f you want to change how you're looking at stuff in Office 2007, click on (gasp!) the "View" tab, which is a larger target for your mouse and easier to spot than the old "View" menu.
I don't have to spot the old menu because I open it with Alt-V. When possible, I do most commands on the keyboard because it's faster than screwing around with the mouse. I don't even have to be looking at the menu to do some things because I "know" how to work it.
I don't have the 2007 version, but to the ribbons still work with any of the key mappings most of us are used to?
You're typing along and want to save to a new name. Which is faster.. quickly hitting Alt-F,A or taking your hands from the keyboard, grabbing your mouse and trying to find a little button on a ribbon?
It's "productivity" software - but it seems they like making me less productive with every iteration. I'm no Luddite, but there's no reason to go and break all the things that make my work faster.
No, it's not just "new features" but more importantly old features that they make work quite differently.
Go to Excel 2000 and put a column of numbers in columns A, B, and D. Hit CTRL-A to "select ALL" and do a sort.
Now do the same in Excel 2003.
You'll find that in Excel 2003, it tries to guess what you mean by "select ALL" and will only select and sort column A and B. If you sort your data, the data in column D is no longer associated with the data in A and B.
In this obvious example, you can see it didn't select all. But suppose you have an excel sheet that has many columns and you want to sort them like you always have... ctrl-A and sort. In excel 2003 you may end up breaking all of your data.
This exact thing happened to me and I lost almost a day of work because the file I was working on was ruined and I only figured it out after getting very strange results.
Why in the hell do they take something as long-standing and nearly universal as Ctrl-A and change what it does? Oh right, because if it's a standard, Microsoft will try to break it - even if it's their own standard.
When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds,
Well, it's pretty easy to fix something quickly when you know exactly what the problems are (ie you put them there).
I've done a lot of PC repairs and as you say, none of those things you mention are terribly difficult to solve, but I wouldn't rush to make changes to bios, jumpers, etc until I'd taken some time to study the system, figure out what it's doing and what it's not doing. I've seen enough strange stuff in computers that it would be foolhardy to just start changing HD pins or reversing cables.
You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements. There is a huge difference between doing science and being a technician. I worked at an engineering school where they thought they could save money in the IT budget by having the CS professors do the systems administration and maintenance. The plan came to an abrupt halt when one of the CS profs suggested that additional money could be saved by having the EE profs handle wiring issues, ME profs take care of HVAC, and CE's taking care of plumbing.
looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day, Nice. Most part-time jobs are places where people learn the details of a trade, with a significant amount of OTJ learning. While you may have demonstrated that they lacked the specific skills needed to do your job, what you really demonstrated is that you're not the kind of person anyone would want to work for.
No. But I think anyone who wants to be in the business of storing personal and sensitive information should engage in actual security, not just the illusion of it.
The situations are completely different. An individual does not have the responsibility to resist criminal acts perpetrated upon them (though it's probably a pretty good idea). An entity like a school, who wishes to store personal information is legally required to resist criminal attempts at compromising that information. Basing your security on the idea that all the client computers will be secured is pretty weak. Going back to your bad analogy, that's like making men when buttons that say "rape-safe" and expecting that it will really protect women from being raped.
I think the problem is with identifying the enemy.
That confusion apparently goes all the way to the top. We get attacked by a bunch of Saudis and to retaliate, we invade their neighbor. That's like when I was in the 2nd grade and this guy got mad at a bigger classmate... so instead of hitting the guy who made him made, he went and found the guy's sister sister in the 1st grade and sucker-punched her.
Actually, it's the University that's putting the information at risk by choosing to use an insecure program and calling is security.
There should be no connection between computers in dorms, labs, and classrooms, and any computer that has secure/financial information. They shouldn't have to rely on a crappy program from Cisco to give them the illusion of security.
Sorry about your ID theft. I'm a veteran who uses the VA, and I'm sure my SSN was one of those 26 million that were recently compromised. Got a nice letter saying they were sorry but I shouldn't worry. Of course, no credit monitoring, no ability to "freeze" my credit reports... just sit back and wait and hope nothing happens. Kind of like the University in this case... but not by choice.
Many university researchers sit on loads of proprietary and/or highly sensitive data with confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements up the yingyang.
Believe me, UP is a nice school, but it's not one of those.
Having worked with some of these particular IT people, they're mostly ignorant and get very nasty about any who tries to point it out. They are only coming down on him so hard because he made them look bad. It's being done to make him an example to anyone else who might make them look bad.
They really don't care about security - only the illusion of it.
It's been a LOOOnnng time since I took geometry. But I think if two lines intersect, there is a plane in which they are coplanar, since the plane can be defined by the intersection point and any other point in each of the lines.
If they don't intersect, they can't be perpendicular... I think.
I'm not sure if they would be considered perpendicular if they were each in a parallel plane and running in directions 90 degrees from each other. The projections from one plane onto the other would be, but I still think they lines themselves would not be.
I do make a fair amount, but I have neither the equipment nor the skill nor the right raw materials sources for making chocolate. I've tried to eliminate high fructose corn syrup and msg from my diet, which means I don't eat many varieties of pre-processed foods. I do eat a lot of canned soups, however, but those are mostly from Amys Kitchen and Miur Glenn - and the ingredient lists are very short.
The Widmer Brothers, in Portland, OR, make some really nice brews. They learned their craft in Germany and do a very nice job with it here. Small enough to really care about the quality and big enough to have national distribution.
One thing that's cool is that they have their main-stays, but they also do "collaborations" with other local and amateur brewers to try out new things. Some of those have been really good and sadly, short-runned. One of my favorites, the Summit Hop Pale Ale, however, became this year's feature beer. They use a distinctive hop that grows, as I'm told, exclusively in this area. I fell in love with it the first time I tasted it.
Then there's the Snowplow Milkstout... creamy, rich, dark smoky flavor. I almost can't wait for winter! And their KGB Imperial Stout... And you can't mention Widmer without mentioning their Hefeweisen.
They even experimented with a gluten free brew (technically not "beer") for people like one of my friends who is a celiac. It was a little mild and sweet for my taste, but for my friend... well, it was his first "beer" in a couple years and he loved it!
The only big miss (in my opinion) is their DropTop Amber. I generally like amber ales, but this one just doesn't do it for me.
The best part is that I'm lucky enough to live 3 train stops from the brewery and gasthaus. I feel so European taking mass transit to go to a pub and get drunk.
Cajun, while French influenced, I believe is uniquely American Jambalaya Gumbo Hushpuppies (falafel, but with ground corn instead of ground beans) corndogs grits "mess o'greens" (collard greens, mustard greens, bits of meat, onions, all simmered together) the reuben (rye bread, russian dressing, saurkraut, and pastrami/corned beef - yummm!) peanut butter & jelly sandwiches? (I have to send peanut butter to friends in France because it's not easily available there - or they can't find it)
And while every culture has probably come up with a way to slowly cook meat with smoke, I honestly believe that barbecue achieves its perfection in the Bible Belt of the US (and at the Russell Street BBQ in Portland, OR).
According to wikipedia, which backs up what I had heard before:.Ketchup existed before anyone outside the Americas had ever seen a tomato. Originally this sauce was made out of pickled fish. It originated in Eastern Asia; the word ketchup is used in Chinese, Malay and Indonesian (e.g., kecap manis - traditional spelling 'kitjap manis'). English and Dutch sailors brought the Asian ketchup to Europe, where many flavourings, such as mushrooms, anchovies and nuts, were added to the basic fish sauce. Whether the tomato was also added to ketchup in England is not certain, and it is likely that this important event first happened in the USA.
If I recall correctly, the 57 on the bottle of Heinz Ketchup comes from the 57 varieties of ketchup that Heinz used to make.
As an American, I'm saddened by this proposal. What we call "chocolate" is already mostly just sugar, vanilla, PGPR, and oil. I read an article about chocolate that pointed out that most Americans don't even know what chocolate tastes like - that what they think of as chocolate is the flavor of vanilla and sugar.
That said, we are waking up some. The groceries that cater to organics and health-conscious people often stock very good chocolates from around the world. My favorite (and I've eaten quite a few) is actually Green & Black's 70% dark chocolate. It's nice to know that the UK is not entirely a gastronomic wasteland.
However, the fact still remains that people are allowing themselves to be potentially unwitting accomplices to all manner of nefarious activity.
Damn straight! And lets start with all those guys in yellow hats building and maintaining roads. Just think of all the illegal things that happen because of roads:
people can transport drugs anywhere there's a road terrorists can move about freely child kidnappers can quickly take their victims somewhere else drunk drivers use roads to kill their victims people speed in their cars and worst of all, people talk on their cellphones while driving
Roads must end! And we can start with those horrible people who build and maintain them./sarcasm
A lot of people intentionally open WAPs so others can access the internet. In my town, Portland, OR, there are groups actively encouraging this.
If anything, this is a move by the police (state) to keep people afraid of being free. But that's what it's like in the land of the (not so) free and the home of the (not so) brave.
I gave it one more chance by clicking on the last page to see if there was a "print this page" option. Nope. Which is kind of ironic for an article about printers.
So the story is kind of like this. I worked until I was about 32 in mostly IT related jobs. Around that time I started taking classes in an MBA program part-time because I was losing interest in working in IT. After a big falling out with my boss, I chose to go to school full-time for a year to get it wrapped up. As the end of the year approached, I had one class left to go... and ended up taking another IT job... in a town 2.5 hours away (dumb, dumb, dumb - though the solitude probably helped me figure other things out). I completed that last class by commuting to my class each week.
I only stayed in that job for 9 months. I knew early on that I didn't want to live in a tiny town in the middle of no-where, working IT. I took a gamble and quit and moved back to my home. There was one particular company I wanted to work for and I had some money saved, so I was willing to eek it out. I tried, unsuccessfully, for 3 months to get on as at temp - a temp anything but my resume specifically said, "seeking position as an operations/business analyst". I finally asked the temp coordinator about admin jobs. She said I couldn't apply for those unless my resume said I was specifically interested in an admin job. "Is that all?", I asked? And submitted a new resume: "seeking position as an operations/business analyst or admin assistant".
She called the back next day. Ironically, they had a job in the supply chain group where they didn't know if they wanted another admin or an analyst. I was perfect! After a month temping in that, they realized they needed an admin more than they needed an analyst and let me go. But I was immediately picked up for another temp job in another part of the company. There I worked as an operations analyst - tracking shipments from our factories into our warehouse, making expedite decisions, and eventually taking the forecasts from our demand planners and placing the buys to those factories. I did that for about 11 months when the original office I worked in actually created a new analyst position and they really wanted me back. And that's where I am now and it's been a great year and a half so far.
For me, I knew I wanted to work for a global organization, and one that was known for trying to do the right thing and also treated its employees well. I was less picky about the specifics of the job as long as it wasn't IT. It was risky, of course, moving back to this town without a job lined up. And I had to swallow my professional pride a bit and take a job that others might regard as "beneath me". But it's paying off so far... though I admit I had a certain amount of luck.
So the cool benefit of my IT experience is that to automate a big portion of my current job (making operations scorecards), we've been building a database system. It's been really useful because I'm able to create small prototypes and mockups as part of our project specifications. In fact, there were pieces I already wrote code to automate a complex powerpoint-based report that we were able to almost completely re-use in the new project. The job doesn't call for those kinds of skills - it's just working out for us all around.
I get that completely. I used to be that way... getting respect and admiration from my peers for the long hours I put in, the sacrifices I made, etc.
Now I see it as a failure. If I have to make these heroic efforts on a regular basis, something is not right - either in the job that's been given me, or how I execute it, or in the systems in which I must work.
the biggest part of your day is the company; if this company suddenly disappeared, where would that leave you? do you have a life outside of it
For me specifically? Well, I forgot to mention that my company is also helping me continue my post-graduate studies (part-time). If the company disappeared, or I had to leave, I'd probably try to push that up to full-time study and try to get into a PhD program.
And for me, I do feel I have plenty of life outside of work. I have my studies, which I enjoy, and I'm also an amateur musician, and when I have time, I like to paint.
As for the CEO that's between him and the board. I'm paid pretty well, treated very well, feel like my work has a purpose, and I have a lot of control over how I do my work. That's pretty good for a job.
I'll always be very interested in technology, but as far as my career goes, it's just not worth it anymore.
Congratulations! It's a scary jump to make. I love technology too, but I decided I liked it better as a hobby when I really enjoyed it. The cool part is that IT touches everything now, so in my current work, I'm able to leverage my skills and experience in IT with great success.
For example, I'm able to whip up a quick database that demonstrates a proof-of-concept to a non-IT person I need to get buy in from, and I'm able to use it with the *real* IT people to show them what I really want as we're writing up a spec. I heard recently from another director in the company that the director my boss reports to said I'm a "wizard" in my job and do amazing things.
Try to find a way to leverage your IT experience and background in your new non-IT job and I think you'll find some interesting avenues to success.
If a man has a little too much to drink and gets in a skiing accident that will make him unable to work for 3 months there isn't even a guarantee of a job when he returns. Why should a woman who has a little too much to drink gets knocked up be treated any differently?
Most localities in the US require this because as a society we value women having babies (even if she was drunk) more than we value men having drunken ski parties. How else are we, as a society, going to stave off those hoards of immigrants?
But as an employer I'm making a bad business decision if I let understanding and sympathy interfere with choosing a candidate with greater dedication and availability. Maybe in the short term. But in the long term, having a business full of people who are happy with their work and home lives has much greater benefits. I find if you treat people well that they are more dedicated. Creating an environment where people are treated well and accommodated well tends to lead to a very happy and productive work force. It's rarely about just on individual - you need a whole company of people to do what you do (or why did you hire them) - and you should want them to not be in conflicts over work and home. Sometimes its inevitable, but as a manager you should be trying to prevent it when possible, not encourage a work culture around sacrificing everything for the company.
My first thought when I read the headline was "Once again, we see that women are much smarter than men."
That was my first thought too.. then most of the posts are of the mind: "Yup IT jobs treat you like shit. Women who can't hack it should just leave anyway." The undertone that they fail write out is, "I like being treated like shit, and if you value yourself, your life, and your happiness, then you have no business working here."
And you're right... here's a chance for companies to raise the bar and make the jobs more enjoyable for everyone. If people are quitting your company because you treat them like shit, I'm not sure the answer is to hire more embittered people who will put up with being treated like shit.
It makes me even happier that I work where I do now. They really push making work a good experience and as flexible as possible. This year, we are doing "summer hours", where everyone is encouraged to go home on Friday at noon. They're pushing this from management down (who's going to leave if their manager stays?) - and we're all probably getting our 40 hours in by then anyway. It's just one cool example of what we do. I love it!
Why would anyone want to stay in a job where they are treated like shit? I was in that once and it extracted a heavy toll from me. I would never do it again.
I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
The message I'm getting in all these posts is something like this:
IT jobs treat people like shit. Women don't stay in the jobs because they don't put with up being treated like shit. Men say the women don't belong because they're not willing to be treated like shit - like they themselves are.
So I ask... why should anyone put up with being treated like shit?
It makes me so happy that I got into the company I'm currently working for. It's a fortune 500 company and everyone works their asses off. But people come and go when they need to/want to. People are always going to the gym to work out or going to volunteer for charities or meeting each other for coffee/beer in one of the several cafes on "campus". The company is always having large after-work parties, even bringing in bands like Dave Matthews; and they always have interesting guest speakers who are eminent in their fields, such as Peter Senge. It's so awesome to work for a company that really values me and wants me to be happy in my work and my home life.
That said, I've never worked harder in my life - and I really enjoy it! If you (collectively) don't work for a company that values you, your happiness, and your well-being, you should try it sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
f you want to change how you're looking at stuff in Office 2007, click on (gasp!) the "View" tab, which is a larger target for your mouse and easier to spot than the old "View" menu.
I don't have to spot the old menu because I open it with Alt-V. When possible, I do most commands on the keyboard because it's faster than screwing around with the mouse. I don't even have to be looking at the menu to do some things because I "know" how to work it.
I don't have the 2007 version, but to the ribbons still work with any of the key mappings most of us are used to?
You're typing along and want to save to a new name. Which is faster.. quickly hitting Alt-F,A or taking your hands from the keyboard, grabbing your mouse and trying to find a little button on a ribbon?
It's "productivity" software - but it seems they like making me less productive with every iteration. I'm no Luddite, but there's no reason to go and break all the things that make my work faster.
No, it's not just "new features" but more importantly old features that they make work quite differently.
Go to Excel 2000 and put a column of numbers in columns A, B, and D. Hit CTRL-A to "select ALL" and do a sort.
Now do the same in Excel 2003.
You'll find that in Excel 2003, it tries to guess what you mean by "select ALL" and will only select and sort column A and B. If you sort your data, the data in column D is no longer associated with the data in A and B.
In this obvious example, you can see it didn't select all. But suppose you have an excel sheet that has many columns and you want to sort them like you always have... ctrl-A and sort. In excel 2003 you may end up breaking all of your data.
This exact thing happened to me and I lost almost a day of work because the file I was working on was ruined and I only figured it out after getting very strange results.
Why in the hell do they take something as long-standing and nearly universal as Ctrl-A and change what it does? Oh right, because if it's a standard, Microsoft will try to break it - even if it's their own standard.
When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds,
Well, it's pretty easy to fix something quickly when you know exactly what the problems are (ie you put them there).
I've done a lot of PC repairs and as you say, none of those things you mention are terribly difficult to solve, but I wouldn't rush to make changes to bios, jumpers, etc until I'd taken some time to study the system, figure out what it's doing and what it's not doing. I've seen enough strange stuff in computers that it would be foolhardy to just start changing HD pins or reversing cables.
You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.
There is a huge difference between doing science and being a technician. I worked at an engineering school where they thought they could save money in the IT budget by having the CS professors do the systems administration and maintenance. The plan came to an abrupt halt when one of the CS profs suggested that additional money could be saved by having the EE profs handle wiring issues, ME profs take care of HVAC, and CE's taking care of plumbing.
looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day,
Nice. Most part-time jobs are places where people learn the details of a trade, with a significant amount of OTJ learning. While you may have demonstrated that they lacked the specific skills needed to do your job, what you really demonstrated is that you're not the kind of person anyone would want to work for.
No. But I think anyone who wants to be in the business of storing personal and sensitive information should engage in actual security, not just the illusion of it.
The situations are completely different. An individual does not have the responsibility to resist criminal acts perpetrated upon them (though it's probably a pretty good idea). An entity like a school, who wishes to store personal information is legally required to resist criminal attempts at compromising that information. Basing your security on the idea that all the client computers will be secured is pretty weak. Going back to your bad analogy, that's like making men when buttons that say "rape-safe" and expecting that it will really protect women from being raped.
I think the problem is with identifying the enemy.
That confusion apparently goes all the way to the top. We get attacked by a bunch of Saudis and to retaliate, we invade their neighbor. That's like when I was in the 2nd grade and this guy got mad at a bigger classmate... so instead of hitting the guy who made him made, he went and found the guy's sister sister in the 1st grade and sucker-punched her.
Actually, it's the University that's putting the information at risk by choosing to use an insecure program and calling is security.
There should be no connection between computers in dorms, labs, and classrooms, and any computer that has secure/financial information. They shouldn't have to rely on a crappy program from Cisco to give them the illusion of security.
Sorry about your ID theft. I'm a veteran who uses the VA, and I'm sure my SSN was one of those 26 million that were recently compromised. Got a nice letter saying they were sorry but I shouldn't worry. Of course, no credit monitoring, no ability to "freeze" my credit reports... just sit back and wait and hope nothing happens. Kind of like the University in this case... but not by choice.
Many university researchers sit on loads of proprietary and/or highly sensitive data with confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements up the yingyang.
Believe me, UP is a nice school, but it's not one of those.
Having worked with some of these particular IT people, they're mostly ignorant and get very nasty about any who tries to point it out. They are only coming down on him so hard because he made them look bad. It's being done to make him an example to anyone else who might make them look bad.
They really don't care about security - only the illusion of it.
You must be thinking of this one:
3
CustomizeGoogle https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/74
It's been a LOOOnnng time since I took geometry. But I think if two lines intersect, there is a plane in which they are coplanar, since the plane can be defined by the intersection point and any other point in each of the lines.
If they don't intersect, they can't be perpendicular... I think.
I'm not sure if they would be considered perpendicular if they were each in a parallel plane and running in directions 90 degrees from each other. The projections from one plane onto the other would be, but I still think they lines themselves would not be.
I do make a fair amount, but I have neither the equipment nor the skill nor the right raw materials sources for making chocolate. I've tried to eliminate high fructose corn syrup and msg from my diet, which means I don't eat many varieties of pre-processed foods. I do eat a lot of canned soups, however, but those are mostly from Amys Kitchen and Miur Glenn - and the ingredient lists are very short.
Oregon and Washington make some damn fine wines too. Why spend $50 on a French Burgandy when a $15 Oregon Pinot Noir is almost as goood.
Or better. We have some very good Pinot Noir here in Oregon.
The Widmer Brothers, in Portland, OR, make some really nice brews. They learned their craft in Germany and do a very nice job with it here. Small enough to really care about the quality and big enough to have national distribution.
One thing that's cool is that they have their main-stays, but they also do "collaborations" with other local and amateur brewers to try out new things. Some of those have been really good and sadly, short-runned. One of my favorites, the Summit Hop Pale Ale, however, became this year's feature beer. They use a distinctive hop that grows, as I'm told, exclusively in this area. I fell in love with it the first time I tasted it.
Then there's the Snowplow Milkstout... creamy, rich, dark smoky flavor. I almost can't wait for winter! And their KGB Imperial Stout... And you can't mention Widmer without mentioning their Hefeweisen.
They even experimented with a gluten free brew (technically not "beer") for people like one of my friends who is a celiac. It was a little mild and sweet for my taste, but for my friend... well, it was his first "beer" in a couple years and he loved it!
The only big miss (in my opinion) is their DropTop Amber. I generally like amber ales, but this one just doesn't do it for me.
The best part is that I'm lucky enough to live 3 train stops from the brewery and gasthaus. I feel so European taking mass transit to go to a pub and get drunk.
How about chocolate chip cookies?
Cajun, while French influenced, I believe is uniquely American
Jambalaya
Gumbo
Hushpuppies (falafel, but with ground corn instead of ground beans)
corndogs
grits
"mess o'greens" (collard greens, mustard greens, bits of meat, onions, all simmered together)
the reuben (rye bread, russian dressing, saurkraut, and pastrami/corned beef - yummm!)
peanut butter & jelly sandwiches? (I have to send peanut butter to friends in France because it's not easily available there - or they can't find it)
And while every culture has probably come up with a way to slowly cook meat with smoke, I honestly believe that barbecue achieves its perfection in the Bible Belt of the US (and at the Russell Street BBQ in Portland, OR).
Too bad it's only breakfast time...
According to wikipedia, which backs up what I had heard before: .Ketchup existed before anyone outside the Americas had ever seen a tomato. Originally this sauce was made out of pickled fish. It originated in Eastern Asia; the word ketchup is used in Chinese, Malay and Indonesian (e.g., kecap manis - traditional spelling 'kitjap manis'). English and Dutch sailors brought the Asian ketchup to Europe, where many flavourings, such as mushrooms, anchovies and nuts, were added to the basic fish sauce. Whether the tomato was also added to ketchup in England is not certain, and it is likely that this important event first happened in the USA.
If I recall correctly, the 57 on the bottle of Heinz Ketchup comes from the 57 varieties of ketchup that Heinz used to make.
As an American, I'm saddened by this proposal. What we call "chocolate" is already mostly just sugar, vanilla, PGPR, and oil. I read an article about chocolate that pointed out that most Americans don't even know what chocolate tastes like - that what they think of as chocolate is the flavor of vanilla and sugar.
That said, we are waking up some. The groceries that cater to organics and health-conscious people often stock very good chocolates from around the world. My favorite (and I've eaten quite a few) is actually Green & Black's 70% dark chocolate. It's nice to know that the UK is not entirely a gastronomic wasteland.
It's not disrespect of authority, but disrespect of authority that has earned it.
For example, I have a friend who is in law school. The first day of the first class, the teacher wrote on the board:
"According to the law, an apple is red, round, and firm."
She then held up a variety of objects, asking if they were apples. Finally, she held up a red plastic ball.
Most people said, "no".
"Wrong", she declared. "This object is round, red, and firm, and in the eyes of the law, it is an apple."
Any system that is based on a way of thinking that is so blatantly wrong and illogical deserves no respect from... well, anyone.
However, the fact still remains that people are allowing themselves to be potentially unwitting accomplices to all manner of nefarious activity.
/sarcasm
Damn straight! And lets start with all those guys in yellow hats building and maintaining roads. Just think of all the illegal things that happen because of roads:
people can transport drugs anywhere there's a road
terrorists can move about freely
child kidnappers can quickly take their victims somewhere else
drunk drivers use roads to kill their victims
people speed in their cars
and worst of all, people talk on their cellphones while driving
Roads must end! And we can start with those horrible people who build and maintain them.
A lot of people intentionally open WAPs so others can access the internet. In my town, Portland, OR, there are groups actively encouraging this.
If anything, this is a move by the police (state) to keep people afraid of being free. But that's what it's like in the land of the (not so) free and the home of the (not so) brave.
I gave it one more chance by clicking on the last page to see if there was a "print this page" option. Nope. Which is kind of ironic for an article about printers.
I'm a supply chain analyst now.
So the story is kind of like this. I worked until I was about 32 in mostly IT related jobs. Around that time I started taking classes in an MBA program part-time because I was losing interest in working in IT. After a big falling out with my boss, I chose to go to school full-time for a year to get it wrapped up. As the end of the year approached, I had one class left to go... and ended up taking another IT job... in a town 2.5 hours away (dumb, dumb, dumb - though the solitude probably helped me figure other things out). I completed that last class by commuting to my class each week.
I only stayed in that job for 9 months. I knew early on that I didn't want to live in a tiny town in the middle of no-where, working IT. I took a gamble and quit and moved back to my home. There was one particular company I wanted to work for and I had some money saved, so I was willing to eek it out. I tried, unsuccessfully, for 3 months to get on as at temp - a temp anything but my resume specifically said, "seeking position as an operations/business analyst". I finally asked the temp coordinator about admin jobs. She said I couldn't apply for those unless my resume said I was specifically interested in an admin job. "Is that all?", I asked? And submitted a new resume: "seeking position as an operations/business analyst or admin assistant".
She called the back next day. Ironically, they had a job in the supply chain group where they didn't know if they wanted another admin or an analyst. I was perfect! After a month temping in that, they realized they needed an admin more than they needed an analyst and let me go. But I was immediately picked up for another temp job in another part of the company. There I worked as an operations analyst - tracking shipments from our factories into our warehouse, making expedite decisions, and eventually taking the forecasts from our demand planners and placing the buys to those factories. I did that for about 11 months when the original office I worked in actually created a new analyst position and they really wanted me back. And that's where I am now and it's been a great year and a half so far.
For me, I knew I wanted to work for a global organization, and one that was known for trying to do the right thing and also treated its employees well. I was less picky about the specifics of the job as long as it wasn't IT. It was risky, of course, moving back to this town without a job lined up. And I had to swallow my professional pride a bit and take a job that others might regard as "beneath me". But it's paying off so far... though I admit I had a certain amount of luck.
So the cool benefit of my IT experience is that to automate a big portion of my current job (making operations scorecards), we've been building a database system. It's been really useful because I'm able to create small prototypes and mockups as part of our project specifications. In fact, there were pieces I already wrote code to automate a complex powerpoint-based report that we were able to almost completely re-use in the new project. The job doesn't call for those kinds of skills - it's just working out for us all around.
I get that completely. I used to be that way... getting respect and admiration from my peers for the long hours I put in, the sacrifices I made, etc.
Now I see it as a failure. If I have to make these heroic efforts on a regular basis, something is not right - either in the job that's been given me, or how I execute it, or in the systems in which I must work.
the biggest part of your day is the company; if this company suddenly disappeared, where would that leave you? do you have a life outside of it
For me specifically? Well, I forgot to mention that my company is also helping me continue my post-graduate studies (part-time). If the company disappeared, or I had to leave, I'd probably try to push that up to full-time study and try to get into a PhD program.
And for me, I do feel I have plenty of life outside of work. I have my studies, which I enjoy, and I'm also an amateur musician, and when I have time, I like to paint.
As for the CEO that's between him and the board. I'm paid pretty well, treated very well, feel like my work has a purpose, and I have a lot of control over how I do my work. That's pretty good for a job.
I'll always be very interested in technology, but as far as my career goes, it's just not worth it anymore.
Congratulations! It's a scary jump to make. I love technology too, but I decided I liked it better as a hobby when I really enjoyed it. The cool part is that IT touches everything now, so in my current work, I'm able to leverage my skills and experience in IT with great success.
For example, I'm able to whip up a quick database that demonstrates a proof-of-concept to a non-IT person I need to get buy in from, and I'm able to use it with the *real* IT people to show them what I really want as we're writing up a spec. I heard recently from another director in the company that the director my boss reports to said I'm a "wizard" in my job and do amazing things.
Try to find a way to leverage your IT experience and background in your new non-IT job and I think you'll find some interesting avenues to success.
Good luck!
If a man has a little too much to drink and gets in a skiing accident that will make him unable to work for 3 months there isn't even a guarantee of a job when he returns. Why should a woman who has a little too much to drink gets knocked up be treated any differently?
Most localities in the US require this because as a society we value women having babies (even if she was drunk) more than we value men having drunken ski parties. How else are we, as a society, going to stave off those hoards of immigrants?
But as an employer I'm making a bad business decision if I let understanding and sympathy interfere with choosing a candidate with greater dedication and availability.
Maybe in the short term. But in the long term, having a business full of people who are happy with their work and home lives has much greater benefits. I find if you treat people well that they are more dedicated. Creating an environment where people are treated well and accommodated well tends to lead to a very happy and productive work force. It's rarely about just on individual - you need a whole company of people to do what you do (or why did you hire them) - and you should want them to not be in conflicts over work and home. Sometimes its inevitable, but as a manager you should be trying to prevent it when possible, not encourage a work culture around sacrificing everything for the company.
My first thought when I read the headline was "Once again, we see that women are much smarter than men."
That was my first thought too.. then most of the posts are of the mind: "Yup IT jobs treat you like shit. Women who can't hack it should just leave anyway." The undertone that they fail write out is, "I like being treated like shit, and if you value yourself, your life, and your happiness, then you have no business working here."
And you're right... here's a chance for companies to raise the bar and make the jobs more enjoyable for everyone. If people are quitting your company because you treat them like shit, I'm not sure the answer is to hire more embittered people who will put up with being treated like shit.
It makes me even happier that I work where I do now. They really push making work a good experience and as flexible as possible. This year, we are doing "summer hours", where everyone is encouraged to go home on Friday at noon. They're pushing this from management down (who's going to leave if their manager stays?) - and we're all probably getting our 40 hours in by then anyway. It's just one cool example of what we do. I love it!
Why would anyone want to stay in a job where they are treated like shit? I was in that once and it extracted a heavy toll from me. I would never do it again.
I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
The message I'm getting in all these posts is something like this:
IT jobs treat people like shit. Women don't stay in the jobs because they don't put with up being treated like shit. Men say the women don't belong because they're not willing to be treated like shit - like they themselves are.
So I ask... why should anyone put up with being treated like shit?
It makes me so happy that I got into the company I'm currently working for. It's a fortune 500 company and everyone works their asses off. But people come and go when they need to/want to. People are always going to the gym to work out or going to volunteer for charities or meeting each other for coffee/beer in one of the several cafes on "campus". The company is always having large after-work parties, even bringing in bands like Dave Matthews; and they always have interesting guest speakers who are eminent in their fields, such as Peter Senge. It's so awesome to work for a company that really values me and wants me to be happy in my work and my home life.
That said, I've never worked harder in my life - and I really enjoy it! If you (collectively) don't work for a company that values you, your happiness, and your well-being, you should try it sometime.