise myself on the surface. I always start out with "application and database developer". I try to let my history speak for itself. Unfortunately, companies also don't know what they're looking for a lot of times. I read so many job openings with requirements that just reek because they are a list of disjointed abilities that no single person can have (without training) -- even if they are already a jack of all trades. HR and managers typically have a poor understanding of the job requirements that they need and this is a huge block to a person like me.
I've tried to craft resumes that highlight my four specialties (C#, Java, Oracle, and PostgreSQL), but a lot of accomplishments fall into broad spectrum categories. For instance, I think it's pretty cool that I wrote a multi-threaded Java program that interacted with dozens of hardware controllers via socket programming. I even topped it with not-so-shoddy Swing GUI to link it all together. (This was a number of years ago when swing was about the only option in Java.) Not everyone has had that privilege. I know most companies can't use that "specific thing" that I did, but it says something about what I can do in the future. I'd never done socket programming nor multi-threaded in such depth before. (I took a lot of care, study, and research to get the multi-threading right because I know it's easy to slip up.) Putting that on a resume is a challenge especially when most HR and managers wouldn't understand a socket from a variable. So I leave those kinds of words out because it just clutters my resume.
My current idea is to try to go face to face. Unfortunately, I'm in a new city, don't know very many people, and I can hardly speak the language in this country. Networking has always been a difficult thing for me. This just makes it doubly so. Not to mention, even under ideal circumstances, it's hard to figure out who is a good person to chat with, not put them off when you mention you're looking for a job, and have them know what C#, Java, and SQL is.
This leads me to see the following problems that make you unfit for hiring in a high-unemployment market where employers can pick-and-choose:
I am quite fit for employment. All of my previous employers have been very, very happy with my work. What I am not an expert at is selling myself. Part of that stems from an inability to lie or stretch the truth as well as many others.
1. You seem uninterested in jobs that might require you to stretch and learn other skills
Bzzz. Wrong.
I knew nothing about web development before I did it. I knew nothing about databases before I did it. I knew nothing about teaching people before I did it. I knew nothing about GUIs before I did it. I knew nothing about multi-threading before I did it. I excelled at every single one of these things. Better than others who do these specific things all day long? No. Better than most of the rest of my team? Yes. Am I superior to my teammates? No. We each had our strengths and weaknesses. As I said, being a jack of all trades is a strength and weakness at the same time.
2. You see some jobs as "beneath you", which is not a mindset employers want when they seek problem solvers
If it doesn't involve programming, then you are correct: I'm not interested. I can do other things, but it is a waste of my talent and a step in the wrong direction for me career wise if I do those other things full time. Sometimes, I do many other things besides programming. It sometimes takes a person who understands something about networking and operating systems to get a program to work properly.
3. You seem too dumb to remove the Java stuff (which you claim is a problem) from your resume
Too dumb? Now you're insulting me. Go back and look at Java. A lot of it has nothing to do with web development. I've done a lot of java programming over the years and none of it required me to stick a ".jsp" on the end of a file name.
4. You exhibit a truly annoying "poke my eye out with a blunt stick" (that would be a "downer" on any team) attitude when you hit a minor obstacle of your own making which you could easliy alleviate
Humor. Try it some time. A lot of people at multiple jobs were very sorry to hear me announce that I was moving on because I kept them laughing throughout the day.
Need I go on? You need to SERIUOSLY re-think things if you ever want things to look up
And the final rebut: I do think and re-think about things a lot -- whether it is programming or job hunting or the way I exercise. Why do you think I posted something here at Slashdot? I was looking for people to chime in and offer advice. I don't claim to be the most intelligent creature on the planet so maybe someone has an idea that I hadn't thought of.
Thanks for the "upbeat" advice you gave. I'll do what I've always done with such advice. Complain about it for a few minutes then ignore it and move on. People like you are a huge problem when it comes to job hunting. Stay the hell out of my way. I'm looking to make a positive impact on the world and I don't need you to slow me down.
I'd pay good money in not-so-sporty cars (like the ones I buy) to have an electronic feature that angles all of my mirrors to reflect the headlights of the guy behind me right into his eyes. If I can't see in my mirrors anyway, I might as well make use of the mirrors. I see no problem with this since I've had my entire inside of my car illuminated brightly while at a stop light complements of the SUV sitting behind me. It destroys my night vision.
I'm hunting for a job and there are days I feel like poking a blunt stick in my eye because it would be less painful. I blame HR and head hunters because of my experience in the past with them. (They are almost all totally incompetent.)
My current resume says I'm an application and database programmer. (In short: Oracle, PostgreSQL, C#, and Java is my current forte.) My blessing and curse is that I'm a jack-of-all-trades so I work in just about any language and I have. On the job boards, companies see the word "Java" on my resume (because I worked on Java apps recently) and that I worked on web apps 7+ years ago and they immediately assume I'm a current Java EE programmer. Phone interviews last all of about 3 minutes before they realize that I'm not who they are looking for. I don't get calls for anything else. I try to bury the Intranet stuff I did so it doesn't stand out and I try to highlight the ability for jack-of-all-trades. Doesn't quite work and I'm sure as hell not going to put "Not a web developer" on my resume. (Apparently, it's a mortal sin to list anything "negative" so I can't put the word "not" on my resume or cover letter.)
So, here I am. Stuck. Unable to properly convey on job boards what I can do and getting the wrong kinds of calls. I think I'm going to go find a blunt stick.
True, some would still OD, but there wouldn't be as many. Not everyone doing drugs is careless with their life.
So, you know, let the customers beta test it.
This is my biggest problem with GMOs. That and any testing done is extremely questionable until the real financial backers are ferreted out. (That goes for both sides of the GMO argument.) When it comes to GMOs, the truth is very obscured. Based on history, when it is hard to find out the truth, it usually means something bad is buried and hard to find. (Again, that goes for both sides of the GMO argument.)
That P'tach didn't even know Klingon. The coward used Bing.
For those too lazy to google it: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
I'm not talking about whether a question is answered or not. It's about how the question is answered. As a programmer, I often want to know more than a single specific answer. Sometimes, specific answers are useless to me. How do I know if the answer is poor answer or a great one if I am ignorant of the whole topic? The noise ratio on the Internet is very high and Google isn't as good as it used to be. Sometimes I need a variety of answers to pick from so I can grow. Example: Without an experienced hand to help guide them, a noob to multithreaded programming is going to take a lot longer to learn proper multithreading (if they ever can figure it out).
Never used it, but this is the holy grail of command line operations -- a proper merging of command line and GUI. I can't remember jack and have to look up a lot of stuff. (Curse of being a jack-of-all-trades.) This kind of stuff being standard would help me tremendously... and I seriously doubt I'm the only one.
You're right as I've been very sad about seeing Slashdot so watered down over the past several years. I'd also like to see a place where experts can help answer questions for noobs that is similar to the Slashdot forum. Asking a specific question and getting a specific answer is nice (as other websites address), but it would also be nice to toss something like what this guy has out there and watch the experts guide him or her in a better direction instead of stomping all over their face. I think the Internet is missing a good place like that.
I've been around the block and I'm half way decent at what I do, but I'll think twice before submitting a question to Ask Slashdot because nay-sayers come out the woodwork. I've been called an expert by a lot of people, but I know better. I've seen the real experts in action and I'm thankful every time I have an opportunity to interact with them and learn from them.
I fully agree some people just do not want to learn. I will also say that I never let school get in the way of my education. These are two separate thoughts you are expressing (unless you start getting into that schools are so crappy they turn off a lot of students who could have been really good).
Well spoken, but one minor correction: Agnosticism is actually the belief that God (or gods) cannot be proven or disproven. I am an agnostic who believes in God. I also have a friend who is agnostic, but he does not believe in God.
No, a select few are random. One of my coworkers from a decade ago randomly copied portions of if-then statements trying to get them to work. "This branch works so I'll copy it, paste it, and fiddle with the conditions until something else happens." Never mind those two branches required completely different decisions. Looking at one part of his program, a third of his if-then branches could never be run because they would always evaluate to false. I pointed that out to him and he couldn't offer a shred of logic behind what he was doing. After I got home, I bleached my brain with a stiff drink and then I hoped I'd never see code so bad again.
Ahh... the good old days of being fresh from college. I've since seen much worse code since, but at least it wasn't as random as this guy's methodology.