I've been consulting for seven years -- full-time for six of those years. I find that my greatest challenge is getting my contacts to understand how my skills and experience have evolved over time. Although newsletters, success stories and a website can help explain developments, people don't always read them. So it can be difficult to explain that I do far more advanced work than I did seven years ago. I actually find my most challenging and interesting work comes from newer clients, who can be more easily persuaded of my full skillset. I don't mean that my longer-term contacts think I'm an airhead -- it's just that people who don't see you regularly have a hard time understanding how things have changed. That's why it's important to market yourself to existing contacts, as well as new ones.
The other challenge is that some people seem to think that "consultant" means you're unemployed. Some say, "Oh, so you're between jobs?" I then explain that I have a roster of clients and that I've been doing this for seven years. I have also learned to stop saying that I'm a consultant and to start saying that I have run a small marketing firm for seven years.
Occasionally, I also run into potential clients who think "consultant" just means that they can avoid payroll taxes. They don't understand that I have other clients and that, while a full-time ongoing engagement is something I'd consider, I'm not using consulting as a way to scam the government. I've run into some companies that have had "consultants" working for them full-time for the past five years. (Canada's tax laws do not allow this.) Fortunately, I don't run into people like this very often.
I live in Canada and have my own Safeway card, but I stopped using it when I got married. Now I use my husband's card -- by providing our phone number. No one ever questions why my name doesn't match with his.
Incidentally, do you know what all these club card points are for? They used to have displays in the stores, showing all the stuff you could save up for. Now the displays are gone and I wonder if points still exist. Am I just getting the supposed discount?
I don't think your comment sounds cheesy. Companionship is important. My sister has had people come up to her and say that the dog has helped them in ways that a wheelchair can't. (The dog can pick up keys, pull laundry out of a dryer, turn on lights, etc.) However, a robot could probably perform some of those duties. It could not replace the companionship of a living being.
So it would be interesting to see a comparison of the projected cost of a robot vs. that of a $25,000 assistance dog. If the robot lasted as long, didn't require training time and instead cost $12,000, perhaps the savings could be applied to other programs that would help people deal with social isolation. The volunteer time could be served in other ways, perhaps through social interaction with persons with disabilities. An economist could probably come up with a way to value the companionship derived from a dog. In fact, if the person had a $12,000 robot, they could probably still afford a dog that would always act as a pet, instead of one that has limited time for play and has been trained to not chase things, tug things, etc. And they could keep that dog for more than the eight years that an assistance dog typically serves. This might actually further reduce social isolation.
Guide dogs are sometimes stolen, but I agree that this could be more difficult than stealing a robot. (Still, do a search for "guide dog" + "burglar" or "theft" and you will turn up some stories!)
Still, I don't know how effective robots would be or how much they would cost. Since they're still under development, service dogs almost certainly provide more benefits.
My sister is raising a puppy for a service dog (assistance dog) program. Assistance dogs are not trained to provide protection or to be aggressive in any way. Because they are leashed and harnessed, they would be at a disadvantage during an attack or threatening situation. If a such a situation occurs, the assistance dog handler is supposed to drop the leash -- if the dog was acting aggressively, the handler might not be able to tell why (e.g. if the handler is blind) or they might be without the valuable assistance that the dog provides (e.g. physical support). If the dog is injured, the handler would be without a guide, which can be scary and dangerous.
An assistance dog that has been attacked or in an otherwise threatening situation may be scarred for life and may not be able to continue as a guide/service dog.
Granted, training programs for assistance dogs may vary from place to place. However, when I checked a few websites (as well as that for the society for which my sister raises a puppy), I could not find any that say these dogs provide protection against intruders/attackers.
I'd like to see a projected cost-benefit analysis for robots vs service dogs. My sister is raising a puppy that will eventually become a service dog for people with hearing disabilities and other challenges (but not blindness). As a puppy raiser, my sister encounters several challenges, both financial and social:
permission from her landlord to raise a puppy for 18 months
permission from her employer to bring the puppy to work every day
mandatory attendance of weekly training courses
purchases of collar, leash, haltis
responsible for any medical costs under $500
daily socialization, including shopping malls, grocery stores, buses, doctor's and dentist's offices, theatres, movies, restaurants, elevators and sporting events.
(This is particularly challenging, since many store owners refuse to admit the dog, despite my sister's possession of a government-issued ID that explains the dog is a service dog. People often say, "But you're not blind!" -- they don't understand that people with hearing problems, as well as invisible disabilities, have these dogs, let alone that people need to train them first.)
Raising a puppy is serious work, but imagine you also need to teach that puppy to ignore food, stop at crosswalks, not chase sticks, ignore animals, and otherwise suppress many instincts. This requires an enormous amount of energy.
Those are just the requirements for the people raising dogs from 10 weeks through 18 months. For breeders and caretakers of puppies under 10 weeks, the people cannot work outside the home -- and they must take on many of the same challenges as the puppy raisers. As for dogs who finish basic training (at 18 months), many must move on to basic training with new trainers, who take on much the same role as the puppy raisers. Finally, after all of this work, the dog can be placed with a client (person with a disability) for specialized training.
Recruiting puppy breeders, raisers, and advanced trainers is a challenge for service dog societies, which also need to subsidize food, training and other products. And clients will eventually need to feed and care for the dogs. This is not a small amount of money.
Given all of these challenges, it would be interesting to see how a robot stacks up. If a robot cost $10,000 plus batteries, perhaps this is not actually much higher than the "value" of a dog that has been through 18+ months of training and must still be fed and cared for -- volunteer time and effects on the puppy raiser's workplace productivity should also be included in the calculation. Certainly, a robot may not provide companionship, but it may not be such a bad idea. With more time on their hands, volunteers could actually provide other programs for clients. Robots could be pre-programmed, so that the first 18-24 months of dog training could be skipped. And you don't need to buy kibble for a robot.
Following the dot-com bust, my husband and I both lost our jobs. We enrolled with an agency that has been hired by the Canadian government to help IT industry professionals find work. Three years later, we both received emails from that agency. Someone had broken into their office, stealing their computer, which had thousands of applications, resumes, social insurance numbers (social security), and other details. The agency claimed that the server was stolen for resale value only and not for the data on it. They said that there was no reason to change your SIN or do anything other than watch your bank and credit card statements. To top it off, the agency's emails to me and my husband said "Dear " -- and the names belonged to other people, so they had further compromised privacy. After talking to police and federal fraud investigators, I pushed the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and Human Resources Development Canada to force the agency to act responsibly. The agency had no right to tell people that their data was safe or that they only had to watch their bills. The police and fraud investigators recommended monitoring social insurance number data and credit reports and putting fraud alerts on our credit files. Of course, this was a real pain for us -- we were in the midst of buying our first home and all of our financial applications were delayed by the credit alert -- but better safe than sorry.
It irks me that the agency is still under contract to the government. The privacy policy they had us sign when we applied actually said that our data would be totally safe and secure. (Of course, that's an insane promise, but they shouldn't put it in writing!) And the agency completely bungled the way they told people about the data theft -- even counselling people to do nothing, which conflicted with the government/police recommendations. Thousands of people were affected, but I bet my husband and I were the only ones who knew to check with police, instead of doing nothing.
It's possible that Ivy League grads are following the same trend seen by MBA grads (Ivy or not) in recent years. Around the time of the dot-com boom, MBAs started jumping into entrepreneurship, start-ups, and SMEs. Perhaps we're seeing more of today's young people look for challenge, experience and stimulation, as opposed to security, steadiness, and predictability.
I don't have an Ivy League degree, but I do have a BA and an MBA. During co-op terms university, I determined that, despite the benefits and security, I could not fathom a career in a large corporation. Instead, I've worked for SMEs and start-ups, and, for the past 4.5 years, have run my own consulting company. Although my own experience cannot speak for that of a generation, I do think that there's a general trend away from big corporations. The downsizing of the 80s and 90s (and the dot-com fallout) suggests that we're all alone in managing our careers.
Are you sure that many leave? We're talking about a country with one billion people. Let's say 1% of Indians go to university. If 1% of those people go to another country to pursue that education, then that's 100,000 Indian students. And I'm just using those numbers as estimates -- perhaps participation rates are higher.
Thanks for your reply. In reading through the site policy for submissions, though, I think they're doing more than ensuring they can broadcast your work.
"You grant CBC a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide license to: (i) use, reproduce, store, modify, make derivative works from, transmit, distribute, publicly perform or display such Submission for any purpose, and (ii) to sublicense to third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the foregoing rights."
So CBC can modify your work and also resell it.
" In addition. you agree to: (i) waive all moral rights in any Submission in favour of CBC".
I found the above point especially irksome. Waiving moral rights means that CBC doesn't have to acknowledge that I created the piece and could even attribute it to someone else.
"The user waives all rights, including contractual and moral, to contributions of content, discussion and other forms of creative expression."
If I waive contractual rights by signing this contract, where does that leave me? If I waive all rights, how can I offer my work to other entities or even display/produce it myself?
Zed's site is moving at a snail's pace, so I'm not able to check to see if this is still the case, but, when I signed up for a Zed account last year, I remember that their submissions policy indicated that all submitted works become the property of CBC. They invited submissions from artists, writers and musicians, but ask for a transfer of rights. I could have understood if Zed/CBC wanted the right to broadcast the work, but I seem to recall that a full rights transfer (short of attribution rights) was in order. Can anyone tell me if this is still the case?
With regard to non-compete agreements, how do they work if the employer has hired someone half-time? Let's say a company hired me for 20 hours a week and had me sign a doc that said that they owned any intellectual property I created during the course of my employment. Does this mean they own all the work I'm doing for other companies during the rest of my time? I ran into this situation last year and the company's HR department said the form wouldn't be interpreted that way. I disagreed. Anyone else have an opinion?
The difference is that your father's work is for the larger public good. The rights are owned by the people of Canada, not a corporation driven by the financial interests of shareholders. I presume that your father's research is made available to the scientific community and the public. (Your father hopefully also receives a pension, allowing him to make ends meet.) Do you think your father would have made the same decision if he knew that the technology would be made available on a licensed basis to the highest bidders and that the benefits (financial) would be diverted to private shareholders, not the larger public?
I studied Japanese for a couple of semesters in university and participated in a short homestay in Japan. Although I actually majored in English, that experience and paltry language skills helped me get my first job after university. I got a job with a financial services software company that had a large client base in Japan. They wouldn't have hired me without my prior work experience in marketing, communication and writing. However, the people on the hiring team figured that, if I had even a basic understanding of Japanese culture and language, I'd bring value to the company. I could at least appreciate some of the cultural norms. The same company also hired a young Chinese-Canadian woman who had majored in Japanese -- but who also had other marketing experience.
While a language degree alone may not ensure success, it can augment your overall profile. Companies rarely hire a person for a single trait or skill -- and you'd probably be bored in a position that only drew on one trait/skill. Instead, try to identify your strongest transferable skills, then map them to the needs of potential employers. In doing so, your language skills will become part of your total offering for the employer. In fact, this is relevant no matter what your major. (I did my undergrad in English, so I had to make this my strategy, since some people think Arts grads are useless.)
While I don't agree with blind corporate loyalty (I'm self-employed), I thought I'd point out that the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book by Richard Kiyosaki has been subject to criticism. (That's just one of the many sites, but it's the most thorough, IMHO.)
The information provided by marketers and sales people (two different groups) is different at each stage of the sales cycle. In the early stages of the sales cycle, the goal is to help stimulate the customer's pains (problems) and create a vision for solving those problems. (This is often where success stories are used -- to help potential customers understand the situations in which others have used this solution.) Marketing usually focuses on the first (external) half of the sales cycle or pipeline. Once the potential customer begins interacting with a *sales* person, the salesperson should be managing the relationship and helping to determine whether the solution (product) fits with the customer's needs. Any salesperson who sells a "wrong fit" solution to a customer is undermining the customer relationship, the company's reputation, and even the trust of existing customers.
No, I don't think that all marketers are honest or naive. But I do know that companies or senior managers often limit the marketers' access to information. And most of the marketers who develop collateral (brochures, websites, success stories, etc) come from arts and humanities backgrounds, not engineering or technical disciplines -- the scope of their training on the product category is often based on what they've been told during their course of employment with the company. So they fall prey to what sales and technical people tell them (and this is often from the very senior tech people, not the junior or intermediate technical people). Moreover, because of a lack of technical knowledge, some of the marketers don't even understand the concept of test conditions. When you tell them that software XYZ can batch 15,000 files a night when run on ABC processors with x-Ghz and blah-blah-blah, the marketers sometimes don't quite catch that that won't apply if the customer is running a different processor or what-have-you. I know this makes the marketers sound really dumb/naive, but many of them have never taken a computer course and only work for the computer/engineering firm because that was who was hiring people who do writing, layout, event coordination, etc. This isn't always the case, but it does happen sometimes.
As long as the company explains the conditions under which its product achieved certain standards, the company is not lying. In most cases, the marketing materials explain the test scenario or the environment of the customer who achieved the results.
Marketing materials do not set out the faults of the product. This is not the role of marketing. Marketing aims to connect buyers to sellers. Providing information about faults does not help to make that connection. Also, many of the "tests" cited by marketers are labeled with titles such as, "Customer Success Story". This should be a clue that the material will not detail unsuccessful characteristics of the product.
Finally, marketers in most companies are not technical experts. They have to rely on the information provided by engineers and programmers. Many companies avoid ever telling the marketing department anything negative. As a result, in many cases, marketers aren't lying when they make claims -- they're explaining what they were told. Many of these marketers, especially the ones writing up collateral, are junior, new to the company, or even working on contract, so they don't have the depth of knowledge to tell that they've been given misleading information. Other people in the company sometimes lie to the marketers. It's not always black and white. (Not that all marketers tell the truth, of course.)
I used to work in the marketing department of a CRM company. Occasionally, I'd do a search to see what sorts of fake addresses were in the database. Billg@microsoft.com was the most common address. However, BartSimpson@fox.com and president@whitehouse.gov were probably in second and third place. I tried to remove those addresses from the database, but only special people had such authorization and the company saw no value in purging bogus addresses unless the owner of the bogus address made the request. They did not seem to understand that having 20% junk in their database added to the cost of direct email campaigns. Oh well. I don't work for *them* anymore.
Re:LOGO ended my programming career
on
IT Literacy Test
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· Score: 1
At my school, you couldn't go into 11th grade computer science without having taken the 8th and 9th/10th grade comp sci courses. (At least two years focused on LOGO drawing.) And they wouldn't allow you to skip computer science, even if you could program circles around the teacher. Of course, this was almost 20 years ago. I'm sure there are multiple options for programming by now. I probably could have put up with LOGO for two years, but I knew I needed a scholarship to pay for university and, at the time, I thought universities looked at all your high school marks, not just the last two years. I wasn't going to lose out on university just because I hated drawing.:)
LOGO ended my programming career
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 1
I started programming when I was seven and had worked my way up to developing databases and other somewhat sophisticated programs by the time I was 12. When I went to junior high in eight grade, I had to take a computer course. They made us use LOGO. After a few assignments, it became obvious to me that I was never going to do well in the course, because the teacher's main interest was in the sophistication of the artwork, not the programming itself. Since I wasn't good at drawing, I was doomed to getting B's in the computer science program, since they wouldn't move on to real programming (like what I was doing at age 10) until 11th grade. And thus I went on to focus on arts and humanities courses during high school...and to major in English at university. The sad thing was that, when I was 11, a teacher had assessed my programming ability at equivalent to 11th grade. But nobody skipped grades in computer science back then, especially not a girl.:)
It may not have anything to do with being male. The Washington Times says a third defendant, Richard Rutowski, was acquitted, even though he had frequently changed IP addresses for Jaynes. It sounds like the prosecution only proved that DeGroot (the sister) purchased the domain names Jaynes used and couldn't prove that Rutowski knew he was helping send spam when he bought a mailbox for Jaynes. Of course, either might have done far more, but it was Jaynes they were able to pin for sending 100,000 emails in a day and for having $24 million in assets.
I grew up speaking English, but learned French during elementary and high school (unless you also count Sesame Street). When I took university Japanese, my instructor informed me that I spoke with a French accent. I was never able to shake it. For some reason, when I try to speak anything other than English, I assign a French accent and rhythm. Apparently, my French accent sounds pretty good, though -- people always think I'm from Quebec, as long as I don't say more than a sentence or two (which would reveal my lack of fluency).
Slashdot Mirror
The other challenge is that some people seem to think that "consultant" means you're unemployed. Some say, "Oh, so you're between jobs?" I then explain that I have a roster of clients and that I've been doing this for seven years. I have also learned to stop saying that I'm a consultant and to start saying that I have run a small marketing firm for seven years.
Occasionally, I also run into potential clients who think "consultant" just means that they can avoid payroll taxes. They don't understand that I have other clients and that, while a full-time ongoing engagement is something I'd consider, I'm not using consulting as a way to scam the government. I've run into some companies that have had "consultants" working for them full-time for the past five years. (Canada's tax laws do not allow this.) Fortunately, I don't run into people like this very often.
Incidentally, do you know what all these club card points are for? They used to have displays in the stores, showing all the stuff you could save up for. Now the displays are gone and I wonder if points still exist. Am I just getting the supposed discount?
So it would be interesting to see a comparison of the projected cost of a robot vs. that of a $25,000 assistance dog. If the robot lasted as long, didn't require training time and instead cost $12,000, perhaps the savings could be applied to other programs that would help people deal with social isolation. The volunteer time could be served in other ways, perhaps through social interaction with persons with disabilities. An economist could probably come up with a way to value the companionship derived from a dog. In fact, if the person had a $12,000 robot, they could probably still afford a dog that would always act as a pet, instead of one that has limited time for play and has been trained to not chase things, tug things, etc. And they could keep that dog for more than the eight years that an assistance dog typically serves. This might actually further reduce social isolation.
Guide dogs are sometimes stolen, but I agree that this could be more difficult than stealing a robot. (Still, do a search for "guide dog" + "burglar" or "theft" and you will turn up some stories!)
Still, I don't know how effective robots would be or how much they would cost. Since they're still under development, service dogs almost certainly provide more benefits.
An assistance dog that has been attacked or in an otherwise threatening situation may be scarred for life and may not be able to continue as a guide/service dog.
Granted, training programs for assistance dogs may vary from place to place. However, when I checked a few websites (as well as that for the society for which my sister raises a puppy), I could not find any that say these dogs provide protection against intruders/attackers.
permission from her landlord to raise a puppy for 18 months
permission from her employer to bring the puppy to work every day
mandatory attendance of weekly training courses
purchases of collar, leash, haltis
responsible for any medical costs under $500
daily socialization, including shopping malls, grocery stores, buses, doctor's and dentist's offices, theatres, movies, restaurants, elevators and sporting events.
(This is particularly challenging, since many store owners refuse to admit the dog, despite my sister's possession of a government-issued ID that explains the dog is a service dog. People often say, "But you're not blind!" -- they don't understand that people with hearing problems, as well as invisible disabilities, have these dogs, let alone that people need to train them first.)
Raising a puppy is serious work, but imagine you also need to teach that puppy to ignore food, stop at crosswalks, not chase sticks, ignore animals, and otherwise suppress many instincts. This requires an enormous amount of energy.
Those are just the requirements for the people raising dogs from 10 weeks through 18 months. For breeders and caretakers of puppies under 10 weeks, the people cannot work outside the home -- and they must take on many of the same challenges as the puppy raisers. As for dogs who finish basic training (at 18 months), many must move on to basic training with new trainers, who take on much the same role as the puppy raisers. Finally, after all of this work, the dog can be placed with a client (person with a disability) for specialized training.
Recruiting puppy breeders, raisers, and advanced trainers is a challenge for service dog societies, which also need to subsidize food, training and other products. And clients will eventually need to feed and care for the dogs. This is not a small amount of money.
Given all of these challenges, it would be interesting to see how a robot stacks up. If a robot cost $10,000 plus batteries, perhaps this is not actually much higher than the "value" of a dog that has been through 18+ months of training and must still be fed and cared for -- volunteer time and effects on the puppy raiser's workplace productivity should also be included in the calculation. Certainly, a robot may not provide companionship, but it may not be such a bad idea. With more time on their hands, volunteers could actually provide other programs for clients. Robots could be pre-programmed, so that the first 18-24 months of dog training could be skipped. And you don't need to buy kibble for a robot.
It irks me that the agency is still under contract to the government. The privacy policy they had us sign when we applied actually said that our data would be totally safe and secure. (Of course, that's an insane promise, but they shouldn't put it in writing!) And the agency completely bungled the way they told people about the data theft -- even counselling people to do nothing, which conflicted with the government/police recommendations. Thousands of people were affected, but I bet my husband and I were the only ones who knew to check with police, instead of doing nothing.
According to Museum of Hoaxes, the photos were taken by Deborah Feingold in 1985 -- for the launch of Windows 1.0.
I don't have an Ivy League degree, but I do have a BA and an MBA. During co-op terms university, I determined that, despite the benefits and security, I could not fathom a career in a large corporation. Instead, I've worked for SMEs and start-ups, and, for the past 4.5 years, have run my own consulting company. Although my own experience cannot speak for that of a generation, I do think that there's a general trend away from big corporations. The downsizing of the 80s and 90s (and the dot-com fallout) suggests that we're all alone in managing our careers.
Are you sure that many leave? We're talking about a country with one billion people. Let's say 1% of Indians go to university. If 1% of those people go to another country to pursue that education, then that's 100,000 Indian students. And I'm just using those numbers as estimates -- perhaps participation rates are higher.
Thanks for your reply. In reading through the site policy for submissions, though, I think they're doing more than ensuring they can broadcast your work. "You grant CBC a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide license to: (i) use, reproduce, store, modify, make derivative works from, transmit, distribute, publicly perform or display such Submission for any purpose, and (ii) to sublicense to third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the foregoing rights." So CBC can modify your work and also resell it. " In addition. you agree to: (i) waive all moral rights in any Submission in favour of CBC". I found the above point especially irksome. Waiving moral rights means that CBC doesn't have to acknowledge that I created the piece and could even attribute it to someone else. "The user waives all rights, including contractual and moral, to contributions of content, discussion and other forms of creative expression." If I waive contractual rights by signing this contract, where does that leave me? If I waive all rights, how can I offer my work to other entities or even display/produce it myself?
Is anyone aware of free/inexpensive tax apps for Canada? Or other countries, although that won't help *me*. :)
Zed's site is moving at a snail's pace, so I'm not able to check to see if this is still the case, but, when I signed up for a Zed account last year, I remember that their submissions policy indicated that all submitted works become the property of CBC. They invited submissions from artists, writers and musicians, but ask for a transfer of rights. I could have understood if Zed/CBC wanted the right to broadcast the work, but I seem to recall that a full rights transfer (short of attribution rights) was in order. Can anyone tell me if this is still the case?
With regard to non-compete agreements, how do they work if the employer has hired someone half-time? Let's say a company hired me for 20 hours a week and had me sign a doc that said that they owned any intellectual property I created during the course of my employment. Does this mean they own all the work I'm doing for other companies during the rest of my time? I ran into this situation last year and the company's HR department said the form wouldn't be interpreted that way. I disagreed. Anyone else have an opinion?
The difference is that your father's work is for the larger public good. The rights are owned by the people of Canada, not a corporation driven by the financial interests of shareholders. I presume that your father's research is made available to the scientific community and the public. (Your father hopefully also receives a pension, allowing him to make ends meet.) Do you think your father would have made the same decision if he knew that the technology would be made available on a licensed basis to the highest bidders and that the benefits (financial) would be diverted to private shareholders, not the larger public?
While a language degree alone may not ensure success, it can augment your overall profile. Companies rarely hire a person for a single trait or skill -- and you'd probably be bored in a position that only drew on one trait/skill. Instead, try to identify your strongest transferable skills, then map them to the needs of potential employers. In doing so, your language skills will become part of your total offering for the employer. In fact, this is relevant no matter what your major. (I did my undergrad in English, so I had to make this my strategy, since some people think Arts grads are useless.)
While I don't agree with blind corporate loyalty (I'm self-employed), I thought I'd point out that the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book by Richard Kiyosaki has been subject to criticism. (That's just one of the many sites, but it's the most thorough, IMHO.)
The information provided by marketers and sales people (two different groups) is different at each stage of the sales cycle. In the early stages of the sales cycle, the goal is to help stimulate the customer's pains (problems) and create a vision for solving those problems. (This is often where success stories are used -- to help potential customers understand the situations in which others have used this solution.) Marketing usually focuses on the first (external) half of the sales cycle or pipeline. Once the potential customer begins interacting with a *sales* person, the salesperson should be managing the relationship and helping to determine whether the solution (product) fits with the customer's needs. Any salesperson who sells a "wrong fit" solution to a customer is undermining the customer relationship, the company's reputation, and even the trust of existing customers.
No, I don't think that all marketers are honest or naive. But I do know that companies or senior managers often limit the marketers' access to information. And most of the marketers who develop collateral (brochures, websites, success stories, etc) come from arts and humanities backgrounds, not engineering or technical disciplines -- the scope of their training on the product category is often based on what they've been told during their course of employment with the company. So they fall prey to what sales and technical people tell them (and this is often from the very senior tech people, not the junior or intermediate technical people). Moreover, because of a lack of technical knowledge, some of the marketers don't even understand the concept of test conditions. When you tell them that software XYZ can batch 15,000 files a night when run on ABC processors with x-Ghz and blah-blah-blah, the marketers sometimes don't quite catch that that won't apply if the customer is running a different processor or what-have-you. I know this makes the marketers sound really dumb/naive, but many of them have never taken a computer course and only work for the computer/engineering firm because that was who was hiring people who do writing, layout, event coordination, etc. This isn't always the case, but it does happen sometimes.
Where did I say that marketers should lie or twist the truth?
Marketing materials do not set out the faults of the product. This is not the role of marketing. Marketing aims to connect buyers to sellers. Providing information about faults does not help to make that connection. Also, many of the "tests" cited by marketers are labeled with titles such as, "Customer Success Story". This should be a clue that the material will not detail unsuccessful characteristics of the product.
Finally, marketers in most companies are not technical experts. They have to rely on the information provided by engineers and programmers. Many companies avoid ever telling the marketing department anything negative. As a result, in many cases, marketers aren't lying when they make claims -- they're explaining what they were told. Many of these marketers, especially the ones writing up collateral, are junior, new to the company, or even working on contract, so they don't have the depth of knowledge to tell that they've been given misleading information. Other people in the company sometimes lie to the marketers. It's not always black and white. (Not that all marketers tell the truth, of course.)
I used to work in the marketing department of a CRM company. Occasionally, I'd do a search to see what sorts of fake addresses were in the database. Billg@microsoft.com was the most common address. However, BartSimpson@fox.com and president@whitehouse.gov were probably in second and third place. I tried to remove those addresses from the database, but only special people had such authorization and the company saw no value in purging bogus addresses unless the owner of the bogus address made the request. They did not seem to understand that having 20% junk in their database added to the cost of direct email campaigns. Oh well. I don't work for *them* anymore.
At my school, you couldn't go into 11th grade computer science without having taken the 8th and 9th/10th grade comp sci courses. (At least two years focused on LOGO drawing.) And they wouldn't allow you to skip computer science, even if you could program circles around the teacher. Of course, this was almost 20 years ago. I'm sure there are multiple options for programming by now. I probably could have put up with LOGO for two years, but I knew I needed a scholarship to pay for university and, at the time, I thought universities looked at all your high school marks, not just the last two years. I wasn't going to lose out on university just because I hated drawing. :)
I started programming when I was seven and had worked my way up to developing databases and other somewhat sophisticated programs by the time I was 12. When I went to junior high in eight grade, I had to take a computer course. They made us use LOGO. After a few assignments, it became obvious to me that I was never going to do well in the course, because the teacher's main interest was in the sophistication of the artwork, not the programming itself. Since I wasn't good at drawing, I was doomed to getting B's in the computer science program, since they wouldn't move on to real programming (like what I was doing at age 10) until 11th grade. And thus I went on to focus on arts and humanities courses during high school...and to major in English at university. The sad thing was that, when I was 11, a teacher had assessed my programming ability at equivalent to 11th grade. But nobody skipped grades in computer science back then, especially not a girl. :)
It may not have anything to do with being male. The Washington Times says a third defendant, Richard Rutowski, was acquitted, even though he had frequently changed IP addresses for Jaynes. It sounds like the prosecution only proved that DeGroot (the sister) purchased the domain names Jaynes used and couldn't prove that Rutowski knew he was helping send spam when he bought a mailbox for Jaynes. Of course, either might have done far more, but it was Jaynes they were able to pin for sending 100,000 emails in a day and for having $24 million in assets.
I grew up speaking English, but learned French during elementary and high school (unless you also count Sesame Street). When I took university Japanese, my instructor informed me that I spoke with a French accent. I was never able to shake it. For some reason, when I try to speak anything other than English, I assign a French accent and rhythm. Apparently, my French accent sounds pretty good, though -- people always think I'm from Quebec, as long as I don't say more than a sentence or two (which would reveal my lack of fluency).