The business/investment press seems to really like being able to latch onto pat causes of market shifts.
9/11 makes a great cause, and the US government has no problem with 9/11 being blown up even bigger than it was -- it makes for a great political tool.
The idea is to (try to) analyze your thinking process, not because the question has any value.
The problem is that you identified the question as insignificant (well, sure, it was) early on, and didn't want to put effort into it. They're hoping that they can get a cross section of your problem solving process. Suppose you had said "Well, I'd like to be a cat because, based on my experience, cats get a pretty good deal. They get a good deal of attention, they are fed, they have more freedom and flexibility to get around than dogs do..."
They aren't going to care whether you have a perfect, defensible answer. They asked you a question and wanted an answer in a couple seconds. They just want a reasonably justifiable one, and want to see some justification.
Frankly, I think the whole thing's a damn waste of time and that giving someone a test or talking to an actual engineer and skipping generic HR crap is a better move, but that's just me.
It was bad enough that they wanted MSCE certification in addition, but wanting fifteen years experience with Linux?! ROFL!
I suspect that if you walk in, list the dates that someone *could* have known Linux for, and then list your relevant AT&T Unix experience or what-have-you, you'd be in a good position.
Frankly, this Jeff guy seems reasonably straightforward. Hard to say whether you'd want to work for him from just this, but:
1) He's honest. He feels that being honest up front is more important than dicking you around because it'll help the company in the short term.
2) He wants you to feel like part of the company, not a component in a machine. Having worked at both small and large companies, I can confidently say that feeling like you're doing something to help the company is generally a much nicer feeling than just being a cog.
3) He's telling you that he's going to run a pretty strict meritocracy. He's not giving you vague promises of "big bonuses" or other crap to string you along that Slashdotters may have seen in the past. You want to get respect and pay, you have to prove yourself.
4) His requirements are pretty damned clear. He doesn't say you need to "produce synergy". He lists tools that you need to know, and that's that.
5) This letter seems a bit like a "fluff cleaner". He's trying to get rid of folks that are trying to get an easy job. You pass this letter and still want to go for the job, he's probably likely in person.
6) He doesn't care about being politically correct. He's happy to reference himself being an asshole. I like environments where people can take and give honest criticism without worrying about not brown-nosing.
7) Unless he's lying (and I doubt it), he's putting a hell of a lot into the company.
8) This is a tight ship. You get on board this company (and assuming they have someone that can actually market), you're unlikely to be riding a sinking ship down.
9) He offers training. Significant amounts, and makes the forumla for the salary that he's willing to go with clear. His offer isn't that out of line with pre-tech-bubble levels.
I've been working with many so called "programmers" from India, they hardly know where is the power button in a PC.
Sure. Right now, the state of the industry is in turmoil. There's tons of money flooding to India, and lots of stupid US companies spending money foolishly. There are few rating companies, there hasn't been long to establish reputations, and the body of programmers is still less experienced and skilled as a whole.
But this will change. There are few things that living in the United States grants one (aside from, perhaps, good experience with English) that is a huge benefit in the industry. Picking up PHP doesn't take very long, and the pool of skilled Indian tech workers will rapidly grow. It's cheap to live in India -- IT prices will go up, but still remain lower than in the US.
A formal education is a good start, but nothing compared to what a dedicated and intelligent person can learn on their own -- plus, India places a good deal of emphasis on engineering and hard science.
I expect that increased competition will increase the global standard of living...but reduce the insane wealth that the US currently enjoys.
Additionally, I would like to comment that tech types overestimate the value of some of their skills, and think that others cant easily acquire them, and at the same time attain a level of competance in other areas.
So close to Socratic wisdom!
At 18, I have a firm grasp of programming theory, I develop software in 5 programming languages, I keep up to date with industry standard technologies, I develop portable applications and have experience with many user interface tool kits, I work a part time job that teaches me about running a business, I still manage to put plenty of time into academic studies that will (hopefully) provide me with enough business saavy to endure the trials of the business world, and somewhere in there I still manage to find time to read Wittengenstien, Kant, Goete, etc. One has to be willing to adapt, and it is quite possible to do so.
Interesting that you assume as an executive I don't know much about the IT systems I oversee. Would it suprise you to learn that I have published papers, articles, and a book on the subjects of distributed and parallel computing as well as object-oriented design theory? I rose through the ranks with technical skills, not business skills. I learned my business skills on the job.
Then you are a rarity, and might well be worth what you are paid.
The irritation expressed on Slashdot (at least from me, as well as many others) is aimed at managers who did *not* rise from the ranks, who do *not* understand the domain they manage (understandable, as currently business schools churn out generic, non-domain-specific graduates) who reached their current pay level through cronyism rather than even a vague approximation of a meritocracy.
I am vaguely curious as to what business skills you feel are so crucial and so difficult to acquire, however. I agree that certainly, not every engineer can make a decent manager. However, I also think that a lot of folks either mix marketing- or sales-related skills with business skills, or overestimate the difficulty necessary to acquire (not fine-tune) business skills. (Of course, I also feel that the same applies to web programming, which probably wouldn't sit well with many folks on Slashdot.)
As the other poster pointed out, this is not a free market.
It is a generally pervasive social condition that CEOs have extremely high pay rates. Why? Corruption and cronyism at the top of a profitable company aren't enough to sink a company, and such things are extremely attractive. I'm, frankly, amazed at the general level of dishonesty and self-serving behavior exhibited by top-level folks I've seen.
There are a couple of legitimate potential reasons to pay your CEO a lot of money. The first is that CEO candidates are extremely rare -- much like how a scientist in an extremely new and lucrative materials science field might make a healthy salary. I don't buy this. There are a ton of business graduates each year. A business degree is one of the easiest degrees to get. MBA work is absolutely trivial compared to something like a good hard science *undergrad* degree.
Another possibility is that you are really getting a lot of quality for your money. Again, aside from connections (which ties back into the whole dishonest cronyism that I'm irritated about), I'm curious as to what kind of value a particular CEO candidate has that merits that he be paid thousands of times what his peers are paid. Given the degree to which markets are unpredictable and other factors, I have a hard time believing that past performance of companies a CEO has headed is a particularly strong indicator of future prediction. I'm *very* dubious that an expensive CEO (10 million a year) is better than a cheap CEO (100 thousand a year) plus 99 $100K/year engineers. That's an awful lot of additional product that you can provide.
A final possibility is that a job is so onerous that one must pay a phenomenal sum to get someone to do it. I don't buy it. At a good-sized company, VPs and above are generally treated awfully well. Business life is an ongoing series of company-paid conventions at fancy hotels and resorts. You may need to be ready to respond 24/7 if there's a corporate disaster (think 9/11), but I suspect that there are a lot of folks that would be in at work in another 9/11. You do run the risk of being a corporate scapegoat ("we fixed our problems by switching our CEO"), but if you work for just four years at $10 million a year, you have an awfully comfortable retirement lined up.
I suspect that most companies could get by with significantly less management than they have.
Another issue to take into account -- in traditional business from a hundred years ago (say, manufacturing), the higher level employees tended to get promoted "from the ranks". Your plant manager was (roughly, and in ideal) the most competent of your middle managers, who were the most competent of your low-level managers, who were the most competent of your bottom-line workers. It made a lot of sense to maintain a pay hierarchy.
That is not the case any more. You generally don't have any folks in the upper ranks (VP and up) that worked their way up from the bottom. There is no even approximation of a meritocracy. You hire business students to become execs. Furthermore, a big move has been made to make business a generic field -- business schools produce students that are interchangable between various companies. An exec generally does *not* have much domain knowledge about his company. He knows a set of business models and processes, how to interpret charts, and the like. As a result, the folks populating executive and engineering positions are drawn from entirely different stock. Execs have business degrees, engineers have engineering degrees. The legacy of a pay hierarchy still happens to live on, however, despite the fact that it requires much less rigorous education to become a business student, and that there is a larger available pool.
All that being said, I (an engineer) don't care too much. If I wanted to earn more money, there are a lot of things that I could do that would improve my salary. However, I pretty much eat, drink, and live my field, on the job and off, so I'm pr
Me, I'd remember that kind of stuff before I took a machine in for repair.
Why? I mean, as far as I can tell, the only issue would be the fact that there's a social stigma attached. You probably don't care if some random person that you're never going to see again knows that you have a hentai screensaver -- and what are the chances of a random computer store knowing one's wife (well, ex-wife)?
I mean, *you* use the handle "wench", for goodness sake, in a far more visibly read forum than a small local computer store.
This isn't exactly someone who ran out and did something positive securitywise out of the goodness of his heart. It isn't even data from someone who works in security and ran out and did something on the side.
This entire linked-to-article is, frankly, an advertisement. It's an advertisement to try to get people to buy security consulting services from this company. Impressively, this company managed to get the story on Slashdot. It's a sample report (you can figure this out early because of the number of tables and screenshots). (Silly execs love tables and pictures -- be sure to include lots if you're ever in a vending situation, even if they provide little useful content.) Other red flags include the fact that it's aimed at financial services (folks who have lots of money), and focuses on flaws in what Citibank is doing (with the implicit suggestion that this company could help them). Especially notable is the fact that if focuses on flaws in Citibank's behavior even if said behavior is not particularly relevant to the scam, such as the format of Citibank's emails. Are customers going to notice or care whether Citibank emails contain unique identifiers -- *not* hashbusters? No, though a security consultant who focuses on spam would.
Then they have the nice little blurb at the bottom about the company.
Frankly, they missed one important aspect. You can't sell anything to a company unless you can provide a measure of how much the company can save. They should run out and get a ballpark estimate on how much Citibank could potentially, worst-case, lose from this. They subtract proposed consulting fees and end up with a nice fat number.
The reason I find this advertisement vaguely disturbing is because folks like this are just another leech feeding off of fat, stupid corporations. Lots of consultants already do so. However, what these folks do *sounds* good but has little point. It's not financially feasible for a company to pay a small private army of techies to try to track down random Russians so that legal nastygrams can be sent to them (keep in mind that the firm didn't actually *identify* who the spammers were). There are too many potential baddies out there. A financial services corporation would be *far* better served by developing secure communication policies and technology that are *easy* to use for the consumer, and then spending money educating their customers about these. Then they become difficult to attack. To go after individual bad guys is like plugging holes in a dyke -- very profitable for the guy being paid to plug holes, but ultimately ineffective.
Anyway, if this is true, I would love to go to one of these colleges.
This has come up before. It's a bit less appetizing than initially appears. That isn't to say that the video game field is a bad field, but that I'd want to think hard before picking up a video game development degree. (This is coming from someone who took a video game development class in university himself.) My comments apply to the software development side of video gaming -- game design, story, music, are a whole different story.
Reasons:
a) Video game development is a hard industry to work in. Turnover is high, pay is relatively low, and there are tough schedules. You may like it, you may not, but it's easy to get a rosy picture of it before you enter the industry. Sure, long hours may not be a big deal at first -- fresh college grads frequently don't have a problem -- but if you get married, have a couple kids, the hours may start to be too much.
b) Video game development houses, from what I can tell (and I don't work in the industry), tend to get a bit shafted from a financial point of view. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case -- they take on a good deal of the risk, they require a good amount of resources, but generally the publisher is the one to really profit from games. There are a few well-to-do game development houses (id is everyone's favorite example), but I suspect most of those seem to publish their own games.
c) I'm not sure that you can *spend* four years learning to write video games. Nobody knows where exactly the technology is going for certain. Currently, for a typical 3d game, you want a grounding in matrix math, some systems programming, an algorithms class or two (especially in graph theory for pathfinding), and experience with applications programming. Depending upon your role, you may want a class in networking (engineer/CS-style, not IT), you may want a class in languages (probably not -- in general, folks have found it to not be a very good idea to make up a new scripting language for each game), you may want a class in practical AI, and you may want something in signal processing (if you're doing *really* elaborate synthetic sound). There just isn't a whole hell of a lot of things that you need to write video games. A good chunk of, say, a CS degree is theory, and you just don't need anything too elaborate to write video games.
d) Writing video games != playing video games. It's easy to associate video games with fun and assume that writing production-quality video games is equally fun. Obviously, that depends to a good degree on the person. I tend to dislike writing video game code, since it's likely done with tough time constrants, and you don't have the freedom to write clean code. It's unlikely that the code will be maintained or anyone else will work with it in the future other than a few bugfixes, compared to, say, database software.
e) I suspect it's easier to get a general CS degree and move to video game programming than it is to get a video game programming degree and move to a position that uses more general CS knowledge.
f) If you're looking for a degree as a magic card to get a job in the video game industry, you may want to reconsider. For years, a lot of the folks in the videogame industry got in there be being really dedicated to video game development, independently producing a portfolio, etc. Right now, the big money is in the console market. As a n inexperienced junior programmer, it's fairly difficult to move directly to the console market -- it's easier to get a job working on PC-based games and then move to the onsole market. Unfortunately, the PC game market's smaller size can mean that it's tough to get into *that* at the moment.
g) If I'm hiring someone to build a space shuttle, I don't look for someone with a space-shuttle building degree. Aerospace engineering, sure. You aren't going to be penalized for being to general. My experience is that college is useful for making you learn the g
Vote-counting is up there with life support systems in terms of how critical mucking it up can be. If you need to have three independently written programs doing the counting and comparing results, then do it. For something as simple as this, I disagree that common mistakes are acceptable.
"Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons. It seems like a motivated attorney could pretty easily make a case that any company who is putting substantial investment into software that is distributed for free is dumping, and trying to kill a competitor.
Ah, but this isn't a problem. IBM is selling hardware with software, a combined product. The two combined are not being sold below cost.
There are a lot of companies that sell at a loss but can still maintain a profitable business model. The term-coining razor-and-blade industry. The video game console indusry. The inkjet printer industry.
and I think that there will be a number of anti-trust questions raised.
I doubt it. Legal issues, yes, but what Microsoft is (might be) doing could be done by any wealthy company -- market share has nothing to do with it. It wouldn't be an antitrust issue.
The average consumer cannot install it or configure it or get it to do what they want with a reasonable measure of training.
I disagree, though it may be just that I am familiar with Linux -- I'd say that a new user with a *current* distribution (very important -- ease of configuration is the fastest increasing factor in distributions and has been for a couple of years) goes through less pain to install Linux than Windows (assuming no preinstall), and roughly equal pain to configure (some of which is the fact that there are just less configurable options in Windows).
I'd say that the main impediment to Linux catching on with Joe Public is that Linux is many distributions with many different interfaces. In general, Windows is Windows (and at the least Windows XP Home is Windows XP Home). You need learn only one interface and one way of doing things.
If you're a Linux guru, you *still* probably aren't (intimately) familiar with more than three or four distributions' installation and configuration setup -- and for that matter, from Red Hat 5.0 to Red Hat 9, the system configuration interface has changed at least 3 times. Even if you're a guru, every last minor version number change of Linux (2.0, 2.2, 2.4) has resulted in a new routing/firewalling interface and similar to be learned.
The sluggishness of Windows to change and improve isn't always a liability in the market. People (non-techies) frequently want to learn something that they can keep using. They don't want to learn something that will be obsolete in eighteen or twenty four months.
I've configured one of those low-end Linksys routers about a year ago, and remember running into tons of pain when the thing tried using an MTU that was six bytes off. After a firmware upgrade, it let me manually set the value, but I was never impressed with Linksys' products.
I purchased another one of these Microsoft Wired Base Stations, which represents the first Microsoft product I've ever purchased. I actually wanted a switch, but I needed one ASAP, and this was the only thing handy at the local Radio Shack, so I grabbed it and kicked it into switch mode.
It was actually quite funny -- the only reason it was competitive was because it (and a whole line of other Microsoft Wired Base Stations) were at 50% off clearance. When I took the thing up to the counter to purchase it, the manager mumbled "Finally. I can't wait to get rid of these things so that I can actually put up something else. You want more? I've got plenty, all at 50% off clearance." This really blew my mind -- I mean, how *badly* do you have to sell in order to get a retail manager to be irritated enough to say something like that to a customer?
I use it as no more than a slightly expensive switch.
Unlike the Belkin switch downstairs, it hasn't gotten confused when the power started wavering (the Belkin barfed with a diagnostic display on its output lights).
I Wish I knew where you could buy a bloody *router* any more. No UPnP, no ad reroutings, no IE-specific functionality, blah blah blah, no flaky, poorly-designed-by-some-firmware-programmer-with-j ack-all-network-knowledge features.
There needs to be a certification company that certifies things as "Good For Geek".
I've never been able to figure out the whole Star Wars/can't get date stereotype. Star Wars is a wildly popular movie with action and light romance -- something to watch with friends or a girl.
You know, I was always under the opinion that all the Slashdot operations required two clicks, and checked host-referer so that nobody could simply link to a nasty GET operation.
'course, neither am I going to click and find out (and I don't care enough to make up a test account), but if this works, it's definitely a Slashcode bug.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the economy was already going downhill.
The business/investment press seems to really like being able to latch onto pat causes of market shifts.
9/11 makes a great cause, and the US government has no problem with 9/11 being blown up even bigger than it was -- it makes for a great political tool.
The idea is to (try to) analyze your thinking process, not because the question has any value.
The problem is that you identified the question as insignificant (well, sure, it was) early on, and didn't want to put effort into it. They're hoping that they can get a cross section of your problem solving process. Suppose you had said "Well, I'd like to be a cat because, based on my experience, cats get a pretty good deal. They get a good deal of attention, they are fed, they have more freedom and flexibility to get around than dogs do..."
They aren't going to care whether you have a perfect, defensible answer. They asked you a question and wanted an answer in a couple seconds. They just want a reasonably justifiable one, and want to see some justification.
Frankly, I think the whole thing's a damn waste of time and that giving someone a test or talking to an actual engineer and skipping generic HR crap is a better move, but that's just me.
It was bad enough that they wanted MSCE certification in addition, but wanting fifteen years experience with Linux?! ROFL!
I suspect that if you walk in, list the dates that someone *could* have known Linux for, and then list your relevant AT&T Unix experience or what-have-you, you'd be in a good position.
Frankly, this Jeff guy seems reasonably straightforward. Hard to say whether you'd want to work for him from just this, but:
1) He's honest. He feels that being honest up front is more important than dicking you around because it'll help the company in the short term.
2) He wants you to feel like part of the company, not a component in a machine. Having worked at both small and large companies, I can confidently say that feeling like you're doing something to help the company is generally a much nicer feeling than just being a cog.
3) He's telling you that he's going to run a pretty strict meritocracy. He's not giving you vague promises of "big bonuses" or other crap to string you along that Slashdotters may have seen in the past. You want to get respect and pay, you have to prove yourself.
4) His requirements are pretty damned clear. He doesn't say you need to "produce synergy". He lists tools that you need to know, and that's that.
5) This letter seems a bit like a "fluff cleaner". He's trying to get rid of folks that are trying to get an easy job. You pass this letter and still want to go for the job, he's probably likely in person.
6) He doesn't care about being politically correct. He's happy to reference himself being an asshole. I like environments where people can take and give honest criticism without worrying about not brown-nosing.
7) Unless he's lying (and I doubt it), he's putting a hell of a lot into the company.
8) This is a tight ship. You get on board this company (and assuming they have someone that can actually market), you're unlikely to be riding a sinking ship down.
9) He offers training. Significant amounts, and makes the forumla for the salary that he's willing to go with clear. His offer isn't that out of line with pre-tech-bubble levels.
I've been working with many so called "programmers" from India, they hardly know where is the power button in a PC.
Sure. Right now, the state of the industry is in turmoil. There's tons of money flooding to India, and lots of stupid US companies spending money foolishly. There are few rating companies, there hasn't been long to establish reputations, and the body of programmers is still less experienced and skilled as a whole.
But this will change. There are few things that living in the United States grants one (aside from, perhaps, good experience with English) that is a huge benefit in the industry. Picking up PHP doesn't take very long, and the pool of skilled Indian tech workers will rapidly grow. It's cheap to live in India -- IT prices will go up, but still remain lower than in the US.
A formal education is a good start, but nothing compared to what a dedicated and intelligent person can learn on their own -- plus, India places a good deal of emphasis on engineering and hard science.
I expect that increased competition will increase the global standard of living...but reduce the insane wealth that the US currently enjoys.
So close to Socratic wisdom!
At 18, I have a firm grasp of programming theory, I develop software in 5 programming languages, I keep up to date with industry standard technologies, I develop portable applications and have experience with many user interface tool kits, I work a part time job that teaches me about running a business, I still manage to put plenty of time into academic studies that will (hopefully) provide me with enough business saavy to endure the trials of the business world, and somewhere in there I still manage to find time to read Wittengenstien, Kant, Goete, etc. One has to be willing to adapt, and it is quite possible to do so.
It doesn't matter how good a programmer you are, there are secretaries that get paid more than you do.
"Executive assistants" is the proper term.
Interesting that you assume as an executive I don't know much about the IT systems I oversee. Would it suprise you to learn that I have published papers, articles, and a book on the subjects of distributed and parallel computing as well as object-oriented design theory? I rose through the ranks with technical skills, not business skills. I learned my business skills on the job.
Then you are a rarity, and might well be worth what you are paid.
The irritation expressed on Slashdot (at least from me, as well as many others) is aimed at managers who did *not* rise from the ranks, who do *not* understand the domain they manage (understandable, as currently business schools churn out generic, non-domain-specific graduates) who reached their current pay level through cronyism rather than even a vague approximation of a meritocracy.
I am vaguely curious as to what business skills you feel are so crucial and so difficult to acquire, however. I agree that certainly, not every engineer can make a decent manager. However, I also think that a lot of folks either mix marketing- or sales-related skills with business skills, or overestimate the difficulty necessary to acquire (not fine-tune) business skills. (Of course, I also feel that the same applies to web programming, which probably wouldn't sit well with many folks on Slashdot.)
Let me guess --
1) Your CEO was involved with the founding of his company.
2) Your CEO is not a Fortune 500 CEO.
Big companies swap CEOs rapidly, and loyalty to a company is pretty much ridiculous.
As the other poster pointed out, this is not a free market.
It is a generally pervasive social condition that CEOs have extremely high pay rates. Why? Corruption and cronyism at the top of a profitable company aren't enough to sink a company, and such things are extremely attractive. I'm, frankly, amazed at the general level of dishonesty and self-serving behavior exhibited by top-level folks I've seen.
There are a couple of legitimate potential reasons to pay your CEO a lot of money. The first is that CEO candidates are extremely rare -- much like how a scientist in an extremely new and lucrative materials science field might make a healthy salary. I don't buy this. There are a ton of business graduates each year. A business degree is one of the easiest degrees to get. MBA work is absolutely trivial compared to something like a good hard science *undergrad* degree.
Another possibility is that you are really getting a lot of quality for your money. Again, aside from connections (which ties back into the whole dishonest cronyism that I'm irritated about), I'm curious as to what kind of value a particular CEO candidate has that merits that he be paid thousands of times what his peers are paid. Given the degree to which markets are unpredictable and other factors, I have a hard time believing that past performance of companies a CEO has headed is a particularly strong indicator of future prediction. I'm *very* dubious that an expensive CEO (10 million a year) is better than a cheap CEO (100 thousand a year) plus 99 $100K/year engineers. That's an awful lot of additional product that you can provide.
A final possibility is that a job is so onerous that one must pay a phenomenal sum to get someone to do it. I don't buy it. At a good-sized company, VPs and above are generally treated awfully well. Business life is an ongoing series of company-paid conventions at fancy hotels and resorts. You may need to be ready to respond 24/7 if there's a corporate disaster (think 9/11), but I suspect that there are a lot of folks that would be in at work in another 9/11. You do run the risk of being a corporate scapegoat ("we fixed our problems by switching our CEO"), but if you work for just four years at $10 million a year, you have an awfully comfortable retirement lined up.
I suspect that most companies could get by with significantly less management than they have.
Another issue to take into account -- in traditional business from a hundred years ago (say, manufacturing), the higher level employees tended to get promoted "from the ranks". Your plant manager was (roughly, and in ideal) the most competent of your middle managers, who were the most competent of your low-level managers, who were the most competent of your bottom-line workers. It made a lot of sense to maintain a pay hierarchy.
That is not the case any more. You generally don't have any folks in the upper ranks (VP and up) that worked their way up from the bottom. There is no even approximation of a meritocracy. You hire business students to become execs. Furthermore, a big move has been made to make business a generic field -- business schools produce students that are interchangable between various companies. An exec generally does *not* have much domain knowledge about his company. He knows a set of business models and processes, how to interpret charts, and the like. As a result, the folks populating executive and engineering positions are drawn from entirely different stock. Execs have business degrees, engineers have engineering degrees. The legacy of a pay hierarchy still happens to live on, however, despite the fact that it requires much less rigorous education to become a business student, and that there is a larger available pool.
All that being said, I (an engineer) don't care too much. If I wanted to earn more money, there are a lot of things that I could do that would improve my salary. However, I pretty much eat, drink, and live my field, on the job and off, so I'm pr
Me, I'd remember that kind of stuff before I took a machine in for repair.
Why? I mean, as far as I can tell, the only issue would be the fact that there's a social stigma attached. You probably don't care if some random person that you're never going to see again knows that you have a hentai screensaver -- and what are the chances of a random computer store knowing one's wife (well, ex-wife)?
I mean, *you* use the handle "wench", for goodness sake, in a far more visibly read forum than a small local computer store.
It's a degree in Computer ENGINEERING, not Computer Science. The two curriculums are quite different.
Yup. Though from what I can tell, lines in this area were fuzzier not so long ago. The computer world is awfully young.
I don't imagine the average CS degree teaches the finer points of analog filter design
Not all CE degrees do either. Depends on how strict the CE/EE (digital/analog) separation is where you went.
state machine theory
[grin] I sure hope it does. State machines are important in CS, just as they are in CE.
or DSP.
True, that.
This isn't exactly someone who ran out and did something positive securitywise out of the goodness of his heart. It isn't even data from someone who works in security and ran out and did something on the side.
This entire linked-to-article is, frankly, an advertisement. It's an advertisement to try to get people to buy security consulting services from this company. Impressively, this company managed to get the story on Slashdot. It's a sample report (you can figure this out early because of the number of tables and screenshots). (Silly execs love tables and pictures -- be sure to include lots if you're ever in a vending situation, even if they provide little useful content.) Other red flags include the fact that it's aimed at financial services (folks who have lots of money), and focuses on flaws in what Citibank is doing (with the implicit suggestion that this company could help them). Especially notable is the fact that if focuses on flaws in Citibank's behavior even if said behavior is not particularly relevant to the scam, such as the format of Citibank's emails. Are customers going to notice or care whether Citibank emails contain unique identifiers -- *not* hashbusters? No, though a security consultant who focuses on spam would.
Then they have the nice little blurb at the bottom about the company.
Frankly, they missed one important aspect. You can't sell anything to a company unless you can provide a measure of how much the company can save. They should run out and get a ballpark estimate on how much Citibank could potentially, worst-case, lose from this. They subtract proposed consulting fees and end up with a nice fat number.
The reason I find this advertisement vaguely disturbing is because folks like this are just another leech feeding off of fat, stupid corporations. Lots of consultants already do so. However, what these folks do *sounds* good but has little point. It's not financially feasible for a company to pay a small private army of techies to try to track down random Russians so that legal nastygrams can be sent to them (keep in mind that the firm didn't actually *identify* who the spammers were). There are too many potential baddies out there. A financial services corporation would be *far* better served by developing secure communication policies and technology that are *easy* to use for the consumer, and then spending money educating their customers about these. Then they become difficult to attack. To go after individual bad guys is like plugging holes in a dyke -- very profitable for the guy being paid to plug holes, but ultimately ineffective.
Anyway, if this is true, I would love to go to one of these colleges.
This has come up before. It's a bit less appetizing than initially appears. That isn't to say that the video game field is a bad field, but that I'd want to think hard before picking up a video game development degree. (This is coming from someone who took a video game development class in university himself.) My comments apply to the software development side of video gaming -- game design, story, music, are a whole different story.
Reasons:
a) Video game development is a hard industry to work in. Turnover is high, pay is relatively low, and there are tough schedules. You may like it, you may not, but it's easy to get a rosy picture of it before you enter the industry. Sure, long hours may not be a big deal at first -- fresh college grads frequently don't have a problem -- but if you get married, have a couple kids, the hours may start to be too much.
b) Video game development houses, from what I can tell (and I don't work in the industry), tend to get a bit shafted from a financial point of view. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case -- they take on a good deal of the risk, they require a good amount of resources, but generally the publisher is the one to really profit from games. There are a few well-to-do game development houses (id is everyone's favorite example), but I suspect most of those seem to publish their own games.
c) I'm not sure that you can *spend* four years learning to write video games. Nobody knows where exactly the technology is going for certain. Currently, for a typical 3d game, you want a grounding in matrix math, some systems programming, an algorithms class or two (especially in graph theory for pathfinding), and experience with applications programming. Depending upon your role, you may want a class in networking (engineer/CS-style, not IT), you may want a class in languages (probably not -- in general, folks have found it to not be a very good idea to make up a new scripting language for each game), you may want a class in practical AI, and you may want something in signal processing (if you're doing *really* elaborate synthetic sound). There just isn't a whole hell of a lot of things that you need to write video games. A good chunk of, say, a CS degree is theory, and you just don't need anything too elaborate to write video games.
d) Writing video games != playing video games. It's easy to associate video games with fun and assume that writing production-quality video games is equally fun. Obviously, that depends to a good degree on the person. I tend to dislike writing video game code, since it's likely done with tough time constrants, and you don't have the freedom to write clean code. It's unlikely that the code will be maintained or anyone else will work with it in the future other than a few bugfixes, compared to, say, database software.
e) I suspect it's easier to get a general CS degree and move to video game programming than it is to get a video game programming degree and move to a position that uses more general CS knowledge.
f) If you're looking for a degree as a magic card to get a job in the video game industry, you may want to reconsider. For years, a lot of the folks in the videogame industry got in there be being really dedicated to video game development, independently producing a portfolio, etc. Right now, the big money is in the console market. As a n inexperienced junior programmer, it's fairly difficult to move directly to the console market -- it's easier to get a job working on PC-based games and then move to the onsole market. Unfortunately, the PC game market's smaller size can mean that it's tough to get into *that* at the moment.
g) If I'm hiring someone to build a space shuttle, I don't look for someone with a space-shuttle building degree. Aerospace engineering, sure. You aren't going to be penalized for being to general. My experience is that college is useful for making you learn the g
Vote-counting is up there with life support systems in terms of how critical mucking it up can be. If you need to have three independently written programs doing the counting and comparing results, then do it. For something as simple as this, I disagree that common mistakes are acceptable.
"Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons. It seems like a motivated attorney could pretty easily make a case that any company who is putting substantial investment into software that is distributed for free is dumping, and trying to kill a competitor.
Ah, but this isn't a problem. IBM is selling hardware with software, a combined product. The two combined are not being sold below cost.
There are a lot of companies that sell at a loss but can still maintain a profitable business model. The term-coining razor-and-blade industry. The video game console indusry. The inkjet printer industry.
and I think that there will be a number of anti-trust questions raised.
I doubt it. Legal issues, yes, but what Microsoft is (might be) doing could be done by any wealthy company -- market share has nothing to do with it. It wouldn't be an antitrust issue.
The average consumer cannot install it or configure it or get it to do what they want with a reasonable measure of training.
I disagree, though it may be just that I am familiar with Linux -- I'd say that a new user with a *current* distribution (very important -- ease of configuration is the fastest increasing factor in distributions and has been for a couple of years) goes through less pain to install Linux than Windows (assuming no preinstall), and roughly equal pain to configure (some of which is the fact that there are just less configurable options in Windows).
I'd say that the main impediment to Linux catching on with Joe Public is that Linux is many distributions with many different interfaces. In general, Windows is Windows (and at the least Windows XP Home is Windows XP Home). You need learn only one interface and one way of doing things.
If you're a Linux guru, you *still* probably aren't (intimately) familiar with more than three or four distributions' installation and configuration setup -- and for that matter, from Red Hat 5.0 to Red Hat 9, the system configuration interface has changed at least 3 times. Even if you're a guru, every last minor version number change of Linux (2.0, 2.2, 2.4) has resulted in a new routing/firewalling interface and similar to be learned.
The sluggishness of Windows to change and improve isn't always a liability in the market. People (non-techies) frequently want to learn something that they can keep using. They don't want to learn something that will be obsolete in eighteen or twenty four months.
I've configured one of those low-end Linksys routers about a year ago, and remember running into tons of pain when the thing tried using an MTU that was six bytes off. After a firmware upgrade, it let me manually set the value, but I was never impressed with Linksys' products.
I purchased another one of these Microsoft Wired Base Stations, which represents the first Microsoft product I've ever purchased. I actually wanted a switch, but I needed one ASAP, and this was the only thing handy at the local Radio Shack, so I grabbed it and kicked it into switch mode.
It was actually quite funny -- the only reason it was competitive was because it (and a whole line of other Microsoft Wired Base Stations) were at 50% off clearance. When I took the thing up to the counter to purchase it, the manager mumbled "Finally. I can't wait to get rid of these things so that I can actually put up something else. You want more? I've got plenty, all at 50% off clearance." This really blew my mind -- I mean, how *badly* do you have to sell in order to get a retail manager to be irritated enough to say something like that to a customer?
I use it as no more than a slightly expensive switch.
Unlike the Belkin switch downstairs, it hasn't gotten confused when the power started wavering (the Belkin barfed with a diagnostic display on its output lights).
All true, though:
j ack-all-network-knowledge features.
Any other HTML derived protocol.
I think you mean HTTP.
I Wish I knew where you could buy a bloody *router* any more. No UPnP, no ad reroutings, no IE-specific functionality, blah blah blah, no flaky, poorly-designed-by-some-firmware-programmer-with-
There needs to be a certification company that certifies things as "Good For Geek".
So what dirty things does Samus do if you manage to get a 1:37 completion?
He was there *on* a date.
I've never been able to figure out the whole Star Wars/can't get date stereotype. Star Wars is a wildly popular movie with action and light romance -- something to watch with friends or a girl.
It doesn't exactly focus on "geek" topics anyway.
You know, I was always under the opinion that all the Slashdot operations required two clicks, and checked host-referer so that nobody could simply link to a nasty GET operation.
'course, neither am I going to click and find out (and I don't care enough to make up a test account), but if this works, it's definitely a Slashcode bug.
But aren't stereotypes a logical and efficient way of group things (in this case people)?
Yes. But it annoys Joe Sixpack and his vocabulary and simple understanding of victimhood in society.