So you admit that what I wrote in this thread didn't justify your attacks. Thanks for making that clear to everyone.
Seeing someone for help in career decisions because I can't see well enough to code any more doesn't make me "touched." It just makes me a reasonable person doing what anyone in a similar situation should do. That you think otherwise shows just how out of touch with reality you are.
As for "normal" - who wants to be "normal?" I'd rather be exceptional.
Also, keep in mind that "what I did to myself" will add at least a decade to my lifetime. The benefits include (and have been backed up in my case with extensive testing over the last 6 months) an abnormally great level of good cholesterol, a level of bad cholesterol so low that there's more good than bad, blood cells that live longer than the normal range, 3d radioisotope and ct scans done before and after stress testing that show my cardiovascular system is great. Now lets throw in the increased protection against both heart attack and stroke, more flexible blood vessels, and protection against dementia, and no history of lifestyle diseases, and I'm quite happy with the consequences.
I have a half-decent shot of making it into the triple digits. That's pretty extraordinary. You don't.
Given the rampant ageism in tech nowadays, you'd better have an exit plan. And so should all these new entrants into the field. More and more, tech jobs should be seen as just stepping stones, not a career in its own right. This was predicted 5 years ago, and people lost their shit over it. "Never going to happen!"
The downside? Well, say you interview as a graduating college senior at Facebook Inc. You may find, to your initial delight, that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm -- and the adults seem to be missing. But that is a sign of how the profession has devolved in recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.
Gone by 40
Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills -- such as the latest programming-language fad -- or “not suitable for entry level.” In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Government data show that H-1B software engineers tend to be much younger than their American counterparts. Basically, when the employers run out of young Americans to hire, they turn to the young H-1Bs, bypassing the older Americans.
And then there's the widespread discrimination based on sex and ethnicity. Plus having a pool of talent twice as large means you can dispose of them twice as fast, and it's going to put tremendous downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
Well, maybe it's a side effect. You know, to an observer, traveling backwards in space may appear to be traveling forward in space as they travel backward in time. So the more you push against these articles, the more will appear. Moral of the story? Don't feed the time trolls:-)
I fail to see how you could ignore the fact that Rome wasn't built in one day. Change takes time. There's no reason why someone who's signed an anti-disparagement clause can't also do as you suggest, and write their congressman to ask the law be changed. And can you imagine the absolute sh*t-storm if the company tried to say that writing your congresscritter is against your terms of employment?
If they think twice because you successfully blew the whistle on illegal activity, it's because they fear you'll expose their illegal activities as well. Consider it a great way to filter out the scum employers. It would be in their self-interest to hire whistle-blowers and use them to help clean up the company before they get hit with lawsuits.
If those are the only two choices available, then it's pretty obvious that you are not completely free in your choices. Don't try to justify mistreatment of workers because "we're the only choice they have."
If those are the only two choices, your economy is broken. Economic serfdom or starvation being the only two options for anyone is simply dysfunctional, and ultimately contributes to the breakdown of social cohesion and the rise of crime.
If those are their only choices, then they are economic serfs. Instead of encouraging such serfdom, maybe it would be better to remove onerous contract clauses? You know, to level the playing field a bit?
Sure, but they have to pay royalties to labels for songs listened to by paying SoundCloudGo+ users since the deal last year. If those royalties are "per licensed song played", the $10 a month subscription fee may not cover it for heavy users.
creimer, the three seats you take up on the bus are an affront to the rest of humanity.
Not only are you posting in the wrong thread, you're posting under a story that creimer hasn't even posted in yet.
Now, how about trying to stay a bit on topic? Here' I'll show you how it's done:
Soundcloud is probably hosed, but whether it is or not, it is acting within the law. If you don't like it, whining won't change anything. Instead of whining, why not try to change the law? If you're going to complain that it's too hard to change the law, you still have another alternative - create your own music and set it free.
Now, if you're going to argue that you don't have the talent or the means to promote it, but that others who do don't have the right to be rewarded for their talent and their work, you're on thin ground. How much of this stuff that you demand be free would you even have heard of? How much would have been created in the first place?
That's how copyright, by giving a limited set of rights to the copyright holder, incentivizes the creation and promotion of work that would otherwise not exist. If you wanted to go back to the pre-copyright system, then a lot of what you would have available would be that which patrons of the arts are willing to subsidize, both for creation and public performance. Do you really want the rich telling you what you should be listening to? That's far more a form of censorship than copyright.
One of my former bosses attempted to get me to sign an "exit agreement." Stupid ass had already signed both copies, so I took both copies and walked out without signing.
Took more than half a year, but I got paid anyway.
You can't withhold severance pay if the employee refuses to sign an exit agreement. What you'll end up doing is getting audited by the tax department because anyone in IT has to know where a few skeletons are buried or they're not competent.
So you blow the whistle, they sue you, it's now on the court docket and the public record that they sued you to try to shut you up because of their alleged unethical activities.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is increased.
It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress numbers, files, and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.
I'm surprised this isn't the first reaction to anyone confronted with such a situation. Anti-disparagement clauses are there to avoid bad publicity. If you go public, the existence of such a clause just invites them to shoot themselves in the foot.
It's like any form of blackmail. Once you go public with it, and whatever they had on you, it no longer works.
Why do you think they are illegal? If each party gets something out of a contract, then it is usually binding.
Okay. How about we sign a contract whereby I pay you $10 and in exchange I now own your firstborn child.
Even surrogacy contracts for 1,000 times that amount are dicey.
The simple, obvious solution is not to work for companies that have such an agreement. Nobody is forcing you to sell your soul (or your right to speak out against abuse) for a pair of golden handcuffs.
1. The Australian guy signs up for a Twitter account
2. The OP receives an email, and marks it as spam
3. Later, the OP signs up for a Twitter account
4. Gmail sends it straight to the Junk mail folder
And just how is that a BAD THING (TM)?
Besides, many sites advise you to check your spam folder if you don't see a reply within a reasonable time. Even if he did later on sign up for twitter, why would he want to receive spam emails from twitter at a later date (twitter gotta pay them thar bills some how some way, and by signing yup, you've agreed to let them spam you).
Gotta just love the way I get under your skin just by existing. When I post, you jump. Awesome. Or sad. Whatever...
I would love to get a bunch of you into a proper study to find out just what damaged you in such a strange way that you became a transmisogynist. It's most likely part of a generalized misogyny but you feel it's safer to express it at targets you feel have been traitors to your gender. Considering the lack of equivalent levels of transmisandry, I'm more likely right than wrong. Deep down, you think women shouldn't be seen as equals to men. No wonder I'm such a threat.
Again, what does any of that have to do with the fact that the methodology of the survey is absolute crap? Show me even ONE such survey that uses a valid methodology. Just one. Web surveys are cheap and easy to do for a reason - they don't require any skill in designing the study to make sure that the data is representative of the population studied. Why? Because, by their very nature, it's impossible to avoid self-selection bias, or any other selection bias. A proper study would require doing actual research, starting with determining how you're going to collect the data in the field so that it's representative of the population being studied.
That would take a lot more work. And most businesses wouldn't cooperate because there's no upside for them, just a lot of busywork as a distraction.
I remember one such study in another field that made a lot of outlandish claims. Turns out that all the respondents were "selected" from a few blog posts that almost nobody would see. The study authors justified this sloppiness because their grant money didn't include enough money to do any actual field work, or try to contact a group more representative of the population under study. If you're going to study violence against a certain minority group, you don't select only people who belong to a forum on violence against that group, and then try to generalize it to say that ALL members of that minority group experience violence of the same kind and at the same rates. And yet that's exactly what they did. Your tax money at work...
Imagine if we did the same thing with data pulled from a support group for survivors of church pedophilia, and then tried to use that to claim "100% of the people who attend any church are victims of pedophiles."
Same thing with app developers. If you get people responding to a public request asking "how much money did you make last year from app development", do you really think the respondents would be in any way representative? Or if you asked for responses to "did you have any problems on your last hospital visit" on the web, that people who didn't have problems would respond at the same rate as those who did? But that's much easier than doing exit interviews with patients, which would yield far more accurate data because there would be no self-selection bias. And if you did it at multiple hospitals, it would be more likely to be a decent representation.
Or doing a study of MENSA members and claiming it's representative of all geniuses, when 99.7% of all geniuses aren't so insecure (and stupid) as to have to pay $60 a year for validation.
tl;rd - web "studies" are bullshit for lazy people who can't be arsed to do it right and are dishonest about the validity of their results.
I have my browser set to use a monospace smallcaps font by default. Kind of hard to confuse a lowercase "ell" and the number "one", for example. I highly recommend it for people with low vision as well.
Nope, the same way that writers have to use the generic term "tissue" instead of the trademarked word "Kleenex" unless they also indicate that the term is trademarked by so-and-so. Even then, the owner of the trademark can decide to prohibit it if they feel its use by you can have negative consequences for the brand.
Besides, tt would be kind of awkward to sing "iPhone, a trademark of Apple Computer Incorporated, formerly known as Apple Computer Company".
Why not just set up a filter to delete everything from him automatically and not worry about it?
Or for a bit of fun, email the church groups and tell them the guy's (thinking of converting to islam|is gay|wants to get a sex change|wants to hook up with the sender who they've secretly had a crush on|been harassed by the pastor sending him dick picks) and is asking for advice, but to PLEASE NOT REFER TO IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT EMAIL BECAUSE IT'S A SECRET!!! Use lots of all-caps where appropriate. If they're as dumb as he is, it could be fun, as a way to relieve some of the stress this guy has caused.
Relax. The algorithm uses weighting. One person marking something from a particular sender as spam isn't going to impact anyone else - not even the sender. Just that the recipient who marked it as spam. Even then, the algorithm usually requires more than one such email to be declared spam, to avoid user error, before it will automatically send it to your spam folder.
Even that is reversible, if you find you've made a mistake and move it back to your inbox.
Of course, if 100 different people mark the same email as spam in a short interval, what would be so wrong about that having consequences for the sender?
Many is not most. And in this study, they're classifying HTML as a programming language. Seriously (yes, I read the article. Yes, I know it's bad form on slashdot). The study kind of sucks, same as all such studies. Have you ever seen a valid one?
Do you really want to go back to being entertainment for the masses? Seriously, how is writing this:
Look at the url - it's politics.slashdot.org. You can avoid it by (do I dare say it? Sure, why not, it's Friday evening) using your HOSTS file to block the subdomain.
... such a terrible thing? If you're that touchy, you're touched. And I don't see Zontar anywhere above or below, so really, if that's what you want to do, knock yourself out. I really don't care - you're just making a fool of yourself.
But if you want to be known as yet another transmisogynist, you're entirely free to do so. After all that's what brogrammers are known for. I guess next time people claim gender discrimination is not an issue, I'll use you as yet another example of how sick and warped the IT culture is in its treatment of women, or for that matter, anyone who isn't white and male.
Lets compete to complete the average task in most offices. You do it in Assembly, I'll do it in Python and we'll see who is done first and gets the most work done in a year.
It's a massive leg up from VBA and just Excel equations while being as easy as BASIC to learn.
Kind of off-topic. Most offices don't have a bullpen of programmers. Selection bias much?
Slashdot Mirror
So you admit that what I wrote in this thread didn't justify your attacks. Thanks for making that clear to everyone.
Seeing someone for help in career decisions because I can't see well enough to code any more doesn't make me "touched." It just makes me a reasonable person doing what anyone in a similar situation should do. That you think otherwise shows just how out of touch with reality you are.
As for "normal" - who wants to be "normal?" I'd rather be exceptional.
Also, keep in mind that "what I did to myself" will add at least a decade to my lifetime. The benefits include (and have been backed up in my case with extensive testing over the last 6 months) an abnormally great level of good cholesterol, a level of bad cholesterol so low that there's more good than bad, blood cells that live longer than the normal range, 3d radioisotope and ct scans done before and after stress testing that show my cardiovascular system is great. Now lets throw in the increased protection against both heart attack and stroke, more flexible blood vessels, and protection against dementia, and no history of lifestyle diseases, and I'm quite happy with the consequences.
I have a half-decent shot of making it into the triple digits. That's pretty extraordinary. You don't.
Given the rampant ageism in tech nowadays, you'd better have an exit plan. And so should all these new entrants into the field. More and more, tech jobs should be seen as just stepping stones, not a career in its own right. This was predicted 5 years ago, and people lost their shit over it. "Never going to happen!"
The downside? Well, say you interview as a graduating college senior at Facebook Inc. You may find, to your initial delight, that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm -- and the adults seem to be missing. But that is a sign of how the profession has devolved in recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.
Gone by 40
Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills -- such as the latest programming-language fad -- or “not suitable for entry level.” In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Government data show that H-1B software engineers tend to be much younger than their American counterparts. Basically, when the employers run out of young Americans to hire, they turn to the young H-1Bs, bypassing the older Americans.
And then there's the widespread discrimination based on sex and ethnicity. Plus having a pool of talent twice as large means you can dispose of them twice as fast, and it's going to put tremendous downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
Well, maybe it's a side effect. You know, to an observer, traveling backwards in space may appear to be traveling forward in space as they travel backward in time. So the more you push against these articles, the more will appear. Moral of the story? Don't feed the time trolls :-)
Now where's my Tardis?
I fail to see how you could ignore the fact that Rome wasn't built in one day. Change takes time. There's no reason why someone who's signed an anti-disparagement clause can't also do as you suggest, and write their congressman to ask the law be changed. And can you imagine the absolute sh*t-storm if the company tried to say that writing your congresscritter is against your terms of employment?
If they think twice because you successfully blew the whistle on illegal activity, it's because they fear you'll expose their illegal activities as well. Consider it a great way to filter out the scum employers. It would be in their self-interest to hire whistle-blowers and use them to help clean up the company before they get hit with lawsuits.
If those are the only two choices available, then it's pretty obvious that you are not completely free in your choices. Don't try to justify mistreatment of workers because "we're the only choice they have."
If those are the only two choices, your economy is broken. Economic serfdom or starvation being the only two options for anyone is simply dysfunctional, and ultimately contributes to the breakdown of social cohesion and the rise of crime.
If those are their only choices, then they are economic serfs. Instead of encouraging such serfdom, maybe it would be better to remove onerous contract clauses? You know, to level the playing field a bit?
Sure, but they have to pay royalties to labels for songs listened to by paying SoundCloudGo+ users since the deal last year. If those royalties are "per licensed song played", the $10 a month subscription fee may not cover it for heavy users.
creimer, the three seats you take up on the bus are an affront to the rest of humanity.
Not only are you posting in the wrong thread, you're posting under a story that creimer hasn't even posted in yet.
Now, how about trying to stay a bit on topic? Here' I'll show you how it's done:
Soundcloud is probably hosed, but whether it is or not, it is acting within the law. If you don't like it, whining won't change anything. Instead of whining, why not try to change the law? If you're going to complain that it's too hard to change the law, you still have another alternative - create your own music and set it free.
Now, if you're going to argue that you don't have the talent or the means to promote it, but that others who do don't have the right to be rewarded for their talent and their work, you're on thin ground. How much of this stuff that you demand be free would you even have heard of? How much would have been created in the first place?
That's how copyright, by giving a limited set of rights to the copyright holder, incentivizes the creation and promotion of work that would otherwise not exist. If you wanted to go back to the pre-copyright system, then a lot of what you would have available would be that which patrons of the arts are willing to subsidize, both for creation and public performance. Do you really want the rich telling you what you should be listening to? That's far more a form of censorship than copyright.
(/me awaits the usual flood of hate posts)
One of my former bosses attempted to get me to sign an "exit agreement." Stupid ass had already signed both copies, so I took both copies and walked out without signing.
Took more than half a year, but I got paid anyway.
You can't withhold severance pay if the employee refuses to sign an exit agreement. What you'll end up doing is getting audited by the tax department because anyone in IT has to know where a few skeletons are buried or they're not competent.
So you blow the whistle, they sue you, it's now on the court docket and the public record that they sued you to try to shut you up because of their alleged unethical activities.
Kind of defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. We've seen how it's played out before
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is increased.
It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress numbers, files, and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.
I'm surprised this isn't the first reaction to anyone confronted with such a situation. Anti-disparagement clauses are there to avoid bad publicity. If you go public, the existence of such a clause just invites them to shoot themselves in the foot.
It's like any form of blackmail. Once you go public with it, and whatever they had on you, it no longer works.
Why do you think they are illegal? If each party gets something out of a contract, then it is usually binding.
Okay. How about we sign a contract whereby I pay you $10 and in exchange I now own your firstborn child.
Even surrogacy contracts for 1,000 times that amount are dicey.
The simple, obvious solution is not to work for companies that have such an agreement. Nobody is forcing you to sell your soul (or your right to speak out against abuse) for a pair of golden handcuffs.
I'm thinking of a scenario more like this:
1. The Australian guy signs up for a Twitter account 2. The OP receives an email, and marks it as spam 3. Later, the OP signs up for a Twitter account 4. Gmail sends it straight to the Junk mail folder
And just how is that a BAD THING (TM)?
Besides, many sites advise you to check your spam folder if you don't see a reply within a reasonable time. Even if he did later on sign up for twitter, why would he want to receive spam emails from twitter at a later date (twitter gotta pay them thar bills some how some way, and by signing yup, you've agreed to let them spam you).
Gotta just love the way I get under your skin just by existing. When I post, you jump. Awesome. Or sad. Whatever ...
I would love to get a bunch of you into a proper study to find out just what damaged you in such a strange way that you became a transmisogynist. It's most likely part of a generalized misogyny but you feel it's safer to express it at targets you feel have been traitors to your gender. Considering the lack of equivalent levels of transmisandry, I'm more likely right than wrong. Deep down, you think women shouldn't be seen as equals to men. No wonder I'm such a threat.
Again, what does any of that have to do with the fact that the methodology of the survey is absolute crap? Show me even ONE such survey that uses a valid methodology. Just one. Web surveys are cheap and easy to do for a reason - they don't require any skill in designing the study to make sure that the data is representative of the population studied. Why? Because, by their very nature, it's impossible to avoid self-selection bias, or any other selection bias. A proper study would require doing actual research, starting with determining how you're going to collect the data in the field so that it's representative of the population being studied.
That would take a lot more work. And most businesses wouldn't cooperate because there's no upside for them, just a lot of busywork as a distraction.
I remember one such study in another field that made a lot of outlandish claims. Turns out that all the respondents were "selected" from a few blog posts that almost nobody would see. The study authors justified this sloppiness because their grant money didn't include enough money to do any actual field work, or try to contact a group more representative of the population under study. If you're going to study violence against a certain minority group, you don't select only people who belong to a forum on violence against that group, and then try to generalize it to say that ALL members of that minority group experience violence of the same kind and at the same rates. And yet that's exactly what they did. Your tax money at work ...
Imagine if we did the same thing with data pulled from a support group for survivors of church pedophilia, and then tried to use that to claim "100% of the people who attend any church are victims of pedophiles."
Same thing with app developers. If you get people responding to a public request asking "how much money did you make last year from app development", do you really think the respondents would be in any way representative? Or if you asked for responses to "did you have any problems on your last hospital visit" on the web, that people who didn't have problems would respond at the same rate as those who did? But that's much easier than doing exit interviews with patients, which would yield far more accurate data because there would be no self-selection bias. And if you did it at multiple hospitals, it would be more likely to be a decent representation.
Or doing a study of MENSA members and claiming it's representative of all geniuses, when 99.7% of all geniuses aren't so insecure (and stupid) as to have to pay $60 a year for validation.
tl;rd - web "studies" are bullshit for lazy people who can't be arsed to do it right and are dishonest about the validity of their results.
You shouldn't use terms you don't understand.
I have my browser set to use a monospace smallcaps font by default. Kind of hard to confuse a lowercase "ell" and the number "one", for example. I highly recommend it for people with low vision as well.
Nope, the same way that writers have to use the generic term "tissue" instead of the trademarked word "Kleenex" unless they also indicate that the term is trademarked by so-and-so. Even then, the owner of the trademark can decide to prohibit it if they feel its use by you can have negative consequences for the brand.
Besides, tt would be kind of awkward to sing "iPhone, a trademark of Apple Computer Incorporated, formerly known as Apple Computer Company".
BTW, it's not because the term is copyrighted (C), but because it's a registered trademark (TM).
What does any of that have to do with the fact that the survey is based on bullshit data because recruiters lie?
Why not just set up a filter to delete everything from him automatically and not worry about it?
Or for a bit of fun, email the church groups and tell them the guy's (thinking of converting to islam|is gay|wants to get a sex change|wants to hook up with the sender who they've secretly had a crush on|been harassed by the pastor sending him dick picks) and is asking for advice, but to PLEASE NOT REFER TO IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT EMAIL BECAUSE IT'S A SECRET!!! Use lots of all-caps where appropriate. If they're as dumb as he is, it could be fun, as a way to relieve some of the stress this guy has caused.
Relax. The algorithm uses weighting. One person marking something from a particular sender as spam isn't going to impact anyone else - not even the sender. Just that the recipient who marked it as spam. Even then, the algorithm usually requires more than one such email to be declared spam, to avoid user error, before it will automatically send it to your spam folder.
Even that is reversible, if you find you've made a mistake and move it back to your inbox.
Of course, if 100 different people mark the same email as spam in a short interval, what would be so wrong about that having consequences for the sender?
Many is not most. And in this study, they're classifying HTML as a programming language. Seriously (yes, I read the article. Yes, I know it's bad form on slashdot). The study kind of sucks, same as all such studies. Have you ever seen a valid one?
Look at the url - it's politics.slashdot.org. You can avoid it by (do I dare say it? Sure, why not, it's Friday evening) using your HOSTS file to block the subdomain.
... such a terrible thing? If you're that touchy, you're touched. And I don't see Zontar anywhere above or below, so really, if that's what you want to do, knock yourself out. I really don't care - you're just making a fool of yourself.
But if you want to be known as yet another transmisogynist, you're entirely free to do so. After all that's what brogrammers are known for. I guess next time people claim gender discrimination is not an issue, I'll use you as yet another example of how sick and warped the IT culture is in its treatment of women, or for that matter, anyone who isn't white and male.
* It's a scripting language.
And Michaelangelo just had a brush.
Lets compete to complete the average task in most offices. You do it in Assembly, I'll do it in Python and we'll see who is done first and gets the most work done in a year.
It's a massive leg up from VBA and just Excel equations while being as easy as BASIC to learn.
Kind of off-topic. Most offices don't have a bullpen of programmers. Selection bias much?