Re:Everybody's not above average!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
first, would the word 'mean' make you feel better? don't tell people to study math if you don't know it thoroughly yourself... if you take average as the mean of a sample set, then the post you're replying to is dead on.
second, by relying on market forces to determine above/below average, your assuming perfect knowledge of skill on your bosses part. that is naive bordering on stupid.
Re:Well, I see the usual anti-union bushwah
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
seniority, like it or not, correlates with ability just as well as any measure that is available. if you've been doing your job for a long time, odds are you know it pretty well. not too many 22 year old gurus out there, are there? why else do people use the word 'newbies'?
seniority's major purpose is in less skilled jobs than advanced programming where you may be replaced by a younger person because you have become too expensive through no fault of your own (raises cut the company's bottom line, remember..)
this hurts more, too, because as you get older and gain seniority (and are increasingly at risk of being replaced), you are more likely to be raising children, paying for a house, college, etc...
admitted, bleeding edge programming will not be unionized, just like any other group of scientists is not unionized. however, do you really think that the ability to write a really great ASP page, a GUI program with VB, or correctly configure Windows 2000 will make you unique? still, these things need to be done, and people doing this work may have to worry about the problems that have caused other fields throughout history to unionize. and an employer doesn't want to pay someone who can program backwards in assembly 100K for a job that someone with an MCSE can do for 35K...
i have nothing left to say to your points except for the link that you sent me gave me a nice selection of hotjobs.com, monster, and the ilk. i can see you don't even research your links before you post them. Given that, here's some information.
i feel that quite a few people in slashdot who are not so familiar with the concepts of supply and demand will gain an appreciation of labor history and economics after 3 more graduating classes of IT employees.
acually, if you read my post, i don't even refute your claims. however, in fact, i do disagree with you
and since your post comes off like elitist garbage, i will now try to refute it.
1. 'Unions members are lazier workers who are not as bright as skilled/white collar workers' ...you've probably lived a pretty sheltered life, having not actually worked in a union shop. if you had, you'd know that those generalization are in fact (weak) correlations at best. the ratio of intelligent/idiot is not that different... maybe the level of education, but slashdot is nothing if not against the idea that an education make you intelligent, no?
2. 'Employment information is too easy to get in today's world' ...if it's so easy, than just go and get it and present it to me. if your argument is sound and valid, and have good sources of information, then i will demure...you keep making claim without backing them up, which was my original point.
3. 'Every time a society begins to submit to the will of stupid and the lazy (a significant % of laborers), it goes all downhill. Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything (because poor Johnny is too stupid to function without big brother!).' ...okay, so what way is it going to be then? Countries that have started socializing everything... sweden, canada, germany, etc. enjoy some of the highest standards of living on the planet. I would counter that every society that have formed a ruling oligarchy that gets fat and lazy on the back of the other 95% of society begins to go downhill (see USSR, colonial powers for illustration of concept). also, aren't you saying that Johnny is too stupid? maybe he does need someone else looking out for him...
4. 'I know programmers and IT workers are too smart to fall for that trick.' ...this is just laughable. If they're so smart, how come so many are working for oldusedtoiletpaper.com and other related companies? also, i would counter that programming isn't that hard, and that any idiot with specialized knowledge can write a working program. Writing a good one takes the intellect, and i just haven't seen too many good ones...
Re:Unionize? No Thanks!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
tactics? i'm not trying to sell you anything.
my point is that IT, like all skilled professions before it, will be squeezed. Many labor markets were unfairly exploited in the early 20th/late 19th century. In response, many unionize.d I'm not defending opportunistic unionizers, who saw a labor pool and started multiplying employees * $yearly dues...RICO laws killed most of them, and many of the good ones. Many, many field were legimately exploited - not only underpaid and underworked, but also forced to work in dangerous (miners, sweatshops with locked emergency exits) condition, competing with child labor.
If you think George W. Bush's republicans will do anything that is not in the interest of their corporate backers, then you're in for a nasty surprise.. (probably arsenic in your drinking water...). this only goes slightly less for democrats. the other solution you've glossed over is to have unions in our country and lobby for and support them in other countries....
Re:The ills of Collective Bargining
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Sure thing. And Reagan was a great president.
'They are just monopolies./.ers are anti-monopoly and pro-individual. We don't believe in collective bargining.'
Listen, keep you generalizations to yourself. Some of the less naive here realize that statements like:
'IT professions are highly skilled workers and are in demand'
... is a highly localize phenomenon in our time, and that it's naive, wishful thinking to believe that this will always be the case.
Re:IT Unions not all bad
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
just because IT employment is unlike every other job in the world right now doesn't mean that we'll be in La-La-Land forever. Wait 3 years when the labor market's nice and flaccid, and send me a tape of the laughter that ensues when you demand training, paid overtime, good benefits, and a guaranteed 40 hr work week.
Re:Unionize? No Thanks!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 2
You're right - you're very talented and deserving of your pay. But as technology is maturing, sysadmins that can program are going to become obsolete (all you'll have to know to do is call MS support).
You will be your own undoing here: you are eating into Corporate profits. If they can pay a less qualified person less money than you make, then you will be fired. If they can pay someone in India or Russia less (where the labor laws are more lax or unenforced), then you and your less talented successor will both be out of jobs... and sweatshop labor isn't good for Nike sneaker, Gap shirts, or IT. No racism behind it. Corporations will seek to exploit their work forces to get higher profits, no matter where they are.
Now if you seek to complain, you will be fired, and if you complain too badly, you will be blacklisted. then you will starve. histories lesson is that people will exploit others for personal gain if possible. organized reaction is one of most effective methods of fighting oppression. hence the unions. sorry the hobbesian outlook on life, but you are being naive to thing the people upstream for you wouldn't fire you if possible to make even a buck more a year...
Re:Unions and what they can do for us
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
...and this doesn't apply equally to corporations?
unions might be large and corrupt...but that's just as much of a reaction against the similar corporate trend.
what you are doing, in fact, is presenting an opinion of yours as fact.
the reason you can't present this as fact is that you '[have not been able to/have not been willing to]' look up the facts or figures.
Now, you are presenting the idea that organizations that DO exist and serve a purpose (albeit unknown to you) don't in fact have any reason to exist.
You are walking a very dangerous path of thought - that if you cannot explain or see the rationale for some phenomenon, then it is not valid. close mindedness can be a very self-destructive thing...
'Magnequench asks the court for past damages measured by no less than a reasonable royalty, treble damages, a recall of all existing products of the defendants that infringe and the destruction or reconfiguration to non-infringing embodiments of all infringing products'
yes, recall all existing compaq computers... this suit is next to extortion...
not to offend, but your post suffers from many of the phrasings uttered by the java marketing force.. i mean "EJBs, servlets, and JSPs are being deployed on many custom applications developed by and for Fortune 500 companies. " sounds like the tagline from the Sun developer connection pages.
i'd like to dispute some points. first, most popular, mission critical middleware is still written in C and C++. most of course will create a Java API by putting lightweight wrapper classes around JNI calls to their code, but important software necessitates the level of control that C/C++ afford the developer.
Second, I dispute that Java programming is absolutely necessary to develop inter/intra (why you make the distinction here is lost on me...)net apps. Knowledge of sockets and wire protocols are the keys to being a competent network programmer. remember, java sockets are native socket calls (and therefore, once again, written in c/c++ or assembly).
now, that being said... I think java is better language to write most programs in. it is easier to write bug free code - both by design of the language IMHO and by ignoring portability concerns. No need to worry if an int is 16, 19, 3, or B bits, in java, just trust the VM that an int primitive is a signed 32 bit data type... Nobody's going to leave dangling pointers or forget to free buffers. It's good for very rapid development that requires very good reliability and good performance. It's also easier to read 'legacy code' since there's no really tricky code you can write for better or worse...
but in the end, it's another turing equivalent language.. you can do the same thing in PERL, C++, VB, blah, blah, blah. it's all a matter of taste and convenience.
It sounded like a mid-tier writer slopping together a $-per-word story. it also sounded like he didn't even know VB, let alone real computer languages.
i, too, want my ten minutes back. eh, i'd probably waste them anyway.
'The FBI doesn't do old-fashioned gumshoe investigations any more. The only tactic used nowadays is deception (lying) to get confessions, and then using those confessions to get evidence against others.'
oh, are they playing hard against the poor criminals?! boo-f**king-hoo...
my bad. however, look at this article from the nytimes (you need username/pass), and you will see a good example of how economically free china has become:
the russian gov't should be concerned with it's deteriorating infrastructure and the collapse of it's currency
we're just arresting some known criminals, and were able to do it because they are fundamentally idiots (did you see the simpsons where homer 'won' the boat from the springfield police dept?).
hurray to FBI for protecting american citizens from criminals.
Basic Notions of Algebra, Shafarevich (the spelling of his name varies due to the vagaries of english cyrrilic translation...)
again, quite advanced, but if you can read it, it's invaluable.
Mardsen and Tromba have written some good Vector calc. and complex analysis books - you might want to look into their books for basic calc. One of my personal favorites for Real Analysis is 'The Way of Analysis' by Strichartz (who happens to be a really great guy in person, too), but it's a little advanced as well (although, if you want to know anything about why calculus works the way it does, and the foundations of what exactly real numbers are... you really have to go the difficult route of reading about it...)
Slashdot Mirror
first, would the word 'mean' make you feel better? don't tell people to study math if you don't know it thoroughly yourself... if you take average as the mean of a sample set, then the post you're replying to is dead on.
second, by relying on market forces to determine above/below average, your assuming perfect knowledge of skill on your bosses part. that is naive bordering on stupid.
yeah, you're so 1337...
you do much better at journalism than CNN..
seniority, like it or not, correlates with ability just as well as any measure that is available. if you've been doing your job for a long time, odds are you know it pretty well. not too many 22 year old gurus out there, are there? why else do people use the word 'newbies'?
seniority's major purpose is in less skilled jobs than advanced programming where you may be replaced by a younger person because you have become too expensive through no fault of your own (raises cut the company's bottom line, remember..)
this hurts more, too, because as you get older and gain seniority (and are increasingly at risk of being replaced), you are more likely to be raising children, paying for a house, college, etc...
admitted, bleeding edge programming will not be unionized, just like any other group of scientists is not unionized. however, do you really think that the ability to write a really great ASP page, a GUI program with VB, or correctly configure Windows 2000 will make you unique? still, these things need to be done, and people doing this work may have to worry about the problems that have caused other fields throughout history to unionize. and an employer doesn't want to pay someone who can program backwards in assembly 100K for a job that someone with an MCSE can do for 35K...
okay, your reading off the same script.
i have nothing left to say to your points except for the link that you sent me gave me a nice selection of hotjobs.com, monster, and the ilk. i can see you don't even research your links before you post them. Given that, here's some information.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations Library homepage
National Statistical Coordinization Board - Yearbook of Labor Statistics page (needs to be ordered)
Duke University Library's Indexes and Databases for Researching Labor Unions and Labor History
Biased links:
AFL-CIO homepage
Union Resource Network
hm, yes.
i understand that these measures rate universal health care, infant mortality, average life expectancy, and education into account.
what an irrelevant figure...
i feel that quite a few people in slashdot who are not so familiar with the concepts of supply and demand will gain an appreciation of labor history and economics after 3 more graduating classes of IT employees.
...electricians were bleeding edge once, too...
acually, if you read my post, i don't even refute your claims. however, in fact, i do disagree with you
... maybe the level of education, but slashdot is nothing if not against the idea that an education make you intelligent, no?
and since your post comes off like elitist garbage, i will now try to refute it.
1. 'Unions members are lazier workers who are not as bright as skilled/white collar workers'
...you've probably lived a pretty sheltered life, having not actually worked in a union shop. if you had, you'd know that those generalization are in fact (weak) correlations at best. the ratio of intelligent/idiot is not that different
2. 'Employment information is too easy to get in today's world'
...if it's so easy, than just go and get it and present it to me. if your argument is sound and valid, and have good sources of information, then i will demure...you keep making claim without backing them up, which was my original point.
3. 'Every time a society begins to submit to the will of stupid and the lazy (a significant % of laborers), it goes all downhill. Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything (because poor Johnny is too stupid to function without big brother!).'
...okay, so what way is it going to be then? Countries that have started socializing everything... sweden, canada, germany, etc. enjoy some of the highest standards of living on the planet. I would counter that every society that have formed a ruling oligarchy that gets fat and lazy on the back of the other 95% of society begins to go downhill (see USSR, colonial powers for illustration of concept). also, aren't you saying that Johnny is too stupid? maybe he does need someone else looking out for him...
4. 'I know programmers and IT workers are too smart to fall for that trick.'
...this is just laughable. If they're so smart, how come so many are working for oldusedtoiletpaper.com and other related companies? also, i would counter that programming isn't that hard, and that any idiot with specialized knowledge can write a working program. Writing a good one takes the intellect, and i just haven't seen too many good ones...
tactics? i'm not trying to sell you anything.
my point is that IT, like all skilled professions before it, will be squeezed. Many labor markets were unfairly exploited in the early 20th/late 19th century. In response, many unionize.d I'm not defending opportunistic unionizers, who saw a labor pool and started multiplying employees * $yearly dues...RICO laws killed most of them, and many of the good ones. Many, many field were legimately exploited - not only underpaid and underworked, but also forced to work in dangerous (miners, sweatshops with locked emergency exits) condition, competing with child labor.
If you think George W. Bush's republicans will do anything that is not in the interest of their corporate backers, then you're in for a nasty surprise.. (probably arsenic in your drinking water...). this only goes slightly less for democrats. the other solution you've glossed over is to have unions in our country and lobby for and support them in other countries....
Sure thing. And Reagan was a great president.
/.ers are anti-monopoly and pro-individual. We don't believe in collective bargining.'
'They are just monopolies.
Listen, keep you generalizations to yourself. Some of the less naive here realize that statements like:
'IT professions are highly skilled workers and are in demand'
... is a highly localize phenomenon in our time, and that it's naive, wishful thinking to believe that this will always be the case.
just because IT employment is unlike every other job in the world right now doesn't mean that we'll be in La-La-Land forever. Wait 3 years when the labor market's nice and flaccid, and send me a tape of the laughter that ensues when you demand training, paid overtime, good benefits, and a guaranteed 40 hr work week.
You're right - you're very talented and deserving of your pay. But as technology is maturing, sysadmins that can program are going to become obsolete (all you'll have to know to do is call MS support).
You will be your own undoing here: you are eating into Corporate profits. If they can pay a less qualified person less money than you make, then you will be fired. If they can pay someone in India or Russia less (where the labor laws are more lax or unenforced), then you and your less talented successor will both be out of jobs... and sweatshop labor isn't good for Nike sneaker, Gap shirts, or IT. No racism behind it. Corporations will seek to exploit their work forces to get higher profits, no matter where they are.
Now if you seek to complain, you will be fired, and if you complain too badly, you will be blacklisted. then you will starve. histories lesson is that people will exploit others for personal gain if possible. organized reaction is one of most effective methods of fighting oppression. hence the unions. sorry the hobbesian outlook on life, but you are being naive to thing the people upstream for you wouldn't fire you if possible to make even a buck more a year...
...and this doesn't apply equally to corporations?
unions might be large and corrupt...but that's just as much of a reaction against the similar corporate trend.
um, no...
what you are doing, in fact, is presenting an opinion of yours as fact.
the reason you can't present this as fact is that you '[have not been able to/have not been willing to]' look up the facts or figures.
Now, you are presenting the idea that organizations that DO exist and serve a purpose (albeit unknown to you) don't in fact have any reason to exist.
You are walking a very dangerous path of thought - that if you cannot explain or see the rationale for some phenomenon, then it is not valid. close mindedness can be a very self-destructive thing...
'Magnequench asks the court for past damages measured by no less than a reasonable royalty, treble damages, a recall of all existing products of the defendants that infringe and the destruction or reconfiguration to non-infringing embodiments of all infringing products' yes, recall all existing compaq computers... this suit is next to extortion...
not to offend, but your post suffers from many of the phrasings uttered by the java marketing force .. i mean "EJBs, servlets, and JSPs are being deployed on many custom applications developed by and for Fortune 500 companies. " sounds like the tagline from the Sun developer connection pages.
i'd like to dispute some points. first, most popular, mission critical middleware is still written in C and C++. most of course will create a Java API by putting lightweight wrapper classes around JNI calls to their code, but important software necessitates the level of control that C/C++ afford the developer.
Second, I dispute that Java programming is absolutely necessary to develop inter/intra (why you make the distinction here is lost on me...)net apps. Knowledge of sockets and wire protocols are the keys to being a competent network programmer. remember, java sockets are native socket calls (and therefore, once again, written in c/c++ or assembly).
now, that being said... I think java is better language to write most programs in. it is easier to write bug free code - both by design of the language IMHO and by ignoring portability concerns. No need to worry if an int is 16, 19, 3, or B bits, in java, just trust the VM that an int primitive is a signed 32 bit data type... Nobody's going to leave dangling pointers or forget to free buffers. It's good for very rapid development that requires very good reliability and good performance. It's also easier to read 'legacy code' since there's no really tricky code you can write for better or worse...
but in the end, it's another turing equivalent language.. you can do the same thing in PERL, C++, VB, blah, blah, blah. it's all a matter of taste and convenience.
It sounded like a mid-tier writer slopping together a $-per-word story. it also sounded like he didn't even know VB, let alone real computer languages.
i, too, want my ten minutes back. eh, i'd probably waste them anyway.
'The FBI doesn't do old-fashioned gumshoe investigations any more. The only tactic used nowadays is deception (lying) to get confessions, and then using those confessions to get evidence against others.'
oh, are they playing hard against the poor criminals?! boo-f**king-hoo...
my bad. however, look at this article from the nytimes (you need username/pass), and you will see a good example of how economically free china has become:
B OXA.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/weekinreview/22
Falung Gong
US citizens (scholar) being jailed without charges
Gov't firing on and killing 2 in a village that refused to pay taxes they couldn't afford (at least we JAIL them here...)
oh... Tianemen square
Tibet
do i really have to give more examples of flagrant human rights abuses by the PRC?
last i heard, it was hit by an idiot chinese pilot....
here's the only problem:
-you're a private citizen
-they're law enforcement officers
oh, wait, that's all the difference in the world. your post made a nice little sound bite, but really fall flat when reality comes into play.
the russian gov't should be concerned with it's deteriorating infrastructure and the collapse of it's currency
we're just arresting some known criminals, and were able to do it because they are fundamentally idiots (did you see the simpsons where homer 'won' the boat from the springfield police dept?).
hurray to FBI for protecting american citizens from criminals.
no, the people that CRACKED it should be arrested. nice to ignore all issues about personal responsibility...
'oh, since you left your window open to your house, and i stole your childrens' clothes, you should be arrested for child abuse...'
great point, bravo...
what a stupid point to make, and how unrelated to the topic.
a very advanced book, but important and readable:
Basic Notions of Algebra, Shafarevich (the spelling of his name varies due to the vagaries of english cyrrilic translation...)
again, quite advanced, but if you can read it, it's invaluable.
Mardsen and Tromba have written some good Vector calc. and complex analysis books - you might want to look into their books for basic calc. One of my personal favorites for Real Analysis is 'The Way of Analysis' by Strichartz (who happens to be a really great guy in person, too), but it's a little advanced as well (although, if you want to know anything about why calculus works the way it does, and the foundations of what exactly real numbers are... you really have to go the difficult route of reading about it...)