Interesting. I'm 41 and looking for a job right now. I live in Seattle, I have a heavy resume (or at least I think so) including financial, hard-core C++/Unix/VMS/whatever development, financial, scientific apps. Now I'm a contractor writing COM objects. I've encountered this phenomenon several times. I get rejections like "everyone who interviewed you was very impressed but we don't have a position where we could leverage your extensive skill set." Translation: you're overqualified and we can do with a younger & cheaper programmer. What I find interesting is that the companies where I get this treatment are the most bullshit in terms of their business plan. In the case of the one above, it's a.com with a brain-dead-on-arrival concept. Which suggests that they don't need heavy skills because all they plan to do is cash out and screw the investors still standing when the music stops.
Of course, that could be sour grapes. But then I have other contacts with companies that are more established, have serious balance sheets, a high degree of professionalism and their attitude is "what can we do to make you want to work here?"
I guess the moral of the story is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it. If there are a lot of buyers out there refusing the over 40 goods, then it may depress the price a bit. But there are a lot of people who know their business and can pretty accurately judge the value of investing in skill & experience. I try not to let it get to me.
I ain't workin no 70 hour week. And I get paid well too. I'll take the options, but only if they're not an inside joke among the early investors.
Media have been churning out these emotionally charged images for a long time now. You can reasonably argue (and many have) that the speed and efficacy of the electronic media has made a qualitiative difference, but really. Public discourse of all kinds has been rolling around in gossip and cras political manipulation since long before the printing press was invented.
A few years ago I came across a volume of speeches given before the Roman Senate (translated into English of course). Two things really struck me. One was that politics has not changed much in two thousand years. The other was that the average Roman senator seems to have been better educated than the average American. The speeches were clear, concise, well reasoned and generally appealed to facts rather than relying on unsubstantiated assertions.
Have you noticed that there are a lot of people on earth now, and that many them have nothing better to do than watch an awful lot of TV? And that some of them are, well... stupid?
One of the effects of technology is that columnists can fire off poorly thought out pieces & publish them on the web before their editor has a chance to see them.;-)
Something else to worry about
on
DNA Encryption
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· Score: 1
So, how do we know that someone or something hasn't done this already? Like, maybe we're just a carrier for a message, a carbon-based animated post-it that some other critters will read when they arrive, like "nice real-estate in this quadrant of the galaxy". Or maybe we are the message, the expression of some higher order of process... like Alan Watts said, "the universe is peopleing." I kind of like that one. Life forms as artistic creation of 4.5 billion year old massively parallel molecular supercomputer.
Methinks you know something of the business. BTW, sequencing is still pretty expensive too, running about $500 a gel which gets you order 50K usable bases read 100Kbits... that's if you're good at it and do it a lot.
Why bother when I can quietly slip as much data as I want into the noise of a compressed image file and hide it in the massive flow of pornography on the usenet alt.binaries. conferences?
Forget network computers, network devices, whatever. The future is here and most of us are using it already. Can you say cash machine?
Wintel has pretty much saturated the PC market. Now they're busy changing the fins on next year's model. The biggest remaining market is "the rest of us" who didn't buy apples because even that was too hard, or because we're still working through issues about potable water and reliable electric service. This market is beyond huge: it's going to be everybody on the planet with enough money to make an advertiser ever care about them, i.e. a majority of humans.
E-commerce is too hifalutin a term to describe what's coming. Niether windows nor anything else that advertises itself as an operating system is appropriate for this image of the future. Do you know what operating system your cash machine is running? How bout the last point-of-sale terminal you used?
Think unlimited bandwidth, ubiquitous devices, and oh, a few trillion transactions a day, taking a max of a few minutes each (not including the time to actually watch the movie) among millions of networked servers/clients, initiated by people who really don't care about saving stuff or whether they're at home, the office, or a fast food franchise waiting area when they do it.
Just to make sure I offend somebody (and you know who you are;-) a dollar to a doughnut says it's going to be based on a protocol and not a binary format.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. I'm 41 and looking for a job right now. I live in Seattle, I have a heavy resume (or at least I think so) including financial, hard-core C++/Unix/VMS/whatever development, financial, scientific apps. Now I'm a contractor writing COM objects. I've encountered this phenomenon several times. I get rejections like "everyone who interviewed you was very impressed but we don't have a position where we could leverage your extensive skill set." Translation: you're overqualified and we can do with a younger & cheaper programmer. What I find interesting is that the companies where I get this treatment are the most bullshit in terms of their business plan. In the case of the one above, it's a .com with a brain-dead-on-arrival concept. Which suggests that they don't need heavy skills because all they plan to do is cash out and screw the investors still standing when the music stops.
Of course, that could be sour grapes. But then I have other contacts with companies that are more established, have serious balance sheets, a high degree of professionalism and their attitude is "what can we do to make you want to work here?"
I guess the moral of the story is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it. If there are a lot of buyers out there refusing the over 40 goods, then it may depress the price a bit. But there are a lot of people who know their business and can pretty accurately judge the value of investing in skill & experience. I try not to let it get to me.
I ain't workin no 70 hour week. And I get paid well too. I'll take the options, but only if they're not an inside joke among the early investors.
Media have been churning out these emotionally charged images for a long time now. You can reasonably argue (and many have) that the speed and efficacy of the electronic media has made a qualitiative difference, but really. Public discourse of all kinds has been rolling around in gossip and cras political manipulation since long before the printing press was invented.
;-)
A few years ago I came across a volume of speeches given before the Roman Senate (translated into English of course). Two things really struck me. One was that politics has not changed much in two thousand years. The other was that the average Roman senator seems to have been better educated than the average American. The speeches were clear, concise, well reasoned and generally appealed to facts rather than relying on unsubstantiated assertions.
Have you noticed that there are a lot of people on earth now, and that many them have nothing better to do than watch an awful lot of TV? And that some of them are, well... stupid?
One of the effects of technology is that columnists can fire off poorly thought out pieces & publish them on the web before their editor has a chance to see them.
So, how do we know that someone or something hasn't done this already? Like, maybe we're just a carrier for a message, a carbon-based animated post-it that some other critters will read when they arrive, like "nice real-estate in this quadrant of the galaxy". Or maybe we are the message, the expression of some higher order of process... like Alan Watts said, "the universe is peopleing." I kind of like that one. Life forms as artistic creation of 4.5 billion year old massively parallel molecular supercomputer.
Too much. I have to go lie down now.
Methinks you know something of the business. BTW, sequencing is still pretty expensive too, running about $500 a gel which gets you order 50K usable bases read 100Kbits... that's if you're good at it and do it a lot.
Why bother when I can quietly slip as much data as I want into the noise of a compressed image file and hide it in the massive flow of pornography on the usenet alt.binaries. conferences?
Forget network computers, network devices, whatever. The future is here and most of us are using it already. Can you say cash machine?
;-) a dollar to a doughnut says it's going to be based on a protocol and not a binary format.
Wintel has pretty much saturated the PC market. Now they're busy changing the fins on next year's model. The biggest remaining market is "the rest of us" who didn't buy apples because even that was too hard, or because we're still working through issues about potable water and reliable electric service. This market is beyond huge: it's going to be everybody on the planet with enough money to make an advertiser ever care about them, i.e. a majority of humans.
E-commerce is too hifalutin a term to describe what's coming. Niether windows nor anything else that advertises itself as an operating system is appropriate for this image of the future. Do you know what operating system your cash machine is running? How bout the last point-of-sale terminal you used?
Think unlimited bandwidth, ubiquitous devices, and oh, a few trillion transactions a day, taking a max of a few minutes each (not including the time to actually watch the movie) among millions of networked servers/clients, initiated by people who really don't care about saving stuff or whether they're at home, the office, or a fast food franchise waiting area when they do it.
Just to make sure I offend somebody (and you know who you are