They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.
Why don't they make the bottom line of the paycheck tied to doing the job? Instead of recording whether you show up at 9:00 on the dot or making sure you take no more than half an hour for lunch or making sure that facebook is not installed on your laptop, why don't they measure how you performed against the goals that you and your management agreed upon, and also consider whether there were additional non-agreed projects or tasks which were assigned during the time period?
Really ??? Was it Jeb that said that and does it extend to all the tech professions in the U.S. ? If so he's got my vote. That will take care of the whole H1-B problem in a shot and guarantee people in Tech fields much more opportunity.
"In the US" is the crucial point. It won't apply to programmers abroad, leading to even more international outsourcing. Yeah, less H1-Bs, but no jobs either, unless you want to move to India.
No, it was anonymous coward on the internet that said that as if it was a true statement without providing any sort of evidence whatsoever, especially to back up the fact that they supposedly said this multiple times.
In fact, the comments on this article are so full of lies that slashdot should just remove it entirely before some gullible person actually believes any of it.
This. The animals are better off dead, but the Republicans won't allow that since they enjoy seeing animals suffer. That is the way of their kind.
I think you mean Democrats, since aquariums and zoological plants are liberal institutions where environmentalism and the fact that every single species of life on Earth is dangerously close to extinction at any given point in time is constantly shoved down your throat.
Furthermore, the police chief's statement...that's not what this lawsuit is about.
Exactly. The Republican-ruled media simply added that statement to confuse the issue. They're trying to redirect from the kid that attempted to get a teacher fired and put in prison. I don't understand why the kid wasn't charged with attempted kidnapping. That is a felony. The kid is a felon. Why do you call kidnapping BS? Kidnapping is serious. It is serious. Why can't you Republicans understand that?
Oops, you accidentally said Republicans when you meant Democrats. Democrats control the media, not Republicans.
I've always said that if a guy's talents are worth importing, then it's worth importing that guy as an EQUAL.
The H1B program is not for hiring equals. It is for hiring people that are BETTER, because even when you offered infinity billion dollars as a salary, you were unable to find an American to do the job. It was never meant to hire people to do a job that any of 100,000 unemployed tech workers could easily do.
I really don't see Silicon Valley hipsters doing that kind of whining. If anything, the Silicon Valley hipsters are more likely to be bleeding hearts. It's the midwestern tea bagger trailer trash that are most likely to whine about illegal immigrants as if they were within 1000 miles of one.
Are you serious? You think there are no illegal aliens in the midwest? About 2% of the population of my state is illegal aliens, and that is only the ones we know about.
But that doesn't accurately depict the situation that existed in *TECH*. Yes, unemployment and underemployment among construction workers was high. But at the time, tech workers had an unemployment rate under 5% (and in 2008 unemployment overall was only 8%). Considering that it takes years to put a tech worker through a college degree and introductory employment, even if construction workers were qualified to switch from construction to tech, it wouldn't have helped the short term problem.
Unemployment figures don't take into account the people who used up all of their unemployment and were never able to find a job. They may still be unemployed, but the numbers aren't tracked. Also, this number doesn't take into account the number of tech workers that took jobs in other fields because they couldn't find jobs in tech. I know many, many people (including myself) who have 25+ years of experience in tech, but are doing something else because there are no jobs.
Underemployment is rampant as well. Tech jobs don't pay enough to live on, but when they demand 60-80 hours a week of your time, and availability on a whim, you also can't go get a second job to make ends meet.
Microsoft is starting to slip, though. They released press releases demanding more H1B workers a little too soon after laying off 6,000 tech workers. Someone is bound to notice.
If it's such a good design, then get some factory in China to injection mould 10,000s of them for pennies.
This. 3D printing is relatively expensive and poor quality compared to a manufacturing process. This is why they are rapid prototyping and not manufacturing machines. Oh sure, they make some that are more robust and make higher quality prototypes, but they would never recoup the cost of such a machine despite the savings on stethoscopes. It would be far cheaper to manufacture the stethoscopes in China. Cheaper than 30 cents? Probably not, but then 30 cents is a lie anyway as it leaves out all of the more expensive factors of the manufacturing process.
I suspect that $0.30 cost is just the materials used in making it. Add in design costs, buying the machine, hiring people to watch over the machines, HR, accounting, sales, and support, that stethoscope can easily cost a full $3.00.
And will only be usable in countries that don't give a crap about medical standards and thusly have no governing body like the FDA which must approve the device.
You're in the minority. Apple, the most successful company on the planet, never do this, and they don't give a fuck about people like you and your moaning. The market has spoken, you and your ilk, lost. Get over it.
The market has spoke, and what it said was that lots of people wanted an option that allowed SD cards and removable batteries, otherwise there wouldn't have been the tremendously successful Samsung line of smartphones. Now Samsung has come up with the incredible idea that rather than sell to people who wanted something a little bit different, they are going to try to sell to people who already are iphone fans and who will probably never switch from apple even if Jobs rises from the dead and flings poo at them.
Who the fuck needs removable storage when ExternalStorage already exists? Plus these two devices also have an external battery for any phone, iOS or Android.
Who the f*ck needs external storage, when you could have removable storage?
If you have a group of people, and one of them does something wrong, you address the issue with the person who did something wrong. If you send an e-mail out to the entire group, then the person who did something wrong will think it is directed at someone else, and everyone else will think it is directed at them. This is one of the very first things you learn as a manager. You absolutely do not reprimand by group. You reprimand individually. You praise publicly. If you can't understand that, or disagree, then you need to be removed from your position of authority.
There is nothing to say about this Zuckerberg quote. Someone doesn't understand 'openness.' I will never work at that company.
Zuckerberg went on to write that the employee obviously didn’t share the same values of openness and transparency because they shared the confidential information in a way they were asked not to do.
The management and C-level folks know about massive layoffs and things that effect the employees months in advance. Are they totally open and transparent about these important things which affect the lives and families of their employees? Of course not. But they expect the employees to be totally open and transparent with them.
Then leave. Seriously if you do not want to be there the company will not want you there either.
My last job I wanted to leave several times but there were hug stock and ownership promises on the table that I would be giving up. Eventually, they let me go after I had finished building their system for them without giving me any of the promised stock or ownership. So it turned out I could have left at any time and would have made more money in the long run if I had quit early on. But hindsight is 20/20. And I learned a valuable lesson. Don't trust employers. Especially ones who claim to be Christians.
I have a phone that can do 1080p60 with complex 3d scenes. It can run games written with the Unity engine. I can seed torrents and watch 1080p60 youtube videos at the same time.
But the phone sound quality? About as good as 20 year old landline.
Lucky you. Most phones can't do anywhere near the quality of a 20 year old land line. The very first phone call was probably of better call quality than any modern cell phone.
And yet their ability to act as a phone has roughly stayed the same over the same time period.
IN fact, it has deteriorated. Until I got a smartphone, I didn't realize that a phone could and would reboot, with no warning or reason. A phone should NEVER reboot. That is not acceptable behavior. This is a huge regression in phone behavior. My old dumb phone never rebooted. My landline STILL doesn't reboot. So my smartphone, if it is a step forward should not reboot either. The fact that we are willing to compromise on the basic function of a phone just so we can play crappy games with poor quality video, watch movies on a screen that is too small, or try to operate an app on device whose UI makes it take 25 times longer than it would on a computer, is just baffling to me.
Do people have troubles making phone calls nowadays? Is the US telephone network so fragile?
I can't remember having had any trouble making a phone call and have never had a connection dropped, so I'm wondering what this article is about.
Mobile phone calls are more reliable than they used to be, but they still are absolute crap compared to landlines, in call quality, dropped call rates, price. About the only thing that mobile phones are better at is stuff that is not related to being a phone.
I can't remember having had any trouble making a phone call and have never had a connection dropped, so I'm wondering what this article is about.
It's "about" a weak premise to try generate some buzz for a messaging platform no one has ever heard of or cares about.
This. I am working with a company that for some reason uses Slack instead of an existing, more robust communication system, like Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. It's annoying because it is one more thing I have to keep track of on my desktop and one more thing I have to check for messages, in addition to the traditional messaging platforms.
As for unwanted calls, register your number with Do Not Call. Not perfect, but I get almost zero cold calls on both my home/land line and cell phone.
Yeah, not perfect. I still get 6 or 7 calls a day. Almost none of them leave messages, but I can tell from the caller ID that they are a commercial outfit that is illegally calling me. I should not have to talk to them and tell them that I am on the DNC list. That is THEIR responsibility. I have been on the list since about the first or second week that the registry was available. They should be required to pay a fine for the FIRST offense, and part of that money should go to me for having to do their job for them.
Voicemail, I get. It's bullshit. If you call me and I don't answer, I'll call back. Without listening to your voicemail. Because I'm going to call you back. Doing voicemail would be a waste of time for everyone involved.
On the other hand, if I get a call from someone and they don't leave a message, then I assume it was a wrong number or was not important. If it was important, they would have left a message. Somebody called me at 5:43 this morning and I didn't hear it because I was getting ready for work. They didn't leave a message, so they aren't getting called back.
I don't understand the fascination with people wanting to call back every single person who calls your phone, whether you know them or not, whether it was a wrong number or a scammer or was one of the 100% of commercial callers who ignore the Do Not Call registry. Same deal with text messages. I am not going to respond to a text message from someone I don't recognize. It could be an online predator, an identity thief, someone phishing for valid contacts. I guess I am not as desperate to be interacted with as other people.
Sequence of questions that will probably need additional clarification? call.
Negative. That's what chat or series of 1-line emails are for. You can't refer back to a call when you're working on that project later, mistakes will be made, and it will turn into a stupid finger-pointing match that eats up far more time than you saved using voice instead of text.
I've found with technical discussions that a bunch of chats often take too long to convey the same information. Phone calls just work better, going to said person's desk and looking at the same thing on the monitor is even better.
I hate chats. It takes hours of back and forth that a minute or two on a call or face to face would have resolved.
People hit you up on IM expecting you to drop everything and pay attention to them. It is too disruptive in a back and forth conversation. Even though it is still disruptive to have a phone call, at least you aren't disrupted and having to switch focus 50 times over the course of hours.
Part of your Internet payment doesn't go to the content providers.
The content creators were never guaranteed a living. The internet is a place to share information. It is not a place to make money by selling content on a crappy link farm that somebody else made available for free but your SEO has drowned out their free or donation supported website.
I have "Ads disabled" checked on/. and I'm getting headline banner ads that actively rotate (chewing up bandwidth and CPU), a small add at the top of the right column (right above the "ads disabled" option), and another ad below that option.
I have been given the option to disable advertising, but have not done so. Hopefully, slashdot is making a little money off of the impressions (I will never ever click an ad on purpose). There have been times when I have been extremely tempted to disabled ads. Slashdot had some autoplay video ads for a period of time. That is a definite no-no. They also have had ads that were broken and so I would get the "unresponsive script" notification and every time I clicked and told it to stop running the script, it would pop up again about a minute later. I started blocking the script by domain name.
Hmm, now that I look at it, I have no ads on my slashdot page, and lo and behold, I apparently have Adblockplus on my Firefox browser. I don't even remember installing it. I still get plenty of ads on other sites despite having ABP though.
a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
Well, it ought to be a quick auction in my case. "Wow, this person has literally never ever clicked on an ad except by accident because we tricked him into thinking something was content. He will never EVER legitimately click on anything and will never EVER buy anything on an ad, so we should save our money and not present ads at him."
Getting tickets to a show where the human athletes will be chairbound.
Why don't they make them computer controlled? Then it would be drone racing instead of remote control quadcopter racing. Also, the winner would be the guy who can best do flight control algorithms, instead of somebody good at shoving sticks around.
Slashdot Mirror
They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.
Why don't they make the bottom line of the paycheck tied to doing the job? Instead of recording whether you show up at 9:00 on the dot or making sure you take no more than half an hour for lunch or making sure that facebook is not installed on your laptop, why don't they measure how you performed against the goals that you and your management agreed upon, and also consider whether there were additional non-agreed projects or tasks which were assigned during the time period?
"In the US" is the crucial point. It won't apply to programmers abroad, leading to even more international outsourcing. Yeah, less H1-Bs, but no jobs either, unless you want to move to India.
No, it was anonymous coward on the internet that said that as if it was a true statement without providing any sort of evidence whatsoever, especially to back up the fact that they supposedly said this multiple times.
In fact, the comments on this article are so full of lies that slashdot should just remove it entirely before some gullible person actually believes any of it.
This. The animals are better off dead, but the Republicans won't allow that since they enjoy seeing animals suffer. That is the way of their kind.
I think you mean Democrats, since aquariums and zoological plants are liberal institutions where environmentalism and the fact that every single species of life on Earth is dangerously close to extinction at any given point in time is constantly shoved down your throat.
Furthermore, the police chief's statement...that's not what this lawsuit is about.
Exactly. The Republican-ruled media simply added that statement to confuse the issue. They're trying to redirect from the kid that attempted to get a teacher fired and put in prison. I don't understand why the kid wasn't charged with attempted kidnapping. That is a felony. The kid is a felon. Why do you call kidnapping BS? Kidnapping is serious. It is serious. Why can't you Republicans understand that?
Oops, you accidentally said Republicans when you meant Democrats. Democrats control the media, not Republicans.
I've always said that if a guy's talents are worth importing, then it's worth importing that guy as an EQUAL.
The H1B program is not for hiring equals. It is for hiring people that are BETTER, because even when you offered infinity billion dollars as a salary, you were unable to find an American to do the job. It was never meant to hire people to do a job that any of 100,000 unemployed tech workers could easily do.
I really don't see Silicon Valley hipsters doing that kind of whining. If anything, the Silicon Valley hipsters are more likely to be bleeding hearts. It's the midwestern tea bagger trailer trash that are most likely to whine about illegal immigrants as if they were within 1000 miles of one.
Are you serious? You think there are no illegal aliens in the midwest? About 2% of the population of my state is illegal aliens, and that is only the ones we know about.
But that doesn't accurately depict the situation that existed in *TECH*. Yes, unemployment and underemployment among construction workers was high. But at the time, tech workers had an unemployment rate under 5% (and in 2008 unemployment overall was only 8%). Considering that it takes years to put a tech worker through a college degree and introductory employment, even if construction workers were qualified to switch from construction to tech, it wouldn't have helped the short term problem.
Unemployment figures don't take into account the people who used up all of their unemployment and were never able to find a job. They may still be unemployed, but the numbers aren't tracked. Also, this number doesn't take into account the number of tech workers that took jobs in other fields because they couldn't find jobs in tech. I know many, many people (including myself) who have 25+ years of experience in tech, but are doing something else because there are no jobs.
Underemployment is rampant as well. Tech jobs don't pay enough to live on, but when they demand 60-80 hours a week of your time, and availability on a whim, you also can't go get a second job to make ends meet.
Microsoft is starting to slip, though. They released press releases demanding more H1B workers a little too soon after laying off 6,000 tech workers. Someone is bound to notice.
If it's such a good design, then get some factory in China to injection mould 10,000s of them for pennies.
This. 3D printing is relatively expensive and poor quality compared to a manufacturing process. This is why they are rapid prototyping and not manufacturing machines. Oh sure, they make some that are more robust and make higher quality prototypes, but they would never recoup the cost of such a machine despite the savings on stethoscopes. It would be far cheaper to manufacture the stethoscopes in China. Cheaper than 30 cents? Probably not, but then 30 cents is a lie anyway as it leaves out all of the more expensive factors of the manufacturing process.
I suspect that $0.30 cost is just the materials used in making it. Add in design costs, buying the machine, hiring people to watch over the machines, HR, accounting, sales, and support, that stethoscope can easily cost a full $3.00.
And will only be usable in countries that don't give a crap about medical standards and thusly have no governing body like the FDA which must approve the device.
You're in the minority. Apple, the most successful company on the planet, never do this, and they don't give a fuck about people like you and your moaning. The market has spoken, you and your ilk, lost. Get over it.
The market has spoke, and what it said was that lots of people wanted an option that allowed SD cards and removable batteries, otherwise there wouldn't have been the tremendously successful Samsung line of smartphones. Now Samsung has come up with the incredible idea that rather than sell to people who wanted something a little bit different, they are going to try to sell to people who already are iphone fans and who will probably never switch from apple even if Jobs rises from the dead and flings poo at them.
Who the fuck needs removable storage when External Storage already exists? Plus these two devices also have an external battery for any phone, iOS or Android.
Who the f*ck needs external storage, when you could have removable storage?
If you have a group of people, and one of them does something wrong, you address the issue with the person who did something wrong. If you send an e-mail out to the entire group, then the person who did something wrong will think it is directed at someone else, and everyone else will think it is directed at them. This is one of the very first things you learn as a manager. You absolutely do not reprimand by group. You reprimand individually. You praise publicly. If you can't understand that, or disagree, then you need to be removed from your position of authority.
There is nothing to say about this Zuckerberg quote. Someone doesn't understand 'openness.' I will never work at that company.
Zuckerberg went on to write that the employee obviously didn’t share the same values of openness and transparency because they shared the confidential information in a way they were asked not to do.
The management and C-level folks know about massive layoffs and things that effect the employees months in advance. Are they totally open and transparent about these important things which affect the lives and families of their employees? Of course not. But they expect the employees to be totally open and transparent with them.
Then leave. Seriously if you do not want to be there the company will not want you there either.
My last job I wanted to leave several times but there were hug stock and ownership promises on the table that I would be giving up. Eventually, they let me go after I had finished building their system for them without giving me any of the promised stock or ownership. So it turned out I could have left at any time and would have made more money in the long run if I had quit early on. But hindsight is 20/20. And I learned a valuable lesson. Don't trust employers. Especially ones who claim to be Christians.
I have a phone that can do 1080p60 with complex 3d scenes. It can run games written with the Unity engine. I can seed torrents and watch 1080p60 youtube videos at the same time.
But the phone sound quality? About as good as 20 year old landline.
Lucky you. Most phones can't do anywhere near the quality of a 20 year old land line. The very first phone call was probably of better call quality than any modern cell phone.
And yet their ability to act as a phone has roughly stayed the same over the same time period.
IN fact, it has deteriorated. Until I got a smartphone, I didn't realize that a phone could and would reboot, with no warning or reason. A phone should NEVER reboot. That is not acceptable behavior. This is a huge regression in phone behavior. My old dumb phone never rebooted. My landline STILL doesn't reboot. So my smartphone, if it is a step forward should not reboot either. The fact that we are willing to compromise on the basic function of a phone just so we can play crappy games with poor quality video, watch movies on a screen that is too small, or try to operate an app on device whose UI makes it take 25 times longer than it would on a computer, is just baffling to me.
Do people have troubles making phone calls nowadays? Is the US telephone network so fragile?
I can't remember having had any trouble making a phone call and have never had a connection dropped, so I'm wondering what this article is about.
Mobile phone calls are more reliable than they used to be, but they still are absolute crap compared to landlines, in call quality, dropped call rates, price. About the only thing that mobile phones are better at is stuff that is not related to being a phone.
I can't remember having had any trouble making a phone call and have never had a connection dropped, so I'm wondering what this article is about.
It's "about" a weak premise to try generate some buzz for a messaging platform no one has ever heard of or cares about.
This. I am working with a company that for some reason uses Slack instead of an existing, more robust communication system, like Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. It's annoying because it is one more thing I have to keep track of on my desktop and one more thing I have to check for messages, in addition to the traditional messaging platforms.
As for unwanted calls, register your number with Do Not Call. Not perfect, but I get almost zero cold calls on both my home/land line and cell phone.
Yeah, not perfect. I still get 6 or 7 calls a day. Almost none of them leave messages, but I can tell from the caller ID that they are a commercial outfit that is illegally calling me. I should not have to talk to them and tell them that I am on the DNC list. That is THEIR responsibility. I have been on the list since about the first or second week that the registry was available. They should be required to pay a fine for the FIRST offense, and part of that money should go to me for having to do their job for them.
Voicemail, I get. It's bullshit. If you call me and I don't answer, I'll call back. Without listening to your voicemail. Because I'm going to call you back. Doing voicemail would be a waste of time for everyone involved.
On the other hand, if I get a call from someone and they don't leave a message, then I assume it was a wrong number or was not important. If it was important, they would have left a message. Somebody called me at 5:43 this morning and I didn't hear it because I was getting ready for work. They didn't leave a message, so they aren't getting called back.
I don't understand the fascination with people wanting to call back every single person who calls your phone, whether you know them or not, whether it was a wrong number or a scammer or was one of the 100% of commercial callers who ignore the Do Not Call registry. Same deal with text messages. I am not going to respond to a text message from someone I don't recognize. It could be an online predator, an identity thief, someone phishing for valid contacts. I guess I am not as desperate to be interacted with as other people.
Sequence of questions that will probably need additional clarification? call.
Negative. That's what chat or series of 1-line emails are for. You can't refer back to a call when you're working on that project later, mistakes will be made, and it will turn into a stupid finger-pointing match that eats up far more time than you saved using voice instead of text.
I've found with technical discussions that a bunch of chats often take too long to convey the same information. Phone calls just work better, going to said person's desk and looking at the same thing on the monitor is even better.
I hate chats. It takes hours of back and forth that a minute or two on a call or face to face would have resolved.
People hit you up on IM expecting you to drop everything and pay attention to them. It is too disruptive in a back and forth conversation. Even though it is still disruptive to have a phone call, at least you aren't disrupted and having to switch focus 50 times over the course of hours.
Part of your Internet payment doesn't go to the content providers.
The content creators were never guaranteed a living. The internet is a place to share information. It is not a place to make money by selling content on a crappy link farm that somebody else made available for free but your SEO has drowned out their free or donation supported website.
I have "Ads disabled" checked on /. and I'm getting headline banner ads that actively rotate (chewing up bandwidth and CPU), a small add at the top of the right column (right above the "ads disabled" option), and another ad below that option.
I have been given the option to disable advertising, but have not done so. Hopefully, slashdot is making a little money off of the impressions (I will never ever click an ad on purpose). There have been times when I have been extremely tempted to disabled ads. Slashdot had some autoplay video ads for a period of time. That is a definite no-no. They also have had ads that were broken and so I would get the "unresponsive script" notification and every time I clicked and told it to stop running the script, it would pop up again about a minute later. I started blocking the script by domain name.
Hmm, now that I look at it, I have no ads on my slashdot page, and lo and behold, I apparently have Adblockplus on my Firefox browser. I don't even remember installing it. I still get plenty of ads on other sites despite having ABP though.
a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
Well, it ought to be a quick auction in my case. "Wow, this person has literally never ever clicked on an ad except by accident because we tricked him into thinking something was content. He will never EVER legitimately click on anything and will never EVER buy anything on an ad, so we should save our money and not present ads at him."
Getting tickets to a show where the human athletes will be chairbound.
Why don't they make them computer controlled? Then it would be drone racing instead of remote control quadcopter racing. Also, the winner would be the guy who can best do flight control algorithms, instead of somebody good at shoving sticks around.