I can honestly say, I strongly recommend this procedure, but with the following caution : choose a physician who's done thousands, not hundreds of procedures. Also, I'd recommend using a physician who uses the 'tracking' lasers. Older lasers require that you keep your eye still during the procedure. I had some difficulty keeping my eye still while I was under the gun - after all; they'd loaded me up with valium. The doc kept telling me "Look directly at the red light in front of you", to which I replied "I am, but it keeps moving...".
Anyhow; my vision went from being 20/300 to 20/15; not overnight, but over the course of about a month. Still (2 years later) sometimes you wake up, and one eye is a little blurier than the other, but that's just a variable.
You should be aware that LASIK does not prevent the normal degredation of vision. If you've been picking up a few points per year on your perscription; you'll continue to do so after surgery.
I have noticed, also, that my eyes do get more tired, and more dry than they used to. Keeping a bottle of visine handy solves that. There's also this gel stuff (really just seems like vasiline for your eyes) called Refresh P.M. by Allergan that you put in your eyes before going to bed. I highly recommend that if you give your eyes a tough week at the computer screen.
The way I look at it though, there are few negatives, and huge positives to having it done. If you've worn glasses or contact most of your life, you won't believe the satisfaction of being able to read the clock when you first open your eyes in the morning...
I went through a similar process described in the article when I moved to Utah last year at this time.
I knew at the time that things weren't going to be as easy as they had before (The last couple of jobs I'd had, I cleaned out one office on Friday, and moved into a new one the next Monday), and Utah was an especially tough market (fewer jobs, and more experienced techies to compete with - not to mention the whole LDS 'inside track' - but that's a different story...).
I realized pretty quick that I needed to really sharpen my resume; not just so that it got across the pertinent facts that I had the skills necessary for the job, but my resume needed to get noticed above and beyond the 10 other equally qualified techs.
Many people will tell you that an objective is crap; this is not so. Think of it as a mini-cover letter. Make your objective custom tailored to each type of position you want to apply (i.e. do a different one for the resume you use to apply for 'programmer' positions than the one you use for 'web developer' jobs). Yes, this means you will end up with various versions of your resume. I had, in all, 5 different versions.
Also, make sure your cover letter explicitly responds to the requests made in the hiring ad. Whether the person reading your cover letter is technical or not, what they really want to know, and in as few words as possible, is if you will fit their needs. Address their needs, tell them (very briefly) that you've solved similar problems before, or have other applicable experience/skills. As I made my Resume's objective tailored to the position; I made my coverletter tailored to the specific company. Yes, this means writing (or selectively editing) a lot of cover letters - one for each application, if you're smart.
Lastly, I had to change the way I looked for jobs. I noticed, at least in Utah (and this is true in other places as well), that web sites such as monster and hotjobs.com had fallen out of favor. This is probably because the local companies were reallyo only interested in local candidates, and not interested in paying headhunter's fees (headhunters still dominate some online job boards) when there's so much local talent laying around. I found the local paper (imagine that) to be my best source of job leads.
The bottom line is, folks; it's a different job market out there now than it was even just 18 months ago. It's time to get your game on, get hip to the strategies that work, and dump those that don't. Otherwise, you'll find yourself working in a place where your name is on your shirt, and not on your desk.
The small companies I've worked for seem to make a number of fundamental mistakes. The number one of them being that practices that applies to their larger competitors do not apply to them.
Having worked for both large (160,000+ employees) and small (10 employees); I've gotten to see the differences up close. Just so there's no question about where I'm coming from, I'm currently employed by a very small company (I'm employee #12 of 13).
You'r boss' request sounds like those endemic to small co.s; the rationale seems to be that "since we're a small company we have to work harder and with fewer resources to compete and survive." This is not a theory to which I subscribe, and to my experience, all of the smaller companies I've worked at who followed this doctrine have folded or been swallowed by a competitor.
The fact is, small companies need to work more efficiently, not just harder than larger companies. With limited resources, efficiency is crucial; waste is not just detrimental, but life-threatening for a small company - it simply doesn't have the margins to support it.
The problem, I think, stems usually from the person who had founded a small company. They've typically worked their butts off and invested countless hours and long beyond belief day after day in the start-up process. This action carried them to the point where they were able to hire others to grow the business outward, but the attitude and expectations remain that longer hours and more work will yield more success (it has up to now, so why should that change, right?). Add to that their perceived need to make certain goals on less manpower, and the usual conclusion is a deluded justification for expecting massive hours from people.
Well, the facts of the matter (as prerviously pointed out by multiple posts) are that such a rule is rarely true, and pushing employees for long hours erodes efficiency greatly, and increases exponentially the chance that they'll incurr the huge cost of replacing an employee (and I'd argue that the cost of replacing and retraining an employee in a small business is 4 times that of a larger business, because in a small outfit, everyone seems to be doing 4 different jobs at once).
Well, now, not that any of this directly helps your case, but it never hurts to think a little about what makes an otherwise rational human being expect that another person would be perfectly happy sitting in a cube for 15 hours a day under flourescent lighting, tapping away at a keyboard performing mentally tedious tasks.
You may not be taking into account the 'whole package' your competitor was offering. They may have allocated ~$5k worth of programming, but probably added $5k for 24/7 customer support availability and $5k to install the app on a server farm with redunant systems and uptime guarantees. They probably also had some sort of legal guarantee of having the project completed by X date (make no mistake, these things cost money!). Or, it may be that your competitor is simply a larger company, with more resources (honestly, more people to answer the phone in case the client calls), and therefore has a larger overhead to support than you.
From the perspective of a small business, these things don't make much sense; why pay so much more money for guarantees on X, Y, and Z when it's just cheaper to take the risk? The thing is, for larger companies, it isn't cheaper to take the risk. Riding on any one given product or service a larger company buys there could be hundreds or thousands of billable hours or thousands of dollars of product waiting to go out the door.
If a software product or custom app doesn't function right, it could easily cost a company thousands upon thousands of dollars in lost sales, lost productivity, or lost efficiency. Therefore, spending an extra $10,000 on an app that comes with some guarantees can be (and is) viewed as cheap insurance. It means a lot to larger companies to have someone they can call 24/7 if the app borks in the middle of the night.
This is a large part of the reason why a lot of companies went with M$ and Sun for corporate IT servers, and why Linux is harder for them to adopt (I know RH and the like offer 24/7 tech support, but there's still a perception among some officers that it's a largely 'unsupported' platform).
Think about it, as an IT director for a $80M company, how long do you think you'd get to keep your job if the email server stopped routing mail, and you had to tell the board of directors that you'd submitted a question to some newsgroups, and you hope to hear back soon. Ok, that's an exaggerated picture, but not far from what IT directors consider when choosing software. They simply don't want, in the case that something does go wrong, to have to tell their bosses that they don't have anywhere to turn to in order to rectify the situation. Therefore, they tend to favor larger, (hence, more expensive) well established software companies who have a plan for some sort of permanence, and factor that into their costs.
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I can honestly say, I strongly recommend this procedure, but with the following caution : choose a physician who's done thousands, not hundreds of procedures. Also, I'd recommend using a physician who uses the 'tracking' lasers. Older lasers require that you keep your eye still during the procedure. I had some difficulty keeping my eye still while I was under the gun - after all; they'd loaded me up with valium. The doc kept telling me "Look directly at the red light in front of you", to which I replied "I am, but it keeps moving...".
Anyhow; my vision went from being 20/300 to 20/15; not overnight, but over the course of about a month. Still (2 years later) sometimes you wake up, and one eye is a little blurier than the other, but that's just a variable.
You should be aware that LASIK does not prevent the normal degredation of vision. If you've been picking up a few points per year on your perscription; you'll continue to do so after surgery.
I have noticed, also, that my eyes do get more tired, and more dry than they used to. Keeping a bottle of visine handy solves that. There's also this gel stuff (really just seems like vasiline for your eyes) called Refresh P.M. by Allergan that you put in your eyes before going to bed. I highly recommend that if you give your eyes a tough week at the computer screen.
The way I look at it though, there are few negatives, and huge positives to having it done. If you've worn glasses or contact most of your life, you won't believe the satisfaction of being able to read the clock when you first open your eyes in the morning...
I went through a similar process described in the article when I moved to Utah last year at this time.
I knew at the time that things weren't going to be as easy as they had before (The last couple of jobs I'd had, I cleaned out one office on Friday, and moved into a new one the next Monday), and Utah was an especially tough market (fewer jobs, and more experienced techies to compete with - not to mention the whole LDS 'inside track' - but that's a different story...).
I realized pretty quick that I needed to really sharpen my resume; not just so that it got across the pertinent facts that I had the skills necessary for the job, but my resume needed to get noticed above and beyond the 10 other equally qualified techs.
Many people will tell you that an objective is crap; this is not so. Think of it as a mini-cover letter. Make your objective custom tailored to each type of position you want to apply (i.e. do a different one for the resume you use to apply for 'programmer' positions than the one you use for 'web developer' jobs). Yes, this means you will end up with various versions of your resume. I had, in all, 5 different versions.
Also, make sure your cover letter explicitly responds to the requests made in the hiring ad. Whether the person reading your cover letter is technical or not, what they really want to know, and in as few words as possible, is if you will fit their needs. Address their needs, tell them (very briefly) that you've solved similar problems before, or have other applicable experience/skills. As I made my Resume's objective tailored to the position; I made my coverletter tailored to the specific company. Yes, this means writing (or selectively editing) a lot of cover letters - one for each application, if you're smart.
Lastly, I had to change the way I looked for jobs. I noticed, at least in Utah (and this is true in other places as well), that web sites such as monster and hotjobs.com had fallen out of favor. This is probably because the local companies were reallyo only interested in local candidates, and not interested in paying headhunter's fees (headhunters still dominate some online job boards) when there's so much local talent laying around. I found the local paper (imagine that) to be my best source of job leads.
The bottom line is, folks; it's a different job market out there now than it was even just 18 months ago. It's time to get your game on, get hip to the strategies that work, and dump those that don't. Otherwise, you'll find yourself working in a place where your name is on your shirt, and not on your desk.
The small companies I've worked for seem to make a number of fundamental mistakes. The number one of them being that practices that applies to their larger competitors do not apply to them.
Having worked for both large (160,000+ employees) and small (10 employees); I've gotten to see the differences up close. Just so there's no question about where I'm coming from, I'm currently employed by a very small company (I'm employee #12 of 13).
You'r boss' request sounds like those endemic to small co.s; the rationale seems to be that "since we're a small company we have to work harder and with fewer resources to compete and survive." This is not a theory to which I subscribe, and to my experience, all of the smaller companies I've worked at who followed this doctrine have folded or been swallowed by a competitor.
The fact is, small companies need to work more efficiently, not just harder than larger companies. With limited resources, efficiency is crucial; waste is not just detrimental, but life-threatening for a small company - it simply doesn't have the margins to support it.
The problem, I think, stems usually from the person who had founded a small company. They've typically worked their butts off and invested countless hours and long beyond belief day after day in the start-up process. This action carried them to the point where they were able to hire others to grow the business outward, but the attitude and expectations remain that longer hours and more work will yield more success (it has up to now, so why should that change, right?). Add to that their perceived need to make certain goals on less manpower, and the usual conclusion is a deluded justification for expecting massive hours from people.
Well, the facts of the matter (as prerviously pointed out by multiple posts) are that such a rule is rarely true, and pushing employees for long hours erodes efficiency greatly, and increases exponentially the chance that they'll incurr the huge cost of replacing an employee (and I'd argue that the cost of replacing and retraining an employee in a small business is 4 times that of a larger business, because in a small outfit, everyone seems to be doing 4 different jobs at once).
Well, now, not that any of this directly helps your case, but it never hurts to think a little about what makes an otherwise rational human being expect that another person would be perfectly happy sitting in a cube for 15 hours a day under flourescent lighting, tapping away at a keyboard performing mentally tedious tasks.
You may not be taking into account the 'whole package' your competitor was offering. They may have allocated ~$5k worth of programming, but probably added $5k for 24/7 customer support availability and $5k to install the app on a server farm with redunant systems and uptime guarantees. They probably also had some sort of legal guarantee of having the project completed by X date (make no mistake, these things cost money!). Or, it may be that your competitor is simply a larger company, with more resources (honestly, more people to answer the phone in case the client calls), and therefore has a larger overhead to support than you. From the perspective of a small business, these things don't make much sense; why pay so much more money for guarantees on X, Y, and Z when it's just cheaper to take the risk? The thing is, for larger companies, it isn't cheaper to take the risk. Riding on any one given product or service a larger company buys there could be hundreds or thousands of billable hours or thousands of dollars of product waiting to go out the door. If a software product or custom app doesn't function right, it could easily cost a company thousands upon thousands of dollars in lost sales, lost productivity, or lost efficiency. Therefore, spending an extra $10,000 on an app that comes with some guarantees can be (and is) viewed as cheap insurance. It means a lot to larger companies to have someone they can call 24/7 if the app borks in the middle of the night. This is a large part of the reason why a lot of companies went with M$ and Sun for corporate IT servers, and why Linux is harder for them to adopt (I know RH and the like offer 24/7 tech support, but there's still a perception among some officers that it's a largely 'unsupported' platform). Think about it, as an IT director for a $80M company, how long do you think you'd get to keep your job if the email server stopped routing mail, and you had to tell the board of directors that you'd submitted a question to some newsgroups, and you hope to hear back soon. Ok, that's an exaggerated picture, but not far from what IT directors consider when choosing software. They simply don't want, in the case that something does go wrong, to have to tell their bosses that they don't have anywhere to turn to in order to rectify the situation. Therefore, they tend to favor larger, (hence, more expensive) well established software companies who have a plan for some sort of permanence, and factor that into their costs.