I'm seeing this same sort of thing happen at a lot of firms. Many firms seem to be taking the attitude of "Well, given how bad the economy is, you're lucky to have this." But the truth, at least in my area, is the economy isn't bad. There are well paying opportunities out there. So the race for the door continues...
But let's not forget, they hire "only the best"! Surely the best will work under their conditions, right? Right? Right?
Because the stated goal was to Open Source Solaris... Without that, this whole exercise is meaningless.
Open Sourcing Solaris does not mean adding everything to Linux. It's bad enough that Sun's competitors get to see all of the highend Solaris code without Sun handing it to them directly.
Hmm still sounds to me like this miscommunication could have been figured out long before a day long interview is over. If I got the feeling that an interview was for an entry-level position, I'd just ask. It's a valid question. Besides, didn't you think it was odd that you were interviewing with lower-level people when you clearly wanted an executive level position?
I wouldn't be suprised if some people at Google did those things to you. But the onus is really on you to know what kind of job you're interviewing for before you go into the interview. It is possible to get a vague idea of pay and level before the interview. If they are really offering you 1/10th of the pay, then it sounds like you were interviewing for an entry level job when you expected an executive job and you really should have known the difference.
Ugh I'm having the same problem. I want to get into that field but I left without my PhD, so I only have my MS. I know that I'm going to have to finish my PhD if I plan to get anywhere in that field. It's just an entry-level job requirement.
Ahh geez, I was just kidding! I just like to poke fun at all the soccer mom's out there with their gas guzzlers driving to the grocery store. Just seems like overkill unless you're feeding a family of 20.
You're right - it is illegal to impede the flow of traffic. It would almost be a good post, if only you're puerile jibe weren't included.
My mom doesn't drive a minivan; she drives the modern-day equivalent - a SUV.
Re:He seems a dangerous driver (serious)
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not a god-given right. It's a law-given privledge. I think people in the US seem to forget that driving is a privledge, not a right. Society is allowing you to put the rest of us at risk by allowing you to operate a machine that weighs several thousand pounds at high speeds. You pose a significant risk to MANY other people and as such, you have no right to make it even more risky by driving too fast.
Re:Animation is not necessarily realism
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 1
A friend of mine and I have discussed the same sort of thing. Hands are a good example of that - it's like our brain is wired to see hands in specific, subtle positions and we instantly know whether or not a pair of animated hands "looks right". But when the hands are abstracted to a three-fingered glove, it doesn't bother people because they are immediately recognized as not being "real hands".
Animation is not necessarily realism
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Animation is not necessarily at its greatest when it is the most like the real world. Yes, Pixar did quite well with the modeling hair in the wind, etc., but that doesn't necessarily make for a better animated movie. It has to be a good mix of realism and fantasy.
Sounds like Apple is using an algorithm called SVM lite. Categorization problems are often solved with that particular algorithm because people feel that it's much better than a Bayesian system. I prefer rule-learner based algorithms. I've found them to be much more accurate and they tend to run in O(n) time where n is the number of rules. I've also found several articles that point to alternatives that are better than SVM. But at least Apple got involved! A quick search on the ACM site comes up with a lot of papers on the topic.
Maybe I don't get it. Do you have to sign a reciept or something after your RFID has been read? Otherwise, what's to stop an unscrupulousbar owner from charging you for all sorts of things during the evening? And if you do sign something, how do they know that they have the right signature? What if I make a fake RFID that has someone else number and just sign for it as usual? Not that most people checked the signatures on credit cards, but at least they have the option of checking...
Reminds me of that song "Master of the House" from Les Miserables...
That's the problem - the iris scanner is not being beat. It's beat when it gives a false positive. The system is being beat because those people are being let in. Instead, the system has to be toughened so you don't let people in who fail the positive ID.
I'm not saying the scanner is perfect - it's clearly not perfect, but it isn't beaten until it gives false positives.
It's true - people are usually considered crackpots until they have irrefutable proof that they are right. There's a darn good reason for that. There are a LOT of crackpots. It's a much better bet to think that any given person is a crackpot than it is to think that they are right. Sure you have a few examples where the claim was true, but there are many, many, many counter examples.
I don't really care if it is Noah's Ark, or just some boat up on a hill. I don't really care if they found Atlantis or it's a sunken cargo ship. But, I'll believe it when I see it...
No we don't! They are Native Americans, or Cherokees and Seminoles and what-have-you. Indians come from India!
Re:Yes but how does Sun compare to other tech stoc
on
Should Sun Just Fold Now?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think it is important to see how Sun is doing comparatively...Sun's BETA vs. the S&P is 1.72. That's pretty good. Since the beginning of the year, their adjusted beta is 1.79.
They haven't had a profitable quarter since Q402, but they did breakeven in Q203 and Q303.
They have $3B in cash and marketable securities. They have $2.3B in accounts receivable. Not bad there either. They have $6.4B in total liabilities, but only $1.5B is long term debt. That leaves $6.4B in shareholder equity.
Their price/sales ratio is a measly 1.2. That's pretty low. Maybe the market is underestimating their chances? Or maybe it's the negative sales growth that is scaring people away?
Sun is usually bought for the high-end servers where Linux is not considered a good substitute. I like Linux, but if I need a 64 processor machine with over 200gigs of RAM, I'm buying a Sun. In fact, that's exactly what we use at my firm. We use Linux boxes too, but those are for smaller tasks. The majority of the heavy lifting is done with large, expensive machines like Sun Fire 15k machines. When we have a system problem, we need the machine backup pronto and it really needs to be able to handle the crisis. Suns do that well. So we continue to dish out $3mm per machine and have about 300 Suns in each datacenter. We have other vendors as well of course and quite a lot of other machines, but the Suns aren't going anywhere.
Actually, Ferrari has suffered and does suffer. It's a money losing venture that was sold to it's chief rival, Fiat. Not that I think Sun is in the same position...
That's the thing though - college isn't about coding skills. I agree - if you come in with nothing, you're probably not going to learn it there. College degrees are about computer science skills - a language independent way of knowing what the hell is going on and how to do things. Don't get me wrong - a lot of college graduates never learn much and it's essentially a waste. But then that's what the interview is for...The resume screening is just to cut the pool of candidates.
Well you have to be good at translating sarcasm into the written word in order for people to get it.
I think most competent firms know that it's easy to fake references. My firm doesn't even bother to check them because they are such unreliable sources. But usually, you can pick out someone who knows what they are talking about from someone who doesn't during the interview. But the point I was trying to make is that often, in order to get the interview at all, you need some credentials.
I guess this discussion also comes down to differing definitions of what "IT" is. Some people see IT as being anything related to computers, whether it be programming, network admin, modelling, etc. whereas some people limit it to just SA/NA/"systems" work.
I think there are some things you can't learn in class when it comes to software development/design. There are also some things that, while you can learn on the field, take a lot longer to learn if you never had the class. Maybe there are also some things that you either "get" or "don't get" and no amount of experience or class is going to help you get there.
Honestly, I wouldn't want to be on the SA/NA side of IT. Maybe it's just because I don't like doing things that tend towards support roles. But, unfortunately, I agree - that part of the industry is pretty tough. It seems hard to have any sort of staying power, but there are always people who do it...
So if your company only hires people with degrees then you admit you have over-paid under-skilled, and way under-motivated employees.
I'm not sure where you've come up with the evidence that fuels your conclusion, but I never said anything of the sort. Motivation never had anything to do with college. You can't equate skills with college OR experience. I've seen many employees with years of experience and barely enough skills to fill a fishbowl.
What I am saying is that there are many very good companies for whom a degree is essential part of their hiring and advancement decisions. Like it or not, I've seen it happen. I have very little reason to believe that it will stop happening any time soon. In fact, I think it will get much harder to survive without it. It used to be that a highschool education was enough for an employer. Now, especially for a young guy, a college education is becoming the norm. I worry that eventually it will be a graduate degree.
We might also be talking about entirely differnt types of firms. I live in New York so the majority of the firms are financial firms. They get a LOT of resumes so not having a degree instantly puts you on the reject pile unless you have some sort of inside track. You can hate it. You can disagree with it. You can personally work another way. It's not a guarantee that in all cases it will work in that particular way. But it's a useful generalization. You can always remove the "Education" component of your resume but if you put it there without having it and someone checks...
No, I never said it was impossible. I just said it can be difficult. There are going to be some jobs at some companies that simply won't consider someone without a degree. Do you have to work there? No, of course not. But if you want to work there, you're going to need to get that degree. Try approaching a hedge fund without a degree - they just don't really give people the benefit of the doubt. I've been out of college for quite a while but they still ask me what my SAT scores, GRE scores and college GPA are!
Sorry to hear that you've had a tough time in this market. If you're trying to move up like the original poster is, I can't imagine how having a degree would overqualify you so much that you want to drop it off of your resume.
Let's not forget that a big part of the job market is soft skills. The degree and certifications and such just serve to get you the interview. Then it's all about how you come across and how they come across. Being too desperate can definitely be bad as well - think of it like hitting on a girl in a bar - if she can smell the desperation, then there's a good chance that she's going to think that something is wrong. At the same time, the confident candidate has to sell himself to the company but also has the pleasure of having the company sell itself to him. You really do have to convince them that you want the job and are committed to it and then the company will work to convince you to take the job.
Not having a degree can be a real career limiter/killer. I don't know precisely what kind of work you do/want to do, of course. For software developers, there's really no question unless you have some sort of fantastic background doing the core development of something really important (ie. if you're the equivalent of Linus Torvalds, then ok fine, I don't care if you went to college). Barring that, even if you want to do sysadmin/network design work, a bachelor's degree is pretty important, preferrably in CS or EE. If you're doing PC support tasks (of the "re-install office" type), then sure, no need for a degree, but then the opportunities for advancement are very limited.
If you want to continue without a degree, then I think it really comes down to having some good connections that will take a risk on you. Don't expect a move up to management but at least move to salaried pay and then move on from there.
BTW, it's been my experience that it's often not enough that you have a degree - it has to be from a great school with a good GPA. I'm not saying it necessarily makes you better, but it's often the filter that companies are using. Certifications usually don't help. For designer type positions, I think that they are actually a hindrence instead of a help...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seeing this same sort of thing happen at a lot of firms. Many firms seem to be taking the attitude of "Well, given how bad the economy is, you're lucky to have this." But the truth, at least in my area, is the economy isn't bad. There are well paying opportunities out there. So the race for the door continues...
But let's not forget, they hire "only the best"! Surely the best will work under their conditions, right? Right? Right?
Because the stated goal was to Open Source Solaris... Without that, this whole exercise is meaningless.
Open Sourcing Solaris does not mean adding everything to Linux. It's bad enough that Sun's competitors get to see all of the highend Solaris code without Sun handing it to them directly.
Hmm still sounds to me like this miscommunication could have been figured out long before a day long interview is over. If I got the feeling that an interview was for an entry-level position, I'd just ask. It's a valid question. Besides, didn't you think it was odd that you were interviewing with lower-level people when you clearly wanted an executive level position?
I wouldn't be suprised if some people at Google did those things to you. But the onus is really on you to know what kind of job you're interviewing for before you go into the interview. It is possible to get a vague idea of pay and level before the interview. If they are really offering you 1/10th of the pay, then it sounds like you were interviewing for an entry level job when you expected an executive job and you really should have known the difference.
Ugh I'm having the same problem. I want to get into that field but I left without my PhD, so I only have my MS. I know that I'm going to have to finish my PhD if I plan to get anywhere in that field. It's just an entry-level job requirement.
Ahh geez, I was just kidding! I just like to poke fun at all the soccer mom's out there with their gas guzzlers driving to the grocery store. Just seems like overkill unless you're feeding a family of 20.
Hmm you seem to be confusing the right to travel with the right to drive a car. You have one of them, but you don't have the other.
You're right - it is illegal to impede the flow of traffic. It would almost be a good post, if only you're puerile jibe weren't included.
My mom doesn't drive a minivan; she drives the modern-day equivalent - a SUV.
It's not a god-given right. It's a law-given privledge. I think people in the US seem to forget that driving is a privledge, not a right. Society is allowing you to put the rest of us at risk by allowing you to operate a machine that weighs several thousand pounds at high speeds. You pose a significant risk to MANY other people and as such, you have no right to make it even more risky by driving too fast.
A friend of mine and I have discussed the same sort of thing. Hands are a good example of that - it's like our brain is wired to see hands in specific, subtle positions and we instantly know whether or not a pair of animated hands "looks right". But when the hands are abstracted to a three-fingered glove, it doesn't bother people because they are immediately recognized as not being "real hands".
Animation is not necessarily at its greatest when it is the most like the real world. Yes, Pixar did quite well with the modeling hair in the wind, etc., but that doesn't necessarily make for a better animated movie. It has to be a good mix of realism and fantasy.
Sounds like Apple is using an algorithm called SVM lite. Categorization problems are often solved with that particular algorithm because people feel that it's much better than a Bayesian system. I prefer rule-learner based algorithms. I've found them to be much more accurate and they tend to run in O(n) time where n is the number of rules. I've also found several articles that point to alternatives that are better than SVM. But at least Apple got involved! A quick search on the ACM site comes up with a lot of papers on the topic.
Maybe I don't get it. Do you have to sign a reciept or something after your RFID has been read? Otherwise, what's to stop an unscrupulousbar owner from charging you for all sorts of things during the evening? And if you do sign something, how do they know that they have the right signature? What if I make a fake RFID that has someone else number and just sign for it as usual? Not that most people checked the signatures on credit cards, but at least they have the option of checking...
Reminds me of that song "Master of the House" from Les Miserables...
That's the problem - the iris scanner is not being beat. It's beat when it gives a false positive. The system is being beat because those people are being let in. Instead, the system has to be toughened so you don't let people in who fail the positive ID.
I'm not saying the scanner is perfect - it's clearly not perfect, but it isn't beaten until it gives false positives.
It's true - people are usually considered crackpots until they have irrefutable proof that they are right. There's a darn good reason for that. There are a LOT of crackpots. It's a much better bet to think that any given person is a crackpot than it is to think that they are right. Sure you have a few examples where the claim was true, but there are many, many, many counter examples.
I don't really care if it is Noah's Ark, or just some boat up on a hill. I don't really care if they found Atlantis or it's a sunken cargo ship. But, I'll believe it when I see it...
No we don't! They are Native Americans, or Cherokees and Seminoles and what-have-you. Indians come from India!
I think it is important to see how Sun is doing comparatively...Sun's BETA vs. the S&P is 1.72. That's pretty good. Since the beginning of the year, their adjusted beta is 1.79.
They haven't had a profitable quarter since Q402, but they did breakeven in Q203 and Q303.
They have $3B in cash and marketable securities. They have $2.3B in accounts receivable. Not bad there either. They have $6.4B in total liabilities, but only $1.5B is long term debt. That leaves $6.4B in shareholder equity.
Their price/sales ratio is a measly 1.2. That's pretty low. Maybe the market is underestimating their chances? Or maybe it's the negative sales growth that is scaring people away?
Sun is usually bought for the high-end servers where Linux is not considered a good substitute. I like Linux, but if I need a 64 processor machine with over 200gigs of RAM, I'm buying a Sun. In fact, that's exactly what we use at my firm. We use Linux boxes too, but those are for smaller tasks. The majority of the heavy lifting is done with large, expensive machines like Sun Fire 15k machines. When we have a system problem, we need the machine backup pronto and it really needs to be able to handle the crisis. Suns do that well. So we continue to dish out $3mm per machine and have about 300 Suns in each datacenter. We have other vendors as well of course and quite a lot of other machines, but the Suns aren't going anywhere.
Actually, Ferrari has suffered and does suffer. It's a money losing venture that was sold to it's chief rival, Fiat. Not that I think Sun is in the same position...
That's the thing though - college isn't about coding skills. I agree - if you come in with nothing, you're probably not going to learn it there. College degrees are about computer science skills - a language independent way of knowing what the hell is going on and how to do things. Don't get me wrong - a lot of college graduates never learn much and it's essentially a waste. But then that's what the interview is for...The resume screening is just to cut the pool of candidates.
Well you have to be good at translating sarcasm into the written word in order for people to get it.
I think most competent firms know that it's easy to fake references. My firm doesn't even bother to check them because they are such unreliable sources. But usually, you can pick out someone who knows what they are talking about from someone who doesn't during the interview. But the point I was trying to make is that often, in order to get the interview at all, you need some credentials.
I guess this discussion also comes down to differing definitions of what "IT" is. Some people see IT as being anything related to computers, whether it be programming, network admin, modelling, etc. whereas some people limit it to just SA/NA/"systems" work.
I think there are some things you can't learn in class when it comes to software development/design. There are also some things that, while you can learn on the field, take a lot longer to learn if you never had the class. Maybe there are also some things that you either "get" or "don't get" and no amount of experience or class is going to help you get there.
Honestly, I wouldn't want to be on the SA/NA side of IT. Maybe it's just because I don't like doing things that tend towards support roles. But, unfortunately, I agree - that part of the industry is pretty tough. It seems hard to have any sort of staying power, but there are always people who do it...
What I am saying is that there are many very good companies for whom a degree is essential part of their hiring and advancement decisions. Like it or not, I've seen it happen. I have very little reason to believe that it will stop happening any time soon. In fact, I think it will get much harder to survive without it. It used to be that a highschool education was enough for an employer. Now, especially for a young guy, a college education is becoming the norm. I worry that eventually it will be a graduate degree.
We might also be talking about entirely differnt types of firms. I live in New York so the majority of the firms are financial firms. They get a LOT of resumes so not having a degree instantly puts you on the reject pile unless you have some sort of inside track. You can hate it. You can disagree with it. You can personally work another way. It's not a guarantee that in all cases it will work in that particular way. But it's a useful generalization. You can always remove the "Education" component of your resume but if you put it there without having it and someone checks...
No, I never said it was impossible. I just said it can be difficult. There are going to be some jobs at some companies that simply won't consider someone without a degree. Do you have to work there? No, of course not. But if you want to work there, you're going to need to get that degree. Try approaching a hedge fund without a degree - they just don't really give people the benefit of the doubt. I've been out of college for quite a while but they still ask me what my SAT scores, GRE scores and college GPA are!
Sorry to hear that you've had a tough time in this market. If you're trying to move up like the original poster is, I can't imagine how having a degree would overqualify you so much that you want to drop it off of your resume. Let's not forget that a big part of the job market is soft skills. The degree and certifications and such just serve to get you the interview. Then it's all about how you come across and how they come across. Being too desperate can definitely be bad as well - think of it like hitting on a girl in a bar - if she can smell the desperation, then there's a good chance that she's going to think that something is wrong. At the same time, the confident candidate has to sell himself to the company but also has the pleasure of having the company sell itself to him. You really do have to convince them that you want the job and are committed to it and then the company will work to convince you to take the job.
Not having a degree can be a real career limiter/killer. I don't know precisely what kind of work you do/want to do, of course. For software developers, there's really no question unless you have some sort of fantastic background doing the core development of something really important (ie. if you're the equivalent of Linus Torvalds, then ok fine, I don't care if you went to college). Barring that, even if you want to do sysadmin/network design work, a bachelor's degree is pretty important, preferrably in CS or EE. If you're doing PC support tasks (of the "re-install office" type), then sure, no need for a degree, but then the opportunities for advancement are very limited. If you want to continue without a degree, then I think it really comes down to having some good connections that will take a risk on you. Don't expect a move up to management but at least move to salaried pay and then move on from there. BTW, it's been my experience that it's often not enough that you have a degree - it has to be from a great school with a good GPA. I'm not saying it necessarily makes you better, but it's often the filter that companies are using. Certifications usually don't help. For designer type positions, I think that they are actually a hindrence instead of a help...