Wow. You're brilliant. I mean, since your information and data is hosted by a company that can set up their servers anywhere, gee, I'm sure they couldn't POSSIBLY have their helpdesk for all clients located somewhere OTHER than the client location.
Think outside your empty box. Data anytime, anywhere. I used to work for an oil company and we had our helpdesk and datacenter located in a building on Westheimer in Houston, Texas while our Oil Field Service Managers were on every continent. Helpdesk was 24/7 due to time zone requirements. This is not a new concept.
IT : Issue for the ages
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree that there is an undertone of negative vibes when interviewing or being interviewed in IT today. I just left my position as Chief Technology Advisor for a billion dollar international oil company and I am one of the unique. I am a 29 year old female. (And I *worked* my way to the top.) I spent many nights on planes travelling overseas where my best friend was my passport and a roll of handi-wipes...just in case they were sending me to a place that had not yet heard of the invention of Charmin.
I have been exposed to the IT industry for over 20 years as my father was in the field. I remember punch card tabs being the coolest thing to play with! Now that I am a bit older and my father is 56 yrs of age and still maintains his skills in the industry, I can see a deffinite bias towards those of age. Any reference to age, such as highschool and college graduation, has been removed from his resume. Now he is receiving more responses than ever. Before he did not even deserve a, 'Thank you, we're not interested,' letter. I, on the other hand, receive calls, emails, and requests from companies on a more frequent basis. And I feel it is because I am younger as our qualifications are very similar with one minor detail, he has far more experience than I.
I have worked with, interviewed, hired, fired and let-go many a skilled IT resource. Therefore, I can say with some degree of certainty that age DOES make a difference. As you get older your priorities tend to change. Gone are the nights that you stay up all night until the wee hours with your buddies partying, playing LAN games and ordering pizza for dinner. (And reheating it for breakfast and lunch the next day!) You'll work all night if you have to because you love to code. This is a plus to someone such as myself who is ultimately responsible for the output of said code and project. But here is the problem, jsut because you are older, does not mean that you do not work to get the job done when needed, in my experience it has been that you tend to make less mistakes or have enough experience to code more intelligently and therefore, can go home sooner.
However, I fast found that the myth of 'younger is cheaper' is just that, a myth. I was lucky enough to work with several people who were older than I, though I was their supervisor, and I would not have the project run any other way. I had a project that was slated for failure come in on-time, under-budget and with extra bells and whistles that the client loved and consequently, hired us to do 10 additional sites in their overseas offices.
The reason? Because the resources on my team were older, wiser and faster because they knew the sound short cuts that could be made and have a successful product in the end. There was no guessing or supposition to their architectural understanding of the task at hand. Only some with experience could do that on a regular basis. So by extension, these resources were less expensive in the long run.
If I have a new developer, how long and what will be the TOTAL cost that it is going to take one of my experienced developers or Team Leads to help them ramp up? How do you teach a young developer how to test why an application is breaking by reviewing hundreds of lines of code with no comments, quickly, efficiently and above all intelligently? Experience will pervail time and again because they have been through this type of exercise time and again and know what to look for first.
I am not saying that fresh starts and young minds aren't a positive thing to have in a company. For this you create a sense of longevity and a new round of knowlege transfer capabilities in a company, but who is going to transfer this knowledge? Other teenagers or college-age kids who are just learning your company as well as technology trends and development skills themselves?
One argument a colleague of mine brought up was that the technology that is available today, i.e. Java, was not available when my father was going to school so we're all starti
The challenge here is that if you take one news piece to make your judgment about the integrity of an entire network, you open yourself up to an ill-informed bias.
If The AJ network were relegated by the US media to be fair as a standard, then they would, by your argument, show clips continually. The question that needs to be asked is, "What was it about this particular story that made it okay by the US media to air?"
Media as a generality across the world is more biased today than it was when my parents were my age. At one point in time (and I have studied this) news was based on factual recounts of a particular event. The 'norm' tended (not always, but more so than today) to be lacking emotional or personal agendas or entanglements from the reporter.
Today, we have reporters walking off the set in the middle of an interview because he did not agree with what the interviewee's political stance was. I find that it takes longer to decipher what "Dan Rather was really trying to say was..." than I do in getting actual, realistic, viable news. That's why I tend to lean more towards mediums such as Slashdot. I get to see comments from many different points of view. On TV you are told what you should think.
My hope is that no one EVER accepts the news today from ANY medium or network as the truth and at face value. Have some thoughts for yourself and do your research. Just because they say something or show something in a few isolated incidences, does not mean that is the whole picture.
I have been all over the world and have traveled to almost every continent and have spoken with countless amounts of people to learn about their cultures, political views, history, etc. and one thing that I have found time and again is that as societies are progressing, the need for verification of information is diminishing. We are, as a civilization, regressing and shying away from individual thought. We need to begin to think for ourselves and stop being reactionary.
Take a moment to take a deep breath, and then verify the information given to you. Never trust one source.
There is a slander campaign going on from all directions around the world. Be your own person and think for yourself.
I agree completely. Life is made up of a law of averages. When you are in the job market, as a manager, you are called upon to give a performance review of employees. I have 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D' employee rankings with which to make my classifiactions. Although and employee may have an 'A' as a ranking, I have it curved such that if there were a cutback or layoff, I know which A would be the last one standing.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. You're brilliant. I mean, since your information and data is hosted by a company that can set up their servers anywhere, gee, I'm sure they couldn't POSSIBLY have their helpdesk for all clients located somewhere OTHER than the client location. Think outside your empty box. Data anytime, anywhere. I used to work for an oil company and we had our helpdesk and datacenter located in a building on Westheimer in Houston, Texas while our Oil Field Service Managers were on every continent. Helpdesk was 24/7 due to time zone requirements. This is not a new concept.
I agree that there is an undertone of negative vibes when interviewing or being interviewed in IT today. I just left my position as Chief Technology Advisor for a billion dollar international oil company and I am one of the unique. I am a 29 year old female. (And I *worked* my way to the top.) I spent many nights on planes travelling overseas where my best friend was my passport and a roll of handi-wipes...just in case they were sending me to a place that had not yet heard of the invention of Charmin.
I have been exposed to the IT industry for over 20 years as my father was in the field. I remember punch card tabs being the coolest thing to play with! Now that I am a bit older and my father is 56 yrs of age and still maintains his skills in the industry, I can see a deffinite bias towards those of age. Any reference to age, such as highschool and college graduation, has been removed from his resume. Now he is receiving more responses than ever. Before he did not even deserve a, 'Thank you, we're not interested,' letter. I, on the other hand, receive calls, emails, and requests from companies on a more frequent basis. And I feel it is because I am younger as our qualifications are very similar with one minor detail, he has far more experience than I.
I have worked with, interviewed, hired, fired and let-go many a skilled IT resource. Therefore, I can say with some degree of certainty that age DOES make a difference. As you get older your priorities tend to change. Gone are the nights that you stay up all night until the wee hours with your buddies partying, playing LAN games and ordering pizza for dinner. (And reheating it for breakfast and lunch the next day!) You'll work all night if you have to because you love to code. This is a plus to someone such as myself who is ultimately responsible for the output of said code and project. But here is the problem, jsut because you are older, does not mean that you do not work to get the job done when needed, in my experience it has been that you tend to make less mistakes or have enough experience to code more intelligently and therefore, can go home sooner.
However, I fast found that the myth of 'younger is cheaper' is just that, a myth. I was lucky enough to work with several people who were older than I, though I was their supervisor, and I would not have the project run any other way. I had a project that was slated for failure come in on-time, under-budget and with extra bells and whistles that the client loved and consequently, hired us to do 10 additional sites in their overseas offices.
The reason? Because the resources on my team were older, wiser and faster because they knew the sound short cuts that could be made and have a successful product in the end. There was no guessing or supposition to their architectural understanding of the task at hand. Only some with experience could do that on a regular basis. So by extension, these resources were less expensive in the long run.
If I have a new developer, how long and what will be the TOTAL cost that it is going to take one of my experienced developers or Team Leads to help them ramp up? How do you teach a young developer how to test why an application is breaking by reviewing hundreds of lines of code with no comments, quickly, efficiently and above all intelligently? Experience will pervail time and again because they have been through this type of exercise time and again and know what to look for first.
I am not saying that fresh starts and young minds aren't a positive thing to have in a company. For this you create a sense of longevity and a new round of knowlege transfer capabilities in a company, but who is going to transfer this knowledge? Other teenagers or college-age kids who are just learning your company as well as technology trends and development skills themselves?
One argument a colleague of mine brought up was that the technology that is available today, i.e. Java, was not available when my father was going to school so we're all starti
The challenge here is that if you take one news piece to make your judgment about the integrity of an entire network, you open yourself up to an ill-informed bias.
If The AJ network were relegated by the US media to be fair as a standard, then they would, by your argument, show clips continually. The question that needs to be asked is, "What was it about this particular story that made it okay by the US media to air?"
Media as a generality across the world is more biased today than it was when my parents were my age. At one point in time (and I have studied this) news was based on factual recounts of a particular event. The 'norm' tended (not always, but more so than today) to be lacking emotional or personal agendas or entanglements from the reporter.
Today, we have reporters walking off the set in the middle of an interview because he did not agree with what the interviewee's political stance was. I find that it takes longer to decipher what "Dan Rather was really trying to say was..." than I do in getting actual, realistic, viable news. That's why I tend to lean more towards mediums such as Slashdot. I get to see comments from many different points of view. On TV you are told what you should think.
My hope is that no one EVER accepts the news today from ANY medium or network as the truth and at face value. Have some thoughts for yourself and do your research. Just because they say something or show something in a few isolated incidences, does not mean that is the whole picture.
I have been all over the world and have traveled to almost every continent and have spoken with countless amounts of people to learn about their cultures, political views, history, etc. and one thing that I have found time and again is that as societies are progressing, the need for verification of information is diminishing. We are, as a civilization, regressing and shying away from individual thought. We need to begin to think for ourselves and stop being reactionary.
Take a moment to take a deep breath, and then verify the information given to you. Never trust one source.
There is a slander campaign going on from all directions around the world. Be your own person and think for yourself.
Cheers
I agree completely. Life is made up of a law of averages. When you are in the job market, as a manager, you are called upon to give a performance review of employees. I have 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D' employee rankings with which to make my classifiactions. Although and employee may have an 'A' as a ranking, I have it curved such that if there were a cutback or layoff, I know which A would be the last one standing.
Excellent comments. You really know your stuff. Looks like you spend alot of time reading up on technology. =)