Uh, yes they are. The difference is that licenses aren't required in IT fields. Someone with his qualifications in IT would also be chock full of licenses and be highly specialized. But, there aren't many non-managerial people making $240,000 or even $100,000 in IT. Name some licenses that are required. I will bet I can show you entire Fortune 500 companies with IT depts without any of those licenses in existence.
The hours in IT shops are just as bad or worse. I don't want to work where you work. My last 4 years have pretty much whittled down to flex time averaging between 40-50 hours per week. I'm certainly not doing regular 12-16 hour shifts with hours changing from graveyard to morning to daytime across a month. (a nurse's hours I know at a major well-known hospital in a major city)
You: They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.
Should they be able to sell you on their skills?... No. The people with that type of communications skills are salesmen. You shouldn't expect an IT job candidate to convince you that they are the one for the job. And you shouldn't think of everyone else as shit because they can't. You certainly have a large chip on your shoulder. Yes, if you want a job, you need to be able to meet the requirements of said job, which at this level includes being able to convey your knowledge to do said job. If you cannot communicate, don't expect anywhere near a 6 figure job. You're mistaken if I think people are unqualified merely because they cannot communicate. I think that when they communicate patently incorrect information several times over a relatively simple subset of a topic they claim mastery in on their resume.
As for jobs at 6 figures or above, they're plentiful, but most involve trade-offs I prefer not to make. The number 1 issue is travel - anything over 10% becomes problematic for me. Issue #2 is the type of work to be done. If I could stomach it, I'd do Documentum work, which is probably the singularly most uninteresting work tied with EJB security you could ever hope to lay eyes on. It pays really really well, though, especially if you add in administration responsibilities, primarily because anyone with the smarts to handle it well has the smarts to go do something more interesting.
I'll take the other tact from greed's posting. Windows, by default, will run anything with.exe,.com,.bat, or.cmd extensions. There is no equivalent in *nix.
Look at medicine and you see some nurses, my dad for example, making $240,000 a year. He's not a manager. The average nurse with his qualifications makes $100,000. Why? There really is a shortage in his field. There absolutely is no shortage in IT. And in fact, no independent study has ever confirmed a shortage, not even during the IT boom. Nurses get licensed, and at that salary range, he should be chock full of licenses and highly specialized. IT folks aren't licensed. As soon as you license them, I'd bet you'd see a huge drop in available workers and that "phantom" shortage would be an obvious real shortage (I strongly suspect a large number of current IT workers would fail in attempting to get licensed.)
There's another aspect to nursing: the hours.
You can find that, or people with opinions like that, in every field, including the previous nursing example. And frankly, I don't care what you say, but idiots can't make it through a good CS program. Everyone in our field with a CS degree from a good school is bright and intelligent. There's another issue, a large number of IT folks I know/see didn't get a degree or didn't get one from a good school. Of those that supposedly did, a large number of them have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading.
However, most CS grads are not good with communications skills, so they couldn't convince you of their skills. Wow, big surprise. They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.
If there were a large deficit of IT professionals, we would be seeing salaries go through the roof. We're not seeing that yet. Salaries are still on par with where they were during the recession. That's not the least bit surprising with the massive layoffs from IBM and HP last year. I used to agree with you, I no longer do. Salaries for good IT folks is far above any equivalent non-managerial salaried position. The reason I no longer agree is that I've begun realizing that approximately 90-95% of "IT" folks are unqualified, bad, and/or just plain shouldn't be in IT. I've worked in a couple of places with excellent development and IT staff. The large remainder of companies I know of both first and second hand are uniformly populated with "Idiots Guide" readers with a tiny minority of capable people. This includes all those I've interviewed, which number well into the hundreds.
Finding people who actually know what's on their resume is pretty difficult. Screening them by anyone other than another capable technical person (like, say, a manager) is how you get more substandard people.
Oh, and H1-Bs are no better on average than anyone else.
Yep, especially funny regarding the commercial where they drop a lexus (simulated) from 4000 feet and a second one racing it on the ground, and the ground one just beats the falling one to the "target". Anyone stupid enough to try it should win the Darwin Award of the decade.
1985? - 286 w/ 1MB RAM and 40MB disk. Screaming (at the time) 1991 - 486 DX (66MHz) with 128MB of RAM and 2GB of disk space on 2 drives. It was a monster!!!
Now my video card has more RAM than my first 8 computers combined.
Last time I checked, your brain didn't increase in size. Since we're talking about human interfaces with documents, or should be, 16+ character tags become odius to decipher. Bold = , Italics = and so forth. Easy to comprehend formatting commands. Fonts, styles, etc should be equally simple. Why obfuscate a workable system? Layout should be equally simple.
Dungeon Seige was most certainly a grinder. You just ground and ground through opponents, because that was the only way to get more powerful, to continue grinding through the next set of opponents. I quit after beating the gnome machine mob.
Good parts? I cycled through 40+ levels in EQ, never got to what I'd call a "good part". Even raiding groups weren't all that different from soloing, other than it went a lot faster and more consistently. Basically SSDD type stuff.
Most MMOs suffer from farming issues, whether by soloists or "parties" in any area that's "interesting". Why is it interesting? Because once in a blue moon, the mob that pops there will drop something considered valuable. It does this randomly, and regardless of who's there, thus encouraging farming.
What kills me is that this is easily solvable on both ends, and would end farming. This would, of course, kill the MMO's as they exist today's cash flows, since they would then have to provide real content to keep people's interest.
I am not a lawyer but.... ditto
As a general rule, contract and consumer protection laws say something to the effect of: 1) Amazon is not allowed to just put a new charge on a credit card, but 2) Amazon, for an honest mistake, can send an amended invoice and after 90 days can go through regular debt-recovery mechanisms.
And anyone who intentionally exploited the bug is a scumbag. 1) true (no buts) 2) I believe applies to larger scope contract law, not to seller/buyer of merchandise. If I buy something in a store, once I'm done with the cashier with me handing over payment, them handing over product, we're done.
Your opinion is noted, and not wholly disagreed with. Would you say the same of a seller that takes advantage of consumers? If so, you should be hating all gas station vendors right now.
Personally and legally (IANAL), I have no issue with Amazon correcting the mistake and not shipping. I might be grumpy, but they've done nothing illegal or unethical, other than get my hopes up. (Several rounds with memory prices being about 1/10th of what they were and having orders nixed didn't bother me in the least, and I continued shopping with those vendors when their prices were good for me).
However, completing the transaction, shipping me the goods, and then charging, or asking to charge me a different price for said goods, that's illegal IIRC. It's no different than, say, if Amazon saw you looking at a DVD set and shipping it to you and then charging you, or just randomly shipping items to you and charging you.
Consumer bad faith not withstanding, if they shipped it, it's done.
The tech tree is actually one of my gripes with Civilization, even though I may be partly responsible for it. (A long long time ago, in another life, I was part of the independent Civ II effort)
I have often thought there should be a better way, although Civ does simplify the entire management aspect. It's still smacks far too much of board games optimizations, and that was one of my gripes about board games.
Colonization I haven't played, so I cannot comment.
I truth, I played and quite EQ, because it was SSDD. Just because you put different bit maps on the screen didn't really change your strategy all that much. You had blunt/blade/magic targets in every level category, and the technique for most efficiently destroying them never changed across the levels.
And that brings me to another thing - levels. Levels in EQ(2), WoW, etc, have completely perverted what should be fun. Leveling is about the only important thing. A level 20 char will neer be killed by a level 5 mob unless they're attempting to commit suicide. Heck, not even by 4 level 5 mobs.
Since all these games are based off D&D, perhaps looking at that system might show that play rather than leveling was what made it fun. Levels did not have the dramatic effect they do in MMOs. A thief of moderate ability could kill a high level mage with luck, for example. A high level mage could, with an obscene amount of luck, kill a dragon single-handedly. (basically, mages and necromancers were the pinnacle of power but were very destructable)
These scenarios are impossible to even strive for in MMOs as they are today. 2-3 level differences are death sentences to the lower level individual.
I guess you didn't quite catch the "A Few Good Men" reference, and the fact that while Nickelson's character believed he espoused those traits, he actually expressed the opposite.
What you're asking for is uniformity in stance by all developers, a group that historically does not play well together, and a large percentage of which is mercenary (consultants). Those consultants' only concern is how to extract money from their customers. They'll promise them anything to get in the door, and if it's impossible, that translates into continuing revenue streams. Thus your posted position is at best a figment of your imagination.
To the same point, it's video rentals that suffer from my downloading of movies. If I like a movie I will still buy it, because having it on a DVD is much longer lasting than on my hard drive, not to mention all the bonus extras on the DVD. But I will download that movie instead of the "inconvenience" of driving five minutes to the nearest video rentals store to pay for a movie I may or may not like. Well, I'll have to disagree with the rental thing. What's killing Blockbuster is Netflix. For a relatively trivial amount of money a month, I get DVDs delivered to my house of things I (hopefully) am interested in, with almost no effort on my part. I set up a list of things I want to watch, occassionally I add things to the list, and for the most part it's just a nice cycle of disks coming through my mailbox. Downloading a movie requires me to do cabling and such. Not so nice. That could change in the future.
What has been hurt is my DVD buying habits. Since Netflix, I have probably only bought 5 DVDs in the past 2-3 years. Those are movies that I'm actually interested in seeing more than once (LOTR, Underworld). I don't see that buying habit changing in the future either, even if movies were $5 each on HD/BR. They'd have to come in around $2-3 for me to purchase them, and even then I'd probably just purchase, watch, and trade in 95% of what I watch.
You've got that wrong - the radio stations and major record distributors were in cahoots, as they say. (Now, those may not be the same as record companies...) But you have the rest mostly right, with the exception of selling records. They wanted to promote only a few "major" acts, especially ones they had they best contracts with, ie - most profit for them.
I was more along the lines of Nitzer Ebb or Front 242 way back then, along with some of the British Steel invasion and Punk/Alternative/Post Modern and whatever category Metallica/Megadeath/etc fell into.
I don't have copies of either Nitzer Ebb or Front 242 anymore, and have forgotten what they sounded like by now. I personally don't think industrial crystalized into someting concrete until NIN brought it "mainstream" (very loose usage for the time). But that's merely my opinion/impression, and my timeframe may have been shifted as location was still key to definitions and exposure at the time, not like today where the internet gives you almost instant access to everything.
I have trouble visualizing Ministry as "industrial". Maybe I just don't recall their earlier works. It's been a few beers since that time.;)
On the e-music front, I don't think anyone will argue that NIN was a front-runner. After all, he created a whole new genre. And his music was more "programming" than playing, way back in 88/89. (Not to mention that he provided the music for Quake.... Did you ever wonder about the nail gun?)
The Beastie Boys are the Rolling Stones of tomorrow. Please NO!!!!!!
How about telling that to Tangerine Dream... When's the last time TD released an album? Force Majeure was the last really good thing I recall from them, and I have it on LP...
...The Ramones and BTO... Two more bands that were good, and have lasted. Sedated and Takin' Care of Business both have had commercial play recently.
You forgot to mention ELO and Nine Inch Nails for other counterparts on MIDI ports and computer programming....:) Head Like a Hole still rocks and applies, although in a slightly different context today.
Nickelback sucks. The only reason some Americans like them is because they're pushed down everyone's throats just as much as, apparently, up in Canada. (There's a reason certain groups refer to people as sheep/flocks/lemmings)
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Should they be able to sell you on their skills?... No. The people with that type of communications skills are salesmen. You shouldn't expect an IT job candidate to convince you that they are the one for the job. And you shouldn't think of everyone else as shit because they can't. You certainly have a large chip on your shoulder. Yes, if you want a job, you need to be able to meet the requirements of said job, which at this level includes being able to convey your knowledge to do said job. If you cannot communicate, don't expect anywhere near a 6 figure job. You're mistaken if I think people are unqualified merely because they cannot communicate. I think that when they communicate patently incorrect information several times over a relatively simple subset of a topic they claim mastery in on their resume.
As for jobs at 6 figures or above, they're plentiful, but most involve trade-offs I prefer not to make. The number 1 issue is travel - anything over 10% becomes problematic for me. Issue #2 is the type of work to be done. If I could stomach it, I'd do Documentum work, which is probably the singularly most uninteresting work tied with EJB security you could ever hope to lay eyes on. It pays really really well, though, especially if you add in administration responsibilities, primarily because anyone with the smarts to handle it well has the smarts to go do something more interesting.
I'll take the other tact from greed's posting. Windows, by default, will run anything with .exe, .com, .bat, or .cmd extensions. There is no equivalent in *nix.
There's another aspect to nursing: the hours. You can find that, or people with opinions like that, in every field, including the previous nursing example. And frankly, I don't care what you say, but idiots can't make it through a good CS program. Everyone in our field with a CS degree from a good school is bright and intelligent. There's another issue, a large number of IT folks I know/see didn't get a degree or didn't get one from a good school. Of those that supposedly did, a large number of them have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading. However, most CS grads are not good with communications skills, so they couldn't convince you of their skills. Wow, big surprise. They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.
Finding people who actually know what's on their resume is pretty difficult. Screening them by anyone other than another capable technical person (like, say, a manager) is how you get more substandard people.
Oh, and H1-Bs are no better on average than anyone else.
which is one of the reasons that *nix systems are far superior to Windows. Programs don't run until their permissions indicate they can run.
Yep, especially funny regarding the commercial where they drop a lexus (simulated) from 4000 feet and a second one racing it on the ground, and the ground one just beats the falling one to the "target". Anyone stupid enough to try it should win the Darwin Award of the decade.
Oh boy, the memories....
1985? - 286 w/ 1MB RAM and 40MB disk. Screaming (at the time)
1991 - 486 DX (66MHz) with 128MB of RAM and 2GB of disk space on 2 drives. It was a monster!!!
Now my video card has more RAM than my first 8 computers combined.
Last time I checked, your brain didn't increase in size. Since we're talking about human interfaces with documents, or should be, 16+ character tags become odius to decipher. Bold = , Italics = and so forth. Easy to comprehend formatting commands. Fonts, styles, etc should be equally simple. Why obfuscate a workable system? Layout should be equally simple.
Dungeon Seige was most certainly a grinder. You just ground and ground through opponents, because that was the only way to get more powerful, to continue grinding through the next set of opponents. I quit after beating the gnome machine mob.
Half Life, the original. Hours and hours and hours of multi-player kill your boss goodness.
The memories....
Good parts? I cycled through 40+ levels in EQ, never got to what I'd call a "good part". Even raiding groups weren't all that different from soloing, other than it went a lot faster and more consistently. Basically SSDD type stuff.
Most MMOs suffer from farming issues, whether by soloists or "parties" in any area that's "interesting". Why is it interesting? Because once in a blue moon, the mob that pops there will drop something considered valuable. It does this randomly, and regardless of who's there, thus encouraging farming.
What kills me is that this is easily solvable on both ends, and would end farming. This would, of course, kill the MMO's as they exist today's cash flows, since they would then have to provide real content to keep people's interest.
1) Amazon is not allowed to just put a new charge on a credit card, but
2) Amazon, for an honest mistake, can send an amended invoice and after 90 days can go through regular debt-recovery mechanisms.
And anyone who intentionally exploited the bug is a scumbag. 1) true (no buts)
2) I believe applies to larger scope contract law, not to seller/buyer of merchandise. If I buy something in a store, once I'm done with the cashier with me handing over payment, them handing over product, we're done.
Your opinion is noted, and not wholly disagreed with. Would you say the same of a seller that takes advantage of consumers? If so, you should be hating all gas station vendors right now.
Personally and legally (IANAL), I have no issue with Amazon correcting the mistake and not shipping. I might be grumpy, but they've done nothing illegal or unethical, other than get my hopes up. (Several rounds with memory prices being about 1/10th of what they were and having orders nixed didn't bother me in the least, and I continued shopping with those vendors when their prices were good for me).
However, completing the transaction, shipping me the goods, and then charging, or asking to charge me a different price for said goods, that's illegal IIRC. It's no different than, say, if Amazon saw you looking at a DVD set and shipping it to you and then charging you, or just randomly shipping items to you and charging you.
Consumer bad faith not withstanding, if they shipped it, it's done.
The tech tree is actually one of my gripes with Civilization, even though I may be partly responsible for it. (A long long time ago, in another life, I was part of the independent Civ II effort)
I have often thought there should be a better way, although Civ does simplify the entire management aspect. It's still smacks far too much of board games optimizations, and that was one of my gripes about board games.
Colonization I haven't played, so I cannot comment.
I truth, I played and quite EQ, because it was SSDD. Just because you put different bit maps on the screen didn't really change your strategy all that much. You had blunt/blade/magic targets in every level category, and the technique for most efficiently destroying them never changed across the levels.
And that brings me to another thing - levels. Levels in EQ(2), WoW, etc, have completely perverted what should be fun. Leveling is about the only important thing. A level 20 char will neer be killed by a level 5 mob unless they're attempting to commit suicide. Heck, not even by 4 level 5 mobs.
Since all these games are based off D&D, perhaps looking at that system might show that play rather than leveling was what made it fun. Levels did not have the dramatic effect they do in MMOs. A thief of moderate ability could kill a high level mage with luck, for example. A high level mage could, with an obscene amount of luck, kill a dragon single-handedly. (basically, mages and necromancers were the pinnacle of power but were very destructable)
These scenarios are impossible to even strive for in MMOs as they are today. 2-3 level differences are death sentences to the lower level individual.
All the consumer has to do is refuse the charge. Once charged, billed and shipped, the transaction is done.
Amazon committing a charge after the transaction has completed should be considered fraud and treated as such.
I guess you didn't quite catch the "A Few Good Men" reference, and the fact that while Nickelson's character believed he espoused those traits, he actually expressed the opposite.
What you're asking for is uniformity in stance by all developers, a group that historically does not play well together, and a large percentage of which is mercenary (consultants). Those consultants' only concern is how to extract money from their customers. They'll promise them anything to get in the door, and if it's impossible, that translates into continuing revenue streams. Thus your posted position is at best a figment of your imagination.
What has been hurt is my DVD buying habits. Since Netflix, I have probably only bought 5 DVDs in the past 2-3 years. Those are movies that I'm actually interested in seeing more than once (LOTR, Underworld). I don't see that buying habit changing in the future either, even if movies were $5 each on HD/BR. They'd have to come in around $2-3 for me to purchase them, and even then I'd probably just purchase, watch, and trade in 95% of what I watch.
You've got that wrong - the radio stations and major record distributors were in cahoots, as they say. (Now, those may not be the same as record companies...) But you have the rest mostly right, with the exception of selling records. They wanted to promote only a few "major" acts, especially ones they had they best contracts with, ie - most profit for them.
I was more along the lines of Nitzer Ebb or Front 242 way back then, along with some of the British Steel invasion and Punk/Alternative/Post Modern and whatever category Metallica/Megadeath/etc fell into.
;)
I don't have copies of either Nitzer Ebb or Front 242 anymore, and have forgotten what they sounded like by now. I personally don't think industrial crystalized into someting concrete until NIN brought it "mainstream" (very loose usage for the time). But that's merely my opinion/impression, and my timeframe may have been shifted as location was still key to definitions and exposure at the time, not like today where the internet gives you almost instant access to everything.
I have trouble visualizing Ministry as "industrial". Maybe I just don't recall their earlier works. It's been a few beers since that time.
the (T)Itanium still exists?
Interesting on TD. Thanks for that.
On the e-music front, I don't think anyone will argue that NIN was a front-runner. After all, he created a whole new genre. And his music was more "programming" than playing, way back in 88/89. (Not to mention that he provided the music for Quake.... Did you ever wonder about the nail gun?)
...The Ramones and BTO... Two more bands that were good, and have lasted. Sedated and Takin' Care of Business both have had commercial play recently.You forgot to mention ELO and Nine Inch Nails for other counterparts on MIDI ports and computer programming....
Nickelback sucks. The only reason some Americans like them is because they're pushed down everyone's throats just as much as, apparently, up in Canada. (There's a reason certain groups refer to people as sheep/flocks/lemmings)