IN big companies, the ones paying big dosh, there is absolutely no fscking way that you can meet your clients personaly. That would be unproductive and you would be rightly fired for not using the resources at your disposal.
I have been only communicating with people by phone and email for the bes part of 6 years and I am doing fine, thanks, since these tools allow me to multitask and be more productive.
Just to think about wasting my company's time meeting people unnecesarily makes me cringe.
If you want to socialize, learn a language, practice yoga, or something like that....
German nationality has always been regulated by bloodlines, which is what you are explaining. The dark side of that is that people of lets say Turkish descent, that have lived in Germany for generations, could not obtain German nationality!
This does not apply in other countries, specially southern ones that follow the Napoleonic legal system, in which nationality is decide mainly by the place where you are born with some precise exceptions.
Spain, Portugal, France and Greece (I can't be bothered to check Hungary) are all part of the EU, and as such they share many laws about immigration.
Example: if one person has EU citizenship (which may be the case with the poster's wife) then that pesron can live anywhere in the EEA (European Economic Area) and bring his/her partner to the country. The partner has full rights to live and work in the country.
Italy, Spain, Portugal and France may be different, but there are threads of culture, religion and language that make them very similar to each other.
Your rampant anti-US sentiment is a myth. As long as some people keep equating George Bush with the US (as you seem to be sadly doing) there will be the posibility to claim rampant anti-US sentiment exists.
I have not seen US people beaten, hassled, harrased or discriminated in Europe, in the contrary, they are always welcomed because the people of Europe are not parochial, have very good memories and are in general grateful. Some US politicians lack all these, so it is unsurprising that those politicians and the people that pander their message feel presecuted by the free and informed European people and intelectuals.
I worked in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Sinagapore and the Philippines.
Those are in Asia as well, but are relatively small compared to China, so it is pretty much like being in Europe since each country has its own language ( Malaysia and Singapore have 4 oficial ones). You can hardly get more "polinlingual" than that. I will not mention India since that would be more of the same.
I don't know how extensively you have traveled through China, but to pretend that it has one homogenous language is absolutely ludicrous. They have one lingua franca which is obviously Mandarin Chinese. But they have many other tongues. Not dialects, but languages on their own right, completely uninteligible in respect to Mandarin.
So frankly your perceived Asian monolingualism is more likely down to the fact that you have been working in one of the few monolingual countries in the world and that you only go to Hong Kong for bussines:-P
As for Japan being a large country, well, I don't know what you are smoking, Japan may be densily populated, but in terms of territory is not disimliar to Germany (slightly bigger) or France (smaller).
I have got the feeling that you are talking more from the point of view of your prejudices thatn from a dispasionate comparison.
Back in Europe, you can work all around the place if you speak English. If you speak German or French you literally have conquered half the continent.
Have you worked with Sun's cluster software (v3.x)?
If you haven,t you should try.
A computer goes down? No problem, all the services move to another machine (the services are balanced accross as many machines as you want).
A network card died? No biggie, the traffic is re-routed using the redundant network cards.
A disk died? No problem, we swap it tomorrow, it is mirrored locally and replicated to a disaster facility in real time.
And that is only clusters. Sun's concept of domains and Virtual computers is that taken to the next level (pretty much like iBM machines running virutal Linux machines).
ANd then you have Google.
The era of the hardwar monkey is comming to an end, it will become a janotorial work where you only need to swap components flashing red without necessarily knowing what you are doing....
And hardware is not troubleshooted, you just replace full units (i.e. disk, board or even the full computer). Tasks that with good hardware require very few people.
Where I work we have 2 guys on call OOO for hardware issues.
We have an army of people on call for software problems, distributed all around the wolrd, including Mumbai...
Lets have some historic vision here please, cast your mind back to 1900.
People (as always) had to compete to get their own jobs, the ones that got them did not have any rights, the ones that did not did not have a safety net of any kind.
I wish to know which rosy era of human history are you longing for during which the workplace was not a competitive environment (maybe Stalinist USSR, but I pretty much doubt it, for sure they bitched about influence and privileges since money was of no concern).
Your whining about prices is ludicrous, now more than ever basic goods are cheaps and disposable income is growing. People are not starving on the street in many countries (even some not too wealthy), people are living longer and healtier lifes in general (in spite of the masochistic urges or smokers and overeaters).
I frankly don't know in which planet you are living, I can attribute your posting to trolling, bad luck (hey, your world may look like what you are describing) or you live in Sudan, in which case I do apologize for my comments above.
Most people of any importance in a company are not discussing employing contractors.
That only speaks about the size of the comapnies you are working with.
All the power to you if you work with small companies or with family businesses, but there are many jobs out there that are not dished out under the bizarre conditions you are describing.
I have been working without interruption for 15 years now.
And I have interviewed and be part of interview processes in many occassions.
The reaity is that the context is king. In some places they could not care less about your university degree or the school you come from.
In other places they did actively filter people from well known universities. In yet other places it was the other way around.
The only thing in common is that people had to demonstrate they knew their field, and the only case in which many places got really punctillious was in assesing skills (ridiculously complicated tests).
Very rarely you have two guys that, once properly assesed, score equally (if you are assesing the candidates properly that is, if you are just fooling around, then yes, paper may win, but I have seen in several occasions managers that lived to regret such carelessness).
In today's economy the unemployment is tremendously low and people are not starving to death on the streets (I am talking developed countries here folks).
Most people in rich countries have excellent standards of living, but forgot how it is to really be working just to earn enough to eat.
The point is that the excuse of accepting streess in order to hold the job is laughable. Any person in rich countires willing to work will be able to work.
You should have a procedure in place to deal with requests.
Even the smallest company can benefit from some procedures.
A form, a website, emails (visible to everybody).
What you want to achieve:
- Organize the work in order to prioritize it. - Quantify the work that you are doing. If 9 to 5 is not enough time to do all the work you should be able to prove it, And by no means work a single minute more than what you are paid for, otherwise resourcing problems will never become evident. - If you are overwhelmed you can shift the decision about what gets priority to your boss. That is why bosses exist, they deal with the unpleaseant part. hey get well paid for that, let them earn their money. - Is somebody comes to chase you point to your input tray (whatever form it takes). If Somebody is too insistent then inform other people that you are giving him priority. If your boss is not sorting out things, then let the users "help you" with the prioritization.
Bureaucracy is your ally if you know how to use it in your advantage.
... about what is moral, the goverment can and should legislate.
When there is not an agreement, the goverment should get out of the way and allow free individuals to reach their own conclussions and act in consequence.
The issues you mention are universally acknoledged as moral ones independently of religious or cultural bias.
Abortion is clearly not, thus the state should protect each individual decissions regarding tis matter and not even think about criminalization.
Only in a fascist leaning state will the goverment of the day impose its morals into the whole population (i.e one child only policy in China for example).
.... whit which Christians curiosuly nowadays, specially in the US, are amusingly unaware off: "don't do into others what you don't want done nto you".
Do you want to kill sombedoy? THen the natural pricnciple begs the question: do you want to be killed?
Thousends of years of common culture and experience have molded an overwhelming "no" for an answer.
That is not a figment of our imagination, that is human natural law in action.
Branding not one but two whole ethnic groups as terrorists is a typical fascist tactic.
Well done, we know how your boat rocks.
To further add to your public humillation then you go on a cheap tirade against people form other European countries (did you notice I wrote "other", because I believe to deny Turkish European heritage is foolish), yet another fascist tactic.
The part of Turkish history and "honour" that Turkey have to swallow is the worst part of it: torture, military dictatorships, ethnic discrimination against Kurds (they did not have schools where their language was spoken for example), lack of free speech.
If Turkey expects to join an organization whith a certain outlook of the World then they should fit that outlook or stay away.
It is not the EU who is eager to have Turkey, it is Turkey who has been pressing for EU membership.
If what they have to give up was so precious then they could decide to stay out of the EU, the EU will not invade them to force to join....
There may be people here that know not much about Turkey, but there is no worst ignorant than the one that has decided to be one, using whatever means are available to justify his own, not necessarily accurate, version of the world.
You are so blinded by your goverment propaganda that are incapabla to understand why blame by tenous association is not an acceptable standard to dish out justice.
Turkey is not in Europe,.... except for a very small part
unquote.
So it is. Well: Duh!
And having said that, Turkey's history is intimately linked to Europe. They are in the unique position that they can call themsleves Europeans or Asians, the rest of parochial Europeans seems to be weary of that.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you (or mister Zirinowsky or whatever the hell his name is) quantify the value of freedom?
That poor sod obviously got confussed between freedom of the code and price of the code to the end user.
Freedom is invaluable, a bit of my time devoted to obtain it is a fair price to pay.
We did not know the media makes a living of grabbing eye balls.
Man, what would we do without people like you....
IN big companies, the ones paying big dosh, there is absolutely no fscking way that you can meet your clients personaly. That would be unproductive and you would be rightly fired for not using the resources at your disposal.
I have been only communicating with people by phone and email for the bes part of 6 years and I am doing fine, thanks, since these tools allow me to multitask and be more productive.
Just to think about wasting my company's time meeting people unnecesarily makes me cringe.
If you want to socialize, learn a language, practice yoga, or something like that....
... do not hate them.
They are justifiable skeptical of the bull in the glass shop.
In any case they treat everybody with a certain desdain, which is not in purpose: they treat each other liket that aw well!
German nationality has always been regulated by bloodlines, which is what you are explaining. The dark side of that is that people of lets say Turkish descent, that have lived in Germany for generations, could not obtain German nationality!
This does not apply in other countries, specially southern ones that follow the Napoleonic legal system, in which nationality is decide mainly by the place where you are born with some precise exceptions.
Spain, Portugal, France and Greece (I can't be bothered to check Hungary) are all part of the EU, and as such they share many laws about immigration.
Example: if one person has EU citizenship (which may be the case with the poster's wife) then that pesron can live anywhere in the EEA (European Economic Area) and bring his/her partner to the country. The partner has full rights to live and work in the country.
Italy, Spain, Portugal and France may be different, but there are threads of culture, religion and language that make them very similar to each other.
Your rampant anti-US sentiment is a myth. As long as some people keep equating George Bush with the US (as you seem to be sadly doing) there will be the posibility to claim rampant anti-US sentiment exists.
I have not seen US people beaten, hassled, harrased or discriminated in Europe, in the contrary, they are always welcomed because the people of Europe are not parochial, have very good memories and are in general grateful. Some US politicians lack all these, so it is unsurprising that those politicians and the people that pander their message feel presecuted by the free and informed European people and intelectuals.
I worked in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Sinagapore and the Philippines.
:-P
Those are in Asia as well, but are relatively small compared to China, so it is pretty much like being in Europe since each country has its own language ( Malaysia and Singapore have 4 oficial ones). You can hardly get more "polinlingual" than that. I will not mention India since that would be more of the same.
I don't know how extensively you have traveled through China, but to pretend that it has one homogenous language is absolutely ludicrous. They have one lingua franca which is obviously Mandarin Chinese. But they have many other tongues. Not dialects, but languages on their own right, completely uninteligible in respect to Mandarin.
So frankly your perceived Asian monolingualism is more likely down to the fact that you have been working in one of the few monolingual countries in the world and that you only go to Hong Kong for bussines
As for Japan being a large country, well, I don't know what you are smoking, Japan may be densily populated, but in terms of territory is not disimliar to Germany (slightly bigger) or France (smaller).
I have got the feeling that you are talking more from the point of view of your prejudices thatn from a dispasionate comparison.
Back in Europe, you can work all around the place if you speak English. If you speak German or French you literally have conquered half the continent.
Why?
I left it in hibernation connected to the wall for the best part of 2 weeks, waking it up when required.
I saw absolutely no problem whatosever.
I am running Mandrake 10.1 in case that makes any difference....
Have you worked with Sun's cluster software (v3.x)?
If you haven,t you should try.
A computer goes down? No problem, all the services move to another machine (the services are balanced accross as many machines as you want).
A network card died? No biggie, the traffic is re-routed using the redundant network cards.
A disk died? No problem, we swap it tomorrow, it is mirrored locally and replicated to a disaster facility in real time.
And that is only clusters. Sun's concept of domains and Virtual computers is that taken to the next level (pretty much like iBM machines running virutal Linux machines).
ANd then you have Google.
The era of the hardwar monkey is comming to an end, it will become a janotorial work where you only need to swap components flashing red without necessarily knowing what you are doing....
... are not hardware related.
And hardware is not troubleshooted, you just replace full units (i.e. disk, board or even the full computer). Tasks that with good hardware require very few people.
Where I work we have 2 guys on call OOO for hardware issues.
We have an army of people on call for software problems, distributed all around the wolrd, including Mumbai...
What are you comparing against?
Yesterday?
Lets have some historic vision here please, cast your mind back to 1900.
People (as always) had to compete to get their own jobs, the ones that got them did not have any rights, the ones that did not did not have a safety net of any kind.
I wish to know which rosy era of human history are you longing for during which the workplace was not a competitive environment (maybe Stalinist USSR, but I pretty much doubt it, for sure they bitched about influence and privileges since money was of no concern).
Your whining about prices is ludicrous, now more than ever basic goods are cheaps and disposable income is growing. People are not starving on the street in many countries (even some not too wealthy), people are living longer and healtier lifes in general (in spite of the masochistic urges or smokers and overeaters).
I frankly don't know in which planet you are living, I can attribute your posting to trolling, bad luck (hey, your world may look like what you are describing) or you live in Sudan, in which case I do apologize for my comments above.
Most people of any importance in a company are not discussing employing contractors.
That only speaks about the size of the comapnies you are working with.
All the power to you if you work with small companies or with family businesses, but there are many jobs out there that are not dished out under the bizarre conditions you are describing.
I do not have a degree.
I have been working without interruption for 15 years now.
And I have interviewed and be part of interview processes in many occassions.
The reaity is that the context is king. In some places they could not care less about your university degree or the school you come from.
In other places they did actively filter people from well known universities. In yet other places it was the other way around.
The only thing in common is that people had to demonstrate they knew their field, and the only case in which many places got really punctillious was in assesing skills (ridiculously complicated tests).
Very rarely you have two guys that, once properly assesed, score equally (if you are assesing the candidates properly that is, if you are just fooling around, then yes, paper may win, but I have seen in several occasions managers that lived to regret such carelessness).
Try it, your go urges will be cured.
I am sure your partner is just waiting for you so whenever you feel stressed she/he/it is the paliative to your woes.
People allow the work to become stressful.
In today's economy the unemployment is tremendously low and people are not starving to death on the streets (I am talking developed countries here folks).
Most people in rich countries have excellent standards of living, but forgot how it is to really be working just to earn enough to eat.
The point is that the excuse of accepting streess in order to hold the job is laughable. Any person in rich countires willing to work will be able to work.
You should have a procedure in place to deal with requests.
Even the smallest company can benefit from some procedures.
A form, a website, emails (visible to everybody).
What you want to achieve:
- Organize the work in order to prioritize it.
- Quantify the work that you are doing. If 9 to 5 is not enough time to do all the work you should be able to prove it, And by no means work a single minute more than what you are paid for, otherwise resourcing problems will never become evident.
- If you are overwhelmed you can shift the decision about what gets priority to your boss. That is why bosses exist, they deal with the unpleaseant part. hey get well paid for that, let them earn their money.
- Is somebody comes to chase you point to your input tray (whatever form it takes). If Somebody is too insistent then inform other people that you are giving him priority. If your boss is not sorting out things, then let the users "help you" with the prioritization.
Bureaucracy is your ally if you know how to use it in your advantage.
... about what is moral, the goverment can and should legislate.
When there is not an agreement, the goverment should get out of the way and allow free individuals to reach their own conclussions and act in consequence.
The issues you mention are universally acknoledged as moral ones independently of religious or cultural bias.
Abortion is clearly not, thus the state should protect each individual decissions regarding tis matter and not even think about criminalization.
Only in a fascist leaning state will the goverment of the day impose its morals into the whole population (i.e one child only policy in China for example).
.... whit which Christians curiosuly nowadays, specially in the US, are amusingly unaware off: "don't do into others what you don't want done nto you".
Do you want to kill sombedoy? THen the natural pricnciple begs the question: do you want to be killed?
Thousends of years of common culture and experience have molded an overwhelming "no" for an answer.
That is not a figment of our imagination, that is human natural law in action.
Inflamatory perhaps.
Branding not one but two whole ethnic groups as terrorists is a typical fascist tactic.
Well done, we know how your boat rocks.
To further add to your public humillation then you go on a cheap tirade against people form other European countries (did you notice I wrote "other", because I believe to deny Turkish European heritage is foolish), yet another fascist tactic.
The part of Turkish history and "honour" that Turkey have to swallow is the worst part of it: torture, military dictatorships, ethnic discrimination against Kurds (they did not have schools where their language was spoken for example), lack of free speech.
If Turkey expects to join an organization whith a certain outlook of the World then they should fit that outlook or stay away.
It is not the EU who is eager to have Turkey, it is Turkey who has been pressing for EU membership.
If what they have to give up was so precious then they could decide to stay out of the EU, the EU will not invade them to force to join....
There may be people here that know not much about Turkey, but there is no worst ignorant than the one that has decided to be one, using whatever means are available to justify his own, not necessarily accurate, version of the world.
You are not understanding the issue at hand.
You are so blinded by your goverment propaganda that are incapabla to understand why blame by tenous association is not an acceptable standard to dish out justice.
And surely they raised in arms for no good reason?
The story of what the Kurds have suffered under Turkish rule has a particular chapter in the black book of history.
Ignore one side of the problem and you are condemned to eternal radicalism and hate.
.... and saying blantant lies should be penalized somehow.
Free speech has limits everywhere, but some limits are arbitrary and dictatorial, others are put in place by democratic concensus.
That difference matters.
Quote:
....
Turkey is not in Europe,
except for a very small part
unquote.
So it is. Well: Duh!
And having said that, Turkey's history is intimately linked to Europe. They are in the unique position that they can call themsleves Europeans or Asians, the rest of parochial Europeans seems to be weary of that.