If the market isn't paying what you think your skills are worth, then maybe it's time to develop some skills (possibly outside of IT) that pay more
That's what most people thought they were doing when they were studying for their degrees. Remember? "Go to school, get an education, get a good job..." I think the correct term is "bait and switch."
I think it's a shame to expect people to give up every waking moment just to stay employed.
Capitalism 101: The market doesn't owe job candidates anything.
Society 101:
Education is important, and should be encouraged by business FIRST. Without education, Capitalism is impossible.
Stable employment is vital to the well-being of families and the community, which in turn provides a stable market, without which Capitalism is impossible.
The current scarcity of qualified candidates is the fault of business first. They are the ones who make it impossible for employees to remain employed long enough to develop marketable skills while simultaneously declaring everyone without long-term marketable skills unqualified.
Businesses exist to serve the community, not only to extract revenue from it.
Each employer evaluates a candidate's potential and skills--not just technical--relative the company's needs and makes a decision on the best available data for its hiring.
Or they just hire the guy who will accept 60% less than the prevailing wage and who doesn't have a family to interrupt those 14 hour days or working weekends.
However, a degree does NOT qualify someone for the "work" they supposedly studied for.
Yes it does. YES it does. To expect every candidate to have two years of experience is to make a complete mockery of the entire employment process. It flat out isn't fair to move the goal line five yards after a candidate has scored a touchdown.
There must be allowances made for inexperienced employees, because at any given moment, most candidates are inexperienced.
What the books teach and what the job requires are not the same.
Fine. But what the books teach is important enough to expect people to list a degree. If the degree were omitted, I guarantee you the skeptical hiring manager will seize on that as a major flaw in the candidate's qualifications, while dismissing it on the other hand as irrelevant to their qualifications to do the job. Can't have it both ways.
Some of these are nit-picky, but the point is after five years of Java coding in the J2EE server environment you pick up habits that school doesn't teach, and I'd bet nearly every other EXPERIENCED coder could tell you why these issues can be problematic later.
Fine, so why do degreed candidates have to produce five years of experience while experienced candidates have to produce a degree?
A degree does not a good programming employee make.
No, but a degree, Masters or Bachelors, qualifies a person to hold a programming job by definition. Just because someone may or may not have a particular skill based on the opinion of a co-worker doesn't even approach justification for firing them for incompetence.
A Masters Degree ON ITS FACE qualifies its holder to teach that field of study at a University. The policies of most Universities require them to grant a presumed qualification and the title of Assistant Professor by virtue of the degree alone. Many faculty committees will address candidates by the title "Professor" during the interview process, as they should. It's no different than addressing a PhD holder as "Doctor." It is a title they have earned.
This entire notion of "just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're qualified" is a pantload. It is arbitrary, subjective and unfair. Creeping qualifications are no more efficient than creeping featurism.
Management that participates in such subjectiveness is also participating in the gradual dilution of the value of education, something which, I'm sure if they were asked independently, they would value as much as their candidates do.
I would call into question the qualifications of a hiring manager who does not recognize the significance of a Masters Degree to the character and values of a candidate.
Someone can have the ability to complete a degree, and still lack some fundamental capability that's necessary to be a good programmer.
Oh, I doubt it. If nothing else they have demonstrated the ability to learn whatever might be necessary to complete the job. Any hiring manager who is skeptical about the ability of a Masters Degree holder to learn a skill is wrong, period.
The idea that a candidate who happens to be familiar with the job is more qualified than a candidate who has spent a minimum of five YEARS studying to earn a GRADUATE DEGREE is ludicrous.
Familiarity with a job can be learned. Every single employed person is familiar with their job.
Very few of those people hold Masters Degrees in engineering or scientific fields of study.
1) Everyone fired or laid off post-dot-com was a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. In fact, middle-management is now finding their IT department unable to do much of anything without a huge budget increase or new equipment. Middle-management, as expected, is still sitting there, having meetings and trying to figure out what to do.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
3) Technical skills are a commodity.
False. Perhaps 10% of the working population has the training, education and experience to build a complete computer program. Middle-management, unable to understand this fact, much less the technologies they are in charge of, continues to presume that ordering a database is no different than ordering new file cabinets.
When these and other myths are no longer givens in the discussion of improving the IT department, then, and only then, will things improve.
I've been trying to get a reliable e-mail program working for months now. MONTHS.
1) Mozilla randomly forgets where its configuration files are, and of course has NO OPTION TO SET WHERE THEY ARE which means that I have to rebuild my e-mail settings over and over again.
2) Evolution takes over a minute to start.
3) Red Hat corrupts its own RPM database when other e-mail clients are installed, then just hangs.
4) mutt will take four months to configure correctly.
5) Yeah, Outlook Express. Sure thing.
Then I look at Mac OS X mail and I have to ask: why is there, after FIFTEEN YEARS, no reliable, working, nice, up-to-date e-mail client outside of Mac OS X?
After watching Mozilla faceplant and Red Hat shit itself (by the way, my first Linux install was Slackware on a 486 WITH NO DOCUMENTATION)...those Macs sure do look nice...
In California, they're about to install sensors to detect if cars are "high emitters" in real time. If the car has high emissions, a picture of the license plate is taken, and the car is scheduled for another tax assessm^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H smog check.
Eventually, the car will have to be "activated" by a central computer system every day. If emissions are too high, the car just won't start, requiring a $150 tow charge to have it checked ($50) and repaired ($850) and then re-registered ($700) and an insurance premium paid ($385).
Since VMware runs on Linux, is it possible it might run on Mac OS X too?
Just a thought.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if you whine like this during the interviews... I wouldn't hire you either.
I don't go to interviews.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 1
Well, at least your name is appropriate. How deeply sad for you.
lol
I haven't been an employee for almost three years. That's the real world.
Contrary to what you think, most people do not check their dignity at their door in return for a paycheck.
Sure they do, they just don't know it. The boss tells them where to live, where to shop, what kind of car to drive, when to eat, when to sleep, what kind of clothes to wear, when to speak, what to say, when to get married, when to have a family, when to go on vacation and when to retire, provided that at some point they don't tell them when to get lost so they can go find another worthless temporary paycheck.
Isn't it amazing that schools always seem to have money for this crap and yet cannot seem to educate literate graduates or provide pencils, books and paper for their students?
They've got endless budgets for in-classroom cameras, RFID name badges and seminars about file-sharing but never enough for field trips, athletic equipment or buses.
Yeah? How does it feel to know that no matter how good a job is done, the average employee can be fired repeatedly for no reason?
Is that a good way to build communities? Families? Businesses? Having every family moving every six months to another state to pursue another entry-level job?
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
Boss: Come in on the weekend please.
Employee: Can't. I'm going on a picnic with my family.
Boss: No, I'm going on a picnic with my family. You're working or you're fired.
Employee: What time?
A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so!
How about a small house, children and a paid-for car? By the way, it was a given until people got fired every three months. Now they're lucky if they can afford to eat three times a day.
With the average volunteer who might want to help kids in the local school districts learn to read or to operate a computer. Schools would require such a person to navigate a bureaucratic maze for weeks.
But for $100,000, they'll gladly put the taxpayer-funded curriculum on hold for the day and allow a live advertisement for the latest feature film to kids who can't read or construct a complete sentence. Incredible.
High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years.
No. Computers are tools. They are not minds. And we'll bypass the entire idea of "standard human brain" for the moment.
While they might be able to compute all the possible moves, computers don't "play" chess. For a computer, chess is an exercise in mathematics. There are a number of games in which a computer will never be able to defeat a human being. Poker comes to mind immediately.
Computers do not have intuition. They cannot form an hypothesis. They have no imagination. They cannot do research or construct an argument. In other words, they have no mind, and therefore they will not "exceed the computational abilities of the human brain" at all, much less in 20 years.
Trademark law only provides for commercial use of a particular word or phrase in the same market category. It is not trademark infringement to use a trademarked word or phrase which is not in competition with the original.
This is a matter of explicit law. Restricting the use of even commercial speech by the inaccurate interpretation of trademark is in opposition to the guarantees of the First Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
and then you can ask it "what supplemental insurance?" and it yells "AFLAC!!"
If the market isn't paying what you think your skills are worth, then maybe it's time to develop some skills (possibly outside of IT) that pay more
That's what most people thought they were doing when they were studying for their degrees. Remember? "Go to school, get an education, get a good job..." I think the correct term is "bait and switch."
I think it's a shame to expect people to give up every waking moment just to stay employed.
Capitalism 101: The market doesn't owe job candidates anything.
Society 101:
Education is important, and should be encouraged by business FIRST. Without education, Capitalism is impossible.
Stable employment is vital to the well-being of families and the community, which in turn provides a stable market, without which Capitalism is impossible.
The current scarcity of qualified candidates is the fault of business first. They are the ones who make it impossible for employees to remain employed long enough to develop marketable skills while simultaneously declaring everyone without long-term marketable skills unqualified.
Businesses exist to serve the community, not only to extract revenue from it.
Each employer evaluates a candidate's potential and skills--not just technical--relative the company's needs and makes a decision on the best available data for its hiring.
Or they just hire the guy who will accept 60% less than the prevailing wage and who doesn't have a family to interrupt those 14 hour days or working weekends.
full CSS support.
How many years late?
I wonder if they will finally support PNG alpha channels correctly.
Throw a 1.5GB file at tar
Throw a 1.5GB file at Word
'nuff said
However, a degree does NOT qualify someone for the "work" they supposedly studied for.
Yes it does. YES it does. To expect every candidate to have two years of experience is to make a complete mockery of the entire employment process. It flat out isn't fair to move the goal line five yards after a candidate has scored a touchdown.
There must be allowances made for inexperienced employees, because at any given moment, most candidates are inexperienced.
What the books teach and what the job requires are not the same.
Fine. But what the books teach is important enough to expect people to list a degree. If the degree were omitted, I guarantee you the skeptical hiring manager will seize on that as a major flaw in the candidate's qualifications, while dismissing it on the other hand as irrelevant to their qualifications to do the job. Can't have it both ways.
Some of these are nit-picky, but the point is after five years of Java coding in the J2EE server environment you pick up habits that school doesn't teach, and I'd bet nearly every other EXPERIENCED coder could tell you why these issues can be problematic later.
Fine, so why do degreed candidates have to produce five years of experience while experienced candidates have to produce a degree?
A degree does not a good programming employee make.
No, but a degree, Masters or Bachelors, qualifies a person to hold a programming job by definition. Just because someone may or may not have a particular skill based on the opinion of a co-worker doesn't even approach justification for firing them for incompetence.
A Masters Degree ON ITS FACE qualifies its holder to teach that field of study at a University. The policies of most Universities require them to grant a presumed qualification and the title of Assistant Professor by virtue of the degree alone. Many faculty committees will address candidates by the title "Professor" during the interview process, as they should. It's no different than addressing a PhD holder as "Doctor." It is a title they have earned.
This entire notion of "just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're qualified" is a pantload. It is arbitrary, subjective and unfair. Creeping qualifications are no more efficient than creeping featurism.
Management that participates in such subjectiveness is also participating in the gradual dilution of the value of education, something which, I'm sure if they were asked independently, they would value as much as their candidates do.
I would call into question the qualifications of a hiring manager who does not recognize the significance of a Masters Degree to the character and values of a candidate.
Someone can have the ability to complete a degree, and still lack some fundamental capability that's necessary to be a good programmer.
Oh, I doubt it. If nothing else they have demonstrated the ability to learn whatever might be necessary to complete the job. Any hiring manager who is skeptical about the ability of a Masters Degree holder to learn a skill is wrong, period.
The idea that a candidate who happens to be familiar with the job is more qualified than a candidate who has spent a minimum of five YEARS studying to earn a GRADUATE DEGREE is ludicrous.
Familiarity with a job can be learned. Every single employed person is familiar with their job.
Very few of those people hold Masters Degrees in engineering or scientific fields of study.
1) Everyone fired or laid off post-dot-com was a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. In fact, middle-management is now finding their IT department unable to do much of anything without a huge budget increase or new equipment. Middle-management, as expected, is still sitting there, having meetings and trying to figure out what to do.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
3) Technical skills are a commodity.
False. Perhaps 10% of the working population has the training, education and experience to build a complete computer program. Middle-management, unable to understand this fact, much less the technologies they are in charge of, continues to presume that ordering a database is no different than ordering new file cabinets.
When these and other myths are no longer givens in the discussion of improving the IT department, then, and only then, will things improve.
I've been trying to get a reliable e-mail program working for months now. MONTHS.
...those Macs sure do look nice...
1) Mozilla randomly forgets where its configuration files are, and of course has NO OPTION TO SET WHERE THEY ARE which means that I have to rebuild my e-mail settings over and over again.
2) Evolution takes over a minute to start.
3) Red Hat corrupts its own RPM database when other e-mail clients are installed, then just hangs.
4) mutt will take four months to configure correctly.
5) Yeah, Outlook Express. Sure thing.
Then I look at Mac OS X mail and I have to ask: why is there, after FIFTEEN YEARS, no reliable, working, nice, up-to-date e-mail client outside of Mac OS X?
After watching Mozilla faceplant and Red Hat shit itself (by the way, my first Linux install was Slackware on a 486 WITH NO DOCUMENTATION)
In California, they're about to install sensors to detect if cars are "high emitters" in real time. If the car has high emissions, a picture of the license plate is taken, and the car is scheduled for another tax assessm^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H smog check.
Eventually, the car will have to be "activated" by a central computer system every day. If emissions are too high, the car just won't start, requiring a $150 tow charge to have it checked ($50) and repaired ($850) and then re-registered ($700) and an insurance premium paid ($385).
Since VMware runs on Linux, is it possible it might run on Mac OS X too?
Just a thought.
I wonder if you whine like this during the interviews... I wouldn't hire you either.
I don't go to interviews.
Well, at least your name is appropriate. How deeply sad for you.
lol
I haven't been an employee for almost three years. That's the real world.
Contrary to what you think, most people do not check their dignity at their door in return for a paycheck.
Sure they do, they just don't know it. The boss tells them where to live, where to shop, what kind of car to drive, when to eat, when to sleep, what kind of clothes to wear, when to speak, what to say, when to get married, when to have a family, when to go on vacation and when to retire, provided that at some point they don't tell them when to get lost so they can go find another worthless temporary paycheck.
Right now public schools are an abject failure. Nobody cares whether I graduated knowing how to read. I knew how to read before I started school.
All I know is a lot of kids in school now don't know how to read and aren't being taught how to read.
Our schools are failing to educate our students.
He pooh-poohed the notion that the system would be abused. ...as the radar screen glowed to life over his shoulder.
It's called a "lack of trust."
If students are never trusted, they will never become trustworthy.
and by the way, the "Civil Liberties" class has been cancelled due to obsolescence.
Along with the Civics and History classes.
And right there you've made the choice to give your life over to your boss. You made the choice.
Frankly, if I had a boss that said that I wouldn't want to work for that hellhole of a company anyway.
Rent's due every 30 days. Kids are hungry three times a day. You do the math.
I'll find someplace else to work where the managers don't treat their employees like dirt and respect them.
Good for you. I know MCS graduates who can't rent a job.
But you are not allowed to own me, nor are you allowed to intrude upon my non-work time in an unreasonable manner.
Yeah, they are. As employees, we check our dignity at the time clock, or we starve. It's a simple choice for most.
Isn't it amazing that schools always seem to have money for this crap and yet cannot seem to educate literate graduates or provide pencils, books and paper for their students?
They've got endless budgets for in-classroom cameras, RFID name badges and seminars about file-sharing but never enough for field trips, athletic equipment or buses.
It just never seems to improve.
employment = slavery is getting hackneyed
Yeah? How does it feel to know that no matter how good a job is done, the average employee can be fired repeatedly for no reason?
Is that a good way to build communities? Families? Businesses? Having every family moving every six months to another state to pursue another entry-level job?
If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
Boss: Come in on the weekend please.
Employee: Can't. I'm going on a picnic with my family.
Boss: No, I'm going on a picnic with my family. You're working or you're fired.
Employee: What time?
A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so!
How about a small house, children and a paid-for car? By the way, it was a given until people got fired every three months. Now they're lucky if they can afford to eat three times a day.
With the average volunteer who might want to help kids in the local school districts learn to read or to operate a computer. Schools would require such a person to navigate a bureaucratic maze for weeks.
But for $100,000, they'll gladly put the taxpayer-funded curriculum on hold for the day and allow a live advertisement for the latest feature film to kids who can't read or construct a complete sentence. Incredible.
100 million shares: 100 million auctions.
High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years.
No. Computers are tools. They are not minds. And we'll bypass the entire idea of "standard human brain" for the moment.
While they might be able to compute all the possible moves, computers don't "play" chess. For a computer, chess is an exercise in mathematics. There are a number of games in which a computer will never be able to defeat a human being. Poker comes to mind immediately.
Computers do not have intuition. They cannot form an hypothesis. They have no imagination. They cannot do research or construct an argument. In other words, they have no mind, and therefore they will not "exceed the computational abilities of the human brain" at all, much less in 20 years.
Trademark law only provides for commercial use of a particular word or phrase in the same market category. It is not trademark infringement to use a trademarked word or phrase which is not in competition with the original.
This is a matter of explicit law. Restricting the use of even commercial speech by the inaccurate interpretation of trademark is in opposition to the guarantees of the First Amendment.