This is a pretty useless submission as the things it links to offer no more information, as it is. However, I think people here are making a lot of unfounded assumptions, since the article doesn't indicate that the penetration tester was unauthorized. For all we know, it was someone contracted to perform the service and when he reported the issues, they took action.
You are partially right. The two big names were two of the companies that were most vocal about telecommuting, so when they change their mind for reasons more related to their own particular problems than remote working, itself, they also gather much of the news cycle and the sky is reportedly falling down.
Meanwhile, much of the industry (and other industries) continue to have telecommuting opportunities and many companies have established systems for facilitating telecommuting and have a large chunk of their employees doing just that, without making a big deal about it in the press. I currently work for one of the largest tech companies on the planet and telecommuting is thriving as is support of it by the company. It was the same at the prior company, too. And the one before that. In my day-to-day, I also get to deal with a ton of other people in the industry (many various roles) and quite a lot of them also telecommute for their companies.
I don't know who it is that keeps trying to push their "telecommuting oh noes!' agenda and trying to convince people that it is dying or a failure or hard to come by, but it is essentially bullshit.
They have consistently (and falsely, according to many reports) claimed a shortage of tech workers and they have eagerly embraced remote workers. They just want them to be working remotely from geographies where they can take advantage of economic disparities that allow them to pay fractions.
I have to tell you, there is very little chance that I would still be working for any of the companies that have made up my career, if I had to remain in the Bay Area to do so, where a six figure salary really just sort of let's you "get by". The thing that has ensured my ability to remain a loyal employee with a strong work ethic for so many years is the ease with which my company provides for telecommuting.
I'm skeptical of anything where you have to "retrain".
Most of us, here, are knowledge workers and much of what we do or know is applicable across the board. There may occasionally be a need to acquire additional knowledge and experience in certain things, but we are not guys on an assembly line who put widgets on gadgets and suddenly need to be employable by going out and learning how to repair refrigerators, instead.
I also take issue with your assertions of remote workers and remote working. Other than personal biases held by some, there is really little benefit to caring about physical proximity for a great swath of careers in the tech industry. Especially in a world where your company is increasingly split up across large geographies. When your team is broken up into 20 people in five buildings over three states, what is the point of maintaining an office and demanding that they commute to it daily, other than some stodgy old-fashioned mindset?
It's also amusing that you talk about a mindset on flexibility and then completely dismiss a simple thing that facilities a great deal of flexibility.
Call me old fashioned, but I kind of prefer the world where you need something done and if I have the skills to do it, you pay me for providing the service you require and if you don't require my services or I can not fulfill that need, then nobody pays me anything for not doing anything.
The boss at the top of my company is an eccentric billionaire. I'm fine with being ordered around by "some rich guy" as he is paying my salary and offering me the opportunity to pursue my interests in this industry. He not only pays my salary, but sees to my health insurance, gives me holidays that are not obligated, and allows me the flexibility to work in whatever manner seems most intelligent and beneficial. I don't believe he had anyone paying his way through life or guaranteeing him a basic anything when he began this company decades ago through his own innovation.
Granted, he is about half a dozen managers above me. Maybe more. But he is ultimately responsible for this all existing and as frustrating as life can be "working for the man" and not feeling that you have the freedom to "pursue interests and innovate", I'd much rather provide him a service that he is happy to remunerate than toil at a potential pipe-dream (or sit around doing screw-all) and collecting some "basic guaranteed income" provided by my fellow man.
Not to mention, you and I and everyone else are always free to pursue our interests and innovate under the same circumstances all the other great innovators and successes have -- meaning that you can put your blood and sweat and tears into a thing on top of working full time and trying to care for your needs and your family and being exhausted and potentially risking everything to follow your ambitions. I don't see why *I* or anyone else should have some special exception from this or be paid to sit around day-dreaming. In fact, I would assert that such a setup would breed more laziness and stagnation and contentment than motivate innovations.
There's nothing "common sense" about "going to work" for work that requires no physical proximity to anything or anyone. You're confusing tradition with sense.
I don't understand your reference to the bleeding edge, however. What is the bleeding edge and who is putting themselves out there? Are you talking about telecommuting? People have been doing that for decades, you realize . . . ?
Interesting, because I've been telecommuting my entire professional career, across three well-known corporations (two of which had between tens of thousands and over a hundred thousand) employees. I've also regularly fielded job offers from everything from start-ups, to companies on the verge of going IPO, to established industry biggies -- all happy to offer telecommuting opportunities and having an entire infrastructure to facilitate such work. Even my manager and many of my past managers over the last 15-20 years telecommute.
What benefit, for example, is there in having people show up to an office in a corporate campus, when that individual's colleagues are very likely spread across several other campuses across the country (or the world)? Great, you're in the office! Unfortunately, you're 800 miles away from your nearest teammate and 3,000 miles away from your manager.
Requiring employees to work locally will seriously curtail the number of qualified and motivated employees who can more than fulfill the demands of your position but are simply limited by having already established roots in a community and aren't able to buy and sell homes every five years and transplant their wife and kids just so that an upper manager at some point can feel secure in the knowledge that they can walk down the hall and see someone hunched over their desk.
There are some companies or positions where this may not fit - that's hardly worth establishing the claim that "telecommuting is going away!" from.
Some of the most vile-mouthed people I have ever known are radio personalities (DJs, talk show hosts, etc) -- a profession in which slipping with foul language can have significant impact on yourself and your employer. I really have to wonder about people who are not capable of (or do not feel they are capable of) knowing when to restrain their language. If you can't watch your tongue when spending the holiday with your mother or your super-religious in-laws, or while on the clock at work, or in other professional environments, then . . . well . . . that seems like a big problem.:)
The other most vile-mouthed people I've ever known are colleagues in the tech industry. Some of them have been my bosses. One of them was a decorated and published former marine who was the director of our entire technical division. However, these people do not carry over the casual discussion, off-duty, lunch-time, having-a-beer-down-the-street language (or topics) into the office. Because, you know, we're all grown-ups.:)
More like a war on the individual. America is a country that has been founded on maintaining and preserving the rights of the individual and encouraging individuality. It's a part of what makes it a unique environment with a lot of breakthroughs. Unfortunately, we have had a war on the individual for quite some time. Hell, our government even has taken to referring to many of them as "belligerent" and "lone wolves" (in a very "you have to be afraid of them, because they probably want to take your freedom" sort of way).
We currently only accept "individualism" as long as it is an endorsed manufactured corporate brand of individual, which isn't very individual at all.
It's the "H" in DHS that you need to be concerned about. How does it not make everyone extremely uncomfortable as soon as a government institution (that spreads and entangles everything everywhere) starts referring to "the homeland". It has a very specific cold-war connotation to it and accurately conveys the mentality behind the department (and the government, overall) of the last decade.
Why don't we put more focus on automated driving? I'd rather not need a license and not waste several hours of my life each day at the wheel, if I could nap, read, get some work done, etc in the back.
I'm pretty sure driving while distracted is already a citationable offense. I don't really care what the nature of your distraction is -- if you're engaging in it, you are endangering other people on and off the road. I can see the rational behind harsher penalties for certain choices, though. Negligent behavior because you're having a conversation with three people in your car is not the same thing as choosing to get drunk and hop on the road or choosing to turn around and discipline your children while doing 65 down the highway.
The problem is we're never willing to impose significant penalties for just about any behavior. Hell, we have a hard time even deciding to take the license away from 90 year old grandmas who hit the accelerator instead of the brake and plow through field of kids playing soccer.
Yes, people who find themselves suddenly facing a driver head-on who has drifted into the wrong lane are at fault for "not paying attention". Same with people going through an intersection when a drunk or texting driver going 80 crosses through a red light.
If it were as simply as "paying attention", we'd have almost no innocent victims of car accidents, as it is.
Let's admit what this is about. They don't give a fuck about seeing you "texting while driving". This is about being able to view as much of the interior of your car as possible without the need to make an excuse to pull you over and justify searching your vehicle.
Agreed. Actively going out to patrol specific violations like this is pretty fucking idiotic. However, when extreme negligence (disciplining your kids, talking on the phone, texting, drinking, etc) is demonstrated by a driver, it should be handled and the penalty should be severe. I have always been baffled, for example, by drunk drivers who have dozens of arrests for it. Why is such a person even out in public? Make the penalties hurt if you want them to stop doing it. First time, suspended license. Second time, permanently suspended license. Third time, jail, because you have proven that you can't be trusted not to put other people's lives at risk. (And driving while suspended counts as one of those violations). Don't want to lose the right to drive for the rest of your life or spend a few months in jail? THEN DON'T FUCKING DRINK AND DRIVE.
Instead, we bitch and moan about how horrible it is, then treat it like a relatively trivial crime.
It's about revenue generation. Can't bill'em if you can't catch them.
If it was about safety, we'd treat it more seriously. The same way we would treat drunk driving more seriously if we gave a fuck. How many chances do you get to be incredibly negligent and dangerous on the road before we take you out from behind the 4,000lb 60mph metal death box? Make the first penalty a temporary one, the second a permanent one, and the third time in prison (including driving while suspended). Sound tough? How many opportunities do you want to give someone to stray into oncoming traffic and kill an innocent person before you say "you can't be trusted doing this; take the fucking bus"?
I don't know why you'd put your age on your resume, but it doesn't matter, anyway. It's a trivial matter (and probably a required practice) to find your Facebook, G+, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn and other accounts online and derive from them your approximate age, marital status, home ownership, prior work history, education, health, financial status, and so on.
There's only so much reasonable adaptation to be done. Nobody with a full time job can "keep up" with the technology that someone whose most recent full time job was four years of keeping up on latest buzzword technology. There's annually a fresh batch of people that just spent four years doing that. However, I don't see how hard it can be for people to stay abreast of things within their own field. For the majority of us, shit isn't changing *that* damn fast. I mean, unless you're in the "buzzword, venture capital, ycombinator" business, I guess.
So the older crowd are stubborn, set in their ways, and lazy -- and probably challenge the young people that you admit know nothing and have no experience for good reason.
And the young people are inexperienced and ignorant, but (when not hanging out on facebook, twitter, or instagramming everything around them in the office) hard workers that can be shaped, molded, and educated. . . . by . . . the . . . older people that aren't there to mentor them?
The world of technology does not seem one where this ageist bullshit can adequately be implemented. This is a field where people from the youngest who aren't even in high school yet to the oldest who was working before a time of personal PCs invent and improve things on a frequent basis and are *in the business* of wanting to know about new things. This isn't a field where people bitch and moan about how these new-fangled sparky-mabobs aren't as good as working on an old IBM Selectronic typewriter.
I work with plenty of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and they are the hardest workers who know the most, spend the most time on the clock, are the most available, the most communicative, and stay on top of their game. In my time, I can only really thing of one much older person who really sort of had the "punching the timeclock" mentality -- and even he was more than proficient at the job.
On the other hand, I have been surrounded by people my age (increasing over the years, obviously) who couldn't really be bothered half the time. If you are concerned with age and pay, you are focusing on the wrong values of your potential workforce.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a pretty useless submission as the things it links to offer no more information, as it is. However, I think people here are making a lot of unfounded assumptions, since the article doesn't indicate that the penetration tester was unauthorized. For all we know, it was someone contracted to perform the service and when he reported the issues, they took action.
You are partially right. The two big names were two of the companies that were most vocal about telecommuting, so when they change their mind for reasons more related to their own particular problems than remote working, itself, they also gather much of the news cycle and the sky is reportedly falling down.
Meanwhile, much of the industry (and other industries) continue to have telecommuting opportunities and many companies have established systems for facilitating telecommuting and have a large chunk of their employees doing just that, without making a big deal about it in the press. I currently work for one of the largest tech companies on the planet and telecommuting is thriving as is support of it by the company. It was the same at the prior company, too. And the one before that. In my day-to-day, I also get to deal with a ton of other people in the industry (many various roles) and quite a lot of them also telecommute for their companies.
I don't know who it is that keeps trying to push their "telecommuting oh noes!' agenda and trying to convince people that it is dying or a failure or hard to come by, but it is essentially bullshit.
They have consistently (and falsely, according to many reports) claimed a shortage of tech workers and they have eagerly embraced remote workers. They just want them to be working remotely from geographies where they can take advantage of economic disparities that allow them to pay fractions.
I have to tell you, there is very little chance that I would still be working for any of the companies that have made up my career, if I had to remain in the Bay Area to do so, where a six figure salary really just sort of let's you "get by". The thing that has ensured my ability to remain a loyal employee with a strong work ethic for so many years is the ease with which my company provides for telecommuting.
I'm skeptical of anything where you have to "retrain".
Most of us, here, are knowledge workers and much of what we do or know is applicable across the board. There may occasionally be a need to acquire additional knowledge and experience in certain things, but we are not guys on an assembly line who put widgets on gadgets and suddenly need to be employable by going out and learning how to repair refrigerators, instead.
I also take issue with your assertions of remote workers and remote working. Other than personal biases held by some, there is really little benefit to caring about physical proximity for a great swath of careers in the tech industry. Especially in a world where your company is increasingly split up across large geographies. When your team is broken up into 20 people in five buildings over three states, what is the point of maintaining an office and demanding that they commute to it daily, other than some stodgy old-fashioned mindset?
It's also amusing that you talk about a mindset on flexibility and then completely dismiss a simple thing that facilities a great deal of flexibility.
Call me old fashioned, but I kind of prefer the world where you need something done and if I have the skills to do it, you pay me for providing the service you require and if you don't require my services or I can not fulfill that need, then nobody pays me anything for not doing anything.
The boss at the top of my company is an eccentric billionaire. I'm fine with being ordered around by "some rich guy" as he is paying my salary and offering me the opportunity to pursue my interests in this industry. He not only pays my salary, but sees to my health insurance, gives me holidays that are not obligated, and allows me the flexibility to work in whatever manner seems most intelligent and beneficial. I don't believe he had anyone paying his way through life or guaranteeing him a basic anything when he began this company decades ago through his own innovation.
Granted, he is about half a dozen managers above me. Maybe more. But he is ultimately responsible for this all existing and as frustrating as life can be "working for the man" and not feeling that you have the freedom to "pursue interests and innovate", I'd much rather provide him a service that he is happy to remunerate than toil at a potential pipe-dream (or sit around doing screw-all) and collecting some "basic guaranteed income" provided by my fellow man.
Not to mention, you and I and everyone else are always free to pursue our interests and innovate under the same circumstances all the other great innovators and successes have -- meaning that you can put your blood and sweat and tears into a thing on top of working full time and trying to care for your needs and your family and being exhausted and potentially risking everything to follow your ambitions. I don't see why *I* or anyone else should have some special exception from this or be paid to sit around day-dreaming. In fact, I would assert that such a setup would breed more laziness and stagnation and contentment than motivate innovations.
There's nothing "common sense" about "going to work" for work that requires no physical proximity to anything or anyone. You're confusing tradition with sense.
I don't understand your reference to the bleeding edge, however. What is the bleeding edge and who is putting themselves out there? Are you talking about telecommuting? People have been doing that for decades, you realize . . . ?
Interesting, because I've been telecommuting my entire professional career, across three well-known corporations (two of which had between tens of thousands and over a hundred thousand) employees. I've also regularly fielded job offers from everything from start-ups, to companies on the verge of going IPO, to established industry biggies -- all happy to offer telecommuting opportunities and having an entire infrastructure to facilitate such work. Even my manager and many of my past managers over the last 15-20 years telecommute.
What benefit, for example, is there in having people show up to an office in a corporate campus, when that individual's colleagues are very likely spread across several other campuses across the country (or the world)? Great, you're in the office! Unfortunately, you're 800 miles away from your nearest teammate and 3,000 miles away from your manager.
Requiring employees to work locally will seriously curtail the number of qualified and motivated employees who can more than fulfill the demands of your position but are simply limited by having already established roots in a community and aren't able to buy and sell homes every five years and transplant their wife and kids just so that an upper manager at some point can feel secure in the knowledge that they can walk down the hall and see someone hunched over their desk.
There are some companies or positions where this may not fit - that's hardly worth establishing the claim that "telecommuting is going away!" from.
Some of the most vile-mouthed people I have ever known are radio personalities (DJs, talk show hosts, etc) -- a profession in which slipping with foul language can have significant impact on yourself and your employer. I really have to wonder about people who are not capable of (or do not feel they are capable of) knowing when to restrain their language. If you can't watch your tongue when spending the holiday with your mother or your super-religious in-laws, or while on the clock at work, or in other professional environments, then . . . well . . . that seems like a big problem. :)
The other most vile-mouthed people I've ever known are colleagues in the tech industry. Some of them have been my bosses. One of them was a decorated and published former marine who was the director of our entire technical division. However, these people do not carry over the casual discussion, off-duty, lunch-time, having-a-beer-down-the-street language (or topics) into the office. Because, you know, we're all grown-ups. :)
I don't have a problem with it at all. Thanks for the concern, though.
Gosh, guys, what on earth could a person who is paralyzed from the waist down have to be depressed about?!
More like a war on the individual. America is a country that has been founded on maintaining and preserving the rights of the individual and encouraging individuality. It's a part of what makes it a unique environment with a lot of breakthroughs. Unfortunately, we have had a war on the individual for quite some time. Hell, our government even has taken to referring to many of them as "belligerent" and "lone wolves" (in a very "you have to be afraid of them, because they probably want to take your freedom" sort of way).
We currently only accept "individualism" as long as it is an endorsed manufactured corporate brand of individual, which isn't very individual at all.
It's the "H" in DHS that you need to be concerned about. How does it not make everyone extremely uncomfortable as soon as a government institution (that spreads and entangles everything everywhere) starts referring to "the homeland". It has a very specific cold-war connotation to it and accurately conveys the mentality behind the department (and the government, overall) of the last decade.
By that logic, why punish drunk drivers, as long as they haven't smashed into anyone, yet?
Because it's about prevention.
Well, prevention and revenue.
Why don't we put more focus on automated driving? I'd rather not need a license and not waste several hours of my life each day at the wheel, if I could nap, read, get some work done, etc in the back.
I'm pretty sure driving while distracted is already a citationable offense. I don't really care what the nature of your distraction is -- if you're engaging in it, you are endangering other people on and off the road. I can see the rational behind harsher penalties for certain choices, though. Negligent behavior because you're having a conversation with three people in your car is not the same thing as choosing to get drunk and hop on the road or choosing to turn around and discipline your children while doing 65 down the highway.
The problem is we're never willing to impose significant penalties for just about any behavior. Hell, we have a hard time even deciding to take the license away from 90 year old grandmas who hit the accelerator instead of the brake and plow through field of kids playing soccer.
I would rather read the comments at Slashdot and not RTFA than RTFA and not read the comments at The Register. :)
But less so every passing year.
Yes, people who find themselves suddenly facing a driver head-on who has drifted into the wrong lane are at fault for "not paying attention". Same with people going through an intersection when a drunk or texting driver going 80 crosses through a red light.
If it were as simply as "paying attention", we'd have almost no innocent victims of car accidents, as it is.
Let's admit what this is about. They don't give a fuck about seeing you "texting while driving". This is about being able to view as much of the interior of your car as possible without the need to make an excuse to pull you over and justify searching your vehicle.
Agreed. Actively going out to patrol specific violations like this is pretty fucking idiotic. However, when extreme negligence (disciplining your kids, talking on the phone, texting, drinking, etc) is demonstrated by a driver, it should be handled and the penalty should be severe. I have always been baffled, for example, by drunk drivers who have dozens of arrests for it. Why is such a person even out in public? Make the penalties hurt if you want them to stop doing it. First time, suspended license. Second time, permanently suspended license. Third time, jail, because you have proven that you can't be trusted not to put other people's lives at risk. (And driving while suspended counts as one of those violations). Don't want to lose the right to drive for the rest of your life or spend a few months in jail? THEN DON'T FUCKING DRINK AND DRIVE.
Instead, we bitch and moan about how horrible it is, then treat it like a relatively trivial crime.
When you read bussdriver's signature, it really puts the whole rest of the comment into proper context.
It's about revenue generation. Can't bill'em if you can't catch them.
If it was about safety, we'd treat it more seriously. The same way we would treat drunk driving more seriously if we gave a fuck. How many chances do you get to be incredibly negligent and dangerous on the road before we take you out from behind the 4,000lb 60mph metal death box? Make the first penalty a temporary one, the second a permanent one, and the third time in prison (including driving while suspended). Sound tough? How many opportunities do you want to give someone to stray into oncoming traffic and kill an innocent person before you say "you can't be trusted doing this; take the fucking bus"?
I don't know why you'd put your age on your resume, but it doesn't matter, anyway. It's a trivial matter (and probably a required practice) to find your Facebook, G+, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn and other accounts online and derive from them your approximate age, marital status, home ownership, prior work history, education, health, financial status, and so on.
There's only so much reasonable adaptation to be done. Nobody with a full time job can "keep up" with the technology that someone whose most recent full time job was four years of keeping up on latest buzzword technology. There's annually a fresh batch of people that just spent four years doing that. However, I don't see how hard it can be for people to stay abreast of things within their own field. For the majority of us, shit isn't changing *that* damn fast. I mean, unless you're in the "buzzword, venture capital, ycombinator" business, I guess.
So the older crowd are stubborn, set in their ways, and lazy -- and probably challenge the young people that you admit know nothing and have no experience for good reason.
And the young people are inexperienced and ignorant, but (when not hanging out on facebook, twitter, or instagramming everything around them in the office) hard workers that can be shaped, molded, and educated. . . . by . . . the . . . older people that aren't there to mentor them?
The world of technology does not seem one where this ageist bullshit can adequately be implemented. This is a field where people from the youngest who aren't even in high school yet to the oldest who was working before a time of personal PCs invent and improve things on a frequent basis and are *in the business* of wanting to know about new things. This isn't a field where people bitch and moan about how these new-fangled sparky-mabobs aren't as good as working on an old IBM Selectronic typewriter.
I work with plenty of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and they are the hardest workers who know the most, spend the most time on the clock, are the most available, the most communicative, and stay on top of their game. In my time, I can only really thing of one much older person who really sort of had the "punching the timeclock" mentality -- and even he was more than proficient at the job.
On the other hand, I have been surrounded by people my age (increasing over the years, obviously) who couldn't really be bothered half the time. If you are concerned with age and pay, you are focusing on the wrong values of your potential workforce.