The names are poorly chosen, and aren't intended to mean what you'd usually think they mean. He's also drawing a connection from a couple of somewhat legitimate (at least not based on a comedy show) books on the subject. If you read far enough to get to the explanation of what the names are intended to mean, it's actually a relatively insightful analysis.
Basically, he's grouping people like this:
clueless / loser : on the bad end of a poor economic exchange, i.e. getting less back from the company than the effort they put in
loser : smart/lazy enough to recognize that the deal is bad, and put forth no more effort than necessary to keep the job
clueless : unaware that they're in a bad deal, and continue to put in way more effort than required -- quickly promoted to middle management where they are positioned to take the fall for:
sociopath : smart / lucky enough to maneuver a position where they get back more from the company than they put in. Necessarily a small group in any company, and must actively foster a population of clueless (to take the fall when a gamble goes wrong) and losers (to get the actual grunt work done) in order to survive.
They're also meant as labels for positions in a company's structure, than an assessment of the person occupying the role. Based on his definitions, it's quite common for people to move between the roles, and both clueless and sociopaths typically start out as losers, unless they're in on the company from the start.
What are the requirements for these positions? Do they require PhD's? Or are the qualifications so varied that its difficult to find people who have above average skill in all the required areas of expertise?
College degree is nice, but probably not required. Some Java experience is probably good, although I was hired with only academic experience in it (I'd worked in C++ previously, and C# before that). Mostly what we find is missing is 1) the ability to code anything past an "intro to programming" level problem on the fly and talk about it intelligently, and 2) a firm grasp on the fundamentals of software engineering. Not specific to any language, but just that you understand OOP, GC in memory managed languages, what SOAP is, roughly what a JOIN does in SQL, what an Edge Caching Service is, when you would use Java vs. C++, and what TCP Keep Alive connections are. You don't have to be a SQL wizard, you don't have to have written the Java GC routines, you don't have to have ever worked with an Edge Cache before, but you need to have at least some concept of what these things are, because they're all major concepts in the process of building a webservice-based system.
Does that count as "too varied"? I don't think it does... like I said, we're not asking for you to be a SQL expert AND a Java expert. We're not even asking for you to be either, so long as you can knock out algorithms in pseudo-code and you seem like you could pick up Java pretty quickly on the job. But it's really depressing how many people who've been in the industry for years just don't have the ability to express themselves cleanly in code. We're looking for people who have the coding down cold so they can work on the actual hard problems without the mechanics getting in the way, and it just doesn't seem to happen that often.
If a company is really serious about a project, they'll hire the most qualified people available. Those available people may or may not have the exact qualifications they are looking for.
That's assuming you can find a minimum level of competency. You'd be amazed how many people have been lead engineers for 10 years but still can't code to save their lives. At some point a candidate is so bad that you'd end up LOSING time by hiring them, because the good engineers you already have would now have to spend time cleaning up after them as well as doing their own jobs.
But since we started H-1b about 12 years ago things have slid and only gotten worse and worse.
How do you figure? I work at a great tech company who pays 6 figures for most programming positions, and we still can't find nearly enough qualified people to hire.
"Same with the U.S. I almost never send a coverletter, my resume is 2 pages but it essentially explains what I've done at the past 4 jobs."
Really? Why so short, doesn't that show lack of experience, etc?
Mine is pared down (I thought) to about 12 pages....I've done too much to squeeze it down to less.
I had always heard that a resume should be exactly 1 page long. If you're young or incompetent it'll be 1 page of mostly filler. If you're older and have a strong career it'll be 1 page of condensed awesomeness, and you'll have plenty to fill in when asked.
As for your 12 pages, that seems really, really excessive. If that's 12 pages of multiple-year jobs with major accomplishments at each, the technology involved in the older ones is almost certainly obsolete by now. If it's 12 pages of every minute detail of every little thing you did at each contracting job that you held for 3 months, it makes you look insecure and incapable of picking out the highlights of your career (and the recruiter / interviewer is NOT going to pick them out for you).
What you really want is a short list of career highlights, with a sentence or two describing the old jobs and at MOST a paragraph or 3-5 bullet points describing the latest couple. More than 1 paragraph, even on the very latest job you've had, is way too much.
That sounds about right, especially since now the major networks are outdoing them even at hard sci-fi. Defying Gravity, FlashForward (adapted from a book, granted, but still nicely done), Fringe, the upcoming V remake, Dollhouse... hell, between Firefly and Kings, Fox alone has prematurely canceled more top-notch sci-fi shows than the Sci-Fi channel has created, and ABC is trying really hard to give them a run for their money. The only thing I've seen come out of the new "SyFy" is that insufferable mess called Warehouse 13. Battlestar was an aberration... they'll be back to programming 22 hours a day of Tremors: The Series reruns soon enough.
Having worked on systems like this, I have to say, you're probably overestimating the complexity of the data that Google keeps. Since you have a "Mark As Unread" option, the ability to tell if a mail has NEVER been read would require a second, hidden flag on every message that serves no purpose whatsoever in the context of an email system. I'd bet a large sum of money that they don't have the ability to tell you whether this message has ever been read with 100% certainty.
The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily.
Same as with any other tool, it's not inherently bad. How it's been used so far, however, is downright awful. I DARE you to justify why the "Find" option is available only on the "Format Text" Ribbon in Outlook.
I dispute that a cursive signature actually IS more personalized. Sure, if you're trying to print really neat block letters you're going to lose most of your unique markers, but that's not what "handwritten" means to most people. Non-cursive, non-block handwriting, which is what most people write in, has just as many personal touches as cursive.
Cursive as a magic agreement that somehow has weight over a printed name isn't really based on anything. Why would it matter if it just became printed? Anyway, there are plenty of people who do use something much more like printing than cursive already, and the world isn't falling apart.
Now granted, the actual disk capacity hasn't changed by a single bit as a result of changing the notation from a mislabeled TiB to actual base-10 TB, but it at least makes buying the biggest, most expensive drives a little less painful since they don't appear 10% smaller right out of the box.
I've got bad news for you... while your drives no longer appear 10% smaller, all your files are now 10% larger.
Same here, but Seattle also has plenty of off-street parking, and people in general walk a hell of a lot more than in Chicago. I'm also pretty sure they're city-owned in Seattle.
Just because they partition a data drive for you doesn't mean you're not going to lose everything about your OS install. And good luck getting the average user to put all the data they ACTUALLY want to keep in the right location to avoid losing a bunch of it.
Cashback isn't going anywhere. It's a permanent feature. The goal, of course, is that you don't go back to Google when they don't offer up a carrot, because you've found that the whole thing is worth using. As long as they keep paying out on Cashback, they'll have a set of people ready and waiting to notice when they actually fix the product as a whole. Not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
It seems like Google is content to measure the content of the buzz they generate, but not the volume. Gmail was like catnip back when it came out... everybody wanted one. Google Maps was the shit. Then Google Talk was pretty cool, and a lot of people started to switch just because it was easy. Docs came out and some people used it, while a pretty large portion of the web ignored it entirely. Android came out and nobody really cared because ooh shiny new iPhone. Now Wave and Voice are coming out, and a select few are raving about them, while the rest of us are left scratching our heads. Every release has had someone wildly convinced that this will change EVERYthing, and every successive release has had more and more people who just Don't Get It.
Call me crazy, but it seems that to make an industry-changing product you need to solve a problem that people already know they have. Email access from anywhere pre-Gmail was a nightmare. Online maps sucked really bad until they pointed some competent Javascript at them. What problem does Wave solve? "Man, I really wish I could live-blog interactively with ten friends, while simultaneously editing a photo journal of our last bar night?" I don't buy it. The idea that computers will sit in between you and human interaction and make everything about your life better in the process, well, that idea is dying fast. The new tech is the kind that augments your life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, then gets the hell out of your way. And Wave does not seem designed to get out of the way.
I swear I read somewhere when I was much younger that in the originals they actually had blades covered in colored glass beads, and blasted extremely bright stage lighting at them during the fight scenes. That's why Darth Vader shines like Yul Bryner's head during the fight scenes, but not so much other times.
Might have been just the first movie, since the later ones had them using the things in darker settings as well.
Call me crazy, but it seems that calling something a "sunken cost" is a justification for abandoning it only if there's really nothing useful to be done with the thing. When there really are some benefits to be had, using a position you're in thanks to money already spent is not unjustified.
Since the cost of the transition was financed with a small portion of the proceeds from the sale of the old Analog spectrum, the whole thing was pretty clearly a net gain.
Man, this is just never going to happen. I've worked in a couple groups at Microsoft, and they can't propose moving a single group 10 miles (from Redmond to Seattle) without half the employees threatening to quit. The stuff they can move offshore, like customer service, large manual testing operations, etc... well, they've already moved those to India years ago. This is just Balmer blowing hot air.
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Basically, he's grouping people like this:
They're also meant as labels for positions in a company's structure, than an assessment of the person occupying the role. Based on his definitions, it's quite common for people to move between the roles, and both clueless and sociopaths typically start out as losers, unless they're in on the company from the start.
College degree is nice, but probably not required. Some Java experience is probably good, although I was hired with only academic experience in it (I'd worked in C++ previously, and C# before that). Mostly what we find is missing is 1) the ability to code anything past an "intro to programming" level problem on the fly and talk about it intelligently, and 2) a firm grasp on the fundamentals of software engineering. Not specific to any language, but just that you understand OOP, GC in memory managed languages, what SOAP is, roughly what a JOIN does in SQL, what an Edge Caching Service is, when you would use Java vs. C++, and what TCP Keep Alive connections are. You don't have to be a SQL wizard, you don't have to have written the Java GC routines, you don't have to have ever worked with an Edge Cache before, but you need to have at least some concept of what these things are, because they're all major concepts in the process of building a webservice-based system.
Does that count as "too varied"? I don't think it does... like I said, we're not asking for you to be a SQL expert AND a Java expert. We're not even asking for you to be either, so long as you can knock out algorithms in pseudo-code and you seem like you could pick up Java pretty quickly on the job. But it's really depressing how many people who've been in the industry for years just don't have the ability to express themselves cleanly in code. We're looking for people who have the coding down cold so they can work on the actual hard problems without the mechanics getting in the way, and it just doesn't seem to happen that often.
That's assuming you can find a minimum level of competency. You'd be amazed how many people have been lead engineers for 10 years but still can't code to save their lives. At some point a candidate is so bad that you'd end up LOSING time by hiring them, because the good engineers you already have would now have to spend time cleaning up after them as well as doing their own jobs.
How do you figure? I work at a great tech company who pays 6 figures for most programming positions, and we still can't find nearly enough qualified people to hire.
I had always heard that a resume should be exactly 1 page long. If you're young or incompetent it'll be 1 page of mostly filler. If you're older and have a strong career it'll be 1 page of condensed awesomeness, and you'll have plenty to fill in when asked.
As for your 12 pages, that seems really, really excessive. If that's 12 pages of multiple-year jobs with major accomplishments at each, the technology involved in the older ones is almost certainly obsolete by now. If it's 12 pages of every minute detail of every little thing you did at each contracting job that you held for 3 months, it makes you look insecure and incapable of picking out the highlights of your career (and the recruiter / interviewer is NOT going to pick them out for you).
What you really want is a short list of career highlights, with a sentence or two describing the old jobs and at MOST a paragraph or 3-5 bullet points describing the latest couple. More than 1 paragraph, even on the very latest job you've had, is way too much.
That sounds about right, especially since now the major networks are outdoing them even at hard sci-fi. Defying Gravity, FlashForward (adapted from a book, granted, but still nicely done), Fringe, the upcoming V remake, Dollhouse... hell, between Firefly and Kings, Fox alone has prematurely canceled more top-notch sci-fi shows than the Sci-Fi channel has created, and ABC is trying really hard to give them a run for their money. The only thing I've seen come out of the new "SyFy" is that insufferable mess called Warehouse 13. Battlestar was an aberration... they'll be back to programming 22 hours a day of Tremors: The Series reruns soon enough.
Having worked on systems like this, I have to say, you're probably overestimating the complexity of the data that Google keeps. Since you have a "Mark As Unread" option, the ability to tell if a mail has NEVER been read would require a second, hidden flag on every message that serves no purpose whatsoever in the context of an email system. I'd bet a large sum of money that they don't have the ability to tell you whether this message has ever been read with 100% certainty.
Same as with any other tool, it's not inherently bad. How it's been used so far, however, is downright awful. I DARE you to justify why the "Find" option is available only on the "Format Text" Ribbon in Outlook.
I bet you can recognize their name written (not cursive) in their own hand, too, though.
I dispute that a cursive signature actually IS more personalized. Sure, if you're trying to print really neat block letters you're going to lose most of your unique markers, but that's not what "handwritten" means to most people. Non-cursive, non-block handwriting, which is what most people write in, has just as many personal touches as cursive.
Cursive as a magic agreement that somehow has weight over a printed name isn't really based on anything. Why would it matter if it just became printed? Anyway, there are plenty of people who do use something much more like printing than cursive already, and the world isn't falling apart.
I've got bad news for you... while your drives no longer appear 10% smaller, all your files are now 10% larger.
Same here, but Seattle also has plenty of off-street parking, and people in general walk a hell of a lot more than in Chicago. I'm also pretty sure they're city-owned in Seattle.
Your understanding of the tax code is remarkably poor. Tax brackets do not work that way.
Uh... what? Unless your boss was defrauding you, there's no way your paycheck will ever be lower for working MORE hours at an hourly job.
Just because they partition a data drive for you doesn't mean you're not going to lose everything about your OS install. And good luck getting the average user to put all the data they ACTUALLY want to keep in the right location to avoid losing a bunch of it.
And no ability to upgrade from XP without wiping your entire machine. That's a hell of a "feature" for something that may as well be Vista SP3.
Cashback isn't going anywhere. It's a permanent feature. The goal, of course, is that you don't go back to Google when they don't offer up a carrot, because you've found that the whole thing is worth using. As long as they keep paying out on Cashback, they'll have a set of people ready and waiting to notice when they actually fix the product as a whole. Not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
It seems like Google is content to measure the content of the buzz they generate, but not the volume. Gmail was like catnip back when it came out... everybody wanted one. Google Maps was the shit. Then Google Talk was pretty cool, and a lot of people started to switch just because it was easy. Docs came out and some people used it, while a pretty large portion of the web ignored it entirely. Android came out and nobody really cared because ooh shiny new iPhone. Now Wave and Voice are coming out, and a select few are raving about them, while the rest of us are left scratching our heads. Every release has had someone wildly convinced that this will change EVERYthing, and every successive release has had more and more people who just Don't Get It.
Call me crazy, but it seems that to make an industry-changing product you need to solve a problem that people already know they have. Email access from anywhere pre-Gmail was a nightmare. Online maps sucked really bad until they pointed some competent Javascript at them. What problem does Wave solve? "Man, I really wish I could live-blog interactively with ten friends, while simultaneously editing a photo journal of our last bar night?" I don't buy it. The idea that computers will sit in between you and human interaction and make everything about your life better in the process, well, that idea is dying fast. The new tech is the kind that augments your life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, then gets the hell out of your way. And Wave does not seem designed to get out of the way.
I swear I read somewhere when I was much younger that in the originals they actually had blades covered in colored glass beads, and blasted extremely bright stage lighting at them during the fight scenes. That's why Darth Vader shines like Yul Bryner's head during the fight scenes, but not so much other times.
Might have been just the first movie, since the later ones had them using the things in darker settings as well.
Call me crazy, but it seems that calling something a "sunken cost" is a justification for abandoning it only if there's really nothing useful to be done with the thing. When there really are some benefits to be had, using a position you're in thanks to money already spent is not unjustified.
I was surprised to see Atlanta on the "good" list myself.
Since the cost of the transition was financed with a small portion of the proceeds from the sale of the old Analog spectrum, the whole thing was pretty clearly a net gain.
Gang shootings involving confused middle-aged white men hit an all time high yesterday.
Man, this is just never going to happen. I've worked in a couple groups at Microsoft, and they can't propose moving a single group 10 miles (from Redmond to Seattle) without half the employees threatening to quit. The stuff they can move offshore, like customer service, large manual testing operations, etc... well, they've already moved those to India years ago. This is just Balmer blowing hot air.