The various jobs you listed don't sound like you've done a lot of climbing rank-wise, it sounds like you've bounced around in different areas of specialty. Programmer, sys admin, tech support... most of the companies I've worked for, these aren't rungs, they're completely separate ladders.
If you're sure that Management (which would actually distance you from all of the above) is really what you want to do, try out a management position within a specialized area, e.g. Senior Programmer at a large company, Customer Support Manager, Lead Systems Engineer. Most importantly, figure out what type of work you like to and whether you want to get involved with management at all.
I doubt that swearing by itself has anything to do with stress relief. I think that supressing parts of your personality in mixed company is stressful, and that the relief of that stress comes when you have a casual/friendly enough relationship with co-workers that you can be yourself. Executives use swearing language less frequently because they have less casual/friendly relationships with most staff. It's more important for them to maintain a professional demaenor, lest they lose respect as an authority figure.
Try replacing the every instance of the word "swearing" in this article, perhaps even in the study itself, with terms like "dressing down," "coming out," "cracking jokes" or anything else you normally curb in mixed company & it's probably just as true.
I had the exact same experience about 7 years ago. After 2 years as a lead developer at a very large financial institution, I had convinced myself that I was sick of IT and made a career change. After 3 months as a science teacher, I realized it wasn't IT I was sick of, it was the company I was working for. I got back intot he IT field at a small, fun company and couldn't have been happier. I've moved around since, but stayed in the field with the knowledge that I really do love information technology as long as I'm in an open, creative environment where I can really enjoy it.
You may very well be sick of IT altogether, but before embarking on a total career change you may want to take a stab at just working for a company with a different corporate culture to see if that's really what you want.
Oops, nevermind, toward the bottom:
"The certification she received was as a Microsoft Certified Application Developer."
Ok, that's a bit more impressive.
I should have RTFA more thoroughly before posting. My bad.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see which certification she got. You can get a certification for an MS Desktop OS, and I know plenty of 9-year-olds who can do that.
Good for her and all, but is this really that big of a deal?
Doesn't the headline of this post conflict with what the article says? It's not 95% of IT projects, it's "some number" of projects by 95% of IT groups.
Even if these groups deliver only half of their projects on time, and we were to assume that all groups have approximinately the same number of projets, it's not anywhere near "95% of all IT projects."
The article says that only 5 percent of the groups responded that they were "always on time." A more accurate headline might be, "95% of IT Groups don't purport to be flawless."
Yeah... unfortunately that part's still a bit of a pain.
We are our own IT department, so while there's no unlucky sap that has to go around adjusting all the paper sizes for everyone in the office, we individually lose some time (& paper) futzing with the settings ourselves. Luckily we don't do that much printing...
Plenty of small businesses, I'm sure. Mine is one of them, I work for a small design studio in NYC, 5 permanent employees on multiple OS's, all using OO, and most of our consultants do as well.
First, the article doesn't say specifically "programming," it says "IT." That can involve a number of positions that ARE very social, and do involve continuous feedback. In fact, any IT project that doesn't somehow involve lots of feedback is pretty much doomed.
Second, consider that the "psychological makeup" of women, as you put it, might have more to do with social adaptation than with some inherent psychological disposition. This is exactly the kind of thinking that Lasha Dekker is trying to put a stop to-- the problem is that many women tend to grow up thinking they wouldn't be happy with IT jobs because they're told by people like you that they simply aren't cut out for it.
"isn't that very similar to how TI's car RFID system was made?"
According to Visa:
"Each transmission between card and reader has a unique code that cannot be reused even if it is intercepted"
So... not really, no. Just because two products use the same base technology doesn't mean that one is as fallible as the other. All cars made of metal and fiberglass don't rate the same in crash tests.
Again, security cameras do not record your name or any other information about you other than what you look like, and the information isn't reviewed unless necessary, and it isn't kept permanently. I made no indication either way whether or not I'm for or against public security cameras, and I'm not going to bother to make anymore arguments because all you're doing is arguing the words you put in my mouth and ignoring everything I've actually said.
Sharing notes is fine, but fingerprinting and photographing people who arren't being arrested for something is an obvious violation of the right to privacy. I've never been one to guard my personal information very heavily, but I certainly don't want it to be OK to be standing on a street corner one night & be attacked by NARCs with cameras.
Can you please show me where my line of reasoning implies that surveilance equipment in banks and stores is just as bad IDing, printing, and photographing specific people standing outside on a public corner?
Surveilance cameras in stores are used to monitor a place of business in case there's a robbery. Tapes are only reviewed if a robbery happens to occur, and THAT's how you get leads. Your name isn't written down anywhere, your fingerprint isn't taken, and when you walk into a bank or store you expect that the area is under surveilance. And, the tapes are usually recorded over after a few weeks if nothing happened that warrented reviewing them.
The equivalent of this practice would be for the police to put surveilance cameras in public places (which is already being done in some areas, see www.notbored.com). Plenty of people have problems with that too, but that's getting offtopic. Either way, jumping out of marked and unmarked vans and recording your name, fingerprint, and image to be kept in a permanent police file is NOT the same thing. Not by a longshot.
My point is, there used to be such a thing as the "right to privacy" in this country. I'm sure you've heard the term, but you obviously have no regard for what it means. The knowledge of your name and other personal information (by ANYONE, including government agencies) are supposed to be your choice and priveledge; a priveledge which you lose if and only if you do something that results in your arrest and detainment. Just because you're OK with the fact that everyone who has your name can cross reference information about you for the purposes of selling you things, or making statistical assumptions about you, or keeping you from getting a loan or finding employment, doesn't mean that everyone else has to be ok with it. It sets a dangerous precedent and renders portions of the Bill of Rights meaningless.
And please don't give me the argument that "those who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't worry that they're being watched." There are other reasons for wanting your personal information kept personal than that you've broken a law.
Maybe this topic will be one that is debated among representatives of the state and community, and it will be decided that this method of crime prevention is in fact effective and doesn't result in any negative experiences for those on file who obey the law (as if being accosted on the street by a team of NARCs isn't already a negative experience). I'd be pretty dissappointed if that turned out to be the majority public's sentiment, but not nearly as disappointed as I am that it's already in practice when it so obviously violates rights we take for granted.
"There's nothing like coming home from work to find your door kicked in and your belongings strewn everywhere."
Tell that to anyone who's had their home searched because they were suspected of being a drug dealer. I bet there's also nothing like having the shit scared out of you by narcs bursting out of an unmarked van, throwing you against a wall & snapping your picture for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But don't worry, when the slow and steady deterioration of our civil liberties starts to affect you, you'll support due process too.
Mayor James M. Baker: "I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
The police units taking the photographs are known in some Wilmington neighborhoods as "jump-out squads" because they descend on corners, burst out of marked and unmarked vehicles and make arrests in seconds... This is known as a "Terry stop,"... On one shift this month, the officers told a group of men after a Terry stop that they were breaking the city's loitering laws, which bar anyone from blocking passage in a public place if asked to move, and could be arrested on the spot.
During that stop, the police took the men's names and addresses, snapped their pictures and let them go.
So, the loitering law says, "no blocking public passages if asked to move." Did the cops jumped out of an unmarked van and say "Please move"? No. They frisked everyone, and started snapping pictures of people doing nothing more than standing around. Does that sound lawful and constitutional to you?
Even if it does, does it sit well with you to know that the mayor has the attitude that he can do whatever the hell he wants until a court of law specifically tells him not to?
I think you're missing my point. There has to be a witness or some evidence or some motive or SOMETHING before someone can be considered a suspect. These are just loiterers with no connection to any specific crime. I don't see how standing on a street corner makes them suspected drug dealers. I'm not saying they are "actual drug dealers" as opposed to suspected, I'm saying they're not even suspects.
A few of differences here:
First, you're describing a situation where the cop recognized your budddy's car because he already had a string of DUIs. Most of the people now considered pre-guilty have no prior record.
Second, when a cop in a small town knows it's citizens' names and faces well enough to judge who is or is not likely to cause trouble, they're using personal knowledge and experience to more accurately assess what they're dealing with in a given situation. Simply blanket-detaining loiterers is the opposite. A small town cop goes from the broad (people in town) to the specific (person in town I know is always drunk driving), where this situation goes from the specific (known criminals) to the broad (everyone standing on a street corner after dusk). I can't see increasing the number of "suspects" for future-crimes making it any easier to single out those who are actually guilty.
Third, when you digitize information that you're collecting on innocent people you take it to a whole new level. Information gathered by one cop through personal experience with criminals is not the same as information shared by everyone in a law-enforcement agency based on circumstance and profile. In a time and place where everyone is paranoid about who or what their neighbor might be, this kind of data collection could easily increase everything wrong with the judicial system exponentially.
And what exactly makes them "suspected drug dealers"? This isn't a matter of police keeping databases on criminal activity that they're already investigating. From what the article says, the people who are having "an eye kept on them" have clean slates. There's no legitimate reason for suspicion, and no crime to connect them to. My question to you is, how the hell are police supposed to do their job of investigating ACTUAL CRIMES if they're busy building files on people who haven't done anything?
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The various jobs you listed don't sound like you've done a lot of climbing rank-wise, it sounds like you've bounced around in different areas of specialty. Programmer, sys admin, tech support... most of the companies I've worked for, these aren't rungs, they're completely separate ladders.
If you're sure that Management (which would actually distance you from all of the above) is really what you want to do, try out a management position within a specialized area, e.g. Senior Programmer at a large company, Customer Support Manager, Lead Systems Engineer. Most importantly, figure out what type of work you like to and whether you want to get involved with management at all.
I doubt that swearing by itself has anything to do with stress relief. I think that supressing parts of your personality in mixed company is stressful, and that the relief of that stress comes when you have a casual/friendly enough relationship with co-workers that you can be yourself. Executives use swearing language less frequently because they have less casual/friendly relationships with most staff. It's more important for them to maintain a professional demaenor, lest they lose respect as an authority figure. Try replacing the every instance of the word "swearing" in this article, perhaps even in the study itself, with terms like "dressing down," "coming out," "cracking jokes" or anything else you normally curb in mixed company & it's probably just as true.
I had the exact same experience about 7 years ago. After 2 years as a lead developer at a very large financial institution, I had convinced myself that I was sick of IT and made a career change. After 3 months as a science teacher, I realized it wasn't IT I was sick of, it was the company I was working for. I got back intot he IT field at a small, fun company and couldn't have been happier. I've moved around since, but stayed in the field with the knowledge that I really do love information technology as long as I'm in an open, creative environment where I can really enjoy it.
You may very well be sick of IT altogether, but before embarking on a total career change you may want to take a stab at just working for a company with a different corporate culture to see if that's really what you want.
http://www.tomsmithonline.com/freestuff/viddio/b5- 5y.mpg
http://www.tomsmithonline.com/freestuff/viddio/b5- 5y.avi
Sorry for the off-topic post, but no email for anonymous coward...
Open question to anyone out there with experience with Rackspace or any large hosting company:
Who would you recommend as a replacement for Rackspace?
Oops, nevermind, toward the bottom: "The certification she received was as a Microsoft Certified Application Developer." Ok, that's a bit more impressive. I should have RTFA more thoroughly before posting. My bad.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see which certification she got. You can get a certification for an MS Desktop OS, and I know plenty of 9-year-olds who can do that. Good for her and all, but is this really that big of a deal?
Doesn't the headline of this post conflict with what the article says? It's not 95% of IT projects, it's "some number" of projects by 95% of IT groups.
Even if these groups deliver only half of their projects on time, and we were to assume that all groups have approximinately the same number of projets, it's not anywhere near "95% of all IT projects."
The article says that only 5 percent of the groups responded that they were "always on time." A more accurate headline might be, "95% of IT Groups don't purport to be flawless."
What the difference between that, and just getting an office telephone system that can forward calls to another number (e.g. your cell phone)?
Yeah... unfortunately that part's still a bit of a pain.
We are our own IT department, so while there's no unlucky sap that has to go around adjusting all the paper sizes for everyone in the office, we individually lose some time (& paper) futzing with the settings ourselves. Luckily we don't do that much printing...
Plenty of small businesses, I'm sure. Mine is one of them, I work for a small design studio in NYC, 5 permanent employees on multiple OS's, all using OO, and most of our consultants do as well.
First, the article doesn't say specifically "programming," it says "IT." That can involve a number of positions that ARE very social, and do involve continuous feedback. In fact, any IT project that doesn't somehow involve lots of feedback is pretty much doomed.
Second, consider that the "psychological makeup" of women, as you put it, might have more to do with social adaptation than with some inherent psychological disposition. This is exactly the kind of thinking that Lasha Dekker is trying to put a stop to-- the problem is that many women tend to grow up thinking they wouldn't be happy with IT jobs because they're told by people like you that they simply aren't cut out for it.
"isn't that very similar to how TI's car RFID system was made?"
According to Visa:
"Each transmission between card and reader has a unique code that cannot be reused even if it is intercepted"
So... not really, no. Just because two products use the same base technology doesn't mean that one is as fallible as the other. All cars made of metal and fiberglass don't rate the same in crash tests.
But he was using a towel as a barricade when shovel-like things were smacking the three of them in the face at the very end of the trailer...
Again, security cameras do not record your name or any other information about you other than what you look like, and the information isn't reviewed unless necessary, and it isn't kept permanently. I made no indication either way whether or not I'm for or against public security cameras, and I'm not going to bother to make anymore arguments because all you're doing is arguing the words you put in my mouth and ignoring everything I've actually said.
I don't have a problem with databases either, I just have a problem with the way they're deciding who to add to them.
0 02/08/25wilmingtonpolic.html
There's a better article than the one from this post here:
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2
Sharing notes is fine, but fingerprinting and photographing people who arren't being arrested for something is an obvious violation of the right to privacy. I've never been one to guard my personal information very heavily, but I certainly don't want it to be OK to be standing on a street corner one night & be attacked by NARCs with cameras.
Can you please show me where my line of reasoning implies that surveilance equipment in banks and stores is just as bad IDing, printing, and photographing specific people standing outside on a public corner?
Surveilance cameras in stores are used to monitor a place of business in case there's a robbery. Tapes are only reviewed if a robbery happens to occur, and THAT's how you get leads. Your name isn't written down anywhere, your fingerprint isn't taken, and when you walk into a bank or store you expect that the area is under surveilance. And, the tapes are usually recorded over after a few weeks if nothing happened that warrented reviewing them.
The equivalent of this practice would be for the police to put surveilance cameras in public places (which is already being done in some areas, see www.notbored.com). Plenty of people have problems with that too, but that's getting offtopic. Either way, jumping out of marked and unmarked vans and recording your name, fingerprint, and image to be kept in a permanent police file is NOT the same thing. Not by a longshot.
My point is, there used to be such a thing as the "right to privacy" in this country. I'm sure you've heard the term, but you obviously have no regard for what it means. The knowledge of your name and other personal information (by ANYONE, including government agencies) are supposed to be your choice and priveledge; a priveledge which you lose if and only if you do something that results in your arrest and detainment. Just because you're OK with the fact that everyone who has your name can cross reference information about you for the purposes of selling you things, or making statistical assumptions about you, or keeping you from getting a loan or finding employment, doesn't mean that everyone else has to be ok with it. It sets a dangerous precedent and renders portions of the Bill of Rights meaningless.
And please don't give me the argument that "those who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't worry that they're being watched." There are other reasons for wanting your personal information kept personal than that you've broken a law. Maybe this topic will be one that is debated among representatives of the state and community, and it will be decided that this method of crime prevention is in fact effective and doesn't result in any negative experiences for those on file who obey the law (as if being accosted on the street by a team of NARCs isn't already a negative experience). I'd be pretty dissappointed if that turned out to be the majority public's sentiment, but not nearly as disappointed as I am that it's already in practice when it so obviously violates rights we take for granted.
"There's nothing like coming home from work to find your door kicked in and your belongings strewn everywhere."
Tell that to anyone who's had their home searched because they were suspected of being a drug dealer. I bet there's also nothing like having the shit scared out of you by narcs bursting out of an unmarked van, throwing you against a wall & snapping your picture for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But don't worry, when the slow and steady deterioration of our civil liberties starts to affect you, you'll support due process too.
Mayor James M. Baker: "I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
From this article: So, the loitering law says, "no blocking public passages if asked to move." Did the cops jumped out of an unmarked van and say "Please move"? No. They frisked everyone, and started snapping pictures of people doing nothing more than standing around. Does that sound lawful and constitutional to you?
Even if it does, does it sit well with you to know that the mayor has the attitude that he can do whatever the hell he wants until a court of law specifically tells him not to?
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/20 02/08/25wilmingtonpolic.html
I think you're missing my point. There has to be a witness or some evidence or some motive or SOMETHING before someone can be considered a suspect. These are just loiterers with no connection to any specific crime. I don't see how standing on a street corner makes them suspected drug dealers. I'm not saying they are "actual drug dealers" as opposed to suspected, I'm saying they're not even suspects.
A few of differences here: First, you're describing a situation where the cop recognized your budddy's car because he already had a string of DUIs. Most of the people now considered pre-guilty have no prior record. Second, when a cop in a small town knows it's citizens' names and faces well enough to judge who is or is not likely to cause trouble, they're using personal knowledge and experience to more accurately assess what they're dealing with in a given situation. Simply blanket-detaining loiterers is the opposite. A small town cop goes from the broad (people in town) to the specific (person in town I know is always drunk driving), where this situation goes from the specific (known criminals) to the broad (everyone standing on a street corner after dusk). I can't see increasing the number of "suspects" for future-crimes making it any easier to single out those who are actually guilty. Third, when you digitize information that you're collecting on innocent people you take it to a whole new level. Information gathered by one cop through personal experience with criminals is not the same as information shared by everyone in a law-enforcement agency based on circumstance and profile. In a time and place where everyone is paranoid about who or what their neighbor might be, this kind of data collection could easily increase everything wrong with the judicial system exponentially.
And what exactly makes them "suspected drug dealers"? This isn't a matter of police keeping databases on criminal activity that they're already investigating. From what the article says, the people who are having "an eye kept on them" have clean slates. There's no legitimate reason for suspicion, and no crime to connect them to. My question to you is, how the hell are police supposed to do their job of investigating ACTUAL CRIMES if they're busy building files on people who haven't done anything?
I saw it on MSNBC this morning, although there doesn't seem to be anything on the website. But it was reported on television at 7:30 this morning.