I hate cubes as much as the next guy, but I'll warrant you look at any group, and 1 in 10 will be depressed, anxiety ridden, or burnt out, cubes or no.
I've interviewed about 100 candidates in the past year. I have hired people with no degree and I have passed on PhD's.
However, the people with the degrees are typically better qualified than those without.
Why is this? Well, I believe degrees conveys a kind of legitimacy. A degree says this person was interested enough in their field to give up four years of their life and a bunch of their parent's money, and had the discipline are wherewithall to get through a unverisity program. There are still plenty of stupid college kids, but at least I know what they are supposed to know, and I can evaluate them pretty quickly. Every self taught guy is different, and that makes my job a lot harder
Does this make college educated people more skilled than someone who is self taught? Probably not. But in an interview, they give me an hour to evaluate a person's entire life. I don't have time to be fair or thorough...I make a SWAG knowing I'm going to be wrong a lot of the time. Half the candidates I see are "self taught" -- meaning they think cutting and pasting a four line CGI into FrontPage is programming. I have to go through the trouble of separating the web weenies sick of working the fry maching from the people who know what they are doing. I see a degree, I can get to the real interview that much faster.
One of the foundations of democracy is the secret ballot.
A system robust enough to resolve the authentication problems is not that far a step from providing secrecy from the gov't, but what about secrecy from your peers?
The nice thing about the way we vote now is the voting booth. It has a little curtain, and you go in alone, and for that moment you can make your choices free of coercion.
But if you vote from home, someone can frogmarch you to the computer, and peer over your shoulder while you vote the "right" way, stealing your vote. An overzealous head of household might force his family to vote in lockstep. An unscrupulous religious leader might convince his flock to accept his guidance, and hold little voting sessions.
Script kiddies hacking the system don't frighten me nearly as much as normal people abusing it.
After Battlefield Earth, Travolta probably no longer has the clout to get his other other pet project into theaters...the movie version of Altas Shrugged.
Among other things, you got your causality all wrong.
Most people who kill their great-grandchildren are over 70. Why? Could it be some biological factor that turns senior citizens into murdering menances?
No. If you aren't 70, you probably don't have great-grandchildren yet.
Similarly, marketability problems are typically related to obsolete skills. There is nothing about 40+ types that make them less likely to update their skills, it just takes that long for skills to because seriously unmarketable.
In the past year, I have interviewed around 30 people, with ages probably ranging from 19 to 50.
I have had to pass over some older people people with obsolete skills. But when I see a resume that starts with Fortran on VAX and ends with Perl on Linux, I know I have someone who knows how to stay up to date, showing adaptability a college kid will have a hard time demonstrating.
The salary for you first geek job is not terribly important...you won't be keeping it for long...:)
The industry is such that they only way to get ahead is to change jobs frequently your first five years or so. Otherwise you get locked into a 5-7% raise structure, and never get anywhere.
So, forget salary, and try to land something that will expose you to skills in growing areas you can market later. The value of someone with even a year experience is so much greater than that of a college kid...that is when you want to start thinking about the dollar signs.
I don't know anything about Norwegian law, but I am sure Norway is a signator to most of the treaties governing international copyright and patent law.
This will provide a pretense for suppressive legal action. Whether they actually broke Norwegian law is largely irrelevant.
While wrapping itself in the guise of free speech, this piece is advocating an insidious form of censorship that is creeping into our society.
Censoring the censors.
Or more precisely, silencing anyone who disagrees with you by screaming censorship.
Free speech guarantees free speech, nothing more. It does not guarantee people have to take you seriously, it does not insulate you from the consequences of your speech, and certainly doesn't guarantee you can contiune to speak on someone else's dime.
And that is what most of these carefully crafted, Slashdot friendly examples boil down to. People want free speech, but they do not want to accept responsibilities for their actions. You have no inherent right to an elected position, a goverment grant, a media platform, or even a job. You are free to say whatever you want, but in a merit based society, doing so can reveal ignorance, incompotency, bias, or even simple incompatibility, causing the powers that be to reevaluate your suitability.
It would seem that to enforce a law like this, law enforcement would have to first prove you were in fact in possession of encrypted data.
It's not too difficult to create a PGP like utility, that produced files without headers, consisting of a single, inscrutable globs of zero entropy data.
Such a file might bear a striking resemblence to ones used in the random number generation experiments, data compression tests, and background radiation measurements we will all be conducting real soon now...:)
The gov't didn't care so much about how we used cryptography...until technology put world class cryptosystems into the hands of ordinary citizens.
Now the gov't sees strong crypto as a threat, and want to restrict it. And most right thinking technophiles are screaming to high heaven, saying the technology is out there, where does the gov't get off trying to stop it?
But now the shoe is on the other foot. Nobody cared so much about security cameras until a technology makes them more effective. Enter the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and now the privacy advocates are trying to suppress a technology.
Technology is irrelevant. Either I have the right to send private data, or I don't. Either the gov't has the right to take pictures, or it doesn't. The technological ability to do either effectively should not matter.
Law enforcement types like to whine about how technology is making their jobs so much harder. I for one would like to see as much publicity on the stuff that make their jobs easier...
...maybe it will take a little heat off the crypto.
...existing corporate policies make it neigh impossible to hire and retain good employees.
I'm amazed that companies are willing to pay salary + 30%-50% overhead for a contractor, then expect them to take a pay cut, lose their overtime pay, and get locked into a 3%-7% raise structure, all for the privilege of having someone else sign their pay checks.
I'm not sure if professing a One True(tm) teaching language is such a good idea.
Remember back when BASIC was the ubiquitous beginner's language? It might have been a good first step toward the fast paced world of FORTRAN programming, but it made it a lot harder for me to grok Pascal and C.
Most CS students and a disturbing number of professionals seem to think the best tool (language, OS, DB, etc.) by divine providence has to be the tool they know the best. Give them a hammer, and suddenly all the world is a nail. Ever see a beginner write a one line sed command in their pet language? It is not pretty.
And the danger extends beyond language bigotry. Python is nice, and all, but is it the wave of the future, or yet another dead end? If Python goes one way, and programming trends go another, are we doing the high school kids any great service here?
Finally, I am not sure Python is the best choice. Even if we stipulate it is the ideal learning language, it is kind of sitting there out on its own branch of the language tree. At least when you learn C (which I am not avocating), you know most of the syntax for C++ and Java, and a goodly chunk of Perl. It is a lot easier to use the right tool for the job when your toolbox is full of tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate cubes as much as the next guy, but I'll warrant you look at any group, and 1 in 10 will be depressed, anxiety ridden, or burnt out, cubes or no.
I've interviewed about 100 candidates in the past year. I have hired people with no degree and I have passed on PhD's.
However, the people with the degrees are typically better qualified than those without.
Why is this? Well, I believe degrees conveys a kind of legitimacy. A degree says this person was interested enough in their field to give up four years of their life and a bunch of their parent's money, and had the discipline are wherewithall to get through a unverisity program. There are still plenty of stupid college kids, but at least I know what they are supposed to know, and I can evaluate them pretty quickly. Every self taught guy is different, and that makes my job a lot harder
Does this make college educated people more skilled than someone who is self taught? Probably not. But in an interview, they give me an hour to evaluate a person's entire life. I don't have time to be fair or thorough...I make a SWAG knowing I'm going to be wrong a lot of the time. Half the candidates I see are "self taught" -- meaning they think cutting and pasting a four line CGI into FrontPage is programming. I have to go through the trouble of separating the web weenies sick of working the fry maching from the people who know what they are doing. I see a degree, I can get to the real interview that much faster.
Dorothy Denning is still at Georgetown.
I'm sure she would give it he usual thorough treatment...
One of the foundations of democracy is the secret ballot.
A system robust enough to resolve the authentication problems is not that far a step from providing secrecy from the gov't, but what about secrecy from your peers?
The nice thing about the way we vote now is the voting booth. It has a little curtain, and you go in alone, and for that moment you can make your choices free of coercion.
But if you vote from home, someone can frogmarch you to the computer, and peer over your shoulder while you vote the "right" way, stealing your vote. An overzealous head of household might force his family to vote in lockstep. An unscrupulous religious leader might convince his flock to accept his guidance, and hold little voting sessions.
Script kiddies hacking the system don't frighten me nearly as much as normal people abusing it.
After Battlefield Earth, Travolta probably no longer has the clout to get his other other pet project into theaters...the movie version of Altas Shrugged.
Among other things, you got your causality all wrong.
Most people who kill their great-grandchildren are over 70. Why? Could it be some biological factor that turns senior citizens into murdering menances?
No. If you aren't 70, you probably don't have great-grandchildren yet.
Similarly, marketability problems are typically related to obsolete skills. There is nothing about 40+ types that make them less likely to update their skills, it just takes that long for skills to because seriously unmarketable.
In the past year, I have interviewed around 30 people, with ages probably ranging from 19 to 50.
I have had to pass over some older people people with obsolete skills. But when I see a resume that starts with Fortran on VAX and ends with Perl on Linux, I know I have someone who knows how to stay up to date, showing adaptability a college kid will have a hard time demonstrating.
The salary for you first geek job is not terribly important...you won't be keeping it for long...:)
The industry is such that they only way to get ahead is to change jobs frequently your first five years or so. Otherwise you get locked into a 5-7% raise structure, and never get anywhere.
So, forget salary, and try to land something that will expose you to skills in growing areas you can market later. The value of someone with even a year experience is so much greater than that of a college kid...that is when you want to start thinking about the dollar signs.
I don't know anything about Norwegian law, but I am sure Norway is a signator to most of the treaties governing international copyright and patent law.
This will provide a pretense for suppressive legal action. Whether they actually broke Norwegian law is largely irrelevant.
While wrapping itself in the guise of free speech, this piece is advocating an insidious form of censorship that is creeping into our society.
Censoring the censors.
Or more precisely, silencing anyone who disagrees with you by screaming censorship.
Free speech guarantees free speech, nothing more. It does not guarantee people have to take you seriously, it does not insulate you from the consequences of your speech, and certainly doesn't guarantee you can contiune to speak on someone else's dime.
And that is what most of these carefully crafted, Slashdot friendly examples boil down to. People want free speech, but they do not want to accept responsibilities for their actions. You have no inherent right to an elected position, a goverment grant, a media platform, or even a job. You are free to say whatever you want, but in a merit based society, doing so can reveal ignorance, incompotency, bias, or even simple incompatibility, causing the powers that be to reevaluate your suitability.
Anyone else remember doing this kind of stuff with Fractint in, like, 1992?
And what is with this analog crap? Extremely uninformed mediot, methinks...
It would seem that to enforce a law like this, law enforcement would have to first prove you were in fact in possession of encrypted data.
It's not too difficult to create a PGP like utility, that produced files without headers, consisting of a single, inscrutable globs of zero entropy data.
Such a file might bear a striking resemblence to ones used in the random number generation experiments, data compression tests, and background radiation measurements we will all be conducting real soon now...:)
The gov't didn't care so much about how we used cryptography...until technology put world class cryptosystems into the hands of ordinary citizens.
Now the gov't sees strong crypto as a threat, and want to restrict it. And most right thinking technophiles are screaming to high heaven, saying the technology is out there, where does the gov't get off trying to stop it?
But now the shoe is on the other foot. Nobody cared so much about security cameras until a technology makes them more effective. Enter the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and now the privacy advocates are trying to suppress a technology.
Technology is irrelevant. Either I have the right to send private data, or I don't. Either the gov't has the right to take pictures, or it doesn't. The technological ability to do either effectively should not matter.
Law enforcement types like to whine about how technology is making their jobs so much harder. I for one would like to see as much publicity on the stuff that make their jobs easier...
...maybe it will take a little heat off the crypto.
...existing corporate policies make it neigh impossible to hire and retain good employees.
I'm amazed that companies are willing to pay salary + 30%-50% overhead for a contractor, then expect them to take a pay cut, lose their overtime pay, and get locked into a 3%-7% raise structure, all for the privilege of having someone else sign their pay checks.
I'm not sure if professing a One True(tm) teaching language is such a good idea.
Remember back when BASIC was the ubiquitous beginner's language? It might have been a good first step toward the fast paced world of FORTRAN programming, but it made it a lot harder for me to grok Pascal and C.
Most CS students and a disturbing number of professionals seem to think the best tool (language, OS, DB, etc.) by divine providence has to be the tool they know the best. Give them a hammer, and suddenly all the world is a nail. Ever see a beginner write a one line sed command in their pet language? It is not pretty.
And the danger extends beyond language bigotry. Python is nice, and all, but is it the wave of the future, or yet another dead end? If Python goes one way, and programming trends go another, are we doing the high school kids any great service here?
Finally, I am not sure Python is the best choice. Even if we stipulate it is the ideal learning language, it is kind of sitting there out on its own branch of the language tree. At least when you learn C (which I am not avocating), you know most of the syntax for C++ and Java, and a goodly chunk of Perl. It is a lot easier to use the right tool for the job when your toolbox is full of tools.