If you going to jump to another company for merely 10% raise, I wouldn't want to hire you.
Don't waste your time unless the new job pays you at least ~35-50% more, you save you time looking for and interviewing for those "more of the same" jobs, and focus on those that really pays.
I am frank about this during interviews (in case I disclosed my previous salary, which I try my best not to). It sends a clear signal to the manager that I intends to stay for long, and I won't be jumping ship unless another job is offering me that much more, so they don't have to worry about me looking for another job right after I get on board. Not sure if it was actually what they thought, but I got hired the last time I interviewed and was asked about it.
conversely, people who aren't extroverts or for whatever reason aren't stars in the verbal part of the interview, but clearly know their stuff when given a written test.
Wish I had mod points to mod this up, this is a great reason for using tests, especially since there are lots of introverts in the programming field, relying only on a screening process that favors extroverts (i.e. interviews) is just going to miss a lot of strong candidates.
You might find it interesting to know that such poor quality for cellphones are not universal. I live in Asia and I routinely do hour long teleconference from my mobile phone (how we call it here) without any problems (plus we all have cheap 1000+ minutes/month plans). With a headset having 2 earplugs (hands free and can hear on both ears), it is definitely much more comfortable than using a landline phone.
Parent post should be moved to the top of the comments.
Couldn't agree more. The purpose of the interview is communication, it is the best chance to find out if the company is where you want to work for and vice versa. It is a waste of everyone's time for you to join a company and quits three months later because you find out you cannot fit in.
Anything relating to what your future life in the company should be fair questions to ask, including but not limited to: what is the real working hours around here? what's the pay? what is your work process that I need to fit into? do people here like to get together outside work? Whom would I be working with if I join? May I meet them before I commit to joining this company to see if we get along? etc.
Asking these questions show you are serious about working for the company, and believe it or not, the more the hiring manager thinks and answers these questions, the firmly you put yourself in his mind as "the one to hire". After investing so much thinking how you fit it (if it seems you can fit in), it would be the logical step to just hire you.
DO NOT ask about benefits in the interview, ESPECIALLY in the first interview.
I hear this quite often, but I disagree with it almost all the time.
It may be different by cultures, but there may not always be a second interview at all. So at least you should ask what is the usual hiring process and how many interviews (and with whom) you should expect. If there may not be a 2nd interview, then you need to ask anything important to you during that first and only interview.
While selling yourself is important, it is also important for both side to find out the ballpark range of each other, to avoid wasting each others' time. So bring up the range of the pay is a good idea even for the first interview. I have been through quite a few interviews, and I ask about the job nature, pay and realistic working hours (the 3 most important aspect of job for me) every time.
through putting in a lot of extra hours that weekend, and a lot of travelling to various IT shops within a 50 mile radius, we managed to get the business back to the point where we could open on the Monday without visible issue....
the board rejected the plan which would have made that situation a non-issue, even at the cheapest option.
(emphasis mine)
Did you realize you have just shown to your board that, through your own heroic efforts, that they don't need your plan and can still recover from such failures!
Now, can you tell me why a sensible business person would want to spend more money to on a contingency plan where they know they can already recover from without spending a dime?
Same here. I seriously considered buying a Kindle, but this incident helped me made up my mind against buying one. I will probably spend the money on an iPhone instead.
With a real book, I don't have to worry if I can still read it a few years later.
I not sure if parent post think this is good or bad, but to put it simply, I dealt with enough a**holes during the day while working, if there is a way for me to keep in touch with my friends without dealing with any more a**holes, sign me up.
50 years ago, you practically cannot interact with your friends without at least N-1 of you "going out", even if it is just next door. So unless you want to be left out, you have to "go out" most of the time.
20 years ago, you can somewhat keep in touch with most of your friends using the phone, so the need to "go out" becomes less.
Now, not only can you chat (voice/text) with all your friends together, you also can have a lot of interactions online, which used to be only possible by getting together (e.g. game of poker, risk, etc). So the need to have N-1 people "go out" just to get together is nearly nil. Wow, no surprise the generation that most used to interact online do not feel the need to physically go out at all.
Criticizing them for not "going out" is the same as a bat criticizing an owl for not interacting with the environment because the owl is no emitting sonar beeps. The owl has vision sees the environment in a way the bat cannot comprehend.
In the same way, the newer generation is interacting and "going out" online, unfortunately some older generation who hardly grasp email is unable to comprehend the level of interaction going on and assume the kid is "hiding himself".
Trying to cut the kid off the net to make him "go out" will be as useful as blinding the owl to get it to use sonar like a bat. It's not going to work. You just got to accept the fact the kids growing up now will interact with friends differently than you did.
I think your idea won't ever be made into real practice, not because it is impractical, but because...
... it doesn't make any more money for those who are practicing the law.
From my (admittedly limited) view of the court system, the cynic in me thinks that all the caveats and tricks are there to make lawyers valuable. Court systems (in any country), while supposedly deliver justice, seems often designed to make the outcome of any trial heavily dependent on the skill of the lawyers, thus making it worthwhile to pay lots of money to the lawyers.
To me, the fact that the skill of the lawyer can significantly change the outcome of a trial seems to suggest that justice actually has a very small role in the courts.
For your statement to make sense, you assumed the same property "time" exists within and outside the universe, and that it made sense to connect the two. It is like saying since Earth existed within something larger, there might be something due North of Earth's North Pole.
Unfortunately, North/South is a local property of Earth, while there is plenty space above the North Pole, you cannot go more north from the North Pole. Similarly, spacetime is a property of our observable universe, and that property breaks down at Big Bang. Trying to simply extrapolating spacetime from the universe to beyond is like trying to reach space by just keep going North on the Earth.
As to whether a foreign power is involved, I think that is an extremely difficult question to answer as a remote consumer of "news" and Internet reports.
Actually, it is quite easy. Just use common sense.
Want to know if foreign country X is involved, just consider these 2 questions:
1. Is it in the interest of country X to do so? 2. Does country X has the capability to do so without getting caught and does country X even care about getting caught?
As you say, since it is difficult to proof anything, it would easy for country X to cover their tracks to avoid any backlash.
I'm all for equality in opportunity.... But I think it's naive to think that, different as men and women are, that all careers will equalize out to a 50/50 distribution over time.
One eloquent way to put it I have heard in a debate about affirmative action:
"Do you want equal opportunity? Or equal results?"
No, what RIAA did not say is "We did not receive such information from CBS nor Last.fm". Which would be a clear answer that any PR person would know can absolute stop any rumors.
"made no such request" could mean they have made other kind of request but only received the data given, or it could mean they did not request but CBS volunteered the data to them.
The fact that RIAA PR did not opt for a crystal clear answer is a good indication that they have received something from CBS/Last.fm.
HR just want to cover their arses and keep costs down.
While I completely agree with your post, this line got me thinking.
The function of HR in a company is just like IT, except they deal with people instead of machines. Then I realize that for HR, hiring someone is just like installing a new program for the IT department.
Would a competent IT support allow any manager to install just about any program they find useful on their PC? Probably not, there will be some kind of screening and checking before it is allowed. In many cases, IT support will counter suggest some "standard" programs instead. In larger companies, all programs must first be approved by IT before you can use them. While this create some inconvenience and inefficiency for the users, IT believed it was for the better on the whole.
The same with HR. If the same manager wish to hiring someone they find helpful, HR will conduct some screening and checking, and sometimes, HR will hire someone else instead. In large companies, you cannot hire someone without HR approval. This creates some inefficiency for the company, but I suppose HR also believed this was better on the whole.
Put in this light, HR is not as evil as we used to believe.
I believe many, if not most, gamers are desensitized to violence.
No, gamers are desensitized to the depiction of fake violence. Much like anyone who has watched enough American TV for a few years.
I played games for over 2 decades, from Karateka to Resistance2. Yet I recoil from the thought of actually punching anyone in violence with the purpose of hurting them, much less taking out a real gun and shoot at them.
If someone cannot separate reality from the fake stuff in a game, they will have just as much desensitization from watch American TV.
Why bother to deny them? Having everybody know they have the capability and the will to perform cyber-attacks is good for the military, it gives more credibility to their threats, which reduce their need to actually perform more attacks, and that reduces their cost and risk.
On the PR side though, well, I think the military will leave that to the politicians... The US didn't much care about their image when national interest is at stake anyway.
I don't feel the need to wander around with a surgical mask and I'm right in the middle of a hot zone. Rather, what bothers me is that people are underreacting.
This attitude is exactly what scares me. See my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1215525&cid=27758051, which I quote here "I doubt its government or people is ready for the swine flu.... I suspect it will take a much greater death toll to scare the US people to really start changing their habits."
Hey dude, everybody wearing a mask whenever they are in public is a major part in how you stop the swine flu from spreading. Note that you wearing a mask is not to protect you (though it is good if everyone thinks that, it encourages people to wear one), but to protect everyone else in case you are infected.
Washing your hands with soap after using the bathroom is not enough, that is what you should be doing normally already. To stop the swine flu, you need to wash your hands every single time you leave a public places, i.e. the first thing you do when you reach you office in the morning, when you return to office after lunch, when you get back home.
The problem is it needs everyone (or almost everyone) doing it to be effective. Wearing mask and washing your hands won't help you a bit if someone else who is infected sneeze or cough right in front of you without wearing a mask, the saliva droplets could land on your eyes for all your mask can do. Doctors in hospitals need to wear face masks with special ventilation to prevent it and still it didn't work 100%.
Not to mention your government officials and social infrastructure are most likely not prepared to close every school if a lot of cases are confirmed to be swine flu. I.e. where do the kids go if school closes? Not everyone has stay home parent to take care of them if school closes. Do your business have contingency plans to allow most of their staff working remotely from home? Or will most still be forced to go to work even in the face of a widespread flu? Will supermarkets be still open if the flu is everywhere? If not, do you have enough food stocked up to last a few weeks? Even worse would be when doctors/nurses in hospital got infected, will they stay in their post risking their lives, or will they strike and refuse to continue (this actually happened during SARS)?
This (and more) was what we did in Asia during SARS, and it was not even as infectious as the swine flu (at least WHO thinks travel warnings was effective to stop SARS, but is not effective now against swine flu).
It doesn't matter if swine flu kills less than 1/10 of the infected compared to SARS if it infects 100x or 1000x as many people, you are going to see death tolls in the thousands or tens of thousands if its spread is not checked soon.
If you are in a hot zone, got look up the archives at the SARS news in Asia, see what happened there and learn how to prepare yourself. Do it for your family's sake at least.
PS3 owner are entitled to the option of buying any DLC for a game available on that platform. Yes, an option by itself do have value even if you do exercise it immediately.
I would say XBox360 owner are shafted because of exclusive agreements for PS3, so why not XBox owners go ahead and stop buying from game companies that shafted them while PS3 owners stop buying from Bethesda?
I would certainly hold back until I know if there DLC is going to be XBox exclusive. If so, I will just skip this one even though I like playing the FO series to save myself some disappointment.
Slashdot Mirror
If you going to jump to another company for merely 10% raise, I wouldn't want to hire you.
Don't waste your time unless the new job pays you at least ~35-50% more, you save you time looking for and interviewing for those "more of the same" jobs, and focus on those that really pays.
I am frank about this during interviews (in case I disclosed my previous salary, which I try my best not to). It sends a clear signal to the manager that I intends to stay for long, and I won't be jumping ship unless another job is offering me that much more, so they don't have to worry about me looking for another job right after I get on board. Not sure if it was actually what they thought, but I got hired the last time I interviewed and was asked about it.
conversely, people who aren't extroverts or for whatever reason aren't stars in the verbal part of the interview, but clearly know their stuff when given a written test.
Wish I had mod points to mod this up, this is a great reason for using tests, especially since there are lots of introverts in the programming field, relying only on a screening process that favors extroverts (i.e. interviews) is just going to miss a lot of strong candidates.
Has journalism ever been much better in the past? Seriously? You would probably just got the same article sans that passage before wikipedia.
Well, you answered yourself in your next sentence.
Having you actually informed is the last thing they wanted.
When your email service is out, isn't it even better if those you communicate with also have their email service out too?
That way, during the outage, no one will send you email you cannot receive, and no one will expect to read your email replies which you cannot send.
You might find it interesting to know that such poor quality for cellphones are not universal. I live in Asia and I routinely do hour long teleconference from my mobile phone (how we call it here) without any problems (plus we all have cheap 1000+ minutes/month plans). With a headset having 2 earplugs (hands free and can hear on both ears), it is definitely much more comfortable than using a landline phone.
If the employer would be offended if asked about their real working hours, you wouldn't want to work there anyway.
Parent post should be moved to the top of the comments.
Couldn't agree more. The purpose of the interview is communication, it is the best chance to find out if the company is where you want to work for and vice versa. It is a waste of everyone's time for you to join a company and quits three months later because you find out you cannot fit in.
Anything relating to what your future life in the company should be fair questions to ask, including but not limited to: what is the real working hours around here? what's the pay? what is your work process that I need to fit into? do people here like to get together outside work? Whom would I be working with if I join? May I meet them before I commit to joining this company to see if we get along? etc.
Asking these questions show you are serious about working for the company, and believe it or not, the more the hiring manager thinks and answers these questions, the firmly you put yourself in his mind as "the one to hire". After investing so much thinking how you fit it (if it seems you can fit in), it would be the logical step to just hire you.
DO NOT ask about benefits in the interview, ESPECIALLY in the first interview.
I hear this quite often, but I disagree with it almost all the time.
It may be different by cultures, but there may not always be a second interview at all. So at least you should ask what is the usual hiring process and how many interviews (and with whom) you should expect. If there may not be a 2nd interview, then you need to ask anything important to you during that first and only interview.
While selling yourself is important, it is also important for both side to find out the ballpark range of each other, to avoid wasting each others' time. So bring up the range of the pay is a good idea even for the first interview. I have been through quite a few interviews, and I ask about the job nature, pay and realistic working hours (the 3 most important aspect of job for me) every time.
Um... the most basic units of the game are the workers, e.g. SCVs, drones and probes.
Oh, perhaps it is better for you to forget I said that...
through putting in a lot of extra hours that weekend, and a lot of travelling to various IT shops within a 50 mile radius, we managed to get the business back to the point where we could open on the Monday without visible issue. ...
the board rejected the plan which would have made that situation a non-issue, even at the cheapest option.
(emphasis mine)
Did you realize you have just shown to your board that, through your own heroic efforts, that they don't need your plan and can still recover from such failures!
Now, can you tell me why a sensible business person would want to spend more money to on a contingency plan where they know they can already recover from without spending a dime?
Same here. I seriously considered buying a Kindle, but this incident helped me made up my mind against buying one. I will probably spend the money on an iPhone instead.
With a real book, I don't have to worry if I can still read it a few years later.
I not sure if parent post think this is good or bad, but to put it simply, I dealt with enough a**holes during the day while working, if there is a way for me to keep in touch with my friends without dealing with any more a**holes, sign me up.
50 years ago, you practically cannot interact with your friends without at least N-1 of you "going out", even if it is just next door. So unless you want to be left out, you have to "go out" most of the time.
20 years ago, you can somewhat keep in touch with most of your friends using the phone, so the need to "go out" becomes less.
Now, not only can you chat (voice/text) with all your friends together, you also can have a lot of interactions online, which used to be only possible by getting together (e.g. game of poker, risk, etc). So the need to have N-1 people "go out" just to get together is nearly nil. Wow, no surprise the generation that most used to interact online do not feel the need to physically go out at all.
Criticizing them for not "going out" is the same as a bat criticizing an owl for not interacting with the environment because the owl is no emitting sonar beeps. The owl has vision sees the environment in a way the bat cannot comprehend.
In the same way, the newer generation is interacting and "going out" online, unfortunately some older generation who hardly grasp email is unable to comprehend the level of interaction going on and assume the kid is "hiding himself".
Trying to cut the kid off the net to make him "go out" will be as useful as blinding the owl to get it to use sonar like a bat. It's not going to work. You just got to accept the fact the kids growing up now will interact with friends differently than you did.
I think your idea won't ever be made into real practice, not because it is impractical, but because ...
From my (admittedly limited) view of the court system, the cynic in me thinks that all the caveats and tricks are there to make lawyers valuable. Court systems (in any country), while supposedly deliver justice, seems often designed to make the outcome of any trial heavily dependent on the skill of the lawyers, thus making it worthwhile to pay lots of money to the lawyers.
To me, the fact that the skill of the lawyer can significantly change the outcome of a trial seems to suggest that justice actually has a very small role in the courts.
For your statement to make sense, you assumed the same property "time" exists within and outside the universe, and that it made sense to connect the two. It is like saying since Earth existed within something larger, there might be something due North of Earth's North Pole.
Unfortunately, North/South is a local property of Earth, while there is plenty space above the North Pole, you cannot go more north from the North Pole. Similarly, spacetime is a property of our observable universe, and that property breaks down at Big Bang. Trying to simply extrapolating spacetime from the universe to beyond is like trying to reach space by just keep going North on the Earth.
A simpler analogy would be to try to go north from the North Pole.
As to whether a foreign power is involved, I think that is an extremely difficult question to answer as a remote consumer of "news" and Internet reports.
Actually, it is quite easy. Just use common sense.
Want to know if foreign country X is involved, just consider these 2 questions:
1. Is it in the interest of country X to do so?
2. Does country X has the capability to do so without getting caught and does country X even care about getting caught?
As you say, since it is difficult to proof anything, it would easy for country X to cover their tracks to avoid any backlash.
I'm all for equality in opportunity. ... But I think it's naive to think that, different as men and women are, that all careers will equalize out to a 50/50 distribution over time.
One eloquent way to put it I have heard in a debate about affirmative action:
"Do you want equal opportunity? Or equal results?"
No, what RIAA did not say is "We did not receive such information from CBS nor Last.fm". Which would be a clear answer that any PR person would know can absolute stop any rumors.
"made no such request" could mean they have made other kind of request but only received the data given, or it could mean they did not request but CBS volunteered the data to them.
The fact that RIAA PR did not opt for a crystal clear answer is a good indication that they have received something from CBS/Last.fm.
HR just want to cover their arses and keep costs down.
While I completely agree with your post, this line got me thinking.
The function of HR in a company is just like IT, except they deal with people instead of machines. Then I realize that for HR, hiring someone is just like installing a new program for the IT department.
Would a competent IT support allow any manager to install just about any program they find useful on their PC? Probably not, there will be some kind of screening and checking before it is allowed. In many cases, IT support will counter suggest some "standard" programs instead. In larger companies, all programs must first be approved by IT before you can use them. While this create some inconvenience and inefficiency for the users, IT believed it was for the better on the whole.
The same with HR. If the same manager wish to hiring someone they find helpful, HR will conduct some screening and checking, and sometimes, HR will hire someone else instead. In large companies, you cannot hire someone without HR approval. This creates some inefficiency for the company, but I suppose HR also believed this was better on the whole.
Put in this light, HR is not as evil as we used to believe.
I believe many, if not most, gamers are desensitized to violence.
No, gamers are desensitized to the depiction of fake violence. Much like anyone who has watched enough American TV for a few years.
I played games for over 2 decades, from Karateka to Resistance2. Yet I recoil from the thought of actually punching anyone in violence with the purpose of hurting them, much less taking out a real gun and shoot at them.
If someone cannot separate reality from the fake stuff in a game, they will have just as much desensitization from watch American TV.
Just stop making games the scapegoat.
Why bother to deny them? Having everybody know they have the capability and the will to perform cyber-attacks is good for the military, it gives more credibility to their threats, which reduce their need to actually perform more attacks, and that reduces their cost and risk.
On the PR side though, well, I think the military will leave that to the politicians... The US didn't much care about their image when national interest is at stake anyway.
Let's hope this series will actually end in the author's lifetime ....
I don't feel the need to wander around with a surgical mask and I'm right in the middle of a hot zone. Rather, what bothers me is that people are underreacting.
This attitude is exactly what scares me. See my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1215525&cid=27758051, which I quote here "I doubt its government or people is ready for the swine flu. ... I suspect it will take a much greater death toll to scare the US people to really start changing their habits."
Hey dude, everybody wearing a mask whenever they are in public is a major part in how you stop the swine flu from spreading. Note that you wearing a mask is not to protect you (though it is good if everyone thinks that, it encourages people to wear one), but to protect everyone else in case you are infected.
Washing your hands with soap after using the bathroom is not enough, that is what you should be doing normally already. To stop the swine flu, you need to wash your hands every single time you leave a public places, i.e. the first thing you do when you reach you office in the morning, when you return to office after lunch, when you get back home.
The problem is it needs everyone (or almost everyone) doing it to be effective. Wearing mask and washing your hands won't help you a bit if someone else who is infected sneeze or cough right in front of you without wearing a mask, the saliva droplets could land on your eyes for all your mask can do. Doctors in hospitals need to wear face masks with special ventilation to prevent it and still it didn't work 100%.
Not to mention your government officials and social infrastructure are most likely not prepared to close every school if a lot of cases are confirmed to be swine flu. I.e. where do the kids go if school closes? Not everyone has stay home parent to take care of them if school closes. Do your business have contingency plans to allow most of their staff working remotely from home? Or will most still be forced to go to work even in the face of a widespread flu? Will supermarkets be still open if the flu is everywhere? If not, do you have enough food stocked up to last a few weeks? Even worse would be when doctors/nurses in hospital got infected, will they stay in their post risking their lives, or will they strike and refuse to continue (this actually happened during SARS)?
This (and more) was what we did in Asia during SARS, and it was not even as infectious as the swine flu (at least WHO thinks travel warnings was effective to stop SARS, but is not effective now against swine flu).
It doesn't matter if swine flu kills less than 1/10 of the infected compared to SARS if it infects 100x or 1000x as many people, you are going to see death tolls in the thousands or tens of thousands if its spread is not checked soon.
If you are in a hot zone, got look up the archives at the SARS news in Asia, see what happened there and learn how to prepare yourself. Do it for your family's sake at least.
PS3 owner are entitled to the option of buying any DLC for a game available on that platform. Yes, an option by itself do have value even if you do exercise it immediately.
I would say XBox360 owner are shafted because of exclusive agreements for PS3, so why not XBox owners go ahead and stop buying from game companies that shafted them while PS3 owners stop buying from Bethesda?
I would certainly hold back until I know if there DLC is going to be XBox exclusive. If so, I will just skip this one even though I like playing the FO series to save myself some disappointment.