My group is not the group in charge of hiring; I do my own share of recruiting (mostly because both this is a great place and we need great people), but I'm not trawling for resumes. I also didn't post as a way to recruit people, so mentioning my company's name was not relevant.
And I certainly am not looking for 1,236,731 resumes to come in from Slashdot readers because "look! A job!"
An old firearms instructor of mine had a saying -- "You can never miss fast enough" -- to emphasize that if you do something badly, it doesn't matter how quickly you did it, you still did it badly. I feel the same way about hiring -- it'll take us longer, probably, to hire who we need because of the ways we're trawling for that person (mostly staying away from Craigslist, monster, etc and relying on personal references), but I think we're more likely to hire someone good that way.
You really want to know where I work? You really think you might be interested? Find a book review I've written for Slashdot -- you should be able to find my email address on it -- and email me. And, err, don't be a jerk. Because frankly, the job market's swimming in "I'm too l33t for people skills" people, and working with people who think that being technically right means they have leave to be assholes is not my idea of fun.
In the Bay Area, at least, the three datapoints I have are: 1. Google's still screaming for people to join them (well, OK, they then axe highly-competent people during their interview process, but I'm sure it's for the best:) ); 2. When I was looking for a job in late August, I ended up in a competitive bidding situation between two companies; 3. The company for which I work now (which has a fabulous environment, IMHO), is looking to hire people, so far with no great success. Of course, we're also looking for pretty decent people:)
My thoughts exactly -- the problem is that we don't have a well-defined idea of what acronyms at this point are well-known enough. You wouldn't see anyone bitching about not expanding AGP, PCI, or SCSI, but hell, I don't know what LSB is...
Well, I do now -- Linux Standard Base. See this link
I started working at this new place about two months ago. My salary is high five-digits, about a 14% increase over my last job, and I got many, many, many, many stock options. Of course, the likelihood they'll pan out is... small. But if they do...
Oh, worst part? Free food, free drinks, great people to work with, and sane management (well, for some value of 'sane'. My boss works crazy hours, but seems to feel that other people working those same hours is unhealthy. Pot. Kettle.)
Anyone remember the story about how a Pakistani medical services person was holding up some records for ransom? Turned out that an SF hospital had outsourced their medical record transcription to a Sausalito (just north of SF) firm which outsourced some of this work to a Florida company which outsourced some of this work to a Texas company which outsourced some of this work to this Pakistani person.
No, seriously, think I'm engaging in hyperbole here? Check this out:
So if you asked UCSF Medical Center "do you outsource information processing to China or India?" they'd honestly be able to say say "Oh, hell no! In fact, we even require our contractors not outsource anything to those countries or to anyone who outsources anything to those countries!"
Good idea. This is why plane crashes per airline usually are reported either in relation to passenger miles (X deaths per Y passenger miles) or in relation to takeoff/landings, since they're the least safe (X deaths per Y take-off/landing).
Personally, I'd like hacks to be reported in relation to hours in operation per year -- so if you've got two Linux servers up and one gets hacked once, you get 1:17532. It's probably reasonable, given that we can assume most servers are just going to be up all the time, to simplify this to hacks per operational systems out there.
(I still think it's somewhat bogus to dismiss out of hand the "more virii are created on Windows because it's more popular" approach while using exactly the same approach to explain why people hack Linux systems. If Windows remained the easiest system in the world to compromise but only had a.5% marketshare, I think we'd be seeing far fewer worms and virii developed for it)
Crunches will always happen, IMO. The question is how often and how you're expected to deal with them. This particular situation is acknowledged to be fucked up -- they should have hired me about three months earlier.
Yesterday, I worked 19 hours. The days before, I worked something on the order of 13-14 hours.
I'm working on a project that's pretty damn important to my company, and I've got to put lots of late hours in. My boss makes me do this.
She does this by working harder, and often longer, than I do. This morning, when I left at 4am, it was only about 45 minutes after she left.
She does this by telling me how much she appreciates what I do, and the impact I make.
She does this by providing me with all the snacks and soft-drinks I can drink, and by making sure that when I work late I'm well starbucked and fed.
She does this by paying me a pretty darn decent wage, and letting me know that when this company can afford to pay me more, they will.
She does this by looking at the fact I worked while on vacation and letting me determine how many days of vacation I really officially took, if any.
And so in return, I spend 70-80 hours at work during crunch times and make sure that what needs to get done gets done.
Everyone I know at Google is like this in this regard. I suspect their managers are like my manager in these regards. I suspect "FOAD" is not normally something a Googler ever considers wanting to tell their boss.
Think about how some cars are sold with option packages: I couldn't get the parking system I wanted ($300) without getting the GPS system I didn't want ($1200).
So maybe the whole thing here is that you _cannot_ have a Level 3 computer with a Level 8 card -- that it's a bundle, and you have to go with an L8 computer if you want an L8 card even if all you want the L8 desig for is just the card, not the CPU.
Add to that some sort of ability to limit in BIOS what you can use ("this is an L3 computer. It may only have video cards that are 33MHz or slower and 32Mb of less of RAM") and you essentially kill modding of the most moddable (is that a word?) platform around! Then, you don't necessarily need to build an 'XBox' to do one thing and a 'PC' to do another and be afraid people will take the XBox and turn it into a computer -- you just sell an L2 (of a certain form factor) that can't be upgraded.
Oh, that would never happen. It's not like I was buying 10-pack of CDs for about $20 (but there's a $10 rebate! So I'm actually getting them for $1/each!) about 12 years ago, but recently bought a 200-pack for $3 ($43 - $40 rebate; Don't want a rebate? Fry's sells 50-pack for $4.50 pretty often).
There's a difference between blank CDs -- where it's purely a manufacturing issue, and production has ramped up enormously, and prices have just dived through the floor (hell, look at DVD media costs) -- and CDs with "stuff" on them. You really think you _ever_ paid all that much for the media? It's the stuff that's expensive.
Actually, you don't need to be worth more than what they pay you -- you need to be worth more than any of their other similarly-priced options. This is a critical difference, and is really at the core of the matter here -- it's not that ye random IT worker isn't contributing more to the bottom line of the company than they're being paid, resulting in a net-positive cash flow change. It's that random Chinese/Indian IT workers can cost A LOT less, and contribute about as much, resulting in a more attractive value proposition.
It's like a savings account: You're not going to look for something that beats inflation -- you're going to look for something that beats the other saving account rates out there.
That was true in the beginning, but do you really know anyone at this point who wants a gmail invite and doesn't have one? Pretty much everyone I know goes around going "anyone want an invite? Anyone?"
The thing about gmail (or any other situation where you're using Google's filesystems to store your stuff) isn't that you've got the same 1000Mb you've got on your desktop.
Using Google's filesystem means you get: 1. Redundant, FAST network accessibility from pretty much anywhere, because it's Google; 2. Redundant, fault-tolerant, self-healing systems on which your information, because it's Google (we've all actually read the PDF talking about GFS, right?).
Now, I heard somewhere that because of Google's massive scaling it still only costs them about $2/Gig (though there's no way for me to verify that number), so it's not like _FOR THEM_ it's a lot of money, but there's no way you could replicate some of the features of gmail (and that's even disregarding things like the actual software capabilities of it) for, err, not a lot of money.
In 2001 I was laid off from my job at a fairly successful company for, well, pretty much sheer politics.
So I walked away, maintained contact with the people who used to work for me and my peers, never badmouthed the guy who sacked me, and went on to have a good life.
By that logic, a story along the lines of "All college students now required to learn Python" can be dismissed with "Oh, big deal. I know Python. So does my friend, Joe."
Among other things, Slashdot focuses on cool tech toys. Not so long ago, people looked at the iPod and said "you want *HOW* much for it? You're insane. It'll never sell." Then people said "well, it's definitely cool, but only very rich people who really want to look cool will get it." Apple has an image of being _THE_ boutique place. It's meaningful (to me at least) that we're getting to the point where iPods are so ubiquitous that we're starting to see large[ish] organizations bundling them with a 'standard offering' (as in this case: "Here's how much a degree and an iPod will cost you; you can't have the former without the latter").
Yow. I'm as much into pain as the next average guy in San Francisco, but there are parts of my body I'd *still* prefer to not get pierced by anyone other than people who've done a WHOLE BUNCH of them first.
Pardon me while I cross my legs and clench.
Re:And now for something completely different...
on
Life After Doom
·
· Score: 1
I've personally witnessed issues with women in CS in terms of how clients and coworkers interacted with them. It verged from annoying (in my first IT job, I had a coworker who had about eight years of experience. There were customers who she'd tell something who would then turn to me to confirm/deny this, because, well, apparently having a penis made me really, really smart) to creepy with racist overtones (like the person who argued that the Indians who were harassing female coworkers were just adjusting to our own culture and in their culture it was perfectly OK).
Ten minutes after it's publicly posted, and the vast majority of comments either say "how about attracting men to childrearing? Why isn't that an issue?" or "well, maybe they just ain't interested! Social engineering sucks!"
I've not seen any evidence that women are somehow biologially inherently uninterested in the computer science field. You can talk about interactions all you like, but I dropped out of a pretty damn decent CS program because I realized I want human interaction, which is why I'm now in _IT_ rather than in programming -- so I get to deal with people. There _are_ CS-oriented environments and jobs that offer more interaction.
My concern is that what we're seeing is artificial -- that women are either dissuaded from entering/staying in the field or are not as encouraged as men. This is bad both because we might be missing out on excellent people out there just because they don't have a penis and because if we discourage women from entering profitable fields (offshoring notwithstanding), we end up perpetuating an earning power inequity between men and women. This sucks because, well, when I get married I'd like my wife to make at least as much as I do (and ideally, much much more. Really, a sugar mommy wouldn't be so bad:) ). And when I have a child, if she's a daughter, I'd like her to have as easy of a time getting into a profitable profession as a son.
So yeah. Honestly? I don't care about men in nursing; both because I don't think society has much to gain by pushing men to accept lower-income jobs (next, lets try to get affluent white kids to take up a career as janitors! That'd be useful!) and because, even in nursing, we see an earnings gap (male nurses get promoted faster and are paid more, on average, than female nurses).
Oh, and forgive me for being a selfish asshole, but the other reason I'd like to see more women in CS is because I'd like to finally be able to talk shop with my loved one; I've known exactly three very attractive women who were in IT (and had a relationship with one of them). We need more.
I entirely agree with you but will point out two things: A) We're talking _interplanetary_, not interstellar; and B) Bulk cargo transportation is definitely doable here -- but we're not talking about travel.
In other words, this isn't "travel to the stars" on two accounts. It's not that this isn't _useful_ (or cool), it's just useful for intrastellar transportation, not interstellar travel.
The ship is absolutely NOT moving 'pretty quickly' when it enters space. It may be moving pretty fast compared to, say, planes -- escape velocity is about 25KMPH, which would be about Mach 32 if it was at sea level.
But when it comes to interplanetary distances, 25KMPH is... barely pokey.
Closest star to us is Proxima Centaury -- about 4.2 light years, or 2.5 * 10^13 miles.
Well, this
explains it much better than I can. Basically, the Japanese mission is using 7.5um film; the NASA document posits that, if we were able to use sail of only a few nanometers (actually, a few thousand times lower areal density than we can currently achieve), we could see acceleration of up to.3m/s/s, and terminal velocity of around 671KPH. Estimated trip to closest star: About 2693 years.
The amount of force exerted on the sail decreases as a square of the distance (since the amount of light reaching the sail decreases by a square of the distance). We're not talking about 'meaningful acceleration' in anything like our current thinking of space travel -- this isn't "get on this space yacht and a few months down the road you'll get to the other star," but rather "put something on this vessel and several hundred/thousand years from now it'll get to where you wanted it to get."
This isn't about travel.
Either way, the Japanese are trying to make this look cool by saying it's star-faring technology. Probably true, but only because we're not likely to put humans on this thing -- so it's possible we'll do this before we get to Mars, because the expense and risk could be vastly lower.
You can mount flashlights on pretty much any firearm these days. Modern Glocks and Sigs have rails for small lights/lasers; shotguns can have a light either clamped to the barrel or integrated into the foregrip; and modern rifles can either have rails (P90, G36, M4) or can have the flashlight mounted to the barrel by way of a clamp.
Having had to compare shooting a handgun while holding a flashlight vs. having a handgun with an integrated flashlight, they're really incomparable.
Slashdot Mirror
My group is not the group in charge of hiring; I do my own share of recruiting (mostly because both this is a great place and we need great people), but I'm not trawling for resumes. I also didn't post as a way to recruit people, so mentioning my company's name was not relevant.
And I certainly am not looking for 1,236,731 resumes to come in from Slashdot readers because "look! A job!"
An old firearms instructor of mine had a saying -- "You can never miss fast enough" -- to emphasize that if you do something badly, it doesn't matter how quickly you did it, you still did it badly. I feel the same way about hiring -- it'll take us longer, probably, to hire who we need because of the ways we're trawling for that person (mostly staying away from Craigslist, monster, etc and relying on personal references), but I think we're more likely to hire someone good that way.
You really want to know where I work? You really think you might be interested? Find a book review I've written for Slashdot -- you should be able to find my email address on it -- and email me. And, err, don't be a jerk. Because frankly, the job market's swimming in "I'm too l33t for people skills" people, and working with people who think that being technically right means they have leave to be assholes is not my idea of fun.
In the Bay Area, at least, the three datapoints I have are: :) ); :)
1. Google's still screaming for people to join them (well, OK, they then axe highly-competent people during their interview process, but I'm sure it's for the best
2. When I was looking for a job in late August, I ended up in a competitive bidding situation between two companies;
3. The company for which I work now (which has a fabulous environment, IMHO), is looking to hire people, so far with no great success. Of course, we're also looking for pretty decent people
It's getting better, I think.
Well, I do now -- Linux Standard Base. See this link
I started working at this new place about two months ago. My salary is high five-digits, about a 14% increase over my last job, and I got many, many, many, many stock options. Of course, the likelihood they'll pan out is ... small. But if they do ...
:)
Oh, worst part? Free food, free drinks, great people to work with, and sane management (well, for some value of 'sane'. My boss works crazy hours, but seems to feel that other people working those same hours is unhealthy. Pot. Kettle.)
These places exist. They're rare, though.
And at least one of them is hiring
Linux has a bunch of good games!
... Super Breakout ...
There's Breakout
Photoshop
I can't believe that after 220 comments, nobody has done this yet!
I, for one, welcome our new shotgun-wielding robot overlords!
And in the end, does it really matter?
/ c/ a/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL
Anyone remember the story about how a Pakistani medical services person was holding up some records for ransom? Turned out that an SF hospital had outsourced their medical record transcription to a Sausalito (just north of SF) firm which outsourced some of this work to a Florida company which outsourced some of this work to a Texas company which outsourced some of this work to this Pakistani person.
No, seriously, think I'm engaging in hyperbole here? Check this out:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
So if you asked UCSF Medical Center "do you outsource information processing to China or India?" they'd honestly be able to say say "Oh, hell no! In fact, we even require our contractors not outsource anything to those countries or to anyone who outsources anything to those countries!"
Bleh.
Good idea. This is why plane crashes per airline usually are reported either in relation to passenger miles (X deaths per Y passenger miles) or in relation to takeoff/landings, since they're the least safe (X deaths per Y take-off/landing).
.5% marketshare, I think we'd be seeing far fewer worms and virii developed for it)
Personally, I'd like hacks to be reported in relation to hours in operation per year -- so if you've got two Linux servers up and one gets hacked once, you get 1:17532. It's probably reasonable, given that we can assume most servers are just going to be up all the time, to simplify this to hacks per operational systems out there.
(I still think it's somewhat bogus to dismiss out of hand the "more virii are created on Windows because it's more popular" approach while using exactly the same approach to explain why people hack Linux systems. If Windows remained the easiest system in the world to compromise but only had a
Crunches will always happen, IMO. The question is how often and how you're expected to deal with them. This particular situation is acknowledged to be fucked up -- they should have hired me about three months earlier.
On a slightly less flaimbaitish note ...
Yesterday, I worked 19 hours.
The days before, I worked something on the order of 13-14 hours.
I'm working on a project that's pretty damn important to my company, and I've got to put lots of late hours in. My boss makes me do this.
She does this by working harder, and often longer, than I do. This morning, when I left at 4am, it was only about 45 minutes after she left.
She does this by telling me how much she appreciates what I do, and the impact I make.
She does this by providing me with all the snacks and soft-drinks I can drink, and by making sure that when I work late I'm well starbucked and fed.
She does this by paying me a pretty darn decent wage, and letting me know that when this company can afford to pay me more, they will.
She does this by looking at the fact I worked while on vacation and letting me determine how many days of vacation I really officially took, if any.
And so in return, I spend 70-80 hours at work during crunch times and make sure that what needs to get done gets done.
Everyone I know at Google is like this in this regard. I suspect their managers are like my manager in these regards. I suspect "FOAD" is not normally something a Googler ever considers wanting to tell their boss.
Ooh, I think we may be missing the point.
...
Think about how some cars are sold with option packages: I couldn't get the parking system I wanted ($300) without getting the GPS system I didn't want ($1200).
So maybe the whole thing here is that you _cannot_ have a Level 3 computer with a Level 8 card -- that it's a bundle, and you have to go with an L8 computer if you want an L8 card even if all you want the L8 desig for is just the card, not the CPU.
Add to that some sort of ability to limit in BIOS what you can use ("this is an L3 computer. It may only have video cards that are 33MHz or slower and 32Mb of less of RAM") and you essentially kill modding of the most moddable (is that a word?) platform around! Then, you don't necessarily need to build an 'XBox' to do one thing and a 'PC' to do another and be afraid people will take the XBox and turn it into a computer -- you just sell an L2 (of a certain form factor) that can't be upgraded.
I hope these are just paranoid delusions
Oh, that would never happen. It's not like I was buying 10-pack of CDs for about $20 (but there's a $10 rebate! So I'm actually getting them for $1/each!) about 12 years ago, but recently bought a 200-pack for $3 ($43 - $40 rebate; Don't want a rebate? Fry's sells 50-pack for $4.50 pretty often).
There's a difference between blank CDs -- where it's purely a manufacturing issue, and production has ramped up enormously, and prices have just dived through the floor (hell, look at DVD media costs) -- and CDs with "stuff" on them. You really think you _ever_ paid all that much for the media? It's the stuff that's expensive.
Actually, you don't need to be worth more than what they pay you -- you need to be worth more than any of their other similarly-priced options. This is a critical difference, and is really at the core of the matter here -- it's not that ye random IT worker isn't contributing more to the bottom line of the company than they're being paid, resulting in a net-positive cash flow change. It's that random Chinese/Indian IT workers can cost A LOT less, and contribute about as much, resulting in a more attractive value proposition.
It's like a savings account: You're not going to look for something that beats inflation -- you're going to look for something that beats the other saving account rates out there.
That was true in the beginning, but do you really know anyone at this point who wants a gmail invite and doesn't have one? Pretty much everyone I know goes around going "anyone want an invite? Anyone?"
:)
Maybe we just have too many friends at Google
The thing about gmail (or any other situation where you're using Google's filesystems to store your stuff) isn't that you've got the same 1000Mb you've got on your desktop.
Using Google's filesystem means you get:
1. Redundant, FAST network accessibility from pretty much anywhere, because it's Google;
2. Redundant, fault-tolerant, self-healing systems on which your information, because it's Google (we've all actually read the PDF talking about GFS, right?).
Now, I heard somewhere that because of Google's massive scaling it still only costs them about $2/Gig (though there's no way for me to verify that number), so it's not like _FOR THEM_ it's a lot of money, but there's no way you could replicate some of the features of gmail (and that's even disregarding things like the actual software capabilities of it) for, err, not a lot of money.
In 2001 I was laid off from my job at a fairly successful company for, well, pretty much sheer politics.
So I walked away, maintained contact with the people who used to work for me and my peers, never badmouthed the guy who sacked me, and went on to have a good life.
By that logic, a story along the lines of "All college students now required to learn Python" can be dismissed with "Oh, big deal. I know Python. So does my friend, Joe."
Among other things, Slashdot focuses on cool tech toys. Not so long ago, people looked at the iPod and said "you want *HOW* much for it? You're insane. It'll never sell." Then people said "well, it's definitely cool, but only very rich people who really want to look cool will get it." Apple has an image of being _THE_ boutique place. It's meaningful (to me at least) that we're getting to the point where iPods are so ubiquitous that we're starting to see large[ish] organizations bundling them with a 'standard offering' (as in this case: "Here's how much a degree and an iPod will cost you; you can't have the former without the latter").
Yow. I'm as much into pain as the next average guy in San Francisco, but there are parts of my body I'd *still* prefer to not get pierced by anyone other than people who've done a WHOLE BUNCH of them first.
Pardon me while I cross my legs and clench.
In Soviet Russia, cheerleaders blow YOU!
Oh, one more point:
I've personally witnessed issues with women in CS in terms of how clients and coworkers interacted with them. It verged from annoying (in my first IT job, I had a coworker who had about eight years of experience. There were customers who she'd tell something who would then turn to me to confirm/deny this, because, well, apparently having a penis made me really, really smart) to creepy with racist overtones (like the person who argued that the Indians who were harassing female coworkers were just adjusting to our own culture and in their culture it was perfectly OK).
Ten minutes after it's publicly posted, and the vast majority of comments either say "how about attracting men to childrearing? Why isn't that an issue?" or "well, maybe they just ain't interested! Social engineering sucks!"
:) ). And when I have a child, if she's a daughter, I'd like her to have as easy of a time getting into a profitable profession as a son.
I've not seen any evidence that women are somehow biologially inherently uninterested in the computer science field. You can talk about interactions all you like, but I dropped out of a pretty damn decent CS program because I realized I want human interaction, which is why I'm now in _IT_ rather than in programming -- so I get to deal with people. There _are_ CS-oriented environments and jobs that offer more interaction.
My concern is that what we're seeing is artificial -- that women are either dissuaded from entering/staying in the field or are not as encouraged as men. This is bad both because we might be missing out on excellent people out there just because they don't have a penis and because if we discourage women from entering profitable fields (offshoring notwithstanding), we end up perpetuating an earning power inequity between men and women. This sucks because, well, when I get married I'd like my wife to make at least as much as I do (and ideally, much much more. Really, a sugar mommy wouldn't be so bad
So yeah. Honestly? I don't care about men in nursing; both because I don't think society has much to gain by pushing men to accept lower-income jobs (next, lets try to get affluent white kids to take up a career as janitors! That'd be useful!) and because, even in nursing, we see an earnings gap (male nurses get promoted faster and are paid more, on average, than female nurses).
Oh, and forgive me for being a selfish asshole, but the other reason I'd like to see more women in CS is because I'd like to finally be able to talk shop with my loved one; I've known exactly three very attractive women who were in IT (and had a relationship with one of them). We need more.
I entirely agree with you but will point out two things:
A) We're talking _interplanetary_, not interstellar; and
B) Bulk cargo transportation is definitely doable here -- but we're not talking about travel.
In other words, this isn't "travel to the stars" on two accounts. It's not that this isn't _useful_ (or cool), it's just useful for intrastellar transportation, not interstellar travel.
But when it comes to interplanetary distances, 25KMPH is ... barely pokey.
Closest star to us is Proxima Centaury -- about 4.2 light years, or 2.5 * 10^13 miles.
Well, this explains it much better than I can. Basically, the Japanese mission is using 7.5um film; the NASA document posits that, if we were able to use sail of only a few nanometers (actually, a few thousand times lower areal density than we can currently achieve), we could see acceleration of up to .3m/s/s, and terminal velocity of around 671KPH. Estimated trip to closest star: About 2693 years.
Don't hold your breath.
The amount of force exerted on the sail decreases as a square of the distance (since the amount of light reaching the sail decreases by a square of the distance). We're not talking about 'meaningful acceleration' in anything like our current thinking of space travel -- this isn't "get on this space yacht and a few months down the road you'll get to the other star," but rather "put something on this vessel and several hundred/thousand years from now it'll get to where you wanted it to get."
This isn't about travel.
Either way, the Japanese are trying to make this look cool by saying it's star-faring technology. Probably true, but only because we're not likely to put humans on this thing -- so it's possible we'll do this before we get to Mars, because the expense and risk could be vastly lower.
You can mount flashlights on pretty much any firearm these days. Modern Glocks and Sigs have rails for small lights/lasers; shotguns can have a light either clamped to the barrel or integrated into the foregrip; and modern rifles can either have rails (P90, G36, M4) or can have the flashlight mounted to the barrel by way of a clamp.
Having had to compare shooting a handgun while holding a flashlight vs. having a handgun with an integrated flashlight, they're really incomparable.