I agree with you. There are very vocal proponents on both sides of this issue (and many other issues) who like to shout how dumb the beliefs of their opponents are. It is counterproductive to insult the group you are attempting to persuade to join your side.
I did not say you are a know-nothing at 10 years. But at 10 you could not have possibly seen all that there is, especially in such a diverse subject as comp. sci. You said yourself, that you discovered two new testing techniques in one class. I take exception to your generalized statement that graduate degrees are "usually only good for credential padding..." I spent a lot of time considering different schools and programs, looking for a degree to compliment my background and career goals. Yes, there were boring nights, but I learned a heck of a lot too, and I don't consider myself a lightweight, then or now. I recognize that you seem to be having a different experience, but most of the people I know, after finishing a program, say that it was a very rewarding experience.
That is good advice on the letters of recommendation. Most schools have some kind of an open house. That is going to be a good opportunity for you to ask about their specific requirements. You may find that they have alternatives for people in your situation.
Another option to consider is enrolling in a non-degree status with the school. You might be able to take a few classes, before having to be formally admitted as a degree-seeking student. There are perks to going this route. It allows you to get more familiar with the school, and them with you. The application process shouldn't be very rigorous. After a class or two, you will have some recent academic experience, and a professor willing to write a recommendation letter. My school allowed me to transfer up to 12 credits from non-degree to a degree program, so the time wasn't wasted either.
... if you are learning much in a Masters program after 10 years in the field, you were a crappy developer.
I have to disagree, especially at only 10 years of experience. A good masters program should be exposing you to a variety of development methods, techniques, and theory. Far more that most people with 10, or even 20 years experience could have learned in the course of a normal career. Most programs allow you to tailor your classes to fit your areas of interest or to fill in areas where you are deficient. It is up to you to find the proper balance. If you are not learning, you are doing something wrong, or picked the wrong program.
I think that is what he is trying to say, that many of these systems are poorly designed. Water is being removed from an area of "ample" supply to areas with little or no supply. We are attempting to take the same volume of water and spread it out over a larger area, on a global scale.
You have been working with a machine(s) that you do not own for some number of years are you are just starting to worry about this now? In most offices, anyone can log on to any machine, probably remotely. There are probably backups of your stuff running around the infrastructure somewhere too. If anyone wanted your info, they already have it. I would simply ask that your machine be re-imaged before you go. If questioned, you want to be courteous to the next person to occupy your desk.
Two thoughts come to my mind on the color. First, green could be the only color this fabric comes in at the moment. It might be some industrial material used in manufacturing, and was ordered for testing to see if it would work. If proven to work, they will then worry about color and style of the suit. My other thought was that this is a safety feature. If the suit is being designed for use on the Moon or Mars, you might want a highly visible color should you need to search for a lost astronaut.
The low res. images don't help. I really want to see closeup photos/video of this new docking hatch. It might make the suit look ugly, but it sure does make it more versatile.
I wouldn't say it is a horrible idea, but you are correct in that it won't scale well. I have used spreadsheets successfully on teams as large as twenty, with everyone collocated at one facility. We simply had color coded cells to denote the reason for being out of the office, vacation, training, travel, etc... If the goal is to coordinate among a small(ish) group of people, then keep it simple. If you need to tie this into payroll and coordinate a large number of employees across several sites, then you are going to need a more comprehensive SW package.
No, I would likely not buy any physical (or downloaded MP3) media. This assumes that the costs are comparable, but would be a valuable service for my family.
Well, for the most part...the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping, and owning to replay over and over again in the coming years.
That's not just my "get off my lawn" mentality either...I hear it from younger people today. They go through tons of music, but it is quite often disposable, I've heard them say.
The worth or value of the music is a matter of taste. The Wall is a good album, but it is crap when compared to Sgt. Pepper.;)
Perhaps the younger generation says their music is disposable because it is easily available. Who thinks twice about throwing away a paper coffee cup when you are done. You could keep it, and bring it back to Starbucks tomorrow, but why? There is a stack of 100 next to the register, and another 1000 in the store room. We all might save a few cents if we reused the cups, but in the end it is not worth it. I recognize that some people have reusable cups, but it is rarely done to save money. I buy a lot of Disney songs to play for my kids in the car. I could choose to tune in the XM kids stations, but they want (demand) a more specific lineup. Since the play list is the same everyday, I find it easier to own the songs, the same way some people own a durable coffee cup, that they have filled at Starbucks every day.
Not only is it easy and available, but it is now customizable. With services like Pandora, I can tweak a station to suit my preferences, and even my mood. I bought CDs when I was young because I wanted to hear more than the title track from an album. I wanted to go deeper into a genera than the radio allowed. Now I can tune in an XM station that plays a very specific sound, or customize my experience with Pandora.
Doesn't that give you less flexibility as a student? Many people have pointed out that you can often buy books online, or from a friend who recently took the course much cheaper. You also might be able to share with a roommate. Some professors might make the book optional, or tell you that an older version is still OK to use. In addition, if everyone is given a copy, there will be little or no demand for resale. I kept some books from school, but I sold most because I had no reason or desire to keep the book.
I think one of the prime reasons to raise the button is to give the user the ability to feel their way across the keypad. Think of how a touch typist can feel the edges of the keys to keep their fingers centered. Before touch screens I could dial my phone without looking. If a single "brush" of the key activates it, have you really improved anything? This is a technology to watch, but I am not sure if it is ready for prime-time.
You are spot on. This is the kind of crap that happens when you are given a "blank check" from someone else. If the money used had been West Virginia's money, or the school district's money you bet that more care would have been taken in how it was spent. Because the Federal Government was paying the bill, the State just blindly said "we'll take 1000 of those."
You do make a good point. I often have to take several shots to get one where all the children a looking at the camera. There are also the over/under exposed ones you would never use. I have made a hobby out of putting all the best photos into a video that I had out to the family at Christmas time. You get the best stuff, all organized and in a medium that is easy to pop in a watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I do take care to archive ISOs of all my disks, since I find that the shelf life of some DVD-r's is kind of short, about 5 years.
I store my photos on a local NAS device in my home, but I am considering a cloud based service. I make periodic backups of the data using archive-grade DVD's that I send to various family members. When stored properly, archive-grade media should last 50+ years. Yes the technology changes, but most BluRay players are backward compatible with CD, a format that has been around for 20 some years, and will be around for the foreseeable future. For most people, it shouldn't be much effort to change formats, and re-archive your collection every 10-20 years, and/or move to a new data hosting service.
Printing could be the ultimate backup method, but it can get expensive, and hard to store. Sifting through shoe boxes of photos is time consuming. Also consider what happens if you have a second or third child. Do you now make doubles, or triples of all your photos? I think your kids would prefer a few disks of files, rather than a steamer trunk of paper.
It is called computer-adaptive testing. I can't speak to the CA CPA exam, but the algorithm is usually not secret. Questions are categorized as easy, medium, and hard, some tests may have more categories. Your first question is of medium difficulty. When you answer a question correctly, your next question is harder. If you get a question wrong, you are given the next easier question. You get more points for correctly answering a hard questions than an easy ones. The test taker does not know the difficulty of the current question, and you are never permitted to return to a question once it is submitted.
This is how the GRE was run when I took it. I recall that you could request a statement of how each question was scored, but it was missing the question and the choices, so it would be of little diagnostic value to most people.
I know I would not want to submit to a test that scores the question before you actually respond. I suppose it is a fun research topic, but I don't see a practical application for the work. Maybe you could add it to a game show like Who Wants to be a Millionare. There would be no need for Regis to ask "is that your final answer?"
I agree. Why can't a business, big or small, simply tell an employee that they no longer need your services? When the tables are turned, no one says that the employee is screwing their employer when they quit. No one complains when a consumer decides to stop buying a product because they just don't want it anymore. Yes employers, especially large ones, do hold a lot of power, but you were not forced to work for them in the first place.
According to the article this person was flagged by the system for making a lot of returns in a short period of time. Simply returning one item does not put you on the 90-day return hold list. This system appears to be able to track returns across multiple stores, so multiple returns at store A might affect you ability to make future returns at store B. The article is light on details, but I will make the following assumptions. Returning an open item is weighted more negatively than returning a sealed item (that can be immediately resold). Also making an exchange for an open item is viewed less negatively by the system than a simple return. Given all this I could see where a retailer would want to flag customers that buy and then return a lot of open items. I don't know where that cutoff should be, but there needs to be a limit. Why subject yourself to abuse? A customer who thinks they are being wronged can vote with their wallet.
I never said that I quiz the candidate on a bunch of facts and definitions. That is annoying, and reveals little. Most of my questions are phrased in terms of "tell me about a time where you did x", or examples of how they handled certain situations. I am always more interested in what you have done, rather than what you know. That being said, if the job description states "... the candidate will be working on an Agile development team...", you had better be able to talk intelligently about Agile, and how your experience applies. Or if the job description mentions a specific commercial software package, I expect that you have read up on in it and know generally what the product does. In that same vein, if I ask if you have ever done multi-threaded programming, or how would you troubleshoot a race condition, you are going to need to know the definition to answer the question.
In short, good programmers do know the definition of basic concepts, and can relate it to their past experience, and good candidates do research before they walk in the door.
The recruiters I have worked with are paid a commission when they fill a position, not the number of candidates they generate. Like the parent poster, I too am inundated with calls from recruiters. I have also interviewed a lot of people for various open positions on my team. In my experience the inexperienced programmers don't get the job because they lack buzzwords, but that they fail to sell the skills they do have. I have interviewed many candidates who say "never heard of that" when asked about a technology in the job description. Some basic research and preparation would help the candidate to see how they can spin their experience to cover any deficiencies. I am more impressed when a candidate says "haven't done that, but I understand the concepts, and let me tell you about something similar in my background." Sometimes you can draw out that diamond-in-the-rough candidate, but if the interviewer has to dig too far, it is just easier to move on to the next applicant.
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I have been cornering the market on Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice. One bad season and I will bring the world to its knees. Bwhaahaa!
I agree with you. There are very vocal proponents on both sides of this issue (and many other issues) who like to shout how dumb the beliefs of their opponents are. It is counterproductive to insult the group you are attempting to persuade to join your side.
I did not say you are a know-nothing at 10 years. But at 10 you could not have possibly seen all that there is, especially in such a diverse subject as comp. sci. You said yourself, that you discovered two new testing techniques in one class. I take exception to your generalized statement that graduate degrees are "usually only good for credential padding ..." I spent a lot of time considering different schools and programs, looking for a degree to compliment my background and career goals. Yes, there were boring nights, but I learned a heck of a lot too, and I don't consider myself a lightweight, then or now. I recognize that you seem to be having a different experience, but most of the people I know, after finishing a program, say that it was a very rewarding experience.
That is good advice on the letters of recommendation. Most schools have some kind of an open house. That is going to be a good opportunity for you to ask about their specific requirements. You may find that they have alternatives for people in your situation.
Another option to consider is enrolling in a non-degree status with the school. You might be able to take a few classes, before having to be formally admitted as a degree-seeking student. There are perks to going this route. It allows you to get more familiar with the school, and them with you. The application process shouldn't be very rigorous. After a class or two, you will have some recent academic experience, and a professor willing to write a recommendation letter. My school allowed me to transfer up to 12 credits from non-degree to a degree program, so the time wasn't wasted either.
... if you are learning much in a Masters program after 10 years in the field, you were a crappy developer.
I have to disagree, especially at only 10 years of experience. A good masters program should be exposing you to a variety of development methods, techniques, and theory. Far more that most people with 10, or even 20 years experience could have learned in the course of a normal career. Most programs allow you to tailor your classes to fit your areas of interest or to fill in areas where you are deficient. It is up to you to find the proper balance. If you are not learning, you are doing something wrong, or picked the wrong program.
Bozeman, Montana, is a great place to live. It has a low crime rate, and will likely be the place where we make first contact with extraterrestrials.
I think that is what he is trying to say, that many of these systems are poorly designed. Water is being removed from an area of "ample" supply to areas with little or no supply. We are attempting to take the same volume of water and spread it out over a larger area, on a global scale.
In some cases the water used for irrigation is piped in from miles away, so the unused water does not flow back to source.
You have been working with a machine(s) that you do not own for some number of years are you are just starting to worry about this now? In most offices, anyone can log on to any machine, probably remotely. There are probably backups of your stuff running around the infrastructure somewhere too. If anyone wanted your info, they already have it. I would simply ask that your machine be re-imaged before you go. If questioned, you want to be courteous to the next person to occupy your desk.
Two thoughts come to my mind on the color. First, green could be the only color this fabric comes in at the moment. It might be some industrial material used in manufacturing, and was ordered for testing to see if it would work. If proven to work, they will then worry about color and style of the suit. My other thought was that this is a safety feature. If the suit is being designed for use on the Moon or Mars, you might want a highly visible color should you need to search for a lost astronaut.
The low res. images don't help. I really want to see closeup photos/video of this new docking hatch. It might make the suit look ugly, but it sure does make it more versatile.
I wouldn't say it is a horrible idea, but you are correct in that it won't scale well. I have used spreadsheets successfully on teams as large as twenty, with everyone collocated at one facility. We simply had color coded cells to denote the reason for being out of the office, vacation, training, travel, etc... If the goal is to coordinate among a small(ish) group of people, then keep it simple. If you need to tie this into payroll and coordinate a large number of employees across several sites, then you are going to need a more comprehensive SW package.
No, I would likely not buy any physical (or downloaded MP3) media. This assumes that the costs are comparable, but would be a valuable service for my family.
Well, for the most part...the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping, and owning to replay over and over again in the coming years.
That's not just my "get off my lawn" mentality either...I hear it from younger people today. They go through tons of music, but it is quite often disposable, I've heard them say.
The worth or value of the music is a matter of taste. The Wall is a good album, but it is crap when compared to Sgt. Pepper. ;)
Perhaps the younger generation says their music is disposable because it is easily available. Who thinks twice about throwing away a paper coffee cup when you are done. You could keep it, and bring it back to Starbucks tomorrow, but why? There is a stack of 100 next to the register, and another 1000 in the store room. We all might save a few cents if we reused the cups, but in the end it is not worth it. I recognize that some people have reusable cups, but it is rarely done to save money. I buy a lot of Disney songs to play for my kids in the car. I could choose to tune in the XM kids stations, but they want (demand) a more specific lineup. Since the play list is the same everyday, I find it easier to own the songs, the same way some people own a durable coffee cup, that they have filled at Starbucks every day.
Not only is it easy and available, but it is now customizable. With services like Pandora, I can tweak a station to suit my preferences, and even my mood. I bought CDs when I was young because I wanted to hear more than the title track from an album. I wanted to go deeper into a genera than the radio allowed. Now I can tune in an XM station that plays a very specific sound, or customize my experience with Pandora.
Doesn't that give you less flexibility as a student? Many people have pointed out that you can often buy books online, or from a friend who recently took the course much cheaper. You also might be able to share with a roommate. Some professors might make the book optional, or tell you that an older version is still OK to use. In addition, if everyone is given a copy, there will be little or no demand for resale. I kept some books from school, but I sold most because I had no reason or desire to keep the book.
I think one of the prime reasons to raise the button is to give the user the ability to feel their way across the keypad. Think of how a touch typist can feel the edges of the keys to keep their fingers centered. Before touch screens I could dial my phone without looking. If a single "brush" of the key activates it, have you really improved anything? This is a technology to watch, but I am not sure if it is ready for prime-time.
Maybe Leakey meant it would take 15 to 30 years worth of figurative Genesis days.
You are spot on. This is the kind of crap that happens when you are given a "blank check" from someone else. If the money used had been West Virginia's money, or the school district's money you bet that more care would have been taken in how it was spent. Because the Federal Government was paying the bill, the State just blindly said "we'll take 1000 of those."
You do make a good point. I often have to take several shots to get one where all the children a looking at the camera. There are also the over/under exposed ones you would never use. I have made a hobby out of putting all the best photos into a video that I had out to the family at Christmas time. You get the best stuff, all organized and in a medium that is easy to pop in a watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I do take care to archive ISOs of all my disks, since I find that the shelf life of some DVD-r's is kind of short, about 5 years.
I store my photos on a local NAS device in my home, but I am considering a cloud based service. I make periodic backups of the data using archive-grade DVD's that I send to various family members. When stored properly, archive-grade media should last 50+ years. Yes the technology changes, but most BluRay players are backward compatible with CD, a format that has been around for 20 some years, and will be around for the foreseeable future. For most people, it shouldn't be much effort to change formats, and re-archive your collection every 10-20 years, and/or move to a new data hosting service.
Printing could be the ultimate backup method, but it can get expensive, and hard to store. Sifting through shoe boxes of photos is time consuming. Also consider what happens if you have a second or third child. Do you now make doubles, or triples of all your photos? I think your kids would prefer a few disks of files, rather than a steamer trunk of paper.
It is called computer-adaptive testing. I can't speak to the CA CPA exam, but the algorithm is usually not secret. Questions are categorized as easy, medium, and hard, some tests may have more categories. Your first question is of medium difficulty. When you answer a question correctly, your next question is harder. If you get a question wrong, you are given the next easier question. You get more points for correctly answering a hard questions than an easy ones. The test taker does not know the difficulty of the current question, and you are never permitted to return to a question once it is submitted.
This is how the GRE was run when I took it. I recall that you could request a statement of how each question was scored, but it was missing the question and the choices, so it would be of little diagnostic value to most people.
I know I would not want to submit to a test that scores the question before you actually respond. I suppose it is a fun research topic, but I don't see a practical application for the work. Maybe you could add it to a game show like Who Wants to be a Millionare. There would be no need for Regis to ask "is that your final answer?"
I agree. Why can't a business, big or small, simply tell an employee that they no longer need your services? When the tables are turned, no one says that the employee is screwing their employer when they quit. No one complains when a consumer decides to stop buying a product because they just don't want it anymore. Yes employers, especially large ones, do hold a lot of power, but you were not forced to work for them in the first place.
According to the article this person was flagged by the system for making a lot of returns in a short period of time. Simply returning one item does not put you on the 90-day return hold list. This system appears to be able to track returns across multiple stores, so multiple returns at store A might affect you ability to make future returns at store B. The article is light on details, but I will make the following assumptions. Returning an open item is weighted more negatively than returning a sealed item (that can be immediately resold). Also making an exchange for an open item is viewed less negatively by the system than a simple return. Given all this I could see where a retailer would want to flag customers that buy and then return a lot of open items. I don't know where that cutoff should be, but there needs to be a limit. Why subject yourself to abuse? A customer who thinks they are being wronged can vote with their wallet.
I never said that I quiz the candidate on a bunch of facts and definitions. That is annoying, and reveals little. Most of my questions are phrased in terms of "tell me about a time where you did x", or examples of how they handled certain situations. I am always more interested in what you have done, rather than what you know. That being said, if the job description states "... the candidate will be working on an Agile development team ...", you had better be able to talk intelligently about Agile, and how your experience applies. Or if the job description mentions a specific commercial software package, I expect that you have read up on in it and know generally what the product does. In that same vein, if I ask if you have ever done multi-threaded programming, or how would you troubleshoot a race condition, you are going to need to know the definition to answer the question.
In short, good programmers do know the definition of basic concepts, and can relate it to their past experience, and good candidates do research before they walk in the door.
The recruiters I have worked with are paid a commission when they fill a position, not the number of candidates they generate. Like the parent poster, I too am inundated with calls from recruiters. I have also interviewed a lot of people for various open positions on my team. In my experience the inexperienced programmers don't get the job because they lack buzzwords, but that they fail to sell the skills they do have. I have interviewed many candidates who say "never heard of that" when asked about a technology in the job description. Some basic research and preparation would help the candidate to see how they can spin their experience to cover any deficiencies. I am more impressed when a candidate says "haven't done that, but I understand the concepts, and let me tell you about something similar in my background." Sometimes you can draw out that diamond-in-the-rough candidate, but if the interviewer has to dig too far, it is just easier to move on to the next applicant.