I am not personally aware of anyone that has gotten a job through a Dice posting, but I'm sure at least one or two such people exist. My company posts jobs on Dice (it's pretty expensive), and we haven't received any applicants from them that even warranted an interview. Admittedly, that could be more due to their userbase. All of our Dice respondents were out-of-state by at least a thousand miles, for an entry level position.
one of the quotes from the meeting I most liked was in response to a question about whether we were posting news of the announcement on Slashdot, and how the community would react. The Dice folks simply said, "Let them talk."
I don't like that at all. When left to talk, chances are, people aren't going to think of the most positive thing. This is exactly what I tell management every time somebody leaves. For the love of $DEITY, make an announcement that so-and-so is leaving, and what your plan is to backfill them and so forth. But every time, they leave gossip to fill the void, and it willingly does, and drops morale, and people leave, and the cycle repeats.
At least Dice could make some sort of official position statement, whether true or not, it works out better for them in the long run, rather than let the tongues wag.
Well undoubtedly the phone under contract was $100, but the phone itself was probably available elsewhere for $150 or so. 6 Months later it was available elsewhere for $100. One might ask why not just buy your own phone and then not have the contract. The answer to that is that many carriers charge you EXTRA if you are not under contract.
Why use it on a less than $100 phone?
Well, it wasn't a $100 phone when I bought it. It was probably $100 plus a two year commitment when I bought it. But 6 months into the contract it was a $100 phone.
I echo that it has been worth the money for awhile. I bought one for my latest system build and I got a 120ish GB SSD and put the system files on it. It boots to the login prompt in like 3 seconds. I bought a 2TB drive for my data files, which is serious overkill because even with copying the entire contents of my previous system on to this new drive, I was using less than 300 GB. I put Flight Simulator on the SSD and also my scenery files, which are mostly static, and Flight Sim starts up in just about 10 seconds. Even moving to a new scenery location, which usually takes 60 seconds or more on a hard drive, takes only seconds on the SSD. I highly recommend it.
A decent "regular" vacuum is, for me, a Dyson, and those cost right there.
I'll give you a hint. If they have to advertise it on an infomercial, it's crap. Sure it costs as much as a Kirby, but it is nowhere near as good as a Kirby. But you are correct that in comparison to the Roomba, just about any regular vacuum cleaner is going to come out looking like a miracle worker.
Maybe i am getting senile, but isn't this the second Roomba slashvertisement in the last week?
Really?, you need to ask the whole slashdot community what to do to insure a freaking phone???
No, they needed to announce to the whole slashdot community that they got an iphone 5.
Most of the carriers are agents for Asurion. They are great to do business with. I've had multiple claims over the last decade and they've handled them well.
Must be a different Asurion than the one I have dealt with. My stepson's phone had insurance on it, for $7.95 a month. When he broke his phone, they wanted a $99 deductible for him to get a replacement. The phone could be had on the internet for less than that.
My guess is that the OP is somewhat of a klutz and buys the insurance because it's a good value for him or her. Just because it isn't a good value for *most* people, doesn't mean the OP should avoid it.
But if careful people like you and I don't buy the insurance, then eventually, this poor klutzy person will have to pay more for his insurance then he would to just buy new phones (because the insurance company has to cover the cost of administration, plus profit). That wouldn't be fair that a klutzy person should have to pay the full price of their klutziness! This is America! We need to make everyone mandatorily participate n cell phone insurance so that everyone, not matter how careful or how clumsy, pays exactly the same rate for their insurance.
A 90 degree F, 90% humid day killed one of mine without any direct sunlight exposure, possibly because of undetected preexisting damage that allowed wet air to get to a bad place and condense when the temperature dropped.
That is barely within the operating parameters of the iphone. It is a little surprising how tight the parameters are. Here is for the iphone 4:
Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
This means that you should not be having your iphone on outdoors during most of a typical midwestern winter, or most of a typical midwestern summer, or when it is foggy or raining. In fact, if you want by these requirements, you would not have your iphone on outdoors 50% of the time.
I can pretty much guarantee you that they do NOT have similar functionality, unless the Samsung can run iOS6. Hint - it can't!
Quiet! if the judge hears this, Apple will have to drop the lawsuit!
Since when do IT Trade/Tech schools give you real knowledge? Nearly every applicant I've met who's been to one thinks he has real knowledge until you ask him to answer a real world question. The few who know the right answers generally knew the answers before they went to school for the paper.
Trade schools don't teach knowledge, they teach a trade. "Why do I insert tab A into slot B? I don't know, I just do it." College, on the other hand teaches knowledge, but not a trade. They know why tab A goes into slot B, but not how to do it. If you get really lucky you get someone who already had knowledge that then went to trade school, or someone who already knew how to do something and then went to college. Me, I've been programming since 6th grade, and then I went to College.
As for the original question, I think some of the information in the question is superfluous. "How To Prove IT Knowledge Without Expensive Certificates?" is the same question as "How To Prove IT Knowledge With Expensive Certificates?" to me, as the certificates mean little if nothing to me. The reason is because I have probably a dozen certificates, many in things I have never done, simply because I studied for a test. I also have failed to get certificates in things that I have a great deal of experience in, because I knew how it really worked and didn't study for the test. So to me, a certificate is not a likely statistical indicator of knowledge of a field anyway, so with or without a certificate, you're going to have to prove your knowledge to me.
it is basically Darwinism. the pilots who are better won't crash. the shit pilots will crash and be removed from the gene pool. over time this will give us better pilots!
By the time someone has the experience to become a commercial airline pilot, they have generally already done all the reproducing they are going to do.
Are you willing to look for employment outside your city? State?
Yes. In fact, I moved out of state to take the one job I was able to get, at about 1/5th of the pay of the previous position.
Have you thought about incorporating yourself, and get some headhunters to look for you some contract gigs?
Yes. In fact, my position prior to not being able to find a position was a contracting position. That was a large part of the reason I was unable to find another job. Companies specifically will turn aside people who have gone the contractor route in order to punish them for trying to get paid their fair share. Companies want corporate sheep who accept low wages and unpaid overtime. Also, I have had zero luck, none, with recruiters. I have only gotten two interviews through recruiters and the positions didn't pan out. This after spending sometimes 10 to 20 hours each filling out paperwork and taking the recruiters test to prove my knowledge and passing with flying colors.
Not pointing the finger at you...but just curious what all avenues you've pursued in gaining employment. Recently I was looking to hire.....had a hell of a time finding someone.
Well, as I indicate I am employed now, but I had to take a 5X pay cut, and I am slowly working my way back up. My responsibility is back to where it was, but my authority is still pretty low ( I have responsibility for a team to get work done, but not much authority to get them to do it , no budget, no authority to hire, etc), and my pay has climbed back to almost half what it used to be.
But it was a definite struggle to get another job, even though everybody I have ever worked for has always had high praise for my work, and my work has saved many companies literally millions of dollars annually. Recently I was looking to hire.....had a hell of a time finding someone.
Well, I am always willing to work remotely. Unlike some people, I can be trusted to actually work when working remotely. Lately, I am managing a team to bring in -house a third party OCR solution, and also managing a team to rewrite the existing internal batch flow. I am using Java and C++, SQL, no-sql, queues, drools, and a number of other interesting technologies. I am actually more of a Team Leader than a manager, in practice. I actually do more than 50% of the development myself, because one of my team members is pretty new and the other one is not really ideal for the position. I inherited the team, so I didn't get to pick or hire good team members.
If you don't get a chance it's because you don't know how to sell yourself or your skills, that has NOTHING to do with a piece of paper or your degree.
Matter of fact, if you are good enough at selling yourself, you don't even have to have the degree OR the skills.
If you're good at what you do, you'll be employable (no matter what the field, no matter what your age).
I used to believe that, too. Whenever somebody couldn't find a job no matter how hard they looked, I just said it was because they weren't head and shoulders above everyone else in the field. Then, when it happened to me, I changed my tune. I realized that just because you are really good at something and even if your last employer fought to the last tooth to keep you as long as possible, doesn't mean that you are employable, at least not in a down economy. In a down economy, a company would rather hire cheap below average performers than a guy who is expensive but could blow the roomful cheap guys out of the water in terms of performance.
There was a lot of opportunity cost lost by GoDaddy customers, but they didn't have to pay to get their websites back up once DNS came back, so comparing destruction of property that remains destroyed until the user replaces it with a website that works just fine once either the DDOS stops or the traffic is successfully isolated.
There is a certain non-zero dollar value of permanent destruction that was caused by this temporary loss. My company, for reasons which are not known by me, uses godaddy as their DNS service. We had customers that were not able to access our site and therefore not able to perform their work. That costs our customers money, and costs us in terms of reputation and real dollars in terms of SLAs. Undoubtely we should have some alternate DNS service. I don't know about stuff like that as it is not my department. Apparently, the department whose business it is to know that stuff also doesn't know that stuff. But what anonymous did caused real people to lose real dollars through no fault of their own.
Space exploration vs poverty relief always comes up, but IMHO it's a red herring. As big as space budgets sound, at the national scale they're generally a pittance - much smaller than is already spent on poverty assistance or any of a great range of things. Heck, in the US we spend less on the space program than we spend on oil exploration subsidies to highly profitable businesses.
If India's space budget were instead spent on the poor, then each poor person could receive the equivalent of $6 USD. According to World Bank figures, an Indian can survive on $1.25 a day. So, by eliminating their space program, all of India's poor could survive for 4 days.
Except even in America today, where people with air conditioning, Xboxes, and cell phones are considered poor
Yes, and we have people who work hard to support those people, and who have no air conditioning, Xboxes or cellphones. Those people are called "Middle Class". And I am one. Well, technically I don't have an Xbox because I don't want one. Also, I have an air conditioner, but it is broken, and I can't afford to fix it. But I can still afford to pay my taxes so that other people can have what I can't.
Hmm, attacking innocent people at random, could have sworn there was some other word for that...
Well I suppose if I disagree with Wal-mart not using union labor, it would be perfectly acceptable for me to go and slash the tires of all of Wal-mart's customers. That'll teach Wal-Mart!
You can barely go 55 on I-35 in Austin on good days
I've driven that particular stretch of road many times. My averages speed is probably at 30, but that is because you spend so much time going 5 MPH that it drags down the 80 MPH that you can go on the rest of the road. At rush hour, the speeds are slow because of the sheer number of cars. At non-rush hour, it is slow because they shut down lanes to do construction. Even in the middle of the night, they have construction going on.
Training is socialistic, isn't it?
No, in America, Training is capitalistic. The more wealthy you are, the better your education and training will be. That is why we are trying to put a stop to training.
When I was stationed in (middle-of-nowhere) Texas in 1987--8, the drivers were courteous to a fault, and pulling over onto the (fully paved) shoulder to allow a faster car overtaking one was the norm.
I would like to echo that statement. I live in Oklahoma, but when I visit Texas, especially south Texas, people will definitely pull over onto the shoulder to let faster traffic go by.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.
Now can I get a job?
I am not personally aware of anyone that has gotten a job through a Dice posting, but I'm sure at least one or two such people exist. My company posts jobs on Dice (it's pretty expensive), and we haven't received any applicants from them that even warranted an interview. Admittedly, that could be more due to their userbase. All of our Dice respondents were out-of-state by at least a thousand miles, for an entry level position.
one of the quotes from the meeting I most liked was in response to a question about whether we were posting news of the announcement on Slashdot, and how the community would react. The Dice folks simply said, "Let them talk."
I don't like that at all. When left to talk, chances are, people aren't going to think of the most positive thing. This is exactly what I tell management every time somebody leaves. For the love of $DEITY, make an announcement that so-and-so is leaving, and what your plan is to backfill them and so forth. But every time, they leave gossip to fill the void, and it willingly does, and drops morale, and people leave, and the cycle repeats.
At least Dice could make some sort of official position statement, whether true or not, it works out better for them in the long run, rather than let the tongues wag.
Why is it only AC's that bother to post that they are leaving?
No one knew you were here before, and they don't give a shit that you aren't here now.
He didn't even leave, he posted again, two posts down. In fact, he is the most prolific poster on this thread.
Well undoubtedly the phone under contract was $100, but the phone itself was probably available elsewhere for $150 or so. 6 Months later it was available elsewhere for $100. One might ask why not just buy your own phone and then not have the contract. The answer to that is that many carriers charge you EXTRA if you are not under contract.
Why use it on a less than $100 phone?
Well, it wasn't a $100 phone when I bought it. It was probably $100 plus a two year commitment when I bought it. But 6 months into the contract it was a $100 phone.
I echo that it has been worth the money for awhile. I bought one for my latest system build and I got a 120ish GB SSD and put the system files on it. It boots to the login prompt in like 3 seconds. I bought a 2TB drive for my data files, which is serious overkill because even with copying the entire contents of my previous system on to this new drive, I was using less than 300 GB. I put Flight Simulator on the SSD and also my scenery files, which are mostly static, and Flight Sim starts up in just about 10 seconds. Even moving to a new scenery location, which usually takes 60 seconds or more on a hard drive, takes only seconds on the SSD. I highly recommend it.
I'll second that. I can only tell my hard drive is thrashing by the indicator light on my laptops panel.
A decent "regular" vacuum is, for me, a Dyson, and those cost right there.
I'll give you a hint. If they have to advertise it on an infomercial, it's crap. Sure it costs as much as a Kirby, but it is nowhere near as good as a Kirby. But you are correct that in comparison to the Roomba, just about any regular vacuum cleaner is going to come out looking like a miracle worker.
Maybe i am getting senile, but isn't this the second Roomba slashvertisement in the last week?
Really?, you need to ask the whole slashdot community what to do to insure a freaking phone???
No, they needed to announce to the whole slashdot community that they got an iphone 5.
Most of the carriers are agents for Asurion. They are great to do business with. I've had multiple claims over the last decade and they've handled them well.
Must be a different Asurion than the one I have dealt with. My stepson's phone had insurance on it, for $7.95 a month. When he broke his phone, they wanted a $99 deductible for him to get a replacement. The phone could be had on the internet for less than that.
My guess is that the OP is somewhat of a klutz and buys the insurance because it's a good value for him or her. Just because it isn't a good value for *most* people, doesn't mean the OP should avoid it.
But if careful people like you and I don't buy the insurance, then eventually, this poor klutzy person will have to pay more for his insurance then he would to just buy new phones (because the insurance company has to cover the cost of administration, plus profit). That wouldn't be fair that a klutzy person should have to pay the full price of their klutziness! This is America! We need to make everyone mandatorily participate n cell phone insurance so that everyone, not matter how careful or how clumsy, pays exactly the same rate for their insurance.
A 90 degree F, 90% humid day killed one of mine without any direct sunlight exposure, possibly because of undetected preexisting damage that allowed wet air to get to a bad place and condense when the temperature dropped.
That is barely within the operating parameters of the iphone. It is a little surprising how tight the parameters are. Here is for the iphone 4:
Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
This means that you should not be having your iphone on outdoors during most of a typical midwestern winter, or most of a typical midwestern summer, or when it is foggy or raining. In fact, if you want by these requirements, you would not have your iphone on outdoors 50% of the time.
I can pretty much guarantee you that they do NOT have similar functionality, unless the Samsung can run iOS6. Hint - it can't!
Quiet! if the judge hears this, Apple will have to drop the lawsuit!
Since when do IT Trade/Tech schools give you real knowledge? Nearly every applicant I've met who's been to one thinks he has real knowledge until you ask him to answer a real world question. The few who know the right answers generally knew the answers before they went to school for the paper.
Trade schools don't teach knowledge, they teach a trade. "Why do I insert tab A into slot B? I don't know, I just do it." College, on the other hand teaches knowledge, but not a trade. They know why tab A goes into slot B, but not how to do it. If you get really lucky you get someone who already had knowledge that then went to trade school, or someone who already knew how to do something and then went to college. Me, I've been programming since 6th grade, and then I went to College.
As for the original question, I think some of the information in the question is superfluous. "How To Prove IT Knowledge Without Expensive Certificates?" is the same question as "How To Prove IT Knowledge With Expensive Certificates?" to me, as the certificates mean little if nothing to me. The reason is because I have probably a dozen certificates, many in things I have never done, simply because I studied for a test. I also have failed to get certificates in things that I have a great deal of experience in, because I knew how it really worked and didn't study for the test. So to me, a certificate is not a likely statistical indicator of knowledge of a field anyway, so with or without a certificate, you're going to have to prove your knowledge to me.
it is basically Darwinism. the pilots who are better won't crash. the shit pilots will crash and be removed from the gene pool. over time this will give us better pilots!
By the time someone has the experience to become a commercial airline pilot, they have generally already done all the reproducing they are going to do.
Are you willing to look for employment outside your city? State?
Yes. In fact, I moved out of state to take the one job I was able to get, at about 1/5th of the pay of the previous position.
Have you thought about incorporating yourself, and get some headhunters to look for you some contract gigs?
Yes. In fact, my position prior to not being able to find a position was a contracting position. That was a large part of the reason I was unable to find another job. Companies specifically will turn aside people who have gone the contractor route in order to punish them for trying to get paid their fair share. Companies want corporate sheep who accept low wages and unpaid overtime.
Also, I have had zero luck, none, with recruiters. I have only gotten two interviews through recruiters and the positions didn't pan out. This after spending sometimes 10 to 20 hours each filling out paperwork and taking the recruiters test to prove my knowledge and passing with flying colors.
Not pointing the finger at you...but just curious what all avenues you've pursued in gaining employment. Recently I was looking to hire.....had a hell of a time finding someone.
Well, as I indicate I am employed now, but I had to take a 5X pay cut, and I am slowly working my way back up. My responsibility is back to where it was, but my authority is still pretty low ( I have responsibility for a team to get work done, but not much authority to get them to do it , no budget, no authority to hire, etc), and my pay has climbed back to almost half what it used to be.
But it was a definite struggle to get another job, even though everybody I have ever worked for has always had high praise for my work, and my work has saved many companies literally millions of dollars annually.
Recently I was looking to hire.....had a hell of a time finding someone.
Well, I am always willing to work remotely. Unlike some people, I can be trusted to actually work when working remotely. Lately, I am managing a team to bring in -house a third party OCR solution, and also managing a team to rewrite the existing internal batch flow. I am using Java and C++, SQL, no-sql, queues, drools, and a number of other interesting technologies. I am actually more of a Team Leader than a manager, in practice. I actually do more than 50% of the development myself, because one of my team members is pretty new and the other one is not really ideal for the position. I inherited the team, so I didn't get to pick or hire good team members.
If you don't get a chance it's because you don't know how to sell yourself or your skills, that has NOTHING to do with a piece of paper or your degree.
Matter of fact, if you are good enough at selling yourself, you don't even have to have the degree OR the skills.
If you're good at what you do, you'll be employable (no matter what the field, no matter what your age).
I used to believe that, too. Whenever somebody couldn't find a job no matter how hard they looked, I just said it was because they weren't head and shoulders above everyone else in the field. Then, when it happened to me, I changed my tune. I realized that just because you are really good at something and even if your last employer fought to the last tooth to keep you as long as possible, doesn't mean that you are employable, at least not in a down economy. In a down economy, a company would rather hire cheap below average performers than a guy who is expensive but could blow the roomful cheap guys out of the water in terms of performance.
There was a lot of opportunity cost lost by GoDaddy customers, but they didn't have to pay to get their websites back up once DNS came back, so comparing destruction of property that remains destroyed until the user replaces it with a website that works just fine once either the DDOS stops or the traffic is successfully isolated.
There is a certain non-zero dollar value of permanent destruction that was caused by this temporary loss. My company, for reasons which are not known by me, uses godaddy as their DNS service. We had customers that were not able to access our site and therefore not able to perform their work. That costs our customers money, and costs us in terms of reputation and real dollars in terms of SLAs. Undoubtely we should have some alternate DNS service. I don't know about stuff like that as it is not my department. Apparently, the department whose business it is to know that stuff also doesn't know that stuff. But what anonymous did caused real people to lose real dollars through no fault of their own.
Space exploration vs poverty relief always comes up, but IMHO it's a red herring. As big as space budgets sound, at the national scale they're generally a pittance - much smaller than is already spent on poverty assistance or any of a great range of things. Heck, in the US we spend less on the space program than we spend on oil exploration subsidies to highly profitable businesses.
If India's space budget were instead spent on the poor, then each poor person could receive the equivalent of $6 USD. According to World Bank figures, an Indian can survive on $1.25 a day. So, by eliminating their space program, all of India's poor could survive for 4 days.
Except even in America today, where people with air conditioning, Xboxes, and cell phones are considered poor
Yes, and we have people who work hard to support those people, and who have no air conditioning, Xboxes or cellphones. Those people are called "Middle Class". And I am one. Well, technically I don't have an Xbox because I don't want one. Also, I have an air conditioner, but it is broken, and I can't afford to fix it. But I can still afford to pay my taxes so that other people can have what I can't.
Hmm, attacking innocent people at random, could have sworn there was some other word for that...
Well I suppose if I disagree with Wal-mart not using union labor, it would be perfectly acceptable for me to go and slash the tires of all of Wal-mart's customers. That'll teach Wal-Mart!
You can barely go 55 on I-35 in Austin on good days
I've driven that particular stretch of road many times. My averages speed is probably at 30, but that is because you spend so much time going 5 MPH that it drags down the 80 MPH that you can go on the rest of the road. At rush hour, the speeds are slow because of the sheer number of cars. At non-rush hour, it is slow because they shut down lanes to do construction. Even in the middle of the night, they have construction going on.
Training is socialistic, isn't it?
No, in America, Training is capitalistic. The more wealthy you are, the better your education and training will be. That is why we are trying to put a stop to training.
When I was stationed in (middle-of-nowhere) Texas in 1987--8, the drivers were courteous to a fault, and pulling over onto the (fully paved) shoulder to allow a faster car overtaking one was the norm.
I would like to echo that statement. I live in Oklahoma, but when I visit Texas, especially south Texas, people will definitely pull over onto the shoulder to let faster traffic go by.